Idle essays

Friday…again! How does that happen? I’d swear yesterday was last Saturday.

LOL! It really is true that the older you get, the faster time goes by. Presumably that’s because you have less and less of it available. All told.

Finished another half-dozen chapters of a client’s novel this a.m. Bid on another Chinese scholarly work but, not having heard back, assume my price was too high. Oh well…that frees up some time to…oh…breathe.

Or run down to the gas station. Used up the few dollars’ worth of QT gas I bought when I dodged the poor crazy guy at the Costco gas pumps ten days ago, so decided to make another run down there. No pests or freaks in evidence this time.

Price was five cents a gallon under QT’s. I pumped about 12 gallons, for a gigantic saving of 60 cents… This again raises the question, Why am I paying to shop at Costco?

With fuel prices this low, there’s not a lot of difference between retailers. And five cents a gallon doesn’t pay for the time involved in  driving down there, since there’s a QT right around the corner from the ’hood. I begin to wonder if it would be practical to drop my membership and pay half my son’s, so as to sponge on his to buy the few things I really do need or want to get there. This would cut both our membership bills in half, in exchange for a minor once-a-month inconvenience.

Really, I’m amazed at how little interest I feel in shopping at Costco, given that before the Citigroup disruption it was my mainstay. Meh!

Gerardo repaired the irrigation leak, to the tune of $180. When his men dug up the pipe, they found that Richard’s guys apparently had not applied adhesive to the threading on the PVC pipe’s connection to the equipment in the front-yard box. Gerardo thinks it had been leaking for a long time.

Ducky. Since that spot is right next to the house’s foundation, I do hope he’s wrong. But find, alas, that Gerardo is rarely wrong.

The weather is beginning to cool. We had a beautiful morning, after a brief sprinkle and distant thunder. The clouds cleared off. With the dogs sleeping through the heat of the day, I snuck into the backyard and left them trapped inside the house, so I could take a plunge in the pool without being barked into submission.

Herding dogs do not like it when their sheep humans jump in the drink.

They assume, of course, that you’re not too bright and so no doubt fell in, and they’re convinced you’re going to drown yourself. Cassie, who has enough sense not to jump in the pool, used to race back and forth trying to bark me out of the pool. When the devil-may-care Ruby came along, I had to build a little fence to keep her from tumbling into the drink. She, having taking over barking duties from the old lady, stands by the gate and yells at me from the minute I get in to the minute I climb out.

This does nothing to enhance one’s enjoyment of one’s swimming pool. So…it was pleasant to have tricked them this afternoon.

And now, speaking of tricked, the would-be next client has replied to my email without answering any of my questions. I think we have a language issue here.

😀

And so, away…

What a beautiful morning. About 80 when the dogs turned me out of the sack, and it’s still lovely and cool outside.

Arizona has two springs: one about March & April and another come September. Plants are reviving and springing back into bloom already, in anticipation of the second spring. We’ll have one or two more blasts of heat, and then it will be gorgeous for the rest of the fall and winter.

The Texas sage by the pool is in an ecstasy. So are the wild honeybees that feed on it.

This is the plant that used to arch over the water, which I love because when the helicopter bastards fly over while I’m in the pool, I can swim in underneath it so they can’t eyeball me. One of the workmen decided NOTHING would do but what it had to be cut back, though, so he hacked off the sprays that bent over the edge and sometimes dipped into the water.

Men. You simply can NOT make them listen to the female voice.

Oh well. It’ll grow back. It still makes a little bit of a grotto: very beautiful from the deep end.

Meanwhile, the orange-variety of yellowbell (I forget what the thing is called) is also blooming, which is kind of a surprise.

So it goes.

Two large projects came in the door yesterday — as usual, it never rains but it pours. One is due in seven days — 100 pages of academic Chinglish, fortunately on a pretty interesting topic. So there won’t be much time for blogging.

Forget me not!

 

Faster than a speeding baby, this will have to be: forgot I had a dentist’s appointment at 10 a.m., which is going to distort all my plans to spend the whole day cooking and shopping and cooking. And then cooking some more.

So I got the Breville model after all, since reviews are marginally better and I’d rather do business with Williams-Sonoma, as huge mega-corps go, than with Macy’s, where the hired help can’t pull themselves away from their personal conversations with their friends to condescend to wait on the (rare!) customer.

It’s much smaller than I expected, though it certainly will hold a small baking pan and one or two bread pans. Most bakeable things, though, can go in the grill, so that comes under the heading of “Nonproblem.”

Interestingly, though, it’s also much lighter than I expected! It doesn’t weigh anything like the slow-cooker, for example. That means there’s really no reason to park it in the garage and leave it there. I think it will camp out in the garage when it’s not in use, but when I need it, I’ll set it on the kitchen counter, whereinat…

a) it will have tile underneath it, reducing the fire hazard factor;
b) there’s already a smoke alarm nearby, so I won’t have to install a new one;
c) I can keep an eye on it at all times; and
d) the fire extinguisher in the kitchen is newer and fresher than the one in the garage.

Today: Prepare the eggplant lasagne; dry the remaining eggplant (which is salted and sweating as we scribble and chopped in chunks for ratatouille), package it, and stash it in the fridge. RUN to the dentist, remembering to drag an empty propane tank with me. Fly away from the dentist; stop by Sprouts to pick up another couple of onions and some zucch’s to complete provisioning for the ratatouille. Race up to the U-Haul to refill the spare propane tank. Put two large pans of eggplant lasagne to bake in the grill. Start cooking the ratatouille. If it’ll fit, put ratatouille in the new countertop oven. If not, finish it in the grill whenever the lasagne is cooked. Cool the lasagne; cut it into meal-sized chunks and freeze. Save some of it for dinner and to feed my son when he gets in from Colorado tomorrow night.

Use remaining FREAKING BUSHEL of tiny sweet peppers to make an improvised cream of sweet pepper soup. I think this stuff is going to defy belief in the deliciousness department. At least…I hope so. 🙂

Slice and pickle some of the cukes. Use remaining cukes to prepare a lifetime supply of xergis (cold cucumber soup — unbelievably good to eat and a real treat in this weather).

Review and comment upon prospective client’s copy.

Feed dogs. Wring dogs out. Fall into the sack.

And so…up, up, and AWAYYYY!

Yeah. The back porch is a lake. 🙂

Lake Patio, we call it.

It’s high rush hour. The I-17 is closed in both directions. Water is still pouring out of the sky.

As the clouds gathered — they looked like nuclear bomb mushrooms along about 1:30 in the afternoon — and later in the day the sky darkened, for a few minutes I thought we might be looking at a potential tornado.

But no. I think this is just a routine freshet.

So far, we haven’t lost power. That’s nice, but the world wouldn’t end: exterior temp has dropped to a highly tolerable 80 degrees.

The main issue is the toilette facilities for the dogs. Ruby tried to go out the doggy door and found herself up to her little hocks in water.

The side yard’s not flooded, but whether they’ll go out there remains to be seen. Dogs, like humans, are hopeless creatures of habit.

My poor son had to drive home in this — assuming he didn’t have the sense or the inclination to stay at the office till the storm passed. If he left even a few minutes early, he wouldn’t have realized the storm cell was this far north and west: by 5 p.m. the local Play-Nooz was showing it in the east and east-central part of the city.

First day of art class today! Personally, I didn’t do well: not feeling very well. Haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks.

Last night I reluctantly dropped a half a Benadryl. The stuff forces me to sleep, but I hate it. Knocks me for a loop. Even after just a half-pill, it takes most of the morning to shake off the fog.

So by 9:30, when the four classmates met the instructor, I was still in a daze, nonfunctional.

However, an allergy pill is probably in order. So much crud has been floating and blowing in the air, my throat’s as sore as if I had a cold!

These summer storms, like the summer temperatures, have changed over the years as climate overall has changed. It used to be that starting around mid-July, we’d get short, spectacular rainstorms around four o’clock in the afternoon. These beautiful events — which really were gorgeous things, replete with wild lightning shows and 180-degree rainbows — would drop the ambient temperatures by 20 degrees: from the low 100s to about 80.

Now ambient temps are more like 110 to 120. The storms don’t come. It’s freaking August, for godsake, and this is the first real “monsoon” storm we’ve had here in the rain shadow of the North Mountains.

When they do finally show up, they’re fewer and far more violent. It’s not unreasonable to brace for a tornado, even though (thank God…so far) they’re nothing like the twisters that blow up in the South and the Plains states. Nevertheless, these are storms that kill the unwary and the stupid. And they don’t usually cut the heat that much.

We are, in a word, screwed.

Hm. I think I’ve said that before.