Idle essays

What a hot, humid day! By 7:15 this morning it was 90 degrees on the back porch and surely must have been pushing 90% humidity. Perfect weather for our various buggy friends.

But…heh heh! The Funny Farm has a better friend: a cute little baby lizard.

Actually, by now he’s more of an adolescent lizard. He’s been living in the back bathroom and bedroom for several weeks now. At first he was a tiny little guy, so new and delicate his skin was pink where you could see the blood through it. He’s still only an inch or so long, but he is beginning to look more like he’s going to live to see old age.

And we haven’t spotted a mosquito around in…well! Several weeks now.

Because his tiny snowshoe-like feet cling to the wall like suction cups, he can race along a vertical surface so fast he turns into a blur. One of the favored vertical surfaces is one also favored by resident mosquitoes.

More to the point than mosquitoes, though, are the crickets.

A couple of weeks ago, a tribe of the little guys encamped — or maybe hatched — in the family room. That they eat binding glue out of the books and consume fabric off the floor pillows would annoy one enough, even without the cricket love songs. But their night-time mating arias pose a more immediate problem.

One of the desert Romeos started up in there about a week ago. This was OK — closing the bedroom door allowed for a decent night’s sleep.

Then he moved up the hall to one of the nearby rooms. When I shut the door on him that night, he came in through the crack beneath it and made himself to home in the bedroom curtains!

Well, the particular variety of cricket that lives in these parts has learned to shut up and hide the instant a human heaves into view. That makes it mighty hard to find and smush the little fiddlers. And whereas Cassie the Corgi shares many personality characteristics with cats, chasing down small insects is not one of them. So I went to sleep with a pillow over my head.

Next morning, come the usual wee-hours call to awaking: Silence.

No cricket song.

I figured he must have found a girlfriend and so was otherwise occupied. But that evening when bedtime rolled around, silence still graced the bedroom. Where was Jiminy Cricket?

He didn’t go out the sliding door. He didn’t hop out the bedroom door and back up the hall.

And the gecko? He seems to have put on an ounce or so.

It’s always good when you can see your gecko breathing…

😉

Images:

Juvenile Hemidactylus frenatus (a gecko). No photographer named. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
House gecko with a spider, Austin, Texas. Ehollins. Public domain.
Field cricket, Acheta domesticus. Luis Fernández García L. Fdez. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.1 Spain license.

(As usual, click on an image for a higher-resolution view.)

The Brits are reporting that CVS has taken it upon itself to make all its customers provide identity every time they buy a bottle of nail polish remover, and in addition to track customers’ nail polish purchases. This would suggest a) the Brits have as much of a meth problem as we do; and b) I’m dead right in saying Big Brother is not the government; it’s the corporate shadow government.

Elsewhere, once again we’re told that because a few morons can’t figure out that jumping on a trampoline is a fair way to maim yourself, all trampolines must be banned or at least regulated.

Honest to gawd! Obviously, it’s brain-dead stupid to bounce around on one of these things given that we’ve known for years that crippling injuries are common. Should they be banned? Maybe. But a business promoting use of the things is probably akin to a shop selling meth at the local strip mall. How hard is it to simply TELL people that? Then let the user take responsibility for the consequences.

You could say that the only person injured is the guy in the wheelchair, but that’s not so — the parents of the “victim” in the report above are now stuck caring for him for the rest of their lives, his health insurance (if he had any) paid the stratospheric hospital and care bills, and over time various taxpayer-supported agencies will have to foot the bill for his care. He’s harmed not only himself but his immediate family, health insurance consumers who have to pay higher premiums as companies’ bills go up, and taxpayers who cover the bills for people on welfare.

This brings me back to my modest proposal on the subject, advanced some time back: people who OD or otherwise harm themselves with drugs should have to foot the bill for their own stupidity. Let’s extend that to any form of terminal stupidity, not  just drug use.

In the regulation-free universe, if you show up at the ER in a state of self-induced distress, your insurance does not have to cover your bills, the hospital is excused from its obligation to treat you for free, and the taxpayer does not pay, either. If you can’t get your mom and dad to mortgage their home for a few million bucks to pay your bills, then you suffer the consequences.

Think of the things you can’t buy at all or can’t buy without letting Big Brother watch over your shoulder, for no other reason than that other people misbehave or harm themselves or their kids out of stupidity:

• cough medicine that works
• nasal decongestants that work (think Sudafed)
• headache pills in bottles you can get open
• toilet cleaner in bottles you can get open
• just about any cleaning product or yard-care product in bottles you can get open
• cars that don’t nag you when you open the door without removing the key

When you consider that few people harm or kill themselves with household products compared to the number of people who are killed and maimed in cars — in 2010, 8.5 times more fatalities than those killed in the World Trade Center — it’s surprising we’re allowed to drive cars at all.

Rescued another little old lady.

It’s not 8 a.m., and I’ve walked Cassie about half a mile, run a tenth of a mile (which is not very far), rescued the old gal, bicycled about two miles, and jumped in the pool. Pretty quick, it’s off to the Costco to buy a pair of jeans that fit.

Yes. By the light of dawn I came across another elderly damsel in distress, trying to make her way along Feeder Street. She could barely stand on one leg and was trying to hold herself up against a wall. Looked to me like she’d had a mild (I hope) stroke.

Stopped and asked if she needed help; she said she was in a bad way but lived right around the corner. I said I’d get my car and drive her, so ran the dog back to the house and picked up the chariot. Asked her if this had ever happened to her before; she said no. I said, “Maybe we should go to the ER instead of to your house.” She said no, her son was at home.

When I got her the two hundred feet to her house, she revealed that her son was asleep and she didn’t want to wake him up. 🙄 I suggested maybe she’d like me to go in and roust him out. She, understandably, wasn’t anxious to have a stranger in her house, to say nothing of one that would create a little drama.

She said she’ll be 80 next weekend. Hope she makes it…still kickin’.

The old gals around here are dropping like proverbial flies. Must be the climate change.

Down to 136.7 pounds this morning! That is 1.7 pounds short of CardioDoc’s announced goal. In theory.

Whereas CardioDoc thinks 135 is a healthy weight for an old bat of my build, I’m targeting 130, for a couple of reasons. Main reason is that these bright and shiny weigh-ins occur the minute I roll out of the sack in the morning. By early afternoon, the weight has gone up a couple of pounds. So, IMHO, the real weight is two or three pounds higher than the morale-boosting dawn figure.

And also, you know and I know that shortly after I arrive at the goal weight, I’m gonna backslide. So I figure that under the best of circumstances, an ego-stroking 130 pounds at the crack of dawn will mean the real figure hovers around 132 to 134. And if I decide to scarf down a pizza with a couple of beers, there’ll be some wiggle room in the calculations.

At any rate, all my pants and shorts are literally falling off me. Even the stretchy jeans look like sacks held up with a belt. So I need to go over to the Costco and buy a couple pair of blue jeans in a smaller size.

My friend Harriet, who lost her excess weight in the wake of colon cancer surgery from which she has recovered and never gained it back, urges me to donate all the “fat clothes.” Her theory is that if you have nothing in the house that you can fit into, you’ll be forced to avoid gaining the weight back.

However, I’ve found that not to be true. After I lost a comparable amount of weight on the Atkins diet — this was about eight or nine years ago — I got rid of all my size 12 Costco jeans. And that was fine for about 18 months, until I decided I simply had to have some pasta!

Pasta is my comfort food. And I believe it needs to be ingested with beer. Dark beer. Guinness. Young’s Double Chocolate. That sort of thing…

Well. Within minutes, of course, I gained all the weight back and didn’t care because I’d missed my pasta so much!!! I had to go out and buy another wardrobe of jeans, the garment of choice around here.

That was fine when I had a job. But now there’s just no way I can afford to buy a whole closetful of jeans. Two whole closetsful: I’ll need several pairs now, and if I throw out the Gloria Vanderbilt Collection and then fatten up again, I’ll need several new pairs of 12s.

So. My plan is to wash all the baggy jeans, fold them up, and stash them in the garage. Then if this whole project turns into a Fail after a year or two, I’ll at least still have some pants that fit.

In another 15 minutes it’s off to the Costco in Paradise Valley, which a) is upscale enough to have a better choice of loot (and their wine selection is better — got one of the worst bottles of wine ever from the Safeway yesterday…it’s not even good enough to cook with!), and b) is close to a Sprouts, a Whole Foods, and a Trader Joe’s, allowing me to pick up my weekly dose of fresh produce and absurdly coddled meats in the same shopping trip.

Happy Saturday!

Funny will probably be out of commission for a few days. I’m sick as a dog, having picked up some kind of enteritis to complement the unremitting hip pain. Mountains of work are incoming; I missed the deadline for the corporation’s annual report, a fiasco aggravated by the fact that the idiot Corporation Commission’s website is not accessible on a Mac and emits printable forms in a format readable only in IE, which I refuse to install because of its chronic security issues; and I haven’t done the course prep for the online magazine-writing course.

{sigh} My poor old dog. If I’d known how much pain that GerShep was in — the vet said virtually every bone in her body was arthritic — I’d have put her down a lot sooner than I did. Wish there was someone to extend the same favor to me.

LOL!! Speaking of IE, here’s a hilarious review of the program as it relates to Apple.

MacFanBoy, meet Allosaurus.
State of Arizona, meet the 21st Century.