The Big Red X

They are cutting down the trees in front of my building.



About 9 trees got the red x.
Click to enlarge-you can see the x better

 Red Xs appeared on them last autumn around the time of the Putney Road repaving project. My landlord wasn't very happy about it, but said that he was told the trees were not in good health. Which is interesting as they have been there for at least 20 years in my memory, through high winds, heavy snows, and ice storms with only the loss of a branch or two (about the size of one's arm) the last year or so. I'm not even sure who said they have to go - the power company  would have such a say, but then again there are no power lines on this side of Putney Road. In one of those weird synchronicity of events things, as I type the news on the radio (national - Free Speech Radio News) is discussing saving hemlock trees from some new disease. A guy I know named Bernie told me that the state can  order it done as Putney Road is Route 5 and, after all, they paid for the repaving. I've watched those Xs nervously, knowing something is wrong - kind'a like the pictures are gone.



Before: now you see two of three on the left

and now you don't - although if you click to enlarge, you do see one of the trees being moved by a crane.

I can't believe it's already January the 20th. But then again, New Year's seems like such a long time ago. The last week has been most stressful and annoying. If I had not called in sick last Friday (the cold that won't go away) I would have worked, as scheduled, seven straight days without a day off. It's nine days when I include going in on my day off last week.

Of course, calling in sick caused another "counselling session". It seems that I have called in sick a total of 6 days in the last 6 months (counted as rolling months, by the way). That includes two days when I left early - one due to my back, the other due to the flu or cold or whatever one is calling this torment from hell. If I call in sick (or go home sick) again, I could either get another counselling session, or be fired on the spot. No matter that for the previous two and a half years I never missed a day's work.

During the last week, we've been through two major snowstorms. The day before the storm is to hit, store business is like Thanksgiving and Christmas combined. And we had a 3 day weekend for the well off office workers and bosses in the form of Martin Luther King Day. Which means that ski hungry tourists descend like a swarm of flies on a dead horse. Maybe that should be locusts on a field of cabbages. Most are snide, rude, arrogant, obnoxious, self entitled, invidious nouveau riche on their way to deservedly becoming nouveau poor. (Isn't it kind of interesting that Martin Luther King spoke up time and again for the poor and the working poor, yet the holiday in his honor can only be enjoyed by fairly well to do and government workers? At least the three day weekend isn't used to promote massive sales of white sheets.)

My favorite customer this past weekend? One of those can't do anything for themselves where is my personal assistant types. I had to walk him through swiping his credit card through the machine to purchase his goods. He read a screen message out loud, "Do I want money back? No, I don't want money back. What do I do?" "Press the 'No' button." "Which one is 'no' ?".   Customers in line were all a twitter. After he left, I waited until he was about 20 feet away and I could hold it no longer and blurted out "The one that isn't 'Yes'."

This post was originally written on Thursday Jan 20th. It is now January 24th, a Monday. All it really needed was one - count 'em - one - graphic to be uploaded. Every time I have tried to get back here to push that "publish" button something has happened. Much of the problem has been my computer, which seems to have decided that it doesn't really want to work anymore. No viruses anywhere, 90% or more of the CPU available - with opening web pages as the highest priority for tasks, no other programs running - yet all it does is sit there and play with itself. It will sometimes take 20 minutes and more to complete opening a a web page! I'll be typing and suddenly the system will freeze (except for whatever it is really doing) for sometimes as much as an hour. (Right now everything seems to be working.)

Anyway, the dark chocolate brownies with raspberry creme cheese and chocolate drizzle are finished and calling my name. There is still so much to post, so much I had wanted to post and thought I still might -but my work schedule is once again devised to drain every ounce of energy I can give. The last couple of days have been exceptionally cold, and customers have added "Nasty" to their repertoire. As this morning's temperature was -19 Fahrenheit, about the only thing that really saved me from going berserk - - is that today was only a four hour day.

Meanwhile, the store's new health care provider raised my weekly payroll deduction to just under $60.00 a week, and topped that off by refusing access to the main antidepressant I take. So for most of a week, I was off my main antidepressant, the other antidepressant, the anti anxiety, the anti itch for the oozing skin condition and the other anti-anxiety pill - in short everything - for several days waiting for payday so I could afford to renew the other prescriptions. 

The next few days ought to be fun.