Coffee heat rising

Angst

Crawling Out from Under the Rock

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Fell asleep last night along about 6:30…woke up this morning at 7:30. And today felt marginally better.

Even felt like eating, though not like slamming around to fix much. Running slap up against deadline, I managed to finish edits on the client’s last chapter and send it off to him along about 4 p.m.

Hope it’s at least reasonably coherent. That thing has now been edited in ER waiting rooms, edited in ER examining rooms, edited in the Mayo Clinic’s doctors’ waiting room, edited inside doctors’ offices, edited in bed, edited on the back patio…gestaltlich, we might say.

Meanwhile, this afternoon I had to report a nut case on Quora who emitted some threatening rhetoric. Dunno if the guy is around here, but it doesn’t matter…it would be very easy to track me down, if you’re crazy enough. Which, speaking of rhetoric, reminds me that I need to buy a long gun and some ammo for it and for the other armaments. And I really need to get off my duff, go up to the range, and practice. I’d like to take their safety course over again, too — it’s been a long time since I’ve even thought about those things.

But what with Trump’s Loonies carrying on about civil war should their hero be impeached, one ought to be prepared. At this point, there’s almost no question he will be impeached. The question is, what then?

Let us hope the U.S. military is capable of containing a guerilla uprising within the borders of our country. I’m fairly certain they are: they have their own guerilla training, plus they have the advantage of some very sophisticated hardware and software that a bunch of bumpkin revolutionaries can only daydream of. Nay, not even revolutionaries backed by the occasional billionaire.

Interesting, isn’t it? How can you be so smart as to make that much money and still be so stupid? Or…maybe one just doesn’t have to be real bright to make that much money. 😀

Arrrgh! What times we live in! Times that are getting late: gotta go scarf down some more cough medicine and fall into the sack.

 

Never Pours but It Rains…

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LOL! This little comedy of errors is getting ridiculous. Actually, we could call it a “comedy of fiascos.” One damnfool thing after another.

So after spending the night before last at the Mayo’s ER and getting exactly zero sleep, of course (wouldn’cha know) the next day I had to go down to the church and spend the afternoon minding the front desk and answering the phone, a task I’m not very good at under the best of circumstances. And fully incompetent at under the worst of circumstances. So that must have been amusing to anyone watching. 😀

And yesterday as all the antics were winding down, I kept spiking a fever. It would shoot up to something over 100° — which is very high for me, since my temp is normally well under 98.6°. But I figured it must have to do with the UTI, which had gotten bad enough to produce some interesting pain.

But…well, no. Nothing can ever be that simple in these precincts.

I woke up this morning with a roaring sore throat, a fever, and a cough. So…presumably I’ve contracted the flu, a cold, or strep throat…also presumably picked up while passing hour after hour in a hospital emergency room. This, despite getting a flu shot while I was at the doc’s office a week ago. Yes: it takes two weeks for a flu shot to take effect!!!!!

Sumbiche.

So…now I’m having to cut choir practice tonight — not that I would be up for two hours of rehearsals even if I weren’t a latter-day Typhoid Mary. And I need to weasel out of staffing the church office’s desk tomorrow. This means, of course, I spent four hours yesterday spreading germs all over the phones, desks, and computer at the office…isn’t that ducky?

Meanwhile, it develops that despite the influenza hazard, it probably was a good thing I traipsed in to the Mayo the other night. One of the nurses there said, after I remarked that I felt embarrassed to occupy their attention with such a petty, stupid little ailment, that urinary tract infections can be “very serious.” Well…she wasn’t kidding. This morning along comes word from KJG that her mom has been in the hospital with a UTI that she chose to neglect — thinking that it would go away on its own.

Wrong. She ended up spending several days in a westside hospital, severely ill, and then being transported to a nursing home, where, KJG says, she “barely has awareness, is very weak, cannot do anything for herself.”

Good grief. Is that terrifying, or is that terrifying?

Well, I hope the poor woman recovers. She’s not in the best of shape to begin with — though I don’t think she’s much older than I am. But evidently, if you think you have one of these UTI bugs, you should trot off to the doc the minute the light dawns in your hazy little brain.

Meanwhile, in addition to being genetically susceptible to every damn virus that comes along, I’m allergic to aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen. So that means the only way I can address a fever is to stand in a cool shower. Which, it develops, is what I’d better go do right now…

WordPress to the Rescue…partly

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Well, that was…uhm…jolly fun… Spent the better part of the night at the Mayo’s ER after spiking a high temperature and enjoying a spectrum of annoying symptoms. Develops that the UTI that I was enjoying returned with a vengeance. The ER doc re-prescribed the stuff his colleague had given me. She’d written a prescription for only 5 days. He said I needed to take it for at least 10 more days. It was after 2 a.m. by the time I got home, and of course I didn’t sleep very well.

Head hurt like hell this morning…but  eventually I realized it was probably because I hadn’t eaten a thing since yesterday morning.

Client mathematician wanted a word count of the first five chapters of his current book, the edits of which I sent off to him the day before yesterday. In editing math copy, I don’t charge for content that I’m too stupid to understand: videlicet, just about every mathematical expression. Word counts every element in a mathematical expression — all those Greek letters, all those numbers — as a separate word. So in order to figure the actual editable number of words, you have to go through it line by line and delete every equation, every mathematical expression, every graph, every table…on and on and ENDLESSLY on.

Well, Word was having none of that. It kept crashing, and even when it didn’t crash, getting this done in any sane manner was almost impossible.

Finally it dawned on me (ever slow to tumble to the obvious…):

Hey! WordPress counts the words in a blog post. And when you paste copy from Wyrd into a WordPress post, it converts to HTML! 

Hot damn! Unlike effing Wyrd, HTML is extremely stable.

Or maybe just…dayum!!!

It took hours and hours and HOURS to paste each chapter into a post and then, in “Text” (HTML) view, to sift through line by line by line and delete every equation and every mathematical equation. Much of this stuff, WordPress converts into tables. You then have to find the table (even though it doesn’t appear as a table in the more easily comprehensible “Visual” view). This entails more sifting: through the HTML in search of tables, and then having to force WordPress to delete the damn things…which it does NOT want to do.

*******

Along about the time this adventure ground to an end, I realized I had a 100-degree temp on top of a number of unpleasant other symptoms. That’s high for me: my normal temperature is well below 98.6, so if I have a fever of 100 degrees, I am sick.

And I have a splitting headache.

Eventually I decide to drive to the Mayo’s ER, which is a distance. What time? Late…the roads were very clear, which is some sort of a miracle.

Though they kindly saw me promptly and were, as usual, marvelously attentive, it was after 2:00 a.m. by the time I rolled out of there and made my way through the black night to the Funny Farm. They called in a prescription to the Safeway near my house, saying I should show up there the minute the place opened — that would be 8:00 a.m. — to retrieve the pills and start gulping them down forthwith. In the meantime, the doc handed me one (1) of the horsepills to take while I was sitting in front of him and said “Get your tail to the pharmacy the minute they open, grab the Rx, and start gulping these things down!” This, as you will see, is a trick easier said than done…

*******

The few hours that remain to the night pass uneventfully and without sleep. Now I have to be at the Safeway at 8 a.m. to try to extract this stuff from their pharmacy.To make things even jollier, I promised one of the volunteer front-desk workers down at the church that I would do her gig this afternoon so she can visit family in California. That chore runs from 12:30 to 4:00 p.m.

So there’ll be no nap time for me. Can’t imagine how I’m going to get through the day.

First off, though, the problematic issue of getting to the Safeway pharmacy at 8 a.m.:

There are essentially three main drags that run from the north parts of the mid-city through the central commercial district to the downtown lawyers’ and bureaucrats’ district. Central Avenue goes through a genteel old-money residential area and ends at the North Mountains. Seventh Avenue also goes up to the base of North Mountain but then flows into Meth Lover’s Drive, which will take you westward if that’s the way you must go. Seventh Street indirectly joins a freeway bringing residents from the far northern bedroom communities, picks up people who live in the north central part of the city, and proceeds downtown.

Our City Parents, in their infinite “wisdom,” took it into their collective mind to convert the left-turn-only central lanes on Seventh Ave and on Seventh Street into one-way NO left-turn lanes during the rush hours: southbound from 6 to 9 a.m.; northbound from 4 to 6 p.m. While this sort of (marginally) speeds commute traffic (but not so’s you’d notice), it creates a GIGANTIC headache, because…well, no matter where you’re going, you can’t get there from here. Everybody who needs to go left to get to a destination travels on Central, so it’s bumper-to-bumper all the way downtown. The other roads move faster, but you have to perform what is known as an “Arizona turn” to get where you’re going.

An Arizona turn? That’s where you turn right to go left…and in the hands of a gifted driver, this can be quite the little maneuver.

This means that to turn left out of my neighborhood during the rush hours, you have to drive around and around and AROUND Robin-Hood’s barn. Because everybody else is trying to get to the same place you want to go, it creates vast traffic jams on the surrounding streets as people try to avoid those goddamn no-left-turn lanes.

Stupidly, I decide to drive across GangBanger’s Way to 12th Street (going north in order to turn south). This lovely boulevard is heavily traveled by my fellow law-dodgers but usually is navigable. BUT….I fail to take into consideration the goddamn high school on Gangbanger’s. At the high school, the city in its infinite stupidity has installed one of those crosswalk lights that holds up traffic whenever some pedestrian pushes a button. The upshot of that is that around 7:30, when I leave the house, traffic on this 7-lane main drag just flat comes to a dead stop, as kid after kid after kid ambles across the road.

But if you know where you’re going, eventually you can circumvent the schemes of Our City Parents and…yes: get there from here.

A hard left across three lanes of oncoming takes me and the pickup ahead of me into a neighborhood. We weave our way through this fairly dire little slum (there’s a reason I call it Meth Central), back to 7th Street, go north (opposite of the direction we need to go), shear right on Butler, cruise through a slightly less dire slum (yes, even this garden spot is beginning to gentrify), and come out on 12th Street. There we cruise southward, he toward whatever his destination might be and me dodging westward (a right turn) on Glendale toward the Safeway that I can’t turn left into because it’s at 7th Street and there’s no left turn allowed there.

Once I reach 7th Street (turning west now in order to go east), I sail into the nearly empty parking lot, shoot through the Safeway’s front door, and accost the two pharmacists, who bless their hearts are in a pretty good mood at this hour of the day.

However…the lucky soul who chooses to take me on has no clue to the Rx that was supposed to have been sent over at 2 a.m.  Finally she realizes: they’ve made it out in my unpronounceable legal name, a little horror that I never use. Being a little frazzled myself at this point, I don’t think of it, but just as she’s about to send me away (having tried and failed to get thru to the Mayo on the phone) it occurs to me that maybe this funny name thing has been applied to the Rx, and lo! So it turns out to be.

Finally I get home around 8:45. It has taken a full hour to make a twenty-minute round-trip drive and grab a bottle of pills!!!!!

Ugh. Now I have three hours before I have to schlep up to the church, where I stupidly volunteered to take on my friend Barbara’s afternoon shift at the front desk.

“When will they ever learn?”  NEVER volunteer!!!!!

I’m too keyed up to sleep now; I really should take the poor little dog for a walk; I’m sure there’s a sh!tload of things I should be doing right this very minute (pay the bills?); and I cannot even imagine how I am going to stay awake through three hours and thirty minutes of excruciating tedium down at the Church.

Why do you suppose they have a switchboard-like phone at all? I do NOT understand that. There’s no reason the staff/clergy (all of about 12 of them) can’t have their own phone numbers that will ring direct to their office phones or to a voicemail. They want somebody lurking around the front office to bounce out the homeless and greet the parishioners?? Whaaa? Maybe two people a day come in. Could the office manager, who appears to be a kind of Guy Friday, be parked in an office near the front, where he can see and greet whoever comes stumbling in the door?

Our rector is in the final running for the position of Bishop. That’s good for him: he’s a pretty ambitious guy and an exceptionally worthy candidate. But it means now we have to get a new pastor. That means major hassle, as you’ve no doubt noticed. I’d like to see them plant our associate priest in that job. She happens to be a woman. She also happens to be amazingly sweet and she can give a killer sermon.

The present incumbent was hired to rescue our merry group from a fairly dire financial predicament, after the prior regime took a richly endowed organization and within three or four years ran its finances right into the ground. Having performed what we might best describe as a dramatic rescue, indeed, he’s ready to move on to the next stage in his career.

We, on the other hand, are not and never will be ready for him to move on….

Tornadoes Outside, Whirlwind Inside

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LOL! Hilariously, every time it rains here, the news media — whose employees are perennially bored witless — regale us with tales of tornadoes, monsoons, and menacing floods that would put Noah’s Ark to shame. They’re having a great time just now: a tropical storm has blown up from the Sea of Cortez, and everyone’s in a great uproar. Oh, the horror! Oh, the terror! Omigod, it’s a tornado!

Well, no it’s not: it’s a whirlwind that picked up a lot of dry dirt. We call those “dust devils” in these parts.

As for the terror and the horror: well, yeah…the level of stupidity that holds forth among Arizona drivers is terrible and horrible. They drive into flooded washes, and then they’re astonished to find that a car will stop running when it’s up to its carburetor in muddy water. 😀

This morning when it came time for our dawn walk, huge pregnant clouds were floating overhead, and the richly humid air felt thick as cake batter. Ruby the Corgi and I decided to risk it, though: we set out for a mile-long hike with an umbrella in hand. But nay…we never needed to open the thing.

Shortly after we got back to the house, though, water coalesced out of the atmosphere in a brief, stiff downpour, huge drops falling straight down. No wind to speak of. No lightning, no thunder.

Ruby is not fazed by wind and rain, though she could do without bright flashes of celestial light and ear-splitting thunder. Just now, though, she is terrorized by an indoor whirlwind: this little dog hates, loathes, and despises the vacuum cleaner. Luz the Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, forcing the vacuum to suck up every micron of dust off the floors. Ruby’s pet human, on the other hand, is most grateful to have someone else doing that job, and doing it exceptionally well.

After the Dog and the Human returned from journeying around the neighborhood — delightfully, the threat of rain chased most of the dog-lovers indoors, so we encountered just three other dogs, two of them on a single lead — the Human took it upon itself to shovel out four of the five office file drawers that have become overgrown with weeds. The sheer amount of paper that pours into this house — most of it generated by Medigap, Medicare, and assorted financial institutions — truly defies belief. So much of it piles in that it induces a kind of paralysis, so that after awhile you end up with mounds of paper stacked atop every table.

My active file drawers had grown pretty unintelligible. Cleaning out and organizing those things was an all-morning challenge…not to say “aggravation.” However, a strategy for simplifying the tasks of filing and finding occurred to me: Once the files are cleaned out and reorganized, create an index for them.

Duh! How obvious is this?

So now I have four tables generated in Word — one for each drawer — that show where each set of file folders resides and how the things are organized. I’m going to print out these little guides and drop them in the desk, where they can easily be found…et voilà! No more searching for paper stashed…where?

Or at least, with any luck, a whole lot less searching.

This little project entailed hauling out pounds and pounds of paper to the long-term storage file cabinet in the garage. One of the disadvantages of self-employment is that you have to save every piece of business-related paper until after the fall of American civilization. This accrues a phenomenal amount of debris. So much, in fact, that the big four-drawer cabinet in the garage is now chuckablock full. No way can I squeeze so much as one more sheet of paper in there. If this paper-storing enterprise is to continue, next year I’ll have to start stashing the stuff in cardboard boxes and storing those in the garage cabinets. Like I’ve got lots of room in the cabinetry to waste on paper.

Welp, here comes another downpour, this time accompanied by a little lightning and thunder. A little…close-by lightning! Since we’ll likely soon lose the power, time to post this thing and begone.

 

 

Rain!

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At last! Monsoon season is almost over, and here we get our first thunderstorm of the summer — with rain. About time, I’d say!

Ruby the Corgi is unnnerved. She contemplates jumping off the bed, but it’s a drop from the top of the mattress to the floor. Too exposed up here: she craves her den, under the toilet.

Clearly, under the toilet is the only safe place to be during a noisy storm. 🙂

And noisy it is. The light show is going on about 5 to 10 miles away, by my count. But still, a few thunderclaps are…arresting.

Amused myself this evening by starting to figure out next year’s budget, the annual required minimum withdrawal having just arrived from Fidelity. The numbers do not look good.

It appears that over the next year, I’ll have a shortfall of $12,470. This year’s RMD plus Social Security total up to $31,460, but when I set aside the amounts I paid for 2019 taxes and insurance plus the $300/month for emergency savings, the net available to live on for a year is $20,085. Meanwhile, my total average living expense per year is now $32,556, not including any little surprises like dental work and pool repair. That’s a shortfall of $12,471. If I don’t put anything aside for emergencies, we still end up with a shortfall of $8870.

I got by for about 10 or 11 months this year on the RMD and Social Security, but had to take the RMD a couple of months early. Financial Dude just transferred $16,500 from Fidelity, but after taxes & insurance, that will not cover my costs for 12 months. Or even, I’m afraid, for 10 months.

Coincidentally, we’re de-incorporating The Copyeditor’s Desk, changing it from an S-corp to a sole proprietorship. What that will mean tax-wise escapes me. But the business account has just about enough to make up the shortfall, assuming I don’t have to buy any new computer hardware. But…that’s this year.

Then what?

 

The Strangeness of Everyday Life

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Ever think that life gets hilariouser and hilariouser by the day?

Hilariouser: I use that term ironically….

A couple weeks ago, the Mayo sent a snail-mail letter — on a piece of paper, can you imagine? — saying that the address to which the credit union was sending my online bill payments was wrong, and asking if I would please change it.

Well, you can’t get into that feature from your computer. So yesterday morning I drive over to the credit union to ask if one of their tellers would please get into the system and correct the address. Understand: the Mayo’s address is something the CU has in its system; in theory I shouldn’t have to enter it at all. What this seems to suggest is that the CU itself has the wrong address, rather than that somehow five or six years ago I entered the wrong address.

My trusty banker dude, Justin, was promoted two or three months ago, leaving his station empty. So if a teller can’t deal with something, the only staff there who can has been the manager. But when I walked in, lo! There was a NEW LADY sitting at Justin’s desk. And wouldn’tcha know, the teller fobs me off on her.

I explain the situation…and as I’m doing so, realize that this dear soul is as dumb as the day is long. She just barely understands what I’m talking about.

Okay, she’s new on the job….but thank goodness she wasn’t on the job earlier this year, when I was dodging around the PayPal/BofA hassle. She gets on the phone, calls someone, and asks what to do. They tell her to get into my account and then they’ll show her how to change the address. So…instead of calling up my account on her computer the way Justin always did, she goes to the CU’s homepage and asks me to sign in on her computer with my username and password. She hands the keyboard across her desk and asks me to sign in.

What?????? I don’t have my password with me. My computer automatically signs me in, using one of the EIGHTEEN SINGLE-SPACED PAGES OF UNIQUE PASSWORDS that my web adventures have generated over the years. I haven’t the faintest idea what my password is.

So I walk out, having wasted a fair amount of my time driving up there. I’m so flabbergasted by how stupid she is — truly, an amoeba would have more power under the hood — that I’m not even mad as the proverbial cat. She’s so stupid she comes out as funny.

WHY, for godsake, would you put someone as dumb as a cow into a job like that?

So now, I guess, after this I’ll have to pay the Mayo by charging their bills on AMEX. That’s fine, actually…tho’ it’s a little extra hassle, I get a nice kickback from everything I charge on that card.

Onward to Costco…

Speaking of herds of cows… HOLY cow! 😀

Waited until yesterday to make this run, because usually Costco is not very crowded on Wednesday.

I guess that was more or less true, except…the people who were in the store were just freaking weird. I would be walking along in a straight line, obviously headed to a destination, and a ninny would drift into my path and then just stop there, blocking the way. You could see that they could see me…they just didn’t give a shit. Once…okay, I could deal with that. Twice…all right, something’s in the air. But this happened repeatedly! Everyplace I tried to go, there was some chucklehead blocking my way.

Don’t think I’ve ever had that experience there…or anywhere. It was just strange behavior. I was in no hurry, so it wasn’t like I was feeling touchy because I wanted to get going, or like I was setting people off by obviously being anxious to “get there first.”

Swimming Pool Service & Repair sent their guy over to set a pump in the pool and drain the water into the sewer connection. He was the chatty type…I learned a great deal about his life. That was fine: I had nothing else to do, and it was nice to chat with a human for a change.

As the water level dropped, it became ever more evident that the walls are festooned with algae. Honestly, I do NOT know how they’re going to beat that stuff. The problem is the heat in the water resulting from the stupid blue surface, which this guy acknowledged. I suggested we should paint it white (turns out you can paint that stuff). He was horrified. I told him my plan, if we can’t resolve the problem, is to fill in the pool and plant a tree there. Horrified some more. 😀 He believes the problem is chemical balance. I believe the problem is the PebbleSheen surface.

Heh…we’ll soon see who’s right!