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Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Propane & the Fire Department

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That was a strange experience…  Last night I called the fire department after discovering a slow leak from the backyard propane grill. I’d cleaned it earlier in the day, scrubbing off accumulated grease spatters, and in doing so apparently managed to turn one of the burners slightly to “on.”

Later I smelled an odor that I thought was a dead animal. Looked around under the shrubbery to see if Ratty might have croaked over someplace in the yard (some people put out rat poison, which you’d like your dogs not to eat when the victim comes crawling into your yard to die…). Nothing. But by the time the dogs went out for their final patrolling of the yard, around 9 p.m., the odor was clearly propane.

So I called the firemen. The dispatcher wasn’t sure it was necessary to send anyone. He said propane is lighter than air and quickly dissipates.

That was not my understanding. Years ago, I read a Consumer Reports article that said propane is heavier than air, that it can linger for quite a while and will collect in low-lying areas, and that if you live uphill from a neighbor, your leaking propane can flow downhill and accumulate at the neighbor’s place — and explosions have occurred in which a neighbor’s leaking propane drifted downhill and blew up in someone else’s property.

The air was still. No breeze at all was moving. And when I went back into the house from the front patio to get the dogs’ leashes, I could smell propane inside the house, especially in the kitchen.

When I mentioned that the interior smelled of propane, the guy decided to send a crew.

They looked around, turned off and disconnected the tank, and loved up the frantically affectionate corgis. They repeated what their dispatcher had said: that propane is lighter than air. Then they went away.

Huh. Propane is lighter than air, eh?

No.

It’s.

Not.

Some training these guys have had, somewhere, has misinformed them. I wonder what else they’ve been told that’s not true?

It’s a Heat Pump Thing…

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So…do you folks who live where it snows have heat pumps to run your air conditioning and heating system? How does that work in a colder climate?

Here in lovely uptown Phoenix, temperatures plummeted to a near-unheard-of 32 degrees last night. Eek, say we.

Along about three in the morning I woke up to an icy breeze wafting across the bed. The heat pump was grinding away, and it was blasting out cold air. As the night wound on, the heater never kicked off…and the house temperature dropped!

If the dogs and I were huddled in a shivering mass with blankets and pillows piled atop us, my poor little roommate  must have been a block of ice. She’s sleeping on an air mattress — the roommate gig being a temporary thing — and so she’s on the tile floor. It’s cold in that room on a warm night! It must have been like a refrigerator in there along about 4 a.m.

This morning I called my favorite AC repair dudes. They said the problem is, when the ambient temperature drops below 32, a heat pump freezes up and starts blowing cold air into the house. Advice: shut the system down for three hours. Turn it back on. If it’s still blowing cold air after an hour, turn it off for another hour. Turn it back on: if that doesn’t fix it, call them and for a bargain $80 they’ll come out and see what the problem is.

LOL! This should get interesting.

The reason I’ve never had this problem is that left to my own devices, I don’t run the HVAC at night. After a summer of $250 air-conditioning bills, I can’t afford the cost of running a heater all  night long. Normally what I’ll do is pile on the blankets at night and then during the day warm the area where I’m parked with a space heater. If it gets really cold at night, then I’ll turn the heat on first thing in the morning, just long enough to take the chill off.

But Roommate, resisting the plot to turn her into a snow zombie, raids the thermostat and turns it to around 70 degrees when she wakes up shivering along about 4 in the morning.

Not unreasonable, do you think? There’s really no good reason for her to be miserable all night.

So along about 5, I get too hot and then I sneak out into the hall and turn the thermostat back down to 68.

Heeee! The battle of the old ladies.

Well, one of them isn’t exactly old. But she’s reaching that age at which women start waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning and can’t get back to sleep. 😀

So we’ll try the “shut it off” routine today and hope it works. After the $600 pool bill, I can’t afford another service  call this month.

Meanwhile, I have to make a Costco run this morning. While I’m there, I’ll try to find those heated throws they had the last time I visited, and I’ll grab one for her. After she heads up to San Francisco to join her DH, the dogs and I will be glad to have a warm spot on the sack, especially if the winter stays cool.

My son says he’ll bring her a space heater that won’t set fire to her possessions — mine are those bowl things with the red-hot element in the center, effective but not something you want to turn your back on.

Meanwhile, chalk up another entry in the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted: a heater that freezes when it gets cold outside.

Most Expensive US Postal Service in the Country…

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Grrrrrrr! Our moronic City Parents and our clueless USPS mail carriers just cost me $75, plus $16 and change, plus about $20 I could’ve made selling the two books forked over to my demented neighbor.

For reasons unknown to anyone, the name of the road I live on was changed from the name the developer put on the plat map (let’s call it Nirvana Street) to Shangri-La Lane. As it happens, the road directly to the north is called Shangri-La Drive. The house numbers are the same.

As you can imagine, the opportunities for confusion are legion. 😀 At this time of year in particular, the Post Office employees get confused. They deliver mail addressed to Shangri-La Lane over to Shangri-La Drive, and vice versa. All the time.

The guy who lives on Shangri-La Drive in the house whose number corresponds to mine is a nice enough man who has been very ill for some years. Not all of the poor guy’s marbles are intact.

This is the gentleman who intercepted six months’ worth of credit-card statements from Macy’s, all addressed to me as plain as day, and threw them in the trash. I’d opened the account to get a dollar or two off of an already discounted little handbag, charged up all of about ten bucks, and forgot about it. Because I use my AMEX card for everything, I never thought about it again…until Macy’s sicced a collection agency on me.

So as you can imagine, I was not pleased. And even though I occasionally remind the postal carriers to try to get it right, the part-timers they hire at this time of year always get it wrong.

Along about the end of last month, I ordered two copies of a book Camptown Races has on the drawing board, so I could take them to display at the WVWW shindig last Saturday. These never showed up. Ordered one more and asked the printer to put a rush on it; got the thing just in time.

But now, two weeks later, the original order has never shown up. That’s 16 bucks down the drain, plus of course I didn’t have those to take with me to the chivaree. Since the one I did have sold instantly, it’s entirely possible that I could have sold the other two there; hence, we have a potential $36 down the drain.

The printer disgorged the post office’s tracking report, which showed they delivered it on December 2.

Yeah. I’ll bet they did: to Shangri-La Drive, not Lane.

So yesterday I walked over to the neighbors’ house and inquired as to whether the residents had seen my package. Mrs. Batshittsky answered the door — she really is a very sweet (and very beleaguered) lady — and said no, they hadn’t seen it. Eventually poor old Batshittsky himself came shuffling up the hall and stood there, cowering behind the Mrs.

He looked very sick — and kind of wild-eyed. I felt terrible for her. She has an awful lot to have to cope with…what a load to bear! Anyway, he clearly wasn’t competent to say what he’d seen or hadn’t seen, but I figured he’d probably relieved the post box of its mail while she was out running errands, so she had no idea what he could’ve thrown out.

So. No help there.

This morning I took the P.O.’s tracking report up the the Post Office. A full hour later… Yes. It took an hour of driving and standing in line and then standing at the counter waiting on a hapless and enormously overworked CSR to get an answer to the question of “where did you deliver this thing?”

At first, the CSR I reached after a half-hour wait in line said they could actually pinpoint the specific building where the carrier delivers a package. She then took the sheet of paper with the zillion-digit tracking number into the back of the building. It was a good twenty minutes before she resurfaced.

Well. No. They didn’t have a GPS doodad running on the day this was delivered. All she could tell me was that the carrier placed it in a mailbox.

Right. The Batshittsky mailbox. Not the Funny Farm mailbox.

I asked how much it would cost to rent a mailbox there. It’s very cheap — only about twenty bucks a year. I’d have to go to the back of the line to do that, though, because I’d need to be attended by one of the employees who could keyboard in the charges.

Uh huh. The line extended almost back to the door.

To pick up my mail from this illustrious institution, I would have to cross the new train tracks (where the signal will be red until sometime after the cows come home), make my way through a freight-train-length school zone, pass through an increasingly dangerous slum, and get out of my car in an area where I normally keep the car doors locked. And…really…do I want to put up with USPS customer service unto the end of time?

Possibly not.

So it was over to the mailbox place and kitsch store in the equally dangerous Albertson’s shopping center down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. There I rented a box from an exceptionally eccentric shopkeeper: $75 for six months.

That’s effing outrageous, of course. But…it’s right down the street — a three-minute drive. I can park directly in front, just two steps from the entrance, and the owners always keep their dogs tied outside next to the door. While I was there, one of them tried to remove a foot from a bum who walked by, so I figure that’s a good sign. Uh, I guess.

So to the $16 for the lost books we can add $75 for a mailbox to receive stuff I’d like to have NOT go to the Batshittsky Manse, for a total of $91 that this stupid little event has cost me. Add another $20 in missed opportunity to sell the absent books, and we’re over a hundred bucks.

{sigh}

Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to prove the package went where I believe it went? Then I could have told Mrs. B to keep her honored husband away from the mailbox — maybe she could rent a box and keep the key out of his reach? And I could have asked her to pay to replace the discarded books. And maybe she could pay the $75 I’m having to spend to keep her DH out of my mail.

There are a million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them…

Every Phisherman Needs an Editor!

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Do you or do you not just LOVE this? Supposedly from Chase Bank:

Chase scam“if you do not authorized this change…”  “your account from being close or experiencing error…” “until you have verify your information…”

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha !!

Where do you guess it came from? China or Russia?

My bet’s on the Russians: the unfamiliarity with the use of articles with nouns is a clue (a native speaker of English would say “an error” or “errors”). Most halfway decent Chinese ESL speakers get the verb tenses down pretty well: “do not authorized” and “you have verify” are atypical, but on the other hand, Russians can usually get Western European verb structures better than this.

Let’s toss Africa into the mix, too. “Once you have complete this process, you will transfer $10,000 to our account in Nigeria so Prince iBangiBangi can succeed to his throne, at which time he will bestowing the $1 million reward upon you via Western Union…”

Heeeee!

Why Do I Dislike Social Networks? Am I a Curmudgeon?

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So the church has obtained this social network thing called “Realm,” a proprietary platform available to nonprofit groups. They want everyone on the choir to join up. Just now they have a campaign going to have everyone in the parish get photographed so your picture can be posted on the system.

The other morning while we were lining up to process, I ran into a very charming young marketing type, a greeter, who urged me to hurry and join Realm. I said I’d tried to do so but was unable to get it to accept any credentials or allow me to create a username and ID. She suggested I needed to download Chrome, install it, learn to use it, and try to get in with that browser — though she allowed that FireFox (the browser of choice) should work.

Others around me really started to apply a lot of pressure to get on Realm. That I said I do not want to join yet another social media platform nor do I enjoy the platforms I have to use in my business was irrelevant. Nothing would do but what I have to join up this thing.

Well. I think not, thank you very much.

I find myself wondering why I dislike and distrust social media so much. Twitter? God, I hate it! Facebook? Okay, so friends post a few photos of their trips or their kittens or whatever and that’s nice, but I can take it or leave it. Google+? Total mystification.

But what IS the problem?

I think the problem is that in my mind, a computer is not a toy. It’s a tool. It’s something you use to do work. And you know, I feel I , do quite enough work, starting at around 5 a.m. and grinding through till 6, 7, 8, or 9 at night: all of it on computers.

I don’t want to socialize on the computer. I just want to get the damn work done and get OFF the computer! Far from making me feel “connected,” the social networks feel like just another component of something that keeps me from having a life. Twitter, with its torrent of spam; Facebook, with its unending stream of trivia, false wisdom, and sappy sentimentality; Google+, whose reason for existing at all is inscrutable:

Here’s a post by an employee of Constant Contact plumping in favor of Twitter. And yeah, I get it: she finds an expensive doodad — a cell phone — that she’d lost in an airline’s overhead compartment; she figures out how to escape a traffic jam; she gets the very LATEST latest news; she asks a credit bureau to correct an error; she apologizes to some famous guy for offending him.

But…really? Are there not more direct, less time-sucking, less “social” ways of accomplishing these things? For example…

  • Don’t put your cell phone in an overhead compartment — take it out of your jacket pocket and put it in your purse or your pants pocket. Listen to the local radio traffic reports, or simply avoid routes prone to traffic jams.
  • Recognize that most of what we think of as “news” today is trivia, and that you can do nothing about 99.999% of any news that really matters. You don’t need to have instantaneous Tweets about any of it.
  • Email or snail-mail the credit bureau; it’s a lot more private…and again, does that error really need to be fixed right this very minute?
  • Don’t insult celebrities (or anyone else) in public (or in private).

When you consider what the writer’s saying, you’re inclined to think that over time her growing dependency on Twitter surely must erode her problem-solving skills. What does she do if she can’t Tweet up her lost phone? If she stumbles across a news report that really does concern something important and urgent, how does she find out all the details, and how does she get a fully reported, credibly accurate accounting of events? And how does she (or her husband) ever learn common courtesy?

Last year Lifehacker posted an article by Alan Henry that offered a number of very good suggestions for keeping the social media plague more or less under control. I like his ideas…but again: t.i.m.e…s.u.c.k!!!! The amount of time it would take to clean up your accounts and organize them in the ways he suggests: oh, ugh! Once you got the mess under control, though, these strategies probably would help cut the amount of time you then continue to waste on Twitter and waypoints.

If I follow the guy’s suggestions, I’ll have to “unfollow” about 600 Twits. That could be even more time-consuming than luring them to follow me in the first place. To say nothing off pissing off a lot of Twits. Organize them by “Lists”? I know Twitter Lists exist, but I also know finding out what they are, figuring out how to work them, and deploying them in any meaningful way represents yet another huge time-suck. Is that really what I want to do with the shrinking number of minutes, hours, and days left to me on this earth?

Well, no.

Therein lies the problem. And I don’t want to spend any of those fast-dwindling minutes, hours, and days on learning a new social media platform, either.

Reality or Illusion? The Growing Complication of Life

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Have you ever wondered why it seems to take SO much longer to get out the door and into your car than it used to? For a long time, I thought it was just me — probably a function of age. But lately friends have made the same remark. It may not be a universal phenomenon, but it surely does appear that a lot of people feel it takes longer to leave the house as the days go by.

Puzzling about this the other day, I decided to list all the things I had to do one morning before I climbed into the car and drove out of the garage, and then compare them with the routine I had say, 30 years ago: back in the day when I could grab my purse, jump in the car, and be gone! Here’s what happened, with the new stuff classified by “Security,” “Age,”  “Burdens of Too Much Stuff,” and “Changes in living arrangements or habits.”

1. Locked up the computer

Security. Also probably Stuff. In the good old days, we didn’t have computers and so we didn’t have to worry about having our entire lives go out the door if one was stolen.

To secure my computer hardware, I have a solid-core door with a hardened lock on my office. Whenever I leave the house for more then ten or fifteen minutes, I lock that deadbolt. This has the same effect as a set of stairs to a second storey: whatever you want is always on the other side of it.

2. Unlocked door, went back in office, retrieved a pair of bifocals for driving and label reading. Relock door.

Security: See above in re: the door hassles.

Age: As a young woman I wore contact lenses and never needed reading glasses, even if I was wearing regular distance glasses. When you get old, contacts number among the many things you don’t want to be bothered with anymore.

3. Took out the garbage.

Changes. Security. The beloved old house had no fence, so I would step through the oleanders into the alley to toss the trash. Later, the gate in the fence we installed had no lock. To get out to the garbage can now, I have to unlock the latch, wrestle the gate open, wrestle it shut, and relock it.

The old house’s kitchen was big enough to accommodate a garbage can, so I didn’t have a trash bag in the sink collecting garbage and starting to stink forthwith. So, I didn’t necessarily have to take out the garbage before I could leave the house.

4. Locked eight (8!) doors and secured two sliding doors.

Security. Changes. It never entered our minds to install iron security gates with drill-proof locks on all the hinged exterior doors. We didn’t have sliding doors, so there was no screwing around with those things, either.

5. Unlocked two front doors. Tried (and failed) to unscrew an irrigation sprayer so as to get a 90-degree model to replace the 180 degree number that waters the front door every time the water comes on.

Changes. Whoever heard of an irrigation system in a residential yard?

6. Chased the dogs back in the house. Relocked doors.

Changes. Security. My German shepherd did not have to be chased. She came when called.

7. Washed the silver that can’t go in the dishwasher, by hand and on the fly.

Changes. My old KitchenAid dishwashers actually worked, if you can imagine. And they did not tarnish the silver.

8. Remembered to retrieve empty propane tank.

Stuff. We did not have a propane grill. Are you kidding? Gimme a break!

9. Unlocked three (3!) doors to get at the propane tank.

Security.

10. Relocked three (!)  doors.

Security. Who is it, really, that belongs behind bars???

11. Loaded propane tank into vehicle.

Stuff.

12. Went back into house and checked that dogs are safe indoors.

Security. Changes. I never had little dogs that were vulnerable to coyotes and drowning.

13. Relocked door, got into car.

Security.

14. Unlocked door, re-entered house, walked back to bathroom, applied lip stuff.

Security. Changes. Age. Did we include “forgot” among our list of causes? I always carried a tube of Vaseline, a stick of lip balm, or lip gloss in my purse. Another item that comes under the late-life heading of “don’t wanna be bothered with it.”

15. Poured ice and water into car mug, carried it into garage. Relocked door.

Changes. Security. People didn’t carry water around in the car with them, except for a jug of water always in the trunk in case of emergency on the open road.

16. Drove away.

Eleven of 15 pre-driving hassles are security-related! Of course, we did worry about burglars, muggers, and rapists back in the Day. But we didn’t live constantly under lock and key. On the other hand, if I’d run in and out of the house to deal with things I’d forgotten or felt needed to be done, I’d never have gotten out the door. And also, on that same hand, I didn’t have to wrestle with a locking interior door.

The difference, I think, has to do with the possession of computers. That and other kinds of junk we didn’t have then.

You know, if somebody had ripped off my house in, say, 1980, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. My dissertation notes were handwritten on notecards and sheets of paper; the manuscript was typed on paper — no one would have stolen that junk. Our checkbook register was exactly that: a real checkbook register, not a Quickbooks  or Excel page. But today my whole life is on my computer! If a burglar stole even one of my computers, I would be screwed every which way from Sunday. It would be a real catastrophe to have a bad guy take a device that contains all my financial information, all my business records, all the projects I’m working on, and all my connection to the Internet. Absolute disaster. Hence layer after layer after layer of locks and gizmos to secure every entry into the shack. Layer after time-consuming, ditzy, annoying layer.

Only one or possibly two interferences relate to age: having to wear a special pair of glasses to drive and navigate the world beyond the house, and (possibly) forgetting to oil the lips before leaving the shack.

No wonder I run late all the time! If each of these nuisances took just 30 seconds on average, the combined bunch of them would make me run 7½ minutes late getting out the door. If they averaged one minute apiece, they would make me 15 minutes late.

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