Christine the Curmudgeon

Christine the Curmudgeon thinks that this crap has gotten WAY out of hand.  The way things are going now, the media is trying to scare us all into moving into plastic bubbles someplace so that we don’t all kick the bucket from this thing.

Seriously…there is talk about schools being shut down, and stuff like that.

I wonder how my former employer who shall not be named is reacting to this.  I mean, when I worked there, I caught a very nasty cold, but was given all sorts of crap for calling in sick.  BTW, these were the same people who gave me crap for wanting to take time off for doing something as trivial as getting married.

Anyhoo, back to the cold thing.  I was sick, coughing up a lung, and they wanted me to come to work, and make sandwiches IN FULL VIEW OF CUSTOMERS?  Who the hell is gonna buy any food from anyone who is visibly sick and coughing up a lung?  Not to mention gallons of snot dripping out of my nose?

So I blame a lot of these workplaces for the spread of disease, when they force people to work when they are sick, and then spread it to everybody else.  If you have serious cold or flu symptoms, all you can do is STAY THE HELL AT HOME until you get better.  Someone needs to send some employers the 411 on this!

But today’s society says that you MUST come to work, even if you are half dead and coughing up BOTH lungs.  This alone is seriously going to make this swine flu thing even worse.  Sheesh, just make it okay for sick people to stay at home, let them use their sick days, don’t penalize kids for missing school due to illness, and just maybe, we would not have these problems as much?

Common sense. people!  Where the hell is it?  It’s even less complicated than finding the best acne treatment! You have flu-like symptoms, you stay the hell at home, call the doctor if you think you need to.  Stay home, and that makes it less likely to spread the disease.

But what gets me is the fact that many healthy people may refuse to go anywhere, because they are so scared of catching this thing.  Today I wrote a post on my baseball blog as to how this can potentially hurt small minor league clubs financially.

Well, I am not letting this scare me.  We are going to the PawSox game on Sunday, and that is that.  I doubt that they will go crazy enough to close down ballparks and cancel baseball for the rest of the season.  But part of me would NOT be surprised if someone was actually nutso enough to suggest it.

The only thing I fear now is the possibility of getting kicked out of the ballpark on Sunday.  You see, Mr. Curmudgeon has been coughing due to a lung issue…a blood clot that is going away.  He is taking medication and is under medical care for this.  The coughing is going away, but he might still be coughing a bit when we go to McCoy Stadium on Sunday.  He has nothing that is contagious to anyone, trust me.

Yet I am afraid that if he coughs, some psycho overprotective parent will throw a fit and DEMAND that we be kicked out, because Mr. C clearly has the swine flu, and DOG forbid her kid might get it.  Never mind the fact that her kid is busy using the railings on the steps in the stands as a jungle gym, and is in a good position to fall and crack his head open.  Never mind the fact that the kid was also crawling all over the floor in the stands, and then eating food with dirty hands that were all over said floor.  Never mind that any of this can make the kid sicker than having my husband cough anywhere near him.  A man is COUGHING, he MUST be banned immediately.  OMG HE HAZ TEH EBIL SWINE FLU!  GET HIM OUT OF HERE, NOW!

We refuse to stay home because of this.  Neither one of us has anything contagious, therefore, we have the right to go and see the game if we so choose.  If so much as one idiotic person gives us crap about Mr. C coughing, the only thing they will catch is the Curmudgeon Fist hitting them squarely in the jaw.

Hell, if I’m gonna get kicked out of a ballpark, damned straight I’m gonna make it worth my while before I leave!

So, Christine the Curmudgeon saw a link on Twitter to a post on the Catster blog about Hello Kitty Beer.  Had to go and check it out.  They got this image from a blog called Hello Kitty Hell.

I confess that I do like Hello Kitty, but BEER?  I think not!

This image, of course, was Photoshopped, but methinks that the pinkly-packed Beck’s beer is real.  Obviously not in the U.S., though, that label is in German.  Someone just shopped an HK image on it, that’s all.

I have already blogged about the fact that some companies are starting to market beer to women.  This includes making more *girly* types of beer that are likely to appeal to the Anoretix crowd.  Well, they can keep that, I prefer to drink the good stuff that only men are supposed to drink.

Another thing I am famous for hating is pink baseball stuff.  I recently blogged about that yet again HERE.  I refuse to have anything to do with it, I wear only team gear that is of the actual team colors.

At least some people do have the brain cells to realize that not all women are into the pink, and make items for women that are not of that color.  For example, behold…

Think REALLY hard and guess which one I have…LOL!

So, no pink-packaged beer for me, no pink baseball team gear, no pink purses.  I thought the whole *blue is for boys, pink is for girls* thing went out with 8-track tapes.

BTW, many women ask me about my Red Sox purse.  I got it from a site called LegendsAreForever.com.  Only $25.00 plus shipping.  So I’ve broken yet another silly female stereotype and did not pay over a thousand dollars for a designer purse.  I never understood people who pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars for a handbag.

But yeah, they sell the silly pink one there, too, if you really, really must!

Christine the Curmudgeon has to laugh at the stupidity of some commercials, and at the fact that some people buy into the crap they spew.

I mean, if you honestly believe that Kelly Ripa, of Live With Regis & Kelly fame really does her own laundry while running about the house in high heels, you have serious issues.  Same if you think that she really does her own cooking when she hosts dinner parties at her luxury home.

Yet, in a series of appliance commercials, she is shown doing just that.  Give me a freakin’ break!  There is no doubt in my mind that she has a slew of household help, everything from housekeepers to cooks to nannies.  If Kelly really does her own family’s laundry, well, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.  Cheap.

It pisses me off to see average people looking up to celebrity moms like this, thinking that people like Kelly Ripa are just like them.  They are not.  For one thing, look at her…she doesn’t even look like she’s ever given birth!  She looks like she’s taken one too many diet pill. She looks so thin because she has money for expensive personal trainers to get her back into shape after each baby, and for nannies to take care of her kids so she has time to work out.

And it’s so much easier to be a mom when you can just hand the kids off to nannies when they get difficult and cranky, as all normal kids do.  Regular people can’t do that, they have to deal with the whole experience of parenting, both the good and the bad parts.  Any average mom will be truthful and tell you that it ain’t all sunshine and roses.

Doing laundry in high heels.  Yeah, right!

Here we go again!  This past weekend, Christine the Curmudgeon and the Mister went away for the weekend, to three New Hampshire Fisher Cats ball games.  The weather was very unseasonably summer-like, and most people were dressed accordingly.  Unfortunately, for some people, that means some stuff that no one should have to see.

Such as bra straps.  If you are going to wear a tube top or one with spaghetti straps, you do know that there is such a thing as a strapless bra.  Don’t you?  In fact, I do not wish to see ANY underwear at all, and that includes thongs being worn with hip-hugger shorts.  Don’t want to see butt-cracks, either, on men or women.

The worst fashion display I saw was not on an adult, but a little girl, looked to be about 8 or 9 years old.  What parent thinks that dressing their little girls up to look like whores is a good idea?  This girl was wearing a blasck midriff-baring tube top, and a pair of tight, low-cut Daisy Duke-type shorts with some brand name written across the ass, also in black.  On her feet were black patent leather  strappy sandals that looked like they belonged more on an adult woman than such a little girl.  She looked like she was going out to work a street corner, as opposed to going on a nice family outing to a ball game.

I wanted to run over to the souvenir store, pick out a nice big Fisher Cats T-shirt, run my credit card through one of their POS systems to pay, and put it on that girl to cover her up.

Hell, if I had tried to leave the house in an outfit like that when I was 16-17 years old, no way would my parents have let me out of the house.  If I even bought clothes like that, they would have made me return them to the store.

It’s sad that they even make such slutty clothes for little girls.  But the reason they do so is because people are buying them.  And it has to be the parents, kids that age don’t go shopping alone, they don’t have any money.  WTF is wrong with people?  What kind of a parent wants their little girls to look like a pedophile’s dream come true?

It’s sick.

Several years ago, Mr. Curmudgeon had a vasectomy.  We made this choice together, because we didn’t want to have kids, and his getting snipped was easier than my going for a tubal.

Still, it was a PITA to get a referral for.  His doctor, the one who he recently fired for being a quack, at first refused to give the referral to the urologist so that the health insurance we had at the time (Tufts) would pay.  He had to fight with the jerk to get it, and finally did.  This doctor is a jerk who thinks that EVERYBODY needs to be just like him and have a kid every year.

Well, we don’t want any kids at all, and did what we had to do to make sure of that.  It’s all moot now, I’m past menopause and couldn’t get knocked up even if I wanted to.  But Mr. C’s snip saved us from having to raise a child when we’re more worried about saving money for retirement.  And let’s face it, we’re both too cranky and curmudgeonly to deal with kids and all of the crap that goes with them.  Curmudgeon Cats are it for us!

Anyhoo, I just read this in today’s Dear Abby:

DEAR ABBY: I’m a nanny and have been for three years. The 10-year-old girl I work with is wonderful, and I love her dearly. Her parents are not abusive, but they are caught up in their own lives. They devote very little time or effort to their daughter.

The only thing my employers ever talk to her about is school (she’s an A student) and academics. When they are home they spend very little time with her. They never buy her even tiny gifts “just because” — only when she brings home A’s does she get gifts. Of course she is upset by this. She confides in me, to the point of tears.

How can I get her parents to take an active role in her life? I know better than to tell a parent how to be a parent, but they are slowly scarring their daughter and making her resent them. I know they love her, but their parenting makes her feel unlovable. — NANNY IN NEW YORK

DEAR NANNY: Loneliness is the ultimate poverty. For all of her financial advantages, that girl is emotionally starved and for good reason. Her parents appear to be so self-involved they give her only the bare minimum and have handed that “chore” off to you. I’m sad to say what they are doing will have ramifications for their daughter in the future.

Whether you can change their pattern of behavior is open to question. You can try by telling them their daughter “needs more of them” and suggest that ALL of you spend an afternoon/evening together occasionally, so the unaccustomed “burden” won’t be too heavy for them. But if they can’t or won’t devote the time, she should be involved in extracurricular activities that will get her out of the house — things like sports and classes in music, dance, drama, etc. — which will give her more positive feedback and less time to brood.

WHY did this yuppie scumbag couple even bother to have a child in the first place, if they were going to ignore her and let her be raised by a nanny? Yet so many people give people who choose not to have kids crap for that choice.  Maybe, just, MAYBE, we chose not to have kids because we thought about it, realized it’s not for us, and that was it?  Ya think?

We got Mr. C’s quack to give us the referral for the snip by threatening to leave any child I gave birth to on his doorstep, with a note that we changed our minds and now he can take care of it forever.  He did say that we might change our minds and want kids someday, well, I’d sooner be a New York Y*****s fan than have that happen.  Sorry if this offends some people, but that is OUR choice.   That got through to him, because once a child is here, someone has to take care of it.

It sounds to me like the couple that this Dear Abby nanny works for only had the kid due to social or family pressure, or whatnot.  And this is good for the kid HOW?

Think about it.