Coffee heat rising

Wiring Payment from China: Another Fine Idea Kicks the Bucket

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LOL! This saga gets better and better.

So about 80% of The Copyeditor’s Desk’s customers are in China. One of the things we do well is to polish the grammar and style for research articles on arcane topics in mathematics, science, and economics for Chinese academics, who must publish in English-language journals to advance their careers. The more of these we do, the more Chinese academics appear at the virtual door. After Paypal decided to do a number on me, I looked for alternatives and finally decided the simplest and cheapest strategy would be to have clients wire payment to me.

But since I bank in a credit union that’s too small to have a SWIFT number (required for wire transactions), this meant I would have to open a checking account in a major international bank. Hence, it was off to Bank of America. It looked like this ought to work. Now I had two business checking accounts, one at the credit union and one at the venerable BofA, which wished me to transfer $3,000 from the CU into the new account — or else. Fortunately, they gave me three months to get around to this.

So now I have a fancy new bank account in a shiny new high-rise tower and boyoboy. It has two SWIFT numbers, one for transfers in dollars and one for transfer in yuan. Hot diggety.

Kewl, huh?

Okay, so the client’s university goes to wire a small payment into this elegant new bank account.

Shortly, the client emits a squawk:

From: Dr. Big MucketyMuck, Associate Professor, Master Supervisor, Director of International Center for Cooperation and Exchange, Director of the Mogul Center College of Business Administration, Erewhon University of Economics and Business

To: Funny, The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.

Hi Funny,

Could you please give me another bank account? There is a sign (‘) in the name of the last one, and my university told me because of it, they can not succeed in wiring the money. Thanks a lot.

Chortle! Got that? They would not accept a wire transaction to a bank account whose name contains an apostrophe. Proposed solution? I should go and open ANOTHER bank account, this one with no punctuation in the business’s name. 😀

How wondrous is that?

Quite wondrous enough to elicit the “enough-is-enough” reaction, that’s for sure. At this point I decide to throw in the towel and just stop doing business with overseas clients. After this, if you can’t pay me by check, I ain’t a-workin’ for you.

This presents a problem: four out every five of our client projects come from Chinese scientists. But what the hell. It’s past time for me to retire, anyway. This, after days of crazy-making hoop-jumping to create that new bidness checking account at BofA.

Closing the fancy-Dan checking account takes two trips down to the bank, one of which consumes an hour of jawing and driving time. As I drive home, I’m feeling frustrated, annoyed as hell, and depressed to lose 80% of my business to Paypal’s crooked greed (yes, I did send a complaint to the AZ Department of Financial Institutions, which licenses PP to do business here).

But…guess what? MIRACLES DO HAPPEN!

Stumble in the door, finish cleaning the kitchen (a job interrupted by the junkets to the bank), then click on the ole computer.

And what should be lurking in the email but a query from a think tank at the Great Desert University: can I, will I, would I puhleeeeze index not one but two volumes in their forthcoming series in Latino studies?

Hot. Diggety. Damn.

I guess it’s God trying to say “there, there, little girl…” 😀

Time passes. Late last night I get curious and ask the Internet an idle question: is it really true you can’t wire money to a credit union?

Sez the Internet: “Well, yes and no”:

From UW Credit Union: https://www.uwcu.org/checking/personal-accounts/wire-transfers/

Wire Transfers

Moving money almost anywhere in the world is fast, easy, safe and convenient with wire transfers. Please note: domestic wire transfers usually occur within 24 hours, while international transfers vary, typically reaching the destination within 7 business days. To complete a wire transfer, log in to Web Branch and select Wire Transfers under the services or visit our nearest branch. Be sure to gather the following information prior to beginning your wire transfer to streamline the process.

Wiring Funds to Your UW Credit Union Account

The sending institution will need the following information:

    1. ABA Number: 2759-7907-6
    2. Our Name: University of Wisconsin Credit Union
    3. Our Address: 3500 University Avenue | Madison, WI 53705
    4. Your full name, address (as it appears on your account), UW Credit Union account number

 Note: UW Credit Union does not have a Swift Code, IBAN or other international routing code, nor do we have a correspondent bank. You are able to wire funds to your UW Credit Union Account without this information. Your international financial institution will have a corresponding bank in the U.S. they can wire to, which will forward the funds to UW Credit Union using our ABA routing number: 2759-7907-6.

Uh HUH!

So, we’ll be taking that over to our honored CU branch manager and asking him, if the UW credit union can do this, why can’t we? I think we can: I think by “send it to an international bank,” this may have been what he meant to say…not “you have to have an account at an international bank.” At any rate, I’ll see if he can manage this. If so, maybe, just maybe I can manage to get paid for the work I’ve done over the past couple of weeks, rather than having to comp three clients.

Heard the Wind Blow Before

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Palm tree in cyclonic wind

The wind is blowing so hard here that it just blew out the flame on the covered gas grill. It’s knocked piles of two-foot-long shield-shaped palm tree thingies into the road, which I soon will have to go out and clean up. And M’hijito is driving through this fine weather phenomenon (plus blowing snow…) through Four Corners to lovely Grand Junction, Colorado, thereinat to visit his 105-year-old grandmother. His much younger mutther is not a happy camperette.

***

Soooo…. An hour or so later (dinner having been cooked and snarfed down), I’m out there gathering palm-tree shields out of the street and some neighbor stops and rolls down his window and thanks me.

Like I should have left the debris scattered all over the road to puncture people’s tires? Maybe left the litter all over their yards for them to enjoy? Lordie.

Oh well. I’m sure in a few hours there’ll be more to collect. Conveniently, a stiff gale is wailing in out of the west, which means the palm debris (which is very much a mess) is being blown over the wall, into the road, and NOT into my swimming pool. Thank You, dear Goddess.

***

But in other precincts, today I got to enjoy a different kind of wind blowing, of the hot air variety.

You’ll recall that when I took my dog-hair-clogged Shark vacuum cleaner up to the venerable 35th Avenue Fabric World/Sew & Vac, they at first gave me a runaround and then announced that it could not be fixed, because Shark vacuums are such junk that no replacement parts are available and even if they were, you can’t open the machine’s body to work on its innards. It was, they said, your basic throw-away.

Stupidly (being very tired and very sick of driving through the homicidal traffic and very discouraged), I said OK, how’s about you throw it away? Said they: why shore, and they took the allegedly defunct machine off my hands.

As it turns out, this claim of theirs was a lie.

This morning I took a much older, still functioning Shark, basically the same model as the supposedly unfixable one, up to a different vacuum repair shop. I’d had this thing since 2010. It has never stopped running; I’d simply bought a second one knowing that if it ain’t broke, some developer will fix it, and so I should have one that still ran as well on hand. When I bought the second one (the one 35th Avenue told me couldn’t be cleaned), I relegated the first machine to the garage, where it sucked up a great deal of dust and grime. It still ran, but was too dirty to think about operating inside the house.

I’m figuring if I can get a real vacuum cleaner repair dude to spiff it up, I can take the new, $150 Shark (which indeed has, since the machines first appeared, been “fixed” in a baleful way) back to Costco.

So I arrive at the shop, where I’m told sure, we can clean it and restore it to like-new life. While I’m standing there(!!), the guy calls his supplier and asks if he can get this part and that part. But of course, says the supplier: we’ll ship that right over.

Uh-huh. We should have this ready for you to pick up on Monday, says New Repair Dude.

***

I was raging furious when I drove away! Basically what has happened here is 35th Avenue simply lied to me, in a transparent attempt to get me to buy a new and much more expensive brand from them.

How much more expensive? Well, lemme tellya…

So angry was I that I decided to drive down the road to 35th Avenue — both these shops are on the west side, both right on 35th Avenue — and give the bastards at Fabric World/Sew & Vac a piece of my mind. Which is what I did, suggesting to the guy who ran the repair department that if they didn’t want to do business with me, all they had to do was say “We don’t work for aging white women.” He was, of course offended, but I did not give a damn and continued to tell him that he needed to tell his staff not to lie to the customers.

At this point, the phone rings and he starts talking to some woman who has left off a vacuum…giving her the same line of bull: your vacuum is such cheap junk we can’t service it. AND — get this! — he then says to her that if she wants a vacuum that will run well and last for some time, it will cost between $800 and $1,000.

WTF? Both of these Sharks were still running fine — they were just dirty. The first is ten years old. Each one cost under a hundred bucks. He gets off the phone and I suggest again that maybe it would be better if they did not lie to their customers.

“Our supplier can’t get the parts for Shark vacuums,” said he.

“Maybe you need to get a different supplier,” said I.

I asked him to return my machine, and of course they didn’t have it. Presumably they’d already tidied it up and sold it to some other sucker.

Can you imagine? What bastards!

***

Welp, I see that on Amazon, the old Shark Navigator is still available — that would be the one without the shoulder-wrenching swivel head. So I’m thinking that if I can get Costco to take the new one back and Repair Dude gets the old one cleaned up and operating, I may buy the old-fashioned, un”improved” version from Amazon just so as to have a functioning, reasonably priced machine in the house. The one I’ve got, which dates back to 2010, surely won’t work forever.

And, judging from current Amazon reviews, the new one won’t work for more than a few months! 😀

Women and Their Ways

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So in the setting of the Great Job-a-Day Scheme, today was clean-the-bathrooms day. This worked exceptionally well and also led to cleaning a few other realms that aren’t on the list. The interesting thing about this little effort, though, is the insight it offers into how much women differ in their ways of doing the most routine things.

Luz, best known as The Cleaning Lady from Heaven, brought her own cleaning products and devices, which she stashed in my garage cleaning-gear cabinet. In her emergency, she has left them behind. Most of these — no, all of them — work just fine. They’re just not products and gadgets that I personally would use.

At first I thought I would just use up the stuff that she left behind and throw out the doodads that get worn out rather than consumed. But then this morning, as I thought about what I was gonna clean the bathtub and wash the mirrors with, decided…nope. Noooo way! I’m usin’ my own stuff, by golly!

If she comes back within the next month or two, they’ll be here for her. If she’s gone like Poor Ole Charley on the MTA, then after two or three months I’ll donate them.

Luz and I differ very distinctly in our opinions about what works to clean a shack. She absolutely positively will not use my perfectly fine, highly effective (…imho…) home-made glass and tile cleaner — which contains the same ingredients as Windex except for the perfume and the blue dye. No. Glass cannot be cleaned effectively by any solution that is not blue, and that is all there is to it! By golly!

Furthermore…floors cannot be cleaned without the appropriate cleaning device: no mere sponge mop will do. Nor may they be dusted with stupid microfiber rags. Lamps and door frames and light fixtures cannot be dusted without the correct gadgetry. Toilets cannot be scrubbed without the right scrubber and the right ferocious chlorine-laced cleaner. And so it goes…

Then there are the habits that we follow. I tend to ignore the mirrors if they’re not dirty. Luz polishes them to a high shine whether they need it or not. I wash the windows when forced to it. Luz cleans them every time she’s here. But Luz seems not to notice the dog-fur smears along the pooches’ well-worn tracks. This morning while cleaning the back bathroom I noticed Ruby’s nest was stained dark and dingy where she has cuddled against the wall under the toilet, and that the wall opposite, where Cassie liked to nest during the day, was also darkened with dog-fur rubbings. A-a-a-a-n-d come to think of it, those hallway walls that I just repainted a few months ago also bear dog tracks where the pooches like to rub against them as they traverse the distance between the kitchen and the back rooms. Hm.

Scrubbing that off took some doing. I suspect that may be a cultural difference: rural people tend to keep the dogs outdoors. I doubt if my father would have allowed a dog in the house if my mother hadn’t insisted…and the minute he got a chance to get rid of her chihuahua while her back was turned, he gave it away. That, I suspect, is an attitudinal artifact of growing up in cattle country. Well…if you’re not used to having dogs residing inside with you, how would you know they deposit wall trails along their habitual pathways?

😀

So…there’ll be some changes made around this place. Not necessarily for the better: just for the différance.

The Mattress and the Housework

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Wow! MattressFirm was on the ball when it came to delivering the new sack I bought a couple of days ago. They would have delivered it over the weekend, except that I had other plans. They were here bright and early this morning to tote out the tired but still vast and still ridiculously heavy number and bring in the new one.

Pleased to get it, and not bad at-tall! It’s a little firmer than the old one, but that may be because the old one was fifteen years old. And sagging. This one is sag-free. To my surprise, it’s not significantly thinner than the defunct mattress, which when I bought it was pitched as miraculously extra-thick (meaning: you can’t fit your sheets on this thing!) Still not easy to get the sheets on, but there they are now. Even though it’s a little less squishy than I’m used to, it’s very comfortable and restful. So: this is good.

A new addition to the things that have to be taken care of around the house. 😀

The scheme to clean the house one chore at a time, one day at a time is working. Today I cleaned the outdoor furniture, swept the porches and deck, and washed the windows.

Notice that this caused rain to fall. Uncanny power, eh?

Over the past week the floors have been cleaned, the kitchen has been cleaned, the bathrooms have been scrubbed, the bed has been changed and the sheets & laundry washed, the furniture has been dusted, the windows washed, the outdoor living areas cleaned…and I have not knocked myself out even once! Most of these chores take all of about 20 minutes. And interestingly, the house has stayed clean-looking. Steadily neat, tidy, and clean.

I don’t know why I never thought of this before!

More to the point, I don’t know why my mother never thought of it.

Of course, housework and laundering were much bigger, harder jobs in her day. Floors were not covered with tile: they were covered with ugly brown rugs (to match the color of the dirt that would get ground into them over time). A vacuum cleaner…oh, ugh! What a monster machine. Ours was an Electrolux that scooted around on metal runners. It was heavy and clumsy and loud and messy and altogether unpleasant to use. You dragged it from room to room, scrubbing at the carpets with an attachment at the end of a long hose. And if you were unfortunate enough to live in a place with stairs…oh, God!

To clean the toilets you donned rubber gloves and scoured with Comet, a chlorinated powdered cleanser.

There were no dishwashers. You washed, scrubbed, and scoured every dish, pot, and pan by hand, arrayed them in a drainer next to the sink, and then poured a potful of boiling water over them to sanitize. Then you dried them by hand and put them away. There were no clothes dryers: you hung everything on clotheslines in the backyard, including the sheets and blankets (to the extent that you laundered blankets, which for most people was not at all: they were dry-cleaned in toxic chemicals). My mother had a wringer washer that miraculously ran on electricity. You’d drop a load of clothes in it with some detergent; it would fill with warm water and slosh around for awhile. Then you took each piece of  clothing out and ran it through the electrically driven wringer…VERY carefully, lest you catch your fingers or hand in the damn thing. This dropped the clothes into a big concrete tub of cold water, in which you manually sloshed the soap out; then you ran each piece back through the wringer again to squeeze out the rinse water. Then you hauled every damn piece of wet clothing and bedding and table linens into the backyard, where you hung them on clotheslines.

Everything had to be ironed: there was no such thing as no-iron clothing. My mother had a giant table press to iron the sheets, and every week we had to stand at an ironing board to press my father’s khakis, all our own blouses and skirts and slacks, all the table linens…you name it, we ironed it. Some women even ironed their husbands’ BVDs. Men’s shirts were starched: you boiled up a starch solution on the stove, dipped the shirts in that, hung them up to dry, and ironed them crisp. Windows were cleaned with water and newsprint…and lemme tellya, that was a laborious job.

Ah, halcyon days.

My mother had a cleaning day and a washing day and an ironing day. Cleaning house took the better part of a day. Doing it right today does, too, for that matter — only without breaking your back. Laundry was also a half-day project or more. Ironing? Shit, she made me iron until I was blue in the face! But I’m very good at it, to this day.

When we lived in Arabia, we had Pakistani, Goanese, or Indian houseboys. Although my mother still washed and ironed the clothes, Dominic cleaned the house every week. In fact, I think he came around more often than that.

When we came back to the States, my mother must have decided that with a 13-year-old in tow, she was not going to do housework again. So once we got to San Francisco, she made me do all the cleaning. She did the laundry, because that entailed a trip to a coin-op laundry room in the basement of our apartment towers, and I expect she figured it wasn’t safe to send me down there by myself. Sometimes she did make me come along to help, but I was not required to do that job alone.

You had a specific day of the week when you cleaned and another specific day when you did the laundry and another specific day when you ironed clothes. Why, I do not know. Possibly it was the easiest way to force a kid to do it. Or it may simply have been the custom: women cleaned on a given day each week.

Whatever. I will say it did teach me to do housework. And to abominate it. I cannot tell you how much I dislike cleaning house.

But the thing is, it never occurred to me — as I’m sure it never occurred to her — not to do all the house-cleaning on a single day. If it had crossed her mind, I don’t know whether she would have done it. Or if it would have been practical to do so. With lighter, easier-to-use vacuum cleaners and less laborious flooring, vacuuming is a much faster and easier job today. Chemicals that you pour in the toilet and leave to do their job change the nature of bathroom-cleaning, in a big way. Dishwashers transformed women’s lives — truly. You could spend a good two hours a day washing dishes, especially if you had a big family…ah, the good old days. Microwaves worked a similar transformation, freeing women from daily scrubbing of heavy, gunky, greasy pots and pans. And fabrics that don’t have to be ironed? Holey moley!

The mind-set remained though: This is Monday, must be time to clean the house.

But as a practical matter, when you don’t have to work yourself into a sweat to do any one of the apposite chores, it actually makes better sense to spread them evenly over five or six days. It’s easier, it’s less tiring, and it doesn’t spoil an entire day of your life.

Everything you never wanted to know about mattresses and would have preferred not to ask…

 

One thing after another…

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Man! Has it ever been a busy few days! Where to start?

Dog Busting, Friend Busting, Weekend Busting

My good friends KJG and VickyC have been machinating a weekend junket to Payson, whither KJG and Mr. KJG recently moved. We were hugely looking forward to seeing the G’s in their new home, a Very Big Deal indeed.

Between the time I left  yesterday morning to drop Ruby the Corgi off at my son’s house for the day and the time I arrived at VickyC’s house in a historic downtown neighborhood, KJG had called, reached VickyC, and said the plans were off.

Mr. KJG had taken their beautiful and endlessly beloved pet greyhound for her morning walk, and while he was out a neighbor’s loose mutt attacked them. The greyhound was alarmingly injured. What the status is now, I do not know — no reply was forthcoming from my emailed inquiry, so in true Drama Queen mode, I assume the dog is dead or in extremis.

This greyhound is Mr. KJG’s baby. They both really love that hound. Should it be permanently hurt or dead, then that is a major tragedy in their household.*

The thing is, rural veterinaries are often not equipped to cope with this kind of emergency. When Charley had his self-induced heatstroke while on the road with M’hijito, the vet up in Nowhereseville said that if the dog was to survive at all — which he did not think would happen — he would have to be transported to a 24-hour emergency vet in the Valley. Additionally, greyhounds are not like normal dogs. One of their eccentricities is that they cannot tolerate the anaesthesia normally used in veterinary practices — they require a special anaesthetic, and they require a vet who a) knows this (good luck with that!), b) who has the stuff in stock, and c) knows how to use it. So you pretty much have to have already established a relationship with a vet before anything happens to such a dog. They’ve been there plenty of time to have done so, but I’m sure this esisode was not a grand way to launch the weekend.

Meanwhile, a new bishop for the diocese was consecrated. It was quite a chivaree and one that I wanted to attend and to sing at. However, my friends and I had made these plans many weeks ago, and trying to get three busy schedules to coordinate is quite a challenge. So I didn’t feel I could duck out of it…

*Some hours later: We’re told the dog is patched up and will be OK. Good news!

Planning for Good Works

VickyC and I punted by going to breakfast, then briefly browsing some antique stores, and plotting some schemes for volunteer work. She is a graduate of the Valley Leadership program that trains young executives, and so has all sorts of contacts and projects.

After many years at her current job with a regional water supplier, she recently applied for a position with a national nonprofit for which my ex- once served as state president and then as a national board member. Naturally, I was very interested in this development and suggested that I’d like to volunteer, assuming all his old cronies have now moved on. That appears to be the case, and so if she gets the job maybe I can sign back on.

Meanwhile, her employer encourages people to participate in community work, and so she already is much engaged. Among of her interests are the de-privatization of our prison system and initiatives to rehabilitate offenders back into society so they do not end up going back to jail. One of the groups she works with is looking for volunteers, so she may introduce me to those folks.

Sometimes I think it’s time to quit the editorial business — just shut it down, rather than continue wrestling with getting paid and ponying up cash to have the taxes done. WonderAccountant has already suggested we de-incorporate it, and we’re about to send in the paperwork to convert it to an LLC. This would much reduce the costs of tax preparation, and also much de-complicate the work she does for me and the bidness. But…given what I’m paid, I do wonder why I even bother: wouldn’t it be better to do something that helps folks for free?

Debugging

All the edible contents of the pantry have been sitting in the freezer for a good three days now. That’s twice as long as is supposedly needed to kill off any infant moths and their eggs. Yay!

That cabinet is now mightily cleaned and very tidy. So today I retrieved the food and packed it back onto the shelves. Very nifty.

I’m almost certain that this infestation came from the dog kibble, an elegant variety of which I buy at an expensive gourmet grocery store. This stuff, I use as doggy treats and to spike the corgi’s custom-made chow. Although I threw out a bunch of aging products, the kibble was really the only thing that clearly was occupied.

WhatEVER. All the pantry goods are now secured inside jars with tight lids, even the pasta. That should discourage any further depredations. And it sure makes the shelves nice and neat.

🙂

Mattress Gambit

So I finally gave up and went to a MattressFirm outlet, the one next door to the Whole Foods at Town and Country. The general over-pricedness of this shopping center — well, with the exception of the Trader Joe’s, the upscale thrift store, and the Nordstrom’s Rack — does not inspire confidence. However, I did find a very comfortable inner-spring mattress, exactly what I had in mind, for well under a thousand dollars.

Can you imagine: $1,300 to $1,500+ for mattress from Penney’s????? Next door to the Costco in one of the grungiest shopping centers in the city???? A store that employs, far as anyone can tell, exactly ZERO sales people? Give. Me. A. Break.

This prize is supposed to be delivered tomorrow, and they will cart off the huge, unmoveable clunker that’s been occupying space in the bedroom for the past fifteen years.

Briefly, I considered having the delivery guys just tote it into the former TV room, which just now serves no purpose. A bed in there would turn it into a guest bedroom, eh?

But really, the room is too small for a queen-sized mattress. I’d have to buy some sort of platform for the thing or else just set it on the floor, neither of which I wanna do. Other furniture in there would have to go. And given that no one ever stays here overnight, the whole idea looked like a great deal more trouble than it’s worth. Really, it would make more sense to get an Ikea bed platform and toss a twin-size Tuft and Needle pad on it. Or a futon. So…

Vacuum Cleaner Fiasco

Now that did turn into a fiasco, when in a fit of frustration and exhaustion I abandoned the supposedly unfixable Shark vacuum at the 35th Avenue Sew’n’Vac, an outfit that in the past has cheerfully repaired the things.

Apparently staff there outright lied when they said parts could not be purchased (oddly, they’re readily available on Amazon) and the machines cannot be opened to work on them (oddly, Amazon customers report all kinds of repairs having been done on their older models).

By leaving the machine there and asking them to throw it out so I didn’t have to tote it home and figure out how to dispose of it, I essentially let the store steal it. And…they have in the past sold second-hand vacuums.

But…I have another old Shark vacuum, which runs fine but is just old and tired. I use it to vacuum the car and pick up the occasional mess of broken glass. After I realized that yea, verily, parts are easy to order and others report no problem with repair jobs, I called another vacuum repair store. The guy who answered said they could clean and refurbish that vacuum.

Since I truly hate the new Shark I bought at Costco the other day — it’s swiveling suction head threatens to yank your shoulder out of joint — I’m thinking I’ll have this other repair guy fix up the old one and then return the $150 number to Costco. So that will put a bundle of cash back in my checking account and relieve me, temporarily, of yet another source of annoyance.

Pool Fiasco

The newly (expensively) refurbished pool pump doesn’t seem to be working. Just now I’m too tired to be mad as a cat about that…but I surely should be. Yesterday I spent half the afternoon cleaning up the algae infestation that resulted from sending the damn pump to the shop for a week or ten days. WHAT a mess, and what a project!

The vacuum just simply does not run when plugged into the (expensive) new inlet on the side of the pool: hangs up on the accursed new hair-resistant drain covers and stops dead. And it is sucking air, causing the pump to cavitate.

Jayzuz.

So it’s now plugged into the strainer basket inlet. Again. This required reattaching three lengths of plastic hose. Still sucks air, still cavitates but now it runs like a bustard.

I’m thinking it’s possible one or more lengths of that hose is leaking. A couple of them are pretty old. But that stuff is ridiculously expensive . I really, truly do NOT want to go out and buy half a dozen lengths of it. They do have pool vacuum hoses at Amazon, but reviewers seem to hate them, and they come in 30- or 40-foot lengths. The shorter lengths — four or five feet — are preferable because you don’t have to replace the entire pricey length if one crack shows up, and because they’re easier to store.

At any rate, I’m getting very, very tired of paying Swimming Pool Service & Repair to get the damn job done right. They soak me for a service call every time they come over here to do something that should have been done as part of the refurbishing job.

The newly purchased hose bonnet gadget — used for picking up large debris that could damage Harvey the Hayward Pool cleaner — proved to be exceptionally annoying. The maker has added a new blandishment: lengths of nylon brush around the circumference. This stuff a) does not play well with the coarse new Pebble-sheen surface and b) pushes the debris out of the way instead of letting the device suck it up into the bonnet.

This afternoon I realized I could take a flat-head screwdriver to the frame and prize the stupid brushes out. By then Harvey had sucked up most of the BBs that had blown out of the damned palm trees into the pool, so haven’t yet tried to see how this “improvement” works. But, dammit, I see that I can get the old-fashioned no-cutesy-brush version from Amazon, for a lot less than I paid at Leslie’s. So I may try to snap those things back in, return it to Leslie’s, and order one that’s not so extortionately priced.

Doggy-Walk Fail

On the way back into the ’Hood from church, what should come galloping across the road but the BIGGEST, HEALTHIEST, HUSKIEST coyote I’ve ever seen in my life. He was gorgeous — in great health, full coat, and at least as big as a German shepherd. And on a dead run, presumably streaking away from something that spooked him.

One of the little girls on the corner of the road that leads toward La Maya and La Bethulia’s house started to putter after him on her bicycle. No grown-up being in evidence, I pulled a U-ie and cruised down the street after him. Didn’t see him in the alley, though that’s the most likely place for a coyote to take shelter. Stopped by La M’s neighbor’s house, where the family was puttering in the front yard, and told them to keep an eye out for the coyote-hunting kidlet. They hadn’t seen him come by, so he presumably shot up the alleyway.

At any rate, it’s now after dark. Ruby the Corgi has not had her daily doggy-walk, but with that big fella in the offing, I think I’d just as soon not take her out in prime coyote-prowling hours. So…she’ll be unhappy with me all evening.

So. Yeah:

One damfool thing after another!

Housecleaning and Moths…Oh, My!

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Holy mackerel, to coin a phrase… Our Beloved Cleaning Lady didn’t show up at her customary time on Monday. WonderAccountant, who shares this extraordinary woman with me, said BCL had called her and said her husband is sick. As in very sick. WA gathered he’d had a stroke.

Well. This is not good all the way around. We do not know BCL’s status, but we do know she has a middle-school aged daughter, and we do know she works like a horse. And we prize her efforts above just about everything else. If BCL can’t work because Mr. BCL can’t work, they’re in deep trouble.  We stand by, waiting and wondering what we can do to help. If anything.

In the UNhelpful department, I had already begun to think that I cannot afford to continue the biweekly cleaning service, and that I either need to cut her visits to one a month or just let her go altogether. I hired BCL during the Year of the Surgeries, when there wasn’t a snowball’s chance that I could clean a floor or even so much as dust the furniture. She proved to be so wonderful — and the Year made it so obvious that I don’t have many more years in which I will be strong enough to scrub 1868 square feet — that I decided to keep her on.

Now, though, several years later: inflation rises but Social Security and investments do not keep up with it. It’s March: I don’t take a required minimum drawdown until August at the earliest, it costs about $2,000 a month to live and run this house, and I have $1268 in the checking account. Somethin’s gotta go, and I had already decided it was gonna be BCL.

Deeply, truly, profoundly do I hate housework. God, how I hate spending three-quarters of a day knocking myself out scrubbing and rubbing and scouring and vacuuming and mopping and laundering and ripping off sheets and putting on sheets and ohhh HELL! Getting rid of the cleaning lady is not a pleasing prospect.

However and come to think of it…

As I contemplate this predicament, it occurs to me that…hey, Estúpida! You do not have to clean the whole damn house on a single day.

Cleaning this house only entails about a half-dozen tasks.

  • Vacuum and mop the floors (takes about 30 to 40 minutes)
  • Clean the bathrooms (20 to 25 minutes)
  • Clean the kitchen (20 minutes) [Because I do most of my cooking on the propane grill, the stove and counters around it never get very greasy]
  • Dust the furniture (30 minutes, unless oiling furniture)
  • Wash the Arcadia door windows (10 minutes)
  • Clean the deck and back patio (20 to 25 minutes)
  • Change the bed (10 or 15 minutes)

These figures may be optimistic: they only add up to about 2 1/2 hours. It takes BCL three to four hours to clean this place, and it typically takes me about four hours, too. But still: take 4 hours x 60 minutes and divide by 7 tasks, and you get an average of 34 minutes per task. That’s absurd, because the only one of these chores that takes anything like that much time is vacuuming and mopping 1868 square feet of tile flooring. In fact, at least six of these seven tasks will take you no more than 20 or 25 minutes. Apiece, that is.

WHAT IF, it dawned upon my fevered little brain…WHAT IF you did just one task a day? Over the course of a week, this would add up to cleaning the entire house, and it would not knock you out. Not only that, but if you were doing one and only one of these things each day, then every housecleaning job would get done once a week, instead of only once every two weeks, as is happening now. The house would actually be cleaner, and it would cost you nothing.

The only one of these chores that’s very difficult is vacuuming and mopping the floors…but in the absence of the heavily shedding Cassie the Corgi, the only floors that really NEED to be mopped frequently are the kitchen and the closet-sized bathrooms. If all you were doing was vacuuming the rest of the house…come the mopping chore you wouldn’t be working very hard.

The other job that’s a PITA is changing the bed, because I stupidly let myself be talked into buying one of those extra-thick, cushion-topped mattresses, along about 15 years ago. NO sheets, not even extra-deep sheets, fit the damn thing. So making the bed is quite the little back-breaker. Hence: yesterday’s annoying search for a new mattress.

Okay, so I divvy the seven chores over five days, leaving myself two days in which to goof completely off, and get started. Yesterday: vacuum the floors. Discover I hate and despise the new Shark. Having dragged its parts out of their box and put them together, I discover the effing thing SWIVELS. Yes. Stupidly, Shark has designed the thing so that its head — the part with the beater brush that rolls along the floor — swivels at random, threatening to yank your shoulder out of joint if you’re not very, very careful. Why anyone would want a vacuum to do such a thing escapes me. But apparently someone does.

This adds another chore: take the thing back to Costco.

At any rate, yes, it takes all of about 30 minutes to vacuum the whole house, and maybe another 10 minutes to Swiffer under the furniture and behind the doors.

Meanwhile, the cleanerly banging around reminds me that I need to do something more about the moths that have taken over the pantry cupboard.

Some months ago, one of these little gals flew out of a bag of the fancy dog kibble I use as doggy treats and to supplement the real food I serve up. I thought UH OH…. But was busy and just let it go. Mistake.

I keep a jar of this kibble in the pantry, for twice-daily use. Of late a tribe of Indian pantry moths has visited the kitchen, and so I was moved to track them down. Realized they had infested the pantry en masse. A friend of mine had remarked that she had inflicted moth genocide with some moth traps, something I’d never heard of before she described the things. So, ordered up a box of these:

Their trick is a layer of extremely sticky gunk spiked with sexy moth pheromone. They target the Indian pantry moth, and by golly, they DO work. The package arrived late yesterday afternoon, and by the time I got back from choir, a few hours later, they’d already caught five of the little buggers.

So, today being “Clean the Kitchen” Day, I decided to pull everything out of the pantry, empty all the food storage jars and run them through the dishwasher, and place any food packages that were not obviously infested in the freezer. (Adult moths are at the end of their lives and will fly around mating and depositing eggs for only a couple of days, but their grubs, which do the damage, live about 28 days.) Turns out that the little worms will die after about a day and a half at freezing temps. So…drop every bag of kibble in the freezer for about three days before you open it, and your problem is solved. Or at least headed off at the pass, to some degree.

You really should keep grain products such as flour and cornmeal in the freezer. Processed products such as pasta and crackers should be stored in closed containers. This will keep the moth issue under control pretty well.

At any rate, the clean-up entailed pulling everything out of the (large!) cabinet, washing all the plastic shelf liners in a hot, strong solution of Dawn detergent, dumping out any stale or even slightly suspect food and running the containers through the dishwasher, wiping down all six (large!) sliding shelves with Dawn solution and drying well…and on and freaking on.

In the process, I found a LOT more moths. The trap catches only males, which are drawn by the alluring parfum de lady moth and so taken out of the reproductive cycle. Catch all the males, and you end the females’ egg-laying prowess. Apparently there were plenty of ladies hanging around. Also found a fair number of grubs and a fair amount of grub mess, now all scrubbed clean.

The upshot is, the kitchen is now pretty well clean. Still have another load of retrieved dishes to run through the washer, along with the stove grids. And still have to replace the stuff in the pantry. But once that’s done, the basic kitchen-cleaning chore is done (stove clean, counters clean, other stuff clean) AND the largest cabinet in the kitchen is cleaned with the vengeance.