Derailed Day

Well, a LOT got done today. But none of it was anything planned. All the schemes on the schedule for this day were totally derailed.

All I wanted to do was paint the east wall. Yesterday I bought a gallon of good-quality paint at Dunn-Edwards, plus a roller designed for use on cinderblock.

Some years ago, Bila the Bosnian Painter (my favorite painter) covered the Funny Farm in the color I craved. He repaired and painted the trim. And all was well. Toward the end of the job, I reminded him that I wanted the wall facint the road along the east side painted to match the house. He’d…well…sorta forgotten about that and was running out of paint. So he diluted what remained and sprayed it valiantly upon the wall.

It looked OK. For a few months. But shortly it started to fade. A couple of strokes where he’d squirted it especially exuberantly with his sprayer retained the color, but mostly it looks like somebody tried to tag it with graffiti. Altogether lacking in panache. So: today was the day to get rid of that.

But.

I overslept. Didn’t get out of the sack until 7 a.m., about two hours late. Then, stupidly, I started the day by farting around on the Internet: reading the news (such as it is), answering the emails, screwing around on Facebook.

Facebook has got to be THE biggest timesuck ever invented by the mind of Man.

At some point, I stroll out in the garage, and out of curiosity decide to see whether the defective hatchback gate on the Venza has decided to work today.

It has not.

In fact, instead of JUST not working in the punch-a-button automatic mode, it now is unusable in the manual mode, too. If you open it manually and stick your head into the back end of the car, the damn thing closes on your neck.

Back to the Internet. Cruise around for quite some time before I find the symptoms described, not in any official way but only by other hapless Toyota owners.

(You may be sure I will NEVER buy another Toyota again. I probably never will buy another car again.) It’s either the struts (cost to repair: $3,000 to $4,000) or the lift motor (cost unspecified).

I do not, do not, do NOT ever want to deal with Bell Road Toyota again.

By now it’s around 10 a.m., so I call my  mechanic, Chuck. Reach his partner, Pete.

Can they work on the car on the extended warranty?

Not sure, sez he. Depends on who the warranty is written with. This is not specified in the effing crooked paperwork.

Call Camelback Toyota. Get the service manager there. I say I bought the car at Bell Road and never want to do business with them again. Like everyone who has ever heard of Bell Road Toyota, he laughs and says ,”Yeah, I hear ya!”

Bell Road’s reputation precedes it…. Too bad it didn’t precede into my precincts before I bought this car there.

He says that for the repair to be covered, I have to have bought “Platinum” coverage. This of course sounds like an excuse not to cover it. He agrees the struts cost three to four grand; if it’s the motor, says he, that’ll be around $2,500. I say I’m living on Social Security and can’t afford that, so if it’s not covered, then I have a “new” car from Toyota that will always be defective. I mention Funny about Money; I describe the number of readers who see it, by subscription, through Facebook, and through Twitter, and I suggest yet another report on the Venza interlude is not the best thing for Toyota’s good name.

He says, “WAIT, DON’T HANG UP! Give me the VIN and I can find out what coverage you bought.” I figure there’s a good chance I did shell out extra for this, because the SOB who tied up my entire afternoon high-pressuring into every extra charge Toyota could dream up probably added that on.

Camelback Toyota guy rummages through his computer and says it looks like I probably have the coverage. (I read this to mean “I’m going to talk my boss into covering this, if I can, on the grounds that it will support the company’s goodwill.”) We agree that I’ll bring the car in on Tuesday for them to figure out what’s wrong with it and decide whether they’ll do the job as warranty work or if they’ll try to give me another royal screwing. If the latter is the case, then the car will just go through the rest of its life without a functioning back hatchback door.

Fvck.

By now it’s around 11 a.m. I haven’t even had my customary pot of high-test coffee, to say nothing of anything to eat. I’m too effing mad to eat, though.

But the dog food is running low and I should’ve made a new batch yesterday so I decide to haul the bag of defrosted pork out of the fridge and cook up some more chow for the corgis.

I grab the baggie full of pork and…S-L-O-P-P-P!

Red, bloody juices squirt out of the Ziplock bag. A lake of red bloody juices spreads across the glass shelf occupied by said baggie. It cascades down the inside walls and floods the shelf below, and from there drips down the back of the fridge to puddle on the ledge behind the produce drawers and drizzle down into the bottom of the refrigerator, soaking the styrofoam thing behind the produce drawers.

What. A. Fvcking. MESS!

Most of the refrigerator now has to be taken apart and sanitized.

This chore occupies the better part of an hour. But — look on the bright side! — it does force me to collect and throw out a lot of unidentifiable rotten stuff.

That’s good.

I guess.

Now I get on with cooking the dog food. This is not a difficult job, but it’s messy. And just yesterday the kitchen counters were scrubbed clean and polished to a high glow. By the time I finish, of course they’re covered with grease. So I not only have two dirty pans to scour and the food processor bowl to wash and the giant mixing bowl to wash, I also have to clean and polish the tile. Again.

Residing in the blood-washed fridge, not yet spoiled, are the remains of a roast Costco chicken carcass. Royally tired of meals from this tasty but oversalted treat, I decide to cut off the meat, run it through the food processor, and add it to the dog food.

This almost doubles the amount of food today’s creation yields. But in the process of course I cut myself with an ultra-sharp kitchen knife. While I’m elbow-deep in meat. Cooked meat. But still. Meat.

I soldier on till the job is done. Then head back to the bathroom, un-bandage the other cut finger (which also has been bathing in bloody pork juice and chicken grease), grab the antiseptic wash the Mayo Clinic gave me, and scrub the bejayzus out of my hands. Apply new bandages to cut fingers. Pray (or whatEVER) for the best.

Clean the kitchen.

I still haven’t had breakfast.

Nor, BTW, have I performed my most recent self-appointed regime: the daily dog-hair cleanup.

Realizing that one could theorize that part or all of the old-lady vertigo I’ve been enjoying could be blamed on allergies and the resultant stuffy head that has plugged my ears to the point where I can barely effing HEAR, a week or so ago I threw out the 10-year-old pillows, replaced them with new uncomfortable pillows, washed everything on the bed and subjected it to mite-killing ironing from a Shark set at “blowtorch,” cleaned the floors until you could eat off them (safely!), and took it upon myself to run the dog-hair-catching bed throw through the dryer EVERY day and, also, EVERY day, to dust-mop the floor with a microfiber rag.

This has made a huge difference. As we scribble, I’m Benadryl-free and nose-squirt free, I can breathe, I can hear, and my head is not spinning anymore.

You would be ay-mazed at how much dog hair and dust settle on a tile floor in any given 24-hour period. Yesterday the floor was not only dust-mopped but vacuumed and wet-mopped. At around noon or 1 p.m. today, this is what came up…

Yuck. No wonder my head has been stuffed up. You can’t even see the skiff of dog hair in this image.

Fixed breakfast/lunch. Really didn’t have much in the house to eat. Did not feel like eating at all, much less scarfing down the usual mid-day feast. Microwaved two pieces of high-end “Sunday” bacon (reliably delicious) and fried up the rest of the frozen hash browns (reliably fattening). Consumed the desired swill of coffee.

Pal who’s a mortgage loan officer surfaced on the phone. He’s trying to get ahold of M’hijito. I and said Mortgage Pal are trying to move the kid to refinance the downtown house NOW GODDAMN IT BEFORE THE RATES GO ANY HIGHER.

The house has a 30/15 mortgage on it. We signed up for this instrument back in the day, before we realized the economy was skateboarding toward Hell and when we thought we were getting the place on the downtick, yea verily maybe at the bottom of the market. We figured M’hijito would stay here for a three to five years, until he got back on his feet; then we would sell the house, he would repay my grubstake, and he would have enough saved and in profit from the sale to go back to San Francisco, where he belongs.

Wrong.

Wrong.

And Wrong.

We still own the house. He still has his miserable job. He has no hope of ever being able to return to the City, where housing prices are so far out of reason that Donald Trump Himself couldn’t afford an apartment there, and he has despaired of ever getting another job worthy of the astronomically expensive elite college degree that he possesses.

It now looks like he will still be living in the house when that 15-year balloon comes due. And Mortgage Pal and I are dead certain that the crazy low interest rates will be long gone by then, and historically “normal” rates will be back.

Let me put it this way: when I bought my last house, my Realtor and I were beside ourselves with JOY when I wangled an 8.25% rate. We thought that was almost too good to be true. The ex- and I had paid rates as high as 13%, though 11% was more typical.

That’s t.y.p.i.c.a.l…

Getting the kid off the dime has been a bitch of a challenge. This afternoon in chatting, Mortgage Pal (who’s almost as venerable as I am) realized that 11% rates are outside the range of the next generation’s experience.

They just don’t get it. They don’t understand that the low rates we’ve seen over the past many months are FREAKING BIZARRE, and that one of these days (soon, with Trump in office) we will see rates go back to historically “normal” levels. Which ain’t gonna be 4.75%.

Hassling back and forth between those two consumed a fair amount of the afternoon.

Have I painted the wall?

No.

Have I taken the dogs for a walk today?

No.

It’s almost dark. I better go do that…