Yikes! I suggest hot toddies all around.
Fuck you 1-800 service number for Canada that’s closed for Thanksgiving.
Fuck you, dentist, WTF?
I had a cracked tooth that, thanks to the VA’s stubborn refusal to notice that I’ve moved, has turned into a broken tooth. Face is swollen. Constant headache.
Oh, and before I go any further, fuck Trump and whatever he did to the already-shitty VA.
Started calling dentists in town to see if they took veterans. Repeatedly heard that the VA makes it almost impossible to get paid, that they never return phone calls, that they never answer phones, that every time you try to untangle the mess, you get a new phone number, etc., erc.
Talked to a nice lady at a dentist. She brushed off my warnings that I have no money, can’t pay, all that, “don’t worry about that,” “we need to get that tooth fixed, it could get infected.” I keep stressing that I have no money, zippo, nada, whatever…
So I shower, get a cab, go down there, fill out paperwork----stressing the no insurance thing again----everybody’s nice, the dentist gets me in the chair, looks over my teeth, then all of a sudden, everybody’s like, “oh, hey, great to meet you, great you got down here, let us know when you get that payment thing worked out, see ya!”
I wasted cab fare on these assholes. I got my hopes up. WTF?
The receptionist called me later with the Veteran’s Service Officer, whose job is to apparently not do shit, because he reccomended I get this new thing where you pay for insurance. “I already paid on a battlefield in Iraq,” I told this guy.
So: broken tooth, fuck everybody, I just hate everybody now.
I don’t want sympathy or I’m-sorrys or whatever. I want rage. I want to trebuchet a week’s worth of dirty litter box leavings into the VA director’s office. Fuck these assholes.
margin, call your Congresscritters. This is what they’re there for.
I managed to lose … the Swiffer? Not sure how the fuck that happened. But we’re packing shit and my ex-IT Guy is moving out shortly, which means unearthing dust bunnies everywhere.
Last time I saw it, I was using it to poke my snake, who had crawled under my bed into an inaccessible cranny. It’s definitely not under the bed anymore (neither python nor Swiffer) and I have found myself wandering the house looking behind doors and stuff, muttering “Swiffer? Where are you?” and that doesn’t make me look like a crazypants lunatic AT ALL.
Again with the goddam ants! Our thorough soaking over the last couple of days with the first rain of the season has given the ants the idea that they’d like to come inside to get warm and dry. They’re crawling all over my living room.
So I’ve put out Terro bait, which experience has shown thoroughly kills the entire colony. But it takes about a day and a half to accomplish this, and in the meantime you don’t want to interfere with the ants swarming around the bait cards. I’m sitting in my living room looking at multiple, ugly black lines of ants leading to blobs of Terro on cards. It’s icky and making me feel crawly.
Luckily, the second batch of ganache turned out good (despite being made with Toll House morsels) and the millionaire bars were a hit with the family. I don’t know how anyone could eat more than one - they’re SO rich- but I came home with only 3 of the 24 I plated and a family of 10.
Turkey Day rant: I love my mom, but damn if that woman wouldn’t make Mother Theresa beat children. “The turkey wasn’t cooked!” yes it was, I saw him temp it. It just was moist, unlike every turkey you have ever made. “Uch, the stuffing was made without gizzards!” Who makes stuffing with gizzards anymore? Really? The entire way home she complained about everything. She told me she had a card prepped for me to send my godmother. I already have one, ready to mail. “Do you have stamps?” Ma, you do know I’m 50, not 5, right?
Bless her heart.
Hm, care to share the recipes? What are “millionaire” bars?
I fear your Swiffer has gone the way of my red fitted sheet. A few years ago I bought a set of red sheets for our king-size bed. I used the fitted sheet once, then washed it. I remember taking it out of the dryer, and that’s the last time I saw it. I have searched high and low, and it’s nowhere in the house. A fitted king-size sheet is not the sort of thing you can accidentally throw out, but it’s Absolutely. Nowhere. In. The. House. If it ever shows up, I’ll let you know if your Swiffer is with it.
Wife mentioned that she missed her grandmother’s lemon meringue pie. So to surprise her I looked up a recipe online and attempted to make one for her from scratch.
Except we were out of corn starch so I subbed in arrow root. And forgot that I needed to wait until the end of the boil cycle to add the arrow root because if you add it too early the extra heat will cause it to break down and not do the thickening thing. :smack:
So I wound up with a beautiful pie that was about half lemon pudding and half lemonade.
Still tasted great and she loved it so there’s that. 
Grandma’s Lemon Meringue Pie. Highly recommended.
I’ll let Miss Take point out the recipe she uses, but if you google Millionaire Shortbread, you’ll see photos so yummy-looking you’ll be afraid all your fillings will fall out.
It’s a three-layer bar cookie; shortbread at the bottom, then caramel, topped with ganache.
Let me know if you find my knee brace with the Swiffer and the red sheet. I have a one-bedroom apartment, there’s only so many places it could be. But it’s nowhere. It’s not a big brace, kind of a fancy Ace bandage. I liked it because it had enough support to be useful but not so bulky it showed under my pants. I’ve looked everywhere. I figured it’d turn up when I got the Christmas stuff out of storage… nope. The only thing I can think of is it accidentally got in a bag of stuff that went to the Goodwill.
Apparently the guys at the tree lot were a little too enthusiastic when they were tying the trees to my Jeep’s roof… The smaller of the two trees has four damaged branches near the bottom, and I didn’t find them until I had almost finished putting the lights on. :smack: None of them are really substantial, but they are bushy enough that their absence would be noticable.
I never thought I would use that entire pack of tiny green cable ties I bought years ago, but between those and the light strands, everything seems to be holding at the moment. I like to think my dad is somewhere sipping a celestial George Dickel and laughing his ass off over this. (He once secured a shaky tree to a door frame with fishing twine.)
Oh my, Jeep’s Phoenix, are we related? My dad tied a tree to the window frame with fishing line. He and I had gone to the tree lot without mom (error on her part!) and the tree we ended up with was enormous. The tree stand we had was not designed for enormous. But the fishing line wrapped around the trunk and then around two screws in the window frame worked just great. Until mom wanted to know who screwed the screws into the lovely old woodwork around the window. Oops.
I guess that was not a rant. So: my rant is that both mom and dad are gone and I can’t tell them what swell parents they were.
If Misstake’s Swiffer, panache’s red sheet, and Dr. Girlfriend’s knee brace ran off together in some sort of polyamorous elopement, I want to know what the babies are going to be …
My mini-rant is about the price of good vanilla now. I’ve been using a lot of it recently as I’ve been trying to lose weight and it’s a great way to add flavor to bland stuff. Penzey’s is asking $24.95 for 4 oz. of the Mexican variety. Madagascar vanilla is a few bucks more. Hol-ee crap. Eating less is costing more. And yes, I know imitation vanilla costs less, first-world problems, etc. ::sigh::
It would be awesome if the lost vintage skirt I posted about in a rant thread last year was with them! What a party! I’m retiring in 6 weeks and will be donating my work clothes to Dress for Success. I’m hoping that in the purging of the closets, maybe just maybe the skirt will reappear. If it does, I’ll let you know if it is accompanied by the Swiffer, red sheet and knee brace.
Maybe King Moonracer spirited them away to his Island…
I should add the backstory to my Christmas tree + fishing line tale…Dad had purchased one of those adjustable stands to replace our clunky ‘traditional’ metal stand (and the various wooden shims needed to level the thing on our carpeted floor). The concept of this adjustable stand was nice…you didn’t have to worry about making a perfectly level fresh cut on the tree stump; just hack off enough for the tree to be able to absorb water, secure it in the bracket, place the bracket in the stand, and straighten as needed. The adjustment was accomplished by stepping on a foot pedal that was supposed to tuck neatly away into the stand to lock everything in place.
Shortly after purchasing this stand, Dad announced that he was tired of putting the goddamn lights on the tree, so Mom hired a person recommended by a friend. We were very pleased with her work, except that she placed the lights in such a way that it was impossible to trace a single strand when removing them…you pretty much had to pull everything off in clumps and sort it out later. In Dad’s opinion, this wasn’t as bad as actually putting the lights on the tree. We hired this same lady to put the lights on the tree again the next year. A few tiny issues combined that year to create a near disaster:
[ul]
[li]This lady continued her random pattern of light strand placement, despite being told that we needed to know exactly where the strands were running in order to safely place the light-up Hallmark ornaments.[/li][li]Mom had acquired many more light-up Hallmark ornaments than we had used in previous years.[/li][li]The adjustment pedal appeared to be pushed all the way into the base, but wasn’t fully engaged.[/li][/ul]
So, as we’re cheerfully decorating the tree, including placing the ‘magic’ Hallmark ornaments at what we thought to be the correct intervals (I think it was something like no more than two ornaments per light strand?), half of the tree goes dark. Oh joy, a burned out bulb. As Dad is trying to track down the bulb, he comes to the realization that one of the strands has at least five of these ornaments plugged into it. He managed to trace the strand to its ends, replaced the fuses, and added new bulbs…nothing worked. He came to the conclusion that we would need to cut the strand out of the tree. (The way the light strands had essentially been layered made it impossible to simply remove the strand.) He got to one point where he thought he could pull on the strand a bit…and the tree suddenly tilted due to the pedal not being fully locked. Although none of the breakable ornaments fell off the tree, between the tilting and the removal of the lights, a lot of the decorations were disrupted. Mom was crying at this point and demanding a new tree. Dad was threatening to convert to Judaism.
We did manage to get the tree somewhat straightened again, but something wasn’t quite right with the stand (I think the tree had shifted in its bracket due to the force of the almost-fall). Out comes the fishing line; Dad used two or three strands to secure the tree to the hinges of the nearby French doors, which were conveniently accessible because he had removed one of the doors entirely to facilitate decoration. So we spent the rest of the season looking at a half set of French doors partially framing a mostly-straight tree with an interesting lighting pattern.
Yup, they’re basically homemade Twix bars. Recipe. Super rich and super sweet, so do sprinkle salt as suggested.