Coffee heat rising

Stormy stormy day…

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Okay, now for something…completely not different.

{grrrrrrr!} Possibly a glass of wine to go with it.

What is NOT different? Cox’s pi$$-poor Internet service.

LOL! In a classic Cox Moment, their connection goes down JUST as I stumble upon an exceptionally promising source going on about the accursed peripheral neuropathy. {One of the prime thangs it sez is that you’d best not drink alcohol. ANY alcohol. EVER.} {hmmmmmmmm… Well, I’m already at Death’s Door with this effer, so…do I care if another glass of white wine kicks in the deadbolt?}

Try to reach a Cox rep on the iPhone. This is actually a GOOOOD thing, because it forces me to learn to use the gadget. Reach a sweet young lady. She is as flamboozled as the rest of us. But she very charming…no doubt why Cox hires such creatures.

Can’t get Carol on the Magical Mystery iPhone (powered by T-Mobile}, so stroll across the street. They have a different carrier: she’s online. We try to find Cox outage info….hilarious!

We schmooze awhile. Her little dog is even cuter than Ruby, which is sayin’somethin’.

She shows me a scorpion Tom snared. HOOLeee shee-ut! He found it in the backyard. That means the li’l fellas are all over our corner…if not now, very soon will be.

Dunno if you folks have these charming li’l critters in your parts. Hereabouts, a scorpion is One Scary, Nasty Critter. You don’t even wanna know how far beyond description a scorpion bite’s pain registers…

I find another shingle down…in their driveway! This, a remnant of the current ferocious desert windstorm. It looks the same as the one New Neighbor and I found in the front of my house. NN and I could find no sign of a missing shingle on my roof (though it’s hard, probably impossible, to view the entire roof from the ground), but it’s pretty clear this thing is either from Tom & Carol’s or from some other decrepit building. So…uhm…there’s SOME hope that the Funny Farm’s roof remains intact, the FF being among a number of decrepit buildings.

Wherever Sally (or what remains of her) is, I’m sure she’s VERY glad she moved on to the Other World and the kids have got that house. Poor young pups! Luckily, they have parents, who presumably will help them navigate what are no doubt about to be some very choppy waters.

Heh. I think I’m quite charmed with New Neighbor. Haven’t met Wife yet, but I assume that if she matches him, she’ll be a nice addition. Dayum, but I do enjoy young people. Old people, too, come to think of it. But the young ones: yeah!

Guess that’s why I persist in teaching college and returning adult students for next to nothin’….

Computer Complications

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Reckon it’s just because I’m Old, but…. Gosh, does it not seem to you, as it does to me, that all our miraculous computer technology and gadgets serve as much to complicate our lives as to bring nifty new stuff to us?

Godlmighty, but I’m sick of computer hassles.

This morning I went to sign in to FaM’s dashboard, and LO!! Was confronted with one of those annoying, time-wasting picture rebuses, where you’re supposed to identify every image that has a (fill in the blank: boat, cat, car, lightbulb, whatEVER). This is an annoying runaround, and one mistake tosses you out and forces you to start over.

I.

just.

HATE.

that.

How can I count the ways I hate the endless, annoying, frustrating, aggravating computer password runarounds?!???

Today I need to get into the credit union account — online, of course — and pay this month’s AMEX bill. That will entail yet another aggravating runaround. The prospect makes me crings.

So much so, in fact, that I think I may resort to a primitive strategy, developed shortly after the first cave man learned to start a fire with a pair of sticks: send them a check.

Yes. Remember those? I still do have a couple boxes of paper checks. It may be easier to simply write a check, stuff it in an envelope, and drop it in a mailbox.

A Best Buy dude is coming over today to work on the laptop. I need to get it backed up to an external hard drive, but I will be damned if I can figure out how to set up the hard drive, to say nothing of making it work.

And he’ll have an additional task he didn’t know about: yesterday somehow I screwed up the toolbars at the top of the screen. The one I use most has disappeared. sorta…it flickers back if the cursor lands…somewhere. But where, I cannot figure out. I want that fixed…got ENOUGH dorking around to have to fiddle with every effing day without having to dink and plink and dork to get the toolbar showing the open pages and the date & time to come up.

****

Ohhh HOOOORAAAYYY!!!

The Best Buy guy isn’t scheduled til tomorrow!

Hallelujah, brothers & sisters: I can go back to bed!

😀

That also provides some time to write up some of the things that need to be fixed. Not just the weird toolbar thing….but the newest quirk: hit a double quotation mark or a single quotation, and you get the symbol with an underscore beneath it. Then hit the space bar or a character, and the underscore disappears.  Yesterday the disappearing act was not in force. You just got a strange symbol.

And there’s one keyboard combo that produces an umlaut. Whaaaaa? In Word, Hit Caps Lock + a character, and you get an umlaut: Ä

Kewl, eh?

Well…it would be, if that were what you wanted it to do.

Do we really want to rescue these folks?…

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Yeah, those folks: the ones who deliberately or heedlessly put themselves at risk by ignoring public warnings intended to help keep them safe. Just now, for example, the ninnies in the Southeast who failed to take shelter or get the fu!k out when the Weather Service and the police issued warnings that life-threatening storms and floods were on the way…how about those ninnies? Why are we sending helicopters and boats to get them out of the mess they plunged into of their own volition?

Here we have this, for example: A woman in Florida who blithely discounts official pleading to get the Hell out as the worst hurricane in the history of the Atlantic Coast bears down. Her grandson, who apparently failed to inherit all her Stupid Genes, realizes she is at risk (along with her dog!!), so he flies into the state, travels to her home, and gets stuck in the predicted floods. Now both their lives are at risk and they end up having to be rescued by Coast Guard helicopters and airlifted to safety.

Know how much it costs to operate a rescue helicopter?

No? Make a guess. Come anywhere close?

It’s SIXTEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS AN HOUR, just to run the chariot to pluck some ninny out of a predicament they got into by blithely ignoring all warnings and all common sense.

  • For a rescue helicopter: $1600 an hour
  • For a Coast Guard rescue boat: $1147 an hour
  • For a C-130: $7600 an hour

!!!!

As nothing… The same source tells us the National Parks Service spent almost $5 million in 2007, in search and rescue alone.

Our cup runneth over with stupidity.

Most such rescues have to happen when some fool decides to ignore signs to stay on the trail, decides that the news reports of an incoming hurricane are just journalistic hysteria or Big Brother trying to manipulate us, that God is watching out for them…and on and inanely on.

Sometimes I wonder how some people manage to figure out how to make their own breakfast.

It leaves us with the question of…well…how much DO we want to continue the genetic heritage of stump-dumb stupidity? When someone pig-headedly does something that public information programs and newcasts and road signs urge don’t do that, should we — really — rescue them? Why?

Yeah, I know. God tells us to be good to our fellow nudnick.

But…y’know…Mother Nature issues no such edict. Is it possible that she’s tryin’ to tell us something?

If we rescue them, we invite them to continue contributing their “stupid” genes to the communal gene pool. If we let them get themselves out of their own predicament, we accomplish one of two ends (possibly both, come to think of it):

  • We make it clear to the other ninnies out there what’s likely to happen if you ignore public safety warnings.
  • We remove their Idiot Genes from the stream of humanity’s genetic makeup, thereby very possibly smartening up the generations to come.

Either of those, to my mind, seems like a salutary goal…

Leave. My. Dog. Alone…PLEASE!

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Well, I offended one of the neighbors mightily this morning. Honestly. Sometimes I do wonder WHAT is the matter with people!

This lady — I’d say she’s in her 60s or maybe early 70s — walks around every morning with a pocket full of dog treats. She inhabits the Richistans, so if Ruby and I go over there on the morning doggy-walk, we’re likely to run into her. And we DO go over there most days, because the park, so much beloved by Ruby the Corgi, is simply overrun with off-the-leash dogs charging around.

Yes. The park DOES have a big sign that says “DOGS MUST BE ON LEASH.” But of course it doesn’t apply to those folks, right?

So if we want to stroll through a shady, park-like stretch, we’re pretty much restricted to Upper Richistan.

This lady haunts those regions. She’s out there almost every morning.

She’s very friendly. She’s a VERY sweet person. And every damn morning she wants to give Ruby a doggy-treat.

Now you understand, I don’t especially mind if Ruby gets a random dog treat now and again. But there are some good reasons to ask her to refrain:

  • Ruby is getting fat.
  • Fat is exceptionally not good for a corgi, with its long spine and short legs.
  • I would prefer it very much that Ruby not expect to get doggy-treats from strangers. My dogs’ job is not to suck up to strangers, some of whom (in these parts) are not folks with whom you especially want to encourage chumminess.
  • Some dogs are diabetic. They should not have doggy treats: their diets, like the diets of diabetic humans, need to be carefully tended.

She always asks if it’s OK to give Ruby a treat, and I always, out of politeness, say “sure.” Today I decided to get honest with her, and so I replied, “I’d really prefer it if she didn’t get treats.”

WELL! You’d think I’d insulted all her daughters and their madame!

She got all huffy and stalked off dramatically.

People are SO STUPID about dogs!

  1. The ones who insist on letting their dogs run loose in a public park bounded on three sides by streets full of commuters chugging off to the main drags.
  2. The ones who confuse their dogs with children and burble inanely over their “fur-babies”
  3. The ones who coo, as your German shepherd is getting set to remove their dog’s throat, coo “Ohhhh don’t worry! They just wanna plaaayyyy!“
  4. The ones who let their dog run loose in the mountain parks and then are surprised when their dog sticks its nose under a creosote bush and gets bit by a rattlesnake.
  5. The ones who run their dog by their bicycles as they peddle down the street.
  6. The ones who run their dog by their skateboard as they skate down the sidewalk.

Lordie, I’m fed up with that stuff.

Folks. Your dog is not your child. It’s not a human at all. It is a descendant of wolves, a type of pack animal. It acts like it’s your friend because its species has evolved into a an advantageous, symbiotic relationship with humans. Treating your dog as if it were a child puts your dog at risk of health problems and behavioral problems and you at risk of lawsuits.

Even if you must be silly about your dog, please please please don’t be stupid about other people’s dogs!

‘Bye, Amazon!

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So I needed a new pair of padded bicycling gloves to walk Ruby the Corgi, a powerful little engine who drags the human fiercely enough that a leash will rub the skin right off the palms of your hands. Toooo lazy to drive to the bike store and buy a new pair, I stupidly decided to order a pair of bicycling gloves, size medium, from Amazon. They arrive; I try them on…can’t even get them up to my wrists. These may be “medium” for a six-year-old, but not for a grown woman.

No, I am NOT fat: 5’6″ & 125 lb.

Gotta send them back.

But lo! We have a change in our dealings with that august online retailer! Evidently Amazon doesn’t want people sending unusable junk back anymore…you can hardly blame them, I guess. So they’ve devised a way to discourage people from returning stuff, by adding a layer of hassle to make the process difficult. Can you take the package to the nearest UPS store and just ship it back? Ohhhhh nooooooo!

No more!

Now have to schlep it all the way across the city to the nearest Whole Foods (!!!!) and jump through a row of hoops there.

I have no business to transact at or near a Whole Foods — the groceries are overpriced, and selection is better at other local stores. So this offends at the outset.

But that’s not all:

First, I have to visit the credit union for the day’s first errand. From there to the Whole Foods and back to my house is TWENTY-FIVE AND SEVEN-TENTHS MILES. Yes: that’s 25.7 miles to return ONE STUPID LITTLE ITEM. It’s a quarter of the way to Tucson from here.

Gasoline is going for $4.50 a gallon just now. I get about 19 mpg on my aging Venza. Sooo….it costs me around $5 in gas to send this ridiculous purchase back to Amazon, when I could have WALKED to either the UPS Store or the mailboxes store in my neighborhood.

Once I arrive at the Whole Foods, I ask a clerk where I can return a useless Amazon purchase. She directs me to a DIY kiosk!!!

Y’know what I say to that, dear Amazon?

..I..

That’s what I say to that. With an F and a Y and a u. Once and for all!

On the way home through the crushing, homicidal traffic (tempers grow short here in Phoenix, when the weather is both hot and muggy), I stopped at a bicycling shop and bought a pair of gloves there. They fit.

And I felt remarkably good about BUYING LOCAL.

It’ll be a cold day in an Arizona August before I buy anything else from Amazon.

Crazier and Crazier

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So a couple days ago I was holding forth about the general looney toons of life in the Valley: the school shooters (real and wannabe), the joy of navigating the city streets around the crashes, the cops, and the lunatics, the endless traipses across the Valley, the fruitless search for a shot of covid vaccine, the ways the city has changed and the persistence of fancy prisons for old folks, the amusingly lurid murders, the daily outbursts of gunfire, the fine self-destructing mobile homes (right up the street from the Funny Farm!), the big business that is the local drug industry,.

♦ This happened right around the corner from where my friend Shannon and her family live.
I pass by this garden spot every time I drive up to the Fry’s or the Paradise Valley Costco.
♦ This: one off-ramp up the freeway from my westside Costco hangout.
♦ This fine institution is about six blocks north of Gangbanger’s Way: you could walk there from here.
♦ This also: right up the road, not far from Shannon’s place.
♦ Here, too: you could walk to this place from DXH’s house; and I can walk from my house to DXH’s without much trouble.
♦ This one occurred right around the corner and up the road from the university: also within reasonable walking distance of ASU West.
♦ This: in a hiking area not far from my favorite Fry’s grocery store and upscale Costco

And…and…as I turn these matters around in my mind, I find myself wondering why on earth do I stay in this place???

Why don’t I pack up the house and the dog and myself and take off for parts quieter, if not damn near unknown?

Well, the main reason is my son. M’hijito has said repeatedly that he doesn’t want me to move. Not out of the city…not out of my (very sweet) house. I suspect the real reason is that he hopes to inherit this house.

And that’s a reasonable desire. It’s a delightful house, very pretty, in a friendly, comfortable neighborhood (albeit surrounded by drug slums), centrally located, close to where his dad lives, close to where some of his friends live. Why would he NOT want me to hang onto this place so he can unload his un-insulatable house and walk into a larger, nicer home in a (slightly) safer neighborhood?

I do love this house, and I also love my neighborhood, with its lush irrigated lawns, its district of million-dollar shacks, its shady groves of mature trees, its large and open park. I think what I could do without is something that plagues ALL of the city of Phoenix. The crime and the drug use and the widespread lunacy make you feel unsafe no matter what part of town you live in. Given that as a basic fact, I would be very sad to leave the Funny Farm and the Hood behind.

Where on earth would I go?

Well…away from lovely Latter-Day L.A.? Here in the state, there’s Prescott, a historic small city favored by the upper-middle-class and the intellectual set. It’s cooler than Phoenix in the summer, though it does get a bit crisp in winter. Prices used to be much higher than Phoenix, but what with the Late Great Real Estate Inflation here in the Valley, they’re about the same for roughly comparable places. Crime rates there aren’t too awful…certainly not like Phoenix‘s.

Oro Valley: a suburb of Tucson favored by aging millenials. Tucson has a nationally respected hospital, a reasonably vibrant cultural life, pretty fair weather, and a major airport to carry you elsewhere as desired. It’s modestly scenic, tucked up against a small mountain range; a short drive into Mexico, and not much of a drive up to Phoenix. The crime rate is middling…at least you wouldn’t risk your life every time you took the dog out for an evening stroll. Probably.

Fountain Hills, right here in the Valley: a quiet, staid development on the highway up to Payson. It’s right next to the Mayo, so the whole trek-across-the-city-to-see-a-decent-doctor conundrum would be mooted. Crime rate there is nothing special: not high, but not rock-bottom low, either. Fountain Hills has two huge disadvantages, though, where I’m concerned: First is the cheap, cheesy construction. The houses, whether “custom” or not, are uniformly tracty and uniformly stick-and-Styrofoam flimsy junk. They appear not to have been intended for for people who live here year-round; apparently the builders expected the place would appeal mostly to snowbirds. And it’s not as quiet as it looks: it’s right under the flight path for jets coming in and out of Sky Harbor! Apparently the natives bellyache constantly (and fruitlessly) about the racket.

Picturesque, arty and interesting Santa Fe is very expensive. It’s beautiful and the weather’s awesome and it has a real cultural life, but… Most humans can’t afford a real adobe house. And so about 90% of those adobe-look homes are actually stick-and-Styrofoam shacks, same as the ones in Fountain Hills (and waypoints). Tarrying there one summer for a conference, I happened to chat with a woman who had moved to Santa Fe from New York, imagining she would get away from the Big Apple’s famed violence and crime. Neighborhood Scout ranks Santa Fe as 9th on a scale where 100 is safest. Lovely!

By comparison? Phoenix ranks 7, making life here marginally more risky.

So….it’s hard to picture where one could go that would be any better than what I’ve got. One or two venues might be safer or less hectic, but they’d have other drawbacks.

Wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here…