It’s been a pretty crappy year, let’s face it. The election of Donald Trump is the biggest mistake the citizens of this country have ever made. If we survive this guy (i.e. the economy doesn’t meltdown or he doesn’t start a thermonuclear war), it will take decades to un-do the damage he will have done to our democracy.
I’m not looking forward to that struggle.
Charlie and I have come down with one doozy of a chest cold. One of our relative guests at Christmas must have been the carrier. I say that because most of our kids and grandkids are sick with the same thing right now. It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya’.
I can’t remember the last time I had a cold; it has to be quite a few years back, maybe 5 to 10. I’m about four days into this one and my chest muscles are super sore from all of the coughing. Same with Charlie. We’ve just been lying around, doing nothing, hoping that the thing runs its course ASAP. We’ve got the Mucinex and Robitussin cocktail working 24/7, on the advice of our doctor. He said “Don’t come in here!”, because he’s down to two staffers from five…the other three have the same affliction. Everyone in town has it; it’s an epidemic!
I had to take my sick sweetheart down to the DMV today so that she could: (a) infect the rest of the city with this shitty cold; and, (2) take her written driver’s test. Charlie had studied for that thing for two weeks, and she damned sure wasn’t going to miss her appointment. She passed, by the way.
That friggin’ DMV office in Temecula is a disgrace. There are always long lines wrapped around the building, which hasn’t changed since Temecula became a city. Back then, the city population was about 30,000; now, it’s over 150,000. And, this postage stamp-sized DMV office serves the entire Temecula-Murrieta valley area, with a total population of around 300,000. So, the undersized facility is always crowded and miserable. Add to that the fact that there is virtually no parking to be had. It’s in an industrial area, very little on street parking capacity, and the DMV parking lot is miniscule. So, the whole thing sucks. I hope Charlie gave every employee a nice case of Super Chest Cold…Happy New Year!
My poor granddaughter Jessica really screwed the pooch awhile back. She was driving her car (actually, the one I’m paying for!) and wasn’t paying attention (cell phone?), and ran into the back of another car…going about 45 mph! Oh, Boy…she called us right after it happened and was crying over the phone…it was a tearjerker!
Anyway, the good news was that no one got hurt seriously, but the bad news is that the car is totaled. Damn…that car was supposed to last her through four years of nursing school! I’m not sure what we’re going to do now; she needs a car for school, but I don’t want to be on the hook for another four-year car loan. Plus, her already high car insurance is going to skyrocket. This could get ugly. Pray for us.
The joint where we store our RV recently informed us that we are being evicted because the facility is going out of the outdoor storage business; in the future, they will only have enclosed storage lockers…(the kind you see on “Storage Wars”, the fake reality show where a guy buys the contents of an abandoned storage locker, sight unseen, and, almost always, finds some sort of weird, valuable item in the locker.)
Anyway, the mass eviction is a huge problem for the several hundred RV owners who store their vehicles at this location, because there was already a shortage of RV storage space in Southern California. I sweated bullets for a day or so after I got the unwelcome news. What would I do? I ended up asking a friend of mine for advice; his name is Phil Berg, and he owns a mobilehome park in Lake Elsinore. He also knows everyone. He hooked me up with his MH park handyman who just happened to have some space on his Lake Elsinore acreage, about five miles north of here. It’s dirt, but…beggars can’t be choosers. I met with the guy and we cut a deal for $100 per month, which is $80/mo less than I was paying at the fancy place. Talk about turning lemons into lemonade!
I feel sorry for the other RV owners who will be scrambling to find storage space for their rigs. It could get ugly for them.
Charlie and I and my sisters and brother all showed up at my Mom’s board and care for Christmas Day. We brought gifts for Mom and her five female friends, including Mom’s roomie, Marcia, who is a healthy 100 years old, and Cookie, who is 90 and has her own room. Anyway, we had a nice time and the ladies enjoyed their gifts.
I heard yesterday that Marcia, Mom’s roomie, fell down and broke her shoulder, and that Cookie has something like congestive heart failure and is circling the drain. Gee whiz…everything was going so smoothly…what a bummer! Such nice ladies…
I hope that the crummy atmosphere around there doesn’t affect my Mom, who has been doing quite well lately. She’ll be 90 in a few months.
I’ll have my fingers crossed all year.