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Thanksgiving Weekend…only moderately lazy

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The young guys across the street, a bunch who personify the maxim that men never really shake off boyhood, are amusing themselves by riding around the neighborhood on the three-wheel motor-cart lash-ups they’ve found/built/customized. They are very funny, very silly, and highly amusing to watch. They have, bar none, the grandest time in all history with the things.

Old people never tire of watching young people be silly. 😀

We enjoyed a great deal of charming silliness last night, celebrating Thanksgiving dinner with my son’s friends’ families. They have children who attained a high pitch of excitement with lots of people and lots of food in the offing.

Our hosts have taken up residence in a new(ish) styrofoam-and-stucco tract north of Happy Valley Road, once regarded as halfway to Prescott but now just another suburb of Phoenix. The houses are tucked up into the low hills to the north of the city, which makes for a pleasant, deserty venue with easy access to hiking trails. The grade school their children attend offers Mandarin Chinese, which gives you a clue to the residents’ dominant social class. Upwardly mobile, we might guess. Homes are reasonably modest in design and lot size, very pleasant on the inside: all and all, a nice place to raise your kids.

If I were slightly more footloose, it’s an area I’d seriously consider moving to, by way of getting away from the blight and the noise. It’s certainly quieter and safer than the ’hood. On the other hand, I surely would not want to drive in and out on the freeway to go to choir. Twice a week! And since the choir forms the mainstay of my social life, I’m not inclined even to think twice about the possibility of moving to Whiteland. Can’t even imagine what I’d do with myself up there…

Prices are a lot higher, too. Think of it: $420,000 for this pleasant but nothing special house, elbow-to-elbow with the neighbors. Friends’ house is two stories, presumably (therefore) somewhat larger…but still: right on top of the neighbors, with the neighbors right on top of them.

Bum habitat or no, one thing you can say about an alley is that it keeps the neighbors behind you at arm’s length.

In my neighborhood, a comparable house (in square footage) would sell for about $350,000. Maybe $375,00. Over in Richistan (another half-mile from Conduit of Bight Blvd): $450,000 to $500,000, unless you were on a half-acre+ lot, in which case you’d be pushing $750,000.

Welp, speaking of Real Estate, I decided to spruce mine up. The wall on the east side of the lot, which faces a neighborhood street and takes the full blast of the morning-to-noonday sun, has been looking pretty decrepit. The beloved Bila the Bosnian Painter, having forgotten that I asked him (lo, these many years ago!) to paint that wall to match the house, was a bit blind-sided when I said, as he was finishing up, “But aren’t you gonna paint the wall?” So I think he diluted the paint he had left to spray it, sans base coat.

The result looked OK when it was fresh, but over the course of a year or two it deteriorated. It now looks amazingly bad.

westwall

The other day my son asked if someone had tagged the wall with graffiti.

The effect is compounded by the enthusiasm of cinderblock for soaking up water and dissolving in it… along the inside of the wall there’s a soaker hose, which keeps the cat’s-claw vines alive. The cat’s claw keeps my privacy alive.

The mortar has fallen out of the seam between the bottom and the second row of block, and what little paint Bila managed to spray on there has peeled off.

So today I scraped off the loose paint and filled the cracks with DAP. I’d planned to paint the wall, too, but what with the usual drive back and forth to the hardware store, the whole morning was soaked up by that chore. So I decided to put off the paint job, per se, til tomorrow.

repairjob

The fill job ain’t great, but it’s probably better than nothing. DAP will take latex paint. I had to stuff so much of the gunk in there, I expect it’ll take more than a couple of hours for it to dry enough to justify slopping paint over it.

Tomorrow. Paint tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the cat barrier along the top of the wall looks pretty…uhm…eccentric. Along most of it, fortunately, the cat’s claw is growing across to hide it. But there’s a section where there’s really no way to hide the madness.

It’s not going, though. In the absence of an HOA, I can fight Other Daughter’s cat collection any way I choose: and securing a double row of carpet tack strips across the top of the wall works quite nicely.

That doesn’t mean I especially want to FLAUNT the double row of carpet tack strips.

Interestingly, there’s a whole bunch of old, unused dripper heads along that sunbaked strip. I don’t know if water still goes to them — they’re plugged off. But if it doesn’t, surely Gerardo can easily string new hose along there. I’m thinking what’s needed is either some cat’s claw growing on the outside of the wall (the inside is paved with brick and houses a tin shed), or maybe a Lady Banks rose or a bougainvillea.

This boug grows at the south end of the wall, where it’s generously protected from frost by a fierce Texas ebony tree…

bougwestside

The photo does the boug injustice. It’s a spectacular plant that causes passers-by to pause and comment on it.

I’m thinking…how about another boug?

Directly on the street, a bougainvillea is likely to freeze in the wintertime.

On the other hand, we haven’t had a hard frost in several years now. And it’s unlikely that we ever will again. Global warming has come to Phoenix, and it appears to be here to stay. Once it’s well established, a boug is pretty hardy.

On the other other hand, of course, it will try to take over Southern Arizona. It’ll have to be trimmed back from the sidewalk, lest I risk lawsuits. (Bougainvillea thorns are akin to tiger’s claws.)

But. It could be worth the risk. Gerardo seems to take a certain perverse pleasure in cutting back bougainvillea. I believe he hates it. One of these plants — to say nothing of two of them — would cover that wall within two or three years, hiding the top of the Satan’s hideous (but very useful) tin shed and also disguising my hideous (but very useful) cat barriers.

And it does discourage the bums from using that strip of the yard as their night toilet.

Another reason to delay the paint job: I’m still not quite over yesterday evening’s nervous breakdown.

When M’hijito and I arrived at my house after last night’s chivaree — there to retrieve his dog, brought to keep my dogs company — we opened the front door to find two big puddles of dog barf, right inside the door.

STINKING puddles of dog barf.

The entire house from one end to the other stank of dog shit!

To understand why this is a concern — as in “HOLY sh!t” — you have to understand something about dogs.

A dog is like a goat: it will eat anything. Alas, though, a dog does not have a goat’s intestinal fortitude. Many of the bizarre items dogs eat are given to creating intestinal blockage, just on the far side of the pylorus. When this happens, the dog can die within a matter of a short few hours. It is a veterinary emergency. A very, very, very expensive veterinary emergency. Symptom number one: throwing up barf containing fecal matter.

Well, of course, I’m freaking out. My son, who understands little about dogs, is trying to keep me calm by assuring me that I’m neurotic and crazy. This is not helping.

Because Cassie and Ruby snack on raw carrots (a potential blockage-builder, come to think of it) and the puddles contained pieces of carrot, we knew the Barfer was not Charley. My son went off into the darkness with his dog, leaving me to deal with a house that smelled like a Tunisian toilet and a pair of dogs one of which may have been pounding on Death’s door.

Neither dog had a tight, distended, or obviously painful belly, and neither dog was behaving strangely. So I decided to take a chance, delay bankruptcy, and refrain from rushing them to the emergency veterinary. But as you can imagine, it was a stressful night which left me,  by the light of dawn, cranky, unhappy, and on edge.

The dogs are fine today.

And it eventually occurred to me why the puddles of barf were redolent of the parfum de dog sh!t. Ruby still occasionally indulges her puppy fondness for coprophagia. She probably scarfed down some little treats in the back yard.

Yes. This, in addition to the possibility of potentially terminal intestinal blockage, is another reason that dog barf can smell…uhm…a lot like a Tunisian toilet.

Oh well.

It being Black Friday, every moron and every fruitcake was out on the road this morning, charging around in hopes of saving a few bucks here and a few bucks there. Under the best of circumstances, they all get in front of me. But today, getting to the Home Depot and then later to the TruValue was a horror show. Never saw so many morons concentrated in one place in my life.

Lest you think I exaggerate, Phoenix was recently congratulated as the home of some of the worst driving in the country. We do not take an honor like this lightly. We are, however, disappointed to come in at eighth place. We will, in future, try harder…

Derailed Day

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Well, a LOT got done today. But none of it was anything planned. All the schemes on the schedule for this day were totally derailed.

All I wanted to do was paint the east wall. Yesterday I bought a gallon of good-quality paint at Dunn-Edwards, plus a roller designed for use on cinderblock.

Some years ago, Bila the Bosnian Painter (my favorite painter) covered the Funny Farm in the color I craved. He repaired and painted the trim. And all was well. Toward the end of the job, I reminded him that I wanted the wall facint the road along the east side painted to match the house. He’d…well…sorta forgotten about that and was running out of paint. So he diluted what remained and sprayed it valiantly upon the wall.

It looked OK. For a few months. But shortly it started to fade. A couple of strokes where he’d squirted it especially exuberantly with his sprayer retained the color, but mostly it looks like somebody tried to tag it with graffiti. Altogether lacking in panache. So: today was the day to get rid of that.

But.

I overslept. Didn’t get out of the sack until 7 a.m., about two hours late. Then, stupidly, I started the day by farting around on the Internet: reading the news (such as it is), answering the emails, screwing around on Facebook.

Facebook has got to be THE biggest timesuck ever invented by the mind of Man.

At some point, I stroll out in the garage, and out of curiosity decide to see whether the defective hatchback gate on the Venza has decided to work today.

It has not.

In fact, instead of JUST not working in the punch-a-button automatic mode, it now is unusable in the manual mode, too. If you open it manually and stick your head into the back end of the car, the damn thing closes on your neck.

Back to the Internet. Cruise around for quite some time before I find the symptoms described, not in any official way but only by other hapless Toyota owners.

(You may be sure I will NEVER buy another Toyota again. I probably never will buy another car again.) It’s either the struts (cost to repair: $3,000 to $4,000) or the lift motor (cost unspecified).

I do not, do not, do NOT ever want to deal with Bell Road Toyota again.

By now it’s around 10 a.m., so I call my  mechanic, Chuck. Reach his partner, Pete.

Can they work on the car on the extended warranty?

Not sure, sez he. Depends on who the warranty is written with. This is not specified in the effing crooked paperwork.

Call Camelback Toyota. Get the service manager there. I say I bought the car at Bell Road and never want to do business with them again. Like everyone who has ever heard of Bell Road Toyota, he laughs and says ,”Yeah, I hear ya!”

Bell Road’s reputation precedes it…. Too bad it didn’t precede into my precincts before I bought this car there.

He says that for the repair to be covered, I have to have bought “Platinum” coverage. This of course sounds like an excuse not to cover it. He agrees the struts cost three to four grand; if it’s the motor, says he, that’ll be around $2,500. I say I’m living on Social Security and can’t afford that, so if it’s not covered, then I have a “new” car from Toyota that will always be defective. I mention Funny about Money; I describe the number of readers who see it, by subscription, through Facebook, and through Twitter, and I suggest yet another report on the Venza interlude is not the best thing for Toyota’s good name.

He says, “WAIT, DON’T HANG UP! Give me the VIN and I can find out what coverage you bought.” I figure there’s a good chance I did shell out extra for this, because the SOB who tied up my entire afternoon high-pressuring into every extra charge Toyota could dream up probably added that on.

Camelback Toyota guy rummages through his computer and says it looks like I probably have the coverage. (I read this to mean “I’m going to talk my boss into covering this, if I can, on the grounds that it will support the company’s goodwill.”) We agree that I’ll bring the car in on Tuesday for them to figure out what’s wrong with it and decide whether they’ll do the job as warranty work or if they’ll try to give me another royal screwing. If the latter is the case, then the car will just go through the rest of its life without a functioning back hatchback door.

Fvck.

By now it’s around 11 a.m. I haven’t even had my customary pot of high-test coffee, to say nothing of anything to eat. I’m too effing mad to eat, though.

But the dog food is running low and I should’ve made a new batch yesterday so I decide to haul the bag of defrosted pork out of the fridge and cook up some more chow for the corgis.

I grab the baggie full of pork and…S-L-O-P-P-P!

Red, bloody juices squirt out of the Ziplock bag. A lake of red bloody juices spreads across the glass shelf occupied by said baggie. It cascades down the inside walls and floods the shelf below, and from there drips down the back of the fridge to puddle on the ledge behind the produce drawers and drizzle down into the bottom of the refrigerator, soaking the styrofoam thing behind the produce drawers.

What. A. Fvcking. MESS!

Most of the refrigerator now has to be taken apart and sanitized.

This chore occupies the better part of an hour. But — look on the bright side! — it does force me to collect and throw out a lot of unidentifiable rotten stuff.

That’s good.

I guess.

Now I get on with cooking the dog food. This is not a difficult job, but it’s messy. And just yesterday the kitchen counters were scrubbed clean and polished to a high glow. By the time I finish, of course they’re covered with grease. So I not only have two dirty pans to scour and the food processor bowl to wash and the giant mixing bowl to wash, I also have to clean and polish the tile. Again.

Residing in the blood-washed fridge, not yet spoiled, are the remains of a roast Costco chicken carcass. Royally tired of meals from this tasty but oversalted treat, I decide to cut off the meat, run it through the food processor, and add it to the dog food.

This almost doubles the amount of food today’s creation yields. But in the process of course I cut myself with an ultra-sharp kitchen knife. While I’m elbow-deep in meat. Cooked meat. But still. Meat.

I soldier on till the job is done. Then head back to the bathroom, un-bandage the other cut finger (which also has been bathing in bloody pork juice and chicken grease), grab the antiseptic wash the Mayo Clinic gave me, and scrub the bejayzus out of my hands. Apply new bandages to cut fingers. Pray (or whatEVER) for the best.

Clean the kitchen.

I still haven’t had breakfast.

Nor, BTW, have I performed my most recent self-appointed regime: the daily dog-hair cleanup.

Realizing that one could theorize that part or all of the old-lady vertigo I’ve been enjoying could be blamed on allergies and the resultant stuffy head that has plugged my ears to the point where I can barely effing HEAR, a week or so ago I threw out the 10-year-old pillows, replaced them with new uncomfortable pillows, washed everything on the bed and subjected it to mite-killing ironing from a Shark set at “blowtorch,” cleaned the floors until you could eat off them (safely!), and took it upon myself to run the dog-hair-catching bed throw through the dryer EVERY day and, also, EVERY day, to dust-mop the floor with a microfiber rag.

This has made a huge difference. As we scribble, I’m Benadryl-free and nose-squirt free, I can breathe, I can hear, and my head is not spinning anymore.

You would be ay-mazed at how much dog hair and dust settle on a tile floor in any given 24-hour period. Yesterday the floor was not only dust-mopped but vacuumed and wet-mopped. At around noon or 1 p.m. today, this is what came up…

doghairYuck. No wonder my head has been stuffed up. You can’t even see the skiff of dog hair in this image.

Fixed breakfast/lunch. Really didn’t have much in the house to eat. Did not feel like eating at all, much less scarfing down the usual mid-day feast. Microwaved two pieces of high-end “Sunday” bacon (reliably delicious) and fried up the rest of the frozen hash browns (reliably fattening). Consumed the desired swill of coffee.

Pal who’s a mortgage loan officer surfaced on the phone. He’s trying to get ahold of M’hijito. I and said Mortgage Pal are trying to move the kid to refinance the downtown house NOW GODDAMN IT BEFORE THE RATES GO ANY HIGHER.

The house has a 30/15 mortgage on it. We signed up for this instrument back in the day, before we realized the economy was skateboarding toward Hell and when we thought we were getting the place on the downtick, yea verily maybe at the bottom of the market. We figured M’hijito would stay here for a three to five years, until he got back on his feet; then we would sell the house, he would repay my grubstake, and he would have enough saved and in profit from the sale to go back to San Francisco, where he belongs.

Wrong.

Wrong.

And Wrong.

We still own the house. He still has his miserable job. He has no hope of ever being able to return to the City, where housing prices are so far out of reason that Donald Trump Himself couldn’t afford an apartment there, and he has despaired of ever getting another job worthy of the astronomically expensive elite college degree that he possesses.

It now looks like he will still be living in the house when that 15-year balloon comes due. And Mortgage Pal and I are dead certain that the crazy low interest rates will be long gone by then, and historically “normal” rates will be back.

Let me put it this way: when I bought my last house, my Realtor and I were beside ourselves with JOY when I wangled an 8.25% rate. We thought that was almost too good to be true. The ex- and I had paid rates as high as 13%, though 11% was more typical.

That’s t.y.p.i.c.a.l…

Getting the kid off the dime has been a bitch of a challenge. This afternoon in chatting, Mortgage Pal (who’s almost as venerable as I am) realized that 11% rates are outside the range of the next generation’s experience.

They just don’t get it. They don’t understand that the low rates we’ve seen over the past many months are FREAKING BIZARRE, and that one of these days (soon, with Trump in office) we will see rates go back to historically “normal” levels. Which ain’t gonna be 4.75%.

Hassling back and forth between those two consumed a fair amount of the afternoon.

Have I painted the wall?

No.

Have I taken the dogs for a walk today?

No.

It’s almost dark. I better go do that…

We’re in the Money…

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For the moment…

This morning the Dow was at 19,000! When it goes wacko like this, my fund will make 30 grand in a month. Woot!

Unfortunately, it’s likely as not to lose 32 grand the following month…but let’s not think about that.

Ha ha!! In amongst the stupid chatter to this YouTube video is One (count it: 1) truly inspired comment:

Sonic Ryan 1992
What it feels like to be a post-graduate who finally got a good paying job.

What I’d  like to do is tell my guy to SELL NOW! Convert about half our holdings to cash; then invest the remainder aggressively for another month or two (maybe six, at the outside), then shift that to the money market.

My son has dragged his feet on refinancing the downtown house. It frosts his cookies to have to pony up more cash to principal, and an extra layer of frosting is applied by the prospect of having to pay mortgage insurance (we don’t, on the current instrument). But I  believe the house’s value will soon rise enough to give us well over 20% equity (it’s probably that high now): the housing market is exploding, his neighborhood (as I prematurely predicted) is gentrifying, and as demand rises, so will prices.

So I’ve sicced a friend who’s a mortgage broker on him, hoping that this time around he’ll kick into gear and get that thing refinanced. The problem is, it has a 30/15 loan on it. In 2020 — just  four years, about the time I expect the Trump economy will tank — we’ll be forced to refinance or to sell. We took out that loan, which had exceptionally favorable terms at the time, because he planned to stay in Phoenix just long enough to get back on his feet after being laid off at the tail end of the Silicon Valley bust, save some money, and then go back to San Francisco. It hasn’t worked out that way. Inertia set in, and he seems to be happy enough to stay where he is.

For the time being.

At any rate, it’s hard to believe that in just four years, he will have been in that house for 15 years. Tempus fidgets, eh?

Not real thrilled, myself, about being over the barrel now to get that place refinanced. Rates are already rising, and they’re expected to head straight for the stratosphere. I expect by 2020, we’ll be lucky to get an 8% loan.

When I bought my first house here in the ‘hood, that’s exactly how I felt: very lucky to land an 8.25% loan. Everybody cooed about what a great deal it was. I only owed $80,000 on the house, and the payments were over half my take-home pay. Imagine the payment on a $180,000 loan at 8% or 9%? We are gonna see a WHOLE lot of people who simply can’t afford to buy real estate at all. Ever. And a lot who will go belly-up. Again.

Interesting times, hm?

How are you planning to deal with all this…interest?

Rumination: Of Appliances and Politics

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So the politically correct “high”-efficiency top-loading Samsung is now history, replaced by a new inefficient, water-guzzling, irresponsible right-wing-crazy Made-in-America Speed Queen agitator-driven washer.

Just took the first load out. The Speed Queen took exactly 30 minutes to run a medium-sized load on a cycle that took the hateful Samsung an hour and ten minutes to complete. The clothes look clean. They actually got wet, if you can imagine, without my having to pour a pailful of water in on top of them. And they did not come out in a wad or in a braid.

That is to say, the inefficient, water-guzzling, irresponsible right-wing-crazy Made-in-America Speed Queen agitator-driven washer works the way a washer is supposed to work: it washes your clothes, gets them clean, and does it in a reasonable amount of time.

Yesterday while I was sitting here waiting for the repairman to show up to fix the oven (again!), so that it can be turned off (again!) at the breaker switch and left that way permanently, so that if and when I want to sell this house or I croak over and my son decides to sell, the house will have a working double oven and will not require a $2,500 replacement before the place can be put on the market, it occurred to me that Americans have pretty good reason, overall, to be mad enough to sweep out the old, endlessly politically correct regime, even if the new regime is led by a narcissistic bigot who has no clue what he’s doing.

The choice is bad; the reasoning is….not altogether unreasonable.

There I was, after all, sitting in an (expensively) paid-off house that had no functioning oven and no believably functioning clothes washer. Stumbling across a brand of washer that is made in America with American-made parts felt like some kind of freaking miracle. Discovering rave consumer reviews of the things made me feel a) beside myself with joy that I may(!) have found a washing machine that works and b) mad as hell that I got suckered into buying the useless (exploding) high-(in)efficiency Samsung.

And I thought…god damn it! Here I am in the (supposedly) greatest country in the world, sliding into Third-World conditions. If I want to bake a loaf of bread, I’ll have to do it outside over an open fire in the grill. To get my clothes clean, I have to wash them by hand — all of them, including jeans and T-shirts. I might as well be washing the damn things in the Ganges. And for the privilege, I’ve paid through the wazoo. What’s next?

Much as I believe Donald Trump is not the man to do the job, nevertheless I could in theory buy into the idea that it’s past time for a change of direction.

• We have politically correct foreign-made wash machines that take almost two hours to not get our clothes clean;
• we have household appliances with, across the board, life expectancy of seven years (if you’re lucky);
• we’ve seen toilets that don’t flush and faucets that take half your lifetime to dispense a potful of water and showers that don’t shower, all in the name of environmental correctness;
• we have health insurance that costs a king’s ransom and covers nothing;
• we have Gloria Vanderbilt jeans made in African countries with pants-leg lengths that don’t match;
• we have bras made in China whose Dixie-cup design fits no one (and NO OTHER CHOICES in any store you can find);
• we have clothing made in China that falls apart within a few weeks or months;
• we have trade agreements that have allowed greedy, socially and environmentally uncaring US corporations to send jobs and production overseas to countries that have no safety regulations and no quality control, where a skilled carpenter thinks he’s lucky to earn $7.50 a day;
• we have copper plumbing that comes from the seller with pinhole leaks in it, made in China;
• we’ve had dog food that poisoned our pets, no matter what the cost and purported quality, because all brands are made in the same few Chinese factories;
• we’ve had toothpaste that poisoned its users, made in China;
• we have high-end, brain-bangingly expensive air conditioners that work no better and last no longer than the cheapest model, because they’re all made in the same place, China…

Don’t worry, be happy, we’re told: Americans whose highest and best skills qualified them to work on assembly lines can land great jobs in IT and medical care!

Right.

Then we have the nanny-state effect:

• wherein we can’t buy a package of Sudafed without signing for it, lest we decide to turn it into meth (does it occur to any of our Governmental Parents that maybe people who choose to consume meth deserve what they get?);
• we can’t buy a bottle of cough medicine lest we decide to drink it and get high;
• we can’t get a bottle of anything, from cough drops to cleanser, that doesn’t have caps that are impossible to open, so that we end up having to leave most household products sitting in our cabinets with no lids on, or else transferring everything to other containers;
• we can’t open the lid on a running washing machine lest we stupidly stick our hands into the spinning tub and mangle our arms;
• we can’t start a car without our seatbelts on, unless we wish to be bonged at nonstop;
• we can’t order a steak at a restaurant without being told eating rare meat could make us sick;
• we surely can’t order a plate of sushi without hearing or reading the same dire warning;
• we can’t buy a bottle of wine without being told the risk to a pregnant woman’s fetus is so dire she probably should go to jail for even thinking about swilling a glass of Beaujolais with dinner;
• and speaking of fetuses, children are no longer allowed to walk to school or play in the neighborhood park lest they be kidnapped by bogeymen; dare to let yours do so and you’ll be arrested for neglect and child abuse…

And then we have the oppressive political correctness, in which Those Who Are Our Betters tell us what we are and what we are not allowed to say, since we’re such ill-mannered troglodytes we don’t know how to function in polite society.

You know, I consider myself a civil grown-up, and so I have no objection to welcoming people of all genetic and ethnic persuasions into the human race; I do not go around calling homosexuals and lesbians nasty names (nor do I concern myself with their bedroom life); I do not care what your religious calling is, as long as you don’t foist it on me. And so most of the politically correct bullshit doesn’t apply here.

But…there are moments.

The moment when I lost patience with political correctness came some years ago, when I was teaching full-time at the Great Desert University’s westside campus. This was before I migrated to the main campus to found and operate an editorial office.

It was coming on to Christmastime when a memo came down from the Dean of Liberal (heh) Arts, informing us that we were not to utter the words “Merry Christmas” when exchanging holiday greetings in the office. We could say “Happy Holidays.” We could say “Happy Kwanzaa.” We could even say “Happy Chanukka.” But we were not, absolutely positively NOT to say “Merry Christmas.”

Furthermore, we were not to exchange greeting cards that had any kind of religious imagery on them. No babies dozing in mangers. No angels singing. No old guys traipsing across the desert following a star. No haloes. None of that. And of course, no “Merry Christmas” emblazoned upon any such greeting card. Acceptable: peace doves, wintry landscapes, and the “Happy Holidays” slogan.

You think I exaggerate?

No.

Academia can get ridiculous. But this took the cake.

Eventually the oven repair guy showed up. He’s an independent contractor, has his own business…not an employee of Sears. He turned on the breaker and discovered…lo! the control panel was working. I explained that it was showing the F7 error, which Sears had twice told me meant the control panel was shot and had to be replaced, to the tune of $500.

Quoth he: not quite so. It also can indicate loose wiring somewhere. Wiring can work loose, he said, through expansion and contraction caused by the heating and cooling inside the oven.

He took the panel apart, tightened all the wiring, pulled the oven out of the wall and checked to see that the fan was working (if not, he suggested, the heat could be damaging the control panel), found the fan was working fine, put the thing back together, and charged me $81.

He did agree that the control panel on these ovens has a limited life expectancy, and he confirmed that the part is no longer made. And he did suggest that if I didn’t want to buy a new oven ($2000+) in the near future, I shouldn’t use it at all.

No wonder Sears is going out of business, hm?

So the oven is returned to its best and highest use: holding pots, pans, and cutting boards. But at least now I have a washer that works. For the time being.

Appliance Hell/Appliance Heaven

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Okay, first off, the plug: If you live in the Phoenix area — as many of Funny’s readers do — and you think you’ll be needing a new large appliance at any time in the future, you need to know about B&B Appliances, up in Sunnyslope.

Remember how Sears used to have an outlet where they’d sell returned appliances or appliances with tiny (essentially unnoticeable) dents or scratches? Well, B&B does that as a business model. They also sell new appliances for a number of brands. And they have a very highly rated repair service. I went up there this morning to ask the proprietor a question, and…I think I’m in love!

Late, a double oven; now, two storage cabinets
Late, a double oven; now, two storage cabinets

Seriously: you’ll recall the nonfunctional oven. At last, the dust being more or less settled between client projects just now, I decided to get the control panel fixed, then leave the breaker switched turned off permanently so that if I ever sell the house or my son wants to sell it after I croak over, the place will have a working oven without my having to go out and spend $2,500 for the privilege. Sears, we know from experience, charges a little over $500 to fix the damn thing — which they’ve had to do twice since I moved into the Funny Farm.

On the outside chance that a few bucks could be saved on the present fix-it job, I got a referral to an appliance repairman from Wonder-Handyman. This guy will be visiting a little later today. While we were on the phone, he looked up the model number and opined that the control panel is no longer being made, but (said he) it could be shipped off to a place that will rebuild it. Cost: about $450. That’s a little less than I’ve paid for Sears’s repairs.

But I wondered. So this morning I trotted up to B&B and asked if it was true the part is no longer made but can be refurbished. After much prestidigitation. the guy discovered that no, it’s not true; yes, you can ship off the Deceased to some place back East, where it can be rebuilt; that the rebuild cost is indeed around $500…and…if you want a BRAND NEW one to blow out by using your oven in a normal way, you’ll now have to pay $750 for the damn thing.

Well. IMHO $750 is the same as “no longer made.” It’s no longer made in my world, anyway.

The B&B guy recommended the rebuild as the least expensive alternative: that is…rebuild and never use the oven again. Let the next owner figure out what to do with the thing. He also remarked, in passing, that these fine made-in-China control panels last an average of five years.

While he was exploring the Internet in search of full and accurate answers to my questions, I explored the old-fashioned high-inefficiency (read “working”) clothes washers on display. They had a nice variety of agitator washers, new and refurbished, from major brands.

i. hate. the. samsung. goddamn. washer!
i. hate. the. samsung. goddamn. washer!

So I asked him about his choices, explaining about the wonderful clothes-braiding Samsung and remarking that Samsung had given M’hijito $150 for his recalled exploding Samsung. He laughed and said that one of his customers had been offered $34 for hers . She opined aloud about where Samsung could shove it.

He drew my attention to the Speed Queen, a brand I’d never considered in my life. Speed Queen, he said, for years has focused on the commercial market: they make heavy-duty washers for institutions and for laundromats. When the fine, politically correct new HE washers came out and Speed Queen’s executives became aware of the Season of Our Discontent, they decided the company should venture into the consumer market. Hence: these sturdy, large-capacity, steel-tub machines.

And…hang onto your hats, folks…SPEED QUEEN WASHERS ARE MADE IN AMERICA! The guy said they’re not just assembled here: the parts are made in the USA, too. He added that the life expectancy for the machines is about 20 years.

Halleujah, brothers and sisters!

I thought about that. Stuffed a lightweight cotton summer blanket into the hated Samsung. Ran the hour-and-ten-minute cycle. Pulled it out, pretty much sopping wet, and threw it into the surviving Kenmore dryer. Thought about it some more.

As soon as New RepairDude is safely on his way with the dead oven control panel, I’m gonna jump in my car and FLY back up to B&B to buy one of them thar Speed Queens.