Coffee heat rising

Get the F*** Off My Phone and….

by

Mid-morning. This is the hour when every goddamn phone solicitor residing in the state prison system gets on the phone and heckles you, heckles you, and heckles you some more. GodDAYUM, but I hate that.

A couple of things discourage them and cut the onslaught of nuisance calls a bit. One is to simply BLAST THE BEJYZUZ out of the bastards’ ears. Get a loud horn and HONK it into the damn phone. This hurts, on their end. They make a note not to call your number again.

For me, this requires me to have a loud horn in every room: I have five phone extensions in this house.  That just adds to the nuisance factor. But I’ve learned that you can accomplish the same effect simply by SCREAMING into the goddamn phone AS LOUD AS YOU CAN. Most of the phone soliciting clowns have headphones on, so SHRIEKING into the phone blasts the bastards in both ears. 😀

And that does seem to work. I get many fewer nuisance phone calls these days, since I’ve started blasting the bastards with the loudest noise I can generate on short notice. So apparently it’s true that at least some of them have a system that flags numbers to avoid calling.

But man, do I ever HATE those goddamn nuisance phone calls. It ought to be against the law to make soliciting phone calls: period. That it’s not tells you how effective the nuisance businesses’ lobbying strategy is.

Some people, I understand, simply no longer answer the phone. They let it ring through to the answering machine and then pick up if and when they hear someone they’re willing to speak with. Tried that: found it to be more of a nuisance than the nuisance calls themselves. Like I have nothing else to do but eavesdrop on my answering machine? And then sit there and erase the messages it’s recorded?

Anyway, generating the LOUDEST NOISE YOU CAN INVENT and blasting it into the phone really does cut down on the number of pestiferizing calls. I’ve gone from upwards of 8 or 10 a day to maybe 2 or 3 in the morning.

Phone soliciting should be illegal.

Bing Bong!!$$!

by

Yeah: come the middle of the lunch hour (you thought you were gonna be allowed to have something to eat??), BING BONG goes the doorbell.

Forgodsake. City water meter guy.

He descends on the equipment. Bop bop bang bang fix fiddle fiddle... They’re gonna bill me for his services, sez he.

Whaddaya bet that’ll be a couple hundred bucks. Or more….

No idea what he was supposedly repairing. No leak. No…nothing that I can tell is on the fritz.

Except, presumably, my bank account….

Wow! What Luck….

by

Y’know…Amazon is saving my tail. Seriously: without the comprehensive delivery service that outfit provides, I would be in the old-folkerie by now.

Without a car — as you know, my son contrived to have mine taken away from me — there’s no way I could contrive to get groceries, to take the dog to the vet, or…helle’s belles, just to survive at all in our car-centric society.

Just ordered a case of canned food for Ruby the Corgi. Six count: that’s about 12 days’ worth. Price is outrageous (that’s for sure!). However…the price of owning a car exceeds outrageous, by the time you add up the gasoline and the regular service and the repairs. I’d have to buy dog food anyway — not at Amazon prices, but if you figure Amazon is keeping that car out of my garage, overall the cost probably evens out. That is, what I’m not spending on the car, I’m freeing up to have stuff delivered to my door.

And that is keeping me in my home.

How much longer that will hold forth remains to be seen.

I’m not going to be able to live here much longer, I’m afraid. By this point in his life, my father had moved himself into an old-folkerie, where he lived miserably ever after. (Not the institution’s fault: he stupidly married a woman he met there, little understanding that he could not replace my mother with some broad he met in the dining hall.) Personally, I loathe hate and despise communal living, and I sincerely hope I die before I reach the point that I can’t stay in my home.

But that’s not likely. Women in my family who didn’t smoke and didn’t drink routinely lived into their late 90s. And none of them were locked up in institutions…no, I take that back: one aunt was institutionalized by her son.

I’m sure I’ll end up in a prison for old folks, myself. There’s really no other practical way to care for me if I really do live into my late dotage. My son can’t take off his job to babysit me, and there are no other relatives who could help care for me. Horrible prospect.

But the really horrible part of it is that those places take everything you have. If I have to go into one of those jails, NOTHING will be left for my son. My savings, the value of my home…it all will be gone. And I want my son to have those things.

It may be best to arrange an early exit. How exactly one does that in a pain-free way escapes me…but clearly, finding the exit door by natural means ain’t pain-free, either. Ideally, one would like to just go to sleep and not wake up. But I don’t see how to engineer that in any sane or reliable way, nor does it appear likely to happen in the natural course of events.

There’s gotta be a way…now’s the time to engage those PhD-level research skills!

Yipe$ My mother would faint!

by

Seriously: my mother believed that when gasoline went over $1.00 a gallon, we would have so-o-o-shal-ism! No kidding: she actually said that, back in the day when about 30 cents a gallon was a lot. Today? Its $5 a gallon! Up by $1.35 over the past month. 

The poor woman would faint dead away if she could see this stuff today!

Well…y’know what? My dear son did me a favor by kiping that car of mine! That’s 87 berjillion bucks a tankful that I’m NOT paying. And y’know further what? I’m not having any problem getting around to all the places I need or want to go.

For one thing, my house is right in the middle of urban everything: three major grocery stores, a hair stylist, a Bookman’s, a veterinarian, a dermatologist…on and on and endlessly on. To my amazement, I’m discovering that I don’t need a car to get to about 90% of the places I’d normally go.

To gild that golden lily, a guy who lives kitty-corner across the street from the Funny Farm drives for Uber! For a tiny fraction of what it costs to own a car, he’ll drive me wherever I please.

So: that’s a pleasant surprise. 

Makes me feel almost like I’m back in London.

We never owned a car there, or even rented one long-term. If we wanted to go someplace in the city, we just hailed a cab. And if we were up to some elaborate sight-seeing, we’d rent a car for a day or for a weekend.

Truth to tell, I would never have imagined you could get by with that in a bourgeois American city like Phoenix. But by dayum! Here we are! No car, and no problem!

Seriously: weeks have merged into months, and to my amazement I’ve found no need to own a car over that time. 

Uber forms a major part of that: if I need to go to an appointment or whatnot, the guy across the street drives me there. My son still has his car, too; if he isn’t otherwise occupied (he usually is), he could drive me from point A to point B. So far, we haven’t had much need for that, though.

It’s convenient to own your own chariot, of course. But really: no more convenient than renting one. How convenient is it, anyway, to have to schlep the car to a maintenance garage every few weeks? And with a rental, someone else owns the thing, pays the registration & taxes on it, and covers the upkeep.

Between you’n’me… I’m pretty pleased with my son for dreaming up the idea that I need to get rid of that damn car!

Hotter Than the Hubs. Again.

by

Thursday afternoon, late in March. This ain’t no spring day: as we scribble, Wundground says it’s100 degrees in the backyard. Hotter than the Hubs of Hades, and then some!

Being stuck carless in Gaza makes a 100-degree day a bit of a problem. Though in theory I could walk to the nearby stores, doing so in the blasting sun through ambient 100-degree temps is…well…pretty much out of the question.

Gotta ask you: can you believe that? ONE HUNDRED DEGREES in freakin’ MARCH!!?!

Hauled the last hummingbird feeder around to the side yard — the only one our clandestine visitor hasn’t yet stolen or busted up. Since I can lock the side gate, we at least have a shot at keeping our hands on that one.

It really is so maddening that it makes me think seriously about selling up and moving someplace else.

Problem is, “someplace else” is gonna be some dreary old-folkerie. And y’know, THAT will be the end of me. I can’t live like that, and I won’t. Stick me in one of those places, and before long I’ll select the Final Exit.

So…what to do, what to do?   Hmmmm…

One thought is to install some hidden cameras in the front and side yards. Hide them well enough, and sooner or later they should provide a clue to who or what is raiding my home. But…then what?

Speaking of old-folkeries, I learned that the venerable Beatitudes old-folks home will send people to your house to take care of you! Called this afternoon to have someone come over and tell me about it.

Now, THAT would solve a big problem.

Truly, I hate loathe and despise institutional living. That’s why I just DON’T want to move into one of those places. But…if they’d send someone to you….well…now we’d have a whole ‘nother story.

Wonder-Cleaning Lady does a great job of keeping the shack clean, but she’s only here once every two weeks. Another worker would put someone in the house once a week, which, as I trudge further into decrepitude, would be HUGE.

Also, if I could get someone here once a week, they might be persuaded to schlep me to the grocery store. And THAT would truly be huge. Especially in 100-degree heat like we’re having now. It would relieve M’hijito of at least some concern, too: between Wonder-Cleaning Lady and a weekly visit from the old-folkery, two days a week would be covered by someone physically coming here to check on me.

Might be able to hire some other babysitter, too. Or at least arrange that I call M’hijito at a certain time each day, so he’ll know I’m more or less in one piece.

***

Meanwhile, the spavined hip seems to be s-l-o-o-w-l-y healing, a micrometer at a time. Today I can walk up the hallway without having to hold onto the walls — haven’t done that in a couple of weeks. Still hurts, but nothing like it did at the outset.

What on earth I did to hurt myself like this utterly escapes me. I haven’t fallen. Haven’t injured my leg  (that I know of). Haven’t done anything to myself.

Only thing I can figure is I must have twisted that joint in my sleep…and done so hard enough or long enough to inflict some lasting damage.

Wouldn’t you think that would have hurt enough that I would have noticed it? Even if I was sleeping, you’d think it would have waked me up. But if anything like that happened, I sure don’t recall it.

Ohhh well.

Helicopter is circling…and circling…and circling to the south of us. Can’t tell if it’s a cop copter, or just a traffic copter. The latter, I think: no other action is evident just now. It’s almost 5:00 pm., so the thing is almost certainly watching traffic. So that’s good: we can do without yet another cops-&-robbers drama.