Almost Friday! [NOT 4/1/24]

4/1/24 brightersideoflife 12
image of Dr. House shrugging with the text "shrug life"

Hi, friends!

This week is soooooo close to being over.

Anybody got weekend plans? I’m going to deep clean my spare bedroom and hopefully catch up on some laundry. Maybe even go to Costco. What an exciting life I lead!

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12 Comments

  1. You think your life is exciting. Years ago our dining room table became Better Half’s home office. I took the real office a decade ago, because the Faithful Hound’s crate is in there and he won’t leave my side, so…it’s a long story.

    So I rolled our shredder into that space (it’s normally in the office) and I said to Better Half, “Get cracking. These mountains of paper have to go. Anything dated before January 1, 2022 will need to go. We can digitize some stuff.”

    Sorry. This should have been part of the hoarding post. But that’s what we’ll be doing this weekend.

    • Save it for the next ticker tape parade. Or hold your own.

  2. We are taking the young one back to Eastern Wa tomorrow to school.  Trying to outrun a snow storm on the pass in her full Subaru if we can get her packed up.  I spent day doing last Asian store shopping, making her musubis, & now tacos & enchiladas.  Saturday I’m going to a basketball game at her school w/ a buddy that is alumni there, daughter will be in student section.  Should be a fun weekend if all goes right.

  3. I only wish I had a Costco to go to.

     

    • They really are amazing. I remember the first time I went to one, or maybe it was a BJs. I was visiting siblings. My mother was there and she died in 2001. I was gawking and blocking traffic and it was the first time I had seen a self-checkout. I was enchanted. “Oh my God, look, this is a 5-lb. [some kind of cheese] and they only want [whatever price] for it. That’s insane! How can they do this?” And my mother said, “You need to get out of Manhattan more, Mattie.”

    • I live in the home of Costco.  We have 3 w/in 10mins in any direction.  One is a business Costco that is mostly Asian small business owners buying cigarettes & stuff for convenience stores.  I will be driving past their huge new corporate office tomorrow in Issaquah tomorrow.

      • My closest Costco is in another state (NC) approximately 120 miles away.

        • I miss shopping at a place like Costco, but it’s just Mrs Butcher and I so there’s really no point.

          • Oh you’d be surprised. Why not buy a year’s supply of cleaning products at one go? Food freezes pretty well, so you can overstuff your fridge’s freezer compartment or do what we did and buy an auxiliary sub-zero. For the sole purpose of hoarding our impulsive grocery purchases 12 or 13 years ago.

            Oh God. If I hadn’t made a specific provision in my will about cremation my tombstone would read something like, “He went kind of crazy toward the end, but he was a nice guy. I mean, once you got to know him. His favorite phrase was, ‘Did I ever tell you…'”

  4. Since this is an OT , let me burden you with a little story. BH has that horrible cold that’s going around and I’m not so spry myself, so we were watching an old episode of “McMillan & Wife” (recap to follow) and I said, “It’s too bad we never had children. They’d come in really handy now. I guess that’s why God created private nurses.”

    So this is kind of a tragic story. When we were about 30 we had been together long enough to know that we wanted to have a life together. Our married straight friends were starting to have children and I come from a large family, so I was put in charge of researching adoptables. I thought it would be too weird for two gay men to take in a young boy. Not that gay men can’t be wonderful fathers to their sons.

    So we settled on these two twin Black sisters. They were 4. I thought it would be good because they could be each other’s best friends in a scary new environment. We would have had tons of help raising them. We could have given them a wonderful life, everything they could have wanted. But here is where my absolute hatred of NYC bureaucracy comes in.

    We got a little home visit from this absolute [expletive deleted] from Child Protective Services. I spent a week cleaning the apartment in anticipation of this, alongside working my corporate job, and we had an adorable little Cairn terrier at the time. I thought this would go pretty well.

    But oh no. My first big mistake was to offer her a drink (it was 4 or 5 pm, after all) and that didn’t go over well. And then I, not particularly drunk, overshared, about my own family and upbringing and my motives for wanting to adopt two little Black girls. And Better Half was not much help. He wanted the girls even more than I did, and it would have been my job to raise them and oversee their education and quit my corporate job and get occasional freelance work if I could.

    So a couple of weeks later I got a call from this loathsome creature, who no doubt now is retired on her tax-free NYC pension down in Florida somewhere, informing me that our application had been denied. Why?

    Well, this was in the Clintonian days of “Don’t ask/don’t tell” so gay civil unions weren’t even possible, let alone gay marriage. But New York has always been good about accommodating gay people, so that wasn’t the roadblock. It was because they had a policy of placing children with “culturally appropriate” families, and while Better Half is Black, I am not.

    I blew up at her. I’m still so upset about this, 30 years later. “Have you ever heard of the concept of supply and demand? The supply is the Black babies and the demand is childless white people. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

    So then I got blacklisted (the irony) and I am ineligible to adopt in the city of New York. But I have my three godchildren, so that’s some consolation. But I’m haunted by the memories of two girls. They’d probably be married by now and have their own children and we’d be grandfathers. That [double expletive deleted.]

  5. So on McMillan & Wife Mac (Rock Hudson) and Sally (Susan St, James) are sitting around in their huge San Francisco house (Mac is the police commissioner.) Their housekeeper, Nancy Walker, also very famous as Rhoda (Valerie Harper)’s mother and the spokeswoman for Bounty, the Quicker Picker-Upper, walks out on them. Probably to go off and do “Rhoda.” They get word that Mac’s mother is in town, a little earlier than expected. It turns out that she’s Mildred Natwick, who fans of 1970s TV programming will remember as the Snoop Sister who wasn’t Helen Hayes, who in turn was the mother of my fictional boyfriend, Danno from “Hawaii 5-0.”

    Sally (Susan St. James) was, as always, very fashion-forward. I remember watching this show when it first came out and my mother saying, “What woman would wear something like that?” And me saying, “I think it’s pretty cool.” Head scarves, ponchos, pantsuits with leg widths large enough to sail a small boat, there’s nothing that Susan St. James wouldn’t have worn, and given that she was the co-star I bet she had a big say in the costuming.

    There is absolutely no need for any new programming since all this classic content has been resurrected. And then, once the “McMillan & Wife” episode ended, we fired up the next episode of “Hawaii 5-0,” but I couldn’t concentrate, so we put that on hold.

    I will conclude with: I once read that Rock Hudson loved “McMillan & Wife” because it was filmed on location in SF and after filming he would cruise Golden Gate Park and pick up men. Can you imagine it being 1975 and you’re on the prowl and Rock Hudson comes up to you and says, “Hey, I’d really like to—”

    I actually got a taste of this because one year, like 2016, we spent New Year’s Eve in Rancho Mirage (CA) and our gay hosts were quite elderly. One was in his 90s, I think. They’re both dead now, sadly. They had stories to tell about LA and SF in the 1950s and 1960s. We only knew them because they had taken in a friend of BH, and who the hell knows what the real story behind that was.

    Oh well, don’t ask, don’t tell.

     

  6. Sorry, this could not wait for tomorrow’s Brain Drain.

    What I watched:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Countess_from_Hong_Kong

    Sophia Loren could not have been more beautiful. That hair. That eyeliner. And Marlon Brando. My God that man was sexy. And he pretty much came out and said he had slept with men, this in an era when bisexuality wasn’t really understood, and he had like 20 children.

    Oh well, back to work I go. Deadlines loom, just like the iceberg that lie in wait for the Titanic.

     

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