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Day from Hell Peters Out in the Wee Hours…

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It was quite the day yesterday:

  • Killer bees take up residence under the outdoor deck in my favorite shady bosque.
  • Duck returns; as expected, poops on CoolDeck, with the same effect as dog poop.
  • Speaking of the which Cassie finds another cache of the neighbor’s accursed cat’s deposits in the unused flowerbed.
  • The water heater goes out, after I pony up a chunk of dough to the new arborist dude.
  • Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner comes to a dead stop. He has, it appears, croaked right over.
  • The neighbors in the rental(?) across the street announce they’re having a big chivaree for a daughter’s wedding reception — we should expect the streets the be parked up and the “music” to be loud…hope that’s not too much of an inconvenience for you folks.
  • Programming the phone system I bought turns out to require a master’s degree in engineering; damned if I can figure out how you bring up the [MENU], which you have to accomplish to make it do anything. Decide to take it back, which will help because all these little surprise expenses are gonna land me in the poorhouse.

Ohhhhh god…

§ § §

Okay, so after Arborist Dude clued me to the new occupants of the westside yard, I jury-rigged a barricade across the backyard’s narrowest reach, by way of keeping Cassie and Ruby from enraging the little gals. Ain’t it lovely?

P1030450Logged into Angie’s List and called a couple of exterminators, in search of someone who could deal with the bee issue. All wild bees in Arizona are now considered Africanized, so our new occupants posed a potential threat — not just to small dogs given to annoying them by trying to catch them on the wing, but just about anyone or anything that disturbs them.

One guy, a fellow named Irish Doherty called me back. He offered to come by yesterday evening, but the Accountant from Heaven and I had tickets to a Chanticleer concert and plans to go to dinner beforehand. No problem, said he…how’s about he comes by around 10 p.m.?

Holy mackerel.

Well, we got back to the ’hood around 10:30. When I called his cell, I found him in the middle of another job. An hour or so later, he surfaced here, just about the time the noisy party across the street was breaking up.

Get this: the guy uses organic pesticides!

Uh huh. Lots of organic things, like, oh, say, nerve gas, are organics… But whatever. He proudly showed me the label. Enough remains of my long-lost photographic  memory for me to remember the ingredients long enough to Google the only one that had a chemistry-lab-bench name. It turned out to be a common ingredient of hand cream. The other stuff was mostly odoriferous “essential oils.”

Knowing my experience with objects and substances eco-friendly, you no doubt can sense my skepticism about this proposition.

Marginally, it seems to have worked. One lonely bee was flying around out there this morning. I thought she’d gone away, but now, a few hours into the day, four or five of them are going in and out. That’s a lot fewer than were out there yesterday, but… If the guys managed to kill the queen, then the surviving bees will die. But if not, they’ll soon be back in force.

Amazingly, in the middle of the night the guy and his assistant went totally beyond the call of duty to get at the nest, which the bees had established on the ground underneath a set of boards that were bolted down. They removed the boards, sprayed like crazy, and then replaced the boards.

It was 3 a.m. before I crawled into the sack, and  of course as usual Cassie and Ruby were ready to bounce at 5 a.m. Thank HEAVEN we have no choir this morning!

Meanwhile, as I was building the Great Wall of Corgi, it dawned on me that the wire garden fencing I was layering between the old strips of picket-fence garden fencing could substitute nicely for the chicken wire I figured I was going to have to buy and lay down over the empty flowerbed that damn cat is using as its toilet. Thank gawd I never throw anything away — one fewer thing to have to spend money on and hassle with.

So I took a bunch of the stuff and dropped it on the ground where the cat has claimed its territory. Probably all that will do is move it over to some other part of the yard. Wish I could figure out how to get rid of that cat without getting blood on my hands…

And yesterday morning when Ruby barked up the duck, I sprinkled the little gal with the garden hose. Hilariously, DUCKS DON’T LIKE TO GET WET!!!!!

No kidding! She took to the sky like a 747, and she didn’t come back until…just now

😀

Chased her off again. Later today when I take Harvey up to Leslie’s to be shoveled out — after I’ve had a chance to get some rest — I’ll see if I can get one of those floating pool alarms for a reasonable price (like I’ve got even a nickel’s worth of spare cash laying around…). If it’ll go off every time she lands in the water, she’ll probably give up in short order. Then I can give the contraption to the  young couple across the street, the folks who are raising four little kids on a teacher’s salary.

Called the plumber who surfaced at SBA a few weeks ago. Our building contractor guy liked him and was impressed, so since the beloved Mr. Lutz seems to have gone out of business, we’re trying him out. He said he’d come around mid-day on Monday, meaning two days (at least) without hot water.

So I’m washing the dishes by hand, which would be OK if the ACCURSED new dish detergents actually worked. In cold water they do not touch grease or stuck-on food. To get the dishes clean last night I had to boil a pot of water on the stove and pour it into the sink, therein to soak and rewash the damn dishes.

While I was waiting for the Bee Dude to show up in the middle of the night, I finally plowed my way through an enormous, difficult, and highly technical paper on the potential complications of the various types of mastectomy.

Holy shit. If women had ANY idea of the astonishingly high rates of adverse outcomes from reconstruction, no one would even think of subjecting herself to such a thing. Ordinary mastectomy, even one that does not involve messing with your lymph nodes, poses some serious risk of very unpleasant aftereffects. But reconstruction ups that risk by orders of magnitude and adds some special nasty complications of its own.

The fact that the medico-pharmaceutical complex has launched an initiative to persuade every woman who needs a mastectomy to elect breast reconstruction…well…it’s just abhorrent. The only way doctors could possibly persuade anyone who’s not just effing dumb as a post is to downplay the many potential negative consequences and the astonishing length of time it takes to recover from such procedures. What we don’t know won’t hurt us, eh?

It appears that, thanks to the Pink Craze, we’re not only performing large numbers of surgeries that probably are unnecessary, in addition we’re inflicting even more traumatic and potentially very harmful surgery on women by pushing reconstruction.

This book is going to raise the roof.

The research is going faster than expected — I’ve had a lull in stoont papers to read. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the stuff I printed out to annotate and organize; in the course of that job, I’ve also found a number of other relevant scientific papers, which I’ll need to print out, analyze, and annotate. But progress is definitely being made. With any luck, I’ll have the proposal ready to ship off before the end of the summer and the book pretty well written by December. Sooner, maybe, if I can shake clear of enough paying work over the next few months.

And so, away…

Duck! Bees!

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Yesterday afternoon Ruby the Corgi Pup strolled out to the backyard and FLEW INTO A BARKING, BAYING FRENZY!

Yes. Corgis can bay, after a fashion. Ruby’s characteristic statement, when confronted with anything new, different, suspicious, or amusing is an ear-splitting arf-arfaROOOOOOO!

When this didn’t settle down and indeed seemed to be getting more and more frantic, I went out to investigate and found, lo! An intruder!

P1030447
Click on the images for a better view.

Yup. There she is. I’ve heard ducks will sometimes take up residence in backyard pools, but this is the first time I’ve seen one do so. Certainly the first time in MY backyard pool.

She’s probably started a nest under the (mightily overgrown) shrubbery near the pool. It’s a perfect spot to raise a duck family. I haven’t seen a mallard, though. Usually they’ll hang around for awhile after getting a female duck with eggs. As it were.

This morning it looks like she’s decided the hotel is open and it’s four stars.

P1030449Isn’t that cute?

Well, the mess she’ll make won’t be cute at all — duck droppings stain the pool plaster and the CoolDecking, so I suppose she’s going to have to find a new rental. Cleaning up last year’s algae infestation was a vast amount of work and expense, and this will make an even bigger mess to clean up than that. Besides, I can’t imagine what she could eat out there. Ducks forage on grass — there’s no grass in the backyard or the front yard, or in any of the neighbors’ yards. And of course nothing edible grows in a puddle of Clorox.

It’s against the law to harass wild ducks, so I’ll need to find some way to discourage her.

Ruby is anxious to take out after her, and that would be the ideal way to scare her off. But Ruby doesn’t yet know how to find her way out of the water (there’s only one spot, about two feet long by 18 inches wide, where she even can get out). The water is still a little t0o cold for me to jump in, which will have to happen for me to train her. Maybe M’hijito would bring Charley over — he can swim, but diving in ain’t his thing.

We’ve had a little cold snap, which has delayed pool water warming despite several days in the 90s and high 80s. So swimming season is coming on a bit late. Ordinarily I’d be in the water by now, and I’m sure watching a lumbering human splash around would be amply alarming to a momma duck.

LOL! I’ve seriously thought about converting that thing into a gigantic backyard pond. When replastering time comes along (which it will, soon enough: $10,000), have a dark color put in there; install a rock waterfall, dechlorinate it, float some pond plants, pull out the CoolDeck and replace it with gardens…wouldn’t that be nice? Put some koi in there…the the duck would be right at home.

But I’m not sure it’s legal to do that. There are mosquito ordinances, and the County flies helicopters to spy on people’s backyards. If they see a green pool, they’ll cite you. And of course, 18,000 gallons of pond water would register with them as “green pool.”

A-a-a-a-a-n-d… The new tree guy just found a brand-new nest of bees a-building. When we walked into the backyard, we found a bunch of them flying in and out under the deck.

This is a serious problem, because there’s no place else for the dogs to go — I’ve fenced off the pool area and can’t leave Ruby out in that area because she falls into the drink in the best of circumstances.

DAMN it! Just when I have to pay some guy $350 that I can’t afford to hack back the trees, now I’ve got to pony up ANOTHER $150 to have bees exterminated. Hell and Damn. That’s going to put the eefus on the plan to rent examples of the cars I’m interested in buying. I’ll have to let the car guy know I can’t do that next week. It also means the planned shopping trip later this month is off. And tonight I’m supposed to go out to dinner before a concert…will be ordering a cup of coffee and pretending to be too sick to eat, I guess.

Good thing I came in under budget for two months running…

Communication Complication

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🙂 So yesterday I bought a new communication complex at Costco. We used to call these things “telephones.” I’m afraid that term no longer suffices…

P1030444I bought it because if you have caller ID  you can use this contraption to block up to TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY nuisance callers. Hee heeeeee! That is SO much better than the five-minute answering messages that cause robo-calling machines to hang up.

Also, my beloved Uniden set is getting old. Replacement batteries for the Uniden are hard to find and a pain to install, especially now that Radio Shack has closed. I used to take the dead handsets up to the Radio Shack around the corner, where the guys would not only sell me new funny-looking battery thingies, they would put them in, too. That was very nice.

The Panasonic uses ordinary AAA batteries — well, the rechargeable kind — which you can get about anywhere and you can replace easily. So that’s a big plus.

But…just lookit that thing. You can connect not one but two cell phones with it (does that mean when you’re using your cell you’re not using up minutes??). Its base unit will run on a handset’s batteries, so when the power goes out your phone doesn’t instantly go dead. It does things that no one ever heard of and no one really has any desire to do.

And thanks to all that functionality, the damn thing is SO COMPLICATED that the instruction manual is NINETY-SEVEN PAGES LONG!

The quick-start pamphlet alone is nine pages long. Holy mackerel.

However, once I figure out how to get it to work, it will have just as many extensions as the Uniden does (a phone in almost every room!), and it will allow me to block incoming nuisance calls.

Most times when the phone rings anymore, it’s a nuisance telemarketer. AARP (I suspect) sells its mailing lists to the crooks, so if you’re in the “senior” category you get blitzed with scammy pitches and frauds at all hours of the day and night. On average, I get three to five of these calls a day, even though I never answer the phone to them.

Only drawback I can see is that if someone calls in such a way that “no number” is available, the Panasonic will automatically block the call. Both M’jito and SDXB have phones that occasionally register with the Uniden as “Unknown Caller,” so I’m a little concerned that it will reject calls from them. Maybe there’s some way they can adjust their phones to make their numbers visible — it’s not consistent, so I don’t know why that happens.

Sure would be nice, though, to stop people from harassing you without having to buy a telephone that requires 97 pages if instruction…

Simplifying My Financial Life: THANK YOU Costco!

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So word comes down that Honored Purveyor of All Possible Lifetime Supplies — i.e., Costco — will sever its relations with American Express and make all its customers use CitiBank Mastercard, if they are to charge things. That means the beloved Costco AMEX card, yea verily the Card of the Gigantic Annual Kickback, is going away.

Well, I have this to say about that:

If Citibank were the last financial institution on the planet, I would be doing business with a tin can buried
in the back yard.

Helle’s Belles, I think. Both my business and my personal charge cards are Costco AMEX cards. A ton of things are auto-billed to these cards. Now I need to make a switch.

So I call AMEX and get started on the process of opening a new no-annual-fee card, so that I can shift my monthly charges over in a timely way (i.e., now, while months remain to untangle the inevitable snafus). Kay, the friendly and truly helpful CSR who answers the phone, explains that I have to talk with someone in a different department to establish a new no-annual-fee bidness card for The Copyeditor’s Desk. So we proceed with the involved process of opening the personal charge.

While we’re jumping through these hoops, it dawns on me that really, the business AMEX card only has one or two permanent recurring charges set up on it. And otherwise, it’s a cold day in an Arizona July that I charge anything on that card: the occasional lunch or meeting over coffee with a client or subcontractor; the monthly AT&T wireless fee for the iPad…and…and what on earth ELSE?

Bloody little, that’s what else. Now and again I’ll charge up a vast quantity of paper or some pens or a computer gew-gaw, but not often. So…..sooooo….WHY do I have a separate AMEX card to have to reconcile and pay every month? Why can’t CEDesk pay its charges on the new “personal” AMEX card whenever they’re rung up?

Haven’t run this past WonderAccountant yet…but I do fail to see why I need a separate account if the bidness just pays its own way directly into a given AMEX account.

This would decomplicate the bookkeeping: only one account instead of two. And since I rarely have any need to go online with the iPad when I’m not in the house, the reasonable thing to do would be to cancel the ATT subscription for that thing, thereby saving about 15 bucks a month.

Costco, as it develops, will accept debit cards, even at the gas pump. And I do have a debit card. So as soon as they take away the AMEX cards, I’ll be down one card and happy to say so.

Current Events and the State of One’s Sanity

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I think my brain has turned itself upside down. Have you read the news over the past couple of days? The current Current Events are enough to make you crazy.

In the first place, I must confess that I have thought the flap over white cops shooting black men has been strenuously overblown. Puh-leeeze! If you decide to knock over a convenience store and rough up a clerk and challenge a cop who comes after you, you can’t be surprised when you get shot, no matter what your racial persuasion. And you might want to think about the potential risks before you let your kid go outside and wave a convincingly realistic-looking toy gun around a public park. But what happened in South Carolina yesterday raises some real questions about that line of thinking.

In case you haven’t pulled your head out from under the pillow this morning: a police officer stopped a driver because one of the driver’s tail lights was out. An altercation ensued in which the officer tased the driver, who turned and ran off. The officer fired eight shots, at least one of which hit the man in the back and killed him. The officer happened to be white; the driver happened to be black.

The officer claims he felt his life was threatened. Exactly how a man who’s fleeing you at a dead run, with his back turned to you and with no gun in his hand, could be much of a threat…that remains unexplained. Was the man a threat to public safety? Well…a healthy and vigorous adult male human being can wreak a fair amount of mayhem without benefit of any kind of armament. But lacking a gun and lacking any reason to beat up on anyone: one wonders.

So…we killed this guy because he ran away (his brother claims he probably was afraid of going to jail for failing to pay child support) after we stopped him over a tail light???

We stopped him over a dead tail light? Really? Seriously?

Let me ask you, my white brethren and sistern, how often has a police officer passed his time arresting you because one (count it, 1) of your tail lights was not working? As you know, I drive a junker. Just the other day when I took the Dog Chariot in for some maintenance work, WonderMechanic’s guys changed a tail light that they noticed was out. I knew the plastic cover was cracked — has been for quite some time (as in months and months) — but was trying to pretend I didn’t know the light was out. I pass quite a few of Arizona’s Finest as I make my way over the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Nary a one of them has even turned a hair at the blank tail light, much less tried to shoot me over it.

Maybe the rattletrap cars of elderly white women are less of a threat to public safety than the rattletrap cars of middle-aged black men?

Funny makes a sharp left turn.

Let  us pour another cup of coffee and turn the page. Along about page 18, we come upon this blood-roiling headline:

Utility Cut Off Stolen Meter Before Death of Family of 8

Dayum! That evil utility company!

The story of the man who poisoned himself and his seven kids by running an electric generator indoors has been framed in this way repeatedly: about 95 percent of the reports I’ve read imply that the cruel utility company cut off the family’s power and left them to die in the cold cold Maryland springtime.

As it develops, however, the victim had never even requested electric power service to the rental home. They moved in there last November — five months ago — and never ran up a dime’s worth of (legal) electric bills. Not, we learn, because the generator powered the home’s heater through the winter, but because Dad was an accomplished thief. He had stolen an electric meter, hooked it up on the QT, and was ripping off power from the utility company. Evidently he couldn’t afford power bills because he was trying to support seven children on minimum wage.

One of the conservative themes that I find especially revolting in the 21st-century national conversation is the idea that if you’re poor, it’s all your fault: poor people are, in this train of thought, lazy no-good bums who refuse to get off their duffs, and they deserve to live in poverty.

But… It’s very hard to push away the unkind question: what would possess you to have seven children if all you can earn is minimum wage? Minimum wage in this country isn’t enough to support one person, much less eight people. What part of birth control do you not understand? Does your zipper fall down on its own?

One of the deceased father’s friends asked “How can a man survive off of basically minimum wage with seven kids, and you can’t help him with a utility bill?”

It is not in any way self-evident that a utility company should donate support for the vast brood spawned by a man who can’t keep a grip on his procreative urges. Avoiding pregnancy is just not that hard.

No, it’s not the kids’ fault that they were born. It’s the fault — and the responsibility — of only two people: their parents.

Funny veers to the right.

Craziness to the left of us. Craziness to the right of us. We live in a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

So it goes…