Flies With Fresh Breath

The bugs in the desert are pretty bad in the summer. It is better to say bugs are bad in the summer for everyone. This has to do with high temperatures that encourage insect eggs to hatch. Our problems insects are crickets, roaches, ants, and flies, pretty common stuff.

I have a Qualified Applicators Certificate from the State of California. This means I could get a job with ORKIN if I wanted, but I enjoy the free golf and lunch where I work too much to consider it. You would think I could handle killing my own bugs but I have an exterminator do it. He does a real good job with the crickets, roaches, and ants, but the flies are still a problem. With three dogs you can probably guess why.

Sherri and the exterminator (Ray) are real close. If she sees anything crawling around the house with more than four legs Ray gets a call. She asked Ray if there was anything he could do about the flies. Austin thinks Ray should do a better job keeping the dog dung picked up. Ray thinks Austin should pick it up twice a day instead of once. I agree with Ray, but when the dog takes a dump in his room he still has a hard time finding it and dealing with it, so I don’t think twice a day is going to “fly” (get it). Ray’s other suggestion was just as helpful, pay $75.00 a month for his special fly treatment.

Friday night Ray gives Sherri a call. What’s up with that? He tells her that he heard about a different, inexpensive way to kill flies in the yard. Spray your yard with Listerine. Something in the antiseptic kills the flies, and it is also safe to spray around pets and plants. Just put it in a hand sprayer and apply it full strength.

I think it sounds stupid, but Sherri hates flies more than decaf, so she is “all in”. Saturday morning she buys two gallons of Listerine, mint flavored, and sprays the yard herself. I won’t participate in such witchcraft I may lose my QAC.

I won’t say it was a total success, but I will say it did put a dent in the fly population. I think the results are going to be short lived. The sprinklers should wash off most of the mouthwash in a day or so. I will say if are you going to entertain in the yard and you have a fly problem it might be worth spraying the night before with some cheap .99 Store mouthwash. I don’t think flossing will help.

Malathionman's Yard #2

On Monday MVCC will be back open for business. It has been 5 weeks since we closed for over seeding. In those five weeks we cut 150 acres of grass down to dirt, spread 48,000 lbs. of fertilizer, dropped about 110,000 lbs. of seed, and threw about 36 million gallons of water. Since I consider this golf course my yard, it seems like a good time for another edition of Malathionman’s Yard!

In this installment of Malathionman’s Yard I would like to share with you, The Malathionman Entourage, some information about fertilizer.

When talking fertilizer, you have to know the symbols N, P, and K. N is the elemental symbol for nitrogen, P is for phosphorus, and K is for potassium. These three elements are very important for good plant growth.

Nitrogen will promote fast growth and green foliage. Phosphorus will promote blooms on flowering plants and strong root development. Potassium works on both roots and foliage. So you could say N is for the top of the plant, P is for the bottom of the plant, and K is for all the entire plant. This is a very basic interpretation of what these elements do for the plant.

Now you may ask,” What do those 3 fricking numbers on the fertilizer bag mean?” Well I’m going to tell you.

41-0-0 is the fertilizer we threw before we dropped our perennial rye seed. Remember that fertilizer, it may come up in a later post. 41-0-0 represents the percentage of the elements N, P and K that are in the bag. This bag is 41% N, 0 % P, and 0% K. If the bag weighed 100 lbs, only 41 lbs of it would be N, the other 59 lbs would be filler. If the 100 lb. bag of fertilizer had 15-15-15 on it that would mean 15% of the bag was N, 15% was P, and 15% was K. That’s 15 lbs of each element, 45 lbs of actual N, P, and K, and 55 lbs of filler.

We went with a fertilizer high in nitrogen because we were trying to grow things as fast as possible.

Now I’m only going to add one more thing to this post, not everyone finds fertilizer as exciting as I do.

FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS ON THE BAG. Some fertilizers recommend mowing before application or not mowing before application. Maybe you are supposed to water before you apply, but usually you water in. Always use the recommended application rate, more is not always better. It is amazing how well things work if you just follow the directions.

Learn From My Mistakes

This week the Malationman had the “pleasure” of buying a new car. It wasn’t actually a pleasure or a new car, but it is newer than my other cars.

I had to buy a car because two of my three cars were down and we didn’t want to spend the money required to repair them. I was hoping to find a dealership that was willing to take the broken cars as trade-ins.

I found a nice Chevy Tahoe at a near by dealer. The price was a little more than I wanted to spend, but I really liked the car. The room inside the car and the leather interior was great, but my favorite thing was the Bose stereo system. Blondie’s One Way Or Another came on the radio during the test drive, so I had to crank it through the entire song. The salesman and I looked like Wayne and Garth jamming to Bohemian Rhapsody.

We told the salesman what kind of down payment we had, the kind of monthly payment we were looking for, and that we wanted to trade in both clunkers. “We will try our best Malathionman,” hissed the slippery salesman. About 20 minutes later slippery salesman slithered back into the waiting room with the news, “We think we can do this for you.” He got the monthly payment exactly where we wanted except for one thing; the loan was for 72 months! We had no idea they did used car loans that long.

Sherri and I looked at each other in disbelief. Although they pretty much did what we asked; we didn’t want to pay that much for the car. We had to run a few errands, so we told them we would be back in an hour with an answer.

I really wanted that car, but even I knew that was a bad deal. Sherri said I could buy it if I wanted, and I was going to, but I had some conditions. 72 months was too long, I would go no longer than 60, and the monthly payment needed to stay the same. So I figured the price needed to come down. The DVD player didn’t work, that would have to be repaired. The car needed to be detailed; there was still crumbs and trash from the previous owner in it. Lastly, I thought the tires only had a couple of months left in them, so I wanted a new set of tires. Now that I’m writing about it, this car sounds like a piece of shit.

I returned with my demands. I told him these were deal breakers. I would not drive the car off the lot without these things done. If he couldn’t do it, I understood, no hard feelings. He said he would talk to his boss. 5 minutes later slimy sales boy brings in the "closer". We go over my deal and he agrees to all my terms. I’m feeling like Donald Trump, playing hardball, making the big deal. I agree to the deal and tell them I’ll return with the pinks to my trade-ins.

An hour later I return with the pinks and my wife. We are signing papers and I noticed the price of the car remained the same. How did they shave off 12 months and keep the monthly payments the same? They lowered the interest rate. This kind of pissed me off. Why didn’t I get this better rate in the first place? Donald Trump had such a bonner over this car they probably thought they could stick him with a crummy loan too. I’m feeling like I’ve just been screwed when I say, “When will the car be ready for me to pick up?” “You can take it home now,” scumbag cheerfully replied. “Really? You fixed the DVD player? There is a new set of tires on the car?” I’m starting to smell bullshit. “Your detail is almost done. You will have to come back and make an appointment to get that DVD player fixed. What’s this you say about a new set of tires?” "You know about the tires, I told you about them, closer boy agreed.” “Oh. I’ll be right back.”

Slimy, slithering, scumbag, sales boy comes back with his sales manager. Pampas jerk says, (That would be the sales manager, not me.) “Who promised you tires?” “Closer boy.” “ He didn’t have the authority to do that. You know we thought we had an agreement at 72 months, and then you make us go to 60 with all these demands. I think we are being taken advantage of.” I’m getting pissed real fast, but I see my opportunity, “Well we didn’t sign anything at 72. Your guy agreed to my terms. If you can’t do them I’m walking.” “Hey, no need to be that way, we can make a compromise.” ”No we won’t. We are done.” I pull the pinks from his folder and walk away.

We get 3 or 4 follow up calls the next day. They do their best to try and get us back in there, but I won’t budge.

So now I’m really in a really pissy mood for the next 24 hours. It took me that long to cool down. I regroup and think about what mistakes I made while trying to purchase this car. Here are some things I learned.

1. Don’t negotiate monthly payment. Negotiate price of the car and interest rate. Almost all dealerships have a website with a loan calculator. If you know the price of the car and the interest rate, the loan calculator will figure out your monthly payment. If you tell the dealer you want a $400 a month payment, that’s probably what you’ll get, even if you can do better.

2. If the dealership has their used car inventory on-line, check the price on-line with the sticker price on the lot. I bet the on-line price is much lower. The price of the Tahoe I was looking at was $2000 less on-line. This is the price I agreed to pay; the dealer had no problem with that. I would guess there isn’t much room for negotiating on the on-line price.

With those two things in mind I looked for another car at a different dealership. I looked for a car that I liked, with an on-line price that I could live with. I found a 2004 Mountaineer with 30,000 miles for $14,000. I drove down to the dealership and checked out the car in person. The price on the lot was $19,000. I went home to do some homework.

When I got home I went back on-line to the loan calculator. I entered the on-line price, my down payment, my trade-in values, sales tax, the interest rate I could live with, and the number of months I wanted to pay. Voila, here is my monthly payment. Now I’m informed before I go to speak to a salesman.

I go back to the dealership. I test-drive the Mountaineer. I am happy with the ride. So I try my new strategy. I told the guy I wanted the on-line price, which he knew was $5000 less than the sticker. There was nothing wrong with the car. I didn’t have to ask for any repairs. I wanted blaa, blaa, blaa, for my trade-ins. I had blaa, blaa, blaa for a down payment. I wanted the best possible interest rate, and a 48-month loan. If I can live with the interest rate you offer me I will buy the car. They came back with an interest rate 1% higher than I expected, so I told them they needed to do better, they lowered it 1%. I bought the car.

I was home with the car in about than 90 minutes. It was that easy.

Malathionman's Yard #1

It is tough being Malathion man's neighbor. I sometimes pee in the bushes and I walk around taking pictures of their yards so that I can rag on them in my blog.


This guy has a huge tree problem. His tree is way too fricking big. You can't see this in the picture, but the roots are tearing up his driveway. They will soon be messing with the foundation of the house. There is also too much shade. Nothing will grow under that tree.


If I turn around 180 degrees, you will see what his neighbor is trying to do to fix the same problem.

As you can see he had no grass from the lack of sun. He still hasn't fixed his bigger problem, the roots. Also, he has left a huge frame that will fill up again and keep the grass from getting any sun.

The real fix would be to remove the entire tree. Start over and plant something that doesn't grow so big.


Also, if you are going to trim your tree, leave some foliage. The more the better. Plants can't make food without leaves, duh. This tree will have to use up stored food to crank out some leaves. Once the leaves are out, the tree can start making food again, but it will be stressed out for quite some time because of all the energy it used to get to that point.


While I am talking about trimming, take a look at the house across the street. Does this guy want a tree or a hedge? If that empty frame across the street gets cut down to size, a dense canopy will begin to grow like they have here, but don't take the hedge clippers to it!

Tree trimming should be an "as needed" job. If the canopy is hanging too low, trim up the low hanging branches. If there is too much end weight pulling down a branch, remove the end weight. Fruit trees are a good example of this.

A rule of thumb about trimming is, do not remove more then 25% of the canopy when trimming. Don't let your tree overgrow the area that you want it in and you shouldn't have to worry about that rule.

Lastly, do your homework before you plant a tree, don't take the Home Depot guy's word for it. How big is this tree going to get? How fast does it grow? Is it evergreen or deciduous? How much water will it need? Think about these things before you invest your time and money on a tree or plant for that matter, then your nosey neighbor won't talk trash about you on the internet.

My Civic Duty

The county of Riverside has my number! I get a summons for jury service every year. This year is no exception, and this is my week to call that 1-800 number everyday this week until they need me. It is incredible how they think you can drop everything and leave work at the drop of a hat. You would think there was a better way to find jurors.

I have been called in 4 times. I only had to sit in a jury once. I hung the jury, but not how you would normally associate a hung jury. I thought the guy was guilty. I actually got one person to see it my way, so the final tally was 10 not guilty, 2 guilty.

Sitting through the trial I thought this was going to be a no brainer. It was just this simple.

The guy on trial was a convicted drug dealer. He was serving his second sentence for dealing drugs. $5000.00 worth of black tar heroin was found in his locker at the local penitentiary. The drugs were hidden in his deodorant bars. The drugs were found during a routine search by the prison guards.

The guy’s only explanation was that –
A) The guards didn’t like him and must have planted it in his locker. And….
B) He never locked his locker! Anyone could have put it in there!

OK, I am a firm believer in if it looks like shit, and it smells like shit, it probably is shit.

One other thing, the judge instructed us that we could use the defendant's drug dealing history against him in this trial.

To me it sounded like we would deliberate for about 30 minutes, give the guy his third strike, and be home before lunch. Wrong! I guess I could have just gone with the consensus and that would have happened, but I was not having any of that. The defense had given me nothing more than what I stated above as a defense, common sence told me this was shit.

Basically the rest of the jurors believed the convict and thought the prison guards lied. Why the guards had a reason to lie I don’t know. Why they would use $5000.00 worth of drugs to frame this guy I don’t know. $100.00 would have worked just as well. What I do know is that 4 jurors had relatives in jail and said they could make an unbiased judgment in this case. Every single one of them was leading the argument against the guards. Why the idiot D.A. let them be on the jury I don’t know. One of them actually called me a Nazi because I would not see her point of view. At that point one other juror change his vote to guilty.

After the trial, the lawyers wanted the jury to hang out and talk to them about how they could possibly do things different, or if they should even bother. The jury was never polled, but the assistant D.A. knew exactly who voted guilty. She asked me flat out, “What the hell happened?” I told her how the guards were scrutinized more than the convict, and that they should have never let family of convicts sit in this kind of trial.

Oh man, I just checked the county web site. My group reports at 7:30 tomorrow morning. Who knows, maybe I’ll have a juicy entry tomorrow. If not, I’ll have to write about why I have to stop now and clean up the puke my dog just spewed on the carpet.