What I Did For Love, Or: How I Learned to Be a Pipe Cleaner

My husband asked me to go up in the attic today. I thought he had some "spice up the marriage" ideas. Doesn't the phrase, "and then he had his way with me amongst the rafters" sound awesome to you?

Turns out I wasn't going up there with him, but rather, instead of him. Apparently he had some sort of traumatic attic childhood experience at church. No, not that kind of traumatic experience. This was a Baptist church, not a Catholic one.

Anyway, something about water coming out of the secondary line from our air conditioner, which meant the primary condensation drip line could be clogged, blah blah blah, bad thing, blah blah, water pan overflowing, blah, blah, water coming through the ceiling onto his computer desk, blah blah, thousands of dollars in damage, blah, blah, blah. Before I climbed up, however, he showed me a training video, so that I knew what to look for.

I poked my head up into the attic to scope for spiders and other scary monsters (cue Psycho music):

 

Eek! That was kinda scary, so I took a second look but this time using the flash:

Ahhhh, that's better. I called for my tennis shoes, gloves and a flashlight and went in to investigate. If the tray under the A/C unit has water in it, that's an indication that the primary line is clogged and you need to clean it out.

While the tray was rusty, I couldn't tell if it had water in it, so I picked up a wood chip and swirled it in the tray, and yes, there was maybe a quarter of an inch of water. So I climbed back down and we prepared a cleaning solution, made up of bleach and water.

Then I climbed back up into the attic (did I mention that it was 196 degrees up there?) and slowly poured the stuff down the primary line while my assistant went outside to confirm that water came out the correct pipe.

 

My husband called me all kinds of hero as I climbed back down and we went outside so he could show me the results.

No more water coming out of the secondary line:

And after some stuff came out, the primary line was working fabulously...

 

Something wicked slimy popped out with the algae, but I have no idea what. You can click on the picture to enlarge and maybe you can tell me what the heck it is. Can you see it? It's that C-shaped mini snot volcano. Here, let's get a closeup:

 

Ewwwwwwwwwww!

Now can you see it? It's gross, right?

Cantankerous Landlords and Crotchety Old Men (Who Yell at Cars)

For the last ten years or so, I've been waking up in the morning, not sure at first which bed I'm in. If you don't know who you're going to wake up next to each morning, it's time to simplify your life.

And I thought I was. Of course, when you live in two cities, four hundred miles apart, owning two of everything doesn't exactly have a minimizing effect. In fact, anything you do to simplify your ridiculously overstuffed existence is a joke as long as your TWO HOUSES and WEEKLY PLANE TRIPS are beating you about the face and neck. What is that you're doing? Donating a bag of books to the library? HA! I laugh at your silly gesture of reduction. Why not try laying off the Southwest Airlines commute? Or hey, I know! What about moving in with your husband after 9 years of marriage and getting rid of half your stuff in one fell swoop, huh? Is THAT simple enough for ya?

What I can't (or shouldn't) do right now is sell my house in Los Angeles. And so I must rent. Blech.

"Landlord" is a four letter word. It conjures up images of Eddie Murphy wanting to kill one. Where did that word come from, anyway: Landlord? It sounds like some medieval concept from England where one is Lord of the Land. Yes, I am Lord of my Land and I command thee to hand over thy hard-earned farthings for the privelege of living on this land of mine of which I am Lord lest I throw ye in the dungeon!

I just want the people to pay the rent on time and not break my stuff. Is that too much to ask? Will I have to put signs all over the property like this one that I saw on the Passive Aggressive Notes blog?




And don't you think I should be worrying about finding a tenant first, before worrying about how they are going to destroy my brand new kitchen? And how they are going to let their over-the-size-limit dog pee all over my brand new floors and let pee puddles sit there for days, staining in the shapes of various US Presidential profiles?

Oh, and please do tell me all your landlord/tenant horror stories so that I can lose as much sleep as possible.

I'm going to be one cantankerous SOB when I grow up.

And speaking of Cantankerous people...

I ask you: Who stops to blog while waiting for the ambulance to arrive? Talking about "If I don't make it, it's been nice and all." Who opens their next blog post from their hospital bed with "I'm in renal failure"? And then writes another post that unfolds the drama of what happened after the ambulance arrived?

Joe from Crotchety Old Man Yells at Cars. That's who! And for such dedication and blogger bravery in the face of renal failure, I am giving him the Purple Kidney Blogger Award.

Joe, you've got a whole internet fan base (plus the HBDC community) behind you right now wishing you and Mrs. C the best. Get well soon, buddy!

If you don't know the Crotchety Old Man, go over and say hello and wish him a speedy recovery. And I'll let him tell you the ambulance waiting story HERE.  (Tell him Nanny Goats sent ya!)

Goat Thing of The Day

Okay, kids. Brace yourself for this next picture. It was shown to me by Mike from Mike's Mixed Memories.

Duct Duct Juice

Junk mail pisses me off, unless it suits me. I thumb through the thirty-some-odd coupons in that blue direct mail envelope that arrives every Wednesday, ignoring all the plastic surgery and dry cleaning ads, and once in a great while a gem is revealed.

The recent remodeling in my condo seems to have created a post traumatic dust disorder. Maybe it's just me. Maybe you are supposed to dust your house every thirty minutes. Nevertheless, that coupon advertising air duct cleaning for $49 sounded pretty good to me and my lazy ass.

I imagined a couple of guys coming over and blocking all my air vents and hooking up a vacuum to one of them and just sucking the crap out of it, ridding all my ducts of remodel residue. They'd be in and out in half an hour; I'd be dust free in no time.

My utopian dream came crashing down within the first five minutes when Horhay showed me cakes of black soot in the furnace and wanted to clean it for $479. "Oh, you HAVE to clean this," he says.

Well, I did what any independent woman who can decide what she will and will NOT do when confronted with such statements.

I ran to the phone and called my husband. Because after owning this condo for 11 years and never having the furnace area cleaned and being shown black sooty fingers wasn't enough for me to say, "Gee, maybe it's time I had that nastiness that's blowing through my house removed." I had to have a man tell me to give the OK.

So the guys went to work:

I wasn't interested in making sure their claims were credible, but I guess Horhay took pride in his integrity and insisted I see what was behind the main air intake vent:

Horhay melodramatically explained that this is where the blower gets its air from, still trying to justify my paying him over $250 an hour to dust and vacuum. Yeah, whatever. I just wanted to see the coupon-initiated forty-nine dollar massive suck already.

Then he pulled out some things that were stored in the furnace area, left behind by some previous owner:

I'm thinking orange juice and empty paper towel rolls.

When they finally finished with all the superfluous soot and plaster removal (boooooooooooring!), I eagerly watched as they prepared for the big Whoosh! air duct cleaning.

Imagine my disappointment when they merely stuck a vacuum tube about a foot into each duct. I mean, this is what I called them out for in the first place. Jeez, I could have done that and saved myself $49. Live and learn, I guess.









I would like to thank Sparky of RedBirdAcres for bestowing on me the "Antique Laundry Machine About to be Touched Down Upon by Tornado" award.

I think it's obvious why I deserve this one, don't you? Thanks, Sparky!









Also, a big fat grateful THANK YOU goes out to The Hussy Housewife for acknowledging my street cred by giving me the Slang Word of the Week award which is usually held over at Humor Bloggers Dot Com, but this week it was awarded on Hussy's blog.

Thanks, Hussy!

Of Bookworms and Trenchcoats

Have you ever walked down a city street late at night, alone, hearing only the click of your heels on the damp pavement, as the fog rolls in from the ocean, when all of a sudden a blogger steps out from an alley in a trenchcoat and whispers, "Psst. Hey buddy. C'mere. I wanna show you somethin."? 

How many bookworms do you know who will show you the seedy underbelly of their lair? If they are anything like Nikki Krumpet, author of Blah Blah Blah Blog, they'll pull you in, show you a little something-something, and shove you out the door - that's all you get to see, you can go home now, thanks for stopping by, leave a comment on your way out, and don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya.

We are like, totally best friends, Nikki and me. There's only 451 degrees of separation between us. Fahrenheit, that is.

Nikki likes to read. A lot. Which prompted the need for her to invent ways to disguise them within her knick-knack shelves:

That picture is from her blog. You look at that and think, "Gosh, that's a beautiful bookcase. Is that blonde oak?"

Nikki has something like twelve million books brilliantly stashed away in the nooks and crannies of her home, but you'd never know it, because she's so adept at blending everything together. Each piece complements its neighbor.

Inspired by Nikki's Martha Stewart ways, here is one of my furniture pieces dedicated to displaying my Spongebob Squarepants curios:



If you walked into my house and saw this, just try to deny that the first words out of your mouth would be, "Gosh, is that the 2004 Limited Edition Paper Spongebob Pop-up?"

You didn't even notice the books, did you? That's because of the mad camo skillz I picked up from good ol' Nik-Nik.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by, that's all you get to see, you can go home now...etc.

Goat Thing of The Day

Thanks, Ken!

So Nice, They Published It Twice...

So yeah, one my posts was such a runaway bestseller, that it has gone into a 2nd printing. It's entitled "Found: FatCatchers Diary Discovered In the Garbage Behind Weight Watchers" and you can find it on the latest edition of MidLifeBloggers. The direct link to the post is HERE, and if you missed it the first time around and you're Jonesing for more Nanny Goats comedic brilliance and can't wait for the next regularly scheduled NGIP installment, then walk, don't run to MidLifeBloggers!

And could you pick up a bag of Cheetos on your way over? We're running low on snacks.

Not sure if you want to leave the confines of this blog to read my stuff on another blog? Well does this photo teaser help any?

My Name is Margaret and I'm a Utensilaholic

Some of you caught my juxtapositional photo the other day when I showed you a container of nasty ass food on my brand new counter in my L.A. condo. That counter was the result of a recent kitchen remodel.

Yes, in spite of living in two different cities, I held my breath, gave my keys to the contractor, left LaLa Town, and hoped for the best. Luckily...

BEFORE:




AFTER:




However, I returned to L.A. on December 30 with a nasty cold (as I pictorially mentioned in this post) and had 24 hours to unpack dishes, wash it all, refill and reorganize the cabinets and clean all the dust from the remodel.

Why does remodel dust feel the need to travel throughout the whole house and cover EVERYTHING, even when you cover it with all that plastic stuff? You know that thin sheet stuff you get at the hardware store to prevent the dust covering EVERYTHING? You know... this stuff?



Anyway, I was rushing around because I was hosting a New Year's Eve Party. While unpacking, I realized I had these:



It's moments like this that make you realize things about yourself. I already know that I can stand in front of the giant utensil wall at Bed Bath & Beyond like a humble worshipper in awe and gaze at the hundreds of goodies before me, completely mesmerized and overwhelmed. But what I did not know was how many times I'd be taken in by a meat pounder, when I don't recall ever even using one.

Also, my taste in meat pounders has clearly changed over time. (Those who wish to take this sentence out of context and make a juvenile joke out of it, may do so in the comments section.)

In any event, I obviously have a problem. But the yellow pages do not produce a very long list of Meat Pounders Anonymous groups, or Utensils in General Anonymous groups, for that matter. So if you have a local chapter in your area who is willing to take on a new member remotely, I am in need of a sponsor.

Goat Thing of the Day

Mike pointed me to the Silly Goats Farm website where they have the cutest kids!

 

Awwwwwww!

And from the What Else Department...

I would like to thank to My Loonyverse for the Proximidade Award.

And thank you to Mom To Bee who gave me the Lemonade Award. Sweet!

Who Says Size Doesn't Matter?

Last week, while test marketing my patented re-usable Kleenex™ with the local men of Schnauz Lodge #492, I saw this billboard:

Wow! A forty-two foot TV? Who doesn't want to win one of those? Mr. Nanny Goats and I have decided to enter this contest because if they're giving away one a day for a month, that's...that's...well you figure it out. In any case, it's a lot, so we're pretty much guaranteed to win.

The problem is, our place is too small, so yesterday we bought a warehouse down by the loading docks at the Port of Sacramento. Escrow on our new digs closes next week.

And just in time for the holidays! You know those Christmas tree places where you hunt down your own fir growing the forest? We're going to yank one out of the ground that's at least 300 years old and plant that sucker in our new front yard.

For the backyard, we'll install an Olympic-sized swimming pool and bid to host the next summer trials. We'll invite Michael Phelps over for tea and a swim. I'm sure we can depend on him to put in a good for us at the IOC.

You're probably wondering how we're going to decorate our not-so-humble abode. Easy - we'll festoon it with big things. Gigantic things. Guinness Book of World Record things.

We are so winning this TV.

Goat Link of the Day

Thanks to Kat of Poetikat for pointing me to this:

Hellooooooo Nurse!

Rhea of Texas World Tangle has more where that came from. And if you're still jonesing for goats, she posted more pics on Thursday here.

Texas World Tangle is not giving away 42-foot TVs, but she is hosting a giveaway for a stir-fry pan and jambalaya mix. Go here for more details. And hurry, the giveaway ends tonight (Friday).

The Museum Exhibits in New York They Don't Want You To Know About

When Kathcom over at Magick Sandwich recommended I go see the "kooky genius" that is Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan, she failed to mention that I would bear witness to one of the biggest hoaxes known to man. That's right, the "kooky genius" architect, father of all things geodesic, is the brains behind all those flying saucers.





Witchita House, my ass. That's an alien spaceship if I ever saw one.

The "dwelling machine" was built in 1946.
Roswell Crash Incident: 1947.

Coincidence?  I think not.

Why is nobody talking about this? This should be all over the TV and radio. UNLESS!...all the conspiracy theorists/UFO believers are paying off the media to prevent the story from getting out.

What are they afraid of? It's not like people stopped believing in Bigfoot after two attention whores pawned off a rubber suit as Sasquatch.

I am sorry to say you will miss this exhibit as it only ran thru September 21. Isn't that just convenient? They get wind of my blog idea and they pull it. Maybe you can catch them loading all that crap onto the truck before they ship it off to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where they've been keeping the aliens and their spaceships all this time. I don't know exactly where the museum is, but it's on the Upper East Side somewhere, near a real big park.

I can't remember the name of the big park, but it's sort of Central to everything in the city. And it's real big. You can't miss it. They should call it The Big Park in the Center of the City. I mean - that would make the most sense. It's practical if not imaginative.

We Pass The Gas Onto You

Can I get a show of hands ... who is sick of hearing about the price of gas? My God, if it's not on the news, it's on someone's blog. When are all you whiners going to stop complaining and DO something about it?

What? Oh, you want your cake AND you want to eat it? You people make me sick. Stop driving, already! Take the frickin' bus! That's inconvenient, you say? You have to take 5 busses to get to work? AND you'd have to walk half a mile from your house to get to the bus stop? Well boo-hoo! You should have thought of that BEFORE you had to buy the big-ass house in the burbs.

And I didn't twist your arm to buy that gas-guzzler you commute to work all by your greenhouse-gas-spewing self in, did I? No. I told you to get the Prius, but you HAD to have the behemoth that doesn't even fit in your garage. Okay, it fits in your garage, but nobody can get out of that monster after you pull into it, CAN they?

And now, here you are bitching about gas prices and bitching about how you're sick of hearing about it on the news. I saw you raise your hand earlier. I'm so disgusted with you right now, I shouldn't even tell you this, but...

There's this website called MyGallons.com. You can lock in a price of gas now, so that when gas prices rise, you still pay the old price. Oh, I can see that little hamster spinning the plastic wheel of saved pennies in your puny brain. Speaking of which, did you ever think of walking to work? Biking to work? Voting for people who won't cause your gas prices to rise? No. Because all you ever think about is yourself. And what you want NOW.

Well, I hope you load up on $4.50 gas and the price falls. I hope you max out your splitting-at-the-seams credit card with that gassy website and then I hope you choke on it.

I can't believe I'm even helping you. Just don't say I never gave you nuthin.

And now, if you'll excuse me, my converted school bus is double-parked. And I left the engine running.


[UPDATE:  NGIP should stress that it does not endorse the gassy website, particularly as it got an F from the BBB, so buyer beware! Thanks, ExploreSacto!]



* * * NGIP SHOUT OUTS * * *

When was the last time you read a good colonoscopy story? Never. That's when. JD from I Do Things So You Don't Have To wrote this gut-wrenching tale that is not to be missed. Why? Because it's funny as hell, that's why. Plus, that story won an award from Babs at Beetle Blog. Now, I don't know if your neck of the woods realizes the prestige that comes with a Glass Poo award, but at NGIP, it's awesome to behold. You can go to this post to see it. It looks like poo. Made of glass. And the best part about it? She doesn't have to give it to five other people. I should give Babs an award for that because, did I ever mention that I'm an Anti-Memite?

And in the interest of sticking it into rant-reverse, Lisa at Boondock Ramblings, who has been so generous as to add NGIP to her blogroll, wrote a beautiful post about how fabulous her mother is. It's honest, sincere, and moving without getting too gushy. Or, I don't know, maybe it is gushy, but I liked it. It's called My mom, my best friend.

What Part of "Squalor" Don't You Understand?

I would ask that you not get me started on this whole housing crisis thing, except that I've already decided to get started without you. Come with me in the Wayback Machine to 2005, when gas was still less than three bucks a gallon but a 2000 square foot home was pushing $450K, in the country's fastest-growing, least desirable suburb: Elk Grove, California. Ask anyone from the Sacramento area who changes their underwear every day, if they had their druthers, would they live in Elk Grove? Who wants to put "Elk Grove" in the real estate search box when the nation's headlines about the poor city lead with "Squalor"?



And I don't want to hear, "Well it used to be nice." "Used to be" doesn't let you sleep at night. "Used to be" doesn't keep you from getting shot while pulling out of Chili's. "Used to be" doesn't stop the house from across the street, and another one around the corner from becoming pot farms.



We held out as long as we could. Our tight-knit neighborly little court began to disperse, saying the neighborhood was going downhill. Plus, in 2004 and 2005, they were panic-buying like everyone else, buying bigger McMansions before they were priced out of the market. Of course they exacerbated the blight of the street by abandoning us, moving out so fast that all we could make out were elbows and assholes in the dust. And everyone who moved in after them were loud, rude, obnoxious, wouldn't speak to us, etc... Eventually our annoyance and fear won over our laziness and we moved.



Now, by "going downhill", do not mistake for a minute that I mean anything racial. In fact, when we were a happy little party-having group, I was the only white girl. Well, actually there were two of us, but the other one high-tailed it out of there because she saw the writing on the wall long before we did.



No, I'm talking about class. I'm talking about behavior. I'm talking about moving two or three families into one house and parking your 12 cars all over the court leaving no room whatsoever for our own guests. I'm talking about letting your yard go. I'm talking about leaving your front door open all day long while your unsupervised children run around half naked and barefoot in the middle of the street, screaming until well after midnight.



So, late to the party, we finally gave in and sold our house. Here is a picture of it just before it sold in November 2005. Please note the green and well-maintained lawn.







A few months after that we began to hear rumors of our old house going into foreclosure. More than once.



Last week, my niece happened to ride by it and snapped a picture from her phone. It's the one on the left...







What is that, a "For Sale, Sort Of" sign?



This is the backyard when we moved out in 2005...







I'm too chicken to climb the fence to see what it looks like now.



When we left, we bought a bigger McMansion. In Elk Grove. But that's another long story.



One year later, we moved again, out of Elk Grove and into Sacramento, which is another long story, one that involves bending WAY over.



Wishful thinkers, manipulative speculators, and real estate talking heads are now going to be calling the bottom of the Sacramento market every week for the next 2-3 years. We'll just be calling it "rent".



* * * W H A T     E L S E * * *

My book review of Driving With Dead People by Monica Holloway is up at Curled Up With a Good Book. You can click on the links in the previous sentence or right here if you wish to read it.

Nanny Goats in Panties wishes to thank Wendy over at wining and ironing for adding NGIP to her blog roll. Wendy joins our global network as she hails from South Africa and is "not your average desperate housewife".







Some of you may recall last week's post about the new Hands Free cell phone law. Have you seen this parody?









Please click here if you wish to rate this post on Humor-Blogs.com

Coming This Summer to a Blog Near You: The Remodel

My bathroom hasn't been cleaned in months. You may or may not be asking why. Well, ever since demolition was scheduled in February, I keep thinking: what's the point of scraping all this mildew off the peeling walls and what's this black gunk all over the grout, and is that a dead mouse in the back of the cabinet?

The contractor (let's call him George because at this point, I still like him) and I agreed on the terms. I ordered and paid for all the materials. Each time I see the corosion on the fixtures, I figure why go to all that trouble when I'm only here one week out of the month and he's just about to demolish it all? And whenever there's a debate about cleaning anything, I win hands down every time.

OK, I haven't exactly paid for the materials yet. I was able to finance it for no interest, no payments for twelve months. Twelve months! And I've only had to call their customer service once so far to have them change the terms BACK to twelve months after I discovered a recent statement suddenly read six months.

Between my travel schedule and the contractor's workload and our miscommunication and his taking on other projects when I thought he was supposed to show up at my place, this thing keeps getting postponed. Twice now, I've had to call the interior designer and tell her to reschedule the delivery of all the new materials only to have the warehouse call me days later to confirm delivery for the day that was supposed to be postponed.

I thought for sure I would have a brilliant Consumer From Hell story to tell you by now, but the project has been postposed until the end of next month. So, I apologize for not having anything to complain about on this remodel front.

Just wait until that first swing of the sledge hammer. I'm sure something will go wrong by then.


* * *

Nanny Goats and Panties would like to thank Boondocks Ramblings for mentioning us the other day:

I got kicked off Humor Blogs for whatever reason and yet something called Nanny Goats in Panties is ranked in the top 30 blogs?

Kicked Off? Eek! Help prevent Nanny Goats from getting kicked off by going to Humor-Blogs to keep apprised of our ranking.

Let There Be Blight

Ahhhh, back in Sac, the little town that hasn't. Did you know Sacramento ranks #5 in the country in foreclosures? Yeah, we're pretty proud of that. I get to come back home to news stories like the one about the people who are vandalizing the homes they can't afford anymore (that they couldn't afford in the first place, actually, and now if they can't have it, no one can.)


Wishful thinkers disguised as talking heads tell us that we're close to the bottom and things should get better next year. It's amazing how the media coupled with mob mentality can be so effective in creating mass delusion. People have a short memory, and believe what they want to believe.

I'm not bitter or anything, but a few years ago flippant flippers swooped in, raped and pillaged, and scrambled out, all the while proclaiming that home prices were going to climb forever. "...and you can just get this interest-only loan with a zero down payment...." What could possibly go wrong?



And now housing market optimism hype spreads like teenage STDs.

But the fact is that there are still plenty of 3 or 5 year adjustable-rate loans that have yet to reset in 2008 and 2009, not to mention all those "liar loans" dotting the financial landscape. (For those of you who haven't fallen asleep yet, liar loans are no-doc loans or stated income loans where the borrower is simply asked to state their income, and taken at their word.)

Foreclosed homes remain vacant, and many are vandalized, creating neighborhood hazards described with words like blight, disease, and poverty. These conditions take years to recover, if they ever do. What part of all that allows the market to "turn around" by next year?

I thought blight and disease were reserved for trees. Granted, houses are made out of trees and Sacramento is the City of Trees. We should we change our motto to: Sacramento - The City of Blight and Disease (which rhymes with trees, by the way).



Kinda makes you want to bust out your AAA Travel Guide book and arrange a trip to the capitol of California right away, doesn't it? Yeah, and if you're interested we've got a McMansion or two or twelve for sale, dirt cheap. Come on down.

... IN OTHER NEWS ...

Nanny Goats would like to step off the soap box for a second to give mad props to Onedia In The Ozarks. This beautiful blog, run by the Super D Duper Miss Onedia, has been generous enough to not only link to Nanny Goats, but to also throw it into the "Laugh Out Loud" category. Thanks, Onedia!