Back in November somebody charged $370 to my debit card to a vendor I didn’t recognize, so I immediately disputed the charges with Bank of America. It disappeared into their system until this Friday, when I got a letter detailing the purchase: a Garmin watch bought from eBay and delivered to a rental house in Severn, MD, with an obviously fake Yahoo email address. Their automated robot decided the charges were legit based on eBay’s garbage information and told me they were going to debit my account.
I got on the phone this morning and spoke with a woman in the Fraud department, who listened to my explanation and reversed the charges again; given the details it’s pretty clear this is fraud. eBay is famously abysmal for customer service; there is no phone number to call or email address to contact, and their chatbot points to a page that throws a 500 Internal Server Error, so it makes total sense that some waiter double-swiped my card at a restaurant and used them to get himself a shiny new watch.
Meanwhile, I ordered a new set of safety glasses two weeks ago from a storefront I’d used successfully in 2021. I never got a confirmation email or tracking number in reply, but they sure as shit charged my card. This was two weeks ago and I still don’t have any glasses; their customer service options are as useful as eBay’s. I’ve sent them some nastygrams this morning promising a reversal of charges if I don’t hear anything by COB.
Update: my flurry of bitchy emails spurred a flurry of return emails and, suddenly, magically, a shipment notification!
I just learned that we are only 7 miles, as the crow flies, from a NIKE missile base that was active from 1954 until 1974, which protected the west side of Baltimore from incoming Soviet bombers within a 25-mile radius. Given the destructive range and potential of Soviet nuclear weapons in this time period, this was yet another expensive exercise in pissing in the wind. Apparently the local Civil Air Patrol has been slowly refurbishing the base, which sat abandoned for decades after the government shut it down.
At what point is it enough, America? At what point do we call a racist a racist and actually do something about it?
One thing we didn’t consider when we adopted Hazel was the fact that, as a black dog, her nails are also black. I don’t think I had ever considered a dog’s nails in my life, even after having grown up with three of them, but Hazel, as always, is an outlier in everything she does. Her nails grow at the speed of an F1 car, so she so she sounds like someone typing on a mechanical keyboard when walking on a hardwood floor. Her nails can get so long that when she stands up normally, they twist her toes in weird directions. In normal circumstances, the length of her nails are kept in check by daily walks and her guiding instinct to pull on the leash like a sled dog, but with the frigid snow conditions of the last two weeks, she has only gone outside to do her business and come back inside as quickly as possible, retiring to the couch to wait until warmer weather appears. So they’ve gotten very long.
She’s been to the vet to have them clipped before, and they’ve given us drugs to administer two hours before the appointment. The last time we did this, it didn’t go well, and the vet tech seemed to be pissed at us. We followed your directions, dude. I made an appointment yesterday to bring her in to get them trimmed again, and they upped her dose at our request. She seemed a little spacey on the way there, and was a bit out of sorts in the waiting room. Thankfully, it only took them ten minutes to actually do the work, and she came back out to the waiting room, anxious to leave. When she got home, she was even more gloopy and passed out under Jen’s desk as we worked, her pupils as big as dinnerplates. Overnight, she splayed out in the middle of the bed like a pile of wet towels and lay in the same position all night, forcing me to teeter at the edge of the bed. This morning, she went outside for her customary walk, came back inside and immediately laid on the couch, completely uninterested in driving to school with the girls—an integral part of her normal routine. As a creature of habit, it’s very strange for her not to want to take a ride. But when it came time to meet our neighbor for the first dog walk in two weeks, she was happy to get outside, back to her normal self.
Well, fuck. The Brewer’s Art, a mainstay of Mt. Vernon, and host of one of the best basement bars in all of Baltimore (RIP Wroten’s), abruptly announced its closure on Monday, citing over $150K in debt. I don’t know what would have happened there—it was always busy—but this is a loss for Baltimore’s nightlife scene. I spent many an evening tucked away in a corner of the basement nursing an OZZY or four (Fuck you Sharon, it’ll always be OZZY to me), and have a special place in my heart for it.
In December, I bought a TIG welder on deep Christmas discount with honorarium money made from a gig at MICA. After a ton of research, I settled on a basic unit from Eastwood, branded Rockwood, which seems to be their entry-level gear. It sat in the garage until this weekend, when I had the jungle site deliver a bottle of 100% argon for about $250 less than if I’d purchased it locally. While freezing my ass off working on the trucks outside, I had the little space heater in the garage warm it up in there. When I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore I retreated back inside, restored the sensation in my hands, and set up the unit.
It’s been four years since my welding class, so my memory of running a TIG unit is very hazy. I’d watched a bunch of setup videos and read the manual, but predictably the printed material was lean on detail. After several minutes with no spark I remembered that I had to ground the workpiece, and after that I was quickly laying beads down. Getting used to the footpedal, which regulates the heat, feeding the welding rod at the right intervals, and keeping the tip of the tungsten out of the pool took some time, but I got into a groove and figured out how to keep the welds from blowing through the metal or just sitting on top of it.
It’s going to take a lot of practice (and a lot of argon) to master, but I’m excited to keep working on it. TIG is really good for doing delicate sheet metal work as well as aluminum, and it’s the latter that I’m really interested in. I’ve got a plan for building a roof rack for the Travelall, and Brian included my metal with an order he put in for the EV project. I’d like to tackle that sometime this summer when I can lay it out in the driveway and assemble the whole thing.
Project Saltbox is a Baltimore-based volunteer group doing work to figure out what ICE is doing behind the scenes in Maryland, through FOIA requests, tracking procurement contracts, and following paper trails. They were the group who broke the news of a warehouse purchase in Hagerstown by ICE, who planned on converting it into a “Processing Center”, better known as an immigration detention center.
I’d like to volunteer some time with this group.