Coffee heat rising

House & Yard

Cleaning Lady from Heaven…

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The Cleaning Lady from Heaven just shot out the door, having spent several hours scrubbing, dusting, and scouring the Funny Farm.

WHAT an AMAZING woman!

Seriously: you have never seen anyone work as efficiently or as hard as she does. And the result is just awesome. After she puts in an afternoon of slamming around, this place is literally — no exaggeration — spotless.

I couldn’t even begin to get the house this clean…not even if I worked as hard as she does or as long as she does.

Sooo lucky to have found this wonderful lady — by the usual means: a referral from a referral from a referral. She was working for a friend when my last house cleaner escaped. When I asked if she’d be interested in taking on another job, she said “yes.” What incredible luck!!

Peace! Quiet!

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Who’d’ve expected it?  😀

Seriously:

Ruby’s spider bite has receded: looks like it’s about gone. Mine had the back of my right hand mighty sore last night, but today that attack, too, has receded, leaving only a mild, almost unnoticeable ache.

Never did find the dog’s kiped water bowl. Fortunately, we have plenty of bowls that she can drink out of. Grabbed one of those out of a cupboard and filled it for her.

Good Son seemed mightily irked at having to take time away from his paying work to schlep me to the Mayo yesterday…for which I surely do not blame him!  It’s a gawdawful drive, half the time for little or no purpose. And it soaks up half your day!

We need to find a doctor here in town…one that meets his standards.

Little progress has been made on the proposal that we can the hired help — i.e., the one who, I’m damned sure, spiked the leftovers in the fridge with ultra-hot chili. Waiting to see what happens next in that precinct.

Have yet to get the electrician over here to get the backyard outlets and power switches running properly again. There’s a limit, Lord! Given that stuff like this has happened at least twice, my sense is that we’re past said limit… But, we shall see.

So…  {sigh} A lot of stuff is up in the air. Some of the gliding stuff is damned annoying. But most of it is just time-consuming. 

 

Malicious Meandering??

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This morning, by early light of day: contemplating the unmistakable fact that SOMEONE — not me — turned off all the watering systems that my yard plants depend on to stay alive. That would be…

* the bougainvilleas
* the roses
* four bearing citrus trees
* the olives in front
* the ornamental trees in front…

…on and on.

This would have required them to turn off more than one faucet. In the back yard alone, they would have had to manually turn off water for a dozen individually irrigated trees and plants! And that doesn’t count the front yard and the east-side yard.

It may rain today — one can hope. We have a 61% chance, according to Wunderground. Not great…but better than 0%. So that would get the yard’s plants through a day of summer heat. Maybe…

At any rate, I’ve turned the system back on  — as best as I can, since that is not my métier. Yard Dude is the one who rides herd on the automatic watering. Hope I can catch him the next time he’s here…won’t he be pleased to be asked to check and fix everything!

The thing that I’m concerned about is…well…the perp may be another of my employees, one who does not like me (I didn’t hire her! my son did…) and who has already pulled another malicious little trick. At least, I’m pretty sure she’s the one who did it.

If I can catch her the act — or round up some convincing evidence — she’s gonna be fired instantly. But…she’s a pretty slippery character, and so I’m afraid it’s unlikely that I will catch her.

And if I can’t?  It leaves me with two choices:

  • Fire ALL the hired help and recruit new household and yard workers.
  • Or sell the house and move into the horrible old-folkerie.

Neither of those is an appealing option.

I’m afraid the first looks better (to me, anyway) than the second. Actually, for my workers it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the 0ther: if I have to move out of my home, they’re all going to lose their jobs here, anyway.

ohhhhhh keerap!

BING BONG! 
BING BONG!!

Now what? 

Trot to the front door. City of Phoenix: they’re turning off the water in the neighborhood, for some sorta water system project they’re doing.

No sh!t, Jose?

Race around the house and yard. Turn off the outdoor faucets that were running on the landscape plants. Fill a big coffee pot with water…  Fill the Brita coffee filter pot with water….

Should have enough water for me (not the plants) to last all day. I hope.

This development raises another question:

Is it possible that whoever turned off all the watering systems in the back yard was NOT an annoyed and malicious cleaning lady, but THOSE guys?

Hmmmmmm…..  Not likely. City workers wouldn’t be suicidal enough to just barge into your backyard to get at your water panel, not with legions of guard dogs lurking around this neighborhood. Plus they don’t have a key to the gate, which is kept locked.

No. Whoever turned off every watering spigot in the back yard was someone who could access that back yard and who did the job maliciously. And I have a pretty fair idea who that someone was.

And if I catch her on camera as she’s up to whatever her next antic will be, she’ll be looking for another job.

Besides, it couldn’t have been the City’s guys! I was able to turn on all the watering zones less than an hour ago. If the men had turned off the water to the house, those zones wouldn’t have been working (so I could test them).

Nope. Coincidence notwithstanding, what has happened here is that some a$$hole came into my yard and, in 100-degree heat, and cut off the water to ALL of my plantings. That was probably done yesterday or before. This morning I went out to turn it back on in time to water the trees and shrubbery before it really gets hot today, and in doing so discovered that the whole system had been turned off.

Those guys wouldn’t have come into my yard and turned off my system, certainly not without my permission. Besides, if they’d turned off the water from their end, I wouldn’t have had any water coming into my yard to turn back on. What they were doing was asking me to turn it off. So…no…  Obviously, they didn’t pull that stunt on me.

What Possesses People???

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Honest to Gawd! Are people malicious, or just plain stupid?

We’re talking about your regular workers, not some burglar or passing vandal. The yard guys. The cleaning lady. Arrrrghh! 

These days, I hire a phalanx of workers to keep up the Funny Farm:

  • Pool Dude
  • Gerardo the Miracle Yard Dude
  • Cleaning Lady from Heaven
  • Smartest Plumber on the Planet
  • Air-Conditioning Dude

And on and on and endlessly on. Together, they keep this place running, and see to it that nothing falls apart.

But singly…one wonders if any of them has a measurable IQ….

This evening I stumble out into the backyard behind the dog. As I’m trying to call her back into the house, I realize the motion-sensitive back porch light isn’t coming on.

Dang! Did the bulb burn out? Or what?

After dorking around with the system for a bit, I realize…waaaitaminit here! There’s nothing wrong with the outside lights. What’s happened is…Jeez! Some idiot has switched off ALL the lights out there! 

HUH? 

Why would you think I wanted the lights turned off if I’d left them all turned on? Why would I install motion-sensitive lights if I wanted to turn the backyard lights on and off manually?

O’course, this event could signal something more malign than mere stupidity. Somebody could have switched off the lights so they could creep around the backyard in a burgling project.

One never knows.

This, of course, is why one has a dog and a firearm. But still… Grrrrr! It’s the principle of the thing. Right?

Yea, verily: more malign than mere stupidity…. Just tried to turn on the motion-sensitive west-side lights. And…yeah. They don’t come on. At all. Someone has unscrewed or broken them.

No, not likely they burned out: we have four of them out there. One or two might burn out after extensive on’s and off’s. But not all four at once.

So…most likely: someone has set up the place so he can burgle around the house & yard unmolested.

Tomorrow I’ll have to call the electrician and have him replace those outdoor lights. Let’s hope whoever has been messing with them doesn’t decide to come a-visiting tonight….

Makes moving into a holding pen for old folks look better and better…

Makes a .38 look damn good, too!

Hotter Than the Hubs…Still

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Seven in the morning. The dog and I are back from the Morning Trudge. She’s taken up her position in the cool cave under the toilet. The human is desperately swilling iced tea.

Ugh! What an AWFUL morning! Hot and sticky and swampy…feels like hideous Saudi Arabia, there on the shore of the Persian Gulf where we lived for ten years. That was an awful place then. And this is an awful place just now.

We walked by our transplanted neighbor J’s house. It used to belong to SDXB, until he got spooked by Tony the Romanian Landlord and ran away to Sun City. In his panic, SDXB merrily sold the place for a pence to the City of Phoenix, who gave it away to a welfare case.

That lady is a sweetheart and a nice person to have as a neighbor. But she has neither the experience nor the cash to maintain an aging upper-middle-class house. Sooo…. the place has more or less gone to pot.

And of course, that affects property values for all of us.

Thank you, Big Brother! 

😀

Occasionally I think about moving down into M’hijito’s neighborhood. Centrally located, within walking distance of the beloved AJ’s Overpriced Grocery Store, madly gentrifying, steps from a bus line….  But…

But GAWD, do I hate moving! Even if the cost were irrelevant (which ain’t the case anymore!), packing up four bedrooms, a living room, a family room, a dining room, two bathrooms, a kitchen, and a two-car garage is more than I care to contemplate. Just. Too. Much. Work!

But…hmmm….  It might be worth it.

Just depends on which way the wind blows.

If the city continues to give away houses here, property values will tank. In that case, I won’t be able to get enough for this house to move into a comparably middle-class neighborhood, and when M’Hijito inherits this place, its value will be nil. So…

Could be worth selling out now and jumping to a more stable district.

My neighborhood is “less stable,” shall we say, because we are the next one south of a dangerous slum. The low-income district to the north of us is notorious, and it took some nerve (and maybe some stupidity?) to buy into our area.

Because of that neighboring blight, I was able to afford much nicer housing than I could have hoped to buy anywhere else in the central city or the East Valley.

Our area has stayed stolidly middle-class since I moved in — a good 15 years ago. But it’s beginning to look like that may not be the case much longer. The accursed city ran a train line up Main Drag West, conveniently bringing every bum in town up to our neighborhood. The nearby grocery stores are getting old…the infrastructure is getting old…everything is getting old. So…

It may be time to start thinking about moving elsewhere. Or consigning myself now to the inevitable old folks’ prison.

At any rate: for the moment…yes. The place is still pleasantly tidy and blandly middle-class. But how long will that be the case?

Anyone’s guess…

NOW what???

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Wooooooooooooooooooooo…….

1:20 in the morning and a weird noise is coming from….where?

I think it’s coming from the neighbor’s house. Possibly their air-conditioning? (Yes, in Phoenix you DO need to run your AC well into September…)

* Trudge outside. Explore around the yard.
* It ain’t my pool
* It ain’t my air-conditioner

Not much else on my property that could be making a weird noise.

That doesn’t PROVE it’s not coming from somewhere around my house or yard. It’s the freakin’ middle of the night…pitch dark…I can’t see much out there…I’m dead tired…

Awww jeez!  Whatever it is, it’s getting LOUDER. But…better yet, I can hardly hear it when I go outdoors, but inside: it’s resonating through the bedroom window.

No, it’s not the bedroom ceiling fan.

WTF?

Welp: forget getting any more sleep tonight.

If I’m right that it’s coming from outside, then it’s likely to be an expensive fix…unless, with any luck at all, it’s coming from the neighbor’s house.

Uh oh…. The AC unit just clicked off, so commanded by the thermostat. Hmmmm…. And guess what? No woooooooooooo.

Yeah. That suggests, o’course, that it IS coming from my place. That it’s probably emanating from the air-conditioning unit. And that my bank account is about to be cleaned out.

Ohhhhhh goodie!

****

Waitaminit… NOPE! The wooooo is back, but my AC is still off. A miracle! The noise, whatever it is, is NOT coming from my gear.

Apparently it’s coming from the neighbor’s house, or from some damfool thing off in the distance.

Hmmm… Pray for the best, then.  For me, that is…not for whatever poor wretch owns the freshly busted machinery.

Phoenix: garden spot!