So I’ve figured out why it appeared I was ostracized from the current Churchly function’s planning activities.
The folks who were sending out notices had my business gmail address. That thing is set to forward to my ME.com address.
Apple does not have a “spam” function. Instead it presents you with three folders: an inbox, a “trash” folder, and a “junk” folder. What exactly is the point of TWO folders for unwelcome mail? That escapes logic of any kind.
WhatEVER. Apparently there’s a difference between “trash” and “junk,” but I don’t know what it is. I use the “rules” function to derail incoming that I don’t want to look at right this minute or that I wish never to see into “trash.”
During the most recent rash of MacHeadaches, one of the telephone techs noted that when you see incoming that’s obviously an ad, you don’t even have to open it: all you have to do is highlight and click “junk”…and forevermore, every incoming from that address is disappeared into the “junk” file.
Okay. So some piece of advertising garbage comes in, and that’s what I do.
BUT…apparently this piece of advertising garbage had been sent to the business address and forwarded from there. So MacMail picks up the CE Desk address and derails EVERY PIECE OF INCOMING that is addressed to that gmail account!!!!!!!
AND…that explains where all the business went this summer… It did seem odd that not ONE current or prospective client got in touch.
It’s taken almost two hours to undo that mess.
At least I’m not suicidally depressed anymore. Now I’m just mad as a cat.
Waiting around for a handyman to show up: Ruben. Learned about him from a woman who works in the trades and has an encyclopedic address book. She thinks he would be the man to re-lay the fiberglass sheets that form the light-filtering “roof” over the back porch shade structure.
Given the amazing mess Gerardo’s underlings made when they tore it off for the painter (chunks of plastic and bolts in the pool!), I think I’d rather not have them try to put it back on. Not only do they give nary a damn how much junk they throw around (a bolt picked up by Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner would mean a hefty repair bill, if not $350 to replace him…), but his enthusiasm for the job is predictably underwhelming.
The new guy is supposed to show up between 9 and 10 this morning. It’s almost 9:30, so it looks like our boy runs on mañana time. Which is OK. We do, after all, live in Mañanaland.
Today is the first since last spring that a person could sit outside in comfort at 9:30 in the morning. We’re having a cold snap: weather’s in the 80s this morning.
That’s lovely in one way – yay! the backyard is usable again! – and the pits in another: dang! say good-bye to swimming. Oh well. Trade-offs.
The yard needs some serious maintenance.
Luz damaged the lime tree when he hacked out a large branch, misunderstanding what I was saying when I asked him to clear enough for me to walk back and forth. Then Gerardo’s boys probably administered the coup de grâce when they cut back the growth over the roof (!!) and trimmed enough away for the painter to get at the eaves.
Citrus does not like pruning. It’s actually not a tree: it’s a shrub. That’s why people paint the trunks white when they cut the things up to look like trees: otherwise the trunks will sunburn. Well, that branch Luz chopped out was on the tree’s west side, so he stripped away the natural shade and cooling for three major branches…just as the summer was coming in! I tried to protect the tree by wrapping shade cloth around the exposed branches, but it hasn’t worked. The tree was visibly stressed by the time Gerardo cut the stuff away from the roof…and as soon as he did that, it dropped all its fruit. It looks pretty sick…my guess is it won’t live another year.
That lime tree is an important part of the westside landscaping: it provides about a third of the shade that makes the side deck liveable, and it shades about half the west wall of the house. So if it dies, it’s going to have an effect…and it ain’t gonna be good.
I’m thinking I could replace it with a desert willow, which doesn’t require a lot of water and which grows into a truly beautiful shade tree.
But it takes a long time for one of those things to get big enough to provide shade. Plus taking the lime tree out will be a vast hassle: there’s a major irrigation pipe under there, which of course will break when we try to pull out the tree and its roots. {sigh}
So that will be an expensive headache. A future one, I hope…
One ringie-dingie…two ringie-dingies…hello?
Yes, it’s Ruben: “I’m at the Home Depot picking up some things for a customer’s job I’m working on, and I’m running late…”
Oh, that’s good! Yes. So much better than the standard “my truck broke down on the freeway.” Credible, and lots less drama.
It’ll be interesting to see if this guy can do the job. When Richard built the thing – lo, some 14 years ago! – he had his crew up there. But Richard, before he started his landscaping company, was a journeyman carpenter. He knew how to build this sort of stuff. It remains to be seen whether just any handyman can do it. I’ll have to ask him if he’s ever used it.
Let’s hope he doesn’t charge too much. It’s actually a fairly small job: just nail down a set of strips and then bolt the fiberglass sheets to those. It shouldn’t take longer than about half a day, not counting the schlep to and from Home Depot…and, if he can be talked into it, a schlep to the city dump to get rid of the old stuff.
I’ve entertained the possibility of not recovering the shade structure with corrugated plastic sheets. It does look mighty WT.
From outside the yard, that is. From inside the yard, the top of the roofing isn’t really visible, so it looks just fine. If you’re down the road a quarter-block or standing on the sidewalk across the street, what you see looks pretty Appalachian.
But…so what? The ’hood isn’t an HOA, thank God. What do I care how it looks to passers-by?
Without a covering, pollen (wads of it, just now) and dust float in and cover everything. And even a light rain is going to make an unholy mess out there. A monsoon? Don’t even wanna think about it!
I use that space. Every day. Hauling the chairs’ seat cushions in and out of the garage so they don’t get dirty and won’t get soaked if it rains is for the birds. So is having to clean up the debris every time I want to sit out there with a cup of coffee.
So the decision is made: Back to my Texas WT roots.
Something there is about making a list to keep the onerou$ little ta$ks under control… That, of course, would mean the onerous bookkeeping tasks that, given the reins, you would ignore until the planet freezes over.
What’s about it is that there’s something ridiculously satisfying about checking off chores, one at a time, as DONE!
The mountain of money paper that comes into this house beggars belief (to say nothing of beggaring me).
Five bank accounts
Four investment accounts
Four health insurance policies (Medicare, Medigap, Part D, long-term care)
And bills coming from more directions than I can reckon
87 berjillion bills came in to make life a little more miserable this month:
Property tax: raised over $200
Car registration: almost $400
Painter’s bill: three thousand buckolas
$260 power bill: holy sh!t
$153 water bill: holy sh!!t
Gerardo: $120 for working himself and his underlings half to death…
So it goes.
You can see why I hate doing the bills.
On the other hand, paying off the loathèd car loan in a bull market was smart. Very, very smart. When times are good, my guys can crank the money (and yeah, they are guys: if there’s a lady financial manager among them, they’ve kept her hidden from me). After ponying up $3,000 for the painter and something over 16 grand to pay off that effing loan, total net worth is barely down a few thousand bucks.
How do they do that?
Oh well: I guess that’s what I pay them for.
So that was encouraging.
Also encouraging: I’d allowed about $800 for the Venza’s 2018 Arizona registration — really, registration rates here are just exorbitant. But not, as it develops, that exorbitant: the bill, which came this month with less than 30 days’ notice to pay up or be cited, was “only” $386. So that adds about $34 a month to this year’s budget allowance…nice. I guess. One meal out, anyway. 🙂
Next year the amount will be lower: Arizona’s registration bills drop as your car ages. Part and parcel of our bat-brained legislators’ astonishing stupidity: cars pollute more as they age, and so it would make sense to give people a break for buying newer, more fuel-efficient and less polluting vehicles and to whack them for hanging onto the stinking junkers. Here, we always go in the opposite direction of common sense.
So this is the most difficult of the set of tasks to do today. Others:
Clean pool, re-install Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner. Dive in after he breaks loose from his hose, rescue him from the bottom, reattach, fix, get him going again.
Haul trash to the alley. Pick up dog piles as part of this joy.
Ever have one of those days when everything you touch goes SPROOOOIIINNNGGGGG? Oh, heck: you don’t even have to touch it to make it go SPROING! All you have to do is think about it.
This afternoon I had to call a halt. My mood was so crabby and my competence level buried so deep beneath the sub-basement that after beating back the jungle vines of mis-serendipity for several hours, I decided that it was time to just…fuckin’…STOP. Yes. I do need to go to Home Depot to get a bunch of stuff for Gerardo and for myself and yes, I do need to go to Sprouts, and yes, tomorrow’s doctor visit will take me far, far in the opposite direction from those destinations…but—
But at some point I realized that if I get in the car I’m going to kill someone. Why? Because everything I touch today goes spectacularly, harryingly, tooth-grindingly wrong. I decide that the better part of valor is to stay off the roads, to forego the errands, to effing STAY HOME.
So when I finally make that Decision — effing STAY HOME — I realize God is saying to Herself, “Well! How many times do I have to slap her upside the head to get her attention?”
It is 100 degrees in the shade outside. Thank you, God, that You steered me away from that tenure-track job in South Carolina. Yeah, You remember: the one where they proposed to pay less than You were getting me paid for that nontenurable position here, but the most spectacular house in a forest was for sale for significantly less than I could get for the Funny Farm? Oh, dear God: sooo glad I’m not in South Carolina today. Or anywhere near the Southeast.
Thank you, God, for causing my father to run away from home at the age of 16 or 17, lie about his age, and join the Navy. Thank you, God, that he did not stay in Ft. Worth or Dallas or (yipes!) Houston.
Thank you, God, for allowing my mother, in her subtle way (do it, dear, and when we divorce I get half of all your coveted worldly goods…), to dissuade my father from retiring to Possum Kingdom, down on the Brazos. Thank you, God, that he did not end up sending me to some junior college in Texas, or, at best, UT Austin. Not that Austin isn’t wonderful…just that it has…well, hurricanes and tornadoes.
Thank you, God, for seeing to it that DH never got a job offer from Atlanta or any such waypoints, and that he never took it into his head to move to where his brother came to light: Houston.
Yesh. I’ll take 100 degrees in the shade any day, Ma’am, to hurricanes, floods, crashing trees, flying trailer homes or tornadoes. Any day.
It feels like I’ve accomplished nothing today, but in fact…what have I done?
Written a blog post.
Worked on a new book project (no, not the latest novel: something Altogether Different)
Figured out how best to deal with the Equifax betrayal
Done battle with Experian
Read behind my business partner on three contributions to the journal
Did not lose my temper altogether at polemic disguised as scholarship
Lost Charley not once, but twice
Hauled garbage
Got locked out of the backyard when the gate jammed.
Found some cash for a charitable cause
Got a ticket to an event & invited three other people to join me
Wangled an appointment with a doctor tomorrow
Yes. I lost my son’s dog. Twice.
I live in fear that this critter is going to slip out of the yard when I go into the alley. So try to observe where he is. This is a trick, as it develops.
Returning from a trash run, I call the dog.
No dog.
I search in every dog nest:
The floor in the hall where the AC keeps things especially cool
The floor by the front door, where he hopes my son will soon come back in
The floor in the family room, closer to Food
The floor in the bedroom, where he can keep an eye on Cassie and Ruby
The backyard, under the trees and around the patios.
Topmost on the list of today’s chores: Call the accursed credit bureaus over the latest identity theft caper at Equifax. Fortunately, after previous exploits, I have phone numbers that go to humans.
Usually. Experian, first on the call list, has a special number to ask about the Equifax fiasco. They’re saying wait times are up to 30 minutes. And of course, they have loud, annoying Muzak to keep you alert and make your head hurt worse.
But in less than 30 minutes — by far — a living creature picked up the phone, one who sounded like she had a fair number of IQ points between the ears.
She said it’s an option to change one’s PIN, but clearly she had been coached not to dispense advice. But it seems pretty obvious that anyone who busted into your account is going to have your PIN and also will have all the information needed to change the PIN. So instead of adding that kind of hassle, possibly to no avail, I put a 90-day fraud alert on the account.
This seems to be the path of least resistance, for two reasons:
a) It means than ANY time anyone tries to create a new credit or bank account, you get a phone call to that effect; and b) Experian shares the fraud warning with the other credit bureaus, meaning you don’t have to kill time in other punch-a-button phone mazes.
Since a fraud alert will let you know if anyone tries to use your information to acquire credit in your name, and since I already have a “freeze” on all my credit bureau accounts thanks to the vast Maricopa County Community College District hack, I think I’m going to let it go at that. Rather, I mean, than spending half the day navigating telephone punch-a-button mazes. It might be good to change bank account numbers again, but that is SUCH a huge hassle…it probably would be better to simply access credit union accounts online about once a week and check for any unauthorized transactions.
Understand: frequent bank account checks will have to become a permanent habit for everyone. Hackers know better than to use stolen information right away. They’ll often wait a year or more, by way of getting around various inconvenient alerts and hassles you’ve set up to foil them. Since these devices foil you, too, after awhile you’re likely to let them lapse.
The type of fraud alert that is shared among all three companies lasts only 90 days. You can get a seven-year fraud alert, but to do so you have to jump through hoops at all three companies, and you have to show that you’ve actually been a victim of an identity theft using your private information. Whether you can renew the 90-day thing or not, I cannot tell.
Another permanent habit: get used to filing your income tax returns at the earliest possible moment. One handy use for your stolen data is to file fraudulent tax returns in your name claiming large refunds — meaning you get no refund until you jump through hoop after hoop after migraine-building hoop to prove it wasn’t you.
Now…to find out how to sign on to a class action suit against those craven morons… Olson & Daines, an Oregon law firm, is already organizing one. You can go here to notify them that you’d like to join the class action. And if there’s ever been an event that demonstrates loud and clear why class action suits are valuable and should never be curtailed, this one is it. Equifax knew this hack was going on from May through July; they knew about it long enough for their top executives to get their money out of the firm’s stocks before the news hit the public media.
Without your permission, they collect data on you that is none of anyone’s business but yours — spying on you, really. Though this data, gathered in one place, renders you extremely vulnerable, they do nothing to encrypt it, and so naturally sooner or later some hacker steals it. Now you are screwed and the worst that happens to them is that their stock loses a few points…after their executives have pulled their money out.
With the government defanged — and if the right wing has anything to say about it, permanently enjoined from regulating business models like this — citizens have very little recourse other than through legal action.
