Cattywampus

Oh Philly How I Love Thee, Let me count the ways

You have beer bars with fantastic beer

You have theaters galore

You have Steven Starr

You have dog parks

and whole foods

and dog friendly coffee shops

and neighborhood hardware stores where you can't get lost and they actually help you find things

and of course

You have people who break into cars in the middle of torrential downpours with sideways rain to steal ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

I have to say it

So, I've been watching Hulu.  Does anybody else watch hulu?  

I love hulu, with one exception - the ads.  Now, don't get wrong, I appreciate that I watch LESS ads than in regular tv and I appreciate that I can ignore them completely, even click to a different window while they are running in the background, but still, they drive me crazy.

I want to know if any of the ad companies have calculated the negative 'rage' effect of repetitive advertising.  During an hour long hulu show you see 3-4 commercials.  The SAME commercial.  And they tend to run the same ones on any given day, so if you were sick and spent a good deal of time on the couch watching buffy last friday, you might have seen 15-20 of the SAME $#@%&^% unnamed store commercial.  To the point where you know the jingle by heart and then some, where you have not only had time to absorb the add, but you have also had time to analyze and tear it apart bit by bit until you have decided that they really aren't saying what they think they're saying at all.  And after that stage you start to want to pierce your own eardrums when it comes on because really, I JUST CAN'T HEAR THE STUPID SONG EVER EVER EVER AGAIN OR I WILL HURT SOMEBODY.

And it is good to know that I am not the only person who feels this way.  This Slate article is about this very thing and made me feel less like a crazy person, it's pretty funny, as is the title:  'I hate you, blue-tux-wearing viagra guy!'

I am not alone.  Also, I am not psychotic for reacting this way to advertising.  Or if I am, I'm not the only one.

To go back to my original point, I wonder if said company has ever considered the rage effect.  I am still SO INCREDIBLY angry at that particular company for making me hear that jingle over and over and over again in one small bracket of time that I will now go out of my way NOT to shop there.  

Marketing people:  It's a new world out there!  The internet should not be an afterthought, stop insulting the buying power of internet viewers with your idiotic repetitive advertising!!!

*stepping off soap box*

YAY FOR FRIDAY!  

My mother is visiting this weekend and we have a wonderful weekend of yarn stores and other shopping and much too much eating and Christmas exchanging planned!  Hooray for fun things and being close enough to family to do these things!!  

We interrupt this knitting blog...

To say that seriously...if the blonde woman who sang '8 days a week' tuesday night doesn't go home I will be astonished.  Absolutely astonished.

Wow.  Sometimes they're bad...this was just freaking weird.  It was too weird to even judge good or bad, just WOWee weird.

A good old fashioned rant

Disclaimer **In this post I am very angry and ranty about completely non-knitterly things, if you'd like to see nice happy knitterly things please scroll down and look at my Simurgh stole and maybe even stop & peruse the quilts immediately below before you get that far.**

I haven't had a good rant in a while, but this one is a doozy and I can't just let sleeping dogs lie.

Let's start with the basics.  I am from New York, a reasonably liberal state.  I consider myself a modern woman, my husband and I share duties around the house and every once in a while he even does a load of laundry with no prompting.  We are both educated, we both have decent careers,  we are approximately the same age - so I ask you this:

WHY on God's green earth does the realtor call ME when she thinks the dining room floor isn't shiny enough and email him when she wants to talk about pricing based on neighborhood values.  SHE.  Not even he, SHE.  Seriously?  I am on the books as the daytime contact, but I'm not good enough to have a conversation about pricing? 

I wouldn't notice whether or not the dining room floor was shiny even if you gave me months to notice, she is obviously under some misapprehension that I should be concerned about the lack of shininess of my dining room floor.  I'm not.  I don't even know how one would go about making the floor shiny compared to vaguely smudged.  I count myself lucky to have a decent job so that I can afford to pay somebody to mop my floors every once in a while because people, I hate cleaning and knitting time is precious - given a choice, I will choose knitting every day.

Does she think that my husband will make some decision about the pricing of our house without consulting me?  It was an email, I could have been cc'd - how hard is that?  But I should have been called.  If I can be called at work about the freaking floors, I can certainly be called about PRICING.  I've gotta say, I'm much more concerned about and interested in pricing and fluctuating values in the neighborhood than whether or not the dining room floor is smudged.

This happens all the time to me in the south and it very, very rarely happened to me when I was living in the northeast.  A few months ago I had a lady quote me $120 to clean the gutters and when I told her I wanted to schedule it she asked me "Don't you want to check with your husband first?"  I calmly told her that no, I didn't need to, I can make this decision all on my own, thank you very much.  This I didn't find insulting, just par for the course around here. 

But the realtor, who sat down at the table and talked with us, SHE assumes I only need to be called about cleaning issues and can't deal with the rest? 

Absolutely.  Completely.  Unacceptable. 

In nupp purgatory

So I am diligently working on the Swallowtail shawl and I have 16 rows left to go.  I'm a bit on overload, I dont' like to knit things and feel rushed to get them done, but surely that's some how not my fault?

Surely I didn't start the shawl in mid-May and let it sit there with 6 repeats done until last weekend when I suddenly realized that if I think I'm wearing it to a wedding on the 16th it needs to be done and be done NOW.

Noooo, not me.

So I have knit nothing but the shawl since last Sunday, and it really is a quick knit, I should be done with it by Sunday.

But I have to say, I'm not a fan of the nupps.  I can't even find a decent google post to explain what they are - but I know some of you know.  So get this - I DREAMED about the nupps last night.  Oh yes, I did. 

After today though, no more nupps!  Until the next one anyway...

One of those days

So you know how sometimes you just have one of those days?  The kind of day when the doctor didn't call in the scrip you needed and the pharmacist looks at you like you're crazy?

The kind of day when you go to the grocery store b/c you won't have time tomorrow and when you get home you realize that there are no bananas, or garlic...or shallots, and you have to call and now you have to go back tomorrow anyway to pick that stuff up.

The kind of day when you come home to a horrible beeping sound b/c the invisible fence line has been cut?

And then when you investigate said cut line it is b/c bellsouth did a good job of putting random ruts through your yard in an unsuccessful attempt to bury the phone line?

The kind of day when you're already tired and fed up and stupid, stupid things keep happening to make you even more tired and angry?

And then you forget that the garbage needs to go out until you're settled and then it seems like a serious chore.

The kind of day that by the time you get outside to take a decent picture of the tulips it's so dark the flash goes off?

Well I hate those days.

But look.  This is what tulips look like in the semi-dark with a flash...

People who...

Don't wash their hands.

You know what I mean.  You're at work, in the bathroom, and the toilet flushes and the next sound you hear is the door to the bathroom opening & shutting.  No soap dispenser, no water running, no papertowels.

These people are EVERYWHERE. 

It happened yesterday and I rushed out as fast as I could but of course I stopped to wash my hands, so I wasn't very fast, but I want to know who these people are.  It's very important!  If I work with these people I want to make sure I never borrow their pens, never eat cupcakes they bring from home, never use their phone, preferably never, ever touch anything they have touched.

As luck would have it, yesterday I caught a glimpse of the perp.  It wasn't anybody I work with, just a random person who stopped in to use the bathroom.  WHEW.  Dodged a bullet there...

An addition to the list of things I hate

When people use the word antidote incorrectly - as in, listen to this cute little story, it works well if you need an antidote to tell at a party.

See?  oooh it just makes me angry.   

Sisyphus or WHY I HATE MY JOB

Sisyphus was compelled to roll a huge rock up a steep hill, but before he reached the top of the hill, the rock always escaped him and he had to begin again (Odyssey, xi. 593). The Image personifies Vain labor.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

Have you ever hated your job?

Visualize this: 

• Say you were hired to make widgets, and the board gave you a directive and said "Put together a committee to make a plan to make widgets."  So you did, in April you got approval to put together a committee to make a plan to make widgets.  In June the committee started to meet about making widgets, but nobody on the committee thought making widgets was a good idea.  So through June, July, August, September, and October you met for an hour and a half every week about widget making and slowly convinced the people on the committee that making widgets was a good thing to do, something you SHOULD do, something you needed to do.  And in November the Widget Committee put together a proposal for a solid plan to make widgets and you presented it to the board.  The board said 'ooh, this looks like a good widget making plan, let's review it after the first of the year'. 

• So now it's January and the board has met again and asked you this:  Why did you put together a plan to make widgets?  We thought you were making fuzzydigits!  Give us numbers to prove that widgets are better than fuzzydigits!  What are the advantages of widgets over fuzzydigits?  Defend this widgit making plan!

• And then you sit there in utter disbelief that you spent God only knows how many hours pushing people to put together this plan to make widgets, researching how to make widgets, and writing the proposal for the plan to make widgets over the last 7 months.  Now the people who requested the widget making plan are asking you to justify the widget making plan.

I say this: 

1. I don't give a flying BLEEP whether or not there are ever any #$%^#$ widgets here!!  I have no personal stake in widgets.  I will NOT defend the widget plan.  I will not sit here and listen to you attack me for MAKING the stupid widget making plan in the first place.  I don't want the BLEEPING widgets.  You ASKED me to do it.  If you wanted freaking fuzzydigits you should have asked for fuzzydigits 7 months ago!!! 
2. Are you completely insane???  If you actually want me to work here, I think you should reasses your evaluation of the widget plan. 

It's a bit traumatic (the biggest understatement of the day) to realize that you are being criticized for putting together and presenting EXACTLY WHAT THEY ASKED FOR.  And that all your work over the last 7 months was completely pointless.   Thank goodness for the three day weekend.  At least I can take a little while to take stock and really think about whether or not I actually want to continue working here.