Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Life in Arizona: Pooches, Drivers, Wackshit Neighbors

by

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.

Open the Window and Let the Damn Sunshine In!

by

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…

My little pal…

 

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?