arrgh

I was looking up airport shuttles, for a ride to O'Hare. The only one I know of seemed a little expensive, so I wondered if there were any others. There's one other in the Milwaukee area. I immediately found their site only a little annoying. A woman started talking over the tunes I was playing, and it took me a bit to shut her down. Over time, the site got worse - tons of links that lead to the other two or three pages on the site. And the photos were... well, I guess I'm picky about that kind of thing.

But the thing that really got to me was... Other Milwaukee transportation companies speak English as a second language and at time communication can become very frustrating. At Airport Service Milwaukee, English is our ONLY language allowing us to fully understand your desired destination. ...really?

That's their main selling point. Or at least the thing they seemed to be most proud of. So first of all, I hate this playing-upon-fears thing. This is the way things are - deal with it and quit your griping about the "damn foreigners." If you were willing to pay more for a ride, taxi companies could afford to be choosier about their drivers. And who has trouble with their driver understanding the destination? Trouble understanding the driver sure, but the other way around? "Our drivers understand English, so we don't have to train them!" But anyway, that other shuttle service, which I've used, doesn't seem to employ many non-native English speakers. So who are they really selling against? There's an implication that the other shuttle service employs a lot of Middle Easterners. And does this mean they actually discriminate against non-native drivers? And they really advertise the fact that they're not going to be much help to customers who speak other languages? Customers who may be using their service to take them to the airport for international destinations. You'd think they'd be asking, "what language would you prefer our driver speak?"

the rock garden

This is our rock garden. I set this up in early November. It lasted a really long time. We're usually lucky if it lasts a few weeks, but this one stood all winter.



Most of the shorter stacks tumbled fairly early, actually, so we replaced those parts, but we never touched the tallest one. In January, we had a couple of days with 40 mph wind gusts, and it stayed up.



That was in mid February. Then in the end of Feberuary, it snowed. I think the snow unbalanced the top one or two, and they fell.



But then Cindy got antsy to play with her rocks again. She took the rest apart and made peace with it.



Today it was fairly warm, and the sun warmed up the rocks...



(Most of these photos were taken by her.)

possum

We keep a compost bucket on the back stoop during winter, for kitchen waste, so we don't have to trudge through the snow to reach the compost bin at the garden. Today Cindy opened the back door, and was surprised to see an opossum in it.





It kept its head down while we were checking it out, but climbed out after a few minutes, and wandered across the yard.