Dear idiots walking in the parking lot at work - it’s a fucking parking lot! It’s not a sidewalk! So, you know, there may be moving vehicles that you need to watch out for!
I’m leaving work tonight and just about dropped my motorcycle when I had to brake/swerve hard because some stupid woman stepped right in front of me from between two parked vehicles without ever looking up. (Oddly enough a cell phone wasn’t involved. Just fascinated with her shoes I guess.)
The wife’s Subaru finally died yesterday.
We have had the car for many years and it has served us well.
It had been acting up a couple of months ago, and my mechanic told me something was suspicious about cylinder one. Well, it overheated on the highway yesterday and blew apart the upper radiator hose.
He gave me the final word today: blown head gasket…need a new motor.
It isn’t worth it, so I asked him if it would survive the 500 yard drive to my house, and he glued things together enough so it could make the trip.
I figured it was nicer for the car to finally die at home instead of in strange surroundings.
Predictably, Drama Mama and her daughter are trying to walk it back - can they just stay another four weeks? Just the teenager? (Of course, this is all via text message - they won’t speak to me.)
Tony and I were discussing, trying to figure whether we could manage that… because we’re idiots. I concluded that our own teenagers deserved to have a voice in this decision, though, and asked them to come join the conversation. The Boy said flatly “no.” The Girl was in the same boat as me and Tony: we don’t relish the thought of making a family homeless, but we don’t want them here. The stress is on all of us, and two people have managed to disrupt practically everything about our family and our lives for all of these months. And so, we present a united front: “No, neither of you may stay here past Friday.”
Fortunately, most of the kids are out of school for fall break next week - we’re arranging everything so that there are at least two adult/ish folks here at all times until the guests are gone. The guests wanted the extra weeks to arrange passports, and apparently? Not one soul on this continent will let them crash for a month. We were the last idiots.
We are prepared for the fallout that we can foresee: No one will be alone with either of them. The Boy has his ear to the ground, listening for the rumors at the high school - My girl is only a freshman, and the rumors would hurt her feelings probably. The Boy is a senior, extremely popular among his peers and his teachers, and known to be very steady. He has already recruited his own friends to shut down any talk that might affect the Girl negatively.
And we wait for the next gambit. Sigh.
My cats had a meltdown and now two of them hate each other. It’s getting to be a pain in the butt.
Also, I woke up at 6 am. On a freakin’ Saturday. Bah.
Lacunae, I’ve been staying away from your houseguest posts because we had THE EXACT SAME ISSUE with our houseguests last year. They were finally able to move out ONLY because the husband’s father agreed to bankroll them into an apartment for a few months, thinking that the wife would have a teaching job by September.
She doesn’t. The husband’s father stopped bankrolling them about a month ago so they’re just barely surviving on the husband’s salary. My husband asked me if I’d be amenable to maybe taking them back in should their rent go up. OH HELL NO. They can be homeless back from where they moved from for all I care.
I can’t BELIEVE some people. If someone took me in for a week, much less a YEAR, I’d be doing all the housework, cooking, yard work, errands, and everything else out of my extreme gratitude. The entitlement of these people is astonishing.
We have a friend staying with us for two weeks while she finds an apartment (she just moved here from California). She’s taken us out to dinner almost every night since she’s been here. She’s bought groceries. She does her own laundry. She says thank you all the time. Boy, am I lucky. Maybe she could give all these other ingrates lessons.
Exactly.
I once stayed with out-of-state friends a few years ago for a couple of weeks. I did anything and everything within my power to “defray” the cost of them letting me stay there. It never would have occurred to me to let them think I was taking a free ride.
To be fair in the situation I mentioned upthread, the husband did a lot of “handyman” work for us while they were here. His wife, OTOH, was Entitlement Personified. She lives in her own little bubble and doesn’t see an issue with spending oodles of money on herself “because I deserve it”. They fought a lot about that while they lived here. Fun times.
Literally, the only things we’ve asked of the houseguests: Clean up after yourselves. No dishes in the bedrooms. No smoking/open flames in the house. They can’t comply with a single one of these.
Meanwhile, we’ve directly spent a minimum of a couple of grand on them - gas money, bath tissue, etc. We’ve received food stamps, and I’ve done all of the grocery shopping and cooking (because, when the “allotment” is $83 per month, per person, buying in bulk is the only way to make it stretch to feed 8 people. But, when I cook a meal and tell folks dinner is ready? An hour later, they’re offended because I’ve put the leftovers away. Or, halfway through the cooking process? Someone comes and opens a can of soup, heats it, eats three bites, and then leaves the rest on the counter for someone to clean up.) Santa Claus spent no more on my kids than on hers last year. School supplies, utilities, etc. They contribute literally nothing except drama and expectations.
But the most recent communique? “What have we done that was so wrong? Why do you have to kick us out on the street? We’ll change!”
Because. We’re horrible, horrible people. And you’ve had a year to pretend to act like a grown-up. If you can’t master the part in 12 months, you probably can’t fill the role.
Maybe print out all the various posts you’ve made here over the past year or so and hand them over to said “houseguests”, Lacunae Matata?
I’m completely amazed and baffled by your descriptions of these people. Not baffled in that I don’t believe what you’ve written, just baffled that anyone could be so horrendously awful.
We’ve recently acquired a housemate and couldn’t be more pleased. She’s lovely. Helps cook dinner, harvests the garden, keeps to herself but also joins in when it’s appropriate. She even cleaned and organized the pantry while I was out one day - a herculean feat IMO.
I’m blown away that anyone can be as horrible as you’ve described and still expect to be welcomed into someone’s house.
Their not realizing what their presence has done to your household IS exactly what’s wrong. It was the same thing with our female housemate. She wanted everything to be to her liking, which, frankly, is opposite of how we run our household. We tussled a lot with grocery shopping and cooking because, in her eyes, if she wasn’t hungry, the hell with everybody else. My husband had to sit her down and tell her point blank that’s not how we run our household. She still didn’t get it when her husband told her the same thing.
Heh, we likened Female Housemate as 54 going on 14. I’ve never known anyone with such stunted emotional maturity in my entire life.
Frankly, I’ve left out a lot of horrible: I’ve heard the “n” word more often in the past year than in my entire lifetime (and I am born and raised in south Georgia. I’ve heard that word. And frankly? I’d rather explain to my kindergartner’s principal why she used the “f” word. My opinion? If “nigger” is all you have left in your arsenal, you’re a low-class ignoramus. At least “fuck” has practical uses, like “I’ve just clobbered my toe on the corner of the steamer trunk.”) I’ve tried helping Drama Mama hook up with any social service/entitlement program for which she might qualify - every setback is described in terms of how office workers don’t like her because she’s white. Or female. Or Native. Or anything except the real reason - she’s a bitch.
The good bit: My mother has arranged her schedule so that she can be here at my house Monday while I go see the doctor and the lawyer with Tony. I fucking dare that woman living in my house to flip the bitch switch on Mama. Mama’s old and don’t give a damn and can, when called upon, outbitch any bitch that ever considered taking up that profession. And she’s tired of seeing her child and grandchildren stressed to the limit. I’m considering trail cams - I could probably recoup all of our costs if I can capture the showdown on video! (And Deity help Drama Mama if my mother-in-law shows up for the showdown. MIL is the sweetest lady on the planet… until you mess with her grandbabies. Or her baby boy. Or her favorite daughter-in-law - the one who gave her grandbabies.
There should actually be some information in tiny weeny little letters about how to unsubscribe; if there isn’t, try sending back one of those mails with UNSUBSCRIBE as the subject and nothing else.
Really mini, but it’s frustrating me. Finally upgraded to Windows 10 on my dad’s computer. Put up with a workaround to get colored titlebars back. Put up with having to jump through hoops to reinstall my old graphics driver and keep it working (as the one from Microsoft can’t play game video!) But I still cannot get old-fashioned user/password filesharing to work. It wasn’t a problem when upgrading to Windows 8. It hasn’t changed in years. I don’t know how Microsoft could fuck that up.
We got a new car nine days ago. Yesterday the left front tire was flat! It"s not even two weeks old and it’s already broken!
I suspect the plastic disk with long metal prongs that I pulled out of the tire a couple of days earlier is the culprit. It was in the thickest part of the tread and I didn’t think the prongs were long enough to penetrate all the way through. Guess I was wrong.
Ahh, Monday.
My day off, after a week of tiring night shifts. My day to
BzzzzZzzzzZzzz
MY DAY TO LIE IN THEN GET SOME CHORES…
*BZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
done?
Or not, as they’re digging up the road right outside my window, and it’s loud enough that the bed’s vibrating.
Sigh At least I only have two more weeks of nights…
My town has a town whistle that goes off at 7 am, 7 days a week. You know, just to make sure everyone is up and grumpy.
I’ve come to rely on the reminders and calendar events on my Android phone. I really liked that I could snooze them. But now Google has “updated” and the snooze function doesn’t work. You no longer get a notice when the snooze time is up, and if you forget about your reminder, after awhile the reminder just disappears.
Then what the hell is the point of having a snooze function? It’s like if you have an alarm clock and whenever you hit snooze, the alarm clock shuts OFF.
Also, if you set a reminder and the notification goes off but you don’t acknowledge it, after awhile the notification disappears, too. "Hey, wasn’t I supposed to call that guy about the thing today? Guess I picked the wrong time to go potty and then not look at my phone for an hour… "
I’m pretty confident that Google will get all kinds of “feedback” about this and do nothing.
We’re at the Buena Vista Social Club concert last night; a group that I’ve wanted to see for probably 20 years. So we paid for better seats on the ground floor. And of course, this fucking Sasquatch sits in front of me, ass a yard wide, shoulders a foot wide, and a head like a watermelon. With that shape, I pegged him as a college prof. He’s also about 6’4", so seeing over him is impossible. Well, fuck. Shit happens, right?
So the music starts, and it’s everything I’d hoped it would be. Then Sasquatch starts doing his ass dance: shoulders jiggling, bouncing from side-to-side. Then starts the head flopping, so now I can’t see through him nor around him. Then he starts with the “WOO WOO WOO WOO!!!” and waving his arms after every song.
Why do I always end up with the biggest ass clown in the venue sitting either in front of me or next to me?
So I brought nearly all my house plants that were summering outdoors inside to grow over the winter under lights in the basement.
Yesterday I was checking out one plant that came in 3 weeks ago, and noticed something odd about the soil. It seemed…rather dark, irregular and spiky. And it had eyes. :eek:
Yup, there was a good-sized toad hunkered down in the pot. When I picked him up, he made pitiful squeaking/croaking noises, then let loose a stream of toad pee (a surprising amount, considering) on my hand and the kitchen floor before I could get outside to release him.
I suppose it’s better than the time I found a shed snake skin (but no snake) in the basement after bringing the pots in.