Turning Japanese 2008

The wife is on the second leg of her annual "Tour of Wisconsin;" thus, I am left to my own devices to survive while she is away.

This is always an interesting time, this "when she is gone" time every year, as one never knows what actually might happen while the wife is in Cheddar Heaven.

Allow me to show you a beautiful rainbow that was seen shining over our neighbor's home. (This part of my blog entry is my attempt to procrastinate from studying for my food sanitation test that is just around the corner. Who wants to study about food-borne illnesses when there are rainbows to be had?) I couldn't resist running out and taking these photos the other night....I also wanted an excuse to go outside and look for that fabled pot of gold. I did get some nice photos but nary a gold coin was found. I hate that photos never do justice to the actual beauty found in nature but the photos do make me smile and do make me contemplate the meaning of life.

Really.

A double rainbow, at that. And, it was a full rainbow--you could see end to end. Beautiful!

FYI.....Right before the wife went traipsing north, we went and joined a family cell phone plan with a company sounding like Horizon. This was very traumatic for the wife as she already had a phone she loved and a plan she was quite satisfied with. Me, being the last person on the planet to not have a cell phone, had no such issue and thus I wanted to join the Horizon family as like 95% of my friends have this service and thus I can talk to them for free. I had originally planned on getting my own plan with Horizon instead of US Hell-u-lar as I really wanted to text the piss out of my friends and that would have cost way too much with Hellular. The wife suddenly jumped on the Horizon bandwagon and the rest was.....

....like buying a car!

The salesman lied, he used the ol' "bait and switch," he contradicted himself. I shouldn't even compare him to a car salesman because that's an insult to the car person.

Talk about a scam--they've got it all figured out. You can't "transfer" your own pricey cell phone from Hellular to Horizon--you have to get a new phone. What a racket! Here the wife has this perfectly good, relatively new, very expensive cell phone (with the words Hellular on the back of it) and she can't use it if she transfers to a new company. Who thought that up? Obviously someone with good business sense for profit. (If it's not true and you technically could transfer plans on the same phone, then piss on all cell phone companies for lying.)

Here's a picture of Lucy. She has nothing to do with buying a phone or with rainbows or food sanitation or even bugs. She just makes me smile and that in turn lowers my blood pressure when thinking about buying cell phones.

We are now proud owners of two new "Chocolate 3" (third generation) phones (which are not brown nor do they smell like chocolate) that do indeed display the Horizon symbol. The third generation Chocolate supposedly "just came out today" but who really knows. They're fine but nothing as nice as what the wife had. Sigh. Now, if I could only get a cover for the thing ("Oh, those won't be out for a few weeks because this is a brand new product") because I KNOW I will drop my phone like every day.

As long as Horizon doesn't drop the calls as much as I drop my phone.....

On to bugs. The Japanese Beetles are back and are in rare form. In fact, they are so vociferous that they filled the bug bag to the point it was overflowing within 24 hours. That's right--less than one day and that bag was so full it was sagging. You can see how full it is in the picture on the left--that bag is FULL! (You can see how the bugs are trying to escape. Yuck.) Of course, without the wife's presence at home, it meant I had to change the bag.....

.....Can I say this was a gross, gross, gross procedure? Bugs swarming my head, bugs falling out of the bag, bugs buzzing in the trees, bugs everywhere. Those Japanese Beetles know how to party.

It was disgusting--and complex. It's not like I could just grab the bag and plop it anywhere. It was too full to do that. So, I had to get creative. I put a large kitchen garbage bag in a large bucket. I then gathered two plastic bags from Wally world and put them in the garbage bag in the bucket. I then put soapy water into the bags (so when the bugs fell out they would drowned a soapy death). I armed myself with a baseball hat (for bugs falling out of the tree) and a pair of scissors (to cut the bag down from the tree).

By the way, do you know what kind of damage these things do? Look carefully at this photo. You can see how the bugs have eaten the leaves of our tree to the point only skeletons of the leaves are left. Naughty Bugs! This poor tree didn't have a chance; that's why we put the bag in the tree. You are NOT supposed to do that--you are supposed to put the bag far away from everything so the bugs fly away. I am here to tell you those bugs weren't going anywhere. The tree was so infested you could hear it buzzing from across the yard. Did they bother to fly over to the neighbor's bag? Heck no. They were enjoying these tasty leaves.

Changing the bag was a difficult operation and I was very queazy during the whole ordeal. I was terrified I'd drop the bag and bugs would fall all over my feet. I would have passed out. It had to be done and it's not like the dogs could help me so I had to do it. Alone.

I am pleased to say that it was a successful mission and that I did not drop one single bug. I was even able to rescue the yellow plastic part of the bag and hang an empty bag on the tree. Let me tell you, by the time I hung it up, the bugs were already crawling all over it, as evidenced in the photo below:


I am sure the bag will be filled once again tomorrow, but by then the wife will be home and I will have someone to help me change the bag. I wish there were something creative to do with the bugs as we sure have collected a lot of them. Maybe they are a delicacy somewhere and we could sell them. Maybe we could export them back to Japan. Maybe we could make an art project out of them....

....or, maybe I can save them and dump them on the Horizon salesperson's head.....