Whenever the surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean shift in just the right way, we get an El Niño event, a periodic rainy season that goes on and on and on. All winter long, we’ve had rain at least once a week.
Blue Dick
It’s raining again this morning. Poured half the night. The desert is greening up, and soon the hills and valleys will be awash in wildflowers. And, consequently, our noses awash in pollen. Arizona is the place to come when you want to find out what you’re allergic to!
Our xeric landscaping also bursts out in wildflowers, more familiarly known as weeds. Right now my front yard is filling up with milkweed and ragweed, filaree and dandelions, many of them noxious imports from other parts of the country and the world.
Arizona lupine
Some are very pretty. A variety of lupine, for example, will sprout in the alleys and occasionally in the lawn. By and large the ones that grow in the city, though, are plug-ugly, invasive, and turn your yard into a jungle of fanny-high brush that, as soon as the heat comes up, dries out and turns to tinder.
Most of the really pretty plants won’t grow in the city, though. You have to get out on the desert and climb a slope to see the carpets of Arizona poppies during the brief few days they bloom. I’ve rarely seen one volunteer in my yard—maybe once or twice, but they’re not happy and they don’t last long.
Arizona poppy
What with all this water falling out of the sky, the yard crop is fierce, noxious, thick, and so robust that it regards Round-up as a minor nuisance. I’ve dribbled the stuff on the front yard weeds twice, to exactly zero effect. And yes, I know… but let qui mal y pense come over here and spend a few days on hands and knees digging thorny plants that exude rash-inducing sap out of a quarter-acre of gravel.
London rocket
The house plants are happy, though. There’s no question that plants can tell the difference between rain and tap water. As the roses are vibrating with joy, so the indoor plants radiate vegetable contentment when they’re allowed to sit below the eaves and bathe in falling rain.
Plants singin' in the rain
Problem is, of course, you have to yank them indoors at the first sign of hail, of which we have a-plenty. That Christmas cactus out there ran amok the first time it was put out in the rain this winter:
Christmas Cactus
Cassie the Corgi, not being a plant, hates loathes and despises water when it’s not in a dish. Water falling out of the sky is particularly abhorrent. This morning she ran out into the wet dark, pivoted on a dime, streaked back into the house, and deposited a lovely steaming pile in the family room for me to clean up. {sigh}
Well, whenever I get back from ululating down at the cult headquarters, I guess I’ll have to set another fire in the fireplace, the better to keep the Cassowary warm and dry, and spend the afternoon in front of it grading student papers.
Okay, so after we decidedI needed a retread and then we went out and bought a kit of mineral make-up from Costco (nearly removing my fingers in the process of opening the thing), I broke out the camera and conducted a few quasi-scientific experiments.
The research questions:
Does make-up do a woman any good at all, or is it just another waste of money designed to enrich gigantic corporations at the expense of the consumer’s vanity, whims, and general silliness?
If make-up does anything positive for the aged face, how does regular cream foundation compare with the new powdered mineral make-up variant?
The research method:
Stage 1: Wash face. Apply face cream. Photograph subject’s face using “macro” setting of swell new camera (lab equipment!) donated by M’hijito.
Stage 2. Wash face. Apply cream. Apply full full complement of L’Oréal’s True Match Foundation; color n5, “True Beige.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.
Stage 3. Wash face. Apply face cream. Apply coat of Kirkland Borghese Mineral Make-up, color “Light to Medium.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.
Stage 4: Compare.
Results
Stage 1, the Naked Face, is pretty alarming, even to a seasoned researcher:
Amazingly enough, this is our subject’s “good” side. A liberal sprinkling of age spots lie along the jaw line, to the extent that one can say a jaw line is still visible through the fat and sagging jowls. When I said this face looks like the surface of Mars, I wasn’t kidding. The wrinkles in this region are less pronounced. However…
The left side shows the true vintage leather effect produced by a combination of genetics (my mother’s face looked just like this) and too much sun. The age-freckles and moles (I’ve always been speckled) along the jaw are joined by a prominent brown spot high on the cheekbone, one that I’ve never been able to persuade a dermatologist to remove because, of course, he knows he’s not going to be reimbursed by my insurance and he also knows I can’t afford to pay him out of pocket for any such procedure.
So, now we’ve established the reason the subject avoids mirrors and cameras. Moving on…
Stage 2, cream foundation, produces some results. What they are remains to be seen.
Here’s the right side, slathered with plenty of L’Oréal. This make-up has as its sterling quality a capacity to cover brown spots. As you can see, it does a pretty good job of smoothing out the blotchy coloring and hiding the brown speckles. Like all make-up, though, it settles into the crevasses of the aged face, thereby not only not hiding the wrinkles, but actually accentuating them.
The left side, courtesy of L’Oréal:
It covers the large brown spot to some degree. Blotchiness can be said, perhaps, not to have been elided but simply to have been moved around in new ways. As for the wrinkles: the microbial flora on this face need rock-climbing tools to get around.
Stage 3 engages the powdery new mineral make-up, co-branded with a big-box store’s warehousey name and a line of expensive department store cosmetics’ exotically Italianate name. Surely with fire-power like that, it’s gotta do some good.
The right side: fairly smooth, with neither the age spots nor the general blotchiness too pronounced. Not sure what that grayish effect is. Following the instructions given on a YouTube tutorial, I used a small amount of cover-up to help disguise the brown spots; that may be showing through here, or it may be the lighting. In later efforts, I deleted the cover-up step, since the makeup itself seems to do a fairly good job of hiding spots.
And so, to the left side…
It should be noted, too, that I added the mineral make-up’s blusher, which is very light and (seen in a mirror) hardly noticeable. I don’t use blusher with the L’Oréal, because it makes me look like something from Ringling Brothers.
Conclusions
Well, now that we’re at stage 4, I’d say something’s better than nothing. I guess. Both foundations provide some degree of cover-up, and given that the skin has suffered significant damage from the effects of weather and age, cover-up is what’s needed. Probably a veil of the sort favored by Taliban women would fill the bill.
For comparison’s sake, can we get all these photos together in one place?
Ah. Science advances. Et aussi la nausée.
I kind of like the mineral stuff, though it’s significantly more hassle to apply. However, I found that as time passes, it tends to yellow a bit. After five or six hours, it doesn’t look all that great. The L’Oréal does not do that: it retains its initial qualities even after several hours, although it does rub off over time.
What a beautiful few days we’ve had! Incredible weather in the 60s and 70s, peace and quiet, and now an unexpected holiday (the State of Arizona, because of the legislature’s deep and abiding resentment at being forced to approve Martin Luther King Day, took President’s Day away from its employees, but the County abides no such scantily veiled bigotry). The young classmates and I don’t have to reconvene until Wednesday, o mirabilis!
Now that the racket of the three-ring circus that is the COBRA, Social Security, and Medicare bureaucracies has died down for a while, I’ve finally had a chance to relax, unwind, catch my breath, and think a few thoughts.
And here is what I think:
• My face is beginning to show my age. This is not surprising, since I was born in the early Pleistocene.
• My face is showing the effects of too much ultraviolet light. Also not surprising: born in an early Pleistocene desert, I grew up in one of the harshest deserts on the planet during a time when sunshine was supposed to be good for you (can anyone else remember the phrase “a healthy tan”?), and then I spent my entire adulthood in one of the most biologically diverse deserts on the planet. I am, in short, a creature of the sun.
• I am fat.
• I am boring as Hell. This is probably because…
• I am stuck in a rut.
There’s gotta be some changes made.
First, I need to get out from in front of the computer and put my body in motion. More exercise…lots more exercise! In addition to meeting La Maya whenever we can get together on weekday mornings for an hour’s walk, I need to walk the dog at least a mile a day, and I must get off my fanny and onto the mountain! There’s a very fine mountain with several quarter-mile vertical hikes just to the north of my house. Need to go there and do that. Ideally, every day; as a practical matter, no less than three times a week.
I have a gaudy pink beach cruiser of a bicycle. It sits in the garage while its tires decompose in the heat. I need to get on the bicycle every day and explore my neighborhood and nearby enclaves.
I have a perfectly fine, athletic little sheep dog. I need to let her take me for a run every day. Not a walk: a run.
At the age of 65, dear friend Garnett Beckman (scroll down that page!) started hiking Phonix’s North Mountain Park several times a week. Just retired from a lifetime of teaching, she decided that no grass would grow under her feet. She was 84 the last time I walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with her. And yes, I’m afraid she did get out before I did. She’s 102 now. She still has all her marbles, and she’s still going strong.
Role model! Listen: can you hear that voice saying, “What are you waiting for, dear?” That would be, yes, Garnett.
A close second: I need to lose about ten or fifteen pounds. It should come naturally if I manage to drag myself away from the endlessly fascinating Internet and start walking. But I also need to eat better. I eat too much pasta, too many sugary treats, too few green and orange veggies. And, let’s face it: I drink wayyy too much for an old lady: two beers a day, down from half a bottle of wine. A day.
Yesh. Sixteen years of working at ASU earned me a mighty fine drinking habit. If it’s any excuse (it’s not), I’m not alone: hardly any of my friends and former colleagues arrive home from a day at that place without craving a drink or two or three. Some of them crave a lot more booze than I can ingest, and that is plenty. One recently lapsed from AA; the others…don’t ask.
I must stop drinking. Really stop drinking. Not reduce drinking. Knock it off.
After a day of gallivanting with M’hito, in which we visited many venues and spent not very much money, I came home not even faintly interested in a drink. Clearly, one thing that will help is to fill my days with something other than counting shekels and clicking on Web sites until my eyes glaze over. I think more exercise and an organized diet program will help a lot.
Other strategies: Use the neat new refrigerator-door-sized glass bottles to make sun tea. Prepare a lot of ginger-pinapple drinks and frescas. Have plenty of pleasing things on hand to drink other than wine, beer, or whiskey.
In the horrible face department: it’s time to get serious about maintenance. Tomorrow it’s off to Costco to buy some “mineral” makeup. Not that I expect any miracles, certainly not on sagging jowls and hide as convoluted as the surface of Mars, but I’m beginning to suspect L’Oréal liquid foundation is a bit passé. Time to try something new, develop a few fresh techniques.
And it doesn’t take much reading of Une femme d’un certain age to get the clue that it’s time to update the wardrobe. I’m starting with red and red. I’m also going to follow Frugal Scholar‘s and SDXB’s advice to shop in thrift stores by way of upgrading the wardrobe. At the very least, I must have some new tops to disguise the Costco jeans. New tops, new sweaters, new jackets, new vests, new skirts, new dresses, new whatever else that comes along. I have got to start dressing better!
New (to me) clothes, fresh make-up, more exercise, better food: these should jump-start the project to get a life. Who knows? Maybe once a little momentum builds up, I’ll have the nerve to do what Mary has done; drop it all and embark on a whole new existence.
First crack out of the box this morning, it was off to the credit union at the (relatively) nearby West campus, there to hand-deliver 15 pages of paperwork.
Well over a month ago, M’Hijito and I had asked to negotiate a loan modification of the downtown house’s mortgage. They asked for evidence of every deep breath we’d taken within the prior 30 days, which after much thrashing around we scraped together into a big digital pile and e-mailed to them.
Well, this mound of debris reached the loan lady one day after the credit union outsourced its loan management. So now, instead of the six-day turnaround on a decision we had been promised, we were told there would be a one-week “blackout” on all information coming from this outfit, and that after that…they had no idea what would happen.
Weeks went by: nothing.
So I called Loan Lady the day before yesterday and asked her voicemail if I was correct in assuming that silence means “no deal,” since we would need to figure out how to pay the mortgage or decide whether we should take a walk, given last month’s munificent earned income of $161.
Within hours, comes a call from Higher-Up Loan Lady, who says that the credit union is “taking some loans back in-house,” among them ours, and would we please send the entire mound over again, only add written proof that I actually was canned and update several other documents, now gone stale. Translation: “we lost your documents.”
Of course, the fuck-you-very-much announcement on ASU letterhead was not in digital form. The new printer/scanner refused to scan it. So that made it impossible to e-mail the new pile of junk, which took a good half-day in the collecting and updating. The new printer/scanner doesn’t have a FAX, and even the old printer/scanner/FAX machine would not talk to Cox’s modem and so would not have sent a FAX anyway. She suggested I either mail it (about $2.00 worth of postage) or take it to the credit union and get them to FAX it.
I chose the latter. This ensured that someone there actually saw to it that the documents went through, and they gave me the printout of confirmation showing the stuff reached Higher-Up Loan Lady. The cost of the gas to drive over there—about $2.53—was probably as much as or more than the cost of postage, but at least it ensured that the pile of paper didn’t disappear again.
Despite the annoying waste of time and gasoline, this junketdid allow me to take advantage of a serendipitous occurrence of the Money Happens phenomenon.
A few weeks ago, a client gave me a $25 gift card to Fry’s grocery stores, a nice little under-the-table lagniappe. I never shop at Fry’s, because the two stores in my general vicinity are located in pretty threatening neighborhoods. After the manager of the restaurant in the Fry’s shopping center at 19th and Glendale was murdered by thieves, I quit going there. On the way to ASU West, though, I passed a store in a working-class neighborhood that looked pretty safe, and so decided to spend the money there.
Not bad. For $20 I nabbed milk and eggs with which to make some excellent biscuits for breakfast, a small stoneware bowl of the sort I’ve been needing for a while, a bag of chunk hardwood charcoal, and some produce. The pork, much needed for Cassie, was ten cents a pound higher than Safeway’s, so I passed on that. But I did find a pair of kitchen tongs with handles, not those chopsticks on a spring that are currently popular. Real tongs have have turned into a hard-to-to-find item, as I discovered when my ancient pair wore out.
Yesterday I had a meeting that took place after I finished teachingin the middle of the afternoon. Because I couldn’t afford to have lunch out even if there were something available on the campus that I’d want to eat, by the time I stumbled in the door I was dead starved. It was evening by the time I’d fed myself and the dog taken the dog for the required doggy-walk and added more acid to the pool. Then I had to wrestle with the mountain of paperwork (above). After that was ready to go, I
was sooo tired I sat down to relax by working on a pencil drawing I started yesterday. The next time I lifted my head, it was quarter to eight and I was an hour late to choir practice.
Started to climb into the car to race down to the Cult Headquarters, but with the garage door open and the engine on, I realized I just couldn’t do it. So went back in the house and missed practice. Now I’ll be in the doghouse again. Oh well.
My beleaguered former RA, who lives just a few blocks from me, was burgled last Sunday. They stole all her jewelry—most of it sentimental gifts from her mother with little monetary value—and her husband’s laptop. {sigh} This neighborhood is under siege from the cockroaches who inhabit the tenements across 19th Avenue. Burglaries are as common as falling leaves around here. I’m almost inclined to go back up to the pound and see if that fake “bloodhound” is still there. Whatever he was, he was no bloodhound. Neither did he appear to have any pit bull in him. But he was big enough to mean business, or at least to look like he might.
I don’t know. I can’t afford another dog. Just feeding me and little 25-pound Cassie is a challenge. On the other hand, I can’t afford to be burglarized, either.
Speaking of the neighborhood, when I got home late yesterday afternoon a carpet cleaning crew was over at Biker Boob and Bobbie McGee’s house, overseen by a hulking bruiser of a man swaggering around in a wife-beater. Turns out said bruiser was a great big, charming gay guy who is a Realtor. He strolled over to introduce himself and say Boob and Bobbie are history and he’s putting the house on the market. He’s asking $239,000, substantially less per square foot than the $285,000 our local Real Estate Empress is trying to get for the same model two blocks to the north and west. He said the place is in pretty bad shape and needs a lot of fix-up.
Not surprising.
As sweet as Queer John was, at one point he had five men living in there with him. (QJ was the original renter, an affable little guy but pretty nuts.) After QJ was chased down in a dramatic pursuit through the neighborhood and hauled off by a team of five cruisersful of cops, he was replaced by Biker Boob and his lady, Bobbie McGee, a raunchy cowgirl given to dumping car trunkloads full of mystery garbage in the big trash bin behind my house and Sally’s. We figured if whatever she was stuffing in there (neither of us cared to tear open the bags to see what it was) couldn’t go into the bin behind her house, it probably wasn’t supposed to go into the city garbage bins at all.
According to Zillow, $239,900 is what the present owner, who lives in upstate New York, paid for that house in 2004. He must figure the market has recovered enough to unload an ill-advised investment. Let’s hope he’s right!
While fooling with the Excel files yesterday by way of cranking the new reports the CU wanted, I made an interesting little discovery.
In January, I only spent $1,698. Multiply that by 12 and you get an estimated 2010 expenditure of $20,376. Optimistic, to be sure—summer power bills will raise that by about $200 a month, adding approximately $800 to the projected total: $21,176.
But if you include the tiny drawdown I’m taking from ASU’s 403(b) plan so as to qualify for the state’s sick leave payment (the net is only $385 a month), you come up with this net income:
“Pension” net: $385 x 12 = $4,620
Social Security net: $1,000 x 12 = $12,000
Net teaching income: $14,400 – 25% = $10,800
$4,620 + $12,000 + $10,800 = $27,420, projected net income
$27,420 – $21,176 = $6,244 positive cash flow for 2010
That’s a far cry from the $1,400 year-end balance I estimated by manually adding up all my projected costs, month by month, and subtracting them, month by month, from projected income (and, during the summer, nonincome).
So far I haven’t been able to account for the difference. I think I’ve included all predictable costs. The $1,698 January expenditure includes the $314 I had to cough up for COBRA, significantly more than either COBRA or Medicare will cost after this. The only thing I can imagine is that my month-by-month estimates of what the community college will pay must be wrong. But they couldn’t possibly be wrong by $4800…that doesn’t make sense.
Time will tell. If the shorthand calculation turns out to be correct, maybe I won’t have to teach three-and-three!
Every now and again a rainbow-like day comes along, one of those phenomena that reminds us of what real wealth is all about.
The choir did a lot of singing this morning—the whole chivaree was quite a songfest, lots of Rutter and some rather challenging chant. Very fun.
Escaping from the church, I met M’hijito for lunch. We went to an old stand-by, a place that bills itself as a “bistro” but which is really salad, sandwich, and pizza joint. The food is always good there.
His roommate having announced, at last, that he is moving on, M’hijito grows more interested in getting a dog. We dropped by the Humane Society, where we saw nothing that interested him, but a dog that I thought was enchanting. The keepers there, who tend to the imaginative in designating breeds, claimed he was a bloodhound. Well, I’ve seen bloodhounds, and fer sure that was not one of them. He looked like he might have some hound in him, not a sight-hound, but I’d say he was more lab than hound. Probably Heinz 57 is the right brand name for this guy. He was mellow and sweet and handsome. If I had been in the market for a medium-sized to large dog, I’d have grabbed him in an instant.
But M’hijito is the one who has to live with this proposed animal.
At my house, M’hijito noticed to his amazement that the Christmas cactus is blooming. It’s the first Christmas cactus plant I’ve ever managed to keep alive—I bought it about five years ago as part of the “staging” of the house I sold then. Astonishingly, it has not only survived my ministrations but has blossomed three times since then. He took photos of the amazing ornament-like flowers:
Later, I grabbed the camera and climbed under the plant, backlighting the blossoms with the sun pouring in through the skylight:
He had to go to the office, unfortunately—not the best of all possible things to do with a spectacular Sunday afternoon.
And spectacular it was. After M’hijito left, Cassie the Corgi and I headed for the North Mountain Preserve. No flowers yet, but the hillsides are green with alien grasses brought to the Southwest by generations of Europeans, the seeds blown evenly across the terrain by the wind. Any good rain, such as the recent products of El Niño that have visited us, will green up the desert mountains and eventually produce poppies and mallow and lupine and vast numbers of yellow things. The air still crystalline after the rains, the mountains to the south stood like violet paper cutouts behind the downtown cityscape.
So…do you risk your life, limb, and (even more precious) your beloved wheels for two hundred bucks?
Raining here. Raining, raining, and raining. It’s almost 8:00 a.m. but the skies are no brighter than the dusk of predawn. The pool water is up to the coping. If it rains steadily for another two days, as predicted, the pool may overflow. Make that will overflow, if we get the prognosticated five to ten inches of rain. No sign yet, mercifully, of the 50-mile-an-hour winds that were supposed to accompany this storm.
One of my client editors expects her page proofs back by tomorrow at the latest, a very easy job for which she will pay a couple hundred bucks. I just finished reading them about 5:00 this morning. Tomorrow I have to teach, 12 miles in the opposite direction of her office, which at the outset is far enough, thank you, from my house. I really, really, really do not want to drive from north Phoenix to central Scottsdale through a downpour over roads that flood in a light sprinkle.
You understand: it doesn’t rain in Arizona (right?), and so we don’t build roads to accommodate water falling out of the sky. We don’t teach motorists to drive in falling water, either.
So high is the hysteria level over this freshet that the police sent out a warning to the city’s neighborhood associations, asking people to stay off the streets or, if they must go out, for godsake to hang up the phone and drive.
Cassie the Corgi, being a smart little dog, feels utterly abhorred by the prospect of going out in the rain to do her doggy duty. When the downpour let up briefly about 4:30 this morning, I decided to take the opportunity to let her into the backyard and wring her out. She decided otherwise. Had to put on her leash and collar and literally drag her out the door.
At any rate, Cassie and the human, in addition to being without visible means of support, have also about run out of food. I put off buying groceries until after the AMEX cycle closed yesterday, so as to put off having to pay until this time next month, when a little money should have arrived in the checking account.
So, in addition to needing to make a run on Scottsdale by way of garnering some of that little money, I also need to stop by a Costco for a major shop on the way home. There’s one more or less on the way. Only one saving grace to that prospect: the store will prob’ly be almost free of crowds.
Yes. Fifty mile-per-hour winds, with gusts to 65. Doesn’t that sound like a balmy breeze? Don’t count on it, though: if we were going to have that kind of weather, it would have blown into town by now. It sounds like more stupid media hype.
You can’t believe much that you hear on the local Play-Nooz.Stürm und drang is the stuff of ad sales, and so the pretend reporters exaggerate every weather report to the point of outright falsehood. Two or three years ago, one TV news operation actually exclaimed that a “typhoon” (i kid you not!) was headed our way!
Typhoon…heeeee!
The day of the typhoon dawned clear, blue, and still. And it stayed that way.
Of course this is terribly dangerous for public safety, because having gotten all worked up for nothing time after time, now no one takes anything they hear on the news seriously. When a real storm comes in, nobody pays the slightest bit of attention, and so the Highway Patrol gets to launch searches for motorists who set off across logging roads as powerful snowstorms roll in and the local cops get to haul people and their cars out of flooded arroyos.
{sigh} I guess I’m not really undecided. I need the money at the earliest possible moment. I can’t afford to piss off that editor by missing a deadline. I’ve got to make a Costco run. And given a choice between charging off to Scottsdale in the rain today and charging off to Scottsdale from North Phoenix in the rain tomorrow after spending half the day in front of classrooms, I suppose today is the lesser of two evils.
