Freakin' Outstanding

I'm giggling down deep inside.

Y'all need to head over to Chris' place, and see the results of his family's what-do-guns-do-to-a-refrigerator experiment.

There's a video. Watch it.

I felt as though I'd gotten vengeance, if only vicariously, for every wrong done to me by a shitful refrigerator in the past three years.

That's good shit. Wonder if it's too late to have Mr. Abby bring the fridge from Florida?

Did you know

that if you're closing on a house, and using a power of attorney, on the space provided for your spouse (or whoever) you write "[Mr. Abby] by Abigail B. [Last name]," and the title agent will say that's what you're supposed to do.

Then you'll leave, assuming you'll get the call saing the closing has been "funded" in two or three hours.

Instead, however, you will get a call at 1647 during which you will be told that every time you signed for your husband, the words "attorney in fact" should have followed. That, it will be explained, is very important.

It is, in fact, so important, that the lenders will not "fund" the closing until those words have been appended to every single page.

Thus motivated, you drive around Fort Worth like a bat out of hell (after more or less just jumping up and leaving your desk at work) to get to the title place by 1713.

"We close at 5!," they had chirped.

Only if you want me to burn your fucking business down, kill your pets and slash your tires, you explain. So they stay open for you.

You write "attorney in fact" 7,492 times. Then, as you leave the title place, you call your lender and explain about the place of business, the pets and the tires. It would be best, you explain, if "funding" this transaction is the first thing that happens in the morning.

Then you drive back up to North Fort Worth and check in to yet another motel. Where you sit, and you smoke, and you hate.

It's here!

Or, rather, it's THERE!

Phone calls we love involve Mr. Abby opening a box-o-carbine for us. Of course, it arrived as the movers are at the Crackhouse collecting our stuff, so they must have thought that was odd.

(Then again, the movers already think we're nuts. They called me this morning, trying to get ahold of the Mister. When the phone rang, I assumed it was Mr. Abby, and answered, "hey, baby!" The moving guy, it seems, does not normally get addressed that way. "Uhhh..." he responded.)

For all his expertise, my husband is not very helpful with this. I asked him to open it and ensure the wood was intact, since apparently there's an occasional cracked stock. So he did.

[sounds of box opening, etc]

"Hey, it looks great," he said.

"Great?"

"Well, about like your other one."

[sigh]

So apparently it's intact, and the stock isn't an utter dog. But the movers have taken his computer, and so it will remain a mystery until they show up out here.

Question for my relationship experts - how bad is it, when your family and pets roll up to your new house, to simply nod and say, "hey" to them, then shove past and burrow through the truck to find and fondle your new gun?

What? You want MORE HORROR?

I got your horror RIGHT HERE, folks. The kitchen wallpaper is bad, but I don't know if it can hold a candle to the Death of A Zillion Red Flowers.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...the guest bathroom.



These two locations are the only offensive wallpaper areas in the house. We have paper in the Grownup Bathroom, but it's normal.

Worst about the wallpaper situation is this - it's very well done. See, I know about these things.

My mother is a Wallpaper Woman. And she's always had a pack of Wallpaper Friends. Whenever there was a redecoration or a new house, I was dragged to Kid Hell. Kid Hell is any store that sells nothing but wallpaper. And they exist. Anyway, I'd get dragged to Kid Hell, often several times, while she plotted the exact paper and border the situation required.

Then the Wallpaper Ladies would descend with their dipping trays, and there would much swearing and use of razor blades.

And when all was said and done? What did you have?

Fucking wallpaper. That's what I thought even as a kid. All that effort and you end up with wallpaper. Bummer deal.

But I did learn enough to know that whoever put this crap up did a good job. Images meet neatly enough at the seams that they're hard to see. Even the switchplates are sharply done. Too bad it sucks.

I just don't get it. But one of the great things about being a grownup is...I don't have to. That wallpaper is on borrowed time.

Through the storm

we occasionally catch a little ray of sunshine.

I was slogging through another day in the Salt Mine of Stupid, field phone calls as surreptitiously as possible and darting into the bathroom to get updates and give feedback.

(We'll keep it short tonight - thank God they accepted the power of attorney because they did NOT get their shit together in a timely manner. Bastards)

Then I sat through a meeting.

Then I real quick and sneaky pulled up the CMP E-store.

SHIPPED! Hitting Tampa tomorrow! Little ol' 5,107,518, made in '44.

It actually got me through the rest of the workday, past the part where I had to find a place to stay near the closing place, and past the part where the underwriters suddenly decided they needed more documentation of what was apparently a questionably large deposit (which was, actually, a CD that matured). This required me to bring the printer in from El Jeepo (which I really did not want to do), hook it up, print pages of bank records, scan them, and send them off.

Of course, would any of that have been remotely possible ten years ago?

But, more importantly, who gives a shit if it may have been possible? My M1 carbine shipped!

Now excuse me, I must go do the Happy Gun Dance.

By the way...

0801 CST - I receive a cc of an email from Mr. Abby with scans of the power of attorney sent by the lender, and of your standard gov'mint "special" power of attorney for redundency.

Then I got a phone call as he was on his way to the FedEx drop box with the originals.

The potential rage level is high today. It's probably a good thing I tend to let any calls that come in on my cell at work roll over to voicemail, or you guys might catch me on the evening news.

Packin'

and no - not the kind that involves any sweet shootin' irons.

The kind that involved schlepping all my shit back out to the Jeep. Mostly done in the wee hours of the morning, my shit has migrated out of Ye Olde Cheape Motel. I'm outta here. Since they only charge a weekly rate here, the next night (or, god forbid, two), will be spent in an equally cheap normal motel.

I did not get enough sleep last night - might have had something to do with the pot of coffee and bottomless pit of boiling rage about this whole closing thing.

Am I going to be a treat at work today or what?

Off to load the last of the Great Pile of Crap.

Huh?

So my new job...well, it is involving the serving of the customers. You buy things from my company, we screw up, and I fix it.

It's dull as hell, but provides the occasional moment of levity. I am, however, not comfortable enough there yet to start sharing stories. Perhaps when we have a minimal acceptable amount of furniture and getting fired would anything but financial suicide...

But we do have a company inbox. And since it's a public address, just hangin' out there on the web, we get spam.

Today I got one titled lumberjack untangle. Although I was a little concerned it would contain naked picture of my Dad playing Twister (pardon me a second while I go boil my eyes), I opened it.

I'm married to your cousin, so . I'd be delighted to attack it all from a different direction...

Huh? Well, I guess being married to any of my cousins would be enough to make anyone think about a different direction. I skimmed on.

What are the physicians doing or saying that you are thinking of as resistance? There are a few reasons that could be argued against as being a bit disingenuous, but for the most part, the reasons seems believable, even if some would be relatively short term problems.

Okay. Sorry. You lost me again. Let's try one more paragraph.

As a result of the simulation, participants learn to apply the principles of visibility, feedback, communication, and collaboration to increase their rate of delivery. A flexible reporting tool has been implemented to provide the information needed by decision makers and with unprecedented levels of grannularity.

Now I can't tell if we're dealing with some sort of hippie shit or something involving spreadsheets. And WTF is "granularity," if we're not talking about making Jell-o?

I totally fail to get it. But it did provide me with about 20 minutes of entertainment in my otherwise boring-as-shit day.

And I promise I'll never subject y'all to my spam again.

It's been a long time

since I've said, on the phone, "that is fucking unacceptable."

And to a civilian, no less.

Even I am aware that one of the things you need to close on a house is a survey. A current survey, really, since I don't know anyone who's ever gotten a house without getting a new one.

It seemed, however, to come as a surprise to our title agency (that would be Land America Title Co., for all my Google monkeys). Which is how I found out today that our closing was in trouble because the survey - which the title people had ordered Thursday - was "not in."

Ordered Thursday? Like four days ago? When we set this closing date like two weeks ago?

It was not a happy discussion that I had with ol' Title Lady when I got out of work today and headed to the walkthrough.

"We can push it back a day," she sniveled.

"No. That's not an option. We are going to close Wednesday, and I don't give a shit what you have to do to make that happen."

You gotta understand, people, I'm not a rude person. I've worked with and for folks with a lot of different styles and, Parris Island aside, confrontational, browbeating interactions really have a limited role in getting things done.

However...Mr. Abby is a very nice man. Cheerful, happy and always looking for ways that he can help you help him. Heck, hint that you can't do your job and he'll probably find a way to do it for you.

Occasionally, I am therefore required to be the member of our household you don't want to talk to. Perhaps after a couple of conversations with Abby the Raging Bitch, you'll be a little more amenable to dealing with Mr. Abby the Very Reasonable.

It's worked before.

But now, since our immediate situation is being theatened by blinding incompetance, we've had to be proactive.

The big problem here is there's FedExing involved. Let's reverse-plan. In order for the documents to be here for a 1030 closing on Wednesday, Mr. Abby needs to send them out of Tampa by around 1800 Tuesday night. Which means he should probably get them by 1400 on Tuesday. Which means they need to be sent...well, see? That already doesn't work.

I didn't get a warm fuzzy from Title Twit about the whole 21st century thing either.

"But emailing is harder," she whined. "He might not sign in all the right spots..."

I was not entirely polite when I pointed out that my husband is phenomenally more competant than the title people, and thus I trusted him to do his part if they could do theirs.

So there I stood, in the driveway of Target House, with the realtor. We'd concluded the walkthrough, during which I had been required to low-crawl through insulation in the attic.

We traded remarks about the level of distrust we had in the Title Agency of Satan. Then a light came on...

"Hey," said I. "Just curious, but can Texas people deal with a power of attorney?"

Her face lit up, and she got on the phone with the lender (who, because it's a good, professional company, was still at her desk not making excuses, but trying to find a solution). Conversation ensued.

Long story slightly less long - yes. It appears they can. Which simplifies things greatly. I immediately received a PDF of the appropriate document, forwarded it to Mr. Abby, and followed it with a phone call. Seeing as he is a pretty bright guy (entirely capable, I remain convinced, of signing in the right places on emailed documents), it will be no problem for him to sign it, get it notarized and return it via FedEx in time for the scheduled closing.

I feel much better when the slippery bits are in the hands of those I know won't fumble.

Fucking idiots.

Anyway. I felt y'all deserved a picture of what was distracting me from the normal posting. And, just because I think it's funny, I have a picture for you.

You know how no matter how much you like a house, there's always something that makes you wonder what the hell was up with the previous owner. Well, in this one, it's the kitchen wallpaper.

Ladies and Gentlemen, you'll laugh, you'll cry. May I present...the Most Hideous Wallpaper in Texas!

Blah.

Sorry for the weekend silence - I had a bit of the melancholy, so I just picked up a stack of paperbacks and read.

I think it's all related to the fact that I did not receive a tracking number from CMP on Friday. [sigh]

But! Onward and upward - there are many things to do this week and many moving parts. The potenital for hilarity and/or disaster is high.

Open letter

Dear Civilian Marksmanship Program,

Today is my birthday. I'm not going to be doing much to celebrate, but that's okay, because I'm kind of over the birthday thing, and next week I'm getting a new house. However, your organization is in the unique position of being able to give me something really cool.

All I want for my birthday, CMP, is a tracking number. I've been "processing" now for a day or so, so it should be just about my turn. Y'all don't have to wrap the box or put a bow on it or anything, just scan the barcode and put it in the truck.

Thanks,

Abby

This could have been me

providing I was a Lebanese news anchor, that is.

The NBN anchor, who has not been identified, did not realize her microphone was on.

"So, why did it take them so long to kill him?" the anchor asked a colleague on live television Wednesday, the same day as Eido's death. She begins laughing, and the colleague joins in.

We make fun of our media for being one-sided (and, oddly, there are people who think the MSM is entirely owned and a pawn of the far right - go figure), but ours at least pretend to be impartial. Most of the time.

Thunderfoot...

I haven't seen whoever lives in the room directly above me in Ye Olde Cheape Motel, but that individual...walks more loudly than anyone I've ever run across.

It sounds like a pissed-off teenager stomping across a basketball court in cowboy boots. And it seems he/she does a fair amount of lurching - this is not a person walking normally around a motel room. It also sounds like a large person person...

I just thought I'd share. It's the last thing I hear at night and the first thing I hear in the morning. Sometimes I like to give y'all a little sense of ambience...

Tappin' my foot

...waiting on this house thing to go down. All day long, from Mr. Abby and a variety of real estate people, I receive documents. Big old honkin' documents. About 98% of them are "FYI," but there are always a couple that I need to initial and send back to someone.

How annoying. I don't remember doing this the last time we bought a house - I think there were just two, maybe three, big festivals of signing and initialing.

It doesn't help that every state is different. I received some 15-page monster when I got home tonight with the exceptionally useless message, "See attached your commitment for title insurance."

Huh. Well, sure. I see it.

Looks about seven times longer than the last set of title insurance documentation I remember, but whatever. I had to email it back to the sender with the message, "I don't know what, if anything, you need me to do with this. Please explain."

Good lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll do the final walkthrough Monday and we'll close on Wednesday. That is, if the week in between doesn't drive me nuts first.

Happy Dance1

I'm getting my carbine! My order is processing! The wait is ending!

[sorry - if you think this is annoying, you should have been sitting next to me when I checked E-store around lunch]

My glee is almost overpowering.

The 51% minority

I grabbed a hard copy of the Fort Worth Star Telegram today to take to dinner. On the front page, a story about women in this next election. Women running for things, women voting, etc.

Hmmm, thought Abby. That might be an interesting read.

Interesting, yes. Interesting in an intelligent, thought-provoking sort of way? No. Seriously - somebody better tell me this newspaper hires "journalists" through some sort of help-the-special-kids program, otherwise there's no excuse for this shit.

Read the story in its entirety here. I, of course, shall selectively excerpt and rant.

Real quick, though, we're going to visit the U.S. Census Bureau for some 2005 numbers. At that point, we had 295,734,000 people in the U.S. 150,425,000 were female, and 145,309,000 were male. That's 50.86% of our population that's female. [please see note at end of post]

They are mothers, daughters, sisters and wives.

We can tell from the lead that this is going to be precious, can't we? They are also grandmothers, aunts, nieces, waitresses, actresses, people who are referred to "she," "her," and a variety of other feminine pronouns... Wading on through the curdling bits of triteness...

...candidates are already creating campaigns to woo the female vote and strategists are tailoring campaign issues to focus on women's concerns, including health care and education. [just for fun, I'm going to ask you to imagine some sort of dramatic flare of brass orchestral sound every time you see the word "women" in bold type - like Storm Trooper music]

Yeah! Nevermind security and immigration and government spending and the environment and civil rights and all that. Women don't care about any of that.

They will do whatever is needed to gain support with the one demographic large enough to swing the election, political observers say.

This is the part that makes me insane. Women are not "one demographic." Well, not anymore than...hell, tall people. We are slightly more than half the country, and there is some slight variety of opinion amongst us. Among the issues "we" care about, that is. You know, health care and education.

Further, the above is an entirely inaccurate statement. The margin of victory in the 2004 Presidential election was...3,012,497. But that's nationwide, and it's generally accepted (I think), that since Ohio was the last state to come in, Ohio was the deciding factor. Bush took Ohio by 118,599 votes.

So, looking at some Ohio demographics (from 2000), we can see that yes, seeing as women consitute 51.4% of the population, they could indeed "swing the election." However, since we assume monolithic demographic voting habits when we write for the Fort Worth paper, so could:
A) black people (1,301,307 of them)
B) asian people (but they'd all have to show up - there are only 132,633)
C) hispanics (easily - 217,123 of them)
D) the always-wild-and-crazy 85+ age group (176,796)
E) the "institutionalized population" (172,368), although I suspect that group is largely made up of those who may have lost their voting rights.

Yes - women can swing an election. But these days, so can pretty much any group. You get the over-90 crowd and the Pacific Islanders, and you're probably in.

Back to the World's Most Atrocious News Story.

"Women will have a critical role in the upcoming election," said Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "They are a huge segment of the public."

Please tell me that this doubtlessly bright man didn't say anything this inane. Yep. Hugest segment of the public, really. Moving right along...

Although some may be influenced by their sex and thus likely to vote for a woman on the ballot, others are just as likely to vote for a man, observers say.

I can't really figure out the meaning of this sentence, which is never a good thing in a "news" story, but no matter how I look at it, I want to pound my head on the table. Notice there's no mention of anything other than gender that might influence the voting choices of women.

Then come many, many paragraphs of "you go, girl!" type stuff. Suffice it to say that while I'm sort of neutrally pleased to see women in government in increasing numbers, it's the same sort of pleased I am to see someone from Michigan become a stunning success. Yeah, it's the home team, but...there are other, stronger allegiances. At least there should be. One would hope. [shudders]

I'm almost too irritated to continue with this, but there is one really choice quote from Sen. Obama's wife.

"My husband is a man who understands the struggles of women and families," Michelle Obama has said. "This campaign believes in the women of this country and envisions a government that doesn't just encourage women to dream big, but to know they have the support and the resources to pursue those dreams.

"I want that for my daughters. I want that for your daughters. And I want that for this country."

You know what I want for all our daughters? I want them to have opportunities. And I want them to have encouragement. I want them to have options. I do not want them to have the sort of "support" and "resources" we saddle every "disadvantaged" group in this country with, the sort dooms them to generations of suspicion about whether they attained their positions through talent or through unearned handouts.

I'm all about women. I is one, you know. I like us (in theory. In practice, I find many of us catty). However, I resent any attempt, at any level, to treat us as one giant single-minded Borg. I also resent any attempts to put half the damn country in the "oppressed minority" bin.

And this sort of drivel in a major metropolitan newspaper...as well as making it seem as though they're letting high school sophomores write A-section stories...it's just idiotic.

Phaaa...[spit]. I'm done.

** NOTE: Incidentally, this appears to be a fairly natural distribution, and hold true in much of the developed world. It seems, however, that China's "one child" policy has skewed this distribution slightly in recent decades. Interesting, but not germane to today's discussion. **

Post 9/11 annoyance

We've all noticed the big changes afterward. The airport security idiocy. The requirements to present 47 pieces of ID to open a bank account. Etc.

But...until today, I didn't notice one of the other, insidious anti-terror measures that seems to have been implemented just to annoy the shit out of me.

They took the mailboxes away. It's damn near impossible to find a regular, blue, freestanding mailbox these days. And that, when you have paychecks but your direct deposit hasn't yet kicked in, is annoying.

I know it's evil to take other people's mail from their mailboxes, but do you also go to Hell if you add your mail in with theirs? We may find out...

Promising Week

Some weeks loom ahead with little or nothing to offer, just five days of stupid followed by two of naps.

Not this one, though. This week shows potential for being chock full of meaty goodness. Or something.

1) We're getting close on the M1 carbine. The CMP is processing orders from May 2, so I'm hoping they'll hit mine in the next day or two.

2) We've got the house appraisal on Wednesday. It's not very exciting, but it's one step closer.

3) Mr. Abby is lobbying hard back in Florida to get his household goods pickup date moved up - he's got nothing to do, the house is too small, and I'm bored out here. So we're trying to see if we can get him and the Pack here sooner.

So by the end of the week I could have assurance that closing will go off, a new rifle (or at least a FEDEX tracking number), and the promise of my Spider Killer In Shining Armor showing up in short order.

Or I could have all of those things go badly, but I think I'm going to err on the side of optimism just this once.

So there I was...

...having a nice, scorching hot shower this morning.

There's a little sign on the wall here at Ye Olde Cheape Dive, and it says, "When taking a shower please turn on your bathroom fan to avoid setting off your smoke alarm from steam."

So. I was taking a scorching hot shower. I had the fan on, but because I am an idiot, I also had the bathroom door open.

I was fully soapy when the alarm started shrieking. I launched myself out of the shower and dragged a chair under the alarm so I could fan it with a folder. I was busily doing that when it occurred to me that the alarm might bring some sort of hotel maintenance people. I realized that I didn't want to be naked on a chair should a band of heroic Mexican housekeepers come through the door.

Then I realized that there was a .45 sitting on the little table by the laptop (gotta be a close at hand if the goblins come). Which I figured might be awkward if the purely-theoretical-hotel-rescue-squard showed up. So I picked it up, and looked for a spot to stash it and for a towel to wrap around myself.

I ditched the gun in my sock drawer and found a towel, then managed to shut the alarm up. No Mexicans showed up to see if there was indeed a fire, and I finished my shower with the door firmly closed.

But for just a second, I was wet, soapy and buck naked, with a pistol and a postage-stamp hotel towel. I'm not sure how I would have explained that to anyone who showed up to check on the alarm.

"I don't know what this looks like, but whatever it looks like, that's not what it is." Only in Spanish.

Things I've learned

Venturing into a nice, cool, dark bar in the early afternoon for a couple of beers has a way of turning into a monster hangover.

Why is it that a "couple of beers" tends to turn into "many, many beers" whenever loud country music is present?

Ugh. I'll be back later after some more coffee.