Coffee heat rising

Angst

Can’t Win for Losin’

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Argha! FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-THREE DOLLARS for a brake job on all four wheels.

Oh damn oh damn oh damn! Just when I thought I just might squeak through the summer on what’s in savings! Not a freakin’ chance.

This is the first day of the March/April budget cycle, and that puts me in the red: right now, today. If I don’t have a single other extraordinary expense—not one vet bill, not one plumbing bill, not one pool repair bill, not one dental bill, not one whatEVER bill—groceries, gas, and other necessaries will push this month’s budget into the red. At the very best, I’ll have to pull about $175 out of my steadily deflating emergency savings fund. At worst? Who knows?

Gotta get a job! A real one, I mean. Not three or four fake ones.

Jury Duty Postponed…

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…to a manageable date. The jury summons the Superior Court sent the other day gives one a chance to plead extreme financial hardship (we’re told this stratagem almost never works) or to ask for a postponement of jury duty. If you go online or telephone the talking robot, your choices are to postpone 60 days or 90 days.

Well, a 60-day postponement would land me smack in the middle of finals week. Ninety days would land me at the courthouse midway through my summer class.

However, if you call the talking robot and hit 0000, it will shunt you over to a human being.

This person kindly reset the appearance date to May 14, the Monday after spring semester grades are due.

Since I’ve never actually been empaneled on a jury (too nerdly, I guess), it’s unlikely they’ll take me this time. So with any luck all that will happen is eight hours of my time will be wasted cooling my heels in the jury-duty waiting room. Even if they do select me, the May 14 date provides two weeks and a day before class begins.

My summer course is a night class, Tuesdays and Thursdays. If I’m unfortunate enough to get stuck on a jury for a long-running trial (one colleague was tied up for over four weeks, after the judge had estimated the trial would take three or four days!), I’ll be looking at two Days from Hell a week, but at least I won’t lose pay.

Jeez. I have gotta get myself a real job. That, or get the editorial business to crank a steady flow of decently paying work, all the time.

Doctored and Drugged and Summoned

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So it was off to a specialist this morning, a pulmonologist recommended by a friend on the choir, who herself is an RN. He, I discovered when I got there, managed to get himself on Phoenix Magazine’s “Top Docs” list in 2011, for whatever that’s worth.

At any rate, his office proved to be very professional and efficient. They got me in to see him today when I called yesterday morning, which has to be some sort of all-time speed record for an American doctor’s office. At the Mayo, I couldn’t even get past the gate-keepers the last time I called–their phone answering lady just left me hanging, to suffer over the weekend and beyond.

He did some breathing tests and asked a wide variety of questions. Tentatively his theory is that it’s either a chronic bronchitis that began with a viral infection six weeks ago or is Valley fever. He’s redoing the Valley fever test, on the theory that antibodies often don’t show up until a month or more after the infection; however, when I said I’d tested positive in my 20s, he remarked that probably, then, this is not Valley fever. That notwithstanding, as long as he’s bleeding me anyway, he ordered the test.

He also is testing for a variety of other ailments and signs of asthma and allergies; next week he wants to do allergy tests.

Let’s hope he doesn’t decide I’m allergic to Cassie!

Never have had a problem with dogs before, though long-term exposure to cats gives me a chronic stuffy head. I had no idea it wasn’t normal for one’s nose to be plugged up until I left my husband and his houseful of cats. After I’d been away for a while, one day it dawned on me…hey! my head isn’t stuffy all the time. Since then I’ve avoided puddy tats.

At any rate, the new doc came forth with a packet of Prednisone pills considerably less powerful than the ones the Mayo’s ER doc gave me, and he said that yes, they would disarm my immune system, but not enough to cause a clinical immunocompromise. He felt that no matter what I might be infected with, the stuff would be safe to take in the short term.

He also thought I should start the antibiotic she gave me, but was puzzled when I told him she said I should do the Prednisone first and then if that didn’t work I should take the antibiotic. He said for acute bronchitis you’re supposed to take them together. And also swallow some Prilosec to try to control the bellyache these drugs will cause.

So in the course of two hours, I’ve gone from no drugs to three drugs a day

He said that even though the antibiotic is in the same family with erythromycin, which has caused some untoward effects in my body, 80 percent of people who have a bad reaction to erythromycin can tolerate this stuff. I pointed out that if a drug has a weird side effect, any weird side effect, I inevitably am gonna get it. He said if anything uncomfortable arises, just quit taking the stuff.

Meanwhile last night when I dragged out to the mailbox, what should I find but a jury summons.

Damn.

Actually, I don’t mind serving on a jury—or wouldn’t, if I ever got past the stage of wasting eight hours in the court’s waiting room. But the problem right now is that if I miss a day of class, my pay is docked, no ifs ands or buts. I’m trying to get the District to come forth with a written statement of that policy, but the woman in the District office the college told me to call can’t be bothered to return my call.

Ideally, I would like to get myself excused from this recurring hassle. But if I can’t get her off the dime, it is at least possible to ask for a postponement, and apparently you can even go online and ask for a specific date. So if I can, I’ll just push it forward to this summer, which at least would give a week or two on which to serve, in the unlikely event that I’m called.

People with PhD’s by and large are not regarded by lawyers as any client’s “peers,” so in all these years I’ve never made it on to a jury.

A friend of mine did, though. The judge told the jury to expect the trial to last a couple of days. Two weeks later it was still dragging on!

She was teaching, too, but at GDU no one pays much attention to whether you’re there or not, and so she at least didn’t get the financial shaft. And she taught poli sci, not writing courses, making it possible for her to send her friends to the classroom bearing videos to keep the kiddies busy.

I, on the other hand, will simply lose my paycheck if I’m forced to serve on a jury.

The other concern is that experience shows the various courts are using the same rotating call-up list. You get called for Superior Court, then City Court, then Federal Court, then the Grand Jury. A summons to the Grand Jury is really bad news, because you’re shanghaied not for a week or two but for many, many  months, during which you’re on call and have to show up at the drop of a proverbial hat to proceedings that can last for lengthy periods. So I can expect at least two and possibly three more of these little headaches to show up in the mail within the next few weeks. Goodie!

Well, a ton of copy awaits. And so, to work…

 

Wednesday from Hell, November 2

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Ohhhh make these days go away!

Late last night Tina e-mailed to say she’d gone to urgent care and been told she has a sinus infection and bronchitis. She has sounded, for some time, like she has exactly the same thing I have. A doctor there told her that a cold shouldn’t last more than seven days, and if it goes on longer than that, then it’s something else.

Ugh. Mine has gone on for over three weeks.

Of course, there’s NO WAY I’m going to get to an urgent care facility today. The nearest one is a half-hour drive from here.

Well. I suppose if I left right this instant—6:40 a.m.—maybe I could get in there, get seen, get pills, and get back here in time to throw on some rags before running out the door to class. However, that would mean no breakfast and probably not even time to take a shower. And of course, on Wednesday from Hell there’s no time to get lunch, either. So the first time I would eat would be around 5:00 p.m. Very quickly.

I should show up at choir tonight…I’ve been out almost a month, and we have a big shindig this Friday that I’m committed to go to. But there’s no way I can sing: I’m still barking and hacking.

Welp, if a real cold goes away after seven days, that means I’ve never had a real cold in my life. That’s ridiculous. I’ve never gotten free of a cold in less than two or three weeks.

However, you’d think by now this one should be getting better. And it is…at least now I can sleep at night without having to spray a toxin into my nose.

One saving grace: Pup was so well-behaved yesterday, I wondered if something was wrong with him. He’s starting to act almost like a dog!

The only times he jumped Cassie were when she deliberately teased him. (Yes: a great deal of the tup-the-Corgi game is initiated by the Corgi, who thinks it’s great fun to get him in trouble.) When told to “leave it!,” most of the time he left it. He did not dig up the yard, charge around the house like a rocket, drag me back and forth, gouge the kitchen cabinets with his claws, pick up pieces of palm tree litter to chew on, or otherwise make mischief. He was off the leash most of the day.

I hope he’s OK. Assuming he’s not sick, it’s a good sign: it means he’s beginning to get the idea of what it means to live with humans. He’s a bit young to grasp that concept, so I’m suspicious. But…it could be promising.

A stiff breeze blew all night long. Amazingly, there’s hardly any crap in the pool. The wind must have come in from the north, blowing the devil-pod leaves away from the water. Thank heaven for small miracles.

Better get up and get going if I’m gonna get any food or coffee before M’hijito shows up with Pup. Looks like the earliest I can get in to an urgent care facility will be mid-morning tomorrow. I could drop by the place on the way back from the SBA meeting.

Ugh!

Lives of the Self-Employed

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“Self-Employed”: that’s another way of saying “underemployed,” which ultimately is another way of saying “unemployed.”

It happened again last night: I worked until 11:30 trying to keep up with a set of jobs that pay poverty wages. This is just flicking INSANE!

Over the weekend it occurred to me, once again, that I need to get a grip on the way I spend my time. Too sick to go to choir, on Sunday I was struggling to get even with the 101 papers so they’d be off my desk, to the extent they ever are, by the time the 235 students’ first real assignment came in. But I realized the house was so filthy it was actually making the dog sick: Cassie’s eyes water all the time because she’s allergic to something, probably all the dust on the floors. Her little nose is only about 10 or 12 inches off the ground, so naturally when she goes tearing around on floors that haven’t been properly cleaned in three months, the dust flies up into her face.

So I finally decided I would have to let the student papers go for a day in favor of basic sanitation.

But not before I tried to sketch out some sort of schedule that might get the massive amounts of work under control. Caring for the house, the dogs, and the yard alone could fill one’s day; add trying to run three exercises in underemployment and you’re doomed.

This, to my astonishment, is the result:

Lives of the Self-Employed
You'll need to click on the image here; it's so large it won't fit in a column.

The plan was to try to keep the actual paid work hours down to 40 a week, and also to work in time to walk Cassie and to take Charley to the park for a leash-training session. Also, I wanted to get back into the habit of bathing and painting my face early in the day, instead of having to race through those jobs in the 15 minutes before I have to run out the door to class.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I don’ t have to leave for campus until almost 11:00 a.m. However, if I do the other things I need to do—walk the dogs, make the bed, pick up the pigpen (which while the weather is warm—we’re just coming off another three-digit spell—entails tending the pool and watering plants), fix and eat breakfast, take a shower, paint my face, and get dressed for class—this schedule still leaves me working into the middle of the night.

Every flickin’ night.

Seven days a week.

Out of curiosity, I added up the number of hours for which I actually get paid, which I’ve called “productive hours.” All that teaching and editing and blogging adds up, during a well-organized week with no rush jobs, to sixty hours a week!

Know what I earn for a sixty-hour work week? $29,790.

Yes. Less than half of what I earned when I had a real job, at which I worked about 30 or 35 hours a week.

All it takes is one thing to disrupt this finely juggled schedule. Today, for example, I have to go to the dentist at 10. That cuts short the time for writing this blog post—Charley’s half-hour training session will have to go—and pushes the other work forward until after I get back, sometime around noon.

Gerardo just showed up. The disruption he and his sidekick create distracts from trying to get the present chore (blogging) done. Just spent 20 minutes cleaning up the dog shit I didn’t get to yesterday because it was well after dark before my son picked up his dog, and instructing Gerardo on the plants that need to be pulled out because they died during the summer’s heat.

And I have to be back here by noon so I can sit here for five hours waiting for the pool guy to come back and fix the filter AGAIN.

Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred and ninety dollars. The dentist is going to clean out my checking and savings accounts today. There’s been NO WAY I’ve been able to set aside another $40 a month for routine dental work. Not only have I not been able to self-escrow enough to cover tooth-cleaning (to say nothing of the new interesting thing that’s developed), I’ve been dipping into savings every month to cover ordinary expenses.

Leslie’s said they might forgive the cost of today’s service call, because it’s not been very long since the guy was last here. But if they don’t, that’ll be at least another $160.

Next month I have to drain and refill the pool: $200.

The $185/month water bills this summer happened after I’d turned off the water on the front east side. I’d forgotten that last winter I figured all that xeric landscaping needn’t be watered and had pledged to manually water the roses and hollyhocks three times a week. Well of course while struggling to keep afloat in the tsunami of work that was last summer, I forgot that best-laid plan. So two of the roses in front are dead; the hollyhocks are seared back to the ground, the yellow oleander just barely recovered from last winter’s freezes and has a lot of deadwood that needs to be cut out.

I’ll have to pay Gerardo extra for all the extra work he and his slavey are doing.

The work tsunami hasn’t subsided. I guess I must have washed out to sea.

Speaking of the which, I must hurry to get some food before the kid shows up here with that dog. Bye!

By the way: that 59.6 hours a week? That’s just the paid work. As for the “nonproductive hours”—the hours of work around this place that are NOT paid: 49.65 hours a week.

Is It Time to Go?

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This, from our neighborhood’s self-elected Intrepid Leader, who forward the remarks from a neighbor:

I have a bit of information about the shooting Saturday night at Side Road and Feeder Street.  The detective told me that the victim lives far from our neighborhood.  He suffered a gunshot wound while at the wheel of his car which looks like it then slow-rolled up over the curb.  Last I heard, the victim is in critical condition.  They have not found the suspects.  It is important to note that eyewitness accounts place two suspicious individuals loitering within 50 feet of the assault around 15 minutes before the attack.  They were witnessed 3 times over a 10-15 minute time frame.  I relay this information as a reminder for us as a neighborhood to be vigilantly proactive.

The detective said if you see anything suspicious at all, please call the non-emergency police number for our area so they can come, investigate, and identify the individuals.  The number is 602-262-6151.  I just put it in the contact list on my cell and on the fridge.  Hopefully, this note encourages others to do the same.  For anything which seems dangerous or has the propensity to get that way, the detective said we should not hesitate to call 911.

All residents, adults and children alike, should feel free and secure in our neighborhood.  While this is not the first crime in our area, it is an alarming rejolt to the system.   I am quite confident  in our neighborhood’s ability to send the message to criminals of any type that we will have the police here to welcome them.

I know I speak for many when I say how thankful I am for those who have been working collectively on this issue for so long.  It is just sad and senseless when a situation forces us to remember the need for our collective diligence.

Saturday night. That would be what we call last night. Last night an hour before this happened (Play-Nooz reports peg it at 8:00 p.m., which doesn’t prove that’s when it happened — only when police showed up to find the half-dead “victim,” who presumably was not made of virgin snow), Cassie and I were walking over to La Maya’s house, whence we were invited for dinner. Three hours later (if you believe the reports), we were walking home through the faintly creepy darkness.

Much creepier is the fact that the crime was happening, or a-borning, about the time I was walking around in the vicinity.

This is not quite a block from my house. Most nights, when it’s not still 108 degrees at 10 p.m., the dog and I cross the street at that intersection as we perambulate the neighborhood. Matter of fact, this is the very intersection where the Renter’s Friend’s German shepherd attacked and tried to kill Cassie.

I think maybe, just maybe, I’ve had about enough of this.

Lookee here at what I found in Scottsdale, within walking distance of the tony Scottsdale Fashion Square: it’s an aged townhome built in the 1970s. Looks a lot like the place my father and his wife retired to, except that it has an actual kitchen and it has no nursing home. And they welcome people of all ages, not just the decrepit.

In fact, most of the residents appear to be on the high side of decrepit. It’s a small tract of patio homes, off the main drag, clustered behind a gate with a 24-hour guard. From what I can tell, it’s a lifecare community without the life care: no nursing home, and though there’s a restaurant on the grounds, no one requires you to show up once or twice a day on pain of being relegated, willy nilly, to said nursing home. It looks like maybe it was somebody’s idea of upscale collective living before the idea of collectives ever came about.

A hundred and forty-five grand is significantly less than I could get for my house. Well…assuming that not everyone in the neighborhood rushes to put their houses on the market. This place is already fixed up. It’s as centrally located as Scottsdale gets, and instead of a menacing slum just to the west, it’s bordered on the west (and the north, and the east) by multimillion-dollar estates. It’s like a tiny chip of Sun City dropped down in the middle of Central Richistan. It’s larger than M’hijto’s house. Upgraded. Doesn’t need to have anything done to it (though I’m not fond of carpets). I could probably even hang my laundry on that covered, enclosed patio (though that little oven would be crushingly hot in the summertime!).

Years ago, a Realtor friend remarked that North Central is “today’s Encanto district.”

Yeah.

Former DH and I spent about 15 years in Encanto. We lived in a spectacularly beautiful 1929 house in a lovely, quaint “historic” neighborhood. Yes. Though the house was newer when we moved in than the houses in in my present neighborhood were when I moved here, it qualified as what Arizonans think of as “historic.”

I loved the house, much more than anyplace else I’ve ever lived. But the neighborhood, for all its cohesion and Yuppie camaraderie, was something else: overrun by derelicts who would camp in your yard (and use it as a toilet), who by night would sleep in any car left carelessly unlocked and by day would stumble up and down the streets.

There was always some background noise going on: burglaries, peeping Toms, bums thrown out of some young doctor’s or lawyer’s car, the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (ask me to tell you about that one some day!), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (I’d tell you that story for a dime and a cup of coffee, too). Over time, though, the volume rose.

It rose on the axe murder at the end of our street. A little old lady came home from the beauty parlor to find a burglar in her house. He picked up a hatchet in her garage and hacked her to death. When he and his girlfriend were stopped in her car outside of Blythe, he was wearing her tennis shoes. The only reason the cop pulled him over was that he was speeding. If the turkey had minded the speed limit, he would have gotten away Scot-free.

The friend who was with me that day—we were hanging out with my little boy in a neighbor’s pool when we heard the cops converging on the old lady’s house—moved out shortly thereafter. The woman who bought her house was home alone one night when a guy who had been watching her and her husband’s movements for awhile came in through the only window in the house that wasn’t alarmed. He spent the entire night beating and raping her.

So…what do we have by way of gradually increasing volume here?

• The cops killed in the apartment complex across the road
• The gangbangers who loiter in front of the Walgreen’s at all hours of the day and night
• The guy killed in a mugging at the corner of 19th and Northern
• The 24-hour Albertson’s that you wouldn’t even think of going into after dark, and that you think twice about visiting in broad daylight
• The shoplifter strangled by Fry’s employees at the corner of 19th and Dunlap (that store is long gone, replaced by an ethnic market)
• The chucklehead who ran off when the door squealer interrupted his attempt to break in my westside Arcadia door (no cojones, eh?)
• The woman who was jumped by the would-be rapist when she went out to get the morning paper off the driveway
• And now…this.

Maybe enough is finally enough?