Sometimes, faith in humanity can be restored.
I had a plumber like that once. Called him for a leaky faucet in the laundry room. He fixed it with a couple turns of the wrench. I asked him what I owed him, and he said “Nothing, just remember to call me when you have a bigger job.” And I always did!
Went to the supply cabinet to grab a box of staples. Half the boxes in there say STAPLES on them. Paper clips, binder clips, tape, etc. Which ones are the staples???From now on we will only buy from OFFICE DEPOT.
I went out to lunch by myself. Mom n Pop Italian place w decent lunch specials. Usually real quick, not that I was in a particular hurry. Few tables inside with excess HVAC & a blaring television; a few tables outside in the warm sun. I order the chix parm & salad special. Tell the girl the order is for here and I’ll be “right out front”. As in where their outdoor tables are. The ones they have surveillance cameras looking at.
Take my bottles of soda & water & go outside. I’m enjoying the weather, reading the Dope, doing email, etc. Time goes by. More time goes by. Many people have arrived empty-handed and left carrying pizza boxes. Still no lunch. I’m in no rush, but this is getting silly.
I go inside. I ask “Where’s my lunch for here? Like I told you, I’ve been waiting out there to be served for a long time. It should be ready by now.” They look horrified, open the warming oven, and there it all is wrapped up in paper bags & to go containers. The order chick says “I thought you said it was for take out. It’s been sitting here waiting for you to return and take it.”
“How about you plate it properly and I’ll eat it in here.” Unsaid: where I can keep an eye on you people.
Apparently my “right outside” sounded to her like “take out”. She’s from England with a thick accent, it’s noisy in the kitchen / order-taking area, the TV is noisy, etc. I could barely understand her, and so I expect that other than her more youthful ears, she was having the same problem with me.
And such was the tale of the 2-hour quickie lunch special.
To their credit, they were mortified and the owner lady came out to apologize and offer me a spif. Which I declined.
Good thing I wasn’t in any kind of hurry. I certainly could have been more diligent about checking sooner, but so many restaurants have become slow because they mostly do doordash out the back door so how many tables are occupied tells you nothing about how backlogged they are.
Sigh.
First world problems.
Spif?
A freebie.
When I got the call that Mom had collapsed, undergone emergency surgery and was in the ICU, it was all but certain that she would die. I flew down immediately in the hope I would be there before she died, and that she would regain consciousness long enough for us to say goodbye.
Mom astounded every one by surviving and recovering. I expected to stay two weeks at most. I have been here since May 12. I have needed to get new presrciptions for all of my medications but one. I had a virtual psychiatrist appointment today. She called in a new prescripton for Qelbree. As I feared, my insurance will not authorize it because I still have an unopened bottle with 30 pills in it. It is in my cabinet in Philadelphia.
I will be flying back to Philly on the twelfth. I do not have enough Qelbree to last me until then. I do not want to skip any days. Besides helping with ADD, my anxiety level is much lower on Qelbree. I wanted to get an emergency seventy two hour supply. The two CVS pharmacies I can get to are both currently out of Qelbree. I may be able to get those three pills when they get Qelbree delivered on Monday and Tuesday. We shall see.
I’m not sure if my rant should be directed to Wells Fargo, or to payees who keep changing their goddamn payment addresses, but I would love to know why all of my online payments that were previously EFTs are now being switched over to checks that take two fucking weeks to arrive and clear. I now have three bills that have been paid late because of this shit.
This news article, published with the intent to just rub it in, I guess.
TITLE: Annual cost of insuring a family tops $35,000
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/04/annual-cost-insurance-family-increase
- A year of health care cost a family of four $12,214 in 2005 — the year Milliman launched the index. The 20-year cumulative gain of 188% outpaced the 84% growth in wages over the same time.
- Health costs have increased about 6% per year on average over the past two decades, according to Milliman’s report. That’s compared with an average inflation rate of 2.5% over that time.
- Health care for the average person with private coverage this year costs $7,871, including pharmacy rebates — an almost 7% increase from 2024.
A reality I know all too well.
It’s a shocking number but not the least bit surprising.
Currently a mini-rant. Hopefully stays that way.
Went to the ob/gyn for regular visit. About a month ago, after 16 months of nothing, I had a drop of menstral blood. Which I reported. She said to go back to using condoms for 6 months, but wasn’t too concerned.
But the intravaginal ultrasound showed that my cyst, which I’ve had for more than 20 years, has grown. And she’s not able to get a good picture of the uterus. So she wants me to go see the specialist, who I saw after the last visit. So there’s nothing critical, and hopefully there is nothing critical. I just have to wait for the hospital to call and offer an appointment. At least the last time I was there, the specialist I saw had studied at Yale, so we spoke English together. The other specialist studied in Brisbane, so also understands English.
Regarding medical costs, Switzerland (where I live) is second on the list of most-expensive countries. Insurance went up 6% since the previous year.
I might have to wait up to three weeks to get a call from the hospital about making the appointment. No idea how long until the appointment itself.
This probably belongs in the workplace rants thread, but I’m having a similar issue. Basically, we had a purchasing rep assigned to our project who was making monthly payments to our email vendor with a p-card. She took another position at the end of the year, her replacement insisted we had to do our payments via purchase order, it took two months to get that set up, by which time we had two past-due bills and were getting weekly emails from the vendor threatening to cut off our account. Oh yeah and this is all right before our major spring email blitz. It finally got straightened out but for some reason accounts payable is paying via check instead of using the EFT/ACH info at the top of the invoice. And they apparently wait until the very end of the Net 30 period before cutting the check. So we still always have one bill showing unpaid when the next month’s invoice comes out.
The Accountant 2 was no where near is good as The Accountant (1). Both are free streaming on Prime.
No, I Don’t have some creepy Anna Kendrick fetish. It just was badly written and not as good. I think that everyone involved just needed a paycheck. The cast of ( 1 ) was phenomenal.
Did they dredge that baby like they wanted more surface area for shore beach season? Hard to say. Do I owe any of those people money? Nope.
Fine, you want to call me a liar, then please watch them both and tell me that with authority.
I’ve been enjoying posting family pictures and stories on a private family FB album page and occasionally on my public page the last couple months. I am not on there frequently but check in during the week.
An acquaintance from many years ago started to leave likes and comments. When I saw her I thought “oh great”.
Last night at approximately 12:30 AM I get a video call alert on my phone from her! 
I rarely call people these days and I have never participated in a video call.
I had to ghost this person years ago because she just could not understand boundaries. She is the kind of person who can suck the last remaining ounce of empathy from an angel’s toe.
I sent her a firmly worded message this morning about not calling me so late at night and that I have limited time and energy and will call her when I get a chance.
So far after 4 hours no response. 
I’m going back to therapy and I’m kinda pissed about it.
I’ve been in therapy for decades working on myself. I made so much progress last year, my therapist and I decided to terminate. And it was like, finally. After twenty years of working my ass off to get better, I can coast.
It was a glorious seven months, declaring myself cured even as my condition deteriorated. It’s not like my progress has been lost, just that there’s more shit to process. My life is an endless parade of shit I have to process.
So here we go again.
Sigh.
I think that’s life, period.
Though I know you’ve had it much worse than most people, and done remarkably well in spite of it.
Yeah, this is more of a micro-rant, too.
We’re having our first hot day of the year today. I still hadn’t harvested any rhubarb. Today, in the cool morning temperatures, is the last day to do that, so far as I’m concerned.
So off I go at the crack of 7:30 a.m. and harvest enough rhubarb for just one pie. That’s all I want. One pie.
I make the pie, but apparently only half my brain is working. I crimp the bottom crust before the penny drops that this is a two-crusted pie – which is why I made two crusts! – and I oughtn’t have crimped until the top crust was applied.
Ahhh, fuck it. I just tucked the top crust under and re-crimped as best I could.
This is not a pretty pie. I hope it tastes better than it’s going to look.
More concerning is how fast my brain is crapping out on me. I’ve never made this mistake before, and I’ve made hundreds of pies.
My next-door neighbours on one side are a lovely old couple. I suppose I could mini-rant that they have a large extended family that often visits and that is comprised of multiple generations, none of whom are exactly quiet. The kids are noisy, the oldsters appear to be deaf and need to communicate accordingly. They do not, IOW, exhibit the reserved understatement of an English country club. But, meh, I can live with it. It doesn’t really happen all that often.
But my mini-rant here is that when it comes to air conditioning, they are insane. I just cannot fathom what goes on in that house. They decided that today was the perfect day to finally turn on their A/C for the season, even though temperatures are below seasonal. Right now it’s 58°F (14°C) though it’s after 2 AM and I had to go downstairs to close the patio door because I heard the furnace come on. And their A/C is grinding away. WTF are they doing in there?
It’s that way all summer. Once the A/C comes on, it grinds away night and day, and my issue is that it’s not that far from my bedroom window. I thank what gods there are that they had it serviced back a few years ago when it was really exceptionally loud, and now it’s at least tolerable. But it’s ironic that I never hear my own A/C, which is off on the far side of a brick wall, but have to be subjected to theirs, and their apparent fetish for living the life of the Arctic Inuit in the summer, or perhaps using their house as a giant beer fridge.
Which bring me right back to my usual repetitive rant about how much I hate summer. And I now officially declare that the garage can no longer be used for cooling anything, and does more harm than good to soft drinks and bottled water that need to brought in ASAP and put in the basement.
Maybe they’re mining crypto with a huge battery of computers in their basement and the AC keeps them from overheating.
Maybe you’ve misunderstood the situation. Maybe your neighbors are ardent environmentalists and they are using their house as a giant bear fridge. That might also explain the noise. I have nothing but respect for an animal that could eat me without breaking a sweat, but bears are not known for their tidiness. I imagine they lose the tv remote all the time, then they’re stuck watching some nature documentary and they are pissed (American, not Canadian pissed).
“Aw, c’mon, salmon again!? Next they’ll show us picking berries. They never show us doing anything majestic like taking down an elk or a walrus, it’s just salmon, salmon, salmon. Fucking humans. Hey, is there any clamato left?”
(Okay, maybe both kinds of pissed.)