Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

A Wrenching Decision…

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Okay, so my beloved kitchen wrench, the one that resides in a drawer, where it stands by to perform the crucial job of unscrewing the caps on bottles of cheap wine, has been hiding for the past several weeks. Didn’t pay much attention to this, because I’ve been on the wagon for quite some time and so had rare occasions to pine for the wine wrench. {heh!}

Well, the other day after I escaped the Mayo’s test lab, whence I was ordered to present myself for an annual health review, the first thing I did was tear down to the fancy-Dan Fry’s at Tatum & Shea and grab a bottle of my favorite California hootch. I’d been abstaining for the past month, by way of gaming the Mayo’s system: I’ve grown mightily tired of hearing my unempathetic doc whinge about my liver enzyme levels. And of having to prevaricate about how much spirits I actually consume, so as a) to avoid getting that written down anywhere and b) to avoid having to listen to a long lecture containing advice that I already know, thankyouverymuch. At any rate, I was reminded that the beloved kitchen wrench had gone AWOL when I tried to open this fine bottle of wine. Searched all over for the thing, but couldn’t find it.

Alas. Managed to get the fine bottle open anyway.

This morning another raft of test results went online at the Mayo’s “portal.” And lo!

  • Liver enzyme levels: right smack in the middle of the “normal” range
  • Glucose level: about 5 points high…we’ll be told, once again (as over the past 8 or 10 years) that we’re “pre-diabetic.” Okay, just hand me the damn candybar…)
  • Everything else: dead on normal.

Hm. I suspect those liver enzymes have come down specifically because I decided to knock off my daily dose of wine. Or beer. Or whiskey.

Have I felt better? Not really. About the same, I’d say. I felt fine before climbing on the wagon and I feel fine now. But that notwithstanding…I do think it’s time to revert to Great-Grandmother’s staunch policy of tee-totaling. Clearly the booze has been affecting the liver, and not imbibing has also affected it: for the better.

Hence….the decision: Stay on the wagon? Or sink beneath the waves of a sea of iniquity?

Contemplating said collection of medico-facts this morning, it occurred to me that I still hadn’t found the wine wrench, despite having launched a special search for it after I arrived home with the recent purchase in hand. So got up off my duff and wandered into the garage for another lookaround…

And lo! There were the familiar yellow handles! Yes. Right there in the toolbox. Uh huh. The toolbox I’d searched three times without finding them.

How does that happen? How can you look at something — right straight at it, presumably — three times without seeing it? When you’re sober and have been dead sober for a month or so?

Possibly it’s sobriety that’s at fault… 😉

Crabby Gardening Lady

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Okay, stand back! I’m goin’ in!

Or off, actually. As in off the fu*kin’ wagon. There’s nothing like a nice cold bourbon and water to brighten your crabby day.

Actually, there’s nothing but bourbon and water, as I’ve unloaded all the wine and beer in the house on friends, by way of refraining from drinking it. I’m not all that nuts about bourbon, so I didn’t donate that to anyone’s cause when I went on the current wagon ride. But..well. One has to allow that bourbon does have its high points.

As it were.

For the past several weeks, I’ve thought the portulaca living in the hanging Mexican pots and growing in ground pots over by the west wall was being eaten by some kind of insect. What kind of insect escaped me, since as far as I know we don’t have anything around here just now that’s capable of stripping the leaves off a portulaca. And even if we did…hmmm…well, the leaves are laying on the ground, not occupying space in some bug’s innards.

Soo… I google “leaf drop portulaca” and discover lo! the main cause of leaf drop in elephant-food plants is overwatering.

Overwatering????? WTF? The watering schedule is exactly the same as it is every summer in these parts: 20 minutes a day, early in the morning, leaving about 14 or 16 hours of sunlight to dessicate the soil in those pots. If you don’t water a potted plant every day in these parts, it will croak over by nightfall. In the summertime, that is.

And summertime is what we’ve had, with a vengeance. It’s been hotter than the hubs of Hades for the past three months. It’s 100° out there, as we scribble. This morning when I took the dog out, humidity was 52%; now, at a little after noon, the air has dried out to a mere 22%, which isn’t quite what I’d call “a dry heat.” It’s particularly not “dry” when you need to work outside but you’re required to cover every square inch of your skin to keep from exposing any part of you to the sun.

That humidity isn’t so horribly high, but we’ve had very little rain. Effectively, “monsoon” season passed us over this year. It just didn’t happen. We got humid, stuffy, yucky, Georgia-summer air, that’s true. But precious little rain.

So I would’ve thought, if anything, that the problem was the plants were underwatered.

But now I think not: the pots’ soil is soggy. If it’s been that wet for the whole summer, well…yeah. The succulents could very well be drowning.

Meanwhile, the rest of the garden has been mightily neglected. The spider plants are dancing the hula in skirts of dead leaves. The calla lilies, also apparently overwatered, are curling up and dying. The bulb thingies Joan gave me are barely clinging to life. The citrus needs to be fertilized. My neighbor Terri’s accursed pepper tree has again seeded the yard, so half a dozen baby invaders need to be sprayed. One of the pots of chard croaked over in the summer heat: new seeds need to be tracked down and planted in that thing.

Ugh. How do I want to work in this heat? Let me count the ways…not…

That profound non-desire notwithstanding, I charged out and cut back dead stuff, cut back dead stuff, cut back more dead stuff. Transplanted one very sick-looking spider out of the pot it had outgrown into a much larger pot that had enough soil to accommodate it…noted that said plant, too, appears to have been overwatered. Dragged three bags of debris out to the garbage, along with two trashcans full of household garbage that was living (heh) in the garage.

Turned off the watering system. Made a calendar note to check soil moisture on Sunday and turn the water back on, as indicated. If indicated.

Having no potting soil, I was unable to transplant the suffering portulaca in the hanging pots. The next time I’m out running around — which will be tomorrow — I’ll stop by a nursery or Home Depot and buy a bag of dirt; then figure out what on earth to do with those things. While there, I’ll get a packet of chard seeds and drop them into the bereft chard pot.

Now we await the defrosting of the scallops, which we intend to stir-fry with garlic and pine nuts and serve up over some lovely chard  + spinach, possibly curried  (there’s not enough chard in that pot to supply a meal just now). Yes. Possibly curried, or possibly just smothered in Pomí tomatoes, which handsomely approximate a decent tomato sauce.

Saudi Arabia: SO glad to be gone…

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Back at the old homestead, I see, those who wish the Americans ill have bombed a refinery. Abqaiq. Oh, God: define Chez Pitts, and you’ve got it… We lived within driving distance of that garden spot, in another hole called Ras Tanura.

Rasty Nasty, as my father used to call it, was a port for oil tankers. At the time, the refinery was located there — I don’t know, really, whether there was also a refinery at Abqaiq…or what. At any rate, oil was loaded onto the tankers at Ras Tanura, and most of the Americans who lived there were refinery or port workers, plus a few support staff such as teachers, medical staff, and administrators.

Dhahran was largely occupied by administrative staff, plus there was an Air Force base there and also an airport for commercial traffic.

And Abqaiq, out in the most gawdawful desert you can imagine, was an oil field. Horrible places, each and every one.  At the time, Dhahran and Ras Tanura had gated residential communities for American families of company employees; these were isolated small towns, occupied exclusively by Americans, who were there on two-year contracts. The paterfamilias got a three-month leave every two years, for which the company would fly him and his family to New York, or, if preferred, to some European destination, and a two-week leave in the middle of the two-year contract, which most of us would spend in Bahrain or Beirut.

This kind of attack was exactly the kind of thing the company secretly expected, and for which it had plans. In the event of riots or revolution, American family members in Ras Tanura were to be loaded onto buses and driven to Dhahran, where magically we were to board airplanes and be flown out of the country.

Har har!

On the two-lane “highway” between Ras Tanura and Dhahran there was an oasis occupied by locals who were, shall we say, less than positive about Americans. Along that road, you could see a billboard that read, in Arabic, “Yankee Go Home.” A pipeline ran out of Abqaiq, which posed a chronic problem: it was always being cut or otherwise sabotaged by the locals.

My father, who was a harbor pilot at the Ras Tanura port, had been a merchant mariner for years before landing the highly paid job that took us to this garden spot. He made his own plans for us, in the case of unrest. We each — my mother, my father, and me — had a grab-and-go suitcase, always packed for a quick escape. (Mine contained my favorite stuffed animals.) Because of his long experience at sea, he knew most of the tanker captains well.

He had made arrangements with all of his tanker-commanding friends to take my mother and me on board should the need arise. We would be hidden until the ship could set to sea (which you may be sure would have been forthwith), and carried through the Persian Gulf, out the Strait of Hormuz, and thence to the Suez Canal. The company confiscated our passports when we arrived in-country, and so we would have no papers. We would have had to be taken someplace that had a US consulate to be let off the ship. Cairo, presumably?

My father had somehow smuggled a pistol into the country, which he hid somewhere in the house where even I couldn’t find it. (That was saying something: I could find almost anything in that place.) He planned to use it in the event riots got inside the camp.

But of course, when the time came…well…he wasn’t there. That night when rioters did almost break through the Main Gate, he and my mother were playing bridge at the home of another couple. My best friend Pamela was staying the night at our house. We slept through all the excitement, and neither we nor our parents had a clue until after the fact. Had the insurgents managed to get into camp, my father wouldn’t have had a chance to get back to the house to protect us, and of course we wouldn’t have had a chance to defend ourselves, either…because I had no idea where the gun was. Nor would I have known how to use it.

What a horrible place it was. Living there was like living in a remote small town in the Southwest — such as, say, Ajo — only with no access to a city, no escape from the social pressure-cooker, and little access to free news reporting. Summers were almost as hot as Arizona‘s, only it was not by any means a “dry heat.” When you would wake up in the morning, water would be dripping off the eaves and puddling on the ground — so humid was the air that once I was standing in the front yard when rain began to fall out of a clear blue sky.

At least the residents of Ajo are not universally hated by the locals — what few of them remain after our ancestors leveled the place. It’s hard to say that’s a “good” thing…but it’s one helluva lot better than having to live in fenced, guarded compounds.

Y’know, there are a lot of good reasons for America to reduce its dependence on oil. Climate change may be the foremost among them. But Saudi Arabia is a close second.

When they say “Empty Quarter,” they ain’t kidding. This is where we lived. For ten long years…

Live-Blogging from the Doc’s Office

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So…here I am at the dermatologist’s office…AGAIN. Ten minutes early: didn’t take as long to fight the traffic as usual. Only one moron, all the way across 103 north-south avenues and six east-west main drags.

Ah! This is amusing. I see typing on a keyboard annoys my fellow waiting-room inmates. Some woman just got up and moved herself closer to the (annoying!) yakathon television. To keep the patients calm, this particular practice serenades us with an UNENDING loop of some TV home-improvement show episodes. On and boringly on about ripping out shelving and installing cabinetry and fixing the plumbing. Sooo soothing…

Young Dr. Kildare’s office is right around the corner – this being the dermatology practice he likes to refer his patients to. Consumed a third of a tank of gas a couple days ago to consult with him about a weird traffic event in which I damn near killed four people by trying to pass an aggressive moron who I thought was in the middle lane but who was actually in the left-turn lane.

That was exciting…

And alarming, because in 42 years of driving, I’ve never gotten so confused I didn’t even know what damn lane I was driving in! So I wanted to…

Oh…the woman disturbed by the sound of keys tapping is yapping on her phone, sharing her personal life with one and all! Love it!

…where were we? So I wanted to ask him if he could tell whether I’m starting to Alzheimer out.

He said. “That’s not dementia. That’s road rage.”

😀

Oh, God! Her kid’s teacher called her on the phone earlier to report that the brat was “having an off day” in school: not paying attention in class. She gets into a worried heart-to-heart about this.

Did any child, anywhere, ever pay attention in those interminable, brain-bangingly stupid grade-school classes?

…where were we? So Young Dr. Kildare says the only thing wrong with me is road rage, and I need to get a grip. And, interestingly, he shares the fact that he also is plagued by constant road rage while driving around Our Fair city.

At this point, I share with him my Universal Theory of Phoenix Drivers. This, as you will recall, goes as follows:

Hypothesis 1: At any given time when you are on the road, one in ten drivers coming toward you is a moron.

He says: “Oh! I would have said two or three!”

I say, “Well, given the volume of traffic on a road like 7th Street, that could be so, but I believe that to be an illusion. Fewer people are morons than we perceive.”

Hypothesis 2: At any given time when you are on the road, one in ten drivers going in your direction is a moron.

Corollary: Therefore, at all times when you are driving in lovely Phoenix, you are surrounded by morons.

He persisted in his analysis, that the numerical value is grossly underestimated. This aspect will need further investigation to produce valid statistical results.

At any rate, the dearth of morons at 10:00 in the morning is puzzling. Usually, one would expect to encounter at least three or four of them.

Today must be some kind of moron holiday.

***

That was easier than I expected.

Meeting with the dermatologist’s PA, I explained that I’d gone to the Mayo to get a second opinion, because that is what I always do, after 40-some years of experience in the Land of Medical Science, and that the alleged doctor I’d spoken with would not give me a straight answer to even ONE of the three fairly simple questions I asked her:

  1. Is the most recently treated lesion, which remains red and has a white spot in it, healing properly, or do we need to do more to clean it out?
  2. What is the cause of the apparent nerve pain up and down my arm, which arose when this lesion was frozen off and has only partially cleared?
  3. Is it really necessary to use the Efudex prescribed by the westside dermatologist’s practice at this time, or can we safely wait to see whether freezing these things off works?

Mayo’s doc simply refused to give me an answer to questions 1 and 2. To question 3, said she: “Well…we normally prescribe that when there are a lot of lesions. Like, 15.”

There had only been two, at this point.

I said, “So, are you saying it’s reasonable not to use the product at this time?”

She said, “That’s up to you. It’s your decision.”

WTF??? Why the hell does she think I would ask her opinion if I had a clue about the advisability of applying a product that is going to blister up my hand, inflict an array of unpleasant and painful side effects, and very possibly cause permanent disfigurement?

So when I tell Wonder-Dermatology’s PA about this, she says…

  1. The recently treated lesion is healing quite well. The redness is to be expected and will go away slowly. The white spots are scars.
  2. It’s really unlikely the arm pain could be caused by treating that particular spot, because to reach the suspect nerve one would have to burrow in a great deal deeper than a squirt of frozen nitrogen can do. Young Doctor Kildare’s theory that it’s a variety of tendinitis or some kind of muscle strain is probably correct. But if it doesn’t go away, I should ask him for a referral.
  3. Hilarious! Yes, actually, we can wait safely to see whether any more keratoses arise after today’s treatment. Fifteen??? We often treat even one or two lesions with Efudex.

And then she kindly sprayed not just the latest visitation on the paw, but the big ugly brown spot on my face, too. The one I’ve been trying to get her to freeze off since I first showed up in her precincts.

Adventures in Medical Science…

Sittin’ at the Front Desk

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So here we are down at the church office, where I got impressed into a stint at volunteering as the front-desk receptionist. The staff is in a meeting for an hour, which means I have to take messages from all the callers. But that’s a good thing, because I am exceptionally stupid about operating the phone system.

For reasons I cannot even begin to comprehend, this thing utterly flummoxes me. I can’t for the life of me figure out — and remember — how to connect incoming calls with their intended recipients or to a recipient’s voicemail. Possibly this is because I’m not here enough to internalize the process — I’m only here about once a month, for 3½ hours, nowhere near long enough to make a series of tricks like these “mine.”

Ironically, my first job ever was as a receptionist/PBX operator for a large law firm. I loved that job! It was the best job I’ve ever had, during the entire 42 years of my working life. And I’ll tellya, that system was a heckuva lot more complicated than this system — we had three stations, each with six incoming lines. During a busy period, all six of your lines would be jangling at once. There were 40 lawyers plus their legal secretaries plus the people in accounting plus the people in filing plus the librarian plus the office manager plus…plus…plus. But it was simple and straightforward to operate.

This little volunteer job rarely has anything going on — as you can tell by the fact that I while away my time playing with the computer and scribbling blog posts. Someone named Jerod is supposed to show up during the staff meeting for our financial person; she wants to be hailed out when that person surfaces. Otherwise, there’s…well…nothing. The phone has rung twice this morning; often it never rings at all during a shift.

Hm. I see the Washington Post will let me into its games from the church’s network. That site recently blocked me because I refuse to turn off my ad-blocker, but I managed to replace all my favorites by finding them at the Great Day Games site. However, WaPo’s versions are a little better designed and the site lets you accrue a lifetime collection of points. Oddly, it seems to recognize me, despite the difference in the IP address. Interesting…

Good! Now I can play Dark Dimensions, a brain-bangingly pointless time-waster! 😀 One of my favorites…

Hmmm…. That’s interesting. I wonder if there’s a way to fake out their system so it doesn’t recognize my IP address? Hmmmm….indeed… Apparently the Tor Browser will hide your IP address. Evidently it’s slow, but it does conceal private (and not-so-private) information.

This is the first time I’ve taken on the morning stint for the receptionist job — they divvy it up into morning and afternoon shifts, and I’ve always been assigned afternoons. Seems a little busier than the afternoon gig…a lot of people wandering in and out. The Kelly Paper guy just surfaced in an 18-wheeler. He’s rolling in stack after stack of boxes full of paper.

Thrill a minute, eh?

****

Only 45 minutes to go.

Three and a half hours seems like a crazy long time when you have nothing to do. I could, of course, work up the energy to re-address the Ella story, something I’ve failed to do for…how long? Weeks and weeks.

As soon I finish here, I have to schlep Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner up to the local Leslie’s store. He committed hara-kiri whilst cleaning up after the last little monsoonlet, which deposited a layer of BB-like palm tree seeds all over the bottom of the shiny clean pool. I was able to get most of them up with the hose-operated leaf-catcher device, but about a dozen of the damn things just would not stay in the net. It only takes one to break Harvey…

From Leslie’s, it’s up to the Walmart grocery store, where I hope they’ll still have a few 20-pound bags of bird seed. The wildlife is almost out of the 40 pounder I ordered from Amazon. It was nice to be able to have the seed delivered to the door, except..

  • Hauling it from the door to the bin where I store the stuff in the backyard was highly problematic… And…
  • The stuff from the Amazon vendor was not what you’d call the highest quality. Walmart’s bird seed is unadulterated by small chunks of weird stuff (Styrofoam? plaster? whaaaa?) and it contains more millet, less sunflower seed.
  • And Walmart sells the same stuff cheaper.

Then the minute I walk in the door, I have to call a prospective client: apparently a memoirist.

The new flat rate of 4 cents a word seems to be working all the way around. It doesn’t seem to scare off clients (much, anyway), yet on a book-length work it returns enough to justify my existence. So if I can land another book, that will be helpful.

One of the Chinese academics talked their university into paying me with a check. So far no such thing has made itself evident. Nanyang Tech says it will send money, too…but again: no sign of a visible remittance.

So I’m pretty sure the China trade is defunct. That’s OK, though, as long as I can keep snaring in book manuscripts. It would take eight 10,000-word academic articles, at four cents a word, to pay as much as one rather short book-length project. And any day I’d rather hustle up one author instead of eight of ’em!

Six more minutes. WHERE is my replacement?????

Hotter Than the Fourth of July!

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Literally. The Fourth scored a chilly 104 here in lovely uptown Phoenix. This afternoon it was 108, sez Wunderground. The pool is more like a bathtub than a swimming pool…especially saturated with algaecide, which creates bubbles!

Aaron the Pool Dude’s discovery that the pump was partially jammed with a chunk of palm tree debris seems to have largely solved the London Fog problem. The water has hovered between clear and crystal clear since he fixed that. The problem right now is that it is demanding SO much liquid chlorine that I fail to see how I’m going to be able to afford to maintain our present scheme. Yesterday it consumed a full gallon of chlorine — put in half a gallon in the morning and by mid-day it was just about out. Dumped the other half-gallon in, and by this morning it needed another hit.

I can’t afford to pour a gallon of chlorine in there every day…not at six bucks a gallon. So we need to find some way to stabilize the chemicals. Meanwhile, I have other fish to fry…

And we do mean fry. Today I had to schlep, once again, over to the far west side through the sizzling heat, there to visit the dermatologist again. Her crew thinks it’s too soon to tell whether the most recent little procedure failed (as I think it did) to get rid of a budding skin tumor. They recommended massaging antibiotic ointment into it.

Hm. Never occurred to me to massage a wound. But in fact, it worked, and promptly. It’s already feeling a little better and looking a lot better.

Finally managed to extract a prescription for some goop to whiten the brown spots all over my face. That, she called in to the Costco pharmacy. Schlepping way to hell and gone down there through the unholy heat was more than I could face, so that will have to wait until I can get into Costco for a regular shopping run.

Maybe later.

Tomorrow I have to traipse almost as far in the opposite direction, to the hair stylist in Scottsdale.

The effort to find someone closer and cheaper failed. I couldn’t even figure out how to get in the beauty school’s front door: apparently they’re closed to the public. So went across the street to the beauty salon in the run-down Albertson’s shopping center.

LOL! “Run-down” doesn’t describe it. Would you go for dark? How about dank? Decided against making an appointment there.

Helle’s Belle’s. Even though Shane is spectacularly expensive, with my hair halfway to my fanny I only need a trim once or twice a year. I can afford sixty bucks, at that rate. His salon is beautiful…and so is he. And he does a reliably excellent job.

So…in short: I have gotten nothing done today except running around through the heat and dumping chlorine bleach into the swimming pool. Whee!