Hello dapper lads and comely ladies.
I’m in the middle of moving but have decided to stop moving for a bit to share some thoughts.
Am I underestimating how often the average person shops for something other than food?
My neighbours, for example, have an Amazon Prime subscription. They’ve had it for a while. Instead of keeping their recycling inside until they’re ready to dispose of it, they pile empty Amazon boxes upon a stool outside their suite that they probably bought off Amazon. The boxes vary in number and size, which is how I know it’s a steady stream of orders.
Even if they’re using Amazon to buy consumables, such a dish soap, that’s still fucked up. Like, you’d sooner give Bezos your money than to walk five minutes to the grocery store? And the guy is a jogger! Good luck running away from your spending problem, #304.
I can’t wait to get a whole bunch of new neighbours to judge, including my boss. Does he know how to sort his recycling? AN UPDATE TO COME.
People who don’t sort their recycling upset me. This is an extension of The Shopping Cart Theory. Similarly, the other day at work, I opened a box to find a pair of child’s winter boots that had been returned dirty. “Really?” I asked a co-worker who responded, “It happens all the time.” People are relentlessly inconsiderate by nature.
I am annoyed all the time, and that, in itself, is annoying: An infinite loop of annoyance.
On a more cheery note, I’ve had two people offer to help me move this week. They’re both excellent people who have never abandoned a physical shopping cart and probably sort their recycling even better than me: separating the foil and polyethylene layers from the paper of their empty Tetra Paks.
I’ve made the traditional pizza offering, but there’s a caveat: they’ll have to eat standing up because I only have a camp chair.
Aside from having new people to scope, I’m excited about living in a place where I’ll be outside as soon as I open the door rather than still inside, confronted by a mountain of empty boxes from Amazon.
Also, I’ll get to have plants. Not that having plants was forbidden–aside from marijuana plants–it’s because I once lived with two cats that chewed on everything, including the wall. Unlike walls, many plants are toxic to pets, so I just focused on watering and feeding the two beasts.
It’s good to have friends who can make you think about the positives that are to come.
If you’re the type to send housewarming gifts, a $450 pitcher plant would be terrific, if not a risky investment. (Ooh, it’s out of stock?)
The move-out inspection will be on the 31st with this asshat from the property management company who I strongly dislike. The first time I met him, he was clearly hungover. Yann and I were at the office to sign the lease: I asked this guy questions by paper and pen, only to have him respond to Yann. Why do people think this is okay? He also ended the meeting without giving us anything to sign until we asked for the lease, which was the whole point of our meeting. “Oh yeah, right… right.”
Months later, I returned to the office solo with an inquiry, forcing him to confront me face-to-face. Except, he managed to bypass this by using the receptionist! What a fuckbag. I’m gonna slip fish into his briefcase when he’s not looking.
It’s a good thing I’ll be wearing a mask, otherwise, the loathe would just seep from my face. My expressive eyebrows will be my undoing though. I better get my security deposit back.
squaremeat.com 
I feel seen. Instead of writing something on my own neglected blog, I am going to defend my Amazon shopping. I order from Amazon roughly six times per month.
1. Recently I have bought a lot of home and garden things that I normally would have bought at the hardware store, but I did not have safe transportation to the hardware store. So it was easier (and safer!) for Amazon to bring the stuff to me.
2. I don’t even know what store I would go to in order to find some of the other things that I bought from Amazon. Clicky counter thingies that I could use for counting rows for my knitting but much cheaper than the ones that you buy at the yarn store. A new keypad that is compatible with my very old garage door opener. An adapter to connect my new camera lens to a particular brand of tripod. Weird (but specific!) flavors of tea.
I am somewhat disappointed with the electric blanket that I bought, though. In all the years I have lived in California, it was not until October 2020 that I’ve ever lived on the first floor. Previously it had always been the second floor. Homes in California do not have basements; they are built on a slab of concrete. This slab of concrete carries the coldness of the ground up into the floor, and I was not aware of this before. Even with slippers on, my feet become colder than room temperature just from being in contact with the floor, and it is seemingly impossible to get them to warm up again. So I had Amazon bring me an electric blanket so that I could put it under my feet while sitting on the couch and/or provide extra heating for the cats. But less than a month in, the buttons on the controller have stopped working. The only one that works is the on/off button; I can no longer adjust the heat level or the timer. Perhaps if I had gone to a real store I would have opted for a higher quality blanket than this one I bought from Amazon. But instead of sending it back, I think that I am going to order (from Amazon) the special tool that I need to open the controller box and see if I can fix the buttons.
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I hate Bezos so much that I wouldn’t throw fish in his vents: I would airlift a rotten whale carcass to drop on his house. I would sooner make slippers from dried leaves and squirrel pelts than order an electric blanket off Amazon. And I love squirrels!
I can’t say that not ordering from Amazon is an option for everybody, but it is for me. So I don’t.
However, I have nicked one of #304’s discarded Amazon boxes to use as a bedside table while my mattress is on the floor. Ah, the lifestyle of the rich and famous.
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I find it difficult to hate Bezos enough to not buy from Amazon, even though I have been personally slighted by him (with one degree of separation). When Amazon was very new and kind of small and only sold books, I knew someone who worked there, and she worked directly with Bezos. I complained to my friend because my order was waiting forever to be shipped because one of the items was out of stock. She told Bezos, and he responded that since I clicked the option to have everything shipped together that I should have expected to wait for that one last item to be back in stock (there was no way of knowing ahead of time that it was not in stock).
The screwdriver set that was supposed to arrive today has still not arrived. Maybe I should reconsider holding a grudge? But I’m already finding myself having to reconsider my corporate grudges; the iron-on letters are peeling off the t-shirt that I made to proclaim my displeasure with Verizon.
At first I was going to make a snarky comment about the idea of trapping squirrels for fur being very Canadian. But then I remembered that my dad was a fur trapper as a part-time job when he was in high school in middle-of-nowhere New York State, so I probably have no standing to make comments about animal pelts.
I have not yet ordered something that comes in the right size and shape of box to use in a furniture-like manner, though. I moved in October and still have not yet acquired sufficient furniture. I am pretending that empty rooms are classy.
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Ooo, lemme know what plants you’d like from my collection and I can propagate some!! I have monstera, snake, umbrella, asparagus fern, pothos, and a few I have yet identified.)
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That would be rad! Definitely the Monstera!
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