Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Days of Our Lives, Dogs of Our Lives

by

Cassie the Corgi is beginning to look a little grizzled. So it crossed my mind to wonder…how old is she?

Well, she was three years old when I nabbed her from the dog pound. I got her in June of 2008. So that makes her, God help us, about 12 years old!

Anna the GerShep was 12 — just — when she shuffled off this mortal coil. On the other hand, everything that could go wrong with a German shepherd went wrong with Anna. Cassie, on the other other hand, has been bizarrely healthy. Literally, between the time I got her and the recent dental abscess surgery, she almost never saw a vet. Not for any ailment whatsoever, that’s for sure.

She still marches right along on a doggy walk — a full mile is no problem, as long as the weather is cool. (She wilts, and always has wilted, in the heat.)

Still. Twelve years old. In doggy years, this critter is as old as I am. And, subjectively speaking, that is damn old!

She probably won’t live more than another two or three years.

Ruby, on the other hand, is only three years old, in the prime of her doggy life.

So…when, not if, Cassie shuffles off this mortal coil…then what?

At that doleful time, I think, there will be two choices:

  • Do nothing and let Ruby become the queen of the roost
  • Get another dog

Why would I get another dog? Because I don’t think these little corgis are much protection. All they can do for you, really, is make noise when someone comes around. And both of them make one hell of a lot of noise.

I’ve had dogs all my adult life. Most of them have been protection dogs — sometimes for good reason.

And despite the endless stream of vet bills…damn, I miss that German shepherd!

Plus the “good reason” is back. Imagine if Anna had been here when Matthew the Garage Invader had jumped over the back wall into the backyard! If he’d survived (highly questionable), he would have been mightily glad to be delivered into the hands of the cops who beat the bedoodles out of him. An angry cop is as nothing compared to an angry German shepherd. I’ve now seen both and will take the German shepherd, thank you, to hold vigil over my junkyard.

Thanks to the city’s misguided light-rail project, our neighborhood has become infested with drug-addicted transients. And thanks to an efflorescence of roof rats, the hood is also overrun with coyotes. Whereas a German shepherd or the late great greyhound could hold its own against a coyote (a creature that can ghost over a 6-foot wall with nooo problem), a 22-pound corgi hasn’t a chance.

Whatever occupies that backyard next needs to be something that can stand its ground against a coyote as well as a prowler. Both of which we have a-plenty these days.

But…

The next dog who comes to live with me, if another one does, presumably will be inherited by my son.

He is not thrilled by small dogs. He was willing to take the corgis when I was feeling in extremis, but he made it clear these were not to be room-mates for anyone’s life: mine, his, or theirs. He prefers large dogs. And of the larger varieties of dog, he prefers retrievers.

My experience of retrievers has been, pretty much uniformly, that they are exceptionally stupid. Not as stupid as some domestic canids, but not so bright that they do well at interpreting human behavior. And because so many humans admire retrievers, all but the most obscure varieties have been ruined by overbreeding.

Charley the Golden Retriever is really sweet, but he sure doesn’t have the sharp edge that a German shepherd has. And the car phobia: what to make of that? Really, there’s nothing you can make of it other than that he suffers from a neurosis induced by irresponsible breeding practices.

Much like, say the German shepherd.

Day from Hell: Part II

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Ha haaaaa! It didn’t stop after I sat down for awhile and tried to unwind.

So come eventide, it was dinnertime for the dogs. Cassie goes in a back bedroom to dine, so that Ruby can’t shove her aside and grab her Molecules.

Dogs must have Molecules: every single last flavor molecule left on a dog dish or that might have slopped onto the floor after all the food is vacuumed into the dog.

And this is where the competition between Ruby and Cassie comes in: Flavor Molecule Wars. To keep them from tearing each other apart, I’ve taken to feeding them on opposite sides of a closed door. Since it’s now a bit too cold to put Ruby on the back porch, Ruby gets the kitchen and Cassie gets the bedroom.

While the royalty is dining, I take it into my feeble brain to use the blender in a little household hack: I wish to thin some aging hair conditioner with water so as to use it as a laundry softener — a function the stuff performs admirably.

Haul the blender jar out of its kitchen cabinet, go to set it on the countertop, and WOOP! It slips out of my hand, crashes to the floor, EXPLODES all over the kitchen. Glass flies everywhere, including into the dog’s food dish.

Ruby is terrorized. BUT…ah yes, but Ruby is a corgi. Nothing deters a corgi from eating. She’s shivering in fear, but she’s still trying to scarf down her food, which by now is glittering with sharp pieces of glass.

Snatch her up and carry her away from the chow — I hope before she swallows any glass. We’ll know by morning, I expect. Lock the shaken dog into a different bedroom; then run back there with a fresh plate of food, which she instantly attacks.

It’s been a long time, I reflect while vacuuming up glass, since I’ve broken glass all over the floor like this. Occasionally a wine glass will break in the dishwasher or sink, but dropped jars have become a thing of the past.

SDXB used to drop glasses and jars all the time. This, we thought, was because he had a depth perception problem: it was hard for him to tell exactly how far item X was from counter Y or faucet Z, and so glasses were constantly getting busted. For that reason, I bought a set of drinking glasses in the heavy Mexican bottle-glass tradition. These things are, for all practical purposes, unbreakable — years later, the entire set still resides in the kitchen cabinet. Two prior sets of less rustic-looking glassware were demolished within months.

Luckily, speaking of demolition, I happen to have not one but two extra blender jars. So despite the annoyance, the hassle, and the time suck, not all was lost.

What. A. Day!!!

Day from Hell: Halfway Point…

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Have you ever noticed that when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong?

It started yesterday, really: Arriving at the Mayo along about 2:00 p.m. for a CAT scan, I’m informed that the imaging machine has been up and down a couple of times during the day, so they’re running a little late.

How much “little late”?

Ahem…well, about three hours.

Holy fuck. It’s an hour’s drive, one way, out there: two hours through homicidal traffic, round trip. I save an hour of misery by depositing two hours in the Mayo’s misery machine.

Still, I do have other things to do with my time than twiddling my thumbs in a waiting room.

“Look,” say I. “I am not in pain and whatever ails me isn’t about to kill me. Why don’t we reschedule, and then you can move everyone who’s sitting out there looking patient/cranky/miserable up 15 or 20 minutes.”

“Oh, no no. It’s no problem. They’ve been catching up!”

Uh huh. READ “We are check-in staff, not scheduling staff.” Also known as “not my job.”

So I take a seat and wait for an hour or more. Luckily, I brought a yellow pad with which to doodle. I make some notes on the direction in which I intend to take the current mini-project.

Some people waiting there are clearly very sick (that, after all, is why you pay extra to go to the Mayo). I remain convinced that they should get priority, since they should not have to sit around till the cows come home to get attention.

An hour later, two of us get called in to a pre-examination waiting room. She’s one of the folks who is obviously, visibly, very ill. Very sweet, too. I learn, as she speaks through a paper face mask clearly intended to protect her from the contagion of her fellow waiting-room denizens, that she’s from Seattle and she has a husband who has manfully stood with her through a long and spectacularly difficult illness: he “retired” from his job to take care of her. This couple is decidedly not at retirement age. Another is a guy who is less visibly in pain, a sufferer of chronic kidney problems. He does not complain, but what he describes is something that has to be fairly excruciating. He is a Republican, but one with common sense. We get on well and if we were not at the Mayo Clinic would no doubt be solving the nation’s problems over several beers.

Finally I escape: yes, three hours late. Trudge across the Valley through rush-hour traffic (why do they call sitting in miles-long lines of cars a “rush”????). Bolt down a few bites of food, feed the dogs, and fly out the door to choir…for which I am totally not prepared.

BUT… minutes before I must race out, an email comes in from M’hijito. He has put his back out, big-time, and is beside himself a) with pain and b) with frustration that this comes just when he has arranged to take two days off work to enjoy life. Do I still have any of the droggas that I obtained during the Year of the Surgeries?

Well. Yes, I do. What he doesn’t know is that I have stashed them (where he cannot find them and take them away from me) to use as the key to my Final Exit, whenever it may be needed. Which could be…oh, very possibly right now, depending on the results from this CAT scan.

Hm.

I also have certain other chemicals obtained in states where they can be purchased legally.

A first-aid kid assembled, I fly down to his house and find him…not there.

Yeah. So…where the f*** is he? I do not know. The house looks like…well, a bachelor pad. I leave the scene to your imagination, which will have to be fairly vivid to be up for the job. So I deposit the medicaments on the kitchen counter, find a piece of paper and (miraculously!) a pen, and drop a note to him in the middle of the living room floor directing him to the source of first aid. Then fly to choir, worrying that he may be at some “urgent” care center.

Later I learn he’s gone to a movie because, says he, he feels better sitting than laying down or standing up. Read “I do not want you to know about the girl I’m with.” Okay.

Moving on…

The light dawns this morning. If anything it is even murkier than it was yesterday. Hoooollleeee sh!t.

Roll out of the sack around 7 a.m., which is about when it gets light at this time of year.

Go to e-mail to check on the Son’s condition. No clue about that…but lo! Here’s an email from a client in Singapore demanding that I produce an estimate on a project we’ve discussed in passing: by 9:00 a.m. September 22, Singapore time.

By now it’s 10:30 p.m. Singapore time, December 21.

Estimate? On what? To my knowledge, I have not even seen his current project. I search incoming and sent e-mail. On the third go-round, I realize his co-author is another of my clients, and this individual has indeed sent me the article and its associated correspondence… As attachments to an e-mail that is a reply to an e-mail from me (itself a reply) that already contained an attachment. In other words, his attachment is in a message that already contained attachments.

WTF?

I download these and find it is a large project.

It’s 9:00 before I get it figured out and calculate the costs plus the PayPal gouges and prepare a formal estimate that they can present to their institution.

BUT…I was supposed to have my car at Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic’s place at 9:00 a.m.

And I’ve forgotten to feed the dogs. Throw some food down and fly into the back of the house to wash the face,. brush the teeth, and and toss on some marginally presentable clothes. Haven’t had a chance to bolt down breakfast.

Fly back into the kitchen, pour some hot water over some coffee grounds in a French Press, slice a few bits of cheese to munch in transit. Step on a dog dish I’ve left in the middle of the kitchen floor. Twist my ankle, bruise my instep royally, but amazingly enough, fail to break the dish.

Swear like a sailor — a veteran sailor, nay, a pirate. The back door is open. The sweet little prissy little mother now living in Sally’s house hears this imprecation and exclaims in horror. F*** you, you twit, I think while limping back to the office to retrieve the car keys and the credit cards.

Along about 9:10, I leave the house, computer in tow — I hope to get some work done while sitting in Chuck’s waiting room, even though he doesn’t provide an Internet connection for the hoi or the polloi. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner is already resident in the car, having broken down yesterday: the plan was to get him fixed at Leslie’s on the way home.

Turning east into the glaring sun, I cannot find my sunglasses. I search as best as I can while driving, and cannot find them. Sh!t…what could have happened to them? It’s not something I would’ve taken into the house…but failing to find them after much groping around, I figure that has to be what happened. Either that or the damn things fell out of the car in some parking lot.

Headed out of the neighborhood… I follow a route of back streets in order to avoid the spine-wrenching speed bumps and the tooth-grinding roundabouts that decorate the most direct feeder streets. At the corner of Neighborhood Lane North-South and Main Feeder Street East-West, I spot a cop car, lights flashing. Figure one of the locals has driven out in front of one of the crazy fools who speed across Main Feeder Street E-W, so slow down for what I expect to find is a fine wrecky-poo.

Nope. No wreck. Instead, it’s a cop and a civilian car and uniformed cops walking around. And there’s the resident of the rental house on the corner, out in her front yard in her bathrobe (it is a chilly morning), looking exceptionally unhappy.

Mm-hmmm. A Police Situation.

Over the past week or so, neighbors on the Nextdoor social network have reported several incidents where creeps sorry, strangers have shown up at the front door, knocked or rung the doorbell, and when confronted with the occupant, identified themselves in various transparently spurious ways. Painfully clear that these people are looking for opportunities to burgle. So I’m thinking that’s probably what happened here. Either that or one of the spouses took it upon him/herself to wallop the other one. Who knows?

Since I’m running so late, I’ve missed the worst of the rush hour and it takes only about half the expected time to arrive at Chuck’s. Of course, because now I am late, I’m told to get in line…meaning a one- to two-hour wait. That’s OK. Car mechanics are, by and large, convenable company.

Ensconced in Chuck’s …uhm…waiting room after having sponged another half-cup of coffee from the boys, I examine the bruised foot. Hurts, but it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as expected.

Turn on the computer and consider what to do. Before leaving, I’d typed the notes I’d made at the Mayo yesterday into the work in progress; hit “save,” or so I thought. But don’t feel very creative and am worried about the Chinese math papers. So open the response to the reviewers and start to work on it in a desultory way.

Start to write a comment to Paragraph 2 when…ker-blankoooooh!!!! The file goes completely white and…yes…fucking Wyrd CRASHES, taking down the other two files that were open.

It is, as it develops, a major crash.

Manage to recover the program, but it takes another hour to recover the crashed goddamn files. The one I’d added data to and had saved seemed to have lost data. It “recovered” in several iterations, no two of which were identical — and all free of the most recently added passage. After much despair, I finally found — as by a fluke — a version that contained the data I’d entered at 7 a.m., suggesting it probably had retained the content I had entered earlier yesterday.

The Chinglish response to peer reviewers…not so much.

Fortunately, I’d only sifted through a couple of paragraphs of that thing. But every sentence that you have to do twice is a sentence that costs you money.

Chuck arrives, himself running late because his wife, who is very sick indeed, is having an exceptionally bad morning. {sigh}

Chuck and Mrs. Chuck are one of those fairy-tale couples who still, 50 years later, are still deeply, passionately in love. And when you hear Chuck describe their travails, you know that watching her suffer (unto what, at great length, will be her death) is even more painful to him than it is to her. You wish there was something that could be done, but you know there is not.

Selfishly enough, this does not help your outlook.

The men finish with the car. I search for my expensive prescription sunglasses one more time, before setting out on the roads again. No, I do not find them.

Northbound, the road is under construction (is there any street in Lovely Uptown Phoenix that is not torn up?). Finally make it to the Leslie’s pool store. Search for the expensive prescription sunglasses again. No, I do not find them.

Schlep Harvey in to be fixed. Find another piece of the disintegrating pool brush in his innards. Discuss cartridge filters with the beloved Leslie’s guy. While we’re chatting, he spots a shoplifter exiting.

This is so commonplace he doesn’t even rise to the bait. {sigh}

I do not mention to him that I’ve ordered a new cartridge filter from his competition, Swimming Pool Service and Repair (because they do not gouge me for a “trip charge,” or at least they are not forthcoming enough to admit that’s what they’re doing). Reflect on how extremely annoyed I am that a) they’re ripping me off for $1,250 for the privilege and b) Leslie’s is only charging $799 for such a filter.

Leslie’s, of course, is not advertising the installation charge, and so I feel pretty confident that the bottom line would be about the same. Still, I’m irked.

Drag the repaired Harvey out to the car, feeling happy not to be panhandled on the way. Search for the sunglasses again, thinking maybe they fell under the seats and got stuck in the exceptionally annoying narrow crevasse between the Venza’s seats and its exceptionally annoying credenza lash-up between the seats.

Back in the ‘hood, I head up Neighborhood Lane NS, retracing my back-roads route toward the house. Naturally I get behind a U.S. Postal Service truck!

Understand: the mail isn’t delivered in our parts until after 5:00 p.m. WTF is this guy doing here at this time of day? There’s not enough room to get around him, so I have to make a U-turn (a fairly elaborate maneuver on a narrow street) and go back down to an east-west neighborhood lane, make my way to Feeder Street NS, and dodge fellow nut-cases and confused workmen to get back to the Funny Farm.

It’s almost noon by the time I get home. All I’ve had for breakfast is a slice of cheese, one decent cup of coffee, and a great deal of caffeinated swill.

Fly into the house, turn on the computer. Find response to early-morning worried e-mail from M’hijito. The high-test addictive drug I delivered scares the bedoodles out of him. He declines to swallow it. I suggest he cut a pill in two or that he try the marginally legal alternative also delivered to his precincts last night. And I cannot figure out how to demand that he return the H-T AD without revealing that I want it for suicidal purposes, having determined not to go through a helluva lot more Healthcare Bullshit in the future. Some things, you simply cannot explain to anyone under the age of about 65 or 70. Especially if they’re your kid.

Drag the computer and Harvey out of the car, let the dogs into the backyard, retrieve two pieces of leftover pizza from the fridge and set them into the toaster oven to warm. Pour a glass of wine.

On impulse, search the car again. This time I finally find my spectacularly overpriced shades: under the choir binder in the passenger seat…where I’ve already searched twice, fruitlessly. The only explanation is that the damn things dematerialized the first two times I searched for them.

{sigh}

So it goes. A long day consisting of annoyance after frustration after socially delicate predicament after grief after annoyance.

Effin’ Brave New World…

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Please. I want my covered wagon and my smoke signals back…  Seriously: SDXB was just over here and remarked that we live in the kind of dystopia that was science fiction and horror fiction when we were kids. We are so ensnared with our effing “conveniences” that they now dictate our lives and spy on us for any number of unknown and unknowable parties.

Anyway, I found out why, after a gangbuster spring, editorial business abruptly fell off to zero at the start of the summer. Google, it develops, arbitrarily brands various incoming messages as “spam,” whether you ask for that or not. In addition, Google has infiltrated my Apple mail, apparently picking up “trash” classifications and deeming them “spam.”

Now, here’s the problem. I have a G-mail address with my company brand. That is, it says “@mycompany.com,” not “@gmail.com” or “@mac.com” or worse yet, “@me.com.” This looks much more professional, and for several years it’s been all over my business cards, all over my stationery, all over my email, and enshrined in the “contact” pages at my business websites. A lot of people email me at that company address. In fact, I’d venture to say most people do.

Meanwhile, though, I do not care for Google’s email interface. Miraculous though it may be, I find it clumsy and annoying to work with. Also, I have other things to do than sign in, several times a day, to a G-mail account. Nor do I want to have to sign in to two accounts every day. So I have all the @mycompany.com email forwarded to my Apple email.

Yesterday, a particularly august friend (let’s call her Friend¹) emailed and asked if I had received a message (copied and pasted into her email) from someone to whom she had referred me. The potential client never heard back, and she let Friend know it.

Well. No. I hadn’t received it.

So I go over to the G-mail account, shoof around, and find this woman’s message in Spam. Along with Friend’s message. Google has decided an inquiry about my editing and indexing services is spam. And it also has decided Friend is a spammer; it decided that some time ago, because a number of her messages resided in Google’s spam folder. Come to think of it, so did messages from several friends. Including Friend², a raft of whose recent emails were sitting there unanswered.

I can’t find any lost messages from dozens and dozens of imagined would-be clients, but since there are only 80 spam messages in that account today (most of them solicitations for sex services by women with fake Russian-sounding names), I assume Google sets up the spam box to auto-delete every month or so. Indeed, the earliest message in that folder is dated September 27, so it must hold only about a week or two of back messages. Presumably, then, any messages that went in there over the Long Dry Summer are already gone.

To give you a clue what this means: the woman whose email was rescued by Friend¹ had a project worth somewhere between $1,200 and $2,000.

It appears that Google has shimmied its sticky tentacles into my Apple system. It’s not enough that this mega-monster corporation spies on you at every turn on the Web.  Somehow G-mail has gained access to Apple mail so that, in order for me to get into my MacMail account, I first have to sign into my gmail account!!!!!!!

This occurs whenever one of my Macs is turned off and rebooted. To get back into MacMail, I have to fire up the iMac, look up the complicated password, go to Gmail, paste in the password, and be online there.

I am sorry, but I DO NOT LIKE THAT ONE LITTLE FUCKING BIT!

I don’t know how this came about, but I’m pretty damn sure I didn’t ask for it because I hardly ever go to the gmail.com accounts because I’m not interested in Russian whores from Moscow. Not knowing how it came about, I can’t cancel it because I can’t find any function to make that happen. In fact, I’m pretty sure this is something that was installed unilaterally by Big Brother.

When I discovered this, I killed a couple of hours trying to convince Google that Friend¹ and Friend² are not spam artists, but in the meanwhile realized that there’s no way I can stop it from derailing messages from prospective clients. Didn’t do any good: a day later, everything I’d installed was un-installed, and it was back to intercepting and throwing out messages from the same people.

It looks like the only way I can make this stop is to delete my business’s Google account. That is NOT good, because as I’ve said, every piece of business-related correspondence and marketing has that address on it!

And the time suck! My GOD!!!!

To advise correspondents to use a different address, you have to get EVERY contact into a message’s address line. That’s not so hard — you can send an email to “All Contacts.” BUT…you can’t make Google automatically stick those ±200 addresses into the bcc line. To put all those private addresses into the bcc line, you have to cut them, a few at a time, and paste them into “bcc.” It won’t let you highlight all > cut all > paste all. Nooooo way! You have to select a few at a time to move them over.

Apple’s procedure is even more time-sucky. In MacMail, you have to put every contact in your address book into a “Group.” Then you have to sift through to delete duplications and out-of-date addresses. THEN you can send a message to tell them not to use the old address.

So I was on the phone to an Apple tech at 7:30 this morning when SDXB showed up at the front door and the dogs went screaming BATSH!T and he kept banging at them, driving them MORE batsh!t. No coffee. No breakfast. Not even a minute to clear my mind. She was trying to figure out the simplest way to get 200 Apple contacts into a single e-mail. I finally had to get off the phone to let SDXB in; she said she’d send the instructions, which I can download and try to figure out myself.

Good luck with that.

So it looks to me like the only way to disconnect Google from my private e-mail service is to go online and delete every. single. gmail. account owned now and in the past by me and my various businesses. This includes several accounts I set up for students in freshman comp courses, so there’s an eng101 account, an eng102 account, an eng104 account, an eng235 account, an eng315 account, and on and on and freaking ON. There are accounts for business enterprises that never flew and fell to the earth, stillborn in the nest, YEARS ago.

This is going to take hours. Maybe DAYS. And since Google presumably is already into my Macmail, there’s really no guarantee that deleting those accounts will take Google OUT of my MacMail. In fact, I do not know what will happen if I delete the gmail account that Google thinks I should sign into in order to have access to MacMail. It may simply block me from MacMail permanently…because, of course, you can’t sign into an account that no longer exists.

You know, I think all this stuff, taken together, defines dystopia. We are already living in Hell.

The Endless Uphill Battle…

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Ever had one of those One-Step-Forward-Two-Steps-Backward days? Yesterday was one of those. It appears, though, that today may have flipped yesterday on its metaphysical head: one step backward, two steps forward.

Yesterday…oh God. Whatever I touched broke. Wouldn’t work. Dissolved. Undid itself. Turned into a fucking disaster. Required the attention of a professional, who was not available.

First off, the MacBook — the computer I do most of my work on because my back hurts too much to sit at a desk for any length of time — pretty much gives up the ghost. It can NOT maintain a connection to the Net. But then it starts with all sorts of other colorful frolics.

Let us say, for example, that I’ve given up on the Internet and just want to do my work. So I click to disconnect, period, from the wireless connection. So…we’re pretty sure this next antic is not a router/modem issue.

I’m typing along in, say, Wyrd or Excel, and out of the blue…CLICK! It shuts down. Before you can gasp “WTF?” it reboots…of course, losing substantial amounts of new data. Wyrd and Excel, being creatures of Microsoft, now present  you with two or three versions of every file you had open, and you have to figure out, somehow, which one has lost the least amount of data, crash out of the other versions, and save the relatively intact version under the original filename, or under the filename + a numeral to distinguish it from the one you started with.

This happens with regularity.

The machine will stay online, sort of, if I go into the back room and sit within about five feet of the router — which defeats the purpose, because there are no truly pain-free chairs in that room, at least, not one that’s suited for sitting and typing for more than about ten minutes..

MacMail starts opening messages in a pane about a third the size of the window, meaning that to read the messages you have to navigate to the green button to maximize the window…not the end of the world, but when you’re talking hundreds of messages, a certifiable PITA. I cannot figure out how to fix that.

These quirks render the computer pretty much unusable

I decide it’s probably time to buy a relatively inexpensive Windows machine plus Office 2016, the last and soon-to-be-disappeared non-Cloud-based version of Wyrd.

There’s not enough gas in the car to make it to this morning’s SBA meeting, which now takes place on the western border of the Pima Reservation…a long, long, LONG way from lovely North Central. So — all this takes place after yesterday’s encounter with the latest bum in the alley, not so much a bad thing as a sad thing — and I have a check to deposit to the S-corp’s checking account.

Figuring that the computer weirdness will turn an effort to deposit it electronically into a screaming nightmare, I decide I should drive the check to the credit union and, on the way back, stop by Fry’s Electronics to look at Windows machines, Lowe’s to buy a new hose timer, and Costco to fill up on gas. While at the CU, I’ll get two hundred bucks of walking-around cash, enough to last a couple months, at least.

Credit union: after a 20-minute drive through homicidal traffic (traffic is always homicidal here), I drive up to the building and discover the bastards have closed the parking lot! WTF? They just resurfaced that lot a few months ago? Why are they pouring more black stuff on it?

The closest parking space is about a quarter-mile away through 110-degree heat.

I park illegally, blocking another illegal parallel-parker, and fly in the door. Deposit the check, but feeling stressed about the potential for a parking ticket, forget to withdraw the spending money. Fly out the door and get back to the car before the other criminal parker returns to find her vehicle immovable.

Drive down the street to Fry’s. There I find they no longer carry the kind of table fans I used to get there. Okay: no surprise there. Over to the electronics department. They have a glorious wealth of windows hardware…woooo HOOOO! There’s even a refurbished thing with a gigantic screen and 2 TB of memory plus god only knows how many more gigabytes worth (can’t recall just now) and…gee whiz.

Fry’s has not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE sales staff lingering around an empty computer department. Literally, I’m the only customer there. Not ONE of them will give me the time of day! They’re all standing around involved in a personal conversation, and none of them even bothers to say “do you have any questions.”

Disgusted, I walk out. No wonder there were hardly any cars in the parking lot that used to be crowded all the time.

Dodging my fate once again (I’m good at that), I make my way down the street to Lowe’s. The reason I need a new hose timer is that the kitchen-timer device I ordered from Amazon leaked from the moment I attached it and yes, it does have a washer. Some months ago, Home Depot’s guy reported that they quit carrying the venerable Orbit timers because (get this!) some customer was suing Orbit and HD after the disaster that ensued when he set the thing to water his lawn and then went off on a 10-day vacation. Apparently the house’s foundation was afloat by the time he got back.

Moron. Don’t go off and leave a hose running on a cheapo timer.

But knowing that Orbit timers do leak — usually not fresh out of the plastic wrapping, but within a couple months — I figured I’d bite the bullet and get a digital timer, even though I really do not need a new learning curve so I can water the damn plants.

The cheapest digital timer was THIRTY BUCKS! Holy shit.

Exit, stage left, carrying a ten-dollar Orbit.

From there it was off to Costco.

Drive up to a gas pump, stick my card in, and am informed the card is expired, Eff You Very Much.

Hadn’t planned on going in, but now I have to trudge into the store, stand in line, pony up a chunk of dough. Might as well buy a few things. Three hundred dollars later, I’ve stocked up on a bunch of key items whose Lifetime Supplies have run low.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, so the place isn’t too busy…yet they do have enough cashiers, which is not the rule for Costco’s slow times. I get in line with my mountain of impulse buys, behind another customer with a mountain of junk.

A sweet little old lady with three (count’em, 3) items in hand gets in line behind me. I offer to let her go before me. After some politely de-rigueur demurrals, she agrees to do so.

The cashier now gets confused and racks up the guy ahead of me’s purchase to my credit card. We say no, no…confused! She fixes that.

Now our LOL steps to the front and forks over her three little items, but by then my stuff has rolled to the front of the conveyor belt.

This further confuses the hapless cashier, who racks up the LOL’s stuff on my credit card. We go nope nope nope nope and the cashier fixes this, BUT….

In the process of moving the LOL’s purchases to the front of the conveyor belt, I pick up a plastic box of blueberries, which flips open and scatters about a hundred blueberries on the floor, then slips out of my hands, falls to the floor, and (already being open) dumps most of the rest of them all over the floor, the guy ahead of me’s feet, and my feet.

The manager comes over. A clean-up crew comes over. A runner is dispatched to get the LOL a new package of berries. The LOL is upset. The cashier is unnerved. And because I’m now hysterical, I think it’s fuckin’ hilarious. I suggest to the LOL that she and I should throw in together, become bank robbers, and see what kind of fiasco we can create in a Wells Fargo. She thinks that’s funny. The cashier at this point has no sense of humor. The manager is too busy to notice.

Costco has a nice selection of little computers, and they sell the entire Office 2016 suite, on disk, for $125. That is one hell of a lot better than you can do by downloading one program at a time from Microsoft.

Probably a sweet li’l HP or Dell will do the job, for not too many dollars.

There’s just one hitch: We do not know that the problem is the Macbook.

What we do know is that the Arris router/modem the Cox dude installed when he was here is roundly reviled by Amazon customers. They do hate it…because…well…it’s given to shutting your computer down. I’ve been trying to persuade my son to help me replace it with a separate router & modem. He, in the time-honored manner of adult sons, has been dragging his feet.

I think that before I ditch the MacBook, I should make sure the problem isn’t with the wireless connection.

Make my way home through sizzling heat and crazed drivers — counting only five bums between Costco and my house, probably because it’s too hot for pandhandling.

On the way, it occurs to me that soon — very soon — I’m going to have to make a command decision.

I’m going to have to decide whether to stay in my home and do the several expensive upgrades that need to be done, or to pony up a shitload of cash to move into a neighborhood that is not the target of the City’s Bum Relocation efforts.

The Ex and I moved out of an exquisitely beautiful house that we dearly loved in the historic Encanto neighborhood because the area was overrun with derelicts that the City had pushed out of downtown in its elaborate renovation project. Most of these folks lived in SROs. The city bought or condemned the old hotels, leveled them, and left no place for the homeless mentally ill and drug addicts to live. So they all moved into the Encanto district.

And lest you think these folks are really harmless — as Dog appeared to be yesterday, as our Honored City Parents will assure you — consider the case of the paralegal who used to work in a dirty-shirt law office within easy walking distance of our house. She liked to come to work about an hour early, fix herself a pot of coffee, and use the quiet time to do the most immediate tasks before her coworkers and bosses would show up.

One morning, a prominent local bum was informed by his Voices that this woman was the Devil and he should kill her. Being an obedient type, that’s exactly what he did: he walked in the office’s front door and stabbed her to death.

This is not the sort of thing that inclines you to want to hang around a neighborhood that the City thinks is just ducky for its most unfortunate and its most neglected.

I am getting old. I no longer can handle a big dog that might provide a little protection. Nor am I especially comfortable with keeping a shotgun or a .38 on hand…too much potential for error.

Meanwhile, I’ve lived in this house almost 15 years. When I moved in, I installed a number of upgrades, all of which need to be redone. The oven no longer works. The dishwasher soon will need to be replaced. That’s about $2500 to $3,000 right there.

The pool needs to be replastered, and really, the pump should be replaced: $6,000. The exterior needs to be repainted: $2,000 to $4,000. The interior should be repainted, too. Another $2,000. The city wants to abandon the alleys and fence them off, which would help with the bum problem, but they intend to stick the residents with the cost. So we’re at…what? $12,500 to $15,000 worth of repairs and maintenance.

It’s bloody expensive to move…but it’s not that expensive. I’d probably need to replace the kitchen counters, since Mexican tile is roundly out of style and it’s cracked anyway. But that wouldn’t cost 12 grand.

If I decide to stay — really, I do not want to move — and I spend 12 or 15 grand to keep it running, the upgrades should last about 15 or maybe 20 years.

In 15 years, I will be 87 years old…and that is too old to move. I would like to live in this house until I die. But at 87, I almost surely will not have the funds to do all that maintenance over again. Nor will I have the physical strength to maintain a by-then-decrepit (again) pool.

In 20 years, I’ll be 92: even more extravagantly too old to move.

If I choose to move now, where would I move? Fountain Hills, a suburb on the far east end of Scottsdale, is a likely venue: it’s a long way from Bum Central, no ill-advised light-rail runs through it, the housing prices are more or less affordable, and it’s nice and quiet. On the other hand, it’s so far from my stomping grounds that I would have to quit the choir, make new friends (not an easy trick at this age), and would never see my son again.

There really isn’t any place in town that does not host a fair number of homeless. The tired, the poor, the wretched refuse of our teaming shores are pretty well endemic in this city. Light-rail aggravates the problem. You have to go a long way out to find a neighborhood where it isn’t an issue. Or have a lot of money. And I mean A LOT of money to buy your way into a protected district. We’re talkin’ Richistan on Steroids. And being WT myself, I personally do not find Richistan a very welcoming place to live.

I could buy a condo in one of the Central Avenue high-rises. But they’re outlandishly expensive. And what on earth would I do with the dogs in one of those places? They would have to find a new home.

Needless to say, this rumination did nothing to make my day any better.

It’s 3:00 by the time I get home: most of the day eaten up by all this Brownian motion.

I call my spy at Apple Support, having put this chore off until after the Fourth of July holiday. Leave word on his answering machine: he wants the case number, but I have so many case numbers I can’t figure out which was the one he’d worked on.

He does not call back. I’m not surprised. The laptop is now limping so badly it’s essentially dead.

Later in the day, a team of Chinese mathematicians sends over not one but two abstruse papers, asking for a bid. They also would like advice on publishing…meaning these things have yet to be brushed by the eyes of a peer reviewer.

Most of the math I edit is in bioengineering. This stuff is SCI, which has to do with information management. I could advise where to submit a paper in mathematical bioengineering, who to talk to, and how to go about it. But SCI? Not so much.

Table this message while I think about how much to charge. The Chinglish is pretty thick, which is especially problematic when I have NO clue what the authors are talking about.

Wireless connection turned off, I type up the rest of the novel “scenes” I’ve been concocting with pen & ink on paper. DAYUM! The total so far…so freaking far!…comes to over 17,000 words. What? I have eight scenes and am almost at the length of a short genre novel?

Study this and realize they’re not quite scenes: they could be construed as chapters. Okay. So…eight chapters and the first serious confrontation is not scheduled until chapter 9.

Ducky.

Decide to give up and wash the dog. This is never an easy chore; today it is made more difficult by the fact that I’ve put it off for a good two years. Because…well, it is an AWFUL chore.

First, brush out as much dog hair as possible:

Hard to believe one 22-pound corgi could even have that much hair at all, isn’t it?

Ruby, who has a more standard short coat, cannot understand why so much attention is being given to her rival, Cassie, and wishes to reclaim center stage.

She does so by placing herself between Cassie and the Human, then assuming the “WTF do you think you’re doing?” look.

Next: drag Cassie outside, kicking and fighting, and scrub her off in the hose. First shampoo her very thick, heavy hair — a lot like trying to shampoo a writhing bear rug. Then condition her fur; rub that in, rinse it out, clinging to the dog for dear life.

Run after the dog, who races in the back door and SHAKESHAKESHAKESHAKESHAKEs all over the kitchen cabinetry.

Any question yet about why I haven’t laundered this animal since the memory of human runneth not to the contrary?

Frantically dry the dog as best as possible with a couple of bath towels. It’s humid. I can’t get her fully dry, and, wishing to continue living, dare not take a hair dryer to her. She is very, very pissed.

Washing Cassie causes more hair to fall out. Every time. And yea verily. Couple hours later, she’s still damp, and clumps of fur are sticking out.

Try again to get her more dry. Brush her again, brush her brush her brush her brush her…

The second mound of fur is even bigger than the first mound, but now at least she’s starting to dry off a little.

Today…

Up at 5:30 this a.m. to race around and shoot out the door for the weekly Scottsdale Business Association Meeting.

Bolt down a piece of the cantaloupe I bought at Costco yesterday and swallow two cups of coffee while getting dressed and piling hair on top of my head. Fly out the door, running 10 minutes late.

It’s a 30- to 40-minute drive with the Commuter Cowboys, made only slightly more tolerable by the several round-about traffic-jam escapes I happen to know. Cruising toward the freeway…and realize…uh oh! Got an embarrassing urgency: out of the blue, diarrhea!

I need to go to the bathroom right now. And between that moment and the freeway, there is not one fast-food joint with a public loo.

Maybe I can make it to southeast Scottsdale.

Maybe not…

I turn around and manage to make it back to the house without having to put in an insurance claim to replace the driver’s seat, but just barely.

Now I have to wash my clothes. Goody.

What brought this on, I can’t imagine. I was fine when I rolled out of the sack this morning and fine until I got on the road. The only thing I can figure is it must have been the cantaloupe.

It seems unlikely you’d experience the effects of food poisoning in under an hour…but is there another explanation? Didn’t eat anything else today. Nothing that I ate yesterday was likely to make me sick…well, no, except maybe for some salad…I did wash the “organic” lettuce leaves, but unless you soak produce in Clorox, washing it doesn’t do much to get rid of pathogens.

Damn. Are we really so Third-World that I’m going to have to resort to what we had to do in Arabia? That was: soak EVERY piece of produce in diluted Clorox, and never eat anything (strawberries, for example) that cannot hold up to that treatment.

One halfway decent thing has happened, then, over the past 28 or 30 hours: The Apple Support guy called back this morning.

If I’d made it to Scottsdale, I would’ve missed his call.

He noted that the version of El Capitan my expensive Mac freelance guy downloaded is out of date. Suggested updating from 10.11.4 to 10.11.6; and BTW, he said, Expensive Mac Freelance was wrong in thinking the Macbook could support Sierra. Don’t try it, he advised.

He then instructed in a couple of strategies for reviving a more stable wireless connection. This resulted in crashing my iCloud sign-in, so had to jump through MORE hoops for that hassle. And he explained why MacMail has decided I should see miniature slivers of incoming messages; fixed that.

He asked me to use it for a while and then call back if there were any more issues. So far it’s working OK from the room where I prefer to work. Only one glitch in the past couple of hours:

Annoying Apple Photos will not import images from the camera: try that and you get another shut-down-and-reboot. Lovely. So I can’t adjust the color and exposure on the unlovely pictures above without loading them into Preview, which I am not going to fool with just now because my head hurts.

Ugh. Now I must prepare for a teleconference, and so…away!

Birdosaurus Rex and Bums

by

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.

We wander off on our separate ways.

There, but for the grace of God, go we.