On Being Crabby

I am not usually like this — being a crabby old fart. Generally speaking I roll through life fairly happily, shrugging off its less than thrilling trials as best I can. However, I frankly admit that a number of things are crabbing me out just now.

1. We've just begun September, and it's still technically summer, but I am brought low by a cold. It's too early for this sort of nonsense. And that is turning me into Mr Cranky Pants.
2. Also: as colds go, it's a bad one. Although colds, by definition, always make one sick, this one is giving me a real pummeling. When watching TV, I have to go a rest for about fifteen minutes every hour or so. Having to rest from watching TV is pretty pathetic, don't you think? Would this not make you a little bit cranky too?
3. Furthermore: it really peeves me that I can't easily do the natural thing to fight a cold: i.e. I can't just go to sleep. That's what normal people do to help them recover. Me? I sleep even less than my usually pathetic amount and that really makes me crabby.
   
4. With that in mind, I am am reduced to dragging myself about the house while the garden stands neglected on what should be perfect weather for those chores that I really want to get to while the getting is good because this fine weather won't last too much longer. Sigh and crab.
   
5. Saturday, despite having very little energy, I decided that I could handle coffee out followed by a few quick tours of Doors Open Day in a nearby town. I trudged wearily to the first stop, only to find that their doors would open an hour later than everybody else's doors. Why they couldn't have noted the time adjustment on the official brochure rather than post a sign after a wearying trudge is beyond me. Grrr and crab.
   
6. We drove to the next point of interest, a former woolen mill that is now, at least partly, a textile museum. The sign out front informed us that we were free to enjoy touring the exterior of the building. Huh? Well thanks, but couldn't I do that any ole time? I mean, do you usually wrap the building in a shroud, so that people can't see the exterior? If we had wanted to go inside, we would have had to pay the usual admittance fee. I'm really crabby about such duplicity. If you don't want to freely open your doors, then don't advertise your site as one of the open doors.
7. Since the morning had gone so badly, I thought it would be nice to drive to the chip truck around the corner for a little treat. It was gone, probably to a special event, or perhaps it is already closing down as cooler weather approaches. Either way I was crabby. I could have gone to another chip truck as there are a number of them in this town, but I was too tired and crabby to go on a merry chase.
   
8. Due to this dadblasted cold, I will not be attending the jam tonight. I have hardly been there for a year; everytime that I have targetted a return date, something has happened — be it ear infection, hearing aid problems or whatnot. Yes, this too is upping my crabbiness index.
   
9. I'm also crabby about how tennis, specifically right now the US Open, is broadcast on TV. We like to watch Wimbledon at the beginning of summer and the US Open at the end, with the Canadian Open in between. But why do announcers insist on mumbling year after year? We are forced to turn the sound way up to try to discern their mumbles, and then the commercials fairly blast us through the walls. It's very crab-making.
   
10. And for goodness sakes, in this high tech era, can they not figure out a way to decrease the amount crowd noise that the mics pick up and transmit to us while they're commenting after an exciting rally? I can seldom make out what they're saying over the background noise. While I understand that my hearing isn't the best, I must report that when I turn to Rabbit-Ears Cuppa for an interpretation, she is generally shaking her head and shrugging her shoulders in perplexity. CBS pours millions of dollars into covering the event and televising it for us. They pay their announcers a small fortune but fail to gauge their sound in such a way as to allow us to hear the commentators. That's stupid, and stupidity makes me crabby.
11. While I'm at it, I want to ask what purpose those pre-match interviews serve. The players clearly don't want to be there and only serve up innocuous statements. Frankly, I cringe when these interviews are shown. I told you that I was crabby.
    
12. Finally, it really frosts me that we can't watch tennis on the American channel (CBS) but get a feed-over from the Canadian channel that buys the rights to the feed. Even when I choose CBS, I get TSN. On Saturday evening after Clisters won her match, there was still twenty minutes to spare in the time slot. I would have loved to have seen a wrap-up of the day: the thoughts and analyses of various commentators. But no: our Canadian relay (TSN) immediately switched over to regular programming, and I found myself suddenly watching a ridiculous car show about an new economy Mazda vehicle. We have this problem year after year. One year, we missed the end of the tennis finals because it went longer than the time allotted, and we were switched over to some telethon or other. It really makes me crabby to endure this year after year.
13. On top of all that, I have had to come back to this post about three times to add points that I forgot about whilst typing. It really makes me crabby to do that.
    

I'm sure I could go on if I really put my mind to it, but this cold is sapping my energy, and I must go rest again. Which makes me crabby.