HEY! It’s March already!
Stop posting in the other thread 
I hate it when the person I live with talks about trivial daily events such as “I’m going to the dry cleaners, etc.”, and they do stupid things like jam the paper shredder with an envelope a dozen pages thick even though we just unjammed it last week.
Seam split on the water tank this morning. Nothing like waking up and 3 people wanting to do their morning ablutions and no water available at all. We do luckily have water in the loop for the heating [water baseboard heating] so it isn’t like there is no heat, though the wood stove takes care of that handily.
On the plus side, mrAru is good at plumbing having been a construction plumber before joining the Navy as an a-gang, and we actually have the money to buy the replacement tank, and it is a weekend that normally we were going to visit my Mom for her 90th birthday, my cold has rolled into bronchitis and seems to be slithering into pneumonia, so the trip was cancelled so I don’t pass anything to my Mom, so we will be home and able to change out the tank.
Crap. Water everywhere, too? Hope it’s not too much of a mess.
This morning, I woke up and found ants in the family room. Apparently they think residual Theraflu is delicious. I am quite grumpy. I hate ants in my house.
Could we sign them up to be air-dropped on Guam?
Deliberately stayed out of the February mini-rants thread to try to cut down on my bitching.
Home sick today. Would be nice if I could have slept in , but NO, I had to wake up at 4:30am and not be able to get back to sleep. 
Cat chewed iPad cord. Woke us up at 3:30 am by stepping on the printer /copier button(whirl, clunk , whirl) . Opened the cupboards and drawers in the kitchen. Dragged the tea towels down the hallway meowing at them. She’s not a kitten, but sure acts like one.
My back has been hurting so badly since Monday I can barely move. It hurts to walk. It hurts to sit. It hurts to sleep. I will have to go to a doctor if it doesn’t clear up by next week. I hate doctors the way Mr. Grant hates spunk.
They cleaned out the fridge at work, I rarely leave stuff in the fridge but because I left for my flight directly from work last week I left a small glass bottle of salad dressing.
They tossed my bottle! It’s from my spice rack and gets used because I have trouble finding anything to store dressings in that doesn’t leak. They toss everything! Condiments and all, like full bottles of ketchup and salad dressing. Just reach in and dump what is there in the garbage. Do all cleaning companies do that? Yes we have a notice saying when they will but since we’ve had so many issues we no longer know when something will happen (and are working to replace them).
So now I have to find something to contain my salad dressings that won’t leak all over everything in my bag, I bring small ones for each day for precisely this reason and the one and only time I leave it they decide to do their job properly!
Grrrr.
Dog has been sick for the past week with what may or may not be megaesophagus, the vets say that they’ve never seen in present exactly like this so maybe it’s not. But if it is, it sucks. Dog can’t properly get food into the stomach. If you feed a special diet and make sure she sits upright after eating and maybe build a special chair she might be OK, but then again, she might aspirate food/liquid into her lungs and get pneumonia. All that is fine and good until I think about the fact that I may someday want to actually take a vacation and who the hell am I going to get to take care of a special-needs dog when I go out of town? I love this dog to death, but at the same time, there’s a reason I have a dog and not a kid, and part of that is because I didn’t want the responsibility of having a kid.
I can deal with a healthy dog, and I can deal with a terminally ill or dead dog, this whole “if you work hard enough and give up your whole life she could be fine!” thing is just killing me. For the past week, I’ve felt like a shit if I leave the house. I have no life, because I have a sick dog. It’d all be OK if I knew it was temporary, that she could get better, but I have this niggling fear in the back of my head that I’m losing my own life over a dog and we’re just waiting for her to end up with pneumonia anyway.
Urf.
It’s probably not as bad as I’m making it out to be, but right now, things seem pretty bleak. There’s still a chance it could go away. There’s a chance it’s thyroid-related and medication will help (we’re waiting on test results). And there’s a chance that even if it truly is megaesophagus, it’ll be a mild version that will take nothing more than elevated feeding and a mild diet. But right now? My brain is poisoning me with the worst case, which is “if you give up your life your dog will live and you are a FUCK if you don’t.”
(((Athena))) What you are feeling is completely normal.
Luckily the way the utility room is set up while it did dump all the water in it, it isn’t in the house. The tank sits on the dirt of the crawl space and stucks up through a cutout that is then covered with some sort of insulated box thing to separate house from not-house. All the water soaked into the dirt under the house, or as I like to think of it as having been released back into the wilds from captivity.
Rant:
Why can’t I just have a consistently successful month? I am tried of this roller coaster of fantastic leads, new clients, and great meetings followed by unanswered calls, impossible software setups, and stupid potential clients who don’t understand simple information.
I also am not a technician, but take whole days out of my schedule to give personal service to my clients, who don’t seem to understand I have to travel 4 hours to get to them just to hold their hand through a reprogramming.
Plus I am almost 7 months pregnant, and they don’t seem to notice or care that I am crawling behind their nasty dirty desks to help untangle cords and figure out their setups, without even a hint of offering to help me.
I found these about five years ago. They have never leaked. Quite pricey but worth every penny.
At not quite 2 and 1/2, my kid is potty-trained. Has been for a while now. He’s even dry overnight - in fact, he was staying dry at night long before he started peeing in the potty. It’s awesome. And I was telling someone yesterday how awesome it is.
And I jinxed it.
This morning, he woke up wet at 4:00 a.m. No big, right? Accidents happen. So, I changed him and calmed him down. And couldn’t get him back to sleep for almost two hours. He just wanted to stay up and shoot the shit. I’m totally exhausted. And of course, now I’m afraid it’s going to be the start of a trend, and we’ll have to put him back in pull-ups at night, after telling him for weeks now about how great it is that he’s a big kid and doesn’t need diapers anymore. If so, man, is he going to be bummed.
Night sweats. F-ing night sweats.
Bullfighting is a cruel and barbaric practice in Spanish countries. I completely disapprove of it as they make extremely poor living conditions for the bulls a couple of days before their death. They give it crap to eat, and really make it so that it’s weak and completely unhealthy. Then they piss it off by sticking a needle in its genitals, half-blinding it, and doing some other nasty things to it. They piss it off even more and at this point it’s really in pain. Then they just kill it just so they can show of their “confidence”. No, your screwed up brain chemistry, it’s not showing confidence; it’s being a total dickhead asshole dog cunt bully. What did the bull ever do to you? You get pleasure out of watching a bull suffer and die, and so the bullfighters can show off their “confidence” (assholishness, really)? You weaken the bull to the point where it’s doomed to death. What’s even more, is that it’s not really a fight. It’s more of just a barbaric killing. It’s not like you’re facing a healthy bull. You’re weakening it so that you can just kill it.
It’s a tradition? I don’t give a shit. Foot-binding was also a “tradition”, but was abolished because of its unfairness. Maybe Spanish countries can do the same with bullfighting.
Sorry - I just had to get that out of my system. I think bullfighting is one of the most messed up practices.
So, France, Japan, and Texas get a pass, then? How about the half-dozen other countries that have non-lethal bullfighting?
Not even remotely sure why this is in the mini-rant thread.
Absolutely no place gets a “pass” in my opinion that even implies animal cruelty. Two wrongs (or multiple wrongs in this case) don’t make it right. I am tired of this condescension humans demonstrate. Just because we are so modern and are much more technically advanced than other animals, we shouldn’t be doing shit like this to other animals. This is also the reason as I am completely opposed to hunting for pleasure. We couldn’t pull this kind of shit on other animals, “bullfighting”, as cavemen, or if we were still back in the good old historic days millions of years ago. That’s because humans are a bunch of weak-asses compared to bulls and other animals. The only reason we survived is because of intellect, and therefore are able to cheat natural selection. You couldn’t pull this kind of shit if you were a caveman, so don’t do it now.
Fine, bullfighting is not the worst practice out there, but are you just going to dismiss this issue just because other places are worse?
$800 out of pocket for an ultrasound. WITH health insurance. Fuck those fuckers right in their fucking asses. I’ll pay it, but not without blasting them on Yelp.