Sending catnip and fuzzy toy thoughts!
[1 month ago] Me: Hey, me and mutual-friend were thinking of going to visit that place you said you wanted to go to. The only day we’re both free is the 16th next month, want to come?
F: Ooh, yeah! Yes, count me in!
[1 week ago] Me: You still OK for next week?
F: Definitely! I’ve put it in my diary so I won’t arrange anything else that day! Should we meet at yours? That’s easiest for me.
[Yesterday] Me: Hey, we still need to pick a time for that trip on Sunday. Oh, and I’ve got some vegetable plants you said you were after, did you still want some?
F: Yeah, great, thanks! Lets organise the trip tomorrow. I’d love the plants! I’m going round yours tomorrow, so can I pick 'em up then?
[This morning] Me: So… what time’s good for you tomorrow? I need to check with mutual-friend, but I was thinking 10, that OK?
F: Perfect! I can do any time though. I’m free all day, my husband’s at work and I’ve got nothing I need to do!
[An hour ago, after digging up said plants] Me, in group message: So, everyone OK to meet 10am at mine tomorrow? 
F: Ooh, I can’t, I’m soooo busy this weekend, I don’t have time. And my husband’s at work tomorrow, so I’ve got to stay home to look after the boys (age 14 and 17, barely home, normally left to themselves).
Mutual-friend: Oh, that’s a shame. I guess we’d better reschedule if you can’t make it, be nice if we could all go!
Me; Oh. Um, didn’t you want those plants?
F: Ooh, yeah, could you drop them round?
I mean, seriously? :rolleyes: I’m mostly pissed off about the plants; I’m away for a week, leaving Monday morning, so now I need to a) give them someone else, in which case she’ll be pissy at me, 'cos I said she could have them; b) leave them in the house for a week, which means they’ll likely be dead when I get back, or c) drop them round hers tomorrow, which will take about an hour.
Plus… if you’re gonna come up with an excuse, at least come up with one that doesn’t directly contradict what you said a few hours earlier.
This is why I do things solo.
What? Seriously? Grrr. I love it on my phone, it’s absolutely helped me manage my emails and keep things that really need dealing with at the forefront.
Well, at least Google hasn’t dropped Google Glass, or Google Instant Search, and of course they’d never drop “Don’t Be Evil” from their code of conduct…
Triple hurricane-related rant.
#1. Every time there is a hurricane, my wife watches coverage on the Weather Channel for days at a time. Honey, we live in Kansas, it’s not coming anywhere near us – can we watch something else now?
#2. It pisses me off when I see these idiots out reporting in the middle of a hurricane. What does the Weather Channel (or CNN, or anyone else covering a hurricane) thinks this adds to their coverage? All you’re doing is risking the lives of your reporters and camera crews. Or, at least that’s what I thought until…
#3. I found out that the Weather Channel reporters are faking it and aren’t really in as much danger as I thought. My wife showed me a video of a reporter desperately trying to maintain his footing in the hurricane-force winds, then you see a couple of guys casually strolling across the parking lot behind him. (Worse, the guy wasn’t even leaning into the wind, it was at his back! :smack:)
I know Kobal2 does come to the Pit…
anybody knows what’s the people in charge of “temporary updates to maps” called in France?
I need to shit on them but want to make sure I’m cussing the right people; it’s probably not the fault of the Ministry of Education that whomever marks Déviations uses a method that involves adding forced stages to GPS maps. At first I thought it was GoogleMaps having had too much acid lately, but no: any electronic map insists that I need to stop at a particular chapel, or a certain horse farm, or tells me “you have arrived at your destination” when I’m on the no-paint-here road between Bumf and Uck. In fact, that “destination” in the middle of the road was the only one so far which didn’t want to take me out of my path despite said path not making any attempts to follow the closed road. Think “I’m going from Chicago to Detroit and there is a detour in Fort Wayne, so the map thinks I need to go to Niagara Falls.”
The maps are fine so long as there are no forced detours due to roadworks, but as soon as there are yellow Déviation markers in the vicinity ho-lee shit. This much cursing needs appropriate targetting.
Our server the other night ranks down there with the worst I’ve seen. We were meeting a friend at the restaurant and when the guy seated us, we told him there were going to be three of us. “Okay.” He trots off and returns with two roll-ups and two menus. Again: "There will be one more person joining us. “Oh, okay. Do you want something to drink?”
“Sure, bring us two glasses of the Merlot.” He leaves. Ah, hell, I tell the wife, let’s just get a bottle. So I call over to him to just bring us a bottle. “Okay!” I can see him opening the bottle over by the kitchen window, rather than bringing it to the table to open. He strolls back over and plunks the bottle down on the table and walks away without having us try it first. Still no third menu or roll-up.
I unroll my utensils and remove the greasy salad fork away from the rest of its partners. Our friend shows up and seats herself. The server wanders back over and I tell him again that we need a menu and silver. He slinks away and comes back with it, then stands there expectantly. “We’ll need a couple of minutes.” He leaves.
We finally get him back. “We only have two appetizers” and he names them. My wife orders the trout; our friend orders pasta Alfredo, and I order the rib eye medium rare. “Oh, that’s my favorite thing on the menu!” he crows.
Some time later, the food arrives. My $32 rib eye is about a half inch thick, perhaps less, and cooked medium. The “baked” (microwaved) potato is still half raw. I signal the only other server in evidence and tell her to please put the potato back in the microwave for a few minutes. She scurries away with it and I start in on the steak. She comes back with the spud and tells me she put it in for four minutes. It’s still tough as a boot, but I resign myself to it. There is not enough butter or sour cream for a potato this size, but by this time I don’t trust myself to be civil, so just deal with it. The steak tastes okay and still has some juice, so I don’t send it back.
We aren’t yet finished with our meal when the guy comes back and slaps the bill down on the table and walks away. I wait until we’re all finished eating, then call him back over. “We’d like coffee and desert, so you can take this back.” I hand him the bill.
“We only have some chocolate cake and I think some ice cream.” My wife says she’ll have some ice cream, but what kind is it? Away he goes, returns and announces “We don’t have ice cream. All’s we got is strawberry shortcake.” So all of us order that and some coffee. The desert shows up looking rather sad, with some unfrozen berries and a mere drizzle of whipped cream on top. The coffee is lukewarm.
Normally, I would not leave a tip for someone like this, but let myself be guilted into 10%.
I’m seeing a lot more in the way of amateurish restaurant service, too. I think it’s the result of almost full employment. A lot of people who were (and still should be) unemployable are now able to be hired into service jobs and it shows.
Halfway home, and every single safety system in my car *simultaneously *turns itself OFF. Subaru can’t see me until Friday and I have to take the car in in the morning because their shuttle stops running around 4 p.m. so I can’t drop it off on my home because I don’t get into their neighborhood until about 6:30 … <sigh> I suppose I should be grateful it’s intermittent (meaning it resets when I turn the car off and back on), but jeez, I SO did not need this.
And then I get home and take my sandals off and walk over to check my messages and dump things on the kitchen counter, and I step, barefoot, into undigested cat kibble. UGH.
Please let the rest of the night be calm and uneventful.
ETA: One of the safety systems turning off is the ABS; not something you want to be without in rainy weather. I mean, okay, I learned to drive before it was a thing and I can deal with it, but dude. EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM?
I never realized that unemployment did have social benefits. Now if we could improve the selection processes just a little (for example to include Ron detectors), that would be nice. I’m sure we can all think of a person or two who left us thinking “that… one has a job? When so many decent people don’t?”
You should copy your post and paste it on Yelp. Oh, and never go back to that place.
Our new mailman is an idiot who can’t seem to read.
I live at 205 West Any Street but my mailbox is on South What Street. My address is clearly written inside the box. I didn’t write it there, the old mailman did.
The other day I got a package left on my front step for 305 West Any Street. So I walk that down there.
I go to get my mail from the box and it contains mail for 111 South What Street. So I walk that down there and put it in their box.
I have no idea if I got any mail or, if I did, what happened to it.
Zen sends licks and pets for your cat.
Heh. You should try my address. About fifty years ago they were putting in a new subdivision located on the land between, well, let’s call them North Main Street and South Major Street. The street my house was to be one of those that ran directly from NMS to SMS.
The first developer started in, laying out streets from NMS working south, and building homes along them. He got about a third of the way through the project and went bankrupt or something.
Six year hiatus. Then the second developer took over the project. He started paving the streets and building houses working north from SMS. You see, in the interim the town had decided it did not want there to be more direct connections between NMS and SMS because they are both also numbered state highways that tend to back up at rush hours, and they feared the subdivision would turn into a tangle of high speed traffic through densely built residential area.
The second developer fought it the whole time construction was going on, but he never got permission to build the final stretches to join the north and south halves of the three roads that were originally intended to be the connectors. But, out of sheer cussedness (I think) he didn’t change the names of the street halves in any way. No North First Street and South First Street. No Spring Drive and Spring Way. No Oak Street and Elm Street.
Nope. There’s just First Street, and Spring Street and Oak Street. With continuous numbering from one end to the other…except you can’t get there from here. 1 to 22 First Street has to be accessed from North Main Street, while 23 to 40 First Street can only be reached from South Major Street. And similar broken numbering for the other two roads.
Would you like to guess how many times I have gotten confused calls from delivery or repair people telling me that my street just doesn’t go up to #37?
Here’s the deal. Put all of it back where you found it.
Tomorrow, when your letter carrier arrives, be there waiting. Show him/her how the mail was delivered into your possession. Determine what he/she has to say for him/herself, and encourage him/her to devote some effort to figuring out how to do the job PROPERLY.
And if your boss, on Thursday, asks why you didn’t show up at work on Wednesday just tell him/her* that kaylasdad99 said it was okay. Because I do say that.
*(this him/her refers to your boss, not the letter carrier. That’s a different one.)
It could be worse.
I moved into what was my mother’s over 55 community. 1400 homes of olde fartes. One central place to get mail, a mile and a half from my door. With a mail sorter with dyslexia. They won’t deliver to the house, they try to cram large packages into the boxes, forgetting the inside of the boxes is larger than the doors to empty them, and just WHO gets the envelopes seems to be driven by a random number generator.
Needless to say, I have met ALL my neighbors.
Thanks for the kind thoughts, everyone. I’ve just got to start realizing that the cat is going to fluctuate in how much he eats and not freak out if he doesn’t eat as much from one day to the next. That’s what the vet keeps telling me. He more than made up for not eating much the other day, he hoovered his food today.
If some sort of repairman or technician I’m expecting calls me saying “I can’t find number 6!”, I know they’ve been given my address in Spanish. The maps have what locals call “the new half” of my area (which doesn’t have named streets, numbers are for the whole area) in Spanish, and “the old half” in Basque. At least by know I can be 99% sure they’ll be calling from right in front of the Library (#12), directions from there are easy.
I blame the Basque Separatists. Hey, they’ve separated your street numbers…
(I had to list an “area of interest” on a ‘team-building’ form at work… I thought of Nava and put down “Basque Separatist”.)
She’s one of those, I would imagine, who probably thinks that Mother Nature can fool you, and that a hurricane that’s at least 500 miles away (maybe more) and hitting one specific part of America (the beaches of NC and SC) can suddenly reach over and dump rain on Kansas for whatever reason.
Either that, or she’s probably one of those Evangelicals (religious people) who gets a kick out of seeing those “sinners” get what they deserve in that hurricane.
Just guesses, though.