Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Dogsters, Copters, Costco, Pool…oh shit

by

Arrrrghhhhh! I come stumbling in from an eye exam at Costco (they’ve made eye exams one HELL of a lot better, having got rid of the cursèd eye dilation drops for most of us), and then take it into my feeble little mind to fix a very nice late lunch/early dinner FREAKING FEAST:

• Grilled marinated scallops (thankyouverymuch, Costco!)
• Steamed sweet corn
• Grilled asparagus (is that asparagi?)
• Avocado
• Fresh Campari tomatoes (which actually taste like tomatoes
• Bourbon admixed with, yes, healthy and wonderful water

What a beautiful afternoon! Weather exceeds gorgeous here today. The pool guy came by and fixed, once and for all, the problem with Harvey the Hayward Pool; Cleaner, and in his absence I figured out all on my little girlie own how to eliminate the pool pump’s motor from laboring and shut UP the damn noise without shutting DOWN Harvey. So the plan was to spread this feast out on the patio table and enjoy this magnificent day.

Well.

Not so much. Shortly before the food is ready to go on the grill, it’s…

RRRROOAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

Goddamn cop helicopter takes up its position over the street just to the north…and parks there.

Welp. You can bet that after the Great Garage Invasion Episode, I do not spend any time outside when the cops are circling overhead. Even if I enjoyed the serenade of laboring helicopter engines, I really do NOT want to meet a fleeing perp face-to-face.

So. Every door and window in the house is shut and locked. I dodge outside every few minutes to flip over the food and dodge back inside, locking the door behind me, until finally the dinner is cooked. Fly back inside, lock the door, serve up the chow on the dining room table. Far from the beautiful outdoor afternoon. Far from the beautifully refinished pool.

Fuck.

These are the times that make Fountain Hills, Sun City, and Prescott look mighty good.

Well. In fact, rural Arizona is even more drug-ridden than the urban areas. But a little town like Yarnell or Patagonia or probably even Prescott cannot afford cop helicopters, and so is in no position to buzz your dinner. What you don’t know can’t drive you batshit.

Dog: very sick.

Cassie the Ailing Corgi has been even more miserable today than ever before. She does have her ups and downs, over the past couple of weeks swinging from a 1 to a 9 on a scale of 1 (at death’s door) to 10 (back to normal). But today she developed such a limp she has barely been able to make her way up the hallway. She’s visibly in pain.

And of course…

Yes…

A limp is a symptom of Valley fever.

But of course…

No…

If you believe all this bullshit, she hasn’t had the disease long enough for it to have disseminated into her bones.

But on the other hand, she’s always had a transient limp on the right side. Maybe she’s had Valley fever for lo! all these 10 years since I rescued her from the pound? Ohhhhh shit! Gotta stop overthinking this stuff.

Costco’s optometry department is infinitely cheaper than the high-rent guys I’ve been using. My daytime driving glasses are now completely fried, having spent several summers in automotively enhanced heat. I decide I need a new pair of shades, but due to protective laws (and here we mean protective of the industry, not, for a change, protecting you from yourself), one must jump through an unneeded and time-wasting eye-test hoop to get them. So it was off to Costco for that nuisance.

Whereinat we learned that essentially nothing has changed, and then we ordered a new pair of lenses for the perfectly fine frames we already have. What a fuckin’ waste of time. And money.

On the way to Costco, stopped by the Walmart, whereinat I picked up a small bottle of low-dose aspirin for all of 98 cents. Chopped one up into little pieces by way of circumventing the enteric coating, which will not dissolve before a pill passes through the canine gut, stuffed it into a chunk of butter, and plugged it into the dog.

An hour or so later, Cassie seems noticeably better. So…maybe, just maybe, she hurt herself. Maybe, just maybe, the limp’s not after all yet another ominous symptom of a fatal disease.

The pool dude showed up as dawn cracked this morning and finally got Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner working. He took the thing apart. Could find nothing wrong with it, essentially confirming the Leslie’s guys’ opinion that there was nothing wrong with it. Screwed around with the pump’s operation and eventually got the thing to work.

He did so by completely closing off the main drain, which caused the pump’s motor to labor to the tune of a loud roaring protest.

After enough of THAT, the old lady went out there and fiddled with it. Opened the drain a bit but far from all the way. This quieted the motor’s roaring, but kept Harvey in motion.

How hard IS this, guys?

Sort of wrapped up the chapter of Ella’s Story that got lost in Wyrd’s most recent crash (in fact, I just arbitrarily ended the goddamn thing) and posted it over at P&S Pressz. So there.

With the new publication schedule — one chapter per book in any given week, not one chapter from each of three books each week — this gives me three weeks to dream up the next installment of Ella’s adventures.

My own adventures will need to slow down considerably if I’m to keep up even with that much slowed-down schedule. Tomorrow we sing at another funeral (of a much beloved friend); Sunday we have a concert (with rehearsal on Saturday); tomorrow afternoon it’s off to try again to meet the prospective new CE Desk emplopyee; and late tomorrow evening it’s off to meet a neighbor who’s trying to sell a twin bed that I’d like to put into the not-quite-a-guest bedroom.

When we say never a dull moment, we mean never a spare moment!

MacFiasco, continued

by

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

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

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

Y’know…if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other dramas seem to have subsided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight Dogs and a Bird

by

Make that eleven dogs: add in Cassie, Ruby, and Charley.

This morning I needed to make a Walmart run fairly early in the day, so as to buy another package of giant pee pads with which to protect my floors from Cassie’s incontinence. In fact, she’s getting a lot better. But not having to mop up great Salton Seas of urine and then disinfect the lake beds made such a difference in the human’s misery quotient that I determined not to run out of the things.

Charley, who’s visiting while M’hijito junkets in Colorado, also tends to defile the floor…but not with pee…

Leaving them here unobserved so soon after feeding time was ill advised. So I did something even more ill advised: decided to leave the back door hanging open while I was out, so they could come and go as nature called.

It was, after all, pouring rain. Not likely any burglars would be working in that deluge. If they were, they would earn whatever they stole. 😀

So yeah. No burglars came visiting, but another intruder moved in: a hummingbird flew in the back door. Once in the house, he flew up into the kitchen skylight, where he became hopelessly, despairingly confused. He could see the sky through the cloudy glass, and of course, being a bird he figured that WAS the sky. But being a bird, he could neither figure out why he couldn’t get through it nor figure out that he needed to go DOWN, not up, to get out of his trap.

This is the second time such a thing happened. Last time, some years ago, I called Liberty Wildlife. The volunteer I reached this morning was dubious. In the pouring rain, all their distressed-critter rescuers were hunkered down, and believe me: NONE of them wanted to venture into the downpour.  Quite reasonably so.

He asked me to call back after 11, when a different volunteer would be on duty and more folks might be available to call on.

Right.

So I called several other rescue organizations, some of which could not be reached at all, some of which had endless yakathon/ear-splitting Muzak phone trees (how i HATE those things!) that were so discouraging that after five or ten minutes I’d hang up, some of which just didn’t answer at all.  Game and Fish greeted me with the familiar electronic run-around. Called the Fire Department’s non-emergency line. They suggested Game and Fish. I said I thought not. So they suggested the Humane Society. The Humane Society’s aggravating yakathon said they’d answer the phone in about ten minutes and then blasted an even MORE infuriating loud fake music at me. I couldn’t turn the sound down on the phone-set low enough to make it less distracting or less infuriating. Finally I realized that the Humane Society is less than ten minutes away from me. So jumped in the car and drove up there, where I found a roomful of live human beings. They suggested Game and Fish. 😀

Back at the Funny Farm, I called Liberty Wildlife again. The new wrangler on duty said they really weren’t supposed to rescue birds that weren’t large enough to harm a person.

Heh. Do you suppose I could persuade them that the hummer was trying to poke my eyes out with its long spear-like bill?

She agreed to call some volunteers, having identified the person she thought was closest to the Funny Farm. But she wasn’t sure she could round him up.

So that was pretty discouraging. I figured I’d just have to wait until the little bird became exhausted and dehydrated enough to fall to the floor, at which point it would die.

But no! Not too much later, along comes a phone call from a man who says he’ll be right over!He lives in the mid-town area, and seemed not to be fazed at the prospect of driving through the rain to rescue a hummingbird from a strange woman’s house.

LOL! Liberty Wildlife has come through!

He arrives at the door. Cassie, Ruby, and Charley, all three of ’em, fly into an ecstasy of Dog Joy upon greeting the guy. They clearly think this is the single best human they have ever seen on this planet, bar none. He introduces himself as Chris. The dogs apparently interpret that as “Christ”: they are now in full-out worship mode.

Chris says he loves dogs. He and his wife have eight of them, several of which are rescues. I say I found Cassie at the dog pound, where she’d been relegated because she barks. He agreed that barking was surely a unique trait for a dog…

I’ve already hauled the ladder in and wiped it dry. Takes Chris about thirty seconds to snab the hummer in one of those nets you use to lift fish out of water. I make a mental note to get one of those next time I’m near the sporting goods store. Bird delivered to the Great Outdoors, it takes off like a feathered rocket, chirping furiously.

So that was good. Sent them a little donation as a token of appreciation.

That and the fact that Cassie is getting much, much better were the only decent things that happened today, a true, certifiable Day from Hell.

There, but for…

by

…the grace of God!

Ever have one of those experiences when nothing happens to you and that causes you to think thank You, God?

This is different from a close call. In a close call, something does happen to you. An event almost does you in, but you manage either to dodge out of the way or to survive without permanent injury. This is a close call:

I’m about 21. I’m driving through the cotton fields on a two-lane road, headed from a suburb into downtown Phoenix, there to start my day as a receptionist for a law firm. As usual, I’m flying low: around 50 to 60 mph. Two lanes. Country road. In a new 1967 Ford Fairlane that was a certifiable lemon.

As I’m tooling along listening to the radio (The mornin’ sun is risin’/Like a red rubber ballll…), some guy in a pickup pulls off a dirt side road, right in front of me. I’m gonna hit him. My mother told me to watch out for country boys on side roads! Why didn’t I listen?

I slam on the brakes.

The damn car LEAPS into the air (no exaggeration!) and lands in the middle of the oncoming lane.

And yes, there is an oncoming car in the oncoming lane. The driver looks panicked.

At that moment, everything shifts into slow motion. I seem to have half an hour to think about this and contemplate my choices. I can…

• jerk the car back into my lane. But the guy who pulled out in front of me is now right beside me, driver-side door to passenger-side door. If I move into the right lane, I will hit him. The recoil may push us both into the oncoming car…

• stay where I am and head-on the third driver. Not an option….

• at around 50 mph, pull off onto the left-hand shoulder, a strip of dirt that borders an irrigation canal. This may cause my car to roll and I could find myself upside down in the irrigation ditch. But maybe not…

I choose option c) as the least disastrous. Miraculously, the ground is hard enough to support my car’s laboring tires, and miraculously, the car does not spin out of control. The guy in the oncoming car whistles past me. The guy in the pickup proceeds on down the road.

That is a close call because an element of choice occurred after the event began. You’re not saved just by the grace of God, but by a combination of your own volition and God’s grace.

A true thank-You-God moment may be influenced by choices you made before the event occurs, but your escape has nothing to do with choices you make during and after the event.

Example: One of my clients was an economist who had a career as an international banker. He traveled a lot in his business. One day he was flying into a large South American city, where he was to meet with another banking executive about some high-end business matter. Somewhere along the line, his plane was held up, so they were running several hours late coming to their destination.

As they circled around to come in for a landing, he looked out the window and noticed smoke coming out of a large high-rise. Of interest, but he didn’t think much about it.

Once he got into town, though, he discovered the smoking building housed his guy’s office. The fire had broken out a few hours before. And, like many buildings in many third-world countries, it was inadequately designed for fire safety: it had few or no usable fire escapes. The guy had been trapped in his upper-floor office, and he died.

Now there you have a thank You-God moment. It was pure, raw luck that my client hadn’t been in the office when the fire started: “a few hours before” was right when the two men had scheduled their meeting. Nothing that either person did could have changed the outcome. The only reason my client survived was that by random chance he happened to get on a plane that was delayed.

I always figure I’ve had a thank You-God moment when I come across a major car wreck, because….if I’d been there 15 minutes or half-an-hour earlier, that could’ve been me in one of those cars. Indeed, I thought I was enjoying one such this very morning when I came across a three-block long back-up at the intersection of two of the busiest arterials in the central city.

The cops had shut both roads down about a quarter-mile in each direction from the wreck. People were winding their way through residential neighborhoods in order to get on their way. Luckily, I contrived to turn left out of a tiny residential lane onto Arterial East-West and continue on my way to the veterinarian’s.

As it turns out, this also wasn’t a true tY-G moment, because no one was killed or even hurt seriously. The only reason the cops were making SUCH a BFD about it was that one of their SUVs was involved. Some guy had sideswiped the cop (?? how hard is it to notice a gigantic white tank with blue stripes all around it and a pair of red bubble-gum machines on top???) and caused the police vehicle to roll.

This happened at 7:00 this morning. I left my house at 10:44, so it was about 10:50 or so by the time I reached the scene of the drama. They had that intersection shut down in four directions for almost four hours!

Forgodsake, they clear out fatalities faster than that.

I surely have had plenty of real tY-G moments, when I and my fellow homicidal drivers missed a monstrously fatal disaster by a matter of minutes. Or even seconds.

How about yourself? Got any good thank You-God stories?

Another Day Late…

by

But no dollars short, to tell the truth. Indeed, I’m yet another day late posting the most recent serial installment of the three (!!) magnum opi going up at Plain and Simple Press because more dollars are flying in over the transom.

Not 20 hours after I returned the most recent paper from one of the teams of Chinese scientists, a long, complicated affair and a tour-de-force of English as a Second Language, in came three departments from our client journal, with more to come.

So that put the eefus on any creative scribbling. I’ve read three book reviews and moved them over to my co-editor for formatting. Much, much more to come.

Meanwhile, the corgi continues to cough. Have to drag her across the city to the vet first thing tomorrow morning. Second thing, actually: the appointment isn’t till 9:45, which will just get us out the door at the right time to avoid a) the accursed no-left-turn lanes and b) the worst of the rush-hour homicidal traffic.

I’ve now added almost 15 pounds of soda ash to the pool water. The pH was almost up to the “neutral” level, at which point I should be able to add the algicide that I plan to dump into the drink in gay abandon. The algae has returned, in its own gay abandon, coating the south wall and steps with sheets of green.

By now the water should have cooled down enough to make the pool nearly unswimmable, but that is far from the case. Weather remains not warm here but hot, and the pool is still warm enough to swim in (if you call dragging a hose and sprayer into the drink and power-washing the walls underwater “swimming”…). This will delay the resurfacing venture, probably into October, since we’re already halfway through September already. I’d hoped to dump in the algaecide so it would be sucked into the filter, where the stuff could saturate the innards.

That won’t do much good if we have to wait very long after the event to shut everything down and empty the water, highly laden with organic compounds that promote algae growth. But…it should use only a little more than a third of the bottle of the stuff. So if the delay goes on long enough to allow the little green plants go start growing again, I’ll just dump some more of the stuff in.

Meanwhile: Beyond tired. Going to bed.

Nine is the new midnight…

Grocery Bags…Back to the Future?

by

Have supermarkets in your parts begun to ration plastic bags? They’re hard at it here. Even Walmart prominently displays colorful (plastic…) tote bags near the check-out stands — for sale, of course; most certainly not for free. Whole Foods has been doing that for years, as has Trader Joe’s — no surprise there, given those chains’ overall zeitgeist.

Many stores offer a choice of paper bags or plastic now — Whole Foods gives you none, of course: it’s paper or else buy one of those totebags. Or you could pile everything in a grocery basket, roll it out to your car, and pack it in a piece at a time. 😀

How do you feel about that? Political correctness aside, do you sense even the slightest…oh…resentment at this shift?

Oh yeah? Well…can you remember when, back in the Day, grocery stores abruptly made the switch from paper bags to the filmy plastic bags that infest our landfills, our front yards, our streams, our lakes, our skies, and our oceans? And do you remember how you felt about it then?

{chortle!}

I sure do.

No choice was offered, during the Dark Ages. One day you went in, piled a week’s worth of loot into a grocery cart, arrived at the check-out stand, and…were presented with a grocery cart filled with limp plastic bags spilling out packages and cans and heads of lettuce.

And “spilling” was the operative term. When you were accustomed to a paper bag that could hold several days’ worth of food and cleaning goods, three wimpy plastic bags that together could barely hold the same amount were, shall we say, confounding. Where a paper bag would stand upright in the trunk of your car, these damn things would flop in there and disgorge their contents to roll around every time you turned a corner. When you got home, you had to gather all your purchases off the floor of the car trunk and pack them back into the wispy plastic bags before you could haul the groceries up the steps to your apartment.

Ohhhh GOD how I hated those plastic bags!

In those primitive times, makers of trash baskets turned out kitchen garbage cans designed to hold a paper grocery bag. You just dropped an empty bag into the trash basket — which fit under the kitchen sink (remember that?) — and when it was full, you browbeat your husband or a kid to take it out to the garbage bin. It was wonderful!

Halcyon times.

The accursed plastic bags, of course, did not fit into anything that even vaguely looked like a trash basket. About the best you could do was set a plastic bag on one side of the sink, use it to hold accruing debris as you cooked, then tie it off and toss it into the trash can, where it would sit there leaking and stinking until someone dragged it and a half-dozen other bags that collected with it in the old trash basket.

Note that I did not hate the bags for environmental reasons. In the Dark Ages, we didn’t get that kind of news. If we had any worries about the environment, they had to do with smog and nuclear fallout.What could a plastic bag have to do with those?

Unless plastic bags were manufactured in nuclear plants. Who knows? Maybe they were… They’re certainly radioactive now.

Switching back to paper bags, I must admit, elicits similar sentiments. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: now we get to change the way we run our kitchens AGAIN! at the behest of faceless corporations and bureaucrats who know better than we do. Always.

After all these years, I’ve arrived at a détente with the accursed plastic bags. I have a lot of uses for them. Uses that paper bags cannot handle.

• Kitchen sink cabinets no longer have room to accommodate a trash can big enough to hold a paper bag. So the plastic trash can is gone. Instead, wet kitchen trash gets stashed in a plastic bag, which lives in the refrigerator until I’m ready to brave the alley.

• Taking the garbage out entails retrieving a key, dodging the dogs, passing through two gates and unpadlocking one of them, dodging the occasional bum, wrestling a huge four-household bin, relocking the gates, putting the padlock key back, letting the dogs back out…good fun. Sooo….being able to refrigerate the trash so I don’t have to traipse out there every day is a great convenience. Not one I’m looking forward to losing.

• Nor do I look forward to having to keep a paper bag full of garbage in an expensive covered garbage can in the garage. This means every piece of trash or garbage has to be traipsed out through the kitchen door into the garage, and the whole mess has to be kept tightly covered to keep the rats out. That, I could truly do without.

And speaking of our little room-mates, have you noticed many sewer roaches dancing around the kitchen floor since the advent of plastic bags? Miss the little fellows, do ya?

• Paper bags nurture cockroaches. The little gals and their boyfriends ride the freighters and airplanes and trucks hauling foods across our borders and into the grocery stores. When they find those nice, dark paper bags, they lay their eggs in them. You bring those eggs home with you when you bring home the bacon. Pack those bags away in the pantry closet or the garage, and the babes hatch out and join the buggy can-can line!

This is totally the main reason I do not want to go back to the future with paper bags.

Well. Except for the dog mounds.

• Nothing beats a plastic bag for picking up dog mounds.

How, seriously, do our Respected Betters think we’re going to clean up after the beasts?

Never fails, does it?