8/23-  Do you guys remember the old, non-zip-lock storage bags, the ones that come with twist ties?  Where are they now?  I need some.

Twist Tie

They are cheaper and you get 3 times as many bags in a box, at least.  I don’t always need a zip-lock.  Sure, they are thicker, better quality, and usually do seal up better than those old twist tie type, but many times you can get by just as well with a twist tie.  And a lot of times they are a hell of a lot faster to close up.  How many times have you battled those fucking zip-lock tracks, trying to line them up just right so the bag actually seals.  I bet most of you have had to sponge down the inside of your refrigerator a couple times a year after one of those tracks you thought you had closed tightly really wasn’t and  later you noticed the meticulously prepared liquid you were marinating your chicken in had been seeping out of the bag for three hours.

Refrigerator with No Storage bag Mishap

Refrigerator with Storage bag Mishap

Speed Method Clean-up of Refrigerator Storage bag Mishap

Of course you should never use a twist tie bag to marinate anything in.  That’s just too risky.  It’s going to leek all over the place.  But there are plenty of other reasons to use a twist tie bag.  I just can’t think of one right now.  But that’s not the point.  You can’t find twist-tie bags anywhere.  What I really want them for is to balance out all the spare twist ties I have with no bags to use them on because you can’t find the damn things anymore.  It used to be when you got a box of twist tie bags, they gave you extra twist ties. At least I think so.  I’m not sure because a lot of times I would use one twist tie on two bags.  It was one of my clever ways to economize, and I think somewhere down the line it’s environmentally sound thinking also.  So I did the smart thing and saved all those extra ties.  Now I have a shit load of ties all tucked away in a sandwich size zip-lock bag, and no bags to use them on.  Shit that pisses me off!

8/24- God damn it another light bulb went out in my bathroom.  I have diligently replaced most of my incandescent bulbs with fluorescents all over the house.  I was all set to upgrade to LED bulbs, but have you seen the price tags on those damn things?  Like I do with electronics, I’ll just wait it out till the market gets saturated and there’s a dramatic price drop.  Till then those bastards at GE can just stick those high priced bulbs up their ass.  Did you know those douchnozzels don’t pay any corporate income tax?  I hope they loose their shirts on those damn bulbs.  So I am sticking with my fluorescents.  At least that’s environmentally more acceptable than reverting back to incandescents.  But I’m tempted.  Have you looked at the fluorescent bulb section at Lowes?  There are 2 or 3 width sizes of spiral ones, some short and longer spiral ones, spiral ones that are kind of in the shape of half a tennis ball, some tube type ones, some that are fairly close to looking like a typical incandescent bulb, and some that look like an incandescent bulb that needs to go on a diet.  And then you

Are You Kidding Me?

have to worry about lumens.  Pick up a bad batch of lumens and it throws off your entire lighting structure.  Too many lumens and you have created a space that has the aura of the lobby of a cheap motel.  The trick is to go low with the lumens, I am pretty sure.  If I remember right, stick with low lumens and you get light that’s close to your old incandescents- soft and natural.

8/25-  I’ve finally had it.  I’m off to Lowes to get a new liquid soap dispenser for the bathroom. This will be the 4th one in two years.  Awhile back we had a metal one, I thought it was stainless steel, but I guess not because it stained.  Then I bought a plastic one.  It was cheap, but at least it didn’t grow nasty stains all over it.  But the pump quit pumping after 3 months.  Then I picked up a glass one.  It’s color was not exactly complimentary to our bathroom, but that sort of thing never bothers me.  Two months later  I found it in the garbage, all busted up and shattered in pieces.  My wife says she dropped it, but it looked to me like someone beat the shit out of it.  She never did like it, so I suspect it was just her way of getting rid of it.  I don’t ask questions when she’s in a bad mood.  So I got another stainless steel one, hoping the one I bought earlier was simply of inferior quality stainless steel.  That seems to be the case.  It hasn’t really developed any type of orange hue, but when the soap squirts out, it squirts out at you.  If you’re not paying attention you will have an embarrassing soap stain on the front of your pants.  Who has time to be constantly on the look out for that?  So I am off to Lowes.  I’m going back to glass, and I saw one I like at Lowe’s last week.  I have to pick up some fluorescent bulbs anyway, and I might as well look for some twist tie baggies.

8/26-  I didn’t have any luck with the twist tie baggies, but I think I found a set of bulbs that will match the other three that still work in the bathroom.  That’s another thing.  You have to buy fluorescent bulbs in sets, like boxes of four. That’s why lumens are so important.  If you screw in one of the new ones you just bought and the light it emits doesn’t match the light coming from all the other bulbs in the room, that’s a tip off you probably messed up on your lumens.  You might as well get rid of all the old ones and install all new ones.  I have to get my step ladder out of the basement, so I don’t have time right now to deal with my lumens.  I think I did score with my new glass soap dispenser though.  It looks pretty sweet.  I think my wife will give it a big thumbs up.

8/27-  The new bulbs are shit-blindingly harsh and a total lumen mind-dicking.  And these things are supposed to be saving me money?  Damn it I hate lumens.

I told you this would happen.  At least I think I did, back in a previous blog.  I don’t feel like checking it out.  The thing is, whenever I tackle a plumbing project, it turns into a complete shit storm.  One of my outside shut off valves wasn’t shutting off.  All I needed to fix it was a simple fifty cent washer to replace the worn out one  Shouldn’t be a big deal.  In fact, the leak wasn’t even a big deal- just a tiny dribble seeping from the end of my garden hose that in 24 hours might fill a gallon container, tops.  But that kind of stuff annoys the crap out of me.  The environmental impact is concerning enough.  I know we are fortunate here in the midwest to have plenty of water.  But still,  I see a dripping faucet and I can’t help but think about all the  long suffering people in California.  What I should be doing if I was really on the ball is sending my gallon of water a day seeping from my garden hose out to California.  Those poor people are getting to the point they probably shouldn’t be flushing their toilets but once a week.  If there was a way to ship my gallon of water at no expense, I would gladly start doing it.  I certainly am not the type to profit from another’s misfortune.  But I’ll be damned if I’m going take it in the shorts with shipping charges.  I have financial and  fiduciary responsibilities just like everybody else.  But if someone in California reads this, I will happily send my gallon of water to you if you send me $6.55.* That’s how much the post office guy said it would cost, non-priority.  If you want next day delivery, ok, but that will cost you $12.80.    I want cash or certified check.

*By way of full disclosure, the charge is based on the weight of a gallon of milk.  I was driving by the post office one day on my way back from the grocery store and one of my items was a gallon of milk.  I’de been giving this whole thing some thought and figured since I was right there I might as well bop in and have the post office guy weigh my gallon of milk.  I’m pretty  sure a gallon of water and a gallon of milk weight about the same.  You can see for yourself if you look closely at the pictures at left.  If you’re some fancy pants science dick and want to argue about density and viscosity and molecular weight and all that shit, well you can kiss my ass and go find your water elsewhere.

So I went to my local hardware store in search of the washer I needed.  I had disassembled the valve and took the washer along with me so I could carefully compare it to the one I would purchase. There are over 200 different kinds out there, so that’s just the smart thing to do. Maybe you’re not handy and kind of a dumb shit, so I just thought I would pass this information on to you in case you suddenly have the desire to improve yourself.

I love my local hardware store.  It’s a Westlake Ace.  I guess it’s not exactly local.  Years ago I had three of those places within a four minute drive from my house.  Then Lowe”s and Home Depot  set up shop and well, you know the story.  I haven’t had a real local hardware store for seven or eight years.  But my almost local hardware store is still only about seven minutes away.  That’s not bad.  Lowe’s is ten and Home Depot about twelve.  Here is a picture of Mr Jimmy.  That’s him in the red shirt.  He’s the owner of my almost local hardware store and here he is showing me how to jury rig an electrical circuit.  The person that took the picture is one of his employees, Roxy.  Here is a picture of her right below.  Mr. Jimmy took that picture on the day I bought the nice chain saw you see in the picture.  I already had a chain saw, but Roxy said this one was better.  So I bought it.  And a belt sander.  And a hammer drill and a butane torch and a couple dozen other things she was sure I would need.  Roxy really knows her hardware.

What I really like about my Westlake store is they sell a lot of their stuff individually.  You can buy one or two of something.  In my shop I have at least 500 screws and another 500 bolts and nuts of different sizes.  And it never fails- the one size or type I need I don’t have.  That’s exactly how I came to own 1000 pieces of this type of hardware.  I had to buy a package of twenty from Lowe”s or Home Depot at some point.  That really sucks.  And true to form, my Westlake store has a huge assortment of individual washers and gaskets for faucets and valves.  But as luck would have it, there were none that matched my old one.  I took a chance and bought a couple of  washers that were slightly different in size.  When I got home I spent two hours trying to shave and trim both to fit and seal correctly, but all I accomplished was to make the valve more difficult to shut on and off and I still had my leak.

So off to Lowe’s I went.  I spotted one that looked like it might do the job, but of course it came in a package of five.  After fiddling with that one at least the valve was easier to turn, but it didn’t slow down the dribble much.

You’re probably thinking where in the hell is this all going.   Don’t be so impatient.  That’s the trouble with the youth of America- always in a hurry.  Pay attention here and you might learn something.  All because the manufacturers of these valves won’t provide any easily identifiable 50 cent replacement washers for their products, I had to buy a whole new $7.95 valve.  That kind of shit just plants a rash on my ass.  But that’s only the beginning.  In replacing the valve, the thread on the pipe at the connection point was rusted and snapped.  To reinstall a new piece of pipe, (another $24.50 to have the correct length of pipe cut and threaded) i had to spend a half day outside of my house blindly trying to screw the inside thread into the inside shut off valve that is inside of my house.   To speed up the process, it sure would have been handy to be able to see through building walls.  If I could do that, I could get the whole project done in a half hour.

And if Jake could see through walls, that would have really been nice because he wouldn’t have ended up in jail.  Jake is an old friend from college.   Not only would that have saved Jake, but it would have saved a lot of time for a good two dozen guys who lived on the North wing of the 4th floor of Swanson Hall during my sophomore year.  I bet if all of them could have seen through walls, collectively the group’s GPA would have climbed by a solid point.  That’s because the only thing they had going for them in the way of trying to spot a naked coed through a carelessly left open window shade in the women’s dorm a half a block away was to implement a sorry practice of “dorm window battleship”- so many columns across, so many rows down.  And of course it was imperative to keep a  steady hand while grasping the binoculars.  And you had to wait your turn for the binoculars.  I think there were only three sets of those.  The thing about Jake though was, since he insisted he was the one who thought up “dorm window battleship,'” he should always get to hang on to one set of binoculars.  He simply would not give them up.  A guy we called Homer got so irritated with Jake he thought he would pull a one-upmanship thing by utilizing a small telescope he happened to have laying around, but that kind of backfired on Homer because it was just too cumbersome.  Jake understood right away you just can’t move a telescope around like you can binoculars.  Jake got the last laugh on Homer there.  Of course all of this kind of carrying on is information I am passing on to you second-hand.  I really don’t know for sure how all this worked.   I was at the library studying at the time.   If you don’t believe me here is a picture.Oh, sorry.  That’s just a picture of a subject I had to study while I was at the library. 

The one I meant to show you is over at the right.  That’s me getting all primed for an all-nighter at the library.   An all-nighter for me as you probably know ended at 10pm.  That’s when they closed the library.   I always brought along a full thermos of coffee to see me through.  And I found that a dozen teaspoonsful of  sugar mixed in got me pretty well super-charged for the evening.  Of course now there’s Adderall.  Back in my day, the big thing was Dexedrine.  But as you can probably tell from my picture, I had no need for that kind of crutch.  I was pretty well motivated without any illegally outsourced assistance.

My friend Jake told me he would pop a dexie now and then.  He said they really helped him concentrate.   Here is a picture of Jake studying in his dorm room.   Because he couldn’t see through walls, he spent so much time studying he never went to class.  Between flunking all his classes and a spiraling amphetamine addiction,  he ended up dropping out of school and then went kind of haywire and ended up in prison on larceny and drug charges.  If only he had been able to see through walls.  Some guys just can’t catch a break.

I know you think I complain a lot.  Maybe you’re right.  But this time I know I have a legitimate gripe, and I’ve just about had it.  I had to deal with another speed-talker during a phone conversation and It was all I could do to keep from throwing my phone against the wall.  And then stomping the shit out of it.  And flushing it down the toilet.  I know you’ve had an encounter with one of these people too.  They talk so fast you can’t understand but every fourth word.  It’s not like talking to one of those guys you’re stuck with because your phone call somehow got sidetracked to India.  If you’re talking to an East Indian, you can’t ask to speak to someone who speaks English.  Your call got sent all the way to India, and so the next person and the next person after that, will be no kind of an improvement for you.  They’re all Indian.  You just have to make the best of it.  I’ve seen a lot in my day, but I am still baffled by the complexity, yet paradoxical simplicity, of telephone technology.  I remember when I was little, a long distance call was something my parents had to budget for.  A phone call from where I lived in Wyoming to my grandparents in Iowa was so pricey it was done only on special occasions, like Christmas and Easter.  I know my 96 year old mother realizes phone technology now is light years ahead of what was available 50 years ago, but I think she still reflexively hangs up immediately if there is the slightest indication her call travelled all the way to India.

To get around exorbitant phone bills, one slick trick parents in the 50’s and’ 60’s taught all their kids was the old bogus collect phone call on Ma Bell.  You know it, if you’re still alive.  The phone you used looked like this:

Or this

You drove a few hundred miles to college and your parents wanted to make sure you arrived safely so they insisted you call them collect when you got to school and of course they would not accept the charges when you made that phone call but the whole thing worked as planned because that way the call was free and resulted in the cleverly intended signal that you were safely at school although you were probably really at a bar with the gang and the real test of whether you would make it to school safely or not was going to occur about 2 hours later when you got behind the steering wheel and drove the final 12 blocks to school.

But I’m talking about speed-talkers.  I had to call my cable company the other day, and that’s how I ran into my speed-talking woman.  And this is not a gender specific phenomena.  It can just as likely happen with a guy.  I want to be absolutely clear about that because I have a couple of  overly sensitive women in my family that get nose-bleeds every time they feel I am somehow denigrating their sex.   I had to make my cable company phone call because of a glitch during one of their supposedly “simple” set up procedures for my new cable boxes.  Yes, that’s right.  Plural.  My cable company is going straight digital, so recently they informed me I will very shortly need a cable box for any television set I intend on using if I currently use their service.  Believe me I have started to seriously contemplate those last 3 words.  The thought of installing a dish is suddenly becoming a more appealing one.  Frankly I’m fed up with my cable company’s attitude, which basically is I should  be perfectly  happy bending over and taking whatever new charge they come up with up my ass.  My TV reception isn’t that great anyway.  I am constantly seeing pixillated video on the two channels I absolutely deem to be a total necessity- ESPN and ESPN2.  All my other channels are great.  Those cable jokers are mind-dicking me, I know it and I am getting sick of it.  During my  HD upgrade I got some nice movie channels, but I hardly watch them.  I don’t give a shit about those.  I want a clear, defined picture on my ESPN channels.  And Fox Sports.  And Big 10 Network.  And all my basic network channels if there is any kind of major sporting event going on there.  Except I guess I don’t care so much about soccer.  My cable company can just go ahead and pixilate that.

One of our TV’s is an old 15 inch cathode tube TV.  It works just fine.  It’s not HD but I don’t care.  More specifically, my wife doesn’t seem to care.  That TV is in the den/craft/art/ironing room and she’s the one who mostly watches that TV.  But I still have to have one of those shitty cable mini boxes for it.  Jesus I’m not a total asshole.  I’m not going to deprive my wife of the small comfort of watching that piece of shit TV.  But during the set up process for that TV, I couldn’t quite complete the last step that was required on my computer screen.  My new set up was working as the computer instructions indicated, but the last step of clicking the “submit”  button did nothing.  I really didn’t care at that point.  My TV was working in its new digital format so I was perfectly happy.  But for 5 days afterward I kept getting emails from the cable company douchebags asking me to activate my mini boxes.  All my mini boxes are as active as active can be, but  because I could not complete that final step for whatever reason, I had to make my phone call and clear things up.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t go into this much detail over something so trivial.  But I thought you might want to know about it in case this happens to you.  That’s how I operate.

I called my cable company, and after 15 minutes on hold I explained what happened, making the points in the above paragraph, and told the cable person all I really wanted was to let their company know things were working fine and to please have them discontinue the emails.  That’s when the speed talking began.

ST (speed talker):– Soyouculled  andeverblingwhatwasok?  ME– What?  Sorry I didn’t understand you.  ST- Isbluckok?  Whatyoumeedto completegoringtofliz your computer?  ME– I’m sorry again.  I’m kind of hard of hearing.  Not real bad, but I need you to slow down and enunciate.  ST-  shotthesmorgasboardandflixfirst screen on firthcomputer.  Didyouseezthat?  Me– I hope I’m not interrupting you in mid-sentence, but goddamn it I can hardly understand a word you’re saying.  ST (slightly irritated now)–  Blathtofungomunch on computer.  Justlet menow if snizzelworks aftagrontmibuckle.   ME (really irritated)– Look.  I don’t want to waste your time, and I certainly don’t want to waste mine.  I am really sorry’ but not only can I not understand you, it seems you have shit for brains because you insist on sneezdorkylizingmuchglimppernog.  How does that feel?  ST-  What?   ME– Hopefully now you get my point.  JUST   TELL   YOUR  BOSS   TO   STOP   SENDING   THESE   FUCKING    E-MAILS!     GOODBYE!

At first glance the little song bird I found dead in my front yard appeared to be another victim of cat-stalking in our neighborhood.  But upon transporting the tiny corpse to my garbage can, some of the maggots fell off, and I noticed an odd-looking projectile protruding outside of its beak.  It glistened in the sunlight and when I examined it closely, I saw it was a shard of clear plastic.

Airial view of some nice-looking maggots

Flash back to six days previous.  We had a little party at our house this evening, a retirement celebration for one of my wife’s close teacher friends.  It was a good party, maybe you would  classify it as a very successful one if you’re into scoring that type of thing.  In attendance were two of my good friends.  The three of us are spouses of teachers who regularly participate in  these social gatherings of educators, and we tend to tag along with our wives as long as we understand food and alcohol will be readily available.  We don’t get together often, so it’s normally a refreshing reunion.  We catch up on family stuff and activities, and since we all consider ourselves former jocks of one sort or another, we attempt to relive our jockdom by competing in various yard games.

A Hand holding a blue bocce ball

Bocce ball seems to be one of our favorites, and was our choice for this particular evening’s competition.

I have never figured out why, but these two douchnozzles are always accusing me of cheating.  Maybe it’s all the beer they drink, I don’t know.  But fuck, it gets annoying.  I have a printed set of rules right in my bocce ball storage bag, and I keep telling them to read the damn rules if they don’t believe me, but no, of course that’s not going to happen because that would mean some thoughtless interfering with their complaining.  It always reminds me of the first time I ever played this game.  That was over  20 years ago during an annual neighborhood Labor Day block party.  I came to hate those parties.  Most of the activity took place a whole block away at the far end of our street.  But when it came to the egg-toss, that event for some reason moved right in front of our house.  Sticky egg residue remained cemented in place for at least a week, attracting flies and stray, mangy cats and flee-bitten dogs, all lapping away at the shit and contributing to an overpowering stink-up in our front yard.

Anyway the one good thing about my first experience with bocce ball is all the complaining from my two friends pales in comparison to the complete pandemonium that ensued during my inaugural competition, and therefore I always take their complaints with a grain of salt.  I don’t recall all the particulars of the block party match.  It basically got out of hand when more and more people decided they wanted to play, and pretty soon the competitive nature of a few and the alcohol consumption of many led to a bocce ball crashing through a basement window and then that resulted in the owner of the basement window throwing a bocce ball at the contestant that broke the window, and then all of a sudden the game of bocce ball got scrapped  and in its place a way serious game of dodge ball broke out.  If you are unfamiliar with bocce ball, the actual balls used are made of dense hardwood,  stone, or even metal.  There are some plastic ones out there, but they are considered unprofessional and useless.  Kids might use them but that’s about it.  Adults only that day.  So you get the picture.  Several people departed from the revelry that evening with a variety of contusions, bumps and bruises, and one contestant quite possibly suffered a concussion.  I can’t say for sure.  He says he never bothered to get checked out.  But most of the neighbors think he started exhibiting some peculiar behavior shortly afterwards.  For instance, two bocce balls balls went missing that evening, and to this day he still wanders up and down the street asking if any of us have seen those bocce balls.  The next year a ban was placed on our block party bocce ball and as far as I know it has never been lifted.

Of course our bocce ball game last week was totally nonviolent, and the party, as I mentioned, seemed to go swimmingly.  All things considered, it was typical of our type of teacher gathering.  Or so I thought.  The next morning my wife and I found empty beer bottles in every kitchen cupboard and behind practically every kind of door in our house, an obvious attempt by my two friends at a sophomoric prank, the practice of which is dismissed by most before they exit college.  I am still finding beer bottle surprises yet today.  For me the supreme surprise was the one they stuck behind our mail-box door.  Our mail is conveniently delivered right into our house through a mail slot chute, and it is closed off by a small door inside the entry way.   When my wife opened that door, out fell a glass beer bottle that chipped the edge of a floor tile and shattered.  What a hoot!  Not so funny was my emergency room visit.  Somehow during the sweep-up process I missed a glass fragment that was embedded in the entry way rug,  and when I went to retrieve the mail  later I managed to step on it.  It was a pointed shard that drove itself home deep inside the ball of my foot, and after both my wife and I poked and prodded in extraction futility and used up all the gauze pads and paper towels we had in the house to staunch the bleeding, we gave up and went to an emergicare facility.  Turns out those assholes don’t take Medicare so I had to charge $185.00 to my credit card.  I left the facility with a clear understanding that friends can sometimes be dicks.  All in all it was a very painful experience.

Not nearly as painful as the death that poor little bird endured.  Flashback two weeks previous.  That’s two weeks previous to the first flashback I expressly requested you take.  Don’t fuck this up.  Since that so indicated time that I hope you grasp, a little song bird became a regular visitor in our back yard.  He must have sensed that I am a nature lover and an all around nice guy, and before long a fond bond of friendship was forged between us.  He followed me around everywhere, and would many times spend an hour or more a day  entertaining me with his beautiful, melodic caroling.  One of his favorite places to perch and  serenade me was atop our patio fan.  At left is a picture my wife  took of me giving him a gentle hug.

Fast forward two weeks.  If you did this correctly you are right back where we started.  I guess that’s not quite right.  You should  actually be back to where we started at the first flash back.  You might have gone too far forward, and then I will have to explain what happened that day.  There were a couple of really shitty moments that went on then, and I really don’t want to talk about it.  So you might have to back up a smidgen.  Just do the best you can.

As a topper, my two buddies “forked” my front yard.  In case you don’t know what that is, it’s what happens to your lawn when a couple of morons decide to plant plastic forks all over it.

Lawn Forking

I missed one during my removal routine, but did not miss it with the lawn mower the following day.  I assumed any pertinent parts were blown into my grass collector, but apparently that was not the case.  That seems to be a fact because of the spear-shaped piece that my beautiful, innocent song bird impaled his throat with after he mistook it for a shiny insect. My special little song bird sings no more.   I hope you guys are proud of yourselves!