Verbie's coming home today

That guy does a lot around here. I'm exhausted from holding down the fort! Oh, and I miss him, too.

Good. I likes good newz!

It is election day in the UK today, Mayor of London and lots of local councils. Seems the voters don't like the austerity bullshit, the Labour Party are just slaughtering the Tories and the LIb Dems.

Guardian live blog here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012 ... government

Part of the group assigned to Clinton?

Yeah, there were over 400 court ordered castrations in Holland for all sorts of reasons, mostly to do with mental health issues. Basicly they castrated the insane, the and it was done also for Eugenic Reasons. And there were an unknown number where the hospitals didn't bother going to court, especially if the patient submitted to the operation "voluntarily". Alan Turing (who broke the Enigma code) submitted to Chemical castration via Eostregen ingections in England in 1952 to avoid getting thrown in jail for homosexuality.

http://socialhistory.org/sites/default/ ... genics.pdf



There were also approx 64000 sterilisations in the USA around the same period, a slight majority of them bieng on women. It was a sad sign of the times really, eugenics didn't die with the Nazis.

Worth a thread on its own, really.

$40K? I am no lawyer and I do not have the motivation to go through what a lawyer goes through in law school. I don't wish to encumber the debts associated with attending law school either. I will say that I am in a trade that requires a license, but certainly not a license that requires much more than a year of technical training. The one thing I do have to offer is 40 years of experience.

Having said this, I make considerably more than $40K. I feel I'm worth it. I also feel that any half decent lawyer is worth more than I, as far as earnings are concerned. I don't blame anyone for trying to make it on their own. These guys are going to sink or swim on their own merits.

Holy cow!

Here $850 gets you a crappy, tiny 2 bed, 1 bath duplex in a sea of other duplexes where people are always moving in and out, the Safeway 6 blocks away sends a truck through once a week to collect shopping carts and the trains rattle the windows day and night...

Even in depressed Sacramento a 3/2 in a decent neighborhood is around $230,000.

Yeah around here $40K with premium bennies is a comfortable living. If it were me, the first thing I would have done is check out what health insurance is going to run them, especially seeing as they are both married and one has young kids. My guess is that they are going to have to dispose of a hell of a lot of traffic tickets just to pay that bill every month.

I certainly do not begrudge them wanting to set out on their own (albeit with each other) but they would have been wise to have researched for an area that is not already saturated with lawyers fighting for a slice of a pie that is rapidly getting smaller and smaller. Court costs and fines in some cases are now over $300.00, people have come to the conclusion that they cannot hire a lawyer AND pay the court costs, it has to be one or the other. I was in court on Monday and the pro se guilty plea line was pretty much half of the courtroom that day. I wish them well, but I think they will live to regret giving up a guaranteed paycheck every month.

Funny. I thought PMs were private.

Well I have Mousetraps scattered all over my bedroom, with bits of Snickers bar stuck on them as I've read that Mice go ape for snickers. Lots of nuts and sugar and chocklate to tempt the pallete. And I'm going to sleep in my VERY unconfortable spare bed tonight.

It's funny the things you learn about yourself. I have had no problem with Dogs and Cats sleeping in the same room as me, but I SIMPLY COULD NOT ABIDE having a mouse scampering around in the same room as me. I never suspected I was in any way mouse phobic but there it is.

Seriously concidering getting acouple of Indoor Cats. But the thought of vets bills and all the rest of the stuff is scary... I think I'll talk about that on the cats thread sometime.

Meeses dig some kinds of kitty litter, too. Also. And peanut butter. As well.

Bad form, Zorbas. What are you thinking? Please consider editing out the personal communications from people who have not given their permission?

I'm sorry Suranis, I know this is really bothering you...but...given your avatar...

My irony meter just exploded!

Mine did too!

I hope you get rid of it/them, Suranis!

Oh, I missed some excitement, eh? Typical insensitive behavior? Ah, well. Some of us have no control when we're irritated.

Suranis, I hope my mouse story doesn't drive you bonkers.

One morning I got up at 5 am to write before the household awoke. I stumbled into the kitchen half awake and heated water for tea. When I pulled the spoon out of the honey jar, I thought it felt a little heavy, but I was completely unprepared for the honey-soaked mouse who hopped stickily off the spoon, scampered up my arm and sat on my shoulder, panting in my ear, while I silently freaked out. Only the tip if his cute little nose was honey-free.

I took him outside and stood next to the chicken coop, one shoulder against the roof. After a while he jumped onto the roof and ran across to the ladder on the other side. My last glimpse was of him covered in bits of leaves and twigs, trundling down the chicken coop ramp.

We had a mouse under the stove one time (they love the insulation in stoves, apparently) and being the animal lovers we are, we used a sticky trap. The 3 indoor cats are obviously also animal lovers because they paid NO attention when the mouse was free-range. (HAHA, didn't intend the pun!) The next night, we hear the thrashing around and clattering that signaled a captive, so my husband goes in there and pulls out the drawer on the stove to get to the mousie and sticky trap. About that time, Gumbo the Foppish Cat comes FLYING in there and SLAPS his paw down on the trap. He missed the mouse, but he's now stuck to the trap. Along with the mouse who has gone from 4 paws stuck to about 2.5 paws stuck and making headway on his escape. So Gumbo uses his back paw to get leverage to unstick his front paw. Ummmm.....no. And my husband is still trying to get the damn sticky pad out from under the stove while avoiding mouse teeth and cat claws. The mouse is screaming, the cat is howling and we are both on the verge of wetting our pants laughing. Not conducive to such a delicate operation. He finally managed to get the trap out from under the stove (by sticking the broom handle to it...we're quickly running out of sticky surface so we have to work fast at this point) and herding the entire thing out the back door. He just threw the whole wad of cat-mouse-trap-broom out onto the deck. Gumbo wandered back in a little later, none the worse for wear. The broom had a chunk gone out of it and the mouse and trap were never seen again.

Oh I'd loved to have seen that! That's hysterical! Even funnier than when I put a long piece of shelf paper sticky side up in the bathtub to stop the cat from pooping in there. It worked, but I didn't see it. When I got home there was the wadded up piece of shelf paper covered in clumps of cat hair and a torn shower curtain. But I never found poop in there again.

I've never had any problems with mammals, including mice. I like 'em, etc.

So this one time I was down in Georgia visiting my grandparents with my (then) three children, the youngest of whom was 10 months old. He was fussy and didn't like the playpen and so I let him have a bottle in there. (Please don't send me literature on tooth decay.)

I tiptoed in to check on him in the playpen. The bottle we were using was one of those playtex kind that you put the bags of liquid into. He had fallen asleep, the bag had emptied and collapsed, and ... a mouse had come from SOMEWHERE -- I did not bring it with me in the playpen -- and was IN the bottle.

I started shrieking. Hormones maybe

My grandfather, a very kind man who I still miss to this day, called me a city girl, very snidely, and scooped up the bottle and took the whole thing outside. God knows what he did with it. No one would accept my explanation that I was just feeling protective of the baby and am not afraid of mice. There was a lot of mockery that week.

That baby hated the playpen even more after that.

I don't like snakes though or any kind of bee. But I'm not afraid of mice!

We used to have a big aquarium on a stand in the dining room that we used as a terrarium. It had snakes in it. We didn't tell people that though.

About 15 years ago we hosted one of those meet-and-greet things for a man who was running for a local office. My mom, bless her heart, send her idiot housekeeper over here to clean my house before the party. The housekeeper managed to let the gekko AND the flying squirrel out of their cages. She was very thorough. I spent a very uncomfortable night keeping one eye on the guests and one on lookout for the animals. I just knew the iguana was going to come cruising out from under the couch and over the mayor's foot or something. At one point I spotted the squirrel on the curtain rod, but nobody else noticed and he didn't dive bomb anyone, so I left him alone. For some reason "Excuse me a moment while I climb up on this chair and get my rodent off the drapes" just didn't seem appropriate.

A low end four room (3 bedroom) HDB flat out in Punggol or Jurong West rents (to foreigners) for around SGD $2,200/mo (~USD $1,750). Two bedroom condos in the Orchard area start at SGD $4,000/mo and go up rapidly from there. Most expats living in that area are paying around $10K/mo for rent (for the record, I live and work quite a ways from there ).

And petrol is pushing USD $7.00/gallon