Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Day from Hell Peters Out in the Wee Hours…

by

It was quite the day yesterday:

  • Killer bees take up residence under the outdoor deck in my favorite shady bosque.
  • Duck returns; as expected, poops on CoolDeck, with the same effect as dog poop.
  • Speaking of the which Cassie finds another cache of the neighbor’s accursed cat’s deposits in the unused flowerbed.
  • The water heater goes out, after I pony up a chunk of dough to the new arborist dude.
  • Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner comes to a dead stop. He has, it appears, croaked right over.
  • The neighbors in the rental(?) across the street announce they’re having a big chivaree for a daughter’s wedding reception — we should expect the streets the be parked up and the “music” to be loud…hope that’s not too much of an inconvenience for you folks.
  • Programming the phone system I bought turns out to require a master’s degree in engineering; damned if I can figure out how you bring up the [MENU], which you have to accomplish to make it do anything. Decide to take it back, which will help because all these little surprise expenses are gonna land me in the poorhouse.

Ohhhhh god…

§ § §

Okay, so after Arborist Dude clued me to the new occupants of the westside yard, I jury-rigged a barricade across the backyard’s narrowest reach, by way of keeping Cassie and Ruby from enraging the little gals. Ain’t it lovely?

P1030450Logged into Angie’s List and called a couple of exterminators, in search of someone who could deal with the bee issue. All wild bees in Arizona are now considered Africanized, so our new occupants posed a potential threat — not just to small dogs given to annoying them by trying to catch them on the wing, but just about anyone or anything that disturbs them.

One guy, a fellow named Irish Doherty called me back. He offered to come by yesterday evening, but the Accountant from Heaven and I had tickets to a Chanticleer concert and plans to go to dinner beforehand. No problem, said he…how’s about he comes by around 10 p.m.?

Holy mackerel.

Well, we got back to the ’hood around 10:30. When I called his cell, I found him in the middle of another job. An hour or so later, he surfaced here, just about the time the noisy party across the street was breaking up.

Get this: the guy uses organic pesticides!

Uh huh. Lots of organic things, like, oh, say, nerve gas, are organics… But whatever. He proudly showed me the label. Enough remains of my long-lost photographic  memory for me to remember the ingredients long enough to Google the only one that had a chemistry-lab-bench name. It turned out to be a common ingredient of hand cream. The other stuff was mostly odoriferous “essential oils.”

Knowing my experience with objects and substances eco-friendly, you no doubt can sense my skepticism about this proposition.

Marginally, it seems to have worked. One lonely bee was flying around out there this morning. I thought she’d gone away, but now, a few hours into the day, four or five of them are going in and out. That’s a lot fewer than were out there yesterday, but… If the guys managed to kill the queen, then the surviving bees will die. But if not, they’ll soon be back in force.

Amazingly, in the middle of the night the guy and his assistant went totally beyond the call of duty to get at the nest, which the bees had established on the ground underneath a set of boards that were bolted down. They removed the boards, sprayed like crazy, and then replaced the boards.

It was 3 a.m. before I crawled into the sack, and  of course as usual Cassie and Ruby were ready to bounce at 5 a.m. Thank HEAVEN we have no choir this morning!

Meanwhile, as I was building the Great Wall of Corgi, it dawned on me that the wire garden fencing I was layering between the old strips of picket-fence garden fencing could substitute nicely for the chicken wire I figured I was going to have to buy and lay down over the empty flowerbed that damn cat is using as its toilet. Thank gawd I never throw anything away — one fewer thing to have to spend money on and hassle with.

So I took a bunch of the stuff and dropped it on the ground where the cat has claimed its territory. Probably all that will do is move it over to some other part of the yard. Wish I could figure out how to get rid of that cat without getting blood on my hands…

And yesterday morning when Ruby barked up the duck, I sprinkled the little gal with the garden hose. Hilariously, DUCKS DON’T LIKE TO GET WET!!!!!

No kidding! She took to the sky like a 747, and she didn’t come back until…just now

😀

Chased her off again. Later today when I take Harvey up to Leslie’s to be shoveled out — after I’ve had a chance to get some rest — I’ll see if I can get one of those floating pool alarms for a reasonable price (like I’ve got even a nickel’s worth of spare cash laying around…). If it’ll go off every time she lands in the water, she’ll probably give up in short order. Then I can give the contraption to the  young couple across the street, the folks who are raising four little kids on a teacher’s salary.

Called the plumber who surfaced at SBA a few weeks ago. Our building contractor guy liked him and was impressed, so since the beloved Mr. Lutz seems to have gone out of business, we’re trying him out. He said he’d come around mid-day on Monday, meaning two days (at least) without hot water.

So I’m washing the dishes by hand, which would be OK if the ACCURSED new dish detergents actually worked. In cold water they do not touch grease or stuck-on food. To get the dishes clean last night I had to boil a pot of water on the stove and pour it into the sink, therein to soak and rewash the damn dishes.

While I was waiting for the Bee Dude to show up in the middle of the night, I finally plowed my way through an enormous, difficult, and highly technical paper on the potential complications of the various types of mastectomy.

Holy shit. If women had ANY idea of the astonishingly high rates of adverse outcomes from reconstruction, no one would even think of subjecting herself to such a thing. Ordinary mastectomy, even one that does not involve messing with your lymph nodes, poses some serious risk of very unpleasant aftereffects. But reconstruction ups that risk by orders of magnitude and adds some special nasty complications of its own.

The fact that the medico-pharmaceutical complex has launched an initiative to persuade every woman who needs a mastectomy to elect breast reconstruction…well…it’s just abhorrent. The only way doctors could possibly persuade anyone who’s not just effing dumb as a post is to downplay the many potential negative consequences and the astonishing length of time it takes to recover from such procedures. What we don’t know won’t hurt us, eh?

It appears that, thanks to the Pink Craze, we’re not only performing large numbers of surgeries that probably are unnecessary, in addition we’re inflicting even more traumatic and potentially very harmful surgery on women by pushing reconstruction.

This book is going to raise the roof.

The research is going faster than expected — I’ve had a lull in stoont papers to read. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the stuff I printed out to annotate and organize; in the course of that job, I’ve also found a number of other relevant scientific papers, which I’ll need to print out, analyze, and annotate. But progress is definitely being made. With any luck, I’ll have the proposal ready to ship off before the end of the summer and the book pretty well written by December. Sooner, maybe, if I can shake clear of enough paying work over the next few months.

And so, away…

Stuff Not Done, Booze, and Wasted Days

by

So today after the time-sucking faculty meeting, I’d planned to…

a) make a Costco run;
b) drag another stack of Medicare & Medigap checks to the credit union;
c) return something to Petco and get the dog vitamins I forgot while buying the useless piece of junk there;
d) do all the college tasks I’d listed during the meeting;
e) have a nice lunch/dinner (big meal happens at mid-day here…supposedly good for your diet);
f) write 16 weekly posts for the online 102 course;
g) write more of the current difficult scene in Fire-Rider II;
h) return strange beads I didn’t order to Fire Mountain;
i) write a post for Plain & Simple Writers;
j) write a post for Funny about Money;…

…and so on.

Welp. Got the Costco run done. That’s something. I guess.

At CC, I bought one of their wonderfully delicious (salt-saturated!!!!) roasted chickens. And some sugar snap peas. And some asparagus. And…well, you can’t have chicken without white wine, can you? A bottle of cheap white.

By the time I shot out the door, a stiff breeze had come up, bearing dark clouds from the west. Weather reports had threatened more storms this afternoon. The area up around the college and over where the Costco was hard-hit during the recent monsoon blasts, and it looked like another one was blowing in fast. Decided the checks and the dog thingies could wait until tomorrow. Besides, after two hours of cooling my heels and trying to look interested in the new chair’s every word, I was getting damned hungry.

So flew back into the central city, flew in the house, wrung out the dogs, and proceeded to saute those lovely peas, slice that nice hot juicy chicken, and tossed together an amazing salad with tender little raw asparagus spears, beet, tomato, yummy sweet mini-peppers, LGOs, and on and on. And, well…naturally, took a wrench to the wine bottle’s screw-on cap.

Decided to write a post on the baleful need for a wrench, a pair of pliers, and a heavy-duty pair of scissors or tin snips in the kitchen drawer.

Sat down to eat. And drink.

Yesh.

After consuming a half-bottle+ of that soda-poppy wine, I staggered back into the back of the house and fell face-first on the bed. Slept until five-freaking thirty!!!!!!!

Helle’s belles.

Wine is dangerous. I’ve learned, actually, that hard liquor makes a lot better choice of boozie-poos. Believe it or not.

I love wine. It tastes so good. And it’s so easy to dispense. Just tip the bottle over and presto-changeo! There’s another whole glassful! So when I’m eating that big meal in the middle of the day, I tend to merrily keep pouring enough to go with the food still on the plate…and to lose track of how much I’ve had.

I love bourbon, too. But…making a bourbon and water requires a process. You have to get up off your duff, walk into the kitchen, get the bottle down, get out the jigger, get out a glass, fill it with ice, measure the booze, pour it into the glass, and top it off with filtered ice water from the fridge.

That is what we call a hassle. Enough of a hassle to get one’s attention and say “that’s enough of THAT!” So as a practical matter, when I’m drinking hard liquor I don’t drink anything like as much as I do when I’m pouring wine.

You also have a lot more control over how much alcohol goes into a given mixed drink. Lately I’ve discovered that a half-a-jigger of bourbon mixed with the usual amount of water and ice is not a heckuva lot less satisfying than a whole jigger. Really, bourbon-flavored water is what we’re lookin’ for here. So that means that if I pour two drinks to go with a large meal, I’m actually only drinking 1.75 ounces of alcohol — the amount the gummint classifies as “one serving” of alcohol.

You can’t do that with wine. Well. You can. But who would?

It’s along about 9:40 p.m. now. I did manage to write a new post for P&S Writers. Fed the dogs. It’s raining, a much quieter, softer, gentler, cooler rain than we’ve had of late. I’m sitting on the patio watching the juice run out of this computer. The charge is down to 6%, and soon the thing will give up the ghost.

And so, to Netflix.

 

Day from Hell? Or Day from Monty Python’s Flying Circus?

by

I have exceeded my capacity to write much further about yesterday’s little drama, so feel free to go to the my corgi blog and read all about it. [?? I do not know why this link isn’t working. Enter this URL instead: mycorgi.com/profiles/blogs/parvo-really]

Not for an instant do I believe Ruby has parvo (forgodsake!). For the past hour she’s been flinging herself around pestering Cassie, barking at the neighbors, racing up and down the hall squeaking a toy, stealing a sandal and banging it on the wall, climbing on top of me, grabbing Cassie’s ball, and (let us never forget) chasing cockroaches around the backyard. This is not the behavior of a dog that is trying to slip past Cerberus and sneak into Hades.

What I do believe is that last night I encountered an unethical veterinarian who took one look at an old lady with a puppy of an expensive breed and heard the cash register ring.

The pet industry in this country (and make no mistake: that is what it is officially called — even vets will tell you they’re part of the pet industry) is a vast cash cow. There is so much money to be made in fleecing people who are besotted by their animals, it cannot even be estimated.

I should have known when I drove up there and saw signs in the parking lot reading “Reserved for Pet Parents.”

Pet parents! SNORT!!!

That is a trope whose purpose is to encourage people to conflate their animals with their children. Once they have you thinking about your dog or your cat as though it were your child, it’s easy to play on your emotions and get you to fork over any amount of money the various merchandisers in the pet industry choose for whatever service, medication, food, tool, doodad, or piece of kitsch they can come up with.

Parvo, indeed. I’m still so mad, just thinking about it, I could throw this computer across the room!

A New Day…from Hell

by

Nice timing for a Day from Hell. Wouldn’tcha know?

Welp, the day was actually preceded by a Night from Hell. Pup is sick as…well, as a dog. She’s got severe diarrhea, probably brought on by some fancy canned food I gave her. Or maybe by eating bird droppings, one of her favorite delicacies.

Whatever the cause, she got me up every two hours, on the dot, all night long.

Understand: I’m not supposed to be lifting things. But both pooches are now sleeping on the bed. Leave them on the floor and they lobby to get up. So this meant lifting the pup on and off the bed three times during the night, since I went to bed early last night. Or at least, tried to.

Fortunately she only weighs 12 pounds. More about which later…

So the third time she comes back in, she decides she wants to go into her nest, and that’s fine. Next time, she wants back on the bed. And that’s fine.

It’s fine until about 5 a.m. That’s when she barfs.

She doesn’t just barf on the bed. She holds her head over the crack between the bottom end of mattress and the footboard. So she gets barf all over the bedding and spills it down the INSIDE of the footboard!

Holy shit.

So at 5 in the morning I have to strip the bed, wash all the bedding, and remake the bed (which I just paid the cleaning lady to do), and then reach down inside there and scrub the inside of the footboard.

Good MORNING, America!

The dog has the wobbles so bad that she’s getting it all over the fur on her rear end. Fixing that entails lifting her into a bathtub half full of water, scrubbing her down, lifting her out, wiping her down with a towel, draining the tub, and scrubbing the tub with a disinfectant detergent.

That had to be done twice today.

I figure to call the vet’s office about 9 a.m. It being Saturday, if they’re open at all they’ll only be that way till about noon.

Meanwhile, though, Cassie is almost out of food, and you can be damn sure I’m not putting her on any of that canned food that seems to be making Pup sick. Cassie eats real food: 1/2 cooked meat, 1/4 cooked veggies, 1/4 cooked starch (such as rice, sweet potato, oatmeal, etc.)

Yesterday noon I put Pup on a diet of boiled chicken (that being all I had in the house) and rice, a concoction that normally helps dogs get past the wobbles. This morning she laid one almost normal BM amongst the brown puddles around the backyard, so I figured she ought to have more of that. This would entail a trip to Costco. And I needed a bunch of other Costco items.

Costco, as we know, is a species of Hell unto itself on a weekend day. So I figure I’d better get there when they open by way of evading the worst of the mobs. On Saturday morning, Costco opens at 9:30. This obviatea calling the vet at 9:00 a.m.

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that I should buy enough dog-food-making meat to last for awhile, since I’m likely to end up in the hospital some time soon. It also occurs to me that if I’m not supposed to feed Pup kibble (contains ash; promotes UTI) and if canned food makes her sick and is of questionable quality, really…there’s no good reason not to feed her real food, too.

That is going to take a lot of cooking. And it sure as hell won’t be cheap.

But the problem is, Pup is not thriving. She’s skin and bones. Six weeks ago she weighed 11 pounds. She only weighs 12 pounds today.

An entire can of this wet dog food stuff is evidently not enough nourishment for her. I inquire at the corgi forum and learn that a pup her size should be eating about two cans of it a day. One can is 13 ounces (no, a one-pound can of dog food is most certainly not a pound’s worth anymore!). One can costs $2.60 on a good day. If I have to feed her two cans of the stuff a day, that adds up to $156 to $161 a month. Just for one of the dogs. Even at $3.38/pound for hamburger, I don’t spend anything like that much on Cassie’s food. Of course, she’s only eating half as much as Pup should be eating.

I hit the 27th Avenue Costco at 9:45 and the damn place is already mobbed. Trudge through the place. Discover Kirkland’s toilet paper is still the normal size, unlike the now damn-near useless Charmin’ and the likewise Northern tissues. Buy that. Get two packages of hamburg and a giant package of pork country ribs and haul those home along with a pile of other junk. Make that piles of other junk.

The car is almost out of gas. The Costco gas pumps have lines halfway back to the road. Without thinking, I get into the shortest line, which has the pump on the far side of the vehicle from the gas tank. Costco’s gas pumps have hoses long enough to reach around the back of even a pretty big clunk like mine. But then I think…waitaminit. To do this I have to use my right hand and arm to pull and hold the hose and…uhm…I ain’t supposed to be doing that.

Decide to opt the fill-up and  head back toward the Funny Farm.

A-n-n-n-d of COURSE, as usual, Costco doesn’t have two of the things I’ve GOTTA have: converted rice and cornmeal. This means I have to traipse back into town and schlep to the Sprouts.

Arrive at Sprouts. Get the cornmeal out of the bulk bins, but they’re no longer selling converted rice (which they call “parboiled”). Goddamn it.

So I have to traipse to AJ’s. Get the rice and a nice, extraordinarily expensive Porterhouse. As long as I’m mid-town, I go by the Costco in the ghetto mall on Montebello. Price of gas is 4 cents/gallon lower than at the Costco in middle-class North Phoenix. And there’s no line at the pump.

By the time I get back to the house, it’s 12:30. The vet’s closed. Figure if Pup keeps getting worse, I’ll call Alta Vista tomorrow — they’re open 7 days a week.

It’s 110 degrees outside. Pup can’t be left outside to do her thing for any length of time. She lobbies to go out about every 10 minutes and doesn’t want to come inside. Every fifteen minutes, then, I have to go outdoors and coax her back into the house.

Fix lunch/dinner. Start cooking meat. Cook two large pans of burger. Decide I’d better not try to cook the pork in the slow-cooker, because it’ll be too heavy to pick up. Especially considering that I’ve already picked up way too many things since 5 a.m.

Decide to take a nap, with heating pad on back and ice pack on boob.

I’m  not puttin’ that dog on the bed, but decide to leave her out of her crate, figuring I’d rather clean up the floor than have to take apart a cage that’s wedged between the bed and a wall and the bureau drawer and launder the dog bedding and drag the cage parts outside and scrub them down.

I was right.

Roll out of the sack. Clean three puddles and a mound off the floor. Light candles around the room to help burn off the stink. Set two fans to blowing, too.

Dog back into the bathtub. Lift, scrub, rinse, lift, dry.

Cook pork in giant frying pan. Make up rice, defrost and chop veggies in the food processor. Fill every freezer container in the house with dog food; store the pork dog food in ZipLock bags. Freeze. This takes the rest of the afternoon.

Feed dogs. Scrub pans. Jam pots, pans, and bowls into washer.

Puppy emitting foul gas. But she’s not so indisposed that she can’t chase a cockroach around the garage.

Waaack! DON’T EAT THAT ROACH! NO WONDER YOU’RE SICK!

Pup runs outside, finds giant slugs that like to come out after dark and stroll around the backyard. Roach darts out of the garage and streaks away. Pup gives chase. YOU!!! LEAVE THAT DAMN COCKROACH ALONE!

What must the neighbors think?

Flop down in front of Netflix with another ice pack on the boob. Start typing this post.

Decluttering Hell: File Cabinets

by

Lookit this…

P1020418

And this…

P1020419

And this!!!

P1020420

This weekend I spent seven hours shoveling out file cabinets!

The accountant, who’s also doing my bookkeeping, would like to get file folders that contain only a few months’ worth of statements and receipts, rather than a pile that requires me to rent a llama to get the junk to her office. These are records that need to be saved for seven years, and so to accommodate her wish, I had to break free some space in the file cabinets in the office and the garage. The current bank account and charge card records reside in my desk file drawers, which have just enough room to hold them. Having to create duplicate files and add them to yet more hanging file folders ain’t gonna work.

The four-drawer garage file cabinet was jammed, and the two-drawer model in the office was also about maxed.

Problem is, I never know what to keep and what is safe to throw out. The ex- (the corporate lawyer, who presumably should know) kept every scrap of paper having to do with finances, jobs, etc. all the way back to before the beginning of our 25-year-long marriage. He kept every check he ever wrote — and in those days that was quite a few. I expect to this day he has some set of bureau drawers packed full of that kind of stuff.

That sort of imprinted me with the importance of keeping anything for which, by the remotest chance, you might be called to account.

All right…so, it was off to the Accountant from Nirvana to get the facts on record storage. Via e-mail, the Q&A:

•  What about statements and paperwork for homeowner’s and auto insurance, dating back to the mid-1990s? Can that stuff go? I have a new insurance company. Is there any reason I might be asked to prove that I had a car or house covered in the past? If I have to keep some of it, how much to I need to keep?

Keep for 3 years.

• Statements from old, long-closed investment management accounts? Statements from the 403(b) at GDU, which has now been rolled into my big IRA? Statements for mutual funds that I no longer own? These go back 15 or 20 years. At one point Reimer (investment manager) asked me to come up with evidence for the “cost basis” of some Vanguard account. I don’t even know what a cost basis is, much less how to find it in that mountain of paper. Apparently he wanted to know how much I had originally invested, back in the 1980s. I managed to unearth what I thought was the first statement from Vanguard, but he said that wasn’t it. Do I have to keep all these stacks of old statements? 

Keep the December statement only (or whatever month shows a good summary for the entire year).

• Bank and credit union statements for accounts that have been closed? Some date back to the 1990s. Some are more recent. 

Save for 7 years.

• How about pay stubs dating back to my first pay period on the job at GDU? At one point my first paycheck came in handy…at retirement, GDU tried to claim I’d started a year later than I really had, thereby trying to screw me out of a year’s worth of RASL credit, to the tune of several thousand dollah (yeah, i know it’s a huge faceless mindless institution, but in my paranoia i do not believe for a minute that there’s no agency behind that kind of thing). Should all those job records be kept? Some of them? Which ones, if only a portion?

Toss them all once you receive your W-2 for that year.

• How about records of annual reviews, student evaluations, CYA notes on formal proceedings with a particularly nasty colleague that could have led to a lawsuit? Don’t know if anything could still come out of it — the student involved has since moved on, and there surely must be some kind of statute of limitations. What on earth to do with THAT pile of paper???? 

I don’t know about those types of professional issues.

•  Evidence of malfeasance on the part of a former chair, notoriously incompetent but now retired? Is there a statute of limitations that might apply to colleagues and former ASU employees who might have a grievance against this woman?  

Again, I don’t know about how  long you would save these items as they relate to standards that are part of the education profession.

Well, this was all very informative. Also very work-making. It meant I had to go through yards of hanging files, sifting out the December statements for many more investment accounts than I can add on my fingers. The ex- and I divorced in 1992. Over twenty years of obsessive document-filing resided in those cabinets! Two of the banks that issued scores of monthly statements no longer exist. Neither do two or three of the investment firms that managed my money before Stellar came on the scene.

I threw out 18 or 19 years’ worth of home and auto insurance paper, 11/12ths of 21 years’ worth of old investment statements, 14 years’ worth of old bank and credit-card statements, five credit cards from long-defunct accounts, and any number of miscellaneous archaeological finds.

An Internet search brought up the specifics of Arizona’s statutes of limitations. For most civil cases, it’s one year. The litigious student who got into the fight with my scoundrelish former colleague is now a successful real estate agent, so she’s unlikely to file a lawsuit even if she could. Other former colleagues who still have gripes against GDU have missed their chance to include the noxious chair in their complaints. My former secretary, La Morona, whom I managed to force out by riding her to do the job right until she finally gave up and quit, also has missed the boat, which sailed four years ago.

So I threw out everything that had to do with GDU.

Then it was into the house to clear out the office file cabinet.

This thing has fast become overwhelmed by the constant flood of dead trees from Medicare’s ancillary insurance companies. Medigap carriers AND Part D drug plan carriers, it develops, send you a three-page (minimum) document called an “Explanation of Benefits.” These things list Every. Single. Doctor’s appointment; Every. Single. Test you take; Every. Single. Procedure that is done on you; Every. Single. Prescription you fill… every goddamn thing any medico or para-medico can think of to charge you for, world without end, amen.

These documents are well-nigh incomprehensible. Without training in the intricacies of the medical bureaucracy, the only way you could figure out what the things mean is to spend several hours poring over each one, studying every entry, looking up the mysteries on the Internet, and trying to relate the mess to reality. Such as it is.

Look up a question like “how long to save EOBs” and you discover nothing is said about when to dispose with this tsunami of paper. Indeed, at least one federal site implies that you should keep the litter forever by remarking that you can use past EOBs to reconstruct your health history, in the event of some question or catastrophic illness.

Another site states that insurance companies are required to store EOBs electronically and can disgorge copies on demand. Uh huh. So, in theory, you should be able to discard them as soon as you’re sure your medical provider has actually been reimbursed.

But yet another source (sorry, didn’t have time to save URLs while heaving paper) tells you that you should match each EOB with the medical provider’s corresponding bill, checking to be sure that the correct procedures were charged (it’s your job, as it develops, to ride herd on Medicare fraud) and searching for reasons to challenge any denials of coverage. Then you are to clip each EOB to each statement and save them until tax time. If you’ve been sick enough that you might be able to claim a medical deduction, then you have to haul all this stuff out, revisit it, and use it to document your deduction. If not, then you should save it for at least a year.

Why not? Who has anything else to do with their time, eh?

By the way, each EOB conveniently includes your name, address, birth date, and Social Security number. 🙂 Ain’t that grand? So all of those things have to be shredded or burned.

They’re not the only offenders. Bank One and Chase Bank print your credit-card number (!) on their statements along with your name and address; American Express does not.

Shoveling all this crap out resulted in a mountain of paper  that completely filled the 18-cubic-foot recycling barrel.

P1020422

And that was just the stuff that didn’t need to be obliterated.  The pile of paper spread all over the floor around a trash can and the dining-room chairs, pictured in the third image above, is all stuff that has to be shredded or burned. Then there’s this stack of paper from a prior, half-baked file-drawer purge, which I just haven’t had time or energy to figure out what to do with:

P1020421

I was going to burn those five (!) folders full of defunct documents over the winter, but we had no-burn regimes every night when it was cold enough to use the fireplace. And besides, burning paper in the fireplace results in a godawful mess to clean up. And it stinks.

My shredder is already on its last legs. So the options are

a) to pay someone to shred the stuff, which I’m just too ornery to do;
b) to go buy a new shredder (which I probably ought to do, since mine has to be coaxed); or
c) burn the whole pile in the backyard charcoal barbecue.

Undoubtedly, c) is the cheapest option. However, as we scribble it is 105 degrees in the shade. The barbecue is  parked in the full sun. Outdoor stuff around the neighborhood is, as you can imagine, quite dry, and that raises a concern about hot ashes floating around.

So, I suppose I’m going to have to get up off my duff and drive to OfficeMax or Costco to get a goddamn shredder.

Lord, how I hate this kind of thing! No wonder my blood pressure is through the freaking roof. Whose isn’t?

How Is It Possible? Another Day from Hell!

by

The past four or five days, I’ve been enjoying yet another goddamn health quirk: sudden stabs of agonizing pain in the eye, as though someone were pushing a needle through the backside of my left eyeball.

This has happened before, but in the past it’s only occurred once and then it’s gone away. This time, it’s not going away. And, as usual, a visit to the Hypochodriac’s Treasure Chest that is the Internet induces raw panic. Raw panic does nothing for one’s sense of well-being.

Awake at 1 in the morning, after a pre-bedtime jolt that felt like my eyeball was about to rupture. Whiled away the wee hours editing some pretty damned awful copy. Went back to bed around 4:00 forgetting to set the alarm clock so I could get out the door by 6:45. Slept until well after dawn.

And so missed my 7:30 meeting. And, interestingly, for a change there was a reason I was supposed to show up.

Got Young Dr. Kildare’s front office staff on the phone at 25 after 8:00. They suggested I should present myself to YDK at 9:00 a.m. sharp.

He observed that there wasn’t a thing  he could do about it. I needed to be seen by an ophthalmologist. I said I’d tried, but the earliest I could get in is a week from tomorrow. He said that would never do. I needed to be seen right now. He ordered his front office staff to find a practitioner and run interference with his or her front office staff.

They got me in to a doctor located in one of the city’s darkest slums, at 1:00 p.m.

My class runs from noon to 1:15. Said slum is a 40-minute drive from Heavenly Gardens Community College. I fly into campus, planning to dismiss class with a list of things to study for the Phaque Phinal.

I don’t bargain on Ms. Grandmère showing up with a gallon of milk and two packages of cooked-up mix brownies.

Nor do I bargain on today’s batshit craziness.

I appoint Ms. Grandmère as my unofficial substitute teacher and say “If anyone comes in here, tell them you’re the instructor.”

She says, “But I was a college dropout!”

I say, “That’s OK. I was a high-school dropout.”

The party is under way as I shoot out the door.

Run to my car, rocket across the freeway, navigate one of the scariest parts of the inner city, find said doc’s office. I’ve brought my laptop with me, because I have a rush editorial job to do, one that will pay decently, and I just know this last minute cram-me-into-the-schedule business is going to mean I get to cool my heels in the waiting room forever and aye.

When I get there, I turn on my computer and…wait. And wait. And wait. It won’t boot up. Mentally, I try to guess how much this apparent crash is going to cost me, right at the moment at which I decide to quit my job.

(As it develops, the thing was trying to download some new “critical” goddamn Microsoft updates — WHAT IS IT WITH THESE GUYS THAT THEY CAN’T GET THEIR SOFTWARE RIGHT THE FIRST TIME AROUND? — and because it couldn’t access a wireless connection, it hung. So I guess one thing, count it, (1), didn’t go totally wrong today.)

Finally I get in to see the doc. He’s an old guy, gringo but to my delight fluent in Spanish and not the least bit afraid of bureaucratic rules forbidding discussion of health-care issues in the native language of “illegals.” I like him, though I question his skills as an up-to-date diagnostician.

He decides I suffer from episcleritis and keratitis and recommends, in addition to four daily doses of prednisone drops, a hefty round of Motrin. I point out that in the ton of paperwork they made me fill out is mention of my allergy to the active ingredient in Motrin. He is dismayed to learn I am allergic to NSAIDs in general, since that is the mainstay of what he regards as the treatment for whatever I have.

By the time I escape his office, it’s two p.m. and I’ve had nothing to eat all day. I’m hungry. I take the Rx for prednisone and head for the pharmacy at my favorite Safeway, figuring I can pick up some food and a couple of foamydelicious canned beers to ease my general angst.

At the Safeway pharmacy, I encounter not a pharmacist but an assistant whose backwoods English is so illiterate as to draw notice, even here in lovely inland Arizona. After making me stand in line and then making me stand around some more while she figures out who I am and how to serve me, she announces that the pharmacist is on break and I should come back later this afternoon for the eye drops. I say I am tired, hungry, and in pain, that I have no intention of waiting half the day to get some prednisone eyedrops that no doubt are sitting on their shelves, that I can’t see to drive anyway, and that I want the prescription back so I can take it to the Walgreen’s across the street.

I practically have to throw her down on the floor and wrest the prescription from her fat, sweaty fist to get it back from  her.

Having achieved this, I proceed across the street, where the pharmacist forks over the eyedrops in about 30 seconds.

Starved, I stick some frozen sweet-potato fries in the oven and defrost a tiny piece of steak to throw on the grill. The steak is freezer-burned. Defrost another tiny piece from a newer package; cook both so as to feed the substandard piece to the dog. Phone rings. SDXB. Can’t make him understand that as soon as I’m finished eating and drinking myself into a well deserved stupor, I’m going to bed.  He keeps saying he’ll call me back after I have time to eat.

Administer prednisone, which requires lying down with eyes closed, while listening to SDXB talk. Get off the phone. Fix breakfast/lunch/dinner; overcook steak. Pained eye is so dilated it looks like the eye of an excited cat at midnight. Can barely see through it.

Decide to STET the appointment with the other eye quack on the 14th, since I suspect the old guy gave me a cursory look and had no clue what he was talking about but instead made a quick guess — particularly since I have exactly zero symptoms of keratitis and because he speculated the thing was some sort of allergic reaction, a theory that makes little or no sense. If there’s an improvement over the next day or two, bueno, I’ll cancel. But if not, at least I’ve got a foot in another door.

Never did get to take a nap. It’s almost 6:00 p.m. If I go to sleep now, which I desperately want to do, I’ll be awake at 10 p.m. and that will be that. Dog  hasn’t had her evening feast, anyway. Eyes hurt.

Entire day has shattered into tiny shards like a wine glass dropped on the kitchen floor. I have gotten NOT ONE THING done.