Category: Daily Blog

This is my Daily Blog category.

Todays Agenda

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

I’ve already gone out on the bike trail this morning at 4:30am and returned before 6:30am doing 20 miles.  Since I had 2 flat tires in 2 days on the front tire I’ve been leery every time I start riding after stopping at like a stop light or a stop sign because it just feels like I have a flat tire.  Then I get off the bike to check and it’s still hard from all the air pressure inside of it.

I’m still exhausted from all that work I did yesterday at the rental house next door.  I still have to do the bathroom, the bath tub, sink and toilet, the floor is already mopped.  Then I have to rake up all the leaves and dog poop that the last tenants were nice enough to leave me to clean up.  I think 3 large piles that he raked up but never actually shoveled up and thrown out.  What a nice guy right?  So now I gotta do his dirty work.  That’s it!  No more pets allowed.

Michael Jackson’s memorial service at the Staples center will be broadcast live from 9am to 1pm on almost every channel today and Darrin wants me to record it for him from CNN.  He wanted me to record it from E! but I was going through the guide on the cable but E! doesn’t show it being live until tonight so there’s something wrong there lol.  They say 10am PST but it shows the Michael Jackson True Hollywood Story being played over and over.  I think CNN will do just fine.

So at about 6pm tonight is the new show Warehouse 13 on SyFy channel.  Yes I said 6pm.  I have SyFy HD which is eastern time zone so I get to watch it as the east coast does.

My day is pretty much set already.  UGH!  I have to go fold laundry before I go next door lol.

Busy All Day

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Wow I’ve just been busy all day long without 1 moment to catch my breath.  First off I woke up late.  I didn’t set the right time on my alarm for some reason.  The alarm clock has 2 alarm settings so if your spouse or whatever has to wake up at a earlier or later time then you can have them both set differently and both turned on.  Well, I have them both set for different times and the one that I needed wasn’t turned on lol.  I guess I just forgot to turn it on the right one.

So I woke up on my own at 5:30am and went out, Dell DJ battery was almost dead so naturally I had to charge that up.  6:30am comes and I leave the house.  I’m on my way home and my brand spanking new tube for the front tire blows.  UGH!  I’m like 5 minutes away from the house (not walking, by bike) so I have to pull over and put some air in the tube, just enough to get me home.  I come home and feel the tire and it’s goin’ down hehe.

I get in the shower immediately and then walk over to Albertsons to buy a bike repair kit.  My bike repair kit sucks, the patches aren’t patching lol so I needed a new one, one with that glue.  But Albertsons doesn’t have them so I go to Walgreen’s and get it.  Of course I had to go back to Albertsons anyway for other things.

I come home, put the new patch on the tube and I take one of my old tubes that the patch didn’t work for and I just cut it all the way around and since it has that green goop stuff (which doesn’t work by the way lol) I have to wash all that out, throw away all the chunks and then get it all off by hand in a bucket of water.  So then I wrapped that around my tube, the one that I just bought yesterday that already has a hole in it that I just patched up lol.  So hopefully this patch will keep it patched and if I run over another sticker then that extra tube in there will take the impact of it and not let it go through to the new tube.

So now it’s 11:45am, I’m going to drink my slim fast shake but then I have to go next door and clean the rental.  We were going to do it over the weekend but Darrin was just too exhausted to go over there.  He slept the entire weekend lol.

Hopefully it won’t take me too long, I’m going to bring my alarm clock and set it for 2:50pm so that I can come over here and watch Stargate SG-1 at 3pm.  If I still have more to do then of course I’ll go back but I don’t think there is too much to clean.

Bad Tenants

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Ok they are gone so now I can talk about them…

In the middle of April these people responded to the ad that we put in Craigslist to rent the little house next door.  They wanted it so bad so they put a deposit down which would be their last months rent.  See, Darrin wants people to pay first, last and a deposit.  The rent was $625 so to be able to move in you have to give $1250 plus $500 for a deposit.  When they give a 30 day notice to move out then the “last” kicks in so they don’t have to pay their rent for that last month.  This way they can use what they normally would pay for rent as a deposit for another place.

So anyway May 1st comes and they move in.  They pull up in a U-Haul truck and I’m standing there waiting patiently for them to come and I hand them both their own set of keys.  I even help them unload the truck.  I’m such a nice guy right?  LOL

The tenants were a couple, Robert who was unemployed since he was coming here from another state, obviously he had no job so he said that when Monday came he would go search for a job.  His pregnant girlfriend, no, not wife, Sarah used to work at this hospital in town (allegedly) and so they said she could come back to work.

Well, after they were living there a whole day they started complaining about stuff.  Sarah said that she was having to scrub down the stove/oven because it was absolutely filthy.  Well, I take that personally because I scrubbed it for an hour and half way before they moved in.  The previous tenant, Justin, left the place so gross that it took me forever to clean it.  So when she said it was filthy I felt like it was a slap in the face to me.  I spent my own money on the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and I spent my own money on the oven cleaner and I spent like I said, 1 1/2 hours scrubbing it clean.

Then she calls and says they are having such a huge cockroach problem and I told her that you can be the cleanest person in the world and you will still get them at this time of year.  It is in fact roach season when it starts getting hot out and when they moved in was around the time that it started heating up outside.  I mean, it wasn’t in the 100’s but I think it was in the early 90’s.  I can’t remember.  But she told me on the phone that she has lived in Bakersfield for 30 years and she has never seen 1 roach.  LOL Yeah right.  In what reality was she living in those 30 years because I’ve lived here in the 70’s and the 80’s and I’ve lived here since 2000 and the roaches are out every summer crawling in the back yard, crawling on the front yard, they get inside the house and you can’t get rid of them.  But she insisted I was wrong and she was right.

So Darrin calls Banks pest control and pays $150 for that 1 visit.  Of course she still complains.  On the 3rd day She had asked for a can of white glossy paint so she could paint the kitchen cabinets lol.  He went over there and just lit into her because she was being too demanding and asking for this and that and the other.  He even tells them they have 3 days to move and the guy Robert says well give us back all of our money.  Darrin goes, ok, I’ll give you your money… after you have moved out and I see how clean the place is, then we’ll talk about getting you your money back.  Of course then he has them both by the balls.

On June 1st instead of putting an envelope in our mail box with a rent check in it they put an envelope in our mail box with a 30 day notice to move lol.  Thank god!  Good riddance.

So they are gone by June 30th and they leave 1 set of keys in our mailbox.  I didn’t hear them drop because I was asleep.  I only found them when I got the mail.  So I went over there to see what damage they left for us.  They left what was a clean couch when they moved in but now it’s filthy.  And they took the door knobs in the house which were all original when the house was built.  I don’t know how many they took, I just found out today when Darrin went over there to look.  And the back yard they left a lot of trash and a lot of cigarette butts on the ground lol.

I never met them until they moved in but if I had met them when they were looking at the place I would’ve told Darrin not to rent to them because they both looked like white trash.  I could tell just by looking at them.  I didn’t have to get to know them to know that, I could tell.  Frankly I’m surprised they aren’t either living in a tent or a trailer.  I’m sure that’s next though because Robert got like 3 or 4 of those little post card sized letters from Bank of America that you tear off the sides and the top to reveal it is insufficient funds fees.  I’ve gotten a couple of those in my lifetime but never have I gotten 3 or 4 in 2 days lol.  Plus they’ve gotten a few letters from what looks like collections by looking at the name of the company on the return address.  We threw all their mail out because they refused to give us a mailing address and they took all the door knobs so screw them.  They also aren’t responding to our calls so how else can we give them their mail?

Let’s hope the next tenants who occupy that space aren’t such dicks.

Oh I forgot to mention something.  The whole 2 months they were living here, Robert wasn’t working.  All he did all day long was either sleep or play with his $400 remote-controlled car that takes its own gasoline or he sat on the couch playing X-Box online with other people.  I know this because I had to go over there a couple of times to install stuff like a new light fixture and a smoke detector.  So he had the nerve to make his pregnant girlfriend work while he hung out at home all day.  What a dick!

Bike Trail Home?

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Now before I get nasty comments on this I would just like to say that at age 17 I was homeless for 10 months, 1.5 months after my 17th birthday all the way until about 1.5 months before my 18th birthday so I know what it’s like being homeless.  That being said here you go…

So I’m riding on the bike path last week and I stop at the Manor St. rest stop which has about 4 cement benches, 1 of them has like a bus stop roof so if it’s raining you can sit in there out of the rain.  2 of them have no cover and those 3 are all in like a half circle (see my bike cam video at the end).  Then the 4th bench is separate from that little half circle, more like across the “street” hehe.

Anyway, so I’m riding the bike path last week (as I said lol) and I go to the stop and it’s dark because the sun hasn’t come up and I see this darkness over by one of the benches.  So I don’t go around the half circle and sit in the middle like I normally would, instead I just pull in on the other side and sit on the bench at the end.  I look over and see a face staring at me.  It’s a homeless guy in a sleeping bag next to the bench but on the ground.  I sat there for my 10-15 minute break and then leave.

Next day he’s not there and then the next time I go there he isn’t there but the sun has already come up and it was the day after Michael Jackson had passed away.  So I go sit down on the bench and as I’m taking off my helmet I can see in my helmet mirror this guy all of a sudden standing like 15 feet away from me, staring at me.  This kinda freaks me out because he wasn’t there when I stopped and when I sat down, almost as if he teleported there lol.

He slowly creeps towards me and is now in front of me and I know that he’s the guy sleeping in the sleeping bag over by the bench and I’m not quite sure I trust him.  He has this scar on his neck from having his throat slashed.  I’m not sure what that was all about but I’m going to give him the benefit of a doubt.  He comes up to me and starts talking about Michael Jackson and I sat there talking to him about all the recent deaths and about how MJ is getting all the attention while Caradine, McMahon and Fawcett get no attention.

So anyway, after about 10-15 minutes I’m ready to go so I said well breaks over and start getting my gear back on, camelbak, gloves, skull cap, helmet, earbud’s and I look in my helmet mirror and he’s back where he was when I first spotted him.  Standing 15 feet away from me, arms folded, staring at me.

The last 2 days (yesterday and today) I could see him in his sleeping bag, I’m leaving really early and so I get there before the sun even has a chance to come up.  But I’ve decided I’m not going to take any chances.  Instead of stopping there and sitting down I’m just gonna go through that tunnel and go about maybe 1/4 of a mile away and rest there.  I’m having to rest standing up now which kinda bites but that’s fine, I’d rather have to stand then worry about having my throat slashed.

Now, as I said above about being homeless, I know what it’s like and not everyone should be judged based on their scars and I don’t want to judge “the content of his character” as Martin Luther King Jr. would say but at the same time I really don’t know this guy and I’m not taking any chances.

Thumb Sucking Adults

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily Blog4 Comments

What is up with thumb sucking adults?  I’ve seen teenagers with a pacifier in his/her mouth or sucking their thumb.  Today we passed this lady in her car sucking her thumb while driving.

I’m not here to make fun of anyone but I just want to know why they do it?  I’ve been reading up on it and apparently it’s all psychological.  But there are problems associated with thumb sucking.  Such as your teeth grow so that your thumb can stay in your mouth and your tongue gets this white coating on it.  Your thumb also can get sores on them where the teeth are biting down on them as well as your skin becomes red and infected because of the constant moisture from the inside of your mouth.

Not only that but your fingers are digging in your purse or pocket, intermingling with objects outside of the mouth such as poles, door handles, money… etc.

It’s a disgusting habit and these adults need to grow up and stop sucking their thumbs and teenagers especially, it doesn’t look cool to either be sucking your thumb or have a pacifier on a necklace around your neck.  Come on, seriously, pick up a different habit because you look like you belong in a psycho ward.  It’s hard to look like a thug with a pacifier in your mouth.  If you come up to me with your jeans around your knees showing me your boxers with that street thug strut, don’t expect me to take you seriously when you have a pacifier or your thumb in your mouth.

Fly Problem

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I don’t know what it is about summer but all of a sudden there are fly’s all over the kitchen window above the sink.  It’s like that every year at this time.  When I go to take the dog out in the back yard I usually open the back door then we walk to the back gate and I let her out then I go back into the kitchen and close the door.  But even if I’m not opening the door they come in through the front door when we answer the door or when we are coming or going.

So about a week ago I was sitting in my room watching tv and the saying “you catch more fly’s with Honey than you do with Vinegar” came into my head.  I wasn’t thinking about the fly’s so I don’t know where that came from but it was like all of a sudden a light bulb turned on above my head.

I went into the kitchen and we had these honey packets from KFC from awhile ago that we never used, yes I’m the guy who saves ketchup packets and all the other “packets” lol.  Anyway, I put some on a napkin (yes, from Taco Bell lol) and put it on the ledge above the kitchen sink and left it.  Well, after a few days the honey had soaked into the napkin so you couldn’t even tell it had any honey on it, it just looked wet.

I threw the honey napkin away like 2 days ago and cleaned the honey off the tiles.  During the entire time I had that honey sitting there it was like all the fly’s had disappeared from existence.  They were gone.  None of them took the bait and landed on the honey and got stuck but they just disappeared.  That’s why I removed the honey but it’s been 2 days, the fly’s are back in full force.  So, I went to look for more honey packets to put on a little plate but we didn’t have any more, I’d used the last 2 but we did have some syrup.

Yes, I know what you are going to say, ants… well, they didn’t come when the honey was there so hopefully they won’t show up for the syrup lol.  But since I put the syrup out about maybe 10 minutes ago all the fly’s are gone again.  It’s almost as if they were offended by it or something lol.

Oh speaking of fly’s lol have you heard on the news about Obama killing a fly during an interview and then PETA came out against him saying he murdered an innocent fly on TV lol.  OMG hilarious.  They said he should’ve used this thing called Katcha Bug which is a stick with a little pyramid looking dome that you catch the fly in then set it free outside lol.  Ok whatever you say PETA.  I believe that dogs, cats, birds, elephants, lions, tigers and bears oh my all have souls but I mean come on, who freakin cares about a house fly whose life cycle is only 15-25 days anyway.  Who cares, KILL EM!

Down Time

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Sorry about that.  Today I went to blog something and noticed at the top of my WordPress dashboard there was a notice saying there was a new version available and I tried to have it update itself but it wouldn’t, it said that the file was too big even though it was only a couple of megabytes.

I did a backup of my blog then started doing the manual upgrade and it didn’t work too good so I had to delete everything and try to put the backup back in.  Unfortunately, I kept getting errors so it wouldn’t allow me to return my backups.

I’ve been working all day trying to get it all back in.  Hopefully it will all be back soon.  Thank you for your patience.

More Kodak Problems

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Darrin bought me my Kodak EasyShare 5300 printer for Christmas in 2007.  In July 2008 I started having issues with it.  Here is my post in August for that:

Kodak All-In-One Printer

It’s happening again.  11 months after my issue originally started which was 6 1/2 months after getting it.  It’s not printing certain colors at all, it’s printing white lines in the pictures but here is a new issue, the black ink looks smudged like someone ran their hand across the paper after I printed something out.

I emailed Kodak support again to find out if they will help me the same way they did last year which was by sending me a new print head with new black and color ink cartridges.  I’m hoping they will honor their product by sending this to me again.  If not then I will just get another printer (when I can lol).

I have never had this issue with any other printer that I’ve had in my life.  My first printer was, well that was a dot matrix printer in 1989 lol.  I had nothing but problems with the paper slipping, it was back when the paper was all attached and it had those holes on both sides.  Anyway, my next printer which was in 1997 was an Epson printer, never had an issue with it.  That is until I spilled my beer on my desk and it got into the printer.  Then I bought an HP and I never had problems with it.  Then my next one after that was a Dell all-in-one printer.  The only issue I had with that was that they didn’t sell their ink at the store, only online.  Then Darrin bought me this and this is the 2nd time I’ve had the same issue.

I would still recommend the Kodak EasyShare all-in-one printers because I really like how it has the SD card slot on the front so I don’t have to upload my pictures from my camera to the computer just to be able to print a picture to a 4×6 glossy sheet of photo paper.  And I like how their software has the Kodak auto fix or whatever it’s called.

I also love that their ink is cheaper than other brands.  The black is $10 and the color is $15.  The ink package I just bought from Wal-Mart was $27 with taxes and it had 1 black and 1 color cartridge in the box.  Very inexpensive.  My Dell ink was $21 for the black and $25 or something for the color so I was spending almost $50 on ink.

I’m waiting for their response so hopefully it will be positive and not them saying well since this is your 2nd issue you have to buy a new print head but instead ok, we will send it right out to you.  I will edit this post when I get the email.

Edit: I got the email from them saying they are going to send me a new print head.  YAY!

No More Corresponding

On By Michel McDonaldIn Daily BlogLeave a comment

Remember the day when you would sit at a desk and write a letter to someone with an actual pen and paper?  Sometimes you mess up so you have to crumble up the paper and throw it away and the trash can would be halfway full of crumbled up paper.  You wanted to get it right because there was no delete button and there was no spell check.  Then once you were finished you folded it up and stuffed it into an envelope and wrote your address and their address and put a 10¢ stamp on it then put it in your mailbox to go out the next day.  Remember that?

Well, then the internet came along and that made it so much easier to sit at your home computer (mac or pc) and you could email your letter instead.  You sat there thinking what you wanted to say so you didn’t sound too weird or something.  Now of course you could delete and spell check then the person gets it in the blink of an eye.

What happened to that?  It seems that I don’t get any emails from family or friends anymore except for the ones that are forwarded to me from other people who have either jokes, funny pictures of dogs or cats or some old lady comic strip.  Most of the emails people forward to me are all telling me about some kid who has cancer and you have to forward it to 10 people.  Or about being careful not to get out of the car with the keys in the ignition because you see a note in the back of the car.

For once I’d like to get an email from someone telling me how their day or week was.  An email saying hi how are you.  I email people constantly and sometimes they actually respond but then that’s it.  If I don’t start a conversation then the conversation never gets had.

What is the point of having email if nobody will actually email you something that they wrote instead of just using other crap people have sent them.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I blog so much because I’ve gotten to the point where nobody emails me so why should I email them.  So if I have something that I want to get out, I’m just gonna blog it and if someone cares enough to read it then they can respond either in email or they can leave a comment.

I know someone out there knows what I’m talking about.