All My Little Words

I find it hard to believe that any of these people make more than the median income with their atrocious spelling/grammar/punctuation/typing and total inability to proofread their comments.

If they are making more than the median without possessing the basic skill it takes to compose a simple comment, there is a lot more wrong with Seattle than the price of these condos.

(It’s been a long time since I bothered with posting anything, but look for more of these quickies. I’ve been thinking about posting more in brief like this for a long time.)

Trying desperately to distract myself from what I am sure is a recently broken tailbone.
I really wanted to start the year out with a BANG! so on January 1st, I did the most memorable thing of the year (so far!) and somehow slipped and fell in such a manner that I have spent the ensuing 5 days in varying states of discomfort. I’m not completely disabled, but it’s really hard to do stuff, and the discomfort is really distracting. I’m back to work tomorrow, something which I’m sure will be a joy to behold. In the meantime, I’m finding it difficult to do even the simplest things, such as pay for my Flickr membership for another year.

I thought this would be the year I’d write something every day, but I already fucked that up. It’s probably the year I did a bunch of dumb shit I shouldn’t have done. Oh wait, I already did that one. Like, 30 times. Fuck.

When I was a kid, I think I was pretty well behaved until I was about 3. At that point, perhaps I became a little more…
self aware, perhaps? Because for some reason, at that point, I guess I started testing the waters to see what I could get away with.

As I had mentioned in the other post about spanking, when I was a kid, all kids knew that if you did something bad, you’d get a spanking.
It was definitely the norm back then, although I think the tide was just starting to turn, as I think I thought that I would NOT
get one, simply because I hadn’t ever before. I was really probably just too young for one, or too young to have done anything to
“deserve” one.
I “got away with” stuff for probably about a year before my parents must have realized that reasoning with me was not working.
They told me not to do stuff and why and it went right in one ear and out the other, I guess.

One day when my dad wasn’t home, I was hanging out in the kitchen while my mom had something going on the stove, maybe hard-boiled eggs or something because she left the room with the pot still on. The cookie jar (which I had been warned repeatedly to NOT get into for a number of reasons) was on a shelf above the stove, probably to make it inaccessible to me. I had also been warned to stay AWAY from the stove, ALWAYS, because it could be hot and I could get burned. I saw my opportunity though,
and dragged a chair over and reached OVER a hot stove with a pot of boiling water on it to get that cookie jar, and in the process,
the jar fell and broke.
Of course, I was caught. But I wasn’t worried, because I knew I would just get a talking to, which I did, from my mom.
Then my dad came home, and I didn’t think anything of it when they went to talk in the other room. Then my dad sat me down to give me a talking to, which again, went right in one ear and out the other. Until he flipped me around and started spanking me.
It didn’t hurt, but I was shocked. I did not know what to do at first, but then it occurred to me that I’d heard that kids cry
when they got spanked, so I started crying. I think I wanted it to stop because it made me realize that I was bad. And I didn’t want
to be bad anymore. No one wants to be bad at that age.
So I started to cry and my dad stopped, and then he hugged me and I could see that he felt bad. My mom felt bad. I felt bad for
making them feel bad. But that was the end of that, and I knew now that I could get a spanking if I did wrong. I still did a few things
that I shouldn’t have over the next year, and I got a couple more spankings, but after only one or two more, I stopped doing stuff I
had been told not to.

But I didn’t stop getting into trouble. I think things were fine until I was about 6. I was well behaved, now understanding the
consequences of my actions. I didn’t intentionally do anything wrong, and in fact I made really sure to not do anything
accidentally wrong either.
One night my parents had a party, and I guess they decided that I was well enough behaved that I could just stay in their room
and sit on their waterbed and watch the little tv in there. All fine with me, the waterbed was fun, and I had stuffed animals.
After a couple of hours, I must have gotten bored. My mom had a bunch of posters push-pinned into the walls which I was fascinated
by, so I stood on the bed to take a closer look. I don’t know if I was bouncing and screwing around, or if the bed was just sloshy,
but I must have knocked one of the pins out of the wall. I didn’t even realize it. AT ALL. The poster was over the bed, so the tack
probably landing right on it, and then as I squooshed around on there, it probably bounced and rolled to edge, where it fell
between the mattress and the frame, and poked a hole in the mattress. But it would have been a tiny hole, and I was a tiny kid,
so hours passed with no visible evidence. It probably wasn’t until my parent’s much heavier combined weight was on the bed hours later that it really started to gush.

And my dad got really pissed. And he yelled, and it scared the everloving shit out of me, even though I didn’t even know what had happened until he started yelling at me about how horrible I was for puncturing the bed, and on and on and on.
This was WAY WAY WAY worse than getting spanked, and I hadn’t even done anything. (not intentionally anyway, or that I was aware of.)

I must have been too old to be spanked at that point, so instead, I was grounded. For 6 months. No friends, no tv, no dessert.
That was a billion times worse than the spanking that only lasted a few seconds. Even worse was the fact that my dad didn’t believe
that I didn’t do it on purpose. Even worse than that was the fact that after that, I don’t think he trusted me at all.
Because I didn’t intentionally go against my parents for years, but there were a few more times when I accidentally broke things
(things I was allowed to touch or whatever) that I again got the yelling, and even worse, the long term grounding.
This continued until I was a teenager, and I was accused of increasingly more and worse deeds over the years, and I
probably spent half of every year for the next 8 years being grounded. No wonder I became socially stunted, overly shy,
self conscious and overweight.

So, I guess, in short, spanking worked to straighten out my behavior, but I also got to experience the other side of the disciplinary
coin. I’m not saying that anyone would advocate verbal abuse in any case, as an alternative to spanking or not, but I think
even in the cases in which I was wrongfully accused, I would have taken the spanking over the verbal abuse and grounding.
When I was spanked, I felt like I had hurt my parent’s feelings and it made me feel remorseful.
When we moved on to the groundings and yelling, I didn’t feel like my parents had hurt feelings – I felt like they were angry and
wanted to hurt MY feelings. The pain on my butt would have faded long before the pain in my heart would have, as it obviously
still exists.
Again, I’m not trying to say that no one out there has a better disciplinary plan than verbal abuse or spanking – I’m sure many of you
do. My only point is that, in my case, the spanking wasn’t that bad.
And if I knew anyone today who was whaling on their kid on a daily basis, or for shit they didn’t deserve, or was actually
doing any sort of lasting damage (physical or mental) I would be sure to do something about it.

After successfully cleaning up my Xmas mess in the attic yesterday, I decided it was time to attack my “paperwork nightmare” that has ended up in the dining room. That would not have worked out well for Thanksgiving.

There are so many reasons why no one in their right mind would want to tackle sorting and filing and storing 5 years worth of old bills and receipts that I didn’t even realize what the real reasons were until I was in the middle of it.

Then I came across all the old leases and moving out documents for the last several rentals I/we lived in before buying our house. I came across the lists of things that were “wrong” upon moveout, my copies of letters I wrote stating why I shouldn’t have to pay for this or that. I was a good tenant. I was responsible, paid my rent on time EVERY time, I didn’t trach any of the places that I lived or otherwise violate any of my lease terms. yet somehow, I ended up getting screwed by people who had acted sweet as pie and like we were friends for the most part while I was still living there.
The lady who made me pay hundreds of dollars to replace a 15 year old carpet, and wasn’t buying it when I told her that Landlord/Tenant says I only have to pay for the life LEFT in the carpet, not an amount equal to the total value.
The people who charged me for painting the walls – just regular old in between tenant painting, NOT painting because I had painted weird colors and not painted back or because I had damaged the walls. The people who charged me something like $70 for a SHOWER CURTAIN. A shower curtain, people! Who spends $70 to replace a shower curtain when they are selling the house anyway? Especially when it didn’t need replacing? Someone who pockets the cash, that’s who. And all these people ran me through the wringer over the cleaning when the law says you only have to leave the place “broom clean”. Not “scrubbed with a toothbrush on your hands and knees clean”. Some of these places were cleaner when I left than when I moved in, YET I STILL DIDN’T GET MY FULL CLEANING DEPOSIT BACK. And they all got away with it because they all know it’s just too much work to go to small claims court over it.
So I was like, the world’s best tenant for nothing. #anotherreasontoownahouse

Then I came across all the paperwork for the only time I’ve left a job that they didn’t beg me not to go. Because I got fired.
It’s not like I never think about that whole fiasco, but you forget how bad it really was. I always tell people that I own my own business because it’s good to not have someone else just take half the money you make, but really, I did it because I was tire dof being treated like shit. I was at that job for a LONG FUCKING TIME. And again, I was a perfect employee, just like I was a perfect tenant. I always showed up, never late, called if I was, worked hard, did my job well, no one ever complained about me.
And as sometimes happens with growing businesses, the place went downhill over time, and when I expressed my concerns, I was treated like dogshit, rather than someone who cares about the place she works. I was somehow denied unemployment even though there were a lot of instances of sexual harassment.
So seeing all that stuff again was super hard. I found a few good memories in there too, but not many.

It took six long hours to go through a mountain of paper which I will probably never need unless I get rid of it. Thank bob for the attic so I won’t have to see it again until it is time to shred it all.

I have been saying this for AT LEAST 5 years!!!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090918/ap_on_he_me/eu_med_condoms_climate_change

It has come loudly and clearly to my attention this week that MOST PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO DRIVE.

Conversation in online forums in just the last week has proven that hardly anyone knows the rules of the road, and pretty much everyone should probably re-read a driver’s manual.

I certainly don’t expect everyone to know each and every little obscure rule, but don’t you think you should know the ones that come up regularly? For instance: One of these conversations was regarding how to deal with a right turn arrow, especially if you come upon one that is currently red. Now, I didn’t KNOW the rule when I read the question, as in, I couldn’t have quoted it to you exactly. But I knew at least, that when you come to one of these, you stop, and then you can turn right on that red arrow, UNLESS there is a sign saying that you cannot (and assuming there is no oncoming traffic and it is otherwise safe, of course.) The arrow is there to keep traffic flowing smoothly. In some intersections, the right hand lane can, at times, flow freely to the right while the other lanes in that direction need to be stopped to allow traffic from other directions to move unimpeded. These arrows turn red to let you know to STOP! and check for oncoming traffic before making a right turn. I knew that this was correct because common sense dictates that it is. If you know the other rules dictating red lights and stop signs and right turns, then you SHOULD be able to figure this one out.

I am terrified by the fact that not only do people not know a simple, every day rule like this, but also that they do not have the intuition to figure it out. Being a good driver is not all about knowing every single rule of the road. A good portion of what makes a good driver is good intuition, and knowing what to do in a situation where you are unsure at first.

Another conversation involved traffic circles, those horrid “traffic calming” measures that are installed in many residential intersections because too many people are too stupid to slow the fuck down on their own.

Logic dictates that one should only go around these things to the right, because when we drive, we stay to the right. Some say that you can go to the left if there is no oncoming traffic and it is otherwise safe to do so. I say that if that is the rule (and the way it is written is open to interpretation) you should only do it if you have to – in other words, if you are the garbage truck or school bus driver, and you don’t really have much choice. It is less safe to go to the left, and it makes no sense.

The other thing about driving is that it is one of the few things that everyone should try to in exactly the same way as everyone else. You can wear whatever clothes you want, or wear whatever hairstyle you wish, but everyone should drive the same way. In other words, we should all drive the speed limit, whether we agree with it or not, stay to the right unless passing or otherwise absolutely necessary, and go around the damn traffic circle in the same fucking direction. To do otherwise causes confusion. On the other hand, I am always prepared for people to drive way over the speed limit and ride my ass, and to drive all over the road, and whenever I come to one of those stupid circles, I fully expect there to be some idiot who doesn’t know how to get around it, or some entitled asshole who thinks it’s okay to go to the left because it is more efficient. It sure as hell isn’t going to be more efficient when you don’t see me, and you hit me and it is YOUR FAULT because you were Doing It Wrong.

Ever feel as if you are being tested?
I don’t what that’s all about today. A test of patience? A test of tolerance? I have no idea.

I am certainly disoriented. We are out of coffee and I refuse to buy any more right now, or anything else for that matter.

Despite not having had coffee, being woken by a whining dog at 6:30, after having been accidentally punched in the eye at 5, I was really ready to have a really kind of gung ho kind of day today. You know, to be really busy, make a lot of money. It’s very quiet though, all week, including cancellations.
So, here I am, already feeling useless, and as if I don’t make enough money to begin with, and then there is nothing going on.

So I feel tested. I don’t know what kind of test this is. Or is it more like a sign? Like that I shouldn’t have changed my hours to hours that I like? That I should be suffering more here to suffer less at home?
There is always something.
At one point, I really thought that I could do anything, anything that I wished, I could just decide to do it, and DO IT. Now I feel like no matter what i do, it is just the same thing over and over again, all the time.
Catch up, get a little ahead, go out to dinner and get too drunk a few times, get morose about it, get over it, run out of groceries, buy more, clean the house, realize it is already dirty again, somehow run out of money, run out of groceries, get back behind, start all over again, ad nauseum.

Is that all there is to life? Just a random series of bad and worse events which have absolutely no meaning whatsoever? That would all be okay if the worse events didn’t do things like ruin love and make every day a living hell.

Do i just have too great a sense of entitlement, like everyone else I’ve been talking about lately? Do I feel like I deserve to do well and get ahead, and have fun? Really? Am I that stupid?

I have spent a lot of my life going without. Even though I now do have a lot of those things that I felt I should have in the past, I feel that maybe it is just in my cards to do without. Maybe that is my test. Forget about the things that I think I should have. Maybe if I could just forget about them.

I really should start meditating again.

Good lord, everyone is off their rocker today.

We’ve got:
People complaining about customer service in a hamburger joint!
(Yeah, the place is pricey, but I’ll bet you are not getting your ass kissed because it is a tiny little shop with a line out the door expecting to receive a gourmet burger);
People RIPPING APART another burger joint for NO reason!
(I have no idea what is going on with people’s palates these days – does no one have flavor receptors any more?!?);
People who do not understand that some places are not appropriate for children!
(Who WANTS to take their kids everywhere anyway? It is no fun to take your kids places that will bore them, and everyone should have some time for themselves.);
More people who think auto drivers are always at fault in car vs. bicycle accidents!
(Why can’t we all follow the rules? I can’t remember the last time I saw a cyclist stop for a stop sign. I personally would never dream of not stopping in my car, and I don’t jaywalk, either. I got a ticket it for it when I was 15. It made an impression!)

But no one wants to say a damn thing about the motorcycle accident that happened a month ago, or the recent article which states that the guys on the motorcycle had been drinking!
(Almost everyone wanted to blame the car in this one too, even though it should have been quite obvious from the information provided that the motorcycle HAD to be going way too fast. Of course no one wants to apologize for blaming the driver of the car now.)

Why do I care?
Honestly, sometimes, I do not know. I guess because I really would like to live in a world where people use some LOGIC. I don’t expect everyone to be nice to each other all the time, that is completely unreasonable.
Just realize, that maybe the person behind the burger counter isn’t kissing your ass because they are BUSY.
Maybe you can’t get a service done right now, because other people planned better than you did.
Not everyone is going to be able to accommodate you if you have children.
And maybe cyclists should stop for stop signs instead of rolling through even it is an inconvenience.

When we bought our house, we were staidly informed that it had “settled, due to known drainage issues”.
When we came to see it that fateful Sunday, the first thing I noticed was that it was noticeably crooked. I actually told the selling agent when she asked me for feedback about the house that it was probably the most noticeably crooked house we’d seen, (and there are a lot in this neighborhood) a fact which I do not believe she appreciated.
It was bad enough that I almost rejected the house for that reason only. But I loved everything else about it so much, I ultimately decided it didn’t matter.

Our house is crooked enough that every conversation we have about improvements we could do revolves around leveling the house.
We hadn’t lived here but a few months before I developed the theory that the “settling” is due to “known drainage issues” is bullshit. For one thing, even though we have since seen pictures of the front yard being so badly flooded that you practically needed a boat to get to the front door, when we had the inspection, it was dry under the house. Like, drydry, and if there really was that much of a drainage problem, it would probably be permadamp under there, especially after that wet, floody winter, and because last summer was a cool, rainy summer.
Also, we live right in the middle of a bog in which the giant peat layer that lies in the middle of the whole thing has been radically depleted of moisture due to development diverting ground water, which has caused that layer to compress like a dried up sponge. After I read the details of the issues with the bog, I began to believe that that was where the problem lies. Either the former owners and their inspector really didn’t know about the issues with the bog, or they covered up a permanent problem that no one can do anything about with a reparable problem that they supposedly had already fixed by pouring a new concrete with drains and a double sump pump.

But the more we talk about things that we could/should do and the more I look around the house, and at the way some thing are, I think part of the problem may be that janky “remodeling” I’ve been talking about. Some of the crookedness may be due to settling, as the floor is definitely sloped, but supposedly the foundation of the house is fine. We have decided to remove our fireplace, as it it seems like a lot of heavy brick dragging down that side of the house. It’s also right where we like the tv (which is parked in front of it right now, in fact) and is made of really ugly brick. And since we started talking about, the more I look at it, the more I notice things which make me think that either someone added the fireplace after the house was built, or at some point in time it was made larger. I also do not think the front door or the giant picture window that takes up most of the front wall of the house are original. The front door is in a really awkward spot, and appears to be crooked in the opposite direction of the rest of the crookedness, which makes me think someone put it in after some of crooked happened, and tried to compensate somehow. I noticed the other day that the edges of the giant window look odd, as if someone who didn’t know what they were really doing cut a raggedy hole in the wall and patched it badly after adding that stupid window.
To top it all off, I do not think the large doorway leading from the living room to the kitchen is original either. I think there used to be a regular, old single-sized door  or doorway, and someone had what really is the most brilliant of all these half-baked ideas, to open up this whole side of the house.

It really is lovely that the house is pretty open from front to back because of this, but I have to wonder if cutting that giant hole in that wall is also a contributing factor. Because three out of four walls of our fairly large living room may have been signifigantly weakened, I wonder of the weight of the upstairs could be bearing down enough the cause the floor to drop as well.

Add on to alllll this the fact that I think the heavy, heavy chunk of concrete that is our front steps was added at some point (and may actually be pulling the wall away from the foundation, which could allow the floor to drop?) and there is heavy brick on the front of the house as well, I really kind of think that the “settling” is due to stupid people slowly but surely ruining what is now my house.

The good news is that, if I am correct, jacking up and re-stabilizing the house will fix all of our issues just as nicely, if not more so, than having piers installed. That’s got to mean we will save tons of money to fix it.

Let the work begin.

During one of the many hours I spent on the couch during my first, real, three-day weekend, I happened to glance up and to the right, and noticed that the fireplace mantle was, indeed, a fake.
I mean, at first I wasn’t sure, although the soft wood and altogether insubstantialness of the thing had always made me suspicious. But as I looked up at the bottom of it, I was sure  could see the original mantlepiece from underneath.
90 seconds with a crowbar later (and by crowbar I really mean a flat metal tool that is really for installing laminate floor), the whole bulky thing had been removed, revealing what may or may not be the original mantle underneath.
And to think, I had considered placing a 65″ television on that thing for a minute.

As time passes, it seems as if every previous owner of this house has left behind some sort of shoddy “remodeling”. From the even-too-small-for-me pedestal sink in the bathroom (upon which you cannot place even the smallest amount of weight without it pulling away from the wall) to the ill-fated walkway on the side of the house that is barely even accesible which connects to the patio in the back that we didn’t know about for months because the grass had grown over it. Even my beloved solarium has shown enough wear and tear in less than a year that at this point, the only real option is to tear the whole thing down and rebuild it.

In less than an hour, the fireplace insert that we do use, but not enough to actually keep, will be removed. We realized that it is only connected by a few screws at the stovepipe and figure we may as well take it out so we can put the teevee in front of the fireplace, whose days are also numbered.

And in case you were wondering? That show “Big Love” is actually pretty damn good. We watched all three seasons in less than a week.
Next up – “Oz”.