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boyoboy, am i lazy!!!

Seriously. What kind of loafer bellyaches because she has to get off her duff to pick up her messy house so the Cleaning Lady from Heaven can come in and work herself half to death scrubbing the place down?

That would be moi.

But truth to tell, I just do not feel like getting up and putting all the junk away.

Today is gonna be a whole day of don’t-wannas.

• Don’t wanna pick up the mess.
• Don’t wanna traipse to Best Buy and get them to explain why I can’t back up the laptop, and maybe with any luck get them to fix it.
• Don’t wanna drive so much as down to the end of the block, to say nothing of over to the most crowded, hectic stretch of hateful Camelback Road.
• Don’t wanna try to find out what happened to Pool Dude, who seems not have surfaced this week. So far.
• Don’t wanna go over to the Toyota shop and argue about whatever the latest recall is about.
• Don’t wanna traipse to AJ’s and stock up on dog and human food…again.
• Especially don’t wanna have to order this damn thing, to the tune of $84 plus shipping.
  • Wait, i take that back. Because i have Amazon prime, i don’t have to pay for shipping…assuming i play my cards right.

Yeah. Somehow the large, expensive lampshade on the brass lamp that stands near the front door got ripped. I think because I gently touched it…

The shades are so old that their linen has kinda turned to tissue paper.

Seriously: my mother bought these lamps in San Francisco, when she and I came home from Arabia to stay — and several months before my father arrived. That would have been about in 19 and aught-57…

Since he wasn’t here to stop her, she went all out with the home decorating frenzy. Bought stuff in very nice stores in the City…read “very expensive.” Macy’s. The Emporium. City of Paris. I. Magnin. The White House….

Gosh, those were the good ole’ days! 😀

He would never have allowed her to buy these things. His idea of “pricey” was Price Club, a predecessor to Costco. The concept of spending a little (or a lot…) more to buy a quality product, one that wouldn’t fall apart every time you turn around, was lost on him. He was so cheap, he wouldn’t even shop in Costco, once it established itself. After she died, he bought a junk lounge chair at a low-end furniture dealer called John F. Lawhon. “Junk” was an understatement…

She never told him how much she’d paid for the stuff. He’d have divorced her if he found out.

No kidding: periodically he would threaten to divorce her if she didn’t quit spending “his” money.

My son still has her dining room table. I glommed the matching chairs, which reside in my dining room. And the handsome bureau drawers and nightstands. And I still have five of the pricey lamps she bought. Wish I still had everything…

One of the lamps, which resides in my office now, is made of Venetian glass. It’s a gorgeous thing. Others were solid brass. And it’s one of those brass lamps that needs a new shade.

The old shade just fell apart, so ancient is it. I’m thinking I’ll order this overpriced thing from Amazon…having spent several hours yesterday traipsing around the city looking for a credible replacement.

Welp…better get up and start shifting around…

😀  Honest to GAWD!

WHY??? Why is it that EVERYTHING I WANT OR NEED TO DO has gotta be done the hard way?

This, as you may instantly have surmised, is one of those days.

You know: the kind of day when everything you touch, everything you want to do, everything you have to do goes ker–SPRROOOOIIIINGGGGGGGG!

Look crosswise at it, and it flies apart.

Immediate case in point: The Mayo has assigned me to some new doc I never heard of. Last I talked to them, I got the impression she’s at the hospital up the freeway off 56th Street. That’s a long way away, but nowhere near as far as the one in Scottsdale, which is halfway to freakin’ Payson.

So I go to look this woman up…hmmm…  No luck there. Call the hospital to confirm my suspicion: NO ANSWER!  This is a freakin’ holiday!

Yeah. Labor Day.

Like those of us who don’t work know it’s another blank day on the calendar, hm? And NO ONE is answering the phones over there.

Got that?

A huge institution with a hospital and two large office buildings and an army of doctors and staff plus a nationwide telephone network, and not one person is fielding phone calls.

IS there a question of whether we live in a Third-World country? If so, whence any such question?

***** 6:09 p.m. *****

Wow!

The day went straight downhill from there.  And wouldncha know: it’s Labor Day, so there’s no help any way you look!

Okay, so the Labor Day phenomenon explains why NO ONE is answering the phones at the Mayo. Like…they can’t afford to pay one minimum-wage receptionist overtime for ONE DAY to answer the effing phones?

Y’know…when you don’t work, there are no holidays. Every day is a holiday.

JAYZUZ!

What a day from Hell!!!!!

Out in the backyard, I’m futzing around the pool. And…and…wondering why the cascades of cat’s-claw vines that cover the back wall and pile up high enough to keep passers-by from peering into the pool areas are all dried up and dying.

Yes. The vines appear to be withering away.

So more futzing..futz…futz…futz…a-a-a-n-d WHOA!!!!!!!

What should I find, while batting around in the shrubbery, but that the soaker hose that I ran along the base of that wall in behind the shrubs, the hose that’s been on a timer for all these years, has been CUT!

Say what???

Climb around climb around climb around the poking, stickery shrubs…and…and…yeah.

That hose has been SLICED IN TWO!

What…

The…

FVCK!!!!!

No wonder the plants have been withering away.

They’re pretty xeric shrubs. So they’re still marginally alive, despite not having any city water for God only knows how long. They’re as close as they can get to dead without being dust-to-dust…but I think they’ll come back if they’re liberally watered.

But…ohhhhhh the fishiness of it.

In the first place, that hose is way back against the wall underneath the thick plants. The only way you could get at it to slice it in half — and that’s what we’re looking at here: a clean slice, like a knife cut — would be either to climb under the plants or to pull it out. From the look of it, the perp apparently climbed under or through the shrubbery to get at it.

So…I think Gerardo may just have gotten fired. We shall see…but it’s going to depend on whether I can find another yard guy, and if so, what kinda yard guy.

Speaking of events in the Back Yard, I took the New Harvey up to Leslie’s to get whatever is wrong with it fixed.

The guy told me it was on the warranty — that the work would be free.

Yesterday when I got home from the store, I realized…hey, waitaminit here…they charged me 45 bucks!

This afternoon, drive back up there, march up to the door, and…yeah. They’re closed.

Of course. It’s Labor Day.

So tomorrow I’ve got to lay siege to those clowns. But I won’t have time to do that because I have to trudge up to the Mayo to see a new MayoDoc, and that will soak up the better part of the day.

JUST what I wanna do with another day of my goddamn time!!

Ohhhh well. On the way back from the doc’s I can stop off at Leslie’s and do battle with them. Yay. What fun.

Meanwhile, I can’t get into my goddamn checking account…AGAIN. This, I discover in the process of trying to find out whether there’s enough cash in there to cover a $2280 (!!!!!) AMEX bill. So that means that in addition to suffering through a miserable doctor’s appointment with a new doc to whom I have to try to explain EVERYTHING all over again without sounding like a raving lunatic, I’m going to have to do battle with the credit union.

NONE of the secret codes they’ve given me will get me into my account online. So that means I have to traipse all the way over there after I get away from the Mayo and ask them how much is in my checking account. This will require me to drive halfway across the west side, adding another 50 minutes to tomorrow’s traipsing time.

ohhhhh gooodie!

It’s 6:30 at night.

Storm clouds are blowing in as we scribble.

And the back-porch thermometer says it’s 105 in the shade.

Here in the coolest room in the house, loafing in the direct breeze from an air-conditioner vent, the thermometer says we have 80 degrees.

Wunderground puts the outside temp at 109, with a crackling 15% humidity.

Lovely Arizona. Why do people choose to live here?

***

Hm… Apparently I was too fried to finish this y’day.

It’s 3:30 in the morning — the usual annoying wake-up call for the superannuated. Don’t get old, kids! It’s one irritant after another… 😮

At any rate: 3:30 a.m. and we’re down to a chilly 110, and partly cloudy. Sez Wunderground, anyway. Tomorrow — well, today actually, it being the wee hours as we scribble — we’re supposed to have a high of 116, “mostly sunny.” Ten percent chance of rain both days.

It’s that 10% that’s a killer: it means humidity will be relatively high. Truth to tell, 110 on a dry day is tolerable. But add a “chance of rain” — or even just a little humidity — and you get truly miserable heat.

August is always a miserable month, though. It being the 29th, we shouldn’t have more than another two weeks or so of this stuff. Mid-September will be hot, but not unholy hot.

**

Welp. It’s almost 4 in the morning. Just won another Outspell game (you see how bored one gets in one’s dotage…). I’m going back to bed.

I hope…

Here it is, mid-morning of an August day, high monsoon season.

We’ve been told repeatedly that (eeeeek!!) a HURRICANE is blowing in from the west and (eeeeeeek!!) we must be prepared for heavy winds and lots of rain.

Eeek.

Well. What we have is a gray, overcast, still day. But so far nary a drop of rain.

Usually if the Valley is going to get rain, our parts are first to see it. That’s because the ‘Hood backs up against a set of low mountains that marks the north end of the central part of town. Those hills collect rain clouds, so we get most of the action.

It’s plenty humid, that’s for sure. Some laundry that I set out on hangers to air-dry is still damp, after hours of hanging there. The sky is solid gray. But it ain’t a-lettin’ go of any raindrops.

The media just LOVE rain here. It’s such a rare and bizarre phenomenon that it gives local reporters (such as they are) opportunity to croon on and on and ON about…nothing…

We’re told that

• Eeek eek! Hurricane Hillary moves north!!! Aieeeggghhh!
• Omigod omigod  you’ve gotta get sandbags!!! Hurry! Yow!
• Rain! Rain, we say! Omigawd it’s gonna RAIN!!!!!
• LIVE UPDATES woweee zoweee!!!!!!!

Heh heh…The nice thing about rain predictions for reporters in Arizona is that you can fill up space without having to get up from behind your desk and doing any actual…you know…reporting.

Hm. I’m thinking I should take Ruby for another walk now, before (if) it starts to rain again. The nice thing about the cloud cover is that it’s keeping the temps down in the tolerable range.

But we went out at our usual 5:30 a.m. hour — get out much later than that, and you’re toooooo late.

And as a practical matter, my enthusiasm for traipsing over to the park and back through bathroom-level humidity is low, at best.

Wunderground, the most accurate source of weather reporting I’ve found in these parts, is also indulging in the widespread repertorial hysteria:

• Eeeek! Strong storms, rain, wind, thunderstorms!!!!
• Eeeek! Flooding, storms!!!!!
• Eeeek! 200 flights at Sky Harbor impacted!!!!

Jayzus… Guys! Teeth are “impacted.”

Airplanes are delayed.
Flights are canceled.

Just a little literacy would help a lot, when it comes to American reportage.

😮

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.