What a gorgeous morning! Cool but not crisp, birds flying around building nests, honeybees darting about the citrus blossoms, which perfume the air like some kind of exotic tropical flowers. Over coffee this morning I spotted a dainty little white butterfly competing with the apis species. Looked very much like this little guy…
Most low desert urbanites hate the citrus flowering season, because they wrongly imagine the highly perfumed blossoms aggravate their allergies. And if you didn’t already have respiratory allergies before you came to Arizona, you soon get them. 😀 But the truth is, plants that attract pollinators by scent are not especially allergenic. What stuffs up your nose and makes you wheeze are blossoms that are pollinated by wind, whose pollen wafts aloft and floats into your schnozz. The worst offender in these parts, believe it or not, is the ponderosa pine, which covers the Mogollon Rim. Despite the depredations of pine bark beetles and drought, Arizona has the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world. And its pollen soars down off the rim and settles into the Valley each spring, where it wreaks havoc with the flatlanders’ noses.
Ruby the Corgi is having a sh!tfit. Someone must be walking their dog past the house. Either that or another bum is stumbling by.
Yesterday she had a merry ride out to Sun City, where we were invited to dinner with SDXB and NG. Normally, when schlepping dogs around, I lay the back seats down flat and, in the present annoying Venza, stuff old bed pillows into the gap between the half-a$$ed cargo compartment and the back seat, so a sudden brake doesn’t fling the dog down in there and break the beast’s leg. Or neck. Normally, Ruby huddles in terror by the back gate, hoping to get out at the earliest possible moment. This is a behavior she learned from Cassie, the Late Queen of the Universe. Cassie truly hated riding in cars.
Running late, though, yesterday afternoon I decided to leave the seat-backs up and just lift her onto the seats. The menacing well between the front and back seats was already crammed with pillows, so…why bother with pointlessly heaving the backs down and then back up?
Well. It took her a little while to realize that — mirabilis! — from the vantage point of the seats she could see out the windows!
This was quite the little revelation. In evident doggy delight, she spent a fair amount of the ride migrating back and forth between the left side and the right side, gazing out at the sights and then switching to the new exotica on the other side. Very cute.
Possibly after this she’ll be less averse to riding in the car. She’s not phobic, the way M’hijito’s dog Charley is. But she hasn’t been fond of auto travel. It would be neat if she would come to like riding around.
Image
Desert white butterfly: Sarefo [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)]. Wikipedia
So this afternoon, after having spent the morning finishing up the first of two indexes for a couple of 380-page books only four or five days late, it was off to the Paradise Valley Costco to collect the new progressive glasses that have been sitting there for a week, while I’ve been wrestling with various crises editorial and otherwise. This, because my beloved stylish fancy guy, who was forced out of Uptown Plaza when the proprietors “upgraded” the mall and jacked up the rent, wanted $395 just to replace the lenses after I fell and irredeemably scratched one of them. And…how did that work out?
Not too bad.
The frames are clunky, no question of it. But for what I paid, one could hardly expect the airy height of style. They’re clunky, wouldn’t be my first choice if I had a job, but WTF!? At this age, no one notices you.
Annd…in with the…uhm…old-fashioned…
Seriously: it is literally true that very few people actually register the presence of a woman my age, much less care one way or another how she looks. She’s just part of the background, like leaves in an oleander hedge.
That is, after all, not a bad thing…
It means you can get away with clunky, which means you can get away with buying a whole new pair of frames along with a whole new pair of progressive lenses for a fraction of the cost of a classier pair of lenses to fit your now-defunct classy pair of practically invisible frames.
So… In the store I try on the new pair of specs, and WOW! It’s a whole new world! Like the entire interior of Costco has been electronically enhanced.
Put them on to drive home, and yeah: pretty impressive. I can see the car’s dashboard as though through a microscope, and the road adorned with my fellow homicidal drivers as though through a telescope. I am, in a word, wowed.
Notsomuch when I get home and sit down to the computer. I can’t see either screen — laptop or desktop — without cocking my head like a blue heron. And this, as you can imagine, is ever-so-slightly painful.
Luckily, I have two old, supposedly outdated pairs of glasses — both progressives, which provide a more or less intelligible view of the distance. These allow me to see what I’m doing when I’m passing hour after fuckin’ endless hour working for pay. Or for fun, as in blogging.
So. We have yet to see whether these new glasses will allow me to read music scores for choir. We’ll know in a few hours, because rehearsal comes up in about two and a half hours. If they work for that purpose, then I’ll use the new thangs for driving, shopping, and choir, and put one older pair in the office next to the desktop and one pair in the family room next to the laptop.
If they don’t? Well…I haven’t a clue.
Figure that out when I come to it, I guess.
Old age is not for the young or the faint of heart. That’s for damn sure.
The theory that one in every ten drivers on the Arizona road is a moron may need revision. Possibly closer to the truth: one in every five. My gawd, were they out in force yesterday!
Several gas stations in Our Beloved City have run out of gasoline. In half-baked Play-Nooz stories, we’re told it’s because fuel supply lines “may” have been disrupted by the weather in the Midwest, another way of saying “we dunno.” Personally, I suspect our country’s present mis-leadership, but that’s another story. Whatever the cause, gas prices have risen by about 30 cents a gallon. Today I have to drive my agèd friends to Costco, but would rather not ask them to sit in the car through the Costco’s long lines and then sit some more while I pump gas. Tomorrow I have to schlep to Paradise Valley Mall and then turn around and traipse way to Hell and gone out to Sun City.
The car had about a third of a tank of fuel, which under normal circumstances would last another week or ten days.
However…if Costco runs out of gas, too…if Costco and QT run out of gas…hmmm…. So, I decided to make a single trip yesterday, just to Costco to fill up the tank.
Sounds easy, eh? And it would be, if we were talking about any normal place.
On the way down, I pass one of the usual road-blocks, on the other side of the street. Every route in the city is dug up. Wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here. Seeing the line of stalled cars stretching westward from 7th Avenue on Bethany, I realize I can’t get home that way. So decide to go up 15th Avenue, a slower route but usually unclogged.
Two morons get in front of me on the way to the Costco, but they’re pretty harmless. Just the usual “don’t know where I’m going” and “texting on the phone” set.
Get filled up, head out, and turn left onto lovely 15th Avenue without incident.
Fifteenth, a major feeder street that runs from Gangbanger’s Way, mostly through neighborhoods, all the way down to the State Capitol area, has been adorned with traffic-harassing nuisances in the form of stupid roundabouts and speed humps. Most people ignore these: in time you learn that you really don’t have to slow down for them. The other day I saw a guy shoot down that road at about 50 mph, navigating the nuisance circles and bumps without a hitch. Most people drive about 35 with no problem.
But…yes. Or rather no. Naturally, I got a Moron of the First Water in front of me.
First hint was that the Moron slowed wayyyyyyy down as soon as it got north of Bethany Home. Then when the Moron came to a speed circle, it STOPPED.
Yes. This idiot slows so far down as to stop before entering the roundabout nuisance and then C-R-R-R-A-A-A-A-W-L-S around it, barely idling foward. About one mile per hour, I’d guess.
No, that is not an exaggeration. The chucklehead is barely moving.
Moron speeds back up to about 30, then as soon as a speed bump pops up, DOES IT AGAIN. This idiot actually STOPS and then, barely moving, C-L-I-I-I-I-I-M-B-S over the thing. Then speeds up to almost 25 mph.
This is why I don’t carry a gun in the car. I’d have blown out the clown’s tires.
Seriously: it’s NO WONDER people shoot at these fools.
We finally get to Maryland, the next east-west road, where the Moron inches into the intersection on the green. I squeeze around him, veer right, leaning on the horn as I leave the nitwit behind. This adds an extra mile to my drive: a half-mile over to 7th Avenue and another half-mile back through the ’Hood.
I think people do this kind of thing on purpose. It’s a game for some folks. And really: it’s a miracle more of them don’t get shot.
How many Starbucks stores does the world need, really?
A prospective client wants to meet at the Starbucks “at Paradise Valley Mall.” Google up the address, and you get not one, not two, but three such bistros. Email the client: which one?
She says the one inside the mall — which is now just another ghost mall inhabited by low-end anchor stores like Penney’s and Costco — is closed. Okayyy…that leaves two others, within walking distance of each other.
Really…how much bad coffee can Americans drink?
It’s one girl’s opinion, of course (apparently the only girl’s), but I think Starbucks dispenses pretty awful coffee. The only thing the stuff is good for is mixing with cream and sugary flavoring goop. You can get a halfway decent cuppa there buy asking for a café Americana, which is actually just watered-down espresso. Espresso is made from a somewhat higher quality coffee bean, because it takes a better quality to withstand being roasted black.
I personally object to paying that much for any serving of coffee, particularly when I can make a better one in about ten minutes without driving across the city for the privilege.
In that department, I see that Costco is again carrying San Francisco brand dark roast beans. That is bar none the best coffee I’ve ever bought, this side of a very fancy specialty gourmet store, now defunct. My life was about shattered when I flew into Costco in search of another bagful and found it GONE! But the last time I was there, lo! It was back!
At any rate, my new glasses are ready. This junket will allow me to kill several birds with one stone: meet the proposed new client, refill my Costco cash cards, pick up the lunettes, fill up the car, and maybe even buy another bag of that coffee lest Costco decide to deep-six it again.
As we know, as soon as Costco finds out you like something, they immediately get rid of it. 😀
So after the computer spent three days in the shop and it took another half-day to fix the mess that sojourn made of DropBox, I was way, way behind on the indexing project. Let the client know it’s gonna be late and then set to work frantically trying to catch up.
After a fashion. First things first, though: in the chore-a-day department, yesterday was dust-the-furniture day. In theory, the plan was also to oil the furniture, something that hasn’t been done in many a moon. Some of the pieces were looking pretty parched.
Was feeling guilty yesterday about suggesting the cleaning lady was less than perfectly bright just because she twisted the vacuum cleaner extension cord like a licorice whip. That was before I discovered the greasy rings in the middle of the living-room’s leather chair, where she put something oily down. Probably, I figure, a can or bottle of some furniture polish she dragged in. Whatever, it wrecked the chair’s seat, thankyouverymuch.
Not that the chair and the sofa were in what you might call pristine condition. The leather was dried out and tired, as was the leather on the much better quality chair in the family room, a piece that came from Crate & Barrel. That one was not just dry and tired, it had been scratched up by several dogs and scraped by somebody whapping it against something. Probably a previously unnoticed moving-man attack.
In the freshly cleaned-out and organized garage cupboard, I found a bottle of orange oil, and in the hall closet, a container of mink oil. I’d heard, shortly after I’d bought it, that mink oil is not all that great for reviving tired leather. But not having anything else…
It seems to have worked well: moistened up the parched, dried-out areas and darkened the leather enough to sorta hide the grease rings. Didn’t get rid of them, but made them less noticeable. It really helped on the family-room chair, though: completely hid all the Charley scratches, all the Ruby scratches, and all the Cassie scratches, as well as any number of other nicks, dings, and gouges. That chair looks practically new. The living-room sofa and chair just look…a lot better.
This was quite a job. Then I had on the list to oil the casework. What a difference it makes to massage a decent oil into a Thos. Moser or a Stickley piece! Wow!
My mother’s furniture — two bureau drawers, a dressing table, and a small desk from the late 1950s in what was then the Danish modern style — have a sort of golden finish on them with some kind of shellac over it. Oiling it makes it look prettier but does little, as far as I can tell, for the wood. But the Thos. Moser chairs certainly seemed to like it.
Contemplating those old 1950s pieces, I recalled that the finish is rubbed off the front edge of my mother’s dressing table, where she sat to apply her make-up every day. Literally every day: she wouldn’t go out of the house without being fully made up. I figured if we came back to the States in 1957, when she bought that furniture, and she lived to 1976, then she used that table for 19 years. That means she sat in front of it to paint her face 6,764 times!
Give or take. Some days she probably applied fresh makeup before going out for dinner or some such thing. And the last three months or so of her life, she was too sick to do much else than lay in the bed and die.
Oh well. Don’t smoke, folks!
One of the cleaning lady’s most endearing traits is a passionate sense of orderliness. This woman loves for things to stand in straight lines, just…so. When she puts your tschotskes back on a table or a mantelpiece, she puts them in a tidy, straight row, exactly the same distance apart — as though she measured their positions with a tape measure.
I, on the other hand, prefer to organize things aysmmetrically. So whenever I dust the mantel, I reorganize her meticulous layout to fit my disorderly taste:
{chortle!} Does that or does that not look better?
These chores added up to a bit of a project. So I didn’t get much paying work done.
Come the dawn, I had to sit down with the half-forgotten index and start up the process again. So I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked, hoping to get through about 50 pages of the page proofs. Got almost up to my goal, very tired, when BLINK!
The goddamn computer shut down AGAIN!
Jezus Aitch Keerist! I couldn’t believe it.
It came back up, surprisingly. But of course, the file it brought up was not complete: it had lost upwards of an hour’s worth of work.
So I call AppleCare and get, for the first time in recorded history, a truly unhelpful Apple Support tech. He wanted to get me into iCloud to fool around, but I couldn’t find a password that worked, so he wanted me to change my password. And his instructions did not work. He finally hung up in frustration, about 30 seconds before I was about to do so.
So now I’m in despair, figuring I’m going to have to do all that brain-banging BORING work over again.
Start fiddling around, and lo! Somehow the more recent version of the file pops up!
It’s a miracle. The thing has actually lost nothing.
Nor should it have: Word on the MacBook is set to save every five minutes (in anticipation of just this sort of contingency…), and so there was no reason (in theory) that it should have lost an hour’s worth of data.
Another burst of labor indexed 150 pages, about halfway through the book. At that rate, I should finish the draft of this index in about three days, and then be able to send it off to the client the middle of next week. Not on time, but not so very late.
So yesterday (is it today already?) I spent OVER FIVE HOURS traipsing miserably from pillar to post, accomplishing…what?
No WAY can you get there from here…
The MacBook, upon which I depend for almost all things computerese, croaked over. So, Apple having closed its store within reasonable driving distance of my house, I had to drive way to Hell and Gone to a tony shopping center called Scottsdale Quarter: 14.5 miles. Add to that the 3+ miles in the other direction, over to the north side of the Metrocenter ghost mall, and you get about 30 miles round trip through the city’s wacksh!t traffic, in which approximately one in every ten drivers is crazy as a loon or dumb as a post.
Before heading east for Scottsdale, I had to drop by the FedEx store at Metrocenter — on the far side of the I-17 — by way of sending a paper(!) manuscript back to a client. This annoyance, because the lines at the post office are so long you’ll stand there for 20 or 30 minutes to get a package weighed, buy stamps, and drop it in the outgoing mail. You actually save time by driving out of your way to go to a store that will sell you the postage. This junket, then, took me six miles out of my way.
Wherever you’re going in the dystopic Valley of the Sun, you can’t get there from here. During this endless junket, I ran into eight roadblocks. If the drive weren’t long enough, it stretches toward eternity while you grind your way through traffic jam after traffic jam. The roads, thanks to all these afterthought asphalt-digging programs and lowest-bidder asphalt-laying, are potholed and ridged every inch of the way. To any drive you choose to make — near or far — you have to add about 10 minutes to your projected driving time, because somewhere along the way you will come to a stop and sit. And sit. And sit.
This time I had enough sense not to park my car in Scottsdale Quarter’s underground labyrinth. Instead left the car across the street in Kierland Commons’ parking lot.
Scottsdale Quarter — to say nothing of the glass box that is the Apple store there, with its ear-splitting ambient noise echoing off the glass and metal walls — is not a pleasant place to spend your time. It is crowded, and not crowded with nice people: the inhabitants by and large are snobbish parvenus, rude and obnoxious. Even outside, the noise level is headache-inducing. Lest any of the customers be disturbed by a moment of introspection, SQ’s designers have kindly lined the sidewalks with fake rocks from which blare a peculiarly annoying type of faceless Muzak. Everywhere you turn, the racket is brain-banging.
Finally, though, I reach the Apple store. And yeah: naturally, they had done exactly what I told them NOT to do: erased the operating system and updated it with the latest and greatest. And by the way deleted the connection to DropBox, which they refuse to deal with because they want you to store your data to iCloud, not to their competition.
My resident Word program will not run on an OS later than Sierra. I went around and around and around with the tech explaining this to him, and explaining that because I am a crazy old lady I do not want my clients’ work in Microsoft’s Cloud, nor am I going to pay Microsoft an expensive subscription for the privilege of having to work in their Cloud. So, when I showed up there after a second nightmarish drive and found they had done exactly what I had asked them not to do, I threw one of my more colorful shitfits, a phenomenon that I am capable of generating with élan.
They agreed to restore the system, but…but…did I have a backup? Of course, they thought I did not. But luckily, I hadn’t taken the external drive that contained the most recent Macbook back-up out of my car, and so yes, it was sitting in the parking lot across the street, in the Kierland Commons shopping center.
Retrieving it required me to walk a quarter mile and cross Scottsdale Road, a huge and hectic thoroughfare, at signals that do not stay green long enough for a rabbit to get from one side to the other at a dead run. But to their amazement I traipsed out, snabbed the thing from the car, and resurfaced in their glass box bearing a two-day-old back up.
So supposedly they have now recovered my system. Tomorrow I have to traipse out there again and pick it up. And you may be sure — because it never fails — that the thing will be totally, utterly, irretrievably fucked up. And you may be sure I will have to spend at least an hour, possibly much longer, trying to get reconnected to DropBox, a chore that is likely to be a horror show of the first water.
Because I still have an antique iMac running, a device I use as a TV substitute, Time Machine has made current backups of all my data. And I can reach DropBox from the iMac. But I don’t do my work on the iMac: my old bones ache so much that it hurts to sit in an office chair in front of a desk for hour on hour. Or, come to think of it, for minute on minute. I have the MacBook so that I can sit in a chair that doesn’t cripple me while I perform the endless work I do for my clients.
Okay, so there’s that.
Meanwhile, when I fell face-first on the concrete pavement the other night, I scratched my expensive pair of glasses. So…oh goodie! Now I get to buy a new lens.
I had gone to Costco a few days ago to pick up a copy of the new prescription I had made there last November. Meanwhile, the fancy optometry shop that dispensed these fancy glasses was priced out of the AJ’s shopping center where it resided for many years and has moved around the corner on Camelback, where you have to navigate around the damned train tracks and where a restaurant reserves most of the parking spaces with posted threats to tow your car if you leave it there.
So I decided to go to the expensive store La Maya frequents for her glasses, which lies tangentially on my homeward-bound way.
Drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and dodge construction and dodge homicidal drivers and jerk left across freeway-sized thoroughfares and finally arrive at this glasses place. Get into the cramped parking lot, find several empty parking spaces in front, park, jump out, prance up to the front door…which is LOCKED. They’re closed. On Monday, at midday.
So I and drive and drive and drive and drive some more and dodge construction and dodge homicidal drivers some more and jerk left across freeway-sized thoroughfares some more and finally arrive at the new venue of my old glasses place. Trot in, show the scratched lens and the prescription to the guy, and ask if they’ll replace the lenses.
Sure, says he. That’ll be $395.
Got that? Three hundred and ninety-five dollars for a pair of plastic lenses. No, that doesn’t include the frames.
Holy sh!t, said I. So it’s back to Costco!
By then I was too tired to make the 11-mile return trip to Costco to order up a pair of dowdy glasses from their optometry department. But I will have to stop there on the way home, tomorrow, from what I expect will be an upsetting trip to pick up the MacBook, which we are told is ready to go.
Right.
Imagine. $395 for a pair of fuckin’ plastic lenses, and they don’t even have to write the prescription.
I may stop by Sassy Glasses — La Maya’s favorite joint — to see if they’ll make the lenses for something within reason. The frames were wildly expensive and they’re my favorite glasses of all time. I really, really don’t want to have to throw them away. But obviously I can’t afford four hundred bucks to replace the lenses. Costco does not make lenses for this kind of specialty glasses, and so if Sassy Glasses can’t do the job for a reasonable price, then it’s back to the ugly old, clunky old plastic glasses from Costco.
Life in beautiful uptown Phoenix. Life in Dystopia.
Ruby the Corgi is having a sh!tfit. Someone must be walking their dog past the house. Either that or another bum is stumbling by.
This was quite the little revelation. In evident doggy delight, she spent a fair amount of the ride migrating back and forth between the left side and the right side, gazing out at the sights and then switching to the new exotica on the other side. Very cute.
