Well, if starters are any clue, it looks like 2023 is gonna be one helluva year. We have…
- a monster blizzard blasting away at most of the country, which has…
- blocked air traffic and no doubt much of the highway traffic nationwide…
- Covid resurgent in China, which has obligingly reopened its borders(!)…
- a major storm bearing down on Northern California, whose residents by and large do not know what is meant by the term “major storm”…
- starving refugees from garden spots like Rohynga
- a pair of tourists stroll out across a frozen lake in northern Arizona, fall through the ice, and drown (what is it about Arizona that reduces tourists to morons?)
- a-n-n-n-d…on the micro-level: my jaw hurts, possibly dislocated
It’s supposed to rain tonight and tomorrow, with temps in the 50s — which here in the low desert is passing crisp.
Naturally, whenever you need to talk with a doctor, it’s ALWAYS a weekend or a holiday. Called the dentist’s office. Got a runaround. He was supposed to call me back. Nary a word…probably because he’s calling from a blocked area code. My phone is set to block calls from several of the area codes around Maricopa County, where I know no one and which are regularly spoofed by nuisance phone solicitors to disguise pestering phone calls.
So: electronic runarounds of the day #1 and #2: jump through hoop jump through hoop jump through hoop to finally get a human at the doctor’s office, and then get told he’ll call me back…which doesn’t happen, probably because I’ve had to disable part of my own phone system to block the nonstop barrage of phone solicitation.
Next: I need some more nose spray — the stuff that actually works, to wit: Afrin.
Big Brother wishing to protect us from ourselves, you can no longer buy Afrin in a sane size. You get half an ounce from any purveyor at Amazon. (Why? Because if you overdo the stuff, you just make your nose stuffier than it already was. Since you’re too stupid to grasp that concept, Big Brother must take it out of your sticky little hands…)
So any time now I do need to get off my duff and traipse over to the Albertson’s or the Walgreen’s and buy some more of the damn stuff. And…how can I count the ways I do NOT want to go out in the traffic, dodge fellow homicidal drivers, dodge stoned bums, dodge panhandlers for the privilege of buying enough nose spray to unclog my damn head???
This is likely to turn into another runaround, because you can be sure one or the other of those stores no longer carries the gunk at all. AND you can be sure that whichever store I enter first, that’s the store that doesn’t carry it anymore. Yep.
***
Woo HOO!
Wrongola! The journey down to the bum-infested corner was a success! Not only did the corner Walgreen’s NOT have any bums standing at the door (someone new bought the franchise and apparently decided to clean the place up a bit), but they DID have Afrin in a full one-fluid-ounce size!!!!
A miracle.
That’ll last me at least a year or two. I’m thinking maybe I’d better buy another bottle or two, because dontcha just KNOW this is the last we’ll see of that stuff… Two more squirt bottles of that size would probably last me to the end of my life.
Hungry. The other day I (stupidleeee!) bought a microwaveable package of something billed as macaroni and cheese. Ohhhkayyy…
NOW, I figure, is the time to heat that stuff up. Num num, eh?
Well, no.
NEVER is the time to heat that stuff up.
😀
What on EARTH is the matter with Americans that we eat the sh!t you can buy off grocery shelves???
Ugh. Macaroni and cheese that was absolutely, positively devoid of flavor.
Who eats this stuff?
Why??????
After a few icky bites, I threw the whole thing out.
You — yeah, you, dear reader: you’re presumably American, right? Or more or less so? Do YOU eat crap like that? WHY?
For less than the amount of time it took to drive to the grocery store, I could have condescended to make myself…you know…an actual sandwich. With real cheese on it. And a real tomato on the side. I could have fired up the barbecue and tossed on a slab of steak, a hamburger, or a chunk of chicken. And a fistful of asparagus spears, doused in olive oil and fresh lemon juice.
Why, really, do we sacrifice edibility for what we imagine to be convenience?
Cruising back into the’Hood… The homeless folks were resting in the bus stop’s covered bench. None of them seemed to be hitting up passers-by, probably because there were no passers-by — the locals having grown wise to the ecology in those parts. One of them had what looked like an iPhone, but it might have been a cheaper smartphone of some other brand.
Before we squawk YOW!! I CAN’T AFFORD ONE OF THOSE THINGS, in fact, they don’t afford them The local social services provide them, free, to the certifiably homeless. Yes, it would be significantly cheaper for the taxpayer to provide flip phones that could be used to dial around. But WTF. There must be better things to complain about. Somewhere.
Still. I do wish someone would pay my T-Mobile bill, so as to make using my cell phone free…