So SDXB’s New Girlfriend (affectionately known as NG) has a place in beautiful Sun City and a place in Boulder. This summer she sold the big house in Boulder, built by her late husband and herself, to move into a smaller place closer to her son and family. In the process, she experienced some heart palpitations
Sensibly, she goes to a doc to have this checked out. He tells her she has atrial fibrillation, a potentially fatal ailment. So she’s now becalmed in Colorado, jumping through medical hoops.
Fast-forward a few weeks: Her son and DiL have to make a sojourn to Phoenix for some damnfool reason. They wish to borrow her car so they don’t have to rent. But…but…but she can’t remember where she put the keys to the damn car.
She can’t, can’t CAN’T remember where she put them.
So SDXB goes over to the Sun City manse and searches the joint from stem to stern. He even checks every door lock in the house to see if maybe she carelessly left her keys in the door. He performs this exploration not once, not twice, but three times. He can NOT find the keys.
He calls Larry Miller Toyota to find out if he can get a new key made.
In order to make a new Annoying Smart Key, NG herself has to show up there, with the title of the car in hand to prove she actually owns it (!!!!!!!) and with a picture ID to prove she’s who she says she is. And the car has to be at the Toyota dealership. This, as you correctly surmise, entails having to tow the damn car to the dealership!!!! The cost is many, many hundreds of dollah.
I say to SDXB…wait. Waitaminit here! Anderson Lock & Key, the pre-eminent locksmith in the Valley, told me they could copy the key to the hated Venza (the Bell Road crooks didn’t bother to give me two keys…). It would be expensive, but nothing like what Larry Miller proposes to charge.
We call Anderson.
Yes. Sure. They can make a new key. But yes, it requires the locksmith and his computer to convene at the same place where the becalmed car resides. However, they will send the guy out to Sun City, laptop in hand, to make a new key.
My God. It’s 9 in the morning and I’ve already coped with three nightmares.
Nightmare the First:
Anyone who believes that computers, at the base level, improve our lives needs to stop inhaling whatever they’re smoking!
This nightmare started last night.
At some point, I realize a bunch of incoming email is…well…NOT incoming. Eventually I figure out it’s stuff addressed to my corporate gmail account.
Understand: I don’t use gmail. Don’t use it because I hate the interface; don’t use it because I hate being spied on by a monopolistic corporation. To the extent that I MUST have a gmail account, I forward that account’s incoming to MacMail. So I don’t even remember the damn passwords; finding them involves a great deal of searching through a secret, coded document and finally changing the passwords.
After some hassle, I do get in and search all around trying to figure out the trouble. Not even sure the test emails are hitting gmail at all. Web Guru and I study it and bang away at it and crash away at it and still can’t find the problem. Finally — after two hours of fighting with the damn thing, and with damn MacMail, which has decided to get stubborn, I finally discover the problem: Google has unilaterally decided that anything coming from mac.com or me.com must be spam! It has derailed all my test emails and quite a few other things.
I mark these messages “Not Spam.”
Doesn’t work.
Confer with guru. We’re both bamboozled.
I try again to mark the messages “Not Spam.”
AT LAST this does the trick.
Ducky. I’ve now wasted my entire evening wrestling with fucking Gmail. It’s 10 p.m. I have to get up and take the dog to the vet the next morning.
However, as one might have guessed…when thou hast done, thou hast not done…
This morning I need to print out an Excel file. To do that, I have to email it to myself (I could post it to Dropbox but that would make sense: let’s stay in Never-Neverland). The reason I have to do that is that fucking Apple has decided I can’t print from my laptop, and I’m working in the file on the laptop. So I have to send the file to myself, then get into it on the iMac (the only computer still speaking to the printer), open it, and print the germane section.
But…I can’t get into my MacMail on the iMac. Floating in the upper right-hand corner is a demand from Google that I enter a password!
Huh? For WHAT?
I start on this at 6:30. At 7:00 I call Apple help. The help rep and I labor with it for another 40 minutes (bear in mind that I needed to take the dog to the vet at 7:30).
Finally we figure out that somehow Google is hanging my MacMail and will not unhang it until I enter a password that I haven’t used in a good two years.
We sift through the NINETEEN SINGLE-SPACED PAGES of fucking coded passwords stored on my computer for this purpose.
Finally we find one that works.
You understand: to recover a password now, you have to tell fucking Google what your last functional password was. But…uhmmmmm…if you’ve lost your password, how the HELL would you know what it was????????
Before we ask to change the pw, though, I decide to make a guess that this thing actually is the current working PW, so we back out of the “lost my password” hoop-jump and try signing in with it…and it works.
As it develops, to make Google unhang MacMail, I have to sign into fucking Gmail and then close out of it.
Makes sense, eh?
Nightmare the Second
I’m now running way late to schlep the dog for this morning’s surgery. The dog is upset, because I’ve been TEARING MY HAIR for the past hour. I grab her, fling the unhappy beast into the car, and set out.
Fortunately, the few minutes spent on hold waiting for the Apple rep gave me time to wash my face, brush my teeth, and throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.
We fly out the driveway and….
…come to a stop.
The vet’s office is about a 30-minute drive to the east of the ‘hood, through brain-banging traffic. To make things difficult, during rush hour we cannot turn east out of the ‘hood: the only viable main drag has a reverse lane that prohibits left turns between 7 and 9 a.m.
Thus to make a southbound drive I have to go north to Gangbanger’s Way, go east as far at that road goes, then turn south on the secondary arterial that goes, oh, maybe halfway downtown. Because this road doesn’t go all the way through, I have to turn east on the last major arterial that does go through to points east of the fucking Squaw Peak Freeway, whose construction blocked most of the navigable east-west drags north of McDowell.
At Main Drag NSE, traffic on Gangbanger comes to a DEAD STOP. I don’t know what’s going on up there, but no one can get through.
I make an illegal right turn across the parking lot of an abandoned gas station, awakening a few camped bums who were hoping to sleep in, and then dart south on Main Drag NSE and east again on Feeder Street East/West, which proceeds to Richistan Avenue. There, I plan to turn north and then go east again on Doesn’t-Live-Here-Anymore Lane, which connects with the east-west road that (with any luck) will take me to Navigable Arterial EW.
Richistan Ave., not surprisingly, is jammed with people trying to get around whatever is going on up on Gangbanger way. I cannot turn north. I go south to my friend’s patio-home development, which I know has a generously sized entry with no gate. Swerve into a U-turn and peel north.
Ah, the joys of a six-banger…
Now I reach Doesn’t-Live-Here-Anymore and proceed fairly calmly toward East Major Arterial, where I start the long, LONG drive to 40th Street.
To get there, I have to drive to 36th, then proceed south through Upper Richistan (makes our Richistan look like a barrio), hang a left, proceed past THE most expensive private school in Arizona (dodging cops and cameras), then turn south on 40th and keep on driving, driving, driving.
The traffic was just horrific. On Secondary Arterial the nitwit in front of me decides to turn left and so, one would think sensibly enough, pulls into the two-way left-turn lane. I’m right on her tail, as everyone else is on everyone else’s tail. She gets halfway into the left-turn lane and then fuckin’ STOPS! With her rear end out in the oncoming traffic. I jam on the brakes and yank the steering wheel to the right and JUST BARELY miss the bitch, dodging back to the left to JUST BARELY miss the poor fuck in the traffic lane to the right of us. I mean, we’re talkin’ inches. Both ways.
Thank god for fancy skid-resistant brakes and reflexes that haven’t, after all, slowed down as much as one would expect in a 72-year-old broad. Probably the adrenaline rage hypes the reflexes a bit.
Ahead, the red light turns green.
And the line of traffic sits there. And sits there. And sits there. And sits there.
Finally the jerk at the head of the line notices the green light, gets off the phone, and goes forward. One car — his — gets through the light.
So we drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and FINALLY we get to the vet’s office.
He has about a half-dozen parking spaces, all of them full. I need to go to the end of a line that runs up the middle of the little lot and kype the space just being vacated by an exiting customer.
But some IDIOT has parked her car on the far end of the middle row: outside the parking spaces. She has blocked access to the spaces on the other side of the middle row.
Son OF a bitch!!!!
I now have to back and fill to get out of the parking lot, a seemingly impossible challenge. But in the process, I realize there’s a space directly behind me along the opposite wall, and if I just glide straight back, I can grab that space and be pointed out.
This apparently, is reserved for the vet. I do not notice the orange cones blocking ingress. So just roll over them.
About then the vet drives up. He now has to find a space to park.
I slither into the veterinary’s front door, evading eye contact. Drop off the dog. And flee.
Nightmare the Third
On the way home, it crosses my mind that I do not recall having moved the exterior doorkey holder out of its (ingenious) hiding place during yesterday’s garden-furniture refurbishing frolic.
Holy sh!t. This would imply that it wasn’t in its ingenious hiding place yesterday.
I worry all the way home. Fortunately the west- and east-bound traffic isn’t so gawdawful, plus by 8:30 the rush hour is subsiding anyway.
Once home, I shoof around and yeah…do find the thing, where it’s fallen unnoticed on the ground.
This relieves me from having to spend several hundred dollah changing all the locks in the house.
Nightmare the Fourth (and counting…)
Pending. Whenever I get up from this, I have to answer a client’s convoluted email about a transaction that happened almost a year ago and about which I recall almost nothing, then clean out the coded password log (that will take half the day!), then download data to create new spreadsheets that yesterday I proposed to build for WonderAccountant, by which time I will have forgotten to call the vet to check on the dog. Then drive to the vet and pick up the dog (assuming the aged dog survives this procedure)…through afternoon rush-hour traffic.
Topmost on the list of today’s chores: Call the accursed credit bureaus over the latest identity theft caper at Equifax. Fortunately, after previous exploits, I have phone numbers that go to humans.
Usually. Experian, first on the call list, has a special number to ask about the Equifax fiasco. They’re saying wait times are up to 30 minutes. And of course, they have loud, annoying Muzak to keep you alert and make your head hurt worse.
But in less than 30 minutes — by far — a living creature picked up the phone, one who sounded like she had a fair number of IQ points between the ears.
She said it’s an option to change one’s PIN, but clearly she had been coached not to dispense advice. But it seems pretty obvious that anyone who busted into your account is going to have your PIN and also will have all the information needed to change the PIN. So instead of adding that kind of hassle, possibly to no avail, I put a 90-day fraud alert on the account.
This seems to be the path of least resistance, for two reasons:
a) It means than ANY time anyone tries to create a new credit or bank account, you get a phone call to that effect; and b) Experian shares the fraud warning with the other credit bureaus, meaning you don’t have to kill time in other punch-a-button phone mazes.
Since a fraud alert will let you know if anyone tries to use your information to acquire credit in your name, and since I already have a “freeze” on all my credit bureau accounts thanks to the vast Maricopa County Community College District hack, I think I’m going to let it go at that. Rather, I mean, than spending half the day navigating telephone punch-a-button mazes. It might be good to change bank account numbers again, but that is SUCH a huge hassle…it probably would be better to simply access credit union accounts online about once a week and check for any unauthorized transactions.
Understand: frequent bank account checks will have to become a permanent habit for everyone. Hackers know better than to use stolen information right away. They’ll often wait a year or more, by way of getting around various inconvenient alerts and hassles you’ve set up to foil them. Since these devices foil you, too, after awhile you’re likely to let them lapse.
The type of fraud alert that is shared among all three companies lasts only 90 days. You can get a seven-year fraud alert, but to do so you have to jump through hoops at all three companies, and you have to show that you’ve actually been a victim of an identity theft using your private information. Whether you can renew the 90-day thing or not, I cannot tell.
Another permanent habit: get used to filing your income tax returns at the earliest possible moment. One handy use for your stolen data is to file fraudulent tax returns in your name claiming large refunds — meaning you get no refund until you jump through hoop after hoop after migraine-building hoop to prove it wasn’t you.
Now…to find out how to sign on to a class action suit against those craven morons… Olson & Daines, an Oregon law firm, is already organizing one. You can go here to notify them that you’d like to join the class action. And if there’s ever been an event that demonstrates loud and clear why class action suits are valuable and should never be curtailed, this one is it. Equifax knew this hack was going on from May through July; they knew about it long enough for their top executives to get their money out of the firm’s stocks before the news hit the public media.
Without your permission, they collect data on you that is none of anyone’s business but yours — spying on you, really. Though this data, gathered in one place, renders you extremely vulnerable, they do nothing to encrypt it, and so naturally sooner or later some hacker steals it. Now you are screwed and the worst that happens to them is that their stock loses a few points…after their executives have pulled their money out.
With the government defanged — and if the right wing has anything to say about it, permanently enjoined from regulating business models like this — citizens have very little recourse other than through legal action.
There’s a woman, young or old is hard to tell. She’s skinny, maybe even athletic-looking, neatly dressed in shorts and a nondescript top, her smooth ebony complexion ageless. She could be 25 and looks 40, or maybe 40 and looks 25.
At a glance, you sense she’s a panhandler. Yet maybe not. She doesn’t have that ragged look of people who sleep in the rough. She looks decently fed and healthy and clean. Middle-class, you’d think, if you met her at a bus stop and she said nothing to you.
But she is a panhandler. She works the Safeway shopping center in North Central Phoenix, at the intersection of Glendale and Seventh Street. They must have chased her way from the grocery store, because she haunts the little strip mall down by the restaurants and miscellaneous vendors. You’ll never see her in front of the Safeway, but you’ll often find her in front of the pizzeria or the deli or the Leslie’s Pool store. She walks around as though she were going somewhere, but it never takes long to see she isn’t going anywhere: just back and forth.
Today when I dropped by Leslie’s to pick up the newly repaired pool cleaner, she pounced as I came out of the store.
“Scuse me, ma’am, can I ask you…”
“I’m sorry, I don’t carry money with me.” (This happens to be true: I never carry cash, and of late I’ve stopped carrying a purse at all…for exactly this reason.)
“Oh, I don’t want any money, I just…”
Heard that line before. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”
She trails me across the parking lot.
“But please, I just want…”
“NO!”
By now I’m at the car and need to toss the gadget into it and get in myself. I’m a little concerned that she’ll accost me at that point or try to get into the car, but experience suggests the fastest way out is the best way out.
She subsides and wanders away before I shut the door on her pitch.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen her perform this maneuver. I don’t know what she’s hitting people up for, but whatever it is, the chase-and-beg strategy is a routine.
Still. It’s haunting. Poor little thing. She was somebody’s baby girl. What the hell happened to her that she’s hitting up strangers in a parking lot, day in and day out?
What can be done?
Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.
Let’s shut off the power while the Fatlady is painting walls!
Rain makes Salt River Project shut down. Doesn’t take much rain, either. It’s just sprinkling here, although there may have been a little blow during the night: the BBQ cover was on the ground this morning, allowing the Merry Goddess to soak the Q’s inner workings.
What a sense of humor that Goddess has…
Power went off about 5:30 a.m., following a noticeable surge. This created a nice opportunity for me to observe that the kitchen flashlight needed new batteries, and now I have to buy a raft more D-cells. The camp lantern I bought a couple years ago comes in mighty handy during these events: it really does light up a whole room.
I love it when the power is out: the neighborhood is SO quiet! You’re not aware of how much background noise hums and bumps and clanks along, all the time, until it stops.
Fortunately the rain has brought the exterior temp down to 80 degrees. So even with the lights back on, we’re giving the air-conditioner a rest.
And of course, these little power outages remind me, as usual, that I haven’t followed much of the advice I’ve emitted about preparing for an emergency. I’m not even very well prepared for an extended electric outage, to say nothing of {gulp} what could happen.
Chortle! It’s easy enough to laugh off the possibilities:
Yes, the fault along the Mexican border has, in the relatively recent past, unleashed an earthquake powerful enough to level block construction even as far north as lovely Uptown Phoenix.
Yes, dangerous nut cases have been emboldened by the take-over of our government by extremist elements and yup, yesterday they showed exactly what they’d like to do to those of us they don’t like.
Yes, we have an incompetent and almost certainly corrupt fool in the White House, one whose stupidity puts not just the US but the entire effing world in real danger.
Yes, we have an aging infrastructure that breaks down in a light sprinkle and is capable of shutting down an entire metropolitan area.
Yes, an asteroid could hit us tomorrow.
But none of those things feels real enough to push one to bestir oneself out of one’s inertia.
I still haven’t bought a decent camp stove. The ones I’ve seen at the outdoor megamarts are made in China and are clear & present junk. I’m thinking that what may be needed is a couple of the little hiker’s stoves that SDXB favors for his back-country (and motel…) excursions. There are quite a few of them on Amazon, though I’m going to ask him to take me out to the BX, where I can get one without having to pay tax on it.
Interestingly, they also make little camp stoves that run on wood or charcoal. It would be a nuisance to light, but I’m not sure you can get these small stoves to connect to a regular propane tank. Having to track down those dinky little fuel canisters would be as much of a pain in the neck as getting wood or charcoal to light. And in a real crisis that extends for any length of time, those little butane canisters might be impossible to find.
The wood-burning things are cheap, and there’s a stack of firewood in the backyard that goes halfway to the top of the block wall. On the other hand…I don’t have a hatchet and don’t feel like learning to use one. Hm. Better get over that quirk, I guess.
So, consider: if a Korean bomb hit Los Angeles and you lived west of the Rockies (but not in the immediate area of L.A., what would happen?
Here’s an amusing online calculator that can give you a clue. If you’re not at ground zero, you probably will survive…but not without considerable, uhm, hassle, shall we say… In the Phoenix area, if a bomb the size that Kim’s guys are capable of building struck dead center in the downtown, the serious devastation wouldn’t even reach up to the northern area of North Central. If you were indoors and your structure didn’t collapse, you’d have a shot at sheltering in place. You’d need some plywood or something to seal up the windows that undoubtedly would blow out…but…well, WTF.
If, as is more likely, the worse Kim could do is hit L.A., the fallout plume would largely miss the Phoenix area. Los Angeles is north of here, and the prevailing wind flows northeast. The radioactive fallout would head straight across the Mohave and up to Las Vegas.
In that case, such a strike would be largely survivable for Phoenicians…if you were adequately prepared.
Much of our food is trucked in from Los Angeles. Thus food stocks in grocery stores would quickly be depleted — probably within a day, as panicky residents made runs on markets. For that reason it would be important to have nonperishable items such as rice, beans, and canned goods stocked in…enough to last a couple of weeks, at the least, but better, enough to last at a month. Preferably two.
Water comes in from the Colorado River and to a lesser extent from ground water. Central Arizona Project has stockpiled enough water to serve the Phoenix area for about a year; it’s stored underground. This was to stave off a drought, but if Colorado River water were contaminated, it could be used for a short time.
Electricity is generated by a nuclear power plant here in the Valley, by a coal-fired plant on the Navajo and by dams on the Colorado. While there could be some interruption or rationing of power, I think that would be the least of one’s worries.
Gasoline is piped in from California and Texas. Prices would soar and gas would be in short supply if Texas were the only source. So it would be wise to have a few spare cans of gas on hand.
And now, my friends, let’s consider a real threat that few of us notice or even know about: the extremist, fascist right wing. It reared its ghastly head in Charlottesville yesterday. It’s always been here, this little Grendel, but it’s been quiescent in the swamp for the past few decades. Now that the political climate looks favorable, this ugly creature climbs out of the murky water and makes itself visible.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the number of armed extremist nut cases who are loose on the land…and an even bigger mistake to underestimate the number of armed criminals who would join them in the event of a seriously catastrophic emergency. If your home were stocked with food, fuel, and functioning tools, your home would instantly become a target for these two elements.
You need to be armed and you need to have enough ammunition on hand to last until order can be restored. That could be anywhere from a few days to a few months, depending on where you are and what community resources exist in your area. If you don’t know how to use them, you need to go to the nearest range, take some safety lessons, and practice.
So it goes.
Meanwhile, back to the paint job…
Banner image of the day, 8/13/2017
Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.
So SDXB’s New Girlfriend (affectionately known as NG) has a place in beautiful Sun City and a place in Boulder. This summer she sold the big house in Boulder, built by her late husband and herself, to move into a smaller place closer to her son and family. In the process, she experienced some heart palpitations
