Coffee heat rising

Round and round she goes…

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…where she stops, nobody knows… Yup. Spent yesterday going round and round and not stopping anywhere very productive.

Working on the “Drugging of America” project — a proposal for which I hope to send off to the chosen university press by the end of this month — I located 10 important-looking books on the subject. Need to see these before writing said proposal. Several of them are 15 or 20 years old.

I locate half of them in the GDU library. To get them, I’ll have to traipse to Tempe through the homicidal traffic, fight for a free parking spot on the street (my crip-space hanger lets me park in any off-campus metered parking, gratis), trudge across the campus to the library, and try to find the things there. One of them is in the law library, a fine hike away from the main library. Or I could go out to the West campus, ask to have them sent out there, and do battle with West’s parking twice.

The City of Glendale evinces no generosity to us crips, so parking at the West campus is exorbitant, unless you stash your car in the credit union’s reserved spaces. Which is likely to get you towed.

As you can imagine, the last thing I wanted to do was go out to either of those campuses.

So instead, I decided to renew my card with the Phoenix Public Libraries, go down to the main library, and ask to have the things sent over through Inter-Library Loan.

Heh. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?

Well. The main library was flooded out when someone incompetently installed a fire sprinkling system. A couple years ago, this system shorted out during a storm-induced power outage and flooded the entire structure, destroying books common and rare and causing gerzillions of dollars worth of damage. Consequently, that august institution is doing business out of the basement of a decrepit shopping center that is now under renovative construction.

Once there, I find some very lovely folks manning — sorry, make that “personing” — the desks. Reach a patient and intelligent librarian, who offers to track all these books down and help me order them through ILL — which these days, thanks to the “convenience” brought to us by the Internet — is pretty much a DIY operation.

For a DIY job, it is extremely complicated. She bounces through stage after stage after digital stage of ordering up each book, along the way remarking that this was the first time she’d ever tried to order anything by Interlibrary Loan!

So we were both learning how to use the system.

Along the way, I also learn that the library has a boatload of movies that you can stream, for free, just by signing on for a library card. Ditto music, and of course ditto ebooks. Many of these videos appear to be things that you’d actually care to see, unlike the offerings at Amazon Prime and Netflix, which are largely dominated by extreme violence or extreme boredom.

Eventually I arrive back at the Funny Farm and go on about my business.

Couple hours later, I’m sitting around feeling pretty pleased with myself when the phone rings. It’s our young librarian. Timorously, as though she thinks I can bite through the phone lines, she explains that she just learned you can’t order e-format through ILL. Eight of the ten works we ordered were available in PDF, which, needless to say, I would rather get because I can copy & paste passages to quote.

😀 This strikes me as so hilarious I can’t even manage a modicum of crabbiness.

So now all this stuff needs to be re-ordered. The Park Central incarnation of the PPL is moving back to its digs in the now-refurbished Burton Barr Library, starting on June 8; they won’t re-open till June 16.

And that throws another monkey wrench in the works.

I have a friend/former colleague at the West campus, a librarian with whom I copublished one of the early studies on on-line learning. E-mailed him yesterday to ask if he can help me acquire these books — he usually has a graduate student underling upon whom work can be foisted, so I’m hoping he’ll get someone to look them up and order them for me, allowing me to make just one trip out there, instead of two or three.

Failing that, I have another friend who is a librarian with the community colleges. He has been very helpful in the past and I think he would find the current project very interesting. Trouble is, the community college library pretty much shuts down during the summer, so I don’t even know if he’s around. He may be on vacation now. But if I don’t hear back from the ASU guy, I’ll pester him.

At any rate, essentially I wasted the entire afternoon yesterday. Since I’ve set a deadline of June 30 to finish the proposal, that was extremely annoying. Excessively so, one might say.

At the crack of today’s dawn, I was supposed to traipse to the Mayo for a liver sonogram. Day before yesterday, though, I canceled this, on the grounds that I do not wish to engage in any more fishing expeditions.

The cause of the proposed exam was a very slightly elevated reading of liver enzyme levels. This, emanating from one of those damned annual “check-ups” that you have to subject yourself to if you’re a Medicare patient at the Mayo. The Mayo, understandably enough, does not especially welcome Medicare patients — even though a large proportion of its patient population consists of the elderly — because they can’t extract enough pay for their services. So if you’re well and you don’t show up at least once a year, they drop you off their rolls and you can’t get back on.

Annual physicals have been shown to be counterproductive, something that has been known at least since about 1980. My ex- was a Stanford alum; one of the perks was a subscription to a series of plain-English research studies by Stanford faculty members. And one of the books we got in that series was written by a full professor of medicine at Stanford’s School of Medicine. This was back when the “annual physical” was so popular that corporations would pay to send their execs to “retreats” at expensive resorts, where they would be jumped through a battery of tests and exams.

The good professor noted that annual physicals may and do harm patients in several ways. One of the most important is the prevalence of false positive and false negative medical test results.

• False positive tests harm the patient in the obvious manner: by leading to increasingly invasive tests that show nothing while making the patient sick, distracted, worried, and by wasting the patient’s and the doctor’s time.

• False negative tests harm the patient by creating a false sense of confidence. The result: if you have symptoms, you’re likely to ignore them, leaving an ailment that might be treated successfully to grow more and more dangerous.

He and his colleagues strongly recommended that one forego the annual physical and see a doctor only when specific symptoms arise.

So…I did not want to undergo an unnecessary physical exam this spring, nor do I ever wish to do so. But the only way to stay in good standing with the Mayo seems to be to subject yourself to one.

The reason I feel I need to have access to the Mayo is that the Mayo hospital is the only hospital in the county that consistently ranks high in quality assessments, such as Healthgrades. In the Healthgrades safety ratings, many of the hospitals in the Phoenix area score poorly.  In patient satisfaction, most score in the 70s (about a “C) or lower. Much lower. It was St. Joe’s, for example, whose pathologist called me at 7 p.m. on a Friday evening, said “I’m sorry, you have cancer,” and hung up. Thankyouverymuch.

This is the reason and the only reason I drive halfway to Payson when I need to see a doctor. As it developed, the drive was worth it: at the Mayo one of the most prominent breast surgeons in the country informed me that I did not have breast cancer. Thankyouverymuch.

So when the new GP they’ve assigned to me said I must have an annual physical, I acquiesced, so as not to rock the boat.

Naturally, back come results saying the two tested types of liver enzymes are high.

Naturally: because I have been drinking daily since I was about 22 years old. It has been my habit to have a beer or wine with dinner for my entire adult life. And, during the 20 years I was married to Dear Ex-Husband, we had one or two cocktails before dinner every day, as well as one or two glasses of wine with dinner.

You expected a bear, doctor?

Well, the readings for these enzymes — ASL and ALT– are not very high. Each is only a few points above the threshold at which it’s regarded as “elevated.”

So now she wants to do a liver sonogram, which, she informs me, could lead to a liver biopsy!

Holy shit.

Look into it, and you discover this gem from the University of Michigan, among many others. Liver diagnosis is yet another example of over-testing and overtreatment, the very subject upon which I happen to be writing. A little more exploration reveals that there’s no hurry to dive into ever-more-expensive, ever-more-invasive testing. It’s best to wait six to eight weeks after a slightly elevated reading, during which the patient abstains from alcohol and any meds that might push readings up. Then do another blood test. Then and only then, if the second test again shows an elevated level, should you proceed to a sonogram.

But we have the question of what are elevated levels. At the moment, for example, the Mayo places the upper limit for normal serum levels of AST at 40 U/L. My test results come back just a few points higher than that. Interestingly, though, there’s a movement afoot to lower that threshold to 30 U/L — just as we have lowered the threshold for “normal” blood pressure a full ten points, rendering many tens of thousands of Americans targets for profitable blood pressure medications.

We are told, in a study published by the Cleveland Clinic, that one should “Suspect alcoholic liver disease when the aminotransferases are elevated and the aspartate aminotransferase [AST] level is two to three times higher than the alanine aminotransferase [ALT] level.” But that is not the case in the results returned by the Mayo’s tests. Not even remotely. In fact, each of these tests returns levels just slightly above the upper range of “normal.”

Returning from the macro- to the micro-level, we have the issue that not only have I been drinking freely for the past 50 years, the blood pressure med that caused so much havoc has as one its potential side effects — rare, yes, but there it is — elevation of liver enzyme levels!

So I’ll be damned if I’m going to be jumped through a series of misery-inducing hoops over this. I’m scheduled to go back in three months for another blood test. If those enzyme levels are still high then, after I’ve been off the sauce for 90 days, fine: they can do a sonogram. But until then: not so much.

Even though this sideshow consumed no actual hours yesterday —  canceling the proposed test rescued the entire morning for more constructive uses — it still has been a distraction. Psychologically, that is.

Like…I don’t have enough stress in my life, just trying to make ends meet and survive the homicidal traffic? 😀

And trying to make the goddamn computers work.

Part of the retrieved time was dedicated to posting another *FREE READS* chapter of the writing guide, over at Plain & Simple Press. For reasons I do NOT understand, every time I post a chapter from The Complete Writer, some endlessly annoying snafu occurs. Why is a mystery. It doesn’t seem any more complicated than the other two bookoids. But for some reason I end up diddling around and diddling around and diddling around trying to get that stuff online as a) a post and b) a chapter in the book-length archive.

Ella’s Story and If You’d Asked Me chapters go up with no problem. But try to post one for Writer, and you can expect to kill a good 45 minutes (or more!) screwing around with trying to get it right.

But I did manage to type up two chapters of Ella’s Story yesterday — one of them, admittedly, fairly short because of a truncated sex scene (sometimes, I reckon, silence speaks volumes).

Was entertained the other day when a dear friend remarked that she’s been enjoying If You’d Asked Me a great deal. 🙂 Now, if only we could get the rest of the world to enjoy it…

How Journalists Dig up the Dirt

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FINALLY got chapter 16 of The Complete Writer online at Plain & Simple Press: a detailed squib on how to do journalistic research.

This is one of my favorite chapters in the book. It’s based on a chapter in my textbook, The Essential Feature, which appeared in another century (possibly on another world…) through Columbia University Press — much revised and updated for our time and our world. Tracking down facts, following the money trail, getting the dirt: I love this stuff!

😀

Back in the day when I was a working journalist, the thing I used to love the most about the job was that it gave you an excuse to ask people nosy questions. The work is as ill-paid as teaching, but because of the nosy-question factor it’s one hell of a lot more fun.

Dear Reader: Would you please post a link to the P&S Press post on research for nonfiction writers at Facebook, Twitter, and waypoints? Here, explicitly: is the URL: http://www.plainandsimplepress.com/the-complete-writer-journalistic-research/

Askin’ and Writin’

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In the writin’ department…

The current Answer to the Great Questions of the World is online at Plain & Simple Press, as is this week’s serialization of Ella’s Story. So…avail yourself of the FREE READS…and if you would please, kindly plug them on Facebook, Twitter, & waypoints, that would be lovely. 🙂

Finally, at last, I’m getting a little traction on the Drugging of America proposal. Can’t recall whether I mentioned this here, at P&S Press, or not at all…but the plan is to peddle this book to a scholarly press (since it’s richly researched). First on the list of prospects is U of Toronto Press, which recently published a rather slight book (as academic books go) about the length of the planned Drugging opus. Short, that is…

I need to make a run on the GDU library to compile a full list. Figure I’ll need at least a dozen. What I used to do — and probably will do again, even though it’s considered dreadfully bad form — is send out proposals to six publishers at a time. Back in the day, I’d have a list of around 20 likely publishers. Then as a rejection came in, I’d just turn it around and send it off to the next outfit on the list. So at any given time, about half a dozen proposals would be on the float.

This is highly problematic. In the first place, editors hate it. In the second, the scholarly publishing club is quite small, so if your idea is striking and your proposal strong, the risk that you’ll get caught out is pretty high. Piss them off and they’ll reject you, no matter how great your idea is.

Creating a book proposal is a project. You need to have completed an introduction and two or three chapters, a table of contents, and a chapter outline. Then you need to survey the market to see what’s out there on the same or related subject and explain how yours is different and why it’s better. You need to articulate the proposed audience and find out how large it is. If you have half a brain, you’ll also suggest some avenues through which the book might be marketed.

For Toronto, I’ll have to update my CV…oh, ugh! An academic CV is a gawdawful long thing, and this one of course will reveal my age, which will make it harder to talk them into buying anything I write.

I’ll also have to unpublish the Drugging of America blog series, because of course they will NOT want to know that this material has been informally distributed online. That will be something we accidentally forget to mention in the proposal.

At this point, the posts amount to draft chapters. So I have seven chapters reasonably close to completion (which will need to be elaborated on), plus I need to write two more from scratch: one on the FDA & its conflicts of interest and one on the practice called “disease mongering” and the medicalization of conditions that do not need treatment or that may not even exist in the patient.

Because seven of the proposed chapters are pretty much in hand (they’ll need some work, but nothing very crushing), I think I can crank the book out by the end of the summer. Today I wrote an introduction and rewrote the bloggity “Overprescription” into full-fledged chapter form. Remaining: revise, edit, clean up the documentation.

If a contract comes in with greater speed than one would expect — say Toronto buys it and they do so within eight or ten weeks — then I certainly will put the thing together by the end of August, at the latest. There’s not that much to do…and some motivation in the form of a check or at least a promise to publish will move what is left to do right along.

A contract in hand will give me access to the Mayo, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and waypoints, thereinat to interview experts on the subject. Some quotes will help a lot, as long as they don’t come across as too very journalistic.

Sometimes academic presses do not pay an advance against royalties. Really, for an academic author, “pay” for a book comes in the form of promotion and tenure, both of which mean substantial salary increases.

Obviously, I’m past the P&T stage of my career. But y’know, I’d like to get just one more book — just one — in print through a real publisher. I mean…well…it’s not like three aren’t enough. But still. Just one more real book through a real publishing house. Please?

Putting your squibs up on Amazon and pretending that makes you a “published author” is great fun in a hobbyist-y way. Sort of like…I don’t know…knitting baseball caps. But it’s totally self-absorbed and self-centered. It doesn’t prove you’ve done anything other than click “post” to upload a file to a gigantic electronic scam. Publishing it is not.

Not real publishing, I mean: in the sense of fazing a book idea past a canny editor and a team of marketers who know what’s good, who know what sells, and who know what the hell they’re doing, then engaging battle with peer reviewers, revising and editing passages again, and so on. When you come to the end of that process, then you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

The overprescription issue is big in Canada. Canadians being brighter than Americans these days are all over the issue, with government-sponsored programs to alert pharmacists, doctors, and members of the public. Although the US has a small effort going, it is as nothing compared to the program Canada has. So I think I can use that interest to my advantage with a Canadian press.

The more I look at the matter, the more astonishing it appears. People in this country are outrageously overmedicated. There’s no question folks in the medical profession know about it — with the exception of some investigative reporting, most of the published reports and assessment of the issue appear in medical journals. But it doesn’t seem to be registering with practitioners. As far as I can see, though, there’s almost nothing out there that is science-based but written for the average Joe or Jane, which is what I propose to produce. Worst Pills, Best Pills, which was the best thing on the market this side of PDR, went out of print years ago, replaced by a pay-to-peek website.

I’m dead sure there’s a market for a plain-English book that describes the problem, how to recognize when it’s happening to you, and how to deal with it.

 

Memorial Day, Memories, and Amazing Work

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Yesterday being Memorial Day, the berserk hordes who now inhabit Our Great City headed out of town, leaving the city streets prett’ much empty. And good riddance to them: it gets less and less pleasant to live in a city that keeps growing like some unholy fungus from outer space…without regard to whether there’s enough water to support millions of people from now into perpetuity…or even until the day after tomorrow. Meanwhile, though, some of us do not quit working just because it’s a holiday: Luis the Arborist showed up at 6 a.m. sharp (uhm… more or less) to cut back the overgrown paloverde, palo brea, and olive.

I hate to do that to these beautiful trees. But the paloverde had sent two limbs up over the roof. One of these sprang from a trunk (it has four trunks) that had started to sag ominously under the weight…suggesting that the first good, hard monsoon that blows in this summer would drop a half-ton of tree limb onto my roof or the neighbor’s. The palo brea poses no threat to any structures, but it does crave to claw out the eyes of passers-by. Given the opportunity, it drapes its monstrously thorny boughs over the sidewalk, where they wave in the breeze right at head-height for a human. So that thing has to be trimmed back every year.

And yes, I do hate cutting them back, especially the paloverde. This morning there are NO birds in the side yard. As I’ve said recently, normally the place is alive with them. So presumably they were either nesting or taking shelter in the overgrown paloverde.

Before Luis came over, I inspected it to see if I could spot nests, but couldn’t see any. So thought it safe enough to let him have at it. But this morning’s absence of the flocks of sparrows, towhees, dove, and house finches suggests that was wrong.

However…the risk of a 500-pound tree limb falling on the roof kinda outweighed the risk of, alas, scaring off the birds.

Meanwhile, a Memorial Day shopping expedition was planned with friends VickyC and KJG. I had to arrive at VickyC’s house at 10 a.m., meaning the key errands I needed to do — grab some dog food and fill up the gas tank — had to be done early. Wrangling the tree guy around the dogs threw a monkey wrench in the plans to do those tasks.

Flew up to Walmart, which is close to the house and usually has the fancy dog food — overpriced though the stuff is for their customer base. But no…they had no chicken, only beef. Ruby the Corgi Pup is allergic to beef. So had to traipse all the way down to AJ’s. The Costco was on the way from the Walmart to the AJ’s, and by then it was past opening time.

Arrive at the Costco gas station to find it empty. Closed. Padlocks on the gas pumps. F!!!ck.

Moving on to AJ’s, they were mercifully open (not so merciful for their employees, but I have no idea what I would’ve done about the dogs had the store been closed…not many places carry this particular brand of overpriced dog food, and it takes two or three hours to cook a new batch of their regular chow).

This junket, as it developed, was a Drive Down Memory Lane.

Holy mackerel…do you have any idea how long it’s been since driving around our fair city was a pleasant endeavor?

The streets were essentially empty. Every yahoo and homicidal driver had freaking left town, Memorial Day traditionally being the first really hot day of the summer. Everyone who’s anyone and a great number who are no one heads out of the city, northward bound on often motionless freeways.

And I was reminded that — can you believe this? — once I liked to drive around Phoenix. Once upon a time it was actually fun to get in your car and just cruise the streets, day or night. As bored 20-year-olds, we had a game in which we would get in the car, the driver poised to take orders from the person in the shotgun seat. Said sidekick would flip a coin: heads we go left; tails right. And we would just drive around, exploring the city at random, usually ending up on the side of Camelback Mountain. If driver and sidekick were members of the opposite sex, this accidental destination presented some even more entertaining possibilities. 😉

So it was strangely pleasant. Despite the frustrations encountered at the Walmart and the Costco, I arrived home in an almost unheard-of good mood, instead of mad as a cat and grinding my teeth. Surprising! On any normal day, driving here leaves you wanting to bite someone.

Leads me to think I should think about living in a smaller city. Like, say, Prescott. Or the beloved Yarnell. Ah, Yarnell. Ah, 40 acres a few miles out of town. Yes. Please.

KJG and her husband, Mr. Fireman, just sold their house up against the White Tanks. They’ve bought a place in Payson, where they’re now in the process of moving. It’s on four acres of forested land and is really going to be a lovely place to live.

Our plan was to have lunch at a favorite place in lovely downtown Tempe, then make a run on our favorite European shoe store, which was having a 10% off sale. But just before we left, we discovered the restaurant was closed. So were all the restaurants in the vicinity of VickyC’s house.

So we came on up to the Funny Farm, where I happened to have a nice package of organic free-range chicken thighs snabbed from the local Sprouts. We cooked those up with some veggies and a side of fresh tomatoes, and enjoyed sitting around yakking for quite some time.

KJG remarked that she’s headed up to Payson this week to establish residence and clean cupboards, cabinets, closets, and everything else preparatory to the arrival of their worldly goods. Mr. F is staying here for the nonce, so that he can continue to pack stuff into their pick-up and trailer and to keep the crazy neighbors’ horde of cats out of the yard…the new buyers being innocent of the fact that KJG and Mr. F are moving because of the filthy cats’ defiling the house’s yard, walls, patios, and gardens.

Isn’t that something? Being driven out of your dream home, custom built for you in one of the prettiest parts of the Valley, by effing nut cases who board mobs of cats and refuse to keep them off your property! These people essentially hijacked the HOA, so the specific written covenants were not enforced and are never gonna be enforced.

At any rate, she remarked that she didn’t have enough silverware to leave some for Mr. F and take enough for her — they only have one set.

Mwa ha ha! Lo and behold, I just happen to have a whole set of fairly fancy flatware, purchased at Williams Sonoma about three years ago. Bought it because I was about to host a temporary roommate, and I knew the fact that my working stainless looked almost identical to my Christofle — which I use all the time — was gonna cause trouble. The silver, while it can be washed in the dishwasher, has to be loaded separate from the stainless. Well, the existing stainless set is such a close knock-off of the Christofle pattern that sometimes even I have trouble telling them apart.

As soon as the roommate moved on — joining her husband in San Francisco, whence he had decamped three months before her contract employment ran out — I resurrected the Christofle knock-offs. Old age: anything new makes you nervous. 😉

So she was pleased to take this practically new set, and I was delighted to give it to her. A great housewarming gift, eh? May she use it in good health, now and evermore.

By the time we finished stuffing ourselves and talking ourselves blue, KJG was getting tired. She and Mr. F have been schlepping up and down to Payson (a 2½ hour drive) carrying their worldly goods, all the while packing and trying to keep the Waddell castle pristinely clean (and cat-urine stink-free…). So she excused herself.

VickyC and I drove out to Tempe, where I spent a great deal more than I could afford on a new pair of dressy(ish) black sandals. My old ones, which I wear to excess, were completely shot: holes worn on the insole under the toes! So that was a pricey trip. Not as pricey as it would have been, though, had we found a non-fast-food restaurant open.

And so it goes…

 

Gate Bait

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The ‘hood, being an inner-city sorta place, enjoys intermittent infestations of mail thieves and porch pirates. Here at the Funny Farm, we got the mail theft pretty well under control by installing a monster, fortified locking mailbox out at the curb. Keeping opportunistic thieves from walking off with Amazon deliveries is another matter, though.

No chance I’m giving some random Amazon driver a key to open the front door and drop a package into a “locker” inside. As for the locker you drive to…well…

a) Having to drive somewhere to pick up an Amazon delivery defeats the purpose of ordering things to be delivered. If you have to get in your car and do battle with Phoenix’s homicidal traffic, you might as well go to a brick-and-mortar store and give your money to a local business.

b) Even if that made sense (it doesn’t), the nearest “locker” sites are in places where I wouldn’t get out of my car on a bet. One is at the QT at the corner of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way, the area’s worst offender as a gathering site for panhandlers, addicts, and petty thieves. The other is another QT on the other side of the freeway, also in a bad area renowned for shootings and redolent with panhandlers.

So, if you live in these parts and you’re gonna order from Amazon, you’ll have to put up with their drivers dropping packages in front of your house.

In theory, the Amazon guys are supposed to ring your doorbell. But they don’t. They come into the courtyard (which is walled and has iron gates) and leave the packages in there. That’s a whole lot better than leaving them propped against a front door or the garage door. But it’s not 100%.

Our porch pirates are bold as Arizona’s summer sunshine. A couple of residents have captured clear and highly entertaining videos of these folks in action. One woman drives down the street at a conspicuously slow speed, searching for packages left in front. When she spots one, she parks in front of the house, saunters up to the door, picks the thing up, strolls back to her car and putters on down the road. She’s clearly stopping at every house where she can see a package from the street.

Well, the past two or three weeks, I’ve repeatedly found the courtyard gate standing wide open.

I’ve thought it was one of Gerardo’s guys carelessly leaving it open.

Thought it was me, not getting the gate latched well enough.

Thought it was a bum looking to sleep inside the walls.

Nope. Nope. And nope.

Last time it happened, I knew someone had entered the courtyard and left the gate hanging open because when I back my car into the garage, I gauge the distance between the left side of the car and the house by watching the courtyard’s wall as the car slides past it. If yesterday the gate had been hanging wide open — as it was this morning — I would have spotted it yesterday afternoon when I came in.

So, yeah. What we have here is a recurrent visitor.

Undoubtedly checking every few days to see if anything has been left.

{chortle!}

This is irresistible.

What should I have in my computer but a JPG of a return label for UPS, to be pasted on a package I returned the other day.

And how hard would it be to print out another copy of it? After jimmying the return address to insert a fake name and address, of course.

A-n-n-d…who doesn’t have a handy small cardboard box from Amazon laying around?

What could an average household offer as a gift to a porch pirate?

• An empty box, maybe, filled with wadded tissue paper?
• How about a rock, wrapped with said fine tissue paper?
• Maybe a mousetrap, set to snap shut on opening?
• Rat trap, the better to break a finger?
• Dog shit, perhaps, of which we have a plethora?

I found it’s pretty easy to mock up a fake UPS return label, if you’ve already returned a package to Amazon. They email the label to you; you have to download it, cut it out of the paper, and stick it on the package.

So: Open the file. Crop the image to leave only the return address data. Import the image into a Word file. Set your font to Arial 14 points and type in a fake name and address where the real one would appear on a real label. Use a text box to put this in place if necessary.

Piece of cake. This will complicate life for the pirate who wishes revenge — with any luck she’ll steal several packages and won’t remember where yours came from. If she doesn’t, a fake address will send her astray. Make it a fake street, so she won’t visit someone else’s home. “Erewhon Lane” works well — people who don’t read literature won’t recognize the anagram for “Nowhere.”

Load the box with whatever gift you wish to give the thief. Include a message, if desired. Carefully seal it up with clear packing tape and the fake label. Leave it out on the front step for the porch pirate to pick up.

Porch pirate gift, in the making. 😀

LOL! Load, lock, and leave!