And Then There Were None

Summer seemed to make nothing more than a brief cameo this year, fall has arrived and shoved summer out on his ass. I don't mind fall, there's quite a bit to look forward to when Autumn arrives...Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas...and I do tend to get a bit Griswold about the holidays. However, I always miss summer when it departs. I've said this before, but from a completely pragmatic point of view I only have about 22 good summers left before some sort of calamitous health event takes me down or renders me (more) physically feeble than I am now...so unless there is a stunning and economically viable breakthrough in robotics or bionics in the next 20 years or so, the summer of 2033 isn't going to be all that much fun for me.

Yes, well...that was depressing.

Sooooo, yeah...I still hate the Starbucks in the International District. The remodel makes about as much sense as Chinese sign language to me. Someone from corporate store design needs to come down and gaze upon the disaster their vision has wrought. It is pure effing chaos in that place when it is only moderately busy, when crowded it's the equivalent of a marketplace in Mogadishu (Blackhawks optional) or the Renton WalMart (minus the tire fires in the parking lot). I think the only place designed more inefficiently and staffed with less motivated employees would be the Krusty Pup or scone stands at the Puyallup Fair...goddamn, it takes less time filling out first time patient paperwork at a dental clinic than it does trying to order a corn dog at the fair. I cut the fair some slack because the booths are staffed by dipshit DECA dorks, very special people, and their parents, but Starbucks earns every atom of rage I throw their way. They should know f*cking better than to try and corral everyone into the center of the store! Ugh.

Wow, so speaking of dentists, I visited an absolute loon of a dentist a couple of weeks ago. Now, I could have looked past the greasy hair, the neonish pink shirt, and the ill fitting dress trousers...dentists can be wacky that way. What I couldn't get past was when he asked to compare wallets with me, his fumbling attempts to give me a soul brother hand shake, and his borderline inappropriate comments about my skin tone. Oh, and he told me that if I decide to have my wisdom teeth pulled I would miss about three weeks of work. Yep, three weeks. Because one of the teeth is crazy sideways. He said removing that tooth would be the equivalent of a compound break of my femur. And there would be an 80% chance the right side of my face would be numb from the nerve damage from the extraction, but hey, Sly Stallone has a numb face and everything worked out for him! If I don't get the tooth pulled then I have a 1 in a 1000 chance of getting inoperable cancer from it...then he saw the horrified look on my face and changed the odds to 1 in 10,000. So I have that going for me. Anyhoo, I won't be going back to that quack anytime soon, especially since the hygienist liked to play rough. My goodness, I had never, ever experienced pain the way I did in that dentist's chair. It was blinding at times and two of my teeth still hurt from whatever it was she did to them. I won't print the dentist's name, but if you email me I'll be more than happy to give you that info so you can avoid them at all costs.

Lastly, I have picked what appears to be the end of the corn I planted. What I have picked so far was pretty good, if not a little underdeveloped. I'm not sure if I want to plant it again next year, although the girls want me to. They really enjoyed watching it grow and picking it, along with the tomatoes and peppers. If the corn had turned out better I was prepared to plow under the entire back yard and turn it into a cornfield next year...but that didn't happen. Too bad, I was looking forward to buying a brand new combine and then having John Cougar Mellenhead write a song about me when I missed a couple of payments and the auction man came to take it away....