Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Dog Joy!

by

What a wonderful morning!

I thought I was supposed to be down at the church office shortly after dawn cracked, to stand in for one of the volunteer receptionists. So I arrive, plug in the computer (having brought 27 pages of client copy to while away the time), and settle in.

Shortly, in pops the Boss Volunteer.

“Hey! You’re supposed to be here this afternoon. I’m on this morning.”

😀

Well. Ahem. Naturally I suggest that if she wants the morning off, I’d be happy to switch. (“Happy” being a highly qualified term in this context.) What a shame: she has to pick up the grandchild shortly after 12:30.

Out the door like a rocket!

Arrive back at the Funny Farm to find the dog moping under the toilet in the back bathroom. (Don’t ask: I have no clue why the dog thinks the cubby under the toilet amounts to a dog den.) At the words let’s go for a doggy walk, she shoots out of the bathroom and flies to the front door

Out the door like two rockets!

It’s still cool enough to manage a mile-and-a-half circuit of the ’Hood.  It’s a strangely lovely little enclave of affluence, despite being bordered on two sides by drug-ridden slums.

Over in Lower Richistan, one house harbors a huge, beautiful jacaranda tree, now in full, brilliant blue bloom. It is the most gorgeous tree you could ever hope to see.

Across the lane into Upper Richistan, an elderly lady lives in a big old sprawling mansion of a ranch house on about an acre of land, which she keeps up like a park. Her property is meticulously, spectacularly groomed. Most days when we pass there, her yard service, whose proprietors dub themselves “Paradise Ponds and Gardens,” are there puttering around. They must visit almost every day. The place reflects it, too.

Other shacks there are less ostentatiously landscaped but equally tidy — they don’t require a gardener’s daily attention, but nevertheless they’re expensively mown and trimmed.

As usual, we run into morons. Honestly…it’s hard to understand how some people ever learn to tie their shoelaces….

First one is putzing up Feeder Street NW, evidently in no hurry. The hound and I are stopped on the sidewalk, under the stop sign that clearly says traffic crossing Feeder is to cede the right of way. We wait for him to go by.

But no. Ohhh, nooooo! He’s polite. And the little dog is so cute he’s driven to feel even more polite. He stops his car. I wait for him to go by. He waves his paw at me, a sappy grin on his face: go ahead go ahead!

I hate that. I just hate it when some idiot thinks he’s doing me a favor by stopping in the right of way and frantically motioning to proceed in front of him — illegally. What the hell is the matter with people?

Does he really think that my standing there for three whole seconds while his car passes by is THAT big an inconvenience to me? Does he seriously believe he’s doing me some great favor with this silly trick? Does he truly not grasp the concept that urging someone to cross a road illegally puts that person at risk?

God, but people are stupid.

This particular brand of stupidity irritates me most radically because I once got T-boned when some idiot stopped, waved me across in front of him (and the as-yet unnoticed guy tooling along in the lane to his left…), and I took him up on it. With my infant son in the car. In that case, we had two idiots in collaboration: him and me.

So we make a loop through the forested lanes. On the homeward leg, toward our low-rent tract, we encounter a woman with a large furry dog in tow. She is not paying the slightest bit of attention to anything that’s going on around her. She holds a phone up to her ear. From the phone blares a stream of dopey-sounding music. She is, in a word, entranced…

Not caring to discuss the time of day with her barely-under-control dog, I cross the road so as to put some distance between us and the oblivious woman and her not-at-all oblivious beast.

It notices. It lunges at Ruby, growling and barking.

Recovering from nearly being jerked off her feet, the Blithe Soul coos, “Ohhhh, what a cute little dog!”

“Uhm… Uh huh.”

“Grrrrrrrr ARF ARF ROARRRRRgrrrrrrrrrrrr”

“He’s really friendly. I usually let him off the leash so they can play!”

holy shit! “Please don’t!”

I dodge across Feeder Street Northwest, hoping some driver in a ball-busting hurry will come blasting between us. Fortunately, she’s too interested in the racket coming out of her toy to pursue the idea.

At any rate, it was a beautiful morning (and remains a beautiful day). The little dog was beside herself with doggy joy to come out from under the toilet and circumambulate the neighborhood. That was a very, very happy dog.

Human, too.

I realized that I was secretly (not so secretly, maybe) relieved not to have to sit here all morning, editing a client’s copy while nothing much happened in the office.

Indeed, a small revelation dawned:

What do I want to do in retirement? What do I most want to do with the small portion of time remaining to me?

I’ll tell you what I wanna do.

♦ I want to loaf.

• I do not want to work.
• I do not want to master some hobby.
• I do not want to participate in volunteer efforts.
• I do not want to lobby for some worthy political candidate.
• I do not want to travel.

♦ All I want to do is loaf.

♦ That is, I wish to do as little as possible. Nothing, preferably.

♦ Nothing is plenty enough to keep me busy.

• Today, for example, I need to traipse up to Home Depot to pick up a bag or two of potting soil, therewith to plant some new chard and refresh a number of other plants.  While there, I probably should get a basil plant to replace the one that’s expiring of old age.
• Or maybe go by AJ’s and spend too much money on something good to eat.
• Or take the dog for another walk.
• Or just anything that does not require the expenditure of anything resembling mental or physical energy.

Loafing. The highest and best use of one’s time.

The Costco Glasses Jamboree

by
New-glasses
Out, alas, with the old…

So this afternoon, after having spent the morning finishing up the first of two indexes for a couple of 380-page books only four or five days late, it was off to the Paradise Valley Costco to collect the new progressive glasses that have been sitting there for a week, while I’ve been wrestling with various crises editorial and otherwise. This, because my beloved stylish fancy guy, who was forced out of Uptown Plaza when the proprietors “upgraded” the mall and jacked up the rent, wanted $395 just to replace the lenses after I fell and irredeemably scratched one of them. And…how did that work out?

Not too bad.

The frames are clunky, no question of it. But for what I paid, one could hardly expect the airy height of style. They’re clunky, wouldn’t be my first choice if I had a job, but WTF!? At this age, no one notices you.

Annd…in with the…uhm…old-fashioned…

Seriously: it is literally true that very few people actually register the presence of a woman my age, much less care one way or another how she looks. She’s just part of the background, like leaves in an oleander hedge.

That is, after all, not a bad thing…

It means you can get away with clunky, which means you can get away with buying a whole new pair of frames along with a whole new pair of progressive lenses for a fraction of the cost of a classier pair of lenses to fit your now-defunct classy pair of practically invisible frames.

So… In the store I try on the new pair of specs, and WOW! It’s a whole new world! Like the entire interior of Costco has been electronically enhanced.

Put them on to drive home, and yeah: pretty impressive. I can see the car’s dashboard as though through a microscope, and the road adorned with my fellow homicidal drivers as though through a telescope. I am, in a word, wowed.

Notsomuch when I get home and sit down to the computer. I can’t see either screen — laptop or desktop — without cocking my head like a blue heron. And this, as you can imagine, is ever-so-slightly painful.

Luckily, I have two old, supposedly outdated pairs of glasses — both progressives, which provide a more or less intelligible view of the distance. These allow me to see what I’m doing when I’m passing hour after fuckin’ endless hour working for pay. Or for fun, as in blogging.

So. We have yet to see whether these new glasses will allow me to read music scores for choir. We’ll know in a few hours, because rehearsal comes up in about two and a half hours. If they work for that purpose, then I’ll use the new thangs for driving, shopping, and choir, and put one older pair in the office next to the desktop and one pair in the family room next to the laptop.

If they don’t? Well…I haven’t a clue.

Figure that out when I come to it, I guess.

Old age is not for the young or the faint of heart. That’s for damn sure.

The Starbucks Jamboree

by

How many Starbucks stores does the world need, really?

A prospective client wants to meet at the Starbucks “at Paradise Valley Mall.” Google up the address, and you get not one, not two, but three such bistros. Email the client: which one?

She says the one inside the mall — which is now just another ghost mall inhabited by low-end anchor stores like Penney’s and Costco — is closed. Okayyy…that leaves two others, within walking distance of each other.

Really…how much bad coffee can Americans drink?

It’s one girl’s opinion, of course (apparently the only girl’s), but I think Starbucks dispenses pretty awful coffee. The only thing the stuff is good for is mixing with cream and sugary flavoring goop. You can get a halfway decent cuppa there buy asking for a café Americana, which is actually just watered-down espresso. Espresso is made from a somewhat higher quality coffee bean, because it takes a better quality to withstand being roasted black.

I personally object to paying that much for any serving of coffee, particularly when I can make a better one in about ten minutes without driving across the city for the privilege.

In that department, I see that Costco is again carrying San Francisco brand dark roast beans. That is bar none the best coffee I’ve ever bought, this side of a very fancy specialty gourmet store, now defunct. My life was about shattered when I flew into Costco in search of another bagful and found it GONE! But the last time I was there, lo! It was back!

At any rate, my new glasses are ready. This junket will allow me to kill several birds with one stone: meet the proposed new client, refill my Costco cash cards, pick up the lunettes, fill up the car, and maybe even buy another bag of that coffee lest Costco decide to deep-six it again.

As we know, as soon as Costco finds out you like something, they immediately get rid of it. 😀

What Planet Am I On?

by

Surely this isn’t Earth. 😀

So after the computer spent three days in the shop and it took another half-day to fix the mess that sojourn made of DropBox, I was way, way behind on the indexing project. Let the client know it’s gonna be late and then set to work frantically trying to catch up.

After a fashion. First things first, though: in the chore-a-day department, yesterday was dust-the-furniture day. In theory, the plan was also to oil the furniture, something that hasn’t been done in many a moon. Some of the pieces were looking pretty parched.

Was feeling guilty yesterday about suggesting the cleaning lady was less than perfectly bright just because she twisted the vacuum cleaner extension cord like a licorice whip. That was before I discovered the greasy rings in the middle of the living-room’s leather chair, where she put something oily down. Probably, I figure, a can or bottle of some furniture polish she dragged in. Whatever, it wrecked the chair’s seat, thankyouverymuch.

Not that the chair and the sofa were in what you might call pristine condition. The leather was dried out and tired, as was the leather on the much better quality chair in the family room, a piece that came from Crate & Barrel. That one was not just dry and tired, it had been scratched up by several dogs and scraped by somebody whapping it against something. Probably a previously unnoticed moving-man attack.

In the freshly cleaned-out and organized garage cupboard, I found a bottle of orange oil, and in the hall closet, a container of mink oil. I’d heard, shortly after I’d bought it, that mink oil is not all that great for reviving tired leather. But not having anything else…

It seems to have worked well: moistened up the parched, dried-out areas and darkened the leather enough to sorta hide the grease rings. Didn’t get rid of them, but made them less noticeable. It really helped on the family-room chair, though: completely hid all the Charley scratches, all the Ruby scratches, and all the Cassie scratches, as well as any number of other nicks, dings, and gouges. That chair looks practically new. The living-room sofa and chair just look…a lot better.

This was quite a job. Then I had on the list to oil the casework. What a difference it makes to massage a decent oil into a Thos. Moser or a Stickley piece! Wow!

My mother’s furniture — two bureau drawers, a dressing table, and a small desk from the late 1950s in what was then the Danish modern style — have a sort of golden finish on them with some kind of shellac over it. Oiling it makes it look prettier but does little, as far as I can tell, for the wood. But the Thos. Moser chairs certainly seemed to like it.

Contemplating those old 1950s pieces, I recalled that the finish is rubbed off the front edge of my mother’s dressing table, where she sat to apply her make-up every day. Literally every day: she wouldn’t go out of the house without being fully made up. I figured if we came back to the States in 1957, when she bought that furniture, and she lived to 1976, then she used that table for 19 years. That means she sat in front of it to paint her face 6,764 times!

Give or take. Some days she probably applied fresh makeup before going out for dinner or some such thing. And the last three months or so of her life, she was too sick to do much else than lay in the bed and die.

Oh well. Don’t smoke, folks!

One of the cleaning lady’s most endearing traits is a passionate sense of orderliness. This woman loves for things to stand in straight lines, just…so. When she puts your tschotskes back on a table or a mantelpiece, she puts them in a tidy, straight row, exactly the same distance apart — as though she measured their positions with a tape measure.

I, on the other hand, prefer to organize things aysmmetrically. So whenever I dust the mantel, I reorganize her meticulous layout to fit my disorderly taste:

{chortle!} Does that or does that not look better?

These chores added up to a bit of a project. So I didn’t get much paying work done.

Come the dawn, I had to sit down with the half-forgotten index and start up the process again. So I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked and I worked, hoping to get through about 50 pages of the page proofs. Got almost up to my goal, very tired, when BLINK!

The goddamn computer shut down AGAIN!

Jezus Aitch Keerist! I couldn’t believe it.

It came back up, surprisingly. But of course, the file it brought up was not complete: it had lost upwards of an hour’s worth of work.

So I call AppleCare and get, for the first time in recorded history, a truly unhelpful Apple Support tech. He wanted to get me into iCloud to fool around, but I couldn’t find a password that worked, so he wanted me to change my password. And his instructions did not work. He finally hung up in frustration, about 30 seconds before I was about to do so.

So now I’m in despair, figuring I’m going to have to do all that brain-banging BORING work over again.

Start fiddling around, and lo! Somehow the more recent version of the file pops up!

It’s a miracle. The thing has actually lost nothing.

Nor should it have: Word on the MacBook is set to save every five minutes (in anticipation of just this sort of contingency…), and so there was no reason (in theory) that it should have lost an hour’s worth of data.

Another burst of labor indexed 150 pages, about halfway through the book. At that rate, I should finish the draft of this index in about three days, and then be able to send it off to the client the middle of next week. Not on time, but not so very late.

Then I can start on the next book.

 

Running on High-Test Gas…

by

Flying around like a Corvette all day… This, after hanging on the phone until after 11 p.m. last night coping with the aftermath of a weird little Apple crash. At first even the very smart lady tech in Australia couldn’t figure it out, but then she noticed a tiny detail and presto-changeo! Problem instantly solved,.

Those people are Apple are freaking amazing.

Off to Costco with my favorite agèd friends this morning. They were circumspect in their buying approach today, but I’m afraid I went off the deep end. I haven’t made a major Costco run in two or three months and so was out of almost everything. So that devolved into a frenzy. At any rate, the freezer is now full again, the dog is supplied with a new potful of chicken, and I found a kewl pair of sky-blue Glorias. Hallelujah.

Cleaned out the storage room closet, a mess exceeded only by the office closet. That was one helluva project. But my, it’s nice and tidy now…unlike the back of my car, which overflows with junk to be donated or thrown out!

Some stuff leaves you wondering…what on earth was i thinking when i put this away? The towels with the frayed edges, for example: why are we keeping these, again? Other stuff: sentimentalia. How could you toss it? I found a box my mother left me, filled with old, evidently hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, all starched and pressed. I think either her grandmother or her aunt must have made them.

Hm. Probably my great-aunt. My great-grandmother knitted; my great-aunt sewed. But…well, who knows? Anyway, they’re museum pieces now.

As, I suspect, is the vintage 1970 Heathware in the hideous muddy olive green, all the rage when we were young things. Truly: every bit as ugly as the battleship gray and eye-searing white in High Style today. My mother must have thought something along those lines: she admired the Heath stoneware, but bought herself a set in white — now in my son’s possession.

Heath recently quit making its coupe style. So those pieces — in both sets — will soon be spectacularly expensive collector’s items. They’re already pricey. I got one of the last of the white ones available after a kid busted one of my son’s plates. He’ll have to ride herd more carefully after this, I reckon, because replacing them now will be outstandingly expensive.

Ugh. Cop helicopter buzzing around. What now?

The other night’s gunshot, noted in passing in one of these posts, was some chucklehead getting himself shot at a house brawl party over on ’tother side of Conduit of Blight Blvd. Well. Better him than me. I guess. Moral of the story? Don’t go to parties in Meth Central.

Also managed to index another 15 pages of the first of two academic anthologies I’m supposed to be working on. No doubt more would have gotten done had I refrained from sleeping half the afternoon. But alas, I did swill down a couple glasses of wine with the beloved Costco roast chicken this afternoon, which caused me to fall face-forward into the sack.

Tomorrow will be occupied, too, with a lot of distractions from paying work: Pick up the cleaned and restored old Shark vac, meet a client on the west side of town, pay a visit to the credit union. Three errands I’d like to get done in one trip, though that will not be very practical…because on top of all that, the cleaning lady will be underfoot all day. So I’m thinking…maybe…make two trips westerly: pick up the vacuum early in the day, run by the CU on the way home, then make a separate junket to meet the proposed new client.

Yeah. That will waste gas. But it’s probably more sane.

To the extent that there is any sanity around this place… 😮

 

Closets

by

So, in the chore-a-day continuum, today is the first day of the Great Closet Clean-up. Every closet and cabinet in the house is jammed with 15 years’ worth of collected junk, about 14 years’ worth of which could go. So I decided to add shoveling out one closet, cabinet, or piece of furniture with drawers to the job of the day. A four-bedroom shack has rather more closets and cabinets than one would like, especially after the proprietor has hired some dude to line the garage walls with storage. Videlicet:

  • Hall linen closet
  • Vacuum (coat) closet
  • Master bedroom closet
  • Guest bedroom closet
  • Storage room closet
  • Office closet
  • Desk drawers
  • Armoire
  • Bathroom 1 cabinets
  • Bathroom 2 cabinets
  • Garage cabinets east
  • Garage cabinets west
  • Garage open shelves

This sounds fairly dreadful, because it is fairly dreadful. Some of the junk residing in those sites has been there since I moved into this shack, yea verily back in 2004. But…it appears that the challenge is not as Brobdingnagian as it appears.

Today I got through the hall linen closet, the vacuum closet, and the storage room closet, killing off three proposed days’ worth of projects in a single day. At this rate, I should be able to get through the entire consolidated frolic in about four or five days.

The problem with projects like this: one thing leads to another. You find some object…and wonder what is it? And why do you have it? In the back of the hall closet I found a gadget that contained butane or propane or God only knows what. A gift, no doubt. Not having used it and not knowing what it could possibly be for, I tossed it in the trash bag.

This caused the thing to spring a leak.

In the house. In the confined hall, Yes: s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s-s

Grab whatever-it-is and hurry out to the alley garbage with it (hoping no one is around to see). Toss it. Run away. Back inside the shack, continue the task at hand, and find some other component of…whatever-it-is. March that out to the garbage, too. So far no explosion has taken place. Thank Heaven for small favors.

There’s the stuff that you haven’t seen in years and don’t know why you kept it; the debris from past cleaning-lady attacks; the junk stash attack…

Here’s a hippy-dippy ash tray from the 1970s, a globe of polished granite annoyingly dyed teal (it was one of my generation’s colors: we called it “turquoise,” but it was the same color that appears in the presently stylish annoying palette of battleship gray + eye-searing white + teal). It has two stupid little half-tube-shaped slots drilled out of its lip, presumably to accommodate cigarettes: i.e., it was designed by some clown who didn’t smoke.

Off-hand I cannot recall whether this thing was my mother’s (the mother who smoked herself into the grave, the mother who on her deathbed was consuming six packs a day, yes, that mother), or whether my mother made me buy it to accommodate her chain-smoking habit while she was at my house. Why did I keep the damn thing, if it wasn’t actually hers? Possibly to accommodate some other nicotine addict who insisted on smoking (outside, damnit!) at my house?

No one that I know smokes anymore.

Throw it away? What? It was my mother’s. Maybe.

A brass lamp finial. What? Examine all the antique lamps in the house (that would be all the lamps, just about). Not a single one of them is missing a finial. WTF? Stash for some future closet clean-out.

Up on the top shelf, where it can’t be broken, resides the sentimental stuff. Like Dot-Dot’s exquisitely beautiful hand-painted porcelain plate, a gift to me and my son. She lived around the corner from us in the historic Encanto district, and she was one of two women of her generation who babysat children in the neighborhood. She watched M’hijito two or three days a week — the other woman filled in the remaining days — while I drove out to a part-time job at the Great Desert University and filled my remaining hours trying to finish my dissertation. Dot-Dot was a gifted porcelain painter: she taught classes filled with women craving to emulate her. For her to give us one of her (amazingly expensive) pieces was a great generosity.

An empty plastic squeeze bottle: move it to empty jar collection in the garage, thereby deferring  disposal to some other day.

An unknown blue fluid stashed in an old glass Straus Family Creamery heavy cream bottle. Dump. Bottle to dishwasher, thence to empty jar collection (see above)

A plethora of prescription meds, including three bottles of a dangerous addictive drug dispensed during the Year of the Surgeries, nary a single pill of which I ever swallowed. Here’s something from a vet called “banamine“: it’s an injectable drug used for muscle spasm. Label says to “apply on affected area.” Probably for Cassie’s hot spots. Dare we ask, WTF????

Something there is that’s kind of scary about the sheer quantity of the prescription drugs that have been dispensed for me and for the dogs. Some of these bottles, I’ve never even opened.

No freaking wonder we have a plague of drug addicts in this country.

Here’s a jacket in the hall closet that must have belonged to someone else: it doesn’t even fit me!

In the guest bedroom closet: a little suit made by a local tailor, supposedly to fit me. When D-XH and I were in England, where I spent three months in archival research for the dissertation, we visited Scotland and bought my mother the richest, most wonderful, beautiful wool tweed fabric. She sewed handsomely, and I thought she would make herself something with it.

But no. Being a mother, she regarded it as a keepsake and squirreled it away for safekeeping. After she died, my father gave it to me.

I took it to a woman who billed herself as a tailor and asked her to make me a suit — a skirt and jacket. She did…but “tailor” was not exactly le mot juste. She apparently made it from some Simplicity pattern — she couldn’t even be bothered to spring for a Vogue pattern, I guess. The result was amateurish and ill-fitting and it has just hung in the closet. Forever.

It did not fit then. And now that I am old and have spawned a child, it does not fit hilariously. What a shame. I’ve hung onto it all these years imagining (occasionally) that maybe someday I could find a real tailor (right! In lovely uptown Phoenix, Arizona!) who could somehow rebuild it or just take it apart and make something with whatever fabric could be salvaged.

Not so much.

But the moths haven’t eaten it. That’s something. I guess. So…this afternoon I tossed the jacket in the car with the rest of the unwearable stuff to be donated. Decided to deconstruct the skirt, salvage what I can of the fabric, and make a pillow of it.

Yes. That’s something. Eh?

Two indexing assignments came in yesterday and now today in comes an inquiry from a self-publishing author: will I copyedit his 85.000-word sci-fi thriller?

Why shore, for a fee. But it’ll have to wait till I can get out from under the academic opuses. While the author’s on the phone and the hamburger’s on the grill, my son, fresh off the road from Colorado, shows up at the door to collect his dog.

Is there some reason why every damnfool thing happens at once?

So now I am fed. Four of the proposed 13 shoveling-out chores are done (hall linen closet, vacuum bedroom closet, guest bedroom closet, armoire) are done. Email is unanswered. I am tired. And the dog remains to be taken for a decent walk.

And so…away.