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Automobiles

She’s B-a-a-a-c-k…

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You lucky souls! 😉

What can I say? Apparently earlier efforts on my part to get back into FaM  failed because of my superb dork-up powers. Our wonderful Web guru, Grayson Bell, has not only put Funny about Money back online but even managed to teach its proprietor how to get back in.

Probably. We shall see as soon as we hit “Publish.”

One nightmare hassle after another in these parts. Wrestling with the state driver’s license office…over, from what I can tell, absolutely nothing. Finally got them to issue the current driver’s license, replete with a hideous photo. Mercifully (…i guess…) it doesn’t have to be renewed again until 2030. By then I’ll no doubt be driving around Heaven with the angels.

This afternoon, my poor beset son is dragging me clear across the Valley to see a neurologist about the stubborn case of peripheral neuropathy that’s been haunting me for the past several weeks. NATURALLY, as soon as one gets in a doctor’s door, the ailment disappears. The buzzing, tingling, and burning are, as of this minute, about 90% or even maybe 95% gone. Left to my own devices, I’d cancel today’s appointment. But since he’s been worried about this…thing, whatever it is…I’m quietly hunkering down and letting him haul me out there.

Understand: we’re talking about a 40-minute trek (one-way!) through horrible traffic. If that doesn’t set off your nerves, nothing will!

Ohhh well… Just now we loaf on the back patio, soaking up a spectacularly beautiful morning. High cirrus clouds wisp across a gorgeous blue sky. North Mountain, a favorite hiking venue, looms above the neighbor’s house. If I had any sense, I’d be up there on a trail now, racking up an hour of exercise time. But…as we know, I haven’t any sense. 😀

Day from Hell…on Steroids!

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Jayzuz, what a day!!!!!

Fought with my son all afternoon. Car crapped out. Should take it to the Toyota place tomorrow and waste half the day sitting around there.

But squabbling notwithstanding, His Princeliness mounted his white charger and galloped into battle with the Toyota dealership, bless him! So he’s going over there tomorrow morning to extract the doodad from them.

hoooboy! No doubt just how he wants to spend half the day! 😀

A day or so ago, we got a WONDERFUL HANDSOME BEAUTIFUL HIGH-POWERED PICKUP from the Toyota guys, as a loaner while they worked on my car.

Ohhhhhhh Emmmm Geeeeee!

I want it!

Besides being kewl beyond kewlhood and blessed with a killer souped-up engine, it would be awesome for camping…but more to the point: all-around awesome just to drive the streets.
Seriously: it’s so much fun to drive, it might be worth considering for a future vehicular purchase.
Hmmmm…. S’ppose I could buy a new car like…tomorrow, maybe?
😀

Still Kickin’…

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…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…

Yow! The Car of My Dreams!!

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Holeeee mackerel, if you haven’t seen the latest Toyota pickup, you surely should! <3 <3 <3

I’m sitting at the Toyota dealership waiting for the crew to finish working on my car. Wait and wait and wait and… Ohhhhh well…what else have I got to do, eh?

At any rate, while I’m loafing in the showroom, I find myself sitting near a specimen of these new pickups. Boyoboy! To have a business that would allow one to write this thing off one’s taxes…  😀

LOL! Bop on over to the Toyota website and you discover these things sell in the vicinity of 60 grand. What a bargain, eh?

Oh well.

Twenty-First Century as Gigantic Rip-off

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Those of us who are decrepit enough to remember life in the late 1900s can surely attest that there were plenty of ripoffs on the float, back then in the “good” ole days. But jeez…

Every which way from Sunday, here’s somebody trying to siphon your money out of your wallet. I swear ta gawd!

Today I had to register the Dog Chariot. Every year or two (depending on how much you’re willing to pay at any one time), you have to trot your car into a state facility to get an emissions test, for which you have to pay about 20 bucks.

Once you pay, they give you a sheet of paper that you have to use to re-register your car. This year: the tab is $227 and change. In other words, it’s going to cost almost $250 to register a nine-year-old car. For one year.

I find this passing infuriating. Yes, I know: we need to pay to maintain the roads and hire highway patrolmen. But we already pay an exorbitant state income tax. And stiff sales taxes on everything that passes a cash register.

But evidently there’s nothing one can do about it.

For a change, though, this year’s ritual was not the unpleasant production of the past. Used to be, you’d drive in and find a dozen lanes, any one of them with ten or fifteen cars ahead of you. So you get in line and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and you wait and you…

…and you don’t have much choice of which line you get into. And this is August. The hottest month of the year in Arizona. (Understand: it was 112 here today…and that was actually a fairly balmy day.)

To my surprise, this time there were not very many cars and trucks ahead of me.

A worker motioned me to a line that had only one vehicle, and it was already inside the drive-thru.

So, incredibly, I didn’t have to wait long at all — only a few minutes.

Get in there…and usually they make you get out of the car and wait inside an uncomfortable booth: hot, stuffy, and claustrophobic.

This year, though, they seem to have done away with those. He didn’t even make me get out of the car!

And…it only took him a few minutes to do the job — not a quarter-hour or more. Forthwith he came back, handed me the paperwork, and said I was good to go!

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! No hassles??????

Well.

Then you look at the paperwork.

The fee to register that nine-year-old vehicle is $227.77.

Can you imagine?

Two hundred and thirty bucks to drive a car I should have traded in four years ago?

Dayum. What do you suppose it costs to register a brand-new Venza? If they even still make them….

I don’t drive that car much. Now that I don’t have to schlep to jobs in Tempe or in Glendale, I rarely have any reason to bucket around the roads. Yeah: I drive to the grocery store, the Costco, and the occasional doctor’s or veterinarian’s office, but that’s about it.

If we had decent public transit here, I probably wouldn’t even own a car.

But we don’t, so I do.

There’s good reason not to feel safe on the city’s buses and trains. Mainly, the transients ride them for free (partly because on the train, no one is taking tickets, and partly because various organizations hand out free bus passes. And o’course, because they’re air-conditioned). Most of those folks are harmless. But some are…not. Many are ex-convicts. Most are drug users. Some are out of their heads with mental illness or the effects of street drugs. So…no. They’re not strangers you want to spend a lot of time with, in elbow-to-elbow seating. Or standing.

And that’s specifically why I don’t ride lovely Phoenix’s buses and vaunted trains.

So here we are in a city — and a state — where public transit is neither very practical nor very pleasant, and those of us who have to drive (that includes almost everyone) gets gouged for the privilege of putting our cars on the road. Don’t forget: this is not the only tax we pay. Gasoline is taxed liberally. Most retail products are taxed at the checkout counter (and points along the way thereto…). Power is taxed. Water is taxed. On and on it goes.

Not that one doesn’t want to support government and public services. But maybe the funds should be used intelligently?

Lordie! One extreme idea after another!

 

Hee! Do the Days from Hell NEVER Stop?

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Today — here in late April — the weather is supposed to hit 100 degrees, for the first time this year. Yep: first Weather Day from Hell of the year. First, you may be assured, of many.

Six in the morning, I roll out of the sack after the usual Old Lady Insomniac night. Not too bad in that department, actually. Though the internal alarm did go off at 3 a.m. sharp, for reasons unknown I somehow got back to sleep. Usually that doesn’t happen — the getting back to sleep part, I mean.

Stumble into the bathroom by way of preparing to take Ruby on our 1- to 2-mile stroll through the’Hood, do my thing, and…and…yeah. Wouldn’tcha know it: the damn toilet clogs!

Haul the plunger in. Plunge plunge plunge plunge plunge plunge… Nothing. Doesn’t work.

It’s freakin’ SATURDAY! No chance of getting a plumber over here for another two days.

Fortunately, the house has two bathrooms. And fortunately, the head in the back bathroom is still functioning. Otherwise, I’d be doing my bidness out in the backyard with the dog.

*****

Holeee mackerel!

So I call the plumber — Maloney’s Plumbing, for those of you who live in lovely Phoenix — figuring that if anyone answered the phone (which surely they would not, right?) maybe I could arrange to be first in line for a service call on Monday morning.

No.

Incredibly, not only did someone answer the phone, but they sent a guy right over! He was in the house and out the door by 9:30! And he was an extremely nice gentleman.

So. Yeah.

I guess Days from Hell do stop!

It’s a miracle!

*****

And speaking of adventures in Days from Hell, I’m sitting here, 20 minutes to 5 on this Saturday afternoon, next-to-last day of the month, when a random thought wafts into my sweaty little brain…

Ohhhh holeee shee-ut!
I forgot to renew my driver’s license!!!!!!

You can do this online here nowadays. But I completely blew it off.

Run out to the garage, dig the piece of plastic out of the car, look at it to see what and where to do what and and when, and see…good grief! It doesn’t have to be renewed until 2025!

Who knew?

Last time I renewed this thing was three years ago. And to do so, all I had to do was go to a random desk in a random privately run post-boxes office and fill out a form.

This means that people who are driving on the Arizona road do not get tested or asked any significant questions for periods approaching a decade.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it?