The Agrinautica

   So as you may have gathered, my boss (Dave) is kind of crazy.

   This guy named Terry* used to work for Dave several years ago. Eventually he and Dave had a falling out, as is relatively likely to happen to people who are around Dave for any period of time. This left them on extremely bad terms and they didn't talk for many years after that.

   A few weeks ago Terry apparently lost his job. In this troubled economy he couldn't find another one and quickly burned through his meagre savings.
   Finally he was desperate and called the one person he knew would help him. He called Dave, whom he had not talked to once sent the fight. He was hoping Dave might have some kind of employment for him, but when he mentioned he'd barely been able to afford to eat lately, Dave invited him over for dinner immediately.

   Despite our company not exactly being flush with cash, after several bad bee years, we've had Terry helping out around the bee cave several days a week lately.


   So lest you picture Dave as merely a psychotic ogre, consider things like this, and think of him as a more complex ogre character.


   And here's an old picture of him from years ago, looking particularly personable!



* Names never changed here at Emo-Snal because we don't believe in that crap!

   After spending only one full day back in OC since the last adventure, last Saturday I trotted down to the local train station and purchased a train ticket.
   "4:37 to Flagstaff please" I said. "THATS IN TEN MINUTES!!" exclaimed the ticket agent. He complained that the train was "99% full" and that he was getting me the last ticket availalbe and that next time I should book a week in advance (psh if I wanted to do that I'd FLY), but I got a ticket and hopped on the train.
   13 hours later I stepped off the train into the snowey pre-dawn air of 7,000 feet in Flagstaff. Its a good thing I chose to take the train, since the highway in and the local airport were both snowed in! 120 trains a day doesn't give the tracks enough time to build up snow between trains though.

   We got another foot of snow in Flagstaff the next day. I think it'd been three years since I'd last been in snow! So there was the making of snowmen and snow angels and such. Got to see many of my friends in Flagstaff, and Vern, one of my favourite people, even drove up from Phoenix to hang out with all of us Friday evening.
   Once the road and cleared a bit later in the week Kerri & I drove down the mountain to the town of Sedona where there was no snow so we could hike about.

   Altogether, it was an excellent adventure.

   My camera is fubar!! )=!!!!

   Yesterday my boss Dave, his friend Bruce, and technician Ryan went out on Dave's new boat. We went out to San Clemente Island, which is 55 nautical miles off the coast (about twice as far as Catalina Island). We saw several whales, as well as dolphins and sea lions. I got pictures of all these things, and a picture of Dave in mid air as he dove off the top of his boat, a picture I was particularly excited about. The weather was mostly real nice, and I swam around out by San Clemente. Unfortunately coming back however the water was real choppy and a fog bank just offshore gave us about 15 feet of visibility for the last half hour (fortunately we had radar and a GPS chartplotter).
   Unfortunately, my relatively new camera was subjected to some salt water spray from the wet return trip. I was optimistic that the camera would be fine since it didnt' look very wet, just some drips on the outside, and was working once we disembarked. This morning, however, attempts to turn it on would only make the "print" button glow for a moment (?!), even after I replaced the batteries. I drove over asap to the Canon corporate office and repair center in Irvine, but its closed on weekends. I'm extremely concerned about my camera )= I've heard that salt-water is extremely corrosive to cameras and I want to get it attention as soon as possible. )= )=

   Yesterday I put over $11,000 of art on craigslist. At least thats the total we're asking for ... it was bought from real auctions for about $2,500 I think.

   This morning we already had an offer to buy one of the paintings for $1,500 --- we'd bought it at auction for $75.

   Dave wants to bring me to this auction in LA on August 7th. Says he's willing to invest up to $10,000 in auctioneering schemes. ...and he mumbled something about giving me a raise!


   Today the OC Register ran an editorial severely backpeddling their previous "all the bees are dying!!!" theme. I think iti would not be unrealistic for me to speculate that my press release on that subject could well have caused them to do so!
   Pwn!

   Driving down to Dave's on the Fourth, I saw my first ex, Elena. It was totally like seeing a ghost. I would have pulled over asap to say hi ... but right there where I would have was a motorcycle cop, so it didn't seem like a very bright idea.


   Anyway, on the Fourth of July, AKA Fuck the British Day, I made it to Dave's after the thoroughly distracting Elena incident. He was grilling up some hot dogs and burgers and tri tip, so that was excellent. Had some of the beer we'd brewed in January, it was pretty good.

   From there I went to my coworker Jeremy's (And coworker Bobby's, since Bob lives next door to him). There they were also bbqing and for some reason hellorz young people live on their street, so there were a lot of people there. Jeremy had had to keep his own partying under-control all day since he was 2nd in line of being on call -- since we work 24/7 365/yr.


   This morning at work we called some people Dave knows who are in the bee research business to see if we can drum up a research project for ourselves. Then we sat around tryiing to decide what to do since no calls were coming in. But by midday it picked up and I roamed around with Jeremy killing shit.

   Then this afternoon me and Bob spent our time conducting espoinage. We called all the other pest control companies in the phone book that looked like they might deal with bees and pretended to be customers, to see how their prices were and how on the ball they were. Nearly all were more expensive than us. One said it was $110 to kill normal bees and $180 for africanized bees ... which is funny because they're all a hybrid around here, and it takes a scientist with a microscope several hours to really figure it out. I figure they get people thinking its gonna be $110 and then raise it to 180 when they get there. Someone else said a swarm of bees could be "from the size of a baseball to the size of a car" (WHAT?!?!!). And finally I thought it was funny that Bob was describing his imagined bee problem to a technician and they guy was all asking about the fireplace, but when he got off the phone I was like "you were thinking bees in the canned lightinig weren't you" "yeah." Silly technician.


Picture of the Day

Texas

Hi, my name is Kristofer Ransom Oscar Fricke --according to the subpoena I received--, but you can just call me "KROF". (one of those four names is not supposed to be there. Guess which one!)


   Looking for a job sucks. I've been trawling through paralegal jobs on craigslist, but everyone wants experience. I'm still optimistic about the interview I had in Long Beach but I'm still waiting on the background check (I probably overwhelmed their system as they try to dredge through the depths of this lj hah). Also been applying for jobs at the State Department, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, etc, but those usually take months to get back to you anyway.

   Anyway today I called Dave Marder, the owner of the Bee Busting company, about a part time job while I look for something else. I talked to him for one minute and 4 seconds. "Be here in work clothes tomorrow morning!"

   Looks like its back to the bee mines! I kind of missed them anyway.

   There was a major lull in the bee business for a few weeks up until about two weeks ago. A dry spell in Spring caused the local colonies not to reproduce at the usual rate and so we only got a few calls a day for awhile. As we sat around the office we consoled ourselves saying that as bad as it was for us, it had to be worse for our competitors (since we have more contracts than anyone else and are generally more established).
   Now the season's picked up again, but it looks like our competitors all laid off their bee people (a lot of them are pest control companies that do other things), or critically reduced their staff. We've gotten a number of calls lately where people mentioned that none of the other companies said they could work them in.
   Yesterday Ryan the Elder & I went for lunch at the Lamppost Pizza by my house. It turns out the general manager there is the (former) bee guy from OC Pest Control!
   OC Pest Control, for that matter, keeps driving past the front of our garage even thtough they have no reason to go that way (we're in the back corner of a building). I think they're trying to see how busy we are to decide if they need a new bee guy.


   In other news, despite earlier statements that "the best way to celebrate labour day is to labour!" Boss Dave has given me Monday off, so I have a rare two day weekend!!
   Kristy moved in down in San Diego today, so I'm a gonna head down there.

   Alright ladies & gentlemen, it is time to have the talk. That's right, I've been meaning for awhile now to sit down and have a serious talk with you about the birds and the bees.

   You see, last summer while I spent my time killing countless small furry animals, I learned a few things about a secret order some of us like to call Hymenoptera. What I mean to say is I'm going to tell you about the bees and the other bees now.

Honey Bees - Are actually more like orange & black than yellow and black if you think about it ... and believe me I had more than enough time to think about that. If they live in a man-made box its a hive, if they've made their own nest somewhere its a feral colony. Colonies are much more prone to diseases than hive boxes (as boxes allow them nice evenly spaces straight corridors for cleaning), and so bees thoroughly benefit from their interaction with man. And yet some fascist vegans refuse to consume honey for god knows what reason.
   In what sounds like a classic science fiction story (only, its true) some mad scientist brought 26 Tanzanian queen bees to Brazil in 1957. They subsequently escaped and have created the entire "killer bee" population that has since spread up from there to the southern reaches of the United States. They really are not at all as scary as people make them out to be, just a little more defensive than more common Italian or Hawaiian bees (who spend their time riding vespas or hula dancing, respectively).
   Incidently the difference between these bees was caused by natural selection. In Europe bees were primarily cultivated by beekeepers, so the more "userfriendly" docile ones were selectively bred. In Africa, however, sustainable apiculture (beekeeping) never constituted a significant portion of the bee population -- rather, honey was harvested by destroying hives (both by humans and animals), so the colonies that survived were the "meaner" ones. So... suck it creationists.

Hornets - Some people, especially the elderly, like to refer to any wasp-like insect from a yellow-jacket to a humming-bird as a "hornet." I really don't know where they got this idea. Hornets are an endangered species in Europe, and have never been wild on the American West Coast. So seriously shut up about them. Also, I found an amazing cinematic quality video of an epic battle between hornets & honey bees, I can't believe its for reals.

Wasps - There are two main types of wasps one finds here in California (and a number of rarer types). Unfortunately the wikipedia article on them sucks so I'm going to have to go entirely from memory here. First off, if you don't know the difference between wasps and bees (and I've found an alarming number of people don't), you are in my opinion an idiot and I'm not going to take the time to explain. The two main types of wasps here though are the Golden Umbrella Wasp (Polistes Aurelius) (which is yellow and orange), and the European Paper Wasp (Polistes Dominus), which is slightly smaller and more common than the Umbrellas. Dominus wasps have sharp construction-vehicle yellow-and-black markings. The two species act essentially the same so I'll talk about them together henceforth.
   Now wasps look fricken scary, and whereas in elementry school I used to freak out my classmates by holding honeybees in my hands, I always gave wasps a very wide birth. Well it turns out they are actually the most pacifistic of the Hymenopterids I've had experience with, and will only sting you if you assault them personally. It could see you looting its nest and killing its children and if its not on the nest it'll just say "fuck that, make love not war" and go be emo.
   Funny story time: once we got this call and the lady told our fearless leader David Mardner that every time someone rang her doorbell a wasp would come sting them in the face. Knowing that wasps are not aggressive like that, David dismissed this claim as clearly the product of hyperbolic wasp hysteria. He took the call, and arriving at the house proceeded to the door and rang the doorbell. A wasp came out of nowhere and stung him him the face.
   Turns out the wasp nest was actually in the doorbell.
   Actually getting stung by a wasp is so rare that despite being employed killing them for over a year, my coworker Jeremy had never been stung by one. He once expressed an interest in actually trying to get stung by one to know how it compared to other stings (he'd been stung by everything else already). What a nut.

Bumblebees: Now bumblebees, on the other hand, are fucking flying battlestations. Fortunately one only rarely comes across their secret lairs, and I never had a bumblebee call during the summer I worked as a bee buster. Bumblebees live in colonies of a few dozen up to maybe a hundred. To quote wikipedia "Often, mature bumblebee nests will hold fewer than 50 individuals, and may be within tunnels in the ground made by other animals, or in tussocky grass."
   Jeremy once got a bumblebee call. It was on a hillside with small bushes. At first he couldn't find it, but then he stepped on a particular shrub and heard an angry buzzing sound that rapidly got louder. Suddenly a few dozen of these angry little deathstars launched out of the ground under the bush and set upon him. Bumblebees you see, can and will both bite and sting (and not die from stinging you), and are also capable of a certain degree of burrowing/tearing (I would of said they're closely related to Carpenter Bees, but Wikipedia is telling me they're no closer related than both are to honeybees, whatever they fucking look the same except Carpenter's are all black), so they'll land on your protective bee suit and start trying to burrow/tear a hole to jam their stinger in. Also I'd imagine they must have been somewhat resistent to our +3 nerve gas attack that kills other things immediately, because otherwise Jeremy would have made quick work of them. Jeremy sustained at least one sting in this encounter and he said it hurt and swelled up in a manner exponentially worse than the other stings he'd received.

Yellow Jackets: These guys are actually pretty underrated. I would have thought they were no worse than honeybees .. wrong. We get a call for yellow jackets, we call for backup. They're smaller than honeybees, so they are better able to get into any orifice they can find in your trusty bee-suit. They bite rather than sting, which just means a single one can get you about a million times more than a single bee could. Seriously, killer bee infestation: no problem -- yellow jackets: call for backup and break out the most potent chemical weapons.
   Yellowjackets are actually a type of wasp, but they look more like skinny honeybees (that are yellow and black). Interestingly, they are carnivorous. I once saw one carting away a disembodied bee head from a destroyed honeybee colony. Morbid bastards.

Mud Daubers: Are another type of wasp. They build mud nests on the underside of eaves. Apartment complexes would pay us a 100 bucks to get rid of them, we'd show up and bat them down with our hands or a broom if out of reach. These things will not sting you, and actually, like the paper wasps discussed above, are beneficial to have around, since they eat less pleasant things like spiders, and pests that are harmful to your gardens. So we've actually talked potential customers out of having us kill wasps before (since our boss Dave actually loves insects, and the rest of us, we get paid whether or not we kill shit so no need to be malicious / waste time & chemicals).


   So yeah, now you know. I actually find wasps strangely fascinating. I had two pet dead wasps named Romulus (a Dominus) & Vortigern (an Aurelius). Hey, people have butterfly collections, and no one says thats weird. I was going to try to collect a specimen of all the rarer types of wasp, but I only came up with this plan late in the season and didn't get a chance. Also I found a dead queen bee from a kill and placed it prominently in our office with a sign identifying it as "Queen Amidala."


Day 9 Pick: eazyt's entry concisely and effectively discusses a current issue relevant to the blogosphere. While it lacks in "the funny," so does this entry. And apparently a difference of opinion over the necessity of The Funny is partially responsible for the Otimus/Roter-Terror commiefascist jihad declared against me; but in my personal opinion an entry can qualify as megabloggery (& therefore 30 in 30 material) if suitably intellectual or informative.

Previously on Emosnail
   Three Years Ago Today: Ambulence Rides Are Fun - Not really. The worst part about being jumped by three wanna-be gangsters and kicked in the head while unconscious was having an IV put in my arm. Seriously. Nearly hyperventilated. I don't like needles.
   Two Years Ago Today: Delirium - RECENTLY DECLASSIFIED: I manage to thoroughly embarress myself by (1) writing a terrible paper at the last minute, (2) emailing myself the wrong version of it so that when I got to campus at the last minute I couldn't turn it in, (3) when I email the professor about this in my delirium I use the name of the author of the book I was using in place of the professor's name!! Oh man, awful. I was so shamed I friends-locked the entry, and that takes a lot.
   Year Ago Today: Making the Paper - My 30 in 30 entry got mentioned in the local paper, beat that suckers! Sure say I'm not funny all you want, lets see you get a 30 in 30 entry mentioned in the paper. (=

   Yesterday I missplaced my pen. I think I left it at Harbour House. I hate losing pens. This one I'd managed to keep for about two months.
   I needed a new pen though so I went out to guy buy one, and while I'm at it some other stuff like gelatine and green hair dye.
   The only place down here I could think of to get green hair dye was hot topic. I feel dirty going in that place. Its the poser supply store, mass marketting the anti-mass-market mentality to plaztarded posers. The whole store is an insult to punk.
   Anyway, so I go in there and who do I see but Wild Rivers supervisor Randy Jostelin (sp?!), possibly one of the last people I'd expect to see in there (he was pushing a stroller with his two little childrens, and wearing his Wild Rivers polo shirt). So I'm talking to him and I mention that I work for Bee Busters now, and the girl that works there is like "Bee Busters? My neighbour Jeremy works there!"
   Then Randy said they've had The Bee Man over there several times lately. I of course told him they should switch over to Bee Busters asap. He said to email him.

   Now you see, the apiacide industry (beekeeping = apiaculture, beehives = apiaries, etc) around here is someone of a tense competition. Our two competitors that I know of (besides shadier ones which are too transient to discuss) are The Bee Man and Buzz Off. The Bee Man is our main competitor. He got a real leg up on us several years ago when our office manager defected to him with our client list, paperwork and a large portion of our treasury. Our fearless leader Theodore D. Marder III (Dave) eventually won a lawsuit against the defector and with the proceeds purchased his new roadster, which he consequently gave the liscence plate of vndc8ion (or something like that).
   Buzz Off isn't as much competition but is at least as evil. The Buzz Off man started his business as one of our own technicians... using our equipment! Dave discovered this knavery when he checked a seldom used company voicemailbox and found the messege to be "welcome to buzz off" (while the guy still worked here).

   So yeah, its time to jostle Wild Rivers away from the infidels.

Picture of the Day

Jim (center), a retired psychologist, plays in one of two chess games going Saturday night at Diedrichs