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Common sense

Another Close Doggy Call

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Damn! These stupid people who let their dogs run loose off the leash!!!!

You’ll recall that a year or two ago Cassie the Corgi was nearly killed by some moron’s loose German shepherd. Fortunately, the mane around her neck is so thick, the dog got such a mouthful of fur he couldn’t pick her up off the ground to break her back, though he tried valiantly.

Tonight we were headed home the back way from a long stroll around the neighborhood. It was a pink dusk after one of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen.

As we came around a corner, I saw one of the neighbor’s sweet little twin daughters playing on the street, riding a cute little scooter. “Where’s her mom?” I wondered. Not an adult in sight.

But…she was not altogether unguarded.

Our young neighbors have acquired a tall, slender, questionably bred German shepherd…and that was who was keeping an eye on the little girl.

When this critter saw me and Cassie coming up the sidewalk, it flew into a full-bore charge, hackles raised and fangs set to go.

I didn’t have time to pick Cassie up, but I did manage to get between her and the shepherd. As it reached us I gave it a quick knee to the ribs and a sharp “NO! BAD DOG” and then yelled to the little girl to get her daddy or mommy. The child hesitated and so I hollered at her to run!

And thank God she took off like a shot on her scooter, out of harm’s way. Once the protective GerShep lost its concentration, it lapsed into normal dog-on-dog investigation and they were OK. Though its hackles never did lay down smooth.

And God was on Cassie’s side tonight. This shepherd was far less aggressive than the last monster, and far less dog-aversive. Or, we might figure, far smarter: it seemed to realize a pint-sized pooch wasn’t much threat, and I think it (mistakenly) believed I was sort of in charge.

The mother eventually materialized out of the house and apologized. I refrained personfully from using the Stupid B- phrase to her face.

Cassie and I retreated back around the corner, where I had to sit down on the curb for awhile, until I stopped shaking.

The older and the crankier I get, the harder it is for me to bite my tongue where stupid people are concerned. Maybe it’s because I’ve run into so damn many stupid people the tongue is getting sore.

But honestly. What gets into people?

Okay, I guess if you haven’t lived with a string of German shepherds, you don’t have a clue. But forgodsake, don’t GET a dog that’s bigger than you and is capable of removing your neighbor’s freaking head until you have some idea what you’re getting into!

A shepherd dog is bred to take care of herds of delicious ruminants. Its JOB is to PROTECT. That’s what it does, sort of like breathing. Take it into your family and present it with a couple of small children, and it will naturally think it’s supposed to protect those children. You, living just down the road from the territory of a menacing street gang and generally feeling a bit under siege, will naturally think that’s cool. You will congratulate the dog for herding up your little sheep and acting as though it would die to keep any harm from coming to them. And that will naturally confirm the dog’s instinct.

So. When you let your little kid play out in the front yard without an adult human watching over her, in an urban neighborhood like this (or probably in any other neighborhood), you signal that you are a moron. When you leave your German shepherd to babysit out there, now socialized to believe its job is to keep the wolves away from the little lamb, you not only signal that you are a moron, you open yourself to a lawsuit whose vastness defies your limited imagination.

I have sooo had it with stupid people.

Anna-in-the-garlic

R.I.P., Anna H. Banana

Is It Time to Close Down the Post Office?

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First_US_Stamps_1847_IssueSome poor mail carrier in Maryland was murdered while on his rounds last night, working after dark as too many mail carriers do these days. What a thing to die for: stuffing junk mail into people’s mailboxes.

Mail carriers are no longer mail carriers, alas. They’re trash carriers.

Maybe it’s time to think  more seriously about closing the U.S. Postal Service. It’s now performing so poorly that workers are regularly sent out after dark to deliver advertising that no one asks for and few people want.

All the coupons and advertising are freely available on the Internet. There’s no need to pay a staff and put their safety at risk to dump the stuff on our doorsteps and make us haul it to the garbage. No need to chop down more trees, burn more energy processing paper and ink, contaminate more water with ink and other chemical run-off. Why do we continue to do this?

We all enjoy seeing a piece of real correspondence land in the mailbox. But how often does that happen anymore? The only real mail I get consists of bills and bank statements. Those things can be delivered electronically for one heck of a lot less than it costs merchants, utilities, and municipalities to send them by USPS. Documents that are important enough to be physically hand delivered in paper form can be sent by UPS or FedEx — yes, it’s expensive, but there are so few of them these days that the cost should be bearable.

As for the magazines and paper catalogues a few of us still subscribe to, couldn’t those be delivered to a central place — say, at the nearest grocery store or corner shopping mall — for people to pick up in person? If you want The New Yorker delivered, you’ll have to go on down to the local store with your ID and evidence that you subscribe to get the thing. It would be hard on publishers, but since they’re on their way out anyway, the net result would only be to speed the day when these publications appear online, on Kindle, or not at all.

Dunno about you, but I get mighty tired of pulling fistfuls of paper out of the mailbox, having to sift through it — usually fruitlessly — looking for something that matters, and then throwing the whole wad into the recycling bin. I’ve actually thought of rolling the recycling bin out to the curb and sticking a sign on it asking the mail carrier to toss the junk directly in there himself. Why should I have to haul that trash around? At least he’s being paid for the chore.

But paid or no paid, why should anyone have to risk his life to deliver junk advertising to people’s doors?

Image: First U.S. Postage Stamps, 1847. Public Domain.

Got Parents? Keep an Eye on Them!

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It is freaking amazing how vulnerable we old folks get to scams and sales pitches as we descend the steps toward the grave. Lissen up,  you young pups: if you have parents, it is sooo incumbent upon you to quietly keep an eye on whatever financial mischief they’re getting up to. If not to protect them (as most of them did for you when you were too dumb to know better), then to protect whatever assets you might inherit or to delay the day, as long as possible, that the old folks become dependent on you.

Here’s what brought on that outburst: Semi-Demi-Ex-Boyfriend called, all hepped up about having dropped something in excess of five grand on an improvement to his 35-year-old tract house in Sun City, a venue that most Boomers avoid like it was radioactive. While the house is ideal for a single person who doesn’t live there year-round, Zillow believes it to be worth $6500 less than he paid for it in 2004.

Here and there around Sun City, you’ll see old masonry houses that recently have been clad in stucco. Most of these get a layer of insulation under the new mud, which in theory should save on power bills.

Welp, one of SDXB’s neighbors decided to do this. Curious, SDXB stopped by to inquire, and that gave the contractor an opportunity to offer him a smokin’ deal if he would just sign on the dotted line before the guy moved his crew out of the area. So now he’s all excited because he expects this will increase the value of his hard tent (his term: a guy with terminal wanderlust, he wishes to spend his dotage in constant motion, using the place in Sun City as a place to camp out during the winter, when the weather’s livable). And it is true that the houses modernized with a layer of stucco do look a lot better than those with naked slumpblock walls.

So now he’s saying maybe he’ll sell the place, taking advantage of what he thinks will be spectacularly improved property value, and upgrade to a better place on the golf course.

Well. This sounds grand, until you think about it:

a) During the winter, it’s a rare day when you’ll turn on the heater. Today as we speak we’re in mid-November and it’s 73 degrees on my back porch. Last month my power bill was $66; this month it will be less. Ditto SDXB’s.

b) In addition to her house in Sun City, New Girlfriend owns a lovely home in Boulder, to which she repairs at the first sign of undue warmth. SDXB either goes up there with her or soon follows, every spring. She stays there until October. He spends most of the summer there, when he’s not hanging out with his relatives at the Hood River in Oregon or visiting boyhood friends in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Thus, when my  power bills run upward of $200, he has exactly no power bills. None. Nil. Zero. Zip.

c) The two of them have developed a love of ocean cruises. They are merrily squandering their kids’ inheritance on wonderful cruises, and having the time of their lives! In summers past, they’ve been all over the Caribbean, to say nothing of the trip to Italy. And just now he’s got NG persuaded that nothing will do but what they must head for the South Pacific. Thus, between the summer home in the high country and the constant peripatetic mode, they’re hardly ever there!

d) SDXB has taken his neighbor’s word for it. He’s done nothing to check this contractor out or to get competing bids. This is SO out of character that it defies belief.

Well. IMHO if you plan to spend the entire year in one of those hard tents and if you believe you’re going to live in it until you croak over, this stuccoing scheme may not be a bad idea. Although God only KNOWS how many years it will take to recover the cost if only utility bills are taken into consideration, SDXB’s slump-block home is fully painted. A new paint job, if it’s done with a decent grade of paint, will cost him two or three thousand bucks. Newer forms of stucco come dyed to the color you please and, in theory, never need to be painted. So assuming that’s true and assuming he lives, say, another 15 to 20 years, he could save as much in paint as he spends on mud. In that case, whatever savings he realizes on the air-conditioning (which could be non-negligible, should he ever break up with NG) would be gravy.

But as a practical matter, SDXB has no intention of EVER spending another summer here in the Valley of the We-D0-Mean Sun. So that leaves us with the question of

W

T

F

???

IMHO, this is a case where a competent family member — a son or a daughter, for example — needs to be on hand to keep an eye on big-ticket decisions for an aging parent.

Of course, none of us wants to give over our autonomy to the younger generation (or to anyone else, for that matter). And naturally, none of the young folk wants to have to take on the responsibility of riding herd on an increasing frail (and so increasingly annoying) parent. However…it must be recalled that, after all, those parents shouldered 18 years or so of responsibility for the pups. Or, less altruistically: our assets are their assets. Whatever we refrain from squandering will help to keep our kids in the middle class, to the extent that a middle class survives in this country.

So. Keep an eye on us old buzzards, you young thangs.

😉

.

 

Discounted Appliances: Nifty Little Side Gig!

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The appliance repairman was just here, going on about the choices between spending $350 to repair my nine-year-old Bosch dishwasher and buying a new one. In the course of chatting, he revealed that he’s built an incredibly cool side gig, one that seems so obvious and yet not one that I, at least, had ever thought of.

As part of his job, he goes around to various retailers who sell appliances. Many, especially Sears, regularly discount kitchen and laundry appliances — sometimes deeply. Very deeply — about three weeks ago he found a dishwasher, brand-new, marked down 85 percent!

When he finds a serviceable, new appliance (note, these are not used machines), he buys it. Then he turns around and sells it for a profit on Craig’s List. He said he made $500 on the last one he peddled that way.

How about that? If you have a truck or service van that you can use to haul the things around, voilà! A handy-dandy resale business!

Is a Business Lunch with a Friend Deductible?

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Well. Technically, it is. Let’s say you have a friend with whom you also do business. You go out to lunch, and while munching your tacos you happen to talk about the project the two of you are working on, for which your friend/client is paying you — or, more specifically, your S-corporation. 😉 Let’s take this a little further and posit that you actually come to a decision, over lunch, about some tiny element in the project. In theory, that conversation magically turns a social event into a business lunch, and so in principle the cost of the lunch could be tax-deductible or chargeable to your business’s credit card.

How do you feel about that?

Saturday evening Wonder-Accountant and I went off to a choral concert (we both sing on choirs), and beforehand went to dinner. On Friday, I had engineered the planned bank-account consolidation maneuver, reducing the number of accounts and their associated complicated transactions from four to two, only one of which will ever see much activity. As a bonus, I arranged for Fidelity to deposit the funds for my share of the mortgage on a house my son and I co-own directly to our joint account, rather than bouncing the money first into my checking account and then into the joint account (my son pays the mortgage bill from that account and also uses it to accrue savings for maintenance & repairs).

As you might imagine, W-A was most pleased, since this strategy acts as aspirin to a headache, where she’s concerned. So we toasted our mutual genius over dinner and spent some time discussing it.

Presto-changeo! A business meal, right?

Possibly. But personally, I don’t feel comfortable with it, as a general practice, and so paid for my dinner out of personal cash. Ex-DH, who was a corporate lawyer, always said that any time you talk business over a meal out, even briefly, the tab becomes a business expense. W-A says that if you’re talking business over a restaurant meal, you can pay for the client’s (or vendor’s) meal with corporate money but you should pay for your own with personal funds. If that’s the case, I could have paid for hers and she could have paid for mine and thereby charged the entire meal to our respective businesses.

To my mind, the technicalities of it are beside the point. It seems to me what matters is the primary reason for the meal. If you’ve arranged with a client or vendor to meet over breakfast, lunch, or dinner for the specific purpose of discussing business, then what you have, obviously, is a business meeting. In that case, all the costs associated with it, including the tab and the mileage, should be tax-related.

However, if the people involved are friends who also do business together but they’re out on the town to have a good time, then it seems to me that the meal is a social occasion — even if business matters come up in conversation — and deducting it is fundamentally unethical.

The only person who knows that would be you. The IRS can’t know or confirm whether you organized dinner out specifically to talk business.

So…how would you regard the deductability of a meeting with a vendor or client in the privacy of a public place?

122 Unread Messages…

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Ugh! MacMail reports that 122 unread e-mail messages reside on the server. Actually, only about 30 of those are significant. But then there’s all the stuff sitting on the Canvas server, from 20 students in one course and 30 in the other.

Ugh, ugh, ugh!!!!!

Sitting in front of the computer causes physical pain. Not sitting in front of it alleviates said pain. Day before yesterday and yesterday I managed to avoid the desktop. What little, absolutely unavoidably necessary work that got done happened on the laptop, in a relatively low-pain chair — hence 122+ unanswered e-mails — and by yesterday afternoon the back and hip didn’t hurt too much.

This subjective discovery, it develops, is objectively true: one study showed just 90 minutes of sitting in front of a computer induced hypersensitivity to pain in deep tissues. Ninety minutes, eh? I’ve been known to sit mesmerized in front of this thing for eleven hours straight, getting up only briefly to grab a few bites to eat and go to the bathroom.

That tends to confirm my growing suspicion that if I’m  ever going to get over this — unlikely, after two years of unremitting pain — I’ve got to get away from the computer.

How exactly to accomplish such a thing baffles me. I make my living on the computer. Really: at this age I can’t be depending solely on Social Security and drawdowns from savings to live…that will pretty much ensure that I run out of money before I die.

On the other hand, I suppose, one could accelerate that latter proposition. There’s hardly any point in living when you’re in agony all the time. And another 15 or 20 years in the present state strikes one as less than desirable.

Oh well.

At the end of the semester, I think I’m going to engineer a two-week break from blogging, writing, editing, indexing, bookkeeping, and anything else that requires extended periods of sitting and staring at a screen. I’ll probably resurrect a dozen “best of Funny” posts to keep the blog alive.

If anyone would like to contribute the occasional guest post, that would be welcome.