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The City is planning to make us put our garbage in new green bins for pickup in front of our houses, instead of in the giant communal bins in the alley. This will mean two space-consuming hulks in my garage instead of one—the blue recycling bin, which is picked up in front, resides in there now. My house has no place in front to stash an unsightly plastic garbage bin, and I don’t want it in my gardeny backyard, which I use as living space. So I’ve decided to put the blue barrel in the alley (there’s no law in Phoenix requiring residents to recycle) and put all the trash in the garbage.

So much trash arrives in the mail that most weeks just the junk mail alone fills about a third to a half of the blue bin. By way of not filling up the new bin so the garbage won’t fit, I finally got around to asking the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to take me off its members’ mailing lists. This, we’re told, is the answer to all your junk mail problems.

Not quite.

In the first place, registering for DMA is a hassle. You either have to send them an application by snail mail along with a check for $1.00 (yeah!), or you have to register on line, requiring you jump through a long series of hoops and give them an e-mail address. Once you’re finally in, you get to jump through MORE hoops.

What is it about “I don’t want to get junk from anyone” that should be so hard to express?

You have to go to several subsites at the DMA page to request removal from several different categories of mailing lists: credit card offers, catalogs, magazine offers, and “other mail offers.”

Click on “credit offers,” and you get to jump through another set of hoops, this one requiring you to divulge your Social Security number. Then you have to print out your request and mail it to Experian, apparently the only one of the four credit bureaus (there’s a new one!) to receive it. Go to “other mail offers,” and you’re presented with seven pages of marketers. You have to go to each one individually and beg to be removed from their nuisance-mail lists! About 99 percent of these are irrelevant: when was the last time you got an ad from ADT Security or Casino Windsor? From what I can tell, the worst offenders are not on this list.

Moving on to “magazine offers,” you come upon a two-page list of 36 magazines. Again, you have to manually contact every single one of them to beg them to stop sending you “offers.”

Like I have nothing better to do with my time?

The outfits that really blitz you with trash are not on these lists. Nor are the chain grocery stores that fill your mailbox with newspaper pullouts advertising “deals” on piles and piles of junk food.

If you seriously want to reduce the amount of trash delivered to your recycling bin through the mails, be prepared to spend a lot of time and some money. Go here to discover the endless series of hoop-jumps you’ll have go through to stem the tide of junkmail pouring into your home.

Valassis and Red Plum, which evidently are responsible for a fair amount of trash, provide a single page that promises to remove your name from their lists (eventually). So does ValPack, which is in the business of sending you blue packages full of coupons for things you never buy—unless you’re into junk food.

Really, every time the Postal Service announces it’s in the red and may go out of business, I think I won’t weep much when that happens. Surely UPS and FedEx will cost junk mailers so much they’ll quit sending piles of useless paper to everyone in creation. Then no doubt they’ll try to get our e-mail addresses and blitz us there.

👿

As Veteran’s Day comes our way, time to honor and pray for our troops in the way of danger. Last term, one of my best students re-upped to serve in Afghanistan. Last I saw of him, he was headed out the door to catch a plane. If there’s a God, may She keep them safe.

And, lest you’re young enough to wonder if America ever was involved in a just war, take some time to read this.

So yesterday I met with SDXB to borrow his digital blood-pressure monitor. Among other things. We met at Infamous Overpriced Gourmet Grocery Store over coffee and then went for a hike in the mountain preserve maintained by the City of Glendale. When we got to the park, he handed over the machine.

Interesting little device. It operates on batteries. You strap a cuff thing around your arm, attaching it with Velcro, and then push a couple of buttons. It blows up the cuff until you feel like your arm is gonna go numb and then beeps a while as it measures your systolic and diastolic blood pressure, throwing in your pulse rate as a lagniappe.

So by way of showing me how to use it, he lashed me up in the thing and punched the appropriate buttons. Resulting figures: about 140 over 80, borderline hypertension. That was what appeared at the doctor’s office, occasioning this expedition. I knew SDXB had a monitor, since he’s been gulping blood pressure meds for years. Instead of ponying up $100 or so for my own, I thought I’d borrow his, at least until we know whether I have to be on the damn pills, too.

Okay. Now he wants me to demonstrate that I’ve learned how it works. I reapply the cuff and punch the buttons.

Lo! Two minutes after the 141/80 reading, I’m down to 124/78.

Well, that can’t be right, we figure. So we try it again: 120/77.

What? We guess the last two figures are more or less accurate, since I was nervous about the gadget (I just hate this stuff!), and because some a**hole cut me off as we were driving from coffee to the park, swerved into the park ahead of me, and grabbed the parking place SDXB had passed up for me to take. The park was crowded, and I don’t like fighting for parking. And a**holes in any environment, on the road or elsewhere, tend to send me through the roof. Presumably those factors combined to create the higher figure, after which I must have calmed down.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

But…  Yesterday after I got home, out of curiosity I tried using it again. The first reading was an astronomical 158/130! That’s higher than any doctor’s gadget has ever registered, despite the fact that I hate few things more than I hate being in a doctor’s office.

Error? So I tried it again. Two minutes later, we’re down to 139/84, a drop in systolic presssure of 19 points between 11:13 and 11:15 a.m.

Interesting. What happens if you run the doodad a third time? Magically, you get a new reading of 129/70, a ten-point drop in one minute.

I tried this experiment twice more during the day, since the docs had asked me to check my blood pressure at different hours. Same thing happened: I got readings that ranged from 120/75 to 148/86 in a matter of minutes.

Either something very strange is going on with my body or this contraption has an accuracy problem.

I surf the Net and discover that, for optimal accuracy, digital monitors need to have fresh batteries. SDXB had said the batteries could run down over theperiod the doctors want me to indulge in this exercise. So, when I got up at 4:00 this morning, I changed out the batteries.

This resulted in sort of normal figures. Sort of. The high was a pleasing (but not very credible) 122/78. But a second test, two minutes later, came up with 106/70, barely higher than the average corpse’s. And, if we buy this at all, a 16-point drop in exactly one minute. Another 60 seconds later, it was back up to an almost healthy 113/69.

{sigh} I don’t know what to make of all this. If anything. It may be that I need to buy a new machine—SDXB’s is several years old. Really, I don’t want to spend $70 on something that’s totally unnecessary. But on the other hand, I don’t want to be stuck on medications that are totally unnecessary for the rest of my life, either. Or not get the meds if they are necessary.

It’s possible that Medicare covers blood pressure monitors. I’ll have to ask today or tomorrow. But then I’ll still have the hassle and expense of having to schlep it to a doctor’s office and get it calibrated—and who knows what they’ll charge for that privilege? Like I have nothing else to do and nothing else to spend my money on!

🙄

Image:
Steven Fruitsmaak, Automatic Brachial Sphygmomanometer Showing Grade 2 Arterial Hypertension. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

The first 8-week term of the semester ends this week. Three sets of papers and assignments will come pouring in, starting today; papers need to be read and grades filed by Friday…preferably by Wednesday, since two new courses go online next Monday. And naturally, I’m sick…have been for the past ten days. Bleyagh!

Got a post in the oven but don’t know when I’ll have time to write it. Watch this space!

😯

Among her many talents, my friend La Maya is developing as a fine artist. For the past several years, she’s studied with several graduates of leading art schools, and she still works with a mentor.

Some of her work is beginning to look very nice! Her friends have been urging her to display through a gallery and to start marketing her paintings. In the past, when she was invited to display her work at area art shows, they’ve sold quite well. Check out this pretty miniature:

Not bad for a Ph.D. in sociology, eh? She’s only just learned how to make these photographs…it’s a little tricky to photograph a work of art. Click on the image for a larger view.

La Maya started by working in pastels. She’s done some truly lovely pastels, one of which resides on my family room wall. A year or two ago, she started working in oils and decided she really likes it. She says she’s interested in the way brushstrokes work to abstract the feeling and texture of the image.

Here’s the other picture she sent over:

This still life is deceptively simple. While she was working on it, I also tried to paint it—in fact, I draw well and in my misspent youth could paint pretty well. But I made a total hash of it! Hers developed into a good, credible work.

La Maya says she’s willing to sell one or both of these. If you’re interested, drop me a line in the comments.