Twenty-nine days hath September (or at least that's how long we get to mini-rant this month.)

The BBQ Pit
41

Returning home after an outdoor visit with my gf’s brother and his family last night, I was designated driver. We were 1/4 mile from home when some dude ran a stop sign, pulling right into our path. No injuries, but gf’s truck wasn’t drivable.

I heard the cop questioning the other driver and when asked why he pulled out directly into my path, he said, “I guess I wasn’t paying attention”. Fuck.

Meanwhile, our airbag didn’t deploy, but the dashboard read, “airbag service required” and there was noxious smoke in the truck.

Fuck

42

I pit the weather today. Today was supposed to be a meet and greet between the kids and their teachers today for school. It would have been outside with us in our car but the sky decided it was a good time to thunderstorm. We took today off work to go to this thing. Now it’ll be on Friday. Hurray, I get to take another day off. (Not great, I’m almost out of vacation time)

43

New truck on his dime?

Glad no one was hurt.

44

It was a sweet truck. My gf likes the idea of a “farm truck” and up until thisa one they’ve been older trucks. This one is/was a sweet Silverado, dual exhaust, etc (she knows more about cars than I).

Nobody being hurt is the big thing, I guess.

45

Yeah, a friend took a day off work for Distanced Drawing at a lakeshore, but it’s pouring and 20º colder than yesterday.

46

My son died three years ago (at 24) and every time I walk somewhere, I feel like hes supposed t be with me, because he usualy always was. We had some great memories and we can always bring them to mind when we are sad.
Other that that (and its a big one) Im doing great. I’d been putting off dental work for years; got my cavities filled and feel good about it.

47

Many of the rants in this thread seem far more substantial and major than the usual mini-rants. :face_with_raised_eyebrow: Maybe it’s a 2020 thing…

My mini-rant pales in comparison: if I hear that ad that consists of people saying “Safe Drivers Save 40%” over and over and over again, I’m going to scream.

48

Oregon is burning. Salem is under an evacuation watch. The Idanha-Detroit Rural Fire Protection District had to abandon the district. They and 70 evacuees were contemplating making a last stand on the docks when the forestry service found them a way out using old logging roads. I’ve seen pictures from Salem that look like they were taken with a blood red filter over the camera lens. They weren’t. They were taken at noon.

It’s terrifying out there, and that comment about having to make a last stand is absolutely chilling.

49

Chicago…WTF?! 51 shootings 11 dead over the Labor Day weekend. Why? Children are being murdered!

50

As robby said above, some of the rants here are about serious issues – people being close to the wildfires, shootings, etc. I will, however, with all due apologies, carry on the mini-rant tradition with my latest mini-misfortune.

I was up late as usual last night watching movies and thought I would make a couple of late-night hot dogs for myself and guest. When I opened the barbecue prior to lighting it, I thought I saw some kind of movement down in the burners, like something blowing around but there was no wind. Turned out, it was a goddam mouse! Quite the surprise as I had never seen any evidence of field mice in the area, plus it was vaguely unsettling to see a goddam rodent inside my barbecue. I wasn’t sure how quickly it could get out if I lit the burners and the prospect of flame-grilled mouse wasn’t really appealing. Even when I banged on the BBQ the thing just cowered at the back. At which point I lit only the front burner and closed the lid. This appeared to encourage little Mickey to disappear very quickly.

This has never happened before in the ten years or so I’ve been here and hopefully this will turn out to have been a freak occurrence that will never happen again. If it does, then I quote my role model, Bugs Bunny: “You realize that this means war!”. Strong retaliatory measures will follow.

51

Continuing wolfpup’s return to the mini-rants, I filled up my gas tank today…and for the umpteenth time, the &*%^^& gas handle would not stay in the automatic fill position, but kept shutting off. Even when I filled it manually, it would stay troublesome and shut down if I squeezed it to hard.

Is it too much to ask that the %^&# thing works right? Would like to clean my windshield and clean out the car some instead of working the gas pump to fill the tank.

Hope that’s mini-enough…

52

Just be careful. Wile E. Coyote probably thought he was modeling his stragety on Bugs’s too.

53

Good point. My retaliatory overreaction would be to have mousetraps festooned all over the back deck. Which means inevitably stepping into one barefoot. One can only hope that this was some lone lost rebel mouse that will never be seen again.

54

Just be careful that there’s not a rodent nest in there before you light the grill. :grimacing:

Years ago, I went to light our grill and found a mouse and a rodent nest nestled around the burners. I scared off the mouse and removed the bulk of the nest, and then lit the grill, thinking it would burn off the residue. It didn’t. Instead it resulted in the most god-awful stench of burnt mouse pee, mouse poop, and mouse hair. :nauseated_face:

I ended up disassembling the grill and scrubbing it with bleach. It took months for the smell to go away entirely. For years after that I used to keep mousetraps in the grill to prevent them from moving back in. (I temporarily removed them when I wanted to use the grill, of course.)

Now I just scrub the grill after every use, which I think is less likely to attract them (since mice are omnivorous).

55

Thass sum goooood bar-bay-kyoo…

(Yaw, cittyfolk throw a passel uh hick’ry chips 'n whatnot in thet thar grill, butchoo need some ser’ous critter boo-kay, iffen ya wants thet ow-thentic roadkill grill es-per-i-ence…)

56

I may have to stop shopping at the Rural King.

For Dopers unfamiliar with this countrified chain, think Tractor Supply, only double the size and with extra redneck.

It’s not so much the in-your-face customer sentiments, although that can occasionally be a bit disconcerting, as with the young couple in the adjoining checkout line, the male half wearing a “You Stomp On My Flag, I’ll Stomp Your Ass” t-shirt, his significant other decked out in a “Defend Our House - Rupp Arena” t-shirt. I was concerned about blending in given that I was sporting a Social Distortion face mask, but my Chuy’s t-shirt with Bill Clinton saying “I Did Not Have Tex-Mex With That Woman” probably helped.

No, these days the problem is that when I enter the store I feel like a giant germ is holding the door for me. There is a significant percentage of customers (and sometimes staff) for whom masks are evidently optional, if they have any conception of how to wear them (re the young couple previously referred to, one had no mask and the other had a plastic shield which sort of blocked his mouth but was open to the air).

The checkout area in front of the entrance/exit doors is always congested, partly because people move at a molasses-like pace due to the need to socialize, confusion over the nature of modern transactions or because they are suddenly seized by a zombie trance state and have no conception of where they are or what they should be doing.
There was a geezer ahead of me in line who seemed to have been transported through a time warp from 1952. He had a credit card but evidently no idea how to use it. The cashier had to give him detailed instructions, and in order to respond to her it was necessary for him to pull his mask down under his nose. This signifies that either his nostrils are connected to his inner ears, or that that he literally speaks through his nose, since as we all know, sound will not travel through a cloth mask.

I gave up at that point and moved to another line, which in defiance of Jackmannii’s Law of Checkout Lines, actually moved faster than the line I’d been on.

*I know, why go to Rural King in the first place? They have important items necessary to survival in the outback, including animal feed, garden tools, enormous tubs of jerky, a great assortment of baby chicks (in season) and pandemic candy supplies unavailable anywhere else.

57

Super mini-rant: After cutting jalapenos, wash your hands. Then wash them again. Even then, do not rub your eyes.
(However, I must say the bacon/jalapeno/cheddar/beer bread is damn yummy)

58

(Background: I use a KVM switch so that I can have one external monitor, keyboard, and trackball that I switch between computers).

I hate Windows sometimes. Why is it that my personal laptop never has an issue detecting and using my external monitor, but my work laptop loses all ability to see the external monitor when Windows decides there’s an update to install? My Asus laptop is just fine with all this. My employer’s Dell laptop has the occasional conniption, and it seems to center around when Windows wants to make updates.

Today’s little adventure started when I restarted the computer to get Adobe to realize that yes, I am signed in and yes, those programs are supposed to work on my computer, and yes, goddamnit, that also means Acrobat Pro. When it finished rebooting, it couldn’t see my external monitor.

I tried unplugging and replugging in the HDMI cable, switching the inputs from the Dell and the Asus in the KVM, and even changing the cable, all to continue seeing “No input detected” on my monitor. I checked the Device Manager and saw that it was only seeing the laptop screen. ARGH!

Somewhere in the middle of this I noticed that my Asus was telling me Windows wanted to install updates, so I set those off and went back to arguing with the Dell.

Hmmm, I sez to myself. Maybe it wants updates, too. So I checked Settings and sure enough, the Dell wanted to make updates, too. I triggered those and, after the initial reboot, I tried plugging it directly into the HDMI2 port on my monitor.

Success!

Waaaaiiit a minute. Plugged it back into the KVM switch and now it’s working again. It’s also still installing updates, an hour later. There are days I want to turn this into a doorstop, but it ain’t mine so I cain’t.

59

We had a couple of folks call in sick for my relief shift last night, leaving them with ZERO staff qualified on our most important processing machine. So, even though I’m not on the overtime desired list, I got drafted to stay until 0030 instead of leaving at 2230. This meant that I didn’t get to bed until about 0200.

At about 0230, I experienced a severe cramping muscle spasm in my left leg (upper, front). I hobbled to the bathroom and applied Mineral Ice to it, then hobbled around some more until the pain subsided a little after 3:00. Then I went back to bed, and tried to get to sleep. At a quarter to four, it happened AGAIN, dammit! My groin and associated accessories were still smarting from the Mineral Ice, so this time I just hobbled. I did learn that it didn’t hurt to sit at my desk, so I surfed the web until 0545. FINALLY I was able to get to sleep, which I did until noon.

I’m glad it’s my day off.

60

Mistermage uses Nitrile gloves when working with hot peppers. When they (him and his BFF) do their super hot peppers they also wear glasses (shooting ones cos they are handy). They learned that when dehydrating said peppers the machine needed to be outdoors (it was pretty much a tear gassed shop).

The Mister also learned to keep his shoes on no matter how sweaty hot it was outside: he was coring and deseeding Jalapenos and was throwing the waste on the ground under the picnic table. After about an hour his feet started tingling and then burning.