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good-BYE, Costco…and dammit, this time I mean it!

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You realize…if you want to buy 89 tons of cheap individually wrapped candies to hand out to the Poor Kids who are bussed into your neighborhood for Hallowe’en, you can get that stuff at Target. Or Walmart. Or for that matter at Safeway, Albertson’s, Fry’s, or Walgreen’s. You don’t HAVE to go to Costco to buy a lifetime supply of junk candy. Or of…well…of anything.

Costco is where I went today, though, by way of stocking up for this year’s onslaught of kiddies and teenagers. The ‘Hood is flanked on two sides by low-income districts, meaning that every Hallowe’en we are flooded with hordes of cutie-pies and silly teenagers in costume. This makes for a great neighborhood party: everyone hangs out on their driveways to greet the panhandling kids, and a grand time is had by all.

So today I was despatched to snare a cache of individually wrapped candies for the coming shindig. Costco seemed like the logical destination, since while I was at it I could stock up on a few things that are running low here at the Funny Farm.

But…maybe not…

Alas. They have decimated their cheap wine offerings. They used to have a wonderful selection of wines in the $8 to $12 range — I mean, awesome. No more. Want a drinkable bottle of wine there? Prepare to spend upwards of 15 or 18 bucks,

No, this is not inflation. Albertson’s, Sprouts, Fry’s, Trader Joe’s, and — hevvin help us — even the ritzy-titzy AJ’s all offer a generous selection of cheapo wines, highly drinkable. Prices are about the same (in the $8 to $12 range), and deliciousness is highly comparable in all the other stores.

The Paradise Valley Costco’s layout is damn near non-navigable. In addition to our communal supply of Hallowe’en candy, I wanted to buy one of Costco’s lifetime-supply bottles of aspirin. Into the pharmacy dept. Search high. Search low. Search medium. Search high and low again. CAN. NOT. FIND. A. FREAKIN’ BOTTLE OF ASPIRIN.

Since this is a commodity you need by the time you get out of the place, presumably my fellow customers have cleared the shelves and gulped down all the product.

Did find a nice package of rack of lamb, one of the things I went specifically to that store to buy.

But…

Y’know…

AJ’s also has superior rack of lamb. And you don’t have to do battle to get to the meat counter for the purpose of grabbing a package of it.

**

But the main issue with Costco shopping is…well…Costco customers.

You think Walmart customers are characters? Jayzuz! Take 45 minutes or an hour to watch Costco customers in action! They leave Walmart People in the dust.

Honest-ta-Gawd, I do NOT understand how Costco employees who work the floor in those stores keep a grip on their sanity! WHAT a job!

Today, as is invariably usual, I got stuck behind some stupid woman who, mesmerized by the glory of the stacks and stacks of merchandise, was rolling her cart right up the middle of the aisles. She would stop, stand there, and stare…while everyone on both sides of her, coming and going, waited for her to get the hell out of the way.

This is not a “sometimes” occurrence. It’s something that seems to happen every time I go into a Costco store.

Y’know, aisles in a grocery store or a drugstore are no wider. If anything, Costco’s aisles are considerably more generous than a Safeway’s or a Walgreen’s. But people don’t seem to pull that stunt in those stores. For the life of me, I cannot understand what gets into people who do that!

Why this is happening — whether it’s because there’s so much variety of merchandise people zone out as they search for what they want or whether a particular type of chucklehead is attracted to Costco — I cannot imagine. All I know is it makes me crazy. And I think I’m not gonna go back there, unless it’s under exceptional duress.

There are things you can’t get in these parts except at Costco or at Amazon. For that reason, it makes sense to maintain a membership, either in order to go there oneself or so as to send Instacart runners. But…if the only time I shop there is when I need something that’s not sold anywhere else and I don’t wanna wait for Amazon to deliver it, I’m surely going to shop there lots, lots less.

Stop the World….

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One of THOSE days again: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Finally get the spilled coffee cleaned up off the deck, the table, the this and the that. Drag stuff into the garage sink to wash. Pissed mightily.

I mean…really. All I wanted to do was sit down, turn on my li’l computer (assuming it will come on, no longer a safe assumption), and diddle away time on the Internet whilst swilling down the rest of the morning’s coffee.

Everything I touch goes SPROI-OI-OI-OINGGGGGG!

Finally ensconced. The mosquito coil I lit an hour or two ago seems to have chased off the effing mosquitos, bred by my effing neighbor’s eccentric habit of leaving a muddy puddle on the bottom of her empty swimming pool, which she decided to drain a couple years ago. Drain…and just LEAVE there.

Is the whole WORLD festooned with nut cases, or is it just my neighborhood?

This one, a freelance accountant who apparently has some emotional problems, is supported by her father, who bought the house next door and ensconced her in it.

Turns out Dad is a DIY real-estate magnate, and surprise! He owns the house next door to M’hijito! So that place is a rental, thereby depressing the value of the house the kid and I paid a hefty price to buy.

That puddle is no doubt what was responsible for Other Daughter’s case of Western equine encephalitis, which damn near killed her. O.D. is in the habit of leaving her windows open all the time, and, weirdly, she doesn’t have screens on those windows. No doubt so her tribe of cats can hop in and out at will.

Little details like epidemiology and safe maintenance seem beyond the scope of altogether too many of the Funny Farm neighbors.

Meanwhile, my own yard is still ankle-deep in debris from the late storm. Gerardo said he would come by today to deal with that and also some fairly desperately needed exterior repairs, which was very kind of him…

ahem…

ESPECIALLY since it dawns on me (if not on him) that today is Columbus day!

Even though his workers are his cousins, WTF? He shouldn’t be working those guys today,. Nor, given the way he throws himself around, should he be making himself work today. Give yourself a break, dude!

So, though I need Gerardo to come around, I do hope he doesn’t.

Speaking of cultural issues, I am really afraid that my neighbor J is about to get ripped off massively.

This is the lovely Latina lady the city gave SDXB’s house to when he sold it for a song in his furor to move away from Tony the Romanian Landlord. Seriously: they had a program where they were buying houses to move people out of the way of the airport construction, which was merrily leveling a barrio in lovely south Phoenix. The area, as you can imagine, was a slum of the first water, being directly under the path of incoming and outgoing jet aircraft…24/7.

So getting into SDXB’s 2100-square-foot house in North Central was an astonishing Godsend for J…but… You understand, she doesn’t have the income to maintain such a place. Her kids are helping, though.

I happen to be enamored of J. She is extremely nice, quiet, and pleasant to have as a neighbor. A-a-a-n-d…that’s why I’m worried.

The recent storm blew a couple of shingles off her roof, same as it did mine. But where my Roofer Guy said “nooo problem: I’ll be back next week to fix them,” hers said “ohhhhh dear! The whole roof must be replaced!”

Uh huh.

Well, I doubt it. That roof looks relatively new; if you study it, you see it’s in excellent condition. If anything, it’s in better shape than mine. I moved here in 2007, shortly after SDXB bought that house that Josie has now. I will say, I don’t remember his having the roof redone…but I don’t remember what I had for breakfast these days.

And…y’know…if you’ve lived in the barrio all of your days, chances that you’ll have adequate homeowner’s insurance — or any homeowner’s insurance — are practically nil, that being something you may never have heard of. Just hope she doesn’t get ripped off.

I did share my new Roofer Dude’s phone number and suggested she get a second estimate. And mentioned to RD’s wife/receptionist that I have a real bad feeling about the guy J is dealing with just this minute. Sure hope she’ll call them.

Speaking again of the ineffable Gerardo, back & forth…. I finally FOUND another much-needed rolling hose-winding stand, this one for the side yard. Amazon provided one for the front spigot and one for the spigot out back by the pool, but… go to order another one and poof!!! You make it disappear!

😀

So, not finding quite what I wanted in the remains of Amazon’s choices, I finally bestirred myself to traipse up to Home Depot. And lo! There it was…and only ONE of them left!

Grab!!!

So now we have a really nifty hose winder-upper gadget, easy to use and with plenty of room for a hose that will run alllll the way back to the alley fence. Looks pretty sturdy, so I’m hoping it’ll last for a few years.

That should please Gerardo: one less hose-wrestling hassle!

Hmmmm…

Some new Incident seems to be under way. Fire and police sirens have been wailing away from the direction of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s way.

Haven’t seen a helicopter…usually there’s at least one gnus helicopter in search of morbid content to fill TV minutes.

That’s a major intersection, seriously messed up by the presence of the Bum’s Railway, which carries any number of drug addicts and panhandlers into the ‘Hood. Several low-rent (read: “cheaply built and highly flammable”) apartment buildings reside in that area, as well as a trailer park.

Welp… No sign of Gerardo. Believe I’ll get up and head for Costco…via a different exit from the ‘Hood!

 

Stormy stormy day…

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Okay, now for something…completely not different.

{grrrrrrr!} Possibly a glass of wine to go with it.

What is NOT different? Cox’s pi$$-poor Internet service.

LOL! In a classic Cox Moment, their connection goes down JUST as I stumble upon an exceptionally promising source going on about the accursed peripheral neuropathy. {One of the prime thangs it sez is that you’d best not drink alcohol. ANY alcohol. EVER.} {hmmmmmmmm… Well, I’m already at Death’s Door with this effer, so…do I care if another glass of white wine kicks in the deadbolt?}

Try to reach a Cox rep on the iPhone. This is actually a GOOOOD thing, because it forces me to learn to use the gadget. Reach a sweet young lady. She is as flamboozled as the rest of us. But she very charming…no doubt why Cox hires such creatures.

Can’t get Carol on the Magical Mystery iPhone (powered by T-Mobile}, so stroll across the street. They have a different carrier: she’s online. We try to find Cox outage info….hilarious!

We schmooze awhile. Her little dog is even cuter than Ruby, which is sayin’somethin’.

She shows me a scorpion Tom snared. HOOLeee shee-ut! He found it in the backyard. That means the li’l fellas are all over our corner…if not now, very soon will be.

Dunno if you folks have these charming li’l critters in your parts. Hereabouts, a scorpion is One Scary, Nasty Critter. You don’t even wanna know how far beyond description a scorpion bite’s pain registers…

I find another shingle down…in their driveway! This, a remnant of the current ferocious desert windstorm. It looks the same as the one New Neighbor and I found in the front of my house. NN and I could find no sign of a missing shingle on my roof (though it’s hard, probably impossible, to view the entire roof from the ground), but it’s pretty clear this thing is either from Tom & Carol’s or from some other decrepit building. So…uhm…there’s SOME hope that the Funny Farm’s roof remains intact, the FF being among a number of decrepit buildings.

Wherever Sally (or what remains of her) is, I’m sure she’s VERY glad she moved on to the Other World and the kids have got that house. Poor young pups! Luckily, they have parents, who presumably will help them navigate what are no doubt about to be some very choppy waters.

Heh. I think I’m quite charmed with New Neighbor. Haven’t met Wife yet, but I assume that if she matches him, she’ll be a nice addition. Dayum, but I do enjoy young people. Old people, too, come to think of it. But the young ones: yeah!

Guess that’s why I persist in teaching college and returning adult students for next to nothin’….

Computer Complications

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Reckon it’s just because I’m Old, but…. Gosh, does it not seem to you, as it does to me, that all our miraculous computer technology and gadgets serve as much to complicate our lives as to bring nifty new stuff to us?

Godlmighty, but I’m sick of computer hassles.

This morning I went to sign in to FaM’s dashboard, and LO!! Was confronted with one of those annoying, time-wasting picture rebuses, where you’re supposed to identify every image that has a (fill in the blank: boat, cat, car, lightbulb, whatEVER). This is an annoying runaround, and one mistake tosses you out and forces you to start over.

I.

just.

HATE.

that.

How can I count the ways I hate the endless, annoying, frustrating, aggravating computer password runarounds?!???

Today I need to get into the credit union account — online, of course — and pay this month’s AMEX bill. That will entail yet another aggravating runaround. The prospect makes me crings.

So much so, in fact, that I think I may resort to a primitive strategy, developed shortly after the first cave man learned to start a fire with a pair of sticks: send them a check.

Yes. Remember those? I still do have a couple boxes of paper checks. It may be easier to simply write a check, stuff it in an envelope, and drop it in a mailbox.

A Best Buy dude is coming over today to work on the laptop. I need to get it backed up to an external hard drive, but I will be damned if I can figure out how to set up the hard drive, to say nothing of making it work.

And he’ll have an additional task he didn’t know about: yesterday somehow I screwed up the toolbars at the top of the screen. The one I use most has disappeared. sorta…it flickers back if the cursor lands…somewhere. But where, I cannot figure out. I want that fixed…got ENOUGH dorking around to have to fiddle with every effing day without having to dink and plink and dork to get the toolbar showing the open pages and the date & time to come up.

****

Ohhh HOOOORAAAYYY!!!

The Best Buy guy isn’t scheduled til tomorrow!

Hallelujah, brothers & sisters: I can go back to bed!

😀

That also provides some time to write up some of the things that need to be fixed. Not just the weird toolbar thing….but the newest quirk: hit a double quotation mark or a single quotation, and you get the symbol with an underscore beneath it. Then hit the space bar or a character, and the underscore disappears.  Yesterday the disappearing act was not in force. You just got a strange symbol.

And there’s one keyboard combo that produces an umlaut. Whaaaaa? In Word, Hit Caps Lock + a character, and you get an umlaut: Ä

Kewl, eh?

Well…it would be, if that were what you wanted it to do.

Do we really want to rescue these folks?…

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Yeah, those folks: the ones who deliberately or heedlessly put themselves at risk by ignoring public warnings intended to help keep them safe. Just now, for example, the ninnies in the Southeast who failed to take shelter or get the fu!k out when the Weather Service and the police issued warnings that life-threatening storms and floods were on the way…how about those ninnies? Why are we sending helicopters and boats to get them out of the mess they plunged into of their own volition?

Here we have this, for example: A woman in Florida who blithely discounts official pleading to get the Hell out as the worst hurricane in the history of the Atlantic Coast bears down. Her grandson, who apparently failed to inherit all her Stupid Genes, realizes she is at risk (along with her dog!!), so he flies into the state, travels to her home, and gets stuck in the predicted floods. Now both their lives are at risk and they end up having to be rescued by Coast Guard helicopters and airlifted to safety.

Know how much it costs to operate a rescue helicopter?

No? Make a guess. Come anywhere close?

It’s SIXTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS AN HOUR, just to run the chariot to pluck some ninny out of a predicament they got into by blithely ignoring all warnings and all common sense.

  • For a rescue helicopter: $1600 an hour
  • For a Coast Guard rescue boat: $1147 an hour
  • For a C-130: $7600 an hour

!!!!

As nothing… The same source tells us the National Parks Service spent almost $5 million in 2007, in search and rescue alone.

Our cup runneth over with stupidity.

Most such rescues have to happen when some fool decides to ignore signs to stay on the trail, decides that the news reports of an incoming hurricane are just journalistic hysteria or Big Brother trying to manipulate us, that God is watching out for them…and on and inanely on.

Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to figure out how to make their own breakfast.

It leaves us with the question of…well…how much DO we want to continue the genetic heritage of stump-dumb stupidity? When someone pig-headedly does something that public information programs and newcasts and road signs urge don’t do that, should we — really — rescue them? Why?

Yeah, I know. God tells us to be good to our fellow nudnick.

But…y’know…Mother Nature issues no such edict. Is it possible that she’s tryin’ to tell us something?

If we rescue them, we invite them to continue contributing their “stupid” genes to the communal gene pool. If we let them get themselves out of their own predicament, we accomplish one of two ends (possibly both, come to think of it):

  • We make it clear to the other ninnies out there what’s likely to happen if you ignore public safety warnings.
  • We remove their Idiot Genes from the stream of humanity’s genetic makeup, thereby very possibly smartening up the generations to come.

Either of those, to my mind, seems like a salutary goal…

Leave. My. Dog. Alone…PLEASE!

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Well, I offended one of the neighbors mightily this morning. Honestly. Sometimes I do wonder WHAT is the matter with people!

This lady — I’d say she’s in her 60s or maybe early 70s — walks around every morning with a pocket full of dog treats. She inhabits the Richistans, so if Ruby and I go over there on the morning doggy-walk, we’re likely to run into her. And we DO go over there most days, because the park, so much beloved by Ruby the Corgi, is simply overrun with off-the-leash dogs charging around.

Yes. The park DOES have a big sign that says “DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH.” But of course it doesn’t apply to those folks, right?

So if we want to stroll through a shady, park-like stretch, we’re pretty much restricted to Upper Richistan.

This lady haunts those regions. She’s out there almost every morning.

She’s very friendly. She’s a VERY sweet person. And every damn morning she wants to give Ruby a doggy-treat.

Now you understand, I don’t especially mind if Ruby gets a random dog treat now and again. But there are some good reasons to ask her to refrain:

  • Ruby is getting fat.
  • Fat is exceptionally not good for a corgi, with its long spine and short legs.
  • I would prefer it very much that Ruby not expect to get doggy-treats from strangers. My dogs’ job is not to suck up to strangers, some of whom (in these parts) are not folks with whom you especially want to encourage chumminess.
  • Some dogs are diabetic. They should not have doggy treats: their diets, like the diets of diabetic humans, need to be carefully tended.

She always asks if it’s OK to give Ruby a treat, and I always, out of politeness, say “sure.” Today I decided to get honest with her, and so I replied, “I’d really prefer it if she didn’t get treats.”

WELL! You’d think I’d insulted all her daughters and their madame!

She got all huffy and stalked off dramatically.

People are SO STUPID about dogs!

  1. The ones who insist on letting their dogs run loose in a public park bounded on three sides by streets full of commuters chugging off to the main drags.
  2. The ones who confuse their dogs with children and burble inanely over their “fur-babies”
  3. The ones who coo, as your German shepherd is getting set to remove their dog’s throat, coo “Ohhhh don’t worry! They just wanna plaaayyyy!“
  4. The ones who let their dog run loose in the mountain parks and then are surprised when their dog sticks its nose under a creosote bush and gets bit by a rattlesnake.
  5. The ones who run their dog by their bicycles as they peddle down the street.
  6. The ones who run their dog by their skateboard as they skate down the sidewalk.

Lordie, I’m fed up with that stuff.

Folks. Your dog is not your child. It’s not a human at all. It is a descendant of wolves, a type of pack animal. It acts like it’s your friend because its species has evolved into a an advantageous, symbiotic relationship with humans. Treating your dog as if it were a child puts your dog at risk of health problems and behavioral problems and you at risk of lawsuits.

Even if you must be silly about your dog, please please please don’t be stupid about other people’s dogs!