The wind has been whipping around for days, not altogether unusual for spring in the Sonoran desert, though it’s a little late in the season. But today it’s worked itself up into quite the meteorological frenzy. This afternoon we were having 30- to 40-mph winds…one gust blasted in under the back patio roof and blew the latched back door open!
Though the sun has been bright enough long enough to warm the pool to swimming temp, the winds are cool — it they weren’t quite so rambunctious, the breezes would feel pretty nice. But the air is so dry it makes your skin feel like you’ve turned to parchment! You itch all over…not just on the mosquito bites, of which there are a-plenty.
So I tried soaking in the tub to rehydrate and then slathering coconut oil all over the body. LOL! The upshot? The coconut oil soaked right in, didn’t do much to help the dryness, but left me smelling like a walking Mounds bar.
Olive oil is probably more effective than coconut oil…but it has its own drawbacks.
😀
Don’t know which is worse: walking salad bowl or walking Mounds bar.
Another large job shipped off to the client in China. Huzzah! Subjected the thing to one last, fast read-through this morning and found still more glitches to fix…some of them induced by moi. I think it’s pretty clean now. It had better be, because by now it will have winged its way across the planet and alighted in Beijing.
I’m not charging anywhere near enough for this project, given the amount of time it took — that’s because (by way of saving a few yuan) he asked me not to edit the references section. That’s redeemed the fact that it’s really a pretty interesting project. And evidently a cornerstone of these folks’ careers: they’ve been gathering data for a number of years.
Today another big project is supposed to come in from yet another client on a ball-busting deadline. So far, no sign of it, so that gives a few minutes to waste on, oh, say…blogging.
Yard Work
Ruby and Cassie and (yes) Charley are going batshit in the living room, yapping at Luis, who’s engaged in one of his monumental tree clean-up projects. This house is like a forest, what with all the shrubbery. Come springtime the paloverde and the palo brea and the Texas ebony and the surviving devilpod tree and the desert willow and the yellow oleander and the olive trees and the mountain laurel and the vitex need to be gently, knowledgeably thinned so that the monster summer winds won’t break off limbs and toss them onto the house. Or onto the neighbor’s house.
Luis is an artist. He never wields a power tool. He climbs up on ladders or into the trees and prunes out the wild stuff by hand. The trees look gorgeous by the time he’s done, and they retain plenty of foliage to shade their branches and trunks from the searing midsummer sun.
And he is, thank God, back. When I called a few weeks ago, I reached a woman who said he was in Mexico.
Uh oh.
Paloverde & mesquite are all wildly in bloom now
Naturally, I figured he’d been deported in the latest wave of jingoism, and that would be the last we’d see of a very wonderful man. And he is a good man. Having enjoyed more than my share of men, I recognize a good one when I see him. This is one of ’em.
But no! The other day, there he was on the phone. So…either he’s legal, or he knows a dependable way to get back across the border. He said he’d had to go into Mexico because his father, in his 80s, developed pneumonia and they didn’t know whether the old man would make it.
So hallelujah brothers and sisters! He showed up at 6 a.m. Three and a half hours later, he’s still wrestling with the jungle in the front yard. He hasn’t even gotten around to the back yard.
Gerardo, another at-risk artisan IMHO, is supposed to come by this afternoon. He called last night and announced he intended to show up this morning. I try to hide Luis from Gerardo, because I know Gerardo considers my yard to be part of his domain and doesn’t like it much that I hire someone else to do the trees. But Gerardo is a yard dude; an arborist, he ain’t. In the course of putting him off, I ended up having to fess ‘up that the trees were getting trimmed this morning. He said he’d come by around 1:00, which translates freely to about 3:00 p.m. I’ll have to give him something extra — money for sure; a gift of some kind if I can dream one up — to assuage his feelings.
Cleaned the pool again this morning. I believe the water is now warm enough to get into, which I will do later today after all the men are out of my hair.
For reasons that aren’t altogether clear, the infestation of mustard algae seems to have died off. Speculation: that particular efflorescence must have effloresced when I got out of the habit of brushing the walls and steps several times a week, in the aftermath of the year of annoying surgeries. It doesn’t really have to be brushed every day…but it does need some attention more than, say, once a month. Or so. This winter I did feel well enough to bestir myself to attend to the pool now again, and as it’s warmed up, I’ve been brushing it down almost daily. It looks incredibly good…especially considering the aged plaster job.
So, I may be able to put off the plastering job to another year. Hope so, because according to my calculations, I will end my personal 2016-17 fiscal year with $706 in the bank… Less than that, no doubt, since Luis will charge $500 or $600 for spending his entire day swinging from tree limbs. Or at least, he surely should.
Pray for more editorial work. A lot more editorial work…
Dog Work, Etc.
Complicating matters, Charley the Golden Retriever is here, my son — his human — having hit the road for Colorado, there to visit his grandmother for her 103rd birthday.
A hundred and three. Can you imagine?
Well, I suppose having one grandmother survive into her advanced dotage makes up for having the other one die before he was born. Oh well. Of the two, I’d far prefer to have had my own mother lurking in the background for him…but that’s probably just daughter-in-law bitchiness.
At any rate, it’s nice to have Charley here. I like having a dog that’s tall enough to pet without bending over. Also, the deep roaring bark that comes out only (uhm…mostly) when there’s actually something to bark at has its advantages over endless midget-dog yapping. Sometimes you just want a dog who sounds like he means business. When he means business.
House Work
So now I’ve got to get the appliance repairman over here. If it’s not one damnfool thing it’s another. The dishwasher has taken to making an ominous noise. Said noise gets louder and louder, rising from a growl to a near roar — especially when the machine first comes on.
The repairman that B&B Appliances put me on to — that would be the guy who refrained from ripping me off for another $500 by cluing me that the problem with the damned wall oven was not the circuit board but loose wiring — has the unbelievable chutzpah to knock off on Saturday. So I’ll have to call him on Monday.
Finally got around to tucking some of the newly made compost in around the calla lily…and by the way, trimming off the dead stuff. I’m hopelessly lazy, no question of that.
Tomorrow and Monday I must remember to drive down to my son’s house and water his plants. With the temps in the 100s, anything in a pot has to be watered every day to keep it from frying.
Speaking of frying, look what I found at Fry’s!
Ever since I broke the last of the large German shepherd bowls, I’ve been needing a dog bowl large enough to accommodate a golden retriever. In 100-degree weather, the two smaller bowls that suffice for Cassie and Ruby run dry when Charley is around.
Fry’s had them on a two-for-one sale (i.e., these things are worth about a third of what we’re asking, so take two of them off our hands — please!). So I grabbed two: one to hold enough water for him and one for his food. They’re huge and they’re heavy and they could NOT be better for dogs. 🙂
And So, Away…
Cox once again is dragging. Fiddling with the wireless connection is pissing me off intolerably, and so I am going to knock off. Soon, I may knock off Cox, too: learned from both my friends yesterday that they, in their respective widely separated parts of town, also have annoying connectivity problems…as well as bills that get bigger and bigger for lesser and lesser service.
There’s an outfit in Scottsdale that caters to small businesses. I’m thinking I may find out how much they charge. If it’s not a lot more than Cox, I may just make the switch. Better to pay a little more for better service than to be constantly aggravated and frustrated with wireless that just…doesn’t…work.
As if Dr. Frankenstein plugged in the electric cord… Or maybe whatever parasites were making me sick fell over dead in their legions, like the ailing Martians in War of the Worlds. Suddenly today I felt well enough and had enough energy to confront and conquer a slew tasks that have gone undone for the past six weeks, sitting there and slowly expanding in the manner of mold at the back of the fridge.
Yes. Done today:
•Walk the dogs •Clean and backwash the pool •Repair the runners on the outdoor rocking chairs (again) •Glue busted things on said chairs and the metal chairs in front •Write a blog post •Do battle trying to post a link on annoying Facebook •Do battle with Cox, whose $150 modem-router-in-one does nothing to improve the connectivity issue; get them to agree to send another guy to try to fix whatever the problem is •Trim mesquite tree, Luis having fled to Mexico •Cut back the shrubbery around the pool so as to make it possible to clean the pool •Haul pile of debris to alley •Clean out the refrigerator(!!) •Drag plastic trashcan full of garbage to the alley •Clean out the freezer (one of them) •Drag another mountain of trash to garbage •Run emptied containers through the dishwasher •Launder clothes; hang up to dry •Wash fancy Ziploc plastic bags; hang up to dry •Enter data from bank in Excel •Negotiate with potential new client: 12,000 words of Chinglish in 5 days??? Seriously? •Iron clothes •Find lost document, re-send to client •Even write a few words on the proposed new novel
It’s weird. Because every day for the past six weeks or so, along about two in the afternoon I’ve submerged beneath a wave of fatigue: abruptly, as if at a signal, so tired all I could do was crawl into the sack. Today I’ve been flying like a Roman candle since I got up at 5:30.
This damn cold/flu/black plague/lung cancer/DEATH OF ME has gone on and on and on. I knew it would go on and on and on. If you get over a respiratory infection in, say, 10 days, it will take me two to three weeks to get over the same bug. That’s because my delicate little system lacks some part of its immune apparatus (according to a past doc), and so I just don’t recover from things the way normal people do.
But apparently I’ve overestimated how long I’ve been enjoying the current gasper. I thought we were in the middle of Week 7, and that next Sunday (by which time the thing, clearly, will NOT be gone) would be the start of Week 8.
No. No, however. Looked at the calendar and discovered that the day on which I came down with this thing — when I thought it was an allergy and so thought it would be OK to go to a Phoenix Chorale concert — was not seven weeks ago but only five.
So we’re actually in Week 5, not Week 7.
This means there’s hope. Typically a severe cold or flu lasts about six weeks for me.
Every evening as I’m choking and gagging and gasping for breath, I think tomorrow I’ve GOTTA call the doctor! But come morning, I’ve slept more or less through the night and I feel like I’m gonna live, until along about 2 p.m. when suddenly such a wave of exhaustion rolls over me that I can do nothing other than crawl into the sack. Literally, I’m not good for anything after about 1 or 1:30 p.m.
Yet…I am so All Doctored Out!
Just the thought of talking to another doctor makes me cringe. I do not want to see a doctor, I do not want to be treated by a doctor (nine times out of ten with drugs that make me sicker than the disease!), I do not even want to think about a doctor.
Am I crazy? Am I the only middle-class American who lives in fear of the avatars of the medical establishment? Is it normal to resist going to a doctor after you’ve been sick for five weeks?
Well, six weeks having proven itself a charm, I figure I’ll wait till a week from Friday (i.e., a week from tomorrow). If this thing isn’t almost gone by then, I guess I’ll be forced to call Young Dr. Kildare. Probably the scenic YDK over the Mayo, because he has common sense, that rarist of all qualities in a doctor.
Some time back my friend KJG’s husband, The Fireman, was reflecting on our shared War on Cats. They have an obnoxious neighbor who thinks it’s just grand to let their damnable cats invade yards, kill birds, dig up gardens, piss and poop on vegetables, and stink up entryways, a problem that makes Other Daughter’s cats a trifle.
Here at the Funny Farm, I had fortified the castle battlements by zip-tieing carpet tack strips along the decorative tops of the cinderblock walls: the top row of block has a pattern of holes, highly convenient for this purpose.
A minor dilemma arose: to wit, a slender block wall like this has a heavier, supporting block column about every 15 feet. Each of these is topped with a flat, solid block, leaving noplace to get purchase for your zip-tied lashup. After a couple of experiments failed, I ended up having to paste pieces tack strips to the tops of these columns, using outdoor-grade heavy-duty double-sided sticky tape. This worked…sort of.
Two and a half years have passed, and the problem with Other Daughter’s tabby cat and KnitWit’s black & white cat has been defeated. Cats do not enter my backyard. The neighbors think a Crazy Lady lives here, but that’s just fine with me as long as their cats are not using my desert landscaping as their toilet and my dogs are not eating their deposits — and all the parasites and diseases that come along.
As you can imagine, carpet tack strips are not made to weather wind, rain, and 118-degree sunlight. They’re really nothing other than thin strips of laminate, about a step above cardboard. They’ve held up a great deal better than I imagined they would — I figured they’d fall apart in about one season. But no. Even though they’re looking a little tired, they’re still up there and still doing the job. Of course, they want to buckle and they want to de-laminate, but where they’re secured to the decorative cinderblocks, the zip ties have held them together. Atop the columns, though, they have warped, buckled, curled, and pulled up from the sticky tape. Ugleee, though still effective.
The Fireman suggested that the column toppers could be held in place by nailing the strips to pieces of wood cut to fit the block and then sticking the resulting solid piece down to the crowning cinderblock.
This, it develops, is a brilliant idea. It’s easy to accomplish — carpet tack strips come with handy little brads that you just tap down to hold them in place.
Under constructionThe deed done
They’re sturdy, they stick on there firmly, and while they’re anything but elegant, at least they do look better than strips of tacks tied on with string and wire. 🙂
{Chortle!} Great WT stuff, isn’t it?
So today I plan to start replacing the weathered strips along the endless lengths of decorative cinderblock, a little at a time. There’s no hurry. While it’s cool in the morning, a few feet of old strips can be discarded and a few new feet installed. By the end of the week, the eccentric lash-up will be fully replaced.
Dogs
While I’ve been sick with this seemingly endless respiratory infection, I’ve again had recourse to rolls of FreshPet dog food, the commercial product that’s the closest I’ve found to the custom-made chow I feed the hounds.
The dogs like it, and gosh it’s so much easier than stewing and grinding and mixing up 10 pounds of dog food at a time. Since the dogs eat a pound of food a day, ten pounds goes fast. Usually I can make a week or ten days’ worth, and then it’s back to the kitchen.
It’s good for the dogs — you’d never know Cassie is over ten years old now — but it sure as hell is a PITA. Especially when you don’t feel good.
FreshPet is bracingly expensive — depending on the store, $12 to $14 a roll, plus 10% sales tax, for enough to last about a week.
So yesterday while I was at Costco, there to purchase some more dog food makings, I tried to calculate a cost comparison. It’s not easy, because custom-make dog food is not the same kind of apple as factory-made stuff. But after much tergiversation, I figured that buying pork, chicken, big bags of frozen mixed veggies, oatmeal, rice, and sweet potatoes is marginally cheaper, over the course of a month, than serving up premade dog food with the same ingredients.
Plus: the main reason I go to Costco these days is to buy dog pork, dog chicken and dog veggies. Really, I can buy everything else in other places, and absent the impulse buy factor, doing so saves money. This month I’ve spent a ton of money in Costco, which I would not have done had I been shopping in grocery stores — the purple jeans come to mind as an example.
So, I dunno. It’s a nuisance to make dog food. But it probably is better for the dogs, and apparently it’s cheaper. If I could train myself only to buy the stuff that’s needed in Costco and not to grab a pair of colorful jeans or a package of oversalted pre-cooked lamb shanks or a couple of bottles of wine, it probably would be cheaper.
Dieting
In spite of past six weeks spent pounding at Death’s Door — or maybe because of it — I’ve put on enough weight to push the BMI borderline between “normal” and “overweight” (i.e., “fat”). The jeans still fit, but they’re getting tight.
So I determined to knock off the bread (every morning two pieces! With cheese or dipped in olive oil or smeared with butter and honey!!) and the pasta (comfort food of the first [salted] water) and the potatoes (mmmmmm hash browns!!!).
And it’s worked! By adding salad or fruit to each meal and subtracting the wheat products and the potatoes, I’ve lost two pounds in a week. This, without going hungry, without exercising significantly, and without knocking off my favorite potables (one beer or one bourbon and water per day). If I would get off my duff and bike or walk without benefit of leaf-sniffing dogs, I’d probably lose weight even faster.
Since only about five pounds need to go, I should be back to my former sylph-like self in another week or two.
One thing I did discover: if I arrive at the church about an hour before morning choir practice, I can sneak in a mile or so of strolling… ahem, “power-walking”…in a different environment without the animals suspecting that I’ve made my escape.
One of our associate rectors came up with the idea of a virtual “walk to Jerusalem” for the weeks coming up to Easter. She mapped out a mile-long route around the church, and they tote up the number of person-miles walked by the interested group, to come up with a total equivalent to the distance between Lovely Uptown Phoenix and Jerusalem. This, she taped in a window, allowing me to see exactly where to walk around the church to rack up an even mile.
The area around there in fact is rather lovely. North Central Phoenix is full of expansive 1950s ranch houses on huge lots, each now worth in the vicinity of $750,000 to $1 million, and the main drag through the center of the district is flanked by what once were riding trails — and now are shady walking paths. So it’s a great place to walk and it offers some scenery a little different from the ’hood’s. When you’re there, you’re smack in the middle of Richistan, rather than having to hike through a buffer zone to get to a scenic upscale tract.
So I’m thinking that as part of the diet plan, I should do this every Sunday I go over to the religious HQ. It may even be light enough an hour before the midweek evening choir practice to pull this off (I wouldn’t walk on Central Avenue after dark) — so that would provide two monotony-defying, dog-free walks a week, instead of just one. 🙂
Welp, on to today’s exercise stint: pulling old carpet tack strips off the walls and zip-tieing new ones up!
Well, I don’t know what worked — the leftover codeine or that reliable old standby, tincture of time — but the Cold from Hell is slowing arriving at the almost tolerable stage. Still barking, but not suffocating anyhow. I managed to drive to choir last night, having swallowed half a dose of the menacing opiate when dawn cracked, a good 12 hours before choir call. So felt it was safe enough to drive by then.
And amazingly I also managed to sneak through two hours of rehearsal without causing a scene that was too operatic. Easter, our religion’s seriously hyuge spiritual frenzy, is fast coming upon us, and some of the music is beyond amazing.
We’re singing Mealor’s Stabat Mater, which defies belief in the “Gorgeous” category.
Last night we also rehearsed Stopford’s Ave Verum, one of my favorites…
And Alan Hovhaness’s “Out of the Depths”…
And K. Lee Scott’s “Open My Eyes”… In English, it’s true, but this Korean choir does better justice to the piece than the only other rendition I could find on YouTube:
And Pablo Casal’s O Vos Omnes…
Can you believe we got through all that (and three hymns) in two hours?
No wonder I didn’t feel like driving to Scottsdale at 6:30 this morning. How much longer that networking group is going to put up with my absences, I do not know. Claro que I’ll have to show up next week if I don’t want to be drummed out of the club!
Meanwhile, one of the things I need to do between now and next Thursday is rejoin a Toastmaster’s group, since speaking gigs will be central to the marketing scheme for the new magnum opus. It’s ready to go to print — I’ve just been too overworked and then too damn sick to do battle with the PoD guy’s software. And I believe the eBook dude is about ready with the Kindle and ePub versions. I intend to sell those off my website, since I’m mightily fed up with dealing through Amazon — and since Amazon sales are beside the point with this book.
And mean-meanwhile: a colleague’s book awaits my editorial attention. And so, away.
