Coffee heat rising

Yipes! ANOTHER Cop “Incident”?

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So the dawg is fed and I’m just about to throw on some clothes and take her for the morning doggy walk. It’s around 6:30.

Right. Sure.

Ruby is chowing down; I’m looking for a pair af marginally presentable jeans. And…ohhhh yeah:

R-R-R-O-O-O-O-A-R-R-R-R….

Cop copter flyover.

Round and round and round he goes. He’s looking for someone, and that someone is within a few blocks of the Funny Farm. The police dispatch website says nothing about it.

Based on past experience, the someone will be…

  • an ordinary burglar (not likely: they’ve been up there almost 40 minutes…they wouldn’t waste that much fuel on a workaday prowler);
  • a wanted criminal on the run from some other neighborhood;
  • somebody who actually did break in to a house here and raped or otherwise engaged the resident;
  • a bum who picked a fight with a homeowner trying to evict him from a garage or a backyard; or
  • a criminal, probably of the violent type, on the run from the cops, who chased him here after some other incident.

WhatEVER: it put the eefus on the Morning Doggywalk.

Fortunately, the weather has cooled dramatically. So, we can afford to wait an hour before setting out to defile the neighbors’ lawns.

😉

Yesterday the neighborhood association had its annual Giant Shindig in the Park, so we weren’t able to go over there during that. And now I”m not so sure about taking her into the park anyway, at least for the nonce. We’re enjoying a parvo plague. This fine and often fatal disease can be picked up off the ground. And Ruby, like any dawg, loves nothing more than sniffing every stink she comes across. Especially if it’s associated with a pile of feces.

Ruby has had her parvo shots, of course. However, I don’t get her shot up every year, because…a study showed that most of the routine vaccines last up to a decade. The researchers shot up a passel of dogs and watched them to see how long the initial rounds of shots worked. The vaccines were still protective nine years after the study began. At that point, the researchers ran out of funding and so dropped the study.

Thus we don’t know for sure how long the shots last, but apparently it covers the dog for as long as most dogs live. And also thus: I’m less than thrilled about taking her to our park, which everybody and their little brother uses as a de facto dog park. Not only are their little furbabies running around off-lead (some of them looking for a fight), but lead or no lead, any dog that’s been exposed to parvo is dropping viral particles everywhere it goes.

***

Hmmmm…. And this may have something to do with this morning’s Copter Flyover:

…the intersection of [Conduit of Blight and Main Drag South] is closed in all directions this morning and will not open until much later in the day. Please seek alternate routes. #PHXTraffic

Probably some idiot drove or walked out in front of the train.

Y’know…I love my neighborhood and all the wonderful young people who are moving here with their kids. I like being centrally located. I love the greenery and the park and the fancy houses in the Richistans and the cute little tract houses in my parts. But I sweartogawd, sometimes I think what AM i doing here?

My son is adamant that I should not move out of this house. But the truth is, there are safer districts, and they’re not all in the Sun Cities.

Fountain Hills is the most attractive of these. Problem is, it’s about as far away from everyone I know and everything I do as the Moon is. It’s halfway to Payson! Close to the Mayo Clinic…but otherwise, I know no one out there and have no great desire to get to know anyone. Sun City is quiet, if you enjoy the silence of the tomb. And mile on mile on mile of houses that look so much alike you can’t tell the difference between them.

Most areas in north Phoenix and Scottsdale do have fewer bums…we get inundated because we live at the end of the lightrail line. The bums and the indigent mentally ill climb on the damned train, ride it up here to the end of the line, get out, and fan out into the neighborhood. Of course we always had some crime before that thing was built. But we didn’t have a bum in every yard, and we didn’t have to be extra-cautious about taking the trash out in the alley (I have two sets of padlocks on the back gates!), and we didn’t have to walk around spaced-out bums sleeping off their latest fix in the park. These are largely functions of the idiotic lightrail project and the insertion of several drug clinics in the immediate vicinity of the neighborhood. So in theory one could escape some of the crime and ickiness simply by moving to a different district.

One of the magnets that calls the transients in: the FIVE drug treatment centers within easy walking distance of the lightrail stops at Main Drag South and at Gangbanger’s Way. One of them is right down the street from a grade school!

Drug abuse is pretty much endemic here. And it spans all social classes. So unless you live in a gated community such as the Biltmore or the Phoenix Country Club, you are going to have drug addicts wandering your neighborhood streets and sleeping in your yard.

Welp, Ruby is lobbying for a doggy-walk. I haven’t had anything to eat and am starved. And so, awawayyyy….to breakfast and then to brave the day’s outdoor adventure.

And tonight? HALLOWE’EN! Armies of cute little kids trucked into the ‘Hood from lower-income districts, here to collect the loot. We always sit in the WonderAccountants’ driveway to hand out candy…so that will be fun.

Yipes! Another Monday Already??? WaitWait…

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Holeee Maquerel! A whole week has gone by since last I posted at Funny. How did THAT happen?

Hm.

I think it happened because precious little has been happening. The days shoot past in the present state of isolation and quarantine-like living. One after another…most of them identical. You would think time would feel slower under these conditions…but it doesn’t. To the contrary… It’s Monday, October 24. The last I knew, it was Monday…the 17th. A whole week is gone, and I’ve barely noticed it was here.

Now that I’ve quit the once-a-week volunteer job at the church, I literally have nothing to do, no one to see, very little that must be done to keep life trundling along.

For some reason I don’t feel especially bored, though. The church receptionist gig had to go because it WAS boring. Excruciatingly so. For some reason, when I’m here at the Funny Farm I never seem to be sitting around doing nothing, staring into space. Even when I’m doing nothing, though, I don’t feel oppressively bored. Why that would be the case escapes me…

What have I done today, for example?

Precious little, yep. Luis the Arborist is here. I’ve spent all of ten minutes aiming him toward the jobs to be done. Then got back out of the men’s way: they passed most of the day pruning the jungle in front.

Wasted a fair amount of the day playing computer games. Didn’t even take the dog for a walk this morning: too, toooo lazy.

Which is too bad, because the days have turned gorgeous. The spate of thunderstorms we had the other day broke the heat. So now the weather is cool and lovely and beautiful.

***

LOL! and now it’s Tuesday. I wandered off and forgot to post this thing.

Luis and his guys spent the entire darned afternoon beating back the jungle. The most signal of his achievements is to lawsuit-proof my front yard: One of those thorny trees likes to dangle a branch over the sidewalk, right at face height for the passing humans. People prance up and down that sidewalk day and night, without ever looking up from their damn phones. Sooner or later, somebody is going to get stabbed in the face by that thing — it’s actually poked me a couple of times, and I do watch where I’m going.

So I figure that’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. I’ve nipped it back a couple times myself, but I’m getting too feeble to climb up on a ladder and chop away at tree limbs.

Anyway, now it’s fixed.

My friend VickyC is supposed to come by this noon. We were planning to go exploring in Cave Creek/Carefree, and upscale tourist trap on the north side of the Valley. That scheme crashed y’day; don’t know if we’ll try to do that, or just go out to lunch.

Which brings us to the current techno-hassle: I accidentally blocked VickyC’s phone number on my land line. It’s possible to unblock a number, but to do so…well…you have to find the number.

Literally hundreds of numbers are blocked on that phone. Without that firewall, as it were, I get anywhere from three to ten nuisance calls every day. They spoof local numbers, so the only way you can tell the call is from a pest is by not recognizing it. Apparently one time when she called, I succeeded in not recognizing her number. So she can’t get through to me. And now I can’t find it in the vast bank of blocked numbers, nor can I find a way to unblock ALL numbers and start over again.

In that department, entertainingly enough…it appears that SHRIEKING INTO THE PHONE AT THE SHRILLEST TOP OF YOUR VOICE is working to cut down the volume of nuisance calls. After a week or two of engaging that tactic, I’m getting many fewer calls per day.

At any rate, if I can’t figure out how to unblock VickyC’s number, I may have to buy a new set of landline phones.

Jeez. Ain’t life in te 21st Century fun?

Dispatch from Costco’s Tire Shop: Monday as Day From Hell

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Any day could be a Day from Hell, I suppose. Monday’s as good any for spiraling downhill. After a full morning in Hell (cleaning lady, nail in a tire, driving round and round Robin Hood’s Barn), as we scribble we’re now parked on a bench in the Tire Shop at Costco, waiting a predicted two hours to get one flickin’ tire fixed.

Again.

Dave, the doughty fella manning the customer service desk, is so busy he hasn’t had time to take a deep breath. Literally: the action here NEVER STOPS, not even for a minute or two.

This morning I had to take Ruby the Corgi to the vet to find out about getting her stinky teeth cleaned. This is a much neglected task: having foolishly imagined that I would be responsible enough to clean her teeth myself, I’ve let it go and let it go and forgotten about it and let it go until now she stinks so much she no longer can be ignored.

Actually…the issue is that her mouth is too small to allow me to fit the finger-sized tooth-scrubber thing in there. So no amount of pretend scrubbing does…well…anything. So this morning I took her to the vet, who wants A THOUSAND DOLLARS to clean her teeth.

This was no surprise, because the same vet used to pull the same stunt on La Maya, who (more or less) willingly forked over the cash for her two dachshunds.

Expecting this, I told her that on Social Security there’s no way in Hell I can afford anything like that.

She recommended some outfit called Doggy Dental, which supposedly does nothing but clean dogs teeth, for something vaguely resembling a reasonable fee.

That notwithstanding, she charged me for X-raying the dog’s teeth (did I ask her to do that?), and of course for the privilege of walking into her office.

So on the way home I stopped by a newer, closer vet to ask what they’d charge. Walked in. NOT A SOUL AROUND! Waited awhile. Left.

Next: low tire light comes on. Sumbiche!

Stop by the Firestone shop on the way home – they’re up at the corner Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way. Guy there says the tire needs to be replaced. And that’ll be a thousand bucks.

Uh HUH!

See ya!

So now here I am at the Costco, waiting and waiting and waiting to see if they can fix the tire and, if, not to simply buy a new one. Which, you may be damned sure, will NOT set me back a thousand dollah.*

This place is hectic!!!

The guys at the desk haven’t had a chance to take a deep breath since I walked in. But now…weirdly!…the crowd has abated, people have roamed off, and it’s downright quiet in here.

Meanwhile, NATCHERLY today is Cleaning Lady Day. So Luz is on her own at the Funny Farm. Fortunately, because I had to duck in there on the way, I did manage to pay her. That’s something. I guess.

Dayumnation! Somewhere, somehow I’m gonna have to find a vet that charges reasonable fees. And is competent.

That’ll be quite a trick. All the good old vets that I knew have retired and sold their veterinaries. So I don’t know anyone anymore. And they don’t know me, either…so haven’t the slightest compunction about charging me through the schnozzola. {sigh} Because of that, I reckon, Ruby  the Corgi is going to be the last dog to live at the Funny Farm.

How much longer, I wonder will the Ruby last? Overall her health seems to be excellent. So, barring accidents…what? Three to five years?

Holeee shee-ut! In five years I’ll be EIGHTY-TWO YEARS OLD! Assuming I’m still alive, that is.

Doesn’t seem possible.

That’s actually not out of the realm of possibility, though. On the California side of the family, women have lived into their 90s…and since they were Christian Scientists, that was in the absence of medical care. One of my uncles was 88 when he croaked over…. But… my mother’s New York grandparents weren’t so fortunate. Her grandmother died of diabetes in what must have been her mid- to late 30s…early 40s at the latest.

So then we’re confronted with the question of whether, after Ruby passes on to her furry fathers, can I justify getting another dog? Or even handle having another dog?

. . . .

Tire Shop Desk Dude: It’ll take about two hours to fix that.
Customer: That’s fine. I’ll do some shopping. The car is right outside.
TS DD: Where’s the wheel lock key?
Customer: In the glove compartment.

Uh huh. NOBODY would ever think to look for it there….

Guy just came in with a tire that needs fixing. Warrantee expired three years from the day he bought it: YESTERDAY.

Augh!

. . . .

As we were saying…. Can I, should I get another dawg after Ruby passes on to her Furry Fathers? Assuming she predeceases me, that is.

Unless the proposed successor to the Crown is already pushing old age when she arrives in the Realm, I’m not likely to survive her. So…who will take her? Can my son be bamboozled into agreeing to take in an ancient dawg when his mother croaks over? Hmmmmm…..

Old Guy comes in, pays a bill, walks out. He’s wearing well-used jeans held up with suspenders. Looks like he belongs in the Ozarks.

Prob’ly cruised in from Paradise Valley in his Rolls.

This is the West Side, though. Not impossible that he could be an old cotton farmer or rancher. Not likely, though.

Hey: Tire Dude says the guys are just finishing up with the Venza. Give it 2 minutes; then walk out to the second bay.

Hungry hungry hungry. By the time I get home it’ll be dinnertime, almost. So I guess that’ll be the main meal of the day.

How much longer before two minutes have passed?

Ohhhh how I wanna go home!

****

ESCAPED!

* Oh, and it cost $12 to replace the tire… It was on warrantee.

 

Ancestors

by
Olive Getten DeLong

Whiling away some idle moments — fast turning into hours! — exploring the Web for clues to my honored (and not-so-honored) forebears… Sources like Ancestry.com are full of stuff: if you’ve got a name, they’ve got the dope. The obvious, of course: details like birth and death dates, places of residence, relatives’ names. And some things that are less obvious, like marriage and divorce records, leads to relative after relative after never-heard-of ’em relative.

Some of this stuff confirms the family legends; some of it contradicts the stories you were told; some of it amounts to brand-new revelation. And some of it poses new mysteries.

Always entertaining.

The current entertaining mystery goes like this:

Ancestry.com says my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died in 1979. That would have put her in her 80s, which is far from impossible: other women in her family lived into their 90s.

However….

My mother said she died in her 40s (this would have been in the late 1920s or early 1930s), of uterine cancer (supposedly brought on by her extravagantly wild lifestyle). My mother claimed to have attended her at her deathbed, as a teenager caring for her dying mother at the California grandparents’ home in Alameda. Like her maternal relatives, we’re told, Olive was a Christian Scientist (despite her loose sexual mores). Thus she refused to go a doctor for the obvious symptoms until it was too late to save her life.

At least, so my mother claimed.

If Ancestry.com has the story right (BIG “if”), that claim was fabricated and richly embroidered. And the horror of this speculation is…well…truth to tell, anything’s possible.

Ancestry.com has her dying in 1979.

Double-check that. Triple-check it: yes, 9 December 1979, in Berkeley, California.

But…but…but…. that doesn’t even make sense! We were back in the States by then. My mother, claiming I was too ill to continue in the miserable school in lovely Araby, demanded to bring me home. She and I arrived in San Francisco when I was in the 6th grade: around 12 years old. That would have been 1956 or 57. But by then my mother was already claiming that her mother, Olive, was dead. The rest of the family lived in Berkeley and Sausalito, and believe me: there was no sign of a wild-assed grandmother there.

As a teenager, my mother had been sent from Upstate New York to California — to the East Bay — when her paternal grandmother died, leaving the grandfather with a dirt farm to cultivate and no help in caring for a teenager. The grandmother dies in 1927, when my mother would have been 16. Olive already has the Big C, and my mother ends up tending her during what must have been my mother’s mid-teens. BUT….

Yes. But…the notes I’m finding at Ancestry.com say Olive died in 1979. Fifty-two years later!

Where WAS she all that time? If she wasn’t in the ground, that is…

Most likely, the date is actually 1929…it’s probably a typo. But still…it’s intriguing.

Innaresting.

My cousin, who probably is responsible for this narrative, converted to Mormonism many years ago. Though he lives in California, these records are probably at the Temple in Salt Lake City.

However, my dear friend and erstwhile business partner happens to be — yea verily! — a nice Mormon girl! A-a-a-n-d she’s active with the Church. So she knows whereof she speaks and how to speak it.

The Temple here in Arizona — in a suburb called Mesa — has access to these records.

My thought is that I should get off my duff while I’m still capable of rising from a chair, drive out there, get myself signed in, and go through whatever records they have.

Lemme tellya: Olive’s life is the stuff of novels. If I had enough information, I could write a story that truly wouldn’t quit. Very possibly one that could become a best seller or the foundation of a movie. She was one. wild. lady. And her relatives, while outwardly stodgy, were…well, verrreee strange.

 

good-BYE, Costco…and dammit, this time I mean it!

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You realize…if you want to buy 89 tons of cheap individually wrapped candies to hand out to the Poor Kids who are bussed into your neighborhood for Hallowe’en, you can get that stuff at Target. Or Walmart. Or for that matter at Safeway, Albertson’s, Fry’s, or Walgreen’s. You don’t HAVE to go to Costco to buy a lifetime supply of junk candy. Or of…well…of anything.

Costco is where I went today, though, by way of stocking up for this year’s onslaught of kiddies and teenagers. The ‘Hood is flanked on two sides by low-income districts, meaning that every Hallowe’en we are flooded with hordes of cutie-pies and silly teenagers in costume. This makes for a great neighborhood party: everyone hangs out on their driveways to greet the panhandling kids, and a grand time is had by all.

So today I was despatched to snare a cache of individually wrapped candies for the coming shindig. Costco seemed like the logical destination, since while I was at it I could stock up on a few things that are running low here at the Funny Farm.

But…maybe not…

Alas. They have decimated their cheap wine offerings. They used to have a wonderful selection of wines in the $8 to $12 range — I mean, awesome. No more. Want a drinkable bottle of wine there? Prepare to spend upwards of 15 or 18 bucks,

No, this is not inflation. Albertson’s, Sprouts, Fry’s, Trader Joe’s, and — hevvin help us — even the ritzy-titzy AJ’s all offer a generous selection of cheapo wines, highly drinkable. Prices are about the same (in the $8 to $12 range), and deliciousness is highly comparable in all the other stores.

The Paradise Valley Costco’s layout is damn near non-navigable. In addition to our communal supply of Hallowe’en candy, I wanted to buy one of Costco’s lifetime-supply bottles of aspirin. Into the pharmacy dept. Search high. Search low. Search medium. Search high and low again. CAN. NOT. FIND. A. FREAKIN’ BOTTLE OF ASPIRIN.

Since this is a commodity you need by the time you get out of the place, presumably my fellow customers have cleared the shelves and gulped down all the product.

Did find a nice package of rack of lamb, one of the things I went specifically to that store to buy.

But…

Y’know…

AJ’s also has superior rack of lamb. And you don’t have to do battle to get to the meat counter for the purpose of grabbing a package of it.

**

But the main issue with Costco shopping is…well…Costco customers.

You think Walmart customers are characters? Jayzuz! Take 45 minutes or an hour to watch Costco customers in action! They leave Walmart People in the dust.

Honest-ta-Gawd, I do NOT understand how Costco employees who work the floor in those stores keep a grip on their sanity! WHAT a job!

Today, as is invariably usual, I got stuck behind some stupid woman who, mesmerized by the glory of the stacks and stacks of merchandise, was rolling her cart right up the middle of the aisles. She would stop, stand there, and stare…while everyone on both sides of her, coming and going, waited for her to get the hell out of the way.

This is not a “sometimes” occurrence. It’s something that seems to happen every time I go into a Costco store.

Y’know, aisles in a grocery store or a drugstore are no wider. If anything, Costco’s aisles are considerably more generous than a Safeway’s or a Walgreen’s. But people don’t seem to pull that stunt in those stores. For the life of me, I cannot understand what gets into people who do that!

Why this is happening — whether it’s because there’s so much variety of merchandise people zone out as they search for what they want or whether a particular type of chucklehead is attracted to Costco — I cannot imagine. All I know is it makes me crazy. And I think I’m not gonna go back there, unless it’s under exceptional duress.

There are things you can’t get in these parts except at Costco or at Amazon. For that reason, it makes sense to maintain a membership, either in order to go there oneself or so as to send Instacart runners. But…if the only time I shop there is when I need something that’s not sold anywhere else and I don’t wanna wait for Amazon to deliver it, I’m surely going to shop there lots, lots less.

Stop the World….

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One of THOSE days again: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.

Finally get the spilled coffee cleaned up off the deck, the table, the this and the that. Drag stuff into the garage sink to wash. Pissed mightily.

I mean…really. All I wanted to do was sit down, turn on my li’l computer (assuming it will come on, no longer a safe assumption), and diddle away time on the Internet whilst swilling down the rest of the morning’s coffee.

Everything I touch goes SPROI-OI-OI-OINGGGGGG!

Finally ensconced. The mosquito coil I lit an hour or two ago seems to have chased off the effing mosquitos, bred by my effing neighbor’s eccentric habit of leaving a muddy puddle on the bottom of her empty swimming pool, which she decided to drain a couple years ago. Drain…and just LEAVE there.

Is the whole WORLD festooned with nut cases, or is it just my neighborhood?

This one, a freelance accountant who apparently has some emotional problems, is supported by her father, who bought the house next door and ensconced her in it.

Turns out Dad is a DIY real-estate magnate, and surprise! He owns the house next door to M’hijito! So that place is a rental, thereby depressing the value of the house the kid and I paid a hefty price to buy.

That puddle is no doubt what was responsible for Other Daughter’s case of Western equine encephalitis, which damn near killed her. O.D. is in the habit of leaving her windows open all the time, and, weirdly, she doesn’t have screens on those windows. No doubt so her tribe of cats can hop in and out at will.

Little details like epidemiology and safe maintenance seem beyond the scope of altogether too many of the Funny Farm neighbors.

Meanwhile, my own yard is still ankle-deep in debris from the late storm. Gerardo said he would come by today to deal with that and also some fairly desperately needed exterior repairs, which was very kind of him…

ahem…

ESPECIALLY since it dawns on me (if not on him) that today is Columbus day!

Even though his workers are his cousins, WTF? He shouldn’t be working those guys today,. Nor, given the way he throws himself around, should he be making himself work today. Give yourself a break, dude!

So, though I need Gerardo to come around, I do hope he doesn’t.

Speaking of cultural issues, I am really afraid that my neighbor J is about to get ripped off massively.

This is the lovely Latina lady the city gave SDXB’s house to when he sold it for a song in his furor to move away from Tony the Romanian Landlord. Seriously: they had a program where they were buying houses to move people out of the way of the airport construction, which was merrily leveling a barrio in lovely south Phoenix. The area, as you can imagine, was a slum of the first water, being directly under the path of incoming and outgoing jet aircraft…24/7.

So getting into SDXB’s 2100-square-foot house in North Central was an astonishing Godsend for J…but… You understand, she doesn’t have the income to maintain such a place. Her kids are helping, though.

I happen to be enamored of J. She is extremely nice, quiet, and pleasant to have as a neighbor. A-a-a-n-d…that’s why I’m worried.

The recent storm blew a couple of shingles off her roof, same as it did mine. But where my Roofer Guy said “nooo problem: I’ll be back next week to fix them,” hers said “ohhhhh dear! The whole roof must be replaced!”

Uh huh.

Well, I doubt it. That roof looks relatively new; if you study it, you see it’s in excellent condition. If anything, it’s in better shape than mine. I moved here in 2007, shortly after SDXB bought that house that Josie has now. I will say, I don’t remember his having the roof redone…but I don’t remember what I had for breakfast these days.

And…y’know…if you’ve lived in the barrio all of your days, chances that you’ll have adequate homeowner’s insurance — or any homeowner’s insurance — are practically nil, that being something you may never have heard of. Just hope she doesn’t get ripped off.

I did share my new Roofer Dude’s phone number and suggested she get a second estimate. And mentioned to RD’s wife/receptionist that I have a real bad feeling about the guy J is dealing with just this minute. Sure hope she’ll call them.

Speaking again of the ineffable Gerardo, back & forth…. I finally FOUND another much-needed rolling hose-winding stand, this one for the side yard. Amazon provided one for the front spigot and one for the spigot out back by the pool, but… go to order another one and poof!!! You make it disappear!

😀

So, not finding quite what I wanted in the remains of Amazon’s choices, I finally bestirred myself to traipse up to Home Depot. And lo! There it was…and only ONE of them left!

Grab!!!

So now we have a really nifty hose winder-upper gadget, easy to use and with plenty of room for a hose that will run alllll the way back to the alley fence. Looks pretty sturdy, so I’m hoping it’ll last for a few years.

That should please Gerardo: one less hose-wrestling hassle!

Hmmmm…

Some new Incident seems to be under way. Fire and police sirens have been wailing away from the direction of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s way.

Haven’t seen a helicopter…usually there’s at least one gnus helicopter in search of morbid content to fill TV minutes.

That’s a major intersection, seriously messed up by the presence of the Bum’s Railway, which carries any number of drug addicts and panhandlers into the ‘Hood. Several low-rent (read: “cheaply built and highly flammable”) apartment buildings reside in that area, as well as a trailer park.

Welp… No sign of Gerardo. Believe I’ll get up and head for Costco…via a different exit from the ‘Hood!