Category: Life

If you’re driving around looking for something, it’s good to have a marker to know where to turn:

Since this sign is in Old Trees, the historic suburb in which I live, it’s possible that we’re looking at an historic no parking zone that tourists might want to visit.

Here’s a little personality test for you:

If you look at that and think, “Wow, couldn’t they have said that with a single no parking any time sign?”, you obviously are one of those people who see the world in black and white, in parking and no parking. You cannot wrap your mind around the shades of grey, the layers of nuance between No Parking Any Time and No Parking Here To Corner.

But then again, not everyone can go to college and get a ::sniff:: humanities degree.

Instapundit linked to a list of Top 10 Great Ways to Save Water. This list was useless to me for the most part because it was geared to water wastrels in the first place. Criminey, here’s the list:

• Apply no more than 1 in. of water per week to your lawn in two applications.
  For Pete’s sake, if I water the lawn, I will have to mow the lawn. If Mother Nature wants me to have a pristine lawn, it will rain nicely to support it, and Mother Nature will make sure that the poison ivy that invades the yet-unnamed Noggle homestead in Old Trees needs the disappearing honeybees for pollination.
• Use a sprinkler timer to avoid over watering.
  I have never owned a sprinkler in my life.

• Use drip irrigation hoses in flower beds, covered by a thick layer of mulch.
  Great Caesar’s ghost! How does one get a thick layer of mulch to adhere to drip irrigation hoses in the first place?

• Replace deteriorated flapper valves in toilets.
  I could do this because I actually have toilets, but I also have a poorly-constructed drain system in my house that could use an extra goosing from some additional clean water flow from time to time. Also, I’m lazy and don’t want to get into it.

• Use a solar cover on the swimming pool when it’s not in use.
  A swimming pool? Lords of London, I don’t have a swimming pool. Who does in these days where you’re liable not only for drowning, but for the cases of West Nile disease that could have been borne by mosquitos bred in your pool?

• Repair dripping faucets.
  Always a good plan, but my relatively new faucets don’t drip.

• When possible, relocate indoor potted plants outside on a deck if a gentle rain is expected.
  A deck? Brother, I moved to a neighborhood that has traffic and have put a front porch swing on my home to ensure I wouldn’t become one of those deck-dwelling creatures segregated to their own family units in the suburban zoo, so I don’t have a deck, thank you very much, and I am not going to construct one because Gaia whispered it in your ear. Also, a number of semi-feral cats have taken residence here, and they look at indoor plants as a salad bar whose contents should be retched upon the rug. So we don’t have indoor plants, either. If we want to talk to flora, we engage the poison ivy in witty banter.

• Cover vegetable gardens with a layer of straw mulch to reduce soil evaporation.
  A good idea. I’ll keep this in mind when President Bush encourages victory gardens. Until then, I’ll get my fresh produce the normal way: putting on a bunny costume and raiding the neighbor’s yard.

• Replace shower heads with low-flow types.
  That’s easy advice for office-job types, but some people need the flow to get real grime off of themselves. Not that I’m speaking for myself here, but I’m too lazy to do that myself and too cheap to hire a plumber.

• Conserve water while car washing.
  I don’t have a car, thankyouverymuch, I have a truck. Also, I don’t wash it, for crying out loud; the dirt is an extra buffer between me and that BMW whose driver is arguing on a cell phone with a soon-to-be ex-husband.

Holy cannoli, that’s a lot of advice for the hoity-toity types with swimming pools and landscaping and/or water features on their grounds.

You want to conserve water? Here’s the MfBJN list for you, short form:

• Drink more beer.
  Sure, you’ll flush the toilet more, but you’re adding water to the local system. Yeah, far away someone wasted water brewing it, but that’s not your fault. You’re only trying to rectify the mistake.
• Stop bathing.
  Personal hygiene uses a lot of water. Stop shaving and brushing, too.

• Club a baby seal.
  Do you know how much those things drink? Also, the pelt makes a nice mulch for your vegetable garden or flower bed, preventing premature evaporation.

• Creative car maintenance.
  To quote the ever wise Jed Eckhart: “Well, when you grow up… then you’ll know these things, Danny. Now get up here and piss in the radiator.”

Now that’s advice the rest of us can effectively ignore.

Reader’s Digest hyperbolically identifies 25 Products That Will Change Your Life.

The list includes:

• The Oregon Scientific Wireless BBQ Thermometer, a thing you can stick into your meat while it’s on the barbecue that has a wireless pager you can wear on your belt that will let you know when the food is done.
• The Anycom HCC-210 Bluetooth Car Kit, a quick and easy speakerphone kit for cars.
• Tech-Ezz Wackerchaps, some sort of overshoes for lawnmowing chores.
• The InnoDesk Thermo-Cut Tape Gun, a packing tape dispenser with some cutting edge cutting edge.

And twenty-one more such things which will alter the very fabric of our existence and cause city planners to redesign their New Urbanist projects.

Unfortunately, they’ve only changed my life by removing the couple minutes I spent skimming the article. At least I got a blog post out of it.

I recently renewed my license plates, and to do so, one must have the vehicle’s emissions tested at a centralized facility contracted exclusively by the government (you can guess how I feel about centralization and exclusive franchises granted by the government, gentle reader). As the woman put the official sticker onto my windshield, she gave me the certificate I needed to take to the License Office to renew my plates. “Take this to the DMV,” she said.

As I stood in line at the License Office, I heard that guy, the one who talks loudly on his cell phone while in a queue, say that he was in line at the DMV. He also called it, on a separate call, the License Bureau.

Now I won’t split too many hairs about the fact that the License Fee Office is a franchised to a private company and is not an official bureau at all.

However, I will point out that it’s not the DMV, Department of Motor Vehicles. It’s an offshoot of the Department of Revenue and only exists to take money. Missouri does have a Department of Transportation, but it deals with highways, not cars.

These people call it the DMV because that’s what they call it on television. Somewhere else’s bureaucracy again becomes the national buzzword.

A job posting on craigslist, viewed in Firefox so the favicon displays, yielded this paradox:

These things do not go together.

Remember the Marathon candy bar, and its Western-themed commercials on Saturday mornings?

Yeah, the candy bar hasn’t been made in 25 years. That one.

Mmm, a lollipop:

click for full size

Looks good, doesn’t it? Not if you have certain food allergies:

click for full size

That warning says: Allergy information: Made in a facility that processes milk, eggs, soy products and wheat.

The allergy information is on the label where it’s twisted around the stem; if you’re like most people, that lollipop is in your mouth before you even look at that portion of the label, if you look at that portion of the label at all.

And if you suffer from a severe allergy to any of those food groups, your throat is probably already closing off.

But, hey, you can’t sue.

Instead of having to look through two or three rolls’ worth–maybe 100 pictures total–of someone’s ill-focused, underlit, and same-three-people-smiling-in-different-places photographs from vacations, now we have hundreds.

You think George Eastman wasn’t thinking ahead?

• Is it felony animal cruelty to pierce your cat’s ears?
• Is it felony child abuse to make a set of eyes that light up when a remote control triggers them, place that set of eyes in the cold air return, and trip them when your newly-mobile baby crawls to the cold air return and starts tugging at the grate?

I ask not so much because I’m contemplating either action, but because I want to be the number one Internet resource for knowledge about both (or at least, a high search result for either question).

I mean, I need the traffic.

So I walked down to the Old Trees Recreational Complex to get a residency card so I can save $1 on ice skating sessions at the rink and save $10 on continuing education programs if I ever needed to learn how to line dance with the elderly. But that $1 per session, over the course of a year where I will go once, will save me a total of $1.

So I arrived with my new driver’s license because it has my new address and I thought that would be enough.

“Do you have a piece of mail with your current address on it?” the woman behind the counter said. “A utility bill?”

I looked through my wallet for anything else. I took out my Old Trees Library card.

“They don’t make you show anything with your address on it,” she said.

I don’t normally carry with me my current outstanding personal invoices for commodity consumption, so I had to walk away empty-handed.

But rest assured, America; even though I had to prove my current address to get this driver’s license with my Old Trees address upon it, that in and of itself was not enough to satisfy the demands of the vigilant public servant. We can all sleep easier knowing that it’s harder to get an Old Trees ID than a driver’s license, and that our ice arena and architecture tours are safe from terrorists who refuse to pay full price.

Sometimes, when I try to reach the Web site of the San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com) into the address bar of my browser, I transpose the a and the g.

And I am ashamed! Briefly. Before I hit the backspace key and can hide my homophobia from the world.

As some of you know, I have recently passed out of the meaningful demographic. In addition to getting the cold shoulder of marketers and television programmers everywhere, I’ve recently discovered some of the horrible, terrifying conundrums of this horrible age between youth and agedness. Such as:

Is that splotch a zit or melanoma?

Espied as I waited for my driver’s license to print several weeks overdue because I’d sent off to the Great State of Wisconsin for a Certified Birth Certificate and paid $15 for the effort to comply with the Lesser State of Missouri’s new laws designed to thwart the malevolent forces in the world from obtaining driver’s licenses with fake credentials so they could wreak havoc upon this nation.

Woman: (Retrieving a photostat of a birth certificate that looked like it had been washed in the pocket of blue jeans with the stones to create that worn effect that is found by certain segments of young people to be so pleasing as to pay extra for) I’m sorry, I sent for a new one and haven’t gotten it.

22 year old license office employee with the ring in her nose: (Not glancing at but not unfolding the three pieces) Okay.

Woman: Can I change my address? I moved.

Employee: I need something with your new address on it. A utility bill, a check, or something.

Woman: (Rifling through purse) Oh, I don’t have anything. That’s okay, keep it the same.

Thank you, faceless license bureau employee with the ring in her nose. Your efforts have ensured that this potentially lethal agent of destruction could not change the address on her driver’s license inappropriately. Our nation is safer!

At least, I was when the Google satellite passed over our old house:

I take pride in how clean those gutters are; of course, as you well know, I had to.

Remember, if someone tells you, “You look nice,” that person is really saying, “Most of the time, you look like crap.”

As I age, I concern myself with subtle imperfections that I’ve ignored for the majority of my thirtysomething years. Blithely, throughout much of my youth, I skipped through life without taking care of things, without worrying how that indifference would lead to consequences later. Now that I am older, sadder perhaps, but wiser, I have learned the importance of proper drainage and water control around a domicile.

Some years ago, when I was an impertinent youth of but eight and twenty, my wife and I bought our dream house of the moment. It looked spectacular in the early spring, with the last traces of the winter’s snow decorating the lawn in the picture. When our realtor walked us through the building, we appreciated the vinyl hardwood-looking floors in the kitchen and foyer, the gas fireplace in the basement den, and the affordable lower Bobo price. Of course, our youthful zeal for home ownership and our overappreciation of the possibilities for the fourth bedroom, we didn’t fully appreciate the impact of a below-grade walkout basement at the bottom of a hill whose sliding glass doors were guarded by a single drain beneath two blossoming crab apple trees.

Fast forward and flashflood two years to a dark and stormy night, where a torrent of water tumbling down the concrete steps outside the basement doors made the exterior look like a leaking fish tank from inside that den with the fireplace. I kneeled in ankle-deep water to bail the blossoms and crabapples from the drain almost as fast as they collected at the base of the vortex. I sniffled in the torrenting chill, man against nature, while my wife frantically sopped the inside seepage with towels and blankets.

We weathered that particular storm with only an extremely damp carpet, and I have learned a lesson. I now spend a portion of each afternoon sweeping the deck above and the concrete steps and drain below free of leaves, cut grass, crab apples, and other assorted detritus. My efforts only ensure my comfort in the hour immediately following my sweeping. I’ll fidget and fuss during any heavy rainfall, looking through the doors frequently to scry how much might accumulate around the drain. Often, I will obsessively or compulsively venture into the rain to clear the drain, removing a crab apple or a palmful of leaves to ensure my own unease of mind.
Perhaps I would enjoy the romance of a good thunderstorm more if I only worried about the drain at the bottom of the basement steps. I also worry about the gutters.

One morning, circa 2:30 CDT, I awakened from a light slumber to hear the soothing—or so I thought then—prattle of rain through the downspout. As I listened to the gentle cascade of water, I realized that I heard a soothing cascade undimmed by exterior walls. I slapped glasses onto my nose and hastened to the dining room, where I encountered a stream of water pouring from the dining room window onto the vinyl, but hardwood-looking, dining room floor. For some reason, water rolling from the roof ignored the best-designed systems of man which proffered a downspout at the house’s corner. Instead, the water fell directly against the side of the house. The charming but energy-efficient sliding window track offered a handy cup to collect this water, and when the cup overflowed, it runneth over into the dining room. Once again arming my beautiful and sleepy wife with towels, I ventured into the maelstrom.

Climbing onto a stepladder, I discerned through trial and error, using the flashes of lightning for illumination and the crashes of nearby thunder as motivation for quick action, that the gutter had pulled from the house so that the water from the roof was streaming between the roof and the gutter. When I held the gutter up with my hands, the stream against the window abated. When I let go, the stream resumed. I pondered the prospect of holding the gutter against the house all night, but I remembered that I had a single stalk of wood in my personal lumberyard that I could prop against the window sill to hold the gutter in place and…. Success!

Of course, success in this case meant that I could dry off, but that I would spend the rest of a mostly sleepless night checking both the drain and the kludged gutter brace to ensure that most of my house remained dry. I took a personal day from work the next day to clean my gutters, to bolt the loose section to the house with the largest bolts I could muster, and to place gutter screens on the gutters beneath the two crab apple trees just to be thorough or just because I was in that aisle in the hardware store.

So as I age, and as I own a home, I pay greater attention to the weather and the water falling outside of my house. As Mr. Fix-It might have said in his book, water is a friend, but it’s also an enemy. Perhaps he didn’t say that, or perhaps he was talking about the copper piping through which we invite the beast into our home. Still, you can be sure that when my wife and I move to our next dream house, I will inspect the topography to ensure that the entire neighborhood does not funnel its watershed to my basement door. I’ll also resist the temptation to use the basement (if we don’t buy a home on a sweet, sweet slab of concrete) to store our extensive library or electronic equipment.

Until then, though, I will arm myself with brooms, buckets, and two-by-fours to prepare for the inevitable unexpected, which undoubtedly will require something other than brooms, buckets, or two-by-fours. Ultimately, though, I know I can do little but study the skies like a native, looking for signs that I have personally angered the rain gods.