Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Shine On, Harvest Moon…

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Did you see the new moon in the old moon’s arms tonight? What a beautiful evening!

It’s a party night here in lovely uptown Phoenix. As the dogs dragged their human around their mile-long racetrack, music and near-music serenaded us from all directions, near and far. The neighbors with the vizlas are having an outdoor party in their front yard, the chatter of cocktail talk rising into the night. Over in Richistan, one of the Privileged is blasting his neighbors with loud rackety noise that I guess is supposed to be music — no cars parked outside, though, so presumably no real party is going on. Visiting teenaged relatives, maybe?

The night is so balmy, it’s hard to believe we’re coming up on the end of November. Not even a sweater is needed.

Also over in Richistan, the City’s “we’re a-gunna condemn this shack” sign has disappeared from the front window in the wreck of a house recently vacated by the strange brothers. More amusing gossip has been heard on that front. Videlicet:

The other evening I stopped to chat with the eccentric couple who live catty-corner across the road from that place. He said they believed the explosions described by the other old-time neighbor I spoke with a couple weeks ago were not incidents related to the men’s shade-tree garage business. Rather, they believed, the brothers were cooking up meth in the back of the house.

And it is true that when they moved out, every window in the house was left hanging open — the place is still wide open.

Shee-ut. If it was a meth house, the City may make them bulldoze it. That, one suspects, would be the path of least resistance. Still…what a waste! These are historic-era homes: almost 70 years old. In Phoenix, you can get historic designation if a house is 50 years old.

Meth was the product of choice for dealers and wannabe dealers in these parts, for quite some time. Sh*theads turned houses into meth factories even in some very fancy neighborhoods — like Palmcroft, probably the most elegant gentrified district in the Valley. Friend of mine moved into a district called Moon Valley, a wannabe fancy area that has had its ups and downs.

Cattycorner across the road from the house she bought stood a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house that had been a meth house and had been condemned. A lot of argument ensued over whether the place would be demolished, the theory being that the chemicals used permeate the structure’s building materials so that it will never be safe to live in again.

So it remains to be seen what will become of Tony the Cat and his sidekick. The old guy across the street said both cats were back and OK. No one in the hood is able to adopt them, which probably doesn’t matter because they’ve always been “outside cats”: read “feral.” People leave food outdoors for them.

However, two mated coyotes have taken up residence in the brush outside a house one street to the north (another eccentric: an architect who thinks feral shrubbery is arty…and it surely DOES block the view from the street into his house). They stroll up and down Tony’s street all the time — I carry a coyote shilelagh with me whenever I take the short stuff out.

So it goes, on the eve of Thanksgiving, 2017…

 

Some things about forgetting…

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…are GOOD things.

Well, on the meta-level, that’s obvious enough: letting go of old annoyances, frustrations, and sorrows surely will make your life better. Or at least make it easier to get on with life.

But when you come to be an Old Bat, forgetfulness soaks into the pores of your life: it exists on the micro-level. When you can’t remember everything, you can’t remember anything. Car keys are the worst offenders in this category, as we know…but the issue is pervasive.

Today, for example, one of the chores on the to-do list is to make a new magnetized note pad to stick on the fridge, thereupon to jot down grocery & household needs and people’s phone numbers (so I can lose them faster).  This low-tech device is easy to build: simply take some Elmer’s glue to some of that flat, black, rubbery magnetic strip stuff you can get at Michael’s, JoaAnn’s, or Target; stick the stuff to the cardboard backing; let it dry, and voilà.

Glue a long, thin strip of the stuff to the flat edge of an old-fashioned yellow pencil, and most of the time you’ll have note paper right at hand. With any luck.

You can re-use the magneto-stuff quite a few times: just pull it off a used-up pad’s empty backing and glue it onto the next pad.

But after awhile it does get tired. Today when I tried to pull off an old strip, the damn thing fell apart. So the first item entered on the new pad was “Michael’s: Magnet strip stuff.”

Then I thought, though…wonder if by some chance i have any more of this stuff?

One nice thing about old age is that memory is replaced by wisdom.

Yes, in the drawer I found not only enough to replace the shredded strip, but the contents of a whole package of flat magnetic stuff. And when it’s new, it comes with fresh sticky backing on it, so you don’t even have to use up your Elmer’s!

Pretty handy, eh?

You can buy those small yellow pads — note that it’s only slightly longer than a partly-used-up pencil — at the Home of the Lifetime Supply — i.e., Costco. One package of the things will last you until they carry you off to the nursing home, where presumably they will not allow you to have pointy things like pencils. Until then, stick a memory pad on the fridge, and you’ll never forget anything again.

Assuming you remember to write down the things you’re not supposed to forget…

Dog Dunes

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You think I exaggerate, don’t you, with that turn of phrase? Really?

Yes. That is from one (1) twenty-pound dog. A mound of hair larger than Ruby’s head!

Is there any question why I seem to be developing an allergy to dog hair?

Well. Yes, there is. This being lovely uptown Arizona, great swaths of dust accumulate on the floors, too. I dust the floors every day… And here’s the accumulation of one (1) twenty-four-hour period:

Yup. As a practical matter, even more dust than dog hair has settled in the course of one day. And nothing is going on. The air is perfectly still: no breezes blowing, no monsoons wailing, nary a soul tracking in and out of the house.

Arizona. It’s where you come to find out what your allergies are.

😀

Small Economies

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So yesterday I became so caught up in various small tasks that FaM fell into a dark pit. Oh well.

Over the weekend, some Friends Who Bead met at WonderAccountant’s house. My project was to rebuild a necklace I’d made incorrectly. Then, with nothing much left to do, I laid out some beads for a small bracelet and got advice on how to make a turquoise necklace look better: lose the cheesey fake-Native American decorative bead. With all that left out on the coffee table, come y’day it was time to put it together or put it away.

That took half the afternoon.

In the process, I reflected on how cluttered my “jewelry” box is. It’s actually a crafts box with a jillion little compartments. When I got the thing, it served well for my vast collection of DIY valuables. Over time, though, the priceless gem collection has grown so that it’s hard to find what I want in the jumble.

This box is kept in the office closet, which is behind a solid-core door with a bust-your-drill deadbolt on it — because the only thing of any real value in the house is my computer. They can steal everything else, but leave the damn Mac alone.

We’re told that when burglars break in these days, what they’re looking for mostly is jewelry. A friend of mine had a lifetime collection stolen — all pieces with sentimental value, many of them picked up on her travels with good friends.

In my case, though, they can take the stuff and good luck to them trying to peddle it to a fence or a pawnbroker. It’s all straight from Michael’s, Bead World, or Fire Mountain. 😀 But…it cost some work to make it and I’d just as soon not have it stolen. Plus the office storage is a convenient place to keep the junk.

Contemplating the clutter, it occurred to me that instead of buying another craft box — providing two boxes to have to paw through instead of just one — there was a simpler, cheaper alternative: Hang the necklaces on nails in the closet shelf braces, leaving plenty of room for earrings and bracelets in the box’s compartments.

So I tapped a bunch of tacks in there…and lo! It worked. And I can see the things at a glance. Best of all, it’s FREE!

Nothing like a FREE hack to warm the cockles of the Frugalist’s heart. 😀

Speaking of the small delights in life, the pink Easter Lily cactus in front is blossoming untimely:

That’s kind of amazing. What possessed it to blossom in October, I do not know. Probably the unseasonable heat: even though the nights are longer & the days shorter, temps are in the 90s and predicted to go into the low 100s this week. So I guess the plant thinks sumer is y-cumen in. Oh well.

Gerardo finally showed up — I suspect because I complained to La Maya, who regards him as a friend. And he is a friend…just a busy one. He and his underlings are out there now, banging and blowering around. He was surprised to see the new panel in the watering system. Not as surprised as I was to see the $300 bill to get it fixed…but what, really, did he think I was going to do? Just let everything die, or drag hoses from plant to plant, every day, on a quarter acre of trees and landscaping?

Oh well. I asked him to repair the quarter-minus, which has been trashed since we repaired Richard’s ill-advised river of rock. Whether he’ll do it or not remains to be seen: he has a lot of other yards to cope with these days, and I’m sure he’ll be wanting to get to them as early in the day as possible.

The pool is blossoming, too: algae. The chlorine level is so high it turns the test tube deep orange, so apparently that is not the issue. Exactly what I’m supposed to do about that escapes me. Probably today I should schlep a bottle of the water up to Leslie’s and listen to the guy tell me what he always tells me: take out the chlorine tabs (done: a week or ten days ago) and wait until it goes down. But…it ain’t workin’.

I’d like not to have to drain & refill the pool this winter, partly because it’s still too hot to do so — heat damages the plaster — and partly because I’ve had one big financial hit after another and just want the pricey little jobs to STOP for awhile.

Moving on, today I’ve got to deposit 87 berjillion small checks gathered by Funny about Money. It might be more time-efficient just to make the 40-minute round trip to the credit union. Then continue on to the Costco — I could do with a couple bottles of wine, I guess.  But…the Walmart grocery store has the same type of mid-range wines, and it does not present itself as a vast bazaar of impulse buys. I really do need to keep the spending down for the rest of this month!

One of our clients, a journal, changed editors. We stayed to review copy, which is good. The editor just sent page proofs. We don’t usually read the journal’s page proofs…but there they are. I’m finding things that I know we changed, which have been stetted and which will make the thing look kind of stupid. But I guess you can take a horse to water… Seeing a lot of changes that needed to be made have been ignored (these are not whims, but grammatical and stylistic issues), I am not inclined to read this stuff character by character and word by tedious word again. Especially since it’s not part of our job: we’re not proofreaders; we’re copyeditors.

I am, I think, going to ask to have our business name removed from the masthead. We will look like idiots if this thing goes to press with every third edit overridden by someone who doesn’t know how publishing works.

Onward: Gerardo out, coffee made, breakfast under way.

How DO we survive?

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Ever have one of those blood-stopping moments that make you wonder how you got lucky? When you imagine that if there’s a god, She must be looking out after you?

Yesterday I was right here, flying low across Glendale on the way into town from the Westside, right at this time. Needed to reload the gas tank at the local Costco, which is on Bethany Home. At about 35th Avenue, I debated whether to go south on the 17 to Bethany Home, cutting maybe a minute and a half off the drive. Given my dislike of freeway driving, I decided it wasn’t worth it and went south on a surface street.

If I had entered the freeway at that moment, I could very well have ended up in the middle of whatever this was. Who knows what caused the woman’s vehicle to roll: maybe a tire blew out, maybe she swerved to avoid a fellow homicidal driver or debris on the road, maybe her attention wandered.

Amazingly, no other cars seem to have been caught up in this wreck. Four in the afternoon is pushing high rush hour here — freeways can be bumper-to-bumper at this time of day. And, it being Arizona, “bumper-to-bumper” does not mean “correspondingly slow speed.” Arizona drivers will go 60 or 65 mph right on the next guy’s tailpipe. We think that’s normal behavior.

But even if you weren’t in the wreck itself, can you imagine being anywhere near it? With five little kids in the car and the mother dead on the road?

Sometimes…you just have to wonder.

Lazy…

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I’m never what you’d call very ambitious…not anymore, anyhow. But lately it’s getting to be a tussle, just to get my rear into gear. Nothing: that is what I want to do. NOTHING.

Maybe it’s spring fever. Fall being Arizona’s second spring, after all.

Nevertheless I did manage to drag myself out of the sack and wash the car before the heat came up — which is fairly early. It’s almost 90 degrees right now, at 10:45 in the morning.

…wash me, Seymour!

My enthusiasm for washing the car, even though I know I can do a lot better job than the nearest surviving commercial car wash for about fifteen bucks less, has faded to nil. And really, poor Phryne has needed a bath for quite some time. She got black tarry gunk all over her when Our Honored City Parents finally elected to resurface the neighborhood streets. Layer atop layer of dust settles on her, as on all cars in the Phoenix area. When SDXB and I drove to Prescott, we ran into swarms of flying insects, so she was peppered with squashed bugs. And some moron decided to scrape a shopping cart all along her right flank, leaving some handsome slate-colored racing stripes.

Normally I would wait until it rains briskly,  park the car in the driveway for awhile, then pull it back into the garage and wipe it down. This has the dual advantages of a) avoiding a hose-drag, and b) not even racking up the cost of city water.

However, it hasn’t rained lately, at least not when I’ve felt inclined to get out in the stuff. And the car was beginning to look pretty disreputable.

The main ingredient of products billed as bug-and-tar remover, it develops, is elbow grease. Took exactly the same amount of vigorous scrubbing to lift the petrified bugs and the road tar with the chemical as without.

At any rate, the car is now radiantly clean and the 17 microfiber rags used for the car wash and yesterday’s house-cleaning have been run through the washer and tossed in the dryer.

The eight-inch-deep pile of paper marked “Attend to this NOW” has been dusted off and finally sifted through. What a LOT of trash. I hate, hate, HATE shuffling paper.

Downloading the PayPal, credit union, and credit-card statements direct into Excel without passing “Go” will eliminate at least some of the paper-pushing. There’s not much you can do about the mounds of paper Medicare, Medigap, and Social Security send, other than simply forget it. I cram all that stuff into files, which are now bursting.

How much of this debris, really, do I have to keep? Godlmighty, there are SIX legal-size file drawers in my office, full to overflowing. And that doesn’t count the chuckablock-full four-drawer cabinet in the garage!

Alas, trying to figure that out and then, once figured, shoveling out the mess represents Work, which I decidedly wish to avoid.

…some things, you don’t wanna know…

Next task: figure out (have you noticed HOW MUCH TIME is spent on FIGURING OUT???) how to measure out the granulated chlorine I bought in bulk from Leslie’s yesterday.

You know how Leslie’s does love to sell you untold zillions of dollars worth of chlorine tablets, supposedly to keep your pool sanitized & algae-free? Well…. It appears the things are unnecessary if you use granulated chlorine and know HOW to use it.

Just read through the lengthy, extremely fine-print instructions plastered on an 8-pound package of granular chlorine purchased from Our Beloved Leslie’s dealer. Planned to use it as I’ve learned to use the same stuff that comes in 1-pound plastic packets: dump it in about once a week, all the while floating a couple of (fast dissolving!) chlorine tablets around the drink.

Well. Comes the Revelation…

It turns out you can use this stuff not just for shock-treating but also for routine day-to-day chlorine maintenance. Purchased in bulk, it is MUCH cheaper than either the tablets or the “shock treatment” packets (which contain the same stuff).

Even at the extravagantly profit-seeking Leslie’s it’s cheaper, and even cheaper still at Amazon & Costco. I just paid about $3.75/lb at Leslie’s; Amazon has it for $3.30/lb. At Leslie’s, the one-pound handy-dandy packets are about $4.17 apiece. Apparently Costco no longer carries bulk granulated chlorine — at least not in the off-season.

How much less this would be than floating chlorine tabs escapes me — the math would be way over my fuzzy little head. But since one bucket of those things costs about a hundred bucks and you only have to throw in about 3 ounces of the granulated stuff a couple times a week, my guess is…a lot less.

So the Pool Task of the Day is multi-pronged:

1. Thoroughly wash out the measuring cup used for doling out chemicals into the pool. This supposedly holds 16 ounces (i.e., one pound), but those are fluid ounces, not granulated dry toxic chemical ounces.
2. Trot the kitchen scale outside and measure granulated dry toxic chlorine into said measuring cup until I can figure out how much one pound would really be. And how much 3 ounces really are.
3. Sweep the pool and clean out the various pots, a much-overdue job.
4. Shock-treat the pool at dusk, so as to beat back the re-nascent mustard algae.

Because daytime temps have been around 100° for the past week or so and really have never dropped out of the 90s since the “end” of the summer, the water may be warm enough for a swim today. If so, it will be a brisk swim, because the nights have been nice and cool — and pool water cools quickly when the night-time temps drop. But we shall see.

I’ve been too lazy to experiment with that, too.

Next: fart with state university paperwork for a client, so I can get paid.

Then: fart with concocting a statement for another client, so I can get paid.

After that: write.

If there is an after that.