Tired, cranky, mad as the proverbial cat, and…yep. Unstuck in time.
I sweartagawd! Life is one long frustration here in the endlessly annoying 21st Century. Stuff that used to be part of everyday life…well…it’s GONE. If you want it, you can’t have it!
By “part of everyday life,” I really do mean the most ordinary everyday stuff.
Like a trash can. Do you realize you can’t buy an ordinary stupid little steel kitchen trash can with a separate lid that you set on it? Not a gigantic one for raking up all the leaves and dogsh!t in the yard. Just a little fella about three feet tall, one that fits in the kitchen or the garage and holds the day’s cooking and cleaning debris.
The things are almost impossible to find, and when you do find one, it costs upwards of fifty bucks. For a fukkin’ TRASH CAN!
I need a non-chewable (read: metal) kitchen garbage can to replace my open plastic trash can in the garage. A metal garbage can with a firmly fitting lid that Rattie can’t tip over, can’t pull apart, and can’t climb into.
Otherwise, every single scrap of delectable-tasting and -smelling trash is going to have to be walked outside to the alley garbage bins, every time I need to throw something — ANYTHING — away.
What’s calling Rattie into the garage is, unsurprisingly, the trash can. Yum! Sooooo… NO LONGER can I put the garbage out there.
For the nonce, I’ve enlisted the refrigerator’s fruit and veggie bins as garbage bins. But…
a) They’re too small for the purpose; and
b) WTF am I supposed to do with the fruits and veggies when those bins are holding garbage?
Today I’m going to sally forth to a couple of my favorite Ace Hardware stores, which I hope MAY carry a real garbage can. Don’t hold out much hope, though.
What the HECK do people do with their daily garbage mounds? To take out every single plastic grocery-bag full of trash would entail trip after trip after trip into the alley.
This means…
* Either dig up a padlock key and unlock not one but two gates going out to the alley, and do this several times a day, each time remembering to put the padlock key back where you found it; or…
* Hike all the away around the end of the block and back up the alley, hauling bags of garbage after every single meal or cook-fest; then,
* Hike back into the house.
And believe me: you do NOT want to be strolling around that alley any more often that absolutely necessary. It’s just not safe.
There’s a reason the back fence has two padlocked gates going out of the yard…
Matter of fact, often I’ll pile the garbage cans into the back of the car and drive them up the alley. That way I can see whether anyone is around, and I’ll have a quick getaway if need be.
This accursed rat situation is beyond the pale. Roof rats started to invade Phoenix several years ago, and now they’ve pretty well spread across the city.
Yeah: I know: Get a cat.
In the first place, I don’t want another cat! We weren’t allowed to have dogs in Arabia (they would fight with the jackals that came into camp, pick up rabies from them, and then spread the disease to the local humans). So we had cats.
And cats…
And cats…
I never want to clean out another cat box as long as I live….
In the second place, Other Daughter’s herd of cats owns the neighborhood. If cats could get rid of roof rats, we would not have any rats here.
And in the third place, Ruby thinks cats are FAR more fun to chase than rats.
She may be right…
Well anyhow, back to the point at hand: The Invasion of The Rat Hordes means every speck of garbage has got to be sealed inside a tightly lidded container or else kept in the refrigerator until trash pickup day.
A-A-A-A-N-N-N-D-D-D…
****
Speaking of 21st-century joys, there I am tapping away on the accursed keyboard when
CLONK!
Off the goddamn thing goes. Dead. Black. Kaput.
Out of juice.
Does it matter that the goddamn thing has been plugged in for the past 45 minutes?
Nope.
Bang around bang around bang around bang around
Drag the computer to a cord. Be sure the fukkin’ cord is plugged in to the wall outlet. Plug it in. Fire it up.
Yup. It loads right up. And forthwith goes CLONK!
Dead. AGAIN.
Or is that STILL?
Bang around charge around bang around charge around bang around charge around finally find another charger cord. Plug it in to a different extension cord.
Cuss, swear, cuss, swear, cuss some more… At last the goddamn thing fires up.
It’s working. Supposedly the battery is all of 3% charged.
And THAT means now I’ll have to sit here twiddling my thumbs half the day waiting for it to get charged enough to be dragged in to Best Buy to get…
to get…
to get…
…ohhh hell! to get whatever it was fixed that needed to be fixed THIS time. I’m so upset and frustrated, I’ve FORGOTTEN the issue for which I needed to drag the damn thing in today.
Oh, I know: the fukkin backup issue.
It won’t back up data.
We’re told this computer has had no backups for 553 days.
That, of course, is ridiculous, because Best Buy had the back-up function working the last time I had to traipse back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth to their store. That was one helluva lot more recently than 18 months ago. And the external hard drive is plugged in most of the time.
Jayzus!
Now, to add another distraction: In comes a nuisance email telling me, oooooh JOY! Medicare Enrollment is here, wheeeeeeeeeee!
So it looks like I have to jump through that set of frustrating hoops again, lhudly sing goddam!
Whenever I can draw a deep breath, I’ll have to call the Medigap insurance lady and find out whether I can just let this go, or whether this is yet another brain-banging hassle to kill time with. This means I’ll have to dig up her name and phone number, which quite frankly is the last thing I feel like screwing with just this moment.
See what I mean about Life in the Twenty-First Century?