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!

Of Bombs and Bugs

Tom Bomb lives next door to me.  If you think that’s his real name you’re crazy.  He’s in impeccable physical shape for what his age must be.  I think he does one hundred pushups every morning with one arm.  He is always well groomed and affable and has a serious Jesus streak that comes out in preaching and other conversation.  He runs a Bible study class a couple times a week and has two students out of four hundred possible learners. 

I sat down this morning with him in the front lobby to talk for a bit.  He told me about the Big Three (Russia, China and the US having a big fight over something and soon) and then told me that Arizona is about to blow up, so is Maryland and be sure to watch Michigan.  I think he was talking about The Rapture, not football.  Tom is such a good deceiver that he believes most of what he lies about. On Monday his mother is Russian (Tom is black) and on Tuesday she’s Mexican.

He’s fun to be with in the music room with a piano (he and I) and a couple ladies with guitars jamming on Southern gospel music – which has more guts and drive than any songs I ever heard out of the mainline churches.  He and others help a lot of people, singing and playing music in hospitals and nursing homes and the occasional church where they don’t know him real well.  He visits sick people.  He is an ok neighbor, there are worse.

A lady asked me the other day, if you put a strip of sticky tape on the floor under your entrance door, would it stop bedbugs from coming in, or was it an old wives tale.  Now as far as old wives are concerned, I always wanted one who went pretty much her own way.  The companionship just isn’t the same if you sit on the balcony and smoke your pipe with your favorite cat.  Besides cats cost five hundred dollars here.

Of course sticky tape will stop bedbugs.  Kind of like those mouse and roach traps.  The bugs get their feet stuck on the tape and can’t move them.  But if the resident is playing music, rock and roll is best, they sway back and forth from left to right.  This is the origin of the Bug Dance which you can watch right below here.

It is very cold here and there’s a big hole in the ice in the middle of the lake with footprints leading to it.  I imagine somebody threw a big rock in.  Ta!

Rose died for awhile.

I just found out from one of the older residents that the limestone that the old Montgomery County court house, downtown, is built of came from the quarry under ‘my’ lake back in the 1800’s.

Rose is in the hospital and everybody has a story.  I’m confining my information to what I know is true.  She lives around the corner from me in 206 and borrowed a postage stamp from me a couple weeks ago.

She has been depressed since her sister died in the spring.  She recently was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and won’t take her medicine because it makes her sick.  She wants to die. She has had some less lucid moments in the past week where she believes that she and her family were going to be burned at the stake on December 30^th.  She has also taken to strolling behind her walker in the snow, in the median of Wilmington Avenue which is a large arterial thoroughfare.

Yesterday at 5.30 pm Rose jumped into the path of a moving car around the corner on Patterson Road and was killed.  She was clinically dead when the medics arrived.  They brought her back in some fashion after she was loaded and she’s now in Miami Valley Hospital with three serious fractures of something or other, head trauma, two severe concussions and extensive everything else..  When she is conscious she vows that she will do it right the next time.  She likely will.

The woman driving the car, who was not cited, has been left with nights of terrifying dreams and some kind of early meltdown from all this.  So would I.  Rose can have visitors if we lie about being family and then only for 5 minutes at a time.  She is 72 years old and a tall girl.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I am going to try to pry a trashy 20-year-old free for an evening of fudge and hors d’ oeuvres with the old ladies and gentlemen here.  Maybe the music will drown out the shriek of brakes.  Ta!

Smell That ??

It’s a couple days after Christmas and they tell me it’s going to warm up for New Years.  These are the same weather people who told me that Christmas was coming in on the heels of a gigantic winter storm.  New York was fooled right?  We will see. 

There are prints of human shoes on the lake ice, walking and skidding.  I think that’s ok if you trust the ice over 80 feet of water.  That’s an old quarry pit down there.  If  somebody dives in, I will have a front row seat to watch Emergency Services roar in and haul them out.  I will take pictures, my right knee limits my ability to rescue people these days.

I watched the nightly news this evening while I was eating supper.  I only watch it for something to do while I’m scarfing down the dish of the day.  It’s on a tray on my lap and I can’t really do a good book and eat at the same time.  But I think I am going to get a music stand to put the book on anyway.  The commercial news features lots of video and talking heads which are supremely useless to me because I can still remember how to make up my own mind about things.  The PBS news stations seem to grind down a 10-year rut of apologizing for Islamic people and their culture and religion.  I probably could get more intelligent programming watching The Simpsons. 

Payday is soon and I will be stocking up on some Estleman books and some Arnaldur Indridasson – fine bloody murder items and excellent reading for a good night’s sleep.  Also a bottle of Tabac by Maurer and Wirtz of Germany because the current bottle is just fumes, and fumes don’t create pheremones, don’t you know.  Prada would be better but that will have to wait until I win the lottery.  And some of the girls I run around with now and then still respond to diesel oil so there.  They are cheap dates too and live in trailers.  Ta!