Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Friday, October 29, 2010 Karate Kid As I think I've mentioned before, Trash and I try not to indulge M. Edium's passing whims; just the lingering ones. So it was with gymnastics, so it was with Bucky the hamster, so it was with karate. You'll notice that last item in the list isn't a hyperlink, because I haven't told the story yet. Which I'm about to do now. We had actually been considering signing him up for karate at the same place where he has his gymnastics classes, but decided against it because a) it wouldn't have worked well with his schedule, b) it's farther away from our house than a full-time karate school, and c) those people have enough of our money as it is. So in August, Trash brought him to the dojo for his first class. Even though he'd been requesting karate lessons for months, we weren't at all sure how they was going to go, given M. Edium's well-documented reluctance to do…well, anything that isn't his idea. But Trash said it went well. Then, a class or two later when I brought him, I saw for myself that it went well. I could also see that when his sensei -- a fifth-degree black belt who is the closest thing to a real-life Jedi Knight M. Edium has ever met -- presented him with his white belt, the kid was hooked. But that wasn't all. There were…unexpected consequences. Soon Trash learned that lots of parents sign their kids up for karate for reasons we knew nothing about. She filled out a questionnaire on which one of the items was why we were enrolling him. Her pen floated on past expected answers like "to help my child deal with bullies" and "to help my child get more exercise" all the way past surprising answers like "to help my child learn to stop fighting" and "to help my child with his/her attention issues," all the way down to the blank next to "other," where she wrote, "so he'd stop bugging us about it." So it's obvious that we didn't know about any of those other reasons. But we noticed a difference in him almost right away. And so did the teachers at his Montessori school. This is a boy who, during the graduation ceremony in May, refused to get up and come to the front of the room when his name was called. Twice. But suddenly, he was doing his own show-and-tell presentation, rather than using his teacher as a megaphone. Something about taking off his shoes, putting on a wrinkly white cotton uniform, and walking into a room where a large man tells him exactly what to do with his body for thirty minutes has given him confidence. I credit some of this to gymnastics. He started that in January, and back then we noticed an almost immediate drop in the frequency with which he face-planted for no reason whatsoever. I think a lot of the coordination and balance he's picked up every Wednesday since then translated into the karate arena, giving him something of a head-start over the kids whose moms checked the enrollment questionnaire box next to "to keep my child from face-planting for no reason at whatsoever all the goddamn time." But confidence seems to be a by-product for the other kids, too. And so does another thing. You know how sometimes kids that age will get so wound up that all you can do is go Lloyd Dobler on them and scream in their face, "YOU MUST CHILL!" Well, now all we have to do is snap, "Chunbi!" and he freezes in ready position. I admit that it's sometimes hard not to use this power for evil. My dad noticed it too, when he came to see M. Edium test for his white-with-gold-stripe belt. "That's the longest I've ever seen him stand still," he said. And compare his graduation non-march with his first tournament, in which he was called up first and was put through his paces while watched by eight other kids and more grownups than I could count. He got up there and he did it, and he can prove it.  So domo arigato, karate. Yes, he'll be able to kick my ass when he's eight, but right now it feels worth it. posted by M. Giant 5:32 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:This is one of the coolest things I've read all month. Congrats to M.edium! What a great trophy.
By Wednesday, October 27, 2010 The Stand M. Edium's always looking for ways to raise a little cash, whether it's doing household chores or trying to sell his parents' stuff to other people, so it's only natural that he wanted to open a lemonade stand. Except for how we live across the street from a high school. And except for how he decided to do it in the morning while the kids were on their way in. And except for how he figured that on a chilly October morning, he'd have better luck selling coffee and cocoa instead of lemonade. Such a genius idea I wish I'd thought of it. But like any venture capitalists, Trash and I were only too happy to subsidize the genius of someone else. So a few weeks ago, on a regular Costco run, M. Edium and I picked up a big bag of coffee, a big box of cocoa pouches, and a few hundred fuzzy coffee cups. I made some cookie dough, so he could sell cookies as well. And then there was too much other stuff going on that week so we blew it off. 99% of success in business is not bothering when it's too inconvenient, you know. But finally, we decided to go ahead a couple of Fridays later, when all we had going on that week was his birthday on Tuesday and his birthday party the next day and our jobs and some unfinished home-improvement projects and a minor skirmish in the northern suburbs. And so it was that before the sun was up, I was threading together extension cords from the back of the neighbor's house on the corner (who leased M. Edium the retail space for one dollar, although he didn't know he was getting the dollar until later) to the long folding table I'd borrowed from our other neighbors. Trash had her new 60-cup coffee machine up and running, and a Tupperware cash box pre-stocked with plenty of singles and quarters (all items had the same price point of 50 cents), and I'd baked three dozen cookies the night before (saving the rest of the dough for making warm cookies in the morning). I was still bringing stuff out there when I saw M. Edium talking to his first customer in the minutes before the sun came up. Fortunately it was his aunt, so I don't think the lack of preparedness harmed business. We had also gotten our neighbors up the street involved, the ones with a daughter who's a year younger than M. Edium. They made the cocoa and the Rice Krispies bars, which they brought down in a wagon after the sun was up. "Oh, wait, there's no school today," the dad said. Fortunately he was joking. The first customers were actually grown-ups; school faculty and employees who weren't all that interested in getting their change back (especially upon seeing the sign reading "50% of all proceeds go to charity"). Which was good, because the kids didn't seem to be coming through. I blame myself for this. I had meant to print out and post signs around the block notifying the kids who walked to school that there would be treats for sale at our corner that morning, but didn't get around to it until the previous afternoon. As a result, most of the teenagers left for school without having carefully budgeted the extra time and cash to shop with us, as I know they otherwise would have. I didn't stick around for long, because with two moms on hand to handle the cash and food while the kids acted as barkers (arguing a bit about which of them got to go after the cars and which of them got to go after the pedestrians), there wasn't much need for me. But after school started and I went back out to help pack up, I saw that M. Edium is the kind of merchant who stands behind his product. Which is to say that he had spilled cocoa all down the front of his sweatshirt. I also learned that the gross for the morning was $37.68 (not sure where the extra 18 cents came from). So rounding up, that meant ten bucks to each of the kids and twenty to Second Harvest, because we rounded up. And that's gross, not profit, because after laying out for the ingredients and the new coffee pot, we actually spent about twice that. But that's the venture capitalists' problem, not the entrepreneurs'. Still, it's just as well that he'll probably be a scientist instead. posted by M. Giant 5:13 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:M.Edium needs one of these: http://www.slashfood.com/2010/10/28/Bike-caffe-food-trucks-for-coffee/
By Congratulations to M. Edium in his first (?) venture. He's quite impressive, but I think most of the credit goes to you and Trash for supporting his "dream".
By Sunday, October 24, 2010 Commuter's Lament Part 2 The nice thing about having your car die when you're on your way back from a gathering of coworkers in a western exurb is that your coworkers are also on their way back. Which didn't occur to me until I called Trash from my dead car and she already knew it was dead. Which was because one of my coworkers had seen me and tried to call me, but only had my home number and not my cell number in her phone. So she got a hold of Trash instead. Which was how Trash knew I was in trouble. She also told me that my coworkers, who hadn't seen me until after they were already committed to getting on the freeway, were turning around and heading back to help me out. By this time, I had squeezed just enough life out of my car to get it out of the turn lane and onto the shoulder, but not where I could leave it overnight. Fortunately, there was a school parking lot a block away. Close enough to push, in other words, if it hadn't been uphill. Fortunately I'd stalled out in front of the home of a guy with a pickup, who towed me out of traffic so that my coworkers could drive me back to their hotel -- close to the office, and also closer to my house, so our friend Bitter could get me home from there. My boss said it was a good team-building exercise. I said I wished; it would be nice if we showed up at the office at the next morning and my boss's boss said, "Nice job" and handed me a bundle of wires. Unfortunately, there was still the question of my getting to the office the next day. We all had to get there pretty early, before M. Edium could get dropped off at school, which meant I couldn't take Trash's car. Luckily Chao (who started at our company a few months ago, I think I forgot to mention) was willing to pick me up and give me a ride. But that still left the matter of my car's corpse mouldering in an exurban parking lot. And unfortunately, because I was in training and meetings all day, it fell to Trash to arrange for it to be towed to a garage. Which she then couldn't find because it had moved for some reason. That's her story more than mine, although if I still had them I could reconstruct it for you from some very frustrated voice mails and text messages on my cell phone. Fortunately my car was all ready to go by the end of the day, with a brand-new fuel pump that made me feel a lot better about never having the alternator replaced. Remember when the bus dies in Priscilla: Queen of the Desert and Hugo Weaving is unable to determine that it's the fuel pump? I always wondered if I would have been able to do any better. Now I know. I also know what it's like when a fuel pump dies, especially because it happened again on the way home from the garage. At least this time I was able to coast to the top of an exit ramp rather than coming to a stop in the middle lane. So anyway, between waiting for a tow back to the garage and checking back in and waiting for the loaner car (a rusty white Oldsmobile about which the manager said, "Be sure to get this back to us, it's our chick magnet"), I got home a couple of hours late, at which point -- on top of everything else -- I discovered that my DVR had barfed and not recorded Big Brother for reasons unknown. Realizing that I couldn't do my freelance work that night was even worse than realizing I cared when my DVR doesn't record Big Brother. It turned out that the fuel pump they'd put in my new car was defective, lasting just long enough for their test drive to a southern exurb and back and then long enough for me to get the two miles to that off-ramp. The garage got it straightened out, of course, at no further charge, and offered me a free oil change, which I can't wait to tale them up on the next time I need one, in 2013. In the end, my car problems lasted almost exactly as long as the amount of time I temporarily went back to being an office drone. One good thing about this: since we've both been working at home, Trash had been floating a few suggestions about us becoming a one-family car. She hasn't brought that up again. posted by M. Giant 5:38 PM 4 comments 4 Comments:Every time I think about breaking down and finally buying car, I read something like this. I'm glad I live somewhere with decent public transportation so I can do without.
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I think you meant one-car family, in that last bit?
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I win! I had my fuel pump die while on a freeway on ramp (thankfully I was able to get my SUV onto the shoulder). WITH a dead cell phone.
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It always makes me happy to see something good come from something challenging.
By Wednesday, October 20, 2010 Commuter's Lament Have I mentioned how much I love working at home? I've been doing it for about two and a half years now and I never want it to stop. It fits with my schedule, it allows me more time with my family, and it has given me the chance to really push the envelope when in comes to the neglect of personal grooming. Pretty much the only downsides are that I go through socks a lot faster, everyone at the office knows it was me who stunk up the bathroom, and once I broke a guitar string during work hours. So I didn't really need to appreciate it more than I already did. But something happened to make me. Of the many things I miss least about going into the office, one of the worst is all the time wasted getting ready and getting there in the morning. With the current arrangement, I often start the workday before getting dressed, eating breakfast, peeing, or getting my eyes properly in focus. And then I stop working after a few minutes, but the new e-mails I got overnight (which average about 0.09 per day) are checked, yo. Then, after two years of telecommuting, I had to go into the office for a couple of days. While I was looking forward to seeing coworkers I hadn't seen in years, and meeting the newer ones I'd never met, I couldn't help minding a little bit. Here I was going to have to wear pants in July and try to remember where I'd last seen my shirts with buttons, not to mention my toothbrush, razor, car keys, and shoes. One nice thing was that with everyone on my team in town for the first time…ever, my only Minnesota-based coworker hosted a little get-together at her house in a western exurb. So I not only got to meet new people, sort of, I got to see new places. It was a lovely evening. However, at the end of it, when I was driving home, my car quit on me. In a turn lane to get on the freeway, which is the fourth-worst place to have your car quit (the other three being, in ascending order, on the on-ramp, on the freeway, and in a horror movie). I thought, Dammit, I knew I should have had that alternator replaced. Everyone told me they go out at 70,000 miles. But I thought I might still be within the standard deviation, with my odometer at 115,000. I confess I'm not entirely clear on what "standard deviation" means, any more than I understand the concept of "alternator." So anyway, after sitting there cranking it until the dome light faded and the clicking of my hazard lights sounded more like someone flicking a playing card, I realized I was going to have to call for help. Luckily my cell phone was in my pocket and fully charged, and had my home number programmed into it so I didn't have to try to remember what it was (you never call home if you never leave it, after all). Trash answered on the first ring. "Are you having car trouble?" she asked without preamble. I looked at my phone, wondering if it had sprouted a GPS tracker and a webcam. "How did you know?" I asked in wonder. She told me -- in part two of this entry. posted by M. Giant 12:47 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:NOOOOOOOOOOOO - don't make us wait.......
By Monday, October 18, 2010 Well Preserved A couple of weeks ago, M. Edium had his school pictures at kindergarten. He insisted on wearing a white shirt and tie for the photo. Since he goes to afternoon kindergarten, and eats lunch at Montessori, we thought it best if one of us went to his school and helped him change after lunch. That way, we thought, maybe the short would still be mostly white by the time the photo was taken. He also needed help with his tie, even though he thought he had it under control, buttoning his shirt save the top two buttons and then hanging the clip-on tie from the third button. Obviously I made him promise to have someone help him with his tie when it was time to take the photo. And even so, we may find ourselves looking forward to retakes of him in a simple t-shirt. But that wasn't the scariest part. Not even close. When I got there, he was carrying around a catalog that his teacher, Mr. N. had received. He wouldn't let go of it, so all I could see was that he was showing me photos of lizards, frogs, crickets, and other uncuddly animals. And he was asking if we could get some of them. I was distracted with the task at hand as it was, so all I really said was no, we have enough pets as it is, we really don't need any more. Then M. Edium said something that I was certain I heard wrong, but he was still excited about the catalog. His teacher, Mr. N. had told him he could take it home. While M. Edium and I were waiting for the kindergarten bus to show up, Mr. N. talked about the catalog as well. He explained how M. Edium was always picking it up to look at, and Mr. N. had finally said he could take it home. There wasn't anything in it he wanted, after all. But then Mr. N.'s Sri Lankan accent became a little difficult to follow, because I knew I was hearing him wrong as well. Finally M. Edium released his death grip on the catalog long enough for me to finally get a look at the cover, and the two words that sent a chill up my spine: "Preserved Specimens." So when I thought M. Edium had responded to my protests against getting another pet, I had correctly heard him saying, "No, they're dead." And Mr. N. had been talking about things being shipped in a vacuum seal that you don't want to open before you're ready. As I paged through this chamber or horrors in full-color print, I realized that maybe the lizards and frogs were sort of cuddly after all. At least in comparison to such items as the skinned cats, beef eyes, and pail o'fetal pigs. Now that I realized what I was looking at, I told M. Edium no even more emphatically than I already had been, which was pretty emphatic. When it was time to pick him up from kindergarten, my mind hadn't changed. But neither had his. The whole way to the car, he kept saying, "We need to go on the dot com and order them. We need to type it in and it'll come. Come on, dad. Come on, dad. Come on!" And I kept saying, "No. No. No." But somehow, I don't know how, on the way home he came up with the angle that would win over his mom, to whom I hadn't even bothered to mention this. He said to her: "But you never say no to science!" Long story short, soon we'll be expecting some ten eighteen-inch earthworms and a frog. Why not just dig up some worms from the yard, you ask? Because M. Edium doesn't want to kill anything. Even the worms he finds on our property are his friends, with names and everything. Their names are all Wormy, but that's hardly relevant. These worms are fine to dissect, because they're already dead. In fact, they died peacefully, in an earthworm hospice, where caring and attentive nurses helped ease the transition from worm to worm food. The only thing is, they have to be delivered to the school where the biology product catalog was sent. We'll have to pick them up, but I say it serves Mr. N. right. posted by M. Giant 11:19 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:
So hang on a minute here: you actually intend to do at-home dissections of these specimens?
By Tuesday, October 12, 2010 Wheels Go Round Everyone knows hamsters have to have a wheel in their cages, but I always thought that was only so when one of their rare urges to exercise strikes, it's ready and waiting for them. It's not like a hamster can signal, "Garcon, my wheel sil vous plait." But I always assumed that those wheels spent most of the day sitting idle. Maybe because they're so damn squeaky. Or maybe that's how they got squeaky. Chicken/egg, you know? All I knew is that I never saw a hamster spending any significant amount of time on its wheel, either at pet stores or at friends' houses. If I was lucky enough to see one jog a few steps, it was a rare spectacle on the order of a transit of Venus. While on Venus. That has not been the case with Bucky. Maybe it's just different because we live with him, and don't experience him in three-minute morsels of time like with every other pet rodent I've ever met. And it might also be different because he lives in M. Edium's room. Where the baby monitor is. No, I know we don't technically need a baby monitor any more, now that M. Edium is six freaking years old. In fact, it stopped being a baby monitor some years ago and became a delivery system for M. Edium's imperious (and yet futile) post-bedtime requests. But with Trash and I working on the main floor in earshot of the receiver, it also became a way for us to hear when Bucky was on his wheel. Or, on rare occasions, when he wasn't. It was most remarkable in the first few weeks after we brought him home. The monitor would transmit and amplify the noise if his wheel (plastic, and thus not squeaky, thank God) into our workspace so steadily that only his infrequent pauses for breath kept it from fading into background noise. Trash kept sending me up to check on him, thinking he was going to have a heart attack. Like, what as I going to do, check his blood pressure with a cooked pasta ring, or defibrillate him with a nine-volt battery? I checked anyway. During one of these look-sees, it occurred to me that a lot of energy was just going to waste. I looked at that wheel spinning incessantly, and I thought, that's a lot of energy that's going to waste. Isn't there some kind of hamster-wheel generator you can buy? Well, no, but you can build one. That is to say, it's been done, by people more technically savvy than me. After finding that site, I saw how much work it would be an almost immediately lost interest. It's the "almost" part that worries me. Because after finding out that it was possible, Bucky's wheel stopped sounding to me like RrrrrRrrrrRrrrrRrrrr and more like RrrrrloseRrrrrrloseRrrrr. I mean, I know he's not going to light the city or anything, but in exchange for the food we give him, could he at least charge my cell phone? First thing's first, I guess. Maybe getting power out of his hamster wheel isn't as much of a priority as figuring out how to make him stop crapping in it. A spinning wheel is cute. A "centri-poo-ge" is not. posted by M. Giant 9:55 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:When I was a child in the 1970s, my hamster's metal wheel squeaked at just the right frequency to stand in for the remote control for our tv. We would never have known, since the hamster lived in the basement and rarely ran in his wheel when anyone was around, except that my older sister moved home and had to sleep down there. The tv randomly turning itself on and off though the night freaked her out completely.
By Sunday, October 10, 2010 Going Down I think our downstairs bathroom is the one we've done the most work on in the whole house. We've replaced pretty much everything in there since we moved in except for the bathtub, the sink, and the medicine cabinet, although years ago I repainted the last one and cleaned the other two. Which reminds me, I realized that after spending half of last summer updating you on my ceiling replacement project, I never posted a photo of the finished product. I still don't have one, but I can tell you that it's a smooth, flawless expanse of white, like so: Anyway, the new ceiling, new wallpaper section, and the new shower surround just made our old bathroom floor look even worse. Well, those improvements and our own shame. Years of M. Edium's careless bathing had sent splashes over the edge of the tub and under the yellow linoleum, through which a spreading layer of black…uh, material…was increasingly visible. Trash and I agreed that it needed to go; we only disagreed on when. I thought I should rip it out as soon as possible; she thought I should do it sooner. On the week scheduled for the renovations, I thought I'd spend an hour peeling up the linoleum right before the new floor went in, in order to minimize the bathroom's downtime. Trash talked me out of that, and two mornings before, I headed in there with a hammer and a screwdriver and a crowbar, expecting to be done in time for breakfast. Even though I'd already eaten it. An hour later, I was glad I'd listened to Trash. Sure, the linoleum had come up easily where was stained, and so did the section of particle board under that, but the rest of the floor appeared to have been nailed, stapled, bolted, epoxied, and incanted into place. Soon Trash was in there with me, attacking the linoleum with putty knives, utility knives, kitchen knives, machetes, and ice axes. And once we got the linoleum up, then it got ugly. Because then there was the rest of the particle board to deal with. And believe it or not, Dr. Jellyfinger, whose shoddy workmanship I've been living with for almost half my life, decided to make the damn bathroom floor the place where he went the extra mile. As in an extra mile of staples, nails, screws, and baling wire holding the wood down. Dude never heard of gravity? So that was a whole other project, pulling up staples and nail heads with pliers whose jaws often couldn't even fit between them, they were so close together. The challenge, as Trash and I learned while M. Edium was dispatched to spend most of the rest of the day with our friends up the street, was that while some areas were loose and came up effortlessly (which coincided with the edge of the tub and where the sink turned out to have been leaking for an unknown period of time), others seemed to have layers that were super-glued together. By the afternoon, I was wanting to take a power saw to the whole floor. But tearing out an old floor is like an archaeological dig; no matter how long you spend scraping away, you never know when you're going to hit something you want to keep. The last thing I wanted to do was damage something that would have been otherwise salvageable, leaving nothing to attach the tiles to but the basement rafters. Finally, after removing the toilet and the vanity, we were able to figure out that under the linoleum, the particle board, the vinyl tile, more particle board, and several layers of plywood glue together, was the original subfloor, which was undamaged either by M. Edium's baths or the previous occupant's incompetence. By then it was just a matter of prying up the bottom layer of old plywood with brute force. After completing this task, I was prepared to take on the whole world -- as long as that world was in the Matrix and I could take it on with my mind, because my body barely had enough energy for a nap. Two days later, the guy came to install the tile for us. Did a fantastic job. Even better news: I'd been toying with the idea of tearing out the old kitchen floor -- that's right, the same one whose replacement I recounted in this space eight and a half years ago -- and replacing it with something a little more durable. After this project, we've decided that we can live with it the way it is for a while longer. Indefinitely, perhaps. posted by M. Giant 12:42 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Wednesday, October 06, 2010 Violated I got a traffic ticket on the last week-plus, multistate road trip we went on, back in 1999, so I was reasonably certain I was going to get one this summer. We'd be going through eleven states and countless counties, and I could just see myself getting pulled over in Iowa trying to make it from any one point to another in under an hour, or running smack-dab into a speed trap somewhere in the winding roads of the Ozarks, or getting arrested for no reason in My Cousin Vinnie country, or finally falling victim to the dreaded Beloit-Hudson corridor in Wisconsin, a state where speeding revenue is outstripped only by that from cheese and Packers crap. But we made it through unscathed. 2,500 miles, and I returned home with an unblemished driving record. Well, no new blemishes, at least (I wrote about the old ones back when there was still such a thing as Hissyfit.com). There was one close call, in Memphis. We were getting off the freeway to head back to Graceland, because the digital camera had capriciously refused to save the photos of M. Edium and me outside the gates and we go back to get some new ones. At the bottom of the exit was a traffic light, which turned yellow when I was still three seconds away from it. Which wouldn't have been an issue had it been a three-second yellow, but since it turned out to be a one-second yellow, the light turned red when it was too late for me to stop and I blew right through it. I was sure the police officer waiting on the cross street for that very light was going to bust me, but his flashers never even flickered. Maybe Graceland gets its name from a magical field of traffic clemency that somehow surrounds it. Whatever the case, I'd gotten home without a single violation in the equivalent of several years of Minneapolis driving, which I thought should count for something. I'm still waiting for my medal, though. So we were back in town all of a week and a half when one night the three of us were driving home from Trash's dad's house in Eden Prairie. Coming around a curve on the freeway, I spotted a figure with a radar gun standing on the overpass we were about to go under. Even though I was staying even with traffic, I tapped the brakes anyway, but it was too late; traffic was getting pulled over. When the flashers went on behind me, I had to drive another quarter mile before I could find an available patch of shoulder to park on. It was like being back at the U of M. M. Edium was so scared at first that he talked about it for the rest of the ride home, and most of the rest of the month. Me, I was just annoyed. I know I wasn't going at the speed the officer said they clocked me at, and there was no way the officer who'd pulled me over was the same one who'd been operating the radar gun. For all I know, the latter had it set to kilometers. So I'm going to dispute the ticket. Years ago -- many, many years ago, when I had that string of (mostly) unfair moving violations, I learned that you should always fight a ticket, even if you're guilty, which I'm not -- at least not as guilty as they said I was. Otherwise, if you get another that's even more unfair, you've got no recourse to fight it because you've got a record. Which was fair, back in the day, but I've been a much more careful driver in my thirties (and in my forty) than I was in my twenties. Especially when M. Edium was born. When I first started going everywhere with a tiny human in back, I actually toyed with getting one of those "Baby On Board" signs -- not because I obnoxiously wanted people to be more careful around me, but because I wanted them to understand why I was driving so lamely. If there had been signs that read "Baby On Board, Which Is Why I'm Driving Like A Half-Blind Grandmother From The Seventeenth Century," I totally would have bought one. That's why this ticket rankles. When I go in for my appointment, I'm going to argue that I haven't had a ticket in either nine or ten years -- see, it's been so long I don't even remember -- and they should just wipe this one off the record in recognition of my decade-or-so of exemplary (as far as they know) driving. I'll even be willing to forgo the medal. posted by M. Giant 7:14 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:
One time my dad was on a work trip and got pulled over in a different state. When my mom called to ask them where to send the payment, they said they were glad she called, they couldnt read the officer's handwriting and were unable to tell who the ticket had been made out to.
By Monday, October 04, 2010 Food Chain As previously mentioned, M. Edium had been agitating for another pet for some time. Like lots of children, he's learned that the key to getting what he want is to make sure certain key words are included in the request. In this case, the majority of his entreaties for a new animal incorporated the vital phrase, "when the cats die." Yes, we've been a cat household ever since we lived in apartments that didn't allow dogs, and of course M. Edium loves the cats. He picked out Exie himself and everything. But he's been hoping for a non-feline pet of his own for a year or so. You know how it is when you have a kid. Every week he wants something different for his birthday or Christmas, so when it's time to do the actual shopping it's impossible to remember what he actually wants (although last month he asked for a skateboard and a pogo stick, which I'm going to remember because at least those will keep him active and busy, until he crashes and burns, which will keep him in bed). And yet there are common threads. He wanted either a turtle or a small rodent for quite some time, which we always refused on the grounds that the cats will eat it. But as often happens, our resistance to an idea of his turns out to be unfounded. In this case it's because Phantom and Exie have proven to be really shitty predators. I think many of us cat owners like to flatter ourselves that our domestic felines aren't all that removed from their killer counterparts in the wild, that if the size differential were reversed, we'd be feeding Fluffy not with carefully measured kibble but with our own giblets. It was natural for us to assume that if one of the cats got even a glimpse of Bucky, the only questions would be 1) how much would they play with him before eating him, and 2) whether they'd yak him back up on M. Edium's upper or lower bunk. When we first set up Bucky's cage on M. Edium's dresser -- which is five feet high -- we declared his bedroom a cat-free zone, at least when we weren't in there with them. We'd check the room for cats and close the doors behind us whenever we left the room. This lasted about three days, which is when we noticed that the cats didn't seem even remotely aware of Bucky's existence. This got boring, so eventually we decided to just hold the cats up and let them see him. Their reaction upon seeing what I'm sure they thought was a mouse (given that their grasp of taxonomy isn't sufficient for them to distinguish between a moth and a dust bunny) puttering around in a cage was immediate and galvanizing: Whatever. Put me down now. During a couple of tornado warnings, when all six of us were in the basement, Bucky's cage sat on the sofa table. Exie watched him with interest, but no apparent hunger, and eventually got bored. Bucky, who jumps with fear if you talk too loud, move too quickly or drop his cage on the floor, didn't seem to alter his routine at all. At least, not to the extent that I've been able to determine a routine. The other night, Exie managed to get up onto the narrow strip of real estate between the front of Bucky's cage and the edge of M. Edium's dresser. Somehow balancing his large furry ass, he sniffed at Bucky curiously. Bucky, face to face with a mass of teeth, claws and fur a hundred times his size, just sniffed back. I think at one point, their noses actually touched between the bars. I may have misjudged the situation. Perhaps one day Bucky will eat all of us. posted by M. Giant 7:02 AM 2 comments 2 Comments:My pet rat used to bite at the cats' noses if they were stupid enough to sniff around his cage. When he was out and scampering around the living room, they wouldn't even get close. They were afraid of him!
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I had a hamster when I was 10 or so - my rodent-despising mother eagerly awaited the day our Siamese cat would take it out.
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