Coffee heat rising

Angst

Cassie: Still Extant…

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…as far as I can tell.

Cassie-off-leashWhen I left the house this morning, Cassie the Corgi was very sick, indeed. Worse than before, by far. Coughing and choking and gasping for air and actually wheezing.

In the absence of a doggy thermometer, it’s impossible to confirm or de-confirm whether she has a fever, but her schnozz certainly felt very hot. I mopped her head with cold water — an effective way to address impending heat exhaustion in a dog, BTW. Works better with dogs than with humans because of the difference in the way the brain circulates blood.

She seemed unimproved.

Comes time to leave for choir, the thought crosses my mind: Lady, this dog is not going to be alive when you get back here…

Really, I thought she wouldn’t make it another three hours. She couldn’t walk a few feet across the floor without gasping for air.

But…I was supposed to be down at the church, so off I went, misgivings or no.

So after cruising southerly two or three miles, I go to turn left from Main Drag NS onto Least Annoying Main Drag EW to get onto Main Drag Leafy Parkway, whereinat resides desired House of God. Traffic clears, I make my turn, and

POP! There’s some clown on a bicycle in front of me, on the WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD, flying through the intersection in the crosswalk.

That is, he’s not traveling on the righthand side of the roadway, as is the law here in our garden state. He’s on the lefthand side, riding on a sidewalk. He’s  in the crosswalk  legally — we both have the light, of course. But he’s not where a motorist would expect to find him, because he’s riding on the shoulder against the traffic.

I jam on my brakes. He jams on his brakes and in his alarm very nearly falls on the pavement. By now cars that were wayyy on down the road are upon us — traffic flows at 45 to 50 mph on that street. He looks confused and scared. I holler GO GO GO!!!! and he jumps back on and dodges out of the way in the nick of time.

Holy cripes. What is the matter with people?

Stumbling across the church parking lot, I think THIS is a towel that I need to throw in. Unnerved by the biker episode and really worried about the dog, I announce that I can’t stay, turn around, and come home.

Not over yet, though:

When I climb back into the car to leave the church parking lot, I notice the statement the vet’s office-lady gave me. I would swear she said the bill was $45. No. They engrossed FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE BUCKS from my checking account!

Holy mackerel! And that’s just to try to figure out what’s wrong with her! He gave me the pills for free, which was mighty kind of him ’cause it turns out that drug goes for — hang onto your hat — $200 a bottle!!!!!!!

I fly back to the house. From inside the garage I can hear Cassie barking merrily. WTF? She could barely drag herself across the floor 30 minutes earlier.

Fling open the door: they’re both doing the welcome home Odysseus how was the Trojan war? dance. They streak out the side door, as usual, like rockets. Cassie doesn’t get far, but she does manage to work herself up to a dead run. Briefly.

Which is better than what I expected: just plain dead.

Well, we’ll find out tomorrow whether the dog’s lung inflammation is really Valley fever, or if she has some other kind of infection. He said he was sure it wasn’t cancer, so I guess that for $485, we can discard that notion.

There are two similar drugs on the market that are cheaper than fluconazole. In fact, this stuff is for the disseminated state of VF. If it’s just in her lungs so far, then we could probably switch to one of the other drugs, which are a lot cheaper. Dr. Vet and I are going to have to have a little chat about this…

Makes “let nature take its course” look depressingly like good advice, doesn’t it? I guess if I have to put her to sleep because I can’t afford exorbitant amounts of money to get her over this thing…well…

Old Dogs, New Tricks?

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Welp, the Great Website Revamp foisted on us by the credit union turned out not to be the disaster I feared. No hassles, no headaches, no lost data, no disappeared scheduled transactions…yea verily, not even a helluva lot of change in the site’s appearance. At all. Guess the reason I was dreading it so much is that this old dog has come to dislike — deeply — learning new tricks. Especially new techno-tricks. 😀

No doubt this trait does have to do with age. Believe it or not, when I was a young pup I was ahead of the wave. We were the first in our (affluent) set to get a PC — an IBM, direct from the breathtakingly pricey IBM store on the ground floor of a fancy high-rise on North Central. And yes, I could code in those days…you had to know some code to do anything on one of those things. DOS was, yes, code. And XyWrite? A pure ASCII system.

XyWrite…how I miss it. Never once did it crash and lose half a day’s worth of work. Nay, not even half a minute’s worth. Yesterday Wyrd shut down twice as I was struggling through an exceptionally difficult Chinese math paper. This team is definitely in the “All Your Bases Are Belong to Us” set…actually, that idiom is significantly clearer than many turns of phrase infesting said paper.

Luckily, Wyrd is now set to save every 5 minutes. Plus I usually hit ⌘-S every time I enter an edit these days. So little was lost. Actually, a lot was lost in the original file, but Wyrd would bring up a phantom file containing the most recent data, which I would then have to save back down under the original filename. This, when you have several files open at once, amounts to a significant PITA.

I vacillate between thinking there’s something wrong with me — I do not learn fast enough anymore, I cannot remember things, I’m getting fat and lazy and just flat do not WANT to learn anything new thankyouverymuch — and thinking we humans of the 21st century are besieged with techno-ditz: far, far too much ever-changing minutiea that is not helpful, does not improve our performance (often quite to the contrary), does not improve our lives (ditto), and exists solely to annoy the hell out of us.

Case in point: the phone system down at the church’s front office. In three hours I get to slide into the chair at the front desk and watch very charming people come and go for four hours — I’ve taken to volunteer receptionist’s duty once a week. This sounds like it should be easy for the likes of me. My first job was as a receptionist at a large law firm. There were four of us seated in front of the elevators on three floors. I was usually on the main floor, where the incoming calls hit the switchboard. There were two of us at that station, and each had 12 incoming lines. Often all 12 were active at once.

Did I have any trouble handling these? Noooooo…. No problem at all. Easy as breathing.

Fifty years later: on a busy day, maybe two phone calls come in. Can I remember how to transfer those to staff? Can I figure it out from the instructions taped to the desktop next to the phone set? Hell no!

Literally, I can NOT figure this damn thing out. I’ve sat next to one or another of the women who do know how to work it for three entire shifts and still cannot remember what they told me or figure out on my own how to operate it.

It’s just not that hard! Yet my brain does not want to know it.

Maybe that’s it: the brain does not want to know anymore trivia.

But alas. I’m reminded of my late, great secretary, lovingly known as La Morona. The one who almost burned down the Social Sciences building when she put her lunch in the microwave, set it to “high,” and went off and forgot about it.

La Morona could not learn PC hardware and software to save her life. The poor soul. She had been using an antiquated Mac for years. When we hired her, she was sure she could learn the PC. Just as I was sure I could learn that phone system.

Not so much. At one point…oh, this is good! I’d sent her to an employees’ training course to learn how to navigate the university’s arcane bookkeeping system. And arcane it was — one of my RA’s was an accountant (a real one), and when I tried to foist the job on her she rose up in high rebellion. I should have known better than to inflict it on La Morona. About a week or into it, the instructor called me on the phone. The woman was in a rage. She demanded that I send in a disciplinary report on La Morona. Why? asked I. “Because she asks too many questions.”

Sigh.

Presumably because she was trying to learn something that no one in her right mind would want to know…

I really do think there’s a point at which your mind says enough of this crap, already! and simply refuses to store away any more pointless trivia that we all know full well will be changed or dorked up before it can be used more than a half-dozen times.

Yesterday, in the techno-terror department, my Chinese team’s lead author emailed in a sweat. Apparently one of his colleagues is a classic loose cannon. This personage sent the article we’ve been working on in to Elsevier, totally unedited. Result? The editor sent back a flame that must have set their hair on fire.

My guy says this editor sent back a sh!tload (not in those terms, of course: sh!tload seems not to be among the vocabulary lessons given in Chinese middle schools… 😀 ) of editorial suggestions. I interpret this to mean she did a light edit on the thing and entered a bunch of changes or QAs. Understand: at this point I’m two-thirds of the way through second edits on this unimaginably sophisticated and abstract magnum opus!

Now I’m thinking WTF? How am I going to justify a whole new set of edits against my edits in 18 pages of typeset copy? This is going to be a nightmare of Brobdinagian proportions.

I decide to motor on through to the end; then open the file he sent and at that point figure out what the hell to do.

Well, when I finally do reach that point, I find it is, thank GOD, not edited or commented-upon copy, but simply boilerplate the woman has copied from Elsevier’s website and pasted into her email. The “what to look for in your ESL copy” boilerplate. Thank you, ma’am: we already know that.

So. That was close!

Shingrix: Walgreen’s 0, Safeway 1

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Welp, Safeway wins the Shingrix vaccine competition by a mile.

Earlier this week I went by Walgreen’s to see if they had the shingles vaccine, which is famously in short supply. They said they did. I mentioned that I’d put my name on a list to be called when the vaccine came available again and never heard from them. She checked her list and found (surprise!) I wasn’t on it.

However, having heard that this stuff can make you mightily sick and facing a sh!tload of work that couldn’t be put off, I asked if they had enough that I could come in Sunday (today) to grab the first shot. She said sure, and put my name on her list.

Today after church I darted down there, as planned, to subject myself to the vaunted shot. By now I’ve heard so many reports of side effects ranging from unpleasant to awful by way of painful, I was mightily dreading this encounter.

Was my name on the list, asked she? “They told me to come down here this afternoon.” She checks the list: nope.

“Well, I can have one available about 1:00 this afternoon.” This, after I’ve stood in line behind some woman for a good 15 minutes while the clerk diddled around and diddled around and diddled around and diddled around.

What time is it now? Around 12:30. What, I wonder, does she think I’m going to do with myself, hanging around a Walgreen’s for half an hour or forty minutes? I say I’ll come back another time . (Maybe in some future lifetime...)

Get in the car and drive across the street to the Safeway, cattycorner across the intersection from the Walgreen’s. March through mobs of customers (is there a reason the Walgreen’s is almost empty? hmmm?), bounce up to the pharmacy counter and ask if they have any Shingrix shots available.

“Sure enough! Come on over to the cash register and I’ll ring you up.”

Uh huh.

In under 10 minutes, I had the shot and was out the door and back in my car. Also had a 10% off coupon for my next grocery shopping expedition.

So. That will bring a permanent end to my getting flu shots — or much of anything else — at Walgreen’s!

Little drawback, though: They charged a $160 copay!!!!!!!

That, of course, is ridiculous. Tomorrow I’ll probably call Humana to ask WTF. But on the other hand, Humana’s Part D plan is so economical that they’ve saved me far, far more than that in premiums over the several years since I signed up. So I don’t feel too exercised. Plus any day I’d cheerfully pony up $160 to avoid the shingles!

As for the horrors of the Shingrix vaccine? So far, nothing like the tales we’ve been told. The pharmacist said most people experience some mild arm soreness and a few enjoy flu-like symptoms, which pass quickly. Me? No pain so far. Slight vertigo and mild headache — which I’ve experienced in the past with ordinary flu shots and are hardly debilitating. And very possibly attributable to stress, since I’ve been flopping around trying to figure out how to fit two to five days of being sick into a very busy schedule.

I wonder if they’ll gouge me another $160 for the second shot…

If It Ain’t Broke…

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Ever feel like you’re oversensitive to change? Dunno whether it’s age or just a manifestation of the ever-more-unlovely dystopia in which we dwell…but I have just about had it with having to adapt, adapt, and re-adapt to change made for no very good reason.

I mean, if there’s a reason for it, fine. But to shake things up for the sake of shaking them up — and hassling everyone who uses said things — not so much. Especially when it comes to techno-change: since electronic technology is now ubiquitous, even rather small changes can mean big, time-consuming headaches. But BIG techno-changes? Ohhh shee-ut!

This weekend, the credit union is shutting down its website for three days in order to disgorge an “update.” This creation is supposed to make our lives easier and ever so much more wonderful.

But you and I know exactly what it will do, right? Make our lives complicated and ever so much more miserable. 😀 Been here before, done this…

FAQ’s:

Will my account number(s) change?
Your account number(s) will have a new look in the upgraded system. We will add a number at the beginning of your current account number to identify the account type (savings, auto loan, etc.). Checking and HELOC accounts will not change, so your current account number will remain the same.
You will see your new account number(s) in online and mobile banking after the upgrade.
We will also link your various account numbers to one Member Number, which is tied to your Social Security Number. If you currently have multiple individual account numbers, your oldest account number—the account you have had with us the longest—will be used as your member number.

Ducky!!!

Will my scheduled transfers in online banking continue to work after the technology upgrade?
If you have scheduled auto-transfers in Popmoney or Funds Transfer, you will need to reestablish them after the technology upgrade with your new account number(s). Auto transfers from checking accounts must also be reestablished even though the account number will not change.

Never heard of “Popmoney” and don’t expect I want to. Funds Transfer? I do transfer my (shrinking…) share of the mortgage on the downtown house to my son, since he manages those payments. So it looks like I’ll have to screw around to keep that happening. Probably will end up having to write him a check next week. Dollars to donuts…

Will online banking and bill pay be available during the technology upgrade?
Online banking and bill pay will not be available from Friday, August 31 at 6:00 p.m. to Monday, September 3 at 9:00 a.m.

Paid the bills that are coming due. Since I’ve been totally distracted for the past several days, two of them are going to be paid late, thanks to the CU shutting down for three days. Whoopeee.

Looked up all account numbers for all the recurring bills; made a note of each in a single place, so it will be relatively less of a PITA to rebuild all those bill-pay structures. Ugh. How can I count the ways I don’t want to waste time doing that?

This is the same outfit that changed its name, pointlessly, from the perfectly intelligible “Arizona State Savings and Credit Union” to the cutesy, unpronounceable and unintelligible moniker, OneAZ. No one knows what that is, and half the people who see it can’t figure out how to say it.

So…it’s hard not to suspect that this “upgrade” is yet another pointless change.

Dollars and Tree$

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Big ole’ storm is building up to the north. Kinda doubt it will blow down this way, even though it looks mighty threatening. The mountains just to the north of us — hills, really, but big enough to create a rain shadow — usually block incoming from that direction. Our most vigorous storms usually come in from the southeast or the southwest. Although…fortunately the most recent freshet, the one that blew down a 60-food-plus Aleppo pine, did fly in from the north. If it had come in from the south, it would have blown that tree right down on the homeowner’s house. And that would’ve been an even bigger-dollar event than it was.

Turns out that when a tree that size blows down across a city street, the city has the US Forest Service come and cut it up. But the homeowner has to pay to have the debris hauled off. Apparently they’ll pile it up on your yard, but you have to find a way to get rid of it!

And good luck with that.

Apparently, too, if your tree falls on the neighbor’s house, your homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover it. The person whose house is smashed has to try to get their homeowner’s to cover it.

“And again I say…” good luck with that. Presumably if your neighbor isn’t insured — or not adequately insured to cover the damage — you’ll end up in court fighting over the damages.

devil-pod-treeI’ve been thinking for awhile that I should have the west-side devil-pod tree removed before it drops a limb (or itself) on my house or Terri’s. Even though I don’t think (right now) it poses much of a hazard — it has been thinned, and yesterday I inspected from a distance and think the wind can blow through it all right — it has got to be the single messiest, dirtiest, junkiest tree in all of God’s creation. Whatever it can dump on the house and on your roof, it dumps.

A wind from the north would, if the tree does decide to break despite being trimmed and thinned out, drop it on the fence between the side yard and the front yard. Actually, it wouldn’t even do that: it would fall on the paloverde tree and smush it. Falling due south or due north would not bring it down on either one of our houses. But if it fell to the east or the west, it would cause some serious damage.

It provides a lot of shade on the west side of the house. It’s now so tall that it shades my roof in the afternoon and Terri’s in the morning. So if I take it down, we’re both going to enjoy even more extravagant power bills than we already get…and mine was pushing $300 last month. It will take several years for another tree to grow big enough to shade that west wall, and one that won’t cause any damage if it breaks would never get big enough to shade the roof.

I’d like to replace it with a desert willow, which a lovely plant. Some of them bear pink or purple blossoms. It’s about as xeric as a tree can get — extremely drought tolerant — and it can stand winter temperatures as low as 10 degrees. The one I have in front is gorgeous.

Problem is a desert willow doesn’t get very big — certainly not tall enough to shelter the roof from the afternoon sun. It’ll get maybe 25 feet high. And it’s pretty slow growing. You can get them from landscaping nurseries that are fairly mature, but it’s quite the project to plant such a thing. Presumably would require a crane to lift it over the wall…for that matter, I can’t even imagine how they’d get it around or over the paloverde tree back there.

I don’t even want to know what any such endeavor would cost!

So… It may be best to leave bad enough alone. Get Luis back up there this fall, only this time browbeat him until he agrees to seal every cut with tree tar. (He resists…and the damned willow acacia does not heal where a limb has been cut off. Result: it drips molasses-like black sap on the the ground, not for a little while but permanently. Forever!)

* * * *

Whoa! Several hours later, and it’s really dark and threatening in the west. It’s unusual for a storm to blow in from the west…even stranger than one coming down from the north. Hm.

What do you suppose could have possessed Satan and Proserpine (the house’s previous owners) to plant something like that tree so close to the house? It’s just a few feet off the west edge of the patio, and maybe 18 or 20 feet from the house’s wall. That just seems so mind-bogglingly stupid.

Welp, they were very naive about outdoor plantings. They put two sissou trees in front, which they imagined would never get much more than 15 or 20 feet high. The pattern fits the sales methods indulged by Moon Valley Nurseries, the used-car dealers of the nursery business in this state. They high-pressure you to buy a “package” of a half-dozen trees, about four of which you don’t need. And I’m sure when they saw those two turkeys waddle in, they figured they’d found a place to dump the junk smarter buyers declined to consider.

People are dumb.

Speaking of the smarter parts of God’s creation: I’d better feed those dogs now, so they can wring themselves out in the yard before that storm gets here.

And so…away!