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The Prepper’s Economic Guide to 2018

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Now we’re all prepared for the next big disaster to descend on us, right?

Well, maybe not so much…at Coffee with a Cop last week, I did win a first-aid kit for the car. But that’s about as far as I’ve gone in the emergency-preparedness department. At least I’ll have a few band-aids, anyway, come the Apocalypse. {sigh}

However, there is something y-cumen in that we can prepare ourselves for, and it’s a lot more likely to happen than a Korean bomb dropping on our heads or a wildfire consuming Philadelphia.

Videlicet: let us speak of the next Great Recession.

Now, just as we’re having fun? Yeah: now.

We do know that what goes up must come down. As Leo Abruzzese, The Economist’s public policy consultant, notes in a prognostication for 2018, “If it [history] is any guide (and it is), the business cycle is coming to an end. The world economy tends to tip into a recession every eight to ten years, and the last one ended in 2009.” Further, he adds, “Recessions typically start when central banks, eager to keep economies in check, raise interest rates too far and too fast. On cue, America’s Federal Reserve will probably raise rates three times in 2018 after three increases in 2017.”

Higher interest rates, Abruzzese goes on to explain, “foretell an end to credit cycles as indebted companies and consumers default in greater numbers. . . . [They] can also produce big corrections in stockmarkets.”

If you’re a legacy follower of Funny about Money, words like these no doubt make you think been there, done that. And yup: we sure have.

Given that economies, like everything else, go up and down; that ours is now way up; and that anyone who can remember the Reagan administration and the Bush fiasco has, by now, figured out that the Republicans’ trickle-down economics dogma is a dangerous superstition, it behooves us to be prepared for the next big economic crash. That, I submit, is a lot more likely than a nuclear hit upside the head from Kim Jung Un or a hurricane in your living room (enjoyed by our friends at Planting Our Pennies) or a wildfire cresting the nearby hills (equally enjoyed by our favorite escapee from Chicago).

What can we do to prepare ourselves for the next “Great Recession”? One that, we can be pretty sure, is likely to fall under the heading of “Major Depression”…

Now is the time, IMHO, to look back on the G.R. and think about what we did right and what we did wrong. Consider these strategies:

1. Get out of debt! In other words…

Get out of debt!

Get out of debt!!

GET OUT OF DEBT!!!

Pay off your loans as fast as you can. And do not rack up any new debt.

If you have cash with which to pay off a mortgage, use it. Do it! Your financial adviser will have a freaking kitten, because of course you are earning one helluva lot more in the stock market just now than you’re paying on one of the present low-rate mortgages. My guy was furious.

But lemme tellya: If I hadn’t paid off the mortgage when I had the money, after I lost my job in 2009 (permanently, folks: “retirement” was not my choice), I would have lost my home. There is no way on God’s Green Earth I could have made payments on a home loan that amounted to 80% of $232,000. I’d have been thrown out on the street…like my neighbor across the road, like my middle-aged students who had worked hard all their adult lives and paid their bills every month, and maybe even like some of you. The only reason I’m writing this from my living room rather than from a low-income apartment, a motel room, or the 7th Avenue Underpass is that the house was paid for when the sh!t hit the fan.

Pay off all your other debts. Accelerate payments on your car. Do not buy a new car, or if you must replace a vehicle, buy one seriously second-hand. Accelerate payments on your credit cards, and once you have those cards paid off, NEVER charge more than you can pay in one month. If you couldn’t pay for it in cash or with a check today, just do without it until you can.

This takes some self-discipline. Probably the most direct and easiest way to summon that self-discipline is to manually keep track of your charging, as you go. Enter “pay off credit card” in Funny’s search bar (on the right side of the page) and you’ll find a slew of  suggestions for climbing out from under debt.

2. Save. Save regularly.

Establish a savings account at your bank or credit union and pre-pay yourself a percentage of each paycheck. If, for example, your goal is to save 5% of income for emergencies, arrange for the bank to make an automatic transfer on every payday.

Do not spend this emergency fund on anything other than a real emergency. It’s not a Christmas fund or a vacation fund. It’s a disaster fund. Keep it that way.

3. Build frugal strategies

Consider the regularly recurring expenses that you can do away with, should the evil day come.

• Cable TV
• Expensive mobile phone plan
• Frequent meals out
• Amazon Prime
• Fitness plans
• Subscriptions

Look closely at your credit card and bank statements and consider: do we REALLY need to pay for that? Is there a cheaper alternative? Can we do without it altogether?

Even if you don’t want to cut back now, at least know what you can cut back on.

4. Create a potentially money-making side gig.

This can be a hobby while money is coming in the door. Still, a hobby that can be monetized is a potential life-saver. Even blogging brings in a few bucks a month. And consider that, over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal’s dog-sitting enterprise — originally a side gig of the first water — has now evolved into a growing, paying business.

Any activity that yields a service or a product is potentially a money-making concern. Consider what you can do, start doing it as a hobby, and know in advance how you could convert it to a business.

5. Think ahead.

You’ll have to figure that one out yourself. You know your circumstances. Review them all and think about how you can economize — whether now or in the future — and how you can best work to recession-proof your finances.

Do it now. Let’s not be caught by surprise this time.

Nutter Season on the Roads

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‘Tis the season to go batshit on the roads of lovely uptown Phoenix!

Running out of dog food; running out of allergy pills; flat out of garlic; need tomatoes. Realizing I don’t want to buy our favorite Christmas dinner entrée — Costco rack of lamb — during the actual horrible hectic week of Christmas, I decided I’d better go after those things NOW, not later. So along about mid-morning — late enough to miss the rush-hour roadblocks, early enough to miss the lunch-hour crowds — I set out.

Only a few stores have Freshpet dog food in the exotic rolls at a reasonable price. Fry’s is one. AJ’s. Walmart — but Walmart is often out of it.

Meanwhile, these allergy drugs I need are highly problematic. In order to safely ingest two 10-mg tablets of Claritin (loratidine, if you want to pay a reasonable price for it) in one 24-hour period, it can not be Claritin D (which contains pseudoephedrine, which keeps me awake all night if I take it after about noon) and it can not be the “extended release” variety. It’s got to be plain, boring, ordinary loratidine in 10 mg tablets.

But I also need a hit of pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) in the morning, to clear the tooth-searing congestion. No, I can not take Benadryl during the daytime hours: it puts me in a coma.

The gummint has decided to make it hard for meth cookers to get enough pseudoephedrine to make marketable amounts of their product (thereby driving the market for the drugs right straight into the arms of the Mexican drug cartel, but that’s another tale). You can only get a limited amount, you have to sign for it, your purchase is reported to the federal government, and presumably a record of your purchase is preserved for perpetuity.

I got the current bottle of plain unadorned loritidine 10 mg at the Fry’s at Tatum & Shea, a long way from here. That Fry’s also carries the dog food. But it’s a frikkin’ LONG drive. I figure if that Fry’s has the drug, then surely the one at 20th Street and Camelback will have it. It’s a schlep, but not as awful a schlep as driving to the outer fringe of Paradise Valley.

Well. No.

They do not have it. What they have is a pharmacy clerk with an IQ in the negative numbers. First, even though I hand him the empty bottle of the stuff I bought at the other Fry’s, he cannot figure out what it is. Finally he realizes it’s Claritin and tries to sell me Claritin D. I tell him no, the doctor said not to use Claritin D. He says they don’t have plain Claritin or unadorned loratidine.

I’m already annoyed as hell, because the roads are effing awash in nut-case drivers. There’s the one on 7th Avenue who gets into the fast lane, slows to 30, and weaves back and forth over the lane markings. Stoned? Or yakking on the phone? The one who will not take the right of way (which he has in extravagant bounty) to make a left turn on the green arrow, so we all get stuck at the red light. The one who cuts me off as she swerves into the parking lot and then grabs the last parking space. (Hope she was duly gratified.) And so on.

Okay, I’m now really mad and thinking I’ll schlep up to Tatum & Shea but by the time I reach the car on the far end of the adjacent parking lot have cooled off enough to think I do NOT want to drive that far. The Walmart has the dog food (maybe) and the Walgreen’s at 16th Street and Glendale is usually well supplied and is sort of maybe on the way to the Walmart.

So I drive up there, encountering the one who swerves right out of the west-bound middle lane, cutting off the guy in the right-turn lane next to him. They missed colliding: how, I cannot imagine.

The bright spot of the day is the Walgreen’s clerk, who has got to be one of the cutest young men I’ve ever seen, in 72 years of male-gazing. He’s handsome, he’s manly, he’s got a sweet expression, and…he’s dyed a streak of his coffee-brown hair aqua. I love him. I want to bring him home. Will he get along with corgis?

With a great deal of earnestness, he searches for the desired variant of loritadine.

No, Walgreen’s does not have it.

“Can you buy OTC pharmaceuticals from Amazon?” I ask him, on a whim.

“Sure! Bet you can get this there!” He whips out his iPhone and discovers a gold mine of plain ordinary unadorned loritadine at Amazon, much of it cheaper than Walgreen’s would sell it for, if Walgreen’s had it. While he’s at it, he also discovers Costco has it.

Well, dang: I have to go to Costco anyway, so WTF? I’ll ask for it there. Maybe I can get a lifetime supply.

Speaking of lifetime supplies, The Boy with the Blue-Green Hair sells me a box of 96 pseudoephedrine pills, about three times as much as I’ve been able to get before and plenty to make up a  Mountain Dew bottle full of low-grade meth.

I drive down to AJ’s to pick up the dog food, AJ’s being on the way to the nearest Costco.

People who shop at AJ’s are by nature Entitled, and so their attitude toward their fellow drivers is “Get Outta My Way, Ya Crazy Fool!” But today they’re not only entitled, they’re full-out nuts. One guy tries to cut me off as I’m turning left across three lanes of oncoming traffic into the parking lot. He fails. There’s a point at which even the craziest of crazy Phoenix drivers will back down when confronted with an obviously lunatic woman. Careening into the parking lot, I meet another one who tries to cut me out of a parking space. Give it to him and grab a better one, screw you very much, bub!

AJ’s has the dog food — $2 more than Walmart and Fry’s charge, but at least they have it. Pony up the $4 gouge so as to stock in enough to be sure to have enough to last the hounds over the holiday.

Onward to Costco, past the public park that serves as a flophouse for spaced-out addicts. The grass is littered with sleeping derelicts. Thank my lucky stars I don’t have to live in the grungy apartments that surround this garden spot. You wouldn’t dare let your child play there. I wouldn’t even take my dog over there.

As usual, the Costco parking lot is full of nitwits who are SO determined to get as close to the door as humanly possible (god FORFEND that they should have to walk ten extra steps!) that they drive around searching for someone loading their car, park in the middle of the aisle, and hold up the traffic until the target parking space is vacated.

One avoids these by parking at the far end of the lot, but today even that area — which is usually half-empty — is full of nut cases. One of them cuts me off in his hurry to grab a spot three spaces closer to the (very distant) door.

The Costco’s pharmacy clerk is even dumber than the Fry’s nitwit, if that is possible. He tries to persuade me that the box marked “24-hour” is not “timed-release.” This is after I’ve told him that I do NOT want Claritin D. The 24-hour Claritin is Claritin D; it contains timed-release pseudoephedrine. That’s what the “D” stands for: “decongestant.” And the “decongestant” is pseudoephedrine (Sudafed, for the brand-name acclimated).  Even if the Mayo’s quack had not specifically told me not to use Claritin D, I would not buy it because I cannot take pseudoephedrine after about 11 in the morning and still sleep at night. It jacks up your blood pressure and turns you into the Energizer Bunny.

Honest to God.

By the time I get home, I’ve been on the road for almost three hours. I’m starved and I want a glass of wine — of which, as you can tell, I’ve now had a couple. The homeward drive has entailed getting behind an airhead who will not turn right on red (eventually he does, showing he knows it’s legal) — at a red light that lasts half your lifetime.

Fly in the house, order up a package containing two bottles of loritadine from Amazon, and wish I’d thought of that first.

But at least I’ve got the chow for Christmas Dinner. What I’m going to do for the Christmas Eve potluck escapes me. But I’ll figure that out…later. Much later.

The Yellow Skies of Arizona

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So this afternoon Tina and I are about to leave our favorite Tempe restaurant, after having loafed and grazed for a couple hours. It was chilly when we arrived — hence our taking up an indoor table instead of our usual patio throne. Peering through a window, she says, “It looks like it’s getting colder out there.”

And yes, it surely does seem to have grown darker. “Some cloud cover must be coming in,” say I.

But no.

What made the sky darker was smog.

The worst smog I’ve seen in Arizona since before my son was born.

Since he’s some 40 years old now, the filth in the air is thicker than it’s been in over 40 years! Literally, the sky has a yellow cast. The touristy little hills at Papago Park, just east of the freeway — within (reasonably healthy) walking distance thereof — looked hazy gray through the dirty air.

Cripes. No wonder my head is stuffed up to the point where my teeth hurt! This is the reason we left Southern California!

If I had a camper, I’d throw the dogs, a jacket, and a couple clean shirts into it and head for northern Arizona. Right now. And if I still had the ranch? Well, I’d prob’ly be living there these days.

Makes Prescott look better & better.

Dust Abatement Update

Yes. So…dust abatement in Phoenix: The Cox guy did show up yesterday afternoon. He did dig a trench across the alley and he did reconnect the cable line and while he was at it he saw the previous service dude had made a mess of the inside of the cable stanchion thing in the alley and so he attempted to fix that.

The phone is working again and my computer is more or less online.

So, yeah: dust abatement is apparently what we need.

Yarnell looks better and better.

Image:
Papago Buttes. Joe Flood from Washington, USA – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=745342

Lost in Space

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TUESDAY:

Total disconnect from the Internet is extremely weird. Truly: a bizarre experience.

I’ve come unstuck from life.

It occurred to me, as I stumbled back into the house after getting home from the Mayo, that it has been years – yea, verily, many years – since I arrived in the Connected Universe. My home (and, by extension, my business) has not been offline in at least two decades. Maybe three. And not being able to get online? Feels like half my life has come to a dead stop. Which, I suppose, it has.

But…this is life???

As I was trudging home from the Mayo through yesterday’s gawdawful rush-hour traffic, the mind wandered.

I need to look up CT scans. The doc’s nurse-practitioner had ordered a CT scan, in hopes of confirming or deconfirming her theory that what ails me is not allergies but a full-blown sinus infection.

Sinus infection. None of the quacks nor the dentist have suggested that one. I need to look up “sinus inf….” Uhm…well…no.

Gotta call my son and ask h… Well. no.

I wonder if the phone in the back bedroom is actually connected to the damn Internet, or if by chance it’s plugged into a real, actual land line? …Well. no.

Crap! If I slip and fall or…or…or if anything happens to me, I will have NO WAY to call for help. Retrieve the emergency inscrutable cell phone from the car; place in jeans pocket.

Has that bastard Moore won in Alabama? Did a miracle happen and drive the state’s wacksh!t bigots to vote him down? No way to know until I get to the Little Guy’s place tomorrow…and that will have to wait until after I schlep the puppy to the vet and bring her back home.

WAHHH! How can I live without watching the news?

Beats me.

On the other hand, if I’m not wasting time watching news stories about which no one can do much…if I’m not wasting time on Facebook…if I’m not wasting time on Nextdoor…if I’m not wasting time playing online games…then there will be little else to do but write the current flibbet of fiction. Under its working title of “Ella’s Backstory,” the thing has proceeded to some 10,224 words. Not bad for a rough draft of nothing much, compiled between other time-wasting activities.

If I wasted my time only on Ella’s Backstory, how much could I get done before Cox restores me to my former ersatz reality?

A lot, I’ll bet.

How much could we Americans, as a people, get done if we did not pass our time in ersatz reality?

WEDNESDAY:

They haven’t laid the blacktop in the alley yet. Possibly if they delay a day or two, the Cox guy, who is supposed to show up this afternoon, will get the lines for the wireless connection relaid.

Possibly not, too: the backhoe operator knocked over the telecomm company’s cable device in the alley, so that presumably will have to be replaced. On what time schedule is anyone’s guess.

Also anyone’s guess: who’s going to pay for this?

Cox will try its best to sock it to me: that’s their standard operating practice. If they make me pay to reconnect a line that THEY fucked up by not installing it properly, I am switching the land lines over to VoIP and buying an annoying cell phone. I’ve probably put off being leashed to a cell as long as I can – these days when you tell people you don’t have a cell phone, they give you a blank look. It’s so unthinkable, they don’t even understand what you’re saying.

Problem is, I can’t afford another monthly bill. Especially not one that’s likely to run around $130. I’m already almost out of money, with nine months to go before the next drawdown. My house is freezing, because the only way I can pay the outrageous air conditioning bills in the summer is to leave the heat off in the winter. There really aren’t a lot of other ways to economize, at this point. I do not travel, I do not go to movies, I do not go to sporting events, I rarely buy clothes, I buy makeup in the drugstore, I do not get my hair done at a salon, and I’ve quit buying food at Costco. There really are no other ways to cut corners, other than to get rid of the dogs.

That would save about $50 a month. Plus the usual Big Hits from the dogs. This morning, for example, I have to schlep Ruby to the vet: now she has a rotten tooth and is getting an abscess. Pulling Cassie’s abscessed tooth cost over $900. Now we get a replay of that disaster!**

And the City has put me out of business. With my computers offline, I’m screwed: all my business is done online. I have no idea whether my clients are trying to get in touch with me, and will not know until I can get to a coffee house with connectivity. I can’t pay my bills. I can’t retrieve clients’ payments from PayPal.

I’ll have to drop by the Little Guy’s place on GangBanger Way, on the way home from the vet. What I’m supposed to do with Ruby whilst answering email in the parking-lot café outside the Little Guy’s escapes me.

Fortunately, it’s wintertime. I can leave her in the car for awhile. But not for very long. Plus I have to be back here by 1 p.m. It’s an hour’s drive between my house and the vet (everything is an hour’s drive in Phoenix’s nightmare traffic). If I get out of there by 10:15 (this assumes he sees me on time and doesn’t consume more than a half-hour of my time), it will be 11:15 by the time I get to the coffee house. That will leave maybe an hour and a half to catch up with the email, cope with whatever headaches arise there, post these blog maunderings, and read the news.

But not so much, really: Cassie rolled out of the sack at 5 this morning with diarrhea. I can’t leave her outside – it’s cold and she’s not used to that, and besides the racket from all that heavy equipment will terrorize her. If I leave her indoors for more than an hour or so, I’ll have an unholy mess to come home to. Scrubbing up doggy diarrhea off the floors is really not what I want to do with an already unhappy day.

If I race home, drop off Ruby, let Cassie out, and then race back up to the coffee house to attend to business, I may not get back here in time to contend with the Cox guy, who is supposed to show up between 1 and 3.

Shee-UT!

** The good news (for a change) is that the bump on Ruby’s schnozz is NOT an abscess, even though her left carnassial fang is encased in tartar. She needs her teeth cleaned, which ain’t cheap. But at least it won’t set me back another $900.

Gonna Be Incommunicado for Awhile

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You’ll recall that the City is supposed to pave our alleys — or actually, just blacktop the dirt by way of holding down the dust.

So their contractor showed up in our part of the ’hood this morning — it’s quite a project, which requires them to blade up the alley’s surface. In doing so, they ripped out the cable connection that runs between the alley cable box thing & my house. When I mentioned it to a foreman, he said the City had given ALL the communication companies a lot of advance warning and told them to get the so-called “temporary” cables installed correctly — that means BURIED, not laid under a shallow layer of dirt and gravel.

Of late when these outfits have come to people’s homes to install or upgrade cable, they’ve just tossed the cable across the alley in what is called a “temporary” installation — allowing them to get out of doing the job right. When the City informed Cox that the lines now needed to be buried correctly for all their customers, the answer was that they’d just wait and see who called to complain! He said he’d already told three other disconnected customers this. A Cox guy is supposed to come to my house tomorrow but I don’t expect he’ll do much because the blacktopping project will presumably take at least a couple more days. So I am without a phone — on Soc Security you can’t afford a cell phone — and I expect Cox will try to soak me for re-installing the cable that they failed to install right in the first place.

At any rate, it will require Cox to DIG UP the brand-new blacktop to reinstall the damn cable correctly. For customer after customer after customer. So presumably this is going to take several days. Or more.

This post is being written in a Mayo Clinic waiting room and is probably the last time I’ll have access to the Internet without betaking myself to a coffee shop.

And so, away…probably for quite some time.

Of Alleys and Dust and Dogs and Pools and Computers and Irons and…whatEVER

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Notice comes in the mail that the City is going to “dust-proof” the alleys here in the ’hood. A Web search to find out WTF “dust-proof” means elicits the actual RFP for the job. Videlicet: they intend to apply black-top to the alleys.

This will be good, because it will, to some degree, discourage the rampant weed growth. Some neighbors apparently believe — wrongly — that the City’s job is to blade off the weeds and grass that run amok out there, creating not just an ugly mess but a fire hazard. Among said neighbors are the couple who moved into Sally’s house behind me. What a pigpen!

Nice, huh? It’s a miracle we haven’t had a fire yet, in a July 4 or New Year’s fireworks frenzy — or just had some crazy or some kid set it alight. So presumably when the City’s contractors come through to lay down asphalt & pebbles, they’ll blade that little jungle.

Meanwhile, my pool’s filter pressure is way up, a signal that the pool needs backwashing. In fact, the filter needs to be cleaned out, but as you’ll see I have a whole bunch of other things to spend my money on.

It’s against the law to backwash into the alley, but everyone does so. That’s one of those things that the city ignores unless a neighbor complains, like out-of-code backyard wall heights and the four mattresses and two box springs someone stashed in the alley and the overgrowth of weeds all up and down the block. But obviously, a bunch of workmen and a layer of fresh asphalt promise to interfere with the backwashing project. So that project got moved up from fourth on the list of to-do’s to first, joining the chores to do before bolting down breakfast.

√ Call vet
√ Call Gerardo
√ Call Chuck
√ Check for wheelbarrow (borrowed by Gerardo and yes, √ returned)
√ Backwash pool
√ Check & adjust pool chemicals
√ Clean office
√ Pick up dog mounds
√ Clean patio
√ Treat allergies
√ Back up data
√ Blog
√ Study material on grant proposal writing
√ Write “Ella’s Backstory”

And it was a good thing I got out there at 7:30 in the morning to engage that tedious little job. About an hour later, along came a city truck, its driver obviously inspecting preparatory to the Big Project.

And it’s a good thing I have a LONG backwash hose that I can run halfway up the damn alley. Backwashing an 18,000-gallon pool creates quite the pond. It takes several hours for that to soak into the packed caliche that forms the surface of our alley. And that would be why the City doesn’t want the natives backwashing into the alleys, hm?

At any rate, the guy didn’t even pause. Presumably his attention was diverted by the mattress collection and the weed forest.

This will accelerate the need to change out the pool pump and filter ($$$$$$$), because without gutters, backwashing onto an impermeable surface actually will be pretty antisocial. I can’t backwash into the backyard, because the quarter-minus that forms the landscaping is actually just sand mixed with tiny pebbles: the backwash hose will excavate a ditch in that stuff. It’s impossible to imagine what might be built out there to accommodate 100+ gallons of water. The only alternative is to install a cartridge filter, which doesn’t have to be backwashed. The cost will require yet another unplanned drawdown from investments.

Speaking of the which, you’ll remember the surgery Cassie enjoyed for her abscessed carnassial fang? That set me back about $900. Welp…guess what: now Ruby seems to have developed one of her own!

Taking her in to the vet Wednesday — soonest I could get an appointment that doesn’t require 45 minutes of fighting my way through rush-hour madness — at which time yet another expensive operation presumably will be scheduled.

You know…I’ve only got $8,000 to last until next September…and maintaining the property, the dogs, the car, the taxes, and myself runs about $3,000 a month. Every time I turn around, here’s another thousand-dollar hit. This is what happens, inevitably, every time I dig into savings to pay off some stupid bill or do some expensive job around the house. Clearly Lady Karma is trying to tell me that I should not have paid off the car loan or paid 3 grand to get the house painted. Especially not in one fell swoop. Every time you pay some big bill because you think the coast is clear, you’re pounced by some new giant expense.

Or in this case, a series of new giant expenses.

Speaking of the alleys and the dust and the fangs, I have a tooth that hurts like hell. The dentist cannot find a crack in it, even though it does feel like a typical split tooth. Last week he studied a fourth X-ray of the upper jaw and still cannot find any evidence of an infection or a crack. So he’s sending me to an endodontist, and God only knows what that will cost. One thing for sure: it won’t be covered by Medicare. It was a hundred bucks just to have my regular guy do another X-ray and consult.

But whilst he was studying the problem, he remarked that my maxillary sinuses are completely filled with fluid. He speculated that chronic congestion on that order could cause some dental pain — although one wouldn’t expect it to be the sharp jab of a cracked tooth.

So it’s back to gulping allergy pills. This morning I’m high on meth…uhm, pseuodoephedrine…plus the usual dose of Claritin. He suggested using Afrin, but Young Dr. Kildare hates that stuff so much the mere mention of it makes him wince. He wants me to use saline solution. Dentist said he’s had the same experience w/ his doc and so is also using saline, with exactly the same results as my own: it does effectively nothing.

It’s reasonable to think, though, that allergies could be at least part of the problem. Lookit this:

Each of those rags represents ONE DAY’S accumulation of dust and dog hair in this house. Every day at about 4 p.m., I run a Swiffer loaded with a microfiber rag across all 1,868 square feet of tile flooring. As you can see, we have a whole lot more dust on the floors than we do dog hair.

Since I’ve started the daily swiff and started swallowing more allergy nostrums, the teeth have felt a little better. In fact, I’m thinking I should cancel the expensive endodontist and go to WonderAccountant’s allergist (she’s found one she swears by rather than at). If there’s no infection and no crack, presumably no long-term damage will happen if I delay long enough to explore the possibility that the maxillary congestion is the cause — and that would be covered by Medicare.

A-n-n-n-d…if the City really is going to pack down some of the dust, maybe that plus some prescription meds would bring a stop to the dental pain.

Hm. Still thinking about that.

Update on the Steam Iron Adventure

And as you’ll recall, my beloved old Shark iron has, of late, taken to threatening to electrocute me. An online search revealed that Costco’s current offering was an expensive thing made by some outfit called Oliso. But when M’hijito and I were over there the other day, we found they were peddling a Sunbeam model that looked very much like the homicidal Shark.

I’ve had a Sunbeam in the past and hated it — the thing would get so hot it would burn your hand. But decided to trust to the judgment of Costco’s buyers. Very nice little machine…or so it looked. Got it home and discovered that what I had was a steam iron that would not steam.

Well. You could produce a blast of steam by jabbing the blast-of-steam button. But otherwise, under no circumstances and with no setting would it emit steam through its sole plate.

Took it back and hiked over to the Target.

There I met a Target employee who did not even know what a fuckin’ steam iron IS! Much less where Target might have them hidden.

However, she being quite a sweetie tracked down a supervisor, who miraculously did know.

Their choices included several models of Sunbeam, all made in China; two models of Rowenta, made in China; several models of Shark, made in China…. Yeah. Pick them up and examine them, and you find they’re all…well…pretty much identical. The only difference appears to be the price, and that appears to depend not on the device itself but on the brand name.

{sigh}

So, despite the 28% rate of one-star reviews at Amazon, I gave up and bought another Shark. It is, as usual, more complicated to use than the older model that worked just fine and didn’t need any elaboration. But at least for the nonce it works.

Speaking of “It Just Works” (…if only!)

I hate Apple.

Why was it necessary to take something that actually did “just work” and BREAK IT?

I hate that the MacBook Pro will no longer upload images from my camera’s memory card.

I hate that it doesn’t have a USB port. Hate it hate it hate it HATE that.

I hate Siri, oh, GOD how I hate Siri. Even when you go into the system preferences and turn OFF fuckin’ Siri, the damn thing keeps nagging at you. The MacBook Pro has this stupid touch bar thing at the top of the keyboard, and up at the far right, directly above the “Delete” key, is a sensitive spot that, if you brush it with your finger, causes a pop-up to ask if you want to enable Siri.

I hate that one uses the “delete” key a LOT with Apple’s current keyboard, because they have subtly changed the size of the keys and pushed them subtly closer together. So every third time you hit a key — or rather, you try to hit a key — you end up having to delete and fix a typo: you either hit the adjacent key or you hit two keys together. For example, in that last sentence:

cur4ent
hgave
s7b tly
change dthe
ieys
puysheds
c loser
togegher

In a word, it is impossible to type on a Macbook Pro without inserting a constant stream of typos.

No, for a change this is not a function of advancing age: when I go back to the old MacBook or use the keyboard on the aged iMac, I do not encounter this problem.

And why do I want Siri go OFF and STAY off? Well, because it is a major invasion of privacy. No, I do NOT want Apple listening to every Word I utter and tracking every move I make online. No matter how glowing a sheen they try to put on it, it invades your privacy. Apple qualifies its description of all the ways that its devices intrude in your personal life with “When you give your explicit consent…” But just turning on Siri amounts to giving your explicit consent!

The Dictation software is a very cool feature…but it also does the same thing: reports everything you say back to the Mother Ship! And there’s no way to forestall that.

I hate Apple’s new photo software. It is a gigantic PITA, and it also invades privacy: it has the capacity to identify individuals by their facial features. And that, of course, means it’s a good thing the damn thing won’t talk to my camera. It means my images do not reside on an Apple device (or, presumably, on Apple’s oh-so-righteously encrypted servers), but on DropBox, where I have to put them manually.

Oh, God. I’ve got to go to work. And so, crabbily, away…