Eight-Legged Freaks

Have you seen this week’s New Yorker? Or maybe it was last week’s? The one with the mummies on the cover? Oh my god… There’s an article in it about this spider lady, and—

(shudder)

I don’t like spiders. I’m better about them than I used to be: I don’t have to run screaming naked from the house anymore if I see one in the shower. The porch is far enough for me to go now. But then again, I’ve never had a porch before, so maybe I’m not so much better after all.

Anyway this lady – who is apparently like four feet tall and weighs about a pound and a half – divides her time between crawling around dank basements known to harbor poisonous spiders, and “milking” the ones she catches (and brings home in her pockets) for their venom.

Now, I don’t love spiders, but somehow I never thought before about them having “venom.” I mean, I know they bite (some people don’t believe it, but they do – you should see the welts on Johnny’s legs), and some I know can kill you with their bite, but what spiders have in their horrid little mouths is poison – special spider poison – not venom. Snakes have venom. I don’t mind snakes.

This lady goes on to say all kinds of things about spiders I didn’t know before, some that doesn’t even bother me. Did you know, for example, that there’s a kind in South America that lives in colonies by the thousands and cooperates in tasks like web-building and whatevering-it-is–they’re-doing-to-their-prey? That’s kind of cool. I mean, I wouldn’t want to accidentally step on one or anything, but still, it’s kind of cool.

Some of it, though, is – to say the least – disturbing.

This spider bites you and the area around the bite turns black and sloughs off gradually until you’re left with a gaping hole. This one hides in wait and then drops down on your head (okay, they’re trying to drop down on other spiders’ heads, but still). This other one kills its rival and adopts the rival’s children…

Yikes. Who knew spiders took care of spider children? I thought they just laid eggs in your ears or something and then carried on their merry way. Now I have to worry about murderous foster mothers trying to get back in your ears to bring the bastards food and shit?

But no, I don’t. Have to worry about that, I mean. Those kinds of spiders don’t live here.

See, there are more spiders – and more kinds of spiders – in this house I accidentally bought than I have ever seen in my entire life. And I'm not fond of spiders. I've seen thick, leggy yellow ones; tea-green, iridescent ones; brown ones that make funnel-shaped webs and swear at you when you look at them; black ones that look like muscley asterisks and jump on you when you try to squish them... Ever since we moved here I've lived in full-time spider red-alert — but at least I knew there weren’t any kill-you kinds that live in Massachusetts.

Except for spider-lady says there are. Spider Lady says that – what with shipments coming from the Orient and South America – there are venomous arachnids in every state plus Canada. Canada!

Yeesh.

I knew I hated spiders.

Scrubbing On My Last Nerve

I don't have the patience for this.

I mean, I'm not exactly one for the patience to begin with - the reason I haven't been posting much lately is that the website has been running slow and I get frustrated and log off to go watch Scrubs reruns on Comedy Central. I haven't had a new movie from Netflix in weeks for the same reason. Good thing Scrubs holds up after repeated viewings. But what I don't have the patience for this time is this whole changeover-to-gas-heat thing, and I don't see how Scrubs can help me there...

When I called last week to tell them their plumber never showed up and I hadn't heard from any sales rep like they said I would, I dialled the number listed under Keyspan in the phone book for "oil-to-gas conversions," but the lady said I had the wrong department. She said I needed to talk to Keyspan. Oh, well, duh. Sorry. I thought when I called the number listed for Keyspan and they answered the phone saying "Hello, Keyspan," then that meant I was calling Keyspan. No, she explained, that was different. But she forgave me my stupidity.

Then she said she didn't have me "in her system" and interrupted me every time I tried to ask if that meant they didn't have my changeover request or if they had deleted my account all together. Whenever I uttered so much as a syllable ("Does-," "But-," "I-") she'd cut me off. "Ma'am," she'd say, "I'm trying to help you," as if I were already irate - and then do her level best to ensure I would be.

She eventually connected me straight through to what she said was the right number, but that guy - after keeping me on the phone for five minutes and taking down all my information - said it wasn't his department either. Finally I asked him to forget we'd ever spoken, pretend I was calling for the very first time and I was interested in changing over - tell me what number to call and don't connect me through. That worked.

This guy apologized but didn't seem too terribly surprised that the plumber hadn't bothered to come or even call. "People get busy," he said, did I want to give the guy another shot? Oh yes, please, when somebody makes me take a half-day off work and sit around the house afraid to get on the computer or the phone, or even take a shower, for fear of missing them, and then they don't come and don't have the courtesy to call - usually what I like to do in that situation is give the guy a second chance because, hey, I haven't managed to give him any money yet!

He gave me an appointment with a different plumber for Saturday morning (this was Thursday). He also said the sales rep wouldn't call until after the plumber came.

So of course the sales rep called later that afternoon. I missed the call. When I returned it I got a generic "please leave a message for the department" voice mail box. No one's called back yet, but I'm still hoping.

The new plumber did at least call to say he wasn't coming but, again, I missed the call. It wasn't that an emergency came up or anything, he called a day ahead of time to say he was going away for the weekend and asking to resschedule, which is considerate and appropriate, and certainly appreciated, but still, it makes me wonder: they gave me the appointment Thursday and he called Friday to say he couldn't make it Saturday... Were they just willy-nilly setting up appointments without checking whether or not the plumber was available?

This time it was I who did not return the call. One of the three times I was on hold with Keyspan last week, a recorded voice had taken care to tell me, over and over and over again, that they were very, very busy with all the requests coming in from customers like me, brilliant enough to be interested in changing over to gas heat. I tried anyway, but my patience is shot. I'll just curl back up into my ball now and wait for summer, try again when things slow down a little bit.

In the meantime I have this card here from my sales rep. He wants to know how my apointment went with the plumber and hopes I'll be a warm and happy gas heat customer for years to come. This is the second card, actually. He sent me one about the first guy and I sent it back saying that, so far at least, I wasn't too impressed. What should I say about the second guy?

Oh hey look, Scrubs is on!

Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore

Oh, god, we’ve really got to get out of here.

The news today is that there’s a proposal up for vote at the (“Now, Hat-Free!”) Town Council meeting tomorrow “that would require business owners and landlords to provide proof that they don’t hire or rent rooms to illegal immigrants” (I quote from the Boston Globe).

Now, let’s be clear about the fact that Johnny is not – and hasn’t been for at least a dozen years – illegal. Let’s also shelve the fact that there is already, and has been, a perfectly good and long-established federal law in place covering the hiring of illegal immigrants. Let’s just, for the moment, examine the details of this particular proposed municipal ordinance.

What is the purpose of this proposal? Well, according to the gentleman who put it on the table, it is “respect for the law.” And how will this be achieved? Oh, please, let me just quote again:

“A volunteer panel of citizens would be appointed to ‘invite’ landlords and business owners to register with a town anti-illegals program. Registrants would be given decals with American flags to display on their properties … The volunteer committee would be able to investigate anyone it believed had an illegal worker or tenant, using such documentation as digital photos or videos. There would be no fines for violators. Compliance would result from ‘peer pressure.’”

Um, racketeering, anyone?

Isn’t it enough that they beat the hell out of the Irishmen? Do they really need to start spying on the Indians as well?

Oh, but wait, apparently we have a logical inspiration behind this “volunteer registration” program. Turns out the guy proposing it had a tree taken down out of his yard and the company that did it was teeming with illegals. How did he know? “They couldn’t communicate in English," he says. "That was the conclusion I came to.”

On the flip side, though, the council isn't all that xenophobic. The Councilor-at-Large, no less, is dismissing most of the groundswell he’s had supporting the proposal, because he doesn’t think the folks emailing him are local.

Well, good for him. What tipped him off?

"He doesn’t recognize their names."

TOWNVILLE UPDATE:

Town Council has voted to disallow all hats in chambers. Hue and cry results. So far, a newspaper survey of high school boys shows the prevailing sentiment to be “I’ll wear a hat there if I wanna.” No speculations yet as to what business a bunch of high school boys would have in Council chambers. Still okay to kick the shit out of strangers on the sidewalk.

Children(ey) of the Corn

I don’t know what I was listening to yesterday – the radio, I think. Whatever it was, they were talking about alternative fuel sources, and I paid attention (sort of) because it so happens we’ve been having some fossil-fuel issues lately at our house.

They started out talking about ethanol and how it isn’t really working out the way certain Presidents had hoped, because it turns out “replenishable” and “infinite” are two completely different words. Not only can they not possibly grow enough corn to make enough fuel fast enough, but now also the corn they can produce is costing more because of the increased demand. So now anything made from corn itself (Post Toasties, Twinkies, succotash, Dick Cheney), anything made from corn oil (margarine, Twinkies, salad dressing, porn), from corn syrup (Twinkies, Budweiser, Jessica Simpson), or anything that consumes corn or is made from something that consumes corn (chickens (and therefore eggs), cows (and therefore milk), pigs (and therefore Twinkies)) – all that stuff ends up costing more as well.

These voices I was hearing went on to discuss other alternatives to the corn-based alternative, among them (and I quote): “woodchips, switchgrass, straw and corncobs.” Switchgrass? What the hell is switchgrass? Am I going to have to spend long winters in the lean-to, twisting fistfuls of hay into sticks of kindling like Laura Ingalls? Why doesn’t Dick Cheney just call Rumplestiltskin (oh, you know he knows him) and have him spin it all into black gold? Plus somebody might want to point out here that corncobs come from corn…

Next, they speculated as to garbage. There’s plenty of garbage lying around, they said, somebody ought to figure out a way to turn that garbage into fuel! I remember this conversation from the oil crisis of the 1970s; I remember the trash mountain at the dump we used to go to then as well. I immediately, in fact, got a sense-memory of the smell of that festering pile, and by the time the urge to purge subsided the voices had moved on.

They were saying something now about how growing all those plants (I assume they meant the switchgrass) would have the bonus effect of removing all the CO2 from the air that's released by burning fuel (well, I can’t swear they said it would remove “all” the CO2, but they said something about it). That’s all well and good, but if you remember your life sciences from high school, then you’ll remember that the end result of all that photosynthesis is oxygen and something called leutinizing hormone, which stimulates the pituitary gland to — oh wait, maybe that’s the menstrual cycle. I never could keep those two things straight. (Horror movie idea: Little Shop of Horrors II: The Alternative).

Anyway, this all sounds like great stuff, and I hope they figure it all out, but in the meantime Johnny and I have been trying unsuccessfully to convert our house over to “clean-burning, efficient, natural gas heat.” For all their touting of its benefits, Keyspan doesn’t seem too terribly interested in actually talking to us about this. They did want me to know, however – via recorded message when I was on hold trying to find out why their plumber failed to show – that (and I didn’t write this down, so I’m paraphrasing) “90% of the natural gas we use is from right here in America.”

Well, yes, but so is 90% of Dick Cheney. And I wouldn’t want him lurking around my basement.

Huh.

Plumber never showed up at all.

Didn't see that one coming...

How Long Till Springtime?

While I wait for the plumber to not show up until I've left for work, I'll fill in a little background on the whole furnace fiasco...

The furnace was new when we bought the house. Not brand-spanking, but enough that with any luck (oh, I am a riot, aren't I?) we wouldn't have to replace it before the fixed rate on our mortgage expired and we had to move along.

Shortly after we moved in, a stranger stopped by and said that she was the one who'd arranged to have the furnace installed for the old lady who'd lived (and died) here. This lady said she still had all the paperwork at home and she promised to bring it over. At least, I think she did. We may have made her up. We didn't catch her name and we never saw her again (maybe it was the lady who used to live here...), but we've come to find out it doesn't matter anyway, because once you buy the house you void the furnace warranty. Apparently there's some sort of vibe surrounding Closing Day that messes the furnace up so bad - kind of like sticking a tuna sandwich in the VCR - that there's no way the manufacturer can continue to vouch for its reliability.

Anyway, we had it serviced right away. May 28, 2004 - a date I remember because a year and one day later the basement filled up with dense black smoke and (after I called the guys) I went to my check register to see exactly how long it had been. When the guys came they said it was just due for servicing. I knew it had to be done every year but I thought it was odd that it would become such a black-smoke emergency on day 366. They didn't seem concerned, though, so why worry?

The next winter we came to suspect that these folks - well, we got a few deliveries that were supposedly bigger than our tank - let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they didn't have the most accurate gauge on their oil truck. So I threw a dart at the phone book and picked a new company. Signing up with them included one free service on the boiler, and when they came (in June, I think) they found parts that needed replacing to the tune of $265. Ah well, better to have caught it, right?

Then, over this past Thanksgiving, we noticed black soot stains on the chimney pipe. The pipe was one of the parts replaced for that $265, so we were sure the stains were new. Since it was the holiday weekend and we didn't want to pay emergency prices for something we went ahead and assumed was not an emergency, Johnny asked a friend (who does this for a living, who is neither retired nor disabled, and who he did meet at the pub but who was not drunk at the time) to take a look at it.

Well, Friend opened up the furnace and discovered he was the first to ever do so. Certainly in the three years we've owned the house, and probably much longer than that, no one who had been paid to service the boiler had ever bothered to open the thing up and clean the soot out. It was packed with gunk and the cast iron was corroding away because of it. Freind's advice at the time was to replace it immediately because he couldn't promise it would last the winter. We didn't have however many thousands of dollars it would take to replace the furnace (and this was all before we found out about the chimney), so first we tried talking to both "service" companies who'd shafted us and then the furnace manufacturer. Then we decided the best plan was to curl up in little defeated balls, hope for the best and wait for spring to come.

We've spent the last few months looking into boilers, wood stoves, oil companies, Airstream trailers and one-way tickets to Tahiti. For some reason, we decided to go with gas. I don't remember why anymore, and anyway, I've got to go to work...