Don’t forget to check dry pet food. We got a bag once that when we opened it up the inside was completely covered with white webs, and teeny little holes had been chewed out through the bag all over. Ick.
So I’ve given several online webinars for customers now and EVERY SINGLE FRIGGIN time the same guy takes a phone call about 40-45 minutes in. Yes, I mute everyone but it never seems to work for this cat. I know you are not from this country, and maybe don’t understand instructions that well, but after 2 months in lockdown doing nothing but online meetings has NO ONE taught you how to go on mute? And who the fuck is it that calls you every day at 12:45?
I went to Walmart today. Went to the usual place to look for a top, juniors female. Lady standing there talking to a friend /customer, one foot apart, says, oh, you want over there, ladies. No actually I want juniors because they fit me, some of us are small enough that it works. Then the cashier says keep your receipt, you can’t return anything until this disease worry is over. Really. What if it’s not, how long does it last on clothing?
Went to Home Depot couple days ago . 95% plus customers had masks on as were all the clerks. Fine, I had a mask on too, one of the clerks yelled at me for trying to go in the Exit only .
I wasn’t. I told to chill…my goodness.
Have had a spot of roommate drama here. Very long story somewhat shorter, she’s supposed to have been taking care of my feral cats since I’ve been unable to get up and down the stairs to get back there. I asked a mutual friend of ours to pick up some Chinese food for me Wednesday evening and she offered to look in on the ferals while she was here. Turns out, as she discovered, my roommate hasn’t been taking care of them after all. It wasn’t an error or a miscommunication- I asked after them frequently because I know she forgets boring responsible things and she said she was doing it. So she wasn’t just forgetting, either. She was knowingly not doing it and lying about it. My friend was livid, and rightfully so. I tried to defuse the situation, defend my roommate, and make peace because I’m stupid and just didn’t want to start anything. It didn’t work, nor should it have- there was at least 3 or 4 days’ worth of poop and the food and water bowls were empty and dry. That’s unacceptable. This isn’t just failing to do the dishes. They’re live animals and to not take care of them is a shitty thing to do to me and a way shittier thing to do to them.
So our friend called her (she must have been on her way home at the time) and gave her an earful. And then she, in turn, called everyone she knows to tell them what a conniving bitch I am and how I had conspired against her for this and how I can’t be trusted and she doesn’t want her animals or kid around me anymore and she has to find a place to move to immediately because they’re not safe here.
And again/still, in the moment, all I wanted was to make peace, so I apologized to her and told her I hadn’t meant anything to come back on her, that I had indeed tried to defend her, and what had happened on my end was totally innocent. Which is true. I wanted egg rolls, not drama. But I also really want my cats to be taken care of. She said we were cool. But what she did not do was apologize to me or acknowledge that any wrong thing had happened, even accidentally, on her end.
What she also has not done is check in on the feral cats at all since then. That was Wednesday evening. I had a friend do it yesterday and asked my landlord today to help me get my second rollator out onto the porch and move a few things around so that I could take care of them myself.
Only. It turns out it really is extremely difficult getting out there and back in. Not 100% impossible, but definitely impossible-adjacent. I don’t know how I’ll do it every day. And it’s certainly not safe- I have to get down and back up two pretty steep steps to the landing to the basement stairs and then there’s a door out to the sun room and another step. For that part, I have to use my crutches, not the walker, and I’m very unsteady on those. If I lose balance, I’m going down those basement stairs. This is so stupid. I’ve figured out ways not to have to depend on her for most things. They’re not always elegant or ideal or cheap and sometimes it just amounts to “go without,” but that’s life. All except this one super important thing that really needs to be done every single day.
But the story’s not quite over yet. Yesterday, she took her dog to the vet and found out she has a mass in her throat and the outlook isn’t good. Which sucks both because I adore that dog and because now I can’t even say anything to her because she actually has a legit reason to be upset. It’s her normal MO to be just so stressed by the couple basic adult things she’s expected to do that she always has to treat herself/take a break/have a day out, which means she overdraws her account and still doesn’t have anything done, so she needs treats/presents/a break/a day out to deal with that and she can’t possibly be expected to take on another thing. But this is an actual thing that really sucks, so I really would be an asshole if I went to her now and told her I think she owes it to me to take some responsibility for what happened. But in the meantime, she’s still calling everyone she knows and describing it as something terrible that’s been done to her and how her dog being sick is on top of all the other f’ed up stuff that’s happening in her life, so there’s definitely no hint of taking responsibility and also no sign of dropping the subject on her end.
All I can say is, if she does move out, I’ll really miss her kid and her dog, but it will overall be for the best. She lives here because she needed a place to go, not because I needed a roommate. If she has another place, then great. (But as a bitchy aside, when the idea of buying a house with her boyfriend of two months backfires, I don’t wanna hear about it)
I don’t get it. Why are you sharing space with this person?
My employer sent out a link to a National Geographic article for us to read. Nat Geo wanted an email addy…we promise it will be easy to unsubcribe. Like a moron, I forgot to use a throwaway email.
I never got to read the article, because even after submitting an email, the screen just sat there doing nothing. Then they sent a slew of thanks for subscribing emails, but I still could never read a single article. And it is a ridiculous process to unsubsribe, requiring a verification email that they keep saying they send but I never receive. I’ve tried multiple times over the last 4 days, but no joy. Trying to use their help is impossible. So fuck you, website people at National Geographic and your communication partner that manages email subscriptions. You suck.
Brian Scuddamore, CEO of 1-800-GotJunk, and his TV ads. “If you want junk to disappear, all you have to do is point!”.
I keep pointing at his grinning mug but it doesn’t work,
I got a come-on in the mail from a water softener company, inviting me to submit a water sample for free testing.
I’m tempted to fill the little bottle with distilled water to see what horrible defects they report.
Fill it with urine and really blow their minds.
That was in the long-story-long version :p. And I’m angry, so I’m prone to rambling and going off on tangents and try to over-explain my side and so on.
Basically. She’s a friend and co-worker. I knew some of this about her before (the flakiness, the drama, the tendency to create her own crises) but not nearly the extent of them. She keeps it together better at work. And she makes a big show of both how well she takes care of her animals and what a kind and generous person she is and how she’d do anything for her friends. And when it’s interesting or fun or someone’s watching, she is. The dog goes hiking and goes for car rides and goes to work and all that goes on Facebook. It never occurred to me to wonder if she was getting let outside regularly and fed every day. She took me out to a park in my wheelchair a few weeks ago. It’s not that she never does anything nice. It’s just that if it isn’t one of those things- fun, dramatic, public, or quick and immediate (like she will sometimes go grab me a drink if I ask her to or help carry something in the house), she isn’t doing it. She isn’t doing it for any animal, she isn’t doing it for me, she isn’t doing it for her kid, and she isn’t doing it for herself, either. And since most of that tedious and mundane stuff is sort of private/nobody has any reason to care (until it hits a crisis point, at which point she gets someone else to deal with it for her), you don’t really get to see that unless you live with her.
She lives here because she was evicted after not paying her bills/rent. Like I said- I knew she wasn’t good at responsible stuff. I just wanted to help and to fix it for her. I thought if I could see to it that she had a place to live that was safe and stable and where she didn’t have bills to pay, she could get her head above water and get back on track. I’ve lost my home before as well (different set of circumstances) and having someone who let me rent a room made a huge impact on my life. That has not turned out to be the case for her. But she had that sweet little girl and the dog and the cats and terrible credit and no money and where else was she supposed to go? There was no way she was going to find a place to rent and, while there were people she and the kid could stay with temporarily, it’s a lot to ask of someone to suddenly bring an adult, a child, two cats, a dog, and all someone’s stuff into their household (plus now the boyfriend and the other dog, although they weren’t part of the equation at the time) on a permanent basis and it was not very likely she was going to find a place that wasn’t “just for now.”
I know there was a lot that was unwise in that decision. Everyone says you should never move in with your friend. I knew from the get-go that it was going to be difficult, but I thought I could be better and more adaptable and more tolerant and learn to be fine with it and I’m not as much as I’d like to be. I’m also not necessarily the easiest person to live around, I guess, especially now that I’m a grumpy shut-in and useless husk of a human. But at least I take care of my animals.
Now I’m wondering why you consider her a friend.
You know when, like, someone dies and there’s an obituary? And the obituary gets to the part where some famous people Tweet about how much they miss the guy, and the article quotes the tweet, then they go ahead and embed the actual tweet so you have to see the quote, like, two times?
I hate that.
Ladies and Gentlemen, for me “Life in The Time of Pandemic” isn’t a very exciting read… and on your best day you would never find Kate Beckensale’s number in it.
I do my household chores (like you all do) and I keep the music and the movie volume down as people are telecommuting. One of my very few vices left is to enjoy my backyard.
Now, until recently, it had been a Stalag-7 type situation with [del]scumbags[/del] neighbors installing 10,000 candle power outside lights for [del]harassment[/del] security, but thanks to Code Enforcement,
the Nazis are on the run. So, now would be the time for a deeply personal meditation from sunset until dark with a fire pit, a cigar, a glass of ice-water, and the occasional glass of red wine.
Or so I thought. Evidently “The Karens” didn’t like having to stop using their Nazi searchlights and stomping about waiting to ask for ‘papers’. One of them (using a range finder I guess?) determined that my firepit was only about 8 feet from my home, not the code minimum of 10 feet, and had hatched a plan to call 911 and report a fire the very next time I had a fire pit.
Well, word got back to me (it always does, “Karen”) so I decided to make some changes. Yesterday, I chainsawed eight pieces of fairly thick limbs down to fire pit sized lengths. (I’m sure she was jumping with glee…!) I then measured 15 feet away from the house ( 1.5 times code distance) twice, planting a stake at each.
I then managed to lift/move the firepit so that it was just past the line between both stakes. I then set up the wood and the chairs so I could enjoy them best and went inside for a leisurely dinner.
Dinner was marvelous : slow cooked potroast… and when all of the dishes were done, I took a leisurely walk outside to enjoy a cigar and a glass of wine at the new set-up.
Well, 9 o’clock rolled around and what did I hear? Why, it’s a fire truck (With eight firemen in full gear!). Good Ole “Karen” : she had dialed 9-1-1 anyway!
Now I should tell you that “Karen” has a husband (along with several feral spawn) who is just as much of an asshole as she is, but at least socializes with some of the other neighbors. He had seen that I had already moved my fire pit earlier that day knew that I was now 100% within code. He merely had forgotten to tell his “Karen” that. ( It’s just so hard to marry good Minions these days…)
So, the firetrucks come whirring down the street… and he runs out in front of them to stop them. On Bended Knee he said, “No, no … it’s a mistake! My wife was mistaken. She didn’t know we were running a fire pit across the street and she called 9-1-1. Please oh Please don’t report this! It was a mistake! We weren’t intentionally trying to abuse the 9-1-1 system…” (Ok, maybe not that last sentence; literacy isn’t his forte).
Well, then our fire dept was Pissed… but I don’t think they took the steps to charge [del]them[/del] anyone… and they roared off down the street. They may have been thinking “those people at number 25 are Total Assholes” and that may have even ended up in their log, but they didn’t say it out-loud.
TL;DR " ‘Karen’ Cries Wolf. Ooopsies…! "
“Narcissa Malfoy is Lucius’ wife and Draco’s mother, a blonde with blue eyes and a constant look on her face as if there were something smelly under her nose…”
Mundane Super Hero, it sounds like you need to render 10 kilos of bacon, and make sure the exhaust blows in Karen’s general direction. Either the smell will drive her crazy from the fact it’s meat products, or it will make the ferals hungry and they will bug her.
Win-win.
You know, this is a fabulous excuse to clean up and test/tighten all of the connections in the old BBQ grill! It’s an old stainless job, but if you maintain her right, she’ll last half way to forever. As for ten kilos of bacon… while I’m sure that my college grad & his HS brother would demolish it… but why not make a full meal out of it?
Now it has been a few years since I’ve made one of these bad boys, but Sir…? They Are Good!
What I have learned is that more than 1/4 of a small onion is a waste of space. Some slightly different recipes call for cream cheese to be used mixed with cheddar. When I present my meat, I want it to radiate heat, so I’m going to add a few pickled peppers and some sprinkles of crushed red pepper.But, and I have YOU to thank for this… this time I’ll make a triple weave of bacon! That’s one weave, rolled, put to the side… a second weave that the first weave rolls inside… and a third weave added after that! Also, I’m toying with frying up a 1/4 of bacon first and crumbling it inside with the cheese.
I’ll need to make sure that I have a meat thermometer … and slow cooking on low for hours and hours would be the order of the day… but I think that I might be able to achieve the same effect… 
I pit the fuckers blowing things up outside like it was a war zone. Tomorrow (Monday) is Victoria Day here in Canada and fireworks are traditional (which is to say, the police overlook assholes making loud banging noises by blowing things up). I bet 99% of these fuckers have no idea who Queen Victoria even was, but they sure enjoy loud bangs when they hear them! Pretty soon it will be Canada Day, July 1, and it will go on for multiple nights again around that time. This neighborhood seems particularly fond of exploding objects. I think it has to do with large numbers of apparently highly patriotic and Queen-Victoria-admiring 12-year-olds. I didn’t realize that selling exploding objects during a pandemic lockdown was considered an essential service, but I guess it is.
I’m here in the US… is THAT what all that fuckery is about?
I swear that it sounded like shotgun target practice last night …
This side of the pond people have started what began as clapping for the NHS at 8pm on a Thursday evening, which then turned into ‘make as much noise as possible’ to thank [key workers, NHS, someone], including setting off fireworks. I’m sure that’s what the national health service and other emergency services would love people to do, set off fireworks in the garden or street :smack:
Of course, the same people who get most into ‘thanking key workers’ by doing this frequently seem to have no issue whatsoever with having friends round despite lockdown, yelling at supermarket staff for enforcing rules and calling teachers lazy cowards for objecting to schools being reopened when there’s pretty good evidence that it’s really not being thought through very wel.l
As some Dopers may know, I have an electric scooter that I ride around on quite often. With the warmer weather, I’ve been riding every evening. It is great fun.
Yesterday I was riding and a car pulled along side me. This in itself isn’t unusual. My scooter (which is a trike) attracts attention. It isn’t unusual for a motorist to pull up next to me and ooh and ahh. Some people just give me a thumbs up. I’ve never had a motorist say anything negative or do anything hateful.
Until yesterday. The car pulls up along side me and the front seat passenger throws a liquid on me. I hear laughter as the car speeds away, so I know the act was intentional.
The driver behind them suddenly pulls up next to me and I can tell by his face that he saw the whole thing. He asks if I know the guys who splashed me. “Naw,” I say.
“You want me to get his tags?” he asks. I can tell he is incensed on my behalf. I gotta say, this got my heart pounding in a good way. But I told him I was fine. What crime was committed? I’m sure there is something on the books that would fit, but I didn’t want to go through the process of finding out.
The guy speeds after the jerks anyway. I watched him chase them around a corner and through a red light. I wanted to follow to see the drama unfold, but I thought again. What if guns were pulled? What if bullets rang out? What if I saw someone get killed just over a cup of water (I wasn’t sure it was water at first, but a smell test later confirmed it).
When I got home, my thoughts began to swirl. What if the front seat passenger had coronavirus and splashed me with his nasty backwash? My feet and scooter got the brunt of it, but what if there were some aerosols that I breathed in? I know this is irrational worrywartism, but is it really? Someone who would try to humiliate an innocent scooterist just minding her business probably isn’t the type of person to worry about whether they should be concerned about infecting someone.
Then my thoughts swirled in another direction. What if it was a hate crime? Maybe that’s why the witness was so mad; perhaps he believed that he’d seen something worse than a jerk just being a jerk.
I thought about watching the 11 o’clock news to see if the affair had resulted in serious violence. But I decided I didn’t really want to know.
Y’all, I hate jerks so much. In that moment when that guy speed off to go get those guys, I was all, “KILL THEM! BRING ME THEIR HEADS SO I MAY STOMP ON THEIR BRAINS AND USE THEIR EYEBALLS AS CAT TOYS!!” In that singular moment, he could have done what he wanted with those guys and I wouldn’t have cared. It was an exhilarating feeling. It was an awful feeling. So the experience helped me to see how road rage happens.