About a week ago, our clothes washer began giving troubles. It was struggling to drain and spin the wet load. A little rebalancing and a little luck got us a few more loads of clothes.
Alas, this morning, I fired it up with a load of whites, a smallish load compared to our dark washes. Its first attempt stalled. I dialed up a rinse and spin cycle, with my fingers crossed.
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More than a decade ago, I had a couple of really bad days when we lived in Chandler Arizona. We had a leaking faucet in our master bathroom, so I needed to change the cartridge on the hot water valve.
Easy peasy. It was a Delta faucet, so a trip to the local Home Depot yielded a drop in cartridge. Cost about $4.
Back home, I go to turn off the hot water feed under the sink.
Fuck, it doesn’t close (cheap ass fitting by the budget cut-rate contractor.)
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Whenever you hear or see the word “Trump”, you can instantly conjure in your mind gaudy, cheesy, trite shit. Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump Sneakers, Trump “tourbillon” watches, and Trump Tokens as part of World Liberty Financial.
That doesn’t even cover the main branding deals that make up the bulk of the Trump family corporation’s recent past business activities.
Alas, there are many that I missed, but never fear, there are still many opportunities for the Orange-hued shit-gibbon to case in on the rubes.
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I am back to my OG blog, here at Tralfaz, and I will use this to take some swipes at pols and douchebag techbros, as well as anything that strikes my fancy.
Today, we’re going to skewer Elon Musk for being a ginormous man-child. There are plenty of topics to slag against Musk, but there are two that I will bring out today, his temper tantrum declaration that he will move all of his businesses to Texas from California, and him throwing his full support behind Trump for president in 2024 in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
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From the moment that I bought my first DVD player (probably 1999 or 2000) I started collecting the plastic discs. Favorite movies, TV shows, and the like were voraciously purchased and enjoyed over and over. Shows like Family Guy, South Park, The Avengers (1960’s) and tons of movies found their way into my collection.
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Yesterday, I did one of those periodic rituals. About every 5-6 weeks, I go to the local “Great Clips” and get my hair cut. I am pretty boring, trimmer #2 on the back and sides, scissors on the top, and sideburns off at the top of the ears.
Sorry, I am not adventurous.
Then I noticed that instead of the $21 listed price, I was charged $18, because the stylist listed me as “Senior”.
Ouch.
Mega ouch.
So I gave her an extra big tip. (I have been tipping heavily to help them through the pandemic anyway, this time I tacked an extra three bucks on it)
The march of time…
More on the music theme. By the time I was in my early teens, I had become infatuated with music. This was the mid to late 1970’s and I skipped the trendy Disco era (dafuq was up with that?) and went straight to the classic and album oriented rock direction.
I listened to a lot of radio, and growing up in the SF Bay Area, we had several titans of the airwaves battling it out daily. KOME, KSJO in San Jose, and a slightly less edgy player in San Francisco KFOG. All three of them played the greatest music.
Late in my High School life, I decided to take up Guitar. This was circa 1982, and back then it was a lot tougher, for a variety of reasons.
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Our toaster is dying. We had a good one that was gifted us for our wedding in 2000, and a couple years ago, it gave up the ghost. Alas, time and resistive heater elements are not entirely compatible. Bummer.
We bought a cheap-ish replacement, and it worked for about three years, but the left slot ejector is stuck, and it is a pain in the arse to get toast out of it.
Time to buy a new toaster.
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If you have been following the weather in California, you are probably somewhat in awe of the sheer volume of rain that has been dumped. The phenomena of “Atmospheric Rivers” have essentially led to wave after wave of intense, constant rainfall, quite atypical of California weather patterns.
What this has led to is that my morning walk with Cerberus have become both wet and treacherous. Last year, the very day that our Christmas shutdown began, I slipped and fell on the algae slicked sidewalk, needing stitches, as well as a few days of concussion protocol observation, a huge “no bueno” situation.
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A bit of self reflection today. I was born on the leading edge of Generation X, just as the conflict in Vietnam was escalating, I joined the mass of mankind in the world (or, 1965).
I struggled in early education, and I was never sure why. My parents whispered behind my back, and I occasionally caught snippets. But one thing I do know is that I had poor hand-eye coordination.
It is why my penmanship is – to be blunt – awful. And it is also why I was not a natural of playing ball sports (baseball in particular).
Of course, my parents tried to improve it. But, in the early 1970’s there weren’t a lot of fun ways for a kid to work on their hand eye coordination. I recall my dad trying to teach me to play banjo at the ripe old age of 5. That didn’t go well, as you can imagine.
The irony is that had I been born a decade later, mid Gen X so to speak, I would have had the growing video game craze to help train my hand-eye coordination. Perhaps that would have made the difference.
Or perhaps not. I suspect that I lie somewhere on the spectrum, and as was common back in the late 60’s and 70’s it was just not diagnosed.
C’est la vie. Now that both my parents have passed, I am left to wonder what my early childhood was like from the snippets of my memories.