Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Adventures in Bureaucracy: Motor Vehicle Division

by

My friend Shannon is trying to help her teenaged daughter get her first driver’s license, an enterprise that has turned into quite the bureaucratic adventure. They called the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division and were flamboozled to be told there were 300 calls ahead of them! When last heard from, she was on Facebook critiquing the Muzak while they waited. 😀

In Arizona, one of the hoops you have to jump through, if you drive a car, is an annual air pollution test nuisance. To drive your car, you have to waste an hour or 90 minutes of your time on that before you can update the registration, which you have to do every year.

Each year – in my case, smack in the middle of the hottest part of the summer – the state sends you a form that you have to drag down to the pollution test site, get certified, and then mail in to the Department of Motor Vehicles (known idiosyncratically as MVD in these parts).

Ummmm….  I don’t recall doing that. True, I’m a senile old bat. But the process is annoying enough that it surely would catch my attention. Especially since I would have enjoyed performing that bit of my civic duty in 118-degree heat.

Did I pay for two years? You can can do that…but…I can’t find the receipt!

Trudge out to the garage: the registration tag on the license plate says “expires in September 2020”!

Ohhhhhhh f!ck!!!!!!!

If a cop catches me with an expired license plate, I’ll get a killer ticket.

No way to find out on the MVD website whether they imagine I’m registered for two years. No way to ask a live human, because presumably there are no humans in attendance. Anywhere.

I can’t not drive my car: you can’t survive in Phoenix without a car.

On a clue from Shannon, I finally found a page where a form invited me to pony up $241 + change to renew the registration. But NOTHING about the emissions test. Normally they don’t allow you to renew your registration without proof that your car passed the emissions test. So I imagined they must have opted it.

I now charge the $241 that I can’t afford on my American Express card and forge on in search of the form to give to the emissions test guys.

But nayyyy, this scheme is not to be.

Online I find a form to fill out to entitle you to a “no contact” emissions test. This also entails your coughing up money, and it requires you to physically go to the emissions test place and be exposed to whatever the members of the public are carrying. In the 118-degree heat.

You have to fill in a VIN number, which I can’t find in the usual place one would find the damn thing on a car.

After a fruitless search, I come back to the computer and try to get to the form you need to take to the emissions test people, so I can fill that in and tote it over to the nearest testing station, so as to get the test done so as to get the car registered. But now I can’t find it online, even though earlier in the day I’d found it but gave up when it demanded the VIN that I couldn’t find on the car. After my son tells me it would be on the insurance card, I try to go back into the site and download the emissions nuisance form. Can’t find it for love nor money.

I message someone unfortunate enough to have his email posted on the Department of Environmental Quality site. He emails back and says later in the day someone from the DEQ will telephone me.

This personable fellow—let’s just call him Bob—surfaces around 4 p.m. 

He says that when you fill out a registration form online, the system will say you can’t enter data until you have the emissions test.

I say wellll….I had no problem filling it out and in fact have a receipt saying “Your vehicle registration renewal is complete…”

He says the only explanation for that is some kind of system glitch.

After a fair amount of back & forth, in which I get the receipt and read the first paragraph to him over the phone, he says (I summarize greatly…) that MVD has such a huge backlog that no one may notice. On reflection, he suggests I may already have paid for a two-year registration, in which case the test is not necessary. If that is the case, it would explain why I never got the paperwork this year.

He proposes the following: On Thursday: check AMEX. If the charge went through, it means MVD accepted the application without the emissions test.

If that’s the case, he says, then just go on about your business and do not waste time with the emissions test. It probably means I paid for two years and do not have to do a test this year,

But, he adds, if  the charge has not gone through by Thursday, call the MVD and ask if an emissions test is required, and ask them to send (or resend) the paperwork. (Reference, if you will, my friend’s experience with this hopeless maneuver…)

HOWEVER, Bob’s guess that I paid for two years is wrong. The vehicle registration receipt from last year, which of course I kept for tax purposes, says it expires 9/30/2020. So clearly there’s some kind of screw-up here.

Apparently things are such a mess down at MVD, they don’t know their collective ass from a hole-in-the-ground. He said it would be the end of September before the tags show up, at soonest. I said I sure don’t want to get a ticket. He said it was extremely unlikely the cops would pull someone over for out-of-date tags. Besides, I have the receipt from MVD stating that the car is registered and registration is paid for.

Why we have emissions tests… Yeah, that IS smog over lovely downtown Phoenix.

Got that? I GOT A GUY FROM DEQ TELLING ME TO IGNORE THE REQUIRED EMISSIONS TEST. Is that off the wall, or what?

This is sounding suspiciously like another piece of mail that got misdelivered to my larcenous neighbor’s house and thrown in the trash. That would be the one who signed for a certified letter addressed to me from my doctor, who couldn’t get through to me on the phone and was trying to tell me I had a nascent cancer and needed to get my a$$ to her office and have it treated. That neighbor.

He did, though, say that the place was pretty much in chaos. So it’s possible that maybe they really didn’t send the annual notice. Except…welll….those things would’ve been-machine generated and stuffed into pre-stamped envelopes. Wouldn’t exactly have required legions of skilled workers…

Apparently state offices are off the tracks because so many staff are either sick or have been told to stay out. Got the impression from Bob that there essentially was nobody there at MVD — that they’re so understaffed the department is inoperative.

Here, the emissions test procedure would put EVERYBODY at high risk of covid. The driver is taken out of the car and told to sit in an enclosed booth. (Yeah: if the guy ahead of you had the bug, you sit there for ten or fifteen minutes breathing in his viruses!) The worker has to get inside the car, handle the controls, and run it for ten minutes or so. So he gets royally exposed to whatever you may be carrying. And if he’s got the virus but is asymptomatic, he’s still contagious, meaning when you get back into your car, you get exposed to whatever bugs he deposited on the steering wheel or breathed into the air.

So…it would seriously make sense to cancel the tests for the duration of the epidemic.

Apparently that’s not what they’ve done here, though. Our Bob said I could just go over to the facility and get the test: no paperwork needed on my end. They give you the paperwork there. BUT, said he, since MVD apparently accepted my application for registration (we quickly found, at the AMEX website, that they’d charged my credit card), he thinks they screwed up and the best thing to do is lay low and go yup yup yup, thankee boss!

The guy theorizes that they messed up at MVD. That’s why he suggested that I wait for a couple of days to see if the charge on the AMEX card goes through. He said if it does and the state accepted the money for the registration bill, then we’re looking at what he called “a glitch in the system”…and what I would call “a f**k-up.”

Adventures in Medical Science: Blood Sugar Frolic

by

One of the reasons I haven’t been writing much at Funny about Money (or anywhere) is that I haven’t been feeling on the top shelf. Not sick. But not what you’d call creative. Just blah. This has been going on for awhile. I put it down to laziness. And to the heat: it’s in the 110s here now. Every day.

Well, three or four weeks ago my hands started tingling. Felt like an electric current was running through them. Then the feet started tingling. Not good.

So I call out to my doc’s office at the Mayo, and the nurse says “you need to come right on in.”

Ohhhh….shit! Just what I wanna do: go to a doctor’s office in the middle of a contagion of a potentially fatal disease. But this stuff is scary, so I traipse out there. They order up an elaborate series of blood tests. Traipse to the hospital at the crack of dawn to get blood drawn. Then traipse way to hell and gone back out to the far side of Scottsdale to meet with the doc’s resident.

Who IS….this really neat and smart and wonderful woman. I want her as my doctor! Don’t let her get away!!!!!

Anyway: She says I have a vitamin B12 deficiency and also am pre-diabetic. Peripheral neuropathy — the grown-up term for tingling hands and feet — is a symptom, and it can get a whole lot worse. She and mega-doc agree I should start taking vitamin B12 supplements and come back in a month. Okay.

At the risk of repeating myself: Well….

Finding this stuff is easier said than done. I decide to try the Sprouts near my house, partly because the last time I went to the Walgreen’s near there, I was waylaid by a pair of aggressive panhandlers in the parking lot — to the point where I had to lock my car door and drive away! — and partly I figured if anyone had a vast selection of woo-woo “supplements,” it would be Sprouts.

But meanwhile and by sheer coincidence, I open up a medical newsletter — a piece of journalism — that I happen to subscribe to and find, lo! An article going on about how a recent study showed that  ingesting 500 mg of cinnamon thrice daily reduced glucose levels among a decent-sized group of test subjects. This peer-reviewed paper came out through Oxford, so it’s presumably reasonably sane.

Hm. So I decide to buy a bottle of 500-mg cinnamon tablets, too.

Troll dollEasier said than done, indeed! No problem finding the B12 pills. But cinnamon is apparently High WooWoo. Not only are there a jillion variants, every one of them is ludicrously overpriced. Most of the B12 pills are rapaciously priced, too, but just as I’m about to walk away I find, down on a lower shelf, a brand selling the stuff for 7 bucks a bottle.

I figure ohhhhkayyy…I’ve got a big jar of cinnamon back at the Funny Farm: that can be sprinkled on apple slices, into spinach and chard, mixed with tea or coffee. A little math shows this should be easy: 500 mg is .1 teaspoon; three doses a day would be 1/3 of a teaspoon. But munching this stuff three times a day could get tiresome. I order a jar of 500 mg capsules from Amazon, which arrives within a day.

Problem is…well, there are two problems.

1. The study doesn’t say what type of cinnamon they used. There are two: Saigon cinnamon and Ceylon cinnamon. The stuff in my spice cabinet is Saigon cinnamon. The stuff in the pills is Ceylon cinnamon. The Korean authors of the laudatory research paper do not specify which variety they inflicted on their test subjects.

Turns out these are the products of two separate plant species. Saigon cinnamon is a cassia. Ceylon cinnamon is not. A little banging around reveals that the supposedly therapeutic variety is Saigon cinnamon, AND that it can have baleful side effects if you overdo it.

How baleful, you ask?

Liver damage.

Uh huh. Apparently you have to ingest somewhat more of it than our researchers inflicted on their subjects for that to happen. But still…

2. The horse pills that arrive from Amazon are as big as the end of my thumb! NO WAY can I swallow one of these without choking on it. To use the things, I’ll have to cut the capsule in two and sprinkle it over food or into a drink.

We have this fine DIY comparison of the two varieties:Hmmm…  Ohhkayy… It looks like it can’t do much harm to ingest Saigon cinnamon, the stuff that supposedly works against incipient diabetes, in moderation: the amount used by the researchers is within the supposedly safe limit. Just.

But of course this means I’ve wasted my money on Amazon’s horse pills. Ohhh well!

All pretty dubious, I’d say. But nothing ventured: I decide to add 1/4 teaspoon of the Saigon variety 3 times a day to what passes for my diet. If this isn’t toxic (it apparently could be), it may be redundant, since I routinely drink a fair amount of tea and coffee and eat a fistful of blueberries every day — all supposedly having a similar effect.

We’ll believe it when we see it.

What is more likely to have the “effect” is getting off the sauce. As it develops, prediabetes and diabetes are not the only potential causes of peripheral neuropathy. It can also be caused by alcohol abuse and by vitamin B12 deficiency. We know I’m low on B12. And, to my doctor’s horror I have a glass or two of wine every day, with dinner. I’m not exactly getting soused every day, though: two glasses of wine with a pile of food fit for the Queen of Sheba is not the same as getting shit-faced every day. Nor am I such a lush that it causes me great pain and suffering to substitute iced tea or water for the vino. So…losing the wine and  losing some weight (I’m 10 or 12 pounds overweight again: the result of spending day after day loafing with a computer on my lap) are evidently in order. Whether these strategies will help remains to be seen.

All of this therapeutic tee-totalling and dieting is complicated by the fact that it is too damned hot to get any exercise. It was supposed to be 118 here today — we missed the mark by two degrees And with these damned precancerous growths sprouting up all over my hands and legs and back, I’m not allowed to go into the pool during the daytime. Like Dracula, I must stay out of the sunlight! The dog and I walk about three miles before sunup every morning — about an hour’s jaunt — but evidently that is not enough!

And what really works on the tingling is ibuprofen. One tablet of ibuprofen tamps it down by about 80% and lasts about four hours.

Shenanigans Update…

by

So a variety of shenanigans have been in progress here at the Funny Farm, none of them very momentous (because you can’t get up to a whole lot during a covid quarantine). It’s been hotter than a by-god here, 111 and up. But today is a little cooler, following yesterday’s monsoon showers — the first we’ve seen in the Valley this summer.  A lovely, hazy 180-degree rainbow stretched across the eastern sky yesterday afternoon, as the sinking sun lit up a broad curtain of virga and rain.

Adventures in Medical Science have proceeded — at a stately pace, but still proceeding. I’ve developed peripheral neuropathy, an unending, annoying tingling in the hands and feet. Turns out this can be related to the pre-diabetes the Mayo decided, lo! these many years ago, that I harbor. As usual, they assign me to a resident to assess my current hypochondria. And what a lovely, brilliant young woman. I want her as my forever doctor!

Before I left the house for the appointment, I checked my blood pressure: 124.4/81.8, average of five, the first of which (always the highest) was 131/85. This bit of intelligence invariably leads to one variety or another of mystification or amusement.

And yea verily: I get to the Mayo and as usual they slap a blood pressure cuff on me. They make me sit up straight on the edge of the bench seat (you’re supposed to sit with your back supported, according to the video published BY THE MAYO for training its employees…). It’s 141/74.

Say what? a serious diastolic of 74…did you happen to notice whether I was conscious at the time? 😀  Well of course…my BP goes right into orbit every time I set foot inside a medical facility, so much do I just love visiting those places. But that reading was pretty hilarious.

So the two docs — one the resident and one an old hand — listened to my sad story, provisionally hypothesized that the tingling is from drinking too goddamn much wine, proposed that I knock it off (easier said than done, ladies…), opined that they don’t THINK it’s diabetes, at least probably maybe likely not, and arranged for a blood draw the following morning. So works well: it’s at the (much closer) hospital facility at 7:10 tomorrow, a straight shot north of the coveted Fry’s supermarket.

I felt marginally encouraged, since it was clear that they weren’t very concerned. Or if they were, they sure hid it well.

Senior doc was not pleased with my boozing habits. I figured out how much is in one of my wine glasses and concluded that a typical serving for me is about 4 to 5 ounces. So if I drink two glasses — which I typically do, because I start tippling while I’m cooking the meal — then I’m drinking twice as much as the amount currently deemed OK for women. Note that this reckless behavior has been going on since I was about 29 years old…46 years!

But she had another suspect: she also told me to knock off the vitamin D capsules I’ve been dropping every few days. Not just because 4000 milligrams is about three times too much for a normal dose, but more to the point, she said, merrily OD-ing on the stuff can make you good & sick. In the vitamin department, though, she observed that a deficiency of vitamin E can cause peripheral neuropathy. So that’s one of the things she wanted to test for. Not likely, since I’m given to scarfing down salmon with gay abandon, but…any fishnet in a storm, eh?

Vitamin B12 deficiency also can cause peripheral neuropathy, so she’s testing for that, too. Again: unlikely, as it’s caused by inadequate diet and I eat like the Queen of Sheba.

Honestly… I dunno whether knowing all this stuff makes a junket to the doctor’s office LESS stressful or MORE stressful. On the one hand, you have an idea what to expect. On the other, it may be better not to know.

Okayyy… So come the crack of Thursday’s dawn, I traipse up to the Mayo Hospital in Paradise Valley, where we hoi polloi are greeted with a phalanx of covid-checkers. Their phlebotomists are so skilled you can barely even feel them puncturing your vein. So that was fine.

Our honored highway department had the righthand lane leading up to the freeway off-ramp that takes you to the hospital ripped up for at least a year. What they’re doing is unclear, but whatever it is seems to involve making no progress. My guess is, what they’re doing is pumping money through a boondoggle. At any rate, if you’re doing 70 on that freeway, you’re just barely keeping up with traffic — you’re actually moving too slow. And of course everybody has to get there first! So you have a bitch of a time maneuvering on to the freeway from SR 51 and then an even bigger bitch of a time getting off at 56th Street. Basically, you have to threaten to kill someone. That is why I always drive a car of hefty build…and why I vaguely covet a candy-apple-red pickup, bigawd!

On the way, I realized dayum! i left my credit cards at home!!! So much for the planned early-morning sneak attack on Fry’s Supermarket. Just as well, though: I’ve become too accustomed to eating breakfast, so by 7:15 when I walked outta there, I was starved. But neverthless decided to head back toward the ’Hood on the surface streets, the freeway being too annoying to contemplate further. Amazingly, there was almost no traffic. I flew across the city and shot into the ’Hood at an astonishing 7:25 after that 7:10 appointment, just freakin’ unthinkable! At any time of day, to say nothing of rush hour on a Thursday morning.

Before you know it, the Mayo ALREADY HAS THE RESULTS of that damn blood test posted on its portal. And…it appears that “glucose” is just slightly high. According to the Mayo’s squib on subject, I could bring that down by losing about 10 pounds.

Wouldn’tcha know: that’s exactly the amount by which I happen to be overweight just now. Except for a low bilirubin figure, which is described as “not a concern.” Jeez…if you believe these figures, there’s not only precious little wrong with me, I’m healthy as my horse-like Christian-Science forebears. Those women lived to be 94 without ever once seeing a doctor. But….

Well then…what the HELL is causing this crazy zinging in the paws?

***

Okay, so I learned early this morning that peripheral neuropathy can ALSO be caused by pre-diabetes, not just full-blown diabetes. Sooo…that explains the condition and releases me from the guilt trip laid on me about my daring to have a glass of wine with dinner every day. (How un-American can you get, eh?)

So, what to do about it?

Medication includes drugs used as antidepressants. I happen to know, from Connie the Long-Haul Trucker and from a couple others of my more stressed-out friends, that these have some amazingly undesirable side effects.

Reading along here, we discover that one factor in this ailment is lack of exercise.

Uh huh.

Well. I’ve been loafing either on the bed or in my chair with my feet up on an ottoman since the covid fiasco crashed down on us — since April 1. I’ve gained 10 pounds. And though the dog and I walk two or three miles a day, that seems not to suffice. Literally, days and days go by when that is the ONLY exercise I get.

You don’t register how much walking you do across grocery-store and big-box parking lots, and around and around inside malls and big-box stores. Though I laid the cleaning lady off as soon as the contagion started, I’ve thoroughly cleaned the house only a couple of times. It’s too hot to go hiking on the mountain now, even in the wee hours, and with the craze for exercise, that place is so mobbed that walking through the desert preserve there is not what you’d call a nature stroll.

People don’t realize how far their voices carry across the desert — especially women’s voices, with their higher pitch. So they’re out there yakking…and you can hear them a half-mile away. In detail. Yakitty yakitty yakitty yakitty yak yak yak!!!!! Sometimes I feel like turning around, walking back to a pair of them, and saying, “Ladies, I do not want to know the gossip in your office. I don’t want to know how your kids are doing in school or what allergies they’ve got right now. I don’t want to know about your husband’s best buddy’s peccadillos. I do not care what color you got your hair dyed, or how your stylist baked cookies, or what a bitch her sister-in-law is. Will. You. Please. SHUT UP!”

But of course one can’t get away with that. {sigh}

Point is, the swarms of humanity out there have ruined what used to be a good (if sometimes sketchy) place to get some decent hiking or mountain-biking exercise, with lots of up and down hill and plenty of rock-hopping. Now you can’t hear the birdsong for the nonstop yapfest.

So that’s one excuse. The other is it’s just too hot at this time of year to go out there safely. Heat exhaustion is a real thing. And it can kill you.

Soooo…one thing that might help is to get off my duff and clean this place up. And keep it clean.

The garage had gotten so dirty and messy that it was uncomfortable to walk around barefoot out there. So this morning I pulled the car out onto the driveway, hauled out the shop-vac, and started vacuuming. There was bird seed scattered evenly all over the garage floor. Whaaaa????? Finally recalled that one of those Instacart delivery folks had kindly carried a 50-pound bag of Costco bird seed into the backyard…we would have cut through the garage…the bag must have had a little leak.

Finally got up all the dust and dog hair and bird seed. Hauled out load after load of precious valuables like empty cardboard boxes from Amazon (who knows when you’ll need an old cardboard box, right?). The problem with these little projects is that they multiply…you go to fix something and that leads to another thing that needs to be fixed which causes you to realize something else could be reorganized and cleaned up and on and on and on. Hauled 30# of soda ash out to the pool, where I’m going to offer it to Jim the pool dude. If he doesn’t want it, at least maybe he’ll help me lift it into the trash barrel, since I can barely pick it up.

***

That chore done, we moved on to a mighty fine HOLY SH!T moment. 

As I’m cleaning up the litter on my computer and go to close out of the Mayo Clinic’s “portal” page, I notice that three items in the blood test report are higher than normal: hemogolobin, hematocrit, and erythrocytes.

What, wonders my hot little brain, does that mean? So I look these up — also on a Mayo page —and discover that if hemogolobin and hematocrit are both elevated, that indicates something called polycythemia.

And what is THAT, you might ask?

That is a blood cancer.

This revelation causes a moment of panic. Nay verily….an extended chain of moments of panic.

I call MagaDoc’s office, trying to get in touch with one of the RNs and PAs they have fielding calls from panicked Mayo patients. Mind you, since one day is the same as the next for me, it escapes my attention that today is Saturday….  However, the woman I reach arranges for me to talk with an MD on call.

Shortly this doc calls me. She looks at the test results and says the high numbers, especially since they’re inconsistent with earlier test results, don’t indicate anything more threatening than dehydration.

Well, that certainly would make sense, since we’ve had temps between 100 and 111 every day since…the birth of Adam, far as I can tell. She adds that if the docs feel any concern about it, they’ll ask me to come back for another test — and be sure to drink some water, for cryin’ out loud.

Yes’m.

She adds that doesn’t think the figures have any dire significance whatsoever.

So aside from the prediabetic level of a couple of indicators, there seems to be nothing wrong with me that losing 10 or 15 pounds won’t help.

Literally, other than the daily doggy walks I’ve been inert ever since the covid panic started. Have rarely left the house (except for sneaking an occasional junket to Sprouts) since the first of April. And, since laying off the Cleaning Lady from Heaven, I have not been throwing myself around to do all the work she did.

And that woman DOES heave around! Right now I need to dust, vacuum, mop the floors, and clean the windows. But…one wonders if those antics count as exercise…given the portliness of CLfromH, who cleans at least one house and probably a couple every day, one tends to doubt it.

I hope she’ll come back whenever the plague abates. But don’t think I want a return to happen until a vaccine comes available. Among the many potential plague-carriers she works for is young couple here in the hood. These two are extreme Evangelical Christians. He—the husband—told a neighbor that (hang onto your hat!) they will not wear masks and will not get vaccinated if and when the time comes, because they do not believe covid-19 is “real,” and because even if it is and they do get it, God will take care of them.

Can you imagine? This guy is teaching high school here! At least he isn’t teaching science.

Exit Facebook, Stage Left

by

This afternoon I lost my temper with Facebook and announced, to the dismay of some readers and friends, that I was gonna close my account, and that would be THAT.

After one person said “don’t do it,” I reconsidered. But not for long.

The issue is that Facebook has found a way to override Adblock Plus, a fine piece of software I use to clear away the chaff and debris that gets in the way of smooth web surfing. All of a sudden, every third post — literally every third post — is a goddamn ad.

Do a little Web search to see if there’s anything you can do about this latest little outrage, and you find advice both from Facebook itself and from various users on adjusting ad preferences. So beside your FB page, you put up a web page explaining, step by step, how to do this. Nary a word of this advice works.

Okay, so the problem with trying to adjust ad preferences by way of minimizing the new Facebook intrusions is apparently that I don’t have a regular user account with Facebook. My account was set up by a marketing agent whom I hired when I was trying to publicize my books and my sideline businesses. The result was just hilarious. Any of you who might be thinking of advertising on Facebook might enjoy the tale:

So she sets up this account for me, and she’s very proud. I have several books for sale at Amazon, where their track record ranges from poor to abysmal. We pick a title. She asks me to keep an eye on Amazon’s sales reports and let her know, day by day, how the thing does. And voilà! She launches an ad campaign on Facebook.

The book had been selling, BTW. Just very feebly. A copy every few days.

When the ad came online? Sales…collapsed. They dropped from almost nothing to nothing at all.

When I reported this to her, she was floored. She actually DIDN’T BELIEVE ME. So I sent her a PDF of the Amazon report, over the three weeks following our launch. She was even more floored. We might say: subfloored.

After several more weeks of assiduous thrashing around — she did a sincere job of trying to make this work — we had sold NOTHING. Not. One. F**king. Copy.

“This has never happened before!” quoth she.

“I’ll bet,” I thought.

Finally we had to give up. But I was left with the account. And so I’ve used it to socialize. It’s been wonderful to reconnect with old friends. And wonderful to stay connected with current friends. But it doesn’t sell much of anything.

And that is why I find the new advertising blitz SO, SOOOO OFFENSIVE. Either Facebook has found some way to override AdBlock Plus, a Firefox extension which in general works very effectively, or Adblock itself has failed. If the latter were the case, though, ads would appear on other sites. Because they do not, I surmise this mess is peculiar to Facebook and presumably engineered by Facebook.

I would not have installed AdBlock if I enjoyed having ads shoved in my face. I do not go to FB to buy stuff. If I could afford to buy random junk, I wouldn’t seek the random junk on Facebook while I’m trying to focus on something else. Thus an annoying ad popping up between every three posts is annoying first because it’s an intrusive distraction and second because it reminds me of the considerable amount of money I wasted on FaceBook Ads myself.

On reflection, I will not shut down my FB account, but neither will I continue to spend hours here. Instead, I’ll continue to post links to new posts here at Funny, and hope any friends who care will come on over and join the circus. Maybe some will even subscribe.

With less time diddled away over coffee at Facebook…and over another cup of coffee at Facebook…and over ANOTHER cup of coffee at Facebook, maybe I’ll have time and energy to get back to writing books. Got to finish Ella’s Story. Got to get the bathroom reading collection in print and on a few local news-stands. Got to find new things to do!

And so, away! Perchance to waste less time. 😀

The Dawning of the Light…

by

Well. Let’s hope it’s the light, not a will o’the wisp.

Ever have a moment of Insight when you realize holy sh!t of course that’s IT!???

So I’d made an appointment at the Mayo for 1:15 this afternoon, after calling one of their redoubtable RNs and describing this weird tingling in my hands and on the soles of my feet. It’s been going on for a while and…and…well…tingling hands can be a sign of multiple sclerosis. Years ago, after an episode that was almost certainly an ocular migraine (but has never been proven to be or not to be, one way or the other), an overenthusiastic ophthalmologist told me he thought it could be a symptom of impending MS.

Shee-utt.

This was the same quack who later announced that I had a melanoma inside my eye. This led to about a months’ worth of frantic worrying, rewriting my will, figuring out how my kid would be cared for and on and hysterically on. The ocular oncologist he sent me to took one look, snorted, and said “That’s not cancer! that’s a congenital thing and it’s harmless. Get outta my office!”

So I’m thinking how MUCH, how very much I do NOT want to make that hour-long trek out to the Mayo Clinic and once again explain myself to a skeptical doctor and what’m-i-gunna-do-if-this-is-MS-holy-shit when…yeah…a moth-like thought flutters past:

Hey, stupid…Yeah, you, that one! What have you had your hands in that might have irritated your dainty skin?

Uhm. Well.

Every time I drive around in the car — like, say, trudging out to the dermatologist’s office yesterday and over to the QT Monday buying gasoline — I pull a wet Lysol wipe out of the plastic canister that resides on the passenger seat and scrub down the steering wheel, the gear shift knob, the keys, the this, the that. Monday I wrapped the gas pump handle in wet Lysol wipes and then scrubbed my credit card with another one of them. If I go into a grocery store, I carry a couple of those wipes and wipe off the handle and kiddy seat on the grocery cart. And o’course, every time that happens I get this Lysol disinfectant stuff all over my hands and forearms. And…and…what’s IN that stuff? A fine product called alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride. And what is that, you ask? That is something that the EPA recommends you not use. It causes…yep…contact dermatitis.

Hello? Could it be?

As for the feet? I walk around barefoot on broiling hot pavement two or three times a day. Is there some reason, d’you suppose, that the calluses on the bottom of my paws hurt? Duh!

So I call the Mayo (i really don’t want to traipse out there!!!), reach a nurse and explain my theory. I suggest that even if it is MS or diabetes, I’m not gonna die from it very soon. How’s about we postpone today’s appointment for a week and see what happens?

Amazingly, she thought that made sense!  So, ô hallelujah, that little bit of misery is postponed.  

Routine, Crisis, and Grief in the Age of Covid

by

Up at 3:30 sharp. Hate this…especially in the Age of Covid. In the middle of the night, your neuroses and your hypochondria are unleashed. But it has become a custom, a habit, some kind of physiological necessity. The internal alarm clock goes off every morning between 3 and 4.

M’hijito is bringing his dog over here around 8, on the way over to pick up his dad and New Wife. Word came down that his grandmother — DXH’s mother — is breathing her last in the Grand Junction, Colorado, nursing home where she’s spent the last 20 years or so of her life.

She is 106 years old, God help her.

They were told that they would all have to take and pass covid tests if they are to go in to her room to say good-bye. Not that this would make much difference, as she’s been blind and deaf for upwards of a decade.

My son used to go over there several times a year to visit with her. But finally he announced he was not going back, because he didn’t believe she even knew he was there. That decision came down several years ago.

At any rate, from here he will run over to his dad’s house, pick them up, and drive them to Grand Junction, a 10- or 12-hour junket.

I am not pleased.

DXH is 80 years old, for God’s sake! He’s had a heart attack and bypass surgery. If he catches this thing, he is not going to get to be 81. NW is significantly younger…but you can be a whole lot younger than 80 and still not be a spring chicken. So both of them are put at risk by this junket, as indeed is my son. Unless they brought food with them, they’ll have to stop to eat either at Flagstaff or at Kayenta. They might make it to Four Corners without fainting from hunger…but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Kayenta, where we always used to stop to grab a bite to eat partway through this journey, is in the middle of the Navajo. The plague is holding forth there, as it has from the outset, with a vengeance. On the Rez, 8,243 people have fallen sick…they’re not even saying how many have died, but other sources report that it is a LOT. These are rural, almost nomadic people. There are no large towns on the Rez. By comparison, Yavapai County, which comprises the town of Prescott (once the state capital) has counted 1,167 cases so far. The population of the Navajo Nation is 273,667. The population of Yavapai County is 235,099. So…uhm…think of it this way: 273,667 is NOT to 8,243 as 235,099 is to 1,167.

Not by one helluva long shot.

So. I do not want my son or his father or his father’s wife driving through that area!

Of course, I have no choice in the matter. They decided not to fly, apparently figuring that was riskier for the old folks than driving. And that no doubt is true.

§§§

At 4:20 sharp, the hound and I are out the door!

Took her out to pee about 4:15 to find it was JUST GORGEOUS outside, Venus in the morning sky, the air highly tolerable.

I had decided to opt the morning walks until it cools off a little: by 5 or 5:30 a.m. it’s just gawdawful out there. (To give you an idea: it was 113 yesterday, down from 116 a couple days ago.) But in the predawn gloaming a thought occurred: y’know…we could shoot out, make our dash through Upper Richistan, and get back before the heat comes up.

What a brilliant idea! It was just lovely out. We encountered only one(!!!) dog, and that was on the way back into the ’Hood. Normally I have to wrestle Ruby past a dozen or more dogs. A coyote lives on the road that leads through Lower Richistan, but if she was in the shrubbery over there, she didn’t make herself known. Forgot to bring my shilelagh, so felt a little antsy about that…but mercifully, nothing happened.

Back in the house by 5:20. Dog fed. Human dropped into the pool. Plants watered. Bird dish refilled with water. Hot dang!

§§§

I never got along very well with my mother-in-law. She’s way too much like me: highly opinionated, and not very polite about it.

My mother, who struggled all too visibly to reserve judgment, was nevertheless unmistakably abhorred. And over time MiL did not wear well with me. I do not care whether your political and social and moral beliefs fail to come up to my elevated standards. Seriously. You can be as wacksh!t crazy as you like, you can even be a damned Trumpeter, and as long as you stay out of my face, you’re welcome to it. But that one…could not stay out of your face. If you did not think just the way she did, well then…obviously you were none too bright. And she was happy to tell you about it.

You know the type. Facebook is littered with them.

So that marriage entailed a 20-year struggle to stay polite around the woman. Thank God she lived in another state.

Yet at this point…well, I feel sorry for her but do not feel sorry she is passing.

To live to be 106 years old is to outlive life.

That horror is not something you would wish on anyone. Imagine being confined to a bed in a nursing home, unable to so much as get yourself to the toilet or into a shower stall, unable to see, unable to hear. Not even a mindless daytime TV show to while away the endless hours. There must be a better way to get off this mortal coil.

Her other son lives in Texas. I assume he’s flying over to Grand Junction. Whether they intend to linger at her side until she passes (if she passes…), I do not know. Whether funeral arrangements have been made, I do not know — although given that New Wife is a woman of sterling common sense and considerable prescience, I would assume so. And if so, are they going to stay in Colorado until a funeral and wake and whatever hoohah take place? Or what?

MiL made herself a minor celebrity there on the Western Slope, during her heyday. She wrote a newspaper column for the Grand Junction paper, worked for awhile as an announcer for the local NPR station, and carried a bright red banner of feminism over the heights of Grand Mesa and right into the precincts of Denver, where she got herself appointed to various political jobs, whenever a Democratic governor was in office. So active was she that at one point she was anointed Colorado’s Woman of the Year.

She did a lot, for a small-town librarian who had ill-advisedly married a bright but mentally questionable young man, struggled through 20 years of marriage, finally unloaded the clown (after he took up with his old college girlfriend), and ended up stuck in a small city in the middle of nowhere. Overall, she seemed fairly happy. She had friends. She adored her sons. She achieved a degree of recognition for her public work.

Not a bad life. All things considered.