I don’t know if Sam would eat mozzarella sticks from a pet dish even if we had his name painted on the side.

In this post: Bowls wanted, ducking the handyman.

I broke one of my favorite bowls a few minutes ago when it jumped off the kitchen counter and fell to its death. I only had four of these from the get-go; now I’ve got three. These are special bowls: plastic, dark brown, shallow and actually shaped more like nine-inch diameter plates with gently sloped sides. I will include a photo here for your possible interest. I originally bought them at Wal-Mart six years ago for 99¢ each.

These are our favorite bowls for eating mozzarella sticks and I know I’m going to miss that fourth one something awful. I’ve been trying to find more online for years but nothing ever comes close. Amazon sells a similar shape described as a “pasta bowl,” except they’re porcelain with fat little Italian chefs on them and I’m not interested in fat little Italian chefs. (Or porcelain.) To tell you the truth, a pet dish would be really perfect but I’d have to keep this secret from Sam because I don’t know if he’d eat mozzarella sticks from a pet dish even if we had his name painted on the side.

And the weirdness continues. One of my Ovation Creative website clients is a really peculiar local handyman who’s already eight days late paying his quarterly web hosting fee, which was due on October 1. He called me around 9 p.m. to ask if he can drive over and pay me in person because he doesn’t trust the U.S. mail to send a check. What the hell? So I said nope, sorry, you can’t come over at night, I don’t open the door after dark for ANYBODY, and if you drop off your check tomorrow during the day CALL FIRST so I know when you’re coming.

Just between us, I don’t plan to let him into the house even in broad daylight because he pulled the exact same horseshit three months ago. He showed up with a checkbook in his hand and insisted on coming inside to write the check in my kitchen even though he’d received an invoice and three emails telling him exactly how much he owed me. Once this screwball weasles his way inside HE NEVER WANTS TO LEAVE. He starts yakking about how talented I am and how much he loves his website but why can’t I help him get more customers, why isn’t his business the top result on Google, why doesn’t his phone ring, and on and on and on. He makes me want to blow my brains out.

This. This is why I’m retiring, people.