LOL! The adventures pursuant tomy son’s having asked for “money” as a Christmas present remind me of a couple of Christmas Presents Past. As I mentioned in that post, his dad was given to similar smart-ass answers to the ever-annoying “what d’you want for Christmas” question. The real answer, of course, is “nothing,” since most middle- and upper-income people can afford to buy what they want when they want it, and so in general do not want more junk inflicted on them to mark the passing of the 25th day of December.
One year I asked then-DH what he wanted for Christmas. As usual, he answered “money.” This had become not very amusing by now — we were several years into the marriage, and concomitantly that many pointless answers to a pointless annual question.
So. I was teaching at the Great Desert University at the time. I didn’t earn much — GDU doesn’t pay real faculty much, and I was just a graduate teaching assistant. But I did get a paycheck of sorts.
That December, I took said paycheck down to to the bank and had it cashed: into $1 bills.
These I packed, in rather a jumble, into a large shoebox. Mixed with air, the dollar bills filled the box right up. Then I wrapped it in the prettiest paper I could find and zinged it up with lots of ribbons and bows. Put it under the Christmas tree and sincerely hoped we didn’t get burgled before the Big Day.
It worked. He thought it was very funny. Of course, I gave him some other present, an object of some sort. Don’t remember what: no doubt something that he didn’t want or need, any more than I wanted or needed the junk he felt called upon to give me.
The next time I asked him what he wanted for Christmas, he said “real estate.”
Ohhhkayyyyy….
This guy was one of the first franchise lawyers in the nation, and his biggest client was Red Carpet Real Estate. I happened to have met the boss at some social shindig, so he vaguely knew who I was.
I called the guy at his office and asked him if I could get one of his business cards, explaining that I was cooking up a custom-made present for his lawyer. Amused, he forked over a fistful of the things.
Then I got a small square bonzai pot, a small succulent, and a small cactus, plus a few stones. Filled this with soil, planted the critters in it, and added the decorative stones. Then I took two of the Red Carpet cards and glued them back-to-back to some matchsticks to make a “Real Estate” sign. This, I planted in the pot, too.
He actually was quite tickled with that. He took it down to his office, where it resided for years. And in fact, years after our divorce, I visited his office — two lawfirms later — and noticed he still kept it on his backbar! 😀
😀 If Work Avoidance is a salable skill, I should be able to make a pretty good living at it. I am becoming very accomplished at it.
So far I have managed NOT to…
…dork around with attaching the expensive new external hard drive to the Macbook; and therefore not to…
…back up the Macbook to Time Machine…
…clean the pool…
…clean the bathrooms…
…call the vet about racking up yet another fat bill to check both dogs for UTIs…
…sneak out the door with Ruby and walk her for the requisite mile…
…clean the mud up off the floor…
…write a single word of Ella’s Story…
…repair the bathroom rug that fell apart…
…paint the chipped area on the archway between the living room and the hallway
I have, however, spent a great deal of time and labor cleaning up dog piss. Just threw down a new dog pee mat, purchased this ayem at Walmart. Within five minutes, Cassie missed it. So once again had to get down on hands and knees, scrub up the mess, and scald the skin on my hands with disinfectant. Wheee!
Yes. By way of acquiring another bag of 30 pee-pads, it was off to the local Walmart this morning, up on Gangbanger’s Way, oddly enough the only grocery store in the ’hood where I feel safe walking across the parking lot. This, thanks to the flamboyant presence of a crew of security guards. One of them actually said good morning to me today, albeit whilst eying me suspiciously. He was busy snapping photos of some worthy’s car on his cell phone. Hm.
Walmart. The home of My Kinda People. Got in line behind a Latina woman who was straight out of a Diego Rivera painting. She was truly beautiful, with her long, loosely braided and radiantly black hair and her sturdy working-class air. And she had the single cutest baby you’ve ever seen in your life, perched in the shopping cart’s child seat. He was a sleepy little kid — must have been his nap-time — yet unsmilingly patient. And quietly interested in the passers-by, some of whom would catch his attention and, for reasons unknowable, induce him to track them across the store with his eyes.
To my great delight, Walmart had boxes of Constant Comment tea bags.
How did I know? 😀 Let me count the ways…
My mother was very fond of Constant Comment, which she loved using to make Arizona tea (known in cooler climes as “sun tea”). And, objectively speaking, the stuff really is superior for that purpose.
On a wet and rainy day, too — the sort of wet, muddy, rainy days we’ve been having this week — Constant Comment served hot makes a great cuppa.
So, how did I know Walmart surely must carry Constant Comment, when more noble venues such as the local Safeway/Albertson’s, Sprouts, Fry’s Richistan, and waypoints more upscale most certainly do not?
Combat experience in the class wars.
After I married into the striving Young Professional class — this would be the Junior League and the Phoenix Country Club set — I was surprised to learn (by way of a sharp rebuke) that Constant Comment is considered deeply déclassé.
Yes. The stuff is regarded by the wealthy and the would-be wealthy as swill for the lower classes. We do not drink that, dear. We do not even recognize its presence on the grocery store shelf, if we are ever unfortunate enough to find ourselves in a grocery store that carries such a thing.
No kidding. Some society wives actually instructed me, peering down their patrician noses, on the low-brow aspects of my favorite exotically flavored tea.
Ohhh well. Now that I’m old and poor again, I guess I can drink any damn tea I like.
Thanksgiving: Great! Wonderful afternoon with my son’s excellent friends, their beautiful children, their charming grandparents. Wish I could socialize with these folks 365 days a year.
Dog: Still alive. More or less.
Paying work: Some pending but none active, thank God.
Phones: Blissfully silent!
The NoMoRobo system that Cox finally, after years of lobbying, made available to its customers has been in place for two days. And it’s been two days of peace and quiet! One, count it (1) scam call got through, this one with one of the weirdest Caller IDs I’ve seen. On two lines:
V123119420100687
1602875-9937
The second line evidently is a spoofed local number. The top number is emitted by a system called “V-dialler,” commonly used by crooks. Why it wasn’t blocked? Possibly because the series of figures represents a kind of time & date stamp (down to the second), which would mean there would many thousands of V-numbers to get registered in the blocking system. At any rate, that particular series got sent off to NoMoRobo. Unknown whether that’s useful, but typing the figures into NoMoRobo’s web form takes all of about 30 seconds…so, voilà.
Another nuisance call came through at ten after 9:00 this evening. It was intercepted. The bastards call at all hours, so the fact that the call is intercepted and forwarded after one ring is a problem: it doesn’t stop them from jangling you up, interrupting whatever you’re doing or even waking you out of a sound sleep. You could probably stop that simply by turning off the ringers on the phone (though I don’t think mine can be completely turned off). But that would mean you’d miss calls from friends and family, unless people could be trained to speak into your voicemail and wait to see if you hear and pick up.
The little dog survived Thanksgiving Day. Most of today she’s been sorta OK, though in the last hour or so she’s had some slippage. She just walked over to the chair where I’m sitting and fell down. And now she…what? She gets up, walks into the corne3r, and appeaers to be lost. She’s sniffing the floor like she’s trying to track something. And there she goes dowbn the hall, fo0llowed by a very puzzled Ruby. I’d better get up and see what’s going on now.
….
Hmmm… Having some kind of episode. She’s very weak. These passages come and go, evidently in response to the emanations or not of the adrenal gland’s hormones. Now she’s shivering. Poor little beast.
Carried her out to the backyard, where she peed and then fell over trying to take a dump.
So, however you look at it, the future is brief for this little dog. We can let her limp along, I guess, as long as she has more good days than bad. That, I expect, will not be for much longer. This is the second day in a row when she’s had an episode that brought on collapse or near-collapse.
…
But it’s late. I tire. Tomorrow is another day. I guess.
Lo and behold! At the crack of dawn this morning I learned that Cox has finally broken through its inertia to make the NoMoRobo nuisance call blocker available to its customers.
Along about 6:45 this morning, the phone rang. Goddamned robocall. Worse yet, it went through, within a ring or two, to Cox’s accursed voicemail system, where the recorded blat is recorded and whence fucking Cox emits little bleeping lights to your phone, pestering you to go listen to the recorded ads.
Apparently this damn system has been in place for quite some time. WHY it suddenly decided to intercept phone calls before they ring though to my answering machine is an unanswered and apparently unanswerable question.
After some hoop-jumps, I get through to accursed Cox’s web page. And I also manage to reach a human being or three.
These worthies eventually clue me that I have to physically go onto the damned web page and physically disable the damned voicemail function. WHY this should suddenly be so was never explained. Why would they think I would want this “service” if I didn’t specifically ask for it?
BUT…along the convoluted way, one of them remarks that NoMoRobo would solve the nuisance call issue. I point out that Cox has steadfastly refused to implement NoMoRobo. He now says — admitting, finally, in so many words that their modem-driven connection we were all required to take on is, contrary to Cox’s claim, VoIP — that yes, as of the 15th Cox gave up and made NoMoRobo available to its victims customers.
DamNAYshun!!!
So forthwith it’s over to the NoMoRobo website — it takes all of about two minutes to sign up, if that long.
NoMoRobo has existed for several years; it won a contest sponsored by the FTC to persuade entrepreneurs to create programs or devices to block the 2.4 billion nuisance calls that bombard consumers every year. Cox, however, declined to make it possible to install.
I could get it on Ooma, but as long as I had copper land lines — that is, real land lines — I declined to switch over, because the hard-wired service continues to work through a power outage, which is not even faintly true of VoIP. So I’ve stupidly stuck with Cox, like a donkey in the traces.
It was good to get the NoMoRobo attached to the phone service. It’s free.
However, it was not so good to find my upcoming bill on the Cox website and discover the bastards have jacked up the base bill to $133 a month — a $16/month increase, slated to go up again in February.
So…I just got off the phone from Cox’s “loyalty” department (no kidding! 🙄) and got them to drop the rate back down to just two bucks more than they’ve been charging, for the next year. Very, very, very fuckin’ tired of this game!!
Anyhow, except for a call from Connie the Long-Haul Trucker and a reminder to pick up new glasses from Costco, the hated phone has been SILENT all day long! It’s kind of eerie, actually.
Pooches: Cassie the Corgi is having a much better than usual day. She’s been running at about 80 to 90 percent since she rolled out of the sack at 6:30. This is not to say she’s magically cured. Far from it: she still has this little problem with breathing… But it’s a somewhat improved problem. She slept all night, far as I could tell, and today has been alert and highly barkifarious.
Do I think she’ll recover? No. Not a chance. She still needs another round of antibiotics for the UTI, which has returned. And the vet is unhappy with me for having taken her off the doxycycline just because it made her royally sick. So how exactly that is going to happen escapes me. And she certainly isn’t over the lung thing, which yes, certainly could be lung cancer. I guess I’m going to have to take her to yet another vet to see if anything more can be done, but just now she and I are both so exhausted it seems like the best and kindest course of action may be to let nature take its course.
If nature has a course in mind…
My wackshit neighbor,Tony the Romanian Landlord, who may or may not own the house across the road, is up to no good. Tony is the guy who moved into the ‘Hood about 15 or 20 years ago, before the run-up to the Bubble, and bought up a half-dozen houses by fast-talking the elderly owners out of the places’ real value and lying to mortgage lenders about what he intended to do with the properties. He turned them all into rentals, which didn’t do the neighborhood any good. To put it mildly.
During this period, he bought two houses, one across the street from my present abode and one two houses down from me. He installed his two daughters in these. Both women have lived there without incident, pretty much. The one he calls his “Pretty Daughter,” across the street, has led a fairly normal life and now her kids are grown and out of the house. Other Daughter, who herself has mental problems but who is quite a sweet person, was married for a long time to a paranoid schizophrenic — he’s the one that Anna the German Shepherd went after when he tried to break into my yard. Poor Alan…fortunately, he survived unscathed. Physically, anyway…. 😉
All that shrubbery in front is tree limbs…
So, of late Pretty Daughter seems to have drifted away. Various relatives come and go at that house, but it’s unclear whether she or either of the kids lives there. At one point, a year or two after he bought the place, she had quite the little conflict with her dad. He had told her he’d put the house in her name. But after she’d been in there for awhile, she learned — apparently by accident — that he had not done so but that it in fact was fully deeded to him.
She had a flying shitfit and, we are told, he was pretty much forced to sign it over to her.
This story, however, is neighborhood folklore. In fact, we do not know whether he or whether Pretty Daughter owns the place. But…
Over the past three days, Tony has been over at Pretty Daughter’s with a crew of itinerant workers, who have taken a chainsaw to the big tree on the front yard. They’ve buzzed and buzzed and buzzed for hours, and hacked the big old shade tree down. They dumped the waste in the yard and now have gone off and left it. A-L-L-L over the yard and driveway!
Today they’ve dragged the debris off the driveway. Yesterday you couldn’t even have gotten into the house: all ingress was blocked. Tonight there are no lights on in the place, suggesting it’s vacant.
That leads me to suspect that Tony has reacquired the house (or never really forked it over to his daughter) and is planning to turn it into yet another flicking rental.
Tony hates trees. Every time he bought a house in the neighborhood (he sold all except the two occupied by his daughters at the very height of the bubble, literally just a few weeks before the crash), he went in and chopped down all the trees on the property.
One of his rentals became known locally as “the boob house.” He felled two gorgeous Aleppo pines in the front yard and then, puzzled about what to do with the large stumps, finally decided to cover them with mounds of the same gravel used to xeriscape the property. And yeah: the result did look like a pair of boobs sticking up out of the ground.
😀
Well, it wasn’t funny for what the rentals did to our property values. But still…it was pretty stupid.
Tony pretty much got out of the rental bidness, to the best of my knowledge. Instead he built and operated a nursing home, which he only recently sold. Exactly how he pulled this off remains unexplained. The bastard bought a nice house in Lower Richistan that needed remodeling. But instead of fixing and flipping, he tore it down and turned it into a commercial property: a nursing home. (Turns out Romanians are big in the nursing home business…). I cannot even imagine how he managed to force rezoning of a residential property in the middle of a residential neighborhood…but he did. So now there’s this two-story monstrosity in the middle of the nicer part of our neighborhood, set up as a settlement house for the elderly.
That’s Tony.
Well, if Tony is wanting to convert Pretty Daughter’s house to a rental, you may be sure it is specifically to do a number on me. He hates me even more than he hates trees. And that’s a lot.
When Sally (directly behind me) put her house on the market, Tony showed up at the door the instant the sign went up. Fortunately, she had listed with a cousin who’s a realtor, and she had told him, expressly — even before said sign went up — that she would not sell the house to him. So the guy, being a relative and not giving a damn about any anti-discrimination laws (Romanians are, après tout, decidedly white), told him no. Tony threw a gigantic shit-fit. He apparently threatened the guy, who told him to take a flying eff at the moon.
So. If he turns that place across the street into a rental, as I think he’s about to do, he will rent it to the grossest, most obnoxious sh!theads he can find. The place will soon be a mess, probably occupied by Harley-Davidson aficionados who own large barking pit bulls and blast the neighborhood with ear-splitting “music.” His aim will be to drive me out of my home.
And he may win. I frankly do not feel much inclination to hold my ground against whatever sh!theads he finds to put in there. (And trust me: he does rent to sh!theads. The place he bought behind SDXB was occupied by child abusers; the neighbors across the street expressly said they were moving because the kids’ screaming and crying was terrifying their own children).
You understand: the people who owned this house before me moved out because they were afraid of Tony. Owning a German shepherd and certain armaments (and not feeling hesitant to engage either), I am not afraid of much. But…I tire of bullshit. And I’m not much in the mood to put up with any more sh!theads.
There aren’t many choices of places to move. Conduit of Blight, which runs just to the west of the ’Hood, holds property values down here — that’s why so many young couples with kids are moving in. It’s the last centrally located neighborhood that’s middle-class and also reasonably affordable. Because of the downward pressure on prices from the Blightrail and the drug-addled slums to the west of us, there’s no way I can afford a similar house — or even one several hundred square feet smaller — for what I can get for this house. One that’s centrally located, that is.
That leaves as my possibilities….
Sun City, where the houses are a similar vintage and construction
Fountain Hills, where the houses are a decade or two newer and proportionately more ticky-tacky in construction (more stick-and-stucco, fewer block houses)
Far north Phoenix, up around Deer Valley Road or Carefree highway: elbow-to-elbow cookie-cutter styrofoam shacks that define ticky-tacky
Every one of those represents the end of my social life.
This is because my social life is centered around the church and the choir, and there’s no way in hell I’m driving in to North central from the boondocks two or three times a week. Not on your life! And especially not at night.
I might be able to afford a house in my son’s area. But that neighborhood is close to even worse blight than we have up here; the highest rate of violent crime in the city occurs around an intersection within walking distance of his house. Plus those houses were built in the early fifties. In 1951, when my son’s place was built, there as no air-conditioning. The only cooling available was swamp cooling. No one ever heard of insulation. Consequently, trying to make one of those houses livable in the summertime is prohibitively expensive — his AC bills on 1300 square feet are now pushing $400, and he leaves the AC off or jacked up around 90 degrees during the summer, struggling to make the place more or less livable with heavy-duty fans in every room. For comparison: mine runs around $225 to air-condition 1868 square feet to around 80 degrees — 78 at night.
Why, you might reasonably ask, would I abandon friends, family and activities just because I moved to the far side of the galaxy?
Because that’s exactly what it is: the Phoenix metropolitan area is larger than Los Angeles County! And that, my friends, is vast.
And…driving in this place is a species of Hell. I simply hate driving in the city of Phoenix. Don’t mind driving on the open road — in fact, rather enjoy it. But do passionately loathe despise and hate driving around this place. People here go batsh!t crazy when they get behind a steering wheel.
Today, for example, I had occasion to drive first up to Home Depot and then, shortly thereafter, down to the nearest Costco. Streets were relatively empty: a lot of the locals have left town to visit relatives over Thanksgiving. Nevertheless, the remaining drivers were no less off-the-wall than usual. I amused myself by writing down their antics:
A guy shoots out of a side street and streaks across five lanes of traffic moving at 50 miles an hour.
A pick-up tailgates me down Cave Creek Road — also at 50 mph, with plenty of room in adjacent lanes for him to get around if 10 mph over the speed limit was just. too. slow for the poor guy.
I drive through mile after mile of dreary, creepy slum — to say the ambience of Sunnyslope and the lesser parts of Paradise Valley is “creepy” is to understate. Am amused by a guy with hair dyed cherry red wearing a blanket like an Indian robe. He’s walking toward a bus stop, where he probably plans to take a nap.
A bus pulls over into the bicycle lane along said 50 mph road, where he’s stopped. He isn’t blocking traffic, but the nitwit behind him sure is: this clown stops in the center of the outside lane and…just stands there, causing drivers behind him to dodge and swerve around him. At 50 mph.
A fucking school bus is on the road at 11 in the morning. Why? State law requires all traffic in both directions to STOP every time a damn school bus stops. And they will get on a main drag and stop at every. single. corner.
Beside me, I see a driver apparently smoking dope. I don’t think he was vaping. I have a friend who vapes, and her devices look nothing like the gadget this guy was using to inhale delectable fumes…at 45 mph in a crowded commercial district.
A yard guy backs his pickup out onto 7th Avenue (45 to 50 mph, on average) from a blind driveway.
Two lanes of Bethany Home Road, a major thoroughfare, are shut down.
I count 10 bums’ carts along the north side of the park across the road from the Costco.
Get trapped in the parking lot by a Controller…you know the type. Moron!
The signal at 15th Avenue and Montebello, which you have to navigate to get north and west when you leave the Costco, has an interminable red light. The only sanity-preserving way to go north there (assuming you don’t spend your idle driving moments sniffing interesting fumes) is to turn south, then dodge east into the neighborhood, then make your way north to Bethany home, then turn east (or west, depending on which way you’re going), then turn north on 7th, 15th, or 19th. Total. Crazy. MAKING.
This, amazingly enough, represents an uneventful ride through Phoenix traffic, about 20 or 30 minutes on the road, all told. It’s just effing typical. And that, my dears, is why there is no way in Hell I’m driving in to the central city twice a week from Sun City or Fountain Hills. Or Cave Creek.
So. We’ll see what the SOB does over there. If he turns it into a nuisance property, I may change my mind about moving. It’ll mean some major changes in my life. But then…change is what life is about, eh?
One of the houses next door to that place is occupied by a military man, a guy who commutes out to Luke AFB. And his wife, and his two kids. Chances are, he’s not going to put up with a lot of sh!t from Tony. The other next-door neighbors are elderly, possibly even original owners. They will have neither the strength nor the inclination to fight Tony or complain much about obnoxious renters. They may just give up and move to Sun City themselves.
Okay. I admit it: my mood has become altogether too goddamn glum. But…helle’s belles. Why not? We have a clown in the White House. California is burning down (and believe me: whither goes California, thither goes Arizona. Every time!). The ice caps are melting. Common sense has gone the way of the dinosaur…which, speaking of thither, is the general direction we can expect our near descendants to go. Hate has become stylish. Our educational system is in the trash heap. Decent jobs are to be had only in China, for those willing to work for prison inmates’ wages. Our idiot leadership and their bigoted fans imagine this will be fixed by blocking cleaning ladies, yard workers, and agricultural laborers from entering the country. You can’t buy a decent cup of coffee for love nor money. And my dog is dying.
Grump!
Somehow I’ve got to find a way to come out of the present blue funk.
This challenge usually involves spending more time around people. Though I must admit, people are not my métier. SDXB and NG wanted me to go with to the Wickenburg Bluegrass Festival, which I really would have enjoyed doing. But some other demand superseded…I believe it was that I had to take the dog to the vet. Again.
Nor, really, could one responsibly have left the poor little beast alone in the house all day.
If I were sane, I’d get off my duff and go for a hike in the mountain park. Except…well…the Phoenix Mountain Parks are no longer what you’d call a joy to visit. They’re SO thumped by the sheer volume of humanity tromping through them that you’d probably do better to go for a walk in a parking lot. Plus with everybody and her little sister yapping on cell phones everywhere you go, the endlessly annoying background chatter has become downright aversive.
Alternatively, I suppose one could accomplish something constructive. That’s always cheering. I could…
•Get the chipped paint on the entry to the living room matched, buy a can of it, and touch up the dinged wall. •Do the laundry. Wheee! •Post this week’s The Complete Writer chapter and update the TofC for that thing •Retrieve the book proposal I left to languish out of brain-banging laziness, find a new potential publisher, write a new cover letter, and send it off. •Go to the nursery or the Depot and buy some winter flowers to replace the summer blossoms that have croaked over. •Or better yet, since I now can’t afford to buy so much as a loaf of bread, beg borrow or steal some flower seeds. •Figure out how I’m going to get enough coffee to last the rest of the month. Gets more and more cheering, doesn’t it? •Prune the roses. A thrill a minute! •Lock up Cassie and take Ruby for a very long walk. •Bake some bread in the grill. •Feed a few of the local homeless drug addicts.
Precious few of these are free… I do have some flour in the freezer, I think, so I could make bread. And a mess to clean up… Posting bits of various magnum opi is free, except of course for the web hosting charges. Mailing off book proposals: free, thanks to email…well, except for the associated connection charges, which, we might add, cost one helluva lot more than a couple of postage stamps, even at today’s inflated rates.
Hm. Precious few seem especially cheering.
Think I’ll go sit in the hall closet with the vacuum cleaner and close the door behind us…
These I packed, in rather a jumble, into a large shoebox. Mixed with air, the dollar bills filled the box right up. Then I wrapped it in the prettiest paper I could find and zinged it up with lots of ribbons and bows. Put it under the Christmas tree and sincerely hoped we didn’t get burgled before the Big Day.
I called the guy at his office and asked him if I could get one of his business cards, explaining that I was cooking up a custom-made present for his lawyer. Amused, he forked over a fistful of the things.
