Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

El Gobierno Quiere Ayudarte! Thanks, Dear Government, but…

by

So this morning city and neighborhood organizers threw a donuts-and-press party to kick off the first of the heavy-duty locking gates they intend to install across the alleys in Richistan and Lower Richistan. These will be grand — in theory — for the folks who can afford to live in those areas. The intent is to fence the local drug-addicted bums away from people’s backyards, theoretically cutting crime and, as a practical matter, much enhancing aesthetics.

When I first heard about this scheme — it was proposed a couple years ago — I was all for it. It sounded like it would cut the risk of crime and get at least some of the two-legged vermin out of our hair. But now I’ve had time to think it over. And what do I think?

Bad idea.

This is a scheme that on the surface sounds great but that is fraught with unintended consequences.

Its biggest drawback? The plan doesn’t address the underlying problem: hordes of drug-addicted transients. Until the matter of homeless mentally ill and drug addicts is resolved, no stop-gap program like gates across the alleys is going to stop bums from roaming our neighborhoods and burgling our homes and cars.

While our City Parents talk on one side of their collective mouth in claiming they want to help our neighborhood fend off the present onslaught of drug-addicted vagrants, many of whom are merely thieving but a few of whom have committed acts of violence and sexual molestation, on the other side they blithely import the undesirable residents by allowing them to ride the Blightrail for free, dumping them at the end of the line, the intersection of Gangbanger’s Way and Conduit of Blight, and providing a 24-hour meth clinic for their convenience. We have a homeless camp right next to a middle-school playground. Over the neighbors’ vociferous objections, they allowed a hugely profitable fundamentalist television church to buy a private home in the ’hood, pave over the yard, convert the property to a “church,” and use it to dispense free food handouts to the bums. This, when the City specifically requests churches not to give out food to the homeless, because government and charitable agencies already do so and also provide needed social services.

Blocking the wandering drug addicts from sleeping in the alleys and using the alleys as their toilets will not make the drug addicts go away. It will not provide shelter for the homeless. It will not provide effective drug treatment or healthcare for them. It will not provide jobs for them. It will just keep them out from behind the yards of our more affluent neighbors.

When the bums can’t get into the alleys, where will they go?

Well, I’ll tellya where they’ll go. I know from experience, because I spent 15 years in the historic Encanto District, where the homeless drug-addict presence makes ours look, by comparison, as nothing.

Into the locals’ front yards. That’s where they’ll go. Into the side yards. Into any car that is not parked inside a locked garage. Into any garage or workshed that is not locked.

Our house had a flange wall that extended from the front elevation, spanning the distance from the east side of the house to the lot line. From the street, this wall looked like part of the structure’s living space. It had a solid wood-plank door that fit into its arched opening, just like the house’s solid wood-plank front door. Being young and careless (not to say “dumb as posts”), we never locked this door. We could have installed a padlock on the back side of the thing, but that would have involved having to hire a craftsman to do it, which would have entailed not only installing hardware on a door that wasn’t intended for such a thing, but also installing said hardware on a solid masonry wall, unlike any wall that has ever been built in the 21st century.

So not being the brightest rhinestones on the cowboy vest, we just let it be.

The bums found it. They quietly slipped in, closed the door behind them, and made themselves to home. A couple of transients set up camp in our side yard. How long they resided there, I do not know. They were quiet, and besides, our television was on the other side of the house, and so we never heard them moving around out there. It wasn’t until I went out there to do some damnfool thing — probably clean up weeds — that I discovered their gear. They apparently had been there for awhile.

One our neighbors bounced out to her car early one morning, jumped in, turned on the ignition, and started to back out of the driveway on her way to work. That was when she noticed the guy sleeping in the back seat.

He was really pissed at her husband for waking him up and demanding that he get out of the car.

If our son and our neighbor’s son were to play outdoors at all, either I or our neighbor’s full-time housekeeper had to stand there and watch them every minute that they were outside. It was unsafe to let them play outdoors at all, especially in our front yards.

One of our neighbors was making cookies for her family while they watched the television one evening. She would put a pan of cookies into the oven, trot out to the family room and watch the TV for 10 or 15 minutes, and then when that batch was done would walk back into the kitchen and put in a new batch. (In those old houses, kitchens were separate rooms, not an extension of a secondary living-room.)

Some guy was watching her from the alley and noticed that she was going in and out with some regularity. He also noticed she’d set her purse on the kitchen counter. So while she was in with her family watching the boob tube, he crossed the back yard, came on into the kitchen, grabbed her purse, and strolled off with it.

Got that? You could not leave a door unlocked even if five people were in the house and moving around! The cops found her purse in a garbage can, but they never did find her cash or her credit cards.

That was Encanto. It’s not that bad here. Yet. I will admit, the child molester who vaulted the family’s back wall and had a little fun with their two small girls was a bit…heh…beyond the pale. But at this point that is still an extraordinary event, not something that happens on a routine basis. In Encanto, this kind of shit happened once or twice a week. It was a constant thing.

We had alleys, too. We had cozy oleander hedges lining those alleys. And we had lots of drug addicts, alcoholics (remember those?), and neglected mentally ill sleeping in them. But we also had them sleeping in our front yards, our side yards, and our vehicles. And I figure that’s what we’ll get when we lock the bums out of our alleys.

Same for the coyotes. See that pipe-like thing at the top of the gate? That’s a coyote barrier: it spins when the animal tries to climb over it.

The coyotes, which are madly being evicted from the horse properties now being converted into farms of ticky-tacky McMansionettes, den in the alleys. If they can’t get into the alleys, they will nest in the hedges and decorative brush in people’s front yards.

How obvious is this?

For city slickers, not very. Evidently.

The hilarious thing is, the flatland touristers who have invaded these parts live in as much terror of coyotes as they do of bums. They are stupidly, brainlessly afraid of coyotes! Which is about as inane as it gets. Tell them that a coyote will not eat your child. They don’t believe you. Suggest to them that if they don’t want their damn stray cat to get eaten, they should keep it inside: they don’t believe you. Plus of course they think they have a God-given right to let their damn cat run loose. Tell them that they shouldn’t leave their dog out in the backyard alone all the time anyway, and they get miffed. Letting their dog howl at the moon, the sun, and every passing sparrow is another of their God-given rights. Point out that the coyotes kill roof rats, moles, and gophers, and they just look at you blankly.

So…you get the picture of why they haven’t thought about whatever unintended consequences might devolve from this project.

Then we have the fact that at the outset the city is going to install these gates only in Lower and Upper Richistan. This, of course, is not just because the squeaky wheel gets the grease but that the palms that have the grease know which other palms to grease…

The Richistans are just to the east of the ’hood, where the Funny Farm resides. The ’hood forms a transitional zone between Lower Richistan and Conduit of Blight Boulevard. Lower Richistan itself is a kind of transitional zone — between the very wealthy, old-money Old Phoenix Upper Richistan and us…folks.

Think about that. Yes.

What will happen when they shut off the alleys in the Richistans is that the bums will flow into our part of the neighborhood. Of course. This means we will get twice as many bums as we already have. Which is as many as we need, thankyouverymuch.

They plan to install gates in Sunnyslope, too, an adjacent low-rent area that has an even worse transient problem than we do. This, of course, is ridiculous: there, the bums are already breaking into vacant houses and commercial properties (of which there are a-plenty) and squatting there. Sunnyslope is overrun with transients, some of them true drug addicts and some just people who are down on their luck or mentally ill and unable to care for themselves.

The situation will not get better very soon. As we speak, there’s a five-year wait for Section 8 housing in Phoenix. So you understand: we have a lot of poor people sleeping on the streets. And Sunnyslope is one of several local epicenters for this phenomenon.

Locking the bums out of the alleys in Sunnyslope will push them down into our area. So our part of the ’hood will get those folks as well as the ones evicted from the Richistans.

When asked about this, a City spokesman said they were planning to do a “study” of the “metrics” resulting from this experiment. Right. Like they studied what would happen when they installed a lightrail boondoggle and let people get on without having to pay a fare. Right.

Glad I installed my own gate! This, you may recall, I had to put in after some of the locals decided the old garbage-can niche in the back wall made a great public loo. It works really well and adds an extra layer of security along the alleyway. Prowlers can’t reach the gate into the yard. And since it’s not easy to climb that swimming-pool gate, passing bums can’t walk up to the wall and peer into the yard.

It’ll be at least two years but more likely something like 6 or 8 years before the city gets around to installing gates over here. By then I’ll be 80 years old and probably won’t care much.

Frustration → Redemption

by

Yesterday was one of the most frustrating days I can remember in a long time. Maybe even in forever. Yet, weirdly enough, hours of frustration and annoyance ended up saving me money.

Started out needing a couple gallons of pool acid, a tank of gasoline, and a few minor things at Costco.

Normally I would buy gas at the midtown Costco, which is cheaper than just about anyplace else in town. It’s not a very pleasant place to shop, though, because the store is located in an area infested with drug-addicted transients. Though security patrols the shopping lot and a hulking attendant lurks by the gas pumps, it’s still depressing to have to drive past a park that hosts a campground full of homeless folks, most of them spaced-out druggies or untreated mentally ill. Plus the Costco in Richistan, because it caters to a more affluent buyer, offers a broader and better range of products.

To get the acid at a reasonable price would require a trip to Home Depot on Cave Creek, which is halfway to the Richistan Costco in Paradise Valley, and directly on the way. The HD, however, is way out of the way of the midtown Costco; to avoid having to drive way north and then turn around and drive back south, I’d have to buy the acid at Leslie’s, where it’s massively overpriced. Soooo…. I decided to make the trek north to the Depot, then head directly east to Costco Richistan. This makes for a longish drive but presents a better likelihood of getting the goods I needed at the cheapest price. Except for the gas.

First stop: Home Depot.

Trot into the garden department, where they normally house the pool supplies.

Nope. No acid. No chlorine. No pool stuff. They’ve moved this junk from its usual niche and replaced it with Christmas junk.

I can’t find it in its old place in the garden department. Can’t find it anyplace outside. They’re supposed to store this stuff outside because the combination of acid and chlorine is explosive, and they keep it outside to minimize the potential for catastrophe, should a leak or a moment of stupidity occur.

After much traipsing around, I finally find an employee. “Where’s the pool stuff?”

“It’s up aisle 16. Go all the way to the end and turn right.”

Trudge up aisle 16 to the far north end of the store. Search, search, search, and search some more. No pool supplies.

Fuck it, I think. Costco has a pool section. They may have the stuff.

So I climb back in my car, annoyed, and proceed to the western border of Richistan, whereon lies the upscale Costco.

A few things are needed, notably another bathmat, this one to serve as a nest for the ailing corgi, who had taken to laying on the icy tiles next to the bed. And a package of meat.

While I’m there, I realize that eating steak is now a thing of the past. At $12  a pound for ribeye (not even the prime version! just choice!), a package of beefsteak goes for $50 to $80 and up. Sooo…forget that.

A package of scallops — wild, not farmed — which used to be an extravagance, is “only” $20, but because I only eat four or at the outside five per serving, it will last for weeks. Pick that up.

One of the snack ladies is peddling some smoked salmon treats. These are very tasty, and with the $2 off come-on a package is only $6. Impulse buy: grab.

A rack of lamb is also a decent buy for me, because I cut it into enough pieces to feed me for four meals. $25.

The bath mat is reasonably priced, comparatively speaking: $13.

I spot a red casual sweater, exactly the thing I’ve been looking for the past several weeks. $18.99. Impulse buy: grab.

The checkout lines are endless. The Richerati…I swear, those people are such sh!theads. I guess the way you get to be rich is to cultivate an attitude that lends to, among many charming habits, cutting people off in line. Every jerk in the store has to slam in ahead of me, so I stand there and stand there and stand there and stand there and finally get to the cash register.

The checkout lady racks up all these purchases. I hand over my cash card. She informs me I owe more.

Huh? There’s $180 left on that card. This stuff cannot possibly add up to that much.

“Okay,” say I. “Take off that and that and that,” pointing to the bath mat and the impulse buys.

She doesn’t know how to deduct a purchase. She has to call a manager. He refunds the amounts she’s charged up, about $35 or $40. They inform me that my purchases still exceed the card’s balance.

People are lined up behind me, tapping their toes impatiently, all the way back to the meat department. By now I am SO exasperated, I say, “Fine. Just keep it. Delete the entire purchase and leave the money on my cash card.”

This is still beyond the cashier’s skill level, but the manager has no problem figuring it out.

Furious, I stalk out of the store and drive across the street to the Target. There I buy a bath rug for the dog to nest on but cannot find a pool department. Nor can I find an employee to ask. When I ask the cashier, she doesn’t know what a pool department is, so I figure it’s safe to assume Target doesn’t sell pool acid. 😀

I trudge back into the central city, where I pay way too much for two gallons of pool acid at Leslie’s.

Continue down to the Pore Folks’ Costco, where I get gasoline for 40 cents a gallon (!!!) less than I paid at the QT for enough to get down to the church and back.

Into said down-at-the-heels Costco, whereinat to purchase the things I needed. By now I am truly furious.

On the way down there, it occurs to me that if the two clerks at the Richistan Costco couldn’t figure out how to refund two items, they might not have succeeded in deleting the entire order.

So as soon as I get inside the store, — which fortunately, because no one else enjoys having to brave a parade of drug-addicted bums, either, is almost empty —  I line up at the customer service stand. There I’m told no problem! Yes, there’s $181 remaining on the card.

Now I run around the store and buy the main things I need, less the sweater and the meat and the bath mat and plus a now much-needed $8 bottle of wine. These items came to a grand total of $71. And that left $111 on the cash card, for future purchases.

Say what? Seventy-one bucks? Really? The Costco up in Richistan just told me that those items plus two packages of meat plus a bath mat and a sweater, hold the wine thank you, came to a total in excess of $181.

Whaaa?

Well, I pay the bill and run.

On the way home, I think…that can’t be right!

Either the guy in the slums keyboarded the purchases in wrong, or the lady at the Richistan store did.

When I got home, I entered that $71 in an Excel file and added the things that I did NOT buy at the mid-town Costco but had tried to buy during the aborted trip to the Richistani Costco…and got this:

I don’t think I’m forgetting anything. In other words, the Costco in a fancier part of town tried to charge me something in excess of $181 for $155 worth of goods. Less than that, actually: I didn’t try to buy a bottle of wine at the first Costco. That’s 8 bucks plus tax. Eight dollars from $155 is only $147.

The prices are the same, by and large, from store to store. So the only explanation is that one of the cashiers — probably the one in Richistan — made a mistake.

It was 3:00 by the time I got home. I’d been on the road since before noon, with no lunch and precious little breakfast. And rather little, we might add, to show for all that frustrating, maddening batting around in the nasty traffic.

So. Even though shopping in a more upscale part of town is a slightly less unpleasant experience, I guess I’ll stick to my kind after this…

In the Dog (and Doc) Dept: Trust Your Gut…

by

Remember how I was wondering whether a possible misdiagnosis of Valley fever by MarvelVet might be what’s killing my dog? Well…yeah. Just talked to NewVet: the results of the second Valley fever test are back. And no.

No. She does not have and never has had Valley fever.

So basically: we have destroyed this dog’s health and very probably killed her by giving her fluconozale on top of prednisone. Or prednisone on top of fluconozale, however you wish to look at it.

That is not a benign combination. What can it cause? Adrenal gland dysfunction.

And yeah, again. That is exactly what has happened. It destroyed Cassie the Corgi. Her health is permanently ruined, and really, if I had a backbone I’d put her down now.

This has happened under the watch of the Great Skeptic. Remember, I am the one who keeps carping away that one should QUESTION AUTHORITY. Don’t take what your doctor (or a vet) says without looking it up yourself, understanding what ails you, and understanding what the proposed treatments will do for you and to you. Sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease.

That certainly is the case here. We basically killed this dog by putting her on a cough suppressant with prednisone plus an antifungal in the absence of no empirical evidence that a fungal infection was what ailed her. Instead, what ailed her was what was obvious: a bronchial infection that was going around the city at the time and that, probably thanks to the dog’s old age, advanced to pneumonia. She should have been treated with an antibiotic. In fact, when NewVet put her on doxycycline for a UTI, her cough cleared right up.

Shit.

Trust no one. Believe nothing.

 

Merchants: Savin’ me money!

by

So this morning I set out to visit Fry’s (a giant supermarket-cum-Target sorta store) and Costco, whereinat to get…

Costco

Pick up new glasses
Reload the cash card with next month’s budget for CC purchases
berries
cheese
melon
rubbing alcohol
possibly a new whiteboard

Fry’s

dog food
chocolate chips
Turtle wax
1 small bath rug
1 long-sleeved shirt, red
$80 in walkin’-around money

Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it?

The Fry’s is on the way to the Costco.

They do have bath rugs…in eye-popping hideous colors. Okay, I knew it would be hard to get a pale purple (we mean “lavender”) rug in an era when the couleurs du jour are battleship gray, eye-searing white, and crudely produced teal. But…jeez.

Rubbing alcohol: that’s a Costco purchase: I can get two bottles for little more than one would cost at a regular retailer, and since I use the stuff liberally in the making of window and tile cleaner, Costco is the desired vendor.

Chocolate chips: no problem, though they’re running low on the favored fancy varieties because of the holiday.

Shirt in the desired color: not a freakin’ CHANCE! Reference the colors of 2018, above. Ugh.

Turtle wax: nope. Any number of other car polishes, but no Turtle wax. Car polish is not what I want. What I want is effin’ carnauba wax (which is what Turtle wax is) with which to renew the aging surface of my beloved office whiteboard.

Dog food: noooo problem.

We come away with one package of dog food and a bag of bird seed that we happened upon, offered at a price that puts Walmart to shame.

That was it. Yes. One (1) item of the six things we went in there for. SO PISSED WAS I, between not being able to find 99.8 percent of the things I needed and getting behind some broad in the fast-service line who decided, as I pushed my cart up to the cashier’s conveyer belt, that she just had to run all the way  back to the far south wall of the store to pick up something she’d forgotten, THAT I forgot I needed to extract a little cash. So…what we have here is a fuckin’ waste of my time. Of the first water.

And so, away!

Heading catty-corner across the gigantic eight-lane intersection  to the Bed Bath & Beyond, I dodge effing entitled rich people every inch of the way and risk my life to get into the effin’ parking lot.

Into the BB&B, a kind of Magical Mystery Wonderland for the housewife and the homeowner.

Yeah. Yep. They had the desired lavender bath rug: Twenty-six dollah and change. Add the tax (10% here in lovely uptown Arizona) and it would come to something over $30.

For a shower mat.

Don’t think so, White Folks.

Movin’ on.

At Costco I retrieved the new Rx shades — having prepaid, it was just a matter of asking. BUT…contrary to past practice, staff there refused to reload my cash cards at the service desk. They instruct me to go through one of the checkout lines to get that done.

You understand: the parking lot is SO JAMMED that I had to park in the Penney’s lot to deposit my car and then hike hundreds of yards to get into the goddamn Costco. This means the lines at the checkout stands are halfway back to the meat department.

“Thank you,” say I. “I’ll do my shopping someplace else.”

Goddamnit.

So I figure the Home Depot on the way back toward the ‘Hood will have the carnauba wax. And the Walmart will have the rubbing alcohol. These are the only two sorta urgent items on the list. (I really, really do want to repair and resuscitate the beloved whiteboard!)

Cruising into the HD parking lot (some miles — read, “quite a few miles, in the context of a city”) — I’m reminded that an Auto Zone resides there. Hot dayum!

Park, go inside. I know they have Turtle wax there (I’ve bought Turtle wax at auto stores before), but of course can’t find it. The two (count’em, two) staffers are occupied at the customer service/checkout desk, serving (if you can imagine!) customers. The guy in front of me is trying to buy and install a spark plug, but he has a little problem: he knows NOTHING about spark plugs. The CSR is trying to instruct him, right down to showing him how to apply a pair of pliers.

Oh. Dear. God.

I wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and finally break one of the two staff folks loose. This person instantaneously produces the desired can of Turtle wax, giving me an escape from a frustrating expedition across the parking lot at the Home Depot.

Filled with great joy, I proceed to the Walmart.

Searching for the rubbing alcohol, I discover — did you know this??? — that Walmart’s pharmacy shuts down over the lunch hour on weekdays.

Follows, doesn’t it?

Their clientele in that hardscrabble neighborhood includes not just the usual crew of welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid recipients, but a fair number of actual working stiffs. You know: the sort of folks whose jobs require them to freaking BE THERE to collect their piddling hourly pay. Which in Arizona, a right-to-work-for-nothing state, you may be sure is piddling. Right. This requires them to do their shopping for prescriptions during the lunch hour or — their only choice, if the shop at Walmart — after a long day’s work.

Not that it mattered to me. It was just a subject of astonishment.

Moving on: I do find the rubbing alcohol, very cheap. Very pleased. And over on the other side of the store, I find a different variant of alcohol, which as you may have surmised by now, I also purchased.

Bogle. Best cheap wine on the market.

Holeeeeee shit.

So now I’ve blown the whole goddamn morning, I’m half-starved, and I’ve accomplished almost nothing of the chores I set out to accomplish.

Since that was how my day had gone, can you guess what happened next?

No, I did NOT crash any of my fellow homicidal drivers on the way home, or run over any of the locals’ small children as the little creatures played in the street. For that we may be grateful to God and to ingrained suspicion.

Now I get home and haul the junk out of the car and…and…find Cassie the Corgi. One of her hind feet is encased in petrified dog shit, cemented with a skiff of quarter-minus.

W

T

F

??????????

This, I did not see before I left home. But since she couldn’t have gotten outside to embellish her new boot with gravel while I was gone, she must have accomplished it before I left, and I must not have noticed.

My poor little dog.

This stuff has turned to concrete. But that has not stopped her from pissing all over the house. Luckily, she’s confined her pissing to the large incontinence mats I’ve thrown down in her favorite pissoires and shittoires. So it’s fairly easy to pick up. Damn good thing I acquired another Lifetime Supply of the things at Walmart yesterday.

I cannot wash or scrape said concrete off her little foot and hind end.

So I have to find a large cap of a large jar — thank goodness for Little Old Lady habits that do not allow one to throw away a container, no matter how much space it occupies — fill it with warm water spiked with Dawn, and force her to sit still long enough to soak the stuff off her foot. This is a trick, but fortunately (??) she’s too ill to put up much of a fight. Manage to soak and scrub her more or less clean. Fill up the garbage cans with incontinence mats and brown wet paper towels. Feel very, very happy for Bogle Vineyards.

Get onto Amazon and look up purple bath mats. And by God, there it is! Yeah. There it is. For about 1/3 the price Bed Bath & Beyond expects to collect.

How do these stores stay in business at all? Even if I had to pay for the delivery (which I do not), it would still come to less than BB&B was charging. And it’s exactly what I want. Not approximately what I want.

Yeah.

And that’s how my day has gone.

Yours?

 

The Cloned Life…

by

Ever feel like you find yourself in a world that was cloned from the world you’ve been living in all these years? Only it’s cloned just slightly off-kilter, so it’s not an exact copy but an ever-so-vaguely cattywampus copy…

Today, for example. I learned the simplest, most ordinary objects no longer exist in my cloned world. They’re gone. Some have never even been heard of by the world’s otherwise normal-looking denizens.

I left the house to visit four venues:

  1. The Apple Store at the Biltmore, there to try to find out how to activate the iPhone given to me by La Bethulia and La Maya
  2. A Walgreen’s, there to buy a new tube of antibiotic ointment and a new tube of pain- and itch-killing Lanacane with benzocaine, therewith to treat the squamous cell carcinoma on the back of my hand, whilst it awaits surgery; as well as a package of orange sticks (to manicure one’s nails) and a new nail brush
  3. AJ’s, to buy a pound of Peet’s whole-bean coffee, since Costco has discontinued my favorite brand and the AJ’s house “espresso” beans are decidedly not espresso or even dark-roast
  4. Total Wine, where I can buy a bottle of Maker’s Mark for the same price as Costco’s, and a few cans of Guinness, one of which I wished to serve up with the chili I intended to fix for dinner

Andddd….

  • The Apple Store has closed. It will reopen in Scottsdale (a half-hour’s extra driving time) sometime in the next week or two. This rendered the scheme to activate the New Old phone moot.
  • Walgreen’s no longer carries Lanacane.
  • Walgreen’s does not carry either orange sticks or anything even faintly resembling a halfway decent nail brush.
  • The fancy Safeway near the Biltmore, in whose upscale environs I hoped to find a package of orange sticks if not a nail brush, does carry Peet’s dark roast, but only in packages of pre-ground (read “stale”) coffee. You can’t afford the Maker’s Mark there.
  • Safeway does not carry Lanacane, either.
  • Nor does it carry orange sticks. Or nail brushes.
  • Total Wine was overrun with the kind of idiot who sees you coming up the aisle toward them and so stops and parks their cart smack in the middle so you can’t get around them.
  • If Total Wine had Guinness in a wine cooler, I couldn’t find it.

In my effort to find seven small items and try to get one moment of attention from a knowledgeable Apple tech, I went to eight retail establishments:

  • The (defunct) Apple Store
  • A Safeway in Richistan, generously stocked
  • Total Wine
  • A Walgreen’s
  • A second Safeway, closer to home
  • Grinder’s Coffee Shop (closed: they were waxing the floors!)
  • Sally’s Beauty Supply (they have orange sticks in commercial quantities, but not in a lifetime supply for one person)
  • Walmart

Each of these required a drive and a fight for a parking spot.

Not a single store or pharmacy sells Lanacane anymore! They sell another nostrum that contains lidocaine, but never having used it, I felt a little wary of buying it. I wanted the stuff I know works to quell the pain and the itch.

Not even the beauty supply store has decent orange sticks; the ones they do have are junk packaged in bags of 50 or 100, or a package of half-a-dozen coated in an abrasive substance.

At the Total Wine, ninnies kept blocking my way up the aisles, and ultimately I never did find a cooler holding beer. Fuck it: I decided to move on to Safeway.

At the fancy Safeway, I’ll be damned if I could find a package of Guinness. They did not have orange sticks, they did not have nail brushes, and they did not have Lanacane. The pharmacist at the downscale Safeway closer to my house remarked that I was not the only customer who asked after the latter, and that one woman had told him she’d found it on Amazon.

The Richistan Safeway had Peet’s, but not in whole-bean form.

Grinders’ proprietor had piled all the furniture on the patio and was merrily polishing the floors. Nice job, too! But it meant I couldn’t buy any of their extravagantly overpriced coffee.

At last it was into the Walmart…which indeed did have orange sticks, nail brushes, and an easily accessible, cold six-pack of Guinness. There I gave in and bought a tube of salve with lidocaine, hoping for the best.

When the hell did Lanacane become a thing of the past? Yes, you can get it from Amazon, but if you need it now, you really shouldn’t have to wait a day or two to have it delivered. Or pay extra for the privilege. It seems to me to be a very ordinary, very pedestrian product. Suddenly it’s an alien artifact???

When did a supermarket — an invention originally designed to allow consumers to do all their shopping in one place — stop carrying ordinary grooming products and, in an upscale district, a damn six-pack of chilled Guinness?

Waxing the freaking floor of a retail restaurant, in the middle of the day on a freaking Saturday?

See what I mean about the hitch in reality? We don’t really live in our world anymore. Do we…

…from Worse to Hilarious?

by

DATELINE: CHURCH FRONT OFFICE. Okay, okay. I give up whinging about the endless stream of bad luck, minor hassles, major headaches, and downright disasters that have infected every damn day here for the past six weeks or so.

This is no longer terrible, horrible, and downright deplorable. It has evolved into…

laughable

😀

Nay, uproarious!

Just when you think nothing more could possibly go wrong…the ENTIRE CITY goes offline.

So we’re told, anyway. The Apple techs and the Cox tech who spent four hours trying to help get my email working were swimming against the stream. Little did they know…even the Cox tech!…that Cox is down over the whole City!

Apparently the degree of down-ness varies by district. From my house, I could at least get Firefox to cruise the Internet. And the phone was working.

I get down to the church, where I cool my heels for four hours once a week, and find that EVERYTHING is down:

The wireless
The outdgoing and incoming phone lines
The in-house phones

Holee ess aitch ai!

The pastor has gone home in frustration, after having tried for quite some time to accomplish his work on his smart phone and about put his eyes out for his trouble.

Other staff are hanging around, filling time with various small manual tasks, except for the musicians, who are giving lessons or practicing.

Hilariously, the Cox tech I spoke with for something over an hour this morning had no idea there was a Cox outage here. And given that some are saying it covers the entire city, that’s quite the little secret to keep from your customer service employees, isn’t it?

Apparently, the extent of the outage varies by district. At my house, MacMail would come on, in a spotty way, though it was operating so slowly that some functions simply wouldn’t work. Yet I had no problem opening web pages, and indeed wrote and published a post for Funny about Money this morning. I thought what was out was the Apple Mail function.

Here, the office is offline, but one of the priests just came in and said she was online at the school, and so was the teacher whose classroom she was working in.

That notwithstanding…the phones and the computers are absolutely positively not working over here, a hundred yards away.

Chortle! I wonder if this is an attack…the Russians strike again. Or the Koreans? The Saudis?

Hmmmm… Will the burglar alarm system here be online? With no phone system operative, how will ADT get the message if the Burglar decides to stroll in and make himself to home?

At any rate, Korean sabotage or not, I’ve about had it with Cox. If they can’t even let their CSRs know about a major service outage, they are not worth the price!

My plan now is to get an iPhone – though one of the staff here was telling me about something called Great Call, designed for old folks who can’t figure out these contraptions. Apparently it has a mode that’s pretty simple to use. But it operates with Samsung. The last time I tried to use one of those types of cell phones, I never could figure out how to work it. Finally just gave up.

Apple is giving classes at its stores. Get an iPhone, and you can go over there and take lessons until you finally get it into your head how to work the damn thing. This is likely to take awhile, because I really don’t want to know how to work such a thing. My head is full of ENOUGH clutter, dammit. But I guess I can’t put it off any longer.

The advantage of an Apple device is that it connects seamlessly with other Apple products – notably MacMail. And I’m told it’s relatively easy for old people to learn to use, which sure isn’t the case for Android devices. Also, they apparently have a highly entertaining robocall blocker, which spoofs a human and makes a live caller truly miserable. That concept, I like.

Get phone

Either from TracFone or from a more conventional provider.
Compare costs.
Also, can you use TracFone to connect the iPad?

Learn to use phone. Ask at Apple store if you can get some lessons before you sign on and transfer the phone number. Or check on Internet for simple lessons on how to use the thing.

I think they’ll let you use a floor model or an extra to sit in on the classes and learn how to operate things.

Sign up and transfer my number to the phone.

Practice a lot at using it. Decide what functions are needed

Phone
Call blocker app
Access to Web
Access to Mail
Camera would be nice

Call Cox and cancel the landline

Confirm that it REALLY is true you can call 911 from a cell phone if it doesn’t have minutes or a connection that you’re paying for.

Buy 6 clamshell phones, charge them up, and have them around the house

Remember to recharge the car phone, too.

Look into Earthlink and Great Call.

How reliable are they?
Do they have customer service?
What does it cost?

Sooooo… My VoIP-ish phones were working when I left the Funny Farm. But if the system is by now as thoroughly down there as it is here, when I get home I, too, may have no phone service. I do have a clamshell phone in my car. And a couple of old phones whose recharging cords I’ve lost… 😀 So if I bring the phone into the house at least I’ll have something to use in an emergency.

An hour and a half to go. With no client work to do, I tend to count the minutes when I’m here. Which is weird…was never a clock-watcher when I had a real job. It’s just that…well…it’s awfully quiet here. And really, there’s nothing to do.

And, I think, the computer and other fine features of Our Modern Dystopia infuse a kind of gestalt into everyday life. You don’t sit and just do a single task or series of tasks from beginning to end anymore. You’re either interrupted constantly or you interrupt yourself with the Internet (out of restlessness or curiosity), so that you become accustomed to doing things in tiny, staccato intervals.

Plus it must be admitted that I failed to appreciate just how inconvenient it would be to have a four-hour slab sliced out of my life every week. I did tell them that I didn’t want to do this gig on the same day as choir practice…but ended up here on practice day anyway. So I have to race home, tend to the dogs – one of whom is still pretty sick – grab some food for myself, bolt down dinner, and then turn around and come right back down here.

True it is that I knew this schedule would be a PITA. But…the hectic turnaround really isn’t the issue. The issue is the four hours taken out of the day – and the week. Which is odd: I really didn’t think I had all that much to do. But apparently I do.

Cassie the Corgi seems somewhat better, actually. I suspect she’s about as much better as she’s going to get…and chances are, that itself is a temporary state of affairs. She still coughs occasionally – Valley fever? cancer? But she can bark again (this dog is nothing if she can’t bark!), and she’s eating cheerfully. Haven’t tried to take her for a walk since all this horror story came down – nor has Ruby had a walk. This means their claws are getting so long they can barely dodder…which tells you something about how long our little horror story has been going on. Tonight, of course, I won’t be able to take them out. So…maybe tomorrow morning? Probably not: some workman is supposed to show up at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

An hour and seven minutes to go. {sigh}

The longer I’m not at home, the longer some crazy new thing can’t happen to me! 😀