Coffee heat rising

House & Yard

Save the Last Dance for Me…

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The Workman Waltz begins again! Darn. I thought my dance card had been used up and tossed away. But nooo… Now we start another round, first with an air-conditioning contractor, then with a roofer, then with…???

Actually after the new air conditioner has been installed and the five-year-old roof has been stripped off and rebuilt, there won’t be enough to repair and coat the CoolDeck, even after the alleged $1,500 tax break on the high-efficiency AC unit.

It would be a break-even deal if the $1,500 materializes. Somehow, though, I doubt I’ll ever see a penny of that. It’s a “tax rebate.” How can you get a rebate on nothing? It’s highly unlikely I’ll owe any taxes this year. I’ve barely earned enough to get by, and thanks to the combined costs of Medicare Part B, Medigap, Medicare Part D, long-term care insurance, and one pair of glasses, my health care bills far exceed 7.5% of gross income. The EnergyStar folks observe,

These energy efficiency tax credits are technically “non-refundable,” which means you can’t get more money back in tax credits than you pay in federal income taxes (your tax liability). Check your last year’s tax return to get a sense of your tax liability (line 61 on the 2008 1040 form, called “total tax”). You can claim all of your tax credits as long as your tax liability, is greater than zero after all tax credits have been applied. . . . If you don’t pay any taxes, then you can’t get the credit.

Probably I should’ve opted for the cheaper, less efficient unit. However, I’m hoping that a better unit will allow me to cool the house into the comfortable range without raising the power bills a lot. One summer of sitting here sweating 24 hours a day was quite enough.

My beloved roofer came in with a bid about $2,000 more than he charged to reroof the house five years ago. I realize petroleum prices have risen, but that seems a bit much. So I’m getting another bid on that. If the other guy’s price is about the same, then the insurance payment of $11,300 will fall about $1,270 short of covering just those two repair costs—air conditioner and roofing. The CoolDeck, I guess, will just have to stay the way it is. Gives the place character!

Rustic, very rustic.

This morning I signed up with Angie’s List in order to get access to their recommended contractors. If you’re interested in this outfit, BTW, when you go to pay the forty bucks for a year’s membership, they ask if you have a coupon code. At that point google promo codes for Angie’s List and up will come a bunch of them. I got in for $31, which was still (IMHO) a bit much.

Can’t say I recommend Angie’s List. It was great that first year, when it was free (they give out freebie memberships in markets they’re trying to break into). But the full-fledged version is bloated and confusing to navigate. To my great annoyance, I found that top-rated businesses had some “D” and “F” ratings once you got into the details. Apparently if a business wangles an “honor” it goes right to the top of the list. In the searches I did, businesses further down the list sometimes had better overall ratings, occasionally with more respondents.

Eventually I came across a roofing company whose sign I recognized from the upscale section of the neighborhood. We’re overrun with fly-by-night outfits right now, come in from all over the country to participate in the insurance-funded feeding frenzy. At any given moment, about one in five roofs in the neighborhood is being torn up and rebuilt. This outfit is well reviewed—no one reported a bad experience, and one guy said he’d learned about the company from a building contractor with whom he’d done some business. So that sounded mildly positive. He’s coming over tomorrow.

Lordie! There are people out there reporting that they paid $10,000 and $12,000 for roofing jobs. What are they putting on those shacks?

“Ya-a-as, we decided to go with the sterling silver shingles instead of the solid copper. Copper is so 2009!”

Some Angie’s List respondents report paying comparable amounts to replace air-conditioning units—$8,000; $10,000…good grief! For residential construction!

Evidently that storm was sent by God Herself to lift Phoenix’s economy out of the doldrums.

Okay, okay, I’m glad (I guess) to get yet another new roof and a brand-new 14-seer air conditioning unit on the insurance company’s dime. Not thrilled: if I don’t own an interest in that company now, I certainly have in the recent past, and I regard it as my insurance company. Paying out for “catastrophic” hail storms cuts into the profits. But it’s good, in its way. The house needed a new heat pump, and I certainly didn’t have $5,200 laying around to pay for it. I’d planned to let it go the same way as the aging Dog Chariot: run it until it falls apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.

And you know when that would be: at 5:15 p.m. on the evening before the hottest July 4 in history, which will fall on a Friday.

{sigh} I love workmen, respect workmen, learn a lot from workmen. But oh! What a job it is to ride herd on them! It’s true, I’ve had a couple years of respite. But I hoped for about a 15-year break!

🙄

Image: Two Roofers at Work in New Orleans, Lousiana. Editor B. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

O Tannenbaum, O Fakenbaum: Real Christmas tree or fake?

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What’s your preference? A real tree or a fake one to stick in your living room and adorn with Christmas lights and gewgaws? Over at Bargain Babe, the conversation is under way: she lists the pro’s and cons of each (fake ones are cheaper over the long run but shed pollutants—maybe even lead—and are expensive upfront; real ones are cheap as a one-time cost but cost more over time, and besides, they suck up fuel), and then leaves it to readers to consider.

Fake purple Christmas tree

Reminds me of my misbegotten childhood. Growing up in Saudi Arabia, of course, we had no access to any kind of tree, unless you count the occasional date palm as a “tree.” Everyone had fake trees, purchased at the commissary.

When I was small, my mother had a weird white thing made of…what? some sort of early plastic? Nylon? I believe it came with its own built-in colored Christmas lights. It was about two feet high. She would put it on a table, drape the table and base of the…uhm, “tree” with white flocking to suggest “snow,” and that was that. Far more interesting to a little kid was the tableau she built by arranging some of the flocking around a small  metal mirror set on a table and then placing a couple of plastic reindeer atop the mirror. This was meant to evoke wild game standing on a frozen pond.

All very fascinating to a child who never saw snow until she was almost 18 years old.

Not too long after my first exposure to snow, I got my first exposure to marriage. My husband insisted on bringing a real pine tree into the house and setting it up in the front window.

This custom has always mystified me. What is it about killing a living thing and then watching it wither for two weeks that appeals?

Oh well.

Christmas tree

For some years, we had these trees. The house we’d moved into had thick, luxuriant shag carpeting. Know what dead pine trees do? They drop their needles. The needles—scores of them!—would work their way into the warp and woof of that fancy shag carpet.

As it develops, there’s a reason pine needles are called needles. I would walk around my house barefoot. For months after Christmas, whenever I’d walk into the living room, I’d get a jab on the bottom of the foot! No amount of vacuuming could get all those damn needles out of the carpeting.

Mercifully, the price of Christmas trees outpaced the double-digit inflation of the 1970s. One year my husband allowed as how the tree business was getting a bit out of hand.

That was when we got the Christmas jade plant.

Jade Plant

As was the fashion in that decade, I had put a jade plant on a stand in front of the south-facing two-story-high window that graced our living room. The jade plant shivered with joy and soon grew to be something of a jade sequoia: large and green and muscular.

Come Christmastime, I started decorating the thing with ornaments and aluminum icicles.

It worked. For several years we were free of Christmas trees, thanks to the Christmas jade plant.

Eventually, though, the jade plant got a fungus and croaked. By then my husband was making an income that was large and green and muscular. The Christmas tree discussion returned.

Don’t remember how, but I managed to convince him that we preferred a living tree. I must have threatened to sue his a$$ if I ever got another pine needle in my foot. At any rate, however it came about, after the demise of the jade plant we took to buying small potted pine trees at Home Depot. These would survive for two or three years in a good-sized pot. Once Christmas was over, we’d tote the living Christmas tree outdoors, water it well, and there it would reside for a year. The following winter it would be hauled back inside, tormented for two or three weeks, and then dragged back outdoors.

black widow spider

Well. You know, a tree is its own little habitat. Certain creatures like to live in trees. Some of these creatures like to lay their eggs in trees. One such creature is the black widow, Arizona’s finest earwig-, mosquito-, and cockroach-eating machine. This worthy arachnid is nice to have around the house. The outside of the house. It’s not something you want indoors, because it can deliver quite the nasty bite.

One year while the living Christmas tree was enjoying the out of doors, one of the ladies deposited a clutch of eggs in its boughs. When we brought it inside, the warmth of the heating system caused the babes to hatch.

Do you know what happens when a clutch of infant black widows gets into the air-conditioning ducts of a 3,300-square-foot house? No? That’s good. It’s best not to know.

The following Christmas we acquired a very convincing green phony Christmas tree. A fakenbaum, as it were. It was so believable that the only way you could be sure it wasn’t real was by the absence of pine pitch aroma. That, and by walking across the carpet barefooted.

The fakenbaum lasted for many years. I rather liked it. It didn’t hurt my feet. Setting it up inside the house didn’t entail killing anything. And the only thing that wanted to live in it was a vintage plastic troll.

Troll doll

Images:

Alarming purple fake Christmas tree: Santa’sOwn.com, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

American Christmas Tree. Iknowthegoods at en.wikipedia. GNU Free Documentation License.

Jade plant: Crassula ovata presented as an indoor bonsai, Emmanuelm (talk), Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Credible fake Christmas tree, Mfisherkirshner, Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.

Tiny House Demo

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Here’s something kinda charming:

Neat, huh? I love his “tiny fireplace…but it’s a tiny house”! 🙂 And how about that scenery in those places where  he’s plopped the things?

Every  now and again Mary at Simply Forties will ruminate about these minuscule little gems and wonder…could a person actually live in one of them? Like…permanently?

Pour moi, I don’t know. I occupy a four-bedroom house. It’s a little loose for me, but at 1,680 square feet, it’s not so huge I want to get free of it. One of the bedrooms is devoted to storage—it holds a freezer that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen; the closet holds linens that won’t fit in the linen closet, some art and sewing supplies, during the summer the space heaters, and during the winter the fans. A wallful of old bookcases holds food staples that won’t fit in the kitchen pantry and shouldn’t be stored in 115-degree heat in the garage. Another bedroom holds my office, file storage, and office supplies; I spend most of my waking hours here, operating not one, not two, but three enterprises. The master bedroom is just another closet—none of these rooms is very large—but I can’t imagine doing without it.

I could, however, do without the bedroom that’s occupied by the television, since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Last night I sat down to veg out while writing a post for another site and found the offerings so bad, with all four channels of NPR begging for money and just garbage on all the other stations, that it didn’t even suffice as background noise.

And I could live without two bathrooms. And the extra living room that is the “family room.” That would cut about 470 square feet off my present space, bringing the desired living space down to about 1,210 square feet.

The underwater downtown house is about 1,300 square feet, to my mind just about ideal for one person. The kitchen is large enough to function. The dining room is big enough to entertain friends. The living room will hold an overstuffed sofa and chair (nonnegotiables, in my book); one of the bedrooms has plenty of space for an office, one is roomy enough for a queen-sized bed or maybe even a king; and the little back room will do for extra storage or as a guest room or sitting room.

What bothers  me about Jay’s minidigs, besides the fact that you’d have to be pathologically tidy to live there, is the loft bedroom. It’s a firetrap. Get a fire started below you—propane is wildly flammable—and you’re dead. There’s no way in hell you’re gonna get out of there. Check out that teeny little window: cute, but a grown man couldn’t begin to fit through it. And if he did, where would be be? Over the top of a flaming porch?

HUH-uh. Don’t think we’ll be contemplating life by Walden Pond in that thing.

Now the one in Texas that Mary photographed looks more reasonable. The bedroom is on the ground floor (there doesn’t appear to be a second floor). With some exuberant downsizing, you could indeed fit inside that place. At least, one person could. Two might be a little tight. Personally, I’d like more kitchen space—I cook a lot, and I’m not seeing enough space there for someone who likes to cook and likes to eat.

It’s a perfect little guest house or vacation getaway. As Mary points out, to make it permanently livable it would be good to have a place for a washer and dryer (or a washer alone…you hardly need a dryer, at least in a warm climate). For the $45,000 Mary’s friend paid to install this on her lot, you might be able to get an ordinary manufactured home in a park model; Cavco is selling them for around $49,000. Clayton claims to build a three-bedroom mobile home for as little as 49 grand…but who knows what you really get for that.

For not very much more that $45,000, I suspect you could get enough space that you wouldn’t have to ponder whether you really could live in it. You’d need to buy a plot of land, of course…there’s the rub! But if you already have one, this would be an inexpensive way to build on it.

THIS Is a Disaster? More news from the insurance front

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The insurance adjuster came by to see what was what with the air conditioning unit. Nice guy: in from San Antonio to help the local Hartford office cope with the flood of claims erupting from the late hailstorm.

He said the air conditioner was pretty well bashed and thought the company would replace it. That wasn’t surprising. The west-facing side of the thing, a set of tinfoil louvers that have something to do with the way the coils operate, had taken quite a smushing, and, the unit’s maker having gone out of business, the part is no longer being made.

But I was surprised when he said the roof was damaged, and The Hartford probably will pay to replace that—a brand-new roof, we might add.

And then, even more amazingly, he announced that the various dings on the KoolDeck around the pool, many of which appeared about the time of the great hailstorm, also qualify for an underwritten repair job!

So for the cost of the $2,000 deductible, it looks like I’m about to get something like $10,000 to $15,000 worth of work done on the house.

A new heat pump is going to cost about $5,000 or $6,000, not counting the cost of installing it so it doesn’t overlap the skylight. The roof on this house, which I had put on a year or two after I moved in, cost something in excess of $5,000. And heaven only knows what it will cost to repair the KoolDeck…does anything happen for less than two grand?

Now that’s what I call a windfall!

Images:

Large Hailstones in Leipzig. Soon Chun Siong. Public Domain.

Hail clouds often exhibit a characteristic green coloration. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce. Public Domain.

Puttering around, catching up…

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Shameful neglect of the blogging project! The fast-bloating set of chores and goals and paid work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, and so I’ve let Funny slide a bit and, at least for the nonce, given up on the Half-Off Diet. Decided to let “Fear and Loathing” sit at the top of the site for a day, because it strikes me as one of the best things I’ve written in a long time and because quite a few people kindly left comments. Half-Off? Well…I’m afraid my dieting habits have tended to “Twice On” the last couple of weeks! {sigh}

The low-desert summer’s unholy heat is slowly fading. The past few mornings have been gorgeous. La Maya and I have crawled out of our air-conditioned boxes to restart our early-morning constitutionals, and it’s finally cool enough in the evenings to walk Cassie before 10:00 at night.

La Bethulia, an accomplished gardener, is planning her fall and winter crops, and of course I can’t let that go unchallenged. It’s been a busy couple of days, despite the crush of student papers, the ad-selling scheme, and various client projects.

Yesterday morning after a breakfast meeting followed by a drive to a client’s office but before it got too bracingly warm (the thermometer eventually rose to 108°), I dropped by Baker’s Nursery, my favorite purveyor of garden goods, to pick up a rat bait station. Of course I couldn’t resist a few packages of seeds and some plants…

Back at the ranch, I managed to pull out some old onions (or possibly garlic chives? don’t think so…think they’re overgrown LGOs) from a big pot. Used part of a bag of potting soil to transplant the ficus and its attendant decorative plantlets into that big pot, a Costco plastic number that looks convincingly like terra cotta.

Earlier this summer, the ficus blew over in a monsoon, breaking its real terra cotta pot. It was so rootbound that its dirt just clung to it in a clotted ball. M’hijito lifted it into another pot about the same size, and, pushed way in under the back patio cover, it managed to stay alive through the remaining horrific heat. Just now it’s shivering with joy to have more room and fresh soil.

The pot recovered from the struggling ficus, which itself is a pretty good-sized terra cotta pot, was refilled with the rest of the potting soil, along with another large pot and a smaller wall pot reclaimed from a wad of dead roots. Decided to use the pots only to hold herbs, and so now we have a new parsley plant, a new sage plant, and a vigorous young basil plant, ready to burst into growth. This is what happens, you  understand, when fall is spring: in Arizona plants thrust out joyous foliage in October.

The basil on the west side is two or three years old now, and it’s getting tired. Really, it’s an annual. But where the weather’s mild and the human is willing to haul the pot into the house during frosts, you can make it behave like a perennial by cutting it way back now and again. Like a rose, it responds to pruning with new (delicious!) growth. But there’s a limit: no matter what, basil doesn’t last forever.

I’m thinking when I get around to tossing that aged basil plant, its pot can hold some chives, summer savory, and maybe a new thyme or tarragon plant.

But for the nonce, I planted a few parsley seeds in the pot with the sage and basil. I love parsley, especially the flat-leafed Italian type. Baker’s was billing its parsley plants as flat-leafed, but the one I got looks curlier than flat. Besides, parsley bolts to seed at this time of year, and so that plant won’t last until it gets cool enough for parsley to live a long and productive life.

One of the things I’ve missed over the past straitened summer has been parsley. I’ve stayed out of grocery stores pretty  much—have grazed out of the freezer and off the shelves, and what I’ve bought has come from Costco, whose limited fresh produce offerings do not include parsley. So it will be nice to have the stuff growing out there again.

Into the pool to cool down around 11:30 a.m., by which time I was thoroughly fricasseed. This is the nicest time of year for pool swimming! The water has cooled down enough to be refreshing, and the sun has slipped behind the devil-pod tree, so a fair amount of the pool is shaded. It is absolutely lovely. It took a half-hour and a couple of dips to let the water soak the heat out. During that time I noticed the pump wasn’t pushing water through there very fast, and from there observed the pressure gauge was into the “clean me” range. Another day…

In the afternoon around reading stoont papers I cooked some of those golden Mayan beans, planning to make a soup. Out of onions (another item that hasn’t been on the shopping list all summer) but still managed to flavor up the beans with celery, carrots, garlic, rosemary and thyme from the garden, dried herbs, and a few aging tomatoes. Just as the beans had reached the desired stage of doneness, La Maya called and invited me over for an impromptu dinner.

Well, given a choice between bean soup and La Maya’s incredible cooking, it was off to her restaurant with me and Cassie! She fixed a fresh pesto sauce with a mountain of basil from their garden, served over pasta. Awesome!

So this morning the beans still resided in the fridge. And a great many chores remained to be done.

Before getting started, though, I decided to have a real, decent meal for breakfast: defrosted a piece of steak, wrapped some asparagus in tinfoil, and tossed both on the grill to cook. Served those up with one of the pears liberated a couple days ago from Costco, now ripened to glorious juiciness.

Having enjoyed that and a cup of pretty darned good coffee, moved the car so I could climb into the attic up the folding stairs in the garage. Sally’s Handyman had come by to secure the loose screens and close up any other suspicious openings, by way of keeping new rats out and locking any resident rats in. A few days ago I’d bought a pair of Tomcat rat traps, a lot safer to use than the Victor traps, which are just gigantic mouse traps. I’ve never been able to set a mouse trap without snapping my fingers in the damn thing. Snap your finger in a rat trap, and you’ll end up with a busted finger…or no finger at all.

The plan is to trap any rats still hiding in the attic, if any are up there at all (it’s now beginning to appear not, thank goodness!), and then to pizzen any visitors that climb up the paloverde overhanging the deck roof before they get a chance to try to break in. It will be easy for me to climb a ladder to the roof over the deck and plant a rat bait station up there. A rat station holds the rat poison inside a box with a rat-sized entry that’s too small for a cat and unattractive for birds, thereby minimizing the risk to the neighbor’s pets and one’s favorite singing bug-eaters.

This is a nuisance, but far less nuisance then getting rid of a covey of little roommates after they’ve already moved in. So today’s first project was to bait the traps with peanut butter and haul them into the attic. That went quietly and I did not whap any fingers in the things.

Onward:

• Hauled the untouched sticky rat traps (proven useless in the past, but they were all I had) down from the attic and out to the garbage.
• Backwashed and recharged the pool filter.
• Dragged the hose to water the plants.
• Cut back the dying thyme plant, which is mightily infested with hated bermudagrass.
• Preserved some of the surviving stems that bore still-living thyme leaves.
• Loosed the opening salvo against the hated bermudagrass.
• Cleaned up the resulting mess; hauled the dead shrubbery out to the garbage.
• Sprayed weeds growing in the alley along the back wall.
• Figured out how to bait the rat station, approximately.
• Walked the dog.
• Dropped in the pool to cool down, again.
• Made the bed.
• Cleaned up the kitchen.
• Started the laundry.
• Shoveled several piles of old student papers out of the closet in my office, filling the gigantic blue recycling barrel about halfway up to its top.
• Gagged the shredder on the wads of paper the school sent containing former students’ ID numbers, scores on placement tests, and grades on earlier efforts at remedial English, ESL English, English 101, and English 102.
• Decided that paperwork should be treated like clothing: if you haven’t looked at it in a year, throw it out!
• Shoveled the first 20 or 30 junk messages of the day out of the e-mail.
• Wrote this post.

And so to work… Back to reading student papers, a pastime that occupied time until about half-past midnight this morning.

🙂

Image: Cynodon dactylon (hated bermudagrass). Bidgee. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Ant Wars: The Battle of the Front Stoop

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Antibal the Great

Okay, the last battle may or may not have been won, but the war has yet to be lost. You’ll recall the previous foray between the human and  Armies of the Ondt, yes? The fight lasted about 24 hours, but ultimately the invaders were repelled.

The little Amazons were undefeated, though. Yesterday evening some of their cousins mounted a new attack. Instead of entering the kitchen directly under the back door, this tribe made its way through a rain-weakened patch of framing at the bottom of the front door. Once in, they marched cheerfully through the living room, jogged left at the hall, and entered the Great Restaurant that is the kitchen floor. Not at all interested in the dishwasher, this bunch descended on some microscopic specks near the dog food dish.

This invasion was particularly jarring because I’d just spent a couple of hours cleaning the kitchen and the floors. Along about 9:00 p.m., after vacuuming, dustmopping, baseboard-scrubbing, and steam-mopping, I was just about to put the gear away, stumble into the bedroom, and fall face-forward into the sack when I came upon a line of troops hiking across the living-room floor.

Damn! I thought the floor was clean. Like, really clean. Not so, though: one of the little ladies was staggering across the threshold with a morsel half her own size.

Here’s a discovery: Home-made glass cleaner, the stuff you concoct with rubbing alcohol, a dab of ammonia, a dash of vinegar, and water, kills Ondts every bit as effectively as gagging, stinking, sickening, dangerously toxic bug spray.

Determined not to go through the Raid misery again, I grabbed a squirt bottle that happened to contain my Windex knock-off brew. The plan, really, was to disrupt the ladies’ pheromone trail, confusing them as to where the grocery store might be. First thing that happened when I sprayed a squirt in the Ondts’ direction, though, was that they curled up and croaked right over, just as though I’d sprayed them with a noxious chemical.

Well, ammonia is not exactly a non-noxious chemical. Neither is rubbing alcohol. However, their fumes dissipate quickly, and the house doesn’t stink of petroleum products for days. Within an hour or so, the odor is gone.

The Ant Amazons…not so much.

Laid down a barrier of boric acid across the threshold. The Ondts joined antennae, reared up on their little hind legs, and danced a can-can, singing “nous nous en fions de toi” in a squeaky ant chorus. They strolled across the boric acid as you and I would stroll across low sand dunes. Unharmed, they proceeded to the kitchen. Meanwhile, outliers found ways to get around the barrier without having to contact the stuff and risk taking it home to the hive.

Found some old, dried-out ant baits. Dropped them right in the middle of Ondt Highway 101, shielded from doggie curiosity by an old fan cage. The raiders evinced not the slightest interest.

Spraying the bedoodles out of them with the imitation Windex, however, eventually beat them back. By the time I stumbled off to bed, not a wandering ant was to be seen.

Probably that’s because it was Ondt Bedtime, too.

This morning, an elegant line strung from the front door through the living room and hall into the kitchen, where the troops were chowing down on two spots flavored invisibly with something.

Sprayed the ladies with more DIY glass cleaner, inflicting vast casualties. Poured a quarter gallon of vinegar into a bucket and topped it off with the hottest water I could extract from the water heater. Mopped the kitchen, hall and living room with that.

Chugged down to the Ace to resupply the ant bait arsenal. Dropped a new brand down in front of a roaming scout. She ignored it. Placed a few more outdoors, near the army’s points of entrance.

All’s quiet on the Living Room Front just now. But it’s very hot outside, 105 as the early autumn sun settles into the west and a bank of cumulonimbus rises above the northeastern horizon. What reason is there to believe that Ondts are any more given to trotting around in the noonday sun than the rest of us?