Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Weird weather, weird computer, weird people…

by

The strangeness that is humanity… In the “weird people” department, we have our honored US Senator from the Great State of Arizona, the aptly named Jeff Flake. This idiot is actively crowing on and on and ON at his Facebook site about how proud he is of throwing millions of people off health insurance and guaranteeing that people who are sick or who have been injured will not be able to get health insurance. What a guy! In response to his latest cock-a-doodle-doo, about how great he is because he voted in favor of killing the few limits on your network privacy and mine, 95 people slammed him. Two supported the jerk. Given the outrage these guys whip up, you have to wonder HOW they keep getting elected. Gerrymandering and money, for sure; probably a bit of fraud, too.

What a bunch!

Yesterday was consumed by boring and mostly fruitless tasks: paying bills, updating Excel spreadsheets, farting around on Facebook, not doing one thing with socially redeeming value.

In the weird department, given how evil and destructive the Republican party has become over the past couple of decades, it never ceases to astonish me that the corporate world in general still thinks having it in power is a good thing. It is not, of course. What’s bad for Americans ultimately will be bad for business. But for the nonce, they’re all excited.

The amount by which my investments are growing simply beggars description. If this growth were to continue for another six months or a year, you probably would be able to describe me as a wealthy woman. Despite all the money I was forced to take out of the stock market by the mandated Required Minimum Distribution from my IRA, I’m still worth more than I was at this time last year. That’s despite buying a car with $3,600 worth of payments a year, despite several pricey house and yard fixes, despite one damnfool expensive thing after another.

But of course, we know all that is easy come, easy go. That truth makes me want to cash out all those funds, convert them to gold, and bury them in the backyard. Sooner or later the bubble will burst, and we’ll all be broke again.

I’m getting too old to weather another spate of “broke again.”

Speaking of “weather,” that has been insane in these parts! A couple days ago, we hit 108 degrees. This morning when I let the dogs out at 6 a.m, it was 60 degrees out here on the back porch. Just now — three hours later — it’s barely 70. Last night it rained a little — apparently not much — and this morning the sky is adorned with fluffy, low-grazing clouds. It’s quite lovely right this minute…conditions swing madly from “pushing intolerable” to “exquisite,” as it was last night when the dogs and I went out to defile the neighborhood lawns.

Because of this unpredictability, I’ve held off repainting the outdoor furniture. The two wicker chairs and the old mid-century metal things in front need new coats of paint, which awaits them in a large collection of spray cans arrayed across the dining-room table. The wind has been so fierce and given to coming up so unpredictably, I’ve been afraid to wave a can of spray paint in the air…afraid, day after day after day.

Oh well. Neither the chairs nor the paint is going anywhere.

Instead, then, yesterday I fertilized all four citrus trees, each of which is getting pretty big and pretty hungry. Used up the better part of a big sack of fertilizer, and then ran the water all afternoon trying to get the stuff started soaking its way down to the plants’ roots.

In doing so, I also fertilized a length of cat-claw vine that’s been suffering for lack of water. Apparently the watering system has crapped out along the vine’s base. Gerardo is going to be deployed to dig up the ground and fix whatever’s broken…won’t he be thrilled?

Speaking of Gerardo and Luis, one of those guys  hacked an entire branch off the lime tree. Admittedly, the tree was a bit overgrown and was in the way — to some degree — as you were walking back and forth. Of all things, you had to walk around it. What could be more outrageous, hm?

The result is, the remaining limbs are now fully exposed, west-facing, to the afternoon sun.

Citrus trees are vulnerable to sunburn. This is why — unknown to most yard guys, and evidently unknown to the city’s public information nitwits — you do not prune citrus to look like a tree. It’s a shrub, not a tree. When you cut its  lower limbs up off the ground, you expose the trunk to sunburn, which will weaken or kill the damn plant.

That’s why you see white paint on citrus tree trunks: in the absence of leaves to shade the trunk, humans have to smear reflective paint on their mutilated flora.

So I am not pleased. I could paint the tree higher up, but brushing paint on the thing halfway to the roof is going to look damn funny. An alternative is to wrap it with this stuff they make to wrap citrus with, but getting that around three or four large branches that are growing almost together is going to be…damn near impossible.

WhatEVER. Something will have to be done within the next few days, because summer is here, officially or no, and the minute this cold snap passes, that tree is gonna fry.

And speaking of weird, doesn’t it strike you as strange that, in the Phoenix area, nary a yard man, be he black, white, purple, or (preferably) Mexicano, has a freaking clue about how to care for citrus? To a man, every one of them wants to hack them up and trick them out as trees. Then the city, pandering to the residents’ terror of (ohhhh eeeek!) roof rats, urges people to hack off their citrus trees’ branches, on the theory that this will keep the ratties from climbing into the trees and hopping from their canopies to your roof, thence to climb down your chimney and chase your children around the living room.

Argh.

If a roof rat, a creature the size of a middling cat, can hoist itself up onto the low-hanging branches of a grapefruit tree and can climb up a block wall, does it not follow that the little guy could scamper right up a tree trunk?

The correct response is not to destroy your (freaking valuable) ornamental and food-crop trees. The correct response is to secure your attic so that Ratty can’t get in. This is not very hard. It’s something you ought to do anyway, since Ratty is not the only critter who would like to take up residence in a nice roomy attic. We have swarms of flying termites here, which happily enter an unscreened attic. Those things will cause havoc that even the most rambunctious rat could never hope to match.

Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking:

Take one of the old sheets of shade fabric, presently stashed in the shed. Tear or cut it into strips. Carefully wrap it around the most exposed part of the lime tree and…hang onto your hat…pin it into place with safety pins.

Et voilà! Doesn’t cost anything and probably will last for a year or so, until the tree’s foliage fills back in.

Moving on in the weird department, yesterday I tried to download Apple’s Pages and its iBook Author program. Couldn’t. Apparently you’re not allowed to download those marvels into a MacBook as old as mine, no matter what OS you’ve installed.

So…I am going to be mightily pissed if I discover I spent something over $800 for updates that were promised, among other things, to accommodate those programs, and those programs still can’t be used. Today, among other time wasters, I’m going to have to call up Apple’s customer service again and spend another hour trying to accomplish this.

Today I’m forced to get up off my duff and carry the busted external hard drive back to Costco, there to beg for an exchange or a refund. I’m a little wary about doing this, because the thing does have backups on it. Discussed this with my son, who agreed there’s some risk in returning it. I’m almost inclined to take (yet another) bath on it, bash the bejayzus out of it with a hammer, and then just go buy a new one.

But…the damn things cost sixty bucks!

And of late I’ve taken so many financial baths my financial skin is peeling off.

I think I’m going to buy one of these, speaking of things that cost sixty or seventy bucks…

It’s a Hunter fan tricked out to look like a real fan, as real fans were back in the day when we made real fans. In America.

Back when Fry’s Electronics carried nice black “retro” (snark!) fans, I bought four of them. These adorn the kitchen and front rooms of the house, making it possible to keep the thermostat around 80 degrees (or so…) in the summertime. But I don’t have one for the bedroom, so instead use a plastic thing that makes a racket and is uglier than pussley. I’d like to have one of these for my bedroom. But I don’t know. With expense after expense after endless expense whapping me upside the head, I’m running out of spending money. It looks like I’ll just break even at the end of my personal fiscal year, come September, when another RMD will replenish the checking account for another 12 months.

It’s getting late. I’ve consumed two pots of coffee. Costco is opening. I must fly.

Arizona Drivers: Batsh!t Crazy, Every One

by

Arizona drivers have always been aggressive. That’s why I insist on a six-banger…so I can dart out of the way of my fellow homicidal drivers, or dart around them. But we have exceeded ourselves. We’re no longer merely aggressive: we’re all batsh!t crazy.

On the Arizona Road

Yesterday SDXB and I decided to drive to Tucson. We wanted to revisit the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and a couple of art collections on the University of Arizona campus. We’d planned to leave at 7:30, but we got (as usual, with me…) a bit of a late start. It was about 8 by the time we got out the door, headed for State Route 51, therefrom (is that a word?) to connect to the hideous Interstate 10 freeway.

Understand: I personally will not drive on the 10 at all. It is way too dangerous for my taste. Given my choice, I would have taken the slow boat to Tucson via Florence, which crosses the Rez and goes through far more scenic territory and is nowhere near as heavily traveled. But normal people — SDXB, for example — would never dream of adding an extra 40 or 50 minutes to the travel time just to avoid a little lunacy.

So we set out.

Oh, my Lord the traffic was gawdawful! Holy crap. The surface streets were essentially stopped. We got on Main Drag South and didn’t even get a quarter of the way to the 51 before I realized I’d brought the wrong glasses. So had to instruct SDXB on the Native’s back-road access into the ‘hood, so we could circumvent the mess. Starting again from the Funny Farm, we decided on another route, which entailed going across GangBanger’s Way as far as you can go, then heading south and connecting to Main Drag South at a point past the roadblock.

Now we’re merging onto the 51, which is barely moving. And — in a typical Arizona driver stunt, a woman decides we are not going to get on ahead of her, so she speeds up to cut him off. He doesn’t see her because she’s in his blind spot. Instead of braking to avoid a collision, she lays on the horn.

He swerves back into the on ramp. Then, with her out of the way, he gets into the first (outside) lane.

She now slows down to get behind him, pulls into the onramp so she can fly past him on the right. She goes along a ways…this onramp doesn’t go away: it turns into an offramp to the next east-west main drag. Now she merges into the lane ahead of him, and within three seconds swerves back into the on/offramp! Just to show she can do it.

What a woman!

Now SDXB tries to merge into the center lane when he spots a gap in traffic. The guy behind him lays on the gas and speeds up, again to cut him off. You know…when you have 10,000 cars in front of you, what the hell difference does one more make?

Apparently it makes a big difference to a sh!thead.

You never saw such traffic in your life. The freeway was jammed in both directions — SDXB figured we were averaging about 30 to 35 mph. We could have driven down to the I-10 on the surface streets faster than that, without risking our lives.

We’re now in the HOV lane, moving along at this breakneck speed — which is far faster than anyone in the normal commute lanes is going.

Next we come across a feckless semi driver. This poor guy, a big muscular-looking blond dude (very scenic) is pulling a medium-sized trailer whose contents, alas, were not what we could call “secured.” A heavy workman’s wheelbarrow had fallen off his load, crashed into the middle of the freeway, and scattered God only knows how many cinderblocks across four or five lanes of traffic. The cinderblocks shattered into tire-puncturing, fender-denting chunks. Naturally, even the crazies were picking their way slowly through the mess. He had pulled off and stopped in the HOV lane, bringing an abrupt stop to any progress there, and was standing in the road looking stressed and talking into a cell phone.

Can you imagine the conversation?

“Yes, boss.”
“All over the 51, boss.”
“Secured? Well, sure I secured the load.”
“Boss. I don’t know what happened. Must have been Jose’s fault.”

Finally moving on, we managed to get onto the I-10 (transit through the spaghetti involves maneuvering not one, not two, not three, but four lanes that disappear within a few hundred feet…get left (no ya don’t, damn ya! HOOOONK!), get left again (die, you bastard!), get left again (I can’t believe I left my .45 at home this morning), and get left again (outa my way, ya crazy fool!).

On the 10, traffic was bumper-to-bumper all the way to Casa Grande, which is effing halfway to Tucson. Traffic westbound into the city was almost stopped, just barely crawling along, from Chandler all the way into the city — and we didn’t see any westbound accidents.

Godlmighty. Imagine having to do that every fuckin’ day of your life, twice a day morning and night. Ugh, ugh, ugh!!!!!!!

Traffic remained very heavy once we got past the bedroom suburbs — not bumper to bumper, but so thick there was no way you could leave enough space ahead of you to stop safely in an emergency. At that point the speed limit jumps to 75 miles an hour. With not enough room to stop safely at 65 mph or even at 55 mph, it’s one long suicide corridor.

Using SDXB’s yapping GPS — those things annoy me so much! — we were directed to an exit different from the one I would normally take. This carried us around the backside of Marana, a farming town just west of Tucson. I’d never taken this route, but we were delighted to find it led us straight through the middle of the Saguaro National Park! Well, naturally, we had to stop in there…

Saguaro National Park

This is a forest of giant saguaro cacti, which grow at specific elevations only in the Sonoran desert. Some years ago I wrote a story for Family Exchange about this attraction. If a gentle breeze is blowing when you’re standing next to one of these amazing plants, you can hear the wind whistling through the spines.

The saguaros were in bloom, mirabilis. They bloom briefly in the spring or early summer, when they feed bats and birds and insects and, once turned to fruit, used to help feed people, too.

Lots of other things were blossoming. Prickly pear, in particular: in gay profusion.

It seems as though most flowers in the low desert are yellow. The Sonoran Desert is the richest bee habitat in the world…and interestingly, bees are especially drawn to the color yellow. They dearly love yellow flowers. 

It really was very lovely in the park. I wish we’d selected that as our destination, because the place is full of hiking trails taking you to amazing scenic vistas through a great forest of strange giants. And you know…it’s quiet there. Very, very quiet.

No planes roar overhead. No sirens pierce your hearing. No damned helicopters buzz you and peer down at you. No dogs bark. No cars roar. No damned train honks and bonks its way up the tracks. Just birdsong and the whisper of the wind in your ears.

Please, God. Let me move to Yarnell.

Or to Picture Rock, Arizona. This seems to be an unincorporated worker’s camp out in the middle of freaking nowhere, probably for farm and national park workers. A whole bunch of trailers and shacks squat on the desert, far enough from the 10 and from Marana that you can’t hear the racket, enough out in the desert to make you feel like you’ve found a hive of desert rats. At night, that place would be so dark you could even see the stars.

Movin’ on…

Arizona Sonora Desert Museum

This place, a great local favorite and still a center of research in geology and biology, has become more of a tourist trap than it used to be. It hasn’t changed significantly since I last visited,  15 or 20 years ago.

By the time we got there, the heat must have been pushing 100 degrees. SDXB, being a Michigander, doesn’t do well at all in the heat. He was beginning to get unhappy.

We took refuge in the shade of a tourist ramada to consume the lunch he’d brought: ham sandwiches, potato chips, and snacks like cinnamon-sugared almonds and Cracker Jacks and sunflower seeds. All of them highly salted: if you weren’t already thirsty in the hot, dry air, you’d be parched by the time you finished that stuff. 😀

Even though it was hot and mid-week, we still shared the space with kids on school excursions, their fried and cranky teachers, and a number of misbegotten tourists.  Better than when the place is over-run, but…oh well. At one point we heard two men and two women, all middle-aged imports to Arizona, going on and on in the single stupidest conversation I’ve ever heard in my life, on the subject of how you must kill every rattlesnake and every black widow you see.

The more I get to know people, the better I like my dog…

Among a variety of educational exhibits aimed at the second-grade level, the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum has some first-rate botanical gardens and a few animal exhibits that, not having been visibly updated in decades, now seem cramped and out of date. There was, for example, a kind of zoo enclosure that held a lonely black bear, the poor beast evidently bored stupid.

And a captive blue heron, also apparently alone, trapped in a wire cage. The fake rocks and fake ponds, while awe-inspiring and attractive when we were younger things, no longer seem either humane or convincing here in the 21st century.  Strange: I used to think this place was so neat and so top-of-the-line. Now, not so much. As a botanical garden it’s good. As a zoo…maybe it’s time for them to get out of that business.

It still has its spectacular vistas, although those are inexorably being encroached upon by development: what appears to be a sprawling water treatment plant, the tacky structures, the handsome trailers.

Pave paradise, put up a parkin’ lot… Even an area like Southern Arizona, which tends to house people of a more enlightened turn of mind — it’s dominated economically and influenced culturally by the University of Arizona — can’t resist the devastation wreaked by simple population growth. The more people, the more mess.

Once there were green fields, / Touched by the sun…

On the Road Again…

The moreness of the people was very much in evidence when we got back on the 10 to head to lovely Phoenix. Now it was pushing rush hour (which starts at 3:00 p.m. in these parts), and again the road was just mobbed, even more crowded Phoenix-bound at 75 mph.

We began to see the antics of the road warriors as comic. Delirious with heat, maybe?

At one point a guy in an old white truck with an equally run-down old white trailer charged up behind a big, later model pick-up, climbed up the tailpipe, then swerved right into the adjacent lane, passed the pickup (which was going the limit), and swerved back in front of it with maybe three feet to spare.

So it went, gathering drama as we approached town. Through the ugly sprawl of the East Valley, along the border between Third-World South Phoenix and sparkly gentrified downtown Phoenix, around the bend and up toward the ‘hood. Another guy in a pick-up swerves around irrationally. SDXB speculates: Must be on the phone. As we pass him, I glance over and see…yup! He’s yakkin on the phone at 65 mph.

We get off on the surface streets, which are no less crazy. At the parking lot of one of our favorite Mexican restaurants, some guy is trying to get out to turn right onto Conduit of Blight Blvd. But an idiot on Conduit of Blight has decided he must go into the parking lot, and so he has headed in and stopped his car, nose to nose up against the guy who’s trying to get out. Both are blocked, and neither will give way.

The red light changes, thank goodness, before the bullets begin to fly.

So it was good to scurry back into the Funny Farm and shut the door behind us.

In recent months, I’ve felt myself growing more and more reclusive. I hardly go out at all anymore. I don’t go shopping. I don’t go to events. I go only to those places and activities to which I’m already committed or that I can’t escape — like grocery shopping or the dentist. It has occurred to me that something must be wrong with me: maybe it’s a function of age. Early Alzheimer’s? Or a mental problem. Nascent agoraphobia? I used to love to drive around, even in city traffic. Now the very thought gives me a flinch reflex.

Am I losing my marbles?

But no. I don’t think so.

You would have to be crazy to want to go out and do battle with those teeming, rabid, sweaty mobs. To risk your safety on roads best described as homicidal. To rub shoulders with people who need only open their mouths to demonstrate how far an IQ score can fall and still leave its holder ambulatory.

No wonder I don’t want to go out. No wonder I’d rather stay in my house and in my yard and in my pool than engage this Brave New World.

I want the 20th century back…

Mac-Cranking…Future Tense

by

So it seems to have worked, sort of: The scheme to copy all the MacBook’s data files over to DropBox is finally in place. It took half my lifetime, but there it is. All the system’s applications (and all the data files but two) are backed up on an external hard drive.

It took half my lifetime to accomplish this. And the system seems to be running slow…possibly because it’s still backing stuff up to DB. Notifications from DB keep popping up to the effect that this or that “shared file” just got stored.  But far as I can tell by looking at the DB file structure, everything seems to be up there and online.

In an hour or so, an independent Mac tech is supposed to show up at the door. When I proposed to schlep both computers to them, they counter-proposed to send their man here. Yay! And believe it or not, having him come here rather than me making two separate trips to Scottsdale to get each of two systems updated will save a few dollars. I think I’m in love with this outfit… <3

The new external drives I bought at Costco won’t run on the operating system presently installed in the two machines. So I’ll have to wait till MacDude gets here to plug those in and start them making extra Time Machine backups. Far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.

Seriously: my plan is to back up to a different drive each week, so that at any given time should I get a ransomware attack, the files I really care about will have been backed up before the hackers could break in. If you’re just continuously letting Time Machine back up, obviously whatever is going into TM is also going to be affected by the ransomware code. Whereas if you have, say two (or even three) hard disks moving in rotation, at least one of those disks will be free of malicious code at the time you discover the code’s presence on your computer.

We’re also told that the latest versions of OS X offer a degree of protection against the current ransomware programs.

The OSX upgrade should allow me to install a cool little program called iBooks Author, which allows you to format e-books — even nonfiction books with graphics! — for sale through Apple (iTunes). This is a relatively small market. But since I’m not exactly getting rich on Google, I don’t care: I now regard the e-book publishing as more akin to a hobby than a business. And if it’s a hobby, creating an iBook looks like fun.

It also would make it possible to create attractive e-books for clients. If we’d had this option while Pete (the Mongolian Bank Magnate) was living, we could have made his book available in electronic format for all his friends, with all his photos intact and in full glowing color. Unless you decide to use an offset printer, you really can’t do a print-on-demand book with color images. He was disappointed about that, and I felt bad that we couldn’t satisfy his wishes.

He did, of course, want hard copy. But if we’d been able to produce a really attractive e-book readable on a tablet (as opposed to a clunky Kindle), he might have been satisfied with that.

So…it’s another option.

I’m also going to install Pages. This, I think, would be worth learning. Pages will convert a file to ePub, which is good. It will do for bookoids with very simple format: no graphics, just long toilet-paper rolls of gray space. That, of course, defines a work of fiction.

Additionally, Pages supposedly will now talk to Word pretty efficiently. Yesterday I came across a claim that you can do the same kinds of edits in Pages as you can in Word’s “Track Changes” function, and convert the whole thing over to Word.

Now, I’ll believe that when I see it. BUT…if it will convert and hang onto comments, and if it will bring a Word document into pages so I can read and edit it, then working back and forth between the two programs might be easier than it sounds.

I no longer edit copy in “Track Changes.” Instead, we’ve been using “Compare Documents,” which is less unstable than “Track Changes.” Instead of making edits that are visible onscreen in real time, open the file you’re going to edit and save to disk under a new name. Then simply make the changes you desire, as though it were your document, your golden words you were polishing. When done, run “Compare Documents” on the original, unedited document to generate a second file that shows everything you did as tracked changes. Save to disk quickly, before the damn thing corrupts and crashes your system… 😉

So the question is, would a document that had been edited and polished in Pages, then converted to Word, allow you to do that? I don’t see any reason that it wouldn’t. The only question is whether comments would come across intact.

If they do, then the whole endless headache of having to work in Wyrd would be resolved (assuming Pages isn’t weird, too…). And it would moot the issue of being forced, by way of upgrading my out-of-date Word program, to rent Word and put my clients’ proprietary work in the Cloud.

I do not want to do either of those. If there’s a way I can make Pages generate an edited Word file, it would keep me in business for another couple of years and spare me a great deal of aggravation.

Next: to decide whether to buy a new Mac.

The business has done exceptionally well so far this year. In fact, I could afford to buy a pricey new MacBook. And I probably should, because the one I’m working on right now has about reached the end of its life.

However, I’m put off by two things:

• Reviews of the new MacBooks have not been what you’d call stellar. The absence of USB ports: not good. No, I do not want a dongle hanging off the damn thing. I do most of my work sitting in a big leather chair that does not hurt by back, with my feet on an ottoman to further forestall back pain. Some doodad flopping around my lap is not gonna make me happy.

• And the price. When I bought the two machines I have now, I had a good job with a good income. I could afford to spend stupid amounts of money on a cult computer.

Now I do not have a decent income. It’s very hard to justify spending upwards of $1500 when I could by a PC that does the same thing for a fraction of the price.

On the other hand, there’s…Microsoft. God help us. One of Funny’s readers reports that the new Windows 10 shuts down and reboots at its convenience — interrupting you in the middle of whatever you happen to be doing. That would make me screaming batsh!t CRAZY.

Not that the Mac doesn’t render me batsh!t with some regularity.

This is not gonna work…

by

This is SO not gonna work…

Among several little strategies under way just now is a scheme to transfer all the data files on the MacBook’s hard disk to DropBox, which I’ve enhanced with a $100 payment to DB’s proprietors. Copy…paste…copy…paste…

Sounds pretty simple, eh?

Right. But it’s a computer. So as we know nothing is simple. For reasons incomprehensible, some folders will not copy over. They eliciit a “-46” error message. The fix? To open the folder and transfer each file, one at a time.

But some of the 32 folders are going over without protest, so I take my chances and copy three or four at a time. Usually this takes 10 minutes or so. Sometimes less.

Arrived nearly at the end of the long, eye-glazing task (some of the folders contain hundreds and even thousands of items, whatever TF an “item” is), I grabbed the last four.

Mistake. This transfer proposed to copy 47,448 “items,” requiring two hours for the job. Shit. And of course it’ll take just one “-46” error to bring the whole shebang to a stop. And that will mean deconstructing each of the four folders and transferring each of each folder’s myriad files over to DB, one at a time.

Progress is magnificently slow.

Tomorrow morning a Mac tech is supposed to come over and help upgrade the operating systems in my so-called “vintage” machines. No joke: Apple’s post-Jobian planned obsolescence technique involves dubbing some computers “vintage” and some older ones “obsolete.” If your computer falls into the latter category, the bastards will not repair it or work on it at all!

So much for Apple’s grand customer service, eh?

So pretty soon I need to decide whether to switch back to the PC and put up with the arrogance that is Microsoft or to stay with Apple’s brand of arrogance.

Anyway, with all data, programs included, backed up to external hard drives with Time Machine and working files on Dropbox, these computers can crash and be damned. Nothing will be lost.

Except…for my time.

§

Amazon seems to have surprising little that’s worth watching among its marvelous video offerings. Right now I’m turning off a perfectly awful space opera called The Expanse. Bleak, violent, grim, and depressing.

That this fine entertainment is regarded as “entertainment” at all, I suppose, reflects the mood of the country.

I hate this kind of drivel. And that undoubtedly explains why my own golden words will never combine to create video-worthy content. My stuff is bleak, that’s so: bleak defines my view of humanity. But violent…not so much. Violence just doesn’t amuse me. I can’t stand it in movies and TV, and I can’t bring myself to write it.

Something must be missing in my character, hm?

0h UGH! We’re still told it will be “about an hour” before this copy/paste project ends. If it ends.

I give up. I’m going to bed…

WTF? High-test cheap wine?

by

Crawled out of the sack about 8 p.m., having fallen face-first onto the bed after the mid-day feast. WTF? A couple of glasses of wine seem have rendered me shit-faced drunk!

The crazy thing is, it doesn’t appear that I drank that much of it. Pondering a near-hangover, I stumbled into the kitchen and pulled the remains of the bottle out of the fridge. It’s still half-full…meaning it’s half empty. BUT…I poured a substantial amount of it into the food.

At Costco this afternoon, I spotted a package of wild scallops. Mmmmmmm!!! Scallops!!!!!!

Naturally, one could not walk past these without having them jump into the shopping cart. And naturally, one could not cook them without slathering them in white wine. So I bought a bottle of Dry Creek Sauvignon blanc, about ten bucks.

Sautéed the little fishies in butter, garlic and herbs. Tossed in some chopped tomato. Then poured in a lot more wine than I probably should’ve: the result was wetter than I like. But good. Very, very good, served over pasta. If memory serves, I had all of two glasses of the wine.

I’ve consumed half a bottle of wine before — as in drinking it, not as in pouring it into the food and boiling off the alcohol. A half-bottle of wine is not good for me, but it doesn’t make my clothes fall off.

So I do not understand why I would get blotzed on a couple glasses of not-very-fancy wine.

Prosit!

Creepy Paws…

by

…or is that “pause”? No: decidedly paws.

Wherein, after staying up half the night doing battle with the damn computer, I decided to excuse myself from choir this morning (it was after 9 a.m. before I re-established contact with the earth — the dogs hadn’t been fed, I hadn’t been fed, I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee, and I most surely had not bathed, painted, and combed myself). So that indeed did create a pause, about a morning’s worth.

During this moment or three of relative quiet, I decided to clean off the garage cabinet tops, which have been piled high with clutter, so that I could stack the leftover carpet tack strips up there and get them out of my way. In the course of that chore, I happened to notice some bird dew had dropped on the car’s hood, so went off and soaked a paper towel by way of cleaning it off.

The hood clean, I start to walk around the car wiping off other specks and smudges. And at the back end of the car, what should I find but big, greasy black pawprints all over the white paint on the car’s back gate. Obviously, my hands get dirty now and again…but with garden dirt, not with black grime. And the handprints are bigger than my mine, by quite a bit. Pretty clearly someone has tried to figure out how to break into the back lift gate.

You can manually open a Venza’s lift gate. But it’s a real PITA. You have to know exactly where the button is to open the thing (it’s a button, not a latch-like thing), and you have to push it just right. And of course the car has to be unlocked, which it was not.

So I wipe that mess off and proceed on around the car, where I find still more paw-prints around the driver’s-side passenger door.

He must have seen the satchel that holds the Scottsdale Bidness Association stuff — a basket for our weekly drawing and assorted such junk. I’d put it in the back of the car but then ended up not going to the east side last Thursday. It was hidden in a crate under a blanket, but I had to take it out so as to load up the crate with Costco junk, and I’d forgotten to put it back in its secret place. So he probably thought that thing was a woman’s purse.

Charming.

If that’s the case, then the prowler visited either in the Walmart shopping center or the church parking lot. Since WM has a couple of armed security guards prowling around, it’s likely the perp visited the church. People’s cars have been broken into there…which makes sense. If you were looking for a car to rip off, wouldn’t you select one in an affluent church’s parking lot rather than at a Walmart in a low-income area? 😀

Image: DepositPhoto, © domnitsky.yar