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Perp Tales: Update on the Garage Invasion

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It appears that the sweaty star of last year’s garage invasion drama finally copped a plea. Staff from the Maricopa County Attorney’s probation department had to prepare pre-sentence reports on our perp and his pals, which they kindly sent to me. And now we have the full story.

On May 4, 2012, the three creeps knocked over a Cash America Super Pawn store located in the historic but blighted district to the north of my neighborhood. After threatening employees with a gun, they made off with $89,568 worth of jewelry and caused about $500 worth of damage to the display cases they busted apart to get at the loot.

Interesting, isn’t it, that an area hosting several homeless shelters and largely home to the very poor could supply a pawn shop with 90 grand worth of jewelry, isn’t it? Once again: I picked the wrong business…

But moving on: Our boy, one Matthew Jason Avery, 25, was hopped up on meth, heroin, and Percocet at the time he jumped the wall into my backyard and hid in the garage. Clearly, it was  lucky that the commotion in the streets caused me to get up and lock the door between the kitchen in the garage. If he’d entered the house before I managed to get my pistol, I would’ve been in deep trouble. That would have been true even if I did have a gun in hand, because I would have shot him the instant I laid eyes on him, and that would have created a whole different tangle of trouble for me.

The “presumptive” sentence for armed robbery is 10½ to 15 years, followed by a period of probation. Matthew is arguing that the court should reduce this term, since this is supposedly his first criminal exploit. (Yeah, right!) He claims he didn’t have a gun during the robbery — that his colleague Tyshawn Simmons was the one who waved a weapon around — and so the county probation officer is recommending that he receive a shortened sentence on the count of sticking up the pawn shop, plus the presumptive sentence of 3½ years for burglarizing my garage. They also want him to make restitution to Cash America, whenever the value of the stolen property that is not in police custody can be determined. So presumably this guy will get out in three years or so, what with credit for the 239 days he’s already spent in jail waiting for court action.

On the gun issue: the cops sure as hell thought he was armed. After they dragged him off, one of the officers and I searched the garage and the backyard looking for the pistol they were pretty sure he had. We didn’t find it, but…

A few days after Matthew was arrested, the sheriff’s office informed me that he was bailed out of the slam. That evening someone entered my backyard during the night. They left the side gate hanging open, signaling that they’d come a-visiting. Obviously, Matthew came back looking for what he left in the shrubbery, and presumably what he left was a weapon.

Possibly the most disturbing element in all this is that Matthew, the poor little sh!t, was born into this world without one single, forlorn hope. This was a kid who was doomed from the outset.

Raised by his biological mother and abused as a child, he was “home-schooled” until the seventh grade, when he and his parent ended all pretense of educating him. The poor schmuck reads below the sixth-grade level and is incapable of supporting himself.

Not surprisingly, he started using meth at 16 and got into weed and coke at 17. He didn’t develop the heroin habit (so it says here) until he reached the age of 24.

Think of that. A grown man who, thanks to “home-schooling,” does not even have a grade-school education. When something like that happens to a kid, the most likely outcome will be drugs, crime, and violence. An escape from such a fate would be mighty near miraculous.

Oh well.

One last word on the matter, a piece of advice:

If you are ever the “victim” of a crime in which you lose little or nothing and from which you emerge unharmed, the police will ask you if you want to prefer charges against the perp. Tell them “NO.”

The hassle factor involved in being a so-called “victim” of a clown like this is just astonishing. The County’s action against Matthew has gone on for fourteen months. During that time, I’ve been the target of a steady blitz of paper, much of it subpoenas to appear at ever-changing trial dates.

One such subpoena is more threatening than Matthew in the garage, because each of them contains a peremptory order to appear in court at 8:00 a.m. on X, Y, or Z date (never mind whether you have a job, whether your pay will be docked if you don’t show up at work, whether you have small kids or a sick relative to care for, whether you’ve paid for airline or hotel tickets, whether anything else). And each of them informs you, in boldface type, that if you do not show up you will be arrested and jailed.

Every time I turned around, I found another of these aggressively worded subpoenas in the mailbox, each one demanding a reply. Once the sheriff’s office even sent a deputy, who parked his vehicle conspicuously in front of my house and marched up to the door to deliver yet another subpoena — even though I had faithfully replied to every one of the things that yes, yes I would be there.

Every piece of correspondence regarding the case had return addresses from the sheriff’s office, the probation department, the county attorney, and various other agencies that made it look, to anyone who didn’t know what was inside the envelopes, like I was the target of criminal prosecution. And as we know, much of my mail is misdirected to my neighbor Mannie, who lives at the same house number on a road whose street name is almost identical to mine. Can you imagine what Mannie and his wife must think? What the postal carrier must think?

If your perp is unlikely to return and you sustained no substantial harm, the best thing to do is to let it drop.

Navigating the Food Desert

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Muffin_NIHYesh, so...the three restaurant meals I’ve consumed over the past two days have put almost two pounds back on the decrepit frame.

Why?

Three words:

salt
sugar
starch

Folks, we Americans don’t live in a food desert. No. We live on the freaking PLAINS OF MARS where food is concerned!

When you can go into a typical restaurant and find almost nothing on the menu that is not gonna be bad for you because of the way it’s been prepared and what was in the ingredients the cooks had to work with, you have virtually no chance of arriving at my age in good health. Not unless you prepare all your food at home, and most Americans wouldn’t think of any such thing because it just isn’t practical.

When you work eight or ten hours a day (or more, as many of us do), you still have to eat. Dragging a brown bag to the office every day isn’t much fun. But more to the point, if you’re a professional or a business executive, you are expected to make some rain. And you’re not making any rain when you’re parked in the lunchroom munching an egg salad sandwich.

You’re expected to take the clients to lunch. And if no client is handy, you’d still better show up at a restaurant or at the club and make yourself seen, and once a week you’d better be at a Chamber luncheon eating some bad Italian food served off a steam table while you glad-hand and schmooze. Your boss knows where you’re eating lunch…

And so you get in the habit of eating out. It’s so much easier than cooking, isn’t it? So you think, anyway. For a mere 25% over the inflated cost of the food, you get someone to wait on  you and pick up after you. How convenient!

So you eat out whether or not you have to entertain clients and shake hands with your competition colleagues and potential customers. You eat out because you’re too tired to cook. Because the kids want a Burger King and won’t eat whatever you put on the table. Because one of you got home late and the other one is about to expire from hunger. Because there’s nothing in the house to eat.

This morning I’m meeting two of my favorite friends for a shopping junket in old town Glendale, a venue graced with charming boutiques in fun antique buildings. They want to start at a restaurant where we can get a muffin (or some such) for breakfast and end at another restaurant where we’ll have lunch.

I am not eating any goddamn muffins. Let’s take a look at the ingredients of such an object, made from a mix, as most restaurant bakery goods are:

White flour
Sugar
Blueberries Canned In Light Syrup (Blueberries, Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup)
Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oil
Modified Corn Starch
Vital Wheat Gluten
Baking Soda
Sodium Aluminum Phosphate
Salt
Propylene Glycol Monoesters of Fatty Acids
Mono and Diglycerides
Corn Starch
Maltodextrin
Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate
Citric Acid
Cellulose Gum
Xanthan Gum
Artificial Flavor
Modified Cream

Yummy!

When you’re avoiding salt, what you’re really trying to avoid is sodium, because it drives up your blood pressure. “Salt” is the word we use in conversation for a compound called sodium chloride; the sodium part is the part we’d like to do without — whether some doctor told us to or not. You do need some sodium for good health. However, most unadulterated food has as much naturally occurring sodium as you need.

Take a look at that list:

Baking Soda
Sodium Aluminum Phosphate
Salt
Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate

Baking soda is high in sodium. In other words, what you’ve got there is sodium, sodium, sodium, and sodium. Probably about four times as much as you would need to bake your own blueberry muffins and have them come out tasting one helluva lot better than a concoction that needs artificial flavoring to make it convincing.

But this product is sweet, not salty! How does it get that way, with all that salty stuff in it? Well, it contains

Sugar
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Maltodextrin
Modified Corn Starch
Corn Starch

That would be sugar, sugar, sugar, and sugar.

The undisguised sugar may be the best of a bad lot here. We’re told by the august authors of Wikipedia that “heated corn starch raises the blood glucose levels even faster than sugar, and like pure sugar, white bread and potatoes, it easily leads to excessive weight gain.” Which is to say that you don’t have to go far to learn what this stuff is gonna do to you.

If you were to make a batch of blueberry muffins from scratch — a project that would take maybe five minutes longer than pouring some water into a boxed mix would take — the result still wouldn’t be very good for you, but it would be a helluva lot better for you than the baked witch’s brew you’d be eating in a restaurant.

To start with, you’d use fresh or frozen blueberries, which come without benefit of high-fructose corn syrup.

Your only sweetener would be sugar, plus the fruit. At least you would then know what’s in the batter: you would know exactly how much sugar you were serving up.

You would use two sources of sodium: 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 teaspoons baking soda. Here, too, you would know exactly how much of the stuff you were getting.

You would use 1/4 cup of butter, not hydrogenated oils, whose baleful effects are well known. You would add 1/3 cup of milk, not (yuck!) “modified” cream.

Ninety-nine percent of restaurants — especially the ubiquitous chain restaurants — serve up packaged, processed foods. Treats that wouldn’t be great for you to start with are downright toxic when they’re mixed up this way. Food that you imagine is healthy actually comes to you swimming in sugar, salt, and chemicals with unpronounceable names.

So…what to do?

It’s hard to say. When I go into a restaurant these days, I order a bowl of fruit. This noon I plan to ask for a salad — hold the dressing, hold the croutons — and then pull a recycled spice jar containing a mix of wine vinegar, olive oil, and fines herbes out of my purse. Otherwise? Try to get baked fish, broiled meat (not fried, which too often is what “grilled” means), and plain vegetables. Ask for salad with a cruet of vinegar and oil or a slice of lemon and a cruet of oil.

It takes the joy out of restaurant-going. But trust me: some doctor telling you that you need to swallow blood pressure pills until you topple over into the grave will take the joy out of life. So will a heart attack or a stroke.

This is the specific reason Americans are fat. It has nothing to do with people being lazy or slovenly or worthless or any other insult that the self-righteous sling at the overweight. It has everything to do with the kind of food that is being marketed to us — and what’s in it, largely without our understanding.

Image: U.S. National Institutes of Health. Public Domain.

Fell Off the Diet Wagon!

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Doomed!

This morning the body broke the 140 barrier for the first time: down to 139.1 pounds! w00t!

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Yeah. It did at 5:30 this morning.

Then it was off to Scottsdale for the Thursday ayem shindig at The Good Egg.

There’s a problem with The Good Egg: there’s nothing to eat there. If you can’t eat eggs (urp!!! ….literally, and immediately) and you’re trying to hold your blood pressure down by not eating stuff with salt in it and you’re trying to keep the weight down by abstaining from breads and pancakes and English muffins and you’re not eating sugary stuff like sweetened yogurt, there’s nothing to eat there! As usual, I ordered a bowl of fruit, which as usual came out soggy and uninspiring, and drank a lot of bad coffee.

By the time I got home around 9 a.m., I was so hungry I decided I would forget the piss-poor packaged berries garnished with half a banana and move on a full meal. Had a piece of steak in the freezer but was low on veggies, so drove back out to the store and picked up some delicious broccolini and…yes! Some lovely little red new potatoes! Cooked all this stuff on the grill, and what the hell…the sun was over the yardarm somewhere, so opened a bottle of wine and had a couple of snorts of that to wash down the feast.

Very lovely.

Figured to eat salad the rest of the day. That actually is a routine that’s been working: cook up a great, fairly large meal for breakfast (sans the wine chaser) and then eat really light from then on.

What I didn’t figure on was M’hijito calling at quittin’ time to invite me out for Mexican food.

Now, you’d think a grown woman with will power could resist that siren call, wouldn’t you? No. There’s just no way I’m going to turn down an invitation from my wonderful son to go out to dinner. And once seated at our favorite hole in the wall, the chances of turning down chips, salsa, beer, a relleno stuffed with melted cheese, a side of refried beans, and another beer are exactly nil.

Nil, nil, nil! And soooooo good!

It’s nine p.m., and I’m still so stuffed I can barely wriggle. And I suppose we could have some sort of lottery betting on how fat I’ll be by tomorrow ayem!

😆

The early-morning meeting put the eefus on the vigorous swim before the carcinogenic sun comes up. At noon it was so freaking hot and humid in the house that I decided to risk death and take a plunge in the pool at high noon.

And that’s when I realized something: jumping off the side and splashing around in the deep end while the dog races back and forth yapping is play. Locking the dog in the house and swimming twice the length of the pool 33 times is work.

Which, presumably, is why I’m finding it difficult to make myself do that once or twice a day. Work is just not my thing.

Not that it wasn’t pleasant enough swimming up and down by moonlight this evening. Just…that it’s work.

Carnival Comin’ Our Way! And various chatter…

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By golly! Funny is once again hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance this weekend! The thing goes live on Monday, so be sure to send your submissions by about mid-day on Sunday — no later than 5 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, which is the same as 5 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Kind of a weird week here. Personally, I’ve been crippled up by the back/hip/whatever-the-heck-it-is enough that I haven’t felt like working or playing. It’s been hotter than a three-dollar cookstove outdoors, and with rain coming in for the so-called monsoon season, just freaking soggy. Couple of days ago, I washed my hair after getting out of the pool about 8:30 a.m….at 1:15 it was still damp!!! And it’s not even very long yet. At all.

Look at this charming thing I found on Etsy, at a shop called LizzyStuff:

MexicanCross

How cool is that, I ask you?

It’s going to be the focal piece of an Anglican rosary that I intend to make and donate to this year’s silent auction for the choir. It’s a one-of-a-kind (as far as the shop owner knows) made-in-Mexico vintage piece. The plan is to create a Southwestern motif by selecting silver or copper, malachite or turquoise, and lapis for the thirty-three beads.

Actually, this project is the offspring of a massive Fail, possibly one engineered by a bemused God Herself.

With three pieces already in the can, I decided to combine piles and piles of seed beads ( 🙄 for which I had never been able to find any use…) into a long rope that a woman could wrap around her neck a few times or simply allow to hang long and loose.

It took for-freaking-ever to make this stupid thing. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the design to get it just right, combining vast numbers of green, red, gold-tone, and silver seed beads with units of pearls, red seed beads, and tiny silver spacers to create just the right “rhythm.”

Along about halfway through this endless project, it dawned on me that I didn’t know how to connect the thing into a single uninterrupted strand without putting in an ugly crimp bead. And worse, the small silver beads would NOT let me run the wire back through them to secure the connection, crimp or no. All through the mind-numbing process of arranging 44 inches of these things just. exactly. so, I contemplated this conundrum. And finally it occurred to me:

Why not string the things on heavy thread, rather than wire? Then instead of having to crimp the ends together, all that would be required would be a good knot.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? I suppose you can guess where this is going.

So I threaded the damn things on three long (long, long) strands of heavy nylon upholstery thread. And it worked! It looked great! Tied them off and felt mighty proud.

Well. Sorta.

coral snakeHeld this elaborate rope of shiny beads up to the light and realized…hm. The pattern of green and red and gold tubular beads looked exactly like a coral snake.

Yes. A colorful green and red and gold hyper-venomous serpent.

Now, realistically…how many women would think of that?

Indeed. One woman thought of it. Strikes me that suggests a fair number of women just might think of it.

In that case, of course they’ll all run to plunk down $80 or $100 bucks for the thing. Of course. Who wouldn’t?

Argh.

I set it down and went away, so as to look at it by the light of another day.

Comes a new dawn.

I go back and look at it again, and yup! Looks exactly like a coral snake.

Ohkayyyy….maybe it would look better in the wearing. I sling it around my neck and

PLING!!!!!

The knot gives way and a jillion little goddamn green and yellow and gold and silver beads FLY ALL OVER THE ROOM!!!!!!!

Bleyachhh! I give up. Toss the remainder down and go away.

At first it seemed best to just submit the several pieces I’d already made. But then, from out of nowhere, the idea of creating a rosary formed. I have no idea where that came from. I do not pray the rosary myself, and come to think of it, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an Anglican rosary, although I have seen one of our clergy wearing something that looked a great deal like a string of prayer beads.

So there it is. Did a little research and learned the RC rosary is pretty elaborate and comes in several flavors. My friend, fellow jewelry-maker, and partner in musical crime is going to bring over several of her own tomorrow when we junket out to Scottsdale, so I’ll be able to see what those look like and maybe get some good ideas. Then once a design is on paper, I’ll order up the beads or buy them from local purveyors, and from there it shouldn’t be long before the finished product is in hand.

The Southwestern motif, which came about purely by the serendipity of an Etsy search, is amazingly appropriate, not just because we’re here in Phoenix but because of what the church in question is and how it came about. One of its original founders, who was a practically inseparable friend of the church’s founding pastor, Paul Urbano, was Paul M. Roca, who was what we might call old Arizona. These two developed a passion for tracking down and exploring Jesuit missions in northern Mexico. Paul Roca acquired one of the early Toyota Land Rovers, a jeep-like affair capable of taking on all terrains, and the two of them made a habit of taking off for the wilds of Sonora and Chihuahua. Paul wrote several books on the subject, describing the churches and ruins they found as they tried to follow in the steps of the missionaries through southern Arizona and Mexico.

The two men as well as the church, founded in the heart of what was then the city’s most affluent district, were central to the development of Phoenix from its small-town Southwestern roots to one of the largest cities in the United States.

So. Southwestern rosary. What could be more perfect?

Images:

Hecho in Mexico crucifix, shamelessly ripped off the Internet.
Coral snake. Norman Benton. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

 

 

Gold-Buggered! Protecting Your Heirs from Con Artists

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You don’t have to be poor to be snookered by con artists. One of the guys in my Thursday morning business group, affectionately known as George the Elder, is a financial manager. He has a client, an old gal who’s been with him for 20 years and has plenty of money in IRAs. He had things set up so that she was getting about $6,000 a month from now unto the end of time, with the fund unlikely to run out before she croaks over.

Somehow, this woman got involved with a scam artist who persuaded her that the world economy is about to crash in flames and that to save herself she must convert all her investments into gold!

Our guy tried his weenie-wurst to persuade her otherwise, but she simply would NOT listen to him — the crook had her convinced that George was ripping her off! — and so she has unloaded all her IRAs, sold all her equities, and drained her savings, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes, and is madly buying freaking gold coins!

George is beside himself, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He thinks she’s alzheimering out or otherwise has taken leave of her sanity…but she lives alone and there’s apparently no one to challenge her competence.

The obvious message here is don’t believe anyone who advises you to do anything drastic with your money. Anyone who tells you the world is coming to an end or the stock market is headed for an irrecoverable crash is either a nut case or a scam artist, especially if the person is trying to get you to change your way of doing business.

But there’s a subtler message. We are about to see millions of people enter old age. Following in their tracks will be millions of scam artists trying to take advantage of them. If you have any assets at all — even if it’s just a paid-off house, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings — you and your spouse or partner should set up your estate to protect the survivor and your children from predators and their own stupidity.

Even if you’re not among the 1 percent, you can set up a trust to protect just about any kind of asset, be it cash and investments, real estate, or your beloved mattress filled with Krugerrands. These entities exist in a variety of forms, among them the irrevocable living trust, the revocable trust, the Kiss trust, and the like. Some work as tax shelters, because in effect you no longer own the assets — the trust owns them. Thus if you have a child who’s trying to get college aid, sheltering your family’s money in a trust can erase wealth that would be held against him or her in the application process, and you can draw funds from the trust without paying large taxes on them. The Kiss trust lends itself to this strategy, especially for middle-income families that are not wealthy, and it has the advantage that more than one person can contribute to it.

A trust should be set up by a lawyer. As with any decision involving your life savings, it pays to get professional advice — and to ensure that the adviser actually is trustworthy. Don’t do business with “experts” who want to sign you up in your living room. Hire a good lawyer and check the person’s credentials. Bear in mind that AARP does not endorse any living trust  products, and so if someone tries to play the AARP card with you, walk away. Also don’t walk but run away from anyone who tries to high-pressure you or speed you through some sales pitch.

In setting up a trust, be sure that you as the grantor have the say over how the funds will be invested; that you retain the right to decide how assets will be distributed among beneficiaries; that you retain the right to remove a trustee if you’re not satisfied with his or her services; and add a provision ensuring that after your death beneficiaries must appoint a qualified trustee from a legitimate bank trust department. Also bear in mind that it’s possible to set up a trust so that assets outside of it are transferred into the trust after you pass away.

If you have a complicated estate or a lot of money, setting up a trust will cost something in lawyers’ fees, although a Kiss Trust can be organized very inexpensively. But you get what you pay for. Consider: if George had his client’s investments set up so she was receiving 4 percent of principal, she had $1.8 million. All of which she is busily converting to gold coins…  The savings on taxes alone would be more than the cost of having hired a lawyer to protect those assets with a trust.  It’s worth checking out the pro’s and cons and exploring whether one of these instruments might help protect you or your heirs from questionable schemes and bad ideas.