Frog and Goat

Last night we went to our local fire station to hear the apology of the young men who beat the heck out of our mailbox. There were two of them and they are both 18 years old. That’s a pretty important piece of information because what are 18 year olds? They are adults. So, when one of the victims asked the parents of one of the young men if they knew where their ADULT children were at 3am the night of the mailbox smashing extravaganza, I rolled my eyes.

Yes, parents hate on me whenever I point that obvious information to them, but your kids are adults when 18 rolls over on their personal odometers. They may not be grown-ups, but they are adults and the sooner you accept that the better. My former supervisor would always answer me with yes, but they aren’t ready yet. OK, fine. The fact remains they are adults and everyone in the equation needs to take a big whiff of reality. I suppose when the judge is chatting with these adults about the various misdemeanor charges and that one felony charge then reality is going to smell kind o’ rank.

Speaking of rank, the group of people last night nearly went over the edge with the SHAMING (really, they did not target specific people so I don’t care if someone had a cold or cancer or whatever–having property damage sucks no matter what your level of health happens to be). We took a different tactic than punishing them even more (they’ve been reparing or buying new boxes for the last week and have been arrested), we told them we didn’t need to be reimbursed for the mailbox and that we appreciated their apology. I also thanked one of the parents for stepping up and doing the right thing by their neighbors. I wished the young men good luck in front of the judge. I really hope they don’t get shackled with a felony because that will just suck for them for a good long time.

Speaking of neighbors and rank smells…we could tell from one of the cars in the parking lot that the couple who live next door to us was going to be at the meeting. We’ve never met either of them–the lots are large and their house isn’t visible from the road. When he came over to introduce himself as a disabled veteran (no lie), the better-half said yeah, we’re your next-door neighbors. The guy looked us up and down AFTER HE ASKED MY NAME 3 TIMES (I have 5 letters in my name and it isn’t pronounced Mxyzptlk) and then asked us how long we’ve lived here (7 years, almost 8). After we let that hover around for a minute, he started in on some crazy talk about how we put up an Obama sign in 2008 and we must be some kind of odd ducks. Thank goodness the meeting started because he started yammering about Obamacare. We left without saying good bye to him. I tell you we are surrounded by nutjobs.

This is the game Lucy and I have going on right now:

She knocks it off the tree. I put it back on the tree. She knocks it off the tree. I put it on the tree. Sometimes the game is played in minutes and other times it takes hours for one of us to notice the other’s move.

Don’t you hate it when you get on Facebook to ask a question that’s really mundane about nice, inexpensive gifts (we have to shop for the MIL and buy things for all the nurses that keep things moving at the nursing home and the MIL had no ideas) and you find that one of your friends has checked in that she’s sitting with her mother while her mom gets the first of six rounds of chemo? Yeah, I can’t ask that question today because damn.

We’re in the process of switching our landline to the voice service offered by our cable company. This is because the phone company (can you hear me now) can’t be bothered to maintain their phone lines out here. True story: the better-half was having problems with his business line and they sent a guy with a truck to check it out. Dude said, “yeah, the company doesn’t care about the old lines anymore” and then I’m pretty sure he hinted that the best bet was to switch to the cable provider. So the better-half did and hasn’t had problems. Me. Problems. Either the line is so crackly that I can’t hear or the person on the other end can’t hear OR we have no phone service OR the line providing service takes every other word and turns it into Farsi and that’s really freaking great when I’m getting messages from potential employers.

Anyway, the better-half was either on a chat or on hold for TWO hours on Friday night with the cable company. Then he tried again last night. We now have a trouble ticket with the cable company which I think is a nice way for the weekend people to push the problem into someone else’s in-box and who knows when in the Hell we’ll have moved over to the new service. Thank goodness the raggedy landline is still functioning today because I have a phone interview later. And, I will cut someone if that line drops out.

We went out and purchased our Christmas tree yesterday afternoon. It is sitting in a bucket of water in the shed. Normally we put the tree in the garage overnight so it can relax, but with Lucy running out to the garage every time we open the door, we decided there was no reason to tempt fate. She was OK with the tree last year so I hope she behaves again this season. At least our tree stand is heavy-duty and we can crank it down around the trunk so the tree won’t end up laying on the floor.

Now that it is December we are slowly making our way to holiday decorations and celebrating. We refuse to do anything in November other than prepare (order things from Amazon, stock up on cards, etc.) and this year with Thanksgiving being a bit earlier we were outraged-OUTRAGED, I TELL YOU!-at how many people started decorating at the beginning of November. Hold your freakin’ horses, man.

Anyway, we have lights in the windows facing the street, the blinking Rudolph light is up in the kitchen and we have a string of colored lights roaming around our breakfast area (basically the bumped out window). We’ve made our version of Chex Mix twice already–we only make that at the end of the year holidays. I also addressed all the cards yesterday and will be dumping them at the mail box later today. I can’t bring myself to burden our postal carrier. He’s a nice guy and so I’m giving him a break this year.