LOL! Hilariously, every time it rains here, the news media — whose employees are perennially bored witless — regale us with tales of tornadoes, monsoons, and menacing floods that would put Noah’s Ark to shame. They’re having a great time just now: a tropical storm has blown up from the Sea of Cortez, and everyone’s in a great uproar. Oh, the horror! Oh, the terror! Omigod, it’s a tornado!
Well, no it’s not: it’s a whirlwind that picked up a lot of dry dirt. We call those “dust devils” in these parts.
As for the terror and the horror: well, yeah…the level of stupidity that holds forth among Arizona drivers is terrible and horrible. They drive into flooded washes, and then they’re astonished to find that a car will stop running when it’s up to its carburetor in muddy water. 😀
This morning when it came time for our dawn walk, huge pregnant clouds were floating overhead, and the richly humid air felt thick as cake batter. Ruby the Corgi and I decided to risk it, though: we set out for a mile-long hike with an umbrella in hand. But nay…we never needed to open the thing.
Shortly after we got back to the house, though, water coalesced out of the atmosphere in a brief, stiff downpour, huge drops falling straight down. No wind to speak of. No lightning, no thunder.
Ruby is not fazed by wind and rain, though she could do without bright flashes of celestial light and ear-splitting thunder. Just now, though, she is terrorized by an indoor whirlwind: this little dog hates, loathes, and despises the vacuum cleaner. Luz the Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, forcing the vacuum to suck up every micron of dust off the floors. Ruby’s pet human, on the other hand, is most grateful to have someone else doing that job, and doing it exceptionally well.
After the Dog and the Human returned from journeying around the neighborhood — delightfully, the threat of rain chased most of the dog-lovers indoors, so we encountered just three other dogs, two of them on a single lead — the Human took it upon itself to shovel out four of the five office file drawers that have become overgrown with weeds. The sheer amount of paper that pours into this house — most of it generated by Medigap, Medicare, and assorted financial institutions — truly defies belief. So much of it piles in that it induces a kind of paralysis, so that after awhile you end up with mounds of paper stacked atop every table.
My active file drawers had grown pretty unintelligible. Cleaning out and organizing those things was an all-morning challenge…not to say “aggravation.” However, a strategy for simplifying the tasks of filing and finding occurred to me: Once the files are cleaned out and reorganized, create an index for them.
Duh! How obvious is this?
So now I have four tables generated in Word — one for each drawer — that show where each set of file folders resides and how the things are organized. I’m going to print out these little guides and drop them in the desk, where they can easily be found…et voilà! No more searching for paper stashed…where?
Or at least, with any luck, a whole lot less searching.
This little project entailed hauling out pounds and pounds of paper to the long-term storage file cabinet in the garage. One of the disadvantages of self-employment is that you have to save every piece of business-related paper until after the fall of American civilization. This accrues a phenomenal amount of debris. So much, in fact, that the big four-drawer cabinet in the garage is now chuckablock full. No way can I squeeze so much as one more sheet of paper in there. If this paper-storing enterprise is to continue, next year I’ll have to start stashing the stuff in cardboard boxes and storing those in the garage cabinets. Like I’ve got lots of room in the cabinetry to waste on paper.
Welp, here comes another downpour, this time accompanied by a little lightning and thunder. A little…close-by lightning! Since we’ll likely soon lose the power, time to post this thing and begone.