Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Time to Take in the Slack…

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Nothing on this earth is there like a Young’s Double Chocolate Stout for unwinding purposes. All of about an hour remains in which to rest. I’ve done (endless!)_ battle with not one but two computers to get a $28 check deposited; finished proofing edits and returning the third of three sections of a P&T review sent over by one of the Chinese academics; met with the appliance repairman, who cleaned the stove burners, examined it carefully, could find nothing that would have caused two of the burners not to work after the recent brisk storms, and charged me sixty bucks; driven to the Costco to return the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted; driven to AJ’s to buy some of their reasonably acceptable coffee; gone back and forth with two veterinary offices; transferred funds (on a wing and a prayer) from PayPal to my corporate checking account; negotiated with the pool company’s dude for a date to resurface the hole in the ground (having decided there’s no need for expensive repairs on the car); talked with the vet at Indian Bend, who finds Cassie has a urinary infection (surprise!); arranged to take Cassie to Arcadia for an ultrasound; explained to both vets that she seems to be returning to health in response to the Benadryl I gave her (good luck with that!); talked to a nurse at the Mayo about an interesting new lesion, (probably unsatisfactorily); cooked up a little spread for lunch and served up said Young’s with it.

In 30 minutes, I’ve gotta be outta here again. Any question why I never get any of my own stuff done?

Cassie continues to revive. As we speak, she’s barking her little furry head off, in her former accustomed manner. And she is NOT wheezing after each attempted yapfest. She seems a little weary, but you would, too, if you’d been as sick as this dog has. This noon she shot out the side door after Ruby, just like a turbocharged little rocket, something she hasn’t done in weeks.

I think if we can get her treated for the UTI the Indian Bend vet just diagnosed, she’ll be just about back to normal. Yes, I do understand that prednisone and fluconozale both cause incontinence. But also understand that cloudy urine is suggests an infection (lo! I was right…). But I also understand that corgis are prone to UTIs and that the incontinence should stop when the drugs stop.

It is much better. But she’s still given to a certain embarrassing urgency. I think if we treat her for the infection this vet says he found, she’ll soon be back to her old self.

Can’t believe it! Truly…there were two occasions when I truly thought she was going to die. Then when the vet proposed to put her on that monstrous drug for upwards of six months, I told him I would put her down before I would do that: occasion #3.

• I can’t believe my 12-year-old dog is still alive and seems to be on the mend…

• I can’t believe I spent upwards of a thousand dollars to do nothing for a doggy ailment that seems to have resolved itself pretty much on its own…or with the help of an over-the-counter allergy pill.

• I can’t believe I crashed my car in the middle of all this.

• I can’t believe I was able to get the car repaired without having to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for the privilege.

• I can’t believe I managed to get through six assignments from clients while all this shit was going on.

• I can’t believe beer could taste this good.

 

Grocery Bags…Back to the Future?

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Have supermarkets in your parts begun to ration plastic bags? They’re hard at it here. Even Walmart prominently displays colorful (plastic…) tote bags near the check-out stands — for sale, of course; most certainly not for free. Whole Foods has been doing that for years, as has Trader Joe’s — no surprise there, given those chains’ overall zeitgeist.

Many stores offer a choice of paper bags or plastic now — Whole Foods gives you none, of course: it’s paper or else buy one of those totebags. Or you could pile everything in a grocery basket, roll it out to your car, and pack it in a piece at a time. 😀

How do you feel about that? Political correctness aside, do you sense even the slightest…oh…resentment at this shift?

Oh yeah? Well…can you remember when, back in the Day, grocery stores abruptly made the switch from paper bags to the filmy plastic bags that infest our landfills, our front yards, our streams, our lakes, our skies, and our oceans? And do you remember how you felt about it then?

{chortle!}

I sure do.

No choice was offered, during the Dark Ages. One day you went in, piled a week’s worth of loot into a grocery cart, arrived at the check-out stand, and…were presented with a grocery cart filled with limp plastic bags spilling out packages and cans and heads of lettuce.

And “spilling” was the operative term. When you were accustomed to a paper bag that could hold several days’ worth of food and cleaning goods, three wimpy plastic bags that together could barely hold the same amount were, shall we say, confounding. Where a paper bag would stand upright in the trunk of your car, these damn things would flop in there and disgorge their contents to roll around every time you turned a corner. When you got home, you had to gather all your purchases off the floor of the car trunk and pack them back into the wispy plastic bags before you could haul the groceries up the steps to your apartment.

Ohhhh GOD how I hated those plastic bags!

In those primitive times, makers of trash baskets turned out kitchen garbage cans designed to hold a paper grocery bag. You just dropped an empty bag into the trash basket — which fit under the kitchen sink (remember that?) — and when it was full, you browbeat your husband or a kid to take it out to the garbage bin. It was wonderful!

Halcyon times.

The accursed plastic bags, of course, did not fit into anything that even vaguely looked like a trash basket. About the best you could do was set a plastic bag on one side of the sink, use it to hold accruing debris as you cooked, then tie it off and toss it into the trash can, where it would sit there leaking and stinking until someone dragged it and a half-dozen other bags that collected with it in the old trash basket.

Note that I did not hate the bags for environmental reasons. In the Dark Ages, we didn’t get that kind of news. If we had any worries about the environment, they had to do with smog and nuclear fallout.What could a plastic bag have to do with those?

Unless plastic bags were manufactured in nuclear plants. Who knows? Maybe they were… They’re certainly radioactive now.

Switching back to paper bags, I must admit, elicits similar sentiments. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: now we get to change the way we run our kitchens AGAIN! at the behest of faceless corporations and bureaucrats who know better than we do. Always.

After all these years, I’ve arrived at a détente with the accursed plastic bags. I have a lot of uses for them. Uses that paper bags cannot handle.

• Kitchen sink cabinets no longer have room to accommodate a trash can big enough to hold a paper bag. So the plastic trash can is gone. Instead, wet kitchen trash gets stashed in a plastic bag, which lives in the refrigerator until I’m ready to brave the alley.

• Taking the garbage out entails retrieving a key, dodging the dogs, passing through two gates and unpadlocking one of them, dodging the occasional bum, wrestling a huge four-household bin, relocking the gates, putting the padlock key back, letting the dogs back out…good fun. Sooo….being able to refrigerate the trash so I don’t have to traipse out there every day is a great convenience. Not one I’m looking forward to losing.

• Nor do I look forward to having to keep a paper bag full of garbage in an expensive covered garbage can in the garage. This means every piece of trash or garbage has to be traipsed out through the kitchen door into the garage, and the whole mess has to be kept tightly covered to keep the rats out. That, I could truly do without.

And speaking of our little room-mates, have you noticed many sewer roaches dancing around the kitchen floor since the advent of plastic bags? Miss the little fellows, do ya?

• Paper bags nurture cockroaches. The little gals and their boyfriends ride the freighters and airplanes and trucks hauling foods across our borders and into the grocery stores. When they find those nice, dark paper bags, they lay their eggs in them. You bring those eggs home with you when you bring home the bacon. Pack those bags away in the pantry closet or the garage, and the babes hatch out and join the buggy can-can line!

This is totally the main reason I do not want to go back to the future with paper bags.

Well. Except for the dog mounds.

• Nothing beats a plastic bag for picking up dog mounds.

How, seriously, do our Respected Betters think we’re going to clean up after the beasts?

Never fails, does it?

 

 

Report from Damage Control Central

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A week from Digital Hell has left the Fat Lady barely treading water. God, but I do hate computerized time sucks. The background noise from Washington doesn’t help…

Two half-days — i.e., a total of a full eight-hour day — have been consumed on the phone with Apple techs. Can’t complain too much about that: it’s mighty nice that Apple has techs and allows them to spend uncounted numbers of hours helping customers to fix this, that, and the other snafu. I’ve lost track of the details — makes my head hurt to think too hard about this stuff. But the upshot was that after one of the techs decided that nothing would do but what we must re-install the Sierra OS on the MacBook (even though I told him that would cause a huge fuck-up), we got…yes, a huge fuck-up.

The current surviving upshot of that is that though the MacBook can read and store to DropBox, the iMac no longer connects to DropBox. When I inquired of DB techs how that might be fixed, I got a pages-long email filled with arcane instructions, not the first word of which do I understand. Truly: whatever it is they have in mind that I’m gonna do…I have NO idea.

So now I’m paying a hefty fee for DropBox’s storage and can access it only with one computer. The thing is, the iMac has an external hard drive permanently installed, to which Apple’s nifty Time Machine constantly backs up data. So that means the iMac should keep an up-to-date back-up of DropBox.

Except…now it’s not. Because it can’t “see” DropBox anymore.

So to keep that backed up, I have to schlep the Macbook into the back office and hook it up to an external drive and manually run Time Machine. This doesn’t take long, but it’s an effin’ PITA and I don’t think I should have to do that when it was working fine before.

Meanwhile, however, WordPress is about to pull the Number of All Numbers on its users. The WP that we know and love — and that operates all our blogs — is about to be dumped in the trash, to be replaced with a radically new system called Gutenberg.

This, obviously is going to represent a gigantic new learning curve.

Those of us who are sick of the brain clutter occasioned by the glories of computer technology do not welcome said development. And those of us who have had experience with earlier seismic upheavals know what to expect: If entire sites don’t crash (which they probably will), at best data will be lost. Probably lots of data.

Funny about Money has been online since 20 and ought-7. And y’know, I don’t really want to lose all that history.

Sure, I know: the nature of the Web is ephemeral. But damn it all! Writing this stuff and tracking down images and doing the research for some of the more solid pieces is work. Why should some tribe of computer jocks take it upon themselves to steal my work so that they can amuse themselves with fun new code?

By way of preserving the stuff for posterity, such as it is, I decided I would back up FaM not through BackupBuddy (whose product I suspect will be unintelligible once the program that generated the content goes away) but by copying it to Word and then, at my leisure, formatting it for print. And eventually printing it out and stashing it in a closet, where one day after I croak over my kid will find it and can, if he so pleases, feed it into his backyard firepit.

At least I will’ve tried…

This sounds like a much bigger job than it is. In fact, it only takes about a half-hour to copy out a year’s worth of blog content. But since we’re talking 11 years, that’s still ample time suck, thankyouverymuch. But at this point I only have one year’s worth of posts left to dump into Wyrd files. This at least will keep what content is left in a form that can’t be magically “disappeared” by the upcoming change.

And when I say “what content is left,” I kid you not. At one point along the line, either WordPress or Big Scoots, my current web host, unilaterally decided to delete all the images in SIX YEARS’ worth of posts! Yes. Without asking my permission, without so much as telling me. So everything predating the first quarter of 2013 is absent most of the images I inserted. Isn’t that super?

At any rate, at least the copy is still there.

Apple’s substitution of iPhoto with the irritating and practically useless Photos program effectively ditched images that were made before the current operating system superseded the far more user-friendly OS of yore. They may not have been erased, but they’re hidden in the system so deep I’ll be damned if I can find them. So even if I wanted to take the time to track down the deleted WordPress images and use them to decorate the rescued posts, it would be a daunting and probably impossible task.

One of the things I did learn to do, thanks to that fiasco, was to save images that go into current blog posts separately from Photos, but copying them to a folder on…yeah…DropBox.

How can I do without these hassles? Let me count the ways…

All of this has interfered with my usual routine little hobby activities. Thank God there’s no paying work in-house!!! Didn’t get this week’s installment of Ella’s story written until the last minute. Whatever went online this week was not proofread and frankly I have no idea whether it makes any sense. I have not uploaded today’s installment of “Asked,” either, not because it isn’t there but because I’m effin’ All Computered Out.

{sigh}

Meanwhile, the Circus in the White House has gotten pretty entertaining, hasn’t it? The sleaze has been outed. Now…will our honored elected representatives get off their collective duff and do their job?

Really: even if Trump is indicted and/or impeached, that might be worse than what we’ve got. We then would end up with Pence as President. And Mr. Pence is, unlike our present Great Leader, decidedly not a clownish dunce. Mr. Pence is an accomplished politician who knows how to get things done. Unfortunately, he also is a doctrinaire fanatic, and so the things he’d like to get done are not necessarily things that are good for the rest of us.

This, I suppose, is the way the world ends…

There could be hope, though…check it out:

Crazy Ol’ Lady Day at Costco

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Home, sweet home…

Well, the Costco Cash Card Budgeting Scheme worked out exceptionally well for July. By the 31st — yesterday — I ended up with $54 and change left on the prepaid card for in-store shopping (budget: $300), and about $45 left on the gasoline card (budget: $60).

The gas card held up well because I’d filled the tank right at the end of May — the 30th or 31st — so in fact the $60 budget intended to cover two fill-ups was only needed for one, and that, not a total fill-up. And the three hundred bucks was probably about right for a month’s worth of grocery and sundry purchases, in the absence of the dreaded Impulse Buy.

So today I join my friends and companions in shopping crime for a Costco Run. We get there as the store opens, but it’s still monstrously hot outside, and warm inside the store, too. This particular day, I’ve driven us not to our favorite store on the fringe of East Richistan, but to a more middle-class outlet on the lower edge of Whiteyville, up on the I-17 freeway. This is a good enough store, but what draws me is that they sell propane. For a lot less than regular vendors do. And I’m low on propane. I lash two tanks into the back compartment of the unbeloved Venza, and we’re off.

We circumnavigate the store, but we find it a little frustrating because its layout is nothing like the other two big-box warehouses we frequent. And I’m pretty sure they’ve rearranged everything since the last time I was there…so I’m no help at all, because I have no clue where they’ve put things. NOTHING is in what feels like a normal place. We wander around, perplexed, dodging millennials and their urchins and generally having to walk three times as many steps as we would normally have to do, to find the stuff we normally buy.

In the course of this venture, Mr. Friend says he’s not feeling well and needs to sit down. Mr. F, you should know, is in his 90s, as is Mrs. F. Fortunately, Costco is selling furniture these days, so Mrs. F and I park him in a dining-room set and take off to find the last couple of items we need. But since he has remarked that he’s afraid his heart may be acting up, I’m worried.

Shortly, we head for the check-out. Mercifully, the lines are extremely short, and we get up to the cash register forthwith.

I tell the cash register guy, when he presents me with a bill for $156, that I would like to top up the depleted Costco cash card with another $250, and then pay the bill with the cash card. He says he can’t do that: he can’t add new money to an old cash card.

Huh? That’s not what they told me at the Outer East Richistan store.

But, says he while I’m puzzling over this discrepancy, he can take the $55 off the old card, put it onto a new cash card, and then I can use my credit-union debit card to add $250 to this new card.

It’s hot, I’m tired, and I’m worried about my friend, so I say okay, make it so. We get through the checkout, stumble back out into the heat, collect the propane tanks, and escape.

When I get home, I look at the receipt and realize that what this idiot has done is, yes, filled up the cash card with money extracted from my checking account via the debit card. A-N-N-D…THEN he has drained another $156 from my checking account to pay for the stuff I specifically asked to put on the cash card.

WTF????

So now I have to get into my car and drive through the heat, fight for a parking space, and hike across the parking lot to my local Costco, down on Conduit of Blight Blvd.

God. DAMN. It.

When I get there and explain that with $156 extra taken out of the bank, I won’t be able to pay the utility bills, the customer service lady is flabbergasted to learn the guy told me he couldn’t refill the cash card. Of course he can refill the cash card, said she.

She called over a guy and said “Fix this!”

And he fixed it. What he did, basically, was simply withdraw $160 from the card and had me a fistful of cash.

This worked. I can either schlep it up to the credit union and re-deposit it (oh, goodie! another 40 minutes of dodging my fellow homicidal drivers through 115-degree heat!) or simply use it to buy stuff during this month. Probably the later is the path of least resistance.

While I was there, I refilled the gas tank, leaving $8.25 of the original $60 cash card for gasoline.

Tomorrow I have to drive to Tempe, so for sure I’m not going to make a whole month on one tank of gas. That’s really pretty unusual…normally I’d have to fill up twice in 30 or 31 days. But still: I’ll only have to put $51.75 on it to top it back up to sixty bucks.

Meanwhile, $40 was left from the rest of this month’s budget, after everything was paid. So I’m figuring if I shifted that over to the Emergency Savings Project, that would help to revive the account to its former glory We put $681 in there, the max I could spare from July’s Social Security deposit and still have enough in checking to live. If no emergencies require withdrawals from that account (har har!!!), then in a year there should be $8,172 for unexpected expenses.

Obviously that ain’t a-gunna happen. But it’s nice to dream, eh?

It would be slightly likelier to happen if at the end of each month I transferred whatever few dollars remained unspent from that month’s budget. Say, $40…multiplied by 12, that would add $480 to the pot. And if $40 is left over at the end of July, the worst month in creation for utility bills, then a lot more would be left over in January and February.

When I got home from the second Costco junket, I realized I’d failed to buy coffee while we were at the Whiteyville store. However, there’s a Costco on the way home from Tempe, on 44th street just north of the freeway. So I’ll have to stop by there tomorrow afternoon. In the heat. Probably in the rush hour, by the time I spring free from the university library.

What fun: three Costco trips in two days! 😀

So…the Fire Prevention Scheme? How’d it work?

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Hilariously.

Well, it didn’t seem funny at the time. But after a stone-cold shower and a couple hours of rest, it’s beginning to seem pretty ridiculous.

Tellya one thing, though: I will never buy another product from Home Depot again, not if there’s any way I can help it. After this, I’ll shop local and pay a few bucks extra to get a product that’s not so cheapied down as to be insulting. If push comes to shove: Lowe’s or Amazon.

Here’s the piece of junk I bought — four of them, actually, so as to cover about 120 linear feet of invitingly flammable shrubbery.

I wanted to buy a 100-foot length and a 25-foot length, or, failing that, two 50-footers and one 25 feet. But the 100-foot hose, as it turned out, was not a hose but a contraption: a kit that you had to put together with an array of cheesey plastic connectors by way of laying down a pattern to fit a garden. It had no built-in connector fittings for your garden hose — you had to DIY those along with all the other pieces of ditz.

As usual with Home Depot: back in the car, drive up to the damn store again, get my money back for the 100-foot non-hose. Replace it with four 25-foot hoses.

Notice, once home, that the new hosing is not the same gauge as the old hose I put in around the roots of the pool-side plantings. It’s considerably narrower. And considerably cheesier.

Oh well.

So I run these fine hoses along the top of the cat’s claw mounds, zip-tying them in place and planning to let water dribble on the plants for several hours. Theory: the underlayment will be good and soggy by the time the lads come around this evening to play with their illegal fireworks.

First thing that happened: as soon as I turned on the water, a SHOWER erupted from the connection to that soaker hose. I tried to patch it with duct tape: no dice. And the other hoses? Water would barely run through them, even with the faucet turned way higher than it should be with a soaking hose.

What a fiasco. I screwed around and dorked around and dorked around and screwed around, trying to find some way to make the junk work. Finally ended up dragging a garden hose over to the vines’ worst dry spot, climbing up on a ladder, and zip-tying a lawn sprinkler to the top of the vines. Realized one of the old soaker hoses (we do mean old: I put those in a good 10 years ago) was still viable, even though the other one, which was connected to it, disintegrated in my hands yesterday. Tried to drag that out from behind and around the stems and plants but it was just too damn hot to continue. Removed the hose-oid with the geyser and attached the other garden hose to the next hose in line.

This one at least didn’t release a spray into the stratosphere. But neither did it move much water into the soaker hose. Even with the water pressure turned way higher than you’re supposed to use with a soaker hose, it wouldn’t move water past about halfway down the next, attached hose.

Finally gave up — even jumping into the pool wasn’t cooling me off, the face was beet-red, and I was beginning to feel light-headed. Turned on the water so it would soak (I hoped) at least the vines directly across from Jerkowitz’s trash piles and retreated into the air-conditioning.

It is 112 degrees here as I write this, after 5 in the evening. I’m a tough old bat (so they say), but wrestling with that mess damn near gave me a heat stroke — at one point I considered whether I should call 911. Then remembered that ice water comes out of the refrigerator’s spigot so was able to soak a compress and chill down the head, bringing a stop to the wooziness. A cold shower finally did the complete job.

Man. What is the matter with a retailer that peddles crap like that to the public?

I will never buy ANY product from Home Depot again. If this is the kind of junk they feel free to foist on customers, I will pay a few bucks more to BUY LOCAL (!!!!!) and get a better product.

If Donald Trump somehow, by some God’s miracle, manages to do ONE good thing while he’s running a three-ring circus from the White House, it will, just maybe, be that he lays enough tariffs on shoddy imports from China and waypoints to force U.S. corporations to start making goods in the U.S. again. With the exception of automobiles, our products were not just out-and-out junk.***

Okay. The Fix-Or-Repair-Daily cars were a big exception. But most of our stuff: not guaranteed to be trash.

We need the jobs back. And we need the quality consumer goods back.

***Uh-oh! CTRL-Z: DELETE RANT! MD notes, below, that we can’t blame China for today’s fiasco after all: Miracle-Gro’s shoddy hoses are shoddily made right here in the good old USofA. Tsk. Well…I still blame Home Depot. It’s all Home Depot’s fault. By golly!!!!! {grump!}

A Fed Coyote…

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…is a dead coyote.

Born hungry…

How the hell many times to people have to be told this before it registers?

This morning the corgis and I were making the dawn stroll across Orchid between 15th and 11th. A coyote lives in the alley over there — I’ve seen her several times before. But this morning I didn’t spot her until she came trotting up the sidewalk on the other side of the street and was just a few hundred feet away.

She saw us.

We saw her.

My dogs, not being the brightest rhinestones on the cowboy vest, figured she was just another dog — how interesting! She, on the other hand, clearly thought, “Ah! Breakfast!” 😀

She kept trotting along, not changing her pace and very clearly not afraid of me. I carry a few stones in my pocket for the purpose of beaning coyotes and aggressive dogs, should it be necessary, but at this point I was too busy wrangling corgis to dig them out.

Breakfast roll…

She now crossed the street, coming straight at us. “Yum! Can I get ketchup with that, please?”

I hollered GIT!

She was unfazed.

Another attempt at GIT! showed that she was unafraid of me and not impressed by a sharp, somewhat aggressive utterance.

At this point I manage to get the dogs behind me and then yell, in full counter-surfing voice, “NO! BAAAD DOG!!!!”

Incredibly, this stopped her! Now she crosses back over to her side of the street and continues trotting westbound. Dogs and human continue east. As distance increases between both parties, she crosses back over to our side and disappears into a yard that has a lot of shrubbery.

She appeared to know exactly where she was going. Probably someone leaves food out for their pets in that area. Or for stray animals — the yard she entered is overgrown with shrubbery (lots of cover), and the owners are, shall we say, eccentric.

Please don’t leave food out for stray cats (including your own cats that you allow to run loose). Or for stray coyotes. Leaving out cat food or dog food helps to acclimate coyotes to humans, and it calls them in to our neighborhoods. Once a coyote is no longer afraid of humans, it becomes a potential hazard to your small pets — cats and smaller dogs. 

In our parts, there’s plenty of natural food for coyotes. It’s called “roof rats.” In your parts, the chow line may include gophers, sewer rats, mice, raccoons, badgers, and the like.

Coyotes predate on vermin, and that is why they are not a bad critter to have in the neighborhood. Unless you enjoy the sound of a line of rats doing the can-can across your rafters, leave the coyotes alone.

That means a) not feeding them and b) keeping your (scrumptious!) cats and your dogs indoors or on a leash at all times. If we feed the wildlife on purpose, they lose their fear of us and then become a nuisance. And speaking of nuisances, letting your cat roam loose is feeding the coyotes.

Do not feed the coyotes. Dammit!