Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

A Few Blessings

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Sometimes one despairs of blessings, living in a right-wing flyover state on an income that the feds think of as “poverty” level (it’s not…but that’s another story), where the drivers are crazy and so are the politicians. Some days, though, you just think Thank God.

• Thank God for a fine son.

• Thank God for friends and online virtual friends.

• Thank God for good dogs, good food, and good wine.

• Thank God for the choir and the church that supports it.

• And thank God we don’t live on the East Coast today.

• Thank God for peace and quiet (when you can get it).

• Thank God for great coffee and a French press in which to brew it.

• Thank God for cacti, a whole swarm of whose new babies will soon be blooming.

Here on Christmas Day, M’hijito tripped over this cactus outside the front side-gate, which is much larger than it appears in that snapshot. He was overflowing with apology, but I assured him it was not a big deal. In fact, it was past time to have cut back that neglected plant.

Eventually I got around to wandering out and picking up the several cactus balls that broke off. This is how cacti reproduce: a chunk breaks off, falls on the ground, and sometime in this century takes root.

w00t! I planted four in the front patio. Can you imagine if they all grow and they all bloom at once? That place is gonna be amazing. Put another couple in the side yard. Planted one in a pot to take to M’hijito’s house. And in the back, I retrieved a pot that had made its way under the lemon tree, where lay an old cactus that I thought had died.

You can’t kill a cactus, you know. Though it had flopped over and broken off at the ground, the bottom was callused and the top part was…still green! No sign of rot. Hmmmm… I have no idea what color it is but suspect it’s one of the deep magenta Easter lily cacti that I brought over from the old house, 14 years ago. Planted it under the overgrown rose on the northwest side of the house, where it should get plenty of light but will have time to adjust to the change of micro-microclimate before the sun turns north and starts to bake that corner.

Yes. The East. They have civilization…we have decent weather. As we scribble, the pooches and I are loafing in the front courtyard. The neighbor’s boy is throwing hoops across the street. Cassie is eating green olives that have fallen out of the tree (the better to barf on the floor!), and Ruby is barking at any sign of a passing neighbor. Yesterday the inversion layer finally lifted and blew out most of the smog. The sky is cerulean blue again, and the trees are rustling softly in a barely moving breeze.

Last night our choir friend who lives in Michigan brought pictures of the snow back home, where she repaired for the holiday. The place was enjoying a serious White Christmas — very picturesque if you don’t have to shovel it. And…that was before the real storm was due to roll in. Fortunately she jumped on a plane back to the Valley of the We Do Mean Sun hours before said monster storm was expected to arrive.

• Thank God for Chinese mathematicians and assorted other academics. A fairly large new project is slated to fly in over the transom tomorrow afternoon, at which time I intend to be hiking in the desert. This is from a senior scholar, a lively fellow who seems to have had an interesting career…and is decidedly still kickin’. So I’m looking forward to working on that, the first major job of 2018.

Today is the only day this week I have to myself: SDXB is coming over tomorrow, a meeting on the far side of the West Valley beckons for Saturday, and of course half of Sunday will be consumed by singing. Every other day has been occupied by one activity or another. It’s almost noon and I have done nothing — unless you consider blogging to be something. This afternoon I want to prune that overgrown rose, which has run amok for years. Walk a mile and a half, preferably sans dragging dogs. Loaf some more. Maybe write some more. Download 2017 data from the bank and credit card issuers; organize that stuff for WonderAccountant’s convenience. And cook up a pot of food for the hounds.

And so, away…to another “busy” day of retirement. 😉

Merry Christmas!

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It was after dark yesterday evening when I set out for the Christmas Eve shindig down at the church. The whole neighborhood was lit up! Not only has the influx of young families led to lots more trees and eaves wrapped in Christmas lights, but the local neighbors group has lobbied long and hard to persuade people to line their front walkways with luminarias, which really are very lovely.

For the longest time, the leader of the pack in the Christmas decor department hereabouts was the proprietor of the Burning Bush. This guy climbs up on ladders — every year — to wrap a huge Chinaberry tree with layer on layer on layer of colored lights. These he would set on timers, so that when you looked at the thing, you’d see it all glowing in, say, red lights. Walk around the block, and you’d come back to find a the tree glowing blue. Or orange. Or yellow. Or green. It is an amazing production, to say the least.

Now he’s got some competition from the young folks, who climb on their roofs to create vast confections of lights and blow-up sculptures or cast movie images on their walls. And of course we have the luminarias.

Down at the Religious HQ, we more or less outdid ourselves for the midnight services. The sanctuary was also all lit up, draped with white lights in all directions — which makes for a pretty impressive effect when the house lights are dimmed. As usual, we had a string section, who this year were joined by our new choir director’s wife, a gifted violinist who played a lovely descant. And for the first time in my memory, we sang the Prayers of the People. I’m told that high churches Back East do this fairly routinely. I’ve never heard it before — and my mother did take me to a high church in San Francisco, back in the day when women wore gloves and hats and veils to church.

Our choir is privileged — gifted — to have many singers with professional-level talent. One of them is a tenor — he actually can sing counter-tenor — who has a truly beautiful voice. He sang the first part of prayer’s verses accompanied by the chamber choir, and the rest of us plus the congregation sang the second parts. The effect was amazing.

It was ethereal.

Over dinner at the half-time (between the early and the midnight services), several folks said people in the congregation had come up to them and spoken ecstatically about their experience of the service.

So it goes.

Sometimes, as I duck bullets or lock deadbolts during helicopter fly-overs or peruse my neighbors’ endless bellyaching on NextDoor about the bums and the thieves  or cast malign thoughts in the direction of my fellow homicidal drivers, I consider how much I would like to move to Prescott or, if only I were thirty or forty years younger, back to the banks of the Hassayampa River.

But on reflection, I can’t imagine living anywhere other than North Central, if one must live in Arizona. There are, admittedly, other cities and other countries where I might have chosen to live, given a choice in the matter. But having had no choice, by luck I seem to have fallen pretty much into the best of all possible sub-domains.  Can’t imagine living in the dreary HOA-ridden elbow-to-elbow suburbs that comprise the home of the ever-fleeing white middle class. Think Scottsdale is a nice place to visit but wouldn’t want to live there. And…well…that’s about the extent of your choices, unless you’re too poor to have any choice, in which case you huddle in a shack down by the airport or hang out in the poverty-ridden west side.

We — the neighbors who live on the northern and western fringes of North Central — tend to exaggerate the negative aspects of our ‘hood.

Yes, there are bums. Yes, the City seems determined to import the homeless and the transients up here and dump them into our neighborhood. Yes, they sleep in our alleys, steal our kids’ bicycles, and rip off blankets people leave on the front porch for their cats to sleep on. (No joke! Such is life in the greatest country in the world…) But by and large, they tend to gather around the meth clinic and around the unfortunate businesses at the end of the rail line.

Yes, we are bounded on two sides by dangerous slums. One of them is the territory of a menacing gang of drug dealers, serenaded by gunfire and haunted by cop helicopters. The other is more benignly poverty-ridden…bearing in mind that there is nothing benign about poverty.

Yes, there IS a reason both side yards are secured with iron bars…

However. We have nothing like the number of bums that we used to see in the tony gentrified precincts of the historic Encanto district. Ex-DH and I lived there for about 14 years, coexisting with people who used our side yards as campgrounds and any unlocked vehicle as an impromptu hotel. Our area enjoyed the highest per-capita rate of drug use in the city. How could North Central even begin to compete with that?

Our children could not play outside in front without at least one adult standing guard outside at all times. You couldn’t poke your head out the front door without seeing a bum wandering up the street. The local grade school was so bad that if you couldn’t afford an expensive private or parochial school, you had no choice but to live in and commute from the suburbs…well, assuming you wanted your kid to learn to read by the end of the first or second grade; assuming your kid didn’t know how to use a knife or a club. And though there’s often some shady frolic going on up in my present neighborhood, most of it is fairly petty. In Encanto: not so much. Here, I’ve had…what? ONE incident — the Garage Invasion — in over 25 years. There, we had the Cat Burglar on the Roof, the Night of the Screaming (in which I managed to scare off a would-be rapist by hollering “Fire!”), the Burglar Who Is Still Running (pursued to this day, in his nightmares, by an angry German shepherd who caught the poor schmuck in the kitchen at three in the morning), the Ax Murder, the All-Night Rapefest, the Sleeping Bum in the Car…it went on and on.

I did not walk in Encanto without that German shepherd at my side — it was unsafe to do so. And even with the beast in tow, I wouldn’t have walked around the block after dark for love nor money.

Here, I almost never see a bum within the neighborhood proper, unless he’s in transit through an alleyway or scavenging for identifiable paperwork in the garbage bin (those latter perps are probably not bums, anyway). The dogs and I walk through the neighborhood almost every day, and we don’t run into roaming drug addicts and neglected mental cases on the local streets. And here, I do walk those dogs at night: small dogs that can do absolutely nothing to protect me. The only thing between us and the bogeyman is a heavy walking stick — one that could easily be turned against me. And have we ever seen a bogeyman out there after dark? Nope.

Do I enjoy driving through a slum to enter my neighborhood from the north or west side? Hell, no! Should the City try to improve jobs and living conditions for residents who live in those tracts? Hell, yes!

But Phoenix is a patchwork: if you don’t live in Scottsdale or in one of the monotonous whitebread suburbs, then you live side by side with a variety of demographic sets. Very wealthy and very poor areas are packed side-by-side in this city. And that’s why you’ll find panhandlers — some of them pretty threatening, but most of them fairly mild folk — in the parking lot of a grocery store that markets to the upper middle class.

Do I shop in my neighborhood’s grocery stores? No. I do the same thing I used to do when I lived in Encanto: drive halfway across the Valley to shop where I feel safe in the parking lot, and where I can get most of the products I want without traipsing from store to store to store. Is that a deal-breaker? Nope. It’s just a fact of life in the Valley of the Sun.

In fact, for an inner-city neighborhood, our area is surprisingly safe and placid. Thanks to a change of policy in the school system allowing you to choose what public school your children will go to, you can send your kids to the public schools here — you just send them out of the district. That makes it possible for the younger families moving in now to come in and upgrade homes…and feel like decorating them with Christmas lights and luminarias.

 

 

Merry (Confuse-a-Human) Christmas!

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Ruby and Cassie’s pet Human is merrily confused today. In my old age, I no longer can tell what day of the week it is. Because in old age the day of the week no longer matters.

😉  😀  😉

We roll out of the sack, this morning as usual, whenever the sun wakes us up. It’s around 7:30. I don’t care: just want to sit in front of the space heater and get warm, but that’s not very practical because it’s pretty bracing in here after a heatless night at the Funny Farm. We turn off the heat at night because if the outside temp dips into the 30s, a damn heat pump will freeze up and blast icy air into the house. Plus of course we can’t afford to run the heater in the winter and still have enough in the annual poche to run the air-conditioning in the summer.

I decide to climb back in the sack, put my feet under the heating pad, cover up, and read the morning’s computerized news. The dogs have other ideas about the use of the heating pad and get into a little squabble over who will get first dibs on shoving the Human off the thing. After they’re pulled apart and duly yelled at, they settle down. This is a good thing, because a dog’s body temperature normally runs around 102 degrees, meaning I end up with three heating pads instead of just one…

Along about 9:00, they begin to lobby for food, so we stumble off the bed again, stumble out to the kitchen, and put down a couple dishes of Their Queenship’s Fine Cuisine. Glance out at the porch thermometer: it’s about 45 degrees out there. But at least the wind has died down and the cloud cover has burned off, meaning eventually the sun shining on the dark roof will warm the inside of the house into the tolerable range.

A list of things to do materializes on the white board on the office door. None of them entail any serious work: most of the day is to be occupied by reading a new iteration of a pair of Chinese co-authors’ elaborate research report, 36 pages the gist of which is “all your bases are belong to us.”

I love this stuff. For one thing, it’s a rare day when a Chinese scholar says something brain-banging stupid…not the case with American and European academics, who seem to love to roll around in arcane nonsense. For another, the amount of work these folks put into their projects is astonishing. In an old-fashioned word: they do not spare the horses. So it’s kind of a delight to read it. You find yourself hoping they get published; they get promotion; they get recognition: whatever it is they’re trying to get, they get it done.

This project, at 36 pages much of which I’ve already read once before, will take two or at the outside maybe three days to get through. I hope.

Finish off a fairly large breakfast of cornmeal mush…uhm, “polenta”…and am just carrying the dishes back into the kitchen when JANGLE!!! Phone rings. Damn! A f**kin’ phone solicitor on Christmas Eve?

No. It’s SDXB. He says he’s not coming to the midnight mass tonight because he prefers to go to the right-wing fundamentalist Prod church his present girlfriend favors. That’s fine. But then I say…wait… We don’t sing til tomorrow!

He says you sing on Christmas Eve.

I say, yeah, that’s tomorrow.

He says today is Sunday.

I say no, it’s not. Today is Saturday.

Traipse back to the bedroom, open the computer, and Dayumed if it isn’t Sunday!

But don’t we sing on Christmas Eve? What? Isn’t Sunday Christmas Day?

No. Christmas Day is not Sunday. And yes, today is Sunday. And yes, we’re singing tonight, which is not the same as singing on Christmas Day, which is not Sunday…which is today, which is not Christmas.

?????????????

It takes a good hour to become un-confused and figure out that the list of things I needed to do today is still the list of things I needed to do today, and no, I don’t have to worry about M’hijito showing up over here this afternoon for a ridiculously early high-speed dinner and gift exchange and shoveling him out before I have to fly down to the church to rehearsal.

Now I get an e-mail from M’hijito that indicates I’m still confused. Thought he was supposed to come over tomorrow but apparently he thinks he’s supposed to come over this afternoon.

So I have no idea.

Clearly I am not going to be aging in place in this house, because my marbles are falling out my ears a lot faster than anticipated. If this continues to worsen, soon I will have to move to assisted care.

The corgis have learned to exploit this phenomenon. They have devised a Trick the Human routine. It’s pretty clever, when you think about it.

The Human has trained them to come to call by luring them with a doggy treat. Come into the house when called; get a piece of kibble. It also has trained them to lobby at the back door whenever they need to go out to do their doggy thing. This is also a rewardable activity.

So: they know where the doggy treat jar is, and they know that certain behaviors will elicit a doggy treat. What if….what if one were to combine these behaviors in a convincing way?

So what they do is dance a jig around the back door, begging to be let out. The Human aroused from its comfortable chair and persuaded to open the door, they walk outside, stop at the edge of the patio, pause, turn around, and come back in. Or in Ruby’s case, she stops, stands there, and stares with an expression that says “if you close that door now I will be stuck out here to be eaten by the coyote who lives in the alley, the one that came over the neighbor’s back wall a few days ago.”

She then trots back in and they both charge over to the counter and stand there staring expectantly at the doggy-treat jar.

Oh, well.

Assuming I’ve become correctly un-confused — not an especially safe assumption — the only thing I have to figure out for this evening is how to get this giant crockpot full of fake cassoulet warmed up and over to the church in time for it to be hot for the half-time potluck. There really isn’t enough space in the meeting room for a passel of crockpots — if you don’t get there first you may not find a plug. And I will not be among the first to get there.

Normally I would buy a dessert from Costco for one of these shindigs. But a) the last thing I want to do a day or two before Christmas, at the height of the worst flu season in years, is go into a Costco, and b) even if that were not a problem, I’m flat broke and cannot afford to buy anything at Costco, much less dessert for 40 or 50 people.

And so…onward to the mysteries of running a de-facto state-owned enterprise in the ecology of International Business…

Prepper Frolics: Christmas!

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What could be better for the prepper mentality than a Christmas Eve potluck? 😀

Between Christmas Eve songfests — one early in the evening and one a sort of midnight service (though somewhat before midnight, which is past the Episcopalian bed-time) — the choir descends on a large potluck. I am not good with potlucks, because my cooking needs are so minuscule I’m not what you’d call accustomed to preparing large meals. Nor can I bake anything, since I no longer have and never again will have a functioning oven.

Well. Unless the lottery pans out…

Luckily, when my friends were emptying out their freezer, they happened to donate a frozen cassoulet kit to my cause. It contains packets of sauce, a little raw chicken, a passel of partially cooked beans, and some sliced sausage. This fine set of ingredients, you’re supposed to toss into a slow cooker and simmer away for the afternoon. Hm.

Not enough to feed 40 people and their spouses… It looks like it’s meant for two to four people. But…interesting…surely it wouldn’t be hard to build on this thing?

I bought a few more boned chicken thighs. The ones that come with the kit are raw — IMHO the only way to make crock-pot meat edible is to brown it first. So cooked up a chopped onion in some olive oil, with a little garlic. Then set those aside, cut up the chicken into more or less bite-sized pieces, browned those. Dumped them into the crock pot with the onions & garlic. Deglazed the pan with some white wine; added that to the pot. Then added the white beans from the package, a can of black beans, a box of fancy Italian tomatoes that actually have a flavor, the packaged sauce and sausage, and another splash of wine.

Just now it smells pretty good! I hope it tastes good. The plan is to get it done by around 4 or 5 p.m., then let it cool and then stash it in the fridge, where it can wait until next Sunday to be rewarmed.

The day is going a lot more smoothly than the last two nightmare days, lhudly sing huzzah. A long list has gotten done, interrupted by a de rigueur traipse to the post office to send outgoing mail.

Remember when we used to be able to stick an envelope in the mailbox, flip up the red flag, and let the mailman take it away?

No longer!

Well, in theory you could, but chances are slim to nil that it would still be there by the time the MailIndividual shows up. The place is swarming with petty thieves, all of them in search of Amazon packages and mail containing data that can be used in identity theft. The other day one of them maced a neighbor in the face; the latter nevertheless jumped in his SUV, chased the bastard on his (or someone’s) bicycle, and ran him down.

Yes, Virginia. There is a Wild West…

Two of today’s envelopes contained checks, and one was a SASE from a limited partnership, containing a vote on a pretty crucial issue. Official-looking to the max, it looks like it would contain a check, useful private data, or both.

So one of the jobs on the to-do list is to • write blog post.

√ Done!

 

The Red Tuxedo

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Who knows what secrets lurk in the hearts of women? Ever wonder…first, at the secrets you held when you were a young thing, and second, what became of those secrets? One of mine is the Man in the Red Tuxedo.

The Man entered my life in my sophomore year at the University of Arizona, introduced to me by a friend I’d met in the dorm.

Jim was not a good man. To the contrary. He was the kind of man who was attractive to women who are attracted to the Dark Side. And I, decidedly, was one of those women. He hung around briefly that year and then he left, and I was privately glad to see the dust rising from his heels.

Several years later, though, he resurfaced. How exactly he found me, I do not recall. But he did. I had graduated from college, landed a piddling little job, and had recently moved into an apartment. So it was early in 1967.

Well, we immediately started dating again. My parents had badgered me into breaking up with the true love of my life, who himself was…we might say, not the best of all possible men. Ultimately I would have shown that guy the door on my own initiative, but because of the circumstances — long story short, my parents inflicted a surprisingly effective variety of emotional blackmail — I missed him very much, felt guilty about having dumped on him, and wanted a man. So, we became an Item.

A fairly rocky Item, because, as I say, he was not a good man. My mother, so happy was she to see the end of the guy I’d been dating for the prior three years, deluded herself that he was a wonder and a joy and the handsomest thing that ever came along.

He was handsome, in a rough way. More or less. When he was sober.

Jim came from Yuma, where his supposedly widowed mother still lived. He claimed to be living off the proceeds of a large inheritance, which, he said, had been put in trust for him. Every now and again, he would make a drive to Yuma to “rip off some cash from the trust.”

So he said.

What we’re saying here is that there were no visible means of support…

Jim was active in the Republican Party here in lovely Arizona. He had attached himself to a Yavapai County congressman as a kind of informal man for all seasons. Because he had been treated, in the past, for some kind of mental illness, he could not run for political office, but he dreamed of becoming a power behind the power — a small-time, primordial Steve Bannon, I guess. His mentor was not a great guy, either. One of the chores he assigned to Jim was scouting up prostitutes to entertain visiting politicos, of whom a few would drift through in a fairly steady stream.

Jim and this state representative had attended the 1964 Republican convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, where they involved themselves in a number of petty acts of vandalism intended to support their hero. An early rendition of “dirty tricks,” you might say.

One day, Jim decided to accompany me and my mother on a shopping trip to Diamond’s Department Store, at that time one of the most upscale merchandisers in the state. It was on a par, I’d guess, with Saks Fifth Avenue today. If such stores thrived now to the extent they did in the mid-twentieth century.

Remember S&H Green Stamps? In those days, Diamond’s dispensed them. My mother collected them and furnished our house with the Target-quality Green Stamp give-aways. She collected assiduously. Keep that factoid in mind.

So at Diamond’s, Jim directs us to the men’s department, saying he wishes to buy a red tuxedo and wants to view the store’s offerings. Forthwith, a salesman shows our man his wares, and they indeed do find a red-toned tuxedo jacket. It’s not a scarlet number like the one in today’s FaM banner, but black with some kind of pattern — probably paisley — limned in red.

He buys himself the red-patterned jacket, a cumberbund, a bow tie, a vest, a pair of black slacks, and such like, racking up a handsome bill. All this, he pays for at the register with cash.

The delighted salesman hands him a stack of sheets filled with Green Stamps, eliciting a blank look from Jim.

It used to be you got one stamp for every dime you spent at a participating merchant. I don’t clearly recall the amount Jim spent. The figure that sticks in my mind is $600, but that seems unlikely. A quick cruise through Amazon suggests that today a tuxedo jacket and trousers go for something between $160 to $360; a vest, $16 to $50; a cumberbund, $7 to $23; bow tie, $6 to $20; suspenders, $5 to $10, for a total price ranging between about $200 and about $460. Presumably today’s clothing all comes from China and so is, in relative terms, much cheaper. But given the difference in the value of a buck, I think he spent about $200.

In 2017 dollars, that would be $1,499.51.

So…it is no wonder that when he turned to my mother and, with a courtly flourish, offered her the entire pile of Green Stamps, her jaw dropped to the floor.

From that day forward, my mother thought Jim was the most wonderful thing that ever walked the surface of this earth.

There was a lot she didn’t know about Jim.

In due course, though, I figured him out and told him to take a flying eff at the moon. His response was to commit a rape and then, thank God, to leave. Good riddance to exceptionally bad rubbish.

Time passed. About three months after I had married, the phone rang. It was my old college friend, the one who had introduced me to the dashing Jim.

Had I read the report in the morning paper about Jim? she asked.

Well, no.

Jim had been arrested driving across the desert from Yuma, carrying the largest haul of cocaine that had, to that date, ever been confiscated in Arizona.

Ha haaa! So! That was the “trust” and the source of his mound of cash money: the Mexican Trust. 😀

Ay, caramba!

What became of Jim after that, I do not know (mercifully). Never heard from or about him again.

That was the Man in the Red Tuxedo.

How’s That Countertop Oven Workin’?

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Happy Thanksgiving! Hope yours is going well.

Mine turned into an entertaining voyage of discovery. You’ll recall that after my oven crapped out expensively for the third time, I decided to shut it down and use a countertop oven instead.

This has worked fine, because as a practical matter I don’t use an oven much. The last time I broke the Kenmore, it was by daring to turn on the broiler to toast a couple pieces of bread. So, yeah: a toaster oven fills the bill for my purposes.

However…ah, how quickly we forget that we live in the New Third World…

When we were invited to bring something to this year’s Thanksgiving friends-&-family shindig, I instantly blurted out that I would make cornbread. Well…’twasn’t till about six o’clock last night that I remembered: I don’t have an oven!

Heh heh heh… Charming!

At first I thought I’d ask my neighbor if I could stick a pan in her oven for the 25 minutes it takes to bake a pan of the stuff. Then thought…waitaminit! That thing in the garage is not just any old toaster oven. That thing was billed as the next best thing to God’s Own Oven. It has a convection function, and supposedly you can bake or broil just about anything that will fit into it.

So this morning I tried it on the cornbread, following the recipe’s instructions. It seems to have worked OK, after a fashion. Looks like the contraption runs pretty hot, though. After 22 minutes in there, the pan of cornbread wasn’t golden: it was toasty.

But it seems to have cooked all the way through.