Coffee heat rising

Closet Clean-out EXTREME!

by

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: I lived to tell the tale!

Today I took on what I believe will be the worst job of the Great Closet Clean-out Scheme: the office closet. Huge. Truly huge!

It took the entire afternoon to shovel that stuff out and put the surviving junk (some of which probably ought not to have survived) back together in a more or less sane way. Oh, look here: we have a before!

I think this is a perhaps a rather distant “before,” because it looks less chaotic than it did when approached this afternoon.

What an enormous amount of trash! Some of it, I have no idea what it was or why I have it. Electronics seem to spawn “stuff i think i’d better save” better, even, that jars of mayonnaise and mustard. Somewhere along the line, I fell into the habit of saving boxes that once held various electronic components, presumably because I imagine they will bear some important clue to the version or provenance of the doodad. So…there were all these boxes. Yes. empty boxes.

Most of those are gone now. I hauled six loads out to the garbage, one of which had to be rolled into the alley in a wheelbarrow.

But we still have two baskets full of cables, earphones, thingie-boggers, and pennywhistles, some of which I do not know what they are or what they’re for. I’m just afraid to throw them out because…who knows? One of them could be important!

Eek.

There are modems and routers and keyboards and cameras and earphones and a call-blocker and boxes of CDs storing data for future generations. Old photos inherited from my parents. Piles of stationary and notecards. Two printers (one of them about to be donated). Cables and adapters and plugs and things. An old iMac and a dust-covered keyboard. File folders. User manuals (some dating back to 2004). Sheets of blank labels. Sheets of blank business cards. A box of plastic sign sleeves. Scotch tape. Hanging file folders. Regular file folders. Computer cleaning air spray. Bear spray. My father’s sextant. A row of self-published books. My dear friend’s manuscript memoir of her dying, which her daughters would not allow me to complete (as she asked) and send to a publisher. More yellow pads than one can count. And on and on and on and…

The shelves are still full, but at least they’re organized now. And the floor is clear (except for the packing box holding said memoir).

It’s 8:15. I am exhausted. Too early to go to bed…but don’t feel like sitting in front of a desk in a hard chair, passing the time on the big computer with games, gnus, and Facebook.

The Apple people called to report that the Macbook is ready to be picked up!

Well, you may be sure I’m not driving out to Dystopia East after church tomorrow: that place will be a zoo on a weekend afternoon. So it will be Monday morning before I can traipse out there and retrieve the thing. Hope it’s working properly now!

The ancient Mac will go to the store with me, staff there having offered to recycle it. It’s so old it contains no data that’s current enough for anyone to exploit. The unused Epson printer that came with some MacPurchase — stashed because I already had a much better printer — will be donated to the church office if they want it; otherwise to St. Vincent’s. A pile of obscure titles will go to the church book sale. Or St. Vincent’s, if it’s too early to foist books on the book-sale organizers.

Now only two closets remain to present a challenge: two sets of cabinets in the garage. I need to get to those very soon, before the weather starts to warm.

Then we’ll have only the bathroom and kitchen cleaning cabinets to shovel out, and the Great Closet Clean-out Project will be pretty much done.

Life in Hell…Life in the Dystopia…Thank You, Apple

by
Garden Spot in Parvenu Central.

Surely I’ve shared my feeling with you — explicitly or implicitly, hm? — that we live in a dystopia. Remember that old cartoon, “Life in Hell”? Well, yeah. It’s a lot like that. Only not so harmlessly absurd.

Today, a fine Day from Hell, presented a superb view of the Canyons of Dystopia. What a place! What a time!

My laptop computer — an aging MacBook, a creature that has made itself integral to my daily life, to my entertainment, and (most to the point) to my business activities — has about given up the digital ghost. It’s taken to shutting down <<~PING~>> out of the blue, sometimes losing data, sometimes not. This is happening more and more often. Uncountable numbers of hours with the telephone Apple techs (starting at 6 in the morning; extending till 10 at night) have done nothing to fix the problem.

In defeat, the Apple techs and I agreed that we were forced to present the damn thing to the Apple geniuses in a brick-and-mortar Apple store.

Naturally, Apple closed the store nearest to me. So I had to schlep the contraption out to Scottsdale.

I’d been at the new, annoying, echoey, brain-banging Apple glass-and-metal box lately installed at Scottsdale Fashion Square. So…yeah. I decided to take a chance that the slightly less-new Apple store at Scottsdale Quarter would be less…annoying.

Well.

No.

Make an appointment: 2:45 p.m.. Start driving driving driving about 2:00 p.m. Get there pretty much on time. Park in the Scottsdale Quarter’s parking garage: B-1W. Pull out my crip-space placard so I can grab a space within walking distance of an elevator or stairs, leave the chariot not very far from a pair of elevators, and make my way toward air. Trudge upstairs past innumerable trendy restaurants and trendy fashion stores and trendy home stores and finally find my way, with difficulty, to the Apple store.

Yes. Glass-and-metal box.

This shopping center is simply dreadful, in an upscale dreadful way. Cold. Hard-edged. Stylish. Ritzy. Loud to the point of blaring. And fucking annoying.

It is, in short, a little shard of dystopia. A freestanding monument to dystopia.

I finally find the Apple store in its maze, after asking at two shops. Get there on time.

Over the blaring background noise and the echo-chamber interior noise, the Apple employees and techs are extremely nice. One of them, a manager, tells me they’re a little confused because one of his employees had been carted off to an ER, about half an hour earlier, with chest pains.

A short stay in the cacophony suggests why. If you had to spend your days in that racket trying to tend to unhappy customers or peddle Apple’s wares to idle lookers, you, too, would have cardiac symptoms.

Shortly, the lone tech behind the Genius Bar decides the MacBook needs to be sent away to TechLand, therein to be evaluated and, with any luck, fixed. This is OK, sort of, because I still have the old iMac to work on. Not that sitting in front of a desk on a hard chair for hour on hour on hour is a good thing. It leaves me with every joint in my body hurting. But at least I’ll be able to make a little progress on the assignments at hand.

Now I leave the Apple store and make my way, with some annoyance, through the complicated maze that is Scottsdale Quarter. Get on the elevator and go down to level B1 West, where my car was parked. In a disabled parking space a few steps from said elevator.

Or was it?

I search all over and cannot find the Venza. Set off the key fob’s panic button: nothing.

Back on the elevator: down to level B2 west.

Same story: no fuckin’ sign of my car! I search and search but cannot find the car.

Now I figure I need to call a cop or security guard to help out. Cop? Not so much: the cell phone is in the missing car.

I go back upstairs and enter a couple of business establishments, asking if they can call up a security guard. The flunkies there haven’t a clue!

Go back downstairs and search again. Not a chance.

Back up to the main level. Find an employee: can you call a security guard or cop to help me look for my car? He hasn’t a clue. He points me to another guy. That guy pretends he doesn’t speak English, fuckyouverymuch.

Now I’m beginning to panic, because I do NOT know what I’m going to do. Has my car been stolen? Seems unlikely. But I know I parked it under a sign that said B1 West. And it ain’t there.

Finally I ascend once more to the ground level, walk around the vast building, and enter through the driveway (“no pedestrians”), and start walking. I find Level B1 East. Keep walking the maze. Eventually I arrive at a sign saying “Level B1 West,” but don’t see my car. I start walking further down into the depths of Hell when out of the corner of my eye I spot the damned Venza: on the other side of the elevators from where I was searching. Not before, we might add, quite the little panic attack.

Never been so happy to drive away from a place in my life.

I made my escape through the west side of Kierland Commons, past block on block of excruciatingly pricey Soviet-style, perfectly ghastly-looking block apartments. Horrible-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places. Very expensive horrible, ghastly-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places.

You know… I think of myself of fairly ritzy-titsy. North Central Phoenix, where I’ve dwelt since 19-and-aught-67, is what would be called, in a venue such as San Francisco, “Old Money.” And let’s face it: despite my protestations of penury here at the ironically titled Funny about Money, I am, yes, damn near rich as Croesus.

But as for the amazingly, hideously dystopic environs of Scottsdale’s astonishingly ugly Kierland Commons district? I am SO FAR out of my league in that place! Dear God. I hear Yarnell a-callin’….

It’s so harshly dystopic that it actually makes dreary, dumpy Sun City look good. It certainly makes Prescott look very fine, indeed.

Lemme tellya: if I were a young woman today, you couldn’t pay me — not in the currencies of love nor money — to bring a child into this land of ours. To bring an infant into the godawful world we live in today would be a form of child abuse. It should be actionable.

Image: By Cygnusloop99 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7863726

Running on High-Test Gas…

by

Flying around like a Corvette all day… This, after hanging on the phone until after 11 p.m. last night coping with the aftermath of a weird little Apple crash. At first even the very smart lady tech in Australia couldn’t figure it out, but then she noticed a tiny detail and presto-changeo! Problem instantly solved,.

Those people are Apple are freaking amazing.

Off to Costco with my favorite agèd friends this morning. They were circumspect in their buying approach today, but I’m afraid I went off the deep end. I haven’t made a major Costco run in two or three months and so was out of almost everything. So that devolved into a frenzy. At any rate, the freezer is now full again, the dog is supplied with a new potful of chicken, and I found a kewl pair of sky-blue Glorias. Hallelujah.

Cleaned out the storage room closet, a mess exceeded only by the office closet. That was one helluva project. But my, it’s nice and tidy now…unlike the back of my car, which overflows with junk to be donated or thrown out!

Some stuff leaves you wondering…what on earth was i thinking when i put this away? The towels with the frayed edges, for example: why are we keeping these, again? Other stuff: sentimentalia. How could you toss it? I found a box my mother left me, filled with old, evidently hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, all starched and pressed. I think either her grandmother or her aunt must have made them.

Hm. Probably my great-aunt. My great-grandmother knitted; my great-aunt sewed. But…well, who knows? Anyway, they’re museum pieces now.

As, I suspect, is the vintage 1970 Heathware in the hideous muddy olive green, all the rage when we were young things. Truly: every bit as ugly as the battleship gray and eye-searing white in High Style today. My mother must have thought something along those lines: she admired the Heath stoneware, but bought herself a set in white — now in my son’s possession.

Heath recently quit making its coupe style. So those pieces — in both sets — will soon be spectacularly expensive collector’s items. They’re already pricey. I got one of the last of the white ones available after a kid busted one of my son’s plates. He’ll have to ride herd more carefully after this, I reckon, because replacing them now will be outstandingly expensive.

Ugh. Cop helicopter buzzing around. What now?

The other night’s gunshot, noted in passing in one of these posts, was some chucklehead getting himself shot at a house brawl party over on ’tother side of Conduit of Blight Blvd. Well. Better him than me. I guess. Moral of the story? Don’t go to parties in Meth Central.

Also managed to index another 15 pages of the first of two academic anthologies I’m supposed to be working on. No doubt more would have gotten done had I refrained from sleeping half the afternoon. But alas, I did swill down a couple glasses of wine with the beloved Costco roast chicken this afternoon, which caused me to fall face-forward into the sack.

Tomorrow will be occupied, too, with a lot of distractions from paying work: Pick up the cleaned and restored old Shark vac, meet a client on the west side of town, pay a visit to the credit union. Three errands I’d like to get done in one trip, though that will not be very practical…because on top of all that, the cleaning lady will be underfoot all day. So I’m thinking…maybe…make two trips westerly: pick up the vacuum early in the day, run by the CU on the way home, then make a separate junket to meet the proposed new client.

Yeah. That will waste gas. But it’s probably more sane.

To the extent that there is any sanity around this place… 😮

 

Walloped!

by

So, as you’ll recall, according to my Universal Theory of Phoenix Transportation, at any given time one in 10 people on the roads is a certifiable moron. Tonight I qualified as number 10!

Headed homeward with Ruby the Corgi, my back hurt, so I was in a hurry to reach the Funny Farm. At Feeder Street NS, some cars were headed in our direction. We could get across if we rushed. It was dark. But there was a speed bump between us and the oncoming vehicles, which, even if they were traveling faster than I thought, would slow them down enough for us to make the other side before they reached us.

So we’re flying across the street and we leap for the sidewalk and trip…kerWHACK!

Goddammit. I fell flat on my face.

MAN, did that hurt.

But amazingly, nothing seems to have broken, not even the now picturesquely scraped nose. I’m sure that by tomorrow morning I’ll look like I was in a boxing match. A lump has already raised up on my chin, plus another on a knee. And my glasses are hopelessly scratched: that’ll be a $300 fix. I met several nice neighbors…

And…here’s the weird thing: the kink in the back disappeared!

Sidewalk as chiropractor…

This may complicate life a bit. Tomorrow I have to drive from pillar to post: first to pick up the vacuum and then down to the credit union to argue about whether they can accept a wire transfer via their routing number, contrary to what their manager seems to have told me. Then back here to index another slab of a client’s book. Then of course I imagined I would clean out another closet…that idea probably no doubt will be going by the wayside. Tuesday (oh shit, there’s another gunshot…down at Main Drag South. Ahhh, the lovely sounds of the city… 😀 ) it’s off to Costco with my old croneys. Wednesday, meet with a new client halfway across the city. Thursday…don’t recall. Friday: SDXB. Saturday: SDXB thinks we’re driving to Castle Hot Springs. By then, with all that gallivanting, I won’t have had a chance of getting far in indexing project #1. And #2 will still be waiting.

{sigh} One thing you had to say about San Francisco along about 19-and-aught-59: they didn’t have damn cop helicopters roaring overhead every time some perp hiccupped.

Nor did the perps do a lot of hiccuping. Not everybody and his little brother was addicted to drugs. It was actually relatively safe: I used to ride the bus, transfer to the streetcar, and walk to school, every day, at the nubile age of 12 or 13. And I was allowed to roam all over the place with my best friend, two little tomboys fishing in Lake Merced and sneaking into the Olympic Club’s golf course and climbing onto the roofs of the local apartment houses. Today “helicopter parents” won’t let their kids out of their sight…for good reason, as we’ve seen here in the ’hood.

Think of that. From Utopia to Dystopia in just 60 years.

Closets

by

So, in the chore-a-day continuum, today is the first day of the Great Closet Clean-up. Every closet and cabinet in the house is jammed with 15 years’ worth of collected junk, about 14 years’ worth of which could go. So I decided to add shoveling out one closet, cabinet, or piece of furniture with drawers to the job of the day. A four-bedroom shack has rather more closets and cabinets than one would like, especially after the proprietor has hired some dude to line the garage walls with storage. Videlicet:

  • Hall linen closet
  • Vacuum (coat) closet
  • Master bedroom closet
  • Guest bedroom closet
  • Storage room closet
  • Office closet
  • Desk drawers
  • Armoire
  • Bathroom 1 cabinets
  • Bathroom 2 cabinets
  • Garage cabinets east
  • Garage cabinets west
  • Garage open shelves

This sounds fairly dreadful, because it is fairly dreadful. Some of the junk residing in those sites has been there since I moved into this shack, yea verily back in 2004. But…it appears that the challenge is not as Brobdingnagian as it appears.

Today I got through the hall linen closet, the vacuum closet, and the storage room closet, killing off three proposed days’ worth of projects in a single day. At this rate, I should be able to get through the entire consolidated frolic in about four or five days.

The problem with projects like this: one thing leads to another. You find some object…and wonder what is it? And why do you have it? In the back of the hall closet I found a gadget that contained butane or propane or God only knows what. A gift, no doubt. Not having used it and not knowing what it could possibly be for, I tossed it in the trash bag.

This caused the thing to spring a leak.

In the house. In the confined hall, Yes: s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s

Grab whatever-it-is and hurry out to the alley garbage with it (hoping no one is around to see). Toss it. Run away. Back inside the shack, continue the task at hand, and find some other component of…whatever-it-is. March that out to the garbage, too. So far no explosion has taken place. Thank Heaven for small favors.

There’s the stuff that you haven’t seen in years and don’t know why you kept it; the debris from past cleaning-lady attacks; the junk stash attack…

Here’s a hippy-dippy ash tray from the 1970s, a globe of polished granite annoyingly dyed teal (it was one of my generation’s colors: we called it “turquoise,” but it was the same color that appears in the presently stylish annoying palette of battleship gray + eye-searing white + teal). It has two stupid little half-tube-shaped slots drilled out of its lip, presumably to accommodate cigarettes: i.e., it was designed by some clown who didn’t smoke.

Off-hand I cannot recall whether this thing was my mother’s (the mother who smoked herself into the grave, the mother who on her deathbed was consuming six packs a day, yes, that mother), or whether my mother made me buy it to accommodate her chain-smoking habit while she was at my house. Why did I keep the damn thing, if it wasn’t actually hers? Possibly to accommodate some other nicotine addict who insisted on smoking (outside, damnit!) at my house?

No one that I know smokes anymore.

Throw it away? What? It was my mother’s. Maybe.

A brass lamp finial. What? Examine all the antique lamps in the house (that would be all the lamps, just about). Not a single one of them is missing a finial. WTF? Stash for some future closet clean-out.

Up on the top shelf, where it can’t be broken, resides the sentimental stuff. Like Dot-Dot’s exquisitely beautiful hand-painted porcelain plate, a gift to me and my son. She lived around the corner from us in the historic Encanto district, and she was one of two women of her generation who babysat children in the neighborhood. She watched M’hijito two or three days a week — the other woman filled in the remaining days — while I drove out to a part-time job at the Great Desert University and filled my remaining hours trying to finish my dissertation. Dot-Dot was a gifted porcelain painter: she taught classes filled with women craving to emulate her. For her to give us one of her (amazingly expensive) pieces was a great generosity.

An empty plastic squeeze bottle: move it to empty jar collection in the garage, thereby deferring  disposal to some other day.

An unknown blue fluid stashed in an old glass Straus Family Creamery heavy cream bottle. Dump. Bottle to dishwasher, thence to empty jar collection (see above)

A plethora of prescription meds, including three bottles of a dangerous addictive drug dispensed during the Year of the Surgeries, nary a single pill of which I ever swallowed. Here’s something from a vet called “banamine“: it’s an injectable drug used for muscle spasm. Label says to “apply on affected area.” Probably for Cassie’s hot spots. Dare we ask, WTF????

Something there is that’s kind of scary about the sheer quantity of the prescription drugs that have been dispensed for me and for the dogs. Some of these bottles, I’ve never even opened.

No freaking wonder we have a plague of drug addicts in this country.

Here’s a jacket in the hall closet that must have belonged to someone else: it doesn’t even fit me!

In the guest bedroom closet: a little suit made by a local tailor, supposedly to fit me. When D-XH and I were in England, where I spent three months in archival research for the dissertation, we visited Scotland and bought my mother the richest, most wonderful, beautiful wool tweed fabric. She sewed handsomely, and I thought she would make herself something with it.

But no. Being a mother, she regarded it as a keepsake and squirreled it away for safekeeping. After she died, my father gave it to me.

I took it to a woman who billed herself as a tailor and asked her to make me a suit — a skirt and jacket. She did…but “tailor” was not exactly le mot juste. She apparently made it from some Simplicity pattern — she couldn’t even be bothered to spring for a Vogue pattern, I guess. The result was amateurish and ill-fitting and it has just hung in the closet. Forever.

It did not fit then. And now that I am old and have spawned a child, it does not fit hilariously. What a shame. I’ve hung onto it all these years imagining (occasionally) that maybe someday I could find a real tailor (right! In lovely uptown Phoenix, Arizona!) who could somehow rebuild it or just take it apart and make something with whatever fabric could be salvaged.

Not so much.

But the moths haven’t eaten it. That’s something. I guess. So…this afternoon I tossed the jacket in the car with the rest of the unwearable stuff to be donated. Decided to deconstruct the skirt, salvage what I can of the fabric, and make a pillow of it.

Yes. That’s something. Eh?

Two indexing assignments came in yesterday and now today in comes an inquiry from a self-publishing author: will I copyedit his 85.000-word sci-fi thriller?

Why shore, for a fee. But it’ll have to wait till I can get out from under the academic opuses. While the author’s on the phone and the hamburger’s on the grill, my son, fresh off the road from Colorado, shows up at the door to collect his dog.

Is there some reason why every damnfool thing happens at once?

So now I am fed. Four of the proposed 13 shoveling-out chores are done (hall linen closet, vacuum bedroom closet, guest bedroom closet, armoire) are done. Email is unanswered. I am tired. And the dog remains to be taken for a decent walk.

And so…away.

 

Golden Shepherd? German Retriever?

by

This dog here…

Charley

…is not a golden retriever. Or even an English retriever, the proper name for a “white golden retriever.” He’s a German shepherd tricked out to look like an English retriever.

HOLY mackerel, what an adventure last night.

M’hiijto has gone off to southern Colorado to visit his ancient grandmother, leaving Charley the Alleged Retriever with me and Ruby the Corgi for a few days and nights.

About a half an hour or 45 minutes after our little tribe had shut off the lights and gone to bed last night, somebody came up to the house and apparently tried to get in. Charley was in his accustomed nest at the front end of the hall, where he can see the front door in case his Human shows up (hope springs eternal in the canine breast). All of a sudden, that dog EXPLODED. I mean, Ger-shep explosion: high insane rage explosion. He started out loud and angry, got more and more emphatic and then rose to GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THAT BED, GRAB YOUR DAMN GUN AND GET OUT HERE!

Holy shit.

Welp, I grabbed the phone, not a pistol, and flew up the hall, pursued by Ruby, who was barking LIKE HE SAID! LIKE HE SAID!

Charley was just insane, trying to get out the door, trying to get through the window, roaring like a freaking lion.

They hadn’t set off the motion sensitive lights, but they’d called for backup. Someone drove up in front of the house; they jumped in the vehicle and it shot off down the street.

So I guess Charley scared them off.

Gooood dog, Charley!