Thursday! [NOT 5/1/23]

5/1/23 brightersideoflife 20

Hi, friends!

I hope your week has been going well. I’ve been entertained by the clown parade also known as the republicans in the House.

Anything good happen today? I got paid which means I paid off 2 credit card bills finally.

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20 Comments

  1. Good? Well, it’s relative. My wife’s car died at the grocery store last night, and I couldn’t get it jumped. So today we had to have a tow truck take it to a repair shop. So, towing = $95 and battery replacement (corrosion apparently blocked my jumping) = $311.

    That said, any time I get a car repair made for less than $500, I call it a win.

  2. I, too, recently got paid. I basically have two clients. One is very prompt with the checks. The other employs a vast army of freelancers and shut down for a couple of weeks over the holidays. Finally they coughed up a big check, which was welcome. And better still I think I underpaid my taxes in 2022 so having this come in during 2023 was better than “better late than never.”

    Then, since I’m the world’s worst bookkeeper, I took a few minutes to go through my outstanding invoices and realized that both of these deadbeats are now only current up until about mid-December. The bigger client, the one that shut down for a couple of weeks, loaded me up with plenty of work over their break which was fine with me, secular heathen that I am. To the point where on Christmas morning I was working on something, and I yelled out, “Jesus fucking Christ,” and Better Half started singing “Happy Birthday” and I had no idea what he was referring to. But eventually it reminded me that I was on the hook for Christmas dinner.

     

      • I normally make something elaborate but non-Christmas-y, like one year I stuffed a few trout and made a lemon-based sauce that I found online somewhere, that was the year we had unexpected overnight guests thanks to Laguardia being snowed in and the friends of mine who brought these strangers to my table didn’t have enough room to accommodate them and we did so they just stayed with us for a couple of days…

        Oh, anyway, it was just the three of us this year and we (at least the two humans) were in a traditional mood so I made a roast and some garlic mashed potatoes and some honey-mustard baby carrots and parmesan-crusted Brussel sprouts. For dessert I had made Better Half  get a coconut-custard pie. Two, actually.

        That lasted us almost until New Year’s Eve, for a few dinners anyway, and then it started all over again. I’ve admitted before that I can’t roast a chicken to save my life, I don’t know why, so I had Better Half get a couple of roasted chickens. NYE turned out to be unseasonably warm here, so I reheated one of them and made potato salad and I forget what else, but I remember for dessert I made a no-bake mint-chocolate-chip ice cream pie with a crumbled Oreo crust.

        We had been very good about keeping Faithful Hound on his new diet but the holidays are no time to cut back so he enjoyed the occasional roast beef or roast chicken add-in to his obscenely expensive canned wet dog food, so 2023 is turning out awfully well for him.

  3. Also, if you read my Hazza-related comments in this morning’s placeholder post from RIP, I contacted my chum at PRH and will, sure enough, be receiving a complimentary copy of Spare. She said, without going into detail, that it is very well-written and heartfelt, and she has very high standards.

    I still want to know more about the cracked dog bowl. Anyway, I will give that a read and report any juicy details.

    There is this one famously leaked scene where Hazza claims that it’s him, Wills, Daddy Chuck, and Gran, and Hazza offers to be a freelance Royal and Wills and Chuck blow up at him and Gran just kind of looks on unperturbed, which I do not doubt, because I think QEII spent 96 years being unperturbed. Family drama, whatever.

    What I want to know is, in which room of which palace did this take place, and what inanimate objects were in that room? Looted treasures from  the “collection” of Hoarder Queen Mary, Hazza’s great-great-grandmother? A vintage Bakelite telephone or two from the postwar Eden era? A copy or stack of The Daily Racing News carefully annotated by HM QEII herself? Were there snacks? Crisps? Anything to drink besides tea and Dubonnet-and-gin? Was it uncomfortably cold because the penny-pinching Monarch had the senior footman dedicated to turning on the heat only turn on one of the electric “fires”? Or uncomfortably hot because it’s not clear that any Royal over the age of 40 has ever heard of a/c?

    The devil is in the details, as Nietzsche so famously put it.

      • I could probably manage that, unless it’s like a novel I read recently. It was terrible so I won’t even name it, and each chapter was about five pages long and full of meaning. It was given to me second-hand by a friend who told me it was the worst thing she had ever read. I said, “Oh, come on, I know we’ve both read [X; I don’t want to get into a literary debate about highly acclaimed novels that are absolute garbage] and it can’t be any worse than that.” “Judge for yourself, Mattie.”

      • Hazza!?!? He narrated his own audiobook? When did he find the time? Oh that’s right, neither he nor Megs have any real jobs or duties, or friends it’s starting to sound like.

        I read somewhere, not Page Six, that Megs got wind of some quasi-charity event and she made it known that she and Hazza would graciously make an appearance for a small fee and filming rights. Some poor PR or marketing person had to call her back, or call a flunky back, and say something like, “Um, actually, neither of you are invited…?”

        I think this was in the British press, which seems to think that Montecito is a glamorous part of LA. It is, kind of, but it’s adjacent to Santa Barbara a good two hours up the coast, so it’s not like Megs could make a daily commute when she gets a recurring role on Search for Tomorrow or whatever her next project may be.

    • i’m wondering what the payout is if you bet on a new record?

      i mean…they are only 122 failed attempts away from breaking the really really old record

      i could see this dragging on long enough to get there…….tho it is more likely someone will fold before then

      how much of an ego do you need to fail to win a vote 11 times in a row but keep trying anyway?

  5. In the potentially very good news category, our friends on the block got the intel on new neighbors who moved in between them and us.

    They own an excellent BBQ restaurant just a mile away!

    It’s not clear if there’s any direct benefit for us. It’s always possible they are too busy to deal with ordinary civilians like us. But it’s always possible some extra ribs and collards are in our future.

    • Oooh! Congrats on your new neighbors. May they be friendly and generous.

      I live next to a chef and became very close friends with his husband. They also have a winery (not in the traditional owning a vineyard sense. They buy grapes and have wine made under their label). They love to host and I love to eat and drink. Sadly, the pandemic and having kids has put a wedge between us. Once my kids are older, I’m sure we will pick up where we left off.

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