That Awkward Age

VISA cries over my plastic surgery

Me to Visa: Please cancel my credit card. I just don't need it.

Visa: But you have a zero balance.

Me: That's right. I have others. I don't need it.

Visa: But you'll lose all of your benefits with us.

Me: That's right. I don't need them.

Visa: But you have great credit with us.

Me: That's because I have a zero balance. Cancel my credit card.

Visa: We hate to lose you as our customer. Is there nothing we can do for you?

Me: You can cancel my credit card.

Visa: Are you sure you want to do that and give up your great credit rating with us?

Me: Yes, and don't ask me any more questions. Just cancel my credit card.

Visa: What is the interest rate you are paying on your other credit cards?

Me: That was a question. Cancel my credit card.

Visa: But we only charge 15%. That's a good rate.

Me: Cancel my credit card.

Visa: Do you pay an annual fee on your other credit cards?

Me: Cancel my credit card.

Visa: Mrs. Kent,  this can't be undone. Do you realize that?

Me: Please cancel my credit card.

Visa: You can't ever reopen this credit card, do you understand?

Me: Please cancel this credit card.

Visa: (Sigh.) OK, Mrs. Kent. Would you like a letter of confirmation?

Me: Whatever floats your boat.

Visa: Is that a yes, Mrs. Kent?

Me: Sure. Have a blast. Send me a letter.

Visa: I'm going to read you a confirmation now, OK, Mrs. Kent? (Reads long BS.)

Me: OK.

Visa: OK, Mrs. Kent. If you ever would like to reopen your credit card, please let us know!

Me: You betcha!

Photo: By liewcf

The Early, Winged, Bipedal, Endothermic, Egg-Laying Vertebrate Get the Non-Arthropod Invertebrate . . . While the Creative-Types Snooze.

 All you early birds out there catching the worms – you can have them. I’m going to bed around the time you’re starting to bob, bob, bob along. 

Yes, I know. You’re the go-getters. You’re up at 4:30 a.m., in the gym by 5, showering at 6, and in the office by 7:30, getting a jump on the day and impressing the boss. There’s a study reported in the Harvard Business Review that proves you early birds get better grades in school, which gets you into better colleges, which gets you better jobs. Worms!

When you’re an early bird, everybody gives you extra credit. But here’s the thing – the study, by Christoph Randler, a biology professor at the University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany (of course he would be German) says that just because you change the hour you get up doesn’t make you a morning person, because half of your “chronotype” is genetic. So even when you try to change, going to bed with the chickens and getting up when everyone else is sawing logs, it doesn’t work. Any more than sleeping in the garage makes you a car.

I wish I had known that when I was a kid. It could have been useful when my dad was waking me up at 6 a.m. by dragging me over the footboard spouting slogans from his Dale Carnegie training.  There’s nothing less motivating at that time of day than a jolly morning person chirping,  “Act enthusiastic and you’re BE enthusiastic!” Worms!

Then there was the job early in my career as a reporter at an afternoon newspaper for which I had to be at work at 6:45 a.m. This was my first job after the birth of my oldest child, who, at 9 months of age, had never slept through the night when I went back to work  -- and didn’t for some time afterwards. And sometimes I had to cover school board and city council meetings that went past 10 p.m.  Those were the caffeinated years . . . 64 ounces before lunch. 

Finally, as a self-employed business owner, I can set my own hours  . . . sort of.  My best ideas explode in my brain like Jiffy Pop just as the rest of the world is getting horizontal. And guess what? We night owls get some respect, too. The Harvard Business Report says we’re tops in intelligence, creativity, humor and extroversion. I’ll take that over worms!

Now if I can only get those worm eaters from calling before noon . . .

Photo: by dicktay2000

The Sex Life of Trees is Making Me Sneeze and Think About Golf

 I made it all winter without a sniffle. 

No H1N1, regular old boring flu, sinus infection, bronchitis or even a cold. Nadda. 

But in the past two weeks, Scottie, the accidental designer dog, and I have been sneezing our fool heads off. And for what? 

Because the trees are fooling around. And they’re not picky with whom or what they do “it” with. Without even first buying dinner and a movie. 

They’re just spewing their tree sperm carelessly into the air and hoping some of hits the target, without any concern for the repercussions for the rest of us. Just how wanton can you get? Remind you of any other promiscuous Woods?

Well, that’s the whole problem! I did some research, and there are all sorts of Tiger trees -- black Tiger pines, Tiger apples, Tiger figs, Siberian Tiger trees, Tiger oak, Vermont Tiger, striped Tiger, Tiger maple, Kipahulu Tiger claw trees … get the picture? 

And did you notice that all this pollen started flying around about the time that Tiger Woods made his big comeback a couple of weeks ago at the Masters in Augusta? That’s not very far away, as the crow – or pollen – flies.

Say what you will, but I say where there’s sex, there’s Tiger.  And while his extramarital affairs may be a personal matter between him and his wife, his personal rights end where my sinuses begin.

Photo: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/didbygraham/ / CC BY 2.0

Do you smell what I smell? Hampton Roads homeowner has a whale of a time with dead mammal

When you hear about a beached whale in the back yard, there are only two possibilities -- you’re in for a mother-in-law joke or you live in Hampton Roads, Virginia.

Back when I was growing up in western North Carolina, periodically there would be pictures in the paper of smiling men holding dead, 10- or 12-foot rattlesnakes that had half-dozen rattles on their tales. But rattlesnakes are boring compared to the dead animal stories we have here.

Can you imagine looking out your back window to see a 30-foot long, 10-ton humpback whale bobbing along belly-up? Can’t you hear the home owner? “Hey Marge – how much room do we have left in the freezer?”

Last weekend a female whale carcass got stuck in the marsh of Perrin Creek in Gloucester, a rural community on the Middle Peninsula. And get this -– this was a small whale. (Somehow, that seems like an oxymoron.) If it had been full grown instead of a juvenile, it could have been as long as 60 feet and weighed upwards of 40 tons.

So you know when you wish your neighbors would keep their yard up better? Oh, wait – that’s what OUR neighbors wish. But can you imagine being the lucky neighbors of these folks, with a dead, stinking mound of rotting whale flesh next door?

And to top it off, state law says if a whale washes up in your back yard, it’s up to you to dispose of it. It’s not as though you can dig a grave in your yard to bury it, as if it were a dead puppy or road kill. Nor can you compost it. What, exactly, do you do with a 10-ton whale?

What they should have done –- and would have done in western North Carolina -- was set up a stand, charge admission and call it a tourist attraction. Apparently people came from miles around to have a look -– and a sniff –- at the decomposing mammal. People from every state agency that had water-related words in its name showed up to poke, prod and slice off a hunk. Yep, they decided. It was a whale. And it was dead. Didn’t know what killed it or why it was in the man’s back yard, but there it was.

After scratching their heads for a few days and waiting until the whole neighborhood smelled like a fish market, the Virginia Game and Inland Fisheries decided they’d pick up the $5,000 tab to get rid of it. While they were searching for a flat-bed truck to haul it away to the landfill, a marine towing company donated its services to tow the whale out into the river Wednesday morning. They tied a rope to the whale’s tale, dragged it into deep water and anchored it to the bottom of the river.

That never would have happened in North Carolina. There it would have been taken to the taxidermist.

How does PETA know WWBD?

If you’ve ever spent any time trying to meditate, pray or just sit quietly, cross-legged, and with your eyes closed without moving for more than 60 seconds, you know that by the 59th second, something hurts and needs to be rubbed, or itches and needs to be scratched.

And that’s just what’s going on in your head.

Add to that phantom hairs falling onto your arm, sweat beading on your lip, underwear creeping into your crack and a booger suddenly whistling, and you’ve got major distractions keeping you from your spiritual quest.

Then there's the possibility of flying insects.

This week after President Obama smacked a fly during a White House interview, PETA blogger Alison Mullins wrote about him, “He isn't the Buddha, he’s a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act.”

Then they sent the President a “Katcha Bug Humane Bug Catcher” that uses a trapdoor to capture insects without killing them so that they can be released unharmed.

Now those of us who live in Hampton Roads, Virginia, where PETA’s headquarters are located, are used to this kind of weirdness. We’re used to seeing these nice folks hang out on street corners in their birthday suits carrying signs, saying they’d rather be naked than wear fur. They’re the sort of organization that folks here in our fairly conservative, very military and oh-so-Southern area think should be located in San Francisco or Oregon, but we’re generally too polite to tell them that.

We’re just like that here. We just smile, nod and cluck a little at them, the way your Aunt Margie may have when adding up the months on her fingers between your wedding date and the birth of your first baby.

But I get it. I’m in marketing, and sometimes you’ve got to exaggerate to make your point. I like animals, too. I want them to have nice lives. At least most of them.

I draw the line at flies. Spiders. Cockroaches. Mosquitoes. And most rodents (squirrels and raccoons are OK as long as they don’t have rabies), snakes, lizards, birds that poop on my clean car, one-celled microbes that cause diseases and any animal that might eat or maim me in the woods or jungle. (It was because of my fear of lions, tigers and pythons -- gained from Tarzan movies -- that I decided early on against a career as a missionary to Africa.)

Other than that, unless it’s chicken, beef, pork or fish, that I might want to eat, I wouldn’t wish any harm on a flea. Well, maybe I would, since I use expensive monthly flea stuff on Scottie. And heart-worm pills, because I don’t like parasites either (having had a few good cases of pin worms as a kid from going bare-footed, I can tell you that having another animal feeding off of your living body is pretty icky).

But you get the point. I’m a nice person. A regular Francis of Assisi to animals.

Just imagine Buddha, who lived in India around 500 BCE, sitting around all day under a lotus tree. For all we know, it was full of bees (oh, I forgot to put stinging animals on my list of things that I don’t wish nice lives to). Just imagine that poor guy trying to reach Nirvana with bees terrorizing him. You just know he wouldn’t sit there all spaced out without swatting them, unless he had his wife and kids doing it for him, which is probably the case. And while she was at it, Mrs. Buddha probably peeled him a few grapes and rubbed his back.

Then there was the case of Jesus cussing at a fig tree because it didn’t have any figs on it when he was hungry. Poor guy had been preaching all day at a revival, then he saw a fig tree, and even though it was too early for figs, he pitched a holy fit and told the fig tree that it was done for, causing it to wither. I’ve done the same thing when I came home, tired from work, opened the frig, only to find nothing but sour milk and leftover Hamburger Helper.

And if you want to go into other religious traditions, I'd bet all those locusts, gnats, frogs and flies that Moses summonsed up to scare the wits out of the Egyptians so they'd let his people go didn't survive that attack. Can't you just hear one of the townies exclaiming, "Jumping Jehoshaphat! I’d give my first-born for a can of Raid!”

And notice the Bible calls those critters "plagues," so who are we to say otherwise?

So, take that, PETA. If Jesus can curse the fig tree and Buddha can swat at bees, then President Obama can kill a fly.

Now. I’m hungry. I think I’ll go make myself a ham sandwich.