And in case you wondered where she was, well…it’s been a bit of a Looney Tunes saga.
To start with the most immediate phenomenon: Funny about Money was knocked off the “air,” as it were, along with its sister sites, Plain & Simple Press and The Copyeditor’s Desk. At least, we believed that to be true…and so it may have been, for awhile. Or maybe not.
This fiasco began when I made up my venerable mind to close my technical editing business, having tired mightily of reading academic papers in mathematics, political science, and economics. First step in this process, I figured, was to close my corporate bank account and transfer its funds into my personal checking account, thereby (I hope) simplifying next year’s tax efforts.
This process disappeared all the credit union’s data for CE Desk — some years’ worth. Fortunately I had already downloaded all the 2021 transactions. This was…wise, lucky, whatever-you-wanna-call-it. Because of course nothing can be simple…and the history of all those transactions was about to be needed.
I had been auto-paying a slew of bills out of that acccount — anything that could even remotely be construed as business- or tax-related, This included utility bills, XXS, YYY, and whatnot. I listed all of these creditors so I could call up their billing departments and arrange to have the autopays made from my now much-bloated personal account.
So I’m tooling around, more or less going on about my business, when LO!
In comes a message saying I haven’t paid the Web hosting bills for Bigscoots and they’re going to take down my three websites.
Huh?
By now, of course, the business bank account is long gone, but as far as I can tell from the year’s worth of entries I downloaded to Excel, I’ve never autopaid Bigscoots from CE Desk’s account. Repeated threats to close the three sites keep coming in.
To make a long and painful story short, eventually my Web guru, Grayson Bell, was informed of this, since it appeared we were about to lose my little Web empire altogether. He did his own thrashing around and eventually elicited a report from Bigscoots that my bills are paid in full, and there is no delinquency.
So…it appears that this was another scam like the one that came in from Amazon a few weeks ago.
The alarming thing is, these people know wayyyy too much about me. The crooks who tried to extract money from me over some supposedly unpaid bill at Amazon knew what was in my Amazon seller’s account. Or…at least they appeared to.
They certainly could have surmised some fairly accurate guesses simply by studying what I was selling (or, more accurately, not selling) at Amazon. But how would they know Funny is hosted by BigScoots?
Welllll….it develops that it’s pretty easy. You can find out where a website is hosted here… and here…and here…and here….and on and on and on. It’s public information.
Once you know a blogger’s Web host, it’s a simple matter to try to scam him or her. And that appears to be what has happened.
I don’t expect these clowns will stop harassing me, now that they’ve got me in their crosshairs. On Monday, I intend to call the FBI just to report this. The website gambit, of course, is a negligible matter. But trying to hack into my bank accounts? Not so much.
Meanwhile, the uncomfortable — sometimes outright painful — peripheral neuropathy persists. About that, the main thing I can say is that it appears our medical system leaves much to be desired. But then, we knew that…
About 18 months ago, in mid-2010, my doctor at the Mayo decided the cause of the crazy-making tingling and stinging in the hands, feet, lips, and gum were the result of a vitamin B-12 deficiency. This, she surmised, was occasioned by what she takes to be alcoholism.
Say what?
A glass of wine with dinner alcoholism does not make…at least not so as I can tell. I do not toss back half a bottle of cabernet with breakfast. I do not drink until I’m drunk. I do not drive after drinking. I do not qualify as a lush by the Mayo clinic’s criteria, or by a prominent alcohol treatment center’s self-test, or by Alcoholics Anonymous’s criteria… Turns out the woman the Mayo has assigned to me as my primary care doctor was raised by a pair of Christian Scientists.
My mother’s family were Christian Scientists, too. They are quite extreme on the subject of booze: disapprove of letting so much as a drop touch your lips.
At any rate, six months of uninterrupted tee-totaling did nothing to improve the neuropathic symptoms. Clearly if booze was the cause, there’s no cure for the ailment. But clearly, too, booze is not the cause: six months on the wagon did exactly nothing to help the misery. Nor did a year of gulping down megadoses of vitamin B-12.
When, in December of 2020, I developed vertigo — dizziness so severe that at times it was unsafe to drive my car — I started to look around…and discovered that vertigo can be caused by OD-ing on vitamin B-12. Not only that, but the British National Health Service inveighs against taking B-12 supplements at all! Turns out the stuff is not a benign drug. Not only it cause vertigo, it also can cause or aggravate peripheral neuropathy. Yea verily, it turns out the Mayo Clinic itself says the stuff can cause dizziness.
Yeah verily.
Meanwhile, a checkup at the Mayo revealed the supposed B-12 deficiency was gone. Not surprising, since I’d been tossing back 1000 micrograms a day for months and months.
Quit scarfing the B-12, and after a few weeks, the vertigo is beginning to seem better. Telling, isn’t it, that the world started spinning about three months after I started dropping megadoses of B-12…
On the other hand, a month ago I managed to reconnect with Young Dr. Kildare. He thinks the dizziness is caused by inner-ear inflammation brought about by allergies. And it must be said, the air here has been even worse than usual — which ain’t good. We’ve had week on week on week of classic Southern California-style smog. Not surprising, since our wise City Parents have modeled development of Maricopa County directly after Los Angeles County. And during all the three years we lived in unlovely Long Beach with its air so thick you often could barely see across the high-school campus, I enjoyed head and respiratory symptoms just like the ones I’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks.
YDK suggested using one of several over-the-counter antihistamines. None of them seem to do much good except for Benadryl, which has its own untoward side effects. However, taken in extreme moderation, it seems to help some.
Also the fact that a West-Coast storm system has (finally!!!) made its way over the Coastal Range and has blown the smog out of the Valley may have something to do with it.
I can’t live with this kind of smog. If, as I suspect, it’s now a permanent Thing, I’m going to have to move out of the Valley. My son is dead set against my moving at all — even to another neighborhood (to get away from the racket on Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s way and away from the commercial nursing home Tony the Romanian Landlord is installing across the street). He’ll be particularly displeased if I propose to move to Prescott, Oro Valley, or Patagonia…
None of this miasma has been helped by the two years’ worth of covid isolation.
The church pretty much shut down in response to the plague. Choir stopped. And this left nothing for me to do with my time other than walk the dog around the neighborhood.
Seriously.
Choir is now slowly resuming for social-distanced services…but alas, I dare not rejoin them. I can get spectacularly sick from just an ordinary flu bug. When I was a little girl, a doctor slapped me in the ICU and told my mother I would not be alive the following morning.
Guess that was the first time I gave the lie to a doctor, eh? 😀
But the truth is, I do NOT want to get the covid bug. That really is likely to kill me. Choral singing is one of the most dangerous things you can do during time of contagion. And I ain’t ready to go yet!
Lo! A day ago, our interim choir director sent out an email announcing that six of the members have come down with covid. Surprise!
In the absence of choir, I volunteered to help staff the church office’s front desk: receptionist duty.
Appropriate: I started my life in the work world as a receptionist…and now am ending it in the same job.
Except my first gig as a receptionist — in one of the Southwest’s largest firms — was fun. We were busy all the time, and in slow times were assigned various filing and mail-room chores. In this volunteer position…well. Literally, you can sit there all afternoon and not get even one real phone call. A phone solicitation, maybe, but that’s it. There is otherwise almost NOTHING to do. And…well…if I’m going to do nothing, I’d rather do it at home.
Meanwhile, a dear friend fell and broke her hip…within days after marrying a man she met online. Had to have surgery to fix the femur. It looks like she’s on the mend, but she’s going to have a long haul. Her doc told her the same thing the orthopedist told me: it will take about a year for the bone to heal. Arrrghhh!
Well, speaking of doing nothing, it’s almost 5 a.m. The dog has gone back to sleep, having dragged the human off the bed so as to go outside and then to mooch a doggy-treat. So I’m gonna knock this off and go back to sleep, too. I hope.
The Ph.D. may (or may not) be worth pursuing…if you have an independent source of income.
So about 80% of The Copyeditor’s Desk’s customers are in China. One of the things we do well is to polish the grammar and style for research articles on arcane topics in mathematics, science, and economics for Chinese academics, who must publish in English-language journals to advance their careers. The more of these we do, the more Chinese academics appear at the virtual door. After 
