Coffee heat rising

Angst

Shaking the Tail: Women’s Strategies for Safety

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This morning in comes news, first from a friend and then from a news story, of not one but two terrifying incidents of harassment and bullying of women.

On Facebook, a friend reported that some guy in a pick-up went off on her while she was on the road riding her Harley. One thing you should know about my friend — she does not keep this a secret — is that she is transexual; in her previous life she was biologically a male and a biker. Yeah: that kind of biker…though she always has identified, psychologically, as a woman, she was probably not the sort of person you’d willingly meet in a dark alley. In her present incarnation, she looks like a pretty normal woman whose presence strikes no fear into your heart. She writes highly entertaining novels whose protagonist is a wild-assed woman biker.

So this guy goes berserk and starts to follow her. She does everything she can to shake him, at high speeds no doubt, but she can’t get rid of him. Beginning to panic, she heads back to her house and parks her bike in the driveway. He follows her and informs her that he’s going to come after her. As you can imagine, she’s somewhat alarmed.

Even more alarmed is the woman in a Phoenix suburb whose home was entered — more than once, apparently — by a lunatic who left a note — while she was sleeping — to tell her he wanted to have sex with her.

Most women begin to experience threats and events of this sort starting at about the age of 12 or 14. I’ve repeatedly been followed, harassed, propositioned, and threatened by strange men — after six decades, it gets old. And “old” is an operative term: even after you’re no longer a juicy, nubile young thing, the creeps still think you’re fair game for threats and harassment, especially when you’re abroad in a car or walking across a parking lot.

This is how I developed my taste for German shepherds…

Seriously and no joke: After the downtown neighbors divorced and I got custody of their dog, all the harassment, all the cat-calls, and all the aggressive passes in public suddenly went away when I had her at my side. What a guy thinks a GerShep is going to do to him while he’s sailing past at 40 miles an hour escapes me…but as a practical matter, the nasty yells and lewd hoots stopped dead when I started taking that dog out with me.

But long before I got the dog, I learned a number of strategies to cope with this kind of sh!t. Note that I have never taken a “woman’s self-defense” course, except for one short session that was inflicted on us in a high-school P.E. class. These things generally scare you more than they help you: you’re told all the horrific things that a$$hats have done to women, and then you’re instructed in techniques that have about a snowball’s chance of working effectively for most women.

The trick is to avoid situations that put you at risk. Since you can’t avoid them all — just being female puts you at risk — you must be mentally prepared and you must always have a variety of emergency plans in mind.

First off, when you’re driving around, know where the nearest police stations, emergency rooms, and fire stations are along your beaten path. Mentally map routes to these places. In our parts, police stations are secured like a castle under siege, and so it may be difficult to get a cop’s attention without getting out of a car — but if that’s the closest refuge, go there and lean on the horn. If you have a cell with you, call 911 and report where you are.

Fire stations tend to be more open, and they’re usually populated by large, fit men. And they’re the kind of men whose altruism triggers their testosterone: show up at a fire station in distress, and they’ll all leap on their white chargers.

An ER is also likely to have someone around who will notice if you park by the door and lean on your horn. Often there are police or firemen around ERs, too.

Failing one of these outposts, always keep an eye out for places that have lots of people around: a crowded parking lot, a popular store, a busy strip mall. I once escaped a nut case by swerving left across oncoming traffic into a shopping center. The crazy kept on rolling down the road, unwilling to continue harassing me in the presence of others.

When driving home, watch your rear- view mirror. If someone follows me into the neighborhood and then stays on my tail after I’ve made the first couple of the turns I have to take to reach my house, I don’t go home. Instead, I take another route back out of the ’hood. If the person stays on my tail, I head for the nearest police station or fire house.

While in public, try to look dowdy. Refrain from dressing sharply (unless you have a man with you, of course), and certainly do not wear obviously expensive clothing or carry an expensive, name-brand handbag. I no longer carry a purse at all these days: too dangerous in the grocery-store parking lots near my house. I keep a credit card and a couple of store cards in a business card case, which I can carry in a pocket.

At home: equip your doors with heavy-duty, drill-proof, bump-proof Shlage or Medeco deadbolts.

Don’t know what “bumping” is? Mwa ha ha! Check this out:

As the “burglar” type in this video remarks, a bump-resistant lock ain’t cheap. But believe me: it is so worth it. Try to drill a Schlage or a Medeco lock, and it’ll break your drill.

Obviously, putting a fancy lock on a kitchen door with a window in it is self-defeating. Install your deadbolt on solid-core exterior doors with no window(!), or — much more cost-effective and handy for letting fresh air flow through the house — install security doors and put the high-end lock on those. You’ll need a top-notch locksmith for the job, because many metal security doors are too thin to accommodate this type of lock; the locksmith will need to special-order a type of metal ring that adds space to install the deadbolt.

Do not use double-cylinder deadbolts. These can trap you or a child in the house if a fire starts — if you can’t reach the key that you’ve stashed out of the burglar’s grasp, or if the person trying to get out doesn’t know where to find it, you’re done for. Remember, the likelihood that you’ll need to get out in a hurry is at least as high and certainly more urgent than the likelihood that some guy will try to get in.

Upgrade your windows. The new double-paned windows have more than one locking system, allowing you to complicate a burglar’s life. And if any of those windows are sliders, add a third “lock” by dropping a stick in the track. You also can buy stick-on battery-operated alarms, which will squeal like an enraged cat if anyone (you included) opens the window. Again, bear in mind: You don’t care if they get in, as long as you get enough advance warning to get out a different door or window.

Make friends with a German shepherd. Get yourself a dog, preferably a large one with a protective temperament.

The dog strategy, however, is problematic. German shepherd dogs are overbred and potentially dangerous — truly, too many representatives of the breed today are batsh!t. Pit bulls — pace, dear pit-bull-loving friends — are unpredictable and also potentially dangerous. You do not want a dog that has a higher than normal propensity to turn on you. This includes a number of purebred lines. The best strategy is probably to rescue a mixed-breed dog, preferably one that does not appear to be part GerShep or part pit bull.

German shepherds and many other large, assertive breeds are high-energy, high-drive dogs that require a lot of time, training, and physical strength to help them adapt to living in your home. You must be prepared to train and exercise these dogs — and to do so you will need training yourself that goes well beyond the YouTube variety — and you must expect to spend some time every day exercising and working your dog.

A smaller dog may be better: most dogs this side of a greyhound are walking burglar alarms. They can’t “protect” you the way most people imagine a shepherd or a Doberman will do…but that’s a fantasy. No dog can or should be expected to protect you. The only critter that can protect you is you.

And you do that with common sense.

Is keeping a gun in the house a manifestation of common sense?

Only if you’re fully trained to use it, if you keep in practice, and you keep the weapon clean and lubricated. And even then, only if you really, truly, deep in your heart of hearts are prepared to use it against another human being. Police officers and members of the military are specifically trained to overcome this scruple.

Most people who are not psychopaths will hesitate to shoot another person. And just a fraction of an instant can give an aggressor the chance to shoot you, if he’s armed or if he grabs your gun and takes it from you. For that reason, I personally think that for most people it’s pointless and, if you have kids around the house, dangerous to keep a gun in your residence. Keep your wits about you, and you won’t need a gun.

Peace in the War Zone(?)

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Aw, c’mon…We live in Arizona. 80 degrees leaves a guy shivering!

So some guy was shot dead just around the corner last night — over by the freeway, but still within walking distance of the Funny Farm. That would explain the excited burst of cop sirens along about 9 p.m.

Blasts of alarm have become so commonplace I no longer pay much attention to them. If the cop helicopters take up residence directly over my block, yeah…I’ll get up and lock the doors. Otherwise…please, dudes: make my day.

Occasionally (well, we could say more like about once every three days), I reflect that it’s probably past time for me to look for housing in some quieter part of town. Or of the state. I suspect that one reason my (former) mother-in-law has lived to 103 is that she dwells in peace: Grand Junction is about as quiet and laid-back as it gets. She hasn’t been subjected to a lot of environmental stress from traffic noise, cop and ambulance sirens, endless copter fly-overs, car alarms, house alarms, barking watchdogs…or, presumably, from daily newspaper reports of mayhem.

That kind of background stress has got to take a toll.

If you’re going to live in Arizona, the answer is to move away from Phoenix. The city, except for a few enclaves and the gentrification-engineering of the downtown district, has largely deteriorated into a gigantic slum. Areas that once were modest middle-class/working-class areas are now mostly working poor or not-working-at-all. To give you an idea: teacher pay (these areas were places where public school teachers would live) is now so low here that the state cannot hire or retain teachers at all. Some districts have no senior staff; most teachers leave the trade after three or four years.

The result of right-to-work-for-nothing laws is that you end up with large segments of your society living in poverty. And poverty, alas, brings with it drugs, alcohol, psychological suffering, and crime. Hence: a neighborhood shopping center where you dare not carry your purse across the parking lot, or where the residents drive miles away from home to buy their groceries at safer venues; people getting shot dead on the street corners; and criminals moving into your neighborhood.

The other day the dogs and I were walking over in Richistan when abruptly we came face-to-face with two of the scariest dudes I’ve seen in a long time. One of them…well…you know how some men get a certain “look” about them after they’ve been in prison for awhile? They put on weight because of the bad food (which they’d probably eat on the street anyway), but they also put on muscle because they pass the time working out; they also take on a kind of self-defensive aggressive demeanor that can be distinctive. One might even say…heh!…arresting.

Well, one of them looked like that: the biggest, baddest dude in town! 🙂

The other was a smaller, fairly slender punk riding a bike that was too small for him — i.e., it no doubt had been lifted out of someone’s yard. It was 80+ degrees and he had on a sweatshirt with the hood pulled over his head, hiding his face. Uh huh…a man has to keep warm, eh?

They had a big old bloodhound with them. It wanted to go after the corgis, but the big bruiser kept it under control. He was polite and well-mannered — his companion was reclusive, but the tank came across like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. It was painfully obvious that they were casing the neighborhood, looking for the best houses to burgle.

There’s a Humane Society shelter just up the road. These guys go to the shelter, “adopt” a dog, and use it as a ruse: they’re “walking the dog” while they’re checking out your house to rip off. So: no question that was what was going on.

The problem with moving out of Phoenix to someplace quieter and ostensibly safer is…well, there are two problems:

a) The suburbs, home of white flight, are now ALL homeowner’s associations. Developers build their tracts as HOAs, and they stay HOAs. I do not want to live in an HOA. I have enough layers of government to deal with, thank you very much; I don’t need another bunch of busybodies bossing me around.

Nor, just between you and me and the lamp-post, do I especially want to live in a lily-white ghetto. Weirdly enough, I happen to like a little diversity in my surroundings.

b) They are halfway to California. They’re so far away from anything that, like my friend KJG, you find yourself driving until you’re blue in the face any time you want to shop or meet your friends or go to any events. I don’t want to live on the road to Mandalay, thank you.

Smaller towns here are poorly provided with infrastructure. Medical care in Arizona, by and large, isn’t great to start with. In a place like, say, Yarnell or Patagonia, it’s nonexistent. You live there at your risk…especially as you get to the heart attack age. And most small towns in Arizona are pretty grody: you want to see poverty here, you visit the rural areas.

Arizona’s closest approximation of MiL’s home town, Grand Junction — the largest town on Colorado’s Western Slope — is Prescott. And it surely is a nice little burg. A little touristy, but not excessively so: it also has a Costco and grocery stores that serve real people who really live there. It has a few decent restaurants, and it has a cultural life of sorts.

But it’s not cheap to live there. Housing prices are fairly high, and the cost of gasoline and groceries is significantly higher than in the big city. And there, too: although the county medical center is one of the three best in the state, that actually ain’t sayin’ much. It’s hot in the summer — cooler than here, but still warm enough to need air conditioning — and cold enough in the winter that it sometimes snows, meaning you couldn’t get away with leaving the heat off all winter long, the way I do here. And there’s a chronic water shortage. So utility bills would be significantly higher.

Plus of course the cost of moving house takes your breath away.

So I dunno…I probably don’t want to move away. But if my son didn’t live here…if I didn’t have the church choir…I surely would.

Image: DepositPhotos © Xalanx

Computers, Cox, & Credit Cards: Never a Dull Moment

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March 14, 2015, 5:50 p.m. So my computers are offline, once and for all. I’m writing this in Wyrd, planning to cut and paste into WordPress tomorrow morning, when I expect to get online at my favorite coffee shop.

Been having some strange connectivity problem for the past few days, some affecting the phone line and some the usual up-and-down connection that characterizes lovely Cox.

Cox is a hell of a lot better than Qwest. But…uhm…that ain’t sayin’ much. Smoke signals would’ve been better than Qwest. One thing you have to give to Cox is that they have decent customer service.

At any rate, the wireless connection went irretrievably down this afternoon. So I have no blog. No email. No endlessly entertaining news and “news” sites. No online games. No baroque Facebook time suck. No clients…

The horror!

Cox allows as to how the problem is on their end, and they’re sending a tech over tomorrow afternoon to install a bunch of new equipment and make the thing work. Whether this will disable the new robocall blocker remains to be seen. If it does, then it’s good-bye to Cox; I’ll have to go over to Ooma, which will save me a shitload of money and inflict a shitload of hassle.

The weird thing about being stuck offline…is the horror.

I feel utterly at sea without the email and without access to the Internet to inform the editing projects.

Fortunately, the book I’m working on now is a work of fiction. So I don’t have to look up every third reference, factoid, circumstance, or stylistic quirk. For most of the editorial work I do, though, an Internet connection is not an option.

So the whole “no email, no Internet” angst is kind of irrational, at least for the time being. As a practical matter, chances are I’ll get more done and enjoy life more without the preoccupation that has become an occupation. Maybe I’ll even take the dogs for a walk this evening!

This evening I was supposed to go to a meeting, but I’m still too sick to go anywhere. Especially not to a two- or three-hour jawfest.

Probably will be too sick to go to choir tomorrow night, and probably will be too sick to go to the Thursday meeting. But just now there’s no way to send my apologies to any of the worthies who expect me to show up.

As dawn cracked this morning, I was going to write a Spring has Sprung sort of post, featuring a passel of flower images from the yard. Not so much, though.

Neither computer would read the camera’s memory chip. As it developed, I was able to access the images on the large computer, which accepts a cable connection to the camera. Copied the images to a flash drive. So that was not a connectivity problem but a memory chip problem.

I did not want to do battle with computers this morning! Got up at 6 a.m.; by 8 a.m. all I wanted to do was go back to bed and take a nap.

Fed the dogs; ate some more leftover soup; watered the plants. The weather has been in the 90s, so the potted plants need to be watered every day and the stuff in the ground needs watering about once every three days.

Brushed down the pool. To my surprise, the mustard algae was not back!

That would be because the pool was brushed yesterday. It occurred to me that pushing the pool brush up and down the walls amounts to a good way to get some much-needed mild exercise – I’ve been spending way, way, way too much time parked in front of a damn computer.

Running the nylon brush up and down the walls again, I reflected that when I first moved into the house, I was so tickled with the pool that I used to clean it and test it and adjust its chemicals every day. Now it’s lucky if it gets cleaned and tested once a month.

When did I take to neglecting this marvelous puddle? It’s obviously an asset to the house: make that a$$et. What’s with letting it go to pot??

No answer to that one. But pretty obviously the wall moss is the outcome. Sweep it down once a day: get some mild upper-body exercise and preserve a $20,000 lifestyle blandishment.

Read about 20 pages of the client’s novel – really a first read, a fast line-edit. The MS is only about 130 pages; at 20 pages a day, I can get through it in a week. Since I set a two-week deadline, this will leave another week to go over the whole thing more carefully, think about it, and offer some advice of the writing-coach variety.

By about 2:00 p.m. the wireless connection was down. It being about six hours past my naptime, I decided to shut down both terminals, disconnect the modem and the router, leave them disconnected, and go back to bed. Surely after an hour or two, the system would reset itself.

No. Not so much.

After a restless and generally miserable attempt at napping, I reconnected the peripherals and rebooted and…couldn’t get online at all.

Oh god.

Back and forth with Cox. Long, long story short, a technician is supposed to show up between three and five tomorrow afternoon and install a whole new set-up. I’m being told Cox is upgrading its equipment. The new stuff is supposed to be installed inside the house (oh, good: MORE junk to clutter up the desktop, MORE junk for me to dust!), supposedly free of cost to me except that I have to pay for backup batteries.

Shit.

Meanwhile…oh, yes, meanwhile…

Yesterday while I was enjoying a particularly miserable run-around in search of groceries that I never did manage to get, I stuck my AMEX card in a pocket that also held a metal doodad. Metal doodad scratched the fancy fucking “chip,” and it wouldn’t work at the Safeway. And that is why, among several other goddamn reasons, I wasn’t able to get the Kleenex and the cough medicine and the vinegar and the ClearCare and the cream despite stumbling around not one, not two, but three goddamn grocery stores.

Don’t ask.

So AMEX was supposed to have a new card delivered by FedEx today.

While yesterday’s antics were in progress, I was so sick I wasn’t thinking even vaguely clearly. Today I realized I hadn’t told them they HAVE to mark the package with a note that the address is on my street, not on the street just north of me that has the same name. Called AMEX this morning to see if a message could be sent belatedly; was told the package hadn’t even been delivered to FedEx but couldn’t get the dumb bunny on the end of the line to understand what I was talking about.

Later this afternoon I called again and reached someone who seemed to have some IQ points. She said the problem is that FedEx was pretty much rendered inert by the storm on the East Coast. They still hadn’t picked up the package.

So, could we PLEASE add a “NOT MY CRAZY NEIGHBOR’S ADDRESS” clue to the package?

Videlicet, my Amazon address is set up to read…

My Name
1234 North Erewhon Drive
Please NOT Lane!
Phoenix, AZ 85123

She at least was able to understand what I was talking about, but she allowed as to how adding NOT LANE to the address was impossible. Which is reasonable, but annoying.

But, she assured me, don’t worry (be happy!): you don’t have to be home because they’ll just leave the package there.

THAT’S THE POINT, I said. If the guy leaves the package at My Crazy Neighbor’s house, it will never be seen again!

They just don’t get it. When you explain this to someone else, they don’t want to believe that these people steal everything that is mistakenly delivered to their house. Most middle-class Americans, I guess, just don’t want to think bad things about other folks.

Oh well. If the card doesn’t show up tomorrow, I’ll call and cancel the AMEX account. I do have a Visa card, which is accepted in more places anyway.

To make everything perfect, the damn Nest thermostat runs on the wireless. No wireless connection: no air conditioning. It’s supposed to be 95 tomorrow!

Fortunately, I don’t normally turn on the AC until temps are in the low hundreds. But…what if this had happened in July? My house would be unlivable.

Enough with that damn thing! As soon as this dust settles, the AC guy is going to be invited to replace it with a NONprogrammable, NONwireless thermostat.

First thing tomorrow morning, I’m headed over to the Little Guy’s coffee house, where I can get a decent cup of café Americano and a free connection to the Internet. Post this thing there, then check the email, and then go on my way for an otherwise Disconnected day.

Comin’ Up Roses Today!!!

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It is a CELESTIAL miracle! After dragging myself out of the sack, sick as the proverbial dawg, I called the County Courthouse and learned that my “group” of jurors was not selected today! And, said the talking robot, that means I’m excused from jury duty for the next 18 months.

Thank. You. GOD!

Then, it got better. Yes: believe it or not, better.

WonderAccountant finished my involved tax returns yesterday. So those were sitting on the table needing to be shipped off very soon. And they have to be sent return-receipt-requested — drop those things in the mail with just a stamp on them at your peril.

I was worried that if they stuck me on a jury, I wouldn’t get free to go stand in line at the post office for 45 minutes until after the March 16 deadline. But yesterday I just felt too damn sick to go up there and do battle with the unwashed masses and the hapless, outrageously overworked P.O. clerks. Mailing something in person from our P.O. is an exercise in masochism.

Anyway, perked up by the news that I wasn’t going to have to drag to downtown Phoenix and sit around a waiting room for six or eight hours — and already showered, combed, painted, and dressed — I decided to take the tax returns over. Also volunteered to buy a roll of stamps for WonderAccountant — why should more than one of us stand in line till the chickens come home?

So: drive into the parking lot…and…there are TWO CARS in there!

Holy mackerel! That’s unheard of.

Went inside and there were only two people ahead of me, both of them already up at the counter being waited on by a crew of…two postal clerks. As usual.

I could not believe it. Got up to the counter in a matter of seconds.

A-n-n-n-d…another mirabilis: The other guy at the counter was one of those ninnies who thinks he has to select a SPECIAL STAMP to grace his recipient. Yes. An EXTRA SPECIAL STAMP.

Have you ever gotten in line behind one of those? People are stacked up in line out the freaking DOOR and the ninnie is going, ohhh well that one’s nice but maybe it’s not perfect…do you have one with a bunny rabbit wearing a pink ribbon? On and interminably on.

For a change, I did not get behind this one.

Got out of the P.O. before he decided which work of art should go on his letter. By the time I got back out to the parking lot, there were ELEVEN cars parked and a flow of new ones y-cumin’ in. And naturally, one of the prospective patrons decides to drive in the wrong way. She blocks the traffic as she tries to back and fill and figure out where she wants to go.

I swear to God: they always get in front of me! Every time. Well…except for the merciful remission at the stamp counter.

But despite the bellyaching, the worst of the symptoms subsided after I’d been up about an hour and stood in a hot steamy shower about 15 minutes. Felt incredibly awful upon rolling out at 6 a.m.: agonizing cough, throat so congested I couldn’t even croak out a “no!” to the dogs, headache, and a fever. But there was nothing for it: I had to go downtown (so I thought) and sit around praying for an escape.

I now feel pretty awful, but at least I can utter a few intelligible words. Haven’t taken my temp again but think it may have dropped closer to normal.

This epizootic is probably bronchitis: I’m wheezing, and I don’t have asthma. Last time I was visited by an episode of wheezing, the doc said it was bronchitis, and he walloped me with a stiff round of prednisone.

Prednisone rips up my gut. The result of that episode was the first really serious flare-up of GERD. It took over six months to get rid of it. No…I take that back: I only got rid of it pretty much once and for all about three months ago. So it took two years to get rid of the side effects of the drug I was given for the last occurrence of severe chest congestion.

As you can imagine, I’m not in any hurry to race back to the doctor. I do not want to go through that again. And my Christian Science roots tell me this bug likely will go away on its own.

What doesn’t kill you goes away. Right? 😉

Image: DepositPhoto, © Kuzmafoto

Come the Apocalypse(?)…

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So, what d’you think about this thing here?

Sure looks snazzy in the picture, doesn’t it? Looks like a regular gas stovetop, in miniature. Amazon wants $53 for this thing, a bargain compared to Costco’s $200 offering, which (admittedly!) does have a stand to hold it at waist height but which has only a couple of burners that don’t look very efficient.

This morning I was reminded that I’d like to have a propane camp stove that will boil water and fry or stew foods, come the apocalypse. This one has a lot of bad reviews — 18%, unfortunately — so I’m still looking (any recommends, dear readers??). But I definitely want to get something with a stove-like burner to use outside.

And how did I happen to be reminded? Well, once again the damned Cox wireless connection went down. So as usual I shut down the computers, unplugged the router and modem, left the system off for half an hour, replugged, and rebooted. Since this happened right about the crack of dawn, the house was kind of cold, so while I was waiting for Cox to recover itself, I went to turn on the heat for a few minutes by way of warming the place up to 63 or 65 degrees.

And lo! The damned Nest thermostat was OFF-LINE.

Yeah. If your router is off, your nifty computerized thermostat is off. So…let’s think about that. Even if your electric service is intact, if your Internet connection goes down, you can’t run your heat or — far more crucially in lovely uptown Arizona — your air conditioning.

Holy sh!t.

If you’ve been paying even the slightest bit of attention, you’re aware that the U.S. Internet is highly vulnerable to attack from Unfriendlies. So much so that an extended regional or nationwide outage is probably inevitable. A serious attack could disable the Internet not for days but for weeks…possibly as long as three months. The same is true of the electrical grid.

We can all imagine the chaos an extended interruption of service would cause nationally and locally. But it’s worth considering exactly what it would mean to you, personally, in your home.

If you couldn’t even turn on the heat or the air-conditioning — even if the electric grid was operating — you would be in deep trouble.

A major attack on the country’s infrastructure — even a part of it, given our present near-100% dependence on computer technology — would mean you couldn’t turn on your stove, your heater or air conditioner, or your water heater. Gas stoves today operate with an electric sparker system, and so your gas stove would not run without electric power. You might not even be able to get potable water out of the tap — or any water. You would not be able to buy gas for your car, because gas pumps run on electricity and computers. You wouldn’t be able to buy groceries and medicines, because retailers’ cash registers are computers running on electricity.

It sounds like crazy Prepper thinking…but between you’n’me, I think it’s probably wise to be prepared, at least minimally, for an extended outage of these services. That’s even if you don’t live on the San Andreas Fault or deep in Tornado Alley.

Today we all live on a fault line.

My best friend in graduate school came from the Salinas area, where her parents were still living when the last major earthquake hit central California. Her mom was here visiting at the time, but her dad had stayed home. Fortunately, Elmer was a camping and fishing enthusiast. So he had a lot of gear on hand. And he had a camper that was equipped with a propane stove and refrigerator.

All the power went down and stayed down for some time. Roads in and out of town were wrecked — no one could get in or out for several days. Elmer kept the entire neighborhood going with the supplies he had, meant to keep him in comfort for a week or two when he was out in the sticks. He was able to boil water and prepare food for the neighbors’ small kids with the propane stoves he had on hand. He became, to put it mildly, the hero of the day.

So…what would be minimal preparation for an extended Internet or electric outage?

• Water — enough to last  until the government or Red Cross can truck water into the area
• Source of heat for cooking
• Source of light, battery or propane operated
• Supply of foods that do not have to be refrigerated
• Supply of pet food, as necessary
• Source of living quarters heat, if it’s very cold outside, or plenty of warm clothing and blankets
• At least one 5-gallon jerry can of gasoline
• A generous stash of propane, stored safely
• Stash of prescription meds, if you can get them, and stash of OTC nostrums
• First-aid kit

That’s really not very much — nothing unreasonable for most of us to keep on hand.

“Source of heat for cooking” means a device with at least one burner that gets hot enough to boil water. You may have access to water, but it may not be safe to drink without boiling. If your stove doesn’t work, you’ve got a problem.

I have 18,000 gallons of water in my pool, so assuming I have a camp stove and plenty of propane, I could get by for quite a long while in the event of a water shortage.

Foods that can be stored without refrigeration include dried rice and beans. These need to be soaked in water and cooked for a fair amount of time: hence, propane and water.

A generator would be good…but generators don’t run on air. Whether to drive or to run your house, you’d need gasoline. And gas is not something that can be stored and forgotten: you need to empty the jerry can into your car now and again and drive back up to the gas station to refill your supply

I’m keeping all my propane tanks full at all times, and am thinking I’ll buy another one. At this time I have three; four would last for quite a while.

While the grill works well for most kinds of dry cooking — roasting, baking, and grilling — it’s not designed for boiling water. Using it to boil water or cook rice or beans would waste a lot of fuel. That’s why I think I should have a functioning camp stove.

As for keeping warm at night? Dog. There’s a reason for the “two-dog night” saying. A dog’s normal body temperature is 102.5 degrees. Put the critter on your bed at night, and it’ll warm you up just like an electric blanket.

The ultimate heat source…

I personally am beginning to believe that within the next four to eight years, we will see serious civil unrest in this country. The time may come when we cannot safely leave our homes or neighborhoods for any length of time…or at all.

Which is the longer shot — cyberattack or civil war? I don’t know. They both seem like long shots. But who would have imagined Americans would elect a President who wants to shut down the free press, who imagines he can build a Berlin Wall from Sea to Shining Sea, who lies as freely as he breathes, who cultivates divisiveness, and who evinces clear signs of mental illness?

Whether you think it’s going to happen or not, it may be wise to be prepared. Helle’s Belles, none of us thinks the house is going to burn down or we’re going to croak over tomorrow. But we all carry insurance…just in case.

Inauguration Day!

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Well…so here we are:  the Black guy is out of the White House and the Orange guy is in. Hevvin help us.

Listening to his brief, to-the-point inaugural address, it was hard to escape the thought…

What if he’s right?

Just now I’m listening to PBS News streaming off the Web, where a commentator is going on about “doom and gloom” in Trump’s speech, and how the beast was “not healing wounds.”

But…I didn’t hear doom and gloom in what he said. I heard “we’re gonna fix this.”

If he hadn’t lied until he was blue in the face..

If  he hadn’t crassly, deliberately appealed to the very worst in the American psyche…

If he weren’t a groper of women…

If he had not courted and had not been courted by (possibly to the point of treason) a foreign power that has been our enemy for decades…

If there were any inkling of a reason to believe he understands as much about running a country as he does about running a TV reality show…

I could almost get on board with the bastard. I could almost be persuaded that yeah, he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.

Almost.

One of the things that’s fed that feeling is the jaw-dropping obtuseness evinced by thinkers and commentators of my own political persuasion. Dayum! What part of a few international billionaires are collecting most of the money in the world while Americans can’t get a decent job don’t you  understand?

Not just a few “deplorables,” folks. But ALL OF US.

Or at least a very significant portion of us.

This afternoon NPR ran (twice!) a piece whose reporter dutifully went out and interviewed some Trumpish WT: high-school graduates working in one of the country’s few remaining steel mills. The hellish difficulty of the work was described in loving detail. The workers’ enthusiasm for just having a job was described, much as the behavior of some exotic beetle might be detailed. Then the reporter asks one woman, “Is the pay good?”

“For these parts, it’s very good,” she says.

Amazed (being a clear and present New Yorker), our intrepid reporter follows up with “Can you afford to buy a car or live in a house?”

“Well, no,” she says (subtext: Are you stupid?) “No, you couldn’t buy a house and you couldn’t afford to buy a car on this salary.”

She and her partner are getting by because they’re both laboring full time. Maybe one person could live on the pay. But two surely can’t. Still…it’s very good pay and she feels lucky to have a job at all.

Okay. We all know that people with GEDs and high-school diplomas can’t get work, and we can hear, from the reporters’ and commentators’ tone that we should believe the people who voted for Trump are the ignored and ignorant white underclass discommoded by globalization.

But…what about the rest of us? Do you know how many jobs formerly held by college graduates and even graduates of professional schools are being offshored? Lawyers’ jobs. Accountants’ jobs. Graphic designers’ jobs. Editors’ jobs. Publishers’ jobs. Carpenters’ jobs. Bankers’ jobs. Architects’ jobs. IT jobs. Engineering jobs. News reporting. Stock analysis. Even medical services.

When my associate editor Tina and I were still working at the Great Desert University, our office provided membership in a statewide association of small publishers. After we were laid off, The Copyeditor’s Desk maintained our membership until the trade organization finally collapsed.

We were hustling to make the business work. Her theory was that if we kept our rates low, we would get more business and so would make up in volume the amount that we might have made with better-paying work. So we were selling ourselves for peanuts.

One evening we were at a shindig put on by this group. Along comes an Indian guy. He has a printing company in Mumbai. The guy is thriving and is, at that time, maneuvering to get visas and green cards to move his family permanently into the United States, where he wishes to take up residence in a Scottsdale mansion.

He starts to talk fairly loosely. And without realizing that he’s telling me this, he reveals that he can take a book from the manuscript stage through copyediting, page design, cover design, typesetting, proofreading, indexing, and printing for less than Tina and I can copyedit it — at our bargain-basement rates!

I simply couldn’t effing believe it. But it was true. This guy was stealing our business. As he circulated around the room, he was telling all our potential clients that he could take their golden words to the finished product for less than a U.S. supplier could do one stage of the product at starvation wages.

Well, since then I’ve raised our rates. I figure if we can’t get much work, we’d better get paid as much as we can for the little work we do get. And we now target a different clientele: businesses and academics who need to publish to make money, not just because they dream of becoming Writers. Effectively, we offer a Cadillac editing service. We’re good, and we get paid for being good.

Why, we even speak English (can you imagine?). And French. And Russian. And Italian. Even a bit of Spanish. And Latin, of course.

The point is, I’m dead sure we are not alone. Large numbers of Americans with expensive college degrees who used to hold down good jobs that fit their education and experience no longer can earn a living wage. Many of us are lucky to be working at all. And IMHO, it’s fvckin’ no wonder people voted for Trump. A lot of people think it’s time for a change — and they need that change if they’re going to survive at all.

Whether Trump can make change happen remains to be seen. Personally, I doubt it. The first major crisis that hits — whether it’s a stock market crash or another plane taking down another landmark building or a gas attack exterminating half a city — will show how little he knows about running a country. The extreme right-wing organization behind him, the hideous, decayed remains of the Republican Party, will take over the instant he falters. And like the Taliban, those people mean no good at all for anyone who is not one of them.

Scary times. Scary times made even scarier by the fact that the people who could have and should have done something about it still don’t seem to get the picture.

Image: Zach Rudisin. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20727816