Coffee heat rising

Angst

Google, GET YOUR NOSE OUT OF MY BUTT!!!!!

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US_Capitol_Building_at_night_Jan_2006
This?…
...or this?
…or this?

How can I do without being spied on by Google at every damn turn? Let me COUNT the ways!!!!!

Really, the invasion of privacy that company inflicts should be prohibited by federal law. It should be effing ILLEGAL to track you around the Internet and track every one of your correspondents, too.

In fact, if Google were a government agency, it would have to get a subpoena to engage in the kind of spying into our personal lives that it does routinely. The reason it gets away with it? It’s a corporation. Because the Founding Fathers could no more have envisioned a world dictated by computer technology than they could have imagined taking a stroll on the moon, it never occurred to them to extend constitutional protections against overweening government to the real government that one day would evolve.

That would be the corporate shadow government, the one that dictates how we live, what we eat, where we work, how much we’re paid, whether we can borrow money and at what rate, whether we can insure ourselves against financial ruin in the event of accident, sickness, or natural disaster…actually, when you think about it, the one that dictates just about every aspect of our daily lives.

This morning I RSVP’ed to an upcoming meeting of a writer’s group I belong to. This group happens to have a Meetup.com site. And Meetup.com is synced with — who else? Google, of course. Within seconds after RSVPing that I would attend, in came an email informing me that Google has automatically installed a notice of the meeting in one of my several Google calendars (all of them, for all I know!) and that it will be sending me an email reminder. Lucky me! Here was a wonderful new G-service!

God damn it. Now I had to get into not one, not two, but three G-mail accounts and disable the damn calendars’ automatic notification. Yet another electronic time-suck. Really: do you need your time wasted that way? I sure don’t, and I’ll bet you don’t, either.

If I wanted Google Calendar to pester me with email reminders, I would proactively ask it to do so. The reason I don’t is that I tried Google Calendar and found it to be an endless hassle and annoyance. Annoyance annoyance ANNOYANCE! I do not WANT to be binged, pinged, and emailed for every deep breath I’m about to take. I don’t WANT Google to record every meeting I attend and every meeting I decline to attend.

So I quit using Google Calendar. I use iCal, which a) is resident on my machine and does not require me to go out on the Net to enter events, b) is easier to control, and c) can be persuaded not to make you crazy. I haven’t used Google Calendar in years.

Wouldn’t you think that would tell them something?

But ohhh no! Willy nilly, whether you love their tool or hate it, they’re going to push it in your face. That’s because they have THEIR corporate face pushed up your butt.

So why, you ask, do I use Gmail at all? No Gmail, no nuisance “calendar,” eh?

Well, because…

• I own a business and need a business address separate from my personal address.
• That business needs two “addresses,” one for the publishing enterprise and one for the editorial business.
• And I have a G-mail address that I use when forced to provide an email address to people I do not wish to share my address with, and to organizations that I believe are going to spam me.
• If you own a small business and can’t afford your own server and an in-house IT team to run it, you don’t have much choice but to use Google. It is, in effect, the only game in town, and because of that, it’s coercive.

One of the biggest mistakes this country has made in recent history was to defang the anti-trust laws. And Google is a prime example of the reason those laws are necessary and should never be watered down.

Consider the aspects of our lives this corporation has its fingers in:

Gmail owns my thermostat, which sends them data (presumably stored someplace) about the amount of electric power I use, the number of hours per day I use the power, and the time of day I use it. Harmless? Maybe. But that’s none of anybody’s business!

Gmail evidently owns Meetup.com, which it markets to just about every volunteer and social group in the country. Every time a group sends out an invite with an RSVP, Google collects data on the group and on every member in the group: who RSVPed and, by extension, who did not RSVP. What groups I belong to and which of their meetings I choose to attend are none of anybody’s business!

Google watches your Web searches, evidently recording those, too, since it never seems to forget what sites you’ve visited in the past. None of anybody’s business!

Google publishes pictures of your home on the Internet, complete with specifics about its location and clearly showing where the doors and windows are, simplifying burglars’ lives. With a vengeance, none of anybody’s business!

Google owns Motorola Mobility, which has to do with your Android phone. How much information that’s none of anybody’s business are they collecting from that?

Google owns YouTube (which, we might add, it has nicely broken). It knows what videos you watch and which you post to your websites. None of anybody’s business!

Come to think of it, Google knows all about what you write on your websites. Of course. What you choose to post to the Internet by default becomes everybody’s business. But that’s about it.

Google owns 180 companies, many of which have reason and capacity to collect and store data about you, your comings, and your goings. It may very well be the largest spy network on the planet.

Soon it will be producing electric cars, which will track and record all your movements about your city, town, and country. Those movements are already being tracked to a degree if you have a newer vehicle that’s “connected” to the Net. But when you’re driving a Google car, bank on it: every trip to the grocery store, every trip to your mother-in-law’s, every visit to your paramour or to the local whorehouse is going to be seen and recorded.

And why is this legal? Why has intrusion into our daily lives become so routine we sheeple hardly even notice it? Pretty obvious, isn’t it: the other 99% of us can’t afford to buy Congressmen and Senators, that’s why.

When corporate America can buy the government, folks, it is the government. If you’re not mad about that, you sure as hell should be!

Images:
U.S. Capitol at night. David Iliff. GNU Free Documentation License.Patio at Googleplex. Jijithecat. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Mailbox Frolics, Continued…

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So I seem to have slandered the USPS in claiming they delivered an order of Racy Books to my feckless neighbor, and compounded the sin by accusing feckless neighbor of tossing the things in his fog of mental confusion. Yet another mail disappearance has occurred, and this time the evidence of theft was unmistakable.

Roomie, being an opera singer, wears stage make-up and other types of very high quality emollients and fancifications. She ordered an item from a New York City cosmetics company she likes to do business with. It was supposed to have arrived Christmas Eve.

As you might be guessing, it did not.

When I got home from yesterday evening’s party, I found a ripped-open, empty box and a message from a neighbor:

We found this as is in our front yard last night (12/24) when we returned home around 6:30 p.m. We wanted you to know that it’s possible someone opened your mail and stole it in case you were expecting this…

Ya think? 🙂

It was nice of them to bring it over…wish someone had done the same with the box for the missing books.

So, case closed: someone definitely is stealing my mail.

Now I have to pony up $200 for a relatively secure locking mailbox. Most specimens under that price can be prized open easily with a pocket screwdriver. The Epoch Boss seems to be about the best reviewed at Amazon. Of course, the local HD doesn’t carry it. So I had to mail-order the damn thing.

A-n-n-d I’ll have to pay a handyman to come install the damn thing.

Infuriating.

Meanwhile, AMEX confirmed that this month’s bills had been mailed out in plenty of time to get here. So the thieves have those, too. I arranged for AMEX to mail to the new private (effing expensive!!) PO Box. Meanwhile, who knows what else they’ve stolen? Probably year-end statements and tax paper from Fidelity and the community college district. And checks from Medicare and Medigap…

I am going to be in deep trouble if stolen Medicare and insurance checks have gone unnoticed…dayum!

Briefly, I planned to go over to the Post Office and fill out a form to have all the mail forwarded to the new private mailbox. On second thought, though, that seems like an unnecessary time suck. The barn door is open and the cows have run off, so any such line-standing, form-filling hassle and explanation hassle (x 2, because it would all have to be repeated after the security mailbox is installed) would be a pointless waste of time.

So as it stands, the supposedly jimmy-resistant locking mailbox should get here on the  30th. Handyman from Heaven will come by in the first week of the New Year. And shortly afterward, I’ll change the address for AMEX and assorted vendors back to that of my house. Between now and then, every day I watch for the MailPerson and race outside to grab the mail the instant I hear the mail truck putter on down the street.

Wheeeee!

 

MacSpamFighting: ONE mistake…

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Thank you, Washington Post, for an hour or two wasted… I made ONE mistake in the fight against spam on my MacMail and ended up having to sift through thousands of messages, marking the ones that are not spam by rebuilding a rule for every message. Each “rule” requires not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but SIX clicks! Make another mistake, and you have another giant fuck-up to a) recognize; b) figure out; c) track down; and d) fix.

On a Mac, you can derail spam to the “Trash” folder by creating a “rule” that identifies the offending sender and states that everything coming from that address should go to the “Trash.” However, the rule function defaults to select not the sender but the recipient. That is: by default it targets all incoming mail directed to you!

If you’re half asleep, as you usually are by the time you’ve clicked through a dozen or more nuisances early in the morning, you can carelessly click “yeah, yeah, just DO IT,” thereby telling MacMail to send all incoming mail to the garbage.

Far as I can tell, there’s no way to undo this mistake.

You now have all your mail directed to the trash.

Your choices, then, are

a) to write a new rule directing MacMail to send all incoming mail, including the tons and tons and tons of spam, to your in-box, requiring you to re-filter every single goddamn spam message, or
b) to filter the contents of your inbox (mine had not been cleaned out since last January…) by sender’s name and then go through and search out everyone you want to hear from and write a new rule to direct each person’s messages to your in-box.

Either way, it’s a huge, huge, HUGE hassle.

This was occasioned by a series of spams from The Washington Post, which inflicts a campaign that you cannot opt out of. There is no “quit spamming me, assholes” link in their messages, and of course a request that they please quit it results in still more trash mails.

When I clicked to tell MacMail to spamify the latest nuisance message from WaPo, I accidentally hit “send all incoming mail” to the spam folder. So…yes…

So much trash arrives every day that the time-suck involved in searching for and re-classifying all legitimate senders is actually less than the time-suck involved in searching for and zapping all spammers.

Well, my mailboxes are now all cleaned out. It remains to be seen how many legitimate business and personal correspondents’ messages will be derailed to the spam folder, thanks to the idiots at The Washington Post. I don’t know how the Post got my email address. But I can tell ya one thing for sure: I’ll never read another WaPo article online! Or anywhere else.

Sales!

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InkslingersSo at yesterday’s Grand Celebration of our group’s 2015 Inkslinger’s anthology, I sold $25 worth of books! The sole print version of the first Fire-Rider collection, the sole print version of the whole Family at the Holidays series, and a copy of Slave Labor.

All of these were purchased by one guy, who seemed a little eccentric. When I remarked that reviews of the books would really be appreciated, he said, “Well, fourteen others are ahead of you.”

Yeah. Thanks, pal. Oh well.

While it’s cheering that someone would buy these things, even a guy who goes around buying self-published books just to make amateur writers feel good, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not making any money here.

Figure the time for just taking the things to the “market”: The event took place at a country club in Goodyear. It’s an hour’s drive one way; over two hours round trip. Then I sat around there for two hours. Twenty-five dollars divided by four hours comes to $6.25 an hour.

Somewhat under minimum wage.

When we factor in the uncountable number of hours entailed in writing, editing, formatting, and uploading the things to Amazon and the printer’s site, we’re in Negative-Number Neverland. Way, way in the Outback…

I was surprised the guy bought the copy of Fire-Rider, since Snowfall Press screwed up the trimming so badly that it really wasn’t salable.

Snowfall, as it develops, has a policy of not printing erotica. When they saw the contents of Family, they printed off a proof because I’d paid for it but had their guy call me and announce they wouldn’t print any more than that. Okay…you have a right to censor what other people write and publish — probably you’re the same sort of folks who think gay couples shouldn’t be allowed to buy wedding cakes at bakeries serving the public, too. So I was polite to the guy and he sounded relieved that I didn’t tell him what he deserved to be told.

However, in their Righteousness, they screwed up the printing of the other two books I’d sent over to prepare for this event: two copies of Slave Labor and a proof of Fire-Rider. They slopped the Slave Labor cover over so the spine wraps around to the front, and they trimmed the Fire-Rider book so badly that the back cover looks crooked, the 300+ pages are out of true, and the interior pages have about a two-inch gutter! It looks terrible.

So now that thing has to be reformatted for the new PoD vendor. I just checked the specs on the thing, thinking maybe I entered the wrong figures for the margins and gutter. But no: they’re exactly what they’re supposed to be.

That makes it very hard to believe anything other than that Snowfall deliberately screwed up those two books because they didn’t like the third one.

Mighty Christian of them, eh?

Anyway, all this causes one to wonder if the publishing endeavor is worth the effort. Unless we can get someone to buy these things and see some results by about the end of March, I think it will be time to sign back up for some more freshman comp courses. We’re running so far in the red now that the S-corp will be out of money by the end of first-quarter 2016.

Next week I’ll hire a marketing specialist to create and manage a Facebook Ads campaign for Fire-Rider. For the Racy Books, which can’t be advertised on FB, I’m advertising on this entertaining site and also probably will consign  to a distributor that targets romance readers. Both sites go direct to readers who enjoy these specific types of books.

Then I’ll have to reformat Fire-Rider for the new printer, format the second “boxed set,” and get Gary to create a cover for the Family boxed set, which will entail creating an ebook  cover based on the print cover I made for that thing.

Those tasks alone will entail hours and hours and hours of work — more than enough to fill up a week. So we’re looking at more 14-hour days, of which I grow mightily weary.

Hm. My roommate is about out of the shower. We have to run around to get to church this morning — she has to be at the early service, too, so presumably will fly out the door in about 15 minutes. Mercifully, I don’t have to sing until 10 a.m.

And so, to breakfast…

Slow down, you’re movin’ too fast…

by

…Got to make
The mornin’ last.

Putting the brakes on the ambitious publishing enterprise, and they’re finally beginning to engage. It takes a long time to persuade an 18-wheeler to slow down…

So freaking tired of computers am I that I’ve developed a flinch reflex at the very thought of re-engaging The Machine.

Last night I mounted an entire month’s worth of Racy Books to Amazon — which is really only seven shorties but goodies. It’s the first set of books we wrote under the Roberta Stuart byline, two of them by moi and five by a writer who for a number of reasons can’t publicize her name. This lady is really a very good writer, with an actual — get this! — SENSE OF HUMOR. Her stories always have a mellow wit that makes them charming to read.

Assuming you like Racy Reading. 😉

Also got the second “boxed set” of six Fire-Rider books up. That really is a serious book; each of the three collections of six “books” apiece will be novel-length on its own.

So, with the design and bureaucracy done, all that’s left to do is click “Publish.” The plan is to “publish” (I use that work guardedly: to my mind, putting a book up on Amazon is more akin to “posting” than to “publishing”) one bookoid a week through December and into January. This gives us eight books each of which can be posted with a single click. So if I click “publish” each Tuesday, then each Wednesday a new bookoid should appear on Amazon.

In the meantime, I will try harder to figure out how to get Goodreads to work. It’s purely torture.

And I will try to mount a FaceBook advertising campaign, a prospect that makes me cringe. I may try to hire someone to do that, possibly from Problogger or Fiverr.

Hiring a pig in a poke from Fiverr also makes me cringe. But it occurred to me that there may be bloggers who know how to handle FaceBook — or at least are younger, more flexible, and techier than I am. So I think I’ll post an ad on the Problogger job board and then do a few searches at Fiverr.

If YOU know how to deploy FaceBook Ads, by the way (this will entail identifying the right demographics in technolanguage that FB can understand and use), I’m interested in talking with you! Leave a comment below with a functional email address in the little sign-in form above the comments box, and I’ll get in touch. The book that would be advertised at the outset is Fire-Rider, not the erotica.

In another few weeks, I may have a boxed set of “Family at the Holidays” available, which would then be worth putting money into for marketing. If the PoD guy comes through (he has not, so far), then we already have a print version of “Family.” Either of those could also be marketed on FaceBook, if it’s possible to identify adult audiences(!!) who want(!!) to read erotica.

How exactly you target those audiences without accidentally hitting some kids escapes me. For that reason, I’m very dubious about advertising the Camptown Races bookoids on Facebook.

At any rate, if I can hire someone to relieve me of some of the social media marketing torture, that would free up time a) to have a life, of all the outrageous things; b) to write some more copy; c) to manage design and production; and d) to take care of business, which has been sliding.

FireFox lately has been given to strange catastrophic crashes, which can on occasion crash my computer. And of course we know Wyrd loves nothing more than to crash, preferably taking your entire system down with it.

Whenever the system crashes while any Office programs are up, every file you had open at the time reloads in two versions: whatever was saved at the time the system went down, and a “recovery” file that may or may not contain the most recent data you entered. My system is set to auto-save every five minutes, so not much data is lost. However, if you have, say, seven files open on Wyrd (not unreasonable around here: I often move from file to file), you have to compare FOURTEEN files line by line to see what was lost and what can be saved. If the auto-save has more recent data, then you have to close the file you were working in and save the auto-save over it with the new filename. But sometimes this process causes the system to “forget” where the original file resides, so you have to figure that out — my computer contains literally thousands of data files, and I’ll tellya…some days it ain’t easy to find where a recovered file is supposed to go.

Well, one of the recent crashes took down the Excel file I’d built to transmit data to WonderAccountant, after QuickBooks converted itself into something I simply cannot use. Even she has a time with it — and she takes courses in Quickbooks!

So, after I realized I had neither the time nor the inclination to learn the entire new program that QuickBooks has mounted, I went back to recording credits and debits in Excel spreadsheets. This workbook I posted on DropBox for WonderAccountant’s delectation — she does my bookkeeping, and really, if the spreadsheet is set up correctly, all she should have to do is upload to the correct account.

Last night I discovered that during a recent crash, data was lost from this Excel workbook.

But SOME data was saved in another iteration of it, which resided in another directory on my terminal.

Recovering the data entailed opening both workbooks and comparing each spreadsheet, line by line by infuckingTERminable line, to determine a) which was most current and b) how to consolidate the data in one file.

And needless to say, this entailed not one but several fuckups. By 9 p.m. I was tearing my hair out by the roots! It took over four hours of this hateful process to straighten it out!

And that, my children, is why the old lady is coming to hate computers.

Really. It was so much easier when you just noted debits and credits in a real, paper book of blank spreadsheets.

And it’s why I need to find somebody else to mount and manage the marketing campaign. At this point, when I get up in the morning and think about having to wrestle with the computers again, I just cringe.

No wonder my stomach hurts!

Whenever I finish diddling away time with the hobby blog, then, I need to take the dogs for a walk; then bring them back here and go back out for another 2.6-mile tour by myself. That gets in about 3.6 miles a day (assuming I get time in a day for these hijinks), which helps a lot with the stress and is helping to bring the weight back down.

But yes…”get time in the day…” As dawn cracked, the phone rang: pool guy. He wants to come over between ten and noon to fix the leak in the pump. Let us hope Gerardo is right, that the leak is just from a gasket. Thanks to Gerardo, the guy is going to have a challenge trying to upsell  me to a new pump, which will set me back a couple thousand bucks. Not looking forward to that exchange…

Anyway, carving that chunk out of my morning means no doggy & human walks: it’s already after 9:00 a.m. Walking a mile with the dogs, who have to sniff every blade of grass and lunge at every passing dog or cat, takes a half an hour. And the 2.6-mile junket requires 45 minutes.

It was very cold this morning — by Arizona standards — and so at 6:00 a.m. I decided to wait until it warmed up. It usually takes this pool guy days to respond to a phone call, so I figured I’d have today to myself. Not so… Now we’ll have to wait until after the guy gets here and lightens my pocketbook some more before we can go out. By then I’ll be fully engaged in something else.

The roommate left before dawn to fly to New York for an audition. She’s an opera singer. So the dogs and I have the Funny Farm to ourselves for a day. That means there are quite a few things I need to do by way of cleaning up the place and making it more livable for her. Those could easily fill up the day.

Roommate: I haven’t written about the roommate because she hadn’t announced to all and sundry that she’s leaving her several jobs in town. She’s one of the paid professional singers with the choir, a very lovely mezzosoprano who sings alto in our rowdy crowd. She also teaches at the Great Desert University and is enrolled in her second master’s degree program out there. Well, her husband got a job in the Bay Area, so she’s having to drop everything and move up there.

She didn’t want to walk away from the teaching job (some day she hopes to get an academic position, and so there’s a bridge she doesn’t want to burn), nor was she happy to leave the other contract gigs she has here in town. But they realized that, given the cost of housing in and around San Francisco, even on DH’s very substantial new salary, they couldn’t afford to maintain two dwellings even for a couple of months. So they sold their house here, rented a place in the City, and she is now couch-cruising to fill in the gap.

Actually, she’s got my guest bedroom, which is a lot better than a sofa. Except there’s no bed in there, so the poor thing is sleeping on one of those blow-up mattresses. All of which makes me feel mighty guilty for not having bothered to buy a bed for that room. It would involve hiring a moving man to move the impossibly heavy TV armoire, which is no longer used for TV but is full of linens & things, and that exceeds the hassle factor that I feel like dealing with. So does purchasing and installing a bed in there, come to think of it.

Anyway, it’s kind of nice to have a human being around. I mean, dogs are charming company and all, but…well, they are dogs. She’s not around much, because she has a hectic schedule that usually keeps her out from morning till late at night. Yet a few conversations have been had, and that is nice.

If it were possible to be sure you could find a person as quiet and considerate as this one, renting out a room would seem like a very good idea. It would provide some company and obviate the need to actually work. But I’m pretty certain this one is rare as diamonds.

🙂

Life in the (Tedious…) (Drug-Ridden) Big City

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So tell me, what type of drug use engages Q-tips, chewing or bubble gum, and (maybe) a stiff wire swimming-pool brush?

Yesterday evening — late afternoon, actually — the dogs were barking around out in the backyard, generally being ignored or hollered at. Then at one point Ruby abruptly went ABSOLUTELY FREAKING BATSHIT!!!!

With the possible exception of two very angry German shepherds, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dog fly into such a frenzy. And I’ve had a lot of dogs in my altogether too lengthy lifetime. This dog wasn’t yapping. She wasn’t barking. She was screaming. Truly screaming like a person might scream.

Well, I was very tired and feeling under the weather and mighty tired of hearing dogs bark — not for nothing was Cassie surrendered to the dog pound with the reason, “barks.” So I yelled at them to shut the eff up and then hollered them back into the house. They settled right down when offered Dinner.

Dogs live for Dinner…

Welp, this afternoon when I went to take some garbage out to the alley, I discovered what had set Ruby the Corgi off: Somebody had been camping outside the back gate, evidently up to no good.

I know what the Q-Tips are used for. I know that gum is often favored by people who are wired to the teeth on stimulants like meth and Ecstasy. But the wire swimming-pool brush, the type used to scrape stubborn algae off the walls?  whaa????

One drug users’ message board suggests using a “wire brush” to clean your meth pipe . But I don’t think they mean a brush that’s six inches long by a couple inches wide. Part of it was mashed down, as though it had been stuffed inside something or used to scrub something. Sooo…could be, I suppose.

Speaking of “very tired,” this sort of sh*t makes me feel very tired of my neighborhood. It’s the stuff of dreams about moving far, far away.

There’s something to be said for an alley. It adds about 20 clear, vacant feet between you and the neighbor behind you. It puts two walls instead of just one between you and said neighbor.

And there’s something to be said against an alley: it’s a burglar thoroughfare, a campground for bums, a coyote freeway.

Our alleys are particularly well designed as bum campgrounds. The builder set up the back gates so they would open onto  vestibules inset in the fenceline, for reasons no one can guess. Maybe he thought this would encourage neighbors to hang out and chat with each other whilst hauling out the grass clippings and the trash. Maybe some stupid city regulation mandated it. WhatEVER…the effect is to create little cubbies where people can sit on the ground and sleep, drink, or do dope.

Annoyed, I picked up the paraphernalia the creep(s) had left behind, and then dumped a little dogshit on the ground out there. Tomorrow my son is bringing his golden retriever over for a weekend of dog-sitting. Now, that animal can create a gigantic mound of manure. His product is going into the Bum Armchair, too.

Then later this afternoon I’m sitting around the castle thinking about how I should be working and thinking about how I still feel awful and do not want to work and may never want to work again when Ruby flies into yet another rage, this time at the front door. I don’t see anyone out the front window, but I can’t view the whole courtyard from the window. The front door is protected by an iron security door, so I open the interior door and discover that someone has opened the east gate and left it hanging open.

They haven’t left any advertising nuisances. So that suggests most likely they walked up to the front door and tried to open it. Finding it locked and attached to a barking dog’s trigger, they took off.

{sigh}

Do I need to get the pistol out? It’s usually locked up. It’s a hassle to haul it out, and more of a hassle to prepare it to blow away some harmless burglar. I do not want to get the pistol out.

But then I didn’t want the dog to keep on screaming, either. Possibly not getting the pistol out is a symptom of the same overall sense of fatigue and laziness.

I need another German shepherd.

What kind of dog is like the GerShep of 35 years ago, an animal whose health will not run you into the poorhouse, whose temperament will not open you to lawsuits, and whose intelligence rises to the level of discerning? It must be large enough to remove a burglar’s foot, when need be…

Yesterday when I went over to the westside to hike with SDXB, we passed some very nice suburban tracts. One of them looked like the houses might be more or less in my price range. No slums bordered these tracts. None of the houses looked rundown. No police helicopters hovered overhead.

Sometimes I think I should sell this place and move to Scottsdale, to the west side, to Yarnell, or to Prescott. Someplace where bums do not smoke or inject drugs outside your back gate, where armed robbers fleeing the police do not come to ground in your garage, where idiot City Parents do not destroy your neighborhood with a misguided electric train boondoggle, where property taxes are still relatively low, where cop helicopters are not given to parking over your roof, where my dogs are not driven batshit once a day.

But then I’m reminded of the reality that I…can’t…afford…to…move.

Maybe I could afford a small, camper-style RV, though. The dogs and I could live in an RV. Then we could go wherever we pleased. Preferably someplace sparsely populated and quiet. Very, very quiet.

Rub_al_Khali_002