Pass the Ranch


Mmm. My next door neighbors seem to be having feet in frozen pea sauce for dinner. At least that's what my nose says.

Off To Sleep Go I

After my sleeping bag is dry. Not that I'm sleeping in it, but I'm trying to wash the campfire smell out and I want to bring it back in before I go to bed. I'm worried that cotton based fabrics left outside the confines of my apartment will get moldy* and revolting - two qualities I find unappealing in a sleeping bag.

So hurry up bag! Who knew it would take so long to dry a million pounds of wet fabric and stuffing? Everybody? Well fine then.


*I mistyped this as modly. As if leaving a sleeping bag out in a fogy climate would make it grow its hair long and down in front of its eyes. It would drive around on a vintage Vespa with its pants rolled up wearing all black except for its white socks. I suppose a modly sleeping bag would lose some of its warmth.

Asses, You, And I

So I haven't actually gone out on a date with the nurse yet, but we have talked on the phone some. The problem is that she lives really far away and our schedules don't line up that well.

Normally I don't like talking to people I don't know very well on the phone. There are long silences, which are almost always my fault, and the person on the other end invariably asks if I'm still there. Yep, I say, and we lapse into another long silence.

But I seem to be able to talk to the nurse without too many occasions where she thinks I may have hung up, and here's why I think that is: I know she likes me. Even though it was right out of middle school, she asked my coworker to ask me if I liked her. And with that I knew that she liked me, and it seems to have given me sooo much more confidence.

I suppose that guys who are good with girls just assume* that a girl is going to find them attractive or like them or something. And I just don't work that way. Usually I assume that I'm coming off as creepy.** So hopefully this confidence will last long enough so we can actually go out on a date.

And that, I'm afraid, is the end of the regular portion of this extremely boring post.

* Until just recently I thought the saying went, "assuming makes and ass out of you and I." It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, apart for the ass bit. When I realized that it was supposed to be "assuming makes an ass out of you and me" it made me realize that I can add accurate recitations of aphorisms to my list of stuff at which I suck. The list also includes spelling, basketball, catching things next to my head on my left side, geography, and neatly wrapping gifts. (I can, however, wrap a gift so unattractively that I can take pride in the final result.)

** I am really good at just standing slightly away from groups and not saying anything. This makes me a big hit at parties. But my finest hour was at a Halloween party last year when I came dressed as the grim reaper. I guess if I'm are going to stand by myself in the corner and not talk to anyone, I might as well be dressed as Death. (End notes don't usually have pictures, but this one does. As Oppenheimer once said, "I am become death, shatterer of the rules of end notes having pictures.")

Look, I'm a Photoblog

These pictures came out waaay better than I thought they would, so I'm going to post them in lieu of typing something interesting.

These shots give you an idea of the fear a flying Norbert can instill when that flying Norbert is aimed at your torso.


Good catch.

Not such a good catch.

Note the aerodynamic tail position.

And her optimism.

Notice her claws and think about how you might not want them to find purchase on your pantless leg.

If I had an assistant I could have gotten some face shots.

Oh my. I seem to have overshot my quarry.

"Why Caution?"

I'm going to put this in a separate post so I don't encourage the lurid rumors of cat nookie.

Anyhow, this is the sign I saw one the way to Snot Lady's house.

Attack!

Tonight Norbert attacked me. I'm not sure what it was - one too many gentle* bumps on the nose when she tried to stick a paw in my soup or maybe one too many puffs of air in the face as she sunk her teeth into my hand. Whatever the cause, she'd had enough.

Norbert crouched on the far side of the couch, tail puffed, ears tucked away, and then leapt at me, teeth bared and claws extended. When I grabbed her out of midair we were both kind of surprised so she got away. The next pounce was more effective, in that I missed her and she got me. Pounce number three was another midair catch, but this time I was ready and took her into my room, blew on her, and tossed her onto the bed.

She stayed in there for a while, then got bored and came out to the livitchen where she fell asleep on my leg. I wonder if they make Zoloft in pet doses.

*From my original spelling spellchecker felt that "gentel bumps on the nose" should have been "genital bumps on the nose." I, however, felt that the word genital really changed the meaning of the sentence and calls into question my abilities as a cat dad.

Ewwwwwwwww

Yesterday I had to deliver a gel mattress pad to a woman in Santa Rosa. When I got to her apartment building I drove past a sign that said "Caution, Speed Humps." I took a picture. I'll post it eventually.

Anyhoo, I unloaded the gel and put it on my little hand truck and made my way though her apartment building. I realized how eerily similar old people apartment buildings are to dorms except that they are much, much quieter. The halls look the same and they both have crappy elevators which smell like pee (but I'm sure for much different reasons.)

I arrived at her door and knocked, and she asked who it was as if it were anyone other than the guy who just called her to be buzzed into the building. Maybe she thought I would slip up and change my story.

She answered the door and I was greeted with a strong ode de ashtray and a woman wearing an old flannel nightdress and slippers. She invited me into the hallway which was almost entirely dark, yet not so dark that I couldn't see the massive brown stains on the ceiling and the grunge on the walls.

I rolled the pad into the bedroom and donned my blue vinyl gloves. To get to the mattress I had to pull of sheet after grubby sheet interspersed with not-so-blue-anymore chucks. (Absorbent pee pads.) After I placed the gel pad I made the bed again and we set off to the living room to sign the 20 pages of paperwork.

As she sat down she gave a big sniff and wiped her hand across her nose, and then across the back of her nightdress, then took my pen. While signing her way through the Medicare paperwork an ever increasing stalactite of snot hung ominously from her left nostril.

When she was done I picked up the clipboard from her lap and felt something slimy. It seems that the middle and ring fingers from my right hand had landed in a clear puddle of mucus on the back of the clipboard.

I rushed down the hallway back to my van, a dangling stringer of snot stretched between two of my fingers. Safely inside my van I applied copious amounts of hand sanitizer to both my hands and my clipboard. Then I drove to the nearest Jack in the Box to wash my hands with real soap.

For the rest of the day I kept thinking that everything I touched felt a little slimy. I would cut those fingers off, but then I'd never learn to play the banjo.

A Big Day for All

This week I haven't been posting much because my supervisor is on vacation and I'm filling in for him. We haven't been super busy, but we have been one driver short, that driver being me. I've been getting up earlier and being overwhelmed all day, so when I get home I've just been reading other people blogs, getting my toes chewed on, and going to bed.

But today was a big day. Today the Head of the Service Department and the VP of American Operations came to my humble depot. I was a little worried about the visit because I'm not usually in charge, but since I am this week, it fell entirely onto my shoulders to have things under control when they showed up. Luckily the tension was broken when I got a look at the VP. He was mostly VP looking with the exception that the front of his shirt had come up just a smidgen as if he'd just finished a big stretch. With his shirt arranged thusly I could see that he was not wearing an undershirt and that he had a mediumly hairy belly. From that point on I felt a little less nervous with the peace of mind that my trusty polo shirt was never going to subject me to the embarrassment of tummy peekage through the treachery of buttons.*

The visit was actually a little strange because I think they thought we might need more help with stuff. After they wandered around and looked at the depot we went to lunch. After lunch they asked if I needed more in depth training on anything and when I couldn't think of anything they said everything seemed to be in good shape and left. So I guess it went well.

My day continued on its path to glory when I went to check on a serial number at the rehabilitation hospital where my Nurse works.

I should put in an aside here about my ability to ask girls out. Whenever I've decided to ask someone out it always goes poorly, or more accurately, it doesn't go. I decided to ask this girl I had been talking to on the bus on the way to class - she stopped riding the bus. I decided to ask out a girl in my physics class 3 weeks before the end of the quarter - she dropped the class. I decided to ask out a girl who kept sitting near me in my poetry class - she stopped sitting near me and left class each day so fast that poems would flutter out the door after her. So when I decided to ask out the Nurse I wasn't at all surprised when I didn't see her for 2 weeks. So I decided to defeat the universe and send my phone number along with another rental tech to give to her. He did. She didn't call.

Back to today. I went into the hospital to check on the serial number and there she was. So I asked for her number, and low and behold, she gave it to me. And I was planning on calling her tonight, but a number of factors have led to me chickening out.

1) By the time I got home, ate, and finished talking to my friend in Ohio, it was 8:30pm and she gets up at 4 or 5 to work the early shift. (I think.)
2) Calling girls scares me.
3) I have to go sit in my car to talk on my cell phone. (My regular phone doesn't have long distance and my apartment and Verizon are not bosom buddies.)

So I'll have to call her tomorrow.

The other person having a big day today is Norbert, and is therefore not a person. She learned two new tricks while I was at work.

1) When I'm sitting on the toilet she likes to reach out a paw and stab my butt. She knows I can't move and she likes the sense of power this gives her.
2) She knows how to hang up the phone. While I was talking to Jeremy she propped herself up to phone height, stuck out a paw, and placed it gingerly and accurately on the phone cradle effectively ending my call from Ohio. It was so deliberate I just can't believe that it was just dumb luck.

Now if I can just get through tomorrow, call my Nurse, and not have any mattress emergencies come up on this, my on-call weekend, I'll be all set. I'm going to have to sit down and have a serious talk with myself about having managed to schedule myself to be on-call after a week of being in charge.

*This unnecessarily flowery sentence has been brought to you by the fact that the VPoAO is English.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

We have a list, at the Depot, of Medicare patients, their names and addresses, and when we last checked in with them. We're supposed to see that everything is ship shape once a month, so when a driver runs out of things to do in his particular neighborhood, we do Medicare checks.

Today a driver ran out of things to do, so I gave him a name. He called up, and the lady who answered said that her husband had died 8 days ago and that a different medical supply company had come and picked everything up. This happens sometimes and it's a huge pain in the ass. We have to track down the company and get them to let us wander through their warehouse looking for our crap. Well, we did all that and we couldn't find our crap.

So I called the lady and asked if she was suuuuure our mattress wasn't in the garage or a storage space or something. She started to get angry and lectured me for 5 minutes (I have a little call-timer on my phone) about how people need to leave her alone and how she's grieving, and how she has no place where she could have accidentally stashed our mattress. All very understandable grievances.

After my lecture I called the sales guy to let him know that our $5000 mattress had disappeared. He asked to know the other medical supply company's name and number and the grieving lady's name and number. Then he went on a calling rampage that involved grieving lady hanging up on him, possibly more than once.

While his calling rampage was going on I decided I would pull the file and call corporate to stop billing. But I couldn't find the file. The reason I couldn't find the file was that we had picked up the mattress last week and it was in the "off" drawer.

For those who would like a flow chart, the flow goes like this:
List not updated -> Lady tells us that a single medical company picked up everything. (There were at least 3 companies involved.) -> Since the warehouse was searched and nothing found it is assumed that the lady is lying and just doesn't want us to come over. -> Sales guy is mean to her and she hangs up. -> Lady has a bad day. -> I have a bad day.

Stupid snowballing chain of events. (Although I have to say, the sales guy seemed peculiarly fine with the whole thing.)

I Almost Forgot

After Diddy left, Martha said that she was sorry he couldn't stay, but he's a busy entrepreneur as she mentioned before. But because he couldn't stay he left a "Daddy's Girl" shirt for every member of the audience.

The camera panned out to a shot of the crowd - a group of non-plussed women and one very disappointed looking dude. The dude looked like he had come specifically to see Diddy, so he could have been disappointed for any number of reasons.

Best Blog Ever

No, not this one. This one.

Transportation

I've found that the best way to carry Norbert around is to cradle her upside down in my arm. But when that doesn't work, or if she'd like to be right-side up, or if my forearm is cold, I like to carry her this way:

Train-wreck Television

Despite the fact that I have a TiVO, I was flipping through channels this evening. When I arrived at TLC I stopped at the strange pairing which lay before me. On my TV screen were Martha Stewart and Sean Puffy Combs Puff Daddy Puffy P Diddy Diddy making wrapping paper.

Just before the commercial break Diddy recommended that everybody should donate money to Katrina relief funds. But more importantly, explained, everybody should pray for the victims because God can fix any problem. With that he waved and walked off stage to Martha’s explanation that he was a busy entrepreneur and he had business to take care of.

Martha mentioned that she was hoping Diddy could stay for her next guest who was going to show her how to wrap presents in the style of the Japanese. I had to stay for the next guest because I had to know if Martha's bejeweled belt buckle actually said M Diddy. It did.

To top the whole thing off, when Martha's Japanese wrapping guest was showing her how to fold the paper the guest said, "Now caress the paper over the edge."

"Caress?" Martha inquired.

"Yes, caress the paper over the corners," the guest encouraged.

"Okay," decided Martha, "I'm going to caress my box."

I switched back to prerecorded programs.

Wednesday: A Culinary Tip:

Don't eat yogurt which has passed its expiration date, especially when it is a month past its expiration date. It may taste ok at first, but sooner or later you'll get a spoon full of fruit which tastes an awful lot like mold. And I do mean awful.

Win-Win

I think little rubber boots would be a benefit to both Norbert and me.

For me, of course, there's the benefit of not bleeding on my shirt.

For Norbert there's the benefit of added traction. She loves to jump into the bathtub after my shower, and she likes to play in the sink after I wash my hands or brush my teeth. Unfortunately she doesn't always realize that wet paws and tile or porcelain don't go well together. I need to put little tattoos on her toes which say "slippery when wet."

Epilogue

After 3 hours of trying, on and off, to try to clip Norbert's nails I got 3 clipped. I quit after 3 because I was tired and my hands hurt.

My theory is that she's trying to slowly kill me by employing the old strategy of Death by 1000 cuts.

And I like the suggestion of the little rubber glue on nail pads, but I can't think of any way I might attach them without sacrificing my hands and arms. Maybe if I dipped her feet in rubber. Or maybe strapped on tiny galoshes. Those would be both safe AND funny.

How Does One Go About

Teaching a kitteen* not to bite while at the same time trying to clip her nails? Don't girls like pedicures?

Norbert has a little game she likes to play called Gently Stab Awake. The title isn't very creative, but what are going to do? She's a cat. The game involves getting up at 3am and slowly and carefully extending a paw until it reaches one of my exposed and sleeping arms, then gently stabbing me with a single claw until I wake up and pull my arms under the covers.

Round 2 is just like round 1 except, since round 1 only happened 15 minutes ago, it doesn't take me as long to wake up. Round 2 concludes with me shooting Norbert in the face with a can of compressed air.

Round 3 is another 15 minutes down the line, and exactly the same as round 2 except this time I take the can of compressed air under the covers so it'll be ready for round 4.

Round 4 commences with a stab (or sometimes a bite), and then is followed by a retaliatory filling of my covers with propellant (which is coooooold), me flailing about in my sheets, me moving the frozen sheet away from my frozen shirtless torso, and then shooting Norbert in the face with a right-side-up can of compressed air.

She made the game a little harder last night by stealing the red air-aiming tube. I'll have to look for it before playoffs.


*Not a typo - between kitten and cat.

I'm So Rice-A-Roni

Today I rode my scooter to KQED to volunteer for the radio pledge drive. Later I'm going to ride my scooter to see M. Ward play is little known music live at Bimbo's 365 club.

At KQED a volunteer* decided for some reason that I was gay. He said, "Oh, you must go to Midnight Sun. No? The Cafe? No? The Endup? No?" He based his assumption on my saying that Robin Williams lives near Baker Beach. I can't figure out why this makes me gay. I mean, half of Baker is a nude beach, but last time I checked gay and nudist weren't redundant nor are they exclusively linked. And I'm neither of those so who knows.

If I hadn't gone to the mall to get money this would be a super San Francisco day. I wonder if I can get some clam chowder in a bread bowl for dinner.


*This same volunteer, when picked up the phone, would yell "Gooooood morning KQEDEEEEE! CAN I TAKE YOUR PLEDGE!?!"

Best Day Ever

It started off my day at 4am when Norbert hooked one claw onto my lip and another a toe's-width away on my cheek.

I went back to sleep and got up at 6:30am, as per usual, but discovered I'd run out of breakfast food. I have cereal, but no milk. I have eggs, but no milk with which to scramble them. I have margarine, but no bread on which to spread it. So I had peas and a caffeine free coke.

On a regularly trafficked day it takes me between 35 and 40 minutes to get to work. I hate being late. HATE it. And traffic was unnecessarily crappy most of the way there. When I was just feet from the Depot I tried to sneak around somebody at an intersection who was turning right so I get go straight through the intersection. I didn't make it. I scraped the right side of my van across her tail light and bumper. She was really nice about it, but I just got rear ended a month ago, and having an accident in a work vehicle takes up your whole freaking day.

And so the accident stuff began. I had to call the insurance company which seems to be staffed completely by idiots. "Explain what happened." I did. "Did this happen on the premises of your employer?" Um, noooo. I don't work in an intersection. "What's your title?" Rental technician. "Do you own the car?" No, it's a company car. "Yeah, but do you own the company?" Noooo, I'm a rental tech.

After 10 minutes of insurance company I spent 4 hours driving around from clinic, to non-existent drug testing facility, to Kaiser, away from Kaiser, back to Kaiser, and finally to a Lab Corp, who told me to go across the street to Quest to get myself drug tested. So 5 hours after my accident I got my drug test completed. I'm sure that cleared up a lot. (I wonder if they will tell my company that I got into the accident because of my poor breakfasting habits.)

When I get back into the depot one of the Rental Techs tells me the rehab nurse really likes me and has asked him to ask me if I like her too, yes or no. How middle school is that? But, whatever, I'm always up for a date, even if she lives an hour and a half from my house. But when I went into the rehab facility to deliver a mattress (when I got there the order was canceled) she wasn't there.

At 4:45pm, 15 minutes from punching out and driving home, I got a Napa delivery that had to be done today. I finished with the delivery at 6:15 (it took an hour to get there and a half hour to get the guy out of bed and set up the mattress) and because CalTrans has just moved a section of the Bay Bridge, it took me until 8 o'clock to get home.

Norbert seems to have just taken the world's most fragrant crap, so I'm going to quit writing and deal with that before my pizza gets here. (Or before it doesn't get here as the case may be. We'll see how late the evil tendrils of this Friday reach.)

Quit with the Magic Twanger Froggy!

A while back Norbert discovered that it was fun to play with the door doynger* in my room. This particular DD is attached to the wall, so I took a big block of corrugated cardboard, gouged a hole in the middle, and stuffed it over the doynger. Problem solved, and actually the solution came with the bonus of getting Norbert interested in her cardboard scratchy box.

Unfortunately Norbert has gone on to discover the doynger in the bathroom. It's attached to the door, so it's much harder to silence. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it yet. It has to be something that stops the noise, yet doesn't make noise itself. Something which is either not any fun to play with, or fun to play with in a quiet way. Both happy and sad. Fast and slow.

The doynger must have a Zen fix.



*Door Doynger, Noun: A piece of hardware constructed of a tapered spring with a rubber cap which is anchored to a door or wall to prevent a door knob from hurting the sheetrock. (Alternate/true spellings of doynger would be much appreciated.)

I'm Here (But Not for Long)

This morning my supervisor's pager buzzed. He looked down and said that coworker who talks to dead people had arrived. He pages my supervisor, who is sitting in the depot, to let him know that he has arrived at the depot. And he does this every morning. How weird is that?

In semi-related news, yesterday I went to check a serial number on a mattress at a rehab facility. Today I went to pick up that mattress and was told that they guy who was using it died yesterday. As I recall, when I was checking the serial number there was a priest praying over the guy. I'm hoping the guy was being put at ease before he went, and not having something said over him just after he'd gone.

I asked a nurse before I went in if it was okay to check the serial number. She said, "sure, go ahead." I would assume that she might have said something along the lines of, "maybe you want to wait until they cart off the corpse" if they guy was dead. Don't you think?

I'm hoping to put off seeing my first dead person until, um, later.

Meal of the Gods

Celebrity chef Michael shares a delicious recipe with his loyal readership:

Crack 3 eggs into little white bowl.
Add some milk, salt, and pepper.
Scramble eggs.

To save on dishes, place egg bowl in microwave. Cover in plastic wrap and set on high for 3 minutes.

Carefully remove plastic wrap and shake egg dome onto plate. When eggs refuse to leave bowl, scoop around the edges with a fork. Now shake egg dome onto plate.

Serve on green plate with salsa and black olives as side dishes. The presentation of yellow and white eggs on a green plate really whets the appetite.

The end result should look like this:



Bon Appétit!

I'm Always Being Tagged

3 things starting with M that I want and why:

Mini Cooper - Because it would be easier to park and cool to have.
Meaningful Relationship - Because girlfriend doesn't start with M.
Monstrous Shop Full of Tools - So I could make marvelous things out of metal more often.

I'm going to tag Me, Mcate, and MJootastic – thusly, the circle of life has been completed.

3 Things

1) My boss was telling me that on of my coworkers was out sick a little while ago. He said that the coworker had to go to the doctor because his limp noids were swollen. I do enjoy any mention of limp noids, whatever they may be.

2) The Yahoo Personals date went well, and ended with mutual I-had-funs. But I emailed on Friday night, and left a phone message on Saturday evening, and I haven't heard anything. So I may have been disappeared on, which is the preferred online method of saying goodbye (or not.)

3) It can be very difficult to blog when your cat is interested in the little moving text and mouse curser on the screen. If she keep sitting so close she is going to ruin her eyes.

I Really Always Need to Close the Door

I know I have to close the door so it clicks when I'm using the toilet in a standing position. But up until this week it's been okay to leave the door open when I'm sitting. Not anymore.

I lifted the lid and pulled my pants down. As my ass moved toward the toilet seat the sound of galloping kitten paws approached. Norbert rounded the corner at full speed and leapt, Indian Jones style, between my descending cheeks and the toilet seat to land square inside the bowl.

Being worried about what her reaction might be to being trapped in the bowl by something so tender and susceptible to all her sharp pieces, I didn't sit down. Instead I lifted her out and dried her off with the rag I use to dry my shower.

I don't get it. What's so fun about being in a toilet? Perhaps her life's ambition is to one day grow up to be a turd.

By Any Other Name ...

Will Norbert realize that her name is Norbert if I only ever refer to her as "Kitten Butt?"

And Then I Threw Away My Pants

Because I didn't manage to do laundry on Sunday I had to wear my old gap pants to work all week. I hadn't worn them for a while because they had started fraying around the legs.

Yesterday morning I got into my van and dropped my pen in my lap. When I reached down between my legs to pick it up I discovered a fairly large hole in my crotch. I'd say it was 2, maybe 2 1/2 inches long. So all day I made sure that when ever I picked anything up from the ground I would squat, not bend over.

I have to tuck in my work shirt and as a result I'm always trying to work a wedgy loose. I was thinking, at the beginning of the week, that maybe I should go commando and stop the wedgy problem at its source. I guess it's a good thing I didn't, what with all the breeziness down there.




(When I typed wedgy into google to see that I was spelling it right, I got these two images:)

Question:

I know it's considered inhumane to declaw cats. But is it also frowned upon to deteeth them? I could make little kibble smoothies.