Let’s dust off the crystal ball this morning. “Dust it off” is the operative term. Here in lovely uptown Arizona, gale-strength winds have been blowing every day and most nights for the past several weeks. Clean the furniture, and the next day it looks like you haven’t dusted in the past ten days.
Arizona is still mired in a decade-long drought, with no end in sight. Actually, the drought has gone on longer than a decade, and “normal” summer temperatures have been steadily rising as development runs amok and cities get bigger and more hectic. When I moved here in 1962, a 110-degree day was hot. Summer temperatures might rise as high as 112, but 114 was unheard-of. Now we regularly get 114-degree days, and we have seen highs of 118. In some parts of the Valley, unofficial backyard thermometers hit 120.
The City of Phoenix, now the eighth- or ninth-largest metropolitan area in the country, has not yet instituted water rationing, although it has raised water bills into the astronomical range, our City Parents hoping to discourage water use. It now costs as much to keep my xeric landscaping alive as it used to cost me to water lawns in front and back yards: often the water bill is higher than the exorbitant air-conditioning bill. The Valley avoids having to force residents to save water, by law, because of the Central Arizona Project, which diverts Colorado River water into the low desert.
However, the Colorado is running low, and the reservoirs that impound that water are running lower.
Outlying towns are forbidding residents to wash their cars, to refill their swimming pools (which means when your pool drops below the level of the tile rim, you have to shut off the pump and drain the pool, or let it turn into a green mosquito nest), to water their lawns, or even to use their garden hoses at all. Exceed your allotment or get caught in the act and you’ll get a stinging fine.
So…the question is, how long is this region going to remain livable?
If tomorrow the City informed me that I couldn’t run my irrigation system, couldn’t keep my pool full enough to operate the pump, and couldn’t water the trees, life here would take a decided turn for the worse. The shade and citrus trees temper the heat inside the house and help keep air-conditioning bills marginally under control. The pool, besides providing therapy for the chronic back and hip pain, makes living through a Sonoran Desert summer marginally tolerable. Without it, one would either suffer some serious misery for three or four months or, if at all possible, leave town for the summer.
The gardens and the flowering desert trees and the springtime abundance of citrus form a major part of what makes the low desert a good place to live. If suddenly we were told we could no longer have those things…well, it would no longer be a good place to live. My guess is about 90% to 95% of Phoenix dwellers would agree with that. Give us water rationing, and we’ll give you out-migration.
And, as you can imagine, if a lot of people start to move away, property values will drop as dramatically as they did during the Great Recession. Only this time they won’t come back up.
Right now, prices are back to where they were pre-Bubble. Most people are no longer underwater. And interest rates are low.
If I were a young Arizona professional, business owner, or craftsman able to make a decent living, I’d start looking right now for work someplace at least 20 or 30 miles inland – more, preferably – where they have water but no tornadoes. And precious little snow. This could be one’s last chance.
The past few weeks, what with a new pup to tend to, a bunch of paying work (and more incoming), the scheme to self-publish three books, and a busy Holy Week, I’ve hardly had any sleep at all. Pup regularly lobbies to go out at 4 in the morning, and once awakened, I rarely go back to sleep. And night after night, bed-time has come along about midnight. Nothing out of the ordinary…but then there’s also the slacking off in the exercise department. When I’ve had time to exercise or walk, I’ve been too tired to bother. Result: ta DAAA! Resurgent back pain.
Sunday night I hurt so much I could barely hobble up the hall. So, along about 10:00 p.m. I decided to try a muscle relaxant the doc prescribed last year. Tried one of these a week ago, and it worked pretty well…next morning, I was actually able to crawl from the bedroom to the refrigerator, a large improvement.
The Rx instructions say the stuff should clear out of your system in about eight hours. Had a vet appointment at 10:30 Monday ayem, meaning I’d have to get in the car at 10. Eight hours plus 10:00 p.m.? Six a.m., right? So by 10 a.m. there should be no problem driving across the city and life should be good.
Actually slept seven hours, a record, but figured the haze of exhaustion was normal, since it usually takes two or three decent nights’ sleep to make up for ten days or two weeks of sleep deprivation.
Drive to the vet. Get last set of puppy shots. Bring pup back. Tuck her into her X-pen, turn around and race back out. Schlep to the credit union, deposit adjunct paycheck. Schlep to Costco; return ridiculous bathmats (purchased as dog mattresses) that can’t go into the washer(!) and make a few new purchases. Unload car, unload dog, let dog out, feed dog noon meal.
Fix my own meal. It’s now around 1:00 or 1:30 p.m.: fifteen hours after I’ve ingested 5 mg of cyclyobenzeprine. Midday feast: steak, potatoes, vegetable. I have a bourbon and water with this. Again, nothing out of the ordinary: I usually have a b&w or glass of wine with the big meal of the day.
I sit down to this little repast around 2:00 p.m. Shortly before three o’clock, I fall face-forward on the bed: seventeen hours after dropping the muscle relaxant pill. A friend expects me to show up at 4:00 p.m.; set the alarm to go off a little in advance. Conk completely out.
Alarm goes off. In a stupor, I can’t recall what I was supposed to do. Shut it off. Fall back to sleep. Phone rings at half-past four: where am I?
Good question…
Think of that! A small amount of booze — no more than usual and certainly not enough to inebriate…at least not normally — and I’m passed out in the sack!
Presumably while I was driving around in a haze of exhaustion earlier in the day, I must have been impaired. And mistaking impaired for tired. Apparently the stuff took a good 18 hours to wear off: more than twice as long as the bottle’s label implies is the drug’s period of effectiveness.
Five milligrams is half the amount of the original prescription a doctor gave me of this stuff. I asked for a smaller dose and got it. But apparently half a dose is not small enough.
So…watch out for drugs that knock you out. The effect may not wear off as advertised.
Have you been following the Republican far right’s latest misrepresentation about the Affordable Care Act? Twisting a statement in an appendix to a Congressional Budget Office report on the ACA’s progress, the crazies claim the government admits that affordable health care will kill 2 million jobs.
HOLY mackerel! We’re all flying toward Hell on a skateboard!
What the budget office’s authors actually said is that once people no longer have to hold onto a full-time job, willy-nilly, in order to maintain health insurance, about two million American FTE jobs may be vacated by those who retire early or elect to quit working full-time so as to follow more worthwhile pursuits, such as rearing their children, spending their time in volunteer work, becoming self-employed, or simply living slightly less miserable lives.
That is different from the loss of two million jobs. It doesn’t represent the disappearance of jobs. It represents a reduction in the number of people forced to work at a certain type of employment.
As a practical matter, the CBO is probably right in saying that quite a few people will find better things to do with their time than trudging through the rat-race five or six days a week. I can’t even begin to count the number of people I’ve known, over a lifetime in said rat-race, who have said that the only reason they didn’t start their own businesses was that they had to have health insurance and they couldn’t afford it or wouldn’t qualify for it if they weren’t on an employer plan.
If these dreams now can be made to come to pass, will that actually cause the loss of umpty-umpteen gerjillion jobs?
Consider: Jane quits her job because she’s tired of working for the Man and she thinks she has a better idea. She starts a cleaning business. Within a year, she employs five cleaning staff and an admin to answer the phone. A year later, she’s regularly contracting with an exterminator and a painter, and she’s hired an accountant.
Her old job back at Avaricious Industries, Inc., may or may not be replaced with two part-time positions devoid of benefits. But in the process, she has created jobs for nine people, three of them self-employed in businesses that also create jobs for workers.
Okay: Annabelle, the lazy bum, just goes home and takes care of her kids, thereby creating…nothing? Nevvermind that one graduates from Johns Hopkins medical school and becomes a cancer researcher, another grows up to be a nuclear physicist, and the third goes to Africa to lead an NGO and, at the age of 63, wins a Nobel Peace Prize. As a woman and “just a housewife,” Anabelle’s obviously a drag on society.
So if for every two workers who quit a job, one of them founds an enterprise that ends up employing, on average, five other workers, it would seem that a “loss” of 2 million FTE employees should result in a net gain of five million new jobs.
It is said that he who elects to go to war with a cat loses. And yea verily, that may be true.
Notwithstanding, the Realm of the Queen of the Universe and Empress of All Time, Space, and Eternity finds itself locked in combat with Other Daughter‘s pretty little, annoying little red tortoiseshell tabby.
Kitty, as you may recall, has been committing a variety of depredations around the queendom, the final straw of which has been converting the backyard into a gigantic cat loo, wherein Kitty likes to deposit little gifts for Cassie to eat.
Ruling out chemical warfare for a variety of reasons, I tried lashing a long row of carpet tacks to the top of the block walls around the yard. Looked pretty good, didn’t it?
Well, apparently Kitty thought so, too. Twice while I was sitting in the dining room munching my breakfast, what should I see but Kitty atop the wall, delicately stepping around and over the tack strips with all the grace of a prima ballerina. Argha!
One row of “extra wide” carpet tack strips, then, does not suffice to repel a cat determined to jump on top of your six-foot wall.
All right. Now we’ll see if two rows will do the trick.
Two tack strips laid side by side pretty well cover the top of the cinderblocks, except for the capstones atop the pillars. And this time instead of trying to tie the damn things on with string, I strapped them on with plastic zip-ties — the weather-resistant variety. Et voilà!
{cackle!} If that doesn’t work, nothing will!
Now, I really don’t know what to do about the wall’s supporting columns. Each of these is topped by a thin block, creating a relatively smooth objet that, unlike the wall with its decorative top row, offers noplace to secure anti-cat devices.
I could glue pieces of carpet strip up there, but would rather not — I don’t much want to get glue all over those blocks. Tried tying pieces atop them, but couldn’t get enough purchase to do any good.
Finally, I had this idea:
Caldrons of boiling oil! Or, in cat lexicon, about the equivalent: water! Lurking in the garage is a lifetime supply of cheap aluminum steam-table liners…perfect for roasting dog meat on the grill. It dawned upon me that these things are just about the size of one of those capstone blocks. If one were to half fill it with water and set it atop the column, the thing would fall on the cat the first time the damn cat tried to jump up there.
😀
If it tried to jump up there.
So far, I haven’t seen the cat anywhere on the wall. This noon when I got home from running around the city, one of the water pans had been tipped on the ground. With joy, I pictured The Enemy doused thoroughly.
But alas, no. After I filled it and replaced it atop the wall, what should come along but a bodacious mockingbird: he perched on the rim of the thing so he could drink the water. I expect it’s safe to assume he’s the one who knocked the pan off the wall.
Not sure how to deal with that the column issue. Obviously, I can’t leave pans of water sitting up there…we’ll all be overrun with mosquitoes. Can’t dose the water with detergent to discourage the mosquitoes if the birds are drinking the water — that would sicken the very creatures I would like to relieve from cat predation.
So I’ve gotta come up with a way to repel Kitty from the tops of those support columns.
One thought that occurs: Velcro. Stick-on Velcro will stick to the cinderblock, so in theory one could attach enough pieces of carpet tack to harass the cat. Another is double-sided tape, of which I have a little.
Tape is not very sticky, but the goop on the side of self-stick Velcro sets up like steel. It could be messy to get off, though. And it may not withstand rain and 115-degree heat. Still. The trick may be just to break Kitty’s habit of jumping over the wall — even if the stuff lasted only a few weeks, that might be enough to stop the cat invasions.
Heh.
You know, I used to like cats. I’ve had cats all my life — in Arabia, we weren’t allowed to have dogs because the jackals carried rabies into the camp. So everyone had cats, which could get up on top of cars and houses to stay out of reach of the jackals and hyenas, theoretically.
Out there, ours were outdoor cats. Really, in the 1950s I doubt if anyone had ever heard of such a thing as an “indoor cat.”
When my mother and I came back to the States, we wanted a cat. To get it, we had to smuggle it into our apartment, for cats were contraband in the whole development where we lived. This was when my mother got the idea that cats could be acclimated to live inside all the time.
And they can — most of them can, anyway.
Some years later, my then-husband and I acquired a pair of Siamese cats. The female was a prize lilac-point, and we stupidly bred her with the male’s sire before we had her fixed. The breeder took three of the kittens and we ended up with two of them. Which meant…yes! Now we had four cats.
Four indoor cats.
Well. This house we lived in had been massively renovated by the previous owners, who had intended to live in it for a good long time. Because their project was no fix-and-flip, they had outfitted the place with top-of-the-line everything, including gorgeous, luxurious shag carpets (it was now 1969) that were at least three inches thick. They were the most wonderful carpets I’ve ever seen, before or since.
Lemme tell you something about cats: anyone who thinks they can be relied upon to use a cat box labors under a false impression.
Once a cat decides to pee and poop outside a cat box, nothing will bring it back to the cat box. Ever afterward, it will urinate and defecate wherever it pleases.
And yes, the cat boxes were kept meticulously clean. And yes, we had several cat boxes to accommodate this tribe.
They decided the dining room — an absolutely beautiful room — was the new loo. And they destroyed the carpeting in there. The stink defied belief, and absolutely nothing we did to discourage them or to try to keep them out worked.
We are talking about thousands of dollars worth of high, high, high-end carpeting.
They did a lot of other damage, too.
I used my pregnancy to persuade my husband to let me get rid of the effing cats. But by then they’d pretty well trashed the place.
Some years later I rescued a kitten from the irrigation outside an office where I was working. This cat, we decided, would be an outdoor cat. And, let me add, it is another myth that outdoor cats will immediately keel over from feline leukemia, be eaten by coyotes, and be run over by garbage trucks. Well. Some of them are run over. But this cat lived to be around 15 years old. One of her offspring made it to around 18.
Our neighbors hated us. They hated the cats, to be specific. And one of them used to come over regularly and complain about the cat turning the planter in his house’s front entryway into a stinking toilet. I expressed empathy, suggested he set mousetraps around the plants to scare off the cats, and quietly declined to bring the damn things indoors. What a bitch.
The more I’ve learned of cats, over the years, the less I like them.
Domestic cats devastate native wildlife. In the city, a single outdoor cat kills more than twice a week. They kill off lizards (which, my friends, eat mosquitos and any number of other annoying insects and biting spiders), birds, and small mammals. Some of the most charming birds in North America are being decimated by pet and feral cats. The cat is, IMHO, truly a nasty creature.
Nevertheless, I don’t want to kill Other Daughter’s cat, upon which she professes to dote. Nor do I want a confrontation with Other Daughter. But sometimes I wonder what on earth is the matter with people.
In the past several days, Cassie and I have come upon the remains of two cats — coyote kills. A coyote leaves little but a pile of ripped-out hair. Interesting. We’re coming on to whelping season, and so of course the coyotes are hungry.
Other Daughter was all upset when one of the neighbors’ stray cats was, indeed, run over by a car in the alley. What a shock! But…if you let your cats run around the streets, what do you think will happen to them sooner or later?
Please. If you love your cat, keep it indoors! If you don’t want to be bothered with cleaning up after your cat and with replacing damaged carpeting, flooring, bedding, draperies, and furniture, don’t get a cat. And even if you don’t love your cat but simply must own one, have a little consideration for the environment and for your neighbors!
Good grief. Did you see this morning’s news? Hundreds of thousands of people are banned from using their tap water, thanks to an industrial chemical spill into the Elk River, which flows through Charleston!
Ever been in Charleston? It’s a real city with a real economy, which has now skidded to the proverbial screeching halt. Restaurants are closed, hotel customers are canceling, schools have shut down, and people are having to stand in line upwards of an hour to get trucked-in water.
An interesting page from a technical site offers some insight into just how toxic this fine substance is. Under “Safety Information,” click on the links next to “Risk statements” and “Safety statements”; in the sections that come up, navigate to the numbers shown in those live links in “risk” and “safety” statements. Holy mackerel! Irritating to eyes, skin, respiratory system…and “safety statements”? There’s twelve of them.
This is not some far-fetched terrorist attack. It’s not an unlikely natural disaster like a tornado or a brushfire ripping its way through the downtown of a major city. It’s just the cost (to the citizenry…that would be the likes of you and me) of doing business in an unregulated or laxly regulated economy. Hey…what are a few sick kids when there’s billions of bucks to be made?
The perp does business as “Freedom Industries.” Heh…no joke! Wave that flag.
It’s a good reason to have a couple of carboys full of water on hand at all times. And it reminds me that mine is getting mighty old — time to pour it on the plants, rinse out the containers, and refill the things.
By extension, I think it’s also a reminder to always have an extra tank of propane, which you can use for cooking if the power or gas goes out. Just refilled one yesterday, having noticed that the tank in the BBQ is running low. I keep three propane bottles on hand, but in my recent spate of a) incapacity and b) bone-laziness, I failed to refill two of them and have let one come close to running out. I’d better take the other one over to U-Haul later today and get that thing topped off.
Water, propane, and at least a few stores of canned foods and dry staples such as rice, beans, and flour: Don’t get caught without ’em!
I was over at Grumpy Rumblings this morning, where I came across nicoleandmaggie’s latest Deliberately Controversial Post. They ask if it’s right (or not) to keep on dropping your kids at day care when you’re on vacation, at one point citing the example of a child who realizes what’s up and is unhappy because he doesn’t get a vacation from the institution where he’s being warehoused.
Naturally this elicits a great string of commentary, much of it pretty entertaining and much of it pretty interesting. Several women remarked that since they’re paying for day care five days a week, they’re most certainly going to use it. Others snorted at the idea that the brats will be scarred for life if they’re left in a day care center for a few more days, willy-nilly.
Grumpy Rumblings has that WordPress comment function that forces you to sign in to enter a comment. I don’t wish to comment as English 235 PVCC, but I would like to add a little rant to the conversation. As follows:
Well. You are paying for it. Good reason to make your kid miserable, hm?
Seriously, IMHO it depends on your child and her attitude toward being institutionalized five days a week. Some kids love it. Some don’t. My son was utterly miserable and sick all the time in what was said to be the best day care center in the city. Fortunately for him, I happened to walk in the door just as he was climbing onto a makeshift table cobbled together by balancing an old door across the backs of two plastic kiddie chairs — he and the door tumbled down on top of a little girl before I could reach him. We left and never returned; I took him back to his old sitters in the neighborhood, which cost more but was sure as He!! worth it. He soon threw off the chronic infections he’d had since I enrolled him in the place, and his whole attitude changed. For the better.
And yes, when I was not physically at work, I did leave him with those women, each of whom watched two to four kids in her home — it allowed me to get a lot done and to unwind from the demanding and sometimes unpleasant job of mothering as well as from my paid work.
IMHO we too often fail to put ourselves in our children’s shoes; videlicet the idea [alluded to in nicoleandmaggie’s post] that you should tell kids how they’re feeling. How would you like some patronizing fool to tell you what’s going on in your head? Similarly, how would you like to be locked up in a day-care center, coming home sick with every bug in circulation, so that you’re literally never feeling well? If your child isn’t bothered by this, by all means leave the kid there when you’re on vacation — you work hard and you do deserve a break. But if she is bothered by it, maybe she’s trying to tell you something.
But then…we often fail to put ourselves in anyone else’s shoes, eh? It’s part of the human condition.
What do you think of this conundrum? Go on over to Grumpy Rumblings and add to the fray! 🙂
