Coffee heat rising

Appliances

Modern Inconveniences: The “Water-saving” Toilet

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Have you ever noticed that all our fine politically correct appliances actually waste more water and energy than they save? Case in point: the “water-saving” toilet that can’t flush a normal load of flushables…so that you have to do your business, then flush; then wipe, then flush; and then (because the thing won’t flush enough paper to get you clean on the first effort) wipe again and flush again. But just to make you feel really, really politically correct, the effing thing refills at about the same pace as your politically correct shower and your politically correct sink faucets operate.

This morning, as I was waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to cycle through three flushes, curiosity struck: How long, I wondered, does it REALLY take to flush this damn thing?

Trot out to the kitchen and grab the timer off the counter. Get back to the bathroom and wait and wait and wait some more till the damned toilet fills back up. Flush again to get the last of the TP down and click the timer.

It took two minutes and 17 seconds to flush and refill.

For the love of God. Since every time you poop in it, you have to flush it three times, that means it not only uses as much or more water as a real toilet used to use (we’re told these miraculous devices use a third as much as a toilet that works uses), that means the damn thing takes six minutes and 51 seconds — ALMOST 7 MINUTES — to flush one bowel movement.

Since, thanks to the aftereffects of the clamitadine I had to take, I’ve been to the bathroom three times this morning (and every morning, we might add), that is 21 minutes wasted, just watching the effing toilet flush and refill.

It certainly isn’t saving any water. In fact, it’s probably wasting water…dollars to donuts, three half-assed flushes take more water than a single flush that does the job.

The showers that make you stand under the flow for ten minutes to rinse two minutes’ worth of shampoo out of your hair? I think we all agree on those damn things. I jimmied mine so they will work (there used to be a gadget inside the damn thing that you could break, if you had a long enough tool). From what I understand, it’s not so easy to do that any more. So there we stand, wasting water and time when, if we had a functional appliance, we would need to waste neither.

And then the damned faucets that don’t dispense water! Argh.

Cooking is not a one-step-at-a-time endeavor: it is an exercise in multitasking. So… If you want to fill up a pot but have other things to do while fixing dinner but stand there and watch water dribble out of a barely functional faucet, what do you do?

Right: set the pot in the sink, turn on the water, and go on about your business. By the time you get back, the pot has overflowed and water is running down the drain.

This saves water…how??

Fortunately, Satan and Proserpine (the previous owners) installed some sort of antique plastic faucet in the garage work sink, so when I need to fill a spaghetti pot, I schlep the thing out to the garage and fill it in about three seconds, which is as long as it should take. And no water is wasted. But if I didn’t have that sink, in the 15 years that I’ve lived here I would have poured half the flow of the Colorado River down the kitchen drain.

The Toto brand elongated toilet is, as it was when these idiotic no-flush flushers were first mandated, billed as the fastest, most powerfully flushing models. I bought one for my last house, and I’ll say that it did work well. But forgodsake: the things cost $240, and that’s before it’s installed.  In California and waypoints that have truly PC water-conservation rules, a Toto that works will set you back $563 (!!!!!!! Plus tax, plus the cost of a toilet seat, plus the cost of installation!). Apparently, however, the newer models leave something to be desired…like flushing. Eleven percent of Amazon reviewers describe clogs, difficult-to-plunge design, and impossible to replace parts. Lovely.

As for the obnoxious faucets? Well, check out the current reviews of high gallons-per-minute models at Amazon. Always go direct to the one-star reviews to get the straight dope; then work up the ladder. Uhmmm…you really want to pay to put this stuff in your house? I especially loved the review of the top-rated model, where the customer described a brand-new kitchen faucet springing a leak on Christmas Day! 😀

Ah, the Third-Worldization of America… No wonder people who have had a bellyful of PC vote for a raving moron like Trump. All he has to do is promise to bring back American jobs to make American products, and we’re sold!

 

Phone-dango!

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So… I’m in the Costco thinking about replacing my houseful of phones, the current system evincing signs of advanced age. All the batteries are running down, so every time I turn around I pick up another dead handset. And lo! There on the shelf at the Costco is this elegant Panasonic model. It’s an elaborate lash-up, very much like mine only updated for the 21st century. Not only does it include 87 gerjillion (well…four) wireless handsets plus the required answering machine, this thing includes a call-blocking feature similar to the much-missed CPR Call Blocker.

I threw my CPR Call Blocker out after Cox barged in and forced its customers to switch to VoIP, having been told it wouldn’t work with Cox’s accursed modem. Cox, however, now offers NoMoRobo, supposedly the be-all and end-all for nuisance call blocking.

Not so much. The CPR Call Blocker 5000 cut the nuisance calls to at most one or two a day, but more typically to none.

NoMoRobo? Holy sh!t, what a nuisance! It takes the robocall nuisance and multiplies the aggravation by a factor of about 10. It does not block robocalls, because the robocallers automatically generate thousands, hundreds of thousands, and ultimately (one presumes) millions of fake phone numbers. They target your area code and phone exchange, or one close to where you live, so that incoming calls appear to be coming from someone in your neighborhood. The kids’ school, perhaps. Your neighbor across the street. Your pharmacy, telling you a prescription is ready. WhatEVER. Pick up the phone, and you get a scam.

The deal here with NoMoRobo is that it can not be programmed to block all calls in a given area code. None of my friends, acquaintances, or business contacts have the same exchange as mine. This means that any call incoming from this exchange is, by definition, a scam and nothing but a scam.

I get between six and twelve such calls every day, starting around seven in the morning and running through till nine at night.

To block spam calls, you have to go to NoMoRobo’s website, type in the offending phone number, describe the circumstances, and send the squib. This turns an ordinary nuisance into a time-consuming nuisance. And it’s pointless: the scammers don’t care that you blocked thus-and-such a combination of figures…their machines are constantly generating new combinations.

Even when NoMoRobo blocks a number, it lets the first ring jangle you up! So…yeah. That’s real helfpul, isn’t it? When you’re trying to focus on something — or hell, trying to take a nap! — the god damned phone jerks you away from what you’re doing, even if it’s a blocked call!

Most of the calls, however, are not blocked, because the spoofers generate many, many more calling numbers than NoMoRobo can catch.

At one point, I suggested to their alleged customer service that they should allow users to block entire area codes. They said ohhh no! That can’t be done!

Well, it sure as hell can be done, because the CPR Call Blocker does exactly that. It can be programmed to block calls from whole countries, to say nothing of local exchanges.  So either NoMoRobo’s developers don’t want to be bothered with making their system do that, or their customer service people are not altogether forthcoming.

At any rate, when I saw this fancy Panasonic wonder-phone, I thought hot dang! Kill two birds with one stone: replace the aging Uniden phones and get a built-in call blocker!

So I grab it off the shelf.

Having become ever-so-much-more wary over time, though, before opening the box and setting up this complicated marvel, I looked up the user reviews on Amazon. And then on Costco’s website.

Not so good.

A lot of people on both sites complained of poor sound quality. This seems to be a nigh unto universal issue. Also roundly hated: poor customer service and incomprehensible instructions. Ten percent of Amazon reviewers pan it with one (!) star. Interestingly, the rate is about the same over at the Costco site.

At Amazon, I figure when one-star ratings add up to more than 9%, that ain’t a happy sign.

For 8 bucks, I could buy four rechargeable phone batteries supposedly approved by Uniden. So I ordered up eight of the things, for a total of about $18 including tax…a far cry from $108 for a complicated phone system that may or may not work.

So I decided to replace the batteries in the existing handsets and hope for the best. If that doesn’t work, Uniden sells the handsets alone: it’s still cheaper to replace a few of those than to buy a whole new Panasonic system.

Apparently, if I’d just waited until the steam stopped shooting out of my ears after the Cox fiasco, I could in fact have attached my old CPR Call Blocker to Cox’s accursed modem. But I can’t find the thing now, so I guess I must have tossed it in a rage. That would be pretty typical.

It’ll cost another hundred bucks to get a new one. But at this point I’m thinking…let’s see if these new batteries hold a charge. If they do, fine: invest in a new CPR 5000, call their excellent customer service on the phone, and get them to coach me through connecting it to Cox’s accursed modem. Et voilà! Say good-bye to the NoMoRobo joke.

Schlepped the unopened Panasonic back to Costco this morning; received a fistful of money back on the card.

Now I’m going to think about this for a few days and, if I can confirm that the CPR 5000 will work, with the hated new Cox equipment, then I’ll just bite the bullet and buy another one. I know their customer service will coach me through connecting the thing to the complicated junk Cox cluttered my desk with — at least, I think they will. They post a phone number at Amazon, which I’ll call tomorrow to see if they’ll agree to do so.

Failing that?

Well, frankly, I think the only alternative is to disconnect the land line. Replace it with an iPhone for actual calling and texting, and several charged-up but un-connected cheap clamshells for dialing 911 in a pinch.

Heard the Wind Blow Before

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Palm tree in cyclonic wind

The wind is blowing so hard here that it just blew out the flame on the covered gas grill. It’s knocked piles of two-foot-long shield-shaped palm tree thingies into the road, which I soon will have to go out and clean up. And M’hijito is driving through this fine weather phenomenon (plus blowing snow…) through Four Corners to lovely Grand Junction, Colorado, thereinat to visit his 105-year-old grandmother. His much younger mutther is not a happy camperette.

***

Soooo…. An hour or so later (dinner having been cooked and snarfed down), I’m out there gathering palm-tree shields out of the street and some neighbor stops and rolls down his window and thanks me.

Like I should have left the debris scattered all over the road to puncture people’s tires? Maybe left the litter all over their yards for them to enjoy? Lordie.

Oh well. I’m sure in a few hours there’ll be more to collect. Conveniently, a stiff gale is wailing in out of the west, which means the palm debris (which is very much a mess) is being blown over the wall, into the road, and NOT into my swimming pool. Thank You, dear Goddess.

***

But in other precincts, today I got to enjoy a different kind of wind blowing, of the hot air variety.

You’ll recall that when I took my dog-hair-clogged Shark vacuum cleaner up to the venerable 35th Avenue Fabric World/Sew & Vac, they at first gave me a runaround and then announced that it could not be fixed, because Shark vacuums are such junk that no replacement parts are available and even if they were, you can’t open the machine’s body to work on its innards. It was, they said, your basic throw-away.

Stupidly (being very tired and very sick of driving through the homicidal traffic and very discouraged), I said OK, how’s about you throw it away? Said they: why shore, and they took the allegedly defunct machine off my hands.

As it turns out, this claim of theirs was a lie.

This morning I took a much older, still functioning Shark, basically the same model as the supposedly unfixable one, up to a different vacuum repair shop. I’d had this thing since 2010. It has never stopped running; I’d simply bought a second one knowing that if it ain’t broke, some developer will fix it, and so I should have one that still ran as well on hand. When I bought the second one (the one 35th Avenue told me couldn’t be cleaned), I relegated the first machine to the garage, where it sucked up a great deal of dust and grime. It still ran, but was too dirty to think about operating inside the house.

I’m figuring if I can get a real vacuum cleaner repair dude to spiff it up, I can take the new, $150 Shark (which indeed has, since the machines first appeared, been “fixed” in a baleful way) back to Costco.

So I arrive at the shop, where I’m told sure, we can clean it and restore it to like-new life. While I’m standing there(!!), the guy calls his supplier and asks if he can get this part and that part. But of course, says the supplier: we’ll ship that right over.

Uh-huh. We should have this ready for you to pick up on Monday, says New Repair Dude.

***

I was raging furious when I drove away! Basically what has happened here is 35th Avenue simply lied to me, in a transparent attempt to get me to buy a new and much more expensive brand from them.

How much more expensive? Well, lemme tellya…

So angry was I that I decided to drive down the road to 35th Avenue — both these shops are on the west side, both right on 35th Avenue — and give the bastards at Fabric World/Sew & Vac a piece of my mind. Which is what I did, suggesting to the guy who ran the repair department that if they didn’t want to do business with me, all they had to do was say “We don’t work for aging white women.” He was, of course offended, but I did not give a damn and continued to tell him that he needed to tell his staff not to lie to the customers.

At this point, the phone rings and he starts talking to some woman who has left off a vacuum…giving her the same line of bull: your vacuum is such cheap junk we can’t service it. AND — get this! — he then says to her that if she wants a vacuum that will run well and last for some time, it will cost between $800 and $1,000.

WTF? Both of these Sharks were still running fine — they were just dirty. The first is ten years old. Each one cost under a hundred bucks. He gets off the phone and I suggest again that maybe it would be better if they did not lie to their customers.

“Our supplier can’t get the parts for Shark vacuums,” said he.

“Maybe you need to get a different supplier,” said I.

I asked him to return my machine, and of course they didn’t have it. Presumably they’d already tidied it up and sold it to some other sucker.

Can you imagine? What bastards!

***

Welp, I see that on Amazon, the old Shark Navigator is still available — that would be the one without the shoulder-wrenching swivel head. So I’m thinking that if I can get Costco to take the new one back and Repair Dude gets the old one cleaned up and operating, I may buy the old-fashioned, un”improved” version from Amazon just so as to have a functioning, reasonably priced machine in the house. The one I’ve got, which dates back to 2010, surely won’t work forever.

And, judging from current Amazon reviews, the new one won’t work for more than a few months! 😀

Something there is about painting a door…

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…that calls for a beer.

Alas, I have no beer in the house. But lo! What should we find but a bottle of Clos du Bois, purchased for two dollars off! Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! 😀

Pulling the Velcroed-on whiteboard calendar off the solid-core fire door between the kitchen and the garage did, yes, get rid of the ridiculous calendar thingie. But…well…it got rid of a fair amount of paint, too. In a few spots, all the way down to the wood.

In other spots, it kindly did not pull off the paint but instead left behind a layer of goop: adhesive from the Velcro. Lovely.

So, the miseries of the cold/flu finally beginning to clear, today I took it upon my little self to sand and paint that door.

Good sander: defunct. New stupid lightweight sander: useless. Get out sanding block: exercise.

Not a great job of sanding, but marginally good enough for gummint work. At least the chipped and ripped-off spots are smoothed down.

Laid two layers, over the course of several hours, of touch-up to hide the busted spots.

Fixed lunch/dinner. Consumed lunch/dinner. Re-opened the paint can.

Painted the door. This third layer over the bunged spots covered them effectively. Feeling smug…and so of course my hand slips and SPLATTTTT! A shower of paint right in the face.

Fortunately, I have on a pair of glasses: otherwise I would’ve gotten a good swig of white semigloss right in the eyes.

Swear.

Finish the job. Wash out the paint brush.

Go into the bathroom. Find self and glasses covered in paint.

Put glasses to soak in strong, hot Dawn solution. Scrub skin and paint off face.

Swear.

Come back out. Inspect door.

Not perfect, but one helluva lot better than it was before, with the streaks of dirt where the dogs have pushed their way in and out and the dings where I’ve kicked the damn thing open and the four big brown spots and the unknown shiny streak along the top of where the whiteboard hung.

I think it will do. And if it doesn’t do? Tant pis.

Beware the DIY Appliance Installation

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Let me amend this story to add that I think my son is amazing, in that he’s willing to take on the task of connecting plumbing and installing two expensive pieces of equipment. Where he got this particular kind of bravura escapes me. His dad would never have done such a thing — he believed one of the jobs of money was to pay people to do household and yard tasks. And I tend to go along with that: if I can get someone else to do some skilled or semi-skilled job, I’ll cheerfully bribe them to do it. He must have inherited this tendency from his grandfathers — my father, who was extremely handy; and his dad’s father, who was an engineer.

Ever been here, done this?

Start in the kitchen…
Run out into the living room…
And down the hall to a bedroom

Good morning, Vietnam! This is what greeted M’hito as dawn cracked yesterday morning.

The water line to the refrigerator’s ice-maker ruptured. Water inundated the kitchen, flowed down the hall and into a bedroom and a bathroom, and puddled up in the living room.

Fortunately, he was dog-sitting his friends’ very smart little reservation dog — a canine Mexican immigrant — which unlike Charley the Golden Retriever was bright enough to figure something was awry. The dog woke him up about an hour before he normally turns out of the sack. Luckily: otherwise it would’ve been a whole lot worse.

In the ensuing frenzy, as he tried to pull the dishwasher (right next to the fridge) aside to get in under the woodwork and turn off the water valve, he broke the door off the thing!

So…now he had to buy a new Bosch dishwasher.

This fiasco elicited 20 miles of driving to two Lowe’s outlets, purchase of the new machine, and another trip to a hardware store to buy the correct fittings to replace the wrong ones sold by Lowe’s. Ain’t it fine?

When I left his house — around 8 p.m. — he was about to climb back under the kitchen sink to try to attach and install the new dishwasher, which we hauled home in the back of my truckoid. And reattach the refrigerator. As of this morning, said strategy had yet to work.

§

Would he buy this fine device from the appliance store around the corner, where the owners are honest, the staff know what they’re talking about and will tell you the truth with no BS, and they’ll come and install the thing? Heck, no! Lowe’s had the desired model on clearance… How could any sane person turn it down???

😀 Kid’s a chip off the old cheapskate block…

From what I can tell, the refrigerator water line, which was made of some sort of nylon stuff rather than the preferable twisted-steel stuff, became abraded when the fridge was moved briefly. It picked the wee hours of the morning to fail.

The dishwasher was 12 or 14 years old — about twice its engineered lifetime. But still…yipes! One would like having a choice as to when to buy a new appliance.

Fortunately, the house is all tiled. Saltillo tile is usually installed without baseboards, or else with a row of tiles cut in thirds and mortared to the wall. The house’s walls are lath and plaster (!!!!). Directly above the floor is a sturdy foundation of what M’hijito says is wood but what I believe to be metal, at least in places (could be wood, but not like the junk we get today). The plaster extends over it, and 65 years of paint jobs have sealed it in. When he wasn’t looking, I inspected and couldn’t see that it was seriously damaged — fortunately, the dogs rousted him soon enough that he was able to mop up the puddles before the water soaked into the walls. I think.

Also fortunately, because the AC system doesn’t work efficiently, he has boatloads of fans, including one of those things that clean-up crews use to blow-dry saturated carpets. So by the time I got there yesterday afternoon, the floors were pretty well dry.

Man! When he told me this story I was thinking “homeowner’s claim…won’t the insuror be thrilled…” But it now looks like no damage was done to the structure

Lordie, but the employees at Lowe’s here in Phoenix are freaking incompetent!

He looked up the desired model online and ascertained that a Lowe’s way to Hell & gone up the I-17 had one in stock. We get there. We diddled around with a guy who seemed sweet despite lacking a few IQ points, paid to buy the thing, pulled the car up to the door…only to be told…well, no. That wasn’t the right model.

So we had to get a refund, drive even FURTHER up the I-17 to a Lowe’s in Whiteyville, a flight-induced suburb almost to freaking Anthem, where…well, yeah. We found the desired washer.

He now buys that and new plumbing connections for both the washer and the fridge. We load the machine into my truckoid and stagger away through the rush hour traffic (all of this travel has been going on during the height of rush hour, which, on the homicidal streets of Phoenix, is a steroid-driven species of Hell). Get back to his place frazzled but still living.

He now endeavors to reattach the fridge and finds — of course — that the line they sold him is too short.

It’s getting late. Our regular Ace Hardware is closed, but one is open down in Gang Central, an area that is, shall we say, the direct inverse of Whiteyville, that which all those pallid types have fled. There we find a couple of guys who sound like they know what they’re doing. They sell him a longer connection.

By the time we get back, it’s after 8 p.m. He throws me out and, as I exit the front door, climbs under the kitchen sink to (he hopes) reconnect the appliances.

All I have heard this morning is “it didn’t work.” He’s back at the office. And presumably he has no dishwasher. Is the fridge running? I dared not ask.

He left the office at 3 yesterday, falling behind in a busy work schedule. So now he’s back at the office with no functioning dishwasher. The fridge, of course, will run without an icemaker; I hope he plugged that thing back in and left it operating.

Meanwhile, yesterday it was 113, with 20% humidity. Nice timing, eh?

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Here is, I believe, the Funny about Money frugalista message to be gleaned for that adventure:

Spring for the cost to have the seller install an appliance! When you think about how much one of these contraptions costs, $60 or $100 to have it delivered and installed is a bargain. More to the point, compare your own hourly wage against what it will cost to pay a handyman to come clean up after you and put the thing in right.

Even if you don’t make all that much, remember to add in your job’s benefits: those are likely to jack up your pay above the cost of having a new dishwasher, refrigerator, or stove delivered and installed. I don’t know how many hours my son spent before he gave up last night — likely at least a couple. But by 8 p.m. he’d been pounding around for five hours, dealing with this fine flap. Now, admittedly, that did entail driving to two Lowe’s outlets. But we were back at his house by dinner time — around 5 or 6 p.m. So figure he put in at least five of his hours — and had to take two or three hours off work for the privilege.

It would not have cost five hours’ worth of his time to pay someone to deliver and install the machine. Figure he makes  about what I used to earn: $40 an hour (probably more like $45 now), plus another $10.41/hour for the panoply of benefits: $50.41 an hour. Not counting the aggravation factor…

So say it took two hours to buy the machine, leaving three hours of screwing around: it costs him $151.23, and he still doesn’t have a functioning kitchen. Lowe’s declines to publish its installation fee online, but in 2016 they were building a reputation for gouging. But even at $200, that’s still only $50 more than the value of his time. IMHO he would do better to hire a handyman to install it — my guy would charge about $60.

This, of course, is why I personally will not buy appliances at Lowe’s or Home Depot. Up around the corner on Gangbanger’s Way is a local appliance store that treats its customers fairly and delivers professional service.

But that notwithstanding:

If you have a paying job, DIY appliance installation is probably a false economy. The value of your time is more than what it would cost to have someone who can do the job quickly and smoothly. And that doesn’t even count the physical and psychological cost of the stress and frustration the job entails.

How’s That [fill-in-the-blank] Workin’ for Ya?

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Thankee, that [hand-wash the dishes scheme] is workin’ surprisingly well. Who’d’ve thunk it?

LOL! Have been banging around since the hounds and I rolled out of the sack at 4:30 a.m. The mile-long dawg walk is done. Pool maintenance: done. Yard maintenance: done. Three loads of laundry: done. Shitload of housework: done. Trash hauling: done. And it’s only 11:00 in the morning!

Interestingly, it turns out that washing dishes by hand is nowhere near as annoying as I remember it from my misspent youth, when my mother used to make me wash all the damn dishes. In the first place, there’s only one person dirtying up dishes here (well…not counting the pooches). In the second, I cook almost exclusively on the grill (especially in the summertime!), and so there are no pots and pans to scrub. And finally, because in diet mode I eat only twice a day, stacks of dirty dishes fail to materialize.

If I set my own and the pooches’ plates in a sink filled with soapy water, whenever I get around to sponging and rinsing them, it takes less than three minutes to wash them and drop them in the washer’s dishrack to drain. Exactly zero electric power is consumed (the water heater runs on gas). Compare that with the two-hour power- and water-consuming cycle to wash the same number of dishes & utensils!

Think of that. If I washed dishes twice a day, every day, that would be six minutes times seven, or 42 minutes a week. Less than half the time it takes to run one dishwasher load!

Normally I run the washer about once every second or third day. So that would mean in a week I would run it twice or three times: four to six hours of electric use!

Compare that with zero hours of electric consumption, and maybe three gallons of water per day, heated with gas.

My kitchen sports a huge double sink. I mean, huge. This makes it possible to fill one sink with richly Dawn-enhanced water. Then, whenever the dogs or I finish eating something, I set the dishes in the water and leave them to soak (having wiped the food into the trash first, of course). Later in the day: sponge down the collected pottery, glass, and stainless, rack it, drain and rinse the sink, and forget it.

It’s no exaggeration to say this takes about three minutes.

Maybe SDXB wasn’t as crazy as I thought.

He hates dishwashers and refuses to use them. When he lived with me, he tried to force me to abjure the use of my Kitchenaid. It was one of several constant sources of conflict.

On the other hand, SDXB did love to cook. And what a mess that man could make! The result would always be piles of sticky, greasy pans, mountains of bowls and platters and plates, knives and spoons and forks and peelers and mixers and…ugh!!! Washing all that stuff by hand was, in fact, one bitch of a chore.

That’s not how I prepare food these days. Almost everything that I cook goes on the grill. Most veggies can be grilled on one of those barbecue pan things with the little holes in it. Meat, of course, goes right over the fire. Even pasta (for example) doesn’t get a cooking pot very dirty. So with few pots and pans — and almost never a frying or sauté pan — the dishes you eat off of are pretty easy to soak clean.

On other fronts: Did I fix the link in yesterday’s Complete Writer post? No. My patience is still too short to address that issue. Gimme a break, Lord!

Am I going to make it to the end of my personal “fiscal” year in September, when the annual required minimum drawdown from the IRA is slated? No. I have $4,000 in the checking account. Talked the Mayo into reducing its bill by $305, the amount Medicare and Medigap refused to cover for the stupid “annual checkup” that I should have turned down, but that was a drop in the bucket. Yesterday in the mail came a bill for something over $2,000 for next year’s Medigap coverage. That is a huge increase. Obviously, since it costs about $2,000/month to run this house and feed me and the dogs and operate the car and fill the various hands reaching into my pocketbook — exclusive of tax and insurance bills — I am not going to make it to September on what remains in the bank.

I’m told long-term care coverage is also going way up.

Obviously, I can’t continue to live on the RMD plus Social Security at this rate. Possibly I’ll have to consider canceling the long-term care coverage. That is a HUGE risk. If I don’t die quickly but instead land in some nursing home, the cost will drain savings fast, impoverishing me and eliminating any chance of leaving enough to my son to matter.

My plan is to exit stage left if it looks like any such thing is coming down the pike. If one were to succeed in that strategy, it would render the long-term care insurance massively redundant. On the other hand, there’s always the chance that — say you had a stroke or you fell and hurt yourself bad enough that you couldn’t move around — one might not be able to reach the tools set aside for the purpose.

I’d rather not have to pay that accursed insurance bill. But on the other hand, I sure don’t want everything I hope to leave to my son taken away…for what? To keep me pointlessly alive?

And finally, remember the Vicks VapoRub Quack Cure for supposed toenail fungus? How did that work? Mixed. After the initial six-week experiment, I continued to use it for a several months. But it must be said that the stuff does stink. One does tire of going to bed smelling like a chemical factory. So eventually I gave it up.

And, as expected, eventually the dry hide/possible fungus was back to business as usual.

My friend VickyC reported that tea tree oil had worked for her. Look it up, and you find that it does work, sometimes: in 10% to 14% of cases. The other option is a very expensive topical fungicide whose results are similarly weak, or anti-fungicidal pills that can make you good and sick. Thanks: I’ll take the toenails as they are.

So the other day I picked up a tea tree oil concoction (woo-wooooo!) at Whole Foods and tried it.

Damned if it doesn’t make a difference!

However: I suspect that’s because this is probably not a fungal infection. At first glance, Derma-Doc pronounced the thick skin and raggedy nail ends on the right foot (not on the left one) to be “dry skin.” He recommended massaging a whole lotta Eucerin into the toes. And the rest of the foot. And the other foot.

Side note: for years a neuroma caused so much pain in the ball of that foot that I would curl my toes under when walking, to relieve the pressure on the spot that hurt. That caused extensive callusing on the ends of the toes…which, we might add, coincide with the tips of one’s toenails. Thus Derma-Doc’s off-the-cuff diagnosis had some credibility.

Later, also on the fly, he remarked that it was a fungus. So: WTF. Who knows?

This time, though, unlike past episodes of fretting, one of the nails had developed a  brown spot.

Side note: however, awhile back I whacked my foot good and bruised the toes. The dark spot could have been a little blood seeping under the nail, which would not be the first time that’s happened.

So, following the quack instructions, I went to file the surface of the nail a bit, and lo! that lifted the discolored area right off. Clearly, whatever it is does not dwell under the nail, as we’re told is the case with a nail infection.

Tea tree oil has its own annoying New-Agey perfume, but it dissipates quickly. Put it on an hour or two before bed-time, and it does not accompany you between the sheets. Nor does it fill the air around you with a nose-crinkling stink.

I’ve been brushing this stuff on each night and then covering the feet with peds… After just a few days, the rhino-hide effect has much improved. The brown spot remains gone. And I suspect that if a person continued this “regimen” (heh) over a period of weeks or months, eventually the road-worn toes would assume a normal appearance.

We shall see. This is so easy, there’s no reason not to try it.