Coffee heat rising

Angst

A Touch of Heaven in a Day from Hell

by

OKAY, this one is as amazing as it gets…

So Apple shipped off my MacBook to its repair shop in Tennessee, where the thing has been for the better part of a week. But before very long, they finish and ship it back. Supposed to arrive between 8 and 10 a.m. today.

Sent off a chapter to one client. Read another client’s chapter and sent that off to him.

Come 11 a.m., no sign of it. I call Apple. Their rep gets ahold of Fedex, who say their guy tried to deliver it but no one was home. Of course I was home. And Gerardo was here with four of his guys, too! I expect the guy delivered it to Josie’s house: same number as my house, same street name except “Lane,” not “Way.” Apple CSR  gets the various numbers for me to try to track this down.  I call FedEx and get a robo-phone runaround, so I figure I’ll drive up to the Fedex office on Meth Lover’s Lane in person.

I’m cruising across SubFeeder Street headed for Conduit of Blight — NOT my usual route, because I hate turning left at the signal at CofB and GangBanger’s Way (because of the Fucking Train), so I normally backtrack around Robin Hood’s Barn to avoid it. The intersection of CofB & Meth Lover’s is impassible with construction, so you have to drive to 23rd on Gangbanger’s Way, go north to Meth Lover’s, then right on Meth Lover’s and left on 21st. And 21st is jammed with frustrated drivers trying to get around the roadblock at CofB and Meth Lover’s. Wheeeee!

As I cross Local Lane West, I see a Fedex Truck headed in my direction. Hot DAYUM!

I lay on the horn, jump out of the car, and flag him down.

And believe it or not, HE HAS THE COMPUTER and…another believe-it-or-not… he FORKS IT OVER.

Holy mackerel. He swears he’s been here and left a notice.

Check when I get home, and by golly, he’s right: the doorbell button on the gate doesn’t ring. Must have run out of battery juice or gotten wet in the rain and ruint.

But…can you imagine? Actually encountering the guy on the way out of the ‘hood?????? Wow!

As expected, I spent the entire afternoon wrestling with the computer, trying to get it back online. It goes, but it goes slow.

Tomorrow I’ll have to spend half a day wrestling with DropBox, which seemed to be cooperating up to the point where it supposedly synced itself with the newly refurbished (i.e., key tools erased or up-gefucked) machine. After making me jump through a thousand hoops and forcing me to dream up a new goddamn password and seemingly starting the 24-hour process to sync the zillions of gigabytes worth of files I have stored in DropBox’s precincts, hours after the process has started they send me an email with some new numeric code, which they demand that I enter to “finish signing in to DropBox.” But…they don’t tell me WHERE to enter it.

So that process, which should have been about 2/3 done by tomorrow morning, is now stopped, and now I’ll have the pleasure of trying to roust a human at DB (good luck with that!) and trying to get him to explain WTF and where the hell I’m supposed to enter this magical number, and then…yes…it will be another 24 hours before my files are synced.

Yeah.

Y’know what?

I. want. my. Smith-Corona. back.

Small Town/Big City: A study in contrasts

by
Payson ranger station

Yesterday VickyC and I finally made it up to Payson to visit our friends KJG and Mr. KJG in their beautiful, newly renovated home in the pines. It was wonderful to see them and to admire their lovely property.

KJG drove us around to some of her favorite haunts in Payson, a small ranching and tourist community perched at the top of the Mogollon Rim. The contrast between Phoenix’s toxic LA-style hectic traffic and the small-town vibe up there was amazing. Not once did anyone cut us off, park in the car’s blind spot, try to get-there-first, jerk around, or behave as though they were drunk, stoned, or demented. Nor did we, even once, run into a traffic jam occasioned by the city tearing up the roads.

We drove through a couple of districts where they’d looked at houses during their search for their dream house somewhere outside of the increasingly dystopic Valley of the Sun. There really are some lovely residential areas up there. And in some cases, the prices are not completely out of line. For about what I could get for my house, I could buy a nice place in town.

This, in sharp contrast with the experience of driving around lovely Phoenix on Wednesday:

I went up to the FedEx office, which is not very far from here. Really, if you didn’t have to traverse Gang Central, you could walk there from here.

First, though, I went to my favorite storefront mailboxes/xerox/notary public-type place, because a) they offer just about every service having to do with shipping, mailing, and minor office services you can dream up and b) I like those folks a lot and usually will try to give my money to people who have proven they can be nice to me. To get there, I have to cross the freeway. Main Drag South and Gangbanger’s Way are both fantastically dug up, creating backups that go halfway to Reno in one direction and halfway to Santa Fe in the other. So I figure I’ll go west across the freeway on Meth Lover’s Lane, the next main drag north of Gangbanger’s. The mail store is in a strip mall facing Meth Lover’s, westward across the freeway and on the north edge of the Ghost Mall (Gangbanger’s skirts this gigantic collection of vacancies along its south side). So it’s northward up Conduit of Blight Blvd toward Meth Lover’s, there to turn left and proceed west across the freeway.

Not. So. Much.

Every effing road in this city is torn up. Wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here…and yesterday provided no exception to that rule.

At the intersection of Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s Lane, they’ve got the damn road shut down to one lane. No left effing turn.

Fortunately, I spot this situation from afar, and fortunately I’ve lived in Our Fair City for so long its road map is imprinted on my brain. I cut off a poor bastard in the outside lane, swerve into the two-way left-turn lane, and jerk across oncoming traffic into a light industrial area. Proceed west as far as this little street will go, dodging an 18-wheeler who’s stuck trying to turn around (thank you, God, for sparing me from having taken up that occupation!); amble to the end of the street, turn north, and follow that road up to its intersection with Meth Lover’s, figuring it’s gonna be a real bitch to turn left onto that thing. Rev up the aggressiveness hormones (drivers in Phoenix learn to control these bodily functions by sheer effort of will….), grit my teeth and…HALLELUJAH BROTHERS AND SISTERS, there’s a freaking signal at Meth Lover’s!

So I get back on my way without having to risk my life unduly. Or anyone else’s, come to think of it.

The mail store folks say they can only do UPS but they point out that I passed a FedEx store on my way there, right on Meth Lover’s Lane. Ah! I know that industrial park!

So I turn back onto Meth Lover’s, cross the freeway eastbound, come to the FedEx store, and have to turn north (left AGAIN!!!!) onto the little street that goes into the industrial park. Traffic northbound on this tiny road is SO THICK that I cannot turn left into the parking lot near the FedEx store. I figure that’s because other folks, southbound, are detouring through the industrial park to dodge the mess at Meth Lover’s Lane and Conduit of Blight. They’re all as mad as I am, and nary a one of them is about to give another motorist a break. So I proceed down Little Street till I find another driveway in the back end of the parking lot. Dart in there and then drive all the way back up to the front of the lot and get parked near the FedEx shop. No problem sending the computer off to Apple…that’s very nice.

Now I have to get home, once again circumventing the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Holy sh!t.

Noooo way of getting out of the parking lot the way I came in: cars are now backed up to Flagstaff. However, the next road to the west of Little Street is Office Complex Drive. This proceeds past the insurance company where my son works, past the former site of the branch office that the credit union so conveniently closed, and past a grassy flood-control park where I used to run my German shepherd when she was young and fierce. AND it happens to debouche onto Gangbanger’s way, which goes right past my neighborhood.

Yes!

The only problem is turning right out of the FedEx parking lot onto Meth Lover’s (circumventing the light at LIttle Street) and then darting across the fast lane (“fast” is not the operative word here…) and into the two-way left-turn lane. But thanks to the signal holding up westbound traffic at Little Street, I manage to take advantage of a Fellow Homicidal Driver’s momentary lapse in attention and dart across in front of him to turn left onto Faceless Office Building Road…only because FOB Road also has a signal.

Proceed without incident down FOB Road and reach Gangbanger’s Way. Mercifully, there’s also a signal at that intersection, allowing me to turn left onto the 7-lane main drag that is Gangbanger’s.

wooo HOOOOO! I got home alive, one more time!

This is pretty much the story of any drive you make through this accursed city, no matter where it is that you think you want to go. Wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here: EVERY road is ripped up and blocked somewhere. Unless you know how to get around virtually any intersection in town, you are going to end up sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting in stalled traffic.

Later in the day, I had to make a 40-minute drive to meet a client at a Barnes and Noble over at Arrowhead Mall, way to Hell and gone on the west side. It was pushing 4 p.m. by the time this confab broke up. Rush hour here starts at 3:00 p.m. sharp.

Homeward bound, I decided to stop by the credit union on the Great Desert University’s west campus, so I could deposit the check without having to dork with scanning it and uploading two images. This entails driving east across Bell Road — one of the main drags into White Flight Country, now situated on the far west side — then veering south on 43rd Avenue to Thunderbird, and sliding onto the campus. Not too bad: since most of the rush-hour traffic consists of whiteys headed homeward — in the opposite direction from the way I had to go — this went smoothly enough. The transaction completed, now the choices are to continue east across Thunderbird to the freeway, take the freeway to Gangbanger’s, and trudge east to the ‘Hood, or else go all the way across Thunderbird to Conduit of Blight, go south several miles, and then turn east onto Gangbanger’s.

Well. You’re crazy to get on the freeway any time after 3 in the afternoon. And the alternative would take me right back to the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Luckily, though, I have that map imprinted inside the brain. So…back eastbound on Thunderbird to 35th, south toward Gangbanger’s way, and thence to the ‘Hood.

Again because this route was east- and southbound, running in the opposite direction of the blue-collar workers and cubicle-dwelling office workers who get off around 3:00 or 4:00 and head home to their styrofoam-and-stucco boxes on the west side, I escaped a lot of rush-hour congestion. But traffic coming in the opposite direction? Holeee mackerel! At the light on the east side of the freeway, westbound traffic on Gangbanger’s was backed up almost a mile. There was no incident stopping them. It was just too damn many cars for the road to handle. That is, yes, seven lanes (if you count the two-way left-turn lane as a traffic lane).

Ugh!

When I got home from this junket, I called up “real estate, Prescott” and looked at the offerings in that Californicated small town. It’s a pretty area, and my house is now worth so much that I could in fact afford to live there. And I did find a couple of cute houses…but in general, I just don’t see anything there that I sincerely would wanna live in. Problem is, my house is damn nice…you’d have to go some to beat it, or even to match it.

The other options are the Oro Valley in Tucson (think I’d ’druther live in Prescott, thank you) or Sun City. The latter would be much cheaper. But my god. Living in a mausoleum ought to be cheaper!

Payson is significantly cheaper than Prescott. However, it has a few disadvantages: it has few urban amenities such as top-rated hospitals, Costco, gourmet grocery stores or even Sprouts; little choice of veterinarians, dentists, doctors, or much of anything else. Those things, of course, are readily available in Phoenix: an hour and a half down the hill.

But… Do you really want to drive an hour and a half to get to one or the other of those?

KJG does it without a blink: she said she’d driven into the Valley to see the kids twice last week. But…she’s highly motivated.

So. I don’t know. Do I want to uproot myself to get away from the traffic, the crime, the drug-addicted transients, the heat, and the overall lunacy? Maybe. But do I really want to leave my son and all my friends? Hmmm…

View from Payson. By Doug Dolde at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain.

 

 

Life in Hell…Life in the Dystopia…Thank You, Apple

by
Garden Spot in Parvenu Central.

Surely I’ve shared my feeling with you — explicitly or implicitly, hm? — that we live in a dystopia. Remember that old cartoon, “Life in Hell”? Well, yeah. It’s a lot like that. Only not so harmlessly absurd.

Today, a fine Day from Hell, presented a superb view of the Canyons of Dystopia. What a place! What a time!

My laptop computer — an aging MacBook, a creature that has made itself integral to my daily life, to my entertainment, and (most to the point) to my business activities — has about given up the digital ghost. It’s taken to shutting down <<~PING~>> out of the blue, sometimes losing data, sometimes not. This is happening more and more often. Uncountable numbers of hours with the telephone Apple techs (starting at 6 in the morning; extending till 10 at night) have done nothing to fix the problem.

In defeat, the Apple techs and I agreed that we were forced to present the damn thing to the Apple geniuses in a brick-and-mortar Apple store.

Naturally, Apple closed the store nearest to me. So I had to schlep the contraption out to Scottsdale.

I’d been at the new, annoying, echoey, brain-banging Apple glass-and-metal box lately installed at Scottsdale Fashion Square. So…yeah. I decided to take a chance that the slightly less-new Apple store at Scottsdale Quarter would be less…annoying.

Well.

No.

Make an appointment: 2:45 p.m.. Start driving driving driving about 2:00 p.m. Get there pretty much on time. Park in the Scottsdale Quarter’s parking garage: B-1W. Pull out my crip-space placard so I can grab a space within walking distance of an elevator or stairs, leave the chariot not very far from a pair of elevators, and make my way toward air. Trudge upstairs past innumerable trendy restaurants and trendy fashion stores and trendy home stores and finally find my way, with difficulty, to the Apple store.

Yes. Glass-and-metal box.

This shopping center is simply dreadful, in an upscale dreadful way. Cold. Hard-edged. Stylish. Ritzy. Loud to the point of blaring. And fucking annoying.

It is, in short, a little shard of dystopia. A freestanding monument to dystopia.

I finally find the Apple store in its maze, after asking at two shops. Get there on time.

Over the blaring background noise and the echo-chamber interior noise, the Apple employees and techs are extremely nice. One of them, a manager, tells me they’re a little confused because one of his employees had been carted off to an ER, about half an hour earlier, with chest pains.

A short stay in the cacophony suggests why. If you had to spend your days in that racket trying to tend to unhappy customers or peddle Apple’s wares to idle lookers, you, too, would have cardiac symptoms.

Shortly, the lone tech behind the Genius Bar decides the MacBook needs to be sent away to TechLand, therein to be evaluated and, with any luck, fixed. This is OK, sort of, because I still have the old iMac to work on. Not that sitting in front of a desk on a hard chair for hour on hour on hour is a good thing. It leaves me with every joint in my body hurting. But at least I’ll be able to make a little progress on the assignments at hand.

Now I leave the Apple store and make my way, with some annoyance, through the complicated maze that is Scottsdale Quarter. Get on the elevator and go down to level B1 West, where my car was parked. In a disabled parking space a few steps from said elevator.

Or was it?

I search all over and cannot find the Venza. Set off the key fob’s panic button: nothing.

Back on the elevator: down to level B2 west.

Same story: no fuckin’ sign of my car! I search and search but cannot find the car.

Now I figure I need to call a cop or security guard to help out. Cop? Not so much: the cell phone is in the missing car.

I go back upstairs and enter a couple of business establishments, asking if they can call up a security guard. The flunkies there haven’t a clue!

Go back downstairs and search again. Not a chance.

Back up to the main level. Find an employee: can you call a security guard or cop to help me look for my car? He hasn’t a clue. He points me to another guy. That guy pretends he doesn’t speak English, fuckyouverymuch.

Now I’m beginning to panic, because I do NOT know what I’m going to do. Has my car been stolen? Seems unlikely. But I know I parked it under a sign that said B1 West. And it ain’t there.

Finally I ascend once more to the ground level, walk around the vast building, and enter through the driveway (“no pedestrians”), and start walking. I find Level B1 East. Keep walking the maze. Eventually I arrive at a sign saying “Level B1 West,” but don’t see my car. I start walking further down into the depths of Hell when out of the corner of my eye I spot the damned Venza: on the other side of the elevators from where I was searching. Not before, we might add, quite the little panic attack.

Never been so happy to drive away from a place in my life.

I made my escape through the west side of Kierland Commons, past block on block of excruciatingly pricey Soviet-style, perfectly ghastly-looking block apartments. Horrible-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places. Very expensive horrible, ghastly-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places.

You know… I think of myself of fairly ritzy-titsy. North Central Phoenix, where I’ve dwelt since 19-and-aught-67, is what would be called, in a venue such as San Francisco, “Old Money.” And let’s face it: despite my protestations of penury here at the ironically titled Funny about Money, I am, yes, damn near rich as Croesus.

But as for the amazingly, hideously dystopic environs of Scottsdale’s astonishingly ugly Kierland Commons district? I am SO FAR out of my league in that place! Dear God. I hear Yarnell a-callin’….

It’s so harshly dystopic that it actually makes dreary, dumpy Sun City look good. It certainly makes Prescott look very fine, indeed.

Lemme tellya: if I were a young woman today, you couldn’t pay me — not in the currencies of love nor money — to bring a child into this land of ours. To bring an infant into the godawful world we live in today would be a form of child abuse. It should be actionable.

Image: By Cygnusloop99 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7863726

One thing after another…

by

Man! Has it ever been a busy few days! Where to start?

Dog Busting, Friend Busting, Weekend Busting

My good friends KJG and VickyC have been machinating a weekend junket to Payson, whither KJG and Mr. KJG recently moved. We were hugely looking forward to seeing the G’s in their new home, a Very Big Deal indeed.

Between the time I left  yesterday morning to drop Ruby the Corgi off at my son’s house for the day and the time I arrived at VickyC’s house in a historic downtown neighborhood, KJG had called, reached VickyC, and said the plans were off.

Mr. KJG had taken their beautiful and endlessly beloved pet greyhound for her morning walk, and while he was out a neighbor’s loose mutt attacked them. The greyhound was alarmingly injured. What the status is now, I do not know — no reply was forthcoming from my emailed inquiry, so in true Drama Queen mode, I assume the dog is dead or in extremis.

This greyhound is Mr. KJG’s baby. They both really love that hound. Should it be permanently hurt or dead, then that is a major tragedy in their household.*

The thing is, rural veterinaries are often not equipped to cope with this kind of emergency. When Charley had his self-induced heatstroke while on the road with M’hijito, the vet up in Nowhereseville said that if the dog was to survive at all — which he did not think would happen — he would have to be transported to a 24-hour emergency vet in the Valley. Additionally, greyhounds are not like normal dogs. One of their eccentricities is that they cannot tolerate the anaesthesia normally used in veterinary practices — they require a special anaesthetic, and they require a vet who a) knows this (good luck with that!), b) who has the stuff in stock, and c) knows how to use it. So you pretty much have to have already established a relationship with a vet before anything happens to such a dog. They’ve been there plenty of time to have done so, but I’m sure this esisode was not a grand way to launch the weekend.

Meanwhile, a new bishop for the diocese was consecrated. It was quite a chivaree and one that I wanted to attend and to sing at. However, my friends and I had made these plans many weeks ago, and trying to get three busy schedules to coordinate is quite a challenge. So I didn’t feel I could duck out of it…

*Some hours later: We’re told the dog is patched up and will be OK. Good news!

Planning for Good Works

VickyC and I punted by going to breakfast, then briefly browsing some antique stores, and plotting some schemes for volunteer work. She is a graduate of the Valley Leadership program that trains young executives, and so has all sorts of contacts and projects.

After many years at her current job with a regional water supplier, she recently applied for a position with a national nonprofit for which my ex- once served as state president and then as a national board member. Naturally, I was very interested in this development and suggested that I’d like to volunteer, assuming all his old cronies have now moved on. That appears to be the case, and so if she gets the job maybe I can sign back on.

Meanwhile, her employer encourages people to participate in community work, and so she already is much engaged. Among of her interests are the de-privatization of our prison system and initiatives to rehabilitate offenders back into society so they do not end up going back to jail. One of the groups she works with is looking for volunteers, so she may introduce me to those folks.

Sometimes I think it’s time to quit the editorial business — just shut it down, rather than continue wrestling with getting paid and ponying up cash to have the taxes done. WonderAccountant has already suggested we de-incorporate it, and we’re about to send in the paperwork to convert it to an LLC. This would much reduce the costs of tax preparation, and also much de-complicate the work she does for me and the bidness. But…given what I’m paid, I do wonder why I even bother: wouldn’t it be better to do something that helps folks for free?

Debugging

All the edible contents of the pantry have been sitting in the freezer for a good three days now. That’s twice as long as is supposedly needed to kill off any infant moths and their eggs. Yay!

That cabinet is now mightily cleaned and very tidy. So today I retrieved the food and packed it back onto the shelves. Very nifty.

I’m almost certain that this infestation came from the dog kibble, an elegant variety of which I buy at an expensive gourmet grocery store. This stuff, I use as doggy treats and to spike the corgi’s custom-made chow. Although I threw out a bunch of aging products, the kibble was really the only thing that clearly was occupied.

WhatEVER. All the pantry goods are now secured inside jars with tight lids, even the pasta. That should discourage any further depredations. And it sure makes the shelves nice and neat.

🙂

Mattress Gambit

So I finally gave up and went to a MattressFirm outlet, the one next door to the Whole Foods at Town and Country. The general over-pricedness of this shopping center — well, with the exception of the Trader Joe’s, the upscale thrift store, and the Nordstrom’s Rack — does not inspire confidence. However, I did find a very comfortable inner-spring mattress, exactly what I had in mind, for well under a thousand dollars.

Can you imagine: $1,300 to $1,500+ for mattress from Penney’s????? Next door to the Costco in one of the grungiest shopping centers in the city???? A store that employs, far as anyone can tell, exactly ZERO sales people? Give. Me. A. Break.

This prize is supposed to be delivered tomorrow, and they will cart off the huge, unmoveable clunker that’s been occupying space in the bedroom for the past fifteen years.

Briefly, I considered having the delivery guys just tote it into the former TV room, which just now serves no purpose. A bed in there would turn it into a guest bedroom, eh?

But really, the room is too small for a queen-sized mattress. I’d have to buy some sort of platform for the thing or else just set it on the floor, neither of which I wanna do. Other furniture in there would have to go. And given that no one ever stays here overnight, the whole idea looked like a great deal more trouble than it’s worth. Really, it would make more sense to get an Ikea bed platform and toss a twin-size Tuft and Needle pad on it. Or a futon. So…

Vacuum Cleaner Fiasco

Now that did turn into a fiasco, when in a fit of frustration and exhaustion I abandoned the supposedly unfixable Shark vacuum at the 35th Avenue Sew’n’Vac, an outfit that in the past has cheerfully repaired the things.

Apparently staff there outright lied when they said parts could not be purchased (oddly, they’re readily available on Amazon) and the machines cannot be opened to work on them (oddly, Amazon customers report all kinds of repairs having been done on their older models).

By leaving the machine there and asking them to throw it out so I didn’t have to tote it home and figure out how to dispose of it, I essentially let the store steal it. And…they have in the past sold second-hand vacuums.

But…I have another old Shark vacuum, which runs fine but is just old and tired. I use it to vacuum the car and pick up the occasional mess of broken glass. After I realized that yea, verily, parts are easy to order and others report no problem with repair jobs, I called another vacuum repair store. The guy who answered said they could clean and refurbish that vacuum.

Since I truly hate the new Shark I bought at Costco the other day — it’s swiveling suction head threatens to yank your shoulder out of joint — I’m thinking I’ll have this other repair guy fix up the old one and then return the $150 number to Costco. So that will put a bundle of cash back in my checking account and relieve me, temporarily, of yet another source of annoyance.

Pool Fiasco

The newly (expensively) refurbished pool pump doesn’t seem to be working. Just now I’m too tired to be mad as a cat about that…but I surely should be. Yesterday I spent half the afternoon cleaning up the algae infestation that resulted from sending the damn pump to the shop for a week or ten days. WHAT a mess, and what a project!

The vacuum just simply does not run when plugged into the (expensive) new inlet on the side of the pool: hangs up on the accursed new hair-resistant drain covers and stops dead. And it is sucking air, causing the pump to cavitate.

Jayzuz.

So it’s now plugged into the strainer basket inlet. Again. This required reattaching three lengths of plastic hose. Still sucks air, still cavitates but now it runs like a bustard.

I’m thinking it’s possible one or more lengths of that hose is leaking. A couple of them are pretty old. But that stuff is ridiculously expensive . I really, truly do NOT want to go out and buy half a dozen lengths of it. They do have pool vacuum hoses at Amazon, but reviewers seem to hate them, and they come in 30- or 40-foot lengths. The shorter lengths — four or five feet — are preferable because you don’t have to replace the entire pricey length if one crack shows up, and because they’re easier to store.

At any rate, I’m getting very, very tired of paying Swimming Pool Service & Repair to get the damn job done right. They soak me for a service call every time they come over here to do something that should have been done as part of the refurbishing job.

The newly purchased hose bonnet gadget — used for picking up large debris that could damage Harvey the Hayward Pool cleaner — proved to be exceptionally annoying. The maker has added a new blandishment: lengths of nylon brush around the circumference. This stuff a) does not play well with the coarse new Pebble-sheen surface and b) pushes the debris out of the way instead of letting the device suck it up into the bonnet.

This afternoon I realized I could take a flat-head screwdriver to the frame and prize the stupid brushes out. By then Harvey had sucked up most of the BBs that had blown out of the damned palm trees into the pool, so haven’t yet tried to see how this “improvement” works. But, dammit, I see that I can get the old-fashioned no-cutesy-brush version from Amazon, for a lot less than I paid at Leslie’s. So I may try to snap those things back in, return it to Leslie’s, and order one that’s not so extortionately priced.

Doggy-Walk Fail

On the way back into the ’Hood from church, what should come galloping across the road but the BIGGEST, HEALTHIEST, HUSKIEST coyote I’ve ever seen in my life. He was gorgeous — in great health, full coat, and at least as big as a German shepherd. And on a dead run, presumably streaking away from something that spooked him.

One of the little girls on the corner of the road that leads toward La Maya and La Bethulia’s house started to putter after him on her bicycle. No grown-up being in evidence, I pulled a U-ie and cruised down the street after him. Didn’t see him in the alley, though that’s the most likely place for a coyote to take shelter. Stopped by La M’s neighbor’s house, where the family was puttering in the front yard, and told them to keep an eye out for the coyote-hunting kidlet. They hadn’t seen him come by, so he presumably shot up the alleyway.

At any rate, it’s now after dark. Ruby the Corgi has not had her daily doggy-walk, but with that big fella in the offing, I think I’d just as soon not take her out in prime coyote-prowling hours. So…she’ll be unhappy with me all evening.

So. Yeah:

One damfool thing after another!

Life in Dystopia

by

Today I needed to accomplish three fairly minor errands:

  • Take the clogged-up vacuum cleaner to the repair shop to have it cleaned out;
  • Go to the post office and mail tax returns, return receipt requested;
  • Buy a new mattress to replace my 15-year-old number, which is sagging on both sides.

How easy does that sound, eh? None of these places is very far away. It should take maybe an hour, an hour and a half at the outside, to accomplish these small chores.

And how much time did it take?

Three hours of miserable, frustrating running around. I left around 11 a.m. and got back at almost 2 p.m.

First, to the post office, the one over by the freeway on the other side of Conduit of Blight Blvd. There I found a packed parking lot and a line extending to the back of the big reception area and curving along the wall.

Okayyyyy. Got better things to do than stand around with a sore back watching postal employees move as though they were swimming through molasses. Turn around, walk back out, climb in the car. Back out of the space, with  no one coming. A moron down the aisle can’t stand it, so floors the gas pedal and shoots around behind me. Fortunately I’m watching and so see the bastard coming. He misses me.

Schlep across the freeway and through a depressing slum, therein to visit the fabric store/vacuum cleaner repair store. Go to the front counter, where I ask about vacuum repair. (The place is primarily a fabric store for quilters.) Am told to go to the back of the (very large) store.

Walk to the back of the store. They tell me to go to the front counter.

Walk to the front counter. There I’m told they don’t repair Shark vacuums because they can’t get the parts. “That’s why they’re so cheap,” says the broad behind the counter. If you think I’m going to replace this thing with one of those Mieles you folks are peddling, you are FREAKING NUTS. They’re evidently lying, because at Amazon customers remark on having this, that, or the other item repaired on their Sharks, and Amazon sells Shark parts. But if the only repair shop in town refuses to fix it, my sole alternative is to buy a new one, which probably wouldn’t cost much more than paying those clowns to fix it. Ask them if they’ll toss the thing, and they say sure. I figure they’ll fix it and resell it, but WTF.

Now for another try at the post office.

There’s another PO near the ’hood, about the same distance from the Funny Farm as the one over in the blight by the freeway. This one is usually less busy; it’s better staffed, and the regulars there seem to be more competent than the bunch over by the freeway. So, traipse north of Gangbanger’s Way into Sunnyslope, park a good long distance from the door, and without much hope, trudge into the building.

And yup: the line there is even longer! People are backed all the way up to the door, a good 20 customers standing there looking bored and annoyed.

Fuck.

Drive down to the Albertson’s shopping center. There one can find a Matchbox Car store that has a postal counter.

“Can you send these envelopes return receipt requested?”

“Sure. Fill out these forms.”

No line. Zero waiting. Nil aggravation. Why didn’t I think of this at the outset? I must be getting senile.

Head on down to the Target, thereinat to buy a new Shark. To get there, I have to navigate endless signals around the accursed train tracks, playing touch-tag with the Bum Express lightrail all the way down to the Target/Walmart/Costco shopping center.

This Shark-purchasing task used to be easy. Not so anymore!

First time I bought a Shark at the Target, they had one (1) model. No hassle. Next time, they had two (yes, just 2). Not much of a hassle there, either. But today? They had a freaking can-can line of Shark vacuum cleaners! What exactly were the differences among these contraptions is unclear. Which is what and why? I decide to go home and look them up on Amazon, where I can at least see the rants and raves of random consumers.

Pick up a bag of tennis balls for the dog, walk to the front of the store, where the longest wall in the whole huge building is lined with checkout stands…most of them closed. Two self-serve stands way down on the south end and one self-serve stand way over on the north end are open…and vacant. Two (2) cash registers staffed by humans are serving lines of customers backed halfway to the cosmetics department.

Well, I figure, if I have to order from Amazon, I might as well buy the tennis balls there. Out the door.

On the way to the car, I reflect that Costco, which is right next door in an adjacent parking lot, vets its products pretty well. They have in the past carried Shark vacuums. If they have one, it’s probably the one their buyer thinks is the best.

Okay. Move the car a quarter-mile, traipse into the store, and track down the vacuums.

Yea verily, they do have Shark: only two models, each well rated at Amazon. I buy the one that looks most similar to the one I just tossed. A hundred sixty dollah!

Cheap, eh?

Peruse the mattresses. See a couple that will do the job nicely. Confirm that you can’t buy them there and arrange for delivery: you have to go online to give them your money and beg them to deliver the thing.

Having been told this before, I’ve watched for mattress stores as I’ve been trudging around the city. These seem to have been put out of business by Tuft & Needle, a popular mail-order product that has two stores in more affluent parts of the Valley.

Tuft & Needle, I’m sure, is wonderful. But their mattresses are made of foam. I’ve never cared for foam mattresses. Sorry, I may be retrograde (again), but I want an innerspring mattress, dammit! Besides, even if their mattresses are miracles from heaven, they don’t deliver and cart off the old stuff. The mattress I’ve got is so heavy I can’t even rotate it by myself, to say nothing of hauling it out to the alley.

No mattress companies. The department stores that used to carry mattresses have closed. WTF?

So I give up and figure I’ll have to order a Sealy or something from Costco’s online site. And lemme tellya…I really, truly, do NOT want to buy a mattress sight unseen.

There’s a Penney’s next door to that Costco, but the area is so downscale I think I’d do better to schlep to the Penney’s in Paradise Valley, or go over to the Whole Foods shopping center in the Biltmore area to see if the mattress store that used to be there is still holding forth. Choices are likely to be better in either of those garden spots.

Annoying.

Think of that: three hours to mail two envelopes and buy a (relatively) cheap vacuum cleaner.

The other day I was chatting with a friend about the dystopic nature of life in Our America. I think this kind of experience is emblematic of that dystopia.

Consider: in the name of political correctness, globalism, and corporate greed, what do we have?

  • Washers that do not wash clothes
  • Dishwashers that do not wash dishes
  • Wall ovens that burn themselves out if you set them to “broil,” to say nothing of trying to use the self-clean feature
  • Cheap foam mattresses sold to us as the be-all and end-all of sleeping luxury
  • Water-saving toilets that have to be flushed three times each time you use them — assuming they’ll flush at all
  • Water spigots that dispense water at a slow drizzle
  • Water heaters that cost $800
  • Steak that even fairly affluent Americans cannot afford
  • Farm-raised fish full of filth and chemicals
  • A steady diet of unhealthy, processed food
  • Cars that cost three times as much as your first home cost
  • Weed killers that do not kill weeds
  • Medications that promote drug addiction
  • Doctors whose goal is to get you hooked on medications of all varieties
  • Homeless drug addicts swarming the street corners and living in our alleys and yards
  • Prisons run by corporations that don’t even provide basic healthcare for the hordes of minor offenders warehoused there
  • Schools like prisons, where children are regularly terrorized in bullet-dodging drills
  • A plague of untreated mental illness (hence the need to teach children to dodge bullets)
  • Costs for basics — like cars and homes — that are now so high that most mothers have to work, leaving the kids in day-care: no option there
  • Cameras and microphones spying on us at every corner
  • Computers that record our every move, from purchases of bug spray online to what TV shows we watch
  • Jobs that do not pay a living wage
  • Decently paying blue-collar jobs sent off-shore
  • Junk merchandise, sold at upscale prices, shipped back into the country, made by underpaid workers in those off-shored jobs
  • Desperate, beleaguered citizens who elect a batsh!t corrupt administration in a mistaken effort to bring back the good old days…which really were better than what we have now, objectively speaking

Lovely, isn’t it?

We live in a dystopia. What marks that dystopia is exactly what my father used to worry about and, in his most pessimistic moments, would predict was gonna happen: Our standard of living is slipping.

He believed that America, simply by its top-heavy nature, risked sliding back into Third-World conditions. This, he feared, would happen for political and economic reasons. And he knew whereof he spoke, when it came to Third-World conditions. As a young pup, one of his first jobs was delivering milk in a horse-drawn wagon. He escaped Texas and went to sea, and then along came the Great Depression — when he and my mother passed ten days eating nothing but oranges and pancakes. And he spent most of his life sailing to Third-World countries, plus for 10 years we lived in a country that was a relic of the Middle Ages.

I used to think, when he’d go on about this subject, that it was just his right-wing craziness speaking. But he was right. 

It’s highly unlikely he would have voted for Donald Trump, and neither would my mother — they recognized corruption and lies in action. But the woman he married after my mother died surely would have — she shared his thinking about the inexorable downward slide of America, but in addition she was very stupid.

Still, my guess is he’d have cheerfully voted for Mike Pence. In a heartbeat. And it’s no wonder, when you look at what has happened and continues to happen to the lives of working-class Americans.

And in the lives of all of us.

Paypal: STAY AWAY from Paypal!

by

Wow, what a freaking nightmare with PayPal! Naturally they choose to dump on me while I’m sick as a dog with the flu and can barely find my way to the bathroom, much less figure out how to deal with the mess they’ve created. Truly, I thought for awhile I was going to have to close The Copyeditor’s Desk down, because Paypal seems to have effectively made it impossible for my clients in China to pay. And…around 85% to 90% of my editorial work comes from Chinese academics and scientists.

Look: there are alternatives to Paypal. I’ll explain what they are in a minute. But first, get a load of this tale…

So the Kid and I had a Paypal account that originally had both our credit union accounts linked to it. Because she’s techie and is married to a tech professional, she set it up. So, the admin on account showed as her. This was fine. When I signed in they thought I was her, and…so it goes.

Then one day she got a phishing email that looked alarmingly persuasive. Fortunately, before acting on it, she contacted me and asked if I thought it was real. I said I thought it was a scam. Couple hours later her husband (then fiancé) sees the thing and has a shit-fit. He believes it’s an aggressive attempt to hack in and tells her to remove her bank account from PayPal. This, she does forthwith.

So, now when her clients pay her, I have to download their payment into my checking account and then snail-mail her a check in the correct amount. This is a mild nuisance, but not that big a deal. I keep the PayPal account open because I don’t know of any other way for my Chinese (and Indian, and German, and Japanese…) customers to remit payment to me. In the civilized world, they don’t have backward instruments like checking accounts.

Welp, a few months ago, the Kid had an idea I wish I’d had when I was her age…or maybe half her age. She decided that instead of getting the PhD one of these days, she should go back and get a second master’s degree: a professional degree in a field capable of providing her a decently paying job. The university where she works offers free graduate-school tuition as a perk for full-time faculty, which she happens to be.

Well of course it’s a brilliant idea. She is now fully engaged in this project — she wants to become a psychological counselor, which is perfect for her given her experience, personality, and interests.

Meanwhile, a couple weeks ago, Paypal sends us a notice to the effect that we must jump through a new set of hoops, and if we don’t they will discontinue our account. She suggests — exactly what I was thinking myself — that we should close down that account and then open a new one with only my name on it, thereby getting the thing and whatever hacking risks appertain thereunto out of her hair.

So that is what we do.

I set up a new account, and it looks like it’s going to work. Forthwith I bill a client, who forthwith sends money. And….I am told I cannot have the money.

WTF? Upon inquiry, I am told the customer must state that they’ve received the product to release the payment to me.

Huh? This is a new one on me. No such rule applied to the other account.

Okay…. I contact the client and tell her she needs to go back in to PayPal and acknowledge she received the job and accepts it. She attempts to do this, but it doesn’t work. We cannot dislodge her payment. The option to state that you received the thing you’re buying disappears.

Back to PayPal: The customer disservice rep is amazingly unhelpful, even hostile. I say I sell a service, not a product, and so there’s no way the client can prove she or he has received an object. Well, I’m told, then the person has to testify that they received a service. Ms. Disservice pastes some boilerplate instructions, copied from PP’s website, into the chat window, screwyouverymuch.

At this point I begin to realize that if PayPal will not forward payment from this client, it won’t forward payment from any of my clients. This means fuckin’ Paypal is about to put me out of business!

By now, I’m good and sick with the cold or flu or whatever it is and am in no condition to tear my hair.

That notwithstanding, I look into things and find there are several alternatives.

Probably the best short-term solution — and the easiest for me — is to have the client in China wire payment direct from their bank account to mine.

Except I don’t have a bank account. I have a credit union account. And my credit union is too small to qualify for a SWIFT number. You have to have a SWIFT number to receive money by wire from overseas.

Ducky.

So I traipse down to the midtown Bank of America and open a new business account. This of course requires hoop-jump after hoop-jump after hoop-jump. It’s quite a time-consuming exercise, made all the more difficult by the facts that my ears are so stuffed up I can’t hear and my nose is so stuffed up I can’t breathe and not being able to breathe means I can barely think. But finally all this gets done and I come away with fistfuls of paperwork and…and…

Yes…and now I have to explain to a passel of rocket-powered Chinese scientists that they must physically go to their local bank in China and, following a complicated set of steps replete with a complicated wad of numbers, wire the money to my bank account here. Charming. Won’t they just love that!

First off, I describe to the client whose payment I’ve just made Paypal return how to go about wiring the money to me. She becomes confused and, not understanding what on earth all this could possibly be about, simply re-sends payment through fuckin’ Paypal.

Ohhkay. Now I have to refund her payment a second time. When all I want to do is be sure they actually have sent her money back to her so I can CLOSE the damn Paypal account. Then I have to re-issue — again — a statement with the complicated instructions for how to remit payment by wire.

Will I get paid by the four clients who owe me money? I do not know. The Chinese government, in response to our asinine President’s stupid trade policies, has slapped a limit of $500/month on the amount its citizens can wire to the U.S. So if a client has a kid in college here in the U.S. to whom she’s sending money regularly — which is very likely with high-voltage academics — then she probably won’t be able to wire money to me. In any event, it will create a hassle for them: instead of clicking a few buttons on a computer, they will have to traipse to their bank and jump through a set of hoops there.

Will it put me out of business? Remains to be seen. So far no one has said they won’t do this. But…heh…I haven’t asked everyone.

Y’know, I’ve seen the endless litany of consumer complaints about Paypal. So can’t say I didn’t know they could turn on you. But up until now, all my experiences have been simple, straightforward, and clean. There’s a number you can call and reach a human being, which I did. She seemed to understand the issue, and she agreed to fix the problem. And then she did…nothing. No action was forthcoming from PayPal. Chatline people hang up on you when you repeat, for the 87 gerjillionth time, that you do not sell a product, you sell a service and your client has already certified that she received the service.

Clearly, Paypal is in business to hold onto people’s money. The longer they can keep a payment due to a customer in their coffers, the longer they can collect interest on those funds. Consider: if ten customers each have $100 in their various little accounts, that’s a thousand dollars. A hundred customers with $100 embargoed for whatever half-assed excuse Paypal can imagine would give them $10,000 with which to crank interest. A thousand such customers would provide $100,000, which would generate a substantial amount of interest. In Q4 2018, Paypal had 267 million accounts. So you can see the potential.

Paypal has persuaded US regulators and legislators that it’s not a bank, allowing it to get away with a whole slew of questionable shenanigans like this. And therein lies the reason you should NEVER do business with PayPal. PayPal is not your friend.

So how do you get your microbusiness or small business paid?

There are several alternatives. One is Stripe, a platform that allows you to accept a wide variety of credit cards at a very reasonable price. It’s active in Asia, Europe, and other venues. Stripe is extremely cool: it will issue an invoice to your client containing a link they can click on to charge up payment, easy as breathing. This would be my choice. Problem is, getting it up and running requires some very serious programming skills. They will advise, when you speak to a rep, that you should hire a developer. Okay. First, good luck finding such a person. Second, to hire someone to set this up would cost approximately the full amount of money that resides in The Copyeditor’s Desk’s checking account.

Another is Square, the one that allows a seller to swipe your card on a cute little doodad attached to a cell phone or an iPad. I do have a friend who knows how to work Square and probably can be bamboozled into helping install it. And I do have an iPad. But…oh, there’s always that damn but, isn’t there? But my iPad is very old and I very much doubt that current hardware and software will work with it. And once again: we’re looking at another wheelbarrow-load of techno-hassle that I do not especially welcome. Especially not when my head already hurts.

Transferwise allows you to make international money transfers for a reasonable fee, cheaper than Paypal. You do have to make a money transfer, which can be problematic in some circumstances.

If you don’t mind paying $25 a month, is said to be an effective platform for small businesses. It allows you to make transactions over a variety platforms, including ApplePay, PayPal, and several credit cards.

Intuit has a tool that integrates with Quickbooks and lets you accept ACH transfers. It also provides invoices and a Pay Now button for your website.

Western Union operates in most countries worldwide.

And you can arrange an international bank-to-bank wire transfer. To accomplish this, your client will need to have access to a bank that does wire transfers, and will need your name and address, your bank’s name, your bank account number, and your bank’s SWIFT number.

So, we’re going to try the wire transfer method. It remains to be seen whether this will work. If it doesn’t, two options remain: one is to try Square. The other is to close the business down.