Hah! Every day is lovelier than the next. Check out this little fella..
….and tell me if you don’t think our sweet pet Rattie isn’t one helluva lot cuter than that rat…
Which is cuter? Rat 1 or Rat 2?
Rat 1’s handsome profile was captured early of a fine Arizona day on a neighbor’s security camera.
See that thing in his hand? That’s not a Budweiser…that’s a pistol, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag.
The gate he’s coming out of? That’s an alleyway entry to a neighbor’s backyard. The photo was caught yesterday by someone’s security camera and posted to the neighborhood Facebook page. Said the proprietor: “This individual was spotted at approximately 7:25 this morning exiting our backyard at our home on El Caminito Dr. I did not see any evidence on any of our security cameras of this gentleman entering our backyard.”
At first I thought it was our boy, the one the cops were chasing around yesterday. But now I think this fella is a little older than that kid, healthier-looking, somewhat better built. So we have not one but two of ‘em frolicking around the alleys.
Meanwhile…the evening sun is sinking like a red-rubber pie tin. The air is still thick and brown from the smoke drifting across from the West Coast, the sun so dim you can stare right straight at it. Though one (who does not suffer from asthma) has no problem breathing it, the stuff out there can’t be very good for you.
My plan is to catch Rat 2 and stick her in a cage with a big bowl of bird seed (she loves bird seed) and a bag of oranges (she adores oranges), toss her and the dog in the car, and start driving driving driving. Patagonia, here we come!
If you were your kid and you were an American, come of age in a time when America the Great was rapidly turning into a Third-World Country, what would you do differently from what your parents did? From what your kid him- or herself is doing right now?
Do strange little thoughts like that ever cross your mind? They sure as Hell cross mine.
My father planned carefully for his retirement and his old age. Thanks to his planning — and to his lifetime of amazingly hard work — I haven’t had to put in that much single-minded effort: he left me enough to live on comfortably through my dotage. But that’s not so true of my son.
Although my son’s dad is affluent, like me he also no doubt will live (expensively) into advanced old age. My son’s grandmother just died at the age of 106 (no, that is not a typo), having spent the past 20 years wasting away ruinously in a nursing home. The new wife is a good 20 years younger than me, and though she has a highly competent son, she also has a feckless, dependent daughter who never will be able to care for herself and her offspring. Thus most of whatever my son’s father has now will be dedicated to supporting the less gifted occupants of that side of the family.
My son, the recipient of a spectacularly expensive private education, has a decent job but not one that will make him rich. It can, however, allow him to work remotely from just about anyplace that he chooses.
My mother smoked herself into the grave in late middle age. We have no clue how long she might have lived had she never picked up a cigarette. Her father died of Hodgkin’s disease, an acquired cancer not uncommon in his part of the country: we have no idea how long he might have lived had he dwelt someplace else, never smoked, and never drank. Her mother chippied herself into the grave: we have no idea how long she might have lived had she never been exposed to the kinds of reproductive viruses one acquires during a wildly misspent youth. But the other women on her mother’s side of the family were Christian Scientists who lived into advanced old age: we do know that in the absence of alcohol and tobacco, they lived into their mid-90s even without ever going anywhere near a medical doctor or a patent medicine.
So what we have here, in the planning department, are two people — me and my son — each of whom have a shot at living into advanced old age. Or not.
What can be done for my son — by me or by him — to ensure that he will be financially secure into his dotage?
We know that I absolutely positively do NOT want to spend my last years in a “life-care community,” a rabbit warren in which to lock up old folks. My father consigned himself to one of those places after my mother died, and I have several friends who are now living (expensively) in similar prisons. I will take a swan-dive off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before I allow that to happen to me…and that also is neither a joke nor a typo. My house is paid for: if I die tomorrow my son will inherit a piece of property worth about $400,000, free & clear. My son’s house will be paid for in another 10 or 15 years; it will be worth around $325,000 to $350,000, if all things remain equal. He lives frugally and invests in IRAs, and so he presumably will have some retirement savings in hand, if he lives into his dotage.
BUT…
The Covid-19 fiasco has shown his employer, clear as handsomely chlorinated swimming pool water, that there is no reason to maintain expensive office space to support a profitable insurance business. He believes the company will never re-open its pricey new digs in Tempe, a dreary suburb of Phoenix. Shortly before the Covid fiasco began, he was promoted to a managerial position. He remains a manager: remotely.
What this means is that there’s really no reason for him to continue living in a dump like Phoenix, a vast, ugly, crass bedroom tract that we might kindly call L.A. East. If the company settles permanently into a mode in which most or all of its mid-level employees can work online, he could in theory live anyplace he pleases.
And there are many, many better places to live.
In Arizona alone, for example, towns such as Prescott, Bisbee, Patagonia, the outskirts of Tucson, and even Payson have far more temperate climates and are nowhere near as grubby and crime-ridden as Phoenix. Nor is there any reason to stay in a culturally backward hole like Arizona. If you want to live in the Southwest, there are many better places to live in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico. If you don’t mind jumping on a plane to visit your employer for monthly staff meetings, Oregon, Washington State, parts of Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and waypoints are highly desirable venues. With a fistful of cash from the sale of two houses, you could easily install yourself in the Low Countries, Ireland, the south of France, Italy, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, or parts of Australia.
Why stay in a declining economy with a corrupt leadership and a moribund health-care system?
Why not use the capacity of electronic telecommuting to ensconce yourself — now, while you still have some years to enjoy life — in a better place?
If I were my son, I would be so gone. Right now: I wouldn’t wait for retirement, certainly not given the wacksh!t direction into which our country’s politics have dragged us. I probably would leave the US, given half a chance to pull it off. But even if I chose to stay in the this country, you can be sure it wouldn’t be in Phoenix.
Speaking of the which: as we scribble a cop helicopter is buzzing its way toward us, the dog has flown into a batsh!t frenzy, and I suppose I’m going to have to get up, dig out a pistol, and lock the security doors. So much for the scheme of taking a moonlight dip in the pool.
Where would you want your kids to spend the best years of their life?
We don’t yet have Aldi here in lovely Arizona, though the chain is planning four discount emporia in our garden state. Doesn’t matter though: the principle applies across the board: We’re not in Kansas anymore…
It’s unclear from this opaque article whether we’re talking about fresh whole peaches sold in bags, or sliced refrigerated or frozen peaches. However, it looks like probably they’re talking about fresh whole peaches. So, here’s a message from 1955, courtesy of US citizens living in lovely Saudi Arabia, where ALL fresh produce was assumed to be contaminated with this, that, or the ’tother fecal bacteria. It applies now as it did then, back before the US was a Third-World country:
Before bringing any fresh produce into the house, fill a kitchen sink (or, if you have it, MUCH better: a garage or workroom sink) with soapy water. Dawn is really good: a generous squirt of Dawn in a sinkful of cold water. But any dish detergent or laundry detergent will do the job.
Gently submerge the produce in the soapy water. Let the produce sit there while you go on about your business for a few minutes; videlicet:
a) In another sink, wash your hands in soap and water
b) Bring in the rest of the groceries.
c) As needed, wash other (non-produce) groceries in the kitchen sink, using soap and water.
d) Drain the kitchen sink, rinse off groceries, and place them to drain dry or wipe them dry with towels. Toss towels in washer.
e) Put these groceries away.
f) Return to the sink where the produce is soaking. Wash each piece with soap and water (that is: your produce is sitting in detergent water — say, Dawn or Ivory + water — and now you take a bar of good strong soap and wash each piece with the soap under running water.
g) Rinse well, and set these aside to drain dry
h) After 15 or 20 minutes or so, to the extent the produce is still damp, wipe it dry with clean toweling.
i) Then, and only then, put it away in the refrigerator or in whatever cool place where you store it.
Got it? Wash produce in detergent, bar soap, and water; wash your hands in soap and water; rinse produce well; drain produce dry; refrigerate produce. Pray for the best.
Ideally, items that have tough skins — such as citrus and melons — should be doused briefly with dilute Clorox and rinsed well before storing.
If it is revealed to us moderns that we’re talkin’ about refrigerated or frozen processed peaches: cook the damn things before eating them.
This was what we had to do with when my family and I lived in Saudi Arabia, where the produce we bought in the local commissary was likely to have been grown in fields fertilized with human waste. Very little that was brought into camp from nearby Middle Eastern countries was safe to eat, at least not by “Western” standards. By the 1950s, most produce and meat you bought stateside, in ordinary U.S. grocery stores and supermarkets, was safe enough to eat that consumers did not typically obsess about sanitizing every bite. But once you were outside the industrialized world…well…you took your life in by your hands if you chose to get careless about any detail of sanitation.
Who would think that half a century later, we here in the Good Ole USofA would find ourselves living in a Third-World Country?
If you feel as though your finances are in ruin, then you need to know that you are not alone. It’s not easy for you to know how you are going to find the money to pay for everything, but at the end of the day you have to make sure that you don’t panic. If you are collected in the way that you approach your debt and if you do everything you can to stay on top, then you shouldn’t have many problems to contend with.
Pay Less Interest on your Credit Card
Credit card debt is bad. It doesn’t matter whether you have debt that is left over from Christmas or whether you have booked a holiday on your card because it can easily take a long time for you to pay it down. This is especially the case if you are paying interest. If you can, you need to move it to a 0% interest card. If you want to get the biggest benefit from this, then you need to pay it down as much as you can earlier-on. If you don’t do this, then you may find that you end up struggling and that you end up in the same situation again when your payments go up again. If you want to really benefit but you are not able to take out a credit card then why not look into: www.bestpersonalloans.com? When you do, you may find that you can pay off your debt and then just pay interest on your loan.
Pay More than the Bare Minimum
Another way for you to pay lessintereston your credit card would be for you to try and pay off more than the basic amount every month. Minimum payments are normally set at very low levels so if you pay this off every month then you shouldn’t have a problem. That being said, if you can afford it, you have to pay more than this if you can. When you do, you will soon find that you can clear your balance with ease and that you can also come out on top with ease.
Shift your Store Card Balance
When you look at your storecard, you may find that they charge a very high-interest rate. You may find that sometimes they are as high as 29%. This can really hurt your finances, so if you want to get around this then you need to try and swap your debt to a 0% card. When you do, you will be able to transfer your balance and you can also really take advantage of the savings. Again, it’s super important that you try and pay down your debt as much as possible during this time.
Pay Less for your Overdraft
Paying interest on your overdraft? If you can, you should try and switch to a current account. This won’t charge you and you may even find that you can save a considerable amount of money too. An alternative would be for you to try and use a 0% money card. This will give you the chance to move money from your credit card to your current account. If you need some help here, then it is more than possible for you to hire a financial advisor. When you do, you can trust in them to help you with anything you need, and they can also give you the advice you need with your overdraft in general. Some can even find you better deals with your credit card too, so keep that in mind if you can.
So it’s been about a month since I decided, at a young doctor’s urging, to climb back on the wagon…and since then have managed to cling to the haystack. She speculated that the disturbing tingling in the hands and feet is a peripheral neuropathy occasioned either by a vitamin B12 deficiency or by alcohol abuse.
I personally do not think one or two glasses of wine, once a day, taken with a large meal consisting of meat, two vegetables, or a vegetable & a salad represents alcohol abuse. On the other hand, neither do I feel my world will end if I substitute iced tea or iced coffee for the swiggles. The doc’s definition of “too much,” it develops, is driven by shifting standards of acceptably safe amounts of alcohol consumption — revised downward. These official pronouncements tell us that women should drink no more than 4 ounces of wine a day. This is less than the standard presented as Received Truth when I was a young pup.
Well. Four ounces is one rather small glass — hardly more than a taste. It’s not worth opening the bottle and dirtying up a wine glass to pour less wine than will accompany a full meal. I’ve probably been drinking about 6 ounces a day. Apparently that is dire, DIRE, we tell you!
Okay, to the great joy, no doubt, of my Christian Scientist ancestors’ lurking ghosts, I heave myself onto the wagon and fasten the seat belt. Meanwhile, the young doc and her boss also suggested that I drop a vitamin B12 supplement every day, the B12 level being one aspect that turned up wanting in the vast complicated set of blood measurements they did. (Does it not strike you as odd that if you have a nutritional deficiency, only one of a wide array of factors would be lacking?). This stuff isn’t going to harm me. Whether it will help remained to be seen.
And, we might add, still remains to be seen!
Neither of these two changes seemed to have much effect, over the course of three or four weeks. Well: I feel a little more energetic — one symptom of B12 deficiency is fatigue. Was I fatigued in the long-ago time? Not exactly: I incline to call it lazy. But whatEVER. Yesterday I scrubbed 1868 square feet of tile without noticeable “fatigue.” 😀
As for the tingling feet and hands? Like an electric current flowing through them. All. The. Time.
Oh well.
I’d been applying a topical anesthetic in the form of lidocaine. Its effect, to the degree that it has one, was brief, at best. But then…oh, yes, THEN: a vague memory flitted across the fogged brain: that nightstand drawer held several vials of CBD cream and ointment given to me over the years by various friends & relatives. Hmmm…. What if? D’you suppose…?
Dig these out and smear them on the paws, one at a time over a couple of days. Only one of them has much effect, but it does make a noticeable improvement. Hot dang.
This elixir goes away quickly, because it’s just a sample size. But…it is to be noted that Sprouts, which has a store within walking distance of the Funny Farm, sells CBD nostrums! So yesterday, girding myself with face mask and disinfectant, I trotted into that fine emporium, where I found the cannabis nostrums under lock and key. Tracked down the woman who runs the cosmetics and patent meds department, and found to my surprise that she was pretty knowledgeable on the subject of cannabis-laced skin balms.
Picked one that she recommended, hauled it into the house, and lo! It actually does work pretty well! Doesn’t make the electrical effect go completely away, not by any means, but it does dull it enough to make it tolerable.
Meanwhile, we have the perennial blood pressure neurosis.
Since I’m going to have to trek back out to the Mayo toward the end of this month to do battle with the docs over my various lifestyle manifestations, I figured I’d better resume making a record of average BP measurements, since every time I so much as drive into a hospital or doctor’s office parking lot, my blood pressure heads for high orbit. I feel I need to have a record to show how the figures run in a less crazy-making environment.
At 2:30 in the morning on August 3, when I was awakened by the sensation of my pulse pounding, the blood pressure was 161/93. Holy shit! By 3:30 it had gone up to 167/107, freaking terrifying. This, however, was not the first time I’d experienced a night-time episode of astronomical blood pressure. Last time, it had dropped into the elevated but not terrifying range by the time I got to the ER, and within 45 minutes or an hour had gone back down to what was then “normal” for me. Also by now had learned that a “blood pressure crisis” — hurry on down to your nearest ER — is upwards of 180/120. So this time I refrained from panicking and just tested it about every half-hour or so, and yes: watched it fall to 143/90. Still way too high, but not immediately in stroke territory.
As this night watch proceeded, it occurred to me that because of the neuropathy I was swimming in ibuprofen. I’d been taking 200 mg four times a day — the last spiked with Benadryl in the (vain) hope of sleeping past 2 a.m. That’s 800 milligrams a day of the stuff. Holy ess aitch ai!
Turns out ibuprofen can jack up your blood pressure. And…it’s dangerous to ingest it along with cinnamon, a little experiment I’d decided to try by way of addressing the alleged prediabetes that also showed up in the blood tests.
So I decide to go cold turkey with that stuff.
It was dulling the tingling a little…but not enough to matter. In fact, the CBD gunk makes one helluva lot greater improvement.
Okay. So…
Now I’m tippling nary a drop of wine (or anything else, either).
And not gulping down piles of ibuprofen.
Two days into the ibuprofen fast: BP is 120/78
Awww c’mon! Gimme a break. I write it down but regard it as a fluke.
Another two days later, it drops to 105/72.
Right. Sure. I figure the BP machine must be busted. Make a note to take it up to the Walgreen’s to get it checked.
Next day: 118/78. Hmmm..that at least is in the more or less normal range. But I’ll believe it if I see it again. More than once.
And today: 118/72.
Dayum! It must’ve been the wine, not the old age and not the various neuroses that was pushing the blood pressure into the alarming range.
Well. We shall see if this proves true. I’ll believe it when I see it…at least eight or ten times.
As for the tingling extremities? The electrical current is about gone in the feet.
One of the reasons I haven’t been writing much at Funny about Money (or anywhere) is that I haven’t been feeling on the top shelf. Not sick. But not what you’d call creative. Just blah. This has been going on for awhile. I put it down to laziness. And to the heat: it’s in the 110s here now. Every day.
Well, three or four weeks ago my hands started tingling. Felt like an electric current was running through them. Then the feet started tingling. Not good.
So I call out to my doc’s office at the Mayo, and the nurse says “you need to come right on in.”
Ohhhh….shit! Just what I wanna do: go to a doctor’s office in the middle of a contagion of a potentially fatal disease. But this stuff is scary, so I traipse out there. They order up an elaborate series of blood tests. Traipse to the hospital at the crack of dawn to get blood drawn. Then traipse way to hell and gone back out to the far side of Scottsdale to meet with the doc’s resident.
Who IS….this really neat and smart and wonderful woman. I want her as my doctor! Don’t let her get away!!!!!
Anyway: She says I have a vitamin B12 deficiency and also am pre-diabetic. Peripheral neuropathy — the grown-up term for tingling hands and feet — is a symptom, and it can get a whole lot worse. She and mega-doc agree I should start taking vitamin B12 supplements and come back in a month. Okay.
At the risk of repeating myself: Well….
Finding this stuff is easier said than done. I decide to try the Sprouts near my house, partly because the last time I went to the Walgreen’s near there, I was waylaid by a pair of aggressive panhandlers in the parking lot — to the point where I had to lock my car door and drive away! — and partly I figured if anyone had a vast selection of woo-woo “supplements,” it would be Sprouts.
But meanwhile and by sheer coincidence, I open up a medical newsletter — a piece of journalism — that I happen to subscribe to and find, lo! An article going on about how a recent study showed that ingesting 500 mg of cinnamon thrice daily reduced glucose levels among a decent-sized group of test subjects. This peer-reviewed paper came out through Oxford, so it’s presumably reasonably sane.
Hm. So I decide to buy a bottle of 500-mg cinnamon tablets, too.
Easier said than done, indeed! No problem finding the B12 pills. But cinnamon is apparently High WooWoo. Not only are there a jillion variants, every one of them is ludicrously overpriced. Most of the B12 pills are rapaciously priced, too, but just as I’m about to walk away I find, down on a lower shelf, a brand selling the stuff for 7 bucks a bottle.
I figure ohhhhkayyy…I’ve got a big jar of cinnamon back at the Funny Farm: that can be sprinkled on apple slices, into spinach and chard, mixed with tea or coffee. A little math shows this should be easy: 500 mg is .1 teaspoon; three doses a day would be 1/3 of a teaspoon. But munching this stuff three times a day could get tiresome. I order a jar of 500 mg capsules from Amazon, which arrives within a day.
Problem is…well, there are two problems.
1. The study doesn’t say what type of cinnamon they used. There are two: Saigon cinnamon and Ceylon cinnamon. The stuff in my spice cabinet is Saigon cinnamon. The stuff in the pills is Ceylon cinnamon. The Korean authors of the laudatory research paper do not specify which variety they inflicted on their test subjects.
Turns out these are the products of two separate plant species. Saigon cinnamon is a cassia. Ceylon cinnamon is not. A little banging around reveals that the supposedly therapeutic variety is Saigon cinnamon, AND that it can have baleful side effects if you overdo it.
How baleful, you ask?
Liver damage.
Uh huh. Apparently you have to ingest somewhat more of it than our researchers inflicted on their subjects for that to happen. But still…
2. The horse pills that arrive from Amazon are as big as the end of my thumb! NO WAY can I swallow one of these without choking on it. To use the things, I’ll have to cut the capsule in two and sprinkle it over food or into a drink.
We have this fine DIY comparison of the two varieties:Hmmm… Ohhkayy… It looks like it can’t do much harm to ingest Saigon cinnamon, the stuff that supposedly works against incipient diabetes, in moderation: the amount used by the researchers is within the supposedly safe limit. Just.
But of course this means I’ve wasted my money on Amazon’s horse pills. Ohhh well!
All pretty dubious, I’d say. But nothing ventured: I decide to add 1/4 teaspoon of the Saigon variety 3 times a day to what passes for my diet. If this isn’t toxic (it apparently could be), it may be redundant, since I routinely drink a fair amount of tea and coffee and eat a fistful of blueberries every day — all supposedly having a similar effect.
We’ll believe it when we see it.
What is more likely to have the “effect” is getting off the sauce. As it develops, prediabetes and diabetes are not the only potential causes of peripheral neuropathy. It can also be caused by alcohol abuse and by vitamin B12 deficiency. We know I’m low on B12. And, to my doctor’s horror I have a glass or two of wine every day, with dinner. I’m not exactly getting soused every day, though: two glasses of wine with a pile of food fit for the Queen of Sheba is not the same as getting shit-faced every day. Nor am I such a lush that it causes me great pain and suffering to substitute iced tea or water for the vino. So…losing the wine and losing some weight (I’m 10 or 12 pounds overweight again: the result of spending day after day loafing with a computer on my lap) are evidently in order. Whether these strategies will help remains to be seen.
All of this therapeutic tee-totalling and dieting is complicated by the fact that it is too damned hot to get any exercise. It was supposed to be 118 here today — we missed the mark by two degrees And with these damned precancerous growths sprouting up all over my hands and legs and back, I’m not allowed to go into the pool during the daytime. Like Dracula, I must stay out of the sunlight! The dog and I walk about three miles before sunup every morning — about an hour’s jaunt — but evidently that is not enough!
And what really workson the tingling is ibuprofen. One tablet of ibuprofen tamps it down by about 80% and lasts about four hours.
