Angst

1. I get up at 5:20 a.m. Things seem ok but I have a headache. I’ve laid awake for quite some time: possibly as long as two hours.
2. Bang around trying to get dressed and feed the dogs and fix coffee and bolt down breakfast in time to leave the house early for my 7:15 a.m. meeting, because I forgot to get gas yesterday.
3. I leave around 6:30. Main Drag South-East-West is all blocked up with construction that has gone on for months. No exaggeration.
4. I get to the QT station, with considerable but not world-ending hassle.
5. I can’t find my credit card.
6. I try my business card. The gas pump GLOMS ONTO it! With considerable struggle and cursing, I force my card out of the machine.
7. Decide it’s too far to drive all the way to Costco’s gas station in the rush-hour traffic, then make my way across the city to Lincoln Drive & Scottsdale Road: by the time I get to the meeting, it’ll be over.
8. Drive home. I email members that I’m not coming to the meeting. I search through my wallet several more times and also search desktops and tabletops in the house. It appears I’ve lost my personal AMEX card.
9. Call AMEX using the number on the back of my corporate card and have a very difficult time getting through. Again I encounter the crazy thing where they try to scam or deflect you with some sort of survey/contest. It’s the 3^rd time this has happened. (Later I dial the number again and it goes through; I figure I must be misdialling and getting this scam, consistently.)
10. Dig out a statement, call a number on that, and finally reach a human being. I change out the AMEX card, which will be a huge hassle. I tell him about the incident at the gas station. He proposes to change the business card, too. We don’t think this is a sign of a credit-card reader, but we don’t know.
11. I fail to consider that this is going to cause horrific hassle because of all the autopays on the business card. It’s going to take upwards of an hour to change all the autopays, whenever the new card gets here.
12. I take the dogs for a walk. As we pass the end of the alley behind the house, I see the garbage guys have dumped not one but two of the four-household garbage bins all over the alley. They’ve left one of the huge bins flopped over on its side. This pisses me off, because a) I know that in wealthier neighborhoods they clean up messes like this — because I’ve spoken to a driver in one of said Richistani neighborhoods, who told me they’re required to pick up stuff that falls on the ground; and b) the last time our guys left trash strewn all over the street, I called the city trash collection department and was told their truck drivers are not allowed to get out of their trucks. Obviously, if you live in an HOA full of million-dollar homes, you get your trash picked up; the proles, though, can go fish.
13. Back at the house, I call New York Review of Books, which has been dunning me to re-subscribe despite the fact that a $150 check for two years of weekly delivery has cleared the credit union; that check, it develops, was not endorsed. Discover the questioned funds have in fact been received by NYRB. Getting through requires a frustrating, time-wasting, annoying hoop-jump.
14. I shoot off an email to our district councilwoman complaining about the garbage dumped all over the alley.
15. While I’m farting with this, the front door is open. I hear the sprinklers come on and then hear a broken sprinklerhead geysering. Run out and shut off the water, but not before a small lake collects in the courtyard. I’m infuriated: I’ve lost count of the number of repairs we’ve had to do on the system, which clearly is failing.
16. I call Gerardo and leave word on his machine.
17. Decide I’d better apply for a Visa card through the credit union, so as to have a backup to the AMEX card and to be able to buy things at Costco with less hassle. I call up the application on the CU’s website but cannot get the Visa application to accept my name. I don’t seem to be able to fill out the form correctly: it keeps demanding that I enter my name. After several tries at entering my name every which way from Sunday, I give up.
18. The e-book designer calls. I’m pretty distracted and upset by now and really would like to be left alone. He has several ditzy questions about a manuscript, requiring me to load a 14 megabyte document to Word. Finally get off the phone from him.
19. Drive to Costco, get gasoline uneventfully, using a previously purchased cash card. Farting around there, I find the lost personal AMEX card, behind my Costco card, where I’ve never ever put it before and would not in my right mind ever think of putting it. So all of the AMEX shit has been forfuckingnaught.
20. Out of food, I drive  from Costco to AJs; attempt to buy some groceries on my debit card. Cashier asks me to enter PIN. It won’t accept my PIN. I try several times and end up having to write a check.
21. I drive home. I miss my turn on Central and have to negotiate blocked lanes on Main Drag South-East-West to get into the ’hood. By now my head is pounding.
22. I call the client, who’s been nagging me to call him, and tell him to call me back because it’s a long-distance toll for me. He argues. I explain I’m trying to live on Social Security and he gives up. He calls me back. While we’re dorking around, he points out that several unchanged passages are marked as edits. I had not noticed that, mostly because I gave his copy just a cursory look on the final go-through. It occurs in two places, in both cases after I’ve entered extended discussions of stylistic matters. Apparently something about entering new copy is altering the paragraph or two after the inserted paragraphs.
23. While I’m screwing with this, Word crashes. I freak out: this is the last straw! I start to cry. Word recovers his two files and the 14 mb file in production with relatively little loss of data, but I’m now unnerved. I can NOT believe this stuff is happening!
24. I fix a large meal – salmon w/ tomato sauce, steamed chard, grilled corn on the cob – and pour a bourbon and water. This causes the headache to ease up. I figure if some is good, more must be better. I pour a second bourbon and water.
25. Gerardo shows up to repair the plumbing. After two hefty doses of Maker’s Mark, I’m not competent to be dealing with much of anything. He fixes the broken sprinkler head but then finds another length of split PVC. His guys dig up the courtyard paving to fix that. He only charges me 50 bucks…I figure it’s because he knows sooner or later he’ll be building a whole new system front and back, which will more than reward him for his beneficence.
26. I go to bed around 2 p.m. Lay there unable to sleep for an hour.
27. Get up and call the credit union. Reach a human. Explain that I want to open a credit card but can’t make the website work. He enters the data; I explain as to how I had to put a freeze on all my credit bureau accounts thanks to the Maricopa County Community College District kindly giving hackers my name, date of birth, Social Security number, address, entire work history, entire educational history, a list of every college course I’ve ever taken, my phone number, my e-mail address, my bank routing number, and my bank account number. Since the credit union caters to state, city, and county employees, none of this is news to him.
28. Fart around with getting Experian to lift the credit freeze. The woman there says the lift will occur in 15 to 30 minutes and be in effect until 11 p.m. tomorrow. Now cannot reach “Tyler” at the credit union, whose direct line rings through to a voicemail. Clearly this is going to develop into a much larger hassle.
29. Tyler calls back at 5 p.m. The credit freeze is not lifted. He’s going to try again at 8 a.m., so this is a hassle that will extend over two days, bare minimum.
30. It is 5:57 p.m. The dogs want to be fed. My head still hurts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can’t get it off.

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

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

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

Pour hot water into the French Press to make coffee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The coffee is getting cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Holy crapola.

That does it! I’m writing in my dog’s name this November.