Jef says There's something in the air

It's been a fragrant week here at the Huntington Woods cartoon and writing studios. Two things demanded attention immediately and concurrently: First, the surface of our bathtub started peeling off in big sheets. One of our house's previous owners had tried a do-it-yourself kit, lending credence to my home-repair approach. I have a policy that says don't do something complicated yourself if you don't anticipate doing it more than once; no point in learning on the job for a task you'll never do again, except to fix what you screwed up. (There's a modified version of that rule that applies to all plumbing no matter how simple or repetitious.) So in comes the tub re-glazing guy with his tub re-glazing chemicals. I'm still a little high.

And somehow we ended up with fleas on one of the pets, and thus in the house and thus on all of the pets. How the fleas survived the tub re-glazing fumes, I don't know, but they did. We'll presume they won't survive the flea-specific stuff.

But there's something a little embarrassing about having an exterminator's van parked in your driveway, broadcasting a big "we have vermin" beacon to the neighborhood. (Geez, why not just put it out there on the Internet?) Fortunately, you can always trust the world to put these things into perspective. Patty and I were driving somewhere that evening when we were passed by another commercial van, and this van's driver specialized in biohazard cleanup. Anticipating observers lacking either vocabulary or imagination, the van painter had thoughtfully lettered examples of biohazards that typically need cleaning up, including but not limited to suicide, unattended death and, my new favorite redundancy, "gross filth."

Puts the flea guy right into perspective, it does. Actually, the flea guy himself did a pretty good job of that. He started his own pest control business -- bugs and vermin, plus larger problems as well, with glands that spray, teeth that bite and claws that claw -- after a tiring of a career in the mortgage business. Now, that's upward mobility.