Coffee heat rising

Dogs

Dogs and Depots…

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…two entirely unrelated topics. Why not?

Dogs

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Ruby the Corgi and I did not run into one single dog during today’s morning perambulation. Normally the place is overrun with dog-walkers, especially in the park-like million-dollar groves of Richistan and Upper Richistan. Yesterday we encountered 11 dogs in about a mile and a half.

Not that I begrudge other people the privilege of walking their dogs around the ‘Hood. It’s wonderful that neighbors here feel safe enough to gallivant the streets with their poochies at the first glow of dawn or the last ray of sunset. The problem is that Ruby is ill-trained. She came to live in my precincts right at the start of the Year of the Surgeries. And believe me, at no time during that period was I in any shape to train a vigorous, energetic young shepherd dog — not even a dwarf shepherd dog. Result: even though Ruby will now walk on a leash peacefully enough and sometimes will even heel (it’s a miracle!), she will lunge at passing dogs, especially if they show even a glimmer of interest in her.

Many of these animals do show more than a glimmer of interest, and it is not friendly interest. Some are fine and would probably play with her — we do have one big old funny-looking doggy pal, a rescue named Sammy. But Ruby has been attacked three times, twice by dogs off the lead, and lunged at murderously by more leashed dogs than I can count. It means every time we encounter another dog-walker, I have to wrestle Ruby under control, cross over to the other side of the street (these people invariably hog the shady side of the street! 😀 ), and physically drag Ruby past.

Often, a person’s dog will not be well under control. Some are off the lead, illegally. Many accompany women pushing strollers, who are often preoccupied. Sometimes an Orthopedist’s Friend goes bicycling past with a big dog on a leash — the other day one such dog yanked its human off the bike when it charged at us from across the road. (Seriously: an orthopedist once told me he just loves people who run their dogs beside their bicycles — they’re a gold mine for him!) And then there are the folks who think their dogs and my dog “just want to play.” God help us.

All of which is, in short, a damned nuisance.

Where was everybody? That escapes me. The weather, though still a little overcast after the past two days’ rainstorms, is gorgeous. A spectacular rainbow was glowing just to the west of us, an amazing thing to see. It’s cool (at last!) and not about to rain and…?????  Not a holiday, far as I know.

Thought we must have gotten a late start — I suspect many of these folks are walking their dogs before they go to work, although some of the women are clearly Junior-Leaguers or other women affluent enough to be stay-at-home moms. But no: we got back to the house right at 7, which means we left around 6 or 6:15 a.m., right at the height of the doggy rush-hour. So what kept all these folks and their dogs indoors, I cannot imagine.

Depots and Daisies…

Speaking of dogs — in a metaphorical sense — I am soooo done with Home Depot!
Why do I go to HD at all? Well. Because it’s closer than the Lowe’s. Except it’s not significantly closer: if I were to get off my duff and drive up the freeway to the Lowe’s, it would be about the same distance as the surface-street junket to the nearest annoying Home Depot.

So day-before-yesterday I go by Whitfill’s, the small-business-owned nursery next-door to the Safeway, a long trip from either home improvement emporium. This is the preferred shopping destination for plants, because Whitfill’s is NOT owned by a Trumpeting megacorporation, but by a local family. Several generations of local family.

The shelves were pretty bare in those precincts…didn’t see any of the several specific plants I coveted. Figured it’s between seasons and so probably their stock was low because it was all sold out. But, thought I, HD would have the pretty much plain-vanilla plants I had in mind. Also needed: a couple of pool chemicals the SPS&R dude recommended this yesterday morning, by way of beating back the resurgent mustard algae. He dumped in a couple ounces of SkillIt, said who told you to put in 16 ounces? (The instructions on the side of the bottle, boss!), and recommended having some PhosFree and some Silvertrine on hand. And his parting shot?  “Don’t buy this stuff from Leslie’s. They’re pirates!”

No. They did not have either of the pool products recommended. We already knew they don’t carry Skillit. So no, these were not on hand as of yesterday afternoon, but probably will be today, because Amazon says they’ve shipped and are on the way.

Nevertheless, I load up on posies and various other home-improvement tchotchskies, and then head for the checkout.

In the garden department.

I always check out in the garden dept, because HD has replaced most of its cashiers with effing DIY self-checkout computers. To get a human, you have to hike to the far end of the store, halfway to freaking Wickenburg, and then hike back halfway to the Superstition Mountains to find your car. But for some reason unknown to 21st-century personkind, they’ve kept a human in the garden department.

One. Human. So, the garden department is my exit.

They used to have two or three cashiers in there. Now they have one, locked up inside an air-conditioned cubicle, and…yes…a goddamned computer checkout station.

SIX PEOPLE were standing in the human cashier’s line.

Over at the robot cashier? None. Zero point zero-zero.

So I join the long line and wait. And wait. And wait. And finally think ooooo fukkkit! 

Roll the full cart over to the side, abandon it, and stroll out of the store.

Cruise down to Whitfill’s — the family-owned nursery — figuring WTF, I’ll just make do with the dregs of whatever they have left on hand.

But WHOA!! Nooooo…since yesterday afternoon, they’ve received a truckload of new inventory. Hot diggety DAYUM, do they have the new inventory!  The gods reward those who persist in support of employees with minimum-wage jobs.

So I grabbed a lovely big blue salvia to put in the large empty pot on the west side. And a raft of strange little blue posies. And a raft of strange little orange posies.

Back to the Funny Farm.

Oh, joy: this pile of plants was enough to spiff up both the back west garden and the front courtyard. Courtyard still needs a little clean-up, but that could wait until morning, when it’s cool again.

What do you suppose possesses the management of Home Depot? Do they have no cameras in the garden department? Is there no manager who can see the endless line at the human’s cash register and the vacant station staffed by a f*cking computer? What COULD they be thinking? I bought about $70 worth of stuff. At Arizona’s minimum wage, that would have employed a cashier for just over six hours. Yes. One customer’s purchase would have covered almost an entire shift for a living employee!

I cannot justify continuing to shop in stores run by people who can only be morons. That is the sole explanation for this stupidity. Well. That, and brain-banging greed.

Dog(walk) Days of Summer

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Summer is tentatively turning its golden-locked head toward fall. Nights are growing longer, days shorter, and the other day’s violent storm knocked the temps down a few degrees. As I scribble, it’s only 98 out here on the side deck, just fine for breakfast, coffee, and computerized time-wasting.

You think I jest? Yes, it is “only” 98, by comparison balmy with recent days whose mornings have started out at 102. It’s a little drier than it was the other day, too: Wunderground pegs the humidity at a mere 38%, as nothing compared to yesterday’s 64%.

Cassie-off-leash
The endless doggy walk…

Ruby-Doo and I got a late start on the morning’s trek — didn’t leave the house till 6 a.m. But to my surprise, we hardly ran into any other dog walkers: only three dogs in a good two-mile perambulation. Which is like…the Twilight Zone, where you wake up one day and discover you’re the only person in the whole town.

What explains this Great Absence? I figure it’s Labor Day: this is the last big three-day weekend of the summer, and anyone who has the means flees the city for one last fling in the cool(er) high country. If you can take off Friday — which lots of people can — you wangle a four-day weekend. And if you work for a government office? Well!

At Arizona Highways — which is run by the Arizona Department of Transportation, making everyone there a state employee — we used to store up our vacation days so they would straddle a three-day weekend. So, for example, my boss would take four days off right after Labor Day, giving himself a week, and two weekends away from the office: (saturday.sunday.monday.tuesday.wednesday.thursday.friday.saturday.sunday) nine days off for the price of four vacation days.

Ultimately, this was remunerative, because the State of Arizona was required to pay you for unused vacation time when you retired. There was a (very generous) limit to the number of days you were allowed to stash for this purpose, but you can be sure that by the end of any given fiscal year my boss was always maxed in that department. 🙂

Didn’t do me much good, because my husband was in private practice and was expected to…oh, you know…show up to work? That kind of unreasonable demand. However, I still got enough vacation days to take off on the junkets he liked to indulge himself in: Hawaii and waypoints.

At any rate, whatever the reason, it was mighty quiet out there between 6 and 7 this a.m.

Susan-B.-Anthony-DollarIn the lengthening shadows of (financial) winter department, I discussed the current budgetary horror show with WonderAccountant. She pointed out that because I never owe any taxes and I get a large refund every year, it’s unnecessary for me to have the feds withhold income tax from Social Security. Cancel that! said she.

Well. Easier said than done.

After some fiddling around on the Internet, though, I finally found a form online. ONE LINE in an entire page of bureaucratic fill-in-the-blanks allows for a “Do not withhold” request. Checking the box and signing at the bottom requires fiddling around with downloading and then printing the form: duly done. then the page suggests you can either mail the form to a Social Security office or drive to an office near you and submit it in person.

So I figured I’d drive up to the SS office in Paradise Valley today and drop this thing off.

But on second thought: There’s no “dropping off” at that place. Dollars to donuts, I can’t just hand this thing across the counter to someone. I would surely end up having to take a seat and wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. Depending on the time of day, wait times range from 45 minutes to three hours.

To turn in ONE FUCKING LINE??????????

Barf.

Now the plan is to drive this over to the post office, stand in line there (almost as interminably, but surely not for one to three hours), and send it Return Receipt Requested. What a nuisance!

Well. The $300 a month that SS is now extracting from my paycheck will re-fund the empty Emergency Savings account, thereby taking up some of the slack.

That will still leave an $8870 shortfall, per annum.

But, noted WonderAccountant, now that we’ve converted The Copyeditor’s Desk from an S-corp to a sole proprietorship (and paid last year’s taxes!), I can take money out of that without tax consequences.

This year.

But then what?

It looks like the choices are…

  • To get a paying job. (Right! Know anyone in the market for a 74-year-old female employee? Har har!)
  • To cut every expense possible. (Done. Now what?)
  • To hustle up at least net $10,000 worth of business in the coming few months.

Ten grand is an awful lot of amateur novels and Chinese scientific treatises.

Truth to tell, the amateur novelists are paying one helluva lot more than the Chinese scientists. This is because a budding author’s draft magnum opus typically runs upwards of 30,000 words. At 4 cents a word, that’s $1,200. Or more. Usually more. The last two authors who hired me paid over $3,000 apiece. But even at only $1,200, that’s…what?  Three amateur novels would yield $3600, leaving a mere $6,400 in the shortfall. This would require about 20 Chinese scholarly articles to cover.

And that ain’t a-gonna happen. It might be workable if I could extract $3,000+ from every wannabe novelist. That is the going rate – 4 cents a word – if you look it up on the Net and you believe what other editors publish on their websites.  To make enough to generate at least 10 grand a year, then, I’d need to land three or four budding Herman Melvilles. Or Isaac Asimovs…most of them dream of writing science fiction.

The only way I could make that happen would be to really hustle the editing bidness. This would mean showing up at every local club of wannabe writers in the Valley — and showing up regularly. And handing out professionally written and laid-out marketing junk at every meeting. It has to be said that the last two novels I picked up came from members of the West Valley writer’s group.

That outfit meets in Tolleson, almost an hour’s jaunt from my house. It’s a horrible drive, and then you have to sit through three hours of palaver. The members are very nice and a delight to socialize with. But because nothing very useful — for my purposes — is said, it feels like an aching waste of my time. Especially if I have paying work in-house.

If I’m having to go to four or five such groups’ meetings, we could be talking about 12 to 15 hours a month of achingly boring time suck…plus drive time. I cringe! Surely there must be a better way??????

 

 

The Dog-Walk Jamboree

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Human to Ruby: Y’know: you’re my favorite dog.

Ruby to Human: I’m your only dog, you chucklehead!

The sun is coming up a little later each day, so we’re not getting out to avoid the blast furnace heat at our usual time, around 5:00 a.m.

The trip through Richistan is fraught with other dog-walkers, about 30 percent of whom represent obstacles or risks. There’s this lady who has two golden-retrieverish characters, one of whom looks like it has as much pitbull in the family tree as golden whatever. The one that looks most like a golden, hilariously, likes to carry along a talisman: it trots along holding a neatly folded-up travel umbrella in its mouth, surely one of the funniest (and cutest) things you’ve ever seen in your life. The other dog, resigned to its understanding that its partner in dogdom is a fruitcake, rides shotgun on the crew’s excursion, and that hound is very serious about its job.

Fortunately, their human is a young, alert, and athletic adult female. The last time it lunged for the kill, by way of taking out Ruby, she caught it instantly and brought a stop to that guerilla operation. Every time it sees Ruby, though, it glares and it watches for its chance. And every time we come upon this fine trio, I have to pick up Ruby and carry her to shield her from yet another dog-attack.

So you see why it is that I prefer not to share the streets with the neighbors’ dogs, any more (I’m sure) than they wish to share them with me. Ruby has now been attacked three times, once by some moron’s pit bull off the leash…in the dark. Before Ruby came along, Cassie was almost murdered by an idiot’s loose German shepherd, but…hey…so was Ruby, just a few weeks ago.

I find these encounters with people’s goddamn out-of-control dogs fucking tedious. And that’s why Ruby and I like to get started on the daily two-mile stroll sometime before dawn cracks…that is, before most of my fellow dog fanciers get out on the streets.

Yesterday, when we left the house around 5:30, I counted nine dogs as we made our rounds. You understand: a lot of people like to walk through the shady, sylvan streets of Upper Richistan, and many of these folks have to go to work, so they get started early for their daily doggywalk. This is good. But, if one were adequately hermit-like, one might regard it as a mildly unfortunate fact of life.

This morning I was lazy, and we didn’t get out the door until after 6:00 a.m.

By the time we’d walked all of a half-block and ambled down to the corner, we had dodged around five dogs: the matched pair of black labs (to die for!), the umbrella crew, and a lady with a dog about Ruby’s size. Understand: we haven’t walked more than fifty yards at this point.

So I say to Ruby, dog food! let’s go home and get DOG FOOD! This is usually persuasive. But today: not so much.

Returning to the Funny Farm right that instant was clearly contraindicated. So instead of heading back to the house, we ventured into our part of the ‘Hood. We went up into the older area to the north of us, a district I habitually avoid because it’s somewhat run-down, it’s closer to Gangbanger’s Way, and…well, in the past there have been some fairly disturbing drug houses up there.

No more! HOLY mackerel, has that neighborhood gentrified!!!!!

We walked by only two remaining run-down houses, both of them wrecks but one of them for sale — soon, no doubt, to be fixed and flipped. Wow!

Gangbanger’s is one of the most major of the city’s major east-west thoroughfares. It’s extremely noisy, and I surely wouldn’t want to live that close to it. But hey: if you want to be centrally located, and you want to be able to afford centrally located, you have to make some trade-offs. Apparently noise and sirens and cop helicopters and Hells’s Angels’ unmufflered hogs are things the lovers of central location are willing to trade off.

That area is looking pretty nice these days.

And interestingly…not a SINGLE dog-walker was in evidence.

After perambulating that neighborhood, we wandered back into our tract. Same story: house after house after house has been fixed up, gentrified, painted, relandscaped. Our part of the ‘Hood is about 10 years newer and probably slightly more affluent. But the area to the north of us is definitely catching up. The whole formerly questionable area is beginning to look pretty damn upscale.

But again: NO DOG-WALKERS.

Not as much expensive shade. Not as many elegant mansions to admire (well, OK: no mansions…). But now that it’s not quite so blazing hot, the area is pleasant enough to walk in.

So I guess, as dawn comes later and we’re more and more likely to start out in the middle of the Doggy Rush Hour, we’ll be roaming the less fashionable boulevards bordered by Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way. There’s something to be said for dowdiness.

😉

Pool (still…literally)/Home Depot Rescue/Doggy Miracle

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So tomorrow the Swimming Pool Service & Repair crew is supposed to come over to drain the pool and start a massive cleanup. Nothing that I’ve done has halted the steady swampification of the water, which now looks like something that should harbor a Creature from the Black Lagoon. You can barely see the drain covers in the deep end.

Frankly, I’ll be surprised if this Great Deswamping works, because I believe the problem is the heat evinced by dark color of the unfortunate PebbleSheen surface, whose application was one of the great errors of my home-owning career.

My son came over yesterday and tried to persuade me to cancel this project. He’s convinced the problem can be solved by the application of a few bottles of Clorox. I explained that Clorox IS liquid chlorine, which I have applied to the tune of several dozen gallons. Yesterday I ran out of liquid chlorine and out of money, so started using the granulated chlorine remaining in the shed. This, I applied along about 2 in the afternoon, after having poured in my last gallon about 7 this morning. By the time M’hijito arrived, around 6:30 the chlorine level was down to nil — meaning enough to last 2 1/2 days was gone in 4 1/2 hours.

Mr. Johnson, the former health inspector and pool chemical guru, says that kind of chlorine consumption is the result of the chlorine interacting with organic matter in the water — meaning algae, leaves, dead insects, sweat, pee, whatever. When Cl disappears that fast, it means organic matter is high — which we know from testing the water, too.

So, hope springing eternal, I had dropped Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner in there and along with the nuclear blast of chlorine. He did at least vacuum up the algae clinging to the floors and walls, but that decidedly does not mean they’re gone. They’re just in the filter, inside Harvey, and floating in the water.

Just now the pump is off, the motionless emerald-green water is opaque as fog, and we await a miracle.

We shall see if SPS&R’s scheme works. I’ll be very surprised if it does. I think we need to apply an algaecide such as YellowOut, which entails a cleaning the filter ($150), then dumping chlorine and the algae-killing chemical in a carefully calibrated ratio, running the pump 24 hours (again) for another couple of days, then cleaning the filter again ($150, again).

In other fields of minor catastrophes…

The back door’s latch set fell apart — its handle came off. Appeared that a set screw had fallen out and probably gotten vacuumed up and then tossed in the trash. Sooo… I drove over to my favored locksmith, a venerable operation in these parts, where I figured I could buy a set screw to fit a Kwikset door handle.

Guy sez, “Wellllll….. We can’t know what size set screw without seeing the cylinder that it fits in.” So, since (obviously) I can’t take the whole damn thing out of the door to traipse it over to their shop, I arrange to have a locksmith come over and fix it.

That would be, we might conclude, exactly what he had in mind.

On the way home, I think… “I’ll bet Home Depot has a set screw that will fit Kwikset hardware.” So drive up there. Find exactly the same door handle set on the shelf. Ask if they can sell me a set screw.

HD guy sez, “Chances are you don’t need a screw. These things are known to work themselves up into the cylinder, not out. All you have to do is put the handle back in place and rotate the screw back outward.”

“What size screwdriver will I need?” I ask, thinking I may or may not have one that’s small enough.

“You need a hex wrench. Here: take this. Bring it back the next time you come in.”

Jaw drops.

“Thanks!” say I, fleeing before anyone can catch me.

And…darned if it didn’t work! The handle is now FIXED! For free. Not for a $100+ service call…

Think o’ that….

It was this lock & safe outfit’s guy who, I remain convinced, lifted my cardholder full of credit and Medicare cards when he was here rescuing the office deadbolt from the key I broke off inside it. Thank goodness at least I didn’t have my driver’s license in there. But…it never resurfaced, and the last time I had it was when I was standing in the living room forking an AMEX card over to that guy. I’m dead sure he took it, because if he hadn’t, sooner or later it would have surfaced.

The dog and I set out at quarter after five this morning. It was gorgeous outside. The heat seems to have broken a little, at least for the time being, so that early morning is a lovely time to walk two miles. And because the sun is coming up a bit later now, too, you don’t get the glare in your eyes as you’re strolling eastward.

A-n-n-n-d…in the small miracles department, Ruby the Corgi has lost a pound or two during all these early-morning walks through 90-degree heat, the result being that her little harness no longer fits her. She’s figured out how to wiggle free of it, and now does so regularly. So yesterday after she’d weaseled loose, I hooked her leash to her collar…expecting about 3/4 of a mile of mighty fight. But…but NAY! she trotted right along like she was a normal, leash-trained dawg!

Whaaaa???? We have that harness because she has, in the past, put up such a fight that she would hurt her neck and throat and bring on violent episodes of reverse-sneezing…which is really just a symptom of collapsed trachea. (“Just”…holeee gawd…)

Well. This was a switch.

Snapping the leash to her collar is a far cry from having to wrestle a squirming dog into a harness, secure it, and attach a leash. So I tried the collar-snap-on again this morning, and lo! The whole two-mile junket was accomplished as though she were a normal, sane dog. She did not try to trap the matched pair of labs. She didn’t try to pounce the Gay Guy’s miniature mutts. She didn’t even indulge a lunging frenzy at the Shi-Tzu Lady’s annoying fluff-ball. Nothing!

Admittedly, we didn’t come across her pal Sammy (the world’s silliest-looking pound puppy). But Sammy is benign and will not hurt her if she annoys him. Soooo…. It looks like wonders really DO never cease.

Summertime, and the Livin’ Is…Keeriminey!!!

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Okay, so…one good thing: Out the door with the dog at 4:30 this morning.

This meant we dodged the wee-hours dog-walker rush — in 112-degree weather, everybody and their little brother, sister, dogs, and puppies swarm the neighborhood streets and the park at 5:00 a.m. Not that I don’t love my fellow humans and their dogs, but…well…yeah: their out-of-control dogs when combined with my out-of-control dog add up to a damned nuisance and an annoying start to the day.

Yesterday I thought maybe I could avoid some of that by walking around the park twice (a one-mile circuit: I’m trying to get in two miles a day), on the far side of the road. The park is overrun at dawn, with people who think our neighborhood park is their private dog park. And no…across the street is not so great. There was some stupid woman in there with TWO big dogs off the leash, chasing around like rockets on high-test fuel after toys she was joyfully tossing for them. And here and there, other dog-lovers letting their “fur-babies” run around loose.

By circumnavigating the park, I hoped to avoid the elderly lady who has invaded my favorite circuit around Upper and Lower Richistan. She’s very sweet and I’d like to get to know her, but not around two nuisancey little dogs — hers and mine. She has an ill-tempered Shi-Tsu that goes batshit when it sees Ruby coming up the street and starts barking and lunging and yanking around. The old gal, who said she was 93 years old, has braces on both legs and limps along with not one but two canes while trying to control her fractious pooch. Of course, when Ruby sees this hound coming at her, she tries to lunge into battle, too, so now I have to struggle and fight to keep her under control. All the while worrying that the sweet old lady is going to be yanked off her feet and thrown on the pavement!

Augh.

Well, the park route proved not to be such a great idea, because of the chronic law-breakers over there. (It is against the law — city, county, and state — to let your dog run around off the leash.) (And no, I don’t need anymore dog fights: three is enough, for this pooch.) Which is why I started walking through the Richistans in the first place.

Guess I’m not the only one who had that idea. 😀

At any rate, hitting the road a half-hour earlier this morning seems to have resolved the problem. We didn’t encounter the Shi-Tsu lady, nor did we meet many other dog-lovers. We passed the lady with the gigantic Bernese mountain dog — what a critter! He, despite his vastness, is well behaved and quiet. We passed the guy with the lab-like Heinz-57: ditto…a well-behaved and quiet dog. We came up behind the big, hefty-looking gay guy with the two wee little toy poochie things, always an amazing sight. But that was it. A cat tried to follow us home from Lower Richistan, but gave up when it noticed we were drifting into the slums.

It is hotter than the hubs of Hades here. AC is pounding away most of the time. My son is getting $500 power bills in that leaky old house of his. I suggested he bring his dog and camp out here until the end of August, but of course (being sane) he’s having none of that noise.

The pool, which tends to haze, looked clear when I got up this morning but by the time I’d finished breakfast was full of London Fog again, despite my having poured in about 8 or 10 ounces of granulated chlorine as dawn cracked this morning.

Dumped in another pound of chlorine; Cl level is now back up to around 4 ppm, fairly high. This will drop quickly, because chlorine degrades in sunlight.

…some things, you don’t wanna know…

NEVER have I had so much trouble with the chemical balance in this pool — and I’ve been tending it for 16 years. I’ve about come to the conclusion that I need to have the damned Pebblesheen jackhammered off and replaced with old-fashioned white plaster, which IMHO looks better and which is one helluva lot easier to maintain.

You cannot get it clean to save your life. Because the surface is coarse — like fine gravel in asphalt — it eats up a pool brush if you try to brush the walls and floors. Literally pulls the plastic bristles out, which then get into the pool cleaner and break the damn thing. That’s OK, because the surface itself will soon destroy Harvey, and I’ll have to replace him with a new $400 cleaner that has wheels on it — which, we’re told, will break quickly under the strain of running over this stuff. Algae settles into the coarse surface’s billions of pores, so brushing is futile, anyway: the only way to dislodge it is by scouring it down with a hard spray of water from the hose. That’s not practical in the winter:  to clean the walls & steps with water spray, you have to get into the water. Result: haze and algae curtains. So you’re constantly dumping chlorine into the drink, which BLEACHES the damn blue Pebblesheen! So now that expensive new surface is not blue: it’s blotchy yellow (bleached spots) and green (algae) and blue (Pebblesheen waiting to be bleached).

I suspect there’s something about the chemical composition of the surface that bollixes up the water chemistry. I cannot keep the chlorine levels up to save my life. Last night after dark, I poured in a dose of chlorine — the dose I’d administered in the morning having burned out in the 112-degree sunlight. This morning I dumped 3/4 pound of granulated Cl in there — which should have sufficed nicely for the day. That was around 6:30 a.m. By 9 a.m, a test kit  registered ZERO chlorine in there. Actually, that’s with two different brands of test kit. (Yeah: it did occur to me that maybe something was off with HD’s kits, so I bought one from Leslie’s y’day). (No, nothing is wrong with the Home Depot kit…)

Two and a half hours later, and ALL the chlorine is gone????? Huh uh. Something is seriously wrong there

On reflection, it occurs to me that the Swimming Pool Service & Repair guy may have failed to apply chlorine stabilizer when he did the start-up after the pool was refilled. Seems unlikely — this IS their business and they’ve been doing it for years. How could you forget that little detail?

But…it would explain why the chemicals go haywire within a few hours after application.

Whenever I get my act together today, I need to return the wimpy test kit Leslie’s sold me (I found a better one on Amazon, same price, more options, better vials, better chemicals). While I’m there I’ll ask them about the stabilizer issue. It would be good if they had a liquid form (stabilizer is basically cyanuric acid). Some brands of pool chlorine incorporate CYA — particularly chlorine tablets. These were pushing up the acid levels so high that the Leslie’s guy recommended using granulated Cl — which may be the problem right there. If the granulated product doesn’t contain CYA, then…duh! No wonder the water’s clouding up.

I personally prefer the granulated product, which you simply broadcast over the surface occasionally. It seems less nuisancey to me than keeping track of the damned floating pool tab holders and wrestling with alarming potentially explosive tablets every time you turn around. But…hm. But. If the tabs will hold down the haze, that may be the first recourse in a series of strategic steps:

  1. Try the tablets again;
  2. Pounce Leslie’s affable manager and interrogate him about the stabilizer issue;
  3. Possibly buy and add stabilizer…

Which I sure would ‘druther not be hassled with.

Speaking of hassle, on Monday I go in to get yet another goddamn actinic keratosis frozen off my hide.

This has gotten very old, indeed…. A forty-minute drive each way, a fun doctor’s visit, and then a wound to have to care for over the next week or two.

Yesterday, to my horror and amazement, I learned that the current thinking among researchers is that actinic keratoses are not discrete phenomena. Instead, they represent what is called a “field disease,” especially where they crop up repeatedly in the same patch of skin. The theory is that they represent a larger area of diseased tissue. And the suggestion? Treat that area with a chemical, as well as freezing off each flare-up. “The management of multiple AKs is a long-term prospect, with no clear cure,” we’re told. “The best approach is the sequential treatment with a lesion-directed and a field-directed therapy.”

This, quite frankly, does not sound very pleasant. It entails applying a topical gel that singes your skin and can elicit some interesting allergic reactions. Monday I’ll have to take a printout of the article to the doc’s office and ask them if they don’t think they should prescribe one of the recommended drugs. Which, no, I would rather not use. But…besides the hassle and discomfort of these goddamn things (each one itches and hurts at the same time), the fact is they can convert to squamous cell carcinoma in short order. And that stuff will kill you just as dead as malignant melanoma will.

In other precincts: this heat is making me freaking comatose. I have not gotten anything done. Have not posted another section of Fire-Rider. Have not tried to get back to writing Ella. Have not done much house maintenance other than struggle with the pool (many other projects await the human’s attention). Have done little else but eat and sleep. And clean the pool. 😀

Yuch! Don’t buy Precise brand dog food!!!

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AJ’s, my favorite overpriced grocery store, sells a couple of dog food brands for the fussy pet owner. Even though I make most of Ruby’s food, I do add a quarter cup of kibble per serving, since the stuff is laced with vitamins and you never know whether you’re getting the right nutritional balance in a pot of chicken or pork mix. Plus a piece of kibble works nicely as a doggy treat. I’ve been using the “Precise” brand, whose small bags I keep in the freezer by way of combatting the pantry moth plague.

This morning I go to dish up a topping, and ECH! Out comes a congealed chunk of mildew!

WTF? Look around in there, and by damn, there’s more of it!

So this morning I carted it up to AJ’s manager. She took a sniff of it, said “ew! it even smells bad!” and gave me a gift card for the full value. She remarked that she’d heard they’d been having “issues” with dog food…this must be one of ’em!

If you can avoid buying dog kibble at all, bully for you. In any event, whatever you buy, don’t get Precise brand products.