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Congrats on Your New Self-cleaning Oven — Oh, BTW, Don’t Use the Self-clean Cycle

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No joke.

Before the key hit the doorlock after after I got home from my Thursday morning meeting, I could hear an alarm frantically chiming somewhere inside the house. WTF? Didn’t sound like a smoke alarm. I fly in the door.

Takes a minute or two to find the screaming alarm’s source: the oven. Takes some more time to find the dog, who’s cowering in the back of the house.

I can’t tell why the oven is hollering. It’s flashing an error message on its little electronic control pad: F 7. Very meaningful. I hit “Off/Cancel” and it stops. Thirty seconds later, it starts up again.

Call the appliance repair company. Answering lady suggests throwing the breaker switch. Fortunately, the stovetop, having been switched from electric to gas, is no longer on the same circuit as the oven, so the only appliance that’s shut off by this maneuver is the hysterical oven. Forthwith, she sends a repair dude.

Repair Dude arrives in something less than 45 minutes. He studies the thing and then opines that it needs a new control board thingie. Motherboard. Whatever it is that electronic ovens have. And he says that the reason it’s busted is that the self-cleaning cycle is too hot for the electronics in such an appliance, and sooner or later if you run the self-clean it will burn out the controls. I say it’s been months since I ran it; most recently I had the broiler on, a couple of days ago. He says it doesn’t matter; inevitably this piece of hardware will crash, and that is the cause. You should never, he emphasizes, run the self-cleaning cycle on an oven.

Of course not. Why would you own a self-cleaning oven if you intended to use the self-cleaning feature?

He says replacing it will cost something over $400 (pretty close to $500, actually). Replacing the double oven unit: about $2600.

I say I’m unemployed. And besides, the control panel thingie was replaced (by a different company) not very long ago.

He says (incredulously), well, didn’t the guy who installed it tell you never to run the self-clean cycle? These things can heat up to 800 or 900 degrees! Get yourself some Easy-Off and read and follow the directions.

I say, I have paid my dues and I am never cleaning another oven or defrosting another refrigerator.

He laughs, being soi-même a man d’un certain âge. Then he says, well, in that case, here’s how to make it self-clean without self-immolating: Set the oven temp to 500 degrees. Leave it on about 45 minutes. Then come back, turn it off, let it cool down, and just wipe the oven out. It works just about as well as running the self-clean cycle.

Is he right? Apparently so: there’s a class-action lawsuit against Whirlpool, maker of the Kenmore oven that’s in my kitchen.

So that’s pretty amusing: Basically, today we manufacture self-cleaning ovens that are just for pretty.

The breaker switch for the oven is now permanently turned to “off,” and the oven has been reduced to new cupboard space. After changing out the doors and window, I have no money to fix the thing, and won’t for at least three or four more months. The painter, who’s set to show up right after summer class ends, will clean out  my short-term indulgence fund, and long-term savings have been so reduced that I will run out of living money on November 1, 2012. I expect not to repair the oven until I’m ready to move out of the house, which could be quite some time. With any luck.

Thank God I had enough sense to buy a propane grill!

Getting Funnier and Funnier about Everything

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Face it: I’ve become a crazy old lady. If I started out “funny” about money, now I’m a little strange about most everything. It could be accentuated by 115-degree heat, which makes you crazy when you go out in it and makes you stir-crazy by imprisoning you inside air-conditioned boxes. But likely there was some underlying funniness to start with…

Check it out:

The big potted ficus tree, which gives the potentially stark back porch some character and even a little shade, is getting sunburned in the blasting heat. That’s even though the thing is under the shade of the patio roof. The morning sun is so fierce it burns the leaves before it gets high enough to be blocked by the roof.

Don’t believe it? Last night the patio thermometer read 101 degrees…at ten o’clock at night! Don’t even ask how hot it gets out there in the daytime.

The tree is roped to the patio upright, because the stiff breezes we get at this time of year (normal people would call them “violent dust storms”) invariably knock it over, causing me to have to risk putting my back out (again) pulling it upright and creating quite a nice mess. It is not gunna get unroped.

What to do?

Well, I had these curtains left after I built new sheer curtains for the bedroom. Think of that.

Screwed a few more cuphooks into the patio beam and then hung the drapes on those. Voila!

Gorgeous, huh?

They’re even more colorful when viewed from the other side, a scenic embellishment visible from the street, if you’re curious enough to peer over the wall.

Oh well. They’ll come down as soon as the weather moderates, probably mid- to late August.

One nice thing about this lash-up is that it creates a kind of tent where I can shuck off my clothes and wrap a towel around myself to dart over to the pool without being observed from the neighbor’s front windows or by tall or nosy passers-by.

Speaking of the wall and scenic embellishments and privacy, I tied another lash-up to the east wall bordering the street:Exquisite, no?

Those things are old tumble-down wooden trellises, to which I nailed old shade screen and then tied to the wall’s decorative block row. They also serve to block curious eyes from peering into my yard as I go about my business, often in various states of undress. Look just awful! But they’ll do the job until those hopseed bushes can get big enough to take over from the deceased devil-pod tree as a privacy screen.

This is the joy of not living in a homeowner’s association: you’re free to decorate your yard in Early Poor White Trash.

Just look at those bushes! They were little one-gallon twigs when I planted them this spring. At that time they just came up to the bottom of the third row of blocks from the bottom—not counting the row that’s half-buried there. Now they’re almost to the top of the wall! They certainly will have reached the top by the end of the summer. From what I can tell, they’re pretty frost-tolerant—not that we get hard freezes around here anymore, thanks to the global warming that is not global warming. So assuming they don’t freeze down to the ground this winter, by next summer they should be tall and vigorous enough to block the view from the road. Thank goodness!

And speaking of the hopseed bushes, remember the “oleander” I reported as having volunteered in a pot? Well…hmmmm….

“Oleander”→

←Hopseed bush

Now personally, I still don’t think they’re the same. Click for extreme close-ups and notice the slightly wavy edges on the known hopseed bush, and then compare with the smooth edges on the intruder. Also the volunteer plant has shiny (oleander-like!) leaves, whereas the hopseed’s leaves are slightly less waxy-looking. However, the leaves are the same size and color and the growing habit is strangely similar.

We’ll know sooner or later. If the visitor puts out pink, magenta, or white flowers, it will give itself away. However…if that thing is a baby hopseed bush, it doesn’t bode well. The  hopseeds growing fifty feet away from it put out about three little seed pods this spring. If they sprout that readily, once they start really producing pods, we’ll have a bumper crop of hopseed babes!

My favorite orange tree, the one that produces fruit so sweet they taste like candy, has been suffering. This spring it quit adding new leaves, and the leaves that still cling to the branches are as sunburned as the ficus’s. I really don’t want that tree to die.

I think the problem is that it hasn’t been getting enough water. The other tree, which is thriving, is planted on a slight incline, so that the bubbler pours water toward the alley. To keep all the water from flowing out under the back gate, I built a berm along its north side, creating a well for the water to pool. Also, the sickly tree has the bubbler installed right next to the trunk (not good for citrus, I’m told), and so the water coming out of that bubbler has never spread out to the drip line.

←An orange tree is supposed to look like this.

So, I broke out the shovel and the hoe and, over three days, scraped the crushed granite back away from the tree, mounding it up to build a berm under the drip line. Really, it probably should be further out from the drip line than this, but that would make the side yard nonnavigable. Still need to get some river rocks to shore it up—otherwise the first hard rain (which, if we’re gonna get it, should come in the next month) will melt this fine moon crater back down to grade level.

It was a bitch of a job in 112-degree heat. But…uhm…good exercise. I still need to cut the shade cloth underlaying loose and pull it out, but I may foist that job onto Gerardo. Then probably will spread some compost around the bottom of the crater.

Yesterday I finally bought the proposed cell phone: a Nokia X 2. Apparently this is an older model that T-Mobile is trying to get rid of by offering as an Internet-only deal. You can’t get it in the stores, nor can you get the plan I want: $30 for 100 minutes of talk, unlimited texting, and unlimited Web crawling. In fact, if you ask about it in the store, they’ll tell you T-Mobile doesn’t offer it at all and try to get you to buy the 1500 minutes of talk or text messages plus a generous 3 MB of Web usage. Uh huh.

It takes two to five days for the phone to show up, assuming it actually does show up. Let’s hope they haven’t yanked the coveted plan by then. You can’t sign up for the plan until you have the phone in hand.

Anyway, the phone is well reviewed. Its data speeds aren’t great, but I don’t intend to use it for web-surfing. I have a perfectly fine iPad for that job, should I feel impelled to surf the web and check e-mail while I’m driving to campus. This thing will do the job nicely for sending texts to certain sons who no longer answer the telephone at all, for calling friends, and for summoning roadside assistance when the Dog Chariot breaks down, as it inevitably will, one of these days.

Well, it’s past time for me to get on with my crazed life. And so, to work…

Pots and Phones: Decisions taken

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Thanks to everyone who responded to my post asking for opinions on cell phones! The hive mind, it develops, has a great deal of common sense. I’ve come to the conclusion that people who suggested an ordinary PHONE phone would suffice, for a great deal less money and waste than the proposed Android smartphone, are dead right.

What was I thinking? Forhevvinsake, I have an iPad. It does most everything a smartphone does (and in fact with a little hassle can be made to function as a phone, sort of). Why does one need a phone with a measurable IQ when one already has a gadget that can direct you to the nearest decent restaurant and allow the FBI to track your every move as you engage you in mindless games?

So, in the phone department, it’ll be an inexpensive device that will allow for talking and texting, probably from T-Mobile because there’s a store right down the street where I can go in, trap a handsome young man, and beg for advice on how to work it.

* * *

Next, the burning (perhaps literally…) issue of the teakettle.

I got to thinking about all those reports about exploding Pyrex. Though I’m pretty sure my two glass percolators predate Corningware’s sale of its glass cookware operation to an outfit that promptly offshored production to China, giving us exploding casseroles and pie-plate shrapnel, on reflection I decided that the prospect of that cute little retro pot blasting me with glass shards and boiling water was more than I cared to contemplate.

So…ugh! Back in the market for another teakettle.

Went over to Williams-Sonoma, where for $60 I could buy a Le Creuset pot that

a) is pretty enough, but…
b) is said by users not to whistle loud enough to matter; and
c) elicits complaints about easy chipping and rust.

The way the new whistling kettles are constructed, they have a cap over the spout that you have to lift by placing a finger or thumb on a little lever. But this lever is far enough from the handle that you either have to have a very long thumb (it’s made for chimpanzees, maybe?) or you have to use two hands to pour the hot water.

My old one had a heat-proof whistle that you simply grabbed with your fingers and removed to pour water. Sounds scary, but amazingly, it was easy and pain-free.

One at W-S has a lash-up on the handle that you squeeze to lift the spout cap. It was stiff and hard to work. And it looked like…yes! One more thing to break!

Target has some pretty little Kitchenaid kettles. The operative word is “little.” And they have the same issue: damn nuisance to pour water out of it.

Most of the pots have rather small lids that fit tightly and would be inconvenient to remove for refilling the pot. Refilling through the spout while you hold the handle in one hand and the lever down with the other: what part of N.U.I.S.A.N.C.E do Chinese manufacturers not understand?

Over at Cost Plus (World Market), the same issue presented itself. However, lurking there next to the useless teakettles was…ta DAAAA! A stainless-steel Copco percolator!

No whistle, but then the old Corningware has no whistle, either. I’ll just have to get into the habit of staying away from the computer while the water’s on the stove.

The design is appealingly midcentury, and the price was decidedly right: about $25.

Now I ask you: how retro can you get?

 

Real Retro: The frugal virtues of never throwing stuff away (+ how to percolate coffee)

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Retro is so in. The other day a Crate & Barrel catalog arrive in the mail. The stuff on the front cover and most of the furniture and tchochkies it advertised looked just like what my friends and I used to covet along about 1972. Couldn’t believe it: avocado green,  Hallowe’en orange, harvest gold, dirt brown and Marimekko are b-a-a-a-c-k! My mother used to say that if you wait long enough, sooner or later your old clothes and stuff you don’t want to throw away will come back into style. Guess she was right: not throwing stuff away turns out to be a frugal virtue.

Case in point: my favorite tea kettle gave up the ghost last week. Our fine city water finally ate through its enameled surface and it started barfing flakes of rust into the French press coffeemaker.

I loved that kettle. It was bright blue and pretty and it had a LOUD whistle that would call me back to the kitchen no matter how absorbed I was at the computer or how distracted with some hassle out in the yard. It was perfectly balanced so it was easy to pour even if it was overfilled, and its handle and the strange little whistle stayed cool even if it had been left on the stove a little overlong.

They don’t make them anymore, of course. Manufacturers know when I like things. They have a radar system that picks up my “like it” vibes, and when they find out, they instantly take the item off the market. It’s true. Magic. This one came from (where else?) Crate & Barrel, purchased back in the day when I could afford to shop there. C&B doesn’t carry anything like it today.

Target has a few that are similar, but they’re too small and the colors aren’t as pretty. So I got onto Amazon and searched for tea kettles. Same deal: this thing is no longer being made, it appears.

However, at Amazon I happened to notice that people are buying a type of heat-resistant glass tea “kettle” that works on those accursed glass-top stoves and will also function on a gas stove. Hm. Customers don’t universally hate them, but some complain that they break, because their construction is rather thin. One of them is described, in the sales pitch, as “retro” in style. By that they mean “somewhat clunky.”

“Retro”? Glass? Glass pot?

Hey! I have one of those!

Matter of fact, I have two of them.

Back in the day—OMG, so far back that dinosaurs roamed the earth—I used to make coffee in a percolator. No one in this country had ever heard of a French press. You had three choices for making decent coffee: a Chemex drip coffeemaker (what a lash-up! literally—you tied a wooden collar around it with a length of rawhide so you could pick it up without burning your hand), a plastic cone that held a drip filter you set on top of a pot, or a stove-top percolator. The ubiquitous electric percolator didn’t make coffee—it made battery acid. And the early electric drip coffeemakers made roadside restaurant “coffee”…ugh!

I would percolate coffee, on the stove. And I was very, very good at it: I could make perc’ed coffee that was every bit as delicious as French press coffee. We’ll see how in a moment. First, though, the point: to do this, I used glass percolators made by Corning. I had two of them, a small one that held about four cups and a large one that would make enough for a dinner party.

At some point along the line, my ex and I started making coffee in a drip machine. They’d improved enough to make OK coffee, and with a kid and two dogs in the house, I didn’t have time to fiddle with elaborate coffee preparations. The glass percolators went into the back of some cabinet. And strangely, when I ran off with the harmonica player I chose to take those things with me.

Well. They make fine tea kettles, absent their percolator innards. Those can simply be lifted out and left in the cabinet. Check out the little one:

Retro? That is so retro it’s the real thing. And its sides are thick, solid Corningware glass. The only way you could break it would be to stuff it with ice cubes and then stick it over a burner turned to “blow-torch.” And see that handle that looks like glass? It’s some sort of clear plastic. It stays cool even when the pot’s contents are at a full boil.

Hot dang! I’m back in style again. And it’s not costing me a penny.

😀

Here’s a warning, however: Do not use Corningware and Pyrex cookware that is of recent vintage. To be safe, the product should be at least 30 years old, or sold in Europe. The stuff made in China for the U.S., Australian, and Canadian markets is prone to exploding, because they add soda lime to the glass, which develops tiny cracks when exposed to heat. Smart, huh? If they’re not trying to kill your dog, they’re trying to kill you. 😉

* * *

So…how do you make percolator coffee that doesn’t taste like battery acid? Well, there’s a trick to it. Goes like this:

Never, ever let a stovetop percolator come to a full boil. The water does not have to boil for the percolator to perc. It only needs to come to a rather slow simmer. If you let it boil, you get battery acid. That’s why electric percolators make such horrid coffee. If you keep the heat low, you get incredible coffee.

Fill the pot with enough water to come no higher than just below the percolator basket. It should not touch the percolator basket. You can use less if you’re making less coffee, but don’t overfill.

Put about a tablespoon of ground coffee per serving in the percolator basket. If you grind your own, it shouldn’t be too fine. Note that the percolator basket’s little holes are not all that little; finely ground coffee will fall through those holes.

Place the percolator on the stove over medium to medium-high heat. And now here’s the hard part, for us moderns:

Do not leave the kitchen. This is not something you can do while frenetically multitasking. You can cook the bacon and eggs, but you can’t wander off and get distracted.

Pay attention to what’s happening on the stove. Watch and, if the pot is opaque, listen. The minute the water starts to bubble up into the percolator’s little glass top, turn the heat down. Regulate the heat so that the water continues to perc, but just perc. If it stops percing, turn the heat up a little; if it percs very fast, turn it down. You’ll get the hang of it.

This is much easier on a gas stove. If you have to use an electric stove, you may need two burners, one turned quite low and another set to medium or medium-high to bring the water just to the percing point; move the pot to the low-heat burner the minute it starts to perc.

I don’t recall how long the process took. The number that sticks in my mind is four minutes. But it probably was longer than that…eight, maybe. Test it after four minutes, and if it’s too weak, let it perc another few minutes. I don’t think it takes very long once the water starts to perc. You can tell how strong the coffee is by the color of the brew that’s bubbling into the little glass thing on the top of the percolator’s lid

* * *

LOL! The Corningware glass pot heats very fast. Because it’s glass, it doesn’t impart any metallic flavor to the water for your French press coffee. If you can find one (a couple are available on Amazon right now), this gadget will put you at the height of style (again…). Just be sure they predate 1998.

Off the Cell Phone Diving Board!

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Welp, the time has finally come. I’ve resisted buying a cell phone as long as any human being could possibly resist. First, because in the early years the month-to-month cost was just out of the question. Then as I watched the fellow humans chattering their way up and down the malls and, in a yakfest-induced haze, stumbling in front of traffic and bicycles and crashing their cars and running down small children in pedestrian crossings, I thought none of that foolishness for moi! Also, truth to tell, I have a kind of moral aversion to going around attached to a tether.

I don’t WANT to be “connected,” damn it. I value my solitude and I especially value peace and quiet. Why would I want to be jangled at or vibrated at as I’m going about my daily errands? And everyplace and everytime else?

On the other hand…

On the other hand we have the superannuated Dog Chariot, that worthy wagon resting quietly in the garage. It has 112,000 miles on it (which reminds me: time for a service appointment), and it’s 12 years old, about 175 years in people years. Every time I get into that tank, whether it’s just to drive over to the Safeway or whether to make a serious junket to Scottsdale or to my friend’s house in Waddell, I wonder if the thing is going to get there and back without crapping out. In times of yore, it wouldn’t have mattered much: car craps out, you walk to the nearest gas station and call for help on a pay phone.

But today there are no pay phones. And people expect that everyone, no matter how poor, owns a cell. And so if they see an old lady standing by the side of the road, what are they gonna do? Nothing, of course. They’ll assume I’ve called someone and am waiting for them to show up.

So, just as a matter of safety, I think I’d better have a cell phone.

Fortunately, the little business earns enough to pay the freight…with pretax dollars. Accountant says the S-corporation can justify buying me a cell phone, it needing a phone number with which to communicate with its clientele. And also fortunately, prices have come down a little.

T-Mobile has prepaid plans that offer significantly more time and power than I need, and that do not lock you in to a contract you can’t escape. For $30, I can get 100 minutes of talk time, unlimited texting, and unlimited Web browsing. And no contract harassment.

A hundred minutes is an hour and forty minutes. I very much doubt if I spend almost two hours a month on the phone! And even if I did, it appears that some of these gadgets will plug in to your wireless service, and in that mode the thing isn’t using up your “minutes.”

You have to buy your phone when you use one of these prepaid plans. T-Mobile’s prices for these devices are exorbitant: $250 for an Android phone that you can get from Amazon for $189, with free shipping.

This thing, which appears to be a slightly outdated 4G gadget, is well reviewed by consumers. As for T-Mobile’s service, it is reviled slightly less than other communications carriers. No one seems to like any of them. Conveniently, this outfit seems to have a store on every corner, so if push comes to shove you can go in and speak to a human. Not that the humans can do much for you: when you do business with the company online, you’re treated as though you were doing business with an entirely different entity from the T-Mobile that appears in strip malls. However, I did learn that you don’t have to buy the phone from them to get it up and running on their network.

Decided to get a smartphone instead of the cheapest walk-around plain telephone I could get, because that seems to be the way to extract the most value from these plans. The $30 service allows one to connect with a smartphone, so it seems kind of ridiculous to pay for service and then not use it.

In that department, the Android seems to be the most sensible way to go. The iPhone is way too expensive, because to operate it you have to buy three different plans: a voice plan, a data plan, and a text messaging plan. With AT&T, for example, the data plan will cost you $15; the cheapest voice plan, $40; and the cheapest texting plan $5 a month for 200 messages sent or received. That’s a bare minimum of $60 a month, plus gouges for “taxes and fees,” plus gouges for exceeding the allowed number of phone calls and random incoming text messages over which you have no control.

Sixty bucks a month for a phone! That is outrageous. Even if I could afford it, which I most certainly cannot, I wouldn’t pay it. Thirty is also a shade on the high side, but it’s marginally affordable.

The low-rent plans advertised by AARP are universally reviled. I’ve developed a flinch reflex around those AARP “bargains,” after the Delta Dental fiasco. And, I might add, after learning that Safeco can provide more homeowner’s and auto coverage for significantly less than The Hartford does in its AARP plan. Check out some of the hilarious yowls of rage over Consumer Cellular, one of the plans advertised by AARP. At best, opinions are mixed. Cricket? Costs more than T-Mobile; enrages customers. Jitterbug? If these customers could award negative stars, they would.

T-Mobile doesn’t appear to be any better, especially of late, although it’s highly rated by PC magazine. A Consumer Reports survey found it was less hated than AT&T but less liked than Verizon or Sprint. Verizon has a prepaid plan, but it’s $50, more than I can afford. About $40 a month is the tops. Apparently there’s no limit on the amount of time you can talk, but why should I pay $120/year more for time I probably won’t use? You do get an alleged deal on a less expensive phone at Verizon, but according to CNET you can get that cheaper elsewhere, same as you can get the Samsung Exhibit II cheaper than T-Mobile’s price.

It appears to be a toss-up. A 2011 Consumer Reports round-up, available online only to those who are willing to pay to peek, suggested smaller carriers are preferable to the large networks and plugged Consumer Cellular along with TracFone, Straight Talk, T-Mobile, and Virgin Mobile.

TracFone has cheap monthly plans, but the company’s website is opaque. You can’t tell what you’re actually going to get for $10, $20, or $30 a month. For the $30 plan, you get 200 minutes over thirty days, but evidently there’s no web-surfing, no texting??? Impossible to tell.

Straight Talk has a $30 plan with 1,000 minutes, texting, picture messages, free 411 calls, all with no contract. You have to do business with Walmart to get it, unfortunately, but it looks like a better deal than T-Mobile.

For $30, Virgin Mobile gives you 1,500 minutes (take that, Straight Talk!). It also gives you 1,500 text messages, but only 30 megabytes of Web access. Interestingly, this outfit includes the extra dings and gouges billed as “taxes and fees” in the base fee, so presumably you don’t pay more than advertised. Here, too, for just $50 you can get a Samsung phone with an actual keyboard, helpful for texting. LOL! Click on the in-house reviews for the phones, and the same reviews come up for every phone! What d’you bet their customer service is comparable?

Do you have a prepaid, no-contract monthly cell phone plan? If so, which one do you  use and how do you like it?

Update: Here’s what came of this scheme, thanks to the generous advice of readers!

July 4: A Miracle Happens in Arizona!

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Holy mackerel! It’s almost 8:30 in the morning and the temperature is only 85 degrees! Doors and windows are open, fresh (if somewhat soggy) air is flowing through the house, fans are blowing…air conditioning is OFF! Off off off, for the first time in weeks!!

We awoke at 5 to a solid overcast and bizarrely cool air. This is the first July 4 I can remember that has not been searing, scorching hot. Normally at this time of year the outside air is so hot all you want to do is huddle inside your air-conditioned box. People in Alaska get snowbound in winter; here the residents are heatbound, and just as stir-crazy.

Actually…I may overspeak.

Before the low desert was obscenely overdeveloped, it used to be that summer storms would roll in about 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Mornings and early afternoons would be hot—though nothing like they are today. Temps would be 105, maybe 110 at most. Then the afternoon rains would drop the temperature, abruptly, to around 80 degrees. This happened every day from early July through the end of August.

Now 110 is a “normal” day, and temperatures of 112 to 115 are routine. I can remember when a 112-degree day was extraordinary, and 115 degrees, unheard-of. We rarely see summer rains anymore, and when we do, it’s long after dark.

Our nasty summers are the direct result of paving over the desert. We’ve created a heat bubble that acts like a big plastic dome over the city. Where thirty years ago rainstorms would flow across the Valley floor, now they bounce off a barrier of reflected, amplified heat. As they cascade in from the southeast, you can see them split aside and pass by the city, the clouds moving out of the Valley and proceeding around through Carefree and Anthem to the north and below the South Mountains and the Estrellas in the other direction. Indirectly, climate warming undoubtedly has something to do with it. Either way, it stems from the same basic primate stupidity.

Oh well.

So de bonne heure it was out the door and into the backyard, there to continue reconstructing the landscaping now that Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy has outgrown the need for dog-sitting and taken up full-time residence at M’hijito’s house.

Yesterday I made a run on Home Depot to pick up some new plants. At first I thought not to get new bedding plants, because it does seem like an exercise in futility. Young annuals are almost bound to fricassee in the hot little bed next to the pool. And putting water in there will just cause all those damn weeds, whose thready roots now infest the soil, to come surging back. But I couldn’t resist.

Picked up two six-packs of zinnias, one of red salvia, and one of something called lisianthus. All of these allegedly crave six+ hours of full sun a day. We’ll see. These plants may define “sun” as something other than “blast furnace.”

Salvia does do pretty well out there. A volunteer between the pots and two plants in one of the pots next to the bed are still alive, despite the heat and drought. As for a lisianthus: never heard of it before. Kinda pretty blue thing, though. All these plants look a little tired. They were sopping wet yesterday afternoon when I set them on the shaded table beneath the patio overhang. This morning they were parched and looking peakèd. We’ll see if they recover after being put in the ground and generously watered.

The two salvia in the pot are sharing space with, of all things, an oleander that volunteered in there! I’ve never seen oleander volunteer before. They do make a seed pod, so it’s not out of the question…but how did the seed get into the pot? Oleander is very toxic and will kill birds (and just about anything else) that eat any part of it. Seeds, flowers, stems, leaves: the whole damn plant is poisonous.

Hm. Come to think of it, there was a dead dove out there awhile back…

However.

It gets quite large (we have 30-foot-high hedges in the neighborhood), and it makes a pretty flower. So I’m thinking that when the weather cools a little, I’ll move this little guy into the center of a larger pot and see if it’ll grow as a patio ornamental. If it doesn’t…well, it didn’t cost anything.

Oleander is expected to go extinct in the Valley within a decade. A bacterial infection carried by a type of leaf-hopper is killing them off. There’s no treatment for it, and nothing seems to be effective against the insect, either. Not a great loss…but another of those changes having to do with too many people doing too many disruptive things that, in concert, alter the nature of our living space.

Two days ago I soaked the flowerbed, to soften the soil so as to dig out the weeds. This morning? Bone dry! So it looks like to keep these things alive I’ll have to water every day and deep-water every two or three days. Another chore added to the daily list.

Well, it’ll be worth it if they grow and prettify the pool area.

Speaking of adding chores, I also picked up a couple indoor plants, too: on sale for ten bucks. One is a fiddle-leaf fig; the other an umbrella plant.

These are both varieties of ficus.

The potted ficus on the back porch thrives, although it’s sunburned right now because the blast of the morning sun has been too much for it. I’ve propped a screen against it, but that thing blows over in the lightest breeze. Guess I’m going to have to put up some hooks along the patio overhang’s beams and hang a length of shade cloth from them.

Later.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if I can keep these things alive indoors. Didn’t realize the fiddle-leaf fig is somewhat xeric. Its soil was very dry, so I put it under the faucet and soaked it. Only then did I bother to go online and discover that it prefers to be dry and does not like soaking. The umbrella tree apparently has more normal watering needs, so watering that is less likely to kill it. But I figure that despite the passing cloud cover, the air here is so dry the fiddle-leaf will soon desiccate to its preference, and after that I’ll be more careful about watering it.

The neighborhood had its annual July 4 parade at 7:30 this morning. I’ve been to it once and almost expired in the heat. But the weather was so clement today I considered trotting over to the park to watch the goings-on. But…

But…so many excuses!

But…by 8:30, when the parade ends, if the cloud cover broke it would be way too hot for Cassie to walk home.

But…at 6:30 it was starting to rain. Did I really want to stand out in the rain to watch an extremely small-time parade and listen to some politicians harangue us?

But…my foot hurts. A lot! (Boy, does it hurt!)

But…my back still hurts.

But…I’m not drivin’ a block and a half and fighting for a place to park, because that would be ridiculous.

But…I’d rather go swimming.

But…I want to sit outside for breakfast.

Can’t believe it’s now nine in the morning and still nice enough to have the doors open.

Time to get up and put some water on the frazzled roses. And so…to work!