It. Is. Finished.
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Category: Life
It is Wednesday December 14, 2011. 11 days until Christmas. By this time, I would have made six dozen jars of jams/jellies, at least 4 batches each of marshmallows and other candies, decorated 15 gift boxes, put up and decorated the tree, put lights on the house, and wrapped at least 4 presents. This year’s tally?
- Dozens of jars of jelly: 1.5
- Batches of marshmallows: 1
- Other candy made: 1
- Light on the house: front and back porch
- Gift boxes decorated: Zero.
- Trees erected and decorated: one broken 3 foot tree with one strand of lights.
- Presents wrapped: Zilch.
I have done nothing this year. I’m having trouble getting into the mood because I HAVE NO KITCHEN. Because I have no kitchen, I can’t put up the tree because the tree goes into the dining room which is currently being worked on. This also means I can’t make anything. The only jellies and candy created was to take up to relatives during Thanksgiving before the kitchen got destroyed. I haven’t wrapped anything (it’s all in a pile on the futon. Boxes and bags all over the goddamn place). Why? we usually use the garage table (8ftx6ft) as space. Can’t do that because the garage holds the kitchen. The stove, microwave, sink, and everything in every cabinet ever. My home does not feel like Christmas. It feels and smells of panic and chaos.
PANIC AND CHAOS.
T-minus 11 days.
So, it’s happening. It’s really happening. My kitchen is moving along. Everything is gone: cabinets, flooring, pantry, counterops, microwave, stupid-assed furdown, ceiling fan (adjoining dining room), everything. Gone. There’s even a hole in my ceiling. This is really and truly happening.
SQUEEE!
I must have a hearing problem. Or maybe it’s just a comprehension problem. Because people will tell me things and I will swear up and down that I understand but when the time comes to repeat or do something with that information I have it all fucking wrong. Just wrong wrong wrong.
Under Budget Kitchens is doing my kitchen. It was explained to me (a couple of times by now) what the timeline was. This what I heard:
December 5: week the cabinets come in
December 7: the day they actually come in
December 15-16: The days the cabinets get busted out and reinstalled
The time between the cabinets coming in and the them getting installed: other construction work to fix my 70’s style house.
My floor is a mess right now. We pulled up the flooring and now there’s horrible nasty 35 year old adhesive stuck to the concrete. I want this fixed now because it’s just ugly and nasty and the old cabinets are there so they can be bumped into with wild abandon. The original plan was to do floors later because I had no money. Well, that went to hell when I tried to pull it up myself (with help from Aelerelean…okay, he did it and I barely helped. I managed. yeah that’s it) and it came up fine. So I looked for a stained/polished concrete guy, thinking “I can get this done now!” Then I remembered. One of the cabinets is going to be shorter than it is now. Meaning, if I got the floors done, there would be this 3 inch space of non treated concrete. SHIT. How do I do this? How do I …oh wait. When is my demo date? Yeah. I’m an idiot. Here’s the actual timeline:
December 5: Demo the kitchen
December 6-14: Demo and reconstruct more of the kitchen
December 15-16: Install the kitchen
Like I said, I must have a hearing problem because for the life of me I could not figure out how this was going to work. You’re probably out there saying “My God, you’re a moron.” Yes. Yes I am. But I’ll be a moron with a new kitchen.
When I moved into my house 8 years ago (holy crap) I decided that the kitchen had to go. The appliances were old, the floor was old, the countertops were YELLOW, the blinds were also yellow with darker yellow flowers on them.
It had to go.
But hell, I didn’t have kind of money. So I waited. I upgraded the fridge and the stove, did what I could with the pantry, but eventually I knew I couldn’t go any longer without a full renovation. I made my decision to dig myself out of some debt (some. If I wait for ‘all’ it would never get done) then get going on the kitchen. Now all I knew is that I wanted New Kitchen. What color paint? Dunno. What kind of countertops? Not yellow. What kind of cabinets? Not ones that drop slivers of wood into everything. What did I want? Not This.
So the plan was to pay off a big chunk of debt then in January, get a new kitchen. I decide to execute on this plan in August. Since I didn’t know what I wanted, I figured I should go get some ideas of what I could so. I went to Under Budget Kitchens since I knew other people had had good experiences with them. I look at some cabinets, talked to the owner and before I knew it, I was scheduling an appointment for a measuring. Oh God too soon!
Not too soon. After the measuring came the CAD renderings. I was in love. I wanted my new kitchen RIGHT NOW. I made some decisions on style and color then type of counter tops. The more I thought about it, the more excited and anxious I became. Fuck January, let’s get it started now!
Dear Lenovo T400,
You are a “high powered” laptop. You are supposedly “smarter” than the two desktops next to me.
But you aren’t.
You are a fucking moron.
Why do you lose basic system settings? Why do you insist on turning off “prompt for password” when coming out of the screensaver? Why–and this really gets on my tits–WHY do you randomly hop on the wireless network WHEN YOU’RE DOCKED??? There is a physical cat5 cable coming out of the dock’s ass. You’ve had no problems being on the wired network for months. So why are you suddenly in love with the goddamn slow ass wireless network whenever I need to pull down big ass files?
Is it the corporate crap I have o have? Possibly, but you’ve lived with all this shit for over a year! WHy are you being such a spaz now?
You know what? Fuck you. All wireless radios off. You’re grounded.
Signed,
Me
A guy I follow on Twitter said “I’ve given up on looking at the temperature and just look at a piece of paper that says “Hot as FUCK”. I really should just do this. I watch the weather every morning. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I just want to be depressed? My front and back yard are a mix of brilliant green, sad looking green, and dead. It’s only green because I have trees. I’m watering my trees. My grass can fend for itself.
My poor little garden boxes? Yeah. It’s just too hot and it takes too much water during an “exceptional” drought. The sunflowers looked crappy even in full bloom, I planted two rounds of peas and they never grew taller than 4 inches before dying a crispy death, cucumbers are just a lost cause. Mint is okay and tomatoes are okay. But I don’t think it’s worth trying to keep it all watered every day in conditions like this. So, with my heart heavy, I have decided to let all this shit die. I’m yanking out the sunflowers today and putting a tarp over it so the cats can stop using it as a goddamn litterbox. Why are they using it as a litterbox you ask? Because I erected a quickie fence (stapled mesh around the box) around the other one. This was apparently too much effort for a cat to jump over or even squeeze through the cat wide gap to shit in their favorite place. So now they use the sunflower box. And they don’t even bother to cover it up. Goddamn outdoor cats.
So, yeah. It’s hot. There are cracks in my yard deep and wide enough to lose a kid in. It’s been stupid hot for a coupe of months now. It was hot (hotter than average) since MARCH. We haven’t had a good long spell of rain since OCTOBER OF 2010.
And to think we still have another 2 months of this shit.
I woke up this morning to damage reports coming in from various points of my body:
Eye: hurting and itchy
Lips: feeling puffy and a little painful
Knuckles: bruised and cut
Ankle: hurting
Sides and back: stiff, painful but can breathe okay
What the hell happened last night? The last thing I remembered was coming home from a friend’s house after a relaxing night of drinks and pizza. I get out of bed to find that my ankle hurts because I have sprained it and my lips are indeed swollen. Holy shit! Upon coming out of my bathroom, I trip over a bag that I know wasn’t there yesterday. Inside? About $500 in dirty crumpled small bills. I chuckle. Well, I may look and feel like hell, but whoever’s ass I kicked, must be feeling worse. Awesome way to start the day!
What really happened:
I had a couple of glasses of wine and a calzone from a new (to me) pizza place. My lip started to swell a bit. I took a shower, went to bed and woke to a big ass upper lip. Song of the South huge. I should have been crying out “Oh Lawdy, Lawdy, please don’t throw me in dat dere briar patch!” Yeah. No fucking clue what happened. Maybe an allergy to the food or good wine (gotta start drinking cheap wine. oh noes. my life is overs). My eye felt like I had sand thrown in it. No idea about that either. My ankle? Geek accident. I rolled it coming out of Fry’s yesterday morning. My knuckles don’t hurt and neither does my back or sides. And the bag o’ cash was just wishful thinking. Yeah, the last couple of days have been a perfect storm of suck.
But the first story sounded fucking sweet, didn’t it?
Oh Desi.
Yes, dear little sister, this is what trying to “be an adult” and “be responsible” and “handle yo shit” gets you.
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Let it be known that on Thursday and today I tried to be a motherfucking adult! The irony (irony? fuck it I don’t know, Alanis screwed up the definition) is that this started with a very childish event. I woke up at 5am on Thursday flailing because I dream i was in a tent full of bugs. In my half conscious state I thought there was a mantis on my ceiling and scrambled to get out of bed. My legs, always the ones late to the party, had no idea what was going on so naturally I fell out of bed on my ass and subsequently on my glasses that had fallen off the night stand and on to the floor.
Now these glasses were awesome not only were they pretty but they had been quite sturdy. I’ve dropped them , stepped on them and even slept on them but they’ve never given in. Until now , apparently I fell directly on the most fragile bit this time, the frame. While yes I had been wanting to get a new pair of glasses I never thought this is the way the old ones would go. I though maybe they’d be my back up pair. I mean those glasses were so effing cool. They were my pseud-intellectual glasses I got when I started college. People complimented me on them especially when they were drunk. I loved those glasses and they went with EVERYTHING! Be that as it may, I had to move on. So I waited for ma to wake up and ask her about the insurance. She said it was ll good and to just go to where I went last time, Lenscrafters.
Unfortunately we forgot to remember that last time I had my eyes examined was 2007 when we were on a different plan. So I called Humana and asked simply for a list of places that would take me. Following their advice I go to TSO who fit me in the day I called them. I sit there in the lobby feeling good about the situation now since it was being resolved so quickly. I had it all planned out. Get my eyes checked then go to LensCrafters, get a new yet slightly inferior pair of glasses done in an hour and then go home and spend the rest of the day doing fuck all because i didn’t have class that day.
But no, as i look over at the nurses they are talking about insurance…they were talking about MY insurance. Oh god.
They told me that i wasn’t in fact covered there and would have to pay 80 dollars or find someone else. I had class tomorrow and my contact lenses were irritating the crap out of me. So i resolved to pay the 80 dollars instead of trying to make a last minute appointment at the other TSO or fucking Temple TX. When i spoke to the actual eye doctor she told me it was because Humana covered eye doctors under the medical umbrella, so I guess that means i have to go to a specialist like my mom to get the benefits. That I understood, I was still pissed but I understood.
So today I wake up ready for my last day before spring break, I had a stack of errands to do, and at the top was go to Eye Masters and get me some mothereffin glasses LIKE A BOSS! Once again my insurance was shot down. They couldn’t find ma in their records and the nice lady at Eye Masters who I told my tragic story to was like “WHA! That’s bullshitter, you call their asses!” This time I was annoyed and called Human again! And they said that I wasn’t covered for eye care PERIOD. Once again I understood, maybe ma misread the info or something.
Then I look at my card. Okay batman riddle me this, if I’m not covered then WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!
Now i looked up Vis903 It seems to say I get frames. So TSO was right but dammit don’t tell me I don’t have a vision care plan PERIOD! So I’ve given up being adult. I’m trying to get a hold of ma because I am a baby and can’t take care of this.
To recap:
I never posted what OSOG was in the first place. Okay. Our couch is about 6 years old. The springs are gone, the cushions are smooshed, we can feel the wooden frame every time we sit down. We need a new couch. So we went couch shopping. Nothing thrilled me like the reclining theater-like chairs that were impractical. But Aelerelean came up with a brilliant idea. Sine the futon is also made of misery and pain, why don’t we replace that with a couch (a simple, no frills couch) for guests and naps and get reclining theater seats for tv watching. ooohhh. I like this idea. A lot. We commenced shopping again. All was going to be well! Life was gonna be good!
Then my car needed $1400+ in maintenance.
So, Operation: Screw Our Guests is on hold. 🙁