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We talked this week about Bob's missing blender and having your children come back to live with you, being asked to indicate your age by selecting an "age group" like 40 to 55, finding a job if you're let go after 50, how Comcast cuts off tv shows early to deliver local information, and having problems seeing – even with multiple pairs of glasses.
Our son, Bob ended up coming back to live with us, for a while at least. He is 24. He's been out and in with us since starting college. We actually moved while he was living in the frat house and I just felt like this house was always my house and not really his home. He was supposed to get an apartment after college with his friends, but that never happened, so giving us one day's notice, I had to clear out a room for him to come and live in. It just seems hard to start living with another person in the house, but in reality, he was hardly every home. We had to get used to someone comeing at going at all hours, when we go to bed very early normally. And someone else was now cooking in my kitchen, and of course not cleaning up. So now, for the past six months he has moved in (basically) with his girlfriend and her family. We got used to him not being around again. But last week she has decided that she only wants him to stay over on the weekends. He is now back. He came in and wanted to know where his blender was. I have no idea, but he got pretty upset with me, like I threw it out. I had to spend a couple of hours looking all through the house for his blender. Then the next morning, I had to hear about it again, since he wanted a blended breakfast. Why should I feel guity about this?? I guess because I am a mother. I now have rotting fruit on my counter that I'm not allowed to throw out, because at some point he will find the blender. Oh well.
I went to a play this past weekend with a younger woman. The people from the playhouse gave us a survey about the play and the playhouse. I was somewhat surprised to hear this woman, who is on the verge of being thirty, being dismayed at the age range part of the survey. She was upset at the categories that she had to choose from. She is now grouped with people that were up to forty-five. It leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth, a sinking feeling in your gut, and a swirling of bad thoughts in your brain. Of course, I thought I was the only one that thought this way. It was useless for me to try to comfort her to look at my age range. Do people that write these surveys, contests, etc. realize that they are alienating the people that are taking them by asking for your age range? Can't they just ask your age (if they must know it at all)? You can always lie as Mark suggested, but you still know the truth and it isn't good.
This weekend, Mark and I went to buy a new washer and dryer at Home Depot. We had a very nice salesman that put up with my indecision on which brand to buy for an extreme amount of time. When we finally sat down with him to fill out the paperwork to buy it, we had a chit chat kind of conversation. We asked him how long he had worked there, probably because he looked about sixty. He said for seven years. We found out that he had been an IT manager for a university and they had outsourced the whole department. He looked for work for two years. No one really wanted to hire him since he was in his early fifties at that time. It just seems to us that it is a sad state of affairs that once you reach a certain age, if you find yourself out of a job for whatever reason, it will be much harder for find a job. At this point it is very hard for anyone to find a job, but good luck if you are over fifty. Just depressing.
Lately I am having some vision issues with my progressive glasses. I also own plain reading glasses and computer glasses and progressive sun glasses. It is a ton of money for all of these glasses. But now the distance part of the progressive seems very blurry when I drive. I think because it is a progressive that it can't be too much of a change from the reading part on the bottom of them, so I'm kind of stuck. But I'm going to try another eye doctor to see if I can get a solution.
My rant is about Comcast, which is our internet, tv, and phone provider. I watch a lot of HLN, which is what Headline News channel is called. They have on Nancy Grace and Joy Behar shows among others. It is either once or twice an hour that Comcast will interrupt these shows with public programming, for five or ten minutes. It has been bugging me for a long time because if Joy Behar, for example, is interviewing someone, the last ten minutes will be cut off. This weekend, I got extremely mad and crazy because they had on a mystery show, which I love. The kind where someone disappears or dies in real life and the show goes on for an hour to tell you what happend. It was interrupted twice in the show and I couldn't see the very end of it as to what the heck happened to the person. I tried calling Comcast, but just got some poor Customer Service person that couldn't help me at all. Is it even worth watching these programs when I know they will be interrrupted?
Let me know if you've had any of these issues!
Till next week –
Kate