funny | Funny about Money

To Move or Not to Move…That is the question: in numbers!

August 26, 2018 by funny

So during the night a bum came up the alley and dumped over the big, bulky four-residence garbage bins and scattered garbage all over the ground, presumably looking for documents that can be sold to identity thieves for enough to help support his (or her) meth habit. On my way to a friend’s house for brunch this morning, I saw a bum steaming along as fast as he could go on a kid-size bike, no doubt stolen — the bike, that is, not the bum. The bum was behaving so erratically, swerving back and forth and then stopping to holler and gesticulate at me when I tried to get around him — that he was no doubt high as a kite.

These things make me consider and reconsider: do I really want to stay in this neighborhood?

I could buy a very nice house in Sun City, freshly renovated, for so much less than I can net on sale of this house that I would walk away with at least 50 grand in my pocket. Given a little luck, with a lot more than net 50 grand.

Pumping up my savings by 50 grand would help my cause tremendously. So would the much lower taxes, house, and car insurance. SDXB said when he moved out there, his property taxes dropped to a third of what he was paying here, and his insurance dropped by half. Plus Phoenix now gouges residents for a tax on food; there are no food taxes on that side of the Valley, which is outside the Phoenix city limits.

And there are no bums in Sun City. Crime levels are very low. It is safe to walk to any grocery store, if you’re close enough (chances are you’re not, but those lucky few who are within walking distance of shopping need not carry heat to do so). You can get around in a golf cart, so gas costs and wear & tear on your car are low, if you rarely go anywhere but Sun City.

So…why don’t I hurry right up and list my house?

Well. There are some drawbacks:

Sun City is an old folks’ ghetto. By and large a white old folks’ ghetto. Weirdly enough, I happen to like the sound of children playing, and I even like a little diversity amongst my neighbors.
The place is overrun with coyotes — and overrun is no exaggeration. My little dogs would never be safe: they could not be allowed to linger in their own yard, even if the yard were walled in., Most yards in SC are not fenced or walled, and you build a wall at risk of incurring the neighbors’ wrath. And a coyote will ghost right over a six- or eight-foot wall, grab your dwarf pooch, and sail back out of your yard before you can move.
It is a long, long way from upscale shopping and dining.
It’s a long, long way from cultural venues.

Nevertheless, though… I’m really tired of the bum situation, and it clearly isn’t going to get any better. The city is moving another meth clinic into our neighborhood (the 24-hour one that serves thousands(!!) of drug addicts a month ain’t enough). The blightrail carries them into our neighborhood and drops them off for free. The corner of Conduit of Blight Blvd and Gangbanger’s Way presently has the highest rate of police calls in the city! Anything that you leave outside that’s not red-hot or nailed down will be stolen. And every few days you hear another report of some thug trying to gain entry into a home while the resident is inside.

Tiresome.

Maybe, I sometimes think, the advantages of freedom from crime, drug abuse, and homelessness would make it worth moving,. Especially given that property values and taxes out there are low enough to create a net profit on sale of one’s existing home.

But…is that so?

To parse out an answer to that question, I decided to list the advantages and disadvantages of each venue and rate them, on a scale of 1 to 10, according to how much I personally care about each factor. Thus, for example, a walled backyard would be worth 10 points (because I value my privacy a lot), while the fact that my present home doesn’t have enough cabinetry in the kitchen is only a 5-point disadvantage because I don’t have a family to feed and I don’t entertain much, so don’t need that much space for dishes, pots, pans, and utensils. The more important an issue is, whether it’s defined as an advantage or as a disadvantage, the higher its point rating.

So we get this:

Here we find that my house presents 80 points of advantage, as compared to 83 points in favor of a comparable house in Sun City. However, when it comes to disadvantages, the spread is much, much wider: only 66 points’ worth of disadvantages for my present home, vs. 73 points in a Sun City house.

The disadvantages rack up because of the area’s distance from the central part of the city, the lack of natural gas service to the area, and lack of private outdoor space.

Even though Sun City has many advantages, it’s only 3 points ahead of mine in the areas that really matter. And even though my house has a lot of annoyances and drawbacks, Sun City outranks my neighborhood in the “disadvantages” category by 13 points.

Even though it costs more to live here, I can afford it. Even though there are a lot of bums here, I think I’d rather have a gas stove, gas heat, and proximity to social and cultural activities than a bum-free environment lacking those things.

Interesting little exercise, isn’t it?

Casts some light on why I feel so conflicted about this question. And it also reinforces the old saw: when in doubt, don’t.

Woo HOO! Girl’s Guide to Knife Renovation!

August 24, 2018August 24, 2018 by funny

It worked. It worked, it worked, IT WORKED!!! After moping online about the scratches and gouges induced by past misguided knife-sharpening ventures, I found a guy on YouTube who describes renovation by ladies’ manicure supply!

WHAT?????

No kidding. The man trots out his wife’s nail file gear — the kind of stuff you use for acrylics, not for real fingernails — and demonstrates how to polish up a stainless steel knife.

Well. I figure nothing ventured nothing gained. The knives are already a mess: they couldn’t get much worse. Plus if I f*ck them up some more, it’ll give me an excuse to go out and diddle away $200 on a whole giant set of fancy German knives.

Right?

So…fortunately, back in the Day I used to wear bionic nails all the time. In an old disused drawer, what should I still have but a stash of files, abrasive pads, and assorted doodads.

Bear in mind, gents, that all a nail file is is sandpaper affixed to a stiff board. And it comes in many grades. The board makes the stuff highly and easily maneuverable. From the male point of view, the only problem with it is that it too often comes in pink. The way around this, of course, is simply to regard pink as “light red.”

Here we have the entire set of fine tools — slightly used, as I didn’t think about writing this project up until I got pretty far into it.

As you can see, this gear comes in a variety of forms and shapes. The acrylic gunk applied to women’s nails to create fake fingernails dries into a hard surface that is first shaped and then polished to a high sheen with various grades of sandpaper….uhm, nail files. You can get blocks of stuff — that butter-shaped thing, for example — that have a coarse surface applied over a sponge-rubber interior, allowing a great deal of versatility. Some files come with two functional surfaces, one coarser than the other. And that one that’s half pink and half white actually has three grits: a medium and medium fine on the pink-&-white side, and on the reverse side a very fine grade suitable for polishing to a high sheen. Other files, such as that square-cornered number near the top of the board, are very coarse, indeed. But noteworthy: no other products are needed to accomplish this polishing effect.

Well, I had my doubts that this scheme would do much, since steel wool hadn’t done much in the past. But nothing ventured, eh?

So here’s an expensive little fiasco: a badly scratched La Guiole steak knife. Stainless; when new, it was highly polished:

You can see why I’ve been so disgusted that I’m willing to pony up a month’s budget savings to replace my knife collection, eh?

Okay, here’s what we get after a bit of polishing, going from coarsest to finest-grit sandpaper…uhm, nail polish tools.

Hot DAYUM! Not a gouge to be seen!!!

Are they shiny new-as-fresh-out-of-the-box? No. Of course not. They’re a good dozen years old. But neither are they all gouged up. The coarser grade nail file scoured off the scratches from the ill-applied whetstone, and the series of increasingly finer grades polished the blades back up pretty darned well.

When you first apply this technique, you get an alarmingly scratchy surface — final effect is a kind of coarse satin, not a high stainless-steel gloss. Like this:

This Henckels blade, too, was tragically gouged up, with deep scratches running all the way the length of the blade, from tip to hilt. The coarser sandpaper that you start with will seem to make things worse (if that’s possible), even as it buffs off the scratches. But persist: as you apply finer and finer gauges of manicure products — i.e., sandpaper — you get a better and better result. Like these:

I hafta tell you: I am thrilled with the result. Virtually all of the scratches on these things are GONE.

Then we had the issue of the steak knives’ handles.

Those amazingly, mind-bogglingly expensive LaGuiole knives are the real goddamn thing. They are NOT a knock-off. And those handles? Those aren’t plastic. Those are made of horn. The real thing. And trust me, I did not pay a low-rent Sur la Table price for that set.

So you can imagine how charmed I was on the morning after I’d had a half-dozen friends over to dinner, one of whom volunteered to help clean up afterward. Being three sheets to the wind by 11 at night, I failed to pay much attention to what she was merrily dropping into the dishwasher. While I was washing several of the knives by hand, she was tossing the rest of them into the washer with the silverware!

Jayzus!

Needless to say, come sunrise I found the handles were wrecked. This was why I haven’t done much or cared much about the scratches, which came later. Trashed handles, gouged blades…why didn’t I just throw them directly into the garbage?

Well, I didn’t because I couldn’t bring myself to do that. And after I got laid off my job, of course I couldn’t afford to buy any other steak knives. So these have had to do.

Seeing that the nail-file treatment removed most of the scratches from the blades, I decided to soak the handles in mineral oil. What the Hell: nothing ventured, nothing gained. While I was at it, I also soaked the walnut handle of that Chicago knife in the center of the above photo, and the sort of maybe-wood handle of the Henckel paring knife on the far left.

Drenched the handles with mineral oil, wrapped them in paper towels, and left them sitting for a couple of hours.

It definitely helped the Chicago knife’s walnut handle. A lot. Don’t think it made much difference for the other ones, though. I’m thinking, however, that it’s possible a coat or two of bowling-alley wax (you remember: Johnson’s wax? do they still make it?) might approximate the original finish on the LaGuiole knives.

At any rate, I account this whole project to be a major success. And now I feel exactly zero craving to buy any new fancy knives.

New Knives? Or Old Folks’ Stuff?

August 24, 2018 by funny

{Chortle!} I remain bewitched with the idea of buying a gigantic set of fancy new German kitchen and steak knives (with white handles! oooooohhhh!) at Costco. The ridiculousness of dropping $200 on any such thing is manifest.

Still…if I don’t spend any more on anything else (and there’s no reason I should), by the end of this month (which it already IS, almost!) I’ll have $200 left in the budget. Why should I not spend it on myself?

Or, one might reasonably ask, why should I spend it on myself?

Thing is, a perfectly fine collection of fancy Wüsthof and Henckels knives is sitting right there in the drawer. I don’t need any fancy new knives.

But…but…the other thing is, every one of them is all scratched up, from the time I took it into my hot little head to use my father’s whetstone to sharpen the knives, which had gone mightily dull. This was an exceptionally bad idea. In my clumsiness, I ruined every knife in the house!

Except they’re not ruined. They look terrible, but they take a perfectly fine edge and there’s nothing wrong with the way they work. So what if they look terrible? Who sees them?

So, here’s another Thing:

Whenever you go to one of those uncountable estate sales out in Sun City, these scratched-up knives are the sort of thing you run into. Those, and the blue-and-pink furniture and the much-scrubbed Revereware pans and on and on. You find the leavings of the make-it-do, use-it-up generation: people who pay a middling-high price to get the best Stuff they can afford and who are then stuck with it, because it never wears out. By the time you’ve owned it half your lifetime and you’re tired of it, it really isn’t worn out.

These houses are full of tired, out-of-style Stuff that’s still perfectly serviceable. Serviceable outmoded furniture. Serviceable old-fashioned pots and pans. Serviceable mixers. Serviceable food processors. Serviceable blenders. Serviceable fans. Serviceable old analog scales and clocks. Serviceable towels. Serviceable sheets. Serviceable throw pillows. Serviceable half-bottles of Arpège and Windsong. Auuughhhh! So depressing it comes out on the other side of depressing.

So the question becomes one of WTF are you saving that two hundred bucks for, anyway?

I dunno. I’m so cheap I don’t want to part with it. Plus I like my knives. I’ve collected them over a lifetime. Handing them over to Goodwill feels like a betrayal. How can I even think of taking my knives to the pound? Auuughhhh!

One thing we can be assured of: despite all those expensive German brand names, the best knife in that drawer was made by Chicago Knives. It takes an edge like a razor blade and holds the edge forever with just light honing. A-n-n-d you cannot buy a decent Chicago knife anymore. That’s another fine American product that has gone down the tubes — though reviews at Amazon average in the four-star range, still some 11 percent of reviewers hate it. Here’s my knife: one guy says Chicago “must be the name of a town in China.” 😀 This one is particularly juicy: “After some very light use and cleaning, the wood on the handle SHRANK exposing the sharp edge of the full tang in the handle. The edge of the tang is sharp enough to cut my fingers.” Hee HEEEEE!

Okay. Yeah. Why, again, do I want to replace a lifetime collection of high-quality German and (real!) American cutlery for…what? Something made in China, like everything else? So my knives are old folks’ stuff. BFD: I am an old folk.

What’s a few scratches, after all…

Crabby as a cat…

August 23, 2018 by funny

Grrrrrrrr! This is one of those can’t touch it without causing it to go T-W-A-A-A–N-G!-!-! days.

Mostly I’ve been too damn lazy to touch anything, thank God. Didn’t make it out for the wee-hours doggy-walk: sucked in to the hilariously lurid news reporting on our national politics. Sat glued to the digital screen until it was way too hot to take the dogs (or me) outside.

This: it’s just too good. Too, too, TOO good:

Uh huh… 😀 Our role model

Except really, you couldn’t make this stuff up. Not a chance!

And how lovely: if enough weren’t enough, my touchpad has stopped working. I’ll have to go get the mouse, put in new batteries, and find something that it can squirchle around on. Never. A. Fuckin’. Dull. Moment.

Naturally, that thing doesn’t work, either. So….I guess I’m without a computer just now.

Well…nooo…lookee here. Now the damn touchpad lash-up is working. Sort of. In a half-assed way. Better than not at all. I guess.

Oh, god!!!! I have SO had it!

After diddling the entire morning away, I decided I should shift around and get something done. How’s about I deposit this stack of checks from Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff?

It’s a task I tend to put off until the stack gets so high it can no longer be ignored. I hate depositing checks electronically. It is a ditzy hassle, every damn inch of the damn way.

So I ditz around and ditz around and ditz around: scan the checks, crop the checks, store the checks to disk as jpegs under distinctive filenames, make a record of each check and its amount and where it comes from so as to be able to explain to WonderAccountant what on earth those random cryptic figures represent and then upload the front of each check and upload the back of each check and print out the receipt and staple each check to its receipt and file it away in a CE Desk file folder and what a gigantic fuckin PITA!!!!!!!!!

Almost as much of a PITA as driving through the wackshit traffic to the credit union, halfway to San Diego, and depositing them in person.

Today I got the best of both fucking experiences.

When I uploaded the first check to the credit union’s site, I got back a message reminding me that it’s a crime to deposit the same check twice, and no, they would not accept any more checks from me.

WTF?

No, it was NOT a duplicate check! The thing had been sitting on my desk for the past two weeks, waiting for the whole pile to accrue. If I’d already deposited it…well, cf “print out the receipt and staple etc. etc. et-endless-cetera”!

Furious, I now gathered the mound of checks and set out through the murderous heat, humidity, and traffic for the credit union. There, hearing this story, the teller remarked, “Oh, yeah. That happens…sometimes it thinks checks are duplicates.”

Oh, thank you so much. I just LOVE having my time wasted and my patience tried!

So, after this, to cut down on the aggravation factor I guess I’ll just have to drive all incoming paper checks up to the credit union in person. What a fuckin’ waste of gasoline and time!! About the best I can do to ameliorate that is plan to coordinate with Costco trips, and do my Costco shopping in the store up on the I-17, which is not my least favorite outlet, but still is far from my favorite.

Pisseth me off.

But I was already crabby, for reasons that are unclear. The weather, I expect. It’s hot. It’s humid. It’s allergenic as hell. My ears are plugged like drums, I can’t sing without choking on gook in my throat, and believe me, nothing constructive is getting done.

About all I’m good for is watching our Honored Leader twist in the breeze.

Speaking of the which, it looks like a helluva storm is blowing in…here as it is blowing into Washington. Towering clouds all around, closing in from every direction.

I give up. I’m going to take a nap.

Report from Damage Control Central

October 7, 2018August 22, 2018 by funny

A week from Digital Hell has left the Fat Lady barely treading water. God, but I do hate computerized time sucks. The background noise from Washington doesn’t help…

Two half-days — i.e., a total of a full eight-hour day — have been consumed on the phone with Apple techs. Can’t complain too much about that: it’s mighty nice that Apple has techs and allows them to spend uncounted numbers of hours helping customers to fix this, that, and the other snafu. I’ve lost track of the details — makes my head hurt to think too hard about this stuff. But the upshot was that after one of the techs decided that nothing would do but what we must re-install the Sierra OS on the MacBook (even though I told him that would cause a huge fuck-up), we got…yes, a huge fuck-up.

The current surviving upshot of that is that though the MacBook can read and store to DropBox, the iMac no longer connects to DropBox. When I inquired of DB techs how that might be fixed, I got a pages-long email filled with arcane instructions, not the first word of which do I understand. Truly: whatever it is they have in mind that I’m gonna do…I have NO idea.

So now I’m paying a hefty fee for DropBox’s storage and can access it only with one computer. The thing is, the iMac has an external hard drive permanently installed, to which Apple’s nifty Time Machine constantly backs up data. So that means the iMac should keep an up-to-date back-up of DropBox.

Except…now it’s not. Because it can’t “see” DropBox anymore.

So to keep that backed up, I have to schlep the Macbook into the back office and hook it up to an external drive and manually run Time Machine. This doesn’t take long, but it’s an effin’ PITA and I don’t think I should have to do that when it was working fine before.

Meanwhile, however, WordPress is about to pull the Number of All Numbers on its users. The WP that we know and love — and that operates all our blogs — is about to be dumped in the trash, to be replaced with a radically new system called Gutenberg.

This, obviously is going to represent a gigantic new learning curve.

Those of us who are sick of the brain clutter occasioned by the glories of computer technology do not welcome said development. And those of us who have had experience with earlier seismic upheavals know what to expect: If entire sites don’t crash (which they probably will), at best data will be lost. Probably lots of data.

Funny about Money has been online since 20 and ought-7. And y’know, I don’t really want to lose all that history.

Sure, I know: the nature of the Web is ephemeral. But damn it all! Writing this stuff and tracking down images and doing the research for some of the more solid pieces is work. Why should some tribe of computer jocks take it upon themselves to steal my work so that they can amuse themselves with fun new code?

By way of preserving the stuff for posterity, such as it is, I decided I would back up FaM not through BackupBuddy (whose product I suspect will be unintelligible once the program that generated the content goes away) but by copying it to Word and then, at my leisure, formatting it for print. And eventually printing it out and stashing it in a closet, where one day after I croak over my kid will find it and can, if he so pleases, feed it into his backyard firepit.

At least I will’ve tried…

This sounds like a much bigger job than it is. In fact, it only takes about a half-hour to copy out a year’s worth of blog content. But since we’re talking 11 years, that’s still ample time suck, thankyouverymuch. But at this point I only have one year’s worth of posts left to dump into Wyrd files. This at least will keep what content is left in a form that can’t be magically “disappeared” by the upcoming change.

And when I say “what content is left,” I kid you not. At one point along the line, either WordPress or Big Scoots, my current web host, unilaterally decided to delete all the images in SIX YEARS’ worth of posts! Yes. Without asking my permission, without so much as telling me. So everything predating the first quarter of 2013 is absent most of the images I inserted. Isn’t that super?

At any rate, at least the copy is still there.

Apple’s substitution of iPhoto with the irritating and practically useless Photos program effectively ditched images that were made before the current operating system superseded the far more user-friendly OS of yore. They may not have been erased, but they’re hidden in the system so deep I’ll be damned if I can find them. So even if I wanted to take the time to track down the deleted WordPress images and use them to decorate the rescued posts, it would be a daunting and probably impossible task.

One of the things I did learn to do, thanks to that fiasco, was to save images that go into current blog posts separately from Photos, but copying them to a folder on…yeah…DropBox.

How can I do without these hassles? Let me count the ways…

All of this has interfered with my usual routine little hobby activities. Thank God there’s no paying work in-house!!! Didn’t get this week’s installment of Ella’s story written until the last minute. Whatever went online this week was not proofread and frankly I have no idea whether it makes any sense. I have not uploaded today’s installment of “Asked,” either, not because it isn’t there but because I’m effin’ All Computered Out.

{sigh}

Meanwhile, the Circus in the White House has gotten pretty entertaining, hasn’t it? The sleaze has been outed. Now…will our honored elected representatives get off their collective duff and do their job?

Really: even if Trump is indicted and/or impeached, that might be worse than what we’ve got. We then would end up with Pence as President. And Mr. Pence is, unlike our present Great Leader, decidedly not a clownish dunce. Mr. Pence is an accomplished politician who knows how to get things done. Unfortunately, he also is a doctrinaire fanatic, and so the things he’d like to get done are not necessarily things that are good for the rest of us.

This, I suppose, is the way the world ends…

There could be hope, though…check it out:

The Mutability of Digitality…

August 21, 2018 by funny

Here’s the problem with All Things Digital: they’re even more transient than most human creations. Sic, we might say, transit gloria digiti. Just about anything we commit to little glowing letters — or to code in the guts of some computer system — is going to disappear. And it’s going to disappear sooner than later.

This, as a side note, is why I prefer my books between paper covers, thank you. Especially ever since we learned that Amazon can reach into your device and delete any Kindle document it pleases. Yes, paper burns. Paper mildews. Moths eat it, crickets eat it, the dog eats it, the baby eats it. But whatever you commit to hard-copy writing at least has a chance to survive for posterity to view it. A medical treatise written on papyrus, for example, survives from 2000 B.C. Carve your golden words into stone, and they’ll last as long as the pyramids stand.

Well, so… We’re told that come the end of this month, WordPress will force us all to use a new program called, bloviatingly enough, Gutenberg. It will, we’re assured, “impact” (God help us! If you can’t use English, why would you think we expect your software to be any better?) “the entire publishing experience” and yada yada.

Any good at reading between the lines? I’ve become fairly practiced at it. Here’s what I glean from this joyous announcement:

New aggravating hassles
More brain clutter for us to have to cope with
Websites or at least important parts of sites will break.
Data will be lost.

Especially “data will be lost.” Funny about Money has been around since 2007 — that’s 11 years, the equivalent of 11 centuries in Digital Land — and I’ve seen a lot of innovations. Scarcely a one of them has happened without some fiasco. That would be why the first several years’ worth of posts at this site have no images: all my carefully uploaded and formatted pictures were taken down without my knowledge and without my permission.

Funny’s Web guru says he likes Gutenberg — that it’s easy to use and it won’t create problems. I hope he’s right.

But… Yeah. Eleven years of data. Just sitting there waiting to be disappeared. Mm hmmm…

Yesterday evening I spend three hours on the phone with a high-powered Apple tech trying to fix the mess created when another tech decided nothing would do but what I had to re-install the Sierra OS on the MacBook, even though I tried to tell him it would create a mess. And indeed…what a mess it did create!

Most of the problems are finally resolved…except for the fact that the big iMac no longer will sync DropBox. I do not know how to fix that. When I inquired of DropBox’s help folks, I got an e-mailed set of instructions that are just flat-out incomprehensible. Literally: there is no way I can figure that mess out. Sooo… I guess I no longer have DropBox on both computers and will never get that service back.

My plan in that department is to buy a large external hard drive and manually back up DropBox to it about once a week. In the meantime, it also gets backed up occasionally to Time Machine along with everything else on each machine. And DropBox itself keeps a kind of back-up — difficult to navigate, but at least something is there.

The point here is…silicon-based data goes away. It goes away at the slightest change in the breeze’s direction. So yes, I do expect this shift to Gutenberg is going to erase a lot of Funny’s content. It may even knock the site off the air, temporarily or permanently.

And anyhow, one way or another, when I’m gone, everything of mine on the Web will go away. And you know…as a writer, I kinda don’t like that.

Backing up the content to disk doesn’t resolve the problem. The outcome is still digitized, unintelligible to the average human, and still vulnerable to disappearance. Nor is the task very easy to accomplish. When I used BackupBuddy to create a copy of FaM, it loaded the whole 11 years’ worth of duplicated data to the host’s server! This quickly maxed their server and shut down the site.

Yeah. See what I mean?

So I decided to take a little project in hand:

Copy the site’s entire contents, dating back to December 2007, into Word. Store to DropBox. Copy to the MacBook’s Documents folder. Format it in “Styles.” And then print it all out on three-hole punched paper and store it in binders.

Though this is not at all hard to do, it disgorges one hell of a lot of copy. In fact, it looks like more copy than it is, because when you just slam content into Wyrd it picks up all sorts of space-gobbling formatting from WordPress. When formatted properly, many thousands of points will be reduced to normal font size, photos will be sized to fit pages, air will be pulled up, and a lot less space will be consumed. Still: a year’s worth will probably fill 800 pages or so.

But…once it’s on paper, it will be on paper. I can leave it to my son. He can throw it in the backyard firepit if he so pleases. But at least he’ll have the option to do so, which he will not have if all this content resides on the Web and only on the Web or inside a computer when I croak over.

This all sounds rather silly, not to say hubristic. But y’know… I wish I had kept my mother’s letters. In my freshman year at the University of Arizona, she sent me a series of handwritten letters, They were pretty Polonian, full of advice she had already delivered during the previous 16 years of my life and stuff I did not want to rehearse in my dorm room. Annoyed, I tossed them out.

Some lady found one that had blown out of the back of a garbage truck and landed in a street. She mailed it back to me (!) with a note saying she expected it was something I might want to keep.

Didn’t then. But do now.

So if he doesn’t throw all this junk out, maybe someday he’ll have something he’ll enjoy looking at. If nothing else, he can give it to a local museum as a record of what life was like in the dystopic 21st century here in lovely uptown Phoenix.

One never knows.