Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Coyote Morning

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So along about 6 a.m. the dogs and the human are trotting up Sub-Feeder Lane, headed back toward the Funny Farm, when flying around the corner comes — HOLY SH!T — a full-grown coyote moving out at a gallop. Big one, too: probably male. His hackles are standing on end (so, we might add, are mine…). Something’s got him scared. He glances at the human with its jaw hanging open and the extremely interested (and interesting) dwarf dogs but keeps on keepin’ on.

Don’t know what spooked him. On the other side of the corner wall, the only people I could see were Manny’s wife and daughter pushing their dog in a baby stroller (don’t ask). No one could be more unprepossessing.

So that was an interesting start to a soggy day. Water is still dripping off the eaves from last night’s rain. It’s hot, muggy, and wet out there.

The pool dude is supposed to materialize in another hour and a half, by which time I will need to be washed, dressed, and painted, and the pigpen more or less picked up.

Later.

The mind (as it were) is about made up: for the new PebbleSheen surfacing job, we should go with the lightest color available that has some sort of irregular mottled-looking pattern. This is most likely to retain its appearance over the product’s 15- to 20-year lifespan. Pool Dude remarked, when asked straight-on, that the coveted darker colors all fade to gray over time. Over, he added, not so much time… Yesterday whilst killing time a-cruisin’ the Web, I came across a chat board inhabited by guys who make their living in the swimming pool biz. One conversation was going on about recoating with PebbleTec and Pebblesheen, which several of the guys had put into their own pools.

{chortle!} God, but I love finding an online chatfest made for guys (and gals) in a trade. You learn so much from their water-cooler yakfests.

So, yeah: all of these products indeed do fade to a pretty uniform gun-metal grey — and it may take just three or four years for that to happen. Several of them posted images of the results…in their own pools. One guy had a chip from the original (black) surfacing job, which he held up against the (faded to chalky slate) side of the pool.

It appears this is mostly caused by precipitation of minerals and pool chemicals out of the water, although sunlight may play some part in it. Around here, you can be sure you get plenty of mineral precipitation: our water is very hard. That’s why, if you have any sense and plenty of money to burn, you should drain and refill your pool at least every two years. Really, it would be ideal to do it every winter, but I don’t like that kind of water waste and so put it off as long as I can.

Like…ahem…four years, just now. This, Pool Dude speculated, might explain the algae issue.

If you could install a couple of water tanks in the backyard that could hold the agèd pool water and allow you to pump it onto your landscaping or use it to wash the car, that would be ideal.

But in the first place, it’s probably illegal. And in the second, it’s unclear to me how you’d pump 18,000 gallons sitting below soil level up into a tank sitting on the surface of the ground.

My water bill this month was $277.

No, not an illusion: that’s almost three hundred bucks! A hundred and twenty-seven dollars over budget.

True, we had an irrigation leak on the front patio, which Gerardo has now fixed. But that zone runs only about 20 minutes…it’s a little hard to believe that would be enough to run up a $300 bill.

***

Pool Dude just called to cancel today’s get-together. Lhudly sing huzzah! It’s hot, muggy, and stuffy in here, and i gotta say…the LAST thing I feel like doing just this minute is banging around picking up the mess and getting myself washed, combed, & painted. Yay!

***

This will free up a lost hour or two to return to drafting the over-prescribing book. Yesterday I finally finished a second draft of the chapter on NNT and NNS (number needed to test and number needed to screen), and even managed to throw in outlines for half of the 14 chapters. Today: finish the chapter outlines; recruit someone to read the NNT squib. I’ve already shipped a draft off to The Kid to fix the documentation — when you write that fast and focus so tightly on difficult subject matter, getting the commas, colons, periods and italics right is more than you wish to cope with.

Next: write the proposal cover letter. Run through the NNT chapter again — third, maybe fourth draft. Then put the package together and ship it off to Editor #1.

As soon as it goes into the email, it’s off to the GDU library to track down their database or (preferably) their hard copy of LMP so as to compile a list of another half-dozen university presses that might be inclined to publish the thing.

Actually, I like a list of a dozen potential publishers for a project like this. Back in the Day, I would always have a half-dozen copies of the proposal in circulation: ship off six copies to six editors; then as a rejection comes in, just ship off another one to the next person on the list. This keeps half-a-dozen queries in circulation and cuts the time required to sell the project to a publishing house by several months. (It’s very bad style, BTW: publishers and editors hate you for doing this!).

LOL! Do as I say, not as I do. 😀

At any rate, this time I’m starting with a publishing house that I have some reason to suspect might be interested in the project. Once they reject (which they probably will: they don’t know me from Adam’s off ox), then we’ll start with the proposal-pushing waltz.

A-n-n-d…if any of this grand plan is going to happen, I suppose I’d better get to work…

Rain! At last!

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So yesterday evening we finally got a monsoon that blew in with enough force to push some precip into the rain shadow of the North Mountains. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

We got a fair amount of rain last night, though not enough to flood the back patio. Certainly enough to water everything nicely, though. And as usual, to confuse motorists who haven’t see water falling out of the sky since they were small children…

I believe that’s a view of a freeway in the East Valley…or…something…
Does your car have oars?
Into the breach…

A tree blew over on some poor soul’s house in Mesa, an East Valley bedroom community. Fortunately, the occupant, a 70-year-old man, was not seriously injured. People have been killed by trees and limbs coming through the roof. That didn’t happen this time, mercifully.

The moisture’s supposed to stick around for about a week, so we should get some more rain. Much needed…but what really is needed is not a (now very rare!) summer thunderstorm, but the regular annual summer deluge plus the now-extinct lengthy, softer winter rains. We get neither of those anymore. Haven’t, not in years.

But don’t worry. There’s no such thing as global warming. Because there’s no such thing as science. Right?

I’d planned to go to a local Fincon meeting last night, and was looking forward to it. But this freshet blew in right about time to head out. And it was still rush hour as the storm blew up. Given the delight I take in driving the homicidal streets of Phoenix under the best of conditions, I decided to opt the pleasure in a wind-and-rain storm. People here simply forget how to drive in rain (or maybe they never learned). They’re crazy under the best of circumstances, but in weather? Rolling menaces, every one of ’em! 😀

Plus…I’m kind of inclined to think it’s not a great idea to leave the dogs here when high winds and heavy rain are under way. Given that gigantic tree on the west side, which would take the house out altogether in a direct hit…and the palm trees that call out to the Lightning Bolt Gods…and the potential for flooding through the back door…. Not that they’d drown. But if the house were busted open they’d run off toward Yuma, never to be seen again. And of course if a fire got started, they wouldn’t live through it without someone here to get them outside.

Incredibly, the pool is holding its own against bathtub temps and blowing dirt. The mossy mustard algae has still not returned! Why, I do not know. One day, it just disappeared, and it has not come back. I did take Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner out as the storm was running in, so as to keep him from choking on tree limbs and drowned rabbits. This morning whisked about half-a-bushel of debris off the bottom, using a garden-hose attachment; then dropped Harvey back in the drink.

Meanwhile…no, I have done exactly NONE of the work laid out on my plate. It is hot. It is humid. And I am too lazy to do much more than loaf.

And so, away: to crank that chapter on NNT!

Images: Arizona Department of Transportation. Public domain.

Gray

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Or is that grey? Oh, well: Yank or Brit, it’s unmistakably a gray, muggy day. The fringe of the supposed hurricane drifted in during the night. Though the air was so thick water seemed to be condensing out like steam, the dogs and I took off for the 5:00 a.m. one-miler, human hoping to get back before real rain began to fall.

And this is where it gets Arizona crazy…

So we’re trotting along and there’s the neighbor wife, ambling around the front yard looking puzzled.

“I can’t figure out where this water is coming from!” says she, pointing to a damp spot on the concrete…directly under the eaves.

This is pleasing, because it means someone else woke up at 4:30 or 5 feeling dazed, muzzy, and befogged. 🙂

After a second she looks up and says, “Oh! The roof?”

I say, “It’s falling from the eaves.”

She says, “Omigod! It’s rain!”

And we both realize it’s been so long since we’ve seen actual rain we can barely recognize it!

😀

Whatever the stuff is, I do wish it wouldn’t pester us today. I’ve got to drive from effing pillar to effing post this morning. And if you think homeowners here are puzzled by water falling out of the sky, wait’ll you see what an Arizona driver does in the rain!

It is going to be horrible.

So at 9 a.m. it’s off to the library to pick up a book that came in from Interlibrary Loan. Then down to AJ’s to pick up not one but two types of dog food, the beasts having consumed the kibble I use as doggy treats and to supplement the home-made stuff. The makings for real food of the doggy variety are only to be had at Costco, and the present budgetary constraints mean I’m out of Costco until the first of the month. Later in the day, it’s pick up friends and meet their kids at their fave restaurant for pre-Father’s Day. One of said kids is Connie the Long-Haul Truck Driver, who hits town today (assuming the weather doesn’t hold her up) and then will have to turn around and head back to some garden spot in North Dakota. Or some such.

What I really want to do with today is work on the Overprescription book. Yesterday I got about 3/4 of the way through chapter 1 — maybe more, actually: just a few more topics to address, just a ton more research sources to dig up. If I would sit still and work on the thing, I could get this chapter done today and chapter 2 done by the end of next week. The Introduction is now done and a credible TofC in place.

The copy is not that difficult to write, because the skeleton of each chapter — well, of most of them — is already sketched out in a series of blog posts. True, a blog post a book chapter does not make. But it makes a damn good running head start.

Once chapter 2 is built, I’ll be ready to send out the proposal. Well, o’course I’ll have to write the cover letter/proposal, but that should be pretty easy. I can do that while Tina is working on the intro and sample chapters to go in the package.

Tina, bidness partner at The Copyeditor’s Desk, has agreed to regularize the citations, a chore I happen to hate. She happens to be in China just now. So that gives me a week or 10 days to get all three sample parts of the book — Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 — in a clean enough draft for her to attack the documentation. Then go over it again with a finer comb, and it’s off to the first publisher!

Yes. Mercifully, you still don’t really need an agent to peddle a book to an academic press. It helps, but unlike the commercial publishing landscape, it’s not de rigueur. So…what you do is compile a list of the presses you imagine will be interested in your topic. At the head of my list is a Canadian university press, because Canada is a great deal more aware of the overmedication issue than the US. Then for each press you find the acquisitions editor for books in your specific subject area; get the person’s name and address. Rack up about a dozen of these, and start sending out your package.

If you have good manners, you send it to just one editor at a time.

However… a) no one has ever accused me of having good manners (not since about the second grade, anyway); and b) I do not have enough years left in my life to wait for …one…editor…at…a…time… to get around to rejecting me.

In the past, I’ve sent out a half-dozen at once. That was in the Day of the Snail, mail-wise. When a rejection would come in, I’d just take the package out of the SASE and drop it into a new envelope for the next editor on the list, which would have no fewer than a dozen candidates. So at any given time, at least six proposals would be in circulation.

In the past, too, the first, second, or third editor would bite. Others wouldn’t even respond, or would send an offer a day late and many dollars short. So it wasn’t really that a half-dozen offers were gonna come in from the first mailing.

We shall see how this works in the Age of E-mail. I surely do hope it goes faster…but don’t hold out much hope.

I probably will shop the proposal around to about a dozen houses. If no one picks it up, I’ll self-publish the thing. But really…the subject is too important for the Trash Heap That Is Amazon. It really needs to go out through a real publisher with a real marketing operation and enough clout to get real reviewers to look at it.

But here in the Brave New World, a lot of things need to happen, don’t they? 😉

But it’s a…soggy heat…

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Whatever it is out there beyond the Air-Conditioned Bubble, it ain’t a dry heat! Indeed, one could call it, well…soggy.

Monsoon weather is drifting in, gently shoved along by the cutesily named Hurricane Bud. That means enhanced humidity, which means enhanced heat. It’s only 109 on the back porch just now — around 3 p.m. — but if you’d asked me to estimate, I’d guess about 112, maybe even 113. The creeping moisture in the air makes the ambience feel a fair amount warmer than it is.

The past couple of days have been hot and muggy. It’s the kind of weather that makes you feel out of sorts, even when you’re inside the expensively air-cooled house. Crabby, even.

Tomorrow there’s a scant chance of rain — maybe as much as 15%. But on Saturday chances jump to 79%. So with any luck we’ll get some serious rain on that day. Hope springing eternal in the desert rat’s heart, preparations have already been made. The back porch furniture, now pretty much unprotected in the absence of the fiberclass shade-structure cover, is covered in plastic bags and camo drop cloth, the latter tied to the legs of the table so it can’t fly away. The pool has been zapped with chlorine (the mustard algae is still laughing). The garbage has all been hauled, so that doesn’t have to be done through wind, flying dust, rocketing tree limbs, or ankle-deep puddles.

Our so-called “monsoons” blow in from the Sea of Cortes at this time of year. The talking weather-heads are predicting it will be the “earliest start of the monsoons” on record. Let’s hope that’s so, and not that it’s yet another fluke. Or another false alarm. The Sonoran Desert desperately needs rain: the drought has gone on for over a decade. This is probably permanent, but since we don’t believe in climate change or science or any other such nonsense, we proceed with the building of one of the largest cities in the country, as though all were well with the world. Our predecessors in this land, when faced with a similar drought, had the good sense to migrate away from it. We just keep on swarming in and laying asphalt. 😀

Oh well.

Morning — early morning — was as usual lovely, if a bit stuffy. By 7 a.m. the dogs were walked (one mi.); a stash of stolen tools discovered along the way, reconstituted in its toolbox (undoubtedly lifted out of someone’s pickup or carport), and placed by a neighbor’s driveway where it will be seen; the dogs fed; the pool cleaned; the hair washed; the plants watered; the garbage gathered and dumped; the outdoor furniture battened down; human fed; dishes washed; towels washed; computer crashed; computer recovered…

So it goes…

Rain, rain come again…

 

How’s That [fill-in-the-blank] Workin’ for Ya?

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Thankee, that [hand-wash the dishes scheme] is workin’ surprisingly well. Who’d’ve thunk it?

LOL! Have been banging around since the hounds and I rolled out of the sack at 4:30 a.m. The mile-long dawg walk is done. Pool maintenance: done. Yard maintenance: done. Three loads of laundry: done. Shitload of housework: done. Trash hauling: done. And it’s only 11:00 in the morning!

Interestingly, it turns out that washing dishes by hand is nowhere near as annoying as I remember it from my misspent youth, when my mother used to make me wash all the damn dishes. In the first place, there’s only one person dirtying up dishes here (well…not counting the pooches). In the second, I cook almost exclusively on the grill (especially in the summertime!), and so there are no pots and pans to scrub. And finally, because in diet mode I eat only twice a day, stacks of dirty dishes fail to materialize.

If I set my own and the pooches’ plates in a sink filled with soapy water, whenever I get around to sponging and rinsing them, it takes less than three minutes to wash them and drop them in the washer’s dishrack to drain. Exactly zero electric power is consumed (the water heater runs on gas). Compare that with the two-hour power- and water-consuming cycle to wash the same number of dishes & utensils!

Think of that. If I washed dishes twice a day, every day, that would be six minutes times seven, or 42 minutes a week. Less than half the time it takes to run one dishwasher load!

Normally I run the washer about once every second or third day. So that would mean in a week I would run it twice or three times: four to six hours of electric use!

Compare that with zero hours of electric consumption, and maybe three gallons of water per day, heated with gas.

My kitchen sports a huge double sink. I mean, huge. This makes it possible to fill one sink with richly Dawn-enhanced water. Then, whenever the dogs or I finish eating something, I set the dishes in the water and leave them to soak (having wiped the food into the trash first, of course). Later in the day: sponge down the collected pottery, glass, and stainless, rack it, drain and rinse the sink, and forget it.

It’s no exaggeration to say this takes about three minutes.

Maybe SDXB wasn’t as crazy as I thought.

He hates dishwashers and refuses to use them. When he lived with me, he tried to force me to abjure the use of my Kitchenaid. It was one of several constant sources of conflict.

On the other hand, SDXB did love to cook. And what a mess that man could make! The result would always be piles of sticky, greasy pans, mountains of bowls and platters and plates, knives and spoons and forks and peelers and mixers and…ugh!!! Washing all that stuff by hand was, in fact, one bitch of a chore.

That’s not how I prepare food these days. Almost everything that I cook goes on the grill. Most veggies can be grilled on one of those barbecue pan things with the little holes in it. Meat, of course, goes right over the fire. Even pasta (for example) doesn’t get a cooking pot very dirty. So with few pots and pans — and almost never a frying or sauté pan — the dishes you eat off of are pretty easy to soak clean.

On other fronts: Did I fix the link in yesterday’s Complete Writer post? No. My patience is still too short to address that issue. Gimme a break, Lord!

Am I going to make it to the end of my personal “fiscal” year in September, when the annual required minimum drawdown from the IRA is slated? No. I have $4,000 in the checking account. Talked the Mayo into reducing its bill by $305, the amount Medicare and Medigap refused to cover for the stupid “annual checkup” that I should have turned down, but that was a drop in the bucket. Yesterday in the mail came a bill for something over $2,000 for next year’s Medigap coverage. That is a huge increase. Obviously, since it costs about $2,000/month to run this house and feed me and the dogs and operate the car and fill the various hands reaching into my pocketbook — exclusive of tax and insurance bills — I am not going to make it to September on what remains in the bank.

I’m told long-term care coverage is also going way up.

Obviously, I can’t continue to live on the RMD plus Social Security at this rate. Possibly I’ll have to consider canceling the long-term care coverage. That is a HUGE risk. If I don’t die quickly but instead land in some nursing home, the cost will drain savings fast, impoverishing me and eliminating any chance of leaving enough to my son to matter.

My plan is to exit stage left if it looks like any such thing is coming down the pike. If one were to succeed in that strategy, it would render the long-term care insurance massively redundant. On the other hand, there’s always the chance that — say you had a stroke or you fell and hurt yourself bad enough that you couldn’t move around — one might not be able to reach the tools set aside for the purpose.

I’d rather not have to pay that accursed insurance bill. But on the other hand, I sure don’t want everything I hope to leave to my son taken away…for what? To keep me pointlessly alive?

And finally, remember the Vicks VapoRub Quack Cure for supposed toenail fungus? How did that work? Mixed. After the initial six-week experiment, I continued to use it for a several months. But it must be said that the stuff does stink. One does tire of going to bed smelling like a chemical factory. So eventually I gave it up.

And, as expected, eventually the dry hide/possible fungus was back to business as usual.

My friend VickyC reported that tea tree oil had worked for her. Look it up, and you find that it does work, sometimes: in 10% to 14% of cases. The other option is a very expensive topical fungicide whose results are similarly weak, or anti-fungicidal pills that can make you good and sick. Thanks: I’ll take the toenails as they are.

So the other day I picked up a tea tree oil concoction (woo-wooooo!) at Whole Foods and tried it.

Damned if it doesn’t make a difference!

However: I suspect that’s because this is probably not a fungal infection. At first glance, Derma-Doc pronounced the thick skin and raggedy nail ends on the right foot (not on the left one) to be “dry skin.” He recommended massaging a whole lotta Eucerin into the toes. And the rest of the foot. And the other foot.

Side note: for years a neuroma caused so much pain in the ball of that foot that I would curl my toes under when walking, to relieve the pressure on the spot that hurt. That caused extensive callusing on the ends of the toes…which, we might add, coincide with the tips of one’s toenails. Thus Derma-Doc’s off-the-cuff diagnosis had some credibility.

Later, also on the fly, he remarked that it was a fungus. So: WTF. Who knows?

This time, though, unlike past episodes of fretting, one of the nails had developed a  brown spot.

Side note: however, awhile back I whacked my foot good and bruised the toes. The dark spot could have been a little blood seeping under the nail, which would not be the first time that’s happened.

So, following the quack instructions, I went to file the surface of the nail a bit, and lo! that lifted the discolored area right off. Clearly, whatever it is does not dwell under the nail, as we’re told is the case with a nail infection.

Tea tree oil has its own annoying New-Agey perfume, but it dissipates quickly. Put it on an hour or two before bed-time, and it does not accompany you between the sheets. Nor does it fill the air around you with a nose-crinkling stink.

I’ve been brushing this stuff on each night and then covering the feet with peds… After just a few days, the rhino-hide effect has much improved. The brown spot remains gone. And I suspect that if a person continued this “regimen” (heh) over a period of weeks or months, eventually the road-worn toes would assume a normal appearance.

We shall see. This is so easy, there’s no reason not to try it.

A Balmy Day in Arizona

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A chilly 107 degrees here today. When will we be able to put away the sweaters?

🙂

Actually, that’s about normal for lovely uptown Phoenix: a little warmer than it used to be at this time of year, but pretty much on target here where we’ve paved paradise and put up a whole lot of parking lots. Speaking of balmy.

Had a fairly balmy episode this morning — balmy as in wacksh!t. On the way out of the house to walk the dogs, a little after dawn, what should I see on the sidewalk outside the side gate to the courtyard but this, chalked on the sidewalk:

Hmmm…

X6 S0Φ9

???

Calculus?

Alien message to incoming fellow invaders?

Well, just a few days ago we were (again) told by some of the most flamboyant “journalists” on the planet — makers of Britain’s favorite tabloids — that burglars like to mark houses that they’ve targeted with hobo-style symbols, for the benefit of their accomplices. Don’t ask why any halfway bright burglar ring would do this when they all have cell phones. But whatEVER.

Anything’s believable when you’re being dragged up the street by two dwarf sheepdogs at five in the morning.

Suspicions were confirmed a bit later, when we ran into two BoB’s: burglars on bikes. This pair rides around on a couple of hot-looking bicycles — we use the word “hot” advisedly — conspicuously casing the locals’ homes. The two are so bold they don’t even try to be subtle about it. Undoubtedly they’ve placed the Funny Farm on their list.

😀

In the suspicions confirmed department: it is indeed impossible to get out of Costco for less than $200. That, after all, is a conservative estimate.

It was time for the monthly Costco Junket with my friends, ever a great adventure. The cupboards were about bare…the only shelves still furnished held toilet paper and paper towels. Steak, fish, chicken; veggies frozen, veggies fresh; fruit and berries fresh; nuts, bagged; maple syrup, packed in plastic fake jug; and…of course…one set of sheets.

Hey! How can you turn down a set of battleship-gray 100% cotton Kirkland sheets? Battleship gray, the height of style. Right up there with eye-searing white.

$300, all told.

😮

Meanwhile, speaking of phenomenal amounts of cash, the dishwasher has started making a weird noise when its water valve comes on. Dropped by B&B Appliances and learned that, yea verily, there are effectively no dishwashers being made anymore that actually get your dishes clean. With, that is, the possible exception of Bosch. Replacing the one I have will cost around $1,000. Not counting tax. Not counting installation.

When I bought the thing 14 years ago, I had a job and could afford these indulgences. Not so much, these days.

So it’s beginning to look like the future holds another Great Step Backward into our grandparents’ lifestyle: the dishwasher is about to become the most expensive dish draining rack in North America.

Oh well.

:-/

Various friends’ efforts to come up with schemes to get me reinstated in Facebook have proven fruitless. That comes under the heading of “no great loss.”

Absent Facebook, a great deal more productive work gets done. For a person who didn’t want to sign up for the thing to start with, I certainly got sucked in to diddling away a phenomenal amount of time.

Two of the three books I’ve been posting at Plain & Simple Press were already complete at the time the idea took form. But the third, Ella’s Story, was (and is) very much a work in progress.

By the time of the Great Exit, I’d posted most of the copy and was barely keeping up with the weekly “publication” scheme. But now I’m already two chapters ahead. And even managed, finally, to get Ella into the sack with her…friend.

At this rate I may actually finish the thing.

Well. If I ever figure out where it’s going.