Easter Monday, 7:30 am Grey And Speckled

Lookin’ toward the house on a speckled grey morning. Took me longer to process this morning’s photos than to take them. But that’s always been the case, hasn’t it?

— Easter Monday Morning, March 28th, 2016 — // 0˚C / +30˚F — Grey and quiet @ 7:45 am on this Holiday Morning in Atlantic Canada —

Jassper, surveying his world, looking for something to boof at.

— Last night we binged on the second half of the season’s “You, Me & The Apocalypse” – A British TeeVee production? Wonderfully done, leaves way too many loose ends. Who’s in the box? Do the characters left for dead find a way in? Is the Grandmother really as evil as we think she might be? Do I have to write my own sequel in my head? Should I have the characters jump out of their script and hold the writers and producers hostage until they all get their happiest endings? What would that look like? Hmmmmm —–

It really is kind of very grey and gloomy this morning. And slippery. And this area’s garbage men don’t get a break. I think they even had to work Christmas and New Years Day. Last week’s ice storm didn’t kill us, but it left a slick surface behind.

— Hints of possible colour in the sky above Canada Street. The road really isn’t this flat here, but everything looked warped until I ‘straightened the horizon’ with iPhoto’s editing tools.

— & the love of my life was on the phone with ‘support’ at her tax prep software’s contact help line yesterday, getting frustrated as she realized the depths and levels of insidious corporate fascism. They are constantly trying to make things more difficult in order to con you into abandoning they ‘free’ versions in favour of mortgaging your soul to how many freakin corporations at the same time? If the punishment really fit their crimes, what sort of torture could they look forward to as they attempt to waltz into the happy hunting grounds? Having molten lead or gasoline poured onto their private parts? With the gasoline comes a gauntlet of everybody they so delighted in screwing out of their disposable income during their ‘careers’ down here in this proximity to hell? Grumble grumble grumble.

— & more of yesterday’s not-so-pleasant insights into ‘human nature’ – On Saturday – The Canadian Tire store on the north side here – twice we went in there with a $10.00 deposit bottle to bring back when the $4.99 10 gallon/18.9 litre bottles of spring water were unavailable at our favourite ‘big water’ store. Twice the cute young front line cashiers tried to charge us for that deposit as if we had no bottle to return. This time the cashier turned to a ‘colleague’ for help and when the colleague called in the correction routine, the cash register again tried to charge us for the deposit even when told we had a return bottle that should have taken care of that. After we squawked again the more experienced cashier had to walk over and manually do something on the newer cashier’s register to make the ten dollar charge go away. And on our way out the senior cashier gave us such a dirty look it made me feel like she believed we were cheating her children out of any possibility of eating healthy stuff this week by not letting Canadian Tire cheat us out of ten freakin dollars. Is this a systemic rip off? — Couple that with the fact that Cathi spent what at least felt like two hours on the phone with the ‘support’ guy at the tax preparation software’s help line only to have the guy finally tell her that she screwed up by trying to do both hers and my taxes with the ‘free’ version of their software = which the support guy said will only do one person’s taxes. This is after several years of that free version doing both her and my tax snar with no problem at all. Do you remember the angels briefing you on what life on earth would be like this time around? Do you remember anybody up there telling us that we were here only to give the greedy someone more to fleece? [ Nobody who’s had a Near Death Experience came back believing they should have worked harder, or spent more time and energy accumulating wealth. They always came back feeling like love, nurturing each other, and compassion were the important things to live and learn in this life.

— Enough of my schnarr for now? –,

~~~~~ Jim