Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

And When I Said “One of Those Days”…

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Plumber visited. Gouged me $400 to fix the toilet and attendant piping. AND — get this!!!!! — tried to make a pass at me!

No kidding; he actually groped me, like I was a 17-year-old kid!!!

Yeah: ME. The cranky old bat who’s olde enough to be his grandmother.

So…that company won’t be invited back.

😀

What on earth does get into people?

DAMN it! Now I’ll have to find a new plumbing company. I think these are the same guys who work for the WonderAccountants across the street…and if so, that means I’ll have to search afield — possibly far afield — to find a new plumber.

Seriously:

WHAT. A. DAY!

Weirdness!!!

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Jayzuz!  Last week ended weird and today — Monday — starts weird!

No clue what’s going on, but whatever it is…it’s weird.

We’re coming up on 8:00 a.m.  I’ve been charging around since dawn, searching for the source of weird noises.

One of these is a strange thump-thump thump-thump that sounds like it may be coming from the plumbing (?????????). In fact, I suspect that’s not its source, but I can’t echolocate on the damn thing…unless it’s coming from the roof, which would suggest the HVAC system is the source.

But I don’t think so.

Whatever it is, it’s definitely coming from somewhere in the house.

At least…I think so. 😮

Now it has stopped. So…uhm…is it from the central heating unit? that’s gone off. Hmmmm…that would tend to support the suspicion that the HVAC system is out of whack and emitting some sort of weird noise.

Uh oh…there it is again, and the unit’s not on.

***

Okay, the vent is turning around. No wind to speak of. AC is off. Why it would rotate at all is a mystery. But that NOISE! Whack-whack whack-whack whack-whack…  Helle’s  Belle’s!

Who to call to get it fixed? It’s 8 a.m. now…I need to find a workman ASAP.

***

Okay, I call my handy-guy. NATURALLY he’s not answering the phone. Probably driving to a job, or to breakfast.

Meanwhile and just to make everything perfect, I’ve put my right hip out. Must have slept cattywampus during the night…and Man, does that HURT!  

Holeee shee-ut, it hurts!

And naturally, because I’ve left word with Handyman Dude, now I can’t hear the crazy noise.

Heh…

This is gonna be One of Those Days, ain’t it?

Tromping, Endlessly Tromping…

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For reasons unknown to The Olde Bat, this afternoon my right hip is spavined. And Boy! Does it hurt! 

No idea why: don’t recall slipping or tripping or sleeping cattywampus. All I know is…I can barely hubble up the damn sidewalk!

Needed to make a grocery-store run this afternoon. The Albertson’s is close: only a few blocks down the road. But man! By the time I got there, scooped up a bag of loot, and headed out of the store, it felt like I’d traipsed halfway to China and back. And I still had to get home!

Finally made it…after seemingly endless limping and limping and limping and limping… Whew! 

So here we are, hunkered in out of the rain (water hasn’t started falling out of the sky yet, but it soon will), chowing down in the company of the Hound, and thinking it will be tomorrow morning before we hobble into the kitchen to load up the dishwasher.

Hmmm…  Here we have news of some monster Gmail hack. Helle’s Belles, I don’t even know what they’re talking about, much less understand what to do about it. Afraid I”m gonna have to shut down all my google mail accounts. And that’ll be the end of that.

{sigh} No question of it: I’ve come unstuck in time. And so I no longer live in our society, with our contemporaries. Not only can I not follow this kinda kee-rap, I don’t want to. That, I think, is the operative feature: I just no longer want to hassle with whatever new monster headache is rolling up the pike.

Y’know what I’d like to do? 

Go way to hell back into the boondocks and buy our ranch back from whoever has it in their grimey hands now. Shut down everything in the flickin’ city. Pack up the car and the clothes and the riding boots and the little dawg and MOVE BACK into the FLICKIN’ MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.

Yes.

The Middle of Nowhere looks better and better with each passing day.

* You don’t need a password to get into your mail, because your mail lands in a tin box on a stake at the entry to your ranch.

* You don’t need to hike half your life with a bag of groceries, because you drive into the next town up the road to get to the store.

* You don’t have to keep up with the latest brain-banging technology, because in reality you’re living in the late 19th Century.

* You don’t have to deal with a crazy-making Mayo Clinic staff or a berserk solo practitioner, because there are no damn doctors out there in the middle of nowhere.

* You do not have to cope with a swimming pool that will have to be cleaned (again!!!) tomorrow morning after tonight’s pending storms, because no one in their right mind would have a pool on a ranch in the middle of Wonderful Nowhere.

* You don’t have to figure out how to drag your dawg to the vet, because the only vets out there deal with cows, not corgis.

Gawd spare me, Lord!

Why would she do that?

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One of the things that puzzles me, here in the wee hours of the morning, is why my mother killed herself that way?  

She knew what she was doing. She’d watched her mother die, hideously, of cancer.  One might say, of a self-induced cancer.

So she knew the horror and misery that particular type of suicide inflicted on the people around her — the people who had to care for her and clean up after her as she died.

She surely knew my father loved her more than life itself. She must have known she was imposing a peculiarly ugly horror on him.

She must have known — should have known, because she wasn’t stupid — that if I took off working on the Ph.D., I would be thrown out of the program. She knew that would mean eight or ten years of my life and effort wasted, thrown down the drain.

She knew — as we all had known since the late 1950s — that smoking causes cancer. She knew her gawdawful smoking habit made her little girl sick, chronically ill from the clouds of sidestream smoke filling the air in their home.

But still she puffed away. Puffed and puffed and puffed until she puffed herself into the grave.

Yeah, I know: it was an addiction.

But addictions can be overcome. She knew nicotine is addictive. She knew she could rid herself of it, even if the effort to do so would be hard and uncomfortable. But hey: harder and more uncomfortable than dying of cancer? Harder and more uncomfortable for the man who waited on her through all the vomiting and the gawdawful sickness and the horror? Harder for the daughter who watched her die and almost lost her own future to her mother’s suicide?

One wonders, here in the wee hours of the morning…

How Do They Know?

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…How DO they know when you’ve been awake half the night and want only to flop down on the bed and doze off?

😀

I dunno…but they DO know. No doubt of it. Mental telepathy, maybe?

Just get under the covers. Play a computer game of solitaire. Next: to turn off the light and launch into a nice nap…

WWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

And yeah: how DOES he know? Lawn equipment revs up and roars up and howls and growls and wails.

😀

Incredibly, it’s not even Gerardo! The racket is coming from two or three yards down the street.

Who knew mental telepathy could carry that far? 

I’m IN!!!

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A miracle!  Lost the password for FaM.  And thought…well, that’s it for the blogging hobby.

But nay! called up a magical page, and presto! Here it is! Why or how, I have no idea…

Probably FaM is no longer for this world than I am…which at the moment appears not to be much longer. I’m very, very sick. No sign of help from any doc in any direction. They clearly don’t know what’s causing this ailment or how to treat it.

Nor, we might add, do they care. In America, old people are less than…”people.”

So…I guess it’s…just resign myself to the obvious fact that I’m not gonna last much longer. And…well, once I’ve stopped lasting, presumably FaM will stop lasting.

{sigh} I reckon the paucity of help or effective care is a function of my personality…which apparently is pretty obnoxious. People have hated me since I entered grade school — before that, really, as evidenced  by the time a neighbor’s preschool brat threw a fistful of sand smack into my eyes.

WOW! Did that HURT! 

Worked nicely, though, to teach me to distrust other people and to stay back from them as much as possible.

Well, WTF. I’m an old lady now — a really old lady, having pretty much outlived my life. A couple of women in my family lived into their 90s. But most died much, much younger than that.

My mother and her mother both croaked over from cancer. I don’t smoke, don’t drink anymore, and don’t f**k every soul who comes up the pike, so you’d think I’d last a little longer than some.

Well, no: “Don’t drink” is mis-speaking. I do love a glass of wine, though lately I haven’t been able to stumble to the store to get any. And I used to enjoy a bourbon and water before dinner. Can’t manage that these days, either. But still…one could figure that a lifetime of pre-prandial swiggling can’t have done the body much good….even if it’s stopped in old age.

At any rate…now that I’m old, I’m so, sooo sick that frankly, I can’t wait for the show to be over. No credible sign that it’s gonna end soon, though…unless I help it along. But that, alas, is not my style.