For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #102: It's All A Blur!, Carly wants to see something that's blurry or blurred - not by inept photography or due to limitations of a camera, but out in the world. Tricky, but I did come up with something.
It's been miserably humid today. The airport got 0.03" of rain last night, but I don't think that the thunder I heard for the second night in a row was followed by a drop of rain here. It was very hot and humid in the church this morning under my alb (a plain, white, long-sleeved vestment), and I was sweating and panting before the morning was over. Some of that moisture found its way onto my glasses, blurring my vision more than it is already.
Here's the main thing I want to show you. One common feature of the monsoon, as I mentioned Friday night, is the buildup of clouds over the mountains, which sometimes blurs the visual distinction between land and sky. How quickly can you spot the mountains in this picture?
That was a relatively easy one. There are times when clouds obscure the mountains entirely. Here's a slightly more extreme example from 2006.
Continuing my theme of weather-related blurring, here's a shot taking during a monsoon thunderstorm on July 31, 2007. I don't think I've driven in worse visibility than Southern California fog, but Florida storms are a close second, and Arizona ones, at their worst, aren't all that far behind Florida. And I love it. I am posting this particular shot for the first time; there are even more extreme ones from the same day that I've used before.
From the same day: I remember this moment. For once I actually sat in the parking lot at First Magnus, watching the temperature fall and waiting for the rain to ease off a little before driving away.
Well, that was a total bust. When I proposed the Round Robin topic "About the Weather," based on suggestions by Steven of (sometimes) photoblog (now defunct) and Julie of Julie's Web Journal, Tucson had just had a reasonably spectacular thunderstorm as part of our annual Arizona monsoon. Prime time for the monsoon is July and August, so I thought I'd almost certainly be able to photograph some more dramatic weather for you. If it didn't work out, I'd show you the less-dramatic weather we got instead. And if all else failed, I could always go with photos of dramatic weather from past years.
The day after the rain: Alamo Wash on July 31, 2010.
Plan B it is, then. You know how much rain Tucson has had in August? A tenth of an inch. Phooey. Average rainfall here in August is supposed to be 2.3", so we're well behind. Last year's monsoon fizzled in August also, with a total rainfall of 0.33" for the entire month. I wouldn't be at all surprised if our decade or more of drought turned out to be due to climate change. During 2001 to 2009, three years had a total rainfall for the season (mid-June to mid-September) of under three inches each, less than half of the current century-plus average of 6.06".
Clouds over the mountains - and nowhere else.
What typically happens is, we get a nice buildup of clouds in the afternoon, almost all of it over the mountains that surround the city. If the clouds spread to the sky overhead, an actual thunderstorm starts to seem likely. All too often, though, it rains over the mountains and leaves the city gasping for water - or it dissipates entirely, with no rain in the area at all. We're supposed to get about 11 inches of rain a year here in the desert, just over half of it during the monsoon. All too often recently, the monsoon hasn't done its job. Over the past decade, we've only had three years of above-average monsoon rainfall - and two of those were above average by less than three quarters of an inch.
Distant rain.
Back at the beginning of July, when the photo above was taken, I had high hopes for this year's monsoon, and a greater-than usual longing for it. The humidity was building, making 100 degrees feel hotter than 114 degrees had in June. Every day I wondered, "Is it here yet? Is the monsoon coming? When is it going to rain and cool things off?" I kept checking the National Weather Service/NOAA site dedicated to the Arizona monsoon, looking for a notice that "The 2010 monsoon started on July 3, 2010" or somesuch. They used to post this info every year, based on the following calculation:
The monsoon start date is determined when the average daily
dewpoint is 54 degrees or greater for "3" consecutive days.
The start date is the first of the "3" consecutive days.
What I didn't know was that NOAA decided several years ago to stop naming the official start of the monsoon by this definition, probably because it's hard to compare monsoons from year to year without using the same date range for each. Now the monsoon officially starts on June 15th, whether the sky is ready or not. This year it wasn't. We had just under a quarter of an inch of rain in June.
Temporary relief.
When it does rain, it can make a huge difference in the temperature. Trust me, 76 degrees is unusually cool for a Saturday morning at the end of July!
Storm over St. Matt's.
Still, I should be grateful for the 2.30" in July. Besides, the season's not over yet. We may yet get a gullywasher or two.
Karen
P.S. It's 4:18 AM, and I just heard thunder! Hooray! So did Cayenne, and she's come to me for comfort.
Now let's go see what the weather has been like for other Robins:
Linking List
as of 7:52 PM MST/PDT, August 14, 2010 (C)
I got a voicemail tonight from Rita at Arizona's Department of Economic Security (DES). My weekly claim for unemployment benefits (I stand to get about $40 to $50 this week from the combined state and Federal governments, representing a total of $240 less my earnings) was not processed because of wages earned in the State of Florida. Say what?
The only time in my life that I actually lived in Florida was in 1976 when my mom moved to Cape Canaveral after the divorce. I did not have a job that summer, and haven't visited that state at all since 1993. So I was hard pressed to figure out what the State of Arizona was talking about. Was it the $27 refund against a fraudulent charge on one of my credit cards? Had someone at DES accidentally entered a Florida church called St. Matthew's or St. Michael and All Angels into my electronic file? Did it have something to do with the First Magnus bankruptcy and lawsuit?
Bingo.
Back in January, I wrote about two pieces of long-awaited mail I had just received. One was a paycheck for $186.72, more than tripling what I had been paid to date for my last two weeks of work at First Magnus Financial Corp in August 2007, leading up to the day the company collapsed. The other was for $706.43 after taxes, in settlement of a class action lawsuit against the company for closing its doors without proper notice to employees. Apparently the Binford Vs. First Magnus Capital settlement check was issued in Florida, and I hadn't noticed. This was the check that DES misinterpreted as 2010 wages earned in the State of Florida. The national headquarters of First Magnus, which was where I worked back in 2007, was at the corner of Fifth and Wilmot in Tucson, directly across the street from St. Michael and All Angels. First Magnus had branch offices all over the country; the class action suit was probably filed by someone from one of its Florida branches.
The First Magnus headquarters in Tucson, April 2007
When I got the voicemail tonight (my cell phone had fallen out of my pocket), I called back and waited on hold for half an hour, which isn't bad by DES standards. The deputy who eventually answered was Rita, the same person who had left the message. Together we worked out what this Florida income was. I explained that it was a settlement for company wrongdoing, not wages for working in Florida. Rita documented all this clearly, and resubmitted my weekly claim, the third attempt to do so.
This was all on my mind, however, and I thought it would make a good blog entry - and besides, it would be good to look up exactly what I received and when. So I started writing this very blog entry, and searching my blog from January for info on that settlement check. (The relevant blog entry is here.)
Black Thursday, August, 2007
It was at about this point that Rita called back. She had sent the claim in with the explanation, and a supervisor was apparently not satisfied. They now are requiring me to write a letter explaining the situation, which I am supposed to fax to them at 602-364-1210. I intend to send them a copy of this blog entry, or some version thereof. That way they have the explanation in detail, and also know that I've gone public about it, for whatever that's worth. I have to wonder whether this is happening to any of the other 500+ former employees of First Magnus in Arizona. I can't be the only one who has had difficulty remaining fully employed since that dark day in 2007.
A local tv news camera crew sets up in front of the FMFC entrance, August 2007
Let me make this as clear as I can, to my readers and especially to DES. I have received two checks this year related to First Magnus Financial Corp, a company I last worked for on August 16th, 2007, the day I and nearly everyone else cleared out our desks. One check, administered through a liquidation trust, was for $186.72, in partial payment of back wages from August 2007. The other check, labeled Binford v. First Magnus Capital Settlement Award, was my portion of a class action settlement in a dispute between former First Magnus employees and one of the corporations related to FMFC, namely First Magnus Capital. (I believe FMC existed mostly to protect certain assets from FMFC creditors.) Neither check was in payment of wages earned after August 16, 2007, in Florida or anywhere else. The check for $706.43 was not for wages at all. It was in settlement of an action against FMFC for closing its doors without any advance notice to employees.
I've also discovered a possible reason why all this came up this week, just before the three year anniversary of First Magnus's collapse and eight months after the issuing of those two checks. In the unopened mail from this week (which I'm going to take over opening because John hates it so much) is a W-2 for 2008, replacing a 1099 that the First Magnus Liquidating Trust issued instead. The total amount of the wages paid to me in 2008, for which all this paperwork is necessary, and probably including a revised tax return, is $70.83. Like the $186.72, it represents a partial payment of my back wages from early August 2007. They still owe me about $600, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'll let you know whether I get the $40 or $50, or indeed any further unemployment benefits. If I were the paranoid type, I'd think this had something to do with my Tuesday night blog entries. But that's just silly, right?
This is the rant that's been building up in me for weeks. I was going to cover it in a two-paragraph aside in the entry below this one, but, in true rant fashion, I've gone on about it quite a bit longer than intended.; So a quick copy-paste, a few edits and expansions, and here we are:
Weekend Assignment #330: Op-Ed
Time to flex your writing muscle again, because for this week only, the Weekend Assignment blog is being changed to The Weekend Assignment Chronicle! Now, we need some Op-Eds to make things a little more interesting around here. Your assignment is to pick a current event and write your opinion regarding it. Anything goes. Write about politics, the economy, or maybe even your opinion about an incident in pop culture. It's all good. It's good to exchange opinions, especially when it's done with respect. So, feel free to speak up here!
Extra Credit: Do you read the Op-Eds? Yes? No? Tell us about it!
August 2007 - my personal economic crash as my employer went bankrupt.
As someone who has been unable to find full-time, permanent work as an accountant since the third economy-devastated industry I worked in laid me off over two years ago, and as someone who manages the finances of a disabled woman who lives on Social Security and food stamps, I'm frustrated with pretty much all levels of government right now. Congress is reducing food stamps, squeezing our poorest people on the grounds that the government can't afford to help them, and besides, maybe they're just lazy and don't deserve our help. They also spent months refusing to extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans, people made chronically jobless by our faltering economy. (They finally got the bill to go through when the late Senator Byrd's replacement was appointed.) Even when this bill was passed and signed into law, it only extended unemployment for people like me, who are not past the 99 week mark in their unemployment benefits;. It does not help my brother, or any of the other "99ers."
What Republicans and deficit-hawk Democrats don't tell you is that benefits for the poor and the unemployed are generally accepted by economists of all ideologies as the most economy-stimulating spending there is. Money paid to such people is likely to be spent immediately on food and other necessities, which helps to keep people employed who sell the food and necessities. The poor and unemployed also pay sales tax, putting money into the empty coffers of financially-strapped states and communities so they don't have to lay off teachers and police and firefighters. Republicans insist that we can't afford to help these people, and anyway they're just lazy bums who don't want to work; never mind that they represent about 10% of the nations workforce and that there are, on average, 5 unemployed for every job. An unemployed teacher or, ahem, accountant, isn't a great match for a job making submarine sandwiches anyway. Most job openings I personally see are for selling insurance, a task I'd be truly abysmal at, or for accepting payments on a home computer on behalf of an overseas company I've never heard of, in return for a commission. It sounds uncomfortably like what's known as a "Nigerian scam." My friend S. talks about trying to find a job online; I shudder to think what she'll come up with, if anything.
So, yeah, Republicans and some Democrats think it's a fine idea to reduce the deficit by paying as little as possible to people like me, underemployed for three years this month; my brother, unemployed for over 99 weeks and therefore getting no unemployment at all, and incidentally with significant medical problems; and my friend S., living on Social Security and with physical and mental health disabilities. Her food stamps were recently reduced on an individual basis, and the only explanation given was that it was because her Social Security benefit went up, which it didn't. (I think they used a small, one-time extra SS payment all recipients got earlier this year as an excuse to artificially recalculate everyone's income as higher than it is, so the state doesn't have to pay out as much in food stamps.) I've seldom seen S. buy much more by way of groceries than bottled water, organic milk and cola, and maybe a loaf of french bread. At the end of July she ran out of food stamps and was unable to even buy that much. Her medical coverage is from state-run AHCCCS, which doesn't cover dental or vision or hearing. (S. has teeth missing, with no prospect of dentures or other treatment.) She is consistently treated rather badly by social workers and medical professionals. Most recently, the agency that pays part of her rent started sending $59 less than before, with no explanation, and no returning of phone calls. I as her representative payee have to make up the difference from her same unchanged Social Security check. How am I meant to do that?
But no, according to Republicans we can't afford to help people like S., because of the deficit, don't you know (deficit price tag for the extension of unemployment benefits: $33 billion), and because my mentally ill, arthritic friend in the scooter, a fibromyalgia sufferer, is somehow a lazy bum, the undeserving poor. Those same people insist that we must extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans, which, if made permanent, would add over $1 trillion to the deficit over a 10-year period. Yeah, that'll help. Such trickle-down, voodoo economics have been in place since 2001, and look where we are now.
On the extra credit question, I admit that I don't typically read newspapers, except sometimes the online versions. My op-ed pages are mostly two tv shows, Countdown with Keith Olbermann and The Rachel Maddow Show, and sometimes The Huffington Post. I feel a little guilty about not supporting Tucson's sole surviving daily newspaper, but I tended to spend the money without ever reading past page one. Sorry, TNI.
I was going to call my entry for Weekend Assignment #330: Op-Ed "Fear and Loathing in Arizona," but I'm in too good a mood for that. Let's start by listing what the assignment actually is, and then I'll tell you about my unexpected WA-related adventure:
Weekend Assignment #330: Op-Ed
Time to flex your writing muscle again, because for this week only, the Weekend Assignment blog is being changed to The Weekend Assignment Chronicle! Now, we need some Op-Eds to make things a little more interesting around here. Your assignment is to pick a current event and write your opinion regarding it. Anything goes. Write about politics, the economy, or maybe even your opinion about an incident in pop culture. It's all good. It's good to exchange opinions, especially when it's done with respect. So, feel free to speak up here!
Extra Credit: Do you read the Op-Eds? Yes? No? Tell us about it!
Originally I was going to rant a rant about Congress reducing food stamps and refusing to extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans, squeezing our poorest people and people made chronically jobless by our faltering economy. But then last night on The Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel mentioned that her executive producer, Bill Wolff, and producer/Maddow Blogger Laura Conaway, would be in Tucson Tuesday evening after a morning spent along the Arizona border near Nogales. Further details were announced on the Maddow Blog: Bill and Laura would be at a meet-up and watch party at the Hotel Congress at 6:30 PM. That was all I needed to know. I'm very fond of The Rachel Maddow Show, an MSNBC show of news and comment. Rachel is one of the smartest people in political broadcasting, someone devoted to factual research and rational thinking. She refutes factually-challenged claims nightly on TRMS, typically with an amused smile and the occasional chuckle. She is friendly and polite, even to people on the political right, who tend to be afraid to appear on her show, lest she disprove everything they say, usually with footage of those same people saying the opposite. She is, in short, a national treasure.
Bill Wolff, her executive producer, is the Lorne Michaels of broadcast news, just as funny but younger and cuter. (Sorry, but you are.) I like him a lot from his tv and online appearances, and I wanted his autograph; so I printed out a page of the Maddow Blog on which was printed a car's thermometer reading of 106 degrees. I'm sure lots of people told him today that it gets much hotter than that here, some days. It wasn't all that humid, so 106 today was relatively painless. Anyway, I brought a printout of that downtown to be signed, on the grounds that he couldn't autograph my tv.
There were about 150 people at the bar in the historic Hotel Congress, one of my favorite places downtown (the hotel, not the bar). Bill Wolff said he'd been expecting about twelve people, including his dad, who lives on the west side of town. They ran out of The Rachel Maddow Show hats before I got there, but I got a TRMS phone cover and a deck of MSNBC playing cards.
Getting "wired"
Producing from the bar with BlackBerry and webcam.
Shyness and courtesy prevented me from formally approaching Bill Wolff before or during the TRMS broadcast, but I stationed myself just a few feet to his right as he produced the show from his laptop. He had a not-very-good webcam and an earpiece, and the people at the other end of his live feed had a little trouble hearing him over the roar of the crowd. At one point shortly before the Arizona segment, his laptop's battery started to run down, and producer Laura Conaway scrambled to get it plugged in to an outlet behind the bar.
The time came for the Arizona segment, which opened with Wolff's interview with Sheriff Tony Estrada of Santa Cruz County, Arizona. Wolff was very impressed with the guy, who had a good sense of what's really going on along the border, and how at odds the reality is with the fear-mongering claims of politicians. The sheriff pointed out that the anti-immigrant fervor mostly comes from people in "the State of Maricopa County" (read: metro Phoenix) in the upper half of the state, several hours from the border. People in Tucson and the rest of Southern Arizona tend to be much more moderate in their views. The sheriff believes that politicians in Maricopa County fan the flames of xenophobia for political gain, and will move on to something else once they're safely reelected.
After the broadcast, other fans of the show told Bill Wolff about "Baja Arizona," the humorous concept that Democrat-leaning Southern Arizona would love to secede from the rest of the state, with a cutoff at the Gila River south of Phoenix. He liked that idea.
xxxxx
xxxxx
BAJA ARIZONA LIBRE!
xxxxx
xxxxx
By the way, when I Googled "baja arizona libre" I got a hit from husband John on the first page of results, from a two word comment on the Huffington Post. I told him about it and he laughed.
Eventually, with the intercession of a kindly stranger, I introduced myself to Bill Wolff. I told him that a few months ago I forwarded to him an email accidentally cc'ed to a Democrat by Russell Pearce, the fearmongering politician behind SB 1070. The email makes it clear that the purpose of a then-pending tweak to SB 1070 was to make it easier to harass Hispanic people in Arizona:
From: KS
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:
Sent: 4/29/2010 1:41:23 AM
Subject: Russell Pearce Message
Hi All,
Following is an email I've received, obviously by mistake, from AZ State Sen Russell Pearce to his legal advisor, Kris Koback of the University of Missouri Law School. Looks like they want to amend 1070 so that they can profile people with, say, cars up on blocks or too many people in a rental...in other words, poor people. I didn't quite know what to do with this, but noticing the confidential nature of it, thought I should forward it as widely as possible. God works in mysterious ways.
--ks
PS I'd already sent this to some of you, but thought that I should explain myself in this additional email.
From: russellpearce
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 11:23 PM
To: Russell K. Pearce ; ks
Subject: Fw: One more change!
This needs to go to Sarah on the amendment to clarify SB1070
----- Original Message -----
From: Kobach, Kris W.
To: russellpearce ; rpearce@azleg.gov
Sent: Wednesday, April 28, 2010 7:42 PM
Subject: One more change!
Russell,
I discussed all of the changes with Mike Hethmon and he concurred. But there is one additional point that he suggested--which you will certainly agree with. When we drop out "lawful contact" and replace it with "a stop, detention, or rest, in the enforcement a violation of any title or section of the Arizona code" we need to add "or any county or municipal ordinance." This will allow police to use violations of property codes (ie, cars on blocks in the yard) or rental codes (too many occupants of a rental accommodation) to initiate queries as well.
I have not received anything from the people on the phone this afternoon. Please ensure that they make this addition as well. Thanks!
Kris
***This communication is protected by attorney-client privilege. Do not share with others.
Then we chatted briefly about St. Michael's, and my parish's collective understanding of the human tragedy stemming from our broken immigration process. I said that most people from St. Michael's care about social justice, and that there's something seriously wrong when a thousand people die in the desert in a single year, just trying to make their way to a better life in a country where they can earn, by their standards, a living wage. Bill Wolff enthusiastically agreed. He said it was the most natural thing in the world for someone in a country with very little by way of money, jobs, or food to want to cross a border into a country where these things can be earned. He said that in all their mostly-"made-up" statistics, supporters of SB 1070 and the repeal of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (!) neglect to consider that these are human beings. That's very true. They're human beings, and they're suffering. But xenophobic politicians and their followers prefer to demonize these people, to think of them as mostly murderers and drug dealers, people who will break into your home, steal your job and use all the social services so there's nothing left for you.
Baloney. People in the country illegally pay sales taxes, in some cases property taxes, and in most cases payroll taxes, and take little or nothing out of the system. An undocumented worker often uses a fake Social Security number. Taxes get paid in, but because it's a fake number, benefits can't be paid out for disability or retirement. Meanwhile they buy food and goods, helping to support the Arizona economy. True, they send money home to Mexico as well, but on balance the effect is a positive one. But don't tell that to the Republicans, the tea partiers and the xenophobes. It doesn't fit what they want to believe, and what they want you to believe.
Bill Wolff (who never did get a beer in the two hours I was there) said one more interesting thing, and I told him one more interesting thing. He said that the lack of enforcement along the border is a myth. Wherever they went down there, the Border Patrol turned up within minutes, making their rounds. I can tell you that the Border Patrol office in Tucson is a huge complex, just a few miles from me at the corner of Swan and Golf Links. I imagine the Nogales contingent is even larger.
My interesting thing was that a group called BorderLinks (I had to look up who it was later this evening) put on an interactive presentation at St. Michael's this past spring. They cast ten or twelve parishioners to role play as would-be legal immigrants, each with a different background and scenario. About half of these fictional immigrants, based on the actual laws and statistics, had a positive result: they were allowed to get a green card and a path to citizenship - eventually. The timetable for this successful attempt at legal immigration tended to be a decade or longer, in some cases much longer, just for permanent residency status. The exceptions were for rich sports stars, and for professionals with Stateside companies actively advocating for them and smoothing the way. Equally deserving applicants, including some of those with family members in the U.S., had no chance at all of immigrating legally. And it's not fair.
The other side of this argument is not working from facts, but from fear and bigotry. The average undocumented worker is not a drug dealer or a human smuggler, although such people do exist. Harassing people in a state that's one third Hispanic, on the suspicion of being in this country illegally, does not help law enforcement go after the actual criminals; it merely ties up resources in a state that's not exactly flush with money right now. Undocumented workers tend to take jobs that "Anglos" don't want, for less money than other workers demand. They are the day laborers, the crop pickers, the seasonal construction workers. Enforce the laws against hiring them, and Arizona businesses may be forced to pay more money to hire people who are here legally. If that is done, people who come here specifically to get work will be less likely to make the dangerous crossing for jobs that aren't there. Already, law enforcement statistics show that fewer people are coming in, because the recession has made all jobs more scarce.
But that doesn't matter, because "They" are brown and scary and evil, and taking over. Aren't they?
Well, no. They're not.
Karen
More photos from the meetup can be found on my Flickr set.
Busy as I've been with my two part-time jobs and other stuff, some of it related to a rant I'll be ranting later, I nevertheless ended up going on two different photo shoots to get the pictures I wanted for Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #101: On The Horizon. Much as I love seeing distant mountain horizons, like the ones at my beloved Babad Do'ag Vista, I equally love driving on a road so steep that the horizon is twenty or a hundred feet ahead, when the road I'm on seems about to carry me over the edge of the world. I also thought it would be nice to show you the same rock formation on the horizon from several different angles. So let's get on with it!
Here is Thimble Peak as seen from St. Matthew's Church. Tour guides like to say it looks like Snoopy on this doghouse, at least from some angles.
This may be Snyder Road, but I don't remember for sure. (Extensive messing around with Google Maps in street view strongly suggests that it's actually Houghton Road.) It's about a mile from the base of Mount Lemmon Highway. Thimble Peak is more or less straight ahead on the horizon, and much closer than it is from the church.
Near that is an unnamed dirt road that does the same thing, even more dramatically. Too bad about the telephone poles.
From six or seven miles up Mount Lemmon Highway we get a back view of Thimble Peak, looking much more Snoopy-like.
Babad Do'Ag, where the horizon is miles and miles away. Other angles show even more distant vistas.
Another horizon around every bend.
And here is what I was talking about earlier, what I went back for. The road ahead (Snyder Houghton again, I think) is the horizon. Drive to the top of that, and one may just leave the earth entirely, and sail off into the clouds.
It's taken me all week to get to this entry, but the result is a bit of an extravaganza. You see, I did find something this week that had been lost for years - a few somethings, in fact.
Have you ever lost something important (or else just really unusual), only to find it again months or even years later? Were you glad to get it back, or was it no longer worth having by then? Tell us your tale of memorable things lost and found. Alternatively, if you never, ever lost anything important, tell us how you manage this nearly superhuman accomplishment. ;)
Extra Credit: If you could choose one missing item to mysteriously reappear in your home tonight, what would it be and why?
When I wrote this last week, I was frustrated because I had lost a piece of paper with a vital phone number on it. It was the number of the social worker whose agency had suddenly cut their contribution to S's monthly rent by $59 with no warning or explanation. Aside from that underwriting and food stamps, which have also been cut for no good reason, S. lives on Social Security alone, which I use to pay her bills from her bank account, plus a small weekly allowance for her day to day expenses. Believe me, there is no extra $59 sitting around each month to be put toward rent. This past Sunday, S. told me she had run out of money and food stamps, and was unable to buy the few things she went to Albertson's for. There isn't much I can do for her financially: even if we could afford it, Social Security would count any cash gifts as income, and reduce her benefit accordingly.
Anyway, I wrote that number down on Monday afternoon, couldn't find it on Tuesday, turned it up on Thursday and called the social worker. Her voicemail promised a return call by close of business the next day. Six days later, there's been no peep of a response. But S. is meeting with someone over there today, I think, so I've put her on the case, to advocate for herself. Sometimes these agencies would talk to anyone other than the client, even a representative payee such as myself.
But that's not what I wanted to tell you about today.
When I was in college the first time around, I lived in a dorm called Haven Hall for a year and a half at Syracuse University. My parents got divorced during that period, the house was sold, my mom moved to Florida and my dad moved into an apartment, having sold pretty much everyone of mine that I hadn't taken to college with me, nine miles away. At the time of the garage sale, I was in Florida with my mom. I had a trunk of clothes and whatever had been in the dorm room with me, and whatever I'd bought that summer, mostly used comics. My dad didn't realize I was counting on him to store the rest for me, so away it went. This is part of why I'm so sensitive about getting rid of - or losing - my possessions, and part of what makes the Museum of the Weird such a glorious mess of exhibits and artifacts.
And boxes.
Back in my dorm room days, my friend Evelyn and I postulated that there was a wandering vortex in my room, which sucked up specific items into another universe and then redeposited them in a different spot, usually months later. That vortex has followed me around for 35 years now, through at least three states (possibly as many as six, if you count visits to my mom and my six weeks at Michigan State for the Clarion Writer's Workshop). Casa Blocher, the Museum of the Weird, is a decent sized house, but it's not bigger on the inside, and does not comfortably hold my surviving childhood possessions, drafts of stories, old clothes, yard sale finds, books, Quantum Leap collection, Doctor Who collection, books and other stuff, in addition to John's Star Trek (TOS) collection, eBay purchases and Sherlockiana, along with more books, DVDs, CDs, cassettes, midcentury modern furniture, and stuff bought to sell on eBay only we never did.
St. Michael's is having an English Faire in September, which includes a book sale, a jumble sale and a collectibles sale. John and I are determined to go through as many of our boxes as possible and though the house generally, and donate pretty much everything of value that I can bear to part with to St. Michael's. Yesterday I took over two boxes of office supplies (which St. Michael's will mostly keep and use), my mom's curlers, a Barbra Streisand cassette, four paperback fantasy novels, a hardcover fantasy, a set of plastic Hunchback figure from the Disney film, a plastic Mickey and Minnie, a carved wooden elephant, a child's puzzle that was a Christmas stocking stuffer, a hot pink straw purse, and a Wedgwood ash tray of my Mom's from the early 1970s. Oh, and four Hallmark Barbie ornaments, mint in box.
In going through boxes this past Monday to produce these donations, I found a number of interesting things, some of which I didn't know I had. A draft of my unsent letter to Piers Anthony turned up, reminding me of last week's Weekend Assignment. A small clipping from a Florida newspaper turned out to be a reminiscence of my mom's best and worst jobs ever, filling in a little info that it's far too late to ask her about. (I'm going to put it on her memorial page.) My mom's will was in one of the boxes, and commencement announcements from when I finally did graduate from college, and a letter from one of my 1978 English professors about how to make up my incomplete in his course - which I did but he never turned in the grade.
Perhaps best of all, I found two chapters of my Route 66 book in hardcopy, consisting of the George Maharis and Martin Milner interviews. I've been looking for those for at least 15 years. They were typed on a Commodore 64, and getting the data from a C64 cassette or weird floppy or whatever it was into a modern Word file has been a problem that always defeated us. Now I can scan and OCR the things, and clean them up from there. Interestingly, the Maharis chapter is accompanied by a cover letter to an agent at Triad, the multimedia agency where my friend Robin used to work. The letter is a textbook example of what not to write when trying to interest an agent, full of self-deprecation and self-doubt. Ah, well.
The last thing that turned up after years of searching for it was my watercolor map of Mâvarin, three years after the equally joyous discovery of my black and white map of Mâvarin. Neither map is usable now, because they were both persistently lost during the period when I wrote the bulk of the Mages of Mâvarin trilogy circa 1999-2002. Fabi Stock did a lot of traveling in those books, to places that weren't on the old maps because I couldn't consult them. Someday I'll need to either use a really good map generator program or hire someone (Sherlock, perhaps) to draw me a new map. It's far too late to change Fabi's journey instead; Mâvarin has changed and developed a lot in the three decades plus since these maps were drawn.
So tonight I'll probably dig through more boxes. What is the #1 long-lost thing I'd like to turn up? The title to my mom's 1984 Chrysler New Yorker. We want to donate this, and John's 1984 Dodge Van, to some charity and get them out of the driveway. I found the van's title (not that I know where it is now), but not the Chrysler one. John says to get a replacement title from the state but I'm being stubborn. If I don't find it soon, I may have to yield to the logic of the situation!
