Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

MacFiasco, continued

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😀  Welp, come to find out: the Sierra operating system has a reputation for effing up Apple’s MacMail function. Whyyyyyy did I not think of looking this up sooner? Too H&H, I guess. That’s harassed and hysterical…

What I don’t understand is why it didn’t crash MacMail sooner.

Interestingly, though, I have an old iMac with a gigantic screen that serves as my substitute for a television these days — for watching the evening news, Rachel Maddow, and various streaming movies & TV shows. So I wasn’t using it to read email. Therefore, I didn’t notice that all the email that was merrily getting lost on the MacBook was coming in just fine on the old iMac. The iMac runs on the El Capitan OS. We’re four versions later now…

Y’know…if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

This is yet another of the many things that render me nostalgic for the [hated] Smith-Corona: the endless iteration, reiteration, and re-re-reiterations of operating systems. Like unto the endless demands, re-demands, and re-re-demands that you enter a goddamned impossible-to-type secret code, every step along the way.

So Brandon, the latest in a string of (very generous, very anxious to help) Apple techs, spent another two hours on the phone this morning, trying to get the damn email system to work. Finally, all things failing, he resolved to “escalate” the issue to Engineering. This entails installing a special tracking and recording program on the Macinoid, which records a couple sessions of antics and ships them through the ether for some other wretched tech to figure out.

All told, then, I’ve spent about 12 or 13 hours on the phone with Apple over the past week, trying to fix the damn email system. Wasted hour after wasted hour after wasted hour…

And all of this is now made rather moot, as I threw in the towel a couple of days ago, spent several more hours gathering as many email addresses as I could find into a gigantic mailing list, and sent out a notice to something over 300 people to the effect that they should get in touch through my gmail account.

This vast hassle should, I hope, result in my catching most incoming, until such time as the MacMail is fixed. As a practical matter, that gmail account is set to forward messages to MacMail, so if and when MacMail ever returns to normal, I can just go back to bidness as usual, without having much to say about it. Or anything to say.

But in the meantime, there’s no way I can possibly round up all the names of all the various correspondents in all the various sub-segments of my life to clue them about the email address shift. So Mr. Tech & I are trying to figure out if it’s possible to set up an outgoing auto-reply Mac message to tell people go to the Gmail address, or better yet, to forward to Gmail. Then I would disable the forward from Gmail to MacMail and use Gmail exclusively. On the front end, that is.

I hate this, on several fronts. The obvious — extraordinary time wastage — is the least of it.

• I do NOT want to do business — or even carry on my idle social life — on Google. It’s not that Apple doesn’t spy on you. It certainly does. But not, I believe, to the outrageous extent that Google does.

• Paranoia aside, I do NOT want my clients and friends to be blitzed with fucking ads when they’re trying to get in touch with me or trying to discuss business issues.

Personally, I use an ad-blocker, which solves that problem on my end. But apparently a lot of people don’t. Otherwise there would be no reason for Google to sell ad space on your private email messages, would there?

• Accessing my email on the Web is cumbersome, inelegant, and annoying. I don’t WANT to have to keep a tab in Firefox open at all times to get at my email, nor do I want to have to physically check in to the email in-box to determine whether anything new has arrived (MacMail silently signals you of incoming, which is good. Very good. Traipsing to some Web address in Firefox: not good.)

The extended time waste has meant I’ve had neither time nor energy to work on updating the various bookoids I started posting at Plain & Simple Press. So that puts the eefus on any schemes over there. Did manage to post a couple of rants about my least favorite examples of cant and cliché, but as for anything creative? Not so much.

Other dramas seem to have subsided.

• The cancer that is not cancer remains — so far — not cancer.

• Cassie the Corgi, while surely not entirely her Old Self, is much better. This morning she swiggled down a fair quantity of water and strolled away from the trough without a single coughing fit. Nor did she cough and gasp for breath after having been lifted off the bed, for a change.

Still…she has slowed down a lot. It’s as though she went from being a vigorous and energetic dog to an old lady in the course of a month or so. Maybe, though, that’s the way of the world. For most of us.

• Ruby the Corgi launched into full out Savage Guard Dog Mode the other day when a bum came into the front courtyard, pretending to be a tree-trimmer looking for work. She is a yapper and does bark at every moth that flies past the house. But this was different: she was alarmed and enraged. And hair-raising. They say corgis are actually short German shepherds. Well, I wouldn’t go that far. But she does seem to have the Ger-Shep ability to discern between the harmless eccentric and the potential menace. Interesting.

• I’ve given up worrying about the money predicament. The worst that can happen is that I’ll go broke. BFD.

• The scheme to learn how to use the iPhone La Bethulia gave me has been put on hold until such time as I can betake myself to an Apple store. Now that Apple has shut down its centrally located Biltmore shop, the “lessons” Apple is supposedly offering will entail a 35- to 40-minute drive every time I want to learn some aspect of the gadget.

Mijhito says he can wipe La Bethulia’s data off the phone and then help me figure out how to get online, but neither of us has been able to break free of our respective hassles long enough to accomplish this. So…the device awaits.

Given the gawdawful hassles entailed with Apple over the past week or ten days, I’m none too sure I really want to sign up to use another Apple toy.

• The plan to send out proposals for the “drugging of America” book went somewhat astray. Have been way too overwhelmed to take on anything new just now.

• The swimming pool resurfacing job proceeds apace. Yesterday the jackhammer crew pounded away for the entire day: a good eight or ten hours. The entire house vibrated nonstop to the pounding. Naturally, it rained on the debris they left in the open pit, but early this morning a couple guys came over and shoveled out the rest of the stuff.

Aaron, the guy in charge, came over and pointed out that they’d busted just one tile, but he was pretty sure they could reattach and grout it back in so it no damage would be visible. If not, we’ll reinstall the whole border of tilework, which will add another two grand to the job. But it looks pretty promising. The crack on the north side, he thinks, is probably not structural because there’s no rust and no dirt visible in it. They will reseal that and fix the grouting around the affected tiles. there’s a small rusted patch in one area, which he also thinks does not represent significant damage to the rebar. Otherwise, he feels the hole in the ground is in surprisingly good shape, considering its age.

So tomorrow they’re supposed to come ’round and clean the scale off the tiles. Then they’ll try to clean out and reactivate the unused line that originally was installed to accommodate the pool cleaner…and I forgot to remind him that they need to figure out why Harvey isn’t running adequately. And finally, they’ll apply the new PebbleSheen surface. This has a supposed 20-year lifetime. The plaster job I put in after I moved in 14 years ago had a max 10-year lifetime, so I expect this stuff will last until I croak over or until they carry me off to the old folks’ zoo.

An hour and a half to go here, and I want a nap. Realized one reason I’m too tired to function in choir after a few hours at the front desk is simply that I’ve fallen into the habit of taking a short snooze in the afternoon. That would be because 6 a.m. is really sleeping in for me…usually I’m up and about by 4 a.m., and often by 3. Doesn’t seem to matter when you get your sleep in, but you do need to get some of it.

A-n-n-d It’s Back to Nightmare Central

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Okay, with any luck the Human is now recovered enough to cope with another headache-filled day.

When the Apple tech left off on Saturday, we still had not solved the problem with my MacMail. This was after a total of around six or eight hours wasted on the phone, wrestling with it.

Yesterday he had something come up and took a day off work. So this morning I called his extension & left a message.

Meanwhile, yesterday along came a demand, in the part of the email still working, that I pay for the use of iCloud. I believe this to be phishing, because the sender’s email was not at apple.com or anything even vaguely resembling it. Not impossible, though: right now the only way I can get at my email is through iCloud’s server: somehow my regular MacMail account has been disabled. But whatever: I am NOT paying for iCloud, a service that I do not want and that I highly resent having foisted on me.

While I’m waiting for him today, I guess I’d better prepare a mailing list for a message I can send out from Gmail, telling all my friends and business acquaintances to deep-six the Macmail address and use one of the old gmail addresses. This REALLY pisses me off, because compared to Apple’s mail program, Gmail is cumbersome to use and a damn nuisance, and of course, Google wants to serve you ads. I don’t see them, because I use an ad-blocker; but presumably ads will be sent, in every message, to my friends and clients. Which I do. NOT. appreciate.

Even more than I do NOT appreciate Google spying on every word I transmit through my private goddamn messages.

And mean-meanwhile, in the headache department: The swimming pool repair company’s guys showed up at 6:30 a.m. to start jackhammering the old plaster off the pool.

WHAT a freakin’ racket! This is an all-day project: they’ll be banging at the pool’s gunite walls until late afternoon or early evening. It’s one bitch of a job, and one gawdawful noisy job. Its only saving grace is that it must annoy the hell out of the annoying neighbor behind me: revenge for the business with the flammable debris dumped behind the wall on the 4th of July.

The thing is, these guys — all Mexican laborers, nary a one of whom speaks English — are working completely unprotected. They have no ear protection, no eye protection, and only a bandana tied over the face to keep the fine, lung-cancer-inducing plaster dust out of their noses.

And that is fuckin’ inexcusable. What does it cost to buy your employees — or contract laborers, which is probably how these guys are paid — a few pairs of ear-plugs, some cheap plastic goggles, and nose masks? Exploitive bastards.

Trying to think of a tactful way to suggest this to our honored pool company owners, but failing just now to come up with any polite words. Maybe I could send them away until Swimming Pool Service and Repair comes up with some basic safety and health equipment?

That, of course, will entail having to hire some other company to finish the job…presumably also with unprotected and probably illegal workers.

Welp, I haven’t heard a thing from the Apple guy. So it’s off to compile a list that can be sent out from Google, and then say good-bye to Apple Mail.

Holy Mackerel! It’s NOT…

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CANCER! To coin a phrase: WTF?

This morning I called the dermatologist’s office to ask if they had the results of the biopsy and whether, even if they didn’t, could we please make an appointment to have this THING on my paw excised because it hurts and it itches and it’s driving me fricking crazy.

Silence ensued. Eventually the office spokesindividual came back on the line: Yes, they did have the results. No, it is not squamous cell cancer, as diagnosed by not one but two medical professionals. It’s “just” (heh) a fairly extreme actinic keratosis. It can be frozen off with the application of iced nitrogen.

Well. Sumbiche.

In the aftermath, comes the weirdest feeling. It’s not “a great weight lifted from your shoulders” (gimme a break!). I mean, puhleeze…after having both boobs lobbed off, I am not frightened by slicing away a small lump from the back of my hand, thankyouverymuch.

It’s more like…

Suddenly, after six or eight goddamn nightmarish weeks, the hassles and the worries and the effing nightmares come to a DEAD STOP.

Abruptly, I realized about two-thirds of the “gotta-do-it-today” To-Do’s do not have to be done today, fuckthemverymuch. It was like…a door to normalcy flang itself open.

Cassie was coughing when she woke up this morning and plainly isn’t well today. Call vet, hurry her over there, rack up another thousand bucks? Maybe not so much. The world didn’t end for me; quite possibly it’s not ending for the dog. Watch dog; see what happens. Open back door: dog flies out like a rocket. If that was Death’s door, she seems not to have minded.

Am I broke? Yeah, I am broke. BFD. I’ve been broke before. Remember the time when I was stockpiling canned goods whenever I could find them on sale? Perhaps that predates my blogging period.

Today I do not give a damn that I am broke.

Today I am not calling the vet yet again.

Today I am not spending another hour or two online with an Apple tech trying to figure out why my MacMail doesn’t work.

Today I am not driving halfway across the city and paying to have the half-baked ID card (NOT) from the Medigap provider encased in plastic.

Today I am not posting a damn thing to Plain & Simple Press.

Today I am not finishing the chapter I was writing to post to Plain & Simple Press.

Today I am not depositing Crystal’s check for the latest paid post I published at FaM.

My son gave me four packages of chicken parts, thighs & drumsticks, which have been residing in the freezer. Remembering these and then remembering, from many MANY years ago when I was a young thang and had a young husband for whom I cooked dinner every evening, an accidentally marvelous chicken recipe that involved braising in a LOT of garlic and white wine and chicken broth after laying slices of lemon across the pieces of dead bird, I thought: I’m celebrating with this.

Trot down to AJs, pick up a bottle of cheap white wine, a new chunk of overpriced cheese, a package of made-in-Italy pasta, and some other delectables.

Drive home. Chow down on freshly made rye bread and overpriced cheese and a glass or two of said cheap wine. And am now about to put the dog and myself on the bed. Whenever we roll out of the sack: it’s on to chicken in garlic (one hell of a lot of it) and wine and Meyer lemon. And…oh, yeah…the rest of the bottle of wine. 🙂

Onward.

Horror$! The Cost of the Weeks from Hell…

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Man! I have been so stunned by all the sh!t that has come down during the past two months from Hell — week after week after week in which every single day has brought some new nightmare — that I just completely let the budget go. There’s a limit to what I can think about, and I’ve been way past that limit for a long time.

By today, though, things have been quiet long enough for me to catch my breath and try to figure out how much this has cost. And how I’m going to pay for it.

• The cost of the vet bills alone has come to just about $1,000 since September 15.
• As of October 21 — with 10 more days to run this month! — I was $575 in the red.
• I retrieved $381 from Social Security by cutting the planned monthly transfer to Emergency Savings by about 60%; this left me a mere $228 in the red.

With 10 more days to go in October.

Yeah.

And that was extremely lucky: no large bills to repair the car after the fender-bender, thanks to Chuck’s guys wrestling and bolting the thing back into place, and because by some miracle I didn’t have to replace tires.

A thousand bucks on the dog in six weeks. Think of that!

Dare one speculate that a substantial part of that resulted from a wrong diagnosis? Well…probably not. We really don’t know whether Cassie does or does not  have Valley fever. She may. But she’s one helluva lot better than she was, that’s for sure. Not back to normal. But not stepping over Death’s threshold, either.

There’s money in savings to cover a couple hundred bucks’ worth of red ink. Just. There’s no way I can sustain even one more unplanned expense. And Christmas, obviously, is now a lost cause.

God only knows what the potentially life-threatening skin cancer diagnosis will cost me. Despite the supposed joys of Medicare and Medigap, there’s always some amount that isn’t covered. Where the cash will come from to pay those bills, I do not know. Out of investments, I expect.

One message from this: unless you still have a job in “retirement,” you can’t afford to keep a pet. So forget that. After Cassie and Ruby are both gone, there’ll be no more doggy companionship.

With any luck, I won’t live that long myself…

The Cloned Life…

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Ever feel like you find yourself in a world that was cloned from the world you’ve been living in all these years? Only it’s cloned just slightly off-kilter, so it’s not an exact copy but an ever-so-vaguely cattywampus copy…

Today, for example. I learned the simplest, most ordinary objects no longer exist in my cloned world. They’re gone. Some have never even been heard of by the world’s otherwise normal-looking denizens.

I left the house to visit four venues:

  1. The Apple Store at the Biltmore, there to try to find out how to activate the iPhone given to me by La Bethulia and La Maya
  2. A Walgreen’s, there to buy a new tube of antibiotic ointment and a new tube of pain- and itch-killing Lanacane with benzocaine, therewith to treat the squamous cell carcinoma on the back of my hand, whilst it awaits surgery; as well as a package of orange sticks (to manicure one’s nails) and a new nail brush
  3. AJ’s, to buy a pound of Peet’s whole-bean coffee, since Costco has discontinued my favorite brand and the AJ’s house “espresso” beans are decidedly not espresso or even dark-roast
  4. Total Wine, where I can buy a bottle of Maker’s Mark for the same price as Costco’s, and a few cans of Guinness, one of which I wished to serve up with the chili I intended to fix for dinner

Andddd….

  • The Apple Store has closed. It will reopen in Scottsdale (a half-hour’s extra driving time) sometime in the next week or two. This rendered the scheme to activate the New Old phone moot.
  • Walgreen’s no longer carries Lanacane.
  • Walgreen’s does not carry either orange sticks or anything even faintly resembling a halfway decent nail brush.
  • The fancy Safeway near the Biltmore, in whose upscale environs I hoped to find a package of orange sticks if not a nail brush, does carry Peet’s dark roast, but only in packages of pre-ground (read “stale”) coffee. You can’t afford the Maker’s Mark there.
  • Safeway does not carry Lanacane, either.
  • Nor does it carry orange sticks. Or nail brushes.
  • Total Wine was overrun with the kind of idiot who sees you coming up the aisle toward them and so stops and parks their cart smack in the middle so you can’t get around them.
  • If Total Wine had Guinness in a wine cooler, I couldn’t find it.

In my effort to find seven small items and try to get one moment of attention from a knowledgeable Apple tech, I went to eight retail establishments:

  • The (defunct) Apple Store
  • A Safeway in Richistan, generously stocked
  • Total Wine
  • A Walgreen’s
  • A second Safeway, closer to home
  • Grinder’s Coffee Shop (closed: they were waxing the floors!)
  • Sally’s Beauty Supply (they have orange sticks in commercial quantities, but not in a lifetime supply for one person)
  • Walmart

Each of these required a drive and a fight for a parking spot.

Not a single store or pharmacy sells Lanacane anymore! They sell another nostrum that contains lidocaine, but never having used it, I felt a little wary of buying it. I wanted the stuff I know works to quell the pain and the itch.

Not even the beauty supply store has decent orange sticks; the ones they do have are junk packaged in bags of 50 or 100, or a package of half-a-dozen coated in an abrasive substance.

At the Total Wine, ninnies kept blocking my way up the aisles, and ultimately I never did find a cooler holding beer. Fuck it: I decided to move on to Safeway.

At the fancy Safeway, I’ll be damned if I could find a package of Guinness. They did not have orange sticks, they did not have nail brushes, and they did not have Lanacane. The pharmacist at the downscale Safeway closer to my house remarked that I was not the only customer who asked after the latter, and that one woman had told him she’d found it on Amazon.

The Richistan Safeway had Peet’s, but not in whole-bean form.

Grinders’ proprietor had piled all the furniture on the patio and was merrily polishing the floors. Nice job, too! But it meant I couldn’t buy any of their extravagantly overpriced coffee.

At last it was into the Walmart…which indeed did have orange sticks, nail brushes, and an easily accessible, cold six-pack of Guinness. There I gave in and bought a tube of salve with lidocaine, hoping for the best.

When the hell did Lanacane become a thing of the past? Yes, you can get it from Amazon, but if you need it now, you really shouldn’t have to wait a day or two to have it delivered. Or pay extra for the privilege. It seems to me to be a very ordinary, very pedestrian product. Suddenly it’s an alien artifact???

When did a supermarket — an invention originally designed to allow consumers to do all their shopping in one place — stop carrying ordinary grooming products and, in an upscale district, a damn six-pack of chilled Guinness?

Waxing the freaking floor of a retail restaurant, in the middle of the day on a freaking Saturday?

See what I mean about the hitch in reality? We don’t really live in our world anymore. Do we…

State of the Chaos

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A little quieter here today… let’s hope it’s not the calm before the next storm. Let’s see how the various crises are doing:

1. In the department of Funny’s Money: I have no idea. I don’t even want to know, it’s such a chaotic disaster. This month I never got an untrammeled moment when I wasn’t too exhausted to sit down and work on the budget, so I’ve just been spending left and right. Financial manager sent over enough to cover the down payment on the pool rehab, which starts Monday. I reset the checking-to-emergency savings automatic transfer to move less than half of what I originally thought I could manage, so that (at least) will leave a little more basic survival money in checking.

2. Hand cancer: still waiting on the biopsy. But I’m calling the doc’s office on Monday to ask if we can accelerate the process. I want this damn thing OFF. Where they shaved off enough to send to the lab, it’s growing back with élan. Whatever it is, it’s very fast-growing and so presumably aggressive. And at times it really hurts. Hurts and itches. Turns out pain and itching are defining characteristics of squamous cell cancer. Why exactly we have to wait for biopsy results until the cows come home to cut the thing out escapes me.

3. Dog decedence*: No credible sign of croaking over yet! Matter of fact, this dog is getting much better. Just now she remembered the chicken jerky treats that reside in a jar on the kitchen counter and decided to do the Dance of the Manipulated Human, thereby eliciting a chew treat for herself and for Ruby. The cough seemed to come back a little: it had subsided to the point where she coughed only when she slurped up a lot of water (which she’s always done…corgis do that). She had stopped coughing when she barks and stopped coughing when I lifted her off the bed. So I cut back the Benadryl from 1/2 tab in the morning and 1/2 tab in the evening to just 1/2 tab at night. A-n-n-d…the cough started to come back. This morning I gave her a dose at doggy breakfast, and lo! No coughing.

*Yes, yes, I did invent that word. Why do you ask? Etym: Late Modern English, from decedent (a deceased person)

4. Car: It seems to have survived its brush with the flatbed trailer with no very serious damage. The gouged tire is still rolling. It hasn’t blown, at least not so far…and yeah, it has been on a freeway or two. I’m trying to stay off the freeways, because I don’t trust the thing. But to get out to the new dermatologist’s office sometime before the end of my life expectancy, I pretty much have to ride the 101 for a number of miles. So far, so good.

5. Cord-cutting Cox escape: Last night La Maya and La Bethulia invited me over for dinner. In the course of conversation, I remarked that I need to get rid of the fake “land line” (Cox’s new version is really VoIP, and not very good VoIP at that), replace my extensions with cheap clamshells and get an iPhone.

“I have two old iPhones that I’m not using!” says La Bethulia. “Want one?”

Do I want one???? Grab!  Well, she quite reasonably wanted to delete all her data on the thing before I trot it over to the Apple store to get it set up. And they’ve forgotten the password for the thing. But it turns out it’s not hard to reboot the thing all by your little self. So…I may try to do that with my son’s help, or just hire an Apple tech to do it. Paying someone a hundred bucks or so would be a lot cheaper than buying a new iPhone! 🙂

6. MacMail fiasco: Still not fixed. Right now the only way I can get to my email is through the Web interface, which is less than ideal. It does allow me to access incoming mail, but all my carefully designed preferences have been screwed up. Not erased — which would have been far preferable — but all jumbled around. So it’s a mess. And I guess I’m going to end up either having to pay Cox for an email account, the bastards, or start using Gmail, which I really really REALLY do not want to do. This, I will figure out later.

7. Other little dramas: Have yet to decide whether I’m going back to choir. The associate director has kindly put me on the women’s chant choir, which I love.  She urged me to come to choir on Sunday despite having turned on my heel and marched back to my car and gone home after last Wednesday evening’s unpleasant exchange at the door (not with her but with a woman who makes no secret of her dislike of me).

I don’t know. I’d pretty well decided to quit — just never go back, that’s how disgusted I am. And besides…

Really, the only thing that keeps me from feeling a great deal more serious about moving out of Crime Central is the choir. I can’t afford any other close-in district — this neighborhood is cheap because Conduit of Blight Blvd, Gangbanger’s Way, the Blightrail, the meth clinic, and the population of bums keep the property values way down. Comparable homes anywhere else are at least a hundred grand higher, and these days more like two hundred grand.

Abandoning the choir and the church would open two housing options: Fountain Hills, wayyy on the east side of the Valley, and Sun City, wayyyy on the west side. Both have the advantages of low crime rates and pretty decent nearby shopping. They’re both quiet and peaceful, and there’s no way any politicians and their greed-driven backers are going to build a boondoggle through the middle of either one. Sun City is a ghetto for old folks, which I really do not like. Fountain Hills is one helluva long way from everything but the Mayo Clinic, a distance that I also do not like. I don’t know anyone in Fountain Hills and, because I don’t make friends easily, this would make me feel isolated and unhappy. But Fountain Hills has pretty scenery and it is close to upscale shopping and to my favorite second-hand store, My Sister’s Closet. Sun City has the advantages that it’s very cheap to live there, and that I do know some people there and so would start with a kernel of a social life. Which would be good. I guess. And the writer’s group I favor meets way on the west side, so it would be easy to cultivate more friends there. I guess.

Well, if I’m going to snab that phone, I need to get up and do it now…La Maya’s relatives are about to descend on the house. And so, away!