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In which Funny risks her life for a drainpipe

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Now, you see…I cannot understand all the whinging from folks who claim to be bored numb at having to hang around the house. What kind of houses do they live in? Around here, there is truly never a dull moment. One high adventure after another! Just yesterday, for example, we had the life-threatening saga of the drainpipe.

The bathtub has been draining slower…and slower…and s.l.o.o.o.o.w.e.r of late. It’s always been a little languid, but since I have hair down to the middle of my back now (being prohibited from visiting Shane the Miracle Stylist has not helped), I figured it was hair balling up in there, and so just plunged it every now and again. Even though I use a hair strainer, those things don’t catch all the hair that drops out or breaks off naturally….and the penicillin I enjoyed with the dental infection caused my hair to fall out in skeins.

So I gave WonderPlumber a call. And to my surprise, he was willing to come over.

With all the covid mania, you may be sure I was not happy to invite a near-stranger into the house and into the bathroom. But it was that or bathe in the backyard hose until the contagion subsides.

He fiddled with it for awhile…didn’t do much good. So, out came the techno-artillery.

He has a camera and a light on the end of a long wire. This gadget, it develops, talks to his cell phone, sending a video of whatever it encounters in the drainpipes.

I’m watching this and thinking, wow! That’s cool!!

Shortly he finds an object, stuck at the place where the drain would turn to head out of the house toward the sewer. “What is THIS?” he wonders.

Me, too: I peer at the image and dunno what it is. It looks like the cross-wise surface of a piece of copper piping.

“Somebody dropped this thing down in here, whatever it is.”

“Not me! I’ve never dropped anything down the drain. If it wasn’t the cleaning lady, then it must have been the previous owner, who was a happy handyman.”

One of the happy things this guy had done was to remove the drain plug — you know, those things on a lever? That device is missing from the drain, so I have to use a regular rubber plug. This is fine, though, because it also allows me to set a hair strainer in the drain after unplugging, which filters out most of the long flowing locks that get shed into the water.

WonderPlumber goes back out to the truck and comes back with a device that consists of a set of little grabber claws on the end of a rod. It also has a light on it.

Amazing!

So he fiddles and fiddles with this gadget, catching the WhateverItIs but dropping it before he can pull it all the way out.

Finally he says, “We’re going to have to cut out the plastic tub surround and also the other side of the wall behind it, in order to get at this thing.”

I say, “Well, I can’t afford to do that. In the first place, what’s on the other side of the wall is a shower, and the previous owner tiled the shower stall with travertine tile! There’s simply NO WAY I could afford to replace the tub surround here and then retile the shower. And in the second place, thanks to the covid panic, my 401(k) has lost $149,000. There’s no money to pull the bathrooms apart and put them back together.”

Backstory here is that Satan, the prior owner, did a pretty good job of applying travertine to a shower stall that previously had hosted another plastic surround. The thing had developed a leak under the plastic floor, so he and his buddies hacked the plastic shower surround apart, pulled it apart, rebuilt the floor in there, and then fancified the bathroom with a DIY travertine job.

On the day before the house transferred to me, Satan and I did the obligatory walk-through. His parting shot to me, as I was testing the faucets and plumbing in that bathroom, was “Oh, by the way… This travertine has to be stripped and resealed every six months.”

Say WHAT, White Man???????”

This fine bathroom is the size of a closet, and it has no ventilation. Well. It has one of those tiny little foggy-glass sliding windows that contractors put into tract houses: it opens about six inches, and it’s maybe a foot high.

Since there’s no way in Hell that I’m going to expose myself to whatever chemicals are in stripper and sealer even once, to say nothing of every six months, I never use that shower.

So I say to WonderPlumber, “But I’ve got to have a bathtub!”

Resigned, he tries again — and this time he does manage to snare the thing. Gets it halfway out, and it drops back down there. And third time’s a charm: this time he succeeds in lifting it out.

What is it? Seems to be the top part of a squirt-bottle assembly: the plastic cylinder with the hole through which the product is dispensed. It’s like nothing I’ve ever used: has a white plastic body and the raggedy remains of some sort of gold paint on the top, which is what must have been reflecting the light to suggest copper.

I figure some former owner must have dropped the thing down in there. Maybe that’s why they took the plug out…so water would flow around the gadget that they couldn’t remove. I figure it’s got to have been Satan and Proserpine, because you can be sure they wouldn’t have wanted to deconstruct their beloved travertine shower.

That’s almost a likely scenario. But on reflection, I recall that I had a friend stay for some weeks, between the time her husband went up to San Francisco to start a new job and establish a beach-head for the family and the time her contract ran out here, so she could go up and join him. It’s not impossible that she could have dropped the part down there and figured, since the tub continued to drain, that it washed down into the sewer. She loved nice cosmetics — so the gilded spray cap would surely fit. Since I’ve been in this house for 16 years now, it seems likely that it would have clogged the drain before this if it had belonged to Proserpine. On the other hand, it’s been several years since my friend’s temporary roommate experience. So…who knows.

This adventure done and Our Hero off to save another day, it occurs to me: Holeee shit! We did NOT maintain any six- or thirteen-foot distance. Far from it! I was hanging at his shoulder watching him do his thing, and he certainly wasn’t cringing away. We were both engrossed, hovering over the drain, in what he was trying to do and in what his iPhone camera was showing.

Uh-oh. I’m done for!

Well, on the hopeful side, he certainly looked and acted plenty healthy.

In his case, he wasn’t likely to catch anything from me, since my son has me trapped in the house. 😉 The kid is doing ALL the shopping, so I don’t have to go out other than to walk the dog and loaf in the garden. But in my case…uhm…wait, what? This is a guy who’s mucking around in bathrooms and kitchens all across the Valley….

Well, so that means once again another two weeks of suspense to see whether the bug develops — assuming a two-week incubation period. This is the third putative “exposure” for which I’ve had to wait two weeks to see whether I was going to come down with the disease. The first was the wee-hours trip to AJ’s, for the special Old Folks Shopping Frenzy. The second was when the pooch and I walked, unwittingly, into a cloud of dust and dirt blasted up by a lawn man’s blower off a public street that everybody and his little brother, sister, and dog walks on every damn day. And this is the third. So it’ll be May 5 before I know whether this one gave me the bug.

Seriously, this panic is getting out of hand. Arizona has 7.29 million residents. As of this morning there have been 5,459 confirmed covid-19 cases. That is .075 percent of the population. The implication, then, is that you have about 7.5 chances in 100 of catching this bug. Quite possibly less than that if you’re white and middle-class or affluent. In our parts, black folks and Native Americans are most vulnerable to this disease…and it’s on the Navajo as we speak, killing off people right and left. The tribe has reported over 1,000 cases. I haven’t heard about the Apache, the Hopi, the Pima, or the Papago, but I would assume the situation is comparable there.

Maricopa County, home of lovely Phoenix and its many exquisite suburbs, has 4.85 million residents, 2,846 confirmed covid cases, and 97 recorded deaths. That would suggest .059% of the population has fallen ill and .002% have died.

Did you know that when the Spaniards began to explore the New World in the 1500s, of course they brought the smallpox virus with them? Smallpox was endemic to Europe at the time. When it hit the native peoples, it spread so fast that it moved ahead of the explorers’ parties, so that by the time the men would reach a village, most of the residents would be corpses and any survivors would have fled. Some scientists believe that 10 million people in the Americas died from smallpox unwittingly imported by the Spaniards and, to a lesser extent, by the English and French.

We creatures of the 21st Century seem, as a population of victims, surprisingly resistant to a virus to which we are imagined to be naïve. Compared, that is, to the peoples of the New World when confronted with the variola virus.

Sentimentalia

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Walking the dog at dusk through a 1950s-vintage neighborhood, you remember the things that were different when this place was new. Of course, the time was different and the place was different. Ras Tanura was not a big city — far from it. But San Francisco was…and much there was different from what this big city is today.

Skies were quiet. Even in San Francisco, the skies were quiet. When a plane flew over, everybody stopped what they were doing and looked up, amazed, to watch it pass. Tonight a cop helicopter buzzed constantly over Meth Central all the time Ruby and I were walking through Upper and Lower Richistan. Back in the Dark Ages, there were no cop helicopters. There were precious few helicopters anywhere, and most or all of them belonged to the military.

Adults did not ride bicycles.

Few people walked for exercise, and no adults ran — at least, not on the paved streets. But people probably did walk more as part of everyday life, at least in major cities: public transportation went everywhere and was reasonably safe. Not everyone owned or needed a car.

On the other hand, the cars we did have were unsafe at any speed.

Food, by and large, tasted good. People didn’t eat anything like as much flavorless packaged foods as we do today, partly because that junk didn’t exist in such vast quantities and partly because we didn’t go out to eat all the time. It took a huge marketing program, launched in the late 1950s and continuing through the early 60s — plus the advent of fast-food joints — to get people out of their dining rooms and into restaurants. Of course there were canned foods, which were considered less than ideal when factory-made. And Bisquick (how could one live without it?). But it wasn’t until the late 50s that we got TV dinners, an early precursor of today’s ubiquitous processed foods.

Women cooked. Girl children washed up after meals. Women and girls cleaned their own homes, washed the laundry, and ironed clothes. Men kept the car running and maintained the yard and house.

In the 1950s, people typically had three or four children — hence the sprawling three- and four-bedroom homes here in the ‘Hood, which started its life as a suburb. If you had three bedrooms, you could accommodate several children no matter what their gender: the girls went in one bedroom, the boys, in another, and the parents resided in the master bedroom. If the house had two bathrooms, you were really set.

Fleets of helicopters were not needed because middle-class and upscale neighborhoods were not infested by drug-addicted criminals, though that didn’t mean crime was nonexistent.

People did not stroll around in public yapping at the top of their voices into cell phones. The only person who had a wrist radio was Dick Tracy.

We had newspapers in those days, wads of newsprint (with funny strips!) delivered to your door every morning, seven days a week. It was considered safe for young boys (and sometimes girls) to go out on their bicycles at dawn to bring your paper to your house.

Children played outside in yards and streets. No one felt a parent should lurk outdoors watching them at every moment. Kids ranged far and wide on their bicycles: also without parents feeling they had to watch over the kids’ shoulders every moment.

Schools were not prisons. No locked gates kept out bogeymen waving automatic rifles. And while yes, the occasional flask of vodka was passed around among a certain set of kids, no recreational drugs were ever in evidence.

After dusk, most people were parked in front of their televisions. Access to television was free, off the air — one did not have to pay for a cable or a dish to watch one’s favorite shows.

Only the wealthy had swimming pools.

There was no covid-19 to fear. Instead, we had polio epidemics and nuclear bombs.

A decent man was in the White House. His name was Dwight Eisenhower.

 

 

Meditations in the Time of Plague

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So how long have we been officially locked down? Nigh unto a month? And a couple weeks before that we who had any brains were wary enough that we were effectively self-locked down. How long, all told? I’ve lost track.

Over the past home-bound weeks, I’ve slipped into a kind of goofy daze. Have managed to keep the house reasonably clean — that’s something. But otherwise have loafed, loafed, and loafed some more.

Consequently, I’ve put on 10 pounds!

So as of today, it’s back on the diet. The dog and I walked, briskly, for an hour this morning, and will do it again this evening. And tomorrow morning and evening…and the next day’s morning and evening…and the next day’s…

Who would think you burn 10 pounds’ worth of calories driving around town, walking across parking lots, climbing into the choir loft once a week? How?

On the other hand, I haven’t purchased gasoline since March 1st! Today is April 18, and the car still has 2/3 of a tank of gas. I normally buy gas once or twice a month. At this rate, I certainly won’t have to get a fill-up before the end of the month, and probably not then.

A tank of gas that lasts two months? Wow!

The main reason for this has little to do with my own desire to hunker down and everything to do with my son’s request that I not leave the house, especially not to go into retail stores. I’ve honored that, especially since he’s willing to do the shopping. It also, in theory, gives me an opportunity to experiment with merchandise delivery services, though so far I haven’t done so because my son is doing all the running around.

So this is one of several little revelations: if I’m not running to AJ’s whenever I happen to be at the church or in the mood, if I’m not trotting hither, thither, and yon for no very good reason but instead organize trips to serve specific needs, not impulses, probably there’s no need to buy gasoline more than about once every two months. Indeed, if I were to have groceries delivered, most of my driving would be mooted. And since a tank of gas costs about $30, that could represent a considerable savings.

Next revelation: Halellujah brothers and sisters, and thank God for Costco!

Because of my habit of shopping at Costco, which pretty much forces you to buy lifetime supplies of staples and household goods, I was bloody well not about to run out of anything that mattered. Except, of course, for toilet paper. I happened to have a half-dozen rolls of Walmart’s Best in the house, but since I prefer the Kirkland brand, it was by sheer chance that I wandered into the Deer Valley Costco on a Friday just as the TP frenzy started. And sheer luck that I happened to walk into the paper goods department in time to grab the third-to-last package of the stuff.

Thirty rolls will, as they always do, last me for several months. So will the nine rolls of paper towels that I happened to have remaining from some earlier Costco run.

Those paper towels will last me even longer now that the next little revelation has dawned:

Why am I using paper towels all the time, anyway? Yeah. Why???? When I was growing up, my mother and I didn’t have paper towels. We used dishrags. Anyone remember those? You had a square rag for kitchen and bathroom cleanup, and for washing the dishes. You didn’t throw it away when you were done using it. No. Hang onto your hats, young folks: you washed it!

You used paper — newsprint, actually — to wash windows and to wrap garbage. That was about it. Oh — and to write on, of course. In those days, people could write. With pens and pencils.

Well, I happen to have about 30 microfiber towels just about the size of a classic dishrag, courtesy of Costco. Thank God for Costco! So I tried using one in place of the wads of paper towels I pull off the roll, swab around, and then toss into the trash. And lo! It works. It doesn’t just work, it works handsomely. It absorbs more moisture. It cleans the counter better. It shines the brightwork better. And…should I say it again? It goes into the washer, not into the landfill.

Revelation the Fourth: Life in These United States is one hell of a lot more precarious than we think it is. (Why do these things seem so obvious to me now?) The present public health horror could not have happened at a worse time, with an ignoramus in the White House play-acting at being President — or Emperor, or King, or Tsar, or Führer, or whateverthehell he imagines he is — while craven interests that do not have the public’s welfare at heart work behind the scenes.

In the absence of good leadership, the covid-19 contagion has brought our country damn near to its knees. We’re looking at a recession that will at best rival but more likely exceed the Great Depression.

Do I really need to point out that Europe is not on its knees? And neither is China. A failure of leadership at this juncture — at just the wrong time — is likely to prove catastrophic.

And that is not an exaggeration, my friends.

Revelation the Fifth: The Mormons had it right. Stemming, as it does, from a rural culture, the Mormon church urges its followers always to be prepared and stocked up for a rainy day. What’s a rainy day? Could be just about anything: a year when the crops fail…a tornado that takes out the farmhouse and barn…death of a breadwinner…loss of a mother…a lost job…a Great Depression…a flood…a drought…a tornado…a Civil War…a devastating contagion…a moron in the White House… The message appears to be that you need to make yourself, at least to a credible degree, ready for hard times.

My dear ex-husband had a law partner, Monroe McKay, an extraordinary man, who, after a stint directing the Peace Corps in Malawi went on to become a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals justice. Monroe was a good Mormon boy — on steroids. One of the interesting things we learned from him is that he and his wife always had a year’s worth of supplies stocked in for themselves and their nine children.

They had a pantry closet in which Monroe had installed shelving on a slight angle, slanting downward toward the front of the closet, with a lip at the bottom to serve as a block. At all times, they kept a year’s worth of canned goods on these shelves, the cans arranged on their sides in rows, so they would roll forward when a can in front was removed. Thus if you took out, say, a can of tomatoes, a dozen more cans behind it would roll down behind that can. When you next went to the store, you would buy a new can of tomatoes and put it in the back, up at the top of the row. In addition, they kept large bags of pinto beans and rice.

So you understand: when this latest panic happened, these folks didn’t have to go running around frantically stocking up on whatever they imagined might keep body and soul together. They had already thought it through. And they already had their stockpile.

What do you bet they also had a generator, should the power fail? What do you bet they kept a rotating stock of gasoline, should the country run short of fuel? What do you bet they had a propane stove on which to cook those beans and canned veggies, if push came to shove?

The time has come, my friends, to pay attention to this institutional wisdom. The time has come to get prepared.

You should not have to run around frantically trying to buy toilet paper: you should always have enough in the house to last several weeks or, better, several months.

You should not have to wonder what will happen if the power goes down for a long while: you should have a generator and enough propane to suffice until a major failure can be repaired.

You should not fear running out of food if you have to hunker down in your house for a period of weeks: you should have enough staple foods to last you and your family for a bare minimum of two or three months.

You should not go to the grocery store and find there’s no yeast and no flour on the shelves, to say nothing of no bread. You should have yeast and flour stored in the freezer.

You should not be in a position to run out of clean water should the water processing plants fail or be attacked: you should always have several five-gallon jugs full of fresh water. Once a month, pour one out onto your garden, refill it, and move it to the back, so that you regularly refresh your supply with new water.

You should never run out of detergent and soap and shampoo. You should always have enough in a closet or washroom to last your family several months.

And, let’s be completely frank about this: You should not fear roving mobs of “patriots” rioting to demand that the government shut down or open up under the most irrational circumstances. You should be armed and prepared to defend yourself and your family. And I don’t mean with a baseball bat.

Progress in the Time of Cholera

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So…we may not have Love in the Time of Cholera going on here, but we’re developing a little progress in the Time of Covid.

Running low on the fancy bread I favor, available as far as I can tell only from AJs, I decide I prefer not to risk my life to buy a new loaf. Surely I can make it.

Well, of course I can: back in the day when I used to bake bread all the time, I frequently made similar loaves. Problem is…back in the day, my oven worked. Now it functions as another kitchen cabinet. I haven’t baked in years — cook most stuff on the grill, and what won’t work that way, atop the stove.

I think bread will probably bake on the grill. But since a loaf typically takes forty minutes to an hour to get nice and brown and crisp and cooked all the way through, that would entail an enormous drawdown of propane.

Williams-Sonoma claims the pricey little countertop oven I bought to take over after the Kenmore wall oven broke will bake bread. Doesn’t look like it could possibly be large enough to accommodate a big peasant loaf. But…the one from AJ’s fits in there. Just.

So. Hm.

Okay, it’s nothing ventured time. Mixed up a batch of dough in the bread machine — those things are great for kneading dough, but not so great for cooking it: the result tastes just like grocery-store schlock. But if you take out the risen dough, shape it into a loaf or two, and bake it in the oven, you get just-like-homemade bread.

Luckily I’d stashed a bag of flour and a bottle of yeast in the freezer, so the ingredients to make this food of the Gods were on hand.

Let the blob of dough rise on the baking sheet that came with the little oven. (It’s been soooo long since I’ve made bread that I actually forgot you can…uhm…y’know…divide it in two and make two smaller loaves…) This produced a chunk of dough that would rise to the dimensions and shape of the beloved AJ’s loaf.

You realize…I haven’t used the wall oven in this house since 2012. Almost eight years, that’s how long it’s been! And I hafta say: I haven’t missed it. Everything I’ve needed to cook has been doable on the grill or the stovetop.

Occasionally, I’ve thought I should buy one of those small Weber or KitchenAid grills, which would just about fit a loaf or two of rising bread. The idea would be to use it only for baking bread or casseroles…the theory behind the idea being that trying to cook bread in a grill covered with grease from steak and fish and the like would produce a mighty strange-tasting loaf. In fact, I was just about to shell out for one of the things when the covid epidemic struck, but by the time I’d reached the “maybe probably no doubt i should do this” stage, it was too late. Trapped in the house now, I have no way of getting up to Lowe’s or the Depot, selecting the mini-grill of my dreams, and putting some handyman up to assembling it.

And lo! The little oven’s alarm just went off!

And darned it it doesn’t look like our experiment worked! We have a big peasant-style loaf of bread with a nice crispy crust. Sounds hollow when you tap it, so it’s presumably cooked through.

Mwa ha ha! Outta my way, AJ’s! It looks like this is going to be the answer. And you know…five cups of flour, a tablespoon of yeast, and 40 minutes’ worth of electricity cost one helluva lot less than buying this thing at the city’s most upscale gourmet grocery store.

Hot dang!

How to make Bread in the Time of Covid:

You need:

  • 1 breadmaking machine (optional, if you don’t mind kneading the dough yourself)
  • 1 tablespoon granulated yeast
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 5 cups flour
  • 2 cups water
  • a handful of dry cornmeal
  • a baking sheet
  • an oven, covered BBQ grill, or countertop oven

Pour two cups of water into the bread machine’s bucket. Add the yeast and the salt. Then add the five cups of flour. Set the bread machine for “dough” (this setting may also be called “knead”). Turn it on and go away.

The bread machine will mix the dough, knead it, and keep it warm while it rises. When the timer beeps, come on back in the kitchen and retrieve the dough from the machine

Preheat the cooker you intend to use.

Meanwhile, take the baking sheet you wish to use and sprinkle it with a thin layer of cornmeal (this prevents sticking). Place the blob of dough, shaped into a round or oval loaf, on the baking sheet (you can use a big skillet if you intend to cook in a grill or regular oven),  and let it rise for 50 minutes to an hour. Then, with a sharp knife, slice a cross or a couple of parallel slashes in the top and set it into the preheated oven or grill.

If you’re using a BBQ , you might be well advised to set your baking sheet or skillet on top of a couple of bricks placed on the wire grill. Try to avoid positioning the loaf directly over the propane burner(s).

If you’re using a countertop oven, position the rack as low as it will go in the oven’s cabinet.

Set your oven or countertop oven to 350 degrees. Use an oven thermometer to help regulate your BBQ grill to around 349-400 degrees. Allow the bread to cook for about 40 minutes to an hour. When it is brown and crispy on the outside and sounds kind of hollow when tapped, it’s done.

The Strange Benefits of “Lockdown”

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So we’re told that the “lockdown” of America’s population — basically urging everyone to stay in their homes, to shut down businesses, to stay at least six feet away from other people (preferably more), to stay away from church services, movie houses, athletic events, restaurants, and whatnot — has apparently begun to work. The coronavirus wildfire is beginning to cool. But we won’t be safe, not a chance, until a vaccine is produced. And when will that be?

“Given the current severity of the crisis, there are efforts to fast-track a vaccine for COVID-19 in as little as 12 to 18 months,” Dr. Abe Malkin, the founder and medical director of Concierge MD in Los Angeles told Business Insider.

A year to a year and a half? As little as? Seriously?

Our honored leader, dumb as a post as usual, craves to reopen the economy ASAP even though at the moment our country has the highest covid-19 death toll of any in the world: 20,000 of our people killed. This ill-advised desire of his is hardly surprising given that we’re headed into a depression the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1929 and that he campaigned on promises of invigorating the economy.

Meanwhile, those who understand economics warn that we’re skateboarding down the tubes at accelerating rates. “The pain will deepen,” opine the august editors of The Economist, “as defaults cascade through domestic payment chains.” Far as I can see, they’ve got that dead right. Recovery from this fiasco in the short term will be miraculous; in the long term it will require fortitude, patience, and — hang onto your hat — intelligent leadership.

If this thing goes on much longer, we could find that the measures we’re taking to save lives could alter the fabric of our society: change the ways we do things permanently.

On the other hand, not all is angst. Let us consider the strange benefits of “lockdown.”

• It has given Mr. Trump a royal opportunity to display what a bumbling clown he is. Maybe his performance will move voters off the dime to get him out of office.

• There’s almost no traffic! Even at 7 or 8 a.m., I can get across Feeder Street N/W without risking my life. The horrid Conduit of Blight Blvd. is relatively quiet and clear. Driving on a freeway is not the usual nightmare.

• I haven’t bought gasoline in a month! And the car’s gas tank is still three-quarters full!

• My auto insurer is refunding 15% of this year’s car insurance premium! Hafta say, it had crossed my mind to quietly resent having to pay to insure the tank for the weeks and possibly months that I’m not driving it. Since the cost of insuring that damn Venza is in the vicinity of $750, a 15% refund will go a ways toward next year’s tax & insurance budget.

• With people home all the time, the neighborhood is safer: fewer burglaries, fewer car break-ins, less harassment of women.

• Delivery services are growing. Getting someone else to bring your groceries to you instead of having to do battle with traffic and crowds is kinda nice. Walmart, Sprouts, Albertson’s, Safeway, Basha’s (a local grocery chain), Fry’s (Kroger), CVS, Walgreen’s, and Home Depot will deliver whatever your heart desires, right to your door. Right now I could order 20 pounds of (much-needed) birdseed from Walmart for a tiny fraction of what the same stuff goes for on Amazon.

• Restaurants are turning themselves into grocery stores. In addition to selling cooked meals to go, many are selling grocery items. One proprietor here will sell you a margarita to go, too, with your upscale gourmet “Mexican” meal.

• My son has been working at home for the past three weeks. He says his employer, a large nationwide insurance company, has closed and locked its large building in the East Valley. He’s afraid they won’t re-open it. Whether that means he thinks they’ll move their operation to some other city, laying off all their Phoenix workers, or whether he suspects they simply will ask everyone on their staff to telecommute has yet to be articulated. But…

Why not have all office workers work from home all the time? Companies wouldn’t have to rent expensive office buildings — these could be converted into homeless housing or retail space. Or  torn down to provide some green space. All a company would need is a meeting room to bring staff together once a month or so, and private space for one-on-one meetings.

• Meanwhile, my neighbor across the street, a high school teacher and English-as-a-second-language specialist, appeared to be relaxing on his front porch the other day, talking into his laptop’s microphone. In response to a quizzical glance, he announced “I’m teaching!“

Yep. I’ve done that. Created the Great Desert University’s first online course in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. It surely has its advantages over standing in front of a roomful of students for 90 minutes to three hours.

Why not put schools online all the time? Where schools exist to provide free lunches and baby-sitting services, why not frankly make them child-care centers? For single parents and couples who both have to work, existing school buildings could be converted into baby-sitting facilities with computer hookups to have the kids do their schoolwork online. Is it really necessary to congregate kids in prison-like facilities to teach them?

When I was teaching at the university’s westside campus — a commuter campus smack in the middle of a district where you really don’t  wanna put your kids in a public school — I was surprised to discover that a bunch of otherwise perfectly sane adult students were homeschooling their kids. Nooo, amazingly, they were NOT religious nuts or end-of-the-worlders. These were people who had tried the public schools in that part of town and found them beyond wanting. And because most were working-class folks, few of them were earning so much that one partner’s salary would be sorely missed. Several classmates explained that after doing the math, they realized that if one parent stayed home to supervise their kids’ homeschooling, it actually cost the family budget nothing — and indeed in some cases they came out ahead. This was because if one parent, usually the mother, stayed home, they didn’t have to pay for office clothing, for gasoline to commute, for higher auto insurance to cover commutes to two jobs, for lunches out, for day care, for summer child care, and so on. Not only that, but these people were convinced their children were getting better education — and having taught the products of Arizona’s public schools after they reach our universities and community colleges, I’d say they had somethin’ there. Not one but several of them reported that their kids could get through a whole day’s classroom instruction in two hours, sitting at the dining room table. They said that if they sat their kids down shortly after breakfast, the kids would go through the lessons, do the homework, and finish by noon.

They would then spend the afternoon in field trips, learning projects, music lessons, or other creative activities. Kids had no problem passing the standardized tests and no problem with the SATs.

Think o’ that… As for socialization, the public schools here are required to let home-schooled kids join in extra-curricular activities, so many of these kids were on track teams, baseball teams, band, debate clubs, even football teams. In addition, the Phoenix area has large kids’ soccer and baseball leagues, so there are plenty of PE-like things for home-schoolers to join.

I’m tellin’ you…if this lock-down maneuver goes on for very long, a whole lotta parents are going to figure that out. Why would you put your kid in a prison-like school where they’re going to bring home a disease, a pack of cigarettes, or a baggie of weed…when you could teach them better at home?

If that happens, school districts will (one hopes) respond by providing extensive online instruction. And then maybe all teachers will be able to hold forth from the comfort of their front patios.

And speaking of change in the offing…

• Sheltering in place is about the same as aging in place. This fiasco is giving me a chance to see what will be involved in staying in my house when I’m too old to go out and bat around the homicidal streets of Phoenix, and to figure out how to make it happen, while I’m still “young” enough and clear-headed enough to figure anything out.

Being forced to figure out how to get damn near everything delivered is good preparation for the Aging in Place Scheme. If all the places that are doing home deliveries now continue to do so into the future — and they probably will, because most of them are contracting out the service — it would be relatively easy to stay in your home (assuming no crippling disability) well into your dotage. All these delivery services essentially co-opt the largest part of one’s need to drive.

For other purposes — entertainment, for example, or church, or clothes shopping — Uber or else catching rides with younger friends will do the job.

What’s good about social distancing and self-isolation in your parts?

Never a Dull Moment in the ‘Hood

by

So after dark, while great dinnerplate of a moon  in the eastern sky chased a diamond-like Venus into the west, Ruby and I set out for the day’s second two-mile stroll around the ’Hood. A cop helicopter had buzzed the trees a few minutes before, a chorus of sirens wailing beneath it, but by now things seemed quiet enough. I took a shilelagh along. Just in case. But didn’t expect any cases.

But as we’re trotting along Cut-Through Street West, what do we see ahead of us, right at the top of Lower Richistan, but a whole covey of emergency vehicles, ambulances, cop cars, and enough red, white, and blue lights to light up the street all the way down to Feeder Street North-South. We get across that road and shortly come across some neighbors gawking from their front yard.

“What’s goin’ on?” I ask.

“House fire,” says one of them.

Ruby starts to play with one of their kids.

“I was afraid a kid must have fallen in a pool.”

“No, thank God.”

“Nice timing: get laid off your job and your house burns down”

He laughs ruefully. “It’s down that cul-de-sac, the one that goes to the left up there.”

“So we can get around on Ruth to get back to Feeder N/S?”

“Think so. It’s somewhere in the cul-de-sac.”

So we proceed, and indeed do manage to slip to the left to get around the commotion.This requires us to loop around to Florence Rd, where the moron’s loose German shepherd attacked Ruby — and me. We haven’t walked on that street since then. The idiots still haven’t fenced their yard, so I pick Ruby up and carry her in my arms while walking past the place. There are some positive aspects to having a small dog.

The cul-de-sac in question is lined with mid-century modern houses, same vintage as all the other large tract houses on half-acre lots in Lower Richistan, except they haven’t yet been upgraded and millenialized. All but two of them are kind of down-at-the-heels, tired-looking ranch houses. I figure they’re mostly occupied by retirees aging in place. One of them houses a latter-day pothead, a gray-haired old hippie who used to be a good buddy of the brothers who lived in the Meth House — he would take his motorcycle over there for them to work on in their shade-tree garage business. Others are pretty much invisible. Dollars to donuts someone left something on the stove and fell asleep in front of the television.

We have to maneuver around the lively scene, once we exit Upper Richistan, by going down Sub-Feeder Street N/W to the park, then back up toward our road. Interestingly, Ruby remembers where I fell and busted up my wrist, and she resists going down that sidewalk. I have to pick her up and carry her (again!) until we reach the place where the heaved concrete has been repaired When she could see that the pavement was now OK, she decided to continue.

Dogs know more than we think.