What do you want? [NOT 8/9/22]

8/9/22 brightersideoflife 52

Hi, friends!

Simple theme tonight. What do you want?

I want my fucking mail. I did a mail hold for a few days and it ended Tuesday. Today is Thursday and I haven’t seen a postal carrier all week.

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52 Comments

      • I have it but I’m lucky: not only do I work from home but I’m given deadlines and no expectation of contact until the due date. So if I’m up at 2 AM and feel restless then I can get some work done, and then if I flag around 10 AM I can take a restorative nap and no one outside this apartment is the wiser. No doubt this is unhealthy.

    • im joining you in that want….i went to bed before midnight…i have the day off

      and ive just woken up at 3 fucking 30…

      no reason for it either….its not even hot anymore

      ugh

  2. That’s interesting. Without being too nosy, what exactly do you get in the mail that you need or gladly anticipate? I suppose this covers packages too, though. Are they not delivering those either?

  3. I haven’t seen my eldest daughter since she turned 21 a few days ago.  She was camping in Banff & has had to work since then.  She is coming home tonight & I want to give her a hug, make her a nice dinner & maybe have a drink with her.

    • Hah! Mine’s back home. Her school has way more students than dorm rooms, so they hold lotteries for the available rooms and she didn’t get one. She was really upset, called me up crying this summer, “How will I go to school? There’s no public transportation — what will I do?”

      Once I could get a word in edgewise, I said, honey, Daddy works from home. My truck sits in the driveway all day. You won’t need a bus. It’s going to be okay. The sobbing subsided.

      So now she’s home and we have to adjust to sharing bathrooms and cooking for three instead of two and scheduling car use. But it’s cool to have her around again, too.

      • Mine has an apartment with roommates but school doesn’t start for almost a month.  She is a super good kid & has been working 10 to 12 hour days all summer doing salmon restoration for a local tribe.  Really good experience for my outdoorsy environmentalist.

  4. I read the following blazing headline (on an America media site, of course):

    In The Wake Of Queen’s Death, They Changed National Anthem

    Well, they would. It’s gone from being “God Save the Queen” back to “God Save the King.”

    Clickbait. It knows no bounds. I’m surprised there wasn’t a barely relevant slideshow to go along with it.

    • I got a bulletin tonight on my phone saying that the Bank of England affirms that coins and notes bearing the Queen’s likeness will remain legal tender, which, I suppose, technically counts as public service journalism — although I’d have figured they’d wait until she was at least underneath the slabs to break that one to the subjects.

      • One of the things that fascinates me about New York is that it is notoriously slow to do anything. Repavng two miles of highway takes years, not days. Replacing a leaking and hazardous sewer pipe, the same.

        But the city and the state are littered with references to the Mayor and the Governor. Every little park in the city, no matter how small and forlorn, will have a sign telling you who the mayor is. Even though the park hasn’t been maintained in years and the heroin needles are piling up, by daybreak following an election that sign will have been changed to reflect the name of the new mayor.

  5. A new fridge. I don’t need anything fancy, I’m not spending $20,000 on a Sub Zero. I’d settle for a Samsung Bespoke. But I’ve spent so much money on the house this year and I need a new driveway in the spring. 

    • I can’t speak for all Samsung’s models but ours sucks!  Ice maker breaks or fails all the time.  Definitely do your research & don’t believe the hype!   Go on tiktoc or Reddit & put in Samsung ice makers for lots of good reads.

    • I’ve heard good things about Samsung washers and dryers, but as others have pointed out, their refrigerators are not highly thought of.

      We have space restrictions in our kitchen that drastically narrow down our choices. We went with a bare-bones Whirlpool. No ice-maker or water line to break. It has run like a champ. I think we got it from Best Buy, who also took away the old one. And their delivery times were way better than Lowes or Home Depot.

  9. I want the world to eradicate Covid for the selfish reason of wanting to be able to live like the before times. I’m tired of being paranoid (about long Covid mostly) and living such a restricted lifestyle.

    This gave me hope.

    But what I really want is a lower back massage and vacation away from anyone who knows me. Oh and I third the motion for no more chronic insomnia.

  10. Hmmm insomnia…yup, me as well. That’s okay though, I just read through the wee hours and caffeine up in the morning. I  need a new backyard fence, and it is not a large yard, either. Sticker shock! I’d also like to have enough money to live without working so much, but at this rate I will be doing the work thing until I am 70.

  11. a barrett 50 cal

    and a grassy knoll

    tho…as im pretty bribeable..i’ll take a mil too mr pootin….i’ll fucking need it for the bills at this rate….

    i’d still like that barrett tho….. that thing is cool

    but sides from that….i am pretty easy….. i’d like a time machine to see young madness

    tho…i’ll admit…the slowed down old farts still have their charm

    • you know…..i have a perfectly good hermits hidey hole for you

      right next to the lake in the middle of nowhere i grew up in

      dude what previously used it no longer needs it on account of being dead

      (he was old… pow in 45 near dresden…. the bombings turned him hermit….dude was done with people)

        • tbh…nowadays….theres no need to learn dutch anyway

          we are only a few years away from the national spoken language being english

          or..at least some bastard version of english

          unless you are in friesland….they will be frysian till the world ends…but the rest of the country is rapidly moving to dunglish

          • Dutch may be the only widely known (as in many people have heard of it even if they don’t speak it) languages on the UNESCO list of Endangered Languages. Almost all the others are languages spoken by very small populations, like less than 10,000, sometimes less than 100.

            • i didnt know we were endangered ….makes sense tho

               

              welp….tbh….i vote for putting two in the back of its head and pretending it never excisted…..unwieldy bastard of a language

              least in english i can express myself clearly

              • Well my Grandfather was Frisian so at least that’ll stick…but if we’re going to do away with a language I suppose it best to be the one spoken by whom that invented the slave trade?

                • did we invent it?

                  sorry ignorance on my part

                  i know we hugely profitted from it

                  (we always kept it abroad tho…. wouldnt want to taint ze motherland)

                  anyways….i accept my share of the blame courtesy of my ancestors…..but i think slavery goes a lot deeper than us

                  • No, the Dutch didn’t, of course not. Slavery is mentioned all over the Bible. Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt was a slave revolt, that’s why it’s invoked so often in African American theological writing, and that didn’t happen in 1619 and it didn’t involve black people, no matter what Nikole Hannah-Jones thinks. There were great slave markets all over the Grecian and Roman worlds. There’s no injunction against it in Islam and the early adherents were great slavers. It’s still practiced in parts of the Muslim world; there are slave markets in Libya, for example. Many of the countless foreigners lured to the Gulf states to work as “guest laborers” are slaves in all but name.

                    As for the Europeans in the modern age the Portuguese were incredibly active in the African slave trade. They were the first to colonize (really, more like set up trading posts) Africa’s western coast to buy and trade for the slaves that the locals would bring to them. Yes, they were enslaving each other, usually as a result of a victory or a loss in some conflict. Portugal sold them to others or shipped them off to their vast holdings in Brazil.

                    The Dutch did probably finance a lot the European slave trade, since Amsterdam was such a huge banking center, but I would imagine a lot of the money flowed through the City of London and then, eventually, the banks in New York and Philadelphia.

                    Gosh. I haven’t done a social studies report like this since high school.

                  • Not necessarily so much “invented” as “perfected,” from what I understand of our combined ancestors,  @Farscythe…

                     

                    Jesse De Forest is given “credit” for being basically *the man with the plan* that became the guiding vision of the Dutch West India Company–

                    This web page gets into his story–it’s a bit in the weeds, buuuuut it fits in-line with alllll of the *other* genealogy** stuff I’ve known of/read since the days of my childhood & adolescence…

                    I found out about him juuuust a bit before The 1619 project… but the 1619 stuff lines up with that little bit which came from the family history geeks in my paternal grandma’s family–and which *I’ve* personally owned copies of since the early 1990’s–(and of which, I have seen & read since the early 1980’s!)

                    I was led to Jesse, by a line in an obituary, copied off microfiche, from a Buffalo, NY area newspaper more than a century ago, which mentioned one of my ancestresses being a “Socialite from an old New York family.”

                    Nowadays, you can dig the genealogy stuff up on the interwebs, and trace your lineage all over, waaaay easier than back in those days, and find out alllll sorts of interesting things that folks have found;

                    http://vanarsdaleleefamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-life-of-jesse-de-forest-petitioner.html

                    Which you can cross-reference with other sources.😉

                    And still other sources, too–to follow up and check veracity.

                    It’s all that cross-referencing, along with the original mimeographed, microfiched, & photocopied-then-mailed papers in my *own* personal stash about some of these folks, which made me believe that yes the stuff the folks working on the 1619 Project found, was very likely to be accurate!!😕

                    Long about 1991-96, it was *incredibly* difficult to find ANYTHING about the Dutch West India Company, if you lived in “the middle of the US,” thanks to that “needing to go to a library which had an extensive microfiche collection” *then* sitting in that library’s basement for hours, reading through allll those YEARS’ worth of old newspapers…

                    (Not that I *ever* got so distracted researching papers for my college writing classes, that I was still reading source material, in a basement in Fargo, ND, the week the final drafts were due or anything…😉😆😂🤣💖)

                    Almost everything you could find back then–except for the pages handed around in our family–kindly sent by a man named Richard Something-or-other (from Upstate New York!😉), spoke of the more famous Dutch East India Company–which was a “slightly related, yet wholly separate endeavor”–and which dealt with the colonization of places like India & “the Spice trade,” not the colonization of the coasts of Africa, Central/Southern/North America and the Caribbean, sending sugar, gold, people, cotton, tobacco, etc., back & forth across the Atlantic Ocean.

                    The *West* India Company info was stuff that you had to search for, in various archives, it wasn’t as widely known–and tbh, if you mentioned it to someone back then, they usually tried to correct you/clarify the info be saying, “Don’t you mean, ‘The Dutch EAST India Company?!?”

                     

                    **Back when “finding out your family history” meant writing letters to folks across the country/around the world, going to churches & libraries, finding the original source material, paying for a photocopy, then sending *that* off via snail-mail to the pen-pal/relative who’d asked the original question about that shared ancestor(s).

                     

                    • Oh, right, I had forgotten about the Dutch Caribbean possessions. But they were tiny. The BC islands (Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao) plus the St, Maarten, plus some stuff that went back and forth among them, the French, and the British. Combined I doubt they rivaled the vast plantations the British maintained just in Jamaica. Did you know that the US British Virgin Islands were Danish colonies that the US bought? The Swedes settled southern New Jersey and Delaware. The Italians kept trying to get their hands on Libya and Ethiopia. The Germans took what is now Namibia, Tanzania, Rwanda, and the Cameroons, and some islands in the Pacific. The Belgians famously had the Congo. It seems like no European country could resist. And the US did its share, of course.

          • Dutch feels like the English Translation of German words–as narrated by the Swedish Chef.

            Which, I think, would make Frysian the language translated by Beaker.😉

             

    • I got a shed with 2 skylights in the back of the yard if you want a hermitage. Between a 50 ft hose and an extension cord, you can also have some basic amenities among the bumblebees, butterflies, and stray cats.

  14. I want a 15 year old girl to go back to being 11!

    I want to live near the border of a country whose nuclear codes aren’t in a desk drawer at a golf course.

    I want a federal government that will add to the Canada Health Act to save us from these CONservative provincial governments dismantling the public health care system ON PURPOSE for the sake of privatisation.

    I also want a federal government that will do the same for the public school system…which may or may not be related in any fucking way to the wanting of a 15 year old girl to be 11 again.

    I want EVERYONE in Canada to be aware of the Plymouth Brethren Church and their puppet they dangle around as a grifter who convinces rubes they aren’t free…and is a “candidate for Prime Minister of Canada” when he isn’t even a party leader yet and there won’t be a fucking election until 20-fucking-25!

    Realistically, what I want – that is actually obtainable – is a Wiser’s Deluxe rye…oh wait…it isn’t obtainable because they stopped making it and changed it to blended whisky…

    …fuck it…

    …I just want sleep like everyone else here in the comments.

  16. Ha, last Thursday I was due to get a check and a credit card bill in the mail, per the USPS Informed Delivery that I signed up for last year in the midst of all that postal fuckery. The credit card bill came, but the check did not – which made me vaguely concerned because the latter was issued in an envelope that said “PAYMENT ENCLOSED” on the front. So, I checked the box underneath the picture of it to say that it hadn’t been delivered and asked the person who was paying me to watch to see if it’d been cashed yet by someone else. After a few days with no sign of it, I made a Special Request for a postal investigation, while the person who was paying me told me just to leave a note to the other residents in the building to let me know if it was in one of their boxes by accident. So, I did that on Tuesday night, hoping at least that someone would leave it on the shelf above the mailboxes, where we all leave the misdirected mail. The next day, I opened mine to grab the grocery store specials and coupons that I never use (the USPS doesn’t even bother letting me know about them, either) when, lo and behold, the check in its slightly bent envelope jumped out at me and onto the floor.

    So, basically, I have to assume that not only did the mailman throw it in the wrong box, but also that whoever got it by mistake hadn’t checked the mail for a week. I’m almost not sure which scenario disturbs me more. But, then again, the check is for all of $63.50 anyway.

    • We often go a week or more without checking our mailbox because all our bills are online and no one we know is in the habit of sending cards and letters. We still sometimes get mail for Better Half’s deceased mother. It’s always amusing when an underwear catalog for plus-size women or Christina tchotchke catalog shows up. She died in 2015.

      In my building all the residents’ names (and there aren’t all that many of us) are posted above the mailboxes with our apartment/mailbox numbers. Additionally, there is always a doorperson who could be asked questions, and failing that the doorperson will take any mail and hold it at the front until it is claimed. Our mail people (the turnover is tremendous; I’m told no one lasts more than a week) will ignore all of this so if you sent me a friendly greeting and forgot to include my apartment number they would put it back in the bag to return to sender. You, in turn, would receive back your friendly greeting anywhere from three to eight weeks later.

  17. In less sane moments, I want a Corg!

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61606972

    Buuuut then I remember that I have roommates–one of whom is currently immobile, and the other of whom is a very inexperienced dog-manager, and who… let’s just say, cannot resist “sad puppy eyes” and remain firm…

    So aside from me trying to hold the line, solo? Said adorable *stubborn & persistent* doggo would soon be ruling the roost, and an absolute terror!😆😂🤣

     

    It would be like being a “new to dogs” person trying to manage the temperament of Shibes–a TOTAL disaster!😂🤣🤣

    http://www.ramenchemistry.com/blog/2016/4/25/shiba-inu

     

      • I’m planning on the next one still being a “big black dog” (most likely some type of Lab-ish/pibble-y sort), because I’ve been talking with my primary care Nurse-Practitioner, since last November, about how Lil kept me on track, as far as my meds, eating regularly, and getting some exercise goes…

        So we’ve been talking on & off since then (WELL before Lil was gone!), about me getting a dog i can take *all* the way through the classes this time, to get it certified as a service dog (and maybe do therapy-work, volunteering too!)

        My primary was 100% on-board with it, and thinks it’s a great idea, to help me manage my ADHD & Diabetes–and I’ve looked into what I need to do, as far as our apartment building goes (they said all i need is a letter from a medical practitioner, saying i need an Emotional Support Animal–i don’t even NEED it to be trained or an *actual* service dog🥴🙃***

        I DO plan to go through all the classes, because–like I said, I’d really like to have a dog trained for therapy work, for volunteering again, once life slows down a bit😉 And I know the process–because Lily & I *were* on that track, before I lost my job & made the career change, back in 2014💖

        ***this is why folks with actual *TRAINED* service dogs get so much PUSHBACK, fwiw!!

        Folks who *do* have needs, but who don’t bother to train their dog, end up with rotten little terrors, who annoy *everyone*–and then folks think that ALL assistance dogs are awful & scammy🙃☹

          • Thanks, @Hannibal!

            That’s part of the reason I’m planning to look at “big” dogs, and hopefully find one that’s *minimum* 6 months, and ideally 1-4 years old.

             

            I want someone who’s past the BABY-puppy stage, as much as I ADORE them–i’m *not* going to be around during the daytime, but my roommates WILL be, annnnd I don’t want any training I’m doing to be counteracted, or BAD habits *learned* that are difficult to turn around, because my Boy-roommie is an absolute softie about those “cute puppy dog eyes!”😉😆🤣💖

  18. @MatthewCrawley, YES, I do know about the Italian/Ethiopian thing, because Ethiopia & Somalia are neighbors, so PLENTY of Somali folks have either traveled here *via* Ethiopia, and some of the folks I’ve known spent time growing up in refugee camps in Ethiopia 😉💖(during the Famine years of the 80’s & the Somalia Civil War years).

    That’s *also* how I found out about Berbere–and this recipe–which is AMAAAAAAAZING!😃😁🤗💖

    NGL, at first I was a little confused about the combinations of cheeses–and a few other ingredients in that recipe!!!

    But, then I learned about the Italian ties, and that it also had the British invasions–and that Somaliland had been “British Somaliland” *back in the day,* and suddenly those “seemingly strange” combinations made PERFECT sense–much like French Pastries, and Rice-Flour in Baguettes do, when ya think of Vietnamese foods & Banh-mi!😉😁💖

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