Invasion of the Stink Bug

Ugh. If you aren't yet fed up with Chinese imports, here's one good reason to be... stink bugs.

These Chinese pests are everywhere. I kill two or three a day.

I hate theses bugs. HATE them!

The other day I saw one crawling all over a news commentator on TV. Made me cringe.

They stayed away during our long cold spell. But now that it's been in the 50s and 60s here, they've returned. I think they live to torment me.

I found out today that I need a different strategy to defeat them. Apparently squishing them only encourages more. "One thing you want to avoid is crushing them, since the lingering scent can be detected by other stink bugs long after it has faded from our own olfactory memory and draw more stink bugs to your hearthside." Source.

I take some encouragement in knowing our government is on it. USDA is working on a pheromone trap that will lure the pest away. Glad to know my government may be good for something. Well, maybe. The bug hasn't been conquered yet.

Because carving your initials into a mountain isn't ever enough

There was a huge uproar a couple of years ago when not-a-Dr. Jerry Falwell carved a big ugly LU into his mountain.


That LU got the best of Jerry. He died of cardiac arrest the day after hiking his fat ass up to the observation gazebo atop the LU (that little white speck above the L).

Just look at what the Falwells are up to now.


It's a ski slope.

I caught myself grumbling about LU's ski slope the other day. "They must be so desperate for students!" I thought, quite smugly.


Then I remembered that my alma mater had a ski slope too.

I still don't want one

I paid a visit to my old place of employment yesterday. The new guy was in a panic over a report that's due at the end of the month. It's something I set up in Excel, and that he couldn't figure out.

I am not sure how it happened, but as I was walking him through what to do, the new guy told me his salary. The college is paying him more than they paid me.

They are paying him more even though the position was downgraded from director to dean after my resignation. They are paying him more despite a state budget crisis and hiring freeze.

WTF?

This is driving me crazy

I have a cheap Timex digital watch that I wear for outdoor play.

I can't find it.

It's in this room somewhere. I know this because it chimes at the top of the hour, every hour.

It's taunting me with that hourly chime.

The limits of charity

I hate being taken advantage of.

I'm all for helping people. Goodness knows I've had a lot of help along the way. I've always been grateful for it, and I've tried my best to "do unto others" and all that good stuff.

But every now and again I encounter a person who is a master at exploiting the generosity of others. We've gotten ourselves involved with one such person. She goes to our church, and it all started with our offering to take her to Sunday services every week.

I really wouldn't mind this little weekly good deed, except that she ALWAYS keeps us waiting, such that we are late for church most weeks. I hate being late for anything. I absolutely hate it. If you ever want to see me go from zero to full rage, just make me late for something.

After-church rides have evolved into side-trips to the grocery store.

The woman's gall reached it's peak this morning, when she sent us this note: "If I schedule a return trip to East Jesus to come in at 5:36pm or 11:35pm, which time would be better for you to pick me up at the airport?" That's right, she didn't ask if we could give her a ride, she just assumed that we would.

Grrrrrrrr!

Trop rants

Ugh. I'm running on about six hours sleep since Tuesday. When I'm sleep deprived I get crabby.

And right now I'm crabby about a client.

As a rule, we require a three week turn-around to build the models I build. There are other models we do that are less time intensive; I can bang one of those out in an afternoon.

But my models (I'm the only one in the firm that does them), are an entirely different beast.

It doesn't actually take three weeks of labor to build one, but it does take a few days to a week typically. A lot of work is involved: data manipulation, model fitting, diagnostics. Then there is the actual deliverable, which is a vast web of formulas in a big Excel workbook of detailed tables and charts.

Millions of dollars are a stake with each one. It has to be right. Sometimes getting it right takes time and painstaking effort.

I have a track record of getting it right. I know what I'm doing.

I'm crabby and sleep deprived because I was given data on Tuesday and had to turn it into a deliverable by 8:00 this morning.

I knew this was coming and that there would be a crunch this week. We go out of our way to accommodate clients, though reducing a three week turn-around to 48-hours is a bit much, especially for a slacker like me. But for the good of the company, I did it. And wouldn't you know it, this one was one of the more difficult models I've had to fit. It just kept coming up wrong. I finally got it working at about midnight last night.

And what did I get for my trouble?

A hijacked meeting.

Every now and then I encounter a wise ass who thinks they know more about what I do than I know. If you run in academic circles or attend conferences where papers are presented you've seen this person. They come for a presentation and then hijack it by challenging every esoteric detail they can retrieve from their graduate school glory days [eye-roll]. It's not that such details aren't legitimate and important, but for purposes of the presentation, they don't much matter.

One of our clients has a wise ass on his staff. Whenever she's in the meeting she hijacks it with really technical questions of the kind I didn't even get at my dissertation defense. She did it again today. There was no point to her questions except to show off. I really have no patience for people like her.

She was so annoying that I seriously considered faking a dropped call just so I could scream.

Grrrrrr!

Welcome to my world

It's Monday morning, and I'm watching The Basketball Diaries. Those boys are bad asses. I love DiCaprio and Wahlberg together (The Departed is so good).

I guess it's fittin', given that earlier today I attended a truancy hearing at Amanda's school.

I threw her under the bus.

I didn't do it to cover my ass. I did it to put the blame squarely where it belongs: on her.

Here's the thing. Last year we gave her options. She could take classes at the college (a lot of high school kids do this), she could be home schooled (many more do this), or she could continue at her high school. I left a job with benefits to make college or home schooling viable options.

Choosing to stay in high school meant that she actually had to:
1) GO TO SCHOOL.
2) ON TIME.
3) EVERY DAY.

She knew the terms. She accepted them. She chose to stay in high school. She said she'd prove that she could do it.

She's not doing it.



And that's about as much as I can say on the whole thing.

What about women, Obama?

Obama too often overlooks women in his "real-world" examples. I don't have the data, but I'd bet the majority of households in this country are headed by women. When the economy tanks, women suffer as much and perhaps more than men, especially as so many of us are THE head of household.

Yet all everyone talks about is "Joe" six pack. I'm not trying to diminish men. I'm only asking why women are so overlooked? Especially when statistically, the average "Joe" in the US is really Jane (we're barely 51% of the US population).



Full disclosure and a serious question. What does this say about me:

There is a swagger to Obama's walk that really bugs the crap out of me. Perhaps it reflects his confidence, but to me it reveals cockiness.

There it is. That's my reaction. There's a hitch to Obama's giddy-up that really unnerves me.

What does that say about me? Is it racist? I honestly want to know, because I take full ownership of the way I react to Obama's walk. If the consensus is that my reaction is racist, then I fully accept that I am racist. I'll work on that. But for now, I'm just sayin'.

ETA: For the record, I'm not claiming cluelessness. I think it's racist.

I swear I'm pregnant

I swear I'm pregnant. I even have morning sickness.

Moody much? One minute I'm gay and flirty, the next minute I'm downright mean.

Amanda called me "catty."

I have moments of real confusion. Fleeting moments when I sometimes don't know where I am.

This is what my pregnancy was like. I was not a person you wanted to be around.

Of course, I am NOT pregnant, so WTF?

I was taking a high dose of Effexor and it is finally out of my system. Maybe it's replacement isn't enough and depression, which causes many of my symptoms, is gradually taking over. I'll need to watch that.

Or maybe my thyroid levels need adjusting (the morning nausea is a clue).

Or maybe I'm just heading into The Change. I'll be 48 next month. Does menopause feel like pregnancy?

Whatever it is, I guess I ought to get my old self to the doctor. I hate going to the doctor.

In other words, he was tortured

Fred Thompson on McCain:

Three months later John McCain was a Prisoner of War.

On October 26, 1967, on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam, a surface-to-air missile slammed into John's A-4 Skyhawk jet, blowing it out of the sky.

When John ejected, part of the plane hit him -- breaking his right knee, his left arm, his right arm in three places.

An angry mob got to him.

A rifle butt broke his shoulder.

A bayonet pierced his ankle and his groin.

They took him to the Hanoi Hilton, where he lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. He was offered medical care for his injuries if he would give up military information in return.

John McCain said "No".

After days of neglect, covered in grime, lying in his own waste in a filthy room, a doctor attempted to set John's right arm without success ... and without anesthesia.

His other broken bones and injuries were not treated. John developed a high fever, dysentery. He weighed barely a hundred pounds.

Expecting him to die, his captors placed him in a cell with two other POWs who also expected him to die.

But with their help, John McCain fought on.

He persevered.

So then they put him in solitary confinement...for over two years.

Isolation ... incredible heat beating on a tin roof. A light bulb in his cell burning 24 hours a day.

Boarded-up cell windows blocking any breath of fresh air.

The oppressive heat causing boils the size of baseballs under his arms.

The outside world limited to what he could see through a crack in a door.

We hear a lot of talk about hope.

John McCain knows about hope. That's all he had to survive on. For propaganda purposes, his captors offered to let him go home.

John McCain refused.

He refused to leave ahead of men who'd been there longer.

He refused to abandon his conscience and his honor, even for his freedom.

He refused, even though his captors warned him, "It will be very bad for you."

They were right.

It was.

The guards cracked ribs, broke teeth off at the gums. They cinched a rope around his arms and painfully drew his shoulders back.

Over four days, every two to three hours, the beatings resumed. During one especially fierce beating, he fell, again breaking his arm.

John was beaten for communicating with other prisoners.

He was beaten for NOT communicating with so-called "peace delegations."

He was beaten for not giving information during interrogations.

When his captors wanted the names of other pilots in his squadron, John gave them the names of the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers.

These are the same inhumane things were are doing to our enemies. Is the value of the information we gain for our inhumanity "the names of the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers?"

This is bullshit

This week's Time magazine proposes a loosening of spelling standards.

That's bullshit. Spelling matters.

And while I'm ranting, know the rules.

WTF is up with Gmail?

I can't get into my Trop account. My other gmail account (for work) is just fine.

I hate when this happens.

I hate when this happens

We drove for fourteen hours Monday, and the whole time all I wanted to do was sleep.

We've been home since 11:00pm, and now it is two-fucking-forty-five in the morning and I still can't sleep.

Self Portrait Tuesday

Despite my many years of education, an internship, and six jobs; I still under estimate how frustrating and hard it is to learn a new thing.

This post brought to you by...

...my inspiron 1720.

The imaged hard drive came today. So far so good.

The sucking and swallowing continues...

The hard drive arrived yesterday. It was fitted for the secondary drive spot. WTF? So I had to exchange parts to get it into the primary spot.

And for the umpteenth time, I launched the operating system installation, only to see it fail, as it always does.

More time on the phone, repeating my story, up the chain. I'm getting better at line jumping...

I reported my problem unresolved. Dell is sending another hard drive, this time imaged with all of the software I purchased when I bought the thing. Suj (the Dell operator) had the near-misfortune of suggesting "if THAT drive doesn't work, it is a motherboard issue."

You can marvel over how calm I remained at her suggestion. Thank you Brandon.

Tomorrow I'll see the DHL guy for the third time this week.

Dell sucks and swallows

Dell returned my laptop, $500.00 later, and didn't do a fucking thing to fix it.

FUCKERS.


I am spitting mad.

I don't know which has been worse...

...withdrawing from a high-dose antidepressant,

or


having to wear skirts for two days.


Thank you for your comments and email (and a drunk dial too). It's been a rough several days (the confluence of a chlorine allergy triggering long-dormant asthma triggering a nasty summer cold, coupled with weaning off a drug triggering vertigo, brain zaps and terrible nightmares).

I'll still be laying low for a while.

Ouch!

I just got an estimate for the cost to recover data from my fried hard drive: $600.

That doesn't include $400 in new hard drives I bought for the thing, plus the cost of an unsuccessful Level I data recovery attempt ($150). Ultimately my crippled hard drive had to be shipped to a lab in Kentucky. A Level II recovery was successful at recovering all my consulting files. With the street value of those files reaching well into six figures, I guess it's worth it. It still sucks though.

So WRONG!

No picture for this post. That's the point.

I've seen the Miley Cyrus picture in Vanity Fair and it is so wrong. The girl is only fifteen. FIFTEEN. What the fuck was Billy Ray thinking? How can that photograph not violate child exploitation and pedophile laws? She's fifteen!