Coffee heat rising

bureaucracy

You Want Me to Pay WHAAAT?????

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Statements arrive in the mail, claiming to show what is not covered by Medicare. Alarming, because they don’t really say you have to pay the vendor…these outfits often generate a Medicare bill, send it off, and then refrain from charging the amounts Big Brother declines to pay.  Then the vendor drops the amount the statement says they’re charging, so you don’t really owe that. Quite.

But meanwhile, you also have private insurance, which may (or may not) cover all (or some) of the amounts Medicare declines to cover.

You can’t tell from a given statement what part of that is what! You just have to wait — weeks or months! — until the vendor gets around to generating its most recent coherent bill.

Even then, you’re likely to have to guess what’s owed and what’s covered.

Right now Medicare says it’s billing me $1,057 and $658…for services that I wouldn’t have used if I’d known they weren’t covered.

IF they’re not covered. They actually may be covered, but you can’t tell it from these statements.

Ducky!

August 5 Heat, Continued…

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So the day that I began describing this morning has trundled on. And on. And on.

Now it’s late afternoon. Hotter than a two-dollar cookstove out there. No kidding: As we scribble, the back porch thermometer registers 110 degrees in the shade of the back porch overhang!

Yeah: that’s 110 in the shade! 😮

WHAT a place, eh?

Today has been quiet…probably because it’s too damn hot for anybody to get up to any hijinks. 😀

But I’ll tellya: the hijinks of recent days are still eating at my nerves. Enough, I might remark, that for brief periods I seriously consider piling my stuff and the dawg in the car and driving outta here.

Where would “outta here” be?  

I dunno. Grand Junction, Colorado, is a pleasant enough venue. A little cold in the winter. A little hickish. But a LONG way from here, and in another state. Presumably out of Arizona’s jurisdiction.

That those two social-worker women who showed up here had, in hand, a record of the night that SDXB and I got into a fight and I stalked off down an alley, ending up at a neighbor’s place…WOW! 

Sorry, folks, but THAT scares the Hell outta me. That little flap happened years ago! How much else does Big Brother have on me? And what can be done with that “else”?

Jayzuz!

Haven’t yet decided what, if anything, to do about this. I don’t want to leave, for two reasons:

* Most important, I absolutely don’t want to leave M’Hijito behind. I love my son, relish his company, and do NOT want to sever relations with him…or even to put any distance between us.

* And I love my home. It’s perfect for me and the dawg, probably the most pleasant place I’ve ever lived in, and you may be sure I do not want to leave. This place is where I want to live until I die.

Which I expect will not be soon!

Seriously: That sounds overweening. But I’ve known several women who have lived here in the ‘Hood, all by their little old selves, dwelling in these houses well into advanced old age. Most notable was my first neighbor here. She was in her 90s when her son carted her off to an old-folkerie — WELL into her 90s. And going strong.

But after her, I’ve also known several others who’ve been able to stay here into their dotage, as the young pups have moved into these houses, fixed them up, and jacked up the property values. A-n-n-d…

…I love young pups and enjoy having them as neighbors.
…As they upgrade the houses, they jack up property values all around them, which means that…
….When I croak over, my son will inherit a house worth A WHOLE LOT more than I paid for it, and a whole lot more than one would expect inflation to increase that value.

I want him to get the benefit of that sharp increase in value. And that’s one reason (far from the only one!) that I hope to stay here through my dotage and until I die: Money, honey! 😀

The cost of locking me up in the desired old-folkerie would absorb every penny we get from sale of this house…and then some. The longer I survive to take up space there, the more of my savings will be taken away from me.

And, at the risk of repeating myself: I want those savings to go to my son, not to some damn depressing institution!

Another Beautiful Day in Arizona…

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“Leave us all enjoy it,” as one long-gone local radio personality used to intone, every morning.

Ugh! I’d like to leave it, all right. 

But with M’hijito living here in town, I’m ain’t about to go anywhere.

Leave us all enjoy it. Sure. Right now it’s a chilly 95 in the shade of the back porch overhang. That’s at 8:05 in the morning.

Ruby and I just got back from circumambulating the park: an hour’s walk through the swampy morning. Ugh!!!

Oh well. At least we both got exercised.

Speaking of sons (as M’hijito happens to be, of mine), we walked (again) past the house where the couple’s son got caught in some sort of hijinks and was shipped off to the state prison.

They lost their home. The sleazy investors who glommed it have never tried to rent or sell it. It just sits there, deteriorating: falling apart. Neighbors must have complained, because now they’ve beat back the weeds and they keep the rotting wood picked up. More recently they did some repairs and painted.

But it’s still an eyesore.

In a fancy neighborhood of million-dollar homes. Right on the park.

Ruby-doo is still COOKED. She sitting here on the tiles, panting.

One of the advantages, I reckon, of not being covered in a coat of thick fur is that the fans in the house can cool you off.

Just now, though, I’m feeling kind of advantageless.

Those terrifying “social workers” who showed up here yesterday and gave me the third degree left me very scared. And by damn, I’m still scared.

Whatever they wanted, whatever they were up to: it couldn’t have been good for me.

This morning I tried to call a lawyer…and discovered my guys have evaporated into the fog! One has died. One no longer practices where he used to, and that place is not handing out his new phone number…if he even has one.

And..well…  I must say, I am SO alarmed by the “social worker” visit, wherein a couple of officious types tried to quiz me and extract a bunch of private information from me, that I seriously do think I should pack up my car, throw the dog in it, and drive away.

Now, not later.

Frankly, if I had someplace to drive to, that’s exactly what I would do.

But…WHERE?

My California relatives are all either dead or gone. No refuge in those parts.

Reasonable out-of-state venues are in New Mexico, parts of California, Colorado, and maybe Texas. But…the Texas relatives are dead. I can’t afford so much as to camp out in California. And New Mexico? What would I do there and where would I go???

************
Later

Well…for one thing, calm the hysteria. 😀

No, I’m not real pleased with the visit from the “social workers,” or whatever-the-hell they were. And I’m concerned that they’ll descend on my son in the middle of his very busy workday.

He does work out of his home — on his employer’s dime, which fits out a nice office and electronics and phones. So if they show up there and start pestering him, they’ll chomp big bites of paid time out of his day.

Hm. If he tells them to get lost, that no doubt will be counted against him. So he’s in the damned-if-do/damned-if-don’t trap.

****

Lately, I’ve found my daydreaming moments haunted by my late mother.  She smoked herself to death, y’know.

No kidding: the poor woman hardly passed a conscious moment without a cancer stick in her mouth. The first thing she’d do in the morning, the instant she woke up, is light a cigarette. The last thing she’d do in the evening, as she was turning out the light by her bed, is smoke a cigarette.

In between, she puffed away pretty much nonstop.

She must have been so dependent on the nicotine that she had to have a fix before any period that was likely to pass without a cigarette. And the damn things killed her.

Not a pleasant way to go, we might add.

***

In even flakier precincts, I find myself irresistibly wondering WHO sicced those flakey social workers on me.

If social workers they were. I suppose they could’ve been some kind of private snoops that someone sent over to poke into my business.

But I don’t think so. Probably they really were what they said they were: state workers sent to snoop.  But WHY? And sent by WHOM?

Those are the nervous-making questions.

****

Welp…no point in obsessing about it. But…I’ll tellya, if I could afford to pack up and move outta here, I’d be on my way to Colorado as we scribble.

 

 

 

In the Land of Looney Toons…

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Welp, speaking of Looney: I’ve lost the post I was writing. In it, I went on at length about an alarming incident: a surprise visit from a pair of social workers, who apparently were trying to elicit evidence that some of my marbles have rolled out my ears.

Luckily, Wonder Cleaning-Lady had just been here, so the house was spotless. Presumably, then, they did not conclude from a slovenly mess that I’m too marble-free to take care of myself. 😀

At least…I hope not.

Lemme tellya: these folks are REALLY scary. A significant part of their job appears to involve deciding whether you’re well enough to live in your home and take care of yourself. From what I can tell, when they show up, you’re at some risk — very possibly significant risk — of being declared non compos mentis and locked up in a facility.

One of the alarming characteristics of such folks is that they have no sense of humor. They seriously can not distinguish between something you say in jest and something you really mean seriously.

One of my schticks, for example, is the very silly proposition that I’m a-gunna throw myself off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon.

I have to ask you: How silly is that? And…if a person were really going to do such a thing, do you seriously believe they’d babble on about it in a casual conversation? Holy sh!t. Obviously, if I were going to kill myself by leaping into the air and plunging several thousand feet down a cliff, I wouldn’t tell you about it first. Would I?

So without thinking, I let part of this joke out, and HOLEEEE SHEE-UT! You’d have thought I took out a pistol and stuck its barrel in my ear.

Okay, after I calm the two down a bit, the conversation devolves into a discussion of a silly incident that followed on a quarrel SDXB and I had while he still lived in the ’Hood — years ago!

I don’t even recall what we squabbled about. But in a fit of pique, I stalked out of his house and charged off down the road, figuring to take a walk and burn off some rage.

For reasons that I also do not recall, I took it into my pea brain to walk up an alley. I think the deal was that this alley went straight from the residential street where I was walking to the street just south of my house, effectively creating a short-cut home. In stomping up this alley in the dark, I got turned around, and….eeeps! I got lost! I couldn’t tell which way was north and which way west, the directions I needed to know to get back home.

A party was going in one of the back yards, so I stopped there and asked if they could tell me which way I needed to go to reach Main Drag West. For reasons I do not know, this bunch now calls the cops, telling them a disoriented woman is wandering loose in the alley.

When the cops arrive, they quite reasonably think I’ve lost a few marbles.

You can see which way this is going, right?

I got them to take me back to SDXB’s place, where together we were able to persuade the cops that I was not stoned and not crazy, and that SDXB would take care of me for the rest of the evening.

And so it went: he drove me home; I went to bed; and that (I imagined….) was the end of that.

BUT… Apparently this escapade went into my permanent record. 

Yes. Did you know you have a record, whether or not you’re a criminal type? Be aware that whatever shenanigans you get into, even the most innocent, go into this record…

Now — several years later! — when these social workers show up in my living room, they know all about this long-ago escapade, and they suspect it’s evidence that my marbles are loose.

No kidding. 

  • Have I ever been arrested?
  • Have I ever gotten into any trouble with the cops, with my employer, at the church, with my fellow crazed drivers?
  • Am I stone cold sober at the time?
  • Do I act like I’m crazy with these women?
  • Am I coherent and level-headed?

Forgodsake: the correct answers to these questions are no, no, yes, no, and yes. I emit all of these correct answers, and prove those answers by my behavior.

Nevertheless, they decide I’m nuts and file a report with their agency to that effect. So now I have an official record as a nut case, and as far as I can tell there is NO way to change that.

Hafta tell you: I don’t know what to do about this episode. Obviously, I need to call a lawyer. But my lawyer recently died! I called his office and got no answer there. So I have no idea which way to jump.

Monday, I’m gonna have to get on the phone and start calling lawyers, at random, until I can get someone to talk with me. And hope I can get them to position themselves between me and the Authorities.

Really. This is scary enough that if my son didn’t live here, I’d pack up my house and leave the state, right now. But he is here. So I’m staying…very possibly to end up in some institution.

Quite some society we live in these days, eh? Orwell set 1984 about 41 years too soon. 

A WTF Week…

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I’d say this is One of Those Days…except that doesn’t do the current three-ring circus justice. One of Those Weeks?  Lordie…just hope “week”is the right term…

Actually, it started out several weeks ago.

What IS the matter with me? No IQ, maybe? Presumably what IQ points I had have rolled out my ears and skittered away down the gutter.

The fun began when a friend — a guy I’ve known for years through a business group we both belong to, an apparently lovely man given to a kind demeanor and an intelligent air — asked to borrow my laptop computer. Thinking he’d return it in about a week, I said why sure. 

Don’t do that, folks.

😀
Not to say
😮

He made off with my computer and…ghosted into the distance, leaving nor hide, nor hair, nor email message.

Time passed.

After nary a satisfactory reply from my alleged “friend,” my son swaggered around a bit and finally got the computer back. Very fine, thank you Dear Son.

But…turn it on and come to find out IT’S BROKEN!

For the luvva gawd!

The perp is not responding to emails asking WTF happened to it. Surprise, eh?

We took it to my favorite computer fix-it and sales store. Their staff said they couldn’t fix it: beyond their skills.

So now M’jito hauls the thing to another store, where they tell him it needs to go back to the Apple store.

Ohhhh…kay….  He takes it to the Apple store in Ritzy-Titzyville, a spectacularly expensive shopping mall in Phoenix’s Biltmore district. They now have it, supposedly fixing it…and nor hide nor hair has been heard again. My guess is they can’t fix it and that’s why we’re not hearing from them — whaddaya bet?

My computer has now been gone for weeks, and we have no word as to if or when the Apple St0re will get it fixed. Now I’m sitting before my desktop Mac, perched in a hard wooden chair in front of a conference table converted into a desk.  And that pose HURTS.

Replacing the computer will cost about $2,000. I can’t afford that.

***

Okay…over in the next circus ring…

Months ago — many months ago, nigh unto a year or so — I was involved in a fender-bender. It was raining, dark, and in a bad part of town. The woman in front of me jammed on her brakes the instant a red light turned at the intersection. I jammed on my brakes…but my car skidded on the wet, oily pavement and rear-ended her car.

As is customary in those conditions, I got a ticket for causing a wrecky-poo. Hereabouts, it’s assumed that if you rear-end someone, you’re driving too close…and nevvermind about the slippery pavement.

Months pass fairly uneventfully.

Now I’m at MayoDoc’s office with my son, and he tells the doctor about this episode and that it was all my fault.

This is accepted as evidence that I’m non compos mentis and should not be driving at all. So she writes an order that the state must rescind my driver’s license!!!!!

So now, I cannot drive legally and my son has dutifully confiscated my car.

Phoenix is an L.A.-style city — vast, spread-out, and frantic. You can’t even get to the local grocery store without being able to drive, to say nothing of a doctor’s or a dentist’s office.

So this really puts me over the barrel.

Probably I can get around, to some degree, by hiring Uber cabs. But just imagine what that will cost!!!!

****

Fortunately, there’s an Albertson’s about five or six blocks to the south of the Funny Farm; a Sprouts right across an eight-lane thoroughfare and set of lightrail tracks, and a Fry’s supermarket a few blocks to the north.

Grand fun, walking to these establishments in 100-degree heat.

This morning I started out around dawn — opening time — to visit the Albertson’s and the Sprouts. Fortunately, I have a rolling cart, which will allow me to haul a week’s worth of groceries from these fine establishments to my house.

Unfortunately…the route between my house and those fine establishments is littered with stoned-outta-their-heads bums. A lightrail train comes up that main drag and drops these fine citizens off in our neighborhood, where they can panhandle and burgle to their crusty hearts’ content. This makes the trek from the Funny Farm to either of those stores…well…shall we say “less than pleasant.”

§

The journey to the Fry’s is not quite so…umh…daunting. You can reach that shopping center by a shorter route and then dart into a stretch along a sidewalk passing a number of small stores that are usually open. If anyone starts to pester, you can whip into one of the stores, and that invariably chases them off. But of course it means you have to hang around the store until they’re gone, and hope they’re not lurking down the way, waiting to snab you again.

Complicating that option: said Fry’s is an ethnic store, the neighborhood to the north of us being a barrio. The emphasis, then, is on Mexican food…which is really kinda cool. It would be a whole lot better if I knew anything about Mexican cooking.

My good Latina friend who used to live around the corner from the Funny Farm has moved away, settling in an upscale suburb. Actually, I once thought about buying a house there, but…well, it’s quite a distance from M’jito’s house, and the other folks that I used to know over there have died or moved away. So…that kind of obviates opportunities to learn la comida mexicana.

Speaking of the which, it’s almost noon. Already too hot to walk to the grocery store. But WTF…it’ll be even hotter in an hour or two, and I do need some chow items. And so…awaaayyyyy….

Eeeek! Stop the freakin’ WORLD!

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Like it wasn’t already crazy enough…

Traipse to the credit union: pointless. Guy can’t tell me any more than I don’t already know, which ain’t enough.

Stop at a Fry’s supermarket to pick up a bag of candy to contribute to this month’s KidFest. FIFTEEN BUCKS (!!!!!!!) for a couple pounds of tooth-rot!!!

Cruise east across the city, dodging a variety of mobile nut cases. Head south of Conduit of Blight Blvd., and…

and…

HOLEEEE MACKEREL!

Not to say WTF IZZAT???????

Seriously: What the HELL is going on in the southwest Valley?

It looks — quite literally — like a bomb has dropped over there. Huge plumes of smoke are rearing up over the tract after tract after track of cheap suburban housing. It’s Orange County East, y’know: piles and piles of ticky-tacky, sold to young (mostly white…) families at extortionate prices.

Fly into the garage. Give WonderAccountant a call: Haveya heard anything?

No, she hasn’t. She fires up the boob tube and learns there’s some kinda controlled burn going on over there: “Don’t be alarmed,” we’re urged.

Uh huh. Keep calm. Unless you’re a duck, a quail, a baby quail, a deer, an antelope, or a stray cat.

Jayzuz. TELL me, somebody, puhleeeze tell me that I don’t live in this ludicrous place.

TELL me that the County Assessor is not threatening to throw me in jail if I haven’t paid some extortionate amount in property tax by…tomorrow!

No kidding.

Did a bill for this fine civic duty come before last week?

Well. Noooooooo…..

Okay, it could’ve. Could’ve been misdelivered. Okay. Sure. But if that’s so, why isn’t a WHOLE lotta other stuff misdelivered? So now tomorrow I have to do battle to figure out WTF that’s about.

One effin’ nightmare after another!

*****

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning

Welp…I still haven’t a clue.

It now appears that probably I indeed failed to pay this year’s county taxes. Tomorrow I’ll have to trek to the CU, find out if indeed the money was never paid, and if so, arrange to have them send it ASAP. Then somehow I’ll have to bust through the county bureaucracy to reach a human there and let them know the late taxes are on the way.

Presumably there’ll be some extortionate gouge for that, too.

It’s 1:15 a.m. What a great way to spend the night, eh?