So many pills, so many times

You know you're taking too damned many pills when you can't keep track of them even with an organizer like this one, which is exactly what I have. I fill it up on Saturday night for the coming week, with the stuff I need to take first thing in the morning (actually an hour before I eat), the stuff I need to take before I leave for work, and the stuff I need to take before bedtime. (While I've seen organizers with one, two, and four slots a day, I haven't yet found a three-times a day model, which is what I actually need. Go figure.) The first two are pretty much on autopilot, since I tend not to be exactly 100% awake until after I get to work. At least.

Last Wednesday night, I went to take my last round of pills at 10:00 pm. Only... the slot was empty. Now it can't be that I missed filling that slot fpr one day, because there's at least five different things that go in there and I fill the whole row with one kind of pill before going on to the next bottle. So I might skip a day (or even the whole week) with, say, the iron tablets, but I wouldn't skip the same day for all five pills.

Then I chanced to check the "noon" row, which for me is the "stuff I need to take before I leave for work" row. Sure enough, the Wednesday slot was still full. Apparently that morning my autopilot led me to take the night pills instead of the noon ones. So I ended up getting half my pills 14 hours early and the other half 14 hours late. Wonder what that does to my blood levels for, say, the low-dose aspirin and the statin?

I guess I should start taking some supplement to boost a failing memory... only I can't remember what that would be.

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Pizza makers, diesel technicians, and shoe shiners = Internet/New Media?

Speaking of job-hunting, the usefulness of our local newspaper's online job listings took a major hit five months ago when they "upgraded" the website. It still provides a search by (ostensibly) "job category", but it's now virtually useless.

Before the advent of the new-and-improved site, a search in, for example, the "Internet/New Media" category returned a list of jobs that almost always had some reasonable relationshup to the Internet, presumably because whoever placed the ad selected that category as being relevant to the job and the search engine selected any job that had been tagged with that category.

No more. Here's just a sampling of some of the jobs that are currently turning up in an Internet/New Media category search (and no, I am not making any of this up):

• HVAC Service Tech and Maintenance
• Pizza Maker, Delivery Drivers & Dishwashers
• CUNSTRUCTION [sic] TERRITORY MANAGER
• Diesel/Technician
• Live-in Auipair [sic] /Nanny
• Bankruptcy Paralegal
• Respiratory Therapist
• Firefighter
• Shoe Shine
• Sophisticated and savvy fashion buyer
• X-Ray Technician
• Pet Cremation Aftercare Coordinator
• Nurse Practitioner

When I first noticed this phenomenon, I didn't know what to make of it; it seemed so astonishingly random. Then I noticed two things: first, the problem seemed to be most acute in this specific category (Internet/New Media) and almost as bad in the Computers/Technology category; and second, various words in the job descriptions were highlighted in yellow, such as "computer", "online", "internet", and "yahoo.com".

Thus it dawned on me that the search engine was no longer looking for jobs tagged with a category (or at least not just those jobs), but was in fact performing a keyword search! Apparently someone got the bright idea not to simply rely on the category that the employer (who arguably would know best) said the job belonged to, and instead thought up a list of keywords to help identify jobs that would fit the category. Apparently it never occurred to them that, in an era when a large majority of job listings are likely to require an applicant to have "computer skills", to be able to "use the internet", to "apply online", or to email their resume to someyahoo@yahoo.com, those keywords might not be all that useful in distinguishing jobs that belong in the Internet/New Media or Computers/Technology categories.

Of course, these are just the categories of most interest to me. Other job categories aren't affected quite as much, but still get some pretty tenuous matches. For example, the Environmental/Agriculture category turns up a listing for an epidemiologist (due to a reference to "environmental health programs"); a Recreation/Sports category search yields jobs for a Line Cook (for a sports bar), a Firefighter (probably because it refers to "physical training" as part of the training), and an office assistant for a car dealer (the job includes "running errands"); and the Restaurant/Food Service category lists a Technical Support Representative for Canon (they have an "on-site cafeteria"), a janitor for a church (work hours specified to include a half hour "for lunch"), and even a truck driver for a contractor located on "Cook Blvd". (Oddly enough, the Healthcare/Medical category seems to be virtually free of this kind of false positives; I fully expected to find it loaded with jobs that specify benefits including medical/dental insurance.)

Clearly, this keyword business needs to be given some more thought. I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to change, though; I emailed the website's customer service contact about it five months ago, and as yet have gotten no reply.

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Up a tree

The photo shows one of the branches I lost off my Bradford pear the other night (the one you can a good bit of in my previous post). Now, if you're familiar with Bradford pears, you know they tend to be brittle and break in windstorms, and you probably think that's how this branch came off. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There I am, relaxing in a hot bath with a good book, when I suddenly hear someone pounding on the front door. Now, I should point out that this had to have been pretty heavy-duty knocking, because I have a hard time hearing anything in the bathroom, which is at the back of the house. In fact, I can't even hear the phone ring there. I can't imagine who would be knocking on my door at 8 PM; I'm certainly not expecting anyone. Nevertheless, I cut short my reading, finish my ablutions, get dressed, and go to the door.

There's a fire truck sitting in the street in front of my house, red strobe lights flashing.


Three firemen are under the tree, apparently addressing someone up in the tree. They've got a stepladder they're trying to position. A man, standing out in the street, catches sight of me and starts demanding to know why I didn't answer my door, which he claims to have been pounding for "twenty minutes". I inquire of the firemen as to what the hell is going on.

Seems that a young woman who lives three doors down from me has climbed up my Bradford pear tree in an attempt to rescue an errant pet. No, not a cat. That would just be too much of a cliche. No, she is after an exotic bird (looked somewhat like the picture at left, which is a "blue and gold macaw") that flew the coop and perched in my tree. (It must have been the first one it could find. The house next to me has no tree in its front yard, and the second house down just felled the remainder of their Bradford pear after it came apart in the recent windstorm and went through the rear window of their car parked in the driveway.) The firemen are trying to convince her to come down before she gets hurt (one branch has cracked already), and point out to her that she is, in fact, trespassing. She's ignoring them, because the damned bird cost her $2000 (yes, that's two thousand) and she has to rescue it. The guy in the street continues to berate me for being rude enough not to answer my door, despite the fact that I told him I just didn't hear anything until five minutes ago.

Well, she manages to grab the bird and starts to maneuver her way down towards the stepladder the firemen have waiting, when CRACK goes another limb. Fortunately the firemen manage to get her down safely, bird clutched to her bosom. She apologizes all over the place but allows as how the bird is OK, so everything is all right, totally ignoring the fact that she has broken two major branches off my tree. The guy in the street, who I assume is her husband, points out that she "got hurt" (she had a scratch on her leg) -- so he hoped I had insurance! I replied that I hoped they had insurance to cover the damage to the tree.

Meanwhile (probably due to this exchange about injuries, damage, and insurance), the fire captain has asked a city cop to respond to the scene. Before he gets there, the women and the guy (who it turns out is actually her boyfriend) go back to their house, presumably to cage the damned bird. The cop arrives and I give him a brief rundown of the incident; the firemen leave. The cop goes down the street to talk to these people, and eventually comes back with the woman (sans bird and boyfriend). She apologizes some more and says I don't need to worry about any liability -- she just got a scratch and the boyfriend doesn't have anything to do with it.

For some reason, no one except me seems to be concerned about the property damage. I've got one branch lying in the yard and another broken at a right angle but still partially attached to the tree, and I'm probably going to have to pay a tree service to take it off before it rips off in a storm and causes even more damage. I've got a $1000 deductible on my homeowner's insurance so no help there. And all she can say is that the important thing is, she got her bird back!

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Memory effect

I have this problem with my cell phone: I keep forgetting to charge it. At least once a week, I find it dead. But Sunday evening I actually remembered to put it on the charger before it ran out of juice.

Only one little glitch. Monday morning it was dead again... because the charger wasn't plugged in. I had unplugged it to charge a digital camera battery and never noticed it was disconnected when I plugged the phone into it.

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Power tool safety

There are oodles of reports of people managing to accidentally (or occasionally, deliberately) fire a nail gun into someone's head, which probably explains why one manufacturer included the warning shown here in their instructions. But neither of these illustrations of nail-gun no-no's would have helped an Austrian roofer named August Voegl, who bypassed heads and feet and instead nailed his own testicle to a roof last year.

According to This Old House magazine -- which awarded him their Black and Blue Thumb award for "Worst Use of a Power Tool" -- Voegl "slipped and shot a 4-inch spike from an air-compressed nail gun through his pants and into the roof -- via his left testicle."

Can you imagine the new illustrations, the next time nail-gun manufacturers world-wide update their instruction sheets in hopes of avoiding liability?

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Professional smoker. Do not attempt.

A motorcycle stopped behind me at a light today, and in my rear view mirror I watched the driver take out and light a cigarette. The light changed and he passed me on the right, butt dangling from his lips. I couldn't help but wonder how he'd react if a piece of hot ash blew down the open collar of his polo shirt, flapping in the breeze...

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Garage door blues

No, not the latest country hit... my automatic garage door has decided it doesn't want to close. It opened OK when I came home with some groceries. And then it refused to close. It would move about a foot or so, then stop and reverse. I turned it off and closed it manually, but now I have to figure out what's wrong. Luckily my car is outside, so I won't have to futz with the door if I want to go out.

*&^%$#@ machinery.

11:20 pm

OK, so I'm an idiot. An empty mulch bag fell off a pile of full bags into the path of the sensor that triggers the door to reverse to keep from squishing errant pets or kids. Duh.

Stupid garage door can't tell a plastic bag from a dog...

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Dumb homeowner tricks

I watch a lot of home improvement, remodeling, and landscaping shows on HGTV, and I've observed that some of the homeowners involved seem to exhibit a high "Duh" factor. (Or as Dogbert would say, they're real in-Duh-viduals.) Case in point, the episode of Ground Breakers that aired this morning.

Seems that the homeowners bought this beautiful (and very expensive) new home with a "splendid view of the golf course." They were delighted with the view -- until they lost a window and a door to stray golf balls during their first three weeks there, and discovered they needed a major landscaping job to ward off the golf balls. (And for privacy, since the golfers had a splendid view of their back yard.)

Isn't this a bit like buying a house that you know full well is next door to a pig farm, and then being upset that it stinks? Or, I suppose, buying a house next to a Naval Air Station and being dismayed at the jet noise.

Caveat emptor.

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