Category Archives: Rants

Jan 18 2012

Grey Slush and Restlessness

This is that dreadful time in winter when I hit the horse latitudes; I need to organize but am unmotivated.  I need to plan for my spring garden but it is so cold outside it doesn’t seem it will ever be warm again.  My hair needs to be cut, we need new clothes, and of course, there is the dreaded grey slush melting on the floor by the mat next to the back door.

There’s something about that grey slush that just sends me over the edge.  The inability to control my environment, the irritation of stepping into a cold puddle in my stocking-feet? Either way, I hate it.

I’m sick of eating casseroles, soups and leftovers.  I’m sick of ground beef.  I’m sick of waking up in the morning in a dark house, with bare trees outside the windows.  I’m sick of the white residue of salt water crusting the car from the water thrown by other drivers’ tires on melting city streets.

Staticky hair from wearing a hat.  Chapped fingertips, chapped lips, dry skin.  Cracked heels catching on socks, cold drafts next to the door, my  engagement ring turning to the side inside my winter gloves, my eyes watering in the cold, my glasses fogging when I come inside.

My daughter is having growing pains and in the evenings after school, every day this week, she has whimpered while rubbing her thigh, unable to concentrate on homework.  The nurse line at the doctor’s office has cut me off mid-recording each time I’ve tried to leave a message.  It took three tries to ask them to call and let me know if we need to bring her in for an exam.

A thousand things are on the list of what I could complain about, but really what it boils down to is restlessness, the feeling I get every year between the new year and the start of spring.  I’m unable to focus, I can’t take on new DIY projects or crafts, and I just want to curl up in a ball and sleep.

So instead, I’m going to take a hot shower.  I’m going to start a loaf of bread and get ready for a client meeting this afternoon.  I’ll make supper for my family and after PC gets home and we eat, Rabbit and I will sit down and watch “American Idol.”

Spring will be here before long, but it can’t come soon enough for me.

Dec 14 2011

Luke, Who Is Your REAL Father?

As business is slow and I’ve been spending either mornings or afternoons at home instead of at the office, I’ve been watching more television than usual.  I’ll turn the TV on while I’m doing housework or cooking, and either listen or watch whatever it is that’s on.

Which is usually trashy daytime talk shows.

How is it that there are roughly four separate hosts whose entire body of work seems to be hours of televised paternity testing?  Are there really that many people out there who are willing to go on TV and air their dirty laundry in front of a studio audience?

Amazingly, about half the guests on the shows seem to be from the south.  The other half are from all over.  The formula is always the same.  ”Lurlene has a secret from Michael: their baby may not be his!  She’s here today to find out once and for all if the father of her one year old baby boy Davon is Michael…or if it is Michael’s best friend Lance!”

OR, it’s “Lance is suspicious of Tricia because he says their 18 month old baby Bella doesn’t look anything like him.  He thinks that Tricia has cheated on him and wants a paternity test to find out who Bella’s father really is.”

Once in a while, to change things up, Maury will throw in a lie detector test, wherein some “Polygraph Expert” in the front row (a chinless guy in a polo shirt who looks as though he flunked out of community college) assures Maury that the results are incontrovertible.   Which anyone who reads crime novels or watches good police procedural dramas will tell you is patently untrue, but never let the truth get in the way of bad television.

There will be some woman screaming “That baby looks more like him than HE does!” and some guy yelling “Y’all just gotta accept that she’s a lyin’ b**ch.”  Or some other woman will come on in the course of the show to start a fight with the wronged girlfriend/wife and bored security guys will stand to the side and watch them tear out one another’s hair.

Yesterday some talk show host with a British accent (“Oy! Shut up, you.  Right? Just…oy! I’m talking to you, right?  Shut it, you, and listen to me, right?”) was berating his two guests for mistrusting each other after a polygraph test showed each of them had been telling the truth about being faithful.  ”And you want to bring a child into this relationship, do you?” he shouted at them contemptuously.  ”Well, off you go….we have a counselor backstage who’s going to get you all straightened out.”

Then as they slunk off the stage, he shouted something like “Up next – is she prostituting herself for a living, and should her mum be allowed to keep her four year old twins?  We’ll find out what Latisha has to say for herself, after the break.”

God, it’s just exhausting.  And then the commercial sponsors for these programs come on during the commercials, and it’s limited to the following:  online associate’s degree programs, personal injury lawyers, LifeAlert bracelets, medicare supplemental plans, consumer credit counseling services, bankruptcy attorneys and paycheck advance lenders.

No wonder I prefer reading to watching TV.

Nov 27 2011

Vanilla Pudding Sandwich: A Church Encounter

WARNING:  What follows is a really PMS-y tirade against a church service I went to this morning.  Please understand that I am not saying these are bad people.  I am saying that I AM A BAD PERSON and that I really, really, really, really, REALLY did not like the service I went to.

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Oh, dear God, what a morning I had.

I’m determined to find a church for our family by the end of the year.  Of course, something this important should be undertaken in the midst of the holidays and by oneself with little pre-planning.  This is how all great decisions are reached, like….none that I can come up with, for instance.

Anyway, this morning I got up and got dressed for church, and went three blocks away to one in our neighborhood.  I had taken Rabbit to a service there about five years ago and wasn’t thrilled with the pastor, but learned that he’d moved on and that they’d gotten a new one.  Rabbit had also enjoyed vacation Bible school there one summer, and frequently asked me if we could go back.

So I took on the reconnaissance work of church shopping and arrived fifteen minutes before the start of the service so I could observe.  Mostly, I found strikes against this particular church for us.

Strike One:  Five of every six adults in attendance were at least 70 years old.  This indicated to me an aging congregation that would end up the way our former church did, which was shrinking and diminishing until there were only about ten families in attendance, and almost no small children.

Strike Two:  Only three or four kids were there, and all were under five.  I’m sure they have more, but I don’t want Rabbit to be the only kid her age at church.

Strike Three:  Only about one of every seven or eight persons in attendance was male. For my husband, this would be a deal breaker.  A few old guys, one white haired hipster in a black turtleneck, a thirty-ish guy in a tweed jacket with a braid down his back, and that was about it.

Strike Four:  Everything else.

Honestly, you guys. It was a terrible 90 minutes I spent smiling woodenly at earnest and well meaning people who didn’t get excited about anything, who sang out of tune, whose service was all the heck out of order, and whose pastor intoned in a slow, plaintive and meditative voice about things like “journeying to this place of expectation” and “advent is a season where we yearn to be in the birthplace of joy.”

Seriously, at times it was less like a church service and more like a really boring staging of The Vagina Monologues.

Here’s my problem with this morning. During the pastor’s sermon, she did not ONCE mention Jesus. I’m not even kidding.  She talked about Advent and the approach to Christmas in smarmy terms like “a season of waiting” and “a time of peaceful organization of the trash that is in our lives” and then talked about how as a child, she would watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade and always knew that the end of the parade, with Santa on a float, meant that Christmas was coming.

At least twice, she uttered the phrase “…at this point in time.”  (Man, I am awful).

She mentioned a dog video she enjoyed on YouTube.  She mentioned “that time of longing for joy, and the vulnerability we all must come to in order to embrace life’s joy.  Vulnerability that manifests itself in a sigh before hearing the doctor’s results. Vulnerability in wondering if there’s enough money for the house payment.  Vulnerability in going to war…”

Uh…I think you have vulnerability and anxiety confused.

The response to prayers of the congregation was this:  ”God of grace and vulnerability, hear our prayers.”

Listen, sister.  If I were looking for a vulnerable God, I would worship the underbelly of a turtle.

I know right now I sound like a horrible person and if you want to stop reading, please do because I kind of hate myself right now.  But sweet merciful unmentioned Jesus, it was so awful.  The music was dreadful.  The three women up front behind the pastor all wore peasant skirts and dangly earrings and long flowy ponytails and swayed while they sang with their eyes closed.

They did the opening hymn sitting down.  Then they had The Children’s Moment, where they explained what the Advent candles meant, while the kids ran back and forth on the altar.  Then more music, and then the Lord’s Prayer, and then the Peace, and only then did they do the readings in the Bible. After that, the prayers of the people, and THEN the sermon.

This is a minor thing to many people, but I have grown accustomed to a certain order of things in a church service:  Opening hymn, welcome, prayers, Psalm, response, Old Testament reading, response, Gospel, sermon, then prayers, then the offertory, then the Lord’s Prayer, then the Peace, then communion or similar, and then a final benediction and recessional song.  Many mainline Protestant religions and the Catholic church follow this basic outline.  It becomes a clock: during the Peace, you know that there’s communion and then the approach to the runway leading to time to leave and get groceries and make Sunday dinner.

I did not invent this: I just grew up with it.

I’ve been to other churches that don’t follow this outline at all.  They have contemporary music and don’t dress up and have PowerPoint projections of song lyrics and the pastor wears jeans and on and  on.  Those don’t bother me as much as this morning did because this church seemed to be trying so terribly hard to be something it just was not.   And I can’t think what that something might be, but it all felt as though it were falling way short of the mark.

It felt like….like an emasculation celebration.  Is that a weird thing?  It did – it felt like the island of Amazons, all blissed out on sacramental wine after a deep discussion group session and maybe some foot reflexology.  It felt placid and innocuous – like eating a sandwich made of vanilla pudding between two slices of soft white bread.

I’m sure that they are all incredibly lovely people who care about each other and walk hand in hand fully expectant of the season of the birth of vulnerable joy, trembling in yearning for the Advent of grace and vulnerability.  Or something.

But boy, it was SO not for me.

 

Nov 21 2011

Pity Party

Saturday morning while I was idling in a store parking lot, there was a pop and then smoke and steam poured out of the hood of my car.  There was a river of anti-freeze coming out from the bottom and streaming across the parking lot.

Great.

I called PC’s former boss at the service station where he worked before getting his current job and Bruce promised to come tow the car downtown and they would take a look at it on Monday.

He called today and said it was fixed – a radiator hose split open and was destroyed.  Parts, labor and the tow came up to roughly the amount we spend in two weeks on groceries.

I have no current listings and my strongest prospective buyer client just called this morning to tell me how excited she was that they are buying a house offered for sale by owner.

Our tax return is STILL under review, so no hope on the horizon of that windfall coming any time soon.

I know this is the week when we gather to give thanks, but I just feel like sitting down and crying like a baby.  I’m so freaking sick of thinking things are going okay and then having yet one more thing drop on us like a brick.

By Mary • Posted in Rants
Nov 15 2011

Personal Reflection And Inevitable Rant

That whole turning-over-a-new-leaf and resisting-the-compulsion-to-be-a-sarcastic-bitch phase of my life lasted exactly nine days and blew up like a backed up sewer line this evening.

I guess I didn’t mention my decision to be much nicer to the people in my life but it stemmed from my youth retreat the first weekend of November.  I had a deep and forbidding sense of disaster and disappointment in myself when I sat and took a personal inventory of the way I talked to people, the way I looked when people talked to me, and the thoughts I let out of my mouth without filtering them first.

I thought about how words can hurt and how my mind jumps to the sarcastic comment far more frequently than a good person’s should.  I thought about how the tension in my house was thick and how my daughter’s shoulders sagged when I would caustically tell her to give me space and how my husband would coldly reply to my nagging words when I really got going.

I thought a lot about the golden rule, and karma, and the laws of attraction and the theory that we are the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time.  I had to almost physically shake myself, sitting there on my air mattress late that Saturday night, and said out loud “Oh, man.  I am so mean.”

And I am.  I know that on this blog, I have the opportunity and luxury of presenting myself to readers in a way that quite often makes me sound like a wise and loving woman who is overflowing with affection for her little family, who bakes bread and reads and is funny and obsessed with groceries and Tupperware and Robert Plant.

But anyone who knows me in real life knows that I have a very sharp tongue and can easily leap to the catty in a nanosecond if I don’t stop myself.  This doesn’t mean that the person on this blog is not real: if anything, on the blog, I am more my true self than in person because I go deeper than I do in a surface conversation.  I can filter myself and throw away the ugly things, or put them aside, and focus on the way I want to be always instead of the way I am most times.

You know the rants?  That’s pretty much me about half of the time in person.  And it can be fun for a while, but pretty soon even I get sick of it.  I want to be a calm and nice person who stops herself before making a comment that could hurt someone’s feelings.

For nine days, I’ve done pretty well.  I’ve been patient with my daughter, kind and patient with my husband, calm at the office, hopeful with work, positive among colleagues.  Then tonight, I just suddenly felt it all pile up and wanted to punch the world right in the throat.

It had been so long since I’d said something acid and catty and mean-spirited that I was itching to just go haywire and cut loose.  I’m not proud of it, I’m just being honest.

I didn’t indulge in the cattiness, but dammit, I thought mean things for about two straight hours.

Someone on Facebook had a wall post that said something to the effect that “Jesus love’s you when your down.”  It was all I could do to not post a response that told them “Jesus loves people who know how to spell and when to use apostrophes.”  It is a terrible thing to have these thoughts.

My daughter was doing math homework and they are starting division. She didn’t know the difference between division and subtraction and I wanted to tell her to just wait til school the next day and have the teacher go over it because I had no desire to help with freaking homework.  Instead, I gritted my teeth and tried to help her and tried not to just tell her the answers.

I sat in my car in front of the library and thought terrible and judgmental things about each stranger who walked past me.  I looked in the mirror and thought terrible things about myself.  When I got home, I finished making dinner and the biscuits on the chicken pot pie were doughy underneath.  There was too much pepper in the sauce.  I made too many dirty dishes and there was a fine grit of pulverized dried leaves underfoot and the dishtowel basket was overflowing with dirty towels and rags.  I wanted to burn the kitchen to the ground and drive off into the sunset.  But my car is almost out of gas and really, I should just go to bed.

I suppose in reality, the fact is that nobody can be perfectly nice all the time.  At least, I can’t.  Once in a while, I have to step away and get these terrible thoughts out without saying something to someone that I can never take back.   So here is my list, not directed at any one person, but in general, at statements, behaviors or personalities that universally make my hair fall out in clumps and my sarcasm gland secrete acid into my brain and my tongue turn forked like a serpent’s.

1.  Plurals do not require apostrophes.

2.  Your (possessive) and you’re (contraction for you are) are two separate and distinct things and if you are allowed to have a driver’s license and a facebook account and the right to vote, you should most definitely learn the difference between your and you’re.

3.  Don’t freaking touch me.

4.  Don’t follow me.

5.  I don’t want to shake hands when your hands are limp and sweaty.  You give me the skeeves.

AND OKAY NOW IT’S JUST FULL ON RANT BECAUSE THIS IS MY BLOG AND IF I DON’T GET IT OUT HERE, I WILL SAY SOMETHING TERRIBLE TO A PERSON IN REAL LIFE.

6.  Please for the love of all that is holy, do not wear pajama pants outside the privacy of your own home, no matter how casual the setting.  Just…wear regular pants.

7.  It’s not a news channel.  It’s not news.  It’s not the truth.  It’s not something I want you to talk to me about.

8.  I will unfriend you if you use the word “retarded” as a casual phrase about something you find lame or ridiculous.

9. Yes, I’m rolling my eyes.  It’s my physical response to listening to someone and trying to prevent my muscles from reflexively punching them.

10.  At the end of the day, it’s very sort of, I mean, basically, you know, like, duh, for real and absolutely.  I hear these sprinkled into conversation and I develop hives.  And see #9 for my reaction.

11.  If I see one more cleverly spelled baby name I will take a hammer to my own thumb for relief.  ”Heaven” should remain spelled that way, and not backward to make the name “Nevaeh.”  You know why? Because that’s stupid.  Yeah.  I said it.

I’M FEELING ENDORPHINS NOW.  I’M FEELING MY BLOOD PRESSURE GOING BACK TO NORMAL.

I could go on and on but I should stop now.  I’m a terrible person.  I’m not nice, not the way I want to be.  Or is niceness just the ability to keep the mean thoughts to oneself?

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know when to keep my thoughts to myself.

Tell me in the comments: are you a nice person? I mean, are you a person who thinks nice thoughts and says nice things?  Are you sarcastic?  How are you different in real life than you present yourself online?

Nov 11 2011

Demolish It and Salt the Ground

Caution: I curse in this post, and not even as badly as I would like.  There is graphic content about a disturbing current event.  Proceed with caution.

What did he know?  So many people are asking that question, as though the level of detail about the child molestation reported to Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno will help excuse his lack of action to stop and prevent it.

“Oh, he just heard Sandusky was horsing around in the shower with a little kid.” Well, that makes things clearer.  Because THAT is okay?

Here’s the bottom line: we all pretty much know that Paterno and the higher ups knew what was going on. Whether they knew the full extent of it or not (and I think they did), just knowing the bare minimum, the surface details, the general ickiness of a grown man taking little kids on trips with him and into his home and into the goddamned SHOWER?  And they knew even these details and didn’t consider that this was bad enough to report to child protective services and law enforcement.

But they knew more.  They had to know more.  Penn State grad assistant (now assistant coach) McQueary certainly knew more and did NOTHING to help that little boy who was being raped.  Oh, wait.  McQueary walked into the locker room, saw the rape in progress, and then left the locker room after making eye contact with Sandusky and his victim.  He just walked out.  He went home, and he called his own dad.  He didn’t stop the rape.  He didn’t take the boy out of the shower.  He didn’t call the police.  He went home and called his dad.   Think about how it looked to that boy, to see a grown man walk in, look at him being raped….and then walk away.

This was nine years (and how many other victims) ago.  NINE YEARS, you guys.   I don’t want to think about this.  But I cannot scrub these images out of my brain, and every time I think about it, I become dizzy and want to throw up.

Almost worse  is the fact that the student body began to riot when the coach (along with several others in administration) got fired on Wednesday.  They rioted to protest the removal of this adored old man from his position of extreme authority at the university.  They rioted to protest its unfairness.

Nobody at Penn State rioted to insist that the football program be suspended.

Nobody rioted to insist that McQueary also lose his job.

Nobody rioted to protest what had happened to those little boys.

NOBODY.

The news, the opinions, the talk of this atrocity: it is everywhere.  As a jaded society calloused to nearly everything, this defies comprehension.  I’m in shock that there is even going to be a football game at Penn State on Saturday morning.  I’m shocked that the administration of Penn State wouldn’t shut down the whole football program until they had rooted out every last detestable piece of shit cover-up artist in that program and swept the entire mess clean.

The show must go on?  The players need this? It will restore normalcy? Please.  There is nothing normal anywhere on the horizon for Penn State.  Out of common decency and a show of complete distancing from a corrupt and insane athletic department, Penn State should end its football season right now.

My heart breaks for those children.  My heart breaks for their families and the children who have not yet come forward.  I think of my own child, my nine year old child, and I know that I would, bare-handed, end the life of anyone who did something so heinous to her.  The knowledge that a whole cadre of grown men did nothing to help these young boys has helped to destroy my faith in humanity.

Oct 21 2011

Tits in a Wringer

I’m really sick of hearing about breastfeeding.

Yes, this is completely out of left field, but seriously.  Yes, breast is best and all that, but I’m an adoptive mother and never had to/got to breast feed.  And I’m fine with that.  If anything, I have a completely valid excuse to sidestep the whole issue without personal involvement.

But here’s the thing:  I know people who are so PRO-breastfeeding that they scare the crap out of me.  With some of them, I think they would prefer that bras and shirts be outlawed and every lactating mother in the world walk around like someone from an old issue of National Geographic, tits swinging in the wind and down to their waists, nursing children until the age of ten and doing so in the middle of Mall of America.

On the other hand, I know people so squeamish about breastfeeding that they would be more comfortable growing babies in petri dishes and having them born at the age of nine, fully weaned, and emerge eating solid foods and smoking cigarettes.  You say the word “breast” to these people and they turn white as a sheet and can’t make eye contact with you for six months.

There is a middle ground.  It’s called mind your own damned business.  If you are uncomfortable with public breastfeeding, I really don’t think it’s necessary to make someone nursing their baby go off into a separate wing of a building just to spare your sensibilities.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s really necessary to stage tit-ins at the mall or whip out your boob in front of Uncle Herman just to prove how open-minded you are and how old-fashioned he is.  Breast-feed or don’t.  It’s natural, it’s fine, it’s what God intended.  But if you wouldn’t take your boobs out in front of Uncle Herman without the baby there, then maybe think twice about doing it with the baby there.  And if you WOULD whip the girls out in front of a stranger whether you’re nursing or not….well, that’s a whole different rant.

At the luncheon after my daughter’s baptism, an elderly member of the church congregation asked my niece, who then had an eight month old baby, whether she was still breast-feeding him.  My niece, who had never met this woman, stammered that she had tried but it just hadn’t worked out for them.  Nosy Oldster then proceeded to chew out my niece and tell her, essentially, that she had done the wrong thing and that if she had been a good mother, she would have breast fed her son.  Meanwhile, my niece, whose pregnancy had been difficult and whose son’s birth had been traumatic and scary, began crying and could only be comforted by her husband taking her out of the church and on a prolonged shopping trip to Target.

So really, the whole nipple-Nazi movement has turned me off to the breastfeeding cause.  I have met so many of these women (and even more annoying, MEN) who take up the mantle of breastfeeding and march around stridently telling everyone what’s best for them that I want to punch them right in the chest.  Don’t get me wrong: I don’t have ANYTHING against breastfeeding.  It’s the fanatics I can’t stand.  Same as Christianity:  I like their coach, but I am not a fan of their cheerleaders.

Oct 11 2011

Glove Up! It’s the IRS!

So I know I haven’t mentioned this yet, but we’re being audited by the IRS.

Yes, I know.  This is what happens when your daughter gets head lice seven times and you shake your fist at the sky and yell “What next? Locusts? Frogs?”

And the Lord, he smiteth them with an official “examination” by the IRS. Heh. Examination.  LIke when the doctor stretches on a latex glove and snaps it and turns to you and says “You’re going to feel a little pressure.”  That’s what I think of when I hear that word.  They use it now instead of the word “audit,” and I can’t help but think that this euphemism is just as chill-inducing as the original word.

Anyway, they just want a copy of Rabbit’s adoption decree and proof of special needs adoption status because of the amount of the adoption tax credit.  Oh, and the fact that the social security number we provided for her doesn’t match her name.

Yeah.  We didn’t change her SSN at the time of adoption and it turns out that we were supposed to fill out some forms to change her name on the SSN to her adopted name.  We thought that some of the reams of paperwork we filled out with our adoption attorney included something to take care of that, but apparently it did not.

So we’re STILL waiting on our tax return.  I am pleased to report that so far (knock wood) the people I’ve spoken to at the IRS have been very nice and helpful.  But then again, they haven’t put on the latex gloves yet.

More on this story as it develops.  Maybe.

 

Sep 14 2011

Rub Mercy From Scalp to Soles

Three words to sum up the suckitude of this day:

HEAD LICE AGAIN.

I swear to GOD, her scalp is clean as a whistle every time we have treated her.  No eggs, no nits, no bugs. Treated and combed through every hair, and then every blanket, pillow and sheet washed in hot water and dried to a crisp in the dryer.  Every stuffed animal bagged up for two weeks.  Every rug vacuumed, the sofa sprayed with insecticide, every precaution taken.

Every home remedy tried, every over the counter remedy with the exception of the little comb that is supposed to electrocute the bugs.

When Rabbit told me this morning that she’d found two live lice on a hair in her hairbrush this morning, I literally broke down and wept.  I wept like someone who has found yet another dog inextricably shot dead on the front step.  I wept like someone whose crops have been eaten by locusts.  I wept like someone whose house has been crushed under a toppled redwood tree.

Sisyphus and his rock.  Me and Rabbit’s head lice.  This morning I reached the end of my tether. I called the doctor’s office and asked them for a prescription for whatever they had that was the strongest thing available for this scourge.

They wrote us a prescription for permethrin.  When I picked it up at the Target pharmacy, the pharmacist told me it was the strongest thing available to treat head lice.  I hope so.  Then I read the directions:  ”Massage into skin from scalp to soles of the feet.” Confused, I read further.

Apparently, this medication is most commonly used to treat SCABIES.  Lord have mercy.  Just fix this horrible problem.

This evening, I applied the cream to Rabbit’s freshly shampooed and dried hair. It stayed in for ten minutes.  I found her at the end of ten minutes in PC’s garage/man cave. She was standing in front of him in her nightgown, her hair twisted up into a clip, tears streaming down her face.  PC was telling her “Honey, when you feel bad, you just need to remember to tell yourself ‘This is not my fault.’ You have head lice because lots of kids at your school have head lice.”

She stood there with her chin quivering and a fat tear rolled down her cheek.  ”Okay?” PC said, taking her by the hand.  ”Okay,” she whispered.

They’re in the bathroom right now: Rabbit sitting on the counter, PC patiently sectioning her hair and using the lice comb to go through one tiny section at a time, combing out eggs and freshly killed bugs.  It is nearly 10:00 and we are drained and exhausted.  Our family has been through a lot in recent months but these damned head lice really do feel like the worst thing outside of the loss of human life.  We have been battling this problem off and on for SEVEN MONTHS.

Dammit.

Sep 12 2011

Fridge Frustration

My sister and I spent part of our morning at my office today; being a Monday, there was quite a bit of catching up to do and I had paperwork to take care of, a few calls to make, a visit with my broker, and mail to sort through. She sat in the guest chair in my office reading while I took care of things.

We left after a couple of hours to preview a house for a client, and then had to drive to check on a couple of listings.  Then we went to Trader Joe’s for the groceries we hadn’t gotten yesterday on our mammoth shopping expedition to a local big box grocer.  Olive oil, butter, raisins, Swiss cheese, some Gouda, yogurt and several frozen items for PC and Rabbit to eat while my sister and I are away from the house for four days.

Back at the house, we put away the groceries and ate lunch, and then my sister went to have a short nap.  I did two loads of laundry and hung them out to dry, ran a couple of errands to check on a listing and check on repairs on a house under contract.

When I got home, I reached into the fridge for something cold to drink and discovered that the sodas we’d put in the fridge this morning were not very cold.  Neither was the gallon of milk I’d bought yesterday.  Or the yogurt, cheese, orange juice or apple juice.

The freezer was still freezing, but none of the cold air was getting into the fridge.  So, for the (I’m pretty sure) sixth time in probably five years, I had to empty the freezer and take everything in it to the deep freeze downstairs (so a repairman can get to the freezer motor), and called the home warranty company.

They were excited to inform me that they could have someone out by Friday.  ”Um…no,” I said.  ”I am leaving town Thursday morning and my husband can’t take off work to meet a contractor here.  And it’s my refrigerator.  We need someone tomorrow.”  He assured me (at 5:00 p.m.) that a contractor would call me this evening.  No call so far and as it is nearly 11:00 p.m., I’d say it isn’t going to happen.

So there’s a giant Tupperware bowl of ice in the refrigerator to keep things somewhat cool until I can get more tomorrow for our cooler.  I don’t want to lose $50 or more worth of perishables while I wait for a repairman.

We have a home warranty that costs us roughly $40 a month as sort of an insurance policy so that repair of things like a washer, dryer, stove, fridge, air conditioner, furnace or water heater only costs us the $60 co-pay.   So far, it’s paid for itself every single year. If the item can’t be fixed, or becomes too costly to fix, they say they will replace it.

But why, do you suppose, would a home warranty company continue sending out a repairman to do a $200 repair on an appliance at least SIX TIMES IN A ROW instead of replacing the appliance itself?  I couldn’t tell you, since it defies logic to me.  But I can tell you this: I will never buy a GE refrigerator again. EVER.