Texas Tea

We used to have a company for our oil. We paid a fixed monthly amount, and they would come and deliver whenever we needed fuel. This worked well until last year, when oil prices spiked. You might have noticed – it was in the news a couple times. Anyway, when the new annual paperwork came around, the monthly increase was about 400% – no kidding.

Our response was threefold:
1. Cancel this relationship.
2. Get a wood stove and make some use of all the free fuel on our 3+ acres of wooded property.
3. Find a new supplier for the oil we still need for hot water and secondary heat.

The first two were taken care of over pretty quickly. Number three was on the agenda this week. We priced several different suppliers that all advertise in various local media. The price per gallon actually varied substantially – by nearly a dollar per gallon. The company with the best price was also the company with the friendliest customer service – and they didn’t try to sell us a service contract or a month-to-month program. Sweet.

So, the delivery came the other day. We watched and waited anxiously because the meter on our tank hasn’t moved in 2 months, so I figured it was stuck or broken. For all we knew, we had empty tanks. Turns out, the meter wasn’t too far off.

But here’s the funny thing. See, at one point in the past we had a problem with our tanks. We have two tanks, and the spillover valve was broken. So, when I noticed one day that someone had written *BONKERS* on the cover to the fill pipe, I thought maybe it had something to do with the wonky valve. Like the oil guy was making a note that the pipe acted funny.

When we last got oil (still from the old company) I noticed that there was an added tag. This time it read “eggy” in a very Peter Bagge-esque hand. Incidentally, the asterisks and quotations are part of the oil pipe graffiti.

Eggy? I wondered if this might be some sort of inside jargon in the home heating oil biz. Maybe referring to the smell? Or the relative viscosity? Or the way it goes good with home fries and hash?

Now here’s the thing – when we got the delivery a couple days ago, the guy dragged the hose up and did his thing with the industrial clamps or whatever and we rushed down into the basement to see what would happen with the meter – remember, we thought it was busted.

Well, this dude was finished in a matter of minutes. Bingo-bango and he was gone. I was hovering by the front door waiting to see if he’d trudge up and tell me that my fuel pipe was bonkers, or maybe that the fill process had gone a bit eggy. But no, he just rolled up the hose and left.

I raced around to the side of the house to check it out and saw a new tag, this one in bright red ink. A little smiley face and the word Beefy.

Is this his freakin’ nickname or something? If I get a CB radio do you think I can get on the line with Bonkers and eggy and Beefy? Can I have a home heating oil delivery guy handle? Like Biscuitman, or Baconwack.

Yo, yo yo! This is Sausage Patty reaching out to Eggy and the Beef-man. what’s your 20?

Twisted Metal

The people across the street from us have a bunch of campaign signs along the road in front of their property. I remember during the last presidential election that they had all the local Republicans and a Bush/Cheney sign. I was talking to the neighbor one day about something completely removed and a youngish Asian woman, kind of Margaret Cho looking, pulled up in a mini-wagon and started gushing about the sign.

Where did you get it? Oh my God it’s great. I have to get one. My neighbor, a little embarrassed it seemed, told her they had them at the Town Hall. When the Bush groupie motored off, my neighbor said to me that her boss, an elected official on one of the signs, asked her to put it up. ‘I can’t exactly say no, can I?”

Hmm. Well, I might make claims of abused power and such if I didn’t already assume that the neighbors are a little bit more conservative than me. I honestly didn’t think much of it. In fact, the woman who couldn’t wait to get her hands on some Bush propaganda for her lawn…I don’t know, the unbridled enthusiasm was definitely weird. And I did wonder if I could have picked up a Kerry/Edwards sign at the Republican dominated Town Hall that year, but that’s not really my point today.

See, a couple weeks ago, the signs went up across the street again. For several days it was locals only. Then, something like a week ago, the McCain/Palin sign showed up. That kind of burns me up, but it is the land of the free.

Then, a few nights ago, around 10 at night, we heard some weird noises out front. It sounded like a car bottoming out…pretty badly…but there’s really no place to do that. It was, of course, pitch black out, so we kind of forgot about it.

Then, the next morning, I noticed that the four or five signs across the street looked particularly trampled. Son of a bitch! Somebody ran them over. The noise we heard was one of the local sign getting particularly bent up, and probably tangling with the vandal’s undercarriage. That one sign is pretty much trashed. The remaining few, including the McCain/Palin sign, are all at a sort of 45 degree salute. Something appears amiss, to say the least, and nobody has yet straightened them out.

Here’s what I want to say about this: If you see McCain/Palin signs, I understand the impulse to run them over. I really do, because it has flitted through me more than once. But you can’t do it. Not only will you risk damage to the underside of your vehicle – or perhaps even a sliced tire sidewall – but it is wrong.

Seriously. Let the conservatives and the so-called Christians, and the right-wing player haters be the douchebags of this election. McCain and Palin have shown the only thing they are good at is being nasty, so the people who put up the signs must approve of the nastiness.

But we, as pinky commie liberal tree hugging baby killers need to take the high road. Don’t run over the douchebag signs. Instead, get yourself a non-douchebag sign and hang it up. I mean, you can’t get one at my Town Hall, but maybe yours is a little better. 

Blast From the Past

I took this week off to burn up some excess vacation time. I’ve been cutting a lot of wood and doing stuff around the house, but yesterday morning I had the opportunity to go to school with Jake. Some helper parents were needed to do an applesauce activity…how could I say no? The chance to see first graders in action and have a snack…for free!

Rock on.

I had an awesome time and want to go back again. His teacher is really quite good. She plans for twice as much activity as can possibly be completed, but selects the next phase on the fly, responsive to her audience. It really was like watching a good performer reacting to the crowd and going with the scene appropriate repertoire. He is definitely lucky to have a teacher that is so creative and responsive. Not that Sister Geraldine wasn’t great and all, but she had nothing on Mrs. M.

Anyway, in the back of the classroom I spotted three computers. Two were fairly recent Dell desktops, but in between was a real classic. It was an Apple IIE. I was like “Holy crap!” I had one of these when I was in school. Actually, I first had a Pineapple we bought in a New Jersey parking garage computer show in the early 80s (who remembers those?) The Pineapple was actually an Apple clone. There was a point when Apple actually planned on approving clones using their OS, but they killed it. Since a number of manufacturers had anticipated being able to legally sell clones (ooooops!), a bunch got made as kits, and ended up at computer shows.

Later I had a machine my father built that was more or less an Apple IIE, but it could do some Apple II+ stuff the IIE couldn’t do. It looked just like the monstrosity in the first grade classroom. Tan and fingerprint encrusted. Tiny monochrome green monitor. Floppy drive on the side, because there was no hard drive to speak of. Actually, in High School I upgraded to a side by side low vertical profile dual floppy that I put under my monitor. Yeah baby, I was a stud. A superstud. I got all the hot chicks.

Saying Goodbye

Alice died the other night. She was my grandmother’s first cousin. She didn’t quite make it to my Laura’s 101, but 99 wasn’t too shabby. Jake came with me to the wake last night. I thought it was a good thing – and it was his decision.

He got emotional and started crying when we went up to the kneeler. Seeing her there…he remembered her. He had met her a bunch of times at my mother’s shop getting her hair done (back in the day she was there once a week). We said goodbye and he cried. It was very sweet.

And before we left a couple hours later, he wanted to go kneel again. We did, he cried again, and I was proud. He knew it would make him emotional and he was not afraid of that. He did not want to run and hide like most men I know. In fact, I thin he was craving the cry a little – and I get that. My little ball of sensitive artist in the making.

I told Jake my favorite Alice story. See, for many years, whenever my Mother and Aunt would go away, they would often leave my Grandma in the house. And they would get Alice to sit with her. I not sure who was keeping whom from burning the place down, but somehow the two old ladies managed to survive.

One such time was when I was in high school. My Mom and Aunt went on a trip to Italy for a week. I was in school, but in the evenings I was with the ladies. We had all kinds of prepared meals in the fridge that I would heat up. They ate like birds, and Alice never “wanted to be trouble.” She’d eat saltines with butter and crazy stuff like that.

But every night…every single night she had a mega bowl of ice cream. Like…mega. I’m talking 4 scoops minimum. My girl loved her sweets. Ice cream and Entertainment Tonight. Good times.

It was a fun, weirdly independent time. I mean, being home with two octogenarians isn’t too far from being home alone. They basically sat on the couch and watched TV and talked loudly to each other in broken Quebec French. I mean, I wasn’t hosting a bachelor party booking the upstairs bedrooms like Las Vegas suites full of strippers. I wasn’t selling blow out of the basement. My boy Adam wasn’t bringing his hoochie-mamas (he had many, I can assure you) over for a good time. Nothing like that.

Good clean fun.

Bye Alice. Say “Hi” to Laura for me.

I have lost all respect for John McCain

And that is saying a lot, because I used to like this guy. Before he went evil during this campaign, I actually thought it would be diffcult to make a decision on Election Day.

But I just saw an ad, and it had the “I approve this message” tagline, so I have given up on the man. I mean, he lost serious ground with his comments over the last few months, and his selection of a VP…well, I chalked that up to desperation and senility. But the lies and invective and blatant misleading bullshit in this most recent ad.

Well, let’s start with this: Sarah Palin is unfit. I am not going to call her an idiot. She is not. I’m not even calling her a freak, even though she does believe the bible is a literal document and that the Earth has only been here for 6000 years. I mean, the concept of walking hand in hand with dinosaurs is cool and all, but I have to err on the side of science here.

Oh, and in case you think I’m a freak, I’m talking about walking hand in hand with Land Before Time good guy dinosaurs, and Dink the Little Dinosaur (check him out on Boomerang!) not, like, those big ass cloned dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. That would be f-ed up.

Anyway, I watched the VP debate – maybe you did to. According to the media, Sarah Palin performed better than expected. So, we expected even less from her? We expected her to be more nervous, to have her voice crack more? We actually expected that she could not reliably pronounce nuclear?

Look, I’m sure Sarah Palin is perfectly nice. I’m sure that she is a loving mother and a fine governor. I’m sure that despite her religion she doesn’t really believe that Catholics and Jews and Muslims and other Christians of a different flav are eternally doomed. I’m sure she honestly does not realize the hypocrisy of believing the bible is 100% accurate and can not, should not and will not be second guessed, but the Constitution is just a loose set of ideas meant to be interpreted.

Hey, if you saw the debate, I hope you didn’t miss the part where she said she wanted to rethink the role of the VP in Washington. Yeah, the person who doesn’t know anything about Washington should be correcting its failures. I mean, I agree, Washington is absolutely nuts, but you should probably know how it works before you propose to change things.

Or maybe not, let’s just start over. Tee hee.

But his atrocious selection of a running mate is not why I have lost all respect for McCain. It’s the ad I mentioned. It’s an ad that deals with a point Sarah Palin tried to raise in the debate – a point that Joe Biden beat her down with. See, there was this vote about funding more weapons for the troops. Biden voted for the measure and Obama voted against it. In the debate, Palin attacked Obama for not supporting the troops. Biden acknowledged that he had had a difference of opinion with his candidate on that vote, but also pointed out that John McCain voted the same as Barack Obama.

In other words, if Palin is calling Obama a douche bag, she’s calling McCain a douche bag. She tried to use bullshit to stain Obama during the debate and looked like an idiot. So what did the McCain camp do? They created an ad that makes the same point.

Evil Obama doesn’t support the troops even though his VP choice did – then they show two quick clips of Biden speaking in favor of this measure way back when. They neglect to mention what everyone who has been paying attention should know – that McCain is just as evil because he voted the same way.

This is sickening. This is mindless smear crap. In the end, the only thing the ad is really saying (when you know the truth) is that Obama and Biden disagreed on one vote. And, since Sarah Palin gleefully promised that she would have lots of disagreements with McCain because that’s what happens when you get two mavericks together…

The truth is, this is what happens when you you get a desperate candidate who will sink so low as to hire the cretins who smeared him in 2000. That’s right, McCain hired the same bastards who made slurs about his military service, his time as a POW, his marital fidelity, and his adopted daughter. I don’t know how he sits in the same room with these fuckers, let alone pays their ridiculously high salaries.

McCain has proven that he is a man without integrity. I don’t need Nikon binoculars to see he will do whatever he must to win, and that alone makes him unworthy of the office he so covets.

That Metal Throaty Thing

Jake came down the other morning and one of those anti-smoking commercials was on. It was with the guy with the metal throaty thing singing ‘you don’t always die from tobacco’ on a city street. He’s been talking about it a lot. Not just the robotic voiced thing, but it’s clear that cigarettes, as a general topic, have come up a bit in school. There’s a lot of fake smoking on chilly foggy-breath days. It’s good, I think, that there’s so much anti-smoking propaganda because it surely doesn’t make things easier. Health issues aside, just try getting smoker life insurance has got to be a nightmare.

But Jake’s morbid fascination with the metal throaty thing is a little weird. I had to tell him about the time when I was in High School, working at Steinbach’s Department Store, and a guy with the tube came up and asked me a question. I could not understand a word, and it was a little scary. He barely moved his mouth, just sort of worked his throat a little, holding the tube thing up to his neck. I was bent over behind the counter and didn’t notice him walk up. I thought it was a car horn honking when I looked up. I was totally at a loss. He made an attempt or two to ask whatever he wanted to ask, and then just walked over in mid-honk, clearly pissed at me.

His wife or partner or girlfriend or whatever was looking at ladies pajamas in the back corner of the store and they got into an argument a few minutes later. She was telling him to take it easy and calm down and he kept honking. Eventually he stomped out and she followed a few minutes later.

Something like an hour later she came back, somewhat apologetically. I didn’t realize who she’d originally been with at first. She told be she was looking for a metal cylinder that they lost earlier, perhaps someone had turned on in. We looked around and couldn’t find it. I assured her there was no such object in the lost and found. She seems suspicious, like I was holding back on her – like I’d be playing with it after she left.

Oh yeah, and then my mother had a customer in her beauty shop many many years ago with a tracheotomy pipe. She used to hold a cigarette up to the pipe and smoke through her neck. Now that is freaky.

Remember When, The TV…

How come TV sucks so much? Even the good shows suck now. Remember the Simpsons, back around season 8 when Bart and Lisa stay at Patty and Selma’s and play with their bras and blackhead remover? Remember when Simpsons flashback episodes revealed a time when Homer and Marge were young and it was still the 1980’s? Hell, even the early 90’s were okay. But now, the thought of a Maggie born after…long after 9/11…it’s just lame. I used to love the Simpsons, but even I have had enough. Get it off the air.

We watched the Office last week. Predictably, there were a lot of plot problems. Ricky Gervais (if you don’t know Ricky Gervais, you need to start googling him now – start here: Ricky Gervais) said something like he doesn’t like to do a show for more than two seasons because it loses it’s originality and punch. He’s so right. Even the shows I love the most, they often start to suffer in the third or fourth season. As much as I miss Arrested Development, I think that a fourth season would have started that terrific comedy down the path to suck. And Veronica Mars – as much as I loved the show, season three, when she went to college, it was sapping up nicely toward the end.

We need fewer franchises and more fresh ideas. Please. Now. My eyes are starting to hurt.

The Loo

We’ve been doing a lot of projects these past few months – new deck railing, staining the deck and its new railing, new den floor, woodstove replacing the old fireplace (and lots of side projects that went with that) plus all the cleaning and rearranging to accomodate the twenty-something cases of booze that came into the house a few months back. Now we’ve got a little something going on in the upstairs bathroom. We’ve been living upstairs a lot more, and as a result, we’ve been using that bathroom a lot more.

The first step was to put in a new shower head, one of those rainfall type showerheads where the water sort of falls on you instead of spraying and pelting out at you. I originally bought it for the massive Jacuzzi tub downstairs, but we ended up moving it upstairs. I also have a vent fan to install – it’s the only bathroom in the house that didn’t have one. I actually bought it almost a year ago, but I’ve been waiting for the Autumn and the cessation of some of these other projects to get on it since the attic hangs out at like 110 degrees most of the year. Yuck.

The other major addition to the room is a really nice whit medicine cabinet we had in our old house, back when we did a slightly more extensive bathroom remodel there. When we sold the house, the cabinet came with us. It’s been sitting in storage for a couple years, but we’re finally ready to take down the ugly three door wood thing that we’ve been living with so far. And the other day we picked up a really nice new light fixture for over the cabinet – it will replace the one we have now. You know in movies when you see the star’s dressing room lighting, with a couple dozen bulbs surrounding the mirror? That’s kind of what this light is like – the one we’re replacing, I mean.

So, as the weather cools, I’m looking forward to cozying up the bathroom. That, and lots of painting, all through the house. It should be a colorful season.