You're Doing It Wrong

The little monster in the back has torn a chunk of insulation off our A/C unit and is now wrestling with it.

I recently ran across an article about raccoons — they are smart and learn quick.

There was a study in Wyoming, Wyoming Raccoon Project — Animal Behavior & Cognition Lab where they trapped wild raccoons (And skunks! If they were in this area they would certainly have used my backyard in their study).

Raccoons have adapted well to humans and do fine in an urban environment.

I encourage you to visit the website. There are photos of groggy raccoons and their names. Molasses is particularly cute.

“Molasses was captured in the backyard of a Laramie resident. She is the oldest raccoon we have captured to date! We can age raccoons by the amount of wear on their teeth, and Molasses had very worn teeth. Not to worry- she also had swollen teats which indicates that she bred that summer, so she’s still fit enough to produce offspring!”

I think I’ve said it before but I don’t feed the raccoons. I only put out the water bucket and even that sometimes seems like too much.

My big observation from the trail cam is that our lawn is a delight of earthworms. They walk back and forth pouncing on it which must be the secret to finding the yummiest worms.

Completely inappropriate rental car for work trip to N. Idaho. Colleague was so frustrated with the poor service at the rental counter he didn’t want to deal with getting it swapped for something else.

Pickle plate and eggplant sando at Tanaka.

I took these photos at the local Fred Meyer. I thought it was an unusual typeface for a stop sign.

Maybe not. What do I know?

I made it to the 10th. The rest of the month is really busy. I’m going to try to at least schedule posts for Sundays – more if I can.

Why yes, this photo was taken in Portland, Or.

We’ve had a shredding service at the office for a number of years.

At some point during The Plague the shredding company stopped making pick-ups but still billed us.

I probably wrote about this before since it was a giant pain in my boodeenie and caused me endless amounts of rage.

The only way to deal with customer service was to call and the wait times were usually close to an hour. Then the person who answered would pull up your account and try to argue with you that a pick-up occurred. The call center seemed to be located on another continent and nothing like someone on another continent trying to tell you that you had a shredding pick up when you spent the entire day in the office so you wouldn’t miss the pick up and get billed for nothing.

They never offered to reschedule the pick up.

They would credit you. Then maybe the next pick up would show up and you’d think the problem was solved. Until it happened all over again.

The bill wasn’t that much so sometimes I would decide it wasn’t worth my time and energy to call and get credited.

Eventually I cancelled the service and of course then they got a retention person on the phone to find out if there was anything they could do to get me to change my mind.

(Yes, I actually said this.) “Invent a time machine and go back in time and make the pick ups that you billed me for.”

For some reason this banner is still up for the championship match back in December that I am still salty about.

This is a very long prologue to a story about our regular driver from the shredding company who I chit-chatted with whenever he was the pick up driver.

I ran inhto him when I was out and about downtown and he recognized me and asked me if we cancelled. He was always super nice and friendly and clearly as nothing to do with the administrative side. He said a lot of the every-other month customers said their pick-ups were dropped.

We have a new company. They cost more but I don’t care because they are locally owned and they show up when they say they will.

I have a zillion photos but somehow can’t find another good photo of this giant tree outside neighbors garage. This one is a couple years ago.

And here it is in September, going to the great forest in the sky.

I was sad because so many birds hang out in that tree but neighbor said it was too big for where it was located and it was buckling the concrete and causing other problems.

I recently re-watched the prequels. Probably the first time since The Revenge of the Sith first came out on DVD.

The Phantom Menace is tolerable. The pod racing sequence is still fun.

Attack of the Clones is dreadful. That is the most poorly executed romance in history. It is completely implausible that Padme would fall for someone so whiny and demonstrably unhinged. I think you could have kept Anakin as a complex character and not make him such a weenie. It’s amazing those actors did as well as they did with the material.

Revenge of the Sith had a lot of terrible dialogue but most of the story is okay. There are some parts that I would have done differently.

I’ve seen all the new trilogy, VII, VIII, and IX — what would you call those? The Disney trilogy? I didn’t hate them but I couldn’t summarize them for you.

I’ve seen all the other movies and TV series except the animated stuff. I’d like to watch The Clone Wars series at some point but haven’t tried to yet.

Andor is spectacular. I feel like this is the series that we’ve been hoping for — serious show set in the same universe with new characters and conflicts.

I was an enormous Star Wars fan back in the day.

When the prequels came out I was at the height of my Star Wars fandom. I saw all of them over and over – when you had to go to the theater.

Plus the original trilogy returned to big screen, too, and I repeatedly watched those again.

I can remember spending afternoons watching one of the movies in one theater and then walking out and going into a different theater to see the next one.

It’s hard to imagine how I had so much free time back then.

I don’t remember doing any major rewatches when they came out on video/DVD. I vaguely recall watching all six in order probably as a holiday thing.

Another thing I remember is from way back in the earliest days of the Internet when you had to shovel coal in the oven to get the computer started.

This was even before the prequels. George Lucas said he envisioned the series was going to be 9 films. A prequel trilogy and a final trilogy. Someone on a Star Wars listserv (do the kids today know what a listserv is?) did the math and was thinking if it took 3 years per film how long it would take and how old he would be when it finished?

Hahahahahahaha!

This is the same street as the Halloween houses. It’s right by a school.

The street is one long straight stretch so some cars get zippy.

This didn’t photograph as well as I’d hoped.

I love how new notebooks are all smooth and flat (pile on the right). Then after you’d filled a bunch of pages they get puffy (pile on the left).

I have lots of these notebooks. Notes for writing or writing exercises or if I take a class or meet with other writers.

The smaller one I use intermittently for planning my day. I usually will go a string of days where it goes really well and then there will be a page where I write things like “off the rails” “who knows?” “total disaster.”

Even though I have a bunch of new notebooks waiting to be used, I can never resist buying new notebooks. Every year when school supplies are out I grab a few. This year I was certain I had resisted the impulse for awhile and was finally running low.

I got home and when I went to put them away I found I was not running low. Not even close.