Coffee heat rising

Angst

Ditz

by
medusa-500px-vincenzo_gemito_medusa_1911_02
Art Nouveau plaque depicting Medusa…1911, the very year my mother was born. Must be talismanic.

God i hate it when i sit down to the computer and it won’t come on and then i have to fiddle with it to make it work. It’s just another manifestation of the DITZ that is my life.

I am so tired of ditz I could barf. Wonder-Accountant laughs when she reviews my labors, and then she remarks that what I do is the English-major’s answer to bookkeeping. Mind-numbing.

Have spent the last…what? Two weeks? Three weeks, off and on?…reformatting the forthcoming book on writing & publishing.

Formatting a manuscript for print publication is ditz on steroids. I labored and labored and labored and finally got the thing into the template for a 7-x-10-inch paperback. This, because the standard paperback trade-book trim size, about 5.5 x 8.5 inches, produces an ungodly length of 445 pages.

Printing costs for a 445-page paperback are, shall we say, bracing. There is NO effing way I can sell this thing for a profit. So I ordered up a larger template, which yields a mere 316 pages.

Unfortunately, I neglected one small detail before I sent away for that template and before I formatted 77,351 words in the fvcker. I failed to ask the PoD supplier just what he would charge to print  a 7-x-10-inch book.

You wanna talk “ungodly”? Lemme tell you about “ungodly.”

So…after I’d done all the formatting and went to upload the PDF to the PoD guy’s site, that’s when I noticed that the cost of one book, though the larger trim size was more than 100 pages shorter, would pass beyond prohibitive.

The upshot of that was, I realized, that I would have to redo the entire book, again, in the smaller size.

This entails a staggering amount of mind-numbing, brain-banging, head-slamming ditzy layout work, because when you reduce the size you change the page breaks. When you change the page breaks, you change the chapter lengths. When you change the chapter lengths you screw up the opening pages. When you reset the opening pages, you screw up every single page and every goddamn image that comes afterward. When you manage, finally, to get all those things fixed (and it takes hour after hour after hour after hour after hour of horrible ditzy frustrating hateful work to make them right and you have to do quite a lot of it over and over and OVER), when you finally have all those things fixed, then you have to rebuild the table of contents (upon which you stupidly did a custom job) and the index (nine pages of double columns).

Meanwhile, I’d sent the MS over to the e-book formatter, where it was to be converted to Kindle and ePub versions. Pretty quick he starts e-mailing: did you really mean to write?… is this what you intended?… is this an error?…

Wayyyy too many queries are coming over from this guy, whose job is not to proofread. So I get into the file and start reading and realize HOLY SH!T. The thing is swimming in typos and bêtises.

Now I realize I need to go through the entire thing from beginning to end a-fvcking-gain, once I get it poured back into its original 5.5 x 8.5 size and formatted sorta right.

I run Word’s spell-checker on the content, and I fvckin’ cannot believe it. Wyrd finds dozens of errors, many of them very obvious. How the HELL did this stuff get through?

I have no idea. All I know is that I now have to go through 445 pages, after entering Wyrd’s corrects, and proofread line by line by ditzy line, searching out the remaining errors.

There are, it develops, a lot of them. I’ve lost track of how much time it’s taken to plod through this thing.

Meanwhile, mind you: I have paying work. The stupid-stuff has to get done around that.

And I’ll tellya: the stupid-stuff gives me serious pause. If I’m making this many errors in my own golden words, how many errors am I making in my clients’ dross?

I certainly seem to be instilling a lot of stupid mistakes in these blog posts of late. So…it’s reasonable to suspect the same high quality of perfection applies to my customers’ work.

Shee-ut.

All of this fun is on the side, of course.

Just now we have 475 pages of academic educationese flowing in-house. It will take all three of us working full-out to get this thing ready to go to the designer by the deadline, January 15.

As a practical matter, we have about a snowball’s chance. That won’t stop us from trying, though.

This thing is a compendium of contributions from a couple dozen authors. Though (as usual), they’ve been told to use a specific style manual, some have submitted their stuff in APA style, some in Chicago, and some even in (incredibly) MLA. Some, probably, have engaged their own idea of what oughta look nice on the printed page.

Untangling this incredible mess entails…? You got it: DITZ.

Oh, god is it a ditzy job.

I’ve done two of the four articles that came in and could have handled another one today. But we have a whole weekend and two other people working on the damn things, so I thought…what th’hell…I’ll try to make some more progress on the book layout.

Made progress, all right: toward pulling all my hair out.

Sometimes I ask myself why am i doing this? I hate this sh!t.

But then there’s the question of what else would I be doing?

Stocking shelves at WalMart? Yeah: I’d get paid better. Probably put my back out, though.

Walking the dogs? How many hours per day can you walk the dogs?

So far I’ve made no money on this enterprise. But hope springs eternal: with the current project, I’m hoping I can sell my services to continuing ed programs and community colleges to advise similarly deluded souls on how to become Writers with a Capital W. To whatever seminars, classes, and online hoo-ha’s I can wangle, I will bring these books. And thereby I hope, at last, to sell a few of my self-published efforts.

Sounds almost like a viable idea, doesn’t it? We must bear in mind, though, that if an idea is viable, I can kill it with a glance. I’m like Medusa. All the idea has to do is look at my head and it keels over in its tracks.

 Really. I should be spending my son’s patrimony driving around the country in an RV.

Image: I, Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11814743

Derailed Day

by

Well, a LOT got done today. But none of it was anything planned. All the schemes on the schedule for this day were totally derailed.

All I wanted to do was paint the east wall. Yesterday I bought a gallon of good-quality paint at Dunn-Edwards, plus a roller designed for use on cinderblock.

Some years ago, Bila the Bosnian Painter (my favorite painter) covered the Funny Farm in the color I craved. He repaired and painted the trim. And all was well. Toward the end of the job, I reminded him that I wanted the wall facint the road along the east side painted to match the house. He’d…well…sorta forgotten about that and was running out of paint. So he diluted what remained and sprayed it valiantly upon the wall.

It looked OK. For a few months. But shortly it started to fade. A couple of strokes where he’d squirted it especially exuberantly with his sprayer retained the color, but mostly it looks like somebody tried to tag it with graffiti. Altogether lacking in panache. So: today was the day to get rid of that.

But.

I overslept. Didn’t get out of the sack until 7 a.m., about two hours late. Then, stupidly, I started the day by farting around on the Internet: reading the news (such as it is), answering the emails, screwing around on Facebook.

Facebook has got to be THE biggest timesuck ever invented by the mind of Man.

At some point, I stroll out in the garage, and out of curiosity decide to see whether the defective hatchback gate on the Venza has decided to work today.

It has not.

In fact, instead of JUST not working in the punch-a-button automatic mode, it now is unusable in the manual mode, too. If you open it manually and stick your head into the back end of the car, the damn thing closes on your neck.

Back to the Internet. Cruise around for quite some time before I find the symptoms described, not in any official way but only by other hapless Toyota owners.

(You may be sure I will NEVER buy another Toyota again. I probably never will buy another car again.) It’s either the struts (cost to repair: $3,000 to $4,000) or the lift motor (cost unspecified).

I do not, do not, do NOT ever want to deal with Bell Road Toyota again.

By now it’s around 10 a.m., so I call my  mechanic, Chuck. Reach his partner, Pete.

Can they work on the car on the extended warranty?

Not sure, sez he. Depends on who the warranty is written with. This is not specified in the effing crooked paperwork.

Call Camelback Toyota. Get the service manager there. I say I bought the car at Bell Road and never want to do business with them again. Like everyone who has ever heard of Bell Road Toyota, he laughs and says ,”Yeah, I hear ya!”

Bell Road’s reputation precedes it…. Too bad it didn’t precede into my precincts before I bought this car there.

He says that for the repair to be covered, I have to have bought “Platinum” coverage. This of course sounds like an excuse not to cover it. He agrees the struts cost three to four grand; if it’s the motor, says he, that’ll be around $2,500. I say I’m living on Social Security and can’t afford that, so if it’s not covered, then I have a “new” car from Toyota that will always be defective. I mention Funny about Money; I describe the number of readers who see it, by subscription, through Facebook, and through Twitter, and I suggest yet another report on the Venza interlude is not the best thing for Toyota’s good name.

He says, “WAIT, DON’T HANG UP! Give me the VIN and I can find out what coverage you bought.” I figure there’s a good chance I did shell out extra for this, because the SOB who tied up my entire afternoon high-pressuring into every extra charge Toyota could dream up probably added that on.

Camelback Toyota guy rummages through his computer and says it looks like I probably have the coverage. (I read this to mean “I’m going to talk my boss into covering this, if I can, on the grounds that it will support the company’s goodwill.”) We agree that I’ll bring the car in on Tuesday for them to figure out what’s wrong with it and decide whether they’ll do the job as warranty work or if they’ll try to give me another royal screwing. If the latter is the case, then the car will just go through the rest of its life without a functioning back hatchback door.

Fvck.

By now it’s around 11 a.m. I haven’t even had my customary pot of high-test coffee, to say nothing of anything to eat. I’m too effing mad to eat, though.

But the dog food is running low and I should’ve made a new batch yesterday so I decide to haul the bag of defrosted pork out of the fridge and cook up some more chow for the corgis.

I grab the baggie full of pork and…S-L-O-P-P-P!

Red, bloody juices squirt out of the Ziplock bag. A lake of red bloody juices spreads across the glass shelf occupied by said baggie. It cascades down the inside walls and floods the shelf below, and from there drips down the back of the fridge to puddle on the ledge behind the produce drawers and drizzle down into the bottom of the refrigerator, soaking the styrofoam thing behind the produce drawers.

What. A. Fvcking. MESS!

Most of the refrigerator now has to be taken apart and sanitized.

This chore occupies the better part of an hour. But — look on the bright side! — it does force me to collect and throw out a lot of unidentifiable rotten stuff.

That’s good.

I guess.

Now I get on with cooking the dog food. This is not a difficult job, but it’s messy. And just yesterday the kitchen counters were scrubbed clean and polished to a high glow. By the time I finish, of course they’re covered with grease. So I not only have two dirty pans to scour and the food processor bowl to wash and the giant mixing bowl to wash, I also have to clean and polish the tile. Again.

Residing in the blood-washed fridge, not yet spoiled, are the remains of a roast Costco chicken carcass. Royally tired of meals from this tasty but oversalted treat, I decide to cut off the meat, run it through the food processor, and add it to the dog food.

This almost doubles the amount of food today’s creation yields. But in the process of course I cut myself with an ultra-sharp kitchen knife. While I’m elbow-deep in meat. Cooked meat. But still. Meat.

I soldier on till the job is done. Then head back to the bathroom, un-bandage the other cut finger (which also has been bathing in bloody pork juice and chicken grease), grab the antiseptic wash the Mayo Clinic gave me, and scrub the bejayzus out of my hands. Apply new bandages to cut fingers. Pray (or whatEVER) for the best.

Clean the kitchen.

I still haven’t had breakfast.

Nor, BTW, have I performed my most recent self-appointed regime: the daily dog-hair cleanup.

Realizing that one could theorize that part or all of the old-lady vertigo I’ve been enjoying could be blamed on allergies and the resultant stuffy head that has plugged my ears to the point where I can barely effing HEAR, a week or so ago I threw out the 10-year-old pillows, replaced them with new uncomfortable pillows, washed everything on the bed and subjected it to mite-killing ironing from a Shark set at “blowtorch,” cleaned the floors until you could eat off them (safely!), and took it upon myself to run the dog-hair-catching bed throw through the dryer EVERY day and, also, EVERY day, to dust-mop the floor with a microfiber rag.

This has made a huge difference. As we scribble, I’m Benadryl-free and nose-squirt free, I can breathe, I can hear, and my head is not spinning anymore.

You would be ay-mazed at how much dog hair and dust settle on a tile floor in any given 24-hour period. Yesterday the floor was not only dust-mopped but vacuumed and wet-mopped. At around noon or 1 p.m. today, this is what came up…

doghairYuck. No wonder my head has been stuffed up. You can’t even see the skiff of dog hair in this image.

Fixed breakfast/lunch. Really didn’t have much in the house to eat. Did not feel like eating at all, much less scarfing down the usual mid-day feast. Microwaved two pieces of high-end “Sunday” bacon (reliably delicious) and fried up the rest of the frozen hash browns (reliably fattening). Consumed the desired swill of coffee.

Pal who’s a mortgage loan officer surfaced on the phone. He’s trying to get ahold of M’hijito. I and said Mortgage Pal are trying to move the kid to refinance the downtown house NOW GODDAMN IT BEFORE THE RATES GO ANY HIGHER.

The house has a 30/15 mortgage on it. We signed up for this instrument back in the day, before we realized the economy was skateboarding toward Hell and when we thought we were getting the place on the downtick, yea verily maybe at the bottom of the market. We figured M’hijito would stay here for a three to five years, until he got back on his feet; then we would sell the house, he would repay my grubstake, and he would have enough saved and in profit from the sale to go back to San Francisco, where he belongs.

Wrong.

Wrong.

And Wrong.

We still own the house. He still has his miserable job. He has no hope of ever being able to return to the City, where housing prices are so far out of reason that Donald Trump Himself couldn’t afford an apartment there, and he has despaired of ever getting another job worthy of the astronomically expensive elite college degree that he possesses.

It now looks like he will still be living in the house when that 15-year balloon comes due. And Mortgage Pal and I are dead certain that the crazy low interest rates will be long gone by then, and historically “normal” rates will be back.

Let me put it this way: when I bought my last house, my Realtor and I were beside ourselves with JOY when I wangled an 8.25% rate. We thought that was almost too good to be true. The ex- and I had paid rates as high as 13%, though 11% was more typical.

That’s t.y.p.i.c.a.l…

Getting the kid off the dime has been a bitch of a challenge. This afternoon in chatting, Mortgage Pal (who’s almost as venerable as I am) realized that 11% rates are outside the range of the next generation’s experience.

They just don’t get it. They don’t understand that the low rates we’ve seen over the past many months are FREAKING BIZARRE, and that one of these days (soon, with Trump in office) we will see rates go back to historically “normal” levels. Which ain’t gonna be 4.75%.

Hassling back and forth between those two consumed a fair amount of the afternoon.

Have I painted the wall?

No.

Have I taken the dogs for a walk today?

No.

It’s almost dark. I better go do that…

O Brave New World…

by

…that has such people in it!

Prospero: ‘Tis new to thee.

Indeed. Well, there’s little time to blog this morning, and probably less to say. Got a project in-house that needs to be done right away; a concert to go to this afternoon, Fauré’s Requiem to sing tomorrow night, a pool crying out for help, and yardwork still left unattended.

Nevertheless, it’s one amusement after another, eh? We have an orgasmic stock market — holy mackerel, at this rate we’ll all be rich as Trump. This, after a day of riding the skateboard toward Hell. In saner times, we’d call that “volatility” and start moving money into conservative instruments. Extremely conservative. CDs, anyone? Gold?

Speculation abounds. The endlessly pessimistic CBS MarketWatch has a PF piece on how the Trump Presidency will affect your wallet. In short: taxes down, prices up.

Federal taxes down wouldn’t affect me much, since nearly half my income is from investments and half is Social Security. But I sure could do with some controls on the damn property taxes. Maricopa County and state property taxes are now pushing the limit of what I can afford, with no end in sight. If they’re not brought under control — which they almost certainly won’t be, because after all services have to be provided and the people who use them (i.e., everyone who  lives here) have to pay for them — I will have to move out of my house. That will probably consign me to Sun City, where exemption from property taxes was wangled by Del Webb when he first bought the property and is grandfathered (heh!) in. SDXB’s taxes are a third of what he was paying on the house two lots down from mine, and his home and auto insurance dropped in half when he moved out there.

WaPo speculates on life in the sciences under an anti-science, anti-intellectual troglodyte of a President. Pence, we know, is reliably crazy and would’ve been one of the guys threatening to burn Galileo at the stake unless he recanted his theory that the earth revolves around the sun. But Trump, as I’ve already remarked, defines loose cannonhood. He could do anything. And will.

The Atlantic runs an extraordinarily obtuse rumination on why a woman can’t get elected President of the United States. Nowhere do they question why that woman can’t get elected or wonder whether there might be differences among women candidates. Oh well.

Trump is already waffling on Obamacare. Whaddaya bet we won’t see it go away after all? Whatever happens, it had better be a lot more “awesome” than what we’ve got now, which doctors as well as consumers agree is pretty grim. It’s not something that religious doctrinaires should be entrusted with, I fear.

Welp, all those articles are very entertaining, and I hope you enjoy them. Hereabouts, the coffee is swilled and it’s time to turn to something one helluva lot less entertaining: (ugh!) Work.

Have a nice day…as my step-sister the judge once said to a guy she’d just sentenced to life in prison…

:mrgreen:

Somewhere…Over the Yardarm, Way Up High…

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The sun no doubt is over the yardarm where my FaceBook friend Cas lives: the Gold Coast of Australia. Hereabouts, it’s time for a late breakfast. The sausage is on the grill. The potatoes (yeah, i know) are frying in butter and oil (i know, i know already!), and the bourbon and water is at my side. Stop that askance-looking! It’s medicinal…

At quarter to seven, I was running late for the early-morning bidness networking meeting. I don’t like to eat in restaurants in general — especially not breakfast, since it’s so hard to find something to eat that’s not eggs, and especially not in this restaurant, where the food often leaves something to be desired. So sliced off a piece of roast chicken, which I gulped down on the run with a mug of coffee that slopped all over the car’s nice new(ish) upholstery as I was flying to Scottsdale.

Yes. Well. I’ve learned something: Remember back when the first CardioDoc, the one whose bullying personality led me to wish to wring his neck, informed me that the “heart palpitations” were actually anxiety attacks and if I would race around the park a few times a day, they’d disappear? He was right.

Turns out he was right in spades.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been going back and forth with New Cardiodoc, who is a very nice man in addition to being, as it develops, a well respected heart doctor. The start of this present interaction was an episode in which I nearly passed out as I was cruising across the city at 50 mph on a surface street.

He cannot find a damned thing wrong with me. It does not appear that the apparent presyncope (click on that one and you’ll see why the sh!t was scared out of me) was caused by an easily diagnosed cardiovascular issue. We speculate that it might have been a side-effect from the dose of pseudoephedrine I’d dropped that morning to clear a sinus headache, though the link is unclear.

Eventually I fell back on Young Dr. Kildare, whose signal characteristic is common sense.

Common sense, clearly, was what we needed.

He was unwilling to rule out a cardiovascular cause. He thought it was not old-lady vertigo (ears were cleaned out; head congestion seemed not to be severe), but he thought it probably was not life-threatening. He recommended not giving up on the cardiologist, yet he also suspected, along with the first CardioDoc, that the origin could be anxiety.

So, I was generally miserable about this, and on a subliminal level scared shitless, until…oh yes, until Election Day.

More to the point, until the day after Election Day.

The ultimate horror happened: the President of the United States is now not a jaded politico but an orange-haired misogynistic, racist, blustering, lying, bullying Bozo with no more clue how to run the most powerful nation in the world than he showed in running several businesses into the ground, one of which was manifestly fraudulent.

The day after Election day, the palpitations and the lightheadedness came to a complete, total, peaceful stop. No, none, zero-point-zero-zero manifestations.

Meanwhile, several people — real-world friends and FB friends — remarked that they’d been having anxiety attacks over the  gawdawful election.

{anxiety attacks?}
{palpitations?}
{light-headness?}
{seriously???}

And the day before the election, this amazing episode occurred.

YDK, thinking that maybe the issue could be allergic head congestion, phoned in a prescription for an antihistamine nasal spray. The pharmacy nearest to my house — a Walgreen’s that I like to habituate because it has practically no business and so waits are minimal — is in a colorful district. When I get up to the pharmacy counter, I find a bum (hey! With the Trumpites in power, now we’re allowed to call a bum a one-syllable bum, not an eight-syllable “homeless mentally ill person”) harassing the staff in a very aggressive way.

Okay, let’s get un-PC: in a threatening way.

He demanded that they fork over an addictive pain-killer. They refused to do so, since he didn’t have a current prescription. He carried on at some length, growing more and more aggressive. They finally cut off the argument by shutting and locking a door between themselves and the bum.

He staggered off into the store, and one of the staff asked me what I wanted, then explained that my insurance refused to cover it. I picked up, with the pharmacist’s advice, an OTC substitute.

At the cash register near the front door, I ask the clerk if the bum had left.

He says, “I’ll walk you out to your car.”

A lady is standing behind me with an armful of loot she wishes to purchase. I say, “No, you shouldn’t do that: you have customers you need to attend to.”

She now says, “I’ll walk out with you.”

This sounds good, so I wait till she’s bought her stuff, and we new-made friends venture into the parking lot.

We can’t see the bum anywhere, so I peel off and head for my car. She proceeds along the front of the store toward the neighborhood street just south of the little strip shopping center, headed for her apartment.

As I reach my car, I look back and see that the bum and a friend of his — another seedy-looking, filthy guy — were hiding out of view and have accosted the woman.

I jump in my car and drive over to her. By the time I get there, she’s put up quite a ruckus, and by sheer nerve and a loud voice has caused them to stand down.

Now I ask if she’d like me to drive her home. She says thanks, but no: she thinks she should walk.

She comes over to the car to chat. She needs to walk home, she says, because she’s been having anxiety attacks! over the election. And, oh God, what in the name of heaven will happen to us if Donald Trump doesn’t win?

heh heh heh heh heh

What, indeed?

So thank you, God, for whapping me upside the head.

* * * Back to this morning***

My favorite networking group is probably the only business group in Arizona whose membership consists of a bunch of wild-eyed liberals. It’s hard to find a business man or woman anywhere who’s a wild-eyed liberal, but in Arizona it’s almost impossible.

After two hours of listening to nonstop pissing and moaning, I was already out of sorts when I got in the car to head back into Phoenix. About the time I reached 16th Street — two-thirds of the way home — the heart started to pound and the head started to spin. I had to pull off into a neighborhood, stop, and sit there until the episode passed, which shortly it did.

* * *

By the time I got home, somewhat after 9 a.m., I was effing starved. So I threw a package of lovely pork sausages on the grill, tossed a fistful of frozen waffle potatoes into some hot butter and oil, and poured a bourbon and water. Hence, this post. And hence, an insight:

America, my friends, is having one huge communal anxiety attack.

If we’re lucky, it will pass.

If we’re not, it won’t.

If we’re screwed one way or another (which we may be; yes, we may very well be), that, too, will pass.

Moving? Secure Your New House Well

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The burglar's handy toolkit
The burglar’s handy toolkit

Once again, a homeowner moves in and shortly afterwards someone comes visiting and steals him blind. The latest incident —  in which the thieves took some $15,000 worth of the guy’s tools — happened in a solidly upper-middle-class East-Valley suburb, lending some truth to what the cop told me at the time of the Garage Invasion episode: that this stuff happens all over the city, pretty uniformly, and it doesn’t much matter where you live.

Around here, moving companies apparently will hire anyone with a strong back and enough hunger to take a job hauling furniture and boxes. The result: some moving guys “moonlight”…literally. So, often people will get themselves moved in and then within a few days or weeks find some uninvited guests have carted off their possessions. And equally often, it’s painfully obvious that the intruders knew how to get in, what to look for, and where to find it.

When SDXB moved into the fixer-upper he bought here in the neighborhood, he (and the moving guys…) found the back door was unsecured — no functional deadbolt on it, and a glass pane in the cheap Home Depot-style door. Moving all his junk in was quite a job, and at some point along the line, he and I remarked that he should come over to my house for dinner and stay the night there, rather than trying to dig out his sheets and shovel aside junk so he could use the bedroom there.

Next  morning he found the back door open and all his boxes cut open and rifled through. They were looking for weapons: they took all his good hunting knives, and a machete he’d picked up as a souvenir while he was stationed in Guatemala.

Mistake #1: He’d pasted an NRA sticker in his truck’s window.

Fortunately, SDXB had the foresight to stash his small arsenal of pistols, rifles, and shotguns at his mother’s place, so the thieves didn’t get any of his armaments. But that’s what they were looking for.

After SDXB moved to Sun City, the new owners of his house had almost the same thing happen. By then, of course, the doors had been secured. The City (which bought the house and handed it over to this couple as part of a relocation project when one of the barrios near the airport was leveled for a new runway) had paid for some very nice renovations. The couple goes off to shop or socialize and, in broad daylight, burglars enter the house. They know the dogs are harmless, and if they haven’t already become pals, throwing a couple handsful of dog kibble all across the kitchen floor made them best of friends. This time the perps stole several hundred dollars in cash, which (you may be sure) a family from the Third-World barrios near the airport could not spare. The couple did have homeowner’s insurance, but the insurance company refused to reimburse them because they couldn’t prove they even had cash in the house, much less how much it was.

A cop and his family moved in down the street. Wasn’t long before someone raided his shed and stole some tires he’d stored there. Unsurprisingly, in that case the perp was caught.

We all know, I suppose, the basic security rules of living in the big city (or in any place where your possessions aren’t red-hot or nailed down). But to those, let’s add a few strategies to keep your possessions and family safe during and after a move.

• Never place an NRA sticker on your vehicle! And don’t leave any copies of American Hunter laying around where movers can see them. Advertising that you’re a member of the NRA is the same as advertising that you have guns in the house. If you want to support the NRA, send them a check.

• Assume any crew of moving men is suspect. Don’t buy a moving company’s assurance that their guys have worked there for ten years.

→ Be present and watchful during the entire moving process.
→ Don’t leave the house to get food or run errands while the movers are present.
→ Do not say, within their earshot, that you intend to go out for dinner, run errands, or stay somewhere else overnight.
→ Emit disinformation in their presence: say you’re taking time off work or (better yet) that you’re retired or unemployed and always around the house.
→ Don’t mention owning any valuables while movers are working — don’t talk about jewelry, guns, cash, tools, hobbies that might entail marketable tools or products, collectibles, or the like

• Hire a reputable moving company. Using a nationally recognized company such as Mayflower’s interstate moving services will help improve safety.

• Stash jewelry and sentimental items at someone else’s house or in a storage unit while the move takes place. Leave them there for several weeks afterward.

• If you’re in the trades, stash your tools at the shop or at a friend’s or relative’s house, and move them into your new house later, without benefit of moving men. If you keep your tools in your truck, park it — locked — inside the garage (and lock the garage, too).

• If at all possible, have the locks rekeyed and high-quality deadbolts installed before moving day. If you don’t have access to the house before then, get a locksmith in on the day of the move.

• If the house has an alarm system, learn to use it right away, and activate it.

• Install security doors with pick-proof Medeco or Schlage locks. These are expensive and available only through locksmiths, but they are so worth the cost.

• F’rhvevvinsake, if you park your car or truck on the driveway, don’t leave the garage door opener in it! 😀

Image: Burglary tools found in bank, Canadian Illustrated News, 1875. Public Domain

Happy Hallowe’en(?)

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halloween themeSomebody no doubt got grant money for this WTF research. It may even have been taxpayer-supported grant money. You, too, can be surprised and shocked that 30% of kids will kipe an extra piece of candy when left alone with a bowlful of temptations!

Actually, the surprise is that 70% will not.

The political preference angle is pretty entertaining, though: in an overall politically liberal neighborhood, more little kids will gravitate to a table offering free candy from the Democratic presidential candidate rather than from the Republican’s table. Oddly, the researchers seem not to have tried a similar “experiment” in a politically conservative neighborhood, so we may never know whether children are partisan or whether they just happen to like Barack Obama’s face better than they like John McCain’s. 🙄

Far more interesting, IMHO, is this op-ed rumination from The New York Post on how the over-parenting Grinch stole Hallowe’en.

Have you noticed how high the stress levels have become in our culture? People are afraid of everything! We’re scared of our food. We’re scared of our air. We’re scared of the weather. We’re scared of guns. We’re scared of burglars. We’re scared of the cops. We’re scared of terrorists. We’re scared of Big Brother. We’re scared of our cars. We’re scared of panhandlers. We’re scared of sugar. We’re scared of salt. We’re scared of laundry detergent. We’re scared of our schools. We’re scared of dogs. We’re scared of cats. We’re scared of strangers. We’re scared of our mother. We’re scared of our laminate flooring. God knows we’re scared of clowns!

The only thing we’re justifiably scared of is our choice of Presidential candidates. Which, I suppose, is the same as being scared of clowns.

Heh heh… I wonder how many trick-or-treaters will show up dressed as Hillary or Donald?

Hallowe’en is my favorite holiday. Because the ‘hood borders on several low-income neighborhoods infested with violence, prostitution, and drug houses, people who are unfortunate enough to have to bring up families there bundle their kids up and bring them over here, where it’s reasonably safe for them to walk from door to door after dark, and where it’s only moderately insane to knock on a stranger’s door.

The kids show up by the pickup truckload.

In response, here in the neighborhood a kind of informal block party has grown up. Everybody sets up a table and chairs (and scary decorations!) on their driveways, the easier to view the happenings and dispense candy to the hordes of cute little kids. A great deal of socializing goes on and the show proceeds.

The kids are adorable in their spectacular outfits. Because many of these parents can’t afford to buy an expensive costume, a lot of the children show up in wonderfully creative hand-made costumes. It’s really fun to see what they’ve come up with.

So this evening we’ll convene in my neighbor’s driveway. For the first time in years, I bought a giant load of Costco Hallowe’en candy. Last year we ran out of a stash of 150 pieces. So this year we’ll have 300 pieces.

It’ll be interesting to see how long that lasts.

Vector image by Aleksandrsb, DepositPhotos