Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Foreclosing on the neighbors

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In an odd way, the foreclosure of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum amounts to a kind of foreclosure for the neighbors, too. There’s the obvious effect that when the lender unloads Dave’s house at a bargain-basement price, our property values will drop into the basement, too. Actually, they were already headed for the basement: now they’ll just ride on down to the sub-basement without getting off the elevator.

But there’s a much larger effect: Dave has been financially distressed since he divorced a year or so ago, and his emotional depression has shown in a sharp increase in his native slovenliness. He never was into anything that might be called “pride of ownership,” but over the past year, his normally trashy lot has become a real eyesore. Also, as it develops, Dave has been cultivating a public health hazard.

SDXB came by this morning, and out of curiosity we visited the abandoned house. Both gates into the backyard, from the front and from the alley, are unlocked and easy to open. The backyard is chuckablock full of debris, old chemicals, bottles of pool acid, old batteries, and stuff highly hazardous to kids. We have, for example, these fine gasoline cans, located behind an open tool shed replete with bottles of old insecticides.

Mighty nice, eh? How would you like your kids to get into this stuff?

Ah, yes. Then we have the issue of the swimming pool. The pool has been drained; evidently has stood empty for quite some time. Though it’s enclosed within a wrought-iron fence, it’s easy to enter: the fencing ends at a screened porch whose two exterior doors have been ripped off, creating a nice corridor through which the curious may pass without obstruction.

Once you’ve passed through the aluminum structure, where, by the way, you’ll find a heavy-duty battery charger with enough juice to flash off big sparks and give you (or the kiddies) one heck of a zap, you come to this:

And at the bottom of this concrete-lined hole in the ground you find a collection of lost toys marinating in a fine little mosquito-breeding Okeechobee Swamp:

It explains where all the nasty little biters have been coming from for the past several seasons: straight from casa David to su casa.

Maricopa County, where we have been dwelling cheek-by-jowl with Dave, has a growing problem with West Nile virus, a disease carried by mosquitoes. And as we know, mosquitoes breed joyfully in standing water. Every year more and more people come down with this ailment, and every year we read of several deaths related to it. The most vulnerable to serious complications are the elderly.

Dave’s next-door neighbors are in their nineties.

I am in my sixties; many of the locals who have died of this disease were between 60 and 65. The most recent death I’ve read about was of a man in his 80s. My house and yard have been overrun with mosquitoes for months. This, evidently, is where they’ve been coming from. My house is clear across the street—imagine what the mosquito swarms have been like for the old folks next door to Dave!

After you’ve enjoyed the scenic view, don’t miss Dave’s old battery collection on your way out:

Maybe an enterprising kid can get a little extra mileage out of one or more of them, using the handy-dandy battery charger left on the back porch.

And as we say good-bye to Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, we pass by the famous Weed Haystack, still gracing the front driveway as it has from time almost immemorial:

Dave's Weed Haystack

Always visible from the street and from front yards in all directions, this fine landmark remains as a symbol of everything Dave has done for his friends and neighbors in Royal Oaks.

Hm. Maybe I could sell guided tours.

Long before Dave’s lender foreclosed on him, Dave foreclosed on the neighbors. He foreclosed on our property values, on our safety, and on our health. I guess we have to say thank you to the irresponsible and unethical lenders who forked out $320,000 in loans against a property worth about half that and handed it over to a recently divorced man who hasn’t held a regular job in years. If they hadn’t sunk him over his head in debt, Dave and his pet mosquitoes would have stayed in that house forever.

w00t! Sumer is y-goin’ out

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It’s actually COOL outside this morning: 55 degrees! October 12, and summer is over in Arizona. At last!

Seasons start and end here in a matter of moments. One day it will be 100 degrees (Thursday it was pretty close to that) and the next day, * ping! * You’ll wake up and it’s cold outside. Vice versa: Come April or early May, summer will start with a sizzling bang! after seven or eight months of balmy weather.

Soooo glad to see you, Winter! Slept all night long in a lovely cool bedroom with no help from my friends.

And now it’s off for a charity walk. Happy Sunday, all!

The Hallowe’en grinch

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What do you do about Hallowe’en?

I get a big boot out of seeing the kids in costume. But I’ve become pretty curmudgeonly about having swarms of kids, teenagers, and even adults show up at my door asking for a handout. Several things make this custom problematic.

Most obvious, of course, is the cost of candy. You have to get the kids products that are individually wrapped, because many parents, wary of nut cases who lace treats with “tricks” of one sort or another, won’t let the kids eat it unless it’s in a manufacturer’s package. It’s pretty expensive, especially if you don’t eat the stuff yourself. Which I don’t. Any candy that doesn’t get handed out to trick-or-treaters gets wasted. I hate that. It makes me feel like I’m throwing money in the trash.

Next, there’s the issue of out-of-neighborhood families trucking their kids into more affluent areas in hopes of scoring fancier stuff. My neighborhood abuts a very tony district—we form a buffer zone between an area of upper six- to lower seven-figure homes and a couple of gang-ridden slums. So we get the overflow of kids being trucked into the swell neighborhood. Well, I wouldn’t let my kids run loose in the areas to the west and north of us, either, so I can’t blame the parents for bringing them to a part of town they may perceive as safer. But what you’ll see is twenty kids jammed into the back of a pickup and dumped on the street in front of your house. Some years, a hundred kids will show up at the door; some years, none. Just depends on which street the freeloading parents decide to use as a drop-off point.

I don’t mind giving candy to the neighbors’ kids, but…OK, ungenerously!…I resent having every kid in Sunnyslope show up at my front door demanding a handout.

When M’hijito was little, one friend’s parents used to keep a stash of expensive, healthy treats for the neighbors’ kids and a big bucket of the cheapest, grodiest junk they could get for the traveling freeloaders. Worked, I guess…but something about that doesn’t sit very well with me, either. Is it OK to rot little kids’ teeth and contribute to their budding diabetes just because the kids are poor?

And finally, there’s the safety question. This neighborhood has had three home invasions that I know of—probably more that haven’t been gossiped about. I don’t open my door to strangers. Really, you’re crazy to do so. Why should I make an exception for hordes of out-of-neighborhood candy tourists? Especially when many of them are not kids. I don’t feel safe doing that.

In my cranky old age, I’ve taken to turning off the lights in the front part of the house, which discourages people from ringing the doorbell. It’s too bad…but the cost, the abuse of hospitality, and the risk kinda militate against it.

Hallowe’en! Bah, humbug!

😉

Dumb tax

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F’cryin’ out loud. In the “I can’t believe it’s possible to be that stupid” department, here’s a memo: when the binger goes off to tell you the bread dough has finished rising, get up and attend to it!

Yesterday afternoon I was dorking around on the Internet, my favorite time-waster, when I heard the breadmaker hollering “beeeep beeeeep beeeeeeeep,” signifying the dough was kneaded and risen, so I should retrieve the stuff, put it in a pan, and preheat the oven while the bread made its second rise. Did I get off my duff? Ohhh noooo. As I recall, what I did was mutter “please. shut. up.” Then forgot all about it.

Forgot it, that is, until I walked into the kitchen and found the stuff had continued to bubble up, overflowed the container, run down into the breadmaker’s innards, and then, its yeasties exhausted, collapsed back on itself.

That was a fine mess to clean up.

Determined not to lose five cups of flour plus the ancillary ingredients, I had the bright idea of adding a little more yeast, turning the stuff back into the freshly cleaned breadmaker, and letting it knead and rise again.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Lemme tellya: it doesn’t taste good! The result was a large blob of bread dough with a strangely rancid, bitter flavor.

At first I thought I could pass it off as sourdough. On second taste…well, no.

Into the garbage with it.

So, I had to mix and bake a whole new batch of bread dough. This occupied my attention until about 9:00 p.m., annoyingly enough. Dumb tax!

Isn’t it interesting how many of the stupid things that happen TO us are actually stupid things that happen BECAUSE of us? Consider how much of the present financial chaos falls into that category.

Now, I will say: I didn’t vote for our present national leadership and thought anyone who did was nuts; I did not get myself into debt over my head; I do not even run a balance on a credit card.BUT…yes, but: stupidly I left the bulk of my retirement money in the stock market, even as I could see the out-of-control train racing up the tracks. If I was smart enough to think of investing monthly savings (meant to pay off a small loan) in the money market, howcum I wasn’t smart enough to think of transferring at least some of my stock holdings out of Vanguard’s Wellington and Windsor II funds into the same Vanguard Premier Money Market fund?

Right now that moron Bush is on the air saying sure, he knows people are losing their retirement savings, “but I think in the long run they’re gunna be fine.” Long run? That illiterate, bird-brained idiot. When you’re 65, 75, 85 and retired or (as I’m about to be) laid off, there IS NO LONG RUN!

We appear to be a nation of morons who have followed a moron into predictable disaster. I will not disown my personal contribution to the national dumb tax fund, nor, I suppose, can any of us. Our dough has bubbled up, spilled over the bowl’s edge, collapsed back onto itself. The breadmaker alarm has been binging for a long time, while we have muttered “please. shut. up.”

Some vacation…

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I took off the four days of use-it-or-lose it time I’d accrued on top of the 267 hours of time My Beloved Employer has to pay me for if I get laid off. Tomorrow is the last of those four days.

With vacations like this, we don’t need salt mines. When I wasn’t sweltering with figures trying to calculate how (if) I can get by without a job, frantically conferring with my financial advisor,and negotiating with potential Copyeditor’s Desk clients, I was filling out job applications or throwing myself around the yard trying to catch up with several months’ worth of neglected gardening chores. Today I tackled the front courtyard: hauled three jammed wheelbarrowsful of plant trimmings and debris out to the garbage can. The other day I hauled two of the same out of the backyard. There’s still a lot to do—more pruning, more cleanup, more hauling. Today I worked until I couldn’t stand up anymore and then collapsed on the sofa and fell asleep.

There’s a phenomenal amount of work around this place that Gerardo doesn’t do, for the grandiose $75 a month I pay him. Grr! I asked him to trim the Texas sage in front. He nipped off about three twigs, far as I can tell. I cut it down two or three feet—quite a trick to do that without turning the thing into a futbol. I like my desert plants to look like desert plants, not like sculptures of soccer balls, but that doesn’t mean I want them to run amok.

Day before yesterday (was it that long ago?) I shoveled the last of the moribund flowers out of the poolside flowerbed, spaded the compost from the bin into the soil, and chuffed the bin full again with new plant debris. Having decided I’d better have some food growing if I was about to be out of a job, instead of flowers I planted beets, chard, carrots, red scallions, and bush peas. And one hopeful tomato, not likely to produce before the frost—but nothing ventured: it was only a couple bucks. One of last spring’s tomato plants survived the summer (a rarity!) and is blooming, so it may produce before winter nips it back.

The package of bush peas held many more dried peas than I had room to plant. Then the light dawned: around the base of the queen palm! Of course! It gets watered by the bubbler that overflows onto the queen palm from the Meyer lemon, and the palm’s trunk is a natural trellis (tho’ supposedly trellissing is optional for these plants). This meant I had to dig up the desert landscaping to plant the peas, which I really didn’t want to do. So I troweled little “cups” into the crushed granite, cut open the fabric ground covering underneath, planted the each seed in the dirt, and then packed the cup with a mix of dirt and potting soil. This was a chore: those guys who landscaped the backyard dumped four or five inches of Madison Gold Minus Three out there. Digging it up is not a joke. The result looks pretty ugly, but the plants should cover it up, and after they’re spentit should be easy enough to shovel the gravel back in place.

I also filled a big pot with soil and planted a bunch of the peas in there. Pruned roses, cut back some other plants, fertilized and watered roses, dug the dead clover and dichondra out from between the flagstones. What killed that stuff? Gerardo thinks it didn’t get watered, and I will say: it was dry. But it’s been thriving all summer—just suddenly keeled over. Pearl mites?

The watering system doesn’t seem to be working. A couple of sections are nonfunctional. So…why are my water bills through the roof? I suspect there’s a leak somewhere.

Coping with that is more than I can deal with just now, and so I think I’ll probably shut it down and drag hoses. Argh.

Cleaned the hummingbird feeders, made new hummer food, reloaded and rehung the feeders.

Backwashed the pool, refilled the filter with diatomaceous earth, treated the water. It needs a chlorine shock treatment, which I will administer once it’s REALLY too cold to swim. We’re right at the verge of that: this afternoon it was mighty crisp, but it still felt soooo good after spending four or five hours sweating in the sun.

Today trimmed part of the desert willow (didn’t do it much good; had to get the saw out to cut one limb) and the Texas ebony. Invented a system for tying the bougainvillea to the block wall without drilling into the wall and without gluing hooks to the wall. Pruned the bougainvillea and tied it up. Pruned the Texas sage. Cut my foot open on a cactus; bandaged foot, dug out spines; drove one spine in too deep to get it out. Trimmed back the palo brea and the vitex. Hauled heavy metal chairs back and forth. Moved the rustic (read “rusty”) iron crucifix from behind the boug and figured out how to hang it on a different wall without having to drill another hole. Dug the dead grass and weeds out from between the flagstones. Took the scissors and trimmed down the overgrown, leggy, dried-out Mexican primroses. Jammed two communal garbage barrels full of trimmings and plant debris. Left an incredible mess on the ground to shop-vac up after resting. Repaired the pool cleaner & got it running again.

And now I need to get up and finish the job. But first must dig the out the thorn, which hurts.

Ain’t homeownership grand?
EveningUpdate
Fed dog; dog evidently not annoyed by spinach (human having run out of preferred veggies), which she normally picks out and daintily sets on the floor: food dish emptied and chased around the kitchen floor. Dug cactus spine out of foot, accompanied by some profanity. Dragged shop-vac to front courtyard to inhale up leaves, compost, and dirt. Cleaned out four clogs, left courtyard looking about 110% better. Paused to feel smug. Dumped plant debris, compost, & dirt into compost bin. Cleaned out shop-vac; washed filter (did you know you can actually rinse out one of those expensive paper filters that come with shop-vacs? yesh!). Put shop-vac away.
Fired up BBQ; cooked a couple hamburg patties and some freezer-burned mystery meat for dog; cod filet for human. Incredible dinner: how did this happen?
Accidental Wonderful Dinner
You need:

§Charcoal grill
§Charcoal
§Hardwood chops (hickory chips were on hand)
§Filet of firm-fleshed fish such as cod or salmon
§1 cup rice (I used converted; you could use regular white or brown rice but try to avoid instant rice…ick!)
§Olive oil
§21/2 cups water or broth; a little wine or sherry optional
§Chives or other herbs
§Asparagus
§Tarragon or other herb, to taste
§Small blob of butter or splash of olive oil
§Tinfoil
§Your favorite way to light coals
§Fresh lime or lemon
Step 1: Start the charcoal. Set the hardwood chips to soak in cold water.
Step 2: While the charcoal is firing up, pour a little olive oil in the bottom of a frying pan over medium-high heat. Add a cup of rice. Let this turn golden brown; stir now and again. Pay attention: once the browning starts, it can move right along. When the rice is evenly brown throughout, add2 1/2 cups of some sort of liquid. Since I was sharing this with the dog and I had no chicken or beef broth, I used water only. If no canine roommates are in the offing, mix and match to your taste. Sherry is a nice blandishment; so is white wine. Combine about 1/2 cup of either with broth or water. Whatever: add to the rice when the rice is browned, turn the heat down to medium-low, and set the timer for about 25 minutes if you’re using converted or about 35 or 40 minutes if you’re using regular white or brown rice.
Step 3: Wash and trim the asparagus. Set it on a sheet of tinfoil. Add a small blob of butter or a splash of olive oil; top with pinch of tarragon or any other herb that suits your fancy. Wrap tightly in tinfoil.
Step 4: Check on charcoal. Pour yourself a glass of wine or beer. Supervise in a desultory way until the charcoal is ready to use. At that point, place charcoal in grill (if it’s not already there; I use a chimney, so have to dump charcoal into the BBQ when it’s covered with white ash). Drain water off wood chips and toss wood chips on top of charcoal. Place grill over delicious charcoal and wood chops.
Step 5: Place the tinfoil package of asparagus over the heat. Rub a little olive oil over the fish and put the fish over the heat. Close the cover.
Step 6: Continue drinking and supervising. Keep an eye on the rice: don’t let it burn dry. When you flip the fish over, also flip over the tinfoil package. Watch rice.
Rice, fish, and veggies should get done at about the same time. Test fish by gently pushing apart with a barbecue spatula. It should flake but not be dried out.
Step7: Retrieve fish and asparagus from grill. Serve on plates with rice and juicy cut lime or lemon. Add some chives to the rice, if available, or dried herbs and a little butter. Be prepared for dog, if available, to try to sponge dinner from humans.
Step 7: Eat. Enjoy.
And so to bed.

Nifty new toy

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The Barbecues Galore grill I bought a year or so ago experienced its third truly scary fire the other day, the second that was certifiably dangerous.

First time, M’hijito was present. The grill has a drip pan for grease, very nice except it’s about an inch above the propane tank. That caught fire in a big way. I’d managed to turn off the burners and was about to approach it with baking soda in hand when M’hijito pointed out that it was so close to the propane and so hot there was some real chance the tank could explode.

Exit the spectators, stage left.

To everyone’s relief, the fire burned out before it had any spectacular effects. After that I was really careful to be sure the drip pan didn’t collect any grease.

Last week the whole darn thing caught fire. It took three or four cups of baking soda to put out the flames, which, as you can imagine, didn’t do the grill any good. Or the remains of the food, not that any of it would’ve been edible anyway.

At this time of year, Lowe’s and Home Depot are having a frenzy, trying to get rid of their unsold barbecue grills. In Arizona that’s weird, because outdoor cooking season starts about in October and extends through May. But those huge warehouse chains operate on East-Coast time, totally out of sync with local reality.

Also out of sync with The Budget of the Coming Depression. Prices of new propane BBQs range from around $300 to around $700. On sale.

Moving on….

Yesterday I picked up a Weber kettle grill, figuring that with the chimney-style charcoal lighter I already had, I could manage somehow to cook the occasional steak or hamburger over charcoal.

Hilarious! In the first place, a part was missing. But more entertaining: unlike the old, sturdy, solid Weber grills, this thing appeared to have been made by hammering out a few beer cans and bending them into kettle shape. It was so lightweight that when you lifted it by the front handle to move it around on its two wheels, it wanted to tip over backward.

Moving on…

Returned that to Lowe’s. Saw nothing else desirable here. Onward to the Depot.

YES! They had the very smoker/grill thing that M’hijito, the Exceptionally Brilliant Chef, uses to turn out incredible food. How much? $157!

One heck of an improvement over the cost of a gas grill, and you can’t blow up the neighborhood with the thing.

Early this morning I put up Gerardo the Lawn Dude to helping me wrangle the thing into the car and then get it out and into the backyard. Being the macho sort of guy he is, he also saw to it, once he’d put it in place on the slab behind the fireplace chimney, that every bolt and nut was solidly tightened down.

It’s really nothing but a metal barrel with vents, a chimney, and some racks. You have to cure it, much as you’d cure a cast-iron skillet, by painting the entire interior & the grills with vegetable oil and then burning a slow fire inside it for two or three hours. It’s undergoing that process as we scribble. Tomorrow: grilled hamburgers par excellence!

Gerardo. As usual, he wouldn’t take any extra pay. I tried to gift him with a half-dozen Coronas and a fistful of tree-ripened limes. He took one, drank it on the spot, and declined the lime.

This is a cultural problem. How am I going to express some appreciation to this lovely man without offending? I’ll think of something. Maybe food: homebaked brownies? He has a cute little kid and a wife who has hit the 21st century running (she doesn’t cook).

Oh, how he coveted the tractor-style riding lawnmowers. While we were waiting for the HD guy to come along with a large piece of equipment to retrieve the last assembled smoker/BBQ from its shelf near the ceiling, Gerardo tried out every one of the tractor lawnmowers. What could a bright, hard-working young man do with one of those things?

Well, I figure at Christmas maybe I can give him a bonus, either cash or a generous HD gift card. Either one, I expect, would go a long way toward improving Gerardo’s business. Must start saving up.

At any rate, thanks to Gerardo I now have a large, down-home, amazing barbecue and smoker Thing that will do handsomely to cook up some mighty fine vittles. And it didn’t bankrupt me.