Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Every Which Way from Sunday…

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I swear-ta-gawd, the hassles and the hustles never stop. They come in every which way from Sunday, and they come in every day AND Sunday.

Today, in comes an email purporting to be from Fidelity, where vast quantities of my father’s and DXH’s money are invested. And it is one weird email…

They want me to send them my signature.

Got that? They want to capture my signature electronically.

Uh huh.

So that ever so many Great Endeavors can be vastly simplified. And speeded up. And…

Uh huh.

Well.

To begin with, I don’t do business directly with Fidelity. I hire a guy, affectionately known in these precincts as Financial Dude, to run interference with Fidelity and just about all else financial in my life.

To end with, where the Hell did Fidelity get my personal email? BECAUSE I don’t do business with them directly, there’s no reason they should have my mac.com address.

Understand: I don’t believe Fidelity is trying to scam me. What I think is that either a)  this is a legitimate message that for some incomprehensible reason was not sent through my financial manager or b) it’s a scam by crooks who found out that I had a Fidelity account and managed to extract the account number.

Scammers, many of them overseas, routinely target elder Americans. Check out this jaw-dropping piece from a guy who’s in the business of tracking them.

What I’m finding is that even when you’re aware of this phenomenon, even when you don’t pick up a phone unless you know who’s on the other end, it’s still hard to avoid. The scammers are bold; they’re convincing; and they’re persistent.

***

Financial Dude says it’s not a scam: they just want an updated signature on some paperwork. I have no idea who to call there. And soooo… About the best I can do is tell whoever sent this request that there’s no way I’m sending my signature anywhere over the Internet, and they’ll need to send something in hard copy.

Heh. Won’t they just love that?

 

A Balmy Evening…

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…for the balmy, that is…  At 7:10 p.m. the thermometer on the back porch reads 109 degrees.

Hey! Ya can’t shovel heat!

Nary a sign of the summer rainstorms known in these parts as “monsoons.”

But it’s still a bit early for them. I think of monsoon as an August phenomenon. F’rhevvinsake, it’s only July 17.

These are the times that make the humans think 12 months of swimming-pool expenses are soooooo worth it! 😀 Into the drink this afternoon. Hop out. Shampoo hair in the hose. Return to the shack’s interior, where the AC system labors to hold the temp (in the coolest part of the house: the hallway) down to 80.

What a day!

Started with Ruby flushing Ratty out of the marjoram bed. Dayum! She almost caught the poor critter!

Later on: the Great Termite Project.

Exterminator came by. He didn’t think the infestation was too bad…yet. He sprayed the little gals where they were evident, and then laid down one helluva barrier all around the house’s foundation. I decided we should have him come back at regular intervals to harass the critters. Whenever the weather cools some, I’ll try to get him up into the attic (you’d have to be suicidal to go up there in this heat!). He didn’t think the girls have invaded there yet…he did show me where he believes them to be, and provided a pretty convincing argument to that effect.

We didn’t see the much-beloved Pool Dude this morning — Monday is his day to come around. We probably missed him while we were indulging in the dawn doggy-walk. The pool is positively pristine this evening, which it assuredly would NOT be, in this heat, had he not surfaced at some point today.

Wait, I know how to tell: did he retrieve the new pump pot filter basket I bought?

Checking….

Whoa!!! He did NOT!

Holee mackerel! That means His Cuteness never surfaced here today!

He must have had car trouble. Or the world collapsed on his head.

Fortunately, he’s done such a killer job on maintenance over the past few months that the damn thing looks clear and clean. So from a selfish point of view, that’s good. But..gosh…  I hope he’s OK…

Back to the subject of infestation: The roof rats are back.

One of them was actually brave enough this morning to shoot right across in front of me.

Cute little fellas. Too bad they carry such nasty diseases. Too bad they do rather more damage than one would like to cope with.

So I set out the traps. When last checked, they were no more successful than they’ve been in the past. But…that was checking their daytime performance. We shall see, come morning, how they worked during our little tenants’ night-time maneuvers.

Awwwww crapola: Cop copters buzzing around overhead.

Check that all the doors are locked. And…hooleee shee-ut! The front screen was NOT locked.

Ohhh well. Now we’re barricaded in: two deadbolts engaged on every exterior door.

Four-legged rats. Two-legged rats. Six-legged rats. What a place we live in!

And now for a balmy afternoon….

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Heh! After yesterday’s 110° at 7 p.m., we’re having a balmy afternoon today. At 4:30 in the afternoon — usually about the hottest point of the day — we’ve only barely reached the 110 mark. Brrrr!

Taking advantage of the crisp temperature, I sallied forth to the Safeway, there to buy some eye salve for the poor little dog, plus a whatnot or two. Truly hotter than the hubs on those black asphalt streets.

Safeway has invented a new annoyance: if you want to buy wine or other boozy beverages, they try to steer you into a dedicated checkout stand in the liquor aisle. Took a second or two to figure that out…

Right, guys. Like I want to stand in line to pay TWICE! Once for food and household items, once for a bottle of Chardonnay.

Criminey. WHO thinks this stuff up?

Oh well. When I expressed my annoyance, I was excused from the booze department line and allowed to buy all my groceries with a single pass-through at the front-of-the-store cash registers.

Man! My air-conditioning bill is gonna sail through the stratosphere this month. Here in the front room, the temp is 80 degrees, with the AC unit pounding away nonstop. But in the front guest bedroom, where Ruby and I have taken refuge from the present heat wave, it’s 78. That’s because the room sits directly under the AC unit, and its vent is the first vent that comes out of the machine.

By the time it reaches the family room, where I’m poking away at the keyboard right now, it’s in the low 80s. And the unit does not go off. Nope. Not once, not alllll dayyyyy long! That’s even though the thermostat is in the hall right outside that refrigerated bedroom.

No sign of the mid- to late-summer monsoon weather. Usually by now we have rainstorms that coalesce late in the afternoon and hold forth from around 4 or 5 p.m. on into the evening. This phenomenon cools the air significantly, sometimes to such a degree that in theory you could cut back on the AC bill.

Not this year, though! Not so far.

No doubt Ruby wonders where her dinner is. Poor beast!

I’m holding off on feeding her until the sun goes down — that’ll be another 2 hours or so — so that if and when we go for an evening doggy-walk, the pavement will be cool enough for her to walk without burning her feet. Even so, if we wanted to cross the street, we would have to wait till around 10 p.m. for the asphalt to cool. The sidewalks we can manage awhile after sundown….the roadways: not so much.

Ruby has a low-level eye infection…i think. Either that or allergies. Nothing much grows at this time of year that ought to trigger allergies, so the hypothesis is either an infection or dry eyes. My doc has me wiping my own dry eyes with something called “iVisia,” which seems to help a little. Tried it on Ruby, and found that yes, it’s seems to work on her, too.

But…go ahead! Just TRY to find it.

Found it a few days ago at the Safeway….but today when I picked up another bottle and brought it home, I discovered the stuff I’d grabbed off the shelf is a gel, not the liquid drops.

arrrrghhhh! AM i going to traipse back through the heat and the lunatic drivers to return that?

I dunno. Really…some things are just. not. worth it.

Speaking of “not worth it,” have you seen THIS little bit of intelligence? Robert Kennedy’s nutty son is busy spreading crackpot conspiracy theories…as part, it appears, of a projected run on the presidency.

Holy sh!t.

Are there, d’you think, enough anti-vaxxer ignoramuses, enough paranoiacs who believe 5G networks are a tool to spy on us all, enough conspiracy theorists who imagine the CIA put out the hit on RFK Sr. to carry this nut case into the White House?

Holy sh!t. Truly. If there are, I am moving to Venezuela. Or better yet: to a desert island in the middle of the Pacific.

 

 

At the Hubs of Hades…

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It’s 7 p.m., and the thermometer in the shade of the back porch reads 111°.

No kidding. It’s a hundred and eleven degrees out there…in the shade…at 7:00 p.m.

How in the name of Heaven do Gerardo and his guys survive in this, banging away they do? It’s horrific to contemplate.

My father survived, wrangling tugboats and tankers in very similar weather: stupidly hot, stupidly humid.

More humid, as a matter of fact. I can remember standing in the front yard of a balmy summer day and having it rain on me out of a clear blue sky.

When humidity reaches a certain saturation, it simply condenses out of the air. Once, in Arabia, I saw that happpen: as I stood in the front yard under a clear blue, hot sky, rain just started falling. No clouds. No wind. No nothing but raindrops falling out of a hot blue sky.

Interestingly, that hasn’t happened here…yet. So I guess we can’t complain too much.

Glub! Underwater in Lovely Phoenix

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It is SOOOOOO wet out there that all you have to do is stand outside to raise a sweat.

wait wait! That’s true of standing inside, too!

Where does this city think it is? Dankest Georgia? Right now the sky is overcast — seriously overcast, as in “gimme 45 minutes or an hour to deliver the rain” — and we’re enjoying 90 degrees on the back porch. Wunderground says it’s 95, with 35% humidity…and I could buy that

Pool Dude surfaced this morning, shortly after dawn. I’d about lost hope…thought he’d disappeared from the scene. But nooo…here he is!

Did a nice job of cleaning the already pretty clean hole in the ground into which to pour money. Repaired some stuff. Chatted…sweet guy, IMHO. Probably a serial killer, but he can hold a nice conversation. And he’s cute. 😉

*****

A-a-a-an-d…. O’course I pick the most miserable hot day of the year to generate an Adventure in Frustration.

Hoooleeee sheee-ut!

The eye that had the cyst in it, lo! these several months ago — the eye that we thought was HEALED, ooohhh thank you gawd and billy graham — started itching and hurting. Again.

Can’t see anything in there. Apply the long-ago-recommended Refresh brand eye drops.

Nothing: no effect.

Wait a day or two, hoping Nature will take its course.

Nothing: no effect.

Hurts itches itches hurts hurts itches…and so on to infinity….

So I call the Honored Eye Doc. His staff directs me to trot out and purchase an over-the-counter product called Ivisia: eye drops of provenance unknown to me.

And, as it develops, unknown to about every retailer in the city.

Walgreen’s doesn’t have it.

Albertson’s doesn’t have it.

Walmart doesn’t have it.

Finally, after what feels like driving…driving…driving for hours through the 110-degree heat, I stumble into a Safeway. Stagger to the pharmacist’s counter. He points me to a stack of shelves down an aisle 15 or 20 feet from the his counter.

And lo!!!  THERE IT IS!

Grab. Trudge to checkout. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand…pay up.

Back in the car.

Heat makes Arizona drivers crazy. We shouldn’t find that surprising, though. Everything makes Arizona drivers crazy.

Trudge and dodge and dodge and trudge and finally make my way home. If the present discomfort didn’t make this thing feel ever so slightly urgent, I would’ve just come home and ordered it from Amazon.

Honestly. I don’t know how local retailers even begin to compete with Amazon. The hassle factor entailed in schlepping around the God Damned City to find ONE STUPID LITTLE ITEM is sooooooooooo aggravating, that given just a little more motivation, I would’ve succumbed to common sense and ordered it online.

But…the eye hurt, and I really really did NOT want to wait two days for delivery plus run the risk of our pet porch pirates stealing the stuff before I can find it.

Ohhhhh well! Now we have it.

****

I sweartagawd, it feels just like lovely Ras Tanura out there. That desiccated corner of Eastern Hell on the shore of the Persian Gulf…summertime was sauna time.

Seriously: I can remember waking up in the morning on those hot summer fucking days and seeing water dripping off the eaves. And no, it had NOT rained during the night.

I can remember standing in the front yard under a clear blue sky and watching RAIN condense out of the hot, cloudless air.

Like that: that’s how it feels.

My poor mother. How on earth did that hapless little Upstate New York orphan survive even her first 16 or 18 years on this pitiless earth, to say nothing of 30+ years of marriage to my globe-trotting, tightwad father? In her place, I would have died long before I gave birth to the first lifeless baby, to say nothing of the second one and the third brat that survived.

To say nothing of the man who dragged her to Hell (seriously…) and back again. She was, when you think about her, an amazing woman.

Damn! I wish I’d appreciated that while she was still living.

*******

Seriously: when I say it’s an inexplicable wonder that local retailers are surviving Amazon — if they are — I kid you not.

  • There were hardly any customers in the Walgreen’s.
  • Hardly any in the Albertson’s.
  • More in the Walmart, but not enough to keep a large retail enterprise alive.
  • Naught but a bunch of yuppifed egotists in the Safeway, creatures that were buying one or two items apiece…nary a week’s worth of groceries in evidence at any check-out stand.
  • Now consider what a hassle it was to get ahold of this magical mystery eye salve in person, from a brick-and-mortar retailer….
  • Why on earth would anyone want to go through that?

You may be sure that in the future I will remember. And when I can, I will order all the little necessaries online. Occupying a fricasseeing hot afternoon schlepping from place to place through nasty traffic is not something I want to do whenever I need this or that little retail item.

Amazon Publishing? Think Again!

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Check this out:

This afternoon, what should land in the incoming email but this stalwart message from Amazon:

On Jul 10, 2023, at 4:44 PM, KDP Customer Support <support+5003n00002ihn8oAAA@kdp-support.amazon.com> wrote:
Hello,

We received a failure notification when attempting to pay your KDP royalties. To receive your payment, you’ll need to update your bank information in the following marketplaces:
Amazon.com,Amazon.com.au

To ensure we have the correct bank information on file, we’ve placed your royalties on hold while you update your information.

If you’ve corrected your bank information within the last three business days, you can disregard this email. We’ll attempt to pay your royalties using your updated bank information in the next payment cycle. You can check the KDP payment schedule here: https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200641050#schedule

For security purposes, you cannot edit your current account’s bank information. Follow these steps to delete the existing bank account and add a new one:

1. Sign in to http://kdp.amazon.com.
2. Click “Your Account” in the top-right corner of the page.
3. Choose the option on how you want to receive the one-time password (OTP).
4. Follow the instructions to complete the Two-Step Verification using your phone or an authenticator app.
5. After you receive the OTP, enter it and click “OK.”
6. Click “Getting Paid.”
7. If you have a bank account entered, delete it by clicking “Delete” under the account’s name.
8. Click “Add another bank account.”
9. Under “Tell us about your bank,” follow the prompts to add a new bank account.
10. You may see a message asking for a bank in a different location (Amazon does not support electronic payments everywhere).
11. Click “Add.” You’ll see a green checkmark showing your information has been updated.
12. Click “Save.”

To learn more about adding a bank account, check our Help:
https://kdp.amazon.com/help/topic/G200641050#add_bank

To check your payment status on the KDP report, visit https://kdp.amazon.com/reports-new

Regards,
The Kindle Direct Publishing team
© 1996-2023, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Amazon and Kindle are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. 410 Terry Avenue North Seattle, Washington 98109 US

Please note: This is a transactional message regarding your account. Your subscription preferences will continue to be honored for all future commercial e-mails from Kindle Direct Publishing.

 

Uh-HUH! Isn’t that innaresting?

Well, folks…my little bookoids have been posted on Amazon for YEARS. All told, they’ve generated…oh, I dunno, maybe $50 at the outside. Not because Amazon’s operatives can’t access my account: this vast wealth has steadfastly been direct-deposited.

As a matter of fact, I wrote off the “publishing” (hah!!) enterprise many months ago. “Years” may be the operative term. I’ve never received more than a few bucks from Amazon — as in “double-digit figures” — and not more than a couple of times. So frankly, I’ve pretty much dismissed the whole endeavor. The only reason the books  still reside on this website is that I’ve been too lazy to take them down. And, Dear Reader, you can access most of them here for free, simply by clicking on the images in the right-hand margin.

It’s getting late in the day now, and I’m tired from the heat and the other tasks I’ve had to do today. But tomorrow, I’ll remove book ads from the site as necessary, or rework them so that they refer wannabe buyers to me, not to Amazon. The truth of the matter is, if you have something to say that’s worth putting in print, you’re far, FAR better off to go through a real publishing house than to fart around with self-publishing — Amazon or otherwise. If a publisher doesn’t want to pick your idea up, it’s probably not worth the cost of typesetting, editing, publicizing, printing, and shipping.

Meanwhile…to KDP, I have this to say:

It would appear that KDP is VERY shady:  https://writersweekly.com/angela-desk/and-even-more-complaints-about-amazon-kdp-kindle-direct-publishin

I am not going to spend my time and work myself up into a state of computer-induced frustration because suddenly Amazon (or whoever you really are) decides to rip off the vast wealth my piddling little books generate.

None of my banking information has changed. If you can’t send me whatever vast fortune my work is producing, then kindly take it off your platform. If you don’t want to hear from my lawyers, please have the decency not to use this device to cheat me out of whatever royalties the things have brought in. And please note: your company would be well advised to let me know when you comply with this request.

Millicent V. Hay (Victoria Hay)
Hay Writing & Editing, Inc.
Phoenix, Arizona