Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Drop a Tranquilizer before Visiting a Gas Station…

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{gasp!} {hyperventilate!!!!}

Just back from a junket to Costco…and waypoints. Belief HAS officially been defied now….

The plan was to traipse up to Costco in search of the usual bargain on gasoline. CC routinely underprices every gas retailer within several miles of a given store, right? While there, buy a few not-urgently-needed but nice-to-have grocery & household items, and also renew this year’s membership, which I’m told is officially running out.

Thank gawd they sell wine… That’s all i can say….. 8-o

Drive and drive and drive and drive and…every road in the goddamn city is under construction. Wherever you’re goin’ you really CAN’T get there from here. Arrive at the store north of the Great Desert University (WAY north…), which is about the same distance from here as the store in Paradise Valley but which, because of the relative penury of the surrounding populace (middle-middle class, not upper-middle-class and Richerati) will likely have a lower price on gas.

My membership is running out. Ask the lady at the entrance where to get it renewed; she says the easiest way is just to pay at checkout.

Ramble around the store ogling all the amazing eye-popping goods. Toss a bunch of stuff I don’t need into the cart. Make my way through the checkout line. Offer to pay for the membership renewal. She says I don’t have to do that now.

Yeah? Well…then why are they telling me to do that now? I figure she just doesn’t want to be bothered. Okkkayyyy….

Retrieve the Dog Chariot. Head for the gas pumps.

They’re mobbed.

But, being the canny type, I manage to slither into a line that has only three or four vehicles ahead of me.

Wait and wait and wait and wait, then wait and wait and wait and wait, and then wait some more.

FINALLY pull up to a gas pump.

Stick my Costco card in. Clickety hummedy click. Then stick my debit card in (Costco doesn’t accept AMEX credit cards)…and….

PLONK! Am told my cards are no good.

Annoyed, I stalk across the lot and retrieve the attendant.

No problemo! saith he.

He sticks my Costco card in. Clickety hummedy click. Then sticks my debit card in. And PLONK! We’re both told to take a flyer at the moon.

He proposes to hold up the ever-longer line with some sort of hoop jumps. I say f’geddaboutit! Because I happen to know the QT in Sunnyslop is charging the same rate Costco is.

Drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and dodge construction zones and drive and slip through a short-cut i know and drive and drive and finally arrive at the QT.

Whip up to an unoccupied(!!!!!) pump and…and…lo and sumbiche! Find the price is a bargain $5.21 a gallon — yea, verily:  the same bargain price that Costco was charging!

Five. Dollars. And. Twenty-One. Cents. A. Gallon!!!!!!!!!!!

It cost THIRTY DOLLARS to refill that quarter of a tank.

CAN….YOU…IMAGINE?

Well, thought I crabbily.There go any ideas about a weekend in Prescott. Or maybe in Yarnell. Or, oh Helle’s belles, even in freakin’ Sun City!

Hmmmm…

Okay, so between you’n’me and the lamp-post, that is the LAST time I visit a Costco to buy (or attempt to buy) gasoline. We have not one but two QT’s practically within walking distance of the ’Hood. And since about half the time (or more), the main reason I go to a Costco is not to shop in the CC but to buy gasoline, that is gonna mean a WHOLE lot less of the Funny Farm’s budget will be spent at Costco stores. I may not even bother to renew my membership. Enough being enough, after all.

One is left wondering what this state of annoying affairs foreshadows for supplies of day-to-day cost-of-living goods: food, diapers, soda pop, motor oil, coffee, tea, toothpaste, shampoo, hot dogs, steak, broccoli…. If the cost of fuel has gone up THAT much across the board, then suppliers and marketers will have to raise their prices accordingly.

This probably is a good time to stock up on things like paper goods (a far better time than we saw in the last Great Paper Panic). And on nonperishable foods. And canned goods. And stuff that can be stored in a freezer.

Because…clearly grocery prices are headed for the stratosphere.

And if you garden? Well then, garden like crazy, my friend! I’m thinking I may build a raised garden in the backyard right now. A bunch of things — summer squash and peppers and tomatoes and if you have any skill even things like corn will grow now. Then, in Arizona an amazing variety of veggies and fruits grow in the fall and winter.

It’s never too late to learn the fine art of canning….

{grump} All Hell Continues to Work Its Way Loose

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As the dog and I hiked back to the house along about 6:15 a.m., there across the street we see our neighbor’s lawn crew, the bunch who stole EVERY SPRINKLER IN THE FRONT AND BACK YARDS.

{chortle!} Guess I haven’t mentioned that little fiasco.

Couple weeks ago, these guys showed up. And since Gerardo seems to have quit, I hired them to clean up the yard. Their fees, by comparison with Gerardo’s, were exorbitant: $180 for the first clean-up, then $80 every two weeks, forevermore.

Shee-ut.

Well, I knew Gerardo was undercutting the competition — or else giving me a special deal, more likely. But he seems to have quit: he’s not coming either to my house or my son’s. And I can’t take care of this yard myself. So..ooohkaaaayyyyy….

They did a pretty good job. So I thought…until I went to put a sprinkler on a parched plant.

Sprinkler? What sprinkler? We don’t need to steeenking sprinklers!

Uh huh. Every. Single. Sprinkler was gone. The little metal ones. The regular plastic ones. All of them.

Sumbiche.

So it was off to buy some new ones.

Lowe’s does not have little metal sprinklers.

Home Depot does not have little metal sprinklers.

The grand, old-money nursery on Glendale does not have little metal sprinklers.

Turns out there’s a sprinkler shortage!

That would be why our guys felt called upon to steal mine.

Finally found a few at an Ace Hardware (everybody buys sprinklers in hardware stores, right?). Grabbed three of them. And they’re now locked inside the garage.

If it’s not red-hot or nailed down…

****

In other quotidian gnus, the dentist wants EIGHTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS to replace the broken crown. Jayzuz! What do they think it’s made of?

No, it ain’t made of gold.

The peripheral neuropathy continues to drive me nuts. However, in one tiny glimmer of light, I stumbled upon a study suggesting that antihistamines may help with the peripheral neuropathy.

Seriously??

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I sure have plenty of those around the house. Arizona is where you come to find out that you’re allergic to everything…

The researchers were using Claritin, but also mentioned chlortrimeton. Apparently chlortimeton is now available over the counter — it used to be a prescription drug. Claritin is readily available, and in fact I happened to have a bottle of it in the house. Benadryl is also mentioned as effective. Though that stuff has some inconvenient side effects for me, I do have some of it in the house.

So I drop a Claritin. And by golly, it does seem to help some. The tingling/stinging is not gone, but it’s noticeably milder.

We’ll see if this works over a period of days or weeks.

****

Meanwhile, the other day La Maya and I decided to go out to lunch.

Our first choice, a beloved Italian restaurant near Moon Valley (in the middle-class northerly realms of Phoenix), was closed, to our horror. They were hard-hit by the plague — I’d heard the husband died (a man and a wife owned it). La M said that wasn’t so…presumably, then, the gossip mill got it wrong.

From there we drove from Yuppified joint to yuppified joint, until we got alllll the wayyyyyy down North Central to Camelback and decided to go into one of the restaurants in the AJ’s shopping center.

Personally, I’m just not all that fond of eating out. In the first place, I cook much, MUCH better than the short-order operators of most restaurants. So the food, when you come right down to it, isn’t very good. And what you get is spectacularly overpriced. And the noise is annoying. And the cigarette smoke (often) is annoying. And…blech!

At any rate, we shared a kale salad, which she enjoyed.

Driving back up lovely North Central…HOLEEE shee-ut! We saw the single closest call I’ve ever witnessed, and were almost dragged into the middle of it.

Central Avenue in that area is a 40-mph zone. This means the locals drive 45 to 55 mph along that lovely main drag, which bisects an upscale neighborhood to the north of the central commercial districts.

We’re cruising along calmly enough in a pod of 45-mph traffic when, incredibly, a Moron steps out into the crosswalk in front of the oncoming traffic (among which we are numbered).

Yes, you are required to stop for nudniks in crosswalks. But it is assumed that the nudniks will wait until the barreling-along cars have passed before stumbling across the road.

He walks right out in front of La Maya, who slams on her brakes. She misses him, so he proceeds to stroll in front of the car next to her!

He escaped intact — literally by inches. And he seemed unruffled…as though he does this all the time.

And yeah. Yep., He probably does.

Both of us expected to see him go flying through the air. Thank heaven no such acrobatics ensued.

Phoenix: what a place!

****

Out of the blue, the credit union apparently stopped making some — possibly all? — of the autopays I’d set up to my various creditors. Suddenly I got a notice from the gas company threatening to cut off service. A little checking revealed that other utility bills also had not been paid.

WTF?????

So now I’ve got to traipse to the credit union and do battle over that — around the Adventures in Dental Science.

WonderAccountant is coming over this afternoon to try to help untangle whatEVER that mess is. One thing is for sure: as senile as I may be, I know I did not ask the CU to discontinue the autopays. That would be insane!

But it IS a mess, and I am not a happy camperette.

Speaking of the which…I’d better get up, eat some breakfast, and start shoveling through that stack of paper…

Whatever can go wrong…

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STOP THE WORLD! I wanna get off, and get back on in about 1947.

Holy mackerel! Whatever CAN go wrong WILL go wrong. Whoever made up that hoary saying must have been living my life in a previous incarnation.

Greeted the sun this morning by finding a hard thing in my mouth. Whaaaaa???

It’s part of a tooth. A back molar simply fell apart.

So now in half an hour, when the dentist’s office opens, I’ll have to call and make an appointment to get THAT fixed, no doubt to the tune of a great deal MORE hassle, expense, and painandsuffering.

Meanwhile, I’m supposed to spend the afternoon at the church office, staffing the front desk. How I’m gonna do that and sit in a dentist’s chair at the same time escapes me. But we’ll deal with that when the need arises. I guess.

At 9 a.m. — less than half an hour — I need to surface at Leslie’s Pool Supply, therein to get them to test the water and sell me the chemicals needed to rebalance the chemicals.

Pool Dude was here yesterday — while I was traipsing from pillar to post around the Valley — Dermatologist in Avondale, then hours at the downtown credit union, then up the moribund Target on 19th Avenue, therein to buy some area rugs so that my son’s dog can walk around on the tiles without falling over (he’s old and weak and his feet slide out from under him when he tries to walk on tiles — and my whole house is tiled).

The Target folks insist they’re just remodeling, even though it’s hilariously obvious that they’re selling off merchandise with intent to close down the store. If they admitted that the location is going out of business, of course, they’d have to clear out the junk with a sale. As it was, I realized that Charley does not need fancy rugs; all he needs is the rubbery stuff you lay down underneath them, which give him plenty of traction to move around. Poor old pooch.

Dermatologist removed more suspicious growths. Reported that none of the last crop had turned to cancer. Yet. I remarked on my one-time best friend’s brother-in-law, a healthy and athletic man who, I recently learned, died of skin cancer — malignant melanoma.

More than one of which I’ve enjoyed meself.

At the credit union, I explained to the extremely nifty dude that I can’t get into my account. We dorked around and dorked around, changing my password. As it develops, these days to change a bank password you have to have a cell phone!

Fortunately, I’d brought the useless iPhone my son gave me — useless because with the plague, the senior center nearby shut down its iPhone class, because Apple’s “class” was a sadistic joke (more so for the alleged instructor than for the customers), because I do not know how to get into it, because…on and on. We were able to fire it up and use it to reset the bank’s password. Now all we have to do is get me into my account there.

With one headache and crisis after another since then, though, I haven’t had time to attempt that trick.

This morning will be consumed with dealing with the swimming pool. When I left for the dermatologist trek — before Pool Dude surfaced — the walls were festooned with fresh algae. I left a check in an envelope for him and flew out the door.

When I got home, I found the empty envelope on the pavement near the pool and the pool’s walls festooned with fresh algae.

Tested water…chemical balance seemed OK — good enough for gummint work, anyway. But decided I should take a bottle of it up to Leslie’s for a full array of tests, and while there try to snab some granulated chlorine.

The chlorine shortage continues — kicked off by a fire that leveled the factory of the major US producer, a year or so ago, and dragged out by political correctness (chlorine being bad for you, after all). So I’m going to have to pay through the wazoo to re-fill my pool supply kit…I’m down to something like two three-inch tabs. Eventually I’ll probably have to re-plumb and install one of those salt-water systems, which will cost an arm and a leg. As I recall, it didn’t do that great a job on La Maya and La Bethulia’s pool. But…I guess if we can’t buy chlorine anymore, we’ll have to take what we can get.

Come four o’clock this morning, good old Cox’s phones were down. Come five o’clock: same. Come six o’clock: same. It finally came back online. Fortunately, I’ve learned to use the iPhone just enough to get into my email and to also onto the Web to check what time Leslie’s opens.

Speaking of the which, it’s ten till. Sooo…off and running!

Dear-Sir-You-Cur of the day…

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Sprouts Corporate Headquarters
5455 E High St Ste 111
Phoenix, AZ 85054

Dear Sirs and Mesdames:

Here’s a suggestion for you: Why not hire cashiers who possess basic civility and ordinary politeness? Surely these are not SUCH rare commodities that you can’t find any minimum-wage workers who possess them.

This noon I dropped by the Sprouts at Northern & 19tth Avenue, here in lovely uptown Phoenix, hoping to buy some ingredients to make food for my little dog and to make lunch for myself. Found the stuff for the dog food…and found a cashier who…well…I wouldn’t treat a dog the way she treated me. Among the several things I set on her conveyer belt was a package from your deli cabinet department labeled “Penne Pasta NRE Chicken.”

What, I asked — politely enough, I thought — is “NRE” chicken?

She gave me a disgusted glare that suggested she thought I had an IQ in the negative numbers, and grunted “I dunno.”

“Well, EFF you very much, too, dear,” thought I. Because I was pretty nonplussed (to say nothing of hungry!), I bought it anyway — if I’d had my wits about me I would have said “if you don’t know what you’re selling, then don’t sell it — I ain’t buying it.”

I’m sorry that your employees think I’m white trash and that they can treat me accordingly. They’re probably right in their assessment of my roots (though my net worth is something in excess of 1.5 million bucks just now…). But even when you think people are WT, nice folks don’t make that line of thought obvious. Merchants who wish to keep selling to members of the public teach their employees to keep their scorn under control.

Please, please, PLEASE rest assured: I will NEVER go into that Sprouts again. I probably will never shop at the Sprouts at 7th and Osborn, which is an infinitely better store. Nor am I likely ever to shop at the Sprouts at 16th Street & Glendale or the Sprouts at Thunderbird and 43rd, both of which I’m given to patronizing as I drive between destinations.

Done. Finished. Kaput with Sprouts.

oh…the “NRE chicken?” Whatever it is, it’s almost devoid of flavor. Another good reason not to shop there again, hm?

Yrs truly, [Etc.]

 

A-n-n-n-n-d….Another Day in Computer Hell

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The Macbook still is running amok, though the ancient iMac seems to be working fine.

I’m told my Apple ID password has been “updated.” I did NOT reset it. If it’s been changed, I have no idea what it has been changed to.

I’m still getting into DropBox and iCloud. But…

Incoming emails are going into the “Archive” folder. Sent emails appear to go out as multiple copies — in one case, 15 or 16 of them! — though it’s unclear whether more than one copy reaches a recipient. Asked one recipient if he had received a pile of copies, and he said he did not.

Messages that I’ve sent to others are landing in “Archive,” too.

So…I retrench by going over to Funny about Money’s G-mail account. Some messages do seem to be getting through. At least one ended up in The Copyeditor’s Desk’s G-mail account — and no, I did not misaddress it.

Sent messages show up in MacMail’s “Archive” folder, not in “Sent.”

An email sent from the Funny about Money G-mail account arrived with a return address for The Copyeditor’s Desk. No, I did not send it from the CED G-mail account.

An email sent from the Funny about Money gmail account arrives in “Archive.” It does not appear in “Inbox.”

An email sent to myself from MacMail lands in the “Junk” folder. MacMail will not let me mark it “not junk.” Manually moving it out of “Junk” to inbox causes it to jump back into “Junk.”

Nothing I do seems to fix any of these problems. How can I count the ways I am fed up? 

The plan now is to jump Apple’s ship. This will entail an involved, brain-banging process.

  • First I’ll have to save as much data as possible to disk or to DropBox. This will be a trick, because for years the Macbook has refused to back up to an external drive.
  • Then I’ll need to trot over to Best Buy and score a PC, preferably as a laptop with Microsoft Office installed. (Mostly I use the big iMac desktop as a TV.) Get their techs to figure out how to access Dropbox and iCloud if possible and how to access MacMail (apparently this can be done, strangely enough).
  • Relearn the use of MS Office, which I quit using years ago. This will entail spending some unholy amount of time at GDU’s or at the community college’s computer commons, pestering staff to help me figure out how to use newer versions of the software.
  • Call Best Buy’s Geek Squad back in to attach the new laptop to the modem, which the Cox tech apparently up-gescrewed when he fiddled with it, fixing nothing.
  • Trouble-shoot God only knows how many new nightmares that this process necessarily will cause.
  • Eventually (I hope: not now!!) replace the iMac.

With any luck, by next week I can begin to migrate the Web Empire over into the PC environment.

It’s sad. I’ve loved my Apple computers, and I use them every day. But Apple has made it clear that the company does NOT want to deal with the likes of me. They’ve done everything they can do — purposefully or not — to make it hard for twerps like me to deal with them.

  • They moved their place of business out of the North Central district, closing the Biltmore store and leaving only the Arrowhead and the Kierland Commons store — each about 15 miles from the central part of Phoenix, through heavy, obnoxious traffic.
  • They do not have tech service that will come to your place of business or home to address issues (they never have offered any such thing, that I can recall).
  • An Apple store is a madhouse. How their employees retain their sanity (if they do) is a mystery.
  • If they suggest anything, it’s not remotely helpful. Apparently Apple repairs are expected to be a DIY adventure. Given the quality of their “class” on using the iPhone, they apparently don’t give a damn whether you ever do figure out how to use their devices effectively.

Meanwhile, Best Buy has staff who will come to your home, who are highly knowledgeable, and who can actually fix the current problem. These guys will explain what they think you need to know, so that by the time you’ve finished an exchange with them, you at least have some idea of what to do.

It’s hard to imagine how they stay in business. As one friend remarked, their customer-service behavior suggests that Apple has dedicated itself pretty much to the telephone business. Desktop and laptop computers are now a sideline — evidently one that they’d like to dispense with.

In my case, they’re gonna get their wish.

Just about Brave-New-Worlded Out…

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Wow! Just deleted what must have been two or three thousand emails from the old Google Mail account, going back to 2013.

My Apple Mail account has died, apparently worked to death by too many old messages sitting in its memory. Or something. If that’s the only problem, we’re in luck. But it’s probably not…  Because in reality the number of back messages sitting there is not out of the ordinary. Exactly…there ARE too many, but the issue is apparently with iCloud, a storage system — not with MacMail.

G-mail forwards to MacMail, so if you send a message to funny-about-money@gmail dot com, it clones itself at my private email address. This G-mail trait would explain at least some of the tons of spam at MacMail…and if old, old, and older emails have been piling up in iCloud the same as they’ve piled up in Gmail, it’s NO WONDER the system has hung.

MacMail is also telling me “Login Failed.” Dunno what it wants me to do about that. Probably some password either no longer works or is now wrong. The Password Conundrum gets exponentially worse when you reach a certain age, and it does appear that I’ve arrived there. I can barely remember my name, much less dozens of passwords, most of which have to be changed every time you turn around.

Apple has arranged for a tech to call me this afternoon. I rather doubt this exchange will be helpful. Even though the Apple folks can share your computer screen on theirs, half the time I don’t understand what they’re doing. So though I can do it while they’re online and guiding me through the endless hoop-jumps, the instant they disconnect I can’t figure it out anymore.

At any rate, I think the G-mail address that’s still functional is for Funny about Money. As I recall, I had several gmail accounts…I may have one in my name or something close to it. How to find it and get into it, though, escapes me. A

Hmmm… If I’m reading this one strange feature in iCloud right, apparently iCloud doesn’t delete email messages that you mark as “delete.” Lo & behold…here’s a button that says “Erase Deleted Items.” It doesn’t say that until you right-click on it…how the heck would you know you were supposed to right-click on these things?

What it means, though, is all those hours I’ve spent during the past couple of days clicking “delete” on junkmail and out-of-date stuff have been…so much wasted effort, where our problem is concerned. At any rate, speaking of wasted effort, right-clicking and deleting does nothing to get rid of the symbol that seems to say MacMail is full and you can’t use it anymore.

Boyoboy am I sick of the technohassles. And I really dislike G-mail, which is weirdly tricky to use. Just now the composing pane (is that “pain”?) has scootched over to the far righthand side of the screen. NOTHING will make it re-center. But meanwhile some things will totally disappear the message pane, resulting in a time-sucking roundabout search for it.

Yesterday was consumed, pretty much, by traipsing back out to the West Valley to return the unneeded refurbished MacBook the predatory “repair” guy persuaded me to buy, and then running into the Apple store to try to arrange some help with an Apple “Genius.” It would have helped a whole lot if they’d agree to make an appointment with a live human being, face to face. But that ain’t happening. They’ll have someone call me on the phone this afternoon.

§ § §

The west side is definitely Anaheim East, no question of it. You never saw such masses of humanity in your life…unless you’ve visited California’s Disneyland, smack in the middle of the real Anaheim. Mile on mile on mile on mile of ticky-tacky stick-and-Styrofoam houses, jammed together roof-to-roof. How a look-alike lean-to is an improvement over an apartment escapes me.

Seriously: for what you’d pay for one of those little boxes, you could buy or rent a VERY nice apartment in Scottsdale or Phoenix. And get someone else to take care of the pool and the lawns and the desert landscaping and the roof and air-conditioner and the painting and the plumbing…

Lots and lots of stuff going on in those parts, though. There’s a big stadium out there. The Seattle Mariners practice there. I passed an ice rink(!!!!). We used to have a couple of those in town, but they’re gone now…what fun it was, ice-skating! And there’s more shopping than Carter has oats. In fact…I was surprised and a little shocked to realize how close the independent Apple store that’s been trying to sell me a used computer is to Arrowhead Mall, where the actual official Apple store resides — it’s only a few blocks away.

Drove across on the surface streets this time. The other day when I took the freeway…well…

To start with, my objection to the freeway route is that, though you get there without having to stop at many lights, it takes you MILES out of your way: it goes wayyyyy up north, and then loops wayyyyy back down to Thunderbird. If you drive straight across on T’hunderbird, you save many miles of wear & tear on your car. And if you know the secret to driving on the surface streets here (i.e., drive about five mph over the limit…) you hardly ever stop at a light.

Then there’s the fact that the damn roads are constantly under construction here. If you get stuck in construction on the freeway, there’s no escape. You just sit there and c-r-r-r-a-a-a-w-w-l along until you finally get out of the traffic jam. If you’re on the surface roads (and if you know what you’re doing), it’s pretty easy to weasel your way around building sites and wrecks.

And there are Phoenix’s hordes of homicidal drivers. My GOD people are stupid here! The other day when I did come back into town via the freeway, I passed a brand-new wrecky-poo on the right side of the road. The guy had somehow flown off over the shoulder, across another 20 feet of dirt and gravel, sailed THROUGH a chain-link fence (bashing down a steel post in the process), skidded across more dirt and gravel, and crashed into a 12- or 14-foot-high block wall, coming to rest upside down.

Not bad, eh? You have to admit, it takes real skill to pull off a trick like that.

Got off the freeway and cruised, out of curiosity, through the corpse of the defunct Metrocenter Mall, once (when it was newly built) the largest shopping mall in the nation. lt really IS a ghost now: just eerie driving around in there! Stores and restaurants that we used to frequent: boarded up. Parking lots vacant. One semi-truck driver and I knew this little short-cut as a way around a near-stationary slab of freeway traffic…his truck and my car were the only vehicles in there.

Well, till you get to the Walmart store that has taken up residence on the south side. That is now the ONLY business — or anything else — open on that huge property, except for a Petco way up on the north side. Oh, and the silly amusement park ride on the east side, next to the freeway.

Eerie!!

I dunno. I suppose that if that property isn’t significantly improved (they’re workin’ on it…sorta), it might be wise to move out of the North Central area. There certainly is a lot more going on in other parts of the Valley. Many fewer bums out in the Arrowhead area. Noisier. More hectic. But definitely not moribund and definitely not at risk from accursed political construction projects like the damned lightrail and brain-banging reverse lanes on the main drags. My son doesn’t want me to move — why he cares escapes me. But it puts the eefus on decamping to Prescott.

Better get up, fix a pot of coffee, and scrounge something to eat. And so, awawwyyy!