Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Storms and Blueberries

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So as the dawgs and I rolled out of the sack — a little late, around 5;30 — what should we see but a flash of lightning off to the south: a storm blowing in! And quite a little freshet it was: a spectacular lightning show, lots of thunder, and this wet strange stuff falling out of the sky.

Yes. It actually rained at six in the morning!

That is a rarity in these parts, at this time of year. Usually monsoon rains come along late in the afternoon or early in the evening.

So we opted the morning doggy-walk, which was too bad. The human needs that mile-long stroll even more than the dogs do. But I wanted to get the coffee ground and the water heated and the melon out of the fridge before the power went off, as its apt to do at the first sign of a lightning bolt. Even though I have a gas stovetop, these fine new-fangled Protectors from Yourself don’t work when the power’s out! Yes. A modern gas stove requires an electric spark to light it and to stay lit. No electric, and the gas shuts off, fuckyouverymuch.

Yes, I do have a camp stove. But how can I count the ways I do not wish to fiddle with that in the dark during a storm…

It’s now after 6:30, and the light has yet to come up: even though the storm has blown over, it’s still pretty dark out there. And muggy. Not any cooler than one would expect at this hour, but soggy. The dogs refused to go out on the back porch, where I wished to repair with coffee after breakfast. Cassie, being a corgi by nature as well as by form, contrived to herd the human back into the house and back onto the bed, where she wished to recline.

Cassie and Ruby look forward to their morning doggy-treat snack of blueberries. I always serve up a handful of fresh blueberries to myself as a side dish to whatever breakfast happens to be. The dogs being spoliated, they mooch treats whenever the human sits down to the table. And I’ve found that a blueberry apiece is a convenient way to shut them up while I’m trying to chow down myself.

So, running low, the other day when I was making one of the late, triumphant Costco runs, I pick up a box of organic blueberries from a produce bin. Walk into the chiller room and find…what? Non-organic blueberrries: same size package, same handsome looks, half the price of the organics. Well…naturally I put the organic berries back in the bin and grabbed a box of the non-organics.

Mistake! Or, in the immortal words of Star Trek‘s Nomad: ERROR ERROR ERROR!

Next morning I serve up these insecticided, weed-killed berrries to myself, and e-w-w-w-w-w-w-w! What a GAWDAWFUL taste.

I thought there must be something wrong with me: old age brings on all sorts of sensory flukes. Put them back in the fridge. Tasted them again later: still inedible. They tasted, not surprisingly, like some kind of chemical.

So yesterday I took them back down to Costco, demanded my money back, and traipsed to the back of the store to pick up a package of the organic variety.

And yup: this morning we see that apparently the cheaper berries indeed were contaminated with some kind of agricultural chemical. The twice-as-much berries taste very much like…well…blueberries. Just blueberries.

Jeez. Think of that: you have to pay double the price for produce that has no gunk poured on it.

Costco is offering a large set of beautiful German kitchen knives, replete with a set of matching steak knives. I covet these. And they fact that they have white handles like the late, great Wüstof’s that Williams-Sonoma kindly canceled after I had started collecting them makes them even more covetable

My favorite paring knife — one of those fancy Wüstof numbers — got bent when I used it to peel off the red stuff around a wine bottle’s cork and then dented when I tried to straighten it by tapping it with a hammer, but it was already scratched up in an encounter with a badly applied knife sharpener. From a YouTube video, I learned how to straighten the bent tip. Worked handsomely. But it still has the dents and the scratches. These are aesthetics, though: the knife works fine.

All the other knives are also scratched from a previous attempt to use my father’s whetstone to sharpen them. She who does not know what she’s doing should NOT try to hone a knife on a stone. 😉

But still: they all work just fine.

So really. I cannot justify plonking down $200 to buy two entire sets of knives with matching white(!!) handles.

But.

That’s really quite a bargain, isn’t it?

I wonder what the quality of those blades is, anyway? They looked very Wüstoflich. But that was looks, not use.

 

The Pre-Dawn Doggy Walk

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Having rolled out of the sack somewhat before five, the dogs and I were on the road as the minute hand hit 12. (Remember those? Yes, my house still has clocks with hour and minute hands!) It was dark out yet. The sky began to pale a bit as we hit Richistan. We got back to the Funny Farm right at 5:40, about the time we usually head out.

But oh! Is it lovely to get out at that hour! Though in August it’s a bit sticky out there, the air was reasonably cool. No sun beating down on you. And no one around!

We encountered one human: a guy on a bike with a headlamp to help him make his way. That was it.

No bums.

No coyotes. (Surprising, as dawn is the prime hunting hour.)

No neighbors standing out in front to intimidate you from letting your dog dump on their yard. 😀

No early morning commuters headed for Starbucks in a dazed and cranky mood.

And most charming, no fellow dog walkers!

Not that I don’t love my fellow dog walkers…but wrestling with two gingery corgis who want nothing more than to pounce your (fill in the blank: pit bull/mastiff/German shepherd/90-pound lab/Great Dane/angry Chihuahua) is far from the most pleasant way to start the day. Nor, indeed, does every one of my fellow dog walkers appear to be having the best of all possible fun keeping their own hounds under control. Odd, isn’t it?

So really…the dark before dawn was pretty much the ideal time to circumnavigate the ‘hood with the dawgs.

And now, a couple hours later, it’s still pleasant enough to sit outside. The various kids are frolicking around the street before they’re carted off to school. Ruby is yapping at every passing dog and its human, the hummingbirds are grating, and the doves would be feeding were not for Ruby chasing them.

We have a nice little covey of whitewings hanging around. So I decided to put up a couple of feeders for them, it now being too hot for much food to be readily available. The bugs go to cover, underground or under the rocks. The seeding plants barely cling to life. One wonders why the birds don’t migrate north with their relatives.

Well. The reason of course is that a city full of humans amounts to a riparian area on steroids. Stuff grows here. Water flows from long hollow ropes strung across the ground and sprays out of mysterious springs that erupt at the same time each day. And a forest of trees provides a lot of cover and roosting space.

How do you like this gadget I scored from Amazon?

Dunno how well you can see the device: it’s a wrought iron hook that fits over the tree branch and then swings down into an elegant swoop to hold your bird feeder. It works handsomely, and it makes reloading the feeder so much easier, by making it easier to take the thing down and put it back up.

The reason I bought it, however, had nothing to do with aesthetics or convenience and everything to do with the usual yard hassles.  Luis, when asked to clear some space so Gerardo’s men could move around the backyard without risking decapitation by tree limb, blithely hacked a big chunk out of the lime tree, exposing its interior to the full blast of west sun. I was surprised, because Luis is usually pretty savvy about trees. But he sure missed the proverbial boat this time!

To keep the tree from dying, I had to wrap swaths of shade cloth around the major interior limbs. That wasn’t enough to protect it from the summer blast furnace, though; this spring I had to drape more lengths of cloth across its entire west face.

This meant I couldn’t hang the feeder from its usual perch in the lime tree…said perch now being wrapped in plastic shade cloth. Lovely.

We still have a feeder hanging from the north eave, but it’s not readily visible from the deck. And since the main reason one hangs up a bird feeder is to watch the birds, I missed the lime tree station greatly. Solution: hang it from the paloverde tree.

Alas, though, the hang-it gadget I had would not fit over a paloverde limb. New solution? So obvious: AMAZON.

Forthwith they sent three of these swell doodads. The top hook just fits over the desired limb. Though it’s a little closer to the ground than I’d like — leaving the birds possibly vulnerable should one of the neighbor’s effing cats come over the cat-repelling wall — I think they’ll have plenty of time to escape should that happen.

Matter of fact, Ruby just strolled there and terrorized them. They all flew off, leaving a bold wren behind to gorge down as much as it can before the competition returns.

Ruby is actually drawn by the twitta-twitta-twitta alarm call of a whitewing dove. If one of them makes the outtahere! noise, she rockets out the door like a furry little missile and gallops around under the trees. Doesn’t seem to occur to her that by the time they’re making that noise, they are already soooo gone.

Summertime, and the cacti are blooming. Across the street a neighbor has a huge, invasive columnar cactus. The things can be quite a job to keep under control in your landscape. However, it makes these amazing blossoms:

Strange and wonderful, aren’t they? They attract strange and wonderful pollinators, too, especially bats (which is one of the reasons they open at night) and a particularly crazy flying critter called a “carpenter bee.” This little animal can best be called a sorta flying thing. Like a bumblebee, which it sort of resembles, it leaves you wondering how it ever imagined it could get airborne. Tried to catch a photo of one, but it came out a bit on the unclear side.

That flower is as big as your whole spread-out hand. So you get an idea of the critter’s size. Hysterical posts published by exterminating companies aside, carpenter bees are pretty harmless (unless you try to grab one) and are actually highly beneficial pollinators.

Also in summer we still have the ghost of Arizona’s once vigorous monsoon season. The “heat island” effect now bounces rainclouds away from the urban areas, and of course the climate change that all the President’s nitwits…uhm, “men” tell us does not exist has created a decades-long drought. That notwithstanding, we’ve had at least had some impressive cloud displays.

Alors. It’s warming up out here. So I suppose it’s about time to go inside and get started on something constructive. À bientôt, then.

The Strange Benefits of Insomnia

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T’other day while chatting with fellow dog-walkers, I learned that Old Dudes enjoy the same wee-hours phenomenon that we Old Bats experience. Says Old Dude with hilarious rescued dog: “We started at 5:00 a.m. Every single morning I wake up at 4:00 and can’t go back to sleep!”

Chortle! Didn’t know there could be an echo in the open air.

At this time of year, 4 a.m. is wake-up time. It’s like an alarm clock goes off, right at four o’clock sharp. Doesn’t matter what time you go to bed. Diddle away the evening and go to bed at midnight, and you’ll still wake up at four ayem.

So I’ve taken to going to bed about 9 p.m. That way, when the internal alarm clock kicks in, I’ve had about seven hours of sleep. Which, we’re told, is ideal for old folks.

And over time, rolling out of the sack at four in the morning turns out to have its benefits.

By seven o’clock this morning…

  • the dogs were walked and fed;
  • the plants were watered;
  • the pool was cleaned and re-chlorinated;
  • the human was bathed and its hair washed;
  • the human’s paws were pedicured elegantly;
  • a magnificent breakfast was served and consumed;
  • news was read;
  • plans for the day were laid…

That’s actually quite a lot of stuff. More to the point: getting all those chores and pleasures out of the way clears the table to do other things. To wit, today I need to…

  • run several errands that grew like weeds after yesterday’s Tempe/Costco junket;
  • spray the weeds behind my house and the kids’ house that are sprouting in the rain;
  • draft the proposal for the Drugging of America book;
  • contact my librarian friend regarding the same project;
  • write the current chapter of Ella’s Story, or at least part of it’
  • pay the AMEX bills;
  • transfer money from PayPal to the S-corp (a major PITA, for arcane reasons);
  • write this post…

Not enough to fill the day to the rafters, but I expect I’ll find other things to do.

The PayPal thing has been a particular nuisance, for two reasons…

First, the account was founded by my business partner, so they think I’m her. In response to a phishing attempt, her husband (an IT dude with advanced degrees in that trade) insisted that she remove her bank account from PayPal, lest it be hacked. Neither of us trusts PayPal or likes doing business through PayPal, but in the absence of a strategy to accept credit-card payments (we’ve been too lazy to engage the hassle and expense entailed in signing up), it’s presently the path of least resistance.

Second, the phishing exploit occurred at the same time the lovely Maricopa County Community College District gave away all its employees’ and students’ private information to hackers. This august institution did nothing about said exploit until the FBI found our data on the Dark Web. When that news came down, my credit union responded to the problem by closing my two accounts (personal and corporate) and transferring the funds into two new accounts with new account numbers. While the Kid was removing the link to her account from PayPal, I was quietly NOT disabusing PayPal of the out-dated account number it had for me. So to withdraw funds for me, we’ve had to order a check from PP to be sent to the Kid, then have her deposit it and send me another check. This, as you can imagine, is a royal PITA.

This morning, though, I happened to notice that PayPal now does have my current corporate checking account number. How they got it, I do not know, unless the CU shared the new number with PayPal…without informing me to that effect. I know I never changed the number at PP — for a reason. So…that’s interesting.

Though the paper-check polka has been a damned nuisance, frankly, I’d rather jump through that hoop than have the funds in my bank account be vulnerable to hacking through PayPal, an organization whose security I do not trust for one hot minute. Naturally, I’d like to have a simpler way to move funds out of PayPal (which is capable of embargoing the balance in your PP account for any number of reasons, fair and wildly unfair). But not at any undue risk…which I believe is posed by doing business through PayPal.

Well, time’s a-wastin’…and time is money, eh? 😉 And so, away…

 

Live-Blogging from Storm Central

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July 30, 8:00 p.m.

Well, not exactly blogging: power’s out and likely to be that way for quite some time. We could say “pre-blogging”…in Word, the laptop being fully charged but, of course, offline.

Dinner at M’hijito’s house. Just as we were finishing the feast, we could see the storm blowing in, and then a pretty heavy dust-storm hit his part of town. I wanted to get home, as I’d taken a Benadryl a few hours earlier to stave off a (weird!) allergic reaction, and it had turned me into a zombie. Just wanted to go home and go straight to bed.

Not so much.

So I figured if I was lucky and the traffic was thin, I could fly low and get home before the rain started.

Wrong.

About halfway up the north leg of the trip, some serious rain started to sluice down. Limbs were already down all over the road, and now it was sheeting rain. An ambulance trundled by and – oh yeah, naturally – turned into the ’hood.

My beaten path to avoid Big Brother’s hateful speed bumps and aggravating round-abouts entails entering our area from the east side on a little neighborhood lane that everybody who lives here knows runs from Main Drag east to Primary Feeder Street North/South.

Via Neighborhood Lane, I’m trying to reach Secondary Feeder North/South, midway between Main Drag East and Primary Feeder Street North/South, by way of making my way up to the small neighborhood road that runs from Lower Richistan to Normalville, my part of the ’hood.

I get about three-quarters of the way up to Small Neighborhood Road and find a large branch down across Secondary Feeder N/S. So hang a U-ie and go back down to Neighborhood Lane, upon which I figure to reach Primary Feeder N/S. And THERE I find my neighbor Josie stopped in front of an entire downed tree.

In the dark, it appears a whole Aleppo pine – and these things are HUGE – uprooted and came crashing down across the road. I get out of my car to check the house across the street, to see if everyone’s OK. It looks like it didn’t quite reach that house, but it’s in their yard. If the residents are home, they’re huddled inside. I don’t think anyone’s hurt.

Josie knows the people who own the house where the tree stood, and she’s on the phone to them. They’re not home. We think their house is OK…except, ahem, for the absence of one exceptionally large shade tree.

Now I tell Josie that I couldn’t get through on Seccondary Feeder N/S. She says she couldn’t get through on the Main Drag to the south, either, because the power is out and the traffic is insane. She doesn’t think we can even reach Primary Feeder Street N/S along Main Drag South.

I say I think I can pull the downed limb off the road if we go back up Secondary. We both make U-turns and she follows me up Secondary. But by now others are trying to get through, and now a neighbor – a large male neighbor – is out in front of the house where the limb fell, trying to wave people away from the traffic jam.

I say I think we can pull it far enough off the road for cars to pass. He says he tried and couldn’t move it. He suggests we go up the wrong way on Secondary – Secondary is a divided road with a planter strip up the middle. No one is coming in our direction, so Josie and I cut across the road and make our way up the down street.

Luckily, we reach Main Feeder East/West before anybody comes our way. And before a cop comes along.

Because the power is out, once I get to the Funny Farm I can’t get into the garage. It is pouring rain. Leaving the dogs in the car, I enter the house, free the garage opener latch, and push the door open. Manage to haul the door closed behind the car – fortunately the door is well balanced, because it’s old, all steel, and damned heavy.

July 30, an hour later:

The power is still out. It’s damn hot in here. I’ve opened the doors that have security screens with drill-proof deadbolts, but of course can’t leave any of the sliders or the windows open. Well….I do have the bedroom sliding door open, because what we have here on the bed is a dual alarm system. If anyone comes anywhere near the place, they go off like banshees.

Which, I suppose, is what they are.

Not surprisingly, I can’t get online, so cannot check the Salt River Project website for word of how soon they might get the power back on. Not very, I expect. People are wandering around outside yakking, babies are screaming, and it’s wet and steamy. Still sprinkling a little, but not enough to keep the yakkers indoors. Or to keep the damn helicopters from buzzing overhead.

Some very odd things are working in the outage.

The phone, for example. I was told it would not run without electric. The Cox guy put a battery in the modem, but that thing died forthwith. So I’m bopping around in the dark when I hear an unfamiliar phone bell ringing. WTF? The clamshell throwaway phone??? My son, trying to get through????!?

Grab the camp lantern, make my way to the office, whence the noise emanates. It’s the main phone that plugs direct to the cable connection. Pick it up: La Maya on the phone. We yak for awhile. She says to be careful about leaving doors or windows open, because she caught a sh!thead prowling outside one of her windows a night or so ago.

Thank heavens for Schlage and Medco locks, think I.

Still. This is the time when you do want your German shepherd back.

And in the weirdly still-working department: I had a Washington Post online game up on the computer before I left the house. Even though the computer is offline, the little game is working! 😀

Strange.

The streetlight outside the Funny Farm flickered a few times, as though the power was trying to come on. Then went dark again.

And now it’s raining steadily again. It’s hot and stuffy in here. Believe I’ll throw a sheet on the tiles and go to sleep on the floor, where it’s cooler. A lot cooler…

July 31, 1:00 a.m.

The power finally came back on sometime in the wee hours., just as I was figuring that come dawn, I’d have to make a run on Walmart, Fry’s, and whatever other stores I could think of in search of dry ice to try to preserve the food in the fridge and freezer. If the whole area’s power was down all night, it could be quite a long grocery store run…

Salt River Project’s website says the power went off here around 7:15 last night. So it’s been off five and a half hours, give or take. This would be O.K. if it hadn’t been around 100 degrees when the power went out. Just now it’s about 80 outside, and around 83 inside the shack.

I see a new assignment came in from a client while all these shenanigans were going on. I hope they don’t want the thing back tomorrow, because today I’m gonna be in no shape to read technical copy. Ugh.

July 31, 7:17 a.m.

Power was out most of the night. Cox has been up and down. No phone, no pool, two heat-soaked pets…ain’t got no cigarettes.

I think the cable (i.e. phone) connection is up right now, but that doesn’t mean it’ll stay up. Here at the Funny Farm, though, it looks like things are intact. Thank heaven Luis came earlier this summer and thinned out the forest! But for sure…I’m going to have to do something about that devil-pod tree. If that thing falls over, it will smush either my house or Terri’s.

July 31, 8:27 a.m.

Dogs fed and walked. Property reconnoitered. Phone and Internet crashed again and are still out…I do hate Cox. Really. Hate. Cox.

Neighbor took this foto of the scene on Neighborhood Lane, just west of Primary Feeder Street N/W.  That tree was uprooted and blown out of the front yard on the right-hand side of the image. Fortunately, the lots are huge and the houses are set back a good distance off the road. If it had been most other neighborhoods in this city, that tree would have fallen into the house situated on the left side of this picture.

That’s an Aleppo pine, a type of tree popular when the tract was built out…back in the 1950s. So the tree is probably 50 or 60 years old. At least. Another pine in the yard lost about a third of its branches — whether because this tree hit it on the way down or from the action of the wind.

Mercifully, no damage here at the Funny Farm. The potted ficus tree, which has waxed huge in its new place beneath the lath shade covering, fell over. Its pot didn’t break, thank goodness, and I managed (just) to haul it back upright and drag it, a quarter-inch at a time, back into the shelter. Fine mess in the pool, but Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner was up to it with no problem. Harvey was already out of the water, in anticipation of just such an event as occurred. Turned on the pump, which scooted the big stuff into a pile. Scooped that out easily with the hose-end water vacuum. Then dropped Harvey back in the drink, where he began tracing white trails through the brown dust. Otherwise everything seems OK except maybe the bougainvillea on the side, which got royally walloped.

Was very glad I’d hired Luis to trim all the trees in front. That devil-pod tree on the side, though, is beyond one man and a saw….Gerardo wants to take it down, but I’m afraid of having one of his cousins fall out of the damn thing. Since he’s laid first dibs on the job, though, I’m also afraid of pissing him off by hiring a tree company (at many times what he’ll charge) to cut it down. And don’t know what could take its place…as hated as it is, it DOES shade the west side of the shack.

I see the wind did blow a lot of shingles off the neighbor’s roof catty-corner behind me. That guy…there’s always one in every neighborhood, isn’t there?…is a shiftless soul. He inherited the house from parents who lived there till they died. And since he didn’t have to pay for it and is one of those clowns who doesn’t understand that real estate = dollars and paid-off real estate = investment, he’s just let it rot away. So that won’t be fixed, and what was already getting to be an eyesore will now be even dumpier.

Checked my own roof with binoculars. Doesn’t look like there’s much damage, though a couple of shingles might need repair. The roofing guys who installed that roof after Late Great Hailstorm didn’t leave me any extra shingles! Duh! I didn’t even think about it at the time. So…finding shingles to match may be a bit of a challenge. Dollars to donuts, they’re not available at the Depot, eh?

July 31, 10:34 a.m.

Having enjoyed all of about two hours’ sleep last night, I’m going back to bed. And so, away…

 

 

Looks Like It’s Time to Move Along…

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So..it’s been a sh!tty few days here at the Funny Farm. So much so, I’m thinking there really isn’t much to hold me here in lovely uptown Phoenix, a city deliberately cloned on another city I’ve long detested, Los Angeles. This afternoon I started thinking — seriously — about unloading most of the junk and moving somewhere far, far away. Preferably in another time and in another galaxy.

Looks like it’s time to move along…

But where?

Locally, there’s Prescott, a nice little burg where the summers are cooler and the ambience is a little more small town. Payson: a little too embedded in forest-fire country for my taste. Tucson: another developer’s hell. Moving on… Patagonia, Sonoita: maybe. Probably chez pitz unless you have a fair amount of cash, though. New Mexico? Can’t afford Santa Fe and not impressed with other venues I’ve visited there. Idaho: too cold in the winter. Oregon, Washington: can’t afford it. California: can’t afford that, in spades, and don’t want to live in dread of forest fires, mudslides. and earthquakes.

{sigh} Thinking on the question while cruising the Internet, what should I come across this afternoon but a YouTube squib about some poor homeless woman who’s living (happily, to hear her tell it!) out of her car for $800 a month:

Eight hundred bucks a month? Unless she’s making a car payment on the clunk — or buying a lot of meds out of pocket — that seems a little high. Especially since, because she’s using an old milk bottle as her toilet, she seems not to be haunting campgrounds.

If your car is paid for, what do you have by way of costs?

  • Groceries and personal items — a couple hundred bucks a month, at most.
  • Gasoline — depends on how much you drive. In my vehicle, I’d expect a couple hundred miles on a $30 fill-up. Say you don’t drive every day (why would you, if you come to rest in a decent free or cheap spot?)…a hundred bucks would take you, maybe, 700 miles…that’s a lot of territory. A lot of free or nearly free state and federal parks. Hm. $122 + $100 = $222.
  • Occasional stop to revive, take a private shower, get a decent meal: YMCA costs $22.50 a month. Okay, we’re at $244.50.
  • Car insurance: My car insurance was $1400 this year; about $117 a month, bringing the tab to $361 a month.
  • Campgrounds: BLM, national forests, and national grasslands are free. Average cost for a night in an RV park is about $30, but in many you get a hot tub, showers, and a laundromat. So, if you camped on public lands say, 6 nights a week, and then visited a fancy resort (as it were) once a week, that would rack up another $120 a month: total: $481.
  • Car upkeep: depends on how handy you are and what kind of condition your clunk is in. Maybe on average ±$50 a month ?? If it averages out to $50 a month (in addition to gasoline), then we’re at around $531.

That leaves about $270 for clothing, sight-seeing, an occasional night in a motel…hmmmm…. From that, pay for a rented mailbox to give yourself a place to receive mail and provide a fake address for things like voting and registering the vehicle…not much. You’d still end up about $200 less than the purported $800.

This assumes you already own a full complement of camping gear. Of course, if you were gonna take off for the open road, you’d sell all your worldly goods, leaving more than enough money to buy everything you’d need to live on the road. This lady sleeps in her car. It being a small sedan, that sounds like an extraordinarily uncomfortable arrangement. My vehicle, on the other hand, being a crossover, has plenty of space in the back — fold down the back seats and there’s room for two adults to sleep uncomfortably or one to stretch out with her dogs. You’d probably want a tent and various other camping tools, though, since in dry conditions tenting is probably more comfortable than sleeping in the back of a vehicle.

Much of this stuff would be one-time buy:

Some of it would be pricey: a tent’s not cheap, for example. Neither, obviously, are a pistol or shotgun and ammo. Or a decent sleeping bag.

Things like toothpaste, laundry detergent, stuff for cooking (salt, pepper, cooking oil, etc.), paper towels, and the like would be covered in the “grocery and personal items” budget. Phone: throwaway thing with minutes. Very cheap.

I fail to see how this would cost you $800 a month, unless you were staying in campgrounds often. But you wouldn’t have to. There are a lot of places to throw down for free. Indeed, these YouTube videos look like they were made in a place up the road, westerly and northerly of lovely Phoenix, where groups of footloose people bivouac out on the desert. It may not be altogether legal, but no one seems to stop them.

Personally, I prefer to camp in solitude, preferably by a lake or river where one can bathe and get water to boil for cooking and drinking. Silence, after all, is golden.

SDXB and I traveled in this mode all over the backcountry of Alaska and Canada. In summer, it was a lot of fun, fairly easy, and amazingly cheap — we traveled for three months for under a thousand bucks. That included airline fare to and from the Northwest, and bus fare across the Canadian plains.

For awhile, we also had a lash-up very much like the one this lady is traveling in:

There are some serious drawbacks to the camper lifestyle, and it’s probably not something you’d want to take up as a permanent dwelling. Although we had a friend who did so, pretty much. Here are the issues.

  • A camper is expensive to buy and expensive to maintain (not to say a giant PITA to maintain).
  • The camper also limits the kinds of places you can go: it has to be set up on level ground (or leveled with those stanchions you see in the video), and it torques if you try to drive it across an arroyo or riverbed on a dirt road.
  • This means you find yourself spending a lot more nights in paying campgrounds than one would like.
  • It uses far more gasoline even than an SUV, to say nothing of a sedan or crossover vehicle. It uses more gas than an unadorned pickup, for that matter.
  • It’s hard to park it in a grocery store or motel parking lot.
  • It’s like pasting a sign on your back reading “Burgle me!”

But it has some major advantages. Videlicet:

  • Air conditioning!
  • Heating
  • A shower (not very usable, but there it is)
  • A toilet (which has to be emptied and cleaned out, if you like that kinda thing…)
  • Electrical hook-up that allows you to use and charge a computer and phone at a campground
  • A stove
  • A sink
  • Running water
  • A table with bench seats
  • A bed
  • Doors that lock

These are all excellent things. The trade-offs are higher costs and more things to break.

We never spent any lengthy periods in the RV, partly because of the hassle factor and partly because it quickly proved itself impractical for the kind of off-road camping we preferred. So I couldn’t really tell you what it would cost. But I’d guess $800 would be on the low end.

I dunno. Living on the road seems like an awful lot of work. Given that out in Sun City, taxes are a third and insurance is half of what I’m paying here it would surely make better sense to get over my aversion for the place (it’s a mausoleum!), sell my house, and just move out there. That would be the path of least resistance.

Though I’d have to find new homes for the dogs: you can’t let a dwarf sheepdog go out to pee in the yard with the coyotes running around out there. They’ll grab your dog and be off with it before you can say…jackrabbit. And no, you can’t have flowers or a vegetable garden, either, because the rabbits (whose ubiquitous presence calls in the coyotes) will level anything you plant in the ground, other than a palm tree or a grapefruit.

But…with no further reason to stay here (except the church…and there are lots of churches, no?), I guess I can start thinking seriously about moving away from the blightrail and into an area with lower crime rates, lower property taxes, and fewer bums.

So it goes…

Overlazied and Underpaid…

by

LOL! Not exactly underpaid, but not doing enough work to matter! Which in Arizona’s summer heat is probably the best way to survive: not working.

Truth to tell, today’s summer heat is not as advertised. It is not going to reach 117 today. Not a chance: at noon, it’s only 110 out there.

The hounds and I rolled out at 4 a.m. so as to get in the mile’s dog-&-human walk before the predicted blast-furnace heat rose up. It was only about 87 at that time — we were told the low would be 90. The morning was actually rather pleasant. We encountered about ten of our fellow dog-walkers, all of whom apparently had the same idea. Arrived back at the Funny Farm around 5:40, fed dogs, watered plants, refilled the pool, tossed in some more chlorine tabs, went swimming.

That must have pleased the neighbors, because Ruby barks hysterically every time I get in the water. Apparently she thinks the human is going to drown. Then (horrors!) she won’t get fed anymore.

Since the neighbors were the cause of my spending the Fourth of July working myself up to a near heat stroke and having to opt out of my favorite party of the year so as to stay home and guard the Farm from the risk of nitwit-initiated fire, I do not give one thin damn if my dog barks them out of the sack on a 90-degree morning. 😀 Bay away, little dog!

All that notwithstanding, the heat and the humidity begin to wear. Just now — along about two in the afternoon — it’s about 115 on the back porch. Not intolerable…but somewhat warm.

Where creative and productive work are concerned, I do best in a cool, fairly gray climate: San Francisco and London are ideal. All this sunshine is a distraction. Actually, what happens is that it puts me in zombie mode. I just do not feel like working.

As in I cannot force myself to do ANYTHING.

Last week I had seven days in which to scribble the current installment of Ella’s Story. Did I write it last week? Was it ready to go come Monday morning?

Hell, no. Of course not.

But I did rack up 50,810 points on the set of games I’ve been playing.

{sigh}

So it was the middle of the afternoon before that got done, and then (IMHO) not very well.

Yesterday the place was overrun with various workers, which rendered writing or editing much of anything…problematic, shall we say.

Happily enough, though, I was rescued from having to pay some batsh!t amount of money to repair the propane grill! Its main knob — the one that turns on the primary burner — was stuck somehow. I thought the tube it attaches to had somehow got bent, and was silently blaming it on one of Gerardo’s cousins, whom I suspected of having whacked it with a leaf-blower.

BBQ repair dude was supposed to show up between 2 and 3 p.m. — try to imagine throwing yourself around with a heavy gas grill, in the sun, in 112-degree heat!

Not surprisingly, this poor fella called in sick. Along about 7 a.m., the office called and asked if they could send someone between 9:30 and 10 a.m.

This put the eefus on my plan to hit the grocery story as soon as rush hour ended. But without an oven, I’ve gotta have that grill working.

Well…”someone” was the company’s owner, an interesting and entertaining man. Forthwith, he discovered that nothing serious was wrong — a little rust or, he thought, just dirt, was jamming a part, He cleaned and lubricated the knob assembly, whilst entertaining me with conversation.

So that was good. Even better: he only charged $68 to fix it!

Man! I was expecting a $200 bill. The original appointment included their whiz-bang cleaning service, which I really did not need and would prefer not to get until after the weather cools off. So he opted that and barely charged enough to cover the gas to drive his truck up here.

So, even after yesterday’s junket to the grocery store, I still have $58 left in this month’s budget, with only a week to go.

At said grocer, I picked up a roll of dog food, meaning the doggy meals are now covered for the rest of the month and then some. Got a very nice watermelon — paying lots more than would have been required at Costco,. but obviating an extra trip to an extra store through the heat.

I may have as much loot as I need to make it to August 1 without having to buy any more food or household items. Possibly not. But whatever comes up surely will not cost $58.