Update for Everyone IV - Hungover

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

On mod review for a post I made like three weeks ago being deleted last night. I'm not digging this situation.

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I spoke to Ron Paul on C-SPAN this morning.

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I spoke to Ron Paul on C-SPAN this morning.

That's cool.

His response to my question resulted in a Politico article.

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Sanchez talks to his Patron Saint.

(It's down there apparently, couldn't link directly too it for some reason).

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Some relatives of mine in Charleston, WV were removed from their house by a neighbor with a kayak at 3:00 AM due to the Elk River overflowing. They were stranded on a hill for twelve hours and police were not able to rescue them. They managed to make it home when waters receded and one relative who is in her late eighties is very shaken up.

Four people died up there. It's really bad.

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A friend of mine is running for National Committeeman for the RNC, challenging a sitting incumbent. He barely won last time against a challenger who made no effort, so this should be fun. He's a young Paulite who I met through AFP and was one of our top volunteers.

Made some bad decisions, almost had to go to the hospital last night. Luckily I'm fine now.

Drank too much? Bad trip? Hope it's nothing too serious.

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Some relatives of mine in Charleston, WV were removed from their house by a neighbor with a kayak at 3:00 AM due to the Elk River overflowing. They were stranded on a hill for twelve hours and police were not able to rescue them. They managed to make it home when waters receded and one relative who is in her late eighties is very shaken up.

Four people died up there. It's really bad.

hope the house didn't get too damaged.

Their house was largely undamaged, though the basement was completely flooded and the entire electrical circuit will have to be redone. The neighbor who rescued them from the flood waters lost his house. My Aunt is planning to hold a benefit concert/party down here and there is a Go-Fund me page that some neighbors set up as well for the man.

https://www.gofundme.com/2b8tpn2c

(The older woman in the bottom picture on the GoFundMe page is the relative in question. She left to visit her daughter in New York and I don't think she'll be returning to WV for a very, very long time. She's been saying that the river was going to flood for thirty years).

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gonna go to a mosque tonight with my arabic class

You're gonna be on a Trump's blacklist. Be careful!

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I was randomly stopped and searched for j-walking in Boca today while I was awaiting my car to be serviced at the dealership over a recall. That was a first. I can't blame someone for being angry and out in the streets tonight considering that events like that seem to happen much, much more frequently to blacks. One incident was annoying, more of them would really get old quickly. I've always been more or less supportive of BLM (though their frequently disruptive tactics annoy me at times) but I was always more concerned about police killings then I was about the general nuisance of random police stops, but now I can definitely understand that aspect of their anger as well.

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So in the last month (I've been down here for a month, going back to Tally for a week tomorrow) I've watched my grandmother rapidly lose almost all mobility and since I'm the closest to her, I've been delegated the duty to tell her that her daughters want her to move in with my aunt. Tonight, I drove her over to our house for dinner. Taking her home is always a pain, since I have to help her up the world's steepest concrete staircase which takes ten minutes sometimes. The fact that I'm like twice her height makes it worse.

Tonight, I did the usual routine-I ran her walker to the top of the stairs and turned around to help her. When I turned around, I was surprised and shocked to see her two steps behind me! It's refreshing to know that she's regaining her strength ever since she finally agreed to use (as she puts it) that "damn walker of yours." Definitely will give me less to worry about up in Tally for the next week.

On the other hand, my middle brother's drug addiction is getting worse. He's been combining massive amounts of booze with full bars of Xanax and I suspect he is back on heroin. I frankly have gotten to the point that I don't really want to even care what happens to him, but my youngest brother (who as many of you know is autistic) won't understand what happened to him if he doesn't wake up one morning.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll be happy to return to my neighborhood liquor store tomorrow night. I haven't had a drink in five weeks and I sure could use one . I'm also overdue to take a trip to...uhh...the place where the walls turn into spongebobs and flowers magically start growing out of the sink.

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Oh yeah, and I just realized that someone has been using my laptop to edit random Wikipedia articles about various Australian golf tournaments because when I log on from time to time, I get random messages from Wikinazis telling me they've undone my apparent edits.

It makes no sense. I don't know anyone who uses my laptop other than me and my youngest brother, and he doesn't have the mental capacity to edit Wikipedia and insert full sentences about various golfers, a sport that he probably has only seen in Sesame Street clips if at all.

Then again, my neighbor across the street is a semi-famous Australian golfer who had until a few months ago an article on Wikipedia (I noticed it was taken off of the "famous Boynton residents" part of the town's Wikipedia article). Is she using our open wifi to edit Wikipedia articles about her colleagues??

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My grandma's downstairs neighbor called the police on her for a noise complaint. She's 74, how loud can she be?

Well, tomorrow, his doorstep is going to have a very funky smell. Don't finks with Granny Sanchez.

Edit: BTW, I'm not the first to leave a little surprise. The Haitian exchange students across the hall also earned his ire. They left something much, much worse last time. Ironically, I ended up smoking a cigarette with one earlier tonight in the parking lot and they predicted exactly what would happen tonight. My grandma loves those guys and after tonight I can see why. They know how to handle this stuff.

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she did it!!!

No. I did. Granny has been having age related bladder issues, she couldn't even make it down the stairs. So I went out after she went to bed and....uh..relieved myself.

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I just saw a Jill Stein ad on CNN. What planet am I on?

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I just saw a Jill Stein ad on CNN. What planet am I on?

CNN is a new Atlas.

Atlas = / = Clinton News Network

I think he's referring more to CNN's sudden obsession with third partiers.

No, I'm just shocked that Stein has the money to run TV ads.

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Bob Dylan is making a swing through Florida during Thanksgiving. I'm gonna see him in Clearwater with some relatives, as it currently stands. He's playing the night before Thanksgiving in Fort Lauderdale, and the said relatives will be coming down for Thanksgiving anyway.

But no, no, that doesn't work for them somehow. So we're going to drive literally across the state to Clearwater

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My brother, before he went to rehab for round one in 2014, was friends with a young kid named Kelcey Riddick, a much younger kid who lived with his Grandpa and used to skate with him. He used to sell him bags of weed that was mostly just various herbs from our kitchen spice cabinet.

Well, as I found out from a former friend of my brother who ended his association with my brother after he twice got into trouble with him (once for dine and dashing at a I-HOP, the other time for grabbing a woman's ass in a park on a dare-my brother was not involved in that incident and did not get in any trouble beyond being present at the scene), that Kelcey is looking at serious time in the pen.

Apparently, in January, the kid lured a gay man from another town and then carjacked him at gunpoint with some other thugs and took him to a nearby ATM. The man fled on foot and the group retreated to a nearby Publix where they were arrested. On top of armed robbery and kidnapping charges, he also is facing conspiracy charges because his phone, seized as evidence, shows that he was selling some hard drugs.

And I thought my brother was the worst of the bunch.

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I'm sorry this is the sort of environment your family had to live through, Sanchez. I don't want to deny or minimize individual responsibility, because it's real and I don't think that being left-wing requires me to deny it. But, from what I've learned about life in the US and other Western countries, there's a strong social component to all this, and it likely means that the State has abandoned and failed your community, and that's awful.

I know this is all very obvious and trite latte-liberal bullsh*t to say, but it's all I've got.

In my family's case, the state hasn't failed us at all (besides the police in Boynton, who are notoriously incompetent and will probably end up shooting an unarmed black guy sooner or later). My youngest brother who has autism receives full time care thanks to programs like Medicare (which you'll never hear me criticize aside from support for a few minor structural changes to keep it solvent), and my family was blessed to live in an older, working class neighborhood that survived the boom, the bust, and the consequent redevelopment of Boynton.

As for my brother's friend, perhaps the state did fail him. He grew up on the "wrong side of the tracks" (Boynton has two railroad lines splitting the town into thirds and the middle part of town is the rougher part) and his parents were not in the picture. He was 14 last I saw him in 2013, and besides being a stoner who bought fake weed from my brother, was never in any real trouble. I was shocked and saddened to hear that he feel into an even worse crowd as he grew older, and I'm actually disgusted that my brother (and my "brother's friend"-yes, that friend who nearly traumatized me with that nasty prank years ago) contributed to this kid's downward spiral. He's looking at the very least ten years in the pen because of this, and his life is basically ruined. Whether he was driven by poverty, drug addiction, or just a desire to rebel against the "man" (or some combination thereof), his actions back in January will pretty much kill any chance of upward mobility whether he rehabilitates himself or not.

It's just sad. I can't help but to blame my brother and his "friend" (note, this friend is not the one who actually called me last night) for getting away from this all while a kid who I remember as being a very polite, very innocent kid is now going to prison. Why is it that my brother and his "friend" can literally fall off the face of the earth to everyone who knows them and continue to party their way until they both literally die while this kid, who was never as troubled as they were, somehow end up in this situation? It just bothers the hell out of me.

And no, what you are saying isn't "trite latte-liberal bs," Tony. The state might not have failed my family, but they certainly failed Kelcey's family.

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My car broke down on I-75, had to be towed in and got a hotel in Ocala. I think my alternator busted.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

I'm sorry to hear, MormDem and TDAS. Hope you guys get some good vibes this coming week.

That is horrible news for both of them; I can kinda relate about the cat (my dad for some reason thought giving our twelve year old dog two Aleves was a good idea and he almost died, but he's on IV therapy and has a good chance at recovery. Frankly if they have to put him down, I wouldn't be too upset. He's old and probably only has a year left at best, but my youngest brother isn't capable of understanding that).

On a lighter note, I'm bored to death in Ocala. I'm stuck here until tomorrow morning when they (hopefully) can get my car back on the road. I have two friends staying at my apartment because both have yet to sign with a new development/buildings and apparently they are at each other's throats. While I was stranded on the side of the road with 20% battery on my phone, one of them called me screaming to order me out of "our" apartment (the friend in question is my former roommate who is staying a few days after his lease expired. That line about "our" apartment set me off and I told him that he's the one getting kicked out when I get back tomorrow).

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Aaannnndddd my car's motor is seized. Needs to be replaced.

So I'm stuck in this hotel in Ocala until around 4:30 PM when my parents drive up here to rent me a car to drive back to Tallahassee so I can have transportation during my first week of classes, then I have to come back to Ocala (hopefully) next weekend when they manage to get a new motor into my Kia. My dad, having been a trucker, mechanic, heavy equipment salesman, etc, for over 40 years, has been less than helpful. Every idea I have gets shot down, yet he doesn't have any ideas about how I'm getting home.

On top of it, the building I live in is doing unit inspections and found my friend who has been staying there for a few days and are pissed at me. Now I have to deal with them trying to charge me for a second cleaning of the apartment even though my friend was just sleeping on the floor on a few blankets. I don't know why he took the couch or my bed. Whatever.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Aaannnndddd my car's motor is seized. Needs to be replaced.

I feel your pain

My car's water pump has to be replaced this week, in addition to a couple other things, and now I have to pay over $700, a surprise expenditure I was definitely unprepared for.

fml

Ugh I know it sucks. I'm waiting for my parents to arrive at my hotel. They're going to rent me a car and spend the night in the hotel room I rented (I was forced to rent it for a second night as I had nowhere to go) while I take the car back to Tallahassee for a week or two until they can find a cheap junkyard motor and install it.

I wish it were just the alternator like I originally thought.

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Got my books, picked up my former roommate so he could retrieve his moped, went to Walmart, and later am going to help my best friend move into his new apartment. Busy day because college stuff.

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Going to get my car back next weekend with a used motor. Hopefully this will end the nightmare that was Ocala '16.

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Got the order today from my boss to "fix" the accounting for one of our products to "up" the sales of this product (on paper).

I don't like the fact of false accounting at ALL, but he also got pressure from his regional supervisor to increase the "sales" of this certain product.

Hmmmm ...

You should refuse and report him if he tries to fire you (provided that Austrian labor law protects workers against this sort of abuse, which I have to assume it does).

I'm pretty sure even our labor laws in 'Murica prohibit that.