The daily news

News I don't like hearing:

Tragic and unbelievable suffering in Haiti. My prayers to everyone affected by the earthquake.

Things certain conservatives are saying about Haiti right now. This news bothers me even more than the tragic suffering.

And much more trivially, and much closer to home, this. Just ate some. Raw. Urgh.

Rain and germs

So I chaperoned my first field trip today. When looking to the future and contemplating parenthood, I never imagined myself riding on a schoolbus, with 30 overexcited kindergartners, in the rain, to an apple orchard. I also never imagined that one could spend a few hours at an orchard without going outside, or anywhere near a fruit tree. Who knew you could kill over an hour demonstrating a cider press?

While the noise level on the bus was beyond intense, and that schoolbus smell brought back not-so-pleasant associations, my greater concern was just not wanting to touch anything. All those germs all over every surface from coughing, sneezing, nose-wiping kids. Swine flu has now hit both my kids' schools and a few families we know, and even though my family has all had the H1N1 mist and regular flu shots, there are other flu strains out there to avoid. And these kids were literally sticking their faces into the seats and against the windows. Gross. I just wanted to decontaminate everyone when we got back, including myself.

I'm normally not that fanatic about germs. I prefer to avoid illness, and I get annoyed at people who bring sick kids to my house, and I'm right there with the handwashing, and I hate being in really germy public places. That said, I think some exposure to bacteria is good for the immune system. I don't care if my dogs lick my kids, or vice versa. I never had one of those shopping-cart covers or portable restaurant placemats for my kids when they were smaller. I didn't sterilize bottles and binkies. When things fall on the floor, I'll still eat them as long as nothing is stuck on them. I don't believe in the 20-second rule or whatever it's called, for me or for my kids. I thought hand sanitizer was only for when you had no other alternative, and that frequent deliberate use of hand sanitizer was a little neurotic.

But this fall? Purell is everywhere. My office has it in every bathroom, and the kids' schools seem to have more dispensers than before. We have it in our cars, plus a big bottle on our kitchen counter to use when we get home. DH is like the Purell Butler if we're out somewhere. We get back in the car and he comes around door to door squirting our hands with Purell. I'm using it. I'm getting used to it. I'm even starting to really like the smell. I should have bought stock in the stuff.

And I'm curious about how this intense focus on illness is changing social behavior. A friend of mine was telling me they just don't take their child to many public places, like shopping malls and playgrounds, because of all the germs going around these days. Anecdotally, I'm hearing that such places are less crowded than usual, and that birthday parties have become smaller and fewer. It's not clear whether the low numbers are due to kids being home sick, or due to parents keeping them home pre-emptively.

Speaking as someone who loathes Chuck E. Cheese, kids' entertainment centers, and restaurant playgrounds in general (mostly because once my kids go in, they won't come out), I'm perversely happy to use germs as an excuse to avoid such establishments altogether. It's clear that I'm not the only mean mommy who feels that way. Strength in numbers, people.

Puppy New Year!

So we went to the local animal shelter and got a dog! He's a big yellow Lab, full-grown and seemingly housebroken but otherwise a crazy puppy. He wants to jump up and kiss everyone, even people who are shorter than he is. He keeps grabbing stuff and absconding with it, and has already semi-destroyed the dog bed and tried to destroy countless other things. Today he ingested two small Lincoln Logs and a Mr. Potato Head beard. I'm waiting to be reunited with these in some form.

As kids of the 70s, we named him Astro. From the Jetsons. Ruh-roh!! It was either that or Rosco P. Coltrane from the Dukes of Hazzard, and he seemed more Astro-ish. He's a dark yellow Lab, more lanky than most Labs, with enormous feet and amber eyes, which suggests to me that there may be a little something extra in there, breedwise. The shelter thought perhaps some Weimaraner. Who knows? But he seems very smart and is already learning his new name and to come and sit. We just need to work on manners and general comportment while in a house with people and their things.

Concurrent with this, we're having some, uh, expensive problems. First, I managed to lose one of my new (and not exactly cheap) earrings while out on New Year's Eve. This is the third time I've done this in the past year. Totally annoying. I wish that '80s one-earring look would come back.

Then, we've been having some trouble with one of our cars and DH made an appointment at the dealership to have it fixed. Then, in the past 72 hours, he managed to lose not one but BOTH key/opener thingies. We think maybe one is locked in the car but one is definitely outside because it was used to lock the car two days ago before it disappeared. The house has been turned upside down. Nothing.

DH is suspecting Astro may be responsible, but if this is the case, we're surprised this hasn't led to significant stomach trouble, and we haven't noticed anything unusual coming from either end of him. Anyway, replacing these exotic locking systems is a $2,000 investment, and the car is so old it might not be worth it. The dealership may be able to come crack into it and then disable the horn, in the hope that one key is indeed inside.

As if this wasn't enough, last night our toilets stopped flushing, indicating either a clog in the waste pipe exiting the house, or a larger malfunction with our aging septic system. This has happened before, and inevitably occurs in the late evening AND only on a weekend or holiday. So this morning was fun: DH and I going through ALL the accumulated trash looking for the car keys, punctuated by trying to get the plumber and the septic people out here. Thankfully, the septic system was OK and the septic guy was able to unclog the pipe even though it was technically the purview of the plumbers (who couldn't get here until Monday). Thank you, Mr. Septic Guy! I'll promise never to make fun of your job again!

So we have plumbing again. And a crazed new dog. And a collection of orphan earrings. And an inaccessible locked car sitting in the driveway like a $2,000 beached whale.

And it's snowing too!

I got your number on the wall

As if last week wasn't already upsetting enough, on Thursday morning I started getting creepy text messages on my cell phone from some guy named Jamie. First he called and left some incoherent voicemail around 2AM. Then he sent a couple of texts.

I was being a nice, naive person and assumed maybe he got some girl's number in a bar and was drunk-dialing or had a couple of digits wrong. So I called the number and left a message on Jamie's voicemail indicating that he had the wrong number.

I'm not trying that again, although I doubt it would have made any difference. He already knew I was female from listening to my voicemail, which he probably knew he would get if he called at 2:36AM.

So then there were a couple more texts. And a couple more texts after that. The messages were general enough that I knew he didn't know me and was probably some kind of annoying individual spammer, but it was still unsettling to get increasingly lewd messages wanting to know if I was feeling sexy. Where could he have gotten my number to begin with? Now I was both freaked out and annoyed; not only was this creepy and weird, but it was costing me money.

DH is in charge of our cell plan so he called our service provider to see if we could put a block on incoming calls and texts from Jamie's number. We were told that they could block it, but we would need to pay extra for them to do that. Gee, thanks, guys. Also, if he really was obsessed with me from afar, he could conceivably start contacting my number from a different phone.

Option Number Two was to ignore the harassment and hope he'd get bored and move on to other victims, but he could theoretically continue texting ad infinitem, which we'd then need to pay for. Mmmm, not so good.

We ended up going with Option Number Three: I get a new cell phone number.

While I'm relieved that these unwanted contacts have now stopped, I'm also pretty annoyed at this cretin. For all I know, he is randomly calling cell phone numbers all over the country, determining which numbers belong to females by calling overnight and listening to their voicemail, and if so, bombarding them with lewd text messages and racking up their monthly bills. Due to Jamie's obnoxious behavior, I now need to tell dozens of people (including my kids' schools, my security alarm company, doctors, coworkers, service people, companies I do business with) that I have a new phone number, and it's not even in my original area code.

I don't know of any way to bust this sicko, but I wish I did. I could file a police report, but it's probably not worth the time - not to mention, where would one do this? He's not from this region. In an attempt to be my own case detective, I went to one of those websites where you can look up phone numbers and the number is assigned to someone in Collinsville, IL, just east of St. Louis, MO. I wasn't willing to pay for the more specific information these sites claim to have; Jamie has cost me enough already. What would I do with this information anyway? Fly out there and surprise him when he gets home? Enroll him in the Turd-of-the-Month Club? Sue him with what little is left of my 401k?

While this is not even a blip on the radar of true crime, I still feel harassed. And I worry that this kind of activity could quietly increase as an insidious and potentially unstoppable form of spam. Under current legal definitions, this is not advertising and thus not spam, but it's definitely unsolicited and unwanted contact from an unknown person, and causes the victim both money and hassle. I don't know of any law that would bar this, nor whom one would contact to report this type of intrusion.


UPDATE:
A friend of mine googled Jamie's phone number and turned up a Craiglist posting he made. So we now know his name and hometown. I'm mulling over filing a report with his local police department. Just wish I'd made better documentation of what he did before we switched over my phone number. Maybe my phone company can help....

Apropos of nothing...

I can't believe I came across this article and this video in just one day!

The ick factor

All right. Here's a little quiz: What is the most revolting news story from this week?

A. Toilet failure on the International Space Station.
B. Those pictures of Warren Jeffs smooching adolescent girls.
C. Clay Aiken knocking up his 50-something friend.

I can't decide.

That whole ranch raid/mega custody case thing with the FLDS just bothers me. Here's what I don't get:

1. How do they know the person who made the calls was actually someone at the ranch, and not some hoax/outside person/ex-member trying to rat them out? Odd how they haven't found this person after almost 2 months.

2. Wouldn't it have been easier, cheaper, and way less traumatic to remove the men from the ranch and keep the moms and 400-some kids there? The men are the ones endangering the kids and young women, not the other way around. How come the men get to stay home while hundreds of moms and kids get removed and sent all over the state?

3. How messed up are these poor children going to be once they go home? Even for a normal kid, being taken away from your home and family and sent to live in a shelter or with complete strangers is traumatic. When you're part of an isolated, insular community that fears and/or has no knowledge of life on the outside, state custody is going to have deep and scarring repercussions.

I don't like the idea of forced marriages and underage marriages and so on either. But I don't understand why the people who already are the biggest victims of FLDS society are the ones suffering the most from this attempt to protect them.

And Clay Aiken. Dawg! He is getting progressively more freakish! This latest stunt is eerily reminscent of that whole Michael Jackson marrying and impregnating his dermatologist's nurse situation. Does he REALLY think this is somehow going to make all the speculation over his sexual preferences go away? Um, hate to break it to you Clay, but no. Out with it! (no pun intended)

Not to mention, this woman is 50! I don't fully understand the ethics of assisted reproduction, but is helping someone that old get pregnant a responsible medical decision? I just have a hard time believing someone that age would still have viable eggs to conceive with, unless she froze some awhile back. So we could have an egg donor here too. I just feel sorry for anyone or anything that has to come into direct contact with Clay Aiken's sperm. Eugghhhhhh!

In other news, I am sad to report that our cars are now sporting locking gas caps. Chip read some report that people are now siphoning gas out of other people's cars, and these locking caps are selling like hotcakes, so he ran right out to Pep Boys and picked up a couple.

Not that this will completely protect us from theft, given that there are videos on YouTube showing how to use a drill pump to puncture and drain someone else's tank. Good thing we don't drive a big pickup or SUV, because I'm not sure draining a 15-gallon tank would be worth the hassle.

So, given my newfound struggles to unlock the #@*! gas cap, getting gas is just more of an adventure than ever. And opening the cap is not even the beginning of the adventure! First you obsessively note the prices at the different gas stations you pass every day and choose the stations that are a few cents cheaper than the other ones (fortunately the lower-price stations don't have those dang TVs). And you get unbelievably excited and even smug when you go to another state or county on business and it's 15 cents cheaper there.

I have to remind myself sometimes that such differences typically add up to less than a dollar in savings, but I still feel a small victory when saving myself a literal drop in the bucket.

Oooh, that smell

It's been a day of cleanup here. Bright and early this morning we joined some neighbors and picked up trash along the road next to my house. This section was about a mile long and we managed to get at least five big bags of garbage, most of which was either food and beverage containers/wrappers, cigarette butts, or construction debris. It was fun and made us feel good, and it was great to be out with our friends on a warm spring day, but truly appalling that so many people (who evidently prefer light beer) use the sides of our roads as a wastebasket. I filled up most of our recycling bin with the bottles and cans we retrieved.

Cleanup then moved inside. We've had this funky smell in the kitchen the last few weeks, and I was hellbent on finding and eradicating it. I noticed it initially and thought maybe one of the kids had lost a chicken nugget somewhere. It was sharp and ripe. Then it went away for a week or so, and I thought one of the dogs had found and consumed whatever it was. Then a different odor arose, an almost cloying one. We just could not figure out where it was coming from, and over the past week I've been trying to find it.

First I thought maybe it was this new dishwasher detergent, because it seemed worse after we ran the dishwasher. I also cleaned out the garbage disposal and looked for leaks under the sink. No difference. We swept and mopped the floor in case the dogs had missed some dropped offering from the kids at the table. Still no change. I cleaned the cooktop, the counters, the table with Fantastik. No dice. Then we thought it was these onions we had sitting on the counter for awhile, and got rid of those. Nope. What was also weird was that the smell seemed to move around the room.

As we were all dressed up and about to head out for dinner tonight to celebrate my promotion, Chip had the bright and not-so-well-timed idea to look under the fridge with a flashlight. He saw eyes, a mouth, a nose...a dead mouse! It must have eaten the rodent poison in the cellar, crawled up to the first floor instead of outside like it was supposed to, and croaked under the fridge. When the fridge would run, the fan would waft the smell around the kitchen, which is why we had such trouble figuring out the source of the mystery odor.

However, extricating a juicily rotten mouse from under a large, full refrigerator took some doing. We tried to retrieve it with a long dowel without success. It did get moved closer to the front but the tray-like thingy under the fridge was in the way. We moved the fridge out and cleaned up the area where the mouse had been initially. When we went to move it back, the mouse had disappeared! We had to move the fridge back into place, and when I checked with the flashlight, it was now lodged inside the tray thingy.

Thus it was that I ended up lying flat across the kitchen floor in my good clothes, with my plastic-gloved hand scrunched into this tiny cavity, fishing out a rotten mouse carcass by the tail while Chip hovered above with a can of Lysol because "my hands are too big to fit under there."

Even better, Chip decided to regale his parents with this charming story over dinner at a steakhouse. Needless to say, it was a good thing I was about done eating. Also, with the amount of stink coming from that thing, even after being tied up in a plastic bag, I am already so sorry for the garbage guys when they open the garbage can lids come Thursday.

And now the kitchen still smells a little nasty with a heavy overtone of Lysol. We have the vent fan on and are staying out of there as much as possible. Other than dipping the entire base of the refrigerator in bleach, I'm not sure what else can be done.