Coffee heat rising

life in Phoenix

Life in the Department of Looney Tunes…

by

Phoenix: what a place!

This morning I had to traipse to the dermatologist’s, a 40-minute trek, each way. About half of this journey traverses a seven-lane surface street called Northern Avenue. The odd lane in these big main drags is a center lane restricted to left turns. You can use them to turn left ad lib across oncoming lanes just about anywhere in the middle of any block, but at the major intersections they’re (obviously) controlled by the traffic light. There, you pull out partway into the intersection on the green. Poised in the void between 12 lanes of intersecting vehicles, you stand till the light turns yellow, at which point you floor it and  FLY across the oncoming traffic as though your life depended on it. Which it does. If you can’t cut some oncoming driver off safely or slink in behind him as he shoots past in the opposite direction, you wait till the light turns red and then cruise across three lanes of restless and annoyed drivers. (All Arizona drivers are, by nature, restless and annoyed. Many have certain other features, such as drunk, stoned, crazy, stupid, and whatnot.)

So I’m cruising westerly, westerly, ever westerly when, at 27th Avenue, I come across a nice wrecky-poo in the westbound left-turn lane. A moron has miscalculated and driven out in front of a cross-bound vehicle. Speed limit on these streets is 40 mph, which means everyone is driving 50 mph. Not surprisingly, the moron’s truck has been creamed. The front end is crumpled tinfoil. A cop is trying to restore order. Passersby are gawking. An ambulance approaches.

My coconspirators and I manage to sneak through the green light before another emergency vehicle arrives and while the cop is distracted with trying to deal with the smashed vehicles’ occupants.

Back up to speed, we approach 35th Avenue — this is the next intersection on down the road! From a distance, we can see flashing lights and…and…yes!!! ANOTHER wrecky-poo!

This one defies belief.

As we approach the intersection, we find a good-sized pickup — Silverado or F250 size — in the left-turn lane. A moron has rear-ended this vehicle, apparently at speed. IN THE FREAKING LEFT-TURN LANE! Moron’s car is unrecognizable. But he’s managed to smash into the truck so hard that he’s pretty well bashed in the truck’s bed and its rear wheel wells, and…get this… A wheel on the moron’s vehicle has sprung loose intact from the car and it has rolled down the road and underneath the rear end of the truck, where it is now wedged, standing upright.

WTF?????

This also appears to have happened just a few moments ago. A couple of befuddled-looking cops are on the scene starting to wrangle some stunned-looking participants. We who are passing drivers push on, before these cops can think to hold up the traffic, and we all escape intact.

Ahhhh…. Just imagine how stoned or drunk you would have to be to believe the center two-way left-turn lane is another ordinary traffic lane, so that you’re cruising along at 40 to 50 mph in it. And accordingly, because you figure everyone else is doing the same, you don’t happen to notice that the guy in front of you is stopped. With his left-turn signal flashing.

What a place, indeed!

Another lovely day in Arizona…

by

So along about 3 or 4 a.m. I happened to remark to a correspondent that the day was shaping up to be a Day from Hell…

Chortle! One should never say things like that. God finds those one-liners too, too funny.

Well, wait though: Her practical jokesterism at least did not extend to conkering out the car. That’s good, no?

Dawn cracked, and I decided to try to find out what could be done about the propane bottle that developed a weird leak after the barbecue cleaning dude reattached it to the system. This was about as fruitful as you might imagine any bureaucratic exercise to be. After jumping through a long and pointless series of phone hoops, I gave up with the city. Called Gerardo, who said he would don his Superman cape and fly over this afternoon. This was another exercise in futility, but as it develops, it’s prob’ly just as well that he didn’t. In fact…very, verrreeee good that he didn’t surface late this afternoon….

But we get ahead of ourself…

First, I go on about my business: traipsing half-way to Timbuktu to visit WonderDermatologist. She agrees that the Thing disfiguring my left-hand finger-flicking finger is yet another precancer and must go. Now.

Does she wonder how I am going to drive with this crucial navigation instrument disabled? Probably just as well that she doesn’t. She practically runs her nitrogen squirt bottle out of juice. This is good. I’m invited to visit her again in two weeks, when we’ll assess how today’s antics worked, and out the door I streak.

Decide to venture across from the 101 on Gangbanger’s Way,  a thoroughfare that runs faster and more smoothly than Main Drag South, which at this time of year is more crowded than Gangbanger’s. Fly low up the freeway, fly low across the city…through the lovely slums that grace the central west side, ahhh yes eventually arriving at the war zone that is the intersection of Gangbanger’s and Conduit of Blight Blvd.

This journey is one endless reminder of Southern California and all that I used to hate about it. The smog. The traffic. The ticky-tacky. The instant-slum tracts. The tired and dreary strip malls. The crowded roads, sun glaring off acres of asphalt. The panhandling derelicts. The exhausted workers navigating the streets on foot. Lordy, but Phoenix is SUCH an ugly city! Just like Long Beach: an ugly place to live.

You know, I do love my neighborhood. It’s a pretty little enclave, gentrifying like mad now that young parents have learned they can put their kids in the Madison schools from here. (Madison is the only decent centrally located public school district.) But driving in from the northwest on Gangbanger’s Way is just deeply depressing…and it gets creepier and creepier as the months pass.. From about 43rd Avenue all the way over to about 23rd Avenue is plain old slum, dirty depressing dangerous and scary. Some of the houses facing Gangbanger’s around 23rd are OK, holding their own; then, eastward-bound, they give way to commercial properties, some of them abandoned.

The city is about to extend the accursed lightrail up to MetroCenter, which is now dead, a ghost mall. Why? It escapes comprehension. The highest and best use of that property would be to turn it into a social service center for the homeless, but the city has big (hallucinatory) plans to revive it as offices and medical centers. Har har harrrrr!!!!!!! So this boondoggle will be yet another fantastical waste of taxpayer money, and the train will continue to transport drug addicts and homeless into our neighborhood.

Catholic Social Services has built a charity home for pore folks on Main Drag South at Conduit of Blight, and an even bigger project has gone up on Main Drag about a half-mile west of that. Alas, while this kind of housing is indeed much needed, projects good neighbors do not make…

So…every now and again I think about whether I should move while I still have the physical strength to do so. And if so, where???? If the church never re-coalesces, there’s really no reason to stay in North Central. Or in Phoenix at all. But where on earth to go???

  • Sun City is a definite NO.
  • Arcadia I cannot afford.
  • Biltmore I cannot afford.
  • The Southern-California style ticky-tacky tracts of the far east and west valley: no, thanks.
  • Payson: eek! no Costco!
  • The south of France I cannot afford.
  • But why not Fountain Hills? Like Sun City, it’s quiet as the tomb, and it’s close to my doctors’ office and close to the kind of shopping I enjoy. Nice view of the mountains, and a straight shot up to Payson, where KJG and Mr. Firefighter hold forth!
  • Oro Valley outside of Tucson is supposed to be very nice, and it’s convenient to Tucson. It is part of Tucson these days, actually.
  • Prescott: a possibility, but further from friends and established huntin’ grounds than I’d like.
  • And of course Patagonia, venue of some lovely country houses just up the road from the border with Mexico…

Depressed after this fine tour of my hometown, I crawl back in the sack for a little nap, hoping to catch up the sleep that ended around 3 this morning.

Soon enough, Ruby jumps to attention. DAWG ON POINT!!!!! 

Something is going wheeeeeeeeeeeee….

What? Rattie’s in the hall? I hear a squeal, and it ain’t the Song, Song of the Rat. No indeed. It’s the serenade of a vehicle that needs a brake job.

WTF? Climb out of the sack, stumble to the front windows, peer out and lo! A cop SUV is idling in the street in front. Two of the biggest rhinoceroses you have EVER seen charge into the front yard (Holy doggerel! Where’s my pistol?). Call the hound to heel…and watch the show.

These vast lumbering critters roust some poor, scrawny little bum out from under the shade trees in front, where he’s been trying to sleep in the gravel.

Yes. That’s on the gravel. Like, little sharp pieces of granite.

Understand: it’s 108 degrees out there. He must weigh all of 130 pounds, he’s filthy, his hair is matted, he doesn’t even have a backpack in tow. They start to rough him up. Amazingly, he manages to slip out of the grip of the guy who’s grabbed him and he takes off down the street. The cops give half-hearted chase but quickly stand down. Doesn’t seem to enter their minds that he could easily hop over the wall into the backyard, just like Matthew the Garage Invader did. Now moderately well armed myself, I watch them give up and drive off. Then I patrol the front and back yards and the alley.

Poor little sh!thead. What do you suppose brings a man to such a pass?

Gerardo did not show up. Good thing! Otherwise he and his suspiciously unilingual cousins would have landed in the middle of this…uhm…manhunt. {sigh} Could be they drove by and saw the game in progress, so decided to move along.

Welp, our visitor having failed to steal today’s Amazon delivery, we also move along: Unwrap the package of tinfoil pie tart pans and combobulate the much-vaunted RAT REPELLANT DEVICES!

The scheme is to punch a hole in a pie tin, run it up the metal rod that holds the bird feeder (endlessly attractive to Rattie), and secure it in place over the existing DYI rat baffle, made of a plastic doodad that has proven too small to discourage our little pal. Fiddle with this briefly, and dayum. I think it’s gonna work. If it doesn’t, at least we had some fun trying it.

The resulting gadgets look weirdly like little flying saucers, come to light on the bird feeders’ hangers. Got them attached fairly firmly (if hilariously) but gave them just enough play to wiggle a bit, should a four-legged critter decide to climb on top of the UFO. Unless Rattie is acrobatic enough to jump down and backward in one motion (from a platform that wiggles), I don’t THINK she can hop from the contraption to the lower end of the hanger. If she can, by golly, she’s earned her share of those bird seeds!

Seriously, I think if she tries to proceed past the tinfoil barrier, she’ll most likely fall on the ground. This will cause an annoyed Rattie but should do no damage to much of anything else.

Cop helicopter shows up a little before 7 p.m. and frantically buzzes the street just to the north, right where my old house resides. They used to materialize every goddamn Friday and Saturday night at 11 p.m. sharp. This is a little early for them…maybe our scrawny guy showed up at someone else’s motel. 😀 Now, shading a little after 7:30, they’ve roared off somewhere else and it’s quiet out there again.

So it goes. That is what we Arizonans call “one helluva day.”

To top it off, WordPress crashed as I was finishing this post, so that helluva day is no longer today but vaguely yesterday. Wouldn’tcha know?

 

Of Retail, Runners, Recession, and…Birds?

by

Yesterday I ordered a few things from Costco via Instacart. One of these was a 50# bag of birdseed. I’d sent them a message that I’d have a wheelbarrow ready, so we could just slide the bag out of the runner’s car into that and I’d roll it into the backyard — with the exception of one young male, most of their runners seem to be willowy young women.

What shows up at the door are not one but two joyous, hefty, and energetic lesbians. I say, I’ll bring round the wheel barrow. One of the women says no problem, I’ll carry it…where do you want it? 

So I let them in the back gate and the gal lifts that massive, inert sack of bird seed and strolls into the backyard with it like it weighed about as much as a three-month-old. The other one is the chatty type, and so she and I are having a good time yakking. I end up thanking them mightily for the hauling job (and giving them a generous tip). The chatty one says they just moved down here from Vegas because they couldn’t make a living up there. They got laid off their jobs in those gilded precincts and started working for Instacart to keep food on the table…and not much food. She said Instacart has a minimum payment to their runners of $7 per trip. But time after time, they — the two wymmen — would get orders for something in the range of seven bucks. So that means that if Suzie Q orders $7 worth of goods from Sprouts, Instacart makes nothing on the transaction.

Nothing!!! Think o’ that!

And think of what it implies for the runner: Here in lovely Phoenix, it takes me about 10 minutes to drive to Costco…5 to park and hike into the store. A typical Costco store covers about three acres. Let’s see…hmmmm… You trot to the far end of the store and you buy a bag of toilet paper (if you can find it), picking up stuff along the way: 15 minutes. Now go back out, 5 minutes to the car, after standing in the check-out line about 8 minutes. Now another 15 minutes to get to the customer’s house… That’s almost an hour. Seven bucks an hour…and you pay for gas, wear & tear on your vehicle, and car insurance out of that. If I’m not mistaken, you’re now deep in negative territory…

Here Instacart has a minimum order of $35…or at least, that was what I understood. Maybe that’s a local policy? She said they were already doing better here than  they were in Vegas, anyway.

§ § §

A-A-A-N-D this morning it’s another amazing adventure here at the Funny Farm! 😀

Ruby wanders out into the front courtyard where what should she find but a baby bird on the ground. Looks like an infant mockingbird. Or thrasher, maybe. The bird panics when Ruby goes over and sniffs at it. I call the dog off and pick up the babe, literally seconds before the watering system kicks in.

It’s frantic.

Bring it into the house and tuck it into an old checkbook box.

My neighbor Joel is out in front, teaching his high-school kids online. I annoy him by breaking into whatever he’s doing — because I know he and his kids have rescued wild birds before and think maybe the high-school has some kind of program for said rescue. He says no, he took the last bird down to Liberty Wildlife… South of two freeways. South of the river. Deep in one of the dankest slums this side of Albuquerque.

Ohhhhkayyyyy…. I try to figure out if there’s an alternative.

…Not so much.

Secure the nestling inside the box with a loosely wrapped paper towel, so air can get in and (i hope…) the bird can’t get out. Fortunately, it’s too exhausted and terrorized to try to escape. Climb in the tank, tune in the cowboy station, and start drivin’ drivin’ drivin’…..

Ohhhhh dear God, i hate driving in Phoenix….

But it’s not the usual teeth-jarring horrible drive. Only two morons cut in front of me. One idiot marches purposefully against the red light across a major intersection. Two construction zones. One really sad, heartbreaking bum, so, sooooooo stoned, one would say stoned out of his head but he apparently was out of his head to begin with, and so skinny, like either he never eats or the meth really burns the calories for him or maybe a bit of both. One pimp, dressed to the nines with his hair dyed orange, strolling past a strip club. Two railroad crossings, thank God neither of them occupied by stalled freight trains. Only one 737 shriekin’ in low across south 24th Street. Traffic relatively light. All in all, not a bad day for a drive.

Get down there and find the place with no problem. There’s only one person in front of me at the drop-off window, also turning in a lost baby bird.

Chat with the staff. The front desk supervisor told me they’d probably take in a hundred baby birds today.

Why? There hasn’t been any wind to knock them out of their nests…whaaa?

“It’s just the season,” says he. This happens every spring. And, he added, Liberty Wildlife takes in TEN THOUSAND BABY BIRDS A YEAR!

Holy mackerel!

It’s a huge facility. I gave them a little donation.

And drivin’ away thought…..hhhhmmmmmm….. If I have to drop out of choir because of the covid sh*t, that would be a place to volunteer.

So I’ll keep that in mind.

10,000 lost chicks a year. Think of that!

Lampquest!

by

And so it was off into the rising sun…

With a printout of a candidate glass lampshade from the Lamps Plus manager, along about midmorning I set out for Phoenix Lamps, a venerable shop that has occupied the same hole-in-the-wall on east Indian School Road for years. Nay, decades.

This is not a place to which I would normally avail myself, because years ago — yea verily, decades ago — their staff was unforgivably rude to me. Never have I returned, and never did I intend to return. But the Hinkley’s lady and the Lamps Plus lady assured me that the joint has changed hands, and the new proprietors were capable of behaving themselves as if they cared whether customers ever came back.

Welp…they’re right. Staff there were visibly human, and they managed to be very nice to me, despite the crankiness of my quest.

Traffic, though? Not so much. I dawdled until around 11 a.m. before dragging unhappily out the door. That was a mistake. Traffic in all directions, on all routes was just effing fierce. What are all these clowns doing out on the roads in the middle of the effing morning?

Phoenix Lamps is parking-lot challenged. They have only a cramped space behind their strip-mall slot for customers to stash their cars. No doubt under ordinary circumstances, this would have been fine. Today, though, was not an ordinary circumstances day.

The store was busy — several parties perusing every item in the store. This would explain why the slot I hogged was the only parking spot left behind the place. But despite the demands on his time and attention, the guy I met up with was very kind and very knowledgeable.

Upon inspecting the wounded Restoration Hardware lamp, he agreed that the proposed replacement glass thing suggested by the Lamps Plus manager was probably the best bet. That notwithstanding, he hauled out a gigantic Sears-Catalogue of the lamp industry and searched. And came up with the same choice. But, he allowed, this thing was not a-gonna fit in the RH lamp: it probably would be too short and too loose. However, his crew could fix that: they could build up the base for the thing and adjust it so the proposed shade would sit there with an adequate degree of stability.

So, he suggested, I should order this thing online, bring it and the crippled lamp in to the shop, and they would make it all work.

Holy mackerel. If the gods aren’t snickering, they surely are smiling.

From there, it was off to the Trader Joe in Town and Country (20th Street & Camelback)…after a lengthy wait until the disabled lady who kindly blocked the entrance and exit to the Phoenix Lamps parking lot with her van reached a point where she felt inclined to move the thing. Staff were not inclined to demand that she get off the dime, so this took awhile. Didn’t bother me — I had nothing else to do — but some customers were a shade miffed. That notwithstanding, staff steadfastly demurred to the lady in the walker.

{chortle!}

Town & Country hosts the snootiest and the snobbiest of the Biltmore nouveau-riche set, and by the time I got there — the lunch hour — the twits were out in force. Parking-lot challenged? Lemme tellya… Fortunately, I prefer to walk a ways (exercise, ya know) and I am…well…assertive. No. Of course I’m not aggressive. Who, me? 😉 I manage to shove the mini-SUV into a spot and hike in to the annoying Trader Joe’s.

Really. Was there some reason I didn’t go to Sprouts, where low-brow types like myself belong? Oh, yeah: the insufficient parking lot. Ohhh well…

The place was simply mobbed. Riots of shoppers, fighting kicking and biting to get at the desired products. Some poor lady was there who had a toddler that…well, the child had simply effing had enough of this bullshit and, trapped in a shopping cart’s kiddie seat, was SHRIEKING HER FRAZZLED LITTLE HEAD OFF.

Poor baby.

Poor mom.

Poor Trader Joe’s shoppers.

I grab the stuff I need, one item I don’t need, and learn that no, of COURSE no self-respecting TJ’s carries anything so déclassé as chocolate chips. Pay. Out the door. Back across the hectic parking lot. Into the car.

And there have to do to-the-death battle with the young, the rich, and the overprivileged just to get out of the fucking parking space.

No joke. Between the parking space and the lot’s exit, three different privileged goddamn wretches deliberately cut me off.

God, but I hate rich people.

Having been a rich person for a significant slab of my life, I can say that. F*ck you all, Rich Wretches!….

Westward on Camelback toward the poor folks’ district. Stop off at Total Wine to pick up a bottle of Everclear, which is damn-near pure ethanol.

Don’t drink this stuff, please. It’s grain alcohol and very much of it will make you plenty sick, if it doesn’t kill you. What it kills even more effectively, though, is microbes. Back a few months ago, I learned (purely by serendipity) that it’s about the most efficient killer of MRSA bugs that you, I, or our doctors can get ahold of. I want some more of it, to use as an antiseptic.

The plonk acquired with surprisingly little hassle, it’s back on the road, headed for AJ’s. My GOD the traffic! Bumper to angry bumper to frustrated bumper to lunatic bumper.

Because I stay off the roads during the rush hours and the lunch hour, I haven’t seen mobs of cars like that in years. And hope not to see them again, unless some taxicab or Uber driver is doing battle with them.

Finally crawl into the AJ’s parking lot. Park a good hike away from the door. This, too, is a purveyor of goods favored by the Rich and the Rude, so navigating their parking lot when it’s full is…well…an adventure. Grab a few goodies and lunch, fly out the door…and find myself once again jousting with The Entitled. One sh!thead cuts me off at the exit, so I veer around him to the other exit and get onto the road before the SOB can. Mwa ha ha!

Driving in Phoenix: a competitive sport.

On Central, too — northward into an upscale residential district — the road was just packed. Managed to veer over to 7th Avenue, which for reasons incomprehensible was much neglected, and shoot up north to the ‘Hood, relatively unmolested.

Finally, home!

Yea verily, back at the Funny Farm. Lampshade thing ordered. Chow scarfed down. A third of a bottle of white wine swilled. And now…enough, already! The dog and I are falling into the sack for a nap.

Ruby to the Rescue!

by

So we’re strolling along a sidewalk in Lower Richistan. It’s after noon, Ruby having had to wait until the Human got back from church to extract a DoggyWalk. As we approach the border of Upper Richistan, we spot a black cat up ahead. It’s messing with something on the sidewalk, presumably some prey it’s killed.

Ruby is more interested in wallowing in the neighbors’ lawns — her favorite pastime, since most yards in the po’ folks’ part of the ‘Hood are desert-landscaped, grass being something that is put out of the hoi polloi’s reach by the cost of water here. So I suggest, “Ruby! Lookit that cat. Git that cat!”

Of course she can’t get it, because she’s stuck on a leash. If I didn’t think she’d chase the thing to Yuma, I’d unhook her. But she can’t be trusted not to run out in front of a car or to follow the cat to Timbuktu. However, the cat hears me and so notices our approach, and it runs away.

I expect to find a dead bird or rat on the sidewalk. But…nay!

It’s a freaking tortoise! A little desert tortoise (endangered species!) about six or eight inches long and around five inches wide. It peeks its head out from its shell to see what the heck.

I ask a kid biking around on a neighbor’s front yard if he knows who belongs to the tortoise. He pretends not to hear me. He’s only about 10, but already his parents have trained him to recognize WT and not respond. Snobsville, and we ain’t even in Snottsdale. Hm.

Not wanting to leave the critter to amble across the roads, I pick it up.

Tortoise recoils inside his shell. Then sticks his head out, realizes he’s in the air, and sticks out his fiercely clawed little feet, which he now uses to try to force the human to unhand him.

I’m trying to figure out how to get a grip on him that’ll last long enough to carry him home, when voilà! Hustling up the sidewalk comes a tribe of dithering humans, led by a visibly distressed female.

“Have you seen a tortoise?” asks the chieftain. She’s so upset she’s almost in tears, and the males she has in tow are not in much better shape.

“You mean this one?”

They practically genuflected on the sidewalk, they were so thrilled and relieved to find their…uhm…pet.

The desert tortoise is protected by law. Fish & Game has a program where you can “adopt” a tortoise and keep it in your yard, registered and checked-on by AZ F&G. They have all sorts of regulations whereby you must house the beast. And no doubt they figured they were about to get in big trouble with Big Brother, to say nothing of losing their beloved baby.

🙂

So. Ruby saved the tortoise. And saved the day.

 

Another Day, Another New Year.

by

New Year’s is my least favorite holiday. Honestly, I think maybe next year I’ll try to rent a place in Yarnell so I can get the hell out of this zoo!

Last night the plan was to go over to the  WonderAccountants’  for a light dinner and to introduce Ruby the Corgi to Chloe the Cockapoo, who recently came to live with Mr. & Mrs WonderAccountant.

This made for an overall pleasant evening — they’re exceptionally nice people. The neurotic Chloe, still getting used to her new digs, didn’t get on well with the hyperdominant Ruby, but on reflection I think it was a mistake to bring Ruby into the poor little pooch’s new territory. A better way to have introduced them would have been a doggy-walk around the park after the day warmed up.

Back to the house by 9 and wanting to go to bed.

Ruby is terrorized by the firecracker racket, and I have to say, it annoys me too. Last night every nitwit in the city was shooting off fireworks and guns, way on after midnight. And the clowns who have rented Pretty Daughter’s house across the street…honestly, I wish one of their colleagues would come pick those two off. One of the jerks has an unmuffled motorcycle. He got on that thing and revved it up as LOUD AS IT WOULD GO, just ear-splitting even inside the house, and roared up and down the street at 11:00 at night. By the time you could call a cop, he was gone, of course.

It sure as hell was maddening. But it could have been worse…

• A three-year-old was collateral damage from gunfire in lovely West Phoenix/Glendale.

• A guy standing at a bus stop around the corner from the university’s west campus (also in beautiful Glendale) was shot and killed. I was near that spot just the day before yesterday.

• An aged guy ran a signal at the intersection of Gangbanger’s Way and the freeway access road. He died; the 19-year-old passenger was OK, as was the 28-year-old occupant in the other car.

• A passenger in an airport parking shuttle van was killed when a truck ran into the van. Truck driver was drunk.

• Another drunk driver slammed into a power pole but, undaunted, soldiered on to bash nine other cars. Quite an impressive accomplishment!

• A crash at Feeder Street N/S and Virginia (mid-town, a distance south of here) put six people in the hospital, four of them in critical condition.

• Some hiker died on a trail in Tucson; a pair of mountain lions found the corpse and proceeded to dine on it. Caught in the act, the lions were murdered by Arizona Game & Fish.

• A 16-year-old girl died when the intoxicated driver of the vehicle she and five or six other people were riding in clipped another car and lost control. Unrestrained by any encumbrance such as a seatbelt, the girl was ejected from the car and died at the scene.

None o’ that stuff allowed!

So…New Year’s Eve here amounts to a night of mayhem, racket, and scofflawing. The city had a no-burn order going, because the air pollution is really bad at this time of year. When I walked in the house after dinner at the neighbors’, the stink of burning firewood was so strong indoors, I thought briefly that the house itself might have a fire going somewhere. So had to go out and inspect the premises, just what I love to do in 40-degree temps. Decided one of the idiot neighbors had a firepit or fireplace going.

Oh, well. Thank goodness it’s only one night a year! 😀