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Monday
August 13

Yes. It looks like today is going to be one of those Days of Dorkification… You know: when everything you touch goes KERSPROOIINGG and everything you do to try to fix it makes it worse.

Today is Cleaning Lady Day. We might also name it after the proprietor: Ungrateful Wretch Day.

Yes. Yes, indeed.  SOOOOOOO lazy am I that I resent having to get off my duff to clean house for the cleaning lady. 😀  Not to say /eyeroll/

Luz the Cleaning Lady Extraordinaire does SUCH a superb job that there’s no way I could match her performance, certainly not without working myself until I fall over face-forward. Even more extraordinary: the Funny Farm is her second house of the day! She starts across the street at Wonder Accountants’ place and then comes over here.

How she does this day after day (presumably she has enough clients to fill all the weekdays) and week after week escapes me. I would die if I had to do that kind of work, day in and day out.

Financially, she seems to be doing OK, if one makes a few assumptions and then does the math. Let’s say she has two houses a day and charges $80/house. That’s $160/day. If she works five days a week (haven’t asked her if she does, it bein’ none o’ my bidness!), that’s $800 a week. Given a couple weeks off, that’s $40,000 a year. And whaddaya bet she doesn’t pay taxes on that?

When a person uses their home as a place of business — as WonderAccountant does, and as I used to when I was working for GDU and freelancing — the cost of cleaning is, o’course, tax-deductible. That means Luz’s pay would show up on my tax returns. If the Taxman chose to look that up, then he could go after Luz for not declaring a full-time income. However, two things would militate against that:

* You’d have to deposit your pay in a checking account.

Many Latina/o immigrants don’t even have checking accounts: they just cash their check at a grocery store or a cambio.

* Everyone who was hiring you would have to declare your pay on their tax returns.

Unlikely. Many people who hire cleaning ladies are Junior League types: wealthy women who spend their days promoting their husband’s careers through highly visible “worthy” charitable works. They’re not hiring a cleaning lady so they can go out and earn their own salary. If you can’t deduct the cost from your taxes, why bother? Some people who do freelance work out of their homes (or are now work-from-home employees) don’t realize that every expense having to do with their house/workplace is potentially tax-deductible, at least to a degree. Plus many folks pay a cleaning lady in cash, so she doesn’t get ripped off at a cambio when she has to convert a check to dollars. This means she’s probably not declaring it… So neither are you, hm?

So, unless WonderAccountant or  some other professional type among her clients is advising Luz on her taxes, Uncle Sam probably has no clue where she works and how much she makes.

At any rate, back to the introductory topic here: everything I touch today goes SPROOOIIINGGG!

Go to put a load of cleaning rags into the washer (it’s only been two weeks since she left them in the garage for me to wash them…), dump the coffee grounds on the potted plants in back…holeeeee sheee-ut! It’s 95 in the shade out there, under cloudy skies. Wunderground predicts a 15% chance of rain.

Yeah: 95 and humid. Where does it think we are: in Saudi Arabia?

****

Speaking of hot and humid…for the love of God, nearly a hundred people killed on Maui, and the searchers think they’ve covered only about 3% of the disaster field.

What. A. Horror.

Y’know…. Even if my own home were unaffected, I can’t imagine that I could go back to a normal life in a place where a catastrophe like that happened. Everywhere you turn your gaze, you must see destruction and signs of death. It’s hard to believe that many folks could make themselves return to Lahaina. It would be just too heart-breaking, too terrifying.

Adding to the horror of it, the town apparently had disaster alarms (so the residents thought…), but they didn’t sound!

WTF? How is that even possible? And can the survivors spell l-a-w-s-u-i-t?

More gawdawful yet, apparently the local officialdom had declared the fire 100% contained. Wrong!

Lawsuit hm? Spell that with ALL CAPS.

****

Hmmmm… In altogether different realms….

No sign of Luz, the Cleaning Lady from Heaven.

Her car is not across the street at WonderAccountant’s.  The WonderAccountants are, as we scribble, touring northern California, having attended a memorial for an old friend in Reno and then having decided to continue to points westerly. WA says she thought Luz was supposed to come over today…but maybe she’s just running late.

Which is fine. The house is actually pretty clean…it really doesn’t need her ministrations today.

*****

BING BONG!

*****

Criminey. Speak of the Devil…

She apparently hasn’t gone to WA’s place yet…she must have figured there was no hurry, since they’re not home.

Drat. So that means no privacy this afternoon.

ohhhhhh well….  It also means we have here an excuse to get off our duff and go shopping for some of the stuff we’re running out of here…

Really, I do need to make a Sprouts run. I just don’t wanna.

Here in the lawless Wild West, it’s legal to sell certain cannabis products…over the counter, like so much candy. And Sprouts, bein’ a hippy-dippy sort of place, carries the stuff, to a degree. Specifically, they carry CBD products: body creams, lip balms, and the like.

Their CBD body lotion is the ONLY thing I’ve found that actually works on the peripheral neuropathy. Aspirin barely touches it. CBD ingestibles: not noticeably  better. But the topical stuff — which you apply directly to the patches of skin where the nerves are buzzing — really cuts that awful tingling.

The other day I stumbled across a credible site that says one cause of peripheral neuropathy is the dread  covid-19 disease.

Hmm…ya don’t say?

Shoofing around, I stumble across an old journal entry that shows the covid-19 episode I picked up at the Mayo’s ER in the fall of 2019 coincided with the earliest appearance of the crazy-making tingling.

I’ll be damned!

Well. Of course I can’t prove it. I can say I do test positive for having had the virus. But I sure can’t prove when I had it.

****

Tuesday
August 15

And oh joy, as a function of Olde Age, I forgot to finish and post this yesterday.

This morning whenever dawn is finished cracking, I have to traipse across the city, barge into the credit union, and try to get SOMEONE there to help me get  back into my account. NONE of the passwords I have will let me in.

Godlmighty am I ever sick and tired of our wondrous password-protected world.

Good Gawd! It’s only 105 out there, but it sure feels more like about 110 to 112. Probably because the humidity, sez Wunderground, is 24%.

Meanwhile, inside the shack with the air-conditioning pounding away, the thermometer next to the bed where the dawg and I are loafing reads 84 degrees. Balmy. The AC is laboring to drag the thermostat down to 80.

My power bill is gonna be astronomical…

Incredibly, the pool remains crystal-clear — some kind of miracle in this fine, algae-friendly heat. Thing is, I haven’t seen Pool Dude in the past two weeks.

No way in Hell that water could stay that clean all by its fine self. That says that PD is showing up when I’m not here, since Ruby goes BATSHIT with Corgi Joy whenever she realizes he’s here. So either he’s sneaking in during the night — very, v-e-e-r-r-y quietly, or somehow he’s arriving when I’m out. The latter is unlikely, since these days, between the heat and the plague, I don’t go out much. But then, the former is pretty unlikely, too.

At any rate, I just tested the water. It’s very high on chlorine. That suggests Our Hero has been at work.

The floater is full of tabs, and I haven’t put any in there. In this kind of heat, chlorine tabs dissolve quickly, so even though he’s dropping five or six tabs in there, they wouldn’t be THAT plump if he hadn’t shown up yesterday to refill the thing.

Welp, we can’t complain too much about Arizona’s summer heat and…absent monsoons. Good Lord! A million people back East without power. Power lines trapping the natives. Airports shut down. Tornado in Tennessee.

It’s supposed to warm up a bit next week…115 or so, come mid-week. Chance of the traditional late-summer monsoon rains: about nil.

When we say “hotter than the hubs of Hades,” we ain’t kidding. It’s 9:00 at night, and the thermometer on the back porch — in the shade all day, nestled among the leaves of an overgrown ficus plant — reads 110 degrees.

Yeah. That’s right: ONE HUNDRED AND TEN DEGREES.

In the shade. All day.

The Wunderground site, my favorite weather predictor, is hung. But the last I looked, it seemed to be saying we could expect three-digit heat all night. The Accuweather site is more optimistic, predicting a balmy 89 degrees as a low, with 103 as the present temp, at 9:00 p.m.

People are dropping dead left and right. Here’s some poor fellow who fell over dead in the parking lot where I leave my car when I walk in the desert mountain park just to the north of the ‘Hood. I actually could walk to that place, but I’m too lazy.

Walking around the neighborhood suffices, especially when it’s 110 degrees out there. And…well, 110 degrees itself suffices to kill you.

This pretty young woman did herself in last Friday, walking on trails I go on several times a week during the winter.

And {ahem!} zero times a week during the summer.

Ruby and I did get out to perambulate the higher reaches of Upper Richistan, along about 5:30 this morning. Can’t leave much later than that: a two-mile stroll would occupy an hour, and that would get us back here around 6:30, way too late for comfort.

At this time of night — pushing 10 p.m. now — the pavement is still way too hot for Ruby to walk on. Early in the morning, the streets are still warm, but safe enough for us to walk around, at least for an hour or so.

Right now, I reckon, about all we can do is go to bed!

“Hot” in more ways than one.

This afternoon as I was idly cruising a neighborhood here looking for someplace to move away from the Romanian Landlord’s antics, what should appear to the south but a HUGE plume of  black smoke. It rose hundreds of feet into the air.

You could see it was a distance off: down by the riverbottom, probably, or at least in the industrial area of South Phoenix. So one hoped…not an apartment building full of poor folks.

Yea verily: it was in some kind of industrial yard. Apparently started as a grass fire and then spread to a warehouse. A half-dozen people were displaced from their mobile homes…unclear whether those vehicles were damaged, or whether people were evacuated for caution’s sake. Depending on what source you access, three or four firefighters ended up in the hospital (more photos!) with smoke inhalation….not too awful, considering that the city had 100 of them on the scene.

Meanwhile, the rest of the city is still cooking. Looks like we reached 111° this afternoon. Balmy!

As in “you have to be balmy to live here…”

 

Sleep. All I want is sleep.

Whatever that is, it’s in short supply. For sure!

Pool Dude is supposed to turn up about now. Ruby, who’s in love with him, has been standing guard at the windows, watching…watching…watching…  No sign of the guy.

Given the way things have been tooling along — “whatever can go wrong will go wrong” — this tardiness has several possible explanations…

* His truck is on the fritz
* Some other customer has a gigantic headache in their pool, slowing him down
* He’s been arrested and carted (back?) to the slam
* He’s sick or injured

It’s pretty clear that Pool Dude is an ex-con. A couple things he’s said indicated…shall we say, wisdom born of experience. And one of my friends has a son who (unjustly, IMHO) ran afoul of a (ridiculous!) law and spent several years at the prison in Florence. There’s a kind of style one develops that’s not hard to recognize. Plus of course, once you’ve enjoyed the state’s hospitality, it’s damn near impossible to get a decent job; so, you end up trying to build a business out of incidental, catch-as-catch-can work. That would be tree trimming…yardwork…pool cleaning…  Yeah.

If that’s the case with Pool Dude, it offers one potential explanation for his absence (if absence it is; not lateness): he may be back in the slam. {sigh}

Heh. In theory, you might make a pretty good living at pool cleaning. I pay him $80 a month for the basic routine clean-up & maintenance. He comes once every two weeks; that would yield $960/year per pool. Let’s say he does four pools a day, which could reasonably be as many as he could handle, when you add in the driving time. Working one day a week for four clients would give him $3840/year. Say he actually does this as a full-time business and so works five days a week: $3840 x 5 = $19,200/year.

That’s not very much, given that he supplies the chemicals — which ain’t cheap! — and has to deal with fuel and maintenance for his truck. Subtract those costs, and you get seriously not very much.

Hmmmm….  Well, I’ll give him til 10:00 a.m.  If he hasn’t shown up by then and he still isn’t answering the phone, I’ll drive over to Leslie’s and ask for a referral to one of their customers. Also put out a query on the neighborhood Facebook page.

The guy has been doing an incredible job.

a-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-d….

True to today’s Pattern of Frustration, OF COURSE… I go to look up  how much I’ve been paying him and see normally I pay him $110 a month. (Where did I get $80????? Ain’t senility grand? ) But the last time I gave him a check, it was for $40.

Huh??????  Why?

Jayzus! If I shorted him that much, no wonder he hasn’t shown up today!

Oh gawd what a mess!!!!!!!!!

The credit union’s website won’t let me into my online account. Apparently the password I have in my records is wrong. So I can’t get in to see whether I actually paid him a third of what was owed, or or whether I entered an error in my checkbook register.

Now I’ll have to wait till the credit union opens — 10 a.m. Schlep across town to get ahold of a live human being. Explain the predicament. Find out if I really DID pay him a measly forty bucks.

If so, I’ll have to grovel like mad. But if I did pay him his usual $110, then I’ll have to demand to know where the hell he is.

If he’s quit because I shorted him obscenely, then I’ll have to find a new pool dude.

Ohhhhh gawdlmighty! Just what I needed to make my day!

******

Hallelujah! It’s a miracle! For a change the mistake I made was in Sanity’s favor, not Satan’s.

Stan the Pool Dude on the phone: yes, I did pay him $110, not cleaning-lady wages. In fact, the $40 probably was for Luz, not for Stan.

Maybe the CU will tell me who that check was written to. If not…no huge hurry. I won’t have to fly over there like a rocket and arrive at their door the instant they open. That’s something. I guess.

Heh!

It’s only 8:00 in the morning. Whaddaya suppose is gonna happen NEXT?

Did you know a corgi can go on point? And will, enthusiastically!

It’s the weirdest silly thing you ever saw: A tiny, furry, little pointy-eared dog standing on point outside the shrubbery that Ratty just ran into. She also knows when Ratty is residing in the marjoram bed and occasionally will go on point without a chase.

In fact, the corgi apparently was bred specifically as a ratter: to harry the incidental wildlife that would take up residence on sailing ships.

She will not enter the shrubbery, though she probably would if I encouraged it. When Ratty decides to make a run for it, she chases the little gal like a rocket across the yard and into the cat’s claw vines.

It’s not clear that Ratty’s first instinct is to run or to hide. Roof rats are spectacular climbers. They will go right straight up a vertical wall at a dead run, without even slowing down. And that would be why the attic needs to be sealed thoroughly, or why poison baits should be scattered around the attic.

I’m not at all comfortable putting out poison, because…well, frankly, I’m afraid if Ruby finds a Ratty corpse and decides to chew on it, that will be the end of Ruby. Guess I’d druther have Ratty in the shrubbery than have no Ruby around the house.

One wonders, though…  Why do we think birds and chipmunks and squirrels are so cute around the backyard, but have such a phobia about roof rats? I mean…the critters really are just another species of wildlife. If they’re not chewing on the electric wiring (hey! seal up that attic, f’r hevvinsake), who cares if they’re ambling around the back yard, stealing birdseed and eating the cat food?