I emerged from another writing fit this evening to notice that:

a) the ants are back; and

b) they brought a friend, probably named Mickey.
Whence follows the ritual scrubbing of the countertops, the liberal application of Ant-B-Gone, and the baiting of the mousetrap with peanut butter.

Ye gods, I hope those were just really large, really odd ( Read more... )

Things are still rotten here: the downstairs landlord, having installed the best filter Home Depot can supply on his furnace [HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER], refuses to do anything else, says I should negotiate with the smoking tenant [MORE HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER], and declares his readiness to rent to smoking tenants in future [OKAY, I'M CRYING NOW]. I've ( Read more... )

Just got word from a doctor friend that the clinic she works at -- the one that serves the poor, the immigrant, and the disabled of a major city -- is being shut down by its parent institution. This leaves my friend out of a job and her patients out of luck. Grrr.

At least, they sounded angry to begin with. Now they sound as if they may have settled their differences in order to plan ... something. Perhaps another assault on my patio tomato plant, which they previously stripped of fruit. I moved it inside and it bloomed again. So it's currently sitting on the porch under my watchful eye for an interval ( Read more... )

Natural disaster #3: minor flooding. Not as bad as what came with Irene, but still pretty annoying. (I hope kanja177 isn't stuck on a train somewhere -- things started getting bad up by her yesterday.)

Got my fireandice2011 prompts. I signed up partly because I've written some stuff I really liked for this contest in the past, but mostly to give my muse a reason to ( Read more... )

First an earthquake; now this. It's enough to make one question the fallaciousness of the Gambler's Fallacy.

My immediate neck of the woods escaped serious damage -- I think most of the marginal trees and tree limbs came down in last year's windstorm (though my friend C lost power when a 100-year-old tree toppled onto electrical lines in his ( Read more... )

So I just experienced my first earthquake -- a thankfully brief and nondestructive event locally. The floor underfoot rolled a bit and the cubicle warren vibrated, but it was all pretty low frequency (the DVD in my player* didn't even skip). A few heads popped up to inquire, "Did you feel that?" -- but given that the construction crew upstairs ( Read more... )

Good news:For the past two nights I have been able to sleep with the windows open and the fans on. Whee! (Though that did mean I was startled straight into wakefulness by the neighborhood fire siren going off at 1 a.m. this morning like Gabriel's trump. Shut windows dampen the noise noticeably. I hope the Apocalypse happens in the dead of ( Read more... )

I was on my way to the trolley stop this morning when I saw black smoke billowing up about a block west. That, I thought uneasily, cannot be good. Then I saw people running into the street, exhibiting the unmistakable signs of panic, at which point I hauled out my cell phone to call 911. I had just hit the first number when the fire sirens went ( Read more... )

I arrived home yesterday evening to discover my kitchen swarming with a sub-Biblical plague of ants. I drowned some (ants in the sink!) and Lysoled others (ants on the countertops and running along the baseboards!) and squished the rest (ants on the cabinet doors! ants under the kitchen mat! ants in the rice cooker!). Skin crawling (literally ( Read more... )