July 28th

IS THERE A BIRD SEED SHORTAGE?

I was running low on wild bird seed. Those birds can get mean if I don't put something in the feeder for them, so I went to the store to grab a bag of seeds. I went to Vons. No bird seed. Went next door to the Sears-that's-really-a-Kmart. No bird seed. Albertsons. No bird seed. I finally found some at Big Lots. Now, back in the day when they put marijuana seeds in the song bird mixtures I could understand a run on bird seed, but I don't see people buying it up for sunflower and millet seeds. (The poppy seeds you could buy in the spice aisle used to be viable seeds for opium poppies too. Now I think they treat them so they won't germinate.)

July 25th

WEREN'T YOU LISTENING?

Phone rang, I answered it.

"Hello, this is a moron from the (Major Political Party) National Committee."

I quickly interrupted. "If you're calling to ask for money, stop right now. I'm living on borrowed funds, I don't have any extra money to donate to anything."

But he kept on reading (badly) from his little prepared spiel, so I assumed that it wasn't about money.

"Important election year, blah blah blah, need your support, blah blah blah, and can I count on your contribution of...."

WTF? "I said not to ask for money, but you did anyway. Are you nuts?"

"I'm just trying to do my job."

Here's a clue. If someone requests that you don't beg for money, say "Thank you for your time", and hang up.

Am I pissed off enough to vote for the other party's candidate?

No.

I can't in good conscience penalize the entire country for one moron who can barely read, much less listen.

July 24th

I'VE BEEN RELEASED!

From Blogger spam-jail. Thanks to the human who did the deed, whoever you are.

MY FAVORITE BLOGS

Some of them are listed to the right, but there are lots more that I read. I'm going to now-and-then tell you about one of them, and why I like it. Let's start with New York Shitty. Here the delightful Miss Heather regales us with photos of dog poop, abandoned mattresses, and horrible examples of cheap condo conversions (most done without permits). She also examines the history of her 'hood, posts photos of cute cats that need homes, and other fun stuff. Even if you aren't a New Yorker, Miss Heather's tales of Life in the Shitty are quite entertaining.

July 23rd

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BLOG!

Actually, it was yesterday-one year since my first blog post. I didn't notice at the time that it also happened to be my father's birthday. He would have been 86 years old.

It's rather odd also that today something occurred that ties to two old posts. First, my whining that "I never win anything". A couple of weeks before that I mentioned an artist I'd taken a class from.

Today I actually won something. Two tickets to an exhibit at the art museum of photographs by Eleanor Antin.

TWO WEEKS!

It's been two weeks since I asked for a human at Blogger to decide that I'm not a spammer, but I still have to type in the not-a-word to publish a post. Maybe the robots killed all the humans.

July 16th

FINALLY!

The members of Congress have finally pulled their heads out and authorized an extension of unemployment benefits. But, this might not even matter to me, and here's why. It's half of your original benefit, so for me it would be 13 weeks. In a week and a half I will be eligible to open a whole new claim, and should be able to get a full 26 weeks of benefits. If I take the extension now when it runs out I would be past the time frame where the last full quarter I worked would count towards my benefit amount.

So, members of Congress.....

Thanks for nothing! (Unless that extension will still be there in six months and I still haven't found a job.)

The sad thing is that there are probably many people who have been out of work for a year that didn't read the information and have no clue that they can file a new claim, so they're all probably jumping for joy at getting half of what they could get if they would bother to read the directions.

I have an idea for something to try with my resume. I have redone it to emphasize my computer and communication skills, but the experience part still shows that I've worked in the mortgage business, and I've never received a response for a job in a different field. SOOOOOOO, I'm going to eliminate the words "loan" and "mortgage" entirely. I won't say "loan processor", I'll say something like "Client Information Specialist". And, the company names-instead of "Blah Blah Mortgage Corp.", it will now be just "Blah Blah Corp." Nothing will be a lie, just two words will be abolished. It will at least be interesting to see if I get any responses.

DAY FIVE AND COUNTING

It has now been five full business days since I sent my request for a human at Blogger review my blog to verify that I'm not a spammer. No action-I still have to type in my best guess at a nonsense sequence of squished together letters. And there doesn't seem to be any way to contact anyone at Blogger to get to communicate with a human. Phooey!

July 13th

EAT YOUR FRUITS AND VEGGIES!

These are a couple of the photos I took at a little "Farmer's Market" close by. I used the quotes because I'm not sure that there were any real farmers there, but the food did look good. Since I neglected to bring a lot of cash (I am truly a plastic money person, I use credit cards for everything and pay them off every month so that I can get the rewards) the only thing I bought was a jar of olives.

Greek olives. REALLY good Greek olives, and I'm not usually a Greek olive fan. Most of the Greek olives I've had have a really nasty bitter taste. These were being sold by a charming older Greek man who told a customer "Greeks don't need psychiatrists, we have Ouzo". We had a discussion about the Greek man I lived with many years ago, when I told the olive seller that my Greek was from Patras he had one word to say. "Spoiled." Oh boy, was THAT right on the nose.

Just in case anyone wants some of these wondrous fruits, he has a website: The Olive Man (I hope the blogger anti-spam bots don't think I'm spamming by posting this link. I won't make a penny if anyone buys some olives-I just really like them.)

July 10th

Duck!

Duck!

Squirrel!

Oh, that's not right, is it? Okay....

Goose!

ME? A SPAMMER?

Yesterday I noticed that when I wanted to add a post that I had to do one of those annoying word verification things first. I investigated further, and it seems that Blogger has some ill-tempered bots that for some reason decided that this blog has the characteristics of a spam blog.

They define it this way:

Blogs engaged in this behavior are called spam blogs, and can be recognized by their irrelevant, repetitive, or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

Irrelevant? Nonsensical? WTF? I do know that sometimes I tend to express complex concepts, and some people don't get the concept so they focus on the words and they misinterpret what I've said. But, nonsensical?

Not to mention that the "word" I have to verify looks like this. Not only is it not a word at all, it's a bunch of letters all squished on top of each other. What looks like a "d" could just as easily be a c and an l having a very close encounter. For instance, in the example-what's that third letter? An o? A c or an a partially obscured by the u? It took me five tries to guess the correct not-a-word in order to publish my post.

NEW ATTITUDE!

I think I will stop letting people who lie, act like simple minded idiots, are rude and play silly junior high school clique games hurt me and make me angry. From now on I will just pity them. I mean, how sad is it that someone feels that they have to lie, twist facts or conceal reality in order to get people to do what they want? Or that some people are so unable to think for themselves that they get defensive when someone tries to help them learn something? People who play little who-hates-who-and-you-have-to-think-like-I-do-to-be-one-of-the-in-crowd games can't be happy, because they have to constantly make sure that the in-crowd is thinking correctly.

What was that old song..."She is more to be pitied than censured"?

Yep, that's my new atti-tude.

July 9th

MORON OF THE WEEK AWARD

It must go to the guy on I15 yesterday. Speeding in a little souped up red car, passed me and a bunch of other people on the right, then swooped across three lanes. Ended up right in front of a Highway Patrol car. Talk about making it easy for him!

SOME PET PEEVES

Liars! People don't usually get away with lying to me for one thing. I have a really good memory, and I'm pretty good at putting things together to figure out what's truth and what's a lie. This includes people who tend to twist the truth to justify their method of doing things.

Rude people! For instance, a group of volunteers, all putting in time and money for a common cause, and one person decides to go off on another because of some little thing. Especially when the person being told off puts in a lot more time, mileage (so therefore gas money) and caring that the rude person who thinks that they are better than others and can boss them around. (It's even worse when the rude people are stupid and uneducated about things they spout off on, but refuse to read or listen to proof that they're wrong-getting argumentative and defensive instead.)

People whose emotional development is stuck in junior high school pretending to be grown-ups! You know the type-"I don't like her, so if you want to be in MY in-crowd you can't like her either". Grow up!

July 3rd

HAPPY ADOPTION DAY CHANCE!



You can see a photo of Chance the Dog over there ---> He's the big handsome boy in front.


It's been five years since Chance came to live here, and I've learned a lot from him. He would go berserk shortly after eating crap-in-a-bag dog food, so I learned about raw feeding. He had a bad reaction to a vaccination, so I learned about the true nature of immunity (and it has nothing to do with vaccines). He was cured of his panic attacks and horrible skin condition with homeopathy, so I learned that modern medicine mostly controls symptoms and does nothing to restore a body to a healthy state.


When he came here he had the name Louie. That was the name of an old boyfriend who dumped me.

Twice.

His name was changed immediately.

THE TWEEKER HOUSE SAGA CONTINUES

Back in December I posted a photo of the Tweeker House, complete with motor home in the front yard and the attractive grey plastic tarp fencing. To refresh your memory, here it is again:

Since then the inhabitants of Tweeker House have been evicted and the house is for sale. Of course they left a ton of junk behind (including the motor home) because, well, they're tweekers.

Earlier this week I came home from moving dogs around and saw that the motor home was gone, and (oh, silly me!) thought that perhaps someone was finally getting around to cleaning up the mess. The next day I saw what had been done to the motor home-it was simply pushed to the end of the block and abandoned in the street. Late last night someone hooked it up to a big truck and hauled it BACK. So, there it sits. Along with the lovely collection of Tweeker Trash.