Coffee heat rising

Angst

Gets worse, if that’s possible

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Bye-bye…

Dammit, I just dropped the external backup drive on the floor. Presumably broke it, because every time you drop anything electronic on the floor, you break it. The other external drive doesn’t work, either. It broke a long time ago.  As nothing, though…

What’s really broken — that matters — is the dog. And my budget.

Today I took Cassie to my son’s vet, who’s only about 10 minutes away (well…when every route going in that direction isn’t dug up and blocked to one [1] lane, which is not the case today…) to find out about the “abnormal” results of her recent urinalysis.

Is there a reason why we have to make such a fuckin’ drama of this stuff?

Oh yeah, sure there is: it’s called a rea$on.

They now want to do another urine analysis, in which they propose to culture the bacteria they found in her urine. Uh huh. And was there a reason we didn’t do this on the first try?

They propose, all told, to charge me almost $700 for the various tests and treatments they foresee.

Understand: I just paid MarvelVet $500 for treatment that has done nothing to help the dog.

Twelve hundred dollars is the sum total of my monthly income. Well, that’s not true: Social Security amounts to about $1211 a month. So this is more than just grocery money. This is more than half of what I have to pay all of a month’s bills. And that’s without repairing the car and replacing the tires after the fender-bender incurred in driving home from the last visit to this vet.

This is just crazy.

One thing is sure: here in our lovely 21st-century dystopia, if you are retired, you cannot afford to own a pet. In the near future, I’ll have to have this dog put to sleep. And that will be it in the doggy department for me: I simply will not be able to have another dog or cat around the house. Because I can’t afford it.

Ruby will still be here, but I’d probably better find another home for her while I can — while she’s still healthy and some naive dummy wants her. Because if I can’t afford Cassie, obviously I can’t afford Ruby, either.

Sooo exhausted. Haven’t slept more than a few consecutive minutes in the past month.

Tried to take a nap this afternoon. If I don’t put the dogs on the bed, they lobby — by whacking the bed and trying to climb up — until I capitulate and lift them up here. Trying to wiggle out of Ruby’s way (she being in full pester mode), I found myself in another cold, wet puddle.

Yesterday I ran FIVE LOADS through the washer, plus had to clean the washer out with the shop vac and then unclog the shop vac. Now the washer is laboring away with another entire set of bedding including a blanket. Literally, I ran the goddamn washing machine until 10 o’clock last night.

Well. Today’s mound doesn’t include the bed pad…this time she managed to pee on the piddle pads that protect the under-bedding. Hope I managed to get all those out of the wad of cloth I hauled out of the garage.

I just can NOT keep on doing this.

Meanwhile, two new jobs came in. When exactly am I supposed to find the time and the physical strength to edit these things, given that it’s impossible to sleep and the dog is so sick she has to be schlepped to a vet every second day and the car is wrecked and the stove is broken and the roof needs to be repaired and…holy shit. To say nothing of the fact that the country is going to Hell in a handcart.

The car is still running. I haven’t had time to get to Costco to find out how much it will cost to replace the tires. Whatever it is, though, between that and the vet bills, I can’t get the pool replastered this fall. Haven’t called the pool guy yet to let him know that deal is going to be off. The brushed metal things that I thought were some sort of fancy wheel covers are…not. They’re the wheels themselves. God DAMN it. So that means I need to buy a whole new wheel for the right front whateveritis on the damned car. God only knows what that will cost.

Still can’t find my credit-card holder with my AMEX card in it. I’m now beginning to suspect, against my better angels, that the locksmith guy must have lifted it. Really: that is the only explanation. I’ve searched all over the house.

There are a limited number of places that I could or would have set it down. We were near the front door when he handed me his bill. I signed it and handed him the credit card, which he put in his Square. He would have handed it back to me, I would have put it back in the case, and I would have — could have — done one of only two things:

  • I would’ve put the case back in my jeans pocket, where it resides whenever it’s not in its accustomed home; or
  • I would’ve set it down on the lamp table next to the sofa, the only flat place available.

Since it’s not in either place…well…

That day I was wearing the only pair of white jeans I own.  I’ve checked the pockets repeatedly: the thing is not in the jeans, not in the laundry bag, not in any other pair of pants, not on the table, not in the table’s drawer, not on the other table near the door.

Am I mistaken? Were we in the dining room or kitchen when this transaction occurred? In that case I would have put the card in my jeans pocket (no…) or on the dining room table or on the kitchen counter.

It’s not in any of those places.

Did I do the responsible thing and carry it back to the office and put it where it belongs, in a small purse hanging from a hook on the wall in that room?

No.

Did I take it back to the office and drop it on my desk or the file cabinet?

No.

Did for some unimaginable reason I put it in the car, in the consoles or on the passenger seat?

No.

Did I leave it on the kitchen counter or dining room table?

No.

And that’s about it. There really are no other places that I would, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, have carelessly placed it.

Soooo…. Reluctantly, I’ve just about arrived at the conclusion that it was stolen. We were chatting merrily and I was distracted by our conversation. If I’d set it on the sofa table, he could easily have lifted it while I was entertained by a dog or by my own mouth going.

Well, if that’s the case, it was more trouble than it was worth for our Nimrod. That card is now canceled. The Social Security number printed on my SS card was blacked out. And as we have seen, the new number on the new Medicare card doesn’t work. I need to contact Medicare and ask them to send me a new card, but frankly, that bureaucratic runaround is more than I can cope with just now. Fortunately, I made several extra copies of the damn thing. Whether they’ll want to cut a new card with a new number, I do not know.

While Cassie was locked up at the vet’s, I took Ruby for a walk, all by her little self. You know, I think that’s probably the first time this little dog has ever been on a doggy walk without the Boss Dog.

Dog interactions are weird. Maybe human interactions are, too…we’re just not aware of it, being humans. She was like a different dog! No dragging, no wackiness…just trotted right along as though she knew how to heel. Which…she doesn’t. 😉

 

 

Dispatches from Hell…

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Day after day after day after day has been yet another Day from Hell, lo! these several weeks. Why don’t things get better? Why does everything break, bust, explode, crash, or die? Finally figured out the explanation. These are not days from Hell. We are actually in Hell. Hence: these are not blog posts. These are Dispatches from Hell.

Case in point: The least of today’s hassles, only because it’s a hassle left over from a week ago…I’ve tried twice to re-up my subscription to The New York Review of Books, one of my favorite broadsides. First time was my fault: I used the credit union’s bill-pay function, but paid for it from my personal account (which, oddly, did have the the NYRofB’s listed as a previous payee). Of late I’ve been making the S-corp pay for it.

That payment bounced. Why, I do not understand: what do they care which account pays for it? Ohhkay… Eventually they sent a desperate “Don’t Leave Us” ad in the snailmail. I replied to that by filling out the form and entering the S-corp’s AMEX account number. This no doubt would have worked if I hadn’t indulged in a moment of stupidity.

As you know, the ‘Hood is not the best of all possible neighborhoods. We’re inundated with drug-addicted transients, who support their habits with petty theft. Including mail theft.

The payment envelope in hand, I raced out the door to run a bunch of errands and get someplace on time. In a hurry, I really did NOT want to drive to the Post Office to deposit the thing in one of their mailboxes. That would entail waiting half my lifetime for the blightrail signal at the interesection of Conduit of Blight and Feeder Street E-W to turn green, then waiting the rest of my lifetime to get back across the damn blightrail tracks to get to my various destinations. So instead of traipsing to the PO for this one small item, I stuck it in the outgoing slot of the Fort Knox Mailbox and flipped up the red flag.

Bad move. Very stupid indeed.

Two or three days later, I went out to get the mail (it’s almost all advertising now, so there’s no hurry to pick it up) and noticed the red flag was still up. Whaaa? Did the mailman not come by? (He often doesn’t….)

Check to see if he’s failed to pick up the outgoing: no envelope in there. Days go by. A couple weeks go by. No payment at NYRofB’s.

Shit. That means someone has stolen the thing and now has my name, the name of my business, its address, and its AMEX credit card number. I wait a few more days to see if the payment goes through. Today I call NYRofB’s phone reps and they say they never heard of it. I need to pay the thing on my corporate AMEX card over the phone. Then I need to cancel the card and order a new one, ASAP.

But ASAP ain’t very AS…because I’m waiting on the PostalPerson to deliver a new personal AMEX card. Yes. Somehow I managed to LOSE a whole cardholder full of cards!!!! The personal AMEX card, the Safeway card, the new Medicare card with a new Medicare number on it (the one that doesn’t work at the pharmacy), the old Medicare card bearing my Social Security number….GONE, every one of them.

I believe they’re somewhere in the house, because I paid the AC guy to fix the thermostat and the leaking roof with my personal card, and I did not leave the house between the time he drove off down the road and the time I realized I couldn’t find that cardholder. Since I’ve habituated that locksmith for a good 12 or 15 years and Steven (locksmith dude) has worked for them for 7 years and he’s a fine upstanding workingman, I don’t believe he walked off with it. Without a doubt, I set it down in the house somewhere and managed to lose it…same as the pair of prescription glasses that got tangled up in a knitted bed throw and disappeared for three months.

Fortunately I have photocopies of the Medicare cards. And fortunately, I had the sense to black out the SS number on the old Medicare card. The AMEX card has been canceled and a new one is on the way, but the weekend coming up, I don’t expect “tomorrow” (no kidding: that is what she said!) to arrive much before Monday. And fortunately, my debit card, corporate AMEX card, and Costco cash cards are in a different card holder. Which is not, after all, lost. Yet.

So what other dispatches from Hell since I had to pay $40 out of pocket for a flu shot?

  • The dog got better off the fluconazole, then worse.
  • Dog continuing incontinent, I ask the new vet if they’ll test her urine for a UTI.
  • Wednesday after volunteer receptionist duty, I race the refrigerated pee up to 40th Street and Thunderbird and drop it off there. I drive up there through the rush-hour traffic, drive back in even worse traffic. Changing lanes to maneuver into place to turn right into the ‘Hood, I misjudge the length of a flatbed trailer being towed behind a pickup in the lane next to me and clip the goddamn thing. The driver doesn’t even blink. He doesn’t slow down, he most certainly doesn’t stop…I think he may not even have noticed that I bumped his trailer. My car sure did, though. Pulled over to find the front bumper was half pulled off, scratched and gouged, flying in the breeze. Shee-ut!
  • Back here, I walk in the door and find…NO Charley! He’s freaking GONE! A worker has been here in the afternoon; I’ve left strict orders not to let that dog slip out the back gate. But he can go in and out the dog door…dollars to donuts that’s exactly what he’s done. He’s old, he’s sick, and now he’s LOST. Try to reach said worker: no answer. Totally, utterly panicked. My son is supposedly in Colorado, which is why his dog is here. I think maybe he got back while I was out and picked up his dog, but he won’t answer his phone, either. Neighbor texts him (I have no cell phone). No answer. I am in utter despair. After a bit I calm down enough to notice that even though the dog’s food is still sitting on the kitchen counter, the dog’s leash and collar are gone. SOMEONE took the dog on purpose…at least he’s not roaming around the neighborhood and ambling across Conduit of Blight Boulevard.
  • Eventually the kid calls and says yeah, he picked up the dog but was too tired from driving in from southern Colorado to bother to leave me a “thanks for keeping my dog” note.
  • Now late for choir, I feed the dogs and fly out the door without any dinner of my own.
  • Get home about 9:15 p.m. and go to enter the (locked) office.
  • It’s been raining for a day and a half. The solid-core door is swollen tight. The key goes in but I can’t turn it. I get a wrench, try to open the thing, and…SHEAR THE KEY OFF level. with the fucking deadbolt! All my computers, all my financial stuff, all my credit cards, all my cash, even my cheesy little clamshell phone are locked behind that door.
  • Call the locksmith’s emergency line. He says he’s sure he can fix it. For a hundred bucks he’ll do it right now (pushing 10 p.m.). I say if he’s sure it can be opened, I’ll be able to sleep at night and so can wait till tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll be wanting to break the front window and climb in to get my computer, which I’d druther not do.
  • Next day have real difficulty getting them to come over — but because I’m an old customer who’s spent a lot of dollars at their shop, they squeeze me in.
  • Steven comes over, takes a screwdriver to the thing, flips out the stump of the key: takes him all of 30 seconds. I’m in love. This love affair costs me 70 bucks. And now I have to go take the fancy key over to the shop to get a new one made. That’ll be another 20 bucks. Later. But not much later.
  • Somewhere in here I lose my credit-card holder. I search from pillar to post, empty out the trash cans, go through drawers, look under the furniture: no luck. I’m sure it’s in the house, probably, but when I can’t find it the next day figure to be safe I’d better cancel the AMEX card. Two or three days without a personal charge card. Yeah.
  • Insurance guy says I’m in luck. Because he bought me a “prime” policy, I have a one-accident-no-fault deal: get out of jail free. AND because I haven’t tried to kill any of my fellow homicidal drivers lately, I also have a zero deductible. He asks me to get estimates from a body shop but suggests that if it doesn’t cost much it may be better to foot the bill and not let the company know about this little fender bender. My son, also an insurance guy, recommends taking the money and running: he thinks I should go to the best body shop in town (which is 20 miles from my house) and have them do a decent job fixing it.
  • The vet’s office calls to say something’s out of whack with Cassie’s pee and they want me to bring her in Saturday morning. I say “wrong”? Like what? Well, like it might be a UTI. Ooookayyyy…
  • I take the car to my mechanic to check for damage under the hood. They find no structural or engine damage, AND they manage to wrest the bumper back into place and secure it with the car’s clips and a few extra bolts. It now looks dead normal except for a scrape on one side, as though maybe I got too close to a guard wall. The men of Chuck’s Auto also opine that it would be best to hide this incident from the insuror. However, they do find a nick in the tire’s sidewall and recommend replacing the tire soon.
  • I call my insurance guy with this report and with the advice from my son. He reiterates that his thinking coincides with the mechanics’ but he will support me whatever I decide to do. (He’s not a sales agent: he’s a broker.)
  • Cassie seems to be getting better. By yesterday I observe that she’s about back to normal and surmise I must have been right that she didn’t have Valley fever.
  • At 3:30 this morning she wakes up and pees in the bed before I can set her on the floor. In doing so, she manages to miss the double layer of pee pads I’ve laid down on the bed: three more loads of laundry!
  • In a flash I haul off the sheets, the bed pad, the blanket, and the dog blanket. Fortunately this five-layer barrier keeps the dog pee off the mattress. Dazed with exhaustion, I toss the sheets and blanket into the washer and start the thing running.
  • Cannot sleep, so go back to reading 8000 words of Korean-accented scholarly writing.
  • Somewhere in here it dawns on me: this lesion that developed on my hand, the one on the same arm that got the ferocious Shingrix shot, is not a zoster pox. Noooo….Y’know what that is? THAT little fucker is ringworm. Look it up and find ringworm image after ringworm image that looks just like it. And ringworm being not a parasite but a fungal infection, y’know what the treatment is? Ohhhh yes! Fluconozale, the same damn stuff that made my dog so sick I thought she was going to die! TWICE!
  • Shit. Well, you can get a topical treatment over the counter. The standard course of treatment, if you believe the Internet (yeah!), is first to try to get rid of it with an OTC ointment. If that doesn’t work, then you move on to poisoning yourself.
  • Eventually I go out to move the bedding from the washer to the dryer and…can you guess? Somehow I’ve missed two of the pee pads! The inside of the washer is now chuckablock full of shredded, wet puffed-up paper stuffing crap! HOLY shit!!!!!!!!!
  • I go inside to finish reading the client’s paper.
  • Eventually go back out to the garage. Realize I can’t put this stuff in the dryer. Haul each piece out into the driveway and shake, shake, shake, shake, snap, shake, snap, SHAKE, shake, shake. This covers the driveway with snow-like stuff but doesn’t get all the crud off the bedding. Hang the sheets, blanket, and mattress pad on the clotheslines, hoping most of the rest of the stuff will shake off when it’s dry.
  • Clean out the washer. Yeah, right.
  • Take the shop-vac to the washer. This clogs the shop-vac but apparently gets most of the crud out of the washer, except for the stuff I have to dig out with a coat-hanger wire. Use the rest of the vacuum’s capacity to pick up the white snow off the driveway and the garage floor.
  • Haul the vacuum tub and two baskets of garbage out to the alley trash bin. On the way, pick up a bum’s fast-food cup out of my yard. On the way, observe that the mess the city water guys made of my front landscaping is pretty well fixed, after I shoveled and broomed gravel back in place. Hope they didn’t fuck up the plumbing under there. But don’t have much hope.
  • Brush out and wash the shop-vac’s clogged filter; set it aside to dry.
  • Finish the Korean professor’s paper. Interesting guy, interesting subject. Learn a lot about international law on freedom of expression and journalistic privilege. That’s good, anyway. Run it past a prospective intern, am impressed with the kid’s response. Ship the edits & clean copy back to the client.
  • Decide I cannot bring myself to do the Costco run that was planned for today.
  • Realize that isn’t gonna do me any good, because I still have to go out to a Walgreen’s and try to find the anti-fungus stuff (miconozale) to treat the frantically itchy lesion on my hand.

And so, away. Let’s see what I can do to my fellow homicidal drivers on the way…

Rain, Rain, Go Away…

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DepositPhoto; Rainy Weather © dnaumoidWell…the metaphorical rain, that is. The real rain, of which we’ve had a fair amount the past couple days, can hang around for awhile. The storm that blew in from the Sea of Cortéz has broken the heat, saturated the earth, refreshed the plants, cleaned the air… And in the micro-bargain, filled up the swimming pool for free! Other than saturating the wiring that runs the AC system (which just now isn’t needed anyway), it seems not to have done any damage here at the Funny Farm.

Roads were flooded. The usual contingent of morons drove into flooded washes and had to be rescued from their cars’ roofs. One moron even walked into a flooded wash.

I haven’t gone down to my son’s house to see if everything’s OK there. If it’s not, there’s little I could do about it. And he’ll be back in a day or so.

Meanwhile…

It was one thing after another yesterday. Among the highest of the many low points: Medicare.

Jayzus Aitch Keerist!

So while I’m at the Walmart buying pee pads to protect my floors from the sick dog’s ministrations, I decided to get a flu shot. Medicare has just sent a new card. Somewhere in Washington — after HOW many decades? — it registered with a bureaucrat that maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea since the creation of Adam and Eve to make everyone in the country over the age of 65 carry around a card bearing their name and Social Security number in order to get medical care.

Ya think?

So they decided to issue new Medicare cards with new computer-generated numbers. That’s good.

Many days late and a dollar short. But good.

Mine came in the mail a couple days ago.

At the Walmart, the pharmacist asked if I had a new Medicare number. Yup. I fork it over so as to get the shot covered on Part D.

It won’t work. She struggles and she struggles and she struggles. She can NOT make it work. She gets on the phone to Medicare — this involves the usual frustrating punch-a-button hoop-jump and yakathon/obnoxious Muzak heel-cooling routine. Time passes. NOTHING that they tell her, nothing that she does will make it work. She’s still wrestling with it when, after about 20 or 30 minutes of watching her try to get through, I say “Look. I’ll just pay for it. Any day I’d rather be short 40 bucks than get the flu.”

So I ended up paying for a shot that was supposed to be covered by Medicare Part D, for which I pay.

When I got home, I called the number for Medicare shown on the back of the card.

MY GOD, the run-around!!!!!

After a good ten minutes of button-punching, hoop-jumping, waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting listening to aggravating yak and excruciating Muzak, a clueless woman got on the phone.

They train these folks to read a spiel to you. You ask your question, and they get out the spiel and start reading it from start to finish. This one was a lecture on what the flu shot will do for you, what the flu is, why you need a flu shot, and whether Part D would cover it. Believe it or not, she did not KNOW whether Part D covers the flu shot and so wasted some more of my time while she looked it up. I finally interrupted her in the middle of this yak-fest — what’ she’s doing is reading from a Web page and no, this is NOT the first time this fine experience has happened to me when I finally reached a human at a government office — and practically hollered, “I know that! Please don’t read that stuff to me. My question is why didn’t my new Medicare number work when I tried to get a flu shot?!??!?”

“Oh.”

Now that we have that figured out, she proceeds to try to find out. To make a very long story short, she doesn’t know. She insisted that the number I recited to her off the card was correct, that everything was in order, and that it should have worked. Curious, she got into the system to see if the Walmart lady was entering something wrong. A-n-n-n-d she could find no trace of an attempted transaction.

She suggested I go back to Walmart and tell them to try again, because Part D still might reimburse me for the $40 that I had to pay to get the shot.

Right.

See those random, rather poorly written posts you occasionally come across at Funny? The ones that natter on meaninglessly about such topics as “four good stocks to buy,” as though you’re going to take stock advice from a retired professor of English? Those are paid posts. I get paid over a hundred dollars A MINUTE to put one of those things online. Just now a new editing assignment hit my in-box; for that kind of thing, I get paid upwards of $60 an hour. You seriously think, dear Medicare bureaucrat, that I’m going to go stand around a Walmart for another hour or so, grinding my teeth and arguing over forty bucks? Really?

So now I’ll have to find out whether this incident was a fluke or whether something is fucked up deep in the works of Medicare. Whaddaya bet it’s the latter?

At any rate, she said it will be the middle of next April before all the new cards are mailed out. In the interim, they believe the old cards bearing one’s SS number will still work. She suggested continuing to use that for as long as possible.

Yeah.

So there you have it: that was the general tenor of the day. The whole damn day went like that, with the exception of the actual arrival and success of the guy from Liberty Wildlife, who liberated the hummingbird trapped in the kitchen skylight.

not so much…

My stove is acting up. I tried to reach Southwest Gas to see if there was some kind of outage. You can NOT reach a human being at Southwest Gas. Even when you send an e-mail, you get a machine-generated fuck-you-very-much response. Whenever I catch my breath from yesterday’s marathon set of run-arounds, I’m writing a complaint to the Corporation Commission about that.

The appliance guy is booked out into the middle of next week. Fortunately, two of the burners — the small ones — are still working, and I do have a camp stove. SDXB, when told this story, thought it sounded more like a problem with the stove than with the gas delivery and thought I shouldn’t try to use the stove at all. But my propane grill doesn’t have a side burner (the one that came with the last grill I had never worked very well, so I decided I’d rather have a shelf than one of those things on the present model). So without a functioning stove, I can’t even make a cup of coffee without heating the water in the microwave.

The aging microwave…

The afternoon will be occupied with the volunteer work I agreed to do down at the Church. Can’t get out of that, because I had to abdicate last week while trying to deal with Cassie’s illness. Fortunately, it’s so quiet there I can bring my computer and do editorial work…which I’ll have to do because today’s incoming consists 8,000 words of arcana due to the publisher on Friday.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to carry a bottle of dog pee to the Second-Opinion vet, to ascertain whether Cassie has a UTI. On Wednesdays, 2nd-O Vet closes his clinic until 4 p.m., then is open from 4 to 8 p.m. So I’ll have to wring out the dog this morning, store the pee in the fridge, FLY back home from the church, let the dogs out, haul the dogs back in, grab the bottle of pee, and drive across the city to the veterinary office. Yes. Through the rush-hour traffic. Over roads that were flooded yesterday.

Not gone yet…

 

 

What’s Sauce for the Goose…

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Okay, so the day before yesterday we whinged at great length about how things are tough all over for women. We listed 40 onerous and marginally paranoid self-protective habits that most women indulge. We failed to mention the First Principle of driving a car, it should be noted: Always lock your car doors. So really, we have 41 onerous and marginally paranoid strategies every woman should follow. Right?

Poor poor pitiful us...

But: the truth is, it’s not just women who do and probably should do these kinds of things. Yes, there are a lot of predators out there…and they don’t just predate on women. And while it’s true that a panhandler — for example — is more likely to hit up a woman (because she’s more vulnerable to the overlay of fear presented by a demand for money in the middle of a parking lot), they also hustle men. Muggers stick up men for their wallets as merrily as they rip a purse off a woman’s shoulder. Let’s consider the strategies men probably do — or should do — even if they don’t admit to it:

• Hold my keys as a potential weapon.

Yep. Absolutely. Especially in a dark parking lot or parking garage. Men & women.

• Look in the back seat of the car before getting in.

Good idea for male or female.

• Carry a cell phone.

In the absence of pay phones, you’d be crazy not to. Is there anyone anymore, male or female, who doesn’t at least have a cheap clamshell at hand in the car, when hiking, and otherwise out and about?

• Don’t go jogging at night.

Probably n/a for men.

• Lock all the windows when I sleep, even on hot summer nights.

Unless you relish the prospect of being surprised by a home invader, obviously you should keep your windows locked when you’re asleep. Men & women.

• Be careful not to drink too much.

Goes without saying, whether you’re male or female. Consider the effect a reputation for exuberant drinking is having on our present Supreme Court nominee’s career — decades after the fact.  There’s more than one way to suffer harm from excessive drinking.

• Don’t put my drink down and come back to it; make sure I see it being poured.

Well…possibly not as important for a man than for a woman. Men have, however, been known to be robbed or otherwise victimized after a Mickey Finn was administered.

• Own a big dog.

Male or female: own a big dog if you really want a big dog (because you like a big dog, not because you think it’s going to protect you), and own one only if you already know how to handle a large, high-drive animal or are willing to spend the time and effort to learn how. So: Conditional no, male or female.

• Carry Mace or pepper spray.

Depends on where the man goes habitually. Neither male nor female should leave a can of this stuff laying in a car: the weather outside doesn’t have to be all that warm for the temperature inside the vehicle to get high enough to cause a pressurized can to discharge.

• Have an unlisted phone number.

See above, cell phone: You’re crazy if you don’t. The constant nuisance robo-calls are enough, without having people be able to look you up and target you personally for pestering. Unisex.

• Have a man’s voice on my answering machine.

No problem with this one. Women only.

• Park in well-lit areas.

You need to be told this? Here, too: males do not enjoy having their cars broken into and their stuff stolen, any more than females do. And men are as vulnerable to lurking muggers as are women.

• Don’t use parking garages.

This one strikes me as a little extreme for either men or women. In some city downtowns, hospitals, and municipal complexes, you really have no other choice. And I fail to see how a parking garage is any more unsafe than a parking lot. See above: “hold keys as potential weapon.” And remember most modern key fobs have a panic button with which you can set your car’s horn to honking frantically.

• Don’t get on elevators with only one man, or with a group of men.

Definitely n/a for a man. Probably a little much for a woman, too, depending on the time of day and the number of people in the lobby or corridors.

• Vary my route home from work.

Probably a good idea for anyone. Who needs onlookers watching where you go at what time of day?

• Watch what I wear.

Since few men’s clothes are sexually suggestive, I’d give this one an n/a for men.

• Don’t use highway rest areas.

If you really think the risk is that high, then probably you should avoid these wide spots in the road regardless of your gender. But by and large, reference above, “hold keys as a potential weapon” and below, “own a firearm.” Men at least have the advantage that they don’t need a room with a door on it to take a pee.

• Use a home alarm system.

Again: burglars don’t care whether you’re male or female. The home alarm system is supposed to deter thieves while you’re out. You don’t need to pony up an expensive monthly charge to alarm your doors and windows so as to alert you if a prowler tries to enter while you’re home: all you need is a fistful of little battery-operated screamer alarms. This one: applicable (or not) to both men and women, depending on whether you feel inclined to pay for it.

• Don’t wear headphones when jogging.

Duh! Applies to men as well as women. Heavens, but people are stupid.

• Avoid forests or wooded areas, even in the daytime.

CassieInTheParkThis is probably more apposite for women than for men. I certainly have been pursued and have had to hide to escape a jerk while hiking in the local mountain preserves. It’s unlikely that would happen to a guy. Again, see below: own a firearm.

• Don’t take a first-floor apartment.

Why on earth would you want to do that? Unless you had a disability that precludes climbing steps, that is. The noise factor in a ground-floor apartment defies belief. Never take a first-floor apartment unless it’s in a single-story building. Applicability: Male & female.

• Go out in groups.

No doubt applies more for women than for men. But…why go anywhere that’s unsafe for a single person to navigate? Don’t go to places where you have to go in a group to be safe.

• Own a firearm.

Unfortunately, yes: male or female. However, this one comes with a caveat: own a firearm and get formal safety training AND go to the range regularly to practice. If you can’t be bothered with learning how to use it and keeping up a minimal level of skill, keep a baseball bat in the bedroom instead. The risk to yourself would be lower.

• Meet men on first dates in public places.

Well. Not being a gay male, I would hesitate to opine.But dollars to donuts it applies to men who meet men as well as it applies to women who meet men.

• Make sure to have a car or cab fare.

Reference above: Duh! Unisexually applicable.

• Don’t make eye contact with men on the street.

Just act like a normal human being. Within different cultures and within a given culture’s different social classes, males have elaborate customs for behavior on first encounter with a strange male. This one probably applies to males as to females, with the caveat that you’d best know what you’re doing.

• Make assertive eye contact with men on the street.

As a female in America, I wouldn’t do that on a bet. As a male? Reference above: act normal.

• Watch your rear-view mirror as you’re driving home.

It never hurts to be aware of your surroundings, male or female.

• Never, ever leave your garage door hanging open.

Reference above: Duh! This is akin to leaving your car unlocked after parking on a public street. Just put out a sign: Burglars welcome here!

• Never walk across a parking lot habituated by panhandlers and potential purse-snatchers.

Mostly women. While it’s a nuisance for a man to be pestered by a panhandler, it’s less threatening, I believe, for a male than for a female. Also, in my experience bums are more likely to approach women than men.

• Do not carry a purse.

{chortle!} Why would you lug a purse around if you didn’t have to? Applicable only to women, and maybe a few guys who have a screw loose.

• Install motion-sensitive lights along all four exterior walls of your house,

Wise idea for anyone.

• Place battery-operated “screamer’ alarms on all sliding doors and windows, and on the sliding screens for Arcadia doors

Ditto. An inexpensive and effective alternative to nuisancey whole-house burglar alarm systems. Men & women.

• Equip a room in your home with a solid-core door and a hardened dead bolt.

This is good to have, not as a “safe room” should you fear a home invasion, but as a way to slow down and maybe deter a burglar to keep him from going after your computer equipment and financial paperwork. I keep everything I really don’t want stolen behind such a door, secured with a dead bolt that will break your drill if you try to drill it open. Men as well as women.

• Have a phone in every room, including the bathrooms, not only for your convenience but so you can grab a phone quickly to call 911.

Seems pretty obvious. If you’ve “cut the cord,” all you need is a cheap clamshell in each room, kept charged. Any cell phone will reach 911, whether or not it’s connected to a paid network. Men & women.

• Equip every exterior hinged door with a heavy-duty security screen, and fit each one with a hardened deadbolt.

I resisted this for the longest time, feeling strongly that the burglars are the ones who belong in jail, not me. But after the Great Garage Invasion, when a police SWAT team had to remove me from my home behind bullet-proof shields, I changed my mind. And in fact, the peace of mind that these things afford — assuming you remember to lock them — is worth it. When the weather’s nice, it’s lovely to be able to leave the doors open all day and all night without any risk of some uninvited guest wandering in.

• When driving at night or through a sketchy district, if you see a red light ahead, slow down to give it a chance to turn green so you don’t have to stop your vehicle.

Common sense. Men & women.

• Avoid driving through high-crime neighborhoods and areas known to be infested with drug gangs.

I imagine men are probably less nervous about this than women…but unwisely so. Anyone can be hit by a stray bullet, and anyone can be pounced by a carjacker. Men & women.

• Drive a substantial distance to avoid having to shop in grocery stores whose parking lots are unsafe.

Well…define “unsafe.” What’s unsafe for a woman may be less so for a man. Reference above, “Never walk across a parking lot habituated by panhandlers and potential purse-snatchers.” If it’s in a a heavily gang-infested locale, then I suppose a man could be even more at risk than a woman, from territorial gang-bangers. Possibly more applicable to women than men, but men & women depending on circumstances.

• If you have a carport or garage with an entry to the attic in its ceiling, padlock the thing.

Many people are unaware that this is a potential entry into a home. If you’re a burglar and you can enter an attic from a carport, all you have to do is walk across the beams to reach the living space, punch a hole in the ceiling, and hop down into the house. Men & women.

• Always lock your car doors.

Reference above: Duh! Men & women.

So…how does that stack up? How much more scared are women supposed to be than men are supposed to be?

We have the following results:

Applies to:

Men only: 0
Women only: 4
Men & women: 28
Men mostly: 1
Women mostly: 8

Surprise! 68% of these precepts apply to everyone of any gender. Only about three in ten apply to women only.

So: are women unsafe in Today’s Modern Society? Damn straight. But men aren’t doing a whole lot better.

 

 

 

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!