Tag: General

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I’m not sure this is a good idea.

I just got an invitation from some of The Other half’s circle of old friends, to attend a beginning of summer event.

Generally speaking members of the group are okay people. There’s one however who drinks too damn much and then becomes an asshole.

NO, It’s not me… I’m an asshole ALL the time! I don’t need booze to become one.

On the one hand I’d like to see some of these guys and I’m sure they have questions about the Other Half’s passing. They deserve answers and I suppose it’s out of a sense of duty to the Other Half that I’m considering going to the event.

I’ll admit to an ulterior motive in going because the asshole likes to pick on people he considers to be “less than”. This particular person is an academic elitist with an Art degree of some sort and considered people like me “less than,” in spades.

I’m not an academic, and I was actually involved in the production of goods and services. He’s always liked getting under my skin, it was somehow amusing or entertaining for this guy to sour every single party we attended. I was always restrained so that I didn’t embarrass the Other Half.

But now the Other Half isn’t around, and he wouldn’t be embarrassed if I just said exactly what I thought.

You see, even after I stopped going to the events hosted by the Other Half’s friends, the drunk elitist simply turned his venom on my Other Half. Within a year or two my Other Half stopped accepting invitations to their parties as well. I don’t think my Other Half had seen this group of old friends for at least 4 perhaps 5 years.

It might be cathartic, hell it might just be dang fun to inflict pain on someone that offended me and my other half on so many occasions. I can’t decide if ignoring this particular bloviating asshole or confronting him directly and brutally would be the best path. I think I’ll have to make that decision on the fly if I decide to go to this event in the first place.

It will probably be the last time I see any of these people and as such… Well I might as well go out with a bang!

I would like to spend time with the hosts and at least one if not two of the other guys. If it becomes too much I can leave. Since I’ll be alone I won’t have to worry about forcing the Other Half to cut the evening short.

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It’s the wadded up sinuses, time of year

Everything is in bloom, including some native plants here that I haven’t seen in a while due to the drought.

This means during the day I’m pretty much okay. I can breathe with only a few sneezing events.

At night I get to sleep okay, then an insidious thing happens. One half my sinuses clog, then I roll over and the other half clogs, and by 2am I’m a full on mouth breather.

I know this because I wake up with my mouth dry as Death Valley and thirsty as a man in the Sahara.

Apparently my snoring disturbs the dog. He’s part of the reason that I wake up. He’ll hit me with a paw, or try to see where in my throat the snoring sounds are coming from. It’s disconcerting to have a dog who thinks he’s an Ear, Nose, and Throat Doctor.

He’s also the kettle calling the pot black. He snores, barks, and farts his way through the night. Sometimes he howls like a wolf in the dead of night and he’s completely asleep dreaming.

Did you know that there’s still a hard wired response in the human brain to wake up fully alert in fight or flight mode when we hear that sound close by?

I didn’t until I found myself waking up in a standing position on the bed, with a baseball bat in hand, and my back against the wall.

I see the dog looking at me in the darkness as though I was the insane one. My instinctive flurry of activity disturbed his slumber.

Since that night, I’ve heard him howl several times. He’ll be laying on his side twitching as though he’s dreaming then he’ll arch his back and howl. Usually by the time he gets to that point I’m by his side calling his name, gently stroking his ear or side. He’ll come to, look around very confused then snuggle against me. I’ll wait until he’s asleep again and then lie back down.

I don’t know what he’s dreaming about. I gather that he’s scared and lost in his dream based on the howl.

This is a new thing. It started happening over the last few months. Perhaps in response to the death of the other half.

We, the dog and I, just returned from a walk.

There’s a remote possibility that we’ll get some rain today. It’s cloudy right now but I think it’s all a big tease. If we were to get some rain It might clear the various pollens from the air but I’d bet that a day after the rain it’ll be worse. The added water will hit just when the little plants can use the boost to go full flower adding their unique pollen to the mix already blowing around.

At which point, I’ll be sleeping in a gas mask…

This time of heavy flower / weed pollen only lasts a few weeks. I don’t have a lot of trouble during this part of the year. I have trouble when the pine tree pollen blows around so thick it’s a yellow mist. Everything is covered in yellow dust and my sinuses feel like they’re filled with concrete. That time of year is yet to come. I think it’s going to be a doozy this year, I could be wrong, but with all the water in the ground, I’m betting the pines will be making up for the drought years.

For any of you humans who may be semen-phobic… I remind you that’s essentially what pollen is, so you’re already covered in, and breathing semen.

I’m sure some folks have just decided to live the rest of their lives in a hazmat suit.

Just to make you phobic folks truly miserable, remember why W.C. Fields didn’t drink water…

“Fish fuck in it.”

So there goes your option to run into the bathrooms and bathe.

Ahh, My work here is done!

Have a great day.

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That was surprisingly easy and nice.

It turns out that I don’t have to pony up a complete payment for the car.

That’s a mercy! The young lady asked first if I was wanting to refinance it, and I smiled back at her, “With these insane rates?”

She thought about it for a minute then looked at the current rate. “OH!” She said, “Let’s see if there are any other options.”

I patiently waited. After several phone calls, she said, “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gong to merge your account into the joint account and then that account will be yours alone. The car loan will then remain there and your automatic payments will continue as normal.”

WOW! Talk about super nice! I’ve gotta say that this particular credit union has been fantastic for the 30 – odd years that we dealt with them. After the fire, when literally everything including our IDs had been burned. It was this credit union that handed us debit cards, and gave us access to our cash because they had photos of us, scans of our signatures, and the smarts to identify us without our drivers license. The same cannot be said of two major banks we were dealing with!

It was amazing.

And once again, they’ve come through making the life of one of their customers easier instead of insanely over complicated.

This is a relief. Now I’ll move forward with putting new tires on the car and have the service done. (Why bother to do any of that if there was any question about me keeping the car?)

Then there’s this. I was out and about with my new iPad and was having a problem getting data on the cellular link. I tried a bunch of things, nothing helped.

“OH NO, I have to call Apple.” Surprisingly I got someone who knew her stuff, she was in Canada and was very pleasant to talk with. We walked through everything and on the Apple side everything should have been working.

She was very sorry but had to direct me to my carrier. It was okay.

Elapsed time on the phone 10 minutes including hold time… Nice!

On the the cellular carrier. Again, got right through to a lovely lady in Idaho. We stepped through normal stuff and then she called someone with a bit more experience. A gentlemen came on the line and said, “I’m going to reset some things on our end, would you please reset your network settings on your iPad? “

I said, “Sure,” and set about that process.

Boom everything started working properly. Elapsed time including hold time about 10 minutes.

So 20 minutes grand total and the iPad is working exactly as it’s supposed to.

Today the power will be off for about 6 hours. Oh goody!