Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Well, i KNEW i had something worth writing…

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But damned if I can figure out what it is…

Several quiet days here at the Funny Farm: no serious drama going on in the ’hood, no excitement to belly-ache about — at least, none that’s not going on in Washington, precincts that have become too tiresome to consider. 😉

A new client sent a paper he intends to deliver at a conference this week. Very interesting piece. The guy’s senior faculty in a decent university’s “Communications” program — that’s what we call “J-school” these days. And so he has something to say, and that something happens to be on a subject I enjoy reading about. So that was a day and a half of pleasurable reading for pay.

The flu continues to make its rounds here in Lovely Uptown Arizona. Friends and foes are dropping left and right. But so far I’ve managed to evade it, for reasons I do not understand. Either I’m one of the 10% to 30% who happen to be protected by this year’s flu shot, or the theory that keeping your hands scrupulously clean works.

If the latter is true, here’s the key: Get yourself a plastic box full of the harshest kitchen counter sanitizing wipes you can find in the store. Place it in the car, and also install a plastic bag or small waste basket for used wipes. Then: every single time you go anywhere and climb back into the car, pull out a wipe and rub it thoroughly over your hands; then wipe down the steering wheel and your car keys and key fob.

Et voilà! If you’ve picked up any bugs on your hands, that ought to kill off a fair number of them.

As soon as you get home, wash your hands well with soap and water. If you have to unpack groceries, be sure to wash your hands again after doing so — you can be sure any cashier or grocery clerk with a sore throat or a runny nose will have smeared bags and boxes and packages with germs.

This amounts to a fair amount of obsessive hand-scrubbing. But presumably after you’re back in the house, you can go about your business without removing any more skin from your paws.

In an office? I dunno. If you have to work in one of those accursed cubes, there’s not a helluva lot you can do to protect yourself. The guy next to you is coughing his viruses in the air, and since the boss is unlikely to let you sit in front of the computer with a gas mask on, you really can’t do much about that. But I think it’s still probably worth hiding a box of counter wipes in your desk and wiping your hands every time you have to leave the cube and move about the infected area. Which will be just about everyplace in an office or school.

Got kids? Forget it. Just get used to the fact that you’re gonna catch the flu. What doesn’t kill you makes you better.

Otherwise, rather little of any constructive import has been going on. I’ve not written a damn word on the noveloid in progress, nor have I updated the Plain & Simple Press Blog (b-a-a-a-ad human!).

No, that’s wrong: The Kid and I met at the Great Desert University the other day and applied for a DUNS number. That has so far not been forthcoming. Whenever (if ever) it gets here, we will then be able to get ourselves certified as a woman-owned small business, which will put us in a preferred category for certain federal contracts. We pledged to look for state contracts, too…but so far I have not managed to elevate myself off my derrière long enough to find out about that. I think probably it will be best to get that DUNS number before spending a lot more time on this effort.

Planning to go to the scribbler’s group this weekend. O’course, I made the same plan last month, but at the last minute did not feel well enough to take on the endless drive to the far west Valley. This month the presenter will be going on about using Word’s “Styles” function to format your manuscript. Well…I already know how to do that, thank you very much. But I do have a book MS in progress that I could play with during this workshop. Or just use some of the draft noveloid MS.

My idea for the nonfiction thing, which is essentially complete and will be easy to put together, is to market it in hard copy. But really. When you come right down to it: why? None of these books is making much money. In any given month, Funny about Money generates about 15 times as much income as all the P&S Press books combined. And it’s a fraction of the work. My plan right now is to “publish” bookoids for free through separate, dedicated websites. Then if anyone wants to buy the whole combined damnfool thing, they can download it for a modest fee from that site. Or for the same modest fee at Amazon.

This, of course, requires me to explain what I’m trying to do for the blogging empire’s website wrangler. And trying to make sense of that in writing? More work than I feel like doing just now.

Can you get spring fever in January?

Rain and Jackhammers

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As is often the case, we’re getting the outer edge of the rainstorm that drifted into California…where it’s been causing houses to drift down hills on a tide of mud. Yarnell, beautiful Yarnell, got well over an inch of rain, as did lovely Wittman, home of Ruby the Corgi.

Ah, to be in Yarnell…

Shortly before 7:00 a.m., the bright and cheery song of a jackhammer rose into the air. Cassie and Ruby also rose into the air, emitting a fine barking frenzy. WTF? Storm sewer busted? What?

So I venture outside to see WTF, indeed. Can’t see anyone, but at first think it’s coming from the direction of the WonderAccountants’ house. Possibly in the alley behind their place? Spying on that will be a chore, since the alley curves there and one cannot easily glance down there from our neighborhood lane. Hm. But no… It’s more like the Young People’s house…noooo…. It’s coming from the backyard of the handsomely renovated house on the other side of Young People. No truck is parked in front, but a couple of pails of plaster are standing in the driveway.

Yeah: Undoubtedly a pool replastering job.

Ugh! That means those jackhammers will be banging away for half the day! It takes hours to blast off the old plaster on a large pool. And…fellas? Did your foreman happen to notice that it’s…like…raining? That’s why that wet stuff is falling out of the sky onto your heads.

Some days you realize you’re very lucky not to have some other guy’s job.

The patio seems not to have flooded in the absence of the shade structure’s fiberglass cover. In fact, I think it’s possible that it may have drained better than before. The fiberglass directed runoff from the roof directly into the French drain off the south side of the patio, which of course would fill and overflow within minutes. With the water hitting the concrete and flowing outward from there, drainage seems to spread the runoff across a wider area, sort of the way water runs off a bajada. And that possibly just may have attenuated the Lake Mead effect.

It’s still a mess that will require me to drag the hose over to wash out the mud. But…could be worse.

The table got wet and, because it already had collected some fallen leaves and Devil-Pod tree pollen, was quite the mess to clean up. But I suspect that problem can be easily resolved with a tarp from the Depot.

The cheapie barbecue cover ordered up from Amazon works well to keep the Que dry and clean, and so I can’t see why a cheap tarp wouldn’t do the same for the table. The BBQ cover is “shaped” crudely with a pair of Velcro-backed strips. It would take nothing to secure some heavy-duty Velcro to a flat tarp, which would allow you to tighten the “fit” (as it were) under the table top to keep the thing from blowing off in the wind.

Meanwhile, forgot to drag the wicker rocking chairs into the house from the side deck. By the time I remembered — after the dogs and I were installed in the sack — the rain was really coming down. So had to jump up, run through the house, throw open the sliding door, and drag the two chairs, now amply wet, into the dining room. Fortunately they weren’t completely soaked. Their little seat cushions are already dry this morning…and a couple months ago I’d slapped another thick coat of spray paint on the things, so I guess they’re probably OK.

Yesterday in my frenzy to improve what passes for my health, I walked 2½ miles at a brisk pace, 1½ of them without benefit of dog. Not only that, I also did a yoga routine and two sets of physical therapy exercises for back pain. And…amazingly…

OMG!

The very first thing that sifted into my consciousness this morning when I woke at dawn was…my back doesn’t hurt my hip doesn’t hurt.

Speaking of WTF! 😀

Over the past some months, I’ve become outrageously lazy. I just do not want to get up out of this comfortable chair. And incoming projects from clients have made that possible: with paid work sitting in the laptop, one can convince oneself that one can’t get up because one has to work. Eh?

Just now the coast is clear. Current client decided to revise his article and asked me to hold off reading it, which instantly shoveled off the virtual desk. So I didn’t feel guilty at diddling away time walking around the ‘hood (read: I had no excuse…).

It is amazing how much better you feel after just one day punctuated with three short periods of mild exercise. The yoga routine only runs about 20 minutes, and the PT routine is much shorter: you can get through it in less than 10 minutes. A mile walk takes about 15 minutes when not interrupted by dog-drags. So really…even if there were any paying work to do, it’s not like that small amount of shuffling around takes that much time away from pecuniary gain. No more time, for example, than lingering over Google News and playing online games…

Hope it clears up enough for another couple of walks today.

 

U$hering: Free Live Entertainment

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The Bach Festival is in town again — it’s an annual spree of lovely classical entertainment presented in small venues, mostly very beautiful churches. As usual, I can’t afford to pay to amuse myself or improve my (probably impregnable) mind, so if I get to one, that’s awesome, but usually…not so much luck.

However, one of my choir friends sent out an email asking if anyone would like to usher for a performance.

Well! Dang. I used to usher for the Arizona Theater Company. It was a great experience…and a way to see a play for free. Downtown Phoenix is a bit of a headache to navigate, though. I most certainly can’t afford to park there. And they moved their volunteers’ parking to a lot that was horribly difficult to find and hard to get into because of all the one-way streets and the construction. So I gave up.

And truth to tell, after all these years (those happenings occurred while I was still working, back in another geologic era!) I had forgotten about it.

Naturally, when she brought it up I jumped to volunteer. And happy day, got accepted for an afternoon performance. 🙂

This really is a fun way to make yourself useful — and on the side, get to see performances you wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. The trick is to find companies that accept volunteers as ushers. It’s not at all a difficult job: you have to learn the layout of the house. Then you just hand out programs and help people find their seats. And be nice to the peeps, of course.

A Few Blessings

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Sometimes one despairs of blessings, living in a right-wing flyover state on an income that the feds think of as “poverty” level (it’s not…but that’s another story), where the drivers are crazy and so are the politicians. Some days, though, you just think Thank God.

• Thank God for a fine son.

• Thank God for friends and online virtual friends.

• Thank God for good dogs, good food, and good wine.

• Thank God for the choir and the church that supports it.

• And thank God we don’t live on the East Coast today.

• Thank God for peace and quiet (when you can get it).

• Thank God for great coffee and a French press in which to brew it.

• Thank God for cacti, a whole swarm of whose new babies will soon be blooming.

Here on Christmas Day, M’hijito tripped over this cactus outside the front side-gate, which is much larger than it appears in that snapshot. He was overflowing with apology, but I assured him it was not a big deal. In fact, it was past time to have cut back that neglected plant.

Eventually I got around to wandering out and picking up the several cactus balls that broke off. This is how cacti reproduce: a chunk breaks off, falls on the ground, and sometime in this century takes root.

w00t! I planted four in the front patio. Can you imagine if they all grow and they all bloom at once? That place is gonna be amazing. Put another couple in the side yard. Planted one in a pot to take to M’hijito’s house. And in the back, I retrieved a pot that had made its way under the lemon tree, where lay an old cactus that I thought had died.

You can’t kill a cactus, you know. Though it had flopped over and broken off at the ground, the bottom was callused and the top part was…still green! No sign of rot. Hmmmm… I have no idea what color it is but suspect it’s one of the deep magenta Easter lily cacti that I brought over from the old house, 14 years ago. Planted it under the overgrown rose on the northwest side of the house, where it should get plenty of light but will have time to adjust to the change of micro-microclimate before the sun turns north and starts to bake that corner.

Yes. The East. They have civilization…we have decent weather. As we scribble, the pooches and I are loafing in the front courtyard. The neighbor’s boy is throwing hoops across the street. Cassie is eating green olives that have fallen out of the tree (the better to barf on the floor!), and Ruby is barking at any sign of a passing neighbor. Yesterday the inversion layer finally lifted and blew out most of the smog. The sky is cerulean blue again, and the trees are rustling softly in a barely moving breeze.

Last night our choir friend who lives in Michigan brought pictures of the snow back home, where she repaired for the holiday. The place was enjoying a serious White Christmas — very picturesque if you don’t have to shovel it. And…that was before the real storm was due to roll in. Fortunately she jumped on a plane back to the Valley of the We Do Mean Sun hours before said monster storm was expected to arrive.

• Thank God for Chinese mathematicians and assorted other academics. A fairly large new project is slated to fly in over the transom tomorrow afternoon, at which time I intend to be hiking in the desert. This is from a senior scholar, a lively fellow who seems to have had an interesting career…and is decidedly still kickin’. So I’m looking forward to working on that, the first major job of 2018.

Today is the only day this week I have to myself: SDXB is coming over tomorrow, a meeting on the far side of the West Valley beckons for Saturday, and of course half of Sunday will be consumed by singing. Every other day has been occupied by one activity or another. It’s almost noon and I have done nothing — unless you consider blogging to be something. This afternoon I want to prune that overgrown rose, which has run amok for years. Walk a mile and a half, preferably sans dragging dogs. Loaf some more. Maybe write some more. Download 2017 data from the bank and credit card issuers; organize that stuff for WonderAccountant’s convenience. And cook up a pot of food for the hounds.

And so, away…to another “busy” day of retirement. 😉

Merry Christmas!

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It was after dark yesterday evening when I set out for the Christmas Eve shindig down at the church. The whole neighborhood was lit up! Not only has the influx of young families led to lots more trees and eaves wrapped in Christmas lights, but the local neighbors group has lobbied long and hard to persuade people to line their front walkways with luminarias, which really are very lovely.

For the longest time, the leader of the pack in the Christmas decor department hereabouts was the proprietor of the Burning Bush. This guy climbs up on ladders — every year — to wrap a huge Chinaberry tree with layer on layer on layer of colored lights. These he would set on timers, so that when you looked at the thing, you’d see it all glowing in, say, red lights. Walk around the block, and you’d come back to find a the tree glowing blue. Or orange. Or yellow. Or green. It is an amazing production, to say the least.

Now he’s got some competition from the young folks, who climb on their roofs to create vast confections of lights and blow-up sculptures or cast movie images on their walls. And of course we have the luminarias.

Down at the Religious HQ, we more or less outdid ourselves for the midnight services. The sanctuary was also all lit up, draped with white lights in all directions — which makes for a pretty impressive effect when the house lights are dimmed. As usual, we had a string section, who this year were joined by our new choir director’s wife, a gifted violinist who played a lovely descant. And for the first time in my memory, we sang the Prayers of the People. I’m told that high churches Back East do this fairly routinely. I’ve never heard it before — and my mother did take me to a high church in San Francisco, back in the day when women wore gloves and hats and veils to church.

Our choir is privileged — gifted — to have many singers with professional-level talent. One of them is a tenor — he actually can sing counter-tenor — who has a truly beautiful voice. He sang the first part of prayer’s verses accompanied by the chamber choir, and the rest of us plus the congregation sang the second parts. The effect was amazing.

It was ethereal.

Over dinner at the half-time (between the early and the midnight services), several folks said people in the congregation had come up to them and spoken ecstatically about their experience of the service.

So it goes.

Sometimes, as I duck bullets or lock deadbolts during helicopter fly-overs or peruse my neighbors’ endless bellyaching on NextDoor about the bums and the thieves  or cast malign thoughts in the direction of my fellow homicidal drivers, I consider how much I would like to move to Prescott or, if only I were thirty or forty years younger, back to the banks of the Hassayampa River.

But on reflection, I can’t imagine living anywhere other than North Central, if one must live in Arizona. There are, admittedly, other cities and other countries where I might have chosen to live, given a choice in the matter. But having had no choice, by luck I seem to have fallen pretty much into the best of all possible sub-domains.  Can’t imagine living in the dreary HOA-ridden elbow-to-elbow suburbs that comprise the home of the ever-fleeing white middle class. Think Scottsdale is a nice place to visit but wouldn’t want to live there. And…well…that’s about the extent of your choices, unless you’re too poor to have any choice, in which case you huddle in a shack down by the airport or hang out in the poverty-ridden west side.

We — the neighbors who live on the northern and western fringes of North Central — tend to exaggerate the negative aspects of our ‘hood.

Yes, there are bums. Yes, the City seems determined to import the homeless and the transients up here and dump them into our neighborhood. Yes, they sleep in our alleys, steal our kids’ bicycles, and rip off blankets people leave on the front porch for their cats to sleep on. (No joke! Such is life in the greatest country in the world…) But by and large, they tend to gather around the meth clinic and around the unfortunate businesses at the end of the rail line.

Yes, we are bounded on two sides by dangerous slums. One of them is the territory of a menacing gang of drug dealers, serenaded by gunfire and haunted by cop helicopters. The other is more benignly poverty-ridden…bearing in mind that there is nothing benign about poverty.

Yes, there IS a reason both side yards are secured with iron bars…

However. We have nothing like the number of bums that we used to see in the tony gentrified precincts of the historic Encanto district. Ex-DH and I lived there for about 14 years, coexisting with people who used our side yards as campgrounds and any unlocked vehicle as an impromptu hotel. Our area enjoyed the highest per-capita rate of drug use in the city. How could North Central even begin to compete with that?

Our children could not play outside in front without at least one adult standing guard outside at all times. You couldn’t poke your head out the front door without seeing a bum wandering up the street. The local grade school was so bad that if you couldn’t afford an expensive private or parochial school, you had no choice but to live in and commute from the suburbs…well, assuming you wanted your kid to learn to read by the end of the first or second grade; assuming your kid didn’t know how to use a knife or a club. And though there’s often some shady frolic going on up in my present neighborhood, most of it is fairly petty. In Encanto: not so much. Here, I’ve had…what? ONE incident — the Garage Invasion — in over 25 years. There, we had the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (in which I managed to scare off a would-be rapist by hollering “Fire!”), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (pursued to this day, in his nightmares, by an angry German shepherd who caught the poor schmuck in the kitchen at three in the morning), the Ax Murder, the All-Night Rapefest, the Sleeping Bum in the Car…it went on and on.

I did not walk in Encanto without that German shepherd at my side — it was unsafe to do so. And even with the beast in tow, I wouldn’t have walked around the block after dark for love nor money.

Here, I almost never see a bum within the neighborhood proper, unless he’s in transit through an alleyway or scavenging for identifiable paperwork in the garbage bin (those latter perps are probably not bums, anyway). The dogs and I walk through the neighborhood almost every day, and we don’t run into roaming drug addicts and neglected mental cases on the local streets. And here, I do walk those dogs at night: small dogs that can do absolutely nothing to protect me. The only thing between us and the bogeyman is a heavy walking stick — one that could easily be turned against me. And have we ever seen a bogeyman out there after dark? Nope.

Do I enjoy driving through a slum to enter my neighborhood from the north or west side? Hell, no! Should the City try to improve jobs and living conditions for residents who live in those tracts? Hell, yes!

But Phoenix is a patchwork: if you don’t live in Scottsdale or in one of the monotonous whitebread suburbs, then you live side by side with a variety of demographic sets. Very wealthy and very poor areas are packed side-by-side in this city. And that’s why you’ll find panhandlers — some of them pretty threatening, but most of them fairly mild folk — in the parking lot of a grocery store that markets to the upper middle class.

Do I shop in my neighborhood’s grocery stores? No. I do the same thing I used to do when I lived in Encanto: drive halfway across the Valley to shop where I feel safe in the parking lot, and where I can get most of the products I want without traipsing from store to store to store. Is that a deal-breaker? Nope. It’s just a fact of life in the Valley of the Sun.

In fact, for an inner-city neighborhood, our area is surprisingly safe and placid. Thanks to a change of policy in the school system allowing you to choose what public school your children will go to, you can send your kids to the public schools here — you just send them out of the district. That makes it possible for the younger families moving in now to come in and upgrade homes…and feel like decorating them with Christmas lights and luminarias.

 

 

Merry (Confuse-a-Human) Christmas!

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Ruby and Cassie’s pet Human is merrily confused today. In my old age, I no longer can tell what day of the week it is. Because in old age the day of the week no longer matters.

😉  😀  😉

We roll out of the sack, this morning as usual, whenever the sun wakes us up. It’s around 7:30. I don’t care: just want to sit in front of the space heater and get warm, but that’s not very practical because it’s pretty bracing in here after a heatless night at the Funny Farm. We turn off the heat at night because if the outside temp dips into the 30s, a damn heat pump will freeze up and blast icy air into the house. Plus of course we can’t afford to run the heater in the winter and still have enough in the annual poche to run the air-conditioning in the summer.

I decide to climb back in the sack, put my feet under the heating pad, cover up, and read the morning’s computerized news. The dogs have other ideas about the use of the heating pad and get into a little squabble over who will get first dibs on shoving the Human off the thing. After they’re pulled apart and duly yelled at, they settle down. This is a good thing, because a dog’s body temperature normally runs around 102 degrees, meaning I end up with three heating pads instead of just one…

Along about 9:00, they begin to lobby for food, so we stumble off the bed again, stumble out to the kitchen, and put down a couple dishes of Their Queenship’s Fine Cuisine. Glance out at the porch thermometer: it’s about 45 degrees out there. But at least the wind has died down and the cloud cover has burned off, meaning eventually the sun shining on the dark roof will warm the inside of the house into the tolerable range.

A list of things to do materializes on the white board on the office door. None of them entail any serious work: most of the day is to be occupied by reading a new iteration of a pair of Chinese co-authors’ elaborate research report, 36 pages the gist of which is “all your bases are belong to us.”

I love this stuff. For one thing, it’s a rare day when a Chinese scholar says something brain-banging stupid…not the case with American and European academics, who seem to love to roll around in arcane nonsense. For another, the amount of work these folks put into their projects is astonishing. In an old-fashioned word: they do not spare the horses. So it’s kind of a delight to read it. You find yourself hoping they get published; they get promotion; they get recognition: whatever it is they’re trying to get, they get it done.

This project, at 36 pages much of which I’ve already read once before, will take two or at the outside maybe three days to get through. I hope.

Finish off a fairly large breakfast of cornmeal mush…uhm, “polenta”…and am just carrying the dishes back into the kitchen when JANGLE!!! Phone rings. Damn! A f**kin’ phone solicitor on Christmas Eve?

No. It’s SDXB. He says he’s not coming to the midnight mass tonight because he prefers to go to the right-wing fundamentalist Prod church his present girlfriend favors. That’s fine. But then I say…wait… We don’t sing til tomorrow!

He says you sing on Christmas Eve.

I say, yeah, that’s tomorrow.

He says today is Sunday.

I say no, it’s not. Today is Saturday.

Traipse back to the bedroom, open the computer, and Dayumed if it isn’t Sunday!

But don’t we sing on Christmas Eve? What? Isn’t Sunday Christmas Day?

No. Christmas Day is not Sunday. And yes, today is Sunday. And yes, we’re singing tonight, which is not the same as singing on Christmas Day, which is not Sunday…which is today, which is not Christmas.

?????????????

It takes a good hour to become un-confused and figure out that the list of things I needed to do today is still the list of things I needed to do today, and no, I don’t have to worry about M’hijito showing up over here this afternoon for a ridiculously early high-speed dinner and gift exchange and shoveling him out before I have to fly down to the church to rehearsal.

Now I get an e-mail from M’hijito that indicates I’m still confused. Thought he was supposed to come over tomorrow but apparently he thinks he’s supposed to come over this afternoon.

So I have no idea.

Clearly I am not going to be aging in place in this house, because my marbles are falling out my ears a lot faster than anticipated. If this continues to worsen, soon I will have to move to assisted care.

The corgis have learned to exploit this phenomenon. They have devised a Trick the Human routine. It’s pretty clever, when you think about it.

The Human has trained them to come to call by luring them with a doggy treat. Come into the house when called; get a piece of kibble. It also has trained them to lobby at the back door whenever they need to go out to do their doggy thing. This is also a rewardable activity.

So: they know where the doggy treat jar is, and they know that certain behaviors will elicit a doggy treat. What if….what if one were to combine these behaviors in a convincing way?

So what they do is dance a jig around the back door, begging to be let out. The Human aroused from its comfortable chair and persuaded to open the door, they walk outside, stop at the edge of the patio, pause, turn around, and come back in. Or in Ruby’s case, she stops, stands there, and stares with an expression that says “if you close that door now I will be stuck out here to be eaten by the coyote who lives in the alley, the one that came over the neighbor’s back wall a few days ago.”

She then trots back in and they both charge over to the counter and stand there staring expectantly at the doggy-treat jar.

Oh, well.

Assuming I’ve become correctly un-confused — not an especially safe assumption — the only thing I have to figure out for this evening is how to get this giant crockpot full of fake cassoulet warmed up and over to the church in time for it to be hot for the half-time potluck. There really isn’t enough space in the meeting room for a passel of crockpots — if you don’t get there first you may not find a plug. And I will not be among the first to get there.

Normally I would buy a dessert from Costco for one of these shindigs. But a) the last thing I want to do a day or two before Christmas, at the height of the worst flu season in years, is go into a Costco, and b) even if that were not a problem, I’m flat broke and cannot afford to buy anything at Costco, much less dessert for 40 or 50 people.

And so…onward to the mysteries of running a de-facto state-owned enterprise in the ecology of International Business…