The neighbors’ white female pit bull looks like she’s either pregnant or has more new puppies. Her teats are swollen with breast milk and I don’t know enough about dog physiology to know exactly when this happens. The 2 white younger pit bulls are probably her puppies. My guess is they are about 6 months old. They don’t give her much of a break, do they?! The darker grayish brown male pit bull seems to have a prolapsed rectum. He is whining & squirming & stretching his back legs out awkwardly trying to find some relief, and the blob of pink inflamed intestines is clearly visible hanging out of his ass. It looks awful. As much as we have wanted those dogs to shut the hell up, seeing his suffering is heartbreaking. He hasn’t been outside much for about a week, so maybe they’ve had him at the vet getting some sort of treatment. Mostly the other unaltered male, the medium brown one, has been outside with the female & 2 younger pit bulls. Haven’t seen any new puppies yet. Not looking forward to it. Just what the hell are they doing over there, running some kind of pit bull breeding farm?!? They already leave the dogs outside alone in the cold almost continuously. Cold, dark, rain, wind. And the dogs howl and bark and whine. They have been gone most of the Thanksgiving holidays, the people I mean. Since Wednesday the man has been coming home for brief visits to feed them. The rest of the time, the dogs that that crazy bitch claimed were so precious to her have been left alone in the yard to bark. Bark bark bark bark bark. Christ on a cracker I wish they’d shut the fuck up! And Smacky’s room is right next to their backyard. I’m in the front, & I have an air filter going constantly. The pit bulls mostly bother me when they get really loud right next to the part of the fence that connects that side of our house right to theirs. In Smacky’s room there is hardly any break from the noise. She can hear everything bark from every corner of their yard. Plus, they gave them cut up water drums to play with which make a loud hollow b-o-i-n- g when they bang up against their house. You have to wonder if the people did this just to be assholes. No wonder the cops and Animal Control came to their house the very first few days they were here. Animal Control said the complaint was that their dogs barked nonstop. We (& presumably the other neighbors around here) weren’t familiar with them yet enough to know what they were like. But neighbors from a previous residence would be. People already angry enough to complain. That’s what Smacky thinks happened, that neighbors from their previous address found out where they had moved to and made the complaints. At first I thought it sounded too far fetched. Now it sounds much more plausible. Especially given how defensive the man was about Animal Control and how the psycho woman went off on us is about the barking of her pit bulls. And when they first moved in the man said they had 2, which turned out to be 3, until they added 2 more, and now maybe + a whole new litter??? If 5 pit bulls is a pack, what is 11? A mob? A swarm? An abatoir?
The young boy seems to have an arsenal of (toy?) guns from which to choose. Besides the large one, he has a smaller one which makes a loud bang but does not appear to shoot any projectiles. These seem to be his favorite outside activities: pretending to execute all the dogs and shooting at houses up and down the street. For us, it’s a question of: “Would I prefer the kid next-door make loud bangs over and over under he runs out, or would I prefer the possibly quieter prospect of having my windows shot out?” Absolutely dread what they might give him for Christmas. The whole damned family is loud and annoying. The man may have at least seemed reasonable enough to talk to in the beginning. But his friends, somebody to see him at any rate, come and go when he’s home, driving up at all hours of the day and night with loud booming stereos, & then leaving about 10 minutes later. I wish I didn’t take such notice of everything that goes on over there, but they make such a godawful amount of noise! If they wanted to deal drugs without people noticing you’d think they’d try to be quiet. They have an alley on the other side of their house. They could even turn it into a drive-thru window lane and draw less attention to themselves than what they’re doing now.
Meanwhile, Smacky is still working at Walmart. This particular store seems to be run by idiots. One has to wonder if they might even be intentionally mismanaging the store, in order to justify soon closing it. They run out of shopping bags frequently. Imagine going to Walmart and they have no bags; that you’d hafta transfer stuff from your basket to your car and then from your car to your house individually, an armful of cans at a time. Many shoppers have just walked out in disgust, abandoning full baskets of perishables at the checkout lines. So they are losing a lot of business with their ineptitude.
(I know that plastic is an environmental disaster. This Walmart could offer an alternative. But they don’t.)
Also, they have this weird aversion to giving the cashiers adequate change. The managers tell the cashiers “You don’t really need it.” WTF??? When customers go through the line, a cashier can’t just refuse to give them their change! So they hafta call for a manager again and again, while the customer waits. But when the cashier tries to prevent this very foreseeable problem from happening again, these managers give them the same line. The managers have also been fucking up everybody’s schedule. Before, they often ran on a skeleton crew because they don’t have enough people. They’re always hiring but people get sick of the crap and quit. But the people that stayed, the regular people they could rely on, those people had pretty regular schedules that they could rely on. These new bigwigs, they’re not even from this store, they’ve been changing everything and making it worse. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, apparently it is possible to make things worse for Walmart employees. ) They fucked up the schedule; everybody’s complaining that their time is messed up, they’re not getting enough hours; and now even the regular people are quitting as well.
It also seems to me that some of the older, sicker employees are being forced into retirement. Several older people, people in wheelchairs, etc were taken off their regular posts, (these positions now considered “trimmed spare fat”) and knowingly put into jobs which they couldn’t do. Sometimes ridiculous red tape was added, like triplicate paperwork over end scraps that would go in the trash anyway, just for added fun. Then, when the employee couldn’t keep up on this Capitalist mobias strip of hell, they were fired. This has happened to three older or handicapped workers that I know of since the new management took over. So now sometimes they have lines that curve around the back of the store and only one cashier who is about to get off her shift , and they have no one scheduled to replace her. Or sometimes they have 20 cashiers “zoning” & trying to keep busy with no customers ready to check out.
Plus, they are digging up the floor and replacing the tiles, right by the registers. So there’s bits and chunks of tile, flooring, asbestos, who knows what, flying through the air, getting all over the unfortunate cashiers and customers, contaminating whatever food they might be buying. This is added to the already toxic cloud of nail salon chemicals that stink up the front half of the store during days and evenings. The manicurists wear little paper face masks which I doubt offer any protection at all. But the cashiers are only a few feet away, breathing that for hours at a time with no respiratory protection at all.
Anyway, those are the current gripes. There are of course many positive things in our lives. But I feel less inclined to go to the effort to describe them in detail for some reason. Kobie and Broccoli are almost done with yet another course of expensive medicine. Freddiecat walks more stiffly with age and sensitivity to the cold. Kobie loves to cuddle with Miss Pooky and play wildly with Broccoli. Caprica enjoys cuddles and pets. Pickleson gives purries to both Smacky and I, and Kobie has started to join in a little. Miss Pooky is getting elderly and we hope she, Freddiecat, and all of them have many years of life left with us. Binki and Little Girl are still sorely missed.
I am waiting on an ordered book at the library, “Planets Of Exile” by Ursula K Le Guin, which is really three books in one, the first 3 books of the “Hainish Series” which I have become increasingly interested in after reading both “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and “The Telling”. I am also on the waiting list for a book I can’t remember the title of , something about Hillbilly? Supposed to explain some of this rural white resentment. There’s also a Jodi Piccoult book (fiction) about race relations in America that’s supposed to be good. Eventually I want to read that. Also gonna try to work my way through my best Buddhist books again, help realign my Zen, & re-motivate my meditation practice. I also have a pile of science fiction, some new some old. And I want to reread some of the best David Mitchell and lots of Kim Stanley Robinson. On audible, currently , listening to Stephen King’s “Insomnia”, looking for connections to the Dark Tower. The narrator is good, but the screeching sounds at the ends of chapters are so jarring and disruptive that this is the first Stephen King book I would NOT recommend. Great book. Read it; don’t listen to it.
Working through Star Trek: Voyager. Just started 6th season.
Lots of other stuff. Nothing important.
That’s all, Folks.
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