Incredible dust storm whipped through here last night. If it were sand and not fine, sifting dust, hot and not cool, I’d say it was just like the shamals we used to get in the Saudi Arabian desert. The heat dropped a good 20 degrees as the dust moved through. It’s down to 80 right now.
Turn off your sound before clicking on the video above; the TV station inflicts a particularly annoying, noisy ad on viewers before letting you get at the images. Here’s a more polite video by an amateur photographer, but shorter and without the awesome sky photos.
The storm hit the suburbs to the south of us around 7:00 p.m., while it was still light out. An hour or so later, M’hijito remarked, over the phone, that a gigantic wall of something was bearing down on us; by then it wasn’t obvious by looking at the storm front that it was dust. A few minutes later, though, it sure was! When I peeked out the front door, I literally could not see the houses across the street!
Here it is again moving through one of those ghettos for families with kids in the East Valley:
Ugh. So much for having spent six and a half hours cleaning house the day before yesterday. Everything—every piece of furniture, every square inch of flooring, every windowsill, every baseboard, every piece of decorative trim on the woodwork—is coated with dust. This morning both classes are unloading a ton of work on me, so there’ll be no time to clean house. About the best I’ll be able to manage will be to pull Harvey out of the pool and dump in some extra chlorine. And backwash. Again.
Doesn’t look like much debris fell in the drink, though. It’s just cloudy with dust. At this hour—3:45 in the morning—I can’t see much out there. Will have to wait until 5, I guess, to get to work on that project.
So the new strategy to stand upwhile working in front of a computer is now under way. It occurred to me to wonder if standing and thinking might burn more calories than sitting and thinking. Here’s what the Web says:
So. Each day one restrains oneself from quaffing one’s favorite brew and stands up in front of the computer for eight hours, one deletes 233 calories from one’s daily pack-it-in activities. Put another way, one beer = 1 hour and 55 minutes of standing on one’s feet.
On the other hand, one bourbon-&-water costs you only 52 minutes of labor in front of the computer.
Interesting. I don’t expect we’re supposed to be looking at it that way, are we?
So, late this afternoon I notice the swimming pool is laboring, choked by all the crud sifting down from the hated palm trees. I’m on the phone leaving word with the accountant’s answering machine about a new little project I’ve cooked up while running across the yard to shut off the pump when I spot yet another bird in the sink of death.
That’s what a pool is, you know: a sink of death. It kills all sorts of small things, from little insects to little children, with birds about a third of the way across the spectrum. In size, I mean.
This one, though, has not yet drowned. It’s managed to climb aboard Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s hose, where it’s perched next to the intake. Because the pump is so thickly clogged, not enough current is sucking to pull the bird off its life raft.
It was a fledgling white-wing, the second to fall into the pool in the past week or ten days. So stunned was the chick that it allowed me to reach in, wrap a paper towel around it, and lift it out of the water.
But…then what?
It couldn’t come in the house: Cassie would make real short work of it. For the same reason, it couldn’t be left on the ground. If Cassie didn’t grab it, the ants would soon eat it alive.
I carried it around to the west side and set it on the shaded concrete bench, figuring it would probably die soon enough on its own.
Half an hour or so later, peered out the Arcadia door to see it was standing on its little feet, still all wadded up and unhappy-looking but distinctly alive. Put some water in a plant dish and set that and a handful of birdseed on the bench. The bird was not interested.
Went out to wrestle with the pool, around phone calls from Gerardo, who claimed to be trying to get a palm tree dude over here this afternoon or Saturday. Took some doing to persuade him that when I said I intend to spend tomorrow in Waddell, I’m not kidding. Pulled Harvey out of the drink; cleaned out his leaf-catcher and the pump pot but decided to let the extremely premature backwash job wait until after the promised palm tree guys have come and gone, since they’ll make an unholy mess of the pool and the pump will have to be backwashed again. Which reminds me: I’ve lost the bonnet to the water-hose-run debris collector.
Damn! Another Home Depot run. Already $126 in the red this month; by the time these guys are done, I’ll be a good $350 in the hole.
But while I’m out there, I realize a couple of adult doves are flying around with uncharacteristic bravado. They must be looking for their pup. So that means the fledgling belongs on the east side of the house, somewhere near its nest. There’s another fledgling hopping around in the tree, which must mean the mating doves haven’t yet lost all their brood to the pool.
After awhile, I spot their nest: about two stories high in a limb of the devil-pod tree. You’d need a cherry-picker to lift this bird back up there. Hm.
Finally, I decide to put the little bird on top of the metal storage shed, which by this time in the afternoon is fully in the shade. But it’s a 110 degrees out there, and the metal is too hot for it to sit on any length of time. A large, flat plant dish, retrieved from the junk pile hidden behind that side of the house, would work to insulate and hold the bird, though. So I haul out a stepladder and set this thing atop the metal roof.
Go and retrieve the bird, which still shows no inclination to try to escape.
However, when I climb up on the ladder and go to set it in the plant dish, it doesn’t like that idea at all. It panics and tries to fly away, skittering across the corrugated metal roof and falling down behind the shed, between its back side and the concrete wall.
Seriously damn! Dead bird, for sure!
Well, no. I peek back in there and see the bird has landed on its feet and looks OK: a great deal better than it looked when plucked from the pool. The old boards I hid back there years ago are level and coated with an inch or so of composting devil pods and leaves, forming a soft substrate…probably not unlike a nest. It’s shaded and cool back there, and there’s no way Cassie can reach the bird. Probably there are precious few ants back there, too—it’ll take them a while to find the little thing, anyway.
As I write this, it’s coming onto the middle of the night. Out of curiosity, I took the flashlight out and peeked behind the shed, expecting to find an avian corpse out there.
Gone!
The bird has flown the coop. Couldn’t see it on the ground, either. So presumably it must have eventually dried out enough to take flight and, with any luck at all, made its way back into the tree and maybe even back to the nest.
Let’s just hope after all that it remembers to stay away from the darned pool!
{sigh} It’s strangely disorienting to walk into the garage to toss the trash in the recycling bin and find the darned place empty. Vacant. Lonely.
The Dog Chariot is down at Chuck’s Auto Service, there to have its oil leak diagnosed.
Weird, isn’t it, how one develops an affection for inanimate objects? (Or does one? Maybe I’m crazy as a loon!)
My favorite car was the beautiful little Camry I gave to my son at the time I bought the Dog Chariot. I loved that car: gave it a name, “Katydid,” because its license plate (the first I’d ever bought on my own, as an independent person!) started with the letters KTD. But in due course I had to have a vehicle that was large enough that Anna the German Shepherd couldn’t stand on back seat, plant her muzzle next to my ear, and bark (nonstop!) in the decibel range of a nuclear blast.
LOL! Buying a minivan so Anna couldn’t deafen me had a lot to do with the 40 grand I spent on that animal during her lifetime. Hence the sobriquet the thousand-dollar-a-day dog.
At the outset, I wasn’t nuts about the Sienna, an ungainly, lumbering, gas-guzzling bison. Looked like and drove like a suburban mom’s car-pooling bus. Oh well.
But over time, it grew on me. It has a lot of room: room to haul junk around, room to haul not one but two ninety-pound dogs, room to sleep in when you’re car-camping and a scary lightning storm blows up. With its Camry chassis, it’s one helluva lot more comfortable to ride in than a Suburban or a Land Cruiser or a Chevy van (all of which I’ve driven endlessly). And it puts plenty of steel between me and my fellow homicidal drivers.
It is, in short, like a good man: maybe not so rakishly handsome, but kindly, capacious of heart, and reliable.
Last time the cost of gas went through the stratosphere, I took out three of the four back bucket seats, by way of relieving the vehicle of some weight. The effect was to create a cargo bay the size of a limestone cave. Never put them back. It seems to have worked. Despite the car’s decrepitude, this morning I calculated that it made almost 21 mpg over the past two weeks’ worth of exclusively in-town driving. Not bad, for a tank with an EPA rating of 18 mpg.
So, it makes me feel sad not to have the Dog Chariot sitting in its familiar place, right next to the water heater in the garage. (Yeah. I know.) (There’s a fire door between the garage and the house. Yes.) And I guess that’s why I don’t feel in any great hurry to run out and buy a new car, even though it’s past time to get one and even though my financial dude says I can afford it.
Nothing lasts forever, of course. Not even you and me. But I’m going to miss that car when it’s gone.
Into the drink late this morning, after a bunch of yard- and housework was done! Yahoo! The pool water is perfect! Just cool enough to be refreshing but not (quite) so cold as to freeze you into a solid block of ice.
The lovely Texas sage is in full blossom, arching over the deep end to create a shady grotto and setting little leis of purple flowers afloat in the water.
The weather is warming up. Looks like we’ve seen the last of the little stretches of respite that have brought night-time temps into the 60s. We won’t get a break from the heat until August, when (if we’re lucky) evening monsoons will drop temperatures about 20 degrees—but add so much water to the air that the morning heat will feel 20 degrees hotter than its normal 110 degrees.
This is the time of year when a swimming pool is the best thing, a luxury beyond all McMansionville.
This is another guest post by a delightful graduate of my magazine writing course, Anita Martinez. It’s not easy to write humor. Let’s hope she keeps writing! 😀
We were a young couple at the time, having our first home built. This was an exciting event in our lives, interlaced with stress, especially when we had to stay at my in-laws’ home during the process.
For the most part, I got along fine with my in-laws, so it wasn’t too bad at first, in spite of the cramped quarters. I soon found out, however, that hot water for dishes, bathing and showering was a commodity my mother-in-law guarded ferociously. So I figured out a strategy.
Early dawn found me awakening before the rest of the snoozing household, armed with a towel and shampoo. I was thankful my father-in-law’s loud snoring muffled my stealthy entrance to the bathroom and shower.
A dry, cracked bar of Ivory soap lay in the soap dish, waiting to be frothed. I turned the squeaky shower faucets, and a dribble of lukewarm water greeted me.
As I basked in the showerhead’s trickle, my eyes wandered to an object upon the window ledge, directly above me: a smiling ceramic monk, complete with dangling rosary and cross. He had a hard-to-reach opening on top of his belly. I tip-toed and struggled to place my fingertips inside it. He was filled with water. Oh, holy water, was my thought. I must bless myself with it every morning and toss up a prayer that all goes smoothly with the house construction.
I followed this new-born tradition every morning: sneak into shower, plunge fingers in the happy monk’s sacred vessel, cross myself fervently, and pray.
One morning, as our extended stay neared its end, I must have been more alert than usual. As I showered, I noticed the ceramic monk facing me, bearing his happy Bob’s Big Boy grin. His protruding belly displayed printing I hadn’t seen before. In large, uppercase letters, were the words CHOPPER HOPPER. My brow furrowed as I pondered: CHOPPER HOPPER? What could that mean?
With a growing sense of dread, I outstretched my hands, groping and grabbing the grinning monk, whose cold water sloshed upon me. I peered down at the contents of his belly: my father-in-law’s dentures. I had been blessing myself with Efferdent and remnants of beef stew.
