Genius Thief

I got to babysit a shoplifter. Apparently, he was a bad-ass and had done prison time (he'd recently turned 18) though he repeatedly asked if he could call his mother, and was quite concerned about whether or not he would be put under arrest.

The thing is, he was already under arrest. This was difficult for him to understand, though it was explained to him several times.

There were a lot of things he found difficult to understand.

For example, he didn't think he was a thief. When our loss prevention guy pointed out that he'd stolen stuff, and that, by definition, makes him a thief, he tried to wheedle around it saying that he's not only a thief. I didn't want to ruffle his little baby feathers, but it did sort of beg the question as far as what else he might be. Fashion model? I think not.

When asked why he stole, he replied that he wanted to go fishing. Okay, then.

When asked if he had money to pay for stuff, he said he had a dollar. (He took about twenty dollars worth of stuff.) He said he intended to pay for one of the items. It was worth more than a dollar. Hmm. He wanted to know if he could just pay for the stuff and leave. No, he couldn't, but out of curiosity, how would he pay for it? He would ask his friend for money. Did his friend have money, he was asked? He hung his head and mumbled no, his friend didn't have money either.

I realized then that I was in the presence of a mastermind criminal.

When asked what he did prison time for, he said that someone's uncle was on the property being scary and that he'd threatened him with a gun to get him to leave. When asked what kind of gun, he paused for a very long time, and finally came up with an airsoft gun. I guess it's possible that this may have actually happened. He was seventeen at the time and said he did three months. And he wasn't afraid of jail, he said, just prison.

He did look like a very, very sad kitty when the officer arrived and put him in cuffs.

So there you have it. A typical criminal, who now has an arrest and citation on his record, should he ever seek employment beyond fishing, which seems unlikely but hey, he may want some sort of job someday. Eventually. Maybe.

I felt a little bad for him, but you know, it's all about choices. Children take things that don't belong to them because they aren't socialized, and when they can't have what they want right now they kick and scream and put up a fuss or sneak it later. Adults recognize things like ownership, community, responsibility ... and these things are awesome, wonderful things. To a thief they're things that get in the way of immediate gratification, and are stupid. But an adult sees that:

With ownership, I can keep and take care of things. With no agreement of ownership, anyone can take anything and there's no point in taking care of stuff, having nice things, or even assurance of some safety within the home. In fact, the concept of home is fragile and one of the things that thieves destroy is a sense of personal space and haven. Thieves are, of course, outraged and upset when people break into their homes and take their stuff ....

Community: awesome. People looking out for each other, watching each others' backs, helping uphold rules that make things like homes and ownership work. Having a community is core to being able to have celebrations, conducting business, and finding help with jobs that are too big or complicated to do by ourselves. Thief boy doesn't get that his mode of providing for himself relies on the existence of a community. Without it, he wouldn't have a store to steal from. He can disdain law-abiding citizens all he wants, but without them he would be taking his life into his own hands to go onto private property in a non-community, isolated area where the resident is accustomed to protecting his own property by him or herself and takes care of their own business.

Responsibility. It sounds like a drag until you realize it has two sides: the stuff you need to do, and the fact that you can do it – you are able to respond. Responsibility sounds initially like slavery, but it is in fact freedom. Responsible people have options, capability, and by accepting the requirements of society, grow to become more and more able through practice of taking responsibility. By being a responsible mother, I become a better parent. By being a responsible animal owner, I can't help but become a better livestock owner and cat lover. When you take action to fulfill your to-do list, through action and practice you become better at things like your job, and fishing, and keeping house, and managing money. If you practice. If you work at it. If you learn and grow and change and adapt. These aren't easy things to do, btw. It's easier just to grab and demand and whine and spend most of your time sleeping both literally and figuratively, like a child. Thankfully, most children instinctively learn and adapt and change. But some get stuck at one stage or another and feel that they have all the resources and knowledge required to get by. I find it odd that so many of them get stuck at a stage when they have almost no resources or knowledge that can help them provide for themselves.

Thieves tend to consider themselves smarter than us idiots who pay for stuff that's so easy to take. I doubt he ever thought through the idea that if everyone stole, there would be no place to steal from because there would be no point in having things like stores and possessions and ... anyway.

So I gazed in wonder upon the genius before me, and thanked the stars that I am a fool.

Rose Rosette Disease

Rose Rosette Disease.

I've been out of the horticulture world for a while. I garden a lot, I learned a bit of plant taxonomy, took classes in plant propagation, helped build a greenhouse, toured nurseries around the northwest corner of Oregon, and drove my husband crazy by collecting plant samples and drying them in weird places in the house and spewing Latin names as we drove through neighborhoods while studying for exams.

This disease was never mentioned in class. It snuck up on me.

Part of the reason is because it hasn't officially blipped on the radar in this area. Part of it is because thanks to a newly-developed test and the devastating loss of some important rose gardens, in 2011 RRD and the rose rosette virus have gained new attention.

It has no cure. Roses that have the disease have to be destroyed, and no new rose may be planted in its place, as the roots remaining in the ground may transmit the virus to the new rose. This disease has destroyed a huge number of wild roses, and many healthy wild roses are destroyed in an effort to restrict the spread of this disease.

The primary vector appears to be a particular sort of wingless mite that doesn't appear to live in this area, and so it may be that my other roses won't be affected, but it may also be true that they're already infected, and I'll lose them all. As symptoms arise, I'll destroy plants, and in their place put lavender and rosemary and peonies and try not to think about how much I loved the scent of all those blossoms in the early morning as I walked down my favorite paths.

I suspect that the rose was infected when I bought it, probably through root stock or a graft purchased from a nursery in an infected region. Last fall, the rose sent up a bizarre shoot. I thought it might be just a weird sport, and wondered if it would bloom. It did, beautifully. The stem remained red, as did all the leaves, and the stem was covered almost completely in thorns. It grew so tall and thick and fast that it easily broke in the next strong wind. Very short side shoots developed, with more rose buds, and one more bloomed. None of the side stems grew more than a couple of inches--unusual for a knocked down branch that bothers to grow side shoots.

In the spring, my husband accidentally mowed it where it lay. The grass had covered it up. I snipped it and forgot about it.

While surfing I ran across an article about the disease, and my heart sank. The stem covered in thorns, the red foliage that didn't mature to green, the very lush, brittle growth ... I had everything except the witch's brooms, elongated and twisted leaves and short stems growing in profusion from a single node, eventually forming 'brooms'. The next morning I went out. That weird stem was long gone, of course, but I had the rest of the plant to look at. It looked normal, except ... the red leaves at the growing tips looked twisted and puckered. No more stems covered in thorns, but .... I emailed our county master gardener program. They concurred with my assessment. Dig it up, burn it. Don't wait for more symptoms. Even if the rest of the rose isn't blaring signs of the disease, even though those leaves might be twisting for other reasons, even though the leaves may eventually turn green, because the rose was probably infected via a graft or root stock, because there's no cure ... there wasn't much point in waiting to see if the rose might not be okay. It wouldn't be.

I may have unwittingly spread the disease. I didn't disinfect the clippers after I clipped off what I thought was a weird sport. I don't have a lot of problems with powdery mildew, and black spot is endemic ... all my roses have at least a little black spot, and so I don't worry about making that worse.

That lack of foresight and basic sanitary practice may have cost me my rose garden. There are always diseases, known and unknown, ready to arise in all our gardens that could kill living things that we prize and that rely on us for their survival. Sloppiness, laziness ... it's easy, but it's risky. I gambled. We'll see how much I lost. Maybe nothing. Maybe just the one rose, a rose I didn't infect, a rose that came infected, that was dying, though neither of us knew it. I surely hope so. Because I have some great roses, and I'd like them to stick around a long, long time.

When the Coyotes Sing

Misread of the day: Urban Wine, for a second, looked like Urine Wine and I thought, ew, what?!

A long-haired, pure black (doesn't have any sun-faded brown areas even!) kitty has been dumped in our neighborhood. It's not feral. I can't get close to it, but it understands domesticated kitty concepts like food comes from houses. It's also been in our house (I think) eating from the kitty food bowl.

Here's another plea that will not reach the right ears. Please don't dump your kitties in the countryside! Yes, most of us will feed these animals but our own cats will fight with them, and if they get injured, there's no way to get them to the vet. Also because they're so skittish and scared, we can't take them inside at night and they will inevitably be eaten by coyotes.

After I noticed it around for a few days the kitty, which I believe is female, disappeared for a couple of weeks and I thought damn, I guess that's it. But now she's back. My son is calling her Oops for the moment.

The coyotes sing at every sunset very near our house. And often during the night they yip and cry while they tear apart and share whatever kills they've managed to snag. One of these times, it will be Oops.

Every morning now I wake up and wonder if Oops will come up to the deck to snatch a quick meal, or if we'll never see her again.

Sigh.

Bad Phone Company, No Bone for You

It appears that we won't be entering the 21st century for at least another week.

Sadness!

Much as I love visiting the library, I'm more than a little irritated. The phone company didn't call and let me know there was a change of schedule. I'm glad I had the day off anyway, as I was able to attend a very informative class on small business tax law for my state, but half the reason I decided to take the day off was to make sure I would be home for the installation. And I had a ton of things I could have done in the morning instead of waiting for the crew, such as grocery shopping and picking up a load of hay, straw, oyster shells, and two loads of landscaping material. The place closes at four--I'm not going to get home and back in time to get that done. Drat and drat.

The day they rescheduled us for without consulting us as to whether we'd actually be there just happened to be, by pure unadulterated luck, a day that R. would be home, otherwise we'd have to reschedule their unannounced rescheduling for sometime in March.

I feel like I'm five years old again and a week is for-ev-er! I've already waited over a week. Whine!

Sometimes patience is hard. I'm all about patience when I'm fishing. Waiting for internet service, it seems, not so much.

But I've been waiting for two years, so I guess I'll just have to put my big girl panties on and tuck in that lower lip. But not before one last hmph.

Hmph.

More Flooring

Here are my kids, helping with the never-ending parquet. It's everywhere! It's in my kitchen under the linoleum. It's in the bedroom under the carpet. It's in the closet. (Seriously.) Everywhere we pull up flooring upstairs, there's more parquet. It's kinda creepy, actually. Parquet isn't easy to install.

I'm sure it looked fantastic back in the day. Unfortunately it doesn't look very fantastic today. Mysterious stains, bleaching, water damage and odors that have permeated what little finish remains on it have made it pretty icky. Maybe the stuff in the bedroom isn't too bad, but I'm not about to pull up the carpet in there to find out. The bedroom carpet is in halfway decent shape. At this point I'm all for the if it ain't broke don't fix it philosophy.

After all the prep (which is ongoing, btw) I finally got to lay down a wee bit of floor with D's help. He did all the brainy stuff, and I just kept going after the hard part was done. And I hit my first milestone. First empty box! Awesome, but scary. Will I have enough of this stuff to complete the project? Did I measure everything right? The conflicting info online and other places is crazy-making too. Everyone insists on poly film of various grades over cement. Everyone also insists on a vapor barrier in crawlspaces under the house where you're putting in floor 'at grade level.' But this is neither. This is my upstairs, with only downstairs rooms beneath all the upstairs rooms. In addition there's alarming warnings pertaining to putting film over wood, as it will cause mold and mildew problems.

But nowhere does it say what specifically to do in my situation. Seriously, people, who wrote the technical manuals for these things?

If I have to I will pop the floor apart and put plastic under it if the 800 number people tell me so when I have a chance to talk to them on Tuesday. But I have a feeling that they'll say it's not necessary.

Is that so hard to say, folks, in your very, very brief instructions in the teeny, tiny print?

So I'm in a holding pattern for now. But it's a pretty holding pattern. And the kitties love it. I have a feeling they'll love it a lot less, though, when they go charging up the (carpeted) stairs and hit that first stretch of slick new floor.

Weee!

D*#% Ink!

I ran out of ink--the same ink I always run out of--and so I had to change the cartridge.  I'm already annoyed because I can't use my new laser printer because the toner cartridge ran out and the new toner cartridge is giving me error messages.  I'm additionally annoyed because I like buying ink in bulk so that I save, but the only bulk ink I can find at my favorite savings store sells one of each kind of ink jet ink cartridge instead of sensibly offering two (or three, please!) of the ink I'm always running out of.

And then!

And then I start trying to pry the ink out of the nuclear-bomb-proof packaging without damaging the cartridge, and I have to fight the impulse to tear at it with my teeth like a wild animal out of frustration.  The way the edges and the extruded parts where the ink sits interplay make scissors almost useless, knives dangerous to use, and argh!! My teeth aren't working!!

The scissors finally do it for me, after prying and some ineffectual cutting and forcing blade against seams, and I extract my cartridge.

My nerves, however, are frayed to bits.

And the worst part?

On the front, images of smiling, happy people are mocking me.

But maybe that's not the worst part after all.  You see, I only managed to open one area, which gave me access to two cartridges (one of which I don't need, of course.)  When I next run out of ink, most likely I'll have to open the other area to get to the cartridge I need.

Expletives don't cover it.  I just have to put it away and not look at it anymore, or I'll do something rash like write an angry letter.  

Argh.

I bet they're punishing me for trying to save money.

Argh times infinite.  Poopyheaded packaging designers ...

"Adult Content" #amazonfail

Here's an interesting article that points out the inadequacy of Amazon's explanation that the sudden disappearance of rankings on thousands of books was some sort of glitch.  Commentators and authors observe that when someone receives an email from Amazon claiming their book was removed from rankings due to adult content, and then later claims that it was a glitch, something isn't right.  

This brings us to the troubling subject of adult content.  Should adult content be restricted?  If so, is America willing to give up its Playboy magazine?  I'm thinking no, and the fact that Playboy didn't end up glitched off the ratings system is a clear sign that this is more sinister than Amazon's explanation allows for.  (It also suggests that white male power is alive and well.)  Many have noticed that male-oriented sexually explicit material didn't go away, including those that included sexual violence.  But gay titles did 'mysteriously' disappear, even if they had no sexual situations in them.

I'm interested to see what develops from this.  In the meantime, I expect Amazon to begin dodging liability.  Curiouser and curiouser.