Salad Is Slaughter

I got a call from our realtor today.  He said that he had a message from the woman who bought Janet’s house wanting to know what to do with the bullets that were in the closet.  At least he thought she said bullets – she was calling from her cell phone and the quality of the recording he was listening too was bad, maybe she had said bulbs like in light bulbs.  I assured him that I was not a target shooter or a wannabe mass murderer.  She had to be referring to the light bulbs we left in the closet because some of the fixtures take special bulbs, we had extra, and had no use for them.  The realtor said thanks and that he would call back to verify that the light bulbs were hers to keep.

I got back from a meeting and the message light on my phone was on.  The buyer did in fact find .38 caliber bullets in a closet.  She gave them to her realtor to return to us.

I called Janet and the first question I asked was if she had a past that she wasn’t telling me about.  She said that no she didn’t; the bullets weren’t hers and she didn’t know where the buyer could have found them.  She was stumped.

Then she got to thinking.  No, they weren’t hers.  And she didn’t think they belonged to the people she bought the house from because they had little kids.  However, the people before them were kind of shady.  She heard stories about how those people drove their cars onto the front yard and were generally considered suspect.  Back then that neighborhood could best be described as “shitty” so it’s really no surprise that there would have been bullets hidden in a closet somewhere.  The only surprise is that the people who had the house before Janet, and Janet herself had never found them.  Janet is pretty thorough, so they had to have been hidden pretty well.

We’re telling the agent to go ahead and dispose of the them.  I sure don’t want 15 year-old bullets.

Saturday was depressurize day – sit around the house, do a little yard work, then go to the hockey game.

Sunday we went wine shopping.  Since we don’t buy wine from the grocery store because they look at you funny if you sample it before you buy it, we had to go to Napa.  We made a quick stop at Opus One and bought four bottles of Overture, their second best wine.  We didn’t do any tasting there – it’s quite expensive – we just popped in, bought the wine, and popped out.

Next on our shopping list was Cakebread.  We bought quite a bit of white wine there as well as a couple of reds.  The first time we went to Cakebread we weren’t that impressed with the reds, but this time we liked them more.  I suspect that the reason we didn’t care too much for them on our last trip was because our first stop then was at Opus One and we had sampled some of the best red wine made.  It kind of biased our palette.  Cakebread was our first stop on this trip so we were able to taste their reds without having to compare them to a standard they couldn’t hope to match.

Next stop was the Charles Krug winery.  I really like their Sauvignon Blanc but we also bought a couple of bottles of some of their other wines.

Lunch brought us to the Culinary Institute of America (CIA).  We started off with the Today’s Temptations appetizer selection that consisted of five different appetizers.  We then had wild mushroom risotto and roasted chicken with apricots.  Dessert was a sampling of six different desserts.  The food was good and not as expensive as I thought it would be.  The CIA is going to be our normal lunch stop when in the Napa Valley.

After lunch we headed to Dean and Deluca’s for a bit of shopping.  Then we drove down to Niebaum-Coppola to buy more wine.  I joined their wine club last month so not only did I save a bunch of money on my purchases, tasting was free, too.

We’re done buying wine for a while.

Following is an email I sent to Paul Foott, the general manager of Homestead Lanes today:

Dear Mr. Foott,

I’ve been bowling at Homestead Lanes for about the past 10 years and after last night I don’t plan to return anytime soon.  In the past I’ve overlooked the gradual decay of the bowling center, I’ve ignored the dirty bathroom, and I’ve held my breath to get through the cloud of smoke at the door.  What I can no longer ignore is the indifferent, unhelpful, unresponsive staff and the abysmal state of the pin setting equipment.

Last night I was a substitute in the Thursday Funnies league on lanes 17 and 18.  We had problems the entire night with the rack dropping pins, pins not being counted, ball return problems, etc.  Lanes 17 and 18 had several problems requiring bowling center assistance every game.  The teams on lanes 15 and 16 had to move to a different pair after their first game, so it clearly wasn’t just our pair that was having problems.  The pin setting hardware and the score keeping equipment obviously need maintenance.

Our attempts to contact someone at the front desk by using the “Front Desk” button on the lane console were futile because there was almost never anyone at the front desk.  On the off chance that there was someone at the front desk, communications were nearly impossible because the speaker volume was so low.

When we did manage to get the attention of the person in the office, and she came to the front desk, our frustration would just begin.  She would make an announcement for customer service over the loudspeaker, but no one would show up at our lanes for at least 10 minutes, sometimes more.  There is really no good reason that we, the paying customers should have to wait for over 10 minutes for assistance every time there was a problem.

We didn’t finish bowling last night until sometime between 9:15 and 9:30 PM.  I estimate that we wasted at least 45 minutes last night waiting for customer service and we wouldn’t have had to make many of those calls if the lanes were properly maintained.  I expressed my frustration and displeasure to Dee Costello, the Thursday Funnies league secretary last night and I told her what I’m now telling you – I will not be returning to Homestead Lanes anytime soon.  I have better things to do than to sit around in a badly maintained bowling center waiting for indifferent customer support.

Frank Hofer

The California Department of Health Services is warning people not to eat grasshoppers.  That’s advice that I can follow.  See http://www.applications.dhs.ca.gov/pressreleases/store/pressreleases/03-92.html for more details.

Does the newspaper’s classified section have any value anymore?  I’m starting to think that the classifieds are obsolete and not nearly as useful as resources found on the web.

When I bought my first house I looked in the classified section of the Mercury News to get an idea of what was out there.  When I hired an agent I envied his multiple listing service (MLS) printout.  When we were looking for a new house we didn’t look in the newspaper at all.  We used the MLS website (http://www.mlslistings.com/) to find houses that matched our desired parameters and told our realtor what we wanted to see.  We could filter on location, price range, size, number of bedrooms, and so on; something that’s not possible with a newspaper. The MLS listings on the web also had at least one photo, and many times either several pictures or a movie showing the house.  There goes one huge section of the weekend paper.

When I was looking for a new car a few years ago, I didn’t look in the newspaper for a good deal (and always one at this price).  I went to autoweb.com  (http://www.autoweb.com/) to select the make, model, and features of the SUV that I wanted.  I submitted my request and received an email from the fleet dealer telling me what the price of my Pathfinder would be.  No dealing with salesmen, just pick up the car at the fleet price and drive away.  There goes another huge section of the classified ads.

I guess you could look for a new pet in the newspaper.  I went to http://www.petfinder.com instead.  Again the filtering capability allows you to find the exact pet that you want.  It’s sure easier than looking in a newspaper.

The employment section is huge, and it’s not that valuable.  Web sites like http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/, http://www.brassring.com/, http://www.monster.com/, and http://www.dice.com/ allow for easy searching and filtering of current listings, and your resume is picked up by recruiters who have been hired by companies who are actively hiring.  I’ve had more success with those web sites than I ever had with newspapers.

The other major section of the newspaper classifieds is for people who are selling miscellaneous crap treasured collectables.  Ebay (http://www.ebay.com/) has that covered and the readership is far higher than the local newspaper.

Essentially, if you have net access you don’t need the newspaper classifieds.  Of course, you can put the newspaper on the bottom of a birdcage, assuming that you have a bird.  And I don’t know of anyone who reads a laptop while sitting on “the throne.”