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Think of that: here’s a post that never got published. When did I write it? Thursday or Friday. ‘Yere ’tis: more to come…

So Amazon delivered the CPR V5000 call blocker gadget practically overnight. Some guy in a white truck threw it over the front wall onto the concrete sidewalk. It doesn’t seem to be broken, though.

By the time it arrived, a little before 11:30, two nuisance scammers had already jangled the phone — one at 7:30 in the morning. So as you can imagine, I surely do hope this thing works and the bastards don’t find a way around it.

Nothing could be easier to set up. You just unplug your phone at the base, snap the plug into the V5000’s jack, and then connect the V5000 to the phone with a conveniently short cable that comes with.  And…now we’ll see how well it works.

The defunct TeleZapper device was still connected to the phone. It’s been useless for a long time: the telemarketing crooks quickly found a way to defeat TeleZapper. So I tossed that in the trash.

What a tangle of wires! Out the door with those: This new doodad doesn’t have to be connected to an electric outlet. It’s just the phone cable and the connection, effectively placing the V5000 in series with the phone. So that tidies up a mess I had to hide by velcroing it, in a great wad, to the back of the cabinet where the phone sits.

Five thousand known solicitors’ and spoofed numbers are already programmed into the thing. So, in theory, just plugging it in should cut down the frequency of calls from the git-go. Then as you get nuisance calls, you just push a button (or punch #2 from a cordless extension) to add the numbers to the device’s capacious  list.

In theory, you’re supposed to plug it into the phone that’s directly connected to the phone company’s incoming line. I’m not sure which one that is. The Cox guy put the filter in the middle bedroom, which is where the Uniden base unit resides. So I’m guessing this will work. But it would make more sense to believe the main line is coming into the office, where the computer and the modem live. The phones run on a Cox cable, not on the old-fashioned phone line, and I believe that cable runs along the outside of the house into the office phone outlet.

The problem is, said outlet is underneath and behind a table that’s too heavy for me to move. Getting to that connection is extravagantly difficult, involving a great deal of floor-crawling and contortions.

So, because the filter is in the middle room — which, I vaguely recall, was the reason the phone set had to go there instead of on my desk — I decided to try that first.

From what some commenters say, the thing will work from any phone jack. If it’s unhappy, what will happen is it will allow one ring to get through before it kicks in. In that case, you’re supposed to…oh…you know…follow instructions and plug it into the cable company’s incoming jack.

But that shouldn’t be as difficult as I feared, since you don’t have to climb under the table: all you have to do is unplug one phone and plug in the gadget.

God, how I hope this thing works. I’m so sick of being called once every couple of hours all day long, starting at seven in the morning!

So the wonderful new(ish) Venza is at Camelback Toyota getting the struts replaced on the back hatchback gate. It took them over two hours to decide whether they would cover this $500 job on the extended warranty.

They ended up soaking me $50 for the job, but I guess that was OK because at least the car is getting fixed. If they had refused to cover it on the warranty, I wouldn’t have had it fixed — just would have used, as JestJack wisely and frugally suggested, a pole to prop the damn thing open.

Here’s the entertainingly spooky thing:

Camelback Toyota resides at the corner of 16th Street and Camelback Road, once the home of the years-defunct Sanderson Ford. Wayyyy back in those years, my father proudly bought me, as a graduation present, a brand-new Ford Fairlane. He’d done a lot of studying on the subject and had decided this was the perfect car for his little girl.

Yes.

He was proud to have made an American, and proud to buy American.

And it was…a perfect lemon. Whatever could go wrong with a car went wrong with that piece of junk, up to AND including its paint powdering off.

This absurd machine lived at Sanderson Ford. I would pick it up, drive it home, and within a day or two take it back for some new ailment.

By coincidence, my newlywed husband and I had rented an apartment in a complex about a quarter-mile to the north of Sanderson Ford. This was good, because it meant I was within walking distance of the place where my car lodged.

Literally, the car was in the repair shop more than it was parked in our apartment carport spot!

You think I exaggerate? Let me assure you: Not at all.

So as you can imagine, a number of unpleasant ghosts haunt a visit to that place, despite the spectacular remodeling job Toyota has done to the premises.

At any rate, as I’m on the phone to Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic asking if he can replace the struts, the Spectacular Cuteness Who Is Brian (eat your heart out, Young Dr. Kildare!!) comes striding up to inform me (at long last) that they can fix the thing and it’ll only cost me a bargain fifty bucks.

WTF.

Just repair it. I’ll never use the effng power assist again. And I have a nice pole, just in case.

SHOULD HAVE BOUGHT THAT RAM 1500!!!!

Oh well.

They “give” me a loaner in the form of a late-model RAV-4. I say “give” advisedly: it’s actually a rental, but the rent is said to be  covered by the warranty.

White of ’em, eh?

So I drive the RAV-4 to the grocery store, where I manage to dodge a PoB (Panhandler on Bike) and escape with a few bagsful of veggies and stuff. Then get home, at which point it occurs to me that I forgot to bring the garage door opener with me. Fortunately, I have a stand-by, and fortunately, it still works.

Oh well.

As I’m driving said RAV-4 around, I reflect that I was not wrong…yea verily, I was RIGHT when I test-drove one of the things a couple years ago and thought it couldn’t even begin to compare with the ancient Sienna. Or with the Honda CR-V. Or with the Subaru. Or with a pet donkey.

Well. A pet donkey has other things to recommend it…like a personality.

The now-defunct Venza (they took it out of production last year) is as the day unto the night, compared to the Rav-4. One is left wondering why on earth they canceled out that lovely vehicle, so far superior to the nearest comparable model. What  could Toyota’s management have been thinking?

Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with quality.

Much as I could do without the Venza’s computer-driven doodads, I will admit they improve on the Rav-4’s (possibly) mechanical controls. This thing requires three dials to get the air-conditioning to operate. The Venza? One: dial to the temperature you want.

Okay, okay: the Sienna? One: off or on.

Given a choice, I’d take “off or on.” But the Venza surely beats the Rav-4 in the “turn on the AC” department.

Here in the 21st Century: Ford. Ford is what I’d say.

Quality-wise, M’hijito’s Ford Escape is comparable to the (defunct) Venza, a modern version of the Sienna, and far, far, FAR superior to the Rav-4.

And I’m brought back to that wistful impulse: Shoulda bought a Ford truck.

Ever think you’re living in a Monty Python Show?

So naturally I caused the sky to clabber up yesterday by deciding that THIS WOULD BE THE DAY to paint that wall along ’Hood Lane West. Forthwith it began to threaten rain.

Undeterred, I soldiered on.

Manly Neighbor opined that if the weather would hold for two to four hours after the paint was applied, it’ll prob’ly be OK…assuming a hard rain didn’t fall…

Of course, Manly Neighbor assumed I could paint the wall in two hours, he being a guy. It actually took four hours, I being a girl. An old girl, at that.

You’ll recall I speculated that the painter,  lo these many years ago, had watered down the last of the exterior wall paint, having forgotten that I’d asked him to paint that wall and so not having enough to cover another 600 square feet, and the result was some streaks where thinner paint and been sprayed on it.

Dunno what’s wrong with the camera or with the Mac’s photo software. It’s not gray (as appeared in the link above): it’s a kind of nut brown. In this adjusted image you can see the stripes. The gravel is NOT blue-green, BTW…it’s about the same color as the wall.

Well, anyway…yeah. The “graffiti,” as we call the stripes, was Bila’s antic, OK, but not quite as simple or as “innocent” as assumed.

On the fly, I grabbed a VERY old paint brush to touch up spots that I couldn’t get with the roller. So I’m standing there filling in strangely colored grout lines and thinking, gee…what IS it about this graffiti-like paint color that seems so…familiar??

{ping!} THAT’s when I notice that some of the old paint stains on the ancient paintbrush are the same color as the orange-ish streaks on the wall. Those streaks are the same hideous tangerine orange that my former friend Elaine talked me in to applying to the hall/dining room wall and the accent wall in my office!

All of which was painted over years ago…

Here’s what Bila the Bosnian Painter must have done:

When I said “aren’t you going to paint that wall like I asked you to?” he must have realized he didn’t have enough paint, because he’d forgotten about that request and so hadn’t calculated the extra 600 s.f. into his purchase.

He certainly didn’t want to have to cover the cost of an extra gallon or two of “Baked Potato” acrylic from Dunn Edwards. So he poured whatever brown paint remained into his sprayer (probably wasn’t much: Dunn Edwards’ guys can calculate how much you need at the level of ounces per square inch!) and then, to stretch it so it would lay down a coat on that wall, dumped in the leftover hideous orange paint. Gave it a shake or two, and off he went!

LOL! It probably didn’t mix well — he would have been very tired by then and anxious to end the job, so wouldn’t have spent much time mixing the stuff up. Hence: stripes!

Heeeeeeee!!!!!!!

If I noticed at all, I would have figured it was just the uneven way water-based paint dries… But as a practical matter, the only time I thought anything about it was when I would drive past it. My memory doesn’t last much longer than it takes to get around the corner of ’Hood Lane and into the garage.

Welp, the wall has no more stripes.

The predicted rain held off overnight, and this morning the sun is shining. They say it’s supposed to rain this evening…which means I should have time between now and then to wash the car. 😉

Tangerine-orange graffiti…it only took 12 years to figure it out.

Vastly to be missed.

Image:  PBS NewsHour. CC BY-SA 2.0

I hope you’re ready for this. PayPal’s cofounder, Max Levchin, has found a new way to help you submerge yourself up to your nose in debt: a scheme whereby you can get yourself into revolving debt for each purchase individually. That’s as opposed to racking up a single gigantic unpayable debt at 21%.

Basically what it amounts to is a short-term loan, essentially unsecured, upon which you will disgorge specified installment payments. It appears to be essentially an agreement between you and a merchant, set up through a system called Affirm. You buy a given item from a merchant who accepts Affirm; as part of the transaction, you have to give the merchant a great deal of private, highly hack-worthy private information: phone number, name, birthday, and last four digits of your Social Security number — transmitted via your smartphone (!). Within seconds, you have a loan that locks you into payments for three, six, or twelve months.

This arrangement supposedly improves on a credit card because, says Levchin, it’s “more transparent”: i.e., you know exactly what your monthly payment will be, as opposed to seeing the balance balloon quietly every time you fail to pay your credit-card bill in full. And, it’s alleged, the APR will be lower than a credit card’s.

It’ll be a boon to retailers, we’re told, because when suckers are presented with a cheap, low-interest instant loan, they’re a lot more likely to buy stuff they don’t need. Or do need but can’t really afford…

Affirm’s target market is “people with thin credit profiles, such as immigrants and millennials who have chosen not to use credit cards.”

Could it be that millennials, notorious for paying in cash, don’t use credit cards because they’re already in debt over their heads with college loans? Could it be that some immigrants come from cultures where people don’t do stupid things like going into debt to buy a lot of junk they could live without until they can afford to pay for it?

The effect of this scheme will be to hook people into not one or two credit-card bills but a whole array of monthly bills for this, that, and the other purchase. Instead of one bill on, say, a Visa card, you’ll owe a mattress company, a department store, a home improvement store, a furniture store, a you-name-it merchant.

Imagine the chaos you could infuse into your financial life with this thing! And consider that the people it targets are exactly the people who can least bear financial chaos: people who can’t afford revolving credit-card debt.

It’s brilliant, I tell you. Brilliant!

🙄