Bad day chez Regina

I'm fuming today! We ordered a cooker online on August 30th. Estimated delivery September 9th. I received an email on the 7th to advise me that the cooker had been dispatched. So far, so good. Having spent three days as prisoners in our own home waiting for the delivery guy, we got precisely nothing.

Yesterday I contacted the sellers, asking for a proper time of delivery, because I have other things to do besides sitting here like an idiot for days on end. This morning an email arrived, with a telephone number and also a reference number, so I could take it up directly with the delivery people. I rang them and they gave me another number for my region, where they never heard my name, and informed me that my order number was wrong, it should start with "99" not "81."

Many phone calls later, to various customer services departments, I was none the wiser regarding the whereabouts of my cooker. While all this stuff was going on, we were busy washing floors and other general cleaning, getting ready for our son Paul's arrival with girlfriend next Saturday. Already in a charming mood, I then managed to tip a bucket of dirty water all over the kitchen floor. I left the room crying and left Peter to deal with spill.

After lunch I made another phone call to the merchants and insisted the guy should ring the delivery company himself, as they kept saying they didn't know anything about me or my order. He came back to say that of course they had dispatched my cooker and would ring me on my cell to arrange a firm date for the delivery.

Could you please light candles, send vibes, do some voo-doo or whatever, so that my cooker arrives before Friday (Peter has an appointment for an ultrasound on Friday) and that I don't go completely crazy? Please? Pretty please?

Or is it too late?

Britain steps back into the last century.

We went to bed feeling hopeful and woke up to the shocking news that Britons had chosen to leave the EU.

One of the idiots leading the Brexit campaign, a jingoistic, racist guy called Nigel Farage, who is married to a German woman (go figure), made a victory speech where he stated: "We won without a bullet being fired." 

How quickly he forgot Jo Cox, who was not only the victim of three bullets, but was also stabbed and kicked by someone who enthusiastically embraced the Brexit rhetoric. RIP, Jo.

They wanted to take their country back (where have I heard this before?). Yes, back to the days before the European Union, with all their "human rights nonsense," without laws that guarantee workers a fairer deal, no rules, no regulations... 

Aah... back to the good old days!

      EDL = ENGLAND DEFENCE LEAGUE

I'll explain what will happen to us when I find out...

Questionable art project

I love children's pictures and was naturally drawn to the article that accompanied them. It's a thing called "The Monster Project," where they pair each child with an artist who then produces a version of the child's picture of a monster in their own style. The idea behind it is to encourage the children's creativity.

Uh???

I am passionate about art and firmly believe that children should be free to express themselves and to be proud of their creations without having them "improved" by well-meaning, but misguided adults. All this kind of project achieves is to leave talented, creative children with a feeling of not being good enough... Give them the best quality materials and let their imaginations fly. Their pictures don't need to be reproduced in some adult artist's style! Some of the results are mediocre, to say the least.

Here are a couple of quotes by Picasso that make a lot of sense to me and help explain my frustration with this monstrous project:

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

"It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child."

I'm sure Picasso would never, in a million years, agree to do this to a child!

Venting

We seem to be terribly unlucky with neighbours in our building. The apartment similar to ours, but at the back of the building, was bought by a person who rents it out. The first lot were a couple of teenagers with a baby. They had horrible fights and all the screaming, shouting and throwing of stuff terrified the baby (and us). I had promised myself that I would call the gendarmes if it happened again, when the girl informed me that they were moving.

Then came the nice ones, a middle aged couple, friendly and considerate. They were here for about six months. We miss them...

The latest tenants are the neighbours from hell. It's a couple around 20 years old, with one of those ferocious dogs. We can tell that it's not a pet, it's an attack dog. It belongs to the girl, who we assume made the guy get rid of his own generic (but nice) mongrel in favour of the beast.

The dog looks like this one

The dog is left alone in the apartment all day, howling and banging against the door. When the guy comes back from work, we suspect he gets furious about the destruction (and perhaps some fouling) and all hell breaks loose. The other day he shut our access door, meaning that our cats couldn't come and go. I opened it and saw Pirouette sitting by the door with her hairs all fluffed up, so I took a peek outside and the dog was sitting at the bottom of the stairs (they're outside the building), foaming at the mouth. He had fouled the road just outside the building and had puked in front of the first step.

I saw red and went to knock on their door (being careful to shut their access door behind me, as I didn't want to become a dog snack). I gave the guy a piece of my mind, said they're too lazy to own a dog, don't take him for walks and don't clean the mess he makes. He apologised, took the dog back in, left it there, then went out with the girlfriend somewhere. I had to leave them a note about cleaning the sh*t and the vomit. They half cleaned it and were lucky we had that storm the next day, because it finished washing the mess away.

This morning I woke up to incessant barking that didn't appear to come from their apartment. I went downstairs to investigate and found the dog shut in the cellar! It's that same cellar where Madame Precious had stashed all her rubbish, which she then proceeded to padlock. It's a common area housing the water meters and all residents may need to access it at any time. The girl came back after a while and took the dog upstairs to their apartment. I went down to see if the dog had fouled the cellar. I'm not sure if he did sh*t anywhere, but he ripped all the expensive insulation Peter and I had put on the door.

I've been reading about the laws regarding dogs in France, dangerous ones in particular. This afternoon we're going to the mairie (mayor's office) to ask a few questions and might end up having a chat with the gendarmes. As far as I could gather, if this dog is not pure bred, but a cross of any of the attack dogs, they've been banned since 2010. People who owned one before then need to apply for a special permit and abide by some very strict rules. As the girl is barely 20, she would have been a minor in 2010 and not allowed to own this kind of dog. Whether it's cross-bred or not, this young couple have broken a number of rules and are not responsible dog owners. Even if they had a little poodle, they would still have to clean after it!

I'm also going to talk to Madame Mim and to Dominique, who still owns her apartment, so we can call a meeting of all the owners and vote on banning this kind of dog from the building. The guy who rents the apartment out would have to vet his prospective tenants and make it clear what the rules are.

Enough is enough.

END NOTE:

I had finished the post and gone downstairs for lunch when the girl came out with the dog. I thought she was taking him for a walk... but no, she shut him in the cellar again and went out on her bike!

O sleep! O gentle sleep!

I'm having trouble going to sleep. One leg jumps, my nose makes an annoying fiiin-fonn noise, I have to get up to pee, random hard-to-scratch places itch, you name it. So I decided to laugh about it...

Meow-ow-ow-ow-ow-ow

Last night Pirouette came in through the cat flap in a tearing hurry and rushed upstairs for protection, always listening and watching the stairs. Later on, Peter found the flap bit of the contraption by the entrance to the kitchen, a good 8ft away from the door... Pirouette must have hit it at great speed!

We think the problem is the cat nextdoor. She was a lovely little kitten back in the summer and now she's in heat. We had Pirouette "done" as soon as she was old enough and we remember the vet's receptionist (lovely Régine) remarking that a female cat in heat who's not allowed to mate is a very pitiful sight. We have been hearing the poor thing yowling for days now.

Pirate doesn't pay any attention to it, as he's been neutered and prefers long walks to the pleasures of the flesh... But we have a gang of very aggressive, whole males around here and I'm sure they're aware of the poor damsel in distress. Pirouette probably went out for a call of nature and encountered a bunch of horny cats hanging around!

There are seven cats in this building and the only ones allowed out are Pirate and Pirouette. If these other cat owners are so mindful of the (very quiet) road and so very protective, wouldn't it make sense to pay a visit to our charming local vet (hey, TW!), spend 85 euros and avoid having their pets in distress?

[The pictures are not of the actual cats, just lookalikes I found on the internet.]

Devious old ad - UPDATE

I received an e-mail with a bunch of old ads, which we have seen before in a previous post. This one was new to me and I found it shocking. The text on the picture is difficult to read, so here it is:

How soon is too soon?

Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and "fitting in" during those awkward pre-teen and teen years. So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of sodas and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness.

They invoke science, referring to laboratory tests, concluding that babies who start drinking soda at an early age will "fit in" better in later years. How can you test behaviour over a span of ten to twelve years in a lab? Did they keep a bunch of children captive, one group drinking soda and a control group having none? Then, after a number of years, concluded that the soda drinkers were more sociable?

It's a dishonest ad. Fortunately, attitudes have changed and this ad wouldn't be tolerated today, in view of the alarming rise in childhood obesity!

UPDATE

I'm relieved to find out that this ad is a fake! Thank you, Amy/Ottoline, for providing the following link:

The Museum of Hoaxes

Too modern for me

Picture this: A guy is going out with a girl he disappointed three years ago but who still loved him enough to take him back and has supported and believed in him for the past six months.

Out of the blue, he refriends his latest ex on Facebook. It doesn't go down very well with the long suffering present girlfriend. Not content with the refriending, this guy goes on to post a comment on an old photo of himself lying with the ex on a beach like two lovebirds: "I would give the world to have this back."

Am I too old-fashioned to think that this is the behaviour of a cad? Am I out of step in thinking that Facebook is not the best place to break up with your present girlfriend in such a sneaky but very public way? Am I a lunatic to believe that a real man does it face-to-face, in a compassionate and considerate way, giving the girl a chance to say how she feels in order to achieve some closure?

I don't know if I'm finally getting too old for these newfangled social network interactions, but I'm very disappointed in somebody very near to me and I needed to vent!