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Hear that Sound in the Sky?

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That is the sound of angels singing.

When the dogs rousted me out of the sack…again…as per the New Usual…at three in the morning, Cassie needed to get outside fast to pee (prednisone makes dogs incontinent), but just lifting her off the bed started her wheezing. She gasps her way through that for a couple of minutes, then can finally breathe enough to stagger to the door.

This little dog was — again…still — very, very sick. Has been for a long while, despite the various drugs the vet has tried for the cough and the wheezing. Today she literally could not bark without falling into a wheezing frenzy. And since this dog lives to bark, that’s a lot of wheezing. She couldn’t drink water without wheezing.

Time passes. When she’s not wheezing, she’s flopped on the bed with her little chest heaving.

Finally I think…what, really, is gonna happen if I give her half a Benadryl?

I know dogs can tolerate Benadryl, and I know 1/2 tablet is the correct dose for a 20-pound dog. Decide I’d better ask MarvelVet about that first, though… Reach his office but am told he’s out for the day. Hm.

So along about 9 a.m., I think fuck it. She’s gonna die if this keeps on, anyway. Wrap up half a pill in a wad of butter and down it goes.

No noticeable effect ensues. I plow through two of the three files the current Chinese client has sent; return them to her. But must go to Costco to (as we’ve been led to believe) replace tires, especially the one I successfully gouged up in the late, great fender-bender. Really, really depressed. Four new Michelins…it’s more than I can contemplate… {GLOOM}

So without finishing the tripartite job, I traipse up to Costco, braced to have to cough up hundreds and hundreds of bucks to install four new tires on the Toyotamobile. But nay!

To my astonishment, the tire foreman looks at the things and says…”There’s no reason to change these tires. They have plenty of tread left on them. Yeah, there’s a ding in that one sidewall, but it’ s nothing to worry about. Only problem is, you did wallop the air valve on that tire. It’s bent so it can’t be used. Sixty bucks to replace it.”

Almost fainted on the spot!

Make it so, say I, and I charge off to spend money in the store.

Buy a month’s worth of food. Retrieve the vehicle. Cruise home, drive into the garage, hear Cassie BARKING. And barking and barking and barking and barking and…NOT WHEEZING!

She hasn’t been able to bark at all — not one yap — without falling into a wheezing frenzy, not for days and days. Fling wide the gates, and…. Cassie is dancing around, she’s barking, she trots outside…not one cough nor one gasp for air!!!!

Holy doggerel! The Benadryl must have worked!

There’s really no other explanation. She was mighty sick when I left the house this morning…as in “dog is not long for this world.” Four hours after a dose of Benadryl, she’s almost completely back to normal!

Wouldn’t that be something, if all this doggy misery and all this worry and all this (phenomenal!) veterinary expense were caused by…allergies? The hound has developed asthma, and it has something to do with whatever is in the air or whatever she’s eating.

Dispatches from Hell…

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Day after day after day after day has been yet another Day from Hell, lo! these several weeks. Why don’t things get better? Why does everything break, bust, explode, crash, or die? Finally figured out the explanation. These are not days from Hell. We are actually in Hell. Hence: these are not blog posts. These are Dispatches from Hell.

Case in point: The least of today’s hassles, only because it’s a hassle left over from a week ago…I’ve tried twice to re-up my subscription to The New York Review of Books, one of my favorite broadsides. First time was my fault: I used the credit union’s bill-pay function, but paid for it from my personal account (which, oddly, did have the the NYRofB’s listed as a previous payee). Of late I’ve been making the S-corp pay for it.

That payment bounced. Why, I do not understand: what do they care which account pays for it? Ohhkay… Eventually they sent a desperate “Don’t Leave Us” ad in the snailmail. I replied to that by filling out the form and entering the S-corp’s AMEX account number. This no doubt would have worked if I hadn’t indulged in a moment of stupidity.

As you know, the ‘Hood is not the best of all possible neighborhoods. We’re inundated with drug-addicted transients, who support their habits with petty theft. Including mail theft.

The payment envelope in hand, I raced out the door to run a bunch of errands and get someplace on time. In a hurry, I really did NOT want to drive to the Post Office to deposit the thing in one of their mailboxes. That would entail waiting half my lifetime for the blightrail signal at the interesection of Conduit of Blight and Feeder Street E-W to turn green, then waiting the rest of my lifetime to get back across the damn blightrail tracks to get to my various destinations. So instead of traipsing to the PO for this one small item, I stuck it in the outgoing slot of the Fort Knox Mailbox and flipped up the red flag.

Bad move. Very stupid indeed.

Two or three days later, I went out to get the mail (it’s almost all advertising now, so there’s no hurry to pick it up) and noticed the red flag was still up. Whaaa? Did the mailman not come by? (He often doesn’t….)

Check to see if he’s failed to pick up the outgoing: no envelope in there. Days go by. A couple weeks go by. No payment at NYRofB’s.

Shit. That means someone has stolen the thing and now has my name, the name of my business, its address, and its AMEX credit card number. I wait a few more days to see if the payment goes through. Today I call NYRofB’s phone reps and they say they never heard of it. I need to pay the thing on my corporate AMEX card over the phone. Then I need to cancel the card and order a new one, ASAP.

But ASAP ain’t very AS…because I’m waiting on the PostalPerson to deliver a new personal AMEX card. Yes. Somehow I managed to LOSE a whole cardholder full of cards!!!! The personal AMEX card, the Safeway card, the new Medicare card with a new Medicare number on it (the one that doesn’t work at the pharmacy), the old Medicare card bearing my Social Security number….GONE, every one of them.

I believe they’re somewhere in the house, because I paid the AC guy to fix the thermostat and the leaking roof with my personal card, and I did not leave the house between the time he drove off down the road and the time I realized I couldn’t find that cardholder. Since I’ve habituated that locksmith for a good 12 or 15 years and Steven (locksmith dude) has worked for them for 7 years and he’s a fine upstanding workingman, I don’t believe he walked off with it. Without a doubt, I set it down in the house somewhere and managed to lose it…same as the pair of prescription glasses that got tangled up in a knitted bed throw and disappeared for three months.

Fortunately I have photocopies of the Medicare cards. And fortunately, I had the sense to black out the SS number on the old Medicare card. The AMEX card has been canceled and a new one is on the way, but the weekend coming up, I don’t expect “tomorrow” (no kidding: that is what she said!) to arrive much before Monday. And fortunately, my debit card, corporate AMEX card, and Costco cash cards are in a different card holder. Which is not, after all, lost. Yet.

So what other dispatches from Hell since I had to pay $40 out of pocket for a flu shot?

  • The dog got better off the fluconazole, then worse.
  • Dog continuing incontinent, I ask the new vet if they’ll test her urine for a UTI.
  • Wednesday after volunteer receptionist duty, I race the refrigerated pee up to 40th Street and Thunderbird and drop it off there. I drive up there through the rush-hour traffic, drive back in even worse traffic. Changing lanes to maneuver into place to turn right into the ‘Hood, I misjudge the length of a flatbed trailer being towed behind a pickup in the lane next to me and clip the goddamn thing. The driver doesn’t even blink. He doesn’t slow down, he most certainly doesn’t stop…I think he may not even have noticed that I bumped his trailer. My car sure did, though. Pulled over to find the front bumper was half pulled off, scratched and gouged, flying in the breeze. Shee-ut!
  • Back here, I walk in the door and find…NO Charley! He’s freaking GONE! A worker has been here in the afternoon; I’ve left strict orders not to let that dog slip out the back gate. But he can go in and out the dog door…dollars to donuts that’s exactly what he’s done. He’s old, he’s sick, and now he’s LOST. Try to reach said worker: no answer. Totally, utterly panicked. My son is supposedly in Colorado, which is why his dog is here. I think maybe he got back while I was out and picked up his dog, but he won’t answer his phone, either. Neighbor texts him (I have no cell phone). No answer. I am in utter despair. After a bit I calm down enough to notice that even though the dog’s food is still sitting on the kitchen counter, the dog’s leash and collar are gone. SOMEONE took the dog on purpose…at least he’s not roaming around the neighborhood and ambling across Conduit of Blight Boulevard.
  • Eventually the kid calls and says yeah, he picked up the dog but was too tired from driving in from southern Colorado to bother to leave me a “thanks for keeping my dog” note.
  • Now late for choir, I feed the dogs and fly out the door without any dinner of my own.
  • Get home about 9:15 p.m. and go to enter the (locked) office.
  • It’s been raining for a day and a half. The solid-core door is swollen tight. The key goes in but I can’t turn it. I get a wrench, try to open the thing, and…SHEAR THE KEY OFF level. with the fucking deadbolt! All my computers, all my financial stuff, all my credit cards, all my cash, even my cheesy little clamshell phone are locked behind that door.
  • Call the locksmith’s emergency line. He says he’s sure he can fix it. For a hundred bucks he’ll do it right now (pushing 10 p.m.). I say if he’s sure it can be opened, I’ll be able to sleep at night and so can wait till tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll be wanting to break the front window and climb in to get my computer, which I’d druther not do.
  • Next day have real difficulty getting them to come over — but because I’m an old customer who’s spent a lot of dollars at their shop, they squeeze me in.
  • Steven comes over, takes a screwdriver to the thing, flips out the stump of the key: takes him all of 30 seconds. I’m in love. This love affair costs me 70 bucks. And now I have to go take the fancy key over to the shop to get a new one made. That’ll be another 20 bucks. Later. But not much later.
  • Somewhere in here I lose my credit-card holder. I search from pillar to post, empty out the trash cans, go through drawers, look under the furniture: no luck. I’m sure it’s in the house, probably, but when I can’t find it the next day figure to be safe I’d better cancel the AMEX card. Two or three days without a personal charge card. Yeah.
  • Insurance guy says I’m in luck. Because he bought me a “prime” policy, I have a one-accident-no-fault deal: get out of jail free. AND because I haven’t tried to kill any of my fellow homicidal drivers lately, I also have a zero deductible. He asks me to get estimates from a body shop but suggests that if it doesn’t cost much it may be better to foot the bill and not let the company know about this little fender bender. My son, also an insurance guy, recommends taking the money and running: he thinks I should go to the best body shop in town (which is 20 miles from my house) and have them do a decent job fixing it.
  • The vet’s office calls to say something’s out of whack with Cassie’s pee and they want me to bring her in Saturday morning. I say “wrong”? Like what? Well, like it might be a UTI. Ooookayyyy…
  • I take the car to my mechanic to check for damage under the hood. They find no structural or engine damage, AND they manage to wrest the bumper back into place and secure it with the car’s clips and a few extra bolts. It now looks dead normal except for a scrape on one side, as though maybe I got too close to a guard wall. The men of Chuck’s Auto also opine that it would be best to hide this incident from the insuror. However, they do find a nick in the tire’s sidewall and recommend replacing the tire soon.
  • I call my insurance guy with this report and with the advice from my son. He reiterates that his thinking coincides with the mechanics’ but he will support me whatever I decide to do. (He’s not a sales agent: he’s a broker.)
  • Cassie seems to be getting better. By yesterday I observe that she’s about back to normal and surmise I must have been right that she didn’t have Valley fever.
  • At 3:30 this morning she wakes up and pees in the bed before I can set her on the floor. In doing so, she manages to miss the double layer of pee pads I’ve laid down on the bed: three more loads of laundry!
  • In a flash I haul off the sheets, the bed pad, the blanket, and the dog blanket. Fortunately this five-layer barrier keeps the dog pee off the mattress. Dazed with exhaustion, I toss the sheets and blanket into the washer and start the thing running.
  • Cannot sleep, so go back to reading 8000 words of Korean-accented scholarly writing.
  • Somewhere in here it dawns on me: this lesion that developed on my hand, the one on the same arm that got the ferocious Shingrix shot, is not a zoster pox. Noooo….Y’know what that is? THAT little fucker is ringworm. Look it up and find ringworm image after ringworm image that looks just like it. And ringworm being not a parasite but a fungal infection, y’know what the treatment is? Ohhhh yes! Fluconozale, the same damn stuff that made my dog so sick I thought she was going to die! TWICE!
  • Shit. Well, you can get a topical treatment over the counter. The standard course of treatment, if you believe the Internet (yeah!), is first to try to get rid of it with an OTC ointment. If that doesn’t work, then you move on to poisoning yourself.
  • Eventually I go out to move the bedding from the washer to the dryer and…can you guess? Somehow I’ve missed two of the pee pads! The inside of the washer is now chuckablock full of shredded, wet puffed-up paper stuffing crap! HOLY shit!!!!!!!!!
  • I go inside to finish reading the client’s paper.
  • Eventually go back out to the garage. Realize I can’t put this stuff in the dryer. Haul each piece out into the driveway and shake, shake, shake, shake, snap, shake, snap, SHAKE, shake, shake. This covers the driveway with snow-like stuff but doesn’t get all the crud off the bedding. Hang the sheets, blanket, and mattress pad on the clotheslines, hoping most of the rest of the stuff will shake off when it’s dry.
  • Clean out the washer. Yeah, right.
  • Take the shop-vac to the washer. This clogs the shop-vac but apparently gets most of the crud out of the washer, except for the stuff I have to dig out with a coat-hanger wire. Use the rest of the vacuum’s capacity to pick up the white snow off the driveway and the garage floor.
  • Haul the vacuum tub and two baskets of garbage out to the alley trash bin. On the way, pick up a bum’s fast-food cup out of my yard. On the way, observe that the mess the city water guys made of my front landscaping is pretty well fixed, after I shoveled and broomed gravel back in place. Hope they didn’t fuck up the plumbing under there. But don’t have much hope.
  • Brush out and wash the shop-vac’s clogged filter; set it aside to dry.
  • Finish the Korean professor’s paper. Interesting guy, interesting subject. Learn a lot about international law on freedom of expression and journalistic privilege. That’s good, anyway. Run it past a prospective intern, am impressed with the kid’s response. Ship the edits & clean copy back to the client.
  • Decide I cannot bring myself to do the Costco run that was planned for today.
  • Realize that isn’t gonna do me any good, because I still have to go out to a Walgreen’s and try to find the anti-fungus stuff (miconozale) to treat the frantically itchy lesion on my hand.

And so, away. Let’s see what I can do to my fellow homicidal drivers on the way…

There, but for…

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…the grace of God!

Ever have one of those experiences when nothing happens to you and that causes you to think thank You, God?

This is different from a close call. In a close call, something does happen to you. An event almost does you in, but you manage either to dodge out of the way or to survive without permanent injury. This is a close call:

I’m about 21. I’m driving through the cotton fields on a two-lane road, headed from a suburb into downtown Phoenix, there to start my day as a receptionist for a law firm. As usual, I’m flying low: around 50 to 60 mph. Two lanes. Country road. In a new 1967 Ford Fairlane that was a certifiable lemon.

As I’m tooling along listening to the radio (The mornin’ sun is risin’/Like a red rubber ballll…), some guy in a pickup pulls off a dirt side road, right in front of me. I’m gonna hit him. My mother told me to watch out for country boys on side roads! Why didn’t I listen?

I slam on the brakes.

The damn car LEAPS into the air (no exaggeration!) and lands in the middle of the oncoming lane.

And yes, there is an oncoming car in the oncoming lane. The driver looks panicked.

At that moment, everything shifts into slow motion. I seem to have half an hour to think about this and contemplate my choices. I can…

• jerk the car back into my lane. But the guy who pulled out in front of me is now right beside me, driver-side door to passenger-side door. If I move into the right lane, I will hit him. The recoil may push us both into the oncoming car…

• stay where I am and head-on the third driver. Not an option….

• at around 50 mph, pull off onto the left-hand shoulder, a strip of dirt that borders an irrigation canal. This may cause my car to roll and I could find myself upside down in the irrigation ditch. But maybe not…

I choose option c) as the least disastrous. Miraculously, the ground is hard enough to support my car’s laboring tires, and miraculously, the car does not spin out of control. The guy in the oncoming car whistles past me. The guy in the pickup proceeds on down the road.

That is a close call because an element of choice occurred after the event began. You’re not saved just by the grace of God, but by a combination of your own volition and God’s grace.

A true thank-You-God moment may be influenced by choices you made before the event occurs, but your escape has nothing to do with choices you make during and after the event.

Example: One of my clients was an economist who had a career as an international banker. He traveled a lot in his business. One day he was flying into a large South American city, where he was to meet with another banking executive about some high-end business matter. Somewhere along the line, his plane was held up, so they were running several hours late coming to their destination.

As they circled around to come in for a landing, he looked out the window and noticed smoke coming out of a large high-rise. Of interest, but he didn’t think much about it.

Once he got into town, though, he discovered the smoking building housed his guy’s office. The fire had broken out a few hours before. And, like many buildings in many third-world countries, it was inadequately designed for fire safety: it had few or no usable fire escapes. The guy had been trapped in his upper-floor office, and he died.

Now there you have a thank You-God moment. It was pure, raw luck that my client hadn’t been in the office when the fire started: “a few hours before” was right when the two men had scheduled their meeting. Nothing that either person did could have changed the outcome. The only reason my client survived was that by random chance he happened to get on a plane that was delayed.

I always figure I’ve had a thank You-God moment when I come across a major car wreck, because….if I’d been there 15 minutes or half-an-hour earlier, that could’ve been me in one of those cars. Indeed, I thought I was enjoying one such this very morning when I came across a three-block long back-up at the intersection of two of the busiest arterials in the central city.

The cops had shut both roads down about a quarter-mile in each direction from the wreck. People were winding their way through residential neighborhoods in order to get on their way. Luckily, I contrived to turn left out of a tiny residential lane onto Arterial East-West and continue on my way to the veterinarian’s.

As it turns out, this also wasn’t a true tY-G moment, because no one was killed or even hurt seriously. The only reason the cops were making SUCH a BFD about it was that one of their SUVs was involved. Some guy had sideswiped the cop (?? how hard is it to notice a gigantic white tank with blue stripes all around it and a pair of red bubble-gum machines on top???) and caused the police vehicle to roll.

This happened at 7:00 this morning. I left my house at 10:44, so it was about 10:50 or so by the time I reached the scene of the drama. They had that intersection shut down in four directions for almost four hours!

Forgodsake, they clear out fatalities faster than that.

I surely have had plenty of real tY-G moments, when I and my fellow homicidal drivers missed a monstrously fatal disaster by a matter of minutes. Or even seconds.

How about yourself? Got any good thank You-God stories?

Driverless Cars: Brave(r) New World?

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The Economist is holding forth about the future Brave New World of driverless electric vehicles. This week’s special report contains five articles on the subject, each more effervescent about the future than the last.

That august publication, ever progressive and ever enthusiastic about futuristic improvements to our lives, predicts a fundamental change in the texture of our society once autonomous (self-driving) cars take hold big-time. As the face of Western culture changed with the advent of the automobile, so it will change when cars can drive themselves. Strip malls, for example, will disappear, for stores will “come to you” with automated delivery of your orders. Urban cores, already plenty dense, will grow even denser as the need to provide parking space for commuters and residents disappears.

Suburbs will become “garden cities” once the need to park residents’ vehicles goes away. People will use the streets to walk on, not to drive on. (Uh huh…and these wondrous shared vehicles? They’ll fly?) Garages and driveways will be replaced by gardens.

And (the editors hope) people will no longer feel the need to own a vehicle at all. Everyone will get around on a combination of ride-hailing and public transit. If the light-rail that takes you downtown (elbow-to-elbow with your friendly drug-addicted panhandler) doesn’t go right to your office’s door, you’ll simply hail an Uber to pick you up at the station and take you the rest of the way.

Roads will, they allow, remain congested: crowds of commuters will be replaced by crowds of delivery vehicles. So if you ride from Outer Gardenville to your job in downtown Rabbit Warren City, it will take you just as long to get there in the rosy future as it does now. Well, probably longer. But buck up! You’ll be able to work — or better  yet, sleep — the whole way!

How d’you like them beer and skittles?

Seriously: Are you looking forward to this, or does it sound like Dystopia Redux to you?

As a practical matter, they may be right that when fleets of driverless ride-sharing vehicles become commonplace, a lot of people will want to shed the expense, hassle, and space demands of private cars. And the things probably will be very expensive, indeed. Plus to keep people off roads, legislators may inflict tolls — some would like to do that right now. So the trade-off for convenience, safety, and mobility in old age could be a pretty pricey ride.

And convenience may not be one of the benefits the price purchases. The cars may be so expensive that most people (Economist editorialists hope) will be forced to rely on ride-sharing services.

Consider: if you have to call a cab every time you want to go to work or run to the grocery store or take the kids to soccer, you will have to factor in substantial wait times. And your calculation will be influenced by a whole slew of variables:

  • The day of the week
  • Time of day
  • The season of the year, if you live in a tourist destination
  • Weather conditions
  • Major-league athletic events
  • Whether any civic shindigs are going on
  • What roads are torn up
  • How far a vehicle will have to come to reach you, and from what direction
  • How much it will cost to get from point A to point B

And probably a whole lot of other eventualities I’m not thinking of just now.

Then there’s the question of whether you really want to “share” a ride with everybody and his/her little brother, sister, and long-lost cousin. These vehicles, absent a custodian to ride herd on the Great Unwashed, are likely to be very dirty. The last rider lit up a cigarette: you get a ride that stinks. People will chow down on smelly fast foods and leave the wrappers on the floors. Mothers will change their babies’ diapers and leave the dirties under the seat. Drunks will vomit, leaving you a mess to enjoy on your way to the baseball game. Drug addicts will leave needles for your kids to play with.

Additionally, the companies that operate the vehicles will be able to track your every move, and they will have a centralized set of records available to anyone who can hack it, subpoena it, or pay enough for it. Privacy is already a scarce commodity in our own Brave New World. In the BNW of the endless rent-a-ride, it will be extinct.

Many people may consider true autonomy — owning one’s own vehicle rather than having to rent every ride — to be worth even a pretty exorbitant cost.

So what will happen? The roads will grow far more congested. If every store and restaurant converts to the Amazon model and every purchase you make is delivered to your home in a self-driving truck, then we’ll all be sharing the roads with that many more vehicles. This extra burden of vehicles will crowd roads and slow down traffic enough. Add to that the likelihood that a car that knows what’s best for you will move v-e-r-r-r-y slowly, and voilà! A drive that takes you 20 minutes now will take you 40 minutes or an hour in the balmy future.

Personally, I would very much welcome a self-driving vehicle: it would mean I could stay in my home until I die (with any luck), and hugely improve the odds against my having one day to check myself into a warehouse for old folks. BUT…

  • Only if it were my vehicle.
  • Only if it and the roads were available when I need them, not at some regulator’s behest.
  • Only if the cost were less than the cost of moving into an old-folkerie.
  • Only if it didn’t jack up the cost of my  power bills to unaffordable levels — i.e., more than the $40 to $60 a month I pay for gasoline now.
  • Only if it were as reliable as a Toyota.
  • Only if it were not tracking me and reporting my comings and goings to a central server.
  • Only if…only if…only if….

Communal living has never appealed to me. Communal riding doesn’t look much better. I do not play nice with the other kids and do not want to share…let’s be frank about that. And I’ll bet that most Americans, deep in their hearts, feel the same way. That, after all, would be why we have sprawling suburbs of single-family homes and vast herds of sheeple driving to work over bumper-to-bumper freeways.

It’s a trade-off. And the choices Americans have already made say something about how they’ll receive the scheme to “improve” private transportation with fleets of driverless ride-shares.

How about you? Ready for the brave new driverless world?

 

Side Gigs: Ride-sharing? Does your insurer know?

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So if you have nerves of steel or you live someplace where the traffic isn’t as batsh!t as the Phoenix area’s, the idea of renting out your car’s back seat to Uber or Lyft riders sounds kind of appealing. Presumably you could set your own hours, and for relatively little effort pick up a few bucks to help make your life more tolerable.

Okay, hiring out as a rideshare driver is not everyone’s cuppa. But if the idea appeals to you, think it through carefully.

There’s something you need to know: your auto insurance will not cover you, your riders, or your vehicle if you get in an accident while you’re driving for hire. And while those highly lucrative companies that make their profits by treating you as an employee but claiming you’re not an employee may tell you that they’ll cover damages incurred while working in their hire, it ain’t necessarily so.

Friend of mine recently got into an accident while driving for Lyft. He did not understand that he needed to buy commercial insurance to cover himself, his car, and his passengers, which can cost ten times as much as regular personal insurance. Apparently the ride-share companies now claim, in a vague way, that they offer some degree of coverage, but whether they really do and to what degree is unclear. Not only is your regular personal insurer unlikely to cover your liabilities, when they find out you were driving for Uber or Lyft, they’re likely to cancel your policy. At that point, you will be left seriously up the creek…

Friend reported the accident to Lyft, whose representative told him to try to collect from his own insurance. He had been told (he says) that Lyft would cover accidents that happen while the car is contracted to the company. Supposedly, Uber and Lyft will cover medical expenses and other damages up to $1 million, even if an uninsured or underinsured driver is involved, if you’re on the way to pick up a fare or carrying paying passengers. But since ordinary auto insurance does not cover costs incurred while ride-sharing for pay, what Lyft was quietly asking him to do was to defraud his insurance company by neglecting to mention the circumstances. Unfortunately, he’s the type who cannot tell a lie.

Of course, his own insurer told him to take a flying leap.

So he returned to Lyft: they refuse to answer his calls. He is now stuck for the cost of repairing his own vehicle, for medical and other costs incurred by the customer, and for costs suffered by the other car’s driver and passengers.

And, he notes, the Lyft gig never paid enough even to cover the ordinary depreciation on his vehicle.

In some (but not all) states, you can buy rideshare insurance. These policies generally cost less than full-blown commercial coverage, but…one wonders.

Even if you have rideshare coverage, you must let your regular policy issuer know. If you do not, they’re likely to cancel your insurance.

But think about this: if my friend is right and net profit from gig taxi-driving doesn’t even cover the depreciation on your car, it certainly isn’t going to cover the cost of extra auto insurance. Car insurance isn’t cheap to begin with; it’s sure not going to get cheaper when you’re using your vehicle to drive strangers around through city traffic.

The take-home message? If you’ve got any common sense, look for some other ways to make a few extra bucks. Mowing lawns might be good. Cleaning pools is said to be lucrative. Painting houses? Cleaning? Anything but ride-sharing.

 

Migraine Morning

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 Like I have nothing better to do… Woke up this morning with the needle-stab-in-the-eye of ocular neuritis (or whatever it is: it’s never been diagnosed satisfactorily), swiftly followed by a fine migraine. These amusing headaches can usually be discouraged by a couple mugsful of coffee strong enough to hold a spoon upright. And yea verily, so it has proven: two hours later the pain has receded to the “mild” level, though otherwise I feel like I’ve been run over by the proverbial truck.

This is not needed in the midst of the various ongoing hassles.

The painter is still holding forth, and of course with furniture & plants moved around and outdoor watering systems derailed, that creates some background chaos.

My son is headed off for a long-planned road trip through Colorado. But with one change of plans: the dog. Since he no longer can take Charley in a car, he’s bringing the hound over here for me to babysit over the next ten or 12 days.

So…yes. Our doughty painter will have to navigate around not one, not two, but three dogs, one of whom weighs 90 pounds and two of whom are given to heading for Yuma at a dead run if a gate is left open.

I’ve pretty well got him trained to shut the gate behind himself when feasible and me trained to check to be sure the gates are shut before letting the corgis out.

But…. Among other things, Charley is given to the doggywobbles. He really needs to have the dog door open — normally I leave it locked shut because Cassie won’t use it and the burglars will. So this is going to present some difficulties over the next few days.

Our beading friends are having a beading party at my house on Saturday. I’m looking forward to it, because it’s a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. However…

Having to clean the house to the standards of half-a-dozen nice Catholic wymmen around an active painting job and three dog-dune shedders is not going to be an easy trick.

Meanwhile, yesterday I bought some delicious-looking hummus at Costco while I was running errands for myself and my aging friends — one of our beaders is genuinely hypersensitive to gluten (not in the faddish sense, either). Great snack for her and everyone else. But…heh…while purchasing this little find I failed to think…ohhhhh….hummus! Must have something to dip in it!

So now I’ll have to go back out — around the dogs and the painter — to pick up some tortilla chips and some veggies. Ugh.

§ § §

Kid in, Dog in, Kid out. Half an hour of busy flapping, conveniently coinciding with Painter Guy’s arrival. I forgot to put down a second giant bowl of dog water…momentarily must get up and do that…but will wait until the sweat I’ve worked up subsides.

Dog seems more or less OK, though he definitely was hyperventilating from the car ride. If he has the collywobbles (as we’re told he does), it didn’t stop him from laying a fine coherent pile in the backyard. Oh well…I hadn’t picked up the corgi mounds yet.

Son showed up in a gigantic very-late-model red SUV marked “JEEP.”

I say, you’re planning to drive to Colorado in a freaking Jeep?????

He says he borrowed it from his father because his car, a reliable Toyota, isn’t big enough to hold all three guys and their camping gear.

I say, “Your father bought a freaking Jeep? I thought he was smarter than that.”

He says, “It’s been recalled four times and has broken down twice.”

Oh dear God. I hope one of those guys has a cell phone carrier that covers Monument Valley and the Navajo.

Holy, holy, holy sh!t.

What on earth could have possessed DXH to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee? For cryin’ out loud, the damn things are unsafe at any speed. WHAT could he have been thinking?

Is it too early to break out the bourbon? Surely the sun must be over the yardarm in Shanghai by now…

§ § §

In smarter climes, the painter is doing an awesome job on the Funny Farm. And he made an amazing discovery. At some point along the line — probably six or eight years ago — I had the out-of-favor Bila the Bosnian Painter repaint the house’s west wall, the same color as the rest of the shack. This is a desert-dust brown dubbed “Baked Potato” down at Dunn Edwards.

So Painter Guy, for whom Dunn Edwards paints are presently out of favor, took the stuff over to HD and had five gallons of matching Behr exterior flat whipped up. “Baked Potato,” as it develops, is very popular in these parts — we could call it “HOA Greige,” and so the HD guys are experienced at concocting it.

He hauls this massive amount of paint back here and applies it to the west wall.

And hot damn! IT’S NOT THE COLOR! It does not match the HOA brown on that west wall.

He of course assumes HD screwed up, so he loads the tankard of paint back in his truck and flies back to the HD at 67th and Bell, in a state of high dudgeon.

While this is going on, I’m out running around the city buying groceries for myself and my aged friends, and then toting their share of the haul to their house. So the poor guy is pretty much on his own here.

At HD the paint department guys inform him that it IS “Baked Potato,” and there must be some mistake on this end.

He is beside himself. He now thinks he’s ordered five expensive gallons of high-test exterior paint…in the wrong color. The cost of which, he figures, is coming out of his pay. Worse, he’s convinced himself that I am going to HATE it.

Well. No. When I get  back and see the actual “Baked Potato,” I say, “There’s nothing wrong with that. I dunno why this doesn’t match, because Bila gave me the can of paint he used and that’s what we schlepped to HD for matching. Don’t worry about it. Paint the house with this.”

Now he proceeds for awhile, and then he resurfaces. “Take a look at this,” says he.

When he applies the paint to the other paintable wall, on the east side, it matches perfectly.

WTF?

I have no idea what hijinks Bila got up to, but when he painted the west wall, he used a different color from the paint that was on the rest of the house.

Bila was fast and cheap, but one gets what one pays for: he really did a half-assed job. This guy has climbed up and filled the siding where it’s split and cracked, and, far more to the point, he’s gotten down on hands and knees and scraped and filled the cracked footing around the slab! Both of those are marvelous fun jobs…and it’s 105 out there.

How glad are we that we’re NOT doing this job?

And speaking of WTF???…

Charley and Cassie go freaking batsh!t when Painter Guy climbs up on the roof. So persistently batsh!t are they that I set aside the effort to make WordPress insert those images there the way I want, not the way it wants, walk out to the living room, and peer out the front window.

Migawd, there’s a cop parked in front of the teacher’s house. I know the family — Dad, Wife (who works at his school as a teacher’s aide), and four kids — left at the usual hour this morning because I heard them climbing into their cars and driving away.

Never a dull moment around the Funny Farm.