Yep: today is slated to be a fine and true Day from Hell.
Yesterday, I got a call from the vet’s office saying the $550 check I wrote to cover the dog’s dental work BOUNCED!
What??? There’s well over 4 grand in that account. And…between you’n’me and the lamp-post, I have never bounced a check in my entire life.
So I’m royally pi**ed about this.
Whenever it gets to be 9 a.m., I’ve gotta start driving driving…over 60 blocks through killer traffic. Make that 120 blocks, round-trip. First, to the credit union branch downtown, there to demand an explanation for why they bounced my check and to obtain a pile of money in cash. Then, out to the vet’s office on the east side: another sixty or more blocks in the opposite direction. Pay the guy in cash, offer up whatever excuse the credit union has come up with (which probably will be “no request for a payment was made”: my guess is they somehow confused the name I go by — my middle name — with my bizarre first name, which was my parents’ earliest act of child abuse. But even then: both stupid names are printed on my checks, and so there should be no cause for confusion.
Whatever…it’s effin infuriating! I’m 78 years old (??? wait what: really??? 😮 ), I’ve had bank accounts since I was 16, and never once have I bounced a check. So…just what I want to do: spend half the day charging from pillar to post and arguing with factotums.
Huh. Think of that… Seventy-eight years old. Me!
My mother died at 64. Reasonably enough: she smoked herself into the grave.
My father made it to around 80, despite a hard life and his own smoking habit. He, at least, didn’t puff away through every conscious moment…my guess is that he smoked far less than a pack a day.
Heh heh… As my mother lay dying, out in their house in Sun City, my poor father had to do the grocery shopping. One day he called me up to report on the ongoing nightmare.
In the course of conversation, he says to me — the sound of horror ricocheting through his words — that he’d noticed they seemed to be buying an awful lot of cigarettes. So, says he, “I started keeping track of how much we were buying.
“Did you realize she’s smoking six packs a day?”
No kidding, Daddy. You just now noticed? Well, you’ve only been married 32 years, so why would you notice a thing like that?
My grandmother supposedly died of uterine cancer and was wheeled off in a corpse-mobile in her mid-40s. However…in the Department of Weird, I’ve found some credible evidence that she did not die (dramatically, in front of her teenaged daughter) but instead was still alive in 1979. It would appear that in fact she faked her death and may have married a prominent businessman in San Francisco. If that’s the case, then she was as long-lived as her mother and her sister, both of whom lived well into their 90s. This grandmother was quite the wild hare — my mother was an accidental side effect of her early sex life…after that episode, grandma learned how to use birth control and where to get abortions. 😀
At any rate, if that critter really did hang on through nine decades, it means longevity is firmly imprinted on the family genes. Her mother and her sister were both Christian Scientists who, despite never once visiting a doctor, lived into their (very active!) 90s. So…presumably I’ve got at least another 10 or 12 years. Assuming I’m not creamed while I’m traipsing around the roads this morning.
Well, that assumes I survive today’s three hours on the homicidal roads of Phoenix.