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One of Those ARRRRGGGH!@#$%^ Days

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Have you ever noticed how everything always happens at once? Wonder why that is…

This has been one of those uphill-haul days, wherein every single damnfool thing you want to do has to be done the hard way, and you have a LOT of damnfool things to do.

That’s because you’ve left the damnfool things to do another day and, yes, this is another day.

I cruise back into town after this morning’s networking group meeting, having heard an excellent presentation and been the target of a rousing pep talk, after the meeting, by the presenter himself. I’m hot to get to work and full of ideas. But first…

But first, I  have to go by the electric supply house and pick up the lamp that was left to be rewired by way of repairing Ruby’s latest cord-eating depredation. It looks nice, and they charge me less than a quarter of what the last predator charged.

But…

Yeah. You get what you pay for. Twelve dollars and change does not enough wire to reach the outlet purchase.

The damn wire is about four inches too short.

I call. They agree to rewire it.

But this entails trying to get across Conduit of Blight Boulevard AGAIN. As you may recall, the city is building a ridiculous lightrail line up Conduit of Blight, making the entire corridor nonnavigable and rerouting rush-hour traffic through the middle of our neighborhood. You cannot get across Conduit of Blight at Main Drag South at all. So you have to drive up to Main Drag North, taking you way afield of the electric outfit, or else you have to drive two miles to the south and one mile back north  — three miles out of your way — to get around the construction horrors. Make that three miles x two, if you have any designs on coming home.

Either way, the environmentally chummy public works project converts a four-mile drive into a six-mile drive. One way.

I decide to drive up to the Depot and just buy a damn extension cord. There I pay almost nine bucks for a six-foot piece of overkill.

While I’m there, I return the hose connector that the very nice sales clerk told me was a set — male and female — and that was not. Whatever it was, it was not what I wanted. It was unusable.

I hate shopping in Home Depot. Hate it hate it hate it HATE. IT. Today there’s not a soul, not even an incompetent wretch who has no idea what she’s talking about, to help. I find the paint roller I need (only because past safaris have taken me into the Veldt of Paint) but have a bitch of a time finding the extension cords, which are nowhere near where two of the worthy employees pointed me.

When I get the eventually found extension cord home and discombulate its intricate packaging, I see it has a connection that would accommodate enough plugs to light a half-a-dozen Christmas trees.

Come ON, guys. This is for ONE freaking LIVING ROOM LAMP. And I have to tape it to the floor, the table, and the wall so as to keep Ruby from eating the lamp cord for the fourth time. A big honking clunky umpteen-plug connection does not lend itself to discretion. Or to transparent packing tape.

Two choices now: Take the lamp back to French Electric and wait another week to get it rewired again, or take the lamp cord back to HD and try to find one that works.

I believe the Depot does not have regular lamp-cord sized extensions, because two HD Dudes tried to help me find the same. We all failed.

Finally I decide to check the local TruValue and, if I can find a normal 1950s-style lamp cord with one count it (1) plug on the end, I will keep the short cord on the lamp and defer returning the ridiculous extension to a day when I’m in the vicinity of an HD for some other constructive reason.

Over to the TruValue. Yes, they have such a thing: four dollah.

Climbing into my car, it occurs to me that Home Depot is upselling by quite deliberately NOT STOCKING lamp-sized extension cords.

It is hot, and it is humid. By hot we’re talkin’ upwards of a hundred degrees.

As per usual, every moron in the county gets in front of me on the road. How the HELL do they KNOW when I’m out?

The last time Ruby ate the living-room lamp cord, I moved another lamp in there and used transparent packing tape to stick the cord to the inside of the table leg, the floor, and the wall between the lamp and the light plug. This a) worked and b) was very easy.

Not so today.

It may a) work, but it was b) incredibly NOT very easy. I ended up with broken fingernails from trying to peel the damn tape off of the damn roll and wads of stuck-together tape strewn all over the living room floor. By the time the job was done, my hair was yanked and my teeth were ground.

While I was at the electric supply store, we tried to remove the lamp shade. The finial was frozen on. None of us could get it loose. But we did succeed in ripping the fabric.

This lampshade was purchased back when I had a job and could afford nice things.

I get on Amazon to try to find something comparable. The cheapest selection: Seventy-five dollah!

Holy shit.

I take a more or less functional lampshade off another lamp (which now goes naked) and put it on the repaired lamp. It looks like what it is: a cheap piece of junk from Target.

Lurking at the back of consciousness: Pay the $1,588 Medigap premium! Find out how far in hock you are to AMEX! Figure out where the money to pay these extravagant bills will come from!

AMEX? Exactly $1,000 over budget. That is twice the amount I paid on the shoe extravaganza. We will have to wait for the itemized bill to arrive to figure out the other charges.

The Medigap premium, surprisingly considering the past year’s medical misadventures, is inflated by less than $100 over the 2014 gouge. And of course, it’s allowed for in the annual budget. But still. Fifteen hundred and eight-eight dollars is fucking painful.

Because I had a meeting halfway across the city at this morning’s crack of dawn, I have not cleaned the pool pump pot, which must be cleaned every morning because the fucking palm trees cannot be trimmed because DUCK has taken up residence in the tree trimmers’ direct line of fire. DUCK is absent this afternoon, it being afternoon and the time at which she forages. Does she not KNOW about the damned garden slugs that overrun the yard at night and that are turning the basil plant into a skeleton of itself? Why is she not doing her DUCK job out there? And where the Hell is she, anyway?

One of the eggs DUCK has hidden lies exposed. What part of “grackle” does DUCK not understand?

Avian concerns, however, do not form a major part of today’s Day from Hell qualities.

Web Guru’s bill needs to be paid. I try to get online to pay this quarter’s bill. His auto-collect software wants me to sign  in as…HIM!

Naturally.

I crash out of his auto-collect software and reboot. Now it tells me I owe an extra payment, which I happen to know I paid.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to cook my lunch, it being 3 o’clock in the afternoon and only slightly past lunchtime, by a mere three hours. Trusty Kitchen Timer is called into action to remind me when X or Y minutes have passed, so the grill will not carbonize the food.

Trusty Kitchen Timer is killed in action.

I try to revive her by replacing her battery.

No dice. TKT is deader than a doornail.

Why doornails are said to be dead is a question that has always plagued me, given that a) I do not know what a doornail is and b) I can’t imagine why anyone would impute either life or death to such an object.

So it goes.

The work I intended to get done was not, repeat, NOT done by 4 p.m., when I shook off the worst of this miasma. Instead of doing anything meaningful, I guess I’ll spend the rest of the day formatting another Fire-Rider episode.

And so…into the fog.

 

 

 

Grrrrr!

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Sorry. Looks like Funny is down today. Hitting “publish” erased an entire post, and now I have to get to work.

Summary of the lost and gone post: If you’re on Medicare, don’t neglect to buy Medicare supplemental (“Medigap”) coverage. It saves your financial tuchus.

Profit & Loss in the Micropublishing Biz

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Using the new Word templates that my little micropublishing business contrived to purchase for a modest price (one was under $50 for a permanent, no-holds-barred license!), I now have hard-copy layout for Slave Labor done and in PDF for the printer (I hope). Friday I met with the beloved graphic artist, who thought the result was pretty decent. He’s going to do a wrap-around cover for the desired trim size, accommodating the present cover art and cover-4 copy. Then it’s off to a local print-on-demand outfit.

If your bookoid is low on images, or if you’re willing to print the images in black & white, the cost for print-on-demand services is amazingly low. To put the whole thing together and perfect-bind it will run $3.33/copy for 10 copies. Per-copy price stays the same at print runs of 100 and 1,000.

This is good, because we would all be mightily surprised if Slave Labor sold even ten copies, to say nothing of enough to create an economy of numbers.

Slave Labor, being my sandbox project, is costing something but not much: I traded out the e-book design in exchange for editing the designer’s upcoming book on marketing e-books. So the only cost has to do with the cover design and with the experiment in Wyrd layout — I did have to pay something for the template. But not much.

How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months, the diet guide & cookbook, is now in what we might call rough-draft layout. All the content is poured into the template, and now I need to go through and polish all the formatting, write the back-page bio and the cover copy, figure out how to make the table of contents function work, and make one version for e-book emanation and another for print-on-demand.

We might call 30 Pounds the stage-two sandbox. Every time I work on this stuff, I discover something new. No doubt at all that mounting these things in digital and hard-copy print will add up to a marathon learning experience.

So I regard the costs for these two books as tuition for Micropublishing U. Once I’ve done a couple of the things, it should be pretty easy to put the rest of them online.

And I do have a “rest of them”!

As soon as Slave Labor goes off to the printer and 30 Pounds goes to Amazon and to the printer, I’ll start working on packaging the eighteen books that Fire-Rider has lent itself to serializing. These I hope to put online at the rate of one every week or two.

And that will put 23 titles (including the three that have emanated from real publishing houses) on Amazon  under my name. How amazing IS that, anyway?

The people at Romance Writers of America claim you start to make a noticeable income after you’ve posted about eight titles — of any genre, fiction or nonfiction. So they claim. We’ll soon see if that’s true.

I had to stop working on the Boob Book and the Revived First (Awful!) Novel when an exceptionally difficult project came in from a new client. Lordie! It truly is the single worst, MOST difficult editorial project I’ve ever had the misery to work on. And as  usual, Author is a graduate student with no concept of what other people’s time is worth. She wants it back in 10 days. I figured I could get through my part in four or five days by reading 28+ pages a day; then pass it along to The Kid to do the References section.

Well. Each 28-page segment took five or six hours to plow through. By the time I was done, my brain cells were effing FRIED. One of the reasons the formatting has gotten done over the past week or two is that I simply could not do anything that required more than manual fiddling.

Ugh. How do I need to have this enterprise fly? Let me count the ways!

And it doesn’t have to fly very high. Hell, I’d be on Easy Street if it earned $30,000 a year, to say nothing of 30 grand a month.

To replace the teaching income, I’d need to net $1200 a month on book sales. To replace what I’m making on editorial work would require net $833 a month. Two thousand thirty-three bucks a month, about $2440 gross: how hard can this be?

By God. If it requires cranking out 5,000-word Fifty Shades of Gray knock-offs from now until I shuffle into the grave, I’ll do it!

 

Big Brother: Not about to quit watching us

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Interesting op-ed article in today’s NY Times: former CIA officer and NSA contractor Edward Snowden rejoices that at last Americans and people around the world are waking up to the ubiquitous spying on innocent private citizens accused of no wrongdoing. He applauds Congress’s move to ban the NSA’s phone-call tracking program and President Obama’s about-face in stating that surveilling every citizen of the United States has done nothing to prevent even a single terrorist attack.

All very nice. But it’s a day late and a dollar short, in my opinion.

In the first place, a huge government infrastructure designed to track the private movements of everyone in the country now exists and has been deployed against us all. Does anyone seriously believe it’s suddenly not going to be used anymore?

And in the second place, Big Brother is not the government. It’s private industry. Note that only the NSA has been told to stand down from spying on us.

Google hasn’t. A few weeks ago, members of our neighborhood association reported that Google mapping trucks were moving up and down the alleys with vehicle-top cameras peering down into people’s backyards. Google tracks every move you make on the Internet. Every time I walk down my home’s hallway, the Nest thermostat on the wall records that I am home and sends that tidbit of information back to a Google-owned server. Nest also records and transmits the details of when I use power to air-condition and heat my home, and how much I use.

Just about anyone who wants to sell you something or to keep tabs on the public is watching you.

• Using cookies, any business on the planet can keep track of every website you visit, every message you post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, every search term you enter in  your browser, every whatnot.

• When you walk through a major shopping mall with your phone in your pocket or purse, curious minds are watching what stores you enter, what food kiosk you visit, even which window you pause in front of to eyeball the merchandise.

• Insurance companies, healthcare corporations (that would include your doctor’s and your psychological therapist’s employers and any hospital or out-patient facility you visit), financial institutions, and credit bureaus gather and store — permanently — vast amounts of private information about you.

• Here in my state, the county sends helicopters aloft to photograph people’s property; the aerial images are stored, and when you go in to ask for, say, a zoning variance so you can build some addition on the back of your home, an inspector studies a picture of your lot. If anything is found to be out of order, the supervisors will order you to take it down. They’re also likely to deny your variance request.

• Every time you telephone your credit-card company, a utility, or many other entities, your phone number is recorded and checked against the number you gave when you started doing business with that entity. This overrides any caller-ID blocking you may have in place.

• Retailers track your buying habits by name, phone number, and address every time you foolishly hand over your private information in exchange for a card giving you a few cents off a store’s inflated prices.

• Facebook tracks everything you do on its site and often uses casual remarks to spin advertisements to you and to your friends.

• Netflix knows what you’ve been watching, reminds you of what you spent time with, and tries to persuade you that you’d like something else based on your viewing habits.

• And by now, you may be sure that some hacker somewhere knows your name, address, birthdate, Social Security number, employment history, and educational history.

Most that information is none of anybody’s business. But in fact, just about anybody can easily make it their business.

That Congress is finally coming around to putting the eefus on the hideous Patriot Act is all well and good. But we’re not going to get our right to privacy back until private enterprises are also prohibited from gathering and storing personal information about us.

Lost Mockingbird Chick

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Yesterday afternoon Ruby the Corgi Pup shot across the side yard and GRABBED something! O doggie joy!

It was a baby mockingbird, just starting to fledge but not big enough to fly yet. When I hollered, Ruby dropped the little chick.

At first it looked like her wing was broken, but in short order she had it back in place and was able to move it normally. Other than being terrorized, she seemed fine.

Ruby back in the house. Lock Ruby and Cassie indoors.

I figured the best thing to do was to leave Chick outside where she was sheltering in the shade and CHIRK-ing for her mother. Usually with wild things, it’s best to let nature take its course. Probably (I hoped) she could fly well enough to make her way back into a tree and from there to find her nest.

But no.

A couple of hours later, the mother bird was CHIRK-ing from the lime tree, trying to lure her babe back home. The babe was CHIRK-ing from the ground but making no effort to move.

Half an hour before closing time, I called Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rescue group. Unfortunately they no longer come by to help save critters in predicaments — some years ago they rescued a hummingbird that flew into the house and decided the only exit was through a skylight (unopenable). But the recession threw them into a permanent tailspin, and they no longer have the resources to do that. The woman I spoke with referred me to another woman, who referred me to another woman.

While these worthies were on the phone, I asked them about the care and feeding of DUCK and her progeny. All three said that baby ducks routinely drown in swimming pools, because they can’t make it from the surface of the water over the coping to the ground. The third woman, who eventually took Chick, said I should gather up the eggs and bring them to her, and she would put them in an incubator.

Welp. In the first place, it’s against the law to mess with a wild mallard’s nest. In the second place, I don’t want to mess with DUCK’s nest. And in the third place, the third woman I spoke with sounded…well, kind of nutty.

And yea verily, when I arrived at her house with CHICK, she proved to be…well, kind of nutty. Their house, in a down-at-the-heels “arty” section of North Phoenix, had been transformed into a kind of aviary and wild-mammal kennel. When I say “nutty” here, I mean seriously nutty.

However, the strange woman quickly made it obvious that she was very knowledgeable about wild birds. And in fact, she proved to be a kind of Mockingbird Whisperer. As soon as she picked up the terrorized little bird and stroked it under its birdie chin, it relaxed, closed its eyes, and looked as if it would purr if only it could figure out how.

One glance at Chick and she exclaimed, “Oh, you have pox on your eyes!” When I asked what that meant, she pointed out the wart-like growths over the bird’s upper eyelids. Hm.

Soon as I got home, I called up the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest. And indeed, avian pox or a bacterial infection with similar symptoms was probably what ailed Chick. Pox can infect a bird’s throat and innards. So it’s possible that the little bird was on the ground because it was sick and was going to die anyway.

{sigh}

The eccentric bird rescuer said she would dose Chick with antibiotics, and maybe the bird would recover. She said she’d raised many mockingbirds.

By the time I got home, the mother mockingbird was gone.

Meanwhile, we have the problem of the drownable ducklings. More to come on that, after I figure out what to do about it…

Does Breast Surgery for DCIS Save Lives?

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In a word: probably.

Yesterday, NPR ran a talk-show piece that went online with a “scare” headline: “Surgery Doesn’t Help Women with Early-Stage Breast Carcinoma.” In fact, the report doesn’t say you’re going to die if you have early stage breast cancer. In fact, it discusses DCIS, which is not known to be cancer at all.

And yes, for some women, surgery makes no difference in survival rates because some cases of DCIS, which has been described as a “pre-cancer,” never progress to an invasive stage.

However, an unknown percentage of DCIS incidences do convert to invasive cancer. We do not know what that percentage is, because a true randomized study (in which X number of women are randomly assigned to have no treatment and an equivalent number get surgery) would be wildly unethical. Knowing that a substantial risk is there — possibly in the vicinity of 80% — doctors are morally obliged to recommend surgical treatment.

The story reports that survival rates are noticeably improved among women who have intermediate and high-grade DCIS:

For the women who had cells that were closer on the continuum to invasive cancer — those with intermediate- or high-grade DCIS — surgery did provide a significant benefit. After 10 years, 98.6 percent of women with intermediate-grade DCIS and who had surgery had survived breast cancer, compared to 94.6 percent of women who didn’t have surgery. And with high-grade DCIS, 98.4 percent of those who had surgery survived, compared to 90.5 percent of those who didn’t.

My DCIS did contain intermediate and high-grade areas; fortunately, there was no necrosis, which is a marker that the DCIS is about to convert to invasive cancer. So it looks like I have a 98.4% chance of living another ten years.

The problem with these survival rates is that they don’t always distinguish between women who died of breast cancer and women who died of just anything.  Some studies take the cause of death into account, and some vacuum up all mortality data. So one can find oneself with a basketful of apples and oranges and no way of knowing which is which.

Survival rates for early-stage breast cancers — I mean the real thing, not DCIS — are quite high. They’re not nearly 100%, but they’re well over 80%. Survival rates for DCIS that has been treated with lumpectomy + radiation + hormone blockers or with simple mastectomy approach 100% when causes other than metastasizing breast cancer are taken out of the equation.

To my mind, a serious problem is the  widespread insistence on lumpectomy, which is not “just as effective” as mastectomy. Radiation treatment, tamoxifen, and AI’s are not minor things. Radiation causes some very unpleasant side effects, some of them long-term, and if the idea is to preserve a semblance of your natural breast, it’s a major FAIL. Radiation causes your scar to contract, so that you can end up significantly disfigured. Tamoxifen can cause uterine cancer and blood clots (leading to stroke and deep-vein thrombosis), and both tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors can cause painful arthralgia. Only about 40% of women stay on AI’s for the entire five years that’s recommended, and the quit rate for tamoxifen is also pretty high.

As many as 50% of DCIS incidences never convert to invasive cancer. Hence it’s reasonable to argue that removing every one of them and performing mastectomies to get rid of it is overtreatment.

But I think that assertion may be debatable. If non-conversion rates really ARE as high as 50% (we do not know and have no ethical way to find out), then it means the rate of conversion TO invasive cancer is at least 50%; it may be significantly higher, possibly as much as 80%. Would you rather go through life boobless or would you prefer to run to the hospital every year for yet another mammogram (mammography also has side effects), possibly yet another biopsy, and worry constantly about what’s growing in your chest?