Coffee heat rising

Current Events and the State of One’s Sanity

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I think my brain has turned itself upside down. Have you read the news over the past couple of days? The current Current Events are enough to make you crazy.

In the first place, I must confess that I have thought the flap over white cops shooting black men has been strenuously overblown. Puh-leeeze! If you decide to knock over a convenience store and rough up a clerk and challenge a cop who comes after you, you can’t be surprised when you get shot, no matter what your racial persuasion. And you might want to think about the potential risks before you let your kid go outside and wave a convincingly realistic-looking toy gun around a public park. But what happened in South Carolina yesterday raises some real questions about that line of thinking.

In case you haven’t pulled your head out from under the pillow this morning: a police officer stopped a driver because one of the driver’s tail lights was out. An altercation ensued in which the officer tased the driver, who turned and ran off. The officer fired eight shots, at least one of which hit the man in the back and killed him. The officer happened to be white; the driver happened to be black.

The officer claims he felt his life was threatened. Exactly how a man who’s fleeing you at a dead run, with his back turned to you and with no gun in his hand, could be much of a threat…that remains unexplained. Was the man a threat to public safety? Well…a healthy and vigorous adult male human being can wreak a fair amount of mayhem without benefit of any kind of armament. But lacking a gun and lacking any reason to beat up on anyone: one wonders.

So…we killed this guy because he ran away (his brother claims he probably was afraid of going to jail for failing to pay child support) after we stopped him over a tail light???

We stopped him over a dead tail light? Really? Seriously?

Let me ask you, my white brethren and sistern, how often has a police officer passed his time arresting you because one (count it, 1) of your tail lights was not working? As you know, I drive a junker. Just the other day when I took the Dog Chariot in for some maintenance work, WonderMechanic’s guys changed a tail light that they noticed was out. I knew the plastic cover was cracked — has been for quite some time (as in months and months) — but was trying to pretend I didn’t know the light was out. I pass quite a few of Arizona’s Finest as I make my way over the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Nary a one of them has even turned a hair at the blank tail light, much less tried to shoot me over it.

Maybe the rattletrap cars of elderly white women are less of a threat to public safety than the rattletrap cars of middle-aged black men?

Funny makes a sharp left turn.

Let  us pour another cup of coffee and turn the page. Along about page 18, we come upon this blood-roiling headline:

Utility Cut Off Stolen Meter Before Death of Family of 8

Dayum! That evil utility company!

The story of the man who poisoned himself and his seven kids by running an electric generator indoors has been framed in this way repeatedly: about 95 percent of the reports I’ve read imply that the cruel utility company cut off the family’s power and left them to die in the cold cold Maryland springtime.

As it develops, however, the victim had never even requested electric power service to the rental home. They moved in there last November — five months ago — and never ran up a dime’s worth of (legal) electric bills. Not, we learn, because the generator powered the home’s heater through the winter, but because Dad was an accomplished thief. He had stolen an electric meter, hooked it up on the QT, and was ripping off power from the utility company. Evidently he couldn’t afford power bills because he was trying to support seven children on minimum wage.

One of the conservative themes that I find especially revolting in the 21st-century national conversation is the idea that if you’re poor, it’s all your fault: poor people are, in this train of thought, lazy no-good bums who refuse to get off their duffs, and they deserve to live in poverty.

But… It’s very hard to push away the unkind question: what would possess you to have seven children if all you can earn is minimum wage? Minimum wage in this country isn’t enough to support one person, much less eight people. What part of birth control do you not understand? Does your zipper fall down on its own?

One of the deceased father’s friends asked “How can a man survive off of basically minimum wage with seven kids, and you can’t help him with a utility bill?”

It is not in any way self-evident that a utility company should donate support for the vast brood spawned by a man who can’t keep a grip on his procreative urges. Avoiding pregnancy is just not that hard.

No, it’s not the kids’ fault that they were born. It’s the fault — and the responsibility — of only two people: their parents.

Funny veers to the right.

Craziness to the left of us. Craziness to the right of us. We live in a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

So it goes…

Stupid Animal Stories…

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That would be “Stupid Human Stories,” actually. Over at the Corgi forum, some of the enthusiasts are grousing about the overall stupidity of the people who show up at dog parks with their pooches in tow. LOL!

I don’t take my dogs to dog parks, first because of the risk of injury, but also because of the concentration of various doggy pathogens — more than one vet has inveighed, over the years, against visiting these places. As one of the corgistis remarks, though, the biggest risk at dog parks (and just about anywhere else) is not from the dogs but from the idiot dog owners.

No doubt I’ve already told the story here of Anna, the loose mutt, the four-year-old, and the moron father. The child survived, but only by the grace of God. And ahh, yes, we have the moron parents down the street who leave their kid alone in the front yard with their German shepherd, which — quite reasonably — defends its kid from all comers.

Looks benign, doesn't she?
Looks benign, doesn’t she?

So commonplace that they’re beneath mention are the Cheerful Chuckleheads who let their little yappers lunge up to your German shepherd (who privately is thrilled, for reasons both humans and dogoids are too dumb to guess).

“Oh, Fifi wants to say hello!” cries CC.

DogAttackUSAF)
…or so you think…

“You might want to keep your dog back a bit,” the GerShep’s pet human replies.

“She just wants to play.”

Really? My dog wants something, too: to have your dog’s head stuffed and hung as a trophy on the wall over her dog dish…

Gaaaaaaaahhhhh!

But you haven’t seen stupid humans until you’ve seen stupid humans around horses. My god! Horses bring out the most baroque forms of human stupidity.

Case in point: moi.

quarterhorse Barrel_racingBack in the Middle Cretaceous, when I was in graduate school, some occasion arose in which my then-husband and I invited the chair of my department, his tartly unhappy wife  and their daughter, then about ten, to spend a day at our ranch, a garden spot that resided up a little past lovely Yarnell. Why, I do not remember and I cannot even begin to imagine. But there it was. Chairman Marvin, Mrs. Marvin, and Kid out on a working cattle ranch just below the Mogollon Rim.

If only I could remember what I was smoking…maybe I could get some more of it…

For reasons even more opaque, we somehow suggested that this crew should take a horsie ride.

The Hassayampa River flowed right through our deeded land. It passed by the cluster of buildings that included the house, the foreman’s house and bunkhouse, and the barns. Very, very lovely: riparian high desert, full of birds and little animals and watercress growing in the trickling water beneath vast shady cottonwoods. To die for.

Indeed.

Nothing would do but what we had to saddle up and ride along the cattle trace that follows the Hassayampa easterly toward Crown King. Of course, we’d have to stop at the bob-wire fence between our ranch and the Smoketree, the neighboring ranch. But that was a good thing.

In what at first glance seems amazingly stupid but what turned out to be the one tiny glimmer of sense any of us evinced, I suggested the girl, who’d never been on a horse in her life, should ride with me on our quarterhorse Babe. I proposed we should ride bareback, because a) this is a good first step in learning to sit a horse and b) it meant I could have her in front of me with me hanging on to her, rather than having her perched on a saddle behind me, supposedly hanging onto me. It also meant I could see her and watch her every minute.

So it went.

All right. We’re riding along this narrow trail, single-file, beside the Hassayampa. The river doesn’t flow continuously, nor does any part of it flow all year round. But now and again it does produce ferocious, astonishing, jaw-dropping flash floods. Over the decades, these have excavated a channel that drops the riverbed about three to six feet below the surrounding terrain. We are riding along the edge of the bank that borders this drop-off. Below us, the river bottom is a chaos of rocks, boulders, old shattered tree trunks, washed-away Model T’s, and similar debris.

As we’re going along, Marvin keeps letting his horse come right up on Babe’s rear end. Babe does not like this. Neither do I.

I tell Marvin, imagining (wrongly) that he can figure out how to rein in a horse, to keep his horse back off Babe’s rump. I tell him that Babe will kick if he doesn’t hold his horse back a few feet. Three times I tell him this, and three times he lets the gelding creep up and stick his nose up Babe’s tail.

Finally, Babe loses patience. She picks the psychological moment — just as the trail teeters on the knife-edge of the river’s bank — to haul off and belt Marvin’s nag.

Of course, Marvin’s horse shies. Babe does a little jig and, well, yes: she stumbles off the side and starts to fall.

I drop the reins, wrap both arms around the kid, and throw myself off Babe, hauling the girl with me. With me doing the best I can to protect the child’s head and neck, we hit the ground about five feet from Babe, who tumbles off the riverbank into the dry riverbed.

Shee-ut.

Mercifully, no one was  hurt. Babe got up, miraculously uninjured, and allowed me to retrieve her without further incident.

Don’t know when I’ve ever been so furious. The rage didn’t kick in until after I saw that Babe hadn’t, after all, broken a leg (as I assumed she would while the girl and I were rolling away from ruckus).

But of course, Marvin was my boss so I couldn’t tell him what a moron he was.

But of course, the real moron was not on Marvin’s horse. The real moron was on my horse. The one in charge of my horse.

What on earth was I thinking when I asked Marvin “do you know how to ride a horse,” heard him answering tentatively — tentatively swaggering — “oh, sure; oh yeah,” recognized that as a ridiculous exaggeration, and acquiesced to it? What was I thinking when I put a ten-year-old on a cow pony, bareback, and climbed up behind her? Oh, hell: what was I thinking when I invited the effete chair of the department up to the ranch to start with?????

So there you are. Stupid is as stupid does. I account it as some kind of miracle that the child wasn’t hurt, the horse wasn’t hurt, and I wasn’t hurt. God watches over children and fools.

Image: Hassayampa River: Todd’s Desert Hiking Guide. Yes, it looked exactly like that.

How to Get Sand Out of a Top-Loading HE Washer

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Here in urban Arizona, we homeowners have something called “desert landscaping.” This is some Easterner’s idea of an approximation of what the Sonoran Desert looks like: a load of gravel spread over the yard and punctuated with a few cacti, a palm tree or two, and an ocotillo. Since the cost of watering a lawn easily exceeds a summer air-conditioning bill (which can be whopping!), this type of xeriscaping is cost-effective, if not what you’d call aesthetically awe-inspiring.

Quarter-Inch-Minus-Sand-150x150An alternative to the ugly, footpad-piercing gravel is a product called “quarter-minus.” This stuff appears to be a by-product of sand-and-gravel operations: it’s a blend of finely crushed granite and gritty stuff that looks a lot like sand. Quarter-minus has three advantages: piled on deep enough, it inhibits weed growth; it vaguely resembles the desert floor (sure does that better than gravel, anyway); and after it’s been watered or rained on a few times, it packs down into a hard surface that your dogs can walk around on. This latter obviates their getting mud all over their feet and tracking it into the house.

“Mud” in Arizona is not your ordinary East-Coast mud. The soil here has a lot of clay — in its extreme form, it creates a kind of hardpan called caliche. This stuff is sticky. When the dog tracks regular wet dirt into the kitchen, the stuff adheres to the tile flooring like paint. You literally have to get down on hands and knees and scour it off. It will not wipe up with a rag or paper towel — you have to use a scrub brush or one of those sponges with a scouring pad on the back.

This is a good reason to put quarter-minus in the back yard. If you’re a dog owner, that is. And if your dog is, say, NOT a corgi puppy.

Ruby the Corgi Puppy, being a high-energy sort of soul, is given to chasing around the yard like a rocket with Cassie. And Cassie, being a corgi herself, is also a bit of a rocket. They’ve built a race track around one of the orange trees. Where they’ve established their route, the quarter-minus is churned up and loose. And that means whenever it gets wet, they track a film of fine sand into the kitchen.

This vacuums up, but it’s a nuisance. So I put a little bathroom rug in front of the kitchen door, which works well to shake off and collect the sand.

The other day one of the dogs wuffed on the rug, so I put it in the accursed Samsung washer. And it came out just fine, since it’s flat. Flat things are the only things the Samsung will run through an entire wash cycle without disgorging them in the form of braids.

A few days later, I decided to toss a pair of jeans that I’d worn just a couple of hours into the rinse-&-spin cycle, knowing this would shake out the wrinkles and give me another wearing before I actually had to wash the things by hand, as I now have to wash everything that’s not flat by hand. Twenty minutes later, I come back to retrieve the pants and…WH-A-A-A?????

They’re covered in mud.

Not mud, exactly: SAND.

Sand has run out into the utility sink, into which the used washer water drains, and left a structure that looks like a sand bar on the bottom of it.

Lovely.

Not only that, but the entire inside of the washer is full of sand.

I get out the shop vac and vacuum out the sand, running the nozzle not only over the bottom but all over the tub’s walls, hoping to suck out whatever sand is caught in the little holes that perforate the tub’s side from top to bottom. I fill a scrub bucket with cold water and attempt to rinse the sand out of my jeans.

Then I run the pants through the washer again, only on a full “Quick Wash” cycle. In the wondrous world of HE washers, “quick” means 45 minutes. I figure an endless slosh like this should knock the remaining sand out of the jeans and rinse it out of the washer.

Three-quarters of an hour later…

The jeans are still full of sand, and so is the washer.

Now what?

I wipe out the washer with a microfiber rag, put the jeans to soak with some detergent in a bucketful of water and run the “Bedding” cycle with the machine empty. “Bedding” is the only cycle that causes the Samsung to dispense enough water to actually clean a load of wash, more or less. The “Bedding” cycle takes an hour and ten minutes to run. Maybe, I hope, that much water slopping around that long will be enough to wash the sand out.

Well. No.

I wipe down the inside of the washer tub again, rinse out the soapy jeans in the sink, drop them back into the washer, and run “Bedding” again.

Have you counted up the amount of time we’re at now? One rinse, two “quick” washes, two bedding cycles: that adds up to 4.17 hours of run time. That doesn’t count the time spent vacuuming and wiping down the washer and manually rinsing sand out of the clothing.

The jeans come out again with sand in them, but less of it: I’m able to shake most of it out in the backyard.

The inside of the washer is still coated with sand. YouTube’s repair dudes and DIY mavens suggest this is not a good state of affairs: sand in the pump will, of course, grind up its innards.

Apparently I’m going to be  buying another new washer sooner than expected. Hope I can find a cheaper one with a rinse-only cycle…

How to get this stuff out?

Now I raid the linen closet and haul out four large towels, one of them a gigantic Costco beach towel. These I dump into the washer with a generous slug of home-made fabric softener (hair conditioner diluted with water works as well as fabric softener and it doesn’t stink). Run it all through on “Bedding” again, the second-longest cycle the Samsung provides.

This seems to work. There’s still some sand in the washer, but a lot less. I shake out the towels in the backyard, attempting to dislodge as much sand as possible. Wipe out the inside of the washer again. Toss them back into the washer. Run the washer again.

By the time the mountain of towels came out the second time, most of the sand was out of the washer. Not all of it, by any means. But most of it.

That’s 6.51 hours — almost seven hours of running the washer trying to get the sand out of it!

Holy mackerel! What would you do if you lived near a beach? Just keep buying new $1500 washers every six months or so? Learn to replace the pump yourself and keep a lifetime supply of the things in the garage?

Ain’t life grand in the highly efficient 21st century ?

 

Buy “His,” Not “Her$”

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Okay, I know there are more important things to write about — like the U.S. Senate’s outrageous votes to sell or give away all federal lands other than national parks and monuments (presumably to their owners friends, the Koch Bros. & Co) — but for a nominally personal finance blog, this is too, too good to pass up.

Lautrec_woman_at_her_toilette_1889By now you must have heard that the cosmetics industry is marketing to men almost as fast and furiously as they always have to women. Most of the paints and creams sold to all and sundry are overpriced junk, but they’re nice junk, junk of the sort that makes you feel pampered and privileged, however briefly.

Well, it turns out that as with clothing, there’s a difference yet not a difference between his and hers. In the case of luxurious personal products, the difference happens to be price. Products that are essentially the same will cost, when sold to men, about 50% less than the fare for women.

Consider, for example, the goop that you smear around your eyes to reduce age-betraying puffiness. Half an ounce of  Ahava Dead Sea Osmoter Eye Concentrate, touted  by its marketer as some sort of miracle balm from the stagnant pond of salinity, will set a woman back $50. But if she stepped across the store to the men’s counter and bought the same stuff as Ahava Men’s Age Control All-in-One Eye Care, she would pay just $28 for it. For $5.14 an ounce, she can buy a deliciously pampering body scrub from L’Occitane, or for $2.33 an ounce she can get an equally ridiculous luxurious product over at Sephora: Blue Sea Kelp Body Scrub, by Anthony. Both smell great and smooth your skin to a finely polished sheen. Clinique for Men SPF 21 moisturizer: $7.65 an ounce; Estée Lauder SPF 15 “advanced protection anti-oxidant creme”: $29.41 an ounce.

Jim_BrochuHow to make this work for your family? Seek out products that are made by the same company — Clinique, Lab Series for Men, and Estée Lauder, for example. Although the perfume may different (with any luck, you may find a fragrance-free product), the supposedly “active” ingredients are similar or identical. Or simply experiment with a few men’s products — at those prices, ladies, you can afford it!

😉

Images:

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Woman at Her Toilette, 1889.
Actor Jim Brochu puts on his makeup. Opening night of  The Big Voice: God or Merman, by Steve Schalchlin and Jim Brochu. Photographer: Basykes. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Not-a-Cancer: Updated Update

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Isn’t it lovely: today I do not have to go to the Mayo!

Friday I drove out to the clinic on the far side of Scottsdale, having been summoned by the medical oncologist WonderSurgeon works with. When I asked them what the appointment was for, they told me it was “a six-month followup.” So I say, “Follow-up to WHAT? What’s this conversation going to be about?” You understand, it’s a fifty-mile round trip and I don’t want to spend two hours and a quarter-tank of gas to schlep out there for nothing. She refused to tell me. When I got the printed “itinerary” that the Mayo sends to announce upcoming appointments, I saw I wasn’t even supposed to see the doc — they had me set up to see a nurse practitioner.

So I fly up to the check-in desk just after the appointed hour, having gotten caught up in a gigantic traffic jam and also having discovered that the Morons were swarming — you never saw so many idiot drivers in your LIFE! The receptionist checks me in and then says oh! wait!

NOW what?

“Your appointment isn’t until Monday.”

“WHAT! Holy shit.”

So I say, “Is there somebody I could talk with who could tell me what it is they want to discuss with me? I don’t understand why I’m being hauled out here — and I don’t have either the time to spend on driving two hours back and forth or the money to waste on the gasoline. Could this conversation take place over the phone?” It takes me some doing to make this register with her, but finally she gets it and she tells me to go over to a house phone hanging on a wall across the room — yeah, one of those hard-wired things with the curly cord — and dial an extension into oncology.

This I do. Naturally, they stick me on hold until a nurse can talk to me. I sit on the floor, open my computer, and rack up 15 minutes of billable time reading a client’s manuscript while listening to loud, obnoxious Muzak.

Finally a nurse gets on the phone. I explain AGAIN that it’s an absurdly long drive, that I’m trying to run a business, and that I don’t have the time to come schlepping out unless there’s a very good reason for it. Would she please tell me why I’m being asked to traipse to the far side of East Scottsdale?

She looks in the records and, after much rumination, finally says, “This appointment was made last September. Uhmm…I see you’ve already had…ahem…several lumpectomies.”

Interesting way to describe a double mastectomy.

“Well, yeah. Actually, I don’t have anything left on my body to discuss.”

“You had no invasive cancer?”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

Uh huh.

“Well, this was a routine follow-up. Since you’ve talked to Dr. WonderSurgeon, there’s no need for another appointment with us.”

No kidding.

So that was only slightly infuriating.

The trip wasn’t entirely wasted. I needed some specific items available most easily at a specific store located on the fringes of Richistan, so I was able to drop by there on the way home and pick up that junk, plus I made a quick visit to the Whole Foods across the street from the desired emporium.

But I could have billed three hours that morning, not the fifteen minutes I managed to crank out while sitting on the floor of the Mayo’s waiting room.

Time to Move Along?

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Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s time to move — and by that, I mean move a long way away. The news of where this country is headed has become that alarming.

The Arizona legislature is infested with crazies whose politics and thinking are so extreme, so far to the right (if “right” is the word to use: “wrong” is where they’re coming from) that these people can only be described as the new Taliban. Right now we have a nut case who proposes, apparently with a straight face, a bill requiring everyone in the state to attend church.

This red-blooded American scheme came up while our legislators were discussing a bill to allow everyone to carry concealed weapons into public buildings. They’ve already passed a measure requiring that the names of police officers involved in off-duty shootings be kept secret.

These are the kind of ignorant loons that get elected when money buys lawmakers. Lest you wonder whose pocket they’re in, here’s a clue: they’re changing the liquor laws to make it easier to bring booze sales right into your neighborhood — at Circle K’s behest.

Arizona’s legislators propose to ban cities from passing local ordinances barring paper bags. They have resisted allowing the state’s driver’s licenses to meet national guidelines for identification that will let you travel on airplanes — in the near future, Arizonans who want to fly will have to buy a U.S. passport! They signed a bill to make it difficult or impossible for home-buyers to sue a developer for shoddy construction (a standard amenity of new homes in this state). They’ve approved a bill making it illegal to sell health insurance policies that cover abortion.

Really, Arizona has always been the Wild West when it comes to politics. But it’s gone completely off the rails now. It really isn’t a place where educated people who have a brain would want to live.

I consider where I would go:

New Mexico is beautiful but the politicians there are just about as crazy, and you can’t afford to live in Santa Fe — which is the only town in NM where I’d want to live.

California is too expensive. Ditto Oregon. Ditto Washington State.

I dislike snow and don’t want to live someplace where the roads ice up in the winter. That lets out the entire upper Midwest. Florida is relatively affordable but too humid. Southern states in general are infested with the same kinds of crazies as have taken over Arizona’s “leadership.”

Nor is it evident that people of good will and common sense remain in office anywhere. In Ohio, they laugh at a woman recounting her experience of rape as she opposed a bill banning abortion at six weeks into a pregnancy. And, by the way, that bill passed. Ohio used to house people who were reasonably sane.

My associate editor and her soon-to-be husband are talking about decamping to Ecuador. That’s one of several Latin American countries that are said to be friendly to Americans and livable. Another friend  has talked about moving to Mexico.

Honestly: we’re talking about a reverse exodus: Mexicans and Guatemalans want to escape to the US; Americans want to escape to Latin America.

There’s the south of France. But I doubt if I can afford the cost of moving across the Atlantic Ocean. One can drive into Mexico, where the cost of housing and furniture is quite low. Plus I think all of Europe is way too vulnerable to attacks by Islamic crazies. The war in the Middle East is going to move into Europe sooner or later, and I don’t wanna be there when that happens. IMHO, it actually is happening right now, in slow motion.

Proceeds on the sale of my house would buy this in Guanajuato...
Proceeds on the sale of my house would buy this little gem in Guanajuato…

It’s not as unsafe in Mexico as we’re told, as long as you’re not living where the drug cartels are warring with each other. And there are some lovely places to live in Mexico. The Mexican people, by and large, are also lovely: polite and kindly, even when compressed in huge, dense urbs like Mexico City. Try to find a New Yorker or a Londoner who’s friendly to strangers! Most Mexicans are friendly and polite as a matter of course.

Throw in another 25 grand and you get this. Do NOT miss the realtor's pitch for this thing!! http://bit.ly/1Dam8hC
Throw in another 25 grand and you get this. Do NOT miss the realtor’s pitch for this thing!! http://bit.ly/1Dam8hC

But even if you have to dodge the occasional bullet and bribe the occasional local official: is that really any different from what’s happening here now? At least the weather’s decent and you can afford to live on the interest from your savings.