Curses! Foiled Again!

There is a public pool in Staunton.  It's in Gypsy Hill Park and it's very nice.  Lots of little kids, but they stay in the shallow end near the slide or sit on the edges of the pool.  Long story short, the deep end is never crowded.

I got to this pool late in the season because someone told me it wasn't nice.  That's my own fault for not checking it out myself.

The official end of summer is upon us as Labor Day approaches, but that doesn't have a lot to do with the weather.  But those are the rules and the pool will close for the season on Tuesday the 8th.  So of course I want to take advantage of all the opportunities left, right?  So I rush through the things I have to do today, which of course means they all took longer than usual, right?  The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

But I make it there by 4 and it closes at 6.

Yeah, not today.  And not tomorrow.  Because even though I read the signs and checked the website.....there is apparently a super secret rule.  Once school starts, the pool is closed during the week.

It's ok, I leave for Boston Wednesday.  We don't close the ocean.

Read This With Pepto Bismol Handy

So you know I was already super aware of "The Weather Underground" and shitty Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.  I don't get how more people aren't outraged about the crap they pulled and how they smugly walked away from it.  I am constantly agog when people buy the Ayers/Dohrn malarkey that dismisses any talk of their actual & attempted violence and rewrites their past through rose-colored, we-were-trying-to-save-the-world lenses.

And I am well versed in 60s, 70s & 80s history.  I lived through it, I watched Huntley & Brinkley, I read various newspapers.  Later, I was interested in history, so my reading tended toward that area.

But somehow I missed a bigger picture.  Maybe I wasn't ready to see it as a whole.  I knew, as I said, about Weather Underground.  And I knew about the Black Liberation Army, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the FALN; I could tell you who Party Hearst, Joanne Chesimard, Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X were.

But here in this book, Burroughs lays out all of these groups and people and their actions chronologically and in depth.  And like someone vividly bringing back the circumstances of a terrible wound that is scabbed over, Burroughs made me feel outrage.

I highly recommend this book.  It's interesting.  It's well written.  And it remembers people who should be remembered, the victims of these terrorists.  The groups weren't protesting, they were destroying & murdering. 

Yeah, I Know.....

I never thought these words would come out of my mouth either.

"Too much."

These "Brownie Batter Oreos" are just too much!  It's not like licking the spoon, it's like eating the bowl and then feeling queasy.

The Guy Who Lives Above Tom Just Stepped On My Last Nerve

It's official, I hate the clown who lives above Tom.  When my son moved in eight months ago, the first thing we both noticed was that the people upstairs wore heeled shoes day and night. Sooooo ignorant & thoughtless.  I tried to get a conversation started about it (nicely, because Tom would kill me otherwise) but the guy would always go off on a tangent.  And I only understood every other word accent, missing teeth, idioms.  And I found out stuff I didn't want to know - like how unreasonable the landlord was to beef about him stacking cardboard boxes on top of his heater.  Or that he didn't use the heater because he used electric space heaters he found at the dump.

He also has a junk heap on the porch.  This includes a broken cooler left behind by the previous tenant (He hoped to sell it for $5.00) He smokes beside his front door, which renders our window unusable. And of course, it's just gross at that end of the porch.  He also appropriated the welcome rug left by the previous tenant and put it at the edge of the porch.  So it's just rotting the wood since it gets soaked everytime it rains.

After a talk with the very, very nice guy downstairs, I realize this was a problem for the previous tenant as well.  Plus, as is obvious to me, this conversation confirms the three upstairs (husband, wife & daughter) are special.  Great.

So one day I'm on the porch and he comes out to smoke.  I say in a very nice, mild tone "Hey, has anyone ever talked to you about wearing outdoor shoes upstairs?"  He looks away, no answer.  I wait.  Then I say "Did you hear me or have I upset you?"  He got up and went inside.  Since then I have completely ignored him.  He tried to make nice, offered to help me carry something.  Is that a game?  Ignore me and then play good neighbor?  No.

Then today there is a water problem.  It takes me a while to figure it out.  There is some kind of blockage just below me.  It caused my washer not to drain.  I did all the checking, but slowly cause it's day 2 of Pomalyst. Constant mopping.

Ok, it wasn't this bad.

Then I am standing in front of the tub, everything cleaned when the washer upstairs begins to drain.  The tub fills.  The toilet bowl fills and overflows. The U shape pipe behind the washer gushes.  I throw down towels and run out to the upstairs neighbors door.  Knocking.  Knocking.  Banging.  Finally, he answers.  I tell him to shut off his washer.  That it's flooding my everything.  I tell him I am calling the building's maintenance guy.

I go back in to Tom's apartment to make the call and mop up this new mess.  I can tell this stupid ass didn't shut his washer off.  He let it finish the cycle.

Now this guy couldn't know what was happening.  I'm not unreasonable.  But he does laundry all damn day, every day.  From 9:30am this morning (it woke me up) and it was still going at 5pm.  How?  There are only 3 of them?  Are they taking in laundry to supplement their income?

Was any of this which has me crazed?  Close but no.

The cardinal sin was this - when he finally opened the door and I told him to shut off the washer, he looked behind me.  What.  The.  Fuck?  Do NOT be afraid of who might be backing me up.