You’re a very good mom.
Hell if I’m not trying.
Thank you.
Funny you should mention that! I have a weakness for ice cream sandwiches, too. I haven’t had Mint Oreos, though – my particular stress reliever, aside from Caesars and rum, is Chapman’s vanilla ice cream sandwiches! Not strawberry, not laced with caramel – just pure vanilla ice cream in between soft chocolate wafers!
My boy is a future Doper - I just got a raft of questions about whether or not non-fiction books are true, and how does he know whether what he reads is true or someone is just trying to trick him, and how do you know a source of information is reliable, and how do you build an argument?
Followed by a copious amount of questions about the War in Iran and boy was I out of my depth there. We decided it was bedtime when he asked me why we used nuclear weapons in WWII.
If nothing else, we’re raising a skeptic.
The outrage.
Just now I was out back of the house by the garage getting ready to pot up some Sabal tamaulipensis (how better to pass the time on a muggy night in Kentucky?), when I saw motion out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to see not just an opposum, but the largest opposum I’ve ever encountered walking rapidly towards me. I barely had time to step back, otherwise (s)he would have walked right across my bare feet (nasty pink marsupial feet will never touch mine). The beast kept right on in a straight line, ignoring me, until disappearing into the darkness behind a collection of large potted and tubbed plants.
A few minutes later after recovering from this near miss, I again saw motion, this time in the opposite direction. A tall plant stem was rhythmically vibrating back and forth. I head over, to see the opposum standing on a pot, in the act of grabbing and eating a ripe fig. After my stern admonishment and banging a couple of empty pots together, (s)he withdrew into the night.
I turned on the sprinkler and played some loud music from iPod shuffle to scare him off from returning, though it’s uncertain if surf rock and songs like “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee” really bother possums.
@Jackmannii You seem to have handled the opossum encounter with grace and success.
Years ago I was startled by one of these baby marsupials perched on the top of a broom handle beside my front door. My screeching alarmed not only the creature but several neighbors. Thankfully, this only happened once.
They might be considered somewhat benign but they have a frightfully alien appearance that activates my primal fear.
A few years ago I was out in our detached garden shed looking for a tool, when I noticed a cardboard box that displayed chew marks.
I opened the lid, and there was an opossum inside lying on a bed of torn-up newspaper. It had established a perfect nest box for the winter months. The possum did not display alarm, but bared rows of sharp, nasty-looking little teeth at me. I closed the lid of the box and exited the shed.
The possum was later caught in a Havahart trap baited with sardines and relocated to the far side of the yard.
I respect and sort of admire these animals for their evolutionary persistence, but damn they’re ugly, and they apparently have very poor night vision and situational awareness.
A specific rant that’s in the middle of a pretty shitty situation, that I’m dealing with, but this rant addresses something that I just can’t let go. Okay, so … not to get too heavy right off the bat, but my dad died in June, so it’s just mom and me in their old house trying to pick up the pieces. To that end, I’ve taken my father’s place in the weekly card game they had with three other couples. I played with them all once at one of their houses and it was okay. They’re all Trumpers, but they know my mom is not so politics is just never broached, which I’m glad about.
Tonight we played at our house and there’s this one guy … my god, he is just the most obnoxious, arrogant, won’t shut up, he’s so cool, and he’s got so much money, and let me tell you this really awesome thing I did that makes me look like a hero at the expense of some schlub … etc, etc, etc. Every goddamned thing out of his mouth was some sort of bitch or complaint, or brag about his bank account, or about how something bad happened but it was obviously somebody else’s fault. At one point I heard him snap at his wife, “Are you don’t correcting me all night?” and he glared at her, like we weren’t all sitting there watching him do it.
Oh, he was too hot in the room so there must be something wrong with our vents. It can’t be that we’re comfortable at this temperature, no he has to make my mom dig out a stepstool so he can adjust the vents on the ceiling — that he couldn’t reach anyway so it was just a big pathetic show of his goddamned worthlessness.
I’m sorry, but my emotions are right on the brimming edge and I don’t need fuckheads like that in my life. Just before they left he turned to me and said, “Listen you need to help your mother out and get those vents taken care of.” I ignored him because if I had opened my mouth I would have told him to go fuck himself.
I told my mom that I can’t take his bullshit anymore and I think I have to opt out of cards if means dealing with that asshole. She has asked me to please deal with him so we can still play cards - she told me that dad hated him too, so there’s that.
Needed to get that off my chest. What an asshole!
Eh, you should just take a page from the life of @Beckdawrek and domesticate him. Leave dinner out for him, give him a name (“Clarence” is good) and eventually teach him to eat treats out of your hand and sit beside you on the porch swing or rocking chair!
I am not a taxi.
I don’t mind driving friends home from the racetrack, but I’m going to have to put my foot down (not on the gas pedal!) about driving them wherever they wish to go in the city. Where they live is pretty much on my way home, so it’s usually no big deal. On Friday, it became a big deal.
Friends A and B wanted a ride home. No problem, normally, but friend A wanted to stop at the corner store about a block from his house, saying he could hoof it home from there. Friend B said that would be great to stop at the store; he needed smokes. So they got what they needed. At some point, while inside, they decided that it was too early to go home, and wanted to go to a bar. Friend A wanted to go to a downtown bar, and Friend B wanted to go to a bar nowhere near the downtown. Well, they decided that A could go downtown, and B could go to his preferred place, and now, Spoons, get going.
(I just wanted to go home, and both A’s and B’s choices were not on my way any more.)
So I dropped B off first, as he was the first stop on my way to A’s selection, then A in downtown, then I went home. But fercrissake, guys, realize that I’m doing you a favour. I’m being a nice guy offering you a ride home. If you want the corner store a block away from your home and you’ll hoof it from there, that’s fine. But when you start redirecting me all over the city just because you see me as a taxi that’s charging you nothing; well, I’m gonna have to draw the line.
Can’t blame you one bit. I’d be tempted to throw them both out of the car, but I’d resist the temptation because, well, good friends are hard to come by, and once you’ve made the commitment you may as well suck it up. Maybe have some excuses handy for the next time they want “just a ride home”. Or claim time pressure, so you can give them a ride to wherever’s on your way, but not a grand tour of the city!
Lesson learned. On the next "Oh, yeah, one more stop, the answer is “Nope; I’m leaving here to go home as we’d agreed. With or without you - your choice.”
Stupid fucking grant is done. I’ll take a look at the other one tomorrow but I’m relaxing the rest of the day. Shouldn’t be nearly as much heavy lifting on that one as it’s mostly done. Then after that one’s done I’m leaving the office for at least two days.
Claude is really good at grant review - flagged a disqualifying budget issue because our accountant confused this grant with the other one and gave me a budget over the award ceiling. I was too overwhelmed to notice it was over budget.
I found a wonderful game called Arcane Library - don’t laugh, but basically the whole game is putting disorganized piles of magic books back on their shelves in the proper order. It’s surprisingly fun. Only problem is it gives me motion sickness. First person games usually do. I was sick half the day because of this. I ordered some dramamine. Hopefully it’s not too bad today.
Finally, my kid won’t stop fucking with my cross-stitch needle minders. He’s lost or destroyed four so far. I bought him his own magnets so he leaves mine alone - he still fucked with them. In a flash of anger I said, “Quit messing with my shit.”
“Your shit?”
Dammit.
“My stuff.”
Hopefully that’s not a thing now.
Where do they even go? We have one chair in the living room right now - no other furniture. But they vanish into thin air. I have two left - a hedgehog and an octopus. He lost my Certified Silly Goose.
I’m taking this last one out of his allowance, but now I have to take the annoying extra step of hiding them when I’m not working on my project.
This is the inevitable result of no longer letting him watch YouTube except on special occasions. He gets bored and gets into shit. I should be happy.
I keep reading this as “Havarti trap”, and every time I picture a happy possum nibbling on the cheese coating of a wire cage.
I finally said no! Not to the friend that I give an occasional ride to, but to his ex-girlfriend.
She keeps asking me if I’d mind picking her up at the local car repair place, then stop for coffee (she does treat me, “as payment”), and take her to her work …
… which starts an hour before I usually wake up.
I was doing it because she might be my friend’s EX-ex (they sound like they might be getting back together).
ICYMI, Lightning McQueen made an appearance today at the Italian Grand Prix. Video in the link
I finally finished a minor chore that took far to long to do. My better half decided to re-arrange the living room. No problem - move furniture, tear up some worn wall-to-wall to expose the very nice wood floor underneath (our daughter and her SO did most of that!).
One of the minor details was to move the landline telephone jack from where it had been jerry-rigged by a previous owner, as the line came up through the floor and the box was tacked onto the adjacent baseboard, out of sight behind an armchair before, but now would be in the way of a relocated shelf unit.
No problem - I had done a lot of this as a Signals Lineman in my Army Reserve days, and I just needed to move it to the other side of a stub wall, beside where the phone was located. I decided to do a neat job, and have a nicer-looking flush wall jack plate in place of the old baseboard box. I measured, determined where to drill up from the basement, cut a hole in the wallboard for the new junction box, and - first problem - couldn’t find the telephone wire I thought I had.
Went to 4 hardware stores - none of them carried telephone wire. OK, I went on Amazon and found some. 100’ of the stuff, far more than I needed, but an acceptable price and I might need more in future, so OK. It was coming from China, so delivery was going to be a couple of weeks, but it actually showed up only 4 days later. When I stripped the outer sheath off, however, instead of 4 colour-coded insulated wires, I found 1 insulated wire and multiple fine bare wires - apparently Chinese telephones are wired very differently than North American ones. After wondering if I could find a telephone extension cord that would serve if I cut the ends off, I managed to dig up a couple of short lengths of proper wire from a box of miscellaneous electrical bits in the workshop.
I ran a length of wire up through the hole, installed the junction box, connected to the wall jack plate upstairs and to the connection plate in the basement, plugged the phone into the new jack - and no dial tone! OK, double check all the connections to make sure the wires were connected to the right colours, connections were tight, etc. - still no dial tone. Well maybe there was a hidden break in the section of telephone wire I had used, so disconnect everything, pull it out, run the new wire, reconnect - no dial tone. Perhaps there was a defect in the jack plate, so run out and get a new one, connect it up - no dial tone.
I temporarily reconnected the ends of the original wire from the baseboard jack - and the phone worked. At this point I was getting very frustrated, as everything was done exactly as required, and should have worked, dammit! I finally decided that maybe I could stretch the original line far enough to reach the new location, and went to disconnect the baseboard box - and realized that some careless idiot running the original phone line had cross-connected two of the wires somehow, and had “fixed” it by connecting black to green and green to yellow at this end. I pulled the wall jack plate and copied the misconnections and now have working phone again.
I had expected to spend an hour or so on this minor chore - it ended up taking almost 3 weeks.
My lawn guys haven’t been coming around or answering their phone for 2 months and I’m worried they got scooped up by ICE.
The updates to our laundry room are taking about that long too - I expected it to take about a third of that amount of time, mainly to allow paint to dry overnight, first on the walls, then the trim. Silly me.
But that’s not what I came here to rant about …
As much as I dislike Walmart, I really, really need to stop grocery shopping at Food Lion. Today’s ridiculously priced item was canned pumpkin - $3.28 for a small can. Wallyworld is selling the exact same item for less than $2 a pop.
I don’t know why it only showed me two US stores last week, they have them in multiple states. Anyway, I called the Manhattan store last week; however, it doesn’t go to the store despite their website stating it’s a phone # for that location, it was answered by someone generically, not in that store. He confirmed that they were going to be open yesterday (Labor Day) because the website states holiday hours may be different. He then called me back the next day after confirming they still hand 10s in stock so we detour our way into the city on the way home yesterday, I made an appointment but got there early.
I’m informed that not only do they not have 10s in stock but to do the purchase & trade in I need to do the switch right then & there & give them my old phone before I leave. Ummm, no, that ain’t a happenin’ as everything isn’t backed up & they’re sitting in the car even if it was ready to switch. This was just supposed to be a run in & pick up. They then ask a manager who states that I can place an online order with instore delivery (online was all the way down to 10-11 days from the 3-4 weeks it was last week but still way too long). He stated the only downside to that is it’s not instantaneous but I’ll deal. Two minutes later they call my name; great, I think, it’s already ready. Nope, that was for my scheduled appointment time. Killing time, I walk over & look at cases; they are both crappy & expensive so I order from ebay & should have by this weekend & go back to sitting & waiting…& waiting. Ended up taking over an hour for my order to process for them to be able to hand me my phone.
Then on the way home from her place we got dispatched for a search; didn’t get home from that until waaay to late (early?) this morning so my arse is dragon today & this morning she informed my that I left my portable drive at her place so all the pictures I took this weekend & went thru & deleted the non-best of can’t just be copied over to my PC & deleted from the camera cards. They’re still in the camera, but 100% of 'em so I can either waste time to go thru them again or wait until I get that drive back to file/backup properly so I can delete them from the memory cards.