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funny

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You Want Me to Pay WHAAAT?????

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Statements arrive in the mail, claiming to show what is not covered by Medicare. Alarming, because they don’t really say you have to pay the vendor…these outfits often generate a Medicare bill, send it off, and then refrain from charging the amounts Big Brother declines to pay.  Then the vendor drops the amount the statement says they’re charging, so you don’t really owe that. Quite.

But meanwhile, you also have private insurance, which may (or may not) cover all (or some) of the amounts Medicare declines to cover.

You can’t tell from a given statement what part of that is what! You just have to wait — weeks or months! — until the vendor gets around to generating its most recent coherent bill.

Even then, you’re likely to have to guess what’s owed and what’s covered.

Right now Medicare says it’s billing me $1,057 and $658…for services that I wouldn’t have used if I’d known they weren’t covered.

IF they’re not covered. They actually may be covered, but you can’t tell it from these statements.

Ducky!

What’s Your Favorite Phone Solicitor Bounce?

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EVERY….GODDAM…MORNING the accursed phone solicitors ring up this number. Even though I have the telephone set to ring through only on calls from specific area codes, almost every day at least one nuisance call gets through. Usually more than that.

They spoof area codes as well as local exchanges, trying to trick you into picking up the phone. I, for example, no longer answer the phone unless I recognize the caller’s name or the call is coming from an area where a client might be located. But this means,  of course, that if you do any amount of business over the phone, you really can’t afford to decline to answer the call.

Phone soliciting is a prison industry. So a fair number of the dorkuses who roust you as the sun rises are convicts, working some miserable job as part of their sentence. Others are more ordinary scam operators: crooks of one sort or another who have a special skill at putting on the Dumb and the Feckless.

To my mind, that files the whole lot of them into the category of Crook and Nuisance. So I feel no compulsion to be polite to them.

So…if they’re taking advantage of you (they know it’s 7 in the morning where you are, and you’re running around trying to get ready for work, wrangling the kids for school, or choking down breakfast and coffee), why not have a little fun with them?

Videlicet:

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. {Pronouncing your name wrong…}

You: Hello, dear. What are you up to?

Them: {Launches into sales pitch.}

You: Is that so?!? That sounds very interesting! How long does it take to get {whatever they’re peddling} here to East Thailand?

*******

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. Blah blah bl…

You: Omigawd! EEEEEK!

Them: Huh?

You: HOLEEE SHEEE-UT!  Call the fire department. The kitchen is ON FIRE!!!! 

Them: Where are you?

You: Eeeeeeeek! HAAAAAALP!!!! Ow, ow, ow, nooooooo!!!!! HEEELLLLPPPPPPP!

Them: What’s your address?

You: GAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

SLAMMMM!
(Mark slams down the phone)

****

Them: Good morning, Ms. Bltzvck. This is Dimwit Dummas calling for Ripoff Industries. How are you today?

You: Just fine, dear. And you? Now the Mark engages the predator in conversation. As the exchange proceeds…

You: By the way, may I ask you something?

Them: Sure?

You: I’ve heard telephone soliciting is a prison industry. What jail are you calling from?

And so on, to infinity. 

As if you had that much time to waste…

What’s your own favorite phone-solicitor revenge? Tell us about it in the comments below…please!

What COULD she have been thinking?

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Or DID she think? 

My great-aunt Gertrude — a kind of amateur intellectual — lived with her mother (my great-grandmother) in a pretty little Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced bungalow in California’s Berkeley foothills. It was such a lovely little house! All wood floors and handsome windows and…on and on.

In back stood a similarly designed garage.

Neither woman had ever learned to drive.

(Can you imagine living in a time when you didn’t have to drive to get around a city?)

So that garage — big enough to hold two cars — served as a gigantic storage bin.

And what did they store in it?

Piles and piles atop pile on pile of old magazines. 

Yes. Gertrude subscribed to National Geographic, and she NEVER threw out a back issue. That garage was chuckablock full of antique issues of National Geographic.

Without doubt, there were other titles, too. But Nat’l Geographic is the one that sticks in my mind. They must have had twenty or thirty years’ worth of issues stashed in that lean-to.

Well. The place would’ve been a fire hazard under the best of conditions. But stacked from floor to ceiling with inky paper? HOLEE mackerel!

Back in the day, when I was a kid, it never occurred to me to ask them WHY they felt they should keep all those old issues, when any public library would have had them. Today, though, I look back on it and wonder were they crazy…or WHAT???

And looking back on it, it surprises me that my father let me and my mother stay at their house for a week or three at a time, while he was off at sea. Though my mother might not have noticed what a hazard that pile of paper presented, he was the kind of guy who would have looked at their proud collection and thought hoooleee sheee-ut! 

Only thing I can figure is that maybe he was never invited back there and so maybe he never saw it. Damned if I’d have let my kid stay for weeks at a time when one spark would set off a conflagration that would burn the house down.

People are strange, aren’t they?

Doggy-Walk from Heaven

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INCREDIBLY gorgeous morning! Cool but not cold. Clear skies. Lovely, low morning sun. Neighbors out walking their dogs and taking the early air…  What a fantastic neighborhood we live in.

Ruby and I circumnavigated the park. Said “hello” to half-a-dozen other dawg walkers. Soaked in the gorgeous morning air.

Walked past the house where the family’s son f*cked some teenaged girl and got arrested for the favor. He went to jail. They lost their home. It’s been a wreck for awhile.

But now someone has bought it and fixed it up. Looks like about all that’s left to do is to repair (rebuild??) the swimming pool.

We hang a left onto that neighborhood street: a lovely upper-middle-class neighborhood of handsome, big houses, irrigated lots, and general toniness. It’s one of the reasons I love living here.

Shortly, we bear north, ever north…again past the lovely park with its expanses of green grass (!!!) and its handsome, mature trees, and its 87 gerjillion other dawg-walkers. 😀

What a place to live!

I hope I can hang onto my home until I croak over. Partly because I do want to live here for literally the rest of my life. And partly because I want to leave it to my son, so he can either move into this beautiful little house or sell it for enough to decamp to Tahiti.

No kidding: this place is Yup Central, the younger generation of the upwardly mobile having discovered it. So by the time I pass on to my furry fathers, the house should be worth a ridiculous amount of money. He’ll be able to sell his house and bank the cash income, or sell both places and move to Upper Richistan.

If things work out the way I hope, it will be a lovely gift to leave him, and something that has the potential to profit him seven ways from Sunday.

Yea verily: the thoughts that preoccupy you as you and the Killer Corgi stroll past a fine green park and piles of fancy houses and little patches of local history. Onward!

Bug Bite Bait!

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Arrrgghhh!  WHY do biting bugs sooooo love me?

No kidding. This human is walkin’ talkin’ Bug Bait! As soon as the li’l critters see me, they swarm in for the feast.

Interestingly, they also recognize the battery-operated electric bug-swatter I use to chase them around.

Just now, we’re in Arizona’s High Mosquito Season. The li’l monsters swarm in on me in a frenzy of Bug Joy. Bite-bite-bitedy-bite-bite-bite!

But…they recognize the bug-swatter, too. 

No kidding. When I pick that thing up to give one or two of them a whack, the rest of them shoot outta here like little bug rockets!

And no, I can’t spray insecticide all around the room, because the damn stuff makes me sick. (Maybe I’m a bug????)

What I need is…lizards. A tribe of lizards. Geckos, by damn!

The only question is…how to catch them and persuade them to linger in the house.

Ohhhhhh gooodie!  Just to make things perfect, the fukkin’ power just went off. And then, less than a minute later, came back on. Now I have to traipse all over the house and reset the clocks on every goddam electric appliance.

Ohhhhhh dammit!!! The power just came back on, but now all the electric clocks are hung up. None of them is working. And the phone is not working, either.

dammit dammit dammit!!!!! Now I’ll have to traipse across the street, lean on the neighbor’s doorbell, and beg them to let me call the phone company from their house. And NO, no indeed I still haven’t figured out how to use the goddam cell phone, because no one will take a few minutes to teach me how to use it.

………….

Nope! Now the land-line phone has come back on. That’s a relief: one fewer hassle for the day.

Well…heh! We’ll see how much longer THAT lasts…

*********

😀  Seriously, in Arabia (where I grew up, lo! these many decades ago) we had tribes of geckos living around the house. Wonderful little critters…they were.

Saudi Arabia, as you might imagine, is awash in flies, moths, and various other bugs. The place is Gecko Heaven. So those glorious little lizards used to take up residence around the humans’ habitations — and we, of course, would encourage them, to the extent that we could figure out how. And they did help considerably with the bug problem.

Flying bugs, that is.

Oddly, other than ants, there weren’t a lot of crawling bugs out there. You didn’t see armies of cockroaches, for example. I always figured the lizards ate the roaches…but surely do not know that to be a fact. Maybe it was just too damn hot out there for roaches, same is it was for gringos….

{sigh} There’s a roadside doctor’s office about six blocks down Main Drag West. I ought to get off my duff, walk down there, and try to get them to look at this nasty rash.

But meanwhile…

…the day is gorgeous…
…the pool beckons, come to me, come to m-e-e-e…
…and I yam hungry….

Hungry hungry hungreeeee…..  

How do I not want to trudge down to the neighborhood doctor’s office? LET ME COUNT THE WAYS…

Hmmmm…..  Welp…I can’t count that high. 

Life in Lovely Uptown Phoe…DUCK!!!!!

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LOL! Here we go again. 

JUST got my fanny sat down in a big comfortable overstuffed leather chair when ROOOAAARRR whirrrr whirrr whirrr… Yet another goddam cop helicopter soars over the house. 

Naturally, Ruby is peregrinating around the backyard, whither she wandered through the open back door.

Set aside the coffee. Leap up, race through the kitchen. Call the dog…..

Call the dog….

Call the dog….

Obedient beast ambles idly across the yard and in through the door.

Good daaawg!

Slam the back screen and kitchen door shut. Lock the deadbolts on both. Amble back to my easy chair, next to which a cup of (cooling…) hot tea resides.

What.
A
Place.

And why do I persist in living here?

Well…I’d say because I’m here and I ain’t movin’. But the truth is, I do like it here in the northerly reaches of North Central Phoenix.

For one thing, there’s never a dull moment around this place. That’s f’r sure!

It’s centrally located but out from underneath the flight paths of the jets that roar in and out of Sky Harbor Airport all day and night.

We’re in a decent school district, which means the neighborhood hosts legions of laughing, cavorting kids. Not to be missed!!

It’s populated enough to support not one, not two, but three high-quality grocery stores within an easy stroll, plus a large bookstore, a nice hair salon, a computer store…and more that I have yet to explore.

Up at the corner, we have a superior car mechanic’s garage. Don’t have to get the clunk towed far to deliver it to those guys.

The city has installed a train that now glides back and forth between ASU West (on the west side) and the Tempe campus (on the east side). Truth to tell, for most purposes, you don’t have to own a car…or even borrow one.

The place gets more and more like a real city as the years slide past. In San Francisco, my mother and I didn’t even need to own a car: we could get everyplace we wanted to go by bus, by trolley, or on foot. Same in London. Same in Paris.

While that’s not true of everyplace in the L.A.-like Phoenix area, public transit here is already pretty good, and it’s continuing to evolve apace.

As a result, I no longer hate living in Phoenix (as I did in my early years stuck in this place). Matter of fact, I’m coming to rather like it. In another few years it will be a real city. And a pretty livable one, at that.

So that’s a good thing.

Then we have the ever-burgeoning crime level. The bloating cost of living. The mobs of people, people, and more people….

Oh well. You can’t not have everything, right?