1/30/2015

Just maybe…

MargaretMargaret
Filed under: @ 4:59 pm

Maybe it’s my natural reaction to the testosterone fueled f’ball hooting and snorting that’s been going on here for the last 2 weeks.
Or maybe, as I mentioned before, I’m really a curmudgeon. A blazing liberal curmudgeon, but a curmudgeon nonetheless.

But it was funny.

So I was just on my way back from the grocery store.
Heading south on 1st Avenue south I had in front of me a pickup truck with one of those family decal thingies. You know the ones that show each member of the family as a graduated stick figure, a pair of graduated sizes of flip flops, whatever all? Yeah. On the driver’s side back window of this particular truck was one of those family decal thingies with the family members each depicted as a graduated size of automatic rifle. On the passenger side back window there was a bumper sticker that read “Of Course You Don’t See Any Obama Stickers…. I’m On My Way To Work!”
To the right of me was a pickup truck with a “Romney 2012” centered in the back window and on either a “Free 2012” sticker with an American flag.
And behind me was a great, shining black behemoth of a Hummer. Not an H2, a Real Big Hummer.

So, as I said above, I was probably a little crotchety to begin with, but I got great joy out of opening my windows and cranking the stereo when South Park’s Uncle Fucker came up on my stereo.
Especially the “Shut your fucking face uncle fucker..” line.

Yeah, it was childish and it probably says a lot about my personality that I couldn’t deal with my frustration in a more adult manner.

But it was pretty damn funny.

1/23/2015

A philosophical question

MargaretMargaret
Filed under: @ 5:43 pm

And perhaps one that only Tony can answer, he having all those letters after his name extolling his virtues as a gerontologist, but y’all give it a try anyway.

How old does one have to be before one can claim curmudgeon status?
Because by my count as of today, January 23, 2015, I’m 46 years 7 months 2 weeks and 6 days old.
And I am officially a crotchety old crank who will be out tomorrow looking for a whittlin’ stick.

A bit of explanation.

I went on my annual pilgrimage to the uniform store in Southcenter today to purchase some new doctor drag. Unlike all three of my sisters in law and at least one niece, I do not consider clothes shopping to be a dreamy, blissful experience to be savored and enjoyed. I find clothes shopping, regardless of how regimented the clothing requirements (two pairs poly/cotton scrubs in either dark blue or grey and one white doctor’s coat), to be an enormous drag. The whole trying on a piece of clothing, finding that whatever you’re trying on doesn’t quite fit or doesn’t quite suit, then going back to the racks to browse and find something more appropriate, is a challenge (I’m built funny and off the rack clothes don’t often fit well) and a bore. The only thing that might have made today’s pilgrimage worse would have been if I had actually acceded to the office manager’s wishes and done my shopping at the place in the Auburn Super Mall (half an hour’s drive and at least 15 minutes in the parking lot and walking through the mall to get to the place) with whom the hospital has an account. Anyway, at any given time when I’m out clothes shopping I can come up with at least half a dozen different things that I’d rather be doing at that immediate moment.

So perhaps my mindset was a little poisoned in the first place. However….

On my way to the uniform store I stopped at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I did so because I was looking to purchase a single twin or full size cotton flat sheet. I’m in the middle of a quilt and have found that I need a large, single sheet of cotton fabric, ideally white. So I thought that a single flat sheet would be just about what I needed. I didn’t need a sheet _set_ I just needed one single sheet. Bed, Bath and Beyond might be a good place to find such a thing, no?
No.
I believe the phrase my esteemed father uses is Jesus Xavier Christ.

Jesus. Xavier. Christ!
It has to have been 10 years at least since I last set foot in a Bed, Bath and Beyond. I hope it’s at least that before I do again!
How is it that I can walk into a store that advertises itself as selling bedding and spend, no shit, no exaggeration, FIFTEEN MINUTES bonking around like a steel ball bearing in a pinball game before I even find any bedding?
Towels? Sure. Bathroom fixings? No problem! Martha Stewart cat food spoons, scented candles that change scent every five minutes, gewgaws, thingamajigs, gadgets, whirligigs, widgets, gizmos, doohickeys, and contraptions, but actual bedding? Nope. That you’ve got to search for.

It really did take me 15 minutes of wandering around and marveling at the massive cornucopia of crap (jalepeno ketchup anyone?) before I found the corner of the store that had the promised bedding. I found one flat sheet that would suit and it was going to cost me $15.
So I gave up, left, and went to get more agitated by purchasing clothing.
Then I soothed my soul by going to the fabric store and purchasing a bunch of quilting supplies.

So is it me? Or is it the decline of Western Civilization as indicated by the fact that so much shit is being produced of such poor quality that so many people have to continually purchase it to keep the economy going that we might just as well fall into one giant shoe event horizon and evolve into birds?

Either way I believe there is a large rum and coke in my future this evening.

1/3/2015

Aw Hell, diddly ding dong CRAP!

MargaretMargaret
Filed under: @ 4:48 pm

I’ve already edited my previous post twice so I’m just going to start a new one.

First and foremost: My 85 year old father in law has re-entered the dating scene after almost a year of being a widower. After a Christmas Eve dinner of an enormous mixed salad and warm rye bread with butter he said to me: “Margaret, my profile on the dating sites mentions that one of the things I’m looking for in life is a good loaf of rye bread. I think that this one was it!” 😀
I’m touched! Even just telling people about it makes me tear up a little bit.

Secondly:
Photos!
Kawainui
Kawainui

The Fish Pot Store (I wish I remembered the name, it was a cool spot) in Salt Lake had a pond-urn similar to what we wanted to put together only bigger. I do love water lilies.

Fish Pot Store Lily

Fish Pot Store Lily

And I couldn’t for the life of me get close enough to this bougainvillea bush behind the Fish Pot Store to get a shot of the sulphur yellow butterflies that were flittering about in it, but it’s a cool bush anyway.
bouganvilla

This, according to the dudes at Koolau, isn’t a water lily. God only knows what a “Yellow Snowflake” is, but it’s pretty and it blooms like crazy.
yellow snowflake

And if you should ever happen to be at one of the Costco-s on Oahu and see some of this stuff I’ve got two things to say. One: Buy it! It’s SERIOUSLY YUM. And two is: SEND ME SOME! Andrew also notes that it makes a great mixer with vodka, but my take on it is…. why mess it up with vodka?buy me some!

Okay. Really. I think I’m done now.

So where the hell have you been?

MargaretMargaret
Filed under: @ 4:24 pm

I hear y’all asking.
But wait! Margaret, weren’t you going to post some Hawaii photos? And haven’t you been back for almost a week? And WTF happened with the New Year’s party?

Okay, long story short.
We went to two different Costco-s three separate times in the space of four days.
We cooperatively served Christmas dinner to sixteen people as a part of which I prepared five loaves of rye bread and ten of the most enormous twice baked potatoes that I’ve ever seen. Seriously, each potato had to have weighed something like two pounds.
We drove to two different Koolau Farmer’s Garden Supply stores, Lowe’s, Home Depot, and back and forth all the way across the island to Kaneohe in an attempt to find what we’re now calling The Fish Pot Store which turns out to have been in Salt Lake, home to the only ice skating rink in the Hawaiian islands. (Although as it turns out the flagship Fish Pot Store is in Waimanolo which is on the windward side of the island and would have been much easier to get to if we’d just given up in Kaneohe and gone to Waimanolo, but we were determined to find the one in Salt Lake. It was a long day.) We finally purchased a fish pot, unearthed the old one which had a whacking great hole in the bottom, seated the new one, filled it with fish and a water lily (although the dudes at Koolau said it wasn’t a lily, but a “Yellow Snowflake” whatever that is) and then found out that the bloody thing leaks. Or at least if it doesn’t leak it sure takes up a lot of water, but since neither of us have been up for any prolonged conversations over the last four days we’ve not called to Hawaii to find out if the new fish pot has stopped taking up water.
We had two days of bloody hot with no wind, four days of pounding rain, and relatively decent weather for the rest of the time.
We finally got to take a ride across the Kawainui Swamp which is a lovely bike and running trail across a protected wetland but was a “swamp” before it was a “protected wetland” so it will always be the Kawainui Swamp trail.
We returned the (partially) volcanic sand that my sister found in the donation bin at the Goodwill in Bellingham in a bottle marked “Aloha Maui” to a beach on Oahu. We’re figuring that Madame Pele will be mollified and if she isn’t…… well, it wasn’t us that took the sand from the islands in the first place. It isn’t *our* bad luck.
And we bought the family dinner at the best Chinese restaurant in Kaneohe which had excellent food, but was seriously the loudest place I’ve ever eaten and yes, I’m including the Des Moines Anthony’s Home Port in that list.
I got thoroughly hooked on Candy Crush, got eaten by only one vampire cannibal mosquito from the black lagoon, and no sunburn. There was a lot of loud, a lot of laughing, a lot of argument, and some tears (some bittersweet, some not).

Then we flew across the Pacific, both unknowingly incubating a rampaging case of Sisteritis or Transmissible Airportopathy, and one or both of us has been feeling like death warmed over ever since.

Andrew’s eldest sister and her husband joined the chaos on the evening of the 23rd. They’d been in North Carolina visiting the newest grandbaby (yes, we’ve got another Great Nephew on the ground, Liam Kai born in late November to Andrew’s nephew Sam and his wife). They’d been in Washington DC visiting the two older grandbabies (Ward and Beccah, now 5 and 3, children of Andrew’s oldest niece Julia). And they’d been in California visiting some of Danny’s family. Which means, by my count, they were in four different time zones and at least six different airports in the space of three weeks and when they got to their home in Kona on the 26th they both came down with the raging funk which they’d so generously shared with the rest of us. Or maybe just Andrew and I. Again, we don’t know because neither of us has been able to talk for the last three days without barking up a lung first.

Our flight hit the ground at 10p.m. on 12/28th and we were home and in bed by 11. I was at work at 0900 on the 29th. Andrew was feeling funky, but went out to get groceries for the party anyway.
I was at work at 0700 on the 30th, but Andrew was feeling funky enough to cancel our NYE party which turned out to be a good thing. I got a call from Andrew at about 3p.m. on the 30th. He was funky, having problems breathing, and he’d been running a fever all day. Since Andrew’s bout of The Funk last January turned into pneumonia and his lungs still haven’t fully recovered, I’m a little Extra Sensitive to fever, coughing, and difficulty breathing. I bolted out of work and took Andrew to the local ER where we spent the next five hours arguing with Dr. McBabyface, the ER resident, who was convinced that he was going to admit Andrew for observation overnight.
As it turns out, Dr. McBabyface lost that argument, but we didn’t get home until after 10 and I wasn’t in bed until after 11.
And I was at work again on 12/31st at 0700.
We did have a short day, but since my last client was one of those partially intelligent, partially internet researching whackitrons with a vicious cat, I didn’t manage to chuck him out of the building until half an hour after we’d closed. I went home, put on my jammies, and I haven’t been out of them since.
Our NYE was celebrated with delivery pizza, orange juice, ginger beer, and the Mythbusters Mega Marathon and ended at 9 p.m. when I fell asleep with a cat poultice on my chest.

Since we’ve spent the last three days doing nothing but sitting in our jammies watching Mythbusters, The Simpsons, The Ricky Gervais Show, An Idiot Abroad, listening to the radio, or sleeping, I think we’ve finally convinced the cats that we’re not going to be leaving again anytime soon. Pogo, in fact, has gotten confident enough that he is actually not glued to my lap at the immediate moment.
We managed to get our suitcases unpacked today and (miracle of miracles) I actually got the laundry done.
We haven’t opened any of our Christmas packages and we’ve been subsisting mostly on ramen (which both of us crave when we’re sick), orange juice, chewy ginger candy, and leftover pizza and manapua.

A STELLAR beginning to 2015. I’m not so naive as to say “It can only get better from here”, but just for any of the fates that are listening, I’d sure appreciate it if the rest of January went smoothly.


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