What was it? All of a week ago that we were exulting over springtime on the desert? Well, spring has done sprung, and now summer has entered, stage left. Despite a skiff of overcast, the back porch thermometer is hovering between 85 and 90 degrees. Tomorrow is supposed to be 90, and so it will go for at least the next week.
Then it will get hot.
The pool is warm enough to swim in — still brisk, but no longer cold enough to freeze off any vital parts. In fact, I’m thinking I may take the plunge in the next few moments of this still and rather stuffy afternoon.
Various bits and pieces of news and idleness…
First up: It develops that commenter marzy doats was right in speculating that my neighbor Sally was not legally bound, by reason of ethnicity, to accept any halfway reasonable offer on her house from the neighborhood slumlord.
This morning at the weekly Scottsdale Business Association breakfast chivaree, it was our Realtor‘s turn to entertain the rest of us with a presentation. During the Q&A, I described what had happened and asked if it was true, as Sally’s agent claimed, that she could not just reject Mr. B***’s lowball offer. He said no, she was not bound to accept or make a counteroffer to any offer that came in the door. If the prospective buyer was not black, unmarried, or conspicuously religious, she could simply reject the offer with no comment.
However, if the offer met the asking price, with no strings attached, that would be a different matter.
So: score one for Funny’s readers!
Next: It appears that I’m now the president of the Scottsdale Business Association. Can you imagine? Me…the English major, president of a bidness group? Wonders never cease.
Our beloved past president, who to our shock had to go in for bypass surgery, took that opportunity to step down, having run the thing for quite a few years.
I called a business meeting for later this month. He suggested we appoint him as treasurer & secretary (since English-major math definitely will not make it in the bookkeeping dept.) and then select a vice-president who can take over if I’m not there and also who will step in as president in a year. He thinks we should have a rotating presidency, and I think that is a great idea.
Yesterday was an exceptionally busy day. Among other things, my self-publishing author, feeling overwhelmed with the technicalities of going to print, asked me to package his magnum opus.
That took me a bit aback, because it wasn’t what I signed on to do: I expected to do the editing. Period. And it really couldn’t come at a worse time, because another pair of clients are now racing to complete the anthology of first-person narratives they’re compiling, and they need to get the last few contributions edited. Now.
So I passed the lion’s share of the guy’s project along to a former client, a designer who owns a small packaging business. She agreed to do the most involved parts of the work, if I would do the hand-holding.
He’d like to see the book ready to go to print by the end of this month. We think it will take four to six weeks to get him registered with Ingram, set him up with CreateSpace, design the pages, adjust the cover design to fit the perfect binding (he commissioned an artist to create a cover and is busy having her lay out the back cover copy, and she apparently wants to do something fancy with the spine), and then produce and read proofs. After that, depending on who he chooses to hire, putting the thing in Kindle and getting it up on Amazon should take a week or so.
Tomorrow is going to be even more crazy.
It’s out the door at 6:45 a.m. to get to an estate sale in the ritzy part of town. See this set of nesting tables? (Click on the image for a better view, but avert your eyes from the hideous lamp.)
Those are solid maple, mid-century modern tables by Conant-Ball. They’re identical to the set my mother purchased in San Francisco in 1958, after we came back from ten years in Saudi Arabia. M’hijito has coveted those tables for years, but he’s not getting the things until I croak over.
I haven’t seen any of these pieces for sale in quite some time. As develops, they’ve become collector’s items, and they’re stupidly expensive. These have been stripped and refinished, which damages their antique value — but then, mine have had the same treatment. Frankly, a good oil finish looks a helluva lot better on this stuff than the original yellow varnish did. Whatever: original finish or no, the price is still bracing.
So. That is going to be my son’s birthday present.
Two other people, both dealers, are trying to get there ahead of me. Forewarned by the proprietor, La Maya and I are heading for the East Side as dawn cracks, and we intend to camp outside the door until they open up the place at 8.
From there, it’s an about-face and a fast drive to the far West Side, where I have to meet KJG and VickyC at Arrowhead Mall. VickyC wants a new love seat, and in fact, I would like one, too, if one could be found at the right price. VickyC has an almost magical gift for finding really neat-looking interior appointments, from furniture to tschochkies, at ludicrously bargainish prices. So KJG and I want to tag along on her search, in hopes of nailing a bargain ourselves.
I’ll only have until 4:00 p.m. At that witching hour, I’ll have to fly back into town to get here in time to feed the dog, change clothes, and shoot out the door to go to dinner and chamber music with my neighbor and friend.
Naturally, tomorrow the maga-writing students submit their first full-blown articles. By midnight there’ll be a raft of those sitting on the server — a few eager beavers have already sent theirs.
Fortunately, only seven of the original 20 enrolled students survive, and they seem to be the cream of the crop. They’re all doing quite well, and most are articulate and creative. So reading this stuff shouldn’t be torture. I hope.
Charley the Golden Retriever spent a day visiting earlier this week. Cassie the Corgi is looking a bit bored just now, without him to chase around. They spend a great deal of time teasing each other. When they’re not conkered out on the floor, they’re a blur of motion.
We have, for example, the opening feint: a toy-snatch…
Cassie, who has doggle telepathy, knows what he’s up to. That thing he’s trying to kill is one of her beloved stuffed vultures, lately brought home from Costco.
Not so fast, hound!
Now for the showdown. First, though, click here for the sound effects…
Make my day, White Cur!
And it’s a total rout. Even if they weren’t shooting up and down the hall like rockets (and charging the human so it can’t hold the camera steady), Charley’s tail would be wagging so fast it would be a blur, despite (or because of) Cassie’s savage barking frenzy.
Gerardo was over here a couple days ago cleaning up the yard, which was still suffering the aftermath of the freeze. He and his underling picked up a ton of fallen citrus — the Meyer lemon was especially hard-hit by the frost, and the two Arizona sweets also dropped a lot of frozen fruit. And of course there were dead leaves and spent spring blossoms all over the ground, plus thorny dead branches to prune out of five bougainvilleas, plus the dead stuff off the blue plumbago, plus the dead stuff off the yellowbell that froze down to the ground, plus more weeds than Carter has oats.
In the course of pulling out clover and chickweed, Underling broke off an agave plant, an old favorite in the backyard. It was pretty badly frost-damaged, but still…I wasn’t too thrilled to have to haul it out to the garbage.
Whenever Gerardo’s underlings do some sort of damage, they invariably try to hide it. LOL! The guy propped up the beheaded agave so it would look like it was still just sitting there normally. Unfortunately, though, it did look ever so slightly strange. 😀
So now I have to figure out what to do with this spot.
Interestingly, there’s a rather pretty agave growing in the front yard, one that does NOT have fierce man-gouging thorns on it of the sort that (dis)graced the deceased. It tolerates more water than I expected — I thought it would be pretty xeric, but as it develops, to keep it looking good I have to drag a hose out to it now and again. That’s good, because there’s an old tree bubbler in the now vacant spot.
And darned if that plant doesn’t have a good-sized baby growing on it!
So sometime in the next few days, I’ll have to twist that thing off and stick it in the backyard.
Weird things are growing from those bulbs I planted a few weeks ago.
And now instead of editing anthology essays, I have diddled the entire afternoon away at blogging. And so, to work…