Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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Five in the morning. It’s 90 degrees on the back porch. Windy. The sun is trying, unsuccessfully, to dawn through muddy yellow-orange haze. Off in the distance: dull thunder. Let the dogs out to do their thing. Decide against the usual a.m. doggy-walk.

Discover I’ve gained almost two pounds since the day before yesterday. Xergis is fattening?????? WTF.

The human and the dogs go back to bed. Actually, the human takes the laptop to the bed, perches there, and fiddles with social media. Dogs go back to sleep.

Cassie starts to hork.

Lift her off the bed before she succeeds in upchucking. Thank God for small mercies.

Clean up the mess. Let Cassie back out. It’s starting to sprinkle. Sort of. Hard to tell what it’s doing: it’s so hot, and the light wind is rustling the leaves, so the sound could be that rather than rain. If it is raining, it’s evaporating before it hits the ground. Cassie goes back in. Decide she’s probably done barfing. Lift her back on the bed. Climb back on behind her. Dogs conker out.

Storm continues to move in. Thunder surrounds us, rumbling in from all directions. Still have power, though. And 70% battery power remains on the Macbook — meaning the thing will run about another 30 minutes.

The pool will be a mess to clean up, with that much dust hanging in the air. The water is bathtub warm. Even though the mustard algae has almost disappeared, these conditions will invite it back.

Arranged to have the pool resurfaced in October. Earlier, if a miracle happens and the water gets too cool to swim sometime in September. I doubt this will happen: global warming is real, folks…and we’ve had it here for some time now.

Decided against the white PebbleSheen. The guy — a genuine charmer, definitely born about 30 years too late, dammit — brought some samples. We put them in the water, because the stuff changes color as it gets really wet. Chose a kind of medium-light blue with little stones engineered to show. I think it will be very pretty.

They’re going to try to save the tile. But if they can’t — it’s been through two replasterings that we know of, and there is a limit, after all — he left a brochure showing a local pool tile company’s offerings. Now I’m thinking I should just spring for the cost of installing new tile. Mine is pretty out of date…think this pool was installed shortly after the first buyers moved in, and the house was built in 19-and-ought-71. It has that 1970s look to it.

At any rate, the stuff is going to look amazingly pretty.

Looking at it in the water, I was reminded of Lebanon.

When I was a little girl, my father would occasionally take his short leave in Beirut. (Aramco gave employees two “leaves”: a two-week short leave midway through a two-year contract, and a three-month long leave between contracts. Sometimes we would go to Beirut; sometimes to Bahrain.)

Lebanon had been largely dominated by the French, following the demise of the Ottoman Empire. Before the civil war (followed, a few years later, by attacks from the Israelis)  reduced the city to rubble, Beirut hosted rows of beautiful, French-operated hotels that served up luxury accommodations and French food on the shore of the Mediterranean. It was a gorgeous place.

So we stayed in this hotel on the most amazing beach. It wasn’t sand, like the hot white sand where we lived, on the Persian Gulf. It was tiny, colorful, surf-polished pebbles. Each little stone was maybe an eighth of an inch in diameter and  they came in every color you can imagine. When I first saw them, I thought they were gemstones. A whole beach covered with jewelry!

When they were wet, they did look like highly polished gemstones. Let them dry out: not so much. But underwater, they were a spectacular thing to see.

Well, this PebbleSheen stuff is like that. Its little stones are about the size of the beach gemstones of Beirut. And underwater, they shine like they were polished.

So I’m pretty excited about doing this project. I think it’s going to make the backyard look really gorgeous.

The cat’s claw, which was suffering from the near demise of the irrigation system along the back wall, is reviving in response to being watered from the top with drip hosing. That stuff won’t last long — if you ever want soaker hose, do not buy the Miracle-Gro brand, which is true junk. But for the nonce, the scheme is working well. The idea of hooking the double hose bib on that back faucet was definitely one of those why didn’t i think of it before??? things. Now instead of having to climb under the shrubbery to hook up the soakers to the hose, all that’s needed is a flip of a switch and a turn of a faucet handle. It’s starting to blossom and will soon be covered with bright yellow trumpet flowers.

Ugh. I cannot stand to read the news these days. When is that orange-haired buffoon going to resign or be impeached?

Dollars to donuts, he won’t make it to the end of this term. But that may not be a good thing. Because then we will get Pence, who is an effective politician, and who hides his viciousness under a smoothly polished veneer of pious respectability. Frankly, a “Christian” who wouldn’t recognize Christ if the Spirit Himself came up and bit him on the tuchus may be worse than a clown whose corruption is obvious.

This country is in deep, deep trouble. As in End-Times trouble, at least for our democratic republic. Hellish hot rain, I suppose, is to be expected.

Update: Rainshowers barrel through to the south. By 8:00 a.m.: 80 degrees on the back porch, under a gentle sprinkle. Arizona is weird.

Things That Go Bump in the Night…

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Well. Not “bump” so much as “rustle rustle rustle” or “munch munch munch.” It’s three in the morning — what most of us would call the middle of the freaking night — the hour that my internal alarm clock has, of late, designated as the dawn of a bright new day. The dogs are conkered out, they being vulnerable to no such metabolic failings. I’m laying there thinking about my best friend in junior high school, Sandy.

Sandy. What an eccentric! We were perfectly matched.

Sandy loved horse racing. Every Saturday morning we would meet at my house to watch the races on TV. Yes. In those days, Saturday morning television (at least in San Francisco) went not to the cartoons but to the races. We loved to watch the races.

Sandy’s hero was not Elvis but Eddie Arcaro, probably the greatest thoroughbred jockey who ever mounted a horse. So I’m laying there thinking — what else? — whatever happened to Eddie Arcaro? Naturally, I have to roll out of the sack (why waste time at three in the morning, eh?) and look him up. Now I’m sitting here, reading up on Eddie, when…comes from the roof (attic???) this weird little sound. At first I think it’s a light rain: could be tapping on the skylights. A sprinkle hitting the glassoid?

But it’s not quite like rain. It doesn’t sound like Ratty dancing across the attic beams. Quite. WTF? Scritch scritch scritch scritch… Something digging in the leaves that have blown onto the roof in the summer’s winds? Something gnawing on the drywall?

The skylights appear to be dry, but it’s hard to tell, because of course it’s mighty dark outside.

I get up and go look out the back door. The motion-sensitive lights have not come on. I can’t see a thing out there.

Open the door and hear rassle rassle rassle! The sound of something running away? I don’t hear anything more. I don’t see anything. And I sure as hell ain’t goin’ out there.

Probably Ratty, I figure. Though it could be a racoon. But I doubt if a raccoon would bother with climbing on the roof. Ratty can scamper up a block wall as easily as she can stroll across a field of grass. Yeah: almost certainly Ratty…

Or was it?

A couple hours pass. The dogs arise and demand a doggy walk. Along about 6:15 we get back, and eventually we wander out to police the backyard. Having performed the morning pool inspection, I amble back and find…

Ruby TRANSFIXED!

Did you know that a corgi can go on point?

Who’d’ve thunk it? That dog was pointing like a fine little vizsla…into the rocks filling a drainage ditch off the patio.

WTF?

So I approach cautiously (rattlesnake? wh-a-a?). She doesn’t budge. Literally: she does not wriggle, so fixed is she on whatever the target is.

From beneath the stones, we can hear the same sound: Scritch scritch scritch scritch….

What the heck? Whatever it is, it ain’t a raccoon and it ain’t Ratty!

I call Cassie, who’s smarter than either of us. She’s not the slightest bit interested.

I try lifting some of the stones, never having heard of a rattlesnake that could go scritch scritch scritch scritch.

This isn’t exactly a ditch: it’s actually a French well. So it’s several feet deep, and it holds a LOT of river rock. Under the first layer of rock, I find…nothing. Eventually the scritching stops.

Was the 3 a.m. scritcher inside the house? I doubt it. But…how could it scritch loudly enough to be heard through the roofing, through the attic insulation, through attic flooring, through the ceiling’s drywall? In both cases, the sound was rather soft. The volume seemed about the same. And in the wee hours, it distinctly sounded like it was on the roof or on a skylight.

The mystery has yet to be solved.

Hmh. Wonder if I could train this little dog to hunt Mearn’s quail? It appears they have, on occasion, been used as bird dogs. Innaresting.

Today’s header image: Preakness Stakes. By Maryland GovPics – Flickr: 139th Preakness Stakes, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32879764

Report from Sauna Central

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Hot, wet, gray, and muggy.

We haven’t had a real summer “monsoon” season for several years — make that quite a few years. The so-called “heat island” effect creates a bubble over the ever-bloating urbanized area that acts like the Dome in the TV show of the same name. The daily afternoon showers of yore are bounced off, to pass by miles to the north or the south. This is the first time in probably close to a decade that we’ve had a system strong enough to overcome that phenomenon.

And strong it is: strongly wet. Took the dogs for a walk around 5:30 this morning and came back drenched. Parboiled, actually. Jumping in the pool doesn’t help much: the air is so wet, water won’t evaporate off your skin and hair, so you don’t get the cooling effect. My hair was still damp this morning — from yesterday afternoon’s dip!

One amazingly wonderful thing, though: despite the heat, the mustard algae has not returned to the pool!

It’s like some kind of freaking miracle!

What caused the little green critters to decide to vacate the pool? Beats me.

I’m not doing anything different. The only odd act was adding two pounds of non-chlorine shock treatment, an oxidizer that is known not to affect algae. The stuff disappeared within a day of that, and it hasn’t been back, except for a few small patches that I was able to wipe right off…and that did not just grow right back within a few hours.

So that makes me feel a lot better about the proposed replastering project. Really, I figured I was about to spend $10,000 to cover the pool with yet another fine substrate for the rampant algae. Of course, the stuff is in the filter and the pump by now, and so jackhammering off the old plaster and smearing on expensive new PebbleTec product is not gonna get rid of it. Its just going to create a very expensive algae-infested pond.

But nay! Apparently not!

Whatever is going on, something has killed it off, and it’s not readily coming back. This is the time of year, when the water is like bathwater, that it grows most exuberantly. So the fact that it’s not running amok now suggests it will refrain from covering the new surface with green slime.

It’s so gray and murky out there…I”m surprised it’s not raining right now. It is, however, only about 90 degrees, rather cool. “Feels like”: ohh, about 110… Chance of rain is only about 24% (so we’re told), dropping to about 15% tomorrow. And that’s about it until next Saturday, when the chance of precip spikes to 15%…very, very briefly.

Oh well.

Plants singin’ in the rain

 

Coyote Morning

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So along about 6 a.m. the dogs and the human are trotting up Sub-Feeder Lane, headed back toward the Funny Farm, when flying around the corner comes — HOLY SH!T — a full-grown coyote moving out at a gallop. Big one, too: probably male. His hackles are standing on end (so, we might add, are mine…). Something’s got him scared. He glances at the human with its jaw hanging open and the extremely interested (and interesting) dwarf dogs but keeps on keepin’ on.

Don’t know what spooked him. On the other side of the corner wall, the only people I could see were Manny’s wife and daughter pushing their dog in a baby stroller (don’t ask). No one could be more unprepossessing.

So that was an interesting start to a soggy day. Water is still dripping off the eaves from last night’s rain. It’s hot, muggy, and wet out there.

The pool dude is supposed to materialize in another hour and a half, by which time I will need to be washed, dressed, and painted, and the pigpen more or less picked up.

Later.

The mind (as it were) is about made up: for the new PebbleSheen surfacing job, we should go with the lightest color available that has some sort of irregular mottled-looking pattern. This is most likely to retain its appearance over the product’s 15- to 20-year lifespan. Pool Dude remarked, when asked straight-on, that the coveted darker colors all fade to gray over time. Over, he added, not so much time… Yesterday whilst killing time a-cruisin’ the Web, I came across a chat board inhabited by guys who make their living in the swimming pool biz. One conversation was going on about recoating with PebbleTec and Pebblesheen, which several of the guys had put into their own pools.

{chortle!} God, but I love finding an online chatfest made for guys (and gals) in a trade. You learn so much from their water-cooler yakfests.

So, yeah: all of these products indeed do fade to a pretty uniform gun-metal grey — and it may take just three or four years for that to happen. Several of them posted images of the results…in their own pools. One guy had a chip from the original (black) surfacing job, which he held up against the (faded to chalky slate) side of the pool.

It appears this is mostly caused by precipitation of minerals and pool chemicals out of the water, although sunlight may play some part in it. Around here, you can be sure you get plenty of mineral precipitation: our water is very hard. That’s why, if you have any sense and plenty of money to burn, you should drain and refill your pool at least every two years. Really, it would be ideal to do it every winter, but I don’t like that kind of water waste and so put it off as long as I can.

Like…ahem…four years, just now. This, Pool Dude speculated, might explain the algae issue.

If you could install a couple of water tanks in the backyard that could hold the agèd pool water and allow you to pump it onto your landscaping or use it to wash the car, that would be ideal.

But in the first place, it’s probably illegal. And in the second, it’s unclear to me how you’d pump 18,000 gallons sitting below soil level up into a tank sitting on the surface of the ground.

My water bill this month was $277.

No, not an illusion: that’s almost three hundred bucks! A hundred and twenty-seven dollars over budget.

True, we had an irrigation leak on the front patio, which Gerardo has now fixed. But that zone runs only about 20 minutes…it’s a little hard to believe that would be enough to run up a $300 bill.

***

Pool Dude just called to cancel today’s get-together. Lhudly sing huzzah! It’s hot, muggy, and stuffy in here, and i gotta say…the LAST thing I feel like doing just this minute is banging around picking up the mess and getting myself washed, combed, & painted. Yay!

***

This will free up a lost hour or two to return to drafting the over-prescribing book. Yesterday I finally finished a second draft of the chapter on NNT and NNS (number needed to test and number needed to screen), and even managed to throw in outlines for half of the 14 chapters. Today: finish the chapter outlines; recruit someone to read the NNT squib. I’ve already shipped a draft off to The Kid to fix the documentation — when you write that fast and focus so tightly on difficult subject matter, getting the commas, colons, periods and italics right is more than you wish to cope with.

Next: write the proposal cover letter. Run through the NNT chapter again — third, maybe fourth draft. Then put the package together and ship it off to Editor #1.

As soon as it goes into the email, it’s off to the GDU library to track down their database or (preferably) their hard copy of LMP so as to compile a list of another half-dozen university presses that might be inclined to publish the thing.

Actually, I like a list of a dozen potential publishers for a project like this. Back in the Day, I would always have a half-dozen copies of the proposal in circulation: ship off six copies to six editors; then as a rejection comes in, just ship off another one to the next person on the list. This keeps half-a-dozen queries in circulation and cuts the time required to sell the project to a publishing house by several months. (It’s very bad style, BTW: publishers and editors hate you for doing this!).

LOL! Do as I say, not as I do. 😀

At any rate, this time I’m starting with a publishing house that I have some reason to suspect might be interested in the project. Once they reject (which they probably will: they don’t know me from Adam’s off ox), then we’ll start with the proposal-pushing waltz.

A-n-n-d…if any of this grand plan is going to happen, I suppose I’d better get to work…

Rain! At last!

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So yesterday evening we finally got a monsoon that blew in with enough force to push some precip into the rain shadow of the North Mountains. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

We got a fair amount of rain last night, though not enough to flood the back patio. Certainly enough to water everything nicely, though. And as usual, to confuse motorists who haven’t see water falling out of the sky since they were small children…

I believe that’s a view of a freeway in the East Valley…or…something…
Does your car have oars?
Into the breach…

A tree blew over on some poor soul’s house in Mesa, an East Valley bedroom community. Fortunately, the occupant, a 70-year-old man, was not seriously injured. People have been killed by trees and limbs coming through the roof. That didn’t happen this time, mercifully.

The moisture’s supposed to stick around for about a week, so we should get some more rain. Much needed…but what really is needed is not a (now very rare!) summer thunderstorm, but the regular annual summer deluge plus the now-extinct lengthy, softer winter rains. We get neither of those anymore. Haven’t, not in years.

But don’t worry. There’s no such thing as global warming. Because there’s no such thing as science. Right?

I’d planned to go to a local Fincon meeting last night, and was looking forward to it. But this freshet blew in right about time to head out. And it was still rush hour as the storm blew up. Given the delight I take in driving the homicidal streets of Phoenix under the best of conditions, I decided to opt the pleasure in a wind-and-rain storm. People here simply forget how to drive in rain (or maybe they never learned). They’re crazy under the best of circumstances, but in weather? Rolling menaces, every one of ’em! 😀

Plus…I’m kind of inclined to think it’s not a great idea to leave the dogs here when high winds and heavy rain are under way. Given that gigantic tree on the west side, which would take the house out altogether in a direct hit…and the palm trees that call out to the Lightning Bolt Gods…and the potential for flooding through the back door…. Not that they’d drown. But if the house were busted open they’d run off toward Yuma, never to be seen again. And of course if a fire got started, they wouldn’t live through it without someone here to get them outside.

Incredibly, the pool is holding its own against bathtub temps and blowing dirt. The mossy mustard algae has still not returned! Why, I do not know. One day, it just disappeared, and it has not come back. I did take Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner out as the storm was running in, so as to keep him from choking on tree limbs and drowned rabbits. This morning whisked about half-a-bushel of debris off the bottom, using a garden-hose attachment; then dropped Harvey back in the drink.

Meanwhile…no, I have done exactly NONE of the work laid out on my plate. It is hot. It is humid. And I am too lazy to do much more than loaf.

And so, away: to crank that chapter on NNT!

Images: Arizona Department of Transportation. Public domain.

Gray

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Or is that grey? Oh, well: Yank or Brit, it’s unmistakably a gray, muggy day. The fringe of the supposed hurricane drifted in during the night. Though the air was so thick water seemed to be condensing out like steam, the dogs and I took off for the 5:00 a.m. one-miler, human hoping to get back before real rain began to fall.

And this is where it gets Arizona crazy…

So we’re trotting along and there’s the neighbor wife, ambling around the front yard looking puzzled.

“I can’t figure out where this water is coming from!” says she, pointing to a damp spot on the concrete…directly under the eaves.

This is pleasing, because it means someone else woke up at 4:30 or 5 feeling dazed, muzzy, and befogged. 🙂

After a second she looks up and says, “Oh! The roof?”

I say, “It’s falling from the eaves.”

She says, “Omigod! It’s rain!”

And we both realize it’s been so long since we’ve seen actual rain we can barely recognize it!

😀

Whatever the stuff is, I do wish it wouldn’t pester us today. I’ve got to drive from effing pillar to effing post this morning. And if you think homeowners here are puzzled by water falling out of the sky, wait’ll you see what an Arizona driver does in the rain!

It is going to be horrible.

So at 9 a.m. it’s off to the library to pick up a book that came in from Interlibrary Loan. Then down to AJ’s to pick up not one but two types of dog food, the beasts having consumed the kibble I use as doggy treats and to supplement the home-made stuff. The makings for real food of the doggy variety are only to be had at Costco, and the present budgetary constraints mean I’m out of Costco until the first of the month. Later in the day, it’s pick up friends and meet their kids at their fave restaurant for pre-Father’s Day. One of said kids is Connie the Long-Haul Truck Driver, who hits town today (assuming the weather doesn’t hold her up) and then will have to turn around and head back to some garden spot in North Dakota. Or some such.

What I really want to do with today is work on the Overprescription book. Yesterday I got about 3/4 of the way through chapter 1 — maybe more, actually: just a few more topics to address, just a ton more research sources to dig up. If I would sit still and work on the thing, I could get this chapter done today and chapter 2 done by the end of next week. The Introduction is now done and a credible TofC in place.

The copy is not that difficult to write, because the skeleton of each chapter — well, of most of them — is already sketched out in a series of blog posts. True, a blog post a book chapter does not make. But it makes a damn good running head start.

Once chapter 2 is built, I’ll be ready to send out the proposal. Well, o’course I’ll have to write the cover letter/proposal, but that should be pretty easy. I can do that while Tina is working on the intro and sample chapters to go in the package.

Tina, bidness partner at The Copyeditor’s Desk, has agreed to regularize the citations, a chore I happen to hate. She happens to be in China just now. So that gives me a week or 10 days to get all three sample parts of the book — Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 — in a clean enough draft for her to attack the documentation. Then go over it again with a finer comb, and it’s off to the first publisher!

Yes. Mercifully, you still don’t really need an agent to peddle a book to an academic press. It helps, but unlike the commercial publishing landscape, it’s not de rigueur. So…what you do is compile a list of the presses you imagine will be interested in your topic. At the head of my list is a Canadian university press, because Canada is a great deal more aware of the overmedication issue than the US. Then for each press you find the acquisitions editor for books in your specific subject area; get the person’s name and address. Rack up about a dozen of these, and start sending out your package.

If you have good manners, you send it to just one editor at a time.

However… a) no one has ever accused me of having good manners (not since about the second grade, anyway); and b) I do not have enough years left in my life to wait for …one…editor…at…a…time… to get around to rejecting me.

In the past, I’ve sent out a half-dozen at once. That was in the Day of the Snail, mail-wise. When a rejection would come in, I’d just take the package out of the SASE and drop it into a new envelope for the next editor on the list, which would have no fewer than a dozen candidates. So at any given time, at least six proposals would be in circulation.

In the past, too, the first, second, or third editor would bite. Others wouldn’t even respond, or would send an offer a day late and many dollars short. So it wasn’t really that a half-dozen offers were gonna come in from the first mailing.

We shall see how this works in the Age of E-mail. I surely do hope it goes faster…but don’t hold out much hope.

I probably will shop the proposal around to about a dozen houses. If no one picks it up, I’ll self-publish the thing. But really…the subject is too important for the Trash Heap That Is Amazon. It really needs to go out through a real publisher with a real marketing operation and enough clout to get real reviewers to look at it.

But here in the Brave New World, a lot of things need to happen, don’t they? 😉