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Fun & Games with Equifax

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Amazing. A hundred and forty-three million people get all their private financial information stolen from Equifax, an organization that snoops into your business and accrues data about you without your permission — without encrypting said data. Adding to this latest entry in the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted, Equifax executives knew what was coming down the pike, so sold their stock in the company before the news hit the street.

So. If your personal information hasn’t already been stolen, chances are pretty good it’s gone now: 143 million is one in two Americans who may be a victim of this latest heist. What can you do?

You’re not helpless, interestingly enough: there are several strategies that will help protect against the effects of identity theft.

• Freeze your credit bureau accounts. You have to call all three credit bureaus to have each one apply a freeze. It ensures that no one — including you — can set up a new bank account, credit card, mortgage, or the like without your knowing about it.

This is probably the best move you can make. It does add some hassle to your life. Any time you want to take out a loan or open a new bank account, you have to un-freeze at least one account — usually Experian. This is made slightly less inconvenient by the fact that you can limit the period that it’s unfrozen, having it refreeze after x number of days. Which sounds good until you realize that you have no way of getting the people your dealing with off the dime: invariably, they don’t get around to asking for a credit report until after the un-frozen period ends.

• Monitor your credit card and bank account statements. You should be doing this anyway, but now that’s even more true. Check each statement promptly after it arrives for any transactions you don’t recognize, and if you suspect fraud, call the card issuer or bank immediately.

• Set up fraud monitoring on your accounts. Equifax proposes to give its victims a year of free fraud monitoring — conveniently, through its own subsidiary.

This is problematic. First, one year of monitoring ain’t much. If bad guys have your Social Security number, you don’t have a year-long problem: your problem is going to last the rest of your life. After that year, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege. And second, if you sign up for the service offered by Equifax, you have to give up your right to sue the bastards — or to be part of a class action suit.

There is some wrong-doing here: they knew about this on July 29, plenty of time for the higher-ups to unload stock. We proles didn’t learn that our personal data was on the way to the Dark Web until yesterday. So no: you do not want to forego your right to sue, and no: you do not want to agree to accept arbitration.

Paid identity fraud monitoring is probably unnecessary. You can accomplish the same thing for free or for very little by freezing your credit bureau accounts, keeping a sharp eye on your financial statements, and also checking the EOB (explanation of benefits) statements that come from your health insurer for any treatments you didn’t receive.

• For free, you can monitor your credit reports. By law, credit bureaus are required to give you one free credit report a year. Since three credit bureaus dominate the privacy-invasion landscape, you can arrange to stagger requests for reports, so that one comes in every four months, giving you a recurring view of activities reported to the credit bureaus.

The federal government has a free identity theft recovery program for people who believe they’ve been victimized. When you review the complicated, time-consuming steps required to respond to an attack on your identity, you realize exactly how serious this vast breach is. It is, in a word, a fiasco.

Trashy Trash…

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No, not racy books. Actual, real trash.

Of late, it’s occurred to me that the recycling bin is a) a nuisance, occupying space in the garage where it blocks cabinetry I need to use; and b) rather a waste of time and effort. The painter has wanted it outside so he can stuff his used paper shielding strips in it, so it’s been parked in the front yard for the past week.

Meanwhile, a friend gave me about half-a-freezerful of high-end packaged goods: prepared meals from Omaha Steaks and Costco. The husband’s cardiologist informed them that they had to get completely off salt — that would be the same quack who gave me the same out-of-date and impractical advice a couple years ago. So they took that to heart and threw out or gave away literally months’ worth of food they’d stashed in in their freezer.

Understand, they’re both around 90 and so, sensibly enough, they tend to prefer packaged goods that can be heated in an oven or a microwave with minimal clean-up mess. These, as it develops, consist of a pile of salt with some food mixed in. So she donated a ton of food to her friends’ cause.

I fix a couple of these meals…and doing so, a small nightlight dawns:

The reason the blue recycling barrel seems like a ludicrous waste of time and effort to me is that about 90 percent of the stuff I slip into that thing (by way of avoiding having to make the mildly hazardous trip into the bum-infested alley) is NOT recyclable, per the City’s rules and regs. Why? Because I don’t eat that kind of food.

One of these ready-made meals — oversalted stewed mushroom beef over noodles — came in a box that was wrapped in stretchy plastic. Inside the box was a plastic container holding the food, and that was also covered in heat-seal plastic. So one meal — just ONE meal — came with THREE LAYERS of landfill-clogging packaging. By the time I’d sampled a couple of the things, I’d filled up the kitchen trash can!

Then some friends came over for a beading party. One of the women drinks, exclusively, diet soda, preferably diet Coke. I bought four bottles, since some of the other women will drink that gunk, too. So now I have two bottles of fake gunky drink to get rid of (donate? pour down the drain?) and four plastic bottles of the recyclable sort.

The fact is, I don’t eat that kind of thing, and I hate loathe and despise artificially flavored soda water. So…that means there’s a lot of wrappings, boxes, cans, and bottles that do not come into my house and so do not go out of my house.

When you buy real food, you do get some packaging waste:

  • Meat comes on Styrofoam trays. Styrofoam is verboten in the recycling bins.
  • It’s wrapped in heat-shrink plastic. Thin stretchy plastic is verboten in the recycling bins.
  • Fresh fruits and vegetables come home in plastic grocery bags. Plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
  • Pasta comes in clear plastic bags. Clear plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
  • Rice comes in clear plastic bags. Clear plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
  • Beans come in clear plastic bags. Clear plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
  • Dog food (to the extent that I feed commercial dog food, which ain’t much) comes in waxy paper bags. Dog food bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
  • I do buy some ice cream, but it’s packaged in cool little plastic “cans” with screw-on lids — I keep those for use around the house and yard. It’s not like I eat that much ice cream, after all.
  • Costco wants to give you a box (i.e., they want you to carry their trash away) every time you shop there, but I have two big Tupperware bins in the back of the clunk, so I reject the cardboard boxes.
  • I shred old documents and waste paper from my printer…that stuff can go right into the compost bin.

When you come right down to it, just about the only thing that’s recyclable here is the junkmail. And I’m beginning to think I should put stickers on that stuff saying “return to sender” and hand it back to the mailman. Or take it and dump it in the blue mailboxes: I’ve about had it with having to carry an entire mailbox full of trash to the blue barrel six days a week. Otherwise, almost everything I throw out isn’t supposed to go into the blue bin at all.

The city laid off the trash cops, pretty much eliminating the chance of a fine, so I toss most of that stuff in there anyway. But why, when I have to take the wet garbage and the dog mounds out to the alley two or three times a week, anyway? Normally I’ll store the few things that can’t go into the composter in the refrigerator (to keep it from stinking) till I get around to unlocking gates and braving the bums. (Damn, but I miss my German shepherds…) Dog shit gets collected and stashed out of sight and smelling range until I take out the food waste.

If I have to go out to the alley anyway, and if in fact almost nothing of what goes into the blue barrel is supposed to go into the blue barrel, why do I have that giant blue thing taking up space in the garage? Why am I rolling it out to the curb every Thursday, willy nilly; then picking up the trash that gets dumped all over the yard, the sidewalk, and the street; picking up the busted barrel that the guy has tossed on its side in the road; and dragging it back in the garage to block the storage cabinets?

As it develops, picking up and sorting and delivering all that recyclable (and not-so-recyclable) trash costs taxpayers a lot of money: funding that is taken away from health care, schools, and other basic services. The effectiveness of these programs is not altogether a given. Here and there, people are actually questioning their usefulness., whether they’re worth the cost, whether popularizing curbside pick-up is a wise idea, and whether it would be more sensible, cost-effective, and kinder to the environment to legislate against all the wasteful packaging that produces all that unnecessary trash in the first place.

So with Painter Dude monopolizing the blue barrel this week, I’ve been testing the idea that except for the junk mail, all of the trash can go out to the alley. And y’know: it’s working. There’s not much extra stuff to haul out there, and what there is, is almost all non-recyclable.

After the trash guys pick up the last of the painter’s paper stuff, I am rolling that barrel out to the Bum Cage in the alley, where it can reside out of sight and mind. The few recyclables I have — maybe one wine bottle every couple weeks, a few beer cans a week, and a Maker’s Mark bottle about once every three or four months — can go into a neighbor’s bin on pickup morning.

As for the junk mail: “Return to Sender!”

On the Crime Scene…again…

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Just stick my dainty little foot into the pool when I hear eeeeeEEEEEEEeeeeeouououououou, loud and frantic, from over at Conduit of Blight Boulevard. Oh well: another happening. Car wreck, apartment fire, heart attack, OD…

Didn’t sound like an ambulance or a fire engine, though.

No.

Before I can dive off the step into the drink ROAOAOAOAOAOAOAORRRRRRR!!!!!! Cop helicopter blasts over at rooftop height.

Shit. I’m buck nekkid (not that there’s much left to see… 😀 ) and damn it, ALL i want to do is dip in the drink long enough to cool off after a long, tedious day before I dump two packages of shock treatment into the water.

Now he starts to circle over the ‘hood. He’s about a block to the north, ranges maybe two blocks north: parks right over my old house.

One of the reasons I moved out of that house was the Friday and Saturday night flyovers. Literally every Friday and Saturday night, you could set your clock by the 11 p.m. flyover. But it’s only 7 p.m., pretty early for the weekly perp chase. Something serious must be going on.

More sirens sound.

Heat rinsed out of my hair, I climb out of the puddle and chase all three dogs into the house. Check that all the security doors are locked. Yeah: the painter and I did leave the side door to the garage open. Lock.

The painter is doing a very nice job. He’s charging a pretty penny, but I’m willing to pay it because he’s working in THE most gawdawful weather, and he’s about my age. I couldn’t do that on a bet, nor would I.

It is sooooooo damn hot, and all of us who live here are sooooo damn sick of being hot all the time.

Today in addition to heaving around outside he laid on a third coat of gray paint in the hallway, this time successfully covering the last of the orange. It really looks very nice: a huge improvement that will improve the house’s potential saleability, should I decide to decamp.

Which is something I consider every time the cops do one of their alarming air attacks.

Here’s Why I’m Paying off a 2% Car Loan…

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...right now, without waiting.

And that is without taking into account any assessment of the clowns who have taken over the White House.

It’s easy enough to see that what goes up must come down. Capitalist economies have always been cyclical. That’s normal. But I think we’re looking at stupidity and foolhardiness that exceed normal, compounded by seditious collaboration with foreign parties who are not our friends, outright corruption, and the takeover of a national political party by ideologues who are so passionate they have taken leave of what little common sense and ethics they might once have had. Compounded, too, by a natural disaster from which this country will not soon recover.

The next economic crash is going to make the Great Recession look like…heh! A tea party. It may make the Great Depression look like a walk in the proverbial park, too. Many, many more of us are going to lose our jobs, and quite a few will never replace them — just as quite a few of us never replaced decently paying jobs and decent benefits after the Fall of the Bush Economy. You think we have a gig economy now? Wait’ll you see what’s coming up the road.

Most of what brought us the Great Recession is already back in place: and then some.

I believe we will see another major economic crash within the next three and a half years, if Trump stays in the White House through his first term. If he is impeached or if he resigns and is replaced with Mike Pence, that may slow things down a bit: then we can expect a major economic crash within the next seven and a half years.

This time, we can see it coming.

Anyone who lived through the Bush Recession would be a fool not to line things up and get prepared ASAP.

What to do to line things up?

• Number 1: Pay off debt, as fast as you can and to the extent that you can. Pay off the car loan, pay off the credit cards, pay off the mortgage if you can.

• Number 2: Do not assume any new debt! Do not buy a new car. Do not buy a new house. Certainly do not buy real estate at the present price point, which in many parts of the country is back in the “bubble” range. Do not charge anything on a credit card. If you can’t afford to pay for it in cash, don’t buy it.

• Number 3: Build a cash emergency fund. Build it as fast as you can. Pay yourself first by putting a set amount aside out of every paycheck. You should have enough in savings to cover at least six months’ worth of living expenses; preferably a year. Even better: two years’ worth.

• Number 4: Take care of routine health and dental care now, while you can afford it. If you are laid off your job, you’ll have about a snowball’s chance of getting health coverage that you can pay for.

• Number 5: Stock up on nonperishable food items. And while you’re at it…

• Number 6: Plant a vegetable garden.

• Number 7: Enhance your networking strategies. Join business groups and make yourself known to potential employers in your field. And while you’re at it, update your resume and keep it updated.

• Number 8: Start a side gig. Ideally, it should be one that could morph into a business that, combined with unemployment and a spouse’s income, can support you. Use the income from a side job to pay off debt and build cash savings.

Be prepared. If you’re not already prepared, better get that way soon…

Banner Image of the Day: Unemployed men outside a soup kitchen opened by Al Capone in Depression-era Chicago, Illinois, 1931. Public domain

Migraine Morning

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 Like I have nothing better to do… Woke up this morning with the needle-stab-in-the-eye of ocular neuritis (or whatever it is: it’s never been diagnosed satisfactorily), swiftly followed by a fine migraine. These amusing headaches can usually be discouraged by a couple mugsful of coffee strong enough to hold a spoon upright. And yea verily, so it has proven: two hours later the pain has receded to the “mild” level, though otherwise I feel like I’ve been run over by the proverbial truck.

This is not needed in the midst of the various ongoing hassles.

The painter is still holding forth, and of course with furniture & plants moved around and outdoor watering systems derailed, that creates some background chaos.

My son is headed off for a long-planned road trip through Colorado. But with one change of plans: the dog. Since he no longer can take Charley in a car, he’s bringing the hound over here for me to babysit over the next ten or 12 days.

So…yes. Our doughty painter will have to navigate around not one, not two, but three dogs, one of whom weighs 90 pounds and two of whom are given to heading for Yuma at a dead run if a gate is left open.

I’ve pretty well got him trained to shut the gate behind himself when feasible and me trained to check to be sure the gates are shut before letting the corgis out.

But…. Among other things, Charley is given to the doggywobbles. He really needs to have the dog door open — normally I leave it locked shut because Cassie won’t use it and the burglars will. So this is going to present some difficulties over the next few days.

Our beading friends are having a beading party at my house on Saturday. I’m looking forward to it, because it’s a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. However…

Having to clean the house to the standards of half-a-dozen nice Catholic wymmen around an active painting job and three dog-dune shedders is not going to be an easy trick.

Meanwhile, yesterday I bought some delicious-looking hummus at Costco while I was running errands for myself and my aging friends — one of our beaders is genuinely hypersensitive to gluten (not in the faddish sense, either). Great snack for her and everyone else. But…heh…while purchasing this little find I failed to think…ohhhhh….hummus! Must have something to dip in it!

So now I’ll have to go back out — around the dogs and the painter — to pick up some tortilla chips and some veggies. Ugh.

§ § §

Kid in, Dog in, Kid out. Half an hour of busy flapping, conveniently coinciding with Painter Guy’s arrival. I forgot to put down a second giant bowl of dog water…momentarily must get up and do that…but will wait until the sweat I’ve worked up subsides.

Dog seems more or less OK, though he definitely was hyperventilating from the car ride. If he has the collywobbles (as we’re told he does), it didn’t stop him from laying a fine coherent pile in the backyard. Oh well…I hadn’t picked up the corgi mounds yet.

Son showed up in a gigantic very-late-model red SUV marked “JEEP.”

I say, you’re planning to drive to Colorado in a freaking Jeep?????

He says he borrowed it from his father because his car, a reliable Toyota, isn’t big enough to hold all three guys and their camping gear.

I say, “Your father bought a freaking Jeep? I thought he was smarter than that.”

He says, “It’s been recalled four times and has broken down twice.”

Oh dear God. I hope one of those guys has a cell phone carrier that covers Monument Valley and the Navajo.

Holy, holy, holy sh!t.

What on earth could have possessed DXH to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee? For cryin’ out loud, the damn things are unsafe at any speed. WHAT could he have been thinking?

Is it too early to break out the bourbon? Surely the sun must be over the yardarm in Shanghai by now…

§ § §

In smarter climes, the painter is doing an awesome job on the Funny Farm. And he made an amazing discovery. At some point along the line — probably six or eight years ago — I had the out-of-favor Bila the Bosnian Painter repaint the house’s west wall, the same color as the rest of the shack. This is a desert-dust brown dubbed “Baked Potato” down at Dunn Edwards.

So Painter Guy, for whom Dunn Edwards paints are presently out of favor, took the stuff over to HD and had five gallons of matching Behr exterior flat whipped up. “Baked Potato,” as it develops, is very popular in these parts — we could call it “HOA Greige,” and so the HD guys are experienced at concocting it.

He hauls this massive amount of paint back here and applies it to the west wall.

And hot damn! IT’S NOT THE COLOR! It does not match the HOA brown on that west wall.

He of course assumes HD screwed up, so he loads the tankard of paint back in his truck and flies back to the HD at 67th and Bell, in a state of high dudgeon.

While this is going on, I’m out running around the city buying groceries for myself and my aged friends, and then toting their share of the haul to their house. So the poor guy is pretty much on his own here.

At HD the paint department guys inform him that it IS “Baked Potato,” and there must be some mistake on this end.

He is beside himself. He now thinks he’s ordered five expensive gallons of high-test exterior paint…in the wrong color. The cost of which, he figures, is coming out of his pay. Worse, he’s convinced himself that I am going to HATE it.

Well. No. When I get  back and see the actual “Baked Potato,” I say, “There’s nothing wrong with that. I dunno why this doesn’t match, because Bila gave me the can of paint he used and that’s what we schlepped to HD for matching. Don’t worry about it. Paint the house with this.”

Now he proceeds for awhile, and then he resurfaces. “Take a look at this,” says he.

When he applies the paint to the other paintable wall, on the east side, it matches perfectly.

WTF?

I have no idea what hijinks Bila got up to, but when he painted the west wall, he used a different color from the paint that was on the rest of the house.

Bila was fast and cheap, but one gets what one pays for: he really did a half-assed job. This guy has climbed up and filled the siding where it’s split and cracked, and, far more to the point, he’s gotten down on hands and knees and scraped and filled the cracked footing around the slab! Both of those are marvelous fun jobs…and it’s 105 out there.

How glad are we that we’re NOT doing this job?

And speaking of WTF???…

Charley and Cassie go freaking batsh!t when Painter Guy climbs up on the roof. So persistently batsh!t are they that I set aside the effort to make WordPress insert those images there the way I want, not the way it wants, walk out to the living room, and peer out the front window.

Migawd, there’s a cop parked in front of the teacher’s house. I know the family — Dad, Wife (who works at his school as a teacher’s aide), and four kids — left at the usual hour this morning because I heard them climbing into their cars and driving away.

Never a dull moment around the Funny Farm.

If You Want Something Done Right…

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F’r example, there’s no way in He!! I’m getting on the roof and prizing strips of stuff off a wood beam-and-slat shade structure.

Gerardo, a case of still water running deep, is very smart, indeed. His two underlings: All muscle, including what’s between the ears

They came back today to finish taking the plastic stuff off the back patio overhang so Painter Guy can refinish the cedar. Friday, they’d taken the translucent plastic sheets off but left the plastic strips used to secure the thing. Sort of: they busted them up and left quite a mess

Meanwhile, I took it into my (once-)pretty little head to simply remove the covering permanently, since from out on Feeder Street NW it does look ever-so-slightly WT. And the woodwork Richard put up there, lo! these many years ago actually shades the place just fine, without benefit of covering.So I ask Gerardo to come back and remove the busted-up plastic strips. He says they’ll show up at 7 a.m. Saturday. This, as he and I both know, means today: Monday. They do show this morning, not very long after 7 a.m. and risk their lives climbing atop the lash-up.

They are brave men. With solid muscle between their ears.

So time passes. They finish the job and leave.

I’ve already done the ayem pool cleaning. Fortunately, though, I’d decided to let the skimmer collect what little floating debris had accrued during the night before putting Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner (a wimp if ever there was one) back into the drink.

Painter Guy surfaces. I thrash around with him for awhile; he starts his prep work. While he’s banging around, I finish the latest Chinese math paper and field a request from North China University for another copyediting job. Nice. Send off the finished research study to the client and then decide I’d better get Harvey back to work.

As I’m about to drop him into the water, what should float by but a piece of busted plastic roofing strip.

Chortle!

How do those guys do this? And can you imagine what a chunk of hard plastic would do to Harvey, who will choke on half a pecan?

So I figure I’d better police the premises before proceeding.

And after considerable study, I find sitting on a pool step: a bolt.

Jeez. The pool is a LONG way from the patio cover! How the heck do they manage that? And what happened to the washer that goes with the bolt?

Never did find the washer, but Harvey is still running around the pool, so I assume the thing didn’t go into the water.

Painter Guy, who does not look more than six months younger than me, spends the morning heaving around: moving junk away from the walls, scraping the cracked paint off the foundations, and actually washing down (!!) the walls and trim. Bila the Bosnian Painter would never in a million years have washed the exterior. Certainly not. Certainly not in 100-degree heat.

In due time, Painter Guy goes off to do battle with Home Depot by way of procuring the desired colors in Behr, not Dunn-Edwards, paint.

Dunn-Edwards out. Behr in. Whoever runs D-E has mightily dropped the corporate ball. Whereas once it was the premier brand of paint — at least in these parts — it has fallen sadly from its former glory.

Even two coats of the stuff did not adequately cover the hall/dining-room walls — the old orange paint still shows through.. I’m paying painter dude to lay on another coat — of Behr — as long as he’s here. And the stuff fades. Dunn-Edwards never used to fade. Now, if you need to touch up a wall a year or so after you painted it, the stuff out of the same can will not match. Neither will a new can of it.

And, apparently, the color itself does not stay stable when left in the can. An hour or so ago, Painter Guy called from Home Depot, saying he’d had five gallons of the white trim paint made up, and it came out looking yellow. I’d given him an old can of the exterior trim, with which to extract a new matching can from the Depot, only in Behr, not Dunn-Edwards. The clerk in the paint department was lurking in the background, and he was also saying he didn’t think it looked right. I suggested I could bring up the can of interior trim, which is the same color, but he said no, he was at the 67th and Bell HD: halfway to Las Vegas.

Finally we left it that we would accept the oddly colored paint and test it. If it’s wrong, I’ll take the interior trim paint up to the HD closer to the Funny Farm: that is a brand-new can, so there should be no deterioration.

If such a thing can even happen. I’ve never had a tightly sealed can of paint change color, just sitting in the garage. But anything’s possible.

I guess.