Have you noticed that? Not only will things always go wrong, they conspire to do so at impossible times.
It is Friday before the Fourth of July weekend. At 5:15 in the morning, I awake in a stupor to the sound of the air-conditioning pounding away.
Grope for my $720 glasses. Can’t find them.
Lift the dog off the bed, let her out, shut off the AC, stumble to the bathroom. Sitting there I think…huh? The seat here sure is warm. Thass odd. I turn the thermostat down at night so I can sleep, then turn it up to 85 in the day. But just now it’s only barely day. By the gray light of early dawn, the thermometer on the back porch reads 98 degrees.
Stumble back into the bedroom. Search for my glasses. Can’t find them.
Bloody hot in here. Stumble into the hall. Thermostat says 82, but it’s set for 78. Shit. That means the AC’s on the fritz.
$ $ $ $ $
Speaking of $$, I still haven’t found the glasses. Search all over the house. Can’t find them.
Finally take the bed apart. Find them under the covers. Miraculously I was so tired I didn’t move last night and so never rolled over on top of them.
Check e-mail. Message from Apple: that worthy corporation’s mail & server account has come due. That’ll be $100 for service I can get free from Apple’s competition. But everyone I know has that address. Do I really want to deep-six it?
Probably not.
My radically reduced budget is already about shot. I really need an air-conditioning bill and an exorbitant bill for Cadillac e-mail service to come up in the same month.
That’s not all. I’m sitting here and realize the traffic ticket that came to me after my son was snapped by the traffic cam in the speed trap on State Route 51 said the registration on the car comes due this month. In Arizona, the cost of registering your car is exorbitant. Although it drops as the car ages, it’s still gunna be a $100 bill, plus another $30 for the emissions testing rip-off: a $130 whap upside the head.
Three expensive, unavoidable hits in freaking JULY, including an air-conditioning service call on a holiday weekend (!), at a time when power bills are through the roof, water bills are through the roof, gasoline prices are through the roof, and I have no income.
So, after another long and amazingly workful day, I poured a tall bourbon & water to go with the (pretty remarkable!) spaghetti dinner I whipped up for myself. But could only get around half of it. Needing to take the dog for a walk, I stuck the rest of it in the freezer, thinking that after we got home, I could pour some very cold booze into a plastic cup and enjoy it while floating around the pool.
It was off to the park for some serious sniffing of doggy perfumes and then a tour around our corner of Richistan to admire the way our betters live. Back to the house to toss together a mess of beans with onion, celery, herbs, tomato sauce, and the dregs of a ten-days-open bottle of wine.
Finally, at last, it’s time to pull the chilled highball out of the fridge and head for the pool.
Chilled is an understatement. Booze iceberg, that’s what we had. Alas, I didn’t think of photographing it while it wouldn’t budge out of the upside-down glass. Here it’s mostly defrosted. But you get the general idea.
Who knew alcohol would form a boozicle? Next time I’ll drop a popsicle stick in the glass and have a handy little treat for nocturnal pool floating. 😉
Midnight. It’s been a long day and a rough evening.Finish working around 11 p.m. but don’t feel like going to bed so am cruising the Web, wasting time into the wee hours.
Doesn’t sound very auspicious, does it?
Well. No, it wasn’t. Closing in on one in the morning, I decide to shut down the computer. It’s running slower and slower, and besides, I can’t keep my eyes open much longer. Too many programs are up, so I’m closing Excel and Word and Acrobat Professional (where did that come from?) and Grab and Preview and iPhoto and Firefox… and… all of a sudden the iMac has a Big Mac Attack!
Suddenly the screen is bloated like it ate too many Big Macs, and it squiggles around when I move the mouse. The mouse being tireder than I am, its scroll wheel doesn’t work and for a while I can’t get any response to any clicks.
Finally it starts to function but the fat screen is still bobbing around, waltzing to the rodent’s tune. Shut down. Reboot. No difference.
Shut down. Unplug. Wait for awhile. {it’s getting later and later…} Reboot. No improvement.
Now I’m thinking
a) what is this? The behavior is so weird I don’t even know what it’s called! and b) godammit, now on top of the two meetings and lunch tomorrow (which is not tomorrow but actually now only a few hours later today) I’m going to have to tote this machine into the Apple store and what is that going to cost me and why do these things invariably happen when i’m broke and the damn pool equipment is broke, too?????
Shut down and figure I’d better go to bed, and then I think uh oh! When did I back all that trash up, anyway?
Boot back up. Time passes. Hours, I’m sure. The machine reboots sloooooowwwwlleeeeeeeee. Finally everything comes back up. Save three vast directories to the external hard drive. More hours pass, or so it seems. Long, very very long minutes, anyway.
As the world turns, I think…there’s gotta be a way. So, google enlarged + screen + moving. Hey. What else do I have to do at two in the morning?
Mirabilis! This delightful site comes up! About two years ago, the Design Watchdog encountered the same problem with her Mac. She being cleverer than I, she managed to figure it out:
The screen gets fat and wobbly when you hold down the Command key and scroll upward with the Mighty Mouse. (Well…I don’t recall even having my hands on the keyboard, much less depressing Command while fooling with the rodent.) The solution, says she, is to hold down Command and scroll down.
Hm. So I try that.
The scroll button on the Apple rodent hasn’t worked properly in years, almost since I bought it. The thing runs sometimes, sometimes not. In the wee hours? Not.
Undaunted, I retrieved a Microsoft Mobile Mouse from another room. Loaded its gadget into a USB port, told the Mac to quit bellyaching, and soon had it running.
And yes: hold down command and scroll downward, and the screen promptly returns to normal!
Was that a relief! Thanks, Trisha!
Well, of course by then I was too keyed up to go back to sleep so explored Watchdog‘s site (check out this Mighty Mouse hack) and then ambled off on roads leading away into the virtual forest from her place. You know how that goes. You arrive at places and have no idea how you got there.
This is amazing. Bizarrely entertaining, is what I’d say: who knew watching some guy enter code (like he spoke it from infancy) to create a web design would be fascinating? Run the video at “Click on how you can design a website with Thesis” (which yes, the guy appears to be selling). It’s a pretty long production, yet strangely interesting.
Moving on, at The Nerdist, don’t even think about stumbling off to bed before checking out this dissertation. And read the comments: in the “Who Knew” department, somewhere there’s a Costco that roasts its own coffee!
And naturally I couldn’t go to sleep without reading this mouthwatering recipe for cowboy beans (more like caballero beans, actually), being on poverty rations for the time being. Glorioski! Suddenly I don’t feel deprived at-tall.
Well, maybe sleep-deprived. After three hours of Z’s, it was out the door for a long and full day. Now it’s 8:20 at night, I just sat down to the keyboard, and neither the dog nor I have eaten.
And so, to dinner.
Image: Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831-1892), Nótt riding Hrímfaxi. Public Domain.
Leslie’s, the pool company I love to hate and hate to love, annoyed me again yesterday afternoon with its ridiculous prices.
They propose to charge $75 to fix Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner, whose wing sheared off when he hit the loose drain cover that the Leslie’s guy didn’t bolt on correctly. Given that I have exactly zero teaching income this summer and am in the process of cutting my monthly discretionary budget from $800 to $500 (or less, if I can manage it), seventy-five bucks was not about to flow from my wallet into Leslie’s coffers. Thanks, but I can vacuum the pool manually.
Problem is, though, thanks to Gov. Jan Brewer and the Band of Bigots at the legislature, all the Mexican palm tree trimmers are hiding out or deported. There are no gringo palm tree trimmers, to speak of: it’s a dangerous, dirty, hard job for which homeowners are accustomed to paying very little. Just now, for three blocks around my house only two yards have their trees trimmed—in the middle of June!
The palm trees are in full bloom, and they’re dropping billions of noxious little sharp-edged, pool-equipment-clogging blossoms and debris into the water. There are four Mexican palms out there. Gerardo the Lawn Dude is not answering the phone—he may be living in Mexico, too, these days. And I’m afraid to even ask the arborist how much he’d charge to climb up there and trim them. If he’d even do it (he probably would not), he’d no doubt charge seventy-five or a hundred dollars bucks apiece. Just now, I’m not willing to part with several hundred dollars of my emergency cushion. Not unless it’s for a real emergency. It doesn’t look like the palm trees are going to get cleaned up. Nor is Harvey going to get fixed anytime soon.
So, I had in mind to buy one of those in-line leaf canisters, figuring it wouldn’t cost much to plug the thing in to the vacuum hose, where it would run interference for the pump pot and spare some wear and tear on the pump itself while I’m manually vacuuming up the litter. It’ll mean I’ll have to vacuum the pool about every day this summer. But beggars can’t be choosers.
Leslie’s want’s $99 for one of these little guys. At $78, Amazon is underpricing Leslie’s. Not only that, but you can acquire a brand-new one here for the cost of refurbished at Amazon. Or so they say. So, I suppose I’m going to have to kill some time driving around the city searching for something like this. Tomorrow I’ll pass a Home Depot on the way home from campus, assuming I choose to drive the surface streets.
A much smaller one can be had for just $37, but given the amount of crud that drops into the pool, I suspect I’ll be needing the larger size. Something called the Aqua Superstore is selling the big one for a mere $64, but this outfit appears to exist mostly online.
{sigh} i can’t afford this…
If the feds don’t override Arizona’s draconian anti-Mexican law (and let’s be frank: it’s Mexicans we’re talking about…few illegal Canadians get picked up in Sheriff Joe’s dragnets), then I guess I’ll have to take the palm trees out. I hate to do that—they’re probably as old as the house, very tall and stately. And nothing else can go into the narrow strip of soil between the pool walls and the block fencing. But I sure can’t afford what white guys charge, nor do I care to deal with the class of men that I’ve run into in that category. The last time I hired gringos, they got into the garage and stole my tools.
Oh, no…wait! That was the pair before the clown who got mad when the German shepherd went after him because he was trying to break into the yard of the old house by jimmying the RV gate. Holy mackerel! I’d put that scumbag out of my mind. He came back after he knew I’d left and vandalized the trees in my backyard—one of the neighbors saw him re-entering the yard. Ripped about a third of the canopy down off the fig tree, and pulled a big limb off one of the ashes. The fig tree never recovered.
They’re just not guys you want to have around. If I can’t find Mexican workers, I’ll do the yard work myself and cut down everything I can’t take care of on my own. That’ll be quite a lot, because I’m too old to thrash around in 100-degree heat.
Guess I can shop around all I want…no matter what, I can’t afford to underwrite the consequences of the haters’ fear of immigrants.
One of Harvey‘s “wings” snapped off, probably in an encounter with the loose drain lid that the Leslie’s guy didn’t bolt on correctly. This part is connected to a set of plastic posts on a larger, moving part. These posts sheared away, meaning both parts will have to be replaced. Annoyance factor (scale of 1 to 5): 5. Dollar factor (scale of $ to $$$$$): $$$
The palm trees need to be trimmed; they’re dropping gunk into the pool and clogging the system. While he’s here, Gerardo the Yard Dude will want to clean up the yard, too, a job I’ve been putting off because I can’t afford it. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $$$$
I lost the neat little container the Humane Society gave me to hold plastic doggy-poop bags. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $
One of the surviving Trader Joe orchids so outgrew its pot that I had to repot it. Not wanting to spring for a new bag of planting medium, decided to substitute some of the tree bark from around the rose beds. Time will tell whether this works or kills the plant. Annoyance factor: 2. Dollar factor: 0
Made a giant pitcher of sun tea yesterday afternoon. Brought it in and found a passle of ants swimming in it. More trotting around the outside. Who knew ants like tea? Had to throw it out—it was my favorite jasmine tea from Cost Plus. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $
Lost my favorite nail brush. It was cheap, but haven’t seen one like it, with really stiff bristles, in years. Stupid expensive wooden nail brush from L’Occitane (what was I thinking when I bought that?) has soft squishy bristles, useless for getting garden dirt out from beneath nails. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $+
Pool growing new species of algae on south wall. Changing out the water made no difference. Need to shock-treat today. Annoyance factor: 4. Dollar factor: $$
Check from client dragged in late, after I’d taken the other checks that have been languishing in a folder up to the credit union. Now have to make a special gas-guzzling trip to deposit this one. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: 0
Other client dropped 70 pages of copy on me yesterday, begging me to assess structural changes and needing it back instantaneously. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: –$$$$$, for the $500 I intend to charge him for this project.
This meant I can’t go to church this morning, because I’ll have to work all day on that thing. Again. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: 0
Need to load updated annoying Microsoft Office into the iMac, having discovered that the a new version of Word for Mac is slightly less cryptic and so slightly less annoying than the PC version. Annoyance factor: 8. Dollar factor: 0
Bathtub faucet has developed a slow leak; that needs to be fixed. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $$$$
Can’t afford $75 for five sessions of corgi agility training. Annoyance factor: 3. Dollar factor: 0
Can’t afford $200 adoption fee for cute little male corgi. Annoyance factor: 2. Dollar factor: 0, assuming I keep a grip on my sanity.
Had to pay handyman out of stash of paper dollars, set aside for survival over the summer. Annoyance factor: 1. Dollar factor: $
Handyman figured out the reason the folding closet doors are out of whack is that when I hung the one-pound (or less) bag of deodorizing stones on the knob, it pulled the cheesy louvred thing out of true. His repair attempt didn’t work. Eventually the doors will have to be replaced. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $$$$
Handyman and I suspect the reason Satan installed the cheesy louvred folding doors instead of the more standard solid doors, which are still on the market, is that the closet door openings in this 1971 house are no longer standard, meaning the opening will have to be rebuilt if the cheesy doors are to be replaced. Annoyance factor: 25. Dollar factor: $$$$$
Unmanageable digital thermostat, which really doesn’t work with heat pump, needs to be replaced; otherwise power bill will run over $300 in July, August. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $$$$
Dog, blowing her winter coat, had a shedding frenzy after yesterday’s bath. Dog dunes are piling up against the walls. Must stop what I’m doing to vacuum floors. Annoyance factor: 2. Dollar factor: 0
No one is saying when I’m supposed to be paid the alleged honorarium for developing the online course in magazine writing. Without it, I go $500 to $1,000 into the hole between now and the time fall semester starts. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $$$$$, potentially
My hair needs to be cut. Can’t afford it in this budget cycle; with palm tree trimming coming up, won’t be able to afford it in the next month, either. Annoyance factor: 4. Dollar factor: $$
Quack has ordered me to spend half the day at the Mayo tomorrow, getting X-rayed and consulting over continuing pain from shoulder dislocation. First time I’ve used the Social Security pushmi-pullyu and so don’t know what it will cost. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: $, I hope.
Plan to insert voice narrative into existing PowerPoint presentation to adapt for online course didn’t work. Presentation too complex. Major headache, huge amount of time wasted trying to figure out how to do this and why it wouldn’t work. Annoyance factor: 15. Dollar factor, 0
Struggling to find time to work on two fall sections but can’t seem to break free enough hours in the days. Whole issue is much more time-consuming than anticipated. Annoyance factor: 5. Dollar factor: hard to calculate; most of this time is unpaid labor.
Need to get a new AC guy in for the spring (now summer) inspection of the rooftop unit. Can’t afford that, either. Annoyance factor: 3. Dollar factor: $$$
Total annoyance factor:130. Total dollar factor:$$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $ One hundred thirty to thirty-six. Apparently ire cannot be measured in dollars.
Is there any question why I need a night guard to keep me from grinding my teeth down to stubs and wrecking the joints in my jaw? That reminds me:
Need new night guard, the old one having been rendered nearly useless by the new crown: Annoyance factor: 30. Dollar factor: $$$$$
Cassie and I awoke to a spectacular dawn, the outside air in the 70s. So beautiful was it that nothing would do but what we had to race outside for a long walk around the neighborhood and park. It was a cool and lovely morning, a few foggy-looking clouds floating in the distance, very San Diego.
Recently I made the happy discovery that Cassie does not have to be on a lead. She wants to stick close to the human, she comes when called and stops when asked, she never darts into the street, and she rarely chases birds or cats. When it’s quiet and there’s little traffic, when we’re out early enough or late enough to dodge the other dog-walkers, we can brazenly flout the law and stroll around as friends, not as slave and mistress.
In my lifetime I’ve had only one other dog who could be trusted off the leash, Greta the Genius German Shepherd. She was an amazing dog, a dog that attained true Greatness (she saved my son’s life, rescued me from a rapist, and unlike Anna the Ger-Shep, who only thought she could understand English, Greta indeed did understand human conversation).
Walking with a dog is a very different experience from walking a dog on a leash. It’s the difference between walking with a companion and wrangling an animal, as one does in riding a horse. When you have a dog that you can trust in this way, you begin to understand why people insist on letting their pets off the leash in the city park, come Hell or high water. It really does add a great deal of pleasure to the dog-human relationship.
Rosy-faced lovebird
While we were strolling around, we spotted a pair of small parrots or lorikeets flying free. They looked very much like this bird. Could’ve been a little larger, but the coloration was very similar.
Well, of course one thinks either “dead birds! What ninny brought these creatures here in the first place and then let them escape?” or “invasive species! Say good-bye to the mockingbirds, towhees, doves, quail, and every other native species around here!”
It’s probably not likely that the pair will survive for long. But one never knows. In fact, the low desert once was home to vast numbers of parrots. The thick-billed parrot inhabited the Sonoran desert and extended from central Mexico all across southern Arizona and up onto the Mogollon Rim. They were exterminated in Arizona and northern Mexico, largely by hunters. South of the border they were shot for food; north of the border, for the hell of it. Between the overhunting and the habitat destruction, they almost went extinct.
Some years ago, a few ambitious environmentalists tried to reintroduce the thick-bill to southern Arizona, an effort that ended in a Fail. Entrenched predators (humans included) quickly picked them off. At any rate, once upon a time the Sonoran desert hosted parrots, and so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that escaped birds could establish themselves and form feral populations. The rosy-faced lovebird, if that’s what we saw, is an arid-land native, hailing from Namibia, a far harsher environment than ours.
Because the corgi holds its head upright and its eyes are toward the front, Cassie seems to see into the air and overhead better than many other dogs. She notices birds and loves to chase them around. She definitely noticed the two parrots, whose call stood out from the busy birdsong that made for our background music, and watched with interest as they flew around the African sumac and palm trees.
Click on me...
We ambled into the rich folks’ territory and paid a visit to the estate-sized lot that used to harbor a gaggle of peacocks. The human who owns the place has so many trees and giant shrubs growing, it’s dark and shady as a grotto beyond the wall. Alas, he’s never replaced the birds that were picked off by the coyotes, probably much to the neighbors’ relief. Peacocks make a loud and ridiculous noise, a sound many people find grating.
I rather like the crow of a peacock. More flamboyant than a rooster’s, it brings to mind exotic locales like Myanmar and India.
And I do love the sound of an ordinary rooster’s crowing. Because the neighborhood still has several horse properties, some people do have flocks of chickens—you’re allowed to keep a cock if you own a horse property, which the county and city regard as agricultural land. So if Cassie and I get out early enough, we can hear the proud and arrogant call of the master of a henhouse, trumpeting up the sun as the Indians drum it down at sunset.
The rooster conjures up some exotic locales for me, too. When I was a little girl, long before the ongoing rounds of war in Lebanon began, we spent one of my father’s short leaves at their friends’ home in Beirut.
You can’t imagine how beautiful Beirut was, a gem on the Mediterranean, where the beaches were made not of sand but of tiny, smooth, jewel-like stones. My father spent his short leaves either in Bahrein, which at the time was comparable to…oh, say Tijuana or Nogales, or in Beirut, a truly magnificent place. Once we stayed in a hotel. But the visit that stays with me came when we took up two weeks’ residence with my former third-grade teacher and her new husband, one of the geologists who had been with Aramco since before World War II. This pair lived in the city, not in some American ghetto, and their friends were Lebanese of all social classes.
One of the most vivid memories of my childhood is awaking in the early violet pre-dawn to the sound of donkeys’ hooves clip-clopping up the cobbled street in front of the house. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the sun snuck up on the morning and told the roosters it was time to wake the world. A symphony of cocks’ crows arose in the distance, quite a bracing and refreshing sound. It made me, a rather sad and withdrawn child, want to get up and greet the day.
Well. So, from the former peacock orchard it was on to the park, which by the time we got there was overrun by dog lovers. I’m not an aficionado of dog parks—which our park is not, even though people from surrounding neighborhoods bring their animals every Saturday and Sunday morning and let them run loose. So, Cassie was on the leash most of the time, unless we were pretty much out of the way of large frolicking descendants of wolves masquerading as foolish humans’ “babies.” Some of these people—oh, let’s generalize and say all of the ninnies—make “self-centered” a religion. One old buzzard, with a big black chow whose fur had been shaved into a poodle cut (no joke!), saw me and Cassie making for our favorite bench and unabashedly hurried to get there first and plop himself down on it.
As soon as we walked past, he got up and left, having shown that he could do it. He probably drives like that, too.
By then Cassie was getting thirsty. After she finished off the water in the mug I was carrying and then consumed half a refill from the plugged-up park drinking fountain, we decided to head home. The sun had already been up too long, too many humans were abroad, and we were hungry.
This essay is not an endorsement of letting your dog run free or walking your dog off the leash. Both of these put your dog, other people’s pets and children, and you at risk. In general, your dog should be on a lead whenever it is outside your home or your yard.
can be had for just $37, but given the amount of crud that drops into the pool, I suspect I’ll be needing the larger size. Something called the Aqua Superstore is selling 
