Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

The Starbucks Jamboree

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How many Starbucks stores does the world need, really?

A prospective client wants to meet at the Starbucks “at Paradise Valley Mall.” Google up the address, and you get not one, not two, but three such bistros. Email the client: which one?

She says the one inside the mall — which is now just another ghost mall inhabited by low-end anchor stores like Penney’s and Costco — is closed. Okayyy…that leaves two others, within walking distance of each other.

Really…how much bad coffee can Americans drink?

It’s one girl’s opinion, of course (apparently the only girl’s), but I think Starbucks dispenses pretty awful coffee. The only thing the stuff is good for is mixing with cream and sugary flavoring goop. You can get a halfway decent cuppa there buy asking for a café Americana, which is actually just watered-down espresso. Espresso is made from a somewhat higher quality coffee bean, because it takes a better quality to withstand being roasted black.

I personally object to paying that much for any serving of coffee, particularly when I can make a better one in about ten minutes without driving across the city for the privilege.

In that department, I see that Costco is again carrying San Francisco brand dark roast beans. That is bar none the best coffee I’ve ever bought, this side of a very fancy specialty gourmet store, now defunct. My life was about shattered when I flew into Costco in search of another bagful and found it GONE! But the last time I was there, lo! It was back!

At any rate, my new glasses are ready. This junket will allow me to kill several birds with one stone: meet the proposed new client, refill my Costco cash cards, pick up the lunettes, fill up the car, and maybe even buy another bag of that coffee lest Costco decide to deep-six it again.

As we know, as soon as Costco finds out you like something, they immediately get rid of it. 😀

What Planet Am I On?

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Surely this isn’t Earth. 😀

So after the computer spent three days in the shop and it took another half-day to fix the mess that sojourn made of DropBox, I was way, way behind on the indexing project. Let the client know it’s gonna be late and then set to work frantically trying to catch up.

After a fashion. First things first, though: in the chore-a-day department, yesterday was dust-the-furniture day. In theory, the plan was also to oil the furniture, something that hasn’t been done in many a moon. Some of the pieces were looking pretty parched.

Was feeling guilty yesterday about suggesting the cleaning lady was less than perfectly bright just because she twisted the vacuum cleaner extension cord like a licorice whip. That was before I discovered the greasy rings in the middle of the living-room’s leather chair, where she put something oily down. Probably, I figure, a can or bottle of some furniture polish she dragged in. Whatever, it wrecked the chair’s seat, thankyouverymuch.

Not that the chair and the sofa were in what you might call pristine condition. The leather was dried out and tired, as was the leather on the much better quality chair in the family room, a piece that came from Crate & Barrel. That one was not just dry and tired, it had been scratched up by several dogs and scraped by somebody whapping it against something. Probably a previously unnoticed moving-man attack.

In the freshly cleaned-out and organized garage cupboard, I found a bottle of orange oil, and in the hall closet, a container of mink oil. I’d heard, shortly after I’d bought it, that mink oil is not all that great for reviving tired leather. But not having anything else…

It seems to have worked well: moistened up the parched, dried-out areas and darkened the leather enough to sorta hide the grease rings. Didn’t get rid of them, but made them less noticeable. It really helped on the family-room chair, though: completely hid all the Charley scratches, all the Ruby scratches, and all the Cassie scratches, as well as any number of other nicks, dings, and gouges. That chair looks practically new. The living-room sofa and chair just look…a lot better.

This was quite a job. Then I had on the list to oil the casework. What a difference it makes to massage a decent oil into a Thos. Moser or a Stickley piece! Wow!

My mother’s furniture — two bureau drawers, a dressing table, and a small desk from the late 1950s in what was then the Danish modern style — have a sort of golden finish on them with some kind of shellac over it. Oiling it makes it look prettier but does little, as far as I can tell, for the wood. But the Thos. Moser chairs certainly seemed to like it.

Contemplating those old 1950s pieces, I recalled that the finish is rubbed off the front edge of my mother’s dressing table, where she sat to apply her make-up every day. Literally every day: she wouldn’t go out of the house without being fully made up. I figured if we came back to the States in 1957, when she bought that furniture, and she lived to 1976, then she used that table for 19 years. That means she sat in front of it to paint her face 6,764 times!

Give or take. Some days she probably applied fresh makeup before going out for dinner or some such thing. And the last three months or so of her life, she was too sick to do much else than lay in the bed and die.

Oh well. Don’t smoke, folks!

One of the cleaning lady’s most endearing traits is a passionate sense of orderliness. This woman loves for things to stand in straight lines, just…so. When she puts your tschotskes back on a table or a mantelpiece, she puts them in a tidy, straight row, exactly the same distance apart — as though she measured their positions with a tape measure.

I, on the other hand, prefer to organize things aysmmetrically. So whenever I dust the mantel, I reorganize her meticulous layout to fit my disorderly taste:

{chortle!} Does that or does that not look better?

These chores added up to a bit of a project. So I didn’t get much paying work done.

Come the dawn, I had to sit down with the half-forgotten index and start up the process again. So I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked, hoping to get through about 50 pages of the page proofs. Got almost up to my goal, very tired, when BLINK!

The goddamn computer shut down AGAIN!

Jezus Aitch Keerist! I couldn’t believe it.

It came back up, surprisingly. But of course, the file it brought up was not complete: it had lost upwards of an hour’s worth of work.

So I call AppleCare and get, for the first time in recorded history, a truly unhelpful Apple Support tech. He wanted to get me into iCloud to fool around, but I couldn’t find a password that worked, so he wanted me to change my password. And his instructions did not work. He finally hung up in frustration, about 30 seconds before I was about to do so.

So now I’m in despair, figuring I’m going to have to do all that brain-banging BORING work over again.

Start fiddling around, and lo! Somehow the more recent version of the file pops up!

It’s a miracle. The thing has actually lost nothing.

Nor should it have: Word on the MacBook is set to save every five minutes (in anticipation of just this sort of contingency…), and so there was no reason (in theory) that it should have lost an hour’s worth of data.

Another burst of labor indexed 150 pages, about halfway through the book. At that rate, I should finish the draft of this index in about three days, and then be able to send it off to the client the middle of next week. Not on time, but not so very late.

Then I can start on the next book.

 

Running on High-Test Gas…

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Flying around like a Corvette all day… This, after hanging on the phone until after 11 p.m. last night coping with the aftermath of a weird little Apple crash. At first even the very smart lady tech in Australia couldn’t figure it out, but then she noticed a tiny detail and presto-changeo! Problem instantly solved,.

Those people are Apple are freaking amazing.

Off to Costco with my favorite agèd friends this morning. They were circumspect in their buying approach today, but I’m afraid I went off the deep end. I haven’t made a major Costco run in two or three months and so was out of almost everything. So that devolved into a frenzy. At any rate, the freezer is now full again, the dog is supplied with a new potful of chicken, and I found a kewl pair of sky-blue Glorias. Hallelujah.

Cleaned out the storage room closet, a mess exceeded only by the office closet. That was one helluva project. But my, it’s nice and tidy now…unlike the back of my car, which overflows with junk to be donated or thrown out!

Some stuff leaves you wondering…what on earth was i thinking when i put this away? The towels with the frayed edges, for example: why are we keeping these, again? Other stuff: sentimentalia. How could you toss it? I found a box my mother left me, filled with old, evidently hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, all starched and pressed. I think either her grandmother or her aunt must have made them.

Hm. Probably my great-aunt. My great-grandmother knitted; my great-aunt sewed. But…well, who knows? Anyway, they’re museum pieces now.

As, I suspect, is the vintage 1970 Heathware in the hideous muddy olive green, all the rage when we were young things. Truly: every bit as ugly as the battleship gray and eye-searing white in High Style today. My mother must have thought something along those lines: she admired the Heath stoneware, but bought herself a set in white — now in my son’s possession.

Heath recently quit making its coupe style. So those pieces — in both sets — will soon be spectacularly expensive collector’s items. They’re already pricey. I got one of the last of the white ones available after a kid busted one of my son’s plates. He’ll have to ride herd more carefully after this, I reckon, because replacing them now will be outstandingly expensive.

Ugh. Cop helicopter buzzing around. What now?

The other night’s gunshot, noted in passing in one of these posts, was some chucklehead getting himself shot at a house brawl party over on ’tother side of Conduit of Blight Blvd. Well. Better him than me. I guess. Moral of the story? Don’t go to parties in Meth Central.

Also managed to index another 15 pages of the first of two academic anthologies I’m supposed to be working on. No doubt more would have gotten done had I refrained from sleeping half the afternoon. But alas, I did swill down a couple glasses of wine with the beloved Costco roast chicken this afternoon, which caused me to fall face-forward into the sack.

Tomorrow will be occupied, too, with a lot of distractions from paying work: Pick up the cleaned and restored old Shark vac, meet a client on the west side of town, pay a visit to the credit union. Three errands I’d like to get done in one trip, though that will not be very practical…because on top of all that, the cleaning lady will be underfoot all day. So I’m thinking…maybe…make two trips westerly: pick up the vacuum early in the day, run by the CU on the way home, then make a separate junket to meet the proposed new client.

Yeah. That will waste gas. But it’s probably more sane.

To the extent that there is any sanity around this place… 😮

 

Closets

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So, in the chore-a-day continuum, today is the first day of the Great Closet Clean-up. Every closet and cabinet in the house is jammed with 15 years’ worth of collected junk, about 14 years’ worth of which could go. So I decided to add shoveling out one closet, cabinet, or piece of furniture with drawers to the job of the day. A four-bedroom shack has rather more closets and cabinets than one would like, especially after the proprietor has hired some dude to line the garage walls with storage. Videlicet:

  • Hall linen closet
  • Vacuum (coat) closet
  • Master bedroom closet
  • Guest bedroom closet
  • Storage room closet
  • Office closet
  • Desk drawers
  • Armoire
  • Bathroom 1 cabinets
  • Bathroom 2 cabinets
  • Garage cabinets east
  • Garage cabinets west
  • Garage open shelves

This sounds fairly dreadful, because it is fairly dreadful. Some of the junk residing in those sites has been there since I moved into this shack, yea verily back in 2004. But…it appears that the challenge is not as Brobdingnagian as it appears.

Today I got through the hall linen closet, the vacuum closet, and the storage room closet, killing off three proposed days’ worth of projects in a single day. At this rate, I should be able to get through the entire consolidated frolic in about four or five days.

The problem with projects like this: one thing leads to another. You find some object…and wonder what is it? And why do you have it? In the back of the hall closet I found a gadget that contained butane or propane or God only knows what. A gift, no doubt. Not having used it and not knowing what it could possibly be for, I tossed it in the trash bag.

This caused the thing to spring a leak.

In the house. In the confined hall, Yes: s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s

Grab whatever-it-is and hurry out to the alley garbage with it (hoping no one is around to see). Toss it. Run away. Back inside the shack, continue the task at hand, and find some other component of…whatever-it-is. March that out to the garbage, too. So far no explosion has taken place. Thank Heaven for small favors.

There’s the stuff that you haven’t seen in years and don’t know why you kept it; the debris from past cleaning-lady attacks; the junk stash attack…

Here’s a hippy-dippy ash tray from the 1970s, a globe of polished granite annoyingly dyed teal (it was one of my generation’s colors: we called it “turquoise,” but it was the same color that appears in the presently stylish annoying palette of battleship gray + eye-searing white + teal). It has two stupid little half-tube-shaped slots drilled out of its lip, presumably to accommodate cigarettes: i.e., it was designed by some clown who didn’t smoke.

Off-hand I cannot recall whether this thing was my mother’s (the mother who smoked herself into the grave, the mother who on her deathbed was consuming six packs a day, yes, that mother), or whether my mother made me buy it to accommodate her chain-smoking habit while she was at my house. Why did I keep the damn thing, if it wasn’t actually hers? Possibly to accommodate some other nicotine addict who insisted on smoking (outside, damnit!) at my house?

No one that I know smokes anymore.

Throw it away? What? It was my mother’s. Maybe.

A brass lamp finial. What? Examine all the antique lamps in the house (that would be all the lamps, just about). Not a single one of them is missing a finial. WTF? Stash for some future closet clean-out.

Up on the top shelf, where it can’t be broken, resides the sentimental stuff. Like Dot-Dot’s exquisitely beautiful hand-painted porcelain plate, a gift to me and my son. She lived around the corner from us in the historic Encanto district, and she was one of two women of her generation who babysat children in the neighborhood. She watched M’hijito two or three days a week — the other woman filled in the remaining days — while I drove out to a part-time job at the Great Desert University and filled my remaining hours trying to finish my dissertation. Dot-Dot was a gifted porcelain painter: she taught classes filled with women craving to emulate her. For her to give us one of her (amazingly expensive) pieces was a great generosity.

An empty plastic squeeze bottle: move it to empty jar collection in the garage, thereby deferring  disposal to some other day.

An unknown blue fluid stashed in an old glass Straus Family Creamery heavy cream bottle. Dump. Bottle to dishwasher, thence to empty jar collection (see above)

A plethora of prescription meds, including three bottles of a dangerous addictive drug dispensed during the Year of the Surgeries, nary a single pill of which I ever swallowed. Here’s something from a vet called “banamine“: it’s an injectable drug used for muscle spasm. Label says to “apply on affected area.” Probably for Cassie’s hot spots. Dare we ask, WTF????

Something there is that’s kind of scary about the sheer quantity of the prescription drugs that have been dispensed for me and for the dogs. Some of these bottles, I’ve never even opened.

No freaking wonder we have a plague of drug addicts in this country.

Here’s a jacket in the hall closet that must have belonged to someone else: it doesn’t even fit me!

In the guest bedroom closet: a little suit made by a local tailor, supposedly to fit me. When D-XH and I were in England, where I spent three months in archival research for the dissertation, we visited Scotland and bought my mother the richest, most wonderful, beautiful wool tweed fabric. She sewed handsomely, and I thought she would make herself something with it.

But no. Being a mother, she regarded it as a keepsake and squirreled it away for safekeeping. After she died, my father gave it to me.

I took it to a woman who billed herself as a tailor and asked her to make me a suit — a skirt and jacket. She did…but “tailor” was not exactly le mot juste. She apparently made it from some Simplicity pattern — she couldn’t even be bothered to spring for a Vogue pattern, I guess. The result was amateurish and ill-fitting and it has just hung in the closet. Forever.

It did not fit then. And now that I am old and have spawned a child, it does not fit hilariously. What a shame. I’ve hung onto it all these years imagining (occasionally) that maybe someday I could find a real tailor (right! In lovely uptown Phoenix, Arizona!) who could somehow rebuild it or just take it apart and make something with whatever fabric could be salvaged.

Not so much.

But the moths haven’t eaten it. That’s something. I guess. So…this afternoon I tossed the jacket in the car with the rest of the unwearable stuff to be donated. Decided to deconstruct the skirt, salvage what I can of the fabric, and make a pillow of it.

Yes. That’s something. Eh?

Two indexing assignments came in yesterday and now today in comes an inquiry from a self-publishing author: will I copyedit his 85.000-word sci-fi thriller?

Why shore, for a fee. But it’ll have to wait till I can get out from under the academic opuses. While the author’s on the phone and the hamburger’s on the grill, my son, fresh off the road from Colorado, shows up at the door to collect his dog.

Is there some reason why every damnfool thing happens at once?

So now I am fed. Four of the proposed 13 shoveling-out chores are done (hall linen closet, vacuum bedroom closet, guest bedroom closet, armoire) are done. Email is unanswered. I am tired. And the dog remains to be taken for a decent walk.

And so…away.

 

El Gobierno Quiere Ayudarte…

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El gobierno quiere ayudarte… The government wants to help you! HOW, after all, would we ever get by without being made to traipse back out to the car from the pharmacy counter to retrieve still MORE identification so we can buy a package of nasal decongestant? This means, after standing in line behind three customers, I have to trudge outside, dodge the panhandlers, trudge back inside, and stand behind three more customers.

Y’know what I think?

O’course you do, but lest we somehow miss the point: Dammit! If you want to convert a box of Sudafed into meth and snort it up your goddamn nose, you DESERVE WHAT YOU GET. And if you’re stupid enough to buy meth from a drug dealer who has distilled the junk from a boxful of Sudafed, YOU EFFIN’ DESERVE WHAT YOU GET.

Let them eat fuckin’ cake!

Okay, okay, let’s admit it: weirdly enough, I did have some fun traipsing in and out and in and out of the Albertson’s.

First, on the way back in, I pass the BIGGEST, yea verily THE BADDEST, most MASSIVE dude you have ever seen in your entire life, marching out of the store with a bouquet of flowers in his paw.

Awwwww…soooo adorable! And, alas, born 30 years too late.

Moving on, I rejoin the pharmacy line, where I fall in behind an Old Dude. He’s loafing in an electric scooter which, as it develops, he doesn’t really need. But in his old age, he has discovered which side his butter’s breaded on. He and I chat about the joys of retirement, which allow us to not give a damn whether we’re first in line. He says he loves to go fishin’. I ask where he likes to fish. He names a park pond over in Po’ Folk Country, where if you fork over a fee for an “urban fishing license” (don’t ask, goddammit: el gobierno quiere nothing more than ayudarte!) you can catch catfish, a creature he finds delectable. And you know he comes from your father’s social class, which causes you at once to love him and to fear him. 😀

The guy behind the counter, also born about 30 years too late, is another of the cutest things you’ve ever seen.

It takes this lovely creature a good 10 minutes of farting around, filling out online forms and more online forms and MORE online forms to sell you ONE BOX of menacing nasal decongestant. This is OK, because of course it provides you just that much more time to admire his adorableness.

How can you possibly be annoyed when you get to absorb this much cuteness and adorableness from an array of random males?

Well, of course, you can’t.

You CAN be annoyed, however, when you get home and find you can’t break into the mini-Fort Knoxes with which El Gobierno arranges to protect you and your brainless children from yourselves. It damn near takes a chain saw to break the lid off the squirt bottle of nasal decongestant, and putting the Sudafed knockoff away in such a form that you can get at it in the middle of the night without driving yourself into a flying rage breaks your fingernails and requires you to find a jar with a lid and a blank label in your garage junk collection.

So yes. Yes, you are pissed by the time you get these medicaments into your house and into a state that allows you to use them without rage-inducing hassle when you will need to use them.

Porque el gobierno quiere ayudarte. By golly!

Eatin’, Workin’, Doggin’…Rainin’?

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Workin’…

WooHOO! I’m halfway through the last piece in this issue of Chicana/Latina Studies, our semiannual client journal. This issue seems to be an especially good effort. One of the authors is such a good writer and she has such an interesting subject that, IMHO, she could be writing her stuff up for The New Yorker. She’d need to put out some effort to learn to write creative nonfiction and escape the academicese, but given the quality of her style, I’d say that would not be an unreasonably tall order for her.

What with The Kid’s project to streak through a new master’s degree program (while holding down her usual two full-time jobs…), I suggested that if she wanted me to do the whole job, rather than splitting it the way we usually do, that would be okay by me….

Yipes! Don’t break the Internet leaping at that one, Kid!

😀

So I’ve been reading all the copy for the entire issue, which is fine by me because a) not a lot of work is in-house just now and b) things having been mighty slow over the past quarter, I sure can use the monnaie.

It’s gone a lot faster than I thought it would. So I think, anyhow: these things will still have to be subjected to a second reading. But still, it appears that won’t take so very long. With any luck. the copy can wing its way back to the journal in another couple days, record time for a whole issue’s turn-around.

And lhudly sing huzzah, a new spectacular Chinese scientist is at the door, wanting an estimate on an arcane paper. This is good: we have missed our beloved Chinese scientists. It has been a slow 2018 Q4!

Eatin’…

By golly, I can not figure out why anyone spends their money and their time on third-rate fast food, when it’s so quick, so easy, and so amazingly delicious to toss together an amazing meal out of real, unprocessed, healthy food.

Today it was a few scallops sautéed with some garlic and some cut-up asparagus, tossed over some Italian pasta (tagliatelle!) and doused with some Pomí tomatoes, an Italian answer to canned tomatoes that comes in a box.

Failed to take a picture of that, but did grab one of some shrimp and spinach that was awesome…and now, having “organized” the 87 gerjillion images on the hard disk, have lost it. But…it was awesome. And took all of about 10 or 15 minutes to fix. To wit:

  • Defrost and peel a few big shrimp (once called “prawns”), per diner
  • Chop one or two cloves of garlic
  • Cut a lemon in half
  • Grab a bag of frozen chopped spinach out of the freezer
  • Pour a little olive oil into a frying pan.
  • Get some curry or cumin off the spice shelf
  • Optionally, have a tablespoon or two of butter at hand.

Sauté the shrimp with the garlic in the olive oil. Sprinkle the shrimp with curry or cumin, to taste. Don’t overcook. About the time you figure the shrimp is done, squeeze some lemon juice over it.

Remove the shrimp from the pan. Add a little more olive oil or, if you prefer, the butter. Add as much frozen spinach to the pan as you think the diners will eat. Stir this over medium heat until it’s defrosted and cooked to your taste. Add a teaspoon or so of sugar, if you so desire, to soften the flavor of the spinach.

Pile the spinach on a plate. Top with a few cooked shrimp. Et voilà: very easy, very fast.

Fill out the meal with a sliced tomato and some sliced avocado on the side.

Doggin’…

Cassie the Corgi steadfastly refused to use the doggy door installed, lo! these many years ago, for Anna the German Shepherd and Walt the Greyhound. So I shut it and locked it and forgot about it: it became part of the wall. As it were.

Welp…of late I’ve been invited on this day trip and that day trip. My son has indicated less than high joy at the prospect of babysitting Ruby the Corgi while I gallivant around the state, and my friends have evinced even less excitement at the thought of taking her along. I can’t leave her locked in the house all day. And I certainly can’t leave her out in the rain, heat, and coyote territory for eight or ten hours at a time.

Would she….? Could she…learn to use the doggy door?

Who’d’ve thunk it: the answer is she sure can. She quickly got the idea of pushing her way out. Coming in is a different matter: she doesn’t seem to remember that if she can get out through the plastic flaps, she can get back in through them, too.

I think a week or so of drilling (read “bribing with doggy treats”) will persuade her that she can come as well as go.

She’s a smart little dog. But one must bear in mind that she’s not a puppy. Dogs, like humans, tend to get sot in their ways as they age. So it will take a little longer for her to set both ideas in her mind: out and in.

Not real thrilled at the idea of going off and leaving that thing hanging open… She is, after all, decidedly not a German shepherd. A grown man can climb through that thing (and has). But I think I can disguise the area around the opening so it can’t be seen from the back wall. If someone’s going to climb over the cat barrier to break into the house, they’ll break in through the back door or a window, anyway. So though the dog door does indeed present some risk, it’s probably no worse than any other risk here in the ’hood.

Rain…

Not so much, despite the alleged “atmospheric river.” {snicker!} It had been sprinkling shortly before the dog and I rolled out of the sack this morning, but despite beautiful, plump, fluffy clouds floating through the blue, blue sky, no serious rain has developed. It is, however, perfect weather for a doggy-walk. Particularly if you’re a corgi.