Rodent Holds Household in Grip of Terror

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Winters around here always include a number of rodents trying to take advantage of the shit-tons of money I spend to keep this house warm.  No surprise there.

 

In December, we had some mice in the kitchen, so we set traps.  In a 24-hour period, we snapped 7 mice in our dish-towel drawer - a record around here.  Then for weeks everything has been quiet.

 

However, in the past week, an unidentified rodent has attracted the attention of Rhonda, our guard-Beagle.  For hours on end, she would stare at the gap between our dishwasher and the adjacent cabinet.  Once in a while, she would lunge at the gap, snarling and scratching.  But no luck. Robin and I just chuckled.  We set a few traps, but whatever was vexing the dog seemed uninterested in the peanut-butter and nuts bait painted on the trap triggers.

 

The critter has been sneaking into the dog's food bowl and stealing kibble, bite by bite.  But nobody's caught him in the act.

 

Last night was a bit of a coming-out party for our resident rodent.  Turns out it's a tiny mole, about half the size of a golf ball.  I'll call it a "he" because of the balls on this thing... he ran out from under the cabinets and shot across the kitchen right in front of Rhonda, me and Robin! 

 

He made a wrong turn and got trapped between the dog's crate and the base cabinets...  I pulled the crate out and let slip the dog of war!  Sic him, Rhonda!  The dog squinted at the mole, turning her head as if she were on an RCA Victor record label, and sat her butt down.  The mole charged, and the dog backed up.  What a killer.  The mole hung a right and went back under the dishwasher.

 

No doubt, our little critter chilled and steeled himself for another run at it...  Two minutes later, he shot out into the open, right at me and Robin and our chicken-hearted Beagle.  Of course, we were all surprised...

 

Our rodent made another wrong turn and found himself trapped by our front door.  The dog looked on in puzzlement - too confused to snatch the little critter.  So big Jim, badass owner of the house, leaned down to pick up the mole and toss him out.  The little shit didn't run - he squared off on me and ran up my arm!  Jumped off my shoulder, and away he went to the other end of the house! 

 

We all followed, once again cornering the little critter in the furnace room.  And once again, he ran up my arm and over my shoulder, blasting his way back into the kitchen and under the dishwasher.  We haven't seen him for 24 hours now.  Don't know if he left the house or is just hunkering down until the dust settles.  Robin suggested getting a butterfly net, but I'm gonna wait...

I mentioned this to a friend of mine when I was shopping today, and he gave me the bad news:  "Jim, you don't have a pest, you have a new pet.  Name the little shit and make sure he has some kibble and water..."

I suppose that'll work... welcome to our home, Speedy...

 

 

Six Years Later I decide to write another Blog entry...

Hola, amigos!

I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya...

No, wait... I stole that introduction completely from the Onion -- Jim Anchower's page.  He says that every time he has a column...  But it's funny as Hell, and I encourage all of you to check it out on theOnion.com.  Jim Anchower is the guy we all went to High School with -- one of the guys wearing the Army jacket, that hung out in the Smoking Lounge down near the wood shop in High School.

But that's not me.  Anymore, anyway.  I fit that bill for a few years after graduation, then I went on to be a college pothead at the University of Illinois.  A post-graduate straight-guy, I tossed all that aside and grunted my way through a career in the construction industry -- thank you, U of I, and got married, raised a family, etc...

Readers of my blog know that my old employer folded -- a family-owned firm that succumbed to a nasty combination of the economy and family feuds.  So last year I was out on my ear.  My severance pay, after 35 years on the books, was an offer of a cab ride after I dropped off my truck.  I declined.

But after a free-fall full of side-jobs and family home repairs, I landed the best job I can imagine, a job as the foreman of the Carpentry Shop at the Art Institute of Chicago.

I'm about to finish my 90-day probation period, and if they like me enough to keep me,  I'm going public with my blog that I think this is the best job in the world!

 

That's funny - I wrote that the day before the Art Institute fired me.  Seems that old Mayor Rahm Emanuel had a nephew that needed a job, so I got canned.   I never finished that blog entry. Or wrote another blog until today.

 Since then I've moved on.  Got hired by a classmate from apprenticeship school to work at Woodrow Development, a non-union piece of shit scab outfit, and that lasted for 15 months.  But the owner got tired of trying to turn me into an asshole and let me go.  Spent a month working at Ace Hardware for peanuts, then Metro Storage hired me to be superintendent on a big storage facility job in Addison.  908-unit building.  15 month project.  I had a $12.8 million budget, and brought it in at $11.4 million.  Saved them $1.4 million.  My bonus check was $500.  Fuckers.

 Then FH Paschen hired me a month later.  Loved that job.  Lasted there 30 months until Covid-19 shut down our industry.  That's when I decided to retire.

 Meanwhile, I got diagnosed with cancer three different times.  Surgery settled the first case, chemo settled the second, and now it's wait-and-see with the third dose of the big C.  I'm not going down without a fight. I can take a lickin' and keep on tickin'...

This blog isn't as funny as some of my others.   Hmmm... sorry.

It's my birthday tomorrow, but things have changed so much... 42 years ago I had a birthday party that lasted 14 hours, with 100+ guests, kegs of beer, squares of blotter acid, bags of weed, LOUD MUSIC... neighbors called the cops at 2 a.m. -- everything.  Tomorrow will feature me walking my beagle Rhonda and drinking a Pineapple Margarita.  Woot woot!  Maybe grill a steak - idk

It's hell to get old.

But it beats the alternative.  Several of my classmates from school have stopped getting old via the graveyard, so I'm ahead of the game for at least a little while.  DNA tests on my latest tumor tell me I have a 98 percent chance to live at least 15 more years, so that means I'm prolly gonna get hit by a bus soon... 

But for now I'm content to make some chili-dogs for me and some beanie-weenies for Robin.  If I can survive that kind of diet, I'm bullet-proof.  I'll write more next time something funny happens.

 

 

 

 

I Never Guessed Billy Mays Was Telling The Truth

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Out of work once again, so I've been putting in a lot of time around the house -- mostly trying not to go crazy.

I hit a great streak working for my cousin Pepe.  He owns a General Contracting company out of Highland Park, and I called him looking for a carpenter's gig last March.  Timing was perfect, cause he said he had a few weeks work for me starting the next week.  Turned into more than seven months!  Things slowed down, and I got laid off.  Good run, anyway.

That stint reactivated my Carpenter's Union health insurance, which gave Robin a chance to have her long-delayed shoulder surgery.  She needed three months off work for her recovery, and, as luck would have it, that came right when I got laid off.  Ironic? Or just a bummer?  Either way it worked out well.

Meanwhile, my Dad had a knee-replacement surgery, and Robin and I tag-teamed to keep him on the mend.  So we were pretty busy, despite being "out of work."

But the last month has been spent pretty much staying out of each others' hair.  She's back to work now, so I have to step up my efforts to look productive around here.  It's Hell on the self-image to see your wife bringing home the bacon when all you're doing is the dishes and walking the dog.  Plus watching People's Court twice a day.

Anyway, to get to the point of this blog, I was at Sam's Club this Monday getting oil for my smoky little Honda Civic.  After getting some culinary delights (Bagel Bites) I headed to the check-out counter, the worst part of the Sam's Club experience -- motto "Where Customer Service Goes To Die."  En route I saw a mountain of "Oxy-Clean Concentrate" boxes. I stopped and stared.

Now for God knows how long, I've watched Billy Mays and later other hucksters, as they shouted all about this crap.  At one point, when it was pretty new, I was in a hardware store when a woman breathlessly asked the older clerk when she could find Oxy-Clean.  "We're all out -- won't have any until Friday."  The woman was crushed.

When she left, I asked the guy what's so special about Oxy-Clean.  "Nothing.  But when someone shouts about a product on TV, people flock in here to buy it up."  So my opinion was cast: Oxy-Clean is a bunch of hype.  I jeered at the commercials for years.

This all went through my head as I looked at the huge pile of Oxy-Clean boxes.  This shit's been around a while -- maybe it really does work. 

Our laundry has been plagued with a mystery for the past 10 years or so.  Virtually every shirt we own eventually comes down with spots.  They look like grease spots, but there's no rhyme or reason to their location.  Not food spills (on the shoulder?) Not auto grease (on the back?) Not crayons (no kids in the house at this time.)  We thought at one time it could be pine tar -- when I mow the lawn, pine cones and little pine shoots would occasionally get in my clothes.  We thought they may leach their tar into the clothes in the wash.

So I worked up a lawn-mowing outfit -- some overalls and a couple of old shirts, and never washed them with our other clothes, or even in our own laundry. But the stains keep showing up.

Flash forward to Monday.  There I am in Sam's Club with my cart and my Pennzoil and my Bagel Bites, slack jawed in awe in front of a display of Oxy-Clean.  The Heavens open, a choir of Angels burst forth in song... and some lady breaks the reverie by bumping my cart out of her way.  My bad.  I grabbed a box of Oxy-Clean and went to the check out.

I got home and read the directions.  One gallon of hot water, fill the scoop to between line 2 and line 4, mix it up, put in the stained clothes, stir, soak six hours. Wash normally. Simple.

Now because of these stains that appear, Robin and I have triaged our shirts.  One group we can wear in public, one group I can wear to work (carpenters are almost expected to look like slobs anyway,) and one group we can wear at home when no one is coming over to visit.  I selected four of the worst offenders and tried out the Oxy-Clean. Filled the scoop to line 3, poured it into hot water, added the clothes and set the timer.  Six hours later, I threw them in the washer and let her rip...

And I'll be damned, it worked.  All but one shirt was perfect.  The forth had a shadow of a stain remaining.

Robin was so impressed she went and got her favorite Blackhawks Jersey.  It had two stains that looked like rust or spaghetti sauce, but were neither.  And they'd been set in that Jersey for several years.  I tried it again, this time filling the scoop to line 4.  In went the jersey, two more stained shirts, and the 4th shirt from the first attempt. Away I went.

When Robin saw her Blackhawks jersey, the Heavens once again opened and a choir of Angels burst into song... I had rescued her favorite Hawks jersey! Me and Billy Mays!

So a belated thank you to Billy -- thank you and Rest in Peace.

Now let me at those other shirts!

Holy Shit! How Many Socks Do You Need?

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OK, so there are three piles.  T-shirts that I can wear in public.  T-shirts that have stains or glue marks that I can only wear to work.  And T-shirts that are so ratty or horribly stained that I shouldn't even wear them to a construction site.

Robin went on a laundry frenzy this weekend, and presented me with two options:  I can sort these out and find a proper place for them in my drawers, or she could sort them for me... by donating them to the YWCA or by putting them in the garbage.

And don't even get her started on the socks. 

I went to the store this afternoon, and when I returned there was a pile of socks literally three feet high on the couch.  All nicely paired and freshly laundered.

"You can pick your favorite ten pairs, the rest are getting donated," she informed me.

Aw, Hell no!  There are at least 24 pair of almost-new socks in that mess, plus another twenty or thirty pair that are only a few months old.  I kinda went nuts over the last few months, when I had a steady job.  Being only sporadically employed over the past three years, when I got to month four of a steady job this summer, I kinda went on a spending frenzy.  Not on stupid shit, but on stuff I know that I'd need if and when I got laid off again.  Like Seagram's 7 Whiskey and about a dozen boxes of Kraft Deluxe Macaroni & Cheese (on sale at Mariano's for only $1.89!!)

And socks.  And underoos.

In June I bought me a dozen pair of socks.  But they were a bit small -- uncomfortable in my work boots.  But OK for my Converse All-Stars after work.  So I kept them and bought another dozen of another brand for work.  They fit great, so I bought another dozen the next day -- it was right on my way home from work.  This all after I had already purchased six pair of high-priced work socks from Rogan's Shoes in May -- but they made my feet too hot.

So I spent the month of August living like a Rock God (Joe Walsh, specifically...)  New socks and new underwear every day for 24 days in a row.  SWEET!  Joe Walsh wears brand new underwear and socks every day of his life.  Then his people launder them and donate them to a shelter.  I don't have that luxury, so five or six at a time, my new laundered socks started to fill up my dresser.  I didn't care, since I was pulling a new pair out of their original plastic every day anyway. 

And since Robin recently had shoulder surgery, I was able to keep the laundry scam working perfectly... about a third of all our stuff was in the dirty laundry, a third in the clean laundry pile on the back-room couch, (waiting for me to get off my dead ass and sort and fold them), and about a third tucked neatly away in the drawers -- (which I didn't need because I was picking clothes off the "waiting" pile every day. Why bother putting them away when you can just put them on?)

Well, that shit only went so far, and Robin's on the way to a full recovery.  So much so that she began a scorched-earth policy of cleaning this place up, God bless her.  After a lifetime of working full time, she's now had a full month off, and she's tired of looking at the same four walls.  A clean-up was in order.  And away she went.

Which is what brought me face to face with a three-foot-high pile of clean socks.  I tried to negotiate... I paid good money for these socks, and some of them have only been worn a few times!

"Pick your favorite ten.  The rest go to the YWCA," she said, holding fast.

I argued that was wasting good socks -- I'll bag them up and keep them until the top ten wear out...

"So the mice can chew them up and make a nest, like they do with everything else around here?  Ten pairs. Pick 'em."

Aw come on, let me keep 20.

"You won't even fit 10 in your drawer -- it's packed with underwear.  Ten pairs.  And go through those T-shirts, too.  Your drawer won't close."


Well I know for a fact that there are two ways to argue with your wife, and neither of them work.  So I sucked it up and picked the newest looking 10 pairs of socks, and stuffed the rest into a Mariano's shopping bag.  Then she brought out another laundry basket -- filled with socks that she hadn't matched.


"You haven't looked in here in two years.  These are going too."


Sheesh, I've never seen this many socks in my life.  So I started filling donation bags.  Three shopping bags full.  But when Robin wasn't looking, I sneaked the Mariano's bag full of my other new socks into our closet and put it on a shelf.  I may have gotten away with it, but I don't know...

Fido saw what I did. 

And that little bastard will sell me out for a Milk-Bone, I know it...

Glorious boredom? Or just bored to tears?

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Ennui. Pronounced "On wee," it can mean "glorious boredom," like when you're hanging out on the beach in Aruba.

Well, I'm bored, but there's nothing fucking glorious about it. So I meet the other definition -- "utter desperate boredom."

Hockey season's over for the Hawks. And the Bulls' playoff hopes may have been dashed by Rose's knee injury. The Cubs suck, and I don't give a shit about the White Sox. I guess that leaves only the Food Network to brighten my life lately.

Oh sure, there's the family. They're fun. And there's Facebook -- a major time suck for the entire planet. But I run the risk of being too ever-present, and alienating my fan-base. All eight of you. So I figure I need to write another blog entry to justify my existence.

The job scene still sucks. Construction on the whole is still depressed. I've visited a hundred job sites in the past five months looking for a gig as a carpenter, and sent out a hundred resumes looking for work as a superintendent. The union hasn't helped a bit, other than funding some skills-improvement classes that I've taken. But until the general economy picks up, it's still side jobs -- and Robin's job -- that are getting us through.

On the good side, we have a robin family nesting in our trellis over the walkout of our back deck. There are four eggs, and Miss Robin is a doting parent, giving us all kinds of Hell when we walk out accidentally -- we generally use the front entrances, to keep her stress level down. The eggs should hatch this weekend or the early part on next week. That'll be nice, as long as they don't get eaten by crows, which happened last year. Major bummer.

And also on the good side, my maniac neighbor is finally taking their garbage cans back to their house within a few days of the garbage pick up. They still don't mow their lawn, but any improvement is a good thing, right?

And also, tomorrow AT&T comes by to upgrade my internet modem to fiberoptics. I called to bitch about the price of my ISP service, and the bastards succeeded in upselling me on the service. But my bill will be $6 a month less. So that's something. Plus faster downloads, so we can utilize Sarah's Netflix account more expediently.

Other than that, there's nothing fun about being out of steady work. My Mom's been sick lately, and it frees me up to visit her a lot more often, but that's pretty weak sauce in the consolation department, really. I'd rather squeeze in my visits between hurried dinners and long work hours. Instead, we sit and watch People's Court and Judge Judy until my eyeballs droop.

And on that note, is Judge Judy a bitch, or what? You just know that she's gonna end up a prison guard in Hell when it's all over for her... and you know, with my recent luck, she'll be working my section. Shit.

I'll blog again when I can think of something less depressing. Sorry.

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Don't Track the Economy into your House

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My wife Robin stepped in dog shit this afternoon, and tracked it in the house. Somehow, that seems to be a perfect metaphor for our lives over the past several weeks.

In my last post, I bragged about how I loved the company I work for... they were paying me Superintendent's money while I was doing laborer's work. That's because the economy is a lot like what Robin stepped in today. Then things picked up and I got a project of my own to run for a few months. Back to being the boss! I like it!

Well, that situation didn't last. It seems that the family-owned company that has employed me for 30+ years had undergone a family feud, and the major partner took all his money out of the bank. The other partner -- who had been doing all the work but taking only a third of the financial "risks," decided to just close the doors and retire.

We had a few jobs still going, but I got leapfrogged in seniority this year by the owner's nephew. So I got laid off on my 29th wedding anniversary. And got told there was no coming back. Sort of put a damper on the mood around here.

At first they said I could keep my truck if I paid my own gas, and just turn it in some time after Christmas, when they company officially closes. But the other partner heard of this kind offer, and he over-ruled it -- made me give back the truck immediately. That's a nice way to treat a guy who's worked for you 30 years.

So I joined the many millions of others who've been bushwhacked by recent economic reality. I got a couple of juicy side jobs, so lately we've done OK. And being off steady work makes it easy to schedule work around the house. On the other hand, it makes it almost impossible to avoid those jobs any longer...

But I have a few months of unemployment benefits to enjoy, and Robin still has a great job. And we have a greater appreciation of just how good we've had it so far.

And the day was beautiful today. Our neighbor's dog got out of his shock-collar and wandered into our yard about an hour age. Fido, our guard-Beagle, went nuts barking, and we let him out to defend our ranch. Of course, all he did was play with Blackjack, and then refused to come back in the house. When Robin went to get a leash for Blackjack, she stepped right into a fresh pile of the economy, and didn't notice until it was too late -- she was in the house.

Yuck!

Thankfully, Pine-Sol saved the day. I wonder if we could dump a couple barrels of that stuff on Washington, D.C.?

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