Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Small Economies

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So yesterday I became so caught up in various small tasks that FaM fell into a dark pit. Oh well.

Over the weekend, some Friends Who Bead met at WonderAccountant’s house. My project was to rebuild a necklace I’d made incorrectly. Then, with nothing much left to do, I laid out some beads for a small bracelet and got advice on how to make a turquoise necklace look better: lose the cheesey fake-Native American decorative bead. With all that left out on the coffee table, come y’day it was time to put it together or put it away.

That took half the afternoon.

In the process, I reflected on how cluttered my “jewelry” box is. It’s actually a crafts box with a jillion little compartments. When I got the thing, it served well for my vast collection of DIY valuables. Over time, though, the priceless gem collection has grown so that it’s hard to find what I want in the jumble.

This box is kept in the office closet, which is behind a solid-core door with a bust-your-drill deadbolt on it — because the only thing of any real value in the house is my computer. They can steal everything else, but leave the damn Mac alone.

We’re told that when burglars break in these days, what they’re looking for mostly is jewelry. A friend of mine had a lifetime collection stolen — all pieces with sentimental value, many of them picked up on her travels with good friends.

In my case, though, they can take the stuff and good luck to them trying to peddle it to a fence or a pawnbroker. It’s all straight from Michael’s, Bead World, or Fire Mountain. 😀 But…it cost some work to make it and I’d just as soon not have it stolen. Plus the office storage is a convenient place to keep the junk.

Contemplating the clutter, it occurred to me that instead of buying another craft box — providing two boxes to have to paw through instead of just one — there was a simpler, cheaper alternative: Hang the necklaces on nails in the closet shelf braces, leaving plenty of room for earrings and bracelets in the box’s compartments.

So I tapped a bunch of tacks in there…and lo! It worked. And I can see the things at a glance. Best of all, it’s FREE!

Nothing like a FREE hack to warm the cockles of the Frugalist’s heart. 😀

Speaking of the small delights in life, the pink Easter Lily cactus in front is blossoming untimely:

That’s kind of amazing. What possessed it to blossom in October, I do not know. Probably the unseasonable heat: even though the nights are longer & the days shorter, temps are in the 90s and predicted to go into the low 100s this week. So I guess the plant thinks sumer is y-cumen in. Oh well.

Gerardo finally showed up — I suspect because I complained to La Maya, who regards him as a friend. And he is a friend…just a busy one. He and his underlings are out there now, banging and blowering around. He was surprised to see the new panel in the watering system. Not as surprised as I was to see the $300 bill to get it fixed…but what, really, did he think I was going to do? Just let everything die, or drag hoses from plant to plant, every day, on a quarter acre of trees and landscaping?

Oh well. I asked him to repair the quarter-minus, which has been trashed since we repaired Richard’s ill-advised river of rock. Whether he’ll do it or not remains to be seen: he has a lot of other yards to cope with these days, and I’m sure he’ll be wanting to get to them as early in the day as possible.

The pool is blossoming, too: algae. The chlorine level is so high it turns the test tube deep orange, so apparently that is not the issue. Exactly what I’m supposed to do about that escapes me. Probably today I should schlep a bottle of the water up to Leslie’s and listen to the guy tell me what he always tells me: take out the chlorine tabs (done: a week or ten days ago) and wait until it goes down. But…it ain’t workin’.

I’d like not to have to drain & refill the pool this winter, partly because it’s still too hot to do so — heat damages the plaster — and partly because I’ve had one big financial hit after another and just want the pricey little jobs to STOP for awhile.

Moving on, today I’ve got to deposit 87 berjillion small checks gathered by Funny about Money. It might be more time-efficient just to make the 40-minute round trip to the credit union. Then continue on to the Costco — I could do with a couple bottles of wine, I guess.  But…the Walmart grocery store has the same type of mid-range wines, and it does not present itself as a vast bazaar of impulse buys. I really do need to keep the spending down for the rest of this month!

One of our clients, a journal, changed editors. We stayed to review copy, which is good. The editor just sent page proofs. We don’t usually read the journal’s page proofs…but there they are. I’m finding things that I know we changed, which have been stetted and which will make the thing look kind of stupid. But I guess you can take a horse to water… Seeing a lot of changes that needed to be made have been ignored (these are not whims, but grammatical and stylistic issues), I am not inclined to read this stuff character by character and word by tedious word again. Especially since it’s not part of our job: we’re not proofreaders; we’re copyeditors.

I am, I think, going to ask to have our business name removed from the masthead. We will look like idiots if this thing goes to press with every third edit overridden by someone who doesn’t know how publishing works.

Onward: Gerardo out, coffee made, breakfast under way.

How DO we survive?

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Ever have one of those blood-stopping moments that make you wonder how you got lucky? When you imagine that if there’s a god, She must be looking out after you?

Yesterday I was right here, flying low across Glendale on the way into town from the Westside, right at this time. Needed to reload the gas tank at the local Costco, which is on Bethany Home. At about 35th Avenue, I debated whether to go south on the 17 to Bethany Home, cutting maybe a minute and a half off the drive. Given my dislike of freeway driving, I decided it wasn’t worth it and went south on a surface street.

If I had entered the freeway at that moment, I could very well have ended up in the middle of whatever this was. Who knows what caused the woman’s vehicle to roll: maybe a tire blew out, maybe she swerved to avoid a fellow homicidal driver or debris on the road, maybe her attention wandered.

Amazingly, no other cars seem to have been caught up in this wreck. Four in the afternoon is pushing high rush hour here — freeways can be bumper-to-bumper at this time of day. And, it being Arizona, “bumper-to-bumper” does not mean “correspondingly slow speed.” Arizona drivers will go 60 or 65 mph right on the next guy’s tailpipe. We think that’s normal behavior.

But even if you weren’t in the wreck itself, can you imagine being anywhere near it? With five little kids in the car and the mother dead on the road?

Sometimes…you just have to wonder.

Lazy…

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I’m never what you’d call very ambitious…not anymore, anyhow. But lately it’s getting to be a tussle, just to get my rear into gear. Nothing: that is what I want to do. NOTHING.

Maybe it’s spring fever. Fall being Arizona’s second spring, after all.

Nevertheless I did manage to drag myself out of the sack and wash the car before the heat came up — which is fairly early. It’s almost 90 degrees right now, at 10:45 in the morning.

…wash me, Seymour!

My enthusiasm for washing the car, even though I know I can do a lot better job than the nearest surviving commercial car wash for about fifteen bucks less, has faded to nil. And really, poor Phryne has needed a bath for quite some time. She got black tarry gunk all over her when Our Honored City Parents finally elected to resurface the neighborhood streets. Layer atop layer of dust settles on her, as on all cars in the Phoenix area. When SDXB and I drove to Prescott, we ran into swarms of flying insects, so she was peppered with squashed bugs. And some moron decided to scrape a shopping cart all along her right flank, leaving some handsome slate-colored racing stripes.

Normally I would wait until it rains briskly,  park the car in the driveway for awhile, then pull it back into the garage and wipe it down. This has the dual advantages of a) avoiding a hose-drag, and b) not even racking up the cost of city water.

However, it hasn’t rained lately, at least not when I’ve felt inclined to get out in the stuff. And the car was beginning to look pretty disreputable.

The main ingredient of products billed as bug-and-tar remover, it develops, is elbow grease. Took exactly the same amount of vigorous scrubbing to lift the petrified bugs and the road tar with the chemical as without.

At any rate, the car is now radiantly clean and the 17 microfiber rags used for the car wash and yesterday’s house-cleaning have been run through the washer and tossed in the dryer.

The eight-inch-deep pile of paper marked “Attend to this NOW” has been dusted off and finally sifted through. What a LOT of trash. I hate, hate, HATE shuffling paper.

Downloading the PayPal, credit union, and credit-card statements direct into Excel without passing “Go” will eliminate at least some of the paper-pushing. There’s not much you can do about the mounds of paper Medicare, Medigap, and Social Security send, other than simply forget it. I cram all that stuff into files, which are now bursting.

How much of this debris, really, do I have to keep? Godlmighty, there are SIX legal-size file drawers in my office, full to overflowing. And that doesn’t count the chuckablock-full four-drawer cabinet in the garage!

Alas, trying to figure that out and then, once figured, shoveling out the mess represents Work, which I decidedly wish to avoid.

…some things, you don’t wanna know…

Next task: figure out (have you noticed HOW MUCH TIME is spent on FIGURING OUT???) how to measure out the granulated chlorine I bought in bulk from Leslie’s yesterday.

You know how Leslie’s does love to sell you untold zillions of dollars worth of chlorine tablets, supposedly to keep your pool sanitized & algae-free? Well…. It appears the things are unnecessary if you use granulated chlorine and know HOW to use it.

Just read through the lengthy, extremely fine-print instructions plastered on an 8-pound package of granular chlorine purchased from Our Beloved Leslie’s dealer. Planned to use it as I’ve learned to use the same stuff that comes in 1-pound plastic packets: dump it in about once a week, all the while floating a couple of (fast dissolving!) chlorine tablets around the drink.

Well. Comes the Revelation…

It turns out you can use this stuff not just for shock-treating but also for routine day-to-day chlorine maintenance. Purchased in bulk, it is MUCH cheaper than either the tablets or the “shock treatment” packets (which contain the same stuff).

Even at the extravagantly profit-seeking Leslie’s it’s cheaper, and even cheaper still at Amazon & Costco. I just paid about $3.75/lb at Leslie’s; Amazon has it for $3.30/lb. At Leslie’s, the one-pound handy-dandy packets are about $4.17 apiece. Apparently Costco no longer carries bulk granulated chlorine — at least not in the off-season.

How much less this would be than floating chlorine tabs escapes me — the math would be way over my fuzzy little head. But since one bucket of those things costs about a hundred bucks and you only have to throw in about 3 ounces of the granulated stuff a couple times a week, my guess is…a lot less.

So the Pool Task of the Day is multi-pronged:

1. Thoroughly wash out the measuring cup used for doling out chemicals into the pool. This supposedly holds 16 ounces (i.e., one pound), but those are fluid ounces, not granulated dry toxic chemical ounces.
2. Trot the kitchen scale outside and measure granulated dry toxic chlorine into said measuring cup until I can figure out how much one pound would really be. And how much 3 ounces really are.
3. Sweep the pool and clean out the various pots, a much-overdue job.
4. Shock-treat the pool at dusk, so as to beat back the re-nascent mustard algae.

Because daytime temps have been around 100° for the past week or so and really have never dropped out of the 90s since the “end” of the summer, the water may be warm enough for a swim today. If so, it will be a brisk swim, because the nights have been nice and cool — and pool water cools quickly when the night-time temps drop. But we shall see.

I’ve been too lazy to experiment with that, too.

Next: fart with state university paperwork for a client, so I can get paid.

Then: fart with concocting a statement for another client, so I can get paid.

After that: write.

If there is an after that.

Talk about Indian Summer…

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Seriously! It’s 100 degrees on October 17 here.

Actually, it’s kind of a nice day…a dry heat, y’know… 😀 And a mere 100 degrees is not hot enough to overcome one’s second-spring planting instincts:

Sweet little posies, eh? Picked those up this morning at the nursery, while running around in that part of town. Do LOVE that pot! The bulbs I put in there last winter pretty much fried over the summer. So I picked up a dwarf foxglove, a geranium, and a salvia, which kind of pick up the colors in the pot.

Salvia grows really well out in front over the winter (assuming we get a winter this year). So I may go back and pick up a few more to stick in the flowerbed under the olive tree, which remains sadly neglected.

One thing at a time.

Few days ago I stuck some seeds in a few other pots, also out in front:

They’ve already sprouted! Well, actually, only the two pots on the right have sprouted seeds: lettuce and beets. In the center: a baby rosemary plant; on the right, a thyme plant and a volunteer tomato.

I came unstuck in time today, thinking it was Wednesday and not Tuesday. As I’m thrashing around thinking I’ve gotta send out a weekly meeting notice and go buy enough gas to get to the Pima Reservation through the Thursday morning rush-hour traffic and dayum! I didn’t wash the car this morning so won’t be able to see into the rising, GLARING sun tomorrow morning and how could it possibly be time for choir practice AGAIN, it crossed my feeble little mind:

…well…no…wait…it can’t be time for choir practice again.

And… Well. No. It isn’t time for choir practice again. Mirabilis! It’s actually Tuesday!

This left a great deal of time to get stuff done:

  • Strip the bed and
  • Wash the sheets and
  • Wash the blanket and
  • Wash the dog covering and
  • Bang the dog hair out of all the above, in the dryer
  • Wash the bathroom rugs and the doggie floor rags
  • Bang the dog hair of the rugs and rags, in the dryer
  • Drive to the nursery to buy some new posies
  • Dart into Safeway and let them know a telephone scammer is spoofing their pharmacy’s phone number
  • Fly to the pool store and buy 8 pounds of shock treatment
  • Clean the pool pots
  • Thin out the lettuce & beet seedlings
  • Plant the new posies
  • And even write a little on the latest chapteroid of the current noveloid!

Think of that. And it’s not yet 1 p.m.

The other day I made a nice impromptu ratatouille, which served handsomely as leftovers-for-breakfast this morning. Ratatouille, a dish from the south of France, sounds very fancy to the American ear in the same way that anything spoken or written in French sounds fancy (mais non?). But in fact it’s good peasant food, on the order of pot roast or Yankee stew: simple, cheap, and deliciously satisfying.

All you need is a nice little eggplant, a summer squash (any of the thin-skinned variety like zucchini or crookneck), a little onion, a bell pepper, a bit of garlic, and…whatever else you have laying around. Celery is nice to add. Herbs of various callings — I dumped the rest of the herbes de Provence into the stuff, maybe all of two or three teaspoons. Thyme is always good. Whatever. Got some carrots? Good. Mushrooms? Fine. WhatEVER. And you’ll need some tomatoes — either a bunch of chopped up fresh tomatoes or a nice can of your favorite brand of chopped tomatoes.

Coarsely chop the onions and garlic and celery if you have it. Pour a little olive oil in a large skillet. Slowly cook the aromatic veggies until they’re transparent and beginning to brown. This should take about the length of time required to consume a small glass of wine slowly whilst reading the news. Get up a couple of times and stir.

Before sitting down with the wine, though, also coarsely chop the other veggies and set aside. You might want to sprinkle some salt on the chopped eggplant, as this is the traditional way: leaches out extra liquid, which if the eggplant is mature can add some bitterness to the flavor. If you decide to do this, pat the eggplant pieces dry on some layers of paper toweling before proceeding with the post-wine step.

Remove the aromatic veggies from the pan — just spoon them out onto a plate next to the stove.

Add a little more olive oil.

Apply the rest of the vegetables to the olive oil in the pan. Pour another glass of wine and, while beginning to consume this, allow the vegetables to cook a bit, stirring occasionally, until they’re starting to brown a little.

Next, stir the onions, celery, and garlic back into the sauteed vegetables. Carry the wine glass over to the stove. Add the canned or boxed tomatoes. Stir well. Pour part of the wine into this mixture (red is better, IMHO, but either is just fine) and mix together well.

Cover the pan. Turn the heat to medium-low. And just let it simmer for 45 minutes or so until all the lovely flavors are combined.

This is good all by itself, or served over pasta, or as a side for grilled steak, chicken, or fish, or whatever you please.

There’s a full-blown fancy recipe for this in the cookbook. And it’s never too late to buy the cookbook! Want a hard copy? Lemme know in a comment and we can conduct business by email.

 

$$$ and All: Clinging to Control

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Something there is about making a list to keep the onerou$ little ta$ks under control… That, of course, would mean the onerous bookkeeping tasks that, given the reins, you would ignore until the planet freezes over.

What’s about it is that there’s something ridiculously satisfying about checking off chores, one at a time, as DONE!

The mountain of money paper that comes into this house beggars belief (to say nothing of beggaring me).

  • Five bank accounts
  • Four investment accounts
  • Four health insurance policies (Medicare, Medigap, Part D, long-term care)
  • And bills coming from more directions than I can reckon

87 berjillion bills came in to make life a little more miserable this month:

  • Property tax: raised over $200
  • Car registration: almost $400
  • Painter’s bill: three thousand buckolas
  • $260 power bill: holy sh!t
  • $153 water bill: holy sh!!t
  • Gerardo: $120 for working himself and his underlings half to death…

So it goes.

You can see why I hate doing the bills.

On the other hand, paying off the loathèd car loan in a bull market was smart. Very, very smart. When times are good, my guys can crank the money (and yeah, they are guys: if there’s a lady financial manager among them, they’ve kept her hidden from me). After ponying up $3,000 for the painter and something over 16 grand to pay off that effing loan, total net worth is barely down a few thousand bucks.

How do they do that?

Oh well: I guess that’s what I pay them for.

So that was encouraging.

Also encouraging: I’d allowed about $800 for the Venza’s 2018 Arizona registration — really, registration rates here are just exorbitant. But not, as it develops, that exorbitant: the bill, which came this month with less than 30 days’ notice to pay up or be cited, was “only” $386. So that adds about $34 a month to this year’s budget allowance…nice. I guess. One meal out, anyway. 🙂

Next year the amount will be lower: Arizona’s registration bills drop as your car ages. Part and parcel of our bat-brained legislators’ astonishing stupidity: cars pollute more as they age, and so it would make sense to give people a break for buying newer, more fuel-efficient and less polluting vehicles and to whack them for hanging onto the stinking junkers. Here, we always go in the opposite direction of common sense.

So this is the most difficult of the set of tasks to do today. Others:

  • Clean pool, re-install Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner. Dive in after he breaks loose from his hose, rescue him from the bottom, reattach, fix, get him going again.
  • Haul trash to the alley. Pick up dog piles as part of this joy.
  • Finally get around to ensconcing the Blue Barrel in its new home, out of my way in the garage.
  • Organize completed client journals’ essays; confer with bidness partner on rest.
  • Call handyman to come rebuild patio roof.
  • Re-install dog safety pillows in back of car.

Now for a nap before having to spring back to life for choir rehearsal. And so, away…

Thank you, God…

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Ever have one of those days when everything you touch goes SPROOOOIIINNNGGGGG? Oh, heck: you don’t even have to touch it to make it go SPROING! All you have to do is think about it.

This afternoon I had to call a halt. My mood was so crabby and my competence level buried so deep beneath the sub-basement that after beating back the jungle vines of mis-serendipity for several hours, I decided that it was time to just…fuckin’…STOP. Yes. I do need to go to Home Depot to get a bunch of stuff for Gerardo and for myself and yes, I do need to go to Sprouts, and yes, tomorrow’s doctor visit will take me far, far in the opposite direction from those destinations…but—

But at some point I realized that if I get in the car I’m going to kill someone. Why? Because everything I touch today goes spectacularly, harryingly, tooth-grindingly wrong. I decide that the better part of valor is to stay off the roads, to forego the errands, to effing STAY HOME.

So when I finally make that Decision — effing STAY HOME — I realize God is saying to Herself, “Well! How many times do I have to slap her upside the head to get her attention?”

It is 100 degrees in the shade outside. Thank you, God, that You steered me away from that tenure-track job in South Carolina. Yeah, You remember: the one where they proposed to pay less than You were getting me paid for that nontenurable position here, but the most spectacular house in a forest was for sale for significantly less than I could get for the Funny Farm? Oh, dear God: sooo glad I’m not in South Carolina today. Or anywhere near the Southeast.

Thank you, God, for causing my father to run away from home at the age of 16 or 17, lie about his age, and join the Navy. Thank you, God, that he did not stay in Ft. Worth or Dallas or (yipes!) Houston.

Thank you, God, for allowing my mother, in her subtle way (do it, dear, and when we divorce I get half of all your coveted worldly goods…), to dissuade my father from retiring to Possum Kingdom, down on the Brazos. Thank you, God, that he did not end up sending me to some junior college in Texas, or, at best, UT Austin. Not that Austin isn’t wonderful…just that it has…well, hurricanes and tornadoes.

Thank you, God, for seeing to it that DH never got a job offer from Atlanta or any such waypoints, and that he never took it into his head to move to where his brother came to light: Houston.

Yesh. I’ll take 100 degrees in the shade any day, Ma’am, to hurricanes, floods, crashing trees, flying trailer homes or tornadoes. Any day.

It feels like I’ve accomplished nothing today, but in fact…what have I done?

  • Written a blog post.
  • Worked on a new book project (no, not the latest novel: something Altogether Different)
  • Figured out how best to deal with the Equifax betrayal
  • Done battle with Experian
  • Read behind my business partner on three contributions to the journal
  • Did not lose my temper altogether at polemic disguised as scholarship
  • Lost Charley not once, but twice
  • Hauled garbage
  • Got locked out of the backyard when the gate jammed.
  • Found some cash for a charitable cause
  • Got a ticket to an event & invited three other people to join me
  • Wangled an appointment with a doctor tomorrow

Yes. I lost my son’s dog. Twice.

I live in fear that this critter is going to slip out of the yard when I go into the alley. So try to observe where he is. This is a trick, as it develops.

Returning from a trash run, I call the dog.

No dog.

I search in every dog nest:

  • The floor in the hall where the AC keeps things especially cool
  • The floor by the front door, where he hopes my son will soon come back in
  • The floor in the family room, closer to Food
  • The floor in the bedroom, where he can keep an eye on Cassie and Ruby
  • The backyard, under the trees and around the patios.

No dog.

Just as we hit the holy shit! stage, I find this:

Hmmm…. Charley has ascended to The Throne.