As the dog and I hiked back to the house along about 6:15 a.m., there across the street we see our neighbor’s lawn crew, the bunch who stole EVERY SPRINKLER IN THE FRONT AND BACK YARDS.
{chortle!} Guess I haven’t mentioned that little fiasco.
Couple weeks ago, these guys showed up. And since Gerardo seems to have quit, I hired them to clean up the yard. Their fees, by comparison with Gerardo’s, were exorbitant: $180 for the first clean-up, then $80 every two weeks, forevermore.
Shee-ut.
Well, I knew Gerardo was undercutting the competition — or else giving me a special deal, more likely. But he seems to have quit: he’s not coming either to my house or my son’s. And I can’t take care of this yard myself. So..ooohkaaaayyyyy….
They did a pretty good job. So I thought…until I went to put a sprinkler on a parched plant.
Sprinkler? What sprinkler? We don’t need to steeenking sprinklers!
Uh huh. Every. Single. Sprinkler was gone. The little metal ones. The regular plastic ones. All of them.
Sumbiche.
So it was off to buy some new ones.
Lowe’s does not have little metal sprinklers.
Home Depot does not have little metal sprinklers.
The grand, old-money nursery on Glendale does not have little metal sprinklers.
Turns out there’s a sprinkler shortage!
That would be why our guys felt called upon to steal mine.
Finally found a few at an Ace Hardware (everybody buys sprinklers in hardware stores, right?). Grabbed three of them. And they’re now locked inside the garage.
If it’s not red-hot or nailed down…
****
In other quotidian gnus, the dentist wants EIGHTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS to replace the broken crown. Jayzuz! What do they think it’s made of?
No, it ain’t made of gold.
The peripheral neuropathy continues to drive me nuts. However, in one tiny glimmer of light, I stumbled upon a study suggesting that antihistamines may help with the peripheral neuropathy.
Seriously??
Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I sure have plenty of those around the house. Arizona is where you come to find out that you’re allergic to everything…
The researchers were using Claritin, but also mentioned chlortrimeton. Apparently chlortimeton is now available over the counter — it used to be a prescription drug. Claritin is readily available, and in fact I happened to have a bottle of it in the house. Benadryl is also mentioned as effective. Though that stuff has some inconvenient side effects for me, I do have some of it in the house.
So I drop a Claritin. And by golly, it does seem to help some. The tingling/stinging is not gone, but it’s noticeably milder.
We’ll see if this works over a period of days or weeks.
****
Meanwhile, the other day La Maya and I decided to go out to lunch.
Our first choice, a beloved Italian restaurant near Moon Valley (in the middle-class northerly realms of Phoenix), was closed, to our horror. They were hard-hit by the plague — I’d heard the husband died (a man and a wife owned it). La M said that wasn’t so…presumably, then, the gossip mill got it wrong.
From there we drove from Yuppified joint to yuppified joint, until we got alllll the wayyyyyy down North Central to Camelback and decided to go into one of the restaurants in the AJ’s shopping center.
Personally, I’m just not all that fond of eating out. In the first place, I cook much, MUCH better than the short-order operators of most restaurants. So the food, when you come right down to it, isn’t very good. And what you get is spectacularly overpriced. And the noise is annoying. And the cigarette smoke (often) is annoying. And…blech!
At any rate, we shared a kale salad, which she enjoyed.
Driving back up lovely North Central…HOLEEE shee-ut! We saw the single closest call I’ve ever witnessed, and were almost dragged into the middle of it.
Central Avenue in that area is a 40-mph zone. This means the locals drive 45 to 55 mph along that lovely main drag, which bisects an upscale neighborhood to the north of the central commercial districts.
We’re cruising along calmly enough in a pod of 45-mph traffic when, incredibly, a Moron steps out into the crosswalk in front of the oncoming traffic (among which we are numbered).
Yes, you are required to stop for nudniks in crosswalks. But it is assumed that the nudniks will wait until the barreling-along cars have passed before stumbling across the road.
He walks right out in front of La Maya, who slams on her brakes. She misses him, so he proceeds to stroll in front of the car next to her!
He escaped intact — literally by inches. And he seemed unruffled…as though he does this all the time.
And yeah. Yep., He probably does.
Both of us expected to see him go flying through the air. Thank heaven no such acrobatics ensued.
Phoenix: what a place!
****
Out of the blue, the credit union apparently stopped making some — possibly all? — of the autopays I’d set up to my various creditors. Suddenly I got a notice from the gas company threatening to cut off service. A little checking revealed that other utility bills also had not been paid.
WTF?????
So now I’ve got to traipse to the credit union and do battle over that — around the Adventures in Dental Science.
WonderAccountant is coming over this afternoon to try to help untangle whatEVER that mess is. One thing is for sure: as senile as I may be, I know I did not ask the CU to discontinue the autopays. That would be insane!
But it IS a mess, and I am not a happy camperette.
Speaking of the which…I’d better get up, eat some breakfast, and start shoveling through that stack of paper…
“If it’s not red-hot or nailed down…” It concerns me that just about every repairman/workman that you’ve employed lately rips you off. Do you think it’s because you’re female, over 60, or are there just a lot of sticky-fingered people in AZ?
ACE Hardware has a little bit of everything. I found toilet paper there during the height of the pandemic.
$1800 for a SINGLE crown? Dang! I pray I don’t need another one in this lifetime.
I learned last month that if I’m going to a business I haven’t been to in a while, or that’s new to me, to call first to make certain that it’s open. Saved myself a long drive to a favorite shoe store that has gone kaput by calling first. Would have been furious if I’d wasted my time/gas for nothing.
I’m pretty sure it’s because of age. People figure they can rip off the elderly because we’re likely to be cognitively impaired. And they’re right. I think you tend to get more trusting, OR put in a position where you’re forced to be more trusting because there are so many things you can’t do yourself. And in fact, you become cognitively weaker: I know my marbles have slipped. I don’t think as logically as I did; I don’t remember things; and where it comes to the ubiquitous techno-hassles, I can’t handle stuff the way I used to. And when it comes to scams, it’s harder to distinguish between sales pitches, outright lies, and reasonably honest offers. This is seriously aggravated by the fact that you tend to grow more trusting as you get older.
Hustlers actually can get mailing lists sorted by age, or targeting certain age groups: https://www.leadsplease.com/mailing-lists/consumer/mailing-lists-by-age. And they do, The instant I turned 55, I was deluged with “offers” for AARP. And that stuff just keeps on comin’…I get about half a dozen nuisance telephone calls a day, plus when you reach out to people who are selling things, many of them figure they can manipulate you. I no longer answer the telephone at all, because of the deluge of hustles.
Honestly, I would pay someone to front for me. I’ll bet you could make a pretty good income by “representing” elderly clients, acting as a go-between to handle business and financial matters.