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House & Yard

DIY Pool Debris Shields that Work and Save Dollars

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Leslie’s sells a nifty gadget called a “debris shield” that does a nice job of protecting your swimming pool filter from floating crud, cuts down on the backwashing jobs, and staves off the day that you’ll have pay someone to take the filter apart and clean it out. It’s extremely simple: a stretchy nylon mesh bag that fits down inside the plastic skimmer basket. And for what it is, it’s stupidly pricey: $12.49! For this package of five, that would be $2.50 apiece.

Though you can rinse them out, they don’t last very long. If you live in a place like Arizona, where high summer winds blow dirt and leaves into the pool all summer, or if you have a dog that likes to swim, you need a finer filter than just the skimmer basket.

The other day, M’hijito wanted to bring Charley the Golden Retriever over for a dip in the drink. Meanwhile, Cassie the Corgi has taken to falling in the pool during her frenzies over the humans’ swimming activities. Cassie has more loose hair on her 25-pound body than Charley has over his entire 70-pound expanse, and Charley alone will leave a skiff of hair floating on the surface. Fresh out of debris shields and unable to afford a new one just then, I cast about…and found this:

Nylon hose ($1.24). Yea verily, an investment of a dollar and twenty-four cents will get you not one, not two, but five very effective debris shields. Here’s the trick:

Get the cheapest pair of pantyhose you can find. These came from Walgreen’s, where I paid a buck and a quarter for one “queen-size” pair. Take a pair of scissors and cut off the bottom part of the legs, about halfway up.

Now you have two debris shields.

Next, cut off the remaining length of the legs, just above the line where the reinforced panty part ends—this is right at the crotch. Don’t include the crotch seam in either of these two lengths.

Tie a knot to close one end of each of the second two lengths of hose you’ve cut off. Lo! This creates two more debris shields. The second set ends up with a tight, stretchy reinforced segment at the top.

Take the panty section and tie a knot at the bottom, where you cut off the legs. Presto-digito! Another debris shield. Two pair of hose gave me ten DIY debris shields.

Drop the knotted or toe end into the filter basket. Stretch the top over the rim—it should fit firmly. And there you are: exactly the same thing as Leslie’s $2.50 (plus tax) mesh debris filter, only you’ve paid 25 cents for it.

This works very effectively, and you can rinse it out and reuse it quite a few times. Check out the wad of dog hair the thing kept out of the pool’s filter!

After this heroic save, I simply washed the bag out and put it back into the skimmer basket, where it kindly grabbed a fistful of small, filter-clogging leaves the next time the wind blew:

Works perfectly. And it’s cheap. Very, very cheap.

Workman Waltz: Blue Danube Dance

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Bila the Bosnian Painter dropped by this fine Sunday morning. He was as entertained by the story of the clueless painters as he was by the new-to-him Corgi (Anna the Ger-Shep owned this place the last time he was here). He proposes to do the job for $400 to $500, as opposed to the $800 Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur wanted for his hapless campesinos. That includes the garage, for which Jeff the P.E. belatedly decided he wanted another $250.

So, that makes the day feel a great deal brighter. And isn’t it appropriate for the Workman Waltz dance card: the Danube flows right through Croatia and Serbia!

The residents of which nations, we might add, are responsible for the presence in our country of many excellent artisans and craftsmen (those who survived the genocide). Bila saw action in that war and eventually fled to Western Europe. Over time he made his way to North America and the United States. Eastern Europe’s loss, our gain.

Weekend Roundup

For aspiring and arrived writers of various sorts, here’s an entertaining read on “how to write.”

This article debunking a widely beloved Limbaugh-style myth has been online for several days at The Atlantic. That  makes it “old,” I suppose, but apparently it’s attracting plenty of traffic. As usual, the comments are as interesting (or more so) than the post.

Lately I’ve developed a craving to seek out new-to-me PF blogs, since those sites are now strewn like ribbons in gay profusion across the Internet. Here’s a guy (I assume) who dabbles in oil securities, writing at Beat the Index. He does the numbers for electric cars and concludes, not unsurprisingly, that they don’t yet make great financial sense for most consumers.

Bible Money Matters is not new to me, but I haven’t visited in way too long. Peter, I see, hasn’t lost his touch. Check out this entertainingly written and good advice on what he calls “zombie” accounts.

At My Family Finances, John posts an interesting rumination on the sociological impacts of college degrees, complete with some eye-opening comparisons and graphs.

Ever have that “uh-oh…” feeling? Jefferson at See Debt Run had a pip…in the middle of the night!

The Outlier Model’s proprietor CF urges us not to donate to charities. Drop over there and find out why.

At another site that’s not new to me but not visited enough, Joe Plemon and his son Jonathon put their second fix-and-flip on the market. Looks like they’ll do pretty well on this one, having learned a lot from their first experience.

Edward Antrobus, much like M’hijito, appears to be stuck in a job any halfway competent high-school graduate could do, making his expensive college degree look rather pointless. Offered a promotion, he agonizes.

Evolving Personal Finance reflects on the tendency for found money to create new “wants.”

Frugal Portland reports that she never uses cash. It’ll be interesting to see what changes we’ll make if merchants actually do start charging extra for credit-card purchases.

Here’s something rather amazing at Earth and Money: check out the response EaM got to a post written somewhat earlier about a type of packaging that looks pretty unecological.

Lately I’ve noticed Add Vodka, another one of those great Canadian blogs—check out proprietor Daisy’s post on the startling cost of owning a car for those on the north side of the border!

And Wealth Artisan is another site that only recently came to my attention. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek bit of advice for budding entrepreneurs.

Everyday Tips and Thoughts presses one of my buttons: sales morons who little-woman the female customer.

And in the old friends department, I see Frugal Scholar is back from a long summer’s hiatus. And by golly, Blogger is letting me comment there again…hallelujah, brothers & sisters! Check out the interesting idea for an olive oil scrub. I love that idea. Matter of fact, I think I’m going to go try it right now.

Images:

Confluence of the Sava and the Danube in Belgrade. Igor Jeremić. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Iron Gate on the Danube, on the Serbian-Romanian border. Denis Barthel. GNU Free Documentation License.

When the Workman Waltz Turns into the Workman Stumble…

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{moan} I should’ve called Bila the Bosnian Painter, the guy who can fly through an entire house in one day. Possibly I was overdemanding to be unhappy that he destroyed the Saltillo tile in M’hijito’s bathroom by using yellow masking tape on it to hold down his drop cloths. The tile now needs to be professionally stripped and refinished, and we don’t know if that will fix the strips of mastic that soaked into the porous tile and now are permanently embossed in it. But at least Bila is competent, overall.

Because I was unhappy about the tiles—and, let’s face it, because Bila can be kinda careless in general—I tracked down another painter. The guy who installed the doors and window recommended someone he knew, saying this fellow had painted his house, did a decent job, and was neither the cheapest nor the highest in the cost department. So Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur came over to issue a bid.

The plan was to repaint the dog-ravaged walls in the hallway, one of which extends into the dining room; change the color in my office, repaint the closet-sized master bathroom the same color only in flat paint; repair a ding on the front door and repaint that; paint the interior doors and some of the baseboards; fill joints around the new framing for one of the new doors; touch up paint around the doors and window; and paint the inside of the garage (most of the walls are covered with cabinetry, and so this is not a tall order). They also were supposed to repair a bad crack over the door between the kitchen and the garage—the old, deteriorated tape a previous owner applied needed to be removed, the crack cleaned out, new spackling packed into it, new tape applied, and the drywall around the patch retextured. Cost was supposed to be $800.

Background: the bid Jeff the P.E. gave me had two sections: one for just these few things ($800) and one to paint the entire house ($2200). In person, he had said the first part of his bid included the garage, but in his penciled bid he’d left the garage out of the $800 offer. When I noticed this I called him on the phone and asked whether the garage was included in the $800 bid, as he’d said it was when he was here, and he said yes, it was—he’d just forgotten to include it.

They were supposed to show up on Wednesday to start painting. Along about 9:00 two men show up at the door. Neither of them speaks English. One guy can sort of make himself understood in pigeon English; the other appears not to be able to speak the language at all.

Fortunately, all I want to do is repaint with existing colors. And when the house was painted the last time, I painted each color on a piece of art paper; on the back of each piece of paper, I wrote down the formula on the can. So I handed the English-speaking dude—let’s call him Angelo—these samples to take to Dunn Edwards, where they proposed to buy the paint.

The color that goes up the hallway and into the dining room, which is a kind of sunny terra cotta, is actually a Behr paint. My friend VickyC’s shirt-tail relative, Kenny the Unlicensed Painter, applied that paint; he preferred to work with Home Depot, which he felt was cheaper, and besides, Consumer Reports rated Behr much higher than Dunn Edwards paints. Kenny annoyed me because he brought his wife and made her do all the work while he sat on the sofa and yakked; and also because his life is one long saga of intractable problems, all of which he imagines I can solve. The last thing I wanted to do was get into that again!

So. Terra cotta. We could call it a variety of orange. Behr, not Dunn Edwards.

The two campesinos say they’re taking these several colors (the terra cotta, a kind of linen-colored off-white, a pearl gray, and the dust gray-brown I’d like to use on the garage walls) to Dunn Edwards, and since it will take quite a while for D-E to match them, they’ll be back the next morning.

So. Paint job does not start on Wednesday, as advertised.

They say they’ll show up by 7:30 on Thursday. They actually appear about quarter to 9, causing me to miss the weekly SBA meeting, after which I was supposed to go by a client’s office and drop off a finished job. They have a woman in tow; she appears to be a girlfriend or wife along for the ride.

First crack out of the box, Angelo tells me the boss, Jeff, told them they were not to paint the garage—that the garage was not in the bid. I say he’d told me it was. He says Jeff wants another $250 for the job. I say I won’t pay that and so they should forget that part of the job.

My color pattern is kind of complex. Each room has an accent wall; in the office, I wanted three walls painted off-white and the fourth painted pearl gray; the closet bifold doors were to be left alone. So these guys could figure out which walls were to be painted which color, I taped a yellow sticky on each wall:

white
white
white
gray

Does that look hard to understand?

Angelo goes in the office, closes the door, throws open the window to the 100-degree heat as the air-conditioning is pounding away, and starts painting. Eventually he resurfaces, feeling proud of himself for having painted three of the four walls. I look in there: he’s painted them the wrong color!

I should have realized: if the guy can barely speak English, of course he can’t read English. Duh!

But I did tell him. We walked all through the house and I showed him, waving the painted sheets of paper around, which walls were to be painted which colors.

He agrees to repaint the walls the right color.

Now I e-mail the client to ask if I can return her project when I’m back in Scottsdale next week. She says no, she needs the job back today. So, I get in my car and drive to Scottsdale, about an hour-long round trip. While I’m out, the Three Stooges start painting the hallway/dining room walls.

When I get home, I notice the paint doesn’t seem to be quite the right color. The paint can says it’s the color ordered, but instead of the vibrant terra cotta that was suppose to be applied, the paint is a muddy reddish brown. First I think well, latex paints dry a different color from the way they look when freshly applied, but after awhile I realize the color is just wrong. None of these three folks can speak English well enough for me to discuss this with them.

I also realize they haven’t repaired the crack as advertised. It appears they’ve slathered a thick layer of spackling over the mess and then slopped paint over the WET spackling compound!

But I don’t have time to think very hard about this, because as I walk in the door I realize these clowns haven’t removed the switchplates and outlet covers. Those switchplates are hand-made. I bought them in San Francisco from a shop that retails the work of artisans and craftsmen, and they were very expensive. The Three Stooges were rolling rectangles around them preparatory to cutting in around them with a paintbrush.

I’ve worked with enough painters over the years to know that even guys who are in a ball-busting hurry will remove the switch plates, because it’s faster to take two seconds to unscrew a quarter-inch-long bolt than to cut in around every switch and outlet in the house. So I had to run ahead of them and remove all the hand-made switchplates plus the others that I had hand-painted to go with them.

Enough!! I try to reach Jeff by phone—only to learn he’s out of the country! His answering machine gives an e-mail address through which he can supposedly be reached while he’s junketing around.

Along about 2:00 p.m., the motley crew leaves. In five hours, they’ve painted the tiny bathroom (which I could have done myself in about 30 or 40  minutes, max), painted the office twice (having screwed up the first time), made a mess of the drywall repair job, and painted the hall/dining room walls muddy brown.

As soon as they walk out the door, I take my paint sample and the can of paint they’d used down to Dunn Edwards and ask why the colors were so different. Josh, the sales rep, says “that was because they didn’t want to wait.” I say the day before they’d taken the specs for the paint and the sheet of paper that I had covered with the correct paint yesterday so they could leave their order overnight, so they wouldn’t have to stand around forever. He says, “No, they didn’t,” and points out that the cans are dated Thursday, July 26. If they’d ordered the paint on Wednesday, they would be dated July 25. I write down Jeff’s explanation of what happened at the Bell Road Dunn Edwards, as he interpreted the details from the paint can’s label:

“They did a read and shoot. It takes at least an hour, and sometimes longer. People do that when they don’t want to wait while an exact match is made. If they asked for a match, Dunn Edwards would shoot the color and then adjust it several times, letting it dry to check the color, until they got it correct. This takes quite a long time.”

So, what happened here is our guys told me they were getting the paint matched, and they did not. The reason they were over an hour late on Thursday morning was because they didn’t bother to place an order for the paint on Wednesday, which would have given Dunn Edwards time to match the color properly. By the way, Josh also told me that they had bought the lowest, cheapest grade of paint possible.

I asked Angelo to remove the defunct burglar alarm sensors in the dining and family rooms. He did not. I asked several times. After the muddy brown paint was applied to the wall, he removed one; he broke apart the other one but failed to take a screwdriver and remove the backplate from the wall.

Finally, instead of using the alley or the utility sink in the garage (which Angelo saw while I was showing him where to paint and what colors), the Stooges washed unused paint out of their buckets onto the desert landscaping in the front yard. When I stopped them and told them not to do that to my (expensive!) landscaping and (unbelievably expensive!) specimen tree, they said “It’s only water.” I pointed out that water is not white; water is clear. Paint contains toxins that harm desert trees when the stuff soaks through to their roots. If that mature tree is damaged or killed because of this irresponsible treatment, I am taking Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur to small claims court for the cost of removing and replacing it.

These clowns, who surely must have been day laborers Jeff picked up out of a Home Depot parking lot, didn’t even have drop cloths. They left my furniture in disarray; they pulled the wires out of a stereo speaker that now will have to be repaired; the crack over the door will have to be undone and fixed by someone who knows what he’s doing; the mess left where they half-way removed the burglar alarm sensors remains to be fixed.They got paint all over my desk, only some of which I was able to scrub off.

I was, however, able to get the paint off the dog. Probably because she’s still shedding and the painted fur fell out when I scrubbed her.

Jeff the P.E. having left his e-mail address in his answering machine message, I e-mailed him to explain the situation and tell him to call his goons off:

I want you to tell these gentlemen not to come back here. If you have a competent craftsman in your employ, you might consider sending him around to finish the work, but I do not want a couple of laborers who clearly are not professionals in my house.

While I was at Dunn Edwards, I asked a licensed painter how much it costs to hire a non-English-speaking laborer to do a slapdash paint job. He estimated about $10 per hour. I also asked Josh how much a gallon of Dunn Edwards’s cheapest would cost at a contractor’s discount and was told it would be no more than $20. So, I will pay you as follows:

The two men who showed up did most of the work. The woman spent most of her time standing around. They arrived after 8:30 and they left a little after 2:00 p.m. So I will pay you for two workers’ labor for 5 1/2 hours, at $10 per hour per worker. That comes to $110.

They purchased 8 gallons of paint. Two gallons are the wrong color, and they are the wrong color because the men did not leave them at Dunn Edwards yesterday, as they said they had done. I will have to buy more paint and either paint the wall myself or hire someone else to paint it. Therefore I am not paying for the two gallons of the wrong color. They also purchased two gallons of the adobe beige color I asked you to paint the garage. I am not paying for paint that will not be applied because of a last-minute decision that contradicts our oral agreement. So, I will pay you for four gallons of paint at $20/gallon. That comes to $80.

Total, then, would be $190.

One would expect this would get his attention. Apparently not, though: I haven’t heard back.

When his guys show up this morning, I’m going to send them away. I don’t want the clowns in my house again—they’ve already made quite enough mess, thank you.

Bila the Bosnian Painter is coming over on Saturday to give me an estimate for repairing and repainting the front door, repainting the hall and maybe the garage, and painting the interior doors and trim. While he’s here I’ll ask him if he’ll paint the accent wall in the office “gray lace,” a deeper color than the pearl gray Angelo applied, which will suffice but is pretty bland.

Needless to say, this chaos has done nothing good for my work life. In addition to the missed meeting and the rush trip to deliver the completed project, we’re right on deadline for the large project we’ve been working on. We’re almost finished, but I’ve still got to go over each of the gerjillion files the client has returned for final clean-up and checking.

I struggled to do that while the clowns were roiling around yesterday, without much luck. Got through half-dozen files. Effing Word corrupted the one file that needed a fair amount of work, losing it permanently. I’d e-mailed it to the client for final approval, but the file in the “sent” box also was corrupted. She doesn’t seem even to have received it: I asked her to send it back to me if she could open it, and what she returned was an earlier file. So now I have to do all that work over again.

In a word…fuck!

Getting Funnier and Funnier about Everything

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Face it: I’ve become a crazy old lady. If I started out “funny” about money, now I’m a little strange about most everything. It could be accentuated by 115-degree heat, which makes you crazy when you go out in it and makes you stir-crazy by imprisoning you inside air-conditioned boxes. But likely there was some underlying funniness to start with…

Check it out:

The big potted ficus tree, which gives the potentially stark back porch some character and even a little shade, is getting sunburned in the blasting heat. That’s even though the thing is under the shade of the patio roof. The morning sun is so fierce it burns the leaves before it gets high enough to be blocked by the roof.

Don’t believe it? Last night the patio thermometer read 101 degrees…at ten o’clock at night! Don’t even ask how hot it gets out there in the daytime.

The tree is roped to the patio upright, because the stiff breezes we get at this time of year (normal people would call them “violent dust storms”) invariably knock it over, causing me to have to risk putting my back out (again) pulling it upright and creating quite a nice mess. It is not gunna get unroped.

What to do?

Well, I had these curtains left after I built new sheer curtains for the bedroom. Think of that.

Screwed a few more cuphooks into the patio beam and then hung the drapes on those. Voila!

Gorgeous, huh?

They’re even more colorful when viewed from the other side, a scenic embellishment visible from the street, if you’re curious enough to peer over the wall.

Oh well. They’ll come down as soon as the weather moderates, probably mid- to late August.

One nice thing about this lash-up is that it creates a kind of tent where I can shuck off my clothes and wrap a towel around myself to dart over to the pool without being observed from the neighbor’s front windows or by tall or nosy passers-by.

Speaking of the wall and scenic embellishments and privacy, I tied another lash-up to the east wall bordering the street:Exquisite, no?

Those things are old tumble-down wooden trellises, to which I nailed old shade screen and then tied to the wall’s decorative block row. They also serve to block curious eyes from peering into my yard as I go about my business, often in various states of undress. Look just awful! But they’ll do the job until those hopseed bushes can get big enough to take over from the deceased devil-pod tree as a privacy screen.

This is the joy of not living in a homeowner’s association: you’re free to decorate your yard in Early Poor White Trash.

Just look at those bushes! They were little one-gallon twigs when I planted them this spring. At that time they just came up to the bottom of the third row of blocks from the bottom—not counting the row that’s half-buried there. Now they’re almost to the top of the wall! They certainly will have reached the top by the end of the summer. From what I can tell, they’re pretty frost-tolerant—not that we get hard freezes around here anymore, thanks to the global warming that is not global warming. So assuming they don’t freeze down to the ground this winter, by next summer they should be tall and vigorous enough to block the view from the road. Thank goodness!

And speaking of the hopseed bushes, remember the “oleander” I reported as having volunteered in a pot? Well…hmmmm….

“Oleander”→

←Hopseed bush

Now personally, I still don’t think they’re the same. Click for extreme close-ups and notice the slightly wavy edges on the known hopseed bush, and then compare with the smooth edges on the intruder. Also the volunteer plant has shiny (oleander-like!) leaves, whereas the hopseed’s leaves are slightly less waxy-looking. However, the leaves are the same size and color and the growing habit is strangely similar.

We’ll know sooner or later. If the visitor puts out pink, magenta, or white flowers, it will give itself away. However…if that thing is a baby hopseed bush, it doesn’t bode well. The  hopseeds growing fifty feet away from it put out about three little seed pods this spring. If they sprout that readily, once they start really producing pods, we’ll have a bumper crop of hopseed babes!

My favorite orange tree, the one that produces fruit so sweet they taste like candy, has been suffering. This spring it quit adding new leaves, and the leaves that still cling to the branches are as sunburned as the ficus’s. I really don’t want that tree to die.

I think the problem is that it hasn’t been getting enough water. The other tree, which is thriving, is planted on a slight incline, so that the bubbler pours water toward the alley. To keep all the water from flowing out under the back gate, I built a berm along its north side, creating a well for the water to pool. Also, the sickly tree has the bubbler installed right next to the trunk (not good for citrus, I’m told), and so the water coming out of that bubbler has never spread out to the drip line.

←An orange tree is supposed to look like this.

So, I broke out the shovel and the hoe and, over three days, scraped the crushed granite back away from the tree, mounding it up to build a berm under the drip line. Really, it probably should be further out from the drip line than this, but that would make the side yard nonnavigable. Still need to get some river rocks to shore it up—otherwise the first hard rain (which, if we’re gonna get it, should come in the next month) will melt this fine moon crater back down to grade level.

It was a bitch of a job in 112-degree heat. But…uhm…good exercise. I still need to cut the shade cloth underlaying loose and pull it out, but I may foist that job onto Gerardo. Then probably will spread some compost around the bottom of the crater.

Yesterday I finally bought the proposed cell phone: a Nokia X 2. Apparently this is an older model that T-Mobile is trying to get rid of by offering as an Internet-only deal. You can’t get it in the stores, nor can you get the plan I want: $30 for 100 minutes of talk, unlimited texting, and unlimited Web crawling. In fact, if you ask about it in the store, they’ll tell you T-Mobile doesn’t offer it at all and try to get you to buy the 1500 minutes of talk or text messages plus a generous 3 MB of Web usage. Uh huh.

It takes two to five days for the phone to show up, assuming it actually does show up. Let’s hope they haven’t yanked the coveted plan by then. You can’t sign up for the plan until you have the phone in hand.

Anyway, the phone is well reviewed. Its data speeds aren’t great, but I don’t intend to use it for web-surfing. I have a perfectly fine iPad for that job, should I feel impelled to surf the web and check e-mail while I’m driving to campus. This thing will do the job nicely for sending texts to certain sons who no longer answer the telephone at all, for calling friends, and for summoning roadside assistance when the Dog Chariot breaks down, as it inevitably will, one of these days.

Well, it’s past time for me to get on with my crazed life. And so, to work…

July 4: A Miracle Happens in Arizona!

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Holy mackerel! It’s almost 8:30 in the morning and the temperature is only 85 degrees! Doors and windows are open, fresh (if somewhat soggy) air is flowing through the house, fans are blowing…air conditioning is OFF! Off off off, for the first time in weeks!!

We awoke at 5 to a solid overcast and bizarrely cool air. This is the first July 4 I can remember that has not been searing, scorching hot. Normally at this time of year the outside air is so hot all you want to do is huddle inside your air-conditioned box. People in Alaska get snowbound in winter; here the residents are heatbound, and just as stir-crazy.

Actually…I may overspeak.

Before the low desert was obscenely overdeveloped, it used to be that summer storms would roll in about 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Mornings and early afternoons would be hot—though nothing like they are today. Temps would be 105, maybe 110 at most. Then the afternoon rains would drop the temperature, abruptly, to around 80 degrees. This happened every day from early July through the end of August.

Now 110 is a “normal” day, and temperatures of 112 to 115 are routine. I can remember when a 112-degree day was extraordinary, and 115 degrees, unheard-of. We rarely see summer rains anymore, and when we do, it’s long after dark.

Our nasty summers are the direct result of paving over the desert. We’ve created a heat bubble that acts like a big plastic dome over the city. Where thirty years ago rainstorms would flow across the Valley floor, now they bounce off a barrier of reflected, amplified heat. As they cascade in from the southeast, you can see them split aside and pass by the city, the clouds moving out of the Valley and proceeding around through Carefree and Anthem to the north and below the South Mountains and the Estrellas in the other direction. Indirectly, climate warming undoubtedly has something to do with it. Either way, it stems from the same basic primate stupidity.

Oh well.

So de bonne heure it was out the door and into the backyard, there to continue reconstructing the landscaping now that Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy has outgrown the need for dog-sitting and taken up full-time residence at M’hijito’s house.

Yesterday I made a run on Home Depot to pick up some new plants. At first I thought not to get new bedding plants, because it does seem like an exercise in futility. Young annuals are almost bound to fricassee in the hot little bed next to the pool. And putting water in there will just cause all those damn weeds, whose thready roots now infest the soil, to come surging back. But I couldn’t resist.

Picked up two six-packs of zinnias, one of red salvia, and one of something called lisianthus. All of these allegedly crave six+ hours of full sun a day. We’ll see. These plants may define “sun” as something other than “blast furnace.”

Salvia does do pretty well out there. A volunteer between the pots and two plants in one of the pots next to the bed are still alive, despite the heat and drought. As for a lisianthus: never heard of it before. Kinda pretty blue thing, though. All these plants look a little tired. They were sopping wet yesterday afternoon when I set them on the shaded table beneath the patio overhang. This morning they were parched and looking peakèd. We’ll see if they recover after being put in the ground and generously watered.

The two salvia in the pot are sharing space with, of all things, an oleander that volunteered in there! I’ve never seen oleander volunteer before. They do make a seed pod, so it’s not out of the question…but how did the seed get into the pot? Oleander is very toxic and will kill birds (and just about anything else) that eat any part of it. Seeds, flowers, stems, leaves: the whole damn plant is poisonous.

Hm. Come to think of it, there was a dead dove out there awhile back…

However.

It gets quite large (we have 30-foot-high hedges in the neighborhood), and it makes a pretty flower. So I’m thinking that when the weather cools a little, I’ll move this little guy into the center of a larger pot and see if it’ll grow as a patio ornamental. If it doesn’t…well, it didn’t cost anything.

Oleander is expected to go extinct in the Valley within a decade. A bacterial infection carried by a type of leaf-hopper is killing them off. There’s no treatment for it, and nothing seems to be effective against the insect, either. Not a great loss…but another of those changes having to do with too many people doing too many disruptive things that, in concert, alter the nature of our living space.

Two days ago I soaked the flowerbed, to soften the soil so as to dig out the weeds. This morning? Bone dry! So it looks like to keep these things alive I’ll have to water every day and deep-water every two or three days. Another chore added to the daily list.

Well, it’ll be worth it if they grow and prettify the pool area.

Speaking of adding chores, I also picked up a couple indoor plants, too: on sale for ten bucks. One is a fiddle-leaf fig; the other an umbrella plant.

These are both varieties of ficus.

The potted ficus on the back porch thrives, although it’s sunburned right now because the blast of the morning sun has been too much for it. I’ve propped a screen against it, but that thing blows over in the lightest breeze. Guess I’m going to have to put up some hooks along the patio overhang’s beams and hang a length of shade cloth from them.

Later.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if I can keep these things alive indoors. Didn’t realize the fiddle-leaf fig is somewhat xeric. Its soil was very dry, so I put it under the faucet and soaked it. Only then did I bother to go online and discover that it prefers to be dry and does not like soaking. The umbrella tree apparently has more normal watering needs, so watering that is less likely to kill it. But I figure that despite the passing cloud cover, the air here is so dry the fiddle-leaf will soon desiccate to its preference, and after that I’ll be more careful about watering it.

The neighborhood had its annual July 4 parade at 7:30 this morning. I’ve been to it once and almost expired in the heat. But the weather was so clement today I considered trotting over to the park to watch the goings-on. But…

But…so many excuses!

But…by 8:30, when the parade ends, if the cloud cover broke it would be way too hot for Cassie to walk home.

But…at 6:30 it was starting to rain. Did I really want to stand out in the rain to watch an extremely small-time parade and listen to some politicians harangue us?

But…my foot hurts. A lot! (Boy, does it hurt!)

But…my back still hurts.

But…I’m not drivin’ a block and a half and fighting for a place to park, because that would be ridiculous.

But…I’d rather go swimming.

But…I want to sit outside for breakfast.

Can’t believe it’s now nine in the morning and still nice enough to have the doors open.

Time to get up and put some water on the frazzled roses. And so…to work!

The Ambivalence of Doggy Love

by

After M’hijito returned from his seaside vacation, he decided that Charley the Golden Retriever is now old enough to stay on his own all day, and so the dog-sitting gig has come to an end. Seems to be working out pretty well for him: he hasn’t complained about any furniture being eaten, and when I dropped by su casa over the weekend, I noted that Charley seems to have regained all the lost weight and looks great.

Funny thing about humans and dogs and their symbiotic relationship. Every time I lose a dog—and most of them will pass on to their furry fathers before we do, with any luck—I feel really bad and miss the dog a lot. It’s been four years since Anna departed and I still miss that dog. And yet weirdly, at the same time there’s this huge sense of relief. All that work comes to a stop.

It was reasonable to feel relieved when Anna passed. The cost of the meds and vet bills was well-nigh crippling, and the amount of work involved in taking care of a large, sick animal is substantial, indeed. When Anna got so blind she fell in the pool, the workload surpassed ridiculous—I built a jury-rigged fence around the Sink of Death to keep her away from it, but that kept me and the pool cleaning chemicals and gear away from it, too. Everything had to be hauled over the fence, several times a week.

Charley, except for the size of his dog mounds (cleaning up Cassie’s rabbit pellets is as nothing!) and his chronic gollywobbles, was far less of a burden than Anna. But…I’d resuscitated the old wire fencing (and bought a lot more of it!) to barricade my plants and the bubblers he loved to chew, barricading myself out of the flowerbeds, too. And pups, unlike older dogs, track in a phenomenal amount of dirt. I tend to get discouraged when faced with a lot of dirt in the house: often as not, I’ll just give up and ignore it. That makes me even more depressed, because I don’t like living in dirt. Then there was the frenzy generated by his pulling up and eating a half-dozen irrigation sprinklers and drippers, most of which I couldn’t then find and still haven’t found to repair. Half the irrigation system is now nonfunctional.

Hm.

Dog out, cleaning and yard repair in.

This weekend I spent most of Saturday and the entire morning Sunday scrubbing the filthy, filthy house. Finally got around to seriously vacuuming the floors, moving and sweeping under the furniture and sucking the dead insects out of the window casings and vacuuming the dust off the baseboards and on and on. Then the entire 1860 square feet of tile had to be dustmopped, especially under pieces that I can’t move, like the bed. Toward 9:00 p.m. I was running out of gas and so as a shortcut dragged out the Simple Green and the janitorial-sized mop and wet-mopped the sticky, stained kitchen, dining room, hall, and living room floors.

Mopping, though, really does nothing to clean the floor. It just moves the dirt around.

So, after a night’s sleep, it was time to haul out the good old floor steamer. This thing actually does pick up the dirt. Because dirt gets absorbed into the microfiber rag I clip to the steamer head, the rags usually have to be changed two or three times during a routine cleaning. Yesterday I went through seven rags, each of which turned black before a room was finished. Even then, in the dirtier rooms the floors finished smeary and streaky and had to be redone until they were closer to clean. Had to steam-clean the kitchen floor twice and the dining room three times to get them to the point where they look clean.

And truth be told, they really need to be steam-cleaned another couple of times. And I really need to get down on hands and knees and scrub the grout clean. Later.

All this was made so much the more pleasurable by the bout of sciatica I’ve cleverly inflicted upon myself. A week or two ago I spent altogether too many hours parked in front of the computer, sitting in my habitual contortionist’s position, feet propped on the desk and rear end resting on the sacroiliac. Must have pinched a nerve. Back and hip and right leg hurt like hell. This antic also caused the plantar fascitis and accompanying Achilles tendonitis to flare up. The right heel hurts so much I can barely walk.

Tough nougies, though. There’s nobody else to do all this work. So I just have to put up with it.

My pretty little flowerbed by the pool has turned into a weedbed, but in the extreme heat and endless goddamn drought, even the weeds out there are dead. Because the doggy fence made it too difficult to reach in there and dig out the weeds, I’ve  just let everything die.

The dried-out, weed-infested ground is so hard that I couldn’t pull the dead weeds out at all—they were just stuck in there. So last night I let the water run in there, to soften up the soil. Flooded the flowerbed after dark, went to bed, got up at 4:30 a.m., and started to work.

Mercifully, we’re having a brief cold snap. This morning we had a little cloud cover, and by 8:30 it was only 90 degrees out there. This provided several hours of clean-up time.

Pulled out the wire fencing, inflicting a nice hematoma on a finger when I had to force a section out of the solidly baked clay on the east side. Good riddance to that: now I can get water on the hopseed and orange jubilee I planted there to reconstitute a privacy shield, and do it without tripping and falling on my face. Now that I’m old, the leg doesn’t swing as high as it used to…I’ve gotten tangled in that stuff twice and both times fell to the ground. Fortunately, I fell in the dirt and not on the concrete; otherwise I would have hurt myself good. Now that little menace is gone.

The young hopseed plants that went in last winter are now almost up to the top of the wall. By  next summer, for sure, they’ll be tall enough to block curious neighbors and passers-by from peering into my yard. The orange jubilee has survived, by dint of extravagant watering—apparently Texas yellowbells and their cousins are not well adapted to Arizona’s extreme conditions. Looks like it probably will survive the summer, but I’m sure it will freeze back next winter. The vitex, shown here on the left in its winter nekkidness, has run amok in the absence of the sun-hogging Devil-pod Tree. It’s now a huge shrub. Next time the arborist is here, I’ll have to ask him to trim it up into a tree shape. It also will help a great deal as a privacy screen.

Back to work, though: shoveled, troweled, and pulled the weeds and as many rampant roots as I could grab out of the flowerbed. Filled a giant black bag with that stuff. Realized the reason the Lady Banks rose looks like it’s barely clinging to life by the tips of its roots is that the damn thing is barely clinging to life. It hasn’t been getting anything like enough water. The weeds that took over the little flower garden I put around its base also were dried out and dead, the ground hard as concrete. Soaked that area with water (understand: water has been running on the landscaping every day since the heat came up! but the drought has been so extreme—one day humidity was 2 percent!—that I’ve had to drag hoses every single day to keep plants and trees alive) and figured I’ll come back tomorrow to dig up and clean out that area.

Dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses… The irrigation system came on. Spotted one dripper hose that Charley had nipped off below grade, now visible by the fountain it made. Dug the dirt out around it so I can come back in the cool of another morning and repair that. Think I’ll need to buy another package of sprinkler heads to fix it. Never did find where the other four or five chewed-up sprinklers and drippers came from.

Now I’m thinking I’ll go over to the Depot and buy a few flowers to brighten up the abandoned flowerbed, and while there pick up a couple of plants to replace the indoor plants that had to go when Charley came to stay. It would make sense, though, to wait until I’m in Scottsdale for the Thursday a.m. meeting and visit the HD out there, since Home Depot outlets, like most mass retailers, offer a better selection and higher-quality goods to more upscale demographics. Especially in the house-plant department, I’m likely to find nicer specimens in Scottsdale than I can up the road.

Most of the morning is now gone and I have not begun to address paying work. We planned to return nine chapters to the honored client today, and I see by the notices from Drop Box that Tina has been laboring assiduously on that project.

And so…to work.