So much I could write about but I'm just so fucking tired and so fucking over it. - The heat pump that the local pool outfit said wouldn't work because it was undersized? And couldn't sell me because they have last year's stock that they want to offload at a 40% markup? And that they want $5000 to hook up two pipes and a 60A whip? Yeah it heats up the pool a degree PER HOUR. And it goddamn well should it's eleven fucking TONS of heat/cool capacity. That fucker on? it's like taking the cooling capacity for a strip mall, concentrating it in an area the size of a trash can lid and pointing it at the sky. You can't quite pretend to skydive over it but hot diggity damn it'll take the sweat off your brow in about three seconds. The delta between "buy it off the Internet and install it yourself" and "trust your friendly local pool and spa dealership is eight thousand dollars or 133%. - It's a fucking countertop, not the new Superman movie. No, I don't want a fucking waterfall edge and neither should you, you goddamn trend-following gloryhounds. Here's where we're at: some rich asshole put a slab of quartz on his wall, so other rich assholes put slabs of quartz on their wall, so now home depot has giant chunks of porcelain painted up to look like quartz so you can put them on your wall and pretend you're a Kardashian or some shit. just fucking stop it. - The designer, two architects, the cabinet people and half my friends mocked me eight months ago for wanting a 45" galley sink. Eight months ago? You could buy one for $11k or you could buy one for $800 and I'm the dipshit for wanting an $800 sink. Fast forward to "we're ready to order a sink" and Kohler and Krauss have one, Costco will sell you one and the #1 best-selling sink on Amazon is a fucking 45" galley sink, the best value among no less than two dozen Chinese ripoff galley sinks. But I'm the dipshit. The whole of the design industry is arrayed around the idea that you can have money or taste but not both so the tastemakers will get you to buy their shit by insulting you and making you feel like a fucking idiot. - I got a grocery list from two weeks ago that says "paper towels, juice boxes, potatoes, butter, lunchmeat, ramen noodles, watermelon, subzero, paint, light." yesterday? A fucking refrigerator that cost more than my wife's Honda sat in my driveway while some dipshit delivery guy, half an hour early, refused to talk to me or look at me while he bullied his boss into letting him leave without dropping off my fridge because he decided my ceiling was too low (it's 92"). When I told him to "get the fuck out of my house" he shouted at me, stepped up to me, and threatened me with physical violence. On camera. With audio. "last chance, get out or I call 911" finally got him to leave. You shouldn't have to deal with this fucking 'hood shit when you're buying an appliance that costs more than most people's kitchens and yet. So in canceling the shit out of that order and shopping around for other places you can find insanely expensive refrigerators, I discovered they'd given me the wrong install sheet anyway and now the cabinets need to move over two inches. Apparently It's easier to put a small-block Chevy in a VW Beetle than it is to put a refrigerator in a refrigerator hole. I've been telling people that the house is an aircraft carrier but that's not really accurate. It's more en pointe to say it's a Typhoon-class submarine: bigger than it looks, with four pressure hulls where one would do, constructed as the last gasp of ostentatious spending by a dying empire and 90% invisible because it lurks below the waterline. Either way it's fucking hard-mode home improvement and I'm fucking sick of it. ____________________________ Hey kids - you wanna see how the sausage is made? Fuckin' David Bois, the pitbull who terrorized anyone who said anything bad about Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos? Yeah he headed up a class-action provider lawsuit against Blue Cross Blue Shield with a fuckin' $3b settlement. So of course they slow-walked this to class members such that they put together a website they told nobody about, have a hotline where they tell people how to navigate the website but not how to interpret the data and oh by the way you need to get all your information in within the next three weeks surprise! They were careful to publish their webinars after they happened, of course. Know how I know about it? Because my cell was so contaminated by the PPP process that vultures far and wide now call and text me multiple times a day to go "hey we heard you need money." Three weeks ago I got a couple spams about some bogus settlement, two weeks ago i went "huh maybe I should ask our biller" and our biller went "whaaaaaa" and then this week we ran reports illustrating that under the class rules BCBS did us just this side of $3m worth of harm. Now - is that gonna be a check with some zeros or is that gonna be a Starbuck's gift card? Well see we don't know until everyone submits their poker-chip count and then they divide by the total number of poker chips submitted. So yeah. Fewer people who know about it the more money you make! Thanks, David Bois! We shat it wide anyway because Fuck BCBS. Of course, by the time we'd piloted the submission process there's five days left. Fuckin' capitalism. I had fuckin' dry heaves at Home Depot when I was about to flip the switch on that goddamn heat pump. Do you have any idea how much it sucks to have every expert tell you you're wrong for months, model your goddamn pool in SOLID WORKS and then spend $6k because you think you're right and every expert is wrong? And then you get to see who's the jackass? out of a cannon, into the sun has become my new mantra and that's probably not healthy.