Three Days of Grouch

I started getting grouchy at about 4:15 on Sunday afternoon when my otherwise uneventful trip home from JFK was sabotaged by the closing of a crucial off-ramp that is the easiest access to where I live. Well, to modify that a little, I wasn’t annoyed so much by the closing as I was about the lack of notification of its closing until well past the opportunity to avoid it by taking an earlier exit.

Then other stuff happened, not necessarily in this order:

The knowledge that I am a victim of a typographical error made in 1993 that designated the building where I live as a three unit as opposed to the two unit it really is, which screws up changing the name on the recipient of the gas bill (yeah, really).

Some judge utilizes his power to sabotage stem cell research, the most promising medical break-through since penicillin. Again, I’m not so annoyed at the sabotage as by the fact “some” judge has the power to do this out-of-the blue, without having to explain him or herself. Of course the same thing happened in California with Proposition 8, but at least I personally agreed with that outcome.

The “news” of some half-vast movie star being discharged from rehab gets equal time on Katie Couric with simultaneous bombings in 13 different Iraq cities after U.S. troops have withdrawn. Then her program further irritated me by covering the fact that Erin (Mrs. Tiger) Woods has spoken out about their divorce. This stuff belongs on Entertainment Tonight or TMV(?) or any of those other extremely nauseating half hours of gossip and innuendo.

I dropped four tomatoes on my kitchen floor, smashing their off-the-vine-fresh skins, rendering them inedible.

The spectacle of various politicians, both sides, making hay over the mosque-near-ground-zero controversy. I wish there was some way to subtract votes from candidates who utilize this method of attention-getting.

Thinking I was exceptionally good at responding correctly to a lot of Jeopardy answers, before realizing it’s a rerun and therefore a lot of my knowledge was cribbed because of a previous viewing.

This morning, after toasting my bagel; going into the fridge only to find a recent houseguest had essentially finished a container of cream cheese and returned it to the shelf with, perhaps, a quarter-teaspoon left.

All this stuff, along with general irritations like the NY Mets, Glen Beck, Facebook and my burgeoning waistline have made the last three days a pain in my burgeoning ass.

Writing all that down yesterday made me feel better. It’s like getting a pedicure; that is, a little minor cleansing of the soul. However, when I tried to cut/paste from Microsoft Word to here my computer malfunctioned and I couldn’t make it happen. More grouchy grist for this particular mill. Not being up to retyping directly I slapped my computer monitor in its uppity reflective face and ditched the project until this morning. Maybe the next three days will be better.