Saturday, December 19, 2009

Half-Assed Work, and the Great Tree Butchering

For what may be the first time in our marriage, BE hung up the bath mat the other day.


Look, I'm not any kind of perfectionist about housekeeping or anything, but seriously. Did he look at that and think he did a good job and that the towel would dry sometime in the same week? Or did he just not look at it?

I often wonder if men do this kind of thing because they don't know any better, or if they do a crap job on purpose so they won't be asked to do it anymore. My dad tells me it's the latter.

The other day in the kitchen, I looked up at the light. BE changed the bulb a few months back, but this was the first time I noticed it.



Here's a close-up in case you can't see the problem.



That's right. He neglected to replace the screws that hold the fixture on. So every time I cook, the Light Fixture of Damocles is hanging over my head, held on there with good intentions and, I suspect, a big dollop of İnşallah. İnşallah is something you can say when you don't want to take responsibility for your own behavior, and everyone just accepts that.

After discovering the light (which I just left that way, BTW, figuring if it's stayed this long it'll stay longer unless there's an earthquake or someone starts jumping around in their kitchen upstairs), I looked out the window and discovered they'd done this to our beautiful trees.



I know trees need to be pruned from time to time, but this? This is awful. To get an idea of what the trees used to look like, check out the smaller ones in the background.



All over the city are these shorn trees with thin stumps and scraggly tufts of growth on the top. Why? I have no idea. It's not like there are any telephone lines overhead, and the branches, even if they were in any danger of falling on a house or car, were not thick enough to do any damage.

And I wish I'd gotten a photo, but to clean up the branches the next day there was one man with a tiny little hatchet breaking them up to load onto a truck. I might be Damocles, but that poor fellow was Sisyphus. At least our trees will make good firewood, I suppose. Maybe that's all they were ever there for.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A Catalogue of Sleep

Last night when I was screwing around with the Bluetooth loading the graffiti photo from my phone into the computer, I decided to just go ahead and load the rest.

It seems there's a running theme here.











This last one, taken a few months ago, is just really cute. Not asleep, but just woken up I think.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Tempting, But No Thanks

This was written on some exercise equipment near our house (apologies for the quality-- I took it with my phone).


Graffiti in crappy English never fails to amuse. This says (I'm pretty sure), "I can saking your bush my penis."

So it's not just the English that's crap, it's the writer's apparent knowledge of sex and what his penis can and cannot do.

Good luck to you, fella, whoever you are.