Idle essays

Taking a few minutes to de-frazzle before flying out the door.

I have to drive down to my son’s house to check on the dog — really, like right now — but I’ve been racing around since 5:30 this morning and must decompress before getting on the road.

Decided I’d better shovel out the house today, so after cleaning the pool and walking the dogs and running three loads of laundry we moved on to picking up the mountains of litter that collect like snowdrifts in the Funny Farm. In addition to developing the bad habit of sitting in front of the Internet all day long, I’ve also been cultivating my natural tendency to drop stuff wherever I happen to be at any given time.

Result: every table top, every countertop, every desk, every floor, every appliance is festooned with trash, junk, and piles of paper. It’s taken two hours to pick this place up, and now I have a four-inch-high stack of paperwork that has to be entered into Excel spreadsheets (apparently all the bills got paid, though, mirabilis!).

Meanwhile, in the course of babysitting the dog I see my son has inherited these genetic tendencies, in spades. Though he does pick up (most of the time…), the floors are ankle-deep in dog hair.

So I’m taking an old vacuum cleaner that resides in the garage down to his place, the better to gag it with wads of white dog hair. I’m sure not using my good one, and his weighs about eight tons. What is it about men that they think the best way to clean a house (repair a gadget, get from Point A to Point B, run a country) is the hardest way???

It’s been so long since I used the old Shark, I could NOT for the life of me remember how to get it apart to dump out the dust and dog hair that had accrued in its collector thingie. After much wrestling around, I finally spotted the right button. Annoying.

Even more annoying is that damn car. It’s a good-sized vehicle, in theory…but the back end behind the annoying stupidly designed seats isn’t large enough to hold a lightweight Shark vacuum cleaner. Holy sh!t. So I had to take everything out of the vehicle and perform a feat of origami to load the damn vacuum cleaner.

The seats have to remain up and the pillows I stuffed in there to keep my own dogs from breaking their necks or their legs or both have to be removed and stashed in the garage because my son has to ride in the back with his neurotic dog to keep the animal from having another panic-induced stroke. This, every time we have to schlep the dog to the vet. Which, as you can imagine, is frequently.

Well, it’s almost 10 a.m. If I’m gonna do this chore, I’d better get going. If he catches me cleaning his house, he won’t like it.

By golly, it was 80 degrees out here on the back porch come dawn this morning. At 9 a.m., it’s no warmer! And here comes Ruby, bearing a mummified orange. Cassie has taught her the delights of chewing up the things…and there she goes, carrying it to the Nest in the back bathroom.

Apparently quite a monsoon blew through during the night: friends who were leaving for vacation last night were marooned at the airport. But as usual, nothing much was up here except for some dust. No sign of any significant rain in our parts. {chortle!} We live in the desert part of the desert. Wonderful, fat-looking gray and blue-gray clouds still shade the desert floor, and for the first time in three months one can sit in one’s yard to play with one’s computer.

And that’s about the extent of what I’d like to do today.

I really need to make a Costco run but don’t see how that’s going to happen this week. Normally Wednesday is the best day: smallest crowds. Monday is not so good, because they tend to run out of stock over the weekend. They restock Monday afternoon, meaning pickings are relatively slim on the first day of the workweek. Plus the employees tend to be a little crabby on Monday.

The rest of the week looks even less promising, though: every day is filled up with one appointment or activity after another. Doctor’s appointment, dentist’s appointment, vet’s appointment: all of them scheduled smack in the middle of the time one would usually use for midweek errand-running.

Some of this stuff I could probably buy at Safeway, but a few Costco-specific things are running low. And, come to think of it, I need gas if I’m going to have to drive from pillar to post every day for the rest of this week and out to the Indian Reservation for this week’s bidness networking group meeting.

Hm. The vet appointment isn’t until 2 p.m. tomorrow. That would leave time for a Costco run in the morning, assuming I fly low, get back here early enough to pile the perishables in the fridge and freezer in time to shoot back out the door at 1:00. That would maybe be preferable to surfacing at the store and finding them low on produce and meat. I’m pretty picky…and when I’m paying that much for a lifetime supply of whatever, I want some choice in the matter.

Wednesday: out of the question. Doctor’s appointment in the morning, way to Hell and gone in Maryvale (a 45-minute drive each way). Then as soon as I get home, it’s off to meet a friend and go in search of some upholstery fabric.

She has a lovely dining room set, vintage Ethan Allen from the 1940s or 50s, which she found some years ago at a thrift store in Sun City. It still has the original, pretty damn handsome seat covers, but they’re wearing thin and need to be re-upholstered. So we’re going in search of upholstery fabric.

These days, that’s easier said than done. One of the many “joys” of surviving into the early 21st century is finding that most fabric stores have shut down. The Fabric World nearest to us closed years ago — and it didn’t carry much upholstery material, anyway. There’s an expensive store out in Scottsdale — you have to take out a bank loan to recover your favorite easy chair with stuff from that place. But up Cave Creek Road there’s a dingy but highly serviceable joint called Fabric Depot. Shopping there is a bit of a project. Though staff is anxious to help and will climb halfway to the stratosphere to get down whatever suits your whim, the stock is indeed arranged almost to the warehouse-high ceiling. So it takes some doing to find what you want, and then you have to get ahold of it.

I think she might be able to take the chairs to Ethan Allen and get them recovered there…but Ethan Allen being what it is, that could be outside the budget.

The shop in Sun City simply defies belief. It looks like an ordinary grungy thrift store. But what’s happening is, when some out-of-stater’s parents croak over in Sun City or have to go into a nursing home, the kids don’t want to be bothered with coming to Arizona and shoveling out the house, so they’ll just consign everything to these places — there’s a whole strip mall full of them. NG (that would be SDXB’s New Girlfriend) got a Stickley dining room set there!!!!!!! For a handful of peanuts.

Amazingly, she didn’t know what Stickley is…I had to explain it to her. Neither, apparently, did the former owners’ kids. Ohhh well: their loss, NG’s gain.

So late last night I finished drafting the current index and shipped it off for the author to review. That is now off my desk, and I am reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned.

The book is a collection of testimonios — short memoirs, as it were — by second-generation Mexican Americans who climbed out of the agricultural fields of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys to go on to universities, often acquiring graduate degrees and law degrees. Their stories are extremely interesting…sometimes jaw-dropping, come to think of it. The book should come out in another few weeks or a couple of months. I’ll let you know when it appears — it’s so worth reading!

Because the contributions are engagingly written and look like informal reflections, I thought this index would be a piece of cake — something I could toss off in a couple of days or so.

Not so much. It turns out that despite the highly readable style, the content is really very dense: ended up with fourteen single-spaced pages of index entries! So…that took a minute or two to assemble…

Along the way, I discovered that this new MacBook, running under Sierra, will in fact run Apple’s “dictation” program. The old one would not; it would read aloud, but it would not take dictation. So…let’s try that:

Along the way, I discovered that this new MacBook, running under Seo, Will in fact run apples “dictation program” the old one would not; it would read aloud, but it would not take dictation. So… Let’s try that:

Heeeee! It ain’t perfect… Sierra becomes “Seo” (that could be my pronunciation), and the future tense of be is turned into some guy’s name. In playing with it, I learned that it recognizes a lot of Spanish words…but not all of them. Mocorito, for example, comes across as Margarita. 😀

I wonder what happens if you spell out “apples” with punctuation…  E a PPLE’s

ooops! That didn’t work!!  No spell, just punctuation:  apple’s

Chortle! Well, it’s getting there. Give it a few more years.

What I can’t tell is whether there’s a way to teach the dictation function new words and spellings. Apparently not, at least as of about 2015. It’s not something that entertains me SO much that I’m gonna run out and buy Dragon. But it is kind of handy.

Last night when I was too pooped to type a multisyllabic word correctly, I highlighted the typo-ridden term and read it into the dictation program…and voilà! Out it came, to perfection!

What really is handy, though, is using the read-aloud function for proofreading. Along about 9:00 last night, I hesitated to launch it to proof the almost-finished index copy. But I strongly desired to be finished, and I was getting tired…as in too tired to notice small errors. “Alex,” the system’s selected “voice,” chugged right through the damn thing, pronouncing everything to perfection, so that by following along I was able to pick up a lot of typos and oddities.

The other day I realized that, at some point along the line, Stephen Hawking was using “Alex” as his electronic voice. He has good taste: Alex is the only one of that bunch whose diction is consistently pleasing.

It’s almost 11 in the morning and I have done exactly zero work, unless you call cleaning the pool “work.” The pool has now fully recovered from its algae infestation. While I’ve been distracted with the indexing project, I’ve shamelessly neglected the hole in the backyard full of water — days have gone by with zero attention. It has rained. Wind has blown. Algae-feeding sunlight has streamed down. The pile of floating chlorine tablets has dissolved away to nothing. The water is bathwater-warm. Yet this morning there was not a bit of moss clinging to the walls!

So: thank heaven for small favors.

At 7:00 p.m., the thermometer on the back porch reads 110 degrees…and it’s overcast.

Matter of fact, the reason it’s still 110 probably is the cloud cover: clouds hold heat on the surface. Otherwise it would dissipate upward through the atmosphere after the sun goes down.

Interestingly, some years ago, when I was writing for Arizona Highways, I came across a 19th-century diary written by a woman who, with her husband, settled in the bottom of Aravaipa Canyon, where they had a little dirt farm. You would think that if one of those pioneers could come back today and tell us what life was like under such circumstances, she’d tell us it was seven kinds of Hell.

But no. If you believe what she told her diary (and why wouldn’t you?), they loved their life out there in the middle of nowhere. It was one big, nonstop adventure for them in a strange new world, as bizarre as the surface of Mars would be to us.

At one point she reported with awe that a midsummer day had been amazingly hot: 101 degrees in the shade!

Oh, horrors! Today we’d think that was a balmy day. Here in the Time of Heat Bubbles and Global Warming, 110 in the shade is par for the course. It’s a pretty normal day in a Phoenix summer.

I can remember when 110 was an unusually hot day, myself. When I moved here, back in the dark ages of 19-and-aught-62, the hottest part of the summer was typically around 103 to 105. A 110-degree day was extremely hot.

But of course, you and I know there’s no such thing as climate warming. Cause science is fake. All fake.

 😉

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