Going Green

WE’RE BACK !!!!!!!

To some of you, this may be more a curse than a blessing. But try to keep up . . . we’re really not pedaling that fast!

To those of you who actually noticed we were missing for a while, and who might’ve even missed us for being missing, we say thanks for thinking of us, even if it was in an offhand, “Hey, what the hell ever happened to that weird little cartoon Jackson used to draw?” kind of way.

Now the next question on everyone’s mind — just where in hell was Jackson Press all summer?! Well, if you refer to our last Jackson Press entry below you’ll notice that it’s barely been a month since we last communicated, but daggone does it feels like it’s been all summer!

And what do we have to show for our absence?

Well, wouldn’t it be great if we told you that we took the entire month (or so) off to travel, to see the world and inject some much needed culture into our lives? To say we saw England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Pakistan; that we walked among the pyramids in both Egypt and Peru; that we drank goat’s milk with Mongolian herders and ate sushi with Japanese fisherman; that we gambled with natives in New Guinea and swam with dolphins off the Australian coast?! Wouldn’t it be great to tell you that we saw Michael Phelps win his fourteenth career gold medal live?!!

Man, wouldn’t that be great?! Yeah, that would’ve been great.

Instead, we here at Jackson Acre were insanely hard at work for the past five weeks! We barely left the house to go to work (more on that later)! We barely had time to eat or sleep!! I don’t even think I pooped those five weeks! There was no time!! There were things to do!!! And in the end, the last of our great Jackson Acre projects were completed!!!! Now we are finally, finally relaxing … and waiting for rain.

So what have we been up to, you ask? What the hell could be so important that you can’t even bother to write, can’t take five minutes to maybe throw a crappy cartoon or two out there to keep the plebeians entertained?

Well, my friends, we undertook two major projects here at Jackson Acre: we face-lifted the front porch and we rerouted the drainage tiles. Those two “projects” pretty much ate up half of July and all of August. The porch alone required two weeks worth of concrete work, including building forms and pouring cement. Then there was a weekend spent fixing the porch columns. Then another weekend resurfacing the concrete only to discover that someone didn’t mix the resurfacer properly or – more likely – that it was a bad batch that mixed too lumpy and looked like crap when we put it on, so we scraped it all off and complained loudly at the idiot who mixed while we drank beer. Then we spent another weekend adding the porch rails.

Yes, all of this took a while, but the end result is a nice homely front porch, suitable for sitting quietly on while sipping lemonade and waving at passing cars. A real quaint, old fashioned kinda porch, although I prefer to sip beer and belch at passing cars, but that’s just me.

The drainage tile project was another level of effort entirely. I’m calling it the Big Dig. That particular project only took us the entire Labor Day weekend (including 10 hour days on Saturday and Sunday) and I’m pretty sure I blew my knee out from all the stooping and squatting I did while laying pipe, checking grade, moving dirt, laying pipe again, checking grade again, moving more dirt, laying more pipe, checking grade again, moving more dirt . . . you get the picture. The trench wound up being about 130 feet long, so there was a lot of dirt to move and a lot of grade to check. That was my entire Labor Day weekend. Nothing like laboring on Labor Day weekend!

But we finally completed what we’ve wanted to do since we figured out just how boogered up the drainage here at Jackson Acre really is. And we’re hopeful that all of that Labor Day weekend labor will actually work, so maybe our flooding won’t be quite so severe and maybe our never-ceasing sump pump will get a break this winter.

We’ll find out around Thanksgiving, I suppose. Worst case, we managed to use the extra dirt to fill in some of the low spots in our yard, so mowing shouldn’t be quite so hard on the keister anymore.

I’m using up the last of my old Civil Servitude stock. Enjoy! There are new adventures right around the corner. It is an election year, after all.

Can I say keister on national TV?

Two bitches are better than one!

It’s a Wednesday and I’m home from work on a vacation day. Yeah, I know – why a Wednesday? Well, the kids are up at Put-In-Bay with the folks, so I took the day off to spend with the wife. Yeah, I know – isn’t that sweet.

We took the dogs for a walk first thing in the morning. It’s definitely been a change having two dogs in the house, the double load of daily poo being only one indicator of the difference. There are other more subtle changes, changes that don’t require a scoop and a bag.

For example, having Daisy around has transformed Ginger into the regal old lady of the manor, at the ripe old age of three years (or twenty-one dog years!). Daisy’s presence, the Daisy Effect, seems to have calmed Ginger down a little, the spastic and reckless puppy energy Ginger once possessed has fizzled as she faces a new dog with even more spastic and reckless energy! Now that Daisy’s the puppy, Ginger’s kinda forced to grow up.

Although Ginger could seem to be more regal and mature simply because she’s tired all the time from fending off Daisy’s puppy attacks, the constant nips at the legs, the tugs on Ginger’s ears, the yapping and high pitched barking, the not even intimidating growls. Exhaustion, oddly enough, has a calming effect on the dogs.

So Ginger spends lots of time lying around looking somber and aloof. And she grumbles a lot more than she used to, back when she was an only child. Like late at night, when shifting positions in bed, you’ll hear Ginger grumble. And for a split second you think that maybe there’s a bitter eighty-year-old man with arthritis and a bad back in bed with you, and that he’s bitter and grumbling because he has to work full time ten hours a day in a cramped guard shack at a shabby chemical manufacturing company because he blew his retirement at the dog track.

Yeah, that kind of grumble.

This morning the dogs were fed after their walk, since they’re supposed to work before they can eat breakfast, according to Cesar Millan’s philosophy, which we evidently subscribe to around here. So we walked the dogs and worked them and fed them. And now they are curled on the couch next to me as I watch Jerry Springer, this exposure to daytime television making me feel like I’m watching television in a foreign country. This stuff’s all new to me, foreign and strange and plenty exotic.

And watching this show suddenly makes me depressed over the state of our country; the white trash love triangles, the commercials for professional management of your structured settlements, the credit card offers for low-end consumers who have no capacity to buy even as they chase their low-end consumer dreams.

This country’s in sorry shape if this is the majority norm of our society. And I suspect that many of these people vote!

But back to the dogs –

Daisy wants to play. She barks her ferocious little bark, or perhaps precocious would be a better adjective, and she picks up an old sock, shaking it viciously and growling fiercely. Ginger casts a weary eye to the pup, obviously not in the mood, more relaxed than regal. But Daisy doesn’t have the gift of experience, so she can’t properly interpret Ginger’s body language. There’s a lesson fast approaching.

Daisy bounces around Ginger, shaking her sock and growling, as if to say “You will play with me, doggone it!” Then she shakes the sock again and whacks Ginger in the face with it. The sock lays draped over Ginger’s snout and Daisy growls again, her snout a centimeter from Ginger’s, her way of saying “Pull on this, dammit!”

And eventually Ginger does, grabbing the loose end of the sock and giving the sock and Daisy a firm tug, the puppy in Ginger giving in to the puppy.

Two bitches are better than one!

The Daisy Effect

Haley and I are home with the dogs, both of us bored to differing degrees about different things – me, bored with my general existence; Haley, bored with television in general. Hannah and Mommy are at piano lessons. Ginger is in heat, lounging about the house on the couch like a depressed, middle-aged, sexually frustrated housewife on her period, generally miserable and miserable to be around.

Daisy, our three month old Vizsla pup and Ginger’s new little sister, is the most energetic of us all, running about the house with boundless chaotic infantile energy, casting random growls about, and haphazardly lashing us with her ferocious tongue. And this is Daisy when she’s bored, like she is now because Ginger’s in heat and has no desire to play. Imagine her not bored!

Daisy barks at Haley, who redirects her attention back to a chewie on the floor. Undeterred, Daisy jumps up on the couch, a feat she only perfected last week after two straight weeks of crashing chest-first into the cushions. Daisy pounces on Ginger, who is trying to be comfortable in her bitchy misery, and mouths Ginger’s left ear. This forces a grumble out of Ginger as she rolls over, pinning Daisy against the back of the couch.

The subtle realization of how completely and irrevocably our lives had changed set in about a month after Daisy’s arrival. Ginger’s life has been the most impacted. I almost believe the puppy has actually become a calming influence on Ginger (and those of you who actually know Ginger are right now thinking “Yeah, right”).

The Daisy Effect on Ginger has most noticeably made her less manic, especially whenever visitors come over. There’s less of the wrist-mouthing, leaping kisses, and incessant cold-nosing that Ginger normally performs as she comprehensively greets each and every individual guest by trying to lick every square inch of their exposed flesh. Now she just tries to lick most of the exposed flesh. It’s a subtle change. Before Daisy, Ginger was a kamikaze attack greeter, blitzing guests with slobber and love as she mouthed their wrists and leaped into their faces.

After Daisy, Ginger now acts like a frazzled but polished Martha Stewart who has just opened the front door to her weekend home to find one hundred uninvited and important guests waiting to come in and eat. And even though Martha knows she has nothing to feed these guests and nowhere for them to sleep, thus damning them all to a weekend of misery, she hides all of this horrific news behind an impenetrable veil of elegance and grace as she greets every one of these guests warmly and personably, shaking hands and taking coats. There’s very little licking or mouthing in the Martha example of the refined Ginger.

Daisy is finally beginning to even out in her growth. For a few weeks her front legs seemed shorter than her back legs, resulting in a butt-up stature that would most certainly not lead to AKC victories and eventual champion-hood, with its allotted glories and privileges for champion bitches. This unevenness was most apparent when Daisy ran, her longer hind legs reaching forward like a jack rabbits when she was at full gallop, her little auburn head pumping, tongue flapping, running with all her puppy might! Every time I saw her run I was reminded of the song for the Flying Monkeys from the original Wizard of Oz. It seemed to fit her funny, loping gait and has since become Daisy’s theme song.

I cut the grass the other night, riling up hordes of mosquitoes who were perfectly content to slumber in the tall grass, waiting for the dogs to step outside to pee so they could have a nice little snack of warm canine blood. The mosquitoes swarmed me, bumping into me with enough force that I could feel them. I moved quickly so they didn’t have time to land on me, avoiding them like I was trying to avoid raindrops. Once the old John Deere was fired up, the mosquitoes disappeared. This made me wonder if the bugs are dumb enough to be confused by the differences between the carbon dioxide from me and the carbon monoxide from the old John Deere. Although I suppose if the mosquitoes were truly confused they would have attacked the tractor and not me.

There is a deep-seated weariness in me these days, which bores down through my bones to sit heavily in my soul. I am exhausted and tired of everything, work especially, the house a close second. I am reading Edward Hoagland’s book of essays, “Heart’s Desire,” and I have found the perfect passage to illustrate my current state. It is a statement describing a mass of people who feel so hard pressed “that their main effort was just to disengage themselves.” That is where I am right now, trying to disengage as Hoagland describes in his essay “Of Cows and Cambodia.” Only without the luxurious wealth to be able to run off and buy my very own antique farm somewhere deep in the heart of rural Vermont.

Trying to keep from calling Daisy Ginger and vice-versa!

Those are weird lookin’ tadpoles …

So I tried to use the natural beauty that is the environment around Jackson Acre to teach my children more about nature. The natural beauty around this place was actually one of the selling points for me, although that was before I learned of the flooding, and the ever running sump pump, and the fact that everything in the house needed updated, and … well, you get the picture.

So the girls and I were out back, a week or so after our June floods, and we were doing something constructive, I’m sure, but I don’t really remember what it was. I was looking into the ever present vernal pools that form in our yard after we get any appreciable rainfall and I saw little creatures wriggling around.

“Hey, girls, come look at the tadpoles,” I hollered.

My kids have a great fondness for frogs, so they ran right over to see. Peering into the large puddle, we saw little black shapes twittering around in the sunlit muck. Haley had a great idea to catch some of the tadpoles in her Critter Keeper ™ so we could watch them grow.

“Great idea,” I said, swatting a mosquito chewing casually on my thigh.

The girls quickly retrieved their Critter Keeper ™ and we scooped up a quart or so of the muck. Holding it up to the light, I noticed that the tadpoles acted odd, bouncing up and down in the water rather than swimming around. And every now and then a few of the tadpoles would stop at the top of the water and just float, hanging there. It was a little strange, so the girls and I decided to take the Critter Keeper ™ up to the porch for a closer look.

Hannah ran into the house and brought out the magnifying glass. Looking closer, we noticed that the tadpoles were strangely shaped for the tadpoles. They were long and thin, with tiny little heads and no discernable tadpole parts.

“I think these are some kind of insect larva,” I said to the girls, slapping a mosquito gnawing voraciously on my neck. One of the girls also slapped an equally ravenous mosquito. Haley decided she would go look on the internet and see if she could figure out what kind of larva it might be.

Ninety seconds later, Haley ran back out, yelling that we’d captured mosquito larva in our Critter Keeper ™ and not tadpoles. Concerned, I took a quick visual survey of all the other vernal puddles in our yard to see if there were any possible tadpoles anywhere.

No such luck.

Every puddle was teeming with mosquito larva, not a tadpole in sight. A conservative estimate put the count at around ten thousand. I was a little worried that there wasn’t enough blood within a square mile of Jackson Acre to sustain all the newly hatched bugs and that they would turn on each other, dousing us in a potential bloodbath of ancient Roman proportions.

And the real question became whether or not the puddles would dry out before the larva became winged mosquitoes and attacked us.

Wondering where all the frogs went!

Mockery Mock-Up

Summertime!

The First Day Of Summer just passed us by here recently. Was anybody paying attention? Did anyone do anything special to commemorate it’s passing?

Yeah, me neither. Summer’s these days are less of a big deal than when I was a kid.

Do you still remember summers when you were a kid? Three months of endless days to do whatever you darn well pleased, as long as you weren’t caught by the neighbors and you didn’t burn anything major down (“major” defined as anything someone lives in or keeps their stuff in). Those summer days found us hanging out at the pool, riding bikes, camping in the woods, stealing produce from the neighbor’s garden – you know, good old-fashioned wholesome fun stuff!

We were constantly being yelled at to go outside and play. And we always did, mainly because we didn’t have central air and the house was a frickin’ oven in August, just as hot inside as out, but at least outside you could ride your bike up and down the street, pretending to race motorcycles and creating your own breeze to cool you off as you pedaled as fast as you could. This was in the days before every bike had gear shifts, when you actually had to pedal faster to go faster.

Rarely did we hang out watching TV. This was mainly because there were only three TV channels back then and all they showed during the day was “The Price Is Right” and yucky soap operas. There were no weekday cartoons! The only time we watched cartoons was on Saturday morning, and then it was usually only Bugs Bunny or Tom & Jerry. In fact, the only people who had more then three channels were the rich people down the street who had cable TV AND central air conditioning. And all cable TV did was give them better reruns to watch!

You know, come to think of it, there weren’t as many mosquitoes or ticks back then, either. And the bugs back then didn’t carry any deadly diseases like they do now – there was no West Nile Virus, no Lyme disease or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. In fact, many a night we stayed out playing hide-and-seek until well past sunset, waiting for our parents to holler for us to come home, and never did we have any more than a few random bites. Mosquitoes were a pest back then, but nobody was actually afraid of them.

Nowadays I yell at my kids to go outside and play. Mainly because if I don’t, they’ll sit around and watch stupid cartoons all day, never actively using their minds or imagination. I sound just like my parents! And now I’m living in the rich house, with air conditioning and satellite TV (even better than cable!) and a fridge that dispenses water and ice cubes.

But my kids have to be in before dark, before the mosquitoes come out, because we don’t want our children to die. And now they have to slather on the sunscreen when they’re going outside during the day, because we don’t to get skin cancer. And we make them wear helmets when they ride their bikes, not because they’re pretending to be Vikings, but because we don’t want them to suffer brain trauma when they crash. Did you wear a helmet when you rode your bike as a kid? Yeah, me neither.

And what about the registered sex offenders living in the area?! Now we have to worry that some predator might drive by and snatch our children. Nobody knew what a sexual predator was thirty years ago! At worst, there might be a few neighborhood perverts, but they never really bothered the kids (unless you went to a Catholic church).

Wow, everything really was better back when we were kids.

Feelin’ Rebellious and Ridin’ My Bicycle Without A Helmet!