Coffee heat rising

Just in case this site goes dark…

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Don’t panic…

The past two or three days, I’ve been getting dunning emails from someone claiming to represent BigScoots. But my understanding was all the bills related to this site are set up to auto-pay…so of course I figured these represented a scam. Now they say they’re taking all my sites off-line (oohhh EEK! Be scared, be very scared!).

So far that hasn’t happened. But it may. I’m trying to get in touch w/ our Web Guru par excellence, but by now it’s well into the evening where he is. Plus of course we’re coming into another holiday.

If Funny goes away, it presumably will be the result of a misunderstanding. And if that’s the case, it will be back. I hope.

Watch this space!

Can’t Live With’em, Can’t Live Without’em…

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New-glassesLOL! I am totally spoiled to having a cleaning lady descend on this place twice a month. But sometimes…

Sometimes the term is “ruined,” I s’ppose. 😀

Having a beloved cleaning-lady around is the same as having a beloved anyone-else around: They dork up your carefully ordered life!

This is because cleaning ladies, like other specimens of humanity, have their own idea of how and where things should go and will brook no interference from the likes of you.

Luz is given to removing all the clutter…uhhhh, collectibles…from the mantel, setting them down on the hearth or the nearby desk, dusting the mantel, and then putting the junk back where she thinks it looks nice.

This is not where I think it looks nice.

So this morning I set my butt down at the dining room table for breakfast, gaze across the family room, and see…all my tschotchkes arrayed across the mantel, higgledy-pigglety! Arrrhhhhhggghh!

Finish breakfast, traipse across the family room, and attempt to rearrange the junk the way I want it.

No big deal, one would think. EXCEPT…I can’t remember how I had them. I know that the way they’re now rearranged is NOT that way, but exactly how and why not…i dunno.

Godlmighty. Fiddle around and fiddle around and fiddle around trying to get those things back the way I imagine I like them.

So now we have a new array. Fine. Good. Go away…

Down the hallway in the office, what do we discover but…but…but…

W?
T?
F?
???

Somehow, for reasons unimaginable, she’s gotten into my Vision System: the collection of accursed spectacles I need to navigate the world.

Back there, on my desk, I have three pairs of glasses:

  • Distance only
  • Close-up only (for reading)
  • Progressives (distance melting into close-up)

Keeping these things straight is a real nuisance. To facilitate that, I’ve got thee glasses cases, one labeled “distance,” one labeled “close-up,” and one labeled “progressives.” But…

Yes: but… Since I tend to be pretty slap-happy, I often don’t bother to put x or y pair of glasses away. So they end up strewn across the desk in my usual slap-happy way.

Well. Luz is the exact opposite of slap-happy. She can’t stand it. So she puts the glasses into the cases…having NO clue what those little labels on the cases mean. This means that now the glasses are all mixed up. And since I don’t wear the individual close/distance/bifocal/progressive pairs often (I use an old pair of progressives for navigating the house and have a pair of driving glasses in the car), I can barely remember which one is which, myself.

It must have taken a good half-hour this morning to untangle THAT mess. And now we’re talkin’ “no small order.”

With the distance glasses, I can see the side of North Mountain (two or three miles off) in exquisite detail.

With the reading glasses, anything beyond the end of my arm is a blur.

With the progressives, I can sorta see the desert on the side of North Mountain, and I can also see to read print on a piece of paper…or the speedometer in the car.

So I have to take three pairs of glasses outside, along with a piece of paper containing 12-point type, and stand there experimenting with them.

Sounds simple, no?  Peer through a pair of spectacles: if you can see the shrubbery on the side of the mountain, those must be the distance glasses or the progressives. Look at your hand: if you can see your fingerprints, then they have to be the progressives; if you can’t, they have to be the distance glasses.

Well.
No.

How well this strategy works depends on the lighting conditions. And today the sky is overcast. I might be able to see my fingerprints through the progressives, sure…but the creosotebush on the mountain, not so much.

This leads to a certain degree of ambiguity. Not to say “rage.”

ohhhhh well….

Life in these New-nited States…

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Do you recall thinking that it would be just ay-mazing if you lived to see the 21st century come in? Maybe even highly unlikely?

Well, f’rgodsake, here we are, two decades into the 21st century, and weirdly enough, we’re still here. “Weird” seems to be the word, all right. Sometimes I feel like I’m unstuck in time. Or magically dumped by kidnapping aliens out of a flying saucer  onto some world that is just slightly out of kilter. The miracles of computer science, in particular, seem to me to distort life so that many things are altogether out of whack.

Paying for things, for example.

I wanted to renew my son’s subscription to The Economist, as a Christmas present. Ended up jumping through hoop after hoop after absurd hoop, reciting digit after digit after digit of strange code numbers, fighting my way through ENDLESS yakathon punch-a-button hoops to get to a live person.

One of the interesting phenomena of the 21st century is that spectacularly wealthy corporations spend spectacular amounts of money to fob their customers onto spectacularly complicated and annoying systems to shuck off salaries for a few minimum-wage customer-service phone slaves. Is this amount of aggravation for your customers REALLY worth saving a half-dozen minimum-wage workers’ pay?

Dealing with doctors and doctors’ offices: HOLY shee-ut. First off, just try to get through the phone labyrinth to reach a live human. Then try to figure out WTF they’re talking about, as they try to wind their way through insurance and Medicare labyrinths. And now there are so damn many stupid rules that you have to sit through the same repetitive yakfest every time you call and then explain for the 103rd time that yes you have this piece of bureaucratic luggage and no you don’t have that piece of bureaucratic bullshit and why do we have to do this every damn time?

Could it be possible that Computerized Civilization is actually worse to deal with, psychologically, than the terrifying Threat of Nuclear Holocaust? Do you remember schoolboys shooting up their classrooms, back in those terrible dark ages? Is it possible that the dehumanization inflicted on us, here in the Digital Age, is driving our young people mad?

Well, I need to get off my duff, write Luz a check, and then traipse off to someplace to buy my son a Christmas present. Speaking of computerized phone hoopjumps, I finally just gave up trying to renew the subscription to The Economist for him. Apparently they don’t want us as customers.  I should’ve thought about going through Amazon, except…I’m not sure how you would renew an existing subscription through that route.

And so, awayyyyy…. after a fashion.

What? A Poem of What…

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Shot off in the purple haze emanating from the bottom of a bottle of wine…

************

“You fell,” he said.
“I’m not leaving my home,” she said.
Her home, where she had brought up the man in front of her from the age of about nine.

“You can’t stay here alone,” he said.
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
Unconvincing.
Unconvinced.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“We must put you somewhere else.
A home where someone is there
All the time
24/7
To look after you.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Can you not imagine, my son,
How you might love your home
More than life?

No.

Can you not imagine, my son,
That some things matter more than life?

No.
“I am afraid for you.”

No. No, my son: you are afraid for yourself.
For your guilt. For your conscience.
Most of all,
For your impotence.
For the impotence that is human.

“We will sell the house.”

“No.”

“We can use the money to pay
For your care.”

No. No, my son. You will use the money
To pay for your guilt.
To pay for your impotence.

“Put her in this bed,” he said.
“And let her sleep.”

Let us sleep.

All of us.

*************

This afternoon I stopped at a house for sale in the neighborhood just to the east of mine. The houses are about 20 years older than the ones in my tract (which came into being in the early 1970s) and also about half again as pricey. Needed work, the place did. As I’m about to clilmb into my car, along comes a middle-aged man, who pulls into the driveway and climbs out of his SUV.

“Tryin’ to sell the place, are ya?” I ask.

“We have an offer,” he says. “Looks like it’s gonna go through.”

We chat.

His mother has lived there for lo! these many years. They moved in when he was nine years old, and that’s where he grew up. From his point of view, it’s the family homestead.

They have her in a “care home.”

I sense what this means: one of those fly-by-night outfits run under the radar by Tony the Romanian Landlord and his ilk, the one who has peppered the ’Hood with a half-dozen “nursing homes.”

He thinks it’s grand. It’s not, after all, the Beatitudes or the Terraces. That would be why I sit here getting shit-faced on the dregs of a bottle of Bogle.

Holy fuck, what a people we have become!

But meanwhile, beside it all and beneath at all: what do we do with our parents when they can no longer care for themselves?

What do we do with people that we, deep in our hearts and unmentionable souls, do not want to care for ourselves? Or cannot care for, wives and sisters and daughters having to go into the marketplace to help keep the roofs over our heads and the food on our restaurant tables and the SUVs in our driveways?

What?

Loafifying…

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How was your Thanksgiving? I hope a pleasant holiday was had by one and all! Mijito and I went over to his friends’ house…they not being middle-aged bachelors are happily married with half-grown kids and large extended families. Had a great time!

Today, I’m hanging out at the Funny Farm doing…nothing. Exactly nothing.

This loafing stuff has gotta stop! I’ve become addicted to it. I’ve learned to loaf with élan thanks to the Covid terror…I don’t even go to grocery stores anymore: just send a delivery person or order on Amazon. Walk the dog twice a day. And that’s it, in the mobility department.

The plague thing, it appears, is never gonna go away.  This is ducky: Looks like we’re going to have to run out and get a new set of shots every time the damn virus mutates into some new strain.

Dunno about you, but I’m getting mighty tired of the lock-up in solitary confinement. I see no one. I go nowhere. I do nothing. And I’m mighty tired of it! {whine}

That’s only a slight exaggeration. Driving around in parts of town where I haven’t gone since the lockdown began is vaguely disorienting. The city continues to evolve as we sit hunkered down in our caves. Normally, I’d be driving through those areas even if I wasn’t going TO a destination there, just to get from Point A to Point B. But since I don’t go to Point B anymore — send the Instacart runner if I must, or else order stuff on Amazon — there actually are parts of the city where I haven’t gone in a year or more, since this whole flap arose. And without the church and choir, I have exactly zero social life. Thanksgiving at the kids’ (now middle-age parents’…) house was the first large social event I’ve been to since the horrible flap blew up.

And it looks like the solitary confinement is not gonna go away soon:  Pfizer says, sounding optimistic, that it can whip up a new vaccine for the Omicron variant in a mere 100 days — forgodsake, that’s three and a half months! Before it even starts to get to market…

Meanwhile… Have you been watching the price of real estate? Migawd…we’re putting Southern California to shame. Lookit this: two bedrooms, one bath. Over by the coliseum, where the neighborhood streets (and people’s front yards) disappear under a tide of parked cars every time any event takes place. Four and a quarter! Over four times my father’s entire retirement savings, which he figured would support him from the age of about 50 until he fell face-forward into the grave. Then we have this astonishing slum property, right around the corner from Chuck’s Auto (car dude extraordinaire), around the corner from Xavier & Brophy (fancy private high schools), and within walking distance of the place where DXH and I lived when we were first married: https://my.flexmls.com/DeanTompkims/search/contacts/20211024182402853739000000/newsfeeds/listings/20211124193010032749000000  Terrifying!!

Seriously terrifying: if a fire started on that stove while you were upstairs in the bathroom, you’d have to jump out a window to escape. Assuming you could get a window open…

The Funny Farm is supposedly worth (sez Zillow) over five times what I paid for an identical model two blocks closer to Conduit of Blight Blvd., back in the day; and well over twice what I paid for the present FF. How the hell do young people get by in these circumstances?

Meanwhile, in other overpriced climes: couldn’t make it to Costco on gasoline fumes yesterday, so filled up at the QT over in east Sunnyslope: THREE DOLLARS AND EIGHTY-NINE CENTS A GALLON!

Hoooolleeeee mackerel. Went ahead and filled up there, though, figuring a couple extra bucks was worth avoiding a twenty-minute wait in line at Costco’s gas pumps. Plus I wasn’t entirely sure the tank had enough gas to make it all the way out to Paradise Valley.

It bein’ Black Friday, Costco was JUST JAMMED.

Only needed a couple things, though, so that was not such a BFD.

Quite.

Well. Yes, it was.

One of the things I needed there was to order up a new pair of  glasses, since this morning I was soooooo delighted to discover I’d lost my regular pair of progressives. Supposedly a prescription is good for one year. By law.

Answer: Nooooo they will not. My computer says it’s still November. Right? I renewed these effing glasses last December. THEREFORE we should have another couple weeks to go before I have to do another government-mandated hoop-jump.

Well. No. They flat refused to sell me a new pair of glasses.

Next time I get a new spectacularly expensive prescription, I am going to buy TWO pairs of regular (not shades) progressives, so that I don’t get screwed like this again. One Rx fits me for a good two to three years, and if I lose or break a pair, I do NOT need Big Brother ordering me to throw my money down the drain like that.

And speaking of spectacularly expensive: Inside the Costco, I picked up a chunk of my favorite white cheddar cheese and then turned to the adjacent wine aisles, where I planned to restock the stash of Spectacularly Cheap Red.

Uh…

No.

INCREDIBLY, their prices for Cheap Plonk were in the Baron Rothschild range!!! Seriously: You could do better on a mid-range to cheapo bottle at freakin’ AJ’s (!!!!!!). And certainly much, MUCH better at Sprouts.

So I was just furious. Drove way to Hell and Gone out to Paradise Valley and bought nothing except for a chunk of cheddar cheese, the like of which also I could’ve gotten at AJ’s or Sprouts, in smaller quantity. And after this: those fine venues are gonna be where I shop

{sigh} After I got home, I stumbled upon the “lost” glasses, so once again can see my feet as well as the side of North Mountain. I’d put them away. As in their proper glasses case, in the cabinet where they belong…bizarre behavior! No wonder I couldn’t find them…

What a g.d. wasted afternoon.

Not exactly loafing, quite. (A typical Costco covers about an acre, so a stroll around it is at least a little bit of a walk.) But somehow wasting time and effort seems even more unhealthy than loafing.

Loafing’s not all that great for your morale, though. Yesterday while wasting time on the computer, I chanced to learn that my former bestie’s brother-in-law died several years ago, in Prescott. Of melanoma, the very entity Wonder-Dermatologist sliced off my face a few weeks ago.

That is just hair-raising…you couldn’t hope to meet a more vigorous, smart, and healthy man.

Ex-bestie: retired from Scottsdale Community College, living in Washington State with her new hubby, in what looks like a very nice home and neighborhood. Ex-bestie’s ex-husband: remarried and living happily ever after in a small town in Oregon. Third of the three brothers: still in Arizona and practicing law, having retired from the Superior Court bench.

How could we possibly all be old enough to have retired???????

Brave…Strange New World

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I wanna say, in the first minute, that surely it hasn’t been SO long since I drove down Seventh Street that the place has changed to the point that I barely recognize it. But…but…??? Maybe it has?

Or maybe instead I’m losing my marbles.

Seventh Street is a road that, when I lived on the east side of Central Avenue between Central and Seventh, either housed my favorite haunts or formed a large part of the route to them. But… On reflection…???

In the first place, now that I live to the west of Central and even of Seventh Avenue (in Phoenix, avenues are to the west of Central and streets are to the east), many of those places on Seventh Street and Twelfth Street that I used to haunt, I hardly ever go to any more.

These days I tend to avoid the Safeway at Seventh Street and Glendale, where I used to do most of my non-Costco grocery shopping. It’s overpriced and overcrowded. Most of my groceries these days come from Sprouts, AJ’s (a local gourmet market), or Costco. Same with the Walgreen’s catty-corner across the intersection from the Safeway. Most of the stuff I’d buy at a Walgreen’s, I can get from Amazon or from the Albertson’s just down the street. If I just must patronize a Walgreen’s, there’s one across Conduit of Blight from said Albertson’s. All that’s required is to run the gauntlet of panhandlers to get in the front door: annoying, but a lot less time-consuming than driving several miles to a bum-free parking lot.

Unholy traffic! It was only quarter after three, but you’d  have thought it was pushing 5 p.m. Unless an awful lot of businesses are letting their workers off early because tomorrow’s Thanksgiving, the traffic on 7th Street has increased so vastly as to make the road almost unrecognizable.

Seriously. I was searching for my favorite bicycle shop, there to replace a pair of padded biking gloves that I use when manhandling Ruby’s leash. I know where it is. I know exactly where it is.

Damned if I could find it!

So I ended up having to trek east to Twelfth Street, schlep way the Hell & Gone down to Bethany Home, and backtrack north up Seventh again. Of course I found it, right where it belonged. But the whole corner seemed so changed, so altered, that I almost didn’t recognize the place.

Today’s road cruise took me past a place the handsome young real estate agent took me to: Nice enough patio home. Actually a very pleasant place, all things considered. I declined, because I really don’t want to live in a patio home — don’t like being crowded that close to the neighbors. Now…boy! Am I glad I said “no, thank you!” The tsunami of traffic pouring past that place…yipes!!! The noise would be deafening. It would be like living next door to Niagara Falls, twice a day.

Money blogger’s message here: Next time you’re looking at a house to buy, before you make a bid on it, go visit there during the rush hour. Park the car, get out, walk around for ten or fifteen minutes, and listen to what you can hear.