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   A couple things I forgot to mention last night:
1).  The landlady said that C4J really trashed that house.  (She has rented to Anger-Management himself before, and said he left his house practically ruined as well, when she evicted him for nonpayment of rent.  Must be inherited.).   Workers have been hauling away giant dumpsters of garbage, ripped up wooden flooring, & white chunks of wall.
2).   The other night at about 4am I think I heard gun fire across the street.  I wasn’t absolutely sure, I was sleeping, & since the cops never give a shit when I call them anyway, I ignored it & went back to sleep.  The next day Smacky asked me if I’d heard it (apparently she had heard it too) & said she looked out the window & saw a bunch of cops out there.   I have looked on the local news websites, but haven’t found anything to explain it.  Oh well.

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     Smacky’s doctor has diagnosed her with Diabetes, & says it is quite unusual since flatmate Smacky weighs all of 114lbs.   Her doctor thinks it might be related to her other autoimmune problems. 
     We both have been diagnosed with Lupus, and BOTH  of our doctors (like HOUSE, MD) have made it clear that it’s probably NOT Lupus (it’s never Lupus) but they’re just calling it that for now.
     So now Smacky has to change her diet, which she’s not happy about.   She doesn’t have to take any medicine; her blood sugars are not severely high, but her A1C is high enough to warrant the diagnosis.   So far she hasn’t changed anything.   Her doctor is supposed to make her an appointment with the local hospital’s diabetic program so they can evaluate what her diet is like now, and how to change it.

     The torrential rains & flooding have been surreal & scary.  There are 2 absolutely gi-normous dead trees in the backyard, & we’re worried they might fall on the house- and bring down the tangle of power lines under them on the way.   The house next door had a tree fall on the power lines a couple of years ago.   We were very afraid it was going to start a fire then, as the torn line was in a dry grassy yard surrounded by chunks of dead tree.   Some people came out right away & fixed it.   After several local power lines were felled by dead trees, the local news started asking people to get rid of them “to avoid costly repairs & possible fines”.    We’ve been asking our landlady about the 2 dead trees ever since, but she always seems swamped with the maintenance demands of her properties, & we were kinda concentrating more on the problems of being shot at with BB guns or attacked by pit bulls coning from C4J house.   We are so happy to be rid of him that we would have preferred not to bother her at all, but the trees are still there more than 2 years after she herself first mentioned removing them.   If one of them falls on Smacky’s bedroom, it would make this house uninhabitable, & therefore Ms. Landlady would receive no more rent from it, be fined for not removing precarious dead trees, and have to pay to tear this rent-generating house down.   Two years ago the greenery dude she had come assess them estimated the charge of cutting them down would be about half what she makes off of one month’s rent from us.  Maybe she’s not very good at math.  I’ve seen her jewelry, house and car, & her grandkids.   I have a pretty good idea why she somehow is always too overwhelmed to do repairs on her rental properties.
      Speaking of which, the landlady was over on our street visiting a neighbor today, who asked the strangest question:  Did we dig a hole in the neighbors house & put 3 orange kittens there?  WTF???   I know our stray cats are no secret, but what kind of paranoid world does this neighbor  live in where people dig holes (!!!) in the walls of other people’s homes in which to insert kittens?    What, does she think we’re spying on her with them?   She does have 2 giant dogs of her own- maybe they dug the hole!   I have no idea.   If kittens were there, they probably got in the hole to hide from the storms.   But she sounds totally nuts!

     I am now rereading The Picture Of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde.  Just into chapter two.   His language is unusual in its descriptions, sensual with a lot of almost bizarre proclamations, but I wouldn’t call it effeminate.   (The introduction made a huge deal about how the book was used as evidence in his criminal homosexuality case.)   It’s a great story.   It’s been a while since I’ve read it. 
     On June 2 the new Stephen King, Finders Keepers, comes out, & I have a reserved book at the library to pick up, but I’ve forgotten what it’s called.

     The cats are all fine.  The new catfish is still alive.   It mostly hides, and hasn’t grown that I can see. 

    Nothing much else unusual is going on.

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     Flatmate Smacky and I have been in touch with a local trap/neuter/release program since last August, and it’s finally our turn for help.  Yay!  They get grants from PetSmart to help cat communities, and also help other cats and dogs get medical care and find “furever” homes.  As I have mentioned in this blog before, this town is overwhelmed with stray and abandoned pets, and there were other cat colonies ahead of us.  We did our best to keep up with the feeding, and these outside cats have had 2-3 litters since we first contacted them.   (Besides flatmate Smacky & I, there are 4 other houses within a few blocks who all feed these cats; and many of the kittens have been adopted already.).  
     It felt like the customer service call from hell:  “Please stay on the line!  Your cats are very important to us!  Thank you for your patience!  You are the next cat community!”.  
     So, after nine long months of waiting, yesterday they came out to begin trapping.  I think we caught 12 cats.   It has rained heavily almost every day for the last week, so yesterday afternoon was the clear weather we needed.  (Besides the tornadoes and destruction this season, the rain has been an unexpected boon for local lake and reservoir levels.  The drought these past few years has been really brutal.).   They are planning to come back in a few weeks to trap any cats we missed.  Hopefully this will get them all medically cleared, stop the reproduction, and get as many of them adopted out as possible. 
    

     Here is a picture of the bathtub drains and faucet.  The drain used to be lined up with the hole in the tub to which it’s supposed to be attached.  This house has been shifting for years, presumably because of the drought and shifting foundations.  The walls are covered in cracks.  The gunk between the tub and the wall is calking that we’ve used to try to fill up some of the cracks in places that need to be watertight.  (It, and various other types of wall crack filler are in such high demand that the local Home Depot keeps stacks of the stuff up near the checkout aisles.).   A few days ago this pipe and its corresponding drain inside the tub were just suddenly in this new location.  There is now a gap where the rest of the hole in the tub is, where water still sometimes goes.  So what’s under there???  The bathroom floor?  The crawl space under the house?  Will water going out that hole rot the floorboards?  Will rats or snakes from outside start crawling into the house from it?  It totally creeps me out!
    
     C4J is out.  The realty people are busy cleaning huge piles of the crap he left behind out of that house and its garage.  As C4J was moving out, he started a new asinine habit of loudly honking his truck horn whenever he passes our house.  So when he was making several trips back and forth each day, it was Honk honk honk honk honk HOOOONK each time coming and going.  He still passes our house once in a while and does it.  I honestly don’t care.  I already knew he was an asshole, so it does nothing to alter my opinion of him.  And it scares any cats away from him, so at least they don’t get hurt.  Dumbass 😜

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     I am now reading the book When To Rob A Bank, by Stephen D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, after having read How To Think Like A Freak.  (I previously read Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics on another occasion.).   I have enjoyed the creative thinking of these authors and their easy storytelling ability.  This book is a bunch of posts from their blog, which I have never read before.   I am about halfway through.   So far many of the posts seem to display the aggravating cluelessness about the money struggles of everyday people usually only displayed by rich Republican politicians, as when they say things like “Minimum wage workers don’t deserve a living wage but I personally could never survive on minimum wage.”
     For example, one post suggests actually making votes FOR SALE, and letting people vote as many times as they want (or can afford).  I’m not going to waste my time listing the many ways this would further the influence of money in politics, or make poor people (who greatly outnumber the privileged few who this system would benefit) so underrepresented that it wouldn’t be worth their time and money to vote even once.  
    Another post mentions something they brought up in Think Like A Freak, the idea of making health care cost more for the consumer.  The author describes a system they suggested to David Cameron that, in the event of a serious illness or accident, would require the patient or his family to have a spare 5000 quid just sitting around handy.  I guess the fact that there are millions of Brits who don’t have that much (& tens of millions of Americans who don’t have the equivalent dollars in savings) has never occurred to them.  Or maybe they just don’t give a fuck; I don’t know.  
     They seem to have almost religious faith in the magical “hand of the free market”.   They say that if healthcare (and gas) were more expensive, if prices reflected the true costs of production, consumers would use less & it would all even out.  Most of the people I know go without healthcare that they need already.  Almost all of them – people with families who work full time – go without dental care.  And gas?  How exactly does he think the working poor can use less gas?  Which day would he like them to not show up for work?  (Many of my friends already carpool because their commute to one of the few decent jobs around here is so long.).  And we know damned well that American politicians will never invest in better public or mass transportation systems.  They can’t even maintain the roads and bridges we already have.
      So these authors can maybe skip their joyrides and elective plastic surgery, but there is a limit to what real people can go without and still remain functioning parts of society.  
     To drive it home how truly out of touch these coauthors are, the last post I read was about being unable to place a bet that was inconsequential to them, totally just for fun, on the Chicago White Sox for $10,000 – each!  So a couple of guys with $10,000 to throw away (the post said it would give their kids a reason to look at the newspaper in the morning) think that if the prices of gas & healthcare go up, it’ll all even out like magic.  Huh. 

     BTW: 1) America doesn’t have actual Free Market Capitalism.   Our government subsidizes corn, and oil & gas, to name a few.  Gun manufacturers have lobbyists but crack dealers don’t.  Republicans are making it harder to obtain an abortion (and are starting to close in on birth control) than it is to buy a drone and strap a homemade bomb to it.   Commerce is still regulated to unfairly maintain the advantages of the rich & powerful.
   2). Free market capitalism brought us slavery (which is still a worldwide labor problem), poverty wages, severe inequality, corrupt oligarchical governments, & possible irreparable destruction of the environment. 

     In one blog they make this statement: “In reasonably competitive markets…the determinant of price is how much it costs to supply the good, not how much consumers are willing to pay.”.    Look at global corporations like Walmart.  They tell farmers how much they are willing to pay; the farmer can take it or leave it.  And because Walmart has such a huge influence on their livelihood, they probably can’t afford to say “no”.  There is no consideration for reasonable production costs in what Walmart demands.  They drive down suppliers pay by sheer force of their size.  That’s how we get $5 T-shirts, $25 dresses from GAP, and $10 shoes at Payless.  That’s why so much of this stuff is made by children in faraway countries with no labor protections and no pollution restrictions.  So while these economists want “higher-priced gas to manipulate usage”,  so far I have seen no suggestions of higher wages or better living conditions for the people who produce so many other ridiculously cheap products.

     Finally, a guest on the blog, Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won a Nobel prize in economics, actually said that women working in male-dominated fields only think that they are being discriminated against based on gender, because women’s self-consciousness damages their mental performance.   No, that’s not sexist at all.  Women just spend too much time worrying if they look pretty to think straight.  Asshole.

     I really hope they don’t put out anymore books.  They should’ve taken their own advice (from the last chapter of Think Like A Freak) and quit while they were ahead.

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     Today C4J hauled away several truckloads of furniture & stuff.   One of the people helping him was his grandson, Anger-Management’s oldest boy.   It scared me when I first saw him over there because I thought it might be Anger-Management himself out of jail.   They look very much alike, and dress alike too.    Sleeveless shirt; backwards cap over curly ponytail.    I was afraid he might get violent or seek some sort of retaliation against us.   But nothing yet.    Maybe they’re gone and we’ll never hear from them again – paws crossed.    I wonder how his new neighbors will enjoy getting their windows shot out.   Since the charges against Anger-Management involve dealing drugs to high schoolers, I wonder if this boy was dealing to his friends. There was that one day when a bunch of cop cars chased him home from school. He must’ve been doing something major for so many cop cars to be after one high school boy.

     Last time I looked I couldn’t find the catfish again.   But he’s good at hiding.   Last time I thought Froggy had eaten him, he was under the bridge.   I tried shining a flashlight under there and still couldn’t see him, but he still might be somewhere.  We’ll see.

     Here’s a couple of weird stories Smacky told me from her fascinating job as a Walmart cashier:
1).  The other day an elderly couple was paying for their stuff at the register.  They were both in wheelchairs; it was all very pitiful.  They were buying a DVD player, which was in one of their bags.  Then, after everything was paid for and they were leaving, a woman ran past, grabbed the bag with the already paid for DVD player in it, and ran right out of the store.   It was all caught on the store security cameras, so maybe they’ll eventually catch her.  They’ll probably distribute her picture to all the employees to watch for her.   Everyone knew that the couple had already paid for the DVD player, so the manager offered to replace it, but that was the last of that particular model that they had, and the elderly couple didn’t want a different one.   So the manager refunded their money.
2).   A man at the register last night became irate and argumentative about his pears.  The pears rang up for $1.77 a pound, and he kept insisting that they were $1.77 an “ulb”!  (phonetically pronounced like bulb).   Smacky had no ideal what he meant at first, but when she figured  out that he was trying to say the abbreviation “lb” as if it were a word and tried to explain it to him, he just got more upset.  In the end, she gave him his pears for $1.77 ” an ulb” because that’s what they cost anyway!

     Tomorrow we take Little Girl in to the veterinarian for her sneezing, snotty nose, and hoarse meow.  I’m a little worried because she’s getting up in years- she’s eleven.

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     We went to PetSmart today to get some sort of catfish for the aquarium.  I have been meaning to get something new after one of the two pink kissing gouramis died, but I had a hard time finding a fish big enough that the frog wouldn’t eat it.  Froggy has eaten so many fish.  Before I had mollies.  The adults were safe at first, because the frog was small, but when the mollies started having babies Froggy ate them.  When the frog grew bigger he started trying to eat the adults too, so we took them to place that takes donated fish and resells them.  That place had fish, reptiles, rodents, and a huge room full of large squawking birds.   Anyway, the plants in the aquarium are starting to have an algae coating on the leaves.  With more live plants the algae gets harder to clean, so I thought I’d get a catfish to help, as long as it was big enough to escape Froggy.
     While we were waiting to pay, the woman behind us in line had a pit bull-ish dog.  Smacky told her what had happened to her, and the lady went into this whole shpeal about how her dog wasn’t actually a pit bull because it had these miniscule differences, perceptible to her alone, I’m sure.  She gave her speech in “listicle” form as if she had repeated it many times before.
     When we got home, “Leonard Raaaaaaaaayyy”‘s again naked little sister was toddling alone down the street.  She wound up in our yard, with her brother following her but no adult supervision in sight.  Smacky tried to take her back home, but then her mother ran out of the house and snatched her up & put her in her car.   The boy ran away from her, & over into their driveway.  Apparently this made the woman angry, because then she proceeded to screech the car up & down the driveway a few times, seemingly in a fit of rage.  The boy was in the driveway while she was doing this, and she only avoided hitting him by screeching the breaks.  So she made a huge amount of noise in this weird display of her desire to run over her own kid.  I really wish I had been ready- I definitely would have recorded that.  I know from experience that the local cops wouldn’t give a shit, but I’ve never seen anyone almost trying to kill their own child before.  That whole family is fucking crazy!  
     After she did that a few times, she stayed in the driveway long enough for him to get into the car, but not long enough for him to close the door after himself.  She did that by speeding off with the door open, using the force of her acceleration to slam the car door closed. 
    
     The new fish is still small in comparison to Froggy and the pink gourami.  I checked on him a few times.  Last time he was under the bridge.  I really hope he lives long enough to become too big for Froggy to cram into his mouth.  The lady at PetSmart said they are fast growers and he would probably grow to about 4 inches.  I hope he makes it. 

     One last thing.  Keiko, our little feral porch kitty who will never let us touch her, who scratches the hand putting food in front of her every single day, and who has raised her three kittens on the porch…she has started to do “the dance with no pants” again, with her kittens right in the chair watching.  Her caterwauling is making a noticeably loud racket.  Her kittens are about 49 days old.  Please don’t make any more kittens Keiko!
(We’ve been asking for help since last Summer from a local service that helps trap/neuter/release stray cats. They have put us off, supposedly because they ran out of grant money and had several other cat communities ahead of us. The way feral animals are everywhere in this town, I believe them. Anyway, the lady says it may finally be our turn to get some help with all these cats. They are hopefully going to come and have a giant trapping party in about three weeks, if everything goes as planned. So we’ll get as many of these outside cats spayed, neutered, cleaned up and cared for, and adopted out as we can. It’s a charity organization set up by a lady who really loves animals. They have a much better reputation than Animal Control. The local “Humane” Society is awful.)

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     Just a quick entry.   Smacky told me a weird thing happened at Walmart today while she was at work.   Somebody brought a pit bull with them to Walmart in the back of their pick-up truck.   (People around here seem to do it all the time, so that’s not the weird part.)  They’re apparently too stupid to consider, or more likely they just don’t care, that riding unsecured in the bed of a truck going anywhere from 20-70 mph is dangerous for the dog, and can ultimately turn their dog’s body into a +100lb. projectile that will crash into any vehicle nearby.  Then these dogs get left outside to wait, many times in +100°F weather, sometimes in the rain, whatever.  This is animal cruelty, but try getting any law enforcement agency in Texas to care about anything besides drug crimes.  
     Anyway, tonight this pit bull was loose running around the Walmart parking lot.  First it killed the Walmart cat, a cat that’s been living there for years.  They feed it and take care of it and use it for pest control.  Then the pit bull went inside the store.  I don’t know if it tried to attack anyone in there, but neither the Walmart employees nor its owner could get it to leave peacefully.  They finally had to call Animal Control to come capture it, while sheltering the shoppers in a separate area.
     So besides our personal experiences, pit bulls have been in the local news a lot lately.