Up since 2:00 a.m. coughing and gagging. This is bar none THE worst respiratory ailment I’ve ever had. Have lost track of how long this had been going on because I’m too sick to think, but my sense is it’s been about a month or six weeks. I’m beginning to think it’s never going to clear up.

Guess I’ll have to call the crew at the Mayo again. Ugh! How I hate having to beat my way through rank after rank of gatekeepers to get at a doctor. Apparently they’re hired to block patients from talking to doctors. Then, whenever I do manage to get an appointment, the damn clinic is an hour’s drive away through homicidal traffic.

My neighbor across the street recommended her doctor. I looked up his practice in Healthgrades and discovered one of the partners was defrocked in Connecticut for recurrent drug abuse. Oh brother. When you’ve been thrown out of practice in a civilized state, what d’you do? Come to Arizona and open a new practice!

Onward to Angie’s List. Almost all the doctors with “A” grades from a respectable number of Angie’s List participants are in east Scottsdale, not a heckuva lot closer than the Mayo. The very few within a reasonable driving distance don’t take Medicare assignment…which is one of the several reasons I spent some $8000 on health-related insurance and care in 2011. The Mayo doesn’t, either: this means a) whatever they choose to charge above and beyond what Medicare and its private henchmen imagine is “reasonable,” you pay out of pocket; and b) they will not accept electronic payment from Medicare or from Medigap insurers, so you have to collect an endless stream of little $20 and $30 checks, drag them to the credit union, deposit them, and then disburse those amounts one at a time to the doctor’s office. You really never have any idea how much you owe and how much Medicare or Medigap owes, so you have a constant tab that you can’t clear off the books.

It is, in short, a plan designed to keep you away from doctors. If going to a doctor weren’t aversive enough, this complicated pushmi-pullyu system effectively discourages you from seeking care, because you just don’t want to get mired in it. Especially when you’re feeling bad.

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Getting a running head start on the taxes this year, thanks to a new(ish) accountant who sees  no good excuse for dawdling. Tax time, is, after all, a-coming in, and really, except for a couple of stray K-1′s from the ex-DH’s various limited partnerships, there’s no reason not to start pulling all this stuff together.

The S-corp’s 2011 tax data, such as it is, can be said to already be pulled. The 1099s have been sent winging toward the folks who help make Funny about Money and The Copyeditor’s Desk possible, and all of the corporate transactions are duly recorded in Quicken’s online incarnation of Quickbooks.

The nice thing about the online Quickbooks is that New Wonder-Accountant can access the corporate books online from her computer, even though she uses a different platform from mine. I’m told the new Mac OS’s don’t support Intuit at all, and so the only other way to coordinate Quicken data with her would be for me to buy an inexpensive PC and load it with a browser and an expensive single program. The online version costs no more (possibly less) than it would cost to buy the program each year at Costco; it’s regularly updated; and she can access it whenever need be.

The S-corp’s 2011 fiscal year marked the beta-trial of QB online for me. I also kept the corporation’s books in an Excel spreadsheet, just in case. But no “in case” seems to have happened. The accountant has already explored the QB site and uttered no squawks of dismay, and so it looks like keeping the company’s books in the Cloud is going to work. It is possible to download the data to disk, by way of making back-ups at one’s own site, so I feel a lot more comfortable about this method than I did last January.

Matter of fact, the first of this month I set up an new online Quickbooks account for my personal bookkeeping, which should go a long way toward simplifying the tax process next year—and, I hope, keeping the costs of tax prep down.

Truly, I hate wrestling with all this stuff. Most of this afternoon was occupied with tracking down data and filling in parts of the 19-page worksheet for my personal taxes that Wonder-Accountant presented to me yesterday. Ugh.

Who knows what any of this stuff means? Though I struggle to keep the records complete, accurate, and transparent, half the time I have no idea what I’m doing and so have no way of knowing whether I’m getting it right. It’s a miserable, incomprehensible, time-consuming job, especially onerous given the inherent unfairness of our tax system.

Plus some of this stuff…well, I just don’t want to be reminded. It would be good, for example, not to have to dwell on how much the most basic healthcare is costing me: in 2011 I spent $6,028 on Medicare Part D, Medigap insurance, long-term care insurance, and dental, vision and medical care that was not covered.

D’you have any idea how much more that is than I used to pay for the same level of care while I had a salary? It’s just phenomenal! Lose your job, lose your income, and the cost of health insurance skyrockets.

That figure doesn’t even count the $111 a month (or so…I’ve lost track) Social Security withholds to cover Medicare Part B.

If I were paying now what I paid for healthcare when I had a job, I could live fairly comfortably in unemployment without having to make like an anchorite. And you know what? When I’ve been sick as a hound dog for something over a month, that is something I really would rather not contemplate.

Especially since my doctors so resent the chintzy reimbursements from Medicare that I can’t even get past their damn gatekeepers, who just brush me off when I call to tell them I’m not getting a whole lot better. Higher cost, lower quality.

Oh well. At least  we’re getting an early start on it this year. Maybe, with any luck, entering my personal data in Quickbooks will reduce the amount of work next January and cut the number of hours—and cost—of 2012 tax prep. That’s something. I guess.

How about yourself? Have you started? Have you found a system that makes your taxpaying life any easier?

Having been vetoed by our governor last year, our wacko legislators are trying again to make it legal for students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on college campuses.

Does anyone need any other evidence of how crazy these people are? Even after the bonkers defunct Senator Russell Pearce was yanked out of office by a recall election, they just don’t get the picture that Arizona still has some rational citizens.

Pearce promptly found new work as the state Republican party’s vice-chairman (its no. 2 position) and still maintains a Web page describing himself as Senator. Why bother to take it down, after all? He intends to run again to take the seat back.

When (not “if,” I’m afraid) they finally push this crazy legislation through, I’ll need to consider whether I really want to stay in the classroom, or if there’s some other way to make what passes for a living here.

It sounds melodramatic to say you’re not going to stand in front of a class when who knows how many students are toting pistols around. But to understand the situation, all you have to do is watch the video of Pima Community College that poor nut case Jared Loughner posted before he shot an elected representative and a bunch of innocent citizens, including a child.

Loughner is far from unique. Every college and university campus hosts a few people who are so far lost in the wilds of mental illness that they’re capable of anything. The last thing we need to do is make it OK for them to arm themselves. And between you and me, I don’t think it’s worth risking my life to earn $2,400 per 16-week class.

The idea that if everyone is armed we’re all going be safe…my god! Is it even possible to express how absurd that is?

In the first place, the fact is most people do not easily shoot another human being, all bragging to the contrary. No matter what we think we’ll do, few of us know exactly how we will react under stress. It takes training—a lot of it—to prepare a person to make a decision, under duress, to kill another person and then to do it quickly and accurately.

And in the second place, few American citizens get that kind of training. At civilian ranges you learn to shoot at motionless targets. By and large it takes military or police training to learn to shoot a moving target accurately, and it takes a great deal of psychological preparation to shoot a moving target that happens to be a human being. How many of the 18-year-olds wandering around college campuses have that kind of training? A few returning veterans may, but that’s about it. And I can guarantee that not one in a hundred college professors have a trained shootist’s mindset.

My father was a military sharpshooter and he remained a firearms enthusiast all his life. I have one of his guns, and yes, I’d use it against an intruder, given the right circumstances. But I don’t practice often enough to delude myself that I could strike an assailant in a classroom without hitting a kid, too—or even that I could get at a pistol in time to do much if such a person burst into the room.

My own strategy for avoiding harm is simply to stay out of harm’s way. And since our legislators propose to bring a lot more harm into my workplace, I guess it’s time to consider how I might find some other workplace.

At my age, there’s not much I’ll be able to do. But I have considered that during this relatively slow semester I could get myself licensed as a Realtor. The course, I’m told, is very easy, and as an adjunct “employee” I can probably take it for free through the community college. While I’m not much of a salesperson, I certainly could work as an assistant in a real estate office. In Arizona, you need a Realtor’s license even to work as a gofer for a real estate office. Pay would be low—but what I’m earning now is lower than low. A part-time job filling out forms and answering phones would at least bring in money through the summer instead of just eight months a year.

Real estate. Maybe it’s time to take a closer look at that.

So, what do you think about the flap over the Pink Ribbon set’s slap in the face to Planned Parenthood, wherein the Susan G. Komen breast cancer charity announced it was cutting off its funding to one of the major providers of women’s healthcare because (horrors!) it provides contraceptive care and ends unwanted pregnancies.

Predictably, it sure makes me mad as a cat.

Reproductive care—including decisions about when and under what circumstances one is going to bear a child—is a central part of women’s health care. Many more of us ovulate and get pregnant than fall victim to breast cancer. An organization whose mission is to save women’s lives ought to be able to get the message that there’s more to women’s lives (and deaths) than boobs.

In the past, friends have asked me to join them in Susan G. Komen “Race for the Cure” walks. I’ve gone along with them, even though I think it’s pretty silly to imagine that walking up and down the streets is going to cure cancer. In fact, despite all the money that’s been thrown at the problem, metastatic breast cancer is not a lot less fatal today than it was twenty years ago. I will admit, I’ve found the pinkiness and the stuffed animals vaguely offensive; more vocally radical women and articulate patients who claim this sicky-sweet motif infantilizes women and turns breast cancer awareness into a merchandizing opportunity have got something there.

Vaguely offended, however, is different from effin’ outraged.

I have walked my last Susan G. Comen mile and donated my last Susan G. Comen dollar. If I have any cash left over at the end of this month’s budget cycle, it’s going straight to Planned Parenthood.

Join me if you dare!

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Surprise! Something didn’t go wrong for a change!

Last month I figured I was $650 or so in the hole, but that was wrong because I’d forgotten to enter the $225 bill for the oven repair. So January actually ended about $875 in the red. {sigh}

Hoping to recover sometime before the utility bills heat up in lockstep with the weather (according to NASA, temps are supposed to go up about 2 degrees in these parts, which would give us 118- to 120-degree days this summer), I’m pinching every penny this month.

Yesterday I went to turn the heat on under a pan and…nothing. The burner would not  light. The other three burners were OK, but this one: dead.

Well, of course it’s the front right-hand burner, the one I use the most. So I figure I’m going to have to call the appliance repair guy again. That’ll be another $250, no doubt.

But since he’s such a nice appliance repair guy, I decide I’d better clean the filthy stove, which I haven’t felt well enough to do since I came down with the present epizootic two weeks ago. It’s extravagantly greasy and dirty.

So last night I put the burner grates in the dishwasher. Soaked the small parts in dish detergent and hot water. Cleaned the shiny parts with white paste for cleaning glass stovetops.

This morning I put the thing back together, admiring how shiny and beautiful it looked. Wondered if the issue was in the burner cap thingie instead of the burner itself. So switched those thingies back and forth, turned on the switch, and…voilà! On it came!

Saved!

I can’t call this a DIY repair, because I didn’t try to fix anything. Apparently whatever was the matter cleared out when I soaked the burner cap thingie and then let it air-dry.

Hallelujah!

Only 20 more days of austerity this month. If nothing else happens, the budget will recover a little. That’ll leave one more month to recover before the utility bills start to rise again. w00t!

By Friday afternoon, I was so sick! And coughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. The voice was gone—for three or four days it was all I could do to whisper, not because of laryngitis (as in a cold settling into your throat) but because the unstoppable violent cough was tearing up the windpipe. I called a Safeway pharmacist and asked if he could recommend a cough medicine that would work.

“Only one cough medication will work,” said he, “and you’ll have to get a prescription: codeine. Dextromethorphan does nothing—it’s practically useless.”

Roger that, pal! “I’m kind of afraid to ask my doctor for codeine,” I said. “He’ll think I’m drug-seeking.”

“Well, you’ll have to get over that,” he said.

So I called the Mayo and repeated to the gatekeeper lady what the guy had said. When I said “…and the pharmacist said I should ask for a codeine cough medicine,” she took on a real snippy tone and said “uh-HUH!” She didn’t hang up on me but said a nurse would call back. Which of course never happened.

Gasping for air and no longer able to speak above a whisper, I finally e-mailed my son and asked him if he would ask his P.A. friend to write me a scrip for a cough med that worked. Finally, around 6 or 7 p.m., this elicited the desired pharmaceutical. My son went up to the Safeway to retrieve it, where he found that Medicare and Medigap absolutely positively will not cover it. Fortunately, it only cost $20. Wouldn’t have mattered…I’d have paid a hundred bucks for it.

And it worked, just like it worked when I was a teenaged girl and used to get these nasty coughs. And no, it did not poison me and it did not make me high. It did, however, allow me to get to sleep for a few hours.

By Saturday morning the cough was still gawdawful but at least was more or less controllable. Sunday it was still terrible, but less so: the throat started to heal up and the torso hurt less with each heave. It took a half-hour to quiet last night’s regular evening frenzy, but I slept until 4, when after a brief coughing frenzy another dose put me back to sleep. This morning the cough-fest was not so bad that I needed any medication, and by about 9 a.m., lo! it pretty much started to settle down.

Now, this very evening, I can talk! Actual words, in an actual voice! Not a single coughing frenzy all day long, and no doses of codeine since 4:00 a.m. Along about 3:00 p.m. my appetite started to come back. It even occurred to me that I wouldn’t mind a bourbon and water—haven’t even been able to look at my favorite potables for the past ten days.

Obviously, I’m holding off on the boozie-poo, just in case another frenzy strikes this evening or during the night. But if this state of affairs stays stable through tomorrow…gosh, maybe I could have a glass of wine with dinner tomorrow night!

In the course of double-checking whether it would be safe to take codeine for bronchitis, I found out why Big Brother is so anxious to keep this useful and highly effective antitussive out of our gummy little hands.

The Moron Brigade has decided that drinking cough medicine is THE way to get stoned! Sunovabiche.

Google “codeine cough medicine,” and up come all these sites where groups of morons advise each other on how to get high on the stuff. Idiots like to mix it with Sprite—the resulting tasty elixir is cutely called “purple drank.” This stuff has been popularized by moron rappers and moron athletes, making the only medication that actually works on a severe cough a very hot item on the moron market.

I found not one but two message boards where stupes were trading dosages and recipes. One of the nitwits actually posted the Rx number of her prescription on the freaking Internet!!!

Where’s yore sign, honey?

IMHO, trying to interdict this stuff, or any of the various intoxicants numbskulls and nitwits like to play with, is the wrong approach.

Instead, street drugs and prescription pharmaceuticals should be made freely available, just like alcohol and nicotine.

And, in the same moment the chains go off, legislation should be enacted to take the chains off ERs, insurance companies, Medicaid, and Medicare. To wit: if you make yourself sick or injure yourself by getting stoked up on a harmful drug, then you pay for your own medical care. If you can’t pay, hospitals will be allowed—nay, required—to turn you away. Your health insurer not only does not have to but will be legally enjoined from covering medical bills that result directly from a patient’s drug abuse. Ditto Medicaid: it will not be allowed to cover medical bills arising from drug or alcohol abuse. If you cause a car wreck and harm someone else or damage someone else’s property, your victims’ insurer will cover their bills, but by law you will be required to reimburse that insurer.

You say you’re a turnip? That’s OK. By law, your wages, your welfare payments, your alimony, your child support payments, your Social Security benefits will be garnished until such time as you cough up all the money…which probably will be for the rest of your miserable lifetime.

And if you can’t cover your own care, if you don’t have a credit card or a checking account or a friend or relative who’ll lend you tens of thousands of dollars to fork over to a hospital or the victims of your negligence, will the taxpayer take pity on you? Hell, no. If you can’t pay, you can go to meet your maker, removing one fleck of blight from the face of this planet.

Harsh?

Well, yeah.

But doesn’t it seem just the slightest bit harsh to you that normal human beings can’t get a bottle of the only cough nostrum that actually works because a few nitwits decide to spike their soft drinks with it? Doesn’t it seem just a bit harsh that all of us are underwriting the medical bills and the prison-cell rental for hare-brains who get in cars and pick up weapons while they’re spaced out on dope?

We’re too damn kind to these fools. We need to let them suffer the consequences of their behavior, and make them pay the bills for it.

The accountant is getting antsy for 1099s. Where are the 1099s? Don’t I know it’s TIME TO DO THE TAXES? Well….yes. Where are the 1099s, there in the disorganized organization that passes for my file drawers?

Thought I’d saved the PDFs to disk. But if I did, I can’t find them. As the desktop iMac has slowly faded into senility, I’ve slowly migrated my operations to the MacBook. But the MacBook won’t talk to the decrepit printer; the only computer I can print off of is the iMac. The iMac is connected to the external hard drive, and so I’m constantly e-mailing stuff back and forth because I never have figured out how to hard wire them together and because the directory organization is now different in the two machines and I don’t want them getting conflated and because I’ve been too lazy and too techno-flummoxed to update to whatever species of large cat is the current OS so I can get into iCloud and right now I’m too sick to brave the crowds at the Apple store to contend with that. Which is a disorganized way of saying no, I’m not organized!

The trouble with a small business is that like membership in Medicare, it breeds great wads of paper. Paper multiplies in my file drawers as wire coat hangers breed in the dark of a closet. I need more file cabinet space. And I need to quit structuring my filing system on the fly.

So this morning the dogs got locked out of the room while I spread the contents of several hanging file folders across the floor and reorganized them. Now, I think, we have it:

Hanging file 1: S-Corp receipts

• File Folder: Receipts: current year
• File Folder: Receipts: last year
• File Folder: Receipts: from long ago

Hanging file 2: S-corp tax stuff

• File Folder: Tax paper: current year
• File Folder: Tax paper: last year
• File Folder: Tax paper: from long ago

Hanging file 3: S-corp incorporation papers

• File Folder: CE Desk incorporation paperwork

Hanging file 4: Website hosting and monetizing

• File Folder: Domain names
• File Folder: Bluehost
• File Folder: Adsense

And what, you might reasonably ask, is meant by the term “tax paper”? Well, it’s all those pieces of paper people throw at you or you throw at others that might have some bearing on tax preparation other than receipts for purchases: stubs for checks received showing the job for which the check paid; statements sent to the issuers of said checks; statements sent from vendors; several strange pieces of paper emanated by the Great Desert University. If I don’t know how to classify it and I think someday an auditor will demand to see it, that’s where it goes.

Yeah, I know: why the hell aren’t I scanning all this garbage to disk?

Well, first because my scanner runs s-o-o-o-o-o slowly that it’s actually painful to use. There are other things I’d rather do, in the brief time allotted to me on this earth, than sit here and watch that scanner groan along.

Second, because I don’t trust digital stuff. It’s all very nice to back it up to a hard disk. But what happens when the burglars steal that along with your computer?

Third, because I figure iCloud comes with my MacMail subscription and that’s where I ought to be storing this stuff. It’s cheaper than Carbonite and looks like it will be easier to use. Maybe.

Fourth, because I’ve been too lazy to break free enough time to go deal with the Apple people and figure out how to get iCloud going.

Fifth, because I’ve been putting all that off until I buy a new iMac (or something) but haven’t gotten around to buying a new iMac (or something) because I haven’t decided which I really need, a new iMac or a second MacBook or a Mac Mini with a large monitor/TV screen, and besides I need a new printer/scanner but haven’t figured out which one of those I want, either. We call that “cascading excuses.”

It’s the Niagara Falls of cascading excuses, come to think of it.

Time to turn off the tap on the excuses. Let’s consider what we need to save and how it can best be organized to simplify data storage and retrieval.

For your business you need:

• Records of your business’s organization and registration with government agencies
• Proof of income
• Proof of expenses
• Records of payments to contractors and agents
• Banking records
• Credit card records
• Copies of government forms filled out and submitted by you
• Copies of government forms filled out and submitted by your paid contractors, agents, and customers
• Information about your vendors, clients, and subcontractors

Almost all of these are now accessible electronically and can be saved as PDFs. Others, such as hard-copy checks, can be scanned to disk.

The ideal filing system, in my ideal world, would have electronic and hard-copy incarnations, and both would be organized along the same lines.

Online

Folder: Receipts

• Scanned receipts for operating expenses, supplies, and travel
• Scanned or downloaded receipts for website hosting, domain names

Folder: Clients & correspondence

• Copies of e-mail correspondence
• Scanned copies of hard-copy correspondence
• Spreadsheet recording clients’ e-mails, Website addresses, snail-mail addresses, rates, amounts billed, and amounts collected
• Statements to clients, organized by client name and date

Folder: Incorporation Records

• Scanned copies of original incorporation forms and records
• Copies of annual corporate reports
• Scanned copies of payment records

Folder: Subcontractors

• Each person’s W-9
• Each person’s 1099
• Invoices from each subcontractor

Folder: Banking records

• Copies of checks scanned for e-deposit
• Monthly or semi-monthly Quickbooks downloads
• Scanned or downloaded copies of credit card statements
• Scanned or downloaded bank account statements
• Downloaded PayPal statements

Folder: Income records

• Adsense statements
• Amazon Associates statements
• Advertiser statements
• Royalty statements
• PDF pay statements from community college (personal, really; but might as well keep all the income records together)

Hard Copy

Hanging file folder: Receipts

• Receipts: Original receipts for every expense
• Charitable Giving: Receipts for donations

Hanging file folder: Statements and Invoices

• Statements from vendors and business organizations
• Invoices to clients

Hanging file folder: Correspondence

• Any hard-copy correspondence that arrives or is sent by snail-mail
• Printouts of e-mail correspondence that might be important

Hanging file folder: Incorporation records

• Annual reports
• Copies of annual government fee
• Original incorporation papers

Hanging file folder: Website hosting

• Bluehost
• Domain name records

Hanging file folder: Subcontractors

• W-9s
• 1099s
• Invoices from subcontractors

Hanging file folder: Banking records

• Original checks scanned for e-deposit with bank receipt printout
• Monthly or semi-monthly Quickbooks downloads, hard copy
• Original credit card statements
• Original bank account statements
• Downloaded PayPal statements, hard copy

Hanging file folder: Pay statements

• Printouts of community college pay statements

Hmh. That’s going to take a few hours (as in “days and days”) to put together. Meanwhile of course we’ll be keeping up with blogging, teaching, editing copy, and hustling business at the same time.

The heck with it. I’m going to take a nap.

Have you got a system? What’s it look like?

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Last night the wind blew briskly enough to pick up several sections of the newspaper that I’d left on the table under the patio cover. It pulled each section apart and scattered newspaper pages all over the yard. One double-truck spread even landed in the pool.

Took all of about ten seconds to walk around and pick these up. The result, after this heavy labor:

Lookee there! Ten feet down, not ONE devil pod or devil leaf. Floating atop the surface, not ONE blob of devil-tree pollen.

That is one litter-free pool!

Mwa ha ha! I am going to be so happy to burn the logs from the accursed devil-pod tree in the fireplace next winter!

Because the nights have been unusually warm, the water’s not even very cold. And today was lovely, warm and sunny. If I weren’t pounding on Death’s door with some lunger epizootic, I’d consider taking a plunge.

Cassie, late the beaten-down 25-pound victim of the gallumphing Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy, has come into her own. All of a sudden one day it dawned on her that even though he weighs three times more than she does, she’s bigger than him.

The astonishing thing is, he thinks so, too. She actually chases him around the yard, around and around the trees and back and forth in a great steeplechase. Haven’t managed any good photos of these antics, because they’re very fast and digital cameras are very slow. Cassie moves like a rocket; the only reason Charley can outrun her is that one of his strides equals about eight of hers. And, I think, she lets him outrun her—that’s part of the game. In any event, attempts to photograph them end in brown and white blurs.

Cassie cultivates an absolutely terrifying wolf-like growl. Addressed to a human, it would make you or me climb up the nearest tree. Charley thinks it’s hilarious. He rears back on his hind legs, assumes a goofy grin, and waves his front paws at her. This causes her to charge him, growling, roaring, and snapping. She never makes contact—clearly she has no intention of biting. But you couldn’t prove that by me.

In addition to the dawn steeplechase, we have the daily Bully-Stick Competition. Dried bull dongs are to dogs as diamonds and rubies are to humans. Except humans don’t eat diamonds and rubies. This morning I realized Charley is deliberately baiting Cassie with these things.

Usually I give each dog a bully stick (gotta be fair around here). Instead of one dog going off in one corner and the other to another corner to chew, Cassie drops hers on the floor and charges Charley, growling and barking. She takes his away from him. He walks over and grabs the other one. She drops her prize and goes after him again. He jumps up in the air and waves his paws around. And so it goes, loudly and boisterously, for 15 or 20 minutes. Often Cassie loses interest in the object and comes into my office to sleep under the desk. Charley then ends up with both of them.

Yesterday when he was here he left one of these pricey toys—which cost about as much as diamonds and rubies—in the back yard. So when he went out on the porch for his morning policing of the property (he has to be sure everything is still in its place), I handed it to him. Cassie was in the kitchen glaring out at him. He picked it up and threw it at her. Well of course she emitted a lupine roar and charged out the door like a wild beast in a Roman arena. A huge “fight” ensued, with much bouncing, barking, growling, and lunging. Ridiculous!

Sometimes these encounters end with Charley standing four-footed in front of her and emitting a long series of monotonous barks: warf! warf! warf! warf! warf! warf!… “SHUT UP, DOG!”

Apparently in Dogese “warf!” means “mine!” Or maybe “give it back!”

At any rate, from the Human’s perspective, it’s a relief to see that she now can hold her own with him. Clearly he’s not going to hurt her. And it’s interesting to consider how long it’s taken for them to come to this accommodation. Maybe it’s because he was such a young puppy at first…possibly female dogs have some instinct that prevents them from beating up on little pups. Or possibly a pup has to achieve some maturity before it learns how pack hierarchy works. Whatever, now that he’s about seven months old, she has unmistakably established her primacy.

Charley in hot pursuit

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Yesterday morning M’hijito’s battery died. So I had to drive up to his place and chauffeur him to work, and then pick him up after work and lend him the Dog Chariot so he could chase down a battery. My friend La Maya asked why we don’t have a AAA (American Automobile Association) membership, since they allegedly will come and replace the battery for you, wherever you are.

Welp. There’s a reason we don’t. We’ve both had some pretty negative experiences with AAA, which is not cheap—membership in the Arizona branch ranges from $55 to $165 a year.

After M’hijito graduated from college, he was working in San Francisco and driving a junker that was second-hand when he’d gotten it in high school and that had barely survived the usual first-driver’s-license crash. I was concerned about him driving that thing back and forth across Death Valley and waypoints, and so I bought him a AAA membership. We sustained the membership for several years, and he still had it when the dot-com bust left him unemployed and forced him to return to Arizona.

It was a very unhappy and very harassed young man who loaded up his gear and set off across the inland valleys and deserts in 110-degree heat. Naturally, his car crapped out in the middle of nowhere…across the Arizona line. He called AAA for help, and they refused to help him!

Why? Because he was a member of the California AAA, and it didn’t apply if he was out of the state.

Uhm. Well. That was a new one on me. Boy, was I pissed when he got home with that story!

It took the kid forever to get himself rescued from somewhere in the desert outside of Blythe and to get his car operable enough to limp the rest of the way into Phoenix.

Strike 1.

Then there was the time SDXB bought the RV. On our maiden voyage, we were cruising back from Flagstaff and hit the Valley at mid-day in 115-degree heat. As we were tooling down the I-17, a tire blew and knocked a hole in the truck’s side.

SDXB, being a manly man, would never think of calling for help. He pulled out the jack the previous owner had left and…voilà! It wasn’t a truck jack! It didn’t fit the vehicle’s Dodge chassis.

It’s hard to describe how hot an asphalt pavement is on a 115-degree day. SDXB gets down on the ground and starts to wrestle with this thing, trying to figure a way to jack the truck up enough that he can get the spare on.

Finally, I walk off the freeway (this is pre-cell days) and hike through the unholy heat to a bar up the road. By the time I get there I’m close to fainting. The hostess asks if she should call 911. I say no, I just need a glass of water, but we may need 911 for my boyfriend up the road. She lets me use their pay phone to call AAA.

And once again, they will not come!

Why? Because contrary to what SDXB was told by their sales rep, AAA does not cover RVs!

I called the Highway Patrol’s roadside assistance. They never showed up. Several cops passed us; they ignored us. I hiked back to the bar a second time and called for help again. No one ever came to help us.

Finally a big, scary biker type in a gas-guzzling junker pulled over. He had a truck jack with him. He jumped out of his car, whipped out the jack, and changed the damn tire for SDXB, who by then was about to expire.

Strike 2.

And then there was the time I took my German shepherd, Anna, hiking in the Dreamy Draw desert preserve. Again, it was a very hot day. Though we’d started at dawn, by the time we got back to the trailhead it was coming on to 9:00 a.m. and temps were fast rising toward 100 degrees. None of the water fountains in the parking lot worked, and we had run out of water.

Dog jumps in the car. I turn the ignition: nothing. Battery’s dead.

I didn’t have a cell, but talked a fellow hiker into letting me use his to call AAA.

Half an hour later, a AAA truck shows up. The large, unfriendly driver little-womans me and says he’ll jump-start the battery (no offer was made to provide a new battery). Anna dislikes this guy at first sight, and I can tell from her body language that she’s calculating how best to remove his lower leg. So I put her in the back seat and then I say OK, but let me turn on the ignition. And I say, in no uncertain terms, Please let me start the ignition. Do not try to get in my car! The dog will bite you if you do!

I was not kidding, but apparently because the little woman said it, he figured it was OK to ignore this advice. He hooked up the jumper cables and then, before I could stop him, he grabbed the door and hopped into the driver’s seat.

Of course, the German shepherd just went bat-shit! He dodged out of the car a fraction of an instant before she could nail him.

He was so pissed off, and my saying “that’s why I asked you to let me start the car” didn’t help his mood. He stalked off and roared out of the parking lot.

The instant I sat down in the front seat, the car died again. His truck was not out of sight.

I borrowed another cell phone, called AAA, and told them the car had died before the guy had got a half-a-block down the road. The despatcher said he would turn around and come back.

An hour and a half later, which the dog and I passed in 100-degree heat with no shade and no water, another truck came along.

Strike 3.

I canceled my AAA then and have never re-upped. Considering the number of years I had belonged to AAA—most of my adult life—and the very, very few times I’d called for help, I would say no, AAA is absolutely, positively not worth the cost. When I’ve needed them most, they’ve let me down.