Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Spin Those Wheels!

by

Well, really, I can’t complain SO much about wheel-spinning. Even though I managed to evade working on the Big Annoyance of the Day — shoveling a foot-deep stack of accursed paperwork off the desk — a bunch of stuff actually has gotten done. Ditz, it’s true…but stuff that needed to get done.

Do you ever feel like, even after you’ve managed to power through a lot of tasks, that you still have been spinning your wheels half the day?

Done:

🙂 Clean out pool pump pot; clean out pool strainer basket; reinstall pool cleaner, run pump
🙂 Figure out why irrigation system stopped working (FAIL!)
🙂 Water citrus trees manually
🙂 Water other plants manually
🙂 Spray Dawn detergent solution on plants infested with skeletonizing bugs
🙂 Repair back gate latch
🙂 Repair kitchen cabinet pull
🙂 Pick up mess in house
🙂 Change bed; wash sheets & towels
🙂 Cook and concoct dog food
🙂 Clean up ensuing mess in kitchen
🙂 Pick up dog mounds
🙂  Drag trash out to alley
🙂 Post today’s chapter of If You’d Asked Me… (how to handle harassment of cute young teenager)
🙂 Post link to that on Facebook
🙂 Enter comments in FB writer’s community

Not Done:

🙁 Write the next installment of the Drugging of America series
🙁 Iron jeans
🙁 Write more of Ella’s Story
🙁 Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper

AND…as you might guess, “Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper” is the chore that all this wheel-spinning has been designed to avoid. I hate, hate, hate dorking with paperwork.

So I put it off. The bills come in. The checks to deposit come in. The statements come in. This nag, that nag, and the other nag comes in from various vendors and doctors’ offices and creditors. They all get tossed on a table.

They’ve been sitting here for upwards of a month now. The table is beginning to groan under the pile’s weight.

Yes. I’ve paid the bills. But all the rest of it is just sitting there.

It is going to take several hours to plow through all that brain-banging shit. And no. I just do. not. want. to. do. it.

Should write the next Drugging of America piece. And could. That also will be a time-consuming and energy-sucking task. If I start on that now, not enough time will be left in the day to fart with the pile of paper distractions. To say nothing of enough ambition.

One thing I probably could do is have the credit union send statements electronically. That would create three fewer pieces of trash to be plucked out of the mailbox. I’m already downloading all the transactions into Excel as it is.

But you just know, don’t you, that whatever form they use to send these proposed electronic statements will not readily convert to Excel. So that will just inflict three more pieces of useless electronic junkmail to deal with. Like I don’t have enough of that?

So little worthwhile stuff comes in the mail anymore, I hardly ever bother to open the thing. Now that the mailbox has to be fortified and locked, the extra effort entailed in tracking down the key, traipsing it out to the curb, wrestling with the mailbox lid, relocking it, traipsing the key back to the house, and hiding it again makes picking up the mail counterproductive. There simply isn’t enough real mail in there to make it worth being bothered to walk out there and wrestle it out of the box.

Consequently, these days I pick up snail-mail about once a week.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to count: EIGHT out of nine pieces of delivered mail went directly into the trash.

That suggests that about 90 percent of mail being delivered by the U.S. Post Office is junk advertising circulars.

And, therefore,  for every piece of nuisance paperwork that arrives here, nine pieces of trash have to be toted to a recycling bin. Ninety percent of delivered mail represents pointlessly destroyed trees, pointlessly polluting paper mills, pointlessly polluting ink manufacture, pointlessly expended gasoline to tote trees, paper, ink, and junk mail around, pointlessly expended power to run those mills and drive the printing presses and operate the equipment to recycle trash that is never even opened or looked at.

That pisses me off. It ought to piss you off, too.

Oh, well. /rant.

I’d better get up and go deal with the pieces of paper that actually do require attention. Of a sort.

 

Oh, for an April Shower!

by

Around here we don’t get April showers. We get April winds. Howling April winds.

In normal times (which we haven’t seen for some years) we get February rains and April winds. But once again this winter brought almost no rain. So the place is dry as…yeah: dust. If you don’t breathe, you’re fine. But if you do…too bad: allergy season with a vengeance.

The wind has been roaring around for days. For hours last night it was banging stuff up against the house and whacking birds into the westside Arcadia doors. And this morning? The air is still (for the nonce), but what a mess to clean up!

Leaves and palm tree debris all over the yard. Junk from the surviving Devil Pod Tree on the southwest side blown all the way over into the patio on the northeast side…and of course, into the pool.

I’m thinking I’ll plug in the blower, blast the stuff off the patios, and mound it into a couple of haystacks, over which I’ll toss tarps to hold it down until Gerardo gets here to haul it off. Can’t step onto the back porch barefooted without puncturing the soles of my feet, so at least need to get the trash piled up somewhere out of the way.

And it’s blowing the oranges out of the trees. True, they’re pushing over-ripe… I’ve been gorging myself on the delicious things for weeks. But once they’re thrown on the ground, they’ll spoil within a day. So these winds usually mean the end of the orange harvest.

So, so, SO much ditzy, distracting work to do. I really want to finish the current chapter of Ella’s Story, which is painfully slow going. But some of this stuff has been put off too long, and some of it has to be done now…

  • Shovel out the wind debris
  • Clean the mustard algae off the pool walls
  • Shovel the mountain of paper off the dining-room table (damned piles of mail that get left there to attend to…later. Much later.)
  • Do battle with the effing credit bureaus again, trying to get the bastards to reinstall the fraud alert needed thanks to Equifax’s having shared my private information with bad actors around the world
  • Spray the alley weeds behind my house and the feckless neighbor’s house
  • Pick up the dog mounds
  • Haul the trash
  • Run two more loads of laundry
  • Iron clothes
  • Figure out how to put a battery in that damn modem Cox attached the phones to
  • Free the Bear Spray cans from Costco’s consumer-proof wrapping and figure how to use the stuff

The kids who moved into Sally’s house either have a moral objection to Roundup or are too preoccupied with parenthood to be bothered to clean up the weeds. In the spring their front yard looks like a slum property — eventually he’ll get out there and manually pull up the weeds, a tedious chore, indeed. You can’t blame him for putting it off as long as possible. But they never do a damn thing about the alley weeds, which are a serious fire hazard. And it’s against the law to let them grow up as high as your butt…a law most honored in the breach.

But I can’t complain: when the ex- and I were young things, we never touched the alley behind our shack. Partly because we were above all that (weren’t we? after all!) and partly because we didn’t know it was our responsibility to keep the area weed-free.

😀 The young things haven’t been here long enough to watch a neighbor’s house burn to the ground (!) after some of the neighborhood brats set fire to the brush in the alley, out of idle mischief.

So I’ve sprayed once out there — it’s killed off most of the weeds outside my fence and theirs, but a few outliers and newcomers remain to be attacked.

The wind is quiet just now, so I should get out there and do that right this second, before it starts to blow again. Typically it’ll die down fairly late at night and then start again mid-morning. But just now am busy swilling coffee.

The wind blew over the giant garbage bin in the alley. Noticed this yesterday. It’s too heavy for me to haul back upright, and (though I haven’t looked) I’d put money on it that the kid back there hasn’t lifted it, either. So I’ll have to drag the trash down about three city lots to the next set of neighbors’ bin. That doesn’t exactly fill me with inspiration to take out the trash! 😀

My laziness knows no bounds…

Wherever You’re Goin’…

by

…You can’t get there from here!

That old chestnut simply has to have been written by someone from Phoenix. About Phoenix. What a f*ckin’ zoo this place is!

Having failed to get to yesterday’s West Valley Writer’s Workshop shindig, today I determined to go to a weekly Central Phoenix Writing Workshop, therein — with any luck — to meet some new people and maybe even make some new friends. A guy who shows up at the WVWW events is one of the Central Phoenix organizers, and I thought it would be nice to see him, he being a pretty interesting fella.

But no.

It should be a straight shot down Central Avenue. This outfit meets in a hipster coffee house dead center in the renovated downtown.

Li’l hipsters…

To give you an idea: During the recession, I considered (in passing) buying a condo within walking distance of this place. They wanted as much as my four-bedroom house costs for 1 tiny living/dining room, 2 “bedrooms” (one would suffice as a small office), and a kitchenette.

Yeah.

But that’s not so much here nor there.

Turn out of a neighboring ‘Hood and head south on Central.

It is slow going.

And then it gets slower.

And then it comes to a dead stop.

WTF? I can’t figure out what the problem is. Must be an accident up ahead.

At Indian School Road, traffic just sits at the light. After awhile, we inch close enough to the intersection that I can see Indian School is closed east of Central. Cop lights are flashing: must be a Wreck from Hell…not an uncommon event in these parts, as you can imagine.

By now it’s quarter to two. The group’s meeting starts at 2:00 p.m. I’m not gonna make it if I stay in this mess. If I veer right and then dart south on Seventh, maybe I can get around the mess. Fortunately, I’m already in the right-hand lane. I nuzzle the car into the right-turn lane, cutting off some poor wretch who has the same idea.

We sit through FOUR SIGNALS before I get to the front of the line to turn right on Indian School.

Westbound traffic is OK.

Turn south on Third, knowing that at Thomas (this being my old stomping grounds) I’ll have to jog west and then south onto Fifth, since those two streets convert to one-way at that point. PITA.

It gets later.

By the time the supercharged Venza reaches Thomas, we’re just a few brief minutes short of two o’clock

At this point, I figure I’ve had about enough of this run-around.

For.

Get.

THAT!

North on Seventh Ave, headed back to Bum Central, way far to the north of these gentrified confines.

…Meet yo’ daddies and yo’ mamas!

Cruising north, back at Indian School I come to this organic market that I’ve always wanted to visit but usually can’t because when I’m northbound on 7th Ave I’m in a ball-busting hurry (yes, I do always run late…why do you ask?) or it’s late at night after some downtown event or I’m evading the Hated I-17 or I have someplace to go on Seventh. None of those eventualities invite one to diddle around in a grocery store.

Dart right out of the middle lane, tromp the brakes, annoy the guy who was flying along in that lane about 10 mph over the limit. (I know, because we were pacing each other.) Whip into the store’s parking lot.

What a freaking blast from the past!

If you are old enough to remember the 1960s and 70s, then you are old enough to remember organic food co-ops.

This place is like an organic food co-op, only clean. Only with pretty damn good-looking produce. What it really makes you think of is a Whole Foods crammed into the space the size of a typical Sprouts.

Remember the allegedly “organic” produce in those 1970s co-ops? Wilted. Brown. Soggy. Looked like it had been picked from somebody’s backyard garden and left to ferment in a warehouse for three weeks? Yeah: you had to be a true believer to buy that pre-garbage.

The produce in this store was FREAKING GORGEOUS! Plump and handsome and happy and calling out to your taste buds: Come to me, come to meeeee!

The clientele? Omigod. You never saw so many aging hippies in your life. And of course health-conscious gay guys. The store is on the edge of the Melrose district, the home of many gay couples. Everyone in the store was visibly having a wonderful time shopping. No irony there: it was clear these people loved it.

And they had hippy-dippy personal products, so many organic combs and brushes and creams and soaps and toothpastes and beard softeners and hair pomades and…the boggle minded.

Naturally I bought a piece of (YES!) unscented Castile soap (couldn’t believe it) and a little pottle of unscented workingman’s hand softener gunk (think udder cream gone to San Francisco). Hallelujah brothers and sisters!

If they’d had some tie-died clothes, you can be sure I’d’ve bought some of that, too.

Raced back home bearing a beautiful, ripe (!!!!) acorn squash, a perfect unblemished yellow onion, and a pound of allegedly organic, allegedly hormone-free, allegedly grass-fed ground meat from the loins of the perfect cow.

Nice. Will I go back? Probably. It was overpriced. Yes: prices outstripped Whole Paycheck even before that honorable store was kidnapped by Amazon. But did it have things I don’t think I can find elsewhere? Yeah. Definitely. I will go back.

So.

Even though you can’t get wherever it is you think you’re going from here, you can get somewhere interesting. 😀

 

Sumer is y-cumen…again!

by

First week of April in Arizona? Summertime!

People who came here from other parts of the country think it’s already awrful hot. It’s not: yesterday the high only reached 91.

To my mind that’s fairly balmy. But I guess if you grew up in more temperate climes, it feels extreme. Oh well. Just wait till they see what it’s like on July 4. 😀

The plants are beside themselves, once again, with plant joy. The citrus has been blossoming for several weeks — tiny baby oranges, limes, and lemons have started to appear.

Just a few days ago, I planted some new chard seeds in a) a pot and b) a perennially sunbaked flowerbed. Speaking of perennial, the existing chard plants have occupied their pot for upwards of three years. Unlike other kinds of leafy vegetables, the stuff doesn’t bolt to seed in the summer (when it does sprout a seed wand, that doesn’t kill the plant), and it can live through a fairly bracing frost.

This winter some kind of tiny bug literally shaved its leaves off to their center spines. I thought the plants were done for. But lo! This spring, they sprouted new leaves.

The bugs went after them again, so I squirted a solution of Dawn all over the plants. Apparently said solution was a little too strong, though: it burned the chard’s leaves. Again, I thought it was done for, so went out and bought a package of chard seeds, figuring to have to start anew..

Nay, verily: the things have put out more new leaves. Meanwhile, the seeds — which I planted about three days ago — are already sprouting.

Would’ve thunk it?

Planted some little chrysanthemum-like things in the pot, having heard that they repel bugs. Right. We shall see about that.

In any event, they’re kind of pretty little plants, and I think they survive in the heat here.

The Mexican primrose — in reality a kind of weed, a plant that Gerardo looks at aghast — is in full, ecstatic bloom. They make a beautiful pink flower on an upright plant. And because they are quite weedish, they spread like crazy and you cannot kill them.

Lookit these orange things that sprouted from an ancient bulb. Don’t remember what they were called — if I ever knew. But aren’t they pretty?

The lantana, which began to struggle last fall and appeared to be about to wither and die, made it through the winter (to my surprise). It probably needs to be transplanted into a larger pot — lantana is a vigorous spreading critter, and I imagine it must have some space demands. Some varieties of the stuff will actually grow into a hedge in these parts.

Welp, I’d better get off my duff pretty quick. I signed up to go to a writer’s workshop here in town this afternoon. They meet on Sunday afternoons, which normally would be highly inconvenient for me (if not altogether unworkable), because most Sundays choir doesn’t unwind until after noon. Getting downtown through the wacksh!t traffic and fighting to find a parking place by 2 p.m.: not so good. But today we get a little “spring break” after the hectic doings of Holy Week: no church.

Because they meet in a fancy coffee house, you pretty much have to buy something — and we’re told a cup of plain iced coffee (hold the cream, hold the sugar, hold the fake flavoring) will put you back four bucks. Going there once a week is, shall we say, aversive to the frugalist. So…they’ll have to be pretty damn good for me to want to do this often.

The Bum Express goes right in front of the place, which would be grand if I had a friend up here who wanted to attend their meetings. But you couldn’t get me to stand around waiting for a train at the corner of Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s Way alone. Not on a bet. I wouldn’t like it even with another person along. But there’s no way I’d ride that thing by myself: not through our garden corner of the city.

This plan to find a writer’s group in town was occasioned by yesterday’s fiasco. The bunch I happen to favor meets in Avondale — it really is great group, the people in it very nice and smart and interesting and fun to know. But Avondale is halfway to Yuma from here.

It is an hour’s drive, door-to-door, from my house to the Avondale Civic Center, where they meet.

Yesterday the drive was enhanced by my realization, just as I turned out of the ‘Hood onto Gangbanger’s Way, that godDAMNit, I’d forgotten my credit cards & ID.

Soooo…had to turn back into the neighborhood, whereupon forthwith I got behind some poor soul who did not know where she was going and apparently had no GPS. She puttered along, blocking the road while peering back and forth and looking pretty puzzled. At one point she stopped at a tiny intersection and stood there, while she cogitated which way to turn.

All the while making me later and later and later….

Flew out of the ‘Hood, having discovered that Gangbanger’s Way is blocked up for pending goddamn lightrail construction, and headed across town on Main Drag South. This moved fairly smoothly, thank God, and I pulled up to the Avondale Library at exactly noon.

This, you understand, is actually “late,” because the guy who runs this group always starts precisely on the minute, and he expects everyone to be ready to go.

Fly to the door and find it…CLOSED.

The air conditioning has gone out and the flatland touristers who live in those far-flung HOA-ridden suburbs think 91 degrees is too hot to hold a library open.

God help us.

We’re told the meeting is moved to some branch library on the far, far southwest side.

I look at that and think…nope. Not going exploring out here. An hour of driving to get here is quite enough. Besides. I’m hungry.

So I headed home, disgusted because I did want to hear my friend’s presentation.

If you want to live in lovely Phoenix, you need to develop an appreciation for long, frustrating drives. 😀

Rain! Hooo-rah!

by

An excuse not to go on the mountain!

😀

Okay, that’s way up there in the “it’s all about me” department, eh? In reality, it’s wonderful to see some rain, even though it’s the tiniest little bit. California is being soaked, people near the burn areas are having evacuate their neighborhoods for fear of mudslides, and us? We’re getting something more like thick humidity.

More like the smell of rain than actual rain…

But it’s kinda nice.

In fact, I didn’t go for the required morning hike because I was loafing with the computer, reading news and social media blather. But when the dogs finally rounded me up and herded me into the kitchen to fix their breakfast, I saw the light rain and felt glad not to have left the house. Even though it’s not much rain, I would not have been happy at having water fall out of the sky a mile from my car.

We need the rain fairly desperately. The drought continues with little let-up — there was some rain and snow awhile back, but that was it. If this continues, as it likely will, the area eventually will not support the hordes and hordes of humanity our greed-blinded honored business leaders and their political hacks have spawned here. It would not be the first time: centuries ago a large tribe of entrenched, technologically sophisticated Native Americans (we still use the traces of their canal works) up and disappeared from the area. The most likely explanation for their exodus was drought & depletion of resources.

Oh well. That’s tomorrow’s problem, eh?

My son dreams of 60 acres in the middle of nowhere, there to construct a hermitage. In fact, he found a piece of land down near the Chiricahuas with grandfathered water rights and a surface stream flowing through it. DAYum! To die for. He actually located two of them but one was a little too far east. Hit New Mexico this far south, and you might as well be in West  Texas. Heaven help you. The east end of the Chiricahuas is absolutely as far east and as far north as you’d want to go in that area…and even there… One would have one’s doubts.

A-n-n-n-d… Our voice instructor just canceled this noon’s coaching session, she feeling a shade overwhelmed by the bouncing Holy Week doings on the way in the door. Sorry for her…but for me that frees up the whole day!

So…I promise to spend part of it (for a change) practicing the keyboard/sight-reading lesson. Honest.

And once the sky clears, the way will be open for a hike, after all. 😀

And it’s time to pay the auto and homeowner’s insurance again…God, I hope there’s enough in the bank to cover that annual headache.

…whoa!!!!!

Damned if there’s not!!!! The Honored Internal Revenue Service returned TWENTY-EIGHT-HUNDRED DOLLAH to my checking account!

However, I see that the amount I set aside for 2018 tax & insurance (both) will just cover the insurance bill. Safeco has decided, unilaterally, to revalue my house, thereby creating an opportunity to jack up the homeowner’s insurance through the now very expensive roof.

So there’s another hassle to deal with: will have to call Insurance Dude to see if he can get a better deal for this year. Jeez.

It just flat never stops.

Sixty Acres.
Middle of Nowhere.
Please.

“Deal of the Century:…so we’re told…

Six Good Things?

by

Over at Surviving and Thriving, Donna Freedman passed along a meme picked up from Jana Says:  listing six good things in counterpoint to the 87 berjillion horrors, annoyances, and minor headaches we all can bellyache about.

Well, thought I: could I even dream up Six Good Things today????

Hmmm…

  1. Another rat jumped Trump’s sinking White House ship today…oh, wait….

Okay, okay. Trying again:

  1. Some kid was thrown out of a college course on Christianity for the crime of stating that there are only two biological genders…. Uhmmm…

Not getting far with this, are we? Surely there must be SOMETHING good out there?

  1. The ancient alien mummy discovered in a Chilean desert isn’t an alien after all. It isn’t even ancient.

Drat! Fourth try’s a charm:

  1. My wonderful son is still kicking. He invited me over to dinner tonight. So the corgis and I will descend on him and the retriever a little later today.
  2. Choir is magnificent. Our former choir director was wondrous and beloved, and to everyone’s delight, the new choir director and also the new associate director/organist are wondrous and beloved. Holy week is coming up and we’re learning a slew of spectacular musical pieces for the occasion.
  3. Spring has sprung in Arizona. The citrus trees are perfuming the air with a new season’s blossoms. The orchid trees are a-blast in color. Soon it will be warm enough to swim in the pool!
  4. Yesterday I saw one of the handsomest men I’ve ever had the pleasure of viewing, along with his fairly adorable son, over in the North Mountain preserve. Scenic.
  5. Today I encountered a man with the sweetest smile and the cutest chocolate lab I’ve ever seen, also over in the North Mountain preserve. When men are attractive, they are very, very attractive.
  6. God is great, beer is good, and people are crazy.

Okay. There you go. The Professional Skeptic’s Guide to the Good Things in Today’s Ridiculous World. What can one say? Other than thank God for Rachel Maddow.

Jeez. Six good things indeed…