The Rabbit Hole

- DO actually show up on time when you make an appointment with your tenant. Showing up on Wednesday instead of Tuesday is unacceptable. Especially when you couldn't even call to say you couldn't make it on Tuesday. It's a good thing I don't have to take time off work for that kind of nonsense, but it's rude, thoughtless and inconsiderate, and people do have shit to do instead of just wait around for someone to show up, who eventually doesn't.

Showing up at 2pm instead of 11am on a separate visit days later, also not acceptable.

- DO NOT show up when there really isn't anything you have to contribute. Showing up a second time to look at the broken washer (which broke a week ago today!) to then tell me that the repair guy hasn't gotten back to you yet, and you'll call him on Monday, isn't helpful. In fact, it only makes me laugh on the inside when you hurt your hand badly with the washer snapping something onto it as you pointlessly look inside it for a second time.

- DO NOT talk to me about how tough things are in this economy. I know how much you charge for this tiny no-storage-space place, and I know you put in the cheapest fixtures and things. We also know you rent the place out behind ours too. And, we know you work as a bank manager, not exactly a minimum wage job. If things are so fucking tough for you, sell one of your rental properties, or maybe that gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban. Or put your wife on a smaller budget, she could do with feeding your fat ass less.

Expect no sympathy from your tenants in regards of the cost of things. At least you own your house. Fucker.

- DO NOT take forever to finally get around to repairing things and doing maintenance. I mean, I laugh because it will cost you more in the long run, but seriously, we shouldn't need to wait 6+ months to get a tap and light socket fixed. Or for you to come power wash the exterior. Or paint the flaking and rotting fences. You may see the light of day when you have to replace those fences though and it really costs you...

- DO NOT give me all kinds of excuses as to why you couldn't get around to [insert whatever needs doing, and was supposed to have gotten done months ago]. I don't care that your mother wanted you to fix her stuff, or weed her yard. We pay you rent, we do so on time, you should do things for your paying tenants in a timely manner.

- DO NOT use the fact that you renovated the kitchen with cheap-ass stuff 8(!) years ago as some kind of selling feature. After 8 years, it's not exactly newly-renovated. It's really just kinda old now. You might be able to mention it if it was a particularly stellar job involving nice materials. It wasn't. Get over it. Move on.

IN CLOSING. If you can't be a proper landlord who gets stuff done on time, without doing the "woe is me, it's so expensive" whining, either stop being a landlord, or get a management company to do your shit for you.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store. They had their Halloween candy out already.


IT'S EARLY AUGUST.


I really hate how manufacturers and stores here put out holiday stuff so far in advance nowadays. It completely ruins my enjoyment by sheer overkill, by the time the holiday rolls around, I'm completely sick of all the decorations and peripheral marketing crap.

I don't want to see Halloween stuff in early August when it's close to 100F. Nor do I want to see Christmas crap before Halloween has actually come and gone, which will inevitably happen.

I wish so much that people who make websites, or who tart up their myspace pages (and $deity knows they're the foremost offenders in this case) would just refrain from inserting music into their pages.

Downloading isn't an issue, not since PreZ just got Verizon to up our FiOS bandwidth to 30Mbps... it's just that sometimes I'm browsing late at night, whilst listening to some music or playing a movie softly, and then all of a sudden there's this other obnoxious noise overlapping what I'm listening too, often MUCH louder than what I've already got on. With a sleeping husband and baby, I don't really need someone else's crappy loud music tastes forced on me at 3.14am.

So just don't, okay?

If we ever needed more proof that reality tv exists solely to humiliate people for ratings, then the dvd of the Worst Moments from American Idol is it.

I'm sure it's entertaining to some degree to watch people caterwaul and painfully mangle songs we know and might love, but you have to feel sorry for the poor schmucks too.

I'm also not sure that I could stomach an entire dvd full of that kind of stuff to be honest. Plus if I want to watch painful "singing" there's that stupid "But Can They Sing?" show on one of the channels, where they get random celebrities to sing, very badly. PreZ and I heard about 5 minutes of that show Sunday evening as we were bathing Dashiell, and whatever we'd been watching had ended and that was the next show on. Absolutely terrible.

Do people not realise that they can't sing at all? I'm not talking about mildly off-key here, but seriously horrible screeching. Or is the lure of some more limelight enough that people really will debase themselves as much as they can just to catch some of the radiant beams? I guess it is, because it's the only thing that explains quite a few of those "eat this really gross thing we dug up, without barfing" shows, and the fact that people line up around the block to be interviewed to participate.

Reality tv has always been mostly idiotic, insipid and profoundly boring, but how bad does it really need to get before they stop making it, and before people stop watching?

They're really scraping the barrel nowadays with Trailer Trash Barbie Britney and her Ken-doll Kevin, and that idiotic new show on Bravo, Being Bobby Brown. You don't even need to see that show, the ads for it already indicate how crap it is, with Whitney Houston and her hubby being obnoxious snots whilst splurging craploads of money at Harrods in London, or Bobby asking people if they know who he is (on several different episodes I might add, not just the once), and him eventually having to explain he's Whitney Houston's husband. If he has to go around saying that, people obviously don't know him (anymore), and don't give a shit, so why the hell does he have his own tv show? And who the hell wants to watch him? Did they run out of interesting people and celebrities to film?

Ditto that crap called The Surreal Life on VH1, where they have a load of has-been semi-famous people, most often 80s tv and movie rejects, shacking up together and being terminally stupid and boring.

How many more years of ever worsening "reality" tv are we going to get exposed to before it finally goes bust? It can't be that long, can it?




Please?

PMs from the forum such as "The webmail has been down all week, what's going on?"

Argh.

If you noticed it was down for more than a few hours or so, wouldn't you contact people a little sooner? It's not like the webmail is a function either PreZ or I use, so it's not like we know this stuff until someone points it out.


%$#&$*@&$!*@#

I cannot wait until the day we have a place of our own. A free-standing house, with no people on the same premises other than just us.

( Rant )

Unless you're bleeding profusely, or look sufficiently horrible, I suggest avoiding the ER. Especially with things that are going to get classed low priority on the triage ranklist.

Otherwise you too might spend a good 5 hours waiting, like we did. At least there's an Au Bon Pain in the hospital.

Upside, when we FINALLY got the x-ray, it at least verified that nothing was broken. They gave him a pair of crutches so he's more mobile with less pain, and a phone number for the Orthopedics department if it doesn't feel any better in a week to ten days, and then we were on our merry way.

What is so hard to figure out about fanlistings?

Seriously, people need to learn to R E A D. I get the occasional "when is the dvd coming out?" email in regards to two of the movie fanlistings I run, and sometimes "where can I buy X book?" with one of my author fanlistings, or whether Jhonen's writing more Squee! comics. And then there's the emails once in a while that are of the variety where they expect me to be in touch with bands (like Cinema Strange, who aren't exactly that hard to get in touch with anyway, either directly/through their "PR person" Ludo), and I've even had someone email me asking what a good price would be to Ebay an original Siouxsie concert tshirt (how the hell would I know? try closed auction searches for comparable stuff?).

I run a fanlisting... I don't sell dvd's, or second hand vintage concert t-shirts or back catalogue books. A fanlisting, just a list, of fans of a subject. I make it perfectly clear on the sites in various places. And usually I provide links to official sites and links that would help people out with most of what they need.

This one gets the prize so far:

I AM A COORDINATOR OF GOTHIC ROCK FESTIVAL IN SPAIN I LIKE CONTAC WITH BAUHAUS FOR A EVENT IN 2005 CASTLE OF MANZANARES IN MADRID SPAIN, THE EVENT IS GREAT AND I FOR I INTERESTING PLAY FOR THE DREAM OF ALL SPAIN FANS OF ALL OF TIMES.

Good for you. The all caps is annoying by the way, so in future learn to turn the capslock off, especially if you're some kind of official coordinator.

Also, Bauhaus disbanded a good 2+ decades ago, though I know they've done some reunion tours etc. and are playing a festival in California sometime in spring this year. However, I still have a question. Why does my fanlisting look like a good place to ask how to get in touch with this band? Did you miss the link to the official Bauhaus site on the Links section? Did you miss the disclaimer saying that I'm in no way affiliated with Bauhaus, any members thereof, any labels they published under etc. etc. on the About section?

Punch in Bauhaus into Google, and the first link you get is the official website. Scour through the first couple of pages, and you'll get at least one or two other links to other pages on the official site, and the official site to at least one bandmember. My fanlisting is not even among the results in the first 10 pages... how they end up here to ask me those questions is really beyond me.

Gah.

I realise the fast food/chain food businesses aren't particularly well-earning jobs, but it would be nice if they didn't hire complete fucking morons. It's on par with having people who can barely speak English managing the drive-thru.

We usually get pizza from Papa Johns. We don't like the local joint's pizza, and our local Pizza Hut doesn't have chicken as a pizza topping, plus often the PJ's pizza is tastier than PH. We generally order online, and it should definitely be done by the time I arrive there to pick it up (we live in the delivery black hole). However, there's nearly always some kind of issue, no matter how minor. Either it's not done yet (and I definitely don't arrive before the supposed 20 odd minutes it'll take to get ready), or they forget something... like today's order of cheese sticks, which I waited way too long for. And sometimes you just end up home and  look into your box to notice they've either left out a topping altogether (like anchovies on Kreestof's half of a pizza I got a few weeks back) or they just ignore the directions you gave to have mushrooms on only one half, and pineapple on the other half and then you find both on a slice.

Today I blame the stupid dipshit behind the counter. You could just tell she was a dumb bitch from looking at her. As I was waiting for them to make our cheesesticks, some guy walked in to pick up his pizzas. I don't know what exactly he ordered, but I know one of them was supposed to have lots of veggie stuff on it, with the exception of black olives and fresh tomatoes. The dipshit was like "oh yes, I have your large beef and your large cheese pizzas ready". I've no idea which one was the screw-up, but neither beef or cheese really come close to veggies.

Last time at least, when they screwed up with Kreestof's anchovies, they did give us a free large pepperoni pizza, because we'd also had to wait once we got there to pick up the pizza. So that was nice enough.