Random and Rambling and Rangy

I really do wonder why it is that every time I start taking my vitamins, I get sick. Every single time I say to myself, “Hmm, I haven’t been taking my vitamins lately” and start taking them? Bam. Sore throat within hours.

I honestly don’t know if it is the vitamins triggering the cold/flu, or if I only take them when some part of my subconscious realizes that the cold/flu is already making itself at home. I don’t know this because I am, at the DNA-level, unable to remember to take my @*^&@ing vitamins. God have mercy on me if I ever have a life-threatening condition which requires taking X pill at Y time. And Lord-Lord, if it’s two or three pills at irregular intervals? Well. I might as well save the cost of the prescriptions, and set it aside for the beer at my wake, friends. It only makes sense.

I also can’t remember to take Tylenol on a schedule, which would probably work much better at controlling the crazy that is this stupid arthritis. But ooooooh no. I only remember to take the Tylenol after I’ve snapped some poor innocent person’s head off because I ache all over.

Well. Mentally snapped their head off. I’m actually a rather gentle person, in person.

Which brings me to my next pondering of the day. Why is it that some people like to go through their life picking fights with everybody? Seriously. I don’t understand it. Is it a power thing? Does it give an otherwise shallow little life deep meaning, to go around stomping on others? To demand your rights be respected before they’ve been in any way approached? To walk through the doors shouting, “Me first! ME FIRST!!”?

To cut people off at the gas pumps, or shove your way around old ladies, or attack the wait staff the moment your every whim is not being indulged? I don’t get this. I just really don’t. I don’t get it in the same way I don’t get why men feel, once married, they have been given a free farting pass.

Judging from the highly scientific study I did (which consisted of asking a few girlfriends after we’d all pounded back a drinkie poo or seven), every man on the planet does this (OK, we may have been a little sweeping in our judgment).

And I don’t get it. Nor do I get what these ‘tude types are getting from all that ‘tude they’re busting up everybody’s…well. I suppose it’s just that I get such a long-lasting rush and charge out of making other people laugh and smile and feel good, and I just can’t grok the concept of the opposite working for anybody, really.

Maybe it’s just an utter lack of self-pride. Not self-involvement, because I’ve got that in spades believe-you-me. But I don’t feel, for example, that the barista in Starbucks is trying to mangle my order, and if it’s wrong generally just gently pointing it out gets it fixed. I don’t feel that I’ve been personally and with malice aforethought slighted in any way.

I don’t feel it’s a waste of my life to wait for an old lady to get her cart out of the rack, or to stop and help her if she’s having real trouble. Shoot, I’ve struggled with those dumb things myself. Takes me, what, thirty seconds, to unhook a cart and pull it out for her? I’m not so danged important that this is any real loss to society. I mean. It isn’t like I’m not curing cancer, for Chrissake!

I’m just…thirty seconds later hitting the produce aisle, ya know?

Which leads me to produce. What the holy heck is going on with the produce this year? This is California. We’re supposed to have good produce. But the bananas have been gosh-awful, to the point that my children have begun boycotting them, and the vegetables – well. Expensive and rotten. Darn near pre-digested.

Hmm. Is that supposed to be a selling point? “Now, partially digested!”

No, ma’am, those aren’t moldy brown spots – they’re our patented enzymes, doing the work so you don’t have to!!

Speaking of which…Roombas.

Dudes.

Roombas need to be standard issue for all homes across America. Shoot. I’ll throw in Canada, because so many very good things come from thence (Rush, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, Loreena McKennitt, inexpensive Vicodin) and I’d like to return the favor for once.

Do you know what I love most about my Roomba? IT WORKS SO I DON’T HAFTA! I just pick an area that needs it, and hit the button and go back to work. It even gets under the beds, an area which has not been vacuumed since approximately 624 BC, when the Great Freeze forced us to burn our beds, and the dust beneath them, to survive the long winter nights.

Which brings me to furnaces.

Do you know how much a new HVAC system costs? A new Trane, that is? A new Trane that is their top of the line, five ton model with dual something or other and a SEER of 16.5 on the higher compressor but an overall SEER of 20-something, which is supposed to be so well sealed that the environment will never see a single drop of coolant and which promises to use so little energy that we will get letters of congratulation from the Sierra Club, PG&E and Ah-nold?

Fourteen thousand, six hundred dollars.

Which brings me to heart medications. Bayer aspirin: it’s a good thing. Also, financing people really need to know CPR. Just sayin’.

Speaking of blackouts (oh, were we?) I expect to single-handedly solve the energy crisis in California with this new system. That’s right. I truly believe that my air conditioner caused the massive rolling blackouts five years ago. I know that my PG&E bill caused a personal blackout. There are whole months I can’t remember clearly.

Speaking of remembering clearly…I have suddenly remembered that I hate mohair. Hate it. Have vowed I will never-ever knit with it again. Ever. Period. Hallelujah-amen.

So I got a few rows into the shawl with the mohair and made a painful realization: it’s mohair.

Yes.

I know I knew it was mohair before I started.

And that I said it was well-behaved mohair.

Well, it is…as long as you don’t, you know, touch it. But as I was working with it, it began to become…hairy. Which would be good if a hairy-mohair look was the objective. In fact, I’d say that as far as mohairs go, this is still a great one. It isn’t so hairy you can’t see what you’re doing, but give it a little rub and *fumph!*, there’s the fur.

Only except…I don’t want the fur. Not on this shawl. It would mar the lace and look stupid. And shed. All over whatever you were wearing underneath it.

@*^&@.

So I broke off and, once I got done sulking about it and went stash-diving, discovered some beautiful bright blue Goode Plain Olde Wool loitering around in the bottom of a box.

It made gauge as if it had been designed for no other purpose than to precisely measure a 4” square when sixteen stitches were knitted twenty-four times on 5.0 needles. It has no false pride. It doesn’t not think it has the right to boss me around. It cast on smoothly, it doesn’t split every other stitch like the mohair, it has good stitch definition and by the way knits about ten times faster than the mohair did, even if I’m watching television instead of my hands at the time. Which inattention to Its Glorious Self the mohair punished with split, dropped, and otherwise mangled stitches every blessed time I raised up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence came my Meerkat Manor.

Did I mention I hate mohair?

And casting on 449 stitches again has taken tedium to a whole new level of hurt.

But that’s OK.

It helped me remember to take my Tylenol before retiring for the night.

Which reminds me, with due respect to the late, great Dave Allen: Good night, and may your god go with you.