in which i rage a little
you have no idea how much time and intention i put into overcoming that shitty “everyone is stupid” attitude smart people often fall prey to and which turns them into assholes, only to end up in this timeline where a third of the population is demonstrably, irrefutably stupid
i mean i used to say that people may look stupid from the outside, but if you understand their actual specific circumstances, most people’s behavior and decisions are actually rational in context
but here we are!
…adults railing against wearing masks and getting vaccines during A DEADLY GLOBAL PANDEMIC, because some bullshit about their “rights” being infringed
…people voting on the single platform of provincial, ignorant fucking racism (see: trump and brexit) and nostalgia for the fake era of 50’s american prosperity
…we just had a record-breakingly insane heat dome and shit’s on fire (as of the time of writing, cle elum has an evac order) AND we’re in a drought. plus most if not all of both WA and OR have official moratoriums on fireworks, but motherfuckers are out there BLOWING OFF FIREWORKS aka this neighborhood sounds like fucking afghanistan in 2010 because LET’S RAIN DOWN SHIT THAT’S EITHER ON FIRE OR JUST MERELY VERY GODDAMNED HOT on dry grasses
…if you watch broadcast TV, which you don’t if you’re under 45, because why the fuck would you, and you lack sufficient critical thinking skills, you probably think that a lot of those snake oil products you see advertised are actually legit because they’re on TV and you don’t know that whatever regulatory bodies that should be protecting you from such garbage lack the funding to do so
…the preponderance of our citizenry really feel that they not only can but should drive everywhere, all the time, because they lack the ability to imagine any other way, like, people will straight up fucking drive a tenth of a mile and back rather than walk or cycle simply because society is so incredibly, horribly, wastefully car-centric and while i have sympathy for thinking this (there are so many mechanisms in place to cause people to think this way) i also require people to FUCKING DO BETTER
in which there’s a complaint
being old sucks because everything hurts all the goddamned time for no reason and i get uglier day by day
but at least there’s rampant government and corporate corruption, grift, a global pandemic, and the climate to make me feel worse!
racists, anti-vaxxers, MAGAts (i cannot imagine finding the former guy intelligent, capable, and a good leader; the man’s a venal, ignorant, racist fucking moron and i have rocks in my yard smarter than his rabid followers), BUT WAIT! a billionaire class that could feed and shelter everyone AND give us all healthcare but just chooses not to because they hold us, their own species, the very one that made them obscenely wealthy, in contempt because they honestly believe their disgusting greed means they’re better than everyone else
In which there’s a post.
Got home from work and ordered a pizza. Quattro formaggi. Ate half of it and it was delicious. Now watching a movie on Amazon Prime.
Uh, let’s see. I bought rye flour and am going to bake my first ever loaf of rye bread soon. The house needs cleaned AGAIN. It’s been hot as hell but I’m either at work in A/C or at home in A/C or it’s night (love living out here again where it never fails to cool down at night).
It’s been picking up in the cheese shop; today was national cheese day so a station did a package on the creamery that ran this morning. Three different couples came in because they’d seen it, so I did the first-time spiel quite a lot today. Every time I point to the picture of the cows and say “…these are my co-workers, this was taken during an important meeting, I think it was about clover or something” it gets a laugh, which is fun. And everybody likes to look at the display window. Who doesn’t like to look at a ton of cheese.
The yeti is good, nothing out of the ordinary. Currently sporting my favorite look, which is long hair and a fairly new beard. Cute as hell. Oh, and my mom recently gave him a new quilt so he’s smug about that. Man loves a snuggly blanket.
Standing for hours straight at work has me thinking I now need to buy expensive compression socks; the cheap ones aren’t cutting it anymore. They never fit right, and the compression, I gather, isn’t properly graduated or whatever. Basically, my calves ache in a stupid way I don’t like after work, plus weird zingy nerve feelings, so I’ma buy fucking thirty dollar socks.
Aging is bullshit. I kid you not. Stuff that always worked without thought now doesn’t work AND hurts. Buh. Fucked up my back and shoulder last week sleeping, and had to be really careful at work not to twang it into total immobility lifting a wheel of cheese.
Read three or four books since the last time I posted, which is the most I’ve read in a very long while. Still have a dozen books on my Kindle to get through, but a start has been made.
Tomatoes are in, last year’s parsley is alive and bolted. I now have a couple of jade plant cuttings from Embo. The avocado is back outside and bursting into new growth.
This post reads exactly like an email from one of my aunts.
In which fuck it, I’ve opened an account at Chase after all.
I’ve been using an excellent online bank called Simple for years. They paid killer interest, the app worked flawlessly, and it’s just been really pleasant, especially considering how infuriating banking has been for me most of my adult life (primarily due to poverty, but how insanely frustrating and expensive banking is for poor people is an entirely different rant).
Like everything nice these days, the Simple product is being killed because its parent company was bought out. It was doing really well, so I assume the decision to close is just more typical corporate raider bullshit, I don’t know, and I don’t care enough about finance assholes to go find out; what I do know is that an excellent, high value service is closing because some dipshits think CEO bonuses are more important than providing an excellent product, and now I have to move my money.
Naturally, I decided to open an account at the little bank down the block from work. That’ll be nice, right? Regional bank, easy access to a branch, should be a no brainer!
It took, and I am not kidding, THREE in-person visits, three phone calls, and FIVE FUCKING DAYS to open a checking account.
The process wasn’t unpleasant, it was just ridiculously complex and took forever. I imagine they pride themselves on their homey, small town appeal, but it’s 2021. Just open the goddamned account. Do not call me and leave messages. Do not make me come over there more than once. Just take my fucking money. It’s a checking account, not an organ transplant.
And after all that, they misspelled both my name and address on the counter checks and the account itself. I had to message them through the website (which, surprise, uses security technology from the 00’s and failed to change the temporary username I was given) to get the typos fixed, and even THAT took three days.
It took something like six business days for my initial deposit to clear, which is nonsense in today’s banking world.
THEN it took just as long for my first direct deposit to show up, and it was from my employer’s account, which is AT THEIR OWN BANK. It was AN INTERNAL TRANSFER, yet it took so long I had to send a message inquiring about it before it actually showed up. (There is no fucking way an internal transfer like that should take more than three days. None. They must be doing all this shit by hand. Like, with punch cards or some shit.)
Today I decided to transfer the remaining balance out of my Simple account (it’s closing for good on the 8th, “transitioning” to another bank with ridiculous fees) so I looked up my balance, wrote myself a check, and used the new bank’s app to deposit it.
Deposit rejected. Limit exceeded. The check was for WELL under five grand, so my new-account deposit limit must be in the range of hundreds of dollars? What the fuck?
Jesus Christ. I give up.
Logged into my Amazon-branded credit card account, which is a Chase account, and opened a checking account there. It took fewer than five minutes. No fees, similar interest rate, and my Simple account was already linked (it’s what I used to pay my card each month) so I’ve already initiated a transfer.
I’ll switch direct deposit from the local bank to the Chase account this week, and then probably just ignore the local account for a few months until I’ve got the stamina for the five phone calls and three in-person visits it will UNDOUBTEDLY REQUIRE to close a checking account I will by then have only used twice: once to open it and once to close it.
I’d much rather use the friendly, small, local bank, of course, but there are reasonable expectations a customer can have, ESPECIALLY in the finance sector. IN-HOUSE direct deposits should take three days at the absolute outside limit, and making me come sit in your drive-through on my bike for twenty minutes, twice, so you can explain checking accounts to me and hand me a printed packet I could much more easily read online? Forget it. No.
So now I’m banking with the big assholes, but at least I didn’t have to WAIT FIVE DAYS to open a GODDAMNED CHECKING ACCOUNT. The only benefit of the small local bank is that IF there’s a problem you should, ideally, be able to go in and speak to a person and get it resolved, but we all know that’s not how it works any more. There’d be an apologetic “I’m sorry, but” and all you’d have accomplished is wasting more time, because rules are rules!
In which fake news must be regulated.
In yesterday’s paper, there’s a Dilbert strip in which Dilbert says he “hates people” so much he doesn’t wash his hands, and hopes he’s an asymptomatic carrier of a deadly disease.
The strip’s artist is a man called Scott Adams who has, I regret even being aware of, publicly fallen down the Fox News/Breitbart/Q rabbit hole. I have no idea who or how he was a decade ago, nor do I care, but today he’s a rabidly pro-Trump, hateful, ignorant white nationalist more famous for saying awful shit online than drawing a comic.
It’s my opinion that all these media companies should be strictly regulated. Fox isn’t a news channel, it’s an opinion channel. It does not adhere to ethical reporting standards and has, as far as can be observed, never intended to.
Watching Fox News as one’s primary source of news turns a citizen into a fearful, angry idiot. It means that they “know” and “believe” a shocking volume of things that simply are not true or didn’t actually happen in reality. This makes these citizens, in my opinion, ineligible to vote.
If you “believe” that viruses aren’t real and that it’s fine that over 560,000 Americans are dead of a preventable disease, you’re not a competent adult.
If you “know” that the horrific number of mass shootings are a reasonable price to pay for… for… for, well, anything, you’re not competent. You’re a fucking sociopath. The second amendment does not mean that idiots can run around with weapons, killing and maiming others at will. Thinking that that’s what it does mean makes you… well, an idiot.
Read this Twitter account, Well Regulated Militia. It’s just an endless scroll of stories of people shooting themselves and others with guns they never should have had in the first place. I mean, we’re a population that can’t be trusted with lawn darts, and yet guns are fine?
These entertainment editorial platforms need to be regulated. They must be required by law to label themselves as entertainment and not news. They are deliberately misleading people and fracturing society. Because of them, people hate the Fourth Estate, because they lack the ability to tell the difference between reportage and editorial. It’s a massive fucking crisis and must be addressed.
I realize the IRS doesn’t go after rich tax evaders because it can’t afford to. I realize that the FDA doesn’t police ads for supplements as it should, for the same reason. (Print, TV, and online ads for unregulated garbage making insane health claims are utterly rampant. It infuriates me, because it’s just making the population dumber.) Trump’s administration gutted a massive amount of oversight in industry. The country’s organs of regulation are all but useless (rich people gonna loot and pillage, after all) but we have got to get them all properly staffed and budgeted ASAP.
We have the money. There are absolute fucktons of money, we’re just siphoning it off into the offshore accounts of the upper eschelons because we lack, apparently, the will to make this rapacious theft stop.
Vote in every local election (these are the ones that really matter). Subscribe to your local paper. DO NOT WATCH FOX, unless it’s just your mostly-harmless local affiliate’s local coverage. Be angry that there are homeless people in your community, not because you’re disgusted by them but because, in a rich country, the only reason anybody’s fucking homeless is because your asshole Puritan ancestors decided that poverty was a moral failing and not ultimately an indictment against society’s empathetic failings. Laugh at the war on drugs. Be offended by warlike language used by the police. Know that cops ARE NOT SOLDIERS and vote down any police funding requests for tanks and other weapons of war.
Shit is pretty awful these days, because a third of the country thinks guns and extra-judicial murders-by-cop are acceptable and that wearing a mask is, bafflingly, a violation of their rights. It’s going to get much worse.
Oh, also: kill Citizens United. Enforce anti-trust laws. Break up ALL the monopolies. And tax professional sports; I can’t fucking believe pro football is tax exempt, that’s a fucking racket. Also tax every penny every church has that isn’t spent directly on domestic charity. Megachurches should be illegal, or at least heavily regulated. And representatives at all levels of government should be heavily fined for refusing to show up in order to deny quorums. End the filibuster. Uh, what else? Drastically change police mandates and fund the ever-loving shit out of replacement entities to handle domestics, drugs issues, homelessness, etc. You don’t send a fucking armed soldier to get some unhoused out from under a goddamned bridge. Oh, and fuck car culture. Every single community in the country should require businesses to remodel existing structures whenever possible before building new, brutalist, sprawling, shitty buildings out on the highway that can only be reached by firing up a car or truck. Outlaw the modern SUV truck; those things are monstrous and ugly and they have such high windows and broad hoods that drivers can’t see anything closer than 23 feet away, which is why they keep killing pedestrians and cyclists.
I’m sure there’s more, but I’m going to go ride my bike now.
In which I need.
I need to quit being so old and fat.
Because it’s constantly uncomfortable. Jeez. The joints, the ankles, the ugh. However, problem is, I dislike diet and exercise a great deal and also time appears, in this plane, to be linear, so apparently I’m fucked.
Such a pain. A pain in the ass.
In which WHERE THE FUCK DID I PUT THE CILANTRO SEEDS?!?!?
Planted some seeds today. Should have done so the 1st, but whatever.
Hopefully they’ll germinate well. Had to re-order cilantro because I can’t find the seeds I got a couple months ago. Also ordered a compost bin thing for the yard and some compost starter, because I have absolutely HAD IT with throwing kitchen waste into the trash!
In which there is an anniversary.
Two fucking decades ago, on the 9th of March, I registered this domain name.
I was working as an engineering assistant at a small ISP in rural Iowa and since part of my job was second and third-tier technical support, I was encouraged to learn HTML. So I did.
Goblinbox has been online ever since, with fewer than a few days of downtime (caused by moves and DNS delays as I changed jobs and hosts over the years).
GOBLINBOX IS TWENTY FUCKING YEARS OLD, which puts me into my fifties.
Jesus.
In which I’ve put “blog” on my to-do list so I can check it off.
Yes, hello. Happy Pi Day! Spring is coming, there are tiny crocuses and the little tree in the side yard is in bloom.
Work is picking up enough that instead of not having enough to do, there’s too much to do — which means now I’m noticing detail stuff I should have gotten done last month but now it’ll be months again before we can!
Here’s a wheel of havarti I cleaned last week:
Look at how fuzzy that cheese was! I kinda love cheese molds.
Today I made FALAFEL POUTINE and it was fucking delish:
Fries, curds from work, falafel balls, gravy, tahini, onion, tomato, and parsley. FANTASTIC! I put a bunch of tahini in the gravy, and seasoned it with the same spices I used in the falafel, and it was brilliant. I’m half-tempted to buy a food truck.
Anxiety disorder symptoms showed back up recently and I’ve had a few attacks. It still sucks and I prefer it when it’s not around, but at least it’s gone more than it’s active.
Sundays are for accomplishing nothing, so I laid around a lot and did some papercraft (primarily because they were suggested by the printer app on my phone).
Tomorrow I am intending to get over to the bank to open a local account, since Simple.com is being killed by its parent company for no fucking good reason whatsoever (i.e. corporations are fundamentally broken) and the bank absorbing its accounts charges, according the to documentation I’ve seen, fees so obscene they border on usury. Tuesday I might bike over to a nearby vineyard for a tasting, if it’s nice out. I’ve met the owners (they’ve been to the cheese shop several times) and per their Instagram they’ve just bottled a red I’ve decided I’m interested in.
This evening I’m drinking white wine and watching tropical murder mysteries on BritBox, and it’s not impossible that I might run a load of laundry through the wash.
Someday, when we’re all vaccinated, I’m going to have The Witches (I have an absolute gaggle of female relatives I’ve taken to referring to as The Witches in my head) over for the housewarming tea party I would have had a year ago if not for Covid-19. I’m considering serving actual tea sandwiches and cheeses from work or chai and pakoras. Hmm. Who even knows what witches will eat.
In which there’s an update. Yawn.
I’ve been watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Disenchantment lately. Fun TV.
Today in cooking, I packed chili, a baked potato, and sour cream and cheddar into a bento for lunch. Turned some beans leftover from making the chili into refried beans, and made Taco Bell-style red sauce, and put them into burritos. I was going to do pita bread and an elaborate Middle Eastern bento, but eh. Baked up some lemon bars from a mix which are currently sitting on the garage floor to quick-cool. (If you’ve never had the wonder that is the Krusteaz lemon bar, buy yourself a box. It’s fucking amazeballs.)
Apparently we’ve got weather coming, up to nine inches of snow between Thursday and Saturday. All I want is for it to be the type of snow I can ride a bike in, and not that bizarre impossibly dry snow that happens around here sometimes that is so fluffy and weird bike tires can’t get any traction.
I get both The Union-Bulletin and the Eastern Oregonian because I believe it’s my duty to support the Fourth Estate at the local level but read them less than half the time. However, one paper had an article stating local foodbanks are overwhelmed and need cash, so I wrote a check (lol) to CAPECO to mail out tomorrow. They run the food bank around the corner from the creamery; I might buy 20 pounds of cheese from work and drop it off, too.
In continuing Aging While Female news, I no longer sleep in single sessions. I go to bed, sleep for two to four hours, wake for one to six hours, and then sleep another five to seven hours (if time allows). It’s fantastic, I fucking hate it. I have, in the past month, been to work on less than four hours sleep more than once, and it sucks. Luckily my job’s flexible enough that I don’t end up doing delicate stuff when I’m tired as hell, but man I really don’t like any form of insomnia after an entire lifetime of being able to sleep just fine.
Here’s a list of my weekend accomplishments: cooked several meals, cleaned the kitchen several times, did dishes twice, did three loads of laundry, changed the bed linens, paid bills, bought groceries, and cleaned the toilet. Also: bought weird stuff online, including a bento box I absolutely do not need.
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
