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Common sense

Trash Scavengers: What Could Go Wrong?

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Trigger warning: This post contains an amazingly gross scheme that is not for the tender of tummy. 😉

As I’ve remarked, because my neighborhood has a problem with identity thieves and transients sifting through the trash, normally I would not throw out anything that has a bank account number on it, or a credit card number, a Social Security number…that kind of thing. But even without those items of information, someone who is raiding your trash for data to sell to identity thieves can still unearth stuff that can do you a lot of damage. In the identity-theft department, plain old junk mail can present some serious threats.

For example:

  • Any solicitation or notice that comes in from AARP signals that you’re a senior citizen and therefore a particularly vulnerable species of pigeon.
  • Notices from Medicare, your Medigap insurance, and Social Security: same issue.
  • Pre-approved credit card solicitations: All the thief has to do is change the address, and voilà! He’s got a new card in your name.
  • Periodicals. These tell an aspiring thief what your interests are and hint at how affluent you are. All those weekly Economist magazines, for example…maybe you’d just as soon not have your name and address on their labels. A copy of American Hunter tells an alert burglar you’re a member of the NRA, which means you have at least one firearm in the house…and how convenient: there’s your address!
  • Catalogs. They reveal just how expensive (or cheap) your taste is and where you shop. They also contain a bar code that can reveal vulnerable information about you.
  • Anything you throw out unopened because it’s stamped “Standard Mail” instead of “First Class Mail.” Cox (among others) inundates me with “special offers,” always delivered by junk mail. Trash digger finds one of those, bingo! He knows the house is served by Cox, not by CenturyLink.
  • Renewal notices. Costco just sent a notice for renewal. And yes, it does have my account number on it.
  • Business announcements. Fidelity sends libraries-full of prospecti for the many companies my money managers invest in. I don’t read them, because I don’t have that much time left in my life. Neither do I shred them — these things are fat, saddle-stitched booklets: just one of them would jam the shredder. A guy who understands what he’s looking at can parse out where my savings are invested.
  • Insurance company solicitations. Bar code: personal information.
  • Reminders to re-up your membership in a political party. Your political leaning is none of some thief’s business.
  • Requests for donations. Ditto your charitable inclinations.
  • Paychecks, checks for reimbursement or for freelance gigs, wage & earnings statements, tax returns and statements, bank statements, credit-card statements, medical bills, insurance bills, insurance claims and information, and random ID documents. These are usually sent by first-class mail and so are easy to differentiate from junk mail. Still: because they’re juicy pickings for identity thieves, they should never land in an unlocked mailbox. In fact, they probably should never come to your mailbox at all, locked or not. Payments to you should be made electronically — either direct-deposited to your bank account or sent through PayPal. As for those other obvious targets: get yourself a hefty steel locking mailbox. Intercept these documents at the mailbox, file them as need be, and shred them before discarding.

To shred all of the piles of junkmail the postperson delivers six days a week would soon add up to hours of wasted time. I do not want to spend any of my time tearing open envelopes and feeding their contents, a page or two at a time, through my shredder. Burning them in the fireplace is illegal, and it leaves a big mess to clean up.

Registering with the Opt-Out list to waylay prescreened credit card offers is about as futile as signing up for the National Do Not Call list. Both of these sops for angry citizens are simply ignored by mail and telephone solicitors. Signing up for do-not-send lists just wastes still more of your time.

So…is there an easier way to deal with the stacks of junk mail?

Sure, if you have a pet dog or cat.

Here’s the strategy:

Get yourself a tall kitchen trash can that has a step-on lid. This, you will use only for junk mail…and for one other kind of debris. Line the trash can with a sturdy plastic drawstring garbage bag.

Every time you visit the mailbox, drop the junk mail directly into the lined trash can, unopened.

Every time you clean the kitty turds out of the cat box, toss them in on top of the day’s layer of junk mail. Every time you pick up the dog mounds out of the yard, toss them in on top of the junk mail. When you change the cat box, pour the used cat litter over the accrued cargo of junk mail.

Keep this stash outside in the yard, since it’s likely to get a bit odoriferous before it’s time to haul the garbage out.

When the time does come, though, pour a cup or two of plain tap water over the combined mail and animal excreta. Tie the bag shut with the drawstring right before you toss it out. Over the course of a few hours in the city’s garbage bin, this will convert a yucky mess into a truly revolting mess.

And that will be your gift to your data-hunting garbage scavenger. He won’t have to break into more than one of those bags of layer cake to decide to pass on your trash.

Cox vs Ooma: Erring(?) on the Side of Caution

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So I sent the Cox tech away while I thought about the options presented by the coming exit from copper land lines on the part of Our Honored Communications Provider. It seemed to me that what the guy proposed to do was not one helluva lot different from switching the land line to VoIP. Big difference: Ooma, a prominent VoIP provider, costs about five bucks a month. Cox, having purchased a few Arizona corporation commissioners, soaks its customers for $35.

Find a guy who will babysit me through connecting VoIP, a chore that I do not feel technologically competent enough to engage. So, it’s off to the Ooma website to order up the device needed to connect through their…network, platform, or whatever it is.

Well.

Since last I reviewed this service, Ooma has added a lot of new features. In the process, they’ve added to their website. One of the additions is a certain brain-banging opacity. Nowhere, far as I could tell, can you find a page that says “Buy this, Get this, Pay this per month.” They babble on about a “smart phone for your home” (I don’t want a smart phone, dammit! I can’t figure out how to use those things), but it’s unclear whether you have to buy their phone sets to connect through their service, or whether your existing handsets will work.

Call a sales rep and get…what? Yes: a person who simply has no fuckin’ clue! No joke. So small is the clue this chickadee has that she cannot even understand the question I’m asking!

Yes. So alien is the concept that a person might have actual phones in different rooms in her house that she is incapable of grasping that I’m not talking about cell phones.

I think…fukkit. These are hoops I am just flat not gonna jump through. At least when I call Cox, I get a human being right away, and that human being usually has at least a FEW measurable IQ points between the ears. That, I suppose, is worth $35 a month.

I guess.

So now I have another Cox dude slated to come over next week and convert the damn phone system.

Do I WANT this conversion? Shit, no. My feeling is, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. You know and I know this is going to create some kind of PITA, driving up the blood pressure, creating vast inconvenience, and eventually eliciting yet another hummingbird-like rage.

In a few days, we will have telephones that go down every time the electricity is out (that will be once or twice a year), every time Cox’s cables are down (that will be every goddamn time a drop of rain falls and every time the City digs up the roads, an ongoing endeavor whose sole purpose apparently is to keep their employees busy), every time the WiFi modem disconnects itself (not so frequent as before, but still unpredictably often), and…hey! EVERY TIME I NEED A PHONE URGENTLY.

Cats, Rats, Snakes, and Coyotes

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What a lot of critter terror has been going on here in the ’hood! Or rather, at large: it’s all over the Valley.

A Facebook friend found this little guy inside her house:

She asked if it was a rattlesnake, or…what?

A great flap ensued:

FB Friend 1: Not in your house, I hope!
FB Friend 2: A scary looking snake!
FB Friend 3: Not to freak you out, [Friend], but I’m 80% sure that’s a snake.
OP: Yes. In my house. Some sort of rattlesnake, I think. It ‘had’ a triangular head and fangs. Very menacing attitude. I chased him out the front door. Having terrible aim, it now rests in peace in several pieces in the courtyard flower bed.
FB Friend 4: The shape of the head is a triangle so I’m glad he’s gone!
FB Friend 5: OMG! I would be in my car with doors locked, calling 911.
FB Friend 1: I am happy to know he is now in pieces.
FB Friend 6: May he rest in pieces.
FB friend 7: It’s a snake! ahhhhh!!
FB Friend 8: Got inside the house, did he? Are you sure it had rattles? Snakes by their nature have fangs, much as humans have molars and eye teeth.
FB Friend 9: Oh, no, [Friend]!!!! Do you leave your doors open?
FB Friend 10: I would guess a rattlesnake.
FB Friend 11: I hope it doesn’t have friends.
FB Friend 12: WonderWoman! Now I know who to call when I am in danger!
FB Friend 13: Way to go Annie Oakley!!!!
FB Friend 14: That’s scary.
FB Friend 15: Omg. Do we like snakes. Egads.
FB Friend 16: WHAT???? Why is it that I didn’t know about this? You are amazing.
OP: Turns out it was a gopher snake. A very aggressive gopher snake. I take no snake prisoners.

Yeah. All that hysteria over one harmless gopher snake. And, we might add, because of the hysteria, one fewer gopher snake to clear the OP’s property of gophers, moles, and roof rats.

It’s interesting that humans seem to be instinctively afraid of snakes, isn’t it? There have been some studies that suggest this discomfort is innate. Too bad…the critter was called a “gopher snake” for a reason: it eats gophers and other rodents. Around here, “other rodents” include roof rats, which are taking over the city. And given the disease rats carry, the damage they do to your home and vehicles, and the cost and poisonous risk of exterminating them, any day I’d druther have a gopher snake around than those critters.

So what is the appropriate response to a snake in your house?

Nothing. Leave it alone. Open the door so it can get out, and it will go out. Do not go get a shovel and chop it up into pieces. That is just plain hysterical, and — apologies to OP and her hysterical friends — stupid.

If it had been a rattlesnake, messing with it would have been stupid: she risked being bitten. It having been a gopher snake, killing it was stupid. She now can deal with gophers excavating her garden and rats cavorting in the attic all by her little self.

Friends of mine who were much more acclimated to the desert lived in an expensive house that backed onto a dry wash in Scottsdale. The wash was more or less natural desert habitat, as much as could be said in an area that had been largely bladed and built up with human habitations. Javelina and coyotes would trot up and down this little thoroughfare all the time. One day man and wife walked out into the garage and found a large, healthy rattlesnake loafing there.

They left it alone.

Couple hours later, it was gone. It never came back. They stopped leaving the garage door open so that it could get in and checked weatherstripping around all the exterior doors to be sure no room was left along the sills for a very slender guest to slip through.

Snakes don’t want to be in your house any more than you want them in your house. Sometimes they will err and find themselves where they do not want to be. When they realize their mistake, they’ll leave.

What is the appropriate response to snakes living outdoors near where some developer has ripped up the desert and built your house?

Well, the best response would have been for you and your neighbors not to have bought the houses in the first place, thereby discouraging greedy developers from ripping up the desert. But since what’s done is done… The next-best response is to encourage raptors such as hawks and large owls to nest and hunt in the neighborhood. A hawk, an eagle, or an owl can and will kill a snake. Pleased to do the job for you, ma’am, and no, there’ll be no fee for that. Well, except I’d kind of like to have that cat of yours for dessert! 😉 Keep your kittycat indoors.

Meanwhile, a like degree of hysteria is going on at NextDoor, the social networking platform for neighbors. Hereabouts, my friends and neighbors are working themselves into a tizzy because a few people have (belatedly…very belatedly) noticed that ohhh eeeeeek!!!! Coyotes live here!

People let their cats run loose around the neighborhood and then are dismayed when they’re “disappeared” by the local wildlife. Others are horrified because some people like to fill their yards with rather feral vegetation. {sigh} If you want every yard to look like a Dutch tulip garden, unfortunately you’ll have to move into an HOA.

Neighbor 1: Two houses east of FancyDan Lane and Lesser Feeder Street NS, grouses one neighbor, the house behind ours, north of us, is a double deep lot that faces Lesser Feeder. The coyotes are bedding down at night along the backside of our fence on the neighbors property in their bushes. I too have two small dogs and am concerned. I have thought about scaring them off with a b.b. gun. We are relatively new to AZ so don’t know what the laws say regarding what we can and can’t do?

Neighbor 2: If you have neighbors allowing rats, feral cats, coyotes to “bed down” and thrive, then wouldn’t you take that up with the neighbors? I saw one head into an overgrown yard on Lawrence and 11th. It simply disappeared. A coyote. Not a neighbor. BTW that yard has been that way for over 50 years. Coyote problem for much less than that.

Crabby Old Desert Rat: @Neighbor 2: Common sense, alas, does not prevail in real life. You can take up the stray cat problem with your kitty-loving neighbors until you’re blue in the face, but they will not stop letting their cats run loose to predate on the birds and to make a mess out of your yard. You can ask your neighbor to clean up the jungle in his yard — good luck with that! You can beg your neighbors to PLEASE not leave cat food and dog food out in their yards and their driveways…har har!!! Even in a homeowner’s association, many of these common-sense suggestions fail to win out — one of my best friends lives in a lovely HOA and has had problems with the neighbor’s hordes of stray cats for years. Letting your animals run loose violates that HOA’s rules, but the HOA refuses to do anything about it, and in fact, the cat lovers banded together to take over the board so they could insure they would be able to let their cats run around everyone else’s yards.

And how does anyone “allow” rats to move in? This is not an “allow” thing. The rats are here thanks to global trading — they came in on the produce we import — and they ain’t a-goin’ away anytime soon. Hence: another common sense suggestion. LEAVE THE COYOTES ALONE. They will take care of the vermin, of which we have altogether too much these days. Folks who do not consider cats to be vermin eventually will learn to keep them indoors. Those who care about their small dogs will not leave them in the backyard to yap or let them run around the park and the streets off-leash. Frankly, I’d rather have the coyotes than the vermin and the pets allowed to become pests. 😉

Breaking the Computer Addiction

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Thus stuff has got to stop! I’ve developed what really can, without exaggeration, be called a computer addiction. I can park myself in front of this thing at 5:30 in the morning and not get up until two or three in the afternoon. Or later.

And that’s when there’s no work in house!

This morning when 10 a.m. rolled around I realized I had to be out of the house in an hour and a half and I hadn’t paid the bills or showered or painted the face or put up the hair or cleaned the pool or walked the dogs or…much of anything other than to play computer games.

Typically I check the email while the dogs are doing their early- morning thing in the backyard. Then I check the news of the day…which is a lot like staring deep into a cobra’s eyes.

This wastes incalculable amounts of time. Usually I’ll find some news item I want to post on Facebook.

If Google News is a cobra, Facebook is the King Cobra of the Internet. What a time suck! It truly is hypnotic. I can piddle around on that thing for what feels like 20 minutes, then look up and realize two hours have gone by unnoticed.

By then it’s too hot to walk the dogs or exercise or even clean the pool. And usually by then I have appointments outside the house, so there really isn’t time to do those things. By the time I get home, I’m tired…and so they just don’t get done.

Gotta stop. But how?

Came up with a plan: make a list of things to do (such as “get a life”…) before the computer can be turned on at all. After this, when the dogs roust me out in the morning, I start doing things. I do not park myself in front of a computer and lapse into a trance.

  • Walk dogs
  • Feed dogs
  • Swim
  • Clean pool
  • Tend garden plants
  • Feed dogs
  • Wash
  • Paint Face
  • Eat breakfast
  • Pick up house
  • Pay bills
  • Write noveloid
  • Shop for groceries, household items
  • Do yoga, exercises
  • Get dinner
  • Go to bed

All of these get priority before the computer hallucination.

When there’s paying work to do, of course, then the routine looks more like this

  • Walk dogs
  • Feed dogs
  • Clean pool
  • Eat breakfast
  • Work
  • Work
  • Work
  • Work
  • Bolt down snack
  • Go to bed

This scheme is going to make me even more of a recluse than I already am, no doubt. Most of my social interaction now takes place by email and over Facebook.

I have no idea which is unhealthier: no social interaction, or ersatz computerized social interaction. Dollars to donuts they’re about the same.

Speaking of the which, gotta go meet some friends for lunch and a concert. Bye!

Image: DepositPhotos, © galdzer5

 

 

Roadblock Man

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Dammit!  I thought he was gone! But ohhh no! This morning when the dogs and I took our usual route around the ’hood, there he was, in front of the cat brothers’ house, dumping cat food on the sidewalk.

We have this old guy who makes a hobby of driving around Richistan during the early morning hours and feeding the outdoor cats. He’ll dump a pile of cat food in the middle of the sidewalk and then stand around waiting for the neighbors’ stray cats to come over and let him pet them.

He also carries pocketsful of large-dog Milk Bones, which he likes to dispense to passing doggy-walkers.

On the surface, this is cute and sweetly eccentric. But when you give it even just a little thought: not so much.

Today’s encounter marked the second time he handed my dogs chunks of Milk Bones after I’ve asked him not to, and the second time it’s caused Ruby to choke and fly into a ten-minute fit of frantic gasping for air. She tries to swallow the whole damn thing without chewing it up, and of course she chokes on it.

Apparently he can’t or won’t remember not to fucking do that. It was the second time I’ve had to pick her up and run with a 25-pound animal in my arms and another one in tow on a leash, hoping I could get to the emergency vet before she died.

Exactly how I imagine I’m gonna get to the emergency vet through rush-hour traffic escapes me, but I’m willing to try.

Fortunately, she managed to gag the stuff up out of her throat by the time I reached Feeder Street NW, and once again she turned out to be OK.

But one of these times, she’s not gonna be OK.

And realistically, there’s no way I can get her to veterinary help at 6:30 or 7 in the morning.

What is the matter with people? Wouldn’t you think the sight of an elderly woman RUNNING down the street with a choking dog would be at least somewhat memorable?

I haven’t seen the old buzzard for a long time. So I imagined maybe he had fallen ill or died — he’s very elderly and seems somewhat frail. Lulled into a false sense of confidence, I’d taken to walking on that street again.

But no.

The real issue is that I haven’t felt very well myself for the past several months and so just haven’t been walking the dogs at all; or when I have, it’s been later in the day. Now that three-digit temps are here to stay, we need to be out of the house by 6 or 6:30, or else we ain’t a-goin’.

So I guess we’ve just been missing him: he’s been there; we haven’t.

Obviously, it’s my responsibility to tell some nutty animal-lover not to feed random stuff to my dogs. But…

In the first place, it feels rude to yelp at some poor old lonely guy, “Hey! Don’t do that!” Which is about what you’d have to do to stop him. He charges at you with both hands full of dog “treats” and shoves them into the animals’ mouths before you can say no. And in the second place, I have asked him not to feed those things to my dogs. He either doesn’t remember or just ignores me.

When you say to him “I’d rather you not feed those to the dogs” or “Please don’t give that to the dogs,” his response is “Oh, pooh pooh! It’s just a little Milk Bone.” He thinks they’re harmless.

And they probably are. Tales that Milk Bone is full of toxic carcinogenic chemicals, it develops, are folkloric: they’re just not true. On the other hand, they’re not full of anything that’s very good for your dog, either. Sort of like candy bars for humans: empty calories. They do contain some kind of beef product, though…and Ruby is allergic to beef in all its manifestations, even cow’s ears and leather chew sticks.

Ruby and Cassie get plenty of dog treats: pieces of carrot, pieces of apple, cubes of cheese, pieces of high-quality kibble. They don’t need any more empty calories than they already get.

So anyway. The guy poses a problem. What he really poses is a road block to my favorite garden spot to walk the dogs. I don’t take my dogs to the park because of the large number of dogs, some of them aggressive, running off the lead. So that leaves Richistan as the favored shady dell in which to stroll. To get in there, I’ll have to walk two blocks north and then drop south a block. In theory we could get there by taking the street one block to the north of the Cat Dudes’ house, but that street curves south and debouches back onto our usual street…about one lot east of Cat Dudes. To avoid him, we’ll have to go way out of our way, and also avoid the prettiest streets in that part of the neighborhood.

Pisseth me offeth…

Milk Bone Ingredients
Highlighted: Things you might prefer not to feed your dog

Wheat Flour, Wheat Bran, Beef Meal and Beef Bone Meal, Wheat Germ, Beef Fat (Preserved with Tocopherols), Poultry By-Product Meal, Lamb Meal, Salt, Chicken Meal, Dried Beet Pulp, Dicalcium Phosphate, Bacon Fat (preserved With BHT, Propyl-gallate, And Citric Acid), Brewers Dried Yeast, Whey, Artificial Color (Includes Red 40, Yellow 5, Blue 1), Vitamins (Choline Chloride, Dl-Alpha Tocopheryl Acetate [Vitamin E], Vitamin A Acetate, Calcium Pantothenate, Riboflavin, Vitamin B12 Supplement, D-Activated Animal Sterol [Source of Vitamin D3]), Malted Barley Flour, Iron Oxide, Casein, Natural Flavor (Source of Peanut Butter Flavor), Sodium Metabisulfite (Dough Conditioner), Minerals (Zinc Sulfate, Calcium Carbonate, Copper Sulfate, Ethylenediamine Dihydriodide [Source of Iodine]), Soy Lecithin

Time to Batten Down the Hatches?

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Cassandra before the burning city of Troy. Evelyn de Morgan, 1898

It may be time to batten down the financial hatches…even if you’re not a paranoid crazy like this blogger. Congress has appointed a special prosecutor to look into the question of Trump’s suspected collusion with Russia in subvening the US election process — if indeed any such collusion occurred. And the guy is not our honored leader’s friend: he’s a former FBI director.

Nothing good is going to come of this, no matter which side of the bob-wire fence you happen to be on. To say financial markets are unstable is to put it mildly: the Dow is in a tailspin and the dollar is dropping. Meanwhile, household debts hit a record high this quarter.

If you haven’t already done so, now is the time to review your investments and move to the most conservative position possible. If it’s not too late, shift some assets toward cash. Avoid buying large-ticket items, such as real estate, that may be overvalued at this time. If the markets sink further as this turmoil continues — as they most certainly could — this is not the time to make any major purchases or to be unduly exposed in the market.

Prioritize pay-down of debt. The less debt you have at this time, the better. Pay for day-to-day purchases in cash, and do not borrow for high-cost items unless absolutely necessary. If you can’t afford to pay for it in cash, don’t buy it.

And…you remember what I told you about stocking in propane, water, and nonperishable foods? Do it.

Obscured in the current flap over Trump is the speculation — discovery? — that the recent global ransomware hack came out of North Korea. If that is true, in normal times it would be regarded as an act of war. More to the point, if it proves to be true, it shows that we are in the crosshairs of an unfriendly power led by a demented dictator who is certifiably insane and who has stated his hostility to the US. A better designed, more targeted attack could — and one day probably will — take down the entire financial and power infrastructure.

This will cause more chaos than any of us can even begin to imagine. And what better time to launch such an attack than in the middle of our present self-inflicted chaos?

Be prepared: not just financially but in terms of daily living:

• Have food and water stocked in.
• Keep your car filled with gas.
• If you have a long commute, plan an alternate route to get home if traffic lights and other infrastructure are down.
• Keep battery-run devices fully charged.
• Back up computer data to media that can be disconnected from your network — now, not later.
• Have some cash on hand (if there’s no power or no computer connections, your credit & debit cards won’t work).
• Stock in barterable goods, such as cigarettes, alcohol, weed, and the like.
• Stock in prescription drugs, any OTC drugs you use regularly, and first-aid supplies.
• If you’re a Second Amendment type, stock in ammunition, if you have not already done so.

Sure. I may be crazy. But that’s what they said about Cassandra…