Where the bloody hell is MY bailout??

I have refrained from commenting on the economic mess thus far because the election was far too engrossing.  Now that I don't have to have hysterics over the McFailin/Same ticket, I intend to make up for lost time.

I worked in the financial services industry for seven very long years.  I wasn't a loan officer (thank the gentle goddess) but I worked with many of them, and understand the process well.  I don't have much sympathy for the lenders who ended up with a bunch of bad debt.  At Ye Olde Evile Bank, they had a simple calculation that they did to figure out how much they could lend to a particular person.  If you didn't, oh, HAVE A JOB, then you weren't getting a loan.  If you couldn't afford a bazillion dollar a month mortgage, you weren't going to get one.  If you didn't have serious cash for a down payment on a house, your interest rate was going to be high.  All of this is pretty common-sense.  So allowing people to get into mortgages where they end up upside-down (where they owe more than the house is worth) was not the smartest move the lenders could make.

I have a very difficult time stomaching the 700 BILLION with-a-B bailout package.  Big problems with that.  I'm astonished (and disgusted) that it passed Congress.  Keeping fat-cat executives swimming in golden parachutes does not sit well with me.  I'm also disgusted to note that Bloomberg News has had to take the ridiculous step of suing the federal government to get information about which banks are taking advantage of the bailout.  Transparency, anyone?  Ugh.

Now the US auto manufacturers are requesting an additional 25 billion dollars.  If you've never seen the number shown in a numerical format, here it is: 25,000,000,000,000

That, my friends, is a large number.

I have little sympathy for the automakers, in the same way that I don't feel sorry for the lenders.  American car manufacturers have spent the last 10+ years focusing on SUVs, ginormous gas-guzzlers that the average person has no need for.  If you're not hauling big stuff around in a trailer, or living in super-rugged territory, YOU DO NOT NEED A 4-WHEEL DRIVE BEHEMOTH.  *ahem*  Sorry.  I'll step down off the soapbox.

But US car manufacturers haven't spent the time or the money working on alternative fuels, and have lobbied against more stringent CAFE standards, the government acronym for legislation that involves vehicle emissions.  Of course, I also place some blame for this squarely at the feet of the Idiot Administration, which funneled money for research into alternative energy to other sources, and spent a bunch of time trying to convince Congress to allow drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in Anwar.  But that IS what ya get when you have an oil executive and his cronies running the country.

The thing is that when I was unemployed in the summer of 2007, there wasn't anyone handing ME a financial bailout package.  There were no lines of taxpayers willing to pony-up for me to fix all of my economic woes.  So how about it, Uncle Sam?  Where's MY cash?

Overly Sensitive

I'm spending more time than usual walking around outside. We don't need to get into where, or why, suffice to say that I'm in the out of doors more than usual. (This is NOT a complaint. I like walking around outside.) In the summertime, even when the weather is cloudy, I wear sunscreen. Yes, every day. Usually 30 or higher. I'm not in the habit of re-applying, but now that I'm out more often in the daytime, I probably should.

For the days when I forget the sunscreen, or when the Oh-hia-ia sun peeks out from the pervasive grey skies, I've been thinking about buying a parasol. Yep, just like the Victorian ladies carried. Although the one I've been looking at is Oriental, not frilly Victorian lace. Lacy-frilly-frou-frou is so not my style, and worthless for sun protection anyway.

I do have an umbrella that I've added to my bag o' stuff that I carry around every day, which changes from day-to-day. Most of those bags o' stuff are too large to be called purses. Because you never know when the skies are going to open up and pour torrential rain down on you. Why not use that? I don't know. Perhaps because it is counter to my inclination to buy more stuff. Or perhaps because it looks like an umbrella, and I get all sorts of weird looks when I carry it when it isn't raining. Honestly, I don't care what people think, my comfort of being both cooler and not sunburned is more important to me. I think a rice-paper parasol with cranes painted on it might be less.....what? Noticeable? Not. Conspicuous? Not. I don't really know what I'm thinking there.

(Acquisition? Maybe? Perhaps? An excuse to shop? Ya think? ~editor)

I know that this would be looked on with less disdain and amusement if I lived in Miami or Los Angeles, heck, any of the major cities it probably wouldn't get a second glance. Here in the rustbelt, where the skin cancer epidemic is treated with the "that's never going to happen to me" attitude, yeah, it looks strange.

Being sunburned sucks. I've been there, done that, often enough to know. Several very bad burns in my teens served not only to increase my awareness, but also to exponentially heighten my risk of skin cancer. Every bad burn you get only makes it worse. I'm so careful with the sun that I rarely even end up with pinken-ed cheeks after a day on the water. I don't think of color from the sun as adding a "healthy glow".

Am I pale? Yeah. I like to joke that ya just don't get much whiter than me. Scandinavian, Slovak, Danish, Czech, and British heritage basically means that my skin is really fair. Fair enough that I have a hard time finding concealer, powder, foundation make-up to match the tone of my skin, even if we just drop the I'm-allergic-to-everything-in-the-whole-world part of the equation.

So carrying a parasol ought to really be a forgone conclusion. Plus it is pretty. The last thing, though, is something that my vanity doesn't want to allow me to admit out loud. My hair is very thin, and I've actually had a sunburned skull. Hats are fine, but I think the parasol would be more fun.

DIE, BASTARDS, DIE!!!

For more than a week, my home has been the haven for a most unwelcome species of guest.

Ants.

My dislike of all things buggy has been well-documented on this site.

In the climate here, when the weather warms up, many people find themselves infested with ants. It isn't a reflection on cleanliness or the lack thereof. They smell food, sugar, whatever, and are attracted to it.

DH and I noticed them about a week ago, and spent last weekend scrubbing every inch of our kitchen, cleaning out the cabinets, getting rid of stuff the ants had gotten in to (both granular and turbinado sugars) and then we sprayed the outside of the house with a broad spectrum pesticide.

Yes, Miss Organic-Hippy-Tree-Hugger used pesticide.

Well, to be precise, DH used it, but I didn't stop him, or insist that he use something more earth-friendly. I do not share my home with bugs. Of any sort. Any method that is going to definitively kill them, and keep them from coming back, is fair game.

The ants were gone for a few days after that weekend kitchen-scrubbing-and-pesticide-spraying fest.

As I was preparing dinner midweek, however, DH noticed one on the floor. Much like deer that jump out in front of your car on a lonely stretch of road, there is never ever just one ant. DH was very irritated. I fluffed it off, saying, nah, we're done with 'em.

After dinner, with the dishes loaded in to the dishwasher, the stray glasses of water from around the house gathered, I took apart our fancy-schmancy coffee pot that grinds the beans and brews the coffee without human intervention, so long as it is set up properly and the timer set. It must be completely cleaned, not a stray speck of grounds from the previous day, not because it won't work if that's not done, but rather because I'm an obsessive-compulsive, and it is part of my evening routine, to clean the coffee pot and set it up for the morning.

When I tossed the grounds from this morning, there were a lot of ants in the cabinet where the trash can lives. (Another rule of my OCD: NO VISIBLE TRASH. The trash can is stowed away under the sink. That's where it belongs, and no amount of argument is ever going to convince me otherwise.) I pulled the trash can out, and ants scattered from the light in all directions. I shrieked at the top of my lungs, summoning DH from upstairs to show him where the tiny bastards were hiding.

DH fetched the remainder of the pesticide from the garage, and we dumped everything else that lives under the sink on to the floor below.

Another round of pesticide application followed, both inside AND outside of the house. I threw a fit when he suggested spraying that shiz in the house, but he pointed out that it is designed for that application, both inside and out, and he'd not detected a whiff of any unpleasant smells when spraying it outside. Grudgingly, I agreed that unless the stuff was sprayed where the ants were hanging out, we were going to play the game of "let's kill the stray ants running around on the kitchen floor" for weeks to come. Not a game that I'd care to spend my leisure time playing, truthfully.


For the remainder of the evening, each time I went back to the kitchen, there were ants on the counter-top. Two or three each time. I'd kill them, bitch about them (loudly enough for DH to hear) and go about my business, only to find more the next time I walked through the kitchen on my way someplace else.

What, the pesticide wasn't enough of a hint for you guys? Freaking die already, geez.

In perhaps an ironic twist of fate, or just happenstance, one of my customers that day had been an exterminator.

Attention, all ants still attempting to roam my house: I have the guy's business card. His e-mail address. His phone number. If you little pests don't make your home elsewhere, I'm so calling him.

Oooo-h-eye-oooo

During football games at the Ohio State University, the marching band will play "Hang on Sloopy" and the crowd will chant the state's letters during the chorus...which herre, sounds completely ridiculous when I type that out. I guess you'd have to hear it to understand, if you've never heard it, but it goes something like this

Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy hang on
O-H-I-O
Hang on Sloopy, Sloopy, hang on
O-H-I-O

and wow, it looks even sillier with the words typed out.

(If that's not enough of a visual for you, check out the YouTube version, and you will see what insane nutcases most of the state of Ohio's residents are; there's a dance that goes along with that o-h-i-o chant.)

It has been running though my head this week (and now it will be running though YOUR head, too, you're welcome) as Ohio residents have been treated to typically heartbreaking early spring Ohio weather. Yes, end of April/beginning of May counts as early spring here. March is still winter, any way you care to look at it.

I've planted some seeds in yet another (probably vain) attempt to grow some vegetables, herbs, and flowers. I was not smart enough to plant them inside the house during the month of February as any gardener worth her salt in Ohio would have done. Expert gardener I am most assuredly NOT. No, no, instead I planted them outside on my side porch a few weekends ago, and have kept very close daily tabs on them, watching most anxiously for seedlings to appear.

Seedlings astonishingly have appeared, often in between my checking them each morning and returning from work to check them again each evening. It is beyond cool to see those little tiny things sprout. I think of everything I planted, I'm most enjoying watching the sunflowers. Because they pop out of the ground with the seed casing still attached, shedding it when the leaves begin to grow, and if it isn't the most obvious 'hey, this plant came from THAT seed' example I've ever seen, then I don't know what I would put in that category.

I even have proof!


Aren't they cute? Just so tiny, it is hard to believe that will turn in to a huge and very unusual colored sunflower. The name on the seed packet was "Chianti Hybrid" and I chose them out of all the other sunflowers (and I lurves me some sunflowers) because I've never seen any this color before, a deep burgundy wine-y sort of color. There were somewhere around 24 seeds in the packet, and they've all sprouted. Of course, that's too many for the spot I alloted to the sunflowers, so I'll have a few left over. I've got some ideas about where to stash them, but I'll probably write about that at some future point, when I am able to put the plants in the ground.

Then there's the salad mix; mesclun greens that are of a very mixed variety, and there were thousands of seeds in that packet. So many that after harvesting the first batch, I have enough to have a second crop of them. I like my mixed greens as baby greens, so they won't be in the ground long once they are planted. They need to be a bit bigger before I can do that, though.



And the happy little daisies. I choose painted daisies because they're all kinds of colors. I love shasta daises, but they're only white. These are a full spectrum of colors.

So I planted these all several weeks ago, and then...what happens? It gets cold again. We go from 70 degree days (21C) to a frost advisory for two nights in a row. The novice gardener could lose absolutely every-freaking-thing. The first night, I covered all the baby seedlings with a huge sheet, folded in half, that has been banned from my bed for having holes in it. (I guess it didn't like being washed in hot water with a lot of bleach....all of my bed linens are white, and I use bleach to kill the dust mites and other creepy-crawlies that are in EVERYONE'S bed.) The sheet protected the seedlings, even when it got wet from a typical spring heavy rain.

The next night, though, the temp was supposed to dip down even further, and as I've never managed to keep anything alive for an entire growing season, I was very worried that a sheet just wasn't going to cut it when it came to frost protection.

Not long after I planted everything, I broke the seed trays down into little individual 4-packs, because I am a complete moron. Had I left them in their original state, they would be far easier to move, but nooooo, I thought the little 4-packs were easier to handle and cute. *headdesk*

When the bitter cold weather threatened, my choices for saving the seedlings were pretty limited. I could 1) bring them inside the house or 2) take them into the garage. Bringing them in the house would mean that any little 6 or 8-legged things that had attached themselves to the plastic trays would be sharing my home. I hate bugs. Anything that has more legs than I do, I am not a fan. A huge amount of soil would be tracked through my house. Not that I'd mind cleaning it up, but it was also raining when I was doing this, and there's a good chance I would have ruined the wooden floor that DH put into the house last year as I tracked in water, the clay-like muddy soil we have in the ground and the potting soil I purchased, because of course there's potting soil spilled on the side patio, where the seedlings live.

Garage it was. Thirty trips or so later, the seedlings were lined up in a spot in the garage where they wouldn't be stepped on (or run over with the cars) and where they'd stay warm. They survived the night unscathed. (Big sigh of relief.) Score one for the girl without the green thumbs.

Then it was time to move them back outside.

Those little white sticks that identify the seedlings, because you need them until the plants are large enough to identify? I don't have one of those in every single 4-pack of plants. Which means what? The ones that haven't sprouted yet are unidentifiable if they get separated from their fellows. Of course I have them lined up in neat little rows, with the markers at the beginning and ending of each section of plants, but what happens if they get out of their orderly little rows? I'd be guessing what was in each one.

Not a disaster, unless you have OCD.

If you have OCD, then your NICE NEAT PLAN is messed up if one goes stray and it makes you want to CURL UP IN THE CORNER AND POUT.

Not that I'd know. Really.

Cool

The end of 2007 was somewhat typical of the rest of the year for the weather around here. Unseasonably warm, weather that is very unusual for the time of year. Our summer was cooler than usual, which was nice 'cause I detest the heat, but the fall and winter thus far have been much warmer than they ought to be.

Hey, Mr. President? Global Warming? Is real. I'm so not in the mood for politics today.

On New Year's Eve, the temp was in the mid-40s. Weather that we should have at the end of March, or near the middle to end of October. Not in December. And then the next day, New Year's Day, it snowed like a sonavabitch, with high winds, blowing and drifting snow...we were forecast at least 4 inches, but didn't get that much around my home.

I am one of those rare lunatics who LIKES the cold. Yes, really. I'd prefer an inch of snow on the ground to 90+ temperatures. My logic goes something like this...in the winter, you can pile on lots of layers to keep warm, or attempt to keep warm, anyway. In the summer, there's only so much you can take off and not be arrested!

We keep the temp fairly low in the winter in the house, partly to save money, partly because we like it that way, and partly to conserve natural gas. Rarely is the thermostat set higher than 68, and overnight it goes down to I think 62. All I know is that woe betide thee if you get out of bed in the middle of the night, because it is COLD in here. It isn't set that low in the summer (our electric bill would be un-payable) but it is pleasantly cool in here in the summer too.

Like so many other things I see going wrong with the country, the weather's anomalies make me nervous. Will my niece and nephew and greats and grands see true Oh-hia-ia winters? Sledding used to be something that we all did (even my parents) every winter. I don't see kids do that these days. There weren't a lot of crisp, cool fall days last year. Days when you feel like you ought to buy some #2 pencils and new notebooks, drink some apple cider. The temps stayed in the high 60s until nearly November; Auntie H's funeral, held 1 November, was sunny and warm, not a cloud in the sky.

I know I'm mostly preaching to the choir. If you read this blog all the time, chances are high that you agree with my POV mostly always. But.

Recycling and making a conscious effort to reduce our consumption of natural resources are, in my ever-so-humble, about the only way the average person can attempt to assist in slowing the destruction of the planet. Even though I don't plan to have kids, I'd like the next 3 generations to be able to continue to live on this planet. I'm working on doing my share; part of my next paycheck is going to one of these. Composting is something I feel I should have been doing for a long, long time. Cutting down on the amount of waste I contribute is a goal for the year.

Cool, eh?

Fall Color

I'm too exhausted to string more than a few sentences together. So today I'm posting pictures of the fall color in the area, which is the main reason that I like Oh-hia-ia at this time of year.


This tree is at the end of my driveway, and I noticed its magnificent hues driving home from the hospice yesterday. Instead of immediately heading to bed as I should have, I walked the neighborhood taking pictures.



Except for the ugly power lines in the way, I really like those two pictures because they show the variations in color that we have.


Amazing, isn't it, the colors that are on just one tree? Red, orange, yellow, green..

Dark reds, with many of the leaves already gone.

Again the tree at the end of the driveway.


More variations in color, a few houses down from mine.


The group of trees at the end of the driveway.

Attempting, yet again, to show the many colors on one tree.

Finally, a little dogwood that is right next to my garage. There's another dogwood in between my house and my neighbor's that is still green, but I couldn't get a clean shot of it so you'll have to take my word for it.

In The Weave

Often, when I am looking at a knitting pattern, because I am geek enough to read knitting patterns, I will build a color chart for the pattern in my mind's eye, trying to see if other colors would work better than the original pattern. Sometimes these experiments have worked; other times, not so much.

I have a multicolored 'novelty' yarn that changes from orange to blue to brown to green, which sounds like it ought to work up in to the most awful melange you could imagine, but it works, even when you're working with more than one skein of it. As you pull the yarn from the center of the skeins, opposing colors seem to fight on the needles for control of the blanket or scarf, but once knitted together, form a more harmonious pattern than I would have ever thought possible.

I think of my writing on this blog in much the same fashion; ideas that seem to have nothing in common, but worked properly and patiently together form a coherent thought. Perhaps I'm fooling myself, and perhaps I write rambling nonsense more often than a cohesive whole. Either way, I enjoy the process.

What I'm thinking about today is dirt, honest to goodness get-into-the-ground dirt, and food production. The genesis of this post was a few completely unconnected things. A friend's blog about her two adorable daughters playing in a sandbox, at a farmer's market that also boasts a playhouse and a lake and ducks to feed. The girls got, gasp, dirty in the sandbox. (I direct you to read the whole post here.) Then a spider spotted inside the grocery store (horrors!) and my thought that we're so far disconnected from where our food is actually produced. Or most of us are, anyway.

I loathe spiders. Loathe them. The story for why is for another time and place, but even the smallest spider has me, unfortunately, reacting 'like a girl'. I often say that I'm not a fan of anything with more legs than me, but spiders in particular...ugh. I think it is something about the way they move that creeps me out.

The spider that I saw in the grocery store was no bigger than a nickel, if I'm going to be honest. I could tell you that it was huuuuuge, but truth is that it wasn't. It was very black, and called attention to itself by being on a white linoleum floor. It had attached a strand of its web to a large cart being pulled by one of the store's employees, a flatbed cart with rails on either end to prevent the boxes of produce that she was carting to the floor from falling off. The spider trailed along at the end of its strand, sometimes being drug by the motion of the cart, other times struggling gamely to clamber back up the line which connected it to the cart.

Another employee stopped the cart puller and called her attention to the spider. I moved in another direction, away from the spider, and did not see them stomp on it, but I heard it. Because goddess forbid that there should be a single insect or any dirt anywhere near the food.

Most of the grocery stores in my area are controlled by a particular chain, and within probably a ten-mile radius of my home are at least five of their enormous brightly lit stores. I worked for them in college, and have no love for the chain, but my choices are fairly limited by the near-monopoly that they have in the area.

Every time I walk inside any of them, I think about Alton Brown and his television show Good Eats. He often shoots short segments of the show inside a grocery store, which he refers to as 'the average American mega-mart.' And mega indeed is appropriate. So much food housed in a single grocery store. So many choices, a bounty of overabundance. No wonder more than half of the country's population is overweight, and our collective consciousness pairs the word obesity with the word epidemic.

But at what point did we learn as a culture that food should come from these gleaming warehouses, not only evidence of bounty but of fantastic waste as well? The gleaming rows of produce without a speck of dirt (heaven forbid) or an imperfection to be seen. How far has that food traveled to get to your mega-mart? When, exactly, did we become so disconnected from the way our food is produced?

I don't use pre-packaged foods, like Rice-a-Roni, or box dinners at all, because they contain too much high fructose corn syrup (otherwise known as HFCS) and everything that I've read the labels on lately also seems to have tHBQ, which is a petroleum derivative ffs, added to it. All of that pre-packaged convenience food only separates us further from the dirt and actual production of food.

"Sure," you say, "but Luce, honey, you're at home full-time these days and can spend as much time in the kitchen as you like to prepare a meal, not to mention time to chase down the ingredients to make such things." And I say to you with my best imitation of a Brooklyn accent, "True dat!"But what is also true is this: we should all be concerned about where our food comes from, and how much or how little connection is has to its beginnings.

I have no neat, elegant solution. No way to fix the problem, tie it up with a pretty bow and present it to you. I solve it for myself by reading labels, buying organic AND perhaps more importantly locally produced stuff when I can, and leave the immense worry of the bigger problem of how much fuel we consume and how much waste we produce getting the gleaming veggies in the grocery store to minds much smarter than mine. Perhaps yours.

Where have all the cowboys gone?

I saw Linkin Park's new video on MTV whilst on the treadmill this morning. I frequently watch MTV or VH1 with no sound, and so my impressions of the videos tend to differ from what they end up being like with sound. The song is "What I've Done," and the vid (on the link) shows environmental disasters of epic proportions. Towards the end, there are some shots of Mother Theresa, JFK, and Ghandi, and watching that, I was struck that I don't know who the environmental leaders of the day are. Or the voices of my generation. Who are our heroes?

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a wake-up call to many, but I'm sorry, Mr. Gore, I just don't see you as a great leader of our day. It goes almost without saying that I hardly see W as a leader either. If we're going to stay in the political arena, I'll mention the fact that I worked for the Kerry campaign in 2004 because I saw him as the much lesser of two evils, not because I greatly admired him. I haven't yet made up my mind who to vote for in the Democratic primary, nearly a year from now, but that certainly isn't for lack of exposure to the candidates. They're EVERYWHERE.

I greatly admired Madeline Allbright, as Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, but she's not in the public eye right now. Kim Gandy, current head of NOW is someone I admire. I think she's very courageous, but she isn't going to stand for election any time soon.

Maybe it is because I'm so terribly depressed, in fact, it is highly likely that it is exactly because I'm depressed, that I can't see a leader, man or woman, who is going to help America clean up its environmental mess, its economic mess, or who speaks for my generation. Sports stars, musicians, and actors get far more attention than say, Greenpeace or Amnesty International, or the World Wildlife Fund, for that matter. I can hardly claim to be exempt from or immune to that celebrity hype, being as addicted as I am to The Superficial and Go Fug Yourself, not to mention my teeny, tiny, itsy-bitsy, little, insignificant crush on Jensen Ackles.

And now I've made myself laugh, so that's at least a more positive outlook for the day.

But, really. Seriously, dude. Who are the young leaders? Who do you admire?