I Hate Facebook

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I was on Facebook once for about a minute.  I know everyone loves it but I hated it.  Someone told me it is a way to stay connected to the outer world.  What’s an outer world? The twilight zone?  All I saw were peoples photos and comments about seeing a new hot movie, shopping at a new mall or just returning from a trip to the Bahama’s.  Hardly outer worlds.  I saw strange greetings to peoples loved ones on birthdays and anniversaries which in my humble opinion is private stuff.  I tired of pictures of kids winning soccer matches, people running marathons and new babies.  Do you really care about all this with more than a few people?  And if you did care why not meet for coffee or talk on the phone?

I said all this to someone younger than me.

“Nooooo!” she said, “you are missing the point!”

“Really?” I replied, “which point…..outer worlds?”

“It’s a really good way of keeping in touch with….” her voice trailed off.

“People you don’t want to stay in touch with?” I asked.

She blushed.

I rest my case.

 

Bubbles

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The other night my husband Steve was stressed and achy so I drew him a bath. I lovingly put in Epsom salt for the aches and a nice smelling bubble bath product for the scent and the bubbles. Bubbles when you are in the bath over age 50 are a really nice idea. His bath was ready and he got in. I hung around in the bathroom with him. We’ve only lived in this house about 8 months and we haven’t taken a lot of baths.

“This bath has a Jacuzzi function, did you know that?” Steve asked me.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Have you ever used it?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “I don’t like chaos and Jacuzzi’s seem chaotic to me.”

“I’d like to try it,” he said.

“Okay,” I replied, “Let’s see if we can figure this out.”

Steve laid his head back while I fiddled around with the controls on the touch screen. Nothing was happening and then suddenly the jets sputtered and sprung into action. And I mean action. The bathwater and bubbles suddenly looked like a gigantic vat of boiling water on steroids.

Then the bubbles began to grow.

And grow.

“Before we knew it, bubbles were rising up from his waist to his chest and then threatening to envelope his face.

“How do you turn this damn thing off!” he shouted over the rising bubbles and the noise from the jets.

“I don’t know!” I yelled back as I was bailing bubbles with my arms and throwing them into the shower.  I had to keep bailing bubbles because they had begun to spill over onto the floor while I had visions of them filling up the entire bathroom.  This was a race against time.

“Try anything and everything!” I yelled, “Before those bubbles cover your face!”  I frantically kept bailing bubbles into the shower.

It seemed like and eternity but he finally did something that worked and the jets stopped. We stood there staring at each other. Bubbles everywhere! In his eyebrows, his hair, my arms and everywhere else.

“Relaxing bath, honey?” I asked. We burst into hysterics. “Steve, I’m going to go get my phone! I need a picture of this for my blog.”

“No, you’re not,” he replied.

Sorry, no photo!

Personal Characteristics

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Ever notice no one has freckles anymore?  I guess at some point they have become considered a flaw.  There are relatively inexpensive procedures to get rid of them now.  Kinda sad. I miss them.  I always thought they were so cute.  I never had them.  Someone who did told me they are cute when they are someone else’s but not when they are your own. I get that. Maybe the same deal with really curly hair. Curly hair is a pain in the ass.

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Delusional Men

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My current house is much newer than the one I had in Scottsdale and it’s also (unfortunately) a lot bigger. This is Texas. The one in Scottsdale was at that age where everything starts breaking for the first time and I lived with a revolving door of service repair people coming in and out with their dreaded 4-hour window of when they would show up.

“What if we both worked?!” I exclaimed to my husband. “Who would sit here and wait?! Do people hire a concierge to sit and wait or what?!  How do they afford that??” My husband has no idea what to say when I say things like that so he likely doesn’t say anything.

And if he does take the chance and say something like, “I know,” I would likely say, “Wait, you mean you know or you don’t know?!” which is precisely why he likely won’t say anything.

So the good news is, I don’t have to wait for service repair people nearly as often in this house because it’s so new, but when I do, I still have the problem of the 4-hour window and one other little thing. Every service repair man (and they are always men) seem to think I want to become an expert on whatever they are fixing.

The fridge guy gave me a “10 Point Understand your Refrigerator” course while my eyes rolled back into my head. The automatic awning man was positive my life would be enhanced by understanding the hidden mechanics unseen by the normal human eye, while I drooled. The handyman spouted the benefits of grout brands for the shower while I finished applying my mascara.

I want to say, “Just shut up and fix it! I don’t care how it works and I don’t want to hear you yak! I’ll never fix it myself as long as I live so I don’t need to know all this shit and I just want it to work so quit talking and fix it!” But, I don’t want to be a bitch not only because I am a nice person but also because these guys can be very passive aggressive and could put a scorpion in my ice cube bin, a paper clip into those hidden mechanics or use the crappy grout!

Recently Airtron was sending someone to diagnose and fix a problem I was having in my home office. In that room, I was freezing in the winter and way too hot in the summer. My window on the day the guy was to come was from 8 am to noon. They promised a call 30 minutes prior to arrival so I could zip home from the grocery store or wherever I might be and not just sit home and wait. I have never in my entire life had a service repair guy come in the first two hours of a window, so after staying up late with friends who came for dinner the night before, I set my alarm for 8 am.

Next morning, waddling in my bathrobe toward coffee, I saw the guy parked in front of my house in his van! OMG, my hair was in turmoil, mascara was all over my face and I hadn’t even brushed my teeth! Fortunately, he was typing on a device and I was able to get the mascara off, brush, put some clothes on, rein in the hair and by the time I opened the door I was in a reasonably presentable state.

Garth went directly to the attic. I’ve never had an attic before living in Dallas. I don’t understand why we need attics here when we never needed them in any other house I’ve ever lived in. And, I’ve lived in many.  (See one of my very early posts “I’ve got an attic??” )

He was up there a long time and finally came down and said with enthusiasm, “When they installed this baby, they reversed the supply and return on the vent which means hot air is being sucked OUT of your home office in the winter and cold air is being sucked OUT in the summer!”

“Okay, whatever,” I said, “did you you fix it?.”

Like the others, Garth was excited and said he did fix it but wanted to educate me and launched into a monologue about the mechanics of the evils of when supply and return are reversed.  OMG, I tried to employ body language to demonstrate I was not interested to no avail.  Once again, I was trapped.

I quietly seethed while visions of sugar plums and him being out of my house danced in my head.