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House & Yard

Burning Down the House, or How to Cook Bacon

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Our most delightful new neighbors, parents of four hopelessly adorable young children, are busy doing battle with insurance companies and contractors to get their home restored after a kitchen fire did some startling damage. Mercifully, only the dad was hurt, and he is recovering nicely.

Dad decided to cook up a skilletful of bacon for the kiddies. He put the pan on the glass-topped stove and wandered off to chase children. He didn’t wander far: only into the family room, which opens into the kitchen — really, the kitchen could be regarded as part of the family room/dining area. The floor plan is pretty open.

Wouldn’t you know it, with no visible flame under the pan, what’s happening with the bacon goes unnoticed until the grease in the pan bursts into flames.

Four kids and a woman in the house, Dad’s testosterone also bursts into flames. He grabs the blazing pan with his bare hands, hauls the thing outside, and heaves it into the pool.

In the process, he blisters his hands pretty mightily.

He’s OK, though, thank God. Today he seems to already be healing up, his fingers wrapped in antiseptic-infused bandages.

Meanwhile… The microwave over the stove MELTED! It literally dripped down like melted wax. The stove itself was trashed, as were the cabinets around it. The firemen punched holes in the drywall searching for fire that might have made its way into the walls. And the whole house is permeated with toxic-smelling smoke fumes.

Sooo… What can we learn from this?

First: In a fire, get everyone out of the house, including yourself. Better that the place should burn to the ground than that anyone be harmed. Don’t…pick up…a burning pan — it’s extremely dangerous.

Second, obviously: GET INSURED AND STAY INSURED, even if you have no mortgage requiring it. Their insurance will cover repairs and replacement of the appliances, walls, cabinetry, countertops, and smoke-damaged goods. This, as you recognize if you’re a home-owner, represents a ton of money.

Third, less obviously: Buy your insurance through a broker, who will run interference for you with claims adjusters. At first, Dad and Mom were a little worried about how they were going to approach their insurer, since a) this is the first house they’ve ever owned and b) this is not their first homeowner’s claim. The previous owner had either let the insurance lapse or, more likely, pocketed the settlement for the roof damage from the late, great hailstorm. As a result, their present company has covered three large claims that resulted from the prior owner’s neglect, including one for reroofing the house. Needless to say, they called their insurer with trepidation.

I put them in touch with my broker, who was able to advise on what they would be entitled to, what they should say and ask for, and what the outcome is likely to be. He knows a lot about the insurance industry and gave them some useful guidance.

Fourth: Learn to cook bacon. More generally: never turn your stove to blow-torch setting under a pan that contains grease or oil in any form.

Aside: How to cook bacon

Bacon does not need to be cooked over high or even medium heat. In fact, it should not be cooked that way.

Lay the bacon slices flat in a skillet. Place the pan on a burner and turn the burner to low heat. Allow the bacon to cook slowly and gently until it reaches the state of done-ness you prefer. Turn the bacon slices over several times during the process.

This takes a while, but if you put the bacon on before you start preparing the rest of the breakfast, it will be cooked by the time you’re ready to serve the food.

Never turn a burner to “high” under a pan of bacon. And do not leave the kitchen while food is cooking on the stove.

Alternatively, you can cook bacon in a microwave. Lay several layers of paper towels on a dinner plate. Arrange bacon slices, flat, on top of the paper towels. Cover with several more layers of paper towels. Cook on “high” for one minute per slice, more or less. Watch carefully. And experiment: the one-minute-per-slice thing is a rough rule of thumb. It works for two to four slices but is less perfect for larger amounts.

Fifth: Always have a container of baking soda within easy reach on the kitchen counter — preferably not too close to the stove. Baking soda is an effective fire extinguisher and can be used safely on grease fires. Just grab a fistful and toss it into the flames.

And item six, IMHO: if you can possibly manage it, get a gas stove. Electric stoves, especially the glass-top numbers, have as their sterling disadvantage that the user can’t see at a glance how hot the burner is — or in some cases, even whether it’s on. You can’t miss a gas burner when it’s on…and you can easily gauge the heat simply by looking at it.

I wouldn’t own a house that doesn’t have gas service. 😉

Downsizing: Is It Worth the Cost?

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Recently Money Beagle ran a guest post whose author suggested that moving to smaller digs may not be the best choice for all of us as we fade into our dotage. It touches on a thought I’ve been ruminating on: the question of whether I should downsize now, while a) I can afford the costs and b) I still have the health and physical strength to engineer moving to another house. Actually, the question is whether downsizing is a good idea at all.

My house has four bedrooms. It sits on a large lot, almost a quarter of an acre. It has a large pool and a forest of trees. How much does one little old lady need to air-condition, heat, clean, water, trim, and maintain? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to move to, say, an apartment in Scottsdale? Or one of those trendy lofts downtown? Or a nice single-story patio home with no yard to take care of?

Or maybe at my age, with about 15 years of tolerable life remaining — at the outside — maybe it’s time to move into a life-care community?

Well. I wonder. Let’s consider the costs.

First, to sell this house:

6% off the top to the Realtor (the better ones in these parts get 8%): $16,500, on my $275,000 shack
Recording fees: $150
Escrow fees & title insurance: $2,500
Prorated tax: up to $2,500
Termite inspection: $300
Home inspection: $300

That doesn’t include a home warranty for the buyer or any blandishments you offer, such as a flooring allowance or a home warranty. Nor does it count the costs of repairs and upgrades at the new digs — how many of us have had to replace a water heater or a garage door within six months of a move? And do you really want to live with that harvest gold Formica countertop for the rest of your life?

If you’re at the age where downsizing makes sense, you’re past the time of life when you can pack up all your possessions and bribe your friends with beer to help you stuff your furniture and boxes into a U-Haul and then drag the stuff into a new house. That means you’ll need to hire a professional moving company, an expensive transaction: $2,000 for a local move; cross-country, $8,000. You could, of course, hire an estate sale company to yard-sale all your earthly possessions and then buy new furniture when you get to wherever you’re going: it costs about $10,000 to furnish an entire house. Probably less if you buy Ikea junque, but again: at “downsizing” age, who wants to live with Ikea’s kid-engineered throw-away gear?

Let’s see what we have here… Total cost of selling and moving: $22,250 (a conservative estimate). That’s 9% of the property’s likely sale value.

My house is paid for. To avoid a mortgage, I’d have to use the net on the house sale to buy the new place. But that place will have to cost about $25,000 less than I can get for this one. Let’s imagine that for $250,000 I could find something I’d want to live in, located in a safe, middle-class area that is NOT a retirement tract like Sun City. I’ve but begun to pay…

Buyer’s closing costs and moving cost for a house purchased in cash go like this:

Close of escrow: $250
Title insurance: $1350
House inspection fees: $200 to $400
Recording fees for deed: $50
Title company closing fee: $400
Property transfer tax: up to $1,000
Attorney fee: $500
HOA transfer fee: $300 to $400 (n/a in my part of town, thank goodness)
Moving fee: $2,000

Total cost of buying the smaller house: $3,550.

Most places I’d want to live in cost upwards of $300,000 these days. That would require me to take out a mortgage. So to the ~$3550 in buyer’s closing costs, we can add the exorbitant cost of taking out a mortgage. To get into a $300,000 patio home I’d have to come up with at least $50,000, assuming I put down everything I net from my home’s sale. It’s unlikely that I could get a mortgage for a sum that small, but let’s pretend…

Lender discount points, about 1%: $500
Loan application fee: $500
Credit report fee: $85
Loan processing fee: $75 to $400
Document preparation fee: $50 to $250
Property appraisal: $400
Prepaid loan interest: Heaven only knows!
Insurance escrow: about $150
Tax escrow: about $1500

I’m not including flood insurance or a flood certification fee because you couldn’t pay me to buy in a flood zone. So the upfront cost of taking out a small mortgage would come to $3,785 — and that doesn’t count the cost of 15 to 30 years of interest payments. So… Cost of buying a smaller house in a more desirable part of the Valley, with loan: $3,550 + $3,785 = $7,335.

Cost of selling present home + moving van and workmen + buying a lesser house in cash: $27,800 – 28,150.
Cost of selling present home + moving van and workmen + buying a smaller house in a safer part of town: $35135 – 35,485.

Y’know… You could pay for a lot of lawn service and cleaning-lady visits for $35,485.

So let’s say you hire a cleaning lady because you’re feeling too frail to scrub, scour, vacuum, mop, and dust — I believe La Maya pays her housecleaner about $80 to $100 per visit (though her house is a thousand square feet bigger than mine). Xeric landscaping costs just $85 or $100 for monthly clean-up & grooming. Cleaning lady comes in a couple of times a month; that makes her cost $160 to $200. So routine maintenance of the existing manse would come to $300/month. The $35,485 it would cost you to downsize from a midsize tract house into a cottage would cover 118 months of routine house and yard maintenance, during which you would never have to raise a finger to clean or do yardwork. That’s almost ten years!

From one point of view, then, it would take around ten years to recover the cost of downsizing from a four-bedroom house on a quarter-acre lot with no neighbors sitting on top of me to a two- or three-bedroom apartment or townhouse in a rabbit warren, complete with HOA fees and politics.

Because I’m in the Salt River Project, my utility bills are low. Because I live in an old neighborhood, I have no HOA fees. Probably on average my total utility bills for electric, water, and gas run about $425 a month — less than that, really, because winter power and water bills are very low and in the summer, the cost of natural gas is nil. In a “better” neighborhood, I’d be in the Arizona Public Service district, where power bills are much higher. And many parts of Scottsdale and North Phoenix have no gas service, so the stove, water heater, and central heating run on expensive electricity. Utility bills in a smaller house could  easily exceed what I’m paying here.

The pool costs about $40/month to run and maintain (exclusive of repairs). The yard guy: $85/month.

In a patio home, yard and pool maintenance costs would disappear, only to be replaced by a monthly HOA fee. From what I’ve seen at places I’ve looked at, $125 a month is not an unusual HOA charge.  At Pebble Creek, for example, the HOA fee is $250 a month. For an apartment…uh, condo…about $100 to $125 is probably average. So costs to live in the smaller place would probably be about the same as I pay here. The only real advantage would be fewer rooms to clean and less outdoor space to have to maintain.

So, if there’s no advantage in utility and maintenance savings, why spend $28,000 to $35,500 to move?

• It would be worth it if your neighborhood were deteriorating.

The opposite is happening here: this neighborhood, like the entire central city, is gentrifying apace. My neighbor sold her house — only 340 square feet larger than mine, on the same size lot — for $285,000. It hadn’t had a serious upgrade since it was built in 1971. The kids who bought it have spent months in renovation.

And, we might add, every other young couple and every other fix-and-flipper flocking to the ‘hood have done the same.  If the slumlords to the west of Conduit of Blight get some help from the government, they could make a handy profit by condo-izing the deteriorating apartments that now front on the urbanite-friendly lightrail line, thereby getting rid of a major source of crime and rescuing the school that was overwhelmed and ruined when the city allowed the people warrens to go in. It’ll take some time before any such thing happens…but if it does, the property value increases we’re seeing now will look modest by comparison.

• It would be worth it if you wanted a zero-maintenance place where you can lock the door and take off for weeks and even months.

In Arizona, many ordinary houses meet that description. An intelligently designed xeriscape can look very nice and need almost no regular maintenance.

• It would be worth it if you lived in a place with a harsh climate.

Arizona’s summers are pretty fierce. On the other hand, for $40 a month plus occasional repairs, the pool makes the summer heat tolerable. Electric bills to power air-conditioning run about $230 a month, hardly enough to break you up in business. And again: at $40 + $230, the $35,485 would pay those bills for 10 years. How much are winter bills where it snows? Or where it’s foggy and chilly year-round?

• It would be worth it if your kids moved out of town and you wanted to live near them.

Maybe. Following the adult kids to some new locale can be a recipe for depression. Your grown children may not feel very invested in spending large amounts of time with you — except insofar as needed to obtain free babysitting services. Meanwhile, you’ve left behind friends who want to hang out with you, to say nothing of your favorite shopping, your church, your clubs, your cultural life, your beloved doctor, your competent dentist, the only hair stylist on the planet who can cut your hair the way you like it…

Overall, then, if your present home is in good repair and in a reasonably safe neighborhood with nearby shopping and lifestyle infrastructure, downsizing to a smaller place could represent not a savings in maintenance but a net loss, one that could extend over quite a few years…possibly to the end of your lifetime.

So: think twice before jumping into the downsizing pond.

Of Books, Business, and Dishwashers

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So here at the Funny Farm, the proprietor continues to put in 12- to 14-hour days. Got a meeting in another two hours, which means no time to write this post AND get any significant other work done. WTF…I’m writing. Dammit, I get a chance to have a cup of coffee and rest for a few minutes.

Yesterday FaM subscribers received an email warning…uhm, advising you all that I soon will be emanating a kind of business newsletter from the Camptown Ladies site, holding forth more about the adventure of starting a new publishing enterprise than about the Racy Books themselves.

A rose, a candle, and an extraordinary man... Or is he a man?
A rose, a candle, and an extraordinary man… Or is he a man?

Speaking of the which, I see I’ve failed to mention our latest shenanigan, The Ouija Lover. Actually, this randy little number is one of my favorite books. The characters come to life quickly and are pretty entertaining — they get more so in the second book of the series, The Taming of Bonnie. The conceit — the “concept” in Hollywoodese — is really bizarre. So that went online yesterday, available for your browsing pleasure at this very moment.

The Ouija Lover is one of several spooky-themed stories that we’re publishing in honor of Halloween and La Dia de los Muertos. Only one of them, Kelpie (scheduled for publication next week), is really very dark.

Interestingly, most of the Camptown Races stories are fairly light and upbeat. That, apparently, is the overall mood of my writers. The occasional heavy or dark piece is an intriguing exception. I think that’s because these stories are very fun to write and (we hope) fun to read. We’re all getting a hoot out of creating racy stories!

Meanwhile, life goes on. In altogether different realms … I wish to sic one of our fictional spooks on the dunderheads who came up with “high-efficiency” home appliances. There’s another bizarre conceit: the idea that a piece of equipment that takes twice as long to do the job and does it badly (so the job often has to be done over again) magically saves electricity and water. Where do people dream these ideas up?

The present target of my ire is (again) the expensive Bosch dishwasher that I installed to replace the deceased (allegedly less marvelously “efficient”) model. This is the one that won’t get your dishes clean unless you run it on the “Sanitize” cycle, thereby engaging an internal heater that boosts the water’s heat enough to wash off the dirt without benefit of functional detergent. The cycle that takes two hours and forty-one minutes of electric power to wash a load of dishes that would take you about 15 minutes and no electric power (assuming you have a gas water heater) to wash by hand.

Now, I happen to own a set of Christofle silverware that the ex- and I bought back when we were flush and dumb. After we split, I took the silver with me. And I thought at the time, I am gonna use this silver and not save it for a special occasion, BECAUSE special occasions never come and I love this stuff.

So for the past 18 or 20 years, I’ve used the Christofle every day, with every meal. Early on, I found a set of stainless that knocks off Christofle’s design (no longer available: patent infringement?), which I use for cooking. And early on, I learned that if you keep the stainless separate from the silver, you can run the silverware through the dishwasher with no harm.

Well. So it went until I acquired the current “efficient” Bosch. After I figured out that the only way to get the contraption to work was to run it on the sani-cycle every time, I found that suddenly the silver was tarnishing and needed to be repolished every time I turned around. (Normally I’d polish the silver maybe once every six months or a year — if you’re using it all the time, it doesn’t tarnish unless you leave it sitting in lemon juice or some such.)

WTF? Why was I suddenly having to polish the silver every two weeks?

Finally I figured out that it must have something to do with the heat in the washer’s sanitize cycle. If you want the dishes clean, you can’t put the silverware in there.

And that means that if I want to use my silver, I have to wash every piece by hand after every meal!!!!

Thank you, dear environmentally correct hucksters, for taking us back to the 1950s in one more aspect of our lives.

Now, in general I’m none too fond of housework. But of all the housework chores, I hate washing dishes by hand with the deepest passion. It’s one thing to have to wash the laundry by hand once every week or two. But another thing altogether to have to wash eating utensils by hand two or three times a day.

It’s such a nuisance, in fact, that I’m thinking about packing up the silver, hiding it from the burglars somewhere or giving it to my son, and just going over to Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel and buying a set of decent stainless.

The Christofle knock-off stainless is cheap and light-weight. The real stuff, the silver, has a nice heft to it, which adds to the pleasure of a nice meal. A better set of stainless would have that quality, and it also would go in the dishwasher. Voilà: one annoyance gone. Sort of.

Crate & Barrel has some very attractive 18/10 designs. They’re not cheap, but they’re not horribly expensive. I just resent having to put away something I’ve made part of my daily life and that I enjoy using. Nor do I want to spend money on something like this because of some stupid “improvement” that’s utterly unnecessary, ineffective, and unfair.

Pisseth me off.

Gotta Get My Life Back…

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This morning the beloved swimming pool finally got a good cleaning and backwash. The yard is a disaster area: things dying, things falling apart, trash piling up, algae decorating the pool walls. Between a searing hot and dry summer and a full year of Adventures in Medical Science — surgeries on average of once every two months — I’ve neglected the house and the yard shamefully.

Gerardo has kept the worst of it at bay, but he only comes around once a month. And he knows exactly nothing about swimming pool care. On the few occasions that I’ve drafted him to help with the heavy pool work, I’ve had to teach him step-by-step what to do. He looked flamboozled by the whole affair!

And he doesn’t do tree work.

The lime tree, silently running amok unnoticed by the ailing human, has grown up against an eave and is resting its limbs on the roof.

Luis, a lovely gentleman and true artist with trees whom I ran into by serendipity while walking the hounds, is coming by this afternoon to deal with that quiet disaster, and also with the Meyer lemon that’s trying to take over Philadelphia.

The heat has been so unremitting and so extreme, even plants that don’t ordinarily mind an Arizona summer are dying. The bougainvillea on the wast side are struggling, even though they’re sheltered to some degree by the gigantic paloverde. A good half of the potted plants died, in spite of daily watering.

The other day I decided I’d better get off my duff. I’ve carted away a lot of the dead potted plants — more remain to be attended to…later!

Meanwhile, how d’you like this?

berm

Unlike the two orange trees, the lime tree has never had a berm around its base. That’s because the flagstone walkway there was in the way. And really, letting the irrigation pool up into a puddle against the tree’s trunk is not very good for citrus.

It doesn’t seem to have harmed any of the other trees, though.

Without a berm, the irrigation water has flowed down a slight grade from the tree to the northwest corner of the house, where it merrily soaks into the soil around the foundation.

This is singularly bad for a house’s foundation — certainly around here, where much of the soil consists of caliche, which expands like a sponge when it gets wet.

It’s bothered me for years, and in fact has caused some damage to the wall in that corner — inside, around the fireplace’s big wall-length hearth, cracks now need to be repaired and disguised with paint.

So the other day I finally bestirred myself to build a little earth dam across the flood plain. Didn’t run it all the way around the tree, first because I don’t have that much energy (the tree is so overgrown I can’t stand up under there and so have to hunker down and crawl around), partly because a berm that circumnavigates the tree would block passage from the west to the north side of the house and would certainly preclude rolling a wheelbarrow back and forth.

Anyway, the above is the result: you can see that it works (!!) to kep the water away from the house.

This afternoon, I hope, Luis will trim the tree back enough that humans can walk back and forth. For which, I expect, Gerardo will be grateful.

The beautiful and much beloved climbing roses on the back number among this summer’s casualties. I don’t know if they’re dying or just suffering. Quite a few canes are dead, and the little foliage that remains is sickly and burnt-looking.

Roses will suffer in the summer here. These two usually do OK because they’re shaded by the paloverde and the weeping acacia. But…climbing roses don’t live forever. I suppose they could be nearing the end of their lifespan. Some tea roses last only about 10 years, although they say species of climbers can live for 50 years.

The horrid paloverde beetles came back, despite my mistaken belief that the beneficial nematodes had done them in. They emerged late and they emerged with a vengeance. Those things eat rose and citrus roots, too, so it’s also possible that the damned grubs are simply eating the roses out from their base.

As the weather has cooled a little, though (it’s 9:40 a.m. and I’m still on the deck! and the AC hasn’t come on!!!), a few tiny springs of new growth have appeared. That’s hopeful. I guess.

So I dosed them both with Meyer’s rose care, a systemic insecticide and mildew protection. If the problem is the accursed borers, maybe that stuff will at least upset their buggy little stomachs. If it’s some kind of disease, sometimes Meyer’s will beat it back. And if it’s neglect (as seems most likely), fertilizing and deep watering the things should perk them up.

Speaking of bugs, the place is freaking overrun with ants! This ant city, which apparently has been a-building under an orange tree all summer, unnoticed, is among the largest anthills I’ve ever seen.

P1030591

It goes on and on. That white thing in the middle is one of Ruby’s toys, which she evidently dropped there and dares not try to rescue. As soon as the little ladies feel your footsteps on the ground, they come swarming out in a collective fury.

They’re near the back gate, so every time I take the trash out, I get all bit up.

I laid down three different varieties of ant bait (ants will favor one type or another, depending on what the hive’s nutritional needs are at any given time), but so far they don’t seem very interested.

Next strategy: put up the bird feeder and call in a few species that eat ants. Fortunately, we have quite a few of those. If you bring them into your yard, they’ll eventually help to bring an ant problem under control.

Choir season begins this evening, lhudly sing huzzah! I for one will surely welcome something to take my mind off the endlessly time-sucking, often frustrating bidness enterprise.

I think, too, I should plan to do a little gardening or some such every morning (at least until it gets too cold). The daily mile-long doggy walk is really not enough exercise, and it doesn’t do much to relieve stress and frustration. Just the little bit of yard-puttering over the past few days has helped to reduce the general crankiness.

Speaking of frustrating time-sucks, yesterday I was HORRIFIED to discover that all of those images I purchased for the Fire-Rider covers were not cover images. In fact, following Ken’s instructions, Gary had tricked them all out as thumbnails.

I’d thought they were cover images and that Amazon’s software was reducing them to create its thumbnails.

Oh, no. Other way around: It’s been stretching them to build covers.

Probably very, very pixelated covers. But I don’t know. The Kindle I have is an antiquated piece of junk that shows only  black & white. I’m viewing Amazon’s e-books on my iPad. Normally when I buy an e-book, it appears on both the ugly Kindle and the iPad. But this one, goddamn it, does NOT. I can only see it on the Kindle. No idea why.

The image actually looks OK on the Kindle, in b/w. It’s not especially pixelated. I’m told the newest HD versions, whatever they’re called, do require higher resolution images, and so I’m told I need to get Gary to create ALL NEW IMAGES (just imagine what that’s going to cost!!!!!!!) and re-upload the fuckers to Amazon.

If I can figure out how, which so far I have not succeeded at doing.

Twelve of the damn things have been posted at Amazon! I was supposed to have posted another yesterday. So now we’re waiting on Gary’s images for those to go up.

Posting books on Kindle is a time-consuming process. Nothing as tedious as registering an ISBN, but still: time-suck.

Meanwhile, in order to publish Fire-Rider series to Smashwords, I have to register ALL NEW ISBNs for the entire 18-volume series. Yes. For every new format, you have to get a different ISBN. Smashwords does not do .mobi — everything you post there has to be in ePub, or else you have to go through the tortures of the damned trying to run your .doc file through what they cutely call their “meat-grinder.”

Ken (Your eBook Builder) is going to convert them all to ePub and post to SW. But to do that, he’ll need EIGHTEEN new ISBNs. That represents hours of filling out page after page after page of ditzy, tedious forms. Last night I sat in front of Netflix and watched an episode of Bones and two or three of Law & Order: SVU to create some distracting noise while trudging through this chore. By the time I could no longer hold my head up, a total of nine new ISBNs were registered. I’d started, though, with three: so that’s how long it takes to register just six of the damn things.

Today I’m going to launch the CONTEST to name the Camptown Ladies.

Our Aunt Tilly
Our Aunt Tilly

Aunt Tilly feels the girls should have a nom de guerre…she’s not real thrilled about any association with the House that might develop. And she has nixed their plan to call themselves “Madison” and “Ashley.” She is, after all, a businesswoman, and she does not approve of Ashley Madison’s business model. “Indiscreet,” “ridiculous,” and “laughable” are some of the kinder critiques she’s shared. “The Internet!” she snorts. “If you’re going to have a fling,” says she, “for heaven’s sake go to a reputable house. If you want the world to know what you’re up to, we’ll be happy to give you a megaphone, show you to the roof, and let  you shout your conquests to the world.”

She’s so old-school.  🙄

Done Duck

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Well, Duck is now definitively gone. I’d say Ruby the Corgi had chased her off, but I don’t think that’s quite the case.

As the days have progressed on their summer trek toward Hell Central, Duck has spent less and less time on her nest. She’s been MIA for hours at a time, which can’t be good for the gestating eggs, even though it’s so hot they can’t very well be cooling off.

To the contrary: they’re probably overheated in there. Baked duckling, as it were.

Yesterday she was hiding under some other shrubbery, presumably where it’s cooler — it was 110 at 7 p.m., to give you a clue of what it’s like out in the backyard. Anyway, I needed to get the hose to keep a few potted plants alive, and when I opened the gate, Ruby squeezed in around my legs and shot around the pool, flushing Duck from her shelter.

Duck took off, and she hasn’t come back.

Oh well. Now I can have Gerardo’s guys trim those damn filthy palm trees.

That’ll be another $300 bill…

Repelling Cats: The Practical Benefits

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So, I’ve made a spectacle of myself by securing tack strips atop the block walls by way of repelling Other Daughter’s obnoxious cat.  Like the Ant Wars, the Cat War has gone on for some time, and as we know,

He who does battle with a cat loses.

Nice kitty kitty kitty! Click on the image for the alarming details...
Nice kitty kitty kitty! Click on the image for the alarming details…

However… Ah, howEVER… It does appear that for the first time since the last sabre-toothed tiger succumbed, the hominid is winning.

That damn cat has not been seen since I secured the last few feet along the eastside wall and figured out that I could use heavy-duty exterior double-sided mounting tape to attach tack strip lengths to the wall’s column caps, which offer no purchase for zip-ties.

She had pretty much stopped coming into the yard after I secured the entire west wall, the back wall, and the front wall — many hundreds of feet, since the house occupies a quarter-acre lot. Some of the houses in this tract have tiny yards, basically just a walkway in the backyard. But the corner houses were built on surprisingly large lots…and this is one of ’em.

How she found out about Duck, I do not know, but evidently the presence of a large, delicious meal nesting right on the ground was more than the damn cat could bear. Still, the other day’s foray was the first I’d seen of her inside the yard for several months.

A season’s absence of the damned cat has wrought some startling changes.

gecko
You need a gecko: http://bit.ly/1CqHuSt

The most visible is the resurgence of birds and geckos, the voraciously insectivorous little lizards native to the Sonoran desert. The yard is alive with birds, from noisy, crowing (insectivorous!) grackles to the flying jewels that are (insectivorous!) hummingbirds, with every kind of tweety-bird and dove in between.

But the loveliest part is that these critters, the birds and the geckos that now find safety in the fortified backyard, EAT BUGS!

More to the point, they eat mosquitoes and they eat flies. This spring, when normally the house and yard would be overrun with the things, I’ve hardly seen any.

A year ago, I swatted over a dozen mosquitoes in the house one evening. They like to come to rest on the white ceilings, where they doze between meals. So at some times of day it’s easy to kill them. But this year, I’ve hardly had to whack at any of them. Nor have I been bit from head to toe…

And the flies? This morning I killed all of two (count’em, 2) with the electric fly swatter. That is astonishing. In the past, a half a dozen would zip in during the time it would take to let the dogs out and back in and to attend to the pool. One year we had some kind of fly bloom…I’ve never seen so many flies, and yes I do clean up after the dogs twice a day and no, none of the nearby neighbors still has a dog.

But Other Daughter has a damn cat.

Cats kill not just birds, as we all know, but also small reptiles and mammals. They can drive certain wildlife populations extinct in a given area. They’re particularly devastating to geckos.

Geckos eat massive numbers of insects. They eat mosquitoes. They eat flies. They eat crickets. They eat roaches. They eat grasshoppers. They eat worms. They eat any number of annoying, garden-chomping, disease-carrying, and unaesthetic bugs. I have not been kept awake half the night by a cricket in weeks and weeks. Happy day!

Birds eat most of those things, and many varieties eat ants.

We’ve had just one incursion from the Ant Queen’s Hordes this year. It was from a colony that set up under the deck, where the “organic” bug guy exterminated a hive of Africanized bees. Guess the guy was right that the stuff he used was relatively less harmful than standard products. Some DE sprinkled across the thresholds and around the entry to the ant nest moved the ants away from the house. But since the cat has been repelled, I haven’t seen a single out-of-control ant colony in the yard.

Getting rid of the cat has gotten rid of the insect pests.

Images:

Homotherium (scimitar-toothed cat): Cropbot at Wikipedia. CC BY 3.0
Gecko: shamelessly ripped off the Web.