Uncategorized

What is it about three-day weekends that causes infrastructure to collapse? How is it that whenever tradesmen are trying to take a couple of days off (and intend to charge you accordingly), things go radically, spectacularly WRONG? And why does it never, not once, ever fail?

In addition to working on the pool (routine stuff) and running the laundry, I wanted to clean out the moldy refrigerator and a couple of cabinets. The fridge, in particular, was pretty desperate; indeed…frightening.

So I’m madly throwing things out. One jar, though, I must save—the glass part, that is, not the mildewed peppers inside. Very pretty jar, so reusable. So, naturally, I throw the peppers down the garbage disposal, which is madly running. It keeps on running and running and water is…not running. Not running down the drain at-tall.

Matter of fact, instead of going down the drain, it’s backing up into the other sink.

Damn. Turn off the disposal.

Get the plunger. Plunge and plunge and plunge and plunge and…not one drop of water goes down the sink.

Turn the garbage disposal back on. More water backs up into the other sink.

Call the plumber. Wonder how much time & a half is going to cost.

Plumber answers on about the 10th ring. He ain’t workin’ today. For cryin’ out loud, it’s Sunday on Memorial Day weekend! What?

He’ll come by tomorrow. Meanwhile, don’t use the sink and don’t use the dishwasher. ’Bye!

{sigh}

The dishwasher contains about three days of dirty dishes, some of which I need and all of which will be stinking by tomorrow. Luckily, there’s a work sink in the garage.

Shovel off the washer and dryer. Clean the tops of the washer and dryer, which have become somewhat littered and soiled during an encounter with Charley the Golden Retriever that involved confiscating a pile of half-eaten plastic and silk plants.

Set up the garage so as to wash dishes. Haul three days’ worth of dirty dishes into the garage. Wash. Rinse. Drain.

Reflect, while enjoying this task, that some time back I saw a blog post whose writer was holding forth on how to wash dishes by hand. Think of that.

A whole generation, maybe two, have never had to wash dishes by hand as a routine matter. How many Americans don’t know that there’s a special pattern to washing dishes? So, let us consider, ↓↓↓↓↓↓

Okay, so now both sinks are full of standing water. The dishes are washed and left to dry in the garage, and the mess in the kitchen is more or less cleaned up.

So it was back to the refrigerator, where the shelves were still laden with alien life-forms whose excreta had left them sticky and gummy.

Threw out vast quantities of former food; hauled trashcansful out to the alley.

Pool pump sounded like it was laboring. Pressure up to 18 psi.

Backwash filter, clean out pump pot filter, reassemble, restart. Looks OK.

Hack back the jungle vines that are trying to suffocate the pool equipment. Work on espaliering the Lady Banks rose. Pick up dog mounds; haul more garbage, dog mounds, and vine cuttings out to the alley.

A great deal of time has been wasted fooling with the dishes. I’m determined to get through at least one other project I’d planned to do today, and so decide to take on the hall closet. This dark cave has been collecting bottles of prescription drugs since 2007(!), along with piles of ancillary debris.

Two hours later:

Not bad, eh? Tidy.

Top shelf, cleaning and ironing stuff. Next shelf: health and hypochondria. Below that: vanity stuff—creams, perfumes, soaps, cotton balls, and the like.

Negotiate a deal with a new client. Damned if we didn’t get a fair hourly rate. Things are looking up.

Throw out another large trashcanful of debris.

The day is still middle-aged. Decide to move on to cleaning out the garage cabinets, especially the desperately annoying collection of debris where I like to stash cute bottles, potentially useful bottles, cool bottles, and colorful bottles. Bottles. A lot of bottles.

Toss out more old jars and plastic containers and fancy tea cans than carter has oats and hauled another ton of debris to the trash. Carry it around the front and side of the house to the garbage bin in the alley, noticing that the Devil-Pod Tree’s undead roots are sprouting more suckers.

Hike back to the garage to get extra-concentrated Roundup; poison infant Devil-Pod Trees. Carry bottle of undiluted Roundup concentrate back to the garage, dodging fierce tiger-clawed eye-gouging twigs on the Texas ebony and the palo brea. Pick up gloves and trimmer; cut back fiercely vicious tiger-clawed eye-gouging twigs; haul skin-ripping plant debris to the alley.

Enter the kitchen, anticipating a bourbon and water. Very, very, very tired.

There, confront a battalion of marching ants. Yes…it’s…

Ant Wars!
The Battle of the Bosch

They’re entering the theater of action through a hole under the threshold and advancing on the dishwasher.

Spray them all with DIY Windex, which in the past we’ve seen slays them in vast numbers. They keel over. But they have reserves. Many reserves.

Sprinkle diatomaceous earth (pool supply) across the threshold. Move on to cleaning out a garage cabinet.

Fill up another trash can with glass jars, plastic jars, fancy tea cans. Wonder what possesses me to keep these things.

Haul piles of junk to recycling bin. Arrange surviving glass- and tinware in the cleaned out cabinet.

Wow! You can actually reach stuff! Those old blue water bottles make great bud vases. And surely I can find something to do with all those other…valuable pieces.

Back in the kitchen, the ants have regrouped. They’ve burrowed a trench through the diatomaceous earth and again are taking over the dishwasher. Engage battle. Engage. Engage. Engage. Engage. Spray floor with Simple Green, scrub kitchen floor on hands and knees, beating back the ants at last. Clean dishwasher innards.

Stagger away, exhausted. It’s after 7:00 p.m. I’m hungry but even if I could use my kitchen to cook in and even if there were even something to microwave in there which there is not, I’m too tired to cook and probably too tired to eat.

Fall on the bed.

Discover a strip of veneer peeling off expensive goddamn bed. Figure out how that can be fixed. Think it’s a little beyond my carpentry skills but maybe not. Feed the dog & wash the dog’s dish to discourage ant interest.

Now it’s 10:09 p.m. and I am exhausted.

Never. EVER. Fails.

Okay, in spite of my recent grouse to the effect that I’m not sending any more posts to carnivals, this week I selected one, and only one, post to submit, just to see what would happen. The post was Springtime, the Only Pretty Burglar Time. I sent it to several carnivals. And here are the results:

Best of Money Carnival, hosted by Budgeting in the Fun Stuff.

That’s it. Haven’t heard a thing from any of the other carnivals, and in fact, with the exception of Carnival of Personal Finance, I haven’t seen any sign that they’ve gone online.

Check out Best of Money. It only runs ten posts each week, it being a highly competitive affair. So all of the posts you’ll see there are pretty darned good. Even mine. 😉

Jeez. What ELSE do they NOT tell us about the Wonder That Is iCloud? So far we know…

• You must upgrade your operating system to access it.
• The new OS has some significant advantages, but it drops some useful tools, such as the option to “bounce” mail from unwelcome pests.
• “Store Your Documents in the Cloud”…uh, no. Not if your document ends in  .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, or .pptx. Not a chance.
• And (here’s a beaut’), your universal password to access your Mac Mail (which now resides in iCloud), your iCloud whatever, and the admin functions of your computer will, without warning, be disabled. You will no longer be able to get into your mail account. Or anything else Applish.
• When, after much frantic searching around various Apple forums, you discover that hundreds of others have encountered this and found (often after several days) that the trick was to change your password, when, I say, you go to the Apple site to change your password, you are told that an e-mail confirmation will be sent to your Mac Mail account before you can do the change.

Uh huh. To get into your mail, you have to change your password; to change your password, you have to get into your mail.

Isn’t that cute?

And how hard would it have been for the “Genius” and the pricey “One-on-One” guy to have simply told me that I had to invent a new password before I walked out of the store with all their expensive new gear? This password zap takes a while…first I found I couldn’t access my e-mail from the campus computer, where I have to get to it from a Web application. Didn’t have time to fool with it, so let it go. Now at 5:29 in the morning, lo! I can’t get into my e-mail through the proprietary software, either! Nor can I get into any other Mac app. Good morning to you, too!

Nice timing. The online course started yesterday, and the two e-mail addresses to which students are sending messages as we speak were set to forward to my Mac account. Flew around disabling the forward functions; then posted an announcement telling students to resend anything they might have sent between 11 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. (you’d be surprised: that’s when a lot of them are doing their online courses); tried to make a One-on-One appointment but was rejected because my password was invalid; soared into a high rage.

Finally calmed down enough to do some more exploring, and then came across a portal that allowed me to enter just my username and, without providing a password (!!!!), let me change my password.

That’s reassuring, hm?

Well, security aside (WHO would ever hack Apple, after all?), I was mighty relieved to find it. At least it reactivated access to MacMail.

We’re told access is no longer very reliable. Quite a few people on the Apple forums reported that the system goes up and down. Apparently if Apple’s servers are getting a lot of traffic, you can get the “password doesn’t work” message. I don’t know if this is true, but just in case, I’m not re-forwarding my Google accounts.

So now instead of spending time dorking with just one e-mail account, I get to access and answer mail in three of them. Oh…make that four; I forgot to unforward the Copyeditor’s Desk account. No, wait, make that five! I forgot to unforward the Bluehost account.

grump!

😡

Hallelujah! For the first time all winter (and..hmmm…as I recall, all last fall and summer), I came out in the black this month. The AMEX bill came in at only $844!!!! That is incredible, since it covers all nonessential spending (food, gasoline, clothing, dog, garden, pool, household goods, eating out, doodads, kitsch, hoodoos, and whatnot). That’s an $1100 budget, which I’ve overspent every month since my limited memory runneth not to the contrary, as unexpected gouge after surprise expense after inexcusable indulgence has tumbled down on the bank account.

The reason for this little triumph, of course, is that for the past two months I’ve been too sick to crawl out of the house. That means I’ve stayed away from Costco.

Ah yes. Costco. A giant drain into which to pour dollars.

Haven’t bought meat in over a month, except for a couple packages of cheap chicken thighs for the dog. The gigantic haul of produce from Market on the Move, once it was cooked up into various scrumptuosities, has filled the freezer. Except for one Costco run early in the budget cycle (it is my favorite purveyor of wine and lifetime supplies of cheese), almost all this month’s groceries came from Safeway and the ethnic market on the corner.

That may be the secret to staying on budget (other than “don’t let your car break down” and “evade all encounters with doctors”): stay away from Costco. Or more to the point, stay out of stores in general.

A little over $4400 came in from the state for the last payment owed for unused sick-leave time. That brings the “survival” pool back up to where it was at the beginning of the summer. That should stretch the survival fund’s lifetime about another year, by which time I’d better have a real job or I’ll have to start drawing down retirement savings to put food on the table. Unless I get a tax refund (which, with $8000 worth of deductible medical expenses, I probably will), the survival fund will run out about this time next year, maybe sooner. Taxes and utilities have risen high enough that what I earn no longer suffices to make ends meet, and so I’m having to pull down more from survival savings than I net on teaching.

Anyway. Tomorrow’s another day…I’ll worry about it when it gets here. For the nonce, things are pretty calm.

Moments of Fame:

The Carnival of Financial Camaraderie is up at My University Money, whose proprietor kindly included Funny’s squib on the cost-effectiveness of a AAA membership.

This week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted at Well-Heeled Blog, included FaM’s rumination on the (rather few) advantages of hanging on to financial records forever and a day.