The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

You live in the country out here on the island, you find out the real population is not human (no offense to my Republican friends), it’s an ever expanding group of citizens who live underground (no offense to my artist friends, who burrow and bore (no, not borrow and bare, no offense to my indigent pals) and who seem to be building an entire infrastructure beneath our lawns without bothering to get building permits (no offense to our current commissioner).  I’m talking moles.  Interstate highways rolling just beneath the surface rhododendron to garden, the little buggers tirelessly  tunneling their way from grub to grub.  Who the hell knows what they’re doing?  And who really cares?  At least until they decide to come up for some air.  In the morning those beautifully manicured suburban lawns look like small mortars were exploded by Libyan insurgents.  Ugly piles of dirt and rock sit atop the weed-and-fed fescue and explode in gravelly shrapnel when the John Deere riders hit them.  You better believe this is war.
Moles, at least to me, are like mosquitoes, a plague to be borne, not warred on.  In the end the human race will die off and yes, Virginia, there will still be skeeters and there will always be moles.   Tell that to my neighbors!  They have incredibly complex military strategies plotted out, staged, implemented and studied when they fail.  One retired Seattle police sergeant sat in a lawn chair and simply waited with his service revolver.  When he heard them surfacing, he undid the safety.  When they poked their little pink nose up into his space, ka-boom.   Underground crime dropped 50% that year, but it wasn’t long before new recruits tore up his lawn.  They’ve tried traps and poison, they’ve stuck dried blackberry cane with one inch thorns poking into their sensitive little feet so they’d bleed to death in the hole, they’ve stuck high pressure hoses into the tunnel, they’ve hooked their muffler exhaust to the exits and revved the engine on old trucks to kill them silently.  And the neighbors with noise.   They’ve cursed and they’ve stomped, they’ve bought high frequency noise repellants, they’ve tried the power of prayer.   Nothing works.   They’ve even dumped raw gasoline into the caverns, let the fumes slowly move thru the network, then they’ve set a match to it.
Don’t try this at home!  It is extremely dangerous, not only to yourself, but to the neighbors too.  The moles, not so much.  I think they move quickly along when the odor of gasoline makes the tunnel obnoxious even to them.  They probably set up little lawn chairs over by the azaleas and watch when the whole thing detonates.  Nothing quite it like it, really, when the sod lifts suddenly from its mooring,  and smoke and debris pour out of the mole holes.  Probably loosens the soil nicely for further excavations, is what I figure.  Probably not so great for the perfectly manicured lawn.   At this point, of course, we aren’t thinking rationally, are we?,  we’re thinking revenge.
There are lessons here for all of us and I don’t just mean West Point strategic planning.  The truth is, when all the assaults have proven futile, when the inordinate time spent is ultimately not worth the goal, when the expense is beyond anything sane, sometimes you just have to learn to co-exist with the varmints you live next to.  The moles, I mean…..

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CLICK-TO-HEAR-caller-ID.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — caller ID

Maybe you already heard the results of a new study that shows 14% of cellphone calls are phony – meaning, the person on the phone is pretending to talk to someone on a non-existent other end.  That’s one in seven calls are meant to remove the user from real interpersonal contact with the excuse he has a call coming in.  This is maybe great news for thespians, all this acting practice, but not so great for actual relationships.
Consider this next time the person you’re in mid-sentence with suddenly breaks off for that important I-have-to-take-this-call incoming.  Good chance they’re nodding and bobbing, babbling away at the soft hum of a dial tone, pausing, listening, answering back, all to remove themselves from the great pleasure of your company.  Course our friends wouldn’t do that, just everybody else’s.  But … occasionally you might try slipping off to dial their number, see if it rings while they’re in mid-chat with Harvey the Six Foot Rabbit.  Good chance they’ll just put you on hold, probably, and keep on talking.  In the end maybe even a crummy friend is better than no friend at all.
Down here on the South End, we sort of expect strange behavior from our pals.   If we wanted Normality, we’d have moved north a long time ago.  But you ask me, anybody who answers a cellphone in the middle of our conversation, made up call or real, is sending me a message loud and clear.  Maybe time to go weed the garden,  let them talk without an eavesdropper.
Still, it’s a tad troubling, this phone-call-from-the-void stuff.  Sad enough to get solicitations from strangers with odd regional dialects, really almost alarming to chatter with nobody.  Next thing you know they’ll be doing it when they’re alone.  And before long, mark my words, they’ll be writing a blog nobody reads.  ….. Uh-oh.  Operator, I think I been cut off….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CLICK-TO-HEAR-black-monday.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — black monday

I’m in transit today, cars, buses, planes – no trains yet —  and hopefully my truck at the end for the final leg.  This means I’m wandering airport corridors barraged by TV’s hanging overhead every thirty feet or so for the traveler in need of a constant IV drip of fast breaking news, an electron lifeline to the events of the day.  Today we’re watching the stock market swooning, the Dow Jones down now by over 600 points, all our winnings at the national crap table lost in one throw of the dice.
Standard and Poor, that exemplar of a ratings agency, downgraded the U.S. from Triple A to AA+ and now the institutional investors are dumping equities like they were toxic drums of pesticides the EPA just banned.  If you’re like me, you got some skin the game.  Enough to hurt if you’re hoping to retire some golden day.  Probably not gonna be as soon as we thought….
I suppose we can be grateful our paltry Social Security isn’t pegged to the Market.  Although I know plenty of folks who would love to gamble that too, the same folks who want an ATM machine in the casino for easy access to more money.  Those people should take an early retirement and head straight to the nearest betting mecca, rent a motel room by the month nearby and put their severance check on the Red Seven and spin the wheel.
I guess I’m not much of a gambler.  And when this rollercoaster market steadies out, I’m going to gather up my losses and what’s left of the shirt on my back and hunker down for a long hard run toward old age.  The Young Turks of Wall Street are going to have to continue without me.  When I watch a ratings agency like Standard and very Poor make a two trillion dollar math error on their downgrade assessment, my faith in capitalism drops way below a Double A+.  These were the fine fellows who gave Top Drawer ratings to Enron and WAMU and all the other fast buck subprime freddies and sold us down the river 3 years ago.  Maybe math ought to be the criterion, not card counting.  It’s supposed to be Wall Street, not Las Vegas.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CLICK-TO-HEAR-BETTER-BIZNESS-PRACTICES.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — BETTER BIZNESS PRACTICES

If you’ve been down to your favorite fiduciary lending institution lately, you’ve maybe run into the New Improved Tighter Regulations.  These are the folks who brought us the Great
Recession we’re still trying to climb out of, but now they’ve learned their lesson, at least the ones who weren’t bankrupted or defaulted or reorganized by the FDIC.  We gave them TARP loans so they’d loan money to jumpstart the
economy they’d stalled, and instead, they just hung onto it.  You got a house underwater, good luck getting new finance terms.  They’re going to take the house  —- the only question is how
long can they convince you to tread water, meaning, how long can they keep you making those payments before you sink like a stone.

I got a check recently through my high powered business name and when I went down to deposit it, I was informed I would now need to open a new business account.
Undaunted, I went to another of my many favorite banks who used to cash my business checks just fine, without the necessity for acting like they were
my parents.  And once again I was told firmly and patiently that they could not, no, absolutely not, confuse my business with my personal account.  I
said it is WAY too late for that in my life that is approaching what for some would be retirement age.  They said  no, the time is now.

Of course I don’t suspect the real reason for this change of heart and policy has anything to do with extra service fees or set-up charges.  I would never never accuse my banks of
petty greed, nickel and dime tactics or outright deceptions from debit card fees, late fees, overdraft fees and all those myriad other small print hand-in-my-wallet charges that eat the poor alive, one dollar at a time.

So I spent an hour setting up my corporate account.  The one I will use til the last check clears from the current client — after which I will have checks issued to me, personally.   Muddy bizness
practice, sure, but simpler for me. And when we were done and the handshakes with the assistant manager done,  I mentioned their promotion of $100 to anyone opening a new business account.  And they smiled sadly before lamenting I was just two days too late, the offer expired already.  To which, I smiled sadly and pulled the internet ad that showed the offer good for another week.  Trust, as they certainly mentioned more than
a few times, is crucial to a good relationship between my business and my lending institution, a partnership, as it were, in these uncertain fiscal times.

It finally cost them 100 bucks for my time.  About $100 dollars an hour.  I’m sure they would agree that this constitutes  a fine business acumen.  I may open a dozen new accounts.  Hell, I could easily learn to love finance
with these folks as tutors and mentors. Or vice versa.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/the-new-etiquette.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —the new etiquette