As I mentioned in a previous entry, we had an uninvited house guest our first week living in the new house. Beans was in the basement when she heard what sounded like frantic scratching on the basement window. The window is covered from the outside making it impossible to see whatever is on the other side of it.  So Beans went exploring.

That's when she discovered Percy, our houseguest.

Percy Titters is a baby skunk that fell into the window well of the basement window because the previous owners of this house did not have a window well covering over the said window well. Which means anything can fall down there and we're stuck with the result because we didn't think to check for window well covers before we moved in. Silly us.

I thought the first thing to do when Beans discovered we had a skunk, which at first she mistook for a humongous super-skunk, was to name it. If we're going to have a house guest, I think it should have a name; it became Percy Titters.

The first thing Beans did, after a few moments of panic were over of course, was to call Animal Control. The woman at AC suggested Beans try to lure the skunk out of the window well. And just how, pray tell, does one LURE a skunk anywhere? I offered to show some leg, or if push came to shove (so long as shoving didn't involve sharing space with Percy), I said I'd flash some cleavage. Beans noted, and rightly so, that my cleavage probably wouldn't do a thing for Percy. So she let her fingers do the walking in the Yellow Pages because now she was afraid to let her feet go outside just in case Percy would get spooked and spray. We REALLY wanted to avoid a skunk spray if at all possible.

The first person Beans called said he might come out to get Percy, but Percy would more than likely leave our place dead, and Percy definitely would spray. Wonderful. Beans didn't like the idea of becoming a skunk killer. And even though I'm conservative which supposedly means I hate all living things except people (and even then it's on a case by case basis), I wasn't crazy about becoming a skunk murderer either.

So Beans called someone else.

The next guy on the list was more hopeful. He said if he came, he'd bring a contraption that Percy could use as a kind of ladder enabling Percy to walk right out of the window well all by himself. No muss, no fuss, no death, no spray. Sounded like a plan to us.

When this guy showed up and saw Percy he said Percy was a 5 month old baby skunk. By then we'd gotten a better look at Percy's cute little skunk face and thought Percy was an adorable critter who did not deserve to die.  The Animal Guy put his contraption into the window well and said he'd come back the next day to pick it up. By then, he said, Percy would be gone.

Which may have happened if Percy were not a 5 month old mentally challenged baby skunk. Percy didn't know he was supposed to use the contraption to get out of the window well. Instead, Percy used the ladder to hide under and sleep.  Occasionally Percy poked his little head out to look around and scratch some more on the side of the window well and the basement window, but Percy never made a move to pack up and move out.

By the next evening Percy had gone without food or water for a whole day, but he still seemed in no hurry to go anywhere. So the Animal Guy came back and somehow, without disturbing or otherwise frightening Percy, put a trap into the window well. It took Percy a very long time to finally wander into the trap. And believe me there wasn't much room at all to wander, but Percy finally did the right thing and allowed himself to be saved. The Animal Guy came back to get Percy and took him off to a much better place where he could eat and drink and meander in far better and more spacious surroundings.

Meanwhile Beans went and got a window well cover, so even though Percy was just cute as a bug, he won't be staying for anymore sleep-overs if we have anything to say about it. Thus ended the skunk saga. Just in time for the Wasp saga to begin.

I've just discovered The Complimenter, thanx to WarCryGirl. Now I'm feeling guilty because I said all that stuff about the dysfunctional family reunion in the next post down without saying a single complimentary thing about those folks. Surely there must be something I can say that may take some of the sting out of... well, that part about the intolerable brats may have been a bit harsh. True, but harsh.

So here's my compliment to the folks who can't seem to keep their dicks in their pants. Ready? Here goes... They all wear very nice pants.

That's it.

I'll try to do better with more compliments when the subject doesn't involve dicks who can't remember to play any home games.

WhatsHisName's family is having their annual reunion this weekend. Since I'm no longer married to the dick, I don't get invited, but Beans does. She has declined her invitation. She's decided she doesn't want to drive 2 hours to sit in a pasture and commune with horses and then drive 2 hours to get home again.  Beans has allergies as well as a well ordered priority list that places breathing above most other things. Communing with horses is so far down her priority list... well, it's not even there. So, she will be passing up the opportunity of the year: to go see how the other half lives.

It has been noted that I consider myself better than WHN's family. They're right. I do. And I am proud to say I have passed along this attitude to Beans. When it comes to the machinations of WHN's family, I am a first rate snob, and I like it that way. Beans does her familial duty by WHN's people, and I say that's all that's required of her. The reason I feel this way is because...

The site for the annual reunion used to be held in our hometown where most all of the family members lived or at least had a short drive to reach. The host for the occasion had built a backyard pool with a beautiful deck attached. He did this to have just the  kind of party the family reunion is supposed to be. While the reunion was held there it was very well attended. The only problem, and this was mainly my problem, was that the host's children were intolerable brats. No one else seemed to mind that, or maybe they just knew a good place to have a reunion when they saw one and didn't want to make waves.  I'd rather have eaten my hamburger standing in the middle of a corn field with bugs and a hot sun beating down on me than eat anywhere near those intolerable brats, but that's just me. As I said, I'm the snob of the piece.

One year the host's pool and deck became unavailable for the reunion. As a matter of fact, the host, his wife, and his intolerable brats  became unavailable to attend the reunion at all. The reason for this was because of WHN's new wife. I'd divorced WHN whereupon he eventually married his old mistress who was also the former mistress of our past family reunion host. The host and WHN are cousins, and it appeared they shared a bit more than family ties. They also shared an interest in the same woman as well as the same work place. Eventually their little three-way attracted the attention of both the boss of their company and the host's wife. Neither of those two women reacted well at all. The boss fired both the host and WHN; the host's wife went to see "the other woman" and generally made everyone's life hell until that relationship deflated faster than an inner tube holding the intolerable brats would have if I'd only had the nerve to stick a pin in it.

For a while there were problems finding a place to accomodate the yearly gathering. And then another cousin moved to a different state, got involved in an affair with a co-worker at his place of business, and when his wife found out about it, he got dumped faster than you can say intolerable brats survived hypothetical inner tube drowning.  He moved to a farm and took on boarding horses as a side line.  That's how the family reunion got moved and how horses became invited guests.

Now WHN is the one who won't come to the family reunion. He could go, but if he were to do that others would be very unhappy about it. WHN's wife has managed to alienate all of WHN's family. She has threatened to have WHN's daughter, Beans, arrested. She has interfered with WHN's older daughter's relationship with her father so that there ceased to be one. She has begun a feud with WHN's sister. No one ever fights with WHN's sister. She has trouble stringing two words together that make sense much less engage in a verbal battle of name calling. WHN's wife has insulted every member of WHN's family to whom she has ever been introduced.  Another of WHN's cousins, who really didn't spend much time with WHN's wife at all, told me he had this urge to use some ancient VooDoo ritual to pull WHN's wife's brains out through her nose. That particular cousin is supposed to be close to genius in mental aptitude. I defer to his intelligence and think the rest of the family should do the same.

So, it appears that those eligible to attend the family reunion are growing smaller and smaller in number.  Big Dumb B, WHN's brother-in-law, will be leading the cavalcade in driving to the reunion site. Since Big Dumb B drives like a bat out of hell, we can only hope everyone survives the trip there and back again. They will be spending at least 4 hours on the road just to have a few hours with the horses and the food, which will attract those gigantic horse flies, and a swimming pool. They will also sit around and talk about the people who didn't show up and probably rake WHN's wife over the coals. I'd be interested in hearing if the rocket scientist cousin has any new ideas for what to do with WHN's wife's brains, but since I'm not invited and wouldn't do the four hour drive just to hear him opine on the subject, that's out of the question. Instead Beans and I will stay put and be thankful as all get out that we aren't reuniting with that family any longer.

George Carlin says that we all need a place to put our stuff. That's why people have homes. There wouldn't be any need to stake out particular territory, assign it an address, and set up shop inside of it if we just didn't need that place to put our stuff.  I'm not one to argue with George Carlin because, for the most part, I think George is dead on target with most of his observations. But in this particular case I don't think George explored the intricacies of housing our stuff as thoroughly as he might have. For one thing, he didn't happen to mention what people should do when they have entirely too much stuff for the place they've chosen to put it. But then maybe George didn't want to complicate the subject. So, George is correct about needing that place to store our stuff. I'm just going to expound a bit on the stuff George missed.

Like what to do when you have entirely too much stuff, but you have to move to a new storage facility. My first solution was to torch all the old stuff and buy new. This is the ideal solution if one is independently wealthy. Unfortunately, I am not.

Instead I quickly learned the art of removing all sentimentality from my possessions and looking at them through the focus of will use again before the end of the decade. This drastically reduces the stuff storage limits. It also helps to have a wonderful sanitation engineer expert. I had no idea just how good my choice of refuse removal professionals was until I moved. I quickly found out that my guys would haul away anything but large appliances and anything containing Freon. That information was like getting the Keys To The Kingdom.

I also discovered Goodwill. They take anything still usable. And I had lots of that.  The thing is, I should have started with the sorting process about a year before moving so nothing non-essential would get carted off to the new place.

Unfortunately I had no prior warning that both my landlord and his wife would die within 3 months of each other, and that Bob, the executor of their estate, would see dollar signs where I saw my storage facility.  BTW, Bob isn't Bob's real name. Bob is named Bob because he looks exactly like the Bob from Twin Peaks who killed Laura Palmer. Finding Bob on one's doorstep is a scary proposition at best. It can be made worse if Bob brings his girlfriend who looks exactly like Elvira. Bob and Elvira make a striking couple; they do not make very good landlords. Bob and Elvira wanted to sell my storage facility and they really wanted to sell it to me.  When that didn't work out, they decided to turn the house over to the Realtor from Hell to sell for them.

Moving is definitely cramping my style and seriously interfering with my journaling. I thought I could do both. I often have these lofty ideas that fizzle out when they crash headlong into reality. I think it comes from my Wonder Woman Complex.

• The Jackson Verdict
• Vacationing in Aruba when it involves disappearing teenagers
• Deep Throat making a fortune
• Gitmo
• Runaway Bride Drama Queens
• Tucker Carlson is not a dickhead
• About a bazillion and five other things

 

Michael Jackson really needs to be slapped up alongside the head. Not hard enough so that his wig flies off, you understand, just hard enough so maybe, and I know this is a risky proposition, some sense gets knocked into him.

It was tabloid news time on Fox News over the weekend. It's not nearly as good without Rita Cosby, but Geraldo was there to do his schtick. Geraldo is a big supporter of Jacko, and Geraldo doesn't even try to hide his bias behind that Fair and Balanced facade. Geraldo's story is that Jacko is innocent, albeit a little misguided, and that all this silly trial business is just... well, that's where Geraldo kind of trails off into gibberish because other than the old they're-lying-grifters-out-for-money, he can't come up with a reason for going through this whole prosecution fiasco that makes any sense. He did toss in the suggestion that there's racism at work here because there was careful planning to be sure there were no African-Americans on the jury. Right. There's Hispanics and relatives of sex offenders which normal people consider minority representation. Except Geraldo. He's still hanging onto the race card.

It didn't take long to get the idea that Rivera is the only media person out there who gives much credibility to Jacko's innocence. It seems that, on the basis of one last look at the police questioning of the accuser during the initial investigation, the courtroom was swayed toward the boy's side. That must have been some kind of impressive tape because for months all the media has been saying is that the boy's mother is a liar ergo so is he. There was even talk about how the mother sent the boy for acting lessons. So taken to its logical conclusion, I'd have thought the last minute airing of the police tape would have been riddled with accusations of acting. Instead, Dan Abrams was almost moved to tears. Others talked about how powerful that video was. And what did Jacko have to counterbalance that tape? A video of him talking about having celebrity chimp parties.  Geraldo was the only one I heard who was swayed by the chimp parties rather than the accuser's emotional discomfort at talking about being molested. But then this is Geraldo who once seriously did a piece encouraging people across the country to participate in an Adopt-A-Horse program. Wild mustang horses. First you have to catch it, and if it doesn't stomp you to death in the process, then you can adopt it.

The rest of the media had an epiphany that last day in court during the summations. All of sudden they noticed that Jackson didn't look well. He'd lost weight. No one could say with a straight face that his color wasn't too good or that he looked peaked, because we all know that's his natural look. But since his dad says he's not eating and has lost weight, OMG! Jacko is worried.  One media stooge mentioned that if Jacko goes to jail he'll have to lose the wig and the plastic nose. So THAT'S why the judge didn't revoke his bail and put him in lock up when he pulled all those stunts being late. No one wants to face the wigless, noseless moonwalker on a daily basis if they don't have to. It's okay for other prisoners awaiting Jacko in his new home to see that, but us regular folks must be spared.

So what does Jackson do now that the media has, for the most part, gone over to the other side? He gets sick again. Stories start surfacing about unapproved machines showing up at Never Land. Machines that have something to do with regulating the heart. There's hydration problems. With Jacko, not the machine. Dick Gregory materializes from nowhere to give medical opinions. Gregory is not a doctor, but this is Jacko-land. We don't bother with trivialities like common sense or credentials.

While no one in the media comes right out and says it, although a few have come close to brushing up against it, after all this time and all these grand stand plays, Jackson still doesn't get it. He still doesn't seem to have a clue that no matter how much he protests that he is Peter Pan living in a magical world, the rest of us don't live there with him so we don't view his life in the way he wants us to. No matter how much he manipulates events.

Michael Jackson has been whining for years that he never had a childhood so he's going to spend the rest of his life recreating one. And if there's events here and there that look like pedophilia, well, so be it. He's Peter Pan, you see.

I don't buy that Peter Pan crap. What I see is a petulent child who will do anything to get his way. That's learned behavior. I have no doubt that he had a seriously screwed up childhood with a family that redefines lunatics. But at some point Michael must have learned how to manipulate the people around him to bend to his will. Because of his celebrity and talent, he pulled the same routine on his fans and those who viewed him with casual amusement.

Only he's not funny. Normal 45 year old men do not sleep with little boys. As hard as Jackson protests his innocence, he has flatly refused to accept the rest of the world's definition of normal by passing it off as something that simply doesn't apply to him. Except laws do apply to him. In spite of the histrionics of hospital visits in the middle of the night and clear attempts to manipulate the press and everyone else watching, the law of the land and of California does apply to him. Now I just hope the jury sees it that way.

There's a strange item in the news for the past few days. A girl who just graduated from high school went to Aruba with a group of her classmates. She never showed up for the flight home. Her mother and a girlfriend are making the rounds of the cable news talk shows discussing this girl's disappearance and some minor details about her. They claim she's very, very responsible. She was ranked 25th in her graduating class. She's planning to go to college in the Fall. Everyone loved her. Her minister says she was a wonderful girl who everyone loved. This story sounds terrible. Another of those missing person stories that is chilling because it could happen to any of us. Only this is worse because this is such a young girl. Just graduated from high school with her whole life ahead of her.

Except the more that is revealed about this trip to Aruba, the more questions I have about what the hell those kids were doing. Apparently there were chaperones, but they couldn't have been very conscientious. Because it seems that this young girl with some of her friends were in a bar in Aruba. When her friends left to go back to the hotel for the night, she got into a car with 3 local island men. That's the last time anyone in her group ever saw her. She was not in her room the next morning. The details of this are sketchy at best because as soon as the questions get too specific, the girlfriend clams up and prefers not to say more.

Now, while this could certainly end up being a terrible tragedy, it seems a little incongruous to me to have this girl's friends and family showing up on television talking about what an intelligent and happy and well liked girl she is when she wasn't smart enough to know better than to stay out of a car with 3 island locals who drove her God knows where for God knows what purpose. These men have been questioned, and they admit to driving off with her. However, they say they returned her to the hotel later that night and dropped her off. Surveillance cameras show no record of that, but the police say they have no reason to hold any of these men for further questioning.

This is not the time to ask probing questions about what the hell kind of trip this was and who these chaperones were who were supposed to be responsible for the welfare of those kids. But at some point, someone had better start coming up with answers that make more sense than what's being reported so far. Because the implication here is that an 18 year old girl at an island resort allowed herself to be picked up by 3 men she didn't know beyond meeting them in a bar. No chaperone stopped her. None of her friends did anything more than watch her get into a strange car with 3 men and drive away. That's not quite so chilling because the fact of the matter is it couldn't happen to any one of us. It only happens to someone phenomenally stupid.

The Cure For Boredom AKA WarcryGirl is never EVER boring, and she's got the blog title to prove it. If you haven't seen her keychain contest, click yourself over there right now and you too may at some point win yourself a tacky keychain. All keychain festishists know that tacky keychains are the best kind of keychains to own. I've put in my application and resume for the next round. So, go vote for the winner of the current keychain and get your name on the list for the next one.

This has been a Public Service Announcement.

Oh Puhleeeeeze. Jennifer Wilbanks has cut herself a deal. For money, an admission of guilt, and a well scripted apology, she has entered a guilty plea to the felony charge of lying to law enforcement.

And what about the media? Who holds them accountable for plastering Jennifer Wilbanks' buggy eyes all over the place for days? Who makes them apologize for their implications that the fiance had more to do with Wilbanks' disappearance than met the eye?  When is Geraldo going to apologize for dragging his sorry ass to Jennifer's hometown and going on a town tour that was carefully edited for all the folks glued to tv sets anxiously awaiting news of Jennifer's body showing up in some godforsaken place?

Jennifer Wilbanks may need psychiatric help. She obviously concocted a rather sexually explicit tale of what her phony abductors did to her. She may definitely be nominated for an Oscar for her performance on the phone with 911 in New Mexico. But Jennifer Wilbanks is NOT responsible for splashing her picture and her life story all over tv for days. Had anyone in the media bothered to do some background checking, they'd have discovered that Jennifer Wilbanks had been troubled for years, so despite what her family and fiance believed, she was capable of staging the whole debacle for nothing more than attention. Instead the media seized her disappearance to fill up time on cable news channels.  And it was the media who was most disappointed and had most of the egg all over their collective faces when a live, warm body showed up in New Mexico instead of a cold dead one.

There's a lesson to be learned here. If one is going to disappear then one had better have the good sense to show up dead because otherwise one could end up in a heap of trouble for cutting one's hair and taking a bus trip.

I'm disappointed because the only thing I wanted out of all this was to see what kind of chop job Jennifer Wilbanks did on her hair.

Thank You to all the brave men and women who have sacrificed so much to protect and defend our country. The courage and dedication these people display on a daily basis is phenomenal, and we are profoundly indebted to them for their service. Our thoughts and prayers continue to be with all those who have served so honorably in the past and those who continue this proud tradition in the present. 

God Bless each and every one.