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Somewhere…Over the Yardarm, Way Up High…

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The sun no doubt is over the yardarm where my FaceBook friend Cas lives: the Gold Coast of Australia. Hereabouts, it’s time for a late breakfast. The sausage is on the grill. The potatoes (yeah, i know) are frying in butter and oil (i know, i know already!), and the bourbon and water is at my side. Stop that askance-looking! It’s medicinal…

At quarter to seven, I was running late for the early-morning bidness networking meeting. I don’t like to eat in restaurants in general — especially not breakfast, since it’s so hard to find something to eat that’s not eggs, and especially not in this restaurant, where the food often leaves something to be desired. So sliced off a piece of roast chicken, which I gulped down on the run with a mug of coffee that slopped all over the car’s nice new(ish) upholstery as I was flying to Scottsdale.

Yes. Well. I’ve learned something: Remember back when the first CardioDoc, the one whose bullying personality led me to wish to wring his neck, informed me that the “heart palpitations” were actually anxiety attacks and if I would race around the park a few times a day, they’d disappear? He was right.

Turns out he was right in spades.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been going back and forth with New Cardiodoc, who is a very nice man in addition to being, as it develops, a well respected heart doctor. The start of this present interaction was an episode in which I nearly passed out as I was cruising across the city at 50 mph on a surface street.

He cannot find a damned thing wrong with me. It does not appear that the apparent presyncope (click on that one and you’ll see why the sh!t was scared out of me) was caused by an easily diagnosed cardiovascular issue. We speculate that it might have been a side-effect from the dose of pseudoephedrine I’d dropped that morning to clear a sinus headache, though the link is unclear.

Eventually I fell back on Young Dr. Kildare, whose signal characteristic is common sense.

Common sense, clearly, was what we needed.

He was unwilling to rule out a cardiovascular cause. He thought it was not old-lady vertigo (ears were cleaned out; head congestion seemed not to be severe), but he thought it probably was not life-threatening. He recommended not giving up on the cardiologist, yet he also suspected, along with the first CardioDoc, that the origin could be anxiety.

So, I was generally miserable about this, and on a subliminal level scared shitless, until…oh yes, until Election Day.

More to the point, until the day after Election Day.

The ultimate horror happened: the President of the United States is now not a jaded politico but an orange-haired misogynistic, racist, blustering, lying, bullying Bozo with no more clue how to run the most powerful nation in the world than he showed in running several businesses into the ground, one of which was manifestly fraudulent.

The day after Election day, the palpitations and the lightheadedness came to a complete, total, peaceful stop. No, none, zero-point-zero-zero manifestations.

Meanwhile, several people — real-world friends and FB friends — remarked that they’d been having anxiety attacks over the  gawdawful election.

{anxiety attacks?}
{palpitations?}
{light-headness?}
{seriously???}

And the day before the election, this amazing episode occurred.

YDK, thinking that maybe the issue could be allergic head congestion, phoned in a prescription for an antihistamine nasal spray. The pharmacy nearest to my house — a Walgreen’s that I like to habituate because it has practically no business and so waits are minimal — is in a colorful district. When I get up to the pharmacy counter, I find a bum (hey! With the Trumpites in power, now we’re allowed to call a bum a one-syllable bum, not an eight-syllable “homeless mentally ill person”) harassing the staff in a very aggressive way.

Okay, let’s get un-PC: in a threatening way.

He demanded that they fork over an addictive pain-killer. They refused to do so, since he didn’t have a current prescription. He carried on at some length, growing more and more aggressive. They finally cut off the argument by shutting and locking a door between themselves and the bum.

He staggered off into the store, and one of the staff asked me what I wanted, then explained that my insurance refused to cover it. I picked up, with the pharmacist’s advice, an OTC substitute.

At the cash register near the front door, I ask the clerk if the bum had left.

He says, “I’ll walk you out to your car.”

A lady is standing behind me with an armful of loot she wishes to purchase. I say, “No, you shouldn’t do that: you have customers you need to attend to.”

She now says, “I’ll walk out with you.”

This sounds good, so I wait till she’s bought her stuff, and we new-made friends venture into the parking lot.

We can’t see the bum anywhere, so I peel off and head for my car. She proceeds along the front of the store toward the neighborhood street just south of the little strip shopping center, headed for her apartment.

As I reach my car, I look back and see that the bum and a friend of his — another seedy-looking, filthy guy — were hiding out of view and have accosted the woman.

I jump in my car and drive over to her. By the time I get there, she’s put up quite a ruckus, and by sheer nerve and a loud voice has caused them to stand down.

Now I ask if she’d like me to drive her home. She says thanks, but no: she thinks she should walk.

She comes over to the car to chat. She needs to walk home, she says, because she’s been having anxiety attacks! over the election. And, oh God, what in the name of heaven will happen to us if Donald Trump doesn’t win?

heh heh heh heh heh

What, indeed?

So thank you, God, for whapping me upside the head.

* * * Back to this morning***

My favorite networking group is probably the only business group in Arizona whose membership consists of a bunch of wild-eyed liberals. It’s hard to find a business man or woman anywhere who’s a wild-eyed liberal, but in Arizona it’s almost impossible.

After two hours of listening to nonstop pissing and moaning, I was already out of sorts when I got in the car to head back into Phoenix. About the time I reached 16th Street — two-thirds of the way home — the heart started to pound and the head started to spin. I had to pull off into a neighborhood, stop, and sit there until the episode passed, which shortly it did.

* * *

By the time I got home, somewhat after 9 a.m., I was effing starved. So I threw a package of lovely pork sausages on the grill, tossed a fistful of frozen waffle potatoes into some hot butter and oil, and poured a bourbon and water. Hence, this post. And hence, an insight:

America, my friends, is having one huge communal anxiety attack.

If we’re lucky, it will pass.

If we’re not, it won’t.

If we’re screwed one way or another (which we may be; yes, we may very well be), that, too, will pass.

Time to Skip Out of the Mac Fan Club?

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macbookWell, I have to say…I’ve loved my two Macs. It was a big transition — moving from the PC environment to the Mac environment is not an easy thing, and finding workarounds to get your Mac to do things that were SOP on the PC is a time-consuming PITA. Once you’ve accomplished all that, you really don’t want to go back. The rock-solid reliability, the seemingly infinite lifespan, the relative immunity to malware and hacks (not 100%, but at least you don’t have to keep the works permanently gummed up with anti-virus software), the general whimsical charm of the Mac…they’re hard to beat.

But the wonderful little MacBook is aging. I’ve actually worn the characters off the keyboard. Though it still chugs along, sooner or later it is gonna have to be replaced. Guess I’d rather have a computer in place and running before this one falls apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay.

Given the shrieks of dismay from the Apple Fan-boy Legions over the latest Macs, my plan to buy a new MacBook Pro met with a serious pause.

Apple  has gotten rid of all the MacBook’s USB ports, leaving only one hole into which to plug any and all external hardware. And there’s no SD card slot or adapter.

Well. Right now mine, which annoyingly has only two USB ports, is fully occupied with the hard-drive to which Time Machine is backing up these very characters as they’re typed, along with everything else that happens on this device, and with a device that talks to a rodent, should I choose to use a rodent instead of the touchpad. Which I occasionally do. And I often back stuff up for clients onto flash drives.

It looks like plugging in even the few external devices I use is going to consign me to Dongle Hell with the new MacBook. Plus…yeah, it is tiresome not to be able to use Quicken, and yeah, it is tiresome that an e-book designed on a Mac ends up with Kindle-unreadable table of contents…and things. And the new version of iPhoto is annoying, and the weak photo editing software: annoying. And…the fact that Apple has raised the MacBook price significantly is especially annoying.

For about $1400 less than a new 15-inch MacBook, I can buy a pretty damn spectacular PC at Costco, one that has a screen comparable to mine and a built-in numeric keypad (a blandishment whose absence on the Apple machine is another annoyance), and my very own, NOT-rented-in-the-cloud, up-to-date version of Office.

It’s true I’d have to do battle with virus-checkers, a constant annoyance. And it’s true I’d have to back up to Carbonite, which I’d druther not do. BUT I could use Quicken for PC, a mixed blessing because over the past few years Quicken has apparently gone to Hell. As a practical matter, Excel is far better, except for the fact that it doesn’t talk to your bank…and that may not be such a bad thing…

It will take some doing to relearn Windows. But I have a friend who’s a PC Magician, and I think I also can walk into the computer commons at the junior college and ask to be shown how to operate it. Really, all I’d need to do is sign up for a yoga class over there to get access to the computer commons hardware.

So…I dunno. But I’m thinking that without Steve Jobs, Apple is just another computer maker. Apple is no longer Apple.

Welp, speaking of Excel, I need to do some bookkeeping. And so, away!

What’s your thought about the new MacBook? And about the prospect of retrograde movement from Mac to PC?

 

Samsung Washers: Told you so!

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P1030121My son alerted me to the new recall of “exploding” Samsung clothes washers. My own piece of junk is not on this list. Which is just as well: Samsung isn’t doing much to help people who own machines that have fallen apart or are likely to.

Consumer Reports, the poor fools, placed the Samsung at the top of its ratings. If you get a kick out of other consumers’ squawks of outrage, don’t miss the hilarious (and not so funny…) endless string of CR readers’ eye-popping experiences with these fine machines. Scroll to the bottom of the article, down to the comments section, and start reading. It’s amazing.

And gratifying: now I feel like maybe I’m not a total nut case. Many a Samsung user reports half-assed performance, ruined clothing, long cycles that leave you with dirty clothes…and on and on. And apparently models other than the ones on the recall list have some alarming mechanical problems.

So far mine has not done anything that looks dangerous — but I hardly use it. Most of the time, I wash my clothes by hand (because the washer either won’t get them clean or braids them into knots, as above) and just run them through the washer’s rinse cycle. That doesn’t make much of a demand on the washer.

My son’s crapped out a couple of years ago…and since he bought his a couple years after I bought mine, his didn’t last long at-tall. Considering the price of the damn things, that is just outrageous. Apparently they’re going to send him about $150.

Whoop de doo.

Here in town there’s a store that sells brand-new scratched and dented appliances and that does repair work. It’s NOT a big box store. It’s NOT Sears  (never again!). And it IS a locally owned business. Even though my Samsung is running OK on the rinse cycle, I’m seriously thinking it’s time to pay that merchant a visit to see if they can come up with something that…oh…you know…works?

Planting

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Perfect timing!! Yesterday morning I made a Home Depot run to retrieve some more Mexican primrose seeds to replant the garden trashed by the Invasion of the Grass Monster from Bermuda. Naturally, they didn’t have any. But they did have amaryllis and paperwhite bulbs for exactly half the price demanded by my favorite local nursery.

Who could turn them down?

muscari_armeniacum_4While rummaging through the bulbs rack, I came across something called Muscari armeniacum. Never heard of it. But it looks extremely neat: bright blue flowers with long grassy-looking leaves. Apparently they’re very hardy and ultra-prolific — gardeners in some parts of the country complain they’ll take over a flowerbed and everything around it.

Well. That would be just fine by me. They also apparently will grow up through grass or other bedding plants, which would be great if the Mexican primrose has managed to reseed itself — which it’s fully capable of doing, bermudagrass be damned.

So I planted the 20 or 30 bulbs that came in the package, mostly by the pool but also a few near the west deck. The amaryllis went in a shady spot on the west side — those things grow madly, once a year, outdoors in a sheltered spot here. And two of the paperwhites went in the ground, two in a pot. And three eight-packs of assorted posies also went into pots and flowerbeds.

Shortly after all those babes got shoveled into the ground, the sky began to clabber up. Along about mid-afternoon, it started to rain. Not just rain, but pour! At first I thought it was hailing, but no: it was just a hard rain. It rained and rained and rained all afternoon and into the evening. It was still raining when I went to bed last night.

This morning the sun is shining and everything is magnificently deep-watered. Even got to turn off the watering system this morning. 🙂

Remaining to do in the poolside area:

• Prune the tea rose
• Prune the orange variant of yellowbell, which has turned into a kind of monster itself
• Prune the blue plumbago, speaking of summer monsters
• Prune the Lady Banks rose, which now does its job of hiding the pool equipment but wishes to return them to the jungle

Houses are a helluvalot of work. But on the other hand…what else have I got to do? And when all these little plants grow, they’re very satisfying.

I wonder if I’m still strong enough to lay brick. Hmmm…. The sand is out there…all I’d have to do is install some edging, level the sand, screed it, set the brick, and broom extra sand over it. Hmmm….

Once I laid a thousand bricks to build a patio in our yard in Encanto. Turned out pretty damn nice, too. But I was about 28 then. This is forty years later…hmmmm…..  On the other hand, I do not propose to lay a thousand bricks. I propose to lay enough to build a pathway where Ruby and Cassie have created a racetrack around the orange trees. Where they run, they knock aside the quarter-minus ground dressing (which is basically nothing but coarse sand), creating an uneven and unsightly mess.

I could use that quarter-minus as a base for a wandering brick path, which they could race around on without digging up the desert landscaping. A-n-n-n-d it would add some charm to the backyard. There’s nothing like a mysteriously meandering pathway to make a garden. 🙂

But for now, it’s off to the races! Et alors, jusqu’à demain.

 

 

Second Spring y-Cumin’ In

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Fall is Arizona’s second spring. The plants recover from their summer heat exhaustion and many begin to blossom again. And the Human always evinces symptoms of spring fever. To wit:

a) I do not want to work, and
b) All I want to do is play in the garden.

Fortunately rather little work is in-house just now. It looked bad yesterday when a prospective new client sent an inquiry for editing and indexing of a bilingual art exhibition catalogue. But mercifully, she’s far from the editing stage. So I can indulge in my favorite unhealthy habit: loafing.

In that department, I want to catch up with the many yard blandishments I’ve neglected during the summertime funk. Neglected longer than that, really: I fell into a kind of depression after the year of surgeries, from which I’ve never recovered. I simply have not felt like doing anything, and so have wasted unimaginable numbers of hours playing computer games.

microgardenbermudagrassOne result, as I mentioned a while back, is that mountains of accursed bermudagrass took over the poolside flowerbed.

Honest to God. It should be against the law to plant this noxious weed in Arizona. Or anywhere in the world. Arizona’s answer to kudzu, it’s the most aggressive, invasive, unkillable monster in the plant kingdom.

Several doses of an Over-the-Top formulation that the company no longer makes did finally succeed in killing off the top growth. It’s almost impossible to kill the root system, but at least the existing growth was dead enough to cause me to get off my duff and dig it out.

What a job!! You can’t just pull it up. It sets roots like steel claws. If you try to pull up the yard-long runners, they snap off at the surface, leaving the underground parts to sprout another day. Another day very soon…

bermudagrasdigAn ordinary trowel will not suffice to excise the roots, especially not when they’re set in Arizona’s clayey soil. So you end up having to get a shovel and lever the damn stuff out, to a depth of 18 inches or more. Even then, you can’t even begin to get it all out of the ground:

bermudagrassrootsHere’s a nice view of what’s still in the ground out there. Any root you leave behind, any sprig you leave in the dirt will promptly sprout new ugly grass. It spreads by root, by runner, and by seed. Birds blithely carry the seeds everywhere, as does the wind.

People here have given up trying to fight it. Instead, we plant it as lawns and cover golf courses with it. It’s easier to mow than St. Augustine, a much handsomer and less invasive grass, one that (unlike Bermudagrass) will even grow in the shade of a tree. And because all you have to do is pour water on any bare patch of ground to get it to grow, I guess people think it’s easy to cultivate.  That may be so…but it sure as hell isn’t easy to uncultivate!

You really don’t even have to throw seeds down, since the entire state is infested with blowing bermudagrass seeds.

Ultimately I ended up with a gigantic bag of stolons and roots, which I dropped by the back gate for Gerardo to drag off.

bermudgrassbagHappily, he and his dudes came by yesterday afternoon to shovel out the yard. So now we have a temporarily clean flowerbed next to the pool — you can see what a small area filled up the largest black bag available on the market.

bermudagrasscleaned

Over the next year, I’ll have to spray Over-the-Top (or rather, its new iteration, Ornamec 170, which still contains the grass-killer that Fertilome has so kindly taken away from us) about once a week, until the resurgent grass gives up. Probably once the weather cools off, it’ll be more like once a month, but in the summertime, it will take frequent spraying and digging to get the damn stuff out of the ground there.

societygarlic361px-tulbaghia_violacea2010
Society garlic

The Mexican primrose that hadn’t been crowded out was unaffected by the old Over-the-Top, as were the society garlic plants that have spread around in there. They’re stinky little plants, the garlics, but they make a pretty flower.

That stupid-looking white picket thing is there to help block Ruby the Air-Headed Corgi Pup from getting into the pool area. All three of the dogs who preceded Her Nibs had enough sense, after falling in the drink just once, to freaking stay away from the water. But Ruby? Ohhhhhhh no! She wants nothing more in life than to tear up and down the 18-inch-wide coping on the far side, where she invariably topples in to the deep end. Then I have to dive into the (sometimes startlingly cold) water to fish her out.

When I go out to buy some new Mexican primrose seeds, I’ll try to find some new, taller black metal garden border to stuff in there. Either that or get some black paint and spray the damn thing.

Ruby is slightly wall-eyed. Her right eye doesn’t point straight ahead — evidently dogs can get strabismus. It’s something she was born with, and it’s never straightened. I imagine it has the same effect in dogs as it can in humans: interferes with depth perception. SDXB has strabismus in one eye, severe enough that when he went into the Air Force a doctor was surprised he could see at all — in fact, he has 20-20 vision. But his depth perception is decidedly off: he’ll knock over glasses at the table, or hit them against the kitchen faucet when he’s washing dishes.

So I suspect Ruby simply cannot tell that the water is not a hard, flat surface. Cassie, Anna, Charley, and Walt all seemed to see that something deep lay there. But Ruby…she doesn’t doesn’t get it. Soooo….she falls in.

Nor does she swim well. Like Cassie, she panics when she gets wet — in fact, she panics more so than Cassie does. Cassie can swim, although she still can’t figure out how to find the steps. Ruby just flails. She sinks quickly when she falls in the water. So if she tumbled into the pool when I wasn’t right at hand, she would drown.

Welp, it’s past time to get up and run around: Back to Costco to return the pair of jeans whose right pant leg is three inches shorter than the left and the box of seed-bearing grapes whose label I misread as “seedless.” Then on to an ordinary grocer for a few avocadoes, and up to HD for the metal anti-puppy fencing.

Then, I suppose, I’m going to have to actually…work.

Image: Society garlic. Oyoyoy. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10394723

 

How to Keep Your Business from Ruining Your Personal Finances

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Starting a small business can be exhilarating.  That is until you realize that the customers are the real boss and you have mixed your personal and business finances to the point where you don’t know where ends and the other begins.  Don’t worry! You are not the first small business owner who has ended up in this situation and you won’t be the last.  The key to overcoming the problem is to first admit one exists and then take steps to correct it.  As such, I want to go over some simple advice on how to keep your business from ruining your personal finances.

Decide on a Corporate Structure

If you are like millions of small business owners, you probably started out with an idea and built everything up from there.  This works great early on, as you need to flush out what it is you are trying to do.  But once you are up and running you need to decide what type of corporation you want to have, and file the necessary paperwork to make it official.

Not only does this force you to separate your personal and businesses finances, it also helps to shield you from personal liability if your business hits a bump in the road.  Another advantage of registering your business is that it opens the opportunity to set up lines of credit in the name of your business, but more on that later.

Pay Yourself Last

A common mistake many small business owners make is to pay themselves first.  I am here to tell you that this approach puts the cart in front of the horse.  Instead, you need to set up an emergency fund, then pay your employees, and then your suppliers.  If you are fortunate enough to have any money left over, then it is time to take a salary or dividends out of your company.

During lean times, you are the one who will get cut first.  While this hurts, it is the way it should be.  After all, you are the one taking the risk, not your employees or your suppliers.  So, get yourself into the habit of paying yourself last, this will ensure your business has enough money and will keep you from using your personal credit to keep the business afloat.

Establish an Emergency Fund

The goal of any business is to make sure that it is profitable and sustainable.  One of the first steps to achieving this is to make sure you have enough cash on hand to meet the changing needs of your business.  You should set up an emergency fund from day one.  This is what you need to collect first.  These funds should be kept in a separate account and you should set clear guidelines when you can access them as the money is there to make sure you have the financial freedom to react to emergencies as they occur.

Establish a Line of Credit

If you are trying to run a business on cash alone, then you know how difficult it can be to manage your cash flow.  Even in a restaurant, you need to buy supplies today for sale tomorrow.  Paying cash for these supplies will only help you to dig a hole which you can never get out of.

As such, you need to consider alternative forms of funding, these can include credit cards, venture capital, crowd funding, private mortgages or a line of credit for your business.  While they can all give you some financial backup to cash, none have the flexibility and terms of a line of credit, which allows you to borrow some or all of your approved amount and pay it back right away as you can without penalty.

There are lots of places that offer these lines of credit, however, banks are probably not the answer. Due to a variety of reasons, including excessive regulations, bad or no credit and the need for collateral, 80% of small business loan applications are turned down by banks. Instead, you need to work with a lender who specializes in loans and credit lines for small businesses.

Get Insurance

Even if your company is incorporated and you have an emergency fund as well as access to a line of credit, a catastrophe could come and knock you off your feet.  Just ask the thousands of small business owners who were wiped out by hurricanes Katrina or Sandy.  Some of these businesses were profitable and well-run, but they lacked the coverage needed to survive a natural disaster.

I realize insurance is an added expense, but having the right amount of coverage is well worth it. This way you can insure your equipment, your inventory, even your facility against loss.  Here is a great article from Forbes which outlines the types of insurance every small business owner should have.

Set up a Personal Retirement Plan

Your business is your retirement plan, at least this is the case for most small business owners.  However, you should not fall into this trap or you will end up working for your business for the rest of your life.  Instead, sit down with a financial advisor and set up a personal retirement plan.  You will be glad you did and it will help you to ensure that your business does not ruin your personal finances.