Blew it right down the street....

We had a hell of a storm here last night about 9 or so.  The first time in years that I put my book down during a storm and walked over to the window and just watched it.  An hour and fifteen minutes of storm with lots of lightning and twenty continuous minutes of hail which made a lot of noise bouncing off my air conditioner.  There are some pictures here, none of which were taken by me, they were viewer submissions to one of the local TV stations.

I live about half a mile from the point of the most damage (Woodman and Woodbine for those who live in Dayton) and there were a lot of traffic lights out this morning.  Some roofs came off newer apartments.  Thank God for my solid 1960's building.  I think a couple windows blew out on the upper floors and I know some screens came off.  No dents in the top of my car from the hail, if there were I would have left them there as souvenirs. More hot and humid today.  Maybe more storms tonight.  I have a couple good books ready if the promised entertainment doesn't materialize.  Ta! 

Poodles, Fire, Beggars and Traffic.

I got my favorite and only nurse riled up last night when I told her the news story about the guy who tried to beat his wife with the family poodle.  (The dog died, she had minor bruising, he's in jail).  Nurse jumped out of her chair and started screaming about family violence, God, white slavery and something else I didn't get because I walked away laughing.  She launched!  Well I thought it was a hoot.  If I were the cop that got called to this I would have requested a photographer before I even went in the house.  Uh, watch out who you get your medical advice from.  She may hit you with a dog!

                                                         


The Canada geese are gone.  I think somebody from the new management brought a team in the middle of one night and absconded with them.  Things are looking up! 


And we had a fire call one day last week.  The alarm went off.  I felt my door to see if it was warm (it wasn't), opened it and didn't smell any smoke, and went back to sleep.  My afternoon nap.  In a few minutes two engines and a ladder pulled up along with a Chief.  I am told.  Apparently one of the nice old ladies on another floor put some eggs on to boil and then got in her car and went to the Dayton Mall.  The burnt eggs exploded all over the kitchen and part of the entrance way and the entire floor smelled like somebody tried to fast-cook a possum. With fur.  I gather something like this happens about once every 2 months or so.  Thank God for a steel and concrete building!


                                                                                         

                                                                                    

The City of Dayton has a new ordinance.  Homeless people ( panhandlers to the landed gentry) can no longer stand on street corners or freeway entrances and beg "Will work for food."  Or, "Not hungry, just want beer money."  The Chief of Police whines that they don't want people stepping out in front of cars and getting hit.  Most people really know that the landed majority just don't want their neighborhoods looking tattered around the edges. I think that for every stop or arrest the officers make, the Chief should buy that person (homeless) one decent meal.  If he is willing to afford it.  What you see is not what you get.....

Same deal with the Red Light Traffic Cameras.  Some few have been in operation for 8 or 9 years and more are being installed.  "It is to save lives" say the City leaders.  Oh for heaven's sake!  It was about money then and it's about money now.  The City gets $55 for every red light ticket (even though they don't have the personnel to identify and collect the offenders.  Some collection agency is doing it now).  When I was a little kid I was told that it was a sin to lie.  I must have been the only one they told.  Ta!

Why I love dead people in Iceland

If you're not fond of the occasional book you can feed this one to the birds.  I love dead people in Iceland because that country suddenly is producing mystery authors of some talent.  The plots are all murder but the locations, language, customs, values and myths are as different as a bat from a buffalo.  Yrsa Sigurdardottir has written a couple fine stories with great skill, including My Soul To Take, and a fellow named Arnaldur Indridason has a good handful in print, of which my favorite is Jar City.  

                                                                   

I am having great fun reading these.  The Swedes have come up with some equally capable new authors and there is a homicide in Lapland called Snow Angels,  a land that is totally dark twenty four hours a day in winter.  Or if you want something grubby and familiar to read, go to the grocery and get a copy of the National Enquirer.


An idea for a greeting card from a dead people book:

(front) "This has been a stressful time for both of us..."

(inside) "...so would you please go to the nearest piranha farm and throw yourself in one of the tanks." 


Ta!


 

Why I love dead people in England

We went from icy winter and cracked ribs to solid rain for weeks.  The ark-building shops opened up again and each ark held two cats, two dogs, two men and forty women.  Which is the approximate composition of the population here.  Now it is hot and humid and High summer is two weeks away, the longest day of the year and a work-free holiday in Sweden, Finland and Norway.  Lucky them.  

The compressor on my air conditioner crashed so, after a couple days, Maintenance brought up a swell sixty-pound job guaranteed to keep dry ice solid, make coffee in the morning and start the bacon.  And it did all that for three hours and died.  The compressor was fine but the fan refused to rotate.  Maintenance is now looking again for me for a replacement.  I have to emphasize that the air conditinoer is my responsibility, not the Complex'.  That's in the Rule Book.  But a little baksheesh goes a long way here and I will get one that works.  Free.

 

The bedbug scare is over and, over the past week, I have unpacked all my clothes and hung them back up, and replenished the contents of my dresser drawers.  The canvases and framed pictures are still sitting out because, if it cools off some, it might be fun to hang them on the walls.  ANd with this I am doing dishes, cooking, cleaning, working with addicted kids and managing an afternoon nap.  Or a morning nap some days just after breakfast when my blood sugar goes up and my eye lids go down. 

We have two House meetings tomorrow, one about bedbugs, which may be causing some problems on at least one floor. It will be sparsely attended.  And one about Medicare which will be well attended by old folks claiming Foul Operating Procedures.  Well it is a government operation after all. 
                                                       
I have lost thirty pounds since I've been here, eight months now.  This has been caused by the spring rains and stress over the loud and intrusive Canada geese.  Who have mostly flown away now but will be back in April again.  Also in the rule book there is a section about not feeding the fowl as it attracts them and they bay and honk for bread crumbs.  This morning one old biddy (did I say --tch?) was feeding an entire family of them from a large bag of something.  I think that somebody should go to her room tonight with a two-by-four and slam it into both her ears until she understands that being nice to the nice geese is not nice.  I wish it could be me.

While doing dishes this morning I invented a recipe for a gumbo of brown rice and either chicken or pork tenderloin with blackened seasoning.  I am going to make it in the crock pot in a day or so and try it out on Mabel across the hall.  She is (a fine!) 87 and could eat nails for breakfast without it affecting her.  She also uses mountains of salt on her food.  She is healthy as a horse.  She does not need a doctor. That is Mabel's picture somewhere here.  She is as suave as I am and I love having her for a neighbor.  Maybe she and I together can beat the goose-woman to death!

I am reading Charles Todd World War I mysteries and I have just watched UNSTOPPABLE which is about train wrecks and heroism.  High adventure. 

I don't know how the title fits in here, it was supposed to be for something else.  But I promised it in an earlier post, so there it is!

Ta!

I still don't have bed bugs.

I've had two critter inspections and come out clean.  So I told the fellow "Fine, DON'T come back and [fleeking] spray!"  My week is shot.  All the people who wanted to talk to me or get together last week are now phoning me and asking if I'm dead.  The apartment is a trash pit.  Tomorrow I am going to start putting things back together.  Slowly, with a nap or two in between and the phone disconnected.
                                                   
We had storms last night, very hefty ones, and the winds blew the big screens off the windows and out into the lake where the ducks used them to fish from.  Maintenance brought them back today smelling like Trout (Fishing in America, remember that old book?)
                                                          

Aging gracefully?  I'm not sure there is one.....   A 91 year old lady made eyes at me and told me she preferred Younger men.  She was wearing a sign around her neck: "Don't put your hands on me unless you mean business."  When young girls start calling you Sir, you know you're on the downhill slide.  When they tell you you're sweet and you remind them of their grandfather, you've just about hit bottom and you better find an Older Woman for yourself. When I finally hit bottom I am going to sit in the sun and dream and hit people with my cane!

More sooner or later when I get the place back into shape.  Ta!

I don't have bed bugs.

When your clothes
are in bags
you dress
in rags.

Mostly because  last week I saw a critter on the arm of my easy chair.  We're not going to use the hated word 'bedbug' because too many people are making too much money off them.  This place has 435 units and, at any given time, two or three units have the problem.  I am told.  The management is so proactive that if anybody even has a dream about having critters, they make an appointment with the bug  killers (Extermital) to do an inspection.  Which, of course, happened the next day.  I had saved the critter sealed in plastic, in the freezer, where he died from terminal retardation and the inspector agreed it was a genuine critter.  He then tore the place apart and looked in places I didn't even know I had -- and told me that if I had any critters he sure couldn't find them.  He has a degree, he should know.  Bugatory, PhB, LLC.  But said that, since I had found one on the premises, they would be treating my apartment.  Badly, from what I hear.

I have had to pack all my clothes, bed linens, bath linens, caps, jackets, boots in bags, all of which to be run through the dryer in the laundry for 20 minutes to send the critters to their reward.  And placed into new clean bags for the next four weeks (4 treatments). All my framed pictures had to be taken down and placed on display, for inspection, all the furniture moved three feet from walls (one of the guys is pretty fat...)

This past Friday was treatment day and I stayed home all day with my door open, from 7 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon.  Nobody showed to tear up the place and make it smell bad.  I reported this to the Front Office today (Monday), they got the info from the Terminators that they were here and nobody lived in that apartment.  They finally decided that I did live here and there was going to be another inspection this week.  If there were no signs of 'activity' found, there would be no treatment.  Apparently the single critter I captured got drunk one night and wandered in the wrong apartment door.


I have about 14 bags sitting on the floor.  A half dozen framed pictures.  I trip on them when I go to pee in the middle of the night.  A thrill a minute.  Extermital gets about $100 per hour.  They are driving Cadillacs to and from work.  My place looks like the great windstorm of 1937.  I can still reach my mystery books and my pipe.  All is well.  Until next visit.  Ta!

Nurse

I call Jane my Resident Nurse and Case Worker.  She has fine medical advice and knows where to get your taxes done or your hemorrhoids shrunk.  If you're a senior.  And for free.  Back in the day Jane was a fine Biker Bitch with all the appropriate habits.  She looked exactly like Faye Dunaway and had a Hungarian mother (she says closer to Transylvania than Budapest...) and a father of some eastern European type.  One day she saw the light, turned herself in to the police, got probation, completed nursing school.  Became a nurse and retired from that.  Found God.  Embraced celibacy .  Has a fabulous sense of humor.  Was married to the same guy, earlier, that one of my girlfriends was married to later.  Is now 74.

                                                               
If I write a poem here it will perfectly describe her.

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle
of her forehead.


When she was good
She was very, very good.
And when she was bad,
She was horrid.

Ta!

Pretty Quiet

I feel rushed today.  I am supposed to meet with a Rotten Kid, have new brake pads put on the car, have an air conditioner installed, for which I'm supposed to be present.  I stewed about schedules until this morning and then decided to just stop everything in its tracks. Instead I went to a tobacco shop, Kroger's and a drug store and then came home and took a nap.  The place needs cleaning and that will just have to be accomplished tomorrow.  Tonight I am lounging in ratty old clothes watching NCIS and, later, drinking chocolate milk.  Tomorrow everything will still be where it is today and I can tackle it then.  

I am learning how to eat out again.  Finances have improved considerably since I moved here and have no utilities to pay, and less rent.  I cook most of my meals because I like to cook and I'm pretty good at it.  But it's nice, for a change, to head to Frisch's or Moonlight Chili on the odd night I don't feel like working in the kitchen.

                                                      
It is Flood City in the area here.  We don't see any of it because we live in the highest part of town.  People keep driving through water covering roads and getting stuck, giving the Fire Department plenty to do.  This Senior Living is good for that.  I don't have to go anywhere.  Groceries will deliver food in a pinch for a moderate $10 fee, or I can take the Project Mobility bus to any of the big stores and let them drive around the puddles.

It's quiet.  It's raining.  I'm snugged up and happy inside and nothing much is going on.  Ta! 

All gone

A little something to cheer up your Monday. 

                                                                              

Not a good day for Osama. First, he doesn't get a Royal Wedding invite, then they blow his head off.

What Happened When my Computer Died.

It's a perfectly gorgeous spring day. Trees are flowering and budding and some are starting to leaf out. And it's starting to look like a state park again. Woodpeckers, muskrats and the feral cats are exploring under bushes on the banks of the lake. I took some sun this morning out front and a woman named Cindy made it a point to introduce herself and make sure I remembered her floor and room number. A high floor. She said I ought to come up tonight and gaze at the view with her. She is a champion bungee jumper. My mother told me to be careful around women like this. I will have my rope and safety harness with me.

When my computer died I took it to a fix-it place. It took them two weeks to tell me they had made a check of my system and it would be folly to put new money into an old box like mine without any guarantees. Whatever was on my hard drive was also unrecoverable so I took the thing home, removed the hard drive and trashed it (there was stuff on there my Mother wouldn’t approve of) and donated the remainder to a worthy cause. I didn't look for a new unit for awhile because I'm personally reluctant to jump in right away and burn up the energy it takes to start a new project. I used the computer at the public library to pay bills and check my e-mail, I missed that. I also found that I didn't like not having the morning news at my fingertips with my first cup of coffee. That got quickly replaced with a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, and the morning paper my neighbor across the hall left for me. There was no news anyway. Libya was in crisis and the congress of the United States would have done more good there than here. I wasn't bored. And I finally got around to getting a new box, a refurbished Dell with a guarantee, and all the attachments including a big flat screen for a little under $200. Now I have to hook it up to the Internet so I can cruise for pipes, tobacco, used CD's (The Doors Light My Fire to be specific) and carry on my international correspondence.

What I missed: My e-mail; morning news from the source; buying the odd thing online (possibly pipes from Germany or Poland...?) Other than that I didn't miss it much. I must spend less time cruising the net than I thought.

Since the computer died I fell on the ice once and got the wind knocked out of me, and a second time at a filling station and broke two ribs while knocking the wind out of me. During that time winter stayed around for awhile, then things warmed up a bit. The Canada geese returned (Big Rats with wings and a lot of noise...).

I think I am Russian Orthodox. I told the girls one night at the evening get-together that I never discussed my religion or my politics as I had found that was the fastest way to get into a good fight. A lot of the women here are highly committed rock-root Baptists and believe you can be saved only in a certain fashion. One wanted to know if I believed in Jesus Christ as my personal savior and I told her 'yes' but didn't tell her who all else I believed in, in case any of them were asleep up there. Then a fellow named Tom (We have a lot of Toms here...) saw the Coptic cross I was wearing around my neck (a present from a fireman buddy in Russia) and said 'I know! You're Orthodox!' 'You never can tell' I told him. The girls think I'm Orthodox and that they have cracked my secret. Most of them don't know what an Orthodox is, but they are convinced that I am one. One or two are waiting and salivating and brushing a shine on their Bibles and knowing they will catch me out some day with The Truth.

Tom Bomb, the inveterate liar and preacher, and my neighbor, was talking about stocks and bonds on his cell phone in front of us the other day --- and the phone rang! We rolled back and forth on the hallway carpet laughing out loud and Tom kept talking. He has so many schemes to try to impress people that he doesn't rmember what they all are.

Kroger's has stopped delivering day-old donuts and specialty bread on Mondays because too many fat women were fighting over them. One gal waddled into the truck before it was even unloaded and started stuffing chocolate items into a Lillian Vernon shopping bag. I'm sorry to see this, it was more free entertainment than a Bob Hope show. The fat girls will have to eat red meat and finishing nails now for breakfast in order to stay fighting fit.

I will be asking some of you for e-mail and U S Mail addresses because some of that, unfortunately, was on the hard drive which got thrown in the trash. Yes, I had all the important stuff backed up on disks but didn't plan for total shutdown so there we are. Now I am going to listen to some more Rammstein. Idon't understand German but they do some very fine hard rock! Ta!