The Not Happy Thread

Bootleg, bootleg...!

Are we showing our age, or what...

 

I'm not happy about the fact that it's going to rain tomorrow here in Maine. We've had enough rain lately.

I wish I could take that rain and send it out to the western U.S., where they really need the rain to help with the fire situation out there.

 

3 weeks without a proper night's kip is really starting to take its toll. I'm absolutely knackered and I'm meant to be up for work in 5 hours. Great.

 

My beautiful grandma died at 93, and I went to her funeral today. Missed my train due to an idiotic student card mishap, so I was 1 h 40 min late and my whole family (which is huge, I have so many cousins) had to wait at the grave so that I lay the last rose on it. I felt like crap for making them wait (I know, it wasn't all my fault, but still...), making grandma wait, and some aunts and cousins acted a little snidely towards me, the big city girl ("oh we should've laid down a red carpet for you, hm?" "Well, I hope you ran here"), which is not that bad cos I kinda deserved it, but the fact that I let grandma down, or so it feels... She'll surely come haunt me now. On the other hand, if she does, at least I'd get to tell her the things I never did during her lifetime. She was a tough cookie, brought up 9 kids, one of them mentally retarded, ran a farm when my granddad was on one of his mysterious trips, and money was always tight, yet somehow she made it through everything, all her kids made something out of themselves and also grew to be tough-as-nails. Her strifes and adversities really put my measly problems in perspective.

 

My beautiful grandma died at 93, and I went to her funeral today. Missed my train due to an idiotic student card mishap, so I was 1 h 40 min late and my whole family (which is huge, I have so many cousins) had to wait at the grave so that I lay the last rose on it. I felt like crap for making them wait (I know, it wasn't all my fault, but still...), making grandma wait, and some aunts and cousins acted a little snidely towards me, the big city girl ("oh we should've laid down a red carpet for you, hm?" "Well, I hope you ran here"), which is not that bad cos I kinda deserved it, but the fact that I let grandma down, or so it feels... She'll surely come haunt me now. On the other hand, if she does, at least I'd get to tell her the things I never did during her lifetime. She was a tough cookie, brought up 9 kids, one of them mentally retarded, ran a farm when my granddad was on one of his mysterious trips, and money was always tight, yet somehow she made it through everything, all her kids made something out of themselves and also grew to be tough-as-nails. Her strifes and adversities really puts my measly problems in perspective. Rest in peace, grandma

 

Aw, I'm so sorry [MENTION=53403]KaTrian[/MENTION]. Your grandma lived a long and fulfilled life, and that's what we all hope for. May she rest in peace.

Your description reminded me of when my dearest grandpa died. He was being buried in his tiny little village in Serbia, and my husband (who is English) and I (my grandpa's favourite) were honoured guests. I was supposed to carry the cross to the grave but when they saw me, they gave me something else instead. I was so devastated, but dressed very fashionably, pointy black boots, silk rain coat, tight dress, platinum blonde and bawling my eyes out. Nearly fell into the grave as I threw the soil over grandpa's coffin. And then, the priest showed up and, apart from his clothes, he was a dead ringer for my husband! Tall, blue eyes, glasses and ginger beard! The priest literally had a double take in the middle of the service, and the entire village was so impressed, they adopted my hubby straight away. They decided he must have some Serbian blood (one can't look more typically English than my husband does, lol )

Afterwards, I sat in my family's patch, amidst wild strawberries, in the most beautiful graveyard I have ever seen (I don't like graveyards normally). It was a totally profound experience, wrapped in a Fellini movie.

 

Aw, I'm so sorry [MENTION=53403]KaTrian[/MENTION]. Your grandma lived a long and fulfilled life, and that's what we all hope for. May she rest in peace.

Your description reminded me of when my dearest grandpa died. He was being buried in his tiny little village in Serbia, and my husband (who is English) and I (my grandpa's favourite) were honoured guests. I was supposed to carry the cross to the grave but when they saw me, they gave me something else instead. I was so devastated, but dressed very fashionably, pointy black boots, silk rain coat, tight dress, platinum blonde and bawling my eyes out. Nearly fell into the grave as I threw the soil over grandpa's coffin. And then, the priest showed up and, apart from his clothes, he was a dead ringer for my husband! Tall, blue eyes, glasses and ginger beard! The priest literally had a double take in the middle of the service, and the entire village was so impressed, they adopted my hubby straight away. They decided he must have some Serbian blood (one can't look more typically English than my husband does, lol )

Afterwards, I sat in my family's patch, amidst wild strawberries, in the most beautiful graveyard I have ever seen (I don't like graveyards normally). It was a totally profound experience, wrapped in a Fellini movie.

 

You will miss her, I'm sure, KaTrian. I am sorry. She sounds like such a vital woman, mainstay of the family. Sometimes it's hard to believe that people like her are really gone.

 

[MENTION=35110]jazzabel[/MENTION] : thank you, and thanks for sharing that story, sounds almost like there was some magic in the air. I was never all that close with my grandma, there are so many of us grandchildren, plus she was such a typical woman of her time, very tight-lipped, very tough, but still a big-hearted person. It's just felt like grandma would live forever and then, out of the blue, died in her sleep. My "surrogate-grandpa" passed away a few months before that, so this year has so far been particularly sad

ETA: [MENTION=53222]jannert[/MENTION] : also, thank you. It's like a piece of time disappears with that person. The house becomes haunted, the old things get dusty, the pictures on the walls fade, the smell is all wrong. But I'm glad that she lives on so clearly in her children, and of course in us, the grandchildren. You spot things like "hey, she has her slanted eyes," "oh, her hands are just as dainty as hers were", "his smile is exactly like hers!" and so on. Suddenly she's everywhere, far less gone than I thought.

 

[MENTION=53403]KaTrian[/MENTION]: I can imagine how you feel. Sometimes these things happen in clusters. Last year, as I was nursing my old dog who had terminal cancer, suddenly I hear trashing in the garden, come out, my greyhound (a healthy, younger one, although in retrospect, 12 wasn't so young after all) is collapsed, blind, paralysed. Just like that. We rushed him to hospital and he passed away the next day. Then Maggie went 4 months later, and my grandma died in January, days short of her 91st birthday .

It's pretty awful, but it gets better with time. Now I remember all the dear people and animals who passed, and I cry but I feel joy for having known them, and if they were a relative, like my grandparents, I see them in me and I'm grateful. Sending you a virtual hug, I know it's not the same, but I wish it was

 

[MENTION=35110]jazzabel[/MENTION] : thank you, virtual hugs back I'm sorry for your losses, but you're right, it gets better, and we should focus on reminiscing them with joy. And at least the funeral did bring the big family together which happens rarely.

 

Too true

 

Lovely thought. And true.

 

Damn it, I broke another toe, this is the third! You'd think with the second one (a year ago) I would have removed the clutter on my floors! I'm an idiot. This one hurts way more, it's a middle toe. The other two were the baby toes. When you step on the ball of your foot, it doesn't involve the baby toes. Not so with a middle toe.

And the idiocy of the ED. I hobble a very long way from the car to check in. I hobble in and out of the triage office. Then I get a wheel chair ride to the room at the far end of the hall, and back and forth to X-ray. But after they said it was broken, no more chair. I walk the long hall back to the waiting room, walk 3 times as far to the pharmacy, and then hobble back to the parking lot.

The insanity of it!


Guess I should add the silver lining, I finished a full half of a novel I'd been meaning to read while I was waiting.

 

How does this even happen? I once cracked the bone in the ball of my foot four years ago. However, this was accomplished by kicking in a locked door so hard (a proper karate front kick, no less) that the metallic lock was broken through. But you seem to imply that you broke toes simply by stepping on certain clutter?

What nefarious objects do you leave scattered around? Titanium weights? Ball-peen hammers? Bowling balls about to fall off shelves?

 

[MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION]: Wow, that sucks! And I thought I was really down to my luck yesterday (the whole funeral fiasco, then a tire blew in our car and it couldn't be changed on the road because the bolts were stuck. Gee, a 200lbs dude was jumping on the bolt key and still no joy), but having two toes broken in a row is a major nuisance, especially only on clutter on the floor! That's just evil I've had horses step on my toes (figuratively too) and so far been lucky enough to get away with bruises but indeed, sometimes the smallest things seem to be able to snap a bone that's in the wrong place at a wrong time.

But your silver lining isn't half bad^^ I wish you speedy recovery!

 

Sorry to read of everyone's woes -- [MENTION=53403]KaTrian[/MENTION], my grandmother died last year at 91 and I still miss her very much. [MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION] - sorry to hear of your toe. It sucks to have anything interfere with your walking, but at least it wasn't your foot or ankle.

We're having our master bathroom renovated. We discovered that water was leaking into our garage from the shower, which necessitated the renovation. We signed a contract back in April and the contractors said they'd start mid-May and it would take 1 to 2 weeks. Well, they didn't start until July 1, and skip many days of work. The end seems to be nowhere in sight, and in the meantime, we have no bathroom. It's not so bad not having the shower, because we do have another bathroom in the house with a shower, but having no sink or toilet is a real pain, in addition to having all of the stuff we store in the bathroom in my bedroom.

 

[MENTION=38553]chicagoliz[/MENTION]: That sounds terrible! I hope you get your toilet back soon. It'd drive me insane not to have access to one for so long.

 

;-) Thanks, Jazz. We do have other toilets in the house. It's just inconvenient not having our master bath useful at all. We've actually got the toilet sitting in our front hallway, waiting for the workers to take it upstairs and install it. It's quite the additional element to our decor.

 

[MENTION=38553]chicagoliz[/MENTION]: Thank god for that! I was imagining not having any toilets at all, what a 19th century nightmare that would be

 

I'm unhappy about the fact that my CD player in my stereo system doesn't work anymore.

If you pop in a CD and press play, it always ejects instead.

Oh, well.

 

Ugh. I had a computer 2 computers back that had a cd drive that did that. I had to physically hold the dang thing shut to keep it from ejecting the CD. It worked some of the time, kind of akin to kicking the thing.

 

[MENTION=53143]GingerCoffee[/MENTION]

For whatever reason, I'm seriously curious now about what kind of insidious "clutter" you broke your toes on. Inquiring minds want to know!

 

Dang, Ging, ow! The only bone I've ever broken was a toe bone. The pinky toe's neighbor. It was awful. I send you cyber-hugs with a small dose of low-grade cyber-opiate. :redface:

 

They doled out a pittance of Vicodin at the ED but it's a trade off between nausea and pain control. I excused myself from the mountain of laundry, pitied myself for missing a the perfect weather day I had wanted to spend at the Bellevue Festival of the Arts and consoled myself with a cool new video web source my son told me about called "Vice". I'd post a link but it might draw the ire of the no-advertising troll that lurks under the bridge. Anyway, I just watched an incredible piece exposing the totalitarianism in North Korea. While my novel does not include totalitarianism, it does have a heavy dose of reality questioning. And the people in N Korea are raised on false beliefs. So all in all it was a positive day.

I am an incessant treasure hunter and while I'm currently in remission, the house is still packed to the gills with all the yard sale and thrift store finds that make up the backlog of my EBay merchandise.