Nothing surprises me any more. Government can't afford to provide food to hungry kids... but government can afford millions of dollars to gold-plate some statues of horses. Government can't afford Social Security benefits that seniors have earned from a life of work... but government can afford to start a war to distract from its head being in the Epstein Files over 38,000 times. It goes on and on.

This kind of bullshit from the highest levels of government makes everything else seem trite.

But that's not to say there aren't surprising things out there that are giving the government a run for their money.

Because this is the craziest shit I've seen in a minute...

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE... SHIT GETS CRAZIER!

And, I gotta say, the lies coming out of the corporate offices for "Bricks & Minifigs" isn't garnering any sympathy from people. Though I do feel bad for is the franchise owners who are being lied to by corporate and suffering the brunt of the fucked-up bullshit that corporate has enabled...

The original owners of the store are revealing shit about the corporate offices of "Bricks & Minifigs" that's making things far, far worse for this asshole company. There is no doubt what-so-ever that "Bricks & MiniFigs" is a fucking nightmare, and patronizing these poor franchise locations who are blameless feels like a terrible solution, but since they have to send money to corporate, it's pretty much the only solution until corporate is made to pay for what they've done. What absolute fucking monsters.

From top to bottom, this company has done a horrible job of dealing with this situation. The CEO outright lying on tape certainly didn't help.

Whatever happened to right and wrong? It's all shades of grey now, and society is shittier because of it.

Good news, everyone! I have water again! Sunday the pressure was so low as to be non-existent, but I put a pot under the spout and turned the water on all day. Then around dinner time I had just enough water collected to boil pasta so I could have be some butternut squash ravioli in browned butter with crispy-fried sage. Something I've been wanting since I bought everything for it the previous Sunday.

It was pretty delicious...

Today I had to get my car serviced. Before I could even sit down, I had a text providing me a link to tracking the progress on my car. That's nice, I thought.

It sat in the shop for FORTY-FIVE MINUTES before they got around to it. My appointment was at 2:15. They finally started at 3:00...

Then they managed to get the inspection and oil change done in fifteen minutes, which means their time estimate of "about an hour" was correct in the end. But... dang...

The wait was made worse by a guy in the waiting room watching videos on his phone... WITHOUT USING HEADPHONES... which made the entire wait a horrific experience. Why are assholes so rude like this in public? Because they're assholes, I guess.

After that blight on my day, I went grocery shopping, picked up kitty litter at Petco, and grabbed an ice cream cone at the drive-through before heading home.

Where I had water again, thank heavens. Pasta for everyone!

Happy Pride Month to LGBTQ+ persons across the country and everywhere! I see you. I appreciate you. I want you to be happy, safe, and authentically you, always. You contribute to society in meaningful, fabulous ways, and I'm proud to stand with you as you celebrate your culture and history.

And, don't worry haters, I see you too! Every year there's a segment of society living in ignorance which feels the need to shit all over Pride by saying things like "WHAT ABOUT THE MILITARY? WHY DO GAYS GET A MONTH BUT OUR MILITARY GETS NOTHING? I'M UNREASONABLY MAD ABOUT THAT, AND BEING MAD SHOWS EVERYBODY I'M A REAL AMERICAN PATRIOT!!"

So here we go...

1. May was National Military Appreciation Month.
2. November is Veterans and Military Families Month.
3. Which is to say that Pride Month isn't taking away anything from our troops being recognized.
4. If you really want to recognize our troops in June, nobody is stopping you. I used to collect foods and snacks so I could send care packages to soldiers every month. The site I used for this was AnySoldier.com, which shut down last year. So now I donate to the USO Care Package Program and Operation Gratitude.
5. Which is to say that if you need a "recognition month" in order to recognize our troops, that's on you. You can do something to support and recognize troops every month if you want. So attacking an important time for LGBTQ+ persons "for the troops" is just performative nonsense.

And for religious haters who find joy in condemning Pride Month as celebrating sin... go right ahead. This is America, after all. But you should know that your highly selective reading of the Bible and your non-contextual interpretation of those passages which you weaponize against LGBTQ+ persons is an incredibly sad way to live as a "Christian," and you really need to read deeper into your Bible for the ultimate message Jesus was trying to teach us. I'm not a Christian, but have been in a Bible study group for the past 22 years. Studying historical context, language translation context, and the different interpretations of Scripture has been an eye-opening experience I highly recommend.

But anyway...

Happy Pride to all who celebrate!

Don't think that life without water pressure will hold me back... because an all new Bullet Sunday starts...now...

   
• Take a Look, It's In a Book! When it comes to video games, I'm a creature of habit. I mostly play Minecraft Dungeons, which is such a relaxing way to wind down when I've had a particularly challenging day. I don't generally look for other games to play, but sometimes they find me. The latest of which I can't even play because it's not available for iPad or Mac! It's a weird concept to be sure. A fairy has ripped 3,072 books off the shelves of a magical library. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to put every last one of them back on the shelves where they belong...

The reviews are pretty stellar. People love it so much that even when they earn magical abilities to allow them to complete the game faster, they don't. Instead they put each book back manually. Because it's relaxing. I can't imagine a bigger endorsement than that. I really, really hope it comes to a platform I have available one day soon!

   
• Priorities! Take a look at this nonsense that greets you when you login to Facebook...

Facebook now prioritizes their shitty AI slop bullshit over your friends. Which speaks volumes. The reason they want you to use their product is not to communicate with those who mean something to you... it's to generate stupid AI crap. And I honestly don't get it. What do they gain by de-prioritizing your friends? Running AI nonsense is expensive. Having you engage with your friends is relatively cheap. Which is why it seems insane that you have to skip past TWO AI products before even getting to your friends. I don't fucking understand any of this. Probably too old.

   
• I'm on a Float! This past week I happened upon a discussion about how "stupid" water beds were, yet they were everywhere anyway. They didn't offer much support for sleep, they were impossible to move, they could have serious problems when it came to the water getting slimy, and they required a heating pad under or else the water would be freezing to sleep on. It was totally a messy idea that made no sense. And yet... I liked my water bed! It was comfortable enough (when warm) that I was able to fall asleep easily. Not sure it did much for sleep after I nodded off, but for the five years it was functional, I enjoyed sleeping on it. But then the heater had to be replaced for the second time, which requires you to completely drain the bladder, at which point my parents told me it was time to be rid of it. I kept the bed frame though, because it had a padded edge I liked, and just threw a regular mattress inside. So... stupid? Yes. Very. But not insanely so. Sometimes I miss flopping down on a squishy, sloshy bed at night.

   
• Full Disclosure! I haven't thoroughly enjoyed a Steven Spielberg movie since Minority Report in 2002. Before that there were quite a few. Despite it all, I never stop rooting for him out of pure nostalgia. His latest, Disclosure Day looks like he may break his 24-year dry spell for me...

At least I sure hope so.

   
• NEWSFLASH: Pardoned Jan. 6 rioter to plead guilty in child sexual abuse case, adding to pattern. "Once is an anomaly, twice is a trend." This is the sixth... SIXTH!... January 6th insurrectionist arrested for being a child predator? And that doesn't even touch the number of sex crimes and other criminal acts from the January 6 mob. All pardoned by the president. The so-called "law and order president." What a fucking joke.

   
• Inhumane! Years ago, a woman tossed a cat looking for affection into a trash bin. The cat was rescued, but the woman was caught on video and (rightfully) became a total pariah of society. People (rightfully) loathed her. She (rightfully) became one of the most infamous people in Britain. Her response made things even worse. If you hadn't heard about the story, here you go...

This morning a news story hit my feed with the headline 'Cat Bin Lady' Mary Bale still lives in Midlands - and doesn't feel forgiven. And I was like. Good. Fuck that piece of shit. This is all I could possibly want for her. Anybody who would cause suffering to an animal which did nothing but show them affection deserves to be an unforgiven outcast. People like this have no place in society.

   
• Talk About Performative! Good Lord am I exhausted over this stupid shit. It burns. IT BURNS!

When you are invited somewhere which has different traditions than you hold, it's merely being polite to be respectful to these traditions. People like this need to get out of the house and fucking travel more. I've been to countless places where I was respectful to my host by doing something I wouldn't usually do. What always, always, gets me is how these same people will totally lose their shit if somebody were to disrespect their traditions. Get a fucking life, asshole.

   
And now back to my regularly-scheduled water outage.

Jenny has pretty much recovered from my being gone for vacation. She's back to her demanding self and only gets clingy when it suits her.

But Jake? He's still clingy any time I'm home.

I wake up in the morning, and this is what I see...

Needless to say, any time I'm laying on the couch, he's going to be on top of me...

The only time I get a break is when there's something new to explore. Like the tray I bought to put my little INSTAX photos in on top of the coffee table...

Guess the tray is his now. If I buy a second one for my photo books, will Jenny take that one?

Day three of watergeddon is at hand.

I'm back down to no water at all, which means another day of feeling grimy. AND ANOTHER DAY OF NOT BEING ABLE TO COOK MY BELOVED BUTTERNUT SQUASH IN BROWN BUTTER WITH CRISPY-FRIED SAGE! The next time I get even a trickle of water, I'm filling up every container in the house.

Which is what I should have been doing all along.

The good news is that I finally got to see the Spider-Noir series on Amazon Prime. I knew I'd love it because I'm such a huge Nicholas Cage fan, but it's so much more than him... it's a really good story that looks amazing (especially in Black & White, which is how I decided to watch it)...

Finally... finally... Sony used their Spidey franchise license responsibly again. Which leads me to wonder if they'll get all stupid again and give us another Morbius or Madame Web or Kraven. Lord I hope not. Better they just sell the film rights back to Marvel than create another horrible mess out of things.

Had water... then didn't have water... then had water, but low pressure. Which meant I could take a shower, but not a very good one.

Then the water was gone again when I got home, which means no butternut squash pasta in brown butter with crispy-fried sage. Again.

In other news, how cool is this...

Probably won't offset the utterly insane decision to shut down federal bee labs, but even a little progress in the face of absolute disaster is better than nothing.

Surely there has to be somebody in the administration who understands what an absolute fucking disaster it would be for life on earth if the bee population collapses?

I have no water! They've been digging in the back of my home after a massive leak sprung up, so I'm guessing that might have something to do with it.

Not being able to take a shower is an inconvenience.

Not being able to flush the toilet is problematic.

But not being able to boil water to cook pasta for my butternut squash ravioli with brown butter and crispy-fried sage? Bedlam. It's all I've been thinking about.

Take for instance my recent scroll through YouTube, where one of my all-time favorite drag queens drops an amazing beat which I wasn't prepared for...

Now, Trixie is talking about being gay... but this is a very smart take for any aspect of your life, even if you're straight. Stop wasting energy trying to conform to what people expect and just be yourself. You can put all that energy to far better use just by being who you are.

Genius.

It makes me happy that Trixie Mattel understands X-Men so perfectly. And even happier that a film has such a great message given that Mystique and Magneto are the villains of the movie X-Men: First Class.

Or are they?

Kudos to director Matthew Vaughn and the writers for making First Class the only X-Men movie I've enjoyed to date. And moments like this are why.

Wishing everybody (but especially our troops and those who lost loved-ones in the military) a peaceful Memorial Day as we take time to remember soldiers of days passed who died in service of their country.

As you likely already know if you've been reading for a while, I love me the robot floor cleaning robots. And right now I've been really loving the Narwal Flow 2 model which has been cleaning my downstairs (Carl) and upstairs (Joy) floors. I feel beyond fortunate to have these devices which make my life a little easier.

But anyway...

I've had a few questions about the mapping that my robots do, and have been looking to online forums for help. The other day while I was scrolling through one of them, a woman was very, very upset that the Flow 2 she just bought wasn't doing a good job of cleaning her floors. She was cursing the poor robot, the manufacturer, and everybody "lying" about how good the devices are.

And then she posted a photo.

Now, I stopped being a Catholic a long, long time ago. But I involuntarily crossed myself when I saw what her floors looked like. They weren't just a little dirty. They were filthy. The grime was so crusted on them that areas looked like they hadn't been cleaned in decades.

Not wanting to be an asshole, I decided to offer up a bit of help by saying something like "I had problem areas that didn't get cleaned too, so I scrubbed them down and just have the robot maintain my floors by running a couple times a week. It's been working out great."

But the subsequent comments on my comment were not nearly as diplomatic.

People were saying things like "Problem areas? That entire floor needs to be torn out so she can start over!" and "Forget the robot have you tried explosives?" which was quickly followed by "Try filling the robot with battery acid."

Then the woman decided to yell at me before deleting her post.

I guess I should feel lucky that my mom kept a clean house and I learned by example. Though, if I'm being honest, I still haven't finished unpacking my suitcase. It's sitting in the kitchen hallway where it's been for a week now.

But don't worry... thanks to Carl, the area around my suitcase is squeaky clean.