Month: November 1999

The spud had her cracked tooth pulled today. Luckily it was a baby tooth and only attached at the gums, so they shot her up with Novocaine and yanked it out. There was a lot of blood, but it didn’t bleed for long. The only downside was as we were standing in line at the check-out desk, the spud turned an interesting shade of green and told me that her stomach hurt. "Okay," I said blithely. "I’ll get you a soda on the way to school." She tugged on my sleeve frantically and informed me that she was about to throw up. I directed her to the bathroom. She went in and treated the whole office to a very loud gagging sound (she gets that from her mother), and came out a few minutes later a little less green. At that point, I decided she wouldn’t be going back to school today, and we came home where she got into bed, sipped gingerale, and watched TV.

I cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed the entire upstairs, and did some light reading. I don’t much care for days when I’m home because the spud isn’t feeling well. Unlike days when I pretend to be sick, the time off is wholly unexpected, and if I don’t do some sort of housework, I feel guilty. Of course, once the housework was done, all bets were off. I read some, surfed some, and got caught up on the last week and a half of "The Bold and the Beautiful." About which, I have this to say: Cut the apron strings, Eric, you self-righteous, sanctimonious asshole. And get a personality, Macy. Brooke will have Thorne, and you can all go to Hell.

In any case, the day flew by, and before I knew it, Fred was home from work. We lay on the bed and talked for a little while (no, that’s not a euphemism for sex), and waited for the sprinkler guy and the cleaning lady we’re getting an estimate from to show up. The cleaning lady was supposed to be here after 3, and she never showed up. The sprinkler guy showed up around 4:45 and fixed the leaky line. While we were hanging around waiting, Fred called Schwan’s and asked them to cancel our service. Does the rest of the country have Schwan’s? It’s a yellow truck that stops by every two weeks, and fills your order for frozen foods like chicken nuggets, pizzas, ice cream and the like. Their stuff is okay, but since you have to buy in bulk, not only do we end up with stuff that sits in the freezer taking up valuable space, but we always spend way more money than we’d like. The guy at headquarters tried his damnedest to talk Fred into staying with Schwan’s, but Fred was firm and didn’t budge. Which is more than I would have been able to do. The first time the guy said "But the food from Schwan’s is so yummy!" I would have folded like a… something that folds easily. A cheap suit? A house of cards? I don’t know, but you get the idea. I would have been signing up for every special that came down the pike, and then some. This in spite of the fact that the Schwan’s food is nothing to write home about. I’m a lily-livered, spineless fool when someone gets me on the phone.

I still hang up on telemarketers, though, so don’t get any bright ideas. I’m weak, not stupid. At least, that’s what I like to think.

As I was sitting in front of my computer this afternoon, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, in the direction of the window to the right of my computer. I turned my head to look, but saw nothing. A few minutes later, another motion in that direction. This time when I looked, there was a big, scary redneck-looking Grizzly Adams type stomping through my front yard. Gave me quite a fright, I’ll tell you, until I realized that it was probably the pool guy come to take a sample of our pool water. I waited for him to ring the doorbell to ask me to let him into the backyard, but he never did. He apparently assumed no one was home, and simply left. By the way, here’s a picture of our pool from today. It’s much more impressive with the solar cover off:

Looks like sewage, doesn’t it?

The cleaning lady, as I mentioned before, never did show up. We waited until 5, and then Fred beeped the guy who — along with his gaggle of children — mows our lawn. Robyn, you’re saying, Why would the lawn guy give a flying fuck that the cleaning lady never showed up? Well, reader, it’s like this. She’s his mother, and she cleans houses in her spare time. Since we are the original Lazy Ass Family, we would like someone to come once a week and clean. Fred makes some pretty damn good money, and what better way to throw some of that money away than by hiring someone to clean for us? God knows I can think of better things to do than clean the toilet.

Like sit on my lazy ass.

And with that, I bid you good evening.

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Ah, me, what to write about?

It rained like hell last night, and we woke up this morning to find our pool full of mud. We have a small sloping hill behind our pool, and behind the fence there’s more sloping hill and lots of mud. Here’s what the pool looked like:

 

The picture doesn’t really do it justice. See all the water under that solar cover? It’s murky brown like the Nile River. There are more pictures, and perhaps tomorrow I’ll put them all on a separate page.

Fred freaked out when he saw the state of the pool this morning. He was afraid we’d have to empty the pool and spray it out and scrub it and then refill it. The guy who owns the company that put in the pool came out and looked at it, and said he didn’t think it was a big problem. He told Fred to shock the pool and over the course of the next few days, the mud should circulate out. Fred calmed down a little, and called around to get estimates for a brick wall to hold back any future mud floods. Pretty expensive, we found out.

Isn’t our back yard tiny? To the left, off-picture, there’s a patio, and next to that there’s some more lawn, but all in all it’s pretty damn small. It suits our purposes, though, and we like it, which is the important thing.

The spud cracked a tooth today as she was chowing down on a package of skittles from Halloween. It’s a tooth she says had been loose for a while (she still hasn’t lost all of her baby teeth), and she said the cracked tooth didn’t hurt, but it’s bleeding a lot. So I guess it’s off to the dentist for the spud and I in the morning. Damn that Halloween candy!

For the last several weeks, once or twice a week, I’ve been getting calls at work where, once I answer the phone "This is Robyn", the person hangs up. Just hangs up! No, "I’m sorry, wrong number", they just hang up. When I check my caller id, it says "unknown number, unknown name," so either they’re calling from an unpublished number or, more likely, they’re dialling *67 before they call me. I was bitching about it in the IRC channel Fred and I hang out in during the day, and a few minutes later, the phone rang again. I checked the caller id, and it says again, "unknown number, unknown name." I picked up the phone and uttered my usual greeting, only this time the caller said, in some obviously fake accent, "Bye-bye!"

It had to be someone in the IRC channel. Fred, who is the king of geeks, checked the access logs to our company webpage and somehow figured out, looking to see who had visited our "contact" page, who it was. Busted! That man just amazes me more often than not.

Later on yesterday afternoon, another IRC person called and said "Want to touch the heiny!" Which is something this particular person had done before to Fred, so I wasn’t too freaked out.

We chat with some interesting people, don’t we?

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So, Fred and I watched Arlington Road last night since everything was in reruns. It was pretty damn good. Tim Robbins does creepy better than I’d expected, but if Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins had switched roles, I think the movie would have been just as good. By the time the movie was over, it was past our usual bedtime, and we lay in bed talking for another half hour or so before Fred stumbled, half-asleep, off to bed. I tossed and turned most of the night, but felt fairly perky this morning when I rolled out of bed at 5:45. And the sun didn’t shine in my eyes on my way to work! Well, the sun wasn’t really out, but I could see the outline of it behind the clouds, and it was too high to shine in my eyes if it had been. Last week at work, Fred discovered the greatest thing. You know those incredibly annoying pop-up ads on Geocities and Tripod and the banner ads on other pages? Well, you can filter them out with the "Proxomitron." I downloaded it at work, and it works really well. And it’s free! Go here to download it and try it out for yourself.

In the "bathroom wars" news: Well, I haven’t done anything I’d planned to, yet. But today, someone peed all over the rim of the toilet in the bathroom I prefer to frequent, and it wasn’t me. Can penii really be that difficult to maneuver? There’s a huge hole (the toilet), you whip it out, you aim, you pee. Where’s the problem, boys? That’s okay; I figure next time I have my period I’ll leave a big old drop of blood on the seat and watch the bastards run away screaming. On the upside, the cleaners cleaned over the weekend, and got rid of the bloody booger-type thing on the tank.

Such appetizing topics, eh?

I’m really quite excited at the moment. I got my statement in the mail, and saw that — try to remain calm, people — I earned thirteen cents on my savings account last quarter. I think a month-long trip to the Bahamas will put a little dent in that windfall, yessiree.

I was listening to country music on the radio this morning, and at one point I got up and walked to the kitchen to wash my cereal bowl. As I walked down the hall back to my office, I heard a high-pitched "Woo! Woo! Woo!" coming from my office. "What the–?" I wondered out loud. Was one of my morally bankrupt bosses boinking someone in my office? Perhaps someone was plucking their eyebrows using the mirror on the back of my door? Turns out it was Shania Twain singing her "Man, I feel like a woman" song. "Woo! Woo!" indeed.

I found a url Fred sent me from a few weeks ago. This article talks about Gulf War Syndrome, and how the antidote Gulf War veterans were given could conceivably be the cause of the widespread illnesses among veterans. The following excerpt from my IRC conversation with Fred pretty much sums up my opinion on the subject:

Robyn_ : (quoting from the article) "Officials at the Pentagon, which commissioned the study, stressed that the findings are not conclusive. "

Robyn_ : And they’ll never be conclusive.

Fredster: 🙂

Robyn_ : Because God forbid our government ever take responsibility for anything it does.

Robyn_ : In 75 years, president Chelsea Clinton will be handing out miniscule payments to descendants of Gulf War Veterans and apologizing.

I guess that would be more of a one-sided mini-rant than a conversation.

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