I Think We Understand Each Other Now

Dear Missionary/Proselytizing People,

Coming to my house and banging on the door repeatedly for 5-10 minutes at 9:30 in the morning on a Saturday is not a good idea.  It's not a good idea ever, to be fair, but particularly on a Saturday morning.

Anyone who actually knows me will tell you that it is never a good idea to try contacting me before 11 am on a Saturday morning -- I'm either already gone to work, or it is probably my one day off that week and I would like to sleep in a bit.

The vigor and duration of your knocking this morning woke me up.  Why you didn't try ringing the doorbell is beyond me, so I assumed it must be a panicked person who had overlooked it.   The thoughts going through my head as I grappled blindly on the nightstand for my glasses were:

--There must be some sort of emergency!  Maybe a neighbor is trying to get my attention because my house is on fire, or my car has been stolen.
--Maybe someone else's house is on fire, or they need the phone to call 911 from a car accident
--What if it is my parents and something happened and one of them is in the hospital?

Notice that none of those possibilities were happy thoughts because no one who knows me would be knocking on my door at 9:30 unless something awful happened!  That is the kind of thing that wakes you up and immediately puts on on alert.  You don't get to wake up and stretch, kind of lazily wander on out to make coffee.  Your heart starts racing, and you brace yourself to deal with whatever shit-storm is about to come your way.

I rushed to the door to see what was going on; glasses askew, bed head in full effect, still rocking my pajamas.  I passed my two cats, who were freaking out and running in the opposite direction, away from the Stranger Danger at the front door.

Imagine my surprise when I open the front door to find two guys in suits, their gold minivan parked in front of my house.  Their little name tags made it clear they were not police detectives, but from a church.

I bet at that moment you knew it was not a good idea to have been so zealous in getting someone to come to the door.  That fleeting look of "Mistake!" crossed one of your faces.  Did it stop you from starting your rehearsed spiel?  Of course not.

And don't say it isn't a rehearsed speech.  Spare me.  I don't know what I have done to convince your church that I am the Spawn of Satan, but my house seems to be on a list of "must-see stops" on your little missionary quests.  I have previously spoken to your people 3 times and told them that I am not at all interested.  I have found your pamphlets stuck under my door, or in my mailbox (which is illegal, just so you know), or under the handle of my front porch door on 8 different occasions.  That is 11 visits in the 3 years since I bought this house.  I don't think your representatives have come to my parents' house that many times in 30 years!

One of the latest pamphlets.  It had been pushed under my front door with such force that it went under my throw rug.  I found it last night when I was vacuuming.

I tried to be polite at first.  I really did.  I said Good Morning.  I let you you make your warm-up small talk.  (On a previous visit one lady asked if my parents were home.  I assured her they probably were, at their own house, but that I owned this one.)  No, I did not invite you in off of the front porch.  I did let you make your invitation to come to church and check it out.  I declined and said I wasn't interested.  

 If you had just accepted my answer and stopped at that point we would probably have been much better off.  You couldn't just let it go though, could you?    

You started the hard sell. You seemed to want a theological debate with a woman in her pajamas that you had clearly just woken up, as apparently telling you I was raised Roman Catholic was not a good answer.  Even your coworker (co-missionary?  proselytizing partner? church companion?  god-squad friend?) seemed uncomfortable.

And that would be when I ran out of "Nice".  I work with the public all day, every day.  I have to be "nice" to a lot of people when they are being total assholes.  My reserves of "nice" are pretty low when you wake me up, don't take a polite no for an answer, and then want to debate.

I didn't even get into the religious debate with you.  I've seen my father try that and get stuck in a half-hour conversation.

No.  Nice had gone bye-bye.

I made it very clear that you had woken me up.  That I did not, in any way, appreciate you pounding on my front door, startling me and scaring the bejesus out of my cats.  That I had, in fact, worked the last 11 days straight and this was my one day off -- my one day to sleep in, relax and drink my coffee at my leisure, get my housework done -- before I had to work another 7 days in a row.  

And then I asked you never to darken my doorstep again.  I informed you that repeatedly leaving unsolicited pamphlets, and repeatedly bothering me at home, was not going to make me want to attend your church.  It was, in fact, having the exact opposite affect.

Do I think it will make a difference?  Not at all.  

Maybe those two particular guys will not come back.  Probably they took this as a sign that I really am the Spawn of Satan, and they will redouble their efforts to save me.

Is there a "Do Not Call" list for missionaries?

In Which I Scare the Hell Out of Myself

Been a while, huh?  I did warn you that I kind of suck at remembering to update.

So here we are, back again.  You might have heard that Nor'Easter Athena was hitting the North East (surprise!) right now.  We didn't get that much snow here, but the wind is still crazy.  I can hear it howling past the sides of my house, and I have to keep a rocking chair propped up against the door on my front porch so it doesn't continually slam open and shut.  I know it is very windy out -- important fact to keep in mind as you read on.

About 2 o'clock this morning it must have gotten very windy.  Jazz-kitty starts bugging out and wakes me up jumping on and off the bed.  I got up, gave her some treats, and hoped she would calm down.  I figured while I was up I might as well take a gander at the back yard and see how much snow we had gotten.

I go out on the back porch, note that there isn't much snow, and then I notice the side door to my garage.

Why the hell is the door wide open?

Now, I had gone out before work that morning to retrieve my shovel and ice melt, but I know I did not leave that door open.  I'm a little OCD about making sure things are secured when I leave a place -- just ask my coworkers.  I know that door was shut.

Remember that it is 2 in the morning.  I'm half asleep.  Rational thoughts are not the ones taking precedence in my brain at this point.  I try to tell myself that it must be the wind that blew it open.  That must be it.  I snuggle back into bed, and just as I start to drift off my brain decides it is time to remind me that it might be a burglar or a homeless person.  Thanks, brain!  Just what I needed to dwell on in the middle of the night.

So I get up again, a little freaked out at this revelation.  I go out on the back porch and look again.  Yup.  Door is still open.  Shit.

Does it occur to me that there are no footprints in the snow, so very little chance anyone has gone in or out since I got home hours earlier?  Nope.  However I do jump to the conclusion that a poor homeless person would have shut the door behind them to keep the relatively warmer air inside, so cross that off the list of horrible scenarios running through my head.  

Now on to the thought of a burglar, rummaging my garage as I stand there in my pajamas on the back porch like an idiot.  That motivated me to get back inside and make sure the back door was securely locked.

WTF do I do now?  No way in hell am I wandering out to the garage in the middle of the night to confront a possible pissed-off burglar.  Yeah, in my mind it morphed into a shady character complete with black ski mask that was pissed because after breaking in he/she realized I had jack shit of any value in the garage, except for maybe my brother's tools.  I'm not going to call the police about this either because I don't want to be the crazy lady who called because the wind blew her garage door open.  No way.  I have to call them enough at work that I don't need them thinking I am a nutcase.

But what if my imaginary, pissed-off burglar is so angry at finding nothing of any value in the garage that they decide to break into the house?  What the hell am I going to do then?  I needed a plan.

So I made sure my purse, my car keys, and my cell phone were all next to my bed.  If anyone tried to get in I could climb out the window and call the police, and drive to safety.  That's a good plan!    I'm so smart!  And then I grabbed the baseball bat just in case I had to beat the living shit out of someone.  Back-up plan.

I finally managed to drift off to sleep around 4 in the morning.  Here is my spectacular thinking on why it was safe to do so:  my neighbors would be up in a couple of hours to get ready for work and shovel if necessary. A smart burglar would want to leave before anyone saw them, so they obviously must have left the garage by now.  That was literally how I convinced myself to get some sleep.

When I woke up this morning and was more lucid, the first thing I did was look at the garage again.  The door was still open, but it looked so much less ominous in the daylight.  It did occur to me then that I was a moron and there were no footprints, just tracks from stray cats, birds, and squirrels. 

 I called my mother and kept her on the phone while I went out to look around and see if anything was missing, just in case an axe-murderer was waiting to get me.  Nothing was missing, no sign of anyone or any furry animal friends having been inside.

And then she tells me, after I got back inside the house, "That happened last week too, during the hurricane while you were at your brother's.  Dad thinks the latch is old and doesn't catch well.  He's planning to put another lock on it this weekend."

........

Seriously?!

As promised...

Here it folks!  As promised the weird pink stuff I saw in the grocery store.

I would love to say that I triumphed over my phone, and my technological shortcomings, and was in fact able to post this without going through some ridiculous steps to get the above picture here.  Sadly, I cannot make that proclamation.

I tried so hard to get Blogger and my pathetic excuse for a phone to be friends.  All I got in return were error messages.  Bad phone!  Sit in the corner and hang your head in shame!

In order to get the above picture from my phone to this post, I had to post it to Facebook, then download it from there to my computer, the upload it back here.  Oh yes, my phone hates Blogger but is all BFF with Facebook. 

So all of this hoopla has been about the weird stuff in this picture.  What the heck is that supposed to be?

It is in the grocery store, on the shelves near the peanut butter and the Nutella.  It says it is strawberry & cream flavored.   Strawberry and cream flavored what?  Spread is a very vague word.  You could put toxic waste on toast and call it a "spread". 

Presumably the strawberry bit is the pink part, so then the white part should be the cream?  If it is cream why isn't it refrigerated, and why is it so thick? 

As I mentioned, I already posted the picture to Facebook.  Consensus there seems to be that:
A) it is unnatural
B) the white part is some sort of marshmallowy-fluff.

So why isn't it strawberry & marshmallow flavored then?  Where does the cream fit in to all of this?  Could it be cream flavored marshmallow?  That seems so wrong.

I'm going to have to go back and do a closer investigation of this product.   I'll just read the ingredients and see if there is anything in there that remotely says cream (or in fact any ingredients that I can pronounce and recognize that aren't chemicals).  And no -- I have no intention of purchasing it and eating it.

Well...as of right now I have no intention of purchasing and eating it.  You never know.  I could be in the store, get all caught up in the moment and decide that I must buy it and sample it in the name of science.  I'd be doing it for you, friends.

This was totally worth the wait and having to read all about my epic battles with my phone, right? 

This is the stuff that keeps me up at night -- wondering what the white goop in the bottle actually is supposed to be.  Seriously, stupid crap like this is why I can't turn my brain off and get to sleep at a reasonable hour.

Why Me?

What were you doing at one o'clock this morning?  Most people were probably blissfully asleep, getting all nice and rested for work or school.  Maybe some of you were battling insomnia.  The rest of you -- spare me the graphic details of your exploits, please.

Me?  I was performing surgery on my toilet.  Yeah, you read that correctly.

 I bought an older home a couple of years ago.  My older home also came with an older toilet.  I don't really care as long as it does the job.

Last night (early this morning, whatever) the stupid thing stopped working.  I pushed down on the handle, and nothing happened.

As I am not a plumber or even a handy-man/mechanically-inclined person, this was a problem. I knew the problem had to be in the top, the reserve tank area, as it was the handle that seemed to have broken. 

Awesome artwork by me!

As you can see in the picture I made especially for you, the handle attaches to a rusty metal bar.  Now, there should have been a metal chain, relatively rust-free, that attached to the end of the rusty metal bar.  Instead, the chain was laying in a blob on the bottom of the reserve tank next to the plug-thingie  that opens to do the flushing and closes to fill the reserve tank.    Ignore the other stuff -- there is a thingamajig there, but I don't know what it is and it wasn't actively involved in my problem.

Please don't be overwhelmed by my use of technical terms.

Now the rusty metal bar is really rusty.  I can't stress this enough.  I'm surprised there weren't barnacles growing on it or something. The metal chain has an clasp at the end, as this is supposed to hook into a hole in the rusty metal bar.  Well, this isn't so hard!  I can handle this level of repair, no problem.

Step #1

There are 3 holes in the rusty metal bar.  What the hell?  1 am is not a good time to start springing decision-making things on a person, toilet.  

Start with the first one, all the way on the end, I guess?  First place is always best in contests, so first hole on the rusty metal bar should be the best flushing.

Step #2

The chain doesn't reach hole #1 on the rusty metal bar.  Fabulous.  So I unhook  the clasp, figure out the right place where it should be on the metal chain, and then hook it to the rusty metal bar.  Or not.

Step #3

Hole #1 is so rusty that it has rusted right on through.  The clasp did hang there for a moment, but then the slight disturbance in the water I made by removing my hand caused it to fall back to the bottom.  Freaking brilliant.

Step #4

You know what?  Hole #2 was secretly my favorite all along.  It seems much nicer and more cooperative.  So I repeat all of that stuff above, measuring the chain and moving the clasp to the right place.  Everything is going swimmingly.

I try to flush, and the stupid chain falls out again!  WTF?!  Did it just rust through before my eyes?  I'm beginning to think the mouthwash is somehow to blame for all of this.

Step Whatever -- it's almost 2am and I am tired

Hole #3, it is all you, buddy. If you don't work then I give up.  No pressure.

*pleasdon'tbeall rustypleasedon'tbeallrusty*

The chain is going to be on a really weird angle at this point.  I don't care. We're pretty much at the f#*k-it-all stage, folks.

I hook the clasp and the chain.  It stays!!!  OMG this is so awesome!

Step Solution!

I give it a flush...and it kind-of works.  I mean it works, but not really the way it is supposed to, if that makes sense.  You have to push the handle down and hold it there for a few seconds, until the water drains out a bit, then you are all good to let go and it will finish.  Victory!

I'm awesome at repairs!  

....and I might also be the proud owner of a special toilet now.