My Daily Rant™

I love to rant. I believe it’s good for the soul.

Sometimes I’ll rant at the Rock God about things (not often about things HE’S done, mostly about Other People), often I’ll rant at the Chums (they mostly just glaze over and ignore me, I’ve found), but most often I like to rant on the internet. It’s very cathartic and I can usually find like-minded souls prepared to join me in my rage.

And then once I’ve ranted, that’s it. I can dust myself down and get on with my day, untethered by the weight of my wails.

A lovely friend of mine has requested an EpicRant™ for today, one she can digest over a coffee and a cake at eleven am. So I have decided to collate a series of minor rants into a rantathon. It’s almost a spreadsheet, in fact.

KITCHEN:

Wine glasses. Wine glasses need to be the right size and shape. Not novelty ones, or thick glass, or short stemmed, or long stemmed, or too big or too small. They need to be CORRECT. It makes the wine taste all wrong if they are incorrectly proportioned. OR, what’s worse, is if they are overfilled. I do not want a FULL glass of wine. I want a nice big glass and a normal amount of wine.

Mugs. Along much the same lines, mugs need to be of a regulation size. They also need to be white. I can tolerate coloured mugs so long as they are white on the inside. I do not want my coffee in a glass, or in a giant mug, or in a teeny tiny cupette. I want it in a nice normal white round mug.

Speaking of round. Plates. Plates need to be round. And also white. Square plates are an abomination. I do not want to eat my dinner from a right angle. I also very much don’t want to eat it off a piece of roof slate, or a brick, or an old shoe. Please, for the love of Jeff, stop mucking around with dinnerwear.

Pasta must be cooked in the biggest pan. Not in the smallest possible pan, or even the milk pan <looks at husband sternly>. It is all kinds of wrong otherwise.

When I ranted about this the other day I was HORRIFIED to learn that people also sometimes cook scrambled eggs in a FRYING PAN. What the hell? No no no. Stop that immediately. Eggs are to be scrambled in a saucepan. This pan mutiny must stop.

Recycling. The recycling bin is JUST OUTSIDE THE DOOR. We don’t have to pile it all up next to the sink. Open the jeffing door and put it out. The fairies won’t do it.

DRIVING:

Mini roundabouts are just like roundabouts. The same rules apply. You dont’ need to hover and edge and stop and panic and look around wildly and then eventually cut someone up. It’s a friffing roundabout. Same as all the others. If you don’t know how to drive, get off the road.

Parking. It’s not rocket science. Don’t park outside my house when you have your own driveway. Don’t park so far over in the space that I can’t open my door, if you do then my children will probably open their doors and ding your car. Not my fault. Oh, and why is it that when I fail utterly to parallel park, I always have an audience of at least a hundred. People even stop their cars to gawk. Yet on the few times I do it perfectly, sweeping my beast of a car into the space in a graceful arc, not one of you bastards is looking! How is that fair?

Tailgating. Just don’t. If you do, I will probably ride my brakes for a few miles just to piss you off. Similarly though, don’t stick to a constant 40mph on every road. If you’re too scared to do 60 or 70 then just get a flipping bus. Grr.

WEATHER:

WHY is it that we’ll have a week of sunny weather, and on the day I want to mow the grass it will bucket down? Seriously, this has happened too much lately for it to be a coincidence. I smell a conspiracy.

Ditto the fact that I pack away all my shorts and t shirts and dig out my jumpers and boots, and then the weather goes all weirdly warm and pleasant. Every arseing year. Why?

LAUNDRY:

Bedsheets. When making the bed, pillowcases have a little lip. This is to fold back under the pillow so the pillow doesn’t work loose from its case. Why, my lovely Rock God Husband, do you fail to do this every single time to make the bed up? Oh, and the buttons go at the foot end, for heaven’s sake. This should be obvious. Why isn’t it?

Towels and bedding go in the wash together on a WHITE COTTON 60° wash. Everything else goes on a QUICK COTTON 40°. Jeans and black stuff together, whites and very pale stuff together, coloured stuff together. It is not difficult. There is also a 30 minute, 30° quick wash for stuff you need in a hurry. They are the only three wash cycles I use. There is never any reason to put a load on a THREE HOUR MEDIC RINSE PREWASH cycle, particualrly if it’s clothes you want to wear to Wing Chun in an hour’s time. Again, very obvious. You would think.

The side of the bed is not a laundry basket glosses over own floordrobe in the bathroom.

Neither is under the bed, in the toybox or behind the curtains.

BOTH my older Chums have a penchant for yesterdays socks. I don’t understand it, but they will both go to extreme and frightening lengths in order to wear the same skanky pair for a week. They don’t seem to understand the logic that if they would put them in the wash every day instead of stashing them in hidey holes around their rooms, they could have their favourite socks to wear CLEAN every day.

OTHER STUFF:

My own inability to type THE in the right order. No matter how much I practise, it always comes out as TEH. In the paragraph above I had to amend each and every one. That’s twelve typos in one paragraph. Tehn, tehir, teh, tehy WHY WHY WHY?

Why is it that when the Littlest Chum sleeps through the night, I wake up at 4am tossing and turning and fretting and unable to doze back off? Where’s the fairness in that?

And finally (although this is by no means an exhaustive list): WHY does the shop over the road never have any New Zealand sauvignon blanc? They have a vast range of wines, all horrible. The only one I can bear is their fizzy plonk, but I don’t always want fizzy plonk, sometimes I want a nice bottle, and I don’t want to have to walk the extra 500 yards to the Co-op. The injustice of it. The horror.

Here endeth today’s rant.

xx

My family and other animals

They’re all bloody menkle.

The Littlest Chum is on a toddling mission to explore the highest peaks of the living room. He keeps toppling off stuff, and I keep saying, ah well, he’ll only do it once. Er, twice. Um, well surely he won’t do it the fifteenth time? Oh.

The Pie is on top form in the Supersonic Whine category. Honestly, she would win awards for it. I wouldn’t mind the shrill whinging so much if it wasn’t accompanied by the sly punching. She’s a bit, um, hard work at the moment. We have an action plan involving cutting out aspartame and more sleep. I’ll let you know how that goes.

The Boy has decided he worships the Ancient Greek Gods and has devoted himself to Poseidon. This may explain his bizarre (if not divine) ability to sniff out water (or mud) at ten paces and immerse himself. Unless the water is in a bath. Then he’ll invoke all sorts of cast iron reasons why he doesn’t need one. It’s a paradox.

The Rock God is a different kind of insanio altogether. Earlier he told me that he’d had a grand plan to wash ALL his new work t shirts last weekend, but because I’d washed two of them earlier in the week he couldn’t. So he didn’t wash any. He had a system, you see. And I’d carelessly scuppered it.

On similar lines, I devised a rota for housework the other week, which is working well so far EXCEPT that I had to specifically add that it was ok to deviate from the rota. We don’t HAVE to wait until Tuesday or Thursday to clean the bathroom, and it’s ok to hoover downstairs on a Wednesday if there’s weetabix crushed into the rug. Once we’d established that, it went a lot smoother.

It’s a good thing I’m such a paragon of mental normalness, or we’d be going to hell in a handbasket.

Erk.