Idle essays

Ohhhhhh i shouldn’t have put this off…. 🙁  Dave, the beloved electrician and all-around nice guy who has kept the power on in three of my homes over the past 32 years, has apparently retired or shuffled off this mortal coil. When you call, you get a “this number is not in service” recording. Dayum!

I fear the worst. Dave is (was?) even older than me. I always figured he probably planned to die in the traces — it was hard to believe he lasted as long as he did. In recent years, he’s always had one of a series of young kids following him around, apparently apprentices. The man was a true master craftsman. But most of all, he was competent, efficient, and honest. He never tried to cheat or gouge the customers.

One of the kitchen light switches has shorted out. Because the Funny Farm has aluminum wiring, not just any handyman can change out fixtures and switches. To fend off flammability, you need a special piece of equipment that can join copper wiring with aluminum so as to keep the pieces from eventually working apart and causing a fire. Electricians have that device and know how to use it.

Anyway, I’ve known for a couple of months that no one was left at home at Dave’s phone number. I should have tried to track down a new guy then, before it became a matter of urgency.

Fortunately, Dave referred me to an electric supply house that he uses all the time. Those guys know him. A little later this morning I’ll drive over there and ask if they can refer me to anyone in Dave’s tradition.

{sigh} Why can’t we all last forever?

ahem…except for the Donald, of course… 😉

Watching the national news is a little like watching cockroaches frying. So…on to a micro-news item:

Making its way around Facebook today is another warning about peanut butter with xylitol in it. Xylitol is a sweetener (sometimes claimed to be “natural”) that is toxic to dogs. It causes liver damage and can easily kill your dog. So, if you like to give peanut butter treats to your pet, or if you’re in the habit of stuffing a Kong toy with peanut butter, READ THE LABEL! Don’t give your dog anything that says “sweetened naturally” or “contains a natural sweetener.”

Oh, well: if you can’t stay away from watching the cockroaches jump, take a look at this truly hilarious report on #MuslimsReportStuff. It’s good. Very, very good.

Believe it or not, we’re not skateboarding toward Hell after all.

Hoooboy! Here’s what we all need: let’s make Facebook our company email platform! LOL! Right this way, Mr. Assange…

Is this town a tornado magnet?

Check out this awesome reconstruction of a Pompeiian fat cat’s McMansion!

Have you been following the silly hysteria over the supposedly menacing clowns? Honestly. Practice in front of a mirror:

• Deploy a fishy stare.
• Gaze at the nitwit in silence for a few seconds.
• Then ask, “Is that all you have to show for yourself?”

Works best on flashers, but it’s made for nitwits in clown costumes, too.

Get your facts wrong and get your a$$ sued by a mega-corporation.

It may be cheaper to send your kid to an Ivy League school than to your local public university…

Surprise! Legalizing pot is already cutting into the drug cartel’s profits!

Here’s yet another way for the corporate Big Brother to keep tabs on you…

Speaking of the whom, not surprisingly a movement is afoot to take the very useful CFPB away from us.

In the “What Next?” Department, this one is way up there…

Images

Domino roach: Sripathiharsha – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47015241
Tornado: Justin1569 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5943918

 

 

Ya can’t get there from here!

The city has had Main Drag South dug up not for weeks, not for months, but for years, thanks to the light-rail boondoggle. Though the thing is now built and open, the workmen persist in excavating this major thoroughfare.

To that they’ve added a new excavation of Main Drag East, so you CAN. NOT. TURN. EAST. OUT. OF. THE. HOOD. ON. ANY. OF. THE. MAIN. DRAGS!

At least, not without miring yourself in a traffic jam that will add a good 8 to 10 minutes to your commute.

I need to drive out to Tempe to meet my associate editor — have about a half-hour before I’d better leave. That entails driving south on one freeway and east on another. And of course driving east from the ‘hood to get to the southbound freeway.

Last night the cops shot some guy on the I-10, westbound at 24th Street. Killed him dead. So that road has been shut down since 4:30 this morning. But only west-bound, so in theory it would be OK. But…coincidentally, some morons created another crash on the State Route 51 on-ramp to the I-10. That ramp is now closed.

Normally to get around a roadblock on the SR 51 ramp, I would drive through city traffic to 24th Street, piddle down to the I-10, and head east from that point. But with the road closed westbound, 24th Street will be dead stopped, making it as impossible to get on the freeway eastbound as it is to get on it westbound.

So it looks like I’m going to have to pass through three neighborhoods to get from my house to a south-bound main drag that’s moving. Then schlep south two miles to a major thoroughfare that goes all the way into Scottsdale and doesn’t stop at the Phoenix Mountains. Drive east on that to 32nd Street, trudge down 32nd to Washington, dodge the effing lightrail there to get east on Washington, proceed to Priest, continue down Priest to Rio Salado Boondoggle Parkway, and from there make my way to our favorite restaurant.

That’s going to take about an hour. At this time of day, it should be about a 20- to 30-minute drive.

Yay.

Charley the Golden Retriever is visiting, having given himself the doggywobbles by consuming an entire plate of cookies at his house. M’hijito’s house doesn’t have a doggy door, so the gigantic dawg has to be someplace where he can get out.

Charley and Ruby are having a sh!tfit just now at a passing band of religious nuts. One nice thing about Charley: his deep bass bark makes hims sound very formidable, even though he’s not. The proselytizers decided to pass is by. Good dog, Charley!

So tomorrow the ladies who know breast cancer are coming over to help build the video application for the $20,000 grant I hope to land. Hope, of course, but don’t expect. Still: the second runner-up gets $3,500: even that would help sustain the project long enough to get it to the send -it-to-an-agent stage. And being able to say someone thought it was worth supporting with grant money would get an agent’s or an academic press editor’s attention.

I’m pretty well ready, I think; now have to refine and rehearse (rehearse, rehearse, rehearse) my part of the dog & pony show.

One of our clients bellyached about the quality of editing in the references of a set of journal articles. I’d foisted them off onto my sidekick, whose life has of late been, shall we say, maxed. So I suspect she probably foisted them onto her own subcontractor, who probably did exactly what one of my subcontractors did a few months ago: used the wrong style manual.

This particular journal, for reasons incomprehensible, uses Chicago author-date style, which is similar to APA style, but different enough to be…different. And confusing. If we follow the journal to Texas when it leaves GDU, which I’m told we probably will, I’m going to suggest to the new editor that they switch to APA style, since most of their contributors are scholars in the social sciences. This would be far easier and less headache-making for their write rs, and it would solve some headaches for us, too, not to have to ask our underlings to use Chicago’s quirky, obscure version of author-date.

That notwithstanding, one thing I want to suggest to Bidness Partner is that it’s past time we came up with an editing test for would-be subcontractors, who tend to line up outside the door. And it’s got to be something that they can’t run through a machine, since some of them are in other states. We need to be sure they actually understand the differences between the various manuals, that they can engage all the manuals accurately, and that they have enough sense to look things up when there’s some obvious discrepancy or nonsense.

Exactly what this test will look like is still pretty vague in my hot little head. But the Kid is one hell of a lot smarter than I am and so no doubt will come up with something that will work.

And now, it’s time to away. Happy Columbus Day!

 

Okay, we have to figure out what to call this new clunk in the garage. As you know, the previous occupant of the garage was known as the Dog Chariot, not really a personal name, but evocative enough. My first post-divorce car, a beautiful Camry, was named Katydid, because her license plate number began with the letters KTD.

In Arizona now, one gets to keep one’s old plate. Probably FKW is…uhm…inappropriately evocative, although it is a greeting I’ve been known to hurl at my fellow homicidal drivers on occasion. Okay, okay…a lot of occasions. {sigh}

I’m leaning toward “Murgatroyd.” Why? Who knows? Why do you call your dog whatever you call it? After a few days around the house, the dog begins to take on certain name-like qualities (“Fang,” “Homer,” “Phryne”….whatever) and so you have a name. Similarly, a car, no?

Surely you must have a name for your car? What do you call yours?

Then we have the question of her decorative garment; to wit, her license-plate frame. Just now she has a paper license attached inside a frame stamped with the name of the honored Bell Road Toyota dealership.

I personally feel no inclination to serve as Bell Road’s rolling billboard, at least not for free. You want me to advertise your business? Pony up my ad rate. 😀

How about this one?

Very Arizona, don’t you think? Except we get license tabs each year in return for our hundreds of dollars of registration fees. Those palm tree fronds on the upper right would obscure the things. And that would annoy the fuzz.

Same maker, I think: this is kinda frou and sweet:

That fleur de lis against the black backround at the top center looks kinda like a vampire to me. Wonder if it looks that way to a driver following you?

Mwa ha  ha! Here it is!

Cut me off, yuh crazy fool, and the entire U.S. Navy comes after  you!

There are a couple with rhinestone bling…not quite tacky enough, though. Amazon is going to have to rise to a new level to sell those things. Or sink, I guess…

Oh, this is good, speaking of tacky: A tattoo license plate!

I think it may be designed for motorcyles, though. What? Little old ladies don’t like tatts?

Oh, god. It gets better and better:

Brilliant! Literally: those are rhinestones all around the outside of the thing. 😀 How could one NOT buy it?

Heh…here’s one made of bobwire, or a convincing facsimile thereof. Right up there with “don’t tread”… Ghost Riders iiiin the Skyyyy….

They have one with shark teeth all around it, but it requires a leap of the imagination to guess what it’s supposed to be…

So what say you? How do you name a pearlescent white Venza? And what should she wear?

As you get old, you really do get “sot in your ways,” a way of saying that over time habit becomes a way of life. You become so comfortable with your day-to-day and minute-to-minute habits — like writing a blog post over the second cup of morning coffee — that you’re loath to change. So loath that it’s almost physically uncomfortable to change your way of doing things.

Videlicet: This morning the corgis and I were perambulating our usual mile-long route, which goes through the lushest and shadiest part of the ‘hood. Lately we’ve been running into a woman who has decided she likes to walk her dogs on that route, too. She has two dogs. One of them is about the size of a standard poodle, with curly white hair and black button eyes — it may actually be a poodle or mix thereof. The other is a short furry thing. Both of these animals go batshit out of control when they see my dogs, and they yank her around so unmercifully that I feel bad for her, so when I see her, I change course.

But I hate that. I want to go the way I’m used to going, not some other way.

Habit. It’s not like going up a different lane is any skin off my teeth, after all. But I do kinda resent it because someone else’s wacked-out dogs force me to change my…damn habit. 😀

Switching from a 20th-century car to a 21st-century car brought this issue to the fore. I’m having to learn to drive all over again! It’s not that big a deal, as it develops, because under all the electronic frou-frou the vehicle is still a Toyota and the logic of its layout is essentially unchanged.

But one significant difference pertains to our topic: The headlights work manually!

I thought the gummint had decreed that all cars had to have their lights burning all the time, so as to keep us all safe. The Dog Chariot’s headlights could not be turned off at all. Apparently this must have pissed off some legislator: the rule seems to have gone away. Now you can set the headlights to “auto,” which will cause them to stay on any time the car is running. But you also can turn them on and off, the way grown-ups used to do back in the day when grown-ups could be trusted with bottles of pills, cough syrup, and toilet cleaner.

Deciding to regress to the ancient state of affairs, I elected to leave the “auto” headlight setting off. So…last night I left a meeting after dark. In the parking lot, someone flicked their lights at me. “Huh?” think I, unaccustomed to this antiquated signal. Before I get on the main drag, though, I realize: lights are off.

Back at the Funny Farm, I park the car in the garage, climb out, and see…whazzat? LIGHTS reflecting off the inside of the garage door. Holy mackerel! You have to turn these lights off if you turn them on. Isn’t that quaint?

😮

This habit-changing is going to take some doing.

It’s a nice opportunity, I think, to change and build some new habits along the way. For example, now that it’s almost cool (only 90 degrees at 9 ayem!), how’s about the one-mile walk becomes two miles? How’s about driving the pooches to the Murphy Bridle Path on Central Ave and walking a couple of miles through the shade, or exploring some new neighborhoods?

Could one switch one’s grocery stores? How’s about taking an extra ten minutes to drive to the spectacular Fry’s up at Tatum and Shea and then walking across the six-lane thoroughfare to finish off the shopping trip with a few special items from Trader’s, Penzey’s, and Whole Foods?

(Last night I saw a Bentley parked in that Fry’s parking lot. Can you imagine?)

And now that we have a car that works, why not track down a couple of B&B’s that welcome dogs and make some overnighter trips around the most scenic state in the union? How about driving up to the ranch, parking on the dirt road in front, and walking the hounds up and down through the road that passes through the BLM land? Or asking the present owners if we can walk up to Knoll’s Knoll? (Yeah: a guy named Knoll built a handsome native stone house on top of a knoll a mile or so from the ranch house.)

So many things to do that I’ve forgotten to do, out of habit.

LOL! Literally… Last night I went to bed around 7 p.m., so tired I couldn’t hold my eyes open. Kindly, the dogs didn’t budge until 5:00 a.m.: TEN HOURS of sleep!

Unheard of! These days a seven-hour rest is exceptionally wonderful, and about six hours is typical. Awoke feeling considerably better than I have over the past week or two, the headache much diminished and the overall sense of stress pretty well gone.

So that’s refreshing. Not to say amazing.

Today I’ve done almost nothing. Nothing constructive, anyway. Polished my toenails. Washed the sheets. Inspected the new Venza’s owner’s manual a little more and made a list of the settings that should be made and the things I should learn to do now instead of when they actually need to be done. Read the news. Posted a complaint at Edmunds about the local car dealership, basically the same as the rant I posted here, only naming names. Explored the AG’s website and discovered my son is correct in saying they have a special interest in tactics that take advantage of the elderly and the dazed.

A-n-n-d… Discovered a competition that might fund the Boob Book, from writing all the way through to marketing. Twenty grand!

Dayum. Think of what  $20,000 would buy in the marketing department! And you know…say the words “breast cancer survivor” and carillons begin to ring.

Mwa ha ha!

You have to submit a video explaining what you would do with the cash. Interestingly, I happen to know a videographer: one of my former students. And he happens to be one of my “contacts” at LinkedIn.

Thought I had his direct email address but can’t find it. So sent him a LinkedIn message — hope he gets it. The deadline isn’t until mid-October, though, and since I created a pitch for a group of real-world publishers and literary agents, I can probably put a script together in a day or two.

So I’m watching the email and hoping to hear from him. Soon.

Meanwhile, resting: Making up for the lost “vacation” in one day.