Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Talk about Indian Summer…

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Seriously! It’s 100 degrees on October 17 here.

Actually, it’s kind of a nice day…a dry heat, y’know… 😀 And a mere 100 degrees is not hot enough to overcome one’s second-spring planting instincts:

Sweet little posies, eh? Picked those up this morning at the nursery, while running around in that part of town. Do LOVE that pot! The bulbs I put in there last winter pretty much fried over the summer. So I picked up a dwarf foxglove, a geranium, and a salvia, which kind of pick up the colors in the pot.

Salvia grows really well out in front over the winter (assuming we get a winter this year). So I may go back and pick up a few more to stick in the flowerbed under the olive tree, which remains sadly neglected.

One thing at a time.

Few days ago I stuck some seeds in a few other pots, also out in front:

They’ve already sprouted! Well, actually, only the two pots on the right have sprouted seeds: lettuce and beets. In the center: a baby rosemary plant; on the right, a thyme plant and a volunteer tomato.

I came unstuck in time today, thinking it was Wednesday and not Tuesday. As I’m thrashing around thinking I’ve gotta send out a weekly meeting notice and go buy enough gas to get to the Pima Reservation through the Thursday morning rush-hour traffic and dayum! I didn’t wash the car this morning so won’t be able to see into the rising, GLARING sun tomorrow morning and how could it possibly be time for choir practice AGAIN, it crossed my feeble little mind:

…well…no…wait…it can’t be time for choir practice again.

And… Well. No. It isn’t time for choir practice again. Mirabilis! It’s actually Tuesday!

This left a great deal of time to get stuff done:

  • Strip the bed and
  • Wash the sheets and
  • Wash the blanket and
  • Wash the dog covering and
  • Bang the dog hair out of all the above, in the dryer
  • Wash the bathroom rugs and the doggie floor rags
  • Bang the dog hair of the rugs and rags, in the dryer
  • Drive to the nursery to buy some new posies
  • Dart into Safeway and let them know a telephone scammer is spoofing their pharmacy’s phone number
  • Fly to the pool store and buy 8 pounds of shock treatment
  • Clean the pool pots
  • Thin out the lettuce & beet seedlings
  • Plant the new posies
  • And even write a little on the latest chapteroid of the current noveloid!

Think of that. And it’s not yet 1 p.m.

The other day I made a nice impromptu ratatouille, which served handsomely as leftovers-for-breakfast this morning. Ratatouille, a dish from the south of France, sounds very fancy to the American ear in the same way that anything spoken or written in French sounds fancy (mais non?). But in fact it’s good peasant food, on the order of pot roast or Yankee stew: simple, cheap, and deliciously satisfying.

All you need is a nice little eggplant, a summer squash (any of the thin-skinned variety like zucchini or crookneck), a little onion, a bell pepper, a bit of garlic, and…whatever else you have laying around. Celery is nice to add. Herbs of various callings — I dumped the rest of the herbes de Provence into the stuff, maybe all of two or three teaspoons. Thyme is always good. Whatever. Got some carrots? Good. Mushrooms? Fine. WhatEVER. And you’ll need some tomatoes — either a bunch of chopped up fresh tomatoes or a nice can of your favorite brand of chopped tomatoes.

Coarsely chop the onions and garlic and celery if you have it. Pour a little olive oil in a large skillet. Slowly cook the aromatic veggies until they’re transparent and beginning to brown. This should take about the length of time required to consume a small glass of wine slowly whilst reading the news. Get up a couple of times and stir.

Before sitting down with the wine, though, also coarsely chop the other veggies and set aside. You might want to sprinkle some salt on the chopped eggplant, as this is the traditional way: leaches out extra liquid, which if the eggplant is mature can add some bitterness to the flavor. If you decide to do this, pat the eggplant pieces dry on some layers of paper toweling before proceeding with the post-wine step.

Remove the aromatic veggies from the pan — just spoon them out onto a plate next to the stove.

Add a little more olive oil.

Apply the rest of the vegetables to the olive oil in the pan. Pour another glass of wine and, while beginning to consume this, allow the vegetables to cook a bit, stirring occasionally, until they’re starting to brown a little.

Next, stir the onions, celery, and garlic back into the sauteed vegetables. Carry the wine glass over to the stove. Add the canned or boxed tomatoes. Stir well. Pour part of the wine into this mixture (red is better, IMHO, but either is just fine) and mix together well.

Cover the pan. Turn the heat to medium-low. And just let it simmer for 45 minutes or so until all the lovely flavors are combined.

This is good all by itself, or served over pasta, or as a side for grilled steak, chicken, or fish, or whatever you please.

There’s a full-blown fancy recipe for this in the cookbook. And it’s never too late to buy the cookbook! Want a hard copy? Lemme know in a comment and we can conduct business by email.

 

$$$ and All: Clinging to Control

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Something there is about making a list to keep the onerou$ little ta$ks under control… That, of course, would mean the onerous bookkeeping tasks that, given the reins, you would ignore until the planet freezes over.

What’s about it is that there’s something ridiculously satisfying about checking off chores, one at a time, as DONE!

The mountain of money paper that comes into this house beggars belief (to say nothing of beggaring me).

  • Five bank accounts
  • Four investment accounts
  • Four health insurance policies (Medicare, Medigap, Part D, long-term care)
  • And bills coming from more directions than I can reckon

87 berjillion bills came in to make life a little more miserable this month:

  • Property tax: raised over $200
  • Car registration: almost $400
  • Painter’s bill: three thousand buckolas
  • $260 power bill: holy sh!t
  • $153 water bill: holy sh!!t
  • Gerardo: $120 for working himself and his underlings half to death…

So it goes.

You can see why I hate doing the bills.

On the other hand, paying off the loathèd car loan in a bull market was smart. Very, very smart. When times are good, my guys can crank the money (and yeah, they are guys: if there’s a lady financial manager among them, they’ve kept her hidden from me). After ponying up $3,000 for the painter and something over 16 grand to pay off that effing loan, total net worth is barely down a few thousand bucks.

How do they do that?

Oh well: I guess that’s what I pay them for.

So that was encouraging.

Also encouraging: I’d allowed about $800 for the Venza’s 2018 Arizona registration — really, registration rates here are just exorbitant. But not, as it develops, that exorbitant: the bill, which came this month with less than 30 days’ notice to pay up or be cited, was “only” $386. So that adds about $34 a month to this year’s budget allowance…nice. I guess. One meal out, anyway. 🙂

Next year the amount will be lower: Arizona’s registration bills drop as your car ages. Part and parcel of our bat-brained legislators’ astonishing stupidity: cars pollute more as they age, and so it would make sense to give people a break for buying newer, more fuel-efficient and less polluting vehicles and to whack them for hanging onto the stinking junkers. Here, we always go in the opposite direction of common sense.

So this is the most difficult of the set of tasks to do today. Others:

  • Clean pool, re-install Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner. Dive in after he breaks loose from his hose, rescue him from the bottom, reattach, fix, get him going again.
  • Haul trash to the alley. Pick up dog piles as part of this joy.
  • Finally get around to ensconcing the Blue Barrel in its new home, out of my way in the garage.
  • Organize completed client journals’ essays; confer with bidness partner on rest.
  • Call handyman to come rebuild patio roof.
  • Re-install dog safety pillows in back of car.

Now for a nap before having to spring back to life for choir rehearsal. And so, away…

Thank you, God…

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Ever have one of those days when everything you touch goes SPROOOOIIINNNGGGGG? Oh, heck: you don’t even have to touch it to make it go SPROING! All you have to do is think about it.

This afternoon I had to call a halt. My mood was so crabby and my competence level buried so deep beneath the sub-basement that after beating back the jungle vines of mis-serendipity for several hours, I decided that it was time to just…fuckin’…STOP. Yes. I do need to go to Home Depot to get a bunch of stuff for Gerardo and for myself and yes, I do need to go to Sprouts, and yes, tomorrow’s doctor visit will take me far, far in the opposite direction from those destinations…but—

But at some point I realized that if I get in the car I’m going to kill someone. Why? Because everything I touch today goes spectacularly, harryingly, tooth-grindingly wrong. I decide that the better part of valor is to stay off the roads, to forego the errands, to effing STAY HOME.

So when I finally make that Decision — effing STAY HOME — I realize God is saying to Herself, “Well! How many times do I have to slap her upside the head to get her attention?”

It is 100 degrees in the shade outside. Thank you, God, that You steered me away from that tenure-track job in South Carolina. Yeah, You remember: the one where they proposed to pay less than You were getting me paid for that nontenurable position here, but the most spectacular house in a forest was for sale for significantly less than I could get for the Funny Farm? Oh, dear God: sooo glad I’m not in South Carolina today. Or anywhere near the Southeast.

Thank you, God, for causing my father to run away from home at the age of 16 or 17, lie about his age, and join the Navy. Thank you, God, that he did not stay in Ft. Worth or Dallas or (yipes!) Houston.

Thank you, God, for allowing my mother, in her subtle way (do it, dear, and when we divorce I get half of all your coveted worldly goods…), to dissuade my father from retiring to Possum Kingdom, down on the Brazos. Thank you, God, that he did not end up sending me to some junior college in Texas, or, at best, UT Austin. Not that Austin isn’t wonderful…just that it has…well, hurricanes and tornadoes.

Thank you, God, for seeing to it that DH never got a job offer from Atlanta or any such waypoints, and that he never took it into his head to move to where his brother came to light: Houston.

Yesh. I’ll take 100 degrees in the shade any day, Ma’am, to hurricanes, floods, crashing trees, flying trailer homes or tornadoes. Any day.

It feels like I’ve accomplished nothing today, but in fact…what have I done?

  • Written a blog post.
  • Worked on a new book project (no, not the latest novel: something Altogether Different)
  • Figured out how best to deal with the Equifax betrayal
  • Done battle with Experian
  • Read behind my business partner on three contributions to the journal
  • Did not lose my temper altogether at polemic disguised as scholarship
  • Lost Charley not once, but twice
  • Hauled garbage
  • Got locked out of the backyard when the gate jammed.
  • Found some cash for a charitable cause
  • Got a ticket to an event & invited three other people to join me
  • Wangled an appointment with a doctor tomorrow

Yes. I lost my son’s dog. Twice.

I live in fear that this critter is going to slip out of the yard when I go into the alley. So try to observe where he is. This is a trick, as it develops.

Returning from a trash run, I call the dog.

No dog.

I search in every dog nest:

  • The floor in the hall where the AC keeps things especially cool
  • The floor by the front door, where he hopes my son will soon come back in
  • The floor in the family room, closer to Food
  • The floor in the bedroom, where he can keep an eye on Cassie and Ruby
  • The backyard, under the trees and around the patios.

No dog.

Just as we hit the holy shit! stage, I find this:

Hmmm…. Charley has ascended to The Throne.

Livelying Up Again

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Last couple of days I’ve felt more lively than I have all summer. Probably it has to do with the slight drop in outside temperatures — still in the low 100s, but 105 is a far cry from 115. And the mornings and evenings now are really lovely.

So I’ve contrived to get off my duff long enough to do a few small jobs that have lain fallow for month after unjustifiable month. The bermudagrass that I cleared out of the flowerbed last November sprang back in all its glory over the summer. I’ve just been too, too lazy to get out the chemicals, mix them up, get them all over myself, barricade the dogs away from the chemical dump, clean up the mess, and scour myself down with dawn and a scrub brush. What ought to be a fairly easy task is made difficult by the presence of presumably toxic, very stinky chemicals.

Anyway, the smell is dissipating this morning, even though I poured a-plenty of it on the damn devilgrass. Yesterday I finally got around to that job, along with figuring out what to do about the trash situation and cleaning the pool and picking up after the dogs and cleaning up after the yard guys and running the laundry and swiffering up the dog hair.

Gerardo’s guys pulled the translucent plastic paneling off the cedar beam & lathwork that covers the back patio, so that the painter can clean up the mess where the stuff leaked and apply new sealer. However, they left the strips that hold the things on…some of them. I think they did that pursuant to putting new stuff on, but…they busted up a lot of the strips. And how exactly the painter is supposed to get around that junk escapes me. Nor am I convinced Gerardo and his underlings have got what it takes to replace that stuff without having it leak from the git-go.

After Richard’s crew applied it, the thing lasted 10 years before it started to leak. Really, only one area leaked, which leads me to think the hail and probably a damned cat jumping on it caused the damage.

Some time during the day, I’ll go up to Home Depot and see if they can refer me to a contractor who knows how to install that stuff. Richard, I think, is no longer in business — he never answered my call. He fell off a roof a couple years ago and broke his back in a dozen places, so he’s presumably not in any shape to wrangle a work gang.

Meanwhile, naturally, I’ve got to drive way to hell in the opposite direction from the damn HD to get gasoline at Costco, hoping to reach the pumps before prices go through the proverbial roof. I’m afraid it’s probably too late, though.

So that mean’s I’ll be on the road for about an hour, dodging my fellow homicidal drivers. Ugh! I do hate driving in this city!

But meanwhile, finally some work came in from China — thank God! After that deluge in the first-quarter, it has been a long, dry summer.

Couple days ago my friends VickyC and KJG had a shopping get-together: drove out to the East Valley to visit Ikea, where VickyC needed to buy a small occasional table. And of course, we couldn’t miss wandering through the entire place ogling the loot. I picked up a box of candles (Ikea has THE best no-stinkum candles!) and impulse-bought an inexpensive pair of glass candle-holders.

We also went to REI, just down the road, where the camp stove offerings are far superior to the ones I’ve seen elsewhere. I may go over to the REI here in town to get one of those. It looks like they require a special propane canister, which will mean having to keep several of those on hand for emergencies. But…time to be prepared, IMHO.

Minor Annoyances of the Day

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Dogs…

…park selves at back door and arf. Human gets up (having just barely brushed the seat of its easy chair with its fanny) and lets the dogs out. Dogs go out onto the patio and stand there, staring expectantly at human.

Human: It’s 105 and overcast out here, and you want to go outside and stand?

Dogs: Well, yes. Yes. Of course.

{sigh}

Phone Solicitors…

…apparently are having a phone-solicitor jamboree.

Despite the wonderful call blocking device, quite a few still get through. They do this by spoofing phone numbers that are not in service (reinforcing one’s suspicion that Cox is in cahoots with them: how else would they get such extensive lists of out-of-service numbers?), or simply by calling from numbers that the device has yet to block.

Even the calls that get blocked still jangle my phone: they ring once and then are cut off. This has to do with the way the gadget has to be connected, because of the number of computers and phones and crap that are attached to the incoming cable. In one way, this is annoying: whatever you’re doing still gets interrupted, albeit very briefly. In another, it’s kinda gratifying, because you know the bastards are getting hung up on. The ones that do get through, though, set off your answering machine, so you have to listen to that thing yap. Sometimes they stay on the line long enough to cause the answering machine to pick up the “busy” signal that ensues, so you have to get up, walk to the machine in the back of the house, and delete the voice message that’s going beep-beep-beep-beep-beep….

Today I’ve had at least eight calls, about half of which have gotten through. That’s just while I’ve been here: left the house at 6:30 a.m. and didn’t get back until sometime after 11.

Whoops! There’s another one: the third from “Bountiful, Utah” today!

Mosquitoes…

…definitely are having a mosquito jamboree.

Don’t know when I’ve seen so many skeeters around. I think it’s probably because I left a dish of water out for the dawgs while it was excessively hot, because I was afraid Ruby would slip out unnoticed, as she’s inclined to do.

Cassie prefers to lurk indoors, but Ruby will go out and lurk in the yard even when it’s hotter than the proverbial hubs of Hades. I do try to check to be sure she’s inside, but given my growing level of incompetence, the chance remains that she’ll get herself stuck out there in the heat.

Even with water, she wouldn’t last long at 115 degrees. It’s cooled down to 105, so I brought the mosquito habitat inside. But that left, of course, a generation of little biters flying around.

There’s a chemical-free way to keep them from chewing on you, though: turn a reasonably powerful fan to “blast” and point it at yourself. Interestingly, mosquitoes are not very strong fliers, and they can’t navigate well in a breeze. Right now we have a large box fan roaring away. Whenever I work up enough energy to get up, I’ll turn on the other three table fans in this room. The box fan is sitting here next to the sliding door, because I take it out onto the deck at breakfast time by way of discouraging the little biters in the morning.

Incompetence…

…Really? Is it really possible that I could get the date of a Mayo Clinic appointment wrong not once, not twice, but three times?

Entre nous, I begin to doubt it.

The journey from my house to the Mayo is halfway across the galaxy. I just simply HATE driving out there. So when I needed to traipse across town by way of finding out why whatever ails me has been hanging on for the past five and a half months, I was not pleased.

I had a meeting in Scottsdale this morning, which would put me about halfway there. So I arranged an appointment at 9:10. This meant that the errands I needed to do while I was in the area where the group meets had to be deferred until next week, and some of them are things I would like to get done this week, not sometime in the far future.

So I leave the meeting early and fly across Scottsdale headed toward Payson — for reasons I can’t imagine, the Mayo built its office complex damn near out to Fountain Hills, which borders the freaking Beeline Highway. Naturally, Shea Blvd, the only way to get out there, is all dug up with “lane closed” signs all over the place. But I hit the campus just in time: run up the parking garage stairs and race into the reception area, only to be told…

“Oh, that’s not today: that’s next week! :-)”

Son. Of. A. Bitch!

This is the third time I’ve trudged way to hell and gone almost to freaking Fountain Hills and been told the appointment I had on my calendar was not for that day but for a week hence.

• The first time, I put it down to my usual old-lady incompetence.

• The second time, I was really pissed.

• But this time? Now I’m beginning to wonder.

Does it really make sense that I would get the date wrong for a trip I truly hate loathe and despise three times?

I go to a whole lot of doctors, dentists, veterinarians, car mechanics, and whatnot. Why would this keep happening only at the Mayo? It never happens with Young Dr. Kildare or CardioDoc or the glasses guy or the dentist or the hair stylist or the vet or the business meetings or choir…so why would it happen with the Mayo and only with the Mayo? Why would these errors consistently be exactly one week off, when they’re usually made pretty far out in the future? (This one wasn’t: I made it a few days ago, but mostly you’re scheduling three or four weeks down the line.)

(Wow! Here’s the fourth call from Bountiful! This guy just does not give up! Now we’re at about 9 nuisance calls today.)

So, yeah: does it really make sense that this kind of scheduling error would happen only with the Mayo?

If they’re deliberately mis-scheduling, why? Could that make sense in even the wildest scenario?

The only possible reason I can imagine is that the Mayo doesn’t like to deal with Medicare patients. Medicare doesn’t pay enough, and collecting is a hassle for them. The Mayo prioritizes private patients over Medicare patients. They may be quietly trying to discourage me from making appointments at all. If a person makes enough wasted trips — especially if the person is elderly or disabled and it’s hard to get out there at all — maybe she’ll just give up and go someplace else.

And I certainly would, if they weren’t about the only game in town.

Overall hospitals and medical care in Arizona are pretty piss poor. In the Phoenix area, only two hospitals are rated excellent; one is the Mayo and one is a facility way to hell and gone out in Sun City. I don’t know anybody who practices in Sun City, and I sure as hell don’t want to drive as far to the westside as I have to drive to the eastside to go to a doctor.

It’s late. I’ve got to get up and start preparing the walls for the upcoming paint job. And so, away…

Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.

Dog/House/Docs/Like Mother, Like Son…

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1. Dog

Car-riding in balmier days…

So yesterday afternoon we schlepped the ailing dog out to his Regular Veterinarian, way to he!! and gone on the northerly reaches of Paradise Valley.

Charley is much improved, and yesterday made a Great Leap in terms of recovery. He’s certainly not cured by any means, but yesterday was walking around a little more normally, despite having to struggle to get up and down. He’s even getting up enough zing to take up one of his favorite activities, counter-surfing.

Day before yesterday, M’hijito discovered a large, strange wound that seemed suddenly to have appeared on his back. Son was beside himself: we did not know where this came from or what it could possibly be.

Actually, I had a theory: First day back from the vet hospital (a.k.a. hole in the ground into which to pour money), Charley levered himself to the floor in the kitchen while we were fixing food. When he got himself down, he was laying with his back jammed up against the sharp corner of the cheap Home Depot cabinetry we had installed in that house. I thought at the time he must be getting jabbed, but elected not to try to drag him away from it for fear of injuring him more. So he could have scraped himself while in that position.

We cut away as  much hair as we could and washed it, but since we already had a vet appointment there wasn’t much else to do.

The vet did a much better job of removing fur all the way around the thing, cleaning, and applying a med. He opined that it’s a hot spot.

I said “how can he have a hot spot, since he can’t reach the middle of his back to lick it?” My dogs love to create hot spots, but these always appear on their legs, which are convenient venues for lick-fests. These create fine festering wounds.

He said a hot spot can start as a bacterial infection. He says they’re very common in goldens.

So now poor Charley is bald on the belly (where they shaved him to do an ultrasound of his abdominal cavity), on his front legs (where innumerable IVs were inserted), and on his back.

However, the vet said he appears to be significantly better and held out some hope for a complete or near-complete recovery.

He also discovered that in X-raying the dog’s chest, the 24-hour veterinary had found a couple of ruptured vertebral disks.

Well, holy sh!t, would that ever explain a lot. As you may know from your own experience, disk pain is pretty damned excruciating. It certainly can cripple you up. And it can cause you to feel extremely stressed.

So if he was already in pain when he was placed in the Hated Car, the combination could have stressed him enough to give him a neurotic fit, as it were.

And you simply would not believe how this dog behaves inside a vehicle. He truly is totally panic-stricken.

Yesterday I rode in back with the dog while my son drove the car. All the way across town, Charley huffed and puffed and gasped for air and tried to burrow in behind my back to hide. There’s no question at all that he was terrorized.

The vet thinks the Thunder Shirt idea is a good one. He says a lot of people swear by them. If you read the reviews, about 75% of users feel they work well or at least adequately to calm their dogs’ anxiety. So my kid is going to order one up. But we’ll have to wait until the hot-spot wound on his back heals up before wrapping him in Velcro and nylon. Also the maker’s site says not to put one on a dog when the weather is over 90 degrees — it’ll be a month or two before temps get back down into the 90s hereabouts.

Anyway, this guy is really a great vet: like Young Dr. Kildare, he combines a great deal of expertise with that rarest of all commodities, common sense.

2. House

So I bought a gallon of gray paint to re-do the orange hallway. I’d very much like to get started on that, but it ain’t gonna happen today. Or tomorrow.

This morning I’ll run up to the Depot, where I figure I can get the rollers and a couple new paintbrushes cheaper than they sell them at Dunn Edwards.

However, it must be said that when I rolled into Dunn Edwards the other day with no paint on my face and engaging my usual long, space-covering hiking stride (had to park on the far end of the lot to get the car in the shade), I looked pretty lezzie. The lone clerk personing the counter was a distinctly mannish-looking woman, and she instantly took a liking to me. Amazingly, that led to her establishing a tradesman’s account for me! ♥ So I got the paint at a deep discount.

Ordered just a quart of the white trim paint, since I figured all that would be needed would be some touch-up. But when I arrived to pick up the paint, I learned they couldn’t get the color (which is long out-of-date in the style department) unless they whipped up a gallon. Incredibly, the guy dispensing the paint gave me the whole gallon for the cost of a quart!!!!!

Hot dayum!

The trim in my son’s house is the same color white. Our honored painter screwed up quite a few things in that house. Among these: he painted the hall cabinet without sanding the high-gloss lead paint already on it, and then — get this — after he finished painting he pushed the drawers shut! Not surprisingly, the paint just peeled right off the first time my son opened the drawers.

Painter dude also applied some of the wall paint carelessly and slopped it on the trim around the kitchen doors.

So with this excess of white paint, I’ll be able to repair the paint at M’hijito’s house, whenever I get around to it.

3. Docs

But that will not be soon: I can’t even work on my own house today.

Have to prepare a presentation for tomorrow’s 7:30 a.m. meeting, and from there go straight out to the Mayo, there to begin the (undoubtedly freaking endless) process of figuring out why my body is still afflicted with whatever struck on March 1. Still coughing and gagging, though it’s slowly getting better. But…this is August: whatever the ailment is has hung on for five and a half months.

Young Dr. Kildare referred me to a lung doctor.

I called this guy’s office during office hours and was instantly shunted into an aggravating punch-a-button phone tree. Okay…so get used to it, right?

Don’t think so. This was an aggravation on steroids. By the time I got to the sixth level of “listen carefully for our menu has changed,” I thought oh fuck it! and hung up.

Now this outfit keeps calling me on the phone and leaving messages for me to call and make an appointment. This after they sent me a letter to that effect; I wrote them a note in reply explaining that I gave up after reaching the sixth punch-a-button put-off and that I feel a business that treats its customers this way reveals its lack of consideration.

And I believe that is exactly so. In any setting, when you put off someone who wants to do business with you by sending them through a long, annoying run-around, you’re really saying you care so little for your customer that you won’t even be bothered to hire a minimum-wage clerk to listen to messages left on a voicemail that answers at the first or second level. When your callers are sick people, for chrissake, that is true in spades. How hard is it to plug in a voicemail system that says “Please leave your name, your number, and a brief description of your concern and we will get back to you soon”?

So this is not a medical practice with which I wish to do business.

Called the Mayo and reached a human on the second hoop-jump. Made an appointment. Unfortunately, it’s for 9:10 in the morning tomorrow. So that is going to make tomorrow a bitch of a day: starting out with a 40-minute drive into the rising sun and a presentation whose subject I have yet to dream up; then racing to the Mayo (another 30- or 40-minute drive from the meeting). And presumably, knowing the way my life goes, downhill from there.

4. Like Mother, Like Son

{chortle} I was tickled to learn that a certain retrograde cast of mind runs in the genes. After we returned from the veterinary expedition, M’hijito went off to a favorite Thai restaurant and retrieved a bunch of take-out.

So we’re sitting around after dinner finishing our beers and reading. M’hijito has turned on the lights…and he apologizes for their dimness because, says he, “I hate those new lights! I hate that blue cast they put out…they hurt your eyes!”

Heeeee!

So I was moved to make a confession: when the last administration decreed that incandescent bulbs would be taken out of our sticky little hands, I hoarded boxes of real light bulbs.

Heh heh…if he’d heard about that when it happened, I’d have had to listen to any number of lectures about how foolish that was.

But like his muther, he tried the fluorescent bulbs and tried the LCD bulbs and found them…amazingly wanting.

So when I croak over, he’ll inherit a lifetime supply of lightbulbs that don’t hurt your eyes or make you grit your teeth.

😀

Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.