Actual human clients

It makes me bloody mad, the way people treat women, and I'm not blaming the mens for this one, since the women do it too. But it's been rubbing me as wrong-wayedly as a cat going backwards in a spin dryer this week with the tradesmen we've had in to replace our kitchen. I've been around for the process, working at home as I do, and . . . grrrr.

Ex. 1. The clamps for the sink (a fucking lovely sink it is too) weren't quite the right size to fix it around the new stone benchtops (oh yes, stone benchtops. Such are the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes), so the stonemasons needed some bits of wood to help get them into place.

"Does your husband happen to have any bits of wood lying around?" And he smirked.

Now you come into my fucking house, my house that I own, or rather that we're in hock up to our eyeballs on with the bank, and you ask me if my fucking husband has wood? I mean, COME ON. You might as well ask me if I have a fucking bomb shelter to try to save myself from the wrath of his tempestuous rampaging manhood. (I don't. I'm a storm chaser). And you know, you could just fucking ask me, buddy, if we have any bits of wood laying around the house. It's not just men who are crafty.

To be fair the F-word is making us furniture with scrapwood like a nutcase, and I'm not, but not because I'm a woman so I don't want to; only because I'm too busy outearning him by 300%. So take your fucking gender roles and shove them back down your fucking innuendo hole. Stupid fucker.

Ex 2. The plumber was meant to come hook up our gas stovetop (which is beautiful, and has a special wok element, because that is also one of the perks of belonging to the parasitic classes) and the water supply to the kitchen. He had plenty of time to do so, given that the stonemasons, for all their fucking cracks about husbands and wood, did their job fast and were outta here by 11. And then he didn't. He told me over the phone he'd come by sometime today, but he didn't know when, and would let me know day-of.

Now readers, Friday is a heavy work day. And I have a fucking Mandarin exam tonight we were only told about on Saturday worth 15% of the class mark which I'm taking a break cramming for to write this blog entry in the middle of procrastinating from work. And I wanted to go for a nice long run this morning to try to calm my brain down enough to get it into the sort of mood where I could fool it into thinking it knows Chinese. So some fucker just popping around whenever he felt like it sometime during the day was not going to work for me. When the F-word got home, he called him, and immediately got a commitment (which was carried out) of getting here around 10:30.

Fuck you, plumber. Fuck. You. You forced us to spend another night washing dishes in the bathub and you cheated us of an extra 24 hours of living with our new kitchen in a functional state, and let me tell you, readers, this new kitchen is the fucking tits. Not only did you do that - which frankly I was expecting because that's just the nature of home renos, and I was really astounded and dubious when told the whole thing'd wrap up in a week - but in the process you treated me like I was a 5-year-old who'd randomly dialled your number and then treated my old man like he was an actual human client. Fuck. You.

Well, plumber, what you might not be aware of is that I manage the joint account, hence your payments, and your fucking attitude has informed me that I would rather keep your cash in our mortgage offset account as long as possible; what that'll save us in interest breaks now outweighs any regard I may have for your convenience. After all, what would you expect when you take on a five-year-old for a client? Silly plumber. I mean, for the sake of fuck. Let's see how specific you can get with a woman about what time things are meant to happen when your money is involved, cockhead.

A bitta culchaw

We went to a concert last night. It was the sort of concert I've been to quite a lot - a chamber orchestra cranking out Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart crowd pleasers. The sort of thing that's pretty much always happening if you're in a big town, so if you feel like some music and there's nothing else happening, there's that, and it's good. Here, of course, it was probably pretty much the music event of the year.

Well, that's fine, I guess. In the sense there's nothing I can do about it. But it took me most of "Spring" to reconcile myself to that. You see, not even North Bay is like that - the NBSO pushes the envelopes it can - and I was getting a little upset about how isolated I was feeling, and how the scope for musical discoveries had shrank for me so remarkably - not just from Europe, but from Toronto too.

Anyways, I snapped myself out of it. Somebody who likes classical instrumental music and doesn't like Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi etc. is just being a cunt. It's like not liking kittens. I really relaxed into the Vivaldi and everything was fine. What helped was the music quite practically guiding me through the idea of four seasons. People had warned me I'd miss having four seasons, and I think my stock response was always that they were probably right, but that I thought it was worth checking. Well, it turns out I miss the crap out of having four seasons. Our life here isn't uneventful, you know, but the weather not being frightfully extreme sort of feels like you're tumbling toward the grave without any way-markers. There are seasons here, but they're subtle. A little too subtle for me. And so for me, winter ends up being the season when I'm atrociously cold at night, and summer the season where I get heat rashes.

I shouldn't write any more today. I'm in a pisser. We got our written Chinese exam sprung on us for Friday and I have this shitload of other things to do, while I try to resuscitate my other computer no less. Feeling a little victimized by my first world problems. I probably need to go back to India for awhile.