Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Greta

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Do you ever have some deep regret come back and haunt you? Something you could have done, you should have done, you didn’t do…

Greta, of all the dogs in my life, all the many dogs, was the one dog I’ve loved more than any other dog, and quite possibly more than any other human. She was the most superb spirit I’ve ever known, through 75 years on this endless earth.

We’d acquired Greta the German Shepherd from some neighbors who divorced. I don’t know how old she was, but I think she was around four, maybe even five years old at the time. She was fully grown, settled into calm maturity when we acquired her.

A few years later my son was born. Then a few years after that, we moved uptown to a new old house in a new old neighborhood. Greta came with us. By then we’d gone through two other German shepherds and a Labrador retriever. If Greta was three when we got her, she was eight when we moved to North Central.

Another three years or so went by.

Greta liked to take the sun in the back yard, loafing outside the big Arcadia doors that opened off the living room.

This one late morning I happened to look out there and saw her laying there in a puddle of her own urine.

I had been told, back in the day, that when an elderly dog became incontinent, that was the end of its life: the time had come to put the dog down.

Steeling myself, I called the vet, put her in the car, and drove her down there.

This vet was a friend of mine. But he wasn’t around when we got down to his office. The receptionist told me to take a seat in the waiting area, which I did.

Greta was actually OK. She was just kind of doddering around, looking a little puzzled.

Across the room was a man and his…whatever the f*ck she was…girlfriend, abused wife, concubine, WTF. He had a nondescript dog with him, large and pit-bullish.

Greta is just standing there. She’s not doing anything to anyone.

The guy suddenly growls at me, “Keep that dog away from me. If you don’t, I will let my dog go and it will kill your animal.”

Huh?

I was so stunned by this attack I didn’t know what to say.

He repeated his threat, into my silence. And then he repeated it again.

I got up, handed Greta over to the receptionist, and left.

Why?

First, why did I not tell the receptionist (who had walked out of the room when this happened) that this guy was threatening me and she should either tell him to leave or call the police?

Why did I not turn to his miserable little woman and say, “Hey, sister: pay attention. A man who will mistreat another woman and some aging dog will do the same to you. Get away, bitch, while you can!”

Why did I not say to the little bastard, “Make my day!”

Why did I leave my beloved dog there?

Why did I not ask, “Is there something that can be done about her incontinence? Can we fix this, even if just for a little while?”

Well. In those days I didn’t have my day made by confrontation. Today I’d take that sh!thead on, even if I had to do it with my bare hands. Today I’d have a cell phone, and I would call the police and say some rabid guy was threatening to sic his dog on me and I needed a cop there right away. Today at the very least I would have started shouting at the top of my lungs for Jerry, my veterinary friend.

In those days, I’d never heard of a UTI. And even if I had heard of it, there may not have been the antibiotic treatments we have now.

In those days, I’d been told, more than once, that when an agèd dog loses control of its bladder or bowels, the kindest thing is to put it down.

In those days, a woman stayed quiet, lady-like.

In those days, I never would even have thought of standing up to a male.

Every now and again, this vignette comes back to me — like now — and reduces me to tears.

Why Toilet Paper? Well…here’s why

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So we’re sittin’ around here, contemplating the mysteries of Life, the Universe, and All That, when one of the greatest of mysteries impinges upon our consciousness: Why are vast tribes of people hoarding toilet paper, in the expectation of a (usually rather mild) disease that is unlikely to cause diarrhea? Even with with quarantining a given (which it was not when the toilet paper mania began), what is the fixation on TP?

Welp, I have — AH HAH! — a theory.

Here ’tis…

Funny’s Theory of Toilet Paper Affection

Among the American affluent classes, and the somewhat moneyed middle classes, everybody and his little brother, sister, aunt & uncle has a vacation home in the boondocks: In Arizona, for example, that would mean forest and desert retreats like Pinetop, Payson, Strawberry, Prescott, Yarnell, the North Rim, the White Mountains, Bisbee, Patagonia, and many waypoints north to south, east to west. Most of these second homes are furnished for weekends; some for a month or two of full-time residence during the summer. But by and large they stand vacant and waiting.

So. If you could see Armageddon coming — in the form of a contagious disease that was likely to get you and your family confined to your home for several weeks — where would you rather be held captive? In a plaster and styrofoam hut in a jam-packed eave-to-eave suburb? Or in a glorified “cabin” (more like resort quarters) on three acres of forest or scenic grassland?

You got it.

If we still had the ranch up on the Rim outside of Yarnell, that’s where I’d be right now.

And what are you gonna do if you figure the kids are going to be shut out of school, you’re probably going to be told to work from home (or be laid off), and all of you are going to be locked up together for anywhere from two weeks to three months?

What you are gonna do is load the kids and the dog into the vehicle, turn on the burglar alarm, lock up the shack in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun,  and drive up to your vacation cabin. That’s what you’re gonna do.

And if you’re going to hole up for some period up to, say, 90 days with your three kids, the family dog, the cat, and two sets of in-laws, what are you gonna need, in addition to food? That’s right:

Toilet paper!

Nor would you need an expensive, maintenance-sucking second home to feel the impulse to stock up with necessaries. Many people in our parts have campers — either pickup shells that convert your Ford F-150 into a rolling hunter’s cabin or fancy living-rooms on wheels of various sizes, some as capacious as a small house. What would you bring with you if you figured you were going to be living out of your car or camper for anywhere from three weeks to three months?

Hell, yeah:

Toilet paper!

Even if you don’t have a vehicle tricked out to accommodate the Life of Riley, plain old camping is just not that hard — even over the long term. SDXB and I did it for three straight months, trekking through the outback of Alaska and Canada. With a camp tent, a propane campstove, a few dishes, and a couple of towels. We slept under a roof one (1) night, when it was raining too hard to cope.

We did it for fun, so trust me: it was no particular hardship.

But…if you weren’t an experienced long-haul camper but you figured you’d better be prepared to stay in the boondocks for a good long while, and you planned on car-camping rather than hiking, what provision (other than food) would you really, truly, NOT want to run out of?

Yup:

Toilet paper!

heee! So this is the theory. People aren’t buying TP to stock their houses here in the Big City. They’re using it to stock vacation homes, campers, cars, duffle bags full of camping gear. They’re not stocking one home. They’re stocking two, or even maybe three, if they have a vacation house and a camper.

Rain on the Roof…

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Looks like the deluge predicted for the Valley is starting to let up. Hereabouts, a patter on the roof started around 4 a.m. Rained pretty briskly for most of the morning, and now, pushing noon, it’s still drizzling.

But gray. Warm and gray.

We’re supposed to sing at a wedding this afternoon. What a glum day for a wedding!

Reminds me of the day the ex- and I married. We’d had to put the wedding off and put it off and put it off, because my father was stuck at sea in a major storm off Alaska. Finally we gave up and went ahead without him.

And of course, the day we selected to go ahead with the ceremony willy-nilly: that was the day the storm blew across the desert from the West Coast. It rained just like it’s doing now, all day long and into the night.

I remember thinking that I’d been told rain on your wedding day was a bad augur, an omen of bad luck.

So it seems.

That evening on our way to a fancy restaurant where we proposed to celebrate our match, the car’s wheel hit a curb and busted the tire. Water was rushing over the curb. D-XH got out of the car, in the dark, in the rain, in the flood…in a suit, in his good shoes…to change the tire.

It was the first and the last time I ever heard him use the F-word.

I, however, use it with gay abandon. 😉

Where were we?

Yes. Rain on the roof.

We got to the restaurant, unhappily. Sat through a dinner, pretending to be gay and delighted. Got home and consummated the marriage.

Which lasted 20 years, give or take. Entertainingly enough, we managed to pick gawdawful weather for every major thing we ever did during that union. The day we moved from our apartment into the Encanto house was Arizona’s hottest day on record. Then we picked a day to move out of Encanto up to snooty North Central in the middle of the heaviest rainy spell on record. The movers’ truck broke down in the middle of a major thoroughfare along about midnight; D-XH ended up driving into the black rain in search of them and helping them jump-start the thing, while I huddled on a sofa with our exhausted six-year-old. That was grand fun.

Give me the hottest day on record over the rainiest day on record, any time. As an augur, that is. We loved living in Encanto. I truly hated living in North Central, whose inhabitants surely beat Scottsdale’s in any competition to measure Snooty and Snobby. Lowbrow as I was, I somehow managed to fit in fine with the gentrifying Encanto set. But the got-it-made set in North Central could spot white trash in an instant. What dreadful people!

Sooo…rain on the roof: no, it doesn’t augur well. Not in my experience.

Gaaah! One Thing After Another

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Is there an explanation for the one thing after another phenomenon? Clearly, it’s very common. So common that we have a variety of folk terms for it: never rains but it pours…damned if you do, damned if you don’t…Houston, we have a problem…out of the frying pan, into the fire…all part of life’s rich pageant…

Argh! With pageants like this, who needs Mardi Gras?

In the background, we have, as we all recall, the lamp fiasco, the driver’s license nuisance, the raccoon/coatimundi question, the foisting of the raccoon nest upon the Yard Dudes of the Century (more about which, sooner or later), income tax prep, the busted deadbolt, and similar bidness as usual. And in the further background (please, God! Make it as far in the background as possible), the endless series of visits to the Mayo’s ER.

To begin at the ending — or at the latest, because you just know this will not be the end of the infinite cosmic jest — last night as I was flying around getting ready to go to choir, I peered in the mirror to paint myself and saw…WTF?  Some kind of ZIT in my eye????????

Yes. It looks like a little blister or pustule on the white of an eye. It doesn’t hurt. But it’s bloodshot around the damn thing, and it looks potentially ominous. Whaaaa? Infection? Injury? Allergic reaction? Some new fiasco incident upon the dental implant (right below it) that refuses to heal up?

Call the Mayo’s night line. Wait and wait and wait and wait  and wait and wait x 10²²… Paint face, paint face, paint face, comb hair, comb hair, comb hair, pull on clothes, pull on clothes… Finally a nurse gets on the line.

She listens to the sad story, asks a few questions, opines that it’s nothing to get hysterical about (but of course she does so in far more professional-sounding terms), and advises me to douse it with some artificial tears and call back if it doesn’t get better.

Ohhh god. It’s time to leave for choir practice, which won’t end until after 9, when everyplace in reach will be closed.

FLY out the door and, astonishing luck being on my side, zip into the Albertson’s parking lot without a traffic jam and without undue driver nuttiness. See with pleasure that Albertson’s has posted an armed guard in the parking lot, THANK you verymuch (this is a store that I do not enter after dark, not on a bet…not under ordinary circumstances). Race in the door, find a not-very-distracted pharmacist, ask where the “artificial tears” are (whatever those are), and am swiftly directed to the product. Not only that, but she agrees to take my money, so I don’t have to stand in line interminably at a check-out register.

Fly back out, dodge the damn light-rail tracks, circle back through the ‘Hood, and fly down Main Drag East to the Cult HQ, where I arrive just in time for choir practice. Just. Barely.

Two & a half hours later, apply this gunk to the affected eyeball. It’s soothing. But does nothing to clear the bloodshot look. Condition unchanged this morning.

I have receptionist duty at the church this afternoon — which happens to be where this missal originates, right this minute — but before I get out of the house I have GOT to finish the latest Chinese mathematician’s paper, proofread the damn thing, generate visible edits from my copy, and disgorge a statement.

This takes several hours.

Now I’m running late to get ready for the front-office gig.

Send off the edited copy and bill, fly to the back of the house, and start painting my face. The eye thing looks…certainly no better, possibly worse. I’ve looked it up on the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest and now believe it to be something called a pingueculum. Apparently it’s not considered very serious, at least not at this stage…but sometimes it does need to be treated with surgery. Godlmighty…here we go again!

Not only that, but there are tumors that can look suspiciously like that. gaaaaaaaa! c -a-a-a-n-c -e-r!!!!

So after I’ve sent off the client’s work, while I’m getting dressed to come down here to the HQ, I get on the phone to the Mayo again, by way of asking: does this thing actually need to be seen by…you know…a DOCTOR? A person with the letters “M.D.” after their name?

My beloved ophthalmologist passed away a long time ago. The guy who took his place was a raving fruitcake. The guy who took that one’s place, a study in overkill. I’ve been getting my eye exams and glasses prescriptions at Costco, whose contract staff do the job with one whole of a helluva lot less hassle and expense.

So I call the Mayo while painting, combing, and clothes-throwing on. And wait and wait and wait and wait  and wait and wait x 10²²… 

Just as their nurse picks up the phone, it’s BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BING BONG!

ooohhh shee-utt! NOW what?? I’m half-dressed and it’s almost time to go out the door.

Run to the front of the house: it’s SDXB…sur-PRI-I-I-ISE!ˆ

He wants to socialize, just having come away from coffee with one of his oldest cronies. Ruby is having a yap-fest. The nurse is on the phone. I dodge down the hall trying to find enough quiet to explain the issue and ask: is this something that should be seen by a doctor?

“Not yet,” says she. If it hasn’t gotten better in about two weeks, call back and make an appointment.

…godlmighty…

Then…yes: The raccoon/coatimundi/Creature from the Black Lagoon issue…

Ah, I see I haven’t blogged about this one. How could I have let such a juicy story lapse?

So a few days ago, I stumble out into the back yard behind the dawg and find these weird pawprints. Something with very long, strong claws has been digging at the surface of quarter-minus top-dressing in the backyard. Quarter-minus, for the uninitiated, is finely crushed granite. After you lay it down and it gets wet and dries out a few times, it packs down to form a practically weed-proof surface. Unlike gravel, it’s comfortable enough for you and your dog to walk around on barefoot. Also unlike gravel, it looks a lot like the surface of the Sonoran desert. And it doesn’t make your yard look like it belongs in Sun City, home of the green-gravel lawn.

What ARE these? think I

Welp, the locals have spotted both coatimundis and raccoons in the ‘Hood. Our resident gadget enthusiast has set up cameras in his backyard and captured images of a coati cavorting around out there. Other neighbors have caught pictures of raccoons visiting their yards.

A raccoon, I could do without. They make a big mess and can be destructive. A coati, however…ohhh yeah! A pet coati is exactly what the Funny Farm needs. They eat bugs. That scratching behavior reflects an attempt to scruffle up some slugs and such.

However, the foot seems not to be shaped quite like a coati’s. Ultimately we conclude it’s probably a raccoon.

And where do raccoons like to nest? In woodpiles, that’s where. And what do we have in the backyard? Uh huh…

Shortly after I moved in here — 16 freakin’ years ago, for hevvinsake! — SDXB decided to move to Sun City.

SDXB just loved his fireplace. He was very, very fond of sitting in front of a roaring fire. This, apparently, is characteristic of Michiganders and Minnesotans. 😀  To supply his habit, he used to scavenge for firewood hither, thither, and yon. Understand, as a Master Cheapskate our SDXB would never in a million years pay for firewood. Whenever someone would chop down a tree, the remains would be stacked by the curb or in an alley for the trash pickup guys to haul off, once every four months. So he would grab this miscellaneous stuff off the side of the road, whenever he found it.

When the quarrel with Tony the Romanian Landlord erupted — Tony was living in the place right next-door to SDXB — SDXB decided to flee to Sun City.

I was not goin’, though SDXB tried to persuade me to sell the place and move out to Mausoleum West. Even though the judge wouldn’t let us leave the courtroom. Even though my terrorized lawyers begged me not to return to the house and to vacate the place right this goddamn minute. I ain’t a-scared of no Romanian mafiosi!

Reluctant to leave his priceless collection of dead wood behind, he toted it over here and stacked it neatly in my backyard.

And there it has sat, for lo! these 16 years. I tried it a couple times in this house’s fireplace and decided I really, truly HATED the stink it poured into the entire house, and that I really, truly do NOT want to spend my time cleaning out a fireplace. So…I’m pretty sure that’s where both Rattie and the Raccoon have dwelt, on various occasions.

It’s too heavy for me to move en masse, and besides, I don’t have a pickup. But after Rocky the Raccoon arrived on the scene, I figured I was just gonna have to get rid of the rodent habitat.

So my latest plan was to slip the stuff into the alley garbage bins, one piece a week, from now until the end of eternity. This had many practical disadvantages, not the least of which is that it’s illegal. Soo…I was at a bit of a loss as to how to dump it. Stacking it in the alley for the bulk trash guys was not very practical: I don’t have the physical strength to haul that many partially split logs, and I don’t wanna, and if you put the stuff out there before The Time to put out bulk pick-up you’ll get a fine, and…did I say I don’t wanna?

Yesterday, however, I finally prevailed upon the redoubtable Gerardo to remove the stack of rotting, termite-ridden firewood so generously deposited in my backyard lo! these many years ago.

The trick was to ask one of his barely English-speaking cousins to do the job before the boss showed up on the scene. So his guy Tony agreed to do it, in his sweet naïveté. By the time Gerardo arrived on the scene, it was tooo late to wiggle out. 😀

He asked for the usual 50 bucks to haul the debris to the dump (which is a long, LONG drive from here). I gave him 80.

Good riddance to that mess!!

Back to this morning: SDXB hangs around telling me about his buddy’s (very trying) recent Troubles of Old Age (and of landlordship… Mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be landlords!) while I’m pulling on clothes, wrangling the dog, rassling up the things I need to bring with me to the church.

Finally get him out the door, splash some of the drops onto the suspect eyeball, grab the keys and the credit card, and shoot out the door.

At least for a change no aspiring burglars were lurking around the house trying to suss out the easiest way to get in. That’s something. I guess.

Later — tonight, tomorrow, whenever, as long as it’s LATER — I’ve got to get on the phone to the Apple Support gurus and put them up to helping me figure out how to fix the Mail program.

Apple computers have a feature that computer geeks apparently think is passing Kewl but that normal people find aggravating, annoying, and infuriating: you can set it so that when you change windows or switch to different programs, instead of just going “clickola” over to the page you crave, it does this goddamn “slide-show” thing! Like a slide on a slide projector slimpsing over to the next picture to view. It’s time-consuming, it’s irritating, and it screws iup the menu in the bar at the top of the screen. I hate it, hate it, HATE it.

The computer, therefore, is set not to do that.

But apparently there’s some accursed keyboard command that will switch it on, within a given program. And apparently as my hot little fingers were jetting across the keyboard, I unknowingly hit that command, in typo mode. Suddenly, MacMail starts with the car sick-making slide-show mode.

Now I cannot for the life of me find out what that command is, nor can I find, on the Web or anywhere else, how to undo the damn command.

Soooo…there’s another time-sucking hassle waiting to be coped with.

See what I mean? Never a dull fukkin’ moment!

 

…And I’m complaining…WHY?

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Ever have one of those moments when you find yourself wondering “Why am I whining about _[fill in the blank_“?

Coming nigh to the close of another full day of batting from pillar to post — doggy walk, grocery run, Home Depot run, Lowe’s run, Best Buy run, electric supply store run, bird feed project, mess pick-up, correspondence catch-up, real estate surveillance check, feast cooking, raccoon tracking, and on and on and endlessly on — I find myself wondering…why the hell do I worry about the chronic insomnia that rousts me around 2 or 3 every morning, when in fact during the day I DON’T FEEL TIRED?

In fact, I feel quite peppy all day: no sense of insomniac fatigue or crankiness.

Maybe — could it be? — just maybe going to bed around 9 or 10 p.m., waking up at 2 or 3 (= 5 hours’ sleep), loafing in the dark until 4 or 5 a.m., then falling back to sleep and waking up around 6 or 7 a.m. (= 5 + 2 hours sleep, for a total of 7 hours) is perfectly reasonable? The upshot is around seven hours’ of sleep, despite a two- or three-hour hiatus. Seven hours is thought to be normal and healthy for the agèd human. What is the difference whether you sleep 7 hours straight from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., or 7 hours off and on between around 9 p.m. and around 7 a.m.?

Seems to me if you feel fine the next day, all day, there really is no difference.

How many other things do we whine about when…really…they make no difference?

  • The homicidal traffic and our fellow moronic drivers? If we get from point A to point B without killing each other, does it really make any difference?
  • Our crazy relatives whose political opinion pigheadedly differs from our enlightened wisdom: this makes a difference how?
  • The gas price at the QT was 22 cents higher than at the Costco, where we had to drive an extra 7 miles (14 miles round-trip) to avail ourselves of the bargain: this changed our lives how?
  • The city raises its monthly trash collection bill by $2.46: our lives are destroyed by this to what extent?

Huh. Think o’ that.

What’s your favorite whinge?

It’s the Little Things That Count…

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Ever feel like the dopiest little things make you feel as gratified as the occasional major triumph? Maybe more so?

Case in point: the blue jeans ironing-fest.

Thanks to Costco’s bargains, I live in jeans. Hardly ever wear anything else. For years, I’ve pressed these fine garments every time they were washed. Because…well…because. Not until a young fellow choir member gasped, as she was climbing behind me up the stairs to the loft, “You iron your jeans??” did it strike me that this was weird behavior. They’re cotton. They wrinkle when you wash them. They’re tacky. They look less tacky when they’re pressed. So I press them.

Admittedly, though, it’s a bit of a tedious job.

Tiring of tedious jobs and feeling liberated by her surprise at the very thought of ironed jeans, over time I quietly gave up pressing denim. Nobody seemed to notice.

Nobody but me, that is…

This evening as I lifted three pairs of jeans off the rack by the washer by way of hauling back to the closet, I reflected that these things just look scruffy! I hate unironed jeans. It also occurred to me that the other three pair I’d just pulled out of the washer and hung up to dry would probably dry looking pressed if I ironed them right that minute, while they were wet. Hmmm…

Looked like that would work. Sooo…while the iron was hot, out came the rest of the baggy jeans from the closet. By the time Rachel Maddow had finished holding forth, I’d ironed ten pairs of jeans, each with nice straight creases running up the legs.

Hot diggety!

Speaking of Costco, by yesterday the Venza was about out of gas. So along about mid-morning I capitulated and traipsed down to the store by the Bum’s Park, which often has the cheapest gas in town.

That, as you might guess, means it has the longest lines in town. {cringe!} Saturday morning: I expected to sit there and sit there and sit there. But resigned myself to that fate, because I’d kept the gasoline wolf from the door a few days earlier by buying a couple gallons from the rapacious QT up by the canal and did not wish to endure another emergency rip-off so soon.

So it was down to the Costco. Long line turning left off Bethany Home onto 15th…and of course every car turned right onto Montebello, headed for the store’s entrance. One guy cruised straight on through the intersection behind the store. Gone! But another guy crossed into the intersection from the left, coming from the rather dire apartments that border Bum’s Park.

But WHOA! He didn’t glide into the gas station’s lot — a miracle. He just proceeded straight for the parking lot. The truck right in front of me, though, did dodge into the station. How many gallons does a pickup hold? Eighty??

Mirabilis! The guy didn’t realize or didn’t care that Costco’s gas tank hoses are extra-long, so that you don’t have to park your vehicle with the gas tank lid next to the pump to fill up. Poor guy plodded over to join a line that would put his gas tank as close to the pump as possible. A long line.

And then another miracle: here’s a pair of pumps with only one car parked in their lane. And the woman hogging both pumps has just put the pump handle back, collected her receipt, and climbed into her car. I nuzzle up behind her. She dawdles but eventually starts her engine and putters away. HOLY mackerel! I’ve gotten to a pump in a matter of seconds! And without anyone barging in front of me to cut me off.

So I got in there and out in just a few minutes, rather than the 10 or 15 minutes I expected. A-N-N-N-D…I paid 22 cents a gallon less than the QT charged!

Definite major minor triumph. Ohhh the smugness!

Doesn’t take much to make some people’s day, does it? 😀