Giant traffic jam this morning so I got to work late so I only have time to mention that: I already started Christmas shopping. Yes, me, the person who always whines how I’m not in the mood for the holidays and I hate shopping and urgh, kill me now. I’ve bought more than one thing and even put some of the things in gift bags. I just need to keep it up before the last minute.
Flying Heritage Collection in Everett, Washington. Really great museum. Worth the effort if you’re in the area.
Last night we had takeout and there were three fortune cookies.
I took one and Bob took one. My fortune was, “You will soon receive an email of great importance.”
“That’s a stupid fortune. I don’t want it,” I said and I grabbed the third cookie.
My second fortune was, “Time heals all wounds. Keep your chin up.”
“That’s also a stupid fortune,” I said.
Bob said, “Sorry, I got the good one. A bold and dashing adventure is in your future within the year.” He gave it to me.
I think November starts the big marketing push for everything in life. Not just the holidays.
I’m getting marketing calls at the office almost every day. Several places have my name and tell me we’ve spoken before and then they tell me what they want to sell me — something that I’ve already told them doesn’t apply to this business so even if we did buy things from random people who phone we wouldn’t buy this because we don’t need it.
And then the endless emails from any place I’ve ever purchased from online. I end up unsubscribing from everything. Even the ones that promise they’ll only send you 1 email a month or only a few times a year — there’s always a week where they send you three in one week and then I’m done.
I found a new recipe to try for Thanksgiving: Green beans, mushrooms and cipollini onions. There’s our one green thing.
It never fails that if I string together a couple of award-winning nights of sleep over the weekend, Sunday night I will wake up at 2am and stare at the ceiling for a few hours. Bob was up around 4am and we chatted a bit, mostly about being awake and wishing we weren’t. I was thinking about getting up and making tea and reading but next thing the alarm blasted out Huey Lewis and the News and frightened me awake. Great way to start the day!
I went through all my glasses and put the ones I don’t need into a sack for the Lions or whatever that service club is that will take your old glasses. I asked Bob to grab me a bunch of +2’s at the dollar store. +2 or +3’s I can’t remember how strong I get. Kids, write this down: once you hit your mid 40’s your eyes completely go to hell. If your eyes are hell before that, I’m not sure what happens.
I now have glasses in every drawer, the car, the backpack. I accidentally left a pair in Timbers ticket partner’s truck and later found them and then left a different pair behind.
Last night I realized that my back-up pair for work was in the Lions’ sack which meant there was no back-up pair at the office. Do you have any idea how screwed I am if I don’t have my glasses? I don’t even like to eat without my glasses on. Problem being addressed.
Yesterday I watched a car appear to ask to be pulled over.
We were on a two lane highway where the speed limit would seem to be a recommended minimum.
The State Patrol came barreling along in the left lane and everyone slowed to the recommended minimum and moved to the the right.
Except this one car that slowed down and then went slower and slower.
The Patrol put on its brakes. We all slowed down. Everyone is afraid of passing a patrol car. Except me, if I’m driving legally I have no problem passing a patrol car.
I thought maybe the person was nervous about moving over but if so: don’t drive.
Finally, the car must have been going 40 mph. And the patrol lights came on and the person pulled right over like all his or her dreams had come true.
I couldn’t rubberneck to see what kind of person was driving because all the cars instantly turned into maniacs and whipped back up to 70+. It was do or die.
Enjoy these photos of the Klamath River Bar, all taken in different spots and at different times.
I’m running out the door to BizarroCon for the rest of the day.
This is a Breuer chair.
You might think this chair looks nice and not the kind of chair that can ruin a person’s day. Do not be fooled. If you have the choice between fixing a Breuer chair and buying new chairs, buy new. If your husband indicates distress over buying chairs over the Internet, even after you point out that the two of you are the worst shoppers ever, always pick the first marginally decent thing you see and you might as well just buy damn Internet chairs to solve your problem, just kindly listen and then buy the online chairs. He’ll forgive you.
Breuer chairs came into my life in the late 70’s. You can see proof here. I still have that Breuer chair. Many years later, in the late 80’s my Dad made me a kitchen table and gave it to me with 4 Breuer chairs. I still have those, too.
The cane gets stretched out and holes in it. I had a local guy fix a bunch for me once.
But the last time I needed help with my chairs, which was OVER FIVE YEARS AGO, I phoned him a couple of times and never heard back. This is the kind of project that I only looked at once every few months. Like maybe company was coming and I thought: extra chairs would be handy, so I’d make the call.
I eventually gave up on my guy and looked for another guy. I finally found a place and I thought I wrote about it here but apparently I wrote about it on Facebook.
In brief, I found a place in an inconvenient location and I made the time to go out there and carried my broken chair parts in and they were patronizing and rather than just saying, this is such a pain in the ass we don’t want to do it, they quoted me a ridiculous price while all looking down their noses at each other. When I said, thanks, but I’d rather buy new chairs, they said: Well don’t buy chairs like these.
If you know me, you can imagine how I took that. I stomped out of there determined to show them.
Using new information, I FINALLY got around to ordering replacement parts that arrived this week. You can buy replacement chair bottoms and chair backs for probably too much online. My parts arrived and this afternoon I fixed my chairs.
First of all, I totally violated the Uncle Joey rule about never letting an inanimate object kick your ass.
I could not get my screws to go in so I looked it up online and saw a demo, from the company I bought my chair stuff from, and they’re like, “Keep the screws you already used. Our parts are pre-drilled.” Well, I had the screws that I already used because I am my father’s daughter. But they are like 10 feet long and I couldn’t get them to fit. And “pre-drilled” my ass, they were like “pre-dimpled.”
Also I had to replace the chair back which is not pre-dimpled. They said either measure from the old chair back that you’re throwing away (too late!) or do whatever you want.
What?!?!?! He’p!
It took probably 3 times as long as it should have and I said a lot of bad words plus ruined the chairs’ self-esteem by telling them how much I hated them but in the end, we have fixed chairs (I was very creative with my screws) and I can cross something off my list that has been there for more than 5 years.
Yesterday I was downtown waiting to cross the street at a fairly busy intersection.
A giant fire truck came roaring up and everybody stopped and waited.
I have to say that in the bigger scheme of things, I’ve lost a lot of faith in mankind. Spend 5 seconds online and it’s hard not to conclude that the world is dominated by selfish and mean-spirited people.
And having said that, it’s little moments like this that restore my faith in people. All the cars stopped. All the pedestrians waited.
The fire truck paused at the intersection to make sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing so it could go through. (I have to add that the driver looked like he was twelve.)
So here I was admiring my fellow man for being so cooperative and then a car making a left, seeing his opportunity since the pedestrians weren’t crossing, went to make his turn, just as the fire truck was making a giant left turn around all the cars.
For a few seconds it looked hairy.
Then the twelve year old laid on the horn and let me tell you, if you are standing a few feet away from a fire truck hitting the horn the sound will peel the paint off your chest.
Car stopped and truck went to save the day so I am not able to provide photos of a fire truck fender bender.
Every morning I smile and say good morning to the bus driver and he never smiles or says good morning back.
It’s like the ultimate challenge now, each morning, trying to relay how sincere and meaningful my morning greeting is and hoping to wear him down. He will good morning me one of these days.
He doesn’t look like a typical grumpy bus driver. He’s younger than I am and looks like the mild-mannered guy you’d see coaching his kid’s basketball team.
For awhile we were getting a different bus driver every couple of days. I like the range of personalities from the crazy cowboy drivers and my favorite driver who I have in the afternoons sometimes who gives us the weather and traffic report and asks if the environment is okay and then suggests that we relax while he gets us to the park-n-ride.
A couple of weeks ago I ended up taking a later morning bus and the bus driver was great, doing some tricky shortcuts. I arrived at the office at 8:01am. I’m tempted to switch to that bus and get a little extra sleep but I’m not sure if he can do that every day.
A couple of weeks ago I had a question about my health insurance so I did what I thought was a sensible thing and went to the website.
The website wasn’t going to tell me anything until I created a username and password to log into my account. Once I was logged in there was a box that said I had 9 alerts.
Nine alerts sounded serious so I clicked on the first one which sent me to a different website and asked me to create a username and password.
I wish I was making this up. At this point I was determined to see what all this alerting was about and the first one led to a cryptic note about a test my doctor had ordered.
Then to see the next alert I was supposed to go back to the first website and start the process again. There was no way to navigate from alert to alert.
Needless to say, I felt that they should take their alerts and shove them. Then I made the terrible error of wanting to tell them this and spent another 15 minutes trying to figure out how to send them a note. Would the process maybe involve going from the first website to the second website? Why yes it did. I’m sure they are taking my suggestions to heart right this minute.
Meanwhile, somehow while I was clicking around between websites I got into a health survey which was 50 screens of questions about exercising and medications.
When I finally got to the end, I failed in two categories: alcohol and nutrition.
First of all, I don’t believe more than 5 oz. of wine a day is bad for you. Oops, accidentally typo’d that as 50 oz. at first. I do believe more than 50 oz. of wine a day is bad for you.
I take really good care of myself and I like to drink wine. There are oodles of other bad things I don’t do that the survey did not ask about so they can take my fail grade and shove it.
Nutrition I screwed up because I didn’t understand how to measure what I eat. Fruit? I have fruit in the morning. 1 serving. Vegetables? There are vegetables in my lunch and dinner: 2 servings. For whatever reason, a serving is a tiny portion. So I should have said 4 fruit servings and 15 vegetable servings. The survey thought I was starving. It wants me to take some positive measures to improve my eating and maybe sign up for coaching – which is tempting purely from a performance art perspective.
Finally, after all this I received a pedometer in the mail with congratulations on taking steps to improve my health.
WTF? Next time I need a healthcare service that isn’t covered I’m going to be pissed because I do not need a pedometer. My fitness is also fine and doesn’t need any canned advice based on the results of a poorly designed survey. Maybe there are people out there that benefit from this and if so, great but to me it seems like a waste of resources that could be put to better use.
