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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One Hand Washes the Other -- Unless it's Trying to Kill You

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I'm beginning to think my left hand is possessed. I'm right handed, and throughout my life I suppose I've favored my right hand to some degree (insert your sex joke here), but over the last eight months, I think my left hand has been trying to exact a measure of revenge for my favoritism. It's trying to kill me.

In the last eight months, I have managed to smash, cut or otherwise mangle my left hand -- or integral parts thereof -- on six different occasions. Two times the damage has involved crushing or damaging my wedding ring. But that ain't no thang, right?

Oh sure, I'm a tough Construction Dude... cuts and scrapes are nothing -- they're a dime a dozen. We Construction Dudes laugh at scrapes, scoff at minor burns, put on a Band-Aid when most other suburbanites or "FHO's" (Fucking Home Owners) would run to the local ER for a stitch or a shot...

At least we'd have you believe that.

In reality, sometimes it's just that we don't have time. Like last year, when I shot a nail through my finger. I was in the middle of a very important cash side job. The nail was very new -- not rusty. And I needed to stay through the finish -- no time for a three-hour ER break. So I stayed, and I got a tetnaus shot later.

Or the month before, when I was trying to hang a HUGE steel door, and it slipped. Not a HUGE slip -- just a gentle slip to the left, about three inches. Unfortunately, there were only two inches between the door and the concrete structure. My wedding ring kept the door from crushing my finger. But nothing kept the door from crushing my wedding ring. I had to use pliers to get the ring off my finger, which was rapidly turning blue. I used a jeweler to repair my ring. Let's call that a break-even kinda day...

But there came a period of relative calm -- nothing more ominous than the occasional hang nail or hitting the base of my thumb with a hammer while striking (at) a chisel... somewhat painful but no biggee... Then things got seriously bad.

My son Jimmy bought a boat, or rather, his wife Vicky bought him a boat for his birthday. They both invited Robin and I on a shakedown cruise on the Fox River. At the dock, Jimmy backed the trailer into the water, and I had the honor of releasing the winch for the inaugural launch. But when I attempted a release, it sort of exploded in my hands -- grabbing my left hand, by the wedding ring, and pulling it into the winch. In a microsecond, my hand was flipped over my head, and the winch was spinning -- the boat heading out into the river.

Turns out the winch "keeper" had failed. My wedding ring was now oblong, no longer a circle. With a nice divot. But no blood and no missing fingers. We had a nice boat ride, and an exciting afternoon of securing the boat, and all was well.

Instead of a Jeweler, this time I slipped my wedding ring down the shaft of a "spud wrench" -- a steel wrench with a tapered handle -- and used a trim hammer to beat it into round. Then I used my carpenter's trim files to make it right.

The next day, I was called back to work after a long layoff. Back in the "day" I was a superintendent, but with the economy in the pits, we don't have enough work. But my company is gracious enough to call me back to do even the lowly laborers work -- at my old superintendent's pay -- so I LOVE them.

This week, we were clearing out the old ceiling of a school lobby, along with two exit vestibules. I removed sixteen large fire doors from their frames, and they needed to be loaded onto a skid. Like a can-do kind of boss, I helped the guys load them on to a pallet, which is when a stray piece of metal cut my left ring finger, leaving a cut almost two inches long. I managed to get my paw out in the nick of time -- in fact, if I had been wearing my wedding ring, it would have been REALLY ugly.

It was a three-Band-Aid cut. On my left hand. But still, No Big Deal.

But on Saturday it got even better. We were removing a steel-and-glass window wall. It was erected in 5-foot wide by 14-feet-tall segments. We had removed three sections, but the fourth was being difficult -- the section containing the door frame wouldn't come down. I decided to show my crew how it's done... and I would have succeeded uneventfully if the welds along the top hadn't failed.

But they did. The door frame, all 400 pounds of it, twisted as it fell, knocking me ass-over-teakettle, and I cut my hand on something I landed on. Which hand? My left hand, of course. So I had to go to the ER to get fixed up -- nasty abrasions and some shoulder X-rays. I "scalped" my left palm, taking a couple of square inches of skin off -- and there wasn't enough skin left to stitch it together. So they planted some artificial skin/turf on my palm. Sort of a skin-farm growing on my palm.

Didn't even make it eight hours until I drew blood again. The glass door on the medicine cabinet mysteriously fell out of its frame just as we were sitting down for dinner. When I picked up the pivot to examine the wreckage, I cut my left middle finger. You can imagine the look on my face -- sort of a combination of "Duh" and "WTF."

So I'm heading over to the Catholic Church up town. Maybe if I dip my left hand in Holy Water it'll lay off for a while. It can't hurt.

Spring is in the Air -- and on the edges of the Roads

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Gosh, it seems like winter's almost over and spring is just around the coroner. Can't wait. The snow's melting, and the entire winter's worth of frozen dog shit is revealing itself day by day along the quiet suburban streets. How grand. But anyway, the weather's getting better. So I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

Daylight Savings Time starts after this weekend, which should give everyone one extra hour of daylight to do whatever it is people do during daylight. In my case, that would be nothing. I've been unemployed since late October, which is my longest personal streak of ass-sittin' since 1987. Still waiting for the economy to rebound.

I saw the layoff coming, and lined up a nice bunch of side jobs, but they've all wrapped up. And I've caught up on most of the fix-it projects around the house -- those that don't involve huge wads of money -- and now I'm in damage-control-only mode.

So I have a lot of loafing time. If you're my friend on Facebook, you already know this. I've found a wealth of semi-amusing crap on the web, and I repost several times a day on FB. I'm mainly stealing from theChive, theBrigade, theOnion, throttle.com, and a few others. Believe me, those sites can suck your day DRY with their nonsense, and links to other nonsense. So my days are full.

Plus, every Wednesday, I get to drag my neighbor's empty garbage cans from the street into their driveway, to remind them that, hey, MONDAY was garbage day, and everyone else on the street has already taken their cans out of the public way.

As far as looking for work, I sent out a load of resumes and made the rounds, but construction work is very down. I took a chance on a career change by applying for a spot as Carpenter Foreperson at the Art Institute of Chicago, but that didn't pay off either. It was a great-sounding gig -- modifying the galleries and building the displays for multi-million dollar art exhibits. Inside work, paid holidays & vacations.

While I was interviewing and waiting for the results, I had to back off my nuttier postings on the web and on Facebook, but it was worth the risk. I bought a new suit, got a haircut, shined up my teeth and got new contacts... here goes!

I actually got pretty close -- made the second interview, got down to the final three choices, but no luck. So now I feel like the bronze/silver medal winning doofuses (doofi?) at the Olympics -- everyone says we should be proud to finish as high up as we did! I am proud -- but there's still no fucking paychecks for second or third place in the Employment Olympics.

Taking that job would have meant a major pay cut, quitting the Carpenter's Union, losing my insurance -- a whole lot of major changes. But it would have meant a paycheck and a potential end-game to this working-for-a-living thing we all seem to be trying to wrap up as early as possible. Plus I wouldn't be at the whim of every economic downturn that comes along... But it was not to be. So back to Plan A -- hoping my old employer comes up with some jobs, and soon! And hoping like Hell that the economic upturn will hit my sector sooner than later...

But rather than sulk and feel sorry for myself, I choose to rejoice in my blessings. I have a wife with a great job; we're not in danger of losing our house; I have three wonderful adult children -- and only two of them still live at home while they're finishing school and/or send out resumes!

I rejoice that I have a dog that rarely bites me, and in fact, only snarls occasionally. I have an entire aquarium full of guppies that absolutely LOVE me! (Hey guys! It's the chubby guy! He's coming over here again! I bet he's gonna throw food at us again! Let's swim back and forth like maniacs!)

And I rejoice that Spring is truly coming. I know this because the sun is warm, the birds are chirping, and the one thing that always tells me that the snow is going to be gone, without question, for another year: State Farm has just sent me a bill for the insurance on my snowmobile.

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Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle -- Hey! Come Back Here With That!

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I read a funny article today. Some kids stole the Salvation Army donation pot outside a store in Addison. Witnesses said four teenagers grabbed the pot, stuffed it into a car and drove away. What the heck? What's the world coming to?

The local cops are checking the store security video to see if they can identify the thieves. If they catch them, I hope I can help post their bond. They were doing the world -- or at least the shoppers at that specific store -- a favor. Giving them a few minutes off from the month-long passive-aggressive panhandling that IS the Christmas Season according to the Salvation Army.

Before anyone declares me a Scrooge -- or worse -- I have to say that I approve of their mission, and I donate to their cause. And I greatly respect the people actually ringing those bells and freezing their collective and individual asses off this time of year. They are unfailingly polite, whether you donate or dodge them. But how about a day or two off during the week?

My local Jewel must be a Gold Mine for the Army. Both doors are covered, and every day, every shift, it's a new bell ringer. You never get the opportunity to get to know one of them; to make eye contact; to get a nod and a smile and a PASS because they know it's your fifteenth trip into the store since last Thursday and it's MAYBE OK NOT TO STUFF A DOLLAR IN THIS TIME JUST ONCE!

I even mentioned it today to the guy at the north entrance, how I never see the same bell-ringer twice. "They didn't just start doing this, you know," he said with a chuckle. I stuck in a dollar. It was my second one today, maybe 20th of the past week.

And they don't stop there -- the Army's direct mail continues. But honestly, if they'd offer me a lapel pin for $50 or so, I'd buy it, just to dodge the daily door-tax at Jewel, Ace Hardware, the adult-video store, etc.

Not that I'm against charity. I donate. To the Salvation Army, the Leukemia/Lymphoma Association, my church. (Just check my tax records on that one! It's amazing how generous I am. And if I go to Hell for lying to the IRS, it's almost certainly a case of bad record-keeping in Heaven, but I digress.)

Anyway, I just don't like the Army's omnipresence. Which is why I laughed when I read that someone stole their pot of money. Those kids probably have more one-dollar bills than the average stripper.

Which just makes the phrase "Ho ho ho" seem even funnier, now that I think of it.

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DO NOT Try This At Home

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I don't think the word "Ouch" came out of my mouth, not even once.

Oh, I'll admit, the first few moments after I shot a nail through my finger a lot of thoughts went through my head, and more than a few words came out my mouth, but none of them were "Ouch." Go figure.

Last Saturday my son Steven and I were working on a side job, framing up a few walls and installing a few pre-hung doors to separate some rooms in a Kindergarten. We had been at it for about an hour, and to my mind, we weren't going as fast as I had hoped. I needed to finish to a certain point before we could leave and I didn't want to have to work Sunday. A late quit was out of the question, since my buds from University of Illinois were getting together that night, and I didn't want to miss the party. It's been 29 years since we graduated, and I was really looking forward to seeing everybody.

So I suppose I was rushing. And when my hand slipped as I steadied a stud in the wall frame, everything happened at once. The nail gun fired, my hand felt like it exploded, and I found myself skipping and hopping in several directions at once, squeezing the living daylights out of my left middle finger. I hopped/skipped out to my truck to get a band aid, desperately hoping that that was all I would need. I couldn't make myself look -- if it was bad, it would ruin the day's work and screw up my life in a major way. The electrician would have wasted a trip. The client would be very unhappy. And I would have to pay the ER bill myself -- working a sidejob with no Workman's Comp insurance has it's risks.

No band aids in the truck. Well, they were there, but I wasn't able to locate them in the three seconds I spent looking. I took a chance and looked at my finger -- bleeding out of both sides, but the nail missed my fingernail and it missed the bone. It went through at an odd angle, and apparently I yanked my finger off the nail without mangling much flesh. Damned good luck. And I was still too shocky to feel pain. So I squeezed the Hell out of it again, and went to find something to wrap it up with.

About this time, Steven noticed my odd behavior. "Are you alright? Did you do something to your hand?" he asked, noticing that I was about 17 shades of pale lighter than I was 5 minutes ago, and gripping my left hand like I was afraid it was going to escape from the end of my wrist...

I found my glasses and two cough drops, which had all flown out of my shirt pocket in the initial leap. I unwrapped a cough drop and tossed it in my mouth like it was a huge Oxycontin.

"Go in the truck -- get me two Advils. I shot a fucking nail through my finger," I explained, as calmly as a man with a fresh nail-sized hole in his finger might explain. Not exactly Clint Eastwood cool, but at least I wasn't crying.

Steven was suitably impressed -- he offered to drive me to the ER or wherever. He seemed skeptical when I said I was OK and that we'll just keep on like nothing happened. "Shouldn't you get a doctor to look at it? Don't you need a shot or something?" No thanks -- I just had one... (RIM SHOT)

I wrapped the finger in a kleenex, and wrapped that with some green electrical tape to keep pressure on it. I was operating at Level 10 Denial. If I just believed it would be alright, the it would be alright. Steve got me 3 Advils, just to be sure, and ran some water in the sink. He turned on the hot water in all the excitement, but I washed down the Advil with it anyway. Then I pounded the nail back out of the 2x4 and put it in my pocket. I don't know why -- maybe subconsciously I thought if it was in my pocket, it couldn't do that to me again.

The finger bled for a while, which is a good thing. Bleeding cleans the wound, I thought. And I changed the bandage every hour or so. I washed it off about noon with some hand sanitizer, at which point I said a lot of things that substituted for "ouch," but were much more colorful. That was the first time it really hurt -- up till then it just throbbed and ached.

We finished up the job a little ahead of schedule. Aside from a garbage can full of bloody bandages, you'd never even know I did something really, really stupid in there this morning. I'm sure some Kindergarten teacher had a puzzled look on her face at some point on Monday morning.

And once he knew I was OK, Steven got to use my accident as a shield... every time I gave him grief about anything, he'd just grin and add, "this coming from the man who shot a nail through his finger this morning."

So we learned a valuable lesson, made some money, and I never even said ouch.

Until the tetanus shot Monday morning. Ouch.

There's A Sucker Born Every Minute... and Two Born to Take Him...

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That's a quote from P.T. Barnum, famous circus owner and all-around huckster.

It's as true today as when he said it several generations ago. My great-grandparents owned a circus until the depression, when Barnum & Bailey bought them out. The Floto Circus. Based in Wisconsin, I think, but they toured the entire country in their day. There are a few artifacts from their operation on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, so you can check it out -- I am not making this up.

About this time, the average reader may ask themselves, "What's this got to do with anything?"

Beats the shit out of me.

Oh yeah, I was thinking about eBay. I usually have a couple of random things up for auction on eBay, and lately I've been pretty busy selling and shipping all sorts of silly crap out to the hungry populace. People never seem to tire of buying stuff that I find basically useless. Pre-eBay, this stuff used to end up in our garbage cart. Sometimes so much of it that I had to tape an envelope with a $10-spot and a quick note to our garbage can. (This way Groot wouldn't charge me extra. My service plan used to be the "unlimited" plan. Turns out, the "unlimited" plan was limited to two garbage carts, or one cart plus two garbage bags. This didn't seem as "unlimited" as the name may suggest, so I switched to "basic," which allows only one cart a week. I soon learned I could leave a dump-truck full of crap at the curb, and as long as I tipped my collection dude, it disappeared without a trace. Imagine that.)

But as for eBay, I'm finding that every time I sell something, I end up buying something else, so I never seem to get ahead. And I never gain any space in my garage, either.

This week I "won" an auction for an electric ice-cream maker. But the picture didn't do it justice. Instead of a tiny little thing -- it looked pretty small in the photo -- it's the one-gallon model. About three feet tall, counting the motor. I left it in the breezeway while I looked for recipes on the internet, since it was too big to bring into the kitchen without some major counter-top re-arranging.

After a few minutes, Robin came home, passing the new appliance on the way in. She asked me whether that thing in the breezeway was a sump pump or a pool filter, or what? We don't have a basement, and unless we got a pool overnight, the filter thing didn't make sense, so WTF?

I explained my well-thought-out high-minded idea... I saw it on eBay and I was the only bidder, so I WON! Your husband's a WINNER!

And since she'll get some home-made ice cream out of this, I didn't receive the usual ration of shit that I get when I do something genuinely hare-brained (think buying a new snowmobile or the electric dog-polisher thing...) So we have a new toy around here. We'll try it out this weekend, and sooner or later, it will be back in the garage, adding to the general clutter.

And when the pile falls over, burns down or sinks in the swamp, I'll have another blog to write. I look forward to it. Now that my neighbor has taken to mowing his lawn regularly and taking his garbage cans up each week, the dick. You're going to be a good neighbor now? WTF? I need something to write about!

Pause Real Life with your DVR!

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Had a television disaster today. Courtesy of DirecTV, and our new DVR.

My youngest son, Steven, has developed a serious personality disorder, as defined by most Americans of my generation. He's a devout follower of the World Cup soccer tournament. And he had recorded today's semi-final game between the Netherlands and... and.... the Netherlands and their worthy opponent.

Steve was savoring the thought of watching the entire broadcast from beginning to end, and to kill time he had been watching a recording of the Tour de France. When that was done, he deleted it -- and to his horror the screen switched immediately to live TV -- where they were celebrating the Netherlands win over whoever they beat. So the surprise was ruined.

There was a whole lot of thrashing and swearing around here for a brief period. The remote control survived, just barely. His sister, Sarah, threw herself on it before any serious damage occurred.

I truly sympathize. It's hard to watch a recorded sports event when you know the outcome. And of course, it was a great game, fought to the bitter end, etc. etc. blah blah blah. Anyone who ever watched a sitcom knows what it's like when someone blows the ending. But it still sucks.

I did it myself the first day we had the DVR. The only reason I got it was to record the CBS shows on Monday nights, during the hockey playoffs. Robin and I don't watch a lot of TV. But we kinda got hooked on the four shows on CBS Mondays. How I Met Your Mother; Rules of Engagement; Two-and-a-half Men; and the Big Bang Theory. Even though I quit drinking, I still tend to stick to rituals. So somewhere we got into the Monday Night Is TV Night habit. We'd get come cheap chicken from Jewel (8 pieces for $5.99), eat it fast and watch TV.

But playoff Hockey was beginning to interfere, so I booked an upgrade from DirecTV, which came in the form of a free DVR. They installed it on a Monday, appropriately, and I got a whirlwind lesson in using the remote, which I promptly forgot. But it was then I became aware of the COOLEST feature of DVR -- you can PAUSE LIVE TV!

So later in the evening, we watched the hockey game while the DVR recorded our CBS shows. The Blackhawks came from behind in the second period to tie the game. The third period was a hard-fought give-and-take battle. All went well until about 5 minutes were left in the game. There was a TV time out, and Robin and I used the opportunity to do a nature break of our own. I paused the DVR. We luxuriated, happy in the knowledge that we can see the whole thing play out before our very eyes, delayed a minute -- two minutes -- whatever delay our hearts desired -- without missing a second of the action. We even had the phone turned off, so there was no chance that anyone would call us and blow the ending.

All ready now, we set the game back in motion. But it was still on a commercial. So I started pushing buttons, to fast-forward through the ads. It's a guy thing, a control thing, I don't know what.

You don't have to be Norman Einstein to guess what I did. Somehow it went to live TV -- and the Hawks were up by a goal. By the time this had sunk in, the Hawks had scored again on an open net, and the game was over.

Those of you who don't know my wife well cannot possibly imagine how angry that girl can get. I've known her 32 years, and I never before saw those veins in her neck, not even during childbirth.

I gave her the remote and asked Fido if I could bunk with him for a night or two... he said no. Smart dog.

Is There Life After Hockey?

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Now that the Chicago Blackhawks have finally done it -- they've won the Stanley Cup after a 49-year drought -- life around the Teeters household can come back to normal. The winter sports season -- on June 9th -- came to an end.

The past seven weeks have revolved around the Hawks' playoff schedule, and the mood in the house has been dictated daily by the recent successes or failures of the team. Robin is a long-suffering fan, and I'm a fully-converted hockey lover. The kids all have Robin's devotion, and if I'm not mistaken, even the dog looked forward to the occasional breakaway one-on-one rush that ended in a Hawks score. When the Hawks won, everyone was happy. After a loss, the mood went dark.

But now it's over. No more planning meal times around the starting time, or planning mid-day naps to accommodate the west-coast late-night finishes. No more scheduling the lawn mowing, car washing, and laundry-doing around the games.

And no more putting off the blog writing. Now I can finally get back to hatin' on my neighbors.

The Hawks' success gave me a period of serenity about my neighbor, the dick -- the Polish feller across the street. He still leaves his garbage cans out in the street for days on end, and his lawn hasn't been mowed in three weeks.

But a while back I made a prejudice-induced guess that he may like hockey, being Polish and all... In my experience, my eastern-European acquaintances -- especially the vowelly-deprived ones -- are more into hockey and soccer than baseball and American football. So I cut him the same slack I expected everyone to cut me when I was too busy drinking to do anything until it became a crisis. But the playoffs ended last Wednesday, and he still hasn't mowed his yard. That leaves only drinking or laziness as his excuse.

He's had a great scam going over the last few years. As a contractor, he has a few connections in the local white-slavery trade. So about every other week you would see a new landscaping company attack his yard. Mexican guys everywhere -- mowing, raking, trimming -- the whole nine yards. Then, I have to assume, the check would bounce. Two weeks later, a different company was on the job, whacking away making a great first impression. Never to return. Eventually I think the word got out, because the weed crop is coming in strong across the street.

He could get my kid to mow his lawn for pretty cheap, as I have an awesome lawnmower. But I don't think he wants to be too friendly with us over here. Maybe it's because when he leaves his garbage cans in the street past Monday, I pull them into his driveway at 5 a.m. Tuesday. Then his wife has to get out of her car and move them in order to go get more vodka and cigarettes. That's the kind of passive-aggressive neighbors we've become.

I really want to steal the cans outright, or lay in some heavy Fourth-of-July ordinance and blow them right off their freaking wheels, but I'm sure that's over the line. Besides, I heard their house is going into foreclosure, and I don't want to be too mean.

Because, like Earl and his mentor Carson Daly, I believe in karma.

Fighting Depression One Toilet at a Time

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Lately I've been fighting depression. Well, not really.

My job situation isn't the best, but a helluva lot of people have it worse, so I'm not really fighting depression, more like Having an Argument with depression every once in a while. And every once in a while things just add up to make a real good case for being depressed.

Not the real shit, like last month when my sister Donna died. That shit would depress the Good Humor Man, for Christ's sake. But the little things that just bum you out. Like the billboard parade this morning.

I'm driving north on I-57 between job sites, and I'm getting paid for windshield-time. So far so good. I spot a cute kid on a billboard just north of 147th Street. Smiley little shit with a knit cap. He seems to be wearing motorcycle-gang colors, and the copy over his head reads "BORN TO DIE."

WTF?

In smaller letters -- probably only as big as my truck -- it says "Arms and limbs form in the first six weeks..." Aw shit, it's an anti-abortion message. Not the thing I want to think about on a day as nice as today.

Next billboard is a clever one. A view of a rear-view mirror, with some teenager holding a sign that reads "Let's go for ice cream after you paralyze us!"

Jesus, I'm behaving! I'm doing the speed limit! But, of course, I have three youngsters to think about -- one with a wife and a baby -- and they could be driving recklessly this very second. So now I've got THAT to think about...

Next sign points me to a great hospital that does Hip and Knee replacements. Nice. I'm not feeling too old already, worrying about my adult children, now hit me with that crap.

After the 1-800-Quit-Now billboard, reminding me about how many people die from lung cancer every year, here comes the Debt Erase offer. Hmmmm... after the paralyzing car accident and the hip and knee replacement, I may need that number. Damn, dude, I just turned off the news radio station two minutes ago because they wouldn't quit yakking about Insurance Reform. Now I'm thinking that if the economy doesn't pick up... and I still have a mortgage and a shitload of education loans to cover...

OK, I have a good sturdy rope in the truck. So I'm thinking about where's the nearest park with a good strong low-hangin' limb when this asshole-with-a-death-wish cuts me off from the right lane on a red motorcycle. Close enough for me to flinch and hit the brakes -- just after the nick of time -- and call him a dick. He wasn't going real fast, and traffic was slowing down, so I caught up with him. He was an older black feller, wearing a leather vest, and I read something about Riding for Christ on the back. "Riding for shit," was my mental response, then I quickly apologized to God in case he misinterpreted my meaning on that one... I'd hate for that fleeting thought to be the "tip in" that sends me where I might be going anyway.

Anyway, my mood lightened right up when I spotted a huge billboard for some new kinda toilet: "Traffic backed up? This baby won't!"

I Love it! A toilet billboard! Maybe this weekend, me and Robin can road-trip up to Wisconsin and score us a nice new shitter in slate blue. On the way home we can stop at Conejito's in Milwaukee, load up on beef-and-bean burritos, and test that baby out on Sunday morning! Now you're talking... fuck suicide, I have a toilet to try and clog up!

It is so nice to have something to live for. Now all I have to do is get Robin to go along with my new weekend plan! Wish me luck!

Lately My Job is Simply Electrifying

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Sometimes my job gives me the creeps.

Like the time we were replacing the skylights in the Reptile House at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Before we started, I had to put plywood over the tops of the snake pens. That meant I had to get up on top of several 50-year-old cages, while underneath me -- some 12 feet or so -- lay a bunch of lazy 20- and 30-foot-long reticulated pythons, boa constrictors, and other legless reptiles. If the cage failed, I'd find myself right there with my least favorite lifeforms -- other than lawyers -- and probably with a few broken bones for good measure. Like I said, it gave me the creeps.

Recently I've been getting the creeps again. My recent assignment has me working in several old electric facilities, part of Metra's electric railroad division on the south side of Chicago. The buildings are part of the former Illinois Central commuter rail division, and they were built in the later 1920s.

With the recent economic downturn, our company is pretty slow. So slow that I have lost my stripes as Superintendent, and have been working as a carpenter, laborer, janitor -- any damned thing to get a day's work on the books. That means I no longer command the construction battles from my windshield. Instead, I'm in the trenches again. With chipping guns, shovels, brooms -- whatever it takes.

What's giving me the creeps is all the live electric equipment I have to work around. The buildings we are renovating are called "sub-stations." Every six miles along the railroad, they need to feed electric power out to the overhead power lines that drive the trains. So ComEd brings the power to the sub-station, where they transform it from high-voltage AC power into lower-voltage DC power. That's done with these huge "rectifiers," which are just giant-assed versions of the transformers we had on our electric trains and slot-car sets when we were kids.

Remember those transformers? They had a vague ozone smell, and hummed when you turned on the power. Now imagine that times 10,000 or so, and you know what the places smell and sound like. A constant hum and buzz all day long in the air. Only now, it's not just a hangover or the dull ringing in my head from the 30 or 40 rock concerts I went to 25 or 30 years ago...

But the really creepy part is all the exposed electric equipment. All of it dangerous.

When we first started the job, Metra told us simply not to touch any equipment. Period. Which was a pretty easy to follow directive.

But as the job went along, you get used to the hum and the buzz and the fact that the electric equipment right next to you -- the thing you just leaned your broom against -- is carrying enough power to blow your ass half way to Florida if something goes wrong.

The basement of these buildings is the wildest thing -- many exposed solid-copper buss bars, switches and taps and levers you haven't seen since the last time you caught "Frankenstein" on Creature Features on Channel 9. When the newer electronic gear fails -- and it DOES fail -- the Metra guys can run downstairs and throw these Franken-switches to bypass the power to other sub-stations. There is virtually nothing preventing a dumbass like myself from reaching out and actually grabbing a live cable. Maybe a sign like "Danger - Alive," or "4000 volts" or, better yet "13,500 volts," but that's all.

There are four types of equipment downstairs.

1 - Live electric, which WILL kill you if you touch it.

2 - Live ground bars, which MAY kill you if you touch it.

3 - Emergency equipment, which will kill you if you touch it when it's energized. How can you tell if it's energized? Here's the fun part -- you can't.

4 - Abandoned equipment. If you touch it, you don't die, you just shit your pants, because you try not to touch ANYTHING at ANY TIME when you're downstairs.

How can they leave stuff exposed like this? Easy. These buildings were built in the good old days, before you could sue someone else when you did something completely stupid. Back then, if you were down there, it was assumed you knew better than to touch anything that looks electric.

When someone fucked up, the widow wouldn't sue. If she did, it would go like this:

Judge: "How did he die?"

Widow: "He grabbed a live, bare 13,500 volt electric cable."

Judge: "What was his job again?"

Widow: "He was an electrician...."

Judge: "Working for the electric railroad company?"

Widow: "Yes, but..."

Gavel: BANG! Case closed.

But the judge still awards her $2.50 anyway because the deceased had already put in his money for the 1934 fantasy football league pool...

The Economic Recovery is On The Horizon

Or maybe that's just another airplane...

That's what it always was when we were kids, laying in the grass at night, looking up at the starry sky, hoping to see a UFO. We'd see something that looked promising, but it always turned out to be another fucking airplane.

Occasionally it was a satellite. That was exciting. And one time it was SkyLab, but we all knew that way ahead of time, and we were all expecting it. It was on the news all day, and we weren't disappointed. But most of the time it was just another airplane.

With the job situation as it is, I spend a good deal of time hoping to see a UFO -- or the economic equivalent, which would be our company landing a big job. Our industry lags the economy by a year or so, which means the crappy economy is just hitting us hard about now. So I've been working with the tools again, not as a boss. Haven't had to do that since 1987, but I seem to remember how it goes...

In any case, I keep looking and hoping for a UFO, and all I see is airplanes.

Happy Freaking New Year

So far 2010 has been pretty damned cold.

Nothing going on around here. New Year's Eve came and went pretty uneventfully. The kids went out and made it home safely. The wife and I went to a friend's house for an early party, then came home to watch the Blackhawks kick the collective shit out of New Jersey. Those Hawks are awesome to watch. We got tickets to see them play Detroit in March. Should be fun.

The party was very nice. The host, Rod, was pretty well lit by the time we arrived. He's a real outgoing dude with a booming voice and a more booming personality. He was making some wicked Cosmo's, and their effect on him was apparent. He was a busy bee, and the Cosmo's made him a most entertaining host.

We met the new superintendent of schools for Libertyville High School. He was nice, and so was his wife. He got me talking about flying small planes, so I was in my element. I couldn't shut up (insert your "Duh!" here...) and yapped for an hour or so. They wanted to hear all about the engine failure we had in my dad's plane a few years back, and I indulged his curiosity until I was hoarse. Then he and his wife wanted my opinion on just how the Hell did John John Kennedy screw the pooch... he looked out the window too long, then didn't believe his instruments when they told him he was rolling upside down. Rookie error -- and a fatal one, at that. Too bad -- that was a nice plane he wrecked.

The party broke up about nine, as it was a "starter" party. After the hockey game, we both fell asleep, but woke up just in time to ring in 12:15 a.m.! I hope that's not an omen about the year to come.

Played a Led Zeppelin tune right away -- Ten Years Gone, off the Physical Graffiti album. Thirty years ago, we played that tune to ring in 1980 at "the white house" I lived in with two of my buddies. It seemed poignant back then, so every year I play that tune, especially to ring in the new decades.

If you notice, the ads next to the blog changed since my last post -- at least one of them did. It's now about snowmobiles, so I'm pretty sure I was right, that Google looks for keywords and posts ads to match the subject matter. No luck on the naked Asian chicks, though.

But I'll keep checking, cause they seem to keep changing. Never give up hope. Naked Asian chicks. There -- I said it again.

I'm Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

I'll resist the temptation to make a joke out of the "wet" and the "dream" part of that title -- it was unintentional, and now it just looks cheap. But I'm too lazy to change it.

Nothing new around here except the wonderful weather. Once again, looking more like Louisiana and less like Wisconsin every day. We have a nice coating of very heavy, wet snow, but the rain is making it look less and less like a white Christmas this year.

Reminds me of Christmas, 1970. Sixty degrees. I rode my Honda 70 minibike around my grade school that day for an hour or so. Then I went home and played the Beatles album (album? WTF?) "Let it Be." I got a new pair of Radio Shack headphones from Santa that year -- Nova 10's! They were made of genuine plastic, and only weighed about 11 pounds. You lost about a pound an hour in sweat alone, since they couldn't breathe. Looked like you worked out, by the time the album was ready to flip... (??)

I have to pretend to work tomorrow... I'm not on salary, and I don't want to take the day off, at least not off my paycheck. I'll miss next Friday, too, and the Friday after that I'm going snowmobiling with my son Steven. So it's three short checks in a row to start the new year. But I'm still lucky to be working -- a lot of others are having a pretty shitty holiday out there.

Including my neighbor, the dick. Poor bastard's too broke to bring up his garbage cans, I guess. But I noticed that this week, he's savvy enough to keep them in his driveway, like the SMART white trash. Tuesday morning I snuck out and pulled them into the street by a few feet, because it was snowing again. But no dice, the snowplow didn't run them over... Damn. Oh well -- they were empty anyway. (But thanks to the commenter who suggested putting a few bags of sakrete in there. That's just evil. I like that in a guy...)

Anyway, I still haven't received a check from Google for the ads that run just to the left of my blog postings... you guys need to help me out here. For every 100 clicks on a specific ad, I get 11 cents. So get to clickin'... I've got a mortgage payment due.

Funny thing -- the ads change after every post. And apparently, they are keyed to whatever is the subject of my rant.

A few weeks ago the ads featured stuff about animals -- specifically raccoons and animal traps. Last week they changed to ads about bear-proof garbage cans and related stuff. I can't believe for a minute that anybody from Google reads this crap, so Google must have a program that selects the ads based on key words. So here's a test: I'm going to put in some key words, and we'll see if the ads reflect the subject matter. Here goes:

Naked Asian chicks.

Sex involving pastries.

Exotic aquarium dwellers.

Snowmobile riding.

Men with "growing" problems. (Don't you love those commercials?)

E.D.

Naked snowmobile riding chicks having sex with men who need Flomax. Eating aquarium pastries with Asian friends suffering from E.D.


That ought to lead to some interesting ads. Or it'll get me kicked clean off this website.

Merry Christmas -- I'd love to keep writing, but after writing about Flomax, I gotta pee......

My Neighbor, the dick -- the Sequel

I thought it would be tougher to get started on this next posting -- the last one seemed to write itself, since I had so much pent-up bitching inside me.

But after I wrote that last one, things just got better around here.

My neighbor, the dick, left his garbage cans in the street last week, as I mentioned before. But it snowed last Wednesday night.

Our little village is small -- it has to hire a snow plow service to do the roads. We have a new company this winter, and the new guys mean business.

The village had sent out a reminder -- which hit our mailbox that Monday -- telling us loyal subjects that we have to keep our garbage cans out of the road on nights when snow is predicted. They apologized, since this might mean a bit of inconvenience to residents, but said it was necessary "for the safety and blah blah blah..." My eyes glazed over.

Wednesday came, and it was snowing like HELL, starting shortly after noon. The dick's garbage cans were still in the street, going on 9 days now. I saw this as I turned the corner, heading for home, and suddenly I remembered the warning from the village! It's snowing like HELL out here, and my neighbor, the dick, still has his cans in the street! And they're still full of garbage! SWEET! I could hardly fall asleep that night... there's NO WAY that lazy fucker will take them up in a snowstorm!

Sure enough, the next morning I awoke to find the street plowed, but his garbage cans were no longer in the street. Instead, they were in his yard -- fully 20 feet off the street -- and garbage was every-fucking-where.

Man, I know exactly what went through that snowplow-driver's mind when he turned to come down Pearson Road... TARGETS ACQUIRED!! My mission: To get some AIR with those fucking cans! I guess he hit them at about 30 miles an hour. Oh Sweet Successful Mission! I bet he shit himself when he hit the cans -- probably thought they were gonna be empty. Hope he didn't bend the plow...

Naturally, being a good, concerned citizen, I called the Village Hall the MINUTE they were open, to complain about the HEALTH ISSUE and the PUBLIC SAFETY concerns I had when I saw this horrifying display of garbage on the side of the street. And since this is a small village, a little gossip goes a long way. Our village motto: "If you can't say something nice about your neighbor, come sit next to me and let's talk..." So of course, I listed a whole 'nother litany of complaints.

I feel better now. Someone took the cans up to his house and cleaned up the garbage strewn about -- it was cleaned up even before I got home from work. The Village Administrator called me and said she left a voice mail on the dick's answering machine, and hoped everything would get better... we'll see.

In the mean time, the Holidays are already a bit happier around here!

And what, you may ask, spurred me to write a sequel about my neighbor, the dick? I got the urge because right now I'm watching the tow truck driver hooking up the dick's wife's Audi SUV to his winch. It appears she ran off her driveway and got the Audi buried in their yard, in broad daylight, once again.

Some things never change.