Helluva last few days.

Saturday was migraine in the morning and then replace fuel pump (or watch pet mechanic writhe around in the filth replacing my fuel pump. Yes, he understands just how much he means to me.) then sushi.
Sushi was a bittersweet affair as this was the last weekend that they would be open.
Times have been tough around here and lots of businesses have closed, packed up and moved elsewhere or simply just cut their ranks to a tiny portion of their former size.
This was a second location of my other sushi place and I really liked this one. It was hard won though; the city of Dublin dicked them around with permits and delays and essentially they didn’t get started in their new place until the beginning of the recession, missing out on building a following in the area. On top of that, the business parks around them were emptied soon after they opened and people started being very careful of how they spent their money (FYI:unemployment in Cali is still 12.5%). So after that double whammy they couldn’t survive. The other location is still open, however it is being sold to new owners. They swear up and down nothing is going to change, but I still see change on the horizon and I don’t particularly like it. (I am a Leo you know.)
I’ll give them a chance, but I’m not confident of their promises.Sunday, we went to see Timmy. He is moving back to Tennessee on WED and I’m not to terribly happy about that either. Intellectually I know it is good for him, but hell, this is not fun.
After visiting Timmy one last time, we went for the last night of sushi.

You probably think I’m being overly emotional about raw fish, but I’ve been going to this restaurant  (or the original one) for 11 years now. I know all the people – they have little to no turn over in staff… even the busboys we know by name. The food is fantastic (and I rarely find a sushi restaurant around here that I go back to more than twice. They just don’t compare.) So yes, I am unhappy about losing my favorite restaurant and a lot of my friends that I have known for 10 years.

Bunny is still eating well and putting on weight. Her ear is still messed up so I have ear goop to administer twice a day.
This isn’t making her happy as you would imagine. She’s crabby at me already for giving her fluids (she tolerates it, but you know she isn’t excited about it either. Sure, its understandable, but its also pretty crucial to her survival, so I continue to be the bad guy.)
So on top of that, she’s getting stuff squirted in her ear twice a day and she REALLY HATES that.

(Here is where I will be talking about cat poop. You might want to go read something else if it squicks you out something fierce.)

A fine mess.

These last few weeks have been a giant mess.
Bunny is still doing well, but everything else is kinda getting to that point where I just watch it pile up and burst into flames.
Seriously, I excel at a lot of things; one of those things I excel at is fucking up.
Colossally.

I need to crawl off into a hole and not come out for several weeks… or months.
But I can't do that, can I?
Sigh.
I never could just drop it all and run away-that inner drill sergeant kicks in and tells me not to be such a pansy and quit whining … so I'll post my turkey day recap eventually (yes, it was a mess as well, but a mostly tasty mess and no one got botulism, which is something I suppose) then I might have to be quiet for a while.
My  whining grates on my nerves after about 20 minutes, and I've usually irritated the shit out of everyone about 13 minutes previously.

Posted via email from fredlet’s posterous

A bit of distance…

was needed for me to talk rationally about last week.
On TUE after Memorial Day, beast’s thermometer decided to take a trip to H land and unless beast was moving (a.k.a. being air cooled) it had an alarming tendency to want to keep going back. I got through my commute ok (heater on high, windows all rolled down; luckily no steam emitted from the hood.)
Got home, called pet mechanic who said “Don’t drive it unless you want to buy a new engine” and other things such as “mumble mumble mumble head gasket mumble mumble” and other deeply alarming things. So, I left a message with the boss that I needed to either be a bit late into work or just arrange for the rental car and work at home.
Did so on WED, and thought, ok, weird week. hope it settles down.
Then THU morning, I staggered into the kitchen to get Bunny food (I am not a morning person you see) and I noticed something weird. It sounded like it was raining. It tends not to rain here in the summer.
I didn’t figure it out right away, but after a few seconds (about the same amount of time it took Martin Blank to figure out the explosive in the microwave was a bad thing) I realized the raining was coming from the ceiling IN MY KITCHEN and was getting water (filthy water run through a hundred year old building’s guts) all over the computer, monitor, keyboard, external drives and all the frightfully expensive stuff that doesn’t like to be dunked in the water.
Mad dash to move EVERYTHING while simultaneously turning it upside down/dry it carefully and not die by electrocution.
I let everything dry for 5 days while snarling politely at my landlord about what we later determined was a terminally stupid 3rd floor neighbor (no, I have not gone up there, I lack restraint at this point) who left the sink running while the drain was “slow”…apparently it isn’t the only slow thing in that apartment.
Long story short, I don’t know that the APC battery backup survived, but so far everything else has. I got a rolly cart for the components so they can live under the table that has a totally classy waterproof table cloth on it and also am puttting a REALLY long monitor cable on it so that it dips onto the floor and will keep water off of at least the computer end of the whole setup. The monitor might not be happy, but its a 5+ year old 15” monitor that only goes well in one place and I can have replaced… the other stuff not so much.

I got through last week repeating the mantra “Bunny is fine. Bunny is fine.”

Fixed beast (bad thermostat and gasket), returned rental car (didn’t spend as much as I thought I was going to have to spend) and am typing on the computer formerly known as wet.
Now I am sitting here, with a lower blood pressure level transcribing the horrid events of last week here vaguely avoiding doing the second to last weekend of “HouseFlop! The Musical…” eating steel cut oats from the crockpot and a mug of orange juice as I read that they might be a superfood combo [Food Combos More Nutritious Together than Separate].
Just got to clean out the living room and prep it for the big furniture move I have scheduled for tomorrow.
TTFN posterity.

I’m either getting sick (again) or I’m PMS’ing

Lights are too bright and the human race needs to be extinct.
Tex said “Sounds like PMS to me.”
Bah.
Every 3rd word I’ve said tonight is some variant on fuck.

So, I made spaghetti sauce (its percolating in the crock pot) and petted the Bun who is plump and perky and rather sweet (aside from all the biting). Tonight she stood on her table next to my office chair (office being a 6’x5′ corner of my living room denoted by the dark wood furniture abutting the back of the couch which is the ‘living room’) and she put her paws on my shoulder and meowed in my ear.
She’s awesome. I’m so lucky I get to have her around more…

Also, I noted earlier in the day that the hoodie sweater I have on (of fine gauge stockinette stitch) has elbow pads of cable knit.
That charmed me.

All the rest of this week?
Hell.
(l’enfer, c’est les autres.)

Oh Fred you are such a cynic.

No, honey, I’m a realist.

One thing I hate about people is the act of building something/someone up to ridiculous heights, expect miracles and then, when reality happens they act all hurt and angry that promises were broken.
This is what I am afraid of with Obama.

Granted, he hasn’t promised miracles (no really, he hasn’t-look at his speeches.), and yet, people look at him and weep in gratitude that he is in the Oval Office.
(Well, I ‘m relieved that Bush is out, but I’m also trepidatious because the people who put the shrub in the office FOR A SECOND TERM (Seriously people, what the hell were you thinking?) after it was proven he has no skill at managing and destroyed a country based on a bad bit of info and still refuses to admit it was a bad idea… are the same booger-pickin’ morons that Obama has to deal with now.)

But, we have a crap economy which has its nasty little roots based in Reaganomics, a war debt that is absurd and problems with the future that won’t just go away (and promises to get worse and worse as my grandparents and parents age and use up the money set aside for all of us (also, if you think you are going to see a penny of that social security that you are paying a good chunk of your yearly salary into, you are seriously delusional. My ‘retirement’ choices are based on it being my primary support system as I will probably need to have a part time job until I die or can’t work anymore to pay for insurance and day to day doodles.)) Not only does Obama have to deal with the current mess we are in, the mess we have coming… he also doesn’t have absolute power.
Think back to junior high social studies, kiddies. There is a bi-cameral legislature and the president.
A system of checks and balances.
So, anything that Obama wants to do pretty much has to be approved by the other guys.
..and this is a good thing.

I remember watching the overwhelming YES vote to the patriot act (with a small, small incident of dissent asking for a discussion of some of the stickier bits) based on scare tactics that hearkened back to the McCarthy era.
Gah.
Our government caved and fell to cheap scare tactics (If you aren’t for us you are against us! If you questions me you aren’t patriotic! and all that bully crap.)… which lead to years of our basic rights, as listed in the constitution, eroded slowly and surely away… and the smug, arrogant looks on Bush & Cheney’s faces as they said it was “for our own good” disgusted me.
I WANT our congress folk and senators to have cojones (and brains while we are wishing for things).
I WANT them to say “Hang on a minute…” and look at what they are signing.

Hopefully, Obama has a bit more honor than the shrub. I don’t know the man, I have heard speeches, but other than that, he’s a politician and that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a good person.
It just means he’s a successful politician and a handsome, convincing speaker.
(Case in point, Kennedy… good lookin’, died early, left a pretty corpse and everyone loves a martyr…but great leader? Maybe not so much.)

I just know that 1. there will be missteps 2. that Obama doesn’t have absolute power (and even if he did, I don’t know that he could clean up this mess that quickly) and 3. he has to get the right legislation/decisions approved by the selfsame fussy, bitchy pile of politicians that is in D.C. and that he might not be able to get this working very quickly; the U.S. is a great lumbering beast, it isn’t known for cunning shifts in direction.

So, no, I am not weeping in gratitude that Obama is in the Whitehouse.
I am more pleased that McCain ISN’T in there (because if you thought the shrub was bad, McCain would have been worse. And even though Palin could have charmed the foreign dignitaries, any socialite wife can, but they would have dismissed her as a moron and asked to sit at the grown-up table…). So I’ll reserve my happiness and stay cautious for now.

We’ve got a shitload of hard choices and heavy lifting for the next 10 years.
Gird your loins, girlies.

(oh, and fair warning bloggers/tweeters: if I catch wind of you weepers doing a 180 when something gets wonky, I will shred you. I know who you are.)