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Clean-up Day

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The late great dust storm left an astonishing mess. And nice timing: The day I bring home 150 student papers to grade (yes!), I get distracted by a good four hours of shoveling mud out of the pool, two trips to the pool shop to keep Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner staggering along (to the tune of $70), an hour of scraping dust up off the floors…my god.

I’m so tired I’m physically sick.

It’s 9:30, I have another 75 papers to read between now and 6:15 tomorrow morning, and I give UP. There’s just no way I’m going to get through all that stuff.

Decided to opt dusting the furniture (and the baseboards, and the walls, and the cabinetry, and the appliances, and the lampshades, and the fans, and…) in favor of microfiber-ragging up the tiles and vacuuming the garage floor, since they were gritty underfoot. There’s so much dust in the air, it will take several days for it to settle out. But settle it will: all over the furniture, the baseboards, the walls, the etc.

So much dirt is still hanging in the atmosphere that, as I was driving up to campus this morning, it was shrouding the hilltops like fog or low-flying clouds. But neither fog nor cloud is what this stuff is. If you linger outdoors, a layer of fine, scratchy grit settles on your skin. Work up a sweat (as I spent the entire afternoon doing), lick your lips, and along with the salt you get a mouthful of crunchy stuff.

So I figured it would be better to just wait until it all settles out than to clean and then have to clean again.

But the pool: that had to be dealt with. What a mess!

Looked like someone had dumped about half a wheelbarrow of dirt in there. Mud rippled across the bottom like sand at the seashore, dusted the walls, piled up in a dune at the deep end.

Started working at dawn, as soon as there was just enough light to grope around. So much dirt lay on the bottom that I didn’t see the wads of devil pods under there. Ran the pump long enough to skim off the floating debris; then pulled out the skimmer basket, dipped Harvey in the drink, and plugged him in.

Took about 10 minutes to bring him to a dead stop. And to push the filter’s pressure gauge to 22 psi.

Backwashed, recharged the filter. Pulled Harvey out and found he was gagging on devil pods and strappy leaves. Put him in the back of the car.

On the way home from the interminable classes, took him by Leslie’s. The manager discombobulated him, cleaned him out, replaced a gear box (which I doubt needed to be replaced…I don’t trust that guy), and charged me $70. Another unexpected, unaffordable little surprise bill.

Back at the house, attached the bonnet to the garden hose, sucked all the pods and other debris off the bottom, put a spray attachment on the hose and swept down the walls as best as I could, reattached the rejuvenated Harvey. He waddled s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-l-y across the bottom, barely moving. Something wrong, but not having time to think about it, decided to let him run a few hours while I graded papers.

Read one batch. Looked back out there: Harvey is at another dead stop.

Haul him out of the pool, schlep him back to Leslie’s. Guy says there’s really nothing wrong with Harvey that another $90 repair wouldn’t fix. He says probably the filter is clogged and needs to be backwashed.

I say I’ve already backwashed this morning.

He says one of his customers had to backwash three times.

Shit.

I plod back to the house. PSI is only 12 pounds or so…about normal. The filter does not need to be backwashed.

So I attach the manual vacuum to the hose, after engaging in a lengthy fight with the in-line leaf catcher, one of the most annoying inventions known to pool-going humankind. Clog the vacuum hose. Get it working. Takes about an hour to vacuum the mud off the walls and floor.

By then, yes, the filter indeed is straining again.

Backwash thoroughly. Run and run and run the water into the alley until it finally starts to run clean.

By now I’ve drained the pool almost to the skimmer basket. When I go to pour some DE in there to recharge the filter, the pump starts to cavitate.

Shit, shit, shee-ut!

Abort, abort abort! Shut down the pump before it sucks too much air in. Drop the hose in the pool and let it run full-bore, about 45 minutes.

Fire up the pump again. Bleed off the air. It’s running OK…at 15 PSI.

Ducky.

This means that before long (as in probably less than a week) the Leslie’s service dude is gonna have to come out here and take the whole damn thing apart, haul the heavy filter out to the alley, deconstruct it, wash all the filter pads (illegally in the alley), put it all back together, and recharge it.

I just had that done a month ago. It costs $120. One shouldn’t have to do that kind of procedure more often than every six months to a year.

So now we have $120 + $70; that would be another $190 this month, on top of the various other unexpected nasty bills that are rolling in while I have no income.

All told, I’d say I worked about four hours cleaning the pool, starting at 4:30 a.m. An hour on the house. Four hours of standing in front of a classroom starting at 7:00 a.m. Ninety minutes or two hours driving back and forth and dickering with the Leslie’s store. And I didn’t keep track of the time spent reading the 75 papers I’ve managed to get through.

Ugh. Life in Paradise!

More freakish weather

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Incredible dust storm whipped through here last night. If it were sand and not fine, sifting dust, hot and not cool, I’d say it was  just like the shamals we used to get in the Saudi Arabian desert. The heat dropped a good 20 degrees as the dust moved through. It’s down to 80 right now.

Turn off your sound before clicking on the video above; the TV station inflicts a particularly annoying, noisy ad on viewers before letting you get at the images. Here’s a more polite video by an amateur photographer, but shorter and without the awesome sky photos.

The storm hit the suburbs to the south of us around 7:00 p.m., while it was still light out. An hour or so later, M’hijito remarked, over the phone, that a gigantic wall of something was bearing down on us; by then it wasn’t obvious by looking at the storm front that it was dust. A few minutes later, though, it sure was! When I peeked out the front door, I literally could not see the houses across the street!

Here it is again moving through one of those ghettos for families with kids in the East Valley:

Ugh. So much for having spent six and a half hours cleaning house the day before yesterday. Everything—every piece of furniture, every square inch of flooring, every windowsill, every baseboard, every piece of decorative trim on the woodwork—is coated with dust. This morning both classes are unloading a ton of work on me, so there’ll be no time to clean house. About the best I’ll be able to manage will be to pull Harvey out of the pool and dump in some extra chlorine. And backwash. Again.

Doesn’t look like much debris fell in the drink, though. It’s just cloudy with dust. At this hour—3:45 in the morning—I can’t see much out there. Will have to wait until 5, I guess, to get to work on that project.

Whee. Why do I live in this place, again?

First Day of Class

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Four and a half straight hours on my feet entertaining 50+ freshman students is…a lot. One class is overenrolled, so the total number of classmates is, at this time, well over 50. Some will drop, no doubt, but I don’t entertain much hope that the total will fall far.

Fortunately, the 101 course is a five-week session, so they’ll be out of our hair soon enough. Then for two weeks, I’ll only have 25 Eng. 102 students…or however many have survived by then.

The pavement out there is so hot that the soles of my sandals got hot enough, while I was traipsing back and forth between the classroom building and my car, to burn the bottoms of my feet. Had to make two round trips to the car to haul the massive course packets—two rolling suitcases full of the damn things. My feet aren’t quite blistered, but they’re still red and sore, two hours later.

It’s only 105 degrees today, not really very hot. But it’s soggy wet out there. Yesterday after I hung up the laundry, it took eight hours for a bath towel to hang dry. Normally a heavy terry-cloth bath towel would dry on the line in 45 minutes or an hour.

To frost the cake, I’m getting a sore throat. Just what I needed to start the semester: hot feet and a summer cold! 😀

Yesterday M’hijito invited me to a July 4 party at his house. It was a lot of fun—his friends are young couples with toddlers, very cute to watch and play with. But soooo hot! He thinks his air conditioning isn’t cooling the house because of the single-paned windows and doors, but I don’t think that’s the explanation. Something’s out of whack there: I’ve lived in many a house glazed with single-paned windows and French doors and never had the AC not cool the interior. Cost more to run: yes. Fail to operate: no.

So now I’ve got to talk him into letting me call an AC company to see why that’s happening.

My own allegedly ultra-efficient air-conditioning unit has been running almost nonstop and struggling to cool the rooms. Where the old clunk kept the front of the house cool and left the bedrooms hot, this new model cools the bedrooms pretty efficiently but leaves a lot to be desired in the public rooms. With the thermostat set at 80, the kitchen/dining room/family room is 84 and the back rooms are around 81 or 82. The other day I shoved a chair into the hall and parked next to the thermostat to read copy. Not very successful: the dog thought this signaled the start of a great game and so would not leave me alone, and it was dark and gloomy in there. Rather be hot in a brighter, more cheerful room.

Yesterday I determined to clean the filthy house and wash the laundry and do the ironing before today’s classes started, which meant having to get through those jobs in time to leave for M’hijito’s house around 3:00 p.m.

Thought I was gunna die pounding through all that physical labor in the heat. Naturally, it turned into one of those interruption-every-ten-minutes days. Pool had to be backwashed and fixed in the middle of everything; that’s just the most memorable of the drop-what-you’re-doing, tend-to-something-else, try-to-go-back-to-work moments.

Anyway, the house is now nice and clean, but by the time I got to M’hijito’s place I was so tired I could barely speak, much less hold a polite conversation. Had to leave early, before the dessert and fireworks, because I couldn’t hold my head up another minute.

Crawled into bed before dark and actually slept half-way decently. That meant getting up at 5:00 a.m. was no problem.

The idea of measuring out the dog’s food and setting up everything for breakfast the night before worked well this morning: it took all of two minutes to fix food. I may want to make that a permanent fixture, since getting ready in the morning can sometimes be a time-wasting hassle.

Okay…rest break over! Now to figure out which of these students really are and which really are not in my courses.

118° in the Shade… Or, Why I Want to Move to YARNELL!

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Not an exaggeration. By midafternoon the temp on the covered porch in back was 118 degrees. Fahrenheit, that is.

It’s 9:00 p.m. now and the heat persists: 105 in the dark. This afternoon I needed to make a quick Costco run, pump some gas, buy a couple of necessities. Walking across the parking lot made one’s skin feel burnt, exposed to something way, way too hot. God only knows what the temperature was over the asphalt surface. I sure don’t want to know.

A tiny storm blew across the Valley late in the afternoon, not enough to drop any rain to speak of but plenty to drop a bushel of devil-pod leaves and seed pods into the pool. Whee!

In Yarnell, the seedy little above-the-Mogollon-Rim wide spot in the road I dream of—my Gloccamorra, my Bali Hai—the heat topped out at 98. The night will drop to 75 degrees, and as we scribble it’s 85 up there. Tomorrow night will be around 70 degrees, and the high on Monday will be 88.

Yesterday KJG and I drove up to Yarnell, where we spent a fair amount of the day hanging out with La Maya and La Bethulia, who are happily reclaiming their weekend home from La Maya’s sister and BiL, who, after renting it for four years, have succeeded in finding their own home, down in the Chino Valley. La Maya is especially thrilled to have her escape from GDU back. La Bethulia, who spent rather more time than she wished on the roof fiddling with the swamp cooler, has other ideas…sale, for example.

But oh! it was so cool, so quiet, and so lovely up there! We visited our favorite purveyor of tourist gewgaws, the Yarnell Emporium, where a short in the electrical system had knocked out the air-conditioning. Our favorite saleslady was disgusted: melting in the heat, said she. Inside the shop, we thought it was pleasantly cool. One person’s 85 degrees is another person’s Carlsbad Caverns cool.

Don’t believe me? Along about 7:00 p.m. this evening, the AC in my house was set to 80 degrees. And so it was in the hall, in the middle of the house as far as possible from an exterior wall, where the thermostat dwells. The bedrooms? 82 degrees. The kitchen, where nothing for dinner was cooked indoors? 88 degrees.

Back in Yarnell (that would be yesterday), La Maya remarked that the house their friends Bill and Joe rebuilt and turned into a sweet little palace is for sale. Wouldn’t we like to see it?

Well, why not? What else did we have to do? So we dropped by Hill Top Realty and asked a bored Realtor if she wouldn’t like to take us over there. Hot dang…anything to get out of the office! How many times can a person manicure her nails in front of the computer?

So with a little ado, she extracted the alarm system code and a few other key bits of information from the listing agent, and off we went to view the place.

O. M. G. Is it sweet!

Big kitchen with tons of cabinet space and counter space. Dishwasher, a rarity in Arizona’s rural towns. Breakfast nook. Huge separate dining room.

Master bedroom: larger than my family room and dining room combined. Current owners have a king-sized bed and all the bedroom accoutrements in there, and a set of overstuffed chairs and accompanying tables and lamps in there.

Two other bedrooms, one as large as my master bedroom.

Vast living room with a beautiful fireplace.

A separate office, off the dining room looking out onto the boulder-strewn backyard.

Backyard: good freaking grief. It backs onto a great pile of granite boulders. When it rains, a waterfall pours off the boulders into a well designed, rock-lined drainage stream that directs the water down through a side yard and away from the house.

Shrine. You have to be there...

The backyard is very private. It cannot be seen from the neighbors’ yards. There is a trail through the rocks above, part of the world-famous Yarnell Shrine. The occasional tourist would stroll by…and by occasional, we mean “rare.”

In the side yard: A raised garden with soaker hoses and wire shelter to fend of the javelina and hungry birds.

Front yard (huge!): a spectacular art fountain procured from a Prescott artist. Trees. Ornamentals. Blue spruce. Xeric landscaping. Peaceful, pretty, quiet. One house from the end of a cul-de-sac.

Two-and-a-half-car detached garage: room for a ton of storage, the Dog Chariot, and a nice golf cart for junketing around town.

No pool. No effing helicopters. No traffic roar. No sirens. No heat.

Gosh.

They want $199,000 for it, about what I probably could get for my house if I’m lucky. However, Realtor Lady remarked that these days Yarnellites will accept just about any bid they get. She suggested just coming up with a figure and offering it: nothing ventured, nothing gained. If I could get it for $150,000 and it really doesn’t need any upgrades or fix-up (on the surface, it appears to be a turnkey sort of thing), I could afford it.

On the other hand…

My son is down here.

All my friends are down here.

Choir is down here.

My pseudo-job is down here.

The pseudo-job, I could deal with: rent an apartment or camp out with SDXB and other friends for the days I have to physically coalesce in front of a classroom. A pain in the ass, but doable.

Hm. Because the house has a separate, dedicated office, both of the secondary bedrooms could function as guest bedrooms: enough space for two couples to come up out of the heat. Allll summer long. The friends problem could be addressed.

Yarnell.

♥

 

 

What’s this thing?

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So this afternoon Cassie and I arrive home from a trip to Yarnell (about which later, in a less tireder moment) to find this interesting flower growing on a weed that volunteered in the vegetable garden:

Does anybody have any idea what this critter is? Click on the image for a larger view.

Four of these plants popped up in the garden, arriving from where, no one knows. (Probably via bird droppings, one expects.) They had a suspiciously cultivated look to them, so out of idle curiosity, I decided to resist the impulse to extirpate them. Whatever they are, they have a pretty flower.

Looks a little like a gazania, ’cept for the leaves, which are most ungazania-ish.

Here’s what the whole plant looks like:

It’s about 15 inches tall. Whatever it is doesn’t seem to mind downright extraterrestrial climates: the temps have hovered around 110 degrees here for the past week, occasionally rising to 115.

Here’s another attempt at a photograph, which, when clicked upon, does give you a nice blow-up:

Whaaa????