Category: Annoyances

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Just because I’m a nice guy…

Doesn’t mean that I want to be drawn into your bullshit.

Especially if you don’t have the balls to directly ask me what you want.

I think I’m going to have a T-Shirt made!

I’m basically a nice guy. I can be an asshole, but to be honest that’s a defensive screen because so many people want to take advantage of any nice people they meet.

Being nice is perceived by some, sadly too many, as inherently weak and easily manipulated. So a lot of nice people cloak themselves in the mantle of being an asshole. If we didn’t, we’d be manipulated into doing shit that we don’t want to do, or indeed didn’t have the time to do for other people all our lives.

I can tell you this from bitter experience, once someone gets their hooks into you and figures out that they can manipulate you they will never stop. They’ll be a fucking parasite until you’ve got nothing left to give them or you actively burn them out of your life.

I have a lot of respect for people who can say “No” without guilt, fear, or remorse.

I have a hard time saying “No” because growing up I was conditioned to please EVERYONE! Instead of breaking that conditioning which was built from the damn cradle onward, I created the asshole cloak. My problem is that sometimes I leave the house without it.

An interesting case in point was Saturday.

I had a very disturbing call with my Mother. The call was beyond disturbing it was very upsetting. (No one can push your buttons like your Mother!) Normally, when I get this kind of upset, I do something physical to dissipate the hurt and anger before it turns in on me and causes further damage.

This is how we came to have a drip irrigation system at our house prior to the place burning. It’s a serious challenge to dig any kind of hole where I live. One day, The Other Half and I had a throw down of an argument. I grabbed my handy trenching tool and proceeded to dig all the trenches necessary to bury the drip lines. When he stepped out onto the deck with a tall glass of ice tea and told me to come and drink something I took it as him apologizing. He wasn’t… He was just worried that I’d work myself to heat stroke. Later he told me he kept thinking, “That dumbass will come in soon, he’s been out there working in that heat for six solid hours with no food and no water.” He only fixed me a glass of iced tea when he realized I was fixated on what I was doing.

From then on, he’d keep an eye on me. He realized that day that I was very stubborn and if I was completely engaged in doing something, I would literally forget basic stuff. This was especially true if I was working off anger, frustration, or sadness. He wasn’t so worried about me in the Winter time but Summer always made him nervous.

Anyhow, I’d had this phone call with my Mother. I pulled on my boots, grabbed my yard tool, and got to cutting and trimming. Trouble was, I ran out of plants to mangle before I ran out of anger. I switched from the chainsaw to the weed whacker and discovered there wasn’t anything tall enough in my yard to trim down.

Then I remembered that my next door neighbor had been out in Palm Springs looking after a sick friend. I marched over to his yard. Surely, there must be something that needs cutting! No Joy! Nothing had grown since the last time I trimmed his place. (I took care of his yard before the weed abatement people could ticket him.)

Now I’m getting frustrated about not being able to vent my frustration!

Hmmm. The new guy… he’s going through a divorce. He’s been spending time with his kids and doesn’t have any of his stuff with him. He’s only living there for 6 months… And he’s gone for the afternoon with his Son.

His rental yard is ripe for the trimming…

So I get to work. My anger and frustration flowing out of me as I focus on trimming the weeds. I’m happy in my own world mowing down thicket after thicket. I’ve moved to the area where he parks and have just about completed it when I hear my name.

FUCK!

It’s the neighbor that lives next to Crazy Pants. The guy who NEVER says what he means. Who never just asks for what he wants, instead it’s always a long drawn out convoluted miasma of words and randomized ideas. I sometimes find dealing with him excruciating. And in my current state… I’m in no fucking mood!

But then, he hits me with a question that makes me concerned that he’s losing his mind just like my Mother. He asks if I’m the property owner of the rental air B&B. He knows that I’m not. When I tell him, “No,” he asks me if I have a key to the place. Uh, “No!”

Suddenly I flash forward to where this conversation is going because this conversation is like 10 other “conversations” before.

He’s going to bitch about the exterior lights being left on and since he sleeps in his living room how these lights bother him and disrupt his sleep. YAWN! NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM!

But he wants to make it my problem. He wants me to talk to whoever and make them turn out the lights. He seems to expect me to be interested or concerned or frankly give a damn.

In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “Get off your ass, put down the fucking bong, and deal with your own shit.” He’s still droning on and on about how tough it is for him sleep and how put upon these lights are making him feel, no-one understands how difficult… blah, blah, blah.

I’m at the end of the conversation while he’s still droning on. And I’m getting really angry about it. I put my brain in neutral. Why does this guy think I, or anyone else for that matter care? Can he not see that I’m hot and sweaty and his puerile issue with the lights is of zero concern to me, I just want to get back to burning off angry energy which he’s actively refueling.

I cut off the remaining 45 minutes of his bitching and complaining, “You know man, both of the lights shine into my house too. We’ve discussed this before. The folks are renters and probably haven’t figured out what switches do what yet. When it was an Air B&B those renters always left the lights on. Having a permanent renter is better than an Air B&B here.”

He blinked, “Both Lights????”

I pretty much growled, “Uh yeah, the porch light and the deck light both shine into my house. I use this new thing they call a shade.”

The whine of the weed whacker motor drowned out whatever reply he might have made. Then I realized part of what had made me so angry. For all his whingeing and blathering on about his interrupted sleep, not once did he ask me directly to speak to someone on his behalf, he just assumed that because I’m a nice guy he can delegate his shit to me.

Now I’m really pissed off. How about this motherfucker asking himself, or me what’s up? Not once in 30+ years of living here have I gone unbidden into someone else yard to clear weeds. Clearly I’m exhibiting odd behavior.

I popped open the gate to the rest of the rental’s yard.

The weeds in that yard now know the meaning of Vengeful! The weeds on an odd small patch of land at the end of my street also learned the term.

The battery died just as I finished the little patch.

My anger and rage had abated significantly, but embers still remain.

I’m going to be really screwed the next time my Mother calls.

OH LOOK! There she is now.

Maybe I really need that belt sander I’ve been looking at. There’s some painting to be done around here. Perhaps that nice compound mitre saw too.

Sigh, “Hello Mom. No, we spoke yesterday. Yes we did, I’m sorry you don’t remember. No, I’m not lying to you…”

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Hmm, the young couple up the road is selling their place.

Either this last winter broke them or the increasingly annoying situation with Crazy Pants did.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen them taking their usual walks lately.

Crazy Pants and her…

Whatever the hell he is, went from having two annoying Chihuahuas to having a pack of very annoying Chihuahuas. The pack is often roaming around the neighborhood so you never know if you’re going to be attacked.

Even if they are in their yard, It is not possible to walk in front of my house, or indeed anywhere on the street without being barked at constantly.

I have also wondered about the status of their various shots. Rabies for example?

This is a redux of every dog, or dogs, Crazy Pants has had for 20+ years. At least in this case they’re Chihuahuas, not some indeterminant aggressive Wolf hybrid.

Years ago, the county had to remove five or six wolf hybrids from Crazy Pants because she had zero control over them and they were beginning to threaten everyone in the neighborhood.

The Chihuahuas too, are becoming a nuisance. I saw them surround a woman who was walking on the street 1/2 block away from Crazy Pants yard the other day. I’m sure the county is going to be called any day. Will they do anything? Probably not.

If the county did actually show up it would be interesting, the dogs, the obscenities screamed all the time, the guy living with her is sleeping in a shed in back of the house because he’s afraid she’ll gut him in his sleep. Let’s not even discuss the trash, junk, and debris over there… Ohhh if the county could be bothered to come up, they’d have a field day.

That’s a big IF.

Crazy Pants has a habit of going to the Young Couple’s fence and just standing there staring at the house. I’m sure that must be un-nerving…

The young couple is asking a lot of money for their house. I hope they get it.

I wonder what it would be like to live in a place where you weren’t held hostage? The county’s inaction with Crazy Pants has led to a situation where effectively the neighborhood is held hostage.

I suppose the rot will spread. It already has in a way.

The cabin next to Crazy Pants is a nice place, but it’s never occupied because the owner can’t get any rest if he’s up. Crazy Pants is shouting and screaming like she’s being murdered the whole time he’s there.

A neighbor adjacent to Crazy Pants hides in his house all the time. The “A-frame” across the street was converted to an Air B&B when the former owner died. Other houses around Crazy Pants seem to change hands about every 2 to 4 years.

In short, the neighborhood is getting more transient. The faster the turnover, the more likely there’ll be trashy people occupying the homes and then the spiral down begins in earnest.

The cops and the county talk about Crazy Pants “rights” as a homeowner. The unspoken part of that is; what about everyone else’s rights as homeowners?

The pack of Chihuahuas gets stirred up at almost anything. Once the barking begins it’s like one of them has to have the last word so they don’t stop.

Their yapping is punctuated by the boyfriend yelling, “SHUT UP” all the time. You’d think that at minimum a noise complaint would be possible. It’s not, the boyfriend is constantly running power tools over there at all hours of the day and night. The cops and county don’t care.

Compared to the power tools, the Chihuahuas barking is almost preferable. I said almost.

In a strange way I’m grateful the trash is over there. Every single “shutup,” power tool noise at 11:00pm, or screaming obscene rant from Crazy Pants, reenforces to me that I need to get out of here.

I love my view, I even like my house and neighbors on my street. But after 20 years of this bullshit, I guess it’s time to go.

The stupid, the trashy, the shitty, always win. They always attract more of their kind and where 2 or more of their kind gather, drama ensues.

There’s another man down the road a bit. He’s trashy like Crazy Pants and her fella.

He actually walked up the hill several times this last weekend to yell about something Crazy Couple did or didn’t do. (I was sorta hoping for him to have a heart attack but alas…) He’d get almost to Crazy Couple’s street and sit and rest on the stairs of an unoccupied cabin. He’d be huffing and puffing like mad for a good 5 to 10 minutes. (Now you know why I was expecting a heart attack,) Then he’d make his way to Crazy Couple’s house and start yelling. He usually drives his truck with no mufflers, then starts screaming at them. I guess he didn’t want Crazy Couple to know he was coming, or he was out of gas.

Ah well, Back to sorting and tossing!

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What the holy Hell?

I’d heard of some singer doing something to the National Anthem and thought, “Goody, some of the mistakes are epically funny, I could use a laugh.”

I looked it up and was not amused in the least.

When I heard the lyrics;

“Oh say can you see by the blood in the streets / That this place doesn’t smile on you colored child / Whose blood built this land with sweat and their hands / But we’ll die in this place and your memory erased / Oh say, does this truth hold any weight / This is not the land of the free, but the home of the slaves! “

There was a time when the folks running the sound system would have pulled the plug on this kind of crap.

I wasn’t going to give this rancid bitch any more publicity but DAMN! Who the hell does she think she is?

Apparently, she was singing at the Essence Festival. Essence of what, stupidity?

Hypocrisy much CUNT?

This is a rich ass bitch who, if she was enslaved, would be paying all her money to Massa.

More likely if she was enslaved and if America was everything that she and people like her believe. Not Black necessarily, but weak minded, idiots the progressive leftists have deluded and corrupted, she’d be singing Camptown Races picking cotton in the fields.

I thought a number of much stronger things than I have written above.

Then I thought “Why did we bother to fight the civil war? After the war, there were some who thought that the Africans should have been repatriated to their country but that was too expensive. There were others who thought that the Africans should be put down like diseased beasts in the fields.”

Cooler, kinder heads prevailed. Sure there were still issues in the South, members of the KKK wrapped themselves in bedsheets and did horrific things.

But the incidents, while deplorable, were not nightly events contrary to what believers in the 1619 project might believe.

Members of the KKK were farmers and businessmen after all, they had families to feed and business to attend to, they didn’t have a lot of free time.

That’s one of the problems with revisionist history. Mine, Yours, Governments, or anyone else’s. There’s a tendency to frame the events and the people in contemporary terms.

Farmers in 1866 got up at dawn, fed the animals, hooked up the Ox, or Donkey, or Horses, to the plow or other farm implement and plowed a large an area as they could physically work. At night, they might read a bit of the Bible, after a simple dinner and then they’d go to sleep exhausted.

From their plot of land, they fed their families. They prayed to have enough rain, that locusts wouldn’t eat everything and hoped there’d be enough to sell come harvest time, to buy what goods they needed for the winter and the next year.

They didn’t have tractors, or much in the way of mechanized devices. They didn’t live long. A simple cut could be a death sentence.

The human equation was pretty simple. Work or Die. Just like all the rest of the animal kingdom. You have to realize that the term work encompasses hunting and gathering as surely as going to an office every day. Going to an office is just Hunting and gathering with extra steps.

Even criminal enterprises like robbing a train is technically work. The thing to remember about criminal behavior in the streets or towns back then is; crime was dealt with in brutal fashion. You’d be lucky to live long enough to see a judge or magistrate.

The truth is;

It was then, and is even today, cheaper to put a bullet in someone’s head, or cut it off, than it is to house them, feed them, and clothe them, in jail or prison.

Nobody gave you anything for free. That was pretty much a true statement right up until the 1930s.

Farming wasn’t the only option, but generally speaking no matter the profession, life was hard work.

Sure, there were some rich people, there are always rich people, but the average person was living hand to mouth.

The lyrics this lady sings make it sound like slavery is still a thing in this country. That offends the shit out of me.

Why aren’t people like her singing about real slavery going on today in other countries? Why aren’y people like her singing about child sex slavery south of the border and now moving north. Why aren’t people like her applying their immense wealth to stopping any of this?

Oh right these people are still bitching about something that happened 150 years ago. Something that no one alive today was a part of.

This bitch has said publicly that she’s considered leaving the USA.

I say, “your terms are acceptable.” I’d love to see her hustled onto a plane, flown across the ocean and dropped in Lagos. Give her $100.00. Put all the rest of her money in trust to pay her debts off.

Perhaps I’m being cruel. But I have gotten really sick and tired of this kind of shit.

Yes, we have problems, but what these people are doing isn’t helping anybody at all.

I hope her career crashes and burns. I don’t listen to R&B so I can’t boycott her. The best I can do is ignore her, and anything she says or does from here on out.

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Ahhh, Made it to the end of “Pride” Month

That’s a laugh. Pride MY ASS! Normal LGB folks have most likely been hiding.

When the Pride… Oh hell let’s call it what it really is, the TRANS gestapo is out in force it’s uncomfortable for normal folks to go to a bar, or even to certain towns.

I had a couple of appointments in Palm Springs which I chose to do via Video. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with Palm Springs during “Pride” month. A more appropriate name would be humiliation or shame month.

Very little about the behavior of these folks engenders pride in me. One of the things that we must always remember is that the news media will always focus on the most shocking or depraved elements of anything. Pride parades are no different.

That they were so many examples of people mostly naked marching through the streets in front kids and tourists isn’t empowering it’s just filth. There’s no reason to be naked in a parade on a Main Street of any city.

There are places where that is appropriate and even fun, but it’s in very poor taste in a situation where children may be present.

There was a time when Pride was admittedly edgy. The leather guys could be intimidating but they refrained from simulated or other sex acts in the main parade down Hollywood Blvd. Generally they kept their damn pants on.

Which is not to say that questionable things didn’t happen at all. There were other less commonly known celebrations which were “adult only” and took place in confined areas blocked off from public view.

You had to know exactly what you were looking for and exactly where it was and then be sized up by guys whose job was to make sure only “Members of the Club” were allowed inside.

Those were fun days! God I miss those….

Umm, I digress…

In the early Pride events, 1979 being the first one I attended it was about getting together under a rainbow banner where all of us had the same goals in mind. Pride used to be fun, we partied and enjoyed each other’s company. We welcomed our brothers and sisters in law enforcement and thanked them for serving our community.

Just because we were LGB meant we could be denied rights, (Real Rights… Right to housing for example. There was a time when you could be evicted by a landlord because you were gay. Right to Jobs, you could be fired if anyone found out you were gay. Right to speak and assemble, the police were still patrolling gay bars looking for any infraction to shut the place down.)

Pride has become overdone, and a pain in the ass.

The Trans activists who have taken over Pride, don’t’ typically have these battles to fight. (I say typically, because I’m sure there are exceptions,) They’re not going to be kicked out of their apartments, lose their jobs, or be subject to arrest just because they’re Trans.

People, the Government, and the Police, take a very dim view of discrimination of any kind these days.

The number of Trans, “Real” trans people is vanishingly small. That is a fucking fact.

The number of attention whores and insecure people is a lot greater. It’s these people in my opinion that have made themselves pawns to the likes of the HRC & GLAAD.

These organizations shamelessly use these folks to generate funds. They’ll take donations from these people, and other guilt ridden elements of society, (aka the progressive left, aka white liberals who need to virtue signal,) and go to their elite fundraising parties throughout the rest of the year.

The HRC is no friend of LGB OR Trans folks today, It hasn’t been a friend to the LGB community for a long damn time. The HRC is trying to hold onto their million dollar salaries. The only way to do that, is by creating and maintaining a victim class.

BLM does the same thing, as do hundreds of organizations in this country and across the world.

How many Trans people did the HRC feed or house last year? How about BLM? So what “Help” exactly do these organizations provide?

The HRC and GLAAD should have disbanded the day after same sex marriage was ruled on. They were done. Mission accomplished! Good job!

Except…

While they were cleaning out their desks, they realized, “No more White House dinner invitations, No more hobnobbing with famous actors, No more health insurance, and finally OMG! We’ll have to be in the unemployment line!” That was the final straw. I’ll bet they dragged a Real transgender person from the phone bank or mail room, into a conference room and began working on building the next victim class.

It’s time for the LGB community to stop attending or supporting PRIDE. In recent years there have even been PRIDE celebrations that excluded people based on race. There is no PRIDE in that.

It’s well past time for PRIDE, the HRC, GLAAD, and many other moneymaking schemes built on the LGB community to be swept into the pages of our history. Theres no shame in becoming history instead of making it. Let’s put pictures of these events and organizations right next to steam engines and ACT UP.

It’s time to turn the page of the history book.

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Wow! That was more difficult than I thought it would be.

I’ve been thinking about buying a pair of nice bluetooth over the ear headphones.

I’ve got a set of AirPod Pros 2nd Gen and while I like them very much, I don’t like that my ears get annoyed with me if I wear them for more than a couple of hours at a time.

Were it not for that, I’d have them in all the time.

It would be so much easier than listening to the crazy lady screaming about whatever she screams about, or hearing her fella, yelling at the yappy dogs, while grinding away on some piece of metal, driving or “Fixing” a vehicle that’s on it’s last legs.

What he needs to do, is stay out from under the hoods of the various vehicles he’s destroyed (5? I think at last count,) and leave it to a professional. His version of a properly running engine is very different from mine! 3 of 8 cylinders firing, punctuated by 5 consecutive backfires is not proper operation! There’s also the thrilling sound of him running a chain saw at 10 PM. I’m not kidding, I’ll turn the lights off and he’ll start the chainsaw. That motor is also on it’s last legs! One can only hope that when It dies we’ll be spared the restful sounds of him cutting whatever he’s cutting.

Don’t ask…

All I can say is this used to be a quiet neighborhood. This is what happens when you let riff raff move into nice places!

I’ve been in hollers in Tennessee, and Kentucky where folks were dirt poor, and not school educated but they weren’t this kind of white gutter trash.

It’s funny in a way, California can’t even do white trash or rednecks right.

You can see why I might be looking for noise cancelling headphones, that are comfortable in the long term.

There are literally times when I can’t watch TV in my living room due to the noise coming from that white trash. I like having the windows open this time of year, I like the fresh mountain air (even when it is full of pollen).

So I’m faced with, turning up the volume to unbearable levels, closing the windows, not bothering to try to live my life and watch a movie or TV show in my house, or a set of headphones.

I know there are those of you saying, “Why don’t you call the police?”

Hahahahahaha! Where the hell have you people been living? Police? Helpful? Responding to a noise complaint? The police can’t even arrest and hold her for more than 8 hours after she assaults someone. Which she’s done 3 more times since she assaulted me last year.

BTW, if I lived in one of those “Fly Over” redneck places… Let’s just say this whole thing wouldn’t be a problem. Folks go missing in hollers all the time…

I digress, I was considering the Apple AirPods Max. They’re expensive! But I can also buy them from Costco and save $70. I saved $50 on my AirPod Pros at Costco. My concern there is that the Max is generation one and come fall Apple may be releasing a replacement version.

This led me down a rabbit hole of reviews and firmware versions for both the AirPod Max and my AirPod Pros. That’s when I discovered something interesting and strange. I did a search for “Latest AirPod Pro Gen 2 Firmware” then I got articles from last year through this year. I told the browser to limit the results to only this year. You’d think that would narrow your search but oddly it didn’t by much.

I was still seeing articles listing last years firmware as current and it was clear from context, the article had been written last year but the date was today’s date. I looked at several similar articles thinking perhaps there was a current update but there wasn’t.

There was however a shit ton (Technical Term) of ads.

Then it dawned on me, these outdated articles are monkeying with the dates to appear current so they can serve these shitty ads.

This reduces the usefulness of the internet and honestly makes me discount the validity or accuracy of publications MacWorld and 9 to 5 Mac I’m looking right at you!

It occurs to me that because of folks doing stuff like this to keep serving the same 5 ads over and over again, overall the internet is becoming less useful all the time. If the filtering doesn’t work, then the user is faced with a wave of outdated and current information with no ability to determine what is real, and what is useless.

Imagine writing an article about Trump when he was President, packing that article with shitty ads, then updating the date.

A query like “Who is President of the United States” could return Trump, Biden, Obama and Bush. How would someone know? If they had to turn on the TV to figure out who the president is, then the internet would be kind of useless.

All this ad crap and targeted marketing was a bad idea to begin with, and it’s only gotten worse.

I come again to a question I’ve asked myself a lot over the past few years.

“Is the internet’s usefulness eclipsed by having to filter through all the crap to get valid information?”

I’m really wondering. I guess I’ll know when I see an article saying, “Australian farmers pig has piglets with wings, Farmer Stunned!” I’d bet that at least 25% of folks on the internet would read the article, and a lot of them would believe it.

I fell for one the other night, some bullshit about a mystery in some dudes backyard. It was written like some reality show script. A paragraph that said essentially nothing, then a commercial, and another paragraph then commercial. It went on and on, but it was putting ads in front of everyone that was curious late at night.

Spoiler Alert: The guy bought a house built in the late 50s, the “Mystery” was that someone who owned the house had put in a fallout shelter. Over time, other owners had added soil and landscaping that buried the hatch. Then the shelter had gotten forgotten about except as a dim rumor. The guy found the original blueprints at the county records office and decided to investigate. The shelter was in pretty good shape so the guy renovated the space. It was pretty cool. The article could have covered everything in maybe 4 well written paragraphs with photos. Instead they took almost 100 paragraphs all of which were poorly written.

I finally went to Apple for the answer. I’d not gone to them in the first place because often asking a simple question in Apple’s support section, does not provide a single Byte of data. You’re still going to have to sort through a ton data that’s not relevant.

By the way, as of 6/28/2023 the current AirPod Pro Gen 2 firmware is 5E135.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to drop the hammer on headphones…

This is how I lose entire days…