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Tired, cranky, mad as the proverbial cat, and…yep. Unstuck in time.

I sweartagawd! Life is one long frustration here in the endlessly annoying 21st Century. Stuff that used to be part of everyday life…well…it’s GONE. If you want it, you can’t have it!

By “part of everyday life,” I really do mean the most ordinary everyday stuff.

Like a trash can. Do you realize you can’t buy an ordinary stupid little steel kitchen trash can with a separate lid that you set on it? Not a gigantic one for raking up all the leaves and dogsh!t in the yard. Just a little fella about  three feet tall, one that fits in the kitchen or the garage and holds the day’s cooking and cleaning debris.

The things are almost impossible to find, and when you do find one, it costs upwards of fifty bucks. For a fukkin’ TRASH CAN!

I need a non-chewable (read: metal) kitchen garbage can to replace my open plastic trash can in the garage. A metal garbage can with a firmly fitting lid that Rattie can’t tip over, can’t pull apart, and can’t climb into.

Otherwise, every single scrap of delectable-tasting and -smelling trash is going to have to be walked outside to the alley garbage bins, every time I need to throw something — ANYTHING — away.

What’s calling Rattie into the garage is, unsurprisingly, the trash can. Yum! Sooooo… NO LONGER can I put the garbage out there.

For the nonce, I’ve enlisted the refrigerator’s fruit and veggie bins as garbage bins. But…

a) They’re too small for the purpose; and
b) WTF am I supposed to do with the fruits and veggies when those bins are holding garbage?

Today I’m going to sally forth to a couple of my favorite Ace Hardware stores, which I hope MAY carry a real garbage can. Don’t hold out much hope, though.

What the HECK do people do with their daily garbage mounds? To take out every single plastic grocery-bag full of trash would entail trip after trip after trip into the alley.

This means…

* Either dig up a padlock key and unlock not one but two gates going out to the alley, and do this several times a day, each time remembering to put the padlock key back where you found it; or…
* Hike all the away around the end of the block and back up the alley, hauling bags of garbage after every single meal or cook-fest; then,
* Hike back into the house.

And believe me: you do NOT want to be strolling around that alley any more often that absolutely necessary. It’s just not safe.

There’s a reason the back fence has two padlocked gates going out of the yard…

Matter of fact, often I’ll pile the garbage cans into the back of the car and drive them up the alley. That way I can see whether anyone is around, and I’ll have a quick getaway if need be.

This accursed rat situation is beyond the pale. Roof rats started to invade Phoenix several years ago, and now they’ve pretty well spread across the city.

Yeah: I know: Get a cat.

In the first place, I don’t want another cat! We weren’t allowed to have dogs in Arabia (they would fight with the jackals that came into camp, pick up rabies from them, and then spread the disease to the local humans). So we had cats.

And cats…

And cats…

I never want to clean out another cat box as long as I live….

In the second place, Other Daughter’s herd of cats owns the neighborhood. If cats could get rid of roof rats, we would not have any rats here.

And in the third place, Ruby thinks cats are FAR more fun to chase than rats.

She may be right…

Well anyhow, back to the point at hand: The Invasion of The Rat Hordes means every speck of garbage has got to be sealed inside a tightly lidded container or else kept in the refrigerator until trash pickup day.

A-A-A-A-N-N-N-D-D-D…

****

Speaking of 21st-century joys, there I am tapping away on the accursed keyboard when

CLONK!

Off the goddamn thing goes. Dead. Black. Kaput.

Out of juice.

Does it matter that the goddamn thing has been plugged in for the past 45 minutes?

Nope.

Bang around bang around bang around bang around

Drag the computer to a cord. Be sure the fukkin’ cord is plugged in to the wall outlet. Plug it in. Fire it up.

Yup. It loads right up. And forthwith goes CLONK!

Dead. AGAIN.

Or is that STILL?

Bang around charge around bang around charge around bang around charge around finally find another charger cord. Plug it in to a different extension cord.

Cuss, swear, cuss, swear, cuss some more… At last the goddamn thing fires up.

It’s working. Supposedly the battery is all of 3% charged.

And THAT means now I’ll have to sit here twiddling my thumbs half the day waiting for it to get charged enough to be dragged in to Best Buy to get…

to get…

to get…

…ohhh hell! to get whatever it was fixed that needed to be fixed THIS time. I’m so upset and frustrated, I’ve FORGOTTEN the issue for which I needed to drag the damn thing in today.

Oh, I know: the fukkin backup issue.

It won’t back up data.

We’re told this computer has had no backups for 553 days.

That, of course, is ridiculous, because Best Buy had the back-up function working the last time I had to traipse back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth to their store. That was one helluva lot more recently than 18 months ago. And the external hard drive is plugged in most of the time.

Jayzus!

Now, to add another distraction: In comes a nuisance email telling me, oooooh JOY! Medicare Enrollment is here, wheeeeeeeeeee!

So it looks like I have to jump through that set of frustrating hoops again, lhudly sing goddam!

Whenever I can draw a deep breath, I’ll have to call the Medigap insurance lady and find out whether I can just let this go, or whether this is yet another brain-banging hassle to kill time with. This means I’ll have to dig up her name and phone number, which quite frankly is the last thing I feel like screwing with just this moment.

See what I mean about Life in the Twenty-First Century?

Dayum!  Dontcha just hate it when you wake to a morning when everything you touch goes SPROOOOIIINNNGGGGG!

Dawn cracked rather too long ago. It’s quarter to seven, which means the sidewalks will be swarming with other people’s dogs that “jus’ wanna pwa-a-a-y“…which is another way of saying “swarming with morons.”

I must not have wiggled all night long. My back hurts, my hips hurt…so much I can barely hobble around the house. Gulped down an aspirin with a piece of bread and butter (aspirin + no food = sick as a dawg). Fed the dog, who — sensing disaster a-pending — is now hiding under the toilet.

Lost my hair comb.

How the HELL can you LOSE an eight-inch-long fancy wooden comb???????

HowEVER, it’s now lost.

Ripped the tangles out of my hair with a plastic “brush” thing. That hurt a bit…grand way to greet the day.

Walked out into the garage to get…don’t remember what now, the brain having gone numb. There I found rat shit on the floor and signs that Ratty had quite a party out there.

Can’t put out rat poison without transporting Ruby to M’hijto’s house and leaving her there for at least a couple of weeks. Then before she can come back, the whole property will have to be policed to find any chunks of poison that have gone astray.

And no. No, rat traps do NOT address the issue. Rats are too damn smart to go inside a rat trap.

What’s needed is a large, hungry cat. Something along the lines of a Manx.

But to have such a creature in the presence of Ruby will mean getting it as a kitten.

How do I not want to bring up another kitten? Let me count the ways.

Belly is hurting like I swallowed a beaker of hydrochloric acid.

Got a lump on my lower jaw. Take recourse to Dr. Internet, and HOLY shit! Come across this serenade from the Mayo. Remove tumor/cyst and nearby teeth, tissue and jawbone; send for biopsy; reconstruct jawbone; inflict “medical therapy”; supportive care that includes “assisting with nutrition, speech and swallowing, and replacements for missing teeth…”

Jayzus! Good morning, America, indeed….

My mother’s mother was a glamour girl named Olive Getten. She apparently, to hear my mother tell it, was quite the flapper.

My mother claimed that she — my mother — was the illegitimately conceived offspring of Olive and a fella named DeLong, an a-scant offspring of a prominent turn-of-the-century family in upstate New York. Though the couple married, once my mother was born and given a proper family name, they divorced. My grandmother allegedly returned to California (or Illinois, or wherever her tribe was living at the time) and my mother’s custody was adjudicated to her father’s parents. In other words, my mother was raised on a farm in upstate New York by her paternal grandparents.

The more you learn about these people, the more jaw-droppers come your way:

Most striking: apparently my mother really believed Olive died in the mid to late 1920s, but that was not true. Olive evidently was still living in the 1970s, when my own son was born.

My mother believed she saw Olive die: that she passed in the Berkeley home of the maternal family and was carted out of the house into a hearse and driven off down the road.

This, apparently, was some kind of a trick. Very clearly, she did NOT die…she left many a footprint in the years that followed.

Olive may have married Jack Sansome, scion of a prominent San Francisco family. If that was the case, she spent at least part of her life as a very wealthy woman.

Somehow they hid this from my mother, OR my mother made it her business to deny it. HOWEVER, in other parts we learn my mother married Sansome: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/85936198/john-colin-sansom

It’s not impossible that the Gettens themselves may have been fairly wealthy. In the 1920s, that part of the Berkeley foothills may have been pretty swell. According to my mother, the house on Hopkins was a Frank Lloyd Wright knockoff, if not an actual FLW design.

If this involved sub-plot has any truth to it, then how much did my mother know?

Did the Getten bunch lie to her? If so, did they do so in cahoots with Olive?

Why?

Or did they evict Olive from their family and their lives, telling her she would be dead to them henceforth?

If so, how did they put her up to the fake cancer death? That would have been a very elaborate performance, apparently designed to trick my mother and possibly some others.

Sansom lived until the late 1970s, and incredibly, he’s listed as my mother’s spouse, married in 1931. This would have been shortly after Olive’s purported demise. Is it even remotely possible that he married her daughter soon after she died? Why??????

Is it more possible that the data appearing online is wrong, confused? Uh…well…yeah…

Here we find an interesting entry in the ever-unreliable website known as Ancestors.com:

https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KWV3-T2S/olive-catherine-getten-1891-1979

Apparently Olive lived until 1979…if you believe Ancestors.com. My mother claimed to have seen her carted off from her deathbed, placed in a hearse, and driven away down the road…when my mother was in her teens.

My mother was born in 1911. So she would have been, say, 15 years old in 1926. Olive would have been in her mid-30s.

Soooooo….how was Olive still haunting us in 1979?

😀 Ever have one of those STOP THE WORLD! days? 

One of those whatever can go wrong WILL go wrong days?

LOL! As you may have surmised by now, we’re having one o’ them thar days here at the Funny Farm.

Whatever I touch goes T-W-A-A-A-A-N-G-G-G!! or gets lost within 30 seconds. In-fukkin-credible!

I’ve spent half the morning searching for stuff or yakking on the phone to CSI’s trying to untangle the latest screw-up.

Latest fiasco: I LOST MY AMEX CARD!

Yes. Lost it.

Here in the house.

No. I haven’t been out of the house with it since the last time I had it in my hand, which was about 45 minutes ago while I was on the phone with an AMEX rep.

Dammit!!!!

all…

i…

wanted

to

do

this morning

was pay off the goddamn balance owing on that card.

After calling AMEX and ascertaining the current bottom line, the next task was to jump in the car, drive to the CU, and be sure the correct amount is transferred from checking to American Express; then be sure I have the correct figure for the remaining balance.

How hard IS this?

Find out the outrageous figure — several thousand dollars. Don’t ask!

Seek out the card case, wherein resides the AMEX card. The very card case that I just had in my hand.

And…it’s gone.

HUH???

Search for it.

Search for it.  Search for it. Search for it.

Search the car for it. (the car??????)

Search the bedroom for it.

Search the office for it.

Search the office closet for it.

Search every purse in the house for it.

Search the family room for it,.

Search the bathroom for it. (the bathroom?????)

Search the kitchen for it.

Search the office again.

Search the car again.

Search the family room again.

Search the kitchen again.

Search every  single purse again.

Goddamit, I can not find it!!!!!!!

Eventually I did find my checkbook. But I can’t find the secret code to get into the damnable online bank account. So I have no idea how much is in the checking account. No idea what has been autopaid. No idea how much is owed to AMEX.

All I know is…I’m losing my mind.

Finally did find the American Express card…tossed on the dining room table. Where else, eh? Doesn’t EVERYONE store their AMEX card on the dinner table?

Meanwhile, the scandalized Mac informs me there have been no backups for 772 days (there’s a reason for that…, the damned thing), I have only 17.567 GB of storage and I’m supposed to do something called “optimizing storage,” a term that might as well be in Martian, and that as we scribble the goddamn thing is running out of juice and will shut down in a couple of minutes.

How sick am I of life in the 21st Century?

Let me count the episodes of nausea….

As I was saying the other day: Stop the World! 😀

Mercifully, this morning the world does seem to have come to a stop. When I woke up, I thought TODAY I HAVE TO TAKE THE CAR TO GET THE REAR BUMPER REPLACED and ooooh lhudly sing goddam I’ve gotta be there by 7:30 and I have NO idea where the body shop is!

Hell and damnation, what a way to greet the accursed day!

Even worse, I’d say, than yesterday, which was quite the little winner.

Along about mid-day, it was down to the gourmet grocer’s. Come prancing out with my purchases. Toss them in the back of the vehicle. Jump in. Start the engine. Can’t see traffic coming on either side, because much larger critters are parked to the left of me and parked to the right of me. E-a-a-s-e out into the lane and

WHAM!!!!!!!!

Some sunovabitch runs into me.

It’s my fault, of course. Because he had the wrong of way, being in the traffic lane and not in a parking spot.

We call a cop to report the dust-up. Cop refuses to write me a ticket, because — says he — we’re on private property.

{can you imagine???}

Welp. Things brightened up a little when I looked at the computer and realized today is Saturday, not Monday. This means I won’t have to spend several hours twiddling my thumbs in the body shop’s waiting room today, anyhow. But more to the point, it means I have all of today and all of tomorrow to drive into glummest northwest Phoenix to locate the place. And that means I won’t have to flail around in Monday’s morning rush hour searching for it.

It also meant that Ruby and I could go for our morning doggy-walk, uninterrupted.

So along about 6 a.m., it was out the door, dragged by a 35-pound beast.

Ruby l-o-o-o-o-ves the park. Ohhh, how she loves that damn park! So whenever we go out for a doggy-walk, she invariably drags me in that direction.

Today I decided to indulge her: why not?

Then again…why?

See, the problem with the park — well, one of its problems — is that at this hour the place is overrun with dogs.

See that big sign at the entrance? The one that reads

DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH

???

You’d be surprised how many of your fellow citizens can’t read. Any time you go over there — particularly during the Doggy Parade hours — the damn place is overrun with dogs racing back and forth off-lead.

A corgi, though to the naked eye a cute little teddy-bear of a dog, is not a teddy-bear. It’s a short German shepherd.

And, like Anna the GerShep before her, Ruby wants little more from life than the opportunity to clear the earth of other dogs.

So if you come bounding up to me with your own teddy-bear on a leash, Ruby is gonna go after it. And if your effing dawg is running around off-lead, then I am going to get dragged into a dog fight.

This is why I try to avoid that damn park as much as possible.

But not today. Nothing would do but what we had to charge over to the park on this beautiful, cool morning with high clouds prancing in the morning breeze.

First off, a Creep spots me. And he is a creepy one.

See…when you’re born female, you learn to avoid certain types of men. And by the time you’re about 20, you’ve learned to recognize those types on sight, from a considerable distance.

He starts to follow us.

I catch up with a couple of older men and ask if I can walk with them. They clearly think I’m crazy but say OK.

Natcherly, we just get going when Ruby stops to dump on the grass.

So much for that strategy.

The two guys having gone on their way, I decide Discretion Is the Better Part, and we head out of the park, homeward-bound.

My cookies are frosted.

Seriously: God DAMN it!!!!!!! You can’t even go for a walk in the neighborhood park — for which you pay with your taxes — without harassment.

It does look like it’s going to rain pretty quick, even though Wunderground emotes to the contrary. They predict just 2 percent chance of precip today, 5 percent tomorrow.

Oh well.

This will mean that later today I can drive up to the alleged location of the auto body shop (and drive, and drive, and drive…it’s halfway to freakin’ Ahwatukee!), which will help a great deal tomorrow, since I have to be there at 7:30 in the morning. Right in the middle of the effin’ rush hour!

Unless forced to do otherwise, I stay off the roads here during the rush hour. Arizona drivers make California drivers look stodgy. You take your life in your hands every time you get behind a steering wheel here…but your chances of meeting oblivion go way up during the rush hours.

Especially when you’re pretty vague about where you’re going…

Oh well. It’s long past breakfast time. The human is starved. And so…awaaayyyyy!

Good grief! It’s Bankruptcy Day at the Funny Farm!

😮

Actually, I can’t complain. Or at least, shouldn’t complain. Much.

The other day, the garage door opener — cry the beloved garage door opener! — gave up the ghost.

Died on the vine. Kaput.

Though the door can easily be opened and closed manually, given the Garden Spot we live in here, a functioning garage door opener is not an optional luxury. Whatever is inside that place — from clothespins to car — will eventually be stolen or vandalized if a sturdy door isn’t closed and locked. And heaving it open and closed and then securing it closed with a couple of concrete blocks is less than desirable, as daily habits go. An electric door opener gadget shuts the door behind you and securely locks it.

So today I had my preferred garage door mechanics come and install a new opener. Admittedly, it was a Job. Took them half the morning.

And admittedly, the thing works wonderfully now: smoother than it did, quieter than it did, snazzy all around. They did an excellent job (far’s I can see), and the new unit has THE best lights on it: they light up the whole interior of the (formerly dim) garage, bright as day.

But…

But…

But then we have the bill…

FOUR HUNDRED AND FIFTY BUCKS!!!!!

Holeee shee-ut.

Well…okay… I hafta say, it took two guys who clearly knew what they were doing a good two hours to install the thing. And it looked like a bitch of a job. So…despite some grousing…I think that’s probably not an unfair price. Much.

I’ve been in this house a good 12 or 14 years, and that unit was far from new when I moved in. So if we’re looking at a brand-new gadget that’s likely to last 15 to 20 years, is a PITA to install, and protects your car and your home from theft…it’s prob’ly a bargain.

I guess.

But wouldn’t it be nice to live someplace where you didn’t have to count on the locals roaming into your garage, stealing you blind, and maybe even strolling into the house thru the kitchen door?

Yeah. Just imagine!

Ultimately (speaking of home updating/improving/whatnot) I did order the linen lampshade from Amazon. Let us hope — sincerely — that it’s as described.

Drove all over the damn city yesterday  and NOBODY had a lampshade even vaguely resembling the one my mother bought back in the Dark Ages. Local retailers had junk, pricey junk, and spectacularly overpriced junk. But not one simple linen lampshade for a living-room-sized table lamp.

So I ordered one up. Jayzus! Delivery included: EIGHTY-TWO DOLLAH AND FIFTY CENTS!!

Ohhhhh well. If it lasts long enough for my son to inherit it and then survives (as this one did) another 15 years after that, I guess it’ll be worth it.

arrghhhhh

Stop the effin world! I wanna get off!