Good riddance to bad Gap clerks, clubs, and guilds… but the butterflies can stay
First and foremost: the giant mulch pile remains.
I did take three heaping wheelbarrows’ full off it last weekend but haven’t touched it since.
Ah… laziness…
So what did I do this week since I didn’t shovel mulch? Well, I did some brainstorming/outlining on a novel I’m writing… that will be under a pen name so never mind…
And I wrote another episode of that weird doll web series I’m developing, the episode called “Ring Toss.”
It’s loosely based on a real incident from my music industry days, wherein a philandering scuzzball man-whore producer I knew never wore his wedding ring in-studio save for the end of the night when he was on his way home to the missus. Except for this one session where the drummer of the band was a newlywed and a nominal Catholic, so every time they went out to smoke weed, the producer would come back in wearing his ring… which would magically vanish again within a few minutes until the next toke break… and when the drummer was out of the control room, said producer would mutter under his breath about “f-ing Catholics…”
LOL… anyway, I had done an outline a while back but initially was feeling uninspired to actually write the damn episode, so I brought in reinforcements:
Left to right: Richard (aka Dickhead) the mix engineer, “The Drummer” (more normally seen in these parts dressed up like a certain Irishman with a groupie Barbie in his lap), Jason the studio intern/assistant/gofer.
It did actually help to be staring at the main characters of the episode whilst writing it, though I’m sure my brother was wondering what the Hell was wrong with his 40-something sister lining up dolls on the dining room table. (He knows about the web series, but still.)
What else… ran into a clerk at the Gap who was obnoxious enough to make me decide that not only did I not need any of the clothes I’d picked out that day, but honestly I don’t need anything at the Gap or its subsidiary stores ever again.
She started to backpedal when it became clear I was going to leave without purchasing, but too late, Karen.
Y’know… a whole lot has been made about the devastation to retail that’s happened this last year, and yes, most of the blame lies on the scumbag politicians and petty tyrants and their inane rules. But some of it lies with cunty clerks. People who have never before bought clothes online have done so this year and discovered it can actually be very convenient and no dealing with shitty retail staff.
Some of those people will never be back, or at least they won’t be back to certain stores.
That said, I’m not a 100% online shopper, and some local stores have earned my undying loyalty this past year just for being pleasant and cordial. Funny how that works.
Like how I’ll be a regular customer at the Patch in Victoria until such time as I leave Canada.
Related thought: substitute clubs and guilds and the like for stores: there’s been a few I’ve been in that maybe I kept going to because I liked some of the people while others there were toxic and a major drag. Well, the lack of in-person meetings has meant breaking that pattern and those habits and y’know what? I don’t miss them.
I can’t be the only one who won’t return when in-person meetings resume for the same reasons.
Naturally, I bet the assholes will assume that people who don’t return are simply cautious. Naw… the whole thing is overblown and statistically no worse than a bad flu, no matter what lies the mainstream media scum have spewed. I’ll be not returning because I have better things to do with better people. The rest can rot.
No fuss, no muss, just a “gypsy fade” as one of my former music scene pals used to call it in regards to just slipping out the side door without a word.
Speaking of a gypsy fade, earlier today I was out in the garden with my brother and we were watching butterflies. Two yellow swallowtails (dunno which specific species as there’s a couple options that are similar and live in my area, but probably a Western tiger swallowtail) were making circuits around the yard and stopping to feed on nectar from the sage in my herb bed in the veggie patch. We watched their antics for a while but when I came out with my iPhone to try to take pics, both were long gone.
This fella, who I believe is a Lorquin’s Admiral based on this ID sheet, however, was a little more tolerant, though he kept circling around the neighbor’s honeysuckle as I tried to both get close enough for a decent photo and stay far enough to not spook him:
Well, maybe I’ll manage to get a shot of the yellow ones later in the summer, they’re usually around for a couple months.
We also saw a grasshopper in one of the flowerbeds as I was pulling some weeds, but he was long gone before I brought out the iPhone.
What else… no new Barbie arrivals to show, but I do have 3 more frumps on the way, one of which will be Richard’s long-suffering wife Pam when not on “deluded middle aged groupie” duty, as well as a long-haired Ken who will be perfect to play the role of one of the strippers’ boyfriends, but that’s a story for some later date… so…
Well, the replacement curtains arrived and are now installed:
I kinda goofed up in that I could have ordered the outer teal ones in either 45″ or 63″ and because I don’t need more than 45″ I ordered those. But then I forgot that the sheers only came in 63″ or 84″ and I ordered 63″… and I didn’t feel like hemming the damn things today so I just used the ol’ safety pin hem method to make them match the 45’s for now.
Maybe later in the summer I’ll get around to hemming them properly or maybe they’ll forever stay safety pinned.
Well, let’s wrap up with some flowers:
