Idle essays

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.

 

Betcha can’t guess what this is:

THAT is a dog-resistant cockroach-bait cage, custom designed to keep Ruby and Charley from eating the cockroach poison laid out there to catch the latest resident of the garage. The rock on top keeps Ruby from pushing the old fan cage over to the wall and then flipping it up with her nose or a paw so she can get at the roach baits and scarf them down. The wood chip, retrieved from the grill fuel, is there so Roachie can get in, since the fan cage’s wires are too close together to let her through.

Three of those are placed strategically around the garage just now.

This morning alone, I have walloped my bare feet on those damn things not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR GODDAMN PAINFUL TIMES! Don’t think I’ve broken a toe (yet), but it sure as hell hurts.

I’d managed to get rid of the roaches. Haven’t had any around for years. The new resident is a different species from the usual babes we have here in Arizona, the big brown fellows who live in the damned palm trees. This little guy is shorter, fat, and almost black. Looks a great deal like the Broad Keys roach. Cute.

And where do cockroaches come from? I’ll tell you where they come from: They travel in goddamn politically correct PAPER GROCERY BAGS, that’s where they come from.

Cockroaches inhabit warehouses, and they inhabit shipping containers. When cartons of grocery bags are stored in warehouses in transit, roaches find them, chew on them, and take up residence in them. They lay their eggs in the stored grocery bags. So when the paper grocery bags arrive at your house, helpfully given to you by politically correct corporations like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, the roach eggs hatch. And pretty quick you have happy throngs of roaches running around your house. Or garage, if you’re smart(?) enough to store the bags out there, or if you throw them into the recycling bin that you store in the garage.

So. Yes. The politically correct grocery bags discarded in the politically correct trashbin: That would be where the roach came from.

Woke up crabby as a cat this morning, and the cockroach bait waltz did not help things.

Sat down at 5 a.m. to finish off a client’s project and ship it off to him. Figured it would take about 20 minutes. Got up from the computer at 7 a.m.: two interminable hours later. Two interminable hours of tooth-grinding electronic ditz.

It being a little overcast, breezy, and not too crushingly hot, the dogs & I went for a pre-breakfast walk. But by 7 a.m., rush hour was well under way. We could not get across Feeder Street Northwest. I finally gave up and turned around. So we went back into the westerly end of the ‘hood by way of circling around to the house and collecting at least a few steps of our doggywalk. Naturally, we encounter some guy with a great Dane-like thing (ears uncropped, so he probably got it from the pound or some such), off the leash. Dane is real interested in two rabbit-sized corgis. Dude manages to grab the dog and starts struggling trying to get the leash on. While he’s wrestling with that, I dodge down a side street and shortly get out of sight and out of mind.

That cut about two blocks off said doggywalk.

Fed the dogs, fed myself (after a fashion), and then decided to pay the $251 bill outstanding to the Mayo Clinic.

Medicare and Medigap paid about $75 of the $325± said outfit billed me for the pointless annual physical they demand you show up for in order to stay on their rolls. The Mayo wishes to purge itself of Medicare patients, since we’re not very profitable — Medicare keeps prices down more efficiently than do insurance companies, which themselves work pretty hard at the task. The way they get rid of you is with this rule: if you don’t spend some money there every year, whether you need care or not, you can’t come back.

Since hospitals in Arizona leave quite a bit to be desired, it’s very much in one’s interest to stay with the Mayo.

So I’d paid the little bit Medicare/Medigap remitted and finally decided that was as much as I was gonna get. Paying is a hassle unless you want to send a check — I prefer to put these bills on the card so as to get credit toward the cash kickback AMEX provides. To pay with a card, you have to dork around on their website, which, the last time I looked, is a true, dyed-in-the-wool PITA. Alternatively, you can call and hang on the line until you get through to a CSR, who’ll take your credit-card information.

This is another hassle: they first tell you the wait is “longer than five minutes.” It’s not: it’s about two or at the outside three minutes. Then they while away your time nagging you to go to their website and pay there…ignoring the obvious fact that if one wanted to fart with the impenetrable website, you would not be farting with their phone tree. Would you!?

So I finally get through to a lady and at that point things proceed quickly and smoothly. Once you get a human on the line there, the place is pretty easy and pleasant to deal with.

Now I decide nothing will do but what I have to clean up the unholy mess I’ve allowed to accrue in the Funny Farm…speaking of things impenetrable. I have the bad habit of setting things down where I finish with them and then erasing them from my mind. I don’t even see the piles after awhile.

It takes over an hour just to pick up the litter, throw away the trash that should’ve been thrown out in the first place instead of left to accrue like dust on a tabletop, scour the pans I left to soak in the utility sink, stub my feet against the roach cages, wrestle two loads of laundry into and out of the washer, unload and reload the dishwasher, scrub the toilet and bathroom…arrrrhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I. Hate. Housecleaning.

Just hate it. Why? Because it is a hopelessly futile endeavor. You can clean until you’re blue in the face and a day later the place is littered and dirty again. What is the point?

The cordless phone in the kitchen died. After a significant period of puzzling, I discovered it would recharge in one of the other recharger cradle thingies. More puzzling and dorking around took place. Finally I decided the kitchen recharger had given up the ghost. Threw it in the trash, leaving a homeless handset and a disgusted human.

Lovely.

This morning I take the extension out of the living-room cabinet, which entails moving a VERY heavy piece of furniture across the tiles, climbing in behind it, unplugging the cord, unstringing it through the hole I’d drilled in the back of the cabinet, and dragging it into the kitchen. And of course pushing the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place and centering it under a picture.

Plug it into the outlet, set the phone handset on it, and…it doesn’t work…

WTF?

Maybe the outlet has died. I plug it into another outlet. It doesn’t work.

So this morning between banging around and emptying the trash into another collection bin, I happen to study the moved recharger, which flickers off when I pick it up. Then realize…wa-a-a-a-aitaminit. There’s nothing WRONG with the thing. The wire has come loose at the connection to the base.

Could it be?

Now I go to retrieve the discarded charger from the garbage. Naturally I can’t find it. I have to dig all the way down to the BOTTOM of two weeks’ worth of trash and garbage to pull the damn thing out of there.

And yeah. When I push the wire connection together firmly and plug the damn thing into the outlet, it comes right on!

Crap.

I decide I’d better not put this one into the cabinet, because I suspect the loose connection will come apart again, and that is another emergency-if-I’m-on-the-floor extension. Don’t want to find that thing dead when I really need it.

So I have to push the VERY heavy piece of furniture out, wrestle with the wiring again, wrestle some more to put the phone back and replug it, and push the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place. Again.

The temperamental phone is working again. Let’s hope it persists.

Do you wonder why, at 12:04 p.m., I want a bourbon and water?

P.S. WHY IS IT that you can proofread a blog post a half-dozen times and STILL not catch all the stupid typos in it??? I am SOOOO TIRED of having this machine display my idiocy!

 

 

So today we have an all-day choir workshop, a shindig that’s fun, tiring, and sometimes challenging, followed by one of our annual potluck dinners. Then tomorrow the regular choir season starts. Hooray! I love it!

Our beloved director is back despite some fairly challenging surgery over the summer. He seems none too much the worse for wear. Two of our other favorites also each enjoy ead their own Adventures in Medical Science over the summer…ain’t life fun? We have eight new people, a passel of professional and near-professional singers, and plenty of younger folks. All of which makes for an awesome group.

The choir is going to perform at Carnegie Hall in the spring. Wish I could go with them. But of course I couldn’t possibly afford a plane trip and several days of food and lodging in New York City. Even if I could, there’s no way on God’s Green Earth that I would subject myself to the bureaucratic bullying required to get on a commercial airliner today.

One elderly woman in the church — a very sweet and nice lady — tried to take a flight across the country. She was in a wheelchair. An obvious terrorist, eh? The TSA singled her out, harassed her mercilessly, would not let her through to her gate, parked her in the middle of a concourse, and left her there. By then I had already decided that I would never ride a commercial plane again; that just confirmed my feeling. If I can’t get there by car, I don’t go.

LOL! And since my car is now too decrepit to leave the city and I’m too lazy to do battle with a rental car company, that means I don’t go much of anywhere.

It’s ironic, because I joined this choir largely because I wanted to travel with them. They regularly do international tours. The year I joined they were slated to go to Italy, and I had a job: I really wanted to go on that trip. That was the year of 9/11. The State Dept was warning Americans to stay out of Italy and the south of France, many of the choir members were nervous about flying,, and the director decided discretion was the better part of valor.

By the time the next opportunity came along, I was unemployed and not about to spend any of my tightly pinched pennies on something that wouldn’t keep the roof over my head.

Oh well. There are better things than gallivanting around a world you’ve already seen several times.

Speaking of gallivanting, now that the oven-like skies are cooling a bit, I’ve GOT to get some exercise. The bike’s tires again dissolved in the garage’s heat, so those will have to be expensively repaired or replaced. Once the thing is working, though, I can get around the North Central district a ways, which burns a few calories. Really should go back to the mountain, but I can’t think of many things that bore me more than trudging up and down a crowded, overused mountain park trail. There are just too many people at North Mountain now. And you can’t get a place to park at Squaw Peak now at any time of day.

SDXB discovered a nice mountain park in Glendale, which seems to be better maintained — or less thumped by crowds — than the Phoenix parks. Trouble is, it’s a bit of a drive. That makes it hard for me to work up the ginger to traipse over there, especially since you have to navigate a freeway to get to the place. Another innocent driver was shot to death on the 51 here — just driving along minding her own business when some shitheads started pursuing her and, when they caught up, shot her in the head. So my feeling is, unless you have bullet-proof glass, stay off the freeways.

Oh well. Time to go! The nice thing about a church is that it leads you to contemplate something more positive than real life. 😉