Steal From My Brother Once, Shame On You. Steal From My Brother Twice . . .

My brother has the learning curve of a lizard.

The police rang our doorbell at 4:00 this morning to let him know they had found his truck. (He was already up having been called by them a few minutes earlier to announce their imminent arrival. I woke up at the sound of the bell.) When they saw who was at the door, the cats all took off like the Angel of the Lord was come to take them to their just reward. We didn't see Paribanour or Mittens again for about six hours.

At first, this particular service--waking people in the middle of the night to notify them of the location of their property--seemed a bit, I don't know, superfluous, since the truck was in the driveway when I went to bed. (Apparently, I don't process too well upon first waking unexpectedly.)

The truck was not in the driveway.

It had been stolen.

It had been stolen and used as a getaway vehicle on a crime spree lasting several hours before being left in a ditch behind the town high school a couple of miles away. Several vehicles in our neighborhood (including, it turned out, Neighbor Dan's truck but not my car) had been entered and pilfered but it was my brother's truck they stole.

Because he left the keys in it.

He left the keys in it! After having his wallet stolen out of the truck only a couple of months ago, he left the keys in it!

So we stood in the driveway, under the eaves of the garage, in the dark and intermittent pouring rain with lightning crashing nearby and the tip of one of Neighbor Dan's palm trees rubbing against an electrical wire in the wind, arcing and sending sparks flying, filling the air with the scent of ozone and burning wood while my brother filled out a criminal complaint form and answered the same questions to each of the three officers who eventually showed up one by one.

They warned him that, although they would try to get the truck back to him as soon as possible, it might take a while if the forensics crew decided they wanted to look for DNA or fingerprints. Also, at the moment they were using the truck as bait, having staked out the area in hopes the perp(s) came back.

As it was, they called at seven to let us know we could come and retrieve it. It was stuck in the ditch, bogged down because of the rain. Neighbor Dan ended up coming by and pulling it out.

The truck works fine and, at first, my brother thought he hadn't lost anything, himself, but on further inspection a diamond ring that belonged to our uncle, of mostly sentimental value, and a check he had out to pay the utility bill, necessitating a visit to the bank to change account numbers, were missing. He added those items to the complaint form. Neighbor Dan may have lost a (full) cash deposit bag from his business. The problem with living in an area as safe as ours is that people get careless.

Let's hope, for my brother's sake, that third time's the charm.

Detailing: If It's Worth Doing, It's Worth Doing Eventually

As I was getting ready to leave the house for my platelet donation this morning a couple of city trucks pulled up on our main street (the one with the recent sidewalk installation). A couple of workers got out with chain saws and I thought, "Uh oh, here we go again," but, fortunately, I went out to take a look at what they were up to before waking my brother.

They did trim a little underbrush from around the power pole at the north corner of our property but just so they could get in and uproot the duplicate pole leftover from whenever they had replaced them all last. Quite a few poles along that street have these residual "stumps." They've been cut down to remove the crossbars and be lower than the wires attached to the active poles but they're still a good 12 - 15 feet tall.

I have no idea when the switchover was done. It was well before I moved down here so, at the very least, it's been years that the old poles have stood adjacent to the new ones. I guess someone finally noticed.

One of the trucks had a large log grabber on an extendible articulated arm. Once the space was cleared it gently reached over, grabbed the redundant pole and yanked it out. Neighbor Dan also had doubles on his property and apparently his was dug in pretty deep because the grabber had to twist it back and forth to loosen it up enough for the pull. It was kind of like watching an old-time dentist pull teeth.

At least now someone at city works can finally close the book on that little project.

And my donation, managed by a new tech, went super well.

At the Sisyphus Garage

I've mentioned before my redneck brother's tendency to shop by price alone, hence his willingness to patronize WalMart for the slightly lower price without noticing the slightly smaller package size and slightly lower quality, but this series of truck repairs can not be blamed entirely on his choice of barely competent mechanics just because they charge less than his old one.

His truck was in and out (mostly in) the shop last week for headlight problems. Specifically, he didn't have any high beams. So he took it in for what should have been a simple replacement.

Tuesday: They put in new lamps and managed to disconnect the low beams. He brought it back.

Wednesday: They reconnected the low beams and managed to disconnect one of the new high beams. He brought it back.

Thursday: They broke the grill. He left it there overnight.

Friday: They installed a new grill. They double-checked all the connections and the alignments and guaranteed everything was in working order, which it was. My brother took it to work where one of his co-workers backed into him denting the grill and breaking one of the lamps.

The bozos at his garage got a big laugh out of that because, hey, at least it wasn't their fault.

This time.

Redneck Studies: Deadly Deja Vu Department

My brother called me last night to come out and rescue him. It seems he'd been turning into a customer's driveway when the left front of his truck collapsed onto the pavement.

Again.

Fortunately, he was only going about 5 miles an hour as he made the turn so he was not injured, but the left front still hit hard and looks like it might have bent the frame since he can no longer close the driver's door. I met him out by the side of the road and we waited for the tow truck to drag his vehicle back to the same guys who "fixed" the exact same problem (which only occurred after they "repaired" a different problem) barely four months ago.

He uses these jokers because he's a sucker for an underdog sob story and the owner claims to have quit the garage my brother used to use (and I still do) in a righteous fit because the other owner was doing something shady although he hasn't given any specifics. He now claims the old shop is in financial trouble which I certainly haven't seen whenever I've been in there. All this is hearsay and only one side of the story. My theory is bozo got fired for incompetence. He claims to have quit in a huff without giving notice. I say he was fired on the spot and told to get out immediately. Considering the quality of his work in my brother's case, I feel pretty confident in my assessment.

My brother does not take advice well. Nevertheless, I attempted, as diplomatically as possible, to explain to him that these bozos had already had all the chances they should be allowed and that he really ought to take his truck somewhere else lest they get another chance to kill him because, sooner or later, they might well succeed. I think I might have got through to him. At least, he was talking about going somewhere else and sending these idiots the bill. Whether he does or not, we'll see.

At leas it wasn't raining last night.

Sign of the Times

Stenciled on the back window of the bed cap of a pick-up truck driving down one of our major thoroughfares:

99c   tomatoes

                                                                                     per pound

No name. No address. No phone number. No web address.

Nevertheless, I presume it's some sort of (ineffective) promotion for locally grown produce and not a political manifesto calling for reduced prices along the lines of "The rent's too high!" Unfortunately, I have neither the time, gasoline nor inclination to follow him around hoping he'll lead me to a bargain.

Redneck Studies: A Close Call, Parts & Labor Included

Neighbor Dan came over Saturday evening shortly after my brother had left for work. I thought he might be coming to visit the kittens as he and his youngest daughter had done the day before but he was stopping to let me know he had my brother on his phone. My phone was charging at the time. It's a problem with not having a land line anymore.

It seems my brother had been driving on our town's main commercial drag, a six lane (not counting turn-offs) "boulevard" of chain restaurants, strip malls and big box stores when the front end of his truck just fell off about four blocks from work. He needed cash for the tow truck. I grabbed $100 from my brother's stash and headed out.

When I found him, he had managed to pull over into a turn-out lane and was out of the main flow of traffic although that did not stop several inattentive idiots, despite his hazard lights flashing, from pulling in behind his truck as they attempted to enter the mall.

He hadn't been kidding about his truck. It looked as if the left front axle had broken or at least separated from the differential. The end of the axle and the ball joint were just lying there on the road. The wheel was turned in and down at a 45 degree angle and the entire front of the truck sagged. It was a good thing he was in town where the speed limit is 45 mph and traffic volume often prevents even that. If he'd been on the highway when that happened the truck would have gone head over heels and he'd be dead now.

And here's where we get to the Redneck Studies. The thing is, that's exactly the part of the truck he'd had repaired only about 1000 miles ago.

Your typical redneck will opt for the independent contractor, good ol' boy almost every time. The main exception is retail where Wally World wins out over mom-'n'-pop. It all comes down to price, quality be damned. My brother had taken his truck to two guys who used to work for an established (but still local and otherwise good ol' boy himself) mechanic. (They claimed they left voluntarily because they objected to certain of his business practices which is just the unverifiably generic excuse I would expect from a couple of guys who were probably let go for being slackers, but I'm cynical that way.) Be that as it may, they quoted my brother a really good price for the work and he let them at it.

You get what you pay for is a maxim that does not register with rednecks.

I offered to stay with my brother but he declined as there was nothing, really, for me to do there and I'd left my dinner on the stove so I went home before the cats could get to it. My brother had the truck towed to the guys who messed it up, left it parked blocking their garage bay and walked home. I gave him my car to go back to work. So now we're down to one car until the truck is fixed or he can convince his insurance to pay for a rental and since he drives for a living that may not be automatic.

First One To Christmas Wins

How to tell the pressures of the Holiday Season are upon us:

Starting the day after Thanksgiving (maybe even Thanksgiving day, I don't know, I refuse to go out then) traffic on the roads not only spikes but speed increases and aggression rises as well.

I've been out and about, to the library mostly and a little shopping, almost every day since the feast and it was very noticeable how many more people were on the road during non-rush-hours. Side roads and residential streets aren't that bad but the main routes are packed with people going at least ten miles an hour faster than usual.

And red light runners. Drivers here in Florida know to wait when the light turns green until they can see the oncoming vehicles slowing or stopped before entering an intersection. I usually see maybe one person every other month trying to sneak through an intersection against the light. I've seen three so far since Thanksgiving.

The best was Saturday. I was approaching a huge crossroad, three lanes in each direction on both roads plus extra dedicated turn lanes both left and right for a total of 22 controlled lanes plus three additional uncontrolled right turn lanes. The signals in my left turn lanes turned yellow and a pick-up truck ahead of me in the rightmost left turn lane sped up although it was obvious he would barely make it into the intersection, with no chance of being through it, before the light turned red. At the last he second the driver suddenly realized the car in front of him had no intention of running the light. He hit his brakes hard, swerved rightward part way into the adjacent leftmost through lane, came to a dead stop inches from the rear of the car in front, pulled hard to the right and gunned it straight through the intersection which was legal because the through signals are on a different timer and were just turning yellow. I half expected to see him pull a U-turn and try a right hand turn coming from the other direction but he kept going.

(Zoom in on the Arrow for the intersection in question)

Catalog shopping is looking more and more appealing. We just received Pendery, full of bulk spices and herbs and sauces and cookbooks and other good things. I think my afternoon is set.

All Things Considered, That Went Well

We survived the looting and pillaging mini-hordes. It took ten bags of candy to do it, but we didn't run out and actually have a few pieces left over for ourselves, like we need them.

Earlier in the day I came home to find my brother upset because he'd decided to frost the skeleton cakes with a glaze, apparently not realizing just how runny that would be (why not I don't know, it's not like he's never seen a glazed cake before), and ended up with two skulls that looked as if they'd been used for candle holders with wax dripping all down the sides. I liked the effect, but he didn't.

Later, he tried making a "fire" pit using colored streamers blown upward by a fan but, after a couple of hours constructing the thing, the fan he had wasn't strong enough to move anything so he went out but couldn't find a single window fan at WalMart (!) and finally purchased one at Lowe's which didn't have enough power, either, so the whole project went south. He took it surprisingly well, which is not his normal M.O.

The actual bribing of the monsters started a little late and slow this year but picked up after 8 p.m. and eventually ran long. I especially enjoyed the tiny three-year-old Batman and also the slightly older Batman who, being a little unclear on the concept, upon hearing us yell, "Hey, there's Batman!" lifted his mask and insisted, "No! It's me!" Never seen him before. We had a pair of moving sound-activated ghosts suspended from wires that crisscrossed the driveway moaning and cackling. Some kids were freaked out but the ones I liked were the kids who were so fascinated that they forget all about asking for treats and just stared transfixed as the ghosts floated by overhead.

The police stopped by at the height of the festivities and we were worried either the cars parked up and down the median strip of the main road were causing a hazard or the neighborhood curmudgeon had complained. (He's filed formal complaints at one time or another against every single property owner adjacent to him and a couple of others that aren't.) It turned out to be just a routine patrol and we all carried on.

The weirdest thing I saw all night though were pick-up trucks with flatbed trailers (the kind lawn care companies use to transport mowers) kitted out with chairs and even a porch swing all filled with kids cruising  through looking for likely neighborhoods to loot. Apparently, those trailers are a thing down here.

Transitions

A number of seasons are ending and beginning just now.

Rainy Season officially ended at the beginning of the month and I optimistically began leaving my car windows open to avoid the runaway greenhouse effect resulting from parking a sealed up vehicle in the sun. Unfortunately, the actual end-of-season is a bit more raggedy and I've had to bale twice now after leaving the car open at the library. And that doesn't even count my brother very kindly not waking me when he came home late one night as it started to shower and hanging towels all over my open windows. I have no idea why he has so many towels in his truck.

Fall is approaching. It is noticeably cooler (although today it's cloudy mostly because of Hurricane Sandy way off the east coast). I watched a tribe of very tiny ants stocking up for the coming "cold" spell. Scores of them were climbing up and down a vine including four triumphantly hoisting a cockroach leg aloft as they negotiated the tendrils. To be more precise, three of them were carrying the leg. The fourth had grabbed it in such a way that it's own legs couldn't reach any surface while they were moving and it just sort of dangled along for the ride not only not helping but actively adding to the burden.

With the weather cooling down, Bartleby has decided to become an outdoor cat again. She spends her time sleeping beneath one or the other of our vehicles or, occasionally, in a lawn chair and comes in only to dine. When we open the door for her she complains loudly at our inattention for not opening it sooner and, as soon as she finishes her meal, she starts yelling at us to let her out again. I am become majordomo to the cat.

Also, the zombies have come and gone. It's an annual migration, pretty much confined to the other side of the river.

Besides, Oktoberfest is here. After a couple of days no one on this side of the river will even notice a few zombies wandering loose.

Redneck Studies

My brother had to take his truck in for repairs . . . again.

It is my considered opinion, after careful study, that rednecks make purchases, especially major ones, only after careful study and deliberation which they invariably ignore in favor of the emotions of the moment.

When my brother's car died last year, he looked at a used truck in a repair shop lot as a potential replacement. Since the vehicle was offered without warranty, I went and bought him a CARFAX report on it which showed a clean record with no serious issues. The next day, he came home with his "new" truck--which he had purchased, for cash, on the spur of the moment, at a completely different garage. Since then, he has had to replace/repair tires, fuel pump, radiator, driver's door, driver's window motor, an axle and now the water pump. He makes no connection between the number and cost of the repairs and not doing research before impulse buying.

The same thing happened last weekend with our new freezer. The store advertising the sale was sold out, six to eight days until delivery. So he went out scouting around, found a used one for even less and had it delivered on Sunday. It doesn't fit under the shelf where the old one was and wouldn't go through the front door so we had to dig out a path through the garage (which was actually shorter to its final destination in the laundry room) which caused the local zoning popo to stop by a day later and inquire about all the cartons still scattered across the lawn and driveway because we left the pathway in the garage open but my brother was able to explain them away since they were mostly Christmas decorations which he had decided to take over to the storage unit until needed again. The gasoline cans he explained as precaution against Isaac which the city guy thought was reasonable and said as long as everything was cleaned up within a week it would be O.K.

At least the freezer does have a one year warranty. As for raising/removing the shelf so the freezer can go back against the wall: if it happens before the warranty runs out I will be very surprised.

Sign of the Times

I pulled up next to a flatbed truck belonging to a local stone mason today. Painted on the upright panel at the head of the flatbed under the company name was the slogan

"The Best Customer Service in South Florida"



except that the "ervice" had been scratched or eroded off so the sign actually read

"The Best Customer S in South Florida"

which, if that is truly how they feel about their customers, may be indicative of how they treat their customers which would be excellent customer service. So it's all good, either way.

(Another) Sign of the Times

I pulled up behind a contractor's white pickup truck over the weekend. The company was named Savior Plumbing.

I can't tell if the name is a pun ("Save Your Plumbing"), a comment on how customers react to the service ("I can flush again! You're my savior!"), or an indication that He has branched out from his original occupation as carpenter.

The Shortcut

My brother went across the river yesterday to buy a couple of tires, one for himself and one for me. He picked some little hole-in-the-wall shop no bigger than a two car garage that specializes in cheap tires. He came home empty-handed.

Just as he pulled into the alley where the shop is located he heard a loud explosion. It seems a full size semi-tractor trailer rig had, instead of simply going straight out to the street, tried to take the diagonal through the back lot of the tire shop where the low hanging power lines slid up and over the wind spoiler on top of the cab and dropped down between the cab and the trailer catching there and pulling down the power pole, snapping it into six pieces and blowing up both of the transformers attached to it. When people went to investigate, they found the idiot driver out of the cab and trying unsuccessfully to push, by hand, the wires back over the top of the trailer, presumably so he could continue on his way.

With power out in the neighborhood, my brother came home mission unaccomplished.

He went back this morning after calling to confirm that electricity had been restored. The owner was so grateful/desperate for business he called back to ask what sizes we were looking for so he could have them ready and waiting when my brother arrived.

Sign of the Times

Pulled up at a stoplight behind a contractor's truck covered in advertising signage describing all the services offered, one of which is "Chinese Remediation." Anyone not familiar with this area might be forgiven for assuming the contractor was offering a sideline in either language classes or a service to deport illegal immigrants.

Anyone who has been here more than three months, however, knows this is the epicenter for defective, formaldehyde-laced drywall originally imported from China. It's a legacy of the housing boom that created the bubble that crashed the market that turned a large number of homeowners upside-down in their mortgages and spiked unemployment. Houses have been remodeled, gutted, abandoned, foreclosed on, and possibly even torched by desperate owners. The lawsuits inch ever more slowly toward resolution. And affected houses are still being found every now and then.

So, here, everyone knows what "Chinese Remediation" is.

Redneck Studies

I've been studying my brother for some time now and I am beginning to get a handle on the concept of "Redneck" especially the southern variety. For one thing, it's an acquired trait. My brother was born and raised in New England and has lived everywhere from the northern plains to southern California without betraying any such tendencies previously.

One of the primary traits is the habit of trying to come up with original yet ad hoc solutions to common problems, attempting to bypass the ways of the world as it were, without, at the same time, covering all of the possible, and often obvious, consequences.

For example: My brother decided, a couple of years ago when gasoline prices were going through one of their regular and in no way manipulated spikes, to do a little hydrocarbon arbitrage. He bought a number of plastic jerry cans and filled them with regular unleaded in an attempt to lock in the price. The full cans he then stored in the shed out back.

Let's forget the opportunity cost of tying up cash in a volatile commodity.

The redneck point is: The shed is not watertight. Neither are the jerry cans. By the time the price of gas had risen enough for him to feel justified dipping into the strategic reserve, the cans contained probably 98% distilled petroleum and 2% H2O. I had to rescue him more than once before we figured out why his truck kept conking out on him (invariably in the middle of the night).

Although he no longer tops off the truck from the cans neither has he disposed of the contaminated fuel. (Note: Review the concept of sunk costs.) Apparently, a couple of weeks ago he filled the tank of the lawnmower from one of the cans. The lawn is now knee high and the grass is literally going to seed. (The length of time it has taken to fix the mower, this time, is not entirely his fault since Mom put the receiver of the phone in her room (Why does she even have a phone in her room?) down backwards which took the entire house off-line for the weekend (we don't use the land line much) causing the lawnmower repair guys to get a busy signal and delay returning the mower to us.)

The last time the mower needed repair (August) he bitched and moaned for a day and a half about the cost. This time, not a word. Which means he knows it's his fault. The repair guys didn't just find water in the tank. Spiders (more accurately, spider corpses) were clogging up the carburetor, too.

Necrophages in the Shade

We had a rough weekend in terms of system collapses and infrastructure breakdowns. People are all O.K. but the air conditioning quit on Sunday and my brother's truck has developed an out-of-alignment condition that led on Saturday to a shredded front tire which was rust welded to the wheel so he was vehicleless until today when he could take it into the shop. He got back just as the HVAC guy was crawling into the attic.

So it was no real surprise to me to find four turkey vultures on the front lawn standing in a circle under a large shade tree. One had the red head of an adult but the other three were black-headed juveniles. They stood a little over two feet tall with three to three-and-a-half foot wingspans. They circled the tree and each other occasionally rising up into the lower branches although they would descend again almost immediately.

I don't think they eat air conditioners or pickup trucks but apparently they can sense the entropy around here and are hanging out in hopes something carbon-based is next.