So last night after the human got back from watching fireworks, the Tribe went out in back to wring out the dogs. There in the darkness I see a black form scuttling across the ground.
“Huh,” think I. “Biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen.”
Well, no: it’s a paloverde beetle: about four inches long and an inch wide, a mighty handsome monster of a bug. These critters’ babies can kill a mature paloverde tree in seven years. And yea verily, they infest the ground all around my beautiful Desert Museum specimen. They’re also going after a couple of the citrus, and I found one exit hole over by the olive tree on the other side of the house, too.
Paloverde beetles are essentially immune to bug sprays. They’re unfazed by any of your schemes to rid the world of their ugly little faces. It is, in essence, an impregnable insect.
Almost.
Curve-bill thrasher
They are not immune to thrashers and mockingbirds. Those little dinosaurs (as we know, birds are dinosaurs) can take on one of these Cretaceous cockroaches, kill it (with some trouble), and eat the damn thing.
That is one helluva bird, because a paloverde beetle is about a third the length of a thrasher, which is not small at-tall as tweetie-birds go.
So this morning I’m sitting here, and down by one of the orange trees, there’s a thrasher doing battle. A paloverde beetle can inflict a fierce bite, and this one is fighting back. You can see the bird dodge out of the way, then dart back in, grab the critter, whack it on the ground, toss it in the air, and dodge aside again.
Finally Birdosaurus rex wins out and enjoys a handsome feast by the light of dawn.
This is the benefit of fighting off the neighbors’ damn cats. No cats in the yard means more birds, safer birds, healthier birds…and lots fewer bugs.
We’ve not seen a single minion of the Ant Queen’s armies this year. Birds—almost all tweetie-birds and many game birds—eat ants.
Another beneficiary of the de-cattification campaign is the single most amazing gecko I have ever seen. He must be a good seven inches long, from the tip of his nose to the end of his graceful, whiplike tail. He lives in the termite nest…uhm, firewood stacked by the wall, as far away from the house as it can be stacked.
In the hour or three after dawn, he comes out to soak up some vitamin D, presumably: races up the wall, parks himself in the sun, and does a series of push-ups.
This, we’re told, is a strategy for cooling the reptilian body.
Lizards eat vast quantities of bugs, notably…yes!…goddamned mosquitoes. There are at least two of the little critters over there, the gigantic gecko and another in a more typical size. And lo! We have hardly any skeeters these days.
What we need here is a Bumosaurus rex. We do have a great deal more bums than mosquitoes around the ’hood these days.
Just went out, armed to the teeth, to investigate the goings-on in the alley and found this poor little guy: filthy dirty, sweaty, exhausted-looking, and claiming to be lost.
Well, he’s lost, all right, but not in a geographical sense.
He remarks on the shillelagh I’m carrying (which of course I have in hand for self-defense), and I say it’s my dog shillelagh, because you’ll run into loose pit bulls and the like around here. This is a lie: he knows it’s a lie, I know it’s a lie, but it’s convenient.
He says, “Sometimes people call me Dog.”
I say, “You’re not a dog; you’re a man.”
He says, with a grin, “A friend! I need a friend.”
{sigh}
I clue him to the activities of Catholic Social Services, who are building “low-income” (read “homeless”) housing down the street from us and suggest that if he finds himself in those parts he should go in and ask about it. I do not say that last night someone said the complex will be only for families. Virtually all of the homeless who haunt our alleys are single men.
Not for awhile, if experience speaks. I’ve now enjoyed 2017’s Cold from Hell for two full weeks. The worst of the infection symptoms have pretty well passed: the fever is gone, the nasal congestion is gone, the headache is gone, the overall sense of wet-noodle weakness is pretty well gone. But — as usual — the frantic coughing hangs on.
Speaking launches a frenzy of chest-deep coughing and hacking. I can’t even utter the words “good dog!” without flying into another cough-fest.
I’ve found, in the past, that a cough like this can hang on as long as six weeks. I hope it will fade enough for me to go back to choir in another week or two, but…the specific reason I so dread catching a cold is that it typically takes me three times as long to get over it as most people require.
At one point my great old (now retired) doctor ran an elaborate series of blood tests on me and came up with the finding (theory?) that I’m missing a small part in my immune system. That, he thought, explains my susceptibility to viruses and probably explains why it takes such a godAWFUL long time for me to get over what ought to be mild respiratory infections.
It’s also why I’m swimming in pneumonia and flu vaccines. And why I do not take communion: you couldn’t pay me to drink out of or dip a cracker into a communal cup of wine.
I think this is neither pneumonia nor flu; I think it’s a chest cold that quickly morphed into bronchitis. Accordingly, it will take a long time to get over it.
Yesterday I wanted to go to a friend’s wedding. So I spent the day swallowing Robotussin every four hours. Usually, Robotussin does exactly nothing for me. But this time around it has a mild but perceptible effect. Two of them: 1) it upsets my stomach and 2) it takes the edge off the cough, as long as I keep my mouth shut. That beneficence lasts about two hours.
I’ve held off taking the leftover codeine, partly because the cough is still productive and I think when you’re coughing up crud, your body is trying to tell you something. And partly because…yes…it upsets my stomach, to say nothing of knocking me into the middle of next week. But today the thing has reached the point where nothing much is coming up and I’m just hacking reflexively, a state that I imagine results from two or three weeks of pharyngeal irritation. Whenever I think it’s safe to do so and I don’t mind sleeping half the day, I probably will dose myself with that stuff.
Still in the middle of the current editorial project, I really can’t afford to knock myself out for a day or two.
Otherwise, the weather has warmed up nicely — we’ve had several days in the mid-nineties, a phenomenon that has, in the past, helped to clear up colds, flu, and bronchitis. The pool is warming fast. Yesterday in passing I thought it was almost warm enough for a swim. But then thought better of that! 😀 Nevertheless, a grandparent or two at the wedding (the newlyweds are themselves grandparents) remarked that the little kids had been in the drink.
Ah, the grandparents. My son’s friends came into town, the bride being his buddy’s mother. The mother-in-law came along.
I wish you could meet these two women. What a kick they are! Each in her own way. The bride and groom are latter-day hippies who never moved into the brave new urbanized techno-world we enjoy today. They raise organic food and organic chickens, and he has an elaborate aquaculture operation set up in the backyard of their north Phoenix tract house. Back-to-the-earthers who have to make a living…but who I can imagine retired with great joy in Yarnell, a perfect venue for the back-to-the-earth life. The bride’s mother appears to be a normal Midwestern small-town gal on the surface…but be not deceived. She has the most wonderful, hilarious personality. I think she’s just more fun than life. She got on the dance floor and…can that lady DANCE. Fan-freakingtastic!
I probably embarrassed my poor son again (because I also can dance in a bawdy 1960s manner, though I did try to keep a lid on it last night…sort of). When I get going, I’m embarrassing. When she gets going, she’s a lot of fun. Too bad I never learned how to do that.
March 14, 2015, 5:50 p.m. So my computers are offline, once and for all. I’m writing this in Wyrd, planning to cut and paste into WordPress tomorrow morning, when I expect to get online at my favorite coffee shop.
Been having some strange connectivity problem for the past few days, some affecting the phone line and some the usual up-and-down connection that characterizes lovely Cox.
Cox is a hell of a lot better than Qwest. But…uhm…that ain’t sayin’ much. Smoke signals would’ve been better than Qwest. One thing you have to give to Cox is that they have decent customer service.
At any rate, the wireless connection went irretrievably down this afternoon. So I have no blog. No email. No endlessly entertaining news and “news” sites. No online games. No baroque Facebook time suck. No clients…
The horror!
Cox allows as to how the problem is on their end, and they’re sending a tech over tomorrow afternoon to install a bunch of new equipment and make the thing work. Whether this will disable the new robocall blocker remains to be seen. If it does, then it’s good-bye to Cox; I’ll have to go over to Ooma, which will save me a shitload of money and inflict a shitload of hassle.
The weird thing about being stuck offline…is the horror.
I feel utterly at sea without the email and without access to the Internet to inform the editing projects.
Fortunately, the book I’m working on now is a work of fiction. So I don’t have to look up every third reference, factoid, circumstance, or stylistic quirk. For most of the editorial work I do, though, an Internet connection is not an option.
So the whole “no email, no Internet” angst is kind of irrational, at least for the time being. As a practical matter, chances are I’ll get more done and enjoy life more without the preoccupation that has become an occupation. Maybe I’ll even take the dogs for a walk this evening!
This evening I was supposed to go to a meeting, but I’m still too sick to go anywhere. Especially not to a two- or three-hour jawfest.
Probably will be too sick to go to choir tomorrow night, and probably will be too sick to go to the Thursday meeting. But just now there’s no way to send my apologies to any of the worthies who expect me to show up.
As dawn cracked this morning, I was going to write a Spring has Sprung sort of post, featuring a passel of flower images from the yard. Not so much, though.
Neither computer would read the camera’s memory chip. As it developed, I was able to access the images on the large computer, which accepts a cable connection to the camera. Copied the images to a flash drive. So that was not a connectivity problem but a memory chip problem.
I did not want to do battle with computers this morning! Got up at 6 a.m.; by 8 a.m. all I wanted to do was go back to bed and take a nap.
Fed the dogs; ate some more leftover soup; watered the plants. The weather has been in the 90s, so the potted plants need to be watered every day and the stuff in the ground needs watering about once every three days.
Brushed down the pool. To my surprise, the mustard algae was not back!
That would be because the pool was brushed yesterday. It occurred to me that pushing the pool brush up and down the walls amounts to a good way to get some much-needed mild exercise – I’ve been spending way, way, way too much time parked in front of a damn computer.
Running the nylon brush up and down the walls again, I reflected that when I first moved into the house, I was so tickled with the pool that I used to clean it and test it and adjust its chemicals every day. Now it’s lucky if it gets cleaned and tested once a month.
When did I take to neglecting this marvelous puddle? It’s obviously an asset to the house: make that a$$et. What’s with letting it go to pot??
No answer to that one. But pretty obviously the wall moss is the outcome. Sweep it down once a day: get some mild upper-body exercise and preserve a $20,000 lifestyle blandishment.
Read about 20 pages of the client’s novel – really a first read, a fast line-edit. The MS is only about 130 pages; at 20 pages a day, I can get through it in a week. Since I set a two-week deadline, this will leave another week to go over the whole thing more carefully, think about it, and offer some advice of the writing-coach variety.
By about 2:00 p.m. the wireless connection was down. It being about six hours past my naptime, I decided to shut down both terminals, disconnect the modem and the router, leave them disconnected, and go back to bed. Surely after an hour or two, the system would reset itself.
No. Not so much.
After a restless and generally miserable attempt at napping, I reconnected the peripherals and rebooted and…couldn’t get online at all.
Oh god.
Back and forth with Cox. Long, long story short, a technician is supposed to show up between three and five tomorrow afternoon and install a whole new set-up. I’m being told Cox is upgrading its equipment. The new stuff is supposed to be installed inside the house (oh, good: MORE junk to clutter up the desktop, MORE junk for me to dust!), supposedly free of cost to me except that I have to pay for backup batteries.
Shit.
Meanwhile…oh, yes, meanwhile…
Yesterday while I was enjoying a particularly miserable run-around in search of groceries that I never did manage to get, I stuck my AMEX card in a pocket that also held a metal doodad. Metal doodad scratched the fancy fucking “chip,” and it wouldn’t work at the Safeway. And that is why, among several other goddamn reasons, I wasn’t able to get the Kleenex and the cough medicine and the vinegar and the ClearCare and the cream despite stumbling around not one, not two, but three goddamn grocery stores.
Don’t ask.
So AMEX was supposed to have a new card delivered by FedEx today.
While yesterday’s antics were in progress, I was so sick I wasn’t thinking even vaguely clearly. Today I realized I hadn’t told them they HAVE to mark the package with a note that the address is on my street, not on the street just north of me that has the same name. Called AMEX this morning to see if a message could be sent belatedly; was told the package hadn’t even been delivered to FedEx but couldn’t get the dumb bunny on the end of the line to understand what I was talking about.
Later this afternoon I called again and reached someone who seemed to have some IQ points. She said the problem is that FedEx was pretty much rendered inert by the storm on the East Coast. They still hadn’t picked up the package.
So, could we PLEASE add a “NOT MY CRAZY NEIGHBOR’S ADDRESS” clue to the package?
Videlicet, my Amazon address is set up to read…
My Name
1234 North Erewhon Drive
Please NOT Lane!
Phoenix, AZ 85123
She at least was able to understand what I was talking about, but she allowed as to how adding NOT LANE to the address was impossible. Which is reasonable, but annoying.
But, she assured me, don’t worry (be happy!): you don’t have to be home because they’ll just leave the package there.
THAT’S THE POINT, I said. If the guy leaves the package at My Crazy Neighbor’s house, it will never be seen again!
They just don’t get it. When you explain this to someone else, they don’t want to believe that these people steal everything that is mistakenly delivered to their house. Most middle-class Americans, I guess, just don’t want to think bad things about other folks.
Oh well. If the card doesn’t show up tomorrow, I’ll call and cancel the AMEX account. I do have a Visa card, which is accepted in more places anyway.
To make everything perfect, the damn Nest thermostat runs on the wireless. No wireless connection: no air conditioning. It’s supposed to be 95 tomorrow!
Fortunately, I don’t normally turn on the AC until temps are in the low hundreds. But…what if this had happened in July? My house would be unlivable.
Enough with that damn thing! As soon as this dust settles, the AC guy is going to be invited to replace it with a NONprogrammable, NONwireless thermostat.
First thing tomorrow morning, I’m headed over to the Little Guy’s coffee house, where I can get a decent cup of café Americano and a free connection to the Internet. Post this thing there, then check the email, and then go on my way for an otherwise Disconnected day.
Do you ever have days where EVERYTHING YOU TOUCH goes ker-sproinnnggggggggg!And explodes in your hands? All over you?????
Okay, about 90 percent of this is because of my own carelessness. No question, I make a lot of extra work for myself by overlooking a LOT of stupid little mistakes. But DAY-um! There’s just too much of this stuff…and some of it — at least today’s some of it — is not of my concocting.
So I start at 5:30 a.m., as usual, figuring to toss off a short job and then feed the dogs and myself before getting on with the REAL work of the day, which is to plow through at least 50 pages of Most Honored Client’s current iteration of his magnum opus.
First, though, the latest Camptown Races masterpiece is on the schedule: post to Amazon. This is a nuisancey little job that can take half an hour or more, and because it’s a pesty thing to do, I’d like to get it off my plate first, before moving on with my day.
TWO HOURS LATER…finally I clicked “Publish” on the damn thing.
Problem the first: When I upload the cover art, I see that the font color selected for the title and author name is too dim to pop out against the mostly black and dark aqua background.
This is really a very cool, extremely strange and dark Halloween story, and I WANT THOSE COVERLINES TO BE EFFING ORANGE DAMN IT!
None of the oranges in my program’s standard color palette are bright enough, weirdly, to stand out against the dark background. So now I decide to create a shade of orange or red-orange or something that will work.
Three tries later, it’s clear that nothing in the red to orange range is gonna cut the proverbial mustard.
Understand, ONE try can take 8 or ten minutes. Or more, depending on how bad Cox’s “high-speed” (har har!) connection happens to be at any given moment. It takes for-freaking-EVER for a TIFF file to load to Amazon. Not as EVER as an entire MS, but EVER ENOUGH.
Finally I decide to change the font color to yellow. But the standard yellow in my palette is not gonna make it. Too grating. So once again, I have to fiddle around and fiddle around and FIDDLE around to develop a shade of yellow that doesn’t make my teeth grind.
(And I’ve broken another crown, BTW, with the tooth-grinding. Good morning to you, too.)
This looks much better. Create TIFF. Upload. Watch Amazon grind away and grind away. View result. Realize the blue “glow” effect is absolutely positively not gonna make it.
Back into the guts of the program. Adjust glow to the newly invented bright orange; transparency (against a black background!) 50 percent. Change color of font line to black. Re-upload. APPROVE! Create new full-size JPEG, create new low-res JPEG, create new thumbnail.
How do you like it, by the way? Is this creepy or is this not creepy? That horse standing in the water is a kelpie, a type of Celtic demon. Be scared. Be VERY scared!
Click on the image for a view of the REAL THING.
Upload edited, templated manuscript. Download the .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader.
This process being one that takes forever, I finally get up and feed the dogs, who have gone back to bed.
Problem the next: Amazon detects a half-dozen “spelling errors.” These all appear to be Scottish dialect spellings in the Robert Burns verse I put in the front matter. Just as I click “ignore all,” I spot ONE real typo: Scottish is set lower-case somewhere in the MS.
Yes. Well. But that particular line is the book’s subtitle, which is set all caps, so no one would know whether you typed “Scottish” or “scottish.” However, knowing Amazon, I figure I’d better fix it. They can penalize you if they think you’ve got misspelled words in your MS: apparently part of the upload process is having one of their abused, terrorized wage slaves check the copy before it goes live.
Fix one character, reload. Go brush my teeth while this takes place.
Download the new .mobi file into Amazon’s Kindle reader. Go wash my face while this grinds and grinds and grinds away.
Back to proofing the .mobi file: In said front matter, half of the little definition of what a keltie is appears in italic! WTF? The name of the source, a website, is set italic, but the blurb itself is set roman. I can NOT figure out why a half-dozen words in the blurb appear as italic.
I screw around and SCREW around with this, racking up another couple of interminable uploads and downloads.
Finally I give up, scroll down the page, retype the copy, and retype the source, leaving it roman. Delete the corrupt passage. Pull up space pull up space pull up space.
Upload and download again. Pour another cup of coffee, open the back door and sic the dog on the new accursed cat that’s come over the wall, anti-cat barrier be damned. Takes almost as long to roust the puppy out of the sack as it does to re-download the .mobi file.
Return to proofing copy. The new passage I’ve typed spells “also” as “alos.” Alas.
Fix, upload, download.
And so on to infinity. Of course I find a few other errors. By the time this process is finished, it’s 7:30 in the morning! I haven’t had anything to eat. I haven’t walked the dogs. I haven’t come anywhere NEAR starting the project I’m supposed to be spending the entire day on.
A boxed set of the first six Fire-Rider stories is slated to go live on Wednesday. I haven’t updated the table of contents on a PC.
Yeah. Clever Amazon’s clever Word-to-MOBI converter cannot read the links in a TofC created on or even touched by a Mac computer. Don’t ask.
I send the MS to Tina. In the requisite 20 seconds, she returns it with the TofC updated on one of her terminals.
Now I need to enter new lines to break this thing up into the books it anthologizes. This, I hope and pray, will not fuck up in conversion (you may be sure the “hope” part is pretty forlorn). Ten minutes later I get down to the end of the thing and realize ONE CHAPTER in the last section lacks its numeral. Entering it in the TofC doesn’t work. AND the title of that book, which is supposedly formatted in a style undetectable to the ToC function, appears in the goddamn TofC as a chapter.
So I have to reformat the book title and fix the chapter title. And send it BACK to Tina to format on her PC. But not before deleting all the work I’ve interpolated into the TofC field, so as not to bollix it up on her end.
After all this screwing around, I see I haven’t assigned an ISBN to the damn thing. This requires ANOTHER ten or fifteen minutes of dorking-around time.
Right this very minute, I drop scribbling the present post (which I started as a device to vent and maybe allay some of the frustration factor) and head over to Bowker to get an ISBN.
Do you suppose I’ve written a stupid “description” for Bowker? Hell no. So now I have to write that, which you may be sure I don’t feel like doing to such an intense degree that I come up blank. I decide to wing it.
I upload the wrong cover image for the boxed set. Where’s the one Gary did? I search all over Digital Creation for the designer’s excellent rendition. Finally find it. Re-upload the cover image. Upload the PDF; watch the computer grind away and grind away. Jump through the remaining hoop after hoop after hoop after hoop. This consumes a good 15 minutes, maybe twenty.
BTW, you must get the first boxed set. It’s an incredible bargain: SIX FIRE-RIDER BOOKS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE!
Reviews of the serial installments are trending quite well. It is NOT p0rn0graphic and is, as a matter of fact and in my not-very-humble opinion, a truly terrific book. It will go live on Wednesday, probably around 6 p.m. Pacific time.
Just as Bowker finishes killing fifteen minutes of my time, the pool pump kicks on.
Yesterday, while my friend Carol and I were at a concert, a huge monsoonish storm came up. I don’t know how much water was dumped, but…whatEVER. Because I was across town, I wasn’t here to shut the pump off by way of preventing it from sucking up bushels of flying debris. When I got home along about 5 p.m., it was making a weird noise. The pump pot was gorged. I ran outside and shut the system down, figuring first thing in the morning I’d clean out the pump pot basket.
Yeah, well… First thing this morning, I was working. And the second thing. And the third thing. And the fourth…and so on to infuckingfinity!
I swear aloud, LEAP up, and FLY to the pool equipment. Shut down the gasping system and discombulate it. So much crap has been sucked up it has burst the plastic basket. That’ll be another 15 bucks I can’t afford.
Satan, the former owner of the Funny Farm, was an inveterate Happy Handyman. As you may know, the work of handyman hobbyists is usually suspect.
One of Satan’s projects was installation of a 12 x 5 metal storage shed on the east side of the house. Instead of pouring a concrete foundation, he laid down paving blocks, upon which he set his structure. The floor of this fine building is — wait for it! — oh yes! PLYWOOD!
Yeah.
The Sonoran Desert crawls with termites.
A family of these little munchers has found the shed and is eating its way across the floor. They’ve also invaded the shelves on the brick-and-board storage I built outside the shed — so those have to be taken apart and the boards tossed, somewhere far away from the house.
Saturday, I called my pet exterminator.
His wife called this morning to explain what they propose to do. No, they can’t use their (stinky!) organic (maybe not quite SO poisonous to humans and dogs?) product on termites. They have to use a standard termite product. For the same price, she said, they’d trench and apply prophylactic treatment to the entire house. They do not understand what this will entail, and I fail to enlighten her.
Price to treat the Funny Farm with a toxic product that is almost guaranteed to make me and the dogs sick? EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAH!
I can’t very well not do it. Once they get into your house, if a home inspector spots damage you can NOT sell your house without expensively treating it, and by “expensive” we do not mean a mere $800.
This reduces me to tears. I have no idea how I am going to come up with $800, now that I’ve quit my teaching job so as to free up time to work on the publishing endeavor.
Another client sends work that she thinks I’m going to do forthwith. Alas, it will have to wait until I finish reading Magnificently Paying Client’s project, which has to be done by Friday. I don’t even open her email: it’s now another message marked “unread” and flagged with a little red flag.
I need to pay my writers. Simultaneously, I should create another spreadsheet for WonderAccountant to display checks and deposits for the S-corp, as we are having to do with my personal account thanks to the kind ministrations of Intuit.
So I get into my checkbook register, another target of my haste and carelessness. Transcribe entries for checks and deposits going back to last April. Now I realize a $300 check I wrote to one of the authors has never cleared. I’m not sure how much I still owe her, since things were a little muzzy before this.
I get in touch with her and inquire about the missing check. She’s never received it, and by the way, the Copyeditor’s Desk owes her $700.
That’s exactly what I figured, but not for the reasons I thought. Oh well.
Now it dawns on me that the missing $300 check was written and mailed on the same day as a check I wrote to another writer, who also reported that it never arrived on his end.
This means the post office has lost two checks.
I drove these checks up to the post office specifically so I could drop them into THEIR box, so they would not be stolen out of my mailbox. Thank you SO much, dear USPS.
Neither check has cleared. So I decide not to shoulder the hefty stop-payment fee to head off any fraud. In fact, if someone succeeds in fraudulently cashing the checks, the credit union will eat it anyway, since they should’ve noticed that Clorox or some such was applied to the “pay to the order of” line. I write a new check to Writer 1 and send out two other checks to a couple of other contributors. These I place in the unsecured mailbox out front, since there clearly is NO EFFING POINT IN MAKING MY WAY THROUGH A MIASMA OF ROAD CONSTRUCTION TO TAKE THESE THINGS DIRECT TO THE POST OFFICE.
It’s now 12:36. I’ve had one banana and a handful of pecans to eat today. Plus three cups of cowboy-strength coffee (it’s ready when a spoon will stand up in pot).
Every single thing I’ve touched or so much as looked at today has devolved into some kind of fuck-up. I am hungry (whaddaya bet the grill is out of propane?) and I want a bourbon and water and that is exactly what I am going to have.
Have you ever noticed how everything always happens at once? Wonder why that is…
This has been one of those uphill-haul days, wherein every single damnfool thing you want to do has to be done the hard way, and you have a LOT of damnfool things to do.
That’s because you’ve left the damnfool things to do another day and, yes, this is another day.
I cruise back into town after this morning’s networking group meeting, having heard an excellent presentation and been the target of a rousing pep talk, after the meeting, by the presenter himself. I’m hot to get to work and full of ideas. But first…
But first, I have to go by the electric supply house and pick up the lamp that was left to be rewired by way of repairing Ruby’s latest cord-eating depredation. It looks nice, and they charge me less than a quarter of what the last predator charged.
But…
Yeah. You get what you pay for. Twelve dollars and change does not enough wire to reach the outlet purchase.
The damn wire is about four inches too short.
I call. They agree to rewire it.
But this entails trying to get across Conduit of Blight Boulevard AGAIN. As you may recall, the city is building a ridiculous lightrail line up Conduit of Blight, making the entire corridor nonnavigable and rerouting rush-hour traffic through the middle of our neighborhood. You cannot get across Conduit of Blight at Main Drag South at all. So you have to drive up to Main Drag North, taking you way afield of the electric outfit, or else you have to drive two miles to the south and one mile back north — three miles out of your way — to get around the construction horrors. Make that three miles x two, if you have any designs on coming home.
Either way, the environmentally chummy public works project converts a four-mile drive into a six-mile drive. One way.
I decide to drive up to the Depot and just buy a damn extension cord. There I pay almost nine bucks for a six-foot piece of overkill.
While I’m there, I return the hose connector that the very nice sales clerk told me was a set — male and female — and that was not. Whatever it was, it was not what I wanted. It was unusable.
I hate shopping in Home Depot. Hate it hate it hate it HATE. IT. Today there’s not a soul, not even an incompetent wretch who has no idea what she’s talking about, to help. I find the paint roller I need (only because past safaris have taken me into the Veldt of Paint) but have a bitch of a time finding the extension cords, which are nowhere near where two of the worthy employees pointed me.
When I get the eventually found extension cord home and discombulate its intricate packaging, I see it has a connection that would accommodate enough plugs to light a half-a-dozen Christmas trees.
Come ON, guys. This is for ONE freaking LIVING ROOM LAMP. And I have to tape it to the floor, the table, and the wall so as to keep Ruby from eating the lamp cord for the fourth time. A big honking clunky umpteen-plug connection does not lend itself to discretion. Or to transparent packing tape.
Two choices now: Take the lamp back to French Electric and wait another week to get it rewired again, or take the lamp cord back to HD and try to find one that works.
I believe the Depot does not have regular lamp-cord sized extensions, because two HD Dudes tried to help me find the same. We all failed.
Finally I decide to check the local TruValue and, if I can find a normal 1950s-style lamp cord with one count it (1) plug on the end, I will keep the short cord on the lamp and defer returning the ridiculous extension to a day when I’m in the vicinity of an HD for some other constructive reason.
Over to the TruValue. Yes, they have such a thing: four dollah.
Climbing into my car, it occurs to me that Home Depot is upselling by quite deliberately NOT STOCKING lamp-sized extension cords.
It is hot, and it is humid. By hot we’re talkin’ upwards of a hundred degrees.
As per usual, every moron in the county gets in front of me on the road. How the HELL do they KNOW when I’m out?
The last time Ruby ate the living-room lamp cord, I moved another lamp in there and used transparent packing tape to stick the cord to the inside of the table leg, the floor, and the wall between the lamp and the light plug. This a) worked and b) was very easy.
Not so today.
It may a) work, but it was b) incredibly NOT very easy. I ended up with broken fingernails from trying to peel the damn tape off of the damn roll and wads of stuck-together tape strewn all over the living room floor. By the time the job was done, my hair was yanked and my teeth were ground.
While I was at the electric supply store, we tried to remove the lamp shade. The finial was frozen on. None of us could get it loose. But we did succeed in ripping the fabric.
This lampshade was purchased back when I had a job and could afford nice things.
I get on Amazon to try to find something comparable. The cheapest selection: Seventy-five dollah!
Holy shit.
I take a more or less functional lampshade off another lamp (which now goes naked) and put it on the repaired lamp. It looks like what it is: a cheap piece of junk from Target.
Lurking at the back of consciousness: Pay the $1,588 Medigap premium! Find out how far in hock you are to AMEX! Figure out where the money to pay these extravagant bills will come from!
AMEX? Exactly $1,000 over budget. That is twice the amount I paid on the shoe extravaganza. We will have to wait for the itemized bill to arrive to figure out the other charges.
The Medigap premium, surprisingly considering the past year’s medical misadventures, is inflated by less than $100 over the 2014 gouge. And of course, it’s allowed for in the annual budget. But still. Fifteen hundred and eight-eight dollars is fucking painful.
Because I had a meeting halfway across the city at this morning’s crack of dawn, I have not cleaned the pool pump pot, which must be cleaned every morning because the fucking palm trees cannot be trimmed because DUCK has taken up residence in the tree trimmers’ direct line of fire. DUCK is absent this afternoon, it being afternoon and the time at which she forages. Does she not KNOW about the damned garden slugs that overrun the yard at night and that are turning the basil plant into a skeleton of itself? Why is she not doing her DUCK job out there? And where the Hell is she, anyway?
One of the eggs DUCK has hidden lies exposed. What part of “grackle” does DUCK not understand?
Avian concerns, however, do not form a major part of today’s Day from Hell qualities.
Web Guru’s bill needs to be paid. I try to get online to pay this quarter’s bill. His auto-collect software wants me to sign in as…HIM!
Naturally.
I crash out of his auto-collect software and reboot. Now it tells me I owe an extra payment, which I happen to know I paid.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to cook my lunch, it being 3 o’clock in the afternoon and only slightly past lunchtime, by a mere three hours. Trusty Kitchen Timer is called into action to remind me when X or Y minutes have passed, so the grill will not carbonize the food.
Trusty Kitchen Timer is killed in action.
I try to revive her by replacing her battery.
No dice. TKT is deader than a doornail.
Why doornails are said to be dead is a question that has always plagued me, given that a) I do not know what a doornail is and b) I can’t imagine why anyone would impute either life or death to such an object.
So it goes.
The work I intended to get done was not, repeat, NOT done by 4 p.m., when I shook off the worst of this miasma. Instead of doing anything meaningful, I guess I’ll spend the rest of the day formatting another Fire-Rider episode.
Nine hundred eighty dollah and twenty-six cents. That’s what a new water 50-gallon water heater costs, installed.
I expected this, because the last time I bought a water heater — about 11 years ago when I moved into this house — the plumber said prices were headed for the stratosphere because of new safety requirements. He said then that heaters would run upwards of $600, which indeed they do. This one was $820, plus the cost of installation.
And now I see that Bradford White, the brand my new guy installed, is almost universally disliked and reviled. One buyer said their four-year-old model turned into a “blowtorch,” burned their house down, and killed their dog. That was just outside of Tucson…three months ago!
Well, the plumber didn’t get the icemaker line reattached. I may tell him to return the thing, when he comes over here tonight to connect that. Wish I’d had the sense to look it up yesterday before he installed it!!
Wouldn’t you think a plumber would know the products better?
What am I gonna do here…? There’s no way the guy is going to be able to return the thing, now that he’s installed it and filled it full of water. But holy mackerel…another Consumer Affairs commenter said a year-old model filled their home with carbon monoxide, poisoned her and her husband, and killed their dog. The thing is in the garage and the door between the garage and the kitchen is supposedly a fire door. But that door leaks like a sieve.
He wouldn’t take AMEX, so I had to give him a check. So that means I don’t have the credit-card warranty/insurance deal.
Why do I think I’m lined up for a royal screwing here? This does not look good.
I guess what I’ll have to do is buy a home warranty, which will replace the unit when it craps out (assuming it doesn’t explode my home), and also put a fire alarm and a CO alarm in the garage. There’s already a smoke alarm in the kitchen.
Another half-assed home warranty…dayum! Just what I need: another monthly charge. They cost about $500…maybe I’d be better off to simply put $42 each month toward the next water heater, which, if this one doesn’t burn the roof down around my ears first, will be in about six years and two days. It comes with a six-year warranty…which the guy failed to give me attached to the unit.
Five hundred dollah times 6 years is $3,000, enough to buy three new water heaters…
Well, meanwhile, it’s off to Costco to return the Panasonic telephone lash-up. The instructions are so complicated they are simply incomprehensible. I never have figured out how to bring up the “menu,” and to use the “Block Call” button to beat back the phone solicitors, you can’t just push the button. You have to somehow “select” the phone number, but you can’t find a way to “select.” And apparently “out of area” is not a blockable code.
The thing wasn’t that expensive, but with a thousand-dollar bill for a new water heater that may kill me, the dogs, or all of us, every little bit helps.
So last night after the human got back from watching fireworks, the Tribe went out in back to wring out the dogs. There in the darkness I see a black form scuttling across the ground.
Another beneficiary of the de-cattification campaign is the single most amazing gecko I have ever seen. He must be a good seven inches long, from the tip of his nose to the end of his graceful, whiplike tail. He lives in the termite nest…uhm, firewood stacked by the wall, as far away from the house as it can be stacked.
He remarks on the shillelagh I’m carrying (which of course I have in hand for self-defense), and I say it’s my dog shillelagh, because you’ll run into loose pit bulls and the like around here. This is a lie: he knows it’s a lie, I know it’s a lie, but it’s convenient.
