Coffee heat rising

Angst

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.

 

 

 

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.

DUCK-Duck saves Day from Hell (almost)

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Well. She tried. Until a fly fell into the last few drops of cheap red wine we were self-medicating with.

She’s so, soo cute. Come 4:30 in the afternoon, she dropped into the pool (like a fly into a puddle of wine, only DUCK-Duck can swim). Ruby and Cassie the Corgis went bat-sh!t, of course. Cassie has been distracted by Ball but Ruby is still running around in circles. Anxious. A very anxious little dog.

DUCK-Duck is a calm bird. Nothing seems to faze her, not even very anxious little dogs. Evidently realizes that the VALD can’t get through the fencing between Duck and Pups. Even if VALD could pull that off, by some magical canid trick, Ducks have wings. VALD’s do not.

Today has been a Day from Hell, oh so inappropriate for a Sunday. Especially the Sunday of a Memorial Day weekend. I guess it’s because we’re not singing for the summer, unless of course we could afford to go on the European tour. Those of us who are on Social Security, who believed the Mayo Clinic would ding us for something between three and ten grand, and who are generally flat broke under the best of circumstances do not fit into the European Tour category.

By late last night, it became apparent that DropBox, the system through which we deliver services to Our Beloved Clients, had cut off the Fat Lady from its sacred services. The Kid could still access it, but to her puzzlement noted that those things I claimed I was posting to Our Current Beloved Client’s folders seemed not to exist.

A little squirreling around revealed that DropBox was quietly — very, very quietly, yea verily almost inaudibly — saying that it was “not running.”

Not running on the laptop.

Not running on the desktop.

Not fucking running.

So to make a long story short, I started working at 5:00 a.m. of this lovely, crankifying Sunday. I worked until 2:30 p.m., with one midmorning break of about an hour to gulp down some fruit for breakfast, feed the dogs, and run a  load of laundry.

Six hours of banging around seems to have caused DB to “run” on the laptop but not on the desktop.

Having been around the technological block a few times, I sensed that the damn thing was about to do quite the little number. Seeing the hundreds of thousands of megabytes that resided on DB still visible on my terminals if not on anyone else’s, I began the downloads.

Downloaded as fast as I could to flash drives (one was not enough to hold all the data, ohhh no). (We do run a bidness here, after all).

I backed up to flash drives. Backed up to the laptop’s hard drive. Backed up to the iMac’s  hard drive. The iMac backed up to Time Machine.

These processes revealed some extraordinary weakenesses in our organizational architecture: to wit, this stuff has been growing like kudzu.

Grabbed a machete and started to hack.

Reorganized and sanitized the mess on one computer.

Cloned the reorganization and sanitization on the other.

Searched (and searched, and searched, and searched) for a fix online, since as is SOP for these accursed tech entrepreneurs, no human being could be reached.

Struggled and thrashed and banged and thumped and struggled. Eventually both terminals were back online with DropBox.

Let both Bidness Partner and Client know they could access the ongoing project.

Five minutes later, the iMac lost contact with DropBox.

Just this minute, the MacBook (laptop) still seems to be in touch. But I don’t expect that to last long and don’t give a damn. Whenever I sober up (which probably will be along about 5 tomorrow morning), I will open a new account at some other provider of free online Cloud space.

Pisseth me off.

Do you know how much productive work I expected to do today?

• Download and install Scrivener
• Learn to use Scrivener
• Apply it to at least one FireRider serial installment; but
• Ideally, apply it to three
• Check on new online stoonts
• Read the several papers early-bird online stoonts have already posted
• Work on Old New Bad Novel
• Come up with some spice to replace a very boring post-adolescent passage therein
• Clean the pool
• Walk the dogs
• Socialize with the neighbors
• Socialize online

Oh hell. At least we got the pool cleaned.

I love computers. I hate computers

YoungDucksminimized

Life in the 21st Century

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DebitCardIt could be argued, my friends, that living in the 21st century is a continual major effing hassle.

You’ll recall that after Costco announced it will drop its credit-card program with American Express in favor of a new deal with  Citibank, I decided I would forego the pleasure of doing business with Citibank, use my debit card to buy at Costco (an activity that has been much curtailed of late, anyway), and replace my Costco AMEX cards with a single new AMEX account unrelated to that worthy retailer.

So about ten days or two weeks ago, I called AMEX and asked for a new account, so that would be in place well in advance of the upcoming jig at Costco.

Instinct told me that doing this would entail some sort of hassle, and so I’d better not wait till the last minute. Boy, was I right!

Yesterday evening comes in the mail a note from AMEX. “Due to the freeze you placed on your credit file, we cannot obtain the necessary information…” yada yada. They want me to call them and give them the password to unfreeze my credit bureau reports!

Yesh. Over the phone!

Well. I’m not sure how to deal with this. I unfroze those accounts and set the unfreeze for ten days. That means it took them over ten days to even bother to get around to opening a new account in my name. Plus they’ve got not one but two credit cards in my name right now, neither of which I’ve ever welched on. Since I’m already a customer, why is it necessary to jump me through a hoop to prove I’m unlikely to do anything different from what I’ve already done?

And I am not happy about giving some phone clerk in a boiler-room the key to unlock my credit bureau files.

The reason I had to freeze my credit bureau accounts was that the Maricopa County Community College District’s incompetent IT department kindly gave to hackers my full name, my address, my phone number, my date of birth, my Social Security number, my entire employment history dating back to 1967, my entire educational history including a list of every single college-level course I’ve ever taken with the number of credits and the grade I got, the name of my credit union, and the routing number and account number of my checking account.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect American Express to respect what little I can do to stop hackers from using that data to frickin’ ruin me.

If I’m going to do this at all, I’m going to have to wait ten or fifteen days, then go back to Equifax and hassle around with changing my password. But since AMEX doesn’t seem to be able to get off its butt in any given two-week period, that may be counterproductive.

I still have the Citibank credit card that I stopped using. Didn’t close the account (you can’t; you can’t reach a human being there to speak with), so I suppose I could just leave that one on the books, use the debit card for everything, and just not bother to use a credit card at all.

You pretty much have to have a credit card. You can’t book a motel room without one, to say nothing of buying your favorite junk form Amazon. But God, I hate doing business with Citibank.

No matter which way you turn these days, you’re hemmed in by hassle.

Day from Hell After$shock: The Water Heater Bill

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Nine hundred eighty dollah and twenty-six cents. That’s what a new water 50-gallon water heater costs, installed.

I expected this, because the last time I bought a water heater — about 11 years ago when I moved into this house — the plumber said prices were headed for the stratosphere because of new safety requirements. He said then that heaters would run upwards of $600, which indeed they do. This one was $820, plus the cost of installation.

And now I see that Bradford White, the brand my new guy installed, is almost universally disliked and reviled. One buyer said their four-year-old model turned into a “blowtorch,” burned their house down, and killed their dog. That was just outside of Tucson…three months ago!

Well, the plumber didn’t get the icemaker line reattached. I may tell him to return the thing, when he comes over here tonight to connect that. Wish I’d had the sense to look it up yesterday before he installed it!!

Wouldn’t you think a plumber would know the products better?

What am I gonna do here…? There’s no way the guy is going to be able to return the thing, now that he’s installed it and filled it full of water. But holy mackerel…another Consumer Affairs commenter said a year-old model filled their home with carbon monoxide, poisoned her and her husband, and killed their dog. The thing is in the garage and the door between the garage and the kitchen is supposedly a fire door. But that door leaks like a sieve.

He wouldn’t take AMEX, so I had to give him a check. So that means I don’t have the credit-card warranty/insurance deal.

Why do I think I’m lined up for a royal screwing here? This does not look good.

I guess what I’ll have to do is buy a home warranty, which will replace the unit when it craps out (assuming it doesn’t explode my home), and also put a fire alarm and a CO alarm in the garage. There’s already a smoke alarm in the kitchen.

Another half-assed home warranty…dayum! Just what I need: another monthly charge. They cost about $500…maybe I’d be better off to simply put $42 each month toward the next water heater, which, if this one doesn’t burn the roof down around my ears first, will be in about six years and two days. It comes with a six-year warranty…which the guy failed to give me attached to the unit.

Five hundred dollah times 6 years is $3,000, enough to buy three new water heaters…

Well, meanwhile, it’s off to Costco to return the Panasonic telephone lash-up. The instructions are so complicated they are simply incomprehensible. I never have figured out how to bring up the “menu,” and to use the “Block Call” button to beat back the phone solicitors, you can’t just push the button. You have to somehow “select” the phone number, but you can’t find a way to “select.” And apparently “out of area” is not a blockable code.

The thing wasn’t that expensive, but with a thousand-dollar bill for a new water heater that may kill me, the dogs, or all of us, every little bit helps.

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…