Coffee heat rising

Angst

Lost in Space

by

TUESDAY:

Total disconnect from the Internet is extremely weird. Truly: a bizarre experience.

I’ve come unstuck from life.

It occurred to me, as I stumbled back into the house after getting home from the Mayo, that it has been years – yea, verily, many years – since I arrived in the Connected Universe. My home (and, by extension, my business) has not been offline in at least two decades. Maybe three. And not being able to get online? Feels like half my life has come to a dead stop. Which, I suppose, it has.

But…this is life???

As I was trudging home from the Mayo through yesterday’s gawdawful rush-hour traffic, the mind wandered.

I need to look up CT scans. The doc’s nurse-practitioner had ordered a CT scan, in hopes of confirming or deconfirming her theory that what ails me is not allergies but a full-blown sinus infection.

Sinus infection. None of the quacks nor the dentist have suggested that one. I need to look up “sinus inf….” Uhm…well…no.

Gotta call my son and ask h… Well. no.

I wonder if the phone in the back bedroom is actually connected to the damn Internet, or if by chance it’s plugged into a real, actual land line? …Well. no.

Crap! If I slip and fall or…or…or if anything happens to me, I will have NO WAY to call for help. Retrieve the emergency inscrutable cell phone from the car; place in jeans pocket.

Has that bastard Moore won in Alabama? Did a miracle happen and drive the state’s wacksh!t bigots to vote him down? No way to know until I get to the Little Guy’s place tomorrow…and that will have to wait until after I schlep the puppy to the vet and bring her back home.

WAHHH! How can I live without watching the news?

Beats me.

On the other hand, if I’m not wasting time watching news stories about which no one can do much…if I’m not wasting time on Facebook…if I’m not wasting time on Nextdoor…if I’m not wasting time playing online games…then there will be little else to do but write the current flibbet of fiction. Under its working title of “Ella’s Backstory,” the thing has proceeded to some 10,224 words. Not bad for a rough draft of nothing much, compiled between other time-wasting activities.

If I wasted my time only on Ella’s Backstory, how much could I get done before Cox restores me to my former ersatz reality?

A lot, I’ll bet.

How much could we Americans, as a people, get done if we did not pass our time in ersatz reality?

WEDNESDAY:

They haven’t laid the blacktop in the alley yet. Possibly if they delay a day or two, the Cox guy, who is supposed to show up this afternoon, will get the lines for the wireless connection relaid.

Possibly not, too: the backhoe operator knocked over the telecomm company’s cable device in the alley, so that presumably will have to be replaced. On what time schedule is anyone’s guess.

Also anyone’s guess: who’s going to pay for this?

Cox will try its best to sock it to me: that’s their standard operating practice. If they make me pay to reconnect a line that THEY fucked up by not installing it properly, I am switching the land lines over to VoIP and buying an annoying cell phone. I’ve probably put off being leashed to a cell as long as I can – these days when you tell people you don’t have a cell phone, they give you a blank look. It’s so unthinkable, they don’t even understand what you’re saying.

Problem is, I can’t afford another monthly bill. Especially not one that’s likely to run around $130. I’m already almost out of money, with nine months to go before the next drawdown. My house is freezing, because the only way I can pay the outrageous air conditioning bills in the summer is to leave the heat off in the winter. There really aren’t a lot of other ways to economize, at this point. I do not travel, I do not go to movies, I do not go to sporting events, I rarely buy clothes, I buy makeup in the drugstore, I do not get my hair done at a salon, and I’ve quit buying food at Costco. There really are no other ways to cut corners, other than to get rid of the dogs.

That would save about $50 a month. Plus the usual Big Hits from the dogs. This morning, for example, I have to schlep Ruby to the vet: now she has a rotten tooth and is getting an abscess. Pulling Cassie’s abscessed tooth cost over $900. Now we get a replay of that disaster!**

And the City has put me out of business. With my computers offline, I’m screwed: all my business is done online. I have no idea whether my clients are trying to get in touch with me, and will not know until I can get to a coffee house with connectivity. I can’t pay my bills. I can’t retrieve clients’ payments from PayPal.

I’ll have to drop by the Little Guy’s place on GangBanger Way, on the way home from the vet. What I’m supposed to do with Ruby whilst answering email in the parking-lot café outside the Little Guy’s escapes me.

Fortunately, it’s wintertime. I can leave her in the car for awhile. But not for very long. Plus I have to be back here by 1 p.m. It’s an hour’s drive between my house and the vet (everything is an hour’s drive in Phoenix’s nightmare traffic). If I get out of there by 10:15 (this assumes he sees me on time and doesn’t consume more than a half-hour of my time), it will be 11:15 by the time I get to the coffee house. That will leave maybe an hour and a half to catch up with the email, cope with whatever headaches arise there, post these blog maunderings, and read the news.

But not so much, really: Cassie rolled out of the sack at 5 this morning with diarrhea. I can’t leave her outside – it’s cold and she’s not used to that, and besides the racket from all that heavy equipment will terrorize her. If I leave her indoors for more than an hour or so, I’ll have an unholy mess to come home to. Scrubbing up doggy diarrhea off the floors is really not what I want to do with an already unhappy day.

If I race home, drop off Ruby, let Cassie out, and then race back up to the coffee house to attend to business, I may not get back here in time to contend with the Cox guy, who is supposed to show up between 1 and 3.

Shee-UT!

** The good news (for a change) is that the bump on Ruby’s schnozz is NOT an abscess, even though her left carnassial fang is encased in tartar. She needs her teeth cleaned, which ain’t cheap. But at least it won’t set me back another $900.

Gonna Be Incommunicado for Awhile

by

You’ll recall that the City is supposed to pave our alleys — or actually, just blacktop the dirt by way of holding down the dust.

So their contractor showed up in our part of the ’hood this morning — it’s quite a project, which requires them to blade up the alley’s surface. In doing so, they ripped out the cable connection that runs between the alley cable box thing & my house. When I mentioned it to a foreman, he said the City had given ALL the communication companies a lot of advance warning and told them to get the so-called “temporary” cables installed correctly — that means BURIED, not laid under a shallow layer of dirt and gravel.

Of late when these outfits have come to people’s homes to install or upgrade cable, they’ve just tossed the cable across the alley in what is called a “temporary” installation — allowing them to get out of doing the job right. When the City informed Cox that the lines now needed to be buried correctly for all their customers, the answer was that they’d just wait and see who called to complain! He said he’d already told three other disconnected customers this. A Cox guy is supposed to come to my house tomorrow but I don’t expect he’ll do much because the blacktopping project will presumably take at least a couple more days. So I am without a phone — on Soc Security you can’t afford a cell phone — and I expect Cox will try to soak me for re-installing the cable that they failed to install right in the first place.

At any rate, it will require Cox to DIG UP the brand-new blacktop to reinstall the damn cable correctly. For customer after customer after customer. So presumably this is going to take several days. Or more.

This post is being written in a Mayo Clinic waiting room and is probably the last time I’ll have access to the Internet without betaking myself to a coffee shop.

And so, away…probably for quite some time.

Duck & Cover?

by

So the Koreans have the bomb. And they hope to drop it on D.C. Interesting.

We have sick men in charge of two nuclear powers: Korea and the U.S. What does that mean for you ’n’ me?

Not very much, probably, other than that we’d better stock in several Costco-size rolls of heavy-duty tinfoil, the better to line our cowboy hats.

As a practical matter, even if a Korean missile does manage to get through America’s defense system — which is far from infallible — it would not wipe out all life in the city it struck. Go on over to Nukemap, enter your city and, under “yield,” select the most recent year for a bomb tested by North Korea. While a hit on an American city would not be good for its residents, nevertheless most American cities would not be wiped from the map. Far from it. Because of the vast sprawl characteristic of US cities, large parts of any metropolitan area would remain standing and inhabitable, particularly if residents had already taken some precautions or knew what to do in the event of a strike.

In Phoenix, for example, if a bomb the size of those available to North Korea hit at Central Avenue and Van Buren (conventionally regarded as the city’s central point, even though demographically it is not), the fireball would level most but not all of downtown. It would not extend as far north as Fillmore or as far south as Washington (these are within walking distance of each other). To the west, it would not quite reach First Avenue, but it would probably reach east to Second Street.

The radiation radius — the area in which you would receive a dose of radiation strong enough to kill you if you did not get medical treatment fairly soon — would extend north to the I-10 freeway and south to Lincoln: again: these borders are within walking distance of each other and certainly within walking distance of the theoretical detonation site.

The thermal radius — in which unprotected people would sustain third-degree burns — would go north to McDowell, south almost to Buckeye, not quite to 15th Avenue on the west, and over to 12th Street on the east.

The air blast radius — where buildings would collapse from the force of the blast — is .06 mile (1.53 km.)

This is not a very large area. Damage to the city’s small downtown would be catastrophic. Obviously, damage to closer-in central areas beyond the downtown district would be substantial. However, throughout most of the Valley, structures would remain standing. People who were indoors would be stunned, possibly injured by stuff flying around and windows breaking, but they would not be killed outright. Nor would they be in much danger of dying soon. People in the suburbs — the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area is larger than Los Angeles — could be unharmed. Even people within the city itself, which extends a VERY long way in all directions from Central and Van Buren, would be able to seek shelter and could, if adequately supplied, survive until help arrived from the outside.

This of course presumes a) that the Koreans would aim for the heart of the city and b) that their aim was accurate. Neither of those is reasonable. More likely they’d try to hit Luke Air Force Base, which is on the far west side of the Valley, almost to the mountain range bordering the western edge of the developed area. This would disable any jet fighters that were still on the ground (which is to say, all it would do is blow up the runway) and kill a lot of suburbanites. But otherwise, it would come nowhere near exterminating the population of Maricopa County. Or taking out the US Air Force.

The chance that they would hit their bull’s-eye is probably also slim. So for an individual who happened to be in the Valley when the Koreans decided to blow us up, what it means is…it depends. One’s survival would (as always, day in and day out…) depend on the luck of the draw.

But the larger portion of the population would survive, and a substantial number of those survivors would be relatively unscathed. So, we’re left with the question of how does one think about this?

What does one consider, as a practical matter and without lining one’s cowboy hat with tinfoil (which would be very hot in the summer), in terms of preparation? What should one have around the house to tide one over the initial period of chaos and danger?

First, if you live in a large city, you would have to assume that you would need to shelter in place for a long time. Getting out of the city could be impossible, with highways damaged and aggressive, panicked residents swarming what few roads remained open. Trying to drive out could be more dangerous than remaining in your home, school, or office building.

Thus it might be good to have some sheets of plywood or other product that could be used to cover broken windows — you can bet the glass would blow out if you were anywhere near the detonation. Duct tape to seal around the plywood would be useful, too.

Then you will have to figure out how to stay alive for a week or more, in the absence of electricity, natural gas, and police.

This will require the obvious prepper gear:

• Carboys of water (very cheap to acquire: just remember to pour your water onto your garden every week or so and replace it with clean tap water)
• Several weeks’ worth of food that can be preserved without refrigeration (dried or canned)
• An ample supply of food for your animals
• Propane fuel and devices that operate on it.
• A battery-operated radio and stash of batteries to keep it running
• A substantial first-aid kit
• Whatever medications you take
• A camp lantern and batteries or propane to operate it
• A small propane-operated camp stove (you may not be able to go outdoors to cook on a propane grill; a one-burner stove can be used safely for a limited period indoors, though it’s not something you’d want running for any length of time)
• Cash money
• Items that can be bartered, such as cigarettes, alcohol, grass, baby food, diapers, feminine supplies
• A weapon and stash of ammunition
• Extra gasoline for your vehicle

Leaving the city would be highly problematic. First, there’s the question of whether your vehicle would run at all. Some people imagine that all recent models of cars and trucks will be rendered nonfunctional by the EMP (a nuclear bomb releases an “electro-magnetic pulse” that can disable electronic gear and shut down an electric grid system). This, it develops, ain’t necessarily so. Your car might display some nuisance malfunctions but probably would run. The bigger problems would be getting out on gridlocked urban freeways and surface roads, and obtaining enough gasoline to drive to safety a long distance from a metropolitan area.

And, for that matter, finding safety. I’m old enough to remember those air raid sirens and bomb drills in San Francisco — we had a siren on top of our building, which went off every Saturday at noon. 😀 That’ll lift you out of your chair!

Back in the day, the city of Whittier, which stood astride what was then the main highway out of Southern California, announced that it would not allow itself to be overrun by hordes of unwashed Los Angelenos. To prevent that, they would block the road and man it with armed men. Anyone trying to get past the roadblocks would be shot and killed. And they weren’t kidding.

People do not act nobly during a disaster. You may be safer to remain in place.

But if you must take to the road, you will have to assume that you’re not going to be bedding down in some resort thrown open by the friendly proprietors. This means you will need a full set of camping gear, and it will need to be stored in such a way as to be ready to go on short notice. That is, you can’t be running around the house, the garage, and the attic to assemble your “go” package. So, you will need all of the above plus your “go” box of important papers, such as your birth certificate, passport, insurance policies, evidence of humans’ and pets’ immunizations, car registration, and the like. And cash.

I figure you’ll need, at a minimum, the following:

• Hard-copy maps of your area, your state, and surrounding states (assume your cell phone will not work)
• Prevailing winds map (download and print that now, not later)
• Compass
• Cell phone charger that operates off your car battery, just in case you find a place where cell service is intact
• First aid kit (make your own; most of the ones you buy are inadequate; remember to include a supply of your prescriptions)
• Fire starter, butane
• Matches
• Camp light
• Flashlight (one of those small lights you wear on your head can be handy)
• Light sticks
• Battery-operated radio
• Extra batteries for lights and radio
• Pocket knife (one per adult or near-adult would be ideal)
• Multi-tool
• Hunting knife
• Camp shovel
• Duct tape
• Rope
• String
• Zip ties
• Scissors
• Wrench/pliers
• Screwdriver
• Carabiners
• Bungee cords
• Water filter
• Backup water treatment (i.e., iodine pills or Clorox)
• Camp stove
• Camp cookset (large lightweight aluminum stewpot, at least one nonstick skillet, probably a few other small pots & pans)
• Camping dishes, eating utensils, and Sierra cups for each person
• Pet dishes and water bowls
• Dish detergent (can be used as shampoo)
• Scrub brush
• Bag(s) for waste
• Box of Ziplock bags
• Clothing for each person, including T-shirt, underwear, quick-dry pants or shorts, long-sleeved shirt, rain jacket or poncho, hat, bandanna, socks(!), jacket & warm pants,
• Hiking boots
• Hiking sandals
• Toilet paper
• Hand sanitizer wipes
• Bug repellent
• Toothbrush
• Toiletry kit with small metal mirror
• Soap
• Towels (one per person, plus one for the camp “kitchen”)
• Shampoo if you’re too picky to use dish detergent on your hair
• For dogs: leashes; collars with tags
• Camp food (dry packaged meals, canned goods)
• Can opener
• Churchkey
• Pet food
• Tent (if you’re not sleeping in your vehicle), ground cloth, stakes
• Sleeping bag
• Camper’s hammock
• Dog leashes and collars with ID
• Day pack
• Backpack
• Gun and ammunition

Commercially available first-aid kits are questionable. Better than nothing, but not good enough (look up the customer reviews on Amazon). You probably are better off to get a large workman’s lunch box or small briefcase and assemble your own. At a bare minimum, you’ll need this stuff:

• Antiseptic
• Antibiotic ointment
• Antiseptic cleanser such as Hibiclens
• Bug bite stuff (cortisone or, more effective, Itch-X gel)
• Rash cream
• Contact lens supplies
• Spare pair of glasses
• Spare pairs of contact lenses
• Painkiller
• Allergy pills
• Gauze
• Sterile dressings
• Bandage tape
• Bandaids
• Elastic tape (the self-sticking type is best)
• Splint
• Tweezers
• Scissors
• Thermometer
• Face mask
• Thermal blanket or poncho
• Body warmer
• Light sticks
• Disposable gloves
• Waste bags
• Towelettes
• Saline solution for contact lenses, which can be used to wash out eyes
• Your prescriptions
• Any drugs your pets might need

See what I mean about not wanting to rustle up this stuff at the last minute? Gather the loot and keep it in a plastic bin, a backpack, or suitcase, so that you can grab it, throw it in the car, and get out fast.

Assuming the getting’s good…

 

Car Keys in the Brave New World

by

So SDXB’s New Girlfriend (affectionately known as NG)  has a place in beautiful Sun City and a place in Boulder. This summer she sold the big house in Boulder, built by her late husband and herself, to move into a smaller place closer to her son and family. In the process, she experienced some heart palpitations

Sensibly, she goes to a doc to have this checked out. He tells her she has atrial fibrillation, a potentially fatal ailment. So she’s now becalmed in Colorado, jumping through medical hoops.

Fast-forward a few weeks: Her son and DiL have to make a sojourn to Phoenix for some damnfool reason. They wish to borrow her car so they don’t have to rent. But…but…but she can’t remember where she put the keys to the damn car.

She can’t, can’t CAN’T remember where she put them.

So SDXB goes over to the Sun City manse and searches the joint from stem to stern. He even checks every door lock in the house to see if maybe she carelessly left her keys in the door. He performs this exploration not once, not twice, but three times. He can NOT find the keys.

He calls Larry Miller Toyota to find out if he can get a new key made.

In order to make a new Annoying Smart Key, NG herself has to show up there, with the title of the car in hand to prove she actually owns it (!!!!!!!) and with a picture ID to prove she’s who she says she is. And the car has to be at the Toyota dealership. This, as you correctly surmise, entails having to tow the damn car to the dealership!!!! The cost is many, many hundreds of dollah.

I say to SDXB…wait. Waitaminit here! Anderson Lock & Key, the pre-eminent locksmith in the Valley, told me they could copy the key to the hated Venza (the Bell Road crooks didn’t bother to give me two keys…). It would be expensive, but nothing like what Larry Miller proposes to charge.

We call Anderson.

Yes. Sure. They can make a new key. But yes, it requires the locksmith and his computer to convene at the same place where the becalmed car resides. However, they will send the guy out to Sun City, laptop in hand, to make a new key.

For a fuckin’ car key…

Stop the World!

by

I wanna get off….

My God. It’s 9 in the morning and I’ve already coped with three nightmares.

Nightmare the First:

Anyone who believes that computers, at the base level, improve our lives needs to stop inhaling whatever they’re smoking!

This nightmare started last night.

At some point, I realize a bunch of incoming email is…well…NOT incoming. Eventually I figure out it’s stuff addressed to my corporate gmail account.

Understand: I don’t use gmail. Don’t use it because I hate the interface; don’t use it because I hate being spied on by a monopolistic corporation. To the extent that I MUST have a gmail account, I forward that account’s incoming to MacMail. So I don’t even remember the damn passwords; finding them involves a great deal of searching through a secret, coded document and finally changing the passwords.

After some hassle, I do get in and search all around trying to figure out the trouble. Not even sure the test emails are hitting gmail at all. Web Guru and I study it and bang away at it and crash away at it and still can’t find the problem. Finally — after two hours of fighting with the damn thing, and with damn MacMail, which has decided to get stubborn, I finally discover the problem: Google has unilaterally decided that anything coming from mac.com or me.com must be spam! It has derailed all my test emails and quite a few other things.

I mark these messages “Not Spam.”

Doesn’t work.

Confer with guru. We’re both bamboozled.

I try again to mark the messages “Not Spam.”

AT LAST this does the trick.

Ducky. I’ve now wasted my entire evening wrestling with fucking Gmail. It’s 10 p.m. I have to get up and take the dog to the vet the next morning.

However, as one might have guessed…when thou hast done, thou hast not done…

This morning I need to print out an Excel file. To do that, I have to email it to myself (I could post it to Dropbox but that would make sense: let’s stay in Never-Neverland). The reason I have to do that is that fucking Apple has decided I can’t print from my laptop, and I’m working in the file on the laptop. So I have to send the file to myself, then get into it on the iMac (the only computer still speaking to the printer), open it, and print the germane section.

But…I can’t get into my MacMail on the iMac. Floating in the upper right-hand corner is a demand from Google that I enter a password!

Huh? For WHAT?

I start on this at 6:30. At 7:00 I call Apple help. The help rep and I labor with it for another 40 minutes (bear in mind that I needed to take the dog to the vet at 7:30).

Finally we figure out that somehow Google is hanging my MacMail and will not unhang it until I enter a password that I haven’t used in a good two years.

We sift through the NINETEEN SINGLE-SPACED PAGES of fucking coded passwords stored on my computer for this purpose.

Finally we find one that works.

You understand: to recover a password now, you have to tell fucking Google what your last functional password was. But…uhmmmmm…if you’ve lost your password, how the HELL would you know what it was????????

Before we ask to change the pw, though, I decide to make a guess that this thing actually is the current working PW, so we back out of the “lost my password” hoop-jump and try signing in with it…and it works.

As it develops, to make Google unhang MacMail, I have to sign into fucking Gmail and then close out of it.

Makes sense, eh?

Nightmare the Second

I’m now running way late to schlep the dog for this morning’s surgery. The dog is upset, because I’ve been TEARING MY HAIR for the past hour. I grab her, fling the unhappy beast into the car, and set out.

Fortunately, the few minutes spent on hold waiting for the Apple rep gave me time to wash my face, brush my teeth, and throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

We fly out the driveway and….

…come to a stop.

The vet’s office is about a 30-minute drive to the east of the ‘hood, through brain-banging traffic. To make things difficult, during rush hour we cannot turn east out of the ‘hood: the only viable main drag has a reverse lane that prohibits left turns between 7 and 9 a.m.

Thus to make a southbound drive I have to go north to Gangbanger’s Way, go east as far at that road goes, then turn south on the secondary arterial that goes, oh, maybe halfway downtown. Because this road doesn’t go all the way through, I have to turn east on the last major arterial that does go through to points east of the fucking Squaw Peak Freeway, whose construction blocked most of the navigable east-west drags north of McDowell.

At Main Drag NSE, traffic on Gangbanger comes to a DEAD STOP. I don’t know what’s going on up there, but no one can get through.

I make an illegal right turn across the parking lot of an abandoned gas station, awakening a few camped bums who were hoping to sleep in, and then dart south on Main Drag NSE and east again on Feeder Street East/West, which proceeds to Richistan Avenue. There, I plan to turn north and then go east again on Doesn’t-Live-Here-Anymore Lane, which connects with the east-west road that (with any luck) will take me to Navigable Arterial EW.

Richistan Ave., not surprisingly, is jammed with people trying to get around whatever is going on up on Gangbanger way. I cannot turn north. I go south to my friend’s patio-home development, which I know has a generously sized entry with no gate. Swerve into a U-turn and peel north.

Ah, the joys of a six-banger…

Now I reach Doesn’t-Live-Here-Anymore and proceed fairly calmly toward East Major Arterial, where I start the long, LONG drive to 40th Street.

To get there, I have to drive to 36th, then proceed south through Upper Richistan (makes our Richistan look like a barrio), hang a left, proceed past THE most expensive private school in Arizona (dodging cops and cameras), then turn south on 40th and keep on driving, driving, driving.

The traffic was just horrific. On Secondary Arterial the nitwit in front of me decides to turn left and so, one would think sensibly enough, pulls into the two-way left-turn lane. I’m right on her tail, as everyone else is on everyone else’s tail. She gets halfway into the left-turn lane and then fuckin’ STOPS! With her rear end out in the oncoming traffic. I jam on the brakes and yank the steering wheel to the right and JUST BARELY miss the bitch, dodging back to the left to JUST BARELY miss the poor fuck in the traffic lane to the right of us. I mean, we’re talkin’ inches. Both ways.

Thank god for fancy skid-resistant brakes and reflexes that haven’t, after all, slowed down as much as one would expect in a 72-year-old broad. Probably the adrenaline rage hypes the reflexes a bit.

Ahead, the red light turns green.

And the line of traffic sits there. And sits there. And sits there. And sits there.

Finally the jerk at the head of the line notices the green light, gets off the phone, and goes forward. One car — his — gets through the light.

So we drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and FINALLY we get to the vet’s office.

He has about a half-dozen parking spaces, all of them full. I need to go to the end of a line that runs up the middle of the little lot and kype the space just being vacated by an exiting customer.

But some IDIOT has parked her car on the far end of the middle row: outside the parking spaces. She has blocked access to the spaces on the other side of the middle row.

Son OF a bitch!!!!

I now have to back and fill to get out of the parking lot, a seemingly impossible challenge. But in the process, I realize there’s a space directly behind me along the opposite wall, and if I just glide straight back, I can grab that space and be pointed out.

This apparently, is reserved for the vet. I do not notice the orange cones blocking ingress. So just roll over them.

About then the vet drives up. He now has to find a space to park.

I slither into the veterinary’s front door, evading eye contact. Drop off the dog. And flee.

Nightmare the Third

On the way home, it crosses my mind that I do not recall having moved the exterior doorkey holder out of its (ingenious) hiding place during yesterday’s garden-furniture refurbishing frolic.

Holy sh!t. This would imply that it wasn’t in its ingenious hiding place yesterday.

I worry all the way home. Fortunately the west- and east-bound traffic isn’t so gawdawful, plus by 8:30 the rush hour is subsiding anyway.

Once home, I shoof around and yeah…do find the thing, where it’s fallen unnoticed on the ground.

This relieves me from having to spend several hundred dollah changing all the locks in the house.

Nightmare the Fourth (and counting…)

Pending. Whenever I get up from this, I have to answer a client’s convoluted email about a transaction that happened almost a year ago and about which I recall almost nothing, then clean out the coded password log (that will take half the day!), then download data to create new spreadsheets that yesterday I proposed to build for WonderAccountant, by which time I will have forgotten to call the vet to check on the dog. Then drive to the vet and pick up the dog (assuming the aged dog survives this procedure)…through afternoon rush-hour traffic.

Do you ever get over…

by

…childhood abuse?

And if you’re not fully human, do you ever learn to pass?

Ah well. I guess if you haven’t learned to cope by the time you’re 72, you’re not going to.

DepositPhoto; Rainy Weather © dnaumoid