Day 321

A better day.

Colin Powell was right: no matter what the problem, it will always look better in the morning. Today Spouse and I talked about the fact that although the drainage issue was indeed a problem, it wasn't nearly as super-urgent as the first repairman seemed to indicate and further reflection upon how he acted toward Spouse and Eldest during the estimate made us conclude that he was doing too much of the hard sell. While I'm down there on vacation next week we will get a second estimate, but we're not going to immediately rush right into a huge remediation project.

But boy do people want us to borrow money - my cellphone rang more today than it has in the entire 15 years I've had one. Once I got home for the night I finally wised up and told the two most persistent callers that I'd gone with another lender...

...which leads right into a particular pet peeve of mine: whatever happened to telephone manners?  I wasn't allowed to PLACE a call in my childhood till I was able to say "Hello this is SamKD, may I please speak to Paul ?" (He was my best friend at the time.)  We held all three children to the same standard but every single time I answered the phone today I got "is this SamKD?" Rude, rude, rude. For the sake of expediency I replied "yes, it is..." and waited but from now on out I'm saying "You called me; who is THIS?"

Anyhow that whole big ugly issue is reasonably resolved for now.  You can probably tell I'm at a real keyboard instead of tippy-tapping on my phone from bed; I'm far more verbose than usual.

Today was also my Big Loop in which I travel to two separate branch facilities for a total of 140 miles from start to finish and I had to do it in the pouring rain -- I am SO sick of driving in the rain. For compensation I took myself to lunch at the one reasonably-local Thai place and liked it very much although in future I need to order my food as a "1" on the 0-5 spicy scale.  Two was still tasty but a tad more spicy than I'd truly like.

Stuffing myself full of good curry made the rest of the afternoon far more tolerable. As soon as I got home I attacked the now-refrigerated giant cookie and discovered that if one could chisel it out of the pie-pan (yes, very well greased beforehand--didn't help enough) it was actually pretty good.  So that improved too.

Then out of the blue Middle walked through the door - what a nice surprise! He said he wanted to see me before I went on my vacation and it was very nice indeed. He seems to be doing well which warms my heart.

World events, however, don't warm my heart at all. I haven't had the television on at all in a good six weeks but Spouse said that I ought to turn on the news as our President had ordered a missile launch against Syria so now I'm listening to CNN for the first time in at least four months. I guess I'm glad I heard Trump's (very short) speech as it happened but the whole thing is just depressing.

On the other hand I wasn't sleepy anyhow so this is at least interesting.  For maybe another half hour I guess.

Oh I almost forgot: I think my treat for eleven months (which will be the 21st which is only two weeks away) will be finally doing 23AndMe. Now that I've eliminated the biggest threat to my health it might be worthwhile to get some genetic information, y'know?

We certainly live in interesting times.