Eight for the April Complainers

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It’s been a few turns since I’ve vented my spleen shared by little annoyances with you, dear readers. I’m not in my usual gay and cheerful springtime mood, probably because I had twelve inches of heavy, wet snow followed by icy rain this past Thursday and Friday. Oh, and did I mention my power, internet and cell service going out for three days? Ha ha! What a lark. If TS Eliot had lived in Maine, his fingers would have been too frozen to write “April is the cruelest month.”

Thrown into a peevish frame of mind, I tend to dwell on other irritants, insults and injuries. Which means you, dear readers, get to hear about them in convenient list form.

 

Unrecyclable pill bottles. Okay, I acknowledge this is petty ante. On an individual level. But they add up – boy, do they add up. I have two prescriptions I fill every thirty days. Twenty-four of the little orange plastic bottles and their tops a year. Almost one hundred over the past four years. Two hundred in eight years, etc., etc. And there’s NOTHING you can do with all those bottles! I’ve used a couple to store coins in foreign currency. A couple more to hold Tylenol and ibuprofen in my purses. After that, I’m stumped. Too small for almost any other use, the pharmacy won’t take them back, and it’s not the right kind og plastic for my town’s transfer station.

I’ve gotten to the point where every time I take my amlopedine, I picture a giant raft of pill bottle floating in the Pacific Ocean. Which is not doing much for my blood pressure, I assure you.

 

Grocery stores with no one available to ask questions.  I have to say, I hadn’t noticed this as much until I went to the second Market Basket to open in Maine. (There are two.) It was wonderful! So. Many. Employees. Someone to help me find the grapefruit. Someone to check if the sales price was still good. Someone whisking the abandoned cart in the parking space away before I even had the chance to grab it!

It was an eye-opening contrast to my usual store, where I wander lonely as a cloud if I have a question. They used to have a customer service counter/check out, but that’s gone now. I guess it was a warning.

 

“Dollar stores” whose prices have gone from a dollar to $1.25 and now as high as $7!  I think we can all agree this is basically a crime against humanity. Allegedly, the C suites at these companies have noticed “people with money” shop there, and therefore process can go up. How do they know that? I, personally, have never had to show my most recent tax filing to the clerk ringing up my bleach, birthday cards and movie candy.

 

The eternally changing recommendations for healthy eating.  My last doctor told me to stop eating an egg daily, it was contributing to my high blood pressure. The current doctor told me eggs are fine. We were supposed to not diet, and listen to our natural hunger signs. No, now that’s wrong (admittedly, my natural hunger signs are for M&Ms and Oreos.) Protein is good. Too much protein is bad. Avoid carbohydrates. You need carbohydrates.

I’m considering adopting my grandmother Greuling’s eating plan: bread with every dinner, lots of canned, salty vegetables, 4-5 Pall Malls a day and one glass of port in the evening while knitting and watching TV. She lived until a week before her 89^th birthday, and never needed any care other than some help with the housework in the last few years.

 

Ads on subscription services I already pay for.  Amazon Prime, I’m looking at you: not only am I paying with both my wallet and my eyeballs, but I’m increasingly presented with a menu of viewing options consisting of two or three great shows I want to stream and eight thousand warmed-over two-star duds. P.S., I immediately mute the ads and scroll on my phone until they’re done.

 

Restaurants that present the “bill” on an ipad.  First off, I have spent too many years nagging my kids to put their electronic devices down in restaurants to bend the line for the restaurant itself. Second, I don’t want a “convenient email receipt.” I’m not an idiot; I know this means I’ll be getting emails from The French Farmers Table, and anyone it sells my info to, for the rest of my life. Third, I tip well. Twenty percent on the whole, tax included, and I round up. I find myself getting viscerally offended when I see those handy pre-loaded tip amounts, which lately start at 25% and go up. Also, I’m sus, as the kids say, about just who gets all that tip when it’s totally electronic.

 

Interesting new recipes I can make almost entirely from what I have in my pantry EXCEPT for one have-to-have-it spice/curry/sauce that’s only available via mail-order from a specialty store in NY or DC. (Yes, I get these recipes from the NY Times and the Washington Post, which is undoubtedly part of the problem.) Please, recipe section editors, take pity on those of us in flyover country. Yes rural Maine is definitely fly-over country.

 

Dear readers, what little irritants are getting up your nose this week?

Photo credits from top to bottom: Macwagon (Flickr), Advantus Media, Amazon, Imanoj Menon (Flickr)

I've Got A Beef

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Everyone feel nice and warm after yesterday's trip down our childhood memory lanes? Good, because it's been a while since I had a good old beef session on this blog, and I've been saving up annoyances to share with you all, in the hopes that misery loves company. 

 

1. Fuel oil. Oh, my God. Okay, I know the rise in price has been caused by 8 or 9 or 10 different commercial, international and weather events that are vastly beyond my or my oil delivery guy's power to affect. Most of you don't have to interact with the fuel oil industry; only 10% of American homes are heated that way. But 75% of Maine houses rely on that big ol' oil truck pulling up to get 'er done. And you can just imagine how fast my drafty, 200-year-old house goes through the black gold. Texas tea. Etc.

In fact, the thing that really has me cheesed off is my furnace repair guy, Rick. A little over three years ago, the old oil tanks - a joined pair that held 500 gallons - had finally had it and needed to be replaced. I talked over whether to get another 500 gallon behemoth, or the more usual (and cheaper) 275 gallon version. "People used to fill up in the summer and take advantage of the lower price," Rick said, "but oil's been pretty stable year round for a long time now." So I went with the smaller tank. Why didn't you warn me about 7% inflation, Rick???

 

2.Burdocks. Why is it the plants I select, pay for, carefully set in the soil and mulch die before the end of the season, but those G-- D--- burdocks are taking over my property. Actually, that's not true; they aren't everywhere; they only cluster in areas where my dogs like to run back and forth repeatedly, so the impossible-to-remove burrs get stuck in their ears, muzzles, tails, legs, and in one memorable case, up where the sun don't shine. Yes, my daughter and I had to perform a burr-ectomy on Rockie's butt. There hasn't been a spot of green on my property for months (except for the Christmas tree I still haven't loaded up to take to the town dump) but those burdocks poke their dead dried heads above the frozen snow like a horde of zombies in The Walking Dead.

 

3.Is it "Keev" or "Key-yev?" Okay, this may be very niche. We're all worried about the situation in Ukraine, I'm sure, and I've been hearing quite a bit about it on NPR which is where I get most of my news (and entertainment. And weather forecasts. And tote bags.) Anyway, I've noticed  a new pronunciation creeping in: reporters who refer to the capital city of the country as "Keev."

Say what? Let me tell you, on the NPR classical station, when the announcers talk about Mussgorsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, they say "The Great Gates of Key-yev." Is it Key-yev? Is it Keev? I'm really hoping it's not the latter, because I only managed to stop saying "THE Ukraine" a few years ago. I still get confused with Siam and Thailand and Ceylon and Sri Lanka. I'm all set with Istanbul, though, thanks.

4. Bridgerton. Whyyyy do I have to wait almost a month for the second season of Bridgerton?!? Ted Lasso's not going to be out until the latter half of 2022, and I don't think they've even hinted at a drop date for the next season of Only Murders in the Building. In fact, my relationship with all our streaming services seems to be: wait with impatient longing to get a show I'm dying to see, binge it down within a week, and then wait a year or longer for the next season. (Side grouse: when did six episodes become a season? I remember when you got twenty-two new episodes a year with TV shows! Now get off my lawn.)

We have, paid for by different family members, HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Hulu. And between the lot, there's only one show a month I'm every actually interested in. Verily, the Golden Age of TV has feet of clay.

 

5.Ham. You probably do not have an issue with ham, dear reader, and until recently, I didn't either. I love ham. So twelve days ago, when I found a local store was selling spiral cut ham for $0.99 per pound, I grabbed one. I rooted around and got the smallest one I could find - about eleven pounds. It didn't look too big. And it smelled so good in the oven. Tasted like heaven!

But the only people eating this ham are me, and my young friend and temporary lodger Samantha. The meals have gone like this:

1st night: Ham, baked potatoes, green peas. Happiness.

2nd day: Ham sandwiches. Yummy.

2nd night: More ham. At least it's easy.

3rd day: Ham sandwich with fried egg to add a kick.

3rd night: Pasta with ham.

4th day: Ham on leftover cornbread.

4th night: Scalloped potatoes with ham.

5th day: Ham and despair. 

And so on. Dear readers, I still have almost half a ham left! I may be forced to learn how to grind and pot meat just to do something with the rest of it. I just wanted sliced ham and a sandwich the next day, and instead I've entered some sort of Sisyphean existence where every day I roll a ham up a tall hill and every morning it's back at the bottom of the fridge, as large as ever.

But I have faith; someday, I'll be down to the bone, and then it will finally be time for homemade bean soup. Of course, it's a big bone, so it will have to be a very big pot of soup...

Dear readers, what's been driving you bonkers lately?