What’s rage-ing me at the moment is that my city is all up in arms that the Cavs (I assume that “Cavs” are not “calves”, but as this is sports-related I don’t know for sure) lost some professional bouncy-ball match last night, and now don’t get to bang as many hookers or whatever the hell the prize is for pro bouncy-ball, after some rich yo-yo spent $100 million (that’s not an exaggeration) getting the team together and paid.

$100 million. For a team that choked in the playoffs.

Meanwhile, the Cleveland school district is laying people off and giving the rest of us pay cuts, so we can try and educate their kids in 45-to-1 classrooms. While their parents watch bouncy-ball, I guess.

@Matt:

Whoa, now. You’re suggesting we should be… educating our kids? At the… at the cost of our entertainment?

SOCIALISM. Soldiers, take him away!

– c.

OMG—–wait until you actually are selling your house. People who have NO BUSINESS complaining (due to their price point) WILL complain about the EXACT same issues about our house as you cited above—paint color, countertops, flooring choices, you name it. And they’ll try to screw you by offering a bogus amount of money. Then, they’ll try to screw you again after inspection. Ugh. We got every complaint known to man regarding our first home, and (though we were the nicest and largest house in the neighborhood) we were told by buyers that we needed to make our house sing for them to make an offer. We were asking the same as 3 other houses in our before-mention neighborhood–and we had 1000 more square feet.

JT:

Heh, I can only imagine. We’ve polished this turd a lot and have done quite a bit to make it as good as we can make it.

And yet, I can only hear the complaints. “I don’t like floors! I wanted a MOON BOUNCE instead of a house.”

– c.

Little Terribleminds Wendigo is full of rage and snark these past few days. WAAH! I just sucked down 5 oz of formula and I’m almost asleep. Give me more food, mother! I’m not really hungry but fuck the nummy! I want another bottle! Go! Warm it up! Dance monkey, dance! I shall drink a quarter ounce from it and pass out in your arms! And then, when you try to put me back in the bassinet, I shall wake once more to demand another 1/4 ounce! I can do this all day, bitch… how’s your sanity doing?

(Psst. Everyone: @Maggie’s lost her mind. Don’t look her in the eyes. Don’t look her in the eyes! Damnit, @Rick, what did I tell you? Someone tell @Julie to bring a net. And a Taser.)

Hey, a moon bounce would kick ass. I’d buy it.

You realize even if you could provide a Moon Bounce on command to the self-entitled snowflakes who want it instead of nice parquet flooring, they’d find something wrong with it.

“There’s not enough air. Your air pump is the wrong color. I wanted one made out of latex and baby cow skin. Why are you not accommodating me? Do you not want me to buy this feculent pile of steaming turd-nuggets? I’m your customer, therefore I’m right. I want a star pony grazing in the yard you’re going to put in, and for it to be redecorated with Tuscany landscapes and purple starfruit trees. And I want a machine that simulates the gravity of the moon. It’s more realistic that way. Well, what are you waiting for? Get to it, or I’ll take my wads of cash and self-importance elsewhere.”

How long does it take to make a sandwich?

Two, three minutes, tops?

I got to the train station in Lansdale and said to myself, “Self, that bit of bread and OJ was something resembling breakfast, but wouldn’t a ham, egg and cheese bagel hit the spot right about now? And we’ve got a few minutes since the train’s apparently running late, so let’s get a sammich!”

I order, pay and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

Train whistle blows outside. Alchemist craps a brick. It’d been six minutes.

“Are you going to Doylestown?” the lady asked me in only slightly broken English.

“Yes,” I told her.

“You need to get on the train?”

“Yes. I need to get on that train.” I pointed to the train that had pulled into the station and was now taking on passengers. “That train, right there.”

She looked at the guy in the back who shook his head and said, “I ain’t gonna make it.”

I hate being late for work. I opted for leaving them there with those dumb expressions on their faces over making a fuss over four bucks. “It happens,” I snapped over my shoulder as I ran to make the train.

Not a great way to start my day.

Hory clap! I thought I was stalking Chuck this morning, waiting for his sweet brainmeats to ripen. As soon as it hits my RSS feed, though, it’s already got seven comments!

I know the angry problem. Though this week for me has been more of a suicide week. I see a moron cut me off in traffic, and think that if he slammed into me, at least I’d get a day off from work. I get a bill in the mail, and consider just walking to Mexico and leaving it all behind. My wife asks me to do the dishes, and I have to wonder if this world is worth living in.

House Hunters is a little wacky that way. I’m always a little surprised by these people, because I move into a house planning to paint the shit out of it. Because that’s how I mark my territory, dammit. I’m not living in your abandoned shell of a life, I’m making my own life here.

And I totally agree with you on the kitchen thing. Of the three houses my wife and I have lived in, none of our kitchens were big enough to hold more than one person. We often have to move things to have enough counter space to make a sandwich. Even on the episodes with relatively low budgets, I consider those kitchens to be palatial.

You know the thing I never get on the show, though? The whole “oh, our budget is $350,000, but this house is only $300,000, so we can put the other $50,000 into upgrades!” First, um, whatever happened to actually saving money? I can’t really talk about that, though. More importantly, how the hell does that work? I mean, don’t these people use mortgages to buy these houses? I don’t know about you guys, but my mortgage company was very interested in tying the amount of my mortgage to the actual value of the house. Sure, if I was selling a property and getting a big wad of cash back out of that, then I guess that could work. I’ve never managed to do that, though. Maybe that really is the way things work for upper-middle-class people.

Saying that, though, the one show I did think was cool was the variant where people with a budget of something like $300K were buying houses for $200K, and they had a designer showing them what the additional $100K could do to the house. Knocking out walls, expanding the kitchen, adding a deck, all kinds of awesome things.

A small bright point to your soul-sucking hate—Geek/Nerd Pride day this year is scheduled for my birthday. Thought you’d find it funny

This week? *Overflowing* with spleenful suck.

So, first, right, it was one of those work weeks where every damn thing has to be annoying, like you think you’re going to spend a peaceful three hours beside the printer binding random shit and listening to the Cure, and instead you end up calling every Goddam school in Tasmania – in alphafuckingbetical order – asking who the head of their maths departments are. And if they’re a primary school? They don’t even *have* heads of maths departments. No. They have *numeracy coordinators*. Which I guess is reasonable, but also sounds just. So. Stupid. Hello, I coordinate numeracy! It’s What I Do. Bastards.

And then there was the day when the whole internet in our office just died in the arse, and we all just sort of sat there shuffling paper and trying to look meaningful for eight hours, because pretty much everything we do involves the internet. And then there was the part where we had no money, and the random family fight, and the bit – just tonight! – when my Goddam bike light died and I had to cycle home in darkness, risking life and limb riding alongside crazy people in four wheel drives who consider ramming into anything smaller than a herd of bull moose their personal sport.

Although, on the plus side, today did involve a slice of free cheesecake that was approximately the size of Europe, and a couple of half-empty bottles of wine that I thieved from the end of our after work drinks. So I guess that works out OK. But so help me, if the internet doesn’t load my new episode of Bones, I may just STAB something.

*mutter mutter*

@Foz:

You get points just for “died in the arse.”

+113 points, actually. So there’s that to brighten your day.

– c.

I did not even know that there existed a Geek/Nerd Pride Day. Huh.

@Lugh: Our counters aren’t quite that bad, and technically our kitchen is big. But it has all the wrong angles, and no counter space, and thus is “small” despite its apparent size.

– c.

@Josh:

I’d go down there tomorrow and tell them they owe you a sandwich or some money. Take what’s yours. Bring a sword.*

– c.

* don’t bring a sword.

SWORDS! SWORDS! SWORDS!

“Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes, well, he eats you.”

Man, I love the Big Lebowski. And that pretty much sums up my week. Glad for it to be over.

Wendig you evil bastard. Went through the house-selling, house-buying hell for the last time seven years ago. I and I do mean the last time. They’re gonna have to take me out of this place dead. I was almost over it, the flash backs, the night sweats, following realtors around in my car, shotgun in my lap, eye twitching . . . thanks for bringing that all back.

BTW, stainless steel appliances? They don’t get marked up too much when you take all your meals down at Andre’s House of Argula and Overpriced Fish. For the HGTV crowd, a kitchen is just a stage setting. It’s not like they actually cook in there.

*Totes net and Taser into fray*

My child is a snot. By all that is holy I’m attempting to raise her not to be a snot, but there it is. We couldn’t even give our son a first birthday present to unwrap because she steals all of his fucking stuff and then pisses on it when he comes near it while crouching and baring her teeth. We tried to give him a present. She snagged it and screamed at him when he was 10 fucking feet away. It lives in the closet now (the toy. not the kid. tempting).

If you fall into temptation to buy a massive fucking doublewide so you can get cheap square footage email me first. I’ll give you the list of mobile home buttfucks. I’ll include photos so you can see for yourself the corner cutting that goes on. If someone lures you into a “flipped” home you need to contact Jack Bauer to torture the motherfucker into telling you exactly where he/she skimped. A person would think the skimping goes into the smaller, less essential things. A person would be wrong.

Fuck it. Don’t call Bauer. Call me. Right now I’m up for it. Right after I complete my daily scan for carpet tacks that are working themselves loose so the boy won’t ingest one.

Aw. But I like swords.

Given how I am with apartment hunting, I have a feeling that’s how I’ll be with house-hunting. I mean, shit, if I’m anything like my parents I’ll buy one house and live there forever, so I better fuckin’ like it.

Sometimes things happen fast. Everything is happening all at once, here. I’ve got crushing deadlines across four different projects, wait, no, five, plus medical news, the house sale, the looking for a job in Chicago, the looking for an apartment in Chicago, the conventions, the summer camp, the actual physical move — it’s all happening in the next 60 days, which means it’s all happening right now. It’s ridiculous.

This has been happening a lot more than usual lately:

I hate people who drive 10-15 miles under the speed limit and then have the *gall* to flip me off, gesticulate wildly and/or flash their brights at me when I move around them (and it’s not like I cut them off when I pull in front of them. I always give at least 2 car lengths before I move back over. 2 car lengths is more than enough when the other person won’t drive faster than 30, and I’m doing 40)

“Your children are not made of balancing teacups.”

You sir are a freakin genius. Thank you.

Selling houses is madness, and demands a patience that the situation will almost never allow. I actually disagree with my wife on some of the best practices, specifically the two schools of thought on staging the house. The first says to repaint everything neutrally and make it as bland as possible. The second says to keep it distinctive – more people will dislike it, but the people who do like it will *actually* like it, rather than just blandly include it on their “ok” list.

Now, honestly, I can be driven crazy by any of the “more money than sense” shows, but there are plenty of good ones as well, including ones that focus on budget and thoughtful design rather than expensive accoutrement. That said, the slack-jawed yokels you’re watching are mimicking the sounds of things you really do want to keep in mind, including:

Storage: This includes closets, but is not limited to them. We all have excess crap tucked away in the nooks and cranny’s of our houses, and we tend not to think about it. In your new house, that stuff’s going to have to go _somewhere_, and you want to figure that out before you buy.

Usage: So, we spent a bit on our kitchen. No Stainless steel or anything, and it was something we knew we needed to do when we bought the house, but we definitely chose to put extra effort and money into it because that was a space we expected to use a lot. We put a lot of thought into how the various appliance doors and power outlets interacted so that two people could be working in the space at once. it’s a nice kitchen. I’m not making the case that everyone should invest heavily in their kitchen, but I am saying that if it’s a space you’re going to use, its worth thinking about how you use it. This is, in fact, the thing that obliterates a lot of *really* expensive kitchens – incredibly pricey and fancy appliances get paired with terrible workspaces and painful storage. They look fantastic, but using them just sucks.

More broadly, thinking about how you entertain and how you spend your time is a big deal, and the trick is that it feels like you can get a lot sloppier about it as the house gets bigger. When we lived in an 880 square foot house, it was necessary to squeeze a lot of use out of available spaces. In bigger houses, we could peel things apart, and in some of the McMansions we’ve looked at, I have genuinely wondered how the help we could fill all that space (and to that end, some friends of ours who had such a house, lived in about a third of it).

All of which is to say it’s reasonable to think about where you entertain. Where the couch is gonna go. Whether you can see the TV from there. The greater the constraints, the more you really SHOULD think about such things.

But when people are looking at vast expanses of space and talking like they need to make tough decisions, I react the same way I do to bankers who complain they can no longer afford Cristal at lunch. I’m sure they think of it as budgeting, cutting corners and being responsible, but all I see is a red haze of rage.

-Rob D.

Randomly, Chuck, if your kitchen has a lot of space but little workspace, the investment in an Ikea work island can look good, be super useful, and not cost too much for the potential return. Plus, stainless steel tops!

-Rob D.

I’m with you Chuck. I got rage inside of me two. Hell, it’s been boiling for more then two months now. I’m at university. I’m being transfered from the major to the bachelor’s degree. My request was sent February 16… and I still have no answer.
3 months… no answer. They won’t even tell me what is taking so long. Yay.

@Rob: Our kitchen is just ill-proportioned enough that an island would be in the way for traffic — especially the dogs. Don’t think we didn’t it! But future home must have island space or pre-existing island. Because right now, I have a little corner of kitchen operability by the toaster. That salacious, surly toaster.

And we’re not going to repaint entirely to neutral, I don’t think. We have one room that’s particularly bold — like, blood red, though we didn’t paint it that way. The rest are fairly mild, soft, and I think will be good enough. I think.

And hot damn, well said about the bankers and their Cristal. Heh. Red haze of rage, indeed.

Good advice all around — since I spend a good portion of my afternoon in the kitchen, that’s definitely one place where a new house needs the potential.

– c.

Thanks, @Mayowa.

@Cat:

Oh! Yeah, that’s another rage-basket for me. Some dude cut me off the other day in a pickup truck, so I honked, and in response he gave me TWO middle fingers. He let go of the wheel to stick two fuck-sticks right out the window at me.

Hate! Burbling syphilitic rage!

– c.

@Will:

No doubt you’re the other side of the coin. I mistakenly imagine that I want things to move that fast — but that is its own monster, indeed.

– c.

@Dan: Please enjoy your flashbacks. They come courtesy of my own rage and fury. If I have to feel it, then so do you.

MOO HOO HA HA.

Bwa.

Ha.

Ahem.

– c.

We must learn to balance the coin on end and live that way, I think. And then roll, ever so delicately, forward.

You think the home buyers on those shows are pretentious, self-entitled, privileged knuckleheads? Just imagine what they’ll be like in 10 or 15 years.

If you want some nice, neutral lime/candy apple green paint, I think I have some hanging around you could have.

sidenote: strawberry rhubarb at owc!

Chuck, I totally agree with you about that show! Ditto, on everything you ranted about. My husband loves crap like that. He also frequently loves to mull over (in detail) what he would do if he won the lottery. I hate that topic.

He also loves to watch those shows on the Travel channel like “Mega Yachts.” That show drove me insane!! This one couple had a full staff on the boat – oh, sorry…YACHT – with them who attended to their every friggin’ need.

They had a dummy waiter put in so the staff could send up their coffee in a silver coffee set at precisely 8am every day so they could have it in their 3rd floor bedroom without being disturbed by the staff.

The guy had a golf tee designe at the back of the thing so he could golf into the ocean, but he INSISTED it be designed to replace the ball from some secret compartment under the floor so he wouldn’t have to BEND DOWN! Then he had his cabin boys out in a dinghy with floating “holes” placed in different areas for them to aim for, while the men chased after the balls to retrieve them (they must’ve floated or something). It was so frivolous and ridiculous. Meanwhile most of the population wonders how they’re going to afford simple things like groceries or their mortgage. Pisses me off.

Great. I wasn’t angry before, but now I am.

@Gina:

My rage is contagious.

Ragetagious, perhaps.

– c.

@Becky:

Heh. I think that paint can remain with its owners.

And oh yeah, Michelle called me about the strawberry-rhubarb ice cream at Owowcow. We’ll be there.

– c.

Holy Christ-Fudge Sunday, Chuck. I’ve spent all week tryin to keep the snaggle-toothed Rage-in-the-Box tamped down, and here you go turning my crank…er, that could’ve been worded a bit better I suppose.

here you are, giving me carte blanche to vent. I don’t know whether to thank you or tell my therapist that you’re to blame for tomorrow’s trip to the bell-tower.

Self check-outs at the grocery store (or Wal-Mart). I seem to have no problem with these convenient little machines, but I always seem to get behind Granny Turtlepants who seems to be under the impression that she needs the Allies to bring her an Enigma machine before she can do more than stare at the magic flickerbox.

Teabaggers. The rampant pedagoguery that these folks slurp up like chocolate-coated crack amazes me. The crazed looks in the eye and violent molestation of the English language on their signs used to amuse me. Now it throws me into a bowel-loosening panic when I give them too much thought.

Sparkly vampires. Geek shame. Stray cats finding their way into my house and spraying the entire laundry room. Over-complicated interfaces for computer applications. The virulent war between PC&Apple lovers. 2 year olds in the theater during Iron Man 2. Cold coffee. Creaky miniature windmills in the neighbor’s backyard that screeches at 3am with a slightly turgid breeze. Raw tomatoes. Cooked fish. Rain on my wedding day. Flies in my Chardonnay…..

Deep breath. Inhale. Exhale. Chardonnay…..wine…..alcohol. I need a drink.

@Paul, I gotta tell you:

…but I always seem to get behind Granny Turtlepants who seems to be under the impression that she needs the Allies to bring her an Enigma machine before she can do more than stare at the magic flickerbox.

Pretty much made me pee my pants.

So. Yeah. Expect a dry cleaning bill. Or, at least, a UPS package of pants that smell like urine.

– c.

Dude!!! Feel your pain. It’s been that kind of week for me too. Heck, been like the whole month this way. Some of it stupid stuff, but annoying as all heck! (Some of it more serious as it looks like Keiko (my main kitty master) is going downhill much faster than anticipated.)

Hope we all have rocking weekends!!!

Works for me. I’ve been looking for something to put up on eBay.

My week? My week’s been pretty good.

I got paid. I didn’t come home from DJing Wednesday night until 6am Thursday morning because I was too busy making out with my super hot coworker all night.

Yeah, I had to reinstall Windows on my laptop this week and thus both comics were up horribly late, but I tell you a night of marathon makeouts will brighten your mood any time.