Homeownership: The Continuing Adventure. What a joy!
Tuesday, June 18
Today’s frolic is a busted door lock. A new workman. A pile of new bills.
Yes. The back door lock jammed. Got it unjammed, but in the process busted the door knob. This made it impossible to secure the door closed.
Fortunately, all the house’s exterior doors are double-secured with heavy-duty steel security doors, locked with heavy-duty monster locks. So: no problem with the local burglars.
The problem is getting the damn thing fixed.
Called my favorite lock company. Along about mid-afternoon, their guy showed up. Dorked around a bit with the mess: the whole doorknob set had fallen off in the course of my fiddling with it.
So. Yeah. Now he’s ordered a new lockset. He’ll be back to install it whenever the hell it comes in. Ducky.
Good thing, eh, that this neighborhood is such a sh!t-show that all exterior doors need to be graced with them thar heavy-duty steel doors. Otherwise the dawg and I would have to go somewhere else to spend the night. Yes, Virginia: that IS how unsafe it would be to spend a night here without lockable steel screen doors.
Isn’t this cute? WordPress seems to have dropped the feature that lets you enter a color for passages of your font. So that does a number on my habit of using red type as an accent for FaM posts. Ducky.
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Wednesday, June 19
Jeez. Never did get this posted. But I did (re-)figure out how to enter colored type. That’s somethin’. I guess.
A fine series of catastrophes has ensued since last I scribbled here.
Just now my car sits in the garage, basically undriveable. I think I can get it started (haven’t tried). If so, it goes straight to the Goodyear garage. If not, I’ll have to walk up there, a 15-minute hike through the humid heat, dodging creeps every inch of the way.
boyoboy, i can hardly wait.
Welp, one nice thing about it is that this pre-empts the proposed journey to Sun City, there to do battle over my parents’ ashes.
Under the best of circumstances, that would be something I do NOT wanna do. With a car that may just barely be limping along, that journey is officially out of the question.
****
The most colorful of our adventures struck in the middle of the night. Along about two or three in the morning, the car’s horn started to blare.
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
ON AND BLASTINGLY ON…
…and I couldn’t turn it off!
My garage is right next to my neighbor’s bedroom. So that meant this serenade was slamming her awake even more colorfully than it was blowing me out of the sack.
Finally, after about 45 minutes of this, I managed to shut it down. How, I do not know. No clue why it finally went off…unless it broke the horn altogether.
Evidently, it’s some kind of vandalism. But how the midnight creeps did it, I do not know. This morning I took it by the Goodyear garage up on the corner.
They didn’t have a clue.
Took it over to the Toyota place this noon. They didn’t know, either.
No way could anybody have gotten into the garage. So whatever they did, they accomplished it remotely.
Hope it doesn’t happen again tonight. If it does, I dunno what I’ll do.
There is a police station up in Sunnyslop — not one that’s easy to access. And there’s a fire station down south on one of the main drags. If it starts again tonight, I guess I’ll have to drive to one of those places and see if a manly type there can shut it off.
And now to our moment at hand…
One ringie-dingie
Two ringie-dingies
Three ringie-dingies
Caller ID: “Spam”
Pick up the effing phone.
* And what would you want, Spam?
* Uhhhh…heh….
* GET OFF MY F***ING PHONE AND STAY OFF MY F***ING PHONE!
Man! Am I sick of the goddamned phone solicitors!!!!
Seriously: phone solicitation ought to be against the law. What a f***in’ NUISANCE!
****
…and…
GAAAAAHHHHH!
****
Wonder-Cleaning Lady has apparently — once again — deep-sixed the window squeegee.
She seems to have hand-washed (call that “hand-smeared”) the west-facing Arcadia door. What a mess!
So I go to get some paper towels and the squeegeee and the window cleaner and…
and…
and…
NOPE!
No squeegee, anyplace to be found!
DAMMIT! This is the second time she’s done that.
But WHY does she do it? Why not just tell me that the damned squeegee wore out?
Tried to clean the window with Windex and paper towels. Got approximately 10 feet x 12 feet of smeared glass.
{sigh}
I should get off my duff and go get another squeegee right now, shouldn’t I?
Wonder if Albertson’s carries them…
DARN it, I don’t want to go out into the traffic (again!) in a no doubt futile trip to buy a squeegee. Guess I should order it from Amazon, eh?
Hmmmm… Six bucks, plus delivery charges.
On the other hand, come to think of it…the last thing I ordered from Amazon — a bottle opener — has never showed up.
I think what’s happening is they’re delivering packages to the wrong address. We have two streets by the same name here, running parallel: Erewhon LANE and Erewhon WAY. Delivery and service folks get them confused all the time. For Amazon, I add to my address in ALL CAPS “Erewhon WAY, not Lane!”
Guess if you could read, you’d have a better job than trundling around delivering packages.
Actually, that’s not fair. The porch pirates here actually follow delivery trucks. Stop in front of the mark’s house. Jump out of their car. Run up to the door. Grab the package. Run back to their car. Drive off after the truck.
One of the neighbors, a techie guy who delights in gadgetry, set up cameras at his front door and caught this caper in action. So…that’s probably what happened here.
Well, I’d better get off my duff. Now I need both a squeegee AND a bottle opener.
And so…{grrowwwllll} AWAYYYYY!
Spammers are why I cancelled my landline.
My husband wanted to keep it because he said he liked it. But he never used it, and no one called bur spammers.
I think it has to do with people not remembering phone numbers anymore.
So much easier to let the phone be your memory.