Apr. 23rd, 2017

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WHO GOT THEIR WALLET STOLEN IN TROY LIKE A DUMBASS and what dumbass thief just instantly went to the ten-feet-away liquor store WHERE HE IS A REGULAR to use my card AND STARE INTO THE VIDEO MONITOR LIKE HE’S POSING Jesus goddamn Christ what kind of genius
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I got no complaints but seriously does anyone over 25 work here I feel like an ancient hag. Also how come I have to sign a separate statement saying I didn’t authorize anyone to use my credit card when I already signed a statement saying it was stolen. Well whatever.
Also did you know cops’ bulletproof vests have special smartphone pockets nowadays? Hand to god, there’s a custom little flap-top spot for ‘em. My guy’s iPhone was in a purple shockproof case with a smoky back. Super cute.
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via http://ift.tt/2pS1mln:bedbugsbiting replied to your photo “WHO GOT THEIR WALLET STOLEN IN TROY LIKE A DUMBASS and what dumbass…”

UGH. Well, at least it was a stupid thief. Stupid ones are easier to stop, though it would be better if they just didn’t even try.

oh my god SO STUPID! The entirety of that section of Third Street is solid with cameras because #1 the county clerk’s office is on 3rd st, #2 there is a HUGE bus depot on the next block where basically every bus line in Troy comes together so there are always a million people around, and #3 there are so many fights at the bar I was standing next to when I dropped it (or so I surmise; I lost it somewhere within less than a 100-foot walk, 20 feet of which was a busy street, and missed it within two minutes; I had several layers on, I think I put it between layers accidentally, and it fell out when I turned my body to throw my gum into the garbage can next to the bar. I noticed ALMOST INSTANTLY– but he’d been standing right there, and I’m sure he saw it fall; there’s a stoop, there’s always dudes sitting on it, it’s right next to the garbage can where I threw out my piece of gum, and my wallet’s bright blue). 

And then he took it to a LIQUOR STORE where he goes DAILY, and LOOKED AT the camera by the door, and then stood in full view of the camera behind the register, talking to the cashier WHO KNOWS HIM, standing next to the owner who ALSO KNOWS HIM, and then went down to the convenience store down the street (retracing his steps! walking past me in the process!) and got the card declined because by then I’d noticed it was missing and called the credit card company! They texted me and I said “IBB Smoke Shop?” and my sister pointed at it (we’d just done a lap of the block looking in all the garbage cans, figuring a smart person would yank the cash out and throw the wallet into the trash and make their getaway and I’d be happy to call this all even and just get on with my life but nooooo) and said “that’s the store on the corner” which we were within eyeshot of.

HE WAS STANDING THERE AS I WALKED IN {cut for drama! and clickbait! and length! tl;dr reader, i did not punch him}

 but the clerk was too chickenshit to tell me that. I noticed him, though, because I nearly bumped into him, and he was with another dude and they were muttering about “maybe try the one across the street”, and I was like all squint-eyed like is that him and then I was like surely not but no. No, it was him.

But here’s the best part, when his (my!) card declined, he told the convenience store clerk “oh it’s because i just used it at the liquor store, i bet i went over the limit” HOW DUMB ARE YOU BRO YOU JUST TOLD ME WHERE TO GO! So, it being like, a minute later, the chickenshit clerk is not too chickenshit to relay this to us, and is like, “they have a really good camera system! I don’t know how to use ours here, he’s on the camera for sure but i don’t know how to rewind it, but i know the one at the liquor store, the owner’s always there, he knows how to use it!” 

So we went down the block (seriously. one block.) and I said, having gotten the statement from the credit card company in the meantime, “hey did a guy just come in here and use a credit card with a chick’s name on it to spend $60.45?” and the clerk was like “bang right here yes I thought it was weird, Miguel comes in every day and never uses a credit card, I thought it was odd that he had one, but I didn’t want to be a dick” and the owner was like “i thought it was funny too, let’s rewind the video,” and sure enough, I was like THAT’S THE GUY THAT WAS COMING OUT OF THE CONVENIENCE STORE and they were like oh yeah, that’s Miguel. The clerk reprinted the receipt and handed it to me and I was like yep, that’s the last four of my credit card.

[by the way. there are no less than five men behind the counter of the liquor store, and three more standing in the various aisles. at first i thought it must be between shifts or some kind of social grouping, but as the evening wore on i realized, no, this is a liquor store in a sort of bad neighborhood, those kids are working security. extra bonus points: they’re all pretty clearly related to the owner. extra extra bonus points: they’re all sort of beefy except one skinny nerd of like 20 who is very obviously the only one there who actually knows how to use the cash register. extra extra bonus points: my drama is The Highlight Of The Evening and many community members turn up to witness it. They all agree, Miguel’s a piece of shit who’s too old to be pulling this kind of stunt.]

My sister calls the police, and the owner says, “gimme a minute,” and goes outside, and comes back in and is like, “he’s standing down the alley there selling the bottle of Hennessy he just bought here” and my sister’s like IMMA GO FIGHT HIM and I’m like middle-little, you cannot go fight him, this is a matter for the authorities. She’s like BUT I WANNA and I’m like, child, you are Not Allowed. [Bonus points: Middle-Little is a gun nerd and has her concealed carry permit and you bet your ass, anytime she’s wearing pants, she’s carrying, and tonight I happen to know she put pants on in honor of my arrival (she’s in the midst of finals at grad school so there have not been a lot of pants lately). jesus christ my child, do not get into a fight with the kind of man who visits the liquor store daily. you cannot trust a man of this sort to be sensible. i cannot trust you to be sensible, apparently. I already knew all my sisters are ride or die but I’d rather they didn’t, though. YOU ARE THIRTY-FIVE FIND SOME CHILL.]

So the cops turn up, too late to see Miguel apparently, but there are three or four of them, all white men of between the ages of 21 and 24, and every one of them recognizes Miguel from the camera. None of them is sure of his last name. They’re all familiar with him. “He’s, ah. Around a lot,” one of them says delicately.

One of them takes my report. I have time to observe his special smartphone pocket in his bulletproof vest. Later in the evening I have occasion to observe that cops all have different smartphones but they all use the same pocket of their vest to hold it. He uses his smartphone and radio near-constantly and for obviously-different purposes. 

I file the report, the guy says I can have a copy later if i want. I am unclear of what i’d do with such a thing but I suppose it’s, you know, good to have. (Maybe I can carry it in lieu of my driver’s license so that I can drive my car home and if the cops stop me, not be in so much trouble for not being able to produce my license.)

I drive out to the farm. (15 minutes.) Unwind, have a drink, eat a little bit. (of course i lost my wallet on the way TO dinner. ugh.) Get into pajamas. Get into bed. My phone rings. Unknown. I almost don’t answer it, but then I’m like, thinking of that smartphone pocket. Surely the police wouldn’t use an unknown number? But. But. I pick up.

It’s the police. They got a positive ID on the guy. They didn’t arrest him yet though because, get this, now I have to file a statement swearing I didn’t authorize anyone to use my card, and also asking them to arrest this guy specifically for doing so. Like– that’s what it was, I couldn’t give a statement without knowing the guy’s name, apparently. 

So I put some pants on and wear my pajama top back down to Troy and go into the police station (oh my god, i’ve been in police stations before and this is the direst one I’ve ever seen, it is terrifying white walls and cracked marble floor and blind hallways with locked doors) and the guy tells me the name (and date of birth! 1989, he says, grimly, “too old for this kind of stunt”, like there’s an age limit on being the kind of man who sits on stoops making noises at women who walk by and then tries to buy things with their credit cards) of the suspect, and writes a statement for me, and takes his smartphone out of his special smartphone pocket to text people in the interim. [It did seem work-related, but it was kind of funny.]

Meanwhile his radio is talking about a man threatening a woman with a gun, someone else getting beat up, a bunch of shit like that, and i’m like, my life is so easy, but also, my fucking passport card was in that wallet. (side note: everyone in Buffalo has the passport card. When you get a regular US passport you can get an additional one that’s just one piece of plastic like a driver’s license and goes in your wallet, and it’s just good for Mexico and Canada, and everyone gets those because almost everyone just uses it for Canada anyway. Here in Troy? Nobody has ever heard of that. You mean an enhanced license? the cop asked, brow furrowed. [this cop was older than me. i mentioned how young everyone else was and he was like tell me about it.] No, I said, real actual US government passport, it’s got RFID stuff in it and all. Wow, he said. Yeah ok. Sounds expensive. Yeah, I said mournfully.)

So. Yeah, the guy said, we know who it is and where he lives, and they were gonna go see if they could pick him up just now. If they don’t get him, I mean, we know where he lives, and with this statement now we can put out a warrant. 

I just want my wallet back, I say. 

I don’t know how you get your license replaced without money, but I don’t know how to get money without ID.

I should mention, this is the credit card I lost all on my own last time I was traveling, and received the replacement for and activated on Monday, so. I deserve negative points for Competent Adulting. 
dragonlady7: self-portrait but it's mostly the DSLR in my hands in the mirror (Default)
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deputychairman:

bomberqueen17:

sarah-jt replied to your photoset “To make up for all my boring healthcare saga posts I’m going to put up…”

The Dick Francis is definitely For Kicks, in case you fancy revisiting it!

ah and here it is on Goodreads! I remember this, it was… oh gosh, and I read all the surrounding ones too. First published 1965! 

I am uncomfortable aware, suddenly, that while all the authors surrounding me in fandom, I mean my contemporaries of a certain age, got their start and inspiration from whatever that genre is, Anne McCaffrey and Mercedes Lackey and all, I definitely, definitely formed my sense of What A Protagonist Is by reading a shitload of Dick Francis. 

Keep reading

This is a blast from the past - I too read many Dick Francis novels at an impressionable age and possibly imprinted on his self-controlled, respectful, manly protagonists! Since they’re mostly the same character with different names over and over again! Also I briefly took an interest in horse racing but that didn’t last, what did last was my enjoyment of non-graphic whump to advance the plot and to Test our Hero’s Resolve! The love scenes are also non-graphic but I was 12 and I remember stopping reading one novel because it was just Too Much sex for young me, which in hindsight was a weirdly mature decision, wasn’t it?

(And you know, that one where the sub-plot is how he’s in love with his cousin, I could swear at the end she’s just *shrugs* ok I guess we can get married after all, how funny we remember opposite outcomes!)

MAYBE HIS COUSIN DID DECIDE TO BANG HIM! I don’t know for sure. I really thought she didn’t. 

oh my lord, I was Not Good at making healthy choices for myself. I read Clan of the Cave Bear at far too young an age, and then that whatever it was by Marion Zimmer Bradley. Dick Francis’s sex scenes didn’t even make an impression; MZB’s phrase “meaty phallus” has been burned into my consciousness for the last 28 years or so, it kind of left a blind spot. (I shit you not, I remember it because I had to look it up. I mean, I could guess, but I still wondered if I was misunderstanding something somehow. Go me, making great choices!)

but ohmygodyes the non-graphic whump!!! oh man, there was one, where he got tortured or something, and he was very like, well, it was unpleasant, but one does what one must, surely, and goes on with his life, and it’s only later when someone catches a glimpse of the damage that they’re like sweet christing fuck what’s wrong with you and it becomes apparent to the reader that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator about how badly he has been treated, the poor thing, and so on. Understatement and stiff upper lip and all. oh my god bulletproof kink now, thanks much my guy.

 And it wasn’t just physical stuff, it was emotional too! Like the various undercover ones where he had to be stoic and pretend it didn’t bother him when people assumed he was good for nothing or whatever, that was always very lovingly detailed, the ways in which that was Difficult but our hero of course did Not Complain. 

I can’t believe how thoroughly I had subsumed all of those formative influences. I studied literature at university but you know, Chekov never taught me shit. 
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via http://ift.tt/2p8m9QU:bedbugsbiting replied to your post “bedbugsbiting replied to your photo “WHO GOT THEIR WALLET STOLEN IN…”

I wonder if he was already drunk before he went to get more liquor because wow.

That’s my working theory. I know he was sitting on the stoop by the bar because when I stopped to throw my gum away I turned to avoid facing that stoop, because the guys on it always say shit or ask for money or make noises and it’s just better if you don’t look at them. They sit there drinking stuff in brown paper bags from the corner store.

If he wasn’t drunk, he’s that stupid. Even if he’d gone three blocks, I wouldn’t have walked that far, I wouldn’t have been confident enough to ask the clerk to review the video footage, would have taken that much longer to get the cops involved before I figured out what was going on. Also VIDEO CAMERAS BRO, how do you not notice that the liquor store you visit every day has the monitor turned so you can see yourself in it as you pay? That’s deterrence, that and his five nephews standing there– he doesn’t want trouble, there’s nothing subtle about this. It’s like a big neon DON’T DO A CRIME HERE sign.

bedbugsbiting replied to your post “bedbugsbiting replied to your photo “WHO GOT THEIR WALLET STOLEN IN…”

WHAT A PAIN IN THE ASS.

Yeah, that’s really what it boils down to. So I’m out the $60 or $80 or whatever was in the wallet, that’s the idiot tax, but now I have to figure out how to replace literally everything and start over. While 300 miles from home!!! Of course!!!

At least I wasn’t traveling abroad or in an unfamiliar city or anything. I can borrow money from my sister or parents, the DMV’s right down in Troy even though it’s not my local DMV, there’s a branch of the credit union I use (which is only in this state, but it’s a big state, so) right across the street from the police station… it’s just going to be a pain in the ass forever.

sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your photo “WHO GOT THEIR WALLET STOLEN IN TROY LIKE A DUMBASS and what dumbass…”

Jesus tap-dancing Christ, are you ever owed some good karma. This whole (month? Year? Epoch?) has been utter bullshit.

Am I? I can’t even tell anymore, sometimes I just feel like everything has been dark and annoying forever and always will be. 

Ugh, it’s after midnight and Farmbaby will probably be excited to see me tomorrow, which of course is great and i love but it is going to be So Early. I’m just… ready for it to be So Early. Ugh. I’m too keyed-up to sleep. Ugh.

god damn you miguel you are such a pain in the ass i would never have cared if you’d just kept the cash and ditched my fucking wallet
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rookbodhi:

Bodhi smiled—just a twitch of his lips—for the first time since Cassian had known him.
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via http://ift.tt/2p5EETX:sarah-jt replied to your post “sarah-jt replied to your photoset “To make up for all my boring…”

Aah, the cousin did! that was Nerve, and from memory she’d drawn the ‘no first cousins ’ line ages ago and stuck with it without any second thoughts, and then spent loads of time with our hero (including helping with stoic torture aftermath) and had allll the second thoughts.

ohhhhhhh yeah, 12-year-old me probably found that pretty satisfying. Adult me kind of wants it to have remained unconsummated though. Hilarious that I retconned that when I’m otherwise such a heavily happy-ever-after fan. 

I remember that title, and i remember that I liked Nerve, but all his books are so vaguely sameish that it’s hard for me to remember which one was That One, you know? Do recall, I was reading this circa 1991. 

Side note: remembering this has helped me feel better about how many tropes I shamelessly reuse over and over in my fic. If Dick Francis could have such a great career and write so many really reasonable books that all featured basically the same protagonist with a costume change, and mostly the same tropes over and over, then why can’t I? There’s no shame in it. 
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via http://ift.tt/2pq7PEk:buttons-beads-lace replied to your post “sarah-jt replied to your photoset “To make up for all my boring…”

you’re making me want to read all these books.

I kind of want to reread them too!

There are worse things to breeze through. They read quick. I wonder how they’d hold up to rereading though… 
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via http://ift.tt/2pqGcLy:danceswchopstck replied to your photo “WHO GOT THEIR WALLET STOLEN IN TROY LIKE A DUMBASS and what dumbass…”

May his stupidity be your gain!

I mean. I get the feeling the cops, who had much more pressing matters on their plate (Troy is a busy small city with not a great budget, even with all the gentrification), would not have bothered except that I had such great data and also had pretty much cornered the suspect. Middle-little was very critical of their slow response time, but last night at the station as I was giving the statement, the guy’s scanner was going on and on about the various terrifying things going on around the city, and I was like, yo, my stolen wallet is small potatoes. There was a woman who kept calling 911 and whispering that she was being threatened with a gun and then hanging up, and they just could not figure out what was going on there and how to help her, so there was much discussion of it over the scanner, and my guy kept pausing what he was doing to listen and look concerned. 

So like. I don’t think I’ll gain anything here. I’d love to gain my passport or license back. But I’m not holding out hope. At this point, it’s gone. I have to figure out what to do. The cop said “maybe the judge will make him pay restitution!” but like. seriously this is a 27-year-old man who visits the liquor store daily and then sits on the stoop next to the corner store across from the bus stop all day making noises at women who pass by. I’m not expecting much.

People have been like “you should be madder” and I’m like look, seriously, I’d fully expect anyone to just take the cash and throw the wallet somewhere, I’d have figured no real harm done there as long as I could find it. If I were down on my luck and found a wallet, I’d consider swiping the cash and then handing it in at the nearest place of business. (There’s a bar right there; we did go ask the bartender if anyone had turned it in.) I totally understand that. Finder’s fee and all.

But Christ, that passport card is going to be expensive, and I don’t know how to even start replacing my license, which I need to operate a car. I have to take the farm truck out on a 3-hour round trip to pick up organic potting soil this week and I don’t have a driver’s license.

At least, again, I give thanks that I’m white and have a local accent, because if I were at any risk of being detained or deported, I’d be a fucking wreck at the moment.
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wynonasrider:

My wife and I will take the girl. We’ve always talked of adopting a baby girl.
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My mother makes me beautiful socks sometimes! I am such a knitting Philistine, I’m always just like “oh cool thanks”, so I figured I should take a photo to document them.
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A post shared by Bridget Kelly (@bomberqueen17) on Apr 23, 2017 at 1:49pm PDT

A sleepy Farmbaby reading Highlights with Grandma.l, practicing counting.

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