Smokers of the world, hear this - my front yard is not where your used butts go. I underwater my grass because I hate grass and I hate the way it sucks way too much water, so my lawn gets a little crispy by August - I just can’t wait for some asshat to set my front lawn on fire with his goddamned cigarette.
Planning my sister’s bridal shower is turning out to be as big a pain in my ass as I anticipated. I looked on the internet for advice, and saw what I was afraid of - you have to ask the bride who she wants invited. So far, my sister wants 37 people invited to her shower, and 28 invited to the stag afterwards. She’s nuts. Doing a quick search on invitations, it turns out that this is a whole, fancy-shmancy thing. I’d been planning to just email/call people, but oh no, that would not do. If it’s wedding-related, it must first be complicated, and second expensive. Those are the rules. Never mind that her engagement was quite short, so there is barely enough time to mail the invites and get RSVPs by the time of the shower, and she’s still dicking around with trying to figure out how many more people she wants to invite. Nuts.
My sister was giving me attitude about what a pain it is that she has to make all the decisions about her bridesmaids’ hair styles for the wedding. Here’s a hint, toots - if you’d pry your fingers off a few of the things you’re micro-managing, you’d be a lot less stressed. Tell us you want it up, or you want it down, or you don’t care, and trust that the intelligent, adult women you have chosen for your bridal party will do right by you. I am living for the day when her wedding is over. Living for it. Her wedding has been my pain almost since the day they got engaged. Joyous occasion, my frustrated, fed-up ass.
That’s it for now. I’m sure I’ll be back if I talk to my sister in the next couple days.
My daughter came to visit–and left her cigarette butts on our front steps. Why?!? The garbage can is 20 feet from where she left the butts. Dammit.
Mr.stretch is going through a med change. My life is…interesting.
I will never try to save money and time again where I work. Ten days to tell me I could order envelopes? And telling me an hour after I decide that I don’t have time to order them after all and will have to go with Plan B? Fuckers.
I have jury duty the next two weeks, which I was excited about until people actually started giving me way too much work to do. Jury duty here means I have to call the night before and find out if my group is needed the next day. If they want my group, I get to sit around the courthouse while they decide if they want to call us in. It makes it hard to plan the next two weeks. So now I feel guilty about maybe not being at work and having to ask other folks to do some things for me. And I was busting my ass all this week because of this, so I am tired as hell and will be pissed if they don’t call my group.
It’s all because of the gods-be-cursed Hard drive manufacturers. Not only have they started using blindingly bright 5000 millamp blue LED’s for power-on lights, but they suck the juice for the LED out of Firewire, so the device can be unplugged from the wall, and still tell you its got power. I wasted 45 minutes wondering if my new drive was toasted before figuring that out. It doesn’t help that the ‘mini 8’ style power plug has no screws to secure it to the back of the unit, and can disconnect while appearing to be copacetic.
To add insult to injury, they’ve also started using a fingernail polish resistant plastic on the LED cover. I had to break out the acrylics to keep the damned thing from blinding me.
These people are EVIL, and their diabolical designs spread chaos, ruin and brokenheartedness all around the world.
Huh, I was going to link to a thread that I had made complaining about the evil blue LEDs and I found that while older threads by me appear in a search, that one that was more recent is missing, so much for the new server.
Oh lord, she’s doing it again. I plan the shower and staggette, not her - I get the guest list for who she wants invited, and then she BACKS THE HELL OFF! She doesn’t get to micro-manage every detail of her shower and staggette, too, like she’s doing with the wedding.
And she’s still dicking around with the guest list. If it was up to me, I would have had everyone invited by now. The shower/staggette is on April 14; that’s three weeks notice if I can get everyone invited this weekend (I’m going to email and call; there just isn’t time to mail and RSVP). And she seems to be giving me attitude because I pointed out that she has 37 people invited to her shower, and that seems like enough to me (to be held in her tiny living room).
Living for the day. LIVING for the DAY. I am so grateful for being able to vent all this frustration here, so I have a better chance of not yelling at my sister.
So the guy who lived across the street sold his house and moved. He’d been living there since he was a small child, and he’s in his fifties now–guy had quite the alcohol habit and the house itself is a festering pit of nastiness, with rats, no less! So I’m not terribly upset that he sold to a couple of entrepreneurial real estate agents, and yesterday I kinda felt bad for them as they were exploratorily dredging large drifts of horrible stuff out of the house, wearing their stylin’ track suits and immaculate Reeboks and their rubber gloves. Imagine how quickly my sympathy evaporated, however, when I discovered they’d posted a Craig’s List ad with the address and a “come 'n get it” pitch–there has been a constant stream of rattletrap pickup trucks and scabby cars over there with crackheads and tweakers dragging out unspeakably filthy items and cramming them into their vehicles. Of course, being Craig’s List kinda people they were out there until 0200 this morning, then back from about 0700 on today, making a mess, throwing shit around, blowing their noses on ripped out sheets from ancient phone books (I so wish I was making this up!) and throwing the used sheets all over the yard, scaring the crap out of my poor cat with unleashed pit bulls wandering around and unsupervised toddlers playing in the no doubt tetanus infested piles of junk metal… You name the unsavory activity, I’ve witnessed it from my front window in the past 24 hours.
So to the realtor chicks–hey, thanks for being such great fucking new neighbors and not giving us the head’s up that this was going to happen! Sure hope I can return the favor when you’re trying to flip this house–maybe I need to renew my interest in nude gardening and outdoor yoga… :rolleyes:
To my dear sweet dog–yes, I did go out and work in the garden a couple of days ago, so nice of you to notice! I took that mostly unused bed next to the vegetable garden and very carefully added more soil and compost, then sowed many, many bulbs and seeds: day lilies, gladioli, pentstemon, hollyhocks, stock, columbines, clematis, a veritable cornucopia of lovely flower seeds in the expectation that in the months to come I will have beautiful flowers with which to lure the bees to my veggies and a sight to gladden mine eye and refresh my spirit. Since I’ve owned you for quite some years now and I’m no stranger to your usual response to lovely new garden installations, I did take the precaution of rolling out chicken wire over the top of the new bed, stapling it down about every three inches, putting stakes into the middle of the bed to help prevent a preemptive attack and digging session from you as you’re so liable to do. I had stakes sticking out, bits of sharpish wire protruding from the surface of the barrier, I had big rocks on it to discourage you from seeing it as a logical place to tromp around/take a nap–and I really, REALLY thought I’d accomplished it in one sitting, to actually deter you from fucking about with it; to make you think, just this once, “nahhh, too much trouble, fuggit!”
From the bathroom window this morning I see that somehow you managed not to impale yourself fatally with the stakes and have instead apparently managed to throw your entire, and not inconsiderable, weight onto the surface of the chicken wire barrier, pulling out about half the staples, breaking several of the stakes and flattening the wire down until it rests firmly on the newly seeded flower bed. Well done, you appalling animal! A hit, a palpable hit indeed! Considering that it’s raining now and I’m in no mood to go stapling and fucking about with wire in the rain, I guess you’ve just bought yourself a lovely trip to Coventry until I get around to fixing the flower bed–sure hope it was worth being confined to the back third of the yard for a few days.
Oh, absolutely the former–the ad specifically said things like “bring a flashlight if you come after dark,” and “come right in, take anything.” Bloody nightmare! Now they’ve brought up the gigantic dumpster, which we had to forestall them from simply dropping eight feet behind my cars. :rolleyes:
Man, the old dude might have been a drunk with bad hygiene habits, but at least he was quiet!
Now, that’s the spirit! You need to think up something really special, and when the realtor chicks come over to ask you to stop doing it, you can very pointedly say something like, “Oh, it never occurred to me that what I do over here could affect your property over there!” Except they wouldn’t get it, because self-involved, entitled people never do.
Ah good. A mini-rant thread. This has been itching at me very slightly, but so slightly I didn’t want to bother with a thread of its own (I’m never again starting a pit thread for a minor irritation, believe me).
Fuck off with the shouting “PLEASE HELP” thread titles. We’re an obliging bunch, and usually will answer almost anything. Just state your question and we will almost always answer.
Of course, if your title is non-descriptive and just says “PLEASE HELP” or equivalent, then the source of the annoyance is obvious, but even putting PLEASE HELP at the end of your question gets up my nose. It’s hard to put a finger on what’s so annoying. Actually, I think it’s because it carries this slight implication that we mightn’t help if you don’t specifically ask.
Nope, nothing in this house was worth $40.00 on the poppiest day it ever popped–it’s a really generic house built probably around the late '30s, early '40s and it has absolutely no redeeming architectural features whatsoever. Any value it might once have had has been buried underneath years of garbage (everybody kept discovering new 18-packs of eggs lying around–on counters, in piles of stuff, I think the final tally is five or six cartons and boy howdy has everyone been VERY CAREFUL not to jostle those too harshly!) empty vodka bottles, pee soaked mattress, drifts of empty cans of pork 'n beans, disassembled VCRs, spongy floorboards that have separated from the walls with what looks like carpenter ant damage, a chest freezer that apparently held a large amount of fishbait or something before it was unplugged sometime in the Eisenhower administration, you know, one of THOSE houses… Five or six thirty gallon trash cans out the back that are stuffed full but the garbage service hasn’t been paid in years–the gigantic dumpster is so full they’re jumping up and down on it to get it packed down so they can put the REST of the crap in there that’s STILL left over after the Craig’s List zombies swarmed over it like meth fueled maggots on a week old roadkill 'possum.
I mean, the neighbor lady and I were trying for the past two years to get the dude to agree to just give one of us a call every week or two on our cellphones–not to talk, just to get the caller ID tag–so that we’d know he was still alive. We had nightmares of the smell tipping us off weeks afterward that the cirrhosis had progressed to its logical conclusion–I’m glad that the dude managed to sell the place, but considering he was a near shut in who only left the house once every few weeks to buy out the vodka supply of the local liquor store I’m a little nervous that he took the windfall and purchased a gigantic motor home. It was bad enough worrying about him DUI’ing around in his little Datsun wagon but now he’s behind the wheel of a gigantic land behemoth. I’m hoping he just parks it in a campground and continues his drinking spree in considerably less unsanitary conditions. He can’t be long for this world, I just hope he doesn’t take out a family of five when he goes…
So I guess I can’t be TOO pissed at the realtor ladies, considering they’re right over there elbow deep in that festering horror–now that’s what I call protecting your investment! It’ll be interesting to find out how they feel about their prospects of renovating once the drifts of filth are removed and the true magnitude of the condition the house is in reveals itself in the harsh light of day. True, the foundation is straight, the roofline is straight and the lines are fundamentally sound, but the garage is a write off and the house will have to be completely gutted and renovated from the floor up to make it habitable. They’re debating tearing down the existing house and building two townhouses, since the lot is confirmed dividable and they’ve done a survey on the lot lines. If they go for that it’s going to suck a bit because I live on a four house dead end stub street that’s unpaved and backs onto a bike trail. We really like it quiet, with minimal traffic and nobody’s terribly thrilled at having the ongoing construction and annoyance of two new sets of neighbors even though new construction would drive the property values up. Progress–sometimes it kinda sucks!
I understand that you’re excited about the programming you’ll be airing, so much so that you want to tell us weeks in advance. But I gotta tell ya, if you don’t stop running an ad for it
every
damn
commercial
break
all
damn
day
long
especially when it has music that is annoying as all hell now that I’ve heard it umpteen times, guess what - I’m not going to watch it! :mad:
Why do they persist in putting the open/close buttons on DVD-Rom drives UNDER the tray? Where you can’t see them, get at them, or push them, without risk of getting your finger jammed as it moves? Why not put them ABOVE the tray so you can access them with ease?
Come to that, why are the insides of PCs so goddamned dangerously sharp and pointy? You can’t install or remove anything without risk of slicing your hand open! Argh! It’s long past the time when they should’ve been redesigned for ease of installation.
Please stop asking me what words mean during tests. How many times have I explained to you that the point of a test is to find out what YOU know? If I tell you what stuff means, then I’m no longer testing YOU, I’m testing ME. Which is infinitely less interesting, considering that a. my English is already excellent, thanks so much and b. I’m the one who’s going to be grading your tests anyway.
You’re great kids and I know you only want to get good grades, but when I inform you that I won’t be translating anything into Bulgarian and you then spend the next 45 minutes beckoning me over and asking me what this word means or that word means, it is really, really annoying.
(1) I admit this is a super-whiny minor complaint, but… I’m sick of thread titles in Cafe Society in the form “What? No thread about XXX yet?”. How is that shocking? SOMEONE has to be the first person to start the thread. Might as well be you.
(2) I hate sending reasonably charming personalized emails to lots of women on match.com (or the equivalent), and getting no responses at all. Sigh.
Why must you answer the phone if you’re not able to talk to me?
If you’re sleeping, let it ring. That way you relieve me of the obligation to try to have a conversation with someone who is temporarily incoherent.
And if you do find yourself on the phone while you’re sleeping (it happens to me sometimes too … I’m not awake enough to realize I’m not awake enough to talk), and if I say “Why don’t you call me back when you’re awake,” you say OKAY, not “No, mumble, mumble, sokay, mumble …”
Let me guess: is your desktop computer not actually on your desktop?
My own mini-peeve of the day: poorly designed sinks, where the water comes out so close to the edge of the basin that I can’t wash my hands without bumping them against the side of the sink. :mad:
