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Time to Batten Down the Hatches?

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Cassandra before the burning city of Troy. Evelyn de Morgan, 1898

It may be time to batten down the financial hatches…even if you’re not a paranoid crazy like this blogger. Congress has appointed a special prosecutor to look into the question of Trump’s suspected collusion with Russia in subvening the US election process — if indeed any such collusion occurred. And the guy is not our honored leader’s friend: he’s a former FBI director.

Nothing good is going to come of this, no matter which side of the bob-wire fence you happen to be on. To say financial markets are unstable is to put it mildly: the Dow is in a tailspin and the dollar is dropping. Meanwhile, household debts hit a record high this quarter.

If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to review your investments and move to the most conservative position possible. If it’s not too late, shift some assets toward cash. Avoid buying large-ticket items, such as real estate, that may be overvalued at this time. If the markets sink further as this turmoil continues — as they most certainly could — this is not the time to make any major purchases or to be unduly exposed in the market.

Prioritize pay-down of debt. The less debt you have at this time, the better. Pay for day-to-day purchases in cash, and do not borrow for high-cost items unless absolutely necessary. If you can’t afford to pay for it in cash, don’t buy it.

And…you remember what I told you about stocking in propane, water, and nonperishable foods? Do it.

Obscured in the current flap over Trump is the speculation — discovery? — that the recent global ransomware hack came out of North Korea. If that is true, in normal times it would be regarded as an act of war. More to the point, if it proves to be true, it shows that we are in the crosshairs of an unfriendly power led by a demented dictator who is certifiably insane and who has stated his hostility to the US. A better designed, more targeted attack could — and one day probably will — take down the entire financial and power infrastructure.

This will cause more chaos than any of us can even begin to imagine. And what better time to launch such an attack than in the middle of our present self-inflicted chaos?

Be prepared: not just financially but in terms of daily living:

• Have food and water stocked in.
• Keep your car filled with gas.
• If you have a long commute, plan an alternate route to get home if traffic lights and other infrastructure are down.
• Keep battery-run devices fully charged.
• Back up computer data to media that can be disconnected from your network — now, not later.
• Have some cash on hand (if there’s no power or no computer connections, your credit & debit cards won’t work).
• Stock in barterable goods, such as cigarettes, alcohol, weed, and the like.
• Stock in prescription drugs, any OTC drugs you use regularly, and first-aid supplies.
• If you’re a Second Amendment type, stock in ammunition, if you have not already done so.

Sure. I may be crazy. But that’s what they said about Cassandra…

 

Lazy as an old hound…

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…on a summer afternoon!

Okay, I admit to it: spending WAY too much time loafing.

The weather’s gorgeous. The laundry’s laundered, the groceries are shopped, the house is clean, and I. do. not. feel. like. doing. ANYTHING. creative or constructive! I did manage to backwash the pool today and ascertain that once again I need to call the pool guys to come clean out the DE filter. Again. I should’ve gone into the pool bidness.

Had to get up and go away from the computer to get anything done at all today. With the exception of Mr. Comey, reading about the doings in Washington is like watching the antics in a snake pit: at once hypnotically fascinating and revolting. I’m finding it so difficult to keep from flipping over to the news sources to stare in horror at the goings-on that I simply can’t get any work done unless I’m a long way from this contraption.

But by sitting down at a table with a pen in hand, I did manage (somehow) to draft four or five pages, once transcribed to type.

It’ll be interesting to see if this story turns into anything. Once again — as usual — my mood tends to straddle the line between literary and genre fiction. It’s too tacky to be literary, and too intellectual to make good thriller, sci-fi, or romance. What can I say?

I’ve signed up for a MOOC through the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. It starts tomorrow…that should be an amusing way to pass the summer. As voltage goes, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s pretty…low-tension. However, it’s free: you get what you pay for, I imagine. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.

Nothing, I expect, of value for the present imagined world. But nothing ventured…

Image: DepositPhotos, © vitalytitov

Springtime Dog Tick Attack

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Last night my son had me over for dinner at his house. This is always a treat, because he cooks like a dream. He happened to be dog-sitting for a friend: the guest was the cutest little critter named Lady. Looks exactly like my friend Susan’s dog, videlicet…

Have you ever seen anything more adorable in your life? {ahem} This side of a corgi, of course.

So as we’re petting and loving up this critter — she jumps up onto our laps while we’re consuming the rest of the wine for dessert  — what do we discover but a tick on her little noggin.

And then another tick…and then another! All told, this beast has five ticks attached to her head and ears!

Of course, I’ve got my dogs there. He’s naturally got his dog there. The poochlet has been around for several days, presumably dropping ticks on the floors and all over the yard. Dayum!

We inspect our dogs and can’t find any other ticks, but that’s not saying much. Cassie the Corgi and Charley the Golden Retriever have coats like carpets: you can’t really feel their skin through those rugs. Ruby, I don’t think, is infested…yet. But as for the other two: who knows?

I point out to him that some dogs seem to have a natural resistance to ticks. The German shepherds I’ve had, in particular, seem to bounce them right off, and over Cassie’s entire residence at the Funny Farm, I’ve only ever found one tick on her…right after an agility training class that was held on a grassy field in a semi-rural area.

We throw the little dog’s bedding and the cover for Charley’s bed into the washer; he pledges to vacuum thoroughly the next day, and we hope for the best.

Some dogs, on the other hand, are decidedly not immune to ticks. One of my first dogs, a young Doberman pinscher, was a tick magnet.

You never saw so many ticks in your life as that dog had. He apparently came to us with the ticks, and apparently they were resistant to insecticide — presumably because the breeder had been overtreating for so long. That dog was covered with ticks constantly.

We lived at my parents’ house in Sun City, which had gravel landscaping, like every other house around it. So there was no grass to harbor the things. Chances are, they had gotten into the wall-to-wall carpeting, where they were living. They would climb up the walls and my mother would get hysterical.

We would then call an exterminator and make an appointment to have the dog tick-dipped while the exterminator was at the house.

The dog was allergic to tick dip, among the many things it was allergic to. (It was also allergic to bermudagrass.) So every time we would take the dog to be dipped, it would come back with hives all over its body. These would take several miserable days to subside. Within a week or two, the ticks would come right back.

We treated the house time after time, to no avail.

Some people believe, like the proprietor of this interesting website, that dogs are more susceptible to fleas and ticks when their health is not up to par, if they have allergies, or if they have a skin condition. That would explain why four German shepherds, two golden retrievers, a Labrador retriever, and two corgis would rarely get ticks — all those dogs were in top condition into their old age.

A dobe, on the other hand, is best described as “a walking vet bill.”

Even though mostly I tend to think of the holistic stuff as bullshit, in fact this writer has several good points:

1) Vacuuming up hard floors regularly — every day — helps to keep ticks at bay. It’s carpet that they get into: carpet is pretty much the same as grass, to the buggish mind.

2) Boric acid works very well against any crawling insect and, used sparingly, will not harm your dog. You can find it marketed as an insecticide in a handy poof-bottle at any drugstore that’s frequented by Latinos, and probably at Walmart; otherwise ask the pharmacist.

3) DE (get the food grade, which you can order from Amazon) is less harmless but not VERY harmful if used only along baseboards and around entrances. However, I believe it to be more effective against ants and termites, because insects need to range around a bit to walk through it, and to control infestations they have to take it back to a hive, meaning both DE and boric acid are most effective against social insect species.

4) Some essential oils in fact are effective insecticides. Which ones, I do not know. IMHO they stink to high heaven, but some people like the odor. A few latter-day exterminating companies peddle them as “organic” and “natural” spraying products.

Resistance to ivermectin has been observed recently in brown dog ticks. Ivermectin is  (to my knowledge) the most commonly used and least toxic of the insecticides used on dogs (it’s in heartworm pills). Resistance mostly has been seen in tropical areas — Mexico, Panama, Florida — but of course with airplanes and global warming, the little guys aren’t likely to be confined to those areas long.

Avoid the use of collars and spot treatments that are supposed to kill ticks. These can be highly toxic to dogs.

Here’s a good guide from the University of Florida. If you spot even one tick on your dog (to say nothing of five of them!) vacuum the house thoroughly. If your vacuum uses disposable bags, vacuum up a small amount of DE or boric acid first, since these chemicals kill insects by causing mechanical damage to their carapaces and are by and large harmless to human and dogs (don’t breathe the DE, of course) (and don’t overdo it: a little goes a long way).

Vacuum everyplace where the little guys are likely to hide — in their nymph form they’re tiny and can easily get into crevices and corners. Vacuum carefully along the walls and underneath all the furniture. Carry the bag out to the garbage directly after vacuuming. If you have carpets, resign yourself to doing this every day for some weeks.

Sprinkle a fine, thin layer of DE or boric acid all along all the baseboards. If there’s a little gap between the baseboard and a hard floor, take a broom or hand-held brush and sweep the powder into that gap. Ticks like to move up a wall toward the corners of the ceiling — remember that they spend 3/4 of their lifetime off the dog, and during that time they’re living on your floors, in your furniture, or inside your walls. Forcing them to cross a DE or boric-acid barrier to reach the wall will do them in. Not instantly…but just give it awhile.

Once you’ve accomplished these fun tasks, just keep checking the dogs regularly. If you don’t find any more ticks for a week or so, you should be fine. If you do, then call a bug guy and have him spray inside and outside; on the same day, have the dog tick-dipped. Keep the dog away from the house until after the exterminator has done the job.

Outside, hang up feeders to attract seed-eating birds, as most of these, especially Abert’s towhees and thrashers, eat insects…including ticks. Really, most birds will eat insects, even sparrows and house finches, but some are adapted to eat mostly insects. In our parts, these include towhees, thrashers, mockingbirds, and woodpeckers. If you can call them into the yard, you’ll have a lot fewer undesirable insects around.

Ridiculously cute little dog: Shamelessly ripped off from my friend’s Facebook page
Dog tick image: By Sam Droege – Flickr: Dermacentor variabilis, U, Back, MD, Beltsville_2013-07-08-19.15.11 ZS PMax, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27635912

Applemania, Vindicated

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Welp…Now that every Windows machine on the planet is in some megalomaniac hacker’s crosshairs, I sure am glad I have an Apple.

Much as I resented the cost, time, and hassle involved in having to upgrade both computers and change out the hard drive on the MacBook…sure am glad i have Apple.

Apparently something over 100,000 organizations (god knows how many computers that means) were hit by the latest ransomware exploit. From what we’re told, the victims are all Windows users.

That doesn’t mean that Apple users aren’t targets. They surely are. One of the women on the choir reported that she had to cough up $300 to get her Mac unlocked. And she was a little old church lady, not likely to be downloading BitTorrent or cruising porn sites. She probably opened a phishing email and clicked on a link in it.

Spared extreme risk from this current attack, I’ve now arranged a two-pronged back-up system: one that backs up continuously to external drives with TimeMachine (which backs up your work in real time), and one that backs up manually to two external drives that most of the time are disconnected from the computer. Additionally, I’ve copied all my data files to DropBox.

You can use Time Machine to make a one-time back-up. It copies EVERYTHING on your computer, including the programs —  not just data files — and stores it neatly on an external drive or other medium. (A few cloud applications are compatible with Time Machine.) So: here’s the strategy…

Time Machine backs up one machine (which also accesses Dropbox) continuously to external drives. Two external drives: if one crashes, the other continues to run. I hope.

With all the crucial data files on DropBox, if the house burns down or the burglar steals both machines, it won’t matter: I’ll still be able to access anything that matters. I now work exclusively on DropBox, so that all updates to data files are done in real time on DB.

Two 2-terabyte external drives back up the MacBook, also using Time Machine. On the first of the month, I plug in drive A and activate Time Machine. Soon as the download is complete, I disconnect the external drive. Then on the 15th of the month, I plug in drive B and repeat. Thus, at any given time the backup on one of the drives is two weeks old.

It takes about three days for a ransomware attack to manifest itself. This means that at least ONE external hard drive will contain uninfected data if malware is installed on my computers.

Since two weeks is a long time when you’re editing brain-banging academic articles ranging in length from 6,000 to 60,000 words — a lot of work that you don’t want to repeat gets done in that period — I also have flash drive large enough to hold the contents of my DropBox files. That, I intend to plug in about every four days, to back up the most recent work. I probably should alternate with two of those, too…but there’s a limit to how much ditz I can tolerate.

 

When Grocery Stores Practice to Deceive…

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So while I’m galloping across the city last Thursday morning, I stop at (among other joints) a huge Fry’s superstore, appropriately Scottsdaleian, the sort of place where Mazeratis populate the parking lot. It is just a Fry’s, though, despite the addition of some fancy cheeses, a full-service sit-down sushi bar, a wealth of Target-like household goods, and a section peddling pricey loafing-around-the-estate clothes. This means I can grab a few fruits and veggies and some cleaning products at about the same price on offer at Albertson’s or Safeway.

We’re almost out of custom-made dog food here at the Funny Farm. So it crosses my mind that if by some miracle this Fry’s has chicken on sale, I could grab enough to fend off another Costco trip for a week or so.

Nope. No sale chicken. However, I do stumble across a gigantic package of pork butt — almost 10 pounds. Dang! That’s as much as you’d buy in a giant Costco package. And it’s on sale: marked down to $9.71 from $17.79.

Well…that’s a bargain! (Or so it appears…) The same or less than Costco’s price.

Grab.

This morning I go to cook up a lifetime supply of dog food from this stuff. It’s packaged, in the manner of a slab of Costco pork, squished inside a layer of tightly wrapped, melted-together plastic wrap. The package says CUT AND WRAPPED FREE!!!!

ohhhh, be still my heart!

So I think that like Costco pork, it’s chopped roughly into big chunks, which makes it pretty easy to stew up in a pot preparatory to food-processing with some veggies and some starches to make dawg food.

Not so much.

It’s one huge 10-pound chunk, and…it has a big bone running through the middle of it!

The package is not marked bone-in, and you cannot see the bone by looking at it through the plastic wrapping.

Fuckaroonies. What a hassle! I had to hack as much of the meat off the bone as I could, and was I mad! The bone weighed exactly 1 pound, meaning instead of 9.94 pounds of meat, I got 8.94 pounds. Meaning I threw $1.09 into the garbage.

Exactly one pound…

No, I do not feel up for turning a pork bone into soup. And no, there’s not enough room in one of those kettles to hold a bone on top of all that meat, which itself produces close to a quart of broth (because as we know, commercial meats are soaked in saline and a substantial part of what you’re paying for is, yes, water).

Aside: You don’t even have to add water to cook these meats for the beasties. Just drop the chicken or the pork into a pot and turn on the heat. Within minutes, enough salt water exudes to keep the meat from scorching, and by the time the meat is cooked, the pot is literally half full of liquid.

That’s convenient, I guess: you can use it to cook the rice or oatmeal for the dog food. It doesn’t taste very good, mostly because commercial factory-made chicken tastes awful and pork just tastes depressing. So I don’t use it for my own cooking. But it finishes off the dog food…the pooches seem to like it. But…they’ll eat mummified oranges. Tells you something about doggie taste.

Okay, now for the English-major math:

At the discounted price, $9.71 for 8.94 pounds of usable meat came to $1.09/pound, a dime more than Costco charges. Only the Costco product is hassle-free: open it, drop it in the pan, and turn on the burner.

At the original price, which no one was foolish enough to pay, the pork would have run $1.99 a pound: a dollar a pound more than Costco’s price.

So. The Fat Lady is not pleased this morning.

I deeply resented discovering a bone in the wad of meat, when the package was not marked “bone-in.” I probably wouldn’t have bought it, had I known: there wasn’t that much rush to make another batch of hound food, and Costco’s bone-free 99-cent pork is a much better, much lower-hassle deal.

In other gnus, however, check out the frozen wild shrimp I found the ‘tother day:

Oh, the magnificence!!!!!

I sautéed these with some garlic, herbs, bottled artichoke hearts, cut-up Campari tomatoes, a handful of frozen peas, and a splash of cheap white wine.

Now that is food. Serious food.

 

How Bank Transfers Really Work

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The first thing you need to know about a bank wire transfer is that it is a safe, credible, and efficient way of instantly transferring money from point A to point B. For many folks, wire transfers are the first choice for making international payments. It is quite fascinating how bank transfers work. Typically, a wire transfer sends money from one credit union to another, or one bank to another using the Fedwire network or the SWIFT network.

The Fedwire network was previously the Federal Reserve Wire Network. It is a funds transfer system from the US Federal Reserve that allows electronic funds transfers between thousands of banks. The SWIFT network is otherwise known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It is a payment network with 10,000 financial institutions across over 200 countries. Most SWIFT members are comprised of banks and financial institutions. All SWIFT members must have a valid Banking License.

Quick and Easy Ways to Send Money: Wire Transfers

Typically, a bank wire transfer is one that takes place between banks. Other money transfer methods are also possible, including alternative electronic payments options or money transfer services. For the most part, any funds that are sent from one bank to another are completed within 1-2 business days. In the United States, it is possible to receive money on the same day. All forms of international money transfers take a little longer to complete. There is usually no hold on any money that is deposited into an account via a wire transfer.

The funds move rapidly from one bank to the next, and the recipient will have instant access to the money. Of course, it depends when the wire transfer is submitted. It is possible that a few hours may go by before the receiving bank displays the proceeds from a wire transfer in the recipient’s bank account. If any delays take place, a simple call to the bank can resolve queries about wire transfers.

No Anonymous Wire Transfers in the US and Other Developed Nations

Getting started with a wire transfer requires the submission of specific instructions to the sending bank. This includes the amount that you would like to send, and all details of the recipient’s bank account. Nowadays, wire transfer services can be completed online, but many banks still require authorized signatures and paperwork.

As a recipient of a wire transfer, it is imperative that you provide the sender with accurate details for the transfer. The average fee for receiving an incoming wire is $10, while the average fee for sending a wire transfer is $40. Whenever credit cards are used for wire transfer services, there are additional fees tacked on at a higher rate.

The most cost-effective way to send a wire transfer is directly from a checking account. All wire transfers must be fully regulated, verified, and authorized by the sending and receiving bank. Both parties must have a bank account for a wire transfer to take place. Both parties must have a verifiable address, telephone number and ID.

Anonymous banking is impossible in developed countries like the United States, so all money that moves around is traceable every step of the way. Safety and security are always high on the agenda when sending money to a recipient. IDs must be verified and account numbers checked for accuracy.

Debits, Credits and FX Options

When you are ready to send money abroad, it’s important to understand how international wire payments work. The first bank will debit the sender’s account by the amount which he/she is sending. That same bank will then credit the recipient’s bank account by the same amount. The receiving bank will then credit the recipient’s account with the amount of the wire transfer. In the above example both banks have an agreement in place between them. This makes it easier for them to debit/credit accordingly.

Sometimes, there is no existing agreement between banks and they will have to use a fourth party to broker the agreement. The more middlemen there are, the greater the complexity. Besides SWIFT, there are other payment services such as FPS, Chaps, and Fedwire. The costs of transferring money with different services will vary dramatically. Various Forex exchange services make it much more affordable to transfer money quickly from sender to recipient. It behooves clients to research all options for the best deals.

Wire Transfers Are Reliable Ways to Send and Receive Money

Note that a bank will not process a wire transfer unless the sender has the funds available. In this vein, receiving a wire transfer is usually safe. Once money has been transferred, it is near impossible for the sender to withdraw the wire request. It is in this interim period of transfers being made and funds actually available that fraudsters ply their craft.

Always wait for funds to clear before goods or services are provided, or receipts of payment are made. Besides for bank wire transfers, there are several other forms of money transfer that take place including automated clearing house transfers (ACH), money transfer services, and various third-party providers.