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Idle essays

July 4 Kaput

by

Gosh. A whole post was almost done here, dated July 4. And…egad! Apparently I never published it.

Out it goes.

Far as I recall, it wasn’t a truly horrible evening. Often July 4 is truly horrible here, with idiots setting off their bang-bangs way-y-y into the night.

The reason for this: Our honored civic leaders, in their Passionate Patriotism, legalized fireworks in Arizona, undoing a years-long ban on sales of the damn things. Of course, people used to smuggle them in across the Mexican border and over from neighboring states…but not every numbskull and his mentally retarded brother, sister and cat glommed the damn things every Fourth of July. Now, everybody can get them —  any kind of them — and so nitwits blast them off all over the city and the state. So we get BAM BAM BAM BAM WEEEEEEEUUUUUUUU  BAM BAM all. night. long.

Understand. It’s not that I hate fireworks. We had a friend — now a late friend — who used to get a license to shoot the things off. He would throw an annual party, and he had professionals who knew what they were doing fill the air over his neighborhood with lights and noise. That was fun. And it was OK, because the fireworks were overseen safely, and because his Paradise Valley home was not surrounded by flammable trees and grasses.

The people who put on that show DID know what they were doing. They weren’t putting people’s homes and yards and pets at risk.

What I hate is fireworks in the hands of flaming morons.

And that’s what we have now.

Last night I ended up standing on the street all evening, keeping an eye on the doings in the alley. To my amazement, two young gentlemen who have taken up residence across the street came out and kept me company!

Can you imagine?

I sure can’t. At any rate, we ended up socializing for the better part of an hour. After the loony toons settled down, we went back into our respective palaces, and that was that.

LOL! Truth to tell, I seriously did consider putting the dog in the car and heading out to the desert, there to camp until dawn. That was NOT the way I wanted to spend the night, but it sounded a lot better than dodging nitwits all evening.

But for a change, not too much nitwittery went on, at least not in the immediate vicinity. Probably, I think, because those two guys were standing out there.

Well, not too much nitwittery except for the drunk driving. Lushes killed one person and injured two on the accursed freeway up the road. Honestly.

It makes Sun City look good…if only that place weren’t such a mausoleum.

At any rate, today we’re back to normal: Hotter than the hubs of Hades. Just now we’re down to a chilly 111 degrees, according to Wunderground. And yea verily: that’s exactly what the thermometer on the back porch reads.

Pool Dude — the guy I hired to come around and take care of the Hole in the Ground Into Which to Pour Money — has about paid for himself in sheer labor savings. The damned pool is sparkling clean: not a sheet of green to be seen anywhere. He’s expensive, but IMHO paying for his service beats leaving the thing empty.

Because, after all, there is no “empty” with a swimming pool. It doesn’t have a drain that you leave open, like a bathtub. If you don’t actively keep it drained, it hosts a puddle in which to grow algae and breed mosquitoes. My next-door neighbor does that.

Other Daughter, who lives in the next house down from that neighbor, leaves her windows open at night. (Don’t ask!!) Result: the mosquitoes got into her house, chewed her up, and gave her a raving case of encephalitis. She almost died. For a while, the doctors thought that even if she survived, she would never walk again.

She’s one tough lady, though. Not only did she live through it, but yea verily, she’s trotting all over the ‘Hood again.

At any rate, this particular stupidity means, for me: keep the doors and windows closed. Keep screens on all the doors and windows. Do not leave a door open for the dog to come and go at will.

Isn’t having to make allowances for neighbors’ idiocy fun?

To my mind, this was the beauty of the ranch: living out in the boondocks, two or three miles from the nearest neighbor, meant you were pretty much out of reach of the idiot neighbors’ frolics.

If you want a job done right…

by

…DO IT YOURSELF, dammit.

The problem with cleaning ladies is that when they don’t know what to do with something, they take it upon themselves to invent something to do with it. And that invention is rarely anything you or I would think of.

I like to hide a front door key outside, in a truly weird place, so that I can get into the house if I lose my regular keys. This has saved my tuchus twice in the years that I’ve lived here, and I have NO reason to want to change that.

Well, apparently Wonder-Cleaning Lady thinks that’s just silly. By this morning’s early light, I discovered she took the front door key out of its hiding place — inside a hummingbird feeder — filled up the feeder with sugar water, hung up the feeder, and put the key….WHERE??????

When I got home w/ the dog this a.m. I couldn’t find my key ring. So I went to look for the key in the bird feeder…and…NOPE

Holeee shee-ut!  Now I couldn’t get into the house, not for love nor money.

Eventually I did find a key. Not THE key, but at least one that works. Later on today, then, I’ll have to drag this key over to the hardware store and have a couple of copies made. Find new hidey-holes for them where the burglars and the delinquents across the street can’t find them. That’ll soak up half the day.

Why would you think a person would put something in a specific place unless the person WANTED the thing in that place?

This will form a nice little distraction from lunch with my son, as planned. Don’t know what time the hardware store opens on Sunday…probably not before noon: whatddaya bet? Maybe not at all, on a Sunday.

****

Next week’s Project from Hell will be to find out if I can get my parents’ “cremains” away from the mortuary in Sun City where the Evil New Wife’s relatives deposited them — without bothering to consult me.

These urns of ashes, I would like to move to the close in the church that I attend, where I wish to get myself deposited.

Turns out the rip-off artists in Sun City CHARGE YOU TO MOVE YOUR DECEASED PERSON’S ASHES out of their effing mortuary! It’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars just to get them out of there and move them down to the church.

I may be talking with a lawyer about that.

My father died of a stroke that turned him (briefly) into a vegetable. Between the time the stroke hit and the time he died, he had no consciousness of anyone around him.

Meanwhile, the hag that he’d married after my mother died was THE single nastiest person I have ever met. He was miserable with her. A number of tartly funny stories depend from those circumstances…among them his strategy of going out into the parking lot and sitting in the car all day long to get away from her, and his secret flight to another old-folkerie, where he contrived to rent a studio on a month-to-month basis, equip it with a TV set, and sit there all day in front of it.

He would tell the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be worked on. Day after day…. Incredibly, she was SO astonishingly stupid that she believed it!!!

Well.

She did...until some mutual friends came over for bridge one evening. As they sat there, the “friends” announced they had discovered THE MOST AMAZING COINCIDENCE!!!

They’d been over at the other old-folkerie to visit a friend, and while there had seen a list of residents’ names…that had my father’s name on it!

Ohhhh boy oh heee hee, wasn’t that the most AMAZING coincidence!

Pissed, my father growled that it was no coincidence: he had a place there.

😀

As you can imagine, this cast a bit of a pall over the bridge evening.

Incredibly, it did not bring an end to the miserable marriage. He was afraid to divorce her because, wailed he, she’ll get all my money!

Understand, he worked like an animal all his life to re-earn the $100,000 inheritance his own mother had squandered on spiritualists and on building a mansion in Ft. Worth. So…money was a bit of an obsession for him. So, incredibly, he was willing to spend the last years of his life in misery if that was what it took to hang onto the precious money.

She had inherited that amount from her father, who was a buffalo hunter, trading hides out of Oklahoma and Texas. Apparently a LOT of money was to be made in exterminating the native wildlife, especially when that wildlife’s hides could be turned into hats and coats. She herself was mostly Choctaw Indian…apparently one with no compunction about clearing the plains of her people’s livestock.

A hundred thousand dollars at the turn of the twentieth century would be like about a million dollars today.

Now….if I’d possessed even half a brain, I would have said to him, “Daddy, she’s NOT going to get your money. I’m married to a lawyer who’s with one of the most powerful law firms in the state — quite possibly in the Southwest. She will have no claim on an estate that you owned before you married her.”

But no. Of course not. Proof positive that I do NOT possess half a brain. It never entered my mind to ask the then-husband about this. It never entered my mind to ask him to assure my father that the Dragon Lady was not going to clean out his savings.

So, he stayed miserably married to her until a stroke carried him away. He managed to transfer most of his life savings to me, which is why I own my home outright and why I will have something to leave to my son.

Ugh. What a way to earn a living, eh?

😮

Ohhh well. When I talk with our priest next week, I’ll ask how I can extract their Cremains from the Sun City rip-off artists, and also arrange to have myself disposed of down at our church.

This is not very respectful to my father’s memory: he hated loathed and despised organized religion. But…he ain’t here, folks. I am. And I hated, loathed, and despised living in Sun City. I ain’t about to be disposed of out there. But since I have no other family but my son, I do want their remains with me.

It’s the principle of the thing.

Daily Doggy-Walk

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6:15 a.m.: Just back from a mile+ doggy-walk. Hot and humid: 98 degrees with 22 percent humidity.

The weather kept most the stupes inside this morning, though. So…that was nice.

We walked across a southerly street populated with big old classic North Central houses on big old classic irrigated lots. Whew! I am sooooo glad I no longer have to take care of one of those places! Even with a cleaning lady coming on once a week, keeping everything clean and running was a bitch of a job.

Here — in a house half the size of our li’l mansion and absent the kid, the husband, and the large dogs — the house stays pretty clean even with a cleaning lady surfacing only twice a month.

At any rate… We saw a white golden retriever over there, the spitting image of the Late, Great Charley the White Golden Retriever.

I don’t know if M’hijito is going to try to replace Charley with another golden...or with any other dog. He works out of his house, ever since his employer discovered how much moola is to be saved by shutting down the big offices and parking workers in front of their home computers.

That would, in theory, allow him to snab a puppy. Except…a puppy demands time, and all of his time is occupied with office work. In theory, it ought to be possible to socialize a pup to Life with Humans when you’re working from home…but…nice theory! He can’t be jumping up every half-hour to attend to a puppy while he’s supposed to be engaged in company work.

Welp…I’d better get up and get something to eat. Or…something…

And so, away!

Sentimental Wanderings….There she goes again!

by

Sources of (much-needed!) fun:

Driving around and around, like when we were kids

Of late, I’ve focused on that crucial element: fun.

Haven’t had much of that since I dropped out of the choir (plague!) and quit hiking alone in the Phoenix Mountain Parks (insane!) and no longer can afford to burn a tank of $4/gallon gasoline driving around in aimless sight-seeing.

This morning I ventured downtown on some minor errand and, once that was done, found myself revisiting and roaming around the Old Neighborhood. Here in lovely Phoenix, that would be the area called Encanto, a district that coalesced around a lovely public park during the 1930s. The place is full of beautiful old homes — one of which DXH and I lived in for upwards of a decade. It’s quiet and pretty and distinctive…and boy, do I miss it!

Over all these years, we’ve lived in…

* Parents/college years: Sun City
* Fresh out of college: Shiny studio apt on Thomas Road
* Early marriage: Bourgeois apartment off Camelback Road
* Married years in Encanto: Cypress Street
* North Central: Hayward Avenue
* Sunnyslope: My house
* Sunnyslope: SDXB’s house
* M’jito: Midtown
* SDXB: Sun City
* North Phx: Overpriced apartment

….a-a-a-n-d….

Now that I’m old…. Well, truth to tell, I’d just as soon be in our first, beautiful, antique house in the historic Encanto district. What a beautiful place. What grand young neighbors and elegant old neighbors.

Scary as Hell, yes. But oh! so beautiful.

If we’d enclosed the driveway at the Cypress house and turned it into lockable garage space, we’d probably still be there! Any such structure would have blocked entry to the patio from the west side, making entries from the street and side yards impregnable. And the continuing presence of a large dog would have kept the backyard plenty safe. BUT: when the city snabbed a private home half a block from our place and turned it into a fire station, complete with wailing sirens 24 hours a day…not so good.

I see the fire station has reverted to private property again….years and years later.

Still, my present house is more than fine. If it weren’t for the Romanian Landlord issue, I probably would feel little or no sentimental longing to return to Encanto.

100 Things about Myself

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I wrote this in response to a question at Quora: “Can you write 100 things about yourself?”  Having completed that little challenge, lo! I find Quora won’t let it go online. So…Here ’tis:

*********

Sher.

  1. Just now, my head hurts.
  2. Think that’s prob’ly because of allergies. Everything in sight is blooming just now.
  3. Can’t take an aspirin because when I was a toddler I got into a medicine cabinet and ate a whole bottle of aspirin.
  4. When my mother realized what I’d gotten up to, she rushed me to an ER, where a doctor told her I would be dead by morning.
  5. Strangely, I’m not dead yet, even though several thousand mornings have passed.
  6. The docs told my mother I must never swallow another aspirin pill as long as I live, because it would kill me. They were wrong, oddly enough.
  7. I need another cuppa coffee…hold the phone…
  8. This morning I’ve got to call a lawyer to help me deal with a relative who’s trying to glom possession of my house.
  9. That makes me nervous, because I don’t know the woman lawyer, who was a partner of my dear long-time lawyer. He dropped dead a week or ten days ago.
  10. If I can’t get this woman to work with me, then I will pack up a bunch of belongings, toss them and my dog in the car, and leave the state permanently.
  11. To “lose” any followers, the dog and I will camp for several weeks in the deserts and forests of the Four Corners area.
  12. Where we’ll end up, I have no clue. And really: don’t much care just now.
  13. Now that I’ve managed to regrow my hair to the length where I like(d) it, I’ve decided I don’t much care for it long.
  14. This could be convenient: I could get my hair cut real short on the way out of town, so when the relative in question describes me to the cops and anyone else he tries to set on my trail, he would be describing someone who doesn’t look like me anymore.
  15. There’s a thought: change your hair! OK, why not change the dog’s hair, too? I could either have a groomer shave her fur off short, or I could dye her (very distinctive-looking) fur.
  16. We live in a nice, thirty-year-old tract house on the fringe of an upscale district.
  17. I grew up in Saudi Arabia.
  18. I grew up hating school, because the brats there thought it was hilarious to tease and torment me for wanting a career as an astronomer.
  19. Back in the Dark Ages when I grew up, girls absolutely positively did NOT get to grow up to be scientists.
  20. As a kid, standardized tests indicated that I was reading at the genius level.
  21. Back in the Dark Ages when I grew up, girls absolutely positively did NOT get to be geniuses of any kind. Well, unless they were geniuses at baking cakes and sewing clothes.
  22. I was pretty good at baking cakes.
  23. But I hated sewing clothes.
  24. My father never knew I found out where he hid his revolver.
  25. Back in those same Dark Ages, I had an elaborate, highly specific plan to run away: tie together a raft of palm spines (used to build fencing in our camp), add a home-made sail, launch it from the beach (about two blocks from our company house), and sail away into the distance. Follow the edge of the continent to where I could cross over and land on the shore of Alaska; continue south into California. Get a dog. Live my life as Little Orphan Annie.
  26. Just now, my hip hurts. Probably osteoporosis. More than probably…
  27. The ongoing headache: probably allergies.
  28. If I weren’t so lazy, I’d get off my duff and take the dog for two-mile walk through the nearby desert preserve.
  29. But I ain’t a-gonna, because the last time I went hiking up there, some S.H. (not realizing I was old enough to be his grandmother) followed me through the desert. When I ducked down into an arroyo before he rounded a hill that briefly blocked his view of me, he stood for a good 15 minutes on that trail, obviously searching for me.
  30. I’m a talented writer, widely published in consumer and trade periodicals, with three books in print.
  31. But I can’t do math to save my life.
  32. I never carry cash with me.
  33. Consequently, I never dispense hand-outs to the legions of panhandlers who pester us whenever we walk across a grocery-store parking lot.
  34. The top of the block wall between my place and the neighbors is lined with carpet tack strips, to keep out the neighboring Cat Lady’s little furry friends, which otherwise would use my vegetable garden as their latrine and kill all the birds that visit my yard.
  35. The neighbor between my house and the Cat Lady’s house hates wild birds almost as much as she hates Cat Lady’s furry pals.
  36. I don’t much like the skylights in this house: They’re classy and stylish and they light up the kitchen, dining-room, and family room very nicely, but they also let in heat.
  37. If I have to run away to keep from being consigned to an old-folks’ home, I definitely will pass through the Navajo Reservation and, while there, buy another beautiful Navajo weaving.
  38. As you might guess by that, I do love the Navajo rugs I bought there some years ago. They now grace walls in the family room and my office.
  39. I refuse to pay for television. Period.
  40. When our Honored Leaders took free TV away from us (nowadays you have to subscribe to cable in order to get a signal here), I just stopped watching television.
  41. Well. Except for the TV I could download into my computer.
  42. Having realized how b-o-o-o-o-ring most on-air TV is, I totally lost my taste for the “entertainment” that used to fill my every evening. Now I watch PBS News on my desktop, and…well…that’s about it. Even Masterpiece Theater isn’t worth sitting in front of a computer to watch.
  43. But gosh, I do miss Dragnet. Strangely, after all these years I now think that was my all-time hands-down favorite TV show.
  44. My favorite magazine is The Economist.
  45. The magazines where I used to work as a staff editor — Phoenix Magazine and Arizona Highways — bore me stupid. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why anyone would pay to subscribe to those things.
  46. Actually, Highways is probably tolerable because of its superb photography. The copy? hmmmm….
  47. And speaking of for-the-life-of-me mysteries, I can not understand why on earth anyone would want to lay down wall-to-wall carpets throughout a house. Tile flooring is sooooo much easier to keep clean! And if your feet are cold? Hey: ever heard something called “slippers”? 😀
  48. My mother believed her mother died in early middle-age, supposedly of a uterine cancer. But I discovered — another miracle of the Internet — that she did NOT die in the late 1920s or early ’30’s , but in fact was still living when my son (her grandson) was born in 1979.
  49. Astonished by this little revelation, I continued poking around in historic documents and discovered that she married a prominent San Francisco businessman.
  50. Two streets converge in downtown San Francisco: one bears her first name and the other bears her and her husband’s last name.
  51. They meet in front of the bank where my highly independent great-aunt spent most of her adult life working as the bank president’s executive secretary.
  52. That aunt’s brother — my great-uncle — designed the Morrison Planetarium.
  53. I have always wished I could live in the beautiful house he and his wife built in the Sausalito hills.
  54. I’d ‘druther live with my dawg than another human, any day.
  55. Helle’s Belles! Here comes another cop helicopter. He’s about a block away…and here we go again.
  56. Glad the dawg and I went outside to do her business 15 minutes or so ago. Otherwise a plugged-up pooch and I could be stuck inside the house for quite awhile.
  57. Verging on Old As the Hills, I still have brown hair with blonde highlights. Gosh! My mother had gone completely gray by the time she reached my age.
  58. Well. Before she reached my age. She died nine years before she got that far.
  59. I find it hard to forgive her for smoking herself to death. She died nine years before her only grandchild was born. That doesn’t make any difference to the kid, though. But her peculiarly baroque style of suicide put my father through the tortures of the damned. And that is, yes: hard to forgive.
  60. I have yet to figure out how to get rid of the resident roof rats, some of whom have taken up residence in the attic. The exterminator I hired couldn’t do it, either.
  61. Corgis love to chase rats. A delighted corgi does a surprisingly good job at reducing the ratty population. Ergo: I love my corgi even more now than I did before our ratties came along.
  62. My brilliant cleaning lady is absolutely positively a gift from heaven.
  63. I need to track down a mortician or three and make pre-arrangements for my eventual exit from this earthly plane.
  64. Though I’d love to have my ashes interred in the church close, they charge FIFTEEN HUNDRED BUCKS for the privilege. So…I reckon my cremains will be flying off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, there to join the ashes of my former mother-in-law, who was similarly disposed of.
  65. I sure do miss singing on the church choir. Had to quit when the plague came up, though. It turns out choral singing is one of the most dangerous things you can do during time of contagion. And I’m highly susceptible to respiratory infections. (See above: parental smoking habit.)
  66. Speaking of the which, I’m still enjoying the aftereffects of the Covid infection I caught way back last autumn. Ugh!
  67. I had perfect teeth until was in my 30s.
  68. Now that I’m old, my teeth hurt.
  69. So does just about everything else, come to think of it. 😀
  70. Tomorrow — today, actually, it now being 4:19 a.m. as I continue to scribble this — I need to call a mortician (where? who??) and make arrangements to have my remains disposed of.
  71. I do not want to be laid to “rest” (does an urnful of ashes rest??) in Sun City, where my parents are at the Sunland Mortuary.
  72. Because I hated living in Sun City, the prospect of spending eternity in Whiteyville, where the residents went to hide from anyone and everyone who was at all different from them, makes me cringe.
  73. Plus I discovered that my father’s third wife’s idiot relatives have deposited her urn-full of ashes next to him, out there in Sun City.
  74. She was meaner than Pussley and made the last years of his life miserable. And now she’s out there with him and with my mother????? Holeee shee-ut!
  75. I’d like to be laid to rest in my church’s close, but recently learned the privilege costs fifteen hundred dollars. That’s fifteen hundred bucks that could and should go to my son.
  76. So tomorrow — well, today, after the sun comes up — I need to start calling around to find out about disposing of my earthly remains with the least amount of cost and headache for my son.
  77. Peripheral neuropathy hurts, hurts, and then hurts some more.
  78. I’m getting exceptionally tired of hurting.
  79. This makes the approaching end of my story look a lot less daunting than it would if life didn’t hurt all the time.
  80. I waste WAY too much time writing Quora posts!
  81. It occurs to me that I should paste this post into my blog, Funny about Money. Probably more folks would read it there than will read it on Quora.
  82. Not that it matters much, in the large scheme of things.
  83. That said, let us emphasize: this post is copyrighted by ME, not by Quora, and may be reproduced only with my permission.
  84. Have you noticed that a standard typewriter/computer keyboard doesn’t include a copyright symbol? It has an “at” symbol (which Quora won’t let me type here without dorking up and snafuing the formatting!), but it does not have a copyright symbol.
  85. I’m going to be peculiarly pissed if I discover that $1500 is cheap for getting rid of one’s earthly remains.
  86. Do you ever wonder why humans have to use EVERY opportunity, no matter how crass, to make money?
  87. I wonder what it would cost — if it could be done at all — to move my parents’ remains from the Sun City mortuary over to the church’s close?
  88. But on second and third thoughts, that wouldn’t be very respectful. My father loathed organized religion, his mother having been relieved of a substantial fortune by scammers who made her believe they could talk to the dead.
  89. No kidding. He described their pretending to levitate the dining-room table.
  90. She was a half-Indian woman — Choctaw, far as I can tell — and apparently quite vulnerable to woo-woo dispensed by white scammers.
  91. Her father’s family was named Donner. This is a weird coincidence, since my mother had ancestors who were in the ill-fated Donner party that got lost in the Sierra Nevadas and ate each other by way of trying to survive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donner_Party
  92. The sky is lightening up. The birds are starting to sing. Morning is dawning, like the first day…
  93. Today is Tuesday. It will be largely consumed by the search for a new lawyer to replace my beloved lawyer, who dropped dead a few weeks ago.
  94. I need a lawyer to be sure the changes we made to my will actually DID get filed with the state.
  95. Have you noticed that whatever you have to do, it ALWAYS ends up having to be done the hard way?
  96. And can you believe that once it was safe enough here to leave the backyard gate unlocked?
  97. Now the alleys are infested with homeless transients and burglars. No one in their right mind would leave the gates to their backyard without padlocks.
  98. Lordie! I am sooooooo tired!
  99. I’m going back to bed…
  100. …dawn or no dawn.

WTF??????

by

An afternoon from Hell brought me home, through 40 minutes of cut-throat traffic, to a glass of wine, a wooden rolling chair in front of an uncomfortable desk, and — when I went to sign in to FaM’s dashboard — a frantic warning that Funny’s website has been phished and it was unsafe for me to proceed.

Sumbiche!

Well, here we are anyway, and honi soit qui mal y pense.

What.

A.

Day.

Started out with my son, who has arrogated communications with the Mayo Clinic unto himself, surfacing to emcee an online appointment with my doctor out there. That was actually fairly benign — much more so than I feared. So we chatted with the lovely, brilliant lady doc, mulled over how we can get some legal hoop-jumps done (a task made far more difficult by the recent demise of my beloved lawyer), and generally wasted time.

Speaking of wasting time, a few days ago I was talked into driving way to Hell-and-gone out to the Mayo’s Scottsdale clinic to join a hand-holding group of patients who are coping with the vicissitudes of senility.

Yes. I spent FORTY MINUTES on the road EACH WAY for the privilege of listening to a bunch of duffers reporting that they can’t remember things.

Right.

And yes. That is EIGHTY minutes round-trip, plus an hour of hot-air time. Jayzuz!

***

Meanwhile, my beloved laptop crashed. A service contract with Best Buy, then, landed the contraption in that fine store’s precincts.

This morning, in comes a call from Best Buy telling me the computer is fixed and ready to pick up. So…this afternoon, after some of the other dust has settled, I jump in my car and fight my way through Phoenix’s lovely surface-street traffic, over to Best Buy.

Get parked. Bound into the Store. Get in line. Stand in line stand in line stand in line stand….  Finally get up to the repair desk.

“You called to say my laptop is ready.”

“Huh?“

The guy denied having any clue that the computer was fixed and ready to pick up.

No…kidding.

So I was only slightly furious. Trudge back out to the car. By that point it’s after 4 p.m. Rush hour is in full, rabid swing.

And now here we are: I’m perched at (horrors!) an actual desk typing on an actual desktop computer and…and…grrrrrrrr…and I’m so tired I can hardly think. As you no doubt can guess from the quality of this copy…

Mean-meanwhile: seeking a lawyer for a lawsuit I may have to pursue. More about that later… It doesn’t look promising.

Here’s a fine drawback to gettin’ old: All the professionals and all the business people you’re used to working with have either RETIRED or DIED. Yes. All of them Sooooo… Now you have to try to find new lawyers, new doctors, new car repairmen, new computer techs, new…god help us all, dammit!