Of course The Girl ran outside ‘cos it doesn’t happen all that often.  Notice her hat?  One of the things I knit while I wasn’t blogging.  The yarn is that Louet Bonnie in the Cold Spring colorway.  I like the yarn but didn’t like the knots.

Later we had dinner.  Steve West cooked tilapia with mango salsa, mashed potatoes and greens.  It was delicious.

A few minutes ago, the po-po arrested three men at gunpoint on the sidewalk in front of the house.  One of them had to be retrieved from our side yard.  I betcha he wasn’t expecting our locked privacy fence to be in his way.  The cops carried his sorry ass down my front bank, right through my hibernating flowers.  I hollered to those fuckers about that one but it did no good.  I’ll have to survey the damage in the morning.  Why couldn’t they use the stairs?

Apparently the guys they arrested had been involved in stealing a car.  I don’t know where the car was but I heard one of the cops say they were doing 100 mph down my street.  The speed limit on my street is 35 mph.  Did I mention the snow has gone to rain and that’s it’s freezing?  Um, yeah.  The way things have been around here lately, I’m just glad bullets didn’t fly.

I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings.

My internet and phone service work sometimes. They are both constantly down. Steve West called last night about it and scheduled an appointment for a tech to come out this Thursday, 01.15.09. Tonight the phone rings once. It doesn’t ring again. About a half an hour later I get around to checking the caller ID. It’s a call from Comcast. I go to check the voice mail and have no dial tone. Figures. This is what our appointment is for, right? I finally get dial tone and retrieve my message. It’s some woman from Comcast calling to say that since they got through to my voice mail my phone must be working and they are closing out the ticket. She said there would be a tech in the area tomorrow dealing with noise on the line and if our service is weird tomorrow that’s why. She doesn’t leave her name or phone number. After 5 very frustrating phone calls – I don’t know if it was my phone (probably) or Comcast disconnecting me (it’s happened) – I call through on my cell and get a customer service rep – let me just point out the oxymoron that is that title at Comcast. I tell him what’s happened and he’s very sympathetic. That’s nice but it doesn’t fix my problem. He can’t find a reason why Comcast has closed out my ticket and canceled my appointment. I ask him what I have to do to get Comcast to honor the appointments they make with me and he replies “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do about that, but I understand your frustration.” What do I do with this? I ask him to transfer me to billing so I can get some credits. I finally get to a woman over there – after I hang up and call the appropriate number because the billing department he transfered me to couldn’t transfer me to the Atlanta billing office. Efficient, huh? The billing woman tells me she can’t credit me until the problem is resolved. I ask her how I am supposed to solve the problem when I can’t get Comcast to come out to my house? How do I solve the problem when Comcast cancels my appointments. I say APPOINTMENTS because Comcast did this to us last month, too. Scheduled and then canceled the appointment. We finally got a tech out here, she fixed the problem and it was good until this past Monday. Now the cycle is resetting. It’s like fucking Groundhog Day. Billing woman schedules a new appointment for Saturday and puts my cell phone number down as the contact in the hopes that rearranging the numbers will get them to keep the appointment. Then she offers me three months of inside wiring maintenance FOR FREE!!! because of all my trouble. Seriously. I ask her how I would ever suspect my inside wiring is bad when they can’t keep the signal coming into my house long enough to find out? She couldn’t believe I didn’t want to take advantage of that awesome offer. I told her all I wanted was for someone to come out here and clime up this pole and fix my internet and phone and give me what I pay for. Nothing more, nothing less.

This Comcast service hasn’t ever been reliable. If the cable is working it’s the internet & phone that’s out. If the internet & phone are working you can bet the cable will be out. Calling into customer service is a lesson in frustration. At this point I am going to call AT&T and see what they can do for me.

p.s. I don’t know when I’ll be able to post this but the time right now is 9:49 pm on 01.14.09

p.p.s.  it went.  I may die of shock

So I’ve got this friend that also has kids at the school.  She was going to be taking on this project and asked if I would represent for our class to help her out.  She needed an ally.  Okay, so I agree.  We go to the first meeting and hash some things out and develop “A Plan”.  Over the next week we find out that people involved in the original decision had been talking and wanted to the “The Plan”.  Okay.  Then they said they wanted to put the whole thing on hold for a while.  Okay.  Now the whole thing has started up again, out of the blue, and the same people who said certain things are totally doing the opposite of what they said they wanted to do.  Okay.  Can you see the crazy here or is it just me?

Example dos:  One of the attached neighborhoods was having their yearly festival which involves a parade.  We typically go check this festival out but aren’t involved in the parade at all.  One day one of the other parents asked if I would be willing to drive my car in the parade – they were going to be walking to represent the school and my car is blue and convertible and The Girl could throw candy out of it.  I say “yeah, I could probably do that” he says he’s not involved with the planning but he’ll send me the email about it.  Great.  I’m thinking we get together one weekend and make a banner, pool some cash and buy some candy and then put the word out that our school is doing this parade and that everyone who wants to walk should show up at this time on parade day, at this place, in the school colors and we’ll do this thing.  Simple, no?  No.  These people are trying to decide how to determine which kids should carry the banner – the banner that hasn’t been made yet to my knowledge.  Should we have a crazy hat contest?  Should we this?  Should we that?  They should we’d themselves right out of the parade!  They could never decide and ran out of time.  And no, I did not get involved.  Just like I don’t go stand in the middle of the bee swarm I don’t wade into discussions I wasn’t a part of from the start.

So the latest…the reading group The Girl is involved in in her class is about out of books.  We don’t have books at the school that are of their reading level.  I get an email from another parent about this suggesting that maybe we could get them from the local library.  I say sure, but that I would also be willing to purchase the books they decide to read and then donate them to the school for future use.  She says that’s great and that she too would be willing to go the purchase route and we’ll just throw it out there.  Mind you, there are only four kids in this group so it’s just a handful of parents involved.  Small should be manageable, right?  Wrong.  The latest email is the kicker.  Now she wants to know if maybe we should let a certain student “spearhead” creating a new book club format in partnership with the library system to leave behind as a legacy.  Why can’t it be simple?  Why?  Why does everything have to be so complicated?  How do I attempt to bring these people back to earth without being a total asshole?  The worst part is I didn’t even see this one coming, but I really should have considering the players.  This is exactly why I keep my distance.  These people are crazy!  Everything, everything, gets turned into a huge deal.  We would be able to get so much more done if people would use their heads and not go global.  But no.  That can’t happen.  Maybe they don’t feel like they are really getting things done unless it’s complicated?  Is it power or sheer, unadulterated madness?  Or maybe I am mad?  That’s a possibility but I am not so sure it applies to me in these situations.  Do y’all deal with this sort of lunacy too or is it just this group of people?  Is it horrible that I just want to be done with all of this?

It was first published in Rowan Magazine 34 but it’s been updated in Rowan 44 using Cocoon since the original yarn has been discontinued.  It’s not in the mag itself but is, or will be if Rowan ever gets the new site launched, a free download.  So imagine it in black or grey or some other dark and dreary color…you have to kind of squint or get up real close to the pic like you do with those 3-D pictures.  I have high hopes people!  High hopes!

Oh yeah – I stole the pic from here, since, well, fucking Rowan’s website isn’t updated.

Quick side note:  I think the dude across the street is totally porking the Zoo Keeper next door who, might I add still hasn’t fixed the gaping holes in her house.  Curious.

That would be the mummified remains of a squirrel that I found in the backyard this evening.  I went out to give the compost a spin and noticed the dogs huddled around something only to discover “the dead thing”.  The Fat Beagle was about to give it a lick, another reason I am thankful that dog doesn’t lick faces or hands or anything else besides his phantom balls and his ass – oh and now dead stuff.  That dog will give anything a taste.  Dude, that squirrel is dried out and not De-Con dry but dead lying in the hot Atlanta sun dry.  I don’t know if it dropped from a tree – there was a big ruckus in the limbs overhead earlier and something dropped, or if the poor schmoes doing clean up on the shitbox rental threw it over the fence.  You know which thing I really suspect so I don’t have to say it out loud.  Okay, I’ll say it out loud:  I think those fuckers threw it over the fence!  RUDE!

p.s.  I still haven’t packed anything but I have a plan.  Probably not a solid plan but a plan just the same.

In the first pick look up by the flashing and you’ll see them. Above that flashing is where there is no siding, making the interior wall open to the outside. Directly above on the ledge where the cedar shakes are, there are a couple of shakes missing, making the attic open to the outside. This is where the voles come in and out – scads of them in all different sizes. They are running out to eat the berries from whatever that tree is – it started as a weed and she let it grow. Those places in the house have been open like that for over three (3) years! What did she expect? We told her this past weekend that they were running in and out but she hasn’t fixed the problem yet. Gross. How could she not hear all that running in her walls and ceilings? Seriously, if that were me there would be carcasses everywhere. Holly don’t play with nasty shit like that. But no, she’ll ignore it for however much longer. Oh, she’s got a bird nest in one of her columns, too. Some brown sparrow bird with couple of babies. It’s like fucking wild kingdom next door.

Now, on the other side I’ve got the renters. The one guy farthest away, it’s a duplex, is okay. Even his ankle-braceleted daughter keeps to herself. And, too, her getups are a source of amusement. The other guys? Ridiculous. At least the one. He is constantly fighting with his girlfriend and he whines. Seems to be aggravated by alcohol. They broke up the other day but it didn’t stick. That dumb bitch was back for more later. How can she have so little self-respect? Dude is a total alkie. He drove home one night so bombed out he couldn’t park his truck and almost fell off the curb when he got out of the vehicle. Nice. I’m curious if he’s the douchebag that hit my car? Fucker. I need it to stay in good shape so that I can trade it. I got an update that my smartcar should be here any day after June 10, 2008. Woo! Something to look forward to outside of kicking all this neighbor ass!

I’ve got a big, less whiny update coming later on.  I’ve been doing things.  Again.

Oh, and to the pervs Googling “free bestiality pics” and surfing in?  Dudes, that’s just nasty.