Hallelujah! The dentist announced that (in his august opinion) I do NOT need the two (2!!!) new crowns I expected to have to pay for.
It’s a freaking miracle. I went in there braced to be told I need at least one root canal and crown, or (I figured) two.
But no. He thinks the attention-getting phenomena (biting down on a seed or a piece of crunchy salt will lift you right out of your chair!) are caused by my endless jaw-clenching. He says I need to remember to wear the mouth guard at night, and I should probably use it any time I’m working with a keyboard.
Yeah. He reports that keyboarding is one of the activities most directly related to bruxism.
Are you surprised? 😀
Anyway, that’s two grand that is not about to leap out of my pocket and into Dr. D’s.
By the way, if you grind or clench, I learned something I hadn’t heard before: you can ease the night-time bruxing — when you grid or clench in your sleep — by applying warm packs to the sides of your jaw (where the joint is, in front of the ear) and then just sort of gently stretching the muscles by opening and closing and by moving the jaw back and forth. The dental wonder-technician said this helps more than you would expect.
I said I thought a glass of wine would do the trick. She laughed and said, “That, too!”
Stupidly busy all day long on stupid little busy-work chores. Meanwhile, the sky has clabbered up and it’s starting to pour rain again. And mean-meanwhile, in about 20 minutes I have to schlep to the dentist’s office.
Yay. I can hardly wait. Two teeth appear to be cracked. That’s two root canals, two crowns, two thousand dollah. Happy day.
Have tried to gut it out as long as I could, because sometimes these little aches and pains pass. But it hurts so much to chew on that side I can hardly eat.
Which…uhm…could be a GOOD thing. 😀
The monthly car payment of almost $400 a month has me so broke I can’t afford to buy decent food, so am subsisting mostly on pasta, bread, and beans, unless I can find a smokin’ deal on some meat.
Which happened the other day: stumbled into the Safeway right after they’d put the “Get RID of It” meat out and nailed two beautiful steaks, each of which provides enough for three of my meals: meat for six dinners for the price of two steaks. On sale: 30% off the already marked-down price. w00t!
At any rate, the Po’Folks diet tends to make one balloon up like a blimp. Of course on lots of starch, I’m madly gaining weight. Four and a half more years of this, and I’ll have a roaring case of diabetes.
Tried the vinegar and baking soda technique on the bathtub drain, along with vigorous plunging (after sealing up the overflow drain and the sink drain). That not only didn’t help, it seems to have made things worse.
Found a guy in town who says he can unclog a bathtub drain for $59. He has endless RAVE reviews on Yelp and almost no negative reviews. We shall see if he can do what he says he can do. He’ll come over tomorrow ayem.
Called WonderAccountant’s plumber but he hasn’t called me back. This situation is starting to look grave, so decided to accelerate the workman waltz a bit.
Finished the last of over a dozen articles for a sociology book late last night. As Tina was sending me her edits and I was sending her mine, what should come in but another Chinese math paper.
Piece of cake: got through that this morning, though haven’t had time for a second read-through. Whenever I get back from the dentist and dry the rain off my self. I guess.
Cooked up some dog food. Very, very tired of scrubbing up. Cooking and grinding up chicken is a messy, greasy job that makes a greasy mess of your counter top and a big pan and everything you touch. So you end up scrubbing and scrubbing and then scouring a sticky pan.
Revamped the Copyeditor’s Desk’s billing method, changing from per-page to per-word. This will eliminate some headaches and regularize our charges in a way that makes sense. PITA: in addition to coming up with a new rate sheet, I had to update the website, too.
Haven’t cleaned the house in over a week, so the floors are festooned with dog dunes. So had to sweep up all that.
The heated throw that I use to keep me and the dogs warm at night seems to be out of sorts. Last night I’m laying there and I feel these little {ping}s on my feet. Like static shocks from a doorknob, only milder. I think it’s old-lady tingling, though it doesn’t feel like tingling. Eventually I realize the dogs have moved away from that part of the throw. I unplug it. And the {ping}s stop. Hmmm…
So the electric throw is off the bed. An extra blanket is on the bed. And two heating pads are in position, to be turned on just before sack-time so as to warm up the sheets and a nightshirt.
Oh, ugh! How can I say how much I don’t want to go out in this WEATHER????? You think Seattle and DC drivers go crazy in snow? You ain’t seen nuttin’ till you’ve seen a homicidal Arizona cowboy driver in the rain. Water falling out of the sky! They just do not know what on earth to make of it. The tourists, who swarm the roads (to the cowboys’ chronic annoyance) at this time of year, are terrified because the cowboys are running amok, so the frightened, confused tourists all slow down, cringing their way down the road to the ever more extravagant rage of the locals.
After the dentist (assuming I survive), I’ve GOT to go by a grocery store. It’ll be after 5:00 before I get back…and that’s if I’m lucky and don’t get stuck in a traffic jam or hit by a hydroplaning fellow motorist myself. Realistically, the ETA is closer to 6:00 p.m. Oh damn oh hell.
Welp: time to go. The sky just let loose: it’s pouring. Naturally. Oh well. My car will get washed, anyway…
Friends over for dinner on Thursday… That turned into something strange. First off, the meat I bought at Costco was SPOILED, something I discovered about an hour before folks were supposed to show up. Fortunately, I’d bought another couple of smaller packages at Safeway, and that product was fine. And equally fortunately, my son came to the party, and he kindly took over the grilling of the burgers. Otherwise I probably would’ve been undone.
Since Thursday is a workday for him, he brought Charley the Golden Retriever over to my house at the lunch hour, so he could come straight here from the office.
Charley, Cassie the Corgi, and Ruby the (former) Corgi Pup get along swimmingly. There’s never been any problem with these pals.
Now people start to show up for dinner, and of course there’s a great deal of Dog Joy elicited by the arrival of several colorful new humans.
Then my friend Connie arrives…with her dog in tow. This, in theory, should be good. Silver the Weimeraner has been here before and she gets along with the corgis about the same way the retriever gets along with the corgis: no problem.
So this all goes along pretty well…until…
About the time the five of us sit down for dinner,all four dogs start to bark…nonstop. In chorus. Nothing we do interrupts this. I put Cassie in the back room, where her beloved nest resides — this usually is a sure-fire bark-stopper. Not so much, this time. My son puts Charley in the back yard, where he continues to bark frantically. Connie eventually puts Silver in her Jeep, but that doesn’t help because Charley, Cassie, and Ruby keep up the din.
The barkfest is so so loud and so uninterrupted that literally we cannot hold a conversation at the dinner table — because we can’t hear each other talking. NOTHING discourages our doggy friends from holding forth.
I do not know what set off this frenzy…but it pretty much ruined the dinner party.
Oh well.
Saturday I went with five friends down to the State Capitol, there to join the Phoenix sister march to the Women’s March on Washington.
It was awesome!An incredible twenty thousand people showed up! I’ve never seen so many people in one place in my life.
And it was cold. It had rained all day Friday and at 1 in the morning, it was just pouring rain. We got there at nine. A brisk, chilly breeze was blowing, but the clouds were breaking up, so as long as you stood in the sun, it wasn’t too bad. Except we were told to gather on the grassy lawn in front of the Capitol building. Well…that had turned into a swamp. A very COLD swamp. Most people were wearing tennies or fabric hiking boots, and you can be sure their feet got good and wet. I had on a pair of Sanitas, which have inch-thick rubber platform soles. These kept my feet out of the water, but by the time I got home, they were coated in mud all the way up to where the leather last is stitched on.
But as the day went on, the clouds blew away and the morning turned very pleasant.
It was a positive event, very fun and supportive, with many vows to keep on fighting the evil impulses that seem to be overtaking our body politick. We shall see about that. But meanwhile, those women can make a damn hilarious sign. The signs were beyond great.
I don’t have a cell phone and didn’t carry a camera (because I didn’t want to carry a purse) — this being Arizona, the home of the hard-line right wing, I expected trouble and wanted to travel as light as possible. So the upshot of that is I have to rely on friends’ images posted on Facebook. 🙂
This morning was “Switch Sunday,” the one day a month the volunteer choir sings for the 9 a.m. service…meaning we have to show up at 8 a.m. Argh! Five-thirty is just too early to get up on a Sunday morning!!! However… This morning’s dawn was not to be missed:
Glorioski!
Friday, after taking the rotten meat back to Costco, I spent the entire rainy day working on academic copy. And all of Saturday afternoon. And after all of this Sunday afternoon. It’s almost bed-time, and I finally sent the second-to-last of a dozen anthology articles back to the client. {gasp!}
And what should pop up on the e-mail server but…lo! Another assignment from one of the Chinese mathematicians!
I haven’t even looked at the material sent by candidate assistant editors, which has been sitting there for days, weeks, god only knows how long.
Tomorrow. I am beat. I am off to do the ironing and then go to bed.
Well…so here we are: the Black guy is out of the White House and the Orange guy is in. Hevvin help us.
Listening to his brief, to-the-point inaugural address, it was hard to escape the thought…
What if he’s right?
Just now I’m listening to PBS News streaming off the Web, where a commentator is going on about “doom and gloom” in Trump’s speech, and how the beast was “not healing wounds.”
But…I didn’t hear doom and gloom in what he said. I heard “we’re gonna fix this.”
If he hadn’t lied until he was blue in the face..
If he hadn’t crassly, deliberately appealed to the very worst in the American psyche…
If he weren’t a groper of women…
If he had not courted and had not been courted by (possibly to the point of treason) a foreign power that has been our enemy for decades…
If there were any inkling of a reason to believe he understands as much about running a country as he does about running a TV reality show…
I could almost get on board with the bastard. I could almost be persuaded that yeah, he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.
Almost.
One of the things that’s fed that feeling is the jaw-dropping obtuseness evinced by thinkers and commentators of my own political persuasion. Dayum! What part of a few international billionaires are collecting most of the money in the world while Americans can’t get a decent job don’t you understand?
Not just a few “deplorables,” folks. But ALL OF US.
Or at least a very significant portion of us.
This afternoon NPR ran (twice!) a piece whose reporter dutifully went out and interviewed some Trumpish WT: high-school graduates working in one of the country’s few remaining steel mills. The hellish difficulty of the work was described in loving detail. The workers’ enthusiasm for just having a job was described, much as the behavior of some exotic beetle might be detailed. Then the reporter asks one woman, “Is the pay good?”
“For these parts, it’s very good,” she says.
Amazed (being a clear and present New Yorker), our intrepid reporter follows up with “Can you afford to buy a car or live in a house?”
“Well, no,” she says (subtext: Are you stupid?) “No, you couldn’t buy a house and you couldn’t afford to buy a car on this salary.”
She and her partner are getting by because they’re both laboring full time. Maybe one person could live on the pay. But two surely can’t. Still…it’s very good pay and she feels lucky to have a job at all.
Okay. We all know that people with GEDs and high-school diplomas can’t get work, and we can hear, from the reporters’ and commentators’ tone that we should believe the people who voted for Trump are the ignored and ignorant white underclass discommoded by globalization.
But…what about the rest of us? Do you know how many jobs formerly held by college graduates and even graduates of professional schools are being offshored? Lawyers’ jobs. Accountants’ jobs. Graphic designers’ jobs. Editors’ jobs. Publishers’ jobs. Carpenters’ jobs. Bankers’ jobs. Architects’ jobs. IT jobs. Engineering jobs. News reporting. Stock analysis. Even medical services.
When my associate editor Tina and I were still working at the Great Desert University, our office provided membership in a statewide association of small publishers. After we were laid off, The Copyeditor’s Desk maintained our membership until the trade organization finally collapsed.
We were hustling to make the business work. Her theory was that if we kept our rates low, we would get more business and so would make up in volume the amount that we might have made with better-paying work. So we were selling ourselves for peanuts.
One evening we were at a shindig put on by this group. Along comes an Indian guy. He has a printing company in Mumbai. The guy is thriving and is, at that time, maneuvering to get visas and green cards to move his family permanently into the United States, where he wishes to take up residence in a Scottsdale mansion.
He starts to talk fairly loosely. And without realizing that he’s telling me this, he reveals that he can take a book from the manuscript stage through copyediting, page design, cover design, typesetting, proofreading, indexing, and printing for less than Tina and I can copyedit it — at our bargain-basement rates!
I simply couldn’t effing believe it. But it was true. This guy was stealing our business. As he circulated around the room, he was telling all our potential clients that he could take their golden words to the finished product for less than a U.S. supplier could do one stage of the product at starvation wages.
Well, since then I’ve raised our rates. I figure if we can’t get much work, we’d better get paid as much as we can for the little work we do get. And we now target a different clientele: businesses and academics who need to publish to make money, not just because they dream of becoming Writers. Effectively, we offer a Cadillac editing service. We’re good, and we get paid for being good.
Why, we even speak English (can you imagine?). And French. And Russian. And Italian. Even a bit of Spanish. And Latin, of course.
The point is, I’m dead sure we are not alone. Large numbers of Americans with expensive college degrees who used to hold down good jobs that fit their education and experience no longer can earn a living wage. Many of us are lucky to be working at all. And IMHO, it’s fvckin’ no wonder people voted for Trump. A lot of people think it’s time for a change — and they need that change if they’re going to survive at all.
Whether Trump can make change happen remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it. The first major crisis that hits — whether it’s a stock market crash or another plane taking down another landmark building or a gas attack exterminating half a city — will show how little he knows about running a country. The extreme right-wing organization behind him, the hideous, decayed remains of the Republican Party, will take over the instant he falters. And like the Taliban, those people mean no good at all for anyone who is not one of them.
Scary times. Scary times made even scarier by the fact that the people who could have and should have done something about it still don’t seem to get the picture.
Image: Zach Rudisin. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20727816
So the air-conditioning company sent over a fine young gentleman, the quality of whom has not been seen in these parts in years. About 20 years ago, SDXB and I had the luck to snag an AC guy who combined the rare qualities of honesty and competence with the even rarer quality of a desire to do good work. This new gent is one of those. Who’d have thunk there were any left in the world?
Before long AC-Dude got the heat pump to working again. He replaced a defunct part — covered on the Goodman 10-year warranty — and he discovered the refrigerant was low. He thinks there’s a pinhole leak that’s allowing the stuff to leak out. He refilled it but would like to keep an eye on that. Apparently this is something that can add up to some big bucks in repair bills… Charming.
Well, it was a cheap unit to begin with…the main reason I got it was Goodman’s 10-year warranty, which saved about $280 on this trip. But obviously it will crap out soon after the warranty expires — DOE estimates 15 to 20 years for a central AC unit, but another site, which I can’t retrieve just now, says it’s more like 13 years. These things being made in China, I’m inclined to believe the 13-year estimate.
While he was here, I asked him what he thought aboutthe ductless AC units we mentioned in an earlier post. Well…the kid’s eyes lit right up! He said he really likes them and that in a given room, they’re amazingly efficient. Then he went on to say his company is working for a guy who’s building a gigantic compound out in the wilds of Scottsdale, huger than huge and complete with a separate gymnasium to go with the tennis courts. He says the client is not having central AC put in at all(!!), but that he’s installing mini-split throughout the mansion.
He said the advantages are that they really will cool a room and that they run extremely quiet. The big disadvantage, he felt, is cost: you have to install a separate compressor outside for each of the things, and you have to run conduits from the compressor up the exterior wall, drill through the wall, and connect to the hanging unit on the inside. Some people don’t like the aesthetics on the outside of the house.
However, he thinks it makes a lot of sense to put one of the things in a room where you spend most of your time and then adjust the temperature accordingly for the central AC — or even turn it off, depending on the weather conditions.
The Department of Energy has anice article on the subject that essentially says much the same. DOE points out that one condenser can run as many as four mini-split units. The compressor can be as far as 50 feet from a unit. If that were the case, I could easily air condition and heat the family room/dining room/kitchen space with two units (would only one be needed???) and also run one into the living room. And I could air condition my office and my bedroom with another. That would leave only two rooms without AC. In fact, I could probably make a compressor on the bedroom end of the house cover both the office and the adjacent bedroom that serves as kitchen, freezer, and crafts storage, as well as my bedroom. That’s only three room units…
If that were the case, two compressors would air condition this house and leave only one room un-airconditioned: a room I never use anyway.
That is really an interesting idea. Even though it would cost more than a new Goodman (maybe not, given the reports we’re hearing on costs and given that AC units do not last 20 years, the way they used to), because you wouldn’t be using every unit all the time, you wouldn’t have to replace units for the entire structure at any one time.
What would you do with the existing ductwork? Grow a mushroom farm in it?
Duct vent covers, of course, can be closed. They’re not air-tight, though, so heat and cold would seep through them. I imagine if you really wanted to commit yourself, you could have a drywall guy come and fill in the holes.
What a beautiful, peaceful evening. Venus, a brilliant diamond, shone in a deep sapphire sky when the corgis and I set out to jog a mile-long course through the ’hood. The dimming sunset, still glowing orange, backlit tall palm, ash, and pine trees to the west.
Two houses between here and Richistan, very nice houses, are on the market. One is a fix-and-flip, acquired from a very aged man who probably was the original owner. The other has been upgraded a couple of times over the past decade and is significantly further from Conduit of Blight than the Funny Farm.
I consider, as I pass each house, whether if I had a sh!tload of money I would wish to buy one of these places. And the answer is no.
In each case, the house’s next-door neighbor has two or three large, deep-throated barking dogs that go berserk whenever anyone walks by on the side walk with their own dogs, their children, their friends, or their door-to-door fliers. Across the street from each house was at least one neighbor harboring large barking dogs.
Now of course, I have barking dogs, too. But when mine are yapping, they don’t act like they’re going to come through the window and grab you by the throat. Nor are they left outside in the yard at all hours of the day and the night — most of the time if they bark at a passer-by, it’s from the living room. They’re not guard dogs and they’re not intended as guard dogs.
A lot of people in this area have large, fierce dogs — more than one of them — because they perceive that the area is unsafe.
But is it?
True, the district just to the north of us, less than a mile away — really, just a few steps across a main drag from the northernmost homes in the ’hood — is notoriously crime-ridden, the territory of a notable meth gang. The district to the west of us, where aging apartments continue to deteriorate and an abandoned golf course has become a campground for homeless drug addicts, also has a high crime rate and an increasingly sketchy ambience.
But that’s the nature of the City of Phoenix: it’s a patchwork of enclaves. Anywhere you look, you’ll find upscale neighborhoods full of doctors and lawyers and business tycoons cheek-by-jowl with drug-infested slums. If you want to live in uninterrupted affluent homogeneity, you pretty much have to move to Scottsdale…which, because everybody knows its inhabitants have plenty of money and plenty of loot to steal, is as much a target of burglars and thieves as any other part of the Valley. Apparently we Phoenicians like it this way: we do nothing to change it.
So it is that our neighborhood, flanked by blight on two sides, is a hotbed of risk.
Well… I’ve taken to walking the dogs every evening after dark. Nary a resident is to be seen outside: they’re all parked in front of their televisions or their computers. You could break into a car, steal a tchotchki off a front porch, peer in a window without anyone ever noticing.
Never once have I seen a bum wandering through the night or a likely burglar slinking by. Except for the occasional coyote — which isn’t any more interested in confronting you than you are in confronting it — after dark there is nothing out there that looks like a threat. Not a burglar, not a bum, not biker, not even a kid in a hoodie.
During the daytime, you see an occasional derelict. Once in awhile you’ll see someone who’s obviously casing houses. But not often. Usually you can walk a mile or more through the ’hood without every seeing anyone but a few workmen and some wandering neighbors.
This is the very house we lived in!
That was not so 30 years ago, when my ex- and I lived in the then gentrifying Encanto neighborhood, a picturesque remnant of small-town Phoenix that, like the ’hood where the Funny Farm stands, was discovered all at once by a horde of young upwardly mobile urban adults. It quickly became known as “the lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto” — because it was within easy driving distance (even walking distance) of the downtown hospitals and law firms.
The Encanto area’s zip code had the highest per-capita drug use in the city, at the time. Despite the efforts of some developers to pave it over with a freeway, it survived a great deal of pressure to force the young would-be city-dwellers out to the suburbs. Today it’s one of the city’s bragging points.
Exactly the same thing is under way here: the ’hood is the New Encanto. But unlike Encanto, the ’hood is not overrun with derelicts and criminals. There are a lot of homeless mentally ill riding the buses and trains up and down Conduit of Blight Blvd., but not so many actually inside the neighborhood — local opinion to the contrary.
When we lived in Encanto, you couldn’t poke your nose outside the door without seeing a bum or two roaming up the street. One family, a block to the south of us, was baking cookies while watching television of an evening. Since everyone was in the house and they felt safety in numbers, it didn’t occur to them to bolt all the doors and windows. A bum watching from the alley noticed this and observed that the wife would come into the kitchen, stick a pan of cookies in the oven, and then go watch TV while they baked for 15 minutes. During one of those interludes, he just stepped into the kitchen, picked up her purse, and made off with it. 🙂
Not all these exploits were so funny. One of my neighbors was hacked to death by an ax murderer, having surprised the guy robbing her house when she came home from the beauty parlor. Another was studied by a man who knew a) where to find the only window in the house that was not alarmed and b) when her husband was out of town. He took the opportunity to spend an entire night beating and raping her.
We have never had anything like that happen here. We’ve had some close calls, but no real horrors. Yet.
But interestingly, few people in Encanto kept large, fierce dogs. I had a German shepherd that I’d inherited from a neighbor. The lady behind us had a doberman pinscher. Our babysitter, a street to the south of us, had a pair of airdales. One couple in our car-pool had a pretty ridiculous bloodhound. But otherwise, that was about it: I didn’t know anybody else who had big dogs.
Here, everybody and his little brother has a large, fierce dog with a threatening bark — or two, if possible. Cassie has been pounced twice by loose German shepherds. You can’t walk around the park without coming across someone with a big dog running loose — on Sunday mornings a bunch of locals bring about a dozen large dogs over there and let them run around, illegally, off the leash. Encanto Park was bum heaven, but you never saw a dog off the leash there. You didn’t see many dogs at all, come to think of it.
That says to me that people who live in this neighborhood are scared. The number of derelicts visible in these parts is a tiny fraction of the number of car-sleeping and window-peeping and yard-toileting natives who used to hang out in Encanto. Yet people apparently perceive a great deal more risk here than they did there.
Yes, we do have some incidents: the bum that jumped a wall to diddle with a couple of small girls being the most recent. And yeah, I did enjoy the Great Garage Invasion. But in the 13 years we lived in Encanto we had…
•The cat burglar on the roof •The Night of the Screaming (in which I chased off a rapist by hollering “fire” at the top of my lungs) •The burglar who was chased out of the house at 2 a.m. by our German shepherd •The ax murder •The night-long rapefest at the neighbor’s house •The guy who took up residence in a neighbor’s car and was pissed when he was thrown out so she could go to work •The guy who tried to push his way in through my front door even as not one but two German shepherds stared him down •The guy who chased one of the nannies in Palmcroft •The guy who followed me even as I was pushing a baby in a stroller (I dodged into a neighbors’ house) •The couple who used our side yard as their latrine
It kinda went on and on. On Mondays, the head secretary at my office (yes, Virginia, in those days admins were called “secretaries”) would ask me what new story I had for them…and I usually did have one.
We hardly ever have things like that happen here. We have a hell of a lot more dogs than we do bums and criminals. Heh…maybe one fact follows the other as the night the day?
I doubt it. I think people are just scared. Unduly scared.
It doesn’t do to be scared of the bogeyman, you know. You’re usually bigger than he is, and nine times out of ten you’re a hell of a lot smarter (your brain not being clouded by dope or booze). A dog is nice company, but it’s not real protection. A gun is reassuring until you consider the fact that you’re more likely to shoot yourself in the foot than to wing the burglar.
The best protection? Keeping your wits about you.
Venus over the Ocean: Brocken Inaglory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Venus_with_reflection.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5223759
