Coffee heat rising

Angst

A Close Call in the Real Estate Department

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My neighbor Sally, the one who lives directly across the alley behind me, has resurfaced. I thought she’d moved out, as she hasn’t been home at least a month. She put her house on the market — the “For Sale” sign has been up for two or three weeks.

But finally this weekend she reappeared. As develops, her 98-year-old mother died last week, after having fallen in the bathtub. The old gal didn’t break any bones, but apparently she hurt herself on the inside. After several weeks of suffering, she died in hospice. Sally has been at her side the entire time.

Sally had already decided to put her house on the market and move to a smaller place before this happened — her agent had listed the house literally hours before the event. But, she said, she’s now so exhausted she can’t face the upheaval of having to empty out a lifetime of possessions and move across the city.

So — hallelujah! — she’s taking the house off the market!

It’s much in my interest for Sally to stay put. She’s quiet —  no barking dogs, no screaming children, no loud rock or salsa music — and she keeps the place up pretty well. Plus she’s a pleasant enough neighbor to have around.

But: it was a very close call, indeed.

She told me that Mr. B*** — the guy who vandalized my pool by throwing about three gallons of used motor oil over the wall into the water — made a bid on the house.

Mr. B***, also known in these parts as The Perp and as The Romanian Landlord, made a business of turning our three-block by two-block neighborhood into his private rental empire. He bought the house next door to SDXB’s, when SDXB’s neighbor was scared off by the local burglars. Seemed like a nice enough fellow at the time.

But then he started buying houses from the elderly neighbors. This tract was built in the early 70s, and, because it’s a decent area (once a very nice area), many of the original owners still live here. And they’re getting on in years.

He would spot someone who looked like they were old enough to be tired of working on a place or whose spouse had recently died; then he would go to the door and offer to buy the house for a song, saying he would pay in cash. Many of these elderly people, especially women, had no idea how much their houses were really worth. They would jump at his offer, apparently without even bothering to consult a real estate agent. And so, in at least a couple of cases we know of, he was practically stealing houses, picking them up for tens of thousands under market value.

He would finance them by telling mortgage companies that he was going to move into them or put relatives in them — this, it develops, appeared in the public records, easily available online.

Then he would promptly turn them into rentals. From there they would devolve into wrecks.

Apparently he was getting advice and possibly financial backing from someone knowledgeable about real estate and the rental business, because he personally is not a very sophisticated soul. Hard-working, yes — but wise in the ways of the world, not so much. At one point he had his clutches on a half-dozen houses here, all of which he was allowing to go to pot and all of which were, of course, driving down property values as compared to adjacent tracts that had few or no rentals.

At the very peak of the real estate bubble, Mr. B*** abruptly sold all but one of these rental houses. So, no doubt thanks to whoever was advising him, he maximized his profit in a big way.

He then bought a house on a huge lot in the pricier neighborhood just to the south of us — where values are higher because there are no rentals wearing out the properties. The house isn’t much, but it’s a prime piece of real estate; the land itself is worth more than the structures. He kept the house next door to SDXB’s former dwelling and turned it into a rental. (After the pool fiasco and resulting court appearances, SDXB fled to Sun City, selling his house to Manny, who bought it with money the city gave him when it condemned his neighborhood to build an airport runway and who has let it run down).

In the wake of the real estate collapse, it looked like B*** was going to stay out of the rental business, or maybe that he just had enough sense to stop soiling his own nest and pissing off the neighbors — maybe he’d go trash someone else’s neighborhood. However…

As soon as he saw the For Sale sign in Sally’s front yard, he called the realtor, who’s one of Sally’s cousins. She wanted $225,000. He offered $180,000.

When Sally heard that that B*** had made a bid on the house, she told her cousin that she wouldn’t sell to him. The cousin informed her that she could not refuse to sell the house to a legitimate bidder.

He told her she needed to make a counteroffer. So she said, “OK, tell him my counteroffer is $224,999.”

As far as we know, that’s the end of it. But I think legally the only way we can be sure of that is for the house to go off the market right now and that sign to come down. She said she’d told her cousin that she’s decided not to move, under the circumstances.

At two and a quarter, the house is offered at or slightly below market, and prices are appreciating fast here. In our zip code, home prices rose 20% in 2012, and they’re expected to go up about 10 percent this year. So, if as I suspect, Mr. B*** wants to get Sally’s house just to spite me — and to put the worst sh!theads he can find in there — he’s entirely capable of coming back with a full-price offer.

If that happens before the house is officially withdrawn from sale, or if she dies (she’s 78) and he gets his hands on the place, I will be out of here in an instant.

How to Be a “Victim”

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As you may recall, after the late, great garage invasion Sheriff Joe and the county prosecutor’s office declared me a “victim” of a couple of gang-banging thugs. The county has an involved victim assistance program, supposedly designed to reassure, protect, and aid victims of crimes.

Yeah.

Beginning way back in November, Sheriff Arpaio’s office started issuing subpoenas — consistently sent to the wrong address, despite repeated corrections from me — demanding that I show up at the trial of one or the other of these two guys. He even sent a deputy to my door to serve one of these papers, all of which inform me that if  I’m not there at 8 in the morning on thus-and-such a day, I will be jailed, and that I have to sit there until a judge dismisses me. Each one has to be answered, by return mail, in the affirmative, to the effect that yes, I have received the latest piece of paper and yes, I promise to show up there, and yes, I know I will be thrown in jail if I don’t show up. I’ve probably received about a dozen of these, partly because they send two or three at a time and partly because the trial has repeatedly been postponed.

It looks like the trial is finally going to happen this Wednesday.

At this point, they’re trying two of the thugs…interestingly, last fall they said one of them had copped a plea. So why we’re having to jump through double hoops is unclear. But that’s far from the most ridiculous aspect of the interminable series of subpoenas.

Silliest aspect? I can’t even begin to identify either of these characters.

One never came anywhere near me or my house, and so I’ve never seen him in my life. The other hunkered down in my garage, on the other side of a dead-bolted door. Two dead-bolted doors, actually, since I locked myself inside my office when it became clear the gent was out there. The only glimpse I got of him was of the back of his head, seen from way across the street as they dragged the guy, kicking and biting, to the paddy wagon.

The only help I can give the prosecutor is to say whether the shirt, the rubber gardening shoes, and an old straw hat that he used to try to disguise himself as a lawn man actually belong to me. This identification could easily be done with a deposition, without dragging me into the courtroom and without exposing me to the attention of the two thugs’ fellow gang-bangers. And without making it obvious, in public, that I live here alone.

The subpoenas punctiliously delete the “victim’s” address. As though they didn’t already know where I live! Hey, folks…they were here. And the night after our boy was released from jail, he came back to retrieve his gun from my back yard — he left the back gate hanging open as a calling card.

Try as I might, I cannot get a straight story from the prosecutor’s office as to how much of my time this fiasco is going to consume. Am I going to be down at the court all day Wednesday? Can I expect this will go on for several days? How much is it going to cost me to park my car downtown all day long? Can I bring a computer so I can do some work while I’m killing time down there? Will they let me take a computer into the courtroom?

I’m supposed to give a presentation at 7:30 on Thursday morning. And since I’m standing in for the group’s president while he recovers from bypass surgery, I have to be there with the organization’s checkbook so as to pay for the Thursday breakfast.

At this point, I have no idea whether I’ll be able to do that or not.

It’s better than last November’s subpoena, which would have had me docked for at least a day of teaching pay — and since my classes met twice a week, that would have meant loss of a fourth of a two-week paycheck. But it’s still a nuisance.

Today I’m going to call the prosecutor’s office again — they’re very nice people; they just don’ t know anything — and if I can’t get a straight story, I guess I’ll have to cancel the presentation and try to get one of the other group members to emcee the meeting and pay for breakfast.

I’m starting to lose patience with this. It’s gone on and on, and it shows some potential to put me at risk, since you can be sure anything I say about either one of the two sh!theads, even “yes, that’s my shirt,” is not going to be appreciated by his fellow sh!theads. And whether they care about their pal or not, they will now know I’m an elderly woman who lives alone, making me a prime target for burglary and possibly other mayhem.

Obviously, the prosecutor’s office needs to get crime victims and witnesses to show up at the courtroom to testify against perps. And that’s fine — I’m happy to be present and to help out to the extent that I can. The issue here is that I can’t help much, or possibly even at all. And the endless badgering from the sheriff’s office has begun to annoy. I’m tired of the threats. And really, I’d like to get a straight story about how much of my time will be absorbed by this — that shouldn’t be too much to ask.

It’s beginning to feel like victimizing the victim. I’m not looking forward to whatever happens next…

How Is It Possible? Another Day from Hell!

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The past four or five days, I’ve been enjoying yet another goddamn health quirk: sudden stabs of agonizing pain in the eye, as though someone were pushing a needle through the backside of my left eyeball.

This has happened before, but in the past it’s only occurred once and then it’s gone away. This time, it’s not going away. And, as usual, a visit to the Hypochodriac’s Treasure Chest that is the Internet induces raw panic. Raw panic does nothing for one’s sense of well-being.

Awake at 1 in the morning, after a pre-bedtime jolt that felt like my eyeball was about to rupture. Whiled away the wee hours editing some pretty damned awful copy. Went back to bed around 4:00 forgetting to set the alarm clock so I could get out the door by 6:45. Slept until well after dawn.

And so missed my 7:30 meeting. And, interestingly, for a change there was a reason I was supposed to show up.

Got Young Dr. Kildare’s front office staff on the phone at 25 after 8:00. They suggested I should present myself to YDK at 9:00 a.m. sharp.

He observed that there wasn’t a thing  he could do about it. I needed to be seen by an ophthalmologist. I said I’d tried, but the earliest I could get in is a week from tomorrow. He said that would never do. I needed to be seen right now. He ordered his front office staff to find a practitioner and run interference with his or her front office staff.

They got me in to a doctor located in one of the city’s darkest slums, at 1:00 p.m.

My class runs from noon to 1:15. Said slum is a 40-minute drive from Heavenly Gardens Community College. I fly into campus, planning to dismiss class with a list of things to study for the Phaque Phinal.

I don’t bargain on Ms. Grandmère showing up with a gallon of milk and two packages of cooked-up mix brownies.

Nor do I bargain on today’s batshit craziness.

I appoint Ms. Grandmère as my unofficial substitute teacher and say “If anyone comes in here, tell them you’re the instructor.”

She says, “But I was a college dropout!”

I say, “That’s OK. I was a high-school dropout.”

The party is under way as I shoot out the door.

Run to my car, rocket across the freeway, navigate one of the scariest parts of the inner city, find said doc’s office. I’ve brought my laptop with me, because I have a rush editorial job to do, one that will pay decently, and I just know this last minute cram-me-into-the-schedule business is going to mean I get to cool my heels in the waiting room forever and aye.

When I get there, I turn on my computer and…wait. And wait. And wait. It won’t boot up. Mentally, I try to guess how much this apparent crash is going to cost me, right at the moment at which I decide to quit my job.

(As it develops, the thing was trying to download some new “critical” goddamn Microsoft updates — WHAT IS IT WITH THESE GUYS THAT THEY CAN’T GET THEIR SOFTWARE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME AROUND? — and because it couldn’t access a wireless connection, it hung. So I guess one thing, count it, (1), didn’t go totally wrong today.)

Finally I get in to see the doc. He’s an old guy, gringo but to my delight fluent in Spanish and not the least bit afraid of bureaucratic rules forbidding discussion of health-care issues in the native language of “illegals.” I like him, though I question his skills as an up-to-date diagnostician.

He decides I suffer from episcleritis and keratitis and recommends, in addition to four daily doses of prednisone drops, a hefty round of Motrin. I point out that in the ton of paperwork they made me fill out is mention of my allergy to the active ingredient in Motrin. He is dismayed to learn I am allergic to NSAIDs in general, since that is the mainstay of what he regards as the treatment for whatever I have.

By the time I escape his office, it’s two p.m. and I’ve had nothing to eat all day. I’m hungry. I take the Rx for prednisone and head for the pharmacy at my favorite Safeway, figuring I can pick up some food and a couple of foamydelicious canned beers to ease my general angst.

At the Safeway pharmacy, I encounter not a pharmacist but an assistant whose backwoods English is so illiterate as to draw notice, even here in lovely inland Arizona. After making me stand in line and then making me stand around some more while she figures out who I am and how to serve me, she announces that the pharmacist is on break and I should come back later this afternoon for the eye drops. I say I am tired, hungry, and in pain, that I have no intention of waiting half the day to get some prednisone eyedrops that no doubt are sitting on their shelves, that I can’t see to drive anyway, and that I want the prescription back so I can take it to the Walgreen’s across the street.

I practically have to throw her down on the floor and wrest the prescription from her fat, sweaty fist to get it back from  her.

Having achieved this, I proceed across the street, where the pharmacist forks over the eyedrops in about 30 seconds.

Starved, I stick some frozen sweet-potato fries in the oven and defrost a tiny piece of steak to throw on the grill. The steak is freezer-burned. Defrost another tiny piece from a newer package; cook both so as to feed the substandard piece to the dog. Phone rings. SDXB. Can’t make him understand that as soon as I’m finished eating and drinking myself into a well deserved stupor, I’m going to bed.  He keeps saying he’ll call me back after I have time to eat.

Administer prednisone, which requires lying down with eyes closed, while listening to SDXB talk. Get off the phone. Fix breakfast/lunch/dinner; overcook steak. Pained eye is so dilated it looks like the eye of an excited cat at midnight. Can barely see through it.

Decide to STET the appointment with the other eye quack on the 14th, since I suspect the old guy gave me a cursory look and had no clue what he was talking about but instead made a quick guess — particularly since I have exactly zero symptoms of keratitis and because he speculated the thing was some sort of allergic reaction, a theory that makes little or no sense. If there’s an improvement over the next day or two, bueno, I’ll cancel. But if not, at least I’ve got a foot in another door.

Never did get to take a nap. It’s almost 6:00 p.m. If I go to sleep now, which I desperately want to do, I’ll be awake at 10 p.m. and that will be that. Dog  hasn’t had her evening feast, anyway. Eyes hurt.

Entire day has shattered into tiny shards like a wine glass dropped on the kitchen floor. I have gotten NOT ONE THING done.

One of Those Days…

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Started at 4:00 a.m. Bathed, painted, dressed, answered emails. Read copy for an hour. Got tired of that around 5:30.

Hungry. Had a breakfast meeting this morning, but a) I wasn’t even supposed to leave the house for another hour and 15 minutes and b) I had to give the dog & pony show for this morning’s chivaree and so would bolt down a pressured restaurant meal around that. Decided to fix my own food and just have coffee at the shindig.

Howcum what used to take minutes now takes half a lifetime? Feeding the dog & then fixing a meal and eating it occupied the hour & something. Late as usual racing out the door.

Hideous traffic. Took 45 minutes to make the 20-minute drive to the Scottsdale meeting. But everyone else was running late, too, thank goodness.

Delivered a half-baked presentation.

Was reminded by a client, who also belongs to this group, that I haven’t done his project yet. He handed me more stuff in a large manila envelope.

I just realized, as I’m sitting here, I think I walked out of the restaurant without it. Shit.

Forgot my checkbook so couldn’t pay this month’s dues. One of the guys was collecting for popcorn, holiday fund-raising for some charity he supports. Couldn’t pay for that, either.

President wanted to know who’s slated to present next week. Would I e-mail him when I get home with the list of the next few weeks’ speakers. “Okay,” I said. Make a note:

• send check for dues
• send check for flicking inedible popcorn
• feed popcorn to students
• email Marshall with next month’s speakers.

Just called the restaurant. They close at 2:30 p.m. Whaaa???? What kind of chain freaking restaurant closes at 2:30 in the freaking afternoon????

Got home. Hungry. Had to eat something more than a snack before doing battle with noon class. Defrosted a small steak and threw some frozen hash browns into a puddle of hot grease while grilling meat over propane. Reheated tea in microwave. Good. Highly satisfactory. Left dirty dishes all over kitchen.

Changed clothes. Raced to campus.

Finished listening to 101 students explain exactly what it is they think they’re going to do in their respective papers. A week ago they were asked to brainstorm ideas for their paper, select an idea that looked feasible, and turn in a note describing that. These reside in my car, because I don’t grade them and have had neither time nor inclination to look at them.

Not one but two students asked me to find their note on their final paper, a stage of which was due at 5:00 p.m. today, because — get this — they could not remember what they thought they were going to write about. So the little twits accompanied me out to my rolling office in the parking lot, thereby to remind themselves of whatever it was they imagined would be the subject of their final flicking paper, which is now due in less than a week.

WTF?

Home again, searched for the calendar with the business group’s presentation dates on it. Couldn’t find it.

Shoveled out the mound of papers that’s duned up on the closet shelves. Threw out a lot of old student papers. Found no calendar.

Rifled through the drawers, searched the car, tossed the mounds of papers on the desk. No calendar. Dug through the file drawers. Found the hanging file for the bidness group; found a calendar: out of date. Wrong calendar.

Edited copy for several more hours.

Fielded a call from financial adviser. Reported that I’d just lost a regular client; doesn’t pay much but I may have to make up the lost editing income with a larger than planned drawdown. He advised that this would be an extraordinarily bad idea. Set up meeting for next week.

Prepared and sent copy to clients; sent bill. Updated billing spreadsheet. Sent a late notice to another client. Figure to see that money about the time I see the lost calendar.

Knocked off around 6:00 p.m.

Fed the dog. Returned call to SDXB while emptying dishwasher and piling more dishes into it. No answer.

Took dog for walk. Beautiful evening, a big fat harvest moon rising up in creamy glory behind a veil of backlit clouds against a black velvet sky.

Followed up the feeder street by two shady-looking males evidently drifting in from the slums across the main drag. Gave them the slip — not a bad trick for an old bat with a small, stubborn dog in tow. Shot up a neighborhood street, running on extremely sore foot, into the light from Pretty Daughter’s garage, where her son was working on a car.

Got mail on the way up the front driveway. Found not one but two notices from the police, still being misdelivered to Manny’s house. {groan!} What NOW?

Remembered M’hijito set a lot of the debris that accumulates on the van’s front seat into a back seat so he could ride somewhere with me the other day. Check back of car. Find calendar.

E-mail Marshall that we don’t have anyone scheduled to speak after this week and so we’ll need to recruit a presenter for next week and then get the rest of the members to sign up for meetings through next month.

Open mail from cops. Interesting. It’s not about Mr. Mejia, the perp who’s allegedly in the slam over the late, great armed robbery. They just arrested another one of these creeps (you may recall that the original heist was pulled off by three accomplices), a Matthew Jason Avery. This is the guy, it appears, that the SWAT team caught in my garage. Mejia may still be in the slam, but this one was not, at least not as of November 25. That’s when they hauled him back to the jailhouse, charged with kidnap, assault and battery, and second-degree burglary.

The latter would be for the theft of my valuable used clothing, gardening hat, and muddy clodhoppers, to use as his lawn-man disguise.

So, you realize what this means?

Well, it means a number of things.

a) Mr. Mejia, the character to whose trial I was summoned, is not the one about which I have anything to say.
b) Mr. Avery is. Therefore, I will also be summoned to his trial.
c) Therefore, it’s not altogether outside the realm of possibility that I could end up testifying at the trials of two of these sh!theads.
d) And while Mr. Mejia may be unavoidably detained in the slam, Mr. Avery has been out on the street. And he knows where I live.

Charming. Here’s what he looks like. Isn’t he a sweetie?

Tomorrow I’m committed to spending the entire day at the Tempe street fair with KJG. Therefore I will not be able to burn a quarter-tank of gas tomorrow a.m. driving to the Scottsdale restaurant to pick up the package my client gave me, assuming they found it and haven’t thrown it out.

That means I get to spend Saturday morning traipsing out there. Assuming they found it and (etc.).

Eight-thirty at night. Phone just rang. The “Attention Power Company Customers” robo-bastard. God, how I’d like to get my hands on the perpetrators of that nuisance scam.

My foot hurts.

 

Freedom Remorse? Short-Timer’s Syndrome and Second Thoughts

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Only about two weeks left in this semester, thank God. That’s five more meetings of each class, and two weeks of interaction with the apparently comatose magazine-writing students. I’m going to be so, so glad to be free of ever having to teach freshman comp again (…i hope). You ain’t seen short-timer’s syndrome until you’ve come to the end of a semester of wrangling freshmen. But as you can imagine, I’ve had predictable second thoughts about walking away from my only steady source of earned income. Well…sporadically steady.

Oddly, though, I haven’t felt as jittery about it as I’d expected. The truth is, over the past few months, I’ve pretty much stopped obsessing about money. Once or twice a month, I go into Quickbooks to log my credit-card charges and the very few checks I write, and that’s about the last of think of it. I expect it’s because living on $26,820 a year, net Social Security and teaching pay, has demonstrated that I really can live on very little money. And my gross annual teaching pay is only about 3 percent of retirement savings. So the truth is, even in the unlikely event that The Copyeditor’s Desk never makes another dime, there’s plenty for me to live on. Modestly, but adequately.

Too, the little revelation that came to me earlier this year, when ex-DH underwent quadruple bypass surgery at about the same time a Mayo doctor was speculating that I had a gastric cancer, has made me care a great deal more about enjoying life and a great deal less about pinching pennies.

In the Insight! department, another little revelation occurred to me this morning. A lovely person purchased the latest of those pretty necklaces I cooked up, and so I set to constructing a third one. It takes about three hours to arrange and string those tiny little beads into a 40-inch “lariat.” That’s exclusive of running around the city in search of the beads, of course.

So let’s say I manage to net $90 on a sale (that would be extremely good, but it could be done if one were making enough of them to buy the parts wholesale). You realize, that’s $30 an hour: exactly what I earned at the Great Desert University when I worked there full-time in a managerial position. Exclusive of the two hours a day, ten hours a week, of commute time.

Yes. I can earn as much as a Ph.D. in an administrative job informed by 15 years of academic experience, 10 years of journalistic experience, and 25 concurrent years of editorial experience…by stringing beads.

{Sumbiche!}

Several small changes will help as things get tighter, if in fact they do get tighter.

Not buying gas to drive from pillar to post four days a week. This month I spent two hundred forty-eight dollars and seventy-eight cents on gasoline!!!  That’s $90 more than in August, when I wasn’t driving to campus.

Not paying the Underlings to provide teaching assistance.

Not passing by an upscale Costco outlet on the way home from campus.

Then there’s the turkey roasting on the grill for Cassie the Corgi, as we scribble. Safeway was peddling the things for 79 cents a pound. It certainly isn’t premium meat — it’s pumped full of saline solution and chemicals — but last year when I got one for her, the meat wasn’t inedible. She can’t tell the difference, anyway, and the meat from one of the things will keep her in food for a good month.

To make things better, one of my friends on the choir qualified for Safeway’s turkey giveaway. They foisted it on her even as she protested that she had no use for yet another turkey. She was trying to find a home for it, and I talked her into giving it to me. That will provide at least two, maybe three months of meat for Cassie.

Meat has become so expensive I no longer can buy  hamburger for Cassie, and the Safeway has stopped putting cheap cuts of beef on sale at affordable prices. Since about half of her diet consists of animal protein (and it probably should be more than that), the cost of feeding her has gone way up. For the short-term future, then, the meat from two fourteen-pound turkeys represents a significant savings.

So, I don’t seriously think things are going to get any worse, financially, than they are. Barring a miracle, they won’t get any better. But with the money situation already about as bad as it’s ever likely to get, I don’t believe I have much to fear.

Summoned by Sheriff Joe

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Sonovabitch! The late, great garage invasion is about to cost me even more money and stress. Comes a summons in the mail from the sheriff’s office: my presence is requested (nay, demanded) at a trial for the sh!thead who caused all that flap.

Over the summer I drew down my survival savings by about $7,000 to install new Arcadia doors that actually latch (two of the old ones couldn’t be latched at all), replace the last of the windows that could be opened simply by pulling off a length of rubber weatherstripping, install a new security door in back, and install (expensive!!!) hardened locks on all three security doors. This seriously impoverished me, requiring me to spend money that should have supported me for the better part of another year and making it impossible for me to to replace my 13-year-old car anytime in the near future (or, more likely, ever).

The summons is for the 20th, a Tuesday. That means I’ll miss the noon class on that day, and very probably this trial will go several days: I may miss class on Wednesday and maybe even more than that. You have to sit there in the courtroom until they call you and until the judge decides you can be dismissed.

I do not get paid if I’m not in class. So unless I can quietly put someone up to standing in for me, I’m going to get screwed royally here. And, given my plan to quit teaching at the end of this semester, I really can’t afford to do without several days of pay.

Just to complicate matters, I donated money to the church during the silent auction, which obviously I should not have done. And during a recent art studio tour, I purchased an interesting necklace, first because I wanted it and second because I realized that if I could study it closely, I could create something similar and sell the things myself. Neither of these was radically costly in the large scheme of things, but taken together they drained this month’s budget. If several hundred dollars of income are sucked out of said budget, I won’t have enough to make ends meet either this month or next.

Nothing gets your attention like a summons from Joe Arpaio. It’s like getting a summons from the Gestapo or the KGB…this is a cynical and irrational fellow. So add that little jolt to the stress of wondering how I’m going to eat and pay the bills.

It is, however, as nothing compared to the content of this subpoena.

As the “victim,” my address is not published in the public record, as if our boy and his pals don’t know where I live…

They’re charging the perp with armed robbery, kidnapping, and aggravated assault.

This represents a real problem.

In the first place, the guy did not kidnap me and did not assault me. He never got close enough to see me, much less lay his hands on my dainty little person. The cops told me that where the garage invasion was concerned, they were going to charge him with criminal trespass and burglary—the latter because he grabbed a shirt, a tattered old sun hat, and a pair of muddy clodhoppers to create his disguise as a gardener. So this means either they’ve trumped up the charges (not at all unlikely in the Arpaio regime) or that he actually did grab and attack someone.

And in the second place, as a witness, I’m instructed to call the “Gang Bureau” on the 19th to confirm that the trial is actually on for the following morning. Charming.

Pretty clearly this character is a dangerous thug of long standing. Not only that, but pretty clearly he’s a member of a violent gang. That means that showing up in court and testifying against him could put me at serious risk, not just from him but from his pals. And that risk may not only be immediate, it may be long-standing, as these guys take their time waiting for an opportunity to inflict revenge on me.

There’s no way I’m going to testify on phony charges, no matter how richly the guy deserves to be taken off the streets. So if the charges of kidnapping and aggravated assault stem from his adventures in my garage, we’re looking at a huge waste of everyone’s time and about $500 that I will lose for nothing.

If, however, the charges had to do with the armed robbery of the pawn shop he and his pals stuck up or with some other caper, then these gents truly are dangerous and could do me some serious harm.

Hm. Come to think of it… This casts a different light on a wacky little incident that took place a couple of nights ago. The doorbell at the front gate rang, after dark. Cassie went batshit. Looked out the front window and couldn’t see anyone, and the motion-sensitive light was off. A few minutes later it rang again: still no sign of a person out there.

The kids across the street at Pretty Daughter’s house were banging around across the street; she also has one of these battery-operated doorbells. I installed mine because Satan or an even more previous homeowner removed the hard-wired doorbell to the house. I had to jimmy it because hers rang on the same preset frequency, causing mine to go off every time any of her many relatives and friends would show up at her door. So I thought she must have adjusted the settings on hers and one of the kids’ friends rang it.

But later when I took the dog for a walk I realized you can walk right up to the gate and not turn that light on—I actually had to enter the gate before the motion sensor kicked on last night. However, the gate was hanging open when I went out…you’d think if someone had entered the gate, it would have turned on the light. If you were careful and savvy, you could, suppose, approach the gate without triggering the motion sensor by keeping your head way down.

A common strategy for burglars and home invaders around here is to ring your doorbell either to see if you’re home or to try to get you to open the door so they can push their way in. Usually they unscrew the lightbulbs in motion-sensitive lights around the doors, so that you can’t see them. But my light bulbs were in place and intact.

It’s mighty unlikely that Pretty Daughter has installed a new battery-run doorbell and, for unknown and highly unlikely reasons, fiddled with it in exactly the same way I’ve fiddled with mine. She’d have no reason to do so, and it would be a pretty weird coincidence if she flipped the same set of switches in the same order that I’ve flipped mine.

I don’t open my door to strangers. But there’s nothing to stop a vindictive sh!thead from shooting you through the door. Or through the window. Or, with the kind of arms gang members carry, right through your block wall. Or from throwing a pop bottle full of gasoline through your window.

So. This episode not only is going to cost me still more money, it may put me at some risk and certainly is going to cause additional worry. And cause me to revisit the question of whether I should sell this house and move.