Here I am again, waiting for a service person to arrive. It's just about 9 AM; the phone guy is scheduled for between 8 and noon. We'll see. I have a terrible track record with this kind of thing, you know.
It's a lovely fall day out there again, but they're saying it may go up to 80 later this week. Pick one, please. Let's just make a change and go with it.
So far today, I've gone out for coffee, to mail some mail, and pick up more on-sale toilet paper at CVS. You can never have too much toilet paper. I had to do this in K's car, since mine is in for service, and I really hate driving her car, a little Cavalier sedan. I can't even pry myself in and out of those little cars anymore. I drive a teeny little SVU, a Tracker. You open the door and sit down, like on a chair. No climbing, no squirming. What will I do when this car dies?
R, meantime, has started another job today, a sort of temporary situation in which she's helping out a friend whose business consists of him and his father and now his father is sick -- in fact, the kid just inherited the business years before he expected to due to his father's illness -- and she's worked with them before so she knows the ropes, and she'll get nicely paid for it, too. Serendipitious. I hope she's having a good day.
I also put down the new rug in the living room just before, and now I see that I need different slipcovers for the two chairs in there, solid navy ones. All my furniture has slipcovers because of the you-know-whos, one of whom barfed all over the couch in the family room last night. Even solid navy slipcovers are risky, considering that they will show everything, but it seems to be what's called for. Some day, when the cats are no more, I will have nice furniture. I can't imagine that everyone with cats has to make this choice, but I've never heard of other cats who routinely vomit on everything and aren't quite sure what the litter box is for.
I slept badly last night, and am very, very tired, but I can't even close my eyes because I won't hear the doorbell if I'm asleep. That's assuming it rings.
11:50 AM - Are you surprised to hear that no one from the phone company ever got here? So that was a waste of a morning off. But K is not working today, so she and I are going out on errands in her car in TEN MINUTES, making it a moot point that my car is unavailable today.
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We went out at noon, rather unproductively to Bed, Bath and Beyond, where they did not have navy slipcovers. I wanted to get curtain rods for K's room, but that did not so much work either, as she didn't seem to understand what I meant by "Which ones do you like?" (As the afternoon begins to take shape ...) So we went to Ikea, whence cometh the actual curtains, and had a lovely time bopping around the showroom upstairs and admiring the Ikea kitchens of our future -- more on that in a minute -- and then to the Marketplace, where my previous question suddenly made sense and we got curtain rods. Then home, then we picked up my car, then to the supermarket.
There should be a mandatory I.Q. test for supermarket entry -- and driving, more on that in a minute -- and everyone there today failed (except us, of course.) People just stopping in the middle of aisles, dumbstruck at the wonder of food in boxes. I don't know. By this time, the kid was cranking up, only made worse by a quick stop at Burger King for lunch for her -- she hadn't gotten anything for lunch at the supermarket -- and they forgot to put in the sauce for her chicken nuggets. And at home, a nugget fell on the floor and a cat got it.
In the meantime, there was a Verizon truck across the street from the house when we got home, and a man up in the bucket working at the top of the pole. When I went to take garbage out a few minutes later, he saw me and called out that he was almost done. ? I asked him if he was there in response to my call, and he said he was. He came to the door when he was done, said he had no idea why they'd said I needed a workman to come inside because it was all outside, and now fixed. I checked the phone, he was right, all good. So that was an unexpected twist to my day.
P.S. Ikea kitchens of the future. Don't you just love the way Ikea kitchens look in the catalog, or the in the showroom? Well, my friend The Other Chai is having someone put in an Ikea kitchen for her, and it has been more on the side of disaster than anything else. Part of this is that she is "saving money" by having someone she knows do the work, but there were delivery problems and she's had to bring back whole cabinets and wait for the right ones, and here's my advice: if you ever get an Ikea kitchen, make sure that Ikea installs it. I think that's the only safe way to go.
P.S.S. An I.Q. test for drivers. Well, this is a no-brainer, because all of us can see that the road is full of morons at any given time. They are not so much stupid, I think, as rude and discourteous, and have no idea of how to share the road with other people. K says this is because we live in New Jersey, where only the strong survive, but I have always lived in New Jersey, and it hasn't always been like this. So I have a theory. Why are there so many rude drivers? Because there are fewer polite drivers. Where did all the polite drivers, those who populated the road in my youth, go? They are either dead or not driving anymore, at least on the highways, because these polite people who knew the rules of living in the world were those we call The Greatest Generation, the ones who came of age during the Depression and World War II, like my parents. People who would be in their 80s now, give or take. I think they made it a better place, at least on the road, but in general, too.
And that's my theory for the day. Ah has spoken.
