Be The Pigeon

Today while driving down the street, I found the perfect blogging topic.  Small towns tend to do things their own way, and though I really enjoy the town I live in, it has its quirks, too. First, a few years ago the town was growing very quickly.  Growth was so malignant that you'd have to camp out (literally) the night before a builder released new lots for sale in order to get a chance at a good one.  (We had our realtor do that for us since we were still living out of state in 2001.)  At that time, when all the streets were first plotted, some genius figured it would be a great idea to use only a handful of street names.  Where streets ended in cul-de-sacs and such, and then continued at approximately the same position further down, they decided to use the same names.  Thus, there are about 4-5 different neighborhoods in our town where the same street name can be found.   Hello, people!  Who came up with that one?!   So if you don't know which neighborhood you should be look...

Not too long ago, I was absolutely shocked at a commercial I saw. You may have seen it, too. It's an oatmeal commercial that shows a bunch of kids in the back of a van happily eating their oatmeal in bowls. The Horror! See it for yourself. Is this not the most ridiculous thing advertisers have come up with in a very long time? The commercial ends with "Every day should be this good." Do you really think that it's gonna be a good day when kids are spooning warm oatmeal all over your car, rubbing it into the carpets, making designs on the windows, and using it as ammo against their siblings?! These high-paid Manhattan metro-ites obviously a) have no kids, and b) have never taken care of a child for more than 30 seconds. Fire them all! I can imagine how the conversation in our van might go with oatmeal: Amy: Misha, watch this! ~~Amy takes spoon of oatmeal and sticks it to the window to watch it glue~~ Misha: Wow, cool! Let me try. Kristen: I like oatmeal! ~~finger...

I picked up a little morsel tonight that I thought you would all profit from: It's generally preferable to have an actual reservation at the car-rental agency if you expect your name to appear on the big board! Apparently, not having a reservation will cause you to not show up in the system. Go figure. It's generally preferable to make an actual reservation at the hotel you want to stay at if you expect it to have any rooms left when you arrive. They don't ask other people to leave just because you arrive without a reservation. Hmmm. So I thought I'd made reservations for my latest trip, but it turns out I was mistaken. Whoops. Good news is that after calling for help, I have a room, although at a different place, and I have wheels that will be fine for the week. (In my defense, I did try to make the reservation weeks ago, but it erred out and I simply forgot to do it again. Too bad close only counts in horseshoes and hand-grenades...) Lesson learned.

If there's something in life that I just HATE doing, its climbing on the roof to shoot and kill wasp nests!  It's right up there with puke cleaning .  Yesterday, I emptied 2 1/2 cans of spray on a couple new nests--which, incidentally are always in hard-to-reach places on the 2nd story--and found that the very resourceful beasts have now found a way into the eave near our master bath.  I have nightmares that they get into the attic, build huge nests, and take over everything.  After shooting all of them that I could,  I took some spray foam to fill the gap they were using, and it was obvious that the ones I didn't kill were kinda ticked at me the rest of the day for filling in their hole. Another fun mental image.  Last year, I ran out of spray one day, so I took my pressure washer up on the roof to make battle with the beasts.  Afterall, you gotta use the tools you have, and it seemed like the proper tool for the job.  I could not bow away from the call of battle.  I can i...

"The disposal is clogged." That's not really the words I'd like to see on an instant message from Jo. And yet she sent them anyway. The nerve. Actually, this is the first time we've had any such backup problems with that plumbing, so I count myself blessed. For my lunch break today I got to disassemble the innards of the sink drain. From that, I learned a few things: Celery clogs things. I'm grateful for easy plumbing that required no tooling to remove. It was actually a pretty easy fix, despite my ugly mood from work (as a recommendation, don't ever work with people who are in the protected-minority of " stupid people "; pretty soon they'll be lobbying for special treatment, mark my words). Here's your sign... I'm even more grateful that it was just fresh veggies that clogged the drain. It could have been mushy, nasty bread, sour milk, and all sorts of disgusting crud we tend to wash down the drain happily without a second th...