Cranky as a cat

Betcha can’t guess what this is:

THAT is a dog-resistant cockroach-bait cage, custom designed to keep Ruby and Charley from eating the cockroach poison laid out there to catch the latest resident of the garage. The rock on top keeps Ruby from pushing the old fan cage over to the wall and then flipping it up with her nose or a paw so she can get at the roach baits and scarf them down. The wood chip, retrieved from the grill fuel, is there so Roachie can get in, since the fan cage’s wires are too close together to let her through.

Three of those are placed strategically around the garage just now.

This morning alone, I have walloped my bare feet on those damn things not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR GODDAMN PAINFUL TIMES! Don’t think I’ve broken a toe (yet), but it sure as hell hurts.

I’d managed to get rid of the roaches. Haven’t had any around for years. The new resident is a different species from the usual babes we have here in Arizona, the big brown fellows who live in the damned palm trees. This little guy is shorter, fat, and almost black. Looks a great deal like the Broad Keys roach. Cute.

And where do cockroaches come from? I’ll tell you where they come from: They travel in goddamn politically correct PAPER GROCERY BAGS, that’s where they come from.

Cockroaches inhabit warehouses, and they inhabit shipping containers. When cartons of grocery bags are stored in warehouses in transit, roaches find them, chew on them, and take up residence in them. They lay their eggs in the stored grocery bags. So when the paper grocery bags arrive at your house, helpfully given to you by politically correct corporations like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, the roach eggs hatch. And pretty quick you have happy throngs of roaches running around your house. Or garage, if you’re smart(?) enough to store the bags out there, or if you throw them into the recycling bin that you store in the garage.

So. Yes. The politically correct grocery bags discarded in the politically correct trashbin: That would be where the roach came from.

Woke up crabby as a cat this morning, and the cockroach bait waltz did not help things.

Sat down at 5 a.m. to finish off a client’s project and ship it off to him. Figured it would take about 20 minutes. Got up from the computer at 7 a.m.: two interminable hours later. Two interminable hours of tooth-grinding electronic ditz.

It being a little overcast, breezy, and not too crushingly hot, the dogs & I went for a pre-breakfast walk. But by 7 a.m., rush hour was well under way. We could not get across Feeder Street Northwest. I finally gave up and turned around. So we went back into the westerly end of the ‘hood by way of circling around to the house and collecting at least a few steps of our doggywalk. Naturally, we encounter some guy with a great Dane-like thing (ears uncropped, so he probably got it from the pound or some such), off the leash. Dane is real interested in two rabbit-sized corgis. Dude manages to grab the dog and starts struggling trying to get the leash on. While he’s wrestling with that, I dodge down a side street and shortly get out of sight and out of mind.

That cut about two blocks off said doggywalk.

Fed the dogs, fed myself (after a fashion), and then decided to pay the $251 bill outstanding to the Mayo Clinic.

Medicare and Medigap paid about $75 of the $325± said outfit billed me for the pointless annual physical they demand you show up for in order to stay on their rolls. The Mayo wishes to purge itself of Medicare patients, since we’re not very profitable — Medicare keeps prices down more efficiently than do insurance companies, which themselves work pretty hard at the task. The way they get rid of you is with this rule: if you don’t spend some money there every year, whether you need care or not, you can’t come back.

Since hospitals in Arizona leave quite a bit to be desired, it’s very much in one’s interest to stay with the Mayo.

So I’d paid the little bit Medicare/Medigap remitted and finally decided that was as much as I was gonna get. Paying is a hassle unless you want to send a check — I prefer to put these bills on the card so as to get credit toward the cash kickback AMEX provides. To pay with a card, you have to dork around on their website, which, the last time I looked, is a true, dyed-in-the-wool PITA. Alternatively, you can call and hang on the line until you get through to a CSR, who’ll take your credit-card information.

This is another hassle: they first tell you the wait is “longer than five minutes.” It’s not: it’s about two or at the outside three minutes. Then they while away your time nagging you to go to their website and pay there…ignoring the obvious fact that if one wanted to fart with the impenetrable website, you would not be farting with their phone tree. Would you!?

So I finally get through to a lady and at that point things proceed quickly and smoothly. Once you get a human on the line there, the place is pretty easy and pleasant to deal with.

Now I decide nothing will do but what I have to clean up the unholy mess I’ve allowed to accrue in the Funny Farm…speaking of things impenetrable. I have the bad habit of setting things down where I finish with them and then erasing them from my mind. I don’t even see the piles after awhile.

It takes over an hour just to pick up the litter, throw away the trash that should’ve been thrown out in the first place instead of left to accrue like dust on a tabletop, scour the pans I left to soak in the utility sink, stub my feet against the roach cages, wrestle two loads of laundry into and out of the washer, unload and reload the dishwasher, scrub the toilet and bathroom…arrrrhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I. Hate. Housecleaning.

Just hate it. Why? Because it is a hopelessly futile endeavor. You can clean until you’re blue in the face and a day later the place is littered and dirty again. What is the point?

The cordless phone in the kitchen died. After a significant period of puzzling, I discovered it would recharge in one of the other recharger cradle thingies. More puzzling and dorking around took place. Finally I decided the kitchen recharger had given up the ghost. Threw it in the trash, leaving a homeless handset and a disgusted human.

Lovely.

This morning I take the extension out of the living-room cabinet, which entails moving a VERY heavy piece of furniture across the tiles, climbing in behind it, unplugging the cord, unstringing it through the hole I’d drilled in the back of the cabinet, and dragging it into the kitchen. And of course pushing the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place and centering it under a picture.

Plug it into the outlet, set the phone handset on it, and…it doesn’t work…

WTF?

Maybe the outlet has died. I plug it into another outlet. It doesn’t work.

So this morning between banging around and emptying the trash into another collection bin, I happen to study the moved recharger, which flickers off when I pick it up. Then realize…wa-a-a-a-aitaminit. There’s nothing WRONG with the thing. The wire has come loose at the connection to the base.

Could it be?

Now I go to retrieve the discarded charger from the garbage. Naturally I can’t find it. I have to dig all the way down to the BOTTOM of two weeks’ worth of trash and garbage to pull the damn thing out of there.

And yeah. When I push the wire connection together firmly and plug the damn thing into the outlet, it comes right on!

Crap.

I decide I’d better not put this one into the cabinet, because I suspect the loose connection will come apart again, and that is another emergency-if-I’m-on-the-floor extension. Don’t want to find that thing dead when I really need it.

So I have to push the VERY heavy piece of furniture out, wrestle with the wiring again, wrestle some more to put the phone back and replug it, and push the VERY heavy piece of furniture back into place. Again.

The temperamental phone is working again. Let’s hope it persists.

Do you wonder why, at 12:04 p.m., I want a bourbon and water?

P.S. WHY IS IT that you can proofread a blog post a half-dozen times and STILL not catch all the stupid typos in it??? I am SOOOO TIRED of having this machine display my idiocy!