Ha. If you record it, please, please send it to me.
Tell me about it. Mrs Magill wass working in the upstairs office on a conference call when Spike (now 13) let out a blood curdling scream after Fang (now 17) grabbed his ear. Thankfully, Squeaky (now 11) had the good sense to keep his head down.
We have a couple of simple rules in this house that are constantly broken. Number 1 is “Don’t touch your brother.” Number 2 is “Never piss off the Italian woman.” You’d think it’d be easy to keep those two in mind, but no. No, it’s not. I thought she was going to kill them both.
The boys originally were all signed up for two weeks of sleep away camp this week. My MiL was going to be here taking care of the rabbit (and taking a break from my newly retired FiL), while Mrs Magill and I were going to be in Naples. This is NOT the week for them to test their mother.
I have to wonder how much lower the school rolls will be in September.
By then, many children will have been ‘sent to the farm’.
Local schools are planning on a class size limit of 10. This is gonna get interesting.
I had an appointment today to meet with the lawyer about my mother’s probate. I was supposed to give him the original will and sign some papers so he can mail them to the court (courts are still closed). I hired him three weeks ago and we’ve handled some things by phone but this was our first in person meeting. I arrived a little before 2 p.m. and called him so he could let me in the office. I got his voice mail. I called again at 2:10 and 2:30 and then came home. It’s 5:30 and I still haven’t heard from him.
I just want to get her house sold. That’s all I have to do. The house is mostly ready, I have a realtor, all I need is the deed in my name. She died in February. Yes, the pandemic made getting all the stuff I needed take forever but, fuck, I just need this done. He better have a pretty damn good excuse for this.
Yeah - the standard answer to the question of how we’re all doing is that we still have three kids. I think because Mrs Magill and I have a combination of shared and separate hobbies, we have not gotten sick of each other.
Have a friend leave a voicemail.
“Good morning this is Hugh Louis Dewey of the law firm Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe. I’m calling in regard to a prospective client, aurora maire, who is contemplating retaining our firm to assist with probate of the estate of one aurorasmom maire. If you could give me a call at 800 555-1212 to discuss getting a copy of your files in this matter, I’d be grateful. If she retains us I’d like to be able to hit the ground running. Thanks a lot. 800 555-1212, Hugh Louis Dewey. I look forward to hearing from you.”
I am fed up with the effing wildlife in our carport, which needs doors put on pronto.
There are carpenter bees which are wood-boring and get in your face but don’t actually sting - yet.
Barn swallows have nested in there and like to sit in the carport on a back railing, squabbling amongst themselves and zooming in and out at crazy angles.
I hit the limit this morning when a three-foot snake slithered in, and responded to my encouraging him to leave by coiling and striking at me. :eek: At that point I felt obliged to dispatch him with a shovel. Based on my tentative ID he was a Gray Ratsnake, the largest species in Kentucky (hooray!) which can get up to six feet. Non-venomous, and I hate to kill a snake, but getting aggressive with me indoors or in outbuildings is a no-no.
Some ideas.
Carpenter bees were driving me crazy in our barn. I built a few carpenter bee traps and the problem is under control.
Barn swallows are awesome birds. They eat insects that would otherwise be bothering you, and they are beautiful creatures. I’ve seen them “play”, flying with a duck feather in their mouth, dropping the feather, then catching it again out of the air. We cater to them. Once they build their nest, we move our horses to leave empty space below the nest so they can reproduce in peace.
Coexisting with a Central Ratsnake in your carport is possible and preferable to living with the rodents he was there to consume. But, a Ratsnake can be best persuaded to find somewhere else to live by squirting him with a hose. You can also pin his head to the ground with a broom, get a hold of him and relocate him that way.
Finding a small Ratsnake means there are likely more around. A clutch of eggs is 10-20. On our little farm I’m seeing a few central rats each weekend. They are pretty shy unless cornered. Because they are constrictors, they “bluff” when threatened, which is what was likely going on.
Be sure to get rid of the dead snake. A decomposing snake smells pretty awful.
I always favored Froelich and DeTour as a law firm name [frolic and detour snicker]
My pitting is my body today. I go every third month to get an exam under anesthesia [flex sigmoidoscopy] and once a year a full on colonoscopy. For the past roughly 18 months the biopsies have returned clear, but this past week the biopsy came back with some cancer cells. The MRI showed it as a very small contained lesion in what is probably a really bad location. Currently have an appointment with the oncologist to discuss options. I spoke at length with my surgeon this morning, and he is willing to let me be sort of an experimental case and do another course of chemo, and perhaps go on ‘permanent’ chemo, and continue the constant monitoring. Thankfully, the seriously frequent scoping and biopsies did what they were supposed to do - catch any recurrence of cancer fast before it gets a chance to go apeshit. My negative strikes are the diabetes and the covid/everything stress [cortisol] I have cut out grilled anything, beef and pork and caffeine [digestive tract irritants] and taken up meditation again. My surgeon and oncologist have previously complimented me on being willing to take whatever steps I need to to win.
sigh
We keep our garage closed all the time (it’s storage not for parking cars) except I left the door up yesterday while I had the lawn mower out.
When I went to put it away, I swear not more than an hour total time, I startled a wild turkey!
Not too badly, though, it took another five minutes before I could get him to calmly stroll out the door and head over to the neighbor’s patio.
When we lived by Tahoe, so many stories of people leaving their garages open and had bears sitting in their cars, opening the freezers, and doing big destruction.
WTF is happening in Seattle?.
I did a thing. I shared a sermon with my parents. Usually, this would not make me so nervous but the subject of this sermon is controversial, though it really shouldn’t be. This sermon (and the next three) are my church’s response to the killing of George Floyd and the protests. It’s a deeply convicting Bible-based sermon, asking us to search our hearts for any pride or bias that may be causing us to ignore the plight of our fellow humans. My parents have previously been angered with my sister and her husband for showing support of the BLM movement because they feel that they were being called racists. I think the sermon tries to say that it’s not enough to just not be racist but it may be taken the wrong way regardless. And if it is, my parents might disown me.
In summary, I shared a sermon that is Bible-based that will likely piss off my parents enough to disown me and I feel sad about that.
I hope things go your way, slalexan - that’s a hard position to be in.
My very mini rant of the day is that one of my employees feels that she deserves a title and pay raise but doesn’t think she needs to do anything else to earn it, does not want to manage people (which having this title requires) and thinks she’s strategic enough to have it, even though the last time I asked her to help me put together a 30-second elevator pitch for our product to support the sales teams, she argued with me that she shouldn’t have to because “that is sales’ job.” (It’s actually our job to make the product and make it something sales can sell - that includes all the training, positioning and sales messages.)
She’s the same person who sends me meetings when my calendar is blocked with 15 minutes’ notice then pings me, “We’re waiting on you - when will you join?” Um, never, because you didn’t check my effing calendar and if you looked at your email, you’ll see I declined saying “I have a conflict but let me know if I can help.” Also, I have five other people I manage - generally unless your thing is an emergency, I’m not going to decline a meeting with my boss’s boss to join your meeting about a monitoring report. Sorry.
Anyway, now I get to have another meeting with her where she tells me she needs a promotion and I have the pleasure of pointing these things out (attempting to do so in a positive way! because we all talk to each other like kindergartners) yet again. Then she will tell me - again - “just tell me what I need to do, but if I have to manage people, can you just give me the title change and not the people?” And I’ll have to say again “this title requires that people report to you.” And she’ll tell me she’s doing everyone else’s job anyway so obviously she should get a promotion. Then I’ll have to suggest that maybe if she would not step in to do things “the right way” on products she doesn’t even own maybe her workload would decrease because I actually need her attentions elsewhere. Good times.
:eek: I hope none of the kids in your practice are biters…
My former boss’s brother had a mini-fridge on his porch that he kept his beer in. One summer a black bear would come by every afternoon for several weeks, open the freezer, take out a beer, and carry it away. No destruction, he just wanted a beer. He had a long day out in the woods.
Hey man, if a bear decides he wants a beer, who’s gonna tell him "no’?
LOL, we have a grumpy neighborhood raccoon who does similar with random ice chests people leave on their patios or decks. Last summer it methodically took a six-pack of Coors one by one from our neighbor around the corner and left them under our deck. We would have never known this if our smaller dog hadn’t almost caught it squeezing itself out from the underside between the subfloor and the fascia. Our dog nipped at it, made it scream, so we ran outside and watched it go over the fence and wobble down our side yard to the street.
A couple of months later there was no evidence that the beer had ever been there. We’re thinking the raccoon must’ve sneaked back in overnight to relocate each can.
I’m completely pissed off and on the verge of tears because my boss has asked me to do something which is very time-consuming, may not be possible, and probably will be of no use. She wants me to locate and print a lot of documents which will contain exactly the same information as the detailed spreadsheet we kept throughout the project. (She already has the spreadsheet). The documents…are in various places at this point, or may not currently exist.
I am overwhelmed already with work that actually matters, and covering for someone else who is on vacation. But, as the gecko says, pump the brakes on this, swap over to that. So I guess I’ll get started destroying another rain forest and just remember that the real goal of all this is to remain employed…
Morgyn is your old guy home yet? I did some poking around online and wok shaped food bowls are a thing. It might not hurt to spend a few bucks testing PHS idea. Be sure to report back on the results!
Back when things started shutting down, both of my part timers got sent home with full pay. When they were working, they spent most of their working time studying (full time college students), so this wasn’t much of a change for them. When word came of the 600 per week extra unemployment, one of them wanted me to lay him off so he could collect unemployment while staying home and studying. Legal said to do nothing, I did nothing and he quit.
Fast forward to yesterday, when I got a call from him asking why his student aid package had been returned to him and when I was going to call him back to work. He really didn’t seem to understand that when he quit, he stopped being an employee and wasn’t eligible for employee benefits or recall :smack: