Automobiles

…after a fashion.

Nine in the morning:

I’m so tired I can barely hold my head up.

My (elegant! spiffy! beloved!!) walking stick is lost. Must have carelessly left it in the park. Wasn’t there this a.m., so presumably some dear soul found it and made off with it.

Bought that at a crafts fair and have dearly loved it for years. Heartbroken at losing it.

Lo! though… Turns out you can get one like it on Amazon! So…whenever I shake free of my present daze, I’ll order one up.

In other Departments:  They’re jacking up our car insurance. As if it weren’t already stratospheric enough.

If we had decent public transport here, I’d just get rid of the car. But…this ain’t San Francisco, and so no, we don’t have decent public transportation. So I’ll have to draw down money from retirement savings to pay for effing car insurance.

And no: one can’t do without the stratospheric insurance, even if one were foolhardy enough to try that: it’s against the law to drive around uninsured here.

In still other sylvan fields… How glad am I that I passed on buying a fancy new condo in fast-Yuppifying downtown Phoenix? You, too, can live across the street from a pile of po’ folks!

Nothin’ basically wrong with po’ folks, o’course. The problem is, a lot of them are po’ because they’re freshly out of the slam. (Phone soliciting is a prison industry.) Or because they’re too mentally ill to hold a job (and so impose on you for handouts…every time you stick your nose out your door).

***

Today is the Day of Woden, which means we’re comin’ up on Cleaning Lady Day.

And how can I say how much I do not feel like getting off my lazy butt to clean house for the cleaning lady?

Yes: Cleaning Lady Day means you get to clean house:

• Pick up the litter
• Clean up after the dog
• Put said dog’s toys away
• Find some clean sheets
• Iron pillowcases
• Put away make-up, hair stuff, bubble bath, whatnot whatnot and more whatnot
• Straighten up the office desk
• Put away the kitchen clutter
• Move the car
• Unlock the back gate’s padlock, so she can get in and out with the trash

……gaaahhhhhh!  On and on in that vein….

Hmmm…. Unclear whether she’s over at WonderAccountant’s already. She goes to two or three houses a day, arriving last at my place…the poor creature must be dead exhausted at the end of every workday.

Car in WA’s driveway…but it doesn’t look like the Cleaning Lady from Heaven’s vehicle. It may belong to one of WA’s clients…in which case, I’ll have an extra hour or two to loaf before WCL shows up at my door.

ringy dingy ringy dingy ringy dingy…

Another goddamn phone solicitor. The damn phone jangles with phone pitches ALLLLLL DAYYYY LONG! That’s with the number unlisted, with Caller ID, with Call-Blocking.

I use the Call-Blocking feature to sidetrack calls from California, the East Valley, and various towns around Arizona. This actually helps a lot. But apparently nothing a phone customer can do — short of unplugging the goddamn phone — will block all the nuisance calls.

Apparently the nuisances can communicate with each other, though. I’ve cut a fair percentage of nuisance calls by

SCREEEEEAAAMMMIIIIIING

into the goddamn phone when one of the ba*tards calls. Because they wear headphones to do their job, a whistle or an air horn or even a good long LOUD scream hurts their bastardly ears. They do have lists warning their colleagues off. So if you make it hurt enough to pester you, you’ll get on their do-not-call list.

Unfortunately, there are dozens of those, just as their are dozens of phone solicitors. You have to keep up your blast-the-ears campaign to cut the pestering calls to any degree.

Life in the Time of Nuisancing…