No time to write this morning: overslept and so have only 45 minutes before the morning constitutional with La Maya. Then must get back to indexing medieval and Renaissance history.
And in the “only” department: only about 130 pages left to go on that: then the task of typing it all up. This will be the last major project I need to do for the Great Desert University.
Once it’s done, I’m outta there. The State of Arizona owes me almost 352 hours of unused vacation time. The most the state will pay for is 176 hours (although I noticed on my latest paycheck that they’re getting set to try to short me. Hallelujah! Another fight with HR comin’ up!). So what one does, I’m given to understand, is to take all the use-it-or-lose-it time at the end one one’s tenure, by way of moving the exit day forward.
If my math is right, that will put me out the door on November 30. The Thanksgiving holiday will add another two workdays to that, meaning I turn in my keys on November 25.
Folks. That is eight workdays from now. I’ve hauled all my junk home, and turning in the keys is literally all that remains to be done, other than finishing the index.
Now, that may not happen in eight days. It takes a good week of 12-hour days to compile a decent index of this book-length annual, and that’s without working around two freshman comp classes. I haven’t even looked at the student papers that came in on Friday, and another raft is due from the Monday class today. At the time I agreed to take on the community college classes, I knew it meant an avalanche of work would crash down on me at the end of the semester. What we’re hearing is the rumble of rock beginning to slide downhill.
It’ll be worth it, though. GDU drives Indians mad, and they’ve done a fair job of it with me. Will tell you all about it once I’m safely out of the white man’s camp.
Among the dusty books and junk I brought home from the office is an anthology of essays that some publisher donated to me, in hopes that I would adopt it for one of the many classes I used to teach at the Great Desert University. In an idle moment yesterday, I happened to pick it up. It fell open to one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard, and this incredible passage from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
When I was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, I used to take a precious penny of my own and hide it for someone else to find It was a curious compulsion; sadly, I’ve never been seized by it since. For some reason I always “hid” the penny along the same stretch of sidewalk up the street. I would cradle it at the roots of a sycamore, say, or in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk. Then I would take a piece of chalk, and, starting at either end of the block, draw some hue arrows leading up to the penny from both directions. After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe. But I never lurked about. I would go straight home and not give the matter another thought, until, some months later, I would be gripped again by the impulse to hide another penny.
It is still the first week in January, and I’ve got greater plans. I’ve been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But—and this is the point—who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless by the sight of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won’t stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.
Today I’m going to interview for a full-time teaching job at a nearby community college. The likelihood that they’ll hire me is about zero, but miracles happen. So I dare to daydream…
♣ If I get this job, the first thing I’m gunna do is buy some decent clothes. Years of living in Costco jeans have left me without any real clothes. No more than one or two outfits in the closet would do for an interview or for work in an office anywhere other than academia.
♣ The second thing I’m gunna do is hire someone to take care of the pool.
♣ Then I’m going to get a car that doesn’t guzzle $80 or $90 worth of gas every month.
♣ And forthwith, while housing prices are still depressed, I’m going to look for someplace to live that doesn’t have a swimming pool, two unused bedrooms, and a big yard to take care of.
♣ And next summer, I will put my beautiful little dog in the beautiful new sporty car and head for northern New Mexico, where we will see nary a 116-degree day through the entire month of July!
♣ County employees (the community colleges belong to the Maricopa County) share in the Arizona State Retirement System, a defined-benefits pension plan. I wonder if they therefore also get RASL? If that is the case, then instantly I get hired, my RASL would max out.
Yes. If I were paid my present salary on a nine-month basis, my hourly rate would jump from $30 an hour to about $85 an hour. Half of that times all my unused sick leave would come to $51,850. RASL maxes out at $30,000, so I would be well beyond that. I could actually use some of my sick leave without biting into that retirement benefit!
Mwha ha hah!
Nothing like a little wool-gathering to start your day...
Sometimes I think it would be a great idea to convert my pool into a trout pond.
The stock pond on our old ranch was not all that much bigger than the pool. Somewhere along the line, some old ranch hand had the bright idea to pour a bunch of trout fry in there. Amazingly, they survived. When my father was living, he would go up there and catch fish, which he would bring back to the house for dinner.
Hey! It would go with the chard patch! Who needs a grocery store when you’ve got trout and chard growing in the backyard?
Seriously: d’you realize it can cost as much to get rid of a pool as it does to build one? Around here, you can get a backyard pool installed for around $15,000 to $20,000. By the time you hire a licensed contractor to demolish the concrete walls, pull up yards and yards of concrete and Kool-Deck, fill in the gigantic hole, and relandscape the yard (pulling out and rebuilding your block wall in the process), you could easily spend that much to uninstall it.
A number of homeowners have converted their pools to what they think of as “natural,” chlorine-free swimming holes. I can’t imagine you could get away with that around here: it’s against the law to let your pool go green. Arizona is developing quite a West Nile problem, one that’s been aggravated by the large number of foreclosures, which invariably end up with a puddle of scum in the backyard.
On the other hand, it’s unclear that they’d do much to you if you actually turned the thing into a fish pond. With fish in it. Assuming you could keep them alive, they’d presumably eat the mosquitoes.
The pool already has a pump and a filter (though a DE filter might not be ideal for a fish pond…especially given its tendency to regurgitate DE into the water). Some people build an above-ground device that functions as a kind of biological filter. Besides having to build that and maybe install a pump designed for a pond (would it work with a 10- or 12-foot-deep pool?), you’d need to tear up the hideous Kool-Deck and redesign the landscaping to create a garden effect around the pond. A fish pond in the middle of a pad of Kool-Decked concrete would just look stupid: like a swimming pool you converted to a DIY fish pond. Even this guy’s pond looks silly, IMHO, because he left it in the middle of a surrounding wooden deck. Better than Kool Deck, by far, but still: obviously a repurposed swimming pool.
No. You’d have to get someone to jackhammer out the concrete, haul it off, and relandscape with xeric mulch (in our yard, that would be what we call quarter-minus), trees, and smaller flagstone or brick sitting areas, bordering the “pond” with boulders, stones, and plantings. Lots of desert bunch grasses: that would look nice.
Here’s what I figure one would have to do to convert my gigantic pool into a functioning trout pond:
• Replaster with Pebble-Tec or RiverRok, at the very least, paint or resurface the white plaster with something dark • Build a filter basin • Reroute the pool’s plumbing to feed water into the filter basin • Disguise the basin with boulders to create a waterfall effect • Build some ledges or lay some boulders inside the pool to create shelter for the fish • Lay some soil on the bottom in which to grow water plants • Jackhammer and haul the concrete all around it • Regrade the ground around the pond • Edge the pond with boulders, stones, and plantings • Get rid of the endlessly aggravating palm trees • Plant a shade tree or two in the area where the concrete was removed • Build a sitting area near the tree and pond, using a compatible surface such as flagstone or brick • Lay stepping stones • Extend the watering system, which would entail… . . . Hooking up a new valve to existing system . . . Laying new pipe . . . Setting up new irrigation tubes • Plant ornamental grasses, shrubs, and small stuff • Install water plants • Spread quarter-minus • Refill pool and adjust water • Introduce fish
LOL! Wouldn’t that be a project!? And though you’d dispense with the endless application of pool chemicals and the chronically broken-down cleaning system, you’d still have a pump and filter to have to take care of. And one wonders whether the fish could survive in Phoenix city water: in some seasons it’s every bit as chlorinated as pool water! Our stock pond, after all, was fed by the Hassayampa River. You’d have to find a way to dechlorinate the water before you could refill the pond, which in the summertime is every. single. day.
Assuming you hold the koi and stock your pond with bass and trout, what do you have?
The most expensive trout dinner in the history of the world.
Well, Saturday the guys from South Mountain Land Maintenance, LLC, showed up, hauling a huge trailer and equipped with all sorts of tools.
My front yard has run amok. In the first place, at my behest Richard the Landscaper par Extraordinaire planted way too many trees and large shrubs. The idea was to create a screen between my front window and what is now the former Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum. This scheme worked, with a vengeance: the screen grew up to become a solid wall. It really was a jungle out there.
Meanwhile, the sickly ash tree inherited from Satan and Proserpine, the previous owners, finally died outright in this summer’s unrelenting 116-degree heat. Sally, the neighbor behind me, wondered idly when I was going to get rid of the snag she could see over our roofs.
The palo brea tree, a ferocious monstrosity with thorns the size and shape of wildcat claws, kept draping over the sidewalk and threatening to gouge out the eyes of passing tourists.
The olive tree went to town over the summer and was now intertwined with sharp branches from the palo brea, which also had wound itself into the innards of the vitex and threatening to strangle it.
The Texas ebony, another heavily armed xeric tree, had merged with the desert willow to block egress through the east gate. The willow’s limbs had climbed onto the roof.
The paloverde on the west side also had decided to rest on the roof, and several of its limbs were crossed or bending low enough to brain passers-by.
Richard had proposed to take out the ash tree for a thousand dollars. Add another two hundred bucks, and he would repair the landscaping where the tree would be ripped down.
South Mountain came in with a bid for a thousand dollars to do all the work that needed to be done in the yard!
The two guys who own the company recently purchased it, having completed a course to train arborists offered by the Desert Botanical Garden. Frankly, I suspect that Richard, who has been in the landscaping business for upwards of 20 years, had a better feel for what the job is worth. The two South Mountain guys showed up here with a laborer, and the three men put in eight uninterrupted hours—they didn’t stop for lunch—in 100-degree heat. That would be 24-man hours. Here’s what I got for $1,040:
• Cut down the huge, scraggly dead ash tree • Saw up the wood and load it into their truck, leaving some for me to use as firewood this winter. • Prune out vast quantities of viciously thorny palo brea brush—they must have cut out at least half the canopy • Prune similar amounts from the palo verde • Load all that stuff into their truck • Haul dirt, build a mound over the tree stump • Plant the baby vitex in the new dirt • Repair, reset, and test the watering system • Set about a dozen large rocks into the new dirt mound • Haul in and spread about two or three inches of gravel over the dirt mound • Climb into the weeping acacia on the west side, climb all the way to the top and inspect the entire tree for weak limbs • Cut out dead stuff from the acacia; cut off a large limb that’s been trying to eat the lime tree • Haul that stuff out and load it onto the truck • Prune three major limbs out of the olive tree; shape up olive tree • Trim the desert willow • Trim the Texas ebony • Pick up, rake, and blower the incredible mess that resulted from these activities
The two gringo bosses, who unlike the older and wiser Richard did not supervise but pitched in and did most of the labor, damn near expired from heat exhaustion. At this time of year the sun is low enough that no matter which way you look it seems to be glaring right into your eyes, making the unseasonable blast of 100-degree heat truly tough going.
Baby vitex, in DIY shade structure to protect from fall heat wave
Today the yard looks mightily thinned. The contrast with the jungle effect is pretty striking—to my eye, even jarring, since I’ve been so accustomed to the overgrown mess. Even the skeleton of the ash tree cast a surprising amount of shade, so the heat in the front courtyard come next summer is going to be truly horrible. Vitex is slow growing, so it will be many years before that little plant grows into something that resembles a tree. It never will create as much shade as a large ash or pine.
So I’m not happy to lose the ash tree after all the effort to keep it going. It was sick when I moved in, and as Mike the Arborist pointed out, once an ash tree shows signs of decline, it’s too late to save it. Five years of pouring water and fertilizer on it amounted to five years of wasted water and fertilizer. I should have had Richard cut it down when he installed the desert landscaping.
At any rate: $1,040 for 24 man-hours of work comes down to $14.44 an hour for each man. Assuming they paid the Mexican guy minimum wage, the two proprietors ended up grossing about $18 an hour apiece, or about $144 each for a very hard day’s work. From that they had to pay the gas for their truck (and presumably the payment on it and the trailer), the use fee at the city dump, and all the various other overhead entailed in operating a business. At that rate, our gents are not going to get rich soon.
So I felt like I got a smokin’ deal for all the work they did. In fact, I felt I was taking advantage of their inexperience as businessmen—Richard wouldn’t have touched that job for any such rate. Of course, that’s why it hasn’t gotten done: I can’t afford Richard anymore.
A news helicopter has been parked over the next street to the south for the past 40 minutes. I hate that.
This morning was the first truly cool morning we’ve had since last spring: temps in the mid-70s as late as 6:30. Glorioski! I opened all the doors and windows to let—finally to let!—the fresh air drift through the house.
But noooooo… The minute you sit down to enjoy your home and your yard, you know you’re going to be buzzed by a cop helicopter or a Snoop in the Sky. As it develops, today’s intrusion is not the police chasing one of the neighborhood home invaders. It’s the “news” copter (I use the term “news” loosely) slurping up gore for the evening news. Some poor woman, having dropped off her child at the nearby charter school, drove her SUV out of the parking lot and hit another poor woman as she crossed the lot’s driveway on the sidewalk. The pedestrian was pushing a baby in a stroller and shepherding a four-year-old. She managed to get the older child out of the way, but the baby was crushed beneath the vehicle.
This is a horrible incident. Frankly, I could do without pictures of it on the evening news or in any other news media. But if we must indulge, surely it couldn’t take more than ten minutes to capture an image like this.
First, I question why it’s necessary at all to display such a thing. And second, I wonder why it’s necessary to buzz a residential neighborhood with a roaring helicopter for the better part of an hour, so as to entertain the masses with yet another lurid video of yet another traffic accident.
Mercifully, the local TV stations have given up on fielding a flock of “news” helicopters. The reason was not so merciful: couple years ago two helicopters, chasing the cops who were chasing a sh*thead who had taken off in a stolen vehicle, crashed into each other over mid-town Phoenix. Four men died so that you and I could watch the spectacle of a few cops trying to chase down a loser in a stolen junker.
We were lucky we didn’t waste more lives. The two copters crashed into a park. A large VA hospital stands adjacent to the park. A couple blocks to the north, two big high schools were in session. And the park is ringed with mid-rise office buildings and commercial strips.
After that, the stations decided to use a single common helicopter to pool their Snoop in the Sky reporting, which helps substantially with the crazy-making noise level. Before then, we would have had four choppers hanging over our homes for an hour. Chances are that decision was made more for financial reasons than out of consideration for the locals’ peace or because management felt much concern for future employees’ safety. At any rate, at least one small benefit accrued after that hideous and heart-breaking accident.
What does this have to do with things monetary? I don’t know. Probably very little. Except that cop and news helicopter racket is part of life in the big city. Retiring to a small town would have the benefit that few small-town news stations can afford a helicopter, and neither can small municipalities. Life with less affluence could mean life with less noise pollution. How lovely it would be to enjoy fall’s first truly pretty morning, without having the peace shattered by gawkers on the wing!
