Everything is annoying lately. I’m at a point where online is stupid. I need a break from online.
My wife just left for the fourth time this year. This upcoming Friday is the 42nd day of the year and she’ll have been away from home for 24 of them. For 14 others she was working an ‘hourly employee’ schedule, so things were still messed up around here. I need to get back into our normal life flow. Hopefully we start establishing that again next week.
Last week the big ice/snow/rain/sleet/snow/rain/ice/freezing rain/snow/ice storm came through. Usually I love that shit…and I did. I go some nice photos of ice on things. It’s so pretty when the ground is snow covered and everything is shiny. Everything was covered in ice. I went out with the kids and we had a blast sliding on the ice-covered driveway and cul-de-sac. That night it got windy. We supposedly saw gusts of over 50mph. That’s when it got real annoying, real fast.
First the power went out. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve gotten soft over the years and I’m raising my kids to be nothing like I used to be and totally like I currently am – soft. It was like the world came to a fucking end just because the power went out. We found candles, flashlights and blankets and shit and moped and complained to each other.
And with the general darkness and silence we were free to hear all the fucking trees in the yard coming down. Yipee. Actually, it wasn’t all the trees. Only one really big one in the front and it fell away from the house and onto the street (where it still lays), but we picked this house for the privacy (or perceived privacy) of the mature wooded lot…really a find for a house that was only 14 years old. They took great care to preserve as many trees as possible when they built this place and we dug it for that reason. Once this tree is cleared out (hopefully this weekend) we’ll have a gaping hole in our tree cover.
In the back we had another big hunk of tree snap off into the neighbors yard – at least 25 feet long and maybe a foot thick…maybe. and another similary sized ‘branch’ split longways up the middle. So a decent hunk of that privacy tree will be lost too. So that kind of blew.
Turned out that the electric was only out 3 hours, but it sucked. We’re wusses. The temperature dropped 5 degrees in that time and I was wondering what we’d do if it laster all night at that rate completely oblivious to the fact that both the living room and the basement have fireplaces. That’s just how much of a fireplace person I’m not. We could’ve simply fired up the fireplace for light and some heat but neither me nor the kids ever thought of it. It wasn’t until the next day that the idea popped into my head.
The whole situation was made worse by being here alone with the kids. Not that the kids are a problem, but the best part of having a significant other is being able to share the shit with them. Being the sole adult sucked. I don’t like playing grown up by myself.
Then we did some shopping at Meijer on Saturday and the store is officially the worst. It used to be the best when we first moved here. We loved it. It became our go-to place. Over time it seems to have decreased in quality on all levels. One summer a fw of the air conditioning units went out and never seemed to get fixed. It was always too hot in there and it made the fresh food smell funny. (At least funnier than it normally does – I don’t do most fresh things there because they’re of questionable quality)
Just lots of little things – sale items never stocked, employees that are jackoffs, the worst deli service known to mankind. It was a long and steady decline. Then last year they closed a Meijer store that was a few miles down the road in the next ‘town’ over. It was a less desireable area and it always seemed weird to us that there were two Meijer stores so close. Apparently, Meijer thought so too and decided to keep the store in the affluent neighborhood and close the one in the less desireable area.
This had the follow-up effect of – and I hate to say this, but it’s true – driving the folks from the ‘less desireable’ store in the ‘less desireable’ neighborhood to our store. Almost immediately you saw a change in the crowd visiting the store…and oddly enough, the store seemed to reflect the change in its visitors. There were more crimes reported there (and in that area). You see police cars there more. You have a different ‘vibe’ inside the store. You have a less enjoyable shopping experience.
On top of that, the prices seem to have risen much more than at the other stores in the area and were thing used to be a bit of a bargain or deal at Meijer, that’s no longer the case.
Our stop on Saturday seemed to be the culmination of all of the above. Just a horrible stop. There’s a good chance we won’t be shopping there much anymore. It took almost 5 years of steady decline, but they finally lost us.
And then the world’s worst Super Bowl extras happened on Friday. The game was decent enough. A little sucky that the Steelers lost, but whatever, it’s irrelevant to my life in general. But the commercials sucked sweaty, tumor-filled ball sack. Seriously the most unfunny, uncreative, uninspired buch of shit advertising ever to run during the big game. And the halftime show by the BlackEyed Peas was without a doubt the worst one I can remember personally. It was toal and absolute garbage. It was fucking horrible beyond horrible. I’m totally ok with the current state of pop music. Really, I am. I get that you don’t have to have much more than looks anymore. It’s about being an entertainer, not a musician…or even talented musically. That’s fine. Just don’t try to pretend you are. The Black Eyed Peas tried. They tried to sing. They tried to be musicians. They failed spectacularly – like I’ve never seem on such a large stage before. All they had to do was perform and they’d have blown it out of the water. No one expects them to do any more than perform. Canned tracks, canned vocals, pretty lights, oooohh futuristic looking set, Fergie, stupid samples and rip-offs masquarading as new songs – it’d have been great. Instead they tried to pretend they were something they’re not (ironically, but not pretending….wrap your mind around that) and it was a fucking joke. Literally, the single best word to describe that whole thing was “garbage” – it was garbage. Fuck Black Eyed Peas. I wish we lived in a world where there would be accountability for such a performance, but we don’t. They’ll just find another old song to yell over and things will be back to normal.
So yeah, lots of shit annoying me…that’s just the tip of the iceberg, but writing this is starting to annoyme too, so I’m done for now. Fuck this blog.
