Coffee heat rising

Angst

Plumbing Blues…Everything Blues

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RainDrop_on_rose_leafOh F!ck It. That’s about all I can say.

I give up on trying to go to the last art lesson. I give up on all of it.

You know, every single time I have the temerity to indulge myself with some little luxury like a month & a half of art lessons for $175, convened by a city museum in a beautiful historic house, every goddamn thing that can go wrong BREAKS AND FALLS ON MY HEAD!  It never, ever fails.

I was up in the air about going out there this morning, anyway. The damn city has closed 32nd Street, a big thoroughfare and one of the roads I take to get there. Last Thursday, just the city’s getting ready to shut it down jammed up Glendale Avenue for miles to the west. I had to make an eight- or ten-mile detour to get around that mess reach to my meeting in Scottsdale.

To get over to the Schemer gallery this morning, I’ll have to make my way through three neighborhoods to reach a north-south road that I can turn east on. Then drive all the way down to Missouri. Then east on Missouri, which will drop me in some of the worst traffic on Camelback right at the tail end of the rush hour. Then easterly, easterly, easterly, easterly through bitchy traffic. It’ll take about 40 minutes to get there — that’s a drive that should take 20 minutes.

And y’know what?

I don’t wanna.

My scheme to keep the water turned off at the frontyard standpipe, turning it on only when the irrigation system needs to run, did NOT work.

When I turned the two shut-off valves back on this morning, I got sprayed in the face with some kind of backwash: water had been building up under pressure in there and it came squirting out when the valves were opened.

Then the damn irrigation system  hung up on zone 3. So I had to turn on each zone manually…BUT…

Ah yes, but…

That allowed me to see that Gerardo was right when he said there’s another leak! He’d noticed a wet patch near one of the orange trees and said it looks like a pipe’s broken under there. But the water system had been running, and that tree is watered with a standing bubbler that floods the irrigation basin under it. I figured water had leaked out from under the river-rock dam I’d built around there.

Wrong.

Turning on the water this a.m. created another wet patch in that spot…and the water had yet to come on under the trees.

So that’s going to be another expensive fix.

Gerardo charges about $80 to $100 to dig up the piping, find the leak, pull out the low-grade PVC pipe Richard installed, and replace the rotted length with new PVC. Since I’m having to get it fixed about once a month now, I guess it’s time to replace the system or shut it down altogether.

If I shut down the irrigation system and leave it off — as I’ve done with the ovens that gave up the ghost (again) — I’ll have to drag hoses around the yard once a week in the winter and every day in the summer. This yard is almost a quarter of an acre… The alternative is to let all the plantings die. And of course…the yard is the main reason I live in this house.

It costs $4,000 to $10,000 (depending on who does it) to replace one of these systems front and back. It will entail digging up the landscaping and repairing all the damage where new trenches have to be dug. So…if Gerardo does the job? My guess would be $4,000 to $6,000.

So. Resurfacing the aging swimming pool this winter is now out of the question. So is putting any leftover savings into a Vanguard index fund. Every penny I’ve managed to pinch is going to go into paying the $750 or $800 overage from this month and then rebuilding the irrigation. That won’t leave anything to get my teeth fixed, BTW.

The pool is not an emergency. It will be OK for another year or two — won’t look great, but as far as I can tell there are no leaks in the gunite, so…it should hang in there.

The plumbing? That is an emergency.

OMG! A thrasher just caught a gigantic bug! At first I thought he’d nabbed one of those accursed paloverde beetles, but now I see it’s a carpenter bee, a funny and mostly harmless creature. That’s too bad…but something was wrong with the bee — it was already stressed, allowing the bird to catch it with hardly any effort.

Good bird! These birds do catch the accursed paloverde beetles (of which we seem to have a slight dearth this summer, lhudly sing huzzah) and, more to the point, they eat ants in gay abandon.

Well, that was a Moment of Nature interlude, entertaining enough in a morbid way. Maybe I won’t kill myself after all.

When I went to turn on the computer at 5 this morning, the better to respond to emails, emit a receipt to one of the Chinese scholars, and return copy and an invoice to another of those worthies, the damn thing was hotter than a two-dollar cookstove!

I’d left it plugged into the recharger…despite having noticed that thing was running pretty hot yesterday afternoon. It had recharged the battery 100%, but the whole lashup felt like it was ready to combust.

Shut down shut down shut down shut down shut down shut down force quit force quit force quit force quit SHUT DOWN DAMMIT!

Finally got the current versions of the really large files I’ve been working on saved to DropBox, shot off the correspondence to the Chinois, and managed to close all the open programs, shut down the computer, and set it on the cool floor tiles.

It seems to be OK for the nonce. But obviously, another expensive catastrophe is brewing there.

So I don’t know whether it’s the prospect of thousands of bucks going out the door for things that I do NOT want to spend money on, or whether it’s the endless confinement in the house through this hot, penurious summer, or whether it’s the fact that the art thing turned out to be kind of a bust because in my age I seem to have lost what little talent I had (at one time I actually could draw pretty well…but no more!), or whether maybe the melatonin stuff is doing something to me but damn it! I am so depressed. Sometimes I just don’t even see the point of hanging around. If it weren’t that I can’t imagine what to do with the dogs, I would be out the Cosmic door by now.

Guess I could just take them down to my son’s house and leave them there while he’s at work. Doesn’t seem like a very polite way to say good-bye, though.

Last night I cut the 5 mg melatonin tablet in two and swallowed the smallest part. It did seem to keep me asleep until almost 5 a.m. — close to seven hours. And I do feel less crazed than I did yesterday morning. But still: not very happy. I suspect the drug is affecting the mood.

There may be worse things than four-hour nights.

Image:
Acagastya. CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38313449

One of THOSE Days…

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Why does that happen? Have you ever noticed that some days dissolve, from the moment you roll out on the wrong side of the bed, into effing CHAOS?

You have done nothing to bring on the chaos. You’re just standing there, innocent as the new-blown snow, and the entire universe deconstructs itself around you.

Welp, I will say this: neither dog has barfed. Yet. That’s something. I guess.

5:15 a.m.: Ensconce self in front of computer, there to wake up by reading emails and Google News.

Exchange emails with honored friend, the Dean of American Scholarly Publishing, over papers left by Honored Client, who deceased a couple weeks ago. Discussion at his wake last night turned to what we might do with whatever notes we can find for the two books he was working on, and what to do with the two he’d already completed.

Dean has friend, a Pre-eminent Asian Historian and former director of GDU’s Asian Studies Center, visiting at her house in Massachusetts right this minute; last night I talked with his wife, who put in dibs on any projects that might occur.

Dean, whose IQ is approximately 250 points higher than mine, suggests that the Right Thing to Do is collect his papers, organize them intelligibly, and donate them to an archive. This indeed is the Right Thing to Do, though there would be precious little profit in it for moi. But that’s OK: I don’t want to make a profit on Honored Client’s literary estate. But neither do I want to spend hundreds of hours on an unpaid project.

Speaking of Asia, current Honored Chinese Mathematician is having a dickens of a time paying me through PayPal. That’s because he has the wrong email address for me. However, that appears not to be the only problem. I hassle around about this for awhile.

Message from most recent Honored Chinese Ph.D. Candidate arrives, explaining that his real issue may be that there’s a Paypal.com and a Paypal.cn, the latter for the Chinese mainland. She says he needs to use the .com incarnation, not the .cn version, and sends attachments explaining the matter in Chinese. She also emits instructions in (somewhat rocky) English.

6:00 a.m.: Stumbling into the kitchen, I realize it is, god help me, Monday. Feed dogs.

There’s enough dog food left to carry the pooches to Thursday morning, when a new month starts and with any luck I can start a new budget cycle that will not fucking bankrupt me.

But I have to give a presentation on Thursday morning, which I have not even begun to think about, and that meeting will let me out an hour before Costco opens. So either I come home and sit around until after 10 a.m. and then break up the morning driving down to Costco to buy dog meat, or I drive up to Paradise Valley Mall, which is obliquely on my way home from the meeting, and cool my heels for half an hour waiting for the damn place to open. Neither of these choices will be productive. But if the dogs are to eat, I will have no way around it.

Well. No. That’s wrong. I could buy another $13 roll of dog food at the Fry’s that is also obliquely on my way home. That will put off having to spend an hour making dog food to another day. That probably is what I’ll do.

Now I stagger into the kitchen to fix breakfast. Pull a fistful of silverplate out of the jar of soapy water where I’ve left the pieces to soak clean (because, as you’ll recall, thanks to the fine ecologically friendly detergent we have and the superb useless dishwasher, I can no longer wash my silver in the Bosch) and find that one of the forks has some sort of deposit on it.

I can’t get it off.

Traipse into the garage and dig out the silver polish. I can’t get it off.

I can chip a little of it off with a fingernail, indicating it’s a deposit, not a stain. I polish it with a little Barkeepers Helper. Naturally, this scratches up the surface.

Polish madly with silver polish. This hides the scouring powder scratches, but neither cleaner removes the deposit. I give up.

Pour hot water into the French Press to make coffee.

Continuing to pick up the mess, I carry the breadmaker out to the trash barrel to brush the dried-off dough into the garbage. Something goes “clunk” and I realize…ohhh shit!!!!!!! I didn’t remove the little stir-paddle thing that kneads the damn dough in the damn breadmaker.

Trudge back in the house. Get flashlight. Trudge back out.  Peer down into giant trash barrel. Try to spot the paddle. Can’t see it.

Carry the flashlight back into the house. Trudge back out. Haul the trash barrel out to the driveway, where I can see its contents in the sunlight. Tip it over. Climb inside and start digging through trash. The paddle is not readily in evidence.

Sit on the concrete next to the barrel and drag every. single. fucking. piece. of. trash out of the barrel, inspect it, shake it out, set it aside.

No paddle. Anywhere. Inspect every. single. fucking. piece. of. trash, one piece at a time, while tossing each piece back in the barrel.

Right the barrel, drag it back into the garage. Swear up a storm.

Stalk into the kitchen and spot the paddle where I left it, on the edge of the kitchen sink.

The coffee is getting cold.

6:58 a.m. I go outside to turn the on the water valves that feed the irrigation system — this will be the New Normal, now that the system’s pipes are rotting away underground. The only way to stop any leaks is to shut off the water at the standpipe.

By now the timer has come on. The system clicks in, but I’m not sure it’s starting on Zone 1. WTF. I decide to forget that and just water anything that gets missed manually.

Slice open a peach. It’s spoiled. It’s the last peach in the house. Fortunately, though, a few bananas remain. Slice up a banana, dump a handful of walnuts over it, and top with heavy cream.

The walnuts are stale. Should know better than to buy lifetime supplies of walnuts from Costco.

In the middle of all this, SDXB calls on the phone, requiring me to walk back and forth between the kitchen and the back of the house to change notations on the wall calendar in my office. My temper is extremely short but I manage not to go off on him when I learn that he’s interrupting the morning’s hassles to cancel next Saturday’s planned junket because it’s the first day of dove season. I fail to invite myself along, though if I’d had any sense, I would’ve, because a little violence would go a long way to let off the impacted steam.

7:15 or so. Take breakfast, such as it is, out to the side deck and notice the new hose timer is leaking as merrily as the old, corroded one was. No wonder I get $240 water bills.

Chew on a stale piece of bread. It makes my teeth hurt. Reminded that I will need not one but two crowns on the left side. This will run upwards of $3,000, since one of the painful teeth has had three unsuccessful root canals and now will need actual surgery, not just some dentist’s office visit. God only knows what that will cost. They say if you can get an M.D. to do the work, you can get Medicare to cover it. But I’ll believe that when I see it!

If I have to pony up three to five grand (or more) on my teeth and another grand to cover this August’s unplanned extravaganzas, I am not going to have $6,000 to replaster the pool this winter. So…that project will have to wait for some other year.

9:25 a.m. MacBook’s battery has run out of juice, the second time this morning. It’s probably wearing out. The whole machine is wearing out. Its cable for the backup hard drive keeps emitting “disconnected” messages when it has not disconnected, indicating that before long one of these phantom disconnects will cause the external hard drive to corrupt and lose ALL the back-up data.

Speaking of multi-thousand-dollar expenditures…I hope to god the computer will last until the new MacBooks come out and I can get the current version on sale.

9:45 a.m. I’ve had it. I’m going back to bed.

 

 

Day’s end…at last…almost

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Oh, god…have i ever been this tired?

God to Puling Human: Well. Yes. Of course you have. What are you going on about?

Up at 4:30. Write today’s rant. Post it on the one Facebook writers’ group I’ve found that seems to be pretty darned good. Fiddle with the pool. Shower in the backyard hose, wash chlorine out of hair. Feed dogs. Bolt down breakfast.

Paint face. Throw on clothes. Put up damp hair. Fly out the door to Scottsdale. Sit through meeting.

Excused from buying new picture frame by son, who found one in his garage to replace the one that broke when it fell off the wall. Convenient, because it means I don’t have to hang around Paradise Valley after the meeting until Aaron Bros opens at 10 a.m.

Stop at Sprouts to buy a couple of grocery items on the way home. Starved: cook up some pasta as a snack.

La Maya invites me over to talk, lunch, and paint (or, in my case, draw).  Get a little work done here and then head to her place. Have incredible RM food (RM: that would the Real Mexican) for lunch, beside self with joy. Discuss life, the universe, and all that, “all that” including politics, academia, business, and art.

She suggests that where marketing is concerned, the better part of valor is face-to-face contact, NOT social media. Together we dream up the idea that I should approach Changing Hands, the only independent bookstore that still thrives in the Valley, and offer to do a workshop (they throw these things all the time) on some aspect of self-publishing. In the act, I peddle my wares to the attendees.

We also propose that I should compile another bookoid, to be produced in PoD format and distributed at these proposed shindigs, that would be filled with tips for writers and self-publishers. I realize I already have enough material to generate such a creature. Easily.

Furthermore, we consider the possibility that I should offer a service course along the same lines for one of the local junior colleges. This, she suggests, would create a small market for all the non-naughty bookoids (we think the naughty ones had better not be suggested to the minions of the local community college district): chances are good that most of the students would buy the things, especially if they could be offered at a deep discount for a week or two during the courselet’s duration.

This, I think, is an exceptionally good idea. Especially if one of the bookoids is the proposed compendium of writing tips. 🙂

Back at the Funny Farm, now I sift through the entire body of Plain & Simple Press posts, dating back to early 20 and ought-14. Come up with 48,950 words.

Not bad. I’ll need about 80,000 words, so am almost 5/8 of the way there. Some passages can be expanded upon — for example, a live link to some article somewhere else can be replaced with a precis of the article. An introduction will add about 1,500 or 2 ,000 words. And I have in print an entire textbook of writing advice, from which I intend to self-plagiarize liberally.

If Melania can rip off the First Lady, I surely can rip off myself.

Next, I open an email from Amazon, responding to my demand to know why TF the 99-cent sale of the six books I put up for countdown sales didn’t work. Amazon’s factotum informs me that the countdown sale is in effect: it was set to start at 3:00 p.m.

Ohhhkaaayyy… I check a couple of the books and find that indeed by then they are showing as available for 99 cents.

But on reflection, I’m pretty sure that even though these old eyes need a pair of glasses to read a damned computer screen accurately, and even though a 3 looks sort of like an 8, I still can tell the difference between a 3 and an 8 and between a letter a and a letter p. No problem. The difference is sterling clear. I do not believe for one effing minute that I entered 3 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. SIX GODDAMN TIMES. But whatever. It looks like the sale is now online, even though I’ve lost the advantage of making it available for 99 cents on the entire first day of the goddamn sale.

Just about to throw it in when a message comes over from Jackie: How come the cookbook is still selling for $9.99?

Shee-ut! Damned if it ain’t.

I open the Amazon factotum’s email by way of sending another annoyed inquiry when I discover that down near the bottom, well below the fold, she claims I never set up the 30 Pounds / 4 Months book for the Countdown Sale.

That, alas, is flat out not so.

The 30# book was the first one I set up. I remember it well because the annoyance factor was so high. After I screwed around with that, figuring out how to operate the software to create the sale, I moved on to Cabin Fever and set up all five of the naughty books. Then, I posted my ads on Twitter and several Facebook sites, merrily crowing that the books would go on sale on June 21.

Later, when I got a notice from Kindle reminding me that I’d made all these arrangements, I discovered that the sales were scheduled for JULY 21, not June 21.

Re-entering the website and navigating back to the place to set things up, I found to my amazement that the drop-down month calendar where you have to select the start day was a JULY calendar, not June — a bit of a surprise, since I did this on June 10, and so naively assumed the calendar they shoved in my face to be the June calendar.

Experimentation showed there was no choice of any other month: it was July or nothing. So I had to go back into each of the books I’d already set up, to confirm that in fact the date Amazon had arrogated was July 21, not the June 21 I believed I was selecting.

I think I would have noticed if I hadn’t set up a sale for the 30# book. If I’d opened 30# on the “Bookshelf,” which I most certainly would have done — first, since that’s the one I expected to make money and that’s also the only one for which an inane “countdown” sale can work effectively — I would have noticed if I’d never set up the sale.

Then I had to go back to each of the two ads, change the dates in PowerPoint, convert to PDF, convert to TIF, crop the TIF, resize the TIF, convert to JPEG, and repost all the ads I’d put everywhere on the goddamn social media. This annoyance was also something I would have noticed.

Really, dealing with Amazon is the sh!ts. Some damnfool thing happens EVERY TIME you try to do something. There’s always some complication, some unnecessary hassle, some mindless pointless restriction that makes your life difficult, SOMETHING. And every, single, goddamn time you respond to one of these by trying to do a workaround, that screws you up even worse!

Not ONE thing that I’ve attempted on Amazon, from trying to create a Goodreads Author Page to trying to establish a pseudonym for Roberta Stuart, has worked without some kind of headache or hassle. NOTHING is simple at Amazon. NOTHING works in any sensible way.

If Bernie would please bring back the antitrust laws, I personally would lead a coup* to clean out all the airheaded Republicans and Democrats and install the man as king.
_________

*Dude, little CIA factotum: it’s a joke.

Brexit…

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Holy sh!t.

Y’know what really worries me about this?  If the Brits could do something that stupid and self-destructive under a populist, xenophobic impetus, so can we. In the xenophobia department, our racism “trumps” theirs, any day.

We could end up with Trump in the White House. All of a sudden, it doesn’t look at all unthinkable.

Hope you had your assets positioned for this eventuality. I know my guys have moved out of some stocks into bonds…but maybe too little, too late.

Conversation at this morning’s business networking breakfast suggested (hopefully?) that US markets may benefit because money will move out of Britain, much of it in our direction. That remains to be seen, IMHO.

News of the Day

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As a long-time news junkie, I read the news of the day several times a day, thanks to the handy-dandy Internet and a long string of links to favorite suppliers. Lately, though, the daily news makes me feel like I’m watching a spider chewing up its prey. Half the time it’s not informative; it’s not helpful: it’s just stress-inducing.

We have the late gorilla episode, for example: the one where the four-year-old says “MOMMY, I’m gonna go swim in the pool inside the gorilla exhibit.” She says “No, you’re not,” and turns her attention to her cell phone and the four or five other children present. Result: rare lowland gorilla male is executed; child is rescued with minimal injuries (only, as far as anyone can tell, by the grace of God and the skill of a sharp-shooter).

Reading the comments on this story is enough to curdle your stomach. Some armchair pundits think the zoo should be put out of business — matter of fact, all zoos should be put out of business. Other self-righteous members of the peanut gallery think the mother should be prosecuted. Some of the uglier commenters believe the child should have been left to die, given that lowland gorillas are teetering on the verge of extinction and human children are a dime a dozen.

F’r chrissake. That was a CHILD trapped with a wild animal. No matter how magnificent and endangered the animal, we humans owe our first allegiance to humans. And no, it does not matter whether the child’s mother needs an IQ transplant.

Then we have Stephen Hawking on the Trump Horror Show. That a lying, clownish demagogue could achieve nomination by one of country’s two major parties suggests something is wrong with our political system; if he gets into the White House, it will prove our system is broken. While I’m not crazy about Clinton, I fear that an avowed socialist couldn’t win against Pluto the Dog, much less against a guy who riles up all the long-standing resentments against the liberal agenda…some of which are justified: the bureaucratic bullshit, the tangled and patently unfair tax system, the dictatorial political correctness, the death of the middle class…all valid complaints.

If the conservatives run a third-party candidate, they’ll split the Republican vote and lose the election to Clinton. That will be a good thing in that it foils Trump, but it may not be the best thing for America. The best thing for America would be for the Republican party to nominate a qualified candidate and let the best man or woman win.

Almost daily, we’re reminded of the ubiquitous American distrust of and hatred for anyone who is different from oneself. One of the gorilla reports elicited a comment from a guy who openly said the kid should have been sacrificed because he was black and the mother would pop out another half-dozen between now and 2026. No shame, there! Nor is there any in just about any part of the media when it comes to people over the age of about 45. CBS MarketWatch, for example, tells us as a fact that “Older adults have a ‘toxic combination’ of high self-confidence and low financial literacy.”

Then we have this astonishment: A woman answers the door to her apartment, expecting to see a 12-year-old relative. Instead, she finds a rapist who barges in and proceeds to beat and strip her. She manages to reach her husband, who comes running and thrashes the thug to death, a fitting end for that particular sh*thead. And what does he get for his trouble? You got it: prosecution. It’s hard to avoid wondering if he would have been charged were he white…

The homeless population is growing older as the homeless mentally ill age and no concerted nationwide effort is made to get them off the streets.

Consumer spending “enjoys” its largest jump in six years. Dude! Mr. Pollyana, sir! It’s not that we enjoy spending. It’s that everything costs more and more. That would be, presumably, because there’s no inflation, hm? And because junk products made in China don’t last longer than about seven years, max. Most of them, far less, come to think of it.

Home prices are rising faster than expected. This is good news? “The economy is supporting the price increases with improving labor markets, falling unemployment rates and extremely low mortgage rates,” David Blitzer, chairman of the S&P index committee, said in a statement. “Another factor behind rising home prices is the limited supply of homes on the market.”

Yeah, uh huh. Zillow thinks my house is worth almost as much as it supposedly was at the height of the disastrous housing bubble. Interest rates are at rock-bottom and it’s not all that hard to get a loan. How many of those loans are covering collateral with real value? And how many of them are loans against air?

Oh, God. I’ve got work to do.