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A sure sign that something has invaded the yard is when Boots barks.  She doesn’t care if other dogs in the area are barking.  She simply ignores that (fortunately).  But she will sound the alarm if something is in her yard. 

So this morning I came out to find out what the ruckus was all about and discovered this specimen:

It was up on the fence because Boots had been chasing it.  At first I was concerned because it appeared to be drooling excessively, which had me thinking rabies.  But it appears that this may be one of its natural reactions to extreme fear (Wikipedia entry on opossums, Virginia Opossum), which includes excessive saliva, among other interesting symptoms: 

But with enough stimulation, the opossum will enter a near coma, which can last up to four hours. It lies on its side, mouth and eyes open, tongue hanging out, with green fluid emitting from its anus, and emitting an odor putrid to most predators. […]  As a result of this unusual behavior, opossums that are discovered apparently dead with no obvious fatal injuries should be given the benefit of the doubt as to avoid inadvertently burying them alive.

‘E’s not dead.  ‘E’s just restin’ 

I guess in this case he was getting ready to fall over and “die” if I hadn’t brought Boots back into the house. 

I saw in today’s Star Telegram that Southlake has decided to dump Allied Waste.

As frustrated competitors looked on, the City Council unanimously agreed Tuesday to a new trash service provider and a rate increase without putting the contract out to bid.

The council approved an 18-month contract with Republic Waste Services of Texas, also known as Duncan Disposal, after an informal survey of five area companies.

The contract is valued at $2 million and begins April 30.

“What we need now is good service,” said Councilman Gregory Jones before the 7-0 vote.

“I’m very pleased with the provisions that have been put in this contract.”

The strike certainly didn’t help, coming as it did at a time when customer complaints had been growing over late or missed collections. 

Oddly enough, though, service actually improved for me during the strike!  The replacement drivers seemed to arrive earlier and didn’t throw my trash can willy-nilly in the middle of the street.

As alluded to above, though, my chief complaint is that the regular drivers have a bad habit of throwing my trash can in the street.  Worse, right after the strike ended, I looked out the window and noticed my trash can in the street again.  About a minute after noticing it (I was on a conference call and couldn’t run out to move it) I saw the truck come back up the street to pick up the trash on the other side.  The driver got out, looked at it on the way to and from grabbing the neighbor’s garbage, and just left it there!

Aside from that, the service works fairly well in my neighborhood, though.  Maybe others had more problems during the strike than I did.

But should the Keller City Council consider alternatives, I hope they maintain the current terms of service.  From everything I’ve heard, containerized service sucks (cf. Ft. Worth).  I’d be willing to pay a fair amount more (haven’t decided an exact amount, though) to maintain our ability to be free from the shackles of carts and having to deal with the recycling nazis (once again, cf. Ft. Worth).

The news of the pet food recall for about 50 different brands only served to confirm my suspicion that most of the so-called high-end brands weren’t too different from the store brands and that the distinction is mostly marketing hype.  It’s really interesting to see that the same company makes Eukanuba, Iams, and Ol’ Roy.  And apparently does so with many of the same ingredients.

Fortunately, though, I’ve been feeding Boots Alpo or Pedigree canned food along with either Kibbles ‘n Bits or Goodlife Recipe dry food, none of which are made by Menu Foods and aren’t affected by the recall.

But I often get her Old Roy jerky treats, and this morning I ended up throwing away an unopened canister.  The treats aren’t listed in the recall, and it’s entirely possible that Wal-Mart sources them from another company, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give them to her.  I’ll look for something similar from one of the other companies when I go to the store tonight.

The risk just isn’t worth it.

Head at capacity
Pollen over 4000
Claritin collapse

[With apologies to fans of traditional haiku…]

With the recent warm weather there has been a marked upsurge in bicyclists and rollerbladers on the trails.  What I find annoying is that some of them seem to regard the presence of me and my dog as some sort of impediment to their progress.  Some seem hellbent on riding two-abreast and on cutting across corners, which tends to cause them to impinge on my personal space.

The other annoyance I now face is a group of women who walk three-across and seem to want to dare me to stay on the trail and hit one of them.  What the hell is up with that?  They’re lucky I was raised to be nice to women, regardless of how chauvinistic they may find it.

I can’t help but wonder where all these people were when it was 40 degrees and raining?  I was out there every day with the dog—rain, shine, or snow.  The only things that keep me away are lightning and ice.

Anyhow, I’m tired of accommodating rude riders and inconsiderate walkers.  Perhaps it’s time to deploy the stiff-arm approach. 

I was out and about on the Bear Creek walking trail earlier this week when I saw this.

A young woman in very tight, short, shorts and not much of a top had just jogged past.  Ahead I saw a man and his young daughter (perhaps 8 or 10) taking a shortcut across the grass.  It was quite obvious that he was watching the jogger, since his baseball cap was a dead giveaway as to where he was looking (target lock acquired:  tracking initiated).  Unfortunately, while he was looking at the jogger he wasn’t looking at the ground.  He stepped in a hole, twisted his ankle, went to one knee, then rolled on his back and did a sort of upside-down bug dance (i.e. legs and arms flailing). 

All in all, a fairly good performance, as it distracted his daughter from noticing the reason for his fall.  I gave it an 8.0 for form and an 8.5 for the save.

It’s not often that you hear such candor from a corporate executive:

“I don’t want to be too sophisticated here, but 2007 is going to suck, all 12 months of the calendar year,” D.R. Horton Chief Executive Officer Donald Tomnitz said at a Citigroup conference in New York on Wednesday. “Our future is not as bright as what we would like it to be.”

It seems that some are slagging him for making such a statement, but I find it refreshingly honest after all the mealy-mouthed corp-speak that we usually get in these situations.

Have you looked at your phone bill lately?  I have to confess to mostly ignoring it, because I have an “unlimited” plan with Verizon (no per-minute long distance charges) and it’s bundled in with my Internet and TV.  But I recently did my taxes and the tax credit for phone taxes prompted me to take another look this time around.

There’s a ridiculous list of charges, surcharges, fees, taxes, and recovery fees (17 in all) that combined, make for an effective tax rate of 35.6%.  I’m trying to think of anything (aside from “sin taxes”) that’s so horribly taxed and I’m not coming up with anything.  Maybe it’s time to give up the land line in favor of the cell phone.  While there are taxes on the cellular bill, they’re nowhere near as bad as this.

In my spare time I’m a volunteer with our local Community Emergency Response Team (Citizen Corps CERT information; Keller CERT site).  While CERT is sponsored by the local fire department, we formed the Keller CERT Association to organize ourselves as a separate entity.  In the last election I was elected to the post of Training Director.  A couple of years ago I took the CERT “Train the Trainer” class along with one of our other members and participated in teaching our last class, so it seemed like a natural fit.

This past week has been pretty busy, as we had our regular monthly meeting last Thursday, a team-wide disaster exercise on Saturday, and we started a new class last night.  Additionally, I attended a training session yesterday afternoon to learn how to use the fire department’s fancy new fire extinguisher trainer (just in time for our new class, which will be using this device in next week’s session).

Organizing a disaster turns out to be a fair amount of work.  You have to think up a scenario, find a location, recruit victims, make sure the team knows where to be and when to be there, prepare the location, and then prepare the victims (moulage, fake wounds, etc).  Once the exercise begins you have to monitor the progress of the teams and make sure that everyone stays safe.  Afterwards, there’s cleanup and teardown, as well as the debriefing. 

Teaching classes is also fairly involved.  You can’t just read from the instructor manual and expect everyone to come back for the next class.  You have to know the material well enough to move through it smoothly, referring back to the book only for quick guidance.  In the case of last night’s class, I reviewed the material and correlated it to the Powerpoint slides, and came up with a time/sequence chart for the topics, so that we didn’t get too far off course.  I’m coming to the conclusion that proper time management is one of the keys to a good class presentation. 

At last night’s class I wasn’t the only instructor, but I was still up there for about two hours.  It takes a lot of concentration, and after the class I was pretty much wiped (these classes run until 9:30pm).

My work involves working with people in a variety of places, so I don’t go a single day without spending at least an hour on the phone, and some days it approaches six or seven.  So a good headset is a must for my work.  For the past six years I’ve been using a combination of a Plantronics H61N and an M12 amplifier.

It’s been a good system, and I especially like the binaural model because it helps me block out most of the sounds around me.  But I’ve found that working from a home office has some unique distractions that I wouldn’t have faced back in the office, like a whiny dog wanting to go out or someone at my front door.  I’ve been contemplating some sort of wireless headset, but what I was seeing just didn’t seem to fit my requirements.  There seemed to be only two approaches:  Bluetooth ear dongles and 2.4GHz phone systems.  I’ve never had much luck with over-the-ear/on-the-ear types of headsets.  With my oddly shaped head they just end up falling off or knocking my glasses askew.  Or should I manage to get one to stay on, eventually it feels like it’s going to bend my ear into some odd new shape:

So, that put Bluetooth out of the running.  The 2.4GHz systems were also out of the running because I’ve banned all non-802.11 2.4GHz devices from the house.  And aside from the frequency, I didn’t want a whole other phone system, I just wanted a headset (all the 2.4GHz devices were complete phone units).

Every so often I take another look around to see what’s out there and that’s when I stumbled across the Plantronics CS361N:

It’s binaural, noise-cancelling, and it operates at 1.9GHz.  It’s a little too futuristic-looking for my tastes (I like the old-style simpler look of the H61N), but it’s not as bad as the Bluetooth models.

Now the list price on this headset is a bit steep ($349.95), but I’ve found that Plantronics is bad about that.  There are tons of resellers that sell their stuff for significantly less than buying direct.  I have to wonder if anyone actually uses Plantronics’ web store at those prices.

I managed to find it for $261.81 at Amazon.com and it included the HL10 lifter (which is another $79.99 on the Plantronics site).

Most Plantronics headsets work by plugging into the phone and taking the place of the handset.  The handset plugs into the Plantronics adapter so you can still use it if you’re not using the headset.  This setup allows them to make headsets to work with just about any kind of phone.  The downside is that it means you have to life the handset off the hook before using the headset.  The HL10 is a little device that sticks to the phone and sits under the handset.  When you press a button on the headset it sends a signal and the HL10 lifts the handset so as to take the phone off the hook.  My phone, unfortunately, has a hanging hook that’s molded into the base and that fits into a slot on the handset (the phone is designed for desk or wall mounting).  So I had to do some fiddling to make it all work right.  At first the HL10 nearly threw the handset across my desk before I found the right spot where it would lift the handset about 1/2-inch without it falling down.  Now I can take the headset with me and answer calls just by pressing the button on the side.  The base unit will activate the lifter which will take the handset off the hook and then put it back when I’m done.

Anyhow, for the amount of time I spend on the phone, it’ll be worth it if this model works as well as the old H61 I have.  I suppose time will tell.  It’s got rechargeable batteries, which are the bane of my existence, but as long as they don’t have problems with memory I think I’ll be OK.  The few calls I’ve made with it so far seem to sound OK as well (sound quality is decent, although not quite as good as the corded model, but that’s to be expected).  And the HL10 is a nice addition.  Maybe the headset is a little dorky looking, but I find as I get older that my dorkiness quotient has increased so I’m not as bothered by it as I used to be.