Putting your money where your mouth is.

Well, fuck.

Another day, another senseless act of violence, another show of meaningless 'solidarity' by changing a facebook picture, all the while ignoring the terrible things that happen to people around the world, people who look less like you.

Yup.  It's good to be home.

Since the events in Paris this week, a mosque in Peterborough was deliberately set fire.  A woman near Toronto was punched in the stomach, the hijab ripped from her head while she was called a fucking terrorist and told to go back where she came from.

People disgust me, yo.

It's exhausting, explaining to people, so-called Christians, people who supposedly worship a man who decried pointing out the splinter in another's eye while ignoring the beam in your own, that all terrorists are not muslims and all muslims are not terrorists.

But I'm privileged in that if I don't feel like speaking up, I don't have to.

I'm tired of trying to explain that the refugees fleeing Syria are NOT the threat.. they're running from the same threat.

And I will fucking scream if one more person talks about 'taking care of our own first' while doing fuck-all to actually help the homeless and the mentally ill.

Homeless people need help. Yes.  No shit.

The mentally ill need help.  Again, no big revelation there.

Refugees need help. 

None of these things need to cancel the others out.  If we have problems with mental health access and homelessness, it's not because of a piddling number of what... 25,000 refugees? That is 0.07% of this country's entire population.  Not even an entire tenth of a percent. 

That's one town.  One rather small town.

The mentally ill and the homeless aren't going to suffer because we accept a small town's worth of refugees.  They're suffering because of multiple governments that had already forsaken them several times over, governments supported by people who ignore the homeless and shit on people who have to rely on government assistance, but trot them out as an argument for having to 'take care of our own'.

The people complaining don't actually care about the homeless.  One person in a thread said that "The money has to come from somewhere."

Yes, it does.  Probably taxes.  I'm okay with that.  I'm willing to pay taxes if it means homeless people, mentally ill people, and refugees all get help they need (btw, there's overlap in these groups, in case you didn't know).  Fuck yeah.  Sign me up.

If you actually care about homeless people, then I hope you're speaking up just as loudly when MP's and MPP's and municipal politicians are giving themselves raises every year.  I hope you're fighting for better access to affordable and emergency housing.  I hope you're donating to food banks more than just at Christmas and Thanksgiving.  I hope you're fighting for legislation that prevents discrimination against people with mental illness or people with criminal records*, things that often lead to people being unable to support themselves.

But don't trot out the homeless to support your bigotry by saying "We need to take care of our own." 

Rejection. Frustration.

So it's Thursday night and the opening for the gallery exhibition I had entered my painting in takes place tomorrow night. I have not yet heard if my piece was accepted.

I'm thinking I'm skunked again.

Sigh.

I'm feeling kind of sorry for myself, I will admit.  Just bums me out.  When I dropped it off, I got a look at some of the other submissions and immediately felt overwhelmed and kind of out of my league.

The Well-Travelled one tried to cheer me up by reminding me that a lot of the people who submit to these things have been painting and otherwise making art for years and sometimes decades, many of them having a formal educational background to boot.

This area, being a small, relatively close-knit area I have to wonder if there isn't a certain level of clique-ishess where those who have been active in the community get preferential treatment.  It's the same feeling I get with the theatre folk around here.

However, it's entirely possible that I looking for mini-conspiracies and nepotism in a misguided attempt at making myself feel better and stop berating myself for being a mediocre talent at best.  Jerkbrain is a jerk, and rejection just seems to feed the beast.

Meh.

As pointed out to me in another well-intentioned attempt by the Well-Travelled one to assuage my self-flaggellation in the face of defeat, at least this has been a bit of a learning experience.  I now know a few things I didn't before, such as turnaround time for custom framing, and where to buy my own damn frames.  I even know how to frame my own canvases now, so I guess that's something?

Bah. 

Still sucks.

SOURCE

No Plow Snow Plow I Don't Wanna Go Plow

I live in Canada.

It snows here.  A lot. It gets cold. Really cold.

There's an old joke about Canada having four seasons: Winter, More Winter, Dear God Even More Winter, and Roadwork.

(It should be mentioned, for those who don't live here, that this is not true everywhere.  It's a big friggin' country, with many climate zones.  Not everyone is subject to brutal winters, right Cheryl?)

But here in Central Ontario, it snows.  Like a mofo.  What's more, it gets cold.  Cold enough to freeze your god-dammed Winnebago, in the immortal words of Fozzie Bear.  Or was it Doc? Maybe it was the singing snowman, I don't know.

A friend and co-worker expressed annoyance at people who complain about Canadian winters.  I partly agree.  If you have lived in Canada for any number of years, there is no reason you should be surprised when you get dumped with 20cm of snow every day for a week, or if you wake up to -30C-with-wind-chill temperatures.

It really shouldn't come as a shock.

That being said, I fully reserve my right to complain about freezing my ass off, despite of wearing layers of clothing.  I fully reserve my right to complain about the sheer volume of static electricity emanating from my body at any given time, and about my compulsive need to tap or kick every door I go through, lest I somehow forget and manage to electrocute myself with the static build-up.

I reserve my right to complain about assholes on snowmobiles who do 65kmh down my tiny road with the 40kmh speed limit at 11 at night.  I also withhold my sympathy for people who send their machines through the ice when they knew damn well we had open water less than three weeks ago.

My house is drafty, my toes are cold.  I'm gonna complain.


I didn't ask to be born in this bullshit climate.

Were it not for the socialized medicine and certain custodial arrangements, I'd have fled this godforsaken no man's land years ago.  

Is this a traffic sign, or a plea for help?  SOURCE

I don't know cars but I can read an invoice, or, Why I Won't go to Pro Oil Change again

I'm really starting to wonder how I keep running into service companies that don't seem to understand that if you give someone a price on something, that should actually be what they pay.  Hell, just being relatively accurate would be great.   In the general ballpark, even. Whatever.

So, in preparation for an upcoming big-ass road trip, and in the name of general automotive maintenance, I decided to get my car's oil changed on my lunch break.  I've had friends offer to do my oil changes and sometimes I take them up on that but mostly I get lazy and impatient and end up going to a 10-min oil change place.  Usually Midas, but they are admittedly a bit pricey, especially when you start treating your motor-baby to synthetic oils.  Generally in the $90 range for a full-synthetic package.

So I decided to try a different place this time.  Pro Oil Change opened a franchaise near downtown about a year ago and lo and behold, they also had a ten-dollar-off coupon on their website and a claim to a 12-minute drive-through service, which seemed handy considering I get a half an hour for lunch.

Ka-ching.

Lunch time rolled around and I drove down to see what the pricing was like.  I asked the senior mechanic guy about pricing and if they did synthetic and he told me a full-synthetic oil change was 60 bucks plus tax.  I asked if the coupon was valid with that package and he said sure so I gave him my keys and hunkered down with one of the limited magazine offerings.

On a side note:  How much sense does it really make to have hot rod and other automotive magazines in a 10-minute oil change place?  Anyone interested enough in cars to want to read about them in magazines are probably doing their own oil changes.

But I digress.

Gripe Number One:  I waited a lot longer than twelve minutes.  I guess they were short-staffed, but I still feel the need to include that to give the fullest picture of my overall shitty experience dealing with this particular company.

Gripe Number Two:  My air filter needs changing, apparently.  I was offered a new one for 29.99 installed.  Now, I could be mistaken, but I have bought one of these before and I don't remember it being near thirty bucks.  And I don't know if you've ever seen where the air filter on a PT Cruiser sits, but a monkey could probably change it.  Hell, I'm fairly confident I could change it, and I'm sure there are monkeys with better automotive knowledge than I have.

Now, these first two gripes, I would let slide.  People get swamped, and understaffed.  Shit happens.  People are in the business to make money so they are going to try and upsell.  And honestly, my air filter DOES need changing.

However...

Gripe Number Three:  When I got the invoice, I saw that I had been charged 38.99 plus tax for service and 37.00 for the oil filter and about 5 liters of synthetic oil. 5W-30.

All told it comes to about $85 bucks after the tax.  After I had been told $60+

(for those unfamiliar with HST, the Ontario rate is 13% so after my coupon was applied, I should have been looking at about $58 bucks total)

I pointed out the discrepancy and was told that ".. that's how the computer rings it up.. you see, it's this much for the service and then this much for your oil."

To which I replied "I see that, but you told me it would be sixty dollars, not over seventy-five."  To which he again said that it was the way it comes up in the computer.

Once again, I reiterated that I was told $60 and that the price card I was shown when I came in also said $60 for the package.  If it comes up as over $75 on the computer, then that is what it should say on the price card.  That is what I *should* have been told when I asked about pricing.

I was also told that I needed to account for the tax.  Which pissed me off, because - as I pointed out on the computer screen - the price BEFORE tax was still fifteen bucks more than the price I was told.

The guy apologizes and says that he's run into this problem before and has told his boss about it a couple of times now.  I told him I'm not surprised he's had problems with customers over it because it's a shitty, dishonest way to do business.

I also told him that as a first-time customer this was a crappy first impression and that I felt I had been ripped off.  I agreed to let them do the oil change under false pretences, believing that I would be paying one price, and then being charged more after the fact.

He then apologized and offered to knock 15 bucks off the price, without the coupon.  He gave me the coupon back and said I could use it again the next time I was in.  I scoffed and told him to keep the coupon as I would not be returning.  I also suggested that he pass that message along to the company owner, once again expressing my opinion that theirs was a shitty, crooked way of doing business.

So yeah.  Will not be going back there.  I had full intention of going in this morning and speaking to the manager face to face, but... life.

For now, this will need to serve as my strongly worded letter and my warning to others who may be tempted as I was.. don't bother.  

Just some stuff.

My grandmother fell and broke her hip, or more accurately, my grandmother's hip broke and she had a fall as a result. She is having surgery for it tomorrow. I'm more than a little worried and upset. I've been lucky enough to have both my grandmothers around for a good long while.. I mean, not everyone is lucky enough to get to their 30's and still have grandparents around. Hell, I know people not much older than me who have already had to deal with losing both parents. So I'm lucky, I know that much.

Because I realize this, it's all the more upsetting to face the fact that they are both of them not as young as they used to be.

god. Isn't that the most ridiculous saying? Not as young as you used to be. Well no shit. I'm not as young as I used to be either. in fact, i'm a whole day older than i was yesterday. Seriously, what an idiotic saying. I feel like punching myself. It's as bad as saying "It's always in the last place you look!" Again, no shit.

I digress.

So I'm clearly worried, and I don't really know what to do. Damnit.

*************************************************

So, my hearing sucks. It's terrible. I'm pretty sure years of headphone abuse combined with a history of chronic ear infections (the over prescribing of antibiotics for said infections eventually, I believe, leading to my ulcerative colitis, but that's a story for another day) have done irreversible damage. I don't hear a lot of ambient noise, and I can have trouble making out what people say, especially if they talk low, fast and don't enunciate well.

I know it can be frustrating for those around me, having to repeat things to me, and me not always understanding things the first time around. It's not like it's not frustrating for me. I hate having to ask people to repeat things, or not to whisper to me. I hate having to fill in the blanks sometimes when people talk to me. I hate that I have to watch movies with the closed captioning on half the time, otherwise I have to have the TV blaring. I've had tests done, and looked into hearing aids, but for the actual amount of difference an aid would make is negligible, as apparently the loss "is only minor."

I'm told that I don't have any fluid build-up but... Well, I love to swim. Love it. A few years ago I went cliff jumping at Grundy lake and when I hit the water, it rushed into my ear and I couldn't hear properly for weeks afterward. Now I find that when I swim, if I stick my head too far under, my ears and head feel like they are going to explode with pressure.

I don't know if I should go back for another second opinion or not.

Hell. Not great mood overall. I kind of wish I had my covered porch again so I could watch the storm.

My body betrays me, once again.

Illness is an asshole.

There was a time when slowly, over a period of months, my life oozed away and my body, in it's attempts to keep that life in place became a ticking time bomb.

I rose, I recuperated, I fell once again. The threat still existed but had grown weak. There came a long, long period of good health, where my body felt strong, felt functional.

This time, when the signs began to show themselves, I was prepared, and I swore I'd be pro-active and take control before this thing took hold of me. I got the meds, I got the supplements and I embarked on a self-care plan.

Sunday, the pain in my legs began and I panicked. I had a full on panic attack, terrified that once again, I had that bomb, that cluster of cells, deep inside that was ready to break free and lodge itself in my lungs, in my brain. I feared Death. I feared everything I had worked for slipping away from me.

I'm not going to die. Not yet, anyway. Not statistically sooner than anyone else.

A swirling deluge of relief, annoyance and shame washed over me when the doctor reported there was no sign of clotting.

Relief, for obvious reasons. Not dying! Yay!

Shame for the worry and fear that had manifested in myself and affected those I love.

Annoyance because my diagnosis, an injured sciatic nerve, was just another fucking issue to deal with. And annoyance because the pain, which mimics the pain that nearly killed me, is triggering as hell. Annoyance because I don't have the luxury of assuming a pulled muscle.. The leg pain could mean a few days discomfort, or it could mean a lifetime of anti-coagulants (Three Strike Rule, y'all) and higher risk of stroke, heart disease or pulmonary embolism. I don't have the luxury of saying "Meh, I'll walk it off."

I'm optimistic, though. Today, the pain is tolerable. I've faced worse than this, and so have countless others. I have hope that this is a short term injury (the most plausible cause being a slight misjudgement of a step at a friend's house that brought my foot down a little too hard) if the improvement between today and yesterday is any indication.