NOTHING TO SEE HERE. Move along.

in addition to running around the DARE bus screaming

2011-04-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

We thought of this too late for this year (yesterday) but next year we office ladies at my office plan to be better prepared for Bring Your Child To Work Day.

We need to find some realistic looking guns. When the youngsters come in, it would be fun for them (and impress them, probably encouraging them to choose careers in law enforcement) if we all whirled around grabbing our guns from drawers and purses and pointed at them. Like Charlie's Angels only there are more of us and we are older and weigh more and don't dress as well.

Then we could say "Oh; it is YOU" and put the guns away and give them candy!*
We need to all whirl around at once. We can practice.

*If we forget to buy candy we can just hand out the small sugar packets from the coffee room like we did this year.

Why is there a pile of tissue paper and dental floss on the Sunday school teacher's bathroom floor?

2011-04-24T21:07:00.000-07:00

Yes it did surprise me a little bit when my friend’s child, T, who I was babysitting, came to the dinner table last night wearing my potholders on her feet.

She had been made to remove her extremely muddy shoes and socks inside the house earlier, and now offered the logic that she put the pot holders on because her feet were cold. A wise adult uses such moments for teaching opportunities. For example, potholders are for hot things not cold things, which she now knows, and I did not make her take them off. It might be extremely useful one day that she can eat toaster waffles with her feet.

SHE was surprised a little today when she found her Easter basket at Easter brunch at her Sunday School teacher’s house. The SS teacher invited me for brunch and then was shocked to see a child with me. Oops. “Do you want me to make her wait in the car?” I helpfully offered. The SS teacher said “No; I just need to make another Easter basket really fast. Look for small things laying around my house that she would like!”

T’s favorite thing in her Easter basket (which did look pretty much like a wicker wastepaper basket) was a pair of reading glasses, although it was hard for her to climb stairs while wearing them.

The Beagle Boys are Back, At Least One Of Them

2011-04-23T08:01:00.000-07:00

I don't know what that means, but my best friend said it for the title to an email where she sent this link : http://kygl.com/crime-pentathlon-drunk-driving-stolen-car-through-crime-scene-while-naked-looking-at-porn, well worth viewing, even if you are skeptical because the word "porn" is right in the link.

C'mon. Click on it. Don't think about that time I convinced you to put peanut butter in your ear!

The best friend is from Texas and said once that she could just look around at all the people reading books on buses in my town and know that she was not in Texas. (Or something like that.) To which I observe now, x years later, yes but the people who post comments of mugshot websites in Texas are much smarter than mugshot website commenters here. Now, why is that?

I love the # 12

2011-04-16T10:13:00.000-07:00

Frustrated bus driver to passenger: I have to ask you if that dog is a service animal! If you say yes, legally I have to allow you to have it on the bus with you! If you say no, you need to get off the bus with it, since it is not in a carrier!

Restive passengers muttering: oh my god. oh my god will this discussion never end. say what she wants you to say!

fbdtp: If you bring a pony on the bus next week, the same rules apply! Miniature ponies have just been added to the list of service animals! Cats are also on the list. I have to ask you that question. I have to abide by the response you give me!

passenger being yelled at: I don't have a pony.

other muttering passengers #1, 14, 47, 3, 11. and 15: oh my GOD.
#13: Will this bus driver never shut up?
standing up front, weirdly cheerful: I'm going to bring my rabbit.
man across aisle: I'm going to bring my monkey....he's a SERVICE monkey.
nice lady: MONKEY! You got a monkey?
maa: yes I do.
nl: I surely would like to see it.
maa: He brushes his teeth and everything.
nl: He doesn't. You should put your monkey on facebook.
maa: He's already on twitter.

I thought she was going to say she felt ashamed of something else

2011-04-10T16:30:00.000-07:00

I was at 777 posts and I hated to add this one.

Friday I cut my finger on butter. Well, the packaging, the flimsy cardboard box. It was more entertaining to think of it the other way. In fact it was worth the discomfort.

Shopper in line at the thrift store, about a different person's purchase: Those don't work.
Thrift store cashier: What don't?
Shopper: Those vacuums. That plug into a car cigarette lighter. I bought one once at your other store. They don't work. Not enough suction.
Me: What did you do with it? Did you give it back to the thrift store?
Shopper: Yes.
Me: Maybe that's yours.
Shopper: No; mine was in a different box.
(silence except for me laughing)
Shopper: I feel ashamed. ..... That I bought it in the first place.

I hit Dexter the cat in the chin accidentally in the dark but he forgave me after going about 8 feet away from me.

short pet quiz

2011-03-23T16:43:00.000-07:00

The small cat smells like vanilla. The big cat smells like salami. But I love them both the same.
a) true
b) false
c) next time get the big cat a flea collar the same place where you got the little cat a flea collar.

I will get a new carpet :
a) soon, because the big cat keeps throwing up on it
b) after I no longer have a cat which throws up a lot
c) not for a long time because I like the color "oatmeal plus cat throw up"

When one of the small black and white chickens refuses to get off the eggs, even when there aren't any eggs, and if I tip her out of the dishpan (nest) onto the ground then she sits there acting like there are eggs under her until I shove her a bunch of times with my foot, this is :
a) ludicrous and pathetic
b) cute
c) as cute as when I am trying to get undressed and a cat wants to fight with my clothes
d) would be cute if you didn't know she also is willing to eat eggs and chicken
e) admirable persistence for a tiny brained animal because she has been doing it for weeks without dwindling away to a chicken mcnugget or a chicken skeleton.

today

2011-03-22T20:42:00.000-07:00

5:15 AM: The person waiting at the bus stop in the dark morning could hear mean growling and nervously kept turning around and flinching, but only saw dark and rain. She knew she looked exactly like a foolish person in a horror movie. When the bus came she jumped happily on board and was not greeted by zombies or even a raccoon with a huge knife.

8 PM: 2 big fat opossums as big as cats were walking up on the back fence. With opossum kryptonite they repelled small rocks hurled at them, so the human who owned (sort of) the yard and some chickens had to run back inside and fetch some biodegradable cleaning products to squirt them with. Those worked, even though she didn't say "I honor you, brother possum" or anything like that.

guapo

2011-03-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

In a few years, the part of " Zoolander" where male models hold cellphones smaller than dominoes up to their ears will still be funny but meaningless. You can blame "smart phones" for ending the interesting competition for tiniest phone.

The weedy lot on Fremont way over by Vancouver Street is turning into a butterfly bush monoculture. So it really does happen! I have to say that it looks pretty great. Double click on the picture to make it huge.

in

yay for uncooperative families

2011-03-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

There is plenty I could say, but then I would not be mysterious and fascinatingly unknowable, so I try post in an irregular and scarce way.

I went to see a dance performance of these guys last weekend: http://www.alvinailey.org/
for free, because of a friend whose teenager didn't want to go. It was good, if you like to watch people with amazing bodies do gravity defying amazing dancing to wonderful music. And you are not spending any money at all and talking to your nice friend before it starts. Do you like that? I tried to brag about it, later (because the troupe is famous and it looked like the shows in my town sold out) but I think I said "Kevin Bailey" or maybe "Arvin Hailey" accidentally, so the response I kept getting was "what's that you say?" instead of "you lucky!"

A tweet from badbanana : Almost got into a dance battle in the parking lot. Thankfully, it ended in violence.

cars cars cars

2011-03-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

Entertaining sentences from otherwise positive online car reviews :
"So loud inside the car that I can't hear myself talk on the cell phone."
"Everybody keeps telling me it will tip over but it hasn't so far."

A coworker said last week that he will sell me a late 80s vehicle (yay! rectangular!) with low mileage (yay again!) that his mother in law has been prodding him to get out of her garage for her. It has been sitting in there for a while so he needs to change the fluids. Sort of a reverse embalming. He said it isn't good to run old gas through an engine. Well, OK. Isn't gas made out of dinosaurs more or less? But I'm still waiting for my tax refund so that's OK. And I don't want to get any mice stuck in the ... distributor cap or something.

On Monday he said he still will do that, but he didn't get to it this weekend because somebody from his family fainted and fell down on the sidewalk instead. Eeek!

sparse but funny

2011-03-08T20:36:00.000-08:00

http://twitter.com/sirkevinkao

Also this guy here who is the other one's favorite : http://twitter.com/badbanana

get outside

2011-03-07T19:33:00.000-08:00

The neighbors across the back fence, south corner, have introduced themselves; their names are David and Laurie. YEP. They used to have 20 chickens in Idaho, so they are not especially chicken fans.

It is trying to be Spring and the first open daffodil on the street is 2 blocks up near (but not in) the weird bare dirt yard on the corner. Saturday was sunny. At work we got one runaway juvenile report after another and (a coworker pointed out suddenly) multiple stolen car reports all for purple cars. This might be what juveniles do when they feel frisky, and what book groups of oldish women do when they feel frisky?

I went by the house before this one to give them a rent increase letter that the landlords had sent me (even though I moved out almost a year ago), but really because AHA it was a chance to see what the new thing in the back yard that looked like a windmill was, and whether all the stuff I planted is doing OK. I figured the new renters would be arguing with the landlord that no they HADN'T gotten notice of a rent increase, and the forwarded letter with my name on it would make it clear what happened. All the plants look fine --so they must have been watering the flame willow bush all summer, and weeding the strawberry beds YAY-- and that thing was a swing, the kind with a metal frame and a seat that takes a cushion, and an awning. So they either enjoy sitting out in the great back yard, even if they aren't 7 feet tall, or they just figure they are lucky to have a place to store that swing (?) The man who answered the door in his pajamas seemed a little confused about why a previous renter was increasing his rent.

at the transit mall, I sat on them

2011-03-06T20:12:00.000-08:00

I transported patio furniture home on the bus.

2011-03-05T18:30:00.000-08:00

Metal patio furniture. I only went into that thrift store to get a stapler and a 2 hole punch for my volunteer job.

I was feeling foolish at the bus stop and then on the bus with my furniture until a man got on the bus with a cart full of so many* groceries that my eyes popped out of my head and dangled down my face on their stalks.

*I could see a 10pound bag of potatoes, a bag of cat food, and a 12 pack of toilet paper, just for example.

more car shopping

2011-03-03T18:14:00.000-08:00

A sorry worn out looking car with 10,000 more miles on the odometer than the man told me it had and which seems to be in a used car lot although it is a private party sale somehow seems plausible to me. The carpet (gray) is really beaten down. He says it just needs a good vacuuming. It does seem to run alright. (The man keeps saying during the short test drive "uh. I think you're in 3rd gear...") I try to arrange taking it to a mechanic to have it checked out, get stumped by the logistics of that and leave, apologizing too much.

The man looks like the nice android on "Alien" or "Alien 2", whichever movie it is that he isn't in but somebody who looks like him is, being an android oozing stuff that looks like milk when he gets killed. Except this one looks puzzled. An android wouldn't be, right?

A few blocks down the road I realize OF COURSE I don't want to buy that car. I just wanted to buy it to be done with car shopping. A few more blocks down the road I realize I feel exactly like that about dating. And the rest of the way home I think about why in car shopping you achieve that by talking yourself into something as soon as possible, but in dating you accomplish it by talking yourself out of something as soon as possible. I feel confused.

car shopping

2011-02-27T19:10:00.000-08:00

I like the reasons that the people on CraigsList give, explaining why they are selling their cars. The reasons never have to do with a car breaking down a lot, although some ads list all the things recently fixed or replaced, maybe on the theory that those things add up to x% of a new car or at least THOSE won't break. Maybe it is all car shop mechanics selling those cars. Because mechanics say it to a customer at the shop as she pays a big repair bill, and she doesn't argue with them, so they don't know she disagrees. "Well, look at it this way: you replaced a BUNCH of stuff. So it should run great for a while!" She hopes they are right but mostly doesn't want to burst into tears if they are persuaded agree with her that they are wrong.

If you saw a car ad that said "new brakes, spark plugs, spark plug lines, cv joints, starter, radiator, battery, heater, and front axle" would you think "HOT DOG! That's about half a new car right there!" or would you think that you can't really blame the person for not saying "I am sick of spending money on it and I want a car that doesn't break so often," but they might as well have?

One lady was selling her car because it was "too purple" for her job. She explained (on request) that people did not take her seriously at her job if she was driving a very purple car...but perhaps I had a different sort of job which it would not impact. Um..yep. I wanted to ask more about her job but did not. I might have been able to say "so I gather you are not unionized" without laughing but I doubt it. That one looked like a pretty good car actually, but somebody else bought it. He had on big floppy shoes.

A man was selling his car because it did not have air conditioning, and he was moving to a hot place with his baby and needed air conditioning. (Baby=object de amor? or baby=infant? I don't know. Baby needs a new pair of sandals... AND a frigid blast of supercooled air.) Another man loved his car, wouldn't be selling it, but there just was not enough headroom for him because he was a big guy. Well, it is possible. I could ask to see photos of himself, smaller, wearing modern enough clothing to support they were recent photos, right? To show that he had been smaller recently.

After you look at CraigsList long enough to get an idea how much stuff is selling for, then you can look at car review websites and see what people say about different types and years of cars. One website only has good comments. Read that one; it will lift your spirits.

you're welcome, Stuart Little!

2011-02-22T21:22:00.000-08:00

I put the small extra coop out in the front yard yesterday with a "FREE" sign. Today the chicken ladder, which was the part the "FREE" sign was taped to, was gone. But the coop was still there. This made me laugh. Who would want a 1 meter ladder, rustic, with chicken poop on it?

After I got done laughing, I remembered that I had taped a sign onto a big sheet of translucent glass (maybe a shower door?) leaning against a building in an alley a few blocks from me. It looked like it was being discarded, but I wasn't sure, so I went home and wrote "Is this free??" on a paper and went back and taped it to the glass. Maybe whoever took the chicken ladder has just returned home for a pencil to write "and how about the rest of it??" and tape it to the rest of it.

things that are stupid

2011-02-19T18:25:00.000-08:00

On Valentines Day, one lane of the grocery store in my neighborhood had an arch over the approach decorated with balloons, flowers, and streamers, and labeled “Lovers’ Lane” (possibly apostropheless). That lane had no shoppers in it, even though the other lanes were full. I didn’t go in it either. And I was not pregnant when I left the store.

Today I wrote page numbers on my expensive street map book. A pen had leaked ink onto the top corner right where the page numbers all were, rendering it nearly useless at night. (In direct sunlight a person could hold the map book up to the light tilting it this way and that and kinda sorta still see the page numbers, which is how I corrected the situation with a grubby pencil stub today, wanting to get something extremely useful done in the shortest possible time .)

WHEW. Now a person can look up a street, read “81 F4” and not have to just start weeping and decide to go home instead. In this map book’s index, the streets are alphabetized including the direction. First all the EAST streets are indexed, then all the NORTH ones, then the NORTHEAST ones...etc. Is that normal? Somehow it sort of seems like shuffling a deck of cards by shuffling all the clubs... then shuffling all the hearts...then shuffling all the spades...then shuffling all the diamonds.

Moss farm in my neighborhood.

The moss is nurtured on a base of parking lot. Look how they have it fenced in so none escapes. I wish I lived in one of those row houses in the background, so I could see when the moss harvesting machines arrive one morning, and the leprechauns hop out with their fire extinguishers which are required by law to put out any fires that start as a result of the metal blades scra-a-a-a-ping across the blacktop.

2011-02-14T16:58:00.000-08:00

The man at the laundromat put too much soap in his machine. I don't think that was what he was asking me about in mis language ("mis language" is a language half way between my and his language) when he asked me something I couldn't quite understand. Anyhow he didn't seem mad later, and too much soap looked sort of beautiful. It is the first "O" below.

xx oo

2011-02-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

Saturday

2011-02-12T18:56:00.000-08:00

I had a GREAT time but they did steal my leftovers

2011-02-08T17:19:00.000-08:00

If you are staying with my friends who live in Woodinville, Washington, (and I heartily recommend it, if you are in the area) do not try to correct the spelling of their town's name. They want it to be spelled like that. Also, you will probably get lost on the way there. (It might be my fault if you are in the car driving and listening to me. I was reading ahead on the directions. It isn't that "keep in the left lane" was wrong; it was just prescient.)

You may bring pets. Your hosts will call ahead to see whether they are indoor pets or outdoor pets, and what accommodations they require. Make something up, if you have chickens. "Oh, any room with linoleum floors should be fine, as long as you put a little straw or wood shavings down. Tra la la tra la la." That yellow dog is a little bouncy. Could they put it in a kennel while your Pets are there? Thank you.

Try to get the room with the John Deere tractor lamp.

You will want to spend most of the time either playing with the lamp, or else in the kitchen eating cupcakes, admiring the view, and using the colorful decision-maker fortunetelling glass canisters to make important life decisions for you. Is there any juice to drink while I eat these cupcakes? Do they have a nicer looking pitcher for me to pour it out of? They don't??

we are all one but we aren't sure which one we are

2011-02-05T09:09:00.000-08:00

It is difficult to find things to complain about in the face of the first signs of Spring.

Yesterday I bordered a brick planter in the back yard with another ring of bricks, for easier mowing around it, IN MY SHIRTSLEEVES , while 5Spot the cat chased a ping pong ball around the back yard. One of the chickens - Thing1 ? Thing2 ? - has been trying to hatch eggs, until I take them away from her. Either she or the other Thing was watching 5Spot and the ping pong ball pretty intently. A thought balloon over her head said "hey...is that an egg? Possibly mine?" Sometimes she, or possibly Elvis or the other Thing, lays an egg during the day out in the middle of the backyard lawn like an EASTER BUNNY. So it would serve her or possibly someone besides her right if it was, but it wasn't.

they need a more logical rule in this place

2011-02-03T17:00:00.000-08:00

The city rule about how many backyard chickens a backyard can have without a permit (3) is meant for regular chickens. Although I have 4 chickens, 3 of them are bantams, which are smaller than regular chickens. If you compare them to medium or huge chickens, which I am for mathematical purposes, they are less than half a chicken. So those 3 count as 1.5 chickens, and then the nearly regular sized one (which is still kind of small for a regular sized chicken) makes 2.5 chickens total, or even a little less.

sorry

2011-02-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

Sorry about posting things here once in a while. I will never forgive myself if it means you aren't reading "overheard" blog http://www.overheardeverywhere.com/

February has been designated COMPLAINING MONTH

2011-02-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

February has been designated COMPLAINING MONTH.

It is important that we all stretch our self imposed boundaries and try to complain more, more bitterly, and at greater length. February has been chosen as likely to have weather that can be complained about as a fall-back complaint, in case of any distressing lack of other complaints. Although seemingly logical, I do not appreciate the choice.

News about complaining:
I’ll bet you have never gotten yelled at on the phone by an angry person (who was even angrier because, she claimed, there was something wrong with our phone at work and it kept hanging up on her. In the middle of her insisting this, and me contradicting her, we were cut off. She called back.) : “YOU gave a CITATION to a DEAD person!!”, but an angry person yelled it at me.

My coworker said the correct response is “Then he clearly should not have been driving.” I didn’t think of that, so I only said carefully “How did we manage that?” It turned out that it was an expired boat registration citation. Oh.

sometimes I go camping by myself though

2011-01-29T07:54:00.000-08:00

E. was telling about the welding class she recently took in Iowa with her dad, in which she accidentally caught her sleeve on fire and burnt her arm and had to take off her clothes to put it out.

"YOU WERE NAKED IN YOUR WELDING CLASS?!" I said.
"No. I was standing in just my jeans and bra in my welding class," she said. "In November. In Iowa."

I pointed out that somebody was no doubt going to suggest to her that she needed to get back on that horse soon, so she wouldn't be afraid to do it ever.
"Oh I already did. I finished the class and after it was over my dad drove me to the hospital."
She finished the class?!
"HELL yes. I was the only woman in the class. I'm not gonna catch myself on fire, take off my clothes, cry, and leave. I just am not."

Oh. On behalf of our entire gender we would like to thank you. And probably the other gender, the ones in your class, would thank you also.

So when my friend J., also female, called a couple of weeks ago and said "Hey! Do you want to take a welding class with me?" I just said "No I do not." But I am maybe going to a metal scrap yard with her today. That I want to do.

sad explanation

2011-01-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

My sister’s showed me that her teeth don’t meet in the middle of the front of her mouth, which her dentist said is called xxxxxx ("malocclusion"? "open bite"? )

Whatever it is called, it is why, when she finishes eating her peanut butter sandwiches, there is always a little biscuit sized scalloped edged piece left over from the center of the sandwich, that her teeth could not reach.

The rest of this month is teeth month.

2011-01-26T16:12:00.000-08:00

For an account of what a person does when he loses his fake tooth by biting an octopus, go here:
http://blog.travelchannel.com/inside-the-wild-within/2011/01/21/in-the-next-episode-hawaii/

double dang

2011-01-25T17:11:00.000-08:00

When a person’s fake tooth goes missing she might have to search through all compost not taken outside yet, looking very closely at every parsnip peal and rotting carrot end, even though she would really rather not. She might wish she did not eat eggs, and drank instant coffee instead of real coffee. Especially when plastered with a whole bunch of coffee grinds, pomegranate rinds oddly resemble a fake tooth and small piece of scary pink plastic gum (and then that other shiny part that is usually inside her mouth holding it in. How will she kiss anybody? She won’t. Get over it. ) If she still doesn’t find it, the person who lost the fake tooth is going to have to pull the garbage can back from the curb and put it in the back yard, and go through IT, too after work. Dang!

What other explanation is there? Could a person give it away to neighbors in her sleep? Could it be the cat’s fault somehow?

At work I did not laugh and talk very much, only smiled restrainedly, for reasons that are my personal business. But it is disconcerting to discover that in a battle between vanity and entertainment, maybe vanity wins. In fact, it hurts my vanity to discover this.

At work, we got an accidental “reply to all” email (all = everybody in the geographic area using our government email system) trivial and dull except the person who did it was named “Dang”. Dang; he accidentally hit “reply to all”. Dang! He doesn’t know how to use the recall option! His name is an onomatopoeia, then, isn’t it?

5-7-5, should you choose to accept it

2011-01-18T20:59:00.000-08:00

The telephone answering tank has collected 13 new messages of silence and pocket dialing* and questions in a foreign language from a stranger. The spotted cat jumped in the bathtub experimentally and then right back out, almost levitating.**

*Bro Moe says it is called "butt dialing".

**We do wish this was a haiku or several.

the ice storm only lasted 6 hours and now it is balmy

2011-01-14T06:16:00.000-08:00

Green tarp blows next door;
driveway light turns on, off, on,
protecting nothing!

silence is golden, music I like is silver, static is bronze, and other people's music against my will is canned peas

2011-01-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

My coworker was showing me the settings on her small white noise/nature noise machine. Besides rain and surf (which they all have—my thrift store 1980s version has Surf I and Surf II, with a total of 5 knobs to control those yeah) hers has a babbling water setting that she says you do not want to use at bedtime. “Or maybe you just have a weak bladder,” I said and then, after she played it and I returned from the restroom, “never mind.” She has “Country Night” which has crickets, and “Windy Night” (my sister would hate that one! Would most people want to hear the wind howling? Surfers might or Heidi might after she left Grandfather’s hut in the Alps. It made us laugh and start planning other settings. Tsunami, Forest Fire...) and “Pond”, with small water noises and frogs, very nice.

Her noise machine is an alarm clock, too, including train, rooster crowing, and her favorite alarm: foghorn. “I wish the foghorn was included in the surf sounds because I like it so much. But it isn’t. You can push the button while the surf plays, though. Sometimes I do lay in the dark listening to the surf and pressing the foghorn alarm every so often.” Aw. Her mix. Horizontal DJ. She said no, she never had listened to the surf while pressing the rooster button, to pretend she was at the beach with chickens, but she was sure that would be awesome.

I don’t have a picture of it so you have to just look at some pictures of other things at work. They are upsetting things from the scruffy break room.

The cop cookie jar that says “STEP AWAY FROM THE COOKIE JAR” when a person touches it. It never has cookies in it and it is so loud that nobody sets it off to listen to it. Some new people don’t even know it talks. An IT guy brought it in. I shall resume my efforts to give it away to temp employees.

The chair legs that have sharp metal on the bottom so they catch on the carpet when you try to move the chair up to the table, or back.

HEY WHAT IS A DREAM CATCHER DOING IN THE BREAK ROOM? I really dislike those. I want my dreams to be free range non captured, thank you. Behind it you see a smelly candle which does not let off its mysterious and beautiful aroma anymore because of the dust on it.

most days are slow news days and mostly that stops us

2011-01-05T20:59:00.000-08:00

#1: announcement to my sister:

MR PAN LID CAN HAT IS REPAIRED. Is that how his legs are supposed to be? It is more secure this time due to a drill that somebody gave me a few holidays ago YAY.

#2 : cat getting a bag unstuck off his head

It was funnier a few minutes before this when it was over his head and he backed all around the table top shaking his head and then fell off the table.

Or even not quite that many minutes ago, when he got back up on the table and got his head stuck in the bag AGAIN.

#3 : materialism Monday:

Lookit this extremely red and huge purse I got this weekend at Goodwill! Looks like leather, but is genuine polyester. Does it look like a racecar driver has a bowling ball to carry around? Or not? FAQ: Do all those zippers work? FAA: Yes. But not all of them have pockets behind them, unless I count ones I could carry only a chopsticks in.

fancier than regular snow

2011-01-01T20:03:00.000-08:00

I stole this picture of snow from a foreign friend. It is foreign snow. It is imported snow. That is why it is fancier than your snow. As for those fancy foreign plants; I have no idea what those are. Mind your own business and do not go pestering the foreigner through me.

I was weatherizing my front door this morning to try to stop the freezing wind from whistling around the jamb (blackberry, with bees added in it) (there is a pun hidden in the previous parentheses) and I was sighing thinking "it would be better now if this half screen half glass door was a glass door. Maybe I could get some more glass to put in it. What A Bother. If it had more glass in it, probably the screen also wouldn't be sort of funky from cats and knees and whatnot poking it semi out of its frame... SAY. WHAT IS THIS? YAR!"

I noticed that the one piece of glass was just raised up in its little metal track to be with the other piece of glass, to let the bottom part be screen. I lowered it back down and now there was glass and no whistling wind in both halves. I felt very stupid, but also on the other hand rather happy. For me, this is a familiar combination. I decided to see it as just another example of "right where the problem seems to be, the solution is."

Still, it is fun to sing in church

2010-12-26T13:07:00.000-08:00

A flock of starlings (probably) were pecking at the ground in a neighbor yard, and then all swooping in a bunch up to the telephone wires above, over and over. Every part of the process had small mysteries attached. Birds swooping in flocks and fish swimming in schools are beautiful to watch. They are also somehow goofy looking and make a watcher want to laugh.

The starlings all swooped up to the wire, sat a short amount of time, swooped down to the ground pecking again. I was counting one blue mountain two blue mountain three blue mountain. They moved on to the next front yard, then one more along. It probably wasn’t seeds or bread spread out for them. Rain has been starting and stopping the last several days. (Worms?) Well, for weeks really. (Maybe not worms.) No cats were visible sneaking up sidewalks toward the birds. They were staying about 5 to 18 seconds up on the wire, about 8 to 30 seconds on the ground, but it varied quite a bit. A big fat crow or 2 got interested and went marching over toward them (not flying! Walking. Sheesh. The smaller birds ignored the crows.)

At church we all sit through most of the hour but stand for the hymns and the scientific statement of being. Sometimes people get faked out and stand earlier than they mean to, and have to decide whether to sit back down or keep standing waiting for the hymn to start. Why do we stand up to sing? I mean what is the logic of the custom? Do we sing better standing up? (Well.... never mind on what I have to say about that, for 2 nice reasons.) The flock suddenly flew off up the street and I threw the things in my hand into the nearby wastebasket including a Canadian penny that I forgot I was holding, meaning to go throw it out the front door, before stopping to stare at birds out the teeny window on the top of the door.

enough about my politics and baroque dating schemes

2010-12-25T10:23:00.000-08:00

Do you know that I have to SNEAK up on the new chickens each night to try to shut the coop up, because when they hear me, they come out of their coop in the dark to see if anybody has old spaghetti or grated moldy cheese for them? If they hear something moving around in the dark they come eagerly right out of the coop to greet it. Why this matters: dark is the main chicken predator time, and being in a secure closed coop is what keeps the chickens safe. An open coop (it is hard to catch them in the dark, and I can’t shut them up in it if they are not in it!) and the chickens running to greet the predator with open wings is not good, except for the predator. Hm. Predators are usually stealthy. Loud bumbling predators will be instantly successful. Stealthy predators will take 10 seconds longer silently making it all the way into the open coop.

I think they recognize the noise the house back door makes. It is rattley metal and the doorframe is tight. Lately I go quietly out the front door and around the side to the back, open the side gate very carefully, sneeeeak up on the pen.....HAH! It works. I can’t take the keys on this (rattling noise in pocket) so the front door is unlocked for the duration of the operation. If I come back inside one day and a ravenous bear is in the house, I am going to be mad.

I never got the pictures of clothes and it is 9 months later

2010-12-20T18:15:00.000-08:00

My sister was talking dressing girly ("If it has a print, basically it is girly" "What if it has little pictures of ... trains?" "Ha. Or camouflage. OK, not those.") and buying real estate, and observing that the 2nd process did seem to require some torture but short term torture, she said. It seemed awful for a while but when it was over then you thought it hadn't been so bad.

I said "That's how everything bad is! That is how being sick is. You think it might go on forever or you might die and then all of a sudden it is over," and she said "Fires!" What? "Fires are especially that way!" This was so weird a thing to say that my brain went scrambling around like jiffy pop and giant rats mixed up together, trying to fit it into something.

One time SWMBT accidently caught a frying pan on fire and woke my sister up by saying "help help the frying pan is on fire and I can't put it out" but my sister said she came out and threw an absurdly tiny amount of water on it, a teacup-full or maybe a thermos top. "Did you have some specific fire experiences in mind?" My sister said uncomfortably well once in Montana she and her ex husband accidentally lit the field on fire... but she meant fires in general. And to punish me for laughing at her she was going to email me a bunch of pictures of the girly clothes she had bought today.

(Now it is 9 months later and I could have had a BABY by now, and I never got a picture of the clothes.)

Just for that, that's what they don't get!

2010-12-14T20:30:00.001-08:00

Somebody at work with 3 or 4 small boys was telling us when there is a head lice sighting at the school, she makes all her boys wear mayonnaise and rubber swim caps on their hair as a low cost low chemical alternative to lice shampoo. “And it is good for their hair!” she says. The one time I met her boys it was summer and they were all in crew cuts. There isn’t a lot that is good or bad for crew cuts, as far as I know. Isn’t that like saying during a gardening conversation that something is good or bad for gravel? Open flame is probably bad for crew cuts. (I miss a little chunk of the head lice discussion by daydreaming about crew cuts and gravel. Gravel heads. I like rocks. There is a giant store that sells rocks and fossils near my house. More staring than buying goes on in that store. No matter how interesting the rock, if you are standing in a store full of rocks, it is easy to catch on you don’t need to own any specific rock or two. I did buy some fossilized poop once, even though I was skeptical that it really was that and not just conveniently shaped to sell it for that. I gave it to somebody else, who was not as a result as happy as I expected them to be.)

How long do they have to wear the mayonnaise and swim caps?
“Oh, not long. Just 8 hours.”
EIGHT HOURS?!?
“They have fun. We do it on Saturday and we stay inside all day and play board games.”
Gosh. Little kids really do believe however their family operates is just the way life is, don’t they?

I lost my brown stocking cap out of my bag on the bus today. It was brand new, never even once on my head, but whoever found it isn’t going to know that. They are going to pick it up with the very tips of their fingertips to give it to the bus driver, because they are worrying about getting head lice. Then it will go to the bus lost and found, all the way across town on SE 17th and Holgate, and I won’t bother to go get it back because I have other stocking hats. I hope somebody finds it who thinks swim caps and mayonnaise and board games are fun, so they steal it and get some use out of it. It will serve them right when they don't get head lice.

brand new topic

2010-12-10T19:10:00.000-08:00

The police agency I work for has asked me to help them plan a change in their search and rescue program (one of the largest in the state) to take advantage of local sustainable resources and areas of local expertise or market glut. In a budget cutting genius idea, we are probably switching over from using police dogs for search and rescue operations to using police chickens

Backyard chickens have crested in popularity in this city and are showing up increasingly in Craigslist listings. Roosters have been available all along. We can get the animals for next to nothing and compared to what it costs to feed a police dog (or police horse either come to think of it. Hm….well never mind because then we would need to hire babies to ride them) the cost of chicken feed is chicken feed. We might need to ask hikers to come in for one brief session, before their hikes, to feed the chickens grated cheese. It only takes once. Unless they just want to take a signaler thing or GPS with them, but those are not tasty and delicious roasted.*

We will not warn hikers that we might be using roosters (only for the shy hikers or anybody wearing show off expensive hiking gear who we can tell just by looking at them will be too embarrassed to yell HELP HELP HELP I AM LOST really loudly unless a rooster with razor sharp talons is fighting them) or about the chicken uniforms (that part will just be a nice surprise and could lead to more helpful screaming also.)

*My chickens can't participate in this program because they have criminal histories.

materialism Monday

2010-12-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

Other people viewing this rock have forever given up hunting for good rocks on beaches, because any rock they find can only be 2nd best. They say they will just be looking for shells from now on.

They will probably be barefoot, after having clapped their eyes on THESE feet garments (Salvation Army thrift store, half price, brand new, exactly the right size)

Or the pictures could be the other way around showing that even inorganic objects make this stunned appreciative face when glimpsing the shoes.

Too Fowl

2010-12-05T12:23:00.000-08:00

In a change of pace and topic, my sister has written a short play idea summary for the blorg. Here we go. All events and words are fiction, reflecting the genius of my sister and do not reflect the actual views of any tennis club in an adjoining municipality. A short statement by the author follows the playlet/possible screenplay.

..................................................

Do you want to come over and watch DVDs of a certain Canadian sitcom? my sister said.

Should I eat? I said. I was eating turkey soup. The cats were eating turkey soup.

Well, I am making rice-a-roni, my sister said. Or I can offer you leftover turkey. I also have that damn roast chicken in the fridge. She meant to give me the roast chicken and a newspaper article about fires in Portland chicken coops the last time I was over watching Canadian sitcoms, but we forgot.

What type of rice-a-roni?
Chicken.

I can’t come over, I’m that word that means frightened but it’s a metaphor.

You turkey.

................................

Statement by the author:

I thought of calling the post "My Sister and I are One" but since we are actually one and three quarters I did not.

Now if any of you have experience with the financially lucrative business of turning playlets in top ranking screenplays, I would appreciate your exciting input. I have to write some camera directions and sprinkle them around the talking and doing parts, correct? "Cell phone ringing. Camera closeup of a hand, with quite a few hangnails, scrabbling in a purse. Muttered cursing. Ringing and scrabbling continue, then ringing stops. Hand finds cellphone, removes it from purse and camera view. Silence for a while, then speaking :" How's that?
..............................

the neighbor

2010-12-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

I met the neighbor’s husband, who is behind her 1%. It was a snowy day. He was in his pajamas. He was behind me zero percent.

Her chickens are named after the women on Charlie’s Angels.

FORGOTTON PANTS

2010-11-30T17:00:00.000-08:00

The belt around my stomach looked oddly familiar.

DEBAUCHERY and THE CAT

2010-11-28T17:00:00.000-08:00

DEBAUCHERY
I ate a lot of Froot Loops and went to bed at 8pm. I had to get up several times in the night to take ping pong balls away from the cat.

THE CAT
How does that cat change sizes at different times?

2010-11-27T17:00:00.000-08:00

river of blessings

2010-11-27T16:41:00.000-08:00

No doubt you all participated in BUY NOTHING DAY yesterday of your own free wills, attesting to your worthiness to read this un blorg.

A really good book about Australia and chickens and domestic violence and drinking that we found at the library last week: After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, by Evie Wyld. It isn’t really about those, but it contains them as elements. We are impressed by authors being the other gender for their main characters and doing it plausibly. Does it mean something about us that we can't imagine pulling it off, even though we are not especially girly (other than shoes)?

Somebody in the book gives the main character a couple of chickens, which he doesn’t especially want, and after that in the book he throws them table scraps sometimes and watches them, the chickens. They are not important to the plot. They are small details that show he is healing.

A really good movie with funny looking people dancing in a way that will make you wish you were them: Rumba (French, but with hardly any speaking, and English subtitles). You could go follow the link and watch the teeny tiny trailer....

2 good music CDs: Mambo Sinuendo (Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban), and (The Ananda Shankar Experience and State of Bengal:) Walking On. Mostly instrumental, a small amount of singing in other than English. Good. Sometimes a person doesn’t want words.

learning from adversity

2010-11-24T06:06:00.000-08:00

Small brownie squares in the fridge, yes! score!!
Oh. They are teriyaki tofu squares I forgot I had.

that mile long list of pet peeves you started

2010-11-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

Why are movies so secretive about the year of issue? They hide the information in Roman numerals, tiny at the very end of the credits. Unless you are watching a movie made in the year 0015, the number (why is it “Roman numerals” instead of “Roman numbers” ?) will be full of confusing Cs and Qs . Those are hard to decode quickly in the theater or even if you are squinting at a small TV with the movie freezed and a bath sounding good compared to finding an old envelope and a pencil. Why do movies do that?

The movie DVD or video box is equally mysterious about dates. That makes sense; they don’t want to lose the customers who think a movie from 3 years ago is stale and might have the kind of worms that get into 3 year old cheerios. But about the credits thing: by the time you are watching the credits you already watched the movie. The credits could say “HAH. Made in 1986 in case you were wondering!” as big as a cow and they already would have got you as a customer.

In video stores, the computer or books you can look movies up in are going to give you multiple movies by the same name with...the date the movie was released, to distinguish the choices.

I have neighbors with people skills

2010-11-21T15:41:00.001-08:00

Yesterday in the back yard as I was ignoring somebody who was knocking on my front door, the person refused to be ignored and came around to the back to peer over the fence into the backyard. Unfortunately she was tall as well as friendly. This points up another problem with the fence.

The first problem with the fence* is that the smaller cat (now named 5spot) easily climbs up it and jumps down from its top horizontal 2x4 support board into the chicken yard, to chase the chickens around while they squawk BOK BOK HELP HELP BOK HEEEEELP. That top support board is like a prison yard catwalk looking down on succulent chicken prisoners and it only took 5spot a few weeks to figure out he was the mean prison guard. Yesterday I was in the back yard rigging up a 2nd fence of chicken wire inside the other board fence far enough in to keep 5spot from leaping over and in from the board fence.

I was also adding a rain-and-heat-barrier door to the new chicken coop (made of an old drum shaped coffee table painted gray blue, with a patio table glass top for the circular roof of it YEAH). The rain and heat barrier door is just strips of plastic dangling down in front of the wooden coop doors. The wooden coop doors are shut at night but need to be open during the day for the chickens go in and out and make a lot of noise and lay eggs in their poopy straw so if the eggs aren’t collected constantly, they get slightly poop smeared, and I tell people not to wash them off. “An egg has a protective coating that keeps it fresh longer if you don’t wash it. Wait: how long will you be keeping the chickenpoop smeared eggs stored in your fridge before you bake something?” So far the 2 new chickens don’t seem to mind that cold air and rain can blow in the open doors during the day, but it is supposed to snow this weekend.

You know the strips of plastic or rubber that old grocery store coolers have dangling down as a temperature barrier? If those work for keeping dead chickens cold in the grocery store cooler, and keeping the warm dry grocery store air out, then shouldn’t the dangling plastic strips I made help keep dry warm air (heated by a lamp in the new blue drum coop) inside the coop, and cold wet fresh nature air out of the coop, for warm live chickens?

The new chickens are Thing1 and Thing2. They are small and stripey.

Summarizing so far: I got 2 more chickens. I made them a coop. The 2 old chickens are still in the old coop. The new coop is a work in progress. The littler cat is bugging all the chickens, so I am figuring out cat fencing, against him. A neighbor is bugging me over the other fence who is too tall to ignore.

The neighbor’s name is Nancy and she came over to introduce herself because she heard I had chickens, when all 4 of mine went over the board fence last week and went up the street 2 houses where 2 other neighbors (Holly and somebody) trapped them and then put notes on the doors of everybody on the block saying “ARE YOUR CHICKENS MISSING? We have them!” and giving their phone number. Nancy’s husband had said to her when she got home from work that day “Your chickens got out.” She went and checked, and said “No they didn’t.” (I got home and checked and said about mine “Yes they did,” and called the number. During that conversation I said “How do you have my chickens?” and they said “They just showed up.” “How did they show up?” I was curious if they were going through the back yards or were out in the street or what, but the neighbor said “Walking.” “How did you know they were mine?” They said “We didn’t. We put a note on every door on the block.” A little thought balloon over that neighbor said “we didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition” and “are you insinuating that your chickens can drive?”) But then Nancy knew somebody else had chickens, and came over to talk chickens with me.

She is nice. She only got her chickens this summer, so was acting like I was ahead of her and knowledgable. Her chickens stopped laying about a month ago. I asked if she has a light in their coop at night. She said no, she had heard that would work, but … er… she was trying to figure out if that was being mean to them. “Yours don’t mind having a light on all night?” I said no, or actually how would I know? Other than the one jailbreak that she had read about in the leaflet in her door, my chickens gave no signs of being unhappy. Nancy said she had just fixed up a reptile light (heat but no light) in her coop. It sounded like she would now think about a regular light to start her chickens laying again.

After that we talked about clipping chicken toenails (maybe we should do it but so far we did NOT. PLEASE.), chicken interestingness (yes they are) and agreed we might be chicken minders for each other when the other one of us went out of town overnight. I apologized for my outfit, which was muddy with paint stains underneath, and the current giant yard shoes on the very bottom.

Nancy said that her husband said, about her chickens, “I am behind you one percent!” This got confusing; I thought she was telling me that her husband was behind me one percent. I even said “Your husband is behind ME one percent?” and she said no he was behind her, Nancy, and her chickens one percent. She probably went back home and told her husband that I was nice, but sort of stupid and dressed like a slob and that she had been right to buy her coop readymade instead of cobble it together out of old furniture, bungee cords, and plastic hula skirts. She told me to drop by and look at her chickens and coop anytime, then she left and I got back to work.

When I go view her chickens and coop I can get it straightened out what percent her husband is behind me. My guess: one quarter of a percent.

*the first problem with the fence is actually that parts of it are rotting and leaning. 5spot is #2. Tall neighbors being able to be friendly above it is the 3rd problem. We apologize for the mathematical error.

I'm on the stairs dressed in curtains, waving

2010-06-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

What I learned: A blog isn't really a conversation; it is a performance. An email is a conversation. I guess both things could be other things. A blog is a really FUN performance but if you start thinking "oh dear; I really need to put something on the blog" then maybe the performance is over. If you tell people you know about the blog then you can't write about them anymore, or not in any mean joke way (not that you would, but before you could, and now you can't.) No wonder people's relatives get mad at them after the people write books using them as sort of springboards for characters. You might think "for Cripe's sake. It's only fiction" but it is probably the fiction part that got them into trouble.

What I plan: Well. I could turn the settings to "private" and then it would still exist but nobody could see it. I could allow it to gather a whole lot of dust, forget the password, and then a hacker could take it over for nefarious schemes (um... giving parties, maybe. At which Celtic music is played, cable TV is watched, and creamed corn is served). I would fill with regret at my foolishness. How was it any different from storing several boxes of cool knick knacks in my basement (for example a sleigh made of popsicle sticks and some bed springs sculpture from the San Antonio creek that is called San Antonio River) ? Had I learnt nothing? Alternative plan: well I could turn the settings to private, fight for another month or 2 with the computer people until they finally hand over the product key allowing me to use the word processing software that I paid for and bring the blog back to life as something totally else. With more photos and zombies in in.

Even a president only goes for 4 years and then you have to re-elect her or him.

two more things

2010-06-26T17:32:00.000-07:00

If you like to read detective books during the summer (and how can you hold your head up in front of your neighbors and Sunday school teacher and your relatives and Sasquatch unless your answer is "yes" ?), I recommend "This is a Bust" by Ed Lin. He has a fan website, possibly written by himself, here: www.edlinforpresident.com/thisisabust.php If characters with drinking problems make you tired, then you might not like it. Some of you are already emailing me and pointing out that your relatives ARE Sunday school teachers and they live next door and they are large and hairy and gentle. What is your point? The sentence is still applicable to you. Get an elderly relative to help you do a sentence diagram.

Why do songs with drama (emotion) almost invariably have the drama be romance related? Someone in my office has suggested a new music genre with more varied and realistic drama types in the song lyrics. The conversation started out "Here's that song that you hate, Moe!" (cranks up the volume as "Love is a Battlefield" begins on an oldies station she is listening to for some reason). Songs could, for example, address "I am faintly insulted because handymen and home repair people keep leaving pamphlets in my door, but otherwise everything is OK" or "I can't find my keys but probably they will turn up." Probably it needs to be called "Reality Rock."

i'm not buddha

2010-06-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

I broke the wireless mouse by turning the laptop over to read a sticker on the bottom, while the flimsy important thing was plugged into the side of it. I was really mad. I told my sister "That cost $50!" If a meteor had whizzed out of the sky and demolished the mouse, I would have been impressed and startled, but not mad at all which made me sort of uneasy although it was sort of interesting to think about. Later at home I found the receipt, which showed the mouse had cost $20 not $50, and suddenly I was not at all mad. Even though nothing had changed.

#2
2 cars having a road tantrum incident pulled into the work parking lot (I work at a law enforcement agency) and people jumped out of the cars and started fighting each other. Some deputies came out of the building and after a while they arrested one of the people. I thought about going out there and asking him how he would react to destroying a piece of computer through his own stupidity, at different price ranges.

My supervisor came through laughing that it was nice of them to have our work delivered right to us that way.

Is it all about control?

2010-06-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

If you are trying to get an undercover dope guy to respond to your work email, and he isn't, and you want him to... you probably are not going to win. But you can get him to at least read your email by recalling it. Somehow I knew it would work, and it did. It is similar to getting a teenager's attention by saying "I am trying to tell you.... wait. Never mind. On 2nd thought, I don't want to tell you that yet."

Those pictures have nothing to do with undercover dope guys. I just like the yards in my neighborhood where stuff is all out of control.

I can't get the wireless mouse to consistently work, so I have to post a picture of the out of control kitten in Midget Mansion on another post. Speaking of more control issues or lack of control issues.

it looks like control but it isn't

2010-06-17T19:24:00.000-07:00

You've seen that movie "Alien" where things erupt out of people's stomachs, right?

because the old ones didn't exist or had rust inside them, depending

2010-06-13T15:15:00.000-07:00

The bigger cat (the one who makes Elvis faces and drools when happy) snores in a way that sounds like people talking far away. The dishwasher cycle makes weird faint chiming music. Both are strange but quite nice. I warn you in advance in case you stay overnight someday and get scared because you think someone has broken into my house and is playing harps in the basement before they come upstairs to kill you.

My sister came over and changed out 3 out of 5 door locks for me -- 3 out of 4 if you don't count the eventual basement door lock that has to wait for the cracked balsa wood basement door to be replaced, but I do count it-- with me providing a small amount of discouraged help. She left her big door drill with me so that I can change the 4th, if I was paying attention and decide what I want to do about that place in the door that sort of derailed us because we didn't expect it to be filled with toothpaste instead of wood. Or it might possibly be bathtub caulk.

My sister said "You could put back in the extra, old, deadbolt there but not even use it. Essentially you would be filling the hole with a fake lock. Then you could move this new deadbolt lock to a place on your door with actual wood. How many locks are you willing to have on your door? You would look a little paranoid." Then we had a discussion about whether I would look paranoid, which I didn't care about, or like I was a New Yorker (also don't care about) or if I would look like I had some really good stuff really worth protecting in my house (counterproductive).

I don't know how to do anything

2010-06-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

It was inspiring to see the enormously long garden hose, cobbled together by I think a cheap old man (the previous owner of the house; I am in love with him for his thriftiness, even though he is deceased) from pieces of hoses, so that it stretches clear into the back yard ... but I couldn't use it because it squirted out like crop irrigation at the faucet end because of the broken threaded part on it. So I decided to fix it. I figured out that one just cuts off the offending piece of hose-- kinked or leaking part -- and puts a new fitting on the end, and connects it to the other bits and pieces. (At the last house what I did with my leaky hose was stick it full of MORE holes with an enormous butcher knife, making a drip irrigation "soaker hose". Also an ex boyfriend came by while I was doing that, leading to the interesting situation of having a very careful conversation with somebody while holding a huge butcher knife. Neither the conversation nor the soaker hose worked very great so I threw them both away.) It took me a couple of HOURS of fooling around on the porch with the hose and the $2 part and a screwdriver. At this rate I will get the dimmer switch in the living room fixed by Halloween after next, and will no longer have to go up and down a ladder* unscrewing the light bulb with an oven mitt to turn it off.

I do not really know if a person who puts together chicken coops with bungee cords should have bought a house.

My sister says she will help me.

I am not a moron. I am just zen. (Is this convincing? I could flesh it out, some.)

*It is a really cool folding ladder that my brother bought me at a garage sale, though. Thanks, SatInPoisonOakBroMoe! Yesterday we leaned it against the front door at night as sort of a burglar alarm, because we don't know, but we might have been broken into on Sunday, but they didn't take anything if we were. Which is either funny or insulting. For example, in their opinion it wasn't that great of a folding ladder, huh? Or else maybe SWMBT just didn't really lock and close the front door even though she is absolutely positive she did.

you should start dreaming about lawyers instead

2010-06-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

my friend's 4 year old to me in the car:
Wishes do come true. Wishes can come true. Did you know that? Do you know that wishes come true, Moe?

Me: um. Sometimes.

mffyo: They do come true, Moe.

me: Could happen, maybe.

mffyo: A dream is a wish, Moe.

me: That was Freud's theory, at least.

mffyo: I have dreams, Moe.

me: Wishes, you mean?

mffyo: Yes. And I know that my wishes can come true, Moe.

me: What do you wish?

mffyo: That when I am older I turn into a fairy!

me: Well... that one just flat out won't happen. Sorry. (Then we had an argument about whether it would happen or not which I think I won by sheer tenacity rather than reason or a respect for decades of experience or recognition of which one of us had piled up a more consistent track record for truthfulness, either. Tinkerbell figured in it.)

now that nobody is listening, I can say whatever I want

2010-06-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

Everything that is an ugly color can just stay an ugly color for a while. The color of things is not necessarily my problem. It turns out that a person might have other things to do and other ways to spend her money than on blue or green masking tape or standing on ladders yelling at cats to stay out of a particular room and enduring insults like "hey moe did you manage to get any of that paint on the walls?"

About that other kind of tape: is it duck tape? Or duct tape?

The new house has krypton or something in the walls and the cell phone doesn't work much inside. I like the sound it makes, like a breaking rubberband, when it refuses to work. boingggggingg! SWMBT is constantly on the landline (house phone) and it has that voicemail that is stored on the phone company's cloud, so if I don't pick up the receiver to deliberately check for a message tone beep beep beep beep, then it might be days before I know you left me a message. At work I have 30 minutes to eat lunch and make any necessary phonecalls and go to the bathroom or the bank or the grocery store across the street. Since I really don't like talking on the phone much, none of this exactly bothers me, but it might be bugging other people who like to talk on the phone in real time. But they probably gave up on me a long time ago. (If they continued to like me for my wall painting skills, then I do now have a problem.)

My coworker was telling me about a police call where a man was claiming that he had a restraining order against himself and reporting or complaining that he really should not be in his own vicinity. Heh heh. I think I figured out how a person really could do this, maybe even without lying to the court, and it does have interesting possibilities. Somebody needs to do this as an art project, and tell us about it.

I don't really know whose underwear I am wearing

2010-05-25T17:27:00.000-07:00

We don't have a washer and dryer at the new house yet. At the laundromat, the front loader washers spin so enthusiastically that things stick to the top of the drum. They might be mine...they just look funny. They are a weird color of blue.

You probably want to hear about the new cats, though. The little one found the big one and spent a day or 2 following him around, meaning being under the bed a lot (when I looked under there, no matter how they were positioned, the big one's back was always to the little one). The little one did emerge to eat the big one's food, scratch on the big one's scratching post, and poop in the big one's litter box. When he scratched on the big one's scratching post the big one looked sad. When he pooped in the big one's litter box, I looked sad. HEY; that means I have to empty it. So much for my genius idea that we each have to have the litter box of our own cat in our own room to motivate each of us to keep it cleaned up.

After a day of mellowness and "I don't care if you turn your back, you are still my hero"-ness, the little one spent yesterday in the big one's face and pouncing and swatting and playing so hard that finally he got clobbered about 6 times HARD with a big serious paw. SWAT SWAT SWAT SWAT SWAT SWAT. He just took it, hardly even flinching. And then he jumped on the angrily switching tail of the big cat and wrestled it mightily!

I would like to point out that everybody smells pretty normal at my library.

INTERMISSION

2010-05-16T15:50:00.000-07:00

*photo of imaginary red velvet curtains here*

Internet isn't working at the new house so please feel free to roam around talking loudly and eating with your mouth open for a while. Or go outside.

don't worry be happy (do as I say, not as I do)

2010-05-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

It was a sunny day and the person in the attic inching across the rafters to remove the tattered small curtain from the attic window could see dots and thin lines of clear blue light through the roof in some places. Like a planetarium, only much stuffier, and for some reason instead of filling her with imitation awe it made her stomach hurt. On the other hand, it beat being at a party or at a mall full of rabid dogs and creamed corn.

The attic had shredded shingles and bits of kindling with small nails in them mixed in with the mulched cardboard insulation. It was probably not infested with huge attic beavers, though.

CLASH OF THE MOE TITANS

2010-05-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

Editor's note: Two guest hosts have contributed to today's post: Moe's FavSis + a brother of Moe(he wishes to be called here: BroMoeSatinpoisonoaklongago) using a ghost writer because they are awfully busy. BMSipola did not know of FS's tirade before submitting his link. Weird.

FavSis: "What is the deal with LOVE SEATS? They are completely useless. Nobody wants them. Craigslist is full of them. You can't get rid of one once you have one, and it was stupidity to get it in the first place even if it was because I thought a regular sized couch wouldn't fit where I wanted it to fit. They are not long enough to sleep on and nobody really wants to sit that close to anybody else. They aren't even good furniture for watching movies with boyfriends because... never mind. So they are essentially just a big stupid chair. ... Are you sure you don't want this loveseat? It was very fashionable in the 90s."

BroMoeSatinpoisonoaklongago: "Hey, Moe. You ride the bus a lot. What do you think of this? :http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/05/love-seats-on-copenhagen-buses.html "

I think you just won an argument you didn't know you were having. Or solved somebody else's problem, if you want to look at it that way. Sort of about buses: a man on the commuter train this morning looked at me and did that talking-while-coughing thing -- like in teen movies where people say "coffLOSER" at each other disguised as a cough-- saying "white b-tch!" at me as he got on, for no reason I could figure out. He was dressed really great and had a nice bicycle with fenders and a generator light. Over the next several miles I convinced myself I must have imagined it, so I said "nice bike!" to him as I got off, but he looked at me with pretty unmistakable loathing. Now I wonder if he was from Copenhagen, and in a bad mood because he missed their mass transit seating arrangements.

Go look at the April 29 Dinosaur Comic

2010-05-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

Heh heh. That's how T-Rex feels about moving. It is a pretty good reason to move, though. I see I got nostalgic in advance, a little, last move. Those different colored words are links. People keep telling me they don't ever bother to go read links in this blorg. It sucks to be you.

I will miss the giant cherry tree* out back at this place. And ENOGADPF neighbor, but he isn't next door anymore.

SheWhoMustBeTexted was home when the landlords showed somebody this place, last week. She said the potential new tenant is an eyepoppingly tall woman, 6 or even 7 feet tall. However, sometimes SWMBT is not entirely accurate on details for reasons I can't figure completely out. She did mention that she (SWMBT) was slumped over on the couch having a long phone conversation when she looked up at the Tall Tenant To Be. Maybe the TT2B just looked much taller because of the sight angle? This could occur if she had a head that narrowed in, like a triangle, and wider hips and skinnier shoulders. And it would help if she was wearing big shoes or had very fat knees.

"Did she say anything about the BEAUTIFUL garden? Did it sound like she was looking forward to sitting out back looking at the creek?" I asked hopefully. SWMBT said "Um....didn't mention any of that. She said we had a very small dining area and her table would take up more than half of it. She was telling Matt about her table. I guess she has an enormous square table." Oh. Well if you are 7 feet tall it takes a lot of food to keep you from toppling over, and then you would need to spread it out on a large space especially if it was chopped up very fine because your mouth was so small (if it was high up on your head, at least), so she is a good planner. Maybe she admired outside while she was outside.

*First it makes a giant fluffy cloud, in March, then it snows all over (first windstorm after blossoms) and finally it gets lots of tiny very sour red cherries which last a long time into the summer. Most of the cherries are out of my reach, an enjoyable kind of torture. Something wonderful is so bountiful that it is going to waste! I did stand on things sometimes. SWMBT wouldn't eat them and neither would ENOGADPF neighbor (he weirdly insisted they were not cherries.) Only I did, and squirrels and birds. I could have eaten twice as many of them if I was a little taller. ......HEY.

congratulations on probably not messing up my address book, for a while at least, after this

2010-04-30T18:34:00.000-07:00

Why do most people congratulate most other people for buying a house? I know that some are doing it to be polite, but they don't congratulate people for other things ("Congratulations for having wrinkles of skin on your elbows, if you do. Not having them is OK too. Congratulations on not, if you don't .") so being polite must not be the whole answer. I didn't build it from sticks and vines or even save up enough money to buy it. Either of those I would have accepted congratulations smugly for. Really the bank did the money saving. Really you all loaned the bank your money for a while and when your back was turned they spent it on a big fat loan to me. And they are getting away with it! Congratulations to the bank. Twice.

I told my coworker I was going to think up something to say to the next person who said "congratulations on your new house" to me that wouldn't make the person feel bad but would subvert the dominant paradigm. "I am deeply disappointed but thank you for trying to make me feel good; you are the wind beneath my wings." Then when they said "WHAT?! Why did you say that?" I could say "You explain first."

While I was typing this, SWMBT's auntie called up and said "Congratulations on your new house." Then she willingly explained: "Oh......because it is sort of a hassle. And expensive. And it is a big step if you aren't rich, like getting married or having a kid." Sometimes it is a big mistake and you can't easily get back out of it? But you don't think that at the beginning and people hope you are not mistaken?? "Well, yes. I guess so." After I accepted her congratulations, now that I understood them, she offered to help us paint tomorrow and to loan us the wire things that the fuzzy parts of paint rollers go on, too. Congratulations to me for having such nice relatives and friends. About 6 people I know have offered to help me move which I would never do casually and it was so nice of them it did make me a little suspicious but perhaps they said it accidentally.

An emergency has been reported !

2010-04-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

I like it when Brady says "I wasn't going to."
emergency: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anythreewords/2770320415/in/set-72157605751165846/

vanity: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anythreewords/2765656686/in/set-72157605751165846/

my guess is somebody who is supposed to be writing a term paper

2010-04-26T06:08:00.000-07:00

or maybe somebody who is supposed to be cleaning their house, against some deadline. (It's a Craigslist ad my sister forwarded to me. Somebody needs to reply along the lines of "I am sending my ex boyfriend over to get it. But don't talk to him. He is the craziest ex boyfriend ever." ?)
---------------------------------------------------------

The. Worst. Book. EverDate: 2010-04-25, 6:38PM

Please come and take this piece of crap away. I love books, and even if I don't like a book I'll finish it. Once I read a James Patterson novel that I hated so much I threw it across the room when I was done. But the point is, I finished it even though I hated it. I could not finish reading this book. It is called "The Eight" by Katherine Neville. Maybe you won't hate it as much as I did. The author claims that it's like a Dan Brown novel. This trash is sitting outside my house on the curb. Please take it away. I can't bring myself to throw it in the garbage because I am truly a book lover but I don't want it in my house anymore. Maybe I'll even pay someone to remove it from my property. I'll respond if you ask me if it's there, despite the fact that I don't want to see it ever again.

I was lying about the Hummer on Wednesday

2010-04-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

Now that moving is nearly certain, we are a whirlwind of motion. Today I took some old windows out from under the deck where I was storing them, and washed them.

After that I played with the chickens.

Here are some ducks that were walking up my street on Monday for no good reason and an accidentally beautiful picture of the pampas grass :

You might be thinking "The ducks probably belong to that house right there!" but some people came out of the house and said no, they didn't. The ducks walked around in the street and the parking lot for a while. I tried to shoo them to the little creek in the back, figuring they must've come from there, but they kept coming back out to the street. (Hm... maybe that was their silver car you can see. "We keep trying to return to our vehicle and leave, but a lady keeps chasing us into the wilderness!" ) Finally I chased them with water from the garden hose and they ran quacking in the correct (according to me) direction. This is all pretty illogical behavior for ducks. Why should they be afraid of being squirted with water? But I was trying to tell you about moving, not ducks.

Ever since I was pretty sure we were moving, I have been looking at cats on the internet. We can have a cat at the new place. Or 8! Or however many before someone from the city comes to tell us that's too many. (Just kidding.) Many people are trying to give away their pets on Craigslist. You can look and look and look and look for hours and hours. It feels a little like surfing porn. (I imagine.) I did it so much I felt strange. I was even muttering "ooh, yes... you are a handsome boy, aren't you..." and going back to look at my favorites repeatedly. Well, it will be fun to have a cat again. I counted up and realized that the last cat I had was 20 years ago in Texas.

The one below seems pretty great and unlikely to chase chickens. The owner told me they got it 10 years ago when they lived in Texas to deal with a mice problem but the cat just looked at the mice without doing anything about them, and when they finally caught the mouse and removed it the cat looked disappointed. He drools when he is happy, and sometimes makes faces that resemble Elvis. Awww. I am in love. When I told somebody at work the part about "drools when he is happy" she just said "don't we all."

win some lose some

2010-04-21T17:50:00.000-07:00

My car broke down again today, at the coffee drive through line. The guy behind me in the line was kind of mad. I told the tow truck driver he could let me off at the corner across from work, but he was a real gentleman and insisted on coming into the work parking lot with his huge flatbed truck. "Now my coworkers are looking out the window and will tease me ," I said in a non judgemental way. "Oh... sorry. I didn't think of that" he said.

Luckily my sister had just loaned me an enormous amount of money for a down payment on the new house and signed a piece of paper saying it was a gift straight out with no expectations of repayment. So I just bought a new car with it instead.

a mote of information

2010-04-18T17:47:00.000-07:00

The new house it on the horizon. It looks very tiny. Because it is so far away? The enigma of perspective? Or because it does not have many square feet? Both.

It is across town and about a month away, if it keeps on coming this direction. It is small but it has a basement that people used to live in. They were either hobbits or tiny people from the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy." That basement is pretty low ceilinged to have been previously inhabited. It is nice sized rooms in the other 2 directions. I could stand upright when I was down there but it was a good thing I don't have a beehive hairdo. The house upstairs seemed to have normal sized rooms but now I remember that rooms seem larger when they are empty. My sister said "Those are kind of small rooms!" so I measured the livingroom and computed that the big green couch, 2 small bookcases, and the TV are going to pretty much fill it up. It's a good thing it has a light in the ceiling. The other stuff (my bicycle, the chicken feed, the aquarium o knick-knacks, the power drill which is now hiding in the clothes hamper, the camping gear, leftover lumber, the bad art collection...) can all go in the basement.

If we move into it, the house is a shining opportunity to be a minimalist, a longstanding goal. Also wearing a beehive is another goal, but one in direct conflict with this house, unless I send SWMBT down to fetch things in the basement all the time . Upstairs we would be minimalist. It has a small stove and a small refrigerator, too.

My best friend told me about minimalism. She told me her fantasy of sitting on the steps of her fantasy minimalist residence to open her mail....after reading it, she would not even bring it inside. It would go straight into recycling. She said it would be sort of like living in a ship. The way I plan to do it is more like car camping. There you are, sleeping under the stars and eating fig newtons for breakfast! But, true, there are 870 Possibly Necessary Items crammed into the vehicle(/basement) next to you.

only boring people are bored, according to somebody's mother

2010-04-14T17:54:00.000-07:00

It is torture on the train home from work to discover you have already read the New Yorker magazine with you. How did that happen without it getting all wrinkly or you remembering it? Maybe alien abductions of some sort or sleepwalking? Or you read some OTHER copy of it in a waiting room you were in recently. Dang. You can attempt to stave off the pain a few minutes by reading the bits you didn't read in the first place because you don't like them- the dance and drama and restaurant reviews. Reviews of things you don't care about, in a place where you aren't. This feels like eating the white parts of iceberg lettuce or that piece of floppy toast from a few days ago still in your coat pocket. You hope for unexpected deliciousness but only because hoping is free and takes up time.

After that you can stare out the window and listen to the man next to you on a cell phone assuring someone on the other end that the phone is loaned to him, not stolen by him, then affirming the person like crazy for minutes and minutes and minutes. He says things like "I think you probably did great....... You did what seemed right at the time. That's all you can do........uh huh...................... uh huh...............................................................was that the part where you got emotional?....................uh huh uh huh.....................well, you said something positive and that is very...positive....." If he did steal that cell phone, the victim has no idea how much compassion and understanding they are unwillingly funding. After that gets dull you can look at trees and once again realize they are in general taller than one would guess. A test: shut your eyes, picture your house and the trees next to it. How many multiples of your house tall are the trees? Then go look. SEE? Taller than you think, right? But you did the best estimating you could, and that's all you can do, so don't think of yourself as a sucky unobservant failure.

that could either= 8 or two hundred and twenty two

2010-04-09T16:50:00.000-07:00

Someone at work was entertained that a real person in the database has the last name "Twotwo." And then: "HEY. There are two TwoTwos!" You can guess what we sincerely hope they are both wearing.

Another real person in the database has a last name "Compost". When he was younger he could say to young hecklers or people telling him to shut up "make me." Then they said "I don't make trash, I burn it." Then he said "I am not trash; I am COMPOST. Ecology ignoramous."

GO. Go, Shorty.

2010-04-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

The TV news last night featured a come-on about a pelican "on the attack" and then showed a, yep, pelican striking its not-too-scary beak a few times at somebody. I didn't see what lame thing that was all about. Later the news reported a dead body found in a local creek. A woman being briefly interviewed (found the body? or maybe just a person in the neighborhood willing to talk on TV?) said it was an unpleasantly unexpected experience in her tidy neighborhood, then said doubtfully "well...there are a lot of transients..." and, decisively: "It was SHOCKing!" SWMBT said "A transvestite was shot!" She was willing to laugh sheepishly a minute later.*

My coworkers listened to this and said to me "That creek floods every year! Why does anybody buy a house there?" Oh. Oh, I guess we switched topics.

*She doesn't like it when I tell that story about when she was 8 and her favorite rap song was "Go. Go Shorty. It's your burfday. We're gonna party...like it's your burfday. We're gonna sit in the car...like it's your burfday." Eventually one day I heard her singing it right (we're gonna sip Bacardi...like it's your burfday) which was much more boring for me, if not for the birthday guests.

my brother is right!

2010-04-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

This is a very funny BikeSnob : http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2010/04/in-transition-livable-streets-lovable.html

This is Octavio; did anybody call for me?

2010-04-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

"All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa. This provides work for them that they can do at home. These women are part of a larger corps of city employees engaged to call wrong numbers. The highest earner of all is an Indian from India who is able to insist that he does not have the wrong number.

Others- mainly old people - have been employed to amuse us by wearing strange hats. They wear them as though they were not responsible for what went on above their eyebrows."

(from a book of extremely short stories by Lydia Davis, may she live forever. This is 7/32nds of a story called "City Employment" )

there is probably carrion and french fries in that direction, too

2010-04-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

It is very windy and at the gas station a crow was trying to fly from the nearby parking lot to someplace important to itself. It took off from the ground flapping its wings mightily. The wind squashed its flight arc then blew it completely off track. The crow looked like a small angry out of control coat or umbrella being blown hard in the wrong direction. It managed a shortcut up to the roof of the gas station, sat there for a minute, and tried again. The wind did the same thing to it again ... cmon...cmon...uh oh you're getting shoved.... now you are standing still in the air flapping as hard as you can! Don't spread out flat that way pointing at that weird angle!.... oh too bad THERE YOU GO FLAPPING AND SPRAWLING in the wrong direction. This time the crow suddenly just pretended it wanted to go in that direction and flew off with the wind hard at its behind.

The top part of a tree outside SWMBT's school broke part way off and dangled down as she watched it during class out the window. "Did it crush anything?" "No... it was just the top part and it didn't reach all the way to the ground, and it was too skinny even if it was longer which I wish." As nothing was purple, we can assume this was not a dream.

not as solitary as you think

2010-04-02T18:16:00.000-07:00

SWMBT points out that the chickens, when loose, hang out quite a bit on the outside back deck very near to the glass doors listening to what we say inside the livingroom. She knows they hear us because they react to voices (human or parakeet) (well, those parakeets are louder than you think) (unless you are somebody who tries to talk to us on the telephone and then you are well aware of this) or to other sounds inside. "They react to the TV sound, too," she says. Awww.

I don't know if they are doing that because they like hanging out next to us? or they think we will run out and shoo cats away if cats menace them? or it could be the small roof overhang stopping rain from falling on them? or the hope ever burning in a chicken's heart that we will maybe come out and grate some cheddar cheese for them to eat. Which we are heartily sorry we ever started, because they like it too much. Some days we have to sneak very quietly out to the car so they do not hear us leave and follow us out toward the street ( hoping for cheese or wanting us to explain something we said while they were listening maybe).

2010-03-30T06:19:00.000-07:00

YEAH

It was raining again all night like the Hindenburg (and more of it predicted all week long. On Thursday the NOAA website has a little icon which shows a car driving in the rain. NOAA recommends I only go to work on Thursday.) which makes it wonderfully easy to sleep at night. 2 seconds after feet in wool socks hit the pillow and thinking just once what IS that creepy noise, oh just the ice maker? ZZZZZZZZZZZZ. Then hours and hours of dreaming that you are a fish.

Last week on the bus an otherwise normal looking lady said "Shaq ass!" as she made her way down the aisle. What does that mean?

2010-03-28T15:17:00.000-07:00

I'm probably not moving right now after all. That way I can put off cleaning house indefinitely.

price elasticity of supply

2010-03-27T19:54:00.000-07:00

The yearly rummage sale for the senior program at the community center up the street had sapling PINK lilac trees for cheap. YAY. I got some.

A nice thing about seniors is, as a general rule, they tend to think everything should be cheap. I suppose this is because of creeping inflation and their nice long memories . If we lived in a place with creeping falling prices, then probably an annoying thing about seniors would be that they would price things too high at their rummage sales. Also, restaurants or stores would need senior prices that were reassuringly higher than regular prices, because seniors would regard the lower prices with suspicion. Instead of saying "$8 for a haircut? That is ABSURD!" the seniors would say things like "$35 for a haircut? What's wrong with it? I'm not accidentally at a beauty college am I? Have you ever cut hair before, young man?"

An ad on Craigslist had free wood chips in my very neighborhood, a huge beautiful mountain of them. The people just posted their address and said come by whenever and take as many as you want. They had chipped up a spruce tree, it looked like. They didn't have any crabby stuff in the ad, like Craigslist ads sometimes do. A previous free wood chip ad by somebody else said DON'T be asking him any annoying questions about whether the tree was diseased or what type of wood it was. And no "lookie lou lous". While it made me burst out laughing, it didn't make me want to go get wood chips from him. Somebody's ad today said "please don't call if your a flake" (sic.) So I didn't. I am an obedient flake. My neighborhood's beautiful free wood chip mountain is on a street just complicated enough--winding, steep, short, with weird curbs and berms making a little maze of the access route--that hardly anybody else seems to be getting them but me. I got some for some church gardening, too. After a few wood chip trips I began getting blissful deja vu about the Never Ending Pie.

Stillmeadowlark asked me some nosy questions about what I did today. However, the information above is about seniors and nice people who keep gratifying my every wish, you notice. SML claims she can't read font this small, so act nonchalant, and we will see if she reads this part or not. Hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm hmmm. Don't tell her that she can re-set the font size on her computer to display larger.

a person could build a pony stall with bricks

2010-03-25T19:44:00.000-07:00

Here is an improvised cold frame, for starting plants outside, from my neighborhood.

It has a bunch of plastic tubs, probably only half filled with dirt, with a couple of glass patio doors laid on top. Would the woodchips would help (insulation) or hinder (the sun would warm the black plastic of the tubs better without the chips) -? I guess they would slow down the temperature changes in either direction, so if a person wanted to go shovel chips away from the tubs on sunny days and shovel chips back next to the tubs other non-sunny times that would be optimal. But labor intensive. It is confusing to think about in the same way that how-do-people-ever-make-money-off-real-estate-? (they keep buying another house when they sell one, and the new house is usually more expensive than the previous one) or how-do-iceskaters-spin-faster-just-by-bending-their-leg-in-? is. Anyhow, I like it. Cheap and improvised.

When I started this blog I had a little private vow that it would not be about ME. This is because the most interesting blogs I read, I noticed, were not about me. There has been some slippage. But luckily, there has also been a lot of lying, all along. So you don't know which is which, right? See? Isn't that more interesting that way?

I find it very hard to resist getting a whole bunch of things from the free section of Craigslist-- a whole bunch of bricks, more yucca plants, a PONY--as the best use of the remainder of my vacation. Or do I ?.......

ramping up to CHEAPSKATE VACATION

2010-03-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to my sister on her new library cards (plural) one for her new city, and one for my city which is across the river from her new city. She found out that our cities have reciprocal library agreements. Wow. We love almost any library, but ones with reciprocal agreements or casual requirements to borrow should get medals and have songs written about them.

I used my library card today to get material for my days off this week. Instead of going to bed at my normal babyish hours, since I don't have to get up at 5:30 AM, I can stay up until 11 or even later, and watch DVDs or read library books. Those library music CDs are for playing while driving around in my car picking up swag I found for free on Craigslist. Yesterday I got a fig tree (sapling) for free from CL, from a lady who said on the phone "IT NEEDS TO GO IN THE GROUND. It has been in a pot for 3 years. IT NEEDS TO BE PLANTED IN THE GROUND." I did not admit to her that my plan was to leave it in a pot a bit longer because I might be moving soon and would want it to end up at the new place if I did. When I showed up to get it, she was on her cordless phone and didn't interact with me much while she gave me the tree, except to cover the phone mouthpiece briefly and say to me firmly "IT NEEDS TO BE PLANTED IN THE GROUND." Through strange mind rays she forced me to mutter "ok, I will." Then she went back to her phone conversations, which was telling somebody that somebody else had asked to interview her when they saw her at dinner last week.

When I got home I planted the fig tree in sort of a temporary arboretum in the spare planter box thing out back. While I was at it I planted the lilac bush starts that I got for free last weekend in the temporary arboretum also, because I figured the bossy famous generous lady would have wanted me to. The lilac starts have leaves on them which aren't wilting. Maybe they will even bloom in a month??

For free, you get a bonus picture below of the free pea gravel and wood chips scavenged off CL a week which are making the muddy parts of the backyard less muddy.

well.... yay for diversity !

2010-03-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

The newest new girl at work went on a ridealong with river patrol on Wednesday. Meanwhile, back at the office half way through the shift, my coworker suddenly said "Uh oh. Somebody is reporting a dead body in the river." DUNH DUNH DUNH (foreshadowing music.) I predicted sadly that a dead body on a ridealong might result in new girl throwing up or quitting or both. Ridealongs are usually pretty dull, on purpose. The officers don't really want anything possibly dangerous to happen while they have a brand new office person in their car or boat (does horse patrol give ridealongs? Can I watch that?), so I think they get given the dullest assignment. The ridealong person is also an unknown quantity so sometimes the officer is uncomfortable. It is sort of like "bring your child to work day" probably. You don't get much done and it is annoying, if you admitted it, but you don't, because you want your kid to learn something. And if you make it as dull as possible then they won't ask to come next year and maybe you can get useful pity out of them later.

When she came in on Thursday we said "er... how was your ridealong? Did you see a dead body?" and she said "YEP. It was GREAT. It was the best night of my life!" Wow. I forgot that new girl used to work in a crime lab for a while. But it was in a little boonies town where, she said, nothing ever happened, and they were in the complicated moral position of hoping intensely all the time that something really gruesome would, on their shift.

Later Capt. G was in using the photocopier and while he waited for his stuff to print, told us about the time that a dead body from the river spit right in his eye. It sort of slipped while he was laying it down on the dock, and knocked its head. I have no response to that.

Read Bill Bryson's memoir soon. It is very funny.

2010-03-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

2 employees were talking at the grocery store tonight where I was buying a head of lettuce + some accidental bananas to break a $20 for a complicated mathematical equation involving a belated bedroom cleaning, a cheap pair of earphones, and a person mailing a pair of athletic shoes to Las Vegas while complaining loudly about the"ghetto" wrapping paper options in this family of either the back of a grocery bag or the back of some Christmas paper:

clerk#1(pretending to be busy with some bread in sacks): "Guess how much my hair cost."
clerk#2 (fooling with the produce): "$8"
#1 : "What? Guess how much my hair cost."
#2 : "I have no idea."
#1: "$120. Not counting the tip." She had short straight hair, shorter than mine, streaked, in that careful way where the streaks are blondish, reddish, or brownish.
#2: "And it isn't even all the same color."
Moe: "I'm going to stay right here to watch the fight that you 2 have."
#2: "She can't hear me from over there."
Moe: "I'll tell her and let you know what she says back."
#2: (just laughs)

If you were reading a blog and there was a photo suddenly of some theatrical curtains, would you say "Oh GOOD. I think it is intermission now. I was wondering when that would happen." ?

they ignore toys, so that will save some money right there

2010-03-10T21:52:00.000-08:00

In an effort to save tax payer dollars, the police agency I work for has exciting plans regarding the canine unit. You are probably familiar, from watching TV, with the work that police dogs do sniffing out drugs, barking in a very scary way at arrested people and (uh.... I am not quite sure what all they do mostly because I don't like watching TV much. In fact it drives me crazy. Did you know there is a show on TV called "Bad Girls' Club"? It is TERRIBLE. Girls with long bleached hair hang around a giant house in their underwear all day getting in drama with each other, gossiping, stealing each other's boyfriends, and sometimes breaking each others ankles. They cuss a lot, too. If you say in a disgusted voice "is this ALL they do?", SWMBT will say to you "No; at night they go out to clubs sometimes." ) and finding where the Hamburgler hid the stolen hamburgers. If you were in my office this morning you also know that the canine unit human police wear outfits like somebody's shady nephew. Is that because they are undercover? We don't know. Does their dog really have to store its spitty stuffed animal in our office supply closet? We don't know that either. But it is an important job, and not one that should be eliminated. However, perhaps it can be done more cheaply. So it is going to be replaced, as an experiment, with a feline police unit. We are still working out the details, as I just thought it up this morning.

and it tried to snow today but failed

2010-03-09T19:45:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the mother in law of the artist chef came in to tell my coworkers that he is lazy. She says he wants to eat delicious things but does not want to work. I think this is often the reaction of the families of artists. Well, that is what books say that I read, anyhow. "You think we wouldn't all like to to draw pictures all day of penguins boiling and raccoons menaced by giant syringes? Well, unfortunately that won't pay the mortgage, Mister!" etc.

Pecker's foot is better. Yay!

updates

2010-03-06T08:14:00.000-08:00

The biodegradable plastic experiment :

It is hard to tell if anything is happening to the plastic buried in the compost (maybe that could have been predicted?) but the one on top certainly hasn't changed much in 6 weeks. The plastic got a little cloudy, I guess.

My sister's moving :

I don't know if she is totally done, but on Wednesday she got another load and drove it back to the new house. She reports that a man and woman at a rest stop made fun of her, including implying that she had lost her grandmother from the wooden garden chair you see up by the pickup cab. Maybe this was a cultural reference to Granny Clampitt of the Beverly Hillbillies, or a slightly confused one to the grandmother in National Lampoon's "Vacation" movie. Or maybe the grandma in "Grapes of Wrath" who really had to be the inspiration for the grandma in "Vacation" ?

My sister says in any case Who Are They To Talk, because their car had a bashed fender and a headlight made out of what looked like a jelly jar. I say ooh, too bad they are a couple because otherwise they could be our friends and join future Spinsterville. We are looking for exactly those aesthetics.

me moving :

You might think that should be "my moving" instead of "me moving", but the "my" in "my sister's moving" modifies "sister" not "moving" so "me" is possibly correct.

I feel myself getting nearly smarter

2010-03-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

The other day, after laughing at a germaphobe, I suddenly started making a short honest list of things I had been recently worrying about. That band aid that fell off my finger, possibly into the casserole while I was cooking last night. (Who would find it? Did I hope a person related to me found it? or SWMBT's boyfriend, who was over watching TV?) The way one of the chickens was sort of limping. The way that lights turned alarmingly on and off on my vehicle dashboard 2 days ago, including the "CHECK ENGINE SOON" light (on), and then the gas, speed, and mileage gauges suddenly (completely off).

That last problem had made SWMBT gasp and say it looked like we suddenly weren't going anywhere and didn't have any gas to do it, either. SWMBT hates it when the gas low light comes on with a ding, even in the normal way. When we got home fine, I asked her if she had been praying, and she said no. I asked her what she did instead of that. She said she just worried. I said THAT didn't sound like much fun. Then I realized that I had prayed AND worried, which was pretty illogical and labor intensive, wasn't it?

I am not going to tell you how any of it came out, because the point of worrying versus not worrying is not "how it comes out."

I tried pretending that at least I won the imaginary contest with the germaphobe, by worrying about things that are larger than germs (and covered in germs, if a person cared about those other than as tiny pets in the first place), but I don't think I want the prize I would get by winning that.

but I have an upcoming better plan

2010-02-27T09:44:00.000-08:00

The chickens were acting subtly strangely, giving odd sideways glances at the chicken pen when they were out and are not much interested in eating. I thought they might be worrying about visiting field mice (or else trying to lose weight to look really good for a wedding they plan on attending this summer. I am not a chicken mind reader. I have to generalize from the behavior of the people at work.) so I put out some mouse traps.

It is weird how carefully a person has to move to check mousetraps. Usually they are a little barricaded away so that they don't catch chickens or cats, and so the rain doesn't fall on them ruining the peanut butter. When you put them out, they detonated 3 or 4 times as you gingerly set them down, until you learned how to sneak up on the task in a buddha ninja way. So you can't just glance at them to know your success or failure. You really must hold your breath and gently remove the flowerpot+2 shingles+ rock barricades. Somehow the suspense is terrible. You hope there is a murdered totally dead mouse but on the other hand you aren't looking forward to it much. When you stealthily uncover the trap, usually there is no mouse. Disappointment mixed with gratitude. If the bait is gone, too, then WHAT THE?! ooooh. How do they do that?

Yesterday I could see something in the trap as I gently uncovered it. It was a garroted slug (oh. So that must be the part of them that is their neck.) and the chickens are still acting strangely.

things my sister learned about moving

2010-02-20T16:01:00.000-08:00

Conceal all 2-to-3 prong outlet adapters while packing on your immediate person during the move, because in order to plug anything in on your arrival, you will need them.

Don't store your computer printer upside down in the linen chest, cushioned in pastel towels and sheets, to move it.

Conceal all light bulbs removed from lamps on your immediate person during the move.

When you have just enough coffee beans for the last day of packing -- buy more in transit, and conceal them on your person. Otherwise you will have to unload the moving truck in the morning after drinking coffee made from whiskey-flavored coffee samples that were a gift 3 years ago that you meant to throw out before they got packed, but thank goodness your niece who was in charge of packing up your kitchen didn't know it. But where did put the silverware?

Conceal some silverware on your person during the move.

Don't allow your moving crew to shop used bookstores in transit. Just in case, pay them AFTER the unpacking. (There is no other explanation for the number of boxes of books in my house now).

Don't allow your neighbor to knit your wheelbarrow onto your pickup load before you leave town.

Thanks for the strange advice, Lumpy. Are we done? Me, I mean? Is that computer ink on your face?

intermission

2010-02-18T17:15:00.000-08:00

Tuesday my coworker told me "that Vietnamese man is back" , a little Vietnamese man who keeps coming in and wouldn't go away and was just sitting out there in the lobby right now. I

asked why we wanted him to go away.

She said because he doesn't want anything, but since he doesn't speak English, we have to get an interpreter on the phone (harder than it sounds and begins with a coworker trying to make the non English speaker understand to pick up the phone in the lobby, call "810" on it, then stay on the line while my coworker does a bunch of other stuff. Sometimes we just go out to the lobby and do the dialing ourselves and hand the phone to the person, who now only has to understand to not hang up even though nobody is saying anything yet. Sometimes they don't hang up. 50% of the time a bunch more steps lead to an accidental hangup by us, and some quiet cussing. 50% of the time it ends up with an interpreter on the line in the right language, and our police agency getting billed for the service a mysterious amount of money) for him to tell us he doesn't want anything, again.

"What do you mean he doesn't want anything? Is he Buddha?"

She meant he doesn't want anything police related.

"But what does he say to the interpreter?"

She said well, he wants to show us his art.
ART!? What sort of art?

My coworker said there is a circle. And there are some words off to the side that she thought were Spanish but turn out to be Vietnamese. (That's a relief.) If you look into the circle you can see a snail. If you read the words out to the side they tell you how to cook the snail.

I said oh that I really really really wished I'd seen that, and she said well I still could, because he gave it to my other coworker.

It looked just like she said. I said "If I stare into this circle I will see a snail???" and my other coworker said it is a rock and the snail is underneath it so, no, not unless you have xray vision, durrr. (Dude. Some shadowing on the rock would work wonders.) She showed me another paper that had tiny drawings of penguins and woodworking tools on it, and some shovels, and a big pot, but when I said "Is that a pot of pee?"- it was colored with a yellow pencil- she said well unfortunately, it might be a pot of penguin soup. (What are the drills and shovels for, then? I notice that telling this story and answering your endless questions about it is making me so hungry that I could eat penguin soup by the shovelful.)

She wouldn't give me the drawings and when I said I was going to buy some from the guy if he came in again, she said no! That would only encourage him to come back!

Yesterday she gave me the drawings and I tried to put them on the blog for you today but it didn't work. I don't know why. I don't know how to do it. The scanner at Kinko's covered them in Adobe and I guess it is too rainy in this blog area for Adobe to hold up well. Too bad.

you may participate

2010-02-16T19:03:00.000-08:00

TEST YOUR PSYCHIC POWERS

Which of these 2 objects goes next into the moving vehicle shown below which you thought you would be ashamed to drive, yourself, because it sort of looks like the behind end of a.... mini van.... until you found out that SAINTS drove them. Oh and also surfers (sometimes). Chicken farmers. And a person can camp in them. In fact, you are suddenly getting the urge to run right out and buy one, and you realize that they look especially cool if they are fairly dirty and have a tarp constantly in the back and smell like... black ice - ?

You will be disqualified for asking any of the following questions.

Q: Are those pictures actual size?

A: No, you dope. Did Moe claim her sister is Stuart Little, or a flea, either?

Q: There's quite a bit of space up near the ceiling there. Could we remove parts of the Objects to make them smaller to fit them into the Coolmobile?

A: You may remove the ceramic pot in the left hand picture. None of the parts of the chair are removable and if you don't like it too much in the first place please do not go on and on about it to Moe's sister in case you hurt her feelings, although she said "I'm not MARRIED to it." You still are not allowed to disassemble it although if you play your cards right the whole thing might be removed into Rosemary (the extremely accommodating ex neighbor)'s basement or garage.

Q.What kind of mileage does that Coolmobile get? Did you ever find out what the funny whirring noise was that it was making a couple of hours into the 5 hour drive up to the moving job, and on the way home, too? And the sluggishness? Was it the fuel filter, the air filter, or the transmission as speculated ghoulishly by parts of the moving crew? Is it true that the Total Car Care guy who talks exactly like Dan Akroyd diagnosed it today as just having not quite enough oil in it? Because you didn't have a crumbling kleenex anywhere on you (which you usually do) to check the oil when you even thought of it, so you said aw who cares?

A.Shut up.

Q:Yesterday's post was about moving already. I thought we were done with moving.

A: Moving is usually done long after you feel done.

When we do finally get done, you may wash the blog with me.

Q:Did her cat make it into the new house OK? Is it true that she only gets boyfriends whose names match her pets? If we wanted to date her, could we get her a kitten, and carefully name it the same thing as ourselves, before we give it to her?

A:That might work. Are you orange? She likes that, also.

Q:What is the A?

A: Some books and a teapot.

I melted her electric teapot by putting it on the gas stove burner when I was tired

2010-02-14T19:48:00.000-08:00

My sister would like to ask you a few questions before she moves houses next time, in case you win the competition to help her move. How many ex boyfriends do you have? Have you ever gone out with Popeye? Are you still on good terms with him? My sister uses nearly exclusively ex boyfriend labor. Can your ex boyfriends keep their mouths shut? None of them are labor organizers, are they? If there is a sliding wage scale going during the moving process, no teenagers present need to know about it or somebody we know might be sleeping with the fishes while holding onto 3 or 4 boxes of very heavy coffee table gardening books.

OK: you and the Popeye-ish non organized labor ex boyfriends: how is your handwriting? We are going to have you audition by writing the following words on some cardboard: "books, red and white dish towels" and on this other piece of cardboard: "teapots. FRAGILE!!!" OK, now just write those over and over about 45 times each. Just that, you don't need to write anything else. I don't know why. No, she doesn't drink tea so I don't know why. Just write those things about 45 or 65 times. That will do it. You don't have to write "wood working machinery" because we don't use boxes for that. We pile that in a huge pile in the garage and then we plan to take things off that pile and sort of wedge them in the cracks in between the boxes of teapots, towels, and books, and our car snacks. It's going to work FINE.

Are you done?
Are all the metal things wedged in? That bleeding should stop soon.
If she says "I forgot about the kayak," she isn't kidding.

loading the IPOD keeps them busy for hours

2010-02-12T20:58:00.000-08:00

SWMBT says that in her opinion, Weird Al Yankovic is "the smartest man alive". I wasn't quite sure he was still alive, but she said well even if he isn't, he is still the smartest man alive. According to the Internet, he is still alive. I have been sitting here for quite a while while SWMBT loads songs onto her IPOD, trying to figure out who it was I was thinking of instead of him who isn't alive. It is pretty much the same feeling as having something stuck in your teeth, and no floss.

I didn't say "the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree" as a complicated weak joke (I think John Prine is the smartest man alive; the quote about the apple has to do with heredity, which I don't believe in, and anyhow if a person did believe in it then it wouldn't apply to adopted people) to her, but I say it to YOU. You are probably saying "an apple falling from a tree which is planted on the side of a very tall cliff might." You win the imaginary argument!

Here the first chunk of the lyrics to "Another One Rides the Bus" from a website full of Weird Al lyrics that doesn't believe in punctuation except for capital letters and apostrophes :

Ridin' in a bus down the boulevard

And the place was pretty packed

Couldn't find a seat so I had to stand

With the perverts in the back

It was smellin' like a locker room

There was junk all over the floor

We're already packed in like sardines

But we're stoppin' to pick up more

Look out

Another one rides the bus

Another one rides the bus

And another comes on

And another comes on

Another one rides the bus

Hey

He's gonna sit by you

Another one rides the bus

The Wikipedia entry on Weird Al is pretty entertaining, more so as it goes along. It has a confusing line near the beginning "He has also made guest appearances in his death scaring, in addition to starring in his own AlTV specials." Is that a typo, or they just figure it will probably be accurate so they put it in ahead of time?

ahem

2010-02-10T21:34:00.000-08:00

If somebody visiting your house came out in the living room in the middle of the night to tell you that there was a horrible noise going on outside, wouldn't you immediately turn on the backyard light to look at the chicken coop??? (While she went out the front way to see if her mini Cooper was being towed?)

somebody also told me a flock of wild parrots lives out by the airport

2010-02-07T08:36:00.000-08:00

While out by the airport at Ikea recently, where I was testing a few hypothemice and eating a 99 cent breakfast*, I eavesdropped the following conversation:

voice#1: The more I learn about nutrition, the more I realize I should own and eat vegetables like, all the time.

voice#2: Really? Is that healthy?

I like the concept of vegetable ownership. I myself own a few vegetables, nothing fancy mind you, just a few root vegetables that were a bequest from a relative who passed on, and some leafy green items that I searched out and purchased on Craig's List (I am now embroiled in an unpleasant email exchange with the seller over my efforts to return them after a few months of ownership in which they have not held up well) in order to display them with other decorative objects in a large glass aquarium in my entrance nook, which aquarium I keep there for such purpose.

My hypothomice about Ikea were:

1) It exists in my town and I can find it.

2) It has quite a bit of furniture in it.

Both turned out to be true and I bought a soap dish. I might go back later if I move to get some other things. Maybe in the move I will open up some ownership space if I have meanwhile divested myself of some of these vegetables. It will take me a while to get them removed off my rental insurance inventory, and the soap dish added, though.

If you want to get to Ikea in my town, I will pass on the helpful directions that people said to me. "Oh it is out by the airport." There you go! You should be able to find it in, oh, 6 months or so! Some other things that people always say are "out by the airport" are: Inverness Jail. Some people's houses. The Carhearts store. (Yep. 2 months ago I didn't even know what Carhearts were and now I know the general vicinity, within a few square miles, where one can buy as many of them as one has aquarium space for.) Mt St Helens. And Seattle.

*It was good, if dainty.

film forum : We are 110% in favor of the recent glut of zombie movies

2010-02-04T19:19:00.000-08:00

Here is a great zombie movie that just came out 8 years ago : 28 Days Later. If your coworker loans it to you, you might read the DVD box claim "ONE OF THE SCARIEST HORROR FILMS IN YEARS!" and consider, although you really really love zombie movies, putting a small sticky on the DVD box that says "Never mind. Too scary for me." & giving it sadly back to her (and what about those little things that look like ninja throwing stars on the box? What are those? Are there going to be ninjas in it ? Ninja movies are boring for no good reason but almost without exception)... but wait. Watch it. It is bloody but not very scary, I promise. You can watch a trailer here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YwkRPxSD8o&feature=related

Maybe it wasn't very scary because of my spiritual beliefs. This could have been a very short movie indeed if these people just called a Christian Science practitioner a few minutes into the movie. It wouldn't even be expensive. Practitioners are supposed to charge what a doctor would charge, but most of them haven't been to a doctor so long that they don't even know what a doctor charges, so they charge about $30. And if you already got the zombie blood dripped in your eye, that would be no problem either. If you have different beliefs then the movie might be scarier for you, which you might enjoy, if you enjoy being frightened as well as spending a lot of money on your health care. So, in that case you would be happy twice, so that works out fine.

This was a really great zombie movie because it made a person think. A short way into the movie a person we had been introduced to shortly before, a sympathetic character, is killed and in the real world it was bedtime, so we had to stop the movie, and I laid on the couch doing mindfulness exercises (because it was homework for something) but really thinking about people dying in movies. I liked how the movie made a person think "OH NO!" when the sympathetic character was killed, then immediately, "wait...I only met the character a few minutes ago and meanwhile, most of civilization has already been turned into zombies or puddles of blood, so why am I invested any more in one of them than the others of them ?" The next day I watched the rest of the movie, which included this theme of "is one person more important to us than another? Why? How important are we to ourselves, even?" , including the characters working on that theme.

No ninjas show up in it at all. Yay.

The movie doesn't over explain everything, either. My coworker said the followup movie, 28 Weeks Later, is much worse and does a lot more explaining. She said skip that one. Somebody else told me that Iowa has an annual zombie march. And so should my town. I suggest Valentine's Day.

Even More State of the Union News

2010-02-03T21:40:00.000-08:00

A distressed gentlewoman boarder has observed/complained that the previous post didn't make much sense. True. I posted it accidentally on the wrong blorg. It was supposed to be a reply to this by Fillibuster Cash, who keeps up with politics and current affairs, including the state of the union speech last week, so that if somebody had said to him "WHAT? The president is talking instead of my TV show???" he would have probably not said uneasily "That's weird.... Nobody at your school mentioned any new wars starting today, did they? Or something big like that?", and also he always wears interesting pants, sort of like lederhosen, but heavily embroidered (a skier thing? or just what young people wear nowadays? possibly both.) which match his hat.

Here is some more punctuation to spread around inside the previous paragraph in whatever triage ways you think useful

: , , . . . ; ; : : ! &, , -

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I was cleaning up the computer files and found this photo of my sock drawer which I meant to post a long time ago when it was really bugging me how snarled and disorganized that drawer gets for no good reason.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And this wraps it up, from the state of the back bedroom news :

SWMBT, fancifully : "Hey, it kinda looks smoky in my bedroom."

Facetious nonsmoking parent: "I promise you I have not been smoking in your bedroom."

SWMBT, going with the flow:"Well, that's not what the other parents told me."

¿y tu' ?

2010-01-30T10:10:00.000-08:00

While I was in the office of the real estate person, I saw my ex coworker who used to do a great silent Robert DeNiro impression on the telephone. We didn't say to each other "Oh my gosh! You look so old!" but we both were probably thinking it. It was making me think of old jokes and things unconnected to the job or the coworker that had happened over the last ten years.

The realtor's computer didn't work right and it was taking a long time to initial or sign a half dozen boxes on a dozen pieces of paper, but I had a library book with me, and the realtor was mostly letting me read it while she muttered to herself about her computer. SWMBT had already called to ask excitedly if she could go to the foot emergency room with her friend's mother and then out to Mongolian grill afterwards. I didn't have to rush home. It was starting to rain gently outside.

I was thinking of all the people I knew or used to know, and the people I didn't know but sort of did. It felt like the opposite of the "check engine" light being on. Maybe a coral reef does have a simian-like consciousness, or maybe it was just warm in that office and it wasn't logical to love a city and world like 2 smelly but agreeable pets, but I was doing it anyhow. If they were 2 pets I guess one pet would have to be contained in or on the other pet, permanently and how would that work? Still, it would be very efficient from a pet owner viewpoint once she figured out the particulars and where to purchase the pets. Now go back to whatever you are doing or go outside for a WALK for petes sake; why are you hanging around inside fooling around with the computer on a SATURDAY?

psst #2 : fell..... or WAS PUSHED

2010-01-26T22:02:00.000-08:00

(Another email in its entirety, from a person who didn't know she was being a guest blogger. My supervisor sent this one. I don't know why it made me laugh so much. Finally I replied "wow. I hope it was OK" but no more information was forthcoming. )

"A cockroach was found inside on the window in the lunch room. It wasn't moving but I don't know if it was dead. I opened the window and knocked it outside. It hit the outside sill and fell to the ground."