Bug Hunt

To the American cockroach, Amazon Prime is the Quantas, the Acela ,that widens their world. Secreted in cardboard, they are invited into the best of homes, and they disembark with joy, and learn to hide at the first human screams.

In come the exterminators, the traps, the boxes of Borax.

Yet they persist.

Even in places that should be pristine, they skitter the halls at night. A few years back, when I worked at a rehab place down town, I would cross the skybridge over Charlotte at night to get dinner at the esteemed cafeteria at the Baptist hospital. One night as I was waiting for the elevator to dining, while I was contemplating a giant crack in the hospital's marble floor, I saw the King of Cockroaches out in the open. He was at least 3 inches long, and he was fast, but I was younger then,  and I gave him a fatal stomp. Perhaps his descendants fear that I will come back one night, with vengeance. But I do not go downtown anymore. Now any one who lived in the last half of the last century, if they worked in hospitals, must have heard the jokes about the huge roaches at Cook County (Or was it Bellevue? With urban legends, who knows?) These cockroaches were faster then the tube systems, and more reliable, and the hospital drafted them to carry specimens to the lab, at speed!

Now, I will even buy hairpins from Amazon, and the postman and UPS are always at the door. The possibilities for cockroaches in my apartment are enticing. I am a reluctant dishwasher, the dog does not always finish off his kibble, and there is debris everywhere .

How safe they must feel!  I stalk them with neither slipper, nor rolled up newspaper.But when I see one ,I know that I will find his carcass on the floor in the morning, and his death costs me no more than several thousands of dollars a year in litter and Tasty Treasures canned cat food, and hair balls vomited on my imported cotton tablecloth from Provence.

For I have a small indoor pride of half-breed Siamese cats, and they are as terrifying to me as they are to the roaches, since their two pursuits are the nightly Bug Hunt and the smashing of antique olive dishes.

To the roaches they are as fatal and relentless as the lions of Tsavo.  The pride hunts at night, and when I go into the kitchen ,I will see them crouched and waiting, for they have sensed something under the stove, and they will not be deterred.

I find the cracked brown cockroach in the morning, Doubtless the Siamese would prefer field mice, but the mice do not dare come through these walls. To the cats the mice would be as desirable as an antelope, but they must settle for baby jackals instead.

The nightly Bug Hunt is not only for cockroaches. The weatherstripping on my foyer door is not perfect, and the cats will wait on the cool tile, watching for June Bugs that bumble in under the door, seeking light.

And their pursuit of bugs is even more adventurous when they start going aerial, and chasing flies.
These cats always get their bug.

The moral of this is that cats are the best bug exterminators known. Get one or two. The cockroaches will be destroyed.

As will your sofa, your books, and your apartment-

Penny Books

A penny is close to free,which is why I buy books on Amazon, where older cookbooks and out of fashion fiction can be had cheaply.

But since the bookseller must make a profit,even the most slender sized paperback costs $3.99 to ship,which brings a penny book up to four bucks even. I do not know what book rate shipping costs,but I do know it cannot be much, and one is not paying for speedy delivery. Penny books, and even not a penny books from third party sellers, ship on turtle time, and after a while one can feel like the young Ronnie Howard character in "The Music Man" awaiting the Wells Fargo wagon-

I could pay 11.99 and get my book shipped "free" on Amazon Prime, but a book is not an emergency ration. I should be able to wait. If I am inpatient I can track the order, and be comforted that three days ago the book landed in Little Rock, though no one knows where it is now.

Amazon Prime delivers in two days. Except when they don't, In November I ordered a cookbook about cast iron skillet baking. Two days later, according to my mailman, the book was in the mailbox.
But it wasn't. Not that day, not that week,not that month. I kept calling the post office, that most passive aggressive of government entities, and gave up after they told me to file a report. I suspected that my mailman had tossed the book into a ditch rather than deliver it to a deadbeat who was constantly receiving certified threat letters from the IRS.

One month to the day the cookbook had been stuffed into a phantom mailbox, the book showed up at my door. I guess that exonerates my mailman,who I really think should be grateful that he spends his days having something to deliver,since we all now know that Amazon is the only thing keeping the USPS in business.

Back to the difference between penny and free-

One can find free books in the discard bins at Mackay books, but who wants 20 year old math textbooks?

Estate and yard sales do not dare charge more than two or three dollars a book,so great is their horror at the prospect of the unsold-

And junk shops! One would think books one stop away from the landfill would be reasonable. Yet the other day, at The Little Thrift Shop here in Bellevue, a shop that is a towering pile of unknowable junk, they would not budge on a slightly mildewed copy of Ackroyd's 5 pound biography of Charles Dickens. " It cost me a dollar a pound,though they threw in the mold for free-

Returning

Miss Betsy's  blog will return this week after a lengthy hiatus. Good news for Russian and Ukrainian spammers and Spam bots who are my most devoted visitors!

New years greetings from "Diva", a long-haired Lilac point Siamese throwback, whose mother is a feral porch cat.

Greetings as well from this chic poster girl in her Mardi Gras finery. I found her at The Little Thrift Shop here in Bellevue. One can find anything at that shop. Dried baby alligator heads.Used skateboards.Cowboy mannequins. A five buck copy of Peter Ackroyd's  Dickens biography.

         

Happy New Year from Nashville,Tennessee!         

I weep for my country

Once we honored dignity,restraint,honor and nobility. What has happened to us? How have we fallen so low? Read the Gettysburg Address. The words of Eisenhower,Kennedy, Martin Luther;King.Pray for this country. Pray that we not be governed by buffoons .God help us all. I have live almost 70 years, and never have felt such despair.

Enough of this Crap! Where is "The X-Files"?

By the time the program did come on this little tom cat named Tenacious had retired for the night.

Leading the Precarian Life-Bellevue,Tennessee

I bought Guy Standing's "The Precariat-The New Dangerous Class" last week,for I am a Precarian myself,living an iffy life on the financial edge in the stodgy and declining suburb of Bellevue,thirteen miles from Nashville's downtown.

My neighbors are precarians as well.

The 83 year old who goes out to work as a courier at three in the morning. The Canadian woman once a ballerina,now a waitress,hoping for a break as a songwriter. She told me a few weeks ago,in a brief parking lot encounter (right after she informed me that Mr Gerald,another neighbor, had been taken back home by his family because of dementia) that she was frightened all the time.

Who is not?

My job at the Little Big House evaporated in January when Tennessee decided to close that pleasant little prison to save money. Now I work at a high end local nursing home as needed,or PRN as we call it in Nurseville.  Wednesday Social Security declined to send me my monthly money because I made 1300 hundred dollars more than I should have in 2014. $18,000 dollars,I earned. Three thousand more than I am allowed. This means another trip to the Quick Cash with their 300% interest rate so I do not get tossed from my apartment.

In the 90's when I and many others made a decent living,my suburb of Bellevue had a mall with a Mondi store,a Williams-Sonoma,,a Dillards.

But the mall withered and died,and has been vacant for almost 20 years. In the past two years the Circuit City closed,and a non-denominational church took its place. The ToysRUs gave up last winter,and is being replaced by a Goodwill Superstore with a job training center.

Some people in Bellevue are mortified the we have attracted a Goodwill and not a Nordstrom or a Whole Foods. But what do they expect when Bellevue cannot find enough customers to keep a Sonic open?

The Precariat are us.

Some industry has moved in,however. The Old Age industry. Bellevue is littered with Senior housing,assisted living,Memory Care facililities,regular nursing homes, with NHC opening another big one out near the Loveless Cafe sometime in 2016.

If you do not believe this suburb skews old, show up at Kroger on Senior discount Wednesday- the day Social Security sends out the money. And the people you see,the codgers like me, are the lucky ones, for we are still free to roam,unlike the Caged at the homes I listed,who wear Wanderguards on their ankles to foil escape, and who get their meds crushed and slathered with applesauce  three times a day.

Sentimental Favorites Seen in the Garden Yesterday

When I was a little girl in New England more than half a century ago, I had two bedrooms with giant lilacs outside the windows. The bushes were as big as small trees.

Not so here in Tennessee,where the French hybrids and Persian lilacs grow better than the common lilacs of the North country.

The tree peony and the lilac do not bloom for long,but what a joy they are when they do-