funny | Funny about Money

Stupid Animal Stories…

April 6, 2015 by funny

That would be “Stupid Human Stories,” actually. Over at the Corgi forum, some of the enthusiasts are grousing about the overall stupidity of the people who show up at dog parks with their pooches in tow. LOL!

I don’t take my dogs to dog parks, first because of the risk of injury, but also because of the concentration of various doggy pathogens — more than one vet has inveighed, over the years, against visiting these places. As one of the corgistis remarks, though, the biggest risk at dog parks (and just about anywhere else) is not from the dogs but from the idiot dog owners.

No doubt I’ve already told the story here of Anna, the loose mutt, the four-year-old, and the moron father. The child survived, but only by the grace of God. And ahh, yes, we have the moron parents down the street who leave their kid alone in the front yard with their German shepherd, which — quite reasonably — defends its kid from all comers.

Looks benign, doesn't she? — Looks benign, doesn’t she?

So commonplace that they’re beneath mention are the Cheerful Chuckleheads who let their little yappers lunge up to your German shepherd (who privately is thrilled, for reasons both humans and dogoids are too dumb to guess).

“Oh, Fifi wants to say hello!” cries CC.

“You might want to keep your dog back a bit,” the GerShep’s pet human replies.

“She just wants to play.”

Really? My dog wants something, too: to have your dog’s head stuffed and hung as a trophy on the wall over her dog dish…

Gaaaaaaaahhhhh!

But you haven’t seen stupid humans until you’ve seen stupid humans around horses. My god! Horses bring out the most baroque forms of human stupidity.

Case in point: moi.

Back in the Middle Cretaceous, when I was in graduate school, some occasion arose in which my then-husband and I invited the chair of my department, his tartly unhappy wife and their daughter, then about ten, to spend a day at our ranch, a garden spot that resided up a little past lovely Yarnell. Why, I do not remember and I cannot even begin to imagine. But there it was. Chairman Marvin, Mrs. Marvin, and Kid out on a working cattle ranch just below the Mogollon Rim.

If only I could remember what I was smoking…maybe I could get some more of it…

For reasons even more opaque, we somehow suggested that this crew should take a horsie ride.

The Hassayampa River flowed right through our deeded land. It passed by the cluster of buildings that included the house, the foreman’s house and bunkhouse, and the barns. Very, very lovely: riparian high desert, full of birds and little animals and watercress growing in the trickling water beneath vast shady cottonwoods. To die for.

Indeed.

Nothing would do but what we had to saddle up and ride along the cattle trace that follows the Hassayampa easterly toward Crown King. Of course, we’d have to stop at the bob-wire fence between our ranch and the Smoketree, the neighboring ranch. But that was a good thing.

In what at first glance seems amazingly stupid but what turned out to be the one tiny glimmer of sense any of us evinced, I suggested the girl, who’d never been on a horse in her life, should ride with me on our quarterhorse Babe. I proposed we should ride bareback, because a) this is a good first step in learning to sit a horse and b) it meant I could have her in front of me with me hanging on to her, rather than having her perched on a saddle behind me, supposedly hanging onto me. It also meant I could see her and watch her every minute.

So it went.

All right. We’re riding along this narrow trail, single-file, beside the Hassayampa. The river doesn’t flow continuously, nor does any part of it flow all year round. But now and again it does produce ferocious, astonishing, jaw-dropping flash floods. Over the decades, these have excavated a channel that drops the riverbed about three to six feet below the surrounding terrain. We are riding along the edge of the bank that borders this drop-off. Below us, the river bottom is a chaos of rocks, boulders, old shattered tree trunks, washed-away Model T’s, and similar debris.

As we’re going along, Marvin keeps letting his horse come right up on Babe’s rear end. Babe does not like this. Neither do I.

I tell Marvin, imagining (wrongly) that he can figure out how to rein in a horse, to keep his horse back off Babe’s rump. I tell him that Babe will kick if he doesn’t hold his horse back a few feet. Three times I tell him this, and three times he lets the gelding creep up and stick his nose up Babe’s tail.

Finally, Babe loses patience. She picks the psychological moment — just as the trail teeters on the knife-edge of the river’s bank — to haul off and belt Marvin’s nag.

Of course, Marvin’s horse shies. Babe does a little jig and, well, yes: she stumbles off the side and starts to fall.

I drop the reins, wrap both arms around the kid, and throw myself off Babe, hauling the girl with me. With me doing the best I can to protect the child’s head and neck, we hit the ground about five feet from Babe, who tumbles off the riverbank into the dry riverbed.

Shee-ut.

Mercifully, no one was hurt. Babe got up, miraculously uninjured, and allowed me to retrieve her without further incident.

Don’t know when I’ve ever been so furious. The rage didn’t kick in until after I saw that Babe hadn’t, after all, broken a leg (as I assumed she would while the girl and I were rolling away from ruckus).

But of course, Marvin was my boss so I couldn’t tell him what a moron he was.

But of course, the real moron was not on Marvin’s horse. The real moron was on my horse. The one in charge of my horse.

What on earth was I thinking when I asked Marvin “do you know how to ride a horse,” heard him answering tentatively — tentatively swaggering — “oh, sure; oh yeah,” recognized that as a ridiculous exaggeration, and acquiesced to it? What was I thinking when I put a ten-year-old on a cow pony, bareback, and climbed up behind her? Oh, hell: what was I thinking when I invited the effete chair of the department up to the ranch to start with?????

So there you are. Stupid is as stupid does. I account it as some kind of miracle that the child wasn’t hurt, the horse wasn’t hurt, and I wasn’t hurt. God watches over children and fools.

Image: Hassayampa River: Todd’s Desert Hiking Guide. Yes, it looked exactly like that.

How to Get Sand Out of a Top-Loading HE Washer

April 3, 2015 by funny

Here in urban Arizona, we homeowners have something called “desert landscaping.” This is some Easterner’s idea of an approximation of what the Sonoran Desert looks like: a load of gravel spread over the yard and punctuated with a few cacti, a palm tree or two, and an ocotillo. Since the cost of watering a lawn easily exceeds a summer air-conditioning bill (which can be whopping!), this type of xeriscaping is cost-effective, if not what you’d call aesthetically awe-inspiring.

An alternative to the ugly, footpad-piercing gravel is a product called “quarter-minus.” This stuff appears to be a by-product of sand-and-gravel operations: it’s a blend of finely crushed granite and gritty stuff that looks a lot like sand. Quarter-minus has three advantages: piled on deep enough, it inhibits weed growth; it vaguely resembles the desert floor (sure does that better than gravel, anyway); and after it’s been watered or rained on a few times, it packs down into a hard surface that your dogs can walk around on. This latter obviates their getting mud all over their feet and tracking it into the house.

“Mud” in Arizona is not your ordinary East-Coast mud. The soil here has a lot of clay — in its extreme form, it creates a kind of hardpan called caliche. This stuff is sticky. When the dog tracks regular wet dirt into the kitchen, the stuff adheres to the tile flooring like paint. You literally have to get down on hands and knees and scour it off. It will not wipe up with a rag or paper towel — you have to use a scrub brush or one of those sponges with a scouring pad on the back.

This is a good reason to put quarter-minus in the back yard. If you’re a dog owner, that is. And if your dog is, say, NOT a corgi puppy.

Ruby the Corgi Puppy, being a high-energy sort of soul, is given to chasing around the yard like a rocket with Cassie. And Cassie, being a corgi herself, is also a bit of a rocket. They’ve built a race track around one of the orange trees. Where they’ve established their route, the quarter-minus is churned up and loose. And that means whenever it gets wet, they track a film of fine sand into the kitchen.

This vacuums up, but it’s a nuisance. So I put a little bathroom rug in front of the kitchen door, which works well to shake off and collect the sand.

The other day one of the dogs wuffed on the rug, so I put it in the accursed Samsung washer. And it came out just fine, since it’s flat. Flat things are the only things the Samsung will run through an entire wash cycle without disgorging them in the form of braids.

A few days later, I decided to toss a pair of jeans that I’d worn just a couple of hours into the rinse-&-spin cycle, knowing this would shake out the wrinkles and give me another wearing before I actually had to wash the things by hand, as I now have to wash everything that’s not flat by hand. Twenty minutes later, I come back to retrieve the pants and…WH-A-A-A?????

They’re covered in mud.

Not mud, exactly: SAND.

Sand has run out into the utility sink, into which the used washer water drains, and left a structure that looks like a sand bar on the bottom of it.

Lovely.

Not only that, but the entire inside of the washer is full of sand.

I get out the shop vac and vacuum out the sand, running the nozzle not only over the bottom but all over the tub’s walls, hoping to suck out whatever sand is caught in the little holes that perforate the tub’s side from top to bottom. I fill a scrub bucket with cold water and attempt to rinse the sand out of my jeans.

Then I run the pants through the washer again, only on a full “Quick Wash” cycle. In the wondrous world of HE washers, “quick” means 45 minutes. I figure an endless slosh like this should knock the remaining sand out of the jeans and rinse it out of the washer.

Three-quarters of an hour later…

The jeans are still full of sand, and so is the washer.

Now what?

I wipe out the washer with a microfiber rag, put the jeans to soak with some detergent in a bucketful of water and run the “Bedding” cycle with the machine empty. “Bedding” is the only cycle that causes the Samsung to dispense enough water to actually clean a load of wash, more or less. The “Bedding” cycle takes an hour and ten minutes to run. Maybe, I hope, that much water slopping around that long will be enough to wash the sand out.

Well. No.

I wipe down the inside of the washer tub again, rinse out the soapy jeans in the sink, drop them back into the washer, and run “Bedding” again.

Have you counted up the amount of time we’re at now? One rinse, two “quick” washes, two bedding cycles: that adds up to 4.17 hours of run time. That doesn’t count the time spent vacuuming and wiping down the washer and manually rinsing sand out of the clothing.

The jeans come out again with sand in them, but less of it: I’m able to shake most of it out in the backyard.

The inside of the washer is still coated with sand. YouTube’s repair dudes and DIY mavens suggest this is not a good state of affairs: sand in the pump will, of course, grind up its innards.

Apparently I’m going to be buying another new washer sooner than expected. Hope I can find a cheaper one with a rinse-only cycle…

How to get this stuff out?

Now I raid the linen closet and haul out four large towels, one of them a gigantic Costco beach towel. These I dump into the washer with a generous slug of home-made fabric softener (hair conditioner diluted with water works as well as fabric softener and it doesn’t stink). Run it all through on “Bedding” again, the second-longest cycle the Samsung provides.

This seems to work. There’s still some sand in the washer, but a lot less. I shake out the towels in the backyard, attempting to dislodge as much sand as possible. Wipe out the inside of the washer again. Toss them back into the washer. Run the washer again.

By the time the mountain of towels came out the second time, most of the sand was out of the washer. Not all of it, by any means. But most of it.

That’s 6.51 hours — almost seven hours of running the washer trying to get the sand out of it!

Holy mackerel! What would you do if you lived near a beach? Just keep buying new $1500 washers every six months or so? Learn to replace the pump yourself and keep a lifetime supply of the things in the garage?

Ain’t life grand in the highly efficient 21st century ?

Buy “His,” Not “Her$”

April 2, 2015 by funny

Okay, I know there are more important things to write about — like the U.S. Senate’s outrageous votes to sell or give away all federal lands other than national parks and monuments (presumably to their ~~owners~~ friends, the Koch Bros. & Co) — but for a nominally personal finance blog, this is too, too good to pass up.

By now you must have heard that the cosmetics industry is marketing to men almost as fast and furiously as they always have to women. Most of the paints and creams sold to all and sundry are overpriced junk, but they’re nice junk, junk of the sort that makes you feel pampered and privileged, however briefly.

Well, it turns out that as with clothing, there’s a difference yet not a difference between his and hers. In the case of luxurious personal products, the difference happens to be price. Products that are essentially the same will cost, when sold to men, about 50% less than the fare for women.

Consider, for example, the goop that you smear around your eyes to reduce age-betraying puffiness. Half an ounce of Ahava Dead Sea Osmoter Eye Concentrate, touted by its marketer as some sort of miracle balm from the stagnant pond of salinity, will set a woman back $50. But if she stepped across the store to the men’s counter and bought the same stuff as Ahava Men’s Age Control All-in-One Eye Care, she would pay just $28 for it. For $5.14 an ounce, she can buy a deliciously pampering body scrub from L’Occitane, or for $2.33 an ounce she can get an equally ~~ridiculous~~ luxurious product over at Sephora: Blue Sea Kelp Body Scrub, by Anthony. Both smell great and smooth your skin to a finely polished sheen. Clinique for Men SPF 21 moisturizer: $7.65 an ounce; Estée Lauder SPF 15 “advanced protection anti-oxidant creme”: $29.41 an ounce.

How to make this work for your family? Seek out products that are made by the same company — Clinique, Lab Series for Men, and Estée Lauder, for example. Although the perfume may different (with any luck, you may find a fragrance-free product), the supposedly “active” ingredients are similar or identical. Or simply experiment with a few men’s products — at those prices, ladies, you can afford it!

😉

Images:

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Woman at Her Toilette, 1889.
Actor Jim Brochu puts on his makeup. Opening night of The Big Voice: God or Merman, by Steve Schalchlin and Jim Brochu. Photographer: Basykes. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Not-a-Cancer: Updated Update

March 30, 2015 by funny

Isn’t it lovely: today I do not have to go to the Mayo!

Friday I drove out to the clinic on the far side of Scottsdale, having been summoned by the medical oncologist WonderSurgeon works with. When I asked them what the appointment was for, they told me it was “a six-month followup.” So I say, “Follow-up to WHAT? What’s this conversation going to be about?” You understand, it’s a fifty-mile round trip and I don’t want to spend two hours and a quarter-tank of gas to schlep out there for nothing. She refused to tell me. When I got the printed “itinerary” that the Mayo sends to announce upcoming appointments, I saw I wasn’t even supposed to see the doc — they had me set up to see a nurse practitioner.

So I fly up to the check-in desk just after the appointed hour, having gotten caught up in a gigantic traffic jam and also having discovered that the Morons were swarming — you never saw so many idiot drivers in your LIFE! The receptionist checks me in and then says oh! wait!

NOW what?

“Your appointment isn’t until Monday.”

“WHAT! Holy shit.”

So I say, “Is there somebody I could talk with who could tell me what it is they want to discuss with me? I don’t understand why I’m being hauled out here — and I don’t have either the time to spend on driving two hours back and forth or the money to waste on the gasoline. Could this conversation take place over the phone?” It takes me some doing to make this register with her, but finally she gets it and she tells me to go over to a house phone hanging on a wall across the room — yeah, one of those hard-wired things with the curly cord — and dial an extension into oncology.

This I do. Naturally, they stick me on hold until a nurse can talk to me. I sit on the floor, open my computer, and rack up 15 minutes of billable time reading a client’s manuscript while listening to loud, obnoxious Muzak.

Finally a nurse gets on the phone. I explain AGAIN that it’s an absurdly long drive, that I’m trying to run a business, and that I don’t have the time to come schlepping out unless there’s a very good reason for it. Would she please tell me why I’m being asked to traipse to the far side of East Scottsdale?

She looks in the records and, after much rumination, finally says, “This appointment was made last September. Uhmm…I see you’ve already had…ahem…several lumpectomies.”

Interesting way to describe a double mastectomy.

“Well, yeah. Actually, I don’t have anything left on my body to discuss.”

“You had no invasive cancer?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

Uh huh.

“Well, this was a routine follow-up. Since you’ve talked to Dr. WonderSurgeon, there’s no need for another appointment with us.”

No kidding.

So that was only slightly infuriating.

The trip wasn’t entirely wasted. I needed some specific items available most easily at a specific store located on the fringes of Richistan, so I was able to drop by there on the way home and pick up that junk, plus I made a quick visit to the Whole Foods across the street from the desired emporium.

But I could have billed three hours that morning, not the fifteen minutes I managed to crank out while sitting on the floor of the Mayo’s waiting room.

Time to Move Along?

March 28, 2015March 28, 2015 by funny

Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s time to move — and by that, I mean move a long way away. The news of where this country is headed has become that alarming.

The Arizona legislature is infested with crazies whose politics and thinking are so extreme, so far to the right (if “right” is the word to use: “wrong” is where they’re coming from) that these people can only be described as the new Taliban. Right now we have a nut case who proposes, apparently with a straight face, a bill requiring everyone in the state to attend church.

This red-blooded American scheme came up while our legislators were discussing a bill to allow everyone to carry concealed weapons into public buildings. They’ve already passed a measure requiring that the names of police officers involved in off-duty shootings be kept secret.

These are the kind of ignorant loons that get elected when money buys lawmakers. Lest you wonder whose pocket they’re in, here’s a clue: they’re changing the liquor laws to make it easier to bring booze sales right into your neighborhood — at Circle K’s behest.

Arizona’s legislators propose to ban cities from passing local ordinances barring paper bags. They have resisted allowing the state’s driver’s licenses to meet national guidelines for identification that will let you travel on airplanes — in the near future, Arizonans who want to fly will have to buy a U.S. passport! They signed a bill to make it difficult or impossible for home-buyers to sue a developer for shoddy construction (a standard amenity of new homes in this state). They’ve approved a bill making it illegal to sell health insurance policies that cover abortion.

Really, Arizona has always been the Wild West when it comes to politics. But it’s gone completely off the rails now. It really isn’t a place where educated people who have a brain would want to live.

I consider where I would go:

New Mexico is beautiful but the politicians there are just about as crazy, and you can’t afford to live in Santa Fe — which is the only town in NM where I’d want to live.

California is too expensive. Ditto Oregon. Ditto Washington State.

I dislike snow and don’t want to live someplace where the roads ice up in the winter. That lets out the entire upper Midwest. Florida is relatively affordable but too humid. Southern states in general are infested with the same kinds of crazies as have taken over Arizona’s “leadership.”

Nor is it evident that people of good will and common sense remain in office anywhere. In Ohio, they laugh at a woman recounting her experience of rape as she opposed a bill banning abortion at six weeks into a pregnancy. And, by the way, that bill passed. Ohio used to house people who were reasonably sane.

My associate editor and her soon-to-be husband are talking about decamping to Ecuador. That’s one of several Latin American countries that are said to be friendly to Americans and livable. Another friend has talked about moving to Mexico.

Honestly: we’re talking about a reverse exodus: Mexicans and Guatemalans want to escape to the US; Americans want to escape to Latin America.

There’s the south of France. But I doubt if I can afford the cost of moving across the Atlantic Ocean. One can drive into Mexico, where the cost of housing and furniture is quite low. Plus I think all of Europe is way too vulnerable to attacks by Islamic crazies. The war in the Middle East is going to move into Europe sooner or later, and I don’t wanna be there when that happens. IMHO, it actually is happening right now, in slow motion.

Proceeds on the sale of my house would buy this in Guanajuato... — Proceeds on the sale of my house would buy this little gem in Guanajuato…

It’s not as unsafe in Mexico as we’re told, as long as you’re not living where the drug cartels are warring with each other. And there are some lovely places to live in Mexico. The Mexican people, by and large, are also lovely: polite and kindly, even when compressed in huge, dense urbs like Mexico City. Try to find a New Yorker or a Londoner who’s friendly to strangers! Most Mexicans are friendly and polite as a matter of course.

Throw in another 25 grand and you get this. Do NOT miss the realtor's pitch for this thing!! http://bit.ly/1Dam8hC — Throw in another 25 grand and you get this. Do NOT miss the realtor’s pitch for this thing!! http://bit.ly/1Dam8hC

But even if you have to dodge the occasional bullet and bribe the occasional local official: is that really any different from what’s happening here now? At least the weather’s decent and you can afford to live on the interest from your savings.

Prerogatives of the Self-Employed

March 26, 2015 by funny

Okay…hang onto your hats. In about 15 minutes, I’m going to knock off working and take a nap. It’s 11:07 a.m. as I scribble. And why? you ask? Because I can. It’s a prerogative of self-employment.

Before you go “That’s exactly what I suspected self-employment was all about,” bear in mind that another prerogative of the self-employed is to work from 5:30 a.m. to 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., seven days a week. We might call that, actually, a “definition” of the self-employed.

Last night, as usual, I knocked off around ten o’clock.

This morning, Cassie the Corgi awakened me at 5:00 by barfing all over the bed. I had to leave the house around 6:30 or so to get to my weekly bidness meeting in Scottsdale, so this was convenient in its way: it got me out of the sack a little early. After hauling the comforter out to the garage and stuffing it into the washer, I began the Thursday morning charge-around, by way of getting myself out the door.

The food served by the restaurant where we meet is best described as inedible, and so I usually bolt down breakfast before leaving. After the clean-up activities and given that my hair had to be set before I could bathe, paint my face, and get dressed, and that I hadn’t checked the e-mail yet (always a time suck), I noshed on some leftover soup and slurped down some coffee while flying around the house and office. Poured the rest of the coffee into a travel mug, leapt into the car, and started driving.

Three hours later, I fly in the house, hit the “rinse” cycle on the washer (since the comforter has been sitting there that long wadding itself into a wrinkled mess), and I’m effing STARVED. All the way across the city, I’ve been dreaming of a handful of tiny little red, white, and purple new potatoes roasted in a panful of butter, thinking how maybe that will settle my stomach, which hurts on top of trying to tell me it wants food.

It’s still very early, but craving meat, too, I decide to make an actual meal. Before 10:00 a.m., the potatoes, a small piece of steak, and a fistful of salad have made it to a plate, which now resides on the backyard dining table.

Meanwhile, I’ve sent off two emails to colleagues, reviewed a document in draft, set up two new meetings, and concocted another endless list of things To Do. I’ve checked the website of the distinguished Changing Hands Bookstore’s Phoenix branch and have found, yea verily, a women’s reading group. (I wish to associate myself with such-like because I believe schmoozing in organized groups of women is a fine way to generate interest in the Boob Book.) I add “visit Changing Hands” to the To-Do List. I’ve reviewed some of the work I did yesterday for the Client and considered the next steps. I’ve conceived an idea for the next Writers Plain and Simple post. I’ve checked the stats for that site and reflected that CoPromote isn’t exactly burning up the world when it comes to calling in new readers.

Now it is 11:27 a.m. and I am going to take a nap. So early is it that by 1:00 p.m. I’ll be back in the saddle, riding off into the sunset. And into the dark of night.

🙂