Coffee heat rising

Angst

The Great Hair Conditioner Fiasco

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The Three Stooges would’ve felt right to home here at the Funny Farm… This place features an ongoing three-ring circus.

Okay, backstory: When the weather’s warm so I can swim every day, I like to shower in the backyard hose. To that end, I keep bottles of shampoo and conditioner on the back porch. These have to be in containers with screw-on caps instead of the pump type, because in the heat, the liquids expand and work their way up the pump and squirt all over the table or pavement.

Since I buy these products in lifetime supplies from Costco, the stuff has to be transferred from the Costco-sized pump bottle to a smaller, more manageable container. Meanwhile, a bottle of conditioner has been sitting in the closet so long it seemed to have congealed: it had become so thick it wouldn’t come up out of the bottle’s pump. I added some water to it, but it’s so thick I can’t make it blend by shaking the bottle vigorously.

So. Now I have a brilliant idea.

What I should do is dump this stuff into a bowl and stir it up with my electric mixer.

🙂 Almost makes sense, doesn’t it?

Convinced, I schlep the gear into the kitchen and whip it up with the mixer. The result: it does whip up: a lot like whipped cream! With lovely soft fluffy peaks…

Oh well. A little air in the mix can’t hurt.

Now I try to insert this thick, gloppy “whipped cream” into an old conditioner bottle, using one of those flexible funnels that you can squeeze and sort of massage stuff through.

Bad idea.

Exceptionally bad idea.

The glop will not go through the funnel. Not on your life. But it will go all over the counter, all over the sink, all over the floor, and all over you!

Holy sh!t.

Ooops…

Now it dawns on me that this stuff really should not go down the kitchen drain. If ordinary cooking and meat fat will clog that drain, THIS stuff will block it like a chunk of cement.

But by the time this revelation appears, it’s toooooo late. The stuff is all over everything and slopped all around the sink and has gone down not one but both drains. And it’s not just gooey: it’s also slippery.

I carry the bowl out to the garbage can, therein to dump its contents. But my hands are covered with this gunk. To get into the alley, I have to pass through two gates, one of which is secured with a padlock. My fingers are so slippery I can’t even hold onto the key!

Finally I manage to get out there and dispose of the glop. But now we have the problem of the sinks and the drains…

Back in the house, I use up almost an entire roll of paper towels wiping the stuff out of the sinks as best as I can, and wiping it off the countertops and the floors. I carry the dirty bowl to the garage utility sink to try to wipe the remaining film of glop out of it, and so of course more of the stuff goes down that drain.

What. A. MESS!

At length (great length!), I manage to mop most of the goop off the house and off me. Result: the kitchen and the garage and my hands STINK of industrial perfume. GOD, how I hate the smell of industrial perfume. The stuff permeates every personal care product on the market, unless you’re willing to pay extra for less. And so far I haven’t found a fragrance-free hair conditioner that works on locks that cascade halfway down to your waist.

So…how much is this going to cost me in plumber’s bills???

I decided to try the baking soda/vinegar trick, though I have no reason to believe either of those substances cuts congealed hair conditioner.

In this maneuver, you pour about a half-cup of baking soda down the drain. Follow immediately with about a cup of white vinegar (any vinegar will do: the white stuff is cheapest). Let it sit while you bring a pot of water to a boil. Then pour boiling water down the drain.

Subjected all three drains to this treatment. Then filled each sink with hot tap water and ran the water through, putting the weight of many gallons into the drain. This should rinse out the baking soda (which can petrify in your drain when you pull this trick) and with any luck will push out at least some of the hair-conditioner gunk.

That exploit consumed most of yesterday afternoon. Too bad I didn’t have a video cam going: it would have made a very funny show.

Images:
Larry, Mo, and Curly: public domain
Steamy water tap: DepositPhotos, © nikkytok

i-don’t-wanna-itis…Is God Tryin’ to Tell You Something?

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I don’t wanna. That’s where we’re at here. I just effin’ don’t want to!

The Light has shined down from heaven and illuminated reality: I’m not doing all the things I should be doing BECAUSE…

Yesh, all the things I should be doing:

• Get The Complete Writer ensconced at the PoD site, generate page proofs, copyedit page proofs, update the MS, upload corrected copy, and generate a second page proof

• Ride herd on the e-book builder; if he doesn’t get his act together soon, hire someone else

• Re-enroll in Toastmaster’s and effin’ get serious about it

• Build more and better publicity on Facebook, Twaddle, and effin’ Mailchimp (how do i hate Mailchimp? let me count the ways…)

• Hustle up some speaking engagements

• Fix DropBox on the iMac (disabled by fuckin’ OS 10.11.4)

• Get to work, get to work, GET. TO. WORK!

Well, all sorts of reasons not do do these things present themselves:

• 12 weeks of debilitating respiratory infection

• Updating the Macs’ OS fucked up everything on my computers, making it a) difficult or b) impossible to perform tasks I did formerly with easy keyboard commands.

• I’m way behind in the marketing program.

• I can’t even begin to figure out how to run X, Y, or Z program.

• Maybe the GERD is back. Maybe the respiratory “infection” is the GERD.

• I’m not getting enough exercise.

• I have too much paying editorial work.

• I have to do __(fill in the blank)__ first.

• The pool needs to be cleaned.

• The shrubbery needs to be trimmed.

• The groceries need to be shopped for…

Nope. ‘Fraid not. The truth is, I’m not doing all those things for one simple reason: because I don’t want to.

And y’know what? I think that’s my body or my unconscious or God Herself tryin’ to tell me something.

If they were things that would work,
if they were things that were worth doing,
I’d have done them by now.

Not just by now, but a long time ago.

You know what I do wanna do? As you suspect, it surely is none of the above.

What I wanna do is draft the next scene in my current wildly unpublishable novel. That’s what I wanna do. I wanna write unpublishable novels.

The God’s Truth is that I do not need to write any more publishable copy. No. No, indeed.

The editing bidness brings in plenty of income. In the past year, it’s generated more than Social Security has plopped into my checking account. And Social Security plus the Required Minimum Drawdown from retirement savings is exactly enough to support me, coming out even at the end of a 12-month period.

So…why do I want to do anything else?

Why, indeed?

Probably because it’s just what I do. It’s what I’ve always done: work myself stupid, often for no very good reason.

And here’s the thing when it comes to personal finance, the putative slant of Funny about Money: FIREers: beware. 

You can achieve Financial Independence. You can Retire Early. But you may find yourself, at some level, still feeling driven to do something constructive. And because America measures “constructive” in dollars, you may define “constructive” as paying work.

What if “constructive” work is not paying work? What if it isn’t socially redeeming work, like charity or teaching or loving one’s neighbors? What if it’s not even work at all?

What I’m suggesting is that at some point in life you should do what moves you, even if what moves you is not socially redeeming, not good for the society, and absolutely absent any chance of profitability. Corollary: If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it.

If you can’t force yourself to do it, don’t do it. Find something else to do.

As of today, I’m stopping.

I need to reconsider what I’m doing with my life and do something else. If “something else” is the same as “nothing,” then it’s time to do…nothing.

Death’s Door: Still Locked…

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Not yet, you!

Welp, much as I keep pounding at Death’s Door, they still won’t let me in!

Visited the pulmonologist this morning, just dead sure that the twelve weeks of gurgling, wet, sloppy, asphyxiating goddamn cough has got to be adult-onset asthma. This suspicion was aggravated by a recent check-up at the Mayo, where a physician’s assistant opined that it could be allergy-mediated asthma.

So the doc did a breathing test at the office: not asthma. Then he sent me off for an X-ray: nothing visible inside there. But I did get to see and play with two of THE cutest little kids you ever imagined could exist, whilst sitting around the lab’s waiting room. 😀

Still coughing, but it’s slightly better than it was a few days ago. He thinks it’s probably an infection, because on one (count it, 1) day of the 12 weeks this thing has run, I spiked a 102-degree fever.

There’s still still hope for a dire outcome — the hypochondriac never gives up… It could be GERD, which can cause a cough like this when stomach acid regurgitates up into your lungs. If that’s the case, then the fever would have been incidental, presumably caused by some other ailment.

Pollen, up close

But in fact, the wind has been blowing nonstop for the past three months — yesterday was the first in weeks that the wind wasn’t whipping around. After all that phenomenal winter rain, every plant on the desert has burst into frantic and joyous pollen-spreading bloom. So…even though this thing has never evinced typical cold or flu symptoms — no sore throat, no head congestion, no headache, no collywobbles — chances are it’s just a combination of a cold plus pollen allergies.

Dang it. I can’t lose!

Death image: Statue in the Cathedral of Trier, Germany; photo  by Jbuzbee – CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4835571
Pollen: By Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility, Dartmouth College – Public Domain. Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility ([1], [2]), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14840522

Shaking the Tail: Women’s Strategies for Safety

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This morning in comes news, first from a friend and then from a news story, of not one but two terrifying incidents of harassment and bullying of women.

On Facebook, a friend reported that some guy in a pick-up went off on her while she was on the road riding her Harley. One thing you should know about my friend — she does not keep this a secret — is that she is transexual; in her previous life she was biologically a male and a biker. Yeah: that kind of biker…though she always has identified, psychologically, as a woman, she was probably not the sort of person you’d willingly meet in a dark alley. In her present incarnation, she looks like a pretty normal woman whose presence strikes no fear into your heart. She writes highly entertaining novels whose protagonist is a wild-assed woman biker.

So this guy goes berserk and starts to follow her. She does everything she can to shake him, at high speeds no doubt, but she can’t get rid of him. Beginning to panic, she heads back to her house and parks her bike in the driveway. He follows her and informs her that he’s going to come after her. As you can imagine, she’s somewhat alarmed.

Even more alarmed is the woman in a Phoenix suburb whose home was entered — more than once, apparently — by a lunatic who left a note — while she was sleeping — to tell her he wanted to have sex with her.

Most women begin to experience threats and events of this sort starting at about the age of 12 or 14. I’ve repeatedly been followed, harassed, propositioned, and threatened by strange men — after six decades, it gets old. And “old” is an operative term: even after you’re no longer a juicy, nubile young thing, the creeps still think you’re fair game for threats and harassment, especially when you’re abroad in a car or walking across a parking lot.

This is how I developed my taste for German shepherds…

Seriously and no joke: After the downtown neighbors divorced and I got custody of their dog, all the harassment, all the cat-calls, and all the aggressive passes in public suddenly went away when I had her at my side. What a guy thinks a GerShep is going to do to him while he’s sailing past at 40 miles an hour escapes me…but as a practical matter, the nasty yells and lewd hoots stopped dead when I started taking that dog out with me.

But long before I got the dog, I learned a number of strategies to cope with this kind of sh!t. Note that I have never taken a “woman’s self-defense” course, except for one short session that was inflicted on us in a high-school P.E. class. These things generally scare you more than they help you: you’re told all the horrific things that a$$hats have done to women, and then you’re instructed in techniques that have about a snowball’s chance of working effectively for most women.

The trick is to avoid situations that put you at risk. Since you can’t avoid them all — just being female puts you at risk — you must be mentally prepared and you must always have a variety of emergency plans in mind.

First off, when you’re driving around, know where the nearest police stations, emergency rooms, and fire stations are along your beaten path. Mentally map routes to these places. In our parts, police stations are secured like a castle under siege, and so it may be difficult to get a cop’s attention without getting out of a car — but if that’s the closest refuge, go there and lean on the horn. If you have a cell with you, call 911 and report where you are.

Fire stations tend to be more open, and they’re usually populated by large, fit men. And they’re the kind of men whose altruism triggers their testosterone: show up at a fire station in distress, and they’ll all leap on their white chargers.

An ER is also likely to have someone around who will notice if you park by the door and lean on your horn. Often there are police or firemen around ERs, too.

Failing one of these outposts, always keep an eye out for places that have lots of people around: a crowded parking lot, a popular store, a busy strip mall. I once escaped a nut case by swerving left across oncoming traffic into a shopping center. The crazy kept on rolling down the road, unwilling to continue harassing me in the presence of others.

When driving home, watch your rear- view mirror. If someone follows me into the neighborhood and then stays on my tail after I’ve made the first couple of the turns I have to take to reach my house, I don’t go home. Instead, I take another route back out of the ’hood. If the person stays on my tail, I head for the nearest police station or fire house.

While in public, try to look dowdy. Refrain from dressing sharply (unless you have a man with you, of course), and certainly do not wear obviously expensive clothing or carry an expensive, name-brand handbag. I no longer carry a purse at all these days: too dangerous in the grocery-store parking lots near my house. I keep a credit card and a couple of store cards in a business card case, which I can carry in a pocket.

At home: equip your doors with heavy-duty, drill-proof, bump-proof Shlage or Medeco deadbolts.

Don’t know what “bumping” is? Mwa ha ha! Check this out:

As the “burglar” type in this video remarks, a bump-resistant lock ain’t cheap. But believe me: it is so worth it. Try to drill a Schlage or a Medeco lock, and it’ll break your drill.

Obviously, putting a fancy lock on a kitchen door with a window in it is self-defeating. Install your deadbolt on solid-core exterior doors with no window(!), or — much more cost-effective and handy for letting fresh air flow through the house — install security doors and put the high-end lock on those. You’ll need a top-notch locksmith for the job, because many metal security doors are too thin to accommodate this type of lock; the locksmith will need to special-order a type of metal ring that adds space to install the deadbolt.

Do not use double-cylinder deadbolts. These can trap you or a child in the house if a fire starts — if you can’t reach the key that you’ve stashed out of the burglar’s grasp, or if the person trying to get out doesn’t know where to find it, you’re done for. Remember, the likelihood that you’ll need to get out in a hurry is at least as high and certainly more urgent than the likelihood that some guy will try to get in.

Upgrade your windows. The new double-paned windows have more than one locking system, allowing you to complicate a burglar’s life. And if any of those windows are sliders, add a third “lock” by dropping a stick in the track. You also can buy stick-on battery-operated alarms, which will squeal like an enraged cat if anyone (you included) opens the window. Again, bear in mind: You don’t care if they get in, as long as you get enough advance warning to get out a different door or window.

Make friends with a German shepherd. Get yourself a dog, preferably a large one with a protective temperament.

The dog strategy, however, is problematic. German shepherd dogs are overbred and potentially dangerous — truly, too many representatives of the breed today are batsh!t. Pit bulls — pace, dear pit-bull-loving friends — are unpredictable and also potentially dangerous. You do not want a dog that has a higher than normal propensity to turn on you. This includes a number of purebred lines. The best strategy is probably to rescue a mixed-breed dog, preferably one that does not appear to be part GerShep or part pit bull.

German shepherds and many other large, assertive breeds are high-energy, high-drive dogs that require a lot of time, training, and physical strength to help them adapt to living in your home. You must be prepared to train and exercise these dogs — and to do so you will need training yourself that goes well beyond the YouTube variety — and you must expect to spend some time every day exercising and working your dog.

A smaller dog may be better: most dogs this side of a greyhound are walking burglar alarms. They can’t “protect” you the way most people imagine a shepherd or a Doberman will do…but that’s a fantasy. No dog can or should be expected to protect you. The only critter that can protect you is you.

And you do that with common sense.

Is keeping a gun in the house a manifestation of common sense?

Only if you’re fully trained to use it, if you keep in practice, and you keep the weapon clean and lubricated. And even then, only if you really, truly, deep in your heart of hearts are prepared to use it against another human being. Police officers and members of the military are specifically trained to overcome this scruple.

Most people who are not psychopaths will hesitate to shoot another person. And just a fraction of an instant can give an aggressor the chance to shoot you, if he’s armed or if he grabs your gun and takes it from you. For that reason, I personally think that for most people it’s pointless and, if you have kids around the house, dangerous to keep a gun in your residence. Keep your wits about you, and you won’t need a gun.

Peace in the War Zone(?)

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Aw, c’mon…We live in Arizona. 80 degrees leaves a guy shivering!

So some guy was shot dead just around the corner last night — over by the freeway, but still within walking distance of the Funny Farm. That would explain the excited burst of cop sirens along about 9 p.m.

Blasts of alarm have become so commonplace I no longer pay much attention to them. If the cop helicopters take up residence directly over my block, yeah…I’ll get up and lock the doors. Otherwise…please, dudes: make my day.

Occasionally (well, we could say more like about once every three days), I reflect that it’s probably past time for me to look for housing in some quieter part of town. Or of the state. I suspect that one reason my (former) mother-in-law has lived to 103 is that she dwells in peace: Grand Junction is about as quiet and laid-back as it gets. She hasn’t been subjected to a lot of environmental stress from traffic noise, cop and ambulance sirens, endless copter fly-overs, car alarms, house alarms, barking watchdogs…or, presumably, from daily newspaper reports of mayhem.

That kind of background stress has got to take a toll.

If you’re going to live in Arizona, the answer is to move away from Phoenix. The city, except for a few enclaves and the gentrification-engineering of the downtown district, has largely deteriorated into a gigantic slum. Areas that once were modest middle-class/working-class areas are now mostly working poor or not-working-at-all. To give you an idea: teacher pay (these areas were places where public school teachers would live) is now so low here that the state cannot hire or retain teachers at all. Some districts have no senior staff; most teachers leave the trade after three or four years.

The result of right-to-work-for-nothing laws is that you end up with large segments of your society living in poverty. And poverty, alas, brings with it drugs, alcohol, psychological suffering, and crime. Hence: a neighborhood shopping center where you dare not carry your purse across the parking lot, or where the residents drive miles away from home to buy their groceries at safer venues; people getting shot dead on the street corners; and criminals moving into your neighborhood.

The other day the dogs and I were walking over in Richistan when abruptly we came face-to-face with two of the scariest dudes I’ve seen in a long time. One of them…well…you know how some men get a certain “look” about them after they’ve been in prison for awhile? They put on weight because of the bad food (which they’d probably eat on the street anyway), but they also put on muscle because they pass the time working out; they also take on a kind of self-defensive aggressive demeanor that can be distinctive. One might even say…heh!…arresting.

Well, one of them looked like that: the biggest, baddest dude in town! 🙂

The other was a smaller, fairly slender punk riding a bike that was too small for him — i.e., it no doubt had been lifted out of someone’s yard. It was 80+ degrees and he had on a sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, hiding his face. Uh huh…a man has to keep warm, eh?

They had a big old bloodhound with them. It wanted to go after the corgis, but the big bruiser kept it under control. He was polite and well-mannered — his companion was reclusive, but the tank came across like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. It was painfully obvious that they were casing the neighborhood, looking for the best houses to burgle.

There’s a Humane Society shelter just up the road. These guys go to the shelter, “adopt” a dog, and use it as a ruse: they’re “walking the dog” while they’re checking out your house to rip off. So: no question that was what was going on.

The problem with moving out of Phoenix to someplace quieter and ostensibly safer is…well, there are two problems:

a) The suburbs, home of white flight, are now ALL homeowner’s associations. Developers build their tracts as HOAs, and they stay HOAs. I do not want to live in an HOA. I have enough layers of government to deal with, thank you very much; I don’t need another bunch of busybodies bossing me around.

Nor, just between you and me and the lamp-post, do I especially want to live in a lily-white ghetto. Weirdly enough, I happen to like a little diversity in my surroundings.

b) They are halfway to California. They’re so far away from anything that, like my friend KJG, you find yourself driving until you’re blue in the face any time you want to shop or meet your friends or go to any events. I don’t want to live on the road to Mandalay, thank you.

Smaller towns here are poorly provided with infrastructure. Medical care in Arizona, by and large, isn’t great to start with. In a place like, say, Yarnell or Patagonia, it’s nonexistent. You live there at your risk…especially as you get to the heart attack age. And most small towns in Arizona are pretty grody: you want to see poverty here, you visit the rural areas.

Arizona’s closest approximation of MiL’s home town, Grand Junction — the largest town on Colorado’s Western Slope — is Prescott. And it surely is a nice little burg. A little touristy, but not excessively so: it also has a Costco and grocery stores that serve real people who really live there. It has a few decent restaurants, and it has a cultural life of sorts.

But it’s not cheap to live there. Housing prices are fairly high, and the cost of gasoline and groceries is significantly higher than in the big city. And there, too: although the county medical center is one of the three best in the state, that actually ain’t sayin’ much. It’s hot in the summer — cooler than here, but still warm enough to need air conditioning — and cold enough in the winter that it sometimes snows, meaning you couldn’t get away with leaving the heat off all winter long, the way I do here. And there’s a chronic water shortage. So utility bills would be significantly higher.

Plus of course the cost of moving house takes your breath away.

So I dunno…I probably don’t want to move away. But if my son didn’t live here…if I didn’t have the church choir…I surely would.

Image: DepositPhotos © Xalanx

Computers, Cox, & Credit Cards: Never a Dull Moment

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March 14, 2015, 5:50 p.m. So my computers are offline, once and for all. I’m writing this in Wyrd, planning to cut and paste into WordPress tomorrow morning, when I expect to get online at my favorite coffee shop.

Been having some strange connectivity problem for the past few days, some affecting the phone line and some the usual up-and-down connection that characterizes lovely Cox.

Cox is a hell of a lot better than Qwest. But…uhm…that ain’t sayin’ much. Smoke signals would’ve been better than Qwest. One thing you have to give to Cox is that they have decent customer service.

At any rate, the wireless connection went irretrievably down this afternoon. So I have no blog. No email. No endlessly entertaining news and “news” sites. No online games. No baroque Facebook time suck. No clients…

The horror!

Cox allows as to how the problem is on their end, and they’re sending a tech over tomorrow afternoon to install a bunch of new equipment and make the thing work. Whether this will disable the new robocall blocker remains to be seen. If it does, then it’s good-bye to Cox; I’ll have to go over to Ooma, which will save me a shitload of money and inflict a shitload of hassle.

The weird thing about being stuck offline…is the horror.

I feel utterly at sea without the email and without access to the Internet to inform the editing projects.

Fortunately, the book I’m working on now is a work of fiction. So I don’t have to look up every third reference, factoid, circumstance, or stylistic quirk. For most of the editorial work I do, though, an Internet connection is not an option.

So the whole “no email, no Internet” angst is kind of irrational, at least for the time being. As a practical matter, chances are I’ll get more done and enjoy life more without the preoccupation that has become an occupation. Maybe I’ll even take the dogs for a walk this evening!

This evening I was supposed to go to a meeting, but I’m still too sick to go anywhere. Especially not to a two- or three-hour jawfest.

Probably will be too sick to go to choir tomorrow night, and probably will be too sick to go to the Thursday meeting. But just now there’s no way to send my apologies to any of the worthies who expect me to show up.

As dawn cracked this morning, I was going to write a Spring has Sprung sort of post, featuring a passel of flower images from the yard. Not so much, though.

Neither computer would read the camera’s memory chip. As it developed, I was able to access the images on the large computer, which accepts a cable connection to the camera. Copied the images to a flash drive. So that was not a connectivity problem but a memory chip problem.

I did not want to do battle with computers this morning! Got up at 6 a.m.; by 8 a.m. all I wanted to do was go back to bed and take a nap.

Fed the dogs; ate some more leftover soup; watered the plants. The weather has been in the 90s, so the potted plants need to be watered every day and the stuff in the ground needs watering about once every three days.

Brushed down the pool. To my surprise, the mustard algae was not back!

That would be because the pool was brushed yesterday. It occurred to me that pushing the pool brush up and down the walls amounts to a good way to get some much-needed mild exercise – I’ve been spending way, way, way too much time parked in front of a damn computer.

Running the nylon brush up and down the walls again, I reflected that when I first moved into the house, I was so tickled with the pool that I used to clean it and test it and adjust its chemicals every day. Now it’s lucky if it gets cleaned and tested once a month.

When did I take to neglecting this marvelous puddle? It’s obviously an asset to the house: make that a$$et. What’s with letting it go to pot??

No answer to that one. But pretty obviously the wall moss is the outcome. Sweep it down once a day: get some mild upper-body exercise and preserve a $20,000 lifestyle blandishment.

Read about 20 pages of the client’s novel – really a first read, a fast line-edit. The MS is only about 130 pages; at 20 pages a day, I can get through it in a week. Since I set a two-week deadline, this will leave another week to go over the whole thing more carefully, think about it, and offer some advice of the writing-coach variety.

By about 2:00 p.m. the wireless connection was down. It being about six hours past my naptime, I decided to shut down both terminals, disconnect the modem and the router, leave them disconnected, and go back to bed. Surely after an hour or two, the system would reset itself.

No. Not so much.

After a restless and generally miserable attempt at napping, I reconnected the peripherals and rebooted and…couldn’t get online at all.

Oh god.

Back and forth with Cox. Long, long story short, a technician is supposed to show up between three and five tomorrow afternoon and install a whole new set-up. I’m being told Cox is upgrading its equipment. The new stuff is supposed to be installed inside the house (oh, good: MORE junk to clutter up the desktop, MORE junk for me to dust!), supposedly free of cost to me except that I have to pay for backup batteries.

Shit.

Meanwhile…oh, yes, meanwhile…

Yesterday while I was enjoying a particularly miserable run-around in search of groceries that I never did manage to get, I stuck my AMEX card in a pocket that also held a metal doodad. Metal doodad scratched the fancy fucking “chip,” and it wouldn’t work at the Safeway. And that is why, among several other goddamn reasons, I wasn’t able to get the Kleenex and the cough medicine and the vinegar and the ClearCare and the cream despite stumbling around not one, not two, but three goddamn grocery stores.

Don’t ask.

So AMEX was supposed to have a new card delivered by FedEx today.

While yesterday’s antics were in progress, I was so sick I wasn’t thinking even vaguely clearly. Today I realized I hadn’t told them they HAVE to mark the package with a note that the address is on my street, not on the street just north of me that has the same name. Called AMEX this morning to see if a message could be sent belatedly; was told the package hadn’t even been delivered to FedEx but couldn’t get the dumb bunny on the end of the line to understand what I was talking about.

Later this afternoon I called again and reached someone who seemed to have some IQ points. She said the problem is that FedEx was pretty much rendered inert by the storm on the East Coast. They still hadn’t picked up the package.

So, could we PLEASE add a “NOT MY CRAZY NEIGHBOR’S ADDRESS” clue to the package?

Videlicet, my Amazon address is set up to read…

My Name
1234 North Erewhon Drive
Please NOT Lane!
Phoenix, AZ 85123

She at least was able to understand what I was talking about, but she allowed as to how adding NOT LANE to the address was impossible. Which is reasonable, but annoying.

But, she assured me, don’t worry (be happy!): you don’t have to be home because they’ll just leave the package there.

THAT’S THE POINT, I said. If the guy leaves the package at My Crazy Neighbor’s house, it will never be seen again!

They just don’t get it. When you explain this to someone else, they don’t want to believe that these people steal everything that is mistakenly delivered to their house. Most middle-class Americans, I guess, just don’t want to think bad things about other folks.

Oh well. If the card doesn’t show up tomorrow, I’ll call and cancel the AMEX account. I do have a Visa card, which is accepted in more places anyway.

To make everything perfect, the damn Nest thermostat runs on the wireless. No wireless connection: no air conditioning. It’s supposed to be 95 tomorrow!

Fortunately, I don’t normally turn on the AC until temps are in the low hundreds. But…what if this had happened in July? My house would be unlivable.

Enough with that damn thing! As soon as this dust settles, the AC guy is going to be invited to replace it with a NONprogrammable, NONwireless thermostat.

First thing tomorrow morning, I’m headed over to the Little Guy’s coffee house, where I can get a decent cup of café Americano and a free connection to the Internet. Post this thing there, then check the email, and then go on my way for an otherwise Disconnected day.