Stay classy, Providence!
Meet, Nibbles Woodaway, the Big Blue Bug, star of stage, screen, tattoo art and morning traffic reports. Built in Providence in 1980 (meaning your humble Weasel predates him in this city by two years), he’s the tasteful chickenwire-and-fiberglass mascot of New England Pest Control.
I suspect his fame derives from the fact that traffic on Interstate 95 bogs down near him at rush hour (much like the Dorchester gas tanks in Boston), so mentions of “the big blue bug” happen every ten minutes on news radio. He has since been featured in such outstanding theatrical productions as Dumb and Dumber and Oprah.
So when my real estate lady told me to call “RI Pest Control,” naturally the giant helpless advertising-drenched lobes of my brain substituted “New England Pest Control” and I did that thing. I don’t suppose it makes much difference; it was just a precaution anyway. And nope…no termites. I do have a bit of woodboring dung beetles or some damn thing — I forget — but it’s no big, apparently.
Also on today’s list: garage doors and the ragpicker. New garage doors aren’t nearly as expensive as I thought (no, I didn’t pick the cheapest and sleaziest, I picked the next one up from the cheapest and sleaziest. A class act, me). Installed a week from Monday.
And finally, the ragpicker. He and his good lady ragpicker have just had the fifty-cent tour…and, as they didn’t run away screaming, I guess they’re hired. When I said I was a packrat, they looked at each other and burst out laughing. I don’t think they were laughing at my nouveau-Brit understatement. I think it means the Weasel Collection is soon to become a small part of the Ragpicker Collection. Suits me fine.
And that’s more boring, home-ownery, grownuppy stuff than I’ve done in the last six years, all packed into one zany, madcap adventure. It’s now an hour and sixteen minutes past drinking time and I’ve been a Very Good Weasel, so — bottoms up! And then let’s have a drink!
November 13, 2007 — 7:46 pm
Comments: 28
Knitting up the ravell’d sleeve of broccoli
In case you’re not sure what you’re looking at there, it’s knitted potatoes and tomatoes and other garden vegetables. They represent a small part of an entire knitted garden dreamed up by some British biddies. That’s 300 people, fifty miles of yarn and four million stitches.
I’m not much into knitting, mind you (that would be my big brother), but Pupster sent me a link to the excellent Stitchy McYarnpants Museum of Kitschy Stitches a few days ago, so the topic just seemed… knitted in the stars or something.
I’m going to need all the cheap and easy blogfodder I can get for a while. A real estate agent had a look at Weasel Manor over the weekend and left me a To Do list that included items such as “douse livingroom in gasoline and light match” and “write ‘I Will Never Buy Another Knick-Knack In My Whole Stupid Miserable Life’ one hundred times — in own blood.”
If you haven’t figured it out on your own, I’m not a very good grownup. The process of hiring and directing workmen is not one I’m likely to do well. I was on the phone all day asking the important interview questions like, “would you like to see me hang a spoon on my nose?” and “recite three recent booger haiku you have written.”
I’m doomed.
November 12, 2007 — 6:40 pm
Comments: 26
And thus ends a lame week, lamely
November 9, 2007 — 7:47 pm
Comments: 84
Notes from the Home Office
That’s not really my cube — I’m three rows and a Data Center up from there — but mine is laid out and stuck in the traffic pattern exactly the same. So I don’t have my back to the door, as McGoo feared, but my partitions are only elbow high — people coming in the directions indicated by the arrows can snag a glimpse of each of my two monitors, respectively. I have to employ all my considerable weasel powers to continue goofing off the extent I have become accustomed.
First thing I noticed, watching humanity walk by, was how very many Indian people work at the home office. That’s funny because the president of the company is Indian. And when the head of Research was Chinese, so were most of the scientists. I know, I know…but when they elevated an Irishman to the top of training, suddenly all the new training hires were European, which flat doesn’t make sense however you look at it.
I don’t substantially object; I assume people tap into their prior contacts or their alma mater to make new hires. It just so damned blatant, is all. We forever hear what arrogant bigots Americans are, but I wouldn’t have the gall to take a job abroad and hire nothing but my own kind.
This map hangs on the wall outside my cube; they’ve moved everything around in this area and everybody’s lost. One of my cow orkers pointed out the highlights to me.
“And down here are the Table People,” she said, pointing to the bottom.
“?”
“That’s what everybody calls them. The Table People. They don’t have cubes. They sit side by side at big long tables.”
“!!!”
“Oh, they seem happy enough,” she said in the same uneasy way you’d discuss conjoined twins or Romanian orphans.
I worked up my nerve after lunch to walk down and gawp at the Table People. PLEASEOHPLEASE…Weasel will be good! Promise! Don’t make me a Table People!
November 8, 2007 — 5:26 pm
Comments: 18
Seven little nekkid dudes and an apology
Blame Mrs Peel for the ‘things I do when I’m in a long, boring meeting’ meme. Blame me for recent bloggy lameness.
I haven’t quite figured out how to blog from my new digs yet. Being unable to go to sweasel.com isn’t a problem; I can just as easily write offline in Notepad and post it later. The problem is that, without the internet, I don’t know anything worth posting about.
Yeah. Whaddya know. I sit there at my desk all day like a big stupid pumpkin, my mind a perfect and absolute blank.
“Heh,” I think, “I’m thinking nothing. They think I’m thinking, but I’m not.” Who knew I was so Zen?
But fear not, my imaginary friends who lived in the computer. We’ve come too far and debased ourselves too low to give up on it now. I’ll think of something. You can trust a weasel.
Hey, I know! Cute cat pictures! That’s bound to be a crowd pleaser!
November 7, 2007 — 5:35 pm
Comments: 28
Is it chilly in here, or is it just me?
Brrrr…somebody throw another environmentalist on the fire…!
November 6, 2007 — 7:17 am
Comments: 9
C’mon-a my house
Have you ever had a break so lucky, you were actually afraid to brag about it for fear God would smite you? No, me neither. And it’s scaring the hell out of me. I’m sure the Acme safe is going to fall on my head any minute now.
Uncle B and I have been house hunting for a decade. We knew pretty much what we wanted, and where. We’ve pored through the listings nightly and looked at dozens of houses. We became known to the local real estate community as “Oh, them.”
We’ve looked at so many houses that were…almost right. But this one had no garden, and that one was in a crap neighborhood, and another one needed a hundred thousand pounds spent on it before you could flush the toilet. We put in a bid a couple of times, but I can’t say with much enthusiasm.
Incidentally, Britain is a fantastic place to be rich. If you have a million or more, you can still buy something that looks like it escaped from an Avenger’s episode. It’s a pretty good place to be poor, too, on account of all the socialism. It’s the mokes in the middle like us what get squeezed like…ummm…gonads in a pair of Levi’s.
Anyhow — long story short — Uncle B found this place that is Goldilocks all over. Set back from the road, decent garden. Walking distance from the town we wanted to live in, but surrounded by sheep fields. Decent size, recently done up (but tastefully, not by speculators). Checked over by a local architect ‘sympathetic to old buildings’ — as the saying goes. JUST inside our price range. Oh, hey, did I mention it’s a SIXTEENTH CENTURY FARMHOUSE?!?
If there’s really such a thing as feng shui, this house is soaking in it. I’ve never been in a warmer, more organic place. It chuckles to itself. It moans in the sun. It gurgles with plumbing. We keep plucking stranded newts off the living room floor. It’s alive with sheep and crows and spiders and little dickie birds.
To avoid distracting this blog from important subjects like penis enlargement spams and booger haiku, I have set up a separate Flickr site for Badger House. I didn’t take as many pictures as I thought, but I was Rather Busy.
Hey, check it out! I’m not colorblind!
November 5, 2007 — 7:24 pm
Comments: 27
Say goodbye to the ass end of a bad week
November 2, 2007 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 19
Meet my new neighbor(s)
Born Tuesday morning at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence: conjoined twins Faith and Hope Echevarria. Video here. These little girls are zipped together from the bellybutton to the breastbone. They share a single heart and liver, so there will be no separate existence for these two.
A pretty example of synchroniwhotsit: my airport book coming out of Heathrow this time this time was Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. I’ve always had a warm spot for teratology.
I (mostly) recommend it. The good bits are very good. He spends a fair bit of time on genetics and the chemical engines that drive differentiation in the developing fetus. These parts are interesting, but heavy going when you have the attention span of a stoat on an airplane.
It’s an extremely handy book for discouraging your seatmate from striking up a conversation, anyhow. It’s illustrated.
— 5:13 pm
Comments: 9
Everything old is old again
The night was made for love, according to such perpetual sentimentalists as Lanny Ross.
But not according to me.
At my advanced age, the night was made for such prosaic chores as getting to the column you didn’t write during the day.
Unobserved, you can sit around in your shorts, stare at the typewriter and sip hot milk until, touched by inspiration or desperation, you begin to write.
Typical blogger. In this case, Paul Coates of the Los Angeles Mirror, writing fifty years ago. A selection of his columns is currently being republished in the LA Times blog section.
The whole page has a sort of wait…what year is this? quality. Teen gangs. Drug addiction. Rogue cops. Gambling. Crime. Mexicans. The problems and the solutions are all of a dreary sameness. Air pollution? Electric cars. Teen pregnancy? Less scorn, more compassion. Rising prison population? Rehabilitation, certainly not more prisons.
Your humble weasel is just a little younger than these words and has thus spent one (1) whole lifetime reading this exact journalistic blah blah blah. I can’t help thinking…any disease that has hung around for half a century without either killing the patient or getting better has to be both less malignant than the pessimists would have it and less amenable to cure than the optimists tell us. It’s also getting pretty damned old.
I am only a little more web-present in this office than when I was flat out offline for two weeks. But this site inexplicably turned up during a legit Google images search (I find some of the weirdest nuggets that way) and, as the entire page had already downloaded itself, I felt entitled to read the whole thing. Starvation may have made this site more interesting than it actually is. But it is interesting, and if nothing else, the fun period ads running alongside make it worth a browse.
November 1, 2007 — 6:32 pm
Comments: 2