Speaking of prepping, as we were yesterday, this morning I tried (again!) to make an appointment through the Arizona Department of Health Service’s web portal for covid vaccination. Here’s what happened:
I went all the way through DHS’s appointment calendar TO THE END OF JUNE — and even tried a few dates in July — and for every single search got a “no events open” reply. Either the system doesn’t work, or they are 100% booked through the beginning of July. And, presumably, beyond.
Each search requires 11 clicks-and-waits. Over and over and over. So to search through to the end of June requires 1,837 clicks-and-waits, only to be told “NO” about 30 days a month, for all hours of the days and nights.
If something comes up that you have to leave your computer and attend to something else, to return to the search you have to jump through the ENTIRE SERIES OF SIGN-UP HOOPS AGAIN. The system doesn’t remember anything more than a few slots of data, so you have to plod through that whole rigamarole again to restart your search, filling in dozens of slots and replying to irrelevant and intrusive questions.
How hard do you suppose it would be for DHS to post a calendar showing when the next available dates are? If such a thing exists, it’s not evident on their website.
By the end of June, the plague probably will be over. So presumably if you live that long, you won’t need a vaccination — that’s some comfort. I guess.
How hard, really, would it have been to simply fund dry ice containers for pharmacies in each ZIP code? Having been through pharmacy school, surely the employees at these sites would be clever enough to understand how to keep the vaccine frozen, and why. Yes, it would be expensive. But it couldn’t cost much more than funding a laughable, almost unnavigable website and paying legions of healthcare workers to staff centralized sites that are open 24/7.
So yesterday I batted from pillar to post, partly to get a couple of routine errands done but also to…ohhh yes! Stock up for the next chapter of the Armageddon Chronicles.
{sigh} I’m afraid I’m becoming a prepper of the first water.
Water, in fact, was one of the issues.
Here’s the thing: Starting along about on the 17th and going at the least through January 20, I expect we’re going to see rioting and vandalism in the streets of every major city in the land. This civil unrest, inspired by our fine outgoing wannabe emperor, will disrupt commerce. And it may disrupt one helluva lot more than that.
Here in lovely uptown Phoenix, for example:
Water. I live around the corner from the water processing plant that serves the better part of the central city. The place is essentially unprotected, except for an ineffectual wall around it. To cut off the flow of water to thousands of city residents, all a person would have to do is fly a small plane up here and drive it into the ground at that plant.
If suicide were not your thing, you wouldn’t even have to do that: a well-guided drone with a bomb attached to it would do the job.
Electric. The power (as well as Internet service) goes out here every time you bat your eye. All it takes is one good monsoon storm with winds that don’t anywhere near approach hurricane velocity to knock out power to large tracts of the city. Sabotaging the power grid, then, could not be very difficult.
Transit. That one’s vulnerable in two ways. First, of course, is “Electric,” above. Shut off the power and you shut off the traffic signals. Shut off the traffic signals, and you have chaos on every city street. But more to the point: the freeway system here carries the bulk of local and intercity traffic. When one stretch of freeway closes down, the surface streets on both sides are jammed to a standstill for a mile or more on both sides. And how hard would it be to disable those freeways? Lemme tellya how easy it would be:
All you’d need are a half-dozen home-made bombs with enough power to bring down a freeway overpass or blow a hole in the pavement. Set them on timers so they all go off at the same time. Put one on State Route 51 about at Northern Avenue. Put one on the Interstate 17 at about Camelback Road. Put one on the Loop 101 along about Indian School Road, and another on the same freeway at about Tatum. Another would go on the Interstate 10 somewhere along the Broadway Curve into Tempe. For good measure you could set one just about anywhere on the 17 northbound toward Anthem. Time them all to go off at once and you will bring the ninth-largest city in the land to a dead stop.
Shutting down transit and jamming every road in the city, then, would mean interruptions in access to…
Food
Emergency services
Medical care (including prescription drugs)
Schools
And just about everything else you can think of.
Sooo… I figured I’d better get enough stuff in to last me and the dog for at least a week, maybe more. Because of my ongoing prepper projects, the fact is we have enough in the house to survive on, in a pinch…but probably not in the glorious style to which we have become accustomed. Plus in some prior decluttering frenzy, I threw out my big water carboys. Nothing remained in the house to store water but a few old booze bottles I stashed to use as flower vases. Soo…after a trudge to the credit union, it was off to Lowe’s and waypoints in search of a few plastic carboys in which to pour water.
No.
Lowe’s has no such thing.
No.
The neighborhood Walmart market has no such thing. It does have those cinder-block size containers, but stored on a shelf over my head so that I couldn’t get even one of them down and into a market basket. Gave up in disgust and stalked out, figuring to head down to the water store way to hell and gone at 16th Street and Glendale.
Out the door, cruise through the parking lot toward an exit to a south-bound main drag, and on the way find…say what?! A cute little storefront ice cream AND WATER store. Dart into the reserved parking, shoot in, and…yeah! Get two nice big plastic jugs, and the proprietor filled them for me for free!!!
Zowie! Is God on my side or not?
🙂
While indulging in the whirlwind trip to Walmart, I saw I was not the only prepper grabbing every survival item in sight. People were pushing around carts already half filled with bottled water, and a whole bunch of the other stuff we couldn’t get during the last panic.
At the Lowe’s I grabbed a package of D batteries, but didn’t realize I’m out of C batteries — so today will have to schlep out again to get some of those. My camp lantern runs on D’s, but ordinary flashlights, of course, take C’s. {sigh}
There’s no ammunition in common calibers to be had for love nor money, and hasn’t been for several months. I have enough to fool any wannabe vandals who get close enough to the house for me to take accurate aim. But unless I hit one of the bastards dead (heh!) on and it scares off his pals (they are pretty cowardly after all, so there’s sorta some hope of that), I won’t be able to hold off a targeted assault for any length of time. That, though, I believe to be extremely unlikely.
But then…who would ever have imagined a phenomenon like Donald Trump was likely?
Lo! Some $1,200 (maybe) arrived in the mail, ostensibly from some outfit called, unconvincingly, “Money Network.” This largesse, the paper inside the envelope assures us, is from Uncle Sam: all ours to spend as we wish, to the tune of a variety of exorbitant service fees.
It looks very fishy.
To start with, whoever heard of “Money Network”? Welp: get online and yea verily! find that it’s legit
Actually, just how much this thing is worth is unclear. Nothing in the enclosed paperwork actually says how much is loaded on this card. But it does contain a series of come-ons apparently inviting you to charge up as much as $9999.99. So…now on Monday, as if I had nothing else to do with my time and gasoline, I’ll have to traipse this thing up to the credit union and deposit it in my checking account.
Since this year is already a little tight, I guess the money can go toward paying some of the staggering plumbers’ bills.
Hmmm… Would $1200 (or whatever it is) buy me into a place in Prescott? Yarnell, maybe?
Cop helicopter just flew over. Figured maybe the “fireworks” we just heard might not have been actual firecrackers but gunshots from up on Gangbanger’s Way, the direction from which this latest little serenade emanated. Distant roaring noise rumbles through the windows and back door.
Dog lobbies to go out, so get up and go open the back door. No, the noise is not the cop copter. It’s just the traffic and the drag racing up on Gangbanger’s. The cops have overshot the ‘Hood and are hovering over the far more active and interesting neighborhood to the northwest. They’re a good distance beyond Conduit of Blight. That’s good. I guess.
So how did you enjoy the latest episode in our national nightmare?
What a mess. At least two people killed, as of this hour, a young woman and a capitol police officer. A farcical clown in the President’s office, rehearsing his next brain-defying act: pardoning himself for whatever crimes he can be accused of committing. Congress and various officials absurdly proposing to impeach said clown (as if they don’t remember they’ve already impeached him: how’d that work for ya, folks?). Others proposing to bat him out of office with the 25th Amendment…when he has thirteen, count’em 13 days left to serve.
Goes from stupid to stupider, doesn’t it?
Friend o’ mine remarked that he’d voted for Trump reluctantly because he found the alternative even more repellent.
{sigh} Afraid I feel about the same when it comes to the choices we’re offered. You hold your nose, think holy sh!t, and cast a ballot…as far away from you as you can throw it. For me, Trump was totally, hilariously not an option. But then we had…gulp! Billary!
Uh huh… Also not much of an option.
Where, oh WHERE was Dwight when we needed him?
As for Biden? I think he’s probably a decent man…at least, more so than the choices we had four years ago. My problem with him is that he’s too old. IMHO the chances that he will survive four high-pressure years in the White House are slim to none. And as for his vice president? Well… ??????????????? Heaven help us if Biden does croak over, or has a stroke that incapacitates him.
My problem with the present incarnation of the Democratic Party is that any critter that’s white and not female (or gay) is brushed off as somehow not fully what we want — no matter what their qualifications. I find that sterling stupid, just about as sterling stupid as Mr. Trump and his worshipers are.
I do. not. CARE. what gender or color a candidate or office-holder is. All I want of a candidate or office-holder is to be honest and, above all, COMPETENT. How hard is this? What about this is somehow morally sub-par?
That would be why Pete Buttegieg was my boy. Queer as a coot: that’s good…appeals to the PC set. White like me…that’s ducky, I guess. Has a measurable IQ. Bingo! Three qualities are a charm! Probably about as good as a person could hope for, in a candidate for public office.
Now we have the screaming, chanting, and dancing around the campfire about the freaking 25th Amendment.
How can I count the facets of Stupid in this? Other than pushing a button to blow up Moscow (how hard would it be to have the janitor climb under the desk and disconnect the damn thing?), there’s not a helluva lot more that Trump can do, beyond emitting a continuing stream of ridiculous tweets. He has utterly lost all credibility. He has all of thirteen days left to call himself President. DROP IT, FOLKS! The big bad wolf has lost all his teeth!
Gaaaaahhhhh! We’re STILL not back in Kansas, are we?
As you may have surmised in reading my all-too-frequentreports about the antics of the local bums, burglars, meth-heads, and thieves, the ‘Hood is pretty much over-run with porch pirates. This is why I had to spend some unholy amount of cash on a Fort Knox of a mailbox: so that I didn’t have to get all my mail delivered to a rental mailbox inside a locked building.
That notwithstanding, I do occasionally order things from Amazon, despite the risk of theft. The view of my front door is obscured by a courtyard wall, so if a package is delivered to the door, a passer-by eyeballing the house from the street is unlikely to see it.
Well, O.K., so there’s that.
Now, the other day I discovered that ground clove, when mixed in solution with water, eases the crazy-making sting-and-burn effect that my current ailment, peripheral neuropathy, inflicts on gums, tongue, and lips. Used as a mouthwash, it disappears the pain right now. Mixed with Vaseline and smeared on the lips, it also stops the maddening lip-tingle, again right now. But lo! Like nutmeg, clove is obscenely overpriced when marketed on grocery-store shelves…so I ordered a quarter pound of the stuff through Amazon, at a fraction of the local supermarket gouge.
So late yesterday evening I plop down before the computer to find a fresh new e-mail: your Amazon package has been delivered. (And your driver was too harried or too lazy to bother to ring the doorbell.)
No, it’s not dropped by the front door. But I can see it’s out by the front gate — in the driveway.
Go out to retrieve it (surprised that it’s actually still there) and find that one of the locals has neatly sliced the long edge of the envelope off, dropped the slice inside, and replaced the package — unstolen — on the driveway pavement.
Hee heeeee! Just imagine the thought process!
Can’t give it to the girlfriend, whatever it is.
Can’t give it to the kids, whatEVER it is.
What IS it, anyway??? Funniest-looking coke I’ve ever seen. Don’t think it’s meth, either.
{sniff sniff} Nope, neither of those.
Can’t snort it. Can’t smoke it. Can’t give it away. DAY-um! You keep it, ya weirdo!
😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
So, feeling a little weary of having to emit elaborate instructions to Amazon delivery people — they can’t figure out that Erewhon Avenue is different from Erewhon Drive, and that these are two parallel streets with the same house numbers, and so they regularly deliver stuff to my neighbor one street to the north (I know: it is a difficult concept!). She declines to forward these or bring them over to my place (it must be all of 100 steps, and she walks by here every day or two with her dogs), so if a package goes to her place, it is effectively gone gone: permanently — I called Amazon’s customer service and asked if it was possible to install a permanent instruction to leave packages inside the gate, NOT out on the goddamn driveway.
Hilariously, I happened to get an Amazon CSR with a sense of humor. (How you could work for that place and retain a sense of humor escapes me: must be a seasonal hire!). So when I started to describe the Looney Tunes that is Life in the ‘Hood, she instantly spotted the ridiculousness of it all. By the time we got off the phone, we were both laughing so hard at the image of the porch pirate trying to figure out WHAT to make of a baggie full of dark red-brown dust that neither one of us could pull ourselves off the floor.
There is some sh!t I will not snort!
After the two of us managed to recover our respective breath and she flagged my account for the delivery drivers accordingly, she suggested that maybe I’d like to use one of those Amazon strong-boxes they’ve put up around the city, specifically for the purpose of thwarting porch pirates.
Well…uh… No. This is an idea whose value escapes me. If I have to get in my car to go get something, then obviously I’m going to shop local — which I would much prefer to do if it weren’t for the city’s homicidal traffic and my near-terminal case of laziness.
Speaking of prepping, as we were yesterday, this morning I tried (again!) to make an appointment through the Arizona Department of Health Service’s web portal for covid vaccination. Here’s what happened:
