What?

I turned on the TV today to the local news. The first two stories were quite disturbing. In the first story, a child (pre-schooler, I'm assuming) brought little baggies of heroin to school and passed them to his classmates saying they were candy. The children are all fine; the teachers called the paramedics once they figured out what was going on. The second story was about how a neighborhood Applebee's served a margarita (instead of apple juice) to a 2-year-old in a sippy cup. The restaurant said that they keep the apple juice and the pre-mixed margarita in identical plastic containers behind the counter. Yeah, because no one could have seen that that would be a problem someday. In light of these two stories, I hope you have enjoyed your time with Nathan until now. He will not be leaving the apartment until he's 30. You are welcome to visit.

GROSS

I'm currently reading Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser. This book is very interesting and has made me consider a number of things, like whether I'll ever come within 1,000 feet of ground beef ever again. (Granted, the book was written 6 years ago so I hold out hope that bringing all of this to light has caused a great deal of change in the meatpacking plants, slaughterhouses, and fast food restaurants.) Of course it's also made me think about eating fast food. Here's an excerpt from the chapter What's in the Meat, page 222:

"Dr. Griffin has good reason to worry. A 1997 undercover investigation by KCBS-TV Los Angeles videotaped local restaurant workers sneezing into their hands while preparing food, licking salad dressing off their fingers, picking their noses, and flicking their cigarettes into meals about to be served. In May of 2000, three teenage employees at a Burger King in Scottsville, NY, were arrested for putting spit, urine, and cleaning products such as Easy-Off Oven Cleaner and Comet with Bleach into the food. They had allegedly tampered with the Burger King food for eight months, and it was served to thousands of customers, until a fellow employee informed the management.

"The teenage fast food workers I met in Colorado Springs, CO, told me other horror stories. The safety of the food seemed to be determined more by the personality of the manager on duty than by the written policies of the chain. Many workers would not eat anything at their restaurant unless they'd made it themselves. A Taco Bell employee said that food dropped on the floor was often picked up and served. An Arby's employee told me that one kitchen worker never washed his hands at work after doing engine repairs on his car. And several employees at the same McDonald's restaurant in CO Springs independently provided details about a cockroach infestation in the milk-shake machine and about armies of mice that urinated and defecated on hamburger rolls left out to thaw in the kitchen every night."

Gross, right? That stuff may or may not make you sick. The following is another excerpt from the same chapter, pg. 197, and to me seems much more serious:

"A nationwide study published by the USDA in 1996 found that 7.5% of the ground beef samples taken at processing plants were contaminated with Salmonella, 11.7% were contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, 30% were contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus, and 53.3% were contaminated with Clostridium prefringens. All of these pathogens can make people sick; food posoning caused by Listeria generally requires hospitalization and proves fatal in about one of every five cases. In the USDA study 78.6% of the ground beef contained microbes that are spread primarily by fecal material."

Really, you should read the book...unless you like fast food (and hamburgers!) too much to give it up. :)

THIS is crazy

Here is a crazy story and Jimmy and I are still wondering how things like this happen to us. Warning: this is a long story and it has nothing to do with Nathan so if you're only interested in him, you can stop reading now. But if you're interested in a very strange story, keep reading. So we have had some problems with our downstairs neighbors off and on during the year that they've lived there. They are college students and keep later hours than we do and have been rather loud on occasion, mostly late at night, including waking us, and guests, up multiple nights at 3 and 4am. We've gone down there (well, not at 3am but at 11pm or so) a few times and asked them to turn the music down, we've written them a couple of notes because we honestly didn't think they realized how much we could hear them. The last note we wrote (last of two) was at the end of April after they'd woken me up (Jimmy was out of town) after midnight two nights in a row. We offered our phone number because we thought that was neighborly, and we asked for theirs. We also went to the apartment manager to ask if we're being reasonable (she said yes). We never heard anything from them.

Fast forward to last night (Saturday, May 26). They left us (and some other apartments) a note on Friday saying that they were having a graduation party from 5-9ish just so we'd know ahead of time about the noise. They were loud, but we dealt with it until 11 (which is an hour past quiet hours) at which point Jimmy went down to ask them to be quiet because all of our windows and doors were closed and we still couldn't hear the movie we were watching. They were nice enough and got quiet when the party ended at 11:30. This morning (Sunday) at 9:15 they started blasting their music. I couldn't read or concentrate on anything even with the windows and doors closed (which was unfortunate because it was kind of stuffy) so I went down to ask them if they'd keep the music down. Here's the conversation:
K: why?
me: because it's loud upstairs, even with the doors and windows closed.
k: no i won't turn it down because it's not quiet hours (*note* the lease says that you can't have your music that loud at ANY time)
me: well it was quiet hours last night when you were loud at 11:30.
k: i apologize for that but you knew in advance about that and it was a celebration and i'm not going to turn down my music because it's not quiet hours.
me: ok, well we'll just have to call R (the manager).

So I called the manager and left a voicemail and while I was at church we got a call back from them saying to call immediately when we got home to talk about it. Before we could do that the dad of the girl downstairs (who is probably our parents' age, so kind of intimidating) came up and started in on us, big time. He said that they felt harassed and threatened by us and that we were never to come downstairs and talk to them that we could take our complaints directly to the manager or proper authorities (which I pointed out is the police at 3am when they wake us up), that he takes care of his children and that he pays for that apartment and we pay for ours and we can't tell anyone else what they can or cannot do in their apartment. Maybe we're not cut out for apartment life and that we should save up for a house. We didn't really get a word in edgewise, but Jimmy was able to say that we had no intention of harassing, we just thought it'd be easier to work out our differences ourselves instead of going over their heads to the manager.

But then we did go to the assistant manager because we were definitely threatened by this man. We went over everything from beginning to end, including giving her copies of the letters we've written them. She said that they would get a formal letter on Tuesday which outlines that there has been a complaint and that the process is as follows: they get the first letter, upon the 2nd complaint they get a "3 day cure or quit" letter which says that if they don't clear it up in 3 days and find a way to solve the problem, if there's another complaint (any time after the 2nd letter) they get a third letter which is a 60-day order to vacate. Ok, we were happy.

A couple of hours later Jimmy got a call from the apartment complex on his cell phone saying that when the manager (R) had come in, the assistant manager (D) had told her the whole story. R was furious because their dad, who's not a resident, had harassed us. She called the girls and said they had to come in on Wednesday to go over the terms of the lease because by their dad coming down, they'd violated the lease. They went in today instead of waiting, got into a screaming match with the manager, and were told by the manager that they were not to speak to us at all and if they (the management) gets even one notice from us (or anyone else, I guess) that they've been loud they will get no warnings, just an order to vacate.

This is surreal. We're normal people and things like this don't happen to normal people. And most of it went down in just a matter of hours. Like I said, this is crazy.