Return of the Bugs

The weather turns colder, leaves litter the sidewalk and it rains half the week.

Fall is here and that means my DC apartment is once again infested with freaky looking camel crickets. (They don't have a hump. They don't carry anything on their back. They don't live in the desert. I can't figure out what is so camel-ly about these camel crickets.)

Anyway, I found three of these nasty jumping bugs in the laundry room today. But unlike my rather embarrassing antics of a year ago, I handled myself rather well I think. I crushed one under the heel of my dress shoe. The other I slammed with a box of dryer sheets, leaving the carcass with a fresh odor and no static cling. And the last one got the message and fled behind the washer.

I'm sure I'll get that one sooner or later too.

Unlike Leah's rather generous catch and release policy with bugs, I'm more of an executioner. For bugs, particularly scary looking bugs, breaking into my apartment is a death sentence.

Bring it crickets! I'm ready for you this year.

Bird Watching

Why watch a video when you can see the real deal?

We told you previously about the DVD we bought our cats to entertain them with pictures of tasty birds and delicious squirrels and even those crunchy bugs. Mmmm bugs! Ralph and Georgette would watch and occasionally attack the TV, but they were smart enough to know the critters weren’t real. Their interest waned.

Then Leah hung a bird feeder outside our living room window. Soon word spread among the neighborhood birds that some chumps were giving away free grub every single day. After that, we were bird central, resulting in our version of reality television for our cats.

Our plan had two problems.

First, the bird feeder is way too close to our car, which is now covered in bird droppings.

And second, the cats go nuts for the birds, jump on the windowsill and scare them away, which really is more annoying that fun.

Leah’s fix was to coat the glass with a reflective tint, which means that during the day our windows look like mirrors for those on the street and more importantly for the birds dining on our complimentary buffet.



Now the birds — and even the occasional squirrels — can chow down, even with two cats just a foot away. It’s good for the birds. It entertains our cats. And as for our car? Well, it’s still covered in bird droppings.

You Gotta Do Something

Poor Bowie was having a rough night. The tiny kitten sat on a stoop a few blocks from Temple University shivering, his (or maybe her) fur all wet for some unknown reason.

Leah and her law school friend Jamie couldn’t simply pass by such a pathetically cute but unfortunate situation. They both have a soft spot for adorable furry creatures.

But what do you do with a stray flea-infected kitten in downtown Philly?

First off, you give it a name. Leah picked Bowie because it had one green eye and one blue eye. Then you wrap it in a scarf and cuddle it a whole bunch and say “aww, you’re so cute” in a baby-talking kind of way, though the official reason for holding the cat is to warm it up.

Then you face facts. Jamie can’t have cats in her apartment. And we can’t mix a stray (possibly ill kitten) with our two cats. We don’t want our cats getting fleas and I have already set a two-cat maximum for our house.

After much angst, Bowie spent the night in a cat carrier in our garage (it’s warm in there) and then we found an SPCA shelter for him/her.

Hopefully little Bowie will be adopted but at least she/he won’t be spending any more nights alone, wet and shivering on a stoop a few blocks from Temple University.

The Writing on the Wall

The pool cue had a rubber stopper on the end. I only noticed it because when I pulled it back it bounced against the white wall, leaving a little black rubber scuff mark.

In a move fitting for a genius of my stature, I used the back of my pool cue to write all over the wall. I was proud of my masterpiece, showing it off to my brothers and cousins at the family gathering in a rec room of an apartment complex.

Then my parents saw it.

And the yelling started. My pride vanished. I was handed a sponge and total to scrub that wall until it was clean, no matter how long it took.

I remember thinking that my father's normal stern voice was slightly different. It sounded a little desperate, maybe it was accented with a bit of embarrassment.

I couldn't fathom why. I only wrote our last name in big block letters on the wall.

Jazz Games and My Folks with a Side of Guilt

You know what sounds good? Renting “The Incredible Hulk” and picking up a big greasy pepperoni pizza.

But just as quickly as this thought popped into my head, I rejected it out of hand because I’m still feeling guilty about the money I recently spent on Jazz tickets.

Here is how my brain works:

1. Matt spends money on something he really wants to do.

2. Matt is totally excited but feels bad about spending the money.

3. Matt punishes himself by eating cheap sack lunches and forgoing stuff like a cup of coffee for four or five days.

4. Matt forgets that he’s supposed to feel guilty, rents Hulk and watches it while eating pizza.

Right now I’m on step 3.

But on a positive note, I get to go to three Jazz games in three different cities in just four days with my Mom and Dad. Does it get any cooler? The Jazz are in New York City on a Sunday and then in Philly a couple days later and the next day they are in Washington, D.C. All it takes are a couple of extra Chinatown bus trips and I get to watch my favorite team on an entire road trip AND visit my parents all at the same time.

That’s pretty sweet — and totally worth the money.

Come to think about it, maybe I should rent Hulk to watch on the bus to New York, then scam my parents into buying me a New York slice.

Riggin’ It: Tub Edition

It’s not always easy to be patient, especially in a house that needs as much work as ours does. Leah’s just itching to tackle the landscaping in our front yard. Inside we need new bedroom doors and light fixtures and blinds, not to mention the de-ugly-fication of every single wall and floor and ceiling.

So while we plug along, some things need simple quick fixes.

Thank goodness we have 319 feet of green electrical wire. Leah and her dad bought a big spool of the stuff when they updated our outlets. The leftover wire is as good as duct tape. It has become our all-purpose fixer. I’ve already told you that Leah used the wire to hang a bird feeder and to close the bag of bird food. She has also used it to keep a metal cover from repeatedly falling off our 20-year-old dryer.

But this last weekend she really out did herself. She has become a wire master. Creative and effective.

Take a gander at this masterpiece. It looks classy, don’t it?



But as always, the wire does the job. The drain switch doesn’t work, so sometimes we have shower water up to our ankles, other times it drains fine. But with Leah’s handiwork — and a couple feet of green gold — that stubborn drain should remain open until we get to replacing the shower fixtures. And according to my list of projects, we should be able to get to it in early 2010.

A Satisfying Defeat

There's just nothing like watching that Team Down South get their butts kicked on national television, especially when they were the No. 8 team in the nation going in. Especially when their cocky fans were dreaming of a national championship game.

I could have watched all kinds of comedy about the presidential race (Saturday Night Live, Daily Show, CNN) or I could have witnessed the Boston Red Sox amazing come from behind victory.

But nope. I watched the University of Utah’s rivals get trounced and I loved every tackle.

It's not as good as watching my Alma mater win, but it's pretty damn close.

Picking Our Leaders By Any Means Necessary

Only blue or black ink would do. And I could either put a check in the box or draw an X, nothing else. These were the rules that accompanied my absentee ballot. I read them twice to make sure I wouldn't get disqualified on some sort of technicality.

Then I went about the heady task of deciding who I believe would best represent me in the state Legislature and in Congress and in the White House. I formed an opinion on bond issues affecting both my adoptive city and my adoptive state. And whether it was a good idea to give preferential treatment for prospective city workers who live within the city's borders.

I voted.

But it really didn't feel the same. It didn't have the cache of walking into my polling place and picking up my ballot, withdrawing behind that little blue curtain to secretly make my selections and then proudly leaving with the ubiquitous "I voted" sticker.

This Election Day I will have to find one of the rather rare "I voted awhile ago" stickers.

Since there's a pretty good chance I'll be working on Election Day, I really had no choice but to cast an absentee ballot. It was a massive piece of paper, folded and folded again. One side had candidates for office, the other had ballot questions on water projects and the like. After I made my marks (I picked an X, because that's just the kind of guy I am), I jammed the ballot back into an envelope.

I tried to make a big deal about slipping the oversized envelope into a mail slot, but it didn't feel momentus. I'm hoping that come Nov. 4 I'll at least feel a little of the charge I normally get from this most fundimental of democratic acts, though it might be vicariously through my friends and family.

But now to the real question. I'm sure you're curious about who I voted for. I probably shouldn't do this, but I'll tell you.

I supported Jack Wagner. Mostly because this candidate for a minor state office shares his name with some hunk who starred on the soap opera General Hospital in the 1980s. My mom and aunt Pam were big Jack Wagner fans.

Ma, that vote was for you!

MacFuneral

Matt is lying in the fetal position on the floor of our living room, moaning. In Will Ferrell-type exaggeration, he screams "Why? WHY?"

He mumbles something about a funeral. A burial. An obit.

I try to comfort him, but it's pretty hard when he's acting this pathetic.

He only lost his computer. In the middle of the day on Friday, while he was researching something or other for the newspaper, it crashed. Not just Word or the Internet, it was the operating system.

Then it crashed again and again. Now he can't even get it to work long enough for him to send an email. His beloved laptop has died.

"WHY? WWWHHHYYYY?"

Great, now he's sobbing. He's screaming something about how can he possibly check ESPN.com 20 times a day without a computer. How can he obsessively watch the number of people who have hit this blog in the last hour (the answer is probably something like two)? Heck, how can he write blog items?

He just wiped his nose and calmed down. I got him some hot chocolate and told him it would be OK. He asked if he could "borrow" my laptop and I said: "Hell no! I'm not going to let you infect my computer with your infected typing fingers."

But then his boss called. The paper is sending him a fancy new laptop and he'll have it by Tuesday. He's still upset, but a little less pathetically so.

A Lazy Man’s Lunch

I got a friend who would gnaw on a brick of Ramen noodles back in high school and call it lunch. The most pathetic kind of lunch I ever saw. But this guy wasn’t want for money or anything like that. He was just a little food lazy.

He took the Ramen right out of the package, tossed away the little flavor pack and then bit down. Dehydrated noodle chunks flew everywhere.

I was impressed, mostly because I’m more food lazy than anyone I know. I’ll eat something I don’t want if it takes less time and effort than the thing I would actually like.
More than once I’ve said if I could get all the nourishment I needed from a pill, I would pop one three times a day. That is, as long as the pill doesn’t come in one of those annoying blister packs. I hate those things.

Anyway, back to the Ramen. I remembered my friend’s little trick when I first left Salt Lake for Washington, D.C. a decade ago. I was an intern at ABC News, getting paid what I thought was pretty good money to wear a shirt and tie every day, answer emails and pass around faxes. By the time I left D.C., I had paid off my car.

But I left that car back in Salt Lake, that meant my roommates and I had to scurry across the freeway in front of our DC apartment complex Frogger-style to hit the bulk grocery store, where we would stock up on cases of mac & cheese, Ramen, soda and other health foods.

One day when I was running late to work, I threw a Ramen brick in my bag. At my desk, surrounded by big TV producers and on-air correspondents and union guys who run all the technical equipment, I quietly take out my lunch, unwrap the Ramen and bite down. Dehydrated noodle chunks flew everywhere.

“What are you doing?’ asked a guy whose job it was to pull video for producers.

“I’m eating lunch.”

“That’s lunch?” he asked.

“What? I was running late.”

“Wow.”

For the next week, I didn’t have to eat the sad pathetic lunch I had stored in my bag. Big time TV producers, on-air correspondents and union guys kept inviting me out. It took me until the fourth day to realize they thought I was too poor to get a square meal. I still took their charity, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to tell them that I’m actually just food lazy.

And I must say that wasn’t the last time I ate Ramen raw. Heck I would eat it today, but when I mentioned it my Leah offered to take me out for lunch.

Worshiping at the Temple of Residency

While we still have big love for Utah, we're officially Pennsylvanians, at least in the eyes of the bigwigs at Temple University.

WOO HOOOOOO!!! CHA-CHING!!!!

Leah is no longer an out-of-stater forced to pay out-of-stater (sky high!) tuition. Moments after receiving the glorious residency letter, she called to tell me we now have all kinds of money. She asked what luxury items we should buy with our cash. We are now quite wealthy, you know.

I instantly said: “Cupcakes! Lots and lots of cupcakes!”

Then we broke into our embarrassing victory dances complete with laughing and cheering, she in Philly and me in DC. Once we calmed down a bit, we were able to talk rationally about her residency status.

Alas, nouveau riche we are not. Really it just means we will ultimately borrow less to pay for law school than we would have, so now our estimated debt at graduation will be slightly less than the just-passed federal bailout, er, rescue plan. I guess buying our house (the home improvement disaster that it is) was totally worth it, since owning property is one of the "factors" the university considers.

So maybe we will celebrate with some cupcakes after all, but we'll make them ourselves.

Fighting That Mongo Urge

There it was, sitting on the curb just a few houses away as if it was a present gift-wrapped for Leah.

Discarded patio furniture!

Like a moth to a light, like Matt to sports on TV, like our gigantic cats to the food dish, abandoned patio chairs have a supernatural magnetism that Leah can rarely fight off.

She loves her mongo (for those who buy their stuff in stores, mongo means reusing furniture and other items that other people throw away.)

But this time she left the chairs on the curb, and she called me all proud of herself. I was stunned. I was in absolute disbelief. And all I could think was "how?"

"It was wicker," she said. " And I really don't like wicker, but I almost grabbed it anyway."

Dreaming of Work

Sigh.

I spent all last night interviewing senators about financial policy, much of their answers went right over my head, but I just kept talking to them and they kept responding. For what seemed like hours. Then my alarm went off. I peeled open my eyes and groaned.

There's nothing worse than dreaming that you are working, especially when you worked late the night before. I feel like I just pulled a 24 hour shift and then had to go straight back to the office.

I've heard of people talking and walking and eating while sleeping. But working? I wouldn't be surprised if in the middle of my night, my arm was extended as if I was thrusting my digital recorder in some politicians face, while I mumbled something about mortgage-backed securities and the credit markets. Maybe I used a pillow as a notebook as I scribbled down whatever the dream senator told me.

But today, everything is different. I'm not interviewing senators about the financial crisis, I'm interviewing House members.