Coffee heat rising

Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Fighting Uphill through Dystopia

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Wow! This has been One of Those Days. Ever have a day where you felt like every  moment you were fighting uphill…against yourself? 😀

So for the fourth night in a row, I wake up at 2 in the morning and don’t get back to sleep. Along about dawn, I give up and roll out of the sack.

Normally at 5 a.m. I’d take the dogs for a mile-long walk: good for them, good for me. After yet another five-hour night, though, instead I wandered in to the computer to glance at the news. Then drifted over to the chapter I’m writing, which has been going exceptionally well. I’ve been working toward finishing a particularly difficult section of the thing…and when I sat down, got pulled into that.

Come 7:30 a.m., that section was written — we’re now at 62 endnotes, just for that one chapter. (This stuff is astonishing! What has been and still is going on boggles the brain.)

By now it’s getting a bit late for a doggy-walk, but thanks to Hurricane Bud’s outer fringe breezing through a couple days ago, by 7:30 it’s not yet unduly hot. So I decide to shoot out the door, despite the late hour, because the other day we failed to go out and I need not to get back into the no-walk habit.

Foolishly, though, I elect to take the route south from the Funny Farm, which is less shaded than the path through Upper Richistan. This: mistake.

Southward from here is Cassie’s favorite place to take a dump. I do not understand what it is about this particular house, but by damn, Cassie wants more than anything on this earth to dump upon its lawn. Specifically, to take up her position in front of the shack’s huge picture windows so the resident can watch her defiling the yard.

Naturally, I carry blue doggy-bags around with me. But really: every goddam day this dog has to dump on THAT lawn? If I were the homeowner, I’d be irked.

So to minimize the effect, I walk them past the house on the other side of the street and then go south on the sidewalk that passes along the side of the house. That way, when she hunkers down she at least isn’t making a spectacle of herself (and us) through the front-facing windows.

This takes us over a long stretch of fast-heating concrete and asphalt. Meanwhile, Cassie is putting up a fight: she drags  backward while Ruby drags forward. And at this moment, as we’re crossing the street, she decides to sit down in the middle of the goddamn road anbd not budge.

Here we have the flavor of the day: drag me forward, drag me backward.

Finally I cut short the stroll, leave the dogs at the house, and go out to finish the mile-long course.  By the time I get back, it’s starting to get hot.

A-a-a-n-d I haven’t watered the plants in back. In Arizona heat, you either water your potted plants or you watch your plants die. Fly outside to do that job and see the pool walls are draped with moss. Again. Mustard algae: it was cleaned up pretty well yesterday, and now here it is back again.

Feed the dogs. Fly back outside.

Screw on the pressure sprayer, jump in the drink, wash down the steps and seat and walls and walls and walls and walls and walls… Dump in more chlorine.

Notice that I must have slopped olive-oil marinade on the patio while I was entertaining friends Sunday evening. Spray the spots on the concrete and sandstone flags with diluted Dawn, let it sit.

Visit my neighbor, WonderAccountant, to gift her and Mr. WonderAccountant with the remaining half-bottle of wine from the recent shindig. It’s my favorite wine. I, however, am on the wagon and do not want this elixir to be wasted, so figured they might enjoy it. Hang out for awhile, chatting pleasantly.

After the series of sleepless nights, I decide to go back to bed for a short nap. Amazingly, it works: I’m out cold and even enjoying a dream. A fairly involved dream, complete with developed plot and characters…and of course the phone rings:

Hellooo, this is Rachel from Card Services…

Fuck!

Onward to spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning and oiling the kitchen cabinets. Fun job… 😮 But the result is pretty nice.

And speaking of Fuck…

If you are not listening to Rachel Maddow on what that bastard in the White House is doing to the children he has stolen from their parents, you sure as fuck should be. Get it on the Internet: google Rachel Maddow. Or better yet, go straight to the horse’s mouth: Pro Publica: https://www.propublica.org/article/children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy

This is simply inexcusable. We put a wannabe Balkan dictator in the White House, funded by multibillionaires who want to change America to fit their perverse tastes, and what we get is a country converted into a wannabe Balkan dictatorship.

If there breathes an American who does not feel shame for this, then that person is not much of an American.

Or maybe we should say this is not America. We have lost our country.

Credit Bureaus, Outrages, Invasion of Privacy, and a Defunct Post Office

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Just got off the phone with Equifax. That took some doing! After waiting two days for their (Filipino? Surely not native speakers of US English) staff to take their places at the credit bureau’s call center, I then had to sit through a good 15 minutes of aggravating, ear-grating Muzak punctuated every 40 seconds with “We value you as a customer” announcements.

No. No, dear Equifax. If you valued your customers, you would pony up enough sub-minimum wage dollars to hire enough Third-World workers to answer the effing phones.

When you finally reach a human, the poor creature sounds like a ‘bot herself: flat and beaten down and soulless.

Equifax sent me a hard-copy snail-mail informing me that someone had changed my address to my ex-husband’s address.

Since I haven’t lived at his house in some 30 years, that was a surprise.

Their call center doesn’t open till 6:00 a.m. our time, meaning I had to start hassling with them right on the dot, since I needed to leave about 9:00 a.m. for a doc’s appointment. Nor did I know whether the number they sent in their annoying letter would even reach a human — usually, these outfits do NOT want you to speak to anyone in their precincts.

Plan B — assuming a phone call got me nowhere, as expected — was to fly directly from the a.m. doctor’s appointment to the credit union, clear across the city, where I would have to beg to talk with the manager (again!!) and ask if she knows a way to reach a person at Equifax. Then charge back here and engage battle.

Mercifully, Equifax let me get through to a near-human (the poor soul!). This means, I assume, that whatever caused them to decide I still live with the ex probably was not someone hacking in with the present PIN: it worked, and the freeze had not been lifted, so presumably no one had changed it.

Thank God I didn’t have to traipse to the credit union in person and beg for help.

No. Instead, now I had to copy two forms of ID including a recent utility bill, write a letter explaining the present fiasco, jump through some more hoops on paper, and snail-mail said package to Equifax. Which of course meant driving to the post office to mail the damn thing. I probably should’ve sent it registered mail.

Naturally, as I’m rushing to get painted, combed, and dressed to dart out of here in time to make the doctor’s appointment, the computer announces its scanner software cannot find the printer/scanner.

Please: give me some more hassle. I love it so!

Shut down and reboot both the printer and the computer. Surprisingly, this works, relieving me of Plan C: go by FedEx on the way to the post office to get the damn private, none-of-their-goddamn-business documents photocopied.

Print and package all this crap just in time to shoot out the door and hit the freeways.

First, since miraculously I was running about 10 minutes early, I figured I’d drop the envelope of nuisance junk into the USPS mail box over on the other side of Conduit of Blight. This post office is close enough to be within walking distance, if you don’t mind taking your life in your hands. I used to walk over there when I had a German shepherd in tow…but of course would never think of it these days.

Well, thanks to the focking Blightrail, at that hour I cannot get across Conduit of Blight! The signal is red, and it stays red. After about four minutes of sitting there — it’s now time for me to get going if I’m to arrive in the Mayo’s precincts in time for the vaunted appointment — I give up, hang a right, and head to points east and north.

So I figure there’ll be a mail box on the large campus of the Mayo’s specialty office buildings. Or a mail drop inside one of the three huge buildings.

Not so much.

Okay. So I need to go to the Fry’s at Tatum & Shea, a huge intersection enveloped in commerce. There’ll be a mail box in one of the parking lots.

Not so much.

On the way down there from the Mayo — a jaunt of several miles on busy main drags — I see one (count it, 1) mail box. It’s placed at the edge of a bus pullout, where you daren’t even think of parking your car, getting out, walking over to it, and dropping in a letter.

Okay, I know of two other post offices, neither of which requires me to cross Conduit of Blight Blvd. One is down in the tony Biltmore District. Reaching that one will mean I have to drive almost down to Camelback Road, way, way, way out of my way. There’s nothing else to call me in that direction: groceries are shopped for, I’m on the wagon — so no Total Wine — and I couldn’t afford to shop at Biltmore Fashion Square today even if I wanted to. The other one is in SunnySlop, home of our reigning meth gang and its various hangers-on, but over in a better part of the former suburb (now one large, tired, arguably historic central-city tear-down candidate).

[Do not miss that link. Or the one to the hilariously famed El Cid Castle. Ah, Arizona…what a place!]

Okay, so… Well, the PO in Sunnyslop is a little out of my way, but really only three miles from my house. In 110-degree heat, six miles round trip is not walking distance, but neither does it involve a ten-minute wait to get across the damned train tracks or a drive past a hobo jungle. Okay.

So the letter is mailed. But when you consider how far I drove to the doctor’s office and then the grocery store — about 23 miles one-way — and there was not one US Post Office in all those miles????? Holy shit.

Remember when there was a postbox on almost every corner? Back in the Day, you never had to traipse from pillar to post to find a place to send your mail.

What a Brave New World…

Prospero and Miranda (William Maw Egley)

SIX CENTS?????????

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Report from the Department of Bureaucratic Ludicrousness, 06/11/2018:

Wellcare, my extortionate former Medicare Part D (prescription drug) provider just sent me a check for a refund on a bottle of oxycodone prescribed in 2014.

The amount? [CUE SOUND TRACK, BELOW]

Can you believe it? SIX CENTS!

Apparently they seriously think I’m going to fart around for ten minutes scanning and uploading the front and back of this munificent payment and recording it in Excel. Or maybe that I’m going to drive 20 minutes each way (40 minutes round trip) to physically deposit it in my bank account, in person.

😀

Can you imagine what it must have cost in accountants’ time, clerical time, paper, printing, envelope, and postage to cut this damnfool thing and put it in the mail?

So. Now we see why our healthcare costs are so ludicrous. Apparently it’s a function of systemic ludicrousness.

Banned in…Menlo Park?

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Trigger warning: politically incorrect speech ahead! 😀 May be unsuitable for children and the namby-pamby.

Check this out! Facebook has banned me and locked me out of its precincts for the sin of saying that public women’s bathrooms are often dirty because women are no tidier than men.

Got that? Apparently if you don’t think girls are better than boys, you’re not fit for polite society.

My friend Connie the Long-Haul Trucker was going on at Facebook about the prevalence of unisex bathrooms at truck stops. She opined that when on the road, men’s bathroom habits tend to  be execrable (uh-oh, wait…is that hate speech?), as witnessed by many truckers’ habit of defecating into a plastic bag or urinating into a soda bottle and throwing the waste out the window onto the shoulder. Unisex bathrooms, she reported, are uniformly filthy because of similar habits brought indoors.

I replied that women are slobs, too — which is the main reason I avoid using public bathrooms unless I absolutely have to — and that it’s the proprietor’s responsibility to keep the facilities clean.

Well, that was too much for the CorrectSpeak CopBot.

Forthwith comes a notice from Facebook:

Only you can see this post because it goes against our standards on hate speech.

Women are slobs, too. I’ve been in amazingly filthy women’s rooms. Problem is that the proprietors need to be required by law to keep the facilities clean.

Once you’ve been adjudged guilty of “hate speech,” there’s no appeal. Nor can I access any of my pages there: I am now officially persona non grata. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to reach a human being at Facebook, unless you can find a snailmail address (GetHuman doesn’t provide one, but a Google search for their street addresses brings up the gaggingly cutesy “1 Hacker Way” in Menlo Park).

I was going to just let it drop — despite the hit to my half-baked marketing efforts, in a way it’s a boon. Of late I’ve found myself spending way, way, WAAAYYY too much time on Facebook. The thing is kind of hypnotic. Many of my choir friends are on it, as are old friends from long long ago, who now live in other parts of the country. Really, in terms of health and constructive activity it would be a lot better — a lot better —  if I would lose Facebook.

But this whack upside the head really is pretty stupid and insulting. And I do have two marketing sites up on FB, in conjunction with one of which I joined a special interest group where I’ve been pretty active. Just disappearing isn’t going to look good.

So I may send a letter — possibly registered, even, if I feel like bestirring myself to drive to the post office — to their PR people at their snail-mail address.

Facebook is more hot air than not. The claim that you can make big bucks marketing your wares on FB leaves a lot to be desired.

At one point I hired a marketer who claimed to be expert with Facebook and guaranteed fantastic sales. Hence the Plain & Simple Press and The Copyeditor’s Desk pages. After she put these two FB pages online, we ponied up some cash and bought a Facebook Ads campaign to peddle the 30 Pounds/4 Months book.

It ran for a month or two. She was sure we would see a sharp spike an Amazon sales.

Along comes the first revenue report from Amazon.

Not only is there no upward movement, sales went dead flat after the FB Ads campaign went live!!! First they dropped off sharply. Then: nothing. Literally, not one sale.

She couldn’t believe it. Said it wasn’t possible. I think she must have thought I was trying to get out of paying her. I had to send her PDFs of the Amazon reports to persuade her to believe me.

You understand: the book wasn’t making me rich by any means, or even turning enough to buy a cup of café Americano at Starbucks. But it was selling a few copies. The result of the Facebook Ads campaign, seemingly, was to bring a stop to even that volume of sales. 😀

So…I don’t know. It’s probably not even worth the trouble to try to bring this little miscarriage of justice to the attention of a live human being at Facebook. I can do better at marketing with Pinterest — especially, come to think of it, with three book chapters going online each week. That avenue had faded from my consciousness because it’s such a PITA to prepare an image for Pinterest…though Pinterest-friendly images could do double-duty on Twaddle.

Better part of valor, I suspect, is just to let it go and get my life back.

You Should’ve Seen the Other Guy…

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Hilariously, I’m prancing off to choir this morning with a black eye. First in my over-long lifetime!

Thought I was too smart for this: I walked into a closed Arcadia door.

In my partial defense, I hadn’t replaced the stick that goes in the runner to wedge the door shut against intruders. And I was bopping around carelessly — headed outside to take a photo of the first-time-ever calla blooms on the side deck. Out of the corner of an eye, I saw the stick laying on the floor and must have unconsciously assumed the door was hanging open, as it often is on a gorgeous day like yesterday.

Wrong.

Fortunately, neither the door nor I broke. After applying a cold pack for a few minutes, I figured it was OK — no sign of any damage except for a sore eyebrow, which was neither swollen nor bruised.

Doesn’t hurt. This morning it was an hour after the dogs rousted me out of the sack before I happened to glance in a mirror and notice…WTF???

So that’s amusing. The whole eye is black and blue!

BUT…I managed to cover it up pretty well with a thick coat of L’Oréal. Yes, Virginia, there are some benefits to being female, after all. A little purple eye shadow on the other eye, and voilá! An old lady wearing too much make-up!

Beauty knows no pain…

Up the Hill Again…and back

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Ugh. Doing this little climb every morning for the next eight days is going to be a challenge. Not because I can’t do it but because, as usual, I don’t wanna do it. 😀 And because as also usual there are a zillion other things I’d rather be doing. Loafing, for example.

Got a late start yesterday, having foolishly turned on the computer to check email and take a “quick” look at the Internet: always a mistake. By the time I got out of the house, the sun was fully risen, rush-hour traffic was in progress, and I could not find a place to park at the trailhead. So to my intense annoyance I had to turn around, head back down annoying 7th Street to the “Visitor Center,” which because of its entrance off a high-speed major thoroughfare is tricky to get into and tricky to get out of. A boondoggle of recent construction, this fine facility at least has enough parking, most days.

But it’s about 3/4 of a mile from the trailhead — maybe more than that, given that that the trail there winds a little. So that added about a mile and a half to the hike. Pile on the mini-heat wave we were supposed to have on Tuesday, and I was not a happy camperette.

I started out in hummingbird mode — hummingbirds being creatures given to constant rage — and continued pretty much in the same vein. That did not help my attitude about this project, which is, shall we say, jaundiced.

Women who hike for fitness like to bring a friend, and they like to yak. Apparently most women have no clue how far the female voice carries across the desert. Two women babbling at each other can be heard a good half-mile away.

Which might be OK if they had anything interesting to say. They don’t. Hiking, slenderizing women talk about three subjects and only three subjects: their diets, their friends (or roommates), and the office. That’s it. Apparently they think of nothing else. So not only is the chatter of their voices annoying, the fact that they have fuckin’ nothing to say is equally irritating.

Then we have the manners characteristic of the hordes that run up and down the Phoenix Mountains.

You know… A hiker coming downhill customarily has the right of way on a trail. This is because momentum makes it harder for a person walking downhill to stop, especially if — as in the Phoenix Mountain parks — the trails are rocky and littered with roller-bearing stones. If you meet someone coming down as you’re going up a narrow trail, you’re supposed to step to one side to let that person get by. The reason is obvious, if you have ever walked either up or down a rocky mountain trail.

But bear in mind that the trail in question is not narrow. It’s a good fifteen or twenty feet wide — it used to be a road for automobiles, and still bears some of the asphalt laid, decades ago, for that purpose.

The  broad thoroughfare that goes all the way up Shaw Butte is so heavily thumped with daily hiking and mountain-bike traffic that there are two traces cleared of roller-bearing scree all the way from the trailhead to the top. In many places, there are three of them. So, if you see someone coming down at you or if you come up behind someone walking slower than you’re going, the logical (polite…) thing to do is to step one or two paces to the left or the right and go around them on the adjacent trace.

But that’s not what these bitches do.

They come up behind you, yakking blithely all the way, and they tailgate you! They come right up your ass and tromp along at your heels. So you have to step aside, stop, and let them pass.

Or, if they see you coming downhill and they’re climbing up below you, they step into the trace you’re using and dare you to keep walking.

You understand: there’s no point in this. With two and sometimes three traces of beaten path — relatively free of loose stones and small outcroppings — there’s no reason to insist on getting in someone else’s way.

Yesterday morning, I took one pair of them up on the dare. Admittedly, one of them was a guy. But he also was an airhead. These trails are populated with airheads. Believe me.

So I’m headed downhill on one of two parallel traces on this wide trail. This guy and his woman are coming up. I see them. They see me. It is obvious that they see me, from a fair distance away. So they march into the trace that I’m coming down on and proceed uphill straight at me.

I think, f*ck you, and just keep on walking.

We are practically bellybutton-to-bellybutton before the oaf steps aside.

Meanwhile, because I’ve made a late start, the sun is well up over the nearby mountains, and so it quickly gets passing warm on the trail. Fortunately I’ve brought plenty of water and dressed in layers. But that notwithstanding, by the time I got about 2/3 of the way to the top, I was damned hot.

I do not like being damned hot. That is why I usually have enough sense to leave the house before sunrise…

Then we have the view. The trail up North Mountain is best described in one word: boring. It is a boring trail devoid of most wildlife, which has been scared off by the hordes of device-connected, “music”-jangling, yammering humanity. The view off the side of the trail is just plain ugly.

Phoenix sprawls to the north — way to the north now — of the Mountain Preserves. What spreads out below you is mile on mile on mile of elbow-to-elbow ticky-tacky developments, commercial strips, and industrial slum. A huge high school looms in the near distance: it looks exactly like a prison. Even on a clear, relatively low-smog day, it is a dreary view.

Just below the top, I paused to swig a swallow of water. An older man also paused on the point and said hello. I said I sure was glad I was born 50 years too soon to go to a school that looks like a jail. He laughed and said, “Me, too!”

So I need to find some other hiking venues. This morning I probably will go to the flats behind North Mountain. Absent the rather precarious climb I’ve described before, the area really doesn’t have a good place to trot up and down hills. But you can walk from Peoria Ave. to Thunderbird, which is about 1.8 miles. Trails allow for a wandering path, and two of them will take you up low rises. So if a person walks at a fast clip, she presumably can get at least a little bit of a workout. Better than sitting in front of a computer, anyway.

Today I have to meet some friends for lunch at 11:30, so will need to get in some pass at exercising and still have time to get home, get cleaned up, paint my face, and get dressed. Since I didn’t get home from yesterday’s junket until almost 10 a.m., I need to go someplace closer, easier to park, and faster to walk.

Enough is enough…and I’ve barely begun!