Coffee heat rising

Urban life

Friday Frolics

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As it were…if one has an odd idea of frolicking… 😀

Awaken at 4 a.m. Retrieve the computer, open the new Chinese grad student client’s thesis. Mm HMM. As suspected (since she wept that her dissertation director called her English “appalling”…just think of what that one would think of my Chinese!), yes, as suspected, it’s a tangle of Chinglish. But not too awful: the organization is good, the research is adequate, the methodology…uhm, remains to be seen.

By 6:30 I’m done with Chapter 1 and have sent the references off to my honored associate editor, who very likely will assign them to her underlings. Earned about 30 bucks an hour, so didn’t feel bad about that at-tall.

Figure out that the way to keep the MacBook’s external hard drive from repeatedly falling on the tile floor is to Scotch-tape the USB cable into the drive’s connection. Add this decorative touch to Apple’s fine styling.

Feed the dogs, throw in a load of laundry, walk the dogs, eat not much breakfast, read the newsoid.

Toss a particularly ugly shirt, a recent Costco buy, into the car and head down to the Ghetto Costco outlet, where as usual they take the thing back and return my money, no questions asked. Fill the Dog Chariot’s tank with gas preparatory to tomorrow’s endless jaunt to the far, far, far, FAR west side (approx. half-way to Yuma). Yesh: filled the tank for under twenty dollah!!!!!

In living memory, it has cost $40 to fill that thing when it’s 3/4 empty. Dance to spring!

Next: Over to AJ’s, a local gourmet market. Get the avocado. Get the frozen peas. Do not get the MSG.

MSG, you ask? What would one want with such a discredited, politically incorrect product?

{sigh} Those of you who are not dog owners should avert your eyes. Those of you who live with dogs no doubt are familiar with a particularly annoying doggy quirk, coprophagia. Ruby has, of recent, decided to phage copros. But — this one’s weird — not her own. Cassie’s.

Ugh. Humans hate that.

You can discourage this revolting little habit by adding a light sprinkle of MSG to the dog’s food. Of course, I’ll have to add it to Cassie’s, since Ruby’s not interested in her own product. At least, not so far.

When metabolized in the canine gut, MSG taints the dog’s excreta with a flavor so ghastly that even a dog will not eat it! Works like a charm. Within two or three days, your dog will be convinced that this activity is not worth the effort. It’s a quick and easy way to break a dog of that particular irritant.

But damn. McCormick’s meat tenderizer no longer contains MSG. It’s salt and some other chemical, unrecognized. The store did not have any Accent.

Back home, order a little jar of Accent from Amazon. No shipping charge, now that I’m an Amazon Prime member. This is good, because the cost of shipping 4.7 ounces of the stuff probably would have cost more than the product itself.

More laundry into the washer. Water plants, water plants, water plants, water plants.

Dribble Round-Up on weeds running rampant in front yard and alley, having noticed while driving out that the yard is looking a little tacky. The neighbor’s behind me looks worse. And of course, Manny’s is a jungle, since they like to grow poppies in the gravel each spring. At least they grow their weeds on purpose.

Repair the paper towel holder that fell off the wall, out in the garage. Throw lunch on the grill. Scour pan left to soak in garage work sink.

Dine magnificently while reading New York Review of Books.

Grab Cassie, who has become extravagantly filthy, drag her into the bathroom, and drop her in the bathtub. Scrub dog, scrub dog, scrub dog, scrub dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, rinse dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog…dog escapes.

Haul wet towels to garage, throw those in the washer with wet bluejeans.

A dog and her dirt... [Click on the iimage to enjoy its full, soggy splendor]
A dog and her dirt… [Click on the image to enjoy its full, soggy splendor. Yes, the topsoil covering the bottom of the bathtub is from the dog.]
Scrub bathtub. In the process of getting all-purpose cleanser out of the bathroom cupboard, tip over the bottle of toilet cleaner, which tumbles out onto the floor. I can’t get those things open without recourse to a wrench, so once I do manage to break into a bottle of the stuff, I just stick it back in the cabinet, open. Take that, Big Nanny!

Toilet cleaner squirts across the bathroom floor and slops onto bath mat.

Finish the job by squirting the rest of it into the terlet. Wash the caustic cleaner off the bathroom floor. Carry the bathroom rug, which was wet and hairy anyway, out to the garage to go in the washer next. Scrub toilet.

With hair dryer in hand, corner Cassie. Dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog, dry dog…dog escapes.

Clean up kitchen. Hang clothes, load more laundry.

Dog is limping. If you wouldn’t put up such a fight, Dog, that wouldn’t happen. Place dry towel on bed, atop Dog Blanket. Place dog on bed. Place other dog on bed.

Ruby evicts Cassie from the Wet Dog Towel.

Move Ruby. Pick up Cassie and put her back on towel. Repel attack of The Look from Ruby.

Retrieve computer. Climb onto the sack with the dogs. Consider doing a little more work. Nothing very urgent is pending. One thing ought to be done today, right now. But the world will not end if it doesn’t get done today, right now. Read news. Play games at Washington Post site.

The Post‘s collection of online games, BTW, is primo. Check it out if you like benign time-wasters.

Who Said It: Candidate or Beauty Queen? is not to be missed, BTW.

Write this post. Realize it’s 7:00 p.m. Would like to go to sleep, but it’s too early. Besides, the washer’s still running.

Maybe I can get a little more marketing work in.

BUY THIS BOOK!

Dark Kindle LoRes

The Mailbox Annals: Four Hundred Dollars Later…

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So yesterday Larry the Preferred Handyman surfaced to install the new locking mailbox I felt called upon to acquire in response to the repeated thefts. This thing, the Fort Knox of mailboxes, weighs about 40 pounds and is, as he remarked, big enough to hold a month’s worth of mail.

Which is good, because having to trot out to the street with a key in hand to pick up a wad of advertising circulars that will go straight into the garbage is infuriating enough that one will not feel inclined to do it often.

Larry charged $200 to traipse to Home Depot and buy a heavier metal post to hold it (the one that held the rural-style mailbox was too lightweight for the job), bang out the wad of concrete the old post was sunk in, sink the new post, and then figure out the obscure instructions to put the massive new mailbox in place. Fortunately, some of the 220 customer reviews at Amazon described the trick to installing the thing. At $200 (including the post), the guy was giving away his services.

So, to the $100 for the mailbox and the $200 installation, add the $75 I had to pay to rent a mailbox for six months to intercept incoming bills, checks, and packages, the $20 worth (wholesale!) of books ordered from the PoD vendor that got stolen, who knows how much for the expensive specialized stage makeup the roommate ordered that got stolen, and who knows how much, if any, in Medicare and Medigap checks that may or may not have been stolen.

Apparently mail theft is so commonplace the USPS doesn’t give a damn about your losses anymore. They make it impossible to report it. Infuriatingly, after I jumped through 87 berjillion hoops to post a theft report presented at their website, I got a message saying that was the wrong form and I needed to call their 800 number. Of course, when you call that number you get a robot. It asks you to leave a message and promises someone will call you back. No one does. After a week passes, you get an email asking you to fill in a survey reporting on how you liked their customer service!

God, how I hate the facelessness of our Brave New World.

The frequency of the theft issue is also indicated by the fact that over 200 people have purchased a behemoth like this thing from Amazon alone. Reviewer after reviewer says it was the only one they could find in the $100 range that is a) not easily jimmied open with an ordinary screwdriver and b) not equipped with a slot big enough for a person to reach in and grab the mail.

The slot is not large enough to accommodate a package, either.

Yesterday while Larry was doing battle with the installation job, I talked with one of the mailmen. He approved of the box (Larry was not thrilled, but Maildude was) and said these days they carry packages up to your doorstep anyway. My house has a walled courtyard, so packages aren’t easily visible from the street. So, despite one of the neighbors catching the thieving bitches on video as they drove up to her house, hopped out of the car, ambled up to the her front door, picked up a UPS package, strolled back to the car, and drove slowly on down the street searching for more loot, the ladies haven’t taken any packages that were delivered to my door instead of stuck in the mailbox.

The damn thing is SO ugly. It just pisses me off to have to spend $400+ and end up with an unsightly monster in the front yard. And it really pisses me to have to do it for the privilege of receiving mountains of junk mail from tree-murdering, ink-wasting, gasoline-burning parasites trying to sell me pizza and real estate.

I’m thinking what I’ll do is plant a vine that can trail up and over it. Don’t know whether I can get one to live there — the concrete under the ground won’t make for a very good growing medium, and the box and the post are black. During the summer, the thing the plant is supposed to climb on will get about as hot as a barbecue. I suppose I could paint the damn thing white, adding to the nuisance factor. But I don’t want to. Enough is enough.

Life in the big city. Please, God: send a grocery store, a gas station, and a competent doctor to Yarnell so I can move to the sticks!

Yarnell shopping district...
Yarnell shopping district…

Strange Day in FunnyFarmville

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{sigh} It’s only 5 p.m. but the sun has gotta be over some yardarm somewhere. Maybe here, for all I know, because really, who knows what “over the yardarm” really means? High noon, I’d say.

So I’m having a bourbon and water while the curried fried rice simmers, and I yam NOT doing any more work!

Flew back in the house a couple of hours after my afternoon deconstructed itself. A pile of requests & orders from Honored Client are in hand. He wants Plain & Simple Press to do the heavy lifting involved in publishing his memoir, intended for family and friends. And that’s good: it’s quite a lovely book…he’s had a wonderful life. Like my father, he’s devoted his life to work that’s taken him all over the world. If my father had written a memoir like this and left it to the family, I would be beside myself with joy. What a wonderful thing to give his kids. And his friends.

It’s also of historic interest — the guy has been at the front lines of some major early 21st-century changes, internationally, and he has known huge 20th-century figures. So these books of his are of value in more ways than one.

So of course I’m delighted to have the privilege of helping him, even in a small way, to publish this latest book.

Walked in the door from this afternoon’s meeting. Sat down and turned on the computer and just then heard a deep-throated truck’s HONK outside. Looked up from the keyboard to see a fire department truck go by, one marked “Hazardous Waste Disposal.”

WTF?

Naturally, I arise and take a stroll up Feeder Street NS, looking up and down the alleys and neighborhood streets. No sign of the guys in space suits. Oh well.

But it IS gorgeous outside. The rain has died down and in the late afternoon the chilly air has finally warmed enough that one no longer needs a jacket. Dogs have been cooped up with the human for days. Stroll back in the house and lash up my furry friends for a Doggy Walk.

Painfully bored with our usual one-mile route, I decide to head up toward Conduit of Blight (which has been slightly de-blighted with the effort to make the light-rail boondoggle look respectable), where another set of turns and twists will generate a different mile-long walk.

We go across Secondary Feeder St. EW and come up on Conduit of Blight Blvd. There, a half-block to the south, we come across a bum (ahem, sorry: “homeless person”) going through a bunch of objects he’s made off with (ahem, sorry: “collected”) in his shopping cart. These appear to be CDs or possibly DVDs. Unclear whether he’s scavenged them from the garbage or stolen them — it’s even odds, one way or the other.

As we slip past him, we hear some guy on the other side of the decorative wall the city has built to gussy up Conduit of Blight, sitting on the ground next to the bus stop. (“Oh, god,” I think, “Why didn’t I get another German shepherd instead of the Short Stuff?”) He’s very stoned and he’s rambling on in a loud whiny moan about God only knows what. A woman who looks like she wishes she could figure out what to do for him is standing over him. She is saying nothing but looks confounded.

First I think, “You poor soul.” Then I think, un-Christianly, “Stay the f*** away from me!” Mother Theresa, I will never be.

So I continue down the road thinking I am a bad person, for if I were a good person I would try to do something for the suffering poor in this godforsaken city of the radically rich and the penniless. But I do not.

Seconds later, a Mrs. GotRocks shoots out of the parking lot of the fenced Montessori school. She doesn’t even slow her SUV when she crosses the sidewalk. She cannot see around the shrubbery decorating the school’s entrance, and so she does not see me and the dogs about to step in front of her. Literally — not an exaggeration — if we’d gotten there two seconds earlier she would have run us down.

We proceed, then turn back into the ’hood at the southernmost street of low-rent homes — i.e., the development I live in.

There we pass the yard where the turquoise fake grass carpeting the residents installed in the frontyard is now very, very tired, indeed. One of my neighbors wondered why the newcomers are so nosy and so vocal about minor issues such as trash in the alley and decrepitude in the front yard. Many of the Old Guard don’t understand, really, that a house is the same as money in the bank, and that when you — or your idiot neighbors — let a property deteriorate, you’re throwing money down the toilet.

It’s a cultural thing, hm?

We pass the home of the couple who have the boy who suffers some frightful crippling ailment. The father watches over his son like a kind of guardian angel. I believe he is a man who is made of steel and gold, probably the best of all possible men. But it appears the boy is not their only problem child.

From a distance we can hear another kid shrieking and screaming, fully launched into a major tantrum. The mom is moving around the open garage, trying and succeeding at appearing calm and level-headed. With an iron grip on her sanity, she issues a few motherly orders. The brat is having none of it.

The kid jumps into the car, locks the door, and LAYS ON THE HORN!

Heh heh heh… I’m sorry, it’s not funny. And it certainly was not funny for the long-suffering mom, who that point just about loses it.

After a fair amount of hollering on the part of all concerned, the kid lays off the horn. But…only because she’s figured out how to turn on the anti-theft system, causing the car to go, merrily, HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…
HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…
HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…

Hah haaaaaah! If it was my kid, I’d have whaled her little tail until she couldn’t walk, to say nothing of climb into the SUV’s driver’s seat and fiddle with the controls. But of course that would be child abuse (nevermind the wee perpetrator’s grown-up abuse), and the mom, being a creature of a more enlightened generation, manages to restrain herself.

Bless you, sister…

Moving on, we pass the home of one of our newer neighbors, a police officer and his beautiful young family. We are thrilled to have these young people here. The only flaw in the blue sky is that Dad is on the outs with the neighbor, apparently because of a misunderstanding of Brobdinagian proportions. Dad, having no insight into the history of what the local moving companies like to do to folks who move into our ’hood, believes the old dude next door is responsible for a series of  post-move-in break-ins. Little does he know. But what can one say? And how can one best serve youth, eh?

But we are glad — nay, proud — to have a police officer here, the second one to move into our precincts. The next time their brothers chase some armed and violent sh!theads into our neighborhood, we can be assured that the Force will be with us.

So it goes. Here in the Naked City, one woman’s beautiful afternoon is another man or woman’s Day from Hell.

 

Banging on Death’s Door at Crime Central

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Corgi

Ohhhhhh gawd! This damn cold is hanging on like glue. Haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in four or five nights — wake up choking and gagging about once every two hours.

Along about 2:30 this morning I was already laying awake, gasping for air, when Cassie uttered the infamous, ominous “whuf?” sound. It is a dog utterance familiar to any companion of a German shepherd. It means, in rough translation, “huh? Whazzat?”

Anna-in-the-garlic
German shepherd

In the German shepherd, “whuf?” has a slightly more nuanced meaning: “If that’s what I think it is, I’m gonna rip its throat out.” Should the cause of the “whuf?” be followed by another suspicious sound, motion, or anything else, the next step can be to explode into action.

Corgis also may ask “whuf?” but they’re a lot less likely to go ballistic if they don’t like the answer. In Cassie’s case, if her suspicions are confirmed, she’ll try to bark the cause to death, but she will not attempt to rip it apart. At least, not in any proactive manner.

Dying, I growled back, “It’s just me. Go back to sleep.” Before I could pull the covers back over my miserable head, though, I spotted the cause of her inquiry: Bright lights flashing in the backyard.

corgiherding
Herd dog

A cop helicopter came roaring up and parked over my house. Holy sh!t, I thought he was gonna land on the roof! He couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet off the ground. He was glaring his spotlight all over the front, side, and back yards, the alley, everywhere.

Here, thought I, we go again. Got up to check that the doors were locked.  Yea verily, yesterday being a 70-degree day, I’d left the front door open. Security screen with its special drill-proof uncrackable bullet-proof deadbolt was locked, though. So was the door to the garage.

DogAttackUSAF)
Mutated herd dog

Unpacked the Ruger from its hiding place. Damn thing hasn’t been cleaned since the Garage Invasion episode, nor have I practiced at the range with it. It being unlikely the current perp was in the house or was about to get into the house (at 2:30 one forgets one has left the German shepherd-sized dog door open…), I decided I was too sick to wrestle the dogs off the bed, herd them and me into the office, and barricade us behind the locked office door. Put the gun where I could reach it and went back to bed.

I really need to keep that pistol in the bedroom, except it would be too, too easy for the burglar to find it there. Wish I had some sort of throwaway pistol that wouldn’t represent a major loss if it was stolen.

Swarm of cops — including police SUVs — frolicked by the light of the copter. They danced around for 15 or 20 minutes.

Eventually, exit the helicopter. Squad wagons hung around for awhile, then left. I went back to bed.

Dog head pops up again: new light. Get up, peer out again: From the west side of the house, a spotlight is aimed into the front yard of my neighbor across the street. Possibly headlights — couldn’t see around my house’s west wall and wasn’t about to go out to investigate. But the light was not aimed down Pokey Lane: it definitely was beaming steadily at my neighbor’s front yard, which unlike my house doesn’t have a lot of shrubbery. This lasted till I gave up and went to back to bed.

It’s a wonderful life. Or something like that.

Breaking Newsoid…Live-Blogging from the scene

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Updates from the ’Hood’s Premier Electronics Nerd:

6 AM this morning heard some explosions and flashes of light…..thought at first it was a storm, then thought it was fireworks……then helicopter flew over head for a minute, then power went out for a couple seconds, UPS kicked in and then power came back on….exciting Monday morning! 😎

Update: apparently a transformer blew up on 19 Avenue and Dunlap…… according to RPN HOA Facebook page.

 

So just before dawn cracked this morning, just as the dogs were stirring, beginning to lobby to get down off the bed and into the backyard, the sound of the usual gunfire pealed out across the city.

Or so it seemed.

Then a lot of bangs and booms and cracks and thuds… A little much for the routine drive-by bang-bang. What? Had our pet thugs declared all-out war?

Rolled out of the sack, let the dogs out, and gazed in the direction of the ruckus.

Holy mackerel! It looked like Metrocenter was exploding! Big flashes and bangs and cracklings lit up the sky. A pall of smoke rose above the flaring blasts.

What? Are we celebrating New Year’s at 6 in the morning? Today really isn’t the 31st, is it???

Apparently a cache of New Year’s fireworks went off prematurely. It was quite a display…all of it, unfortunately, on the ground and presumably (even more unfortunately) merrily blowing up someone’s building over there. I heard only one siren running up the I-17 or possibly up Conduit of Blight (the 17 was closed in the wee hours when a motorcycle cop wiped out — amazingly he survived, thank heavens, and the hospital expects him to live).

My guess would be that one of the local sh*theads wondered what would happen if he shot a few automatic rounds into a stash of incendiaries. Now, presumably, he knows. Assuming he’s still with us.

Not a WORD on the local Play-Nooz. Nary a word on Twitter. Nothing on the police department’s Twitter feed. Nothing on the fire department’s Twitter feed. Nothing on the local TV and radio stations’ sites or Twitter feeds. Nothing even on the Twitter feed at Fox 10 News, sadly the only local news website that’s even remotely on the ball. Nothing. Nada. Niente.

It was quite a show. You’d think our corps of pretend journalists here would be thrilled to have something spectacular to kick off yet another slow news day here in beautiful uptown Phoenix. Only one helicopter came by, too late to capture an image of the several fireballs that erupted. He parked over the house for five or ten minutes and then moved on.

Metrocenter, at its inception several decades ago the largest indoor shopping mall in North America, is a ghost mall today. As far as I can tell, the only really viable business there now is a small amusement park that draws people with a roller-coaster ride, a miniature golf course, and an electronic game arcade — the most expensive venue for a kiddie birthday party in the state! 😀 And I believe it’s this successful concern that sponsors the fireworks.

When I first moved into the ’hood, about twenty years ago, Metrocenter used to put on a fireworks display every weekend throughout the summer. As the mall deteriorated, that came to an end — too bad. It was really cool! Now Castles and Coasters (or the mall?) has fireworks on New Year’s and the Fourth of July.

What d’you bet we’ve seen the last of that?

Most Expensive US Postal Service in the Country…

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Grrrrrrr! Our moronic City Parents and our clueless USPS mail carriers just cost me $75, plus $16 and change, plus about $20 I could’ve made selling the two books forked over to my demented neighbor.

For reasons unknown to anyone, the name of the road I live on was changed from the name the developer put on the plat map (let’s call it Nirvana Street) to Shangri-La Lane. As it happens, the road directly to the north is called Shangri-La Drive. The house numbers are the same.

As you can imagine, the opportunities for confusion are legion. 😀 At this time of year in particular, the Post Office employees get confused. They deliver mail addressed to Shangri-La Lane over to Shangri-La Drive, and vice versa. All the time.

The guy who lives on Shangri-La Drive in the house whose number corresponds to mine is a nice enough man who has been very ill for some years. Not all of the poor guy’s marbles are intact.

This is the gentleman who intercepted six months’ worth of credit-card statements from Macy’s, all addressed to me as plain as day, and threw them in the trash. I’d opened the account to get a dollar or two off of an already discounted little handbag, charged up all of about ten bucks, and forgot about it. Because I use my AMEX card for everything, I never thought about it again…until Macy’s sicced a collection agency on me.

So as you can imagine, I was not pleased. And even though I occasionally remind the postal carriers to try to get it right, the part-timers they hire at this time of year always get it wrong.

Along about the end of last month, I ordered two copies of a book Camptown Races has on the drawing board, so I could take them to display at the WVWW shindig last Saturday. These never showed up. Ordered one more and asked the printer to put a rush on it; got the thing just in time.

But now, two weeks later, the original order has never shown up. That’s 16 bucks down the drain, plus of course I didn’t have those to take with me to the chivaree. Since the one I did have sold instantly, it’s entirely possible that I could have sold the other two there; hence, we have a potential $36 down the drain.

The printer disgorged the post office’s tracking report, which showed they delivered it on December 2.

Yeah. I’ll bet they did: to Shangri-La Drive, not Lane.

So yesterday I walked over to the neighbors’ house and inquired as to whether the residents had seen my package. Mrs. Batshittsky answered the door — she really is a very sweet (and very beleaguered) lady — and said no, they hadn’t seen it. Eventually poor old Batshittsky himself came shuffling up the hall and stood there, cowering behind the Mrs.

He looked very sick — and kind of wild-eyed. I felt terrible for her. She has an awful lot to have to cope with…what a load to bear! Anyway, he clearly wasn’t competent to say what he’d seen or hadn’t seen, but I figured he’d probably relieved the post box of its mail while she was out running errands, so she had no idea what he could’ve thrown out.

So. No help there.

This morning I took the P.O.’s tracking report up the the Post Office. A full hour later… Yes. It took an hour of driving and standing in line and then standing at the counter waiting on a hapless and enormously overworked CSR to get an answer to the question of “where did you deliver this thing?”

At first, the CSR I reached after a half-hour wait in line said they could actually pinpoint the specific building where the carrier delivers a package. She then took the sheet of paper with the zillion-digit tracking number into the back of the building. It was a good twenty minutes before she resurfaced.

Well. No. They didn’t have a GPS doodad running on the day this was delivered. All she could tell me was that the carrier placed it in a mailbox.

Right. The Batshittsky mailbox. Not the Funny Farm mailbox.

I asked how much it would cost to rent a mailbox there. It’s very cheap — only about twenty bucks a year. I’d have to go to the back of the line to do that, though, because I’d need to be attended by one of the employees who could keyboard in the charges.

Uh huh. The line extended almost back to the door.

To pick up my mail from this illustrious institution, I would have to cross the new train tracks (where the signal will be red until sometime after the cows come home), make my way through a freight-train-length school zone, pass through an increasingly dangerous slum, and get out of my car in an area where I normally keep the car doors locked. And…really…do I want to put up with USPS customer service unto the end of time?

Possibly not.

So it was over to the mailbox place and kitsch store in the equally dangerous Albertson’s shopping center down at the corner of Main Drag South and Conduit of Blight. There I rented a box from an exceptionally eccentric shopkeeper: $75 for six months.

That’s effing outrageous, of course. But…it’s right down the street — a three-minute drive. I can park directly in front, just two steps from the entrance, and the owners always keep their dogs tied outside next to the door. While I was there, one of them tried to remove a foot from a bum who walked by, so I figure that’s a good sign. Uh, I guess.

So to the $16 for the lost books we can add $75 for a mailbox to receive stuff I’d like to have NOT go to the Batshittsky Manse, for a total of $91 that this stupid little event has cost me. Add another $20 in missed opportunity to sell the absent books, and we’re over a hundred bucks.

{sigh}

Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to prove the package went where I believe it went? Then I could have told Mrs. B to keep her honored husband away from the mailbox — maybe she could rent a box and keep the key out of his reach? And I could have asked her to pay to replace the discarded books. And maybe she could pay the $75 I’m having to spend to keep her DH out of my mail.

There are a million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them…