Even More Fun!

So I have discovered the recession proof industry - exterminators!

Meanwhile, I have spent 2.35 cents on beer and lured one, count em, one snail to its death.

So last week I noticed two little black dots on the living room wall and the little black dots were bumpy - extruding out from the walls, I pushed on the bumps and they crumbled to the ground and there were two little round black holes in the wall. Yes, traveling, swarming, subterranean termites have taken residence in my wall. Well, they are not living in the wall, they are living underneath my house in some sort of hive and they crawl up the wall to eat the bearing part of my load bearing wall. They swarm! Yuck!

So the Western Exterminator people can't visit me for ten days, they are too busy! Hence the thought - I need to become an exterminator! Termites don't downsize with the economy!

Anyway with work slowing down and no end in sight to work slowing down, I am not panicking (like a boyscout I am always prepared! To panic that is!) about the fact that I need to spend 2500 to stop the evil fuckers from eating my home. The Orkin man managed to be able to fit me in and so he told me that I have DRYWOOD termite as well and that I would have to tent my house. That's another 2500 bucks!

Now, I'm a city girl. I like cities. I've tried to live in medium sized cities and it was like purgatory - I like my cities big, full of museums and traveling bands and weird performance artists. I like my cities full of people and interesting things to do. I live in the middle of Los Angeles. I expect Gang graffiti. Instead I am also beset with: snails, fecund feral cats, raccoons, crows, wasps, two kinds of termites. This is why I don't live in nature - imagine what kinds of things live there???

So to calm myself down about my bugs and my finances I went to the kitchen and started washing dishes. I stared at the avocado tree which seems to be flowering and noticed a whole bunch of bee activity there. So my gaze wandered over to the lemon tree - which is also flowering, lovely scented flowers whose aroma wafts into my bedroom - and it was also filled with bees. Lots of bees. Way too many bees. Bees that seemed to be flying from my lemon tree to the avocado tree to the neighbor's vents in their wall. Yes, we now have a bee hive to contend with! Undoubtedly when they smoke the bees out of their house they'll just move one house down - after all there's lots of company at my place.

More fun things to do in the depression

No, this isn't a picture of my victory garden.

The best thing I've found to do with the nutty little white flowers that bloom when your arugula bolts and matures (which hasn't stopped me eating the greens) is to sprinkle them on tomato soup. The red soup and the little white flowers are very pretty. They are also nice in salads. But really this whole flower eating business has gotten out of hand (and is so rather excessive in this moment of less is more.) The local pizza delivery place puts handful of edible flowers in their salad (yes, that is a clue that it is not a chain pizza joint, but as one who has truly been Michael Pollen-ated, local and organic) and I want lettuces in my salad and not flowers.

Anyway, the arugula has got to go, not only is it four feet tall, not only is it blocking the afternoon sun from my romaine lettuce starts, not only am I bored with the pretty flowers, but it HARBORS SNAILS!

Ick. There is really nothing ickier than skipping out to your garden and picking a few greens - tossing them (tra la, tra la!) into a sink full of water and pulling them out to find a whole bunch of snails floating in your sink, I mean I am not French. Ick, snails.

There is an old tale of Snail Control that involves putting beer in a shallow pan in the garden - the snails are attracted to the yeast in the beer, fall into the shallow pan and voila dead snails. Repeat until snails are controlled.

So off I go, like an undergraduate, to find cheap beer. Standing in the aisle of the drug store (note there is no cheap beer at the whole paycheck) I ponder my choices, would the snails like a Lite beer or would they prefer the full flavor of Budweiser? Can I actually buy Coors Lite? An awful beer from an awful company? I've never bought Coors in my life - I was of an age to be aware of beer, but unable to buy beer when we were boycotting Coors for their homophobic and anti-union actions, so I am sure that the snails won't be attracted to it either. No, no Coors lite for them, so I go with Bud, it's 30 cents more but it has that attractive and retro red label that I remember from my childhood, and the Clydesdale horses, and plus when I was 17 I lived in a slum two blocks away from the Busch cannery in the Valley and breathed in the smell of hops on most days.

I bury a shallow dish near the borage which is a decoy plant, a plant you plant so the snails and bugs leave your real plants alone. I figure the beer will lure the herd of snails amidst the borage.

Now the problem with the beer thing, is that you have to wake up in the morning and dispose of a whole bunch of slimy icky nasty gross things. So I go to bed with trepidation about the whole disposal thing.

Not that I should have worried, there were snail trails everywhere glistening in the morning sun, but not one snail was in the dish.

So the experiment will have to continue.

Things to do during the New Depression

Since the stock market decided to go up four days in a row last week - I thought I would engage in some high finance. Actually the first day the stock market went up, I was like Hurray! The S&P is now at 712 points! I had been meaning - oh for the past three years or four years to move my 401(k) into an IRA; and since January I've been pegging when I would do it to the S&P. So for a while I was like, when the S&P is at 900 points again, I'll transfer. Then it was, well, when the S&P is at 850 points again, I'll transfer. Next it was when the S&P is 800 points, I'll make my move! Then well, when it's over 700 I'll go. So I transferred the money but the market continued to go up and the S&P ended at about 756 - while I had cleverly bowed out at 714. So don't count on me for stock tips!
In this new era of pinching pennies I have started composting (who needs to buy fertilizer?!?) and have started making my own vinegar. This entails mixing wine, vinegar mother and water in a large non-metallic jar and having it hang around in a warm place breathing until the wine has miraculously turned into vinegar. So I have a bunch of Merlot hanging out in a jar with some vinegar - and now I have to find a place to put it where it won't be in the way and won't be accidentally knocked over - because two bottles of red wine and a bottle of vinegar knocked over would probably create some horrid chemical bond with the residue of Murphy's oil soap that I use to wash the wood floors and I can imagine the red liquid moving like wildfire on my floor, burning it's way down, down, down to the basement. And goddess knows that no one has any spare let's replace the floor cash around. So I have put the jar of about two liters of liquid in the bathroom, on the floor of the shower (a handy drain!) underneath the camera enlarger. But it's a little weird to have guests use a bathroom that has a vat of vinegar wine as aromatherapy in it. So when guests come I hide the vinegar\wine mixture in the outdoor coat closet, which makes all the coats smell like - you guessed it - wine!

We are also composting. The compost media posse make it seem like "Oh! Just Throw your lettuce scraps in here and VOILA! Dirt!!!!!" But then you actually get the instructions and you have to have the right mix of brown vs. green, you have to turn it over, you have to add dirt, you have to add yard waste but not weeds! My yard waste is weeds! You have to add paper, but not printed paper or white paper and you have to keep it all in balance or you start getting little bugs flying around. So I have bugs.

I diagnose the compost heap - not enough "Brown". So how do I get more brown? My garden is not supplying it. I start walking around with bags and a rake and start raking other people's leaves. Look there's the crazy lady stealing leaves!

Now I just need to find some ducks to eat the snails that are eating my chard!

My cousin went to the Alamo Movie set and the "Marshall" an Alamo Movie Historian who dresses up like a Marshall, gave him this photo of my grandfather and Richard Widmark. If you peer past grand papa you can see some extras in costume.

I was in the Delta a while ago and came across this sign for Bab's Delta Diner - a great place for breakfast before you go fishing, which of course you can't do since the California salmon fisheries have collapsed.