Coffee heat rising

Dispatches from Hell

Doggy & Human Ups and Downs

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Luckily for the Human, it had agreed to host a dear friend and cat for an hour or so, while hordes of Realtors swarmed through their house, which they’re putting up for sale. They didn’t want to be there, and they surely did not want their cat there, while a bunch of strangers cavorted around the place. So the wife went to the beauty parlor and the hubby and kitty came over to the Funny Farm.

This provided a therapeutic break for the Human. I really needed some company this morning. The damn computer was working hard to thwart me at every turn — had a helluva time trying to catch up with the gerjillion tasks running late, and whenever I did manage to get something more or less posted, it invariably went up wrong, so I had to delete stuff and try to dork with it to get it to do what it was supposed to do and UGHHHH! I hate that kind of thing under the best of conditions, but when with even a small degree of extra stress, it drives me CRAZY!

And there was plenty of extra stress. Cassie the Corgi seemed even sicker than usual. She had a hard time eating the food I put in front of her. And when I smushed some dog food around her morning pill to get it down her, Ruby pounced and grabbed it.

Honestly, I do not know which dog swallowed the pill, but I’m pretty sure it was Ruby.

So this means that every time I have to medicate Cassie, I’ll have to lock Ruby behind a door in another room. One more fun hassle to make life grand.

Things went downhill from there. Mostly in the computer department.

Enfin, with the cat and the guest here, the dogs were locked up in the back bedroom. Good place for ’em!

When I returned from delivering my friend home and released the hounds, strangely enough Cassie seemed much more perky.

This morning I’d have said she was pounding on Death’s Door. Five hours later, she trots into the backyard, chases Ruby a short way across their racetrack, and appears to have lost the limp.

Yes. A limp is a symptom of disseminated Valley Fever, so as you can imagine the fact that for the past few days she has barely been able to hobble up the hall has been making me crazy. Yet another of the many things to make one crazy.

But she limps all the time. She’s always limped off and on, ever since I got her 10 years ago. Just not this badly.

Maybe it’s not from whatever is ailing her, but maybe she was injured. I have to lift her both on and off the bed. It’s possible I accidentally twisted her or kinked something, unknowing, and maybe that’s why she was limping. Or maybe Ruby gave her a whack when I wasn’t looking. WhatEVER. For a brief shining moment, she’s been limp-free.

In about 40 minutes, I’ve got to start yet another long trek toward Scottsdale, this time to visit the vet my son uses. I want a second opinion about the Valley fever theory. Several second opinions to address several concerns:

To wit: Can we please get empirical proof that this dog really has Valley fever before putting her on a drug that’s clearly making her sick and then proposing to keep her on it for six months to a year? Or more?

The dog came down with a cough at the time some sort of respiratory infection was epidemic. The cough improved when treated with antibiotics and a cough suppressant, but it persisted longer than expected. Is it not possible that it took her longer to get over a viral bug because, for godsake, she’s 12 years old! She is an elderly dog. Like an elderly human, she may not recover from infections at the speed of light. Is it not reasonable to suspect that the elevated neutrocil and monocyte values might reflect an ordinary viral respiratory infection, not Valley fever? Might the congestion Dr. B saw on the X-ray be pneumonia or bronchitis, rather than Valley fever?

Does it really make sense to dose a 12-year-old dog with a drug that makes her sick, and to keep her on it past her normal life span? Seriously?

Damn it! I hate to be one of those patients. But my innate skepticism just will not go away.

And my innate skepticism has served me exceptionally well in the past. One might even call it, say, a kind of survival mechanism.

Report from Damage Control Central

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A week from Digital Hell has left the Fat Lady barely treading water. God, but I do hate computerized time sucks. The background noise from Washington doesn’t help…

Two half-days — i.e., a total of a full eight-hour day — have been consumed on the phone with Apple techs. Can’t complain too much about that: it’s mighty nice that Apple has techs and allows them to spend uncounted numbers of hours helping customers to fix this, that, and the other snafu. I’ve lost track of the details — makes my head hurt to think too hard about this stuff. But the upshot was that after one of the techs decided that nothing would do but what we must re-install the Sierra OS on the MacBook (even though I told him that would cause a huge fuck-up), we got…yes, a huge fuck-up.

The current surviving upshot of that is that though the MacBook can read and store to DropBox, the iMac no longer connects to DropBox. When I inquired of DB techs how that might be fixed, I got a pages-long email filled with arcane instructions, not the first word of which do I understand. Truly: whatever it is they have in mind that I’m gonna do…I have NO idea.

So now I’m paying a hefty fee for DropBox’s storage and can access it only with one computer. The thing is, the iMac has an external hard drive permanently installed, to which Apple’s nifty Time Machine constantly backs up data. So that means the iMac should keep an up-to-date back-up of DropBox.

Except…now it’s not. Because it can’t “see” DropBox anymore.

So to keep that backed up, I have to schlep the Macbook into the back office and hook it up to an external drive and manually run Time Machine. This doesn’t take long, but it’s an effin’ PITA and I don’t think I should have to do that when it was working fine before.

Meanwhile, however, WordPress is about to pull the Number of All Numbers on its users. The WP that we know and love — and that operates all our blogs — is about to be dumped in the trash, to be replaced with a radically new system called Gutenberg.

This, obviously is going to represent a gigantic new learning curve.

Those of us who are sick of the brain clutter occasioned by the glories of computer technology do not welcome said development. And those of us who have had experience with earlier seismic upheavals know what to expect: If entire sites don’t crash (which they probably will), at best data will be lost. Probably lots of data.

Funny about Money has been online since 20 and ought-7. And y’know, I don’t really want to lose all that history.

Sure, I know: the nature of the Web is ephemeral. But damn it all! Writing this stuff and tracking down images and doing the research for some of the more solid pieces is work. Why should some tribe of computer jocks take it upon themselves to steal my work so that they can amuse themselves with fun new code?

By way of preserving the stuff for posterity, such as it is, I decided I would back up FaM not through BackupBuddy (whose product I suspect will be unintelligible once the program that generated the content goes away) but by copying it to Word and then, at my leisure, formatting it for print. And eventually printing it out and stashing it in a closet, where one day after I croak over my kid will find it and can, if he so pleases, feed it into his backyard firepit.

At least I will’ve tried…

This sounds like a much bigger job than it is. In fact, it only takes about a half-hour to copy out a year’s worth of blog content. But since we’re talking 11 years, that’s still ample time suck, thankyouverymuch. But at this point I only have one year’s worth of posts left to dump into Wyrd files. This at least will keep what content is left in a form that can’t be magically “disappeared” by the upcoming change.

And when I say “what content is left,” I kid you not. At one point along the line, either WordPress or Big Scoots, my current web host, unilaterally decided to delete all the images in SIX YEARS’ worth of posts! Yes. Without asking my permission, without so much as telling me. So everything predating the first quarter of 2013 is absent most of the images I inserted. Isn’t that super?

At any rate, at least the copy is still there.

Apple’s substitution of iPhoto with the irritating and practically useless Photos program effectively ditched images that were made before the current operating system superseded the far more user-friendly OS of yore. They may not have been erased, but they’re hidden in the system so deep I’ll be damned if I can find them. So even if I wanted to take the time to track down the deleted WordPress images and use them to decorate the rescued posts, it would be a daunting and probably impossible task.

One of the things I did learn to do, thanks to that fiasco, was to save images that go into current blog posts separately from Photos, but copying them to a folder on…yeah…DropBox.

How can I do without these hassles? Let me count the ways…

All of this has interfered with my usual routine little hobby activities. Thank God there’s no paying work in-house!!! Didn’t get this week’s installment of Ella’s story written until the last minute. Whatever went online this week was not proofread and frankly I have no idea whether it makes any sense. I have not uploaded today’s installment of “Asked,” either, not because it isn’t there but because I’m effin’ All Computered Out.

{sigh}

Meanwhile, the Circus in the White House has gotten pretty entertaining, hasn’t it? The sleaze has been outed. Now…will our honored elected representatives get off their collective duff and do their job?

Really: even if Trump is indicted and/or impeached, that might be worse than what we’ve got. We then would end up with Pence as President. And Mr. Pence is, unlike our present Great Leader, decidedly not a clownish dunce. Mr. Pence is an accomplished politician who knows how to get things done. Unfortunately, he also is a doctrinaire fanatic, and so the things he’d like to get done are not necessarily things that are good for the rest of us.

This, I suppose, is the way the world ends…

There could be hope, though…check it out:

Why I Bank at a Credit Union…

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A fine Day from Hell in every way: at five in the morning, temp on the back porch in the 90s and air so thick you need a spoon to breathe it. It rained during the night, so that did cool things off. But. Ugh.

First order of the day’s business, once business establishments opened, was to run up to the credit union and try to find out why all my accounts are scrambled.

Ugh, indeed!

You’ll recall that to reset my grip on the finances, I decided to use Costco cash cards and my existing credit union cookie-jar accounts to create an “envelope method” approach to budgeting. Purchases at Costco would stop when the current cash-card was used up ($300, though I may drop that to $200). And (as usual) set-asides for 2019 taxes & insurance, for incoming Medicare and Medigap reimbursements, and for an emergency fund would be doled out, monthly, among three credit-union savings accounts.

These accounts have always existed. You can make as many savings accounts as you choose at my credit union, plus your checking account. So I’ve always had an account called “Emergency Savings,” one called “Mayo” (for the medical reimbursements), and one called “T&I” (for tax & insurance).

At the time I make this decision, I figure I’ll live on my 401(k)’s Required Minimum Drawdown (or try to), and transfer all the Social Security payments into “Emergency Savings,” an account whose balance had dwindled to a little over five dollars. To accomplish this, I get on the phone and talk with a credit union’s CSR. I ask this person how I can arrange to auto-transfer the gummint’s monthly electronic deposits from checking to the account branded “emergency savings.”  SS payments come in unpredictably, roughly depending on what cycle the bureaucrats use to send them to you. Mine arrive sometime between the first and about the 12th of the month. I explain that I’d like this money set aside to build an emergency fund and I’d like not to have to do that manually whenever the SSA gets around to sending the money. She says she will make it so.

Good. Days go by.

Now I do some more budgeteering — and I realize that there’s no way I can possibly live on the RMD alone. While I probably can avoid suctioning up all the SS income, I’m going to need at least $500 a month of it. Probably more. When I go online to arrange an automatic transfer of $530/month, I’m astonished to discover the “Mayo” savings account has disappeared, and the chunk of dough set aside in there to pay the Mayo’s next bill has disappeared with it.

The money to cover medical bills has been moved over into my regular savings account (which I’d dubbed “Emergency Savings,” but which has been renamed “Share Savings”).

When I go to double-check the scheduled transfer of the SS funds, I can find exactly no trace of it.

So. You know better. I know better. We all know better: Never do your banking over the phone.

This meant I had to drive to the credit union, collar a manager or assistant manager, and find out WTF is going on.

  1. What happened to the scheduled transfer of the monthly Social Security deposit into Emergency Savings?
  2. If it didn’t get arranged, why not?
  3. If it did get arranged, why doesn’t it show as a scheduled transfer? Where did the transfer that was supposedly arranged go? Is that monthly deposit going to disappear into limbo?
  4. If it did not get arranged, can we arrange it? Can we be certain that we’re not duplicating a scheduled transfer that doesn’t show even though it  supposedly was made?
  5. Can we arrange an auto transfer on the 20th of each month from Emergency Savings (holding the SS deposits) to checking, enough to make ends meet?

Oh, those lucky people! We need to start a U-Tube Video series: Here She Comes Again!

So I get up there and discover…

  1. If a scheduled transfer was made from the CU’s environs instead of by you, you can’t see it in the online “scheduled transfer” function. (Naturally! Why did I ask?)
  2. He doesn’t have a clue what happened to the “Mayo” savings account.
  3. He suggests it would be simpler to transfer the difference between the total SS monthly deposit and the amount I need  into the “Emergency Savings” account. Keep whatever is needed in checking and transfer the rest to the savings account.
  4. He will rename “Emergency Savings” as “Mayo,” leaving the amount for the medical bills in that account rather than transferring them around.
  5. And he will create a new “Emergency Savings” account to hold a little over half of incoming Social Security deposits, leaving the rest in checking to cover cash flow. We hope.

Sounds OK, right? He says what I see at home is different from what he says on his monitor. He suggests I send him a screenshot, after I get back to the Funny Farm, so we can check that all this is working.

And so, off I go to retrace the 8.2 miles of my steps back to the house: it required driving 16.4 miles and about 90 minutes of my time to accomplish this.

A check-up revealed that we had it almost right. We ended up with…

  • a checking account  (Balance: one year’s worth of RMD plus a few bucks)
  • a savings account (“Emergency Savings, 00.” Unfunded)
  • a savings account, (“Taxes & Insurance, 60.” $8408)
  • a savings account (“Taxes and Insurance, 61.”  $538.95)

So what has happened is that the set-aside account to cover medical bills was redundantly named “taxes and insurance” rather than “Mayo.” But at least we have an account into which to stash Medigap and Medicare payments.

Gaaaahhhhhh! So I had to get on the email, send him the desired secreenshot, and ask him to rename account 61 in such a way that I can distinguish it from the real tax-&-insurance “envelope” at a glance.

Jeez.

Long as I’m wrestling with money online, I decide to check to see how much AMEX thinks I owe it as of this minute, to be sure it jibes with the $130 I believe I’ve charged up.

Well. No. AMEX’s website says I owe that fine outfit $682!!!!!!

WTF??????? Have they not received the seven-something I sent them when the last statement came in?

Go back to the credit union’s site and find that they have indeed paid last month’s bill, as directed. AMEX should have received the money on or about the 5th…four days ago.

Get a chat rep online at the AMEX site. After endless waiting and screwing around with typing out the question and explaining that it was paid electronically and should have been received, I learned that yea verily it had been received. It would take another 24 to 48 hours  before that fact registered on their website.

Ducky.

Q. So, I ask: how much have I charged up on the card in the current billing cycle — that is, how much do you see owing right now?

A. About $126.

That’s four bucks less than my records say I’ve charged — probably because this card applies an automatic cash kickback to eligible transactions. But at least their conception of reality is now close to my conception of reality.

What a bitch of a morning! And early afternoon.

Coulda been worse, though. Just imagine if all those cookie-jar shenanigans had been happening at, say, Wells Fargo.

Needing to pick up some one-pound bags of chlorine shock treatment this morning, I serendipitously discovered a Leslie’s about six blocks from the campus (where the CU office resides). And even more serendipitously, right next door to the thing was a Fry’s grocery store….where I could buy another breakfast melon, some grapes, and a few tomatoes to restock the larder.

And at the Leslie’s, I discovered that eight pounds worth of shock treatment in bags costs about $14 less than the same amount of the same stuff dispensed in bulk. Jeez. Such a deal.

 

 

Some Punkins!

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How d’you like this mess?

And this one?

And how would you like to hit this chunk of concrete in your car or truck, while you’re tooling up the alley?

Guaranteed to take out your oil pan!

That crap is the dried-out remains of my former neighbor Sally’s backyard landscaping, which the new young owners have hacked out and dumped, higgledy-piggledy, into the alley. It’s actually less of a mess than it was: at first they just dumped it all over the thoroughfare. After a week or so, they (or someone) went out there and stacked it against the kids’ wall. More or less. Except for the chunks of concrete, which they left there to catch an unwary motorist.

See that thing that looks like a shrub somebody yanked out by the roots and threw on the ground? That’s a juniper. Juniper is one of the most flammable plants you can put in your yard. And all that loose debris? It’s been there a good ten days: drying out in 108-degree heat. It is, in a word, a pile of tinder.

The day after tomorrow is the Fourth of July.

Every July 4, people sneak into the alleys — ours included — to shoot off marginally legal and illegal fireworks. Our idiot legislators, who confuse “fireworks” with “firearms” and so must preserve our right to carry them, did away with all state regulation of consumer fireworks. They did allow a few cities to lay down limits…but their workaround for that was to pass another law stating that cities and counties cannot tell retailers not to sell any fireworks they please — whether or not said fireworks are illegal within the city limits;.

Right. Got that?

City to Morons: You can buy these things that will blow off your hand and blast out your eyes but you can’t set them off.

Morons to City: Sure, boss. Yup yup yup!!!

Phbhphbhthphththt!

So now every July 4 and every New Year’s, we have chuckleheads blasting powerful, dangerous fireworks in every neighborhood. And since some of these things are illegal to shoot off inside the Phoenix city limits, they sneak into the alleys to play, where they think they won’t be seen.

Fun, eh?

Well, my back wall is covered with a vine called cat’s claw. Satan and Proserpine planted it there, and I’ve let it grow because I like a whole lot of privacy around my pool. And everywhere in my backyard, for that matter. The building code forbids a backyard fence higher than six feet, but nowhere is there any law that says ornamental plants growing along a back wall can’t be as high as you like. So one way get around this regulation — other than ignoring the law and stacking block eight or ten feet high — is to plant oleanders, vines, and other plants that will block the curious and the criminal from peering into your backyard.

Cat’s claw can pile up on your fence to make a ten- or twelve-foot high barrier. But of course…it’s a plant. Far as I can tell, it’s no more flammable than any other ordinary plant — nothing that I’ve looked up mentions flammability as a problem, in the way that juniper and eucalyptus and cypress are problems. That notwithstanding, Gerardo keeps it trimmed up about four feet off the ground. Still…it is a plant. And there is a lot of it. And people who sneak into alleys to shoot off their illegal fireworks do not give one thin damn about the safety of your property.

Nor, speaking of thin damns, do the neighbors. Their piles of debris are easily three to four feet deep. If that stuff catches fire, the likelihood that it will jump across the alley and set my landscaping plants alight is extremely high. Not just the cat’s claw, but the palm trees (four of them) and the citrus and the devil-pod tree and the paloverde and the olive and the …yeah: and the roof of the house. All it will take is a stiff breeze — like the one we had late this afternoon — to spread sparks from here to Hell.

So this morning I went over and visited the guy who seems to be in charge. Explained the problem. Would he please have that stuff hauled off, it being illegal to dump in the alley?

He refused. By way of blowing me off, he actually said (can you believe this?) that the City’s bulk trash collection was supposed to come by before July 4.

That’s the day after tomorrow. Did I mention that?

Well, anyway: no. Look it up online, where it’s always posted. They won’t even start bulk collection in this area until July 30.

My insurance agent advises that I should call the city and launch a complaint. He thinks everything possible needs to be done to eliminate risk of a house fire.

My son, who also is in insurance, thinks this would cause neighbor trouble, big time. He suggests making a record to the effect that I asked them to get rid of the flammable debris — like sending them a registered letter! My insurance company would then have a paper trail so as to file a claim against their insurance company.

Heee! This is supposed NOT to cause neighbor trouble?

😀

Even if a registered letter could get there by tomorrow(!), that sounds like an exercise in futility. But I do have a record: my camera dates its pictures. And I’ve just described my exchange with the jerk here in WordPress, which also dates content.

Interestingly, it appears that the guy is staying there. His decrepit truck has been parked on the street day and night — all night — for as long as the landscaping exploit has been going on. After I walked away, I heard the woman come outside and ask him what I wanted. So she does know that I asked him to clean up the mess.

I figure he must be a relative or a friend who agreed to help them with their landscaping project.

Whatever he is, he sure ain’t a landscaper!

What a mess they’ve made of Sally’s formerly dull but pleasant enough backyard. They’ve pulled out all the planting except three or four scrawny cape honeysuckle up against the back wall. And they’re spread some sort of dust-like top cover all over the back yard, with no break or planting or anything.

I don’t know what it is, only that it’s not quarter-minus. It’s like a fine dust. Weird.

These are the people who claim to want four children. They’ve already started toward that goal. Maybe they think they’ve made a giant sandbox???? I wouldn’t let a child play in that stuff on a bet: it’s Valley fever waiting to happen. And Other Daughter’s damned cats habitually used Sally’s gravel — real gravel, the heavy stuff — as their catbox.

Ugh! It won’t take long for those animals to saturate that powdery stuff with cat urine and cat shit. What on earth could they possibly be thinking?????

Anyway, absent certified letters, my plan is to go out there along about four or five p.m. on the Fourth, haul the hose with a sprinkler to the far side of the pool, and soak the bejayzus out of those vines. Get them all very, very wet, like totally drenched.

That way if a moron does get a fire started in that debris, sparks that hit the vines probably won’t set them alight. At least, given that cat’s claw supposedly isn’t extraordinarily flammable, there’ll be a fair chance that they’ll resist burning if they’re already good and wet.

If the wind comes up, though, there will be nothing I can do should sparks or embers reach that damn weeping acacia. Those trees are as flammable as eucalyptus — which is very — and the thing is a good 40 or 50 feet high.

Damn, but I’m tired of dealing with other people’s stupidity.

Losing the Visa Card but Keeping Costco

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You may recall that when Costco dropped American Express and switched all its customers over to Citibank’s Visa card, I demurred — having enjoyed Citibank’s customer disservice in the past and had a bellyful. Instead, I decided to opt the wondrous benefits that attach to the Costco Visa card (which, it must be allowed, are considerable) and stick with a Visa card issued through my credit union.

This has worked OK. The CU’s Visa card even offers a few kickbacks, though of course nothing as generous as the Costco card provides.

But there have been a few problems. The biggest one has been getting the bills paid on time.

Item: When you use the credit union’s online bill-pay service — which should be transferring the payment electronically — the CU in fact pays Visa with a freaking paper check sent by snail-mail!!

This means it takes some ten days to arrive in Visa’s precincts. And then it takes another day or two for the check(!) to clear Visa’s bank. So if, say, the due date is April 10 and the check arrives there on April 10, payment is considered late!

The envelopes in which the CU-branded bills arrive are so discreet as to be practically incognito. It’s not obvious at first glance that a Visa statement (or any financial document) is inside. So it’s possible to simply miss an incoming statement, if you’re not paying attention.

I have paper statements sent as signals that it’s time to pony up some cash. This I favor over electronic statements, because a) my incoming email is a freaking NONSTOP tsunami, and sooner or later an electronic blat will get lost; and b) things computer make me tear my hair out. I do not want to deal with any more than I’ve already got, thank you.

So, if a statement doesn’t get here, chances are I will miss a payment.

This happened last month. The May statement seems to have been lost in the mail, and I never noticed that it hadn’t come and so hadn’t been paid.

This week, in comes a snarling wallop upside the head from Visa, saying they not only are gouging me $25 as a late payment penalty, they also are reporting me to all three credit bureaus as delinquent.

This morning I call and ask to get this reversed, which you usually can do if you don’t try it very often. WonderAccountant says most credit-card vendors will forgive one lapse a year.

Not so this outfit. The guy I reached, who sounded like a sweet enough young fella, said there was not a thing he could do about it. He pretended to absent himself long enough to make it look like he was talking to a boss, then came back on the line and said there was nothing they could do to reverse or undo the black blot with the credit bureau.

So I had to get in the car, traipse across the city to the credit union, and talk with the manager in person.

Forthwith, she got the late charge reversed and arranged to pay the bill in full. I said I wanted to close the account. She suggested not doing that. And yeah, I do know you really shouldn’t close a credit card account, because just closing it — whether or not a dispute is involved — will ding your credit rating. She did say that the credit ding was not slated to go through until the 22nd, and since we’re a long way from that date, there should be no report to the damned credit bureaus.

Okay. Well, that’s fine: I still have an active card. But there’s no way they can make me use it. It’s now in a file folder, hidden in a drawer.

In passing, I considered opening a Citibank Costco card, which after all would provide some rich kickbacks. But that is going to be a major hassle, with all the freezes on the three credit bureaus. When I talked with Citibank over the phone yesterday, their rep said they could not know which of the three credit bureaus they would use — apparently their software rotates among them  at random. So this would mean I would have to apply; then sit by the phone till I got a call from Citibank; then call the specified credit bureau; then demand a temporary lift of the freeze.

Yeah. Right.

Well, to start with, I have only one phone number that reaches a human (or did, the last time I called), and that’s with Experian. Trying to get through to those people is a headache of migraine intensity; as for the others…don’t even ask.

So. That leaves me with a Visa debit card, which I decidedly do not want to use at Costco’s gas pumps (or anyone else’s) and would prefer not to use at all.

Hm.

I spend way too much money at Costco, AKA “Impulse Buy Hell.” Matter of fact, over the past six months, I’ve averaged $332 a month in store purchases and $36 a month in gasoline.

Really, that’s not all that terrible when you realize I buy most of my clothing there, most of my food (I don’t eat out, so this is significantly less than $10/day), ingredients for the dog’s spectacularly expensive DIY food, all my personal products, and most of my household goods. And a fair amount of the S-corp’s office supplies.

Still. I suspect that if I weren’t packing a credit card every time I shop there, I could cut the spending. A lot.

Sure don’t want to write checks, and I sure don’t want to have that much cash around.

So. I think what I’m going to do is this:

Figure out what would be a reasonable monthly budget for all those necessaries, absent the impulse buys. Let’s say about $275, maybe $300 at the outside. Add on enough to cover gasoline — around $40 just now, but rising fast. Then go into the store at the start of the month and buy a Costco cash card in the amount of, say, $340.

Be more careful about purchases…knowing there’s a palpable upper limit will help a lot with that. Use it till it’s gone, and then stop buying there until the next month. Or if push comes to shove, pay for any serious necessaries with the debit card.

I refuse to put a debit card into a gas pump, nor will I use one at a restaurant — there just aren’t enough consumer protections against theft. But the occasional restaurants I visit always accept AMEX, and if the tank runs dry after I run out of dollars on the cash card, I’ll just pay a couple bucks more to buy at a gas station that takes AMEX.

It’s really not that much hassle. If memory serves, the last time I bought a cash card I was able to get it at the regular checkout register, rather than having to stand in a different line. But even if you do have to buy from the customer service desk, so what? It’s not that big a deal.

I guess…

I need another hole in my head….

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So along about 11:00 a.m., having organized this year’s mountain of tax papers, I stroll across the street to WonderAccountant’s place, there to deliver the trash. As I stroll down the driveway, I hear a woman shrieking, truly screaming in terror. Drop the papers on WA’s doorstep, holler at her to call the cops, and start to run in the direction of the yelling. By the time I get down to the house where I think it’s coming from, it’s stopped. I can’t find anyone around, so stand down.

While WonderAccountant and I are waiting for the cops to show up (they never do…) we see the Perp stalk out of Other Daughter’s house, jump in his car, and drive away. We realize the screaming was very likely coming from OD’s: WonderAccountant has noticed before that conversation taking place in OD’s yard bounces off house walls on the other side of the street and sounds like they’re right in her or Joel’s  front yard.

We debate whether to add this to our report to 911 but figure since he saw us standing out there, he’ll know where that came from. If (we’re still thinking, mistakenly, when) we see a cop, we’ll casually mention that they might want to check on her welfare, without commenting on the abusive father.

OD told another neighbor that when her sister, Pretty Daughter, was advanced in pregnancy, he socked her smack in the gut with his fist. Said he used to beat both girls and their mother when they were kids. It’s believable: he really is a beaut. But then: she’s certified nuts, too…evidently for a reason.

So there I am in the driveway waving good-bye to the plumber, who shows up half-an hour before the 1-to-3 slot he reserved, and thinking…God Dayum, I do need that German shepherd back.

Anna. She did quite the little number on the Perp’s schizophrenic accomplice, Son-in-Law (he who no longer lives with Other Daughter). SiL tried, apparently during a phase when his meds weren’t working, tried to get into my backyard through the side gate, while a friend and I were sitting on the side deck. He managed to escape (luckily he’d parked his car in front) before she could catch him, but I’ll tellya…he never came back here again. Scared the bedoodles out of him.

As for the Perp himself: she could’ve taken that aging sleaze out in about three seconds flat.

Sometimes I think I need to get another German shepherd.

Right. Just what I need: another hole in the head.

If I’d had Anna at hand this noon, I would’ve gone down to O.D.’s place to see if she was OK.

Right.

Today’s Day from Hell started yesterday morning, when I managed to clog up the main bathroom’s toilet. It being Sunday, that meant I had to make do until today, when the plumber could send his son to clear out the pipes.

This morning, during a visit from yet another Cox technician, we learned that Cox’s shitty equipment just doesn’t work at all with the VSR Call Blocker 5000, which is damned annoying.

After 309 intercepts, most of the robocallers have given up. It’s been relatively quiet around here the past few days, with the device disconnected.

They’ll be back in due time, of course. At that point, I’ll either switch the phones to Ooma and NoMoRobo (as I should have done at the outset) or deep-six the landlines and replace them with a few cell phones. I figure I can get a real cell phone — an actual smartphone, now that one of my friends has volunteered to teach me to use it — and then acquire a few ultra-cheap clamshells with prepaid minutes to set around the house for emergency use. These can just be left turned off, and the proposed smartphone can take my present phone number.

Last night at about 12:15 a.m. (that actually would be this morning, wouldn’t it?), Firefox (!!! Firefox!) crashed with a resounding roar. In doing so, it took down a website I’d been working on half the day, losing about two hours’ worth of coding. I hate coding. I hate coding even more than I hate grading freshman comp papers. And that is a lot. And yes. Yes, the page was saved. Do you really think I don’t hit “Save” about every thirty seconds, after all my fun escapades in Computer Science?

So spent two hours this morning reconstructing the disappeared content and design. Good morning, fuckin’ America!

In the Hole in the Head Department, y’know what I really think I should do?

I think I should give over all pretense of doing anything that in any way looks like work. Toss a couple pair of jeans, a few shirts, a jacket, the camp stove, the dwarf dogs, and a sleeping bag in the car and just…start…driving.

And never. come. back.