Harrumph.

Is it wrong of me to want to have a smoke detector that doesn't go off every time I boil water? All I have to do is turn on the exhaust fan, but even at the slow speed the noise is overwhelmingly obnoxious. It's bad enough where I work - buzzers buzzing, bells ringing, beeps beeping, kids screaming, bad 80's music playing on the celestial sound system where "Shiny Happy People" seems to play every 20 minutes as though it will somehow turn either the staff or the customers into happy face moronic shoppers... oh, wait...no, they just don't have happy faces. Everywhere, it seems, there is noise, noise, noise. I feel positively grinchy.

I do not like the way this year has started

It's only January the 20th, for Christ'sake. Already we've had IowaNewHampshire free time for uncontested Republican ideology, SOPA, PIPA, the Costa Concordia tragedy advertisement for the upcoming 3D re-release of the movie Titanic, a severed head rolling around the Hollywood sign, the bankruptcy reorganization last ditch attempt to save Eastman Kodak from extinction, a Russian intended destination Mars aircraft that fell to earth no one quite knows where, locally horrible news of the accident related death of a well known woman, a teenager killed by a train, a ruling from Federal level Judge Murtha that the local falling apart nuclear plant run by cost-cutting seeming we don't care about the consequences as long as we rake in the dollars sociopaths who have lied to the state and it's agencies can stay open for another 20 years, a friend losing her job due to the closing of a store which benefited our local hospice, the forced cancellation of a mediation session between the town approved but yet to be built skate board park and the intractable well off bastards who live across from it and are horrified by the thought of such commonness near them (although hidden in save the park stay green sloganeering),  the nearly complete destruction of our once wonderful local daily paper, and now the announcement of the passing of both Etta James and Johnny Otis, who wrote her first big hit and made her a star.

It's all a bit much.