Mr. Blandings and I

Home ownership is supposed to be the ultimate American Dream, but I have to tell you, right now I am just not feeling the love.

Specifically, I have a squad of little things—electrical, plumbing and installation tweaks—that need doing, which are beyond my skillset. I do in fact have a drill, and I know how to use it, but I generally speaking do not mess with electricity, and my record with plumbing is not what you might call stellar. So I want to hire a handyman (or woman; it’s a job category, not a political statement) to take care of this stuff.

But this, it turns out, is not a simple matter.

Handymen, it seems, are rather thin on the ground. (I’m talking about ones who’ve come via recommendations. You can find plenty of them, but the trick is to separate the sheep from the goats. Although, tbh, I wouldn’t care for either a sheep or a goat in my house, but I suppose that’s a different post.) And they're in as much demand as orthopedists at a tennis camp. I started with two recommended by my realtor.

One (the woman) did not return my calls at all, and the other keeps trying to reach me via my mobile phone, even after I TOLD him to call my landline. Even so, I worked from home on Tuesday because he said he’d be sending one of his minions out to the house to take a look at the jobs. Well, the minion arrived about 30 minutes after the specified time, walked around with me without taking notes in somewhat bug-eyed silence, and then mumbled that he’d have to “talk with my manager” to get an estimate. Then he promised he’d return in an hour to deliver said quote to me.

Ah, dear readers, I know you see what’s coming. I sat at home the entire afternoon, like Meg Ryan at that hipster coffeeshop in You’ve Got Mail. There was no return visit, no call, bupkis.

But the manager called me Wednesday, at work, on my mobile. There’s crappy mobile reception in that building, so the call dropped twice before he made it known to me that he’d have to come out to my house himself to create a proper estimate. (So why didn’t he come out in the first place?)

Well, but by this time, I’d collected a fistful of recommendations from my neighbors on Nextdoor.com, and I was practically robocalling right down the list.

Well, of the ones who’d call me back, many of them were booked through April. For handyman jobs. And then you start to wonder: if a guy is able to come over on short notice to spec the work, do you want him doing the job? Is there a reason (or many) why he’s got an empty calendar?

For example, one fellow said he’d drop by yesterday morning between 0900 and 1000. I worked from home again, and finally around 1020, I rang him to ask if he wasn’t coming. Well, he did, but by that time I just wasn’t massively confident in his ability to show up on time to do the work.

Then, it was interesting getting the quotes. One guy just said over the phone, “I can do that in a day. It’ll cost you $300.” Eh… Mr. Can’t-call-my-landline eventually did show up  (more than an hour late), walked around, made long faces about what might or might not be feasible, scratched on the handyman equivalent of the back of a cocktail napkin and said, “I’ll do it for $420.” Nothing in writing, no line items, just, “I’ll do it for $420.”

The fellow from yesterday morning had a form, in triplicate, but his best- and worst-case pricing parameters were scratched out and scribbled over so much that it’s really hard to tell where the outside numbers are.

In the end, I’ve gone with a guy who showed up more or less within two hours of his promise, who took a good hard look at everything that needs doing, didn’t seem to think I’d need to rip out all the tile in the shower cubicle to replace a leaking faucet, and gave me an estimate that’s not the cheapest, but seems in the ballpark.

Now we face the prospect of scheduling the actual work. This will be like getting on the books for cardiac surgery.

American Dream my ass.

Rallies. Bigly.

Okay, I have one more thing to share about Kleptocrat “rallies”. It’s from a couple of weeks ago, but it’ll hold true for weeks and months to come.

Questions?

Sorry, wrong numb...

There must be something about my new landline at home that just makes spam callers itch to call it. It seems like I’ve had more junk calls in the past few weeks than in entire years in the past. I’ve been blocking a few more of them each day. (And there’s a series of numbers from Bellevue, Wash., that just keeps trying.)

So, I’m glad that Comcast offers me a more robust call blocking capability than Verizon FIOS did. Their offering was so convoluted to set up that I got the impression that they actually wanted to encourage the spam calls.

Also—Verizon does not support NOMOROBO, the free platform to block actual robo calls, which rather lends credence to my suspicion.

Well, yesterday I was waiting for a handyman to show up and in the middle of trying to activate NOMOROBO, when the phone rang with a Vienna, Va., number on Caller ID. I picked up because I was expecting the handyman, with an unknown-to-me mobile number to be calling, but “Jennifer” from some “vehicle warranty” outfit launched her spiel. Seems they’ve sent me several notices that the warranty on my “vehicle” is about to expire, and…

Well, dear reader, my Saab is 16 years old, and the warranty expired 13 years ago, so this was a wasted call on “Jennifer’s” part.

I’ve got NOMOROBO installed. Let’s hope it works better than the Do Not Call Registry. Someone on Twitter posited that the Do Not Call Registry sells the numbers we register with them to telemarketers. It certainly doesn’t seem to stop them.

Unless there are about 14,277 callers per day who aren’t getting through.

Meanwhile, if you want to talk with “Jennifer” about extending your vehicle’s warranty, give her a call. Her number is 571 474 1049.

Yo rally so skinny...

Evidently the Kleptocrat took time out from his busy golfing schedule this weekend to—yes, you guessed it—tweet. Viz.:

I wasn’t aware that there’d been any rallies, but then I’m not aware of about 87% of what this lunatic claims is fact, so I don’t put much stock in it.

However: the responses to this tweet (as to all of the ones I see, tbh) were cherce. Viz.:

Rehage and Zalben are regular trolls on the Klepto-timeline. They (unlike the Kleptocrat) never fail to deliver. Although, to be fair, this material pretty much writes itself.

Gratitude Monday: SAD!

We in the US had a bit of a NutriNinja® time of it last week. But it was the Repugnants in the House of Representatives, and the Kleptocrat, who were whirling around with the frozen bananas and kale.

And they were shocked, utterly shocked, to discover that their intent—expressed for the last seven years—to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something that came as close to no coverage as dammit—was not looked upon with favor by their constituents. Not even by those who ticked the boxes on the ballots that got them elected.

And, in fact, the Repugs up to and including the inhabitant of 1600 looked pretty much like The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, emphasis on gang, because all the flapping by Paul Ryan (R-19^th Century), and all the bullying that the Kleptocrat did—none of that could get enough Representatives of their own party to agree to vote on it to even bring it to a vote on the House floor.

Following the bigly failure, Kleptocrat started spinning on Friday afternoon—calling a reporter for The Washington Post, and then one for the New York Times (two publications he has characterized as “failing” and purveyors of “fake news”, SAD!), to explain that they were close, very close (they were 30 votes short on the Repug side), but no Democrat (“zero!”) would vote for it, so “they own this.”

(How the reporters managed not to bust out laughing at this, I do not know, because the Democrats never got a chance to vote at all, as the bill never made it to the full House.)

And the thing that accomplished this miracle was the unrelenting barrage of phone calls, faxes, letters, emails and visits to Congressmorons from voting constituents who expressed their outrage (in words of one syllable, and possibly with visual aids) at what they were proposing for a replacement for ACA. (And there were also members of the so-called Freedom Caucus who didn’t think this vicious and cruel proposal went far enough by way of cutting off Americans from healthcare or cutting taxes for the wealthy.) They also discovered that making jokes about how old white men don’t need mammograms so they shouldn’t have to pay for plans that cover them did not go down well, and they were unaccountably quiet when people countered their removal of women’s reproductive care as an essential health benefit with questions about how coverage for erectile dysfunction treatment should likewise be eliminated.

Well, we should be in for a world-class episode of finger pointing shortly, and we still have to find a way to get to the bottom of the matryoshka-levels of Russia-45 administration relationships, both to the Kleptocrat directly, and through his family and Gauleiters. Which means we have to find a way to get that cretin Devin Nunes off the House Intelligence Committee. And that’s going to be a lot of work.

However—we have shown that it is possible to hobble these monsters, to stop them in their tracks and to make them rethink how they go about trying to return us all to the Nineteenth Century. They are beginning to understand that they can run, but not far enough.

And I am grateful for that.

Dead as a...

Okay, today it’s not found on the road dead. It’s found at Metro Center, dead. And I just thought it was interesting because I’ve never before seen a dissection of an escalator.

But here you go.

Proving once again that I have a low bar when it comes to amusement.

Have a good weekend.

Lost at sea

Twitter is like a box o’ choc’lates; you never know what you’re gonna find. This came across my feed yesterday, and even though it’s on the Internet and therefore de facto true, I did a bit of digging.

Also on the Internet, but still…

So, it turns out that, yes indeed, there was a ship’s cat named Red Lead serving on HMAS Perth at the start of WWII. This was not an unusual circumstance, as—aside from providing purrs and other morale emoluments—cats were often a very practical addition to a ship’s complement, because they kept the vermin down.

But evidently after his first foray into a battle on the light cruiser, off Java in February 1942, Red Lead rethought the seafaring life and tried several times to abandon ship when Perth pulled into port for resupply. He was put back aboard, as it was considered bad luck to lose your ship’s cat, but he definitely wasn’t happy about it.

The ship’s log noted, “Red Lead, ship’s kitten, endeavoured to desert, but was brought back on board, despite vigorous protests.”

Sadly, both the crew and Red Lead were right, because shortly after Perth put back out to sea in the company of USS Houston, the Allied ships engaged with the Japanese fleet off the coast of Java, and Perth was sunk. More than half the ship’s company went down with her, including poor little Red Lead.

Well, I don’t know if there are ship’s cats any more, in anyone’s navy. But I do like that the Aussies have added tributes to Red Lead on every ship that has borne the name HMAS Perth. Viz.:

So thanks for an interesting bonbon, Twitter. I’ll just have a poke around and see if you got any Bordeaux in that box.

Found on the road

‘Kay—y’all know how I like to wonder about the stories behind what artists refer to as objets-trouvés, right?

Well, here’s a for-example, in the parking lot of the Park-and-Ride:

I mean—what do you suppose? Because even if they fell off the roof of a car when the driver drove away, you have to wonder how they got up there. Or maybe the driver (or a passenger; coulda been a passenger) pulled them off to change into something a tad more fetching, and forgot about them. Or maybe they were left there on purpose because…well—lotta places to go with that one.

Pods redux

Oh, dear—we still got trouble on the ninth floor. Only last week I reported on the passive-aggressive explosion around the Keurig coffee machine in the kitchen.

Well, there’s more.

Late in the week, apparently the miscreant responsible for the 11x17 full-color display on the wall re-offended, because there was a used pod left pointedly beside the machine, which also had a used pod in it.

But it got worse:

Here’s what I saw when I went into the kitchen yesterday morning:

And I did not see signs of anyone attempting to use the manual methodology all day. 

Seriously—there is no joy anywhere near Mudville.

Gratitude Monday: Minor saints

Yesterday was Saint Joseph’s Day, which—if you are not Italian, Korean or trying to buy or sell a house—you may not have been aware of. Poor guy is always losing out: in the Nativity, it’s all the Madonna and the kid; in cursing it’s always Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph; in March it’s always Saint Patrick.

Well, it’s a tough job, but Joe was not the type to complain.

I’ve always liked Joe for precisely that reason. If you want flash, you go to your Bernadettes, or Patricks or Nicholases. If you want the job done, you go to Joseph.

Also, I like Saint Joseph because the 19^th of March is the day the swallows return to Capistrano (más o menos). It’s a big deal where I come from.

And last week, in the run-up to Saint Joseph’s Day, I had occasion to just wallow in birds returning to my life

First there was the snow day on Tuesday, when a fairly steady stream of all sorts showed up to eat the seed I tossed out. But then on Thursday, as I was engaged in a 30-minute conversation with Philip at Comcast technical support, I looked out the patio door and—even though there was not a fresh supply of Fine Tunes—there were more robins than I’ve ever seen at one time in my entire life.

Seriously—more than 15. Just all hopping around the patio, jostling and milling about, like I’d hung out some kind of flashing robin-diner sign. It was absolutely amazing. Philip thought I’d lost my mind, but I did not care. Because robins.

So today I’m grateful for Saint Joseph—I’ll be needing his patronage of various home improvement projects—and for the joy that birds showing up around his day brings me.