It is a CELESTIAL miracle! After dragging myself out of the sack, sick as the proverbial dawg, I called the County Courthouse and learned that my “group” of jurors was not selected today! And, said the talking robot, that means I’m excused from jury duty for the next 18 months.
Thank. You. GOD!
Then, it got better. Yes: believe it or not, better.
WonderAccountant finished my involved tax returns yesterday. So those were sitting on the table needing to be shipped off very soon. And they have to be sent return-receipt-requested — drop those things in the mail with just a stamp on them at your peril.
I was worried that if they stuck me on a jury, I wouldn’t get free to go stand in line at the post office for 45 minutes until after the March 16 deadline. But yesterday I just felt too damn sick to go up there and do battle with the unwashed masses and the hapless, outrageously overworked P.O. clerks. Mailing something in person from our P.O. is an exercise in masochism.
Anyway, perked up by the news that I wasn’t going to have to drag to downtown Phoenix and sit around a waiting room for six or eight hours — and already showered, combed, painted, and dressed — I decided to take the tax returns over. Also volunteered to buy a roll of stamps for WonderAccountant — why should more than one of us stand in line till the chickens come home?
So: drive into the parking lot…and…there are TWO CARS in there!
Holy mackerel! That’s unheard of.
Went inside and there were only two people ahead of me, both of them already up at the counter being waited on by a crew of…two postal clerks. As usual.
I could not believe it. Got up to the counter in a matter of seconds.
A-n-n-n-d…another mirabilis: The other guy at the counter was one of those ninnies who thinks he has to select a SPECIAL STAMP to grace his recipient. Yes. An EXTRA SPECIAL STAMP.
Have you ever gotten in line behind one of those? People are stacked up in line out the freaking DOOR and the ninnie is going, ohhh well that one’s nice but maybe it’s not perfect…do you have one with a bunny rabbit wearing a pink ribbon? On and interminably on.
For a change, I did not get behind this one.
Got out of the P.O. before he decided which work of art should go on his letter. By the time I got back out to the parking lot, there were ELEVEN cars parked and a flow of new ones y-cumin’ in. And naturally, one of the prospective patrons decides to drive in the wrong way. She blocks the traffic as she tries to back and fill and figure out where she wants to go.
I swear to God: they always get in front of me! Every time. Well…except for the merciful remission at the stamp counter.
But despite the bellyaching, the worst of the symptoms subsided after I’d been up about an hour and stood in a hot steamy shower about 15 minutes. Felt incredibly awful upon rolling out at 6 a.m.: agonizing cough, throat so congested I couldn’t even croak out a “no!” to the dogs, headache, and a fever. But there was nothing for it: I had to go downtown (so I thought) and sit around praying for an escape.
I now feel pretty awful, but at least I can utter a few intelligible words. Haven’t taken my temp again but think it may have dropped closer to normal.
This epizootic is probably bronchitis: I’m wheezing, and I don’t have asthma. Last time I was visited by an episode of wheezing, the doc said it was bronchitis, and he walloped me with a stiff round of prednisone.
Prednisone rips up my gut. The result of that episode was the first really serious flare-up of GERD. It took over six months to get rid of it. No…I take that back: I only got rid of it pretty much once and for all about three months ago. So it took two years to get rid of the side effects of the drug I was given for the last occurrence of severe chest congestion.
As you can imagine, I’m not in any hurry to race back to the doctor. I do not want to go through that again. And my Christian Science roots tell me this bug likely will go away on its own.
Sure looks snazzy in the picture, doesn’t it? Looks like a regular gas stovetop, in miniature. Amazon wants $53 for this thing, a bargain compared to Costco’s $200 offering, which (admittedly!) does have a stand to hold it at waist height but which has only a couple of burners that don’t look very efficient.
This morning I was reminded that I’d like to have a propane camp stove that will boil water and fry or stew foods, come the apocalypse. This one has a lot of bad reviews — 18%, unfortunately — so I’m still looking (any recommends, dear readers??). But I definitely want to get something with a stove-like burner to use outside.
And how did I happen to be reminded? Well, once again the damned Cox wireless connection went down. So as usual I shut down the computers, unplugged the router and modem, left the system off for half an hour, replugged, and rebooted. Since this happened right about the crack of dawn, the house was kind of cold, so while I was waiting for Cox to recover itself, I went to turn on the heat for a few minutes by way of warming the place up to 63 or 65 degrees.
And lo! The damned Nest thermostat was OFF-LINE.
Yeah. If your router is off, your nifty computerized thermostat is off. So…let’s think about that. Even if your electric service is intact, if your Internet connection goes down, you can’t run your heat or — far more crucially in lovely uptown Arizona — your air conditioning.
Holy sh!t.
If you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention, you’re aware that the U.S. Internet is highly vulnerable to attack from Unfriendlies. So much so that an extended regional or nationwide outage is probably inevitable. A serious attack could disable the Internet not for days but for weeks…possibly as long as three months. The same is true of the electrical grid.
We can all imagine the chaos an extended interruption of service would cause nationally and locally. But it’s worth considering exactly what it would mean to you, personally, in your home.
If you couldn’t even turn on the heat or the air-conditioning — even if the electric grid was operating — you would be in deep trouble.
A major attack on the country’s infrastructure — even a part of it, given our present near-100% dependence on computer technology — would mean you couldn’t turn on your stove, your heater or air conditioner, or your water heater. Gas stoves today operate with an electric sparker system, and so your gas stove would not run without electric power. You might not even be able to get potable water out of the tap — or any water. You would not be able to buy gas for your car, because gas pumps run on electricity and computers. You wouldn’t be able to buy groceries and medicines, because retailers’ cash registers are computers running on electricity.
It sounds like crazy Prepper thinking…but between you’n’me, I think it’s probably wise to be prepared, at least minimally, for an extended outage of these services. That’s even if you don’t live on the San Andreas Fault or deep in Tornado Alley.
Today we all live on a fault line.
My best friend in graduate school came from the Salinas area, where her parents were still living when the last major earthquake hit central California. Her mom was here visiting at the time, but her dad had stayed home. Fortunately, Elmer was a camping and fishing enthusiast. So he had a lot of gear on hand. And he had a camper that was equipped with a propane stove and refrigerator.
All the power went down and stayed down for some time. Roads in and out of town were wrecked — no one could get in or out for several days. Elmer kept the entire neighborhood going with the supplies he had, meant to keep him in comfort for a week or two when he was out in the sticks. He was able to boil water and prepare food for the neighbors’ small kids with the propane stoves he had on hand. He became, to put it mildly, the hero of the day.
So…what would be minimal preparation for an extended Internet or electric outage?
•Water — enough to last until the government or Red Cross can truck water into the area •Source of heat for cooking •Source of light, battery or propane operated •Supply of foods that do not have to be refrigerated •Supply of pet food, as necessary •Source of living quarters heat, if it’s very cold outside, or plenty of warm clothing and blankets •At least one 5-gallon jerry can of gasoline •A generous stash of propane, stored safely •Stash of prescription meds, if you can get them, and stash of OTC nostrums •First-aid kit
That’s really not very much — nothing unreasonable for most of us to keep on hand.
“Source of heat for cooking” means a device with at least one burner that gets hot enough to boil water. You may have access to water, but it may not be safe to drink without boiling. If your stove doesn’t work, you’ve got a problem.
I have 18,000 gallons of water in my pool, so assuming I have a camp stove and plenty of propane, I could get by for quite a long while in the event of a water shortage.
Foods that can be stored without refrigeration include dried rice and beans. These need to be soaked in water and cooked for a fair amount of time: hence, propane and water.
A generator would be good…but generators don’t run on air. Whether to drive or to run your house, you’d need gasoline. And gas is not something that can be stored and forgotten: you need to empty the jerry can into your car now and again and drive back up to the gas station to refill your supply
I’m keeping all my propane tanks full at all times, and am thinking I’ll buy another one. At this time I have three; four would last for quite a while.
While the grill works well for most kinds of dry cooking — roasting, baking, and grilling — it’s not designed for boiling water. Using it to boil water or cook rice or beans would waste a lot of fuel. That’s why I think I should have a functioning camp stove.
As for keeping warm at night? Dog. There’s a reason for the “two-dog night” saying. A dog’s normal body temperature is 102.5 degrees. Put the critter on your bed at night, and it’ll warm you up just like an electric blanket.
The ultimate heat source…
I personally am beginning to believe that within the next four to eight years, we will see serious civil unrest in this country. The time may come when we cannot safely leave our homes or neighborhoods for any length of time…or at all.
Which is the longer shot — cyberattack or civil war? I don’t know. They both seem like long shots. But who would have imagined Americans would elect a President who wants to shut down the free press, who imagines he can build a Berlin Wall from Sea to Shining Sea, who lies as freely as he breathes, who cultivates divisiveness, and who evinces clear signs of mental illness?
Whether you think it’s going to happen or not, it may be wise to be prepared. Helle’s Belles, none of us thinks the house is going to burn down or we’re going to croak over tomorrow. But we all carry insurance…just in case.
Well…so here we are: the Black guy is out of the White House and the Orange guy is in. Hevvin help us.
Listening to his brief, to-the-point inaugural address, it was hard to escape the thought…
What if he’s right?
Just now I’m listening to PBS News streaming off the Web, where a commentator is going on about “doom and gloom” in Trump’s speech, and how the beast was “not healing wounds.”
But…I didn’t hear doom and gloom in what he said. I heard “we’re gonna fix this.”
If he hadn’t lied until he was blue in the face..
If he hadn’t crassly, deliberately appealed to the very worst in the American psyche…
If he weren’t a groper of women…
If he had not courted and had not been courted by (possibly to the point of treason) a foreign power that has been our enemy for decades…
If there were any inkling of a reason to believe he understands as much about running a country as he does about running a TV reality show…
I could almost get on board with the bastard. I could almost be persuaded that yeah, he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.
Almost.
One of the things that’s fed that feeling is the jaw-dropping obtuseness evinced by thinkers and commentators of my own political persuasion. Dayum! What part of a few international billionaires are collecting most of the money in the world while Americans can’t get a decent job don’t you understand?
Not just a few “deplorables,” folks. But ALL OF US.
Or at least a very significant portion of us.
This afternoon NPR ran (twice!) a piece whose reporter dutifully went out and interviewed some Trumpish WT: high-school graduates working in one of the country’s few remaining steel mills. The hellish difficulty of the work was described in loving detail. The workers’ enthusiasm for just having a job was described, much as the behavior of some exotic beetle might be detailed. Then the reporter asks one woman, “Is the pay good?”
“For these parts, it’s very good,” she says.
Amazed (being a clear and present New Yorker), our intrepid reporter follows up with “Can you afford to buy a car or live in a house?”
“Well, no,” she says (subtext: Are you stupid?) “No, you couldn’t buy a house and you couldn’t afford to buy a car on this salary.”
She and her partner are getting by because they’re both laboring full time. Maybe one person could live on the pay. But two surely can’t. Still…it’s very good pay and she feels lucky to have a job at all.
Okay. We all know that people with GEDs and high-school diplomas can’t get work, and we can hear, from the reporters’ and commentators’ tone that we should believe the people who voted for Trump are the ignored and ignorant white underclass discommoded by globalization.
But…what about the rest of us? Do you know how many jobs formerly held by college graduates and even graduates of professional schools are being offshored? Lawyers’ jobs. Accountants’ jobs. Graphic designers’ jobs. Editors’ jobs. Publishers’ jobs. Carpenters’ jobs. Bankers’ jobs. Architects’ jobs. IT jobs. Engineering jobs. News reporting. Stock analysis. Even medical services.
When my associate editor Tina and I were still working at the Great Desert University, our office provided membership in a statewide association of small publishers. After we were laid off, The Copyeditor’s Desk maintained our membership until the trade organization finally collapsed.
We were hustling to make the business work. Her theory was that if we kept our rates low, we would get more business and so would make up in volume the amount that we might have made with better-paying work. So we were selling ourselves for peanuts.
One evening we were at a shindig put on by this group. Along comes an Indian guy. He has a printing company in Mumbai. The guy is thriving and is, at that time, maneuvering to get visas and green cards to move his family permanently into the United States, where he wishes to take up residence in a Scottsdale mansion.
He starts to talk fairly loosely. And without realizing that he’s telling me this, he reveals that he can take a book from the manuscript stage through copyediting, page design, cover design, typesetting, proofreading, indexing, and printing for less than Tina and I can copyedit it — at our bargain-basement rates!
I simply couldn’t effing believe it. But it was true. This guy was stealing our business. As he circulated around the room, he was telling all our potential clients that he could take their golden words to the finished product for less than a U.S. supplier could do one stage of the product at starvation wages.
Well, since then I’ve raised our rates. I figure if we can’t get much work, we’d better get paid as much as we can for the little work we do get. And we now target a different clientele: businesses and academics who need to publish to make money, not just because they dream of becoming Writers. Effectively, we offer a Cadillac editing service. We’re good, and we get paid for being good.
Why, we even speak English (can you imagine?). And French. And Russian. And Italian. Even a bit of Spanish. And Latin, of course.
The point is, I’m dead sure we are not alone. Large numbers of Americans with expensive college degrees who used to hold down good jobs that fit their education and experience no longer can earn a living wage. Many of us are lucky to be working at all. And IMHO, it’s fvckin’ no wonder people voted for Trump. A lot of people think it’s time for a change — and they need that change if they’re going to survive at all.
Whether Trump can make change happen remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it. The first major crisis that hits — whether it’s a stock market crash or another plane taking down another landmark building or a gas attack exterminating half a city — will show how little he knows about running a country. The extreme right-wing organization behind him, the hideous, decayed remains of the Republican Party, will take over the instant he falters. And like the Taliban, those people mean no good at all for anyone who is not one of them.
Scary times. Scary times made even scarier by the fact that the people who could have and should have done something about it still don’t seem to get the picture.
Image: Zach Rudisin. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20727816
What a beautiful, peaceful evening. Venus, a brilliant diamond, shone in a deep sapphire sky when the corgis and I set out to jog a mile-long course through the ’hood. The dimming sunset, still glowing orange, backlit tall palm, ash, and pine trees to the west.
Two houses between here and Richistan, very nice houses, are on the market. One is a fix-and-flip, acquired from a very aged man who probably was the original owner. The other has been upgraded a couple of times over the past decade and is significantly further from Conduit of Blight than the Funny Farm.
I consider, as I pass each house, whether if I had a sh!tload of money I would wish to buy one of these places. And the answer is no.
In each case, the house’s next-door neighbor has two or three large, deep-throated barking dogs that go berserk whenever anyone walks by on the side walk with their own dogs, their children, their friends, or their door-to-door fliers. Across the street from each house was at least one neighbor harboring large barking dogs.
Now of course, I have barking dogs, too. But when mine are yapping, they don’t act like they’re going to come through the window and grab you by the throat. Nor are they left outside in the yard at all hours of the day and the night — most of the time if they bark at a passer-by, it’s from the living room. They’re not guard dogs and they’re not intended as guard dogs.
A lot of people in this area have large, fierce dogs — more than one of them — because they perceive that the area is unsafe.
But is it?
True, the district just to the north of us, less than a mile away — really, just a few steps across a main drag from the northernmost homes in the ’hood — is notoriously crime-ridden, the territory of a notable meth gang. The district to the west of us, where aging apartments continue to deteriorate and an abandoned golf course has become a campground for homeless drug addicts, also has a high crime rate and an increasingly sketchy ambience.
But that’s the nature of the City of Phoenix: it’s a patchwork of enclaves. Anywhere you look, you’ll find upscale neighborhoods full of doctors and lawyers and business tycoons cheek-by-jowl with drug-infested slums. If you want to live in uninterrupted affluent homogeneity, you pretty much have to move to Scottsdale…which, because everybody knows its inhabitants have plenty of money and plenty of loot to steal, is as much a target of burglars and thieves as any other part of the Valley. Apparently we Phoenicians like it this way: we do nothing to change it.
So it is that our neighborhood, flanked by blight on two sides, is a hotbed of risk.
Well… I’ve taken to walking the dogs every evening after dark. Nary a resident is to be seen outside: they’re all parked in front of their televisions or their computers. You could break into a car, steal a tchotchki off a front porch, peer in a window without anyone ever noticing.
Never once have I seen a bum wandering through the night or a likely burglar slinking by. Except for the occasional coyote — which isn’t any more interested in confronting you than you are in confronting it — after dark there is nothing out there that looks like a threat. Not a burglar, not a bum, not biker, not even a kid in a hoodie.
During the daytime, you see an occasional derelict. Once in awhile you’ll see someone who’s obviously casing houses. But not often. Usually you can walk a mile or more through the ’hood without every seeing anyone but a few workmen and some wandering neighbors.
This is the very house we lived in!
That was not so 30 years ago, when my ex- and I lived in the then gentrifying Encanto neighborhood, a picturesque remnant of small-town Phoenix that, like the ’hood where the Funny Farm stands, was discovered all at once by a horde of young upwardly mobile urban adults. It quickly became known as “the lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto” — because it was within easy driving distance (even walking distance) of the downtown hospitals and law firms.
The Encanto area’s zip code had the highest per-capita drug use in the city, at the time. Despite the efforts of some developers to pave it over with a freeway, it survived a great deal of pressure to force the young would-be city-dwellers out to the suburbs. Today it’s one of the city’s bragging points.
Exactly the same thing is under way here: the ’hood is the New Encanto. But unlike Encanto, the ’hood is not overrun with derelicts and criminals. There are a lot of homeless mentally ill riding the buses and trains up and down Conduit of Blight Blvd., but not so many actually inside the neighborhood — local opinion to the contrary.
When we lived in Encanto, you couldn’t poke your nose outside the door without seeing a bum or two roaming up the street. One family, a block to the south of us, was baking cookies while watching television of an evening. Since everyone was in the house and they felt safety in numbers, it didn’t occur to them to bolt all the doors and windows. A bum watching from the alley noticed this and observed that the wife would come into the kitchen, stick a pan of cookies in the oven, and then go watch TV while they baked for 15 minutes. During one of those interludes, he just stepped into the kitchen, picked up her purse, and made off with it. 🙂
Not all these exploits were so funny. One of my neighbors was hacked to death by an ax murderer, having surprised the guy robbing her house when she came home from the beauty parlor. Another was studied by a man who knew a) where to find the only window in the house that was not alarmed and b) when her husband was out of town. He took the opportunity to spend an entire night beating and raping her.
We have never had anything like that happen here. We’ve had some close calls, but no real horrors. Yet.
But interestingly, few people in Encanto kept large, fierce dogs. I had a German shepherd that I’d inherited from a neighbor. The lady behind us had a doberman pinscher. Our babysitter, a street to the south of us, had a pair of airdales. One couple in our car-pool had a pretty ridiculous bloodhound. But otherwise, that was about it: I didn’t know anybody else who had big dogs.
Here, everybody and his little brother has a large, fierce dog with a threatening bark — or two, if possible. Cassie has been pounced twice by loose German shepherds. You can’t walk around the park without coming across someone with a big dog running loose — on Sunday mornings a bunch of locals bring about a dozen large dogs over there and let them run around, illegally, off the leash. Encanto Park was bum heaven, but you never saw a dog off the leash there. You didn’t see many dogs at all, come to think of it.
That says to me that people who live in this neighborhood are scared. The number of derelicts visible in these parts is a tiny fraction of the number of car-sleeping and window-peeping and yard-toileting natives who used to hang out in Encanto. Yet people apparently perceive a great deal more risk here than they did there.
Yes, we do have some incidents: the bum that jumped a wall to diddle with a couple of small girls being the most recent. And yeah, I did enjoy the Great Garage Invasion. But in the 13 years we lived in Encanto we had…
•The cat burglar on the roof •The Night of the Screaming (in which I chased off a rapist by hollering “fire” at the top of my lungs) •The burglar who was chased out of the house at 2 a.m. by our German shepherd •The ax murder •The night-long rapefest at the neighbor’s house •The guy who took up residence in a neighbor’s car and was pissed when he was thrown out so she could go to work •The guy who tried to push his way in through my front door even as not one but two German shepherds stared him down •The guy who chased one of the nannies in Palmcroft •The guy who followed me even as I was pushing a baby in a stroller (I dodged into a neighbors’ house) •The couple who used our side yard as their latrine
It kinda went on and on. On Mondays, the head secretary at my office (yes, Virginia, in those days admins were called “secretaries”) would ask me what new story I had for them…and I usually did have one.
We hardly ever have things like that happen here. We have a hell of a lot more dogs than we do bums and criminals. Heh…maybe one fact follows the other as the night the day?
I doubt it. I think people are just scared. Unduly scared.
It doesn’t do to be scared of the bogeyman, you know. You’re usually bigger than he is, and nine times out of ten you’re a hell of a lot smarter (your brain not being clouded by dope or booze). A dog is nice company, but it’s not real protection. A gun is reassuring until you consider the fact that you’re more likely to shoot yourself in the foot than to wing the burglar.
The best protection? Keeping your wits about you.
Venus over the Ocean: Brocken Inaglory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Venus_with_reflection.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5223759
Good GOD is this EVER going to stop??? It’s one of those mornings when a thousand little tasks come crashing down on you at once, and you can’t get one thing done before the next thrusts itself into your face. I’ve been binged at, bonged at, banged at, tweeted at, rung at, buzzed at, thumped at, yakked at, and barked at nonstop since the first goddamn robocall struck at 7:00 a.m.
Meanwhile, weirdly enough, I do have some things I need to do, but I can’t get at them for all the pesterments.
The dogs have not stopped yapping since they rolled out of the sack this morning. I think it’s because the kids are all out of school, it being MLK Day, and they’re having a gay old time playing outdoors on this beautiful cool day. Cassie and Ruby would love to be out there chasing around with them, but about the best they can do is race around barking at the front door, barking at the back gate, barking at the side gate, barking at the east wall, barking at the west wall, barking at the south wall, barking…barking…barking…BARKING.
Everything I pick up to do gets interrupted by something else that has to be done right this minute.
The handyman was slated to come by at 9 a.m. to see if there was anything he can do about the plugged bathtub drain, a task the plumber shows no interest in doing. Handyman guessed that it was a BIG job, one that could entail pulling out the plastic tub surround. (These things were installed in the houses at the frame-out stage…to get one of them out through a bathroom door entails sawing them apart in the bathroom and taking them out in pieces. How you get a new one in escapes me…my guess is, you don’t.) After showing up an hour late with his brother in tow, he thought about it and then went off to think about it some more, saying he’ll be back tomorrow.
The pool guy is supposed to come by between 3 and 5. But before then, I need to get Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner over to Leslie’s to see if he’s jammed…because it dawned on me that the reason Harvey has stopped moving may not be the pump or the filter but Harvey himself. A fix at Leslie’s would be one hell of a lot cheaper than a fix and a filter cleaning trip by an expensive repairdude in a gas-guzzling service truck.
But the question is, WHEN can I get out of here?
An acquaintance was supposed to come by, also (conveniently while a repairman is underfoot) at 9 a.m. to drop off some books to donate to the church’s book sale. She called about 10:30 to say she’d be here in 45 minutes or so. Since she’s coming in from Sun City West, which is halfway to Los Angeles, that actually will be more like an hour, unless she’s in the habit of flying low.
So that puts the eefus on getting done with the SLEW of errands that need to be run between now and 3:00 p.m. In addition to the trip to Leslie’s, I need to make a Costco run and a Home Depot run. The Costco run can be (and probably should be) put off until tomorrow, but H.D., not so much.
Sat down to catch up with bidness and with the personal email.Every thirty seconds the damn dogs launched into another barkfest! Read half a sentence…bark bark bark bark bark bark BARK BARK BARK…try to figure out what the interlocuter wanted…bark bark bark bark bark bark YAP YAP YAP…go back and read it again and try to figure out what’s needed and bark YAP YAP bark bark BARKITY YAP bark…try to frame a response…type type BUZZZZZZZ dryer goes off…haul out blankets, move another load of laundry out of the washer into the dryer, put blanket back on bed YAP YAP YAP BARK BARK BARK BARK bark bark…start over with email, try to think through what to say…type BARK BARK briinnnggggggggg goddamn TELEPHONE…wait till the system hangs up the robocaller’s system…type type YAP YAP YAP BARK BARK BARK…ohhhhh crap! Give UP!
Pick up the litter and sort of clean the house before people show up here and see how I really live. briinngggggggg goddamn TELEPHONE “Yes, I’m here, come on over whenever you can” BARK BARK BARK yap yap GROWWWWLLLLLLL bark bark BARK Swiffer up the dog hair off 1860 square feet of tile, something that should be done every single day but that in reality gets done about every second or third day. Throw ten days’ worth of microfiber dog-hair-swiffering rags into the wash… Ruminate on how pissed it makes me that some asshole robocalled me at 7 in the morning on a national holiday.
You know, I really need to dump Cox and get Ooma, a VoIP service that lets you use NoMoRobo. The latter is supposedly the most effective nuisance call blocker around.
But I hesitate. I can see that attaching Ooma is going to involve a) a learning curve and b) DIY technodiddling. The chance of my screwing it up is high. You have to wrest your phone number away from Cox, meaning that if I screw it up (as I will), un-screwing will present a major-major hassle.
It could be worth it, though.
Cox is charging a little over $14 a month for the phone plus another $13 a month for alleged “taxes.” Ooma calculates a total of $4.08 for taxes & fees in my zip code. Switching would mean a HUGE savings.
On the other hand, there are trade-offs.
First, obviously, you would not even have ONE phone in the house that operates when the power is off. Right now one of the eight extensions in fact is directly connected to the landline. And it does run when the power is turned off. Not well…well enough to call 911.
Second, you’d be dependent on an Internet connection. Cox’s Internet is not what you’d call “reliable.” And…lo! Here’s someone at the door…
Our country — and by extension, your finances and mine — is in deep trouble. We are about to inaugurate as President a man whose mental stability is questionable; who announces his petulance in wee-hours tweets; who gropes women and brags about it; who exploits hatred and fear to gain power; who is at odds with the country’s intelligence agencies; who denigrates the disabled, the female, and the brown-skinned; and who “owes one” to the corrupt, thuggish leader of a nation that has been our enemy since shortly after the end of World War II. He is backed by a phalanx of extremists who want to reverse not just the ACA but the entire New Deal, which has been in place for almost 80 years.
The New Deal, we might point out, came into being in response to the Great Depression. Part of its purpose was to prevent a repeat performance of the Depression.
I believe that, in the near future, we are going to see a recession that will make the Bush Recession look like a cakewalk. The reason is that the dominant economic thinking among the doctrinaire right wing riding Mr. Trump’s coat-tails is simply wrong. It was proven wrong by the Great Recession, as it was proven wrong in earlier recessions.
Since 1948, this country has seen 11 recessions. Seven of them — 63.6% — were presided over by Republicans (Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush the Elder, Bush the Younger). Some of the economic downturns were precipitated by factors over which we had little control, such as rises in oil prices. Others correspond with rises in interest rates by the Federal Reserve or with monetary tightening in pursuit of a balanced national budget. Most egregious, from a political point of view, was the Great Recession, which was brought about by deregulation of financial institutions (a mainstay of voodoo economics). The Great Depression of 1929-33 was largely aggravated by “extensive new tariffs and other factors [that] contributed to an extremely deep depression.”
The pendulum swings. As we all know, things go one way for awhile, and then they turn around and go back in the other direction. For the past few years, we’ve seen a roaring economy. We can expect that it, like any hot economic period, will cool down. But I think the pendulum is going to swing, all right: waaayyyy in the opposite direction.
It would be good to position your investments in a balanced portfolio to include variable rate bonds and variable rate preferred stocks that pay decent income and aren’t as sensitive as stocks are in a downturn. In addition, some financial planners make it a policy to sell certain exposure to the market should it turn down below a certain level. This doesn’t protect from losses should the market sell-off, but should help cushion further losses in a market meltdown. Now is the time for you to speak with a financial planner about steps to take in managing your savings.
Additionally, you should be prepared for a period of unemployment. During the Great Recession, 10% of Americans were put out of work, a rate beat only by the Reagan recession (10.8%), the Great Depression (24.9%) and the subsequent 1937/38 recession (19%). That means having at least six months’ worth of living expenses in cash savings and possibly taking on a side gig now, not later, so that you’ll have something to fall back on should you lose your main livelihood.
Remember that many of us were never able to get jobs comparable to the ones we had before the Bush recession — large numbers of Americans are still unemployed or underemployed. After you become discouraged enough to give up seeking full-time work, you no longer register in the government’s unemployment figures, and so most of us in that category are simply not counted.
In addition to building cash savings, pay down debt and avoid racking up new debt, especially on credit cards.
Now more than ever is the time to live not just within your means but below your means. Good luck to you, folks. We’re all gonna need it.
