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The Wages of Loafing

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So I had this great idea, some months ago, to facilitate my loafing ambitions: Hire a pool guy to take care of the hole in the ground into which you pour money!

Grand scheme, isn’t it? I’m already pouring money into it. What’s a few more bucks a month to get someone else to do all the scutwork? These guys bring their own chemicals — the cost is part of the monthly fee. So mirabilis! I would never have to see the inside of another Leslie’s Pool store! 😀

Mwa ha ha! Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Well, o’course…its success is predicated on several premises

  • that once a week cleaning and chemical balancing will suffice
  • that a pool dude knows what he’s doing
  • that such a creature will scrub down the decorative tiles whenever he surfaces
  • that the guy is using quality chemicals, and enough of them
  • that he’ll clean out the filter every three or four months

Heh! Sounds good, doesn’t it?

In real life, none of these things apply.

I have not seen that guy backwash the filter even once during the several months that I’ve been hiring him.  The pool walls look fairly clean and algae-free, but the row of decorative tiles is CRUSTED in white lime, all the way around. This indicates that the water is too alkaline. And also that the tiles aren’t getting brushed properly.

So this afternoon it was into the drink with a paint scraper in hand. Scritched and scratched and scraped and scraped and SCRAPED until a mass on incoming storm clouds rolled in. It looked pretty good by the time I got all the way around…

Until…

The tiles dried off.

I didn’t even BEGIN to get the stuff off. Just went out there and took a look…and…if anything the white crust looks WORSE instead of better.

Jayzus!

Cleaning that tilework is going to be a MONSTROUSLY expensive project. In fact, they’re looking so bad and the deposits are so thick, I may have to replace the tiles.

This, just over the winter months. Last summer, I would scrub them a bit whenever I was in the drink — at least once a day. But over the cold months, THAT MUCH calcium built up.

It’s pretty much all my fault, of course. I should have been paying more attention, and not just assumed the guy was doing his job and doing it right.

That was what we might best describe as a totally wrong assumption. That kind of calcium build-up results from less than perfect chemical balance…and I’ve been stupidly assuming that the guy I hired to do a monthly pool service knew what he was doing. And would do it;

WRONG.

At any rate, by the time I got back in the house from scraping the tiles with a razorblade — a futile effort, far’s I can see — Swimming Pool Service & Repair was closed. They’re the best pool repair shop in town. If anyone can clean those tiles and restore the filter & pump, it’s those guys.

So tomorrow at the crack of dawn I’ll have to get through to them and try to get them out here at the soonest possible moment.

Meanwhile, I’m gonna have to go back to the doctors. This Whatever-It-Is Bug has produced so much chest congestion I can’t inhale a deep breath, and I’m coughing constantly. To perfect that situation, somehow I’ve LOST my real thermometer — the mercury thermometer, that is. The only one I have left is a digital thermometer, whose accuracy  (IMHO) is highly questionable. NOOO idea where I put the real thermometer…it must have fallen into the trash or something.

Heh heh…Look at this clown, leading the cops a merrie chase through the L.A. area. Where does he think he is? Phoenix? 😀

As nothing compared with an Arizona driver, though. Drat! We’re only ranked 8th worst in the nation? We’ll have to work on that!

 

i need a drink!

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Augh!  Is there EVER a dull moment around this place?

Another Day from Hell. So many of those pepper the temporal landscape that sometimes I wonder if live in Hell. A day like this leads one to suspect that’s true.

This place — the city of Phoenix and its tacky environs — gets more and more like Southern California every day. That’s not surprising. Twenty years ago, give or take, our honored City Fathers openly announced they wanted to model the Valley after L.A.

Ugh! was what I said to that then. And Ugh! is what I say to it now.

I just hated living in Southern California, after my father moved us down there from San Francisco. Tacky? You want tacky? The place defines tacky. The crowds, the traffic, the noise, the smog, the ticky-tacky, the worship of mediocrity…yuch! What a place!

In Long Beach, we lived in a dreary second-story flat in a dreary ticky-tacky plaster apartment building: no insulation — either for heat or for sound. Every part of it a study in cheesiness.

My mother, after a year or so, found a place that was somewhat better built and contrived to get us into it. That was an improvement. But it was still Southern California. Ticky-tacky Southern California.

I didn’t have to drive there, because I was still too young to get a permit. Thank gawd!

Driving here in (un)lovely uptown Phoenix is now just about the same as it was there. Crowded, dirty, dreary, streets never built to hold the volume of traffic, ticky-tacky apartment buildings lining many of the main drags; all the rest lined by ugly strip malls. It’s an ugly, ugly city with a dreary, dull lifestyle.

The ‘Hood was built awhile before full-scale LosAngelization set in. So even though our houses are somewhat cheaply built, they’re not outright junk. Not great. But not as awful as newer construction.

Oh yeah: the Day from Hell….

My laptop hung majestically as I was working on the files for the Olive Getten project.

Olive Getten was my wild-assed grandmother. From what I can tell, she was about as far off the wall as you can get and still stay in the troposphere. She was, indeed, one off-the-wall lady. And as I traipse around digging up data about her, I keep finding more and MORE off-the-wall stuff.

Olive supposedly died of uterine cancer in the late 1920s, allegedly the result of her wild and woolly lifestyle. Her family were Christian Scientists, so she didn’t get to a doctor until it was too late to save her life…if it was ever not too late. We’re told she remarked to my mother that she thought her agonizing death was God’s punishment for all the abortions she’d had.

My mother was her first illicit pregnancy — dignified by a marriage with the father that lasted…what? ten days? WhatEVER. 😮

Apparently they were divorced by the time my mother popped into this world, thereby defining a “flash in the pan” marriage.

The maternal grandparents — Olive’s immediate family — had moved to California from upstate New York long before my mother came on the scene. How Olive got mixed up with the boyfriend in New York–allegedly my mother’s father–I dunno. But she did. The Bay Area family made my mother care for Olive on her deathbed…you can imagine what a great adolescent experience that must have been? My mother said she saw her carted out of the house, dead as a doornail, and loaded into a hearse.

But…y’know…to the contrary,…

…apparently she lived until 1979.

It appears that Olive had an extramarital relationship with a San Francisco business magnate named Jack Sansome…and it appears that at one point she married him.

These antics add up, within the mores of the time. She couldn’t very well bring her illegitmate(!) daughter into a marriage with a prominent member of the business community. So…what to do? “Disappear.” And recoalesce under some other name.

Did the East Bay relatives know about this accommodation? My guess is that at least some did. The paterfamilias was a prominent businessman. He would have known Sansome well. Did he tell the distaff side of the tribe? Dunno. But in downtown San Francisco, there are two streets that merge in front of a large bank: Sansome Street and Olive Street.

Well…natcherly…

As soon as I start to write up this saga, the goddamn computer CRASHES!

So once again — for the how-manyth time over the last couple of weeks — it was traipse through the unholy traffic, trudge into Best Buy, stand in line, try to explain what the trouble is.

I hope they can at least retrieve my data. Stupidly, I didn’t back it up to iCloud…’cause I was still working on it.

Meanwhile, in the middle of all this, I am sick as a proverbial dawg. Gawdawful hacking cough, stuffy nose, 101.2 fever. I just wanna go to bed! And the real thermometer — as opposed to the touchy and wacksh!t digital one — is presently LOST. Had it this morning, but have no idea where it is now.

Driving around Phoenix, though, to return to our original premise, reminds me eerily of ticky-tacky Southern California in the late 50s & early 60s. WHAT a dreary place. Mile on mile on mile of cheesy, cheaply built apartment buildings, dreary, dull, and vastly mass-produced.

Can’t see how my son can stand living here. Think it’s because he wants to be near me and his father — that’s why he magisterially insists that I NOT move away. But if he ever moves — or if he ever can be persuaded to move to wherever I want to go — I am outta here!

Surprise! You get switched willy nilly!

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In comes an email from WordPress: Your site has updated to WordPress 6.1.2!

Ohhh goodie…something else to hassle with.

For more on version 6.1.2, see the About WordPress screen:
https://funny-about-money.com/wp-admin/about.php

WordPress 6.2.1 is also now available. Updating is easy and only takes a few moments:
https://funny-about-money.com/wp-admin/update-core.php

If you experience any issues or need support, the volunteers in the WordPress.org support forums may be able to help.
https://wordpress.org/support/forums/

I can hardly wait…

Welp…in the few minutes that I’ve been sitting here (very few), I don’t see any differences. It all looks the same and works the same.

That doesn’t mean that it won’t change, before we know it, make a great leap forward.

Nice timing, guys! When people are sick as dawgs and can barely think clearly enough to make their way from the bedroom to the bathroom…

Man, covid is grand fun. I haven’t been this sick since I was a very little kid.

As a young child, I was preternaturally susceptible to respiratory infections and to certain meds. If you believe my mother, I spent time in the ICU, and at one point was not expected to live through the night.

This became convenient for me, actually. Come the second grade, when I discovered how deeply I hated school and how VERY much I didn’t want to go there, I learned to take advantage of her fear by claiming to be sick. The “my tummy hurts” maneuver almost invariably got me out of the horrid place. 😀

LOL! This particular ailment, though, is no ruse.

The cough is so violent it tears up your throat as you hack away.

a-n-n-n-n-n-n-d…

Along about 7 a.m., I dish up a mound of dogfood roll for Ruby, her favorite stuff. Set it down in front of her…and she refuses to eat it!

She’s a corgi, for godsake. Corgis do NOT have picky appetites.

Break open a can of the mushy stuff she likes.

Turns up her nose at that, too.

Oh GOD!  Can dogs get the dread disease?????

Well…

Yes. Holy shee-ut!

  • The virus that causes COVID-19 can spread from people to animals during close contact.
  • The risk of animals spreading COVID-19 to people is low.
  • Pets can get serious illness from infection with the virus that causes COVID-19, but this is extremely rare.

At the rate I’ve been going lately, “extremely rare” is another way of saying “commonplace.” She sleeps on the bed with me, so “close contact” I guess is included in that.

Ohhh gawd! Now I’ll have to get on the phone to the vet the instant the clock hits 9 a.m. And make a 30-minute drive to his office when I feel like a limp rag. And of course he won’t let me in the building, since I’m shedding viruses like sawdust.

…hmmmm…  She’s in the kitchen now…think she’s eating, but am not barging in there to disturb her. But…this reluctance to eat is NOT normal.

In other precincts…

Wanna live in Phoenix? Here’s a garden spot for you.

It’s at least 50 or 60 years old. Bordered by two of the noisiest streets in the city. Devoid of landscaping. All spiffed up on the inside, in the latest shades of prison-gray paint. A hot plate for a stove.

They want half a million bucks for it!

For the luvva gawd, that is just INSANE. And we’re told real estate prices are coming down!

Nope. Dawg was not eating.

ooohhh gawd…now as soon as the clock hits 9:00, I’ll have to start getting through to the vet.

 

Never Rains But It Pours….

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For CRYIN’ out loud! 

Firefox is the default browser on this computer. So along about 15 or 20 minutes ago, I come back from whatever I was doing to try to get into Funny…and LO!!!

I can’t get in! Apparently somehow the default browser has been switched to Chrome!

I don’t WANT to use Chrome. Chrome has NEVER been installed on this computer! But apparently it is now!

Getting rid of it was a trick! But it looks like, at least for the nonce, we’re back in Firefox and at least SOME of its pages are working more or less normally.

Since I have no idea why this happened, I also have no idea whether it’s going to happen again, and when, and why.

Honest-ta-Gawd! If my head didn’t already ache like Hell from this damned disease, it would hurt a lot now.

Hmmmm…  I see that somehow an icon for Chrome has popped up in toolbar. How or why, I have nooo clue.

Like I didn’t have ENOUGH headaches (heee! literally)?

No. Evidently not. Over to Facebook, only to find it no longer recognizes my log-in credentials.

Now, this is no great tragedy…EXCEPT that I do use FB to keep in touch with friends, and also to promote Funny about Money. So…both of those activities are now things of the past.

Speaking of the past, wouldn’t it be cool if you could walk through a Hole in Time and come out back in the Good Ole Days, when our worst headache was whether the Soviets were going to blow us to kingdom come?

GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Day from Hell…on Steroids!

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HOLY mackerel, what a day!!!

Along about late morning, I started enjoying some breathing and coughing problems. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Pretty much a dry cough — not hacking anything up. Well, actually, once or twice during the night I practically strangled. But…WTF? The coughing wouldn’t stop.

Nothing I tried beat it back one bit.

I’m thinking this does not look good. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!

Eventually I come to light long enough to take my temperature: 101 degrees.

Holy shit.

My normal temp is around 98.2.

I’ve already been charging from pillar to post out there in the heat. The last thing I wanna do is traipse to a doctor. Way to hell and gone up in North Scottsdale!

Try the mercury thermometer. It’s off the scale: over 106.

Oh, sher…

RE-try the electronic thermometer: 100.8.

Prob’ly not very drastic, after all the crap I’ve been through this afternoon.

Call the Mayo. Nurse Kim gets all anxious. She wants me to drive right out there, or else call an ambulance and have them cart me up there.

a) I do not want to drive halfway to Fountain Hills to get to the nearest Mayo facility.
b) There’s no way in Hell I’m going to our nearest full service hospital and ER: John C. Lincoln, the home of the careless and the incompetent.
c) Nor am I trudging downtown to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I’ve had a truly hair-raising experience.
d) I suspect these wacky swings represent…well…Looney Toons.

So we decide I should go to a nearby pharmacy or the neighborhood Urgent Care Clinic, which is right down by the Albertson’s. She wants me to get tested for covid-19.

Albertson’s has an excellent pharmacy, and straight across the street, Walgreen’s has one very similar to it. If it weren’t 96 degrees out there just this minute — at 7:20 p.m. — I could walk down there. In mid-afternoon, Wunderground suggests, the high was a balmy 99 degrees, with 19% humidity.

Garden spot.

No, Albertson’s pharmacy does not have covid tests. No, Walgreen’s does not have covid tests.

So I go to the Urgent Care Center next door to the Albertson’s. That fine institution has six people sitting in the waiting room. And outside, the most horrifying, pathetic bum…the poor guy is collapsed on the pavement, in the shade of the pony wall that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk.

Even if I had any cash — which I didn’t — I don’t give handouts to panhandlers. Many of these folks are dangerous, when they’re not making pests of themselves.

Inside the “Urgent” (yeah…) Care place, I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait, along with all the other “patients” (got that right) who are waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.

Finally I think oh fukkit! Get up, walk out, drive back home. Gasping for air.

Call the Mayo. They try to get me to drive out there. I bang around trying to manage that…but finally think, once again, oh fukkit!

I just. can. not. bring. myself. to. drive, a half-hour or forty minutes. and then get to a place where I have in the past waited HOURS for care.

If I die, I die. Kulawahed!

Right now the mercury thermometer won’t let me shake it down below 99 degrees. Screw it. The battery thermometer reads 100.8.

So presumably I have a low fever. Or I’m fricaseed in the heat.

Here’s what I’m gonna do:

First, I’m going to set up the steamer to blast

I’m a-gonna traipse into the backyard and take a dip in that cool but not at all cold swimming pool.

Well. Maybe not. Now that the steamer is put together, I feel a little cooler. The headache could go, though….

Reset the electronic thermometer. FRANTIC beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep!!!!!!!

WTF?????

Now it claims I have a temp of 101.1!!!

Make up your mind, ya damn thing!

WhatEVER: my mind is made up: throw on some clothes and head for the Mayo. DAYUM!

********

So…here I am, in the Mayo’s shiny, majestic new ER. Quite a place!  The computer’s iOs (or the surrounding architecture??) is not letting me save much to disk, or save copy written in Word or MacMail. My son is in the middle of a dinner party…offered to drive me out here, but that was not necessary.

How could I do without this little horror show? Let me count the ways…

I hate hospitals, to begin with.

Especially, I’m not fond of ERs, which are scary places…IMHO.

A little kid is back there being tortured: screaming her sweet head off.

My head hurts like hell, speaking of heads.

I need to go to the bathroom, but am afraid they’ll ask me to pee in a cup so I’d better not get rid of the present collection.

****

LOL! We’re now all pee’d out, X-rayed with a vengeance, ridden around in a chariot all over the new and old parts of the ER. Zowie! They’re still threatening to drain blood out of me with a damn needle: THE part of this sorta thing that I hate the most. But ohhh well.

This is a nasty li’l cough. I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that it’s GOTTA be a case of covid.

COULD be an ordinary cold, o’course. One could keep on hoping. BUT…I don’t get a fever with an ordinary cold. And rarely get a fever with the flu. So I think it’s pretty safe to guess that whatever ails me begins with a “c” and ends with a “d.”

My computer isn’t working right in here. Though I’m in Funny’s post-building function and it seems to be working…nothing else is functioning. This post is up and the system is letting me type in it, but other pages are nonfunctional. So it remains to be seen whether any of this copy ends up on the Web.

Lordie!!! All these professional folks with tattoos! About every second or third staff member is covered in skin artwork!

Heh… My mother would have been SO abhorred!!!! She thought tattoos were low-class even on men. And on women? Well! It just wasn’t done!

Another thing that would have sent my mother into a spiraling tizzy is the price of gas!

It’s well over $5 a gallon here. Yesterday I did manage to fill up at a QT: a bargain $4.99!

Back in the Dark Ages — this would have been in the late 1960s or early 70s, I think — my mother once remarked, reflecting on the State of the World, That when gasoline reached a dollar a gallon, we would have soooooo-shal-ism!!!

My parent were right-wingers, Goldwater types. My father: even more extreme than that. I recall him sitting me down one day to lecture me about the virtues of bigotry. He was, as you might imagine, an extreme bigot: anyone who wasn’t white like him was less than fully human. Not only white, but American of English and German extraction.

Ironically, though…as we’ve mentioned elsewhere in these precincts, he was a quarter Choctaw.

Soooo….how it came to be that he hated anyone who wasn’t lily-white is a great mystery.

Cultural thing, I expect. It was probably just the way people who lived in rural Texas were.

***

It’s almost midnight. I think they’re going to spring me out of here pretty quick. One of the staff was in here collecting my insurance information.

***

A-N-N-N-D…I was right. The disease of the day IS Covid 19.

Holeee sheeut!

Speaking of “Stop the World”….

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Lo! This morning I discover that Word has apparently automatically encrypted a file containing a pile of data I learned about my ancestors. HOLY Sheee-ut! It wants a password. What password?

You have to send them an email begging for a password before you can get into YOUR OWN FILE! Goddammit, just what we all need: something else to waste our time on!

I managed to get in with the accursed extraneous password; copied the file’s contents, and pasted to a new Wyrd file. Apparently, that did the trick: It looks like the damn thing isn’t going to ask for a password for this new file.

But how many other files on my system have been magically encrypted?

And lo and behold! Once again my land line is dead!!!!!!!!!

That means I have to hassle around and struggle around AGAIN to get someone over here to fix the goddamn phones!

Goddammit! I have the land line FOR A REASON. And that is as follows: I don’t think to carry a phone around with me every minute of my waking existence. Nor do I own clothing that inevitably has a pocket that will hold a cell phone. The accursed little flip phones won’t hold a charge longer than a few hours. This means that without a land line, I am often WITHOUT ANY WAY TO CALL FOR HELP if and when I fall and break another bone. It means that the next time that happens — especially if it happens in the house, where no one can hear me screaming for help — I will lay on the floor until I die.

The last time I fell, it was outside by the pool. Even though the bone that was broken was in my shoulder, I could not get myself up off the ground. I screamed and screamed and screamed and SCREAMED for help until finally a neighbor heard me and called 911. I could have laid there and died of thirst and shock, for all most people around here care. And certainly for all Cox cares.

It’s a dying technology, no doubt of that. Guess I’m just going to have to resign myself to toting a damn cell phone around with me every where I go, in the house or out. And the fact that women’s clothing tends not to have usable pockets? Just tough, I guess.