2 months 7 days

. . . and I still miss Dusty. It’s not time for another dog yet. My daily schedule for the next several months is just too tough for a puppy in terms of being left at home too long alone, and I’m pretty sure that my next dog will be a young ‘un. I have a long commute to and from a sometimes overlong work day, and can’t take a dog to work with me.

I’m lurking around stealing dog therapy from friends’ and neighbors’ dogs. I even enjoy ogling the pics of Sweet Melissa that George posts on his blog. Thanks, George.

Um, if anybody sees me hanging around in a Petsmart store on a weekend, would you steer me out the door with a kind but firm grip on my arm? I have no need to buy anything they sell, and I should not be ogling the dogs and cats up for adoption.

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New Orleans Public Libraries Need Our Help!

I was in information overload condition after a few weeks of seeing all those pictures in the news (TV, print, and online) of the incomprehensible amount and severity of damage from Hurricane Katrina. Numbed out after awhile.

Then I clicked on this link, and saw these pictures of just one area in one New Orleans public library, before and after Katrina. The former bright and cheerful room, hung with banners and stocked with books, has been just destroyed. Reduced to a wasteland of mud and rubble.

That pierced my numbness like a hot knife cutting butter. I cried.

I love public libraries. Have all my life. They make all the difference, all the time, usually without fanfare, to the lives of thousands of kids. And adults too.

I harbor a feeling about public libraries that’s probably like what a very devout Christian feels about her church sanctuary. I get a kick out of just walking into Denver’s way cool central public library building, and wandering through the room where several years ago the Summit of the Eight was held. The heads of state of the big player nations all sat down to talk important stuff – in a public library.

It hurts to see the devastation and destruction of New Orleans’ public libraries. We can all help.

You can donate online through the link above, or go here to the NOPL main page for more information and other links to contribute to the effort.

And tell your friends.

Thanks.

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The cruel limits of spell check

It’s probably been done to death in the world of blawgs.

But I can’t resist mentioning this story from law.com about a California lawyer who ran spell check on a brief before filing it. But didn’t realize until too late, after filing, that the program didn’t recognize the legal phrase “sua sponte.” So it had busily replaced the offending phrase with “sea sponge” each time it occured in the brief – five or six times, all told.

Ouch.

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Not so fast on the ethanol thing

George in Denver says I may be able to resume my Sunday corn-worship meditative dance routine, and quotes some folks who have written to the Rocky Mountain News to debunk the opinion piece published a week ago which debunked ethanol.

The only place with more debunking going on is probably an Army barracks at dawn (assuming they still have barracks for basic training and such).

I’m all behind conserving petro fuels so it would be nice if a renewable energy source were to become more and more feasible and more and more in use.

I do draw the line at those yellow tee-shirts in the TV commercials. That’s just not one of my colors.

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Another myth shattered

I’ve been too demoralized to go into this here, but I need to face the facts.

My friend George in Denver really opened my eyes to The Last Straw – The Absurdity of Ethanol – and it’s taken me a few days to cope with the truth.

Alas, I had been smiling at those yellow-tee-shirt ethanol TV ads and thinking maybe Dubya was on to something with this ethanol shtick. Until the sorry facts were made known. Ethanol probably consumes more energy in its production than it in turn provides.

Damn. The synergy of corn, which I was all set to believe in, turns out to be yet another myth if not a downright scam.

Now I have to find something else to do on Sunday mornings instead of my usual corn-worship meditative dance ceremony.

Is there nothing left to believe in?

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Take my word for this one

You just HAVE to read the latest entry on BizBlog.

The author blogs as “Suz” too but she’s not me. For which I’m sure she’s devoutly grateful.

So go read this on her blog – see, there’s another link if you lost the first one – and I dare you to keep a straight face all the way to the end!

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Memento box

Open lid
Touch my past
In modest objects
Shabby relics
Some made by hand
Most by machine

Some handled daily
By parents long dead
His wallet
Her gloves

Two stuffed toys
Chaotic infancy
Toddlerhood farmed out
To loving aunt’s
Refuge from home storms

My first Kodak brownie
Arty college portrait
By boyfriend’s exotic bro-in-law

Boxed for so long
Let ‘em breathe
Somewhere
New home
Light them, air them

Leave the lid open

For now

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Freezing and burning in the kitchen

The Condo of course needed all new kitchen appliances, after we got rid of the original 1978 harvest gold ones. I indulged myself with Whirlpool stainless steel ones, including a double door counter-depth fridge with the door ice and water dispenser and everything.

The fridge was delivered 3 weeks ago and has been nicely freezing everything in the freezer compartment. It has also been freezing everything in the refrigerator compartment too. I followed the owner’s manual directions about setting the refrigerator compartment temperature and waiting 24 hours for the actual temp to change. But it didn’t work.

This is an electronic control panel and in my uneducated consumer role I supposed that the panel will need to be replaced because it’s malfunctioning. And then last weekend the water dispenser stopped working; I figured it’s frozen up somewhere.

So I called for service; I picked Thursday (yesterday) as the service day. I hoped they would give me a two-hour window for the service appointment so I’d lose less time from work. Oh, no. They would call me between 8 and 9 am on Thursday to tell me the two-hour window for the service appointment. Crud.

OK, OK, so Thursday morning I sat at home by the phone till 9:15, no call, and then called the service company. Who told me that a service tech will arrive between noon and 5 pm.

Holy camoley! Two hour window?

About 2 o’clock the tech arrives, a very nice and knowledgeable guy named Eddie. Two minutes of questioning and looking at things and he says, that control board will need to be replaced, I’ll write up the order for it. And, he sez, there’s a tank for the water dispenser behind the fridge compartment and that’s frozen up now which is why the water isn’t flowing.

Hey, I should go into fridge repair as my next career.

Eddie suggests that I unplug the fridge and leave the fridge compartment door open for about an hour, then plug it in again and restart it; sometimes those electronic control board thingies just need to be reset and then work fine. We do that; he leaves. An hour later I plug in the fridge, start it up and close the door. By bedtime it’s back to the same old frozen fridge compartment.

I HAVE HAD TO BURN A WHOLE DAY OF VACATION LEAVE OVER THIS. AND I WILL PROBABLY HAVE TO TAKE ANOTHER WHOLE DAY OF VACATION LEAVE FOR THEM TO REALLY FIX THE DAMN THING.

I don’t want to think how much this is really costing me – at least one and probably two full days’ pay, to be precise. Not immediately out of pocket, but earned leave time burned up over a malfunctioning fridge. It would be cheaper to just buy a little fridge for the stuff I don’t want to freeze and use the big one as a mega-freezer. But that would be eccentric – lord knows women of certain age have to be careful not to act eccentric – and anyway I don’t have that much extra room around here.

Bah.

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A Teensy Tiny Bite out of Crime

. . . Hey big fella, is that a drug detection dog in your pocket or are you really glad to see me?

This story warmed and charmed and made me smile. Reported by WKYC TV in Cleveland, it has several pictures of Midge, the latest recruit to the K-9 corps of Geauga County’s Sheriff’s Department.

As reported on the station’s website:

For the last seven years, there has been one top dog in the Geauga County Sheriff’s Department – Brutus, the big German Shepherd has been the go-to canine.

But that’s about to change.

Here comes “Midge” … two pounds of raw recruit police power.

It’s a 3-month-old miniature Chihuahua with a little Rat Terrier mixed in, who has one major talent right now.

“She is cute,” Geauga Sheriff Dan McClelland said. “She is little. She’s very friendly. She likes people a lot.”

Midge, in her little uniform, is already patrolling the hallways at the county jail and the sheriff has plans to train her as the smallest drug dog in the state of Ohio.

“I had this idea that I’ve toyed with for a few years … why couldn’t a small dog be used just as well?” McClelland asked.

“She watches everybody comes in the room,” Sheriff Dept. Deputy Carrie Jericho said. “Her ears perk up and she watches who’s coming in.”

So far Brutus, who obviously has a sense of humor, has taken to the new tiny trainee.

And the department’s K-9 trainer thinks Midge has a bright future.

“I know from my work that kids and dogs get the people’s hearts,” K9 Deputy Lt. Tom McCaffrey said.

She won’t begin her training as a drug detection canine for another six months.

Even on her tiptoes, Midge is only two feet high.

“She’s not going to strike fear into a whole lot of folks,” McClelland said. “That’s not her job.”

On further thought, I wonder what the scope of her duties as a drug detection dog will be. It’s one thing to have her sniff around school lockers, another to put her really dangerous situations. Well, any more dangerous than your average high school. Which may be dangerous enough, but that’s as they say a whole nother subject.

I often see beagles at the airport, a federal agency (either Customs or US Dept of Agriculture) uses them to sniff passengers’ luggage and carryons for incoming contraband such as meat and fruit. They are friendly low-key dogs, but not so tiny that they could be easily stamped on by a careless or malicious person.

Now I’ve moved from being charmed to being worried about that little dog’s safety on the job.

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