Banging on Death’s Door at Crime Central

January 9, 2016January 3, 2016 by funny

Ohhhhhh gawd! This damn cold is hanging on like glue. Haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in four or five nights — wake up choking and gagging about once every two hours.

Along about 2:30 this morning I was already laying awake, gasping for air, when Cassie uttered the infamous, ominous “whuf?” sound. It is a dog utterance familiar to any companion of a German shepherd. It means, in rough translation, “huh? Whazzat?”

In the German shepherd, “whuf?” has a slightly more nuanced meaning: “If that’s what I think it is, I’m gonna rip its throat out.” Should the cause of the “whuf?” be followed by another suspicious sound, motion, or anything else, the next step can be to explode into action.

Corgis also may ask “whuf?” but they’re a lot less likely to go ballistic if they don’t like the answer. In Cassie’s case, if her suspicions are confirmed, she’ll try to bark the cause to death, but she will not attempt to rip it apart. At least, not in any proactive manner.

Dying, I growled back, “It’s just me. Go back to sleep.” Before I could pull the covers back over my miserable head, though, I spotted the cause of her inquiry: Bright lights flashing in the backyard.

A cop helicopter came roaring up and parked over my house. Holy sh!t, I thought he was gonna land on the roof! He couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet off the ground. He was glaring his spotlight all over the front, side, and back yards, the alley, everywhere.

Here, thought I, we go again. Got up to check that the doors were locked. Yea verily, yesterday being a 70-degree day, I’d left the front door open. Security screen with its special drill-proof uncrackable bullet-proof deadbolt was locked, though. So was the door to the garage.

Unpacked the Ruger from its hiding place. Damn thing hasn’t been cleaned since the Garage Invasion episode, nor have I practiced at the range with it. It being unlikely the current perp was in the house or was about to get into the house (at 2:30 one forgets one has left the German shepherd-sized dog door open…), I decided I was too sick to wrestle the dogs off the bed, herd them and me into the office, and barricade us behind the locked office door. Put the gun where I could reach it and went back to bed.

I really need to keep that pistol in the bedroom, except it would be too, too easy for the burglar to find it there. Wish I had some sort of throwaway pistol that wouldn’t represent a major loss if it was stolen.

Swarm of cops — including police SUVs — frolicked by the light of the copter. They danced around for 15 or 20 minutes.

Eventually, exit the helicopter. Squad wagons hung around for awhile, then left. I went back to bed.

Dog head pops up again: new light. Get up, peer out again: From the west side of the house, a spotlight is aimed into the front yard of my neighbor across the street. Possibly headlights — couldn’t see around my house’s west wall and wasn’t about to go out to investigate. But the light was not aimed down Pokey Lane: it definitely was beaming steadily at my neighbor’s front yard, which unlike my house doesn’t have a lot of shrubbery. This lasted till I gave up and went to back to bed.

It’s a wonderful life. Or something like that.

Fighting the Joys of the Golden Years

January 2, 2016 by funny

One of the delights of old age is that you can’t find anything unless it’s sitting in its accustomed spot. If you put ANYTHING down where you don’t usually put it down, you might as well have taken it out to the alley and tossed it in the garbage can. Ah yes. The joys of your golden years…

I just bought these gadgets to fight back said joys. How kewl is this?

It’s a set of FOUR radio-activated squawking doohickeys that you can attach to things you’re apt to lose. As soon as the package gets here, one of them is going right on the key ring (assuming the key ring isn’t permanently lost by the next Wednesday, when Amazon promises to deliver it). The other three are going to get Velcroed to phone extensions.

To what, you ask, to we owe this $30 pleasure?

Well, I’ve been sick as a proverbial dog since the 29th — that’s how long it’s been since I’ve gone out of the house. Most of the time has been spent literally sick in bed. Today was the first in four days since I’ve felt like walking around the block.

Normally when I come in the house, I stick the keys in the lock to my office. Take note of that, because…

Once you get past the age of about 60 or 65, if you don’t put the small incidental junk of life down in your accustomed places, you cannot find things. That’s because when you don’t put things down in the same place every single time, you can’t remember were you put it!

That is not an exaggeration. Ask any old bat and they’ll tell you.

Keys and phones are the bane of my life.

So this afternoon is beautiful and today is the first day I’ve felt well enough to move around. Wanted to take the doggies for a stroll. Went to get the keys out of the office door and, wouldn’tcha know it: no keys.

Searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and could NOT find them. Finally in a moment of desperation, I called my son. Sometimes I can look right straight at something and not see it, so there was an outside chance that a fresh pair of eyes could find the lost keys.

Making a call like this is never a jolly thing to do: he does not like his days off interrupted by frantic appeals from his enfeebled mother, who was crazy enough before she started to lose her marbles and who now drives him bats. Unhappily, he agreed to come over later — much later — to help me look

Beside myself with frustration and anger, I walked into the kitchen, glanced at the fridge, and remembered…hm…sometimes I carelessly drop the keys in with the dogs’ leashes and collars, which are stored in a basket atop the refrigerator. I didn’t think I’d taken the dogs out since last Tuesday. But checked anyway, on the off-chance.

And lo! There were the keys, right where I’d dropped them, without a second thought.

Those doohickeys would have saved me about 15 minutes of increasingly frantic searching plus a disagreeable phone call to my unsympathetic son.

Just you wait, kid. One day you’ll be 70, too…

Do you realize that when he’s seventy I’ll be 104?

Oh, God. Let us sincerely hope not…

Google, GET YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY BUTT!!!!!

January 1, 2016January 1, 2016 by funny

US_Capitol_Building_at_night_Jan_2006 — This?…

How can I do without being spied on by Google at every damn turn? Let me COUNT the ways!!!!!

Really, the invasion of privacy that company inflicts should be prohibited by federal law. It should be effing ILLEGAL to track you around the Internet and track every one of your correspondents, too.

In fact, if Google were a government agency, it would have to get a subpoena to engage in the kind of spying into our personal lives that it does routinely. The reason it gets away with it? It’s a corporation. Because the Founding Fathers could no more have envisioned a world dictated by computer technology than they could have imagined taking a stroll on the moon, it never occurred to them to extend constitutional protections against overweening government to the real government that one day would evolve.

That would be the corporate shadow government, the one that dictates how we live, what we eat, where we work, how much we’re paid, whether we can borrow money and at what rate, whether we can insure ourselves against financial ruin in the event of accident, sickness, or natural disaster…actually, when you think about it, the one that dictates just about every aspect of our daily lives.

This morning I RSVP’ed to an upcoming meeting of a writer’s group I belong to. This group happens to have a Meetup.com site. And Meetup.com is synced with — who else? Google, of course. Within seconds after RSVPing that I would attend, in came an email informing me that Google has automatically installed a notice of the meeting in one of my several Google calendars (all of them, for all I know!) and that it will be sending me an email reminder. Lucky me! Here was a wonderful new G-service!

God damn it. Now I had to get into not one, not two, but three G-mail accounts and disable the damn calendars’ automatic notification. Yet another electronic time-suck. Really: do you need your time wasted that way? I sure don’t, and I’ll bet you don’t, either.

If I wanted Google Calendar to pester me with email reminders, I would proactively ask it to do so. The reason I don’t is that I tried Google Calendar and found it to be an endless hassle and annoyance. Annoyance annoyance ANNOYANCE! I do not WANT to be binged, pinged, and emailed for every deep breath I’m about to take. I don’t WANT Google to record every meeting I attend and every meeting I decline to attend.

So I quit using Google Calendar. I use iCal, which a) is resident on my machine and does not require me to go out on the Net to enter events, b) is easier to control, and c) can be persuaded not to make you crazy. I haven’t used Google Calendar in years.

Wouldn’t you think that would tell them something?

But ohhh no! Willy nilly, whether you love their tool or hate it, they’re going to push it in your face. That’s because they have THEIR corporate face pushed up your butt.

So why, you ask, do I use Gmail at all? No Gmail, no nuisance “calendar,” eh?

Well, because…

• I own a business and need a business address separate from my personal address.
• That business needs two “addresses,” one for the publishing enterprise and one for the editorial business.
• And I have a G-mail address that I use when forced to provide an email address to people I do not wish to share my address with, and to organizations that I believe are going to spam me.
• If you own a small business and can’t afford your own server and an in-house IT team to run it, you don’t have much choice but to use Google. It is, in effect, the only game in town, and because of that, it’s coercive.

One of the biggest mistakes this country has made in recent history was to defang the anti-trust laws. And Google is a prime example of the reason those laws are necessary and should never be watered down.

Consider the aspects of our lives this corporation has its fingers in:

Gmail owns my thermostat, which sends them data (presumably stored someplace) about the amount of electric power I use, the number of hours per day I use the power, and the time of day I use it. Harmless? Maybe. But that’s none of anybody’s business!

Gmail evidently owns Meetup.com, which it markets to just about every volunteer and social group in the country. Every time a group sends out an invite with an RSVP, Google collects data on the group and on every member in the group: who RSVPed and, by extension, who did not RSVP. What groups I belong to and which of their meetings I choose to attend are none of anybody’s business!

Google watches your Web searches, evidently recording those, too, since it never seems to forget what sites you’ve visited in the past. None of anybody’s business!

Google publishes pictures of your home on the Internet, complete with specifics about its location and clearly showing where the doors and windows are, simplifying burglars’ lives. With a vengeance, none of anybody’s business!

Google owns Motorola Mobility, which has to do with your Android phone. How much information that’s none of anybody’s business are they collecting from that?

Google owns YouTube (which, we might add, it has nicely broken). It knows what videos you watch and which you post to your websites. None of anybody’s business!

Come to think of it, Google knows all about what you write on your websites. Of course. What you choose to post to the Internet by default becomes everybody’s business. But that’s about it.

Google owns 180 companies, many of which have reason and capacity to collect and store data about you, your comings, and your goings. It may very well be the largest spy network on the planet.

Soon it will be producing electric cars, which will track and record all your movements about your city, town, and country. Those movements are already being tracked to a degree if you have a newer vehicle that’s “connected” to the Net. But when you’re driving a Google car, bank on it: every trip to the grocery store, every trip to your mother-in-law’s, every visit to your paramour or to the local whorehouse is going to be seen and recorded.

And why is this legal? Why has intrusion into our daily lives become so routine we sheeple hardly even notice it? Pretty obvious, isn’t it: the other 99% of us can’t afford to buy Congressmen and Senators, that’s why.

When corporate America can buy the government, folks, it is the government. If you’re not mad about that, you sure as hell should be!

Images:
U.S. Capitol at night. David Iliff. GNU Free Documentation License.Patio at Googleplex. Jijithecat. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Round-up: Too sick to dream up a title edition

December 31, 2015December 31, 2015 by funny

Many thanks to Donna Freedman for the giveaway she’s running around the 30 Pounds/4 Months cookbook! Go on over to Surviving and Thriving and sign up — it’s easy! And you’ll get a chance to read some of her handsomely written posts, while you’re at it.

Earlier this year I remarked on the absurd cost disparity between men’s and women’s personal grooming products. Well, “pink” pricing goes way beyond shaving cream and face lotion. Like…a $20 price hike for a child’s scooter painted pink, and a $5 gouge for a back brace labeled “for women.”

If there was ever any doubt that a certain faction in Western civilization wishes to keep women in their place, this report should remove it. That not enough to convince you? Try this one.

In the Department of Dollars, a friend of mine is trying to persuade me to put about half my retirement savings into an annuity and let him manage the rest of it. I’ve been putting him off politely, because I’m happy with the money management where I am, thank you very much, and because I don’t understand annuities in general well enough to make an informed decision. Mostly, I’m wary of the costs, which he hasn’t detailed, and I’m not happy at the prospect of having a large chunk of my money tied up in an instrument that’s difficult (if not impossible) to get out of. So I appreciated this excellent, clear description of annuity pro’s and cons.

I’m not a Yuccie, but I do covet this car! Luckily, the cravings of an eccentric 70-year-old academic are unlikely to plant the Kiss of Death on Toyota’s pride and joy. In this part of the world, you need at least a ton of metal between you and your fellow homicidal drivers. So the next Dog Chariot is likely to be a Ram 1500, since Toyota has discontinued the Venza. But…how cool IS it!

At year’s end, Revanche counts her blessings. Possibly the sub-text to this amiable post is the fact that those of us whose families have been in the US for several generations haven’t much of a clue to how good daily life really is here.

In the mood for a mystery? Here is a truly bizarre story.

And on that strange note, I’m taking myself, the dogs, and the worst cold of 2015 back to bed!

Happy New Year!

Make Some Crackers

December 30, 2015 by funny

So here I am at death’s door. I’ve caught the horrid cold that’s going around, quite a nasty one, we’re told. Today I’ve got such colorful laryngitis that I can barely croak out a sentence. The dogs and I have been loafing in bed all day…and it doesn’t seem to have helped much.

Along about noon, I was really hungry and wanted something to eat that didn’t entail a lot of cooking. Specifically: the other day I picked up a gorgeous piece of Camembert at Trader Joe’s. Wanted to eat that with some wine and side trimmngs. But I didn’t have any crackers, and I sure didn’t feel like waiting three or four hours for a loaf of bread to bake.

Depressed. Hungry…. Then I recalled that some years ago I made some crackers. Yeah: in the oven. They were easy, and the result was pretty tasty.

Thrashed around, found a recipe, and discovered that yes! They are easy. And they take all of 6 minutes to bake.

Why not? It sounded a lot better than driving through traffic, parking, tromping around a grocery store, standing in line, unparking, and driving through some more traffic.

Here’s the trick:

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Lay a sheet of aluminum foil or parchment on a large baking sheet; place the pan in the oven to heat.

Combine 1/2 cup water with 1/3 cup olive oil (or, if you prefer, melted butter) in a small bowl or measuring cup.

Place 1 1/2 cups flour in a larger bowl. Stir in 1 teaspoon baking powder and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Add a flavoring, if you like — I happen to have a rosemary plant in the yard, so minced up a few rosemary leaves, but I think you could add just about anything you please. Mix the dry ingredients together to blend well.

Make a well in the center and add the water & oil, a little at a time, stirring together to form a soft, scruffy dough. Flour a pastry board, toss the dough on it, and knead it briefly — three or four times, prob’ly. Divide the dough into several pieces (four to six, I’d say). Cover with a towel while you continue.

Reflour the pastry board, and dust a rolling pin with a little flour (if you don’t have a rolling pin, you can use a liter soda-pop bottle filled with soda or water). Place a piece of dough on the board and roll it out nice and thin. Remember, these are CRACKERS, not hamburger buns. You want them to come out crisp.

Cut the rolled dough into pieces, in the shape and sizes desired (doesn’t have to be fancy). If you wish, use a pastry brush to spread a thin layer of olive oil over the top. Sprinkle with a little coarse sea salt, if desired. Take a fork and poke the dough all over to give it a perforated effect.

Remove the hot pan from the oven. Sprinkle some cornmeal (if you have it) over the aluminum foil and lay the sliced dough pieces flat. Pop the pan into the oven, set the oven timer for six minutes, and voila! Roll out the rest of the dough blobs the same way, one at a time.

I had two pans going at once, one on each rack. Made about 20 or 25 crackers in all of maybe 20 minutes. It was simple, and the result was as fancy as anything you can get at Whole Foods!

Downsizing: Is It Worth the Cost?

December 29, 2015 by funny

Recently Money Beagle ran a guest post whose author suggested that moving to smaller digs may not be the best choice for all of us as we fade into our dotage. It touches on a thought I’ve been ruminating on: the question of whether I should downsize now, while a) I can afford the costs and b) I still have the health and physical strength to engineer moving to another house. Actually, the question is whether downsizing is a good idea at all.

My house has four bedrooms. It sits on a large lot, almost a quarter of an acre. It has a large pool and a forest of trees. How much does one little old lady need to air-condition, heat, clean, water, trim, and maintain? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to move to, say, an apartment in Scottsdale? Or one of those trendy lofts downtown? Or a nice single-story patio home with no yard to take care of?

Or maybe at my age, with about 15 years of tolerable life remaining — at the outside — maybe it’s time to move into a life-care community?

Well. I wonder. Let’s consider the costs.

First, to sell this house:

6% off the top to the Realtor (the better ones in these parts get 8%): $16,500, on my $275,000 shack
Recording fees: $150
Escrow fees & title insurance: $2,500
Prorated tax: up to $2,500
Termite inspection: $300
Home inspection: $300

That doesn’t include a home warranty for the buyer or any blandishments you offer, such as a flooring allowance or a home warranty. Nor does it count the costs of repairs and upgrades at the new digs — how many of us have had to replace a water heater or a garage door within six months of a move? And do you really want to live with that harvest gold Formica countertop for the rest of your life?

If you’re at the age where downsizing makes sense, you’re past the time of life when you can pack up all your possessions and bribe your friends with beer to help you stuff your furniture and boxes into a U-Haul and then drag the stuff into a new house. That means you’ll need to hire a professional moving company, an expensive transaction: $2,000 for a local move; cross-country, $8,000. You could, of course, hire an estate sale company to yard-sale all your earthly possessions and then buy new furniture when you get to wherever you’re going: it costs about $10,000 to furnish an entire house. Probably less if you buy Ikea junque, but again: at “downsizing” age, who wants to live with Ikea’s kid-engineered throw-away gear?

Let’s see what we have here… Total cost of selling and moving: $22,250 (a conservative estimate). That’s 9% of the property’s likely sale value.

My house is paid for. To avoid a mortgage, I’d have to use the net on the house sale to buy the new place. But that place will have to cost about $25,000 less than I can get for this one. Let’s imagine that for $250,000 I could find something I’d want to live in, located in a safe, middle-class area that is NOT a retirement tract like Sun City. I’ve but begun to pay…

Buyer’s closing costs and moving cost for a house purchased in cash go like this:

Close of escrow: $250
Title insurance: $1350
House inspection fees: $200 to $400
Recording fees for deed: $50
Title company closing fee: $400
Property transfer tax: up to $1,000
Attorney fee: $500
HOA transfer fee: $300 to $400 (n/a in my part of town, thank goodness)
Moving fee: $2,000

Total cost of buying the smaller house: $3,550.

Most places I’d want to live in cost upwards of $300,000 these days. That would require me to take out a mortgage. So to the ~$3550 in buyer’s closing costs, we can add the exorbitant cost of taking out a mortgage. To get into a $300,000 patio home I’d have to come up with at least $50,000, assuming I put down everything I net from my home’s sale. It’s unlikely that I could get a mortgage for a sum that small, but let’s pretend…

Lender discount points, about 1%: $500
Loan application fee: $500
Credit report fee: $85
Loan processing fee: $75 to $400
Document preparation fee: $50 to $250
Property appraisal: $400
Prepaid loan interest: Heaven only knows!
Insurance escrow: about $150
Tax escrow: about $1500

I’m not including flood insurance or a flood certification fee because you couldn’t pay me to buy in a flood zone. So the upfront cost of taking out a small mortgage would come to $3,785 — and that doesn’t count the cost of 15 to 30 years of interest payments. So… Cost of buying a smaller house in a more desirable part of the Valley, with loan: $3,550 + $3,785 = $7,335.

Cost of selling present home + moving van and workmen + buying a lesser house in cash: $27,800 – 28,150.
Cost of selling present home + moving van and workmen + buying a smaller house in a safer part of town: $35135 – 35,485.

Y’know… You could pay for a lot of lawn service and cleaning-lady visits for $35,485.

So let’s say you hire a cleaning lady because you’re feeling too frail to scrub, scour, vacuum, mop, and dust — I believe La Maya pays her housecleaner about $80 to $100 per visit (though her house is a thousand square feet bigger than mine). Xeric landscaping costs just $85 or $100 for monthly clean-up & grooming. Cleaning lady comes in a couple of times a month; that makes her cost $160 to $200. So routine maintenance of the existing manse would come to $300/month. The $35,485 it would cost you to downsize from a midsize tract house into a cottage would cover 118 months of routine house and yard maintenance, during which you would never have to raise a finger to clean or do yardwork. That’s almost ten years!

From one point of view, then, it would take around ten years to recover the cost of downsizing from a four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre lot with no neighbors sitting on top of me to a two- or three-bedroom apartment or townhouse in a rabbit warren, complete with HOA fees and politics.

Because I’m in the Salt River Project, my utility bills are low. Because I live in an old neighborhood, I have no HOA fees. Probably on average my total utility bills for electric, water, and gas run about $425 a month — less than that, really, because winter power and water bills are very low and in the summer, the cost of natural gas is nil. In a “better” neighborhood, I’d be in the Arizona Public Service district, where power bills are much higher. And many parts of Scottsdale and North Phoenix have no gas service, so the stove, water heater, and central heating run on expensive electricity. Utility bills in a smaller house could easily exceed what I’m paying here.

The pool costs about $40/month to run and maintain (exclusive of repairs). The yard guy: $85/month.

In a patio home, yard and pool maintenance costs would disappear, only to be replaced by a monthly HOA fee. From what I’ve seen at places I’ve looked at, $125 a month is not an unusual HOA charge. At Pebble Creek, for example, the HOA fee is $250 a month. For an ~~apartment~~…uh, condo…about $100 to $125 is probably average. So costs to live in the smaller place would probably be about the same as I pay here. The only real advantage would be fewer rooms to clean and less outdoor space to have to maintain.

So, if there’s no advantage in utility and maintenance savings, why spend $28,000 to $35,500 to move?

• It would be worth it if your neighborhood were deteriorating.

The opposite is happening here: this neighborhood, like the entire central city, is gentrifying apace. My neighbor sold her house — only 340 square feet larger than mine, on the same size lot — for $285,000. It hadn’t had a serious upgrade since it was built in 1971. The kids who bought it have spent months in renovation.

And, we might add, every other young couple and every other fix-and-flipper flocking to the ‘hood have done the same. If the slumlords to the west of Conduit of Blight get some help from the government, they could make a handy profit by condo-izing the deteriorating apartments that now front on the urbanite-friendly lightrail line, thereby getting rid of a major source of crime and rescuing the school that was overwhelmed and ruined when the city allowed the people warrens to go in. It’ll take some time before any such thing happens…but if it does, the property value increases we’re seeing now will look modest by comparison.

• It would be worth it if you wanted a zero-maintenance place where you can lock the door and take off for weeks and even months.

In Arizona, many ordinary houses meet that description. An intelligently designed xeriscape can look very nice and need almost no regular maintenance.

• It would be worth it if you lived in a place with a harsh climate.

Arizona’s summers are pretty fierce. On the other hand, for $40 a month plus occasional repairs, the pool makes the summer heat tolerable. Electric bills to power air-conditioning run about $230 a month, hardly enough to break you up in business. And again: at $40 + $230, the $35,485 would pay those bills for 10 years. How much are winter bills where it snows? Or where it’s foggy and chilly year-round?

• It would be worth it if your kids moved out of town and you wanted to live near them.

Maybe. Following the adult kids to some new locale can be a recipe for depression. Your grown children may not feel very invested in spending large amounts of time with you — except insofar as needed to obtain free babysitting services. Meanwhile, you’ve left behind friends who want to hang out with you, to say nothing of your favorite shopping, your church, your clubs, your cultural life, your beloved doctor, your competent dentist, the only hair stylist on the planet who can cut your hair the way you like it…

Overall, then, if your present home is in good repair and in a reasonably safe neighborhood with nearby shopping and lifestyle infrastructure, downsizing to a smaller place could represent not a savings in maintenance but a net loss, one that could extend over quite a few years…possibly to the end of your lifetime.

So: think twice before jumping into the downsizing pond.