Monday
August 13
Yes. It looks like today is going to be one of those Days of Dorkification… You know: when everything you touch goes KERSPROOIINGG and everything you do to try to fix it makes it worse.
Today is Cleaning Lady Day. We might also name it after the proprietor: Ungrateful Wretch Day.
Yes. Yes, indeed. SOOOOOOO lazy am I that I resent having to get off my duff to clean house for the cleaning lady. 😀 Not to say /eyeroll/
Luz the Cleaning Lady Extraordinaire does SUCH a superb job that there’s no way I could match her performance, certainly not without working myself until I fall over face-forward. Even more extraordinary: the Funny Farm is her second house of the day! She starts across the street at Wonder Accountants’ place and then comes over here.
How she does this day after day (presumably she has enough clients to fill all the weekdays) and week after week escapes me. I would die if I had to do that kind of work, day in and day out.
Financially, she seems to be doing OK, if one makes a few assumptions and then does the math. Let’s say she has two houses a day and charges $80/house. That’s $160/day. If she works five days a week (haven’t asked her if she does, it bein’ none o’ my bidness!), that’s $800 a week. Given a couple weeks off, that’s $40,000 a year. And whaddaya bet she doesn’t pay taxes on that?
When a person uses their home as a place of business — as WonderAccountant does, and as I used to when I was working for GDU and freelancing — the cost of cleaning is, o’course, tax-deductible. That means Luz’s pay would show up on my tax returns. If the Taxman chose to look that up, then he could go after Luz for not declaring a full-time income. However, two things would militate against that:
* You’d have to deposit your pay in a checking account.
Many Latina/o immigrants don’t even have checking accounts: they just cash their check at a grocery store or a cambio.
* Everyone who was hiring you would have to declare your pay on their tax returns.
Unlikely. Many people who hire cleaning ladies are Junior League types: wealthy women who spend their days promoting their husband’s careers through highly visible “worthy” charitable works. They’re not hiring a cleaning lady so they can go out and earn their own salary. If you can’t deduct the cost from your taxes, why bother? Some people who do freelance work out of their homes (or are now work-from-home employees) don’t realize that every expense having to do with their house/workplace is potentially tax-deductible, at least to a degree. Plus many folks pay a cleaning lady in cash, so she doesn’t get ripped off at a cambio when she has to convert a check to dollars. This means she’s probably not declaring it… So neither are you, hm?
So, unless WonderAccountant or some other professional type among her clients is advising Luz on her taxes, Uncle Sam probably has no clue where she works and how much she makes.
At any rate, back to the introductory topic here: everything I touch today goes SPROOOIIINGGG!
Go to put a load of cleaning rags into the washer (it’s only been two weeks since she left them in the garage for me to wash them…), dump the coffee grounds on the potted plants in back…holeeeee sheee-ut! It’s 95 in the shade out there, under cloudy skies. Wunderground predicts a 15% chance of rain.
Yeah: 95 and humid. Where does it think we are: in Saudi Arabia?
****
Speaking of hot and humid…for the love of God, nearly a hundred people killed on Maui, and the searchers think they’ve covered only about 3% of the disaster field.
What. A. Horror.
Y’know…. Even if my own home were unaffected, I can’t imagine that I could go back to a normal life in a place where a catastrophe like that happened. Everywhere you turn your gaze, you must see destruction and signs of death. It’s hard to believe that many folks could make themselves return to Lahaina. It would be just too heart-breaking, too terrifying.
Adding to the horror of it, the town apparently had disaster alarms (so the residents thought…), but they didn’t sound!
WTF? How is that even possible? And can the survivors spell l-a-w-s-u-i-t?
More gawdawful yet, apparently the local officialdom had declared the fire 100% contained. Wrong!
Lawsuit hm? Spell that with ALL CAPS.
****
Hmmmm… In altogether different realms….
No sign of Luz, the Cleaning Lady from Heaven.
Her car is not across the street at WonderAccountant’s. The WonderAccountants are, as we scribble, touring northern California, having attended a memorial for an old friend in Reno and then having decided to continue to points westerly. WA says she thought Luz was supposed to come over today…but maybe she’s just running late.
Which is fine. The house is actually pretty clean…it really doesn’t need her ministrations today.
*****
BING BONG!
*****
Criminey. Speak of the Devil…
She apparently hasn’t gone to WA’s place yet…she must have figured there was no hurry, since they’re not home.
Drat. So that means no privacy this afternoon.
ohhhhhh well…. It also means we have here an excuse to get off our duff and go shopping for some of the stuff we’re running out of here…
Really, I do need to make a Sprouts run. I just don’t wanna.
Here in the lawless Wild West, it’s legal to sell certain cannabis products…over the counter, like so much candy. And Sprouts, bein’ a hippy-dippy sort of place, carries the stuff, to a degree. Specifically, they carry CBD products: body creams, lip balms, and the like.
Their CBD body lotion is the ONLY thing I’ve found that actually works on the peripheral neuropathy. Aspirin barely touches it. CBD ingestibles: not noticeably better. But the topical stuff — which you apply directly to the patches of skin where the nerves are buzzing — really cuts that awful tingling.
The other day I stumbled across a credible site that says one cause of peripheral neuropathy is the dread covid-19 disease.
Hmm…ya don’t say?
Shoofing around, I stumble across an old journal entry that shows the covid-19 episode I picked up at the Mayo’s ER in the fall of 2019 coincided with the earliest appearance of the crazy-making tingling.
I’ll be damned!
Well. Of course I can’t prove it. I can say I do test positive for having had the virus. But I sure can’t prove when I had it.
****
Tuesday
August 15
And oh joy, as a function of Olde Age, I forgot to finish and post this yesterday.
This morning whenever dawn is finished cracking, I have to traipse across the city, barge into the credit union, and try to get SOMEONE there to help me get back into my account. NONE of the passwords I have will let me in.
Godlmighty am I ever sick and tired of our wondrous password-protected world.