A Bad Start

Dagmar and I have two cars. One works, so Dagmar uses it to get back and forth to work. The other… well… The other car is the car that stays home in case I absolutely NEED to get somewhere. It’s an old beat-up Ford of some kind. Heater doesn’t work, it often stalls in traffic, it shakes a lot, no rear-view mirror, brake lights work on odd days… But it’s the only transportation I have in the winter. (During the summer I ride my bicycle or take the motorcycle.)

Anyway, it’s buried under a pile of snow thanks to the snowplow driver who, well, who did his job and cleared the street after the storm the other day. I went out to try to start the car to move yesterday, only to find that my front driver’s side tire was flat. Just like the neighbor’s front driver’s side tire, and the other neighbor’s front driver’s side tire… AND someone had run into my car as it was parked in front of my house, leaving a dent just big enough that I can’t get the driver’s side door open.

So there the car sits until I have the time/energy to deal with it.

That smarts.

Stupid dog.

The last couple days have been an icy mess. It rained for about an hour Monday, then the temperature dropped a bit and it froze into a nice sheet of ice. Then it snowed on top of it. You know how it is. It makes walking the dog an adventure.

She’s pulled me down three times in the last two days.

Here I’m walking along all bundled up and happy when the dog sees a squirrel or a shadow or something sparkly in the snow and bolts, which results in a bundled up hippie pirouetting around in little circles, arms windmilling frantically…

Stupid dog.

And it hurts, falling on your keester. Even though I’ve been wearing two or three layers of everything for weeks now (you know you live in Iowa when you wear your wife’s underwear — not because it’s fun, but because YOUR longjohns are in the wash), but it still hurts when tuckus meets concrete.

Class Warfare in Sioux City

A couple houses in the Northside got tagged with graffiti the other day. It was on the news. The building down the street here on the Westside gets tagged nearly weekly, the bike paths a block away are constantly tagged, the building across the street gets it about twice a year, many of the traffic signs in my neighborhood are spay-painted over, and no one says a thing. But when the rich people get vandalized, THEN it’s in the news and the police are all scampering about…

Here’s my neighborhood:

Sure be nice if the city would pay more attention to our part of town. Dagmar carries a cattle prod with her when she walks the dog. Shouldn’t be that way — we’re in Iowa for cripe’s sake.

Yet more woes…

My Mac has locked up on me twice this morning and shut down on me once. I really, really need more RAM. It’s hard to work when the computer’s not cooperating. (Macs are wonderful machines, but I bought it to do web design and photography work. It handled that perfectly well. But now I’m doing some video editing and more high-end stuff, and, well, I didn’t buy enough RAM.)