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Most Expensive US Postal Service in the Country…

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Grrrrrrr! Our moronic City Parents and our clueless USPS mail carriers just cost me $75, plus $16 and change, plus about $20 I could’ve made selling the two books forked over to my demented neighbor.

For reasons unknown to anyone, the name of the road I live on was changed from the name the developer put on the plat map (let’s call it Nirvana Street) to Shangri-La Lane. As it happens, the road directly to the north is called Shangri-La Drive. The house numbers are the same.

As you can imagine, the opportunities for confusion are legion. 😀 At this time of year in particular, the Post Office employees get confused. They deliver mail addressed to Shangri-La Lane over to Shangri-La Drive, and vice versa. All the time.

The guy who lives on Shangri-La Drive in the house whose number corresponds to mine is a nice enough man who has been very ill for some years. Not all of the poor guy’s marbles are intact.

This is the gentleman who intercepted six months’ worth of credit-card statements from Macy’s, all addressed to me as plain as day, and threw them in the trash. I’d opened the account to get a dollar or two off of an already discounted little handbag, charged up all of about ten bucks, and forgot about it. Because I use my AMEX card for everything, I never thought about it again…until Macy’s sicced a collection agency on me.

So as you can imagine, I was not pleased. And even though I occasionally remind the postal carriers to try to get it right, the part-timers they hire at this time of year always get it wrong.

Along about the end of last month, I ordered two copies of a book Camptown Races has on the drawing board, so I could take them to display at the WVWW shindig last Saturday. These never showed up. Ordered one more and asked the printer to put a rush on it; got the thing just in time.

But now, two weeks later, the original order has never shown up. That’s 16 bucks down the drain, plus of course I didn’t have those to take with me to the chivaree. Since the one I did have sold instantly, it’s entirely possible that I could have sold the other two there; hence, we have a potential $36 down the drain.

The printer disgorged the post office’s tracking report, which showed they delivered it on December 2.

Yeah. I’ll bet they did: to Shangri-La Drive, not Lane.

So yesterday I walked over to the neighbors’ house and inquired as to whether the residents had seen my package. Mrs. Batshittsky answered the door — she really is a very sweet (and very beleaguered) lady — and said no, they hadn’t seen it. Eventually poor old Batshittsky himself came shuffling up the hall and stood there, cowering behind the Mrs.

He looked very sick — and kind of wild-eyed. I felt terrible for her. She has an awful lot to have to cope with…what a load to bear! Anyway, he clearly wasn’t competent to say what he’d seen or hadn’t seen, but I figured he’d probably relieved the post box of its mail while she was out running errands, so she had no idea what he could’ve thrown out.

So. No help there.

This morning I took the P.O.’s tracking report up the the Post Office. A full hour later… Yes. It took an hour of driving and standing in line and then standing at the counter waiting on a hapless and enormously overworked CSR to get an answer to the question of “where did you deliver this thing?”

At first, the CSR I reached after a half-hour wait in line said they could actually pinpoint the specific building where the carrier delivers a package. She then took the sheet of paper with the zillion-digit tracking number into the back of the building. It was a good twenty minutes before she resurfaced.

Well. No. They didn’t have a GPS doodad running on the day this was delivered. All she could tell me was that the carrier placed it in a mailbox.

Right. The Batshittsky mailbox. Not the Funny Farm mailbox.

I asked how much it would cost to rent a mailbox there. It’s very cheap — only about twenty bucks a year. I’d have to go to the back of the line to do that, though, because I’d need to be attended by one of the employees who could keyboard in the charges.

Uh huh. The line extended almost back to the door.

To pick up my mail from this illustrious institution, I would have to cross the new train tracks (where the signal will be red until sometime after the cows come home), make my way through a freight-train-length school zone, pass through an increasingly dangerous slum, and get out of my car in an area where I normally keep the car doors locked. And…really…do I want to put up with USPS customer service unto the end of time?

Possibly not.

So it was over to the mailbox place and kitsch store in the equally dangerous Albertson’s shopping center down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. There I rented a box from an exceptionally eccentric shopkeeper: $75 for six months.

That’s effing outrageous, of course. But…it’s right down the street — a three-minute drive. I can park directly in front, just two steps from the entrance, and the owners always keep their dogs tied outside next to the door. While I was there, one of them tried to remove a foot from a bum who walked by, so I figure that’s a good sign. Uh, I guess.

So to the $16 for the lost books we can add $75 for a mailbox to receive stuff I’d like to have NOT go to the Batshittsky Manse, for a total of $91 that this stupid little event has cost me. Add another $20 in missed opportunity to sell the absent books, and we’re over a hundred bucks.

{sigh}

Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to prove the package went where I believe it went? Then I could have told Mrs. B to keep her honored husband away from the mailbox — maybe she could rent a box and keep the key out of his reach? And I could have asked her to pay to replace the discarded books. And maybe she could pay the $75 I’m having to spend to keep her DH out of my mail.

There are a million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them…

Sales!

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InkslingersSo at yesterday’s Grand Celebration of our group’s 2015 Inkslinger’s anthology, I sold $25 worth of books! The sole print version of the first Fire-Rider collection, the sole print version of the whole Family at the Holidays series, and a copy of Slave Labor.

All of these were purchased by one guy, who seemed a little eccentric. When I remarked that reviews of the books would really be appreciated, he said, “Well, fourteen others are ahead of you.”

Yeah. Thanks, pal. Oh well.

While it’s cheering that someone would buy these things, even a guy who goes around buying self-published books just to make amateur writers feel good, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not making any money here.

Figure the time for just taking the things to the “market”: The event took place at a country club in Goodyear. It’s an hour’s drive one way; over two hours round trip. Then I sat around there for two hours. Twenty-five dollars divided by four hours comes to $6.25 an hour.

Somewhat under minimum wage.

When we factor in the uncountable number of hours entailed in writing, editing, formatting, and uploading the things to Amazon and the printer’s site, we’re in Negative-Number Neverland. Way, way in the Outback…

I was surprised the guy bought the copy of Fire-Rider, since Snowfall Press screwed up the trimming so badly that it really wasn’t salable.

Snowfall, as it develops, has a policy of not printing erotica. When they saw the contents of Family, they printed off a proof because I’d paid for it but had their guy call me and announce they wouldn’t print any more than that. Okay…you have a right to censor what other people write and publish — probably you’re the same sort of folks who think gay couples shouldn’t be allowed to buy wedding cakes at bakeries serving the public, too. So I was polite to the guy and he sounded relieved that I didn’t tell him what he deserved to be told.

However, in their Righteousness, they screwed up the printing of the other two books I’d sent over to prepare for this event: two copies of Slave Labor and a proof of Fire-Rider. They slopped the Slave Labor cover over so the spine wraps around to the front, and they trimmed the Fire-Rider book so badly that the back cover looks crooked, the 300+ pages are out of true, and the interior pages have about a two-inch gutter! It looks terrible.

So now that thing has to be reformatted for the new PoD vendor. I just checked the specs on the thing, thinking maybe I entered the wrong figures for the margins and gutter. But no: they’re exactly what they’re supposed to be.

That makes it very hard to believe anything other than that Snowfall deliberately screwed up those two books because they didn’t like the third one.

Mighty Christian of them, eh?

Anyway, all this causes one to wonder if the publishing endeavor is worth the effort. Unless we can get someone to buy these things and see some results by about the end of March, I think it will be time to sign back up for some more freshman comp courses. We’re running so far in the red now that the S-corp will be out of money by the end of first-quarter 2016.

Next week I’ll hire a marketing specialist to create and manage a Facebook Ads campaign for Fire-Rider. For the Racy Books, which can’t be advertised on FB, I’m advertising on this entertaining site and also probably will consign  to a distributor that targets romance readers. Both sites go direct to readers who enjoy these specific types of books.

Then I’ll have to reformat Fire-Rider for the new printer, format the second “boxed set,” and get Gary to create a cover for the Family boxed set, which will entail creating an ebook  cover based on the print cover I made for that thing.

Those tasks alone will entail hours and hours and hours of work — more than enough to fill up a week. So we’re looking at more 14-hour days, of which I grow mightily weary.

Hm. My roommate is about out of the shower. We have to run around to get to church this morning — she has to be at the early service, too, so presumably will fly out the door in about 15 minutes. Mercifully, I don’t have to sing until 10 a.m.

And so, to breakfast…

Slow down, you’re movin’ too fast…

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…Got to make
The mornin’ last.

Putting the brakes on the ambitious publishing enterprise, and they’re finally beginning to engage. It takes a long time to persuade an 18-wheeler to slow down…

So freaking tired of computers am I that I’ve developed a flinch reflex at the very thought of re-engaging The Machine.

Last night I mounted an entire month’s worth of Racy Books to Amazon — which is really only seven shorties but goodies. It’s the first set of books we wrote under the Roberta Stuart byline, two of them by moi and five by a writer who for a number of reasons can’t publicize her name. This lady is really a very good writer, with an actual — get this! — SENSE OF HUMOR. Her stories always have a mellow wit that makes them charming to read.

Assuming you like Racy Reading. 😉

Also got the second “boxed set” of six Fire-Rider books up. That really is a serious book; each of the three collections of six “books” apiece will be novel-length on its own.

So, with the design and bureaucracy done, all that’s left to do is click “Publish.” The plan is to “publish” (I use that work guardedly: to my mind, putting a book up on Amazon is more akin to “posting” than to “publishing”) one bookoid a week through December and into January. This gives us eight books each of which can be posted with a single click. So if I click “publish” each Tuesday, then each Wednesday a new bookoid should appear on Amazon.

In the meantime, I will try harder to figure out how to get Goodreads to work. It’s purely torture.

And I will try to mount a FaceBook advertising campaign, a prospect that makes me cringe. I may try to hire someone to do that, possibly from Problogger or Fiverr.

Hiring a pig in a poke from Fiverr also makes me cringe. But it occurred to me that there may be bloggers who know how to handle FaceBook — or at least are younger, more flexible, and techier than I am. So I think I’ll post an ad on the Problogger job board and then do a few searches at Fiverr.

If YOU know how to deploy FaceBook Ads, by the way (this will entail identifying the right demographics in technolanguage that FB can understand and use), I’m interested in talking with you! Leave a comment below with a functional email address in the little sign-in form above the comments box, and I’ll get in touch. The book that would be advertised at the outset is Fire-Rider, not the erotica.

In another few weeks, I may have a boxed set of “Family at the Holidays” available, which would then be worth putting money into for marketing. If the PoD guy comes through (he has not, so far), then we already have a print version of “Family.” Either of those could also be marketed on FaceBook, if it’s possible to identify adult audiences(!!) who want(!!) to read erotica.

How exactly you target those audiences without accidentally hitting some kids escapes me. For that reason, I’m very dubious about advertising the Camptown Races bookoids on Facebook.

At any rate, if I can hire someone to relieve me of some of the social media marketing torture, that would free up time a) to have a life, of all the outrageous things; b) to write some more copy; c) to manage design and production; and d) to take care of business, which has been sliding.

FireFox lately has been given to strange catastrophic crashes, which can on occasion crash my computer. And of course we know Wyrd loves nothing more than to crash, preferably taking your entire system down with it.

Whenever the system crashes while any Office programs are up, every file you had open at the time reloads in two versions: whatever was saved at the time the system went down, and a “recovery” file that may or may not contain the most recent data you entered. My system is set to auto-save every five minutes, so not much data is lost. However, if you have, say, seven files open on Wyrd (not unreasonable around here: I often move from file to file), you have to compare FOURTEEN files line by line to see what was lost and what can be saved. If the auto-save has more recent data, then you have to close the file you were working in and save the auto-save over it with the new filename. But sometimes this process causes the system to “forget” where the original file resides, so you have to figure that out — my computer contains literally thousands of data files, and I’ll tellya…some days it ain’t easy to find where a recovered file is supposed to go.

Well, one of the recent crashes took down the Excel file I’d built to transmit data to WonderAccountant, after QuickBooks converted itself into something I simply cannot use. Even she has a time with it — and she takes courses in Quickbooks!

So, after I realized I had neither the time nor the inclination to learn the entire new program that QuickBooks has mounted, I went back to recording credits and debits in Excel spreadsheets. This workbook I posted on DropBox for WonderAccountant’s delectation — she does my bookkeeping, and really, if the spreadsheet is set up correctly, all she should have to do is upload to the correct account.

Last night I discovered that during a recent crash, data was lost from this Excel workbook.

But SOME data was saved in another iteration of it, which resided in another directory on my terminal.

Recovering the data entailed opening both workbooks and comparing each spreadsheet, line by line by infuckingTERminable line, to determine a) which was most current and b) how to consolidate the data in one file.

And needless to say, this entailed not one but several fuckups. By 9 p.m. I was tearing my hair out by the roots! It took over four hours of this hateful process to straighten it out!

And that, my children, is why the old lady is coming to hate computers.

Really. It was so much easier when you just noted debits and credits in a real, paper book of blank spreadsheets.

And it’s why I need to find somebody else to mount and manage the marketing campaign. At this point, when I get up in the morning and think about having to wrestle with the computers again, I just cringe.

No wonder my stomach hurts!

Whenever I finish diddling away time with the hobby blog, then, I need to take the dogs for a walk; then bring them back here and go back out for another 2.6-mile tour by myself. That gets in about 3.6 miles a day (assuming I get time in a day for these hijinks), which helps a lot with the stress and is helping to bring the weight back down.

But yes…”get time in the day…” As dawn cracked, the phone rang: pool guy. He wants to come over between ten and noon to fix the leak in the pump. Let us hope Gerardo is right, that the leak is just from a gasket. Thanks to Gerardo, the guy is going to have a challenge trying to upsell  me to a new pump, which will set me back a couple thousand bucks. Not looking forward to that exchange…

Anyway, carving that chunk out of my morning means no doggy & human walks: it’s already after 9:00 a.m. Walking a mile with the dogs, who have to sniff every blade of grass and lunge at every passing dog or cat, takes a half an hour. And the 2.6-mile junket requires 45 minutes.

It was very cold this morning — by Arizona standards — and so at 6:00 a.m. I decided to wait until it warmed up. It usually takes this pool guy days to respond to a phone call, so I figured I’d have today to myself. Not so… Now we’ll have to wait until after the guy gets here and lightens my pocketbook some more before we can go out. By then I’ll be fully engaged in something else.

The roommate left before dawn to fly to New York for an audition. She’s an opera singer. So the dogs and I have the Funny Farm to ourselves for a day. That means there are quite a few things I need to do by way of cleaning up the place and making it more livable for her. Those could easily fill up the day.

Roommate: I haven’t written about the roommate because she hadn’t announced to all and sundry that she’s leaving her several jobs in town. She’s one of the paid professional singers with the choir, a very lovely mezzosoprano who sings alto in our rowdy crowd. She also teaches at the Great Desert University and is enrolled in her second master’s degree program out there. Well, her husband got a job in the Bay Area, so she’s having to drop everything and move up there.

She didn’t want to walk away from the teaching job (some day she hopes to get an academic position, and so there’s a bridge she doesn’t want to burn), nor was she happy to leave the other contract gigs she has here in town. But they realized that, given the cost of housing in and around San Francisco, even on DH’s very substantial new salary, they couldn’t afford to maintain two dwellings even for a couple of months. So they sold their house here, rented a place in the City, and she is now couch-cruising to fill in the gap.

Actually, she’s got my guest bedroom, which is a lot better than a sofa. Except there’s no bed in there, so the poor thing is sleeping on one of those blow-up mattresses. All of which makes me feel mighty guilty for not having bothered to buy a bed for that room. It would involve hiring a moving man to move the impossibly heavy TV armoire, which is no longer used for TV but is full of linens & things, and that exceeds the hassle factor that I feel like dealing with. So does purchasing and installing a bed in there, come to think of it.

Anyway, it’s kind of nice to have a human being around. I mean, dogs are charming company and all, but…well, they are dogs. She’s not around much, because she has a hectic schedule that usually keeps her out from morning till late at night. Yet a few conversations have been had, and that is nice.

If it were possible to be sure you could find a person as quiet and considerate as this one, renting out a room would seem like a very good idea. It would provide some company and obviate the need to actually work. But I’m pretty certain this one is rare as diamonds.

🙂

Baaad Human! Bad BUDGET-BUSTING Human!

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So after two glorious months of running way under budget, I seem to have decided to make up for lost time: along comes an $1818 bill from AMEX.

[Gasp!]

Studying the charges, we wonder what have we done to deserve this? Hmmmm…

$147 at the Costco: nothing out of the ordinary. That’s the start-of-the-month stock-up, and it’s under $200. You  hafta allow that getting out of Costco for less than two hundred bucks is a rare accomplishment.

Forty-six bucks to El Bravo, our favorite Mexican restaurant. Whaa? I must have paid both tabs.

Williams-Sonoma: $276.90!!!! Holy shee-ut. Well, that’s the set of stainless — two sets, actually, since W-S only sells sets in four place settings. Okay. I’ve been well pleased with those, though. In fact, I think I like them better than the silver I so highly resented having to put away, thanks to the politically correct “improvements” in dishwasher design. And I’ll tell ya: $277 would pay for about three forks in that Christofle, now locked in a closet somewhere.

Leslie’s Pool Supply: $70. I have no idea. Presumably supplies of some sort.

Leslie’s Pool Supply: $120. Ugh. I bought a lifetime supply of chlorine shock treatment, having grown weary of driving over there every time I turn around. The algae was coming back, thanks to my neglect. Pool looks darned good right now! 😉

All Saints Episcopal Church: $100. Donation in the form of a silent auction purchase.

All Saints Episcopal Church: $90. Lordie! I thought we were required to buy a ticket for the dinner at the auction, at which we were to sing. Turns out many choir members did not. Apparently it wasn’t a requirement at all.

[Redacted]: $75. Christmas gift for son.

Shane: $78. Not the most expensive hair stylist in town, but getting there.

Otro Cafe: $24. Lunch with a friend. Probably should’ve invited her to lunch here…

So how do these add up? Let’s assume the $70 Leslie’s bill was something I couldn’t avoid — delete that. All the rest: highly optional.

Et voila: $732 in unnecessary or extraordinary expenses. That’s just about the amount the budget has been busted.

Is there a frugalist message here? Probably more than one…

 1. Reconsider the wisdom of buying lifetime supplies of stuff, even if it’s something you will use over time and will have to buy over time. Ten or twenty bucks once a month will not bust the budget the way a $120 bill can.

 2. Stay out of the goddamn restaurants!!!!!!!!!

 3. Make do with what you have.

 4. Do not run with a high-powered social set whose members can afford to drop $190 without blinking. When you are pore folks, know your place and stay in it. 😉

A Night of Mares…

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haywain-1What a weird night.

Had a great time at the Thanksgiving party yesterday afternoon and evening. Got home not very late, around 9 or 10 p.m. Fed the dogs, let them out, went to bed.

Along about 4:30 a.m., Ruby started twitching in her sleep. Pretty clearly she was having a dogmare. Eventually she settles down and I think now it’s back to sleep.

And so it seemed, for about five minutes. Then she begins to utter little hmh! noises.

This dog’s vocalizations are eerily human. They often have exactly the intonation that human speech would have, with question marks and exclamation points and periods and dot-dot-dots… This noise sounds just like the hmh! you and I would make when contemplating something that mildly surprises and interests, or some set of facts that contradicts an assumption.

Sometimes if I ignore her when she wakes in the middle of the night, she’ll go back to sleep. But no. This keeps on. Then she goes down to the end of the bed, where they get lifted on and off.

It was late when they got fed, so I figure she probably needs to go out. But once she’s on the floor, it becomes evident that “let me out” is not what “hmh!” means. The instant her feet hit the ground, she goes BATSHIT!

She roars down the hall, barking furiously. Cassie follows her. I hobble after them.

Nothing in the house. She’s at the back door. None of the motion-sensitive lights are on, so I figure it’s probably OK to open the door and let her out.

She flies out the door IN FULL HOWLING BAY!

Yes. Corgis can make a sound a lot like baying. It’s the final level before they start to scream, and this particular specimen of corgidom does scream when something gets her mad enough.

She chases into the yard in an utter frenzy, and now Cassie kicks in and she charges out there emitting her fullest-throated make-my-day! bark. They are both ready for bear, and Ruby apparently thinks the bear is in the yard.

I run barefooted into the yard behind them, thinking damn, I should’ve at least grabbed a steak knife out of the kitchen drawer. I’m unarmed and not what you’d call dressed. The only thing between me and whateveritis would be two twenty-pound shepherd dogs.

But once we rounded the corner, it became obvious that no one and nothing was in the yard. Apparently no one was in front, either, because both dogs came to call (they will not, if they’re seriously distracted) and Ruby quieted down as soon as she patrolled the side yard and found no threat.

So THAT was weird.

Back to bed. Back to sleep.

Between the waning hours of night and the waxing hours of dawn, it was my turn to have a vivid dream. Worthy of a Twilight Zone episode it was, fully plotted, set in a clearly developed scene, even filmed in color. A sort of Hieronymus Bosch color, but unimistakably not the usual dreamtime b/w.

That was even weirder. First the dog has a nightmare that persuades her something real is out there. Then I have a nightmare that persuades me I’m trapped in a 1960s television show.

It’s a great story idea, though. I may try to write it up. Very strange.

A Thanksgiving Series! Just in Time…

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Just in time for your Thanksgiving trip to the family homestead, we finally got all eight installments of The Family at the Holidays posted to Amazon! It’s really a fun little set of sexy romances, perfect for whiling away the time in airports, planes, or the passenger seat of the car.

In Julio, Andrea, and Karyn, one of the brothers discovers the girl next door. And then another girl next door! And finally, back at the ranch, the family patriarch and matriarch enjoy their lifelong love…and a little surprise.

Pack all eight of these sweet Thanksgiving tidbits into your Kindle and make passing the travel time a lot more fun!

Happy Thanksgiving!