My sister was in a car accident. It was just her and some black ice and she is totally fine after bouncing between the guardrails on a bridge and spinning around a few times. She was closer to town than her house, on her way to work, so she limped the van to a gas station and called her husband.
His first instinct was not to ask if she’s okay. It wasn’t to express relief that she didn’t fly off the bridge into the frigid river below. It wasn’t even to comment how fortunate it was that none of their kids were with her.
No, his first instinct was to bitch her out, question her driving abilities and whether she was speeding, and further bitch about the $500 deductible on their fully covered vehicle. He hit a deer once and later bitched about the same deductible. And when she was like, “Uhh… you’re the one who hit that deer…” he said, “Well, that’s not the point!” But she’s a retard because ice.
I fucking hate this guy anyway and he’s a douchebag for a million reasons. I’m like “Jesus fuck, why don’t you just leave him already?!” Well, the kids love him.
Because that’s the best reason to stay in a marriage with a guy who absolutely doesn’t give a fuck about you.
I don’t even know who I’m bitching about anymore. The asshole husband more than my sister, I’m sure, but she’s been with him for years and I’ve heard so much bitching about him that I have to wonder if she just enjoys being miserable.
When I last left the previous rant thread just before the holidays, a new fuel line had been installed to my furnace and I had finally gotten my heat and hot water restored after ten days of freezing hell due mainly to the fucked up county inspector system.
In the meantime, the first week of January my car broke down three times within a week, causing me to miss some training for a project I’m in charge of that starts this coming Monday. This prompted me to finally buy another car last week. I had hoped to make it another year or so but I could afford it so I didn’t stress too much about it. And I do love the car. Things were looking up.
But then yesterday I smelled gas again. Some HVAC guys came out this afternoon and said it wasn’t the furnace but a leak in the new fuel line. So a plumber came tonight and said it wasn’t the fuel line, but a hole in the heat exchange in the furnace. And I would have to have HVAC guys back to confirm this. These guys are all from my home services company and the plumber said he would note in his report that the HVAC guys from today not be the ones to come back. It was too late at that point to reschedule so I’ll have to call in the morning and hope I can get someone out tomorrow. Since the leak isn’t too bad, I can still use the furnace which is great since arctic air has descended on us again and will stick around until next week. But just to be on the safe side, I’m keeping the temp low so it doesn’t come on so often. I have experience with bundling up.
The plumber used to do HVAC work and told me that the chances for getting a new heat exchange for a 60 year old furnace were none. So now I it looks like I’ll be buying a new furnace. Not only that but paying to have everything all super code-upgraded. Oh, joy. Yes, I knew the furnace was old and this would happen but the week after I buy a car? Shit, shit, shit.
But that’s not all. Remember the project I mentioned uppost? I’m in the final stages of getting everything ready to go and today I had to take the afternoon off. Tomorrow? Who knows. I’ll have to be here when they can. And these aren’t the guys who will install the damn thing. They just have to confirm that it needs to be replaced. I don’t know if I’ll have to meet with the installers before we can proceed on the actual installation. My boss is going to freak if it’s Monday when they can do it.
So I would imagine this will not be a something quickly done, which will require the cats to be locked in the kitchen for a long time and they really hate that. And then when it’s finished, I won’t be able to use the new furnace until…a county inspector says so. Did I mention the arctic air? How about that the county inspector system SUCKS? You have a wait all day for them to show up or maybe they’ll come the next day. This could potentially take all of next week. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
tl:dr
I wish I could just crawl in a hole and come out in February.
This reminds me of the beginning of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur Dent is lying in the mud in front of the bulldozer trying to knock down his house. All the workers sit around and discuss how they can turn the situation into getting overtime pay.
I too went through this sort of thing, about 15-20 years ago. Read a lot of stuff, didn’t finish at least 1/3 of it because it was dreck. Jack London is good, but fucking depressing.
Ayn Rand? Moby Dick? Couldn’t get more than a couple of pages.
I read a lot, and every once in a while, I’ll try an old classic (thinking it might be boring, but on the other hand, there must be a reason it’s a classic, right?).
I’ve been amazed at how great some of them are (thanks, Mark Twain, for understanding very different types of people, and listening to how they express those differences).
But a lot of Ye Olde Dustye Bookes? Well, I’ve decided I don’t need to be Silas Marner/Great Expectations-level ‘cultured’. Life’s too precious to spend it finishing a painful book.
And yes, I agree. I can’t count how many times I saw a really exciting or compelling movie version of one of those (Treasure Island, Lorna Doone), raced to find a copy of the book, and slowly went numb trying to wade through those fifty-word sentences. Good stories; boring delivery.
I temped in an office that had nothing for me to do except sit there and answer something like 3 phone calls a week that had the 100 Greatest Books sets [or whatever the damned things are called]. Lovely books, the ones from sometime in the 60s that came in a lovely box sleeve. Pity that half the books are not worth reading. I think the most surprising book in that set was Salo or 120 Days of Sodom :eek: But for 100 books written between 1700 and 1960 it was OK [when was Peyton Place written? I think that was the most current book in the set.]
I have heard it said by a lit prof I had in college that the readers of Dickens falls into one of 2 groups - those that like A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities and those that like Bleak House and Little Dorrit. Personally, I will read pretty much anything by him and just adjust for boredom level - it is the style of his writing. I find the 1800s novels ranged from entertaining to stultifyingly boring - the only reason for Russian novels is to replace sleeping pills. At least some of the Soviet era writers were interesting for the view into the Soviet era life. I did get somewhat hooked on the purple prose of the turn of the 1900s speculative fiction like H P Lovecraft and Abe Merritt.
So I’ll include a little rant that I’d love to go out for drinks tonight, but my husband is stuck working until after 10 and I have to be in tomorrow around 7. Boo.
When someone says, “Sure I’ll discuss that with the guy, have him email me” it means the discussion is going to take place via email. So what do I get? An email from the guy that basically reads, “Hi, please call me.” :smack:
Fuck you MVD! I can’t pass a vision test on your busted ass machine BECAUSE IT’S A BUSTED ASS MACHINE! My doctor, who is a doctor, and not a MVD clerk, passed me on my commercial DOT physical in December. He tested me with a wall chart at 20/35 uncorrected, which is within spec, and precisely where my optometrist tested me with his giant machine last February. And why the hell do I need to update my test to drop the lien from my car title, anyway?
What?! You need to take an eye test to drop a lien? That’s all kind of messed up. All I’ve ever had to do was take the form and the title from the bank in and pretty much all they did was stamp it and sign it.
I have my license renewal next October, so I will have to do the whole eyesight check thing. I really don’t mind, as I am getting on in years, I am 53 going on 54. I do think that as we get older we need to be rechecked a bit more frequently - our vision can degrade and seriously affect our ability to drive safely. Driving in parts of Florida and Arizona is scary.
Interesting side-hijack about the Ye Olde Dustye Bookes (love that!) because I’m a Very Bad English Major and have never read a bunch of Things I’m Supposed To Read:
Moby Dick
Macbeth … actually, most Shakespeare tragedies*
anything Russian besides Anna Karenina (I learned my lesson there! wooooooofffff … )
War and Peace (counts as its own category; makes a good doorstop)
Heart of Darkness
but I studied Taming of the Shrew in three different courses … dafuq?
ETA: this could be its own thread? Shit People Think I Should Read
horseshoe, I think one of those courses should at least have had the decency to make you study the “Kiss me, Kate” version. Men in tights prancing about, yeah!
You start it, I’ll rant in it. Partly because I’m married to a No-Nonsense Woman who reads Meaningful Books. So I know I’m going to get that sidelong glance if I’m reading Sci-Fi or Guy Lit.
But I would not include Shakespeare. I think he’d groan at the idea of people reading his plays that really only work on stage (and then only when well-acted), the way he meant them.
S’okay, I have a BA in theater and I’ve never read Hamlet. I call it my deathbed read. If I’m ever so sick I take to my bed, I’ll just say, “Hang on, I can’t die yet, I haven’t read Hamlet,”.
I had a Revelation when I was in Translator School: one of the Big Divides of the world is between readers who like to get their food for thought from essay-style books (and despise those who’d rather read a novel) and those who like to get it from novels (and find that essays are very good to fix short table legs). Each to their taste, but Dolly the Sheep gave it up the ass to the first group and the PoliSci teacher who despised science misquoted TANSTAAFL… (having to take something called “international organizations” which turned out to be “the EU, UN and World Bank” was bad enough, but having a Spanish teacher who corrected the English of people whose English was better than his was the cherry on that particularly heavy cake).
Boo.