Home ownership... am I right?
Today I got the worst news possible... the upstairs shower, which has started leaking again (and it's worse than ever)... will have to be entirely torn out so they can replace everything the original plumber did. The pipes. The pan. Everything. Which means I will, of course end up having to re-tile and re-paint. Lord only knows how much that's going to cost.
Let's see what this brings us to in seven years of owning a home, shall we? And this is after the complete renovation I had already paid for when I bought the place...
I am positively terrified as to how much this all cost me. A big thank you to my original contractor, who is responsible for half this mess.
Good thing I'm not going on vacations any more. I couldn't afford it.
The good news is that the massive hole in my living room wall is very close to being fixed...
Later today they skim-coat to level everything out.. Then tomorrow morning they prime it. Then tomorrow afternoon they paint.
And how happy will I be that one of four ongoing projects (soon to be five) will be checked off my list?
Very.
Look, if I end up contracting the Coronavirus and die, so be it. I've been as cautious as I can be. I've had a decent life. Shit happens. I'm good to go.
But if I end up dying because I was attacked by a murder hornet? Yeah, just kill me now. I have no desire to wait around for that.
As you have undoubtedly read, so-called "murder hornets" have reached the United States and... in what I can only describe as a fucking horror story and just my luck... where they've landed IS RIGHT HERE IN MY HOME OF WASHINGTON STATE!
Disturbing photo by Yasunori Koide via Wikipedia Commons
My reaction to the news?
You know that moment in Galaxy Quest where Sigourney Weaver finds out they have to run through "The Chompers" in order to keep the ship from being blown up? And her line is "Well fuck that!" but they changed the film from an R-rating to a PG-rating, so she ends up saying "Well screw that!" but her mouth is still saying the original line?
It was like that.
Murder hornets (which actually aren't called that anywhere but here in the USA where absolutely everything has to be sensationalized) are 2-inch long death-bringers from the sky who get their kicks ripping the heads off of bees and pulping their thorax to feed to their baby murder hornets.
Considering that a huge chunk of our food supply either directly or indirectly comes from bees polinating flowers and crops, this is insanely bad news. I hope that once everybody studying the Coronavirus comes up with a vaccination or cure or whatever... they turn their attention to finding a way to kill every last one of these bastards before I have to worry about running into them when I walk out to check my mailbox.
I tell you... the way things keep going on this planet, the more I am hoping for alien abduction.
My car has always been a piece of shit.
But thanks to Saturn going out of business a couple years ago, it's now a worthless piece of shit.
Considering I'd probably have to pay somebody to take it off my hands, I'd even go so far as to say it's less than worthless. And now even more things are starting to go wrong with it. The latest is that the alarm goes off when somebody farts in the vicinity of my car or I have to shut it down. Not all the time... just some of the time. Like tonight.
The first thing I do is look around and see if anybody is around to notice.
If somebody IS there to notice, I look around for somebody else I can blame.
If there's nobody I can blame, then I brace myself for the inevitable nasty looks I'll get.
Yeah.
Tonight I not only got a nasty look, I got a head-shake and finger wag.
This is a really crappy situation because my car isn't valuable enough to even have an alarm. I thought it was something I could just unplug or remove, but apparently it's not that easy. The alarm is built into the electrical system, so it's actually kind of a complex ordeal to get rid of it. I guess this makes sense, because if car alarms were easy to disable or remove they wouldn't be very effective.
I suppose my simplest option would be to just shoot the fucking car, but my Buddhist sensibilities prohibit my firing a gun. Fortunately, I live in the heart of Redneckistan, so finding somebody else with a gun to shoot my car would be no more difficult than walking into the local tavern (or church) and saying "Anybody packin'?"
The problem is that I just don't want new car payments, and my piece-of-shit Saturn is already paid off. This means I'm just going to have to ignore the defective alarm for a while longer.
Like until my car falls apart and explodes.
And speaking of "Redneckistan" and "exploding"...
Washington State now has a website to promote marriage equality in our state.
The more liberal West Coast voters can probably be convinced. But across the mountains in my
And speaking of "heads exploding"...
HOLY SHIT! NBC HAS PULLED COMMUNITY FROM THE SCHEDULE! There goes one of the funniest shows on television, as the odds of it getting picked up for a new season are now effectively zero. Poop.
I worked 16 hours today. I should have worked 16 more. Except that would be 32 hours in a day, which is only possible if you are a government contractor.
In many ways, the long hours are comforting because they take my mind off of things. Things I'd rather not have to think about. Things that fill you with the kind of hopelessness and despair from which it is difficult to escape. Or impossible to escape.
And I don't have time for that now.
Quite a while ago I read that you can have power over such bad feelings if you write them down each night before you go to bed. That way, you've gotten everything out of your head and can move on to happier thoughts.
This never worked for me. If anything it made things worse.
What were once only figments of my imagination became very real after they had been organized into a list of horrors. Horrors that can't be dealt with just before bedtime.
If ever.
And so my worries, failings, and fears stay bottled up in my head where there belong, and that notepad next to my bed stays empty. Which is probably for the best since you really don't want to provide your enemies with a checklist to your destruction.
Unless I'm your enemy, then you definitely want to do that.
I remember what it was like to sleep. Good times. Good times.
Except I rarely sleep anymore. I just don't seem to get tired...
...until the minute it's time to get up and go to work, then I'm totally tired.
But then the night comes and the cycle repeats all over again...
I really don't like taking drugs if I can help it, but this is getting ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous when you fondly remember the good ol' days when you were only complaining about getting four hours of sleep instead of no sleep at all.
Four hours seems like something from a dream now.
If I could fall asleep to have it.
Reading back through my blog entries these past couple weeks, I'm reminded just how unlucky a traveler I am. Anything that could possibly go wrong, usually does go wrong. Delayed flights? Check. Missed flights? Check. Cancelled flights? Check. Lost luggage? Check. Vomiting co-passengers? Check. Whatever horrible thing you can think of? Check. Been there, done that. Many times.
Why me?
But through all the pain and suffering, at least I could take solace in the knowledge that those two crazy kids Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston finally got back together and will be married at last!
But then... BLAM! Just minutes later, they're separated again and the wedding has been called off!
Why me?
Oh well. At least I still have the marriage of Herpes Simplex One and Herpes Simplex Two to reignite my faith in humanity and maintain my peace and happiness in the face of adversity!
What? What's that?
Son of a bitch! Not Spencer and Heidi too?!?
Why me?
What have I done to deserve this?
After my non-stop battle with misfortune, I have come to the only possible conclusion: God is totally messing with me...
I wish He would unleash His "Divine Love" on somebody else for a while.
P.S. Any resemblance between myself and The Almighty is purely intentional.
In other non-theological news... why is it that every company seems to have shitty customer service anymore?
For reasons unknown, I started receiving paper bills in the mail from Charter Cable a couple months ago. It's a mystery because I set up automated payments and paperless billing. Usually, I just ignore the statements when they arrive, but thought I'd open the one that wasn't as thick as a usual bill. Turns out it's a past due notice. So I call to find out what the hell is going wrong, and am told that they don't know... sometimes automated payments don't go through. But they verify my account is correct and volunteer to credit the late fee on my next bill (apparently they can't credit on the bill they fucked up on)... but only IF I pay my late balance immediately.
Except I can't pay for their screw-up with the service rep I'm already on the phone with unless I pay $1.99 fee.
Yes, that's right. THEY fuck up and I have to pay for it.
Except I'd rather never watch television again than pay for their bullshit, so I use their crappy automated system.
I'd use their website, but it won't let me login.
I'm guessing God has a part-time job on the web development team at Charter Cable.
What other possible conclusion could there be?
I tossed and turned all night, which I assumed was anxiety from the massive pile of work that awaited me this morning. This was a bit confusing, because every morning begins with a massive pile of work. There was no reason for today to be any different from other days.
And yet it was.
I was busy with a project when the email notification came. Not wanting to be disturbed while I was in the middle of things, I ignored it. Twenty minutes later, the world came crashing down as I finally read the email from a friend who was sharing some terrible news. This seems to be happening far too frequently now-a-days, so you'd think I'd be accustomed to it. People losing their jobs. People losing their homes. People losing their health. People losing their lives.
But of course you can never get used to these kinds of things. Not really. And this time it was particularly sad.
I think I must be at the point where I hurt for friends, family, and loved-ones more than I can hurt for myself. This is both terrifying and liberating to discover, though I don't know what to do with it.
Except more tossing and turning, I'm sure.
Despite having worked a big chunk of Saturday and Sunday I was still completely overwhelmed today. This was kind of disheartening, as it made me feel as if I had given up my weekend for nothing.
It's times like this that I am seriously reconsidering my no-drug policy here at Blogography.
Because, let's face it, if anybody is the perfect candidate for drug use it's me. I work under high amounts of stress, I am often alone, and I have a highly addictive personality. I often joke that the only thing that keeps me from doing buckets of cocaine is the cost. But the truth is that I could probably juggle a few things in my budget and be able to free up enough cash for a decent coke habit if I really wanted to.
And days like today, I really want to.
Living in a hallucinatory land of green skies with pink clouds while surrounded with hundreds of imaginary monkeys may seem like a terrible thing, but I assure you it sounds pretty good compared to my non-cocaine-hallucinated reality...
So far so good.
But then I look at the legal ramifications of being caught in possession of cocaine, and this rose-colored scenario starts to turn murky. As a first-time offender, I could probably get off with community service and drug counseling. Picking up garbage on the side of the highway wouldn't be too bad, that I could do. But the idea of having to go to meetings with crack-heads, stoners, blazers, and drugged-out nut-bags while some counselor lectures on the joys of a drug-free life... well, that's enough to scare me straight before I even begin. In all honesty, I'd rather go to prison.
So I'm back to square one.
I guess it's time for chocolate pudding and a glass of milk.
Which I'm sure is almost as good as a couple lines of cocaine anyway.
And so here I am back in Spokane.
I just got back from having The Best Pizza on Earth, but even that wasn't enough to compensate for the crappy 3-hour drive over. Or the balls-slow internet here at my hotel (seriously, my iPhone is faster than this). The only thing that keeps me from going postal is that the shitty internet is free. Because there's nothing worse than having to pay for shitty internet.
Except maybe having no internet at all.
Though, if I didn't have internet, then at least I would have a decent excuse for not answering all the emails overflowing from my inbox. Instead, I have no excuse except to say that I am thoroughly exhausted.
That really should be enough, but the guilt lingers.
Oh well.
Guess it's time to get back to planning some much-needed life changes.
Sadly, none of which involve my becoming an astronaut. I said "much-needed" not "much wanted."
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