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Sumer is y-goin’ out…

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Lhudly sing cuckoo!

It’s only the middle of August, and mornings are beautiful again. At eight in the morning, one can sit outside with one’s pet dogs and pet mosquitoes, enjoy a second cup of coffee, and write a blog post.

It’s pretty early for the weather to cool, so I’m sure it’s a trick. The Goddess, renowned for Her twisted sense of humor, is trying to lull us into a false sense of confidence.

Speaking of Her sense of humor, have you ever noticed that every time you awaken with a splitting headache, one of the neighbors decides to practice his technique with a chain saw?

Last night the third of three finalists for the position of our new choir director auditioned for the part…this peculiar species of torture involves trying to elicit recognizable music from as many choir members as will volunteer to show up. Since this is Arizona and most sane people with any money leave town for the summer, that’s not very many. {chortle!} Those poor guys must have been ready to expire, to a man, after they’d jumped through that hoop.

Personally, I liked them all and surely will not despair no matter which is hired. One of them, who will remain unnamed lest some member of the hiring committee read this, I truly fell in love with. Another is an extremely close second —  neck-and-neck, really. It’s too bad we can’t hire every one of them!

But I felt encouraged, because…frankly I’ve felt unsure whether I would be able to continue in the choir, since I have no formal training (none, zero, zipola!) in music and know only what our long-suffering and venerable director has managed to convey over the past few years. I suspected that without him around, I would be doomed in a choir whose members all have plenty of music training. Some have advanced degrees in music, and about a third are professional or semi-professional vocalists.

To my surprise, though, I was able to follow what each man was saying and to yodel along with the group. And that, my friends, speaks volumes for our outgoing director’s teaching talent…

Meanwhile, back in the trenches…

Tony Schwartz, the hack Trump hired to write his book The Art of the Deal, speculates that our illustrious leader will resign before the end of the year. {snort!} That’ll be the day!

Trump repeats an error (dare we say alt-fact; i.e., “lie”?) that he’s already been called on, evidently figuring his admirers are so stupid they didn’t notice he was wrong about this before and he’s wrong about it now.

Erstwhile Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (who now looks surprisingly good!) slams the orange buffoon for, among other things, lending comfort and aid to the racist fruitcake fringe, holding a political event after a national tragedy, alienating the US from its allies, and scaring the bejayzus out of our military leaders.

Congressional Republicans fret and chew their nails, but seem to lack the equipment between their legs required to propel them off their butts and do something about the ongoing fiasco they’ve created.

In other news, an idiot state senator stoops to our President’s level by remarking in public that she hopes he’s assassinated.

And the real-life assassination victim’s mother, Susan Bro, displays enough dignity and common sense to say she will not debase herself to speak to our President.

Holy sh!t. Every day a new circus act in the news… Today, the three-ring circus is running full-tilt.

Cuckoo! Cuckoo!

Svmer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu

Awe bleteþ after lomb
lhouþ after calue cu
Bulluc sterteþ
bucke uerteþ

murie sing cuccu
Cuccu cuccu
Wel singes þu cuccu
ne swik þu nauer nu

Sing cuccu nu • Sing cuccu.
Sing cuccu • Sing cuccu nu

Image: British Library, Harley 978. “Sumer is icumen in”

Banner Image of the Day: Chestnut-breasted malkoha (a type of cuckoo), by Evan Parker – Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3730238. Note the interesting resemblance to the Orange One.

 

Charley Update

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So this morning my son reports that the hound appears to be “about 80% better; largely acting like his old dog self.” The hot spot has completely healed (reminder to dog owners: acquire hot spot spray from the vet…it works!), and though he still has a little difficulty getting up and down, mostly he’s walking normally and has returned to bossing the human around.

It’s amazingly good news. If you’d asked me ten days ago how long it would take the dog to recover — or if he’d recover at all — I’d have guessed it would take 6 to 8 weeks for him to arrive at the stage my son describes. And I’d have guessed he’d never get much more than 80% of his functionality back.

But if he’s that much better now, it looks like there’s at least a chance he’ll return to normal.

He must not have had a 107-degree core temp for very long. It’s a five-hour drive from Phoenix to Show Low, even if you fly low on the open road. But they didn’t do much aviation: the road was closed in the Salt River Canyon, and they were stopped dead for an hour. At 107.4 degrees, if he’d been in that state for even 45 minutes or an hour, he surely would have died.

Okay. So it’s good news and bad news. If my son is right that the dog worked himself into a state of hyperthermia because he’s that terrorized by a car’s interior, it presents a problem: you can’t even get that dog to a vet without taking him in a car. And when Charley is under the weather (he’s given to unexplained collywobbles), my son will usually bring him to my house on the way to work. Same if he’s going out of town or has some other reason to have the dog babysat. All of those escapades will now take two people — one to drive and one to sit with the dog and try to keep him calm. My son likes to go camping and fishing, and he’s always taken Charley with him — after this, the minivacations will have to be dog-free.

And why would a man go fishing without his dog, eh?

A Man, a Dog, and Its Neurosis:
The Malignant Hyperthermia Soap Opera

Day One
Update
Homeward Bound
Back in Town
Home Again
Crisis, Continued
Hot Spot!?!

What’s the truth?

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Banner image of the day:
A meeting of the four jurists who imposed Nazi ideology on the legal system of Germany.
 Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J03166,_Berlin,_Amtsübernahme_Dr._Thierack.jpg ‎(800 × 586 pixels, file size: 46 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Someone’s Baby Girl…

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There’s a woman, young or old is hard to tell. She’s skinny, maybe even athletic-looking, neatly dressed in shorts and a nondescript top, her smooth ebony complexion ageless. She could be 25 and looks 40, or maybe 40 and looks 25.

At a glance, you sense she’s a panhandler. Yet maybe not. She doesn’t have that ragged look of people who sleep in the rough. She looks decently fed and healthy and clean. Middle-class, you’d think, if you met her at a bus stop and she said nothing to you.

But she is a panhandler. She works the Safeway shopping center in North Central Phoenix, at the intersection of Glendale and Seventh Street. They must have chased her way from the grocery store, because she haunts the little strip mall down by the restaurants and miscellaneous vendors. You’ll never see her in front of the Safeway, but you’ll often find her in front of the pizzeria or the deli or the Leslie’s Pool store. She walks around as though she were going somewhere, but it never takes long to see she isn’t going anywhere: just back and forth.

Today when I dropped by Leslie’s to pick up the newly repaired pool cleaner, she pounced as I came out of the store.

“Scuse me, ma’am, can I ask you…”

“I’m sorry, I don’t carry money with me.” (This happens to be true: I never carry cash, and of late I’ve stopped carrying a purse at all…for exactly this reason.)

“Oh, I don’t want any money, I just…”

Heard that line before. “No, I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

She trails me across the parking lot.

“But please, I just want…”

“NO!”

By now I’m at the car and need to toss the gadget into it and get in myself. I’m a little concerned that she’ll accost me at that point or try to get into the car, but experience suggests the fastest way out is the best way out.

She subsides and wanders away before I shut the door on her pitch.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen her perform this maneuver. I don’t know what she’s hitting people up for, but whatever it is, the chase-and-beg strategy is a routine.

Still. It’s haunting. Poor little thing. She was somebody’s baby girl. What the hell happened to her that she’s hitting up strangers in a parking lot, day in and day out?

What can be done?

Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.

Here’s an idea…

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Let’s shut off the power while the Fatlady is painting walls!

Rain makes Salt River Project shut down. Doesn’t take much rain, either. It’s just sprinkling here, although there may have been a little blow during the night: the BBQ cover was on the ground this morning, allowing the Merry Goddess to soak the Q’s inner workings.

What a sense of humor that Goddess has…

Power went off  about 5:30 a.m., following a noticeable surge. This created a nice opportunity for me to observe that the kitchen flashlight needed new batteries, and now I have to buy a raft more D-cells. The camp lantern I bought a couple years ago comes in mighty handy during these events: it really does light up a whole room.

I love it when the power is out: the neighborhood is SO quiet! You’re not aware of how much background noise hums and bumps and clanks along, all the time, until it stops.

Fortunately the rain has brought the exterior temp down to 80 degrees. So even with the lights back on, we’re giving the air-conditioner a rest.

And of course, these little power outages remind me, as usual, that I haven’t followed much of the advice I’ve emitted about preparing for an emergency. I’m not even very well prepared for an extended electric outage, to say nothing of {gulp} what could happen.

Chortle! It’s easy enough to laugh off the possibilities:

  • Yes, the fault along the Mexican border has, in the relatively recent past, unleashed an earthquake powerful enough to level block construction even as far north as lovely Uptown Phoenix.
  • Yes, dangerous nut cases have been emboldened by the take-over of our government by extremist elements and yup, yesterday they showed exactly what they’d like to do to those of us they don’t like.
  • Yes, we have an incompetent and almost certainly corrupt fool in the White House, one whose stupidity puts not just the US but the entire effing world in real danger.
  • Yes, we have an aging infrastructure that breaks down in a light sprinkle and is capable of shutting down an entire metropolitan area.
  • Yes, an asteroid could hit us tomorrow.

But none of those things feels real enough to push one to bestir oneself out of one’s inertia.

I still haven’t bought a decent camp stove. The ones I’ve seen at the outdoor megamarts are made in China and are clear & present junk. I’m thinking that what may be needed is a couple of the little hiker’s stoves that SDXB favors for his back-country (and motel…) excursions. There are quite a few of them on Amazon, though I’m going to ask him to take me out to the BX, where I can get one without having to pay tax on it.

Interestingly, they also make little camp stoves that run on wood or charcoal. It would be a nuisance to light, but I’m not sure you can get these small stoves to connect to a regular propane tank. Having to track down those dinky little fuel canisters would be as much of a pain in the neck as getting wood or charcoal to light. And in a real crisis that extends for any length of time, those little butane canisters might be impossible to find.

The wood-burning things are cheap, and there’s a stack of firewood in the backyard that goes halfway to the top of the block wall. On the other hand…I don’t have a hatchet and don’t feel like learning to use one. Hm. Better get over that quirk, I guess.

So, consider: if a Korean bomb hit Los Angeles and you lived west of the Rockies (but not in the immediate area of L.A., what would happen?

Here’s an amusing online calculator that can give you a clue. If you’re not at ground zero, you probably will survive…but not without considerable, uhm, hassle, shall we say… In the Phoenix area, if a bomb the size that Kim’s guys are capable of building struck dead center in the downtown, the serious devastation wouldn’t even reach up to the northern area of North Central. If you were indoors and your structure didn’t collapse, you’d have a shot at sheltering in place. You’d need some plywood or something to seal up the windows that undoubtedly would blow out…but…well, WTF.

If, as is more likely, the worse Kim could do is hit L.A., the fallout plume would largely miss the Phoenix area. Los Angeles is north of here, and the prevailing wind flows northeast. The radioactive fallout would head straight across the Mohave and up to Las Vegas.

In that case, such a strike would be largely survivable for Phoenicians…if you were adequately prepared.

Much of our food is trucked in from Los Angeles. Thus food stocks in grocery stores would quickly be depleted — probably within a day, as panicky residents made runs on markets. For that reason it would be important to have nonperishable items such as rice, beans, and canned goods stocked in…enough to last a couple of weeks, at the least, but better, enough to last at a month. Preferably two.

Water comes in from the Colorado River and to a lesser extent from ground water. Central Arizona Project has stockpiled enough water to serve the Phoenix area for about a year; it’s stored underground. This was to stave off a drought, but if Colorado River water were contaminated, it could be used for a short time.

Electricity is generated by a nuclear power plant here in the Valley, by a coal-fired plant on the Navajo and by dams on the Colorado. While there could be some interruption or rationing of power, I think that would be the least of one’s worries.

Gasoline is piped in from California and Texas. Prices would soar and gas would be in short supply if Texas were the only source. So it would be wise to have a few spare cans of gas on hand.

And now, my friends, let’s consider a real threat that few of us notice or even know about: the extremist, fascist right wing. It reared its ghastly head in Charlottesville yesterday. It’s always been here, this little Grendel, but it’s been quiescent in the swamp for the past few decades. Now that the political climate looks favorable, this ugly creature climbs out of the murky water and makes itself visible.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the number of armed extremist nut cases who are loose on the land…and an even bigger mistake to underestimate the number of armed criminals who would join them in the event of a seriously catastrophic emergency. If your home were stocked with food, fuel, and functioning tools, your home would instantly become a target for these two elements.

You need to be armed and you need to have enough ammunition on hand to last until order can be restored. That could be anywhere from a few days to a few months, depending on where you are and what community resources exist in your area. If you don’t know how to use them, you need to go to the nearest range, take some safety lessons, and practice.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, back to the paint job…

Banner image of the day, 8/13/2017

Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.

Paint Job…

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…in progress…

The longest wall, the one that goes up the hallway and continues to form the north wall of the dining room, is about 45 feet long. The other one, about 30 feet. The hallway has SEVEN doorways with white trim, not counting the archway into the living room, which also has paint that contrasts with the new gray paint.

For some hours I played with the possibility of junking the gray and instead using the old Alexander Julian “Sawgrass” green — we call that “Swamp Green” — which is actually a soothing and pretty color, much admired by guests who see it in the living room. But then I realized the gray test swatch painted on the dining room wall looked kinda muddy because the underlying orange was showing through.

Yes. Orange.

When I moved in, we painted the entire place with a coordinated set of Alexander Julian colors — Alexander Julian seems to have gone out of the paint color business, which tells you something about how long the paint has been on the walls. One of the colors in the set my friend and I selected was a saccharine tangerine orange. I painted a couple of accent walls that color — one in my office, and I think maybe the bathroom…can’t recall anymore. Hated it, though I loved all the other colors. Finally got rid of the tangerine by painting  one office  wall Julian’s “Silver” gray and the other three the very ingratiating ivory white that was part of the collection, and then painting the bathroom a kind of soft violet shade.

But then La Maya put a sort of red/orange on an accent wall in her house. I thought that was too, too kewl and had to have an orange wall, but red she chose was a little harsh against the smokey Alexander Julian colors. After much experimentation I did find an orange color that I liked a lot and continued to like right up to today.

However. If I have to move, I can’t put the house on the market with orange walls running up the hallway and into the dining room. It’s just too, too idiosyncratic. And if I do decide to move, it’ll probably be on fairly short notice. It’ll depend on how much crime follows on the dumping of homeless drug addicts into our neighborhood and on the construction of the several low-income developments that the city is shoehorning into the area. I don’t want to move, but must face the fact that  I’m getting too old to handle another large, high-drive protection dog…and other facts, such as that I really don’t feel safe taking the garbage out into the alley anymore and that almost no one here feels safe walking a dog at night. At least, not a dog that doesn’t come even halfway up to your knee…

Weirdly, all the other colors in that line of Alexander Julian colors are still the height of fashion: you see all of them, in exactly the kind of combination I’ve used, in all sorts of fancy and not-so-fancy home fashion magazines.

The young people favor shades of gray. Everything is gray, gray, and more permutations of gray. And I do like the gray in the bedroom: it’s very soothing.

And boring.

Speaking of gettin’ too old, I am gettin’ too old for house painting!

Cut in all the 87 gerjillion corners, door frames, endless baseboards this morning — last night I touched up said baseboards and door frames with the white semigloss trim paint. The cutting-in chore was a PITA but didn’t take as long as I expected…though I was mightily annoyed that I couldn’t find the cool new paintbrush I bought the other day at HD.

Have you ever noticed that the tireder you get, the more likely you are to glop paint around you? Ugh!

Anyway, pushing onward, I managed to fill in the walls with primer by about 3:30.

Yesterday all the cutting-in caused me to lose a pound and a half overnight.

By tomorrow morning I should be down another five pounds…

Why? Because endlessly annoying Facebook will not pick up the image you want to illustrate your post. It wants to pick up the banner image, which, if it’s generically the same day after day, quickly bores readers or makes them think today’s post is a repeat of yesterday’s. So the only way to force FB to use an image that has anything to do with your post is to change the banner image to fit the subject of the day. That means today’s banner image (a historic photo of four Nazis, for example) bears no relation whatsoever to the topic of yesterday’s post (ruminations on power outages, for example). So annoying.