I have been in a bit of a funk lately, and the reason I know this is because yesterday I went online and bought customized Nike sneakers.
I do not care for sneakers or even shoes as a general rule, and my grueling workout schedule (20 minutes on the elliptical machine once every three weeks) certainly did not require this purchase.
I simply felt like spending money. And I was sick of driving to every sports store in the area and looking in vain for a sneaker that came in the colors I wanted, was available in my size, did not look overly bulky, and provided decent arch support.
In the carefree days of my youth, I wore various brands of tennis sneakers, and found them sufficient for getting me from Point A to Point B. Now, though, my trips often involve going from Point A to Point B but then back to A to get something I forgot and then onward to Point B with possibly a detour to Point C and then a trip home via Point D.
This is not only because I am old and forgetful, but also because there are random strangers in the outside world who will invariably piss me off. In order to limit my time with these people, I spend as much time as possible inside my house, where only a stray dog poop can incur the Wrath of Jane. This gradual Howard Hughes-ing of myself requires that I cram all my errands, whether they are conveniently located or not, into one trip.
Due to this extra walking, my feet have decided I can no longer take them for granted. I never cared much for my feet, but for the first time, my feet are making me aware that they do not much care for me, either. A simple trip to the mall now leaves me with tender heels and sore feet, not to mention increasing rage at how difficult it is to park at the mall, and we haven’t even hit the holiday season yet.
And so I decided I needed to buy real sneakers.
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When you review a proposal and the author has misspelled HER OWN LAST NAME, then you know that this person didn’t even read it over after she wrote it.
Obviously, this mistake was a typo. (At least, I hope it was, or else she has more problems than I thought.) But to send out a document that you typed, with your name on it, and with your name misspelled? My mind boggles at the idea.
One or two mistakes in a document is pretty normal, especially if what you’re reviewing is an early draft. But during the 30 seconds that I was staring, with increasing horror, at the document, I saw other typos, grammatical errors, and punctuation mistakes. I wasn’t even reading the document, but was skimming it, and there were still more mistakes in this than I have ever seen in my father’s project summaries that he wrote for work and asked me to review when I was in high school.
My father didn’t learn English until he was over 30. And he has never sent out anything this awful, including the email he sent to me that read, “Hane. If you go to Wallmart could you buy several distill water for me? I still can suive 2-3 wks. When next time you go there, take a look. iF YOU FIND IT PLEASE BUY IT FOR ME. i SHOUGHT NEED TO KEEP TO AVOID RAISE HEAVY STUFF NOW.”
I am astounded that anyone could even physically produce a document this bad. I mean, Word even UNDERLINES the words it thinks are misspelled — how hard is it to just skim through a document after you’ve written it and look for the little red lines? DO YOU NEED BILL GATES TO PERSONALLY WALK OVER TO YOUR HOUSE AND POINT AT THESE WORDS BEFORE YOU CAN SEE THEM?!?
I’m not even going to go into the sheer horror of knowing that there are people out there who would hire someone to write a proposal who cannot write. Or type, evidently. Or proofread. Or see little red lines.
HER OWN LAST NAME.
What is this world coming to?
I don’t watch singing competitions on tv anymore, since Rock Star is off the air, but my sister sent a link to America’s Got Talent.
This is an 11-year old girl. She could win American Idol NOW. Hey, she even got Hasselhoff to move his chair closer.
The link
I’ve been very careful about not identifying myself online because:
- I don’t want people from high school googling me
- I may be paranoid
- Except I google high school people all the time, thus they are likely to be googling me
- And there are strange creepy people in the Internet, many of whom I have dated
Since I moved my website to WordPress, I’ve removed as many identifying features from my site as possible. I do not have my name associated with the site, and I never post pictures of people without their permission. The only photos I put online without permission are of dogs, because frankly, as dog-crazy as I am, even I have to acknowledge that dogs simply don’t care if they look a teensy bit fat in a particular picture.
Today I happened to google my cousin’s name. My cousin is over a decade younger than I am and has Asperger’s. She has never really understood why it is unsafe to post identifying features about yourself online. Currently you can find her name, email, photos of herself, birthdate, location, and high school online.
So I googled her to see what she had been up to, and to check if there was anything I should freak out about.
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A few nights ago, we experienced severe thunderstorms and lightning.
We were notified of these events by Miss Mina Beana, who began barking as soon as the thunder started. Using her patented “Get Up, Bitches®“* system, the Bean not only woke us up, but also Stanley who had been sleeping in the family room.
Because I didn’t have to get up in the morning for work, I went downstairs and let a howling Stanley out of the family room, and brought him into the dog bedroom with me.
Mina was barking furiously and stopped only to wag her tail at me when I walked into the room. She continued barking even after I had picked her up and put her in my lap on the chair in their room. Stanley jumped onto the chair and curled against me, shivering and whining softly.
Meanwhile, Paco was sleeping or appeared to be, since all I could see of him was his butt poking out of a blanket.
I sat with the dogs for a bit before Mina decided she was bored. She climbed down from the chair and sat in a crate where she proceeded to groom herself. Thunderstorm? What thunderstorm?
Paco finally got out of his blanket and seemed surprised to see me. His face said, pretty clearly, “Hey! No one told me you were here. Are we having a party?”
I pulled him onto the chair with me and Stanley, and he burrowed against me, rubbing his face against my leg.
Stanley was still whimpering, Mina was still grooming, and Paco was having fun, so I decided things were calm enough that I could take them outside.
They all ran outside and peed, and I put Stanley in bed in the family room and Mina and Paco back in their room.
A few minutes after I got back into bed, Mina began to bark again. Apparently she was fine with thunder as long as I was in the room with her, but she was unwilling to face it with only Paco in the room — a Paco who clearly did not understand the severe ramifications of not barking at the thunder, and insisted on sleeping.
*”Get Up, Bitches®” involves a series of three barks separated by 3-5 seconds of silence. The Bean’s revolutionary technique of varying the length of the silent stage has been proven to gain attention from humans faster than a comparable barking system that utilizes finite silence, as evidenced by a scientific study involving 10 humans and 4 pets, including 1 lizard. Results not typical; your experience may vary. Not intended to treat, prevent, mitigate or cure disease.
This year we finally decided to hire a CPA to do our taxes. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that I finally bit the bullet and allowed Chris to convince me to get someone professional to do our taxes.
I’ve done our taxes since Chris and I got married, because frankly, Chris’s method of preparing for tax time is to dig into his work bag and pull out a bunch of old statements that he’s been carrying around for months. I myself prefer the file cabinet method, and I like numbers. Especially when preceded by a dollar sign.
Because I started doing my taxes before tax software really took off, I have always done our taxes by hand. While I don’t do our taxes perfectly, I also don’t do them terribly wrong. And I am free.
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Lately Chris and I have each been working from home a few days a week. When our days at home coincide, we both get up at our usual work times but the day progresses much more easily.
The dogs get taken outside twice as often because neither of the humans knows when the last outing was. The dogs are quite happy about this, and they have now learned that they can just wait meaningfully by a door and someone will let them out. Whereas if only one human were home, this human would know quite well that all the dogs had just gone outside an hour ago and they don’t need to go out right now, and I’m talking to you, Mr. Stanley.
Also, one of us can usually distract the dogs while the other’s on a conference call. On days when Chris isn’t working from home, the dogs often participate in my conference calls, whether they are on the agenda or not. On mornings when I haven’t woken up yet and Chris has an early conference call, he takes the call in the garage. In his car. I found that puzzling at first but then Chris explained he couldn’t hear the dogs from the garage.
“And sometimes I get tired of standing up,” he said.
On good days we can even work in one load of laundry between the two of us, thus saving us some weekend chores. In fact, the only negative thing about working at home together is the temperature.
After the first few days of working at home together, I began to notice something strange. Our thermostat is set low overnight because that’s the only way to get the air conditioning to stay on long enough to send some cool air to our 3rd floor bedroom. So most mornings, I have to turn up the thermostat to be comfortable on the lower levels of the house. I usually only need to make that one adjustment to the thermostat during the work day.
But now I was making multiple trips a day and I was always turning the thermostat in the same direction — higher so that the A/C would kick in less often. I assumed that the thermostat was just adjusting itself automatically according to its programmed temperatures. Or that maybe it was just magic. (Magic, I’ve found, is a good, all-purpose explanation of anything that happens which you can’t immediately explain and don’t want to put any time into investigating.)
Then one day I heard Chris on the stairs. I heard a click. I heard the A/C turn on, and I heard Chris going back down the stairs to his computer.
Apparently for every time I ran down a flight of stairs to turn up the thermostat, Chris was running up the stairs to turn down the thermostat. Neither of us said anything to the other — me, because it took me so long to realize what was going on, and Chris because, well, I’m not sure if he’s noticed yet how many times he’s had to adjust the temperature.
I didn’t really mind the running up and down, because at least I was giving my typing hands a short break from the computer. But then I pictured us in the not-so-distant future: Me staggering downstairs with my electric wheelchair built into the staircases to raise the thermostat. Chris making his way up the stairs with his cane to lower the thermostat. The two of us doing this in reverse during the winters. The two of us taking up the entire day, what with all that slow moving back and forth between the thermostat.
No wonder retirees go to bed so early. After all that walking, I’d be tired, too.
HAHAHAH!!!
I finally figured out how to delete that blogroll category that was driving me insane after I upgraded versions of WordPress.
HAHAAHAHA!!!
(Solution here if anyone needs it)
Stan is going through some difficult times right now (he’s being weaned off Prozac, he sits and stares at us for no apparent reason, and he has a skin tag and thus is getting old) but he has still maintained his youthful figure.
This is why.
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