printers

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.

Billy loves you sons of bitches.

Alice

one of my favorite star trek characters is the borg queen:

a few weeks ago i was watching children of dune and there was just something about lady jessica that caught my fancy. finally my curiosity led me wikipedia where i found out that lady jessica was the borg queen!

as you're probably tired of hearing, i'm in the midst of the annual deadwood marathon. there was something about maddie that caught my fancy so once again it was off to wikipedia and son of bitch, maddie is also the borg queen!

and the wonderful actress who plays the borg queen is ALICE KRIGE.

that's the beauty of watching deadwood so many times. each time i watch it, i fall in love with a different character and learn something new. i continue to watch it in small doses, about 20 minutes each night before going to bed. i'm always medicated and i always have the music dialed in perfectly. it's my reward for making through the day. a guy needs something to look forward to and for me, it's that 20 minutes of bliss before hitting the hay.

and speaking of the borg queen, the lovely mrs myshkin is away on one of her extended vacations. she's been gone for a few weeks and lucky me, she's due to return on xmas eve. so it's me and rip all alone in the house. the kids are gone, my dad is up in valhalla and my mother doesn't recognize me, i've never felt so alone. i'd really be lost without rip.

sonny boy williamson sums it all up. (have i ever mentioned how much i like sonny boy?)

billy loves you sons of bitches.

i am depressed.

i don't know if i'm really depressed, i'm just thinking of slim pickens in blazing saddles. have i ever mentioned how much i love slim pickens?

for just a moment, pretend that slim pickens is donald trump and cleavon little is obama:

that clip brings a smile to my face but i'm still depressed.

this morning i took my mother to a remembrance day event and got all choked up. my dad would have been 95 years old in a few days and he was a veteran of WW2. my mother was a war bride. i wore a pair of my dad's pants, his shirt and his shoes. as the ceremony progressed and i got more and more verklempt and tears were flowing down my face as they played the last post.

as i looked around at all of the veterans, all of whom were at least 90 years old, i couldn't help but think of that prick donald trump. that son of bitch evaded military service and yet has the gall to proclaim that he "loves war" and wants to "bomb the shit our of" muslims in the middle east. i just got really really angry with the donald.

in the past few days i've had a total roller coaster of emotions regarding trump's victory. on election night i was totally depressed but the next day it was back to business. at times i even smiled thinking of all the excitement and bullshit that's going to happen in the next few years. but then i see trump's smirking face on tv and i get back to reality and almost slip into depression.

but fuck donald. here is my absolute favorite anti-war song.

billy says he love you sons of bitches.

flu shot

It was that time of year again to get a flu shot. I've been getting flu shots each year for as long as I can remember. I've had the flu a few times in my life and I don't want to get it again. I'm talking the real flu, not some lousy cold that a lot of people call the flu. From what I've read, getting a flu shot is a crap shoot. They guess what strain will hit and that's what you get vaccinated for. Last year apparently they guessed wrong and the shots were only 50% effective. So it goes, like I always say, if it's free, I'll take it.

It was off to the pharmacy to get poked and maybe get a sore arm for a day or two. Before the pharmacist administers the vaccine, a form must be filled out that basically absolves the pharmacist and health ministry of any responsibility in the event that something goes wrong. ie, an allergic reaction. This year the form was different:

THE FUCKING FORM WAS IN CHINESE!!!!!

I shit you not, the form was in Chinese with English in small fonts under the absurd little Chinese stick figures. When I passed my form to the pharmacist, a stern eastern European lady, I couldn't resist complaining about the form and her response, "don't get me started" She then told me that 70% of the customers were Chinese and it was a nightmare trying to get them to fill out a form in English.

I liked her enough to offer my left upper arm for the shot. I have a sea turtle tattoo on my left arm and I'm usually reluctant to get a shot in that beautiful creature. They always give you the warning to sit down for 15 minutes after the shot just in case you get dizzy but there were two chances of me hanging around and slim had just left town. I immediately hopped on the bike and pedaled into the sunset. And yes, my arm hurt that evening.

The best thing about a flu shot is it gives me peace of mind when riding on public transit when some asshole starts coughing and sneezing.

The deadwood marathon goes well:

Billy still loves you sons of bitches.

the awakening

     I guess everyone has a few moments in their life when the light goes on and they remember the moment. One of my most important moments happened when I was a teenager and it was one of those watershed moments that literally transformed my outlook on life.

The transformation happened while reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky. I was child of the cold war and grew up being continually told how the evil Russians were subhumans and a major threat to my life and happiness. Being a normal young guy, I didn't give it much thought. If that was  what they wanted me to believe, so be it. I had sports to play and vandalism to commit, questioning authority wouldn't make me run faster or throw a stone further.

My parents always told me to read books and reading books made my life easier. Spend an hour a day reading and not get  hassled, seemed like a fair deal to me. When I started reading Crime and Punishment the thing that stuck out to me was that the evil Russians were just like us. They had commerce, private property and the sons of guns could even read and ponder life's great mysteries, just like us.

This was when I figured out that the authorities were full of shit. It was a propaganda war and we were being fed a bunch of bullshit about the Russians and if they were feeding us bullshit about the Russians, there was good chance that most of the other stuff we were taught was also bullshit. For some funny reason I fell in love with Dostoevsky and took it upon myself to read any books of his that could lay my hands upon. And just like Deadwood, I would read them several times. In the past year I've re-read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot. I just plain old like Dostoevsky's style.

Then another watershed moment hit me a few years ago. While browsing dvd's at the public library I stumbled upon The Last Station. Aside from falling in love with Helen Miren, I also grew curious about Tolstoy. Like most people, I had read War and Peace and it was a long tough read. Somewhat of an endurance test where the goal was to finish the book rather than enjoy it so Tolstoy was relegated to the dormant part of my mind for about 40 years. I've read several of his books in last few years and I'm just finishing "Resurrection". It's a great book.

I'm finding that Tolstoy is basically a kinder and gentler version of Dostoevsky.  I still consider old Fyodor Dostoevsky to be my soul mate and Prince Leo Myshkin remains my hero. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were highly critical of the Russian system and the  injustice suffered by the peasants. Being a dissident in 19th century Russia was a risky proposition. Poor old Fyodor was sent to prison in Siberia and sentenced to death but like myself, someone up there liked him and he was given a reprieve. So it goes.

Give it a try, you might just fall in love with Leo.

Billy still loves you sons of bitches.

games!

finally, life is good again in the pond.

one of my big beefs with windows 10 is they took away the classic games and put in some shiny new games. but the new games came with a price, unless you subscribed to their premium package of games, you couldn't play any of their so-called free games unless you watched a few commercials. have i ever mentioned that i hate windows 10?

the new shiny games are kinda cool but those fucking commercials were driving me crazy, not to mention the fact that microsoft was monitoring me every time i played a game and deciding what commercials to blast me with after monitoring everything else  i had been doing and reading all my hotmail messages. and that brings up another annoyance with windows 10, it reconfigured my hotmail account and i couldn't read my fucking mail!!!  the inbox would say 10 new messages but there was nothing there! if i went to my sent file and then back to the inbox, i might just get lucky and find my messages but it was hit and miss. after some monkeying around i discovered that outlook/hotmail had activated some "focus" tool that took it upon itself to hide my messages.

i had told my kids about these problems but they didn't share my sense of urgency. dear old dad not getting old classic microsoft games and his free email acting up didn't register on their urgency index. i had to fix these problems myself and fix them i did. i found and turned off the focus bullshit and then installed the old games from windows 7.  the fruit of my loins are in for a surprise next time they request funding from the rosewater foundation.

for some funny reason i have absolutely no problem with google looking over my shoulder and invading my privacy. google answers all my questions and provides me with excellent directions whenever i need to find an address.  and i'm now using google "sheets" rather than microsoft's excel. i have excel on the old computer but have to access microsoft's cloud to use it on the new toy. so far google sheets fit my needs very well. and i haven't used facebook for a nanosecond on the new toy.

in summation:

google     - good
microsoft - bad
facebook - bad

billy says he love you sons of bitches.

soup

I made a truly outstanding pot of bean soup yesterday. Firstly, I had a surplus of carrots so I grated 4 good sized carrots whereas I usually use 2 carrots. Then I tossed in some beef soup flavoring rather than the french onion flavoring. The usual suspects such as barley, beans, garlic, onions and beef remained the same.

After the soup was finished I tossed in some spaghetti sauce that was left over and son of a bitch, I had some soup that the boys in Valhalla would be proud of. Now I have a shit load of soup in the fridge, probably enough to last for the next 3 days. I'll have soup for lunch and dinner each day with a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. This is my health kick that I'll do about twice a month until spring arrives. There will be lots of farting in the bat cave.

Yesterday panic set in, I lost a debit card. I have about 5 of the stupid things and the only one that I ever use was nowhere to be found,  it's for my mother's account. After an hour of frustration, I decided to hop on the bike and ride up to the credit union. I'm not crazy about credit unions but I leave some money in there because my father liked the place. Typically, there was a large line-up for service. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate line-ups?

An elderly asian man was standing behind me and he was very close which was annoying. Then the asshole belched right in my ear. I came very close to throttling the rude little nine iron but with age comes wisdom, so I just gave him the dirtiest stare I could muster and stood in that fucking line-up with the old blood pressure skyrocketing.

But the baseball playoffs have started and the grocery store has some fresh apples that are beyond compare. It's just too bad that I have to use a paring knife to eat them since I have zero confidence in my front teeth.

And the Deadwood marathon has begun!

Billy says he loves you sons of bitches.