Coffee heat rising

Costco Jeans Redux

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Okay, so this morning I traipsed up to the Paradise Valley Costco to return the annoying Buffalo Jeans that did not fit…unlike the identical pair of the same brand and the same size in a different color. As usual, no argument was made.

Checked the women’s clothing department in hopes that MAYBE this branch of the store would still have Gloria Vanderbilts. But no. Of course not.

Asked an employee in the clothing aisle. She said she thought they were discontinued.

Yesterday I did ascertain that you can buy Gloria’s from Amazon — at significantly more than Costco has been charging for the same jeans. Also, many of the styles shown there are not available in all sizes. Annoying.

So I guess after this, it’s off to the country/western store to buy Wranglers. They never fit as well, but at least they’re not stupid stretchy gym tights. Ugh!

Can’t really blame Costco for deciding to change up its stock. After all, I’ve been buying Glorias there for a good 20 years. Maybe more! They can’t carry the same stuff forever. I guess.

Seems like they at least coulda waited till after I shuffle off this mortal coil…

Shopping Adventure in the Absence of Instacart…

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In the “How Dumb Can You Get?” department, today I believe I scored a gold medal for Olympic how-dumbness.

This morning I decided nothing would do but what I must drive up to Costco so as to purchase, among other things, two pair of size 12 blue jeans in my favorite brand: Gloria Vanderbilts. My usual size 8s and 10s no longer fit, after the extended period of sedentary solitude occasioned by covid confinement and then by the broken shoulder.

I had tried to put an order through Instacart to achieve this purchase, but ran into an Olympic-sized snafu, and a chucklehead who barely spoke English as their excuse for customer service. After this jerk put me on hold with obnoxious Muzak blasting into my ear at high decibels, I hung up and went on about my way.

Now, if you had been here, you would’ve reminded me that today is Good Friday. And yes, that would be the Friday before Easter, the first big holiday we’ve had in over a year for which large numbers of people imagine that it’s probably-sort-of-kind-of safe to get together with their families. Right?

Pissed as hell with Instacart — whose employee has now become aware that I have checked out and has begun to harass me with nuisance telephone calls — I clamber into the dog chariot and head on up toward Costco, over Phoenix’s homicidal surface streets.

There must’ve been a thousand people inside that store along about 11 AM. I exaggerate not. This store has an enormous parking lot and almost every space was filled. I parked next to a sporting goods store that occupies the pad just to the north of the Costco’s. Under the best circumstances, any given Costco is crowded and hectic. But when the stores are really crowded, they morph into Sites of Nightmare.

So there I am inside this concrete cave trying to get from point A to point B through churning mobs of people, each one of whom believes that she or he is the only person in the place  and navigates accordingly.

Turns out that it was a good thing the scheme to deploy an Instacart runner was foiled. If any such soul  had been sent forth into the fray to try to find a pair of Glorias, they would’ve been flummoxed. Apparently, Costco has decided to quit carrying Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, one of the very few brands that accommodates the rear ends of aging women. All that was left were the sad dregs of their last shipment, clearly meant to be the LAST shipment.

Hell and damnation!

Eventually I decided to experiment with a couple pairs of Buffalo jeans by David Bitton. These are made of stretchy tencel — no, not the desired denim, but the stretch might give them an outside chance of sorta-maybe-kinda fitting. I buy denim jeans for a simple reason: I do not want to live in stretchy athletic tights! I like saggy baggy comfortable jeans. That is why I like Gloria Vanderbilt jeans.

But…whatEVER.

An hour of banging from one wall to the next wall to the next wall to the next wall inside the Costco eventually elicits the dog’s treats, a roast chicken, no make-up of any interest whatsoever, a bottle of cheap Portuguese wine, a box of grapes, a box of Campari tomatoes, a chunk of cheddar cheese, a chunk of blue cheese, a box of blueberries, and…some other stuff, I’m sure. A lengthy stand in line transfers ownership of these items to me and finally I am out the door.

Escape into one’s vehicle is most surely not escape from the madding hordes — this is being, after all, lovely Phoenix: capitol of the lunatic Arizona driver.

I’m making my way home by surface streets, electing not to risk my fellow homicidal drivers’ lives with a one-handed jaunt down the freeway. Incredibly, the southbound I -17 has been detoured onto Conduit of Blight Boulevard! No kidding: four lanes of 70-mile-an hour-traffic is pouring onto a surface street best described as “annoying” during its better moments.  Conduit of Blight is aptly named in the map of my personal geography. It passes through some of the dreariest agèd ticky-tacky in the city. Naturally, the residents are out and about, and — typically– one of them is tooling along blasting everyone around him with his boombox. Literally, the bastard has got the thing blasting so loud that even with all the windows in my car closed, each THUMP from his bass speaker causes my rear-view mirror mirror to vibrate!

This lovely serenade follows me all the way down to Gangbanger’s Way, where I hang a left, dodge away from the bastard, and whip into the ‘Hood. This, need I remind you, is why I do not carry a pistol in my car.

What a place!

Out of the tunnel of annoyance, into the daylight of hilarity…

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Tuesday: The usual 4 AM a.m. wake up call leaves me, once again, without enough sleep by the time I finally give up and roll out of the sack. About three hours later, I decide I’d better walk the poor little dog, who has not been outside in for-freaking-ever.

So I’m lashing the dog up in the complicated lash-up required to keep her more or less in line wiithout having her choke on her collar and fly into a reverse-sneezing frenzy. Remember, a doggie walk in these stressful days has to be managed with one hand: normally it requires two hands to keep her under control at all times. So in the best of conditions, this stroll is going to be a one-handed wrestling match.

Phone rings, just as we’re about to head out. My friend who was going to drive me to the first physical therapy session in the morning. Yeah.

Well, says she, she has remembered that she has a couple of errands in Scottsdale. So she will need to drop me off about a half an hour early and I’ll have sit there and wait for the therapy appointment and then  after that little nightmare is over I will have to wait again for heaven only knows how long until she gets back from Scottsdale to pick me up.

To put it mildly, this is not a scenario that appeals. So I say I will find some other way to get there.

As a matter fact the “other way” will be for me to drive myself, over my son’s dead body and in direct contravention of doctor’s orders.

Frankly I believe I will have no problem driving over there one-handed. As a practical matter I drive around with one hand most of the time. Except of course when dodging my fellow homicidal drivers. This, after all, is why we have power steering. Right?

By 9:45, the rush hour will be over and it should not be too unsafe to get there. It’s only 3 miles. I can get down there and also back home with a series of right-hand turns… In fact the only left turn I would have to make would be off a neighborhood arterial onto a relatively tame main drag. Additionally, the parking at this place consists of a long row of single-car spaces, so you can drive straight through without having to back and fill to get out.

Ruby loves grass, probably because we don’t have any. So when we get into the Richistans, all she wants to do is wallow and roll in the luxuriant, irrigated lawns that grace the stately homes. And, we might add, sniff every drop of dog pee that has ever  been deposited thereon. And of course, dump on said grass. Preferably directly in the line of sight of the proprietors’ front windows.

It’s supposed to reach 90° by afternoon and it’s already getting warm. All I want to do is move along, get the doggie walk out of the way and get back home where I can sit down and put my feet up again. So while she’s sniffing around in someone’s grass, I decide to stride right along… As I’m marching toward Pretoria, dragging her highness behind me, I hear ssskkkkkkkriiichchchchch….  

Huh? Turn around, glance back, and there’s the poor little dog at the end of the lead: she has assumed the position and is now helplessly being dragged forward by the harness, squatting and looking much like a stuffed Easter bunny.

Oh, dear God! I stop. She finishes the job: all over the neighbor’s front sidewalk. So there’s a nice mess to clean up!

We continue up the way and of course, invariably, it does not matter what time of day or night you leave your house with your dog…you cannot avoid your fellowvdog-walkers…

Along comes someone else with two large black beasts straining at their leashes. On our side of the street. The only side of the street that has any shade.

So we have to cross the (hot!) (asphalt!) road and proceed down the sunny side of the street until we get past that patrol. They drag their human into a garage, but the human leaves the garage door open, thereby also leaving open the question of whether he has let his dogs off the leash to roam around loose inside there, ready to charge us as we walk past.

I’ve noticed, on the way out, that the Funny Farm’s front yard is sprouting a nice crop of dandelions and assorted other weeds. When I get home, I call Gerardo to find out when he figures he will be around again. He says he’ll come over tomorrow. How convenient. I tell him that I won’t be here tomorrow morning, but Luz will be here. I arrange to leave a check for him on the back patio table. It also means I will have to leave the side gate open, because he has lost the key that I gave him and I have never managed to go to a locksmith and have another one made. Nor am I going to do so tomorrow, given the circumstances. I pointed out to him that Luz will need to be alerted to his presence since she will be less than thrilled to see a crew of dudes invade the backyard while she’s here alone.

At any rate speaking of the dog and the doggie products, I did manage to pick up three weeks’ worth of doggie mounds out of the backyard this morning. This is the first time that I have felt up for even trying to maneuver the doggy picker-upper gadget… And SURPRISE! Nooooo problem! So that was a pleasant discovery.

As a matter of fact, overall the arm is feeling a lot better. It seems not to hurt (much) unless I lift it up and out to the side. Lifting the arm straight frontward seems to elicit scarcely a twinge… Though I will say I haven’t tried to raise it over my head. So I take this as a good sign. I hope.

One thing that is clear from this fiasco: you cannot live in Phoenix without access to a car…PERIOD. It very well may be that if you imagine you are going to age in place in a freestanding home, you’re simply going to have to be able to drive a car or to find some way to get some transport service — not volunteers, not relatives — to ferry you around. This predicament, of course, is what makes it possible for outfits like the Beatitudes to talk the elderly into consigning themselves to a de facto prison. The Beatitudes will ferry you to doctors and grocery stores — at some considerable inconvenience to yourself, but at least you can get there.

One way around that, I think, is to move into one of the newer apartment developments that are going up around the city. These things are roughly modeled on European urban areas: commercial and office space on the ground floors, with apartments on half-a-dozen upper floors. If you live in one of these places, you could in theory avail yourself of restaurant food and maybe even some (very expensive) specialty groceries. One of my friends works in such a place right now…apartment buildings and office buildings are mixed together with retail and restaurants in a single development. It wouldn’t be my first choice of living environments, but on the other hand it wouldn’t be my last choice, either. The Beatitudes would be my last choice. With Sun City as the second-to-last.

The big malls built in the 50s and 60s here are moribund. Plans are on the drawing board to convert one such mall — the venerable Paradise Valley Mall, home of Macy’s (defunct), Dillard’s (now renting out its second-floor offices to freelance entrepreneurs), Penney’s (on its way out), and the like. There is a freestanding Costco in that shopping center — one would presume they will close it because it will be way too tacky to go with the fancy production the developers intend to build… But if it doesn’t close… If it stays in place… Well! That would make such an apartment development look mighty attractive. The living space would be right next door to a place where you could buy anything your heart wants, in lifetime supplies. Costco also has a gas station that underprices the competition by anything from $.05 to $.13 a gallon. It would be across the street from a Target, an REI, a Dollar Store, and a slew of middle-class restaurants. And it’s just up the road from the Valley’s largest and best-stocked Fry’s supermarket, which competes directly and ferociously with AJ’s, purveyor of fine and overpriced goods And it’s also close enough to the Mayo Clinic that you could get there quickly, and the 911 people would drive you there if you asked, rather than telling you that they’re going to take you to the depressing facility at John C Lincoln. The truth is that might be a place for me to consider moving to.

Fact, I think I will ask one of my coreligionists, who is an ambitious real estate agent, if she’ll keep an eye out for me as that place is developed.
Later. Having been up since 4 a.m., I’m going to take a nap before the sun comes up. And honi soit qui mal y pense!

Machinating Toward Normalcy

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…Or toward whatever normalcy is around here. There’s a reason we call the the ol’ ranch The Funny Farm. 😉

Come the past couple of days, I’ve realized that I’ve got to get myself up off my duff and I’ve got to start acting a little bit more like myself and a little bit less like a 93-year-old woman who’s afraid to dodder across the the floor.

That literally is what I’ve been doing: doddering. Taking tiny little cautious steps and inching around the house lest I fall again and hurt myself worse. Or end up on the floor again and not be able to get up. Again.

Truly I don’t even have to sit down on the floor to be stuck. All I need to do is it squat down next to the dog, as I just did a few minutes ago to unbuckle her collar, and lo! I can’t get back up on my feet! This time I contrived to use the coffee table as a platform to climb up, saving me another butt-walk into the family room. But seriously: this stuff is scary. No wonder I’m mincing around the house, too cautious to take a normal stride.

First step — heh… as it were — is to get off my duff and get back to walking the dog a couple of times a day. I had kind of let the doggy-walks go even before this little fiasco happened, but once I was hurt, I felt like could not manage Ruby, who is not what you would call sterling obedience-trained. Indeed, a walk around the block with Ruby is actually a drag around the block behind Ruby. So, if I wasn’t already fully converted to Jell-O, the last three weeks of hunkering in the house have completed the process. Even Ruby has put on weight!

Instead of trying to make our usual 1 1/2- to 2-mile walk, I decided to take two shorter walks, one in the morning and one in the evening. Just got back from the second of those today. And it seems to be a pretty good idea. This should allow me to build up a little strength in the legs again, which seems to be in order. Over time, I can increase the length of the walks, which also should help some.

Next Wednesday, a friend is driving me to my first physical therapy session. Number-one order of business will be to ask them if they have any techniques for getting back on one’s feet after one ends up on the floor. Apparently I have habitually used both hands to press against the floor or some object in order to shove myself upright. One hand does not suffice for the job!

Even though Ruby did not drag me around the neighborhood tonight — I’ve learned a leashing technique that discourages that — the shoulder still hurts like hell. So exactly how this scheme is going to work remains to be seen…

 

Walloped, continued

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Well I’m still alive, believe it or not, and still more or less ambulatory. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost 3 weeks since I fell out by the pool and and broke my shoulder. Since then my right arm has been in a sling 24 hours a day, except for a few minutes per day in the shower. That’s jolly fun. The pain has slowly gotten a little bit better, day by day in almost unnoticeable increments. This evening as a matter of fact it feels a lot better than it has over the past couple of weeks.

Yesterday — migod was only yesterday? — my son drove me out to the Mayo for more X-rays and consultation with the orthopedist. This soaked up half of his day and mine, too.

The young doc’ — who actually is a PA — ordered a vast round of X-rays to be done before we met with him.

Now, the problem with the Mayo’s X-ray department is that they operate at the speed of a galloping snail. They plunk you down in the lobby outside their four x-ray rooms and…you wait. And wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait and wait… I must have sat there 45 minutes waiting for them to get around to X-raying my shoulder, a job theoretically scheduled at 12:45. Only two other people were waiting to be x-rayed. So that was a bit stressful, if you find annoyance to be stressful.

On the other hand, the technician was awesome. She took photos of this damn thing from every angle you can imagine and then some. By the time we got in to see Young PA Kildare, we had a very detailed set of the images.

He said he thinks it will heal up completely in another 6 to 8 weeks. But in the meantime he wants me to start physical therapy.

The nearest physical therapy outfit is about three miles away. I’ve been in there before and was magnificently unimpressed. My long-ago physical therapist, who really was awesome, has moved into tonier realms, and I will be damned if I want to drive to Scottsdale to get to a PT.

Which brings us to the next problem: I can’t drive. And my son cannot keep on taking time off work to schlep me around the city. Yesterday soaked up his entire afternoon. He is supposed to be working. He manages a crew of underlings. He cannot be gone all day long. So how the hell I’m going to get to this place escapes me. In theory I could walk: three miles (one way) is not that far for me. But in the shape I’m in just now, really it’s too far. Plus it would require walking most of the way along major horrible thoroughfares, every one of them seven lanes full of Looney Tunes. Driving on those streets is difficult enough, but walking alongside one of them…Holy shit.

So one of my chores today was to try to get my coreligionists to volunteer to schlep me over there… Three times a week. Or to somehow get the Uber application downloaded into the iPhone and try to figure out how to use it. But I ended up so so engrossed in the client’s project that I never got around to either one of those proposed chores.

God only knows how much it’s going to cost to have Uber or taxicabs haul me to this place and back home. And the hassle factor is more than I can contemplate! So that is something I’m going to have to figure out in the next few days.

On Monday when Luz the Wonderful Cleaning Lady arrives, I’ll ask her if she has time to haul me around once in a while, and if so, can I pay her to drive me back and forth to this place maybe once a week. And today when I can work up the strength, I’ll ask around the church.

Meanwhile, the beloved new client is hot to trot... Off to the University of Washington Press! She wants to get a formal proposal organized and sent to the editor there. As a practical matter, she does need to get started now: selling a book entails creating a proposal (which is a very BFD indeed) and then shopping it around to publisher after publisher.

In theory you’re not supposed to send proposals out to more than one publishing house at a time. I personally consider that to be BS and in the past have sent my proposals to four to six publishers at once. It would be a cold day in an Arizona July for two publishers to happen to stumble across each other and oh, yes, of course chat about your brilliant proposal and discover that they both received the same magnum opus on the same day. I just don’t think that’s going happen, and I think publishers’ attempts to inflict that kind of embargo on their writers are exploitive. I hesitate to tell the kid that. But may discuss it with her dissertation adviser, and also with my favorite current spy in scholarly publishing.

Also meanwhile, trying to edit copy by using Apple’s dictation system, which is about as knowledgeable as my dog, is just flikkin’ torture!!! Every passage, every sentence, every phrase pops up with error after error after error after error after error after error after error. Each one of which has to be manually fixed with one-finger, one-hand point-delete-point-tap. Over and over and over and over and over and over again. To fix one item is endlessly time-consuming. And to do it for hundreds of pages simply defies belief. Dictating a few sentences gives you things like this:

This passage is probably more appropriate for the proposal, to be addressed to publishers acquisitions editor rather then placed in the books introduction. Consider using much of this material for your proposal focusing the introduction on the background of the events and in research in which you set the book’s facts and pieces

Here is what it is supposed to say.

This passage is probably more appropriate for the proposal, to be addressed to a publisher’s acquisitions editor, rather than placed in the book’s introduction. Consider using much of this material for your proposal, focusing the introduction on the background of the events and on the research in which you set the the book’s facts and thesis.

Intended:

Since then my right arm has been in a sling 24 hours a day.

Delivered:

Since then, the army has been wrestling 24 hours a day.

Intended:

It feels a lot better than it has.

Delivered:

it feels a lot better than cats.

LOL!! How do cats feel, anyway?

What this fiasco means — and it is an ongoing, unending fiasco — is that every single sentence, every single phrase, every single word has to be scrutinized with x-ray vision to get it correct. And even then some weird mistakes are going to slip through. It is excruciatingly time-consuming — probably absorbs about three times as much time and effort as ordinary editing requires. I do not know when I am ever going to be able to get through the client’s copy, and I’m certainly instilling as many errors as I’m correcting.

I do have my moments of wondering whether I can continue with this project… I may have to tell her she’s going to have to find someone else to edit her book.

And that is going to make this a very expensive little accident. The project is worth several thousand dollars, all of which are about to go right straight down the drain.

None of this is helped by the chronic insomnia. I was awake between two and four this morning — well, 4 a.m. was the last time I looked at the clock. The day was overcast, which delayed the usual dawn awakening for me and the dog, but we rolled out of the sack at about six. And I am presently bat-brained exhausted.

Isn’t that amusing. Apple thinks the word Dawn is a trade name, and capitalize it CAPITALIZES …sumbiche!  Five tries to get the damn thing to spell capitalizes correctly!!!!!!!!!!!

I give up. Gotta go to bed. Good night, Mrs. Calabash!

 

 

 

Hairsassination

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Well, clearly I’m going to have to find some way to “pay it forward” to the church and most specifically to the choir. My gosh! Choir members have risen in mass to help me out. Yesterday morning a fellow named Kerr came over to collect me and drive me all the way to hell and gone out to Scottsdale to get my hair done.

He’s the gent whose wife fell and busted her shoulder last fall. He said she’s back to normal now. Her fiasco was significantly worse than mine because instead of just inflicting a set of cracks in the bone, she actually snapped it into two pieces. Ouch!

So it’s reassuring to know that in spite of having a worse injury, she recovered: apparently with no long-term ill effect.

At any rate, once we got to beautiful downtown Scottsdale, we found that my old and much beloved hair stylist Shane is still there! As requested he cut off the Rapunzel-esque locks into a cute, curly style… Yes, to the tune of sixty-eight dollars. And so now I will have to budget something to visit him once every two months. {grump!}

The mop needed to have about four inches of split ends trimmed off. But I rather resent having to get it all cut off. As a practical matter, though, with a crippled arm I can’t even wash it, much less comb the tangles out of wet hair or keep it combed and brushed between launderings. So… it is what it is, to coin a phrase.

Today, the pillar of the choir, D., is going to pick me up and take me down to the dentist’s office.

I made this appointment when a little revelation struck me. As I was reviewing the test results that the Mayo has posted on its portal, I realized that none of them is outside the range of”normal” except for the A1C measurement, which is a grandiose .1 above normal. The vitamin B12 level, which Dr. Fields blamed for the crazy-making peripheral neuropathy, is smack in the middle of the normal range. The last I spoke with her, she remarked that she could not understand why, given these improved numbers, the PN hasn’t started to go away.

This led me to wonder if there might not be some other cause for the present ailment. And lo! Looking around the hypochondriac’s treasure chest that is the Internet, what do I discover but that a titanium dental implant can cause peripheral neuropathy! The site that has the most detail that I could find seems to indicate that by “peripheral neuropathy” they’re talking about tingling in the gums and lips. Mine started there but has spread to the hands, arms, feet, and legs. One would think that might suggest some more systemic problem than just a local reaction to a dental implant. However… now that I think about it, before all this started I had an episode of burning mouth syndrome. That seemed to come out of nowhere… But maybe it didn’t! Maybe it was a response to all the damned dental work.

At any rate when I called the dentist and mentioned peripheral neuropathy, you could hear his ears perk up over the phone line. This is a very smart guy. And so I think it will be worth raising the question of whether the metal they stuck in my gums could be causing this thing. Elsewhere I learned that a test exists that supposedly can tell you whether you have a titanium allergy. I’m going to ask him if we can get that test done somewhere here in town.

D. picked up a bunch of things for me at a Fry’s here in town, and tomorrow she’s going to drive me to the dentist’s office. A week from tomorrow, my son is driving me back to the Mayo for another x-ray and a repeat visit with the orthopedist.

The result of all this gallivanting is that I didn’t read one word of the client’s magnum opus. In fact the stuff has been such a distraction and I’m so effing tired that I didn’t even think of it until just this minute. Tried to sleep in the afternoon to no avail. Now at 9:30 in the evening, I can barely hold my eyes open.