Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Migraine Morning

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 Like I have nothing better to do… Woke up this morning with the needle-stab-in-the-eye of ocular neuritis (or whatever it is: it’s never been diagnosed satisfactorily), swiftly followed by a fine migraine. These amusing headaches can usually be discouraged by a couple mugsful of coffee strong enough to hold a spoon upright. And yea verily, so it has proven: two hours later the pain has receded to the “mild” level, though otherwise I feel like I’ve been run over by the proverbial truck.

This is not needed in the midst of the various ongoing hassles.

The painter is still holding forth, and of course with furniture & plants moved around and outdoor watering systems derailed, that creates some background chaos.

My son is headed off for a long-planned road trip through Colorado. But with one change of plans: the dog. Since he no longer can take Charley in a car, he’s bringing the hound over here for me to babysit over the next ten or 12 days.

So…yes. Our doughty painter will have to navigate around not one, not two, but three dogs, one of whom weighs 90 pounds and two of whom are given to heading for Yuma at a dead run if a gate is left open.

I’ve pretty well got him trained to shut the gate behind himself when feasible and me trained to check to be sure the gates are shut before letting the corgis out.

But…. Among other things, Charley is given to the doggywobbles. He really needs to have the dog door open — normally I leave it locked shut because Cassie won’t use it and the burglars will. So this is going to present some difficulties over the next few days.

Our beading friends are having a beading party at my house on Saturday. I’m looking forward to it, because it’s a pleasant way to spend an afternoon. However…

Having to clean the house to the standards of half-a-dozen nice Catholic wymmen around an active painting job and three dog-dune shedders is not going to be an easy trick.

Meanwhile, yesterday I bought some delicious-looking hummus at Costco while I was running errands for myself and my aging friends — one of our beaders is genuinely hypersensitive to gluten (not in the faddish sense, either). Great snack for her and everyone else. But…heh…while purchasing this little find I failed to think…ohhhhh….hummus! Must have something to dip in it!

So now I’ll have to go back out — around the dogs and the painter — to pick up some tortilla chips and some veggies. Ugh.

§ § §

Kid in, Dog in, Kid out. Half an hour of busy flapping, conveniently coinciding with Painter Guy’s arrival. I forgot to put down a second giant bowl of dog water…momentarily must get up and do that…but will wait until the sweat I’ve worked up subsides.

Dog seems more or less OK, though he definitely was hyperventilating from the car ride. If he has the collywobbles (as we’re told he does), it didn’t stop him from laying a fine coherent pile in the backyard. Oh well…I hadn’t picked up the corgi mounds yet.

Son showed up in a gigantic very-late-model red SUV marked “JEEP.”

I say, you’re planning to drive to Colorado in a freaking Jeep?????

He says he borrowed it from his father because his car, a reliable Toyota, isn’t big enough to hold all three guys and their camping gear.

I say, “Your father bought a freaking Jeep? I thought he was smarter than that.”

He says, “It’s been recalled four times and has broken down twice.”

Oh dear God. I hope one of those guys has a cell phone carrier that covers Monument Valley and the Navajo.

Holy, holy, holy sh!t.

What on earth could have possessed DXH to buy a Jeep Grand Cherokee? For cryin’ out loud, the damn things are unsafe at any speed. WHAT could he have been thinking?

Is it too early to break out the bourbon? Surely the sun must be over the yardarm in Shanghai by now…

§ § §

In smarter climes, the painter is doing an awesome job on the Funny Farm. And he made an amazing discovery. At some point along the line — probably six or eight years ago — I had the out-of-favor Bila the Bosnian Painter repaint the house’s west wall, the same color as the rest of the shack. This is a desert-dust brown dubbed “Baked Potato” down at Dunn Edwards.

So Painter Guy, for whom Dunn Edwards paints are presently out of favor, took the stuff over to HD and had five gallons of matching Behr exterior flat whipped up. “Baked Potato,” as it develops, is very popular in these parts — we could call it “HOA Greige,” and so the HD guys are experienced at concocting it.

He hauls this massive amount of paint back here and applies it to the west wall.

And hot damn! IT’S NOT THE COLOR! It does not match the HOA brown on that west wall.

He of course assumes HD screwed up, so he loads the tankard of paint back in his truck and flies back to the HD at 67th and Bell, in a state of high dudgeon.

While this is going on, I’m out running around the city buying groceries for myself and my aged friends, and then toting their share of the haul to their house. So the poor guy is pretty much on his own here.

At HD the paint department guys inform him that it IS “Baked Potato,” and there must be some mistake on this end.

He is beside himself. He now thinks he’s ordered five expensive gallons of high-test exterior paint…in the wrong color. The cost of which, he figures, is coming out of his pay. Worse, he’s convinced himself that I am going to HATE it.

Well. No. When I get  back and see the actual “Baked Potato,” I say, “There’s nothing wrong with that. I dunno why this doesn’t match, because Bila gave me the can of paint he used and that’s what we schlepped to HD for matching. Don’t worry about it. Paint the house with this.”

Now he proceeds for awhile, and then he resurfaces. “Take a look at this,” says he.

When he applies the paint to the other paintable wall, on the east side, it matches perfectly.

WTF?

I have no idea what hijinks Bila got up to, but when he painted the west wall, he used a different color from the paint that was on the rest of the house.

Bila was fast and cheap, but one gets what one pays for: he really did a half-assed job. This guy has climbed up and filled the siding where it’s split and cracked, and, far more to the point, he’s gotten down on hands and knees and scraped and filled the cracked footing around the slab! Both of those are marvelous fun jobs…and it’s 105 out there.

How glad are we that we’re NOT doing this job?

And speaking of WTF???…

Charley and Cassie go freaking batsh!t when Painter Guy climbs up on the roof. So persistently batsh!t are they that I set aside the effort to make WordPress insert those images there the way I want, not the way it wants, walk out to the living room, and peer out the front window.

Migawd, there’s a cop parked in front of the teacher’s house. I know the family — Dad, Wife (who works at his school as a teacher’s aide), and four kids — left at the usual hour this morning because I heard them climbing into their cars and driving away.

Never a dull moment around the Funny Farm.

Someone’s Baby Girl…

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There’s a woman, young or old is hard to tell. She’s skinny, maybe even athletic-looking, neatly dressed in shorts and a nondescript top, her smooth ebony complexion ageless. She could be 25 and looks 40, or maybe 40 and looks 25.

At a glance, you sense she’s a panhandler. Yet maybe not. She doesn’t have that ragged look of people who sleep in the rough. She looks decently fed and healthy and clean. Middle-class, you’d think, if you met her at a bus stop and she said nothing to you.

But she is a panhandler. She works the Safeway shopping center in North Central Phoenix, at the intersection of Glendale and Seventh Street. They must have chased her way from the grocery store, because she haunts the little strip mall down by the restaurants and miscellaneous vendors. You’ll never see her in front of the Safeway, but you’ll often find her in front of the pizzeria or the deli or the Leslie’s Pool store. She walks around as though she were going somewhere, but it never takes long to see she isn’t going anywhere: just back and forth.

Today when I dropped by Leslie’s to pick up the newly repaired pool cleaner, she pounced as I came out of the store.

“Scuse me, ma’am, can I ask you…”

“I’m sorry, I don’t carry money with me.” (This happens to be true: I never carry cash, and of late I’ve stopped carrying a purse at all…for exactly this reason.)

“Oh, I don’t want any money, I just…”

Heard that line before. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

She trails me across the parking lot.

“But please, I just want…”

“NO!”

By now I’m at the car and need to toss the gadget into it and get in myself. I’m a little concerned that she’ll accost me at that point or try to get into the car, but experience suggests the fastest way out is the best way out.

She subsides and wanders away before I shut the door on her pitch.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen her perform this maneuver. I don’t know what she’s hitting people up for, but whatever it is, the chase-and-beg strategy is a routine.

Still. It’s haunting. Poor little thing. She was somebody’s baby girl. What the hell happened to her that she’s hitting up strangers in a parking lot, day in and day out?

What can be done?

Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.

Day 1: De-Computerizing Regime

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So today I took it upon myself to try to break the not-so-benign computer habit. This is easier said than done: apparently I’m constitutionally incapable of not checking the email first thing in the morning.

My son is almost out of minutes on his phone, so that’s my excuse: if he has something to say about the dog crisis, he’ll say it by email. And he did: more about which under separate cover.

I regard this de-computerizing scheme as akin to decluttering: when too much junk accrues, you need to shovel out your life. Get rid of STUFF.

LOL! Just think in terms of “digital stuff” throughout this spiel…

At any rate, by not turning on the computer but instead getting off my duff, I got a lot of STUFF done…and done by noon, believe it or not:

• Clean pool
• Swim
• Deposit check
• Send receipt
• Update spreadsheet
• Drive to pool store

Explain to DIFFERENT pool store clerk that an orange reading on the pH test means the water is too HIGH on acid, not too low on acid. Today’s pool guy manages to grasp that concept. Why the regular guy did not escapes me, since it’s the most basic of all possible basic concepts. He agrees the water needs a base added to it; peddles some soda ash to me. I also buy a case of shock-treat packets.

• Onward to the paint store: buy a gallon of primer, a gallon of gray paint, and a quart of white semigloss for the trim I inevitably will butch up when I repaint the hall
• Onward to Total Wine: buy a small bottle of bourbon, which should last another two or three months
• Dump half the package of soda ash into the pool; reflect on how much I dislike working with soda ash
• Finish writing the present scene of the noveloid; reflect on how to get the only fully likeable character out of the predicament he’s about to fall into
• Eat myself stupid with broiled open-face sandwiches chased by a bowl of ice cream

All of this, accomplished by noon. Of late, what I’ve gotten done by noon has been…

• Browse several news sites
• Write a blog post, maybe (maybe not)
• Play several online games, over and over obsessively
• Fart around with the email
• Write a post on Quora
• Write post or comments on NextDoor
• Fart around on FaceBook…

So at least something got done today. For a change.

Whenever I can get to it, my plan is to paint the hallway and touch up the interior trim. Some years ago, I got the bright idea of painting the hall this kind of rusted-pumpkin orange color. It’s not as hideous as it sounds: matter of fact, I’ve liked it quite a lot. The north hallway wall runs up into the dining room, so that wall serves as an accent wall in there, and then the wall on the south side matches it. And you can see the color through the archway from the living room, where it serves as a kind of accent in there.

But whereas the other colors in the house have stood the test of time handsomely, this orange business hasn’t held up as well. I’m really pretty tired of it. And it’s dark.

There’s a (very expensive!) red-orange light in there: orange light just gets soaked up by orange paint, so really that light just barely makes the hallway navigable. My son wants the light, and so he can have that; we’ll replace mine with one that emits a nice white glow..

Gray is the new orange… Permutations of gray are the height of style these days. Amazingly, my taste was way ahead of its time when I painted this house: the bedroom and the accent wall in the office are matte gray; the fireplace brickwork and hearth are semigloss gray, a very pretty soft color called “silver” by the now-defunct designer Alexander Julian — who apparently also was well ahead of his time.

When you look at the various designer magazines, you see a whole bunch of colors that are not even faintly gray dubbed “gray”: hues that I call “cream” and “taupe” and even “beige.” And lo! There’s the subtle, smokey green of the living room: “gray.” Hilarious!

One thing is clear: replace the orange hall with Alexander Julian’s “silver,” and presto-changeo: the house will be at the forefront of interior fashion. 😀

Besides the fact that I’ve grown weary of the orange hallway and the orange wall up the north end of the dining/family room, I want to update the place a bit because I’m beginning to think about selling. The influx of bums, drugs, and crime is causing a lot of unrest among the residents. Latest news is a large apartment complex for “homeless families” is going in about a mile down Conduit of Blight. That’s in addition to the three- or four-story homeless apartment complex Catholic Social Services is installing right next door to a soon-to-be-formerly upscale infill development.

Supposedly these will get people off the streets. One surely does hope so. They’re better than the shelters we used to have around the Encanto District, which would put up transients at night and then throw them out at dawn, leaving them to wander around our neighborhood, ride the buses, and doze in the library until such time as the flop opened again that night.

The National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty says the main causes of homelessness in America are insufficient income and lack of affordable housing.

According to the most recent annual survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, major cities across the country report that top causes of homelessness among families were: (1) lack of affordable housing, (2) unemployment, (3) poverty, and (4) low wages, in that order. The same report found that the top four causes of homelessness among unaccompanied individuals were (1) lack of affordable housing, (2) unemployment, (3) poverty, (4) mental illness and the lack of needed services, and (5) substance abuse and the lack of needed services.

Presumably, then, these housing developments will address one (1) of the four or five leading causes of US homelessness. But…we still have the remaining issues. What is to be done about the corrosive state of poverty, about the right-to-work-for-nothing laws in Arizona, about the lack of mental health care, and about the drug abuse?

My expectation? Nothing.

What will be done about the fundamental issues is nothing. The practical consequences of those terrible societal problems will be dropped in our laps, where they can remain invisible to our city fathers who live on the side of Camelback Mountain, in the balmy reaches of Paradise Valley, in the high-rent environs of Arcadia, or even out in Scottsdale.

{sigh} I love my home and its spacious yard and the friendly neighbors. And I can’t afford to buy anything comparable in a safer part of the city. But…I’m afraid it’s time to think about moving to a smaller, lesser house, or else moving out to Sun City — which, because no one wants to live there, is a lot cheaper than central city areas and newer, fancier outlying developments. At a certain age, you’re really too old to cope with drug addicts and bums in the alleys, thieves watching your home for an opportunity to break in, and the inevitable German shepherd.

Still…how d’you like Chloe?

Think I should adopt her?

Or maybe Chance? As a male, he’d probably get along with the bossy corgis a little better than Chloe…

Heh heh…just what I need: three dogs to have to take care of! 😀

Trains, the ’Hood, Safety, and All That…

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Underwater with work: shot off the latest Chinese math paper just as an indexing project came in. By yesterday afternoon, managed to mark up pages and create a five-inch-high stack of notecards. Entered an inch or so worth in the draft document.

Problem is, any given keyword recorded in this way may point to a topic that needs to be documented more carefully. So for about every fourth or fifth keyword, I end up having to run a “search” through the PDF. This is time-consuming and mind-numbing…but alas, it usually does unearth a few more indexable instances of the term. All of which means, put briefly, that it takes for-freaking-ever to type up the index terms, and then they have to be alphabetized and formatted to the publisher’s standard.

Alas, we don’t have forever: this thing has to go back to the publisher on August 2, but before that it has to be reviewed by not one but two authors and their changes entered. It will be a gold-plated miracle of we make the deadline at this rate.

Yes…it is true: I’m not working; I’m blogging. At 7 in the morning I get to do something other than work. For a minute or two, anyway.

Stupidly, I subscribed to Nextdoor, the social media site that puts neighbors in touch with each other. It’s interesting…but… Overall its effect is to reinforce one’s feeling that the neighborhood is being over-run with drug-using, potentially thieving derelicts. The other day on my way back from the fruitless effort to get the present stack of page proofs printed at the Metrocenter UPS store, I counted nine such folk — that’s just on the main drags, not in the alleys and on the neighborhood streets.

One of the neighbors was cleaning up the alley and found a fine bum encampment hidden behind a transformer. In it they found…

  • 11 cell phones (older Kyocera and Alltec models. Cases to newer ones present but no phone)
  • 30+ chargers and cables
  • A/V cables
  • License plate with current tags (97 Chevy)
  • Jewelry
  • Sports watches
  • Laptop
  • Credit/store cards (numerous different names)
  • Dismantled bike frames, parts, gears, broken locks
  • Personal items like keepsake pins and work anniversary memorabilia
  • Purses, backpacks, and makeup bags
Once a nice bike. Probably got more for the parts than he could for the whole thing.

The police responded that they weren’t interested in this loot because none of it constituted evidence of a crime. Right. Miscellaneous credit cards, a license plate hot enough to singe your fingers, a stash of expensive watches…clearly innocent stuff, hm?

Here’s our guy’s bed, cuddled up against the resident’s backyard. Doesn’t that look cozy?

The other day I had a long chat with a group of enthusiastic city bureaucrats in a teleconference about lightrail safety. This materialized, presumably, from some rant I put on Facebook or waypoints. No doubt I remarked online — truthfully — that I do not feel safe riding the lightrail because of the number of vagrants who use it as free air conditioning. All of these shady characters are dumped off at the corner of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way, whence they osmose into our neighborhood. The city is accommodating them by installing a meth clinic around the corner and encouraging nonprofits to build homeless shelters. (Note that NarcAnon suggests there’s a fair amount of money to be made in the meth clinic business. Some investors seem to think so, too.)

The group members were very nice, and I’m impressed that someone in the City gives a damn whether some old lady feels safe riding the train. One of the speakers, who before acceding to her present position had a long and successful career as a police officer, pointed out that the city has increased patrols and enforcement along the train tracks where they run north from Camelback up Conduit of Blight. And it is true, arrest rates have skyrocketed along that stretch.

But: it doesn’t address the problems: homelessness, vagrancy, and drug addiction, deliberately brought into reasonably quiet neighborhoods by an ill-conceived, incredibly expensive trophy public-transit toy.

First, let us address the safety on the train issue: you can put as many officers on the street as you can spare, but it doesn’t put them on the train, where they need to be.

SDXB, recently back from Seattle, reports that their lightrail has a conductor on every car, and the person stays there and keeps the peace…as well as collecting fares, which are rarely collected here. You can jump on our train in north Phoenix and ride all the way to Mesa with a good chance that no one will ask to see your ticket. The cars are stupidly designed in that there’s no passway between them. So if you have four cars on a train, you have four separate pods. That means a single conductor cannot walk the length of the train collecting tickets and cannot see the length of the train to keep an eye on the goings-on.

It also means that if somebody who stinks or who is arguing with his voices or is shaking people down for change or shooting up or masturbating or pestering women gets into the car, you can’t get up and walk to another car: you have to get off the train and stand on the platform until another one comes along.

Next, let us consider the folly of the train project itself: the most efficient way to move traffic around a sprawling city like the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area is by bus, shuttle, and car. The infrastructure for those vehicles was already here. To build the light-rail system, which can only go where the rails are laid, the city has had to spend $70 million per mile! Think of that. That’s $1.4 billion for the first 20 miles.

Just imagine what $1.4 billion would have done for the homeless in this city. For the drug addiction problem. For our bottom-of-the-barrel K-12 system. Or how many electric buses and shuttles it could have bought.

Holy Sh!t.

In the folly department, our crew from the City reported that our city fathers and mothers intend to continue building the train tracks to Metrocenter, the ghost mall of which we have spoken in the past. For this to happen, the line will have to cross over Interstate 17. In the past, the Arizona Department of Transportation has stated that they will not allow that to happen, because sooner or later they intend to convert the I-17 along that stretch into a double-decker freeway. That plan seems to have been ditched…or at least, they’re not talking about it in any venue that ranks in a Google search. 😀

In terms of people-moving, doubling the freeway’s carrying capacity — even though that, too, will be quite the little horror — probably makes more sense than the train because within the next 10 or 20 years, most cars and many trucks will run on electricity. And probably a large number of those will be self-driving, cutting the accident rate and eliminating the Sunday drives up the wrong side of the freeway.

If we must put billions of dollars into transportation schemes, why not dedicate it to building an infrastructure for the inevitable self-driving electric cars?

Folly continued: The idea that developers are going to fall all over themselves to renovate the Ghost Mall or to build offices and apartments there is…well, a pipe dream that makes one wonder what who put into whose pipes. That whole district is dangerously blighted: it’s the sort of place where you reflexively check to be sure your car doors are locked when you drive through. There’s not enough customer base to support a middle-class shopping area there — that’s why Metrocenter crashed and burned. Right now they’re building a Walmart Supercenter amongst the ruins…not the kind of venue guaranteed to attract the young urbanites who ride from their pricey mid-town digs to their downtown or ASU jobs. About the best one could do is try to lure light industry or a big medical center. Most likely, though, the site will end up as a gigantic park-&-ride.

That alone is silly: why would you drive 40-plus minutes to Metrocenter from the westside or Anthem and then park your car in 110-degree heat in a high-theft area, walk through said high-crime area to stand in the heat, and climb into a vehicle that will put you elbow-to-elbow with folks who need a bath and a handout?

Finally, let us consider the question of whether, as the city asserts, the lightrail system really does jack up property values and does lead to upscale development.

It’s undoubtedly true for certain districts and certain demographics. Studies have shown that the effect is modest, and in some cases may be negative. In the Phoenix area, there’s a certain set of urbanites, most of them in well-paying jobs, who prefer to live in centrally located areas — first, because they dislike commuting long distances and second because they want to take advantage of downtown and mid-town cultural amenities. My ex-DH and I were among those: we lived in the centrally located historic district specifically for those reasons, and because we could afford to put our child in private schools. Those people will regard a lightrail or a trolley system as a convenient urban amenity and will ride it.

And certainly, mid-town and downtown Phoenix’s economic development has exploded.

But interestingly, that does not apply everywhere. The slum apartments across Conduit of Blight are still slum apartments, despite several years of shiny tooting and honking up that road. The abandoned golf course behind the slum apartments is still a derelict piece of property, one that houses a number of human derelicts. There’s no serious sign of fancy development up here.

• Some people work in places where they can park for free or for a modest cost and so have no interest in rubbing shoulders with their fellow citizens twice daily on buses or trains.

• Some have sporadic or contract work to which they have to drive, and whose customers provide parking.

• Some prefer to live in the suburbs where there are more children for their kids to play with, more people like themselves, and at least a shot at usable public schools.

• Some — make that “most of us” — can’t afford to live in those “value-improved” districts. Downtown and mid-town rental rates here rival Portland‘s and Seattle‘s…and believe me, Phoenix ain’t Portland and it ain’t Seattle.

What seems to be happening is that while the thing pushes property values up in some areas, it may push them down in others — areas where people have no vested interest in riding the lightrail to work and where the train serves mainly to transport derelicts into formerly placid neighborhoods. The City no doubt knows this. Clearly the strategy of building shelters and installing a meth clinic belies the claim that the lightrail merrily improves districts through which it moves. A population of drug addicts and mentally ill bums does nothing to increase property values.

Here in the ’hood, there’s not a thing we can do about the train: it’s already built. Unless we sell our homes and move a long way from Folly Central, we’re pretty much stuck with the result.

So…what can be done?

Well, to start with, take some of the funds planned to build still more miles of track — which as we can see must amount to billions of dollars — and apply the money to the problems of homelessness, untreated mental illness, drug addiction, and health care for the indigent. The Man Who Is Not Dog, for example, had pinkeye — no, not red eyes from drug use, but an itchy infection in one eye — that clearly was untreated. He didn’t even have a place to wash the sweat off, much less get his infected eye treated.

• Provide SRO-type housing for single homeless men and women — not religion-based, a status that repels many non-believers.

• Provide medical care targeted at specific issues common in that demographic.

• Provide mental health care and counseling that does not substitute one addictive drug for another and is not thinly disguised preaching.

• Engage neighborhoods in empathizing and working with the poor: possibly create grants to provide services that reliably get people off the streets, out of established neighborhoods and parks, and into SROs and off of drugs (alcohol included).

• Provide grants to landlords to upgrade deteriorating apartments in return for dedicating some portion of the complex to homeless housing or space for service facilities caring for the homeless.

The point is this: Just driving a light-rail train along a route and adding a bunch of police officers is not going to increase property values or get the people whose neighborhoods are damaged to like it. Or persuade people who’d rather drive to ride it.

 

Work: The Spigot is On…

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…again. Freelance work comes out of a spigot that someone else controls. It’s on for awhile, off for awhile. Sometimes dribbles. Sometimes overflows the sink. Just now it looks like we’re going into “overflow” mode.

Yesterday I finished off the latest Chinese math paper and sent it back to the authors…accompanied by a nice statement. 🙂 Very interesting article, amazingly enough. Some of these things are just mental masturbation: publish any damnfool thing for the sake of P&T (or whatever the equivalent is for Chinese academics). But this one? Not so much.

They’ve created a sophisticated data analysis of the way air pollution moves among 168 of China’s major cities. China, in case you missed this particular boat, is now the world’s most industrialized country, and it has the smog to go with. In some cities the air is truly dangerous to breathe.

The Chinese, however, are starting to get off the dime. They’re trying to come up with ways to control various kinds of pollution, and bad air is one of them. The system our heroes have come up with amounts to a tool that could be used to assess the sources and movement of pollution in any country…and of course, that insight is very valuable, indeed. Don’t know if citizens of the PRC can make something proprietary. But if these guys can, they should.

And…now you see why I do. not. want. to. put. my. clients’. work. in. the. Cloud! How hard is this to understand, dear Microsoft, dear Apple?????

Meanwhile, a middling-sized book came in for indexing. And that converted yesterday into another one of those stupid DAYS.

Needed to get about 250 pages printed. Even though I do have a laser-like printer with a practically bottomless ink cartridge, I really don’t want to print out page proofs for an entire book. So I usually trot the digital file over to my favorite FedEx place, which is a bit of a drive.

Really, I wanted to get started on the indexing project. Like now, not later. Plus I need another packet of index cards (yes, Virginia, there are still indexers who actually read the copy and actually make real, hand-crafted indexes). There’s a UPS store that will copy stuff for you on the fringe of a ghost shopping center called MetroCenter, just across the freeway from the Funny Farm. And directly across the street from that joint is a Staples, which I could visit on the way to the UPS store. While there is a Staples directly across 20th Street from the FedEx shop, the parking lot there is a screaming nightmare to navigate.

So it seemed like the path of least resistance to dart up to Metrocenter, grab the cards, and have the UPS clerk print out 245 indexable pages.

Not-so-much x 10³…

The traffic between here and Metrocenter is tangled by the accursed goddamned lightrail. You have to get over the train tracks, and because the thing curves west at GangBanger’s Way and comes to light in an end-of-the-line depot, navigating the left turn at that corner takes for-freaking-nightmarish-EVER. Normally I would backtrack into Richistan, go up the Genteel Folks’ feeder street, and hang a left onto GangBanger. This takes you through the intersection of GangBanger’s Way and Conduit of Blight without much delay, because it circumambulates the turn into the train depot.

But it dawns on me that maybe I could get there easier by taking Feeder Street E-W across Conduit of Blight, into Blight Central, across to B.C.’s main feeder street, cross Conduit of Blight on that road, and proceed straight up to the main drag on which both the Staples and the UPS store reside.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Ah, but this is Phoenix. Roads are not designed to make residents’ lives easy here. To the contrary.

The signals at BC’s feeder street, at Conduit of Blight, and at Staples/UPS Road were just fucking interminable. The traffic was gawdawful. I was not the only one who had this bright idea, and by the time we all reached Staples/UPS Road, we were all MAD AS CATS, to a person.

So now I’m hot and cranky, my fellow drivers are hot and cranky, and about halfway to my destination I realize I could have driven over to the Biltmore (whose palmy environs you can imagine by the tony name) in as much time as it’s taking me to drive a couple miles to the Ghost Mall.

Mildly pissed by the time I get to the UPS store, I’m even more pissed when the bovine clerk tells me the book file is “broken” and she can’t print it out. I drive home through the bitchy traffic, wasting still more time, load the file, and it opens. But to be sure, I copy it again to another flash drive.

Now I climb back into the chariot and drive to the Biltmore, where I present myself at the FedEx store.

Leave the file there to be printed. It will take them several hours to get around to it. They will call me.

If I had an IQ point that had not yet been fried, I would have engaged battle with the parking lot across the street, gone into the Staples, and bought the index cards. But by now I was hot, pissed off, and decidedly not in the mood to fight for a parking space and hike through still more heat. I figure by the time they call me, I’ll be cooled off and I will have had time to do a few things around the house that need to be done and so maybe I’ll feel more human by then.

Shortly after I get home, the phone rings: SDXB. He wants to chat. We yak for a long time: maybe an hour. I go back to work. Time passes.

Now I realize it’s almost 4 p.m., the witching hour. After 4:00, I cannot turn east out of the neighborhood to get to the tonier parts of town, at least not without driving several times around Robin Hood’s Barn or waiting for a half-hour-long signal on Feeder Street NS. So I leap into the car and drive over to the Biltmore FedEx store.

The traffic, as you might expect, is a bitch. Missouri Road, the route I would normally take to circumvent the hideousness that is Camelback Road, is all dug up. (Every navigable road in this city is always all dug up.) So I have to make my way around on alternate routes. Everyone else has the same idea. Everyone else is just as hot, mad, and frustrated as I am. On the way, I dodge a fresh wrecky-poo and almost clip a cop who’s standing in the middle of an intersection trying to cope with a motorist who is beginning to cry.

At the FedEx store, I fork over $35 for the page proofs and then discover…lo!

I told them to print NUMBERED pages 4 through 245, NOT the front matter. NOT starting on the page that the PDF counts as “4,” which is in the middle of the front matter. I showed them the page I wanted them to start with. “Start HERE. Note the title: ‘Introduction.'”

Did they follow instructions?

Fuck no! Of course not.

Goddamn it. Well…I don’t feel like arguing and I know that if I try to re-explain what they were supposed to do and why printing all the front matter and reproducing several blank pages will not help me, I just know I will lose my temper and will get mean. Real mean. So I figure the better part of valor is to come home and print out the 15 indexable pages at the end of the book that they failed to copy.

By the time I get home through the heat and by-now even crazier traffic, I’m just beat. I have something I have to do in the evening, and so pretty quick I need to get ready for that shindig. I pour a bourbon and water, jump in the pool, and try to cool off.

At least I got the math paper sent back to China.

But… This index is due to the publisher (not to the author) on August 2. Between now & then I not only need to compile the index, I’ve got to run it past the author and then make all the corrections she and her coauthor dream up. So we’re looking at a pretty tight deadline here. I did not need to have my whole goddamn afternoon wasted.

Meanwhile, at least one and probably two new indexing jobs are slated to arrive in August. (In academia, of course, that means “October,” but hope springs eternal in the entrepreneur’s breast).

All that’s needed, just this moment, to cover the cost of the new Macbook and its assorted accouterments will be one more index and maybe one or two more scholarly articles.

We also have an issue of Chicano/Latina Studies to edit — that should come in this fall. It pays a grand, but I have to split that with Tina, leaving not much to cover much of anything. But every little bit helps. I guess.

Image: DepositPhotos, © slovegrove

The Endless Uphill Battle…

by

Ever had one of those One-Step-Forward-Two-Steps-Backward days? Yesterday was one of those. It appears, though, that today may have flipped yesterday on its metaphysical head: one step backward, two steps forward.

Yesterday…oh God. Whatever I touched broke. Wouldn’t work. Dissolved. Undid itself. Turned into a fucking disaster. Required the attention of a professional, who was not available.

First off, the MacBook — the computer I do most of my work on because my back hurts too much to sit at a desk for any length of time — pretty much gives up the ghost. It can NOT maintain a connection to the Net. But then it starts with all sorts of other colorful frolics.

Let us say, for example, that I’ve given up on the Internet and just want to do my work. So I click to disconnect, period, from the wireless connection. So…we’re pretty sure this next antic is not a router/modem issue.

I’m typing along in, say, Wyrd or Excel, and out of the blue…CLICK! It shuts down. Before you can gasp “WTF?” it reboots…of course, losing substantial amounts of new data. Wyrd and Excel, being creatures of Microsoft, now present  you with two or three versions of every file you had open, and you have to figure out, somehow, which one has lost the least amount of data, crash out of the other versions, and save the relatively intact version under the original filename, or under the filename + a numeral to distinguish it from the one you started with.

This happens with regularity.

The machine will stay online, sort of, if I go into the back room and sit within about five feet of the router — which defeats the purpose, because there are no truly pain-free chairs in that room, at least, not one that’s suited for sitting and typing for more than about ten minutes..

MacMail starts opening messages in a pane about a third the size of the window, meaning that to read the messages you have to navigate to the green button to maximize the window…not the end of the world, but when you’re talking hundreds of messages, a certifiable PITA. I cannot figure out how to fix that.

These quirks render the computer pretty much unusable

I decide it’s probably time to buy a relatively inexpensive Windows machine plus Office 2016, the last and soon-to-be-disappeared non-Cloud-based version of Wyrd.

There’s not enough gas in the car to make it to this morning’s SBA meeting, which now takes place on the western border of the Pima Reservation…a long, long, LONG way from lovely North Central. So — all this takes place after yesterday’s encounter with the latest bum in the alley, not so much a bad thing as a sad thing — and I have a check to deposit to the S-corp’s checking account.

Figuring that the computer weirdness will turn an effort to deposit it electronically into a screaming nightmare, I decide I should drive the check to the credit union and, on the way back, stop by Fry’s Electronics to look at Windows machines, Lowe’s to buy a new hose timer, and Costco to fill up on gas. While at the CU, I’ll get two hundred bucks of walking-around cash, enough to last a couple months, at least.

Credit union: after a 20-minute drive through homicidal traffic (traffic is always homicidal here), I drive up to the building and discover the bastards have closed the parking lot! WTF? They just resurfaced that lot a few months ago? Why are they pouring more black stuff on it?

The closest parking space is about a quarter-mile away through 110-degree heat.

I park illegally, blocking another illegal parallel-parker, and fly in the door. Deposit the check, but feeling stressed about the potential for a parking ticket, forget to withdraw the spending money. Fly out the door and get back to the car before the other criminal parker returns to find her vehicle immovable.

Drive down the street to Fry’s. There I find they no longer carry the kind of table fans I used to get there. Okay: no surprise there. Over to the electronics department. They have a glorious wealth of windows hardware…woooo HOOOO! There’s even a refurbished thing with a gigantic screen and 2 TB of memory plus god only knows how many more gigabytes worth (can’t recall just now) and…gee whiz.

Fry’s has not one, not two, not three, not four, but FIVE sales staff lingering around an empty computer department. Literally, I’m the only customer there. Not ONE of them will give me the time of day! They’re all standing around involved in a personal conversation, and none of them even bothers to say “do you have any questions.”

Disgusted, I walk out. No wonder there were hardly any cars in the parking lot that used to be crowded all the time.

Dodging my fate once again (I’m good at that), I make my way down the street to Lowe’s. The reason I need a new hose timer is that the kitchen-timer device I ordered from Amazon leaked from the moment I attached it and yes, it does have a washer. Some months ago, Home Depot’s guy reported that they quit carrying the venerable Orbit timers because (get this!) some customer was suing Orbit and HD after the disaster that ensued when he set the thing to water his lawn and then went off on a 10-day vacation. Apparently the house’s foundation was afloat by the time he got back.

Moron. Don’t go off and leave a hose running on a cheapo timer.

But knowing that Orbit timers do leak — usually not fresh out of the plastic wrapping, but within a couple months — I figured I’d bite the bullet and get a digital timer, even though I really do not need a new learning curve so I can water the damn plants.

The cheapest digital timer was THIRTY BUCKS! Holy shit.

Exit, stage left, carrying a ten-dollar Orbit.

From there it was off to Costco.

Drive up to a gas pump, stick my card in, and am informed the card is expired, Eff You Very Much.

Hadn’t planned on going in, but now I have to trudge into the store, stand in line, pony up a chunk of dough. Might as well buy a few things. Three hundred dollars later, I’ve stocked up on a bunch of key items whose Lifetime Supplies have run low.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, so the place isn’t too busy…yet they do have enough cashiers, which is not the rule for Costco’s slow times. I get in line with my mountain of impulse buys, behind another customer with a mountain of junk.

A sweet little old lady with three (count’em, 3) items in hand gets in line behind me. I offer to let her go before me. After some politely de-rigueur demurrals, she agrees to do so.

The cashier now gets confused and racks up the guy ahead of me’s purchase to my credit card. We say no, no…confused! She fixes that.

Now our LOL steps to the front and forks over her three little items, but by then my stuff has rolled to the front of the conveyor belt.

This further confuses the hapless cashier, who racks up the LOL’s stuff on my credit card. We go nope nope nope nope and the cashier fixes this, BUT….

In the process of moving the LOL’s purchases to the front of the conveyor belt, I pick up a plastic box of blueberries, which flips open and scatters about a hundred blueberries on the floor, then slips out of my hands, falls to the floor, and (already being open) dumps most of the rest of them all over the floor, the guy ahead of me’s feet, and my feet.

The manager comes over. A clean-up crew comes over. A runner is dispatched to get the LOL a new package of berries. The LOL is upset. The cashier is unnerved. And because I’m now hysterical, I think it’s fuckin’ hilarious. I suggest to the LOL that she and I should throw in together, become bank robbers, and see what kind of fiasco we can create in a Wells Fargo. She thinks that’s funny. The cashier at this point has no sense of humor. The manager is too busy to notice.

Costco has a nice selection of little computers, and they sell the entire Office 2016 suite, on disk, for $125. That is one hell of a lot better than you can do by downloading one program at a time from Microsoft.

Probably a sweet li’l HP or Dell will do the job, for not too many dollars.

There’s just one hitch: We do not know that the problem is the Macbook.

What we do know is that the Arris router/modem the Cox dude installed when he was here is roundly reviled by Amazon customers. They do hate it…because…well…it’s given to shutting your computer down. I’ve been trying to persuade my son to help me replace it with a separate router & modem. He, in the time-honored manner of adult sons, has been dragging his feet.

I think that before I ditch the MacBook, I should make sure the problem isn’t with the wireless connection.

Make my way home through sizzling heat and crazed drivers — counting only five bums between Costco and my house, probably because it’s too hot for pandhandling.

On the way, it occurs to me that soon — very soon — I’m going to have to make a command decision.

I’m going to have to decide whether to stay in my home and do the several expensive upgrades that need to be done, or to pony up a shitload of cash to move into a neighborhood that is not the target of the City’s Bum Relocation efforts.

The Ex and I moved out of an exquisitely beautiful house that we dearly loved in the historic Encanto neighborhood because the area was overrun with derelicts that the City had pushed out of downtown in its elaborate renovation project. Most of these folks lived in SROs. The city bought or condemned the old hotels, leveled them, and left no place for the homeless mentally ill and drug addicts to live. So they all moved into the Encanto district.

And lest you think these folks are really harmless — as Dog appeared to be yesterday, as our Honored City Parents will assure you — consider the case of the paralegal who used to work in a dirty-shirt law office within easy walking distance of our house. She liked to come to work about an hour early, fix herself a pot of coffee, and use the quiet time to do the most immediate tasks before her coworkers and bosses would show up.

One morning, a prominent local bum was informed by his Voices that this woman was the Devil and he should kill her. Being an obedient type, that’s exactly what he did: he walked in the office’s front door and stabbed her to death.

This is not the sort of thing that inclines you to want to hang around a neighborhood that the City thinks is just ducky for its most unfortunate and its most neglected.

I am getting old. I no longer can handle a big dog that might provide a little protection. Nor am I especially comfortable with keeping a shotgun or a .38 on hand…too much potential for error.

Meanwhile, I’ve lived in this house almost 15 years. When I moved in, I installed a number of upgrades, all of which need to be redone. The oven no longer works. The dishwasher soon will need to be replaced. That’s about $2500 to $3,000 right there.

The pool needs to be replastered, and really, the pump should be replaced: $6,000. The exterior needs to be repainted: $2,000 to $4,000. The interior should be repainted, too. Another $2,000. The city wants to abandon the alleys and fence them off, which would help with the bum problem, but they intend to stick the residents with the cost. So we’re at…what? $12,500 to $15,000 worth of repairs and maintenance.

It’s bloody expensive to move…but it’s not that expensive. I’d probably need to replace the kitchen counters, since Mexican tile is roundly out of style and it’s cracked anyway. But that wouldn’t cost 12 grand.

If I decide to stay — really, I do not want to move — and I spend 12 or 15 grand to keep it running, the upgrades should last about 15 or maybe 20 years.

In 15 years, I will be 87 years old…and that is too old to move. I would like to live in this house until I die. But at 87, I almost surely will not have the funds to do all that maintenance over again. Nor will I have the physical strength to maintain a by-then-decrepit (again) pool.

In 20 years, I’ll be 92: even more extravagantly too old to move.

If I choose to move now, where would I move? Fountain Hills, a suburb on the far east end of Scottsdale, is a likely venue: it’s a long way from Bum Central, no ill-advised light-rail runs through it, the housing prices are more or less affordable, and it’s nice and quiet. On the other hand, it’s so far from my stomping grounds that I would have to quit the choir, make new friends (not an easy trick at this age), and would never see my son again.

There really isn’t any place in town that does not host a fair number of homeless. The tired, the poor, the wretched refuse of our teaming shores are pretty well endemic in this city. Light-rail aggravates the problem. You have to go a long way out to find a neighborhood where it isn’t an issue. Or have a lot of money. And I mean A LOT of money to buy your way into a protected district. We’re talkin’ Richistan on Steroids. And being WT myself, I personally do not find Richistan a very welcoming place to live.

I could buy a condo in one of the Central Avenue high-rises. But they’re outlandishly expensive. And what on earth would I do with the dogs in one of those places? They would have to find a new home.

Needless to say, this rumination did nothing to make my day any better.

It’s 3:00 by the time I get home: most of the day eaten up by all this Brownian motion.

I call my spy at Apple Support, having put this chore off until after the Fourth of July holiday. Leave word on his answering machine: he wants the case number, but I have so many case numbers I can’t figure out which was the one he’d worked on.

He does not call back. I’m not surprised. The laptop is now limping so badly it’s essentially dead.

Later in the day, a team of Chinese mathematicians sends over not one but two abstruse papers, asking for a bid. They also would like advice on publishing…meaning these things have yet to be brushed by the eyes of a peer reviewer.

Most of the math I edit is in bioengineering. This stuff is SCI, which has to do with information management. I could advise where to submit a paper in mathematical bioengineering, who to talk to, and how to go about it. But SCI? Not so much.

Table this message while I think about how much to charge. The Chinglish is pretty thick, which is especially problematic when I have NO clue what the authors are talking about.

Wireless connection turned off, I type up the rest of the novel “scenes” I’ve been concocting with pen & ink on paper. DAYUM! The total so far…so freaking far!…comes to over 17,000 words. What? I have eight scenes and am almost at the length of a short genre novel?

Study this and realize they’re not quite scenes: they could be construed as chapters. Okay. So…eight chapters and the first serious confrontation is not scheduled until chapter 9.

Ducky.

Decide to give up and wash the dog. This is never an easy chore; today it is made more difficult by the fact that I’ve put it off for a good two years. Because…well, it is an AWFUL chore.

First, brush out as much dog hair as possible:

Hard to believe one 22-pound corgi could even have that much hair at all, isn’t it?

Ruby, who has a more standard short coat, cannot understand why so much attention is being given to her rival, Cassie, and wishes to reclaim center stage.

She does so by placing herself between Cassie and the Human, then assuming the “WTF do you think you’re doing?” look.

Next: drag Cassie outside, kicking and fighting, and scrub her off in the hose. First shampoo her very thick, heavy hair — a lot like trying to shampoo a writhing bear rug. Then condition her fur; rub that in, rinse it out, clinging to the dog for dear life.

Run after the dog, who races in the back door and SHAKESHAKESHAKESHAKESHAKEs all over the kitchen cabinetry.

Any question yet about why I haven’t laundered this animal since the memory of human runneth not to the contrary?

Frantically dry the dog as best as possible with a couple of bath towels. It’s humid. I can’t get her fully dry, and, wishing to continue living, dare not take a hair dryer to her. She is very, very pissed.

Washing Cassie causes more hair to fall out. Every time. And yea verily. Couple hours later, she’s still damp, and clumps of fur are sticking out.

Try again to get her more dry. Brush her again, brush her brush her brush her brush her…

The second mound of fur is even bigger than the first mound, but now at least she’s starting to dry off a little.

Today…

Up at 5:30 this a.m. to race around and shoot out the door for the weekly Scottsdale Business Association Meeting.

Bolt down a piece of the cantaloupe I bought at Costco yesterday and swallow two cups of coffee while getting dressed and piling hair on top of my head. Fly out the door, running 10 minutes late.

It’s a 30- to 40-minute drive with the Commuter Cowboys, made only slightly more tolerable by the several round-about traffic-jam escapes I happen to know. Cruising toward the freeway…and realize…uh oh! Got an embarrassing urgency: out of the blue, diarrhea!

I need to go to the bathroom right now. And between that moment and the freeway, there is not one fast-food joint with a public loo.

Maybe I can make it to southeast Scottsdale.

Maybe not…

I turn around and manage to make it back to the house without having to put in an insurance claim to replace the driver’s seat, but just barely.

Now I have to wash my clothes. Goody.

What brought this on, I can’t imagine. I was fine when I rolled out of the sack this morning and fine until I got on the road. The only thing I can figure is it must have been the cantaloupe.

It seems unlikely you’d experience the effects of food poisoning in under an hour…but is there another explanation? Didn’t eat anything else today. Nothing that I ate yesterday was likely to make me sick…well, no, except maybe for some salad…I did wash the “organic” lettuce leaves, but unless you soak produce in Clorox, washing it doesn’t do much to get rid of pathogens.

Damn. Are we really so Third-World that I’m going to have to resort to what we had to do in Arabia? That was: soak EVERY piece of produce in diluted Clorox, and never eat anything (strawberries, for example) that cannot hold up to that treatment.

One halfway decent thing has happened, then, over the past 28 or 30 hours: The Apple Support guy called back this morning.

If I’d made it to Scottsdale, I would’ve missed his call.

He noted that the version of El Capitan my expensive Mac freelance guy downloaded is out of date. Suggested updating from 10.11.4 to 10.11.6; and BTW, he said, Expensive Mac Freelance was wrong in thinking the Macbook could support Sierra. Don’t try it, he advised.

He then instructed in a couple of strategies for reviving a more stable wireless connection. This resulted in crashing my iCloud sign-in, so had to jump through MORE hoops for that hassle. And he explained why MacMail has decided I should see miniature slivers of incoming messages; fixed that.

He asked me to use it for a while and then call back if there were any more issues. So far it’s working OK from the room where I prefer to work. Only one glitch in the past couple of hours:

Annoying Apple Photos will not import images from the camera: try that and you get another shut-down-and-reboot. Lovely. So I can’t adjust the color and exposure on the unlovely pictures above without loading them into Preview, which I am not going to fool with just now because my head hurts.

Ugh. Now I must prepare for a teleconference, and so…away!