Coffee heat rising

Life in the ‘Hood: Stay or Flee?

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Summer storms blowing in, along with a few gangsters and fruitcakes…

Didn’t notice this exchange on the neighborhood Facebook page yesterday evening:

***

Police website…
7:25 p.m.
August 13
Report of Shots Fired
North Feeder Street NW and West Feeder Street EW
[Map with dramatic visuals…
[This is one block from my house]
GV(Neighbor): I am at 18th and Feeder E/W, didn’t hear anything. Hope everyone is safe!
I can hear a helicopter right now , its circling right down south from my house
Funny: At Side Street and Funny Farm Drive, also heard nothing. Helicopters are hardly noticed, they’re so ubiquitous. Any news on what this shenanigan entailed?
***

….a-n-n-n-d…nary another word.

Could’ve been firecrackers, I reckon. We have a lot of nitwits around here who like to set off fireworks, which, annoyingly enough, are legal to sell anywhere in the county. I would’ve been swimming at that hour. Still would have been way too hot for an evening doggy-walk. As a practical matter, I don’t recall if we went out last night at all. But if we did, it wouldn’t have been until 9 or 10 p.m. By then it was raining, though.

***

Now as evening ambles in, we have a little melodramatic wind (not enough to do much damage, that I can see) and a sky full of dark gray and dimly white clouds that started out as thunderheads but now are pretty well shredded and turned into high overcast. If it rains tonight, my bet is that it won’t be much.

What a place! Why do I stay here?

Probably because there’s really no place much better, at least not that I can afford. In Paradise Valley, entire neighborhoods are fenced and gated off, with private security guards roaming the streets 24/7. Ain’t that reassuring for the rich and the tasteless?

Fountain Hills is probably quieter, but it’s as far east as you can get in the Valley, halfway to freakin’ Payson. Personally, I don’t find it inviting. Most of the houses are cheaply built — stick and styrofoam, tracty-looking. The place is lily-white and IMHO devoid of character. It’s a long way from shopping and even further from the folks I know.

Sun City is calm: haunted by the peace of the mortuary. It’s not entirely free of crime — some fairly eye-popping shockers have occurred out there. And those houses, too, are cheaply built tract numbers: better construction than Fountain Hills (most of the S.C. homes are built of block) but devoid of insulation. People who choose to stay there over the summer will fir out the exterior walls, lay on insulation, and then plaster over the top of it. So you get the effect of a typical stick-and-styrofoam tract house, only the structure has in effect two walls: one of cinderbock and one of styrofoam-backed plaster. To my mind, it’s a depressing place to live, made even more so by the fact that my poor mother died there after my father retired and dragged her out to the Arizona desert.

I’m fairly sure she expected to retire to Southern California — Long Beach or points south. She wanted to be in the Bay Area, but the cost of living there was well out of the question. Betcha she about fainted when my father stumbled upon Del Webb’s ghetto for old folks. 😀

Actually, I believe she liked Sun City. One time she remarked to me how much she loved the screened back patio where she could sit all morning over coffee and listen to the doves and quail hooting. It really was very, very quiet out there.

Heh. While yeah, I could do without the helicopter, siren, and lightrail serenade from Conduit of Blight Blvd and Gangbanger’s Way, I’m afraid I like the sound of children playing and teenagers carrying on.

Truth to tell, if my son were not here, I very likely would be long gone.

But..where?

Well, some friends have moved to Utah, the Provo area. But I feel no desire to live there. Another friend: gone to Portland. Brrrrrr!

Santa Fe is extremely cool (culturally, that is), but from what others have told me, its ambience isn’t a helluva lot safer than the Hood’s. Don’t know anyone there. Can’t work up a lot of enthusiasm for decamping to someplace where I’d have to build a whole new life.

Prescott is nice. I do like Prescott. But…. It snows in the winter. Gets hot enough to need air-conditioning in the winter. And the gringos have discovered it, big time: hordes of immigrants from the Valley and from California have flooded into the place. Hence: out of the frying pan…

View from the Mogollon Rim near Payson

Mr. & Mrs. Fireman sold their manse in the West Valley and moved up to Payson, where they bought a truly beautiful home on a nice expanse of forested land. They seem to like it there very much. Main problem: not enough infrastructure. They have to drive into town for shopping, and even to take the dog to a vet.

In Tucson, there’s an area called Oro Valley, spreading northward along the west flank of the Catalina Mountains. It’s very pleasant. And it has the advantage of being close to a major medical center, to a fairly arty city with a large, established university (cultural life!!!), to shopping, and to a major regional airport. I suppose if I were going to decamp to someplace where I don’t know anybody and where I’d have to build a whole new lifestyle, that would be the foremost candidate.

Ohhh well…. Long as I’m livin’ in a freestanding house on a quarter-acre of land with a pool, I reckon I might as well be swimming in that pool. And so, awayyy!

The View from the Steam Cooker

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Incredibly humid. Not all that hot at 5:40 a.m., objectively speaking, but so wet you’re dripping with sweat after you’ve walked the dog half a block.

That does nothing to put a leash on the morning Doggy Jamboree, though. Ruby wants to go to the park, which for the human entails a PITA of the first water: a mile of being yanked and pulled and jerked around, hauling the pooch away from dog fights and idiots simpering “ohhh don’t worry, they jes’ wanna plaaayyyy.”

And yes, I do know: Ruby behaves like that because she’s not adequately leash-trained. Those who’ve been around FaM for awhile will recall that I got her just as I was being wheeled away to have both boobs chopped off. Convalescing from that adventure a) took awhile and b) did not leave me much in the mood for wrestling with a dog. Consequently, she has grown up sweet, charming, cute, adorable, and utterly devoid of leash manners. And now that I’m old, I feel no more inclined to wrestle with leash-training than I did when I was enjoying invalidism.

Decide instead to roam north and west, staying in the low-rent section of the ‘Hood. And alas, “low-rent” is how it’s beginning to look: yard after yard smothered in weeds, some of the crops knee-high. The house owned (still owned?) by the jerk who used to try to pick fist-fights with the mentally challenged guy across the street apparently had an attic fire. Unclear whether anyone is living there, but nothing has been done to repair the holes in the charred roof and attic walls.

Huge thunderheads have built up in the northwest: they look like they’re over Yarnell or maybe over Wickenberg. That’s weird: usually those kinds of storms come in from the southeast, blowing in from the Gulf of Mexico.

Wunderground reports major flooding in Las Vegas, which is sorta vaguely in the Yarnellish direction…but it seems unlikely that we could see clouds over Vegas from this far away. Just now, sez Wunderground, it’s 94 here with a predicted high of 104; 38% chance of rain.

Our neighbor’s pipe-installing dudes are lumbering back and forth out there in their truck, apparently lost. Must be a new driver or crew…they were down the street the other day heaving around in the heat. Nothing like a little plumbing crisis under a 105-degree sun, eh?

Stagger home. Tumble into pond. Dog has a frenzy.

Ruby hates, hates, HATES it when the Human gets into the pool. She barks and screams and yells and charges back and forth outside the gate, totally frantic. Guess having fallen in the drink a couple of times herself, she thinks I need to be rescued. ASAP. So…if I’m in a hurry and don’t feel like cornering the dog and locking her up, that kinda puts the eefus on the morning dip.

***

And now the dog is fed, the human is fed, the dishes are washed, the garbage is hauled out, the random trash is picked up out of the alley, the email is read and answered, the sheets are dried and folded, another load of laundry is in the washer, the yard dude is summoned to clean up the weeds and trim the tree limb off the neighbor’s roof, and the human…is going back to bed.

Weather, Arizona-style

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Yes, Virginia: there IS a weatherman in Arizona.

Actually, quite a few of them. Arizona has three (at least) climate zones: low (hot hot hot!) desert, plateau (temperate in summer, cool enough for maybe some light snow in the winter), and mountain (pleasant in the summer and colder than a by-god in the winter, festooned by the occasional blizzard). Lovely Phoenix is, as you no doubt have guessed by now, in the accursed low desert, Death Valley-like in summertime.

And yea verily, it has been hotter than the Hubs here, reaching figures above 112 off and on. That’s for June and July.

Come August, come the so-called “monsoon,” a rainy season caused by a shift in prevailing winds that blows humid, hot air up from the Gulf of Mexico and gives birth to towering thunderheads and violent local rainstorms. Just now, for example, it’s 8 p.m. Outdoor temp is 98°; humidity a mere 15%. Rain not predicted, at least not for this evening, despite thunderheads all around the Valley’s perimeter.

I’ve been letting the AC keep it at around 78 inside the house. Apparently that’s a bit too balmy: just got a “balmy” bill from the power company: $345.71.

Lovely.

I’ll probably have to draw that down from Fidelity, since the checking account is already running low, what with the exorbitant gasoline bills. Pisseth me offeth. It’s 81 in the master bedroom. A breezy 79 in the middle (guest) bedroom, which is directly under the air conditioning unit and so gets air fresh out of the fridge.

If I had any sense, I’d decamp to the bed in there. But not only do I not have any sense, but the dog and I do not fit well on a single twin bed. So far I haven’t accidentally kicked her off in my sleep, but that’s an imminent hazard.

Turn the ceiling fan to “shamal,” and you get a  nice little breeze in here…or, some might say, a cyclone. Not very restful, though it does create the illusion of a slightly cooler temperature.

Hm. Speaking of shamals, in Dhahran, just up the road from where we used to live on the /s/ lovely Persian Gulf, it’s 6 a.m. just now: 94 degrees out of doors; 33% humidity.  Ah, what a garden spot! Makes Arizona look like a temperate paradise.

Which it is, most of the time. Dhahran is not, most of the time.

Never a Freakin’ Dull Moment…

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DepositPhoto; Rainy Weather © dnaumoidSo….how is it possible for the day to be soooo busy before 7:30 in the morning? 

Incredibly, the Dog’s human managed to sleep all the way through till nigh unto 5 a.m. which of late represents some kind of record.

It’s been raining all night; thunderstorms and more rain predicted. Still…at 5:00 it’s relatively cool, which is an unfamiliar mercy. “Relatively,” though, is a relative term… 😀

Human slams around getting dressed. Dog barks: someone’s in back. Grab a steak knife, peer out the back door, and…by damn! There’s New Pool Dude out there,

Holy mackerel.

Well, you can’t blame him for wanting to get through the day’s pool jobs before the sun comes up, that’s for sure!

Bridle up the Dog: out the door. 

Even though it’s relatively(!)(?) cool, the air is SOOO muggy and warm it’s a swamp out there.

The cops are buzzing Gangbanger Central to the north of us…never a good sign. Is it safe to forge ahead? Hm. Consider the options:

  • Delaying the doggy-walk means canceling the doggy-walk, because it will soon be too hot to stroll around outdoors.
  • Proceeding with the doggy-walk means taking one’s chances with the Drama of the Day.
  • Heading south from the Shack means skirting the park, which at this hour will be overrun by idiots with their dogs off the leash, risking a dog fight.
  • On the other hand, any bums who chose to sleep out in the rain last night will be getting out of bed (as it were) and stumbling around. If this has meaning, I dunno what it is. Other than that I need a German shepherd, not a 23-pound corgi.

Oh WTF: into Upper Richistan it is!

The cop copter is north of Gangbanger’s Way, which suggests the scene of the drama is either north of the canal (meaning they’re after perps) or right along the canal (meaning they may be trying to locate a candidate for drowning or they may be chasing a perp who’s lurking in or near the canal). In that case, it’s relatively safe on the surface streets here in the ’Hood. Maybe.

Dogwalk is mercifully uneventful. Most of the Five Ayem Horde are absent, presumably staying in because of the wet weather. Good. We cover a couple miles and return to the Funny Farm without getting rained upon, kidnapped by a fleeing desperado, or questioned by suspicious cops.

WonderAccountant, who kindly hired on to do the bookkeeping that I’m getting too senile to manage accurately, is supposed to come over today to tackle this month’s chore. Despite sleeping most of the night, I’m bushed (at 8:30 in the morning) and wish to go back to bed.

Ah: on the calendar: W.A. “early afternoon”…thank the heavens!

Yesterday it was off to a new Dental Type, blowing away the afternoon. Orthodontist…alas, not a candidate for New Dentist. She says the titanium stake in the upper jaw is NOT infected. Therefore the eye thing does not signal a more serious issue. Probably the injury that instigated the eye cyst was the slicing up of the nose to remove the suspected melanoma.

That’s something, anyway.

She recommended an actual dentist, not too far away. I may call that one and make an appointment to get acquainted. However, I’ve already established an acquaintance with the WonderAccountants’ dentist, who as far as I can tell is excellent.

The Baltimore dude who came out West and bought our beloved long-time dentist’s practice does not make the cut. Not by a long shot. Interestingly, when you look him up online locally, it appears that he’s opening a bunch of offices on the west side, apparently with the intention of recruiting low-income patients on welfare.

Is there a REASON why there’s never a dull moment around this place???????

Dental Insurance in Retirement…or No?

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Since retiring from my job at Arizona State University, I’ve gone bare when it comes to dental insurance. It’s a risk, obviously: betting on the “not come” rather than the “come.” My teeth have always been excellent. My mother died in her 60s; her mother died in her 40s, and her grandmother also died fairly young: hence, one could lay a bet that I will outlive my teeth.

I retired at about the same time a dear friend did. She and her husband chose not to enroll in the state’s plan for dental insurance. Why? Well….

The Arizona state dental plan doesn’t cover everything. For $8.52 a month, Cigna tells you you’re insured but actually covers very little; at $35 a month, the “premium” plan it actually covers things. Their fee schedule is so complicated that She Who Is Not an Accountant can’t even begin to figure it out, but it would appear the coverage doesn’t apply to everything. But following my friends’ logic, I chose not to sign up for Arizona’s retiree dental plan because my friends — one of whom was the head of the Arizona Department of Gaming, fairly large in the Bigwig Club — calculated that over a predictable lifetime, most of us would end up paying the same or more in insurance premiums than we would pay out of pocket for typical old-folks’ dental and orthodontic care (including extractions and all the other fun and games that come with decreptitude).

I’ve been retired since December 2009. So let’s start at January 2010… This is August 2022: about 12.6  years, hm?

At $8.52 a month, one year on Cigna’s low-rent plan would cost you $102.24. By now, I would have paid out around $1,288 for retiree dental insurance, on the cheap. But of course, you KNOW that if you really need dental insurance, that amount of coverage will be a drop in the bucket; so if you’re gonna buy the coverage, you’d better buy the top of the line. And that, by now, would have cost me $5,292.

AND not all dentists will accept the state’s insurance plan. Nor do those figures take into account services that would not be covered under the state’s plans. Also it’s worth noting that some of the stuff I’ve needed has been covered, to a degree, by Medicare and Medigap.

At this point, I’ve probably spent somewhere around a thousand bucks on the Adventures in Dental Science. So compared to the price of retiree insurance, probably the cost is six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. But I haven’t had to bicker with any providers. AND…it must be remembered that many providers will not accept the low-rent coverage one gets from the State of Arizona. So for the amount I’ve paid, I’ve retained my choice of providers. And that, it develops, is big.

Very big.

Also very big is the fact that not everything appears to be covered on the State’s plan, meaning that a fair amount of one’s Adventures in Dental Science are likely to be paid for out of pocket. How much might that be? Difficult to calculate. But even a small figure would cut in to the value of the premium-supported insurance scheme.

***

By now, I’d guess that over the past couple of years I’ve spent about the same as or a little more than I would have shelled out to Cigna for dental, what with the present Adventures in Medical Science. However, that may change as things get worse.

Or as they get better…

Our extended amalgamated family’s beloved dentist, Dr. D. was forced to retire for medical reasons. He sold his practice to a guy who moved here from Baltimore.

This fella has taken over and, as of course he should, is now doing things his way. Not Dr. D’s way. He’s canned all of Dr. D’s excellent dental assistants and office staff (or maybe they all fled?). And I see he’s building an empire of low-rent offices over on the West Side: exploiting the impoverished set.

I’ve now seen the guy several times. And truth to tell, I don’t like him. Nor do I trust him.

Evidently for good reason, come to find out.

He told me the stake another practitioner — an orthodontist specializing in rather eccentric restorative work — had installed in my upper jaw was infected. He would like to take that thing out and…what? Rebuild it? Put in a fake tooth? A bridge?? Argha!

Not to say…innaresting.

So…couple weeks ago I got a referral from another medical doctor to an orthodontist, who herself specializes in these sorts of shenanigans. Today, I finally got in to see her — coincidentally, on the first day the damn tooth hasn’t either hurt like hell or ached vaguely.

She shot a set of X-rays. Inspected them. Let her assistant inspect them, apparently by way of pedagogy but in fact putting another set of eyes on the scene.

Then she showed the X-rays to me and said, “Look. There’s no infection around this thing at all.”

“Why,” quoth I, “does it hurt?”

“Because,” quoth she, “the implant is too long. It’s grinding against your lower teeth. Especially when (as indeed is my habit) you clench your teeth.”

She picks up a handy-dandy little whizzer and, zzziiip! Drills off the upper surface of the crown.

And…

By damn! Now my jaws fit together straight! The teeth do not whack each other when I close my mouth. And the implant does NOT hurt.

So…uhm…howcum the Philadelphia Wonder didn’t notice that?

***

She fixed the damn thing in under ten minutes! Probably under five, actually: all she had to do was polish the excess porcelain off so that the fake tooth FIT, same as all all the other teeth in that part of the upper jaw.

The bill was a couple hundred bucks. A far cry from what I would have spent on Cigna’s dental insurance over the past twelve and a half years.

Unfortunately, she’s a specialist and so doesn’t do routine dental maintenance. But she gave me the name of a colleague, whom I intend to track down next week.

 

 

 

Scamarama!

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Wow! In the past few weeks and months, I’ve been the target of scam after scam after scam!

Latest: a Paypal scam.

In comes a message from PayPal saying I charged up a piece of furniture for something over $900. Uh huh.

You understand: we closed that account months and months ago. As in “enough time for my former business partner to go back to graduate school, earn a master’s degree in psychological counseling, complete an internship, and open her practice as a shrink.”

The months, thus, translate into years. At least two or three years.

Trying to reach a human at PayPal is damn near impossible. After running round and round and round Robin Hood’s Barn, I finally did get ahold of a fella with a pleasingly exotic accent. He says the problem is hereby solved: the fake charge is disallowed and the account is closed.

Right. I’ll believe that when I see it. Or when I don’t see another notice of a fake charge.

You know, there are mailing lists organized by age. That’s how AARP knows to start hustling you to buy a membership, the minute you hit about age 62.

My guess is that some list now shows me as pushing 80 — which (can you believe it? I sure can’t!) is pretty close. Thus the various bad actors know there’s a good chance enough of my marbles have slipped away that they can scam me easily. Hence the endless stream of telephone scams.

I’ve stopped answering the phone — either land line or iPhone. Almost every call is a hustle of one sort or another.

And yeah: I do know about the National Do-Not-Call List…har har! They just ignore that. They know nothing will happen. The numbers they appear to be calling from are spoofed, so even if you were to call the feds and complain, it wouldn’t matter: you couldn’t provide the information needed to track them down, even if they were calling from within the US (which they probably aren’t).

With the iPhone, you can block all incoming and set the thing to let only selected callers through. But I still haven’t been able to figure out how to use the complicated damned thing. As devices go, it’s just brain-banging.

This PayPal stuff spooks me. I’m afraid that if I refuse to pay for the phantom furniture, they’ll wreck my credit. This is one reason I posted a narrative of the little saga here at FaM: If Paypal starts harassing me for the supposed charge, I’ll have a record of when it happened and a public statement that it’s fraudulent.

Basically consumers are pretty much defenseless against the barrage of soliciting and scamming phone calls. It’s virtually impossible to block them without blocking access from legitimate callers. And look it this involved rigamarole Verizon recommends to us!!!

Seriously, guys? Who has time for that kind of BS?

I’ve stemmed part of the tide by blocking calls from area codes where I don’t know people. The Phoenix metropolitan area, for example, has three area codes: 602, 623, and 480. Blocking calls from area code 623 cuts down significantly on the harassing advertisements…but it has a BIG (and obvious) downside. One of my doctors’ offices is in the 623 area code: they can’t get through to me on the phone. Same is true for anyone in 480. Or 520 (Tucson). Or 213 (Los Angeles). Or 415 (San Francisco), 408 (San Jose), 510 (East Bay), 562 (Long Beach, Whittier, Norwalk, Lakewood, Bellflower, Cerritos, southeast Los Angeles County and a small portion of coastal Orange County)…. That is a WHOLE lot of friends and business acquaintances who are cut off from reaching you by telephone. I give out an email address whenever I can, but the truth is, most people don’t quite grasp the problem.

And the problem, apparently, is that as you advance in age, you become a juicier and juicier target for telephone scammers. Before I started blocking area codes and some local exchanges, I’d get as many as ten or twelve calls a day from crooks pestering me.

The 21st Century…Dante would’ve loved it!