Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Good Saturday!

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G’day, indeed… Here’s a Saturday that’s been an unusually good day. Weirdly so, one could say.

Come noon, Ruby and I are trotting along…Ruby is practically glowing with joy. Her whole little body radiates a single message: oboy, this is a PERFECT dog day! And yea verily: the weather does make for a corgi-perfect perfect dog day: cool, even crisp, under Welsh-gray sky.

The natives were outside frolicking in force. We came across two kid parties and one big yard sale, all with folks hopping around like popcorn. It’s such a nice neighborhood, with legions of great neighbors!

Today I decided to change up my “system” for keeping the rambunctious Ruby under control. Because (like many corgis) she’s given to dramatic episodes of reverse-sneezing, often set off by pressure on the windpipe, I’d been lashing her up in a harness so that she didn’t give herself a choking fit whilst dragging me down the street. This, when she was a pup, had its drawbacks: without the control of a collar, she could and would pull me along like a little tugboat, so I used a tandem (two-dog) leash, clipping one lead to her collar and one to the harness. This provided some extra traction to keep her at heel but little control to communicate my (usually ignored) desires to her doggy brain.

Cassie could not keep up with Ruby charging down the road at full throttle. So I would have one dog dragging me forward and another dragging me backward…not a very happy arrangement. The double-leash lash-up helped ameliorate that, but it was a major PITA. Now that Ruby  and I can move along without an anchor, it’s a great deal more fun to go for a doggy-walk. And this afternoon I finally registered that, now Ruby is no longer a wacksh!t puppy and now that she’s a lot less susceptible to reverse-sneezing frenzies, maybe a single lead attached to the harness would do. Her collar, of course, bears her name and my phone number, so she can’t go without it. But possibly she doesn’t need to be connected to it.

And yea verily! That proved to be the case. She still drags during the first half-mile, but after awhile she was trotting right along like a normal dog. On a perfect dog day.

Sights in Payson…

Yesterday’s comedy of errors — in which I got the date wrong for a long-planned day trip to Payson — having resolved itself, today was freed up for me to go to the special rehearsal for tomorrow’s evensong concert. Hot diggety! Our choir director has lured a gifted guest conductor into town to lead us in this endeavor, and when I heard about this (belatedly arranged) coaching session, I really wanted to go to it.

So that was wonderful. As usual I learned a lot of things and enjoyed every minute of it. It should be a pretty impressive service:

  • William McKie, “We Wait for Thy Loving Kindness” — which was written for the marriage of the then Princess Eizabeth and Lt. Philip Mountbatten in 1947
  • Preces and responses by William Byrd
  • Stanford’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G Major
  • Sir Edward Elgar, “Give Unto the Lord”
  • Salve Regina (a Marian antiphon

The Elgar piece is pretty challenging, at least for the likes of moi. But it’s all truly gorgeous music. So it’s quite a joy to be able to participate in that.

Back at the Funny Farm, I managed to get the paperwork tasks under control, more or less, whilst treating the pained back with an ice pack. I’ve learned the cold seems to work better on this particular spavin than does heat. Indeed, the heating pad sometimes seems to make it even worse, whereas a cold pack numbs the damn thing so no pain (well…little pain) can be felt.

In the paperwork department, I was pleased to find a water bill of “only” $118. This is well below the recent “normal” figures of late. And I’m pretty sure it’s because the pool job must have sealed off a leak. Normally, in wintertime the pool would need to be topped up a couple of times a week — presumably because that much evaporates in the dry air. But nay…since we resurfaced the thing last November, I’ve only added water two or three times. Total! And that, not very much.

Admittedly, we’ve gotten a little rain over the past few weeks. But in fact, “a little” is the operative term: in years past, it would have been nowhere near enough to keep up with the “evaporation.”

Starved after the doggy-dragwalk, I enjoyed a pasta orgy in the afternoon: gorgeous sea scallops sautéed in garlic & olive oil along with some chard and cut-up spring asparagus, then doused in marvelous Pomí tomatoes flavored with a splash of wine. Not too bad at-tall. This, celebrating a return to the desired weight target (to my surprise…).

Oddly enough, pasta that is made in Italy of wheat grown in Italy does NOT elicit the usual effect of bloating me up by two to five pounds. Literally: one serving of ordinary American pasta instantly puts on a chunk of weight, which then takes two or three days to dissipate. But for some reason, a comparable amount of this expensive imported Italian stuff does no such thing. Since pasta is my comfort food, IMHO it’s worth the price. But y’know…. If the Italians can make pasta that doesn’t f**k up your system, I fail to see why we can’t do so, too. At any rate, I never buy American pasta anymore. Try it: you might find the same.

Image: Payson art gallery. By Alan Levine from Strawberry, United States – Down The Street Art Gallery. Uploaded by PD Tillman.

Pillar to Post…or is that Po$t?

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Okay, I knew I was going to have to drive from pillar to post this morning. But that doesn’t make life any less…amazing.

Item: Yesterday by pure serendipity I happened across a study that looks real (but sure, may not be: have we heard of the International Journal of Dermatology?) reporting that virgin coconut oil is almost as effective as mupirocin in beating back staphylococci. I’ve come to the end of the time that one is supposed to use the anti-MRSA staph ointment, and my nose still itches and the fading remains of the first and largest of the staph boils lingers on my paw. I am neurosing.

Meanwhile, I’ve had to throw out all of my makeup, because of course all if it is contaminated with the honored microbe. Yesterday I spent $90 at the Target replacing just  a few of my favorite drugstore cosmetics. But Target, being in the process of dumping last year’s fashions and restocking with this year’s fashions, offered precious poor pickin’s.

Item: Today I need a bottle of wine and a bottle of that “green” odorless relatively environmentally friendly dish detergent, which Sprouts does not carry. Sprouts does carry woo-woo shit like “virgin coconut oil,” whatever that is. There’s a very fine Sprouts down in the old, now obscenely gentrified neighborhood. It’s across the street from a Safeway, which will sell the coveted detergent. And I needed to go in search of the eyeshadow and brow powder that Target didn’t have.

Target, which I visited yesterday, is in the process of replacing last year’s stocks and so had almost none of the brands and products I use. To frost that cake, most of my makeup is several years old. Makeup, like clothing, goes out of style under the impetus of its manufacturers’ craving to sell more, more, and still more of the stuff. So of course I couldn’t find most of my preferred brands and colors.

I wear a lot of makeup when I go out in public, because my weathered skin is so grotesque that my unpainted face will scare small children. It’s an annoyance: when I was a young thing, especially during the hippy-dippy period when women went around bare-faced all the time, I could go out unpainted without feeling self-conscious. But now: not so much. Two layers of L’Oreal foundation covers a lot of brown spots and scars.

And carries a lot of staphylococci, presumably: I apply it with a brush, which gets dipped back into the cream between smearings-on.

First stop was the new Sprouts in Encanto, where yes, they did have several brands of the coconut oil nostrum, including one in a house brand that was significantly cheaper than any of the offerings at Amazon. Plus of course some wonderful red potatoes on sale. And a beautiful squash…and…and…

Moving on: of course, as usual, the road was under construction. Getting out of the parking lot involved dodging an 18-wheeler and a ninny in an SUV who felt entitled to take his half out of the middle of the road (and whom the truck driver also had to dodge), then navigating a fine mess at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Osborn.

I needed, also, a bottle of red table wine. Sprouts’s choices of wine range from poor to mediocre, all of them overpriced. So I needed to dodge through the construction to get into the large, fairly fancy Safeway across the street.

Wow! I’d forgotten how massively gentrified the stores in that area had become. Holy mackerel! At the Safeway, I saw a bottle of wine that Costco sells for $9…on offer for eighteen bucks! No, thank you.

This added a trip to said Costco.

Up to Costco through the homicidal traffic. It being Wednesday, almost noon by then, the place was as uncrowded as it’s been in weeks. I stand in a very short line and buy a bottle of $9 wine and a bottle of $7 wine.

How hard is this?

Very, apparently. The cashier charges up a lifetime supply of butter to me, which really belonged to the guy in front of me. Said guy doesn’t notice.  Neither do I until I pick up the box his sidekick hands me. He says he didn’t charge me for the butter, and they take the stuff back. I head for the door, but check the receipt on the way. Yes, he did charge me.

It’s the unsalted variety, which I use. I go back and say “you did charge me.” His sidekick is about to take it back to reshelve it. I say I’ll take it, by way of avoiding the hassle of standing in line again and wrestling with the cash card to get the money back. Fortunately, it’s the unsalted variety, which I prefer, and so that’s one fewer thing I’ll have to buy in the future.

Onward.

Cruise east and north across the city to get to the Walgreen’s I habituate. This entails driving through a residential neighborhood to avoid having to wait to turn left at the interminable red light at Montebello and 15th Avenue. Which is OK, but a nuisance.

Arriving in the vicinity of the Walgreen’s, I see it’s a good thing I decided to try the Safeway downtown, because as usual the City has the streets torn up and getting catty-corner across the street into my usual Safeway haunt would have presented a headache.

In the Walgreen’s, I finally find the make-up I’ve been searching for. Damn! I kick myself: I should’ve gone to Walgreen’s first, not hoped I could find replacements at Target.

Yesterday I spent $90 at the damn Target on foundation, mineral powder, blusher that was the wrong color, and eye paint, but still didn’t find the products I prefer.

At the Walgreen’s, hallelujah sisters, I do find a blusher whose color probably will be OK. And they have a lady who runs the toiletry and make-up department: unlike the Target lady, this one knows what she’s doing. I ask for matte eyeshadow. She does not look at me as though I’ve lost my mind. And she does indeed find a box of the stuff I want, over on the Neutrogena shelf. They also have the L’Oreal gold accent shadow I like, which I grab before it evaaporates.

The new mode is to sell all eyeshadows in “sets.” so to get the color you want, you have to buy a box that contains upwards of five colors: four or more shades you don’t want. This is exceptionally annoying, but far as I can tell can’t be avoided. The Walgreen’s still had a few of the glittery gold eye stuff I wanted to replace in single pads. But to get the matte brown I need to use as eyebrow fill-in, I had to buy five colors.

Shee-ut! $30, all told.

So I’ve now spent $120 replacing the makeup contaminated by the late, great staph infection. Ducky.

Now to get home…  Hah! The city has the intersection of Seventh Street and Glendale blocked for construction, too. So now, to go west and north I have to backtrack a block, come back around, navigate the left-turn at the intersection, veer through a neighborhood, beat my way through to Central to go north. Lovely.

The dog, of course, has peed on the floor while I was gone. Again. I’ve already cleaned up two brown mounds this morning, before leaving the house. Is there any question why I have a staph infection all over my hand and arm?

In cruising the Web this morning, I learned that rubbing alcohol — which I used in hopes of disinfecting my computer’s case and touch-pad — does NOT disinfect. To the contrary. It’s exceptionally counterproductive in the case of S. aureus. It not only does not kill staphylococcus, it enhances the bacteria’s film, which it produces and which harbors the little bastards.

Holy fuck.

The only way to kill S. aureus is to clean well with water and detergent. And of course…you can’t very well apply those substances to a computer keyboard, hm? The CDC says about the best you can do is equip the keyboard with one of those plastic covers, which  can be removed and washed in a sink.

Holy shit. As though this damn computer isn’t hard enough to use?

I wonder if I’m going to have to buy another MacBook? Like I have a spare three grand laying around for the purpose.

Oh, well. At least I found this out before I wasted my time scrubbing down all the door handles in the house with rubbing alcohol.

The coconut oil, by the way, is extremely soothing and makes your itch feel a lot better. It also makes you smell like a walking Mounds bar. But if you don’t dislike the parfum de palme, it’s something to know about.

Now I have to cover my face with the new make-up and run off to choir practice. And so…away…

Monks, Bums, and Pee Pads: Why I Love the Walmart

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Yes. If there was ever any question whether Funny is politically incorrect (really??), let it be forever dispelled: I love the Walmart in our neighborhood.

Why?

Well, in the first place, it’s the only grocery store within about an eight-mile radius where I feel safe getting out of  the car in the parking lot. This is because unlike the Safeway or the Albertson’s or the Walgreen’s or the Sprouts, they hire a security guard service. Actually, staffers at my favorite coffee house, right across the asphalt from the Walmart, say the shopping center hires the service, apparently grâce à a kind of protection racket (don’t ask: I can’t prove it; it’s just a rumor). When you don’t see an armed guard ambulating around the property, you see a massive male Walmart employee lurking out in front, allegedly wrangling the shopping carts but in fact transparently keeping an eye out for shenanigans.

Never once have I been harassed in that parking lot, which fronts right on Gangbanger’s Way. I’ve been harassed at the Safeway (which serves a very fancy part of North Central). I’ve been harassed at the Walgreen’s across from the Safeway and at the Walgreen’s in my neighborhood. I’ve been harassed at the Albertson’s in my neighborhood — indeed, chased around the parking lot at a run. I’ve been harassed at the Sprouts across the street from that Albertson’s. So annoying is this that I will cheerfully (well…grudgingly) drive through 20 miles of homicidal traffic to get free of it. Or…oh, indeed: or shop at the nearby Walmart.

The much-abused (so we’re told) staff at the Walmart are always nice to you. I’ve never met an employee there who wasn’t polite, kind, and helpful. And, as a lagniappe, nary a one of them is stupid as a post.

If they don’t know where something is (they usually do), they’ll try to find out. This is not invariably true at those other fine emporia: I no longer buy meat from the Safeway’s meat counter because one of their butchers was so rude to me. I’ve had clerks at the Whole Foods recognize at a glance that I decidedly did not belong there. At the Albertson’s…well, good luck finding an employee: they’re like Seldom Seen Smith. The staff (when you can find one) at the Paradise Valley Fry’s are very nice, but their efforts are negated by the Maserati-driving customers, who recognize poor white trash when they see it. 😀 Ditto the clientele at the Whole Foods, which since Amazon’s takeover sports even fewer hired help than the Albertson’s. But at the Walmart? No one at the Walmart treats you as though you don’t belong there, even when they are visibly tired, stressed, and overworked.

Which brings us to another small truth: Walmart people are my people.

That’s right. The customers behave as though they were decent human beings, even when they’re dressed in rags and buying their groceries with today’s equivalent of food stamps. I love Walmart people.

  • The tired-looking hard-working laborers who show up late in the afternoon
  • The Mexican mothers with their beautiful, sweetly behaved babes and toddlers, the mothers who speak Spanish with the cashiers, no doubt hired for the purpose
  • The disabled welfare recipients who stand patiently, endlessly in the line at the pharmacy (when the pharmacy’s open) and jump through hoops to get the care they need
  • The old people who amble around the store, searching for the best prices
  • The Black women, sharp and quick-looking, who no doubt also search for the best prices…but a great deal less obviously
  • The locals who act as though they were in a small-town corner grocery and will strike up a neighborly conversation with you at the drop of a hat
  • The hungry-looking, weary vagrants, also negotiating a purchase or two on “nutrition assistance”

They’ll all talk with you, genially enough, as though you were at a small-town corner grocery. Who knows? Maybe you are. Maybe Walmart is actually a port to the Twilight Zone.

I love these people because there’s a decency to them that you don’t find in the overpriced Fry’s or the Amazonized Whole Foods or the self-righteous Sprouts. No: they’re no more decent than you or I or Ms. Gotrocks. But they don’t hide what decency they have behind an elitist façade.

Today I rolled toward the checkout stand and found, ahead in the closest line, a clear and present homeless dude. Being old, single, and jaded, I tend to be wary of single homeless males. They can be all right. Or they can be…well, in need of medication. So….I roll into a longer line behind a youngish guy who appears to be, shall we say, mildly disabled intellectually. He’s clean, he looks honest, and I know I’m smarter and faster than he is, and so he’s my choice of fellow shoppers. Behind me: two other homeless or near-homeless guys, one of them hauling an oxygen tank. They’re clean enough and quiet. We wait until the cows come home while the cashier checks out the guy in front of the intellectually questionable guy. Then we wait some more because he has a sh!tload of stuff. In passing I think about asking the two homeless-looking dudes if they’d like to get in front of me but think better of it because they also have a basketful and I only have three things.

One of the guys ambles over to the machine that dispenses lottery tickets and shoves some change in there. The pot is $245 million. Silently I send a petition heavenward: Goddess! Hey, Goddess? Yeah, you, Ma’am. Please give this guy 245 million bucks. She refrains from emitting a reply at that moment.

But if you hear that some poor scruffy-looking fella in Phoenix won $245,000,000, you’ll know where that came from. 😉

To our right, another show is going on. We regulars who are in the know happen to know that the customer service desk will check you out, just like any of the check-out stand. Most people don’t do that, even though we’re aware of it, because it’s kind of rude to occupy the customer service lady with routine cashiering when there are people who really do need some special attention. But because it’s busy, a half-a-dozen shoppers are stacked up there, too.

Among them is a guy in a dress.

What?

No: he’s a monk! A real monk. He’s wearing gray Franciscan robes and he has a beautiful crucifix around his neck and…by heaven, he’s the handsomest man you have ever seen in your life. Born 40 years too late and about 90 degrees too religious. But…gorgeous. And he exudes a kind of radiance. This is a man who is deeply happy, so it seems: presumably in his vocation.,

Happy New Year to ye, brother. And many happy more.

Wanna know a little secret? You’re not gonna see that guy at the Whole Foods…

Moving on… The reason I had to make a run on the Walmart was that I ran out of doggy pee pads. Poor little Cassie is really sick (again, still). And as you know, whatever little needs or emergencies that need to be attended to always occur on a major holiday. Wasn’t sure the store would be open today, but was very pleased to discover it was doing business.

Cassie has been going through four or five pee pads a day, between pissing on them (or missing them and puddling up the floor) and shitting on them. This is turning into a bit of a nightmare. Yesterday after cleaning up, cleaning up, and cleaning up again, I realized that I did not have enough paper sponge pads to last another 24 hours. And this, m’dears, presented a major problem. If it turned out that the Walmart was closed today — as any retailer that treats its employees decently would be — then the dogs and I were going to have an Issue.

What on earth was I going to do if the Walmart was closed? Really: THE last thing on this earth I felt like doing was running around the city searching for pee pads. Wheeeee!

But thank God Walmart treats its employees like slaves and yes, they were indeed impressed into service on New Year’s Day.

Last night was the usual seven kinds of Hell presented by New Year’s Eve in the ’Hood. Offered the opportunity to buy any kind of fireworks they like, folks rich and poor will do exactly that, and spend half the night blasting away with those and with their cannons.

The locals start shooting off fireworks and guns about 11:30. This goes on until they run out, around 1 a.m. The idiots out in the alley, right behind the house, are blasting away…but that’s alright because the racket is going on for miles around. At least it’s raining, cutting the fire risk out there. Gerardo sprayed the weeds behind my knucklehead neighbor’s house, but he didn’t cut them down, so there’s a swath of dried-out dead grass and brush out there. I’d hoped the rain might keep the ninnies inside in front of their televisions…but ohhhh no!

The racket scares the bedoodles out of Ruby, so there’s no chance of diving under the pillow and trying to sleep. She paces around anxiously, threatening to jump off the bed. Said sack has one of those stupid double-thick mattresses…I didn’t realize how ridiculous it was until they delivered it, at which point is was too late to do anything about that bad choice. It’s so high that if she jumps off, she will hurt herself, and then I’ll get to drive through the dark and the rain, dodging bullets, to take her to an emergency vet.

Time passes. Eventually she settles down.

3:30 a.m.: Dog pacing awakens the human. I imagine it’s Ruby, probably hearing another round of ordnance going off — the drunks don’t stop just because midnight happened three and a half hours ago.

“Go to sleep!” I growl. Dog pacing continues. Get up. Turn on the light.

It’s not Ruby, it’s Cassie, experiencing an embarrassing urgency. Lift her off the bed. Set her on a pee mat, hoping she’ll go there because it’s freaking cold and wet outside. While I search for my shoes, she squats on the pee mat and goes PHPHBHPPHFFFPPTTTT…. Doggie effing diarrhea. Then she waddles off the end of the pee mat and goes PHPHBHPPHFFFPPTTTT some more: all over the tiles.

Well, I should be glad that it is tilework and not damn carpet. And not on the bed. But I’m not THAT glad. I lose my temper. Swear the dog is going to have to go: I cannot be on my hands and knees scrubbing floors with disinfectant four, five, six times a day, 24 hours a day. This is no longer a viable arrangement.

Get another pee mat — running out, and I expect the Walmart will be closed tomorrow. Toss it on the floor.

She immediately waddles over and pisses all over it.

Get another pee mat. Tear it whilst shaking it open. To$$ that in the garbage.

Get out another one — now there’s only one or two left, and I’ve been putting down four or five a day. There are three on the bed, which I can take off and lay on the floor. That means both dogs will have to sleep on the floor tonight, which means they’ll be banging against the bed all night long. What the hell. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since Cassie got sick, along about the first of September. So it doesn’t much matter.

The damn burns on my wrist itch like fire, as does the rash. One of these burns is going to leave a perfectly hideous scar. On the positive side, the rash is going away, so I guess it must not be MRSA. That’s something. I guess.

Another blast of ordnance goes off — now almost 4 a.m. Sounds more like a shotgun than a cherry bomb. But the stuff they sell in the Albertson’s and Home Depot parking lots at this time of year really does sound like…artillery fire.

Ruby, terrorized again, tries to jump off the bed. Get up, lift the dog down to the floor, search for shoes so as to take that dog outside. No: by the time I find my shoes, she’s hiding behind the toilet. Call her: she stays put. I lose my temper.

Go in the other bathroom in search of lidocaine to smear some on the frantic itching.

Well, no…that stuff I squished out onto my arm is sun block. F***!!! Scrub off the wound and rashes. Apply lidocaine.

Dog comes out. Call her to let her out in the yard. She dives back under the toilet.

Well. Who can blame her? The human is visibly NOT a happy camper… and the bedroom now stinks enough to gag a skunk.

Speaking of the knucklehead, those two acquired another dog, apparently as a Christmas present. It’s a yapper. So now they put this animal out in their backyard and it stands there and BARKS. And barks and barks and barks and barks….  This causes their other dog to start yapping. Cassie is too sick to bark back…but Ruby isn’t. When she hears that mutt barking, she runs out there and joins the chorus.

Aw, geeez!

4:45 a.m.: A Hell’s Angel flies by on Gangbanger’s Way. DUDE! Get a muffler on that damn thing!

What the heck. The guy’s prob’ly so high on meth and booze he can’t hear it. Or couldn’t, if he weren’t already stone deaf. Or…heh…stoned deaf. 😀

Happy 2019 from Beautiful Uptown Phoenix!

Images:

Walmart Store: WhisperToMe [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons
Monks: By Francisofmconv – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44107853

 

 

 

Happy New Year! I think…

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Cheers! It is cold on this New Year’s Day. It is raining. It is a day to hide in front of the idiot box and binge on old Cadfael shows.

Well. Okay.

It’s not really that cold: about 43 degrees on the back porch. Arizonans consider that akin to 30 below. But I suppose normal people have a different perspective on things.

That will put the eefus on the fireworks displays this year. Which is too bad. On the major firecracker-banging holidays, every resort, municipality, and public park shoots sparkly rockets into the sky, which makes for a really neat display — especially if you can get yourself into a high-rise or climb up the side of North Mountain, Camelback Mountain, or South Mountain.

But…it will also put the eefus, with any luck, on the ninnies who go out and shoot their guns at the stratosphere, and the idiots who stock up on the fireworks that by state law are legal to buy in the city but by city law illegal to set off here and who then roam up and down the alleys blasting the neighbors. They use the alleys as their firing grounds because they figure they can get out of there long before the cops show up…and they’re right. It’s 30 to 40 minutes before the police answer a 911 call here, if they bother to answer it at all.

Sooooo…you wonder why some of us wild-eyed liberals are in the “out of my dead hands” set? You take care of yourself here in the Wild West, or you don’t get taken care of. 😀 What a place!

Rain: not good when you have a sick dog. Cassie the Corgi is having an unusually difficult day. Just now she’s inert. She lays on her dog mat beside the computer, which is stuffed with old bed pillows and so not consistent in…puffiness. This padding inconsistency causes her to sink into an arroyo, which she can’t pull herself out of. So I have to lift her up and set her on her feet beside the dog bed, which gives her a coughing fit.

{sigh} I really need to put this dog down. But can’t bring myself to do it. Every time I work up enough courage to do her in, she has a “good” day: almost but not quite back to normal. Well. Far from it, but at least she doesn’t appear to be suffering on those “nearly normal” days, and she’s sort of up for ambling out to the back yard between depositing puddles and mounds on the floor. Poor beast.

News comes from NextDoor: missing autistic child. A seventeen-year-old, out in the rain and cold and unable even to tell anyone who he is or where he belongs. Two minutes later: Kid found. Thank heavens for small favors, hm?

Accomplished today…what? Uhm…

Well…I polished my toenails. That’s something. I guess.

They look pretty nice. Lots better color than the last paint job.

No dog walk: too cold, too wet.

Wouldn’t go into a grocery or drug store on a bet. Nothing done in the re-provisioning department.

Clean house? Too dark.

Wash clothes? Done.

Pick up wet dog mats? Continuous.

Write? Not so much.

All of these things failing. I guess I’d better get up and iron the clothes and table linens. And so, away…

Happy New Year!

 

 

Nuisance Abatement: Ads, Phone Calls

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Yesterday evening I happened to look at the AdBlocks Plus icon on Firefox. It has a counting feature that reports how many ads are being blocked: a total of 1,204,683 blats, blips, yaks, and yips have NOT reached my eyes or ears since that handy bit of software was installed.

Have you ever noticed that we are endlessly inundated with nuisance advertising? Ever count the number of billboards, ads on billboards, ads on the sides of buses, trucks, and cars, ads inside shopping carts, hulking signs on buildings, and “helpful” messages hanging over the roadway between your house and the grocery store? We’re drowning in nuisance messages. No wonder so many people do drugs: seen in a certain light, it’s a reasonable way to drown out the constant buzz of distraction and advertising harassment.

On this page alone — where I’m drafting this post and no one else sees the page’s contents — the program is blocking eight ads, Right now. At the current P&S Press post, two ads blocked. At the FaM home page: nine. And those are on sites that do not carry advertising! At least, not any that benefits their proprietor. At the Washington Post, where they’ll shut you down unless you disable your adblocker: 30 ads are being blocked on the home page, right this moment. At Google News, only seven, but at the Huffington Post, 81 obnoxious, unwanted messages are being shoved in users’ faces.

Ad Blockers

We tend to get numb to the constant intrusion and, on some level, to block it out of our consciousness. Nevertheless, it’s there, hammering away at us all the time. There are a few tools to help. Though they’re not perfect, they do suppress a fair amount of the static.

Adblock Plus works very effectively and is free. Mine is running on Firefox; I believe you can get it for Chrome, too. This maker also has an app that will supposedly block tracking and advertising on mobile devices. As you can imagine, an effective piece of software like this created quite an uproar among the big-money advertisers who see our time as theirs, our attention as theirs, and us as sheep to be shorn. Consequently, Adblock permits “acceptable” ads to show up, by default…as though there were such a thing. You can, however, disable this function.

Ad blocking is controversial, for the obvious reason that inundating Internet users with nuisance messages is what keeps Web content free. Consequently, some news sites will try to block you when they detect an ad-blocker. It’s possible to get ad-block-blocking programs, but there’s a limit. Truth is, the Internet provides such a tsunami of information that there’s very little out there — possibly nothing — that’s not duplicated or similar somewhere else. So I simply don’t read sites that ask me to turn off my ad-blocker: you can always find the same information elsewhere.

Others will demand that you pay to subscribe to their online content. At the risk of repeating myself: nope. Not that I wouldn’t like to if I were rich as Donald Trump. But I cannot afford to pay to read Web content. Hell, I can’t afford to subscribe to real newspapers and magazines anymore. And certainly cannot pay to look at every random site where I while away my idle time.

Personally, I never found that running ads at Funny about Money was very profitable. At one point, the site had a high Alexa ranking and a lot of traffic, so in theory AdSense (for example) should turn a profit. It did not: at most it would make maybe $10 or $15  a month. This, in return for cluttering my site with junk and serving ads for Scandinavian “escorts” to my readers. Hardly fair pay for the hours it takes to write and wrangle a website! The Guardian, a UK newspaper, reportedly makes about the same from voluntary reader contributions as it does from advertising.

Canning the Spam

One way advertisers try to get around ad-blockers is by blitzing your e-mail with nuisance advertising and “newsletters.” This is more problematic, because it means that you have to manually block each nuisance sender. Chrome has a Webmail ad blocker, and you can get software that will strip ads from Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.  How well this type of software works, I do not know, because I use Apple’s mail program, which so far does not serve advertising to users. Apple mail does, however, serve up plenty of spam. A program called Mailwasher supposedly will block spam from “Outlook, Outlook Express, Incredimail, Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, EM Client and every other email program.” Whether it actually works on the Mac platform remains problematic.

Really, about the best you can do is stagger along, day to day, with various stop-gap measures: keep fiddling with your email filter to block incoming nuisances, never respond in any way to spam, hide your email address and do not share it with merchandisers who demand it, use a disposable email address for sites or vendors who demand one, and try various spam filters.

NoMoRobo!

As for the worst aggravation in our Brave New World, phone solicitation by automated robocallers, the answer has arrived if you can get access to it: NoMoRobo. For land lines, this is an application that must be made available through your phone company; some do so, and some do not. For cell phones, there’s an app.

In October 2018 alone, over 5 billion robocalls were perpetrated on unwilling consumers. Our honored legislators are working to pass a law (TRACED) to get a grip on this harassment…but frankly, you know and I know about how well that’s going to work. About as well as the vaunted National Do Not Call List, right? Har har hardy har har! 😀 😀 😀

For the moment — and if experience speaks truth, well into the future — the solution lies not with the government but with you: each consumer has to equip his or her telecommunications devices with call blockers. These come in the form of devices that you attach in-line with a hard-wired phone and as programs that run through the phone company’s VoIP or through cell phone apps.

My first venture in this direction was with the CPR V5000 Call Blocker, a kewl little gadget that you could attach to a landline. When Cox disabled it (you don’t really believe phone companies would get so reluctant to get a grip on the phone solicitation if they weren’t making some kind of profit on it, do you?), for awhile I had nothing and again was receiving upwards of a half-dozen nuisance calls a day, often starting before six in the morning. While it was working, though, the thing was some kind of miracle. It cut the automated pestering down to one or at most two calls a day — sometimes even none. As far as I can tell, it was not blocking real calls from real people.

Cox finally condescended to make NoMoRobo available, for free to its landline customers. As soon as that came online, I signed up for it. This system is working at least as well as the CPR Call Blocker. It’s very easy to sign up for and very easy to use. Both are very effective — incoming nuisances are now back down to one or at most two a day. And apparently once a robocall computer detects that calls are being deflected by this type of device or software, it stops calling the number. As time passes, you get fewer and fewer nuisance calls. The only disadvantage is that NoMoRobo uses the phone company’s simultaneous ring feature, so you get jangled up on the first ring no matter who’s calling. Similarly, a caller that is not registered in CPR Call Blocker’s database will ring right through your phone: you have to manually flag it as a nuisance call,which happens for every spoofed number. In either event, it means if the crooks call you early in the morning, while you’re trying to rest in the afternoon, or while you’re concentrating on a work project, you are going to get interrupted. And when you’re asleep or trying to sleep, one ringie-dingie is as good as an alarm clock.

There are several others. One is Hiya, which apparently works exclusively on cell phones. Same is true for Mr. Number and YouMail. RoboKiller works on both landlines and cell phones, and it has the delicious attribute of a robo-responder that engages whatever live human is on the other end with hilarious time-wasting patter (scroll to the bottom of the linked page to the RoboRadio link!).

Some of these apps have a serious disadvantage in that they access your contacts, an egregious invasion of your privacy. NoMoRobo does not do so, but before installing any other call-blocking app, read the privacy policy.

Grrr!

So it’s all very nice that CPR Call Blocker and NoMoRobo and Mailwasher and AdBlocker put the brakes — to some degree — on the endless pestering and invasion of privacy from advertisers. But still…it’s aggravating as Hell, IMHO. We shouldn’t have to spend time and money to patch up devices and services that we pay for, to protect ourselves from spammers and scammers. It should flat-out be illegal to serve this stuff to consumers — whether by the sp/scammers themselves or by the telecom companies.

If that means we have to pay for content on the Web, then so be it. For most of us, that would mean a lot more limited access to news sources — I would pay for the Washington Post and for Reuters, but that’s about it. It would make researching a subject a lot harder: you’d have to go to a library to get access to information that you can read in your living room right now. But…would that really be a bad thing? Consider how much time you waste cruising the Web. Because the computer is right there, calling softly for you to just enter a few more words in that search bar, you waste far more time than necessary even after you have the answers you needed. Less time spent on the Internet might be a good thing for most of us.

 

 

Uhmmm? Is there something we should know?

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😀 😀 😀 The new handyman showed up today to install a back porch light fixture that replaces the motion-sensitive one that morphed into motion-insensitive. And…well…there’s something weird here. This guy SO MUCH resembles my son that if he were just slightly less chatty, you would think the two of them were separated at birth. The way he looks: check. The way he talks: check. The things that interest him: check.

Well. Not identically. But one could imagine that they sprang from the same sire, about 12 or 15 years separated.

And. Uhm. Therein lies a tale.

About at that distance of birth-date separation (around 15 years), when I was thinking of exiting the relationship with D-XH, along about midnight one fine evening a friend of mine who was kinda “fast” was in a girlie bookstore where, she swears by every Bible that can be stacked, she saw then-DH cruising around.

At the time I thought, Oh yeah? Sure! Right, sistah!

But…

At this point, he and I were not sleeping together. He could easily have slipped out of the house sometime between, say, 10 p.m. and midnight without my knowing about it.

Holy sh!t. Tell me this is ridiculous, willya?

It is scary weird how much this young man looks and sounds like my son, only about a decade & a half younger.

Cripes. I think I’ve come unstuck from reality…