Like many people (I suspect), I turn the radio on for the dogs when I leave the house in the morning. I’d like to think it makes them feel less lonely. Ordinarily I leave in on NPR, ‘cuz I figure if anybody is snooping around, they’ll hear talking and think somebody’s home (though they’d have to be kind of nuts to risk sneaking in with three rather large noisy dogs woofing at them – they have some pretty impressive big boy/girl barks).

Of course, living out in the sticks, sometimes the NPR talk station doesn’t come in that great (the Jazz station comes in, as does the Classical station, but they aren’t into Classical, and they Jazz station is hit and miss, depending on who’s working), and I’m constantly trying to tune it in properly before I make my way out into the cold, cruel world.

So a couple of days ago I tuned until I heard talking, figured it was good to go, and I left. It wasn’t until I got home last night that I realized I’d tuned to a Christian station. Now I know why the dogs keep asking me if I’ve accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior (I’d ignore them but, shit, they never used to talk before, so it makes you wonder).

Anyhow, I think I got it tuned into some kind of crappy music station this morning, so hopefully they’ll all quit staring at me and judging.

Speaking of dogs, it was an exciting Saturday as Peggy and Fritzi got to go to the vet together. Peggy got her Lyme booster and Fritzi got his rabies, lepto, and first Lyme (with 3-year distemper and Lyme booster to come in three weeks or so). This meant that Bud – for the first time in his entire life – was alone. He’s always had Peggy with him, going back to even before they were born. He was definitely not happy about it, and Peggy wasn’t exactly thrilled by the whole thing either (nor was Fritz, come to think of it). But we all survived and now Fritzi is legal again. And I, while I wasn’t exactly wealthy when I left the house, came back home with even less.

Good thing I’m a dead branch on the family tree, or I’d feel like I was squandering somebody’s inheritance. As it is, I’m just trying to make sure I die with as little money as possible (and I’ve been doing an excellent job of it lately, I must say).

Speaking of squandering money, I finally got my “Project Fi” invitation last week, and promptly signed up for service. My new phone was delivered this morning (and here I am, stuck at work), so that’ll give me something to play with when I get home. The downside of this is that I still have something like 11 months left on my Verizon contract, so I’ll have to pay ransom to get out. The good news is that the same basic plan – unlimited text and messaging plus 2 GB a month data – will cost me $40 instead of $80. On top of that, Fi will refund me for all my unused data.

Since I use an average of, oh, .15 GB or so per month, my bills should average about $22 a month versus $80. So paying off my contract will take me less than 4 months. Of course, I also had to buy a new phone, but, hey, who doesn’t want a new phone?

But the biggest news from this weekend was probably the end of the hunt for two escaped convicts from the Clinton Correctional Facility (or, as we all call it, Dannemora). It was kinda fun having them on the lam (since we’re at a very safe distance where I live), but all good things must come to an end. I don’t know if this was news outside of NY or not, but it was pretty big news around here. They kept calling the area they were in “Upstate NY” on the news, but that’s really “Northern NY” to those of us who live north of Manhattan (or “The North Country” or even simply “Up North”).

I knew those fellas were in for a tough time up there. While there are lots of places to hide (seeing as there are about 100 square miles of trees per person up there), it’s pretty miserable this time of year, bug-wise (fuckers will eat you alive), and if you don’t have survival skills, you aint getting much to eat or drink. Winter wouldn’t be a very good time to escape either. It gets really, REALLY cold up there, plus you’d probably be pretty easy to track and spot from the air. Next time these guys make a run for it (well, the one guy isn’t gonna be going anywhere ever again, but I guess the other guy could heal up and give it another go), they should probably shoot for late September.

One thing I found awfully confusing throughout all this was why the hell Andy Cuomo got so much airtime. Like he was doing anything whatsoever to help the situation? I really can’t stand listening to him – he has this snide, smug air about him that just makes me wanna puke. I hope now that this is over he can go back to being snotty where I don’t have to hear him.

Otherwise, the weekend here was pretty crappy Rain, rain, and more rain. Saturday was a total washout, and yesterday wasn’t much better. It barely got into the 60s – which is pretty cold for almost July. And now we’re already losing daylight – on the downhill slide toward winter and I’ve been in the pool a total of once since we opened it way too early back in May. And that was only for a few minutes. If I wasn’t trying to spend all my money before I croak, I’d be bitching about what it’s costing me.

And to make matters worse, this is my on-call week, so I’m here for five damn days. Good thing I took next Monday and Tuesday off.

I’ve been reading the label on a case of Clorox® for the past week or so, since it’s sitting on a table in the garage (and by “table” I of course mean “cube freezer,” which like most things with a flat surface in our house has been transformed into a table – but I digress). Mostly I’ve been looking at the part that says, “Kills 99.9% of Common Household Germs.” Some might find this comforting, but all I can think about is the fact that there are apparently germs (defined on the Clorox® website as bacteria and viruses) that are in my house, common, and cannot be killed by a 6.0 percent aqueous solution of sodium hypochlorite. I really don’t wanna run into the virus that can’t be killed by bleach in a dark alley (or my bathroom) some night.

Fortunately, I came of age in an era when the failure to sanitize your house to cleanroom levels and/or rush to the doctor for a course of antibiotics at the hint of a sniffle wasn’t considered child abuse (also, driving drunk was frowned upon, as opposed to actually being illegal). So I think I’ve developed a resistance to those bleach-immune bugs running around out there. Or course, I also grew up a time when eating right and exercising weren’t particularly emphasized, either.

So, like my father, my father’s father, and his father before him (not to mention my mother’s father), I’ll most likely die at a relatively young age (though I’ll probably feel a lot older than I actually am, so I guess that evens things out. My last thoughts will either be “I really should’ve taken better care of myself,” or “I never shoulda quit drinking beer” – my money’s on the latter).

Anyhow, to all my male progenitors who passed on their genes and then promptly stepped aside for the next generation, I say “Happy Father’s Day.”

Speaking of sodium hypochlorite, I’m fairly certain I did permanent damage to my lungs yesterday. There’s a big old bucket of 3″ chlorine tablets that’s been sitting out on the pool deck since last year. When I opened it up this season, I noted that there was was quite a bit of water in the bucket – with, as you might expect, a very strong aroma of chlorine. But many of the tablets in there (individually wrapped, if not exactly hermetically sealed) were still viable, so I was able to avert my nose and fish a few out every now again to add to the chlorine floaty dispenser thing.

The weather around here has been pretty crappy – rainy and not consistently warm – so I’ve had the solar cover on and before Friday, nobody had actually gone swimming (I try to to think about the waste of money). A few sunny days warmed the water up a bit, though, and on Thursday, out of the blue, they came and filled up the propane tanks for the heater (at roughly triple the cost of Natural Gas – one of these days I’ve gotta convert that over).

So, anyhow, I went to grab some more tabs and the bucket was filled with this yellowish water and when I pulled the lid off, the chlorine vapor damn near knocked me over. After about three tries, I realized I wasn’t getting any more chlorine out of that sucker and I gave up. Since then, I’m wheezing, my chest hurts, and I can’t take a more than about half a breath without coughing. So if you don’t hear from me for a while, it probably means I’ve succumbed (or am just too lazy to write).

In the event that I don’t die in the next 2-4 hours, I’m stuck waiting for people at work to complete some project or other. I’m not actually involved in it, other than they wanted to make sure there was a DBA around in case they had problems with the database. Since I’m the “on-call” person (in quotes, because without the quotes, they’d have to pay me something for being on the hook 24/7 all week – and what a pain in the ass week it’s been), I have to sit and wait for them to finish and fuck everything up (which they will), then wash their hands of it and pass it along to me to un-fuck it (which would be a lot easier – and less stressful – if I actually knew what I was doing).

So, no Father’s Day party for me today (I’m guessing the dogs didn’t actually have anything planned anyway). No golf, no trip to the ball park, no picnic, no barbecue, and – worst of all – no beer.

Hey, but don’t let that stop all of you from having a good time.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but…

EXCLUSIVE: Seems Barack Obama is coming to L.A. this week for more than just Hollywood cash. After big-bucks fundraisers at Chuck Lorre and Tyler Perry’s not-inconsiderable Pacific Palisades and Beverly Hills pads on Thursday, the leader of the free world is going to spend a little bit of time on Friday morning in a garage in Highland Park doing a podcast. Of course, the fact that the garage is the HQ of the widely downloaded WTF With Marc Maron probably sweetens the appeal for the President, who is making his debut on the show.

The plan is that before Obama jumps on Air Force One on June 19 to head up to San Fran for more Democratic Party fundraisers, the pop culture-conscious POTUS will swing by the comedian’s garage studio in the morning for a just over one-hour sit-down. The White House reached out to Maron’s team a couple of weeks back to set up the interview, sources tell me. The commercial-free podcast with the President is set to be posted online June 22. As is fitting the office, and like most of the WTF episodes, Obama will be Maron’s only guest for Friday’s taping. Having teased something “massive” coming up the past few days, Maron will announce the presidential visit on Thursday’s podcast, which hits the Internet very early this AM.

I don’t know about you all, but weekends sure do seem to take a lot out of me. But it’s a lot better than going to work, which is why I’m glad I have today off. Especially since I neglected to cut the grass (though it’s kind of wet out there, so I’m not sure if I’ll get to it today, either). I also have a new $11 plastic mailbox to install. Kind of decided that since the snowplow’s just gonna take it sooner or later anyway, there’s no point in getting anything but the cheapest shit available.

Not that I didn’t manage to spend more money than I’d have liked to this weekend. When I went to buy a window to stick in my office, it of course turned out that they didn’t have what I wanted in the size that I wanted, so I was forced to spend more on something better. So my cheap little $120 air conditioner will probably wind up costing me close to $500 (of course, some of that’s paint and screws and stuff I can use for other things down the road) when all’s said and done. But, what the hell, I’ll never have to buy another one. And it improved my view greatly, for where once when I was sitting in my chair facing north, I was looking at a wall, I now see this:

So now I see trees on two sides of me, which helps compensate for the total lack of a view in my windowless workplace. Now I just need to finish finishing it.

Which I suppose I better get started on (easier said than done, because I seem to be surrounded by about 240 pounds of dog, and there aint a lot of room to move).

So, yesterday was the first day in a while when the weather wasn’t really, really sucky. It was actually sunny, not hot, and not humid. I celebrated by sitting in my windowless office all day (I did manage to get in a 10 minute walk across a couple parking lots to go look at some trees and the vestiges of the old Erie Canal, which is right by where I work. More accurately, I work next to what’s called Wide Waters, which are widened out areas they had every so often along the canal.

They used these areas to turn the boats around (at least, that’s the notion I have in my brain). I’m not really sure when or where I got that information (for all I know, it isn’t even true, but, as Stephen Colbert used to say, it sounds like it should be), other than to say that Erie Canal lore is one of the three things you most definitely learn about if you grow up around here – the other two being the glaciers, and the Iroquois (as we called them back in my day) or more specifically the Onondagas.

Anyhow, that was about it seeing daylight during working hours yesterday. By the time I got home, about all I did was fix the spring on the gate by the pool and then hang out with the dogs for a bit. I really haven’t been feeling well lately, and that was about all I managed before going to bed early (well, that and fiddle about with some teevee-related software). Oh, and I watched the latest episode or iZombie, which has become a guilty little pleasure of mine. It’s the kind of stupid, mindless diversion that comes in handy when you’ve quit drinking beer and your life now has a huge void.

I used to love sitting out by the pool, drinking beer and reading my Kindle. Used to be I thought it was because I enjoyed being outside and I liked reading. Turns out, I was really only in it for the beer, and bugs are really annoying when you’re sober.

Go figure.

On the bright side, my new little baby air conditioner was delivered yesterday. Even in the box, it looks tiny. I can hardly wait to get it installed. I guess.

I originally wanted to keep the install simple and just stick the thing in my window. Of course, I have crank out casement windows, so I can’t do that easily (god forbid anything should be simple). So I was planning on taking one of the windows out and cobbling some sort of seasonal installation fuster cluck. Then I thought maybe I should make it a permanent installation. But I have a really nice view out the window, and hate to lost half of that, so then I was thinking that I’d need to use clear Lexan™. But this is a west-facing window, and as hot as it gets on summer afternoon, it gets about a hundred times colder in the winter (the wind blows from the west all day, every day, all winter – aka, November to May – long).

So then I thought I’d just stick it through the wall, though that would mean either taking down the fake Monet watercolor, or the Picasso print that are next to the window. Then it dawned on me that one of my walls is actually (mostly) an outside wall by the front porch. So I thought maybe I’d put the a/c through the wall there. Then I thought, hell, if I have to put a hole in the wall anyway, maybe I should just put in a double hung window that I can stick the a/c in for a few months of the year, and get not only a cross-breeze but a view of my front yard and up the driveway so I can see UPS and FedEx when they sneak in.

So that’s where I’m at. Goodness knows when I’ll actually get this in. I mean, I still need to do fence repair, paint the house, and do everything else that I have on my list that probably will never get done before I die.

Not the way I’ve been feeling lately, anyway.

Oh well, at least it’s Thursday, which isn’t Friday, but it’s the next best thing.

Well, at least it isn’t snowing. But it was friggin’ cold and rainy this morning (and all day yesterday, for that matter). It was hot and humid when I went to bed on Saturday night, but I don’t think it got much above 50 yesterday. Fortunately, having gotten the grass cut Saturday, I took advantage of the shitty weather to put an outlet in my office in anticipation of installing the little $119 air conditioner I ordered in there at some point (window or wall, I haven’t determined yet – I’ve gone back and forth on the idea, and am leaning toward a through-the-wall install at the moment).

This involved crawling around in my attic (which is a pain in the ass), and yesterday was about as good a day as it gets for it. I actually had just about everything I needed – all I needed was a double gang old work box for it, and what with Home Depot being on the way to Costco, I was able to get that and still get to Costco right at opening time.

Of course I inhaled a shitload of dust and fiberglass whilst farting around in the attic, but, hey, that was expected. Now I’m ready for phase two (maybe as early as next weekend).

My home office faces due west, so it gets hotter than hell in there in the afternoon (especially since I’m generally in there with at least 150 pounds of dog and a lot of electronics), and I can’t leave the window open when I’m not there, because if it rains, everything floods.

If it had been up to me, I’d have chosen the room on the corner of the house for my office – two windows and a cross-breeze. But of course it wasn’t up to me.

It doesn’t look like there’ll be much need for air conditioning this week, though. I suppose that’s just as well, though it might be nice to use the pool one of these days. It’s only June, but with all the projects that really (really) need get done before the snow flies again, I can feel the end of summer upon me already – hell, in three weeks, the days start getting shorter again.

It’s a full five-day (on-call, even) week for me, so it should be pretty painful (it’s been filled with headache and nausea so far – I looked possible causes for that; trust me, you don’t wanna know).

Oh well, at least Monday’s half over.