Pet Peeves

I was making up a mental list of my pet peeves in my head last night as I lay awake at something like 2:45 until maybe 5-ish. I can only remember one now, but I'll forge ahead.

1. People who preach to others in general and by doing so imply that their religion is better than all others. It makes me nuts. I spent much of the night composing witty retorts or mentally typing e-mails to my boss who announces (yes, it's plural) that his daughter can actually sing Christmas songs at her school because it is a Christian school. He also announced that there would be no reference to "Happy Holidays" in our office as long as he is in charge. He felt the word Christmas should be first and foremost. I wanted to tell him that I was offended that he was leaving out my own personal religious holiday, Hannukah, when he said that, just to see what he would do. I would have said Ramadan, but it's already over. It's a public institution for Christsakes! Shut your zealot yap!

2. I hate it when I have a whole list of pet peeves and I can only remember one of them. I'll have to make up the rest.

3. I sat down to work on a client's stuff last night and my printer ran out of black ink. We all know that inkjet cartridges dry up WAY too fast (come on -- they could fix that couldn't they?) but I fortunately had a backup cartridge. I put it in and.....nothing. I fussed with it for nearly an hour before huffing off to OfficeMax to return it. It was a store brand cartridge made to replace my HP cartridges. When I got there, the clerk told me that sometimes the store cartridges just didn't work with certain printers. Huh? Where was THAT in the information on the box. Then she asked for my receipt. Huh? It says OfficeMax right on the damn thing, so it's pretty clear I bought it there. I had the foresight to bring R along to prevent me from killing someone since all I really wanted to do last night was take a hot bath and read my book instead of having to go out in single-digit temperatures. He prevented me from committing murder. Good man. (Kind of hard to tell if the peeve is about the cartridge or the store or the weather on this one.)

4. I hate it when pet peeve list-making keeps me up at night. And then proves to be a waste of effort because I can't remember them. This is sort of like #2 but I'm reaching.

I'm going to go take a boiling hot bath, enjoy a white Russian while I do it, and read my book, Barbara Walters "Audition". I am really enjoying it which is crazy because I don't really like her. It appears to be very honest and she sounds pretty normal (so far) for someone who grew up so differently from most people. By normal, I mean she suffered insecurities and doubts like most of us.

Done. Next time I'll write the damn list down.