Busted, Disgusted, and Cain’t Be Trusted

Lenten thanks, Day 8

Thank God for Social Security! Without it, I’d be spending my old age in real poverty.

Busted because I spent over $200 yesterday, just sitting here in the house. Disgusted because after KJG left, I came down with a roaring sore throat. And cain’t be trusted to show up at the weekly trade group breakfast meeting because of the roaring sore throat.

{sigh} I hope KJG doesn’t catch this bug. At least I’m not exposing my friends in Scottsdale to it. And thank goodness it’s spring break and I don’t have to entertain 50 freshmen today. Ugh!

Some spring break, eh? It starts out with three solid days wasted doing battle with the unholy Blackboard and ends with a nasty cold.

After I paid Gerardo twice as much as his usual fee for the extra work he and his sidekicks performed by way of cleaning up after the recent hard freeze, he lost the check. His pocket had a hole in it. Actually, all his pockets have holes in them, as we discovered when he resurfaced here asking for another one. So I had to stop payment on the first check. That will cost me fifteen bucks, so, bitch that I am, I wrote him a new check for $15 less than the first one. Maybe that was ungracious. But…I really shouldn’t have paid him double his usual amount to begin with, and to add a hefty bank fee on top of that when I’m trapped in my house because I can’t afford to buy gasoline until next Monday was a bit beyond the pale.*

*Update: This turned into a pricier adventure than I imagined at the time I was writing. The credit union has upped its stop-payment fee from $15 to $32!

Then the locksmith charged $111 to install a new lock and make keys for it. That also was a bit beyond the pale for a job a handyman could’ve done.

Anyway, now there’s a lock on there that can’t be opened by someone who decides to break the windowpane.

The kitchen doors on these houses are the most vulnerable entryways, through which most of the break-ins happen. By and large the residents secure the sliding doors; although those are notoriously flimsy, a few simple tricks will make them harder to break through than most burglars like. But if you have an ordinary lock on the back door, which is the only egress in the event of a fire on the stove, then the burglar can just punch a hole in the window, stick his hand through it, unlock the door, and make himself to home. Because of the safety issue—trapped by a fire, a person could panic and not find a hidden key to a deadbolt—people tend to install single-cylinder deadbolts on those back doors.

During my cleaning frenzy the day before yesterday, I discovered a greasy forehead print on one of the backdoor windowpanes. It wasn’t that long ago that I cleaned those windows, so this must have happened fairly recently. Evidently the perp—or some other wannabe perp—cased the joint.

Don’t think this happened on the night of the event, because the motion-sensitive exterior lights were not on when I walked out to investigate. They stay on for about five or ten minutes, so, unless the guy waited until after they clicked off to try his luck on the side door, it doesn’t seem likely he peered into the kitchen at that time. Besides, what could he have seen at 4:00 in the morning by the light of the microwave clock? It’s very dark out there.

Charming.

As soon as I regain consciousness this morning, I’ll have to burn my last gallon of gasoline on a trip up to Home Depot, there to buy some prison bars for the back door. I just hate those ugly things—dammit! it’s the bad guy who belongs behind bars, not me!—but without a big, mean dog and now lacking the wits and reflexes of a younger woman, I just don’t feel safe anymore.

Well, I see one client sent a new chunk of technomaterial to edit yesterday, and the other called while KJG was here asking if I’d do a rush job, which she dropped in the mail yesterday. Sooo…. I’d better get to work. Sore throat or no, it’s gonna be a busy day!

Image: Human rhinovirus 16-coat protein at high resolution. A. T. Hadfield and M. G. Rossmann. Posted at the Protein Databank, an “archive of macromolecular structural data that is freely and publicly available to the global community.”