Idle essays | Funny about Money

Tempus Fidgets

April 1, 2016March 31, 2016 by funny

Sometimes it’s hard to believe how fast time flies. The older you get, too, the faster it seems to fly.

Neighbors catty-corner across the street are getting ready to move. Their Realtor has stuck a “For Sale” sign in the front yard with a “Coming Soon” addendum. This seems to be the newest style: sticking up a sign before the house is actually listed.

Out of curiosity, though, I looked it up on Zillow, mostly to see if the out-of-state landlord who used to own it still did own it and had gotten lucky with the tenants.

Apparently not. Looks like the folks who live there probably own the place. They (or someone) bought it in 2010.

The previous owner had purchased it in 2004, right at the run-up to the Bubble. That, by coincidence, is when I moved in here: twelve years ago!

Can you imagine? I can’t… TWELVE YEARS!

The neighborhood has really changed since I moved over to this street.

The New York landlord rented that house to Queer John and the Boys, a funny but off-the-wall bunch who, not having any ownership interest in the shack, never did anything to fix it up. Queer John was a sweet sort of down-at-the-heels guy, assertively gay and friendly on his good days. Not all his days were good, alas: he suffered from bipolar disorder, so his ups were stratospheric and his downs were subterranean. In a manic phase, he went out and bought two identical SUVs and shortly was pursued into the ‘hood, driving a vehicle that had something caught on the rear bumper, by three squad cars, a paddy wagon, and a couple of motorcycle cops.

{sigh}

One evening Queer John and one of his roommates had a home invasion. They claimed three guys and a woman had broken in, the men by forcing their way in the front door at the same time the woman and the third guy climbed in an unlocked back window. One of the men chased him up and down the street waving a pistol, until Dave (proprietor of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum) came outside and scared the perp off.

They called the cops, who, seeing QJ’s flaming queerness (he really could be pretty flamboyant), refused to pursue it. They said QJ and roommate must have hired the woman and gotten rolled by her pimps.

We think not.

Another day, the Psychotic Son-in-Law, spouse to Other Daughter (the Cat Lady), went fully ballistic when Queer John told Pretty Daughter’s girl and boy child (at that time, yea verily 10 years ago, they were still children; they lived next door to the rental) that they could swim in the house’s pool, as long as their mom or another relative was present. Son-in-Law jumped to the conclusion that Queer John intended to molest the children and charged over there threatening to kill QJ and anyone else who got in the way. It took some doing to call him off and stuff some meds down his throat.

So on the Night of the Swarming Cops, poor old QJ was hauled off, never to be heard from again. The New Yorker rented the house to a pair of slobs. The woman worked for Bobby McGee’s, a local fixture-type restaurant. Apparently she used to bring the garbage home, because she’d show up in my alley with the trunk of her big old Buick-like tank of a car chuckblock full of stuffed trash bags, which she would jam into the garbage bin shared by me and Sally. It used to enrage Sally. I just thought it was weird. They were weird. WT in the most classic sense. They made Queer John and the Boys look genteel.

Eventually the New Yorker sold the house, at a significant loss (the crash having crashed by then), and these quiet people moved in. They haven’t done anything to make the house look any better, but at least they keep the yard tidy and their behavior is plain-vanilla.

In those days, Carlos the Knife would chase his 80-year-wife Inez and his daughters around, brandishing the kitchen cutlery. And he thought it was funny to let his daughter Maria’s batshit crazy mutt out. The dog chased Pretty Daughter’s girl child up a mailbox column; I shouted the dog down and chased it off long enough for the girl to get back inside her house with her little dog.

Carlos and Inez have since passed away. Maria lost the house, and a lively couple with four cute kids bought it. They just finished painting the house a pretty color. The kids are the center of everyone’s attention down in this corner of the ‘hood. We love them.

Son-in-Law succumbed to his schizophrenia and moved out from Other Daughter’s care. That was probably good for OD, but not so great for SiL, because she did take care of him. At one point the cops swarmed into Terri’s yard so as to jump her fence into OD and SiL’s yard, because they thought he had killed her.

He had not.

It’s mighty quiet down there now, except for the stray cats.

Dave, proprietor of the used car lot, marina, & weed arboretum, also lost his house. He’s living in a condo not too far away. A bottom-feeder picked up the deed off the courthouse steps. His crew cleared out the toxic waste, and he sold the place to a woman fix-and-flipper, who came in, painted, put in a new kitchen, renovated the pool and the yard, and sold the place to a pair of accountants with a teenage son. Son is now in college, the house is weed-free and tidy, and no junk is parked in front.

Sally moved to an old-folkerie some months ago, selling her house to a young couple who plan to have four children. Last month they produced their first. They updated the interior a little but have done nothing to the outside, which could use a new coat of paint…but it’s not too bad.

Pretty Daughter’s kids are grown. The boy has gone off to school in Flagstaff. The girl, alas, fell in with bad company and dropped out of high school. Two young men are living over there now, allegedly the girl’s cousins. Haven’t seen the girl for awhile, but (admittedly) haven’t looked. The guys are a hoot, though.

A whole lot of young people have moved into the ’hood, and they’re doing great things to the place. Most of the houses are hugely improved, with new paint jobs and freshened up yards. Some people have gone so far as to bulldoze the gravel “landscaping” and replace it with actual lawns — that’s nice! Presumably this bunch is paid well enough to afford the water bills. 🙂

The lightrail is now running. The city pulled out a row of houses facing Conduit of Blight Boulevard so as to lay tracks and new utility lines. This looked like a disaster at the outset, but the new young residents, who have the energy to fight city hall and some of whom must have some clout (if for no other reason than that they’ve organized a very active neighborhood association), managed to wrangle the city into building a wall between us and Conduit of Blight and even got them to landscape it!

So our part of the train route looks a lot better than it did. It’s annoying to hear the train honk every few minutes…I’m so glad I moved away from there. If I’d stayed in my first house, I would’ve been about four lots away from that thing, which would have made the war-zone traffic and cop noise just that much worse. One of several reasons I moved was the prospect of two years of train construction, to begin with the demolition of houses on my street and to end with a boondoggle train blatting its way along from five in the morning till midnight…make that 3 a.m. on Saturdays.

The new young residents call the cops on the hookers, which of course keeps the cops busy. But I haven’t seen any of the girls flagging anybody down on our side of Conduit of Blight recently. There’s a linear red-light district about a half-mile to the west of Conduit of Blight, conveniently passing behind a school. Must be nice for the ladies…they can drop the kids off on their way to work. The City keeps promising to clean it up. We’ll believe that when we see it.

The whole neighborhood is looking a lot better, all spruced up the way it’s getting thanks to the young urbanites.

The house that’s about to go up for sale is now valued at about $378,000, which is insane. I bought my house for $235,000, and it’s been renovated. That place, I think, has not — or if it has, the wear and tear has done worn and torn it.

Well, it may be crazy, but if it sells for anything even in that ball park, it won’t be turned back into a rental. With any luck, that house, too, will get a paint job and a fix-up.

That’s the news from lovely uptown Phoenix, where mediocrity is a virtue and all our children are below average.

The Carnival Comes to Town

March 19, 2016March 19, 2016 by funny

All the Presidential candidates have descended on Arizona, anticipatory to the local primary. It’s quite a circus…especially with the Republican clowns in evidence.

Cruz was down at the border pandering to hatred of Mexicans and Indians. He hasn’t a clue to the real issues: only to the mentality of people who would vote for him.

The local right-wing crazies optimistically compare Trump with the craven Sheriff Joe Arpaio and suggest the similarity between the two opportunists’ political strategies points the way to the White House for Trump.

Meanwhile, Clinton campaigns at a high school in the decrepit low-SES district of South Phoenix (not to say “ghetto”), presumably hoping to get out the vote among the poor and to demonstrate her progressive creds among those who understand that the American middle class is going, going, almost gone.

Sanders is in Tucson, where a substantial educated, enlightened population has grown up around the University of Arizona, the state’s only reasonably decent institution of higher education. That would be, he no doubt figures, where his constituency clusters here in our backward fly-over state.

And Trump? He’s taken over the city’s huge convention center, where protesters started marching at dawn.

Meanwhile, no one seems to notice that our honored legislators are busy trying to draw a line around women’s right to decide what they will do with their bodies, that Arizona is distinguished by ranking at the top of the list for states whose college graduates move away (why might that be??), that the nitwit-infested legislature has defunded the largest community college system in the country (we need a lot of junior colleges because most of our high-school graduates are not well prepared for four-year universities), that the City of Phoenix is about to jack up property taxes in the face of a budget surplus, that utility companies are trying to raise their rates even higher while they work to quash rooftop solar power — this, in a state where electric bills are already among the highest in the nation — and the city’s wi-fi service is so. freaking. slow….that it’s taken almost 45 minutes to get into just these few links to write just these few words.

WhatEVER. My plan is to walk the dogs while it’s still cool enough and then stay out of the car and off the roads for the rest of the day.

Friday Frolics

March 4, 2016 by funny

As it were…if one has an odd idea of frolicking… 😀

Awaken at 4 a.m. Retrieve the computer, open the new Chinese grad student client’s thesis. Mm HMM. As suspected (since she wept that her dissertation director called her English “appalling”…just think of what that one would think of my Chinese!), yes, as suspected, it’s a tangle of Chinglish. But not too awful: the organization is good, the research is adequate, the methodology…uhm, remains to be seen.

By 6:30 I’m done with Chapter 1 and have sent the references off to my honored associate editor, who very likely will assign them to her underlings. Earned about 30 bucks an hour, so didn’t feel bad about that at-tall.

Figure out that the way to keep the MacBook’s external hard drive from repeatedly falling on the tile floor is to Scotch-tape the USB cable into the drive’s connection. Add this decorative touch to Apple’s fine styling.

Feed the dogs, throw in a load of laundry, walk the dogs, eat not much breakfast, read the newsoid.

Toss a particularly ugly shirt, a recent Costco buy, into the car and head down to the Ghetto Costco outlet, where as usual they take the thing back and return my money, no questions asked. Fill the Dog Chariot’s tank with gas preparatory to tomorrow’s endless jaunt to the far, far, far, FAR west side (approx. half-way to Yuma). Yesh: filled the tank for under twenty dollah!!!!!

In living memory, it has cost $40 to fill that thing when it’s 3/4 empty. Dance to spring!

Next: Over to AJ’s, a local gourmet market. Get the avocado. Get the frozen peas. Do not get the MSG.

MSG, you ask? What would one want with such a discredited, politically incorrect product?

{sigh} Those of you who are not dog owners should avert your eyes. Those of you who live with dogs no doubt are familiar with a particularly annoying doggy quirk, coprophagia. Ruby has, of recent, decided to phage copros. But — this one’s weird — not her own. Cassie’s.

Ugh. Humans hate that.

You can discourage this revolting little habit by adding a light sprinkle of MSG to the dog’s food. Of course, I’ll have to add it to Cassie’s, since Ruby’s not interested in her own product. At least, not so far.

When metabolized in the canine gut, MSG taints the dog’s excreta with a flavor so ghastly that even a dog will not eat it! Works like a charm. Within two or three days, your dog will be convinced that this activity is not worth the effort. It’s a quick and easy way to break a dog of that particular irritant.

But damn. McCormick’s meat tenderizer no longer contains MSG. It’s salt and some other chemical, unrecognized. The store did not have any Accent.

Back home, order a little jar of Accent from Amazon. No shipping charge, now that I’m an Amazon Prime member. This is good, because the cost of shipping 4.7 ounces of the stuff probably would have cost more than the product itself.

More laundry into the washer. Water plants, water plants, water plants, water plants.

Dribble Round-Up on weeds running rampant in front yard and alley, having noticed while driving out that the yard is looking a little tacky. The neighbor’s behind me looks worse. And of course, Manny’s is a jungle, since they like to grow poppies in the gravel each spring. At least they grow their weeds on purpose.

Repair the paper towel holder that fell off the wall, out in the garage. Throw lunch on the grill. Scour pan left to soak in garage work sink.

Dine magnificently while reading New York Review of Books.

Grab Cassie, who has become extravagantly filthy, drag her into the bathroom, and drop her in the bathtub. Scrub dog, scrub dog, scrub dog, scrub dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog…dog escapes.

Haul wet towels to garage, throw those in the washer with wet bluejeans.

A dog and her dirt... [Click on the iimage to enjoy its full, soggy splendor] — *A dog and her dirt… [Click on the image to enjoy its full, soggy splendor. Yes, the topsoil covering the bottom of the bathtub* is from the dog.]

Scrub bathtub. In the process of getting all-purpose cleanser out of the bathroom cupboard, tip over the bottle of toilet cleaner, which tumbles out onto the floor. I can’t get those things open without recourse to a wrench, so once I do manage to break into a bottle of the stuff, I just stick it back in the cabinet, open. Take that, Big Nanny!

Toilet cleaner squirts across the bathroom floor and slops onto bath mat.

Finish the job by squirting the rest of it into the terlet. Wash the caustic cleaner off the bathroom floor. Carry the bathroom rug, which was wet and hairy anyway, out to the garage to go in the washer next. Scrub toilet.

With hair dryer in hand, corner Cassie. Dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog…dog escapes.

Clean up kitchen. Hang clothes, load more laundry.

Dog is limping. If you wouldn’t put up such a fight, Dog, that wouldn’t happen. Place dry towel on bed, atop Dog Blanket. Place dog on bed. Place other dog on bed.

Ruby evicts Cassie from the Wet Dog Towel.

Move Ruby. Pick up Cassie and put her back on towel. Repel attack of The Look from Ruby.

Retrieve computer. Climb onto the sack with the dogs. Consider doing a little more work. Nothing very urgent is pending. One thing ought to be done today, right now. But the world will not end if it doesn’t get done today, right now. Read news. Play games at Washington Post site.

The Post‘s collection of online games, BTW, is primo. Check it out if you like benign time-wasters.

Who Said It: Candidate or Beauty Queen? is not to be missed, BTW.

Write this post. Realize it’s 7:00 p.m. Would like to go to sleep, but it’s too early. Besides, the washer’s still running.

Maybe I can get a little more marketing work in.

BUY THIS BOOK!

Thank You, El Niño!

March 2, 2016 by funny

It seems ungracious to be thankful for an El Niño, given the havoc the phenomenon wreaks on the Western hemisphere. But here in Arizona, the effect is not so much tornadoes and floods but much-needed rain. The occasionally recurring effect of a warm current in the Pacific Ocean, El Niño brings weather disturbances that can have some severe economic and health effects in the countries it affects. In Arizona, though, it brought back the kind of gentle winter rains we used to see every year when I was a young thing.

You get used to drought after it’s been going on for a couple of decades — 22 years, to be precise. Native flora shrivels up, and the springtime wildflower shows go away. Once-flukish 118-degree days occur every summer now. And ornamental plants? Forget it!

So I had pretty much resigned myself to the belief that the beautiful climbing roses that turn the west-side deck into a leafy bower were going to have to be taken out this year. All that remained of them was a few parched sticks, no matter how much water I thought I was pouring on them.

But nay! Check this out!

Who’d’ve thunk it?

So overjoyed were these plants at actually getting enough water for a change — for the first time in years — and actually getting water all over them, that last January one of them burst forth with a single blossom:

Neither of the vines has made another one yet, but they’re getting ready to. And both are covered with more leaves than they’ve had in as long as I can remember.

Earlier this winter, in a fit of spring-planting enthusiasm (it’s been spring since January…), I bestirred myself to plant some flowers. It’s the first time I’ve felt like gardening since the marathon spate of surgeries, which really left me very depressed. But spring has sproinged, and oit looks like even the old lady is shaking off the long, dry winter.

LOL! I give up on trying to force WordPress to put these images where they oughta be! Is there a reason computer technology has to be such an unholy timesuck?

Dogs love springtime, too…probably the more so because they never indulge in electronic distractions.

Running in Place

March 1, 2016March 1, 2016 by funny

Ever spend the whole darned day working busily, come to the end of the day thinking, “Gosh, I got a LOT done,” and then on reflection realize you really didn’t do very much?

That was yesterday. A bunch of time-sucks occupied most of my waking hours…

• Breakfast and light shopping with Associate Editor Tina and her sister. Okay. Not a time suck. That was fun.
• Correspond briefly with new client: her project is delayed.
• Review Big Kahuna Client’s magnum opus. Realize there’s not much more I can do until he gets back to town.
• Decide to use the time thereby freed up by creating a couple of Word templates for future client work: one for APA style and one for Chicago Style. Very time-consuming, but will save time on future projects.
• Acquire Nanyang University’s style sheet (one of them) for Ph.D. dissertations; consider creating another style sheet based on APA but tailored for the university. Decide against it: different departments there have different requirements.
• Consider how I might make a few pennies on these handy-dandy style sheets; fail to figure out how that would work.
• Consider the possibility of using them as give-aways in conjunction from some marketing effort or other, as yet inchoate.
• Write this month’s publishing co. newsletter, only two weeks late
• Publish the same through MailChimp, a PITA
• Publish the same on LinkedIn, easier but still requires tracking down a public-domain image. PITA.

I’ve decided to massage said newsletter so as to downplay the racy books a little and up-play (hee! is there such a word?) the book that’s selling: to wit, the cookbook. Hence, the shift away from news about the enterprise and toward useful information: this month’s newsletter describes three common triggers that can cause Word to crash, and what to do about them.

Also used the LinkedIn post recycling the newsletter copy to add a plug for the editorial bidness. A fair amount of new editorial work has come in. Since we’re not getting rich a-sailing the Amazon, I’m thinking that if we put the amount of effort and money into marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk as I’ve dumped into the publishing scheme, within a few months we would have enough editorial income to matter. And you know…editing Chinglish dissertations is really nowhere near as mind-numbing as wrestling with Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook, and other refractory institutions, hour after fruitless hour. Nor is it quite as boring as jumping through hoops to register ISBNs and jumping through more hoops to publish bookoids at Amazon and waypoints.

Meanwhile, though, I’ve hired Jackie Beck to help drive Pinterest traffic toward the Plain & Simple website and found she’s imbued with the common sense I so sorely lack. She has suggested that instead of mounting posts and images on three different websites — Camptown Races, Fire-Rider, and Writers Plain & Simple — it would be smarter to post all the marketing blats at a single site. She proposed that we use the Plain & Simple Press blog for that purpose, since P&S is the imprint for the two books I’m hot to market just now: 30 Pounds/4 Months and Fire-Rider. This will relieve me from an awful lot of jumping around and website hassling. Plus it just makes good sense.

One plan is to post a “riff” on Fire-Rider once a month: all new, never before published vignettes, scenes, and brief stories from the strange and fierce world of Okan.

I think of Fire-Rider not so much as science fiction as a kind of “reverse anthropology.” The story of a future culture, it rides on the science of anthropology to create its imagined world. The first riff (in that link above) shows Kaybrel, an aging warlord famed as a wise man and healer, teetering on the edge of the dark night of his soul, which will come in the next novel. In the latest one, The Women Warriors, we visit the home life of an Okan warrior’s family in a setting where extended families are truly extended. With a chronically decimated male population, the Okan practice polygamy. The elite women, who themselves are trained in the arts of war, have as much political and social power as the men. They decide whom they will marry and, if they please, they decide which other women their men will have as wives.

The first novel (now available in three handsome print volumes, btw, or electronically in three collections at Amazon) follows the men as they spend a summer tromping through enemy territory. The next novel, replete with cryptids (yeah!), will take Kaybrel through a spiritual crisis and show a number of the women in action.

Order the print books through Plain & Simple Press and you get $5 off the retail price.

Welp, time’s a-wastin’…must run to the post office, the credit union, and Costco before getting back down to work.

And so, away!

Roomie Heads West

December 25, 2015December 25, 2015 by funny

So the Great Rent-a-Room Experiment ended this morning when Roomie stuffed the last of her gear into her car, waved good-bye, and set off for San Francisco, where DH and Son hope to see her before the end of Christmas Day.

I’ll kind of miss her, because it’s nice to have a live human being around, particularly one who happens to be considerate, tidy, a good conversationalist, and so overworked she’s out of the house most of the time. 😀

So as experiments go, it was pretty successful. As a matter of fact, it worked out so well I could imagine going into the short-term rental biz, as an off-and-on sort of thing. Don’t think I’d care to do Air BNB, because I wouldn’t want total strangers around here. But occasionally visiting musicians come to town, and every now and again you hear a request for people to put up foreign students for a semester.

It’s not something I’d want to do all the time. But I could imagine hosting an out-of-towner two or three times a year.

For my purposes, Roomie could not have come along at a better time. The whole adventure was pretty stressful for her, given the circumstances she was having to cope with. But for me…hot dang!

Right at the time she was moving in, the pool pump sprang a leak. That was $600. Then of course it’s freaking Christmastime. I found the coolest hand-made artisan thingie for my son. To swing that I had to mortgage both his first-born sons (if he ever has any). And while junketing with my dear friends, I not only dropped more money than Croesus would even have considered paying for a very fine lunch, I bought myself a ludicrously overpriced purse and wallet.

Those two will go back, as soon as the holiday is over. But meanwhile the six hundred buckolas and the lunch and the Christmas presents pretty much broke the bank.

So number one Big Advantage to hosting a house guest for a month or two: the company.

Number two Big Advantage: those few incidental dollars for the rent probably saved my tail this month.

Two things I’d do differently the next time:

1. Buy a twin bed for the spare room.

Roomie bought one of those blow-up mattresses, which she tossed on the (cold!!!!) tile floor to sleep on. She insisted it was plenty comfortable, but I’ll believe that when I see corgis fly. Obviously, if I’m to volunteer that room for guests, it needs to have a decent bed in it.

2. Charge something for the utilities.

My son, a veteran of the Roommate Wars, urged me to add more to what I charged to cover utilities, and he probably was right. We’ll find out soon, when the water and gas bills show up.

When you live alone, you get so sot in your ways that you forget other people don’t live the same way you do. For example, in the wintertime, I like the ambient temperature to be cool. Very cool. Some folks (such as, oh, say, the occasional Roomie) might call it FREAKING FREEZING. I sleep better when the central heating is off and the bed is warmed first by a heating pad and then by a couple of furry friends. When the heat is set to 70 (or even 68), I’m sweltering.

Weirdly enough, Roomie found the climate on the tile floor a little too bracing for her tastes. So she would trot into the hall and jack up the heat. Eventually I would wake up in a sweat, sneak out into the hall, and turn it back down. At one point, outside temps dropped far enough below freezing to seize up the heat pump, which caused it to labor away for hours blasting us both with icy air before one of us woke up and shut the damn thing off.

We found the way around that problem when M’hijito showed up with a fancy space heater with a remote control and a swell thermostat. It really worked very well to keep that room comfortable — Roomie expressed her joy. Nevertheless, I expect the electric bill will be pretty startling.

And Roomie is one of those folks who likes to stand in the shower until the hot water runs out. You forget there are people who are not tightwads where water and power are concerned. I’m very cheap about both and, though I insist on drawing a bath (dislike showers, by and large), filling the tub does not run the water long enough to drain a 50-gallon water heater. And when the weather’s cold, I’m not in the habit of bathing every single day, something that’s not good for aged skin and not necessary if you don’t work yourself into a sweat every day. So the water and gas bills also are likely to be…interesting.

So I think if I were to do this on a short-term basis again, I’d add a set amount to cover utilities. If the person were going to be here more than six or eight weeks, then I’d probably ask them to cover half the utility bills.

And if I were seriously to do this as a semi-regular thing, I might move myself into the guest room. The master bedroom in this house is no larger than the secondary rooms, and its bathroom is tiny. Day-to-day, I use the hall bathroom, which has room to move around and also has the bathtub. The master bathroom is about the size of the closet…and this house was built before the day of TractMansions with closets the size of a baby’s nursery.

Also, the dog door is in the guest room. To keep Ruby out of Roomie’s things, we closed off the dog door and also kept her bedroom door closed. This was OK — luckily, neither dog left any deposits around the house. But it was a little bit of a nuisance. If I were sleeping in that room, there’d be no need to keep the pooches out of it. I’d have access to the “good” bathroom. And the alleged master bedroom, which resides in the back of the house, would be more private for a guest, too.

Now I must run to the second Christmas party of the day. And so…

Merry Christmas to One and All!