Jeez. This door and security lock business is turning into a huge (and hugely expensive) project. Yesterday the locksmith was here. He wants to sell me four high-security locks, to the tune of something over a thousand bucks. Medeco is the brand he recommends. Says it’s more secure than the Schlage high-security locks that remain on the market. Consumer Reports seems to agree that one model of the Medeco is probably better than other deadbolts out there. Most deadbolts can easily be picked or drilled, and the Kwikset locks I bought the other day at Home Depot seem to be about the most vulnerable of the lot. Whether the Medeco is really worth the price remains to be seen: we have here this entertaining report, in which our intrepid hackers used keys fashioned from plastic credit cards to let themselves in the Medeco-armored door…in six seconds.

Not every burglar hangs out at DefCon listening to hackers report on their latest exploits. However. The fact is, it is a pin-tumbler lock, and it is vulnerable to attack. Possibly there are other ways to discourage the Perp.

This afternoon Chip Marvin, owner of my favorite skylight, door, and window retailer came by to check out the situation and give me an estimate on replacements for the sliding doors that no longer lock and the front door whose lockset has to be screwed back on every two or three weeks. He came up with several alternatives to replacement that could save a ton of money. To wit:

• Don’t replace the steel front door, which, though boringly generic, is a perfectly good door and can be refurbished. The old hole where the former lockset connected can be sealed with car body filler, and the new lockset I so unsuccessfully tried to install can be put on properly. There’s really nothing wrong with it that a little repair work and some paint won’t fix.

• The problem with the back door is that the two layers of kitsch created by the plastic mullions that came with the cheapie HD kitchen door overlaid by the ridiculous fake wrought iron of the new ugly security door. I proposed to ameliorate that by replacing the door with a 32-inch single-pane entry door (to the locksmith’s dismay). Instead, he suggested, if what’s wanted is a clear pane, the cheesy mullions can be removed and the cheesy glass can be replaced with a single low-E pane.

• To his mind the sliding door is actually easier to secure than French doors. While the all-in-one lock does extend upward and downward into the sills, it’s simple to get them open.

Yes! The front door I’d seen at Home Depot was almost $800; by the time it was installed, the cost would have come to around a thousand bucks. The single-pane back door was a mere $288, but it was made by some outfit I’d never heard of and presumably fabricated in China or Bangladesh or Nigeria. Again, add a couple hundred bucks to install that thing—which because it only comes prehung would entail removing the new security door and reinstalling it—and we’re up around $500 or $600.

So. That’s a significant savings.

Savings, we might add, that can be thrown at the stuff I’d really like to have, to wit: upgraded Arcadia doors and replacement of the last of the tinfoil windows from the 1970s.

Chip showed me Milgard doors that match the excellent windows he installed shortly after I moved into this place. They’re low-E (none of the old sliding doors come under that heading), come in the wide-framed “French” style that I find very handsome, and they even come with the Frank Lloyd Wrightish mullions that I like in the windows I have.

When I moved in here, I didn’t change out the window in back, because there was only one of them and because I’m a cheapskate. Should’ve done that then. But as long as his crew is here installing doors, they might as well put in the one remaining bedroom window and maybe the little bathroom window, too. That will make all the doors and windows low-E, which I doubt will make a lot of difference but at least is…righteous. And it certainly will make the house look nice.

Arcadia doors can be fitted with sliding barrel bolts, which will back up the regular locks and require the Burglar to break the glass to get in. So with the standard lock plus one or two barrel bolts plus the traditional stick in the slider channel, the Burglar will at least have to earn his pay. And they really are very attractive doors.

Related posts:

• Shoring Up the Barricades

So as I was saying yesterday, among the several things the Funny Farm needs is a new paint job. Was feeling mighty proud of the Behr paint samples I got, and expected at least a couple of the colors to look swell and elegant on the walls.

As you know if you’ve ever painted a house, those tiny little paint chips you get at the Depot or the paint store are a cruel joke. There’s NO way you can estimate what the color really will look like, because the leap of imagination between the sample and a wallful of the paint is just too large for the human brain to traverse.

One strategy is to get paint samples in the coveted shades and paint splotches on the walls, in one- or two-square-foot patches. This works effectively, but it sure makes your house look funny until such time as you make up your mind. If you’re the finicky type, “until such time” can be a while. There’s a better way, though: Make your own paint chips.

Get a pad of low-end artist’s paper from someplace like Michael’s—don’t get the good stuff for this project—or, if you’d like sturdier samples, cut up a cardboard box into as many six-inch or foot-square pieces as you have sample colors. Then simply paint the sample colors onto the paper or cardboard. Allow to dry, and then you can tape the samples to the desired walls, leave them there, and watch how they look as the light changes throughout the day.

This is an effective way to see how a given paint color will actually look on your walls. It saved me a lot of time and probably some money. The shades I thought were gonna be just great turn out to be just ugly. Of the six I tried, the only one I really liked was “peach fade.” The other off-white, which judging by the Behr paint chip looked like an extremely pale beige, looks pink when a large enough sample is hung on the wall. A better name for “Adobe straw” might be “Necco candy chocolate.” The “flint smoke” is bluish-gray, a blah color—much duller than it appears above. “Blanket brown” has a grayish overtone that clashes with the kitchen cabinetry. And…a whole house full of off-white, beige, and brown? Bleyach! There’s a reason those brightly decorated houses in Mexico appeal to me.

After staring at the colorless “neutral” color scheme for awhile, I realized that dammit, I like the colors my friend and I put in the house when I moved in here, except that I’m mighty tired of the orange hall. That orange replaces a kind of tangerine orange that came with the Alexander Julian line we were working with, and I never liked that color. That’s why I put the terra cotta color in the hallway. All the other colors are just fine.

And the truth is, I know exactly where to get a much, much better shade to cover up that orange: at my son’s house. We painted his place a kind of…hmmm…what’s the word? It’s a mellow sort of beigey terra cotta—not a harsh orange like mine—that looks really, really pretty with the saltillo floors. He still has the paint can. All that’s needed is to trot over to Dunn Edwards, buy a pint of that, and test it on DIY paint chips. I’ll bet it would look really, really nice in that hallway.

See the teal in this image? That’s pretty close to swamp blue: the color of the accent wall in the living room, which has an archway through which one views the hallway. And that salmon color on the Mexican wall is a little brighter but not very far off from the color I have in mind.

If I’m right—that most of the walls can stay the same color they already are, with a little touch-up here and there—then those home-made paint chips saved me a great deal of money. Instead of repainting the entire interior, all that’s really needed is to repaint the hall (I can do that myself!), touch up the paint around the kitchen and front doors, paint the woodwork some shade of brown compatible with the cabinetry, and maybe repaint my office. Oh…and I do want that garage painted. Adobe straw would do just fine in there.

Related posts:

• Shoring Up the Barricades

Okay, so assuming I’m not moving away from Crime Central anytime soon—because I can’t afford anything I want to live in anyplace where I want to live—then presumably it makes sense to shore up the defenses. This house’s barricades are easy to breach: three old sliding doors, all of them ugly, two of them installed by different previous owners, two of them with locks that don’t work, and none of them energy-efficient. The handle set on the front door is falling off; every now and again I have to screw it back on. Neither of the two wooden gates is very sturdy, and one is falling apart.

I can’t afford to fix all this stuff, either…but doing so would be one helluva lot cheaper than selling this place and moving. So, I suppose I’m just going to have to raid Survival Savings and get some work done.

Friday we made a start: a Home Depot subcontractor came by and installed a security door on the kitchen door. It’s not too ugly, and unlike the gate on the front door, its metal screen lets you see out.

Well. It’s not too ugly when the kitchen door is open. With the cheapo door closed, it’s plug-hideous.

Also at the Depot, I picked up three sets of bump-resistant locks. Because these don’t have pins, they supposedly can’t be bumped. Of course, they can be drilled, but that means the Perp has to bring some equipment that can’t be carried in his pants pocket. While these KwikSet Smartkey locks can easily be picked or smashed, they’re much sturdier than the existing locks, and they’re actually quite handsome pieces of hardware.

Heh. I just learned how vulnerable they are while researching the present post, and so will return them to Home Depot and get something better (I hope) from the locksmith. Lissen up, folks: DON’T BUY KWIKSET SMARTKEY “BUMP-PROOF” LOCKS!

The door installer put these on the new security door, and while he was here took out the double-cylinder deadbolt I’d installed on the kitchen door by way of avoiding having to put a security door there and put the old single-cylinder deadbolt back on. With the security door making it harder for the Burglar to break out a light, reach in, and unlock the deadbolt, I no longer need a lock that’s keyed on the inside. That means in the event of a fire, I won’t have to grope around searching for the key to get out.

Couldn’t talk him into installing the other two lock sets on the side and front security doors, which is just as well, since I’ll have to have the locksmith come over with better locks, anyway.

Yes. The cheapo kitchen door combines with the mid-cheapo security door to hideous effect. Plus one of the unlockable sliding doors resides adjacent to the newly secured kitchen door.

So, what I’m thinking is to replace all three sliding doors with single-pane sliders, and to install a matching door in the kitchen—the kind that has just one large glass pane in it. Then all the Arcadia doors would match, they’d all have halfway decent factory-installed hardware, and once they’re supplemented with bars dropped in their tracks, screw-on locks, and door squealers, they should be relatively safe. The back door, then, would be mostly clear glass, so when you look out through it, you’d see the “decorative” (heh) ironwork of the security door: only one layer of kitsch instead of two.

These little gems are not cheap. Each will cost about $1500. On HD’s website, however, I found Anderson knockoffs by some outfit called “Masterpiece” for about  half the price. They’re probably junk—I’m having the company that installed the windows and skylights in this house give me a call, tho’ I don’t expect them to underprice anything at Home Depot, since they carry top-of-the-line products and do first-rate work. I’d rather not spend any money on this  kind of thing, but still…closing costs alone on my house would run over $12,000; and then we’d have the cost of moving my stuff across town, plus the usual mountain of bills that invariably accompanies possession of a new place. Clearly, making the place a little more perp-resistant trumps selling this house, finding a new one, and moving.

Meanwhile, as long as I’m spending money on the house, the interior really, really needs a paint job. The Alexander Julian color scheme my friend and I cooked up when I moved in here about six or seven years ago was very stylish at the time, but it’s pretty…uhm…idiosyncratic. I think I’d like to replace the surprising colors with more neutral shades, and also paint the white doors and trim brown. The color of dirt. I am tired of scouring dirt off the doors and woodwork!

Paint the woodwork the color of dirt, and the dirt won’t show.

While visiting the Depot, I came across a gorgeous paint color, or so it appears in the chip. Behr is calling it “faded peach.” It’s really an off-white with just a tiny touch of peach in it. The effect is a very warm, rich neutral that picks up one of the subtle shades in the floor tiles. If someone didn’t tell you it had peach in it, you’d never know. My plan is to put this in the living room, dining room, and up the (presently orange terra-cotta) hallway. The accent wall in the living room, which is now swamp blue a kind of murky teal, will give way to “adobe straw” (a soft grayish brown) or “blanket” (brown brown, which is also going to be the color of the doors and trim). The gray in my bedroom will be covered with “adobe straw,” and the swamp blue accent wall in there repainted with “flint smoke,” a much lighter, subtler sort of misty teal. The master bathroom will be “Arabian sands,” another neutral brown that’s close to “adobe straw” but goes better with the travertine in the shower. The office and other two bedrooms: variants of “peach fade,” “adobe straw,” and “flint smoke.” Overall, the effect will be much more subtle; keeping the woodwork clean will require a lot less elbow grease, and should I decide to sell the house after all, the paint job will be neutral.

While the painter’s here, I think I’ll have him paint the garage walls “adobe straw,” too. Same strategy: hide the dirt.

So, by the time these projects are done, the house will be a little more secure and a lot more attractive. I think.

Related posts:

• Locks & Doors, Doors & Locks

Okay, so today I’m wrestling with the pool—its filter pressure is running twice as high as normal, so I’ve backwashed it and now go to prime the pump. This is easy: just turn it on with the pressure release valve open to drain off the air; then when the pump is primed, shut the valve and go on about your business.

Well. No.

Turn the breaker switch to “on” and the system kicks in and looks like it’s gonna run OK…for about 10 seconds and then holeee gawd it’s suckin’ air out of the skimmer basket. A great water tornado has formed in the skimmer and it’s pumping air into the system. Shut it off. Cuss.

This is the second time that’s happened in a week. Last time after I fiddled around with it, I got it to stop. But don’t know what on earth I did to make it stop. This time no amount of fiddling makes the phenomenon quit. So…it’s on the phone to schedule a visit from Leslie’s repair service.

Since it’s been less than 90 days since there were out here expensively repairing the leaking pump, and since this started after the guy adjusted the drain valve (thereby changing the force with which water is sucked in through the skimmer basket weir), I figure they should give me a break.

No. Base price is $110. That’s just to show up out here.

Soonest the guy will schedule a trip is next Friday. That is a LONG time for a pool to just sit, in 100-degree weather. The upshot will be an algae infestation. The pump needs to circulate to keep the chemicals in balance and moving around.

So, I ask if he has any recommendation for how I can keep the pool from turning green while we’re waiting for a Leslie’s technician to show up. Get this…

Oh, this is too, toooo good!

He says (no joke!), “What you can do is add the chemicals and then sit on the edge of the pool and kick your legs in the water real hard!”

LOLOLOLOL!  I don’t think I’ve ever heard a funnier eff-you from a customer disservice representative, not in many years of trolling punch-a-button systems and putting up with rude, stupid, and uncaring reps. This guy truly takes the cake.

Tomorrow I’m calling Swimming Pool Repair and Service to set up a business relationship with them. When last heard from, they were still a locally owned company. They don’t answer the phones on Mother’s Day. But that may simply mean they don’t hire overseas and cross-country slaves.

Meanwhile, I tried to reach Phil, the manager of the Leslie’s shop nearest my house. He’s worked for that illustrious corporation forever, and before taking on a store job he was a field technician. He does know how to make a pool work. Interestingly, the guy who answered the phone said “Phil no longer works here.”

Telling.

Anyway, so I ask the new guy if he thinks he could give me a clue as to what might be the issue. He thinks backwashing drew the water level down too low. I say it’s only a quarter-inch below the middle grout line…not like it’s anywhere close to the weir. He think the pump could be drawing hard enough that it’s sucking so much water in through the weir that it’s pulling in air.

I adjust the drain valve, cutting the suction a little. He suggests filling the pool above the middle grout line (the “full” line, for those of us who are not pool aficionados) and then turning on the pump again. If it doesn’t suck air at that point, it means I should overfill the pool a bit to keep the thing from doing that.

This requires running the hose about 30 or 40 minutes at full blast.

A-n-n-n-d…yeah. Overfilling and fooling with the drain valve seems to have worked. Right now it’s running pretty well. Nice for swimming in, too: the water’s perfect!!

“Kick your legs.” Heeeeeeeeeeee!

Related posts:

• 2012 Baptized!

Being self-employed certainly has its benefits—you can choose your own hours, you have only yourself to answer to, and if you’re ill, you don’t have to phone in sick.  On the downside, as well as the occasional inconsistency of income (if you don’t work, you don’t get paid), you also have to sort out your own tax, national insurance and insurance.

There are several types of insurance you might need for your self-employed business.  If you have any employees (or even people who help you voluntarily), you must have employers’ liability insurance in place.  In any event you might want to also pay for public liability insurance (if customers come to your premises) and for professional indemnity coverage.

Professional indemnity insurance is what covers you should you give advice that turns out to be bad or inappropriate for the client.  If you give bad advice or make a mistake in the professional service you give to your clients, then they could sue you for damages if they suffered loss as a consequence.

A good example of this is will-writing.  People can set up as self-employed will-writers with no qualifications or experience, and there is no requirement for them to have professional indemnity Insurance in place. However, if the wills they draft are poorly written, or if they mistakenly include or exclude a beneficiary, or if they do not ensure that the will is executed properly, they could later be sued.  Although a suit might be filed by the person who had the will written (the testator), who might seek to recover the amount they paid for the will, it’s more likely that mistakes will not be discovered until after the testator has died. In that case, the beneficiaries or executors could sue for their losses or on behalf of the estate—or both.

That’s where the timing of your professional indemnity insurance purchase comes into play.  If a client makes a claim against you several years after you have done the work for them and, in the interim, you have allowed the insurance to lapse, then having had professional indemnity insurance at the time the work was carried out makes no difference—you won’t be able to claim against it.  You’re only covered if you have a professional indemnity insurance policy at the time that the client sues.

Since many small businesses don’t last, you could find yourself in deep water years after your business has folded.  Let’s say you ran a business from 2001 to 2006 and had professional indemnity during that entire period, during which no clients sued. If a client who you worked for in 2006 makes a claim against you in 2010, then you’re not covered. Amazingly, if you didn’t have professional indemnity insurance at all between 2001 and 2006 but took out retrospective professional indemnity insurance from 2007 (perhaps for a new business venture), then claims arising from 2001 to 2006 would be covered.

This is an important fact to remember.  If you need professional indemnity insurance, then you will need it for many years to come, even after your business has ended.  For most types of business it is safe to say that six years after your last job, you can stop paying for your professional indemnity insurance (or ‘run-off’ insurance, see below) because most claims are barred from being brought if six years has passed (this is known as the statute of limitation).  For some businesses, though, like Will-Writing, a claimant might be able to persuade a judge that they didn’t know about the negligence within the six year period and they might be given permission to sue.

If you don’t like the idea of paying for professional indemnity insurance forevermore, you could pay for run-off insurance instead for six years (or more, as above).  That type of insurance generally carries a lower premium and usually reduces each year as the risk is deemed to diminish.

This is a sponsored guest post by James Rowland.

Related posts:

• Insurance Frolics
• Getting an Insurance Checkup
• Health Insurance Eye-Popper

Look at this. And this. Or maybe this.

A hundred and ninety-five grand for that first hacienda, and I’ll bet you can get it cheaper. Matter of fact, I’ll bet I could rent something like it for less than a 5% return on investment from the proceeds of sale of the house I’m living in right now.

Gardener in: clean up courtyard, plant flowers, plant una jacaranda. Owner’s furniture out. Local purchases in.

Aquí: all my furniture goes to my son. The junk, like the books and the piles of trash I never even look at, goes away. Dog gets a double dose of every vaccine known to veterinariankind.

I throw my clothes, a few favorite pots and pans, and the dog in the car and drive to San Miguel…never, with any luck, to return.

Why in the name of God am I still in this place?

Consider:

I don’t want to work anymore, but I can’t live here without working. I have to work like a horse to keep a roof over my head in an aging tract bordered on two sides by increasingly dank and violent slums, under siege by pistol-waiving thugs pursued by legions of cops. The central part of the city, except for three or four small, elite, and expensive enclaves, is steadily deteriorating; it’s already reached the point where young adults say they would not live in a home south of the Loop 101…that’s nine miles to the north of here. If you covet middle-class neighbors and infrastructure, you have two choices: you can live in a sea of elbow-to-elbow cookie-cutter houses built so shabbily that by the time they’re ten years old they’re falling apart, or you can mortgage your first-born son to live in Scottsdale or Carefree. There really is surprisingly little in between.

The U.S. is turning into a third-world country. Why not move to a real third-world country and enjoy the amenities?

Amenity numero uno being that I could live like the Queen of Sheba on my Social Security in this place.

Amenity numero dos: For as little as half of what I would clear from my shack, a fun and original and downright unique place awaits.

 ← Go ahead. Just try to find a detail  like this in the US for $135,000…

How about a brand-new colonial-style hacienda? ↓

For just a few…

…thousand dollars more than I could get for my house…

Amenity numero tres: Hired help in Mexico comes even cheaper than the real estate. Much cheaper, as our industrialist friends know, the folks who have sent our jobs down there. You and I could own a place like this and afford to have someone come in and clean it and take care of the grounds. And still have enough left to go out to eat!

Just imagine: this for about what I can get for my dowdy little tract house…

Okay…whence this little frenzy?

Welp, in the aftermath of the most recent little drama, a strange blue funk settled over me. Weird, because there’s really little reason for it: I was not harmed, was not even especially alarmed…although I surely would have been had I not moved myself to go check the locks on the garage and back doors. The could’ve been, it develops, is more disturbing than one would expect. So, too, is the bizarre irony that as the most recent episode was coming down, I was cruising the Web looking for “better” places to live. Whatever those might be.

Know how long I’ve been looking for a “better” place to live?

Not weeks. Not months. Years.

Because the houses in this neighborhood are solidly built of masonry (unlike the standard stick-built Phoenix-area tract house, which is ticky and tacky), because they are well designed, because they’re a block from a very nice park, because they abut a tract of $500,000 to $1 million homes, because they’re centrally located, you can’t find a thing that’s a few blocks further from the Conduit of Blight for anything like what a normal person can pay. Yes. I could sell my house and apply the proceeds as a down payment for a comparable (but not as nice) house further from Crook Central. But for what looks like an even exchange but is not, I would end up owing about $60,0000, get a teensy little lot with about six feet between buildings, and drive halfway to Yuma, Prescott, or Tucson for the privilege.

In the unlikely event that I could get a 30-year loan for such a balance, I’d add $304/month to my already straitened budget; more likely, the best I could get would be a five-year loan, with a monthly payment of around $1100. Let’s say I netted $200,000 on the sale of my present home and invested that in instruments that return, on average, around 6% (as has been the case with retirement savings…with, alas, some notable exceptions). That would pay $1,000 a month…less 15% taxes, for a net of $850. A $200,000 loan at 4.5% would cost me $1,013 in principal & interest alone, meaning I’d have to come up with an extra $163 a month from someplace.

This means I don’t have much choice but to buy a house for no more than what I can net on the sale of this house. After closing costs, the best I could do would be around $190,000. Right now, not counting foreclosures (which are problematic), there are 12 houses in that price range in one North Central zip code, none of them in good areas (one does not want to be in Sunnyslope; one does not want to be east of Seventh Street or west of Seventh Avenue); thirteen in another (including a house in my neighborhood but closer to the Conduit); in another, one kinda cute little patio home that backs onto a shopping center; and in two in the last—one of them a decrepit patio home and the other one-bedroom apartment in a high-rise. I’ve looked at the latter; if claustrophobia is your preferred state of mind, it’s perfect.

Following the white flight, we find one, count it (1), house in the $150,000 to $200,000 range north of the Loop 101; several in Scottsdale but most are apartments and most overlook the freeway; quite a few in the cookie-cutter tracts in Mesa, Chandler, and Gilbert (invest in oil futures to fund your driving habit!). On the west side, where you have to go past mile on mile on mile of blight to get to middle-class tracts, there are about three trillion vacancies in Sun City; several new tracts are (still…) under construction on the far, far, far west side (more oil futures!), and KJG and I saw some gorgeous new houses going up on large lots for around $265,000…plus.

Moving to these distant suburbs requires you to invest in a reliable vehicle and resign yourself to spending half your waking hours on the road. I could no doubt afford a tract house sitting on top of five adjacent neighbors’ houses out there. But it would mean I would have to give up seeing all my friends, give up choir, give up teaching at Paradise Valley… For heaven’s sake! If you’re going to move away from your entire life, why move into a tract where the houses will be “old” and need renovation in ten years? Why not move to Mexico?

* * *

A day or two ago it occurred to me that my paradigm is wrong. Something is wrong with the search paradigm. But what?

• Could I be searching for the wrong thing (should I be looking for an apartment, not a house? How about a big RV?).

• Or maybe I’m looking in the wrong place (somewhere other than Phoenix, for example? Like…say, Mexico, the south of France, Yarnell?).

• Or…maybe the search should not be for new-to-me housing but for better ways to secure this house and for more accuracy with a pistol.

Maybe the reason I can’t find anything I care to live in and that I can afford in an area where I want to live is that I really don’t want to move. Possibly I’m complacent. Or possibly I actually have found housing that’s as ideal as it’s going to get at this time in my life: paid off, relatively low in maintenance, centrally located, and except for the occasional moment of drama, mostly pleasant to live in.

On the other hand…in Mexico, one could live reasonably well on one’s Social Security benefit alone.

Every now and again, Lady Karma smirks. While we already know that the state of Arizona, with its wacko politicians and bizarre customs, is the perennial laughing-stock of the nation and steady supplier of Supreme Court cases, we occasionally forget how ludicrous its “educational” system is. Could the Great Desert University possibly out-do its administration’s pronouncement that the first African-American President of the United States did not have a “body of work” deserving of an honorary degree, unlike, say, Steve Allen (1982), Eddie Basha (1999), and the renowned Delbert Ray Lewis (2001)?

Well.

Yes.

Once again GDU makes its hundreds of laid-off former employees proud to be…former. Emphasis on former.

One of the university’s many teapot tempests, one that’s been brewing for quite a while, recently came to the attention of local news media, whose avatars were amazed to discover not only that a distinguished historian allegedly plagiarized with élan in his spoken as well as his published works, but that the administration overrode his tenure committee’s decision to deny a promotion to full on the basis of their view that his treatment of his unacknowledged sources (among them, we’re told, Wikipedia) amounted to plagiarism.

There’s a backstory that I’m not going to detail here, because I haven’t been directly privy to it and doubt that I could get faculty to confirm it on the record. However, the hilarity has begun. Now, if someone would please let Jon Stewart know about this…?

GDU: Defining Ugly

Image: Wells Fargo Arena. YF12s. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

My house is surrounded by yellow tape and there’s about a dozen cops out there. A half-dozen cop vehicles have shut down the neighborhood.

Things are a bit quieter now. They dragged one of the three perps out of my garage, but not until some extravagant drama took place.

Yes. My house is a crime scene.

Along about 5:30 or 6, shortly after M’hijito came by to pick up his spectacular dog, I’m sitting in front of the computer cruising the Internet, looking for real estate. Nice little house in another neighborhood, only a hundred grand more than mine. Hm. Could I find a hundred grand on short notice? Oh well.

This reverie is interrupted by a cop helicopter buzzing the house. Normally I don’t pay much attention, because the cops buzz our neighborhood all the time. It’s that kinda place. But this particular cop copter is behaving pretty frantically. I get up off my duff, walk into the front of the house, and check the various doors to be sure they’re locked. They’re not. I throw the deadbolts and lock the doorknobs. Wander back to the office, where I try to focus on ogling houses in nicer parts of town.

This, however, is not easy. The cop helicopter is practically parked on top of the roof, and when I glance out the window, what do I see but hordes of cops and cruisers out there. A male shape runs up the sidewalk on the east side of the house, but he’s going so fast I don’t get a good look at him before he disappears past the wall. I figure he’s a cop, though.

Oh well. Sit down to the computer. Shortly hear a “CLUNK” outside the east wall and steps that sound sorta like someone walking on the roof. Are the cops on the roof?

No…it dawns on me that someone has jumped the back wall and landed on the brick-and-board shelves I stuck out there to hold pots and garden junk. Cops? Or fugitive?

Pick up the phone and dial 9-1-1 and close the office door and lock the heavy-duty deadbolt on it. While talking to the dispatcher, who quickly realizes none of Phoenix’s Finest are inside my backyard, I pull the Ruger from its hiding place.

Before long, it becomes apparent that the smartest thing I’ve done to this house is to have installed that solid-core door with the hardened deadbolt on my office, wherein reside the only objects of any value I happen to own. At this point, the office is now a safe room.

The dispatcher gets off the phone. A few minutes later she calls back and says that the police are going to come into my house and get me out of it with a “caisson.” She actually says they are in the house. I ask how they could have gotten in through the security doors without making a fair amount of noise.

Well, no, they’re not in the house, but they’re about to be. Forthwith they show up at the front door. She asks me to walk through the house and let them in, leaving the dog locked in the office.

A “caisson,” it develops, is a formation of bullet-proof riot shields. These guys have got three of them, which the sandwich around me. Pistols drawn, they escort me out of the house behind these things.

They park me across the street in front of Pretty Daughter’s house while the drama proceeds.

Three desperadoes, I’m told, are on the loose. They’ve committed a robbery and taken off in an orange vehicle; just up the street they jumped out of the car and ran off on foot. The cops found one guy’s clothes stashed under the shrubbery in my front yard.

They now extract a German shepherd from a cruiser, kick the locked side gate open, and charge into the backyard.

There, who should they meet but…yes! The perp!

He saunters out of the garage, dressed in a T-shirt and (expensive!) white cover-up I’d left hanging by the washer, with my garden hat on his head and my mud-slogging shoes on his feet. (This means, BTW, that he has gone through a garage cabinet, because that’s where the shoes were stashed, and he’s also come close enough to the kitchen door to try to pull it open, because the hat was hanging on a nail right next to the door.)

“Hi, fellas,” says he. “What’s going on?”

He claims to be the gardener, there to trim the trees.

The officers in the yard radio over to their cohort near me to ask if I have a gardener. I ask what their gardener’s name is.

“Matthew.”

“My gardener’s name is Gerardo. Wrong gardener!”

They now pounce this guy and physically drag him, kicking and fighting, out of my backyard.

They bloody up my shirt in the process. At first they were going to give my hat and the mud-sloggers back, but now they decide to keep them as evidence. In addition to unlawful trespass, they’re charging him with burglary and the theft of the hat, shoes, T-shirt, and overshirt!

Heh heh heh heh…

What can one say?

So now they proceed to wrap my house with yellow crime tape. They’ve already shut down the streets in three directions. The drama shifts toward the baroque.

I get into a conversation with a very charming and attractive middle-aged officer. A widower, he has a five-year-old son born late in life (the father’s life, that is): his wife died three years ago, and he’s on the verge of retirement. He’s been with the police force over 20 years. I’m thinking this is a pretty nice guy and he seems to be thinking about the same and things are going along well until he mentions that his mom just turned 70 and I say… “Gee, you could be my son! I’m almost her age.”

Bad move.

“No! You can’t be!”

“Yup. I’m 67.”

Moment of silence.

“Well. You certainly don’t look your age.”

{sigh} If I’d kept my mouth shut, maybe he’d have concluded that older women make good lovers.

Moving on.

The police officers had to kick their way through the garden gate, which was pretty easy because it was flimsy when it was new and now it’s flimsy and old. To my amazement, they actually repaired it on the spot! It’ll need a little touch-up, but thanks to their extra effort, the gate is latched shut.

They figured the perp had stashed a weapon somewhere, possibly on my premises. So they searched the cabinets and the outdoor shed, without coming across anything. If he ran up an alley at any time while they were pursuing him, he probably dropped his gun in a garbage can. But tomorrow when it’s light I’ll open the garage door and check the place more carefully. All I need is that turkey to come back looking for his pistol.

* * *

La Maya and La Bethulia got wind of this when the neighborhood association sent out a memo explaining what was happening. After the dust settled, they invited me over for a quick dinner and a gin and tonic. I really wasn’t hungry, having had a large meal with Tina over the lunch hour. However, I certainly wasn’t about to turn down the company.

So now it’s quiet here again. The crime scene tape is gone. The perp is probably out of jail by now. The cute cop has gone on his way. Cassie is crapped out on the floor. My father’s pistol is back in its hidey-hole.

I think that fine door deserves a paint job.

Images:

Police Helicopter. Matthew Field. GNU Free Documentation License.
Schlage hardened deadbolt. Mine.
Taped-off crime scene. U.S. Army. Public domain.

Last night we had the final exam for the real estate course. I felt like I was walking into the Jaws of Doom, so convinced was I that I was gonna bomb the thing. I was totally unprepared, and so exhausted I could hardly walk. The past 5 weeks have devolved into one time-consuming, headache-inducing screw-up, hassle, bugaboo and freaking catastrophe after another, and so I’ve had almost no time to study the content. I figured I was going to fail for sure.

Well.

When our Realtor friend said getting the license was “easy,” he wasn’t kidding. Of the 80 questions, I’d be surprised if I missed 10. Most of them were factoid questions, and of those most were so intuitive you probably could answer a good 80% of them without ever reading the book. There were five or six math questions, which of course I’m incompetent to do. Of those, I know I got three correct; I made a good guess at one, leaving two almost certainly wrong. So: two or three of the math questions wrong. Three or four of the factoid questions concerned material not covered in our textbook (the instructor draws on two texts for his questions)—had to make guesses on those. So I’m estimating I missed about six or seven questions.

To get 75%, you’d have to get twenty questions wrong! And…to get twenty of those see-Dick-run questions wrong, you’d have to be so far out in left field you’d qualify as mentally retarded.

All of which is neither here nor there, because on Tuesday, when he reminded us that because it’s a five-week course the final was scheduled for last night, not next week during the regular final exam period and I realized that on Wednesday I wouldn’t have a chance of finding time to review 14 chapters, I asked him what would happen if I failed this exam after having scored a 96 on the mid-term. And…brace yourself…at that point he said not to worry, everyone in the course would get an A or a B. No one would get less than a B in the course.

Heh.

Anyway. It is ridiculously easy. And it’s pretty interesting. You certainly learn a lot of things that you should have known before ever setting a pen to a purchase contract, a mortgage agreement, or an apartment lease.

Bitch of a week here. I told you we fired the client who converses with the dead, right? That leaves us without work, which has Tina agitated. Two incoming queries appeared today; one looking for someone to edit his thesis, another from some outfit trolling for slave labor. Last week of instruction—finals coming up next week. Students are also agitated, lobbying for hurried return of their gigantic final papers. Much nagging, whining, and nail-biting in those precincts.

This morning I’m going out to Tempe to drop by and sign some paperwork at the new insurance agent’s office. Thence to the credit union branch on the main campus. Then over to the GDU library to scour Literary Market Place for leads to publishing houses Tina and I can hit up for freelance work, and then it’s off to meet Tina for a nice lunch to celebrate the end of the semester and, more to the point, to calculate a strategy to bring in some more (and better) work. Back to the house to write up an exam for my own students and send that off to the copy center. Then have to translate their grades out of my spreadsheet into the hated Blackboard so they can view their final score, a process that takes about eight times as long as it should because it has to be done manually and because BB screws around with you as you enter Each. And. Every. Score.

So that will fill absorb every moment of productive time today, I expect.

Discovered a $1230 discrepancy in my checking account and can NOT find the error(s), so had to make a balance adjustment in that amount. Fortunately it’s in my favor; otherwise I’d have ended this month with about a $300 balance. But it looks like I’ll have to hire the accountant to untangle whatever mess I made there.

Noticed last night that the pool is busted again. Gotta get up from writing this post and go fix that, or else turn off the power and leave the thing to grow algae while I’m racing around the city today.

Had to buy a new toilet, the facility in the middle bathroom having given up the ghost. Actually, neither that one nor the one in the so-called master bathroom had a very strong grip on the ghost when I inherited them from Satan and Proserpine. I like this new one so much, I may have WonderPlumber come back after I recover from the summer’s penury and replace the one in the alleged master bathroom.

Told him about my idea to turn the fourth bedroom (now the unused TV room) into a luxurious spa, complete with vast bathtub and a walk-through into the closet-like master bathroom. He thought it was a great idea. Estimated it would cost around 10 grand.

Well…when I’m a rich old real estate agent, eh?

Related posts:

• End in sight…but apparently not the end of teaching
• Another best-laid plan defunct

{sigh} So the scheme to do a little market research and then race out to Tempe to meet my business partner got derailed last night.

I was thinking the real estate course’s final exam took place next week, during finals week. No. It’s tomorrow!

Forgot that these five-week short courses do not have dedicated final exam periods. I assumed we would meet next Tuesday for the exam. And of course, since I was figuring I’d have Friday, Saturday, half of Sunday, and Monday to read the three chapters I haven’t looked at and to figure out the math procedures that went over my head, I am SO not prepared. Not only that, but I’m only about 3/4 of the way through the page proofs that are due tomorrow morning—had figured to spend late afternoon and evening finishing that, since I’ll hit the road at 6:45 tomorrow morning.

So had to cancel everything for today and dedicate the entire day to reading page proofs and trying to catch up with the course material that I fell behind on while dealing with the toxic client. Shee-ut! That was not what I had in mind.

Fortunately, I scored a 96 on the mid-term. Asked the instructor if I would get a “C” in the course if I fail the final, which I fully expect to do. Did I really need to ask? This is a junior college, after all… He said not to worry, everyone in the class would get an A or a B, and that the final would have no meaning.

Why are we doing this? Why…why…? Because we have to sit in a classroom for 90 hours before we’re allowed to take a certification exam that could easily be passed by simply reading a 26-chapter book, about 80 percent of which consists of common sense and about 20 percent of which contains career-specific information that really does need to be learned?

So I figure I can prioritize the page proofs. Get that done by noon, maybe sooner—about 11 would be good. Bolt down some cheese and crackers for lunch. Then move on to trying to learn something about real estate; work on that into the night, until I can’t hold my head up anymore.

You know…the crazed thing about “retirement” is that the number of hours in the day seems to shrink. You never seem to have enough time to get through all the stuff you need or want to do. Mostly “need.” Rarely “want,” in my case, given the joy and pleasure I take in teaching and in reading the ramblings of demented wannabe writers.

And—here’s the weird part—the phenomenon is not exclusive to neurotic little moi. Almost everyone I know who is retired or semiretired says exactly the same thing. Most of those people manage time a great deal better than I do. SDXB, for example—no one is better organized than that guy, and on top of that he’s a freaking rocketship. He does so many things, every day, day in and day out, and he gets them all done between around 5 in the morning and 9 at night, when he goes to bed. But for him everything is quite orderly (he has, yes, a military mind). His schedule is not gestalt, the way mine is: he gets one thing done at a time.

Other, more normal folks, whose inclinations lie more centrally on the spectrum between gestalt and pristinely organized, report that after they quit their jobs they never seem to have enough hours in the day to do all the things they need or want to do. Maybe it’s a function of age. Or maybe it has to do with making a shift between the regimentation of work life and the naturally gestalt structure of freedom.

Whatever. I need to get back to work just now. Bye!