My neighborhood may improve.

So, my city councilwoman included this blurb in her e-newsletter today:

On East Colfax, the prevalent prostitution & street crime along the corridor has been reduced to the point where development would and IS coming! The first major development
to occur east of Monaco Parkway since the motel era will break ground this August.

That's pretty much my neighborhood. And while it may take awhile, redevelopment is certainly overdue and will be pretty cool, I hope, when all is said and done.

Damnit, postal service!

So I took the opportunity this morning, since I'm not going down the office until later, to go over to the post office and see why I haven't been getting mail people have been sending me, which has been more than a bit frustrating.

I didn't get the whole story, because I just walked over and didn't bring anything with me and the lady wanted to see my ID to protect my privacy, which I appreciate, but I think I've pieced enough of what happened together to do my CSI and know the story.

So. During my Canadian stints this year I set up this temporary mail forwarding thing online. And you say online WHAT DAY YOU WANT YOUR NORMAL SERVICE TO RESUME. And I was temporarily forwarding things to my parents (who live in the same zip code I do, I wasn't making this complicated on these people...).

Anyway, what I suspect happened is that the little yellow sticker that says 'temporarily forward A's mail' never got taken down when it was supposed to. Apparently my regular mail carrier has been out sick for awhile (a long while, I guess). And I spoke to the temporary carrier who'd been carrying around a little green card in his bag that said 'forward A's mail, don't deliver it to him'.

But the part of the story I didn't get a good answer to is where my mail is. Because nothing HAS been forwarding to my parents, probably because it wasn't supposed to. They couldn't give me a good answer to that question.

So my mail is lost in mail purgatory because someone forgot to take down a little yellow sticker when they were supposed to. Arg.

But where it went is a mystery.

This includes a credit card reward thingy. And I already called the CC company once to say that it never arrived. They're not going to like it when I call back a second time to say it never arrived. They're going to think I'm scamming them out of CC rewards. But I'm not. The damn PO lost them all.

Night with E.

So I met E downtown and we walked over to this jazz club where we watched this group play, one of the dudes I'd met at that housewarming a few weeks back. Three friend met us there, one of whom E has acquired an instant crush on, as I suspected he would. She's a main friend in town and I've always had to fight back my crush on her because she's totally adorable.

I think I'll have her'n'E over for dinner Monday or Tuesday night.

Then we split up and I took E on a decently long walking tour of downtown Denver, as it was a lovely evening for walking. Conveniently, his hotel is *right* next to my office - they have adjacent corners of a block, and I had to drop something off there tonight so he got the two-minute tour of the office (it's just one room, the office)...

Fun!

E may or may not be coming to town early next week for a conference and may or may not be wanting to hang out in the evenings.

And ants?

And just tonight I've had a few ants crawling around on the main cushy chair I use in the summer time. I don't know why they're in here. There's almost absolutely no food in the house.

And the moths are still bothering me. Boo.

Lost mail?

I'm quite concerned that I'm not reliably getting my mail. There are a few specific pieces of mail that I have definitely not received in the past month that I was expecting. One of which was scanned and emailed to me today after it was returned undeliverable - despite being correctly addressed.

I just emailed the postal service. No idea whether they're able to solve problems like this. But something is wrong.

Which is weird. Usually, amazingly, the postal service just... works.

But I'm annoyed.

This is the Squirrel Hunters...

I just discovered that my local squirrels have just discovered that chewing up my hammock is a fun new game. I'm not pleased about this.

I was always impressed watching the pair of them run helical squirrels up and down the trunks of my blue spruces from which the hammock is suspended. Impressed that they would ignore the hammock and continue about their business. I was always afraid this day would come, and it has.

I just watched one of them get down onto the hammock, take it in its mouth, and jump up and down on the hammock whilst biting the hammock.

Also, two or three of the main cords that attach to the hammock have been chewed through, and are no longer serving to keep the hammock suspended. They may be repairable.

But upon googling squirrel repellent and the like, I came across one website that says that while many sites may sell things to repel squirrels, nothing really works.

So I'm in trouble. I don't want to have to take my hammock inside and out whenever I want to use it - I want it to be able to just be out there. But now that the squirrels have discovered it, I don't think that there's any way to stop them.

How're the insects after the weekend?

Anyway. Title of the post (I'd originally given it a different title, but this is more appropriate). There's a classic fiddle tune by John Hartford which he'd kick off by droning 'This is the squirrel hunters...' in that gravelly voice of his. Recently learned that that line was so poignant that some new bluegrass band has named itself This Is the Squirrel Hunters. Good name. Anyway, upon learning that that band (not very good, but oh well) had named itself after the song, I went to look up what squirrel hunters are. Pretty interesting.

My friend J suggested I get a pellet gun to scare the squirrels. I don't think that's a good idea. I enjoy them spending time in the yard. Except for the hammock.

But then I could become a squirrel hunter.

Lots of rain.

Precip map for prior 24 hours.

News article.

I have a housewarming party to go to plus a baseball game with my dad, and the World Cup game right now...

Don't sleep in your exterminating fumes. Let it air out a few days.

Moths in the bathroom! (snakes on a plane?)

So, this morning I woke up to find a miller moth in the toilet bowl. Flushed him. Then, when I in the shower gettin' good and lathered up a moth flies in and starts banging around the shower curtains and freaking out because he's all trapped in a freaking torrent of water. So I spray him to the bottom of the tub and try to spray him down the drain, but my showerhead doesn't go at any angle so I can only blast him so far. And he keeps tenaciously trying to walk up the tub towards my feet, which I really don't like the idea of. Eventually, he gets flipped over onto his back and slides right down the drain and I envision him falling all the way into the sewer and being gone forever.

I try to recapture my shower mojo and finish up. A minute or two later, monster moth comes crawling back out of the drain - I guess he must've grabbed onto something on his way down like they do in the movies when they go over a cliff or off a building or something.

So I just turn off the shower, dry off, and get him with some balled up toilet paper and throw him in toilet too.

What a way to start off my day.

In other news, those of us who might spend part of our time exploring for oil may've made a major find yesterday. Which is pretty exciting.

I guess I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes...

So I came home yesterday afternoon and couldn't connect to the unsecured wireless in my neighborhood, and then I when I went to the fridge for some water the light wasn't coming on in the fridge and I thought to myself that I had to change it.

Then I walked over to the cheap Mexican food place five minutes from my house - I *love* hole-in-the-wall'ish Mexican food. I only went to this place for the first time last week, and I'm ashamed that it took me ten months of living here to make it over there. But now that I've been, it's dangerous for me to have in the neighborhood, but I love my house about a billion times more now - anyway, on my way to the restaurant a bunch of streetlights were out, and then when I got there the power was out inside, and I *finally* connected the dots between the wireless and the fridge and everything else. But it really hadn't occurred to me at home that the power might've been off.

Anyway, this morning I wake up to find this missed call - from 1.16am. I suppose it's nice that they called with an update, but really, 1.16am? The call goes to my cell phone because I don't have a landline, and I keep my cellphone on vibrate and it was in a different room and it totally didn't bother me, but it probably woke a lot of folks up for no good reason. Plus, I'm testing out embedding of voicemails.



And the power was already back on by that time anyway, so no bid deal as I see it. Article in the local paper about the substation that blew. First really hot day of the summer yesterday, so maybe people went a bit nuts on the power.

I think I'm going to have to furnish my basement better so make it more comfortably livable so that I can hang out down there in the cool while the rest of the house is warm and I don't have to run any AC.

In other news (post getting to be longish, impressed if you've read this far), I picked up a new part-time summer job yesterday. I'm a bit surprised at myself, but I'll be doing about 15 hrs/wk at a water law firm. I sort of thought I'd go to law school on and off for a few years and never do anything related to all that, but sometimes I surprise even myself. But they readily admit that water lawyers dress like slobs and there are a bunch of geological maps up on the walls and it's pretty unstructured, so I guess this is as good a fit as I'm going to find as far as me giving the whole working law world a whirl.

Takes time away from my geology, but I'll get my geology done in time.

Watch out!

Not that you live 'round here, but those skunks by your place probably shouldn't be trusted either...