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Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Of Retail, Runners, Recession, and…Birds?

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Yesterday I ordered a few things from Costco via Instacart. One of these was a 50# bag of birdseed. I’d sent them a message that I’d have a wheelbarrow ready, so we could just slide the bag out of the runner’s car into that and I’d roll it into the backyard — with the exception of one young male, most of their runners seem to be willowy young women.

What shows up at the door are not one but two joyous, hefty, and energetic lesbians. I say, I’ll bring round the wheel barrow. One of the women says no problem, I’ll carry it…where do you want it? 

So I let them in the back gate and the gal lifts that massive, inert sack of bird seed and strolls into the backyard with it like it weighed about as much as a three-month-old. The other one is the chatty type, and so she and I are having a good time yakking. I end up thanking them mightily for the hauling job (and giving them a generous tip). The chatty one says they just moved down here from Vegas because they couldn’t make a living up there. They got laid off their jobs in those gilded precincts and started working for Instacart to keep food on the table…and not much food. She said Instacart has a minimum payment to their runners of $7 per trip. But time after time, they — the two wymmen — would get orders for something in the range of seven bucks. So that means that if Suzie Q orders $7 worth of goods from Sprouts, Instacart makes nothing on the transaction.

Nothing!!! Think o’ that!

And think of what it implies for the runner: Here in lovely Phoenix, it takes me about 10 minutes to drive to Costco…5 to park and hike into the store. A typical Costco store covers about three acres. Let’s see…hmmmm… You trot to the far end of the store and you buy a bag of toilet paper (if you can find it), picking up stuff along the way: 15 minutes. Now go back out, 5 minutes to the car, after standing in the check-out line about 8 minutes. Now another 15 minutes to get to the customer’s house… That’s almost an hour. Seven bucks an hour…and you pay for gas, wear & tear on your vehicle, and car insurance out of that. If I’m not mistaken, you’re now deep in negative territory…

Here Instacart has a minimum order of $35…or at least, that was what I understood. Maybe that’s a local policy? She said they were already doing better here than  they were in Vegas, anyway.

§ § §

A-A-A-N-D this morning it’s another amazing adventure here at the Funny Farm! 😀

Ruby wanders out into the front courtyard where what should she find but a baby bird on the ground. Looks like an infant mockingbird. Or thrasher, maybe. The bird panics when Ruby goes over and sniffs at it. I call the dog off and pick up the babe, literally seconds before the watering system kicks in.

It’s frantic.

Bring it into the house and tuck it into an old checkbook box.

My neighbor Joel is out in front, teaching his high-school kids online. I annoy him by breaking into whatever he’s doing — because I know he and his kids have rescued wild birds before and think maybe the high-school has some kind of program for said rescue. He says no, he took the last bird down to Liberty Wildlife… South of two freeways. South of the river. Deep in one of the dankest slums this side of Albuquerque.

Ohhhhkayyyyy…. I try to figure out if there’s an alternative.

…Not so much.

Secure the nestling inside the box with a loosely wrapped paper towel, so air can get in and (i hope…) the bird can’t get out. Fortunately, it’s too exhausted and terrorized to try to escape. Climb in the tank, tune in the cowboy station, and start drivin’ drivin’ drivin’…..

Ohhhhh dear God, i hate driving in Phoenix….

But it’s not the usual teeth-jarring horrible drive. Only two morons cut in front of me. One idiot marches purposefully against the red light across a major intersection. Two construction zones. One really sad, heartbreaking bum, so, sooooooo stoned, one would say stoned out of his head but he apparently was out of his head to begin with, and so skinny, like either he never eats or the meth really burns the calories for him or maybe a bit of both. One pimp, dressed to the nines with his hair dyed orange, strolling past a strip club. Two railroad crossings, thank God neither of them occupied by stalled freight trains. Only one 737 shriekin’ in low across south 24th Street. Traffic relatively light. All in all, not a bad day for a drive.

Get down there and find the place with no problem. There’s only one person in front of me at the drop-off window, also turning in a lost baby bird.

Chat with the staff. The front desk supervisor told me they’d probably take in a hundred baby birds today.

Why? There hasn’t been any wind to knock them out of their nests…whaaa?

“It’s just the season,” says he. This happens every spring. And, he added, Liberty Wildlife takes in TEN THOUSAND BABY BIRDS A YEAR!

Holy mackerel!

It’s a huge facility. I gave them a little donation.

And drivin’ away thought…..hhhhmmmmmm….. If I have to drop out of choir because of the covid sh*t, that would be a place to volunteer.

So I’ll keep that in mind.

10,000 lost chicks a year. Think of that!

Amazon: Beware this gouge!

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Wow! I just tried to order a $6 bottle of 400-i.u. vitamin D capsules from Amazon.  The cause of this craving is recent research showing vitamin D deficiency may make you more vulnerable to covid-19 (and many elderly folks do suffer vitamin D deficiency), and that adequate (not excessive!) vitamin D may have a protective effect against covid-19. But the ones I have, which I picked up some weeks ago, are 4,000 i.u., a massive overdose.

Vitamin D is not entirely benign. ODing on the stuff can lead to hypercalcemia (excess calcium in the blood), which can make you uncomfortable at best or good & sick at worst; kidney damage; heart problems or even a heart attack; brittle bones, dehydration, inflammation of the pancreas; and — ironically enough — lung damage. As I came to realize this, I decided I needed to back off from this nostrum. Studies that suggest it helps fend off the dread disease indicate that 400 i.u. is about the right dosage.

Well. I’d rather not risk my life traipsing into Sprouts for a bottle of pills. So what do I do?

Of course: order them up from Amazon!

A lot of fishy stuff is going on there (heh! no doubt because commercial vitamin D is often derived from fish oil…): some ads will not allow you to see the one- and two-star reviews (which I always check before deciding about any purchase from Amazon). Others indicate that reviews are better than they actually seem to be. Hm. And of course fish oil is akin to snake oil, so I’m trying to be careful with this.

Finally settle on one from Whole Foods. Price is just under $6 for a hundred pills. I go to order this stuff, go clickety-clickety, and up comes an invoice for $25.99!

Huh?????

Sprouts has it for six bucks! And a three-minute drive down to the corner market.

Y’know, folks… Vitamin D is available for free. Your body makes it in response to sunlight. Wash off the sunblock, go outdoors, and sit in the sun for 15 minutes. Et voilà! Your full dose and then some.

So I try to deep-six the order…and Amazon’s system will not let me cancel it!

I try to get “Help” to find out how to cancel an order in mid-process and get nothing but useless bots. In-fukkin-furiating!

It looks like Amazon is going to charge this rip-off to my AMEX card.

So I call American Express, get a very fine CSR on the phone (this would be why we use AMEX…), and explain the predicament. She says it doesn’t look like Amazon has put a charge through yet.

Well, say I, I can’t see a way to cancel the order.

She says, Just crash out of it. If that doesn’t work, then we won’t honor the charge on this end.

It appears that she was right: it did work. After closing out of Amazon and logging back in, I don’t see the order. So I assume that closing out of an order before completing it cancels it and disappears it.

This is the first time I’ve experienced anything like what appeared to be deliberate gouging at Amazon. Whether it was coming from the merchant or from Amazon, I dunno. But it’s good to know that it can happen,.

Caveat emptor!

Of Groceries and Gates

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The major grocery chains in lovely Arizona are posting special Old Folks’ early-morning shopping hours on certain weekdays, by way of minimizing covid exposures to the most vulnerable segment of our population. If you’re 65 or older, you get to make a dawn shopping trip in a low-population store.

So yesterday, armed with shopping lists from the Old Folks (who are literally locked up in the Agèd Rabbit Warren Arms) and from WonderAccountant, who as you can imagine has her nose on the proverbial grindstone. Out the door in the wee-hours darkness, I arrive at AJs as the door opens, a little before 5 a.m.

Me and a bunch of other old buzzards.

We dodder around the store and pick up…uhmmm…whatever is left. I managed to find almost all the stuff I needed, which wasn’t very much, and the couple of small items for WonderAccountant were on hand. But finding the loot that Joan had ordered up was a whole ‘nother story.

She wanted eggs, preferably boiled. There were none. Nothing, zero: no eggs at all.

Whipped topping: I did find some of the squirt-on stuff. Not sure that’s what she wanted, but that’s what they had left.

1/2 gallon lactose-free milk. She was in luck: no one wants lactose-free milk, so there were two cartons there; otherwise, nary a drop of milk in the dairy cabinet.

Speaking of the which, I wanted a container of heavy cream: no such thing.

Pepperoni pizza for Lee: after much searching I finally found one. Didn’t look very good — frozen. They usually get one of those huge freshly made numbers from Costco. I fear he will not be happy with this factory…thing.

Large bag frozen blueberries: not a frozen berry of any variety in the entire store. I grab a package of fresh blueberries, which will last them all of, oh, probably one breakfast. Better than nothing, I hope.

Cat food: managed to find a couple cans of stuff (looked like one serving apiece, weirdly enough) and a bag of kibblish stuff, neither of which I believe their cat will eat. Also got a roll of Freshpet cat food — Freshpet, apparently, is so overpriced as pet food goes that no one will buy it even if it does look like their furbaby is going to starve. Otherwise: that cupboard was bare.

I was able to find all the things I wanted except the cream:  tea, Jet Dry, avocadoes, coconut-flavored paletes, lettuce — so felt pretty smug about that.

Okay, so after I got the WonderAccountants’ items delivered to them, I called Lee and told him I was on the way down to the Beatitudes with their loot.

You simply would NOT have believed… When I’ve yammered “prison guards” in earlier communications, I imagined I was joking.

Not…so…much…

They had THREE barricades for you to get through. First you have to get past the gate guard. To do that, you’re diverted into a parking lot where TWO guards give you the third degree, quizzing you with about a dozen questions as to your health, your reason for being there, your whereabouts over the past two weeks, your international travel, your local travel, and on and on. They take your temperature — with a thermometer that doesn’t work: it registered something like 96, and I happen to know my temp that morning was 98.0, which is elevated for me…my normal temp is around 97. (Admittedly, I was having a hot flash when I took it myself, but usually hot flashes don’t make any difference in your thermometer-type temperature).

Then you get back in your car and drive up to the front, which they’ve barricaded with tables. There you are once again ordered to state your business. I was able to drop off the groceries with the worthies manning this barrier and get back on my way. Later Joan called and said they’d received them.

Later in the day, the guy I contracted with to install a new gate to replace the tumbledown thing Satan and Proserpine left behind, all these years ago, showed up to install it. He did a beautiful job! I’m thrilled! Now instead of the rotting wood thing that dragged on the ground, we have a fine metal-framed number with indestructible fake wood stuff as paneling, and it has A DEADBOLT!!!

Which brings us to the true, 24-karat gold holy shit! moment of the day….

Once he got the gate hung, he found the deadbolt they’d supplied him was defective. A part inside was bent. So he decided to schlep to the Depot to pick up a new one.

The guy is gone the better part of the afternoon. He finally shows up and installs a deadbolt that works like it was made of silicone. It’s a very nice piece of hardware, and he extracted five keys so I would have them for my son, Gerardo, Luz, myself, and an extra.

What took him so long at the Depot was…they are letting only fifty people into the store at any time! 

He said they make you stand on a spot outside the door and wait your turn to go in the door. Can you imagine?

While he was here, he remarked on the black granules that washed (or were beaten) off the roofing shingles during the latest storm. He lives right around the corner (!!  Close enough that his little girl rode past on her bike while he was working!), and he said they had hail over there. I said I thought it sounded like hail, but I couldn’t see any ice on the ground. He said it was kind of slushy and didn’t last long.

Hm. So I called George the Insurance Dude, who recommended a roofer to come inspect.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll get another new roof out of this!

This gate thing is very pleasing. The incumbent was decrepit when I moved in and had devolved to “tumbledown.” Getting it open and closed was a chore — and the cops having kicked it apart in pursuit of Matthew the Garage Invader didn’t help it.

§ § §

So at any rate, I made a nice discovery in the course of today’s adventures: Hitting the grocery store before dawn cracks is a GOOD thing, not the PITA one would assume.

This kinda pot

Seriously. I was home by 5:40, with the grocery pickup done for three households. That meant I had the whole rest of the day, UNINTERRUPTED, to do more interesting things, among them paying work. The stuff I wanted and needed to do was not, after all, interrupted by the annoying time-sucking shopping chore.

One project: I bought two of those little heads of butter lettuce that come in a plastic box with the roots still on, sitting in a little depression with some water in it. (One actually was a mix of loose-leaf varieties.) Some years ago, Iearned that those things will grow if you stick one of them in the dirt, with a few leaves remaining on the head. Soooo…I pruned a bagful of leaves off the things, then took the pretty new Mexican pots that I’d intended to use for decorative cacti, filled them with potting soil, and stuck the little guys in there. If they take root, I’ll have two handy-dandy heads of lettuce right outside the back door.

§ § §

Later in the day,  it dawned on me that I’d made a MAJORLY mistake. Took those keys from our Gate Guy, the ones he’d had made at the Home Depot, marked them for what they’re for, put them away…and failed to wash my hands. Dawned on me as I was sitting here with my hands…where? on my face, of course. Ohhh shit.

Well, let’s hope he managed to escape HD without getting exposed. So far the covid infections have been mostly in the East Valley, I think. As of yesterday, we had 251 cases in the county, if which 15 were on the ASU campus. As of two days ago, 17 people had been hospitalized, and 1 had died. There were 26 cases on the Navajo, most of them in Chilchinbeto, which is beyond remote. On the other hand, of late some guy flew in to Sky Harbor on a jetliner with it.

George (Insurance Dude) recommended a roofer, who perked right up when it was proposed he should inspect the roof. 😀 The guy just e-mailed to inquire about contact info…sent him the fone number and address.

How kewl would it be if I can extract another $10,000 roof from the insurance company? Holy mackerel! That would make the roof last longer than I will, which means one fewer maintenance headache for the duration of my time in this house. THIS time, though, if we get away with this I’m going to ask to have a light color. The stuff they showed me last time was all pretty dark, which is brain-banging stupid in Arizona.

The fascia board on the roof thingie in front has what looks like dry rot (gulp! termite damage???), so while he’s here I can get him to look at that. If they have the roof off, they should be able to fix that then, and maybe even that cost can be foisted on the insurance company.

So, that which doesn’t kill you fills up every minute of your day.

Life proceeds, in spite of it all.

Why Toilet Paper? Well…here’s why

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So we’re sittin’ around here, contemplating the mysteries of Life, the Universe, and All That, when one of the greatest of mysteries impinges upon our consciousness: Why are vast tribes of people hoarding toilet paper, in the expectation of a (usually rather mild) disease that is unlikely to cause diarrhea? Even with with quarantining a given (which it was not when the toilet paper mania began), what is the fixation on TP?

Welp, I have — AH HAH! — a theory.

Here ’tis…

Funny’s Theory of Toilet Paper Affection

Among the American affluent classes, and the somewhat moneyed middle classes, everybody and his little brother, sister, aunt & uncle has a vacation home in the boondocks: In Arizona, for example, that would mean forest and desert retreats like Pinetop, Payson, Strawberry, Prescott, Yarnell, the North Rim, the White Mountains, Bisbee, Patagonia, and many waypoints north to south, east to west. Most of these second homes are furnished for weekends; some for a month or two of full-time residence during the summer. But by and large they stand vacant and waiting.

So. If you could see Armageddon coming — in the form of a contagious disease that was likely to get you and your family confined to your home for several weeks — where would you rather be held captive? In a plaster and styrofoam hut in a jam-packed eave-to-eave suburb? Or in a glorified “cabin” (more like resort quarters) on three acres of forest or scenic grassland?

You got it.

If we still had the ranch up on the Rim outside of Yarnell, that’s where I’d be right now.

And what are you gonna do if you figure the kids are going to be shut out of school, you’re probably going to be told to work from home (or be laid off), and all of you are going to be locked up together for anywhere from two weeks to three months?

What you are gonna do is load the kids and the dog into the vehicle, turn on the burglar alarm, lock up the shack in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun,  and drive up to your vacation cabin. That’s what you’re gonna do.

And if you’re going to hole up for some period up to, say, 90 days with your three kids, the family dog, the cat, and two sets of in-laws, what are you gonna need, in addition to food? That’s right:

Toilet paper!

Nor would you need an expensive, maintenance-sucking second home to feel the impulse to stock up with necessaries. Many people in our parts have campers — either pickup shells that convert your Ford F-150 into a rolling hunter’s cabin or fancy living-rooms on wheels of various sizes, some as capacious as a small house. What would you bring with you if you figured you were going to be living out of your car or camper for anywhere from three weeks to three months?

Hell, yeah:

Toilet paper!

Even if you don’t have a vehicle tricked out to accommodate the Life of Riley, plain old camping is just not that hard — even over the long term. SDXB and I did it for three straight months, trekking through the outback of Alaska and Canada. With a camp tent, a propane campstove, a few dishes, and a couple of towels. We slept under a roof one (1) night, when it was raining too hard to cope.

We did it for fun, so trust me: it was no particular hardship.

But…if you weren’t an experienced long-haul camper but you figured you’d better be prepared to stay in the boondocks for a good long while, and you planned on car-camping rather than hiking, what provision (other than food) would you really, truly, NOT want to run out of?

Yup:

Toilet paper!

heee! So this is the theory. People aren’t buying TP to stock their houses here in the Big City. They’re using it to stock vacation homes, campers, cars, duffle bags full of camping gear. They’re not stocking one home. They’re stocking two, or even maybe three, if they have a vacation house and a camper.

No Cure for Stupid

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LOL!!! There’s a BIG SIGN attached to the front gate reading

PLEASE DELIVER PACKAGES FOR THE BOXANKLE FAMILY TO 1234 EAST WHIZBANG DRIVE.

YOU ARE AT 1234 EAST WHIZBANG ROAD.

* ROAD AND DRIVE ARE DIFFERENT. *

Well…or something to that effect, only slightly more polite.

 

Apparently “polite” is not operative on “stupid.” Once again a UPS moron delivered a package for Josie, who’s holed up behind a wall of weeds and refuses to answer doorbells. So I had to traipse this thing over to her and leave it outside her locked security gates. She’s attached a new interior screen to the things, so you can no longer toss a misdelivered package into her entryway. But it doesn’t matter. The weeds and the jungle are now so thick no porch pirates can spot anything left at the door. 😀

Honestly. Neighbors you wish would move away….

The renters at the Perp‘s house, across the street, also fall into that category. Their ragweeds are up to your fanny. And they’re bikers. They like to roll their motorcycles out to the driveway and sit there revving up the unmuffled engines.

So how are y’all doing in the Great Pandemic Terror? I see they’ve locked down California and locked down Texas (whateverthef**k that means), but so far have refrained from applying prison technology to the inhabitants of lovely Arizona. We have closed all the schools, though; we’re told there’s some possibility that the public schools will remain closed for the rest of the semester.

Local parents have found a way to defeat that public-health measure, though: They’re banding together in neighborhood collectives to lodge the kids with a stay-at-home parent while all the worker bees go on in to the office.

This has some charm, despite its obvious untreatable stupidity: yesterday afternoon walking the dog was like a lovely Sunday afternoon, with all the little cutie-pies out playing up and down the streets. These beautiful children do add a great deal of charm and joy to an aging central neighborhood. But one hopes they’re not carrying anything to cut short one’s own plans for aging…

Frankly, I find myself wondering if a bunch of parents won’t decide that home-schooling isn’t such an eccentric quirk after all, once they discover that a home-schooled kid can get through a whole day of public-school content in about 90 minutes to two hours, at the dining-room table. If they figure out that they can hire on retirees and stay-at-home residents to watch the kidlets in play groups or take them on field trips while the working parents are at the jobsite, home-schooling may begin to look one helluva lot more attractive.

Once again, Ruby was attacked by some moron’s off-the-lead dog yesterday. When I started hollering at this pair — a young(ish) man and wife — to keep their F**KIN’ DOG on a leash, dammit! — they just didn’t get it. The dog did have a leash on. They just weren’t holding the other end.

Yes! They were letting their dog roam around their unfenced front yard dragging a leash behind it. See? “Dogs must be on leash”? Our dog IS on a leash. Right?

Neighbors we wish would move away…

Haven’t had much to say here because I’ve been paddling frantically to keep my head above a tsunami of incoming work. Sent off edits for a huge study in business management to the expectant authors. It’s an amazing thing, one that has taken a decade of research. Very, very interesting.

Literally had no time to take a deep breath when in came a book-length project. This is a historical study of Burma, Vietnam and waypoints  — again, extremely interesting. The author is a native speaker of Chinese teaching at a prestigious US university. I’m excited to read it…this is going to be a significant contribution to her field and quite a privilege to work on.

Made a run on AJs to pick up a crucial supply I’d forgotten to hoard: wine. {gasp!} What would one do if one ran out???

The shelves — all of them — ranged from empty to half-empty. Staff said the place had been going crazy for the past week — though my observation, a few days ago, was that AJ’s was pretty calm compared to Safeway, which literally was a mob scene. Most of the good cheap wine was sold out, but fortunately, I’m an aficionado of fine wines in the $8 to $9 range…and so is my pal, the AJ’s wine concierge. So managed to find an Oyster Bay Sauvignon blanc (!!! I thought they didn’t carry it! Walmart’s finest vintage!) and four superb bottles of…uhm…red stuff. This should last for a few days. I hope.

My son has been ordered to work at home. Even though he seems to prefer that when it’s his choice, when the boss says get-the-hell-outa-here, it’s a different tale. “I’m bored!” quoth he. He was reduced to cleaning out the kitchen drawers.

Yes. When you work at home you get a lot more work done a lot more efficiently than you do at an office…same as when you study at home. 😀

Speaking of work…it’s onward to Burma for me…

Panic à Costco?

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Went over to the Costco on the I-17 this morning to stock up on some products the store here in the po’ folks’ part of town doesn’t carry. Amazingly, for example, you can’t buy a chunk of blue cheese here in the low-rent district. But the store up north has a very nice Bel Gioso blue that’s wonderful. They also have a propane dispenser, the only Costco in town that does.

It’s always wise to plan one’s trips to that place propitiously. So a bit before noon on Friday morning I figured the store wouldn’t be too crowded. Hit the Albertson’s first, then hit the freeway, where a couple of those lighted message signs informed us that a construction worker had been killed. So got off the freeway to avoid a traffic jam and got to the store the back way.

Not too crowded? Hah! The Coronavirus Panic run on grocery and hardware stores has begun.

The place was jammed.

But it was weird. Normally Costco customers are exuberantly oblivious of their fellow grocery-cart pushers. And a lot of noise goes on and people are happily rolling toward whatever doodad they think they can’t live without. Not so today. Not that people weren’t talking and kids weren’t carrying on…it was that they were strangely quiet. And bizarrely polite — people would motion you ahead instead of cutting you off to get there first.

I got one of the last packages of toilet paper. People were buying a lot more TP than paper towels, but the paper towels were also going fast. And I nabbed the second-to-last package of boned chicken thighs. Drumsticks were gone. One of the butchers told us they were out of chicken and wouldn’t get more in until the first of the week.

It really was just…kind of a weird experience

Anyway, if you haven’t already done so, now may be the time to make a provisions run. If Costco is any measure, it looked like paper goods (especially TP!) and easily cooked or grilled meats were going fast. In these parts you can’t buy hand wipes, but countertop wipes by Lysol will work as well or (probably) better.

Don’t forget to keep the gas tank topped up, too.