Another Thing That Irks Me

I suppose y'all thought that having no day job would cut down a bit on the things that got on my last nerve. Well, that puts you somewhere between "naive" and "entirely unfamiliar with my cranky existence".

OF COURSE things are annoying the crap out of me. Here's the one for today: people who list ingredients for products and include things like "love" and "good fortune" and "prayers" and other happy bullshit. Implying that their stuff is made with loving care and that everyone else's is made with .... lesser ingredients, certainly with inferior grades of karma.


Really? Because my products contain spite and malice. Actually, the body polish is full of loathing because it makes it much scrubbier. And my soap is made with ennui and angst, in alternating layers.


Tune in tomorrow, when I make bath bombs filled with formless dread and night sweats.

Neighbors, and Why I Usually Hate Them

We've been pretty quiet for a few days, I know.

We're finishing up with the unpacking chores, plus unpacking and inventorying for the business, and getting a new workroom set up, all while Jesse is job hunting. Then there are the supply orders, which are a) enormous, at least by my piddly standards and b) urgent, because we were out of everything and I am due to reopen. It's a LOT to take care of.

While this is going on, we learned something. Fireworks are legal in Florida. This is something I never considered, because when we lived in California, anyone with a firecracker would be shot on sight. One spark during dry weather and half the state would burn down. So it never even occurred to us that you could buy fireworks everywhere. There's an aisle for them in the supermarket, for pete's sake.

This is only a problem because it turns out that we live directly across the street from three hell-born urchins. If you saw Talladega Nights, and you remember the two unwashed brats that were in that movie, you can picture these kids. I've never seen their parents. What I do see is a six year old - maybe seven - out in the front yard every evening after school, with a shopping bag full of firecrackers and a lighter.

And of course, it turns out that the dog is afraid of firecrackers. I have no particular desire to be the lady who runs around the neighborhood telling all the kids to knock it off, but seriously, you let your second grader spend all his free time trying to earn the name Nine Fingered Willy?

I do know that their house is on the market, so I can only hope that they move on to torture somebody else. Or it's going to be a long, cranky summer.

Texas In My Rearview Mirror

Alarm clocks are for people who don't have dogs.

We enjoyed our day off in San Antonio. We looked at the Riverwalk, took a short sight-seeing drive, ate a ton of barbeque, and went to bed at a reasonable hour.*

At about five in the morning, Bander let us know that it was time to get up. Since there's no point in arguing, we got up, packed the cars, and took off. Part of our strategy was to miss any sort of rush hour traveling through Houston.

That turned out to be a good thing, because whoever handles road maintenance in Texas is on a wild tear-ass spending spree. More of the I-10 was chewed up and in the process of revamping in Texas than I could believe. I wanted to explain to the chowderhead in charge that instead of ripping everything out and then starting repairs, you do one freaking section at a time.

The crown jewel in the asphalt crown of freeway fuckery is the center of downtown Houston, where the I-10 - a major cross country artery that carries scads of long-haul trucks and a big chunk of travelers - is squeezed into a single ultra-narrow strip that clearly used to be the bike lane. It took quite some time to get through, and I can't imagine how long it would have taken during normal traffic hours.

We did indeed like San Antonio, but the traffic alone put Houston on the list next to El Paso of places that we don't need to visit again.

What seems endless hours later, and we've finally finished crossing Texas. We're in Lafayette, LA, and we found a restaurant that will deliver deep-fried alligator nuggets for dinner. Louisiana is pretty country, and they have fried gator.

I'm happier already.

Spamalot

Somehow, at some point in the last five years, we got on somebody’s group mailing list. This is one of those big gangs of people with a common interest who stay in touch by emailing each other constantly with all kinds of random bullshit. They’re all on the other side of the country, but somehow we’re included to every Taco Tuesday to discuss fundraising and t-shirt sales, or whatever stupid event they’re having lately.

We didn’t complain for quite a while, because there was a couple who were having quite the drama-filled long-drawn-out breakup. It was like watching Cops via e-mail. Joe would say “Just so everybody knows, Linda is not comin to the piknik becuz she thinks I’m sleepin with Susan and shes mad”. And then Linda would e-mail everybody and say “Joe is a basterd and I put his stuff out on the lawn so if anybody wants a guitar for free come get it right now”. And then the next week or so they’d announce their engagement.

Anyway, as long as this was going on it was hilarious and we were glad to be included. However, they finally broke up or one of them got a restraining order or something, and they stopped posting to the group. We still get the emails, but the joy is gone. And over the past couple of years both the e-mailers and I have gotten older and crankier. The emails got dumber and more political, a bad combo.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it any more. I sent a response to the primary offender, saying “I don’t know you. Take me off your list.”

I got the luxury of a personal response.

And since it included an agreement to take me off his mailing list, I just responded with “thanks”. But since I had more to say, and I didn’t want to start a fight, I’ll respond here.

(Click the pic for a better view)

Driven to Distraction

I hate these moments.

See, most of my posts are me bitching about other people. But sometimes, dangit, I’m the problem.

A couple of weeks ago, Jesse and I had some errands that required us to rent a car – neither one of ours were suitable, or up to the task. To be quite frank, I drive an overpowered Mustang convertible with 225,000 miles on it, with bald tires and a slipping rear differential, so it’s isn’t suitable for very much but I can STILL suck your doors off while passing you in the slow lane.

Anyway.

We went trotting down the road to [Star Fleet's Finest] rent-a-runabout, where I had reserved a more reliable (and slower and more boring) small SUV. Everything was fine until I got to the counter and had to show my driver’s license. Which, as it turns out, is expired. It expired on my birthday, nearly four months ago.

I had never noticed.

I never get tickets because I’m sneaky and who the hell writes checks any more? It’s all about knowing to slow down before the blind hiding spots where the motorcycle cops lurk, and using the debit card.

I kept a straight face, and said, “Huh, must have left it at home. Go ahead and put it in his name, it’s just as easy.” Inside my head, I was doing more wild screaming “aaaaagh! I’m a felon! I’ve been driving around illegally for months! Wait, he’s looking. Be cool.”

So technically speaking, Jesse rented the car, and off we went.



My next thing was to figure out why I hadn’t gotten an automatic renewal. I always get an automatic renewal. So I called the DMV. Since I have to do this during office hours, there’s always a chance that I’ll get interrupted for work questions or rush projects, and the hold times are looooooong.

For several days, I did the following:
1. Phone the DMV.
2. Go through the endless menu of buttons to be pushed.
3. Get connected to the hold system.
4. Listen to the Muzak version of “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” and don’t I wish I was kidding about the song selection but I’m not.
5. Wait 45 minutes.
6. Get an incoming call.
7. Put the DMV on hold, answer the other call, and see the hold light go off because that very second was when the DMV picked up the farking phone.
8. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Finally I got to talk to someone.

He agreed that I should indeed be eligible for automatic renewal. He mentioned that sometimes things get lost in the mail. He explained that I would have to go to the DMV office and handle it in person. He agreed that it did, in fact, suck to be me. Then he said thank you and hung up.

Next step: Find a nearby DMV office.

This is not hard because there’s a big cloud of misery over each such office. You can see it for miles. Then I start checking hours. The DMV system here in California has an appointment feature, which is great except that you can only use it for setting times at least one month away. They list wait times at the various offices: with appointment, 3 minute wait. With no appointment, 1 hour 40 minutes.

Crap.

I spent several days trying to guess a pattern, like if I scheduled my lunch at 2:15 and drove to Fullerton, could I save twenty minutes? After much watching of wait clocks, I realized that the only thing to do was to show up first thing in the morning, before the line got long.

So today, I left early for work and went to the DMV office nearest my house. Then I went inside (wait time: 1 hour. DAMMIT). While standing around feeling my life ebb away, I realized that I probably had to have my proof of insurance card. I know I’d emptied all the extra crap out of my bag lately, into my trunk, so it must be in there. I go outside and start rooting through all the bits of paper.

Guess what I found.

Go on, guess.

My updated extended driver’s license. Good until 2014.

This means I have no memory of the following things:

1. Getting the renewal form.
2. Completing said form.
3. Writing a check and mailing said form, or going online and making the payment.
4. Receiving the license.

How the hell have I forgotten FOUR steps?


Having a middle-aged brain bites.

Common Scents

Well, it’s that time of year.

Everyone else is thinking of the dog days of summer, and the last lazy time around the swimming pool before Labor Day and me…. I’m locked in a hot hellish kitchen getting ready for the Christmas rush.

Generally, when I’m making soap, I do scent “groupings” – like if I just soaped jasmine, I’ll do gardenia and vanilla and sandalwood. They go together, see? And the four different kinds of soap sit on the curing rack together, getting along nicely. In a similar grouping, if I just did pineapple, chances are good that orange and mango are on the list.

Right now, though, you know what I’m making?

EVERYTHING.

I (and by me, I mean Jesse) even added more curing racks in every nook and cranny throughout the house. And while he frantically builds shelves, I am setting up wholesale customers, taking new accounts, making custom orders, and stocking up on our own stuff. I have soap curing on just about every flat surface.

The only problem shelf is the custom order one. This contains soap batches for several different clients. It has rosemary/mint, tea tree/eucalyptus, peppermint/menthol/eucalyptus – so far, so good, although if you breathe deeply in there you don’t have to brush your teeth that morning, and your sinuses are nice and clear. But it ALSO has black raspberry, vanilla musk, pineapple/grapefruit, and ginger/lime. The two elements together are … not nice.

It smells a lot like a koala horked into a bag of Skittles.

If you wander into what used to be a walk-in pantry and is now a curing room, you will hit a wall of peppermint, pumpkin spice, cider, and sandalwood, topped off with a big batch of beer soap which is still in the early stages – stale beer funk crossed with cat pee. It takes beer soap a little while to settle down and stop smelling like a frat boy on Sunday morning, and we’re not quite there yet.

Tonight I will be making two different batches, I can’t even remember what, but I bet they smell godawful together. Probably Cranberry and North Woods – I won’t know until I get home and read the little scrawled notes I left myself.

This is the torture I put myself through for you guys.

I hope you appreciate it.

Let There Be Light

I wanted to write more about other crazy people at my day job, but it turns out that the woman who cries about the alignment of staples is just way ahead of the pack, and cannot stop providing me with blog fodder.

Here’s the current problem.

Recently, we started an effort to go more “green” This is corporate-speak for “let’s make stupid empty gestures while changing nothing”. For individual people, being green might have actual meaning, but filtered through layers of committees and focus groups and middle management, it just ends up being stupid.

They went into every single office and installed motion detecting light switches. They did this because there are one or two people who always left the office lights on when they left at night. This is not such a problem, because one, the cleaning crew comes around after everyone leaves, and they turn ALL the lights off, and two, most of the guilty light-wasters have been laid off and nobody really cares whether they’re sitting at home in the dark or not.

It probably would have been cheaper to go tell the remaining idjits to turn off the lights, but that would have been (gasp!) CONFRONTATIONAL. So the passive-aggressive pantywaists just gave all of us motion sensors.

I don’t WANT a motion sensor. It destroys what little dignity I have been pretending to have, because it turns your lights off if you stop too long to think, and you have to do a lot of arm flapping to turn it back on, so several times I’ve been caught sitting in my chair doing a spirited impression of a wounded whooping crane. Also, I always turned my lights off when I left, and my sensor is way too sensitive, so it turns on my lights when people walk by my office door. Therefore, I am using MORE light than I was before they gave me this great “green” device.

And of course there’s more. There’s always more, isn’t there?

The Staple Weeper is worried about flashing light, because she heard once that it might cause fits in epileptics. She does not have epilepsy THAT SHE KNOWS OF but thinks it is better to be safe than sorry. She is VERY concerned that my office light turns on when she goes past my office to the ladies room, because she might have a seizure. And she goes to the ladies room a lot, because she is an obsessive flosser. (What a shock, huh?)

Now, a normal person might solve this problem by walking down the center of the hallway, not so close to my office door, therefore not triggering the light. But that would be a NORMAL person. What SHE does instead, is to wait for me to leave, and then run over and immediately shut my door.

When the cleaning crew comes, they’ve been given instructions to leave closed door offices alone. So the cleaning crew does not come into my office, and they do not throw away my trash. I am sitting here with four days worth of sandwich wrappers and old Yoplait cups, which are beginning to reek a bit, because the Weeper is obsessed with closing the door so she can be sure she’s not going to have a spontaneous attack of epilepsy. Asking her to, and I’m quoting here...

...just results in her sobbing, and then doing the exact same thing that very night.

This is why I was in human resources this morning pointing out that our office should have a mental health professional on call 24/7. Monk is cool when he’s on his TV show and all, but hella annoying to work with.

I have two things I’m going to do to solve this.

One, I’m going to cover the sensor with a little piece of tape when I leave at night. Two, I’m going to wait until the Weeper isn’t looking and put my aging sandwich wrappers into her office trashcan.

I should be angry but I’m too busy giggling.

This should be good.

Driving MeCrazy

You may remember this, well, it's changed somewhat.

I’ve been driving to the office lately, because the dog is leading a very complicated life. He’s still in the cast, and likely to stay in it for another month, which is driving him absolutely bonkers. On top of that, his separation anxiety is pretty much through the roof right now – we’re working with a behaviorist/trainer, but one of the keys to success is getting enough exercise and of course he isn’t allowed to have ANY exercise, so he’s losing his mind and taking mama right down the drain with him.

So, I need to be ready to rush home at a moment’s notice. And that means that I cannot take the train, which has a set schedule. There are trains that leave Irvine at fifteen minutes past inconvenient, followed by a later train at waytoolate thirty. Sometimes those trains are late, and when a train is late, they mean it – I had a couple of nights where I sat on the tracks for three hours, wondering if I would have time for a shower before work started again.

What I’m doing instead is driving, through heavy traffic, every damn day.

The worst portion of my commute, by far, is the bit close to my office, deep in the heart of Orange County, California. And I have a couple of words about Orange County:

Heidi and Spencer Pratt live here.
And fit in without being noticeably worse than everyone else. Since Heidi and Spencer are two of the most horrible, odious people who have ever lived, this should tell you just how awful the OC is.

It’s filled with people who behave like complete self-important tools at all times. The job losses during the recession hit Orange County hard, and a lot of these folks are living on the brink of financial doom, but by god they worked hard at being so superficial and pretentious and they’ll still be yakking into cell phones via cutesy Borg-style headsets when they’re bedding down in the shelters.

If they have to sleep in cardboard boxes, they’ll check the brand of the product that used to be packed inside before crawling in.

I’m generalizing, of course. But it’s my blog, so I’m allowed.

Anyway, this population segment manages to be wildly obnoxious while standing in line, so just imagine how they act when they all run get in their Beemers and get on the freeway. I swear, I spend two hours every day on the Sphincter Expressway. That gives me a certain amount of expertise, and therefore I think I can offer some advice.


...and stops talking on our cell phones and sits up very straight while holding the wheel at ten and two, we probably saw that highway patrol car hiding in the bushes. Clearly you didn’t, and you made a point of flipping me off as you cut around me going ninety.

I’m sure you understand why I was pointing and laughing a mile later while you were getting your ticket. Next time, you should assume that the rest of the group knows something that you don’t, and fall into step.

Especially if you can see that it is at least four car lengths of space, and your lane is stopped. You might be tempted to suddenly change lanes and floor it, but be aware that you might slam into the back of a stopped car just five car lengths ahead of you. I saw some random jackass do this exact thing last week, so take the time to look ahead more than 100 feet before you test your car’s zero-to-sixty performance.


It does no good to tailgate me, then swerve wildly into the next lane and back into this one, if you have not noticed that there is a reason I am going slow. I am trapped behind a cement mixer, and so are you, and being pissed off at me is not going to make me go any faster.

What it WILL do, because I am getting pretty tired of your antics, is make me very careful to make sure that any openings for getting around said truck are just big enough for me. You’re still stuck back there?

Awwww. That’s too bad.

Somebody is changing the tire. It’s over on the side of the road. It isn’t anybody famous. Nothing to see here.

Can we all just quit staring and GO?

There’s nothing to do down here. You are supposed to be up in Orange County clogging up traffic and hogging the good restaurant tables and acting like assholes. What could you possibly want in San Diego? It can’t be good.

So that’s my summer.

Asphalt and insanity.

I can’t wait for fall.

It's About Fricken Time.

Well, I got the computer fixed.

First he slowed down. Then he hung up. Then, in his infinite wisdom, Calculon the Third (C3) decided it would be fun to turn off the sound. And as a last bit of defiance, he told our printer, Gutenberg, to stop the presses.

Now I know that some of you would say that I neglected the poor thing, and that really he was sick, and needed to be taken care of. I know that some of you will recognize these symptoms as some attention seeking cry for help. But the truth is, our machines are on a Machiavellian machination of machina über alles. They hate us.

They're trying to kill us.

Really.

We've had more coffee machines than Angelina has had kids, hers or others. Jackie has been electrocuted by the crock pot. I've had various fingers almost severed by hovercraft, fans, and other sharp pointy electrical things. We may be the first people, ever, to hurt themselves with a clock radio not in a bathtub.

So.

They're trying to kill us.

Really.

...To Protect the Guilty...

I’m having a lot of trouble finding something to post about.

It isn’t that I don’t have anything to say. God knows, I have LOTS of things to say. But there are two hindrances:

Some of the stuff I want to say is stuff I can’t talk about. Not yet, anyway. I have quite a few things in the works, and I can’t discuss them without ruining it all. So *mmfff mmmmfffff mfmf mffm* (takes hand off mouth) until Spring or so.

I’m distressingly public. I really don’t make any attempt to hide my real life identity – so, if you tracked me down, stop patting yourself on the back. It’s pretty easy to get my name and address. Most of the people I know are well aware of the blog. They figured it out when I ran up to them and said “Hey, you have to go read my blog! It’s a big collection of random crap! With pictures!”

And THAT, of course, means that they can all read all the nasty stuff I say about them. I didn’t realize how much of a problem that would be until I got a phone call refuting one of the crazy stories, from someone who had a starring role. This person made it quite clear that they were not, in fact, as crazy as they had been made out to be.

Well.

Let me start by saying:

Denials are meaningless.

Secondly, damn it all, now I have to either resort to writing about random strangers or just put up with endless phone calls.

I did consider trotting down to Cinnabon in the mall food court, with a notepad and a pair of field glasses, to people watch and take notes on said random strangers while I had a nice sticky bun with pecans, but most of my posts about strangers have to do with What They Did to Piss Me Off This Time and I don’t see why I should subject myself to that. Also, each Cinnabon weighs about six pounds and contains enough calories to power a small nuclear reactor for a week or two, so I should probably rethink that plan.

I could put up with the phone calls, I suppose, and let it go to voicemail, but I happen to be one of those people who is completely incapable of letting the phone go to voicemail. I have been known to look at caller ID and shriek “Crap! I don’t want to talk to this person” in the split second before I pick up the phone, say hello, and act all surprised about who it is. I will even answer the phone to tell people that I am way too busy to answer the phone.

I guess I should have kept the blog a secret, but what would be the point of that? There’s no reason to bitch if nobody is listening. It’s like a tree falling in the forest.

I am convinced that blogs are insane. Write out your innermost diary thoughts, publish them on line, and tell everybody where to find them.

What the hell was I thinking?

What Are You Doing?

Why are you reading this?

Go out and play!

Mundane Mondays

We tried Mystical Mondays, Money Mondays, Maverick Mondays and any other Monday you can think of, and the best we could come up with was mundane.

Because Mondays just sit there like a rock in a shoe. Nothing ever good happens on a Monday. The only exciting thing about Mondays are all the stories you tell that happened over the weekend.

Sundays get brunches and lazy afternoons, Saturday are forbeaches and parks and barbecues. Even Fridays get dinner and a movie.

But Mondays?

The Archduke, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on a Monday, launching World War One. Mondays are for mayhem. There's a reason there's a Good Friday, a Fat Tuesday and a Black Monday. And for the record, kids, don't use me as a reference for your term paper, I looked it up, and it was a Sunday. But you can bet your butt, they were talking about it on Monday.

Ahem, My Side of the Story

I know you are all wondering why I mentioned Helena Bonham Carter and then went mysteriously quiet on the topic. It has something to do with this posting from a favorite website, Go Fug Yourself:

As much as I think the shoes are wackadoo, I have to admit that my first thought was “dang, I bet those are comfortable”. I made the mistake of admitting that to Jesse, who, nutbag that he is, has completely overstated the case.

However, those FiveFingers are AWESOME and I want a pair right now.

And before he makes you think he’s not the crazy one, these are his favorite shoes right here:

Not only are they uncomfortable, technically speaking, THEY’RE NOT EVEN SHOES. THEY’RE SKEWERS YOU TAPE TO YOUR LEGS.

I rest my case.

Jackie is Crazy

There is no question in my mind. She's off her rocker. She's gone over the edge. Mad as a Hatter. Lost her marbles.

You might say, she's past the point of safe return.

You see, she has fallen in love with something new. She claims that it's practically a match made in heaven and that there is nothing in the world that she wants more right now:

That's right. Z-Coil shoes.

I'm sure they are practical. I'm sure they are comfortable. But come on! They're glorified (if they can be called that) Mary Janes. Tired. Boring. Usual, albeit, with a spring.
First it was Crocs, then it was 'Gellin like Magellan' (which really isn't a rhyme, no matter what the story books say). I thank the stars that she never caught the ballerina slipper shoe movement, 'cause those are just wrong; they're not even cute, they're snub nosed hose slippers with little bows or bedazzled bits on them, sheesh.

If you really want to make a funky fashion statement and be more comfortable than your regular fare, Fivefingers are so much cooler:
These are awesome. Totally remind me of the socks I always wanted as a kid. Well, alright, I still want them.

It's not that I hate the shoes. I just think they're way too boring for her. I mean, she is crazy. Nothing helps a crazy person better than a little bit of boring and therefore, I may have to hide them from her for all time.