it's xmas eve and the rip is helping me find a good xmas song.
we looked and we looked and we looked but couldn't find anything. then the rip set my mind straight with these two words: waiting is
then i looked at the rip and set her mind straight with these 3 words: thou art god
then the 4 legged god gave me four magic words: xmas falls on sunday
merry feckin xmas
we've had snow for the past week or so and it's caused me considerable hardships. nothing like the siege of leningrad but considerable discomfort nonetheless. vancouver snow always ends the same, a quick rise in temperature followed by rain that creates slush and makes walking very difficult, especially if it freezes at night.
my discomfort comes mainly from having to walk rip 3 times a day for her empty her bladder and evacuate her bowels. but nobody ever said caring for a magnificent beast was easy and as i'm so fond of quoting tony soprano, "this is the life we chose." my little duck boots work perfectly in shallow snow but having to put on big rubber boots for deep snow causes me pain. the top of the boots chafe against my shins causing me pain and i don't like pain.
and getting rip prepped for the walk is a challenge. i have to select the correct coat and convince her that it's in her best interests to dress for the weather and then hook her up to the leash. this isn't too bad if i've remembered to bring all her gear into the house but occasionally i forget and leave it on the deck. when we return from the walk and she's dripping wet, i take her gear off outside and let the water drip off before bringing it in to dry.
that goddamned xmas is just around the corner and i've done zero, zip, squat.... to prepare for the blessed event. the lovely mrs myshkin is still on vacation and without her constant reminders, i seem to forget about it. but all things must pass and before i know it, xmas will be but a distant memory and it'll be on to bigger and better things.
i've toyed with idea of buying myself a nice toy. i've seen a few giant train sets for sale on craigslist but sonny lacks my enthusiasm so that adventure is looking doubtful. it would be a lot of work to transport all that equipment to the house and set it all up. if my dad offered to buy a giant toy when i was younger there would have been very little hesitation on my part to make it happen. of course i would probably got myself half drunk and proceeded to make a big mess out of the situation. there are times when i wished my kids were as crazy as i was in my youth.
my dear departed father and i got drunk together more times than i can recall and got into some really good messes. if i get motivated in 2017, i'll relate the story of me, dad, fritz and the chinese food. a few people found the adventure to be funny but many people were totally disgusted. it's one of my fondest memories of good old dad.
xmas in canada:
billy hopes you sons of bitches have an outstanding xmas.
although i'm living alone at the moment and have no special love of xmas, i thought it might be a good idea to put up the fake xmas tree. i had never assembled the current fake tree, my littlest angel always did this but she's flown the coop. it was me and rip against the tree.
after about 10 minutes, i gave up. assembling the base proved to be an exercise in frustration so i gave up before frustration led me to tossing the whole thing in the trash. here is the conundrum that i often face:
putting on some mellow music and sparking a bud would most certainly curb my frustration and make life easier for rip but there is a downside to this plan. my mental faculties decline with this plan and there's a good chance i'd just end up listening to the music and ignoring the mess on the floor. the classic conundrum, medicate and lose some brain power or tackle the son of a bitch head on and risk going berserk. i chose the 3rd option, put the son of a bitch back in the box.
i briefly toyed with the idea of calling my littlest angle and asking for guidance but that would be admitting the game is over, senility could not be denied.
well, i went back to the tree and got the son of a bitch assembled but it looked like shit so once again, i cut my losses and put it back in the box. this time though, i put the box back in the crawl space so the great xmas tree experiment ended in failure. fuck me, now i know how that idiot hillary feels. but i didn't blow 1.2 billion on the tree.
For years and years I resisted having a printer at home and just printed all my stuff at the cracker factory but when I left the cracker factory it was time to get a printer. To say it has been an exercise in frustration might be an understatement.
My Brother printer is big and bulky so I don't keep it on the desktop and have to go to the trouble of carrying it to the computer and hooking it up each time there's something to print. Today after doing all that the son of bitch wouldn't print, telling me that it was out of ink. I had just replaced the black ink cartridge so this was a surprise to me. I took the cartridge out and it seemed to have lots of ink so I put it back in and still got the message that there was no ink! What the fuck, I decided to put in another new cartridge and still got the message that it was out of ink.
It turned out that the "yellow ink" cartridge was empty and the son of a bitch wouldn't print until the yellow ink was replaced. The goddamned thing wouldn't do anything without new yellow ink even though I just wanted to print a black and white document. I replaced the black cartridge for nothing, a waste of money!
After a few minutes of checking on-line I got lucky and found the solution. I had to remove the yellow cartridge and put a piece of electrical tape over the clear window on the cartridge to fool the printer into thinking there was ink in the yellow cartridge. The good news is it worked, the bad news is I replaced a black cartridge for nothing. And to add insult to injury, my hands are covered in black ink!
All this happened because I got fucked over by a bank. I ended up telling the bank rep to go fuck himself and decided to open an account at a different bank. This entailed me signing some documents so I had to print, sign, scan and email all the shit back to the new bank. An exercise in frustration! So at this point, I hate banks and Brother printers.
I'm not too crazy about dentists these days either but that's a story for a different day.
K.D. and Tony are the tonic to sooth my tortured soul.
