It's ironic that I posted what I did just before this, because this weekend, which started off so nice, ended with a bang. I'm not sure that there is any hope of a future at my house. And I'm not sure that I want to be a part of whatever the future there is. There are a lot of things that I'm not sure of. One thing that I am sure of, though, is that I can put up with almost anything as long as I believe that the person loves me. But once I stop believing that, I am done.
Meanwhile, the northeastern coast of the US was flooded by hurricane Irene, a big storm that got weaker, but not smaller, as it slammed inland. It was all over the news, on every channel and in every paper and all over the internet. And yet, despite this 'flood' of coverage I found myself totally disinterested. There is only so much that one person can care about, and only so many disasters or distant events that we can worry over. After awhile, I believe, a person can get fatigued of caring for the whole world's problems and just start to shut down and close the door to outside concerns.
In other words, I have enough to worry about without stressing over a storm that probably won't even touch me, especially after the tornadoes that shredded Alabama earlier this year.
I haven't been to the gym in 2 or 3 weeks. They've been working on the locker rooms and disabled the showers, plus I've been sick, plus I've somehow injured my shoulder while not working out. I honestly have no idea how I did that.
Anyway, this month is nearly over and the gym showers should be operational again soon. And then I'm going to have to get myself back into the gym and get back to working out. And embarrassing myself.
In the meantime, I've bought a John Deere riding mower. I thought I got a real bargain on this thing. I paid $400. The seller was asking $650, but I talked him down. Little did I realize that I got no bargain.
I had my local John Deere dealer pick up the mower and tune it up. It needed one or two things, but seemingly nothing major. Once they got it and began to look it over, the trouble began.
"Yes, your deck won't go down, but we fixed that. But we noticed that your electrical system isn't charging. The whole wiring harness has been cut and spliced to hell. Somebody took a good mower and just tore up the wiring for some reason. We really need to replace the entire wiring harness. Your muffler is the original factory muffler. It's totally rusted out. It needs to be replaced because it is leaking and the intake is sucking hot exhaust straight back into the engine. $$$"
$1000 plus later, my mower is purring like a kitten. Or like a big-ass John Deere king of riding mowers. Or lawn tractors, as they say. Damn, this got expensive fast.
I spent my weekend doing a whole lot of nothing. I hope you did the same. Actually, I hope you had more fun than me. And I hope you spent less money.
Earlier this week I spent about $150 at The Guitar Center buying a tiny portable amp and a kick-ass effects pedal for my guitar. But you know, my guitar is an acoustic with electronics built-in so that I can play it through an amp, but it isn't as easy to really jam with as an electric.
My guitar
So on Friday, totally as a favor to a friend who is suffering the after-effects of a break-up, I went out for drinks in order to keep my friend from having to eat alone. And after the drinks, I noticed I was only a block away from The Guitar Center.
So I wandered over just to take a look around one more time, you know, in case anything had changed since I was last in there. Nothing much had changed, but they had set up a shiny black electric SG guitar on top of a bunch of boxes.
So naturally I bought it.
My new guitar
It's a nice guitar. It is the Epiphone version of the kick-ass Gibson SG that I used to own. But because it's an Epiphone, it costs about half as much.
And also because it was apparently made in China.
So by Friday night I had blown about $350 in The Guitar Center already, and they only just opened their doors for business earlier this month. I would have blown this money sooner, but I didn't know they were here.
I spent my weekend alternating between entertaining my heartbroken friend and screwing around with all my new guitar equipment. I also learned that it's probably rude to play "Smoke on the Water" with heavy distortion and amplification at 12:30 at night when other people are trying to sleep.
Today I met up with my heartbroken friend again to entertain them and keep them from having to eat dinner alone. Being so close by The Guitar Center once again, I decided to stop in.
I bought a $20 guitar cable and $35 worth of music books. I also learned that because I let them ream me up the ass with a $35 2-year-extended warranty that I really don't need, I can bring my guitar back any time in the next 60 day and exchange it for a better one, after I pay the difference, of course.
I'm seriously considering it. There's a much nicer cherry one for about $100 more than I paid for mine.
So let me ask you, do you play any instruments? And if so, what do you play and how long have you been playing it?
I've been sick all week. I don't know what I have, but I know what it is doing to me. First I feel like puking and then it comes out the other end. Yay! Sorry to tell you this, but I thought someone might have wondered where I had gone to. Or maybe I just hoped that someone might wonder.
I've been doing a lot of sleeping, and a lot of reading, and I've been practicing guitar a little, only to see clearly that I need to practice a lot more than I currently do. I've been texting a fair amount, too. But I turned off the ringer on my phone. Someone woke me up bright and early with a call that wasn't intended for me this morning. When you're sick and having freaky dreams about a hot female friend who is a personal trainer doing weird sexual things to you, that sort of rude awakening is extra annoying.
Obamanomics
You might have noticed that the U.S. stock market is in free-fall. The Press is saying that this is in response to Europe's economic woes. I noticed that it also corresponds exactly with Obama's very politically motivated assault on Standard and Poor's, which he claims is totally justified even as every single person paying attention is fully aware that it is nothing more than political pay-back and the very sort of thing that a Chicago thug does, but not a President. This man is a criminal, and so is his right-hand man in the DOJ, Eric Holder.
Standard and Poor's gets payback, Chicago-style
Ever since my father died, my mother seems determined to destroy every single thing he built at their house.
First she had his workshop hauled off. My sister and her husband were happy to take it. They have it set up on their land now and are using it. There was nothing wrong with it. It was filled with his weights that he'd had since he was 15, his chemistry equipment, his reloading equipment, his 2 oscilloscopes, a stereo as old as me, a working telephone from the 1940s that hung on the wall in case of emergency, a vice, a drill press, carefully organized toolboxes filled with everything a person might need to do any sort of repair, and more. It was a wonderland in a space the size of a single-car garage, compact and efficient.
Dad's workshop goes down
Later, she had the back porch torn down. Dad had that porch built so that he could set up his porch swing and sit outside every day after work. And he did. He sat out there every single day and he loved it. But mom needed new gutters. So she hired a man and he casually mentioned that it was difficult to work over the porch, so she paid him a great deal of money to just tear it down. Well, there were a great many tools and things that were kept both in Dad's workshop and on the back porch, where they were protected from the weather, things like a riding mower, a push mower, a motorcycle, a wheelbarrow, etc. Suddenly she had a crisis of what to do with all the tools and equipment which now sat out in the rain.
So she just got rid of it all.
Then she complained that she didn't have a lawnmower and didn't have this and didn't have that, because she had gotten rid of it.
So because she got rid of all the lawn equipment, she has to hire a man to come mow her yard each week. None of us could do it for her because she got rid of all the lawn equipment and we aren't equipped to mow our own yards and then borrow some trailer to haul our stuff over to her house every week and mow hers, too. But she knew that when she got rid of the mowers. And she did it anyway.
Next, she paid 2 men to come and tear down the last remaining thing my father built, a small metal toolshed which held the few remaining tools that she had available to her - shovels, rakes, etc. That was just today. Already she is complaining that she'd like to plant a tree where the shed was, but she has no tools with which to dig a hole for the tree and she wondered aloud, as she sat lazily in her chair in the air conditioning, whether she could hire the people who sell the trees to come and plant it for her.
The shovels that were in the shed are on the back porch at this very moment, waiting to rust in the rain until someone hauls them away, as she has already arranged. But the point is, the shovels are still here. She could pick one up and use it to dig a hole for a tree if she truly wanted. She could even ask me to and I would do it. She might even stick one of the shovels in the garage next to her car.
But she won't. She's too busy worrying. Worrying and getting rid of every single element of work available to her. She's worrying now about various small shrubs growing up around the yard in the fence or near the fence. Oh worry, worry, what to do? I mean, if she had a shovel she could just dig them up and there'd be no more worry, right? But she's getting rid of the shovels, just as she got rid of everything else that might enable her to do any work around the yard instead of hiring men to do it for her.
When she was thinking about having the back porch torn down, she worried and worried and made herself sick. She asked every single one of her children and we all said "don't tear it down." But she wanted to. It was the easier way to go, you see, and if there is one thing you can always count on my mother to do, it is whatever is easiest. Sure, it cost a fortune and resulted in more headaches, but that was something she didn't think about, even as we told her to think about it. Just plan one more step ahead and you'll see where this might be a problem. But she wouldn't. She only thought about the worry of how the man installing her new gutters said it would be a pain to work over the roof of the porch. Thus, she concluded, the porch must be torn down to make life easier. She had made up her mind almost instantly upon hearing this stranger mention that it was difficult to work over the roof of the porch. Asking all of us our opinions was just a search for someone to take responsibility for her decision which she had already made.
My mother is a true blue American feminist, you see, and always looking for someone else to be responsible for her choices, as they do.
So anyway, my father's workshop was gone not a month after he died. His beloved back porch was demolished awhile later, leaving my mother complaining about the hot sun beating down upon it. And his toolshed was torn down today, with every tool and instrument that a normal person might need to maintain a house and a yard meticulously eliminated in order that my mother might simply worry over tiny shrubs tangled in the fence, the fence being the next thing she wants to hire someone to tear down. She also worries about whether or not she can continue to afford to hire men to repair and destroy, alternately, the various worries she finds for herself around the house while she sits in her chair sipping coffee and spending her inheritance to eliminate any possibility of work. And she worries that she may run out of money.
Meanwhile, she has been diagnosed with diabetes. The doctor recommends exercise and a lot of it. But she has all but entirely eliminated that. She has her chair and she's comfortable in it. She hires men to exercise for her while she complains that she can't eat whatever she wants to anymore, although she mostly does anyway, due to her condition.
And I watch all of this and I wonder, what the hell makes a person so bound and determined to destroy everything around them, including their own body, leaving their life empty and void of any purpose or meaning?
Truer words than she ever suspected
Then again, we have a president who seems very similar, bound and determined to destroy all that he touches and then punish anyone who observes what he's done. He hasn't created one single thing, except worry and debt and injustice. He blames everyone around him, everyone except the Keynesian Marxist feminists that he has surrounded himself with in the White House and all the many government agencies where he appointed like-minded destroyers to rule and ruin. I guess it's true what they say, anyone can be president.
Of course, no one says that just anyone can be a GOOD president.
Last week a friend of mine, who lives on the extreme left side of Huntsville, Alabama, alongside Redstone Arsenal, left to go to Florida for the weekend. She posted about it on her Facebook page and then headed out. While she was gone her parents went by her house every day to feed her dog and make sure he had water.
When she came home on a Sunday night, she found that her 2 laptop computers, both brand new, were missing. She searched around inside her house and determined that she had been robbed.
Her doors didn't show any sign of having been damaged. No windows were broken. But someone had definitely come into the house and stolen her computers. It appears that they went out through her garage, closing the door behind them as they went.
She reported it to the police and then began trying to figure out who might have done it.
Monday afternoon, around 2 pm when she came home from work, she saw a big white van in her neighborhood. After she went inside her house and put her stuff down, one of the guys came to her door. She said he knocked 'oddly' 3 times, not like a normal knock somehow. Something about the way he knocked made her uncomfortable.
She went to the door, but did not open it. She has windows on either side of the door that she can see out, but you can't see in. She stood and looked at the man standing there. He was wearing a powder blue shirt and tie. He was young and holding nothing in his hands. While she looked at him, her dog came running up behind her, jumped against the door and let out a deep bark. The man at the door turned and RAN back to the white van.
This, too, seemed odd, since the dog was safely inside the house.
She watched the men with the van for awhile. There were 3 guys walking chaotically from house to house, knocking 3 times on this door and that door, in no particular order. She thought it was odd, not at all like salesmen, but more like they were checking which houses were empty.
She called a guy friend, who came straight over (he has a massive crush on her and would die for her if she asked him to.) She got into his car and together they followed the van.
The van would drop off 2 of the guys and then drive out of the neighborhood and down the road to a gas station, where he would sit for about 5-10 minutes before driving back to the neighborhood and rendezvousing with the other 2 guys again. Eventually, the van picked up the other 2 guys and headed out of the neighborhood.
My friend and her loyal companion followed them.
At some point the guys in the van realized that they were being followed.
They gunned it and ran.
She took photos of them and their tag number and offered it to the police who are working the case of her house being robbed.
AZ72887
Meanwhile, she talked to some of her neighbors. Most of them were not home during the hours that these guys were working the neighborhood and had no idea this was going on. But one of them had been home and met with the guys. She said they were odd, claiming to be selling vacuums and yet overly interested in the things she kept inside her house, commenting on how nice they were and such.
Another neighbor who had been home when the 3 guys came around said she heard the same 3 knocks on her door, but did not answer. And then she heard someone very loudly trying to get in through the door. She said it was so loud that she thought he had succeeded in getting the door open.
So anyway, if you live anywhere near the neighborhoods bordering Redstone Arsenal and Madison on the west side of Huntsville, Alabama, keep your eyes open for 3 strange guys in a white van. The tag number is AZ72887
We had a substitute trainer today at the gym. I had never seen her before. I shall never forget her, though.
I knew she was up to no good when I came in and was told that I would need every single weapon available in the room - weighted bar, balance ball, medicine ball, 2 different cables, step plus 3 risers on each end, multiple dumbbells, mat. And by God, we used them, every one.
I was so oxygen deprived midway through the class that I can barely remember much about what all we did. I just remember that it was fast. We moved quickly and if you stopped to breathe or get some water or wipe sweat off your face or the floor then you were instantly behind.
"Hurry up - go, go, go" she cracked like a whip.
I heard weights hitting the floor throughout the class as people grew exhausted and gave up, dropping their weights and trying to catch their breath.
I tried to drop my weights quietly so the college girls wouldn't hear me wimping out. Of course, they could SEE me wimping out if they looked my way, but I was counting on their not wanting me to look at them and thus avoiding looking at me to prevent eye contact as my protective invisibility shield. I realize that girls all pumped up on estrogen have the peripheral vision of an owl and can virtually see in all directions at once, but I'd prefer to believe that none of them saw me stopping and falling behind. Let's just agree to say that they didn't.
We did exercises I had only ever seen in horror movies - squatting low, pressing weights overhead and then jumping as high as we could before landing in a lunge and then dropping into pushups and oddly rolling into a ball and falling forward for some Martian tricep push-back exercise that I had never heard of before. I'm surprised we didn't do any handstand presses from a sitting position. No one mention those to her or I swear to God she'll make us do that next time!
After class she started talking to a soccer player about how his squats are wrong. She pressed her chest against the mirrors and slid her body down the glass, jutting her ass straight back and then rising up again. I know I have watched strippers do that move before, but she insisted that it is a good way to work on your form for squats because it forces you to keep your chest up and thrust your hips back. To me it just looks like a sexual position that young girls on silver poles use to get extra money thrown up onstage. But who am I to say?
She commented on my form since I was standing there watching her do her stripper squats. Apparently she noticed that I do a certain exercise differently than everyone else. She made us use the weighted bar to squat down, then press the bar overhead, then stand straight up, lower the bar, and repeat again and again times 1000. I found that my form didn't feel right when my hands were close together like everyone else was doing, so I slid them out wide and turned it into an Olympic style snatch move. It felt right to me that way, so I stuck with it. But apparently it looked odd to her. Except that my form was good so she hadn't said anything during class.
All that jumping and not stopping to breath turned my legs into rubber. I wobbled out of the classroom and went to the showers. That was almost 3 hours ago and I'm still wobbling. I suspect I shall wobble for the rest of the day. Perhaps even the rest of the week.
