New Fire Alarms

Ok, after the Great Kitchen Chicken Fiasco of a week ago, I purchased new batteries for my (current) smoke alarms. After 3 days it became abundantly apparent that this was not the "fix" that was needed.

The alarms went off if the cat walked past. They went off when I opened the bathroom door after taking my shower (that is STEAM, not smoke!!) they went off if the wind blew through the windows. They went off if I cooked bacon. They went off if you looked at them funny, and they LOVED to go off at 2 am. Obviously with fresh batteries, this was not a "low battery" warning - they were just being snots.

So yesterday I went to Menards to Save Big Money, and looked into some new smoke/fire detectors. I figured that after 20 years they probably had advanced in smoke-detector technology to where one could live with a smoke alarm without hearing from it every 20 minutes or so.

Pedro, the nice guy in a blue vest at Menards showed me where the alarms were and we went through them. I bought a more expensive one, because it has a feature that I simply WILL not live without ever again. You can use ANY television remote control and tell it to STFU if it goes off when there really isn't a valid reason for it to do so. You can also tell it to STFU if it decides it's battery is low at 2 am, and it will wait for a more civilized hour to get it's power supply replaced.

Now, granted, the Great Kitchen Chicken Fiasco was a valid reason. There was certainly smoke, lots of smoke, and it was certainly a BAD THING®. But it's now been over a week, and the house barely has any smoke smell anymore, so there is literally NO reason for the alarms to be having fits anymore. The new alarms are somewhat more "hi-tech" looking as well. No more large white lozenges on the wall. These look more like blobs of marshmallow fluff.

They better work. I'll be putting them up this weekend.

Mr. Nibbles takes a shower?

Mr. Nibbles is a little grey squirrel who hangs out on the top of the fences around our back yards/gardens. I call him Mr. Nibbles because he LOOKS like a Mr. Nibbles. (Stock Photo - this is NOT the real Mr. Nibbles, but it might could be his cousin Phil.)

Usually he looks very cute and fluffy, and scampers ahead of me along the fence as I go in or out of the gateway. I talk nice to him, and although he remains respectfully far from arms length away, he doesn't scamper frantically, but hops along as if he knows I won't hurt him.

Today, however, part of me was a little afraid. Perhaps there was no reason, but Mr. Nibbles was soaked. Wet thru and thru, his tail looked like a bottle brush, and he looked a little fierce.

It's been raining a lot here lately, sometimes with some really heavy drenchpours that seem to come out of nowhere - and I guess that I would be grumpy too if I got into one of those, but Mr. Nibbles was also a little less "wary" - I got awful close before he scared me enough that I stopped - pointed to where I was headed and suggested he hop on down.

He did hop that way, so I continued on, talking to him the whole way, and got through without incident.

I hope he is ok. I hope he is not sickly or something bad. I hope he is just angry and wet.

We have a bumper crop of skunks in the neighborhood this year. Every night one of them goes off. It is not nice to wake up to the fragrance of Eau de Pepe LePeu.

I hope Mr. Nibbles is all right...

Ginormous Gophers Take Over My Subdivision

Film whenever I get around to it... (edit: Photos Below Now!!)

There are ENORMOUS holes all over the subdivision. Surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape on sticks and covered (partially) by weatherbeaten plywood slabs. There are small hills next to them. One can only assume there are exceptionally HUGE gophers invading the subdivision!

Well, either that or ComEd is replacing their underground cables.

And while option 2 is probably much closer to the truth (considering that is what the guy in the hi-vis vest who was operating the digger thingy told me this morning), the mental image of ginormous gophers is much, much, much more fun to contemplate.

Photos:

Hmm. I wonder if this thing still works?

Ok, yes, I am a lazy blogger. Whatever.

There's a lot going on at work, a lot going on at home, and just so many hours in the day.

How about that Rand Paul, huh? What an interesting (Translation: Idiotic) person! Apparently he thinks that there should be NO government regulations at all on any "private business". So there should be no consequences for BP, there should be no oversight on the financial markets, there should be no reason for Woolworths to let dark-skinned people eat at their lunch counters. Take this a step further - and I do honestly believe that Rand Paul is just FINE with child pornographers - it is their private business, and if enough people are disgusted by it, it will magically go away, even without government involvement.

Did you hear that, Glenn Beck? Rand Paul supports Child Pornography!

Speaking of BP - Shame on you, British Petroleum. I for one will never again purchase gas at one of your stations, and I will make sure that the investments for my IRA do not contain any of your stock. If they do, I'll divest the holdings and go greener. Boycott BP. Please.

I remember back when I was a kid - we were taught that there were 5 "Great Lakes" in North America - but only 4 of them were actually "living". Lake Erie was dead. The fine people of Ohio had dumped so much industrial toxins into it that there were no fish, no plankton, nothing, living in what had once been a great lake. The Cuyohoga river used to catch on fire every summer (spontaneous combustion!). It saddens me greatly that although we've managed to rejuvenate Lake Erie, and the Cuyohoga river is ... well... much less polluted and not prone to conflagrations anymore, the British have managed to destroy the Gulf of Mexico. I suspect it will be "dead" for generations. *sigh*

The weather has gone from chilly to "I wish I had air conditioning" rather quickly. I also wish I had a nice outdoor grill. My old one got destroyed by the aluminum siding guys a few years back and I haven't bothered to replace it yet. Perhaps this year. I got some "greek marinade" chicken breasts from Caputos. I have a feeling they would taste awesome if they were grilled, but since I don't yet have a grill, I'll just broil them in the oven.

224 of 625 Yes, I know - I'm a sloth.

My Maserati does 185....

Wow. Never saw one of those before! An actual Maserati - driving down the street in the lane next to me. Pretty blue with silver shineys on it. I don't think it was Joe Walsh. $125,000 dollar car. Imagine that. You could buy TWO of my house for that much.

WTF it was doing in Bloomingdale is beyond me. While Bloomingdale does have it's share of lawyers and assholes and business owners (was that redundant?) it has never been what I would consider a hot-spot of Maserati ownership. Perhaps this was a STRANGER in a Maserati. Sounds like a great title for a cheap, trashy murder mystery.

I got called a motherfucker this morning. I find this interesting. Most guys don't refer to women as motherfuckers. Bitch, etc, yes - but motherfucker is usually reserved for other males. Of course, this was a wetback* who screeched it at me, so perhaps it is a cultural thing.

He was not the guy driving the Maserati. Just in case there was any confusion about that. He was the passenger in an older-model conversion van with dingleballs hanging from the top of the windshield. Not to be stereotypical or anything... At least he wasn't playing Mexican Oompah Polka.

So Comcast sent me a new modem. Apparently my old modem is antiquated. It certainly is big and clumsy and ugly as sin. So they want me to replace it with this new modem. The letter inside the box says to follow the directions in the enclosed booklet. Right. The enclosed booklet is for someone who does not have Comcast set up yet. My guess is that if I followed their instructions they'd reset my home page to Comcast.com, erase all my bookmarks, and add a bunch of annoying toolbars. So I did the online chat thing with "Jennifer" this morning who says I can just plug-n-play the new modem. Will try it tonite. Better to do it tonite than discover tomorrow that I can't get into the weekend raid group!



*Yes, I know it is un-PC for me to call him a wetback. I have no proof that he's a potential member of the Mexican Olympic Team. It is rude and unkind of me to suggest it. Unfortunately, that is the risk he took by calling me a motherucker. Paybacks are, like me, a bitch.


218 of 625. Would have been more, but I BROKE the needle!

Being Counted

This whole Census thing has me laughing. Michelle Bachmann of Minnesota (R-loonytunes) has complained that it is an "invasion of her privacy" - even though said Congressdoofus seems to have forgotten that the Census is Constitutionally mandated - and that she SWORE AN OATH to uphold and defend said Constitution in order to get her cushy job.

Apparently the criminal trespassers don't want to answer it either. I'm ok with that. See, the Census is used to determine congressional representation in the different states, and I personally don't think that the illegals deserve representation. No Representation Without Taxation!!!

Now, I don't like the idea of splitting up families, and I understand the folks who scream about sending baby Americans back to Mexico - or Poland - or Rumania - or WHEREVER - with their parents who are illegally trespassing on American Soil. I am, however, opposed to the "anchor baby" part of the Constitutional 14th ammendment. I would much prefer that the words "born to a legal resident or citizen", rather than just "born" be part of the wording. We really don't have to worry about the whole "negro slave" issue anymore, as it is no longer relevant. Emancipation Proclamation and all that.

Commuting

Stuck in the traffic jam that is the entire city of Addison this morning - and has been ever since they began road work on the Eisenhower Expressway - for absolutely no reason I can even vaguely fathom.

I am driving alongside a Porsche ragtop Carrera (sp?), a lovely little silver beastie with shiney, shiney, shiney chrome wheels. We stop, yet again, for the aforementioned unfathomable reason, and I notice that there is something red inside the shiney, shiney, shiney chrome front wheel. It looks vaguely like a McDonalds french-fry box. I am embarassed for the poor Porsche driver, in his sexy, expensive automobile that I could no more afford to insure than purchase - but then I notice that there is another red thing in the shiney, shiney shiney chrome rear wheel as well. On more intense scrutiny, it appears that the red thing has the word "Porsche" on it in white.

Probably something to do with the brakes.

However - Porsche? It looks stupid. It looks like someone stuck McFries in the shiney, shiney, shiney chrome wheels of your hideously expensive sporty automobile. Nothing says "appropriate color for brakes" than black, dears. Think little cocktail dresses and unobtrusive stereo systems and I'm sure you'll get my drift. Verstehen Sie?

Oh the apple trees are beautiful. All covered with little white flowers (that will doubtless all end up stuck to my car windshield when it rains next) - but for now, it's as pretty as the fairy lights that cover the same trees at Xmas time. One can notice these things while sitting in the middle of the road like a dead oppossum

It really is true, here near Chicago we only have 2 seasons - Winter and Road Construction.

Progression

In WoW, I belong to a "progression" group - we meet once a week and work on progressing through a very large, very difficult dungeon. It's co-operation, strategy, tactics, expertise and fun all rolled up.

IRL (In real life), I've managed a bit of progression as well. I have managed to fill the LARGE tin with cookies and mailed them off to the girl-child. I hope she likes them. The first batch are small and a few of them are kinda "burned-y" on the bottoms. The second batch are larger, totally unburnt, but not made the "traditional" way, because I couldn't find the right kind of chips. I think they'll be ok, though, because I kind of sneaked a little taste off the edge of one.

So... COOKIES AWAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!!

Kal's quilt is progressing again - I managed to get past the mental blockage that was keeping me from finishing the 2 rows I'd been working on. So, 8 of 25 rows done, or 200 of 625 squares - almost 1/3 done, and the Radio is playing "Bad, Bad Leeroy Brown".

There are just not enough hours in the day for me to do all the stuffs I'd LIKE to do along with all the stuffs I GOTTA do. This sucks, and not in the good way. I need longer days. 27 hours, maybe.

One of these days, I gotta get me a passport. I need to travel. I need to go see somewhere that isn't USA, Niagara Falls or Tiajuana. Hell, I can't even go back to Tiajuana or Niagara without a passport anymore, TYVM, George W. Asshole.

Found the charger for Dad's cell phone. Now all I need is to get him to get me the phone numbers of SPTLM and his neighbors/friends so I can program them into the phone so he has one-touch dialing.

Driving In My Car...

Without question - without the slightest hesitation - I can confidently assert that Male drivers in the State of Illinois are the most impatient, rude and annoying individuals ever to roll around this planet on from 2 to 18 wheels.

In fact, one would be tempted to call them "Fucktards".

As a matter of fact, I think I will. *sweet smile*

Stop light. 4-lane divided road. Fairly narrow lanes. Young lady stopped appropriately at traffic light. Fucktard in car behind her honking and threatening to mash her rear bumper because she won't pull up into the intersection so he can make a right turn.

Stop light. Same 4-lane divided road. Young lady doing approx. 5 mph OVER the posted limit. Fucktard behind her making hand gestures, honking, shouting himself red in the face - because there is more than a car-length between her vehicle and the one in front of her.

Never mind the fact that there is a red light. He's NOT going to get any more than a few feet further along...

All I can say is - it's worse in Indiana.

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I have very sore knees. I suspect this is due to overconsumption of caffeine, as it is a known difficulty for me. So I've cut out most of the caffeine in my life for the moment, attempting to calm down the knees so I don't have to creep up and down the stairs.

I have a headache. Caffeine deprivation headache.

I can't win.

Tall Skinny Guys and School Busses

Was a little late to work yesterday. Traffic was incredible. Considering I live out in the 'burbs and have no appreciable traffic woes usually if the weather is nice, this was somewhat unusual. However, once I got up to the stoplight in front of the children's rehab center, I found out why.

Traffic in the opposite direction was being funnelled from 3 lanes into 1 lane to bypass a collision. A Nissan Sentra had hit a school bus.

Yes. Rear-ended a school bus.

Now - how the bloody hell do you hit a schoolbus from behind? I mean, REALLY???? They are HUGE. They are BLINDINGLY YELLOW, they have flashy red lights on top.... HOW in the blazes could you possibly run into one?

The Jiffy Lube and one of the Shell (petrol) stations have these balloon skinny floppy guys in front. Some sort of blowing hot-air thing, a long, tall tube with arms and eyes and ribbon hair on top. I am not 100% certain WHY they annoy me so much, but... They really annoy me.

I suspect I am probably the only person who finds them so annoying, however. Everyone else on the planet probably thinks they are cute.

*sigh*