The Oppenheimer Report - 6/13/11

When I returned from Buffalo last week, I stopped at our apartment to pick up the mail. I went into the kitchen to grab something to eat, and I noticed that the refrigerator had crapped out. One of the many nice features of living in an apartment building is that I simply call up the maintenance department and request that they replace the faulty appliance. The bad news is that I still have to clean out the refrigerator before they can replace it. Yuck. There were frozen blueberries from 2009 which had melted and leaked all over the freezer, melted frozen vegetables, not-so-frozen meat, etc. It’s amazing the stuff that can accumulate in the back of a refrigerator and go unnoticed for half a decade. I found a jar of jam stuck behind the pickles that had an expiration date from 2006. Miraculously, no mold. In the freezer there is a slab of white chocolate made to look like piano keys with dark chocolate black keys, which Shauna has kept for the past twenty years I have known her (and perhaps for much longer). I do not question these things, I just leave stuff where it is and hope that some day it will disappear.




Everyone in Canada knows it’s black fly season in the Great White North, and for any of you unfamiliar with those little bastards, they are tiny enough to go unseen, but their bites are ferocious and itch for days. The other day I was in such a hurry to try out our new lawnmower that I went out under-protected. I didn’t realize my mistake until it was far too late, and now I am covered in black fly and mosquito bites. This coupled with the squirrel family that has taken up residence in the one foot crawl space between our ceiling and our roof deck just above my bedroom made for a few relatively sleepless nights. I may have to resort to playing my Del Rubio Triplets album at full volume to drive the squirrels out. That is something I usually reserve for unwanted dinner guests who have over-stayed their welcome. The Triplet’s version of the Doors tune “Light My Fire” is so bad it’s not even funny. For the black fly bites I have made my own version of Afta-Bite itch reducer (ammonia and water), and that seems to help, temporarily. Unfortunately, I was attacked in the two sensitive areas wherein scratching is considered unseemly. One of the major problems with these embarrassing nether regions is that it is difficult to determine the exact location of the bite (for obvious reasons), so there is a lot of unproductive groping and grabbing to achieve the desired relief. This of course is not acceptable public behavior. Thank goodness I have no pressing social engagements this week, only a dental appointment. I will if needs be, scratch those areas in front of my dentist. I once had to sit through my entire college graduation covered from head to toe in poison ivy, and that was in sweltering heat. The only advice I can give based on that experience is that alcohol and skinny-dipping are not always a good combination.



Mini rant about postal service. It’s bad enough that I constantly have to buy two cent postage stamps to add onto my letters because the rates keep changing, but I have just had my second CD package returned to me, months later, that was properly posted in the first place. I’m not sure what is happening, but I am certain I would not be having this problem if I could fax a CD. A few weeks ago there was a postal strike over the usual issues: salary and benefits. That’s right, let’s make mail delivery even less economical shall we? I recently heard about a bulk email delivery service that some of my musician friends use called something like Usendit.com which will send large files and/or documents through the internet for pennies a day. I can email a 400 page book to a friend in Bangkok or my entire CD collection (as computer files of course) to my buddy in Australia, for a very reasonable annual membership fee, and it offers the almost instantaneous transmission times characteristic of the internet. This is a thousand times more economical than snail mail. I keep hearing about how snail mail is losing business, and it’s not hard to figure out why. It now costs $1.03 Canadian to send a POST CARD to Buffalo, N.Y. from Ft. Erie, Ontario, a distance of a mile or so. And that usually takes at least three days, if Canada Post does not lose the piece. If they were a private enterprise, the market place would deem them uncompetitive and run them out of business within a month. But noooo, they’re run by the government so they’re expected to be expensive and inefficient. Jeesh.



Oh, I think I just found the spot …. Oh yeah … ahhhhh, that’s better! Scratch and win.