Category: cranky

Ow! *Slap*

And here we are at Friday, the end of another week.

An unusual week on my part, but happy to see Friday nonetheless.

Much to process from my day yesterday seeing old friends, burying a dear friend and reminiscing.

But for today, I’m here to talk about a feature of our Fair New Mexico that I really, really don’t miss.

Mosquitos.

Now, where I live, I’m sure such creatures exist. It’s just that I’ve not seen ’em.

I’m ok with not seeing them. Pinche insects.

I arrived Wednesday evening at my friend’s home out in the boonies north of Las Cruces, and noticed water standing in all the pecan groves and cotton fields.

“I see everyone is irrigating,” I mention.

Nope, they tell me. Rain. Three inches arrived the day before I did.

Which leaves standing water.

Perfect habitat for *slap* mosquitos.

I sat for maybe eight minutes outside at a table with a citronella candle on it. My arms. Fine. My ankles? Ten bites on the left, eight on the right.

Mosquitos in the house, too!

As I slept, I got zapped on the earlobe. The earlobe! The one place I forgot to apply repellent.

Gah!

And I won’t mention a spot rather close to an unmentionable place where I was also ruthlessly attacked. Twice!

Hate ’em. Always hated them. Sure, I grew up with bug bites up and down my legs, and it was a fact of life. But living without them sure has been pretty durn nice.

I don’t miss them. At all.

I’m not usually a fan of chemicals in the air, but even I cheered when the neighbors called the city to have the spraying truck come out. It helped, but didn’t eliminate all the little buggars.

*scratch* This Benedryl lotion I’m using isn’t helping one bit.

In other, happier, news I’ve been experimenting with night photography because the light noise at my friend’s place is minimal. You can see the ding dang milky way out here!

If I get anything decent, I’ll gladly share the results here.

As for now, onward to the weekend.

Oh The Humanity!

Side note:

I’d considered taking the week off from blogging because awkward commentary on awkward things seemed, perhaps, inappropriate after yesterday’s post.

But then I decided…well hell, writing this blog, no matter how trivial the topic, is what keeps me sane. I need to write something, anything, every day. And so, dear readers, despite my ongoing grief and my travel plans that will take me back to New Mexico for a few days, I’m going to try to keep on writing this week. Because it’s who I am.

Thanks to all for your support in comments and via email. Ya’ll rock.

And now, onward……

So I have a topic I’ve been wanting to talk about for a while.

I’ve not brought it up before because, well, I was dealing with all the emotions.

It’s essential that I my footing on this and make peace.

I don’t think it is any secret that I mostly use Apple products for my computing needs.

I had the great fortune to be able to use a Mac for work in my last three jobs, a time frame of almost fifteen years.

I have Macs at home. I have an iPhone.

Yes. I’m a Mac person.

Doesn’t mean I don’t know how to use the PC, I just haven’t had a lot of need to. Sure the occasional lookup on the PC at the library. Sometimes using my best friend’s machine to check email.

Not a problem.

Well. A month ago, I came to work on my first day, and into my hands they plopped….

A Dell.

Not just a Dell. A three year old Dell.

A three year old Dell that originally came with Vista but has since been blasted with some corporate approved version of some other member of the Windows family. I’ll be dag blarned if I can remember what it is.

(Because one click on the Apple logo in the upper left corner and it will tell me what OS I’m running, but I can’t find the similar on this machine. Oh wait…start….control panel….system…. Ah ha! Windows XP.)

The Good Man assures me that whatever the OS is on this machine is better than Vista.

Oh? So…ok.

I’m getting used to it, using this machine day by day.

It’s slow. It’s stodgy. It’s….well…it’s Windows.

I’m used to “hey, I wish this thingamabooper was over there instead of over here” and so I drag it over and off it goes, happier than anything, to its new location and it just does what it’s supposed to do.

Not so with my Windows. You have to find the thingamabooper in the right file and ask it nicely, maybe even coax it, to come over and perhaps make the transfer. Like a professional bureaucrat, it wants rubber stamps and approvals and nodding heads to let it know that, yes, it might be ok to be over there.

And it will go over there.

And then, later, it will go back to where it came from, without asking.

So okay. I’m adapting. It’s all just fine.

But I have a confession to make…

(I’m so ashamed.)

I find I really kind of like the ol’ right click. I never thought I needed more than one button on my mouse. It turns out…right click is pretty darn handy.

This whole PC thing is not so bad, really!

Sssh. Don’t tell Steve Jobs. He’d be so disappointed!

Propagation of the Species

I work across the street from a public park that borders on marshlands, very near the actual Bay. The proximity of water and the tasty grasses in the marsh entice lots of birds to come visit and stay.

Among others, we have egrets, herons, spoonbills and sandpipers. All so elegant and beautiful.

Here’s a rather grainy shot of a snowy egret, one of my favorite birds. This one usually keeps a beady eye on everyone walking by:

Many of the birds that we get in our beautiful marshes are on the endangered or near endangered species lists.

So it’s good we have a nice habitat here for them.

That said, ya wanna know what bird isn’t on any endangered list and is pretty much in zero danger of extinction?

Geese.

@#$%ing Canada Geese.

Or, as I like to call them, feathered poop factories.

Taken with my iPhone, this is by a walking trail:

That’s not even a small portion of the inventory.

Here’s a wider shot:

Again, to the left and right of this frame there are at least this same number if not more geese.

The one in the center of that photo charged at me, hissing, so I didn’t take any more photos.

The geese eat grass, lots and lots of grass, then they process it internally and drop the leftovers right in the middle of the walking trails.

Their drop offs equal the size of the leavings of a large dog. Only a whole lot greener.

Just. Ew.

This morning coming into work, there was a goose right in the middle of the driveway (which is a long narrow single car path). The goose moved neither right nor left, but strutted right down the center of the lane. I counted ten cars in line behind while Mr. Goose waddled his way into the day.

I was in car number eleven.

These cranky birds have certainly figured out how to continue the prosperity of their species. In a big way.

My elderly uncle, unfortunately now deceased, used to shoot bottle rockets at the Canada geese that befouled the walkway in front of his house in Indiana.

They sort of frown on that here in California, don’t they?

All photos by Karen Fayeth. Click on any photo to see a larger size.

That’s a Travesty!

What’s a travesty?

This, this is a travesty!

I know a lot of people really like Coffee-Mate. A lot of people use Coffee-Mate. It’s very popular.

A dear friend’s husband is a self confessed Coffee-Mate hazelnut flavor addict. He stockpiles it in his fridge.

Weirdo.

Look, I’m here to tell you, this isn’t a food product. I don’t know what it is, but it is definitely NOT a food product.

The label says “contains milk ingredients”.

Uh. “Milk ingredients?”

What in the seventeen kinds of sam hell are “milk ingredients?” That doesn’t say “contains milk” or “contains cream” or “contains anything you’d recognize.” No!

Milk ingredients. And oil. And a bunch of other things you can’t pronounce.

There is a big box of these pods of crap-food in our break room.

It’s the only option for lightening a terrible cup of coffee in the late afternoon when you are desperate for a cuppa and the coffee bar downstairs is closed.

Look, I’m inherently suspicious of any sort of dairy product, even a pseudo-dairy product, that doesn’t spoil when you leave it out on the counter for weeks at a time.

Except for real butter…and even real butter has its time limits.

What is the half-life on a pod of Coffee-Mate? A billion years?

I personally enjoy a good splash of half and half in a cup of joe.

Or as I call it, half of the half, which makes The Good Man laugh.

So with no half of the half on hand, I used some of this Coffee-Mate “creamer.” Cuz I ain’t calling it creamer without them thar sarcastic quotes.

It’s gross. It’s oily. It’s chemical-y.

Just. Ew.

So then I poured out the coffee and tried this, also available in the break room:

While sipping at this sort of tangy beverage from a package that does not include an ingredients list, I did a Google search. I didn’t net any ingredients, but I found this image which shows the main box that the packets come in. The box says “contains no apple…” and the rest is blocked by the packet in front of the box.

I assume it says “contains no apple juice.”

Which means…

This is ALSO not food. This is more chemical crap.

Gah!

I’m not any sort of Birkenstock wearing, tree hugging, raw food eating girl. I like as much red dye number whatever as the next guy.

But even I have my limits.

________________________________

***Note to my readers: I actually wrote this yesterday afternoon. Upon a solid reread today, I was struck by just how much I’ve been whining lately about the no-cost beverage choices at my new place of employ. I’m still new, and while I do have some work to do, I am also sitting around a lot.

Leaving me to my own devices is never a good idea.

As I become busier with my job, I suspect the beverage posts will die down.

Hopefully.

Learning The Language In a Foreign Country

So yeah. The new job. Good job. VERY good job. Great folks. Super team.

Like it. A lot.

However….

(Because you *knew* there was going to be a however)

This is a pretty old school type of company. Because they are so old fashioned, I’ve discovered in my short time here that the straight faced usage of corporate buzz-words is rampant.

Rampant. (just needed to emphasize that)

I would imagine these days that one couldn’t work anywhere and NOT run across the ol’ popular buzzwords, but it’s especially bad here.

“Low hanging fruit,” for example, is one of my all time least favorite expressions. I first heard it back in 1994 in Albuquerque. Yes, I remember the moment I first heard this ridiculous phrase, because I had an immediate “why would you say that” reaction to it.

Guess what I hear just about daily here in the Bay Area in 2010? Yep.

“Think outside the box” still has life.

“Think inside the box” is fairly new, and it’s bandied about a bit. It means, roughly, the old way may not be so bad anymore. (Funny how, in a financial crisis, everyone turns back to the textbooks as a way to bail themselves out.)

“That’s powerful” is one I wish wasn’t taking on life, but it is. Example: “We wrote up the workflow for that process and posted it on line. It’s very powerful.”

Yeah. No.

My super executive boss type guy dropped a “let’s form a Tiger Team” on me two days ago.

Ok. Remember Tiger Teams? I do. It was the year 1997 and I worked for Lockheed. We paid an outside consultant A LOT of money to help us form a Tiger Team to figure out why every meeting we had descended into yelling at each other.

Turns out, we were just a team of very strong personalities from vastly different disciplines (procurement, engineering, marketing, etc) and the only way we could ever get anywhere was by arguing.

So the term “Tiger Team” really makes me twitch.

But by god, I’m on a newly formed Tiger Team here at work.

There is a new bit of jargon that seems to be catching on. I hate it. Oh I hate it. Almost as much as I hate “low hanging fruit.”

Ready for it?

The phrase is….”set it and forget it.”

As in, “With that new reporting software, you can just set it and forget it. It’s so great!”

Or

“Now that we’ve established pricing on that product, we can’t just set it and forget it. We have to keep checking the demand reports.”

So let me just say that while I’m a longtime fan of Ron Popeil and his Ronco commercials, I fully blame him for bringing this atrocity into my life.

Business people are seriously using a phrase from a dagblam infomercial for a @#$%ing chicken roaster!

Why? Why does this show up at my conference table?!?!?!?

The Good Man says he heard this phrase in use a few years back, and I believe him. It’s new to me and I sure as heck don’t want to set it, and now that everyone is using it, there’s no possible way I *can* forget it.

I guess “set it and forget it” is just a new square added to the buzzword bingo playing card.

There’d better be good prizes, because at this job, I’m gonna be winning (or is it losing) every day!