Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: July 2022

  • New Toy 2

    This is the toy that Gary bought me, the one on which I have bestowed the honor of Official Birthday Gift, which means he can sit back the entire month of August and have no gift responsibilities whatsoever. It is ideal. Perfect gift. It is me embodied in a present. It is an electrified tennis-racquet-bug-swatter…

  • New Toy 1

    Lately, there have been too many nights spent watching Gary watch television, so I thought of my friends who assemble Lego models for fun. I thought that might be a fun shared experience for Gary and I. I looked at some Lego models, then I wondered how much money my friends make. There was one…

  • This Morning

    One of the nice things about having a substantial mailbox is that you know when the mailman arrives, because you hear the clunk as the door closes. It also lets you know if you can stay in bed because your husband has gone out to get the mail instead of you for once in your…

  • Weekly Home Construction Update: 7/28

    Here is my art all bundled up. Half the basement is still wrapped in plastic, waiting for the dust to settle. Today was to be the day that I would set about putting things right, because yesterday was to be the day that we cleared the basement drainage issues. That was not to be, because…

  • Duolingo Advice

    When telephony began, back in the day, I found that the best way to communicate with the phone application was to sound very pissed off. My words became clipped, my consonants were sharp, the phone knew I meant business. I have now cracked a similar code for DuoLingo Russian. I have had trouble getting points…

  • TV Screen Grabs

    The first screen grab is from a campaign ad directed against candidate Trudy Busch Valentine, accusing her of being a proud Queen of the elitist, racist Veiled Prophet organization. I am about as liberal as they come, plus I am somehow tangentially pseudo-related to the man who swung down on the VP Ball and unmasked…

  • Filter

    Today I was in a Zoom call at work and I noticed that when I compared my image to the others in my call I was blurry. So blurry that I tried to wipe off my camera. Not the camera. It was the “prettification” filter. Where non-work Zoom has filters that make you look like…

  • Duo Dentist

    By a strange fluke Gary and I ended up with consecutive dental visits. We intended to go in the same car, but he wanted to leave an hour early to drive to the five (5) miles to the dentist. I convinced him to wait, but then a work problem blew up half an hour before…

  • Close Encounter

    I was in bed when Gary showed up at my bedroom door and whispered, “ellen you have to come see the raccoon babies on the patio they’ve been patting on the window and looking in at me.” Of course, I went to the back door and saw no baby raccoons at all. Gary flipped on…

  • Cable Shenanigans

    I know the rest of you stop suckling at the cable teat years ago, but Gary and I are happy paying outrageous amounts of money for poor service and unreliable options. Evidently they can’t manage to supply both tvs with all the channels we pay for, or support my antiquated TiVo and Gary’s now-dead new…