Cranky pants

I’m far from being a perfect person and I’m starting to think I have way too many pet peeves to even attain average status.  The vast majority of them, however, have to do with the way people drive.   Sometimes the things people do just baffle me.

1. Turning from the driving lane when there is a perfectly good turning lane that you are blatantly not using, forcing me to slow down.
2. Slowing down to 5 mph to make a turn.  Unless you are a super-frail old person or are transporting an Ace of Cakes-style confectionary wonder, there is no excuse for this.
3. Braking as you go through a green light.  (brain explodes)
4. Turning left right in front of me as I'm coming towards you.  For some bizarre reason I referred to these people as "suicide bunnies" the other day.  I'm thinking of making it a thing.
5. Hanging out for a good 5 seconds before accelerating when a light turns green.  This is not your personal green light.  You have to share with others.  Go.
6. Blocking an intersection because you were about to lose your green light and then you got stuck and now everyone on the cross-street can't move because you're in the way.  I'll admit sometimes this can be an honest mistake, but sometimes people are just jerks. Also, does no one else pay attention to the cross walk signs that count down the number of seconds left?  I love those things.
7. Swerving in front of me then braking to turn.  Dude.  Not cool.
8. Turning left from the right lane or vice versa.  How in the world did you get your license?  If you miss your turn you go around the block.  You're not in some high speed chase where the bad guy gets away if you lose sight of him.
9. Driving slowly but swerving in your lane.  I don't know if you're drunk or what, but it makes me nervous to try and pass you so I'm forced to go all slow until I get angry enough that I don't care how much you'll destroy my car, I'm passing you anyway.
10. Not giving me the wave when I'm nice and let you merge or turn in front of me.  ALWAYS give the wave when people are nice, it's not like it's hard.  Do NOT give the wave if you cut someone off.  Then it's just snarky.
11. Ignoring all of the "lane closure ahead" signs and zipping right down to the end and forcing your way into the line, cutting all of the responsible people who got over a mile ago.  You, you personally, are causing traffic jams.
12. Zooming all the way to the end of a merging lane on the interstate and forcing your way in rather than taking an open spot at the beginning of the lane.  People coming up on the ramp are looking for you and making room, people past it are not.  (This is really the same peeve as #11 minus the construction.)

You may have noticed a good portion of these pertain to people forcing me to slow down because I find that to be incredibly annoying.  I mean look, I just used a bunch of gas to get up to the speed I was going and if I have to stomp on the brake I lose all of that momentum and then have to use MORE gas to get back to the speed I was originally at!  I don't know if you've noticed, but gas is really freaking expensive.

I know, some of these are pretty nit picky but I'm not always in the most forgiving frame of mind when I drive and I start panicking that I'm going to be late.  Also, I promise I don't have road rage!  I don't actually DO anything to these people, I just grumble to myself about their callous disregard for my schedule/gas budget.

A note about footnotes

I find footnotes to be inherently funny and I 100% blame Terry Pratchett for this.  If I’m reading something and there are footnotes but they’re just informative rather than humor-centric I feel cheated and may stop reading whatever it is as a result.

This is important stuff people! (Spoiler: No it isn't)

I think one of the most surreal things about moving to a different part of the country is not knowing where to buy groceries.  It’s such a normal everyday thing that it doesn’t even occur to you that it’s one of the many adjustments you’re going to have to make.  The stupid thing is, it gets me every time.  Not that I’ve actually made more than one significant move, but it can be an issue on vacation too. 

For me, the standard grocery is Kroger.  There’s no objective reason for this; it’s just that I shopped at Kroger my entire life until I moved to California.  Apparently, they don’t have them here.  So when I got here I was a bit flummoxed.  I had no idea what the good chains were and holy cow are there a lot of chains.  I started out trying all of the close stores on a rotating schedule until I eventually settled on a couple of winners.  Predictably, my main store is Ralphs.  If you don’t know why, Ralphs is owned by Kroger.  The store has the same familiar layout, has most of the brands I like and there’s the occasional fun of spotting a product with a Kroger label. 

Fun Fact:  Ralphs Rewards cards and Kroger Plus cards are interchangeable; you can use them at either store. 

The other grocery I go to a lot is Henry’s.  All I buy there is produce.  It’s great.  It’s usually pretty cheap and sometimes they have insane deals.  Since roughly two-thirds of my food budget gets used up in the produce section this is a big deal for me.  I know that Henry’s gets compared to Trader Joe’s a lot, but all I can say about that is I’ve walked into Trader Joe’s a few times and walked right back out after I saw the prices.  There’s no way I’m paying a dollar for one apple.  I know to a lot of people this probably sounds kind of crazy and that I care entirely too much about where I buy food, but for some reason I really like grocery shopping.  I’m not really sure why since I always buy the same things (I have the least-varied diet ever, I know it’s less than healthy).  Maybe it’s because it’s kind of a guilt-free  shopping spree since if I don’t eat I die.

I’m just very neat, okay?

I have been accused on multiple occasions of having OCD and always in a good-natured haha-you’re-so-funny-but-seriously-have-you-been-checked kind of way.  I don’t really think I do, but I definitely like to have things neat and orderly.  I love to read and my books (I have ~370) are organized by genre then alphabetical by author’s last name then title, unless it’s in a series then it’s in series order.  And they are all logged in a spreadsheet.  Ones that I haven’t read yet are highlighted and ones that I started but never finished are highlighted a different color (I like to buy random books I think look good, sometimes I’m wrong). 

My DVDs are not organized at all for the sole purpose of not being organized at all. (I caught a lot of crap about the books, okay?)  I don’t have very many DVDs so it’s not a big deal and they are divided into TV and movies, but I don’t really think that counts as organized.  And the movies are beside their sequels, but it’s not like they’re REALLY organized.  I mean, there’s no reason to go all crazy with the unorganized thing.

In college I worked as a grader for the calculus classes so I had to alphabetize all the tests and quizzes so I could input the grades and alphabetize the folders that we stuck the stuff in to hand back their work.  I had to alphabetize A LOT; we’re talking hundreds of kids multiple times a week.  Apparently, one of my friends didn’t know this was my job so whenever someone asked what I did last night and I said “Alphabetizing” he thought I was going frantically around my house looking for things to organize and possibly messing things up just so I could put them back.  This makes me worry about the impression I make on other people. 

Another thing that my boyfriend at least seems to think is OCD is that I eat M&M’s by color.  I don’t see a problem with this.  Obviously they should be eaten:

1.  Blue
2. Brown
3. Red
4. Green
5. Orange
6. Yellow

When I first made the order it had something to do with minimizing the chances your mouth would be funny colors after eating them, but my boyfriend kept trying to argue why my choices didn't make sense with the reason I gave, so now there's no reason.  It's just because I say so.

Pwned!

So you know how guys always try to pick up girls by lying and trying to talk about made-up careers and backgrounds and stuff?  (I don’t actually know how much this happens in real life, but it’s practically non-stop in sitcoms.)

I always wish that would happen to me.  But I want the guy to be lying about something I know all about so that I can trip him up and call him out and be all “Aha!”  I think that’d be great.  And I maybe even have a semi-decent chance of it happening (using sitcom stats) because although I live in LA now, I used to live in Kentucky.  And if people lie, they’re probably going to lie about stuff that’s far removed from where they are now so it’s harder to check on.  I feel pretty confident I could catch someone out if they lied about Kentucky (heck, let’s say the South in general), horses, alcohol (I used to work for a distillery) or math.  I’m not saying I know all there is to know about these things by any means, but I think I know more than someone who’s lying about knowing all about them. 

Now that I think about it, this is probably just another form of my pathological competitiveness.  If I can call him out, I win!  I like to win entirely too much.  Unfortunately, this entire scenario is highly unlikely because I’m a fuddy duddy who never goes out and if there’s a strange guy in my apartment I’m not going to be listening to him hit on me, I’m going to be pulling out my baseball bat to encourage him to leave.

This means war

My apartment seems to have a small-to-moderate cockroach problem.  It’s not my fault though, I promise.  I don’t leave food or water out and I regularly take out the trash.  I can, therefore, only conclude that my neighbors are to blame.  I’m not a particularly squeamish sort of person, so this didn’t actually strike me as an issue for the first few weeks of living here.  I kind of figured, “If I see them, I’ll kill them.”  This has long been my stance towards insects and spiders.  At my parents’ house I literally made a deal with the spiders in my room and the bathroom (don’t judge me) that if they stayed out of my bed and the shower I wouldn’t squish them.  They abided by it and my brother and sister were the only ones who ever got bitten.  (And yes, I absolutely made that deal after reading “The Seventh Son” by Orson Scott Card, but it worked.) 

Anyway, after a stray comment from my sister about how disease ridden cockroaches are, I started to get kind of disgusted and a little bit paranoid.  She has tons of little gems to toss out for any occasion because she’s in medical school and her world is full of unsavory things she feels the need to share with the rest of us.  

So I decided the thing to do would be to get some traps/poison and some caulk to seal up the baseboards.  I ran this plan by my boyfriend who was underwhelmed.  He seemed genuinely concerned about the caulk part of it in particular, since he didn’t want me to mess the apartment up even though my landlord has a distinctly hands-off approach.  I decided his fears were unfounded so I took myself over to Lowe’s to gear up.  I have two distinct approaches when I go into Lowe’s:

1.        I’m just a girl who doesn’t really know anything and couldn’t some manly man please come help me?  (This is when I don’t feel like reading signs to figure out where stuff is.  Usually if I look lost someone will ask if they can help, but if all the roaming employees are hiding there’s always someone at the paint counter.)

2.       I’m a woman on a mission, don’t you dare assume I need help just because I’m a girl.  (Striding purposefully through Lowe’s does give me a sense of badass-ness, I’ll admit.)

So I came home with poison bait and caulk.  (And a caulk gun.  How awesome am I for owning a caulk gun?)  Dilemma:  do I put out the bait first letting them take the poison back to their nests and then seal everything up once they’re dead to prevent a new batch or do I seal them out and then put out the traps in case any got in?  The decision was made more difficult by the fact that this was the first I’d heard that cockroaches have nests.  (I do acknowledge that it's ludicrous to think that any amount of caulk could completely trap cockroaches.  They're crafty devils.)  But I decided to put out the bait first since that was a lot less labor intensive than caulking my entire apartment. 

My boyfriend expressed concern again about the whole caulking idea, so I explained that I had gotten the trim and molding kind that you can paint over and scrapers so there’s no excess and that I had caulked before.  His response was along the lines of “Oh, I didn’t know that.”  But it was said in such a way that it reminded me of the way he reacted when he found out I has scored the same as him on the ACT in high school.  “YOU got that?!”  To be frank, it was not a very flattering reaction.  Sometimes I think he forgets that I do have a real college degree even though I don’t happen to be doing anything with it.  Anyway, I took the high road and did not remind him who has to borrow whose hammer because apparently only one of us is handy enough to have real tools.  (He actually has a lot more than I do but mine are more useful in an everyday sense and also more accessible, so I win.)   I haven’t gotten around to caulking yet because, let’s be serious, that’s going to be a lot of work.

UPDATE:  Okay, so I decided to rearrange my living room because it was kind of cramped and as a general rule I like to have a big open space in the middle of rooms and that’s just not what was happening.  After I moved the filing cabinet in the corner by my desk, I discovered a hole in the wall.  I don’t really know how to describe this hole, because it kind of seemed like it was supposed to be there.  It looks like a metal plate embedded in the wall that has cut-outs and part of the plate is covered but the other part isn’t.  


Now the first thought in my mind was “How in the world do I not remember that being there when I moved in 3 months ago?” and the second was “Well that explains why there were always cockroaches by my desk.”  That was something that had always bothered me since it made no sense.  I always saw way more creepy crawlies by my desk than in the kitchen or bathroom.  Granted, I spend more time at my desk than either of those other places so I figured that was why.  Turns out it was the gaping hole in the wall.  Clearly that needed to be fixed.  


My first thought was to seal it shut with tape (I have painter’s tape so it wouldn’t damage the wall), but I started getting antsy about it not sealing that well since the walls are textured.  Then I remembered:  I have caulk.  Mwahaha!  Hopefully that hole wasn’t actually for anything because it is now completely sealed up.  I feel like I should win some kind of amateur handyman award.

Just wear socks for instant fun

My floors are all hardwood which, I remember at some point, I used to love.  They’re way easier to clean up since you can just sweep and maybe Swiffer wet mop if you feel like it or if you get lotion-y footprints all over the floor the way I do when I don’t want dry feet but I don’t want socks either.  Two apartments ago I had all hardwood floors and it was great because I’m a girl with pretty long hair and if you are or have ever lived with a person like that you know that hair control is a serious issue.  In my old place the air currents would move the hair around the floor until it gathered in clumps in three different corners where it could then easily be picked up and thrown away.

I don’t know if my current place has bad air flow or if the furniture placement is throwing things off, but here my hair does not settle sedately into a few key locations waiting patiently to be disposed of.   Instead, a few rogue strands will meet up, form alliances with dust bunnies and roam the place at large frequently stopping in the middle of the floor making me think 1. It’s a bug that needs to be destroyed or 2. I live in a den of filth and disgustingness which makes me all dejected, causing me to turn to Baked Lays for comfort.

UPDATE:  I’ve since rearranged the furniture (several times) and now it’s much better.  I can see any dirt really easily though because of all the natural light I get so if I’ve been too busy to clean for a while that still gives me the heebie jeebies. 

Optional utilities?

So a fun thing I discovered about my apartment a few weeks after moving in is that there is no heat.  No central heat, no radiator, nothing.  This isn’t as big of a problem as it might seem since I live in southern California, but it definitely made me go “Huh.”  My last apartment had heat but I refused to use it since, based on my preconceived notions, it shouldn’t get cold enough here to require heat.  Or to even really qualify as cold. 

This, as it turns out, is not the case.  Last winter it got quite chilly but because I am stubborn and cheap I refused to use the heat.  Instead, on really cold days, I would turn on the oven and open the door because in my mind that is obviously the more frugal option and not so much cheating as it is ingenious.  So far, even though it’s been cold a few days it’s been mostly okay because the afternoon sun pours in the windows of the living and dining rooms which heats them up pretty nicely until I’m sweating in all my heavy clothes and cranky from being overheated.  The logical thing to do would be to remove a layer of clothes, but sometimes I get in a stubborn mood and refuse, thinking that if I will it hard enough the ambient temperature in my apartment will become perfect without me having to change clothes.  It rarely works out.

UPDATE:  Now that there have been several definitely chilly days without the benefit of afternoon sunshine due to malicious clouds, I can unequivocally state that my apartment gets way too freaking cold.  My toes were regularly turning blue until I remembered my winter weather trick from my old apartment in Kentucky.  That building was built in 1910, had crappy radiators and my room had two exterior walls, one of which with six feet of single pane windows.  It was normally about 50 degrees in there during the winter.  I’d have to take breaks every 10-15 minutes when doing homework because my writing hand would go numb.  Anyway, the solution I came up with for my feet was to put on a pair of socks and then over those put on these silky fuzzy socks I randomly got for Christmas one year.  Then I would tuck whatever blanket I was wrapped up in under my feet and voila!   No frostbite.  The only adjustment I made to that here is that for Christmas my sister and brother got me this little Afghan rug that fits perfectly under my desk, keeping my toes off the frigid floor.  I actually feel kind of bad about having it shoved under there since it’s a really nice rug, but it’s just temporary and no one wins if my toes fall off.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE:  My little brother has come through in a major way.  Without even knowing about my dire situation, he gave me these insanely awesome fuzzy boots (made to be worn indoors) that are quite possibly the best thing I’ve ever put on my feet.  My feet SWEAT now despite the frigid temperatures and I hung the rug on the wall so I could quit feeling guilty every time I accidentally stepped on it.  All-around improvements.