Monthly Archives: July 2013

Chapter 77, Heebie Jeebies

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I like words.  Not just the words themselves but the origins of words.  I don’t have a huge vocabulary but when I come across a word, or expression, that really says what I want to say I’m not shy about using it.  So when I decided to tell this story, I remembered the perfect expression to capture the essence of the event and that’s “Heebie Jeebies”.

It was actually coined by a famous cartoonist of the 1920s and 30’s by the name of Billy DeBeck who created the cartoon “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith” and, coincidentally, worked for newspapers in both Youngstown and Pittsburgh at some point in his career.  I don’t think many of us have actually seen his work, but Heebie Jeebies has endured and become part of American slang.  If you’ve never heard the expression, here’s how I would define it.

Earlier this month Peg was sitting at the dining room table with her IPad.  Yes, I did drink the Koolaid of the Apple Nazis and purchase an Apple product but only because they’re simple-minded, inflexible products and I figured Peg, who is not tech savvy, would be less likely to click on something damaging.  And I’m certainly not saying Peg is simple-minded or inflexible.  It’s just that, when it comes to electronics, the KISS principle is sometimes more practical.  So, as Peg was sitting there web surfing or playing Angry Birds, she heard a strange sound.  She described it as a vibration or humming that would come and go and she asked the rest of us if we had heard it.  Our friends Scott and Cindy Schade were up from Atlanta visiting but none of us had heard a thing.  This went on for several hours and we decided that maybe Peg needed to have her hearing checked.  This, of course, irritated her to no end but she finally managed to get us in the her corner of the room while it was happening and, sure enough, there was some kind of mysterious humming coming from the far corner of the room.  We quickly ruled out all electronic sources and when we walked out on to the back porch and looked around the corner of the post by the wall of the house we discovered the source.  There was a continuous flow of yellow jackets flying in and out of the hole at the bottom of a piece of vinyl siding inside-corner molding.

The siding has been there for over 20 years and bugs have never shown any interest in the molding but this year, for some unknown reason, some ambitious critter decided that the gap looked interesting.  I am not a fan of yellow jackets.  I fight an ongoing battle with the things.  Every year I have to wipe out at least one nest somewhere in the compound but they’re always in a hole in the ground.  This was different.  They were invading my turf and they had to be destroyed.  With extreme prejudice!

Over the next three days I sprayed them with every deadly chemical I could find.  I squirted the “sprays from 20 feet” stuff.  I injected the “foaming action” stuff into the hole from every angle possible and eventually their activity slowed to a trickle.  At that point I sprayed a little expanding foam into the gap, to keep them from building another nest, and declared the mission complete.  Fast forward three weeks.

I was on the phone with my brother-in-law Ben when, from the corner of my eye, I caught something flying by.  Thinking it was a fly, I glanced towards the lamp next to me, and realized it was a yellow jacket.  Panic ensued and, after quickly ending my conversation with Ben, Peg and I ineffectively swatted at the thing with anything we could get our hands on.  I headed for the kitchen to retrieve the flyswatter and as I ran through the dining room the heebie Jeebies hit.  The french doors that lead from the dining room to the back porch were covered with angry yellow jackets, on the inside!  I got to the kitchen and the kitchen window was covered with angry yellow jackets, on the inside!  It occurred to me that the flyswatter in my hand was, to say the least, inadequate so I grabbed a can of “sprays from 20 feet” stuff and started hosing down the dining room with products labeled “not for indoor use” and “use in a well ventilated area only”.  Yellow jackets were dropping like “flies?” and after the chemical fog of organo-phosphates settled we began a search for the source of our horrific infestation.  I looked up to the corner of the dining room, where the ceiling meets the walls, and there was a tiny hole with yellow jackets crawling out into the room.  More heebie jeebies as I jammed the nozzle of the bug spray into the hole and opened fire until the deadly liquid was running down the wall and no more yellow jackets heads were peaking from the hole.

Peg covered the hole with some packing tape, lots of packing tape, and I got on line and googled “bee infestations Pittsburgh”.   Up popped a company called “the Bee Hunter” and after a quick phone call and explanation of what had happened the “Bee Hunter”, Jim, used a phrase that I have never heard and don’t ever want to hear again.  He said that we had a “chew through”.  Just typing it makes my skin crawl!  I thought I had killed the nest earlier in the month but in reality I had simply sealed them in and pissed them off.  More had hatched and they had chewed through the joint compound in the corner of the room looking for a way out.

Jim came the next day, sprayed some really good stuff in the hole, cut out a section of the ceiling, removed the nest, taped up the hole, and told me to wait two weeks before I remove the temporary patch and plaster it over to make sure all of the stragglers were dead.  I’m actually not in any hurry to look under the cardboard and, rest assured, I will have a can of spray in my hand two weeks from now when I peel it back and I will have a monumental case of the heebie Jeebies.

Chapter 76, Where does Your Poop Go?

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It’s time for more excuses.  I know I’m late but I really do have a good reason which you’ll figure out shortly.

If you’re like me you have a checklist, of sorts, in the back of your head.  To explain it in the common vernacular, it’s a brain app, kind of like the calendar app in most phones.  There are certain events or concerns that are always floating around in there that I don’t consciously think about but, when the time is right, just pop up.  Things like birthdays, and anniversaries, and when the car registration is due to be renewed, and when state inspection is due on which car, and when it’s time to apply for my antlerless deer tag.  I don’t write these things down, they just make their way to the top of the “need to do list” at the appropriate time.  The most pesky on is the one I call; “Where does your poop go?”

Most people fall into one of three categories when it comes to poo.  Either: A)  I don’t care.  I flush and it goes away.  B) I flush, it goes away, I’m glad someone, somewhere is taking care of it. Or C)  I hope my septic system doesn’t back up into my basement because I don’t really want to see this again and when was the last time I had it sucked out.  I, of course, am answer C.  It’s not that I continually think about poop (that would be weird) but when three of the four properties you own have septic systems you tend to worry about the potential liabilities associated with a system that has gone bad.  To that end, we regularly have ours pumped and I’m a stickler about what goes down the drain.  No matter how much I try not to worry about it though, there’s always a little voice somewhere in the back of my brain whispering “It’s only a matter of time.  Beware the poop!”  Several weeks ago the little voice became much louder and actually sounded a lot like my mother.

After some epic nephew flushes her system began gurgling up from the basement floor.   After a snaking and scoping by my plumber Jim (It’s like a colonoscopy for your house. Who knew that there where little albino flies living in the poop in the pipes under your house!) we discovered that the old terra cotta pipes under the garage floor had cracked and partially collapsed.  The only solution was to dig them up and replace them.  I, of course, am retired.  So, since I have nothing better to do during the hottest week of the decade, I got to cut concrete, break up concrete, dig a ditch, shovel poop laced dirt, lay pipe, shovel gravel, mix concrete, pour concrete, finish concrete, reconnect sewer lines and take lots of showers.  Retirement is great!  So there’s my excuse.  I usually write in the morning but, because of the heat, I was digging every morning and had very little motivation to do much else in the afternoon but rehydrate.  But I do still want to know, “Where do you put your poop?”  Not your real poop, but another kind of poop.

Life is never simple.  None of us go through life never having to deal with problems.  We’ve all lost loved ones, maybe parents or children or spouses.  We have financial difficulties, marital problems, work issues, obnoxious neighbors, the list goes on.  And what do you do with that “poop” in your life?  Do you hope it just goes away?  Do you ignore it and assume someone else will handle it?  Or do you just let it bounce around in the back of your head waiting to explode at an inopportune time?  I know I’ve been guilty of “all of the above” at one time or another and I don’t recommend any of them.  We need to face difficult issues head on.  Get professional help if you need to.  Talk to someone who has been through the same crisis.  Find someone to trust or just someone who will listen.  Believe me, it’s always worse if you wait for the poop to come bubbling up.  Be proactive.  Head things off before they become a bigger issue.   Confront the problem and don’t wait for the little voice to become a screaming banshee!  And no, my mother is not a screaming banshee!  I’m just glad I now know where her poop goes and how it gets there.

 

Chapter 75, I See the Light!

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I’m taking a poll.  How many of you believe in at least one urban legend or myth?  It can be that bigfoot is real or there are alligators living in your sewers or Bill Clinton wasn’t a pathological liar and womanizer or a myriad of others.  There are lots of them out there and I think, to some degree, we all believe that some totally unproven event or thing actually might exist.  My favorite one is UFOs.

There have been hundreds of books and documentaries written and produced about the subject.  Thousands of eyewitness accounts yet there really isn’t one piece of indisputable evidence proving their existence.  So now that I’ve got some of you true believers fired up, it’s time to tell my UFO story.

I’ve written about my first Aircraft Commander at least once.  He was an old, crusty, Vietnam vet named Mike, but I’ve never mentioned my second AC, Jim.  By the time Mike left the crew, I was considered a seasoned copilot.   What they usually did was to balance out the cockpit experience level by pairing up an experienced copilot with a brand new aircraft commander.  That was Jim.  Jim was a great pilot but his outlook on life was a little different than Mike’s.  Jim was a lot more, shall we say, fun loving.  It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re flying a 488,000 lb bomber, there’s a lot of opportunity for “fun loving” to get you in trouble.  Here’s what I mean.

On the bottom of the B-52 there’s a very odd piece of equipment.  There have been lots of things added to the venerable BUFF over the years.  Antennas,  cameras, lumps and bumps everywhere, but an original piece, that by 1980 was never used, was something called the “terrain clearance light”.  No one ever explained it’s use, they just said; “Leave it alone, we never use that thing anymore”.  Here’s how it worked.  In the cockpit there were two switches.  One was an “on/off” switch and the other an “extend/retract” switch.  When it was turned on, an large 1,000,000 candlepower spotlight mounted in the belly of the airplane would illuminate and you could then extend the light to the point where it would shine out ahead of the airplane.  You could also stop it any intermediate position.  It purpose was a little confusing.  A million candlepower seems like a lot, but when you’re moving along at 350 knots, 300 feet off the ground, it really couldn’t illuminate out far enough to accomplish anything and by the time I was flying the airplane, there was a low light camera mounted in the nose and a bright light would have rendered the camera useless.  And besides, why in the world would you want to turn on a huge light if you’re trying to penetrate enemy defenses.  But, because it was installed on the aircraft, the maintenance guys still had to keep it in working order.  Jim had come up with a “fun” use for the thing.

The first night we flew together we were on a standard 3 hour low level leg somewhere in Montana or Wyoming or Nebraska, they all ran together.  We were flying in a wide valley at the end of which was a highway running perpendicular to track on a plateau.  We were actually slightly below the altitude of the highway and when we were about ten miles from it Jim turned to me and said, “extend the terrain clearance light”.  It was a request I had never heard before but, after fumbling around the dark cockpit for a second to find the toggle switch, I dutifully extended, without illuminating, the light.  As we got close enough to see individual vehicles on the highway Jim pointed out a camper.  He said that he was going to fly right over it and when we were three miles from the road he wanted me to turn on the light and then slowly retract it and keep it aimed at the camper until we were directly over it and then turn it off.  It’s at this point that I was in a position to make a conscious, life changing choice.  I could be a responsible, mature adult, or could head down the path of perpetual practical jokes and sophomoric pranks.  A difficult decision.  Only seconds to decide.  I turned on the light.

The camper lit up under the blistering intensity of a million candles.  I could see the brake lights come on but as the vehicle slowed Jim eased in some right rudder to keep the light squarely on the side of the weaving Winnebago.  I slowly retracted the light and as we passed directly over the terrified driver, whose face I could just make out, I turned off the light.

I can’t help but wonder what the driver told his children and probably tells his grandchildren today.  “There I was, 1:00 in the morning, driving my camper in the middle of nowhere when I had an alien encounter.  The noise was deafening, the light was blinding.  It seemed to hover over me for a second and then it disappeared in a instant.”

Ah, the good old days!

Chapter 74, “Finally”

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Finally!  1 July 2013, is finally here!  Those of you who work for the Federal government might want to,  for planning purposes,  take note.  I retired 8 months and 2 days ago and today I receive my first retirement check.  There were no errors in the package, no documents missing, no clarification required on any forms.  AFPC (Air Force Personnel Center) executed their part of the process flawlessly.  But, once my package reached OPM (Office of Personnel Management) it was as if I ceased to exist.  A file in an “In” basket waiting for the bureaucracy to decide it was my turn.

When I retired I was told that I could expect to wait 3-6 months for the process to be complete. (How many of you, getting close to retirement, have saved up 6 months of living expenses!?)  When, after 4 months, I was finally able to actually speak to a human at OPM I was told that the waiting period was actually 6-12 months. (How many of you, getting close to retirement, have saved up 12 months of living expenses!?)  That’s when I decided it was time to be the squeaky wheel.

I called and I emailed.  I spent hours on hold.  They promised that they would answer emails in “just 20 working days”.  20 working days?  That’s a month!  To answer an email?  I repeatedly got scripted responses and it soon became obvious that their goal was to simply put me off for another month.  Just keep kicking the can down the road by giving me a nugget of hope that it was almost done.  I was very close to calling in some favors from two congressmen and two senators but I really wanted to see how long it would actually take and, besides, I know how easily bureaucracies can deflect and delay congressional inquiries.

So what’s the point?  Am I whining, or just boring ya’ll by venting?  Maybe a little of both.  But the real point is this.  This is a process that has been in place for decades.  People retire every day.  There’s nothing new.  So why doesn’t the process work?  Thomas Sowell once said, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong”.  Sadly, when a bureaucracy fails, no one gets fired.  It simply gives the bureaucrats ammunition to ask for more money to “improve”  the process and enlarge their empire.  And it’s the same at all levels.  Remember the last time your school district, or city, or county had a fiscal crisis because they overspent on frivolous programs or bloated staffs?  Did they try to manage your money better, streamline, or get more efficient?  No, they told the community that they would lay off police, firemen, teachers and eliminate essential infrastructure repairs unless they got a tax increase.  Pathetically, a significant percentage of the electorate actually believe it.

So, let’s put on our logic thinking caps.  How can it be possible to reduce the cost of something like healthcare by adding an enormous new bureaucracy on top of the costs of hospitals and doctors and medications?  How can we get better care when decisions about your health aren’t made between you and your doctor but by an unaccountable bureaucrat who just sees you as another file in his in box?  It is, of course, not possible.  The bureaucracy will simply grow and grow and grow and demand an ever increasing budget so that it can fix the problems it has created.  Can you afford to wait for a bureaucrat to decide if you should live or die?

My retirement is just money.  I anticipated the failures of the system because I’ve seen how the system hasn’t work for the last 35 years, but I don’t think any of us are ready for the inevitable results of the destruction of the best healthcare system in the world.  As my friend Dr. Dave always said, “Getting old is not for the faint of heart”.