Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Brave New World…redux

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God’lmighty!!!!! It’s 11:30 in the morning; I’ve been on the road since 9, burned a third of a tank of ga$, and so far have gotten exactly nowhere.

In the Getting Nowhere Department, for the life of me I cannot enter edits to clean up the formatting mess that is yesterday’s post. NOOO clue what’s the matter with it. Grayson the Web Guru doesn’t seem to know, either. Because, he offers, I copied and pasted it in from a different program?

Well, OK, could be: he’s got somethin’ there. I pasted much of it from MacMail, reproducing a narrative of adventures I’ve shared with friends. But I do that all the time!!!!!! If copying a passage from an email bollixes up the formatting so spectacularly that it can’t be fixed, then 2/3 OF THE POSTS I’VE INSTALLED HERE FOR LO! THESE MANY YEARS would be similarly up-gefucked.

It won’t let me fix the formatting. So I give up. The copy is not unreadable — just a bit funny-looking. The latest effort fixed all but about the first third of the post. Sooooo…fugeddaboudit… Let’s pretend it’s just ducky and move on.

What. A. Day!

It’s 102 out there, with 15% humidity. And not even noon.

Day from Hell started with a simple goal: trot out this morning to visit the nearest hardware store and pick up a battery-operated doorbell. One with two bing-bong buttons. This to replace the one that was disassembled by a thief.

No kidding. I’m sitting in my office and see a pickup pull up to the front of the house. Looks like a yard dude: he’s got a trailer full of yard debris in tow. Guy hops out of the passenger seat. I figure he’s gonna come up to the door and ask if I’d like to hire them to clean out the weeds that have sprouted (in gay abandon!!) since Gerardo and the boys were here.

He walks up to the front gate; pauses there; then turns around and RUNS back to the truck.

Turns out he’s ripped off the doorbell button from the gate!

Backstory:

This house has been owned by a succession of eccentrics. Before Satan and Proserpine (my immediate predecessors) bought the place, some chucklehead who lived here got the bright idea of RIPPING OUT THE WALL BETWEEN THE LIVING ROOM AND THE FRONT BEDROOM. No kidding. This clever strategy turned the front room into a cavern, and reduced the number of bedrooms from four to three. Thereby also reducing the value of the house by about 20 grand.

In the process he also ripped out…yes…the doorbell installed by the developer. Like most sane doorbells, this thing operated on electricity, and so it had wiring that ran through the very walls that Previous Moron Owner had declared redundant. So when S&P moved in, the house had no doorbell.

And when they moved out, the house had no doorbell.

BUT…you can buy handy-dandy battery-operated doorbells at the Depot. Most of these devices have (or used to have…) two buttons: one for the front door and one for the back door.

Since my backyard is secured like Leavenworth, this gave us a redundant button.

But it was rendered UNredundant when Richard the Incredible Landscaping and Construction Dude built a marvelous enclosed front courtyard for me. He installed wrought-iron gates in the wall around this thing. A-n-n-d…conveniently enough, most battery-operated doorbells come with two doorbell buttons. We put one next to the driveway gate (where most people enter the courtyard) and one in the customary spot beside the front door.

This has worked well.

Until that a$$hole stole the doorbell button by the gate.

Ohhkay…i figure i’ll go out and buy another doorbell and set of bing-bong buttons, just like the one I installed a few years ago when I moved into this place.

Well.

No.

Of course not.

They apparently don’t make the damn things anymore. You cannot find them for love nor money.

Beloved Ace Hardware store up by the QT doesn’t have them.

Similarly beloved Ace Hardware Store in the Basha’s strip mall doesn’t have them.

Today we learned that Home Depot doesn’t have them. Lowe’s doesn’t have them. The hardware store just off the I-17 that might have had them (because they had everything) no longer exists: closed, lost, and gone forever.

Any surviving unsold specimens (if they actually do exist) are available only on Amazon.

So. I spent the ENTIRE FUCKING MORNING driving from pillar to post through the heat and humidity, banging around amongst the homicidal morons, and accomplished exactly NOTHING.

Well. Except for witnessing some fine examples of humanity’s nuttiness.

Jayzuz!

Here we are in the Home Depot parking lot, having dodged oblivion twice on the way there. Cruising up to where the reasonably located parking spaces reside, I see a young HD employee collecting empty shopping carts.

Because, after all, no self-respecting HD customer would have the common decency to put the damn things in the li’l stables where you’re supposed to park them after unloading your junk, right?

The kid is heaving a long line of carts across the lot — he must be pushing 15 or 20 heavy metal carts over the tarmac.

Along comes a moron in a beautiful new pickup — all red and shiny and magnificent. He cruises past the kid and the kid’s choo-choo train of carts, then CUTS IN FRONT OF HIM and swerves into a parking space directly in the path of where the kid has launched the carts!

Hooleeee shee-ut!

I think omigod that whole train of metal shopping carts is gonna crash into the truck’s shiny new rear fender!!!!

Incredibly, the kid manages to stop the caravan just before it collides with the truck.

Trudge into the Depot. Ask around. Find a guy who knows about battery-operated doorbells. Nope, they don’t have any with two ringy-dingy buttons.

I know these still exist, because I’ve seen them on Amazon. Say g’bye. Trudge back out through the soggy heat to the car. Resume driving driving driving.

Cruise across the city, under the freeway, through the ever-present road construction, and over to the Lowe’s. First try to visit the Best Buy next door to the Lowe’s, because as we know Best Buy carries everything, no matter how eccentric. Forget that: they don’t open until an incredible 11 a.m.!!! It’s about 9:30 or quarter to ten by now, since I wanted to get an early start to beat the most crushing of the heat.

Lowe’s of course has battery-operated doorbells…but none of them have two doorbell buttons.

Sumbiche.

Drive home, ready to bite somebody.

Dodge a huge truck that tries to change lanes into the driver’s side of my car. Incredibly, escape unharmed.

Get home, mad as a cat.

SDXB on the phone. Tell him this sad story. He starts to lecture me about how to get the desired doorbell, unknowingly reiterating Every. Goddamn. Thing. I. Just. Told. Him. I’d. Done. This, evidently, because he suffers from male pattern selective deafness: this is a guy who literally cannot hear the female voice. And so it doesn’t register with him that he’s advising me do do all the things I’d just told him I tried to do.

Arrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

Finally get off the phone, more or less politely.

Get online. Call up Amazon. And yup: there’s the very doorbell.

Order it up. It’s supposed to be delivered by 10 p.m. tomorrow.

That’s assuming, of course, that none of the ‘Hood’s ubiquitous porch pirates steal it before I notice it’s been delivered.

Scamarama!

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Wow! In the past few weeks and months, I’ve been the target of scam after scam after scam!

Latest: a Paypal scam.

In comes a message from PayPal saying I charged up a piece of furniture for something over $900. Uh huh.

You understand: we closed that account months and months ago. As in “enough time for my former business partner to go back to graduate school, earn a master’s degree in psychological counseling, complete an internship, and open her practice as a shrink.”

The months, thus, translate into years. At least two or three years.

Trying to reach a human at PayPal is damn near impossible. After running round and round and round Robin Hood’s Barn, I finally did get ahold of a fella with a pleasingly exotic accent. He says the problem is hereby solved: the fake charge is disallowed and the account is closed.

Right. I’ll believe that when I see it. Or when I don’t see another notice of a fake charge.

You know, there are mailing lists organized by age. That’s how AARP knows to start hustling you to buy a membership, the minute you hit about age 62.

My guess is that some list now shows me as pushing 80 — which (can you believe it? I sure can’t!) is pretty close. Thus the various bad actors know there’s a good chance enough of my marbles have slipped away that they can scam me easily. Hence the endless stream of telephone scams.

I’ve stopped answering the phone — either land line or iPhone. Almost every call is a hustle of one sort or another.

And yeah: I do know about the National Do-Not-Call List…har har! They just ignore that. They know nothing will happen. The numbers they appear to be calling from are spoofed, so even if you were to call the feds and complain, it wouldn’t matter: you couldn’t provide the information needed to track them down, even if they were calling from within the US (which they probably aren’t).

With the iPhone, you can block all incoming and set the thing to let only selected callers through. But I still haven’t been able to figure out how to use the complicated damned thing. As devices go, it’s just brain-banging.

This PayPal stuff spooks me. I’m afraid that if I refuse to pay for the phantom furniture, they’ll wreck my credit. This is one reason I posted a narrative of the little saga here at FaM: If Paypal starts harassing me for the supposed charge, I’ll have a record of when it happened and a public statement that it’s fraudulent.

Basically consumers are pretty much defenseless against the barrage of soliciting and scamming phone calls. It’s virtually impossible to block them without blocking access from legitimate callers. And look it this involved rigamarole Verizon recommends to us!!!

Seriously, guys? Who has time for that kind of BS?

I’ve stemmed part of the tide by blocking calls from area codes where I don’t know people. The Phoenix metropolitan area, for example, has three area codes: 602, 623, and 480. Blocking calls from area code 623 cuts down significantly on the harassing advertisements…but it has a BIG (and obvious) downside. One of my doctors’ offices is in the 623 area code: they can’t get through to me on the phone. Same is true for anyone in 480. Or 520 (Tucson). Or 213 (Los Angeles). Or 415 (San Francisco), 408 (San Jose), 510 (East Bay), 562 (Long Beach, Whittier, Norwalk, Lakewood, Bellflower, Cerritos, southeast Los Angeles County and a small portion of coastal Orange County)…. That is a WHOLE lot of friends and business acquaintances who are cut off from reaching you by telephone. I give out an email address whenever I can, but the truth is, most people don’t quite grasp the problem.

And the problem, apparently, is that as you advance in age, you become a juicier and juicier target for telephone scammers. Before I started blocking area codes and some local exchanges, I’d get as many as ten or twelve calls a day from crooks pestering me.

The 21st Century…Dante would’ve loved it!

PayPal: It Never Goes Away

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Trying to send a complaint to the FTC. Their website form apparently “sees” some character in this disquisition as a disallowed weird character, even though nothing out of the ordinary appears in it. So…Here’s an effort to get it to them by posting it here and asking them to come over and take a look at it. Wish me luck, folks!

§

Some time ago, my business partner and I closed the PayPal account for our business, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., since she was beginning a new career and I had decided to get out of the technical editing trade. Recently, I have been getting statements from PayPal to the effect that hundreds of dollars in billing have been racked up on the supposedly defunct PayPal account, for the purchase of furniture from some outfit I’ve never heard of. I have tried twice, using addresses from PayPal’s website, to straighten this out, but it’s impossible to reach a human being at PayPal. Now today in comes another demand for payment of something in excess of $800 for a purchase neither of us ever heard of. Below is a copy of the email I just sent to PayPal, presumably into the ether.

“Into the ether” indeed: when you send an email to the contact address given at PayPal’s website, it bounces right back with an “invalid address” message. Please investigate. And if you would, please, inform these crooks that they’re not getting any money out of me.

Below: message sent to PayPal email address (billing378579@gmail.com) requesting cancellation of fraudulent charges on closed account:

***

billing378578@gmail.com

Okay, see the BS below? This is a fraudulent charge to a PayPal account that SHOULD be defunct and that we have tried to close, apparently without luck. We closed our business, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., some time ago and are no longer doing business through PayPal.

Apparently some swindler has charged up hundreds of dollars worth of furniture on that account. I attempted to contact your people and clue them that no such charges were made by us, and that the account should be closed. Apparently you either have no people or none of your people care whether your customers are scammed.

I am forwarding this email (plus my requests to you to shut down that account and negate this fraudulent charge) to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Trade Commission.

Once again: CLOSE THE ACCOUNT for The Copyeditor’s Desk Inc., Millicent V. Hay, Victoria Hay, or Vicky Hay. DO NOT HARASS ME FURTHER WITH FRAUDULENT CHARGES.

Sincerely,

Victoria Hay, Ph.D.
Former director, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.

I would appreciate some help from someone who is in a position to bring a stop to this fraud. Thanks for your attention.

Victoria Hay
vickyhay@mac.com

***

There seems to be no way to reach a human being at PayPal. However, their business is essentially a form of banking and so should be regulated by U.S. authorities. How does one go about submitting a complaint to the relevant regulatory agency? And what IS the relevant U.S. regulatory agency?

§

I don’t expect to get far with this call for help to the banking regulators, even though PayPal is regarded as a type of banking operation and even though they have offices on US soil.

Don’t do business through PayPal, folks! They are totally, bullet-proofedly untouchable. You can’t reach a human for love nor money. But meanwhile they’re wrecking your credit by letting crooks rack up false charges on an account they refuse to close.

Arrividerci, Costco

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B’bye!

Welp, I’ve pretty well decided that I’m done with Costco.  The reasons: various.  They range from the microscopic — personal experience, mostly — to the macroscopic: the plague and the cost of gas.

Let’s start with the last…

Costco shut down its centrally located store some time ago.  This means that everyone who lives in the North Central, mid-town, Encanto, and Coronado districts has to drive halfway to Timbuktu to get to a store. There’s one store that’s sort of central, at Grand and about 33rd Avenue, but that’s a LONG way from my house, and it’s in a dangerous part of town where I would prefer not to drive at all, to say nothing of getting out of my car and walking across a gigantic parking lot. Plus it’s a “business” outlet, leaving one wondering how much of the regular housewifely products are available there. The two stores that I’m most likely to visit are equally remote from the North Central area: one in Paradise Valley and the other up the freeway halfway to freaking Prescott.

Driving in Phoenix, as I’ve no doubt groused here more than once, gets more and more miserable as the roads get more and more crowded. The place is Southern California Redux, only drivers here don’t drive as well as California drivers do. Every time you get in your car, it seems, you watch someone do something breathtakingly stupid — and they’re aggressive about it. Road rage is commonplace, apparently because so many people drive around hopped up on drugs. And, no doubt, because driving in the Phoenix area is an intensely frustrating activity for everyone, stoned or sober.

For that reason, driving halfway across the city’s increasingly crowded, annoying, and dangerous roads to buy a few household and grocery items grows increasingly counterproductive as the days go by.

Driving gets increasingly expensive, too — as it no doubt does everyplace else. This morning we’re told the average price of gas here is $4.44 a gallon. A month ago it was $5.04. At that rate, it’s prohibitive to drive outside your neighborhood for errands that can be accomplished locally. Personally, I don’t think you save all that much in buying at Costco — in fact, sometimes you probably spend more there than you would at other stores. But when you add in five bucks a gallon for the privilege of fighting your way across the city, the drive alone becomes prohibitive.

So the question arises: why drive halfway to Timbuktu when you can buy the same or similar products at the Sprouts, the Walmart, the Safeway, or the Albertson’s right in your neighborhood? Or order the stuff online?

For that matter, you can order Costco merchandise online, thanks to a local shopping service called Instacart. Set up an account with them, and all you have to do is go to their website, pick out the loot you want, upload payment, and voilà! Within a couple of hours, a runner shows up with the loot you ordered — and they’ll even haul it into the house for you.

For the nonce, I’ll probably keep my Costco membership and order through Instacart. This will allow me to continue to buy tires and the like there…maybe. Most everything else, though, will be purchased closer to home, at Sprouts, Albertson’s, Safeway, Walmart, and AJ’s.

The immediate cause of my rage at Costco just now is the fact that they suddenly decided to decline my debit card.

Costco won’t accept American Express, my credit card of choice; Instead, they force you to use Mastercard or Visa. I’m not interested in juggling any more mailed-in statements and payments than absolutely necessary, so I use ONE charge card. And that card is AMEX, because of the superior service they provide. Mastercard will drive you bonkers just trying to reach a human being, and the effort will get you nowhere. American Express hires, at least for the time being, actual humans who know what they’re doing.

So when I’m in Costco, I have no choice but to use a debit card — or, I suppose, to write a check.

But I no longer carry a purse around, largely because of the risk of theft in the parking lots at shopping centers near my house, and because hauling a purse from place to place is a damn nuisance. I carry a metal case of cards that will fit in a pocket. Period. Since women’s clothing generally has minimal pockets, hauling a checkbook and a pen everywhere I go is next to impossible.

So: don’t take my card, and you don’t take my money. How hard, dear Costco, is that to understand?

The last time I was there, I killed an hour roaming around the store, dodging crazed fellow shoppers and filling up a shopping cart. Waited in line at the checkout (and, as usual, waited and waited and waited and waited). Finally got up to the checkout. Forked over my debit card, and was told it doesn’t work!

Huh????

They threw me out with no purchases, all that time utterly wasted.

Furious, I drove straight to the credit union, which happens to be on the way toward my house from that far-flung Costco outlet.

The CU staff studied my debit card, looked it up, and said nothing was wrong with it. They had no idea why Costco would reject it.

So, apparently there’s not a thing I can do to fix that.

Other, of course, than buy merchandise elsewhere, thankyouverymuch.

And, though it’s going to be a nuisance to buy things I normally buy in bulk (such as paper products) at places like Sprouts and Walmart, the truth is local stores do carry most of the products I habitually get at Costco.

And then some. Sprouts has freshly prepared meals — mostly made with real, whole foods, not canned and frozen junk. The Walmart Neighborhood Store has the paper goods and cleaning products. AJ’s carries the dog’s food as well as top-of-the-line fresh produce and gourmet items. The Safeway has everything else, albeit at premium prices.

I may keep the Costco card so that I can send Instacart runners to pick up the (very few!) things I can’t get elsewhere. But that won’t last long. You don’t really know what Costco carries unless you visit the store fairly often. So within a few weeks or months, Instacart won’t be an effective option for buying there.

While Costco has more than enough customers to keep itself in business even after I quit spending vast oceans of money there, one does wonder: what is the point of deliberately driving buyers away?  Why make it hard to buy from your stores?

B’bye, Costco!

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One last view…

ENOUGH, already, with shopping at Costco. I’ve had it, and I’m NOT goin’ back there!

Whaaaa? ask ye who are familiar with Funny’s Costco love affair.

Well, I do hafta say that my patience with Costco wears thin every now and then, and yeah, every now and again I vow never to return. But this time, it’s stickin’…bigawd!

Only two exceptions:

1. To buy gasoline (sometimes: if I happen to be in the vicinity and the lines don’t stretch halfway to Yuma)
2. To keep access to their tire shop

Otherwise, I…yam…DONE. Not going into the store ever again, and never, ever again making a special traipse across the city to buy gas.

Whither this withering insight, you ask?

Well. This morning I took it into my dizzy little head to go in and talk with their CSRs about the screwup I experienced there a couple weeks ago. I’d gone into the store in Paradise Valley, wasted some unholy amount of my priceless time roaming around the store and collecting a basketful of goods, wasted some more time standing interminably in a checkout line, and stood there while the (excellent! all their staffers, by the way, are beyond excellent) cashier racked up a couple hundred bucks worth of purchases, and then handed over my debit card.

The same debit card with which I always pay for Costco purchases.

You need to know that Costco does not accept American Express, which is my credit card of choice. Both the business and the personal charge accounts are with AMEX. When this charming decision came down, I acceded to signing up with their Visa or Mastercard (don’t recall which, after all this time), and that devolved into a headache of Brobdinagian proportions. Canceled that annoying card and resorted to using my debit card, which is issued through my credit union.

This worked fine until a week or so ago, when the check-out clerk said she couldn’t take my credit union’s debit card — it was no good!

Ohhhh yeah?

So now I shoot down to the CU, haul the card in, tell them this sad story, and ask them WTF?

Their answer is, indeed, WTF?

They have no idea why Costco has suddenly decided to quit accepting a debit card on a checking account that has, shall we say, a balance that measures in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Maybe they just don’t believe than anyone who’s not a scam artist would deposit a year’s worth of spending money in their checking account? How might that be any of Costco’s bidness, anyway?

The CU’s agent says there’s nothing wrong with the debit card and hands it back.

Eventually I decide to traipse over to the Costco on the west side, barge up to their customer service desk, and ASK them what is their problem. That’s when I get the suggestion that I should kill some more of my time farting around in their store and repeating the fiasco that I would like to have resolved.

Bye!

Enough, already!!!

WHEN did Costco forget that customer service is a key part of retailing?

Well, thought I, their gas is still the cheapest in town. I’ll keep my card so I can buy gas here.

Uhm…

Maybe not.

First, to get to a Costco store from the Funny Farm, now that they’ve closed their outlet that was centrally located in Phoenix, you have to drive way to Hell and gone into Scottsdale, or else you have to drive way to Hell and gone up the I-17 freeway, halfway to Flagstaff.

I have NOTHING ELSE TO DO IN EITHER OF THOSE PARTS, now that I’m not working at ASU West and no longer have pals living in Moon Valley. So you wanna know what I ain’t doin’? I ain’t drivin’ halfway to Flag, and I ain’t drivin’ to Snotsdale West, just to save maybe $1.50 on merchandise I don’t much need anyway. Fry’s has a mega-supermarket on the fringe of Snotsdale West, much closer to my house, which peddles just about everything Costco does.

Soooo…why, pray tell, should I keep a Costco membership that requires me to burn vast quantities of overpriced gasoline in order to spend vast quantities of cash?

Which brings us to Second: Practically around the corner, QT has not one but TWO gas stations, each generously equipped with pumps.

Are they the cheapest gas in town?

Probably not. Costco usually claims that honor.

But by the time I’ve burned a gallon or three driving up the freeway to a Costco gas station, how cheap — really — is CC’s gas?

My guess is, the price ultimately is about the same. As for the aggravation factor? Any day I d’ruther spend a few cents more at a QT than drive halfway across the city to stand in line 20 minutes and then be told my membership card doesn’t work (which is what happened the last time I tried to buy gas at Costco).

I’ve spent my last dollar in Costco. Alas!

Drivin’ Drivin’ Drivin’….

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And here we are with the rest of the cattle herd, parked in the Mayo’s waiting room.

Getting out here from central Phoenix induces a migraine headache — the Mayo Clinic is situated in affluent Scottsdale, where they presumably figure they’ll be closer to the kind of patients who a) know what the Mayo is; b) have the kind of jobs that provide the sort of health insurance that will cover the Mayo; and c) are bright enough to run to the doctor whenever a need arises…or appears to arise. The location is one BITCH of a long drive from North Central. I left at 20 after 8, and it’s now 9:17 a.m.: yes, almost a full hour of navigating rush-hour traffic with my fellow homicidal drivers.

But…given the quality of US medical care in general and Arizona care in specific, it’s worth the drive. HOOO-lee mackerel.

My late mother-in-sin — SDXB’s mom — was at John C. Lincoln — the Institution that serves this part of town — after she’d had some sort of cardiac episode. While she was laying in the hospital room, she DID have a heart attack, and…NO…ONE…NOTICED.

Actually, that’s wrong.

A cleaning lady  noticed. She came into the room to pick up the trash, and instead picked up the phone — to call the nurses’ station. Mom survived…but only by the grace of God.

So that’s why I avoid John C. Lincoln.

Doing so means the nearest hospital is a fair hike from here. EMTs will take you to some of them, but not all of them. Especially not to the Mayo…the only one where you can feel solidly sure of getting competent care.

If I had any sense, I’d sell the Funny Farm and move closer to the Mayo Hospital, thereby insuring that the local ambulance services  will take me there. But I don’t have any sense; nor do I have enough $$$ to afford to buy a comparable house (or much of any house) in Scottsdale or Paradise Valley. Ohhhh well. We all have to go sometime…maybe sooner is better than later…

*****

So I get in to see MayoDoc. She hasn’t a clue, being a GP, and she reports that their eye specialists are not seeing any but the most urgent cases, because of the plague. She suggests I visit thus-and-such an ophthalmologist, who…heh!!…happens to be in practice with my guy!

When we say “waste of time,” we MEAN waste of time.

😀 😀  😀  😀  😀  😀  😀  😀

Speaking of the which… I was supposed to be down at the church for today’s volunteer gig along about noon. Having come unstuck in time, I had no clue that Today’s The Day, until my opposite number for the morning hours called to say “where ARE you?”

Well, where I was was in the backyard throwing food on the BBQ whilst dealing with the Leslie’s pool repairman. Ohhhhhhhh gawd!

So, so, sooo tired beyond description. Now I have to hang here until the Swimming Pool Service & Repair guy finishes wrestling with the pool, write down what he wants me to do (because you may be dead SURE i won’t remember!!), then race down to the church and sit through the last several hours of phone duty and then take a vial of water up to Leslie’s and then call Pool Dude and tell them what they say and…and…but…but…if I have this pool dude’s phone number (and name) I sure as hell don’t know where they are.

Meanwhile the Toyota people want me to bring the car down to the dealership to get some recalled nightmare part replaced, which obviously I now won’t be able to do tomorrow because I’ll be running from pillar to post with the swimming pool fiasco.

§§§§§§§

So here we are down at the Cult HQ. I got here two hours late. Now there’s only an hour left to go. My morning counterpart, Barbara, has hung around and spent the last hour chatting, which was nice.

The pool is crystal clear, thanks to the SPS&R guy. How long this will last remains to be seen. But at last the filter has been cleaned, so there’s a good chance the present repair will have some longevity.

§§§

Long, LONG elaborate email from the power company, Salt River Project, going on about a plague of scams visiting their customers.

§

Don’t know when I’ve ever been so tired. Up since 4 a.m., for unknown reasons. Then of course the fun junket across the crazy-making city.

Then couldn’t even sit down for lunch before the Pool Guy showed up.

It’s 103 degrees out there, with 21% humidity. Lovely, lovely day…

Thirty-five minutes to go…