Move the tv and computer, and put a potted palm there.
Hes going to have people move that. This is an old building.
The maintenance guys still have to fix it somehow.
Last night, my children both physically hurt me unintentionally and, for once in my adult life, I told my husband that I needed to be done, that I needed a break. I walked away from my children and let my husband handle it. And he did. No one died, everyone got to bed.
So why do I still feel guilty about not being the perfect mom? No one is perfect. Stupid brain.
I’m moving to Oregon on Saturday. Kayla will be going back to Brooklyn two weeks later, so I rented her a car so she has transportation in the interim.
So, on my day off today, she was helping me with some errands, and I decided to get an oil change. She came with me to get her tires properly inflated (because her TPMS was advising her to). The guy at the service station said one tire seemed okay to have developed a slow leak, so I called Budget to arrange for a replacement car. They sent us to John Wayne Airport to make the swap. The guy at the counter “upgraded” her from an Altima to a Jeep Compass.
In what universe does swapping a 41mpg Altima for a 33mpg Jeep constitute an “upgrade”?
Day 6 of no A/C. Still no word from the HVAC guys. Many bad words from me.
What is it with my elderly relatives? Beloved non-parent elderly relative (upper-mid-70s) lives alone and had had covid for 10 days when I found out, and that only because I happened to call. Is their health my business? Well, no, BUT… if you’re in a high-risk group, wouldn’t it be sensible to let people in your support network know? Said relative is fully vaxxed and boosted, thankfully, so apparently the experience was fairly mild.
I’ve been trying to convince them for a while that regular check-ins are good (you! live! alone!) and that maybe it would be sensible to have a will, but it does no good. The will conversation was especially awkward for all the obvious reasons, though I genuinely don’t want or expect anything. I just don’t want to deal with the chaos when a childless person dies intestate, and more importantly, I don’t want them to die just because they’re not in the habit of communicating with anyone and so no one notices when they go silent for a week because they’re expiring on a floor somewhere.
Sigh. I had to have the same conversation with my mom (unrelated to this relative) a few years ago, after she finally got around to telling me that she was in the hospital with a broken leg. She didn’t want to worry anyone, so she waited a week before she let anyone know. And let’s not talk about my dad who ignored his pneumonia as “allergies” until another relative bullied him into the hospital.
And I know I’ll be exactly the same, which makes the whole thing extra infuriating.
I’m approaching 70 and in the past few years I’ve had a number of health issues. Most of my family is in Chicago and I’m in NC (where I moved to retire), and for various reasons most of the communication among us has been through Facebook. Earlier this year I mentioned that I had just gotten out of the hospital after being treated for a heart problem and my niece bitched at me for not letting the family know how I was doing. The upshot was that now every Monday I post a “Weekly Check-in” on Facebook just to let the family know that I’m still alive and what’s been happening in my life.
The flight to Strasbourg went just as expected: chaos from start to finish, nerve wrecking.
The flight back was… interesting. From Strasbourg to Frankfurt, 45 minutes flight, less than one hour to catch the other flight, we departed with 30 minutes delay. I thought I would miss the connecting flight, but when we arrived it was delayed for at least two hours. I don’t know how much it was delayed in the end, because the preceding flight was also delayed, so I could switch planes thanks to my so called economy flex flight (they also call them business light). I only had hand luggage (see my previous post), otherwise that would not have been possible. I had got five e-mails from Lufthansa during the 45 minute flight, each one telling me that the departure gate had been changed: A11, A17, A25, A9, A17 again, but the other flight was still in A11, blocking the gate. My original gate. When I arrived at the counter two Lufthansa stewardesses were on the verge of a nervous breakdown, they were telling the assembled crowd in front of the counter that “this is like a bad movie”, that the flight shown on the monitors (Rome - Fiumicino) was in A15 and that boarding would start as soon as “the system” (aaah… computer’s fault, nothing that can be done about that, can it?) was fed the new data. The Italians waiting in front of the gate did not understand anything, as the announcement was made in German. I told them, I felt nice. Still, soon we were on the bus to the plane, just a ten minute drive through the airport. Fingers are for suckers, I guess.
When we landed in Berlin after a very turbulent flight (not Lufthansa’s fault this one) the pilot spoke whiningly through the intercom to us passengers asking for forgiveness for the delay (for me about 45 minutes compared to the original booking, for the other passengers more like three hours - on a 50 minute flight): there had been so many lay-offs during the pandemic, and they were not up to full speed yet. That takes time, it can’t be done in just three months. It had been a toll on them all. (Well, it had been on the passengers too!). And should our luggage have been lost, we should not try to solve it at the airport, they were overwhelmed anyway. Just try to use the Lufthansa app or webpage, and good luck. I found it pathetic, I may be a bit harsh on him. I was so happy to have only hand luggage.
I was even happier when I arrived home. My wife was surprised to see me so soon. Some beers taste better than others: this welcome beer tasted excellent.
My last flight until september, I hope. We have cancelled a holiday trip we had envisaged to Paris in August. We don’t have the nerve to try. We’ll stay home. Read, eat, relax, repeat.
Thanks for the thorough update, @Pardel-Lux ! Interesting reading, though you have my sympathies. For some reason I always imagined European travel being much more civilized than that!
Meanwhile, back here in North America, my son just flew across the continent to LA a couple of days ago for an event that was cancelled at the last minute because of COVID. Not sure of the details, but the end result was two days in LA doing nothing and then flying back home. Apparently there is a surge of the omicron variant in LA right now.
That sounds bad, I hope your son did not catch Covid on this trip. BTW, you have to wear a mask during flights in, from and to Germany, and people do (for which the pursers excuse themselves, go figure!). But in the airport itself it is not mandatory, and only about 1/3rd of the passengers wear them.
We don’t know whether we have a surge or not: people are not getting tested anymore. PCRs are almost impossible to obtain, and no longer paid for. I use personal antigen tests, less reliable, but better than nothing. They cost about one Euro each and can be bought in supermarkets and news stands. Infected people are supposed to voluntarily self isolate, but nobody is keeping tabs. This is not going to end well.
Oh, and while I am at it: let me show you what I did in Strasburg:
I am the one interpreting Ursula von der Leyen in the plenary session. 
Lourdes de Rioja is a young colleague that has a YouTube channel dedicated to interpretation in general and has the permission of the Parliament to publish videos like this. They are mostly more informative, this one is just a “feel good” clip: told you that some people like going to Strasburg. All the people you see close up are colleagues from the Spanish booth, most of them free lancers.
Disclaimer: She does not own the rights to the music, so YouTube credits the proceedings to the rightholders. Neither she nor me gain anything from this financially.
That place looks amazing! Thank you for sharing.
So I walk into the bathroom and my sink is 2/3 filled with brown water. I called maintenance. He says, Interesting. Odd. Never seen that before. He plunged it, said it was coming up from that opening by the top instead of down. I went out, came back. Hes gone, but the waters gone. A plumber will come tomorrow.
They’re trying to say that they should only pay half the bill because both dogs were off-leash, so both were responsible for the other dog ripping open my daughter’s dog side. Idk if they understand their homeowner’s insurance will cover it. Looks like we’ll be looking for a lawyer to write a steely worded letter, and necessarily reporting their dog for the attack, which will bite them in that their dog will now be considered a dangerous dog and no longer covered under their homeowners policy.
First, I haven’t read the thread. Sorry
Second, I usually do my shopping at a neaby Russian market. It’s great if you want Soviet food. If you want an ordinary, sliced loaf of white bread- this isn’t the right store. Tonight, I bought a gallon of skim milk and what I thought was a large tub of cottage cheeses. It isn’t cottage cheese. Tvorog is very similar to cottage cheese, but has a very strong bitter/sour taste. I already sampled it, so I cannot return it. I may just eat it with pineapple as I was planning to when I thought it was cottage cheese.
I had a much better experience years ago, when curiosity got the better of me and I bought a “curd cheese bar”. This turned out to be a wonderful cheesecake bite coated in chocolate.
A friend of mine has been trying for years to get me to invest in cryptocurrency. I did very little research, decided the entire system was way too bro-heavy and imaginary, and cautioned my friend to get out while he could.
He’s now lost about almost all of his $800,000 in the last couple of months. He texts me just a few days ago, and asks if I’d be willing to float him “just $30,000” so he can “really take advantage of the market now”, and “guarateed” a 25-30% ROI in a year. My response of “Hell No” was not well received. At least I can now hopefully help my kids pay for college.
You can make a fortune with cryptocurrency.
You can also make a fortune at a roulette wheel. Except that’s safer, because casinos are regulated.
Assuming Bitcoin and looking at a chart for the last year, he must have traded in and out at almost the worst point every time (note - I completely believe he did that). Just holding he’d still have 40-50% (via eyeball) of what he started with.
Idiots who do donuts at intersections have discovered our neighborhood.
We live in a quiet suburb. There is an intersection a long block away which, though not huge, is just big enough for numbnuts to screech around in circles. They started doing it a few weeks ago and did it again this morning at 3:30 a.m. It’s loud enough where we live; it must be deafening for the poor folks who live right on that intersection.
This neighborhood is beginning to suck.