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All I want for Christmas…

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…is this:

I ask you: is that not to die for? It’s just down the road from our old ranch outside of Yarnell, on 40 deeded acres. The ad doesn’t say anything about lease land, so I assume no BLM land is attached. But still.

That little palace is not quite as grandiose as it looks in this photo: when you see the inside shots, it appears to be almost identical to a house some friends built outside of Flagstaff, largely on a DIY basis. I assume the plans are some sort of standard thing. Maybe even the house is a kit of some kind? Click on that link, assuming it’s still live by the time you see this post. That downstairs room: our friends used that as their office — Gerry was a retired zoologist who still wrote, occasionally, on his specialty, and Jean was an amazing creative writer. I edited one of her books, about her experiences during World War II flying as a WAC.

Well, two stories is not very practical for a 72-year-old broad. But I’m thinking…what if you made that downstairs room into your bedroom? Then you would not be required to run up and down those steps every day. You actually could rent out the upstairs rooms on Air B&B. Or turn it into your own small B&B, come to think of it.

It appears to be pretty much off the grid:

3KW solar power system powers all the electricity needed. Backup power provided by Generac generator with very few hours used. Well with 3K gallon underground storage tank provides ample water, 10-15 GPM. Outstanding water supply with water level at 25 feet and well sunk to 100ft. Septic system. Large propane tank fuels gas WH, Range, Blue Flame vent less wall heaters.

Hot dayum!

They don’t say anything about water rights. Just because you have a well on a piece of property around here doesn’t mean you own the rights to the water that flows under the property. “Seasonal stream”…hmmm…it may be on the Hassayampa. I believe John Hays owns the water rights to most of the Hassayampa. But…one wonders.

I don’t see a lot of tree of heaven in that brush…the area is fast becoming infested with that stuff, which is a serious nuisance plant. Hmmm…

The fencing looks to be in pretty good shape. Looked at that and thought: Here’s how we pull off this $650,000 purchase: we turn it into agricultural property by keeping a small herd of llamas, which could be rented out to hiking, hunting, and fishing guides. Presto-changeo: you don’t make any profit but you DO turn that thing into a tax haven.

Then, whilst looking into the question of Valley fever in dogs, I stumbled across the startling fact that llamas are preternaturally prone to Valley fever. And they die fast from it.

Ohhhhkayyyy…. There was an idea whose time came and went at the speed of light.

Another possibility might be to turn it into a small winery. I do know grapes will grow up there. One of the Gold Bar’s previous residents had planted a couple of Thompson’s seedless grapes on an arbor up against the house. They were huge, and they bore a large crop every year.

Remembering that one is not really looking to make a profit when one claims one’s property as “agricultural”…this could be an answer. I could either make wine and sell it here in the Valley as some kind of ultra-chic boutique item, or I could sell the grapes to the wineries up in the direction of Cottonwood. The latter, of course, would be the path of least resistance.

Or I could use those pastures to board horses. With the upstairs rooms…think of it: B&B for you and your nag! Seriously: I know people down here who would cheerfully board their horse up there and come up on weekends and holidays to ride. That way…I could have horses, but they could pay the vet bills. 😀

Y’know…. Seriously. If I could turn that thing into an excuse for agricultural property, thereby foisting a fair amount of the expense onto the taxpayer, I could marginally afford it. My house is worth three & a half. With practically no water and power bills, it would be relatively cheap to live there. You’d have to drive into Prescott or down to Wickenburg once a month to buy groceries, racking up some gasoline bills and wear & tear on the vehicle. But…with a good enough freezer and a reliable enough propane system…

Welll….no…probably not. Propane up there is damn expensive. If you’re running your stove, fridge, freezer, and heaters on propane, it’s going to cost at least as much as Salt River Project costs to power your house down here, and possibly as much as the piratical Arizona Public Service gouges its customers.

Yet. On the other other hand…I hardly ever use my stove anymore. I use a propane grill, which in fact does not consume much fuel. Despite daily use, I change out a tank maybe once every two or three months. Hm. “Ventless wall heaters.” Right. That means they are using propane to heat the place. And that’s what costs the money. Imagine heating two stories with propane….holy sh!t.

I wonder if a solar electric system can sustain space heaters. That’s mostly what I use down here to heat my house in the winter. But…the Valley of We-Do-Mean Sun ain’t Yarnell. Helle’s belles, it’ snows in freaking Yarnell. You would need to be able to heat something more than just the chair where you’re parked to do your day’s writing and editing jobs.

…but…

I….want…that…pretend…ranch…

Never a Dull Moment: Dog Department

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Cassie the Corgi
The Queen of the Galaxy

Never a dull moment, all right. Cassie has been sick for the past 10 days with an alarming cough and general lassitude. The vet put her on a couple of dog drugs which off the bat seemed to help significantly. But just as I thought she was healing up, the cough came back.

So this morning it was off to the vet, a 40-minute drive through late rush-hour traffic. After considering the details and X-raying her lungs, he found a lot of congestion up near the top of the lungs and near the heart. Between that and the elevated temperature, he suspects Valley fever.

Jayzus!

So he did some lab tests — results won’t be back until Monday — and handed me a bottle of fluconazole and said to take her off the stuff she’s been taking and give her two of these a day. Call back on Monday to see whether his suspicion is correct.

I remarked that about 15 or 20 years ago, a friend had a dog with Valley fever, which they dosed mightily with an antifungal. The stuff was astonishingly expensive in the U.S., where patients are regularly ripped off — he was a lawyer and couldn’t afford the treatment…had to drive into Mexico and bring the stuff back across the border. He said the newer drugs work much better, and that if she does have Valley fever, chances are very high that the fluconazole will work on it.

ohhh-kayyy.  The course of treatment is 6 to 12 months, though some dogs have to be medicated for the rest of their lives.

It’s credible, as off-the-cuff diagnoses go. Every time the two dogs go out through the side door to the garage — which is every time I come home, and then some — Ruby shoots out like a rocket and Cassie chases after her, hot on her heels. So a couple times a day she gets the quarter-minus ground cover sprayed right up into her face. And dusty desert sand is exactly the stuff that harbors the pathogen (coccidiodes).

Valley fever is endemic in the low desert. If you’ve lived here any length of time, you’ve had it. Used to be when they tested you for TB — as they would if you wanted a job as, say, a teacher or a nurse, or just on general principles — you would test positive, simply because the Valley fever antibodies would trigger the TB test. Don’t know if that’s still true — I avoid jobs that require invasive and nosy medical tests or investigations, and so haven’t had another TB test in years. But the point is, everybody who lives here gets it. And so do a lot of dogs: 6 to 10 percent of dogs in Arizona’s Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima counties get it. Like humans, most infected dogs throw it off quickly and probably develop lifelong immunity. But anything that compromises your immune system…such as, say, old age…can cause you to develop disease symptoms. And Cassie is 12 years old: about 69 in human years. As far as we know…she could be older than that.

Fortunately, her symptoms suggest the disease is still confined to the lungs and has not yet begun to disseminate through her body. If that’s the case, the drug should get it under control and she may live a normal lifespan.

A “normal” lifespan for a corgi is 16 to 18 years… We shall see.

Another Day Late…

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But no dollars short, to tell the truth. Indeed, I’m yet another day late posting the most recent serial installment of the three (!!) magnum opi going up at Plain and Simple Press because more dollars are flying in over the transom.

Not 20 hours after I returned the most recent paper from one of the teams of Chinese scientists, a long, complicated affair and a tour-de-force of English as a Second Language, in came three departments from our client journal, with more to come.

So that put the eefus on any creative scribbling. I’ve read three book reviews and moved them over to my co-editor for formatting. Much, much more to come.

Meanwhile, the corgi continues to cough. Have to drag her across the city to the vet first thing tomorrow morning. Second thing, actually: the appointment isn’t till 9:45, which will just get us out the door at the right time to avoid a) the accursed no-left-turn lanes and b) the worst of the rush-hour homicidal traffic.

I’ve now added almost 15 pounds of soda ash to the pool water. The pH was almost up to the “neutral” level, at which point I should be able to add the algicide that I plan to dump into the drink in gay abandon. The algae has returned, in its own gay abandon, coating the south wall and steps with sheets of green.

By now the water should have cooled down enough to make the pool nearly unswimmable, but that is far from the case. Weather remains not warm here but hot, and the pool is still warm enough to swim in (if you call dragging a hose and sprayer into the drink and power-washing the walls underwater “swimming”…). This will delay the resurfacing venture, probably into October, since we’re already halfway through September already. I’d hoped to dump in the algaecide so it would be sucked into the filter, where the stuff could saturate the innards.

That won’t do much good if we have to wait very long after the event to shut everything down and empty the water, highly laden with organic compounds that promote algae growth. But…it should use only a little more than a third of the bottle of the stuff. So if the delay goes on long enough to allow the little green plants go start growing again, I’ll just dump some more of the stuff in.

Meanwhile: Beyond tired. Going to bed.

Nine is the new midnight…

Old Dogs, New Tricks?

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Welp, the Great Website Revamp foisted on us by the credit union turned out not to be the disaster I feared. No hassles, no headaches, no lost data, no disappeared scheduled transactions…yea verily, not even a helluva lot of change in the site’s appearance. At all. Guess the reason I was dreading it so much is that this old dog has come to dislike — deeply — learning new tricks. Especially new techno-tricks. 😀

No doubt this trait does have to do with age. Believe it or not, when I was a young pup I was ahead of the wave. We were the first in our (affluent) set to get a PC — an IBM, direct from the breathtakingly pricey IBM store on the ground floor of a fancy high-rise on North Central. And yes, I could code in those days…you had to know some code to do anything on one of those things. DOS was, yes, code. And XyWrite? A pure ASCII system.

XyWrite…how I miss it. Never once did it crash and lose half a day’s worth of work. Nay, not even half a minute’s worth. Yesterday Wyrd shut down twice as I was struggling through an exceptionally difficult Chinese math paper. This team is definitely in the “All Your Bases Are Belong to Us” set…actually, that idiom is significantly clearer than many turns of phrase infesting said paper.

Luckily, Wyrd is now set to save every 5 minutes. Plus I usually hit ⌘-S every time I enter an edit these days. So little was lost. Actually, a lot was lost in the original file, but Wyrd would bring up a phantom file containing the most recent data, which I would then have to save back down under the original filename. This, when you have several files open at once, amounts to a significant PITA.

I vacillate between thinking there’s something wrong with me — I do not learn fast enough anymore, I cannot remember things, I’m getting fat and lazy and just flat do not WANT to learn anything new thankyouverymuch — and thinking we humans of the 21st century are besieged with techno-ditz: far, far too much ever-changing minutiea that is not helpful, does not improve our performance (often quite to the contrary), does not improve our lives (ditto), and exists solely to annoy the hell out of us.

Case in point: the phone system down at the church’s front office. In three hours I get to slide into the chair at the front desk and watch very charming people come and go for four hours — I’ve taken to volunteer receptionist’s duty once a week. This sounds like it should be easy for the likes of me. My first job was as a receptionist at a large law firm. There were four of us seated in front of the elevators on three floors. I was usually on the main floor, where the incoming calls hit the switchboard. There were two of us at that station, and each had 12 incoming lines. Often all 12 were active at once.

Did I have any trouble handling these? Noooooo…. No problem at all. Easy as breathing.

Fifty years later: on a busy day, maybe two phone calls come in. Can I remember how to transfer those to staff? Can I figure it out from the instructions taped to the desktop next to the phone set? Hell no!

Literally, I can NOT figure this damn thing out. I’ve sat next to one or another of the women who do know how to work it for three entire shifts and still cannot remember what they told me or figure out on my own how to operate it.

It’s just not that hard! Yet my brain does not want to know it.

Maybe that’s it: the brain does not want to know anymore trivia.

But alas. I’m reminded of my late, great secretary, lovingly known as La Morona. The one who almost burned down the Social Sciences building when she put her lunch in the microwave, set it to “high,” and went off and forgot about it.

La Morona could not learn PC hardware and software to save her life. The poor soul. She had been using an antiquated Mac for years. When we hired her, she was sure she could learn the PC. Just as I was sure I could learn that phone system.

Not so much. At one point…oh, this is good! I’d sent her to an employees’ training course to learn how to navigate the university’s arcane bookkeeping system. And arcane it was — one of my RA’s was an accountant (a real one), and when I tried to foist the job on her she rose up in high rebellion. I should have known better than to inflict it on La Morona. About a week or into it, the instructor called me on the phone. The woman was in a rage. She demanded that I send in a disciplinary report on La Morona. Why? asked I. “Because she asks too many questions.”

Sigh.

Presumably because she was trying to learn something that no one in her right mind would want to know…

I really do think there’s a point at which your mind says enough of this crap, already! and simply refuses to store away any more pointless trivia that we all know full well will be changed or dorked up before it can be used more than a half-dozen times.

Yesterday, in the techno-terror department, my Chinese team’s lead author emailed in a sweat. Apparently one of his colleagues is a classic loose cannon. This personage sent the article we’ve been working on in to Elsevier, totally unedited. Result? The editor sent back a flame that must have set their hair on fire.

My guy says this editor sent back a sh!tload (not in those terms, of course: sh!tload seems not to be among the vocabulary lessons given in Chinese middle schools… 😀 ) of editorial suggestions. I interpret this to mean she did a light edit on the thing and entered a bunch of changes or QAs. Understand: at this point I’m two-thirds of the way through second edits on this unimaginably sophisticated and abstract magnum opus!

Now I’m thinking WTF? How am I going to justify a whole new set of edits against my edits in 18 pages of typeset copy? This is going to be a nightmare of Brobdinagian proportions.

I decide to motor on through to the end; then open the file he sent and at that point figure out what the hell to do.

Well, when I finally do reach that point, I find it is, thank GOD, not edited or commented-upon copy, but simply boilerplate the woman has copied from Elsevier’s website and pasted into her email. The “what to look for in your ESL copy” boilerplate. Thank you, ma’am: we already know that.

So. That was close!

Ella’s Story LIVES!

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Finally managed to get through the current chapter of Ella’s Story.

The past few weeks have been so hopelessly busy I simply haven’t had time to dream up any new goings-on. It’s now twenty to 10:00, I’ve been up since 3 a.m., haven’t had breakfast but have wrestled with Elsevier’s authors’ instructions, tried to figure out if the current Chinese author’s magnum opus is going to fly through all those desiderata, diddled away a fair amount of time on the Internet. finally put this thing online.

It’s been long enough since the last posting that I forgot endlessly annoying WordPress sometimes (but not always) arrogates the format of the URL to itself and so I have to go in there and manually change it. This, I didn’t realize until AFTER I’d hit “post” on Twitter, which was after I’d already posted a notice on Facebook. Which means now I can’t change the damn thing from http://www.plainandsimplepress.com/2968-2/ to something that might vaguely make sense.

Damn, but I want my Smith-Corona back.

And now I must get up and run, because not so many hours remain in the day but many, many things remain to be done.

Shingrix: Walgreen’s 0, Safeway 1

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Welp, Safeway wins the Shingrix vaccine competition by a mile.

Earlier this week I went by Walgreen’s to see if they had the shingles vaccine, which is famously in short supply. They said they did. I mentioned that I’d put my name on a list to be called when the vaccine came available again and never heard from them. She checked her list and found (surprise!) I wasn’t on it.

However, having heard that this stuff can make you mightily sick and facing a sh!tload of work that couldn’t be put off, I asked if they had enough that I could come in Sunday (today) to grab the first shot. She said sure, and put my name on her list.

Today after church I darted down there, as planned, to subject myself to the vaunted shot. By now I’ve heard so many reports of side effects ranging from unpleasant to awful by way of painful, I was mightily dreading this encounter.

Was my name on the list, asked she? “They told me to come down here this afternoon.” She checks the list: nope.

“Well, I can have one available about 1:00 this afternoon.” This, after I’ve stood in line behind some woman for a good 15 minutes while the clerk diddled around and diddled around and diddled around and diddled around.

What time is it now? Around 12:30. What, I wonder, does she think I’m going to do with myself, hanging around a Walgreen’s for half an hour or forty minutes? I say I’ll come back another time . (Maybe in some future lifetime...)

Get in the car and drive across the street to the Safeway, cattycorner across the intersection from the Walgreen’s. March through mobs of customers (is there a reason the Walgreen’s is almost empty? hmmm?), bounce up to the pharmacy counter and ask if they have any Shingrix shots available.

“Sure enough! Come on over to the cash register and I’ll ring you up.”

Uh huh.

In under 10 minutes, I had the shot and was out the door and back in my car. Also had a 10% off coupon for my next grocery shopping expedition.

So. That will bring a permanent end to my getting flu shots — or much of anything else — at Walgreen’s!

Little drawback, though: They charged a $160 copay!!!!!!!

That, of course, is ridiculous. Tomorrow I’ll probably call Humana to ask WTF. But on the other hand, Humana’s Part D plan is so economical that they’ve saved me far, far more than that in premiums over the several years since I signed up. So I don’t feel too exercised. Plus any day I’d cheerfully pony up $160 to avoid the shingles!

As for the horrors of the Shingrix vaccine? So far, nothing like the tales we’ve been told. The pharmacist said most people experience some mild arm soreness and a few enjoy flu-like symptoms, which pass quickly. Me? No pain so far. Slight vertigo and mild headache — which I’ve experienced in the past with ordinary flu shots and are hardly debilitating. And very possibly attributable to stress, since I’ve been flopping around trying to figure out how to fit two to five days of being sick into a very busy schedule.

I wonder if they’ll gouge me another $160 for the second shot…