Coffee heat rising

Angst

Why I Hate My Car

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Oh, hell: make that “Why I Hate the 21st Century.” ’Cause I do: I hate almost everything about it, especially

  • Donald Trump
  • Lunatics who shoot up schools, churches, synagogues, and just about any other public space that suits their fancy
  • Opportunists who subsequently take advantage of the lunatics to propose confiscating our guns
  • Drug-addled thieves and crazies who make it necessary for a little old lady to own a gun
  • A medical system dedicated to making huge profits in shearing the sheeple
  • Homicidal traffic
  • Just about anything computerized… And consequently,…
  • My car

Day before yesterday when I went to get into the car, I forgot I had the cell phone I’ve taken to carrying around the house — so as to call for help if I fall or otherwise get into some kind of old-bat trouble — not only in my pocket but turned on.

A live phone, it develops, is a live bomb when it comes to the Toyota Venza’s goddamned “audio” system. Climbing into the car caused the radio to shut off and the screen thing that sorta operates it to switch to “AUDIO.”

Whatever “audio” does, it doesn’t play music. Apparently it wanted me to talk on the phone.

I did not want to talk on the phone with it. I just wanted it to fuckin’ GO AWAY.

Nothing — and I do mean nothing — that I tried would make AUDIO go away. This wrestling match, we might note, was going on while my car was rolling down the road. I punched every button I could think of, but of course many of the “buttons” are not on the dashboard but instead appear as images on the goddamned screen if and when you punch the right (or wrong) combination of…somethingorother.

Y’know…I do not want to use my car as a telephone. I do not want my car to tell me which way to turn in a quarter-mile. I do not want my car to order up a pizza for me.

Believe it or not, I can manage all those things without a car tutoring me. I know how to read a map. The only reason I carry a nuisance cell phone is because there are no pay phones anymore. Well…except insofar as the goddamn cell phone makes you pay for minutes and minutes and minutes that you’ll never use, lest ye be stranded by the side of a freeway 60 miles from home with no help in sight. All I want a car radio to do is PLAY WHATEVER THE GODDAMNED RADIO STATION IS BROADCASTING.

How hard is this?

For the nonce, I give up, by way of navigating Phoenix’s homicidal traffic without killing myself or any of my fellow crazies.

A couple of more efforts to fix it, after I reached a parking lot and later after I got the car back in its garage, failed. Ignominiously.

I now realize I’ll have to dig out the instructions from the THREE VOLUMES of driver’s manual…but later, please. Much later.

This morning I recall this annoyance, whilst bathing and getting dressed to go out. I think…maybe I should go by the Toyota place and ask them to put it back on “RADIO,” thereby giving me a chance to bellyache at the Toyota people. This, I realize, is an exercise in futility: discard that idea. Chuck the Wonder Mechanic’s place is just around the corner from the Toyota place: I could go by there and of course any of the young pups will know, instantly, how to work the damn thing.

That seems unduly lazy to me, though. Also it will make me look like an idiot…probably not an unfair characterization, but still…why advertise it?

I decide instead to shuffle through the owner’s manual’s voluminous index and try to figure out how to switch the accursed thing back to RADIO.

Yeah. Right.

Those three volumes that make up the Venza owner’s manual? ONE WHOLE VOLUME is dedicated to the complicated whack-shit audio system! Yes. TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-TWO PAGES on how to use “AUDIO.”

For the love of God. All I want to do is listen to my cowboys crooning down from Wickenburg on the FM airwaves. Do I really have to paw through 232 pages of technobabble to accomplish that?

Well. Yes.

So after some difficulty I find the section explaining how to turn on the radio — which apparently is not what the system is designed to be used for — and discover the trick involves pressing a virtual button several ways from Sunday and then pressing some more choices that supposedly will pop up to get to a point where the thing will receive ordinary FM stations.

Jezus Aitch Keerist.

Honest to gawd, I wish I’d kept that Sienna and taken my chances with the alternator. Yes, waiting for the insurance company’s Roadside Disservice for five hours was exceptionally unacceptable. But…if I’d signed up for AAA — which I need to do anyway, obviously — and ponied up the cash for another unreliably rebuilt second-hand alternator, it would have cost one helluva lot less than the present endlessly annoying jalopy cost.

The damn thing is emblematic of all I hate about the 21st century and its digitization: a fair number of things — maybe most things — worked better in their analog formats.

No one should need 232 pages of instructions to turn on a fuckin’ radio.

Down at the HQ

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So… Trying to get out of the Funny Farm to drive down to the Religious HQ for today’s volunteer stint at the front desk, whereinat I now reside. Finally…

LORDIE, what a hassle.

To start with, I hurt from top to bottom. Even though the injured paw is slowly healing (I think) it’s very slow. The wrenched knee also hurts. If I get into the bathtub, I can’t get out through any normal contortions and so have to scrabble around to try to get on my feet without slipping and braining myself.

Not that it would make much difference these days.

A normal person would take a shower, not get herself trapped in a tubful of hot water, right? Yes. But first, I’m far from normal. And second — more to the point — soaking in hot water seems to be about all that eases the present tumble-induced aches and pains.

Next, the deadbolt on the door between the kitchen & the garage has jammed. Soonest I could get a locksmith out to the house was tomorrow. Fortunately, there’s a drill-proof Schlage lock on the garage’s side door, and prizing open the garage door itself…well…that’s not very hard, but it would be a little conspicuous for a burglar’s tastes.

But…I tend to mindlessly drive away from the house without closing the garage door. Invariably I think of this as I get about halfway up the block, so feel honor-bound to turn around, go back, and check to be sure it’s shut. This noon when I pull a U-ie…well, naturally, my computer slides off the passenger seat and tumbles onto the floor. Shee-ut!

It doesn’t seem to have broken. Otherwise, obviously, this wouldn’t be getting written.

To add to the kitchen-door issue, the lock on one of the Arcadia doors won’t work. Turns out for some reason the door isn’t closing tightly enough to force the little button that makes it possible for the latch to shift into place. These doors are supposedly warranteed for life, but taking advantage of that will entail digging out the paperwork from files that date back 15 years…won’t THAT be fun? And then hoping the manufacturer is still in business.

To add to the computer issue, the MacBook has developed a slowly worsening quirk: its cursor randomly jumps backward up the file as I’m typing, and since I type very fast even with one paw wounded, it inserts a series of letters into some random place in the file. This, I find extremely annoying.

I also find it’s a known issue. And probably will clinch the requirement that I buy a new computer, which I really do not want to do.

One reason I don’t want to is that I haven’t been paid the $1300 owed by my most recent client. Contact his admin and find it’s because she failed to enter some tiny speck of data into the university’s excruciatingly complicated computer forms.

Soooooo….. Let’s hope this thing survives long enough for that payment to get here, so I can afford to buy another unit and jump through the involved set of hassles that will entail.

Further adding to the fun… Usually the Thursday afternoon front-desk gig is quiet as the tomb. Not so today. The phone has been jangling since I sat down. We’re doing a concert of Handel’s Messiah — people are calling with questions to which I do not now, never have, and probably never will know the answers.

At any rate, this is the kind of day that makes me question the state of my marbles. I can’t even get out the door without a fiasco, and when I finally get here — pushing late — I have no clue what I’m doing.

The front yard looks a lot clearer and tidier with all the brush that Gerardo and crew removed yesterday. But from the street you still can’t get a full view of what’s going on — if anything — inside the courtyard. So, what with that guy obviously casing the house the other day, I’m  not at all comfortable at leaving the place. Ever. Especially not for several hours at a time.

So we’re brought back to the question that arises these days every time I get in my car and drive away from the Funny Farm:

Why am I staying here?

Argha!

Main reason? I have no idea where else to go.

Not that I can afford, anyway. If you don’t want to live in  a suburb of eave-to-eave styrofoam-and-stucco ticky-tacky, there’s really not much you can afford in a safer area. Not around here, anyway. All of North Central — where I’ve lived all my adult life — is now outside my price range. Well, except for the strip that borders Conduit of Blight Boulevard, all of which suffers the same issue as we in the ‘Hood confront: our neighbor to the west is one huge meth slum. That’s why the ’Hood is relatively affordable.

The alternatives are Fountain Hills — an hour’s drive from everything I do, and also largely ticky-tacky construction, albeit on larger lots — and Sun City –also almost an hour away from my life, and a ghetto for old folks, to boot.

Prescott? Wickenburg? Oro Valley? I’d have to start my life completely over in any of those places. And y’know what? I’m just too damn lazy to feel like building whole new networks of friends, whole new networks of retailers, whole new networks of doctors and dentists and optometrists and hair stylists and car mechanics and cleaning ladies and yard dudes and locksmiths and AC repairmen and plumbers and bankers and veterinarians and accountants and computer gurus and…augh!! It’s more than one can contemplate.

Ugh…some woman just hung up on me because I have no idea where to buy size 3x men’s pajamas. WTF????

And…ohboy, two seconds later the wooden gadget someone made to hold the door open got busted. Now the door is permanently latched shut.

BUT…the amazingly resourceful Nanette forthwith walked in through the door, retrieved the busted device, and fixed it.

A parishioner wants to know at which the Christmas Eve service do we sing “Silent Night” in the dark. I say it must be the midnight service…because that’s when the choir sings and we always sing…etc. No, says she, it can’t be the midnight mass because they never go to that.

Huh? Well, then, sister, it must be the service you usually go to, no???

An hour to go before I can head home and pour a bourbon & water.

 

Stay or Fly: The Busted Paw, the Peeper, and the Doc

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Sooo… After the little jig I did yesterday to deflect the turkey who was transparently casing my house, I had to cancel out of choir. This provided the opportunity to move the 2:00 p.m. appointment at the urgent care unit next door to the neighborhood Albertson’s forward to noon. This turned out to be a good thing for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that I diddled away two hours there. If I’d gone in at two, that caper would have consumed the entire afternoon.

They decided the pained paw probably has no fracture in any of the complicated set of bones that make up a human hand. But nevertheless, they sent the X-rays to a radiologist for assessment, later in the week. So that was mildly reassuring.

So I ended up chatting at length with a PA, these groups’ answer to an MD. What a doll! He fessed up that he was 53 — dayum! Born 20 years too late. He was an Indian gent — India Indian, I mean. Two daughters, wife, nice career. And even warier than I am of Life in the Big American City. I mentioned to him that when I fell I was walking Ruby the Corgi, and in passing remarked that I used to have German shepherds but at my age feel I’m past the time in life that I can effectively handle a large, high-drive dog.

Now get this: the clinic is right on Conduit of Blight, the border between the ‘Hood and a meth-ridden slum. And he says — apparently PC is not a Thing in New Delhi — that given some of the people he’s seen in that practice, he strongly recommended that I get another German shepherd, for my safety. But not just any German shepherd. “Spend the money, raid your life savings, to get a fully trained German shepherd.”

Yipes!

I said, “Well, it’ll have to wait until the corgi passes on, another five to seven years.”

He said, “No, don’t wait. If you have a trained German shepherd (by that, he clearly meant protection training), you will get another ten years of independent living. Otherwise, you won’t be safe and you’ll have to move on before then.”

Holy mackerel!

That was quite the exchange, because…well…we’re talkin’ about a guy who deals all the time, day in and day out, with the denizens of Meth Central. He remarked, too, that social problems in this country have become exponentially worse. And no amount of education or social service seems to be helping. He had, he said, seen young men with master’s degrees in fields like business and science, “melting away” (his phrase) as drug addicts.

Well. However. He is not a guy who deals with German shepherds all the time. In my experience with them (about 20 years’ worth), a good GerShep does not need protection training or any other kind of training other than basic obedience work to do the job for you. This fella, for example, would no doubt prove himself useful in an emergency…

The problem with a Gershep, provided you know what you’re doing and you’re lucky in your choice of companion, is not training but expense. These are very costly dogs to care for throughout a nine- to twelve-year lifetime. They can develop some spectacularly pricey ailments, not the least of them pannus, osteoarthritis, dysplasia of several varieties, thyroid failure…and on and on. So, in retirement the problem is not so much the dog’s strength and need to have you be incontrovertibly Alpha; it’s that you can’t afford the health risks when you’re living on Social Security.

At any rate, such speculation does nothing to address the issue of a sh!thead casing my house, just as we come up on the High Burgling Season that is Christmas gift-exchange time.

The plan: I happen to have an old stereo sitting in the family room. Believe it or not, the thing still works. So the strategy is to turn it to an NPR yakathon, turn up the volume, crack the solid-core door into the garage open, and lock up the dog in the back bedroom. That way, anyone who approaches the front of the house will hear the blabbity-blabbity through the tinfoil garage door. We are told this strategy — leave a radio or TV set on — is pretty effective against prowlers, because they can’t be sure no one is in the house.

Ruby sleeps in her nest under the toilet all the time I’m gone. If I just close the bedroom door, she won’t be able to race outside through the garage and head for Yuma when I come home. The radio will be plainly audible through the garage to anyone who approaches the front of the house, and of course it blats right through the glass doors and windows in back. Its racket doesn’t carry through that solid-core door; hence, I’ll need to crack it open a bit.

HOW, you may ask reasonably, did I instantly size up our passer-by as a would-be burglar?

By his dogs.

His dogs were  behaving as though they wanted to be nowhere near the guy. While he was ogling my house from in front of WonderAccount’s place, they were hunkered on the ground behind him, as far away as they could get at the end of their leashes.

That is not normal doggy-walk behavior. Dogs do not huddle behind you when you take them on a doggy-walk. They drag you down the street.

Plus…after innumerable daily doggywalks of my own, I know all the dogs in our neighborhood. His are not among them. By extension, I know most of the neighbors by sight…never saw this dude before.

The dogs’ strange behavior drew attention to the guy’s strange behavior. And the guy’s strange behavior was…strange.

But THEN…heh heh heh!

When I pretended to drive out but in fact circumambulated the block and showed up back in the driveway about 40 seconds later and found him ACROSS THE STREET AND LURKING NEXT TO MY HOUSE on the east side, where he was studying the front entrance and the front patio, well…he did himself in with that stunt.

Seriously: it could not have taken more than 40 seconds to get back to my driveway. The next street north was empty — nary a soul out in front — so I gave that six-banger a mighty hit of gasoline and JETTED up the road. I would be surprised if it took much more than 30 seconds for me to re-coalesce in front of the Funny Farm. And lo! there he was, upping the ante on the casing job.

German shepherd. Hm. Pit bull, maybe?

Live-Blogging from the Apple Store…

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Here’s a little oddity. For the first time in recorded history, I heard an Apple dude remark (to someone else, not me) that he dislikes the dsytopic, gawdawful site Apple moved to in Scottsdale Fashion Square.

It’s slightly less dsytopic than the one in Kierland Commons. But…welll…nooo…maybe not so much.

Scottsdale Fashion Square, like other upscale shopping malls here in lovely Phoenix, has been “renovated” into a postmodern nightmare mini-world: sharp-edged, ugly, noisy,… Oh, yeah: noisy as Hell! Indeed, if I were to design a new Hell for Satan Himself, it would look just like these hideous malls. And Satan’s throne would be smack in the center of the Apple Store.

These places are designed to reverberate. Every wall, every floor, every ceiling is made of echoic matter: faux marble (who knows, maybe it’s real marble), definitely faux granite flooring, four walls of two-story-high glass. As a result, the noise level is fuckin’ deafening. You can’t hear yourself think, much less hear the poor Apple guy, who has to shout to hear himself.

To add to the din, the Apple store has a guy emitting “lessons”, through a loudspeaker, on how to operate this or that or the other complicated software. This one is “Music Lab,” which generates “music” – I’d call it “noise,” but whatEVER. Right now he’s showing how to create a beat, emanating whacka-whacka-whacka-WHACK whacka-whacka-whack-WHACK at high volume. The latter being required so the two people watching can hear it over the ambient racket.

Just the thought of working here…ugh! It’s unimaginable. These people must go home with a splitting headache after every shift. And consider: we have to drive on the same roads with these harried folk as they trudge back home from a crazy-making day in this place.

***

Not surprisingly, the Apple Genius (they don’t exaggerate with that…) figures most of the issues have to do w/ outdated software, both the OS (which I’ve had to keep in the pre-Christian era because I haven’t wanted to move to Microsoft’s cloud and so needed to maintain the functionality of VERY old Wyrd and Excel programs). He is, however, the first to know that Microsoft has updated versions of Wyrd and Excel that can be installed as resident on the computer, rather than floating in the Cloud.

He proposes I install these. This will create an Issue, because they’ve been changed so many times over the years that they’re totally alien. Effectively, I’ll have to relearn Wyrd and Excel.

As you know, this will mean a Chinese mathematician will shortly fly in the door waving 30 pages of differential equations and crying “we must turn this into English YESTERDAY!”

At any rate, if a miracle happens and I have a few days before the next client surfaces, I may be able to run out to the campus and get one of the librarians to coach me. Except…it’s coming on to Christmas break, so unless I move fast it may be too late to trap one of them before the semester ends.

In any event, I’ll still have the big iMac loaded with the outmoded but mercifully functional Wyrd, Excel, and various Mac programs, so if push comes to shove I can perch in front of that thing to work. The problem is…sitting at that desk is bone-crushingly painful.

Pray for no work…

When You Think You Have Nothing to Do…

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You’re just sitting here, right? Playing some silly computer game, whiling away the time before you have to drive to Scottsdale to schlep your computer to the Apple “Geniuses” in hopes of getting the current raft of quirks fixed. That’s an hour’s drive, so you’ve gotta be outtahere by noon…and…and…dayum! It’s already 10 a.m. Holeeee shee-ut!

Hurry...

Dump the coffee grounds into the garden to pre-empt the cleaning from dumping them down the kitchen sink drain, thereby creating a fine new plumber’s bill.

Hurry...

Climb into the bathtub to get washed and…

Hurry...

Haul out of the tub to answer the goddamned phone. Manually  block another spoofed number. Recall that you didn’t block the number that was used for yesterday afternoon’s harassment, either.

Hurry...

Get the money for the cleaning lady; place it where she can find it.

Hurry...

Hurry…block yesterday’s nuisance call number. Search through the blocked phone numbers and unblock the dermatologist’s number, zapped in error yesterday.

Hurry...

Throw on some decent clothes and paint the face preparatory to schlepping across the city. Realize an old sweater and a pair jeans will not make it for an appearance in the dystopically redesigned and now very ugly Scottsdale Fashion Square. Consider: do you care what the Richistani think of you? Reconsider: problem is, of course, getting the “help” at the Apple store to notice you.

Hurry...

Better put on some better clothes. And shoes, come to think of it!

Hurry...

Pick up the mess in the office.

Hurry...

Recharge the computer, for godsake. It’s already at 78%…will it get back to 100% by noon?

Hurry...

Back up to Time Machine. But…seriously? Won’t that take longer than 45 minutes? Shoulda thought of that sooner. Doesn’t matter. Damned Time Machine isn’t reading the external drive. Ducky. But Finder is reading it and emits an angry squawk when it’s disconnected.

Hurry...

Out the door!

 

Under Frikkin’ Petty Siege…

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Ever feel like you’re under siege from all directions? In a petty way, I mean.

There is, of course, under siege, Main Edition:

  • Your car deliberately drives itself into a utility pole.
  • Your cat croaks over.
  • Your roof leaks and melts the ceiling drywall.
  • Your house burns down, flood from the leaky roof notwithstanding.

Petty siege is not that kind of assault from the Fates.

Petty siege is the one-little-annoyance-after-another variant. An act of petty siege does not entail major catastrophe or heart-rending tragedy or budget-busting surprise expense. No. Petty siege is when every stupid little thing that can go wrong or that can make you crazy occurs, one after another.

9:00 p.m. For the second time, the MacBook barfs up an error message claiming I can’t get into iCloud and must enter a password. It won’t accept any of the several word/number combos I hope to be the password. I spend an hour or more on the phone with an Apple customer service tech, who is uncharacteristically stupid. We go around and around and around and around in circles and get nowhere. Finally iCloud starts working again — at random, not by virtue of anything we’ve done — and we conclude it must be a problem with Cox’s connectivity. This, not before I’ve fucked up my passwords, leaving me pretty much in the dark as to what combination of letters and numbers applies where. I give up, frustrated and angry.

10:00 p.m.: In comes an email from Amazon demanding that I pay $8 for the OxiClean that was never delivered.

3 a.m.: Wake up and can’t get back to sleep.

5 a.m.: Give up trying to sleep; decide to pass time on the Internet. Get the “you can’t get into iCloud message” again. This time before calling Apple, I send myself an email. It goes through, eventually. I go to iCloud and open a document. The MacBook forthwith delivers the document. I decide to forego another hour of frustration on the phone. Wander off, the mystery unresolved.

6 a.m.: Rain dripping off the roof is hitting a plastic drain cover, making a weird drumming sound. Dog is alarmed.

6:10 a.m.: Try to get the dog to go outside to do her business, which she declined to do in the rain late last night. Not a chance, Human! quoth she. She doesn’t want to get wet. Have to go outside into the middle of the yard, bare-footed in the rain, and call her to follow me. Then wait until she decides she can manage to do the job in spite of water falling on her head.

6:30 a.m.: Wipe the mud off the kitchen floor. Lay down one of the late Cassie’s pee pads in front of the back door. These things make efficient mud-catchers, BTW.

7:00 a.m.: Get an Amazon CSR on the phone (mirabilis!!!). She says the bill was sent in error and claims it is hereby canceled. Yeah, Right. We’ll see about that.

8 a.m.: Pool guy shows up, just as the heavens split open. He’s at the front door, in a downpour. I invite him in, of course. He treks through the house to the back door, Ruby excitedly dancing along. So much for Luz’s shiny clean floors, rendered that way less than 48 hours ago…

9 a.m.: The nuisance phone calls start up again. Despite the CPR 5000 Call Blocker, which has been a marvel, more and more nuisance callers have been getting through, most of them by spoofing local numbers. By 10 or 10:30, I’d been interrupted four times by these pests.

10 a.m.: My beloved, rustic, eccentric-old-lady electric heater — an old-fashioned “heat dish” — throws a hissy fit. Its alarm goes off in a buzzy blast, the kind of noise it makes if someone picks it up or moves it or tips it over while it’s on. It’s on, all right, at Day-Glo blast because it’s cold and damp in here. But it hasn’t been touched or jiggled in any way…unless we had an earthquake that I failed to notice. Unplug that.

10:40 a.m.: Stumble across my second, back-up eccentric-old-lady electric heater, stashed upside down in the back of a closet where a more organized search failed to unearth it earlier. Plug it in: seems to be working. Decide against driving through the rain to buy a new space heater. Ugh.

11:00 a.m.: More and more e-mail spam comes in through a blog contact page. Earlier this morning I disabled the Contact Page at The Copyeditor’s Desk by way of circumventing the bastards. So they go over to Funny about Money and send their BS through its contact page. Now I have to get into that site and delete that Contact form.

11:30 a.m.: Another goddamn nuisance phone call. Traipse back to the office, intent on calling CPR 5000’s customer service to ask after workarounds. First, though, I go so far as to read the instructions. (Isn’t THAT quaint!) Discover that I can enter codes to block “Name Unavailable” callers, VoIP Rogue callers, and “Withheld/Private” callers. Jump through the hoops to accomplish that.

12:08 p.m. Another nuisance phone call, this one from area code 213. Can I block all incoming from (213)? Yeah, I can…but that could be problematic. Though I have no friends who would call me from that area code, I could occasionally do business with clients in Southern California. This is, I think, the sixth nuisance call and we’re not even halfway through the day’s waking hours…

The problem with blocking each number as it comes in — well, there are several problems. In the first place, to block a number you have to pick up the receiver and then punch in a code. When someone picks up the receiver, of course, that alerts the robocaller that someone is on the other end of the line, which triggers an avalanche of further calls. And in the second place: virtually all of the numbers you see on Caller ID are spoofed. And the robocaller is programmed to generate literally an infinite number of phone number spoofs, something made possible by the fact that telephone numbers contain 10 numbers now.

12:32 p.m. A mighty deluge of water is pouring out of the sky. The back patio floods. So far it hasn’t reached the back door’s threshold, thanks to Gerardo’s guys having removed the plastic covering over the shade structure, which prevents a back-up by allowing water flowing off the roof to disperse evenly. That’s something. I guess.

12:41 p.m.: Another nuisance call from my area code. And of course, blocking one’s own area code is contraindicated. So is blocking most of the exchanges within your area code: who knows when someone will call from such an exchange?

12:47 p.m.: Discover, deep in the complicated instructions the Call Blocker, that to block a call with the “#2” code from a cordless extension, that extension has to be plugged into the call blocker! Holeee shit! But no.., not so! Here online, the how-to-block instructions say “answer the call from a DECT 6.0 wireless handset then press the # key then the 2 key…” Yes, my handsets are DECT 6.0. Okay, guess that’s been working, anyway. For all the good it’s doing me…

12:53 p.m. I’m hungry. I want a beer. And I want a nap. The roof is rattling to the approaching thunder squall.

‘Bye!