Now I want Rice Krispies.
This rant is mini for me but maybe not so mini for a lot of other folks.
I went to the beach today. It was kinda not nice and I left early. That’s the mini part. Here’s … the rest … of the story.
This is, of course, the 4th of July weekend. Which means today through Monday vast throngs of South Floridiots will be going to the beach. For the sun, sand, and surf, the cooler temps and better breezes than inland, and also for civic fireworks launched from piers all up and down the 120-ish miles of coastal suburbia. Whole lotta beachin’ goin on.
Along with a couple hundred thousand tourists from all over the world who’ll be joining them. Many are refugees from the excessive heat up north, coming down to enjoy our relative cool.
In summer sometimes we get large amounts of floating seaweed washing ashore. It grows a couple hundred miles out to sea in a vast floating forest of bioproductivity. Then currents and winds carry the fragments here, ranging from in-water “dust” particles to blobs the size of a human adult. The stuff’s not dangerous, but once pulverised in the surf for a bit it stains our usually clear water about like dark tea. You can see maybe 8" underwater instead of 20 feet. And piles of it onshore stink to high heaven.
Anyhow, as you’ve probably guessed by now, the weed gods have decided to dump a bumper crop of weed on us starting a couple days ago. Great spongy 4 foot tall mountains of rotting yellow-brown stuff line the beaches mile after mile after mile. The clear water begins maybe a quarter mile offshore; nobody is swimming out that far to enjoy it. The various beachfront cities have ways to cope, mostly by plowing the stuff under the top layer of sand, and in extreme cases, scooping it into dump trucks and hauling it to compost sites or landfills. But this volume of weed is far beyond their puny efforts to manage. So there it’ll sit until Nature reduces the problem to manageable for them.
A side effect of this will be beachgoers reluctant to go in the water to cool off. So we’ll have a lot more heat illnesses tomorrow than we’d have at the same temps and winds but without the weed. A lot more. July 4 is always a sucky day to work EMS; it’ll be extra sucky this year.
I predict vast amounts of ranting tomorrow. Cranky overheated disappointed kids and cranky drunk overheated adults, noxious smells, prickly dried weed in your shorts, etc., etc. etc.
Another grocery store rant. I went to pick up a few things, and as I walked in there was a big display of cherries, on sale for something like 2.49 a pound. So I grabbed a bag, then picked up the other things I had planned on buying, and headed to the checkout. Scanned everything, entered my phone # for my shopper’s card discount, it showed the discount on a couple other items, but not the cherries. So I waved over the guy who mans the self checkout and said “I thought the cherries were on sale…” and he says “Oh, that’s a digital coupon” and scanned something that gave me the sale price.
So I guess it’s not enough now that you have to have a shopper’s card to get a sale price (as opposed to the good old days when the sale price applied to everyone) but there is also a separate tier of sale prices for people who have the app on their phones or whatever. I swear the Kroger execs must sit around all day thinking “How else can we screw our customers yet keep them coming back?”
On Wednesday, July 1st I fell off of my bicycle.
In my driveway. Mostly just standing still. Bruised ribs, jammed thumb and wrist and my knee is really banged up.
Nothing broken, but standing from sitting is hard because of my knee.
I’m still limping around. Sneezing and coughing hurts because of my ribs. I suspect I will need at least another week of recovery.
Eeeeeeuuuuugggghhhhhh!!!
I just found a new mole on my upper right arm. I’d never seen that mole before. At first I thought it was a bit of stray flora that had adhered to my arm when I took the dog out for his morning constitutional.
Upon closer inspection, I realized it was a fucking tick.
In all the years I’ve lived in the country, I never suffered a tick on my person until about 3 years ago, when one latched onto my shin. It was tiny, I thought it was the beginning of a scab from a piercing injury and I scratched it off before I realized its true nature. The head was left behind. Doc said not to worry unless the telltale ring formed around the area and my body would get rid of the head without medical intervention. Which it did, but it took about a year. I still have a wee scar.
This was a slightly bigger model, but it was only getting started on its meal. I removed it properly with tweezers and flushed that fucker down the loo. Now my skin won’t stop crawling!
Damn, I hate those things, and I especially hate that they’re now a problem where no problem used to be!!
Welcome to 2010. This has been going on for many years. It’s funny you only noticed it just now.
I do find it somewhat annoying. I think it’s social engineering to get people to use the app more. What really annoys me is that the apps that grocery stores use (because multiple chains do) advertise that you can scan a UPC for a coupon code and add it that way, but it almost never works. So then you have to manually type a 12 digit or whatever number, or search the app for the item to add it. And the search sucks. All while in a store with a spotty internet connection so the app keeps timing out or otherwise taking forever.
I decided to be a good dog today and go to my bank to withdraw cash from the ATM for the next time the lawn mowing kids come by. Well, damn, the whole place was closed because … they have no power! So all the ATMs were down and so was the whole branch. They just locked up the area beyond the ATMs, put up a big-ass sign, and went home.
You’d think that a major bank branch could afford a backup power system, but since other things in the area seemed to have power, it may have been something local to the building.
So I was forced to use my debit card at the liquor store instead of my rewards card to get cash back there. On top of all that, there was a prolonged rain storm earlier and instead of cooling things off all it really did was fantastically raise the humidity, currently 93% and feeling like a goddam sauna. I had meant to do a little grocery shopping today, too, but fuck it. I’m gonna sit in my nice cool house and drink Caesars til the cows come home.
Update: Google is pretty amazing in its ability nowadays to provide up-to-date information. It informed me that there was a limited power outage in the area of my bank due to extreme weather causing a violent thunderstorm yesterday that knocked out power lines. The bank isn’t that far from me so I guess I was lucky I wasn’t affected.
On Wednesday, I flew from Portland, OR to Grand Rapids, MI to be there for my recently-widowed sister at my BiL’s funeral service. This afternoon I started home, making it as far as Midway Int’l for what was supposed to be a 3.5 hour layover.
Half an hour ago my phone blew up with a flash flood advisory in effect until 10 PM. The sign says that the flight the next gate over is delayed, but at my gate it says boarding begins in twenty minutes (although there’s no plane in sight).
Not confident that I’ll get back to Portland tonight.
Oh, look! A plane just pulled up to my gate! Only forty minutes later than the scheduled boarding time!
Mini-rant rescinded.
Something is very wrong with our neighbors.
In a stunning reversal of past behavior, the past two nights have been…restrained when it comes to explosive ordnance. July 3d featured only sporadic firecrackers, and July 4th, which in the past had various idjits bombing away with abandon, was eerily calm, with only some people living nearly a half-mile away firing up Beijing candles and similar displays. We got to have a relatively calm couple hours on the porch, eating popcorn and watching stuff go off on the distant eastern horizon. Pluto the field spaniel barely cocked an ear at the goings-on.
What has become of our Patriotism??!?
We had a block party thrown by two neighbors. But we all help. I brought Iced Tea and Lemonade. Set up in a large cul-de-sak where two big water slides, a bouncy castle, a mechanical bull. And a food truck was there as well. Shade, tables and chairs provided.
They do it every year. It must cost thousands, but he won’t take a dime. And these are working joes.
They set off fireworks that probably cost thousands as well.
It was BYOB which I think is a good thing (helps that we are only two houses away, and can dash home for a beer or bathroom break)
The block party was fun. Good way to get to know your neighbors.
The last thing a king wants is patriots. They want subjects. That’s about 30% of the country now.
Patriotism, if judged by the frequency and loudness of exploding objects, seems to be on the wane here, too. The usual sounds of battlefield munitions were minimal both on Victoria Day (usually the worst because it’s in the spring when noise-loving hooligans come out of hibernation) and on Canada Day.
They do seem to be getting worse. You can probably blame climate change among other confounding factors - a decade plus of milder winters and dryer summers in many areas seems to have been a boon to ticks. That article is for New England, but the West Coast and Canada have similar problems.
Do they have teenage children? Maybe the kids went to Florida. 
I would change “probably” to “almost certainly”, since northward pest migration of at least some species is a documented fact – for example, the pine bark beetle.
That is very much a component, at least according to my pest control folks. Same with wasps, which now overwinter, whereas before the nests died out when our temperatures got cold enough.
Climate change as a factor was also indicated in a recent article I read in the New Yorker about Lone-star ticks that actually pursue you. They also spread an affliction that causes some people to become allergic to red meat. We don’t yet have the Lone-star variety here, but we’ve sure seen an < ahem > uptick in other varieties.
I could rant all day about unintended consequences of ignoring climate change, but it wouldn’t qualify as a mini-rant.
“Shush, will you? I’m on the phone!”
Last night there were explosions going on, even right across the street, things being launched in the air, etc. All completely illegal, and going well past midnight. Two housing areas within walking distance of us (one apartment complex and one senior retirement community) caught on fire. You could also hear people racing cars in the streets. (That’s common enough that there are permanent street signs warning of penalties for racing, but you don’t usually hear it happening nonstop.)
Fucking idiots. It wasn’t a celebration so much as an excuse to cause destruction while the authorities had their hands full.
What (general area) was this?
Auburn, WA is where I live, the north part of town pretty close to Kent.