Category Archives: Whining

Dogs

Whining

In which I’m tired of yard dogs.

I live in a very small town full of very large yards.

One should, I believe, do pretty much whatever one wants in their own yard. Rip out the turf and put in vegetables or wild flowers. Park a fucking car on blocks. Build a little free library. I don’t care, it’s your yard.

Except, truly, I wish your dogs would shut the fuck up already.

I just sat on my patio under a lap blanket to drink a cup of chamomile tea. It was ten straight minutes of all y’all’s dogs barking, endlessly. They never quit! Endless barking, from near and far. One dog goes off, then the dogs in the next yard go off, then the next block goes off. Back and forth forever. And, since it’s frozen out, the sound travels almost perfectly.

Maybe take your dogs inside sometimes. Train them to bark less. Oh, or here’s an idea: put them in your truck, drive to a path, and walk them for five miles, how about that?!

I’m so sick of barking fucking dogs.

Terrible discoveries made during a short bike ride

Life, Whining

In which there’s complaining.

So I’m riding home from work the other day. It’s past four. It’s dusk. It’s foggy. So, it’s still light out, but only barely, and my colored bike lights are lovely. There’s a light rain. It’s in the 40’s, so, it’s chilly but not truly cold, and I’m properly attired. It should be glorious.

My work day is done, nothing but free time ahead, it’s damp and moody and I’m moving my body. I should feel vibrantly alive. I should have a heart full of abject gratitude, lifted in animal joy.

I can barely feel it.

My feet hurt always now, even when I get out of bed in the morning, and my legs do too, after work, for a few hours, and generally there’s some other low-level pain somewhere else, a muscle or a bruise. Nothing terrible, really, maybe a three or four on the pain scale, but is that little pain somehow dulling… everything? Like, I can remember—

Robust, radiant youth. Good, even excellent health. Intense sensations, both physically and emotionally. Zero pain, not a single twinge. Every breeze, every temperature variation, was picked up by my exposed skin: cheeks, wrists, throat maybe, or ankles. The exhilaration of just… being alive and biking home at night in the fog. Joy.

Now I don’t feel the joy or the physical sensations the way I did. I think I should, and I recall how I would have felt, if this ride home were happening, oh, say a decade ago, but IT’S NOT THERE ANY MORE.

I reached up, biking home in the rain and mist, and ran the back of my finger over my cheek, and guess what? I can still feel touch, of course, but it is, now that I’m really paying close attention, comparatively dull now?!

I hadn’t even noticed this loss.

Anyway, I know now why old people have stuff on their faces sometimes: they can no longer fucking feel tiny hairs or drips or crumbs or whatever. Because the fine sensitivity is gone, probably lost when the collagen went, and the nerve endings aren’t where or how they were in youth.

My other senses are duller, too. Hearing, certainly, but I expected that (standing on loud-ass stages in front of gear belonging to loud-ass guitarists, mainly), smell (I did smoke for a very long time), and I’ve never been able to see, really, but the surface of my motherfucking skin?!?! I’ve since realized that I no longer get goose bumps if I lightly touch the sides of my neck or ribs. I can feel it, sure, but it’s just… less intense than it used to be. Far less. Jesus.

I don’t know, I think I thought it was boredom or mild depression or something, my lack of intense reactions to things I once absolutely loved (going on vacation, an afternoon out, riding my bike home in certain types of beloved weather) rather than just, you know, the slow and steady decay of my literal, physical senses.

But, haha, it’s the slow and steady decay of my literal senses! And just a general lack of the vitality and vibrancy of being young and healthy as fuck. The information my brain is receiving about the world I’m moving through is just a whole lot less than it used to be, and that’s why stuff doesn’t feel as intense as it used to.

I’m fifty-five. And aging is nuts.

Time isn’t working correctly?

Food, Health, Whining

In which I decided to blog. So here’s a blog post! Enjoy! It will not be interesting.

My contact lenses showed up a few days ago, so I’ve just sat down to fill out the rebate. (The only reason I ordered this new brand of contacts was that the optometrist’s office told me they’d be cheaper — $280 for a full year of lenses versus $312 — but I’d have to complete a rebate. But it’s easy now, because it’s online!)

The rebate form is, in essence, a data scraper: you have to upload your purchase receipt, the barcode off the product itself, and your doctor’s invoice showing the date of your last exam. I mean, I realize Google knows far more about me than Alcon now does, but honestly the receipt itself should be ample proof that you both got an exam and bought lenses?!

ANYWAY, the point of all this is that my exam, which I swear I just had, was actually on 22 November?!? Three months ago already?

WTF, time?

—
I’ve decided that I made a mistake painting the kitchen flat pale yellow, and now I think I’m going to re-paint it gloss white.

And maybe do a subway tile backsplash. Because I like subway tile, for some reason?

The rest of the house is really colorful anyway, perhaps too much so if I’m honest, so I think a white and wood kitchen would be just fine. And most of my stuff is blue and white anyway, and the appliances are white, and the countertops are white. So why not.

Also I’m starting to hate all the mismatched ceiling lights in my kitchen. They were amusing for a year, but now? Maybe living in the lighting section of a Lowe’s isn’t as funny as I’d originally thought? Over the sink is a ‘modern’ brushed nickel triple halogen light, the 90’s behemoth in the middle of the ceiling is gold and white with ash fan blades, and the dining table one is floral and brushed bronze from the 80’s! None of the fucking things have anything in common beyond all being ceiling lights!

I am probably too cheap to replace two perfectly functional ceiling lights just because I don’t like the way they look. But it’s my house, and I can bitch about it all I like! They look fucking terrible!

—
I’m on a diet.

Logging everything you eat is a fucking pain in the ass (unless all you’re eating is pre-prepared stuff with barcodes you can scan). I just ate a meal the way I normally do, and it took nearly as long to log it as it took to eat it: homemade man’ouche, labneh, a few red grapes, a few smokehouse almonds, a radish. A cup of tea with cream.

A fuckton of data entry for 359 calories.

Dieting is bullshit and I hate it, but I’m old now and the weight won’t stop piling on so I’m going to starve myself for a few months, WHAT FUCKING FUN, even though dieting doesn’t work and the results are never permanent.

Mostly what’s happening is that I sleep a lot, because you’re not thinking about food (or going out for empty calories in the form of cocktails) when you’re asleep. And I watched so much video during the Covid years that zoning out in front of the TV doesn’t really work the way it used to, sadly.

—
We still have leftover Christmas money (my aunt is insanely generous with cash gifts), so I splurged on something decadent that I’ve always wanted: a genuine Pendleton blanket!

Should be here next week. I love wool! It was on sale at about 60% off, somehow, so I also got a set of plaid mugs (what. we only have four mugs, or maybe six? MUGS ARE USEFUL, OK) and a scarf that were also in the online version of the discount bin. Very excited to own a Pendleton.

—
Are modern glasses more prone to dirt, or did I just always walk around with filthy lenses in the past?

My last couple pairs of glasses are forever greasy and smudged and impossible to see through; I’m cleaning them at least once per day, usually more.

Is it the coating? Or that they’re plastic now? Or both?

Thanks, I hate it!

—
I need to prune the rose bushes.

I have the right kind of shears, and I know to sanitize them. I’ve read several articles and watched a few YouTube videos. I feel that I could prune them with relative competence. Should have done the one out front today, but I was enjoying puttering around inside in the warm and wasn’t feeling motivated enough to put on more clothes and go outside.

Still utterly overwhelmed by the enormous size of the backyard and all the time, labor, and money it will take to turn it into something pleasant. I’m not a yard work person. I just want it to be 50% anything-other-than-lawn and be pretty without having to spend four thousand hours and twice as many dollars out there.

What feels weird is being a 50-something woman who says things like “I need to prune the rose bushes,” let alone “I’m starting to hate all the mismatched ceiling lights in my kitchen.” How the fuck did I turn into this person?

I’m old enough to be somebody’s g’ma. What a riot.

To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply

Admissions, Soapbox, Whining

(NOTE: I found this post in my drafts folder, it’s actually a couple of years old; apparently never published it. In it, I say I don’t care what she thinks, but then I wrote all these words, so I guess I did! Sometimes I’m full of shit, yo.)

In which my ex’s girlfriend posted a picture on Instagram of the deck on my old house, finally FINISHED, after all these years! It looks fantastic!

Dear my ex-husband’s girlfriend,

Thank you for your inexplicably bitchy comment on social media. You appear to misunderstand “snark.”

Having had no meaningful interaction with you (beyond clicking the occasional Like button, or sending you Christmas cards) for the past ten years, your apparent rage — coming, as it did, out of absolutely nowhere — rather upset me and hurt my feelings, as you and I were good friends the last time I saw you.

I’m guessing that you’re mad because I used a picture you took, in one of my many stupid blog posts about my stupid feels about my stupid marriage? This picture-stealing happened, according to my archives, seven years ago. (It took half an hour of paging through old posts to even find the post you were probably talking about.)

Apparently you tried to communicate your anger at the time by unfollowing me on social media, I think? I’m sorry to say that I didn’t even notice that you were “done” with me, because, seriously, who pays that much attention to their ex-husband’s girlfriend’s sporadically-maintained Instagram account?

Technically, I did not “steal” your image. You’d posted your images publicly, on Facebook, on the internet, where anybody on earth could see, use, download, or link to them. I’m sorry it made you mad that I used one, but I didn’t even think about it, really. I mean, nobody even reads my blog but Stanley and my parents anyway. Plus, it was a picture of my house.
Continue reading To my ex-husband’s girlfriend, on why I didn’t reply →

MY FEET HURT

Whining

In which I whinge!

My feet hurt.

I’m glad of my new job because it forces my lazy self to move around, but MY FEET HURT! I just worked a seven-hour shift (wearing compression socks and squishy shoes, even) and MY FEET HURT!

My feet hurt! OW.

I did get a delicious sandwich half-off, though, so that was lovely. Oh, and I get a booze discount, too, so I got some Bailey’s and am totally gonna have Bailey’s in my coffee tomorrow!

Monday evening musings

Blurbs, Whining

In which I’m blogging because I’m not scrolling Twitter.

TWITTER:

I waste a remarkable amount of time on Twitter. Used to enjoy it, but now it’s more a habit than a pleasure. Sometimes it’s fun, still, and there are quasi-meaningful interactions with other users, but most of it’s just crap: the absurdity that is the White House, the bad performance art that is Fox news, international news of wars, crimes against humanity, the occasional interesting tidbit about an old word or some science. But most of it is really just unadulterated crap: recycled jokes, married women saying mildly clever coquettish things for male attention, pet pics, ads, and vitriol.

Now it’s been “improved” into a site that does not show you content chronologically; you see others’ Likes in addition to their Retweets; and the mobile app some months ago started refreshing to the top on its own, hiding older content and re-displaying seen content.

That was annoying, so I’d switch to the site in a mobile browser. But now the browser version has started doing that, too. You’ll be reading a tweet, and the thing will just reset to the top on its own.

Too annoying. Tab closed.

GERMS:

It’s been, oh, around 72 hours or so since a co-worker showed up visibly ill and breathed all over everything, and I now feel what may be the beginnings of Coming Down With Something.

Am I irritated as fuck? Why yes, yes, I am! Stay home when you’re actively shedding goddamned germs, people, especially if you work in public!

There are people out there, like me, who JUST DON’T LIKE BEING SICK, thank you, and worse, there are those who will FUCKING DIE FROM THE COMMON COLD, and you might be breathing on their caregivers in your public job, so do your best to stop it from spreading. It’s your civic goddamned duty. If you can afford to work in Uptown, you can afford a couple days off when you’re contagious. Working while sick is not a praiseworthy sacrifice indicative of a good worth ethic, it’s rude and, at a stretch, quite possibly involuntary homicide.

BIRTHDAY:

My birthday is Saturday. I’ll be 50. No friends or family in the area, so no party. At least I won’t have to put up with macabre black bunting and balloons and over the hill jokes, but also, nobody’s planning shit, so, yeah? Not gonna say I’m not disappointed about not celebrating my big five-oh with a proper party. Nobody cares about 38 or 47, but 50?

It’s looking most likely at this point that I’ll be snot-filled and bed-ridden for the day, but if not, I’m considering requiring I be taken on a date to a jazz supper club about twenty minutes away. Wear a dress, some makeup, a cocktail ring, eat a $25 plate of food, come home. Sounds fun!

DISHES:

I have to do dishes at work now, so doing them at home is making me mad. I grumble about it under my breath.

It’s sorta like my internal monologue when I was married and infuriated, except my current partner actually, you know, supports me, so mostly I just want a professional sink and sprayer setup because domestic dishes are stupid.

CHILI:

I made three bean vegetarian chili today in the Instant Pot. Came out yummy!

Chili

WEIGHT:

Having a job that requires me to move around has not only destroyed my feet (ye gods they hurt!) but I think might be helping me lose a little weight. I haven’t taken my measurements or anything, but my gut seems slightly less gigantic.

At the very least, my Google Fit app pings me each shift to congratulate me for taking my 10k steps for the day! I mean, it’s not like I’ve become sporty, but compared to the nothing I’ve been doing the past three years, it’s an improvement. A painful one for my feet, sure (ye gods they hurt!), but hey.

WEATHER:

It cooled down from the 90’s! Wore a hoodie and a scarf the past two times I walked to and from work; tonight it’s rainy and cool and I have the window open and it smells nice!

PHONE:

My phone, which works excellently, is doing that things all phones do after a couple of years: it’s telling me its full.

I have a massive SD card in it, but apps bloat endlessly. Apps also flat-out refuse to work if they get old enough, so you have to let them update in order to even use them, and then one day your phone’s full.

App bloat pisses me off. I remember when devs would try to keep code small and efficient, but the expectation now is of endless hardware and processor improvements, so nobody cares. In a few months, my phone will start telling me it can’t update installed apps, and then I’ll spend half a year deleting things until I’m down to a quarter of what I’d actually like to have installed, and then I’ll need to buy a new phone.

Cell phones are marvels of technology, they truly are, but the expectation of endless hardware upgrades is just humanity being fucking wasteful and dumb.

CLINGS:

I cannot wait until next Monday because I’m going to put THESE up!

Halloween clings

I adore me some holiday window clings, I truly do!

HOBBY:

My traveler’s notebook/fountain pen thing is still going strong. I have a dozen (cheap Chinese) fountain pens now (anybody who’d drop $700 on a pen is a weirdo), and a half dozen bottles of ink.

Look at this precious little lipstick-sized swirled teal mini fountain pen!

Stationery stuff

Occasionally I go over to the Java Hut and practice calligraphy over a latte, though only for fun; I have no intention or expectation of actually mastering it.

Sunday

It’s pleasant and distracting; much better than scrolling Twitter!

Just having a little trip down memory lane

Admissions, Life, Miscarriage, Soapbox, Whining

In which there’s The Past.

Here’s me, 16 years ago, standing in my kitchen.

2001

See how rough and unfinished that shit was? The whole place looked like that. It never got better, just worse. It was barely a step above living in a car. (Well, a very large car, with a bug-infested shower, but still, roughly the comfort and insulation of living in a car. Or maybe a super ghetto mobile home.)

That secretary desk, on the left? Was really cool. Wish there’d been some way I could have kept that. It was old and in shitty shape, but it had cubbies and a hinged desk and I adored it.

I feel that way about a remarkably small number of the things that I had in that house and lost. My grandfather’s table. A couple of leather coats that molded. And I did rather like that samovar. My hard drives, the ones he left in a filthy, shitty, open-to-the-elements “room.” But that was later; I digress.

leak

That house was a piece of shit. We never should have bought it. I never would have, except my husband was a professional fucking contractor and said it was a good idea, it was fine, he could handle it, no problem. And, idiot I was, I chose to believe him. I thought he had expertise!

We bought it on contract, and, like fucking morons, we used the same lawyer the sellers used. I don’t think we even had it inspected, because I was home when an inspector showed up after we’d bought it and moved in, and he told us the electrical was nowhere near code and that we’d be fined if we didn’t correct it. (Husband’s solution was to just destroy the entire mud room/porch, rather than correct the issue. Huzzah.)

We hadn’t even been there a month when the roof leaked and a bunch of ceiling fell in. Oh, and then the well-head pole fell over while I was in a hot shower in a literally freezing house.

The kitchen was in the basement and you could see dirt through the cracked concrete slabs of the floor. Cobwebs in the unfinished ceiling. Main bathroom had a countertop on a raw 2×4 frame, cement floors, and unfinished brick walls with no cupboards. Kitchen “cupboards” were the same: just unfinished, open 2×4 shelving with salvaged countertops stuck on by hippies. There had been cloth curtains on the front when they showed us the house; when we moved in, just raw shelves.

Then he tore the already shitty disaster up even more. Refused to fix the decent bathroom on the second floor, the one with walls and a bathtub and ceilings. Destroyed the only decent or useful spaces in the house — the finished attic, the mud porch, the greenhouse.

Oh, the greenhouse, where it was sun-warm in the winter and one could have grown herbs and sat to read!

He covered most of the basement windows with a massive porch he never finished*, so the main living space became not just dirty and unfinished, but lightless as well, and we had an unusable porch!

I mean, he did re-roof the house, which was actually necessary and good, and a lot of incredibly hard work, certainly, but even that was embarrassing as fuck because I later saw him refuse to honor the markers he’d traded for his friends’ hard work on it, because he was honorless and lazy.

It’s not like he didn’t do shit; he did a lot of shit. I realized later that he just did shit he wanted to do. He was good at getting firewood, for example, but he’d spend inordinate amounts of time on it — cutting down whole trees, hauling them, cutting them, splitting them, renting machinery to do so — rather than just fucking buying it and working on the house. He made it so much more complicated and involved and time-consuming than it needed to be; we could have just worked on the furnace, and maybe, I don’t know, installed some fucking insulation?, and bought more propane. But no, he’d spend months of weekends “getting us firewood to heat the house.”

Firewood I had to haul from the barn, in a wheelbarrow, through the snow, half a city block. Yeah.

He did do a lot of work, sure, but he never did what we needed or finished anything. He’d do shit like spend tons of time building a really cool but ultimately unnecessary trailer for the riding lawnmower, or sawing holes in the roof to frame in dormers he never actually completed (covering shit in plastic sheeting for a year is not completing something), or putting in external doors that didn’t actually go anywhere yet and wouldn’t for years.

And then those fucking hippies had the balls to threaten to sue us! They sold us a total piece of shit of a house [caveat emptor], then forced us (well, not us, because I’d bailed just before then, and not him — because he had no money, per the usual — but J., who paid it off for reasons I will probably never understand) to honor the entire mortgage over a decade early!

What a fucking shit show!

Continue reading Just having a little trip down memory lane →

Customer service is still weird af.

Soapbox, Weather, Whining, Work

In which I STILL don’t understand how people can know so little about the services they use.

If you were the majority of Floridian customers I assisted during my shift at work this evening, you’ve just been through a massive 500-year storm that destroyed tons of shit, you either don’t have power or you’re running a generator, and you’re astonished that you can’t watch TV.

You don’t have power! Why in the fuck do you think your cable and internet should work? Irma was one of the strongest storms in recorded history. It did at least eighteen billion in insured losses damage (not counting crop losses or flood insurance), infrastructure is destroyed, farms are destroyed (Irma took almost half of the citrus crop in some areas), you had to fucking evacuate, and you can’t believe you didn’t return home to functioning internet?

Really?! YOUR CELL PHONE’S OBVIOUSLY WORKING, AND THAT’S A GODDAMNED TECHNOLOGICAL MIRACLE CONSIDERING THE CIRCUMSTANCES, but you’re mad anyway?

I have compassion for you, I do. It must have been and must still be incredibly stressful. But being a dick to customer service reps because you haven’t had internet for four days is just weird. Shit’s broken, my people, important shit, and if your neighbors down the block have cable and you don’t, well, I’m sorry. Life’s not always fair. Go watch TV at their house.

Multiple customers told me it was absolutely unacceptable for an outage to last four days. They demanded refunds, threatened to cancel (which, please, if you could get service from anybody else you’d already have it, and we both know it). It was a 500-year storm! Read a book, be glad you’re alive, and chill the fuck out! There are innumerable people out there working day and night to restore power, internet, cable. It takes time!

One customer admitted she had no power at home and was charging her cell phone at the corner store, but still freaked out about not having wifi in her house. It blew my mind. EVEN IF there wasn’t an outage and WE WERE DELIVERING INTERNET TO YOUR HOME, sweetie, IT WON’T WORK IF YOUR ROUTER ISN’T GETTING POWER. How can you not know that?

Furthermore, how can you not realize that if your house doesn’t have electricity, the node providing your cable probably doesn’t, either? Sure, installations like that have generators, but they only run if you can get to them to put fuel in them. If gas or the generators themselves aren’t accessible, they’ll go down. The network is vast, interdependent, and complicated, and service crews can’t even start working on them until cleared to do so by authorities. Internet service doesn’t just fall out of the sky, for fuck’s sake. Power outages, destroyed equipment, line cuts: there are tons of them because A MASSIVE GODDAMNED ACT OF GOD JUST ROLLED THROUGH.

I’m sorry your kids are driving you nuts without screens to occupy them, and I’m sure it’s a bitch, but your internet and cable will be restored when it’s restored. You need to back the fuck off the ignorant attitude and be glad you’re all still alive with homes to return to. It’s not like your provider somehow fucked up; it was an act of God. And at least your cell phone still works. You may be going over your data plan, but at least you’re online.

So, fuck this town, basically.

PSA, Whining

In which we’ve been trolled.

In the middle of the night, the apartment suddenly exploded with white dust.

IMG_20170813_015722

It was probably between 2:30 and 3 in the morning. We were still up and the lights were on. There were three fans running, so it was everywhere, instantly.

IMG_20170813_015951

My guess is that some asshat stole a fire extinguisher and discharged it into the box fan in our window, which was facing inward at the time to pull the cool air in.

IMG_20170813_015614

The shit is everywhere, and a lot of it.

Whoever you are: fuck you. You’re not funny. You’re a dick. There isn’t an inch of this place that doesn’t have to be cleaned now, and you’ve exposed us to a great deal of topical and inhaled bicarbonate soda, which is essentially harmless, or ammonium phosphate, which isn’t, for no fucking reason other than you’re a moron.

I was sitting right by the open bedroom window when you did it, too. And had I not turned away because of the odd noises coming from the other room, if I’d looked left instead of right, I’d have seen your punk ass. As it is, I didn’t, and you just walked off quietly while we freaked out because our home was filled with flying white powder.

You’re a punk and a twat and I sincerely hope your dumb unfunny ass woke up in jail this morning. This is not a fucking college dorm, it’s my goddamned home. So fuck you.

I’m basically ignoring the insane amount of cleaning I have to do and hiding out in the bedroom. I’ve ordered Indian food delivery, because it will be hours of cleaning before I can cook again, and I just don’t want to do it. It’s Sunday, it’s my day off, and I don’t want to tackle the sweeping, dusting, washing, wiping, mopping, vacuuming, and multiple loads of laundry YOUR DUMB ASS has caused me.

Oh, yeah, and in unrelated news, some other dumb asshat — one assumes, but I suppose it could be the same one — took the two largest tomatoes off our vines. We’ve had ONE FUCKING TOMATO this year so far. ONE. AND IT WAS NOT EVEN ENTIRELY RIPE.

So, if you’re not starving, literally actually going hungry, then fuck you. I cannot tell you how much I’m looking forward to that first ripe tomato of the year THAT I HAVEN’T HAD YET BECAUSE YOU JUST FUCKING STOLE THEM.

Tomatoes

I mean, what the fuck? Go fucking buy a tomato if you want one. At least it would already be ripe, you asshole. Why steal mine? And if you’re going to steal unripe tomatoes, TAKE THREE OF THE SMALLER ONES, MAYBE. BECAUSE FUCK YOU.

So, for today, at least, my attitude is this:

FUCK this town and fuck this neighborhood. Seriously. You’re all a bunch of bike stealing, dumpster burning, tomato raiding, prank pulling dipshits, PLUS your weather TOTALLY SUCKS.

Close enough!

Weather, Whining

In which there’s another slightly wonky Android map of my adventures.

I went for a bike ride! Now I’m melting like a bad witch because: heat and humidity!

I felt like I had to go because it’s my day off, the dishes are done, and I sit around inside ALL THE GODDAMNED TIME, because it’s either a blizzard or a sauna out there. (Or I have nowhere to go. But I digress!)

So a bike ride it was, even though it’s 80-something and 70% humidity.

Went to unlock the Schwinn from under the stairs and it had a flat tire, of course. Went to the Marathon on the corner but their air’s off, so had to wait for the light across Lyndale at rush hour to go to Eric’s Bike Shop for air.

They let you borrow a hand pump, the bastards, rather than having a compressor. Plus you have to haul your ride up stairs and through a manual door to get in, which is weird for a bike store. You’d think they’d let you enter with your bike through the level garage door entrance on the side or something, rather than making whoever’s working the front desk hold the door all day long.

Anyway, then I rode along 28th to the Bryant street Greenway ramps and headed back toward my place. Passed it. Exited the Greenway at Nicolette, rode around a bit, moseyed on home, passed it, went down to Lake and turned left, and rode until I finally found the damned Walgreens.

Bought the mini-scrunchies (that’s how thin my hair is now! i buy mini-scrunchies!) and pair of sunglasses that have been on my to-get list for months, put them on, and rode home.

So humid. So hot already. It’s only the middle of May! It’s only bearable if you’re on the bike and moving (which I discovered when I tried to sit on a rock under a tree on the Greenway for awhile). I hope so much that it cools down and acts spring-like for the next four weeks, because this is bullshit!

Rode home. Nobody hit me with their car!

The apartment building itself seems somewhat bearable in the hallways, but my living room is miserable! Stuffy, hot, humid as fuck, just uncomfortable. I love you for supporting all life on earth, Sol, but sometimes you overdo it on this little ol’ brick building I live in! Ha ha!

LUCKILY, THE BEDROOM NOW HAS AN AIR CONDITIONER. So I turned it on high and stripped off and am sitting here in blessed refrigerated air in a cotton bra and prairie skirt and probably will not actually melt. Yay!

Portable air conditioner

Whenever I tell Scott I hate the weather here, he just ignores it like I’m saying I hate TV commercials or something. I don’t think he groks that I legit do not like Midwestern weather, and that this is not merely my third, but my sixteenth (at least!) year living in it, so it’s not just an offhand observation! I really think it’s not the best!

Compared to Walla Walla — a town with the mildest, most pleasant weather on the continent, and all four seasons fairly represented in their time — the weather here does suck! The grass was still brown a month ago, and now Spring’s over! It’s summer! Turn on your A/C! Fuck you!

But he did buy me an air conditioner (which just basically astounds and amazes me), and I suppose since he won’t fucking move to Walla Walla, it’ll have to do. Heh.

Revision (8:53 PM): I went to bring my bike in just before dusk and it was cooler, so I went for another brief ride. Would still be out except I didn’t have my bike lights with me. Sky was doing a Maxfield Parrish thing, and although the humidity is still high it was much nicer!