We have – HAD – wild raspberries growing in the power easement and along an embankment that’s actually  private land belonging to the day care center on the corner. Normally the power company mows along each side to make sure the power trucks have access to the easement, but leaves the center of the easement alone. This means that there is heavy, dense brush from the raspberry canes which provides not only yummy fruit for both human and animal (birds, deer, even bear occasionally), but also cover and nesting area for the birds.

They mowed it down. All of it. Even the stuff ON PRIVATE LAND. And they did it when the day care owners weren’t there so they couldn’t object – starting at about 7am this morning.

I’m furious. I am really unhappy about them mowing them down in the power easements – but that’s their right. But to mow them down on private property? That just makes me all kinds of livid. It isn’t the first time they’ve tried that – though the last time, the owners were there and got out there and told them to stop. This time – no.

Anyway, it’s shortsighted because the birds and critters – esp. the deer – keep the growth down and eat the stuff that might actually pose a danger to the power lines – trees and things. And, by cutting down the berries, they’re going to open the way for trees to grow in that area, which means a much bigger issue for power lines than berry canes. Not to mention, I expect my yard to be overrun with birds and whatnot looking for shelter. I can only hope they don’t flush out any bear.

This week, I’m divvying stuff up to get rid of it. Two weeks ago a friend helped me (more or less) empty our storage unit, which was packed to the gills with baby stuff from Munchkin. So now it’s all in my living room. and dining room.

The first stuff went to the church consignment sale. a stroller, a backpack, a couple of higher end toys. The next round is going to a women’s shelter. Swing, baby gates, bed rails, training potties. This means I had to clean the stuff and get it ready to go.

I also sorted through clothes and pulled the 18 mo, 2t, 3t stuff aside for a neighbor with a toddler.

Craigslist will be seeing the crib, bassinet, changing table, glider, and a few other non-baby things.

After that – it’s all getting donated. I want this stuff out of my house so bad I can taste it. I’m about ready to donate everything but our clothes, the computers and the kitchen gadgets and say to hell with it. Hell, we can even donate some of the computers. (You have no idea how many computers in this house. I’m pretty sure we qualify as a medium sized business.)

What about you? What moving prep stuff made you crazy? (Because I KNOW Inez has moving stories that will make your hair stand on end.)

This makes me insane.

Is it really so difficult to say please and thank you? Is it such an imposition to actually respond to an RSVP request? I’m not talking about handwritten thank you notes on personalized stationery or whether that fork is for seafood or spaetzle. No, I’m talking about basic courtesy.

The problem, as I see it, is that manners are the grease that helps the wheels of society slide along easily. Without that grease, society grinds along, but it’s painful and it keeps jamming and freezing up.

So, while I don’t intend to go all Emily Post on you, I do want to mention some small things that make life easier for everyone. Plus, I’m nearly completely convinced that as manners fall away, the tendency to see people as people (as opposed to obstacles) also degrades. As manners decline, so does the general “nice” quotient. And that’s just sad.

Say please and thank you. Sadly, when you do, you’ll likely get a look of shocked gratitude. Which should tell you how bad things are for manners in the real world. If someone does you the courtesy of sending you an invitation, the least you can do is pick up the phone and call to tell them yes or no. Open doors for people. Pick things up and hand them back to the person who dropped them. These small niceties make a big difference. And you might just find that your mood improves. I know it’ll improve mine.

But, naturally, our primary objective was to get rid of the nasty beasts.

Here’s what I learned.

1) The chemicals don’t work as well as you might think. The literature varies on this, giving effective rates for over the counter lice treatments of between 50% and 70%.

2) The chemicals in question are neurotoxins. And they might be absorbed in small amounts topically. Nasty stuff.

3) Even if you use the chemicals, you still have to remove the nits by hand (or, rather, by nit comb).

4) Lice eggs (nits) take around 10 days to hatch.

5) A louse can lay between 3 and 10 eggs daily. Average is around 4.

6) Nits are tan or dark when they contain a louse, but white after hatching.

7) A louse takes between 8 and 24 days to reach sexual maturity.

8 ) A louse breathes through holes along the side of it’s body. It can hold it’s breath for several hours.

9) Lice prefer clean hair for laying eggs. Eggs don’t attach well to hair shafts coated in styling products or dirt.

10) Human head lice can’t live on pets.

11) Human head lice can only live 24-48 hours off a host. They also require a blood meal (host) within 10 hours of hatching.

12) There are several effective non-neuro-toxin treatments for lice. I’ll detail 2 – but I’ll also say that if you have a boy – or a very secure girl – just shave the head. Wash the head thoroughly and without hair to adhere to, no eggs will be laid. For all treatments, it’s a good idea to wash clothing, linens and towels in hot water. Stuffed animals and other non-washable items can be tumbled in a hot dryer for 20-30 minutes. The prolonged heat will kill the lice (keep in mind that if your dryer has a cool down feature, you should extend the drying time to ensure that the high heat lasts at least 20 minutes).

13) The mayonnaise treatment. This is what we used – and it was extremely effective, though also extremely labor-intensive. Mayo works by suffocating the lice. It must be left on a minimum of 4 hours, and preferably overnight. Do not use light mayo or “salad dressing” style mayo – use cheap, full-fat, “real” mayo. You’ll also need SEVERAL shower caps. The mayo needs to be applied to the roots of the hair and all over the scalp. This is most easily accomplished by doing it in small sections and working it into the roots and scalp. Be VERY generous. Once the scalp and roots are covered, coat the rest of the hair. My daughter has short hair and we used 1/3 of a large jar of mayo for each treatment. After the hair is coated, put on the shower cap. You can seal the shower cap with gauze or something similar to hold it in place overnight. In the morning, remove the cap and comb out as much excess mayo as possible using a regular comb. You’ll want to have SEVERAL towels or rags available, since you will need to wipe the mayo out of the comb frequently. At this point, the mayo will be loaded with lice and some nits. You’re going to need to wash those towels a couple of times in hot water. After you’ve combed out most of the mayo, section the hair into small sections, no more than about an inch square. I used hair pins to secure my daughter’s hair during this process. Now, using a nit comb, starting at the back hairline, moving around toward the ears and up the head, comb each section carefully with a nit comb. I dipped the nit comb in rubbing alcohol to help unstick the nits. Again, you will be wiping off lots of mayo, so be prepared. The first time we did this it took about 3 hours – I didn’t know what I was doing so it took much longer than necessary. By the last time we did this, it only took half that. In any case, after you have combed the entire head with the nit comb, wash the mayo out. Repeat every 2-3 days for 10 days to 2 weeks. That should catch the entire life cycle. Yes, it’s a lot of work – but no chemicals and very effective.

14) Now I’ll tell you the easy way. The way I didn’t find out about until too late for us. But I’m sharing with you because I’m sure you don’t want to bother with the mayo treatment. Sure, it works, but daaaaang that’s a lot of effort. So, here’s the Nuvo treatment. The instructions are very detailed, but it’s important to follow them exactly. You will need Cetaphil cleanser, a regular fine-tooth comb, a hair dryer, a condiment bottle (the kind used for ketchup or mustard with the pointy tip), and possibly a nit comb. The treatment involves putting the Cetaphil on in a specific way, combing out the excess cleanser, then using the hairdryer to dry the Cetaphil onto the hair and scalp. The Cetaphil is left in place for several hours (overnight, usually), then washed out. This is repeated exactly one week later, and a third time exactly one week after that. If you are interested in trying this method, I urge you to read the instructions at the link above. This method is 96% effective. That’s pretty stinking good for no chemicals and not much effort.

So… now you know way more than you want to about lice. And, if you’re like me, you’ll have psychosomatic itching every time you think about it.

MOSQUITOES! Gah! These things are like Japanese kamikaze bombers. I walked out to the car last night and got swarmed. A literal visible swarm hit me. They were in my hair, my face, down my shirt, up my skirt. I don’t even know these insects and they are getting down right personal. I have bites on my boobs, my butt and my arms are covered. They didn’t even buy me dinner first.  Then my husband informs my only the females bite. This is girl on girl action I could do without.

I am coating everyone in bug spray, doing foggers and even resorted to a yard spray. Sadly, I think I will still lose. So I sit and try not to scratch(fail at that) and my poor kids look like they have the played connect the dot in pink marker on their legs.

Anyone have any tried and true anti-bloodsucker remedies?

Honestly, I don’t know if they were waiting for me to cover it in sparkles or send it with an accompanying brass band. So, now we call and ask what in the hell we’re supposed to do with the check, and why are they suddenly sending this back to us when they’ve cashed every other one we’ve been sending for over a year? The answer: “You are xx days late and it says here that the check was sent back to you for the wrong payee. ”

Smoke slowly begins to pour from my ears at this point. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m looking at the check right now, it’s in my hot little hand and it has your company’s name on it.”

Dead silence.

“Ma’am you’re xx days late on your payments.”

By this point I want not only claw her eyes out, but my own as well.

My hubby had just made another payment on line, this one a double. I told the braindead woman this and she said. “Ma’am you’re xx days late.”

“How can I be when my husband just made a payment. Here’s the confirmation number.”

For the next four days we contined to get calls saying we were behind. No one. And I mean no one is able to think outside their cubicle here.

I woke to Dave yelling at someone on the phone they were giving him the exact same run-around. Finally, he lost it so bad the dogs hid. He then asked to speak to a supervisor. Things are not quite resolved, but reasonably better now. However, my credit is fucked because of the company’s mistake. Not fair. At all.

Don’t even get me started with the incompetence at my mortgage company. The right hand doesn’t know the left one even exsists over there. We got notified by them that they paid our property taxes and they were raising our monthly payment to cover the escroe account they opened for us – without us asking – the reason – they said we hadn’t paid our property taxes, or our township hadn’t informed them of payment. Whatever. I have receipts that prove I paid. So what’s the problem? They are a bunch of freakin’ idiots. That’s what. It comes down to that alone.

So, today I called a mortgage broker who works with one of my best friends who owns her own realty company. He’s the man who wrote up our original mortgage and refianced us when we bought the house ten years ago. He’s going to see what he can do for us. Thank God!!! Now just cross your fingers and pray.

As for the car. The lease is up in December, so I’m going out on my next day off and looking at new ones. I’m going to talk to the credit union at work and see about getting another car and having the payments taken out of my paycheck. (They do payroll deduction where I work) No muss. No fuss. No drama.

That’s the plan. I am just sooooo over the fucking drama that isn’t even of our making.

Jesus wept.

So, let me hear about your brushes with incompetence. Please, let me know I’m not the only one being bombarded by stupidity.

-Kate

Local example.  The county in which I live – Chesterfield, VA – has a major budget shortfall.  They are cutting funding for libraries, schools, and county services. Major cuts. At the same time, they are offering tax breaks to big developers to put in new retail and housing space – when we can’t fill the retail space we have currently and houses aren’t selling. WTF? Oh, and as an added bonus, they aren’t cutting in places that it makes sense to cut. Our county has 48 county employees who make over $150,000 per year. Compare that to Henrico, which has a similar tax base and similar school system, and is located just across the river.  They have 6 who make over $150,000 per year.  Why do we have so many? Cut THEIR pay. Don’t eliminate their jobs, but cut their pay. If we instituted a county-wide salary cap of, say, $148,000 with the exception of maybe the school superintendent (who, btw, is a whole other bucket of WTF. He gave himself a 58% pay increase last year in the school budget, and while the parents screamed, the county said fine) and the county superintendent, which we could cap at $200,000, we’d save enough to fund the libraries at their current level and make up about 80% of the budget short fall for the schools to bring them to current levels. If they don’t institute the proposed tax “incentives” to the developers, the revenue might actually pay for the proposed infrastructure expansion that will go along with the development. Though, frankly, I wish they’d shelve the development for at least 5 years – give our existing space a chance to fill up.

This is ridiculously short-sighted and profoundly disturbing. The county is effectively telling me, as a parent, that they don’t care about my child. They are cutting my child’s education budget and at the same time cutting funding to the other places I might go to make up the lack – libraries, community centers, county parks.  You know what, Chesterfield? That sucks.

There are similar cuts on the plate at the state level, but I’m not even going to get into what I think of the Virginia state budget and my extreme unhappiness with McDonnell’s asinine plans (you tell me – what sense does it make to eliminate a key revenue source at a time of serious budget shortfalls? Really?)

We aren’t the only ones. Kat talked about NJ libraries losing funding (good article here), and California is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

We all understand that the states, counties, the nation, need to tighten the collective belts. The problem is the priorities.  The only thing that Americans have to sell on the global market is service and innovation. We make almost nothing – our manufacturing is nearly nonexistent (in 1965, manufacturing accounted for 53% of the US economy, in 2004 only 9%).  That means that our brains our carrying us. We HAVE to invest in those brains – in education, in services that encourage learning, and in services that encourage strong service.  Our education system is sliding compared to other industrialized nations, and without the education, our young people will have nothing to offer on the global marketplace.  Far from cutting education and libraries, governments should be manning a push to increase the level of competency in our education system.  Cutting education and similar resources is the height of short-sightedness.

Instead, states should be cutting the fat in high-end salaries, in capital overhead (facilities, etc.), and similar places. And, yeah, I have to say that while I, personally, would love to have more money in pocket, I don’t think it’s the time for tax cuts or eliminating revenue streams or providing big tax incentives for new development projects. If you want to encourage development, offer a tax break for occupying space that has been empty for longer than 6 months. Offer tax breaks for rehabilitating and updating existing facilities. Offer tax breaks for rehabbing and/or occupying vacant homes, or provide tax incentives for buying foreclosures. THAT might actually help stabilize the real estate market.

What our politicians fail to comprehend is that real estate is in a  basic capitalist crisis here. We have a case where the supply of existing homes/retail space far exceeds the demand. Adding more supply is NOT going to help. All it will do is drive prices down further.  Instead, we need to decrease the supply, and the only way to do that is to NOT add more and make the existing supply more attractive. For people who theoretically should understand basic capitalist theory, a lot of politicians sure look like they don’t get it.

It’s simple.  We are a capitalist society.  We must offer something the market wants – and in the US it isn’t manufactured goods, it’s service and innovation.  And the supply must be appropriate for the market – which means we need an educated, innovative population. Cutting education and libraries and community centers is precisely counterproductive.  On the other hand, we need to balance supply and demand in real estate. That means NOT increasing the supply when there is already over-supply. Instead, we need to increase demand for the existing supply by changing incentives from new development to using existing development.

And, really, basic financial rules of the game wouldn’t go amiss. But that’s a whole other rant.]

Okay. I promise that next week I will find something non-political to discuss. I SWEAR. Though it might pain me to do so. lol

Now, I realize our state is in big trouble financially and Governor Christie needs to cut the fat somewhere in order to get us back in the black, but honestly, this is not the way to do it. Does the legistature not realize how many people use a library for services? Especially in times when it is so very tight financially every where else. It’s great to go to the library and pick up a movie or a book instead of spending the 40 bucks to go to the local theatre.

According to the article I read some of the libraries – a good portion  – throughout the state will close . Others services will be cut drastically. Things like inter-library loans, the Braille Center (are you kidding me! How can they cut that? – that’s my WTF moment for this week!), loss of eletronic databases and services. It’s unbelievable.

I’ll let you know more as information becomes available.  What are they? A bunch of book haters?

-Kate

Let’s do some basic math here, shall we. Three accounts. 401 spam messages among them.

While I have to admit that this week’s load for the site was heavier than usual (I have no idea why – usually it’s about half what it was this week), the yahoo accounts are about average.

And you’d think, what with over 400 spam messages, that I’d see some variety. But there isn’t. As far as I can tell, we (and I) get spam in one of four varieties. The first category is pRon. Sex tapes for any celebrity you can think of (and, btw, this just tells me one should never, ever make tapes of oneself having sex if you don’t want it plastered all over the internet), anime, kinks, toys, you name it, if it has to do with porn, there’s spam.

Intersecting with that, but by no means totally overlapping it, is the second category of spam: drugs. These seem to be mainly either erectile dysfunction or depression drugs (I suspect these two might be related), but occasionally you’ll get cholesterol drugs or something else just to add some variety to your druggy spam.

The third category I see is designer (knockoff) accessories. Handbags for the most part, but occasionally jewelry/watches. Evidently while hubby is searching out his awesome deal on Viagra and whacking to porn (because the porn is nearly universally guy porn – not much girl porn included in the spam I see), I’m supposed to be spending our hard-earned cash (and credit!) on bad designer knockoffs.

Which brings us to the fourth category- one which I suspect is predicated on us all falling victim to the first three categories – the money spam. This comes in two varieties. The first is the enabling variety – cheap loans! bad credit? no problem!  The second is the “helpful” variety – get out of debt, buy a better credit score, that sort of thing. And you know none of these guys is listed with the BBB.

So, you know what I want? I want something a little different from my spam. I want something that surprises me, something that doesn’t make me yawn and say “Oh. Another free loan for free Viagra with free sex toy and purse offer. Yawn.”

You know what I want? Spam I can use. Send me spam on how to pick a summer camp for my Munchkin. That I can use.

Early last week, I heard about the site fabulis – a gay-themed travel start-up. They launch a little later this year, but they have a whole slew of cute and interesting little videos up on the site about how individuals are fabulis – and what makes them fabulis (one cutie talks about how his mom being awesome is what makes him fabulis). In this case, all the vids are PG-13 or less, and some of them are irritating, some cute, a standard internet variety. Anyway, nothing objectionable in the content except that it’s mostly gay people talking about *gasp* being gay (as well as a variety of other topics).

The way I heard about them is through Twitter. But the story was so jaw-dropping, I’ve been following along.

Here’s the deal:  fabulis evidently ran afoul of Citibank. Jason Goldberg, one of the founders of fabulis, blogged about it starting here.  The gist is that Citibank blocked fabulis’s bank account (freezing it so they couldn’t get access to their money) on the grounds of objectionable content on their website. Bwah? The only possible objection is the idea that the site is gay-themed. And, btw, where do they get off blocking access to a person/business’s money without appropriate notice. That’s right – no notice. They just cut them off without even bothering to inform them. Needless to say, Goldberg was less than pleased. Being a smart guy, he called the bank and sought an explanation.  Initially, all he got was “we’ll check into it” – but his money was still stuck.

After a discussion with an account manager, fabulis was informed that their website content was not in compliance with Citi’s policies, so would they please terminate the account.  Goldberg gave a bit more information here. And, yeah, this looks a lot like gay-bashing. Especially when you consider that Citibank evidently did something similar here.

Now, at this point, Goldberg has been hitting Twitter and various other avenues and getting the word out. It’s picked up by bloggers, twitters, and starting to make inroads into the print press.

Let the backpedaling begin. Citibank says … uh… we didn’t mean that. Sure, three separate people told you that and read you the policies, but we didn’t mean it. And we’re really, really sorry. Really sorry.

But the backpedaling, the double talk, and the somewhat generic apology don’t erase the stink from this little fiasco – and other bloggers agree. Switched sums up my viewpoint handily. Alistair Fairweather points out the blatant idiocy of the move, and the Wall Street Journal and NPR’s Marketplace even wade in.

Here’s my thing. Leaving aside my personal opinion on the moral idiocy and the stupidity of alienating the gay market and their money, Citibank can be homophobic if it wants – they have the right to refuse to do business with whomever they choose. What they DON’T have the right to do is open the account for fabulis and then, without notice, freeze that account. And then piddle around before asking fabulis to terminate the account. In the (approximately) 5 days this took to play out, fabulis did not have access to its own money, but Citibank did – which means that they were making money on fabulis for that time period while fabulis was getting jerked around. You know, in any other place that would be called… theft. I have your stuff and I’m not giving it back. At the very least, it would be fraud – taking someone’s money without the intention of providing the agreed upon service.

Frankly, Goldberg is more forgiving than I am – and good for him for being a better person. But I can tell you that none of MY money is going to Citibank. I write objectionable content – Lord only knows what they’d do to my money.