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GAAAAHHHH! STOP THE WORLD!!!

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😀 Ever have one of those STOP THE WORLD! days? 

One of those whatever can go wrong WILL go wrong days?

LOL! As you may have surmised by now, we’re having one o’ them thar days here at the Funny Farm.

Whatever I touch goes T-W-A-A-A-A-N-G-G-G!! or gets lost within 30 seconds. In-fukkin-credible!

I’ve spent half the morning searching for stuff or yakking on the phone to CSI’s trying to untangle the latest screw-up.

Latest fiasco: I LOST MY AMEX CARD!

Yes. Lost it.

Here in the house.

No. I haven’t been out of the house with it since the last time I had it in my hand, which was about 45 minutes ago while I was on the phone with an AMEX rep.

Dammit!!!!

all…

i…

wanted

to

do

this morning

was pay off the goddamn balance owing on that card.

After calling AMEX and ascertaining the current bottom line, the next task was to jump in the car, drive to the CU, and be sure the correct amount is transferred from checking to American Express; then be sure I have the correct figure for the remaining balance.

How hard IS this?

Find out the outrageous figure — several thousand dollars. Don’t ask!

Seek out the card case, wherein resides the AMEX card. The very card case that I just had in my hand.

And…it’s gone.

HUH???

Search for it.

Search for it.  Search for it. Search for it.

Search the car for it. (the car??????)

Search the bedroom for it.

Search the office for it.

Search the office closet for it.

Search every purse in the house for it.

Search the family room for it,.

Search the bathroom for it. (the bathroom?????)

Search the kitchen for it.

Search the office again.

Search the car again.

Search the family room again.

Search the kitchen again.

Search every  single purse again.

Goddamit, I can not find it!!!!!!!

Eventually I did find my checkbook. But I can’t find the secret code to get into the damnable online bank account. So I have no idea how much is in the checking account. No idea what has been autopaid. No idea how much is owed to AMEX.

All I know is…I’m losing my mind.

Finally did find the American Express card…tossed on the dining room table. Where else, eh? Doesn’t EVERYONE store their AMEX card on the dinner table?

Meanwhile, the scandalized Mac informs me there have been no backups for 772 days (there’s a reason for that…, the damned thing), I have only 17.567 GB of storage and I’m supposed to do something called “optimizing storage,” a term that might as well be in Martian, and that as we scribble the goddamn thing is running out of juice and will shut down in a couple of minutes.

How sick am I of life in the 21st Century?

Let me count the episodes of nausea….

One “NOW WHAT” after another…

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Dawn cracks. Ruby is delighted: she dearly loves the break of day. Human is less thrilled. Ohhh well.

We stumble outside, Ruby to patrol the yard and pee on everything, the human to…uhm…stand around. And…

LO! A set of wet tracks has been laid down on the Kool-Deck…like someone or something climbed out of the drink. Impossible to tell whether the tracks are human or animal…

Did Pool Dude show up before the crack of dawn and maybe fell into the water?  Seems like Ruby would have alerted to that. Pool Dude is her hero…paws-down the very finest hero in the history of human-canine contact. If he’d been out there, she would have been hot to shoot out there and love him up.

Besides, if he’d fallen in the drink he would have made a lot of noise, enough to set off Ruby like a four-legged burglar alarm.

Hmmm…

Tony’s Home for Juvenile Delinquents has been a little more restive than normal. Maybe one of the pistols over there snuck out and frolicked around the neighborhood last night. But…why would they climb through the thorny vines over the alley wall to do…effectively nothing?

Tony himself has targeted the pool in the past. Indeed, that’s how we ended up in court with him, where he scared my lawyers so much they urged me not to come back to the house. And that was the immediate reason that SDXB sold his house and moved to Sun City. He who swaggers first runs first, hm?

Maybe I’d better put up a camera or two out there. If the delinquent charges of the Delinquent-Master have decided to launch a new campaign, it would be good to have a video of them. Right?

But…I Want It NOW…

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Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not whenever I can find it (if I can) on the local market.

NOW.

It’s spectacularly convenient to be able to order up this little thingy and that little doo-dad and have it delivered right to your door. Yes. That much must be admitted. That much must be admired.

But the other day, I wanted one silly little, minor little, once always-available-about-everywhere little thing, and I wanted it now. Today. Ideally, within the hour.

It was the sort of thing you used to be able to find in a type of store called a “dime store,” such as a TG&Y: chain stores that sold inexpensive handy-dandy gadgetry that people use around the house and the car and the yard.

No more! Far as I can tell, dime stores no longer exist.

I drove from pillar to post searching…

  • Albertson’s does not carry it.
  • Safeway does not carry it.
  • Target does not carry it.
  • Bed Bath & Beyond no longer exists.
  • Walmart does not carry it.
  • Lowe’s does not carry it.
  • AJ’s does not carry it…

On and on and gas-guzzlingly on. NO ONE carries it.

What is “it”?

It’s this: an old-fashioned purse-sized, pocket-sized spiral-bound notepad.

Apparently they still make them. Although of late retailers will not let you copy an image and paste it into your effing blog post….

You just can’t find them. At least not in brick-and-mortar retail stores. I searched all over the effing city, and nobody had these things.

Upshot: It’s not that you can order it from Amazon. It’s that you HAVE TO order it from Amazon. And if you need it now? Well, screw you, m’dear.

Ugh! I am sooo unstuck in time! My God, sometimes I feel like I live not in a different era but on a different planet from the one I grew up on.

And while we have many, many blandishments that are wonderful and amazing…well… Are they?

We have these awesome phones we can carry around! Whoop-de-doo!

  • Now anyone who takes a whim to do so can pester us on the phone as we drive around or hike or bicycle ride or sit in a meeting or…whatEVER.
  • Now advertisers can track us around the city and harass us at will.
  • Now if our car craps out and we don’t have one of these gadgets with us — or, Gawd forfend if it’s not charged up — we are in deep, deep trouble.
  • Now if we’re on the lam from the cops, the authorities can track us down, intercept us, and bust us…

Hmmmmm…. THIS is a good thing?

We have delivery services that bring everything from a cheap notebook to a filet mignon to our doorstep. But what if we want to shop for it in person? What if want to see what we’re getting before we plop down our credit card?

What if, f’r hevvinsake, we want it NOW?

Ugh. What a brave new world!

Stop the World? Yea, verily…

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As I was saying the other day: Stop the World! 😀

Mercifully, this morning the world does seem to have come to a stop. When I woke up, I thought TODAY I HAVE TO TAKE THE CAR TO GET THE REAR BUMPER REPLACED and ooooh lhudly sing goddam I’ve gotta be there by 7:30 and I have NO idea where the body shop is!

Hell and damnation, what a way to greet the accursed day!

Even worse, I’d say, than yesterday, which was quite the little winner.

Along about mid-day, it was down to the gourmet grocer’s. Come prancing out with my purchases. Toss them in the back of the vehicle. Jump in. Start the engine. Can’t see traffic coming on either side, because much larger critters are parked to the left of me and parked to the right of me. E-a-a-s-e out into the lane and

WHAM!!!!!!!!

Some sunovabitch runs into me.

It’s my fault, of course. Because he had the wrong of way, being in the traffic lane and not in a parking spot.

We call a cop to report the dust-up. Cop refuses to write me a ticket, because — says he — we’re on private property.

{can you imagine???}

Welp. Things brightened up a little when I looked at the computer and realized today is Saturday, not Monday. This means I won’t have to spend several hours twiddling my thumbs in the body shop’s waiting room today, anyhow. But more to the point, it means I have all of today and all of tomorrow to drive into glummest northwest Phoenix to locate the place. And that means I won’t have to flail around in Monday’s morning rush hour searching for it.

It also meant that Ruby and I could go for our morning doggy-walk, uninterrupted.

So along about 6 a.m., it was out the door, dragged by a 35-pound beast.

Ruby l-o-o-o-o-ves the park. Ohhh, how she loves that damn park! So whenever we go out for a doggy-walk, she invariably drags me in that direction.

Today I decided to indulge her: why not?

Then again…why?

See, the problem with the park — well, one of its problems — is that at this hour the place is overrun with dogs.

See that big sign at the entrance? The one that reads

DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH

???

You’d be surprised how many of your fellow citizens can’t read. Any time you go over there — particularly during the Doggy Parade hours — the damn place is overrun with dogs racing back and forth off-lead.

A corgi, though to the naked eye a cute little teddy-bear of a dog, is not a teddy-bear. It’s a short German shepherd.

And, like Anna the GerShep before her, Ruby wants little more from life than the opportunity to clear the earth of other dogs.

So if you come bounding up to me with your own teddy-bear on a leash, Ruby is gonna go after it. And if your effing dawg is running around off-lead, then I am going to get dragged into a dog fight.

This is why I try to avoid that damn park as much as possible.

But not today. Nothing would do but what we had to charge over to the park on this beautiful, cool morning with high clouds prancing in the morning breeze.

First off, a Creep spots me. And he is a creepy one.

See…when you’re born female, you learn to avoid certain types of men. And by the time you’re about 20, you’ve learned to recognize those types on sight, from a considerable distance.

He starts to follow us.

I catch up with a couple of older men and ask if I can walk with them. They clearly think I’m crazy but say OK.

Natcherly, we just get going when Ruby stops to dump on the grass.

So much for that strategy.

The two guys having gone on their way, I decide Discretion Is the Better Part, and we head out of the park, homeward-bound.

My cookies are frosted.

Seriously: God DAMN it!!!!!!! You can’t even go for a walk in the neighborhood park — for which you pay with your taxes — without harassment.

It does look like it’s going to rain pretty quick, even though Wunderground emotes to the contrary. They predict just 2 percent chance of precip today, 5 percent tomorrow.

Oh well.

This will mean that later today I can drive up to the alleged location of the auto body shop (and drive, and drive, and drive…it’s halfway to freakin’ Ahwatukee!), which will help a great deal tomorrow, since I have to be there at 7:30 in the morning. Right in the middle of the effin’ rush hour!

Unless forced to do otherwise, I stay off the roads here during the rush hour. Arizona drivers make California drivers look stodgy. You take your life in your hands every time you get behind a steering wheel here…but your chances of meeting oblivion go way up during the rush hours.

Especially when you’re pretty vague about where you’re going…

Oh well. It’s long past breakfast time. The human is starved. And so…awaaayyyyy!

Where were we…about stopping the world?

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Gawdalmighty, “STOP THE WORLD” seems to be the byword of the day.

It’s after dark. The dawg and I are fed. It’s too crazy out there to go for an evening doggy-walk, so we’re hunkered down.

And hunkered in full stop the world mode.

A cop helicopter is buzzing the ‘Hood. Lemme tellya: these guys don’t burn pricey aviation fuel for nothin’. They’ve been overhead for a half-hour or 45 minutes: searching, searching, searching. Rattling the windowpanes. Disturbing the dawg. Disturbing the human.  Now they’re cruising above the streets just to the north of us.

Have I said how much I hate living here?

But…

But….

But……

Is there anyplace better to live?

Truth to tell, what that cop said right after the Great Home Invasion Episode appears to be true: “It’s the same all over the Valley.” From the Richistans to the blue-collar slums to the ghettos, it really DOES appear to be “the same all over the Valley.”

Okay, wtf is going on now? Over to the neighborhood Facebook page, usually the fastest source of fact and gossip…

H. Acken

Was anyone else asked to stay inside?

Loren Rohrer

Helicopter is saying to surrender now….that can’t be good….

Morgan Hoaglin

I am betting on the K9 here
Sonja Marie Clarke Yurkiw
What’s happening with the helicopter?

Megan Tranter
          A truck was pulled over on Drey Drive. One of the occupants fled the scene. There’s where it stands just now. But…Ughhhhhhh am I ever tired of it.

You ‘n’ me both, sister!!!

Wednesday, October 4, 2023…Stop the fukkin world, already….

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De bonne heure  (which is a way of saying “at the crack of dawn”)…

Well, the cop cars have moved on from Tony’s Home for Juvenile Delinquents. 😀

When Ruby and I went out along about 6 or 6:30 this a.m., TWO cop cars were parked over there. Must’ve been quite the little dust-up under way. It’s quiescent now. A car is parked at the curb along my house’s east wall…presumably a vehicle belonging to one of the keepers. The policia were gone when we got back from this morning’s doggy-walk, about an hour later. With any luck, maybe they will have found something new the County can use to bop Tony about the head and shoulders.
hmmmmmm…….  Y’know….if I were a parent and I learned that a school bus my kid was riding — for the Glendale Union High School District(!) — was detouring off its route to pick up one or more urchins from a home for juvenile delinquents in the Phoenix Union High School District, I would NOT be happy.
* Which brings up another little irregularity: We’re in the Sunnyslope High School district, not in the Glendale Union district. Or the Phoenix Union High School District.
So..WTF???
Ever entertaining!
Gorgeous morning…actually COOL out as dawn cracked.
****
time marches on
****
4:00 p.m.
Late Afternoon 
Irrigation Dude is here. Has been all afternoon…speaking of jobs one is happy one does not have. He’s dug up the back side yard, rebuilt the underground irrigation on the west side of the house, got most of it working. Arrgha!
Now his son just showed up, a grown young man evidently intended to inherit the business.
I yam starved, having done without lunchoid. Even though it’s only a little after 4, I’m about to expire. Soooo….
What we have on the menu is shrimp sautéed in garlic, tossed with boxed tomato sauce over pasta.
Yay! Was delighted to find the shrimp in the freezer, and even more delighted to find a box of “canned” tomatoes in the cupboard. To say nothing of a bottle of white wine.
Just watching Irrigation Dude dig and haul and gadgetize all afternoon — in the heat — has left me exhausted.
***
Yea verily: So exhausted I can’t think clearly. As in WHY THE FUCK WON’T THE GODDAMN OVEN TIMER SHUT THE FUCK UP! 
 
Nothing that I do makes it stop. It’s not showing a count-down. As far as I can see, it’s not on. But every five minutes or so, it starts in again with beep…beep…beep…beep…   Damned if I can figure out why, and therefore damned if I can shut it off. Tonight I’ll have to go to bed behind  a closed door… 
 
Oh…now whatever it thinks it’s doing is done: BEEEP BEEEP BEEP BEE…
 
Run over there and shut it off. But don’t see how to shut it completely off once and for all because I don’t see HOW to shut it off, period. Before I go to bed tonight, forgodsake, I’ll have to go outside and shut off the damn breaker switch to the kitchen!
 
Stop the world, Lord. I wanna get offf!
***
5:15 P.M.
Tired. Spectacularly tired.
Moderately hungry, but not very… Read: “too tired to eat.” Pasta is boiling. Unclear what I’m gonna do if I can’t shut off the fuckin oven clock’s dingy-bonger.
BEEEP BEEEEP
Fuckaroonies!!!!. Let’s see if we can shut it off at the breaker box.
Yes. That shut it up.
Dump the raw pasta into the pan of boiling water. (The stove runs on gas, so is exempt from the goddamn breaker box’s present set of antics.)
Walk into the family room. Sit down. Pick up computer, Proceed to…to…
BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP BEEEP 
God DAMN it. 
Traipse to the kitchen. Glare at the oven. Click off. 
 
 Off, godammit! Off off OFF!
 
Quiescent for the moment,. Dunno how long that will last. And have NO idea how I’m gonna get any sleep tonight if the fucker doesn’t QUIT IT!!!!!
*****
Only Quarter to Six…
Soooo exhausted that all I wanna do is GO TO BED!
But it’s too fiukkin hot to go to bed, despite the air-conditioner pounding away…and pounding away…and pounding away nonstop. Expensively nonstop!
Finally get the goddamned oven timer to shut up.
How???
Noooooo idea!
6:03 p.m.
The fukkin oven timer has stayed shut up. WHY, I cannot imagine. But it this point, I figure discretion is the better part… The fewer questions asked, the better.
Ya know what?
I HATE living in the 21st century! 
It’s seven fukkin’ types of Purgatory….
What a time. 
What a place.
What a people.
And…and…and…
 
Every line in that little graphic I’ve had to do three times. AT LEAST. 
‘
Stop the fukkin world. I wanna get off!