Got the Jimmy Legs

What side you on

2009-12-01T14:43:00.002-05:00

So the past month has been full of house-fixin' and career-contemplatin'. I just registered with the outplacement company paid for by my old company as part of the severance package, so we'll see if they can offer any useful advice. Meanwhile, I'm tyring to brush up on my programming skills, trying to learn everything I can about MySQL databases using PHP. This is probably stuff I should have learned in, say, 2001, but instead I chose to waste my days sleeping late and pretending to work. In those days I was telecommuting and making a relative ton of dough doing very little. If I had those days now ... like gold in my hand ...

Oh well, guess I'm stuck with my resume-sharpenin' and book-learnin'. I still need a solid name for my cats website, I just need something short but memorable. Something like "Street Cats," "Gritty Kitties" or "Bushwick Rent-a-Pet." Maybe "Shwickitties?" The house's cats are holding steady, haven't had many responses to adopt lately. Several new cats have showed up outside as well but funds for cat-fixing are currently locked until I figure out what I'm doing with my life.

Let's do the time warp

2009-10-29T15:55:00.003-04:00

I went out with some of my soon-to-be-fired coworkers last night. It was a lot of fun but I exercised poor boozing form and today feel awful. Today is our last 'real' day on the job, since tomorrow will mostly be us dumping our company laptops and Blackberrys and probably having Security escort us out the door. But of course, the real work has been drying up for some time. I get a couple of emails a day with some small matter to address and the rest of the time I can sit here wondering when the crushing enormity will hit, when I realize the money is running out and I still don't have a job ...

I've never been out of work more than a month or so, and that was when I graduated with my MA in Poetry and couldn't find work in my lil' college town for 3 months. Since then I've been gainfully employed. I get so antsy when I'm out of work usually, it spurs me onto the job market like Garfield on lasagna. You should see what a Yes-Man I turn into when I get in the interview room. It's quite a skill.

But I haven't yet felt that fear seep in, mostly in part to the generous severance package ($$$) I have been given. One wonders what it costs a company to keep an employee at a desk in their office, what overhead arises, since they're basically giving me 6 months' salary to leave right now. I guess there's a way things are done in Corporate America, though much of its lessons are lost on me. My whole time here has been full of inexplicable decisions by management, with strange, almost insidious behavior from the those in a position to fire vast swaths of the company. I have to assume it all makes sense to someone, cuz I sure don't get it.

I'm all packed up here, it should be pretty simple to walk away from this office. I'm still having no end of trouble getting my new mobile phone to work; I suspect the Radio Shack management might have a thing or two in common with my (ex) company. But, rest assured, I soon will be texting, tweeting, sexting and swtweexting, sending missives rife with bad usage to my similarly-dyseducated cohorts. OMFG. Hey, wasn't that part of the title over CBGB's?

The Finish Line

2009-10-28T10:35:00.003-04:00

I'm a couple of days away from employment freedom and financial slavery. Work has dried up nicely, most of my work has been farmed out to people around the globe, or just forgotten entirely. I have about a day and a half of official workday left, and then on Friday I have to come in to dump all my office gear and then I fly the coop.

I just picked up my own cell phone to replace the Blackberry they let me use for the past year. I'm gonna miss it, especially the whole not-paying for anything on it. I decided to go with a pay-as-you-go plan from Virgin, as my calculations put it at the absolute cheapest for the best service. So far that has been sort of true.

I am on my 2nd phone so far, the first one had a defective camera, so they just gave me another. This one seems to be having trouble running its applications, giving me lovely Java errors when I try to access the Email program. Yes, I'm getting a bunch of non-phone related stuff on this, if only because I would like to continue to appear to be a "with it" with my "finger" on the "pulse" of something. Which is hard when the damn thing won't work.

So it looks like it's back again to Radio Shack for me! It has dawned on me that perhaps the root of the problem is that I shouldn't have gone in that godforsaken store in the first place. Radio Shack has been in decline since kids stopped building crystal radio sets, and in their death rattle they decided to become glorified cell phone stores. And yet, they can't even seem to get that right. Why is it still so hard to get things that just work when you purchase them? Everything has to be riddled with issues and no one knows how to fix them.

They will invariably just give me another phone, which probably has something wrong with it as well. I have 1.5 days to get a working phone (the Radio Shack is right across the street from my office). After that, god help us all.

I'm going out for drinks with the ladies of my office today, though, that should be pretty interesting.

You're gonna make it after all

2009-10-20T14:59:00.003-04:00

"Do you sell bags of gum?"

The question was pointed towards me, standing in the 'gum' aisle at Walgreen's, trying to decide what bizarre flavor of sugarless gum I would most desired (today it's "Mango Surf"). I turned to the woman and replied, "Um ... I don't work here ..." She apologized, adding how annoying it must be to be mistaken for a drugstore employee. But considering my situation these days, is it really?

I was wearing a tie, as I am forced to do in the office, and I was standing next to a cart full of candy meant for restocking the shelves, so maybe I looked like an earnest go-getter from a previous era. The astute casual anthropologist will note the staff at Walgreen's wears drab polo-style shirts with the company name on it; I was wearing a dark green shirt and a skinny tie I bought in 1993. Maybe I just look like the kind of guy who should be working in a Walgreen's.

I thought of retorting something witty to the woman, like "Well I may not work at Walgreen's but boy, can I market to the older, ultra-affluent set. And their wealthy, layabout children." But I held my tongue. What skills have I gained from my time at this office, what will I take with me to a potential new employer?

I was talking with my coworkers (also soon-to-be laid off) and we determined that all the people we hate in the office are those who do the least, foisting their rightful work onto our more capable shoulders, simply because they outrank us. And as that Dilbert guy noted years ago, the stupidest people really do seem to be the ones who are pushed to the top of the management chain, where as Scott Adams says "they can do the least harm." People with true skills stay mired at the bottom, where they prop up the company's infrastructure. I fear I've been getting pushed into dumbening for several years now.

I've been at this job, in one form or another for over 9 years now. I have the word "director" in my job title. I, as previously noted, wear a tie to work. But what skills do I have? When I first got here I was semi-skilled, with a knowledge of hand-coding HTML and such, which at the time was still something in demand. Now my skillset has atrophied, as I spent valuable programming time on conference calls, flying back and forth to Asia to have pointless meetings with people who would later fire me only because I live in New York and they found this somehow distasteful.

Legions of nerds have come since; they have learned many programming languages as well as the other skills at which I was sort of adept at once, like Photoshop and Quark Xpress (I mean 'InDesign,' apparently no one uses Quark anymore!) Meanwhile I was filling out a Business Requirements Document and sending pestering emails to the regional marketing contacts asking them to update their office list for the website. I can think of ways to render this on a resume, but it fills me with shame to do so.

Plus I'm not even sure I want to continue down this path. Ironically, a fairly well-paid position as a Project Manager might be easier for me to get at this point than the modest remuneration of the semi-skilled 'web grunt' jobs of yore. Maybe I should shoot for that Walgreen's job!

Note: I have 8 days left at this job!

Tender prey

2009-09-24T11:58:00.005-04:00

The Bad Mom

Along with all the usual stuff going on, a cat we had recently trapped for TNR gave birth on Tuesday. We knew she had been pregnant but didn't know how far along she was. The two kittens she produced were clearly premature, I'm not sure by how much. One was stillborn, but the other was still alive. However, the mother cat wasn't being motherly at all, preferring to get as far from the kitten as possible.

We moved them into a room to try to lessen the cat's stress level (stress is probably what mad her give birth early, so we thought stress may have been keeping her from taking care of her kitten. Well, the mom cat didn't change her tune, she just hid behind a futon. I don't know when the kitten was actually born but the situation was getting dire. We set up a box with a heating pad under a towel and tucked him in. I ran off to get kitten formula. When I got back I got him to consume a syringe full (the kitten bottle was way too big). Newborns need formula every couple of hours so I started setting my alarm. The first few feedings went well; he was eating 2 or 3 syringes full (it was difficult to tell when he was full, but he would sort of turn his nose up to let me know). I tried 'burping' him but who knows if I got that right. Finally I had to rub his genitals with a damp cotton ball to get him to 'eliminate.' Nothing really came out, but he also had been hours born without food, so I figured I would let it slide.

At around 4am I got up to feed him. He felt warm but I knew something was wrong, as he wasn't squirmy and he felt limp. His warmth had come from the heating pad; he had died. It was pretty clear he hadn't made it, but honestly it's hard to tell with such a young kitten. I've seen newborn kittens, and this guy was probably a week away from even that level. He had no fur and could barely move by himself. The thought of him managing to find his mother's nipple to latch onto, even if she had been accommodating, seemed impossible. So maybe it wasn't all that surprising. But it's still kind of sad, the little fella didn't have much of a chance.

It's possible the mother cat rejected him because she knew this; it's also possible the mother cat still has more kittens inside her, that will be born at the right time. I'm not sure what this means as she is scheduled to be spayed on Friday. This is always a touchy area for TNR advocates. We want to improve the quality of life for cats that are here now; part of this involves sterilizing cats to prevent future cats further crowding their environment. But what do you do when a cat is so far along that her kittens can survive? This makes me imagine all manner of gross surgical situations with kittens, but I'll leave that to the real vets.

Anyway, it's still disappointing we were able to save the kitten, but we have so many other cats to take care of it would have been insurmountable to do it all. Still, if we encounter any more rejected kittens, we now have a big supply of kitten formula and a little know-how which we may put to good use.

I don't wanna be a pinhead no more

2009-09-17T11:01:00.004-04:00

The whole package

So my Zenni Optical glasses arrived, looks like it took almost exactly 2 weeks from date or order. First thing I notice about them is that they don't really look like the photo on the site: they're wider and flatter than I expected. Also they're black and not brown, but I checked my original order and I apparently ordered black for some reason, so my bad. Also the earpieces are longer and more wrap-around-the-skull style than I thought. I went through the list of $8 frames to make sure they sent me the right model. Truly no other frame matched as closely but the ones on the site are definitely more square than these. Oh well.

Quality-wise, they feel like the cheap sunglasses you buy on the street for $5. This is sort of what I expected, and hey, I have some $5 sunglasses I've had for years. Due to the odd temples pieces, they kind of pinch the back of my head, but maybe that's because I don't have any hair to cushion the blow. Again, they're wider than I thought so I feel like a pinhead but I suppose I could get used to that. I still wish they were taller, I hate feeling like my range of vision is reduced to this little rectangle.

On the plus side, the little sunshade attachment seems to work fine, and is a nice solution to trying to swap out prescription sunglasses every time I walk outside. The glasses are really light which is nice as my regular frames are a bit heavy. I can't even imagine anymore what it would be like to have actual glass in the frames, we must have had calluses built on on our noses.

Overall, they seem fine if a little more nondescript than I had hoped. I am wondering if I ordered them with a narrower pupillary distance they might look a little better on my head. But that's another $8! Actually it was $22 all told, with the anti-glare coating, sunshade and shipping. Still a pretty good deal. I saw a subway ad for Cohen's Fashion Optical, they're advertising a special on specs, $99 for a set. I'm sure their glasses are higher-quality but I can basically buy 4 sets before I come close to paying that much.

The whole pinhead

You just haven't earned it yet

2009-09-11T10:14:00.003-04:00

It always feels weird working on September 11. I know stuff is going on, and the President probably had a moment of silence or something. But I dunno, shouldn't we have the day off or something? I guess we didn't get Pearl Harbor Day off, but I sometimes feel like there is a palpable push against making today into something 'special,' as though acknowledging what happened too much makes it look like we're actually still bothered by it. It's like Canada would lean down and say "Come on, you're still whining about that? Get over it."

A victim of someone's evil plan

2009-08-31T14:53:00.004-04:00

While I'm running out the clock at this job, I'm trying to use all the resources available to me while it lasts. One big issue is health insurance. Sure, there's some kind of Obama-subsidized COBRA thing but in all honesty I will probably forget to sign the forms or whatever when the time comes. So I'm trying to get some doctor-related stuff taken care of while I have full employer-backed coverage.

To that end, I just had my eyes checked and am happy to report that my vision has improved yet again! A few years ago I had my eyes checked and my scrip went down from -2.25 to -2.0. This time around I'm down to -1.75. At this rate by the time I retire my vision will be so strong I should be able to cut steel girder with a mere glance. In the meantime, I need new glasses!

I ordered some frames at the eye doctor that basically look like the ones I usually wear. But I just discovered this place that sells glasses, lenses and all, for $8. At first I thought they just meant frames for 8 bucks, which is not bad in of itself. But here it turns out you can get the whole kit 'n kaboodle for less than $10, not counting the 'shipping' charge. But which frames should I get?

I went through a bunch, the $8 frames as well as the more expensive types. I need to check with the optometrist to get the full prescription details before I order, but then I'm gonna go hog wild. I'll have glasses for every occasion! Cuz, you know, I have so many occasions to attend.

Seems like there's a damn good reason to worry worry worry

2009-08-24T14:15:00.003-04:00

I keep waiting for the heat to subside, but it keeps being hot. I have so many projects to complete this summer, projects I specifically waited for summer to begin, only to find myself unable to complete them because I'm sweating so much I can't hold a paint brush or get a proper grip on the staple gun.

Of course, soon, I will have all the time in the world to do my little household tasks. Unemployment is looming, but for the time being the focus of my paranoia is not so much on the actual getting of a new job so much as on why I'm not sweating over it enough. Maybe it's because I'm doing all my sweating climbing the stairs. But I can't get really freaked about not having a job, which I find odd since I haven't been out of work more than a couple of months since college, and nearly all of those situations were in fairer economic climes than this. It seems like all the people I know who lost their jobs since the economy gave out are still not working regularly, and it recently dawned on me that even though I am technically an adult who moves in certain tech-friendly circles, I somehow don't have any friends or old school chums who are ultra-successful, who have invented something unique or written a one-hit wonder song. In short, my friends are no help in my desire to leech off somebody's good work so I'll have to go ahead and get a job after all. Unless I win the lottery, and I'm starting to think that Quick Pick machine doesn't like me and keeps giving me bad numbers.

I'm trying to formulate a plan for a new web site project, something to demonstrate some skill and maybe be of some use to somebody as well. Considering all these cats we have I have concluded I should build a site to help advertise these cats for adoption, though I don't know who will actually see the site since I'm not exactly Nick Denton. But it will be good to exercise my web muscles and give me something to do at the office since I'm clearly not expending any effort in that area anymore. It's totally way hard to give a hoot about this job now that I know it's going away. I just plan to keep my head down and make sure I come out looking okay in the end.

Now, I just need a name for our home-grown cat shelter adoption joint. I'm thinking of something with the word "hoarders" in the title.

Pictured (from top): Powder, a lovely 14 year old princess I catsat for last week, Hotplate, recent TNR victim, and Granita ("Granny"), recovering from spay surgery in the basement, possibly the mother of pretty much every cat in the neighborhood.

What I look like under a microscope

2009-08-04T15:46:00.002-04:00

If you thought this site was single-minded before, get ready for "All Job-Loss Talk." As usual, I'm about 18 months behind everybody else on the trends, so you're probably all full up with whining about losing one's job. So maybe I won't do that, even though I sure am thinking about it. I guess I would care more if I liked my job. But here at the flute end of things, I gotta say that the tedium had long won out over the interesting parts of this work. Ideally I'd like to get out of this business altogether and work in a field I actually care about. And I would ... if I hadn't bought this damn house!

The one big trade off of my lousy job was that it provided me with, literally, more money than I knew what to do with. I saved up enough to jointly buy a house, and then had enough left over I was able to let every cat in the neighborhood move in with us. It was the thing that allowed me to say Yes to stuff I would never have been able to otherwise; in some cases it became the thing that forced me to say Yes (would I have all these cats if I had the self-control that limited funds provides?).

So now I am guessing that whatever job I can finagle, it won't be as much as I've been making. I've been looking at my expenses and if I whittle it down to the bare necessities, I might be able to get by doing production art work for a temp agency, which was my very first job in this town, and still one of my favorite things to do (hours spent nudging graphics and tweaking layouts). But that's not a career, and maybe it's time I got one of those.

So I'm going to spend the next 3 months trying to really think of what I'd like to do with my time. Since I know I can scrape by for a while if I have to, I'll try not to let that little voice (who sounds just like my Dad) flare up too much with comments of "Hey! You! You have to get a new job RIGHT NOW. Don't wait for the severance!" I don't know if it will yield anything useful, maybe the best way I can serve humankind is through 6AM conference calls with testy Flash developers and belligerent middle managers.

From safety to where ... ?

2009-07-29T12:19:00.003-04:00

clouds on the horizon

I am back from vacation and finally settling in enough to blog and do things people normally do. We were in St. Thomas again, which was the last place we went for a 'real' vacation almost 2 years ago. We did go to Cleveland last summer, but hey, it's Cleveland. Anyway, as you know, St. Thomas is nothing but beach-lounging and relative-mooching for a week. Jeannie's sister took care of the cats while we were gone, guaranteeing her eventual canonization. People covered for me at work for the first time in recorded history, so this trip did not involve driving halfway across the island to an Internet cafe to do 'urgent' job crap. It was very relaxing; and a good thing it was.

Getting back to work was rough, none of these emails made sense, nor did I remember why I cared about it all. My boss' boss was in town, which should have been a sign. She hadn't been to this office for over a year (she's based in the UK). But she took us out to a fancy lunch and said many nice things about our dept's work. Then like a drunken one-night-stand, the next morning brought with it long faces and muttered apologies.

"This has absolutely no bearing on the quality of your work," she assured us repeatedly. As it turned out, she had come to tell us that our group will be eliminated by the end of October. The work we have been doing will be distributed among the staff who are lucky enough to live in the UK and Asia. Despite the fact that we are a global business and are all well-versed in conference calling and asynchronous group work, management apparently has never been comfortable having the marketing people in the US. So they've quietly hired more marketing people abroad and finally threw the switch.

Reaction was a stunned silence, although later everyone said they had seen it coming. Still it's hard to be told that you're losing your job. I felt a strange sense of relief, like the billion emails I was still catching up with suddenly just don't matter anymore. Unfortunately, they still do sort of matter, I have 3 more months to slog through before emancipation. So how do you ramp up the faux-enthusiasm for work you've been barely maintaining when you know you're getting canned anyway?

I guess I can stop thinking up ways to distinguish myself in the field. No more favors! Troubleshoot your OWN printer difficulties! Create your own PDF files, dammit! I have to figure out what my job has been for the past 3 years so I can update my resume (circa 1999)!

I'm getting a severance "package" which is some money and near as I can figure, not much else. I have the option of paying for my own health insurance and receiving $405 a week from unemployment. I'd be fine with all of this but I'll be out of work going into November, not known as a great time to find a new job. I might get a new job before the deadline, but then I don't get the severance dough, right. Screw that! I wanna get paid!

So now I am faced with the notion of finding a new career, mid-30s style. I sure hope I don't have to work in the same industry as I have for the past decade. I would like to think I won't have to do web-related work, but what else is there? I have a master's degree in poetry; my main skill still is a knowledge of Microsoft Office slightly above that of a novice. I gotta find a way to work in an industry I actually care about, like music or art or cats.

Cursory job searches are demonstrating little so far. I could get a job driving the ASPCA's mobile adoption van, that would be pretty sweet. But maybe I have some other skill I could apply in the service of a discipline I admire, yet to be revealed. I dunno. All I know is I can't believe I have to stay here 3 more months before I can get outta here! Do they really think I'm gonna give 110% anymore? No! I shall give no more than 65% at any time until Halloween.

It's the only way to live in cars

2009-07-13T14:05:00.004-04:00

Every New Yorker without a car should force themselves to rent a car at least once a year, if only to reiterate the inherent smartness of living the rest of the year without one. Sure there is the initial joy of feeling like you can go anywhere! do anything! You feel possessed of the heady sense of self-determination that no-doubt drove our forefathers to wagon-train into the Great Unknown of the Louisiana Purchase only to settle in what is now Utah. Then you realize that all the assholes who get in your way on the subway are now in front of you, each in their own metal exoskeleton, and each of them with as little clue as to where they're going or how much room they're taking up than on the L train platform.

I just returned a rental car (from Image on Empire Blvd, cheapest Sentras in town!) and despite how useful it has been over the past four days, I am relieved to not have to drive one for the foreseeable future (at least, not in a major metropolitan area). We got the car to drive to Baltimore to surprise Jeannie's mom, who turned 80 recently. We snuck down and stayed at a friend's house for the night, then emerged while the Moms was at what she thought was a casual dinner at her friends' house. The surprise worked (video to follow, I left my camera in Jeannie's purse), and a lovely time was had by all. We got to spend some time with her and I got to see the many faces of Baltimore, something I had wanted to do since Female Trouble. A misreading of the map landed us in West Baltimore, which indeed does have that Wire feeling, although to me it looked a lot like Bushwick in places. Our friend lives in Hampden which is like a flower-filled and silent Williamsburg, with better architecture. In between we saw sweeping mansions and blasted out hovels, historically-significant buildings and an influx of skinny jeans.

The rest of the time we were driving, to Baltimore, to Bel Air, back to Brooklyn. I know Robert Moses didn't invent the superhighway but I still like to curse him every time I'm in traffic. There was a lot of traffic to and from Baltimore, mostly severe jams that lasted hours and seemed to have no cause whatsoever. Also there are like a bazillion tolls between Brooklyn and Baltimore, whose costs were only slightly less annoying than how the constant stopping and paying affected traffic. It's impossible to relax while driving, and relaxing isn't something I'm that good at anyway, so I'm still a bit frazzled from the trip.

One shining light was the fact that Costco is right off the BQE, and we got back into town just in time to duck and grab more cat food and dish soap. Our car was minuscule but it held all the crap we got there, as well as all the crap we bought at the Bel Air Target (I know we have one in Brooklyn but it's always so picked over). The Costco trip was something we needed to do anyway so it was a nice perk to get that out of the way. We dragged the stuff home and thankfully got a decent parking spot in front of the house. Despite the positives, I still can't see how people can live like this every day.

I took the car back in the morning, thinking the trip would be a nice cruise over to Crown Heights, but once again the Impossibly Stupid Drivers of Brooklyn were out in force. It should have taken 20 minutes, tops, to get over there but it took twice as long, due to bad drivers, a plethora of red lights, and perhaps a bit of my own poor driving skills. With the car dropped off, I walked around the corner and got on a 5 train taking me almost directly to my office halfway up Manhattan in less time than it took me to drive a few miles in the car. Now that's transportation.

I never thought that I would end up here

2009-07-03T12:11:00.003-04:00

So for some reason our company did not give us the day off. I guess it's because 4th of July falls on Saturday this year, and Saturday is still not officially a 'day off' like Sunday is. This seems pretty stupid to me, it's like everyone silently agrees not to call Saturday a holiday even though most 9-to-5ers would blanch at the idea of working on a Saturday. So my company seizes on this opportunity to wuss out on a Friday off by giving us a 'floating holiday.' This means we're given the right to take a day off at some point this year ... just probably not today. I found out about this too late (apparently) to get Friday off, so now I'm trying to weasel out of here early. Then it's off to the Brooklyn Historical Society to determine what we can about the history of our house. I don't know what information might be available, but we're gonna check it out in any case. Worse case, we don't find anything useful but we still get to go to Sahadi's after for big tubs of the best hummus in town!

I think we're seeing the Fresh Kills at Union Pool on the 4th, aside from that I never get that excited about this as a holiday. I hate fireworks for some reason, so I rarely look forward to it. Meanwhile, the kids in the neighborhood LOVE fireworks, and express this by amassing explosive devices in the weeks leading up to the 4th, from those annoying little things you throw that pop, to elaborate sky blossoms that they shoot off in the street. Miraculously nobody has set their house on fire yet, though there was a fire truck out on our street for a while last night. I kind of hope it rains on Saturday. I'm such a wet blanket.

My view stretches out from the fence to the wall

2009-07-01T15:11:00.001-04:00

Gazing out, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

One of the things that sold me on our house (aside from the fact we couldn't afford anything else we looked at) was the size of the kitchen. It's a 22x11 foot room with a lot of counter space and one really old sink. Its only downside was its lack of light. It's on the ground floor and the only light came through a tiny window (and a little from the open vent in the wall meant for a range hood.)

The back door was a big metal exterior door. Soon after we moved in I decided to change the lockset on it, as the existing one was rusty and rinky-dink. The same night I chose to irrevocably remove the old knob (I had to pry it out in pieces) was the same night the people who lived behind the hosue on the next street decided to have a loud argument, which led to a loud fight, which led to a loud round on gunfire. It was our first "on the block" experience with shootings, and definitely the first time we literally didn't have a door to hide behind. I will never forget that night, standing half in and half out of the house, struggling to remove the old hardware while somebody protected their precious reputation (the argument involved the oft-elusive 'respect' one participant was not receiving in kind from others.) At no time did I think, "I've made a huge mistake buying this house," after all we'd explored the neighborhood a lot before committing to buy. No, what I thought was, "I hate this fucking door." I got the new knob in and engaged the deadbolt, safely inside. The crisis was over but I never stopped hating that ugly-ass door.

So it's been nearly 3 years since then and while the door still hasn't gotten me shot, it's proving hateful right back at us. Its wood frame warped in humid weather, which as you know, has been pretty much every day so far in 2009. You have to literally slam against it to get it open, at which time a bunch of cats would either run in or out, depending on which side had food left. The door sucked, we needed more light in the kitchen ... a glass door seemed obvious.

Actually it seemed obvious over a year ago, when I first got a guy out for an estimate. Disagreement between me and my lady led to apathy and we never got the door. So this year, when we got our tax refunds we committed to get rid of the old door, so I got the same sad-sack salesman to come out and measure the door again (did it grow or something?) and pick out a glass door and accompanying security door.

It took them 6 weeks to get back out to install it (after a gentle reminder) and after a few false starts we finally have it! It's a total generic door, I guess there's not a whole lot of creativity at this level of industry, but it's doing the trick. Having two doors is a little cumbersome, but at least I can open both with a couple of fingers instead of concentrating all my force onto my shoulder as I try to bash my way outside.

The cat are fascinated by it; Stymie tried to jump 'through' the glass door and received an unfortunate lesson. They line up at the door to peer into the yard. And the feral cats line up outside to peer in. We still have to get some kind of curtain for it, but for now I don't want to do anything to obstruct the view.

Sending out an SOS

2009-06-19T12:32:00.004-04:00

I've spent all morning downloading applications of dubious utility to my company-owned Blackberry. The reason: the company has seen fit to start blocking all manner of websites AGAIN. They did this before, blocking nearly every site that one might find entertaining or distracting. But then they relaxed the restriction and allowed some site, like Gmail (though they blocked the gChat feature). Then a few months ago, restrictions seemed to really relax, and we had unfettered access to all but the most offensive and evil sites (ie, hotrepublicansex.com, etc.) But over the last few days, they have been systematically clamping down again. I have a theory that you can gauge how well a company is doing by how much leeway they allow their employees online. So I guess the company is hitting the skids again. Oh well.

I now have Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Flickr and the Opera Mini Browser installed. It's not as easy to use as their Web counterparts, but at least I don't have to feel marooned at the office. Honestly without these distractions (plus selected blogs), how could I be expected to survive a day at this Mediocrity Factory? Well, I could probably live without Twitter but maybe I'm just not following enough interesting people. Story of my life.

P.S. Don't forget! See SPIKE the Angora cat at the North Shore Adoption Van this SUNDAY in Park Slope, outside NYC Pet, 5th Ave @Union/President, Brooklyn.

You're as cold as ice

2009-06-17T16:48:00.002-04:00

I promised I wouldn't make any more Spike posts, but whatever. Spike was all set to move out on Sunday, when his would-be adopter emailed to back out at the last minute. It's not like me to talk smack about someone on a blog, but what a douche. I don't know what it is, but this poor cat has brought out nothing but losers and psychopaths from the first post, several months ago. I don't know why I can't find a normal person who's not a total flake to adopt him. We're not really asking a tall order here, either.

Anyway, our loss is your gain, in that Spike will be on display this coming Sunday, outside the NYC Pet store in Park Slope. He will be joining a bunch of other cats on the North Shore Animal League Adoption Van, which is really more of a huge panel truck full of pets. I don't know what he'll do in the cage, with strangers streaming by him, but I'm hoping he puts on the dog, so to speak. He knows he's a looker, so hopefully he'll strut and pout his way into a permanent home.

Sunday, June 21, Noon-5:00PM (est.)
NYC Pet, 218 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY (718) 230-8224
http://www.nycpet.com/

Bird on a wire

2009-06-17T16:13:00.003-04:00

I don't have much to add to this story but I wanted to note it on my blog, if only so I could look back in the future and note the moment in history when the Port Authority decided it had the right to round up a bunch of animals that had done absolutely nothing wrong and kill them. This goose thing is amazingly stupid. It is proven the birds most often getting caught in jet engines are migratory geese, not this bunch that live here (sure a few may be from the 'dangerous' group but come on). Even if every goose killed could somehow be guaranteed to get sucked into a plane's rotors, it still isn't a long-term solution, unless they plan on killing every single goose, gull, pelican and egret in the country. They're going to kill a bunch now, but of course, more will come to take their place. That's an ECOSYSTEM; gassing a bunch of geese isn't policy, it's distraction.

Yet somehow with almost everyone (except the NY Post) against them, they have already begun the mass slaughter. I don't care what you think about geese, but this should be at least mildly annoying to all of us.

She's gonna love me in my Chevy van

2009-06-01T13:12:00.003-04:00

Lucy makes sure nothing happens to the cat food

You people with cars won't understand this, but sometimes we sit around and discuss all the things we could do if we had one. How we could go to Ikea, to Costco, to the Catskills (I don't know why we bring that up, neither of us knows anything about the Catskills). The idea that we could have something to not only transport us around but also hold heavy items so that we may bring them to our door, well, let's just say we understand the allure.

Eventually these conversation descend into all the reasons we SHOULDN'T ever have a car: the costs, the worries about theft, the moving from one side of the street to the other all the time. So we end feeling pleased we are still reliant on mass transit. But this weekend we were able to tool around and block the box like all those SOBs who act like they don't see me jaywalking on 23rd St.

Empty Cages had put out a request for a washing machine, and a woman offered up her washer and dryer for free. Someone would need to go get them, but nearly every member of the group was working an adoption event scheduled for the same day. They needed a Transporter.

I saw this not only as an opportunity to help out the group but to turn the whole thing to my selfish advantage and take the van out shopping after my chores were done. So I picked up the van at my favorite Uhaul spot in East New York where the receptionist calls everybody "Honey" and your transactions are constantly interrupted by people buying bags of ice (their other business) and people yelling at each other loudly. I got the van and an appliance dolly and started up to the BQE. Before getting on the highway, I stopped off at a friend's house to finally pick up the air conditioner she said I could have months before. Originally I intended to use this AC myself, but somehow I promised it to Empty Cages along the way (maybe it's a cult). With the AC stowed, I was off to Bay Ridge.

I got there way faster than I thought (thank you Robert Moses), located the apartment and found the donators ready for me. The woman's burly son, along with his burly friend, were ready with the washer/dryer. These things were huge, front-loading machines, the washing machine itself weighing almost 250 pounds. With effort we got them into the van with millimeters to spare.

As I headed up to the shelter space, I was already doing the math: 2 Burly Guys + Me = Barely got it into the van, therefore me + [UNKNOWN] = spinal injury. I got up to the space and amassed a few people to help move them. It didn't look good, unfortunately it appears that cat rescue attracts few really muscular people. But lucky for us, some truly tough guys were right down the block.

There's been a big bus on the block for a while now, all painted and graffiti-covered, and big dudes are always around working on it. It's one of those biodiesel conversions, which is better for the environment (even better for it is the fact that it hasn't moved in weeks). We asked a couple of the guys if they would help and they agreed.

We tried to pitch in but they basically did all the work, strapping the machines to the dolly and lugging it up the narrow stairs. Their only remuneration: they wanted to meet the roosters (liberated from cockfighting dens in the Bronx). They said they hear them crowing all the time and had wondered where it came from. The rooster complied loudly.

With the machines dropped off, the job was essentially over. This gave me the perfect excuse to commandeer the van and use it to my own nefarious purposes. I drove home, picked up Jeannie and we drove to the Sunset Park Costco.

I haven't been in a wholesale store in years and Jeannie had never been. It's pretty overwhelming at first. We got memberships and ID card and waded through the enormous crowds with our oversize cart. We knew we wanted cat supplies but we didn't have a list or even a clear idea of what Costco carried. I was convinced they would have 'everything' from kitty litter to furniture, while Jeannie thought it would be far more limited. The truth was somewhere in the middle, an odd collection of stuff with no discernible theme. You could buy 20-packs of bar soap, but they didn't carry Ivory. You could select from a huge variety in brands of laundry detergent but no one brand had the oil-drum size I was searching for. However in some areas they had exactly what we were looking for.

I had been told by Lisacat that Costco carried a decent-quality cat food, and indeed, it is higher quality that it has any need to be. It's all chicken and rice, no wheat and no meat by-products. It's sold in 25-lb. bags, of which we bought 5. They also had cases of canned Friskies which we also picked up. But there wasn't much else in the way of cat supplies, just some Iams and 40-lb. buckets of Scoop Away litter (we bought one even though I find Scoop Away overly perfumey). I still can't figure out why the cat food was so premium when they don't appear to have much interest in cats beyond these few supplies, but I'll take it.

After getting that, everything else was gravy. The place is huge; at first I thought it was merely big until I realized there was a whole other floor to the place. We bought as much stuff as we could justify and by the time we got to the check-out, we both had to push the cart, it was so heavy. We lucked with a short check-out line and got back to the van in plenty of time (and oh yeah, we stopped at the liquor store next door and bought a couple of huge bottles of Jim Beam, just in case we need several gallons of whiskey soon).

We got the stuff home and dumped it off (the cats were very excited to see the cat food so it had to be stowed in the bathroom until we could deal with it). We got the van back before the office closed, so we didn't have to worry about getting up in the morning to return it. I can't believe it all went down without any mishaps, usually these vehicle encounters always result in some injury, however small. But I managed to drive without running into anything/anybody, and near as I can figure the equipment we transported suffered no real damage. Mission Accomplished.

So it was fun having an excuse to drive around and do stuff in a car, but by the end of the day I was happy to return it and walk away. There's just too many things to worry about when you own a car, and I got enough stuff to obsess over these days. But maybe I will sign up for that Zipcar thing, although I'm not sure it's worth it when the Uhaul van is closer and cheaper. And really, is there anything cooler than driving a cargo van that tells everyone how cheap you are?

I'm not going to spend my life being a color

2009-05-26T10:59:00.004-04:00

Izzy: My only regret is not taking better photos

We're happy to announce that Izzy the non-feral yard cat has found a permanent (indoor) home! We're very glad to get this guy off the street for good, he'll be moving up to the north side of the neighborhood where, we're told, all the fun stuff happens.

It's been a while since we had an adoption go so smoothly; the guy answered Izzy's ad and actually provided the info I asked for. It's pretty simple, I ask that anybody who's interested in a cat to write in with their own background info. I just ask for some sense of their living and work situation and what kind of history they have with pets. I think it's pretty reasonable. You know how many people respond in kind to these questions? Maybe 20%. Everybody else sounds evasive or just plain stupid. One person said "I don't divulge my financial information to strangers." What? Did I ask for your W-2s? No, I asked what you did for a living. I've had my share of Craigs-List paranoia, but come on. I guess people think if I know they live in a studio apartment somewhere in Manhattan that I can leverage this hot info and swear out some credit cards in their name.

I guess some people think of pets on Craigs List the same way they think of the Free Stuff section: if they respond first they'll get the gear, no questions asked. You always know when an adoption isn't going to work out when their first questions is "How much is the adoption fee?" That should be the LAST question they ask. Then you get other weirdos who write you a novel initially about how much they want a cat, but despite all the content, they don't actually give you any other useful info except that they're leading very sheltered lives.

Anyway, I couldn't be happier about this latest adoption. Izzy was far too sweet to spend his life outside, and the guy adopting him seems like a good fit (Izzy was all over him the moment they met). But it underscores how random this thing can be; Izzy's ad was put up Thursday and now he's got his person. Meanwhile, poor Spike continues to languish on the vine, despite a PR campaign full of cute photos, amusing videos and clear-eyed testimonials. Meanwhile, a simple black cat gets snatched up like he was dipped in chocolate. If Spike knew, imagine how appalled he would be!

Spike waits for his new home

Feed me Seymour

2009-05-20T14:01:00.004-04:00

The local falafel cart has several chefs, and they all suck, except for this one kid. Bad acne and indecipherable accent, for some reason he takes this stuff seriously, dressing up a standard falafel on rice with a ton of vegetables, both raw and grilled. While other guys are content to throw some iceberg lettuce on rice and toss in some dessicated falafel balls, he always fries the falafel at order, and jazzes up the salad with red cabbage, peppers, scallions, carrots and broccoli. Oh yeah, and french fries and eggplant! I skip the mysterious 'white sauce' and ask for liberal amounts of hot sauce, although he put so many jalapenos in already I have to towel off my head, I'm sweating so much.

The other guys who work there on other days merely toe the line to an indifferent lunch crowd, why does he give so much extra effort when he clearly doesn't have to? I dunno. I certainly can't imagine doing the same thing at my day job. Maybe he actually likes what he does for a living; what a foreign concept!

I skipped the line, I paid my dime

2009-05-18T12:33:00.003-04:00

In an effort to both clean up this site a little and cross-pollinate my stuff, I edited this home page slightly. I've added a list of cats we have up for adoption, which I assume I'll keep updated as needed. Now, normally we only advertise for cats who are currently under our roof, and several of these cats are not technically residents. But they live right outside among the ferals, but have proven themselves tame and friendly enough to warrant a mention. I've also included longtime holdouts Augie and Marbles; I don't really think they'll get adopted as they are really bad at selling themselves ... and we've sort of gotten attached to them in the meantime. But hey, if the right people come along, who knows? So that leaves Spike and Haley as 'classic' adoptable cats, living with us but with every intention to move them out once we find a decent home.

Spike is still with us, we've decided he can only go to a home as an only-cat. He just doesn't get along with other cats well enough. He's a real people-pleaser otherwise. Haley finally got spayed a few days ago, so she's all set. I'm having a hard time describing her personality since most of the time we had her she was in heat. She's very different now that she's not constantly rolling around yowling, holding her butt up in the air and running in place. Time will tell.

You may also note Ainslie on the adoption list, he's a recent TNR guy who just decided to reveal how tame he is as well. I kinda figured he was tame but I thought it would take months to win him over. Naw; just a plate of canned food did it. The number of tame cats around is setting a dangerous precedent (namely, our house full of tame cats) so we're trying to be more aggressive with the adoptions. If we can't find a good home for Spike, we're campaigning to get him in on an Empty Cages Collective Adoption Event, which have a great track record for finding homes. Haley will also get in on this, although there's a waiting list for getting in. How New York.

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

2009-05-15T11:50:00.001-04:00

Replacing camera LCD, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

Here's something sort of not cat related! I use my digital camera a lot (mostly for taking photos of cats, yes). But I treat it horribly. I never use a camera bag and I generally just let it bang around in my stachel-bag. Consequently it's all banged up. That's fine, as it was all cosmetic damage. But a little while ago I scratched the LCD screen, which created lines across the viewable area. This was annoying but did impede the functioning of the camera. So in my leisure I investigated how I might replace it.

First I checked with Canon, but amazingly enough they have no service offices in New York City (lame). And the thought of shipping it off somewhere seemed like a recipe for blowing a buncha dough for what seemed to me to be a simple swap job. So I decided to do it myself.

I found a cheap replacement LCD kit on eBay, it even comes with a small screwdriver and plastic prybar. I had mistakenly ordered an LCD backlight from somebody else, so I had a full replacement if need be.

I googled a couple of how-to guides but I couldn't find anything about my specific model. So I went with the instructions from some other Canon camera, assuming it couldn't be much different. Wrong! I took the camera apart, separated the LCD-backlight assembly, separated the LCD from the back light, and yanked out the LCD ribbon-tape plug. Easy!

I got out the new LCD and slipped it into the backlight (which has its own, tinier ribbon-wire plug). With some difficulty I got the new LCD plugged in, but I was having trouble getting the two parts to play nice together and fold back down into position. The ribbon wire allowed limited movement of the component and unbeknownst to me it got caught under the housing for the screen. When I tried to put it all flat on the camera body, the wire broke. Hard!

Lucky for me, I had been dumb enough to buy a replacement backlight, so I swapped this in. But the plug was super small and I could not for the life of me figure out how to get it into the socket. I gave up and started researching camera repair shops. But I turned to the Internet once more and found somebody who had my same model. He mentioned in passing that the way to re-attach the plug involved lifting up a tiny clip on the opposite site of the socket. Jesus.

I got the plug in and the tiny clip back down and got the camera back together. Success! What a pain in the ass. So it cost me $60 to replace it, all told. I have to assume that's cheaper than having somebody who knows what they're doing do it. I have to!

Empire building

2009-05-07T11:48:00.004-04:00

I can't believe how hard a time we're having in finding a home for Spike, the white Angora cat we took in a little while ago. We keep getting weirdos who string us along for weeks and then disappear right at the moment they're supposed to come meet him in person. I keep thinking it's one person who keeps using different email addresses, but unless they're spoofing IP addresses all over the city, it's separate individuals. Super lame. I think people think they will respond to an adoption ad and then, minutes later, go to an undisclosed location to pick up their briefcase full of kitty. Come on, people, we've got to at least attempt to establish some background before handing out cats. Oh well, try, try again.

I wouldn't mind so much but you see, we're all full up with cats. I know I've said it before but summer hasn't even begun and we've got cats everywhere. Two of the back yard cats who were presumed to be feral have turned out to be more tame and friendly than the indoors cats! So we gotta find them homes as well.

And then there's Haley, a young cat we trapped a little while ago. We'd never seen her before the night she turned up in the trap. She also turned out to be very friendly, but was skin and bones and sporting a hugely infected abscess which manifested itself as a big hole on her shoulder. She recovered from her injuries at Empty Cages Collective, and once she was well enough, we brought her back home to finish her convalescence. She still needs to be vaccinated and spayed so she's kept separate from the other cats. It looks like we'll have to wait until the end of the month to get her spayed; we could get fixed sooner but it would require getting her ear tipped. And I don't wanna do that anymore if at all possible, not for tame, adoptable cats.

Meanwhile I have been having a helluva time getting this guy to come out and give me an estimate on replacing our back door, but he finally made it over yesterday (2 hours late). We're also probably putting a fence in, and THAT guy has been giving me the runaround for weeks. This is not even mentioning the first fence guy who came over, duly measured the yard and discussed options, only to never ever call me back with an estimate. What's up with that?

In an effort to bridge all my problems, I am in the process of teaching the cats to build a fence and replace a door. Results have been mixed so far, they have a lot of energy but I'm having trouble finding tools small enough for them to hold.

I'll be back when I have something interesting to report!

Digging in the dirt

2009-04-27T11:25:00.004-04:00

This isn't the tent he gave me, but I assume it looks like this.

I'm trying to get organized and live up to the secret pact I made with myself that go me through the winter. During the cold months, when there was work to do on the house, I comforted myself with the thought: "I'll do it when it warms up."

Then this weekend comes along with 90-degree temperatures. Great. Unable to put it off any longer I went into the back yard with the intent to half-ass some yard cleanup then retreat to the TV again. Over Christmas we refinished some floors in the house, which produced a whole lot of scrap wood. Instead of dealing with it at the time (see above), I just piled all the wood in the yard. The Plywood, 2x4s, Masonite and old wood paneling have shuttled around the yard over the months, coming to rest against the neighbor's chain link fence. It somewhat resembles the barricade in Les Miserables.

I figured I could put the smaller debris in contractor bags and lash together the longest wood boards together in preparation for sawing them into bundles small enough for the trash guy to pick up. This still would leave some huge plywood sheets that would need to be cut repeatedly but there was no way I was doing that for now. I busied myself with the easiest of the tasks, bagging up small garbage, breaking down some of the thinner panels and whatnot. Meanwhile, my neighbor a couple yards over was puttering out back as well.

He struck up a conversation with me, noting that he had just dug up a bunch of dirt from his yard while working on his latest project, which appears to be a sort of gazebo structure (he described it as a 'cabin' and admitted that he's sort of winging the plans, making it up as he goes along; I like him already). Anyhow, he had a bunch of dirt, and he knows we have all these cats running around (his son learned to say "gato" before "Papi," I was somewhat chagrined to learn). The cats love to 'play' in the dirt, as he put it, so it could help keep the cats in my yard if they had more dirt to 'play' in. So I said sure, gimme the dirt.

Herein lies one of the awkward issues of yard-having in Brooklyn: we can't enter each others' yards. My next-door neighbor and I have no fence between us, but nearly every other yard is fenced off. So dirt that needed to travel some 20 feet would need to be carted through the neighbor's house, out the door, down the sidewalk, and through my living room just to get over here. He suggested an alternative: he would fill up sandbags with dirt and hand them over the fence to me.

For the next couple of hours, he shoveled dirt into reinforced bags, dragged them over to a ladder next to the fence, climbed up and gingerly dropped the bag into my waiting hands. I don't have a lot of space to dump extra dirt, but we do have a sizable plot in the back of the yard and a sort of narrow median down the center. We filled up every inch of available dirt-space, and there's still some dirt leftover. Part of his motivation was that now he won't have to pay to have the dirt hauled away. I don't know how much that costs, but he seemed grateful. It must be expensive, cuz I was exhausted and my muscles are all sore from the hauling and dumping; he did all that PLUS the shoveling. He even gave me a new gazebo tent that would have gone unused by him since he was building the permanent cabin thingy. Wow.

I admit I don't interact with my neighbors as much as I should. I talk to the next-door neighbors, since our houses are identical, so we feel like we are sort of related or something. But we're on head-nodding level at best with most of the other neighbors. So it was nice to have an excuse to speak to him, especially since his family is just about the only other family on our end of the block to use their back yards much. I'm hoping we keep talking, I'm racking my brain to find something I can give to him in return, but I'm pretty rusty in the ways of Neighbor Gifting. If I can't find something I would otherwise throw out he might find useful, should I bake him some cookies or something?

Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper

2009-04-17T12:20:00.000-04:00

Pepper is a Portuguese Water Dog. She was rescued from a kill shelter and is hoping to find a permanent home. She lives in DC. Too bad no one in the DC area was interested in bringing a Portuguese Water Dog into their home.

UPDATE: Pepper has an adoption pending! But without groups like K-9 Lifesavers, every purebred dog produced on spec just pushes one more dog (purebred or not) into the euthanasia room.