Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Gaming the Mountain: YAHOO!

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In pursuit of a fine score on next week’s proposed stress test, it was off at the crack of dawn to climb Shaw Butte, a small “mountain” just to the north of the ‘hood. In most parts of the country, people would call these little mounds “hills.” But here, we think of them as key parts of the Phoenix Mountain Park.

Heh.

Well, the trail is billed as 4.4 miles, but I’m pretty sure that means the entire loop, from one end off Thunderbird Road, over the top of Shaw Butte and down the back of neighboring North Mountain; then out at Peoria Avenue or else back around the base of the hills to return to Thunderbird. The typical walk, though, is from the parking lot to the top and back. I’d guess this is about two miles.

Parts of the trail are somewhat steep — not as much so as the scrabbly uphill in behind North Mountain, but enough to provide a workout. Some guy’s dog had collapsed with exhaustion as I passed by — probably because the human had been too stupid to bring enough water for the animal. Most people don’t realize how much water domestic dogs need in this climate, or how vulnerable they are to heat exhaustion.

No heat today, though: at dawn it was fairly crisp up there.

Okay, now: here’s the amazing thing.

Bear in mind, it’s been years since I’ve walked on that trail.

I got all the way to the freaking top without stopping!!!!!!!

The last time I tried to hike to the top of Shaw Butte when I was out of shape, I had to stop three times to gasp for air.

How, you ask, did an old bat like me pull that off?

By gaming the mountain…

Actually, I used two techniques.

1) Diaphragmatic, deep breathing. You learn it in choir. And this is the device used to make blood pressure readings drop, too. Starting on the flat right off the parking lot, I started breathing steadily and deeply from the diaphragm. Continued all the way up the side of the hill.

2) On the steepest parts: the rest-step. Actually, I call this the rest-trudge… It’s something I learned while hiking in the bottom of the Grand Canyon with an Arizona Highways photographer, who was toting 50 pounds of large-format camera equipment. The rest-trudge entails stepping up-hill and then locking your knee and putting all your weight on that leg as you swing your other leg forward and upward. It creates a brief rest for each leg as you move up the hill, allowing you to go practically forever without feeling tired.

In the past, the rest-step alone was not enough to get me all the way to the top of that pile of rocks without having to stop, unless I was in pretty good shape. But combining it with the deep breathing, at no point did I feel I needed to stop. Nor at any point was I ever panting.

And when you consider how magnificently out of shape I happen to be just now, that’s pretty amazing.

It took about an hour and a half to get up there and back down. I wasn’t trying to beat any speed records…on the flat, it would take me about 25 minutes to walk two miles. Dog-free, that is.

Heh heh heh…. If it works on a mountain, it surely will work on a treadmill. You may be sure I’ll be using the deep breathing technique during that supposed stress test.

Images

Shaw Butte with paraglider: By Sonoradocent – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49041534d
Banner image: North Mountain as seen from Shaw Butte trail: By Aznaturalist (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

New [*FREE!*] chapter online: THE COMPLETE WRITER

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Okay, so far I’ve managed to squeeze in one (count it: 1) productive task around a day of busy socializing and loafing: Posted Chapter 3 of The Complete Writer at the Plain & Simple Press website.

Chapter 3, online now!

Each chapter of three books will appear, one at a time, at the P&S blog, “News & Chat,” and at the same time, each chapter will be added to a separate page, in normal print-book order, so that eventually the entire book will appear on its dedicated web page. Thus…

This weekend was fairly hectic. Saturday morning we had a special coaching session for the All Saints’ choir, engineered by our new choir director, featuring a guest speaker who is an expert on the human voice. It was extremely interesting — in addition to learning a lot about how humans make vocal sounds, we got a whole slew of exercises and advice.

So…watch out, Metropolitan Opera! Here we come.

Sunday morning’s service was fairly long, and handsomely embellished by a rousing sermon from a guest pastor. Our guy is good, very good indeed…this lady was awesome. Plus the women’s chant choir got to sing the Psalm. So that was all highly satisfactory.

Then it was OUT of there like a rocket to meet WonderAccountant. We had tickets to the Phoenix Chorale’s Sunday afternoon performance: Scandinavian music! As usual with the Chorale, that also was pretty awesome.

First, of course, we had to go to lunch at one of our favorite restaurants…thereby piling on another pound for me to get rid of (again). Great food. Two margaritas. She was driving, thank God: for those who live and dine out in Phoenix, Otro serves real margaritas with a full portion of tequila, not frozen bottled margarita mix. Two will put you under the table. 😀

This morning I was reduced to having to pick up the mess preparatory to house-cleaning. This sounds simple but…well…when the occupant is in the habit of simply dropping things wherever she happens to finish with them, picking up the house can be a challenge. This is a lifelong bad habit: gotta quit doing that!

Today: off to La Maya’s place: home-made tamales for lunch! Now am so stuffed I can barely waddle. But very, very happy.

In less than an hour, I want to tune in to Chuck Bartok’s talk show: the emanation of a marketing guru who spends a fair amount of time and effort sharing what he’s learned. This could be interesting.

The day’s two remaining to-do’s — deposit checks and pay bills — will not get done between now and then, meaning little or no time & energy will be left to finish the Ella chapter I’m supposedly writing as we speak. Oh well.

Who would imagine “retirement” could be so effing busy?

Oranges and Rain

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At last it’s raining here, and raining steadily. Has been all day. The plants thank the gods, the ground thanks the gods, the fishes in the streams (whatever those are) thank the gods.

And especially the citrus thanks the gods.

Citrus trees are high-water plants: short them on water, and even an old and established tree will shrivel up and die. And you don’t want them to do that….

Interestingly, too, citrus trees can tell the difference between rainwater and irrigation water. They much prefer water that falls out of the heavens. You can pour the irrigation to the things, but if it doesn’t rain at least a few times during a year, they will yellow out, drop leaves, produce pathetic fruit. And…no, you don’t want them to do that.

One of the best things I did when I moved into this house lo! these many years ago — maybe the best thing — was to plant oranges, lemons, and a lime. An Arizona Sweet orange is possibly the greatest joy that a human can experience. These oranges are so sweet they’re like candy. Incredibly juicy, delicious candy.

And this is orange season. Every day I’ve been scarfing down four or five oranges at breakfast. If I happen to wander out in the yard during the day, I’ll grab another. Even a single orange tree produces so much fruit, I’d have a hard time eating all of it. Two produce twice that many.

Almost. One of the trees is suffering. I think it’s because the hateful paloverde beetles have made their way over to it — last summer I saw an emergence hole inside its dripline. The rain will help it, but whether it will revive as the days grow longer, I do not know.

The lime tree also is at risk. Luis damaged it when he hacked out a whole limb, apparently misunderstanding what I meant when I said I wanted to be able to walk around it freely. This exposed the interior branches and trunk to the blast of the summer sun. Though I tried to protect them by wrapping them in strips of shade cloth, it doesn’t seem to have done the trick.

So it was already suffering when the house had to be painted. The other side of the tree had grown over the roof, so a lot of its canopy needed to be cut back. That gave the tree a serious shock, from which I doubt it will recover.

Citrus trees do not like to be pruned. Contrary to what the roof-rat fearers will tell you, you should NOT cut their limbs up away from the ground. You shouldn’t prune them at all, except to clear out any branches that are truly dead. So I’m pretty sure the lime is a goner — we’ll know, I expect, by this time next year.

Should have fertilized them before this wonderful rain came along, but was too lazy and hurting too much from the weird hip thing to get to the Depot and haul a 40-pound sack of citrus food home. After the rain clears, I will go and do that…a day late and a dollah short, as usual.

Expect another thing I could do for those two trees is spray them with Miracle-Gro. They do absorb nutrients through their leaves, and Miracle-Gro is plant nutrients on steroids. If part of the trees’ problem is that they’re not getting enough water falling on their canopies, dousing them with water & fertilizer should help them. I hope.

The pained hip is mostly recovered…but now I can’t go walking or biking because of the rain. Nevertheless have lost weight by dint of starving myself: not eating after about 2:00 p.m. does cause the poundage to drop. It would work better if you could burn off a few calories, but on its own it will peel off a few ounces a day.

Oh well.

Since I gave up the fight and succumbed to taking the blood pressure pills, the threatening numbers have hovered pretty much in the normal range. And amazingly, this is happening without benefit of dizzy spells and disorientation!

We shall see how long this lasts: I’ve gone several days at a time before with numbers in the low one-twenties and teens. It looks like the spikes into the 140s — and, hevvin help us, the other day into the 160s — happen about once every four or five days. The headache that I thought was a migraine and then decided was maybe a sinus thing seems to have mostly cleared up. I suspect it had something to do with the 165/105 spike…but which was causative of which, I could not say.

Nor, one might add, do I wish to say.

At any rate, I’m going to choir in a couple of hours, having fled between rehearsal and the Sunday morning service, and having missed the Sunday evensong. Better to err on the side of caution when it comes to driving with these dizzying headaches: once I was flying up 7th Avenue full-out at 50 mph when suddenly I realized I could not see the street signs. Fortunately I was almost home, fortunately I was in a part of town I know so well I don’t really need to see it to navigate it, and fortunately the effect passed quickly. But it was damn scary.

Try to stay out from behind the steering wheel when you think you’re having a migraine. 😉

Well, i KNEW i had something worth writing…

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But damned if I can figure out what it is…

Several quiet days here at the Funny Farm: no serious drama going on in the ’hood, no excitement to belly-ache about — at least, none that’s not going on in Washington, precincts that have become too tiresome to consider. 😉

A new client sent a paper he intends to deliver at a conference this week. Very interesting piece. The guy’s senior faculty in a decent university’s “Communications” program — that’s what we call “J-school” these days. And so he has something to say, and that something happens to be on a subject I enjoy reading about. So that was a day and a half of pleasurable reading for pay.

The flu continues to make its rounds here in Lovely Uptown Arizona. Friends and foes are dropping left and right. But so far I’ve managed to evade it, for reasons I do not understand. Either I’m one of the 10% to 30% who happen to be protected by this year’s flu shot, or the theory that keeping your hands scrupulously clean works.

If the latter is true, here’s the key: Get yourself a plastic box full of the harshest kitchen counter sanitizing wipes you can find in the store. Place it in the car, and also install a plastic bag or small waste basket for used wipes. Then: every single time you go anywhere and climb back into the car, pull out a wipe and rub it thoroughly over your hands; then wipe down the steering wheel and your car keys and key fob.

Et voilà! If you’ve picked up any bugs on your hands, that ought to kill off a fair number of them.

As soon as you get home, wash your hands well with soap and water. If you have to unpack groceries, be sure to wash your hands again after doing so — you can be sure any cashier or grocery clerk with a sore throat or a runny nose will have smeared bags and boxes and packages with germs.

This amounts to a fair amount of obsessive hand-scrubbing. But presumably after you’re back in the house, you can go about your business without removing any more skin from your paws.

In an office? I dunno. If you have to work in one of those accursed cubes, there’s not a helluva lot you can do to protect yourself. The guy next to you is coughing his viruses in the air, and since the boss is unlikely to let you sit in front of the computer with a gas mask on, you really can’t do much about that. But I think it’s still probably worth hiding a box of counter wipes in your desk and wiping your hands every time you have to leave the cube and move about the infected area. Which will be just about everyplace in an office or school.

Got kids? Forget it. Just get used to the fact that you’re gonna catch the flu. What doesn’t kill you makes you better.

Otherwise, rather little of any constructive import has been going on. I’ve not written a damn word on the noveloid in progress, nor have I updated the Plain & Simple Press Blog (b-a-a-a-ad human!).

No, that’s wrong: The Kid and I met at the Great Desert University the other day and applied for a DUNS number. That has so far not been forthcoming. Whenever (if ever) it gets here, we will then be able to get ourselves certified as a woman-owned small business, which will put us in a preferred category for certain federal contracts. We pledged to look for state contracts, too…but so far I have not managed to elevate myself off my derrière long enough to find out about that. I think probably it will be best to get that DUNS number before spending a lot more time on this effort.

Planning to go to the scribbler’s group this weekend. O’course, I made the same plan last month, but at the last minute did not feel well enough to take on the endless drive to the far west Valley. This month the presenter will be going on about using Word’s “Styles” function to format your manuscript. Well…I already know how to do that, thank you very much. But I do have a book MS in progress that I could play with during this workshop. Or just use some of the draft noveloid MS.

My idea for the nonfiction thing, which is essentially complete and will be easy to put together, is to market it in hard copy. But really. When you come right down to it: why? None of these books is making much money. In any given month, Funny about Money generates about 15 times as much income as all the P&S Press books combined. And it’s a fraction of the work. My plan right now is to “publish” bookoids for free through separate, dedicated websites. Then if anyone wants to buy the whole combined damnfool thing, they can download it for a modest fee from that site. Or for the same modest fee at Amazon.

This, of course, requires me to explain what I’m trying to do for the blogging empire’s website wrangler. And trying to make sense of that in writing? More work than I feel like doing just now.

Can you get spring fever in January?

Rain and Jackhammers

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As is often the case, we’re getting the outer edge of the rainstorm that drifted into California…where it’s been causing houses to drift down hills on a tide of mud. Yarnell, beautiful Yarnell, got well over an inch of rain, as did lovely Wittman, home of Ruby the Corgi.

Ah, to be in Yarnell…

Shortly before 7:00 a.m., the bright and cheery song of a jackhammer rose into the air. Cassie and Ruby also rose into the air, emitting a fine barking frenzy. WTF? Storm sewer busted? What?

So I venture outside to see WTF, indeed. Can’t see anyone, but at first think it’s coming from the direction of the WonderAccountants’ house. Possibly in the alley behind their place? Spying on that will be a chore, since the alley curves there and one cannot easily glance down there from our neighborhood lane. Hm. But no… It’s more like the Young People’s house…noooo…. It’s coming from the backyard of the handsomely renovated house on the other side of Young People. No truck is parked in front, but a couple of pails of plaster are standing in the driveway.

Yeah: Undoubtedly a pool replastering job.

Ugh! That means those jackhammers will be banging away for half the day! It takes hours to blast off the old plaster on a large pool. And…fellas? Did your foreman happen to notice that it’s…like…raining? That’s why that wet stuff is falling out of the sky onto your heads.

Some days you realize you’re very lucky not to have some other guy’s job.

The patio seems not to have flooded in the absence of the shade structure’s fiberglass cover. In fact, I think it’s possible that it may have drained better than before. The fiberglass directed runoff from the roof directly into the French drain off the south side of the patio, which of course would fill and overflow within minutes. With the water hitting the concrete and flowing outward from there, drainage seems to spread the runoff across a wider area, sort of the way water runs off a bajada. And that possibly just may have attenuated the Lake Mead effect.

It’s still a mess that will require me to drag the hose over to wash out the mud. But…could be worse.

The table got wet and, because it already had collected some fallen leaves and Devil-Pod tree pollen, was quite the mess to clean up. But I suspect that problem can be easily resolved with a tarp from the Depot.

The cheapie barbecue cover ordered up from Amazon works well to keep the Que dry and clean, and so I can’t see why a cheap tarp wouldn’t do the same for the table. The BBQ cover is “shaped” crudely with a pair of Velcro-backed strips. It would take nothing to secure some heavy-duty Velcro to a flat tarp, which would allow you to tighten the “fit” (as it were) under the table top to keep the thing from blowing off in the wind.

Meanwhile, forgot to drag the wicker rocking chairs into the house from the side deck. By the time I remembered — after the dogs and I were installed in the sack — the rain was really coming down. So had to jump up, run through the house, throw open the sliding door, and drag the two chairs, now amply wet, into the dining room. Fortunately they weren’t completely soaked. Their little seat cushions are already dry this morning…and a couple months ago I’d slapped another thick coat of spray paint on the things, so I guess they’re probably OK.

Yesterday in my frenzy to improve what passes for my health, I walked 2½ miles at a brisk pace, 1½ of them without benefit of dog. Not only that, I also did a yoga routine and two sets of physical therapy exercises for back pain. And…amazingly…

OMG!

The very first thing that sifted into my consciousness this morning when I woke at dawn was…my back doesn’t hurt my hip doesn’t hurt.

Speaking of WTF! 😀

Over the past some months, I’ve become outrageously lazy. I just do not want to get up out of this comfortable chair. And incoming projects from clients have made that possible: with paid work sitting in the laptop, one can convince oneself that one can’t get up because one has to work. Eh?

Just now the coast is clear. Current client decided to revise his article and asked me to hold off reading it, which instantly shoveled off the virtual desk. So I didn’t feel guilty at diddling away time walking around the ‘hood (read: I had no excuse…).

It is amazing how much better you feel after just one day punctuated with three short periods of mild exercise. The yoga routine only runs about 20 minutes, and the PT routine is much shorter: you can get through it in less than 10 minutes. A mile walk takes about 15 minutes when not interrupted by dog-drags. So really…even if there were any paying work to do, it’s not like that small amount of shuffling around takes that much time away from pecuniary gain. No more time, for example, than lingering over Google News and playing online games…

Hope it clears up enough for another couple of walks today.

 

U$hering: Free Live Entertainment

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The Bach Festival is in town again — it’s an annual spree of lovely classical entertainment presented in small venues, mostly very beautiful churches. As usual, I can’t afford to pay to amuse myself or improve my (probably impregnable) mind, so if I get to one, that’s awesome, but usually…not so much luck.

However, one of my choir friends sent out an email asking if anyone would like to usher for a performance.

Well! Dang. I used to usher for the Arizona Theater Company. It was a great experience…and a way to see a play for free. Downtown Phoenix is a bit of a headache to navigate, though. I most certainly can’t afford to park there. And they moved their volunteers’ parking to a lot that was horribly difficult to find and hard to get into because of all the one-way streets and the construction. So I gave up.

And truth to tell, after all these years (those happenings occurred while I was still working, back in another geologic era!) I had forgotten about it.

Naturally, when she brought it up I jumped to volunteer. And happy day, got accepted for an afternoon performance. 🙂

This really is a fun way to make yourself useful — and on the side, get to see performances you wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. The trick is to find companies that accept volunteers as ushers. It’s not at all a difficult job: you have to learn the layout of the house. Then you just hand out programs and help people find their seats. And be nice to the peeps, of course.