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Horror$! The Cost of the Weeks from Hell…

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Man! I have been so stunned by all the sh!t that has come down during the past two months from Hell — week after week after week in which every single day has brought some new nightmare — that I just completely let the budget go. There’s a limit to what I can think about, and I’ve been way past that limit for a long time.

By today, though, things have been quiet long enough for me to catch my breath and try to figure out how much this has cost. And how I’m going to pay for it.

• The cost of the vet bills alone has come to just about $1,000 since September 15.
• As of October 21 — with 10 more days to run this month! — I was $575 in the red.
• I retrieved $381 from Social Security by cutting the planned monthly transfer to Emergency Savings by about 60%; this left me a mere $228 in the red.

With 10 more days to go in October.

Yeah.

And that was extremely lucky: no large bills to repair the car after the fender-bender, thanks to Chuck’s guys wrestling and bolting the thing back into place, and because by some miracle I didn’t have to replace tires.

A thousand bucks on the dog in six weeks. Think of that!

Dare one speculate that a substantial part of that resulted from a wrong diagnosis? Well…probably not. We really don’t know whether Cassie does or does not  have Valley fever. She may. But she’s one helluva lot better than she was, that’s for sure. Not back to normal. But not stepping over Death’s threshold, either.

There’s money in savings to cover a couple hundred bucks’ worth of red ink. Just. There’s no way I can sustain even one more unplanned expense. And Christmas, obviously, is now a lost cause.

God only knows what the potentially life-threatening skin cancer diagnosis will cost me. Despite the supposed joys of Medicare and Medigap, there’s always some amount that isn’t covered. Where the cash will come from to pay those bills, I do not know. Out of investments, I expect.

One message from this: unless you still have a job in “retirement,” you can’t afford to keep a pet. So forget that. After Cassie and Ruby are both gone, there’ll be no more doggy companionship.

With any luck, I won’t live that long myself…

The Cloned Life…

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Ever feel like you find yourself in a world that was cloned from the world you’ve been living in all these years? Only it’s cloned just slightly off-kilter, so it’s not an exact copy but an ever-so-vaguely cattywampus copy…

Today, for example. I learned the simplest, most ordinary objects no longer exist in my cloned world. They’re gone. Some have never even been heard of by the world’s otherwise normal-looking denizens.

I left the house to visit four venues:

  1. The Apple Store at the Biltmore, there to try to find out how to activate the iPhone given to me by La Bethulia and La Maya
  2. A Walgreen’s, there to buy a new tube of antibiotic ointment and a new tube of pain- and itch-killing Lanacane with benzocaine, therewith to treat the squamous cell carcinoma on the back of my hand, whilst it awaits surgery; as well as a package of orange sticks (to manicure one’s nails) and a new nail brush
  3. AJ’s, to buy a pound of Peet’s whole-bean coffee, since Costco has discontinued my favorite brand and the AJ’s house “espresso” beans are decidedly not espresso or even dark-roast
  4. Total Wine, where I can buy a bottle of Maker’s Mark for the same price as Costco’s, and a few cans of Guinness, one of which I wished to serve up with the chili I intended to fix for dinner

Andddd….

  • The Apple Store has closed. It will reopen in Scottsdale (a half-hour’s extra driving time) sometime in the next week or two. This rendered the scheme to activate the New Old phone moot.
  • Walgreen’s no longer carries Lanacane.
  • Walgreen’s does not carry either orange sticks or anything even faintly resembling a halfway decent nail brush.
  • The fancy Safeway near the Biltmore, in whose upscale environs I hoped to find a package of orange sticks if not a nail brush, does carry Peet’s dark roast, but only in packages of pre-ground (read “stale”) coffee. You can’t afford the Maker’s Mark there.
  • Safeway does not carry Lanacane, either.
  • Nor does it carry orange sticks. Or nail brushes.
  • Total Wine was overrun with the kind of idiot who sees you coming up the aisle toward them and so stops and parks their cart smack in the middle so you can’t get around them.
  • If Total Wine had Guinness in a wine cooler, I couldn’t find it.

In my effort to find seven small items and try to get one moment of attention from a knowledgeable Apple tech, I went to eight retail establishments:

  • The (defunct) Apple Store
  • A Safeway in Richistan, generously stocked
  • Total Wine
  • A Walgreen’s
  • A second Safeway, closer to home
  • Grinder’s Coffee Shop (closed: they were waxing the floors!)
  • Sally’s Beauty Supply (they have orange sticks in commercial quantities, but not in a lifetime supply for one person)
  • Walmart

Each of these required a drive and a fight for a parking spot.

Not a single store or pharmacy sells Lanacane anymore! They sell another nostrum that contains lidocaine, but never having used it, I felt a little wary of buying it. I wanted the stuff I know works to quell the pain and the itch.

Not even the beauty supply store has decent orange sticks; the ones they do have are junk packaged in bags of 50 or 100, or a package of half-a-dozen coated in an abrasive substance.

At the Total Wine, ninnies kept blocking my way up the aisles, and ultimately I never did find a cooler holding beer. Fuck it: I decided to move on to Safeway.

At the fancy Safeway, I’ll be damned if I could find a package of Guinness. They did not have orange sticks, they did not have nail brushes, and they did not have Lanacane. The pharmacist at the downscale Safeway closer to my house remarked that I was not the only customer who asked after the latter, and that one woman had told him she’d found it on Amazon.

The Richistan Safeway had Peet’s, but not in whole-bean form.

Grinders’ proprietor had piled all the furniture on the patio and was merrily polishing the floors. Nice job, too! But it meant I couldn’t buy any of their extravagantly overpriced coffee.

At last it was into the Walmart…which indeed did have orange sticks, nail brushes, and an easily accessible, cold six-pack of Guinness. There I gave in and bought a tube of salve with lidocaine, hoping for the best.

When the hell did Lanacane become a thing of the past? Yes, you can get it from Amazon, but if you need it now, you really shouldn’t have to wait a day or two to have it delivered. Or pay extra for the privilege. It seems to me to be a very ordinary, very pedestrian product. Suddenly it’s an alien artifact???

When did a supermarket — an invention originally designed to allow consumers to do all their shopping in one place — stop carrying ordinary grooming products and, in an upscale district, a damn six-pack of chilled Guinness?

Waxing the freaking floor of a retail restaurant, in the middle of the day on a freaking Saturday?

See what I mean about the hitch in reality? We don’t really live in our world anymore. Do we…

State of the Chaos

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A little quieter here today… let’s hope it’s not the calm before the next storm. Let’s see how the various crises are doing:

1. In the department of Funny’s Money: I have no idea. I don’t even want to know, it’s such a chaotic disaster. This month I never got an untrammeled moment when I wasn’t too exhausted to sit down and work on the budget, so I’ve just been spending left and right. Financial manager sent over enough to cover the down payment on the pool rehab, which starts Monday. I reset the checking-to-emergency savings automatic transfer to move less than half of what I originally thought I could manage, so that (at least) will leave a little more basic survival money in checking.

2. Hand cancer: still waiting on the biopsy. But I’m calling the doc’s office on Monday to ask if we can accelerate the process. I want this damn thing OFF. Where they shaved off enough to send to the lab, it’s growing back with élan. Whatever it is, it’s very fast-growing and so presumably aggressive. And at times it really hurts. Hurts and itches. Turns out pain and itching are defining characteristics of squamous cell cancer. Why exactly we have to wait for biopsy results until the cows come home to cut the thing out escapes me.

3. Dog decedence*: No credible sign of croaking over yet! Matter of fact, this dog is getting much better. Just now she remembered the chicken jerky treats that reside in a jar on the kitchen counter and decided to do the Dance of the Manipulated Human, thereby eliciting a chew treat for herself and for Ruby. The cough seemed to come back a little: it had subsided to the point where she coughed only when she slurped up a lot of water (which she’s always done…corgis do that). She had stopped coughing when she barks and stopped coughing when I lifted her off the bed. So I cut back the Benadryl from 1/2 tab in the morning and 1/2 tab in the evening to just 1/2 tab at night. A-n-n-d…the cough started to come back. This morning I gave her a dose at doggy breakfast, and lo! No coughing.

*Yes, yes, I did invent that word. Why do you ask? Etym: Late Modern English, from decedent (a deceased person)

4. Car: It seems to have survived its brush with the flatbed trailer with no very serious damage. The gouged tire is still rolling. It hasn’t blown, at least not so far…and yeah, it has been on a freeway or two. I’m trying to stay off the freeways, because I don’t trust the thing. But to get out to the new dermatologist’s office sometime before the end of my life expectancy, I pretty much have to ride the 101 for a number of miles. So far, so good.

5. Cord-cutting Cox escape: Last night La Maya and La Bethulia invited me over for dinner. In the course of conversation, I remarked that I need to get rid of the fake “land line” (Cox’s new version is really VoIP, and not very good VoIP at that), replace my extensions with cheap clamshells and get an iPhone.

“I have two old iPhones that I’m not using!” says La Bethulia. “Want one?”

Do I want one???? Grab!  Well, she quite reasonably wanted to delete all her data on the thing before I trot it over to the Apple store to get it set up. And they’ve forgotten the password for the thing. But it turns out it’s not hard to reboot the thing all by your little self. So…I may try to do that with my son’s help, or just hire an Apple tech to do it. Paying someone a hundred bucks or so would be a lot cheaper than buying a new iPhone! 🙂

6. MacMail fiasco: Still not fixed. Right now the only way I can get to my email is through the Web interface, which is less than ideal. It does allow me to access incoming mail, but all my carefully designed preferences have been screwed up. Not erased — which would have been far preferable — but all jumbled around. So it’s a mess. And I guess I’m going to end up either having to pay Cox for an email account, the bastards, or start using Gmail, which I really really REALLY do not want to do. This, I will figure out later.

7. Other little dramas: Have yet to decide whether I’m going back to choir. The associate director has kindly put me on the women’s chant choir, which I love.  She urged me to come to choir on Sunday despite having turned on my heel and marched back to my car and gone home after last Wednesday evening’s unpleasant exchange at the door (not with her but with a woman who makes no secret of her dislike of me).

I don’t know. I’d pretty well decided to quit — just never go back, that’s how disgusted I am. And besides…

Really, the only thing that keeps me from feeling a great deal more serious about moving out of Crime Central is the choir. I can’t afford any other close-in district — this neighborhood is cheap because Conduit of Blight Blvd, Gangbanger’s Way, the Blightrail, the meth clinic, and the population of bums keep the property values way down. Comparable homes anywhere else are at least a hundred grand higher, and these days more like two hundred grand.

Abandoning the choir and the church would open two housing options: Fountain Hills, wayyy on the east side of the Valley, and Sun City, wayyyy on the west side. Both have the advantages of low crime rates and pretty decent nearby shopping. They’re both quiet and peaceful, and there’s no way any politicians and their greed-driven backers are going to build a boondoggle through the middle of either one. Sun City is a ghetto for old folks, which I really do not like. Fountain Hills is one helluva long way from everything but the Mayo Clinic, a distance that I also do not like. I don’t know anyone in Fountain Hills and, because I don’t make friends easily, this would make me feel isolated and unhappy. But Fountain Hills has pretty scenery and it is close to upscale shopping and to my favorite second-hand store, My Sister’s Closet. Sun City has the advantages that it’s very cheap to live there, and that I do know some people there and so would start with a kernel of a social life. Which would be good. I guess. And the writer’s group I favor meets way on the west side, so it would be easy to cultivate more friends there. I guess.

Well, if I’m going to snab that phone, I need to get up and do it now…La Maya’s relatives are about to descend on the house. And so, away!

Gnus of the Day

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The e-mail disruption of the past few days — one of many ongoing little fiascos — has meant that I have to retrieve my personal and business mail from the iCloud website, rather than from the application that resides on my computer. Thus every time I need to check on the mail, I get Google News flashed in my face, because long, long ago in another time and in another space, I set that URL as Facebook’s and Safari’s home pages. Well…that has become a bit counterproductive. When your nerves are feeling frayed, the last thing you want to read about is the three-ring circus in the White House.

But there’s a much larger and more universal problem with Google News than that. As an information source, it doesn’t cut the mustard. Why? Because Google’s bots spy on you, peering over your shoulder at the stories you pick and noting how quickly you go to them. It then helpfully serves you content it thinks you’d like.

That’s very kind, o’course. But what it means is that you read news in a bubble. You don’t get a full picture of what’s going on or of what people who don’t think just like you are thinking — possibly rational thinking that would give you a fresh point of view on issues. You get what you are. It’s like looking into a mental mirror. That’s because Google News isn’t selling news to you. It’s selling you to advertisers. And so it fits Google’s purposes — to say nothing of its advertisers’ purposes — to turn you into a sheeple.

Being forced to go to your Web browser every time you want to check incoming mail brings that factoid sharply into focus — or at least it should. And having the Orange Ringmaster’s latest inanities and menaces shoved in my face every time I want to see my mail really is beyond the pale. I like getting the news, but I would like to get NEWS news, not whatever infotainment or disaster-mongering Google thinks I will find amusing. The obvious solution, then, is to reset your browser’s default “home” page to some legitimate news source. But…which one? The best, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, have paywalls — they’ll string you along by letting you see four or five stories, but after that they block you unless you subscribe. There’s always NPR, of course, but it subscribes to its own agenda, which is just about as tedious as the right-wing agenda.

However, there’s an alternative, and for the nonce it’s free: wire services. In particular, UPI and Reuters. Wire services earn their pay by selling news reports to newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, and magazines. They don’t have to charge online readers to stay in business, and they’re less agenda-driven than most news outlets. Quite a few of them, understandably, refrain from running a news feed: they’re selling to customers, and random Internet users are decidedly not their customers. This is true, for example, of the Associated Press (AP) and the Canadian Press.  AP does have an interesting blog, but it’s mostly photos…entertaining time-killer but not especially informative.

So… I decided to make Reuters the home page for both Firefox and Safari. It’s a great deal less annoying than Google News, because it doesn’t shove the latest outrages from Washington right into your face.  One of the cool things about the Reuters site is that you can choose the topics you’d like to read about:

Browse the subject links that appear in the banner (each of which has its own set of related sub-topics), and you get a much broader and more informative selection of news reports than you do with Google News.

I’m including links to Reuters and AP in the right-hand sidebar’s list of news sources. Check them out: they’re sure an improvement over Google!

Corgi LIVES…

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Cassie the Corgi started to fall sick about the first of September. Migawd! It’s the 18th of October now…that poor little dog has been ailing for over a month and a half!

However…it looks like she may be on the mend. That is, if you assume that whatever is growing on her adrenal gland is benign.

Since it won’t do her or me any good to know what exactly that is — because of course I can’t afford thousands of dollars on surgery and cancer therapy for a 12-year-old dog — we are throwing the dice and betting on the come: that the thing is one of the 50% of such growths that are harmless.

She’s acting like that now. She finally has recovered from whatever ailed her and the horrific drugs that made her even sicker than the ailment did. Her cough is about gone except for when she drinks water…but she’s always choked on water, long as she’s been living here at the Funny Farm.

And this evening, for the first time in all these weeks, she’s been up for a beloved doggy-walk!

We didn’t try to go far — about a third of a mile, maybe — and she was looking a little tired by the time we got back. But it made her and Ruby the Corgi Pup very, very happy.

She’ll have to work back up to the traditional mile-long speed-walk. It may be that she’s a little too old for a fast stroll, but I’m pretty sure she’ll eventually get to where she can at least amble through our usual circuit.

Will she live a lot longer? In human years, I’d bet not. She is, after all, an elderly dog. At 12, a medium-sized dog has supposedly aged as much as a human ages in 69 years. But we don’t know she’s only 12. That’s what the Humane Society said was her age. But too often the staff at rescue shelters just make a guess at a dog’s age. When she came to live at the Funny Farm, she certainly didn’t act any younger than two. She could have been three. Ruby is around four, and I’d say she behaves very much like Cassie did ten years ago.

So…if Cassie was three then, she’s 13 now. If she was four then, she’s a very elderly 14 now. It’s hard to tell with a corgi: they’re vigorous, sturdy dogs, and Cassie was born before the breed was “noticed,” so is not overbred. If we cast our imagination to the outside border of this speculation and allow that she could even be 14, that would give her a human age of 78.

I’ll be happy if she lives another year or so and does so without undue suffering. And at the rate she’s going now…I don’t think that’s outside the realm of reason.

Why We Pay More for Apple Products…

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Customer service. That’s it. That IS the reason to pay more for Apple products. Seriously. Over the past three days, I’ve spent eight hours on the phone with Apple techs. All that time as been (heh) “free”: no one is going to charge me for the time four highly accomplished tech advisers spent on trying to make my MacMail work.

My mail program crashed, big time. Unclear why. Apple’s folk thought it was a hardware problem. A visit from Cox and God only knows how much for a new modem/router showed that it was not. Finally got to a boss-level tech who decided (we hope he’s right) it was a problem with iCloud, not with my hardware. Figuring this out over the phone literally took hours.

Could I have done without a catastrophic crash of my email system? Damn right.

Will I probably abandon the program, one way or the other? Yeah. I suspect that Google is going to be more stable. Right now I have messages forwarded from my business email account — which actually is a Google account, even though it doesn’t end with google.com. Messages from famadverts and funny-about-money at gmail accounts also forward to MacMail. They can, after all, be aggregated in a single Google account.

But…it has to be said: Google has exactly zero customer service. So…why would I want to do that?

😀