Archive for the 'house' Category

BGE Peak Time Rebate Program UPDATE

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on April 8, 2008 @ 9:23 am
in house, money, nerd stuff and suhmuhmuh bitch
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Most of you will want to skip this post unless you live in MD, DE, NJ, or PA and you’re interested in saving some money on your energy bill. Really. Stop reading. Stop. Right now. You’re going to be bored.

Okay, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

When I was first enrolled in the program I thought I had passed all the major hurdles. Apparently not. They can’t attach the new meter to my house because of the way our current meter is set up. Right now the old meter has the deck built around it, and apparently the new meter is bigger than the space in my deck. So, no peak time rebate program for me. Boo.

But, because I called to find out what it would take to be in the program, the guy let me know that I could call BGE and just ask to be in the air conditioner/fan program described in the link above. So I’m going to call now and see what that’s all about.

UPDATE: Here’s the basic process to get more information-

1) Call BGE at 800 685 0123
2) Listen to the menu options twice to be connected to a human
3) Ask about the BGE Demand Response Infrastructure program and the free programmable thermostat OR an air conditioner load control switch. I don’t know if they’ll let you do both, but I guess you can ask. We already have a programmable thermostat, so I didn’t ask.
4) They’ll ask for some address and phone information to look up your account, and then they’ll put you on the list to receive further information about the program. From what I was told you not only get this device strapped on to your AC unit to save you some energy costs, but they also give you a credit for each month you have the thing on there.

Of popped-collars and douchebags

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on March 31, 2008 @ 9:46 am
in Glen Burnie, Mrs. ACW, beer, bitches, devil cat, house, money, people are idiots and suhmuhmuh bitch
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Saturday morning I woke at the crack of 11am to wrestle my cat to the ground before Mrs. ACW gave him his medicine. And by “medicine” I mean a savage beating. And by “a savage beating” I mean the anti-biotics that are supposed to be degunking his pee-maker.

Because I’m a cheapskate I opened the curtains rather than turning on the lights, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a car full of early-twenties popped-collar douchebags parking across the street from my house. The three of them got out of their late model E-class Mercedes featuring 18-inch z-rated tires and chrome rims. As would any rational person, I immediately hated them.

A few minutes later they returned to the car, opened the trunk, and got out a thirty-pack of Keystone Light and a white trash bag full of assorted swill. I wanted to burst out of my house, run into the street, and beat them to death with their canoe beer* and then take a dump on the hood of their car.

Given their beer choices, I was clearly witnessing the triumph of money over taste. I decided that life was too short to waste any more time on thinking about them, mentally wished them a happy afternoon pickling their livers, and went about my day.

Later that day Mrs. ACW and I left to go over my brother’s house to finish our taxes, and from there we went to see a play our friend is in.** After the play we went out for drinks with some of the cast, so we didn’t get home until about 2am.

As we were pulling into our driveway I noticed that someone had left the visor down in the Mercedes, and the lights on the visor were burning brightly, and looked like they would be doing so all night. And then next morning my theory proved to be correct. There was a tow-truck parked in front of the Mercedes, but alas, no popped-collar douchebag.

Eventually the tow truck left and the popped-collar douchebag emerged, and I have to admit that my level of schaudenfreude was so high that it was almost able to manifest itself physically. I was wandering around the house sneering at the thought of this douchebag having to pay out the nose to have his car towed just to be told that he had a dead battery and one of his idiot popped-collar douchebag friends could have given him a jump. The darkest part of my soul was giving birth to bitterness incarnate.

Then the better part of me thought, “It’s not his fault he’s a complete and utter douchebag with all the fashion sense of Meghan McCain. I’ll go give him a jump.”

Before I could go get him another tow truck came back, hauled his car up onto back of the truck, and drove away.

Oh well. At least I tried to do the right thing, even if it took a few hours. Also, I’m pretty sure he’s still a collar-popping douchebag that drinks shitty beer and has more money than taste, so maybe I’m still glad I didn’t help him.

*Drinking beer like Miller Lite, Bud Light, Keystone, Milwaukee’s Best Light, etc. is like making love in a canoe. Fucking close to water.

**Shameless plug. This play was hilarious, and our friend is in it, so if you’re looking for something to do, this is a cheap and highly-amusing way to fill your time.

It just kind of spirals into insanity

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on March 14, 2008 @ 9:57 am
in beer, food, house, jokes, meta blogging, nerd stuff, people are idiots and the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs
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Because I hadn’t done it for a while, I thought I’d take a spin through the old stats page to see how the mental deficients, drifting like flotsam on the currents of the intertubes, were washing up on the sparkling golden shores of my website. Here’s a smattering of dumb people using the internet, and some insight as to how their tiny walnut sized brains work:

“18 year old” “parents responsibility” “michigan”

I can see this one going one of two ways. Either it’s a kid trying to figure out how soon they can get away from their shitty parents, or it’s a shitty parent trying to figure out how long they can oppress the life of their child. Or maybe their trying to find out just how little work they need to do to not get charged for neglect by the state. Whichever way you slice it, they wound up on my blog, and probably got terrible advice.


rehomo beach

This one is a little astonishing, because I’ve never even typed “rehomo beach”, but Angy Hangy did in my comments, and her willy-nilly use of a neologism for a gay beach in Delaware landed me this search.


how to stop cats shitting in your yard

I wish I could help you dude. I really do.

he s looking at her boobs game online

Ah, Romania. Is there nothing you can’t do? What’s that? You can’t teach your citizens how to create a legitimate web search? Oh, well, no country is perfect. Except America. Seriously. Don’t fuck with us or we will bring you our democracy. We invented ass whoopin’ for the sake of ass whoopin’.

house

And what country could possibly have worse searches than Romania? America! Home of the mouth breathing idiot that has more time and money than taste or sense. Really, you just typed “house” into a search engine and immediately got what you were looking for? Do you go into the bread aisle of the store and pass out from shock when you see more than one kind? Also, why are you using MSN Live Search? You must be some sort of post-lobotomy lab-experiment in a competition with rats to see who has a better mastery of the internet, and too bad for you, the rats just identity thefted your mouth-breathing ass.

this is relevant to my interests origin

Another newcomer to the internet, this time from Australia. Bonzer, mate! I’m grinning like a shot fox that you found my website. Ace! We should hit the turps with heaps of Foster’s and a Bloomin’ Onion at the boozer! Well, I’ve got a cane toad in my clacker, so donger the cleanskin and sleepout the yabby and we’ll pozzy the spunk for a corker dingo’s breakfast!

Also, this is a personal note to the person who is still using Netscape 5.0 to access my site:

Who the hell are you!? Is Netscape Navigator 5.0 some sort of magical web browser that no one ever used but is capable of time-travelling 10 years into the future to read a shitty blog?! That’s awesome, but also kind of really lame. Oh, and by the way, September 2001 is really going to suck for you guys, so be ready for that. Also, you might want to stop buying any products from China, unless you’re really into lead. Um, I think that’s it. Keep it dopey double-fresh on the rewind, and hook-up your blingety for me. Yes, that’s how we talk in 2008.

The cats don’t sit still long enough to keep my toes warm

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on February 20, 2008 @ 9:40 am
in Mrs. ACW, bitches, devil cat, house, money, nerd stuff and sex
. 22 Comments

For the last few weeks the temperature inside our house has been nut-shrinkingly cold. In an attempt to save a little money, and because we desire to open the electric bill and not see, “You owe us assrape dollars and non-consensual-fisting cents.” Our electric bill has never been too crazy, really, because I’m that guy who walks through the house and turns off all lights and unplugs items that aren’t being used, but still the bills were more than we wanted to pay. So we’ve set the thermostat for a steady 62 and dealt with it.

Before I go on and eventually reach the uninteresting point of this story, I’m going to preemptively defend myself from those of you who live in the arctic tundra north of the temperate zone better known as the mid-Atlantic seaboard of the United States. Yes, 62 is cold for us. Yes, the temperature in the winter usually only hovers around 20-40 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, we know you are buried in snow for all but two weeks in the middle of the summer. Yes, we realize that Kelvin is just a guy on your street who stands on his porch in his underwear when it’s -273.15 degrees Celsius outside.* Yes, we realize that you set your thermostats at 2 degrees and you just throw on another sweater. That’s awesome. You’re awesome. We’re all glad that you’re so awesome that you can live in such unforgiving climates. Really, no one at all is tired of hearing you scoff, “27 degrees? Heh, that’s warm for us!” That never, ever gets tired, especially when we grew up in the reasonable climate we grew up in, and you grew up in a snowman’s armpit. So, yes, to conclude this diatribe, our house is kept at 62 degrees and that’s cold for us. Shut it.

Anyway, we’ve been getting by with hoodies, sweaters, and blankets on the couches. That generally keeps us from being so cold that we’re uncomfortable. But I’m 6′2″ and though I’ve got some padding around the middle, my fingers, and especially my toes, get cold fast. It’s not uncommon for my toes to go completely numb, even if I’m wearing socks and slippers. I’m tall and blood doesn’t circulate well to far-away places like my toes. No big deal. I can make do. For example, instead of wearing regular socks, I might throw on some wool socks or thick Xmas socks. Or I’ll sit cross legged and try to keep my toes warm with my hands. Or I might tuck the bottoms of my pants into the top of my socks, and my sweater into the top of my pants. This makes me look like an utter goon, but I don’t care, because it keeps me warm.

Every time Mrs. ACW sees me with my sweater tucked in, or with my pant legs tucked in to my socks she just shakes her head and says, “I can’t believe I’m married to you.” And I guess I could be offended, but the fact is that I really don’t care. She’s stuck with me, and my feet are cold, so until the weather gets a little warmer I’m going to look like the gooniest goon that ever gooned an automatic gooning machine. Also, I retort by saying, “Not only are you married to me, but we also have sex,” which usually just leaves her shaking her head and wondering where she went wrong.

*I so love nerd jokes.

I’m also a somniloquist

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on February 15, 2008 @ 9:10 am
in Mrs. ACW, devil cat, house and ocd
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Yesterday morning I was reminded of a strange habit that relates to my sleeping. Well, maybe habit isn’t the best word. Nuance? Foible? Peccadillo? Idiosyncrasy? I think any of those might fit. Anyway, basically what happens is that in the first few minutes or so after waking, my mind will occasionally be furiously paranoid.

An example: The other morning I woke up to the sound of metal hitting wood or plastic, and there was a high-pitched tone that resulted from the metal, sort of like the vibrations from a tuning fork. I very rationally thought, “Oh, there goes my ring off the dresser.” Then I went insane. My next thought was that one of the cats was going to ingest the ring (probably because of this), so I was scrambling around on my hands and knees looking for it on the carpet. After not finding it I checked the dresser and found it exactly where it was supposed to be, so my next though was EVEN CRAZIER. Mrs. ACW sometimes leaves her rings all over the damn house all the time. On the coffee table, on top of the toaster, on the window by the kitchen sink, on her dresser, on her nightstand, on my dresser, on the computer desk, on her scrap-booking table, on the bathroom sink, et cetera ad nauseum. So upon finding my ring where it was supposed to be, I crawled back into bed and had angry paranoid thoughts until I fell back asleep.

“God damn it, the cats are going to eat her ring. Then we’ll have to pay out the ass to get the ring back. Then the ring will be ugly and Mrs. ACW will be like, ‘I need a new ring,’ but I’ve got news for her: there won’t be any more new rings after this. She just leaves them all over the place. She doesn’t care if they fall in the trash or the toilet or anything. She always does this with everything. She just leaves things laying around because she’s so materialistic. She thinks we can just buy anything we ever need.” And so on.

For those of you who know Mrs. ACW, you know she’s not really materialistic at all, so I have know idea where this craziness comes from, but it tends to go away after a few minutes, or once I fall back asleep. I’ll wake up later and think, “What was I thinking? What a ridiculous train of thought.”

Another time I didn’t fall back asleep, but actually came out of my paranoid delusions as I was going about my morning routine. As usual the cats were being little bitches and whining for food, so I got up to feed them and found their food container empty. No big deal, I just have to refill it with a fresh bag. But that’s not what my brain was thinking. “I can’t believe this, Mrs. ACW left emptied the cat food container and didn’t refill it. She knew I was going to wake up first and find this. She is intentionally sabotaging my morning. I can’t believe that someone would do something like this. How hard is it to put a new bag of food in the container? In fact, why isn’t she doing this right now? I should be sleeping, I can’t believe this.” And on and on as I gave the cats their food and water. But then as I was walking down the hall to brush my teeth and get in the shower I began to think, “What the hell was that all about? Why would Mrs. ACW intentionally do something like that? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever thought. I can’t believe I thought she was trying to sabotage my morning. Sabotage?! What the hell?”

And before all you people with Psych degrees put on your Dr. Freud hats and start chomping on your phallic cigars, know that Mrs. ACW has only been the target of my delusional mind those two times. The other times that it has happened it’s been focused on any number of people, animals, and inanimate objects. And this doesn’t happen every time I wake up, just once every few weeks or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m crazy, and I was really pissed off at a lamp one time. Whatever. Shut up. Eat a dick.

I don’t know why it happens, but I think I have some idea. I know when some people wake up they take a while to get going, and it takes them a bit for their brain to warm up. Like starting a car I guess. For me, on the other hand, it’s like instead of my “car” being turned off overnight, it is instead driven onto a treadmill, where it slowly builds speed throughout the night, then at the point of waking the treadmill is shut off and my “car” rockets forward. Most of the time I keep going, like Bo and Luke evading Boss Hog, but occasionally the car bottoms out, hubcaps go flying, an axle snaps, and all the passengers are killed. On those mornings, I have the paranoia.

Has anyone else ever experienced anything like this?

Putting the “ass” back in “assessment”

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on January 7, 2008 @ 11:40 am
in Glen Burnie, Mrs. ACW, house, money, people are idiots and suhmuhmuh bitch
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Mrs. ACW and I got our housing assessment this weekend, and after reading about the ridiculosity surrounding other’s assessments, I was prepared for a mountainous raft of crap. Surprisingly, the value of my home did not go up by an umpity-hojillion percent, but instead increased at about the 33% rate detailed by the MD Dept. of Assessments and Taxation.

However, since we are talking about the guvmint, I’d be remiss to point out some of the things that they did get astronomically wrong.

The first thing they got wrong was deciding that we had a basement. Unless the MDDAT has been working tirelessly and silently digging out the crawlspace under our house and replacing gravel with complimented earth-tones and delightfully zany throw-pillows; or unless drainage-rocks and exposed beams with three feet of clearance between now counts as a basement, we do not have a basement. You’d think this would be easy to determine since we live in a duplex and share a roof, walls, and a foundation with our neighbors, and THEIR assessment (I looked it up online) properly indicates that they do not have a basement. However, I’m sure we can all agree that a simple double-check that would have been obvious to a fourth-grader is beyond the mental reasoning of a stadium full of bureaucrats. Hopefully, our magical basement will either appear at no cost to us, or be removed from the assessment soon.

The second thing that they got blitheringly, stupefyingly wrong, was the location of our house. Rather than placing our house on the tiny lot on which it belongs, we were placed about a block away, residing in the huge lot occupied by an apartment building. This stymies me for a number of reasons: first, they got our address right, and since we share the address with our neighbors (e.g. 123 Fake Street, Unit 1, and 123 Fake Street, Unit 2), and since they got our neighbor’s location correct, we should be located in the same lot; second, we share a roof, walls, and a foundation with our neighbors, SO HOW THE FUCK COULD OUR HOUSE POSSIBLY BE A BLOCK AWAY?

Jiminy fucking Christmas! You could fire pen-wielding monkeys scatter-shot out of cannons onto huge assessment forms and it appears they’d STILL get more right than the addle-pated drool-factories at the state.

It’s three more things, but that third one is kind of weak

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on December 21, 2007 @ 8:49 am
in Glen Burnie, house, meta blogging, nerd stuff, potty humor, suhmuhmuh bitch, the worldwide information super-tubeterwebs, word nerd and work
. 14 Comments

1) I woke up this morning to a cacophony of noise. I’ll wait while you go look that up.

Reaching for something in the distance
So close you can almost taste it
Release your innovations
Feel the rain on your skin
No one else can feel it for you
Only you can let it in
No one else, no one else…

Oh, you’re back. Didn’t see you there. Anyway, when I woke up there was a helicopter hovering overhead; the apartment complex next door had the landscaping people out to mow the non-existent grass; my Roomba, Roombie, was vacuuming and caroming around the house; and Sherlock and Wookie were tear-assing around the house in a game I like to call, “I will punch you each in the goddamned cat-colon if you don’t settle the fuck down.”

The irony is, this is the first day of my winter vacation*, and my first chance to sleep in has already been ruined. I forsee cats chained to litter boxes in the near future.

2) A conversation recently had by my brothers and I about our new extended-family email list; a list created exclusively for news, planning, and information, and not idiotic email forwards. My uncle is the offender I’m referring to in this case.

Me: So which one of you guys is going to lay the smacketh down for this? I know you’re thinking, “Oh, it’s Christmas, it’ll be fine.” And I’m thinking the same thing. But by March our inboxes will be overflowing
with urban legends about email causing cancer, animated jpegs of the baby Jesus, and every other unfunny piece of nonsense that clogs up the ‘tubes.

Desk Job: [sends regulating email to entire family]

Desk Job: [to me and Mokie] Hope the whole family doesn’t hate me now.

Me: I think you’re fine. You did a pretty good job of putting it diplomatically. Plus, if they give you any trouble you can just shove (your two and a half week old son)** in their face and they’ll settle down.

Mokie: Alternatively, if you need to get some distance, just throw him like a football. I bet that little guy makes a pretty good spiral.

Me: Mokie! That is uncalled for! He is a baby. Do you have any sense? You don’t throw babies. You punt them.

Desk Job: You’re both a bunch of jerks. If you punt a baby he’ll get hurt. If you throw a baby, someone will probably catch him, and the spiral of baby vomit will hit lots of bystandards.

Mokie: I really hope your spelling of “bystandards” was an intentional mashing-together of “bystander” and “retard.” I nominate it for word of the year.

Desk Job: Uh, yeah, that’s it. Shut up.

3) Wookie just jumped in my lap and put her butt in my face, and it smelled like kibbles. Not like butt. Not like butt and kibbles. Just kibbles. Somehow, that was more horrifying.

*As such, blogging will be light from now to January 2, but I’ll be sure to pop in from time to time. If you had an RSS reader, this wouldn’t be such a big deal.

**Yeah, my older brother be-nephewed me a few weeks ago. No, I don’t tell you everything because it’s not necessarily any of your goddamned business.

We Three Things

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on December 18, 2007 @ 10:41 am
in Glen Burnie, Mrs. ACW, awesome, beer, food, house, i am so fucking awesome, meta blogging, money, nog, people are idiots, potty humor and sex
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1) Last year Mrs. ACW gave me a container of powdered eggnog mix for Christmas and to be honest, I’m a little scared to even try it. I thought I would be able to get up enough gumption yesterday, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Especially considering that the third direction is to “allow mixture to sit for a few minutes and thicken” (that’s what she said! ha! I’m hilarious) I’ve been particularly apprehensive. Even after having already come up with similes and metaphors relating to foamy reindeer ejaculate and elf orgies I still couldn’t bring myself to try the stuff. Or maybe that was part of the problem. Regardless, I’m going to attempt to try it at some point in the near future, and believe me, you’ll hear about it.

2) Last night I finally bought our Christmas tree. Last year I paid $20 for a tree that cost about $27. I didn’t haggle. I didn’t bargain. I just pointed to the tree I wanted and said, “I’ll give you 20 bucks for that one.” This year my success is debatable. Because of the drought, tree prices were a bit higher this year than last year. And by “a bit” I mean “ridiculously more expensive”. I saw quite a few trees that looked like our tree last year, the shabbiest of which cost about $50, and the one most like last years was going for about $78, and it was still no prize compared to some of the other trees on the lot. The nicest tree I saw went for about $150 bucks, which I guess is like buying a disposable ivory back-scratcher; nice to look at, but really completely pointless. I found two trees on the lot that were less than $40, which I figured was the upper limit of my bargaining range, and set about comparing them. The $37 tree was taller, but it was missing huge sections of branches, so I went with the shorter, chode-ier tree, even though that meant we’d have to put it up on some sort of small table. I found the saleswoman and told her I’d give her $20 for the tree. It was priced at $31.

“Well, I’d love to but that’s a blahblahwhatthefuckeverblah kind of tree, and people rarely pay less than full price for those.”

“I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

“I’m not sure I can go that low, but I can probably let you have it for 28.”

“I have a twenty dollar bill. It’s twenty or nothing.”

“Okay. $22.50. It’s as low as I can go.”

“I’m not sure you understand. All I have is a twenty. I can’t pay you any more than that. No one else is going to buy this tree. Do you want to make twenty bucks off it?”

She didn’t look like she was going to relent, but just at that second a whole gaggle of wide-eyed suckers wandered onto the lot, so seeing her chance to sell a blahblahsomefuckinkindoftreeblah to them for a hundred bucks, she took my twenty and left.

A guy came over to cut off the bottom and bag it in that plastic netting, but I told him not to worry about it, rolled my passenger side window down, and had him stuff it in there. Voila: a Christmas tree.

3) Today is our Holiday Party at work. I say Holiday Party because our boss is Jewish and the co-chairs of the planning committee are Jewish, Musilm, and Hindu. In fact, now that I think about it, the other three people on the committee are Non-denominational Christian, agnostic, and a non-affiliated spiritual zen Buddhism-type guy. Weird. Anyway, an email went around a few weeks ago about the gift-exchange at the party this year. It’s one of those events where people buy $10 worth of crap and then pass it around for a while until everyone is unhappy. Every year people hound me to participate, and every year I demurely turn them down. Finally my colleague, the non-denominational Christian, asked me why I don’t participate, and I decided to be completely honest. Why would I pay between $10 and $20, and spend the time to pick out something nice that just about everyone could enjoy, when I’m guaranteed to get crap in return? The gift exchange is nothing more than complicated, protracted boondoggle for me to pay $20 for something I don’t even want. That’s money I could be spending on beernog.

More about blowing leaves

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on November 30, 2007 @ 10:30 am
in house, potty humor and sex
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The money shot is never worth it.

Ha! I’m awesome.

Maybe you thought I was done with my leaf travails after having written about oh so much poop, but that was just the back yard. The front yard was a whole different bag of poop. And by “bag of poop” I mean, no poop is involved in this one. Except for those last three sentences.

Anyway, as I’ve mentioned before, I share my front yard with my neighbors because I live in a duplex. We also share a wall so I can hear them screaming ridiculous insults at each other (”You’re lazier than a dumpster!” or “You talk too loud!”). Whenever I do anything like mow the lawn, clean up leaves, or burn a giant pentagram in the yard, I’ll do the same for my neighbors.

So I started on the far side of my neighbor’s lawn and began blowing leaves across his lawn towards my lawn, and when I got to my lawn I’d switch the leafblower into a leafsucker/mulcher/taffy-puller and mulch up all the leaves. Simple. Thirty minutes later I have a huge pile of leaves, ready to get mulched. And I do not disappoint. I mulched the shit out of those leaves.

But when I started getting to the bottom of the pile the leafblower started making funny noises every so often. I’d hear a loud crackling sound as the leaves and small sticks would be ground up into mulch, but every now and then I’d hear a wet, slurping noise, and then the mulching chamber would be thrown off balance for a second as something weighty was spun around the chamber, and then another wet slurping noise, and then back to the regular crackling sounds.

It would happen frequently enough that I began to be able to tell when I was about to hear the wet noise, and I was finally fast enough with switching off the blower to see something white and soggy roll out of the end of the vacuum tube. I wasn’t really interested in taking a closer look, but I leaned over anyway and was surprised to see what looked like two pieces of old bread that looked like they’d been sitting on the lawn for a while before being blown across the lawn with a bunch of leaves and then partially sucked up in the leaf-blower. And then it suddenly all clicked.

My neighbors throw stale bread out for the birds every day. I don’t know if this is a Baltimore thing, or a middle-class/lower-middle class thing, or what, but my family is guilty of this too. From time to time we’d have a piece or two of bread go stale so we’d break it up into little pieces and throw it into the yard for the birds. Not my neighbors. They throw whole pieces of bread into the yard. Daily. Sometimes there’s six or seven pieces stuck together. I’m not exactly sure where all the bread comes from, but I sure as hell knew I had already sucked up at least half a loaf, and by the time I was done I was pretty sure that the bag of my leaf vacuum contained a tiny replication of hell for people who hate leaves and stale bread.

Which brings me to the final part of this unnecessarily long story: leaf removal. The one drawback to my leafblower/sucker device is that emptying the mulching bag is a goddamned pain in my ass. The mouth of the mulching bag is unnecessarily small, so it’s really difficult to pour leaves out of the mulching bag and into a trash bag. So instead I just laid a 10×12 foot tarp on the ground and dumped all the leaves on to it. It was much easier and faster to do it that way, but leaf disposal presented a new problem. I wasn’t going to throw away my good tarp, and I had to get rid of the leaves.

So I grabbed some string and bundled up the tarp. As a bundle the leaves were heavy and cumbersome, but with a minor amount of trouble I was able to sort of lift/drag them to the waiting trunk of the car. As I left the fenced-in back yard I was met eye-to-eye with my neighbor on the other side of my house. I heaved the leaves off the ground and into the trunk of the car. I’m not sure if she doesn’t speak English, or if she just doesn’t talk to me, but she took one look at the body-sized bundle I was dragging from behind my house and stuffing into my trunk and she turned around, put her head down, and probably tried to mentally erase me out of existence.

I was only able to get the bundle halfway into the trunk, which was good enough since I was just driving it to the dumpster about 100 feet down the street. But there were a surprising number of neighbors out that day, and I could see their eyes following the man-shaped body-bag in the back of the car. They all watched as I hefted the leaves halfway into the dumpster and then eventually undid the string so that all the leaves spilled in, but I think some of them are still pretty skeeved out by the whole affair.

If only they had also known about the bread and the poo. (Nuts! I did it again! Crap! I mean darn! Sorry.)

Of leafblowers and other subjects

Published
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on November 29, 2007 @ 10:03 am
in bitches, devil cat, house, potty humor, sex and suhmuhmuh bitch
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Last weekend I was using the ample weekend to get some crap done around the house. My list included sitting around in my jammies and watching tv, sitting around in my pjs and playing video games, humping your mom, and cleaning up all the leaves in the yard. Every year the goddamned trees make like two girls with one cup and shit all over my yard. Except none of the trees has the decency to eat their leavings, the sanctimonious, prudish bastards.

So there I am, out in the yard with the leafblower cleaning up tree shit when what should I find when I blow away a pile of leaves? Real shit. Turns out our yard is the high-traffic interstate interchange of the neighborhood. Cats can quickly go from one side of the neghborhood to the other by cutting through our yard, and apparently, squat a monster kibble-log while they’re at it. Which makes my yard remarkably similar to the Baltimore beltway, now that I think about it.

And so I stand there, staring at this revolting tootsie roll of foods past, and think to myself, “Fuck if I’m cleaning up that shit.” So with all the grace and skill of a ninja brain-surgeon I blow a single leaf, bright-red-side up, over the poop like the leaf is one of nature’s own traffic cones. “Watch out! Don’t drive there! There’s doody under that!” I guess that’s the analogy I’m making. Whatever. Shut your stupid face-hole.

I go back to blowing leaves around, blowing air under piles of leaves so that the tops of the piles don’t move but the other side of the pile explodes with deciduous detritus; or making little tornadoes of leaves in the wind that would give that freaky kid from American Beauty a raging hard-on, and then suddenly: more turds.

These were a bit more substantial, and definitely hadn’t originated from a cat. Or, if they had originated from a cat, that cat was probably pushing close to 50 pounds and was making it’s way around on a miniature Rascal. In that case, the cat wouldn’t have been able to make it through the gaps in the fence, so it’s highly unlikely. Also, I’m pretty sure they don’t make tiny Rascals. And cats probably lack the currency or insurance policy to be able to afford one. While pondering tiny cats on electric three-wheeled scooters I blew another leaf on top of the lawn land-mine and fancied myself the Princess Diana of my backyard.

I finished the leaves in the middle of the yard and began to concentrate on the edges, and like before, I was quickly interrupted by more shit. I was hardly phased at all this time; I just flicked the leafblower towards a stray leaf and deftly marked the offending area.

But this leaf-covering solution is just a stop-gap measure. The only reason I was cleaning up the leaves is because I needed to mow the lawn. And if I mow the lawn with the yard-bombs still intact I’ll splatter-paint the inside of my lawnmower like Jackson Pollock after a Chipotle Grilled Stuft Burrito at Taco Bell. Oh, and by the way Taco Bell, could you really not afford all the letters it takes to spell “stuffed”? Or were you trying to ride the ridiculous wave to Web 2.0 glory, acting like you’re the flickr of the fast food world? Well I’ve got news for you douches: the only wave you’re riding is the brown wave of the feces tsunami erupting from your customer’s backsides after they make a cheek-clenching dash to the closest bathroom, trashcan, or Taco Bell drive-through. I hate you.

So I’m at an impasse. I don’t even like seeing my OWN shit, so I’m not really at all excited about cleaning up something else’s shit. Which is why the shit is still in the yard and the lawn will be mowed in the spring.

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