Pretty much every culture, I’m guessing, has discovered that in the springtime, when young men aren’t busy thinking about love, the sun is reborn and life returns to the planet. In my neck of the woods, this means the weeds flourish.

I do have the best weed eradicator on the planet that doesn’t produce milk. It’s a hand tool, about a foot long, that has a soft rubber grip and a head comprised of one flat, square spade about an inch and a half wide and another that’s the same size but has four teeth a couple inches long.

I’ve never used the flat side yet, but the pronged end is most excellent. I can stand, or bend over, and with a couple good whacks at the dirt surrounding the weed, pick it up roots and all. Crabgrass, in particular, has no defense against this attack.

After filling my city-supplied green trash can, the one for yard trimmings, and setting it out to be picked up this morning, I was more than slightly annoyed to discover that, in picking it up, the city’s machine crushed my green bin in half. Not only did this make an incredible mess on the street, which I mostly winced at and ignored, it necessitated a phone call on my part to the city agency to get the bin replaced.

That took about half an hour, total, or less than a minute talking with the lovely bureaucrat. The conversation went something, roughly, like this:

Her: How can I help you?
Me: I need a new green bin. The truck tore mine in half.
Her: What’s the bin’s serial number?
Me: P6G 026410
Her: Your address?
Me:
Her: Put it out on the street Tuesday, and we’ll replace it. Not this Tuesday, next one, April first.
Me: April first? Is that a joke?
Her: (Laughs) No.

Two things about this strike me as interesting. Not only do I have a lot more weeding to do and get rid of, but now I have to struggle through with a crippled bin for two weeks of hydraulic excesses. The odds of the bin surviving are slim, but I have no choice.

Second, and perhaps more interesting, is that our bins all have serial numbers that the government, somehow, considers very important. I hate to think how much money is spent maintaining that database, or how it would ever be remotely useful. I suppose a case could be made for tracking survivability of the bins, but to store and track every one of the city’s several million bins just to see how long they last seems inefficient, at best. Just note, after they’re returned, when they were sent out. Since they all have bar codes, why any consumer would need to know and report the number is just silly.

Are they worried about theft? I’ve never known any bin to go missing or seen any, like shopping carts, littering the landscape. I sincerely doubt it’s the existence of the serial number that’s coming them from being pilfered and put to use in meth labs or used to smuggle illegal immigrants.
But, no matter what, I should be getting a sparking new green bin next month. Just in time to coincide with heater filter replacement and my mortgage payment!

I’m feeling a tad under the weather, by which I mean I have a sore throat, headache, and sniffles.

From what some people tell me, it’s all because of my diet, and I’m in no position to argue.

According to people who know about these things, the foods I eat are often loaded with chemicals. These chemicals, the thinking goes, then hang around in my body and get in the way of it properly performing or actually cause it harm. People who eat right, who only eat food as nature provides it, don’t suffer all these illnesses.

Me? I don’t know. There’s certainly something in their argument, but my mind is in no condition to do any heavy thinking right now. I’ve always been of the belief that what I put in stomach most often gets tossed aside if my body can’t figure out what the hell it is, but maybe my digestive tract is more like a pack rat and holds all this crap just in case it needs it some day. In that sense, it would be a lot like me.

I’m not sure how sick I am because I don’t have a very good frame of reference. I have no idea how you, or anyone else, feels when they’re sick, but that bothers me. I’m not sure if I’m suffering as bad a headache as anyone has ever experienced or if this is one that most people would just shrug off. I feel like a weenie when I hold my head and moan, however quietly, but — dammit — I feel like shit.

Of course, I made some chicken soup. With noodles. And, with a once-happy free range organic chicken and organic carrots. Yeah, it’s incredibly expensive, but the rest of the ingredients were those everyone else gets to eat. I even made it with tap water.

With chicken, noodles, leeks, carrots, celery, sugar snap peas, and parsley, it looks like a very good soup. It tastes, however, only like salt. I’m not sure if that’s because I added too much salt or if that’s because salt is about the only thing I can taste. It didn’t hurt my throat, and I’m not thirsty, so I think I got the salt just right.

If I did, that would be one thing.

There’s a lot of things that surprise me, but you shouldn’t take that to mean everything does.

The other day, after my car passed its smog test by the slimmest of margins, I was wondering what I could do to lower those pesky hydrocarbons to, say, a more tolerable level. Being all hip and with-it and all, I did a Google search and the results were different than I expected. That’s the definition of surprising I believe in.

Rather than offering up anything particularly mechanical, my query returned links to pages of people selling or touting additives. “Pour this stuff in your gas tank, drive it out, and pass the test” pretty much sums up the process.

These products, which may or may not work as described or help in the slightest, don’t seem to me to be a way to “fix” your engine. Few details are given, but it reminded me of one of my all-time favorite expressions, the one that comes from marketing: People don’t buy drill bits, they buy half-inch holes.

That is, the results, not the means to acquire them, are what’s important, and I really shouldn’t have been so surprised.

I wonder, though, how these Blue Sky type products work their magic. Do they take all the things that could be contributing to hydrocarbons, burn ‘em up, and shoot them out the tailpipe before you take the test. That doesn’t sound particularly beneficial, even though it may result in you passing the test. How long before they come back? The directions on the Internet say to burn up the tank with the additive, then fill the tank as normal and then take the test, so this strikes me as more of a band-aid than a fix, if you catch my drift.

Still, any problem in this capitalistic society will have solutions provided by people out to make a buck. If we didn’t need paper, a lot fewer people would be growing trees.

The other thing that struck me as obvious within a minute of hearing about it was this recent discovery of pharmaceuticals in the water supply. While I, myself, am healthy enough not to need medicine, I’ve taken enough vitamins over the years to be familiar with green, smelly pee. Extra vitamins, that I bought and paid for, I might add, literally going down the drain.

It makes perfect sense that heart medications, birth control, antibiotics of all types, anti-depressants, cholesterol drugs and all the rest would also have enough extra stuff in the pills that there would be some waste. When you buy from a printer I think you get plus or minus ten percent of the quantity, and every carpenter or painter knows to get about ten percent more than they need. Just to be on the safe side, you understand.

Now, no one knows what the long term effect of taking all this mystery, unwanted medicine will be, but I sleep easier knowing I won’t be having any babies. I don’t think I’m getting as many anti-depressants as I might want, but it’s comforting to know that I’m getting a few molecules of heart medicine with every bowl of soup.

The steroids don’t bother me at all. They’ll just pass through my system and into the next person’s. If our digestive system had any way of handling those things, Roger Clemens and bicycle riders wouldn’t have to get shots in their butts.

So things which might surprise me at first really shouldn’t. If they do, they don’t do so for long, but that’s because my mental faculties are getting all this free medication!

My Best Friend of the Day, Kenneth Barnes, suggested that I buy a lottery ticket today after I gave him eighty bucks. His reasoning behind his suggestion is closely tied to my giving him the money to pass my car’s smog exam.

Against all odds and many of my fears, Timmy passed.

According to Ken, he sees about four or five of these Metros each year and three or four of them fail. I think it has something to do with their notoriously problematic number three cylinder, the one in the middle, and a lot to do with their age. I don’t know when the last one was built, but I doubt it was last year.

Timmy, as the generated report indicated, has a definite problem with hydrocarbons. The state average is 31ppm, which seems to be a pretty low number. The maximum allowable by law is a whopping 153 at 15mph or about 2000 RPM. Timmy passed this test by a comfortable 4ppm, coming in at 149.

I have no idea what a concentration of 4ppm looks like, but if it’s anything like the amount of pharmaceuticals they’ve recently discovered in our water, that’s a teaspoon or so in about three or four Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Ken said my passing was pretty much a crap shoot, but he didn’t use those words. He said an engine temperature difference of as little as five or ten degrees could have put Timmy and me over the limit, but I failed to ask if cooler or hotter would be better.

With the speed increased to 25MPH and the engine running at 2226RPM, Timmy only generated 104ppm of hydrocarbons, a better result since the maximum allowable at those numbers is 128. Still, the average is twenty, so I’m only contributing something like five times that number.
To my credit, though, I hardly ever drive. In the eighteen months or so I’ve owned Timmy, I think I’ve put only about thirteen hundred miles on him.

The other piece of bad news is that Timmy is a resounding failure as a suicide device. While the average CO emission is 0.10%, Timmy can only offer up a measly 0.07%, nowhere near the 0.91% maximum. I’m not sure he can idle long enough on his tiny six gallon gas tank to fill any decently sized garage with enough carbon monoxide to kill anyone.

No, I didn’t buy the lottery number. You can add that to my list of regrets.

There are things going on with this blog that I don’t understand fully, if at all.

Access, even for me, the owner of the damn thing, is sporadic. Now that it’s working I have a good mind to post an entry, so I will. Just to let you all know that (1) I’m aware of it, and (2) I’m as puzzled as the next guy.

Assuming, of course, that the next guy is as baffled as I am.

I’m blaming my host, but I haven’t told them about that yet. There’s some sort of something or other going on with the site, maybe some update or other, and it’s the kind of thing that makes it difficult for me to access my site to manage it. Not only have they instituted a capcha that fails three times before working correctly, I have to continually choose between “old and new” management tools.
I believe I have the old set, but not the oldest set.

In the meantime, enjoy this post!

Before we get started, I should mention that, since they have so many goodies the overwhelming majority of men crave, women have a power we men can only dream of. We’ll do damn near anything to have access to those goodies, including agreeing and admitting they’re right.

That said, I met the most powerful woman in my life last week on Sadie Hawkin’s day and shook her hand. The occasion was my sister’s retirement party, and the event was unique in many ways. For twenty-seven years my sister worked for the US government, specifically as a civilian for the Defense Contract Management Agency. Her job, as near as I’ve figured out, had something to do with the military personnel who also work for that agency. I think she made sure that the forms were all properly completed and contained no errors and helped them out if they needed revising.

Now, no private company that I know of has these kind of official retirement parties. Maybe there were affairs for the executives I never knew about, but the parties I attended were always slapdash affairs held in the lunchroom. This one was at Trump National Golf Course in Rancho Palos Verdes, a place I never knew existed.

When we arrived at the sign-in desk I was immediately met by a woman I’d heard about for years and who I recognized instantly by those descriptions: Colonel Wilma Slade. About as imposing a woman as you could ever hope to meet, but as delightful as a bag of kitties. It was apparent at once that Col Slade (ret) was one of those people who expects and receives no amount of questioning. She’s as nice as can be about it, but her “You’ll go here and sit there” gave me no chance to complain or any choice to do otherwise.

I was impressed. I also followed her orders. I had no choice in the matter.

There were about twenty people in the room; my sister didn’t want a large party. The invitation recommended business dress or, for members of the military, the uniform of the day. About a quarter of the attendees were in uniform, several in camouflage ODs. Since the party was indoors, sadly, none of them got to wear their hats.

Col Slade (ret) came over to instruct me and my niece’s son that, since we were seated at the head table, it was our job to pull out the chairs for the two women when they were escorted into the room. One of the women receiving this honor was my sister, whose chair would be my responsibility. The other woman, the one Greggory would seat, was the most powerful woman I’d shake hands with, one Mrs. Patricia Kirk-McAlpine.

I gave Greggory a quick rundown on what I thought would be involved in seating her. “Pull back the chair,” I said, “then, when she sits down, pretend to push it in while she does all the real work.”

We were all sitting around, and the event kicked off precisely on schedule. This did not surprise me in the least. We were welcomed by my sister’s ex-boss, a woman who took over the job when she retired from the military and who, I’m told, was stunned when she received her first paycheck because there was no “clothing allowance.” These military types, you see, live differently than you and me.

The next item on the agenda, and, yes, there was one, including a four color seal of DCMA complete with the eagle holding the olive branches and arrows, was the arrival of the official party, to wit my sister and Mrs. Patricia Kirk-McAlpine. We all rose, they were seated, then we stood up again for the playing of the National Anthem.

I thought of Senator’s Obama’s problems, and did not place my hand over my heart. Neither did any of the people in uniform, who did a much better job of standing at attention than I could ever dream of.

It was over in a minute, and was a great version of the anthem, performed, no doubt, by some military band with plenty of cymbal crashes. We only got to hear it through a little boom box, however, so some of the finer details may have been lost. There was, as proscribed by protocol, a row of other flags.

Say what you will about the military, but just like with Roman Catholics, they have quite a bit of ceremony and I’m a sucker for it. Next to the US flag, which is placed on the far left, the flags of the Marines, the Army, the Navy, Coast Guard, and Air Force are all lined up. That’s the official order, based on when the force was founded. There were no Coast Guard or Navy personnel present, not in uniform, anyway, but their flags were there.

Then came the flag of the Agency my sister worked for and last, and perhaps the most inspiring, was Mrs. Patricia Kirk-McAlpine’s flag.

She has her own damn flag.

The Agency, until she took over a few years ago, was always headed by a General, who always had, of course, his own flag. I always found that incredibly cool. Although Mrs. Patricia Kirk-McAlpine is not in the military, as director (if that’s her title) of the Agency, she’s entitled to a flag and hers was a fine one. I have no idea what her title is, only that she signed the proclamation she presented to my sister as SES, DoD. Her flag was quite simple, really, with just some bars on a shield as far as I could tell, but just like any Navy flag officer, she has her own damn flag.

It’s safe to say that I will never have my own flag. Nor, that I will ever be in the presence of anyone, male or female, who does.

For lunch I chose the chicken, which came with two perfectly prepared stalks of asparagus and two equally well-prepared carrots nestled in a few tablespoons of garlic mashed potatoes.
It wasn’t as good as the flag.

My father died years ago, so I can’t ask him about his hat size, but I bet he knew it. I don’t know mine, and I’m willing to bet no more than a handful of men I know, do. Hats, at least the ones that come in sizes, just aren’t as popular as they once were.

I mention this because I recently bought a pair of gloves. They were on special sale, so they said, because of “limited availabilty,” by which they meant only one size left and not very many more of them. The one size was medium, the Goldilocks of all sizes, and after trying on a pair, I bought them.

I have no idea what my glove size is, either. Leaving aside, for the moment, male measurement theories having to do with hand size, if my hands are proportional to my body size, I’d imagine I should wear a large. These gloves are snug, but since I have no comparable fingerless bicycling gloves with which to compare them, maybe they all are. I could make them not fit, as OJ Simpson famously did in court, or, with about the same amount of effort, struggle into them and wear them.

The point is, they may or may not be my size, but I wouldn’t know.

Not satisfied with one questionable purchase, the long sleeved thermal T-shirt that I wanted wasn’t in my desired size, either. Unlike the arcane measurement systems used for hats and women’s clothing, these T-shirts came in small, medium, and large, but there may have been some extra-larges hanging around.

The one I wanted was large, which were all sold out. The salesman offered me a medium and told me the arms would be long enough, which is always an issue with me. The other issue, the more vain one, is that my stomach has grown to such a size that its girth is quite noticeable in most medium shirts, embarrassingly so. There was a large, but it featured white writing instead of the cool-looking bright green that I associate with Rock Racing, and I was momentarily stumped.
I could have the green, which seemed to fit, or the white, which I had more confidence in. I’ve never been very good at holding clothing up against my body to see if it will fit, as both the white and greens did. I went with the white, and when I later got home I understood the salesman’s remark about the arm size.

The arms on the one I bought nearly, but not completely, cover my hands.

I’d figured that anyone who rides a bike is more smelt than I am, but this one fits around my belly just fine. I don’t know if the green one would have, but I’m guessing the cuffs would have lasted longer.