Can You Figure Out What Happened?
see more pwn and owned
-
-
RSS Feeds
Blogroll
Comic Relief
Creative Pursuits
Engage in Controversy
Visit Some Friends
Miscellaneous Stuff, I Guess.
I really wish I were better at long-term planning. A lot of the yard work I have to do could have been done in the fall or in Spring, instead of staring me in the face now shouting the accusation, “You have the sloppiest yard in the neighborhood! Everyone with nice yards hates what you’re doing to property values!!!” No matter how long I’ve worked at silencing the inner guilt-inspiring voices, some of them still come back to haunt me!
The fish pond is low on water, so it’s the perfect time to vacuum it out and cull some of the brown shubunkins and retrieve things that fell to the bottom before refilling it - and this should be done before the marginal plants die of thirst, too.
My duct tape double is mostly stuffed, and it wouldn’t take more than a few hours to finish it, secure all the tape ends, and make a cover so I can start sewing clothes for myself that fit right. I have a pile of t-shirts that are all ready to remake creatively, but since I haven’t had the time, I hit Target and restocked on new ones.
I’ll need to run the vacuum around the house before the Smart Carpet salesman comes tomorrow, too. We’re going with the least hassle option - carpet - because it’s the thing they’re least likely to mess up installing. They said that they wouldn’t charge for new installation, but we’d have to pay for an upgrade. The thought of these guys fouling up on the installation of an even more expensive floor was too much to bear. Nobody seems to want to tell us if we’ll get any kind of credit for a less expensive floor (since carpet is generally less than laminate) but if they say no, we’re going to get the best carpet and pad they’ve got. I’ve been researching, and I’d like to get PET or PTT polyester. They’re not as plush or long-wearing as nylon brands like Stainmaster, according to the experts. However, I’ve had Stainmaster, and not only was I not terribly impressed by how well it stood up to wear, I also had a terrible problem cleaning it. Yes, the stains come out, but so does the dye. One of the reasons it’s popular is the variety of colors it comes in, but because it’s easy to dye, it’s also easy for the dye to be sucked out. I can get almost any stain out eventually, but I’m not interested in making up a matching dye so it’s handy to re-color the stupid spots. The PET and PTT polyesters are also made from recycled plastics, so I like that, too. So we shall see tomorrow.
I’ve also really been wanting to finish up my polymer clay color samples and refine my clay/fabric decoupage technique, but the art studio has been acting like a garage lately. Not only do we have the stuff that needs to be kept until we sort it and arrange it logically after we finish the walls and wiring, but we had to put litter boxes in because of Spencer’s poor hygiene habits, and all the stuff from the living room/office and bedroom had to go somewhere while the floor guys were futzing around.
I haven’t been sitting around doing nothing, though. (Well, I do, but mostly after I’m tired from NOT sitting around doing nothing all day long!) Audrey and I rode to the bike store and got baskets put on our bikes, and rode to the supermarket for a two-bike-basket-size trip. I’ve been back and forth to the pool store trying to get the sludge out of the water (I love what happens when the water pipes get cleaned in this town!) I created more yard waste by trimming a big tree out front and pulling up the junk from underneath, and have been planting and moving things. I’ve been in the car to visit a friend for a day, take the kids to the dentist up north, take them to art classes in Red Bank at Colorest, then back to drop off the art I forgot to bring for the show, then up again for the show itself, to Monmouth Feed for pond supplies, doing laundry and hanging it to dry, teaching Audrey how to do applique on one of the items we picked up when we went thrift-store shopping. . .and I did clean up a lot in the garage so I could get to my clay (that took an entire day, in between hanging up laundry!)
I think that we’re going to haul one vanload of brush over to the recycling center, then I’ll take care of the fish, and then I’ll spend the day being an artist. I see a couple of cool showers in my future. . .
The Power of Prayer. . .
Not too long ago, I passed on a story about a young girl who died because her parents were treating her diabetes with prayer. A different church attempted the same thing with young Ava Worthington, with equal success, and now Ava’s cousin has had the same results.
Fortunately, Oregon, unlike Wisconsin, has laws that hold parents responsible for withholding medical treatment from children in favor of faith healing. (In the articles from kgw, it looks like this particular church was a driving force in this law.)
Colorado had just changed their law granting exemption from prosecution for faith-healing parents when this happened:
March, 2001
Grand Junction — Charges have been filed against the parents of a 13-year-old girl who died from a common infection that turned into gangrene after her parents opted to treat her with prayer but not medicine.Randy and Colleen Bates, members of the General Assembly Church of the First Born, were issued summonses Friday on charges of criminally negligent homicide, reckless manslaughter, reckless child abuse resulting in death, and criminally negligent child abuse resulting in death.
Church of the First Born members believe there is a biblical injunction against medical treatment. They treat illnesses and injuries with prayer.
Amanda Bates, one of the Bateses’ 11 children, died Feb. 6. Someone at her home called 911 early that morning to report an unattended death. Paramedics were able to revive the skeletal youngster, and she was kept alive until evening on machines at St. Mary’s Hospital and St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver. An autopsy showed she died from complications of diabetes, which include an increased risk of infections. Amanda’s infection began with an easily treated vaginitis, which eventually spread and turned to gangrene.
Even a group called Religious Tolerance lists faith-healing sects, including their incidences of unnecessary deaths. Our tolerance, as well, should be exclusive of beliefs that cause this kind of suffering. Perhaps we must allow people to hold their beliefs, no matter how ridiculous, but they have to be held responsible for the actions they take because of their beliefs. People whose beliefs include animal sacrifice or grave robbing for human remains to be used in ceremony find themselves charged with crimes if they’re caught sacrificing animals or robbing graves. There is no reason that people who withhold medical treatment from children until they are clearly ill, even until they die, should not be charged with a crime. The evidence of faith healing’s failure as a treatment is abundant - evidence of its success is wishful thinking.
And yet. . .our tax dollars just paid for Ken Ham to speak at the every-Wednesday Pentagon Prayer Breakfast.
Despite the fact that Ken Ham is delusional, as any look at Answers in Genesis or a brief tour through his ludicrous Creation Museum shows. But our military leadership wants to hear what he has to say.
Despite the fact that the prayers of devout believers directed at specific individuals has failed to save their lives, our government supports prayer to save entire troops (who were sent into danger by the very same folks soliciting the prayers) both ideologically and financially.
Despite the fact that parents avoid simple, proven medical treatments in favor of wishing really hard end up killing their children, many states exempt them from prosecution.
Am I wrong to object to my government endorsing religion in this way? Does it not seem like letting people die is OK as long as you really wish hard that they don’t? Is doing nothing, in the form of waiting for your invisible friend to grant your wishes, a get out of jail free card?
As long as prayer is held up as a viable course of action, practiced loudly and publicly by influential people, and allowed as an excuse for people to act in otherwise inexcusable ways, it is indeed an establishment of religion. It is a violation of the Constitution, and a violation of common sense.
Congo Attacks Again
Why did this have to happen? I am not a fan of euthanizing animals, even when it’s the alternative to a protracted, painful death (a mercy, but I still feel bad), but an animal that’s dangerous and hasn’t been controlled by its owners shouldn’t be allowed to live.
“I don’t want people who were supportive of Congo (after last year’s landscaper mauling) to think they were supporting a bad dog,” Guy James said in an interview. He said Tuesday’s unfortunate encounter between the dogs and his mother-in-law “wasn’t an attack at all. It was dogs jumping.”
Right. He claims that his mother in law opened the back door, and the dogs were just jumping enthusiastically because they wanted to come in. They were so happy that they bit her head, chest, and forearm. Just a little innocent play. Oh, and they knocked Mrs. Ladd over, breaking her hip. Wait, that’s another place where the police report was wrong - according to James, his wife knocked her mother over trying to get between her and the dogs. Nice way to shift the blame, dude. Especially if Ladd dies or is severely disabled as a result, which is highly likely.
He’s telling the press that the dogs were euthanized because a judge would force him to do it anyway, and he didn’t want them stuck in a cage while the lawsuit went on. Nobody understands how delicate these sweet doggies really are, apparently.
I mean, after all they went through after that little incident with the landscaper, you can understand why they might be a bit nervous! (And look at the photo of Rivera - what a whiny baby!)
A google search on this dog returns more hits sympathizing with the dog than anything else. It’s sickening. What’s clear to me is that Guy James is an irresponsible pet owner. He has not trained them to behave, he has not made accommodations to protect people in lieu of training the dogs, or in response to the dogs’ propensity to attack. If you have an animal that responds violently and offensively to strangers and/or surprises, you need to train that animal. If the animal can’t be trained, then it must be restrained. If you can’t or won’t restrain the animal, you need to put it to death.
Did he train Congo? His wife claims that she commanded the dogs to stop attacking Rivera, to no avail. If that reflects their training, I’d say they were untrained or badly trained. Were they restrained? Well, if a guest can open a door to the house and get attacked, then the restraint was inadequate or nonexistent.
Two of the cats I’ve had in my life and one of the dogs were put to sleep as soon as it was clear they were dangerous. The first cat jumped on my sister while she was sitting watching TV, and his antisocial nature indicated this would happen again. He went to the vet that afternoon. The dog was from back in the days when you let the dog out to wander - we don’t know if he bit anyone else, but he bit someone who knew who he was, and he was put to sleep as well. A few years ago, one of our cats overreacted to provocation - I was willing to give him a chance, since this was the first time, and he had actually been hit on the head deliberately. When my daughter was snuggling with him and he sunk claws and teeth into her head, that was his last chance. If any animal of mine inflicted the kind of injury these dogs did, they wouldn’t have gotten that second chance. You can’t reason with them or negotiate.
I just wonder how long it’s going to take Guy James to get himself some more dogs to ruin with indulgence and excuses. Congo’s Law should include a provision restricting people from getting more animals - but by euthanizing these dogs before he could be charged under even this watered-down piece of legislation, James has nothing holding him back. Sadly, I’m pretty sure we’ll be seeing this man’s new dogs in the news somewhere down the line, too.
I Hate All Kinds of Marketing. . .
I was going to make this a pretty simple post, with just a couple of pictures and comments, but it took a while to get into my admin section of wordpress. . .because some shithead spammer hacked in and managed to post a link to his fake pharma site. It put a whole bunch of comments that had been marked as spam into the comments folder as well, which slowed everything down, on top of which there were 425 spam messages in the comments awaiting moderation. As always, these people take the prize for being scum of the earth.
In second place, would be the folks who are marketing to children. Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection has a post about these subhuman creatures that you should read (and watch).
So, by comparison, these next two ads are so far down on the vile and repugnant scale that they’re almost humorous. I’d imagine anyone who’s cracked open a magazine with a female demographic in the last couple of months has seen this:
Yep, those women were all 50 pounds overweight until they slipped into those jeans. They’re frickin’ amazing, those jeans. It’s like living in photoshop! Put them on, and people can see light between your thighs! Your inhumanly long, slender thighs that completely fill out pants labeled “natural fit”. Cut me a break.
Sunday’s coupon section of the newspaper is always good for reassurance that you’re feeding your family better than most of the country, but rarely does it give me a laugh as big as this did:
Oh, this has so many levels of stupid. Shall we begin with the simple ludicrousness that pirates knew anything about barbecue? I’m picturing the cook struggling to keep a grill full of hot coals from spilling all over the deck while the crew does battle with another ship, or fights nature’s fury. . .and, of course, the idea that they’d set sail for months at a time with a hold full of raw steaks, sausages, and ground beef. Yum! Moving on, because you can’t really see it in the image, I must point out the authentic pirate-y flavors of Apple Maple, Fra Diavolo, and Mesquite. Finally, you could really have fun with “Put the Arrr!!! in BBQ”. I mean, yeah, it’s short for “barbecue”, but let’s be honest - “BBQ” stands alone, so if you put an R in it, it could stand for all kinds of other things, depending on where you put it. Heh. Go on, give it a try!
Be Right Back, Quasimodo!
Beer Belly Quarter Round
Requisite Basic Bitchslapping Quiz
BTW, that parrot had better not poop on the potato salad. . .
Smart Carpet on Notice. . .
Not quite 10 months ago, I was so excited to have new floors. It was about January I started to notice the dark lines between the flooring panels. I went to a local floor place to see whether there was a product that would safely fill the gaps in my laminate floor, and was given more of an education in flooring than Smart Carpet had offered. Apparently, those gaps shouldn’t exist at all. Nor should I hear cracking noises as I walked across it. Plus, I should have been given a whole lot more paperwork with warranties and instructions, like at least more than the absolutely none at all that were provided by Smart Carpet.
The store owner suggested that I should contact Smart Carpet directly, since this was clearly not the way the floor was supposed to look or act, in his experience. So I did, and this has led to several months of appointments and visits and reports. We went from being told that this was normal when a floor was installed on concrete, that it would be fine again when the weather warmed up (Somehow warmth expels dirt from cracks?) to Smart Carpet saying it was a manufacturing defect, to the manufacturer saying it was an installation defect, and finally to Smart Carpet saying that they would come in, pull up the floor, clean up the edges, and reinstall the floor - correcting the gaps as they went.
I kind of knew something bad was coming when the replacement flooring was dropped off on Monday (to acclimate it to the environment in the house) and there were only 6 boxes and one small roll of underlayment. I knew for darn sure that there was too much wrong with the floor for this to be the solution, and sure enough, when the installers started working, I could see that I was supposed to be placated by a token gesture.
There was quite a bit of animated conversation going on in Portuguese. Nice way to make sure you can talk freely in front of the customer. They showed me how much tighter the joints were on the new planks, which was certainly not helpful because there weren’t enough of them. I pointed out that the edges on the new planks were jagged and still had gaps that would undoubtedly widen from friction as the floor was walked on. One of them left the house, made a call (in Portuguese) and then told me his supervisor would be calling. We waited for a while. He called again, then spoke to his partner, and they began reinstalling the old planks. I asked him what was going on, and he said his supervisor would call me in an hour. Then they left.
I wasn’t keeping track of the time, but the man who called me was not the one I knew as their supervisor. He had it all figured out.
I had ruined the floor myself by exposing it to moisture.
What???
He cited the fact that a couple of spots were noted on one report as moisture damage. I told him that those were specific spots where I had told the various inspectors that I had spilled water, which was then immediately wiped up but still caused damage. He said that I had used a swiffer to clean the floor, so that must have done it. I asked him why, then, was the floor just as damaged in the areas that were covered with carpet and furniture? He just reiterated that I should have used an approved laminate cleaner, so I asked him how that would be applied? Well, a spray bottle, for spot cleaning only, with an approved solution, which I should then wipe up with a dry cloth. I asked him how this liquid would not get into the cracks, but wetjet laminate floor solution wouldn’t. I asked him why, if the salesman had told me this was an easy-care floor, I should be on my hands and knees with a spray bottle and a cloth to clean it. This went on - he continued to insist that I had damaged my entire floor, in two rooms, in a matter of months, by saturating it from above. Forget that the joints were gapped and uneven with no evidence of moisture damage, forget that the salesman said it would lock tight and could be washed with the swiffer, forget that the floor makes cracking noise when you walk on it, forget that you can see tiny chips on many of the edges of the laminate, forget that there’s glue gobs all over the transition pieces. Forget all that. The floor would have stayed pristine forever if only I’d never sprayed it down with the garden hose - I told him that in order for the floor to have the conditions he was describing, that’s what I would have had to do.
So now he has “tried” to get in contact with “someone” who can “address” this “problem”, but he’s “been in meetings all day.” That’s OK, I’m trying to get in contact with someone who can address the problem, too. Like, a lawyer. We’ll see who can address the problem faster.
Sometimes. . .
it’s so hard to be nice. Yes, I’m a really nice person, sometimes disgustingly so, but I’m only human. I need to blow off steam just like anyone else, but that side usually comes out only in front of friends (who can forgive me) or on the internet (where it’s de rigeur and hardly noticed.) Bingo night usually gives all of us a chance to blow off a little snark, but last night I had to take a little retreat!
Let me give you a little exposition here first.
The end of the school year is always crazy, what with the concerts and kids’ parties and end-of-school things that I always have to do coinciding with the beginning of gardening season. There have been additional things this year, much of it relating to marching band in one way or another. I’ve been busy almost every waking moment. Ummmm. . .busy doesn’t necessarily mean productive. I have to be honest. I have done a lot of stuff, though.
Among the things I’ve been working on have been teaching myself a little more Excel, in the form of updating the band roster and getting it to have multiple tabs for different orders of the list. Hubby had to help, but I am definitely ascending the learning curve a lot on my own. The other thing I’ve been doing is honing some photoshop skills, assembling and editing images for band buttons. I thought it would be a cool thing for the kids to have buttons for orientation night that showed their section instrument. I was able to find some free clipart images of a number of instruments, but not all the ones I needed. So, it was off to Google image search, then a good amount of time trying to make photos look more like drawings, layer, resize, and skew multiple images (and then try to make them look the same so that I could then make them look more like drawings. . .) then play with the layer styles to make them look related without totally obscuring the background image. I think they turned out pretty neat.
So, I go to do the Bingo thing last night. I usually sell two different game sheets, and the money for these goes into separate boxes. However, people who are buying both usually give me a single bill to pay for them, so I need to make change and transfer money to the other box. It’s not such a big deal for me, but last night we had about 30 more people than we usually do, different jackpots, and a couple of new games. Even the cranky people still got smiles and thank-yous from me - and believe me, some of these people seem to be so stressed out by every little thing that you wonder why they even come.
Well, we get to one game, and a woman asks me how it’s played - it’s one where you have to get two bingos in two separate squares, but I don’t play this game, so we had some regulars yelling at me from the back that I was explaining it wrong. This table is our crankiest by far, but I figured I’d head over there and be all agreeable and let them explain it to me. I did this knowing it was probably a bad idea. There are certain sacrifices we disgustingly nice people have to make.
So this little group starts telling me that it’s two bingos in a column but they can be rows or columns or diagonal but it has to be two out of three and they can be in different columns but they all have to be in the same column and I’m saying wait, they don’t have to have two B columns or two N columns, so what columns are they talking about and they start screaming at me two out of the three, not the columns, it’s two bingos in the same column but they don’t have to be up and down!!! Holy crap, it could have been a comedy routine about people who don’t know how to explain things, but it wasn’t funny. I smiled and said that as long as they all knew how to play it, then we wouldn’t have to worry about anyone getting it wrong, and as I walked away they began talking about me to each other. “How can someone be that stupid?” “She’s so stupid she can’t even understand Bingo!” Mmm-hmmm. Smart enough to know the difference between stupid and deaf, which would put me a step ahead of them. . .
As it turns out, a rational person explained to me that the two bingos could go any way in two separate boxes, but that the boxes on the sheet were arranged in three rows and two columns - therefore, a bingo in row one, column one and another in row three, column two wouldn’t win, but any two rows in the same column of boxes would. Aha! Believe me, I’ve been spending enough time with Excel to know what rows and columns are, but when I see a grid, the rows and columns within that grid are the first thing I think of!
Oh, the things I would love to say and/or do to these people! The huge, steaming piles of snarkiness I could unload on them in one fell swoop! What a thrill to contemplate an act of revenge, delivered with the unbesmirchable sweetness I have perfected through years of practice! But no, what about an actual snub, a wise and witty retort guaranteed to cut them off at the knees? Why, they’d never see it coming! Perhaps I could be too stupid to be able to sell them eight of each game and give them correct change for a fifty? Maybe some choice phrases from several different languages uttered before them, followed by a sugary “Oh, you don’t know Latin? I’m so sorry. . .” The direct, in-your-face confrontation enumerating some concrete differences in our levels of intelligence and/or education just to see who exactly is stupid around here. The possibilities were swirling through my head, tempting and intoxicating.
Let’s get real, though. These people come every week, and spend an embarrassing amount of money that helps support the band. I have to deal with them only once every four weeks, and for such a short time in the grand scheme of things. On top of that, I am unaware of anyone who would find them a credible source of character judgement - I don’t have to worry about getting a reputation for stupidity on their say-so. Whatever I might fantasize about doing would never have any positive result in real life.
Still. . .I might just have trouble adding and subtracting money next month. Just a teensy little bit, and I’ll be really, really, really nice about it. . .
Finding Your Cat
I’ve been inspired by Dave’s return to start a Yahoo group for reuniting cats with their families. I don’t know if it’ll take off, or even help, but I hope people will have at least a few good results from it. Here’s the link: Ocean County Cats Lost and Found
I think I’ll write a letter to the Asbury Park Press telling the story. . .I know there are other people out there wishing they could find their missing cats.
Dave is Back!
Pics and updates tomorrow, after we get him checked at the vet. We got a call from a woman who lives far enough away that we suspect that he was trapped and released, but he still had his collar on, and she finally got him to come close enough so she could read the tag. He disappeared in August!
He remembered Audrey right away. He remembered Judy right away (she was a pretty darn happy dog, gettin’ her cat back!). Miles isn’t happy about being closed out of the bedroom, but Dave has to be quarantined until we know he’s healthy.
As Usual,
Rather than actually blog about all the things that have kept me too busy to blog, I will provide you with an amusing video link:
Enjoy! I’ll catch up later!
