- I get up at 5:20 a.m. Things seem ok but I have a headache. I’ve laid awake for quite some time: possibly as long as two hours.
- Bang around trying to get dressed and feed the dogs and fix coffee and bolt down breakfast in time to leave the house early for my 7:15 a.m. meeting, because I forgot to get gas yesterday.
- I leave around 6:30. Main Drag South-East-West is all blocked up with construction that has gone on for months. No exaggeration.
- I get to the QT station, with considerable but not world-ending hassle.
- I can’t find my credit card.
- I try my business card. The gas pump GLOMS ONTO it! With considerable struggle and cursing, I force my card out of the machine.
- Decide it’s too far to drive all the way to Costco’s gas station in the rush-hour traffic, then make my way across the city to Lincoln Drive & Scottsdale Road: by the time I get to the meeting, it’ll be over.
- Drive home. I email members that I’m not coming to the meeting. I search through my wallet several more times and also search desktops and tabletops in the house. It appears I’ve lost my personal AMEX card.
- Call AMEX using the number on the back of my corporate card and have a very difficult time getting through. Again I encounter the crazy thing where they try to scam or deflect you with some sort of survey/contest. It’s the 3rd time this has happened. (Later I dial the number again and it goes through; I figure I must be misdialling and getting this scam, consistently.)
- Dig out a statement, call a number on that, and finally reach a human being. I change out the AMEX card, which will be a huge hassle. I tell him about the incident at the gas station. He proposes to change the business card, too. We don’t think this is a sign of a credit-card reader, but we don’t know.
- I fail to consider that this is going to cause horrific hassle because of all the autopays on the business card. It’s going to take upwards of an hour to change all the autopays, whenever the new card gets here.
- I take the dogs for a walk. As we pass the end of the alley behind the house, I see the garbage guys have dumped not one but two of the four-household garbage bins all over the alley. They’ve left one of the huge bins flopped over on its side. This pisses me off, because a) I know that in wealthier neighborhoods they clean up messes like this — because I’ve spoken to a driver in one of said Richistani neighborhoods, who told me they’re required to pick up stuff that falls on the ground; and b) the last time our guys left trash strewn all over the street, I called the city trash collection department and was told their truck drivers are not allowed to get out of their trucks. Obviously, if you live in an HOA full of million-dollar homes, you get your trash picked up; the proles, though, can go fish.
- Back at the house, I call New York Review of Books, which has been dunning me to re-subscribe despite the fact that a $150 check for two years of weekly delivery has cleared the credit union; that check, it develops, was not endorsed. Discover the questioned funds have in fact been received by NYRB. Getting through requires a frustrating, time-wasting, annoying hoop-jump.
- I shoot off an email to our district councilwoman complaining about the garbage dumped all over the alley.
- While I’m farting with this, the front door is open. I hear the sprinklers come on and then hear a broken sprinklerhead geysering. Run out and shut off the water, but not before a small lake collects in the courtyard. I’m infuriated: I’ve lost count of the number of repairs we’ve had to do on the system, which clearly is failing.
- I call Gerardo and leave word on his machine.
- Decide I’d better apply for a Visa card through the credit union, so as to have a backup to the AMEX card and to be able to buy things at Costco with less hassle. I call up the application on the CU’s website but cannot get the Visa application to accept my name. I don’t seem to be able to fill out the form correctly: it keeps demanding that I enter my name. After several tries at entering my name every which way from Sunday, I give up.
- The e-book designer calls. I’m pretty distracted and upset by now and really would like to be left alone. He has several ditzy questions about a manuscript, requiring me to load a 14 megabyte document to Word. Finally get off the phone from him.
- Drive to Costco, get gasoline uneventfully, using a previously purchased cash card. Farting around there, I find the lost personal AMEX card, behind my Costco card, where I’ve never ever put it before and would not in my right mind ever think of putting it. So all of the AMEX shit has been forfuckingnaught.
- Out of food, I drive from Costco to AJs; attempt to buy some groceries on my debit card. Cashier asks me to enter PIN. It won’t accept my PIN. I try several times and end up having to write a check.
- I drive home. I miss my turn on Central and have to negotiate blocked lanes on Main Drag South-East-West to get into the ’hood. By now my head is pounding.
- I call the client, who’s been nagging me to call him, and tell him to call me back because it’s a long-distance toll for me. He argues. I explain I’m trying to live on Social Security and he gives up. He calls me back. While we’re dorking around, he points out that several unchanged passages are marked as edits. I had not noticed that, mostly because I gave his copy just a cursory look on the final go-through. It occurs in two places, in both cases after I’ve entered extended discussions of stylistic matters. Apparently something about entering new copy is altering the paragraph or two after the inserted paragraphs.
- While I’m screwing with this, Word crashes. I freak out: this is the last straw! I start to cry. Word recovers his two files and the 14 mb file in production with relatively little loss of data, but I’m now unnerved. I can NOT believe this stuff is happening!
- I fix a large meal – salmon w/ tomato sauce, steamed chard, grilled corn on the cob – and pour a bourbon and water. This causes the headache to ease up. I figure if some is good, more must be better. I pour a second bourbon and water.
- Gerardo shows up to repair the plumbing. After two hefty doses of Maker’s Mark, I’m not competent to be dealing with much of anything. He fixes the broken sprinkler head but then finds another length of split PVC. His guys dig up the courtyard paving to fix that. He only charges me 50 bucks…I figure it’s because he knows sooner or later he’ll be building a whole new system front and back, which will more than reward him for his beneficence.
- I go to bed around 2 p.m. Lay there unable to sleep for an hour.
- Get up and call the credit union. Reach a human. Explain that I want to open a credit card but can’t make the website work. He enters the data; I explain as to how I had to put a freeze on all my credit bureau accounts thanks to the Maricopa County Community College District kindly giving hackers my name, date of birth, Social Security number, address, entire work history, entire educational history, a list of every college course I’ve ever taken, my phone number, my e-mail address, my bank routing number, and my bank account number. Since the credit union caters to state, city, and county employees, none of this is news to him.
- Fart around with getting Experian to lift the credit freeze. The woman there says the lift will occur in 15 to 30 minutes and be in effect until 11 p.m. tomorrow. Now cannot reach “Tyler” at the credit union, whose direct line rings through to a voicemail. Clearly this is going to develop into a much larger hassle.
- Tyler calls back at 5 p.m. The credit freeze is not lifted. He’s going to try again at 8 a.m., so this is a hassle that will extend over two days, bare minimum.
- It is 5:57 p.m. The dogs want to be fed. My head still hurts.
funny
Breaking into blister-pack pill packages
At one YouTube tutorial on how to break your pills out of their accursed plastic prison, a commenter wonders angrily who invented unit-dose packaging. Well…I don’t know for sure who invented it, but I did know a guy who said he invented it and who developed and marketed it. He was one of my ex-husband’s legal clients. Seemed like a benign enough fellow…today if I knew where he is, I’d wring his neck.
Actually, I think he’s passed on. Too bad.
Here in Arizona, because of the thriving meth trade, you can’t buy Sudafed or generic pseudoephedrine without begging for it at the pharmacist’s counter, forking over your ID, and signing a form. If you try to go from pharmacy to pharmacy to buy enough to cook up some meth (or to have enough on hand for a really bad allergy season), you risk arrest. And it ALWAYS comes in those hateful unit-dose bubble-wraps.
I dunno about you, but when I have a screaming sinus headache because the wind has been blowing crap into the air all day and all night, the LAST thing I want to do is break my nails and cut my fingers doing battle with a goddamn plastic package to get to my allergy nostrum.
So after I’ve extracted a box containing two flats of annoying blister-pack from the pharmacist, I will take all the pills out of the damn wrapping at once and drop them into a jar. But this task seems to get harder and harder: big pharma works not only to fleece the customer but to make the customer’s life as difficult as possible.
/rant
The advice given by the YouTube lady (above) is less than perfect. Cutting them out with a knife or a pair of scissors wrecks your knife or scissors (the tinfoil backing dulls any blade). And punching the pills out one at a time wrecks your fingers.
Here’s what you need to foil a blister-pack:
• a cutting device with a razor blade, such as an Exacto knife or a paint scraper
• a Phillip’s screwdriver
• a bottle with a label clearly identifying the med
• the damned blister-pack full of pills
Hold the blister pack perpendicular to the countertop and give it a gentle shake to cause all the pills to move to one side of the blisters.
On the back (foil) side, slice a cut into the pill-free edge of each bubble.
Turn the package plastic-side up, and use the Phillip’s screwdriver to poke each pill through the backing. A Phillip’s is the right size for a round pill; you may need a large slot screwdriver for bigger oblong pills.
Yes, it is an aggravating hassle, but with this technique you can free up a whole package of Sudafeds in the time it takes to wrestle one or two of them out with your fingers.
You can see, in the photo below, what happens when you try to hack the things out with a pair of scissors. You get sharp pieces of foil, a mess to clean up, and damaged pills. Get out the paint-scraper the screwdriver, and the remaining package (right next to the bottle and the scraper) comes apart quickly, without ruining the pills and without creating a mess of sharp metallic litter.
Do not use a good knife for this task. That silver metallic backing shit will wreck your knife’s edge, if the damned plastic doesn’t. Keep a cheap Exacto knife or paint scraper on hand for removing pills from their packages.
Where do you buy your sheets?
Couple days ago, I was startled to wake up and find a long, transverse rip up the middle of the bottom sheet on my queen-sized bed.
Day-UM! Those things are expensive! And this is not the time that I can afford to drop another hundred bucks or so on a new set of sheets.
Whoa! Make that $150 to $290. Holy sheet!
Fortunately, I have two extra sets of sheets, so there’s no hurry to run out and drop another wad of dough. Still… Those of you who can remember Back in the Day: can you ever recall a real, made-in-America cotton percale sheet just FALLING APART ON THE BED? That is freaking amazing.
Now I’ll admit, these sheets are not brand-new. But they’re not ante-Diluvian, either. And they’re not total junk. I’ve been buying sheets at Costco for the past couple of decades, because they seem serviceable and reasonably well made, as products available on the general consumer market go. I’ve also bought Target sheets. But these are not from Target.
The Target sheets did fall apart, but not by simply wearing through in the middle — they were a shade too small for the annoying new extra-thick mattresses, and so eventually the fitted-sheet “pockets” ripped. Those can be mended, though. A flat sheet with a tear up the center cannot be mended.
The pillowcases on one of the remaining two sets developed strange little holes in them. I thought maybe I forgot to pull a hair clip out before collapsing in exhaustion, but…that doesn’t really seem likely. Nothing will keep you awake more efficiently than a hair clip poking you in the head. I was able to fix those holes by embroidering flowers over them — primitive renditions of flowers, because it was mighty tricky to fill in a quarter-inch-wide hole, but good enough to get a few more months of wear out of them.
And…have you noticed how poorly the pillowcases are made? On one pair I got from Costco, the seams are sewed crooked, so they don’t fit the pillow straight. That’s annoying, but since no one but a couple of dogs shares the bed with me, I just ignore it. On another set, the fabric is fraying through at the seams! Which is weird, because no friction has ever been applied to the seams of the damn pillowcases. They’re just effing falling apart.
I’m thinking about going back to a department store to buy new sheets, that being where I used to buy immortal bedding. But my god: Macy’s is having a close-out on Martha Stewart sheets for 60 bucks PER SHEET, and they’re that icky “sateen” stuff. I do not like sheets that have been chemically treated to feel “soft” — the word I’d use for the feel is “oily.” Is there some REASON we can’t have plain, ordinary, crisp percale cotton sheets? How hard is this?
“Hotel Collection” sheets — a pretty good brand, I’ve found — are $95 a sheet at Macy. The “extra-deep” queen fitted sheet is $117, “marked down” (har har!) from $170. That’s obscene.
Dullard’s sheets seem to be a little cheaper, but their website hangs when you try to get a good look at the offerings. Hm. What are they trying to say to us? Hmmm… $160 for a 450-thread-count set. That’s overkill, really: you do not need a 450 thread count sheet. Most people can’t tell the difference once you reach 300 count.
Welp. Dullard’s price is no worse than Costco’s. I wonder if the quality is any better?
Probably not. The things are all made in China. Ugh!
Have you found a vendor that’s selling sheets made of real, un-gummed-up 100% cotton that don’t fall apart and don’t warp the pillowcases into a funny shape?
Cranky as a cat
Betcha can’t guess what this is:
THAT is a dog-resistant cockroach-bait cage, custom designed to keep Ruby and Charley from eating the cockroach poison laid out there to catch the latest resident of the garage. The rock on top keeps Ruby from pushing the old fan cage over to the wall and then flipping it up with her nose or a paw so she can get at the roach baits and scarf them down. The wood chip, retrieved from the grill fuel, is there so Roachie can get in, since the fan cage’s wires are too close together to let her through.
Three of those are placed strategically around the garage just now.
This morning alone, I have walloped my bare feet on those damn things not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR GODDAMN PAINFUL TIMES! Don’t think I’ve broken a toe (yet), but it sure as hell hurts.
I’d managed to get rid of the roaches. Haven’t had any around for years. The new resident is a different species from the usual babes we have here in Arizona, the big brown fellows who live in the damned palm trees. This little guy is shorter, fat, and almost black. Looks a great deal like the Broad Keys roach. Cute.
And where do cockroaches come from? I’ll tell you where they come from: They travel in goddamn politically correct PAPER GROCERY BAGS, that’s where they come from.
Cockroaches inhabit warehouses, and they inhabit shipping containers. When cartons of grocery bags are stored in warehouses in transit, roaches find them, chew on them, and take up residence in them. They lay their eggs in the stored grocery bags. So when the paper grocery bags arrive at your house, helpfully given to you by politically correct corporations like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, the roach eggs hatch. And pretty quick you have happy throngs of roaches running around your house. Or garage, if you’re smart(?) enough to store the bags out there, or if you throw them into the recycling bin that you store in the garage.
So. Yes. The politically correct grocery bags discarded in the politically correct trashbin: That would be where the roach came from.
Woke up crabby as a cat this morning, and the cockroach bait waltz did not help things.
Sat down at 5 a.m. to finish off a client’s project and ship it off to him. Figured it would take about 20 minutes. Got up from the computer at 7 a.m.: two interminable hours later. Two interminable hours of tooth-grinding electronic ditz.
It being a little overcast, breezy, and not too crushingly hot, the dogs & I went for a pre-breakfast walk. But by 7 a.m., rush hour was well under way. We could not get across Feeder Street Northwest. I finally gave up and turned around. So we went back into the westerly end of the ‘hood by way of circling around to the house and collecting at least a few steps of our doggywalk. Naturally, we encounter some guy with a great Dane-like thing (ears uncropped, so he probably got it from the pound or some such), off the leash. Dane is real interested in two rabbit-sized corgis. Dude manages to grab the dog and starts struggling trying to get the leash on. While he’s wrestling with that, I dodge down a side street and shortly get out of sight and out of mind.
That cut about two blocks off said doggywalk.
Fed the dogs, fed myself (after a fashion), and then decided to pay the $251 bill outstanding to the Mayo Clinic.
Medicare and Medigap paid about $75 of the $325± said outfit billed me for the pointless annual physical they demand you show up for in order to stay on their rolls. The Mayo wishes to purge itself of Medicare patients, since we’re not very profitable — Medicare keeps prices down more efficiently than do insurance companies, which themselves work pretty hard at the task. The way they get rid of you is with this rule: if you don’t spend some money there every year, whether you need care or not, you can’t come back.
Since hospitals in Arizona leave quite a bit to be desired, it’s very much in one’s interest to stay with the Mayo.
So I’d paid the little bit Medicare/Medigap remitted and finally decided that was as much as I was gonna get. Paying is a hassle unless you want to send a check — I prefer to put these bills on the card so as to get credit toward the cash kickback AMEX provides. To pay with a card, you have to dork around on their website, which, the last time I looked, is a true, dyed-in-the-wool PITA. Alternatively, you can call and hang on the line until you get through to a CSR, who’ll take your credit-card information.
This is another hassle: they first tell you the wait is “longer than five minutes.” It’s not: it’s about two or at the outside three minutes. Then they while away your time nagging you to go to their website and pay there…ignoring the obvious fact that if one wanted to fart with the impenetrable website, you would not be farting with their phone tree. Would you!?
So I finally get through to a lady and at that point things proceed quickly and smoothly. Once you get a human on the line there, the place is pretty easy and pleasant to deal with.
Now I decide nothing will do but what I have to clean up the unholy mess I’ve allowed to accrue in the Funny Farm…speaking of things impenetrable. I have the bad habit of setting things down where I finish with them and then erasing them from my mind. I don’t even see the piles after awhile.
It takes over an hour just to pick up the litter, throw away the trash that should’ve been thrown out in the first place instead of left to accrue like dust on a tabletop, scour the pans I left to soak in the utility sink, stub my feet against the roach cages, wrestle two loads of laundry into and out of the washer, unload and reload the dishwasher, scrub the toilet and bathroom…arrrrhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I. Hate. Housecleaning.
Just hate it. Why? Because it is a hopelessly futile endeavor. You can clean until you’re blue in the face and a day later the place is littered and dirty again. What is the point?
The cordless phone in the kitchen died. After a significant period of puzzling, I discovered it would recharge in one of the other recharger cradle thingies. More puzzling and dorking around took place. Finally I decided the kitchen recharger had given up the ghost. Threw it in the trash, leaving a homeless handset and a disgusted human.
Lovely.
This morning I take the extension out of the living-room cabinet, which entails moving a VERY heavy piece of furniture across the tiles, climbing in behind it, unplugging the cord, unstringing it through the hole I’d drilled in the back of the cabinet, and dragging it into the kitchen. And of course pushing the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place and centering it under a picture.
Plug it into the outlet, set the phone handset on it, and…it doesn’t work…
WTF?
Maybe the outlet has died. I plug it into another outlet. It doesn’t work.
So this morning between banging around and emptying the trash into another collection bin, I happen to study the moved recharger, which flickers off when I pick it up. Then realize…wa-a-a-a-aitaminit. There’s nothing WRONG with the thing. The wire has come loose at the connection to the base.
Could it be?
Now I go to retrieve the discarded charger from the garbage. Naturally I can’t find it. I have to dig all the way down to the BOTTOM of two weeks’ worth of trash and garbage to pull the damn thing out of there.
And yeah. When I push the wire connection together firmly and plug the damn thing into the outlet, it comes right on!
Crap.
I decide I’d better not put this one into the cabinet, because I suspect the loose connection will come apart again, and that is another emergency-if-I’m-on-the-floor extension. Don’t want to find that thing dead when I really need it.
So I have to push the VERY heavy piece of furniture out, wrestle with the wiring again, wrestle some more to put the phone back and replug it, and push the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place. Again.
The temperamental phone is working again. Let’s hope it persists.
Do you wonder why, at 12:04 p.m., I want a bourbon and water?
P.S. WHY IS IT that you can proofread a blog post a half-dozen times and STILL not catch all the stupid typos in it??? I am SOOOO TIRED of having this machine display my idiocy!
PLEASE! Don’t “give” me your right of way!
Please. When you’re driving, don’t politely cede your right of way as your Good Deed of the Day. It’s NOT a good deed. It’s dangerous and can cause a wreck.
Couple days ago, a friend of mine was turning left across a thoroughfare to get into a parking lot. Some kind soul, seeing him waiting in the left-turn lane and signalling, stopped in the road, held up the traffic, and motioned him to go ahead. When he turned across the road, some poor soul who didn’t see him and didn’t expect someone to turn left illegally across oncoming traffic slammed right into him.
Totaled his car.
The idiot who caused this fiasco, of course, tooled off down the road unscathed.
These damn people who think they’re being extra-special, nicey-nice kind and courteous by ceding their right of way make me want to jump out of the car, reach through the driver’s-side window, and wring their necks. When somebody stops and sits there when they have the right of way, you do NOT know what they’re going to do. Are they not paying attention? Will they try to move whenever they wake up? Are they stupid? Or what?
More to the point, they’re urging you to break the law.
Y’know, I had exactly the same experience as my friend’s when my son was an infant in his car seat. I’d picked up the husband from Sky Harbor. We had to turn left out of terminal 2 to go west on the airport’s weird little ring road, which for some reason was bumper-to-bumper. Guy stops his car, holding up the traffic behind him, and motions me cheerfully to cross in front of him. I couldn’t see the oncoming traffic in the outside lane but, being a dumb kid, naively drove out because, after all, this guy here is grinning dopily and waving that it’s OK to pull out. The guy coming up beside him walloped me, of course…
Naturally, I got a ticket for pulling out in front of the poor wretch who hit me.
And just the other day I almost hit a woman under similar circumstances.
On Phoenix’s Central Avenue just north of AJs, there’s a fancy new signal that the city put in to accommodate the growing restaurant empire in the ultragentrified area just north of Camelback. Four large globes strung overhead, this array turns red every time a pedestrian hits its button, stays red not long enough for anyone over 25 to get all the way across five lanes, then starts flashing red. While it’s flashing, you’re supposed to drive with caution through the crosswalk, preferably without running down any pedestrians or their dogs.
Guy ahead of me is in a Toyota Highlander, a behemoth that you can’t see around even from my Sienna, which is pretty far off the ground and fairly massive itself.
He’s already proven himself to be a nitwit…in the fast lane puttering along like he’s out for a Sunday drive.
I’ve been stuck behind him for a couple of miles and am fully fed up with him. He stops on the red and the pedestrian ambles across the street. The light starts to flash on & off, and he just STANDS there. I figure he hasn’t read the sign that says you can move on flashing red after the nuisance pedestrian has gotten out of your line of fire.
The light shuts off altogether, but he’s still gathering wool. By now I’m mightily annoyed, because he’s not the first nitwit who has blocked my progress down Central on this trip. The car that he’s been pacing (by way of blocking all the traffic backing up behind him in the fast lane) moves on.
So I start to pull into the right lane, which is clear, and because I’m pissed and because I’m going to want to turn left into AJ’s — which will require me to cut the dunce off within a block and a half — I floor it. With no seats in the back and its handy little six-banger, the Sienna is relatively light and can take off from a standing start…shall we say, promptly. Which it does…
…just as some woman turns left in front of me!
Shee-ut!
Life goes into slow motion, providing plenty of time to think. I jam on the brakes and steer to the right into the west-bound side street, which thank God has no oncoming traffic. The ABS brakes are pretty amazing: the car does NOT skid and not only that, it maintains some degree of steerability. Amazingly, it does let me steer out of the woman’s way.
Fortunately she saw me bearing down on her and jammed on her brakes, too, so we managed to evade each other.
Oh well. It’s nice to know, in an ironic way, that even an old guy with 80-odd years of experience with the morons of this world falls for the “Let Me Do You a Favor” gambit…
Yay! Choir’s Back!
So today we have an all-day choir workshop, a shindig that’s fun, tiring, and sometimes challenging, followed by one of our annual potluck dinners. Then tomorrow the regular choir season starts. Hooray! I love it!
Our beloved director is back despite some fairly challenging surgery over the summer. He seems none too much the worse for wear. Two of our other favorites also each enjoy ead their own Adventures in Medical Science over the summer…ain’t life fun? We have eight new people, a passel of professional and near-professional singers, and plenty of younger folks. All of which makes for an awesome group.
The choir is going to perform at Carnegie Hall in the spring. Wish I could go with them. But of course I couldn’t possibly afford a plane trip and several days of food and lodging in New York City. Even if I could, there’s no way on God’s Green Earth that I would subject myself to the bureaucratic bullying required to get on a commercial airliner today.
One elderly woman in the church — a very sweet and nice lady — tried to take a flight across the country. She was in a wheelchair. An obvious terrorist, eh? The TSA singled her out, harassed her mercilessly, would not let her through to her gate, parked her in the middle of a concourse, and left her there. By then I had already decided that I would never ride a commercial plane again; that just confirmed my feeling. If I can’t get there by car, I don’t go.
LOL! And since my car is now too decrepit to leave the city and I’m too lazy to do battle with a rental car company, that means I don’t go much of anywhere.
It’s ironic, because I joined this choir largely because I wanted to travel with them. They regularly do international tours. The year I joined they were slated to go to Italy, and I had a job: I really wanted to go on that trip. That was the year of 9/11. The State Dept was warning Americans to stay out of Italy and the south of France, many of the choir members were nervous about flying,, and the director decided discretion was the better part of valor.
By the time the next opportunity came along, I was unemployed and not about to spend any of my tightly pinched pennies on something that wouldn’t keep the roof over my head.
Oh well. There are better things than gallivanting around a world you’ve already seen several times.
Speaking of gallivanting, now that the oven-like skies are cooling a bit, I’ve GOT to get some exercise. The bike’s tires again dissolved in the garage’s heat, so those will have to be expensively repaired or replaced. Once the thing is working, though, I can get around the North Central district a ways, which burns a few calories. Really should go back to the mountain, but I can’t think of many things that bore me more than trudging up and down a crowded, overused mountain park trail. There are just too many people at North Mountain now. And you can’t get a place to park at Squaw Peak now at any time of day.
SDXB discovered a nice mountain park in Glendale, which seems to be better maintained — or less thumped by crowds — than the Phoenix parks. Trouble is, it’s a bit of a drive. That makes it hard for me to work up the ginger to traipse over there, especially since you have to navigate a freeway to get to the place. Another innocent driver was shot to death on the 51 here — just driving along minding her own business when some shitheads started pursuing her and, when they caught up, shot her in the head. So my feeling is, unless you have bullet-proof glass, stay off the freeways.
Oh well. Time to go! The nice thing about a church is that it leads you to contemplate something more positive than real life. 😉