Aggravating Saturday
Yesterday was not a good day, starting when I discovered someone had run off with the charger I keep on my desk at work for when my phone starts to run out of juice near the end of my shift. It was neon pink, so it would be both easily spotted and readily identifiable. I took a quick walk around checking to see if whoever had "borrowed" it had left it sitting on their desk when they left for the day (or under it, by the power strip), and asked a few people who do a lot of walking around to keep an eye out for it, but I couldn't find it -- not then, and not when I took a closer look at the end of my shift before leaving. So I spent the last hour of the day working in silence after my phone powered down, and added a new charger to my grocery list. (It was really cheap, or I wouldn't have left it on my desk in the first place. But I'm still annoyed.)
And then I came home and my mother informed me that my uncle was coming over again for another round of fiddling with garden spigots. He arrived and cut off the water to the house so quickly after I walked in the door I hadn't even had a chance to use the bathroom. I griped a little to them about having preferred a verbal warning for the water cutoff, my mother replied that she told me he was on his way over and what did I think he was coming over to do?, which, missing my point.
I revisited the topic after my uncle finished up and left. (Only one working spigot, in the back yard, and "go gentle on it because there's no mortar on the bricks holding it yet," and my uncle suggested we just buy a 100-foot hose that'll reach around the house and not bother dealing with the spigot in the front of the house, which I assume was a joke but my mother thought was a valid course of action. I said absolutely not and when Mom tried to push it reminded her that we're not supposed to tug too hard on the working faucet, remember?) We were a lot less restrained without the third party for a witness, and there were a couple of long-term sources of aggravation that got raked up.
Problem #1 is that shit does not get fixed around this house when it breaks unless it makes a direct inconvenience for Mom that we can't work around. This is why I find it so personally aggravating that Mom has spent tax refunds or Xmas money on progressively larger TVs over the last several years. The last TV was just fine -- meanwhile, there's a hole in the chimney letting possums and raccoons and cats and whatever else thump around in the attic. We haven't had a working oven or stovetop for years. There's a shower curtain liner taped to the wall in my shower covering the space where the tiles have fallen off the wall and never been replaced, and the wall behind the showerhead and toilet is rotting away. There's a patch of bare concrete in the kitchen where the slab leak last year was fixed and the linoleum was never replaced. (Note that Mom actually does have the insurance payout to handle replacing flooring and wallpaper now that the leak has been handled and the soaked drywall removed and replaced. This is just inertia.) There's still half a dead tree lying next to the patio. (Mom got the chain back onto the saw - it's just another job that needs doing.)
And I am similarly bad about finding time and money to deal with these things myself, so I know where she's coming from. I'm ignoring this shit too. But that doesn't mean I appreciated having Mom tell me that fixing the faucets was for my benefit - the implications of course being A) that I have no right to complain about being inconvenienced by any part of the process and B) that if it weren't for me demanding running water outside to water plants and wash things with, she'd be fine with just letting that be one more thing about the house that never gets fixed. (Once the leaking spigot in the back was shut off, of course, because that problem was costing her money.)
Problem #2 that got kicked up in the fight was Mom trying to claim that it was my own damn fault she didn't tell me the water was about to be cut off because I went into my room and wouldn't let her in to talk to me. I reminded her that opening bedroom doors lets animals in, and she conceded that Dizzy had been right there in the hallway whining to be let into my room.
Ongoing issue, trying to keep uninvited pets out of the bedrooms. Mom has the largest bedroom in the house and the procedure is to knock, be told to come in and then to shut the door after myself so no cats slink in. I have the smallest bedroom in the house and furniture from when I had a larger room. There is not enough floor space to run a vacuum over (which made the diagnosis of my severe dust mite allergy so grimly amusing) and barely enough room for myself. The procedure is DON'T COME IN HERE, YOU KNOW THERE'S NOT ENOUGH ROOM, DAMMIT YOU JUST LET THE CAT IN because of course she walks right in and stands there with the door wide open next to her as she tells me something I neither needed nor wanted to hear.
The ongoing issue there dates back to me being a teenager and having to lock my door just to hang out in my bedroom reading or whatever, because literally the only way to get my mother to ask before coming in was if the door was locked when she tried to walk in unannounced. I don't have to lock my door now, but Mom's still having difficulty with the concept that my bedroom is where I go when I want to be left alone and quiet. (At least she quit smoking. You have no idea how little I appreciated having her walk into the room of the only nonsmoker in the house with a lit cigarette in her hand. Also, while Lauren was living here she had a tendency to come in less than a minute after Mom did, just to find out what we were talking about.)
So, yes. Introvert working in an open-plan lab with dozens of coworkers and fucking conveyor belts running behind me all night. I get home all out of dealing-with-other-people and want some quiet alone time. Also, working an off-kilter schedule, so Mom gets home from work and wants to tell me about her day just when I'm either been-up-way-too-long or else just-woken-up-brain-not-online-yet. Weekends allow for a little more interaction, but I'm still generally running on fumes by the time she's up and running for the day. And she's prone to following me from room to room and even out of the house as I look for excuses to get away from the chatter.
(Come to think of it, the only room in the house she won't harass me in is the bathroom. Which probably has a lot to do with me occasionally hiding out in there for an hour or more reading or fiddling with my phone.)
So, yes. Mom tried to blame me for not being informed about the water cutoff because I refused to have her follow me into my bedroom to tell me about the phone call I'd just overheard her side of. I pointed out that my bedroom door isn't a soundproof barrier and that "We're shutting the water off now!" is a message that can be shouted through the door just fine. (Now that I think about it, Mom in the master bedroom in her en suite bathroom or sitting on her bed across the room from the door with the TV going (which it is all the time, including when she's sleeping) can't hear a damned thing I say from the hallway and wants me to come into the room to say something. I in my tiny room with the TV almost never going can hear her on the other side of the door just fine. I suspect this had never occurred to her. It only just now occurred to me.)
So anyway. The spigot repair is about half-done, and my uncle is coming again next weekend or the one after to hopefully finish the job. Until then, I have a working hose in the backyard - and I'm stuck using a watering can on the five bushes on the front as well as the one in the sideyard. And it's getting hot enough that I should probably start watering every day...
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
And then I came home and my mother informed me that my uncle was coming over again for another round of fiddling with garden spigots. He arrived and cut off the water to the house so quickly after I walked in the door I hadn't even had a chance to use the bathroom. I griped a little to them about having preferred a verbal warning for the water cutoff, my mother replied that she told me he was on his way over and what did I think he was coming over to do?, which, missing my point.
I revisited the topic after my uncle finished up and left. (Only one working spigot, in the back yard, and "go gentle on it because there's no mortar on the bricks holding it yet," and my uncle suggested we just buy a 100-foot hose that'll reach around the house and not bother dealing with the spigot in the front of the house, which I assume was a joke but my mother thought was a valid course of action. I said absolutely not and when Mom tried to push it reminded her that we're not supposed to tug too hard on the working faucet, remember?) We were a lot less restrained without the third party for a witness, and there were a couple of long-term sources of aggravation that got raked up.
Problem #1 is that shit does not get fixed around this house when it breaks unless it makes a direct inconvenience for Mom that we can't work around. This is why I find it so personally aggravating that Mom has spent tax refunds or Xmas money on progressively larger TVs over the last several years. The last TV was just fine -- meanwhile, there's a hole in the chimney letting possums and raccoons and cats and whatever else thump around in the attic. We haven't had a working oven or stovetop for years. There's a shower curtain liner taped to the wall in my shower covering the space where the tiles have fallen off the wall and never been replaced, and the wall behind the showerhead and toilet is rotting away. There's a patch of bare concrete in the kitchen where the slab leak last year was fixed and the linoleum was never replaced. (Note that Mom actually does have the insurance payout to handle replacing flooring and wallpaper now that the leak has been handled and the soaked drywall removed and replaced. This is just inertia.) There's still half a dead tree lying next to the patio. (Mom got the chain back onto the saw - it's just another job that needs doing.)
And I am similarly bad about finding time and money to deal with these things myself, so I know where she's coming from. I'm ignoring this shit too. But that doesn't mean I appreciated having Mom tell me that fixing the faucets was for my benefit - the implications of course being A) that I have no right to complain about being inconvenienced by any part of the process and B) that if it weren't for me demanding running water outside to water plants and wash things with, she'd be fine with just letting that be one more thing about the house that never gets fixed. (Once the leaking spigot in the back was shut off, of course, because that problem was costing her money.)
Problem #2 that got kicked up in the fight was Mom trying to claim that it was my own damn fault she didn't tell me the water was about to be cut off because I went into my room and wouldn't let her in to talk to me. I reminded her that opening bedroom doors lets animals in, and she conceded that Dizzy had been right there in the hallway whining to be let into my room.
Ongoing issue, trying to keep uninvited pets out of the bedrooms. Mom has the largest bedroom in the house and the procedure is to knock, be told to come in and then to shut the door after myself so no cats slink in. I have the smallest bedroom in the house and furniture from when I had a larger room. There is not enough floor space to run a vacuum over (which made the diagnosis of my severe dust mite allergy so grimly amusing) and barely enough room for myself. The procedure is DON'T COME IN HERE, YOU KNOW THERE'S NOT ENOUGH ROOM, DAMMIT YOU JUST LET THE CAT IN because of course she walks right in and stands there with the door wide open next to her as she tells me something I neither needed nor wanted to hear.
The ongoing issue there dates back to me being a teenager and having to lock my door just to hang out in my bedroom reading or whatever, because literally the only way to get my mother to ask before coming in was if the door was locked when she tried to walk in unannounced. I don't have to lock my door now, but Mom's still having difficulty with the concept that my bedroom is where I go when I want to be left alone and quiet. (At least she quit smoking. You have no idea how little I appreciated having her walk into the room of the only nonsmoker in the house with a lit cigarette in her hand. Also, while Lauren was living here she had a tendency to come in less than a minute after Mom did, just to find out what we were talking about.)
So, yes. Introvert working in an open-plan lab with dozens of coworkers and fucking conveyor belts running behind me all night. I get home all out of dealing-with-other-people and want some quiet alone time. Also, working an off-kilter schedule, so Mom gets home from work and wants to tell me about her day just when I'm either been-up-way-too-long or else just-woken-up-brain-not-online-yet. Weekends allow for a little more interaction, but I'm still generally running on fumes by the time she's up and running for the day. And she's prone to following me from room to room and even out of the house as I look for excuses to get away from the chatter.
(Come to think of it, the only room in the house she won't harass me in is the bathroom. Which probably has a lot to do with me occasionally hiding out in there for an hour or more reading or fiddling with my phone.)
So, yes. Mom tried to blame me for not being informed about the water cutoff because I refused to have her follow me into my bedroom to tell me about the phone call I'd just overheard her side of. I pointed out that my bedroom door isn't a soundproof barrier and that "We're shutting the water off now!" is a message that can be shouted through the door just fine. (Now that I think about it, Mom in the master bedroom in her en suite bathroom or sitting on her bed across the room from the door with the TV going (which it is all the time, including when she's sleeping) can't hear a damned thing I say from the hallway and wants me to come into the room to say something. I in my tiny room with the TV almost never going can hear her on the other side of the door just fine. I suspect this had never occurred to her. It only just now occurred to me.)
So anyway. The spigot repair is about half-done, and my uncle is coming again next weekend or the one after to hopefully finish the job. Until then, I have a working hose in the backyard - and I'm stuck using a watering can on the five bushes on the front as well as the one in the sideyard. And it's getting hot enough that I should probably start watering every day...
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.