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Urban life

A Measure of Success

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Yesterday a small miracle occurred: I was able to tuck a shirt into my blue jeans, run one of my favorite old leather belts through the loops, and buckle it!!!!

Not only that, but the buckle fit on the SECOND HOLE!

Lordie! I haven’t been able to get that belt around me in years. Not that one nor any of the other belts that have been hanging in the back of the closet gathering dust for all these past years. And yesterday was the first time in living memory that tucking in a shirt did not make me look like an overstuffed walking sausage.

Couldn’t believe it.

This morning the fat-o-meter broke 138: if you can imagine, 137.8! And that was in spite of yesterday’s greasy restaurant breakfast of twice-fried potatoes and four slices of (apparently undrained) bacon. Thought for sure I’d be up a pound today, not down almost a full pound.

So that leaves a little under three pounds to reach CardioDoc’s expressed goal of 135. I think, however, that I’m going to try to get down to 130, since these elegant measures are being taken the first crack off the bat in the morning. In reality, by the middle of the afternoon, the scale (should I dare to get on it) is running two or three pounds heavier. So it seems reasonable that if one shot for 130 pounds, one’s real-life, mid-day weight would hover around 133–34 pounds.

Yesterday was so cool — only 80 degrees all day long — that I didn’t have to turn on the air conditioning! That will save about $7.20 off the electric bill. The Nest sent its monthly AC power use report, grutching about my having run the contraption 52 hours longer in July than in August. It scolds, too, about my noxious habit of turning the thermostat down at night so as to get more than four hours of sleep (if that much):

• In July, the lowest temperature you set at night was 76°F.
• Top savers in your area like to keep it at 78°F or higher at night.
• Nesters in your state are setting Nest to 78°F or higher at night.

Oh yeah? Well, dear Nest, just because some sheep like to lie in a puddle of sweat all night doesn’t mean they all have to. Grrrrr!

LOL! Lest you think I keep the thermostat at 76 all night, the Nest is programmed to drop from 83 degrees to 78 along about 6:00 p.m.; then to go down to 76 around 10:00 p.m. when I might be expected to go to bed; then rise back up to 78 at 1:00 a.m. — by which time, if I’m not asleep yet, I’m not going to get to sleep at all.

Because the morning was so mild, I ventured to take the first walk around the park since the 21st of June. That’s about a mile and a half, including a short detour through the prettiest part of the neighborhood. Tried to maintain a stately pace, not charging along like a Marine making a run on Tripoli. And it worked: hardly any pain, and no aggravation of what there was. Did it again this morning, and walking actually felt good!

So there’s hope, maybe, for that 130-pound goal.

What hurts, as it develops, is sitting in front of the computer. This morning it occurred to me that when the feet are up on the stool that resides under the desk, it causes me to cantilever back and sit on my tailbone. And the tailbone does hurt. Along with just about everything else.

So the footrest came out and got shoved way across the room.

How lovely it is to stroll around the rich folks’ part of the ’hood!

The corporate lawyer, who favored expensive vacations, once took us to a very swell resort in Santa Barbara, the sort of place the likes of Ronald Reagan would hang out in. We walked all over the residential area around this retreat, and I remember thinking holy mackerel! Just imagine being able to live in a place like this!

Well, amazingly, today I live in a place like that. Right on the fringe of it, actually. Because of the patchy nature of Phoenix’s in-town neighborhoods, it’s possible to buy a middle-class (or lesser) home in an area that abuts a very upscale district, and that’s the nature of my present living arrangement. I look at newer houses — as I was doing online just this morning — plopped in amid the far-flung square miles of homogeneous suburban tracts that have been smeared across the desert, and think i am so lucky to have this pretty little house in a quiet corner of the middle of everything, a block from a beautiful park and a five-minute walk from what is probably the loveliest street in the entire city.

Yes. In addition to the solidly upper-class housing surrounding the park, we have the cutely named Why Worry Lane, a little piece of high-toned Santa Barbara transplanted to West Hell. The entire area is shaded by gorgeous, mature (as in 30 to 50 years old) trees, and because the acreage is irrigated (it all used to be agricultural land), every house has deep, rich lawns front and back. Because the real estate is so expensive, the people who live there are the sort who can afford to maintain it. And maintain it they do: in stately splendor.

WhyWorry

Some of these big old spreads are just gorgeous. Walking past them is great entertainment…and getting back to my little house, just a few yards from theirs but eminently less work, less expense, and less of a headache to care for, is a real joy. 🙂

A measure of success in itself.

’Druther Drive Than Ride, Thanks…

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Sometimes a news report is better than a thousand of a blogger’s words:

Police Search for Two Suspects…

While I was riding the lightrail from Central & Third Avenue to Tempe three to five days a week (a 20-minute drive; a 40- to 60-minute train ride), folks who looked just like those two got on and off all the time. Fortunately, most guys who look like that don’t misbehave in public, and so I never got a ringside seat to any of the drama. Nor do I care to.

“Safe and Secure“

Training Prosecutors: It WAS Entertaining

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No, I didn’t get paid to trot downtown and spend 2/3 of a day in a mock jury trial orchestrated to train budding county prosecutors. Did it because an old friend, recent law-school graduate, worker at a grant-funded county project importuned. All volunteer…it was worth it. What a hoot!

So here was the scenario:

Boyfriend and Girlfriend go to a local casino to celebrate Boyfriend’s birthday. They have a nice dinner, imbibulating a few boozies to go with the food. After a couple of hours at the all-you-can-eat chow line, whereat Boyfriend scarfs up more BBQ’ed ribs than a starving African lion could dream of, they move on to the gambling room.

Girlfriend parks herself at a one-armed bandit. Boyfriend goes to the tables to play a game called Show Low, and as the evening and early morning wend on, he’s doing pretty well. He’s about $860 to the good, but more enticing to his feeble brain-pan, he’s now in the running for a chance at a lottery to win an expensive gift, and he’s also in the running to win a Bass boat, something he’s been coveting for quite some time.

She, however, is not faring so well. When she runs out of money, she applies to Boyfriend for a few bucks to continue playing the slots. As part of their live-in arrangement, they share incomes, so she regards this as a request for her own money.

He declines.

She throws a sh!tfit. The decibel level quickly accelerates. Just as quickly, the casino management asks them to depart. The argument moves into the parking lot.

In the ensuing discussion, according to Girlfriend, he throws her to the pavement, kicks her several times in the ribs, gets in his car, and drives away, thereby “abandoning” her in the casino parking lot. (In Arizona, that would be on an Indian rez, a good long distance from wherever the Belagana She and Boyfriend probably live.)

Nine-one-one is called. A cop arrives. As he’s interviewing Girlfriend, Boyfriend weaves his way back into the parking lot, where, despite creeping along at an ultra-cautious 5 mph, he knocks over three parking stanchions and inserts his car into not one but two parking spaces.

Girlfriend, meanwhile, has displayed several bruises to Cop, which she claims to be the outcome of the evening’s quarrel. Cop takes due notice but does not bother to photograph these alleged injuries.

BF staggers over and engages Cop in a quarrel, during which he expresses his suspicion that Cop, whom he calls “Mr. PlasticBadge,” is GF’s new boyfriend. Cop, not surprisingly, arrests the bastard for drunk driving and domestic abuse.

Fake Jury is asked to discern Boyfriend’s guilt in the matters of

a) driving with even a WHIFF of intoxication;
b) driving sh!tfaced (Arizona’s definition of sh!tfaced is a blood alcohol count of .08; Boyfriend’s was .094);
c) domestic violence in the matter of kicking the bedoodles out of the broad after he tossed her on the pavement.

Prosecution and Defense put on spirited cases. Fake Jurors learn a helluvalot about Arizona DUI and domestic abuse laws, after which we are despatched to a room to deliberate.

OK. In Arizona, it’s illegal to drive a vehicle if you’re even slightly impaired. (This would mean if you have the hiccups, to say nothing of having ingested the numerous hard-liquor drinks Girlfriend says Boyfriend consumed.)

In Arizona, it is believed that any blood alcohol count (BAC) over .08 indicates impairment. Boyfriend has registered over .09.

First off, Defense tells us Boyfriend is a Disabled War Hero, having sustained several concussions (six years prior…) and shrapnel to the knee in Iraq. The apparent unsteadiness on his feet and the inability to follow a point back and forth without jerky eye movements are the aftereffects of his war wounds. Next, Defense tries to insinuate that we have no way of knowing whether the crew of scientists who run the BAC tests have f*cked up said tests. Therefore, say they, we have a reasonable doubt.

Prosecution trots in a forensic chemist (called a “criminalist” in the dumbed-down language of the early 21st century) who bowls everyone over with her professionalism and expertise.

Girlfriend weeps on the stand.

Boyfriend,  limping in with a baroquely exaggerated stagger, proclaims his innocence.

All very informative. Soooo…

How do we hold in the matters of

charge 1: driving a vehicle with even a whiff of intoxication;
charge 2: driving a vehicle heavily under the influence;
charge 3: kicking Girlfriend while she was down?

When we went off to confer about this, I was amazed to discover that I was far from alone in thinking Boyfriend was three sheets to the wind when all these shenanigans occurred but that the evidence did not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he beat the bejayzus out of Girlfriend, once he had her in the parking lot.

We suspected the bruises could have been sustained earlier. We worried that Cop failed to photograph these wounds. Our suspicions were aggravated because Girlfriend didn’t go to an ER to see whether she had any broken ribs or internal injuries. Several of the younger members of the Fake Jury noted that casinos have video cameras coming out the ying-yang, and that Prosecution was remiss in not at least subpoenaing videos of the quarrel inside the building, to say nothing of the probable videos of whatever went on in the parking lot.

Verdicts:

Guilty on counts 1 and 2, DUI
Not Guilty on count 3, domestic abuse.

Here are a few things I learned:

• Police reports are not admissible as evidence. When an officer reports that X person said yyy, that is regarded as hearsay and is not admissible. Only what the officer actually saw and could measure on the scene is admissible.

• Imagining a police officer should document wounds from an alleged domestic violence incident with photographs comes under the heading of “CSI syndrome.” Lawyers should try to elicit these tendencies from prospective jurors and disqualify people who expect concrete documentation of violence.

• Even if you’re far from sh!t-faced, you can be convicted of DUI. Arizona, for example, makes it a felony to be driving to any degree impaired.

• A good lawyer can put on one helluva show.

Why I Don’t Need a Gun

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P1020137…Because everybody else and his little brother has a gun.

Yesterday I got up to the mountain park a bit  late — around 11 a.m., after meetings and a trip to My Sister’s Attic to consign a set of old Noritake china. The day was warm, and so barely a soul was to be seen on the trails across the flat valley between Shaw Butte and North Mountain.

That was good: I didn’t have to listen to people yakking their heads off at the top of their lungs — the air filled with birdsong and the wind’s whisper almost drowned out the grumble of traffic on the surrounding roads.

On the other hand, of course, if one fell and broke an ankle, one would be stuck out there in the heat until five or six o’clock before anyone else would come along. And, also of course, if there’s another person out there at mid-day, it’s just you and him.

About halfway between the Seventh Avenue & Peoria trailhead and the dam below Thunderbird Road, I passed a guy walking toward me. Nothing notable, except that there was no one else on the trails around noon on a 90-degree day.

After a bit, I realized that every time I turned around, here was this guy.

He wasn’t a big man — just a strange-looking little fellow with a glabrous, ageless face. Hard to tell his age, because his head and much of his face were covered by a big hat. He passed me twice coming in my direction, and then as I headed back toward the car I saw him walking ahead of me up the trail.

And I noticed that occasionally he glanced back in my direction.

Weird. Probably harmless. But weird.

Occasionally he would slow down enough that the distance between us kept narrowing.

I stopped in the shade of a paloverde and stepped into the shrubbery so that I couldn’t be seen, figuring to wait until this character moved on.

At one point he stopped and looked back. At another, he could have borne left or right at a Y in the trail. Naturally, he was going my way.

At the Y, I picked up a narrow, flat rock and put it into my pocket, which already bulged a little where it held my car keys. Oh…did I mention I had on a pair of short-shorts?  Yeah. Stupid.

About three inches of the rock stuck out of the pocket. I wrapped my hand around it so with the fingers laying against the outside of my cut-offs in sort of…oh, the position they might be in if they were resting on a trigger guard. The stone was not visible — only my hand obviously holding something that was hidden in my pocket.

😀

He did slow down enough that I caught up and passed him. I figured if he tried anything I’d brain him with the rock — only by serendipity had I picked up a piece of granite that fit in my pocket like a nice little lady’s Derringer.

We said “hello” again. I went on my way. Nothing happened.

Weird. Harmless, but weird.

MORE Perp Hassle!

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F’crying out loud, the ba*tards have sent me ANOTHER pair of subpoenas! Now they want me to show up in court at 8:00 a.m. on the 25th to testify about events of which I know nothing. Four days ago, they told me our hoodlums’ trial was vacated. Now it’s back on.

They’ve dropped the burglary charge, eliminating the only topic about which I can testify, and even in that event, I have little to say, because I never saw Mr. Avery‘s face — only the back of his head as the cops were dragging him, bruised and battered, to the paddy wagon. The other one, Mr. Mejia, never came anywhere near my house or me, as far as I know.

They have sent me eleven subpoenas! Each one threatens, alarmingly, to put me in jail if I don’t show up downtown to have my time pointlessly consumed.

They’re going after these two clowns for three counts (each) of armed robbery and nine counts of kidnapping and aggravated assault. I was not present when they stuck up the pawn shop, and, unless the county attorney’s office thinks cowering in some old lady’s garage is the same as kidnapping and assaulting her, I was not present at whatever happened to evince those charges.

This is starting to feel like more than a nuisance. Each of these subpoenas, one of which was delivered in person by a sheriff’s deputy, comes with an explicit threat to throw me in jail. Every one of them demands that I cancel whatever I have scheduled on the many days when they’ve called upon me to spend an unknown amount of time in a courtroom for no discernible useful purpose. If they drag me down there next week and the proceedings last more than a day, then it will interfere with a doctor’s appointment for the very painful condition I’ve been wrestling with for the past year. Assuming it’s once again continued, next month I’m supposed to go on a hike up the West Fork of Oak Creek, a one-time opportunity (also assuming I can walk that far by then…); I may have to cancel the trip if I get a subpoena for a day or two beforehand.

I guess whenever the sun comes up this morning, I’d better to call down to my ex-husband’s office and see if I can hire a lawyer to bring a stop to this.

Like I have nothing else to spend $200 an hour on…

Counting Our Blessings…with a Grain of Salt

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OldBeggar1Over at Blue-Collar Workman, TB was listening to a relative bellyaching when he happened to glance out a window and see someone begging on the street. This led him to reflect that most people’s complaints can look mighty petty when compared to real problems, like homelessness, unemployment, and poverty.

It’s true we should count our blessings, and that whatever problem we have, someone else has a worse one.

I’m skeptical about folks begging on the street corners, though. Two reasons:

1) A police officer who surfaced in one of my classes advised that one should never give street-corner beggars money, because most of them are drug addicts seeking cash to buy more dope. She also said they often have an organized system for allocating the most profitable corners — her description of this was pretty eye-opening.

2) Consider how much you could make if you parked yourself at the right corner or haunted the right parking lot. Twenty bucks an hour, maybe? That’s more than some of us earn on the job. If you’ve got welfare and food stamps, $20 to $50 a day, tax-free, would make for some decent pocket change; $20 an hour — unreported — would provide  you with a decent living, especially when combined with government benefits.

For a panhandler to make $20, only two people would need to hand him a ten; only four would need to give him a fiver. And some people, you can be sure, do fork over a $20 bill — because, after all, that’s what comes out of the ATM.

There’s a guy who takes up a post outside the local Safeway, a would-be busker. He sets out a hat and plays the saxophone. Safeway employees chased him off the parking lot, so he does business on the sidewalk at the entry to the lot. Problem is, the guy can’t play. So his serenades consist mostly of ear-splitting sour notes. It sounds like an eight-year-old’s practice session. He’s a friendly sort, though, and will chat amicably with you if you say hello. A lot of customers go out of their way to carry hand-outs over to him.

It’s hard to know how much panhandlers actually earn, for obvious reasons. One sociological study suggested that beggars in Toronto made about $300 a month, although the authors admitted their subjects may have been low-end earners, in contrast with a Toronto journalist who, for an investigative story, lived on the streets and reported earning $200 a day.

Tales of middle-class and better income from panhandling are highly anecdotal. The Huffington Post, the Internet’s answer to The National Enquirer, once reported that a guy in Oklahoma City was earning $60,000 a year at panhandling. More credible is a study done by Coos Bay, Oregon, police showing that panhandlers outside a local Walmart were earning $300 a day — as much as the employees inside the store earned in an entire week.

Overall, though, apparently it’s not a high-income endeavor. In the first place, even if you did earn, say, $200 or $300 in a day, income would be sporadic, at best. And it’s unlikely your average panhandler sticks at the job eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year. Too, while many panhandlers are not homeless, most have substance abuse problems or untreated mental health issues.

Experts on homelessness and poverty recommend donating your money to organizations that feed, clothe, and house the homeless rather than forking over spare change to street-corner beggars. Of course this doesn’t help people who don’t want to stay in homeless shelters, for any number of excellent reasons. But at least it doesn’t transport your cash straight to some junkie’s drug dealer.

How do you respond to panhandling? Do you give money to people asking for a handout? Have you ever thought about  panhandling yourself?

Image: The Old Beggar. Louis Dewis, 1916; painted just outside his clothing store in Bordeaux. Public Domain.