Coffee heat rising

Scams & crooks

Just a LITTLE peace and quiet, puhleeze?

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Uh huh... 7:46 p.m…. and it’s

ROAAAAARRRR roooarrrrr buzzzzzzzzzzz whizzz roar buzz…

Cop helicopter overhead. Dayum! Am I tired of this routine or tired of this routine?

He buzzes around in circles over the northwest section of the ‘Hood: right above the house where SDXB and I lived together for a couple of years before parting ways, then buying our own shacks here in the neighborhood.

Lovely: I guess I should be glad we split up and moved away from that corner.

SDXB, I’m sure, is very glad he moved to Sun City, where the local crooks rarely feel it’s worth the effort to stage a home invasion.

Not altogether, though.

LOL! I can remember the panic my mother enjoyed when they had a couple of guys who would climb up on top of a car in a carport (there were no enclosed garages in that garden spot), slide open the ceiling hatch, climb into the attic, make their way across the rafters to the area of the living room, cut a hole in that ceiling, and hop down into the living room. Yes: dwelling in the land of the somnolent and the half-dead did not guarantee freedom from burglars.

😀

Hm. Sounds like the cop copter has already flown away. Must have chased our boys on down the road.

We live directly south of one of the highest-crime ZIP codes in the state. Every now and again the action spills over into the ‘Hood, which provides us a little entertainment.

Ruby will bark at our guests, but weighing only abut 20 pounds does naught for her potential as a threat. Really: one does need to be armed in these parts.

Arizona. What a friggin’ garden spot!

Ah, the Good Ole’ Days…

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Well, lookee here. This charming event occurred within walking distance of our beautiful old historic home in the Encanto district — the first house DXH and I owned together.

The Encanto/Palmcroft district really is a lovely area. I miss its pretty streets and friendly neighbors and beautiful park with its lakes, every day. I could walk to the grocery stores and the post office from my house. And did.

Actually…I could do that here, too. Older and wiser, though: I’m not that foolhardy. Today I jump in the car and lock the doors before opening the garage door to travel the few blocks down to the stores and such.

This is, after all, the Big City. A big, crime-ridden city.

Occasionally, I’ll drive downtown and cruise through that area, house-shopping: thinking maybe I’d like to move back. But…

But.. No.

It really is dangerous. Did we ever have some adventures in that house! And that was with 90 pounds of fur and fang as our room-mate….

My present area, while its ambience is a little more repetitively middle-class, is less than REAL safe for a lone woman to walk around in…but it sure ain’t like that place was.

Oh my goodness, so many adventures.

There was the night our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Wilson, awoke, got out of bed to stroll around the house, and spotted some guy sleeping on her back patio. Right outside her living-room door.

The night Greta the Ger-shep awoke in the middle of the night to find a prowler coming up the bedroom hallway. Somehow, she got between him and the door he’d come in. The panic was quite amusing.

The night my mother came down to stay overnight with me while DXH was out of town. We set up the sofa bed for her and get ready to say goodnight, when…she pulls a .38 out of her purse and sets it on the TV table next to her!

The morning DXH pranced out of the house, hopped into his car, and prepared to back out the driveway, step 1 in the journey to his office…. And found some very angry guy in the back seat. The fella was irked that anyone would have such bad manners as to wake him up at dawn!!!

That was life in the Encanto District.

It was so beautiful, so conveniently located, and the neighbors were so grand. But really: I’d never go back there again.

Scared Witless

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Nope. There really is no other explanation for my mother’s behavior and habits than that she truly was scared witless.

Yeah. I kinda knew it, largely because part of her motherly teaching was that I should be extremely cautious and yes, always, always, ALWAYS lock all the doors and windows before going to bed at night.

To a degree, if you’re female, that’s just common sense.

But…no. Her terror went way beyond that.

She was convinced, for example, that some guy was going to stroll into their carport one evening, climb up on top of the car, hop through the attic opening, crawl across the rafters, take out a saw, cut a hole in the ceiling, and jump down into the house — there to have his way as he pleased. One evening, it became evident that this was real fear and not just some silliness she picked up out of a women’s magazine.

She showed up at my house to stay overnight on the TV room sofa. What did she bring with her?

A .38.

No kidding.

We get the bed made and, after watching TV half the evening, shut off the idiot box and head into the night. And out of her purse she pulls this GUN.

Y’know… You wouldn’t do that unless you were terrified. And you certainly wouldn’t do it in front of your daughter. In your daughter’s home.

That was the point at which I realized she wasn’t play-acting. She was genuinely frightened.

Had something happened to her in the past that made her that scared?

I kinda doubt it. If so, she would have said so. Oh, hell: she would’ve gone on at length about it.

No. She didn’t hide things like that.

Whether it was the ambient fear in our culture — which is real and does affect many women’s thinking — or whether something had happened to her, I do not know. But there’s no question that she was terrified. She wouldn’t have pulled a stunt like that if she weren’t scared half to death.

My parents’ house in Sun City did have a carport, not a garage with a door you could close. So that meant, of course, that your car and anything in that carport were exposed to the evening air…

AND…that carport’s ceiling had a hatch-type door, whose purpose was to let workmen in to fiddle with the wiring, the plumbing, the insulation, and the drywall in the attic.

She was convinced — apparently because she’d read about this happening to some other Sun Citizen — that somebody was going to climb on top of the car, open that door hatch,  hop into the attic, make their way to the living room, saw a hole in the ceiling, and drop down into the house.

The better to rape some nubile 65-year-old, right?

Yeah. That’s what I grew up with.

That kind of thing has to affect you, over the long term. I don’t feel terrified. No: if I did, I wouldn’t live here alone in a four-bedroom house a mile south of a crime-ridden suburb and two blocks east of some very alarming apartments.  But yes: I do remember it. I remember it as not just strange, but as fundamentally alarming.

As for my mother?

There really isn’t much explanation for the chronic terror that afflicted the last couple decades of her life.

* Don’t know if she was similarly scared when she was a young thing

* Don’t know if she’d ever been attacked, and so might have suffered the aftereffects.

* Yes, I do know there are a lot of sh!theads out there, but not so  much as to require you to cower in terror behind locked doors and windows, with a pistol in hand.

And as for the local creeps, crooks, and nut cases?

* Dudes! Make. My. Day!

What if…what if…why didn’t I?

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Ever ask yourself that question, LONG after the fact? Why didn’t I…make this small move or that obvious decision that would have cut off a disaster at the pass? An obvious disaster…

What WAS the matter with me that I failed to dispense the most obvious, simple-minded advice?

Sitting here thinking about my father’s painful marriage to the horrid Dragon Lady, whose real-world name was Helen… My god, but she was an evil thing!

When they came to me in the spring of their dotage — both widowed by the demise of their first spouses — and asked my permission to wed (yes! No kidding!!), why didn’t  I say “ARE YOU CRAZY?” or maybe HELL, NO! AND STAY AWAY FROM ME WITH THAT BS!”

Of course, at that point I didn’t know how evil Helen was. And she was evil: that is the best word for her cast of mind.

My father was devastated by the loss of my mother, the love of his life. The one who smoked herself to death, sucking on the murderous tobacco corporations’ cancer sticks.

And when Helen moved in for the kill after they met in the old-folkerie where he moved after my mother died, he must have thought marrying her would salve his grief. A grief that was more profound than you or I can imagine.

Little did he know how much worse she could make it….

After it became obvious — after, alas, they were legally bound in marriage — that Helen was the meanest creature that ever walked or crawled over the surface of this earth, he understood how miserable he was. He took to taking a book outside, climbing into his parked car, and sitting there all day reading…having told the Dragon Lady that he was taking the car to the Ford dealership to be serviced.

She was so astonishingly stupid, she bought this story…over and over! How many times can you change the oil in a sedan, over the course of a month? of a week?

When the parking-lot car hideaway came to seem a little too transparent, he rented a studio in another nearby old-folkerie. Put a TV set and an easy chair in there. And repeated his story that he was taking the car to the Ford place. He’d sit there all day, come back to their apartment in time for dinner, and then have only an hour or two before he could escape from her again by going to bed for the night.

Eventually, one of the other inmates noticed that my father’s name was on a list of residents at the other old-folkerie…and, by way of torturing him and amusing themselves at Helen’s expense, brought it up one evening while they were playing bridge. My father was humiliated, Helen was rightfully infuriated, the marriage stank even worse than it already stank (which was plenty)…godlmighty!

Y’know… I might have headed that horror show off at the box office, if I’d had half a brain in my head. Because…when they came to me melodramatically one day to ask my permission to marry (!!!!! CAN you imagine?), I could have (should’ve, would’ve…) said NO! “No. Wait for a year to be sure you want to do this. Come this time next summer, if you still think you want to commit to living together for the rest of your lives, by all means do it. But don’t do it NOW.”

What WAS the matter with me?

Young, I guess. Self-centered. Stupid as a post.

My father was just miserable with that witch. Truly: I’ve never met a meaner human being.

I didn’t attend my father’s funeral, first because I wasn’t invited and second because by then that evil creature had chased me off with her unrelenting meanness.

Recently, I learned the Dragon Lady’s daughter’s family had her remains interred — or boxed up in an urn and set on a shelf — next to my father and mother’s ashes out in the mausoleum in Sun City. They’re all together there on a shelf.

Just horrifying.

If I’d had any idea they were up to any such outrage, I would have hollered HELL, NO! and sicced a lawyer on them.

One thing’s for damn sure: no one is setting my ashes on that shelf, goddammit.

I’ve arranged to be interred in the Close down at the church. Called out to the Sun City mausoleum to find out about moving my parents to the same venue, and learned that the bastards charge THOUSANDS of dollars to move a person’s remains out of their sanctified quarters.

Can you imagine?

That’s the Death Industry in America. They getcha coming and they getcha going. What incredible evil!

Holy Junkmail, Batman!

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Just happened to go into the email program’s “junkmail” folder, and…forgodsake!!!! Almost 550 junkmails have poured in since the first of the month! That’s in just two weeks!

DayUM, what a nuisance.

Nuisance because I’ve got to scroll through all that crap looking for any messages that are NOT junk, and nuisance because now I’ve got to delete it all, but can’t do so without checking to be sure I’m not accidentally trashing a message from someone who matters.

Yeah. That’s 548 messages in the junkmail folder, plus a sh!tload more that managed to slither into the in-box and will also have to be deleted.

Here’s one demanding payment for iCloud space. Hm. Senile though I am, I’m pretty sure I’d remember if I were paying for iCloud. And if I were, a monthly hit like that would be set up on auto-pay.

Man! These damn scammers come at you from all directions!

I’ve heard that for phone solicitors, there are lists of phone numbers organized by the marks’ ages. They figure older people are easier targets, so knowing that you’re, say, over 55 or 60 makes it easier to focus on a passel of potential suckers. Maybe they’ve got age-based junkmail pestering lists, too?

Wow! If all this crap were coming directly into my in-box, it would render my email unusable. There’s no way I could sift through hundreds of pestering messages.

Hmmm…. Here’s something about an “iCloud Plus” service. But I don’t think that’s what I have. My system is just the standard come-with iCloud, without any + sign after it. {but…see below for an update…}

Shee-ut. Today is Thursday: M’jito will be working from dawn to dusk, so he can’t tend to this. So I guess I’ll have to schlep this thing to Best Buy, where I have a service contract, and see if I can elicit any clarity there. That entails a trip through gawdawful traffic and a nice, long stand in line. Yay! /eyeroll/

***

Yea verily! It turns out there’s an iCloud Plus scam!  Damn these bastards!

I’ll have to traipse to Best Buy anyway, just to be sure it really is a scam and I don’t find my li’l computer empire knocked off the air.

Just how I wanted to kill half a day….

The Salton Sea Boondoggle

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About the time we came back from Saudi Arabia for (thank gawd!) our last long leave, my father celebrated by purchasing the Car of His Dreams: a Chrysler sedan. He bought it in New York. He and my mother drove it across the country to San Francisco, where he took up a first-mate’s job on an oil tanker and we lived for a couple of years in a tony apartment complex called Parkmerced. Then he got another, better-paying job, shipping out of Long Beach, California.  So my mother and I packed up all our worldly goods, sent everything south, and moved into a (crummy!) apartment in Southern California.

Of course, we took the new Chrysler with us.

My father was so proud of that car. It was a Rolls Royce for the working classes. At least, so it was in his mind.

Meanwhile, my father being quite the cheapskate, my mother took it into her head to create her own little career: selling real estate. She had become friendly with a real estate saleswoman who was quite the scam artist. This woman persuaded my mother to get a real estate license and throw in with her, selling houses at the Salton Sea.

Salton Sea, then imagined to be a developer’s bonanza, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.  And my mother got swept right up in it. Fortunately, she didn’t buy any property down there, so my father didn’t lose his hard-earned shirt through her real-estate exploit. But….

Among other things, one aspect of my mother’s project involved driving from L.A. through Palm Springs and down to the half-baked development at Salton Sea. And that involved driving through a broad, sandy desert, where the wind blew fiercely.

Fiercely enough to sandblast the finish off that swell new car, right down to the metal.

My father must have just been horrified when he came home from the ship and saw the paint scoured off his beautiful new car.

And for what?

For naught. Salton Sea, as it developed, was one of the Great Scams of the Western World.

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She had no clue. Neither, unfortunately, did he. But one senses that if he’d had a shore job, if he hadn’t been off at sea for week after week and month after month, he would have sussed out the rip-off before she got caught up in it..

I was just a kid in high school. I therefore had an excuse (of sorts) to have no clue. Instinct suggested that all was not perfect there, but there was no way in Hell (where we were dwelling…) that I could have figured out that it was a huge, ridiculous scam. Even if I could have, my parents paid no attention to me. I MIGHT have alerted my father…but probably not. As far as he was concerned, I was just a weird little kid — and worse, a weird female kid.

So they got sucked into the Salton Sea boondoggle. How much they lost — above and beyond the damage to a brand-new Chrysler — I do not know. They didn’t share their financial matters with a weird little kid.

Mercifully, she didn’t buy any property down there. I’m pretty sure that was only because my father wouldn’t have allowed it. He clung to every penny more fiercely than Scrooge McDuck hung onto his dollars.

Luckily for me..