I’m losing the battle. My front yard, beautifully manicured as it was, is now infested. There are tall weeds with sharp pokies. Short weeds with sharp pokies. Stinky weeds. Yellow weeds. Viney weeds. Flowering weeds. Pink weeds. All just plain evil weeds. I don’t think I can keep up; it’s either work or weed, and I need the money from working. Fucking nature. Throw a couple of cinder blocks and a Camaro out there, and you wouldn’t even notice that I don’t live in a broken-down trailer. Add a broken chest freezer and it’s Anywhere, Idaho, circa 1987. I don’t know how much longer my lawn can stay weedicide-free. I can only pull so many weeds before the defeat creeps in.
Oliphant Parts
Reframing Reality
Archives: June 2007
Plastic To Oil
I’m sure there’s a downside, but I want one of these for my local recycling center. Since I don’t get trash pickup service, I haul all of my garbage and recycling to the local waste station. About half of what I see tossed out there is plastic, so assuming you could actually power the equipment there with this stuff, it should pay for itself in short order.
You’ll Go Blind Doing That
Getting new glasses is an adventure for me. A poopy adventure, but an adventure nonetheless. Due to my picky nature and my astigmatism, I am very particular about my glasses. New lenses take me weeks to get used to, and even then I’m always pretty sure that my last prescription was better. There’s axis, rotation and other words to deal with. By the time I replace, my old frames are bent to hell and I’ve grown accustomed to everything looking wrong. It’s a whole new hell getting back to right.
So I picked up my new glasses yesterday. Top of the line jobbies, these:` Rimless flexy frames to withstand being used as a monkey gym by my monkeys, high-impact polycarbonate lenses in case I’m ever shot in the face by a shotgun or hit my a flying cow, and all the latest and greatest coatings and lens treatments. I’ve got an anti-reflective coating to make driving at night or watching internet porn, er, working in front of the computer all day less fatiguing for my eyes. I’ve got what they call a hydrophopic coating (because who doesn’t want rabid lenses) to repel water and oil. By virtue of the lens material itself, I’ve got UV protection, which will allow for a more responsible eyeball tanning, cancer-free. And finally, at the suggestion of the optician, and for a mere $7, I have polished edges.
Polished edges are great! To minimize the appearance of your lens edges, the natural matte finish you get normally is ground off and polished. The Idea, I gather, is to make it so people don’t see the edges of your lenses and therefore can’t tell that you are wearing glasses. Considering the enlarged bridge, and the fact that there are still little metal bits to stick behind one’s ears, I don’t think that trick is going to work. What, everyone looking at me is going to think “Hey, you’ve got a bit of metal floating above your nose and weird metal bits sticking out from behind your ears, but I can’t see the lens edges, so you must not be wearing glasses?” Umm, yeah, sorry but it doesn’t work that way. The whole light reflecting off the lenses thing and bits of dust and fingerprints floating in front of my eyes are a pretty good giveaway, for starters.
Anyway, back to the polished edges. Instead of a dull, refractive surface that scatters the light nicely, I now have a thin, curved magnifying area that reflects every stray bit of light from the edges directly into my eyes, blinding me in all but the darkest room. Great idea, that. “Yes please, could you make my lenses non-reflective everywhere EXCEPT the edges, which I want customized to direct as much bright, stray, absolutely useless to me light directly into my corneas? I want to be completely blind by next Tuesday, thank you.” The good news is that it was only an additional $7 U.S. to pay for blindness. Since my optician refuses to fix it, I plan on sanding the buggers down this weekend (my lens edges, not the optician).
Just Asking
Cuba . . .
“Washington rebuffed the offer for talks, saying it would deal with Raul Castro’s government only when it showed a clear commitment to a peaceful transition to democracy.” Umm, yeah. So when do the sanctions and embargoes against Saudi Arabia and Pakistan begin?
Above the Law . . .
Cheney isn’t part of the legislative branch, nor is he part of the judicial branch. Since he is now denying that he is part of the executive branch, does that mean we can replace him? Sounds to me like he has abdicated his position.
Everybody loves singing toilets! . . .
Thank you, Maike, for pointing me towards Sweet Juniper!
(and apologies to Sweet Juniper for including you in a post about Cuba and Cheney)
Stormy Monday
Ugh. Monday again, and I have a headache. Is it the weekend’s departure or the onslaught of the work week? Or do I just stay up too late on Sundays? Whatever it is, this is the fifth Monday in a row. Maybe it is synchronized pollen-pushing on the part of all the grasses and weeds out there.
It’s a stormy day, or has the potential to be. Winds are blowing, clouds are gathering and the temperature is dropping like a leper’s extremities. Almost the end of June and the temperature’s dropped into the 40′s. Yesterday was in the upper 70′s, lower 80′s. Just two days up here in Northern Idaho and we get a wider temperature range than two years in Humboldt County. I kind of like it. I hope those grey-bellied clouds that keep zipping overhead spew some rain, though. I planted seven more trees this weekend and really don’t feel like dragging a hose around to do watering today.
Forests
We have fairy rings. Fairy rings in the front yard. Fairy rings in the back yard. Fairy rings in the orchard. Wherever I look, fairy rings. The interesting ones are the ones in the orchard, which came with the house. Instead of rings, they’re more like serpentine paths. I have only myself to blame for the front and back yards, I suppose. I know that I need to de-thatch and aerate the lawn, and it wouldn’t hurt to occasionally pick up the hundred or so pounds of chewed sticks that the dogs leave lying about (perfect fuel for fungi!). Unfortunately, I keep coming up against an insurmountable obstacle: I really don’t like lawn maintenance.
If I had my way, I’d turn the entire front and back yards into mini forests, canopied with maple, sumac, ash and hawthorn, the ground covered in anything other than grass and weeds that is willing to grow here. No mowing, little or no weeding and far less watering. We’ve already got quail and pheasants nesting out there, along with various blackbird species, damned starlings, robins and tons of other little hoppity birds. Oh yeah, killdeer, doves, hawks and the occasional owl. With more trees and bushes, maybe we could get some of the grouse to wander over this way as well as increase the number of quail and pheasant. Anyone out there willing to convince my wife that this is the way to go?
psst!– In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve started a serial novel. Okay, more of a serial short story. The goal is to create a really bad noirish detective story. In case you’re interested, it is in the new category: Serials. Anyone willing to write a chapter or two for this thing?
Sheep
Of the emergency war spending bills that the congressional sheep rubber-stamp every year, how much of that money really goes to our troops and how much goes to mercenaries? Hopefully none to the mercs, because they sure as hell aren’t our soldiers. If Blackwater, et. al. are being paid to fight, it is certainly not for less than we pay our own soldiers. If they are overwhelmed with a patriotic passion kill some towel-heads, terminate some terrorists or whatever cliched excuse they have for traveling to a foreign sovereign nation and killing its subject in the hopes of further destabilizing a nation and fomenting war, why not do it as real soldiers? Why not join the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or even the Coast Guard? With the way things are going these days, we will probably be calling up the U.S.F.S. for our Iranian, North Korean or Pago Pago invasion.
And yet we keep on paying the Halliburtons and Blackwaters of the world to defraud America and endanger our troops. Isn’t there a better way? Or is the worst the best we can do, diverting funds away from our real soldiers and into the pockets of the friends of the administration?
Viva Hate
Is this a great country or what? Maybe the INS is just trying to distract her from the sorrow of her husband going missing in Iraq. Maybe next we should start billing the wives of soldiers for the cost of shipping their bodies home. Yeah, that should keep their minds off those minor things, like the ache of losing someone they love.
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now
I gave my two week notice this week. With all of these conflicting emotions, I don’t know whether to laugh with joy or scream ecstatically with excitement and, um, joy. I think I’ll go with joy. It’s a big step, but as long as the kids don’t decide to get sick, it will be months before we are homeless. Joy!!!
Hopefully this means more time to torture fish.
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