I just finished disposing of two more mice out of the storage room in the basement. The battle with the mice is definitely not over. I have seven traps set in the storage room right now and it seems like the critters are multiplying faster than I’m killing them. Nina thinks the nest is under the stairs somewhere, so tomorrow I need to clean out that area and see what we find. That area has been a kind of a catch-all, so that will definitely have to change. Fortunately there are no more empty lots around us to drive the mice out of when construction starts. I rather dislike mouse traps. They are sensitive and it’s easy to catch one’s fingers! I have a set of rubber gloves that I wear, but the fingers and thumbs in the gloves are longer than my fingers and thumbs so it takes about four tries to set a trap and get it on the floor where I want it without the dang thing firing. On the other hand, I’m quite happy this is the only thing I can complain about today.

Yesterday I started working on putting up Christmas lights. My goal is to figure out a way to do this without having to climb up on the roof. I thought if I attached the lights to 1×2 pieces of lumber and then put hooks on each end of the board, I could hook that on to the rain gutters. So, I made my first trial yesterday. It took two trips to Lowes to get all the hardware I needed. However, the prototype didn’t work. The span I was putting the lights across was too long … the board sags and twists … any breeze will cause it to break. The concept is still valid; the spans just need to be shorter. That means getting on the roof to fit them in place this year, but then I should be able to take them down after Christmas and put them back up next year without having to get on the roof again. That would be much better. I didn’t put up any lights last year. Hopefully I can work through the concept by the end of the coming week and we’ll have Christmas lights up this year. Most of the neighborhood houses are decorated with lights in some fashion.

Our weather has been very nice for the past couple of weeks. The ski areas in the Salt Lake City area are complaining as there isn’t enough snow for them to open. I’m not complaining, though. Thursday we took mother and dad to Logan to do a session at the temple. We take them down once a month so they can do a session without mother having to drive. She’s quite happy not to have to drive in much traffic and I don’t blame her at all. I had appointments in Salt Lake City on Tuesday and again on Friday and some of the Utah drivers are pretty bad. I think that the speed limits cannot be high enough for some of them. For many others, the left lane is the only lane regardless of how fast or slow they wish to drive. On Tuesday going through a long construction area in Ogden, a car came up behind me quite rapidly so I moved out of the left lane into the right lane. The car came up alongside and slowed down to match my speed. I sped up a bit and they stayed right with me as we came up on a very slow moving semi. I slowed down. They slowed down, all the while the driver was waving a finger at me (probably signaling his IQ??). I’ve no idea what I had done to them, other than being in a car with an Idaho license plate. There was an exit coming up, so I took the exit, waited through the light, got back on the interstate and they were long gone. There are not many policemen patrolling the interstate in that area (but beware south of the Point of the Mountain … plenty of opportunities in Utah County to meet a traffic officer) which is quite unfortunate. The man in charge of the Pocatello barracks for the Idaho State Patrol has said a couple of times that the ISP issues two speeding tickets to cars with Utah plates to one with any other plate, including Idaho. “Utah drivers are very good for our coffers,” he said. My anecdotal evidence agrees with his observations.

I’m here in Pocatello on Monday and Tuesday. I’ll be in Boise on Wednesday for a seminar on “Doing Business With the State of Idaho”. Thursday is Thanksgiving Day and we’ll take dinner over to Soda Springs and spend the day with mother and dad. We will NOT be shopping in Friday! And for that I am very thankful.

Heather’s comment on her blog about politicians struck a chord. A few years ago in a close presidential election year I made the mistake of contributing some sheckles to one of the candidates (it doesn’t really matter who since in this regard they are all the same). For the next several months that candidate spent more money soliciting ME for money than I had contributed. I wanted the money to be spent on the campaign … maybe a few posters or a couple of seconds of a TV spot or the like … not on trying to get more money from me. I was planning to make several more contributions … and would have if they had just gone about the process of campaigning for office. As it was, their actions put my money back into my pocket.

I’ve mentioned this to other people and have gotten the same reaction from people who contributed once to a specific candidate and then received the full-court press to pony up even more money. Like me, they also will never make such a contribution again. Want to drive a Republican crazy? Make a small contribution to a Democrat in the Republican’s name … for the next four years their mailbox and email inbox will be stuffed with solicitations for money…!! So much so that the Republican will probably have to learn to recycle (very big grin).

The subject came up again last night when we were in Soda Springs visiting mother and dad. They had made a $50 contribution to one of the current presidential candidate campaigns and were now being flooded with solicitations for more money from that campaign. Dad was lamenting how badly his money (and in his opinion, $50 was a whole bunch of money) was being spent.

Heather, you’ve got it right on who should get the money!

The same applies to the so-called social agencies. We are constantly being solicited (by phone) by the police, firemen, disabled veterans, and similar agencies who are exempted from the Do-Not-Call regulations. These are paid solicitors who are the most rude people on the face of the earth (and unfortunately the disabled veterans are the worst of the lot). We won’t even speak with them anymore. As soon as the voice on the phone asks for “Rowwwland Smith” or for “Nighna Smith” we hang up. I’m not enough of a masochist to stay on the line and be called “cheap” or “unpatriotic” and sometimes worse. They aren’t getting any more of my money, either! There aren’t any “deep pockets” in this household.

Bradica (the dog) spends much of her life these days sleeping. She’s not in the best of health (not by a longshot) and has to work at getting into a sleeping position where she can breath somewhat easily. She’s got four beds strewn about the house, including this one in the computer room. It’s in front of the bookcase where Nina keeps a lot of her genealogy information. This afternoon the bottom shelf became Bradica’s pillow. It must have worked … she slept for a couple of hours!

Yesterday I received this update on my cell phone from Twitter:

(misspants): @babygirlxo: While I know that’s true, it makes me feel a lot better just that it’s there. Utah is f******g retarded and I hate it.

I’m not interested in forwarding the profanity, so I’ve edited it. Actually, the profanity itself isn’t the main issue. I expect that some folks on Twitter will use profanity. There is no reason … no real justification … it’s just that they take the low, vernacular road rather than trying to say something in a more profound way. Since Twitter is more of a casual conversation, some people use profanity because that’s the way they talk normally. And that’s part of the disturbing trend.

I got the update from Twitter because I track the keyword “Utah”. I don’t live there, but have an interest in what’s happening in Utah. That’s not the only keyword I track, but so far it’s the only keyword that has attracted a comment like the one that @misspants made. (As a clarification, in the Twitter language an ampersand preceeds the user’s screen name, which may not be their username, to signify who is the subject of the conversation.) She has no expectation that her tweet would be private, even though it was in response to something that @babygirlxo had said. If it was to be private, she would have designated the update as a “direct message” and I wouldn’t have received it, along with everyone else who tracks any of the words in her tweet.

So, I now have an impression of @misspants that perhaps she didn’t intend (or perhaps she did?). I think of her as being uncouth, uneducated, helpless, and well, dumb. So what qualifies her as an expert on Utah? Does she mean the state, the people, or both? The State of Utah seems to be a good place since hundreds of thousands of people each year make their way deliberately to Utah to go skiing, hunting, fishing, snow machining, mountain bike riding, back packing, camping, and playing. If the State were retarded, I think that wouldn’t be the case.

Does she then mean the people living in Utah? There are a couple of million people living in the State of Utah. According to the Census Department, more than 60% of the population of Utah who are twenty-five years old or older have attended college, or graduated from college, or hold advanced degrees. That’s about ten percentage points more than the general U.S. population. That doesn’t seem to fit the definition of being retarded.

Perhaps she is talking about a particular group of people in Utah. Most likely the people she is having to associate with either at school or work. If so, that is very unfortunate, but that small population doesn’t generalize to the whole state. There would be some redeeming value if she were not just complaining, but rather doing something to improve the situation, either her own circumstance or the perceived situation in general, but that seems too much for me to expect from her. My impression is that she only wishes to complain in some way that she perceives to be shocking.

This tweet from @misspants is only one in what seems to be trend, particularly among younger folks (perhaps because they’re more Internet savvy?) of pushing the envelope downwards. Trying to be increasingly more crass than someone else. Vilifying anything and everything just to do so. I don’t like it at all.