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Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

The Genealogy Jamboree

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In an idle moment, I happened to google the name of some long-dead relative, and lo! up came a bunch of interesting stuff, not just dry government documents but newspaper articles and obituaries written by surviving loved ones. Genealogical records tend to suck you in. Like history (of which, I suppose, genealogy is a branch), the stories of the dead can be hypnotic.

Fooling around, I had the idea of creating a table that would compare the family lore about people on my mother’s side with what appear to be the facts, as reflected in public records. And…whoa! This is when you begin to realize how curious are some of the things your relatives have said.

My father never talked about his family, most of whom he was alienated from or just didn’t care about. But my mother’s stories…oh, my!

Gree, presumably in her younger days

One particularly memorable legend has it that my great-grandmother, familiarly known as “Gree,” was brought up by Mary Baker Eddy after her own parents died. This is why Gree was a staunch Christian Scientist right up to her dying day, at the (very active!) age of 94.

Think of that. She and her daughter both lived to 94, and they never saw a doctor in their lives. The evening before she died (of heart failure), she entertained a dozen people for Christmas dinner in her dining room.

Well, anyway: Mary Baker Eddy as stepmother. Right?

Start to look into it, and you find exactly zero evidence that Gree ever came anywhere near Mary Baker Eddy during her childhood. Eddy lived in New England: mostly in Massachusetts. Gree was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, and as far as I can tell, lived most of her younger years in Michigan and Illinois. She married in the Midwest, and she and her husband moved to California after they were well into adulthood.

It is true that Gree’s mother died when Gree was three years old. However, the father lived another ten years. That would have left Gree unparented at the age of 13…but again, there is exactly zero evidence that she was ever sent East. And as far as I can tell, Mary Baker Eddy never inhabited either Michigan or Illinois. 😀

My mother believed that Gree and her widowed, never remarried daughter Gertrude were prominent in the Christian Science movement at the start of the 20th century. She said they used to contribute frequently to the Christian Science Monitor.

Okay. Yes. The Christian Science Monitor was founded in 1908. So…yeah. Could be.

Look into it, though, and you find their sole surviving squib in any CS publication was a testimonial to the miracles of Christian Science in The Christian Science Sentinel, which appears to have been a kind of propaganda bullhorn whose nature was akin to a newsletter.

None of this means they didn’t know Mary Baker Eddy personally. Surely one or both of them could have. But evidently my great-grandmother never spent any time as Eddy’s stepchild. Unless…she was sent east on an orphan train (at the age of 13? In the 1800s, when she would have been considered old enough to earn a living?) and nabbed as a free servant by Eddy. But there’s no word of this either in fact or in family lore. Besides, the orphan trains went in the other direction: from East Coast cities into the hinterlands.

Interestingly, in this testimonial Gertrude remarks that she survived typhoid(!) and appendicitis grâce à the miraculous qualities of Christian Science. She also remarks that her brother went to France during World War I.

Then we have the story of Gertrude’s brother, my uncle Albert, who designed the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. We’re told that Al wanted to go to college but that his father refused to let that happen, saying no one needed a college diploma to earn a living. This, in the backlit haze of family lore, made Al’s accomplishments as an engineer and designer all the more astonishing.

Well. No. Mucking about on the Internet, what DO I come across but an article in an antique university newsletter indicating that at the age of 23 he was a junior at the University of Illinois, Champaign — majoring in civil engineering.

He was born in 1892. So if he was a junior in 1915, then he would have been a little old for an undergraduate. This could indicate that he didn’t start college until a year or two after he left high school. Or that he was working his own way through and so had to take a lighter than normal course load. Assuming he was able to carry a regular schedule of classes, though, he would have graduated in 1916. The U.S. entered World War II in April, 1917, and so it’s possible that he might have dropped out of college to volunteer for the war. But it’s just as possible that he finished his course of studies before joining up.

Whatever: this bit of intelligence gives the lie to the tale that he was entirely self-educated.

Amusing, isn’t it?

I have a cousin in California who converted to Mormonism shortly after he reached adulthood. He compiled a large genealogical record, we’re told, which in the first place would be lodged here in town at the Temple (and I do have Mormon friends who could get me in there) or which, in the second place, he may have information about. His sister, who lives in Fountain Hills, has completely alienated herself from me, for reasons unknown. Apparently I said something to offend her — what, I can’t imagine. My father had plenty to say about her conversion to Roman Catholicism, some of it extremely nasty — he was a bigot who operated in the highest stratosphere of bigotry, and if he made any of his remarks to her (God help us!), she no doubt thinks I’m just as stupid and vicious as he was. It remains to be seen if she passed this opinion along to her brother.

One would assume she did. But I figure it can’t hurt to try to get in touch with him. He can’t hit me over the Internet.

 

Yuch! Don’t buy Precise brand dog food!!!

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AJ’s, my favorite overpriced grocery store, sells a couple of dog food brands for the fussy pet owner. Even though I make most of Ruby’s food, I do add a quarter cup of kibble per serving, since the stuff is laced with vitamins and you never know whether you’re getting the right nutritional balance in a pot of chicken or pork mix. Plus a piece of kibble works nicely as a doggy treat. I’ve been using the “Precise” brand, whose small bags I keep in the freezer by way of combatting the pantry moth plague.

This morning I go to dish up a topping, and ECH! Out comes a congealed chunk of mildew!

WTF? Look around in there, and by damn, there’s more of it!

So this morning I carted it up to AJ’s manager. She took a sniff of it, said “ew! it even smells bad!” and gave me a gift card for the full value. She remarked that she’d heard they’d been having “issues” with dog food…this must be one of ’em!

If you can avoid buying dog kibble at all, bully for you. In any event, whatever you buy, don’t get Precise brand products.

Oddities of the ‘Hood, Oddities of Humanity

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Out the door at 5 a.m., in early July well after day has dawned. It is just gorgeous at that time of morning: cool, clean, and quiet. Most people are still in bed; the few who are stirring are not emitting exhaust fumes, yapping loudly at each other as they jog up a neighborhood lane, dragging their frustrated dogs along, or sharing their mediocre taste in music with everyone around them. Yet.

It’s amusing to observe how other people live. Have you ever noticed how much rolling stock your neighbors leave out on the driveway or at the curb? In our parts, each vehicle is in itself a big sign reading Burglars, Break into This. And have you ever wondered…why does a household without teenaged kids need three, four, five cars? And why don’t they park at least a couple of them in their two- or three-car garage?

Few of the residents here now have teenaged kids at home. Most are either older couples left behind after the offspring grew up and moved out, or  up-and-coming millennials with small children. Probably about 90 percent of the houses around here are occupied with no more than two licensed drivers. What do two teenager-free adults need with three or four vehicles? And why do they park them out where the local prowlers can easily rip them off?

It’s true that some residents here don’t have garages with doors. Most of the houses in Lower Richistan were built before U.S. levels of homelessness and drug addiction reached the heights to which we have attained.  Car theft and car break-ins, while of course they existed, posed nothing like the problem that they do today, and so builders cut corners by equipping even fairly upscale tract houses with carports. Indeed, a carport was considered a selling point: Look! If you live in Arizona, you don’t even need a garage to protect your car from snow, ice, rain, or salt sea air!

In Upper Richistan, most of the houses were either built with actual garages that included such amenities as garage doors, or homeowners have retrofitted the carports to make them more secure. Many of those houses can store two, three, even four cars out of prowler’s reach.

By the time my part of the ’Hood was built, drug use had begun to infiltrate the middle class and crime levels were rising — and with them, rates of car break-ins and theft. So in my parts, most cars have double garages equipped with garage doors.

Nevertheless, even here in the po’ folks’ section, people still park up their driveways and the streets with their rolling stock.

Why? This escapes me. In my part of the ’Hood, which comprises one street that goes from the tract’s north border to the south border and another that runs between the east border and Conduit of Blight Blvd., not one home houses a teen-aged driver. Yet almost every house has at least one car parked in the driveway, at the curb, or (illegally) in the yard.

Out of idle curiosity, this morning I took it into my head to count the vehicles sitting outside at dawn, presumably left out overnight. Between the entrance to Upper Richistan and my house (a distance of about 1/2 mile), I counted 96 cars & pick-ups (!!!!), 1 motorcycle, 1 boat, and 3 trailers.

Some of these homeowners have filled their garages with junk and so can’t fit a car inside. But most have not: walk by when a homeowner is out puttering around, and you see one or two cars inside the garage. This suggests that most couples here — i.e., one or two people — have at least three and often four or five vehicles, some of which they park outside.

What on earth could they be thinking?

Even if you don’t care if your car is rifled or stolen, consider the cost of owning the thing. A decent used car in our parts costs around 30 grand these days. A pick-up? Fifty thousand. Yes: that is “dollars.” Sure, the tank is insured against theft…but what does it cost you to insure the thing? What does it cost to register it every year? (Answer: a lot, in Arizona! Scroll down to “variable fees”…) Why you would use your garage to store junk and leave a valuable asset that costs you money just to own it sitting on the street inviting drug addicts to rip it off simply escapes me. It’s incomprehensible.

And what would possess you to own any more expensive, cash-sucking vehicles than you absolutely must have to get around. Whaaa?

God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy…

Speaking of crazy people, Arizona’s wacksh!t legislators have removed just about all restrictions on fireworks. Where cities have tried to keep a grip on the craziness, the legislature has issued an edict stating that even if thus-&-such a hand-maimer has been banned in a municipality, towns and cities may not ban retailers from selling the junk.

Result: every moron in the city runs amok on the Fourth of July. And New Year’s. And Cinco de Mayo. And what the hell: any random Friday or Saturday night.

Last night I went over to the home of some friends who live on the 12th floor of a high-rise that overlooks the Phoenix Country Club and the Steele Indian School, both of which put on spectacular professional fireworks shows on the fourth. This was great fun.

In preparation, though, I had to take Ruby down to my son’s place and leave her there. She’s terrorized by the banging and whamming emitted by the neighborhood fireworks enthusiasts. Plus the neighbor’s dry grass collection still occupies the alley. All it will take is one moron’s firecracker to set the stuff ablaze, and once that starts, the vines along my back wall will catch fire within minutes. I do not want to come home and find my house incinerated, and even less do I wish to find my dog incinerated.

The country club’s display ended about 9 p.m. and the Indian School’s wasn’t slated to start till 9:30. I’d told M’hijito I’d relieve him of my dog along about 9:00, and also I was tired by the time the first act ended. Waking up at 4:00 a.m. during the 110-degree season, while it gives you three beautiful cool hours in the morning, makes for a very long day. So I left early and headed over to his place.

The racket from amateur bang-bang frolicks was distracting, even with the AC on and all the car windows closed.

And, in the crazy people department: our wise City Parents had closed Central Avenue, meaning all the traffic from the Steele Indian School shindig would be dumped onto 7th Avenue and 7th Street! Holy shit. My son’s house is right off 7th Avenue. I just got outta there on time: if I’d waited until after the second fireworks show, God only knows how long I’d have been stuck in the traffic jams.

So that was a lucky decision on my part.

The Indian School fireworks had started by the time I left his place…it really was something to see, even from three or four miles away.

Ruby, preoccupied by the company of Charley the Golden Retriever, was completely unfazed by the racket. Well…one explosion made her jump about a foot, but otherwise she was pretty calm.

Think I’m being neurotic about the fire hazard? Lemme tellya…  A few years ago, a couple of the neighborhood teenagers — these weren’t small boys, these were almost grown morons — were playing with fire in an alley over in the older part of Lower Richistan. They were behind a beautiful old property on about a half-acre. The house was occupied by an elderly couple aging in place, long after their kids had grown and moved away. They no doubt figured they’d live there until they died and then be able to leave an asset worth something over half a million dollars to their kids.

Well, the oleanders caught fire. The flames leapt from the oleander hedge (everyone has oleander hedges around here) to the mature trees in the backyard, and forthwith from there to the roof.

I happened to be driving down that street right about then. When I squeezed past with the other incidental traffic, I saw the old folks sitting in the neighbors’ front yard, watching their home burn down. And burn down it did: despite the fire department’s best efforts, the place burned to the ground.

So. Yeah. That’s why I’m not happy about the neighbor letting the grass grow up to his ass along the alley.

For a few extra bucks, Gerardo will go out there and spray pre-emergent on the ground along the guy’s fenceline, and occasionally he’ll hack back the weeds. But neither he nor I feel it should be our responsibility to keep the idiot neighbor’s weeds under control.

A-n-n-d…The July 4 Jamboree

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Happy Independence Day, one and all, whatever your particular political weirdness. Enjoy your freedom…such as it may be.

Here in the ’hood, the locals throw a great old-timey small-townsy July 4 parade. It’s grand. Did I go to it this morning? Not a chance…nothing will peel me away from my 7 a.m. coffee.

The Ruby and I were out the door shortly before 5 a.m. “As dawn cracks” is the best time to get out onto the streets for the daily two-mile stroll. Wait till 5:15 or, gawd forbid, until 5:30, and you’re elbowing aside every other dog-owner, dog-pisser, and dog-pooper in the city. Fly out the door just as the eastern horizon starts to gray out, and you have the place largely to yourself.

Except for my colleague, the other Old Bat in the hood who likes not to have to wrestle her dog away from the competition’s nuisance mutts. 😀 This is a fellow LOL (Little Old Lady) who is dragged around the hood by an ill-tempered shi-tzu. Whereas Ruby will (foolishly) try to love up every dog that walks past us, the shi-tzu will simply try to kill them all.

This old gal keeps herself in action, despite braces on her ankles and knees, by strolling about a mile every day around Upper and Lower Richistan. She lives in Lower Richistan, so this area is her territory. In chatting with her, I’ve learned that she is the living, breathing avatar of Aging in Place. Yes. She’s 93, she lives alone, she wrestles with whatever disability puts her in braces, and she does just fine. She’s an upbeat and happy human being.

Today I learned that one way she manages this is by having someone come in two days a week to help her out.

Ah hah.

And how much does this cost?

Let us posit $80/day, the going rate for a cleaning lady in these parts. Oh, hell: let’s give them a raise for putting up with an old bat: $100 a day.

That would be… $200 a week x 4 weeks in a month = $800 month. And how does that compare with the posited $3,000 a month to live in the Institute? Plus all the proceeds from the sale of your home…

Not bad, I’d say. Even if you figure taxicab rides and food deliveries and the cost of one of those Save-My-Ass buttons… Ninety-three years old and she’s still goin’ strong.

This evening I’m going over to watch the public fireworks displays from the 12th-floor balcony of some friends’ condo. Looking forward to it: it’s a yearly Event.

Last year I was afraid to go because of the neighbor’s alley weeds. Arizona has lifted all restrictions on fireworks, so we citizens can indulge ourselves in whatever suicidal idiocies we please. And since, as we know, at any time on the roads one in ten people around us is a moron, this is…problematic.

The city of Phoenix, faced with this new Freedom legislation, outlawed certain kinds of particularly dangerous, blow-your-hands off ordnance. The state, outraged by any such imposition on a Free Society, said okay, you can have that, but you cannot place any limit on any fireworks a retailer can sell.

This means that the local morons can buy any face-blasting hand-maiming kid-crippling fireworks they please; they just can’t legally set them off inside the city limits. Knowing this, the morons bring this crap into the alleys to set it off, figuring if a cop (or anyone else) catches them in the act, they can run off down the alley to escape capture. So you have all this garbage going off, ALL. NIGHT. LONG in the alley behind your bedrooms.

Ruby the Corgi, like most dogs, is terrorized by the sound of exploding fireworks. And of course if one of the morons sets fire to the mounds of cat’s-claw vines that insure my privacy along the back alley fence, the fire will jump to the roof (no, it’s not “if”: it happened already to another house in the neighborhood, which burned to the ground, leaving only a pile of ash on the concrete slab) — and my little dog will be incinerated.

But really. I do want to go to the party.

So I put up my son to watching the dog tonight. This evening I’ll drop her off at his place, fly down to my friends’ place, enjoy the company and the spectacle, and then pick her up on the way home.

How stupid is this?

Well. This is what we call Arizona.

😀

The Difference between a German Shepherd & a Corgi…

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…is that when the moron neighbors start shooting off fireworks (or pistols), the German shepherd tries to track them down and rip off their heads, whereas the corgi ends up shivering under the bed.

Or on the bed, as is the case with this one.

For the love of God, it’s only the first week in June, and already the chuckleheads are shooting off their cherry bombs? WTF?

Phoenix. What a garden spot! They just passed a law that you can’t feed the backyard birds, on pain of a $2,600 fine. But it’s OK to shoot off hand-amputating fireworks any time of the day or night, as you please.

 

Hello Again, Little CPR Call Blocker! Good-bye NoMoRobo!

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Hoorah! The new CPR v5000 Call Blocker I ordered to replace the one that got thrown out after the Cox dude told me the one I had wouldn’t work with Cox’s infuriating modem IS HERE! Thank you, Amazon!

When Cox forced its customers to abandon the old, steadfastly reliable copper lines, I already had a CPR Call Blocker installed on my landline phone. It was wonderful. Because it WORKED. I asked the Cox tech to install it on the damned space-gobbling, dust-collecting modem he deposited on my desk, and he said Cox wouldn’t touch anything that wasn’t Cox equipment. Besides, it wouldn’t work.

Right.

Subtext: “We get paid by phone scammers to let them blitz you with advertising and scams, and you can be darned sure we ain’t about to aid and abet your efforts to thwart the bastards.”

However, Cox was making a service called NoMoRobo available to its new VoiP customers. I’d heard good things about it and so figured signing up with that should address the problem of robocalls and live scam artists. Because I had no idea how to attach the little Call Blocker device to the damned modem (sometimes connections can be kinda tricky), I just tossed it out, figuring NoMoRobo would do the job.

Not

So

Much

NoMoRobo is a complete bust. Here’s why:

To block a call from a phone number, NoMoRobo has to let the first jangle ring through. This is how it identifies fake phone numbers. Unlike the CPR 5000, it apparently has no preprogrammed numbers; thus the 5000 numbers blocked by the CPR  device just come right through. And it seems unable to identify VoIP/IP rogue diallers, leaving you vulnerable to an expensive scam.

The first-ring feature is a deal-killer for me. It doesn’t matter whether this is a new number nuisanceaferizing you. Even numbers that are blocked are allowed to jangle you up once.

Sorry, but I don’t find the sound of a phone jangling to be conducive to work that requires my full, uninterrupted attention.

Then we have the problem that you can’t signal NoMoRobo that a number is bad with a push of a button. Ohhhhh no. You have to go online to their Website and fill out a freaking form!!!!!! You have to retrieve the offending number from your phone’s memory, report the caller’s name, say what time the call occurred…all of which adds the insult of time suck to the injury of phone scamming.

And as hoop-jumps go, it’s pointless: the robocallers simply generate new numbers, potentially dialing you from every telephone number in your exchange. Or, for that matter, in any exchange.

And we have the added problem that when NoMoRobo fails to recognize a call as pestiferous (which is often), it just lets the phone ring and ring, till your voicemail picks up. At which time the creeps fill up your voicemail with their hustle.

I get upwards of a dozen pest calls a day. Today they started at 8 a.m. sharp; sometimes they start around 6:30 or 7 in the morning. They often run through till 8 or 9 or even 10 at night.

With the CPR call blocker, you simply press the “Talk” button and then, if you’re on a wireless extension, press #2; if you’re at your desk where the device is sitting, you don’t even have to pick up. Just press the big red “BLOCK” button.

The highly satisfying big red BLOCK button….

If you miss that boat, then simply click your phone’s callback button and as soon as the number starts to ring, hit that “Block” button.

The thing has been plugged in for less than an hour, and it already has three numbers in its bank of blocked callers.