Coffee heat rising

Urban life

With vacations like this, who needs work?

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Ohhhhh….tired. Head hurts. Totally distracted with work.

Would you believe that ten days ago I was wondering what on earth I would do with myself when I finally finished the heavy lifting involved in rewriting five college courses and mounting them online? Yes. I stood in the house and thought, in passing, “I’m going to be mighty bored.” Also thought, “Maybe I can finally get some sleep.”

That lasted about eight minutes.

Work has just poured into the S-corp. Not that I’m complaining: it means the subcontractors will get paid and I can buy a new computer, which, it’s clear, is much needed.

The iMac is so old and so clogged with data it interferes with productivity. So much time is wasted sitting here watching the damn thing grind away, it’s no wonder I clench my teeth until they break.

Need a new printer/scanner or at least a freestanding, more efficient scanner, too. Add to the fact that my HP all-in-one is even more excruciatingly slow than the iMac, its scanner defaults to color. To upload a check to the credit union, you have to scan in b/w. Reset the scanner to black & white. If you’re not watching closely, it’ll flip back to color. When this happens, you have to go back and s…c…a…n…….t…h…e d…a…m…n…….c…h…e…c…k…….o…v…e…r…….a…g…a…i…n….endlessly.

Which was what happened this morning: turned out of the sack, figured to e-deposit the check that came in yesterday, then take the dog for a walk before it gets hot. This started at 5:30, while my bloodshot eyes were so bleary I could hardly see. Didn’t notice it had blithely defaulted back to 300×300 color, thank you very much, until I went to upload. So had go go through t…h…e…….w…h…o…l…e…….p…r…o…c…e…s…s…….o…v…e…r…….a…g…a…i…n…. UGH!

It’s now 6:30, the sun is up, and I suppose it’s too late to go out into the heat.

Poor little dog.

Oh well. She got walked at 11:00 p.m., which after all was just a few hours ago.

Sent off a set of edits to one client last night for approval and to get a few queries answered; hope to put the finishing touches on that in the next day or two.

Meanwhile two more book projects are in house, one of which I’ll probably have to farm out to a sidekick.

Met with Tina, the numero uno sidekick, yesterday. She’s still earning more waiting tables in her off-hours than the Great Desert University is paying her, despite her boss having engineered a raise through the Chinese gummint.

In a few months, her job with GDU runs out, so she gets a second screwing from them in the form of yet another layoff. Her boss, who jumped at the early retirement offer and now spends most of her time in China, is taking the publication with her and hiring Tina to manage the thing on a contract basis. That’s nice, except it means that in a few months her benefits end, meaning she has to find a way to get her self and the kid insured.

She’s planning to form an S-corporation for her editorial work, too. This would be convenient for The Copyeditor’s Desk, because it would mean I wouldn’t have to issue 1099s to her. Think she’ll find it convenient for herself, too: the S-corp is turning out to be a good way to run a minuscule business.

We were trying to figure out if there was a way I could carry her and maybe one other person as employees so we could buy an insurance plan through Copyeditor’s Desk. Maybe we could get a plan that would allow me to use it as Medigap coverage and her to get herself and the child covered. The problem is, though, our income isn’t yet steady enough to be sure the corporation can pay its share of the premiums reliably.

Well. If the new client who’s supposed to come onboard next month likes our work and turns into a steady thing, that could change. We’d only need one or maybe two such customers to build enough cash flow to allow the corporation to function more…corporately.

Had a bizarre experience yesterday while driving from the press down to meet Tina in Tempe. Scottsdale Road, the most convenient main drag from Scottsdale into the university district, has been under construction forever. They’ve got the curb lane shut down for miles, and in some places they’ve closed the middle lane, too. So I turned west onto McDowell, another six- or eight-lane main drag, to jog over to 64th, which would take me into Tempe via the scenic route through Papago Park. This would evade the lane closures and heavy equipment on Scottsdale, and besides, it’s a nice drive.

I’m cruising along in the left lane (because sooner or later I have to turn left to go south). There’s hardly any traffic to speak of.

All of a sudden this woman in a jeep-like vehicle comes roaring up beside me, opens her window in the 110-degree heat, and starts screaming at me.

I can’t hear her, of course, because my windows are closed and the air-conditioning is running, and I’m not about to open my window.

I have no idea what her problem is, but she is absolutely freaking BERSERK. She’s screaming like a harpy, not watching the road and yelling her head off.

Naturally, the signals turn red Every. Single. Time I drive up to one, and every time we stop she starts to scream again.

Why? I have no clue. I don’t believe I’ve done anything to set her (or anyone else) off. There’s no traffic. I’ve been in the left lane since I turned off Scottsdale Road. There was no one in the lane coming from the east when I entered it, because the light had just turned red in that direction. So I’m sure I didn’t cut her off. I’m not weaving back and forth. I’m driving the limit or slightly faster, and so I’m not holding up traffic in the fast lane. As far as I can tell, she’s crazy in the abstract.

Adding to the weirdness, she’s an expensively groomed, professionally dressed (as far as I could see) young woman. She doesn’t look like a nut case. But she sure is acting like one.

Now she gets out her cell phone and starts taking pictures of my car and me! She drops behind me, apparently snaps a photo of my license plate, then zooms back up beside me, takes her hands off the steering wheel at 40 or 45 mph, leans her head out the window, and shoots a picture of me through the windshield!

Holy mackerel!

Guess I’m just lucky all she had to shoot with was a camera. Most of the nut cases around here carry pistols in their cars.

Now she veers in front of my car and jams on her brakes.

Fortunately, no eastbound traffic is coming in the opposite lanes. I’m already in the left westbound lane, and I spot a car dealership on the south side of the road. Slide into the turn lane and dart into the dealership’s parking lot, figuring at least there’ll be some men hanging around in there. This maneuver gives her the slip, and she continues on down McDowell.

Hung around the parking lot for a few minutes. By the time I got back on the road, she was gone.

This place is just crazy. Just batshit crazy.

An attraction along the scenic route through Papago Park. LOL! The locals have as many holes in their heads as the rocks do.

Image: Papago Buttes. Joe Flood. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Gunfire? Reconsidering the suburbs…

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Carol (accountant/neighbor right across the street) e-mailed to ask if I’d heard Sunday morning’s gunshot fusillade. She was awakened by the racket, too (for me, it was just another sleepless night; she actually has work she needs to be awake for), and she called the cops. They told her several other people had called in a shots-fired report.

Hm. I thought it was firecrackers. Our idiot legislators have legalized fireworks, and so every one of their fellow morons—and we have more than our share of those in this state—has run out and stocked up on every incendiary device one can now get one’s hands on. The Safeway, if you can imagine, is selling fireworks that will blow your fingers off and scorch your eyes blind. But by golly, we wouldn’t want Big Brother robbing our kids of a nostalgic childhood experience!

Oh. Sorry. Back on topic:

Firecrackers. Pretty Daughter‘s teenage kids were outside—I could hear them laughing when I got up to investigate. And an  unmuffled car with a boombox, exactly the description of Pretty Daughter’s girl child’s boyfriend’s vehicle, roared off down the street forthwith.

The gangbangers around here favor automatic and semiautomatic weapons. This was not one of those. If it was a gun, the person was using an old-fashioned six-shooter, and that is so unlikely in this neighborhood as to defy credibility. Also, the reports—about twenty of them—were not as sharp as pistol shots.

But Carol is pretty sure it was a gun. And Sally was up that night, too—her lights were on; she turned them off and apparently went back to bed after the dust settled. I imagine Sally, who’s been around the block a few times, also called 911.

Damn, but sometimes one tires of living in…shall we say, a socioecomically mixed neighborhood. Those slums west of 19th and north of Dunlap really do affect the quality of life in adjacent middle- and working-class neighborhoods. And as the economy slides deeper into actual depression for low-income workers, who now comprise the largest numbers of permanently unemployed Americans, the area to the west is getting worse and worse. Really, none of the grocery stores and other retail establishments that serve our neighborhood are safe to patronize now. The Albertson’s has been hopeless for a long time, but the Sprouts across the road from it used to be OK. Now I won’t go into either shopping center. The Ranch market has taken the place of the defunct Food City in serving the Latino population—it feels a little safer because most of the customers are families, and because the proprietors have hired a security guard to patrol the parking lot.

But really: who wants to do their grocery shopping under the gaze of an armed guard?

I love my house, I love my immediate neighborhood, and I love my life in the central city. BUT… Do I really want to spend my old age dodging bullets?

This brings me back to the possibility of buying one of the hugely devalued houses in the new tracts up against the White Tanks mountains. One thing you have to say about an old folks’ “community” (snark) in a new settlement occupied entirely by middle-class whites: not a lot of gunfire will be going on there. Consequently, not a lot of cop helicopters will be rending the quiet of the evening hours (you can set your clock by the 11:00 p.m. cop fly-by here).

I’d love to have a beautiful new house like the models out there. But on the other hand, how could I live without choir, without my friends, and without seeing my son at the drop of a hat? And how could I get by without enough adjunct teaching income to take up the financial slack?

By way of wasting time when I should be working, I tricked out a little pro-and-con analysis. Listed twelve items in favor of living in Trilogy and twelve agin’ it. Then assigned a value to each, according to how important it is to me, subjectively. The result was a little surprising:

I expected the point spread between the pro’s and the cons would be a lot wider, much heavier in favor of staying put where I’m as happy as I’m ever likely to get. But there’s only a four-point difference between the reasons to move out there and the reasons not to move out there.

Some items, of course, are huge: dodging automatic fire stacks up just as heavily as being able to see my son on short notice. Others are more ambiguous: I don’t consider a new house to be especially important, especially given the solid construction and pleasant ambience of the 40-year-old house I’m living in. To my mind, the absence of rambunctious, noisy teenagers is not necessarily a good thing; hence the relatively low “7” on the pro side.

Judging by these dozen criteria, it’s almost a toss-up whether I stay in the increasingly violent inner city or follow my kind to the Holsum Bread suburbs.

Realistically? I can’t afford to live out there. Certainly not while I’m tethered to the upside-down house M’hijito and I got ourselves into: to pay that bill, I have to have a job, and the only work I can hope to get is part-time adjunct community college teaching. There are no community colleges within sane driving distance of the White Tank mountains. Plus no matter how much “greener” construction might save on the utility bills, a $218/month homeowner’s association fee is out of the question.

Which, yea verily, brings us to the homeowner’s association. Notwithstanding phenomena like Dave’s Marina, Used Car Lot, and Weed Arboretum (now mercifully replaced by the tidy accountants across the street), I do not want to live in an HOA. I like to hang my laundry on the line…the last thing I need is some supercilious association telling me I can’t put my sheets out on the back porch. Or, more to the point, that I have to spend $350 to $500 I can’t afford to replace a dryer I don’t really  need or, now, even want.

Guess I’m your basic trailer trash, eh? Looks like this is where I belong.

😉

Bird Rescue

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So, late this afternoon I notice the swimming pool is laboring, choked by all the crud sifting down from the hated palm trees. I’m on the phone leaving word with the accountant’s answering machine about a new little project I’ve cooked up while running across the yard to shut off the pump when I spot yet another bird in the sink of death.

That’s what a pool is, you know: a sink of death. It kills all sorts of small things, from little insects to little children, with birds about a third of the way across the spectrum. In size, I mean.

This one, though, has not yet drowned. It’s managed to climb aboard Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s hose, where it’s perched next to the intake. Because the pump is so thickly clogged, not enough current is sucking to pull the bird off its life raft.

It was a fledgling white-wing, the second to fall into the pool in the past week or ten days. So stunned was the chick that it allowed me to reach in, wrap a paper towel around it, and lift it out of the water.

But…then what?

It couldn’t come in the house: Cassie would make real short work of it. For the same reason, it couldn’t be left on the ground. If Cassie didn’t grab it, the ants would soon eat it alive.

I carried it around to the west side and set it on the shaded concrete bench, figuring it would probably die soon enough on its own.

Half an hour or so later, peered out the Arcadia door to see it was standing on its little feet, still all wadded up and unhappy-looking but distinctly alive. Put some water in a plant dish and set that and a handful of birdseed on the bench. The bird was not interested.

Went out to wrestle with the pool, around phone calls from Gerardo, who claimed to be trying to get a palm tree dude over here this afternoon or Saturday. Took some doing to persuade him that when I said I intend to spend tomorrow in Waddell, I’m not kidding. Pulled Harvey out of the drink; cleaned out his leaf-catcher and the pump pot but decided to let the extremely premature backwash job wait until after the promised palm tree guys have come and gone, since they’ll make an unholy mess of the pool and the pump will have to be backwashed again. Which reminds me: I’ve lost the bonnet to the water-hose-run debris collector.

Damn! Another Home Depot run. Already $126 in the red this month; by the time these guys are done, I’ll be a good $350 in the hole.

But while I’m out there, I realize a couple of adult doves are flying around with uncharacteristic bravado. They must be looking for their pup. So that means the fledgling belongs on the east side of the house, somewhere near its nest. There’s another fledgling hopping around in the tree, which must mean the mating doves haven’t yet lost all their brood to the pool.

After awhile, I spot their nest: about two stories high in a limb of the devil-pod tree. You’d need a cherry-picker to lift this bird back up there. Hm.

Finally, I decide to put the little bird on top of the metal storage shed, which by this time in the afternoon is fully in the shade. But it’s a 110 degrees out there, and the metal is too hot for it to sit on any length of time. A large, flat plant dish, retrieved from the  junk pile hidden behind that side of the house, would work to insulate and hold the bird, though. So I haul out a stepladder and set this thing atop the metal roof.

Go and retrieve the bird, which still shows no inclination to try to escape.

However, when I climb up on the ladder and go to set it in the plant dish, it doesn’t like that idea at all. It panics and tries to fly away, skittering across the corrugated metal roof and falling down behind the shed, between its back side and the concrete wall.

Seriously damn! Dead bird, for sure!

Well, no. I peek back in there and see the bird has landed on its feet and looks OK: a great deal better than it looked when plucked from the pool. The old boards I hid back there years ago are level and coated with an inch or so of composting devil pods and leaves, forming a soft substrate…probably not unlike a nest. It’s shaded and cool back there, and there’s no way Cassie can reach the bird. Probably there are precious few ants back there, too—it’ll take them a while to find the little thing, anyway.

As I write this, it’s coming onto the middle of the night. Out of curiosity, I took the flashlight out and peeked behind the shed, expecting to find an avian corpse out there.

Gone!

The bird has flown the coop. Couldn’t see it on the ground, either. So presumably it must have eventually dried out enough to take flight and, with any luck at all, made its way back into the tree and maybe even back to the nest.

Let’s just hope after all that it remembers to stay away from the darned pool!

Images:

Two White-winged Doves perching on a cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
A White-winged Dove perching on a Santa Rita Prickly Pear cactus in Tucson, Arizona, USA. Snowmanradio. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Wafting on the Wind…

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It’s 10:00 p.m. and I just finished the last revamped syllabus for the summer courses, which begin to incorporate my various schemes to make life terrifying interesting for my students. Been a bit silent on the blog because of the workload and the various adventures.

This morning my friend KJG came into town to socialize. She lives on the far side of the galaxy, halfway to San Diego, and so getting together can be a project. She brought her doberman pinscher along to schmooze with Cassie the Corgi. That was entertaining.

KJG’s dobe was a rescue dog that came to K and her husband with some serious behavioral problems. Today, though, the dog is impeccably well mannered. She’s mellow, quiet, and amazingly intelligent. Amazingly alert, too: very little gets past this animal.

Contemplating that very beautiful beast, it crossed my mind to wish I could still handle a big dog. As much as a large, powerful animal can be a challenge, it’s also reassuring to have something that will take out an intruder or die trying. Cassie slept through the guy trying to get in the side door a while back and remained silent while the alarm was squealing. KJG’s dog would have shot out of the bedroom and down the hall before I could’ve regained consciousness from the deep sleep that the door alarm interrupted.

A week or ten days ago, a couple of guys practicing the same MO—quietly breaking in at four in the morning—tied up an elderly couple and beat the bejayzus out of them. Imagine beating up a pair of 80-year-olds!

Nothing like a little meth to cut the boredom factor.

Speaking of the which, yesterday along about 2:30, after I’d come home from eight hours of driving around the city, I picked up the phone to chat with La Maya. Carrying it around the property, I walked into the garage for something and remarked that Phew! It smelled like something had died out there!

La Maya said she’d smelled a bad odor when she got home, too: when she walked from the garage through the courtyard into her house, she thought she smelled gas.

I said it didn’t smell like gas; it smelled like sulfur. And yes, it was indeed outdoors…I could smell it in the side yard and in the sheltered back patio.

But by the time I got inside, the stench had wafted into the house so that the family room and dining room stank to high heaven! Dayum!

La Maya also could smell it at her house. We debated whether we should report this, and if so, to whom. Ultimately we decided she would call Southwest Gas and I would call the City.

The City sent an engine full of firemen, who did nothing.

Southwest Gas sent a guy who inspected both houses and the gas lines in the alleys. He couldn’t find a gas leak. He agreed that he didn’t think it smelled like natural gas and speculated that it could be sewer gas released by some of the construction in the area.

I said I used to live near 15th Avenue and Osborn, where, because an excess of high-density housing has overwhelmed the sewer system, the air stinks of sewer gas most of the time. So I know what sewer gas smells like, and that ain’t it.

He allowed as to how it didn’t smell exactly like sewer gas to him, either. Whatever, he opined that it was not flammable and that it was outdoors, and so he went on his way.

Yes. Smells like natural gas or rotten eggs (i.e., “sulfur”).

A fair breeze was blowing in from the southwest, meaning we were upwind from the nearest construction, about a mile away. And also meaning it was blowing in from the gang-infested slums that have risen from the blight between us and the freeway. I suspect we were smelling meth in the cooking process.

It’s not the first time a whiff of it has perfumed the family room, either. I’ve smelled it several times over the past few weeks. Figured it was eau de doggo, since I haven’t committed an excess of cleaning while I’ve been working myself stupid lately. But Cassie is not a smelly dog at all. If she smelled like that, I’d have noticed the odor on her, not in the air.

gaaaahhhhh! I need to move away from here! Sure would be nice if I could afford a comparable house in a safer part of town. Or a safer part of the world.

But I can’t.

Makes a large dog with sturdy fangs and hair-trigger nerves look like a charming pet.

Image: European dobermann pinscher. By Ilicivan at en.wikipedia. Public domain.

Killing Harry: A True Story

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Here’s another post from my former student, Anita M. Martinez, who’s kindly holding the fort while I index a volume of medieval European history. This is a great story!

Knowing I’d killed a man was a horrific feeling—one I hope never to experience again. Had he been some sort of perpetrator, I could have felt justified and maybe even triumphant. But Harry was minding his own business, that unforgettable day in September 1994.

“Oh dear God, I’ve killed him!” my mind screamed as I ran toward Harry’s lifeless body, his arms stretched out on the ground. His bright blue eyes glazed over as they stared straight up to the sky. He wasn’t breathing!

“I have to revive this man, or at least try,” I told myself in a panic, wishing to God I’d paid more attention to that Red Cross CPR instructor eighteen years ago. My eyes zeroed in on his white, parched lips. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if I could bring myself to administer mouth-to-mouth on a man I didn’t know.  Strange, how the mind can drift to silly things in the throes of catastrophe.

What brought me to this moment? Shortly before I killed Harry, my children, namely my boys, nagged, nagged, and nagged me some more until with an exasperated sigh, I gave in, agreeing to take them to Toys R Us to get a stupid toy truck called the Big, Big Loader. They had just seen the commercial with, you know, one of those jingles that reverberates in your head until you find yourself waking up at four a.m. ready to stick your head in the toilet to flush it away.

Our rusty 1964 Chevy Malibu felt hot as a kiln when I piled the kids in shortly before sunset.  I fastened Erika, my five-month-old daughter, into her car seat with the one and only seat belt her father installed in the car.

As the searing September sun fought its descent, the Malibu chugged westbound on Thunderbird Road. My boys were repeating and repeating and repeating the Big, Big Loader jingle. Sweat trickled from my temples. My thighs glued themselves to the Malibu’s vinyl seats while my nerves came unglued. The sun was in on it too, inflicting a blinding glare as the Malibu bulleted through the intersection at 60th Street.

By the time I hit the brakes, it was too late. With a smoking rubber screech and sickening thud, the Malibu’s heavy grill smacked into Harry and his shiny motorcycle. The force of the crash threw Harry into the opposite lane, a good 20 feet from the point of impact.

My adrenaline pumped so hard when I threw the car door open, that I forgot to put it in park. As if to tip toe from the scene, it lurched ahead, driverless, with my children in it. I chased it, jumped in, and jammed that gearshift into park. Glancing quickly at my bewildered children, I ascertained they were uninjured.

I ran to Harry’s lifeless body. Ah yes, CPR. Simple as “A-B-C”: Airway – Breathing – Circulation. Assessing those white, parched lips, I made the split-second decision to skip steps “A” & “B,” proceeding to step “C.”

Gingerly, I placed my hands somewhere (anywhere!) on Harry’s chest and pressed. Suddenly, Harry came to life, pleading with a twang, “Ma’am, DON’T TOUCH ME!”

I screamed as if I’d seen a ghost and began running in circles like a mad woman. You’d think relief would have been mine at Harry’s sudden revival, but embarrassment at my own stupidity took center stage.

I ran back to the steam-hissing Malibu, peering in like a Jurassic Park dinosaur. The baby’s bottom lip was trembling, so I took her out and held her, telling Henry, Jacob, and my stepdaughter, Kaycee, to stay put.

Several of the female residents on Thunderbird Road emerged from their homes, like zombies at sundown. They circled me slowly, orderlies trying to calm an escaped lunatic.

“Honey, why don’t you hand me your baby?” requested a woman. Another offered me a murky glass of lukewarm water, which I reluctantly sipped (just to appease her). Yet another, with unblinking, cow-like eyes, took apparent pleasure in telling me I had run a red light. She must have been a hall monitor in sixth grade.

Phoenix Fire Station Number 31 was four blocks west, so instantly we heard sirens. The medics swiftly responded to Harry, who still lay in the street. Traffic in both directions had ceased, so everyone saw the show.

Amid the sounds of a wailing siren and chopper blades overhead, I found myself strapped to a board in the back of an ambulance, lying next to my 9-year-old son, Henry, also strapped to a board—a scene straight out of M*A*S*H.  Jacob, Kaycee, and Baby Erika got to ride in the fire truck behind us, en route to Paradise Valley Hospital, where a rotund, red-faced Phoenix PD officer awaited me.

“The guy you hit is alive, but they’re air-evacing him to Barrow’s,” advised the officer, while presenting me with my citation for running a red light. I knew it couldn’t be good (Harry’s condition, and well, yes, the citation, too) so I began to sob. The officer lost his patience.

“Ma’am! DID-YOU-HEAR-WHAT-I-SAID? He’s going to LIVE!”

The days that followed engulfed me with depression and guilt, knowing it was all my fault Harry lay in the sterile confines of Barrow’s Neurological Institute, probably surrounded by plastic tubes and beeping machines.

“Maybe you can bake him a batch of chocolate chip cookies,” suggested my mom.

Buying Harry’s forgiveness with baked goods was never to be. Luckily, he agreed to a $12,000 insurance settlement plus coverage of medical charges. Harry’s thumb sustained a fracture, which was the extent of his injury. (Thank God!)

As for the Chevy Malibu? Believing it was still operable, I sold it to some guy for 100 bucks. He ended up towing it to a wrecking yard on the west side, he told me with disgust. Not only that, but the radiator was flat as a pancake. And no, it DIDN’T run. He wanted his money back.

No dice, friend.

Add fraud to my rap sheet.

🙄

Image: Spanish cemetery. Steven J. Dunlop. Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Bureaucrats and the Workman Waltz

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Another monthly bill just arrived from Wellcare, the provider of my Medicare Part D (prescription drug) coverage. For the second time in our year-long relationship, they announce that I owe not one but two payments at once.

What’s happening here is Wellcare wants direct access to my bank account. They want me to give them my account number so they can engross monthly premiums whenever they feel like it. When I point out that I can EFT the money to them through my bank, they try to say my only alternative to letting them into my account is to pay by check, which I do not care to do. When I push back, I’m told well, yeah, sure I can pay by the credit union’s BillPay function, but it won’t post for a week or so, which means I have to pay well in advance.

O.K. That’s what I’ve been doing. Wellcare bills a month in advance. On January 10 I EFTed the February bill, which was due February 15; it cleared my account on January 12. How do I know it was actually the bill they claim is unpaid? Because they jacked up their premiums by four bucks, and last month’s bill was the first at the increased price. So I know that payment cleared my account, a month and three days before the due date.

Fortunately, their phone lines (presumably to a call center somewhere on the far side of Malaysia) are open until 2:00 a.m. EST. Sooo….

One ringie-dingie…two ringie dingies…about 40 ringie-dingies’ worth of  climbing around the aggravating phone tree…

And we reach a human being with a distinct but unidentifiable accent and a voice that makes her sound about fourteen. This is entertaining.

After making a pass at trying to suggest I must have missed last month’s bill, she caves at the revelation that the payment that cleared my account was for $23.80, not the prior premium amount of $19.70, and she allows that yeah, they received it.

Now she attempts to explain why they sent a bill demanding $47.60 even though they received my last payment on time. Her ever-so-slightly fractured English delivers an explanation along these lines:

The reason you were billed twice is that your last bill was sent out before you made your January 12 payment.

{moment of silence}

“Wait. Let me get this straight:

• You send me a bill.
• When I receive the bill, I pay it.
• Because I pay the bill promptly after I receive it and not before I receive it, I get double-billed on the next statement?”

“No, no! that’s not it,” says she. “It’s that the bill you have right now was printed before we posted your last payment.”

“Ah. Yes. Of course. I understand.”

Hee heeeeeee! I personfully refrain from remarking that maybe they shouldn’t assume, a month and three days before a bill is due, that they’re not going to receive payment.

Hilarious!

Well, in the same envelope came an announcement that they’re dispensing with monthly statements and sending coupon books, which makes so much sense a person wonders why on earth they haven’t always done it. Actually, one wonders why Wellcare won’t let you pay a year or six months at a time, as the Medicare Part B insurer does. Wouldn’t that a) put a heckuva lot of subscribers’ payments in their investment accounts in advance of a heckuva lot of due dates and b) eliminate a surprising amount of paperwork and hassle for all involved?

So that was a fun way to expend some time. The only thing more amusing is the Workman Waltz.

This morning the roofer had tons of asphalt shingles piled on the ridge of my roof and, while I was taking a 7:30 a.m. walk with La Maya, had a vast dumpster dropped on my driveway. I’d asked to have it put as close to the west edge of the driveway as possible, so I could get my car out. What I didn’t realize is how huge the container would be. There was no way I could squeeze my car past it, even if it weren’t placed so close to the eaves that I couldn’t open the garage door.

So the minute I shoot into the house, it’s on the phone to the roofer. He calls the trucker back, and they good-naturedly move the damn thing so I can remove the car from the garage and park it on the street.

Yesterday, when plans for this dance were being laid, RooferDude said he was going to have his crew rip off the existing shingles today, unless it was raining. I pointed out a 30 percent chance of rain was predicted for today, and I didn’t want the roof removed if it was gonna rain. He agreed that they would put off the job until Tuesday, by which time the rain was expected to pass and a freeze warning would be in place.

So with the car parked on the street, I’m sitting here building next summer’s freshman comp courses, when Cassie starts to bark at some mysterious thumping. Look outside thru the windows. Trucks.

A half-dozen Mexican guys are on the roof, getting ready to prize off the shingles. Weather report says there’s now a 40 percent chance of rain today; I put it at 100 percent, since La Maya and I got sprinkled on while we were circumnavigating the park. I trot outside and ask them what they’re doing, because their boss said they weren’t supposed to be here today.

One, and only one, of the men speaks fluent English. He says, “Well…well, but it’s not raining.”

I say (stepping around a container of salsa someone has dropped and left spilled all over the middle of the accessible part of the driveway), “Well…well, but it’s GOING to rain. And I don’t want that roof torn off there when it’s just about to rain and we’re supposed to get thunderstorms!”

“I’m calling the boss!”

“Bueno.” I go inside and dial up the boss, too. He doesn’t answer my call, but apparently the crew foreman gets through; he tells them to stand down. They climb off the roof and go away, bearing the busted-open salsa container, which I placed in the back of one of their pickups.

An hour or two after they left, it rained. Pretty generously…certainly enough to cause a leak, if they’d pulled off the shingles and not nailed down enough plastic tarp to cover half of Disneyland. So far, none of the high winds and pyrotechnics one expects with a Sonoran Desert thunderstorm have come up. But the night is young.

And dark. My car is parked on the street out in front of my house, about as vulnerable a spot as you can find this side of the parking lot at the nearby Metrocenter Ghost Mall, which has the highest rate of car theft and break-ins in the city. One leaves one’s car parked outside around here at one’s peril.

RooferDude says he’ll have the job done in a couple of days. We’ll see about that.

Image: Songbird Perched on an Asphalt Shingle Roof. TriviaKing. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.