Category: Wednesday Wrant

I haven’t written a Wednesday Wrant in awhile, mostly because the last couple of weeks, most of my ranting thoughts have been about Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum. But, I’d rather keep it mostly unpolitical on my blog, since I’m pretty sure my political opinion won’t skyrocket my readership. Also, the dog upstairs has been getting steadily quieter as the weeks go on, so I can’t complain too much.

So today, I want to rant about the sunroof of my car. Ever since I moved to Texas, I’ve been able to pretty well count on one hand the number of days it’s rained (which, for those who can’t count on their hands, means it hasn’t rained much). Some time ago, I thought I smelled a little bit of mildew in my car, but when it dissipated almost immediately, I didn’t think about it again.

Fast forward to last week, when we had a storm worthy of the Midwest in Spring. Nonstop thunder that left my fraidy-cat dog huddling under the bed, lightning that made me wonder if I was in a rave, rain and hail beating against the window thanks to the gale-force winds that came with it. I’m also a fairly light sleeper, so it kept me up for several hours.

Since I work from home and use the gym at my apartment, I only drive about once a week. So two days later, when I got in my car to go to the grocery store, I discovered about 2 inches of water in the floorboard of my car, a soaked and stained passenger’s seat, and a discolored roof. After finding a place in town that could repair a sunroof leak, which was of course not conveniently located for me, they informed me that there was a lump of mud lodged in the drainage tubes for the sunroof that they needed to flush.

Did you know that car sunroofs had drainage tubes? NO? Me neither. They looked at me like I was a neglectful car mom and cautioned me that I am supposed to flush the tubes once a year. Why have I owned no less than three cars with sunroofs and never, once, been told that part of owning a car with a sunroof is getting the tubes drained every other time I rotate the tires? Also, I get that you CAN charge $80 to run some water though some tubes, because I have no idea where they are and would probably eff something up if I did it myself, but that’s a little steep, don’t you think? Still, thanks for vacuuming out all the water. That was nice. Not $80 nice, but nice.

In other news, it rained again last night and the inside of my car and it’s nice and dry on the inside, so I’ll see you again next year, one place in town that flushes sunroof drainage tubes…

It’s been difficult getting back into the groove of things at the office, since the holidays and being sick last week.  I had this nasty sore throat for several days, but I finally got healthy and ready to get back to work.

Unfortunately, something has been distracting me when I already have this motivation problem – the little dog upstairs has been barking.  All day, every day.  And it’s got this yip-yap whine that makes it sound like it’s in mortal danger.  At first, my dog would whine when she heard the dog upstairs, but after awhile, she’s just kind of learned to ignore it.

I wish I could do the same.  Typically, I just turn up the podcast or the song I’m listening to and try to drown him out, but then I have a meeting where the only background noise I have is YAP-YAP-YAP-YAP over and over and over.  Normally, I would call the apartment office, but I’m a little hesitant to do so.  You see, my dog is part chow, and the Texas Apartment Association expressly prohibits any mix of breed they want to call “aggressive”: Akitas, Pit bulls, German shepherds, Dobermans, Rottweilers, and Chows.  Never mind the fact that my dog is scared of her own shadow.  So I told them she’s a Retriever mix, which isn’t a complete lie, but I hate to invite complainer karma lest someone decides they want to complain about my dog.

When the owners are home, the dog doesn’t bark, but it runs from one end of the apartment to the other all the time, which would make me wonder if it were thundering outside if only it weren’t Texas, where it rains about two days a year.  If I write the dog into a story and then murder it violently, I hope you all won’t think less of me if it turns up dead the next day.  I would think it’d be barking itself hoarse by now.

I hope everyone had a fantastic holiday, filled with magic and wonder.  If nothing else, I hope it was preferable to mine, because mine was kind of a disaster.  But hey, I am home now, and we’ve begun a New Year.  And next year, I’m staying home for Christmas.

So without going into too much detail, let me just say my holiday was filled with a head cold, a stomach bug, a teething one-year-old, a blaring car alarm 12 hours away, and family that generally drives me crazy.

It was actually, seriously, comforting to celebrate with my boyfriend’s parents.  No one was vomiting, teething, showing up late, talking about the evils of microwaves, etc.  The first day we went over for a visit, I was just getting to where I felt somewhat normal again after my stomach bug.  No more vomiting or other rapid fluid loss (lovely).  We’re sitting around chatting when all of a sudden I start feeling a sharp pain in my upper belly.  It gets worse and worse, so I go lie down and finally decide I need to go to an Urgent Care.

Which brings me to my Wednesday Wrant. Urgent Care my ass.  We’re in Olathe, which is the Kansas City equivalent of no man’s land.  The closest place to us was a Walgreen’s Care Clinic, so we went over there, after waiting for what seemed like 15 minutes for a train. We get to the clinic, which has a sign up saying they won’t be accepting any new patients for the evening.

We Google the closest place, which takes us out to an empty parking lot.  We start calling Urgent Care places left and right, all of which are either closed or about to close in 20 minutes – at 7 pm.  What the crap is the point of an Urgent Care that closes at 5? That stops taking patients at 6:30? Luckily I got to feeling better before we resorted to the emergency room, but the unhelpfulness of the Urgent Care industry in Olathe, Kansas has pissed this nice Midwestern gal off.  And Google Maps, sometimes you really suck, too.

I use Twitter pretty prolifically for expressing my distaste for things, people, and events, but sometimes 140 characters just doesn’t cut it. It occurred to me that I really have no designated place to get my rant on from time to time, and having seen other author blogs do this week, I am adding a new feature to my site… Wednesday Wrant. The twist is, at some point, I plan to turn these rants into a manuscript of some kind, so stay tuned!

So, as the title might imply, my rant this week is about coffee pots. My fingerprints are, apparently rife with some kind of crazy Kryptonite for coffee machines. This is a fairly recent development, about the last four years or so. Before that, I always just kind of bought a cheap-o coffee pot because, hey, coffee is coffee, right? But a few years ago, when my boyfriend and I were dating, and lived in separate apartments, we each had our own cheap-o coffee pots. His was a little 4-cupper that he’d had for about eighty years, and the little on/off switch (yes, the kind you actually switch, not the button) finally stuck in the off position, meaning it was time for a new one.

He had some gift cardage to use up, so he decided to get a fancy-ish coffee pot to replace it. When we moved in together, I still had the coffee pot from my apartment, which we kept as a backup. The entire time we had the backup, nothing went wrong with our fancy-ish coffee pot. Fast forward to the time we move to Texas, where I still have the backup coffee pot at our old place while my boyfriend gets things ready at our place in Texas. There’s only so much stuff we can take, so I relinquish the backup coffee maker.

As soon as we finish moving me to Texas, our fancy coffee pot decides that it, too, prefers the power button in the off position, and it decides to stay there, as if it knows we have no backup coffee pot anymore. So our solution, naturally, is to go out and get a more expensive, fancier coffee maker. Fast forward four months, and the thing is now stuck on “clean”. I Googled the problem, which is apparently in our coffee pot’s model. Lots of people have had it, but no one has solved it. I tried running a few pots of water through it and unplugging it for a few hours, and the clean button finally went off, and it didn’t beep incessantly. I did a happy dance around the kitchen and did an Aaron Rodgers touchdown dance (or discount double-check, whichever you prefer), displaying my amazing human triumph over machine.

Until the next morning, when I went to brew a pot of coffee and the Clean button came back on. I pressed, and pressed it, trying to get it to go away. It just beeped at me. Thank you, fancy expensive coffee pot. I am just going to tell myself that you’re making nice, clean coffee for me, and buy your cheaper cousin when I inevitably break this one.