Coffee heat rising

The Chaos Hangover

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The older you get, I think, the harder it is to deal with stress. And this past two weeks of unending techno-chaos have been nothing if not hideously stressful. Last night I enjoyed a fine hangover from that stress-storm…again, I think.

Along about 2:30 in the morning, a bright flare of pain and sweat woke me up. Gut pain, chest pain, shoulder ache…hard-to-tell pain.

Heart attack? Certainly could be. Chest pain and sweating are classic heart attack signs.

On the other hand(s):

  • It was 80 degrees in the house and I was under three layers of blankets.
  • The pain seemed to be on the outside of the ribs, not inside, not under the ribs, not under the sternum, not under the clavicle. Earlier this week I wrenched that shoulder again, wrestling the dog around the ’hood — the same shoulder I dislocated a couple years ago. Damn thing has been hurting for a couple weeks, every time I wake up.
  • The mastectomy scars hurt, in a low-key way. All the time. On the outside of the ribs. Press anyplace around that area, three or four inches to the north or south of the elegantly disguised scar, and it hurts. So if I’m sleeping in some kind of odd position, likely I’m going to wake up with my chest hurting. On the outside of the ribs, not inside, not under the ribs, not under the sternum, not under the clavicle….
  • Stress invariably creates some sort of malign hangover, usually of an unpredictable nature. And stress, frustration, time suck, and anguish have haunted every waking and sleeping moment of my existence for the past two or three weeks. I’ve lost 2/3 of my business base, my computers are a jumble, I can’t figure out how to use iCloud effectively (and don’t believe it can be used the way I need to have it work), and I feel generally f*cked over. In a big way. No wonder I’m having some kind of little tizzy…
  • Interestingly, sitting up eventually elicited a fine burp: gas! Maybe…ya think?…just maybe I shouldn’t have swiggled down that half-a-cup of cheap red wine right before turning off the light and pulling the pillow over my head.

Yes, I could call 911. They would not take me to the Mayo, where my doctor practices and which is the only local hospital in which I have anything resembling confidence. They would take me to the hospital of their convenience, where I decidedly do not want to go. And want or no want, I have soooo HAD it with doctors and doctoring, I would rather die right now today than go through any more of that. And no, my friends, I do not exaggerate.

Get up; repair to the hall closet. Chew a couple of vile Gaviscon tablets. As usual, this stuff has no effect other than to make me hate my taste buds. Remember the ranitidine stashed in the closet. That’s Zantac. Drop one of those. After about 30 or 45 minutes, this stuff seems to work.

Evidently not about to die, climb back into bed around the sleeping dog.

Resolve…

a) Quit drinking as a stress control strategy.
b) Test blood pressure sometime after sunrise; if systolic is over 140, call the quack on Monday. Maybe.

Well, come the dawn, the BP numbers are a little high: average 137/86.

On the other hand:

  • It’s hot.
  • I drank half a bottle of wine yesterday afternoon.
  • And then I spent half the night wrestling with the question of how to copy data from DropBox and from iCloud to Documents, whence we know for sure that Time Machine will copy it. It appears very likely that TM does not copy iCloud. Wouldncha know it. There is a LOT of data stored to these two fine thunderclouds…so much, in fact, that the MacBook just informed me that it doesn’t have enough space to absorb another gulp of this trash.
  • I hate loathe and despise taking my blood pressure, almost as much as I hate loathe and despise watching some underling in a doctor’s office do it wrong. That sentiment alone is enough to drive up one’s numbers.

Jayzus!

At any rate, planning a strategy for organizing and transferring all this data was quite the little project…as in “took two hours to figure it out in any rational way.”

Most of my stuff is now deleted from DropBox. It took two full days and then some to transfer this data over to iCloud, an apparent exercise in futility. Copying from iCloud to the MacBook’s hard disk only took a couple of hours this morning…but of course I can’t get it ALL on the hard disk, because the MacBook is now chuckablock full.

Next: run Time Machine to back up the MacBook, thereby saving this data in perpetuity. In fact, do a TM back up to not one but two external hard drives…hope to God the hard drives are large enough. Once this stuff is saved, delete all the really old, “archived” debris that no one, myself included, cares ever to see again. This should free up some space on the MacBook.

Then get into iCloud and delete sh!tloads of data, which has about maxed the space I’m paying for. A lot of this stuff is archived business and financial documents, which really need only to be saved in a couple of places — a backup drive and the MacBook. But other than that material, much of the remaining detritus can be deleted without much risk.

How do I hate this sh!t? Let me count the ways.

I am soooo sick of technohassles! Once again, another entire day is going to be spent watching machines grinding away. No work, paying or otherwise, is going to get done. I am going to be frustrated and angry by the time the day ends, and once again I will go to bed frustrated and angry. Which no doubt contributes to things like waking up at 2:30 in the morning with a hair-raising bellyache.

Please, God: send me a patient little quarterhorse, about 50 head of cattle, and 2000 acres of upland grass country.

And now i want…

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a beer…

Just a beer. And a plate of pasta: comfort drink, comfort food.

Finally finished shoveling away the layers and layers of paper that have floated in the door and come to rest atop my desk. Interestingly, the desktop seems to be made of wood…huh! I’d forgotten that.

So gawdawful much paper comes flying in the door or gets dragged into the house in a purse or stuck on the bottoms of my shoes…God only knows how it all it all makes it way in here. I tend to drop it where it arrives: on the dining room table, on a kitchen counter, on the passenger seat of the car, on my desk…on my desk…on my desk….

It took the entire morning to dig the desk out from its current burden of paper, some of it dating back to 2018. About 90% of it is stuff that either needs to be kept or needs to be shredded, so less than a trash-basketful goes to the recycling. {sigh}. Well, except for the stuff you run through the shredder…that, actually, can be composted, if you’re careful to avoid grinding up any of the plastic “envelope windows” that come with some mail.

At any rate, after several hours of sorting, file-folder stuffing, and shredding, boyoboy does that desk look CLEAN. Who’d’ve thunk it was possible?

That notwithstanding, the overall hassle never, ever stops.

This morning the DropBox hassle developed a new twist and turn. I called to tell them I don’t want them to renew my annual subscription for extra space and was horrified to discover that despite my having spent two and a half days transferring 87 berjillion kilobytes to iCloud and deleting said kilobytes from DropBox, the damn stuff is still on DropBox!

That’s right. They keep it as a “back-up” stashed away where you can’t get at it to kill it off.

Augh!

Getting rid of it takes an elaborate techno-hoop jump, following instructions that might as well be in Martian. I tried to reach a techie friend to see if I could hire him (please!) to help, but he’s not answering.

So…what alternative?

American Express, I guess. This is why I persist in using AMEX: like Costco, like Apple, they have superlative customer service. I call and reach a patient CSR. Explain the situation: DropBox is not about to let me off the hook, and I do not want to pay for the extra server space to accommodate data that they will not simply reach out and delete or explain to me in simple terms how to erase.

N-o-o-o-o-o problem, quoth the AMEX dude. He put a block on the next bill from DropBox.

DropBox charges $9.99 per month(!) for a terabyte of storage. Apple is now charging the same, for the same amount of storage — having dropped its price by 10 bucks a month. However, I do not need a terabyte of cloud space: for $2.99 I can get 200 gigabytes. Well, even unedited and un-shoveled out, my DropBox files add up to a mere(!) 160GB. A-n-n-d there’s a LOT of stuff in there that could go away. When I get around to it, I’ll move a pile of superannuated debris off of iCloud, which will free up enough space to last for all of posterity.

Weather is starting to warm up a bit. If I felt like jumping into slightly chilly water, I could plunge into the newly resurfaced pool. But I’m too lazy to get cold just now: bad human.

The watering system is on the fritz. I need to call an irrigation guy to fix it, since all Gerardo seems to do is shut off the valves for the parts that spring a leak, leaving my plants to die. He doesn’t seem to understand — or to care — that a potted plant will die in one day flat if it’s not watered daily once the temps are over about 90 or 95 degrees. So that’s yet another hassle to deal with.

And I do need to find a tree guy to remove the devil-pod tree on the west side, which has become a bit menacing. The US weather service expects this winter’s El Niño to linger over the Pacific through the summer. What meant nice rains in the winter, then, will mean heavy winds and violent monsoons this summer, hiking the risk of that tree breaking and falling on my neighbor’s house or mine. Again, Gerardo said he’d do it…but…no action there. Dayum….just what I need to kill some more time on.

The winter’s rain, though, produced some very gorgeous flowers this spring…

 

Unfortunately these look awful. Somehow the new iCloud thing has f**cked up my photo function. Dammit! Am I ever SICK of this computer bullshit! It just simply never stops!

 

“Why didn’t I think of that…?”

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Ever have one of those “Why Didn’t I Think of That Before?” moments? 

The chore-a-day approach to household cleaning is one of those. Why did it take me 70 years to figure that out? How come it never occurred to my mother? Duh!

Well, I just came up with another one.

As you may have noticed, the price of beef — particularly of steaks — is through the roof. I no longer can afford to eat steak at all. However, I do require at least one serving of some kind of meat per day…sorry, I’m simply not the veggie type. I don’t like the icky flavor of farmed chicken and also can’t afford organic free-range air-cooled chicken. Nor do I care at all for farmed American pork (ech!). So one way of filling this gaping hole in my normal diet is by substituting Costco’s excellent hamburger (which really is first-rate) for steak.

But…really…I’m just not that nuts about grilled hamburger patties. Once in a while…okay, whatEVER. But I find the “while” gets longer and longer. So now what do I have in the freezer but a TON of hamburger, divvied into patties and frozen as single servings. Which — let’s face it — at the rate my enthusiasm is flagging, is not likely to be consumed anytime soon.

So I’m sitting here thinking am i gonna throw all that meat out? don’t think so…but what’m i gonna do with it?

While, no, I’m not nuts about grilled hamburger, I do love a pot of chili. Or Caribbean-style stuffed squash. Or curry. Or cheese ravioli or spaghetti or lasagne bathed in tomato sauce spiked with hamburger.

For all of those, you start with the same first step: sauté some onion and garlic (add celery and carrot if you want to go all out). Remove from the pan and then brown the hamburger in the veggie drippings. Then mix the cooked veggies back into the cooked meat. This is the basis of most American-style tomato pasta sauces. And it’s where you start when you make chili.

But it’s enough of a chore that when you’re tired and hungry at the end of the day, you just don’t feel like bothering.

But…but…wait…BUT? Why do you have to do that every time you cook one of those dishes?

Why couldn’t you cook up the foundation  for any of these sauces or stews ahead of time and freeze it? Why not take that mountain of Costco hamburger, chop a couple of onions, a couple of celery sticks, and a carrot, and sauté the vegetables, brown the meat, let it cool, and then divide it into meal-size portions, pack them into Ziplock bags, and toss them in the freezer?

Estimate how much of your meat mixtures would go into any one of the desired final dishes. That’s how much you’d pack into one bag.

Then, when you a crave a pot of chili (let’s say), you pull out a bag, defrost it, dump it into a stew pot (or a crockpot, if you’re in no hurry), add a hefty dose of chili powder, a big can of tomatoes, a can of tomato sauce or paste, maybe a little beef broth if have some around, and a generous splash of red wine. Allow to simmer long enough to blend the flavors, And voilà! Chili without the work. You could easily throw this together after a day of work.

Same for any other dish that requires a base of sautéed hamburger (or sausage!) and aromatic veggies.

It’s a weekend project that could feed you for many weeks to come.

Why didn’t I think of this before?

Why I stopped carrying a purse…

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A couple years ago, I decided to stop carrying a purse around. Why? Well, because in my part of town, it just flat isn’t safe. Any time you walk across the parking lots of our neighborhood grocery stores, you run the risk of mugging.

The way to minimize that risk: carry a wallet with your credit cards and nuisance store “member” cards in a pocket. Leave the purse at home, in a closet.

Interestingly, this works in a variety of positive ways, one of which is to cut panhandling exponentially. When a bum thinks I’m not carrying cash, he doesn’t barge up and demand that I share it with him.

But…then there is Tempe, even more richly infested with bums and panhandlers than the ’Hood, here at the end of the accursed lightrail line. (The lightrail is affectionately known in these parts as “the bum express.”)

Today I went out to that garden spot, that lovely little college town (you have to live in Arizona to sense the full irony in that characterization), to meet my friend and business partner for a late lunch at our favorite overpriced restaurant. Had to park about a block up the road, there being no spaces anywhere near the front of said restaurant.

Afterward, we drifted out to the front sidewalk and stood chatting for a few minutes. A bum wandered up and hovered nearby, studying a parking meter as if it held some clue to the meaning of life, the universe, and all that. Tina’s car was right in front of the place; shortly she jumped into her vehicle and drove off. I now had to walk a ways to get to my car.

Because of the quasi-infected surgical wound on my leg, I haven’t been able to wear my jeans, which are about the only women’s clothes you can buy that reliably contain pockets. So I’d brought a small purse with a long strap, which I’d slung over my shoulder.

The bum looks up and gazes at me quizzically, his eyes a startling blue. If he were washed and sober, he’d be a handsome man. But he is…well, neither washed nor sober.

I avoid his glance (Rule of Womanhood No. 213: Never make eye contact) and start walking up the block toward my car.

Naturally, he follows me. I’m walking fast, and he’s keeping pace with me, just a few steps behind.

I walk past my car — not a chance am I going to stop long enough for him to get any closer. As I march along, I slip the purse strap over my head so the bag hangs crosswise across my chest. And I search for a building that I can get into.

ASU and the city of Tempe have littered this stretch of the lovely downtown with pointless museums, all of which are locked tight. I keep hiking all the way down to Mill Avenue, where at last I come to a sandwich shop that’s open. I dart in the door and find — thank God — four burly men, two behind the counter and two standing in line to order food. They look a little startled when they see me come flying in.

Fortunately, the shop is fronted with ceiling-to-floor windows. I can see the vagrant walk on past and continue north on Mill. After waiting for a minute or two, I slip back out the door and hike back down the sidewalk to my car.

What did I think was going to happen? Well…take your pick:

  • Nothing.
  • The guy would ask me for a handout.
  • The guy would grab my purse and yank it off my body.

“Nothing” would be nice, but experience suggests it was the least likely of the three possibilities.

Frankly, I suspect if I’d had my credit cards stashed invisibly in the pocket of a pair of jeans, that guy would never have followed me.

This is something you learn from living in the central city. In the old house, one old lady was walking from her car into a nearby grocery store when a purse-snatcher threw her to the ground to grab her bag, thereby breaking her hip. Here in the ‘hood, another shithead shot one of my neighbors when he mistakenly thought she was resisting an attempt to steal her purse.

And that, folks, is why I do not carry a purse. Not unless I’m forced to it.

Chaos, continued…

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So in another 15 minutes I’ve got to race out the door so as to be parked at the credit union’s door when they open. Jeez!

I went online to check on the new account my beloved Banker (Justin) opened at the credit union, by way of forestalling any hackers poaching from my impossible-to-close goddamn PayPal account. After trying and failing to get in — none of my passwords work, and you have to have a password to get customer service from PayPal — I realized the way to prevent malefactors from draining my account through DropBox was simply to change the account number at the credit union. Justin agreed with this and made it so.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Well. No.

After I got home…after dark, well after the CU closed on Friday…I went online to check this and found a nearly empty savings account and no checking account.

Several thousand dollars reside(d?) in that account. So as you can imagine, I’ve been in a sweat all weekend.

Seems to me there are three possibilities:

  1. The account is simply misplaced somehow and can, with any luck, be restored to my access.
  2. The account had already been hacked and was empty at the time Justin changed it over to a new account number; hence it doesn’t show online because there’s nothing to show.
  3. I need some new password to get at it.

No. 3 is highly unlikely: why would I be able to see the savings account if I needed a new password to get into my CE Desk accounts? They’re linked.

No. 2 is a possibility, but it seems to me Justin would have mentioned that the account was empty, since he knew my concern about this was that someone might empty it.

No. 1 is, I sincerely hope, the likeliest scenario.

In any event, even the simplest explanation adds still MORE hassle to an already hassle-filled series of crises. Now I have to drive clear across the city, do battle with this new phenomenon, drag back here, try again to get online…oh, shit shit shit SHIT! Am I ever sick and tired of dealing with crises and catastrophes!!!!!!!!!

To add to the fun, my erstwhile business partner and I had planned to meet at our favorite restaurant this afternoon. So that means that in addition to driving and driving and driving and driving to the west side of the Valley, I’ll have to turn around and drive and drive and drive and drive to the east side!

Fortunately, we’re meeting for dessert, I having decided that the cuisine there has deteriorated to the point that it’s not worth $50 for a fancy meal and a glass or two of wine. Their desserts are still excellent, but the last two times I’ve been there, neither meal was worth the prices they charge.

Which is too bad: they used to be decidedly worth it.

***
Late morning

She’s b-a-a-a-c-k!

Arrived at the credit union as the doors opened. One guy was ahead of me, but two tellers were on duty, one of whom promptly referred me to the manager.

The heroic Justin, of course, started this day across town in the corporate office, whence he has been despatched. Deb, a migrating manager, was standing in for our regular boss.

It didn’t take her long to see the problem and to harass their IT people. First off, she discovered that the account’s funds are still intact: no problem. Then she beat the IT folks about the head & shoulders to get make the account show up on my end. She said the fix would take two or three days to “take.” But that’s fine, as long as we know that the money is there and we know where it is. Recurring payments for CEDesk are charged to AMEX, so if push came to shove, I could’ve paid them from Personal. But it doesn’t look like that will be necessary.

And, though there’s no way I can close the PayPal account (apparently), it is now disconnected from any of my bank accounts and so nothing can be sponged out of the credit union.

Can you imagine trying to get this mess cleaned up at a Wells Fargo or BofA branch? 😀

Twenty minutes before it’s time to head for lovely downtown Tempe…

***

The pool is now crystal clear: check that off the fiasco list.

iCloud seems to have scrambled some data and lost other data in the download from DropBox. However, so far I haven’t discovered losses that I can’t live without.

Clients: One is confused. I would like to migrate him to iCloud but fear this would cause even more confusion. I’ve left his files on DropBox, but he still seems a little flummoxed about the whole affair. This, I will deal with later.

Surgical leg wound: slowly getting better, i think. Have an appointment tomorrow.

Lost Social Security and Medicare cards: Dunno how that lovely man swung it, but both cards have now showed up!

And so…away!

 

 

 

Update from Chaos Central

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Slowly, SLOWLY, SLOWLEEEEEE some aspects of the present Chaos Storm are resolving.

DropBox: After three days of downloading, it’s all copied over into iCloud. Now, after one last backup (which presumably will take another 36 hours, if it can hold together that long), I will be able to delete all the DB files except for those dedicated to a couple of clients who freakin’ insist on using it. When they’re gone, DB is gone, done, GONE.

iCloud: Seems to have finally absorbed all the Drop-Box data, after three long days of grinding away. Tried to back up to DropBox Time Machine, preparatory to deleting DropBox Files, and discovered Time Machine wants to copy down BOTH DrobBox and iCloud: all the redundant contents thereof. Jayzus! This will take till the middle of the next century!

PayPal: In the wee hours of the morning — along about 2 a.m. — I woke up and thought…hmmm…I wonder. So, stupidly wondering, I opened the new online credit union account and found a) one savings account containin g $5.59 and b)…nothing.

That’s right: NOTHING. Nooooo sign of a checking account. Four grand has disappeared into the ether. I have vendors to pay, and far’s I can tell, I have no money to pay them.

That was at 2:00 this morning.

Needless to say, I have not gone back to sleep since then. Presumably I will not go back to sleep before 9:00 Monday morning, when I intend to be standing outside the crecdit union’s doors waiting for the staff to show up.

Mentioned this in passing to a friend who’s a legal assistant for a ferocious criminal litigator. She said “eeeek! Call the police.”

Well. Not so much. I do not know whether this reflects hacking into PayPal (no money left = no new checking account) or whether my system is just not accessing the new account. In the immortal words of Zaphod Beeblebrox: DON’T PANIC.

Easier said, o’course, than done.

Pool fiasco: As of this morning, it was about 50% improved, having had two gallons of chlorine applied to its hazy depths. Off to Leslie’s, where for a change the boss was holding forth. He was highly amused by the tale of…whateveritis…and thought Pool Dude’s advice was good as far as it went, which wasn’t far enough. Chlorine, despite adding two gallons(!!!!!) of liquid chlorine, was back down to zilch.

He thought another shock treatment and then keeping the Cl level fairly high for awhile would do the trick. Needing some more of my favorite granulated Cl product, I decided to spring for 25 pounds, which despite the bracing price is far less per pound than what I pay for smaller packages of it.

Computer: ay-freaking-AMAZING! Running perfectly. Effectively Apple rebuilt the MacBook and sent me a brand-new computer. WHY does anyone buy anything other than Apple products?

My (few!) surviving clients: Returned a revised Table of Contents and four edited chapters to one client; two chapters and some writing coaching to the other. Think of that: I’ll never have to figure out what a Chinese professor of higher mathematics is trying to say…ever again. {sigh}

State of mind and body, after starting at two o’clock this morning? Exhausted. Going back to bed, 9:04 p.m.