In which I am a successful Good Samaritan

Some of you may remember the following incident:

On Februay 7th, I declined to have my good deed punished. Walking the dogs, I found a brand new Galaxy phone, lying in an apartment complex parking lot. I called the number that seemed in heaviest rotation on the phone & got a girl who passed me to her boyfriend, owner of the phone. Said boyfriend proceeded to rip me a new one for “stealing” his phone. After I got the moron to understand that a thief would not be calling to return the phone, he began to explain that he was on his way to KC for dinner and I should meet him at Applebees to “turn over” his phone. (And who the fuck drives to Kansas City to eat at Applebees?!) When he paused to make sure I understood, I said, “Listen up, douchenozzle. I called to try to do you a solid, only you’re infectious human waste so I’m not going to. There are 3 empty lots at the corner of 19th & Tennessee. I’m going to throw your phone in one of them. It probably has enough battery power left that you’ll be able to call & find it, if you get here in the next 2 hours.”

Then I did just that.

Lots of very funny alternate solutions were suggested, but I was over all pleased with how I resolved my failed Good Samaritan attempt. However, it all left a bad taste in my mouth. I like being able to help people and do nice things for them, so when I’m thwarted by someone who can’t even graciously accept my aid, it makes me grumpy.

Today, I got another chance. Again, while walking dogs, I found a credit card lying on the sidewalk. I pocketed it and finished the dog walk. When I got home, I searched for the person on the internet. Although I found a listing for the card owner in the white pages, there was no phone number. Just the address–about twenty yards from where I found the card, and about two blocks from my house.

On my way back to work, I rode over to the address, but no one was home. Since the name on the mailbox matched the card, I opted to just pop the card in there. Only as I was about to bike away, it occurred to me that people rarely look into the dark depths of their mailboxes, and they don’t dig around in the bottoms, which are full of dead moths and things. They just pull out the mail that pokes out of the top. The card owner might never even find the card, or if she did, it might not be until she’d been through the headache of cancelling the card.

Getting back on the internet, I looked over my search results for her name and discovered that she has a Goodreads account. So I logged in and sent her a message to say, “Hey, I found your credit card and put it in your mailbox, so no need to panic and cancel it.”

By the time I got back to work, I had an answer to say, “Thank you so much! I didn’t even realize it was missing! &c.”

Now that, that is how good deeds are supposed to go.

(Also, how amazing is the internet? Pretty amazing, though in some ways, it has replaced old systems of knowledge and communication. After all, while I was standing on this person’s front porch, sending her a message on my smart phone, her neighbor drove up. I called out to ask if she knew her neighbor or had a phone number for her. Nope. Which made me realize I don’t have my neighbor’s phone number. Note to self: fix that tonight.)

I’m “overweight.” Yay me!!

I just realized that with my weight down to 173, I’m officially no longer “obese.” I’m merely “overweight” now. Woohoo! At 183, my BMI was 30.4 , but now it’s 28.8.

Gotta celebrate the little victories.

I’m a winnah!

The dogs could not understand why I had to get up at 5 am this morning. Of course, they don’t understand a lot of things, including “dieting,” my scales, and “weighing,” but they are big fans of me eating fewer carbs and more meat. A dropped cracker is a minor treat. A dropped buffalo burger goes down in Dog History.

But up at 5 am it was to do the final weigh in for my diet bet. I went over to the high school where Robert the Adequate works and got better news than I expected. I had to weigh 176.4 of less. Final result: 172.9. I lost more than ten pounds in four weeks. And dig my weigh in word:

Hai! Karate!

You can tell this is only (marginally) the second day of sandal weather, because my toes are naked. And this picture illustrates why I paint my toenails. I think I have boy feet. I mean, obviously, I have better nails and grooming than most boys, but my feet are kind manly. And at their size, why shouldn’t they be? (You know it’s been a long winter when I leave home at 7:30 with a current temperature of 43, and I still insist on it being sandal weather.)

At any rate, Robert and I both won our diet bet, so we will naturally be celebrating tonight with Mexican food. Then I will try to be very good for the rest of the week, since I suspect this Mother’s Day weekend will be a blow out. It will also be a duck day!! Ducklings to the river!!

PS: It took me less than ten minutes to fold and put away a load of laundry this morning. I’m going from Olympic class laundry slob/procrastinator to trying to break records! Damn!

Glorious Spring!

Yeah, not so much. Dogs were in total disbelief this morning. They looked at me like, “No fucking way! We have to go walk in that?!” Which pretty well sums up the way I felt about my walk to work. Cold, rainy, bleh. My nose is cold, my pants are soaked from the knee down, and it’s still hard to do computer work, because my eyesight is fucked up.

At least now I know why my vision has been messed up. My right eye is getting better. For real, after years of being the weak eye, it is now a full half point less near-sighted than my left eye. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that I’m waiting for them to get in lenses in the right correction so that I can see normally again. And how awful is it that this is a first world problem? I hate to think of poor people elsewhere whose eyesight is worse and who can’t get it fixed.

In other news … I got nothing.

Oh, wait. Interesting Blurter update. So on Sunday, there was good weather, so Robert the Adequate decided to go to the dog park with us. Just as we arrived, I got a text from Blurter: “U bitches going to the dog park today?” To which I replied, “We just got here.” Now, don’t for one minute think that this means anything. He often texts to ask if we’re going to dog park, but he has not been to dog park since October. October. So I think nothing of it.

Half an hour later, as Robert, the dogs and I are circling back around the park, who did I see pull up on his motorcycle? Yep. Blurter decided to make his twice annual appearance. And discovered Robert has usurped his place. Robert and Blurter have met twice before, and although they play nice about their respective positions in my life, they’re not buddies.

So we spent an uneasy half hour playing with the dogs and sort of chatting in this awkward triangular interface. Then Blurter departed, giving me this look. So I walked back out to the parking lot with him, where he gave me money, but clearly could not bring himself to say or do whatever he was thinking. (Because really, he showed up on his motorcycle, freshly shaved. He had something on his mind.) His problem. I said good-bye, and went back in the park to make sure the dogs weren’t giving Uncle Bob hell.

Flash forward to Tuesday, when Blurter texted me, ostensibly to see how the dogs were. Fine, of course. Bigs was sleeping with her big head on my leg while I watched blurry TV. Then, out of the blue, he said, “I felt weird at the dog park.” Okay, first, Blurter confessed to having “felt” something? So I took the bait and asked why. Because he felt like a fifth wheel.

Well, duh, pal. You’ve made yourself into a fifth wheel. You could be the fourth wheel, but you’ve abdicated that role.

Then he suggested that Robert gave him the stink eye. I made a doubting remark, and he admitted, okay, no, maybe it was just him feeling weird. I suggested that maybe he felt weird and felt like he’d got the stink eye because he feels bad about not being part of our lives anymore. He conceded that might be so.

o.O

Huh.

Kansas in a tax petri dish

It’s an experiment. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard people say about Kansas’ new tax laws. Our governor is calling it a “glide path to zero.” That is, zero state income tax. In order to go from having a fairly high state tax rate to no state income tax, naturally, we’ll start with the richest first.

Business owners will no longer have to pay taxes. It’s not just small businesses that will be exempt, a move that would help people like Blurter, but all business owners. No matter how large the business. Also, professionals who practice within the constructs of a partnership, like most doctors, lawyers, and engineers, will be exempt from state income tax. Also, any income received through a partnership or trust will be tax-free. That means people who have the means to create a trust for their investment income will have no state income tax obligation.

So, the first step of the experiment in having no state income tax? Stop taxing the rich. Who will go on paying taxes? All the regular employees who keep everything in the state running. And the poor schmoes who’ve retired from those regular tax-paying jobs.

No word on when the next part of the equation might happen–relieving poor people of their tax obligations. That’s some grand experiment, letting the poor and working class go on paying for things. Isn’t that how we’ve been doing it for a while now? Here in Kansas, though, we’re just going to let the wealthy stop looking for loopholes to avoid taxes.

Assuming this isn’t all some cruel joke that will end with hard working Kansans continuing to pay taxes while the rich hoard more money, what is supposed to happen after no one pays income taxes?

Brownback touts the end of the state income tax as the gateway to economic prosperity and growth, except there are no numbers to support the hypothesis behind his experiment. States with no income taxes have shown no greater economic prosperity than states with income taxes. There’s just no demonstrable correlation. (Check out these numbers that relate to Louisiana Governor Jindal’s efforts to do away with their state income tax.)

Heck, even Bloomberg news (not exactly a liberal bastion) posits that higher income tax does nothing to dampen economic growth.

But knowing even the bare minimum about Brownback, we can’t be too surprised that he’s willing to undertake such an enormous experiment on the basis of so little information. After all, this is a man who doesn’t truly believe in evolution (despite his fancy footwork trying to claim he values the scientific method). Why would he place any real value on simple facts that have already cast serious doubt on his economic hypothesis?

So, who knows what’s going to happen? Perhaps come next election cycle, we little Kansas spores will vote for someone more inclined to nurture our growth. Until then, we’ll be over here in our petri dish.

Home home on the range

 

I just did a load of laundry

And then as soon as the dryer finished, I folded the clothes and put them away. O.o

Of poop and impermanence

I recently switched to a new kind of dog poop bags. I was sold on them because they’re biodegradable and just slightly larger than my old bags for about the same price. Trust me, an extra inch or two in a dog poop bag can be the difference between a close call and a crap encounter.

I’d used a few rolls of bags out of the box, but when I reached in today to pull out the next roll, there was a piece of cardboard in the way. I pulled it out and discovered this:

That, my people, is a temporary tattoo. Of a dog taking a poop. Yep. I like the bags but I just don’t even know what to think about the fact that their marketing plan includes temporary tattoos. Of a dog pooping. (And taking a closer look at the dog, I’m worried that he seems to be straining a bit too much. Don’t blow an aneurysm, little guy.)

The only question, I suppose, is where to apply it?