plntpolice

Psychologists sometimes measure our mental well-being by recording the number of traumatic life events we’ve endured recently. At some point you’ve probably been given one of those quizzes where you check off which stressors are currently making your head explode: divorce, bankruptcy, even happy things like the birth of a child still cause major mental disruptions. To keep up with the way we live today, the experts really should add the death of a computer.

I’ve struggled for years with a 400 MHz HP desktop handed up to me from my grown son. He used it while getting his Masters Degree, so I guess it dates from about 1998. It was running Windows XP Professional, just to spite the IT guy on my last office job who told me that wasn’t possible.

Almost a year ago it began to make fearsome grinding noises. It sometimes refused to write to its CD drive; when I tried to make it, it would lie to me and claim the pristine disk was full. Months passed, and I couldn’t stretch the budget to buy a new one, or even contemplate a new, larger monthly credit card payment, so we kept going, pretending things were okay. Remembering a brief past relationship with Windows ME, I wasn’t about to buy anything with Vista, so staying in this less than perfect relationship had its good points.

Several months ago I got some part time work from home involving web page review. This brought me encounters with lots of things my computer couldn’t handle. Games caused it to freeze up. Some simply told me they wanted nothing to do with a 400 MHz system. I knew my co-workers were zipping around blowing through tasks with ease, while I had to act like a disgraced politician’s wife at a press conference, smiling bravely through the public humiliation.

When the end came, it was cruel. One day my computer simply acted like it didn’t know me. A curt message said my personal settings had been lost. The grinding sound grew ominous. A splash screen proffered a phony greeting and asked if I’d like to take a tour of Windows XP. A tour?? A tour of what was mine for 3 years??? No, thank you. Grudgingly, Internet Explorer opened, as if to a stranger, telling me it was on a ‘run once” basis, but wouldn’t be saving settings. Nice. I guess I could come in for 30 minutes to clean out my desk, huh, but with a security guard watching.

Finally, it let me put some important things on a few CDs, but it kept my address book and some of my pictures. We talked a little, just so there would be no public scenes, and used system restore, but it wasn’t the same.

I don’t mind admitting I was emotionally devastated. No matter what I tried to do, my mind obsessed about the computer situation. Panic nearly broke through the veneer of my social interactions. In the supermarket I wanted to scream to strangers, “My computer is dying and I don’t know what to do.” Family members began to avoid me because they couldn’t bear to hear me talk about it any longer.

As all this unfolded, my older son, who works at a university, told me about a nice older system available in the school’s surplus property sale. It’s a Dell Pentium 4, 3 GHz processor just like I’ve dreamed of, 512 RAM, nice big flat screen monitor. We’ve got lots of interests in common, mainly Windows XP. Life goes on.

I recently had the misfortune of visiting the little town of Etna, PA in the aftermath of the town’s yearly tree massacre. I assume the tree massacre isn’t something the town officials have entered into the community activities roster, but, whether announced or not, it happens every spring in Etna.

Etna is a borough of about 3900 folks located on the North bank of the Allegheny River, just ten minutes from downtown Pittsburgh. Like many area river towns, Etna has seen better times, and has some depressing vistas. Still, many good people are products of the dozens of similar little villages in Western Pennsylvania, and to make fun of Etna’s bad spots would be as uncool as belittling your own infirm grandma. Etna’s fundamental problems are complex societal problems, and the solutions are difficult for a small town to tackle. What is within their power to manage and what they did a ghastly job of managing is their street trees.

For unknown reasons, who ever controls the town’s tree maintenance has some very odd ideas about community beautification. The trees have been butchered (I can’t bear to use the word pruned for this hack job) down to their trunks, many with flat tops left to invite disease. The pictures tell the story of how dozens of trees lining the town’s business district were destructively cut into grotesque stubs.

I could go on and on about proper pruning and maintenance techniques, but shouldn’t the people in charge of the Etna trees already know this stuff? Topping is a detrimental practice, ultimately causing malformed regrowth, disease and the death of the tree, but this butchery goes beyond topping.

I can hear the excuses already: the trees are too big for the street if allowed to grow. That’s evidence of the first mistake on the part of Etna’s officials. Certain trees are indeed too large to plant as street trees, but others have been bred to produce slender, upright growth patterns that are great for street use. Many fastigiate varieties have a teardrop silhouette and don’t interfere with pedestrians or parked cars. Even if the town is saddled with types that aren’t quite the right size, wouldn’t some judicious limbing up make more sense?

In an old European practice called pollarding, all the limbs were cut off young trees to encourage rapid growth of thin, lateral limbs for firewood. The cutting has to be repeated every year, and eventually results in a stubby, gnarled look, with an oddly swollen top to the trunk, which usually becomes hollow. Only certain species can be pollarded successfully. Here’s a Wikipedia article which explains the technique. Assuming the Etna public works people weren’t out to harvest firewood in the business district, I doubt if the massacre was done with pollarding in mind.

I guess I could be called a tree hugger; I hate to see trees needlessly destroyed, but the issue goes beyond that. A town like Etna needs to do the best it can with limited resources. It can’t pretend to be its swanky neighbor, Fox Chapel. There’s no Starbucks in Etna, and that’s okay. Many people are quite content to drink their Sanka or Maxwell House, as they’ve done for generations, in one of the respectable blue collar homes clinging to the incredibly steep streets of Etna. Every community doesn’t need to be pretentious, cutesy and oh-so-hip.

Every community can, however, try to be inviting and decent; it can endeavor to be a comfortable place to live. Etna’s business district now radiates the feeling that something bad happened here. To use politically incorrect terms, it looks crippled and deformed. It has the aura of the kind of place where an asbestos factory might be around the corner.

If you want a small dog, you don’t buy a German shepherd and cut off its legs; you buy a dauschund. If you want small street trees, you plant small street trees and maintain them properly, so the street looks like a sane, safe community where people might want to shop, buy homes and pay taxes.

If the Etna officials should happen to read this post, I would be glad to hear their feedback.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had a good article about dandelions by Gretchen McKay in the food section today . It seems that while they were once a popular food in the good old days, Americans began to shun them as poor people’s food several decades ago.

As the perfect lawn became a suburban Holy Grail, dandelions became the enemy and we forgot how very nutritious and tasty they can be, used in salads, sautéed or made into wine.

Ms McKay points out, “Not only are its leaves an excellent source of vitamins A, C and E, but the plant also contains more beta carotene than carrots and more potassium than bananas. Full of trace minerals (more accessible when the leaves are cooked), dandelion is also rich in calcium, iron and lecithin and loaded with magnesium.”

This is all great information and I’m eager to try the dandelion recipes in the article, but the amazing part came at the end. It seems we have not only lost sight of the value of these ubiquitous weeds, but we can no longer figure out where to find them. Ms McKay listed several local sources for purchasing dandelions, at up to $3.99 a bunch at Whole Foods, and even sources for seeds. She related that one seed company had already sold 5 million seeds this year.

Being generous with my judgments, I will admit that if you live in a city high rise apartment, you might need to purchase your dandelions. Maybe. But aren’t dandelions growing in every tiny plot of dirt everywhere you look? So you don’t want to pick them by the roadside, covered with filth and pollution, but what about parks and friend’s lawns? Would the folks at church or the office complex or anywhere that sports a patch of lawn object if you picked their dandelions?

Yes, weeds growing in all those places may perchance have been anointed by a passing dog, but even the most pristine organic garden has squirrels, mice, cats, etc. ambling through looking for a rest room. That’s why we need to wash produce.  

Buying dandelion seeds just boggles my mind. If you have space to grow dandelions intentionally don’t you automatically already have accidental dandelions?

I think this leads me to conclude that my fortune is out there, ripe for the picking so to speak. It’s time to put up a sign in front of my house: “Pick Your Own Dandelions - Farm Open for Business.

Here’s the Post Gazette article.

Ah, Spring…time for idiots to arm themselves with toxic chemicals and start killing. Last Sunday’s newspaper coupon supplement contained an ad from Ortho with a coupon for their Home Defense Max product. The large print read “Protect your family and cut insects out of your life.”

Yeah, that’s the spirit, kill everything. Who needs pollinating insects? Who needs the insects that eat decaying material and keep the cycles of the natural world going? Why do birds need a supply of food? Why do little children need to watch magical lightning bugs on a warm June night? Who needs those pesky bright yellow butterflies when you can get Home Defense Max for $1 off?

No, I don’t like cockroaches, and I scream like a little girl at the sight of those creepy, hideous thousand-leggers. I kill thousand-leggers; I admit it. Any time I see one, whether it threatens me or not with its nightmarish skittering, I hit it with a shoe or whatever and crush it. But I would never indiscriminately spray a poison so strong that it can claim “kill bugs inside your home and keeps them out for an entire year”, or “one application controls lawn insects all season.” What about the earthworms and other beneficials in that lawn?

For years I worked as a horticulturist and then a landscape contractor and I’ve had countless conversations with people who sought advice because they used “something to kill bugs” but later “saw more bugs”. I’d ask them what kind of bugs, and they never knew. Oh, they would describe them as orange bugs, green bugs, little bugs, flying bugs or whatever, but not one of these people had any idea what sort of critter they had decided to eradicate. Just because they were bugs, they deserved to die.

Ortho seems to be especially egregious in promoting the attitude of kill it if it moves. I never see any attempt in their ads to inform the average Joe about which bugs might cause harm and which are helping to keep earthly life going.

Many years ago I read a report which indicated that ignorant homeowners were much more likely to misuse and misapply insecticides than farmers. Farmers realize that insecticides are expensive tools and will try to use them as sparingly as they can. A homeowner, however, doesn’t think twice about buying an $ 8.99 product a few times a season and dumping it all into his yard. Farmers are much more likely to know the identity of insect pests and non-pests. This knowledge is essential to their work.

So many environmental problems are out of control and momentous beyond imagination that I am near the point of giving up any attempt to talk or think about them. I tell myself to simply put the newspapers and cans into the recycling container, buy the funny little light bulbs and don’t think about the continent of garbage in the Pacific or the manatees. Still, when I see some Homer Simpson look-alike perusing the offerings in the insecticide aisle at Home Depot, I get the same urge he has: “Kill it, it’s moving!”

I recently wrote an article that was published on Associatedcontent.com about the childrens’ book Little Black Sambo. I was born in 1944, and for my generation, books with wildly racist overtones were considered normal entertainment for children.

In the article, I talked about how the book came into being and described the plot. When I got the idea to write this I actually had to do a little research because I couldn’t remember the full plot. Most prominent in my memory were the tigers and the pancakes, most of all the pancakes.

The article is written from an outside perspective and I decided not to add any personal or first person aspects, but later I was sorry that I didn’t. I think the most optimistic and affirming remark I could make about Little Black Sambo is the personal note that to me, it was a story about pancakes. Not a little black boy illustrated with a huge ear-to-ear mouth, or wild, white rolling eyes or any of the other stereotypical images, not parents named Black Mumbo and Black Jumbo, but pancakes were what stuck with me.  Pancakes and tigers mattered enough that I still think of them first after almost 60 years.

Isn’t that cool that when you give a kid a racist image, she remembers the pancakes instead?Here’s the story, if you’d like to read it

Who knows more about all things phone related than Verizon? They qualify as experts, so logically they are the go-to choice, even for crank calls, as I discovered, Verizon has the know-how.

 

About two years ago, I began to receive one ring hang-up calls in the middle of the night. At first I thought I was dreaming. Like the familiar feeling of falling that shatters sleep, a single phone ring would jolt me awake. Night after night it happened, and often I’d forget about it by morning.  Finally it occurred during a bout of insomnia and I knew it was not my imagination. Some time between 2:00 AM and 4:00 AM, almost every night, for more than a month, the calls persisted.

 

Who would do this? I live a quiet life and haven’t managed to rile up any new enemies for years. The old ones probably lost my number or died of cirrhosis decades ago. This made the possibilities all the creepier. Obviously it was a serial killer who had selected me at random and was watching me with night vision binoculars right now.

 

Trying not to sound like a soap opera victim, I called the Verizon department that handles this stuff and explained that I needed to have my line traced. The cheerful rep replied with a friendly laugh. “It’s undoubtedly Verizon calling you, ma’m. We get dozens of calls about this every day.”

 

“Verizon is calling me at 3:00, night after night?” I was confused, to say the least.

 

“Yes!” She asserted, simply reeking of hearty glad-we-could-be-of-service confidence. “We need to check the lines periodically to make sure they are working, and so our computers call briefly in the middle of the night.”

 

“Ahhh, but wouldn’t I contact YOU if my line wasn’t working?” This was getting less logical.

 

“Well, it’s a technical thing, to make sure the electrical charge in the lines is working correctly, and so on. We need to check everyone’s lines, but sometimes the computers recycle the same number and just keep dialing for weeks and weeks.” She managed to combine “you-know-how-it-is” with “you-wouldn’t-understand-it’s-technical” in a well practiced tone. Then a sudden helpful idea popped into her head: “We can stop the calls if they disturb you.”

 

“Gee, why would the phone ringing in the middle of the night disturb me? Yes. Please stop.”

 

“Certainly! We’ll be glad to do that.” The rep transferred me to the Verizon repair department after giving me their direct number just in case the matter wasn’t resolved in a few days. I spoke to a repairman who promised to take my number out of the queue.

The calls continued and I made another plea to the repair people a week later. They stopped.

 

Months passed and Verizon people worked their way through my neighborhood installing FiOS. A rep came to the door and successfully convinced me to trade in my perfectly adequate DSL line for a FiOS connection for almost the same price. At the end of the sign up process Verizon warned me that there was no turning back; they would not hook up DSL again once I switched to FiOS, and my landline phone would be a FiOS line, too. This made me a little uneasy, but I hadn’t heard anything negative about FiOS, so I agreed. They explained that the installation could take several hours and a back up power box would be installed in my basement. Because I’m stupid, this didn’t set off any alarms.

 

After the FiOS installation, I looked over the several pounds of written stuff they gave me and realized the back up power box was needed because unlike the phone lines I’ve come to rely on my whole life, FiOS lines don’t have their own electrical supply running through them. If the power goes off, so does the land line phone after the two hour back up battery is exhausted.  I was appalled. This is not progress.

 

Verizon must have known that I was freaked out by this, because they decided to taunt me. Within a short time I began to see TV commercials touting the reliability of Verizon, showing customers in their cozy homes, safe from storms, chatting on their Verizon land lines. “When the power goes off, your phone stays on,” the reassuring announcer said.

 

How could Verizon have the gall to use such a commercial at a time when they were pushing the widespread installation of a system that negates that feature we’ve always taken for granted?  Every time I saw the commercial, I’d fume.

 

My son and his family live a block away and we talk almost every day. One day I realized that no one had been home and the answering machine never came on when I phoned for the last several days. This seemed odd. When he came over to visit, I asked if his machine was broken and after going round and round, we came to the realization that my phone couldn’t call his. I could call everyone else’s number, he could call me, but I couldn’t connect to his line from my FiOS line. This seemed unbelievable.

 

Verizon sent out a repairman who couldn’t have been nicer. I really enjoyed the four hours he spent at my house repeatedly calling his office trying to troubleshoot the issue.  The solution involved a switch which was installed somewhere because my son at one point called Verizon to get FiOS and then changed his mind. I don’t even pretend to understand that.

 

While talking with the nice young Verizon techie man, I told him about the late night calls and my anger over the FiOS power supply issue. In the course of a whole afternoon you pretty much exhaust all your Verizon conversational topics. I remarked that at least I’d never have to deal with calls to check my line’s power supply again.

 

About six weeks ago the problem with calling my son’s house happened again, but this time they settled it remotely from the Verizon office within a few minutes.

 

Then three nights ago, the phone started ringing in the middle of the night again. If it’s a serial killer, it will all be much simpler.      

Don’t waste your money on DVDs and books; I am ready to reveal, free of charge, the real “Secret” about money and the abundance of the Universe. 

 

Just as work will always expand to fill the time allotted to it, expenses will expand to fill the amount of money you can get your hands on. In October, by several miraculous twists of luck, I found my self about to be in possession of several hundred dollars more than I needed to survive.

This might not sound amazing if you are a member of the normal upper middle class, but if you, like me, wallow in the wretched, stagnant swamp of micro-economics, it is earth shuddering great.

Think of the possibilities: six pairs of new socks, large shrimp, $12 face cream. Groceries BEFORE the Social Security check comes. Fix the bad electrical outlet in the living room before the house burns down. It would be like winning the lottery.

Then the Universe started cranking along toward the inevitable. If you read my last entry, you know that my cat had an accident and needed to have his leg amputated. Three anxiety filled hours at the emergency all-night vet gobbled up almost $300.  Zipper got an X-ray and a pain patch to tide him over until our long time vet could see him the next morning.  Our trusted doctor did the best he could to spare expenses, but the operation, medication and care totaled $500 more.

Yes, it was worth it, and yes, I am grateful that I had a way to pay for an emergency which, at any other time, would be impossible to cover.  Still…

Ah, crap, who cares? Large shrimp are an oxymoron anyway.

It’s been a long time since I blogged, but that doesn’t mean nothing has happened, and it certainly doesn’t mean I’ve had nothing to complain about. 

About six weeks ago I got a real job. It’s work-from-home and part-time, but seems to still take up an incredible slice of my day.

My new cat, Zipper, whose picture appeared here in the late summer, had a life altering accident. He either fell or got hit by a car or who knows what, he ain’t talkin’. The result was a badly broken leg, high on the femur, resulting in amputation. Zipper’s convalescence has required a lot of my time, too. He was on cage rest for a few weeks, and I simply want to spend lots of time holding and comforting him. Not to mention scratching behind his left ear, since that will be my responsibility from now on.

I’ll ease back into my outraged consumer mode with one little toe in the water today. Can’t work up the energy for a full rant, but at breakfast this morning I had to shake my head in wonder when I read the label on my Dole peaches. They are the kind in the plastic jar. Pretty good peaches. Well, I never read the label carefully until today. It says, “Peaches from Greece.”  Okay. But then further down it notifies us, “Packed in Thailand”. What???!!!

These peaches have more frequent flier miles than Condi Rice. They had to go around the world and back to get to Pittsburgh? I am an advocate of locally produced food when available, but with the snow beginning to fly, peaches in a plastic jar are a necessary indulgence. How can it be that Dole still makes a profit buying fruit in Greece and sending it to Thailand for packing? How much fossil fuel did my peaches use to get here? I think this is just over-the-top silly.

The day before Labor Day I went to a friend’s cookout. Her son, a staunch union advocate and tradesman was telling me about taking a trip with his father-in-law. They were in a hurry to get somewhere and the old man asked if they could spare just a few minutes to stop for some bottled water. My friend agreed, but was sorely irritated when his father-in-law pulled into a Wal-Mart. He regarded it as a double burden to not only endure the delay, but to aid and abet a Wal-Mart purchase.

Wal-Mart has become an almost taboo subject in my circle of friends. Most of my close friends are liberal Democrats; yes, we hang with our own kind like hyenas, wolves or whatever animal you don’t like. I don’t know of anyone close to me who likes Wal-Mart. The problem is, a number of my friends are on very tight budgets and several feel they must shop at Wal-Mart, like it or not.

I’m in the opposite camp. I’m poor, but I’d rather clip coupons, wait for sales or simply try to get by with less so I can shop at the Giant Eagle instead. I not only dislike Wal-Mart for all the political and social reasons, but I find the store depressing, crowded, dirty and inconvenient, too.  I refuse to go to Wal-Mart. We abstainers try to be tolerant of those who sell out and go over to the dark side, keeping in mind that not everyone can afford to put their principles into practice.

My friend’s father-in-law has plenty of money, but he just doesn’t care, which makes it all the more egregious. On the other side of the spectrum, I’d love to do all my shopping at Whole Foods, but when I treat myself to a trip to the foodie wonderland and come home with one skimpy bag and $40 poorer, I start thinking maybe processed chemical additives don’t taste so bad after all. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve read about the evils of growth hormones, antibiotics in poultry, yada, yada, yada, I can’t afford to feed myself from Whole Foods. Some people can’t afford to feed their families without shopping at Wal-Mart.

A former coworker used to argue about this with me and she always said, “Oh, there’s no substitute for wholesome food, it’s worth the difference in price.” Yes, I’m sure. That’s true if you HAVE the difference in price. I’m sure my third hand 1998 minivan is no substitute for a Mercedes either.

The recent Chinese merchandise recalls will undoubtedly prompt many people to rethink their Wal-Mart habits. I know Wal-Mart is not the only place carrying Chinese imports, but it does seem that virtually everything in the store is now made in China. The chain had to be a big factor in the growth of US-Chinese trade.

When the Christmas season comes, how many parents will be able to patronize those ever-so-precious little boutique toy stores with their German and Norwegian lead-free merchandise?

In the end, we should all do what we can do, if we can do it. And show some tolerance for those who can’t.

I assumed that if you Google “brilliant” or “outstanding genius writer” the search would lead here to my blog.  Imagine my chagrin when I actually checked which search terms led readers to my entries and found “slimy brown stuff under sink faucet”. Really. True story.

Also, this week someone typed in “my cat’s bladder rupture blockage” and found me. Also true.

This leaves me speechless. No, it’s not the first time in my life I’ve been called names equivalent to pond scum, but this is so…official…I guess is the word for it. Sure, it’s insulting to have an angry relative or another driver hurl disgusting invectives at me, but this was done by a dispassionate computer.

It’s one thing when my son calls me fat, quite another when a digital scale reads out a certain astronomically high number.  Subjective/objective results.

Several weeks ago I wrote an entry titled “What Happened to Dirt?” It was about potting soil. Is that a reason to link me to “slimy brown stuff under sink faucet”?

As for that poor cat’s bladder, I can’t imagine how I got mixed up in that, unless someone knows I haven’t changed the litterbox in 8 days. I did get a new cat last week. He’s a beautiful teenaged kitten who was lost in the neighborhood, and found by my daughter-in-law and grandkids, then dumped on me. I tried to sound surly and complain a lot, but I fell in love as soon as I saw his evil little crazed-bat face. His expression is reminiscent of my dearest cat ever, Taj, R.I.P.

Katie, my old cat is really pissed about the invasion of this upstart fur ball. So pissed her bladder might rupture.

Did Google know that?