WORST. SUMMER. EVER.

Expected local weather over next few days, courtesy of our friends at Weather Underground:

	Overnight Mostly cloudy. Scattered showers and a chance of thunderstorms. Lows in the upper 50s. West winds 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent.
	Sunday Showers and thunderstorms likely in the morning. Partly cloudy in the afternoon with a chance of a lingering shower. Cooler with highs in the mid 60s. West winds 15 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent. » ZIP Code Detail
	Sunday Night Mostly cloudy. A chance of a shower. Cooler with lows in the upper 40s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph... becoming north after midnight. Chance of rain 30 percent.
	Monday Partly cloudy. Highs in the upper 60s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. » ZIP Code Detail
	Monday Night Mostly clear. Cool with lows in the mid 40s. Northeast winds around 5 mph.

GAH. ENOUGH. What the hell is up with the weather this year? I'm not demanding 100 degrees of blast furnace Arizona-style heat every day, but how about more than a mere handful of days in the 80s? Sure, I do appreciate the relative ease in which Sarah and I can take care of our power bills these days, but it seems like I spent all of June and July waiting for the real summer heat that finally arrived partway into August and hung around for, oh, two weeks.

If I sound unreasonable, hear me out for a minute: summer is the one season all year where I can sleep at night with the windows open and wake up in the morning without spending five minutes sneezing my head off or feeling like my sinus cavities have been packed full of rubber cement. Even more importantly, summer is supposed to be the one season all year when I can take a walk, drive or bike ride at 1 A.M. and feel completely comfortable in shorts and a t-shirt. Even if all of the days this past summer had topped out at 85 degrees with no humidity and not a cloud in sight, the near-total lack of evenings with the conditions as I described above leads me with no other choice but to proclaim the summer of 2009 to be the Lamest Summer In History (my history, anyway).

If I have to deal with six months of godawful weather starting in November, the least I can ask in return is an actual summer and not three months of what felt like early autumn instead. Here's to the warmest September/October ever.

Chill Of An Early Winter

Willowick, Ohio. Today. 3:00 PM.

The First Day Of Summer

While it may not not officially have arrived yet going by the calendar, evenings like this one (79 degrees at 11:15 PM) are unmistakably summer nights in the classic sense: the muggy, warm evenings when you can sit out on the front porch in shorts and a t-shirt with a cold drink handy and a ball game on the radio.

Mmmm, I've been waiting for one of these since the end of October.

One Last Arctic Blast (?)

Ok, this is getting a bit silly.

Weather-wise, March has been a complete bitch of a month around here. Exactly two weeks after the biggest snowstorm I can remember since I was 8 or 9 years old slammed into the area (and gave our sales figures a serious black eye that might take months to make up for), one more late season snow storm crept into the area Friday night and wound up dumping another foot of snow all over Lake County.

If nothing else, this gives me the opportunity to introduce you all to the imaging powers of my new Sony Cybershot DSC-W200 digital camera. As I write this, we are only 8 days from the first game of the 2008 baseball season at Progressive Field (which is half the reason I bought this new toy in the first place). I am becoming more and more sure by the hour that I'll be watching this game in a scarf, gloves, two sweaters and a winter hat. :-\

Happy Easter from Northeast Ohio!

Intermission

If last week's Ice Storm From Hell wasn't enough to make me sick to death of this endless winter (hacking through the 1/8" thick sheet of solid ice covering my entire car after work last Tuesday took a week's supply of brute force), then an epic blizzard on Friday and Saturday sure as hell was. We all knew it was coming, and it showed up right on schedule and dumped something like 2 feet of snow all over the place by the time it was over.

The shittiest part of this, predictably, was that I had to be at the store on Saturday morning in order to squeeze whatever blood from the proverbial stone that could be squoze out of that day, and what a complete freakin' disaster that was.

Business-wise, I suppose the workday itself could have been worse as far as people were concerned: generally, the folks who show up at the store on days like that are not the bright bulbs you'd care to be snowed in with ("WOW, MAN! I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU GUYS WERE DUMB ENOUGH TO BE OPEN TODAY!" they typically exclaim, perhaps not catching the irony in their own words). With only, uh, eight customers in the store the entire time I was open, it was a pretty peaceful day all things considered. I got some shelving done, shoveled and salted the front walk, caught up the orders, et cetera. As the afternoon wore on and the visibility actually worsened (it was maybe 250-500 feet on the way in that morning), I was given the green light to get the hell out of Dodge before sundown. We closed a bit later with a pathetic sales total, about three grand short of where we were shooting for. That was pretty bad, and on top of an abbreviated (and dead) Friday, and an abbreviated (and dead) Tuesday (a lot of Tuesdays recently have sported pretty terrible weather, come to think of it), the month of March is already looking like a lost cause unless we can turn this boat around in a hurry.

While the day itself was tranquil, the drive home (in the middle of a Level 2 Snow Emergency, whatever the hell that is), was a complete nightmare. I closed the store at 5 P.M. and waded into the parking lot drifts to get my car warmed up, and let it idle while I re-shoveled the front walk. When everything was finally ready, I jumped into the car, popped it into reverse, and floored it, going about five feet or so backwards before getting hung up in another drift (the snowplow guy had just showed up as I was leaving, and he had a long way to go before he reached my part of the lot). After some gunning of the engine, I headed back into the store to retrieve the shovel and dig myself out, openly cursing our decision to open up that day.

By the time I had finally burst out of that drift, it was nearly 5:30 and I was so happy to finally be moving that I neglected to realize I still had the shovel in my passenger seat until I was more than halfway home. Ugghhh... HULK SMASH.

No, wait! My co-worker (Brian) lives on my way home now! I can just drop by his place and leave the shovel with him since he is working on Sunday anyway!

Wooo! Great idea!

Oh wait ... back up. Hold it right there.

Whaaaat?

When you went back into the store to grab the shovel to dig yourself out, you didn't remember to lock the door behind you when you left, did you?

Awwwwww shit!

Yeah, thought so.

So, I turned around angrily and returned to the store, taking care this time to stick to the plowed areas of the parking lot (and very nearly getting stuck again anyway). Luckily, I had indeed left the door unlocked, so the trip back was certainly worthwhile, if aggravating.

It was about halfway home again when my mind chirped again: hey, uh, didn't you intend to bring home a bag of packing supplies?

You know what? Screw the goddamned packing supplies.

Roger that.

Right now, the roads are clear and dry, and snow is piled up in conical sight line-blocking hills all over the place. Perhaps it's me, but I detect a bit of a bias towards SUV drivers in the way snow piles are arranged at the front entrances of plazas and driveways, completely blocking your car-eye view of oncoming traffic. Getting out of our plaza at work has become a pretty dangerous proposition since Saturday afternoon. Here's hoping the melt-off hits quickly before someone gets killed.

Anyway, the suffering is only in the here and now. Three weeks from today (and, hopefully, about 20 degrees-and-change north of our current temperature), Sarah and I will both be in attendance down at the Jak ... uh, Progressive Field for Opening Day 2008. With a bit of luck, we'll soon have a bitchin' brand new digital camera with us in order to take plenty of slick pix of the day's events, followed with mucho footage of the kitties, the condo and points all around the area (and I'll soon be putting up a link to the Flickr account you can scope 'em all out at).

Courage.

'Midwinter' Addendum

Figures. I decide to write one toss-off post admitting that winter weather ain't so bad sometimes and all Hell breaks loose a week and change later. Sheesh.

We were hit by the biggest storm of the season yesterday and today (about a foot of snow, though it's impossible to know for sure thanks to all the attendant wind), and we have more snow on the ground and drifted up against everything in sight than I have seen in years. Looking out the front bay window of the condo, I am faced with a snow drift that reaches as high as my chest, fer cryin' out loud.

All of this started sometime Tuesday morning: the roads were already pretty iffy when I got to work. As it turned out, showing up at all was ultimately a waste of time as it was pretty much a morgue in that place from the moment I got there until the moment Greg called at 7:00 PM and gave me the green light to shut everything down and go home early. The rather terrible sales figures from that day and the next took a nice chunk out of our once-blazing pace, and now the month of February is looking a bit up in the air unless we can make up the lost ground (and considering that this month is shaping up to be remarkably weak on the new release front, we aren't holding our breath) and have a few days in a row when it doesn't, you know, snow.

Driving home that night was a blend of the worst parts of dealing with winter traffic along with the best: none of the roads had been plowed yet, and Mentor Avenue in particular was an utter clusterfuck as none of the lanes were moving, and the vehicles that were in motion were being piloted by suicidal cockmops. Simply getting out of Mentor was what ate up most of my 30 minute drive home as a desperate attempt to access westbound Mentor Ave. by cutting over to Route 306 (by way of a few deserted side streets) put me in the exact same traffic situation, with people making up new and exciting traffic lanes as we went along. Sigh.

By the time I'd gone through Willoughby and down Vine Street, I'd had enough of dealing with street traffic and decided to cut over onto the freeway for the rest of the way home. This was probably not the brightest idea I ever had as far as safety was concerned: the exit ramp, also unplowed, was invisible under a blanket of white, and Route 2 really wasn't much better. That said, at least there were only about two cars in my field of vision heading westbound with me, which took a lot of the worry and stress out of driving (once you realize you can't hit someone else, worries about such things as traction and skidding magically vanish!). It was also odd looking down the limitless deserted expanse of westbound Route 2 before me, while on the other side of the concrete barrier, the eastbound lanes were bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see.


There were a few tense seconds spent aiming my car at the exit ramp when I finally reached Willowick, but once I had slowed to a complete stop a quarter mile later, all was fine (parking in a freaking snowdrift in our unplowed parking lot exempted) and a nice, warm, early evening at home was had by all. I think we need to do these more often.

The next day, as blindingly white and cold as it was, felt like a bit of a drag as it seemed pretty much everyone in Northeast Ohio scored a snow day, save for us hapless retail pukes. Blah.

NP James Brown Star Time

In The Bleak Midwinter

I am a bit distracted in typing up these rather long life-update posts right now, as the heaviest snowfall of the season is softly blanketing the area outside.

Those who know me well also know my feelings on winter (and all cold weather in general if we define "cold" as "anywhere south of sixty degrees"), which can be a bit contradictory at times, I suppose. I generally am ill-suited to the cold and I always dread dealing with it year after year, yet at the same time I have no problem whatsoever with snow on the ground during the holidays ... it's just that it can basically piss off for the other 50 weeks of the year for all I care. :)

I can make adjustments in my loathing, however, if a significant snowfall should arrive on a day when I am off work (like today) and provide a kind of mellowing, beautiful counterpart to a relaxing, cozy afternoon and evening. There is something quietly hypnotic and serene in a thick, billowing storm of fluffy white that has always soothed me even when I'm stuck in the middle of a 40 MPH conga line on Route 2. The peaceful, striking sight somehow makes dealing with the stuff tolerable as it's coming down, but always ready to become a grating nuisance the instant it stops.

Heading downstairs now to take in some more of the sight. More updating later.

P.S. - Of course, as our lake effect snow warning appears to be extending into the work week as I type this, I fully expect these warm happy fuzzy feelings to quickly vanish the instant I rise for work on Tuesday morning. Such is life.


NP David Axelrod Song Of Innocence

The End Of Drama: Floods, Bills, & The Stupidity Trifecta

A few weeks back, I wrote a post whining about how it felt like we were living on Waterworld, and lemme tell you, that was peanuts compared to the Biblical deluge of this past week.



You may have heard that Mother Nature went ballistic on Northeast Ohio last Thursday, dumping 9" of rain over most of Lake County in about 24 hours, and flooding the living shit out of Painesville, Fairport Harbor, Eastlake, Mentor and Willowick.

Don't worry: we're untouched and, as it turns out, damned lucky: the worst we had to cope with (aside from the hellish driving conditions exacerbated by most major roads being shut down) was a wet stretch of carpet and linoleum from rain pushed underneath the door and into our little foyer. The folks on Bayridge Road (a few hundred feet away from here) weren't so lucky, however, as water piled up in their basements to a depth of 3 feet, resulting in a tons of ruined carpeting and furniture being piled up on treelawns up and down that street over the last couple of days.

Now that the waters have receded and getting around town is no longer a challenge in coming up with alternate routes on back roads, I can attend to more pressing matters in the form of my medical bill situation, which I am extremely pleased to report is now largely a non-issue, save for a few small issues to be picked over tomorrow. To my surprise, The City Of Willowick wrote off the $460 ambulance bill, which was a relief, but nowhere near as much as being able to tap into some money my Dad had squirrelled away in a mutual fund for me years ago, which will cover the balance of the remaining bills.

As expected, I apparently make too much money for the feds to write off the charges incurred by Chuck's visit. This is kinda sad, really: I earn well below what is popularly considered "the poverty line" and I can only imagine what unbearable financial one must live at for the State will absolve you of being in debt up to your eyeballs from medical expenses. However, I was also informed that the astronomical (and still non-itemized) figure I was mailed a few weeks ago has been cut in half as long as I can pay it off in one lump sum, which I will be taking care of as soon as my check arrives. Said check will cover the remaining amount, as well as the two other bills that are not covered by these financial help people (and it would have been nice to know this over a month ago so I might have started to pay them off by now). The only drawback to this good news is that I am going to feel some sting from this withdrawal come April 15 of next year, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

It wasn't all good news this past week in the money department, however: the cherry on the sundae of this life update is that I managed to snap my record 8-year streak of good traffic behavior in pretty spectacular fashion last Wednesday night (just as The Deluge From Hell was starting to get going). Realizing that I had forgotten some work that needed to be done, I headed back to the store at 2 AM to retrieve a new release order book that had to be taken care first thing Thursday morning. Upon leaving the store, I neglected to turn on my headlights (something I am always prone to do when the roads are wet) and was pulled over a few moments later on Route 306 thanks to that and the fact that I was speeding through a very popular downhill speed trap underneath a railroad bridge. You see, this section of Route 306 is a 25mph zone and I was clocked going 41. Oops.

Making matters worse, the policeman returned to my car after writing the ticket and asked me if I knew that my driver's license had expired. "That's incorrect, sir" I said, looking at the card in his hand with some irritation, "it doesn't expire until two thousand and...six..." Oops again. So, I was handed a ticket for 41 in a 25 and an expired license, and was pretty steamed at this development, but at the same time thankful that I was allowed to drive home instead having my car towed on the spot (which he was certainly in his right to do as I had just nailed The Stupidity Trifecta) and thus forcing me to get a ride in the middle of a downpour at 2 AM.

The license problem was taken care of the next morning, and (depending on the waivable price of the ticket) I will either pay that off sometime this week or decide to show up in court a couple of Wednesdays from now in an attempt to get the costs knocked down a bit. After that, all of this wonderful endless summer drama will at last be over. Here's to a peaceful August.


NP: The Go-Betweens 1978-1990

So Goes The News

Hello!

Yes, I'm still breathing and I still have internet access, fear not...

As you might have guessed during my little unannounced writing vacation (which turned into the entire month of February), things have been really slow around Chez I Am A Bug, with very little of note to report for a while now in the ongoing Life Of The Author. At least until now.

So, what's new since the last time I posted anything but an updated store sales list? Some damn good news balanced out by a little bit of bad: this past Wednesday I moved out of debt and made it out of a month with money in the bank for the first time since the Great Financial Automotive Holocaust last July. Yessss! For two wonderful, carefree, glorious days, all was good and right with the world.

But then along came earlier this evening ... my car now refuses to start. Hoorah. I left it at work for now, and my current thinking is that it must be some kind of fuel injector/pump issue since everything seems to be working save for the engine actually kicking to life.

God fuckin' damn it! How's that for timing?

As of this writing, my current car problem is not yet a disaster (and I'm trying very hard to forget that last year's Voyage Into The Abyss started off as a minor annoyance as well), as I have some money in the bank to get this taken care of relatively quickly. Since I'm off from work on Monday, this is at the very least a minimum transportation inconvenience as long as it is a routine kind of repair and not, say, a fuel injector shitting the bed on me. I have to head up to work at some point tomorrow evening to retrieve paperwork and generate orders for this week, and I'll give it another try at that point. If it doesn't start, I'm going to have to set up a tow. If it does start, however, Mr. Beretta is headed straight to the garage for a look-see (and an oil change while it's there, what the hell).

In far better news, after three months of wondering what in the hell was going on with her bank situation, Sarah finally got back a little more than half of the funds she had lost from an apparent hack of her account. This was about what I'd expected in a best-case scenario (though I still wonder how and why her account was drained into the negative four-digits before anyone let her know what was happening), and though she still lost a couple grand when all was said and done, she was at least finally able to get her financial situation righted at last. Whew.

In matters of work, things went absolutely beautifully at the store in January: possibly assisted by the unseasonably balmy weather (well, it certainly wasn't a plethora of new releases), we managed to exceed our target by 10% that month and start off 2006 way ahead of pace. February, on the other hand, was a very slight loss (to be fair, we were up against a rather freakish total from last year that defies easy explanation), but thankfully nowhere near enough to derail the year to-date.

Finally, The Best Winter Ever just couldn't last: after six glorious, Goat-given weeks of amazingly temperate conditions (as mentioned above), the cold and white finally came roaring back at last as February got going, and we've been back in that on-again, off-again melt-off-and-then-snow-some-more cycle for the last few weeks. As I type this, it's feels almost like spring outside once again, though the current weather forecast portends more hateful snow, rain and cold by Tuesday. Huzzah. Just in time for my latest car drama ...


NP The Orb Brighton U.K. 9/27/91

BEST WINTER EVER!!!

Going into this winter, I figured it would be statistically improbable to follow up the Snowiest Winter In NorthEast Ohio History™ with a season just as bad or even worse, but I had no idea the weather was going to swing completely the other way as it has so far.

It seemed initially that we were in for one very long winter as it was already colder than hell and blowing snow all over the place on Thanksgiving Day, and we found ourselves pretty well blitzed by heavy snow storms over the early weeks of December as well. And then, something utterly unexpected happened as we hit the calendar start of winter: the season just stopped, and seemingly on a dime at that.

Now, I am not exactly complaining about all of this, mind you. Outside of a two-week period around Christmas and New Year's Day (as I've said elsewhere, green Christmases are a real spiritual drag), we could stay completely snow-free all winter long and I'd be totally O.K. with that. I like watching snow falling and seeing a fresh blanket of white in the morning as much as the next guy: it's driving though said conditions (especially with other people on the roads) that makes me dread this time of year.

So, perhaps as a karmic treat for enduring the unending hell of 2005, I have been given a Dream Winter (or at least a Dream January ... we won't be in the clear for "no snow" until May) this year. For the last three weeks (save for a two-day false alarm last weekend), there has been no snow, no blasts of steel arctic suffering, and a temperature reading that is seemingly incapable of dropping below thirty degrees. Hell, Sarah (snowbunny incarnate) tells me we're due to hit fifty degrees on Thursday. Muahahahaha.

Tennis, anyone?


NP Robert Plant & The Strange Sensation The Mighty Rearranger

This Post Has Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Canada

It feels weird noting that today is the first day of winter when we've had one of the snowiest Decembers in recent memory thus far. Then again, it's either feast or famine that way in this part of the U.S., it seems.

A few topics to cover before I head downstairs to watch a DVD with a bowl of chicken soup and some saltines ...

OK, I think it's official: David Gilmour hates me ... or maybe he thinks I smell.

See, it's not enough that my hero's first freakin' solo tour in 22 years does a nice looooong wide arc around my environs (and plays in venues so small in size that even if I were insane enough to truck off to Chicago to see him play, I would get cornholed on the tickets themselves), it also appears that he is terrified of somehow competing with himself, which is about the only reason that comes to mind for the news I heard at work today.

Hopeless fanboys like me nearly wet ourselves with joy a couple of months ago when Pink Floyd's eternally-delayed DVD release of Pulse was finally slated for release on December 20. Well, that news was too good to be true, we learned a few weeks ago, when the street date was pushed back to January 17, 2006.

Well, I found out earlier today that the January 17 date was also too good to be true, since the fucking thing has now been shoved into distribution Limbo once again: one source tells me that the title has been outright "cancelled," while amazon.com now lists a release date on January 1, 2010 (I'm not sure which is worse). AARRRGH!!

--

I'm nearly finished Christmas shopping ... just need to take care of some work friends and my siblings before I'm finally done. While scoping out some ideas, I bought a set of multi-colored "icicle lights" for the office, though I need to stop at the store sometime to pick up some nails and an extension cord so I can put them up as thumbtacks and reinforced packing tape didn't hold them up very long.

--

The Christmas tree went up on Sunday (along with a few lights in the window), and I'm now wondering if I'm going to bother with this again next year as Moe has been a complete butthead ever since. Almost immediately, he was attempting to climb/eat the tree while hidden underneath it, necessitating the placement of two Scat Mats on top of the tree skirt.

Moe quickly figured out a way to move these mats aside without shocking himself, of course, so I am at a loss as to how to proceed from there. Worse, it looks like he's also attempting to scale the tree from the outside, judging by the flattened bottom branches and a couple of bowed-downwards metal tree limbs. Grrrr.

--

The dry and cold conditions Weather Underground had been calling for last weekend never materialized, as we've been snowed on quite a bit instead. Here's hoping that they also called this weekend's forecast wrong as well: temperatures in the low 40s and rain! On Christmas! UGGGH!

--

Finally, some far happier news: after a slow start, we've been kicking some ass lately at the store. We finally reached the pace of sales we've been worried about all month long on Monday, and started padding our lead with a very good day today. Our increased pace should start getting noticeably more intense tomorrow night, followed by all-out mayhem on Thursday, Friday and Saturday morning.

Alright, time to relax a bit before facing the hordes again tomorrow. 'Night!

Turkey Day '05 Wrap-Up

Being that Sarah and I didn't even get out of bed on Thanksgiving until about 2 or so in the afternoon, you could say that it was a pretty laid-back Thanksgiving, even by my lax standards.

After some puttering about for an hour or so, it was time to get seriously moving. In order to keep up our "Thanksgiving Breakfast On The Town" tradition, we decided to head over to the Denny's in Willoughby around 4. This was a bit late for a breakfast, granted, but we had no idea that my parents had actually started Turkey Day dinner at a reasonable hour this year. I'd never noticed this until sometime around high school, but it certainly seems like 99% of America eats Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner at about 3 in the freakin' afternoon, while the my family prefers to sit down at the table even later than our normal dinner hour of 7 o'clock.

While Denny's worked out just dandy as a breakfast locale for us last year, it turned out to be the worst-case scenario this time around, largely due to the unbelievably sucky waitress we were saddled with. Oh well, we only had to deal with her twice in the hour and change we were there ...

From there, it was straight over to Mentor in what felt and looked like the arctic gales of midwinter. Luckily, the weather people were largely wrong when it came to the local conditions as the Early Winter Apocalypse that was called for on Tuesday wound up amounting to 3" or so of snow and a whole lotta wind (though I'm sure it must have been a real party in the Snowbelt that day). Upon arriving at my parents, we saw that the table was already set and the smell of a finished turkey hung thick in the air. Oops.

While I didn't exactly stuff myself at the restaurant, I was only able to eat one plate's worth of Thanksgiving dinner that night. Pretty shameful. From there, it was a few hours of relaxing, doing some last minute buffing and polishing to my amazon.com wishlist (hint hint!) and watching DVDs of Triumph The Insult Comic Dog and (by request) Back To The Future with Sarah and my younger brother, Bryan.

A bit later on as we were approaching midnight, my brother Brett and I briefly (and jokingly, I swear) discussed the idea of heading over to Wal-Mart in full NHL gear and busting some heads when the doors opened at 5 AM. Sadly, however, I was secheduled to be at work at noon on Friday, so the plan was scuttled. As it turns out, a few dozen customers nationwide did a credible enough job of acting like crazed bulls in a china shop on their way to the electronics section to do us proud. Gawd bless Black Friday mornings.

While we're on the topic of Black Friday, it's been pretty hectic at the store the last couple of days, but not in the way we had planned it. Yes, the business has been pretty much on target for the weekend, but we've also been up to our ears in moving and re-arranging work since the guy we commissioned to create some new product bins finally delivered most of them about three months behind schedule. We desperately needed the expansion space and it's nice to have it at last, but doing all of this gruntwork at the onset of the Christmas shopping season is exactly what we were trying to avoid by asking for these bins back in fuckin' August. Grrr.

Autumn Is Upon Us

Well, it's October again. Time for an indian summer (I think we're getting one starting yesterday as a matter of fact), and steadily, stealthily cooling evenings that drag you into winter without your realizing what is going on. Then, next thing you know, it's November first and freaking cold out and you realize that you'd better busy yourself winterizing the car and maybe start planning Christmas shopping expenses before too long. Damn it.

O.K., I jest a bit: I actually like October a lot...it's just too bad that November has to follow, you know?

As you might have guessed from all the pics here, I'm a big fan of October colors: it's the prettiest month of the year as long as the weather keeps from getting all gray, wet and blustery. October makes me think of caramel apples and funnel cakes and rickety carnival rides at the It's Better In Mentor fair (which usually happens in September, but was always the true benchmark of the beginning of autumn for me as a teenager) and also of standing around small fires to keep warm on cool, damp nights. Most of all, October always brings up fond memories of the old cider mill my family and I used to frequent every year around this time when we were living in Southfield, getting thick apple cider and hot cinnamon-tasting donuts that were absolutely delicious and always worth the trip (now is when I start thinking about jumping in the car and making the 3.5 hour trip to the northern suburbs of Detroit to get some more, heh heh).

October also makes me think of baseball and playoffs and the World Series, but this year finds me once again in the position of having no teams to root for, and only teams to root against, thanks to the Indians falling apart at exactly the wrong goddamn time of the season. Ah well, at least with this team, saying the words "maybe next year" doesn't have that hollow ring of "yeah, right" to it.


Sarah and I have now been in the condo for over a year now: that particular anniversary came and went unheralded at the end of last August. After a rather blistering summer, the weather has been absolutely perfect over the last few weeks, which means we have not been running the AC much at all, and that makes me a very happy camper.

While we're on the money subject, I am finally seeing the end of the tunnel in getting myself out from underneath the crushing load of my car's repair bills. By the end of this month, I should be able to clear Bill Week with a decent positive balance ... maybe even enough to take care of the two other problems that have sprung up since that godawful final week of July: an apparent coolant leak of undetermined severity and the similarly undetermined state of my rear brake system. Yay.

In better news, my work schedule has recently taken a delicious turn for the better. Brian's job working for that electrician guy apparently was an utter wash from Day One, and he was recently laid off. This doesn't come as a huge surprise as things he's said offhandedly over the last couple of months seemed to indicate that all was not quite working out as planned. What makes this news notable is that he now needs more hours to work and, as a result, I now have two day weekends (Sunday & Monday) for the time being. Weeeeoo!

I could get used to this real quick...


In other store news, things are moseying along alright in a business sense, though by "moseying" I mean we've just finished up an utterly flat September (missed the target figure by 93 stinkin' dollars, damn it). Our pace for the year is still comfortably ahead of target, and thus our magic number of half a mil is still within our sights, though it might involve an extra push at some point to achieve. Last year it was the week after Christmas that saved our asses, thanks to all the godawful snow days beforehand ... here's hoping we don't get pushed up against the wall the same way this year.

Of course, November will also bring about The Return Of Inspector Scene and a part of me is just breathless with ancticpation as to how this year's inspection sweep will pan out. I have my suspicions that the assertions I've heard to the effect of "don't worry, if he checked something last year, he won't check it again this year" may not hold a lot of water since nearly all of the work we did to the doors in this condo to make them close correctly has come rather undone over the last six months or so thanks to the gradual, imperceptible sinking of this place into landfill. Thus, a part of me thinks that we will certainly hear about the doors, and yet another part of me answers that with: "yeah, so what? What the hell can I do about it now?" Needless to say, you will certainly be reading updates on this should it come into play.


NP Depeche Mode Playing The Angel

Crisis Mismanagement

All of the music-related posts I once had archived here in I Am A Bug, were mirrored columns: all of them are actually intended for 45RPM, the mp3 blog run by my old friend and ex-Den co-worker Mike Beaumont. I mirrored these Sunday Synthpop Brunch posts in this forum merely to keep I Am A Bug active in the frequent times when I’m not in the mood to write outside of the 45RPM framework.

Crescent City Blues briefly explained why I was not submitting a regular column for this weekend (or the next, for that matter), but I deliberately shied away from going any further into the subject with my personal thoughts since 45RPM isn’t the place for them. This blog, however, is.

I try very hard not to let myself rant on politics, but it gets harder to avoid outrage lately, either due to the slow onset of fogeydom or perhaps the current cast of jokers inhabiting the White House. I am not a professional pundit and no one’s idea of an expert in this field, and so I try to avoid inflicting pure, annoyed venting on people. Making it even more frustrating to vent on this subject is that while I may not like The Way Things Are, I also have no constructive answers to these problems. Thus, I tend to look upon these rants as empty, self-indulgent wanks that do nothing but add to the already-deafening background noise of the internet.



Then along came the events of the last week, and … well, it’s pretty hard to find the words, isn’t it? I’m going to give it a try, regardless.

I haven't been this worked-up over the state of the U.S. gub'mint since that dreary, awful, soul-killing morning after Election Day last year. That was a pretty fucking terrible day, but even that had no comparison to the epic, needless suffering experienced by the victims of Hurricane Katrina. I'm not just talking about the shame of New Orleans, either ... plenty of equally enraging stories of neglect and half-assed bureaucratic effort have come from Mississippi and Alabama as well, and I am pretty goddamned angry right now thinking about it (I think "downright furious" covers it better, actually). I am also embarrassed, ashamed, stunned, and (best of all for the intents of this post) increasingly vitriolic at the absolute clusterfuck that marked the official world premiere demonstration of the power of our wonderfully-integrated Department Of Homeland Security and FEMA. I gotta save some shout-outs for the Senate, and the White House too, since they worked with DHS and FEMA to create a "perfect storm" of haplessness in the face of a natural disaster that was the most gobsmacking display of organizational pratfalls, shameless, childlike deflection-of-blame and sheer clueless bungling that I have seen from this government in my lifetime.

What happened in New Orleans last week was "the anti-9/11," as coined by New York Times columnist David Brooks, in every possible fashion:

On Sept. 11, Rudy Giuliani took control. The government response was quick and decisive. The rich and poor suffered alike. Americans had been hit, but felt united and strong. Public confidence in institutions surged.

Last week in New Orleans, by contrast, nobody took control. Authority was diffuse and action was ineffective. The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. Leaders spun while looters rampaged. Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed.

The first rule of the social fabric - that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable - was trampled. Leaving the poor in New Orleans was the moral equivalent of leaving the injured on the battlefield. No wonder confidence in civic institutions is plummeting.

Jesus, what if this had happened instead to Manhattan? Norfolk? Washington D.C.? Kennebunkport? I can't be the only person who feels that if any of these places been hit instead of New Orleans, the level and speed of response would have been a very different story indeed. We already know what would have been the case had the damage been as terrible in Florida: FEMA (and even Our Fearless Leader) were on the scene the instant the storm(s) had finished passing through, walking the streets, cutting checks, helping Americans out, showing how much their government cared about their well-being. Of course, that was during an election year, in a state run by Our Leader's brother, and a territory that he absolutely, positively had to win in order to get re-elected, but I digress ...

I have long since grown calloused and immune to hearing out man's inhumanity to his fellow man, but when this extends to the government of the United States, I can't help but be staggered by it all. As if there was any doubt whatsoever with whom the priorities of this administration lay (re-election at all costs followed by the fortunes of the upper class, all other priorities rescinded), last week cleared them up beyond all doubt.

Much as it pains me to admit, you cannot lay the all of the blame for last week at the feet of the President. There, I said it. No, this was a failure on nearly every level of government from the Oval Office all the way down to the city of New Orleans itself. For a disaster that had been talked about for years (and over which Michael Brown, the absolutely-useless head of FEMA tells us that they had just practiced for last year), the various bureaucracies were behaving like freshly-guillotined chickens. Exactly what is the point of declaring an statewide emergency in multiple states a day and change before the hurricane makes landfall if nothing happens for days afterwards?

Listening to the likes of Trent Lott and Mary Landrieu prattle on during interviews like they had just won a fucking Oscar was absolutely fucking unreal (and thank God for anchors like Anderson Cooper who have cut these sanctimonious fucks off at the knees with a cold splash of reality when the occasion arose). Exactly where in the hell does this Government fly to when the city of Washington D.C. shuts down every August? New Zealand? Tahiti? Ganymede? Nowhere in this reality, apparently. For chrissakes, when even the likes of Shephard Smith at Fox News is left nearly speechless on-air wondering what in the samhell is going on (not to mention deliciously handing a slice of de-politicized reality to such putrid, insulated minor Antichrists as O'Reilly and Hannity), you know that things have gone terribly, terribly wrong.

To her credit, Landrieu recently issued a press release indicating that Bush's arrival at a levee repair site in New Orleans was a sham. A fucking photo-op. Nothing more. What a surprise. Also, how very convenient that his arrival was on the very same day that the REAL help finally began to arrive in New Orleans at last. Coincidence, I'm sure.

So, the city of New Orleans and a giant swath of the Gulf Coast is effectively no more as I type this, and one wonders if this region will ever be what it once was. The question also remains of what will happen to the displaced and nearly-entirely destitute population which seemingly now inhabits every domed facility in the Deep South at this hour. Is there another patented Magic Bush Tax Cut in the offing to somehow make all of the reconstruction and the strain on the social services of states hosting the refugees come together?

If there is to be any silver lining in this whatsoever, it's that the opportunity exists at amazing cost to correct the mistakes of the past in rebuilding New Orleans, but an unbelievably, incalculaby huge cleanup will come first. The scale of this is just beyond me: The Big O, The Crescent City, The Big Easy, whatever you may call it is nothing more than a dessicated, filth-ridden, waterlogged city of the dead.

From the inactions and miscues we have seen all last week, it has become glaringly apparent that we have achieved absolutely nothing since September 11 in the areas of security and disaster relief. We can have aircraft carriers off of Banda Aceh in a day or so after a tsunami erases half of the city, but we can't shoehorn any National Guard troops in a major urban area in this country for 4-5 days after a hurricane that everyone saw coming two days before it hit. And how about this for a cherry on the sundae: we are more vulnerable to societal/administrative decay (and resultant anarchy) than we ever knew.

Happy Labor Day.

Winter Wonderland

Well, it's not quite that wonderlandish around here yet, but according to the fine folks at Weatherunderground, our second blast of true Northeast Ohio winter weather is on the way tonight, tomorrow and Monday. As I write this, it's been fitfully drizzling rain for a few of hours in temperatures that feel a bit too mild for the kind of snow we're slated to be getting...so I guess I'm in for a hell of a surprise when I open the curtains Sunday morning.

Now, there is some good news to the forthcoming crappy driving conditions and evil wind chill factors -- according to the current long-range forecast, we're in for an early and lasting white Christmas (not one of those last-second midnight-on-Christmas-Eve arrivals like we've had the past two years), which raises my currently drained spirits quite a bit. Hopefully, this will also finally be the kick in the ass that drives people into the store at last (we seem to have derailed in our early seasonal momentum the last five days or so) and gets us the rawkin' year-end figure we've been busting our asses all year for.

With the weather going bone-chillingly horrible tomorrow, I'm looking forward to an at-least-partially relaxing day off punctuated with some more mandatory home refurbishments (which I am getting as sick of writing about as you must be reading about them). This week's work will consist of planing down the door to the downstairs bathroom so that it actually fits into it's bent frame and latches correctly, followed by the installing of new screens into the computer room windows. I'm not looking very forward to either of these tasks right now, since I am probably dangerous with running power tools in my hand when it comes to door-planing, and I haven't the slightest goddamned idea how these new screens are going to fit into the window frames when I had a hell of a time getting the old and busted up frames out last week.

I should mention that in our ongoing quest to make Inspector Scene happy with our condo, a tip of the hat is very much due to Sarah, who has really been outdoing herself on the home improvement/fix-it tip. Thanks to her work over the last week during an impromptu work vacation, the front door is now insulated and doesn't leak heat to the outside (while letting in invisible jets of cold air), the back door now latches when closed, the crack in the wall above the staircase is nearly entirely invisible behind layers of fill-in goop, and the cracked kitchen tiles around the outlet are repaired and looking dandy.

While we're talking home improvement, it's been a while since the last time we last talked holiday decorations. After an iffy start, Moe appears to have adapted pretty well to having a string of brilliant green lights all the way around the bay window. He did so well with them, in fact, that I finally decided to put up a Christmas tree. Going one step further, said tree is a brand new pre-lit model. My initial financial second-thoughts to this entire idea were put to rest in short order last weekend when we found some very nice models at the local K-Mart for 25% off, thus putting them well into my financial range (which is currently being stretched by the recent start of my Christmas shopping).



Not bad, eh?

Round Three of Moe vs. The Christmas Decorations had only just begun when our little boy came out of the corner swinging: we weren't even finished getting all of the pieces of our new tree out of the box before Moe had decided to take a few exploratory munches on the wires and branches. Thus, out came the water bottles and the Bitter Apple and the battle was joined. With the bottom of the tree now unfit for feline palates, the cats seemed to find it a cool new hangout instead of a 7 foot tall snack bar. Sarah and I thus ultimately claimed victory. People 3, Cats 0.



As it turns out, there was also to be a Round Four. Satisfied after a couple of days that Moe wasn't going to electrocute himself chewing on any of the lighting cords, Sarah decided to put up a few ornaments up on Wednesday. Bad idea. Apparently, Moe was up on two legs in no time batting away at the lowest ornaments in his reach. Not entirely surprised by this, Sarah moved the ornaments farther on up the tree, figuring that would solve the problem, but it only succeeded in getting Moe's diabolical little mind working on a solution. Apparently, Moe thought of one: when she returned home from a shopping trip that afternoon, Sarah found four ornaments scattered about the living room and into the kitchen. I personally have no idea how in the hell Moe managed this stunt (did Ghidorah suddenly turn mischeivous and give him an alley oop or something?), but after this episode and a situation later that night where Moe attempted to reach another shiny bauble and settled for jumping directly into the structure of the tree itself (much to my dismay), the ornaments came off and were packed away. People 3, Cats 1.

A parting thought before I wind down and head to bed: I'll give this much to dear ol' Martha Stewart, while I find her at best condescending and at worst outright fucking annoying when I see her foofy little show on T.V., her company sure knows how to put together a strong fake Christmas tree -- Moe's little escape gambit the other day didn't even budge it an inch, which was surprising to me considering how little I paid for the thing. Yay.