My husband used to live this way before we met (apparently) when we met and for quire a few.years after wbe usd to do things together and with the kids, but he has gradually gone back to his old lifestyle and he doesnt seem to think theres anything wrong with it. His personal grooming has always been an issue also, but i gave up on that a long time ago. :(

Has anyone ever thrown their phone into a river, and how did that feel?i hate this phone.
i

Probably it felt like this:

Hahhahaaa!

Drama on the playground.

There's a boy in Minifob's class, we'll call him James. They were in the same class last year as well, wherein they were best friends, but not really good influences on each other. They amped each other up, as best friends tend to do. My personal assessment was that James is ADHD, and I'm pretty sure the parents medicated him halfway through the year because he made this very sudden switch from crazy-hyper-impulsive-but-friendly to never-smiling-calm-but-mean.

Anyway, I asked for them to be separated this year but it didn't happen, and now they actively hate each other. James is actually the lesser of two major reasons we were desperate to change school environments. I hear every day about how James said this mean thing, or organized the boys into rejecting him from some game, and how they fight all the time and taunt each other with the fact that neither will be invited to the other's birthday party. (James' birthday was in the fall and Minifob was indeed not invited, which was actually a relief to me.)

Now Minifob's birthday is coming up in a week, and the rhetoric about not inviting James must have reached a peak and made it home to his parents, because out of the blue, his mother is emailing me to schedule a playdate. I asked Minifob, but he has made it clear he does not want a playdate with this kid under any circumstances. Thing is, it's not impossible that this boy doesn't even really get that Minifob hates him, he seems like the type (or maybe the meds have made him the type) that figures everyone is just mean to everyone and there couldn't be any larger consequences to be derived from that...

So now I have to figure out a way to put off this mom, hopefully without telling her to her face that my kid hates hers. I used our new Cub Scout commitment as my latest excuse, since I don't know what night this week the den meeting will be yet... but that's dangerous, since the idea might make her decide to sign her kid up too. On the other hand, if James appears in his den Minifob is likely to want to quit. So that could work out for me in the long run.

Gawd, I thought girl children were supposed to be the drama queens.

No, it's always the moms. Been there, done that, thankfully almost out of that territory..... I put off unwanted playdates by boring them to tears with our schedule while allegedly trying to find 23 minutes where I could drop my child off and pick them up in time for the next gig if mom can assure me he'll be ready on the curb by precisely 3:21........ ;)

stupid kittens with more curiosity than good sense.... has gone wandering upstairs somewhere... and hasn't come back and now I have to keep the dogs separated out until the independent little cuss decides to wander on back to the cat room - so of course I'm getting sweet piss all done today worrying on the bugger

I've been getting some casual part time work from the (other) uni, which is good. Not quite enough to support myself year round, but a good start.

Over recent years, the academic support unit has been juggled through various administrative structures, and this year it started "fresh" with a new coordinator. He was told to plan a roster and not go over (or under) budget, but could never get an answer to what the budget actually was.

Turns out he guessed high, and thosetoblamefor85% have basically forced him to cut everyone's hours by a third.

With three weeks to go in first semester when it is busy as hell.

Ahh, yes, I remember his bullshit. :right:

Sorry, that should be cut by half, as of next semester, with a longer down time during mid year break.

Mild irritation which comes from a difference of tastes and opinions.
No advice or sympathy sought, although I'm not trying to censor comments.

The two Johns are coming up this weekend.
I know I am not invited to the meal out. I have absolutely no issue with that - three childhood friends, three long-term wives (although one is a second wife... only married 30 years the cheeky minx)

But I expected to help out with the faux-bbq the next day.
I thought Mum was rejecting my suggestions for being "too much". Which is ridiculous, because for a small lunch, an actual bbq requires far more effort and preparation. And if you are going to chuck on cheap burgers and sausages, most of them will be wasted, as will the buns.

I wanted to get some frozen salmon, defrost and marinate and cook in the oven. Ditto chicken breasts, and/ or ribs. Bake up some garlic bread and/ or serve with new potatoes in garlic butter salad. No. Too much.

Saw their shopping list today. Enough cheap burgers and sausages to feed the 5,000, ditto rolls and buns. Shop bought potato salad and coleslaw, sausage rolls, chicken drumsticks and crisps.

Now I do have a sneaky suspicion that she just doesn't want me around in case I swipe some alcohol. Which is a reasonable and deserved reaction. It won't be in case I show them up, because I never have, in front of visitors. I have been drunk in front of other people, but never in my own house.

I think it's more that she just has the idea set in her mind.
It's not a big meal!
It's not about cooking!
I don't want to spend all day preparing it!
But she just can't relax and hand it over to me.

Tcha. What was the biggest success at my 40th? Ribs I'd simply marinated and then shoved in the oven. I was lucky to get two, they went so fast. And even if they don't trust my recipes, ALL of Tesco's bbq range can be oven-cooked, because we get so few good days a year. Oh and yeah, it's going to rain Sunday.

Still. Dad's friends and her house. So I can only moan here.
I will spend the afternoon hiding in my bedroom pretending not to exist if that's what it takes for them to enjoy the day. And I don't mean that sarcastically.

Okay, update.
I was partly wrong.
Apparently one of the Johns is extremely faddy about his food.
He'd be like "Garlic bread? You're joking!? It's like garlic... and bread" (Peter Kay)

Don't see why the rest of them should suffer for it, but perhaps she's right in that marinated salmon might blow his mind.

I still disagree about the ribs.
Far cleaner to cook and I'm sure he'd manage a few.
Mum says "I don't want them to have to sit down. At least with a burger you can hold it in your hand." That, ladies and gentlemen, was where I bowed out. Because even my Mum doesn't eat a rib with a knife and fork.

I think I'm just craving ribs :yum:

Anyway, making my strawberries and cream cakes for them.
I offered all the classics. Because it is pretty traditional to have a cup of tea and a slice of cake on arrival (sure it is in many places.) So I was offering traditional cakes. Mum jumped at the cakes I made them for their anniversary, which is her right of course, and shows they were as appreciated as their swift disappearace suggested.

All I can do about the rest is enjoin her not to throw anything away until I have had a chance to look at it. Beefburgers, sausages and even buns can be frozen and reincarnated into more interesting dishes. Maybe I'll even try bread & butter pudding...

I've said my piece and will be on hand as my newly slimmed down self, cleaning and clearing and helping. Or hiding in my room pretending I don't exist. I can deal with either without rancour now I get to make some cakies :)

bread and butter pudding is dead easy, and you can put anything in that you want flavour wise. Chocolate chips go down a treat here with the kids, but they also like the traditional jam and raisins. :)

My sis in law arguing with me on fb about how men and women should behave. I'm sure some of you can see it. Most of you probably don't want to.

Also, I feel very old.

Me too. I just had to explain to my best mate why Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit wasn't in the TripleJ hottest 100 of the last 20 years.

Oh great. Well thank you very much for THAT, Zen. Excuse me while I go slit my old, wrinkled wrists in private.

You think that's bad? I read recently that a team of archeologists is excavating a site where Atari used to dump their unsold games. They're hoping to find a stash of about 2 million ET games.

That's right.

Archeologists are searching for the ruins of our childhood.

:crone: indeed.

Geez. I was hoping to come here and find some inspiration. All I got was confirmation. I'm a dumb old crone who's living in the past. A time when it was ok to say women should act like ladies and they might get treated like one. A time when it was ok to say women and men should be held to certain standards. Sometimes life is just a pain in the arse crack.

I refer to it as entering my geezerhood ...

If anyone tried entering my geezerhood I'm sure it would be a pain in my arse crack too.

:lol:
On my best day I couldn't go toe to toe with you, foot.

See, you just did.

"Irritating" is too strong a word, but I'm suspiciously perplexed.

I don't use LinkedIn, but I'm on there, and a woman I know just extended an invitation to join her network so I ended up on the site. One of the people it suggested I might know is a former Dwellar whose name starts with R and ends with adar.

There were no shared connections, and no clues about why LinkedIn might think I know him. I've never emailed him, and I'm not connected to any other Dwellars on LinkedIn that I can recall. I'm trying to figure out how they became so clairvoyant...

weirdness

1. Your friends gave LinkedIn the ability to search their mailboxes for new connections.

2. They didn't Link to him, but LinkedIn remembered the connection anyway.

3. They Linked to you.

4. Their email connections may be real connections for you in real life, LI thinks. Maybe moreso, if two or more of your Linkers have messages from him in their email boxens.

That's my theory

Ohh, it's just the NSA trying to be helpful. Why is everyone so paranoid?

Mother is a super-spiteful mode today.
I have avoided it so far, but she's really laying into Dad.

She's now told him to bin the stupid fucking roses he's planted in pots.
Not sure how they have aroused her ire, but she says she didn't ask for them, didn't want them, only wanted two to plant on the graves so they may as well be binned.
And he will. He'll put them in the bin, just because she is in a pissy mood.

SLAM goes the microwave. BANG goes the cupboard.

It honestly isn't me this time, we had a pleasant convo this morning.
I'm still going to hide though.
We'll play nicey-nicey-family later because Maureen is coming over.
I'll still hide. It's extremely rare for me to eat with them anyway as dinner is a flashpoint.

Maybe it was an email, she was on here just before me.

I must teach you to knit next time you're here. It's great for removing yourself from the immediate environment ;-)

Sent by thought transference

Removing yourself from the immediate environment is key in (abusive) these situations. Knitting is a good way. So is Zen breathing while focusing on something in the distance. Even though others will decide you're touched, you tend to get excused early.

Is there any way to tell if someone legitimately wants a contact rather than just having poor information hygiene?

They would send you a request to be linked. Linkedin will only make suggestions as to people you might know, e.g. email contacts of emails contacts as opposed to friends of friends.

I've seen this happen with Linkedin. They asked me to let them scan my email folder for people I may know who are on linkedin. I did and then they by default check every box to be sent an invitation, you have to go through your entire list to decide who to send invites to and who not. I did this and they still sent invites to people I did not want to invite. Then I noticed a bunch of suggestions of people who are only connected to me by certain business contacts who I did not invite, leading me to assume linkedin made that decision for me.

Is LinkedIn useful for anything?

It seems to just be another way for salesmen to pester me. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

If you're in an isolated industry, it can be helpful. When hunting for audio contracts in the past, I have scrolled through looking for the names of companies that old coworkers are now working for, because they are all small independent game outfits that you wouldn't necessarily know are in town except by word-of-mouth. But other than cold job-hunting leads like that, no, it does nothing.

I heard from The Mac Guys finally, $585.00 for a new back light. SHIT I just bought a used laptop. SHIT

Here's what you need to know: you can still sell that old Mac on eBay for a top price, in the "for parts or not working" category.

Thank You again sir. But I to them to recycle the piece of shit, I wish that I had thought of that.

If it was a 2010 MacBook Pro 15, and the only thing wrong was the backlight, you just gave away about $400-$600.

It's worth a trip back there, saying you made a terrible mistake and don't want to have it recycled. But they probably won't give it back.

On Wed (6/26) I paid for some 5 ft cedar fence pickets for @ $1.66
I took about half of the order in my pickup and trailer.

On Thurs, I took the load to the coast (85 miles) and returned for the rest of the order.

As I was checking out, I noticed a new sales flyer on the counter
for the same pickets..."starting 6/28/13" @$1.88

Great Sale... marked UP 22 cents each !

you've reduced the supply and thereby increased the scarcity, thus the increase in price.

go capitalism, go free markets.

Nation-wide, to boot.

:D

five footers... how wide?

Here's where I'm gonna get my cedar fence materials. you'd have to drive farther than your 85 mile stretch though... plus sales tax.

@V: Here (on line "SALE" price)
5/8" x 5 1/2" x 5 ' cedar #2

That does look like a good $ deal - if cedar is suitable quality.

Sitting in Newark airport waiting for my second flight of the day - delayed at least 2 1/2 hours. This makes 4 out of 4 late flights on this short trip to Ottawa, lots of nail-biting and running through airports like a fool only to find out my connection's delayed 2+ hours, and no advance information or updates from the airline. United, you suck. At the very least, you owe me a free drink.

Quite literally mildly irritating me today is a splash of Worcestershire Sauce.


In my eye.


Don't ask.

sounds.... sexy

sounds sexy, looks painful.

and not in the good way.

Sounds sexy, but not in a good way.

After all, a little pain never hurt anyone.

A little pain can be sexy, in the right circumstances ...

But Worcestershire in the eye? Painful. Not sexy.

:lol: Freaks.

After Plthijinx's warning about not masturbating after handling jalepeno peppers, and now this, us weirdos may be opening up a new field of sexual kink: condiment related S&M.
What's next? Ladies, try a dab of wasabi in the pink zone. Chaps, raw ginger in the prostate region. Report back. :lol:

Trust me, the ladies don't need wasabi. We do just fine ...

Raw ginger in the prostate region? :eek: Report back, mates!

Freaks?

I prefer "sensation-junkie", thank you very much.

By the way, I doubt there's much new under the sun. These folks put out a great spread.

I went looking for an old story I saw in a JPEG of a medical juornal about a woman who went to the doctor fearing cervical cancer and found her partner of the night before had simply inserted a clove of garlic while she slept (... without waking her!).

I couldn't find the story, but "garlic vagina" returns over a million hits on google. This is totally a thing.

I am nearly at the end of Philip Pullman's trilogy and I really don't want to leave that world.

Yeah, "My partner put it up there while I slept" is the female equivalent of "I fell on it." A clove of garlic up the hoo-ha is one of many supposed home remedies for a yeast infection. I'd bet any amount of money that she stuck it up there herself, then couldn't get it back out again.

Emergency Departments frequently see women who've stuck something up themselves and then been unable to get it out. The most common thing is a tampon with a lost string, typically in place for days by the time the woman comes in.

The proper excuse is "I fell on it while doing the housework in the nude". I mean, you have to come up with a believable explanation.

Ortho, that sounds like one of the less fun jobs to get in the casualty ward. I'm sure there are much, much worse.

Got the insurance payment for my kids' colonoscopy/endoscopy/pill cam procedures 6 weeks ago.

1.) My daughter's pill cam was dismissed as unapproved, despite my having an approval letter in my possession.

2.) The supposedly standard "member rates" did not match for any pair of procedures between the two kids.

3.) Apparently they think my son did not have a colonoscopy at all, but rather a "proctosigmoidosis with tumor ablation."


So I called, registered all these errors with the nice man on the phone, and everything has been sent back for review. The sad thing is, this only barely registers for the mildly irritating thread, and definitely not the upsetting thread, because this is just how this shit works. Standard Operating Procedure. Last time the kids had their scopes done, it took me 6 months to get it all processed and paid correctly. That was with a different insurance company, but that's actually pretty irrelevant, I've learned.

Has been a day of minor irritation, really.
Building and building until my brain exploded out of my ears, causing an almighty mess in the spare room, ruining the carpet and the sofa bed. I mean I was able to clean the computer and the walls but I'll never get the copper smell out of the soft furnishings.

Tried to be helpful to the 'rents and applied for a benefit that Dad is entitled to.
Online.
Kept having to go back to Mum for more and more information.
Fair enough, but imagine poor old Dad trying to apply for it with his Swiss cheese memory. While I was getting the info the system kept logging me out. Grrrrrrr. I can't be the only person who would have to consult a list or a diary or a calendar to complete the form.

Still, all done now. Mostly.
Just have to make a phone call regarding the information that has to be sent via snail mail, whether copies are acceptable and what address to send them to. You know, minor details like that which aren't given on the website and the link provided doesn't work...

Of course if it does go through it could mean an extra £200 per month for them. Talk about worthwhile. It's what he will receive as opposed to Mum getting a carer's allowance, beause she is retired. Given the amount of hospital appointments she has to get him to, and the amount of tablets she has to sort and get him to take, AND all the taxis because he gets confused by the new bus schedule, it is a little extra jam for their bread, but it is deserved. If he didn't have Mum it would cost the State a heck of a lot more.

Then a general email went out from W, my new employers.
Including this line and The attached list of people who needed to complete multimedia training was SO LONG that when I typed my reply I had to sit and watch each letter coming up about 5 second intervals. I felt like I was living in slo-mo. Except my frustration was in real time.

Anyway, I replied saying I was very happy to undertake additional training. Which I am! But I did also include a scan of my original communication which says and Because I don't like an email being circulated to all staff suggesting I have not completed ELEVEN modules which I was not aware I needed to. NB - my response went to the Manager that sent the email, not to the distribution list.

Response?
Yes. You should have been clearer. In a telling it like it actually is way.

There was something else.
I know there was.
I came on here thinking "three things I want to get off my chest".
But maybe I've just maxed out my irritation for the day.

Am calm now. Blessedly so.
I'm really hoping I can get the 'rents their benefits and I am looking forward to doing my extra training because the truth is that the more I know before I start, the better I'll be able to do my job and the easier it will be.

Oh I was lying about my brains coming out of my ears.
In case you were worried about the carpet.

But I loved the part about the copper. ;)

Glad all is calm now, and kudos for going after the benefits for the 'rents. You are awesome.

I never think of that smell as copper--to me, it's pure IRON.