Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Never a Dull Moment…

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SO…here I was, about to write a complacent little post about how NICE is it that I’m getting a little respite from the grinding workload this summer and how a friend is coming over and we’re going to go window shopping at the long-ignored “fashion square” upon which we ruminated yesterday, and ahhhhh isn’t everything beer and skittles…

Never fails, does it?

Our Fair City, in all its City Parents’ bat-brained wisdom, evades going so far as to fix worn-out streets by patching them instead of resurfacing them. They send crews around about once every 10 to 15 years to fill and spray oil over the cracks in your neighborhood’s streets. This enhances the Look of Blight so fashionable in our town and delays having to do the job right for another while.

Week or so ago, they threw flyers on our driveways (we call those “Burglars Enter Here!” notices) informing us that we were to keep our cars off the roadway, because if they came across a vehicle parked at the curb when they arrive to fill in the cracks, they will have the vehicle towed.

I’m sitting here, then, about to start scribbling today’s post, when the dogs go FREAKING BATSH!T.

The tarring crews are out in front, and they are flummoxed. Neighbor catty-corner across the street, a very beloved and nice neighbor, has left an SUV parked out in front of his house. The workmen are obviously trying to get a rise out of the house’s occupants. Some of the men are taking the opportunity to loaf, to inspect the car, and generally to scurry around aimlessly. No answer: Joel & Dita presumably are…you know…at work.

I call WonderAccountant, whose house/office is next door to them. She hadn’t gotten the message that the City intended to impound vehicles left parked on the street, but in any event, the car is not Joel’s. It belongs to a friend of theirs who’s trying to sell it. Friend lives in a gated compound and is not allowed to leave it out for potential buyers to see. Not that they could get in through the gate anyway. So Joel & Dita are letting the guy sell it from our street instead of his.

W.A. texts Joel. Joel contacts Dita. Dita is home but like all women around here, wisely not answering the door to strangers; she is going to run out and move the car.

Ah, the drama. Ah, the operatic flights of fancy!

Respite…yeah, OK…what was that about? Oh yes…

The nasty cough that was the only symptom (except for a brief 102.5° fever) of the late great homicidal cold is still hanging on. FOUR MONTHS LATER.

After 12 weeks of choking and gasping, accompanied by some unprintably disgusting effects, I finally gave up and visited Young Dr. Kildare. The reason I persist in seeing this man, despite his having moved his practice to a part of town where you have to dodge bullets to get from the parking lot to the door, is that his signal quality is common sense.

You don’t often find that in a doctor.

So I tell him I’ve been to WonderAccountant’s lung doc, who says it’s not asthma and who says the X-ray he ordered came back “clear.” YDK whips out his stethoscope and listens to everything you can listen to and says he can’t hear anything in the chest, either.

I remark that the evil Other Symptoms sound a lot like the cough you can get with GERD. He being a GERD veteran himself, remarks that it could be.

He suggests that I go back on the omeprazole for two weeks. If it helps, we’ll know it’s the GERD and a few more weeks of omeprazole should calm it back down. If it doesn’t help, then we’ll know it’s not GERD and then we’ll have to figure out what to do next.

Two long weeks later… Nothing. The omeprazole plus liberal doses of ranitidine have effectively zero effect.

Well, not quite zero. It’s gotten a tiny bit better, but not so much as you’d notice.

This means I really should go over to my “official” GP at the Mayo. But I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna because those folks at the Mayo are test-happy. Extravagantly test-happy. They are going to subject me to hour after hour of tests — which will entail endless drives to the far side of Scottsdale. And one of the tests they’d like to foist on me involves shoving a camera down my throat. I do not want a camera shoved down my throat. Enough medico-miseries are ENOUGH, already.

So I think…hmmmm…. So it’s probably not GERD. It’s not lung cancer (though it surely could be esophageal cancer but it’s probably not). It’s not Valley fever. It’s not pneumonia. What can we conclude from this?

a) If it’s not esophageal cancer, it’s likely not life-threatening; and
b) It probably has something to do with the Cold/Cough from Hell.

I’m not swallowing any more of the carefully husbanded stash of codeine cough medicine, which I think is contraindicated anyway because the reason I’m coughing so hideously is all the gunk that’s coming up. But I do have some Mucinex left over, purchased when I came down with this thing. It didn’t do a whit of good then. But…it functions to make you cough stuff out. What if the problem is that this hideously thick, gummy stuff is stuck in there and needs to be expelled? The worst that could happen is the Mucinex could kill me, and at this point, that doesn’t sound like an altogether bad thing.

So I try the stuff. And amazingly…next morning, the cough is about 90% better! It’s still there, but it’s not about to drown me, nor am I gasping for air.

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

So that’s relief number 1.

Relief number 2 will be engineering a chance to visit with my friend for several hours today. And even to go into a very fancy, very air-conditioned mall and view the way the One-Percenters live. Always an amusing prospect.

This relief is attenuated by the facts that…

a) A new version of Honored Clients’ 33-page (typeset!) tome on matters economic arrived yesterday, with a request to please turn it around in three days; and
b) The second set of The Complete Writer‘s page proofs are ready at the printer’s shop, and my Honored Spy there thinks the cover is still not working — suggests redoing it from scratch.

Welp, I got through 12 pages of the Chinese economic study yesterday, plus the headnotes of the 8 single-spaced pages of 11-point tables. So if I can get through six pages today and six pages tomorrow — not at all unreasonable — that may leave time to proofread tomorrow afternoon, or at least will make me only one day late.

Meanwhile, I have a presentation on Saturday and really wanted to have the book in hand to sell to the audience. This means those proofs have to be picked up today!!!!!!!!

It also pretty well guarantees I will not finish the Chinese paper tomorrow, because it will take a good half a day to rebuild the goddamn cover, and because I’m still not finished preparing the presentation. And the interior copy will need to be double-checked to be sure the three or four dozen changes came across OK.

So I propose to suggest that Dear Friend, who planned to drive today, leave her car in my garage and let me drive, thereby consuming my gasoline for the considerable drive to the printer’s shop.

If she agrees to this exploit, it will be an experience for her, since the printer is located in a part of town where…shall we say…nice girls do not go. It’s due south of the airport, in one of the most desperate slums in the Southwest.

Mall as Dinosaur

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Used to be you couldn’t find a shaded place to park at Scottsdale Fashion Square for love nor money. Especially  not on a weekend.

Yesterday morning I had to drive to darkest Old Town Scottsdale to visit the Hair Stylist from Heaven. He’s talking about moving to Prescott, where he and his sister own a house that they trade off using as a weekend retreat. If Shane moves to Prescott, I am goin’, too.

Drove past Fashion Square on the way to Shane’s place. It’s one of the few malls around there that’s still going strong. There are probably three, one of them a sprawling open-faced thing supposedly modeled on a small-town Main Street, with expensive apartments upstairs over the stores.

Y’know…I haven’t been in that place — Scottsdale Fashion Square — in years. I used to go there all the time, not necessarily to buy things but just to walk around. Really didn’t buy much — sometimes I’d buy nothing. But it was pleasant to just schmooze around in the stores, see what’s stylish and what’s on sale.

Don’t know when I stopped, precisely. Probably when I lost my job. When you don’t have a regular cash flow — more than Social Security provides — you don’t go into stores. These days I buy most of my clothes at Costco and a couple of small boutiques, and all my shoes at a boutique in Tempe. Yard and household items: Target or Home Depot. Otherwise: Amazon.

The boutiquey places aren’t cheap. But on the other hand, I don’t shop there much. They’re not places you go to window-shop; they’re places you go to buy specific items.

On the way home, I missed my turn and had to cut through the parking lot to get back to 68th Street. There was hardly anybody there. I could’ve parked right outside the door of any of the tony department stores, or had no problem getting a close-in spot in the shade structures. Admittedly, it was a 118-degree day. But…it didn’t use to be that way.

Wonder how much longer that place will survive? The middle-class shopping malls around here — Paradise Valley Mall, Metrocenter, Christown, Fiesta Mall — are decrepit wrecks. None of them are places you would go to walk around for the fun of it. Some are dangerous. One is being converted into a medical center.

On the other hand, Scottsdale Fashion Square is and always was in a different class  from those has-beens. although it had (still has) a Dillard’s and a few other more or less normal stores, it’s also got a Nordstrom’s and a Nieman-Marcus and an Armani store and a Gucci store and naturally a Prada store and a Tiffany’s and a place to buy your Ferragamos… Not likely to go away soon. I guess.

 

Red-Hot or Nailed Down…

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Finally it dawns on me what happened to the two shiny brass hose nozzles that disappeared out of the flowerpot where I store them in the back yard. About the only thing that could have happened: the pool guy must have taken them when he was using the hose to clean out the filter.

Gerardo hasn’t been here for two months…and besides, he’s not given to stealing. Even though I can’t be depended upon to remember where I last set my toothbrush down, I’m pretty sure I didn’t put them “away” in some weird place because there would be no reason to do so. And I’ve searched every weird spot on the property for them.

These  little gadgets are not easy to find around here. So when I spotted a boxful of them on a Home Depot shelf, I grabbed three of them. One was on the hose. The other two are now gone. And since the things are just the ticket for the kind of job he does, I figure when he spotted them, he just picked them up and dropped them in a pocket.

He also broke my hose timer, the jerk.

What IS it with workmen and hose timers? These cheesey little things are really nothing more than a kitchen timer on a valve…how hard IS it to turn a kitchen timer to 15 minutes? Every time one of those guys spots one of the things, he gets confused. And I forgot to turn it on for him…one too easily forgets how stupid other human beings are.

Given the creature we’ve elected as president, it’s hard to grasp how one could forget such a thing: clearly we’re a nation of dolts. But there it is. Busted timer, stolen nozzles.

Oh well. Like my father used to say: if it ain’t red-hot or bolted down, someone will steal it.

Warm Enough for Ya?

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 Temps are supposed to hit 120° today. We’ll believe that when we see it. But it probably will get fairly warm. Just now it’s almost 9:30 and the backyard thermometer reads 100 degrees, not especially out of the ordinary for this time of year.

A light skiff of high clouds has moved in, and that will cut some of the supposed heat. Monsoon dust on the New Mexico border killed six people yesterday evening; as you can see from the video, some serious clouds were in the offing. If that moisture moves this far west, it will lower temps some, even if it doesn’t come all the way into the Valley.

The pool is spotlessly clean — the scheme to brush it down at least once a day is working. Last night I shock-treated it (part of the scheme is to do the weekly shock-treat that you’re supposed to do and that I’ve managed to avoid for the past several years…) and so this morning backwashed, a PITA that I could do without. Very many more of these weekly backwashes and the filter will have to be taken apart and cleaned again, to the tune of another $125 or $150.

Supposedly you need to clean a pool filter only about once or twice a year. I’ve found that to be hogwash (heh… backwash? back-hogwash?): every time I turn around I have to pay someone to come disassemble the thing, haul the parts into the alley, scrub it out, haul the parts back in, and reassemble it.

Pretty soon I’ll need to replace that old thing, and I’m thinking about making a retrograde move: replace the fancy DE filter with a sand filter. DE does a better job on a pool the size of the one in this yard. However, a sand filter does not need to be cleaned on a regular basis. You backwash and you only backwash. After a number of years, you have somebody come and dump the sand into the alley, then replace the sand…but it’s years, not months or weeks.

The pool water would be a little cloudy — maybe — with a sand filter. But the pool has to be replastered…very soon…and if I were to get a darker color plaster or Pebble-Tek — the height of style — it wouldn’t be noticeable. If I were very clever, I might figure out a way to backwash onto the trees without excavating the landscaping, thereby saving a little on the water bills and no longer having to drag the hose out into the alley.

Leaving the gate open while I’m fiddling with the pool gives me the heebie-jeebies, given the “neighbors” who inhabit the alleys. The dogs have to be locked up during the backwash procedure; otherwise Ruby will take off for Yuma. Wouldn’t make much difference anyway: they’re not big enough to do much more than love the meth-head to death.

Who knows? Maybe that’s what meth-heads need.

Heh! The Corgi Drug Cure. Good, very good.

One-twenty in the shade or no, at this time of year I have to cover up the rose bushes. Otherwise they fry. This does not make for high aesthetics in the garden architecture department.

 

Hotter than a two-dollar cookstove…

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With inflation, make that a three-dollar cookstove. Wow!

That was my father’s saying. Think it derives from “Hotter than a two-dollar pistol,” though the “sayin'” waayyy predates George Jones. 😀

’Tis about 98 here now — around 7 p.m. But I’d guess the thermometer went north of 105 sometime today.

 The Midwesterner immigrants have a hard time with this. They just don’t get it. That’s why, I expect, so many of them migrate back to Michigan along about the end of March. Some of them, though, foolishly take up residence here.

One of them, the poor dolt, tossed a hair spray can into a black plastic garbage bin, a bin that spent its days a-sittin’ in the full sun. Bet you can picture the result, can’tcha?

Yes. The can exploded, as spray cans left in an oven are wont to do. It blasted a hole in the trash bin’s lid and launched itself toward orbit.

😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

Okay, okay, it’s not funny.

Heeeeee!

Yes, yes it is.

The pool is holding its own against the Invasion of the Algae King. I’ve been sweeping it down twice a day, which isn’t as annoying as it sounds because it creates an excuse to jump into the drink. And it provides some mild exercise, which — believe me! — is hard to force on oneself in an Arizona summer.

Otherwise, I’ve spent most of the day — after a frustrating junket to Costco and Target around noontime — dealing with the font corruption fiasco brought on by the endlessly annoying Mac OS upgrade. Having finally concluded that the only solution would be to reformat any books in the production process with a font resident in Mac OS 10, I spent most of what passes for my productive time rebuilding the book in progress in Big Caslon 11 pts.

Like the endless pool cleaning, this, too, is easier than it sounds. Fortunately the entire document is formatted in Word “styles.” The beauty of this is that when you reformat any part of one type of copy, you reformat it all. Change one paragraph of body copy from Alegreya 11 pt roman to Big Caslon, and every graf that is not a first paragraph, not hanging indent, not a footnote, not indented block, not a cutline, not a running header or footer and PRESTO CHANGEO all the body copy changes to Big Caslon 11 points.

Big Caslon is so close in size and kerning to Alegreya that the entire book came over without changing the pagination! The author’s note appears, yea verily, on page 432, same as it did in Alegreya. The index: p. 423; opening page of the last chapter, p. 407.

Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

The heads and subheads were less accommodating. Those required some screwing around. But the serious screwing around was elicited by Big Caslon’s answer to boldface. For reasons incomprehensible, this font’s boldface is weirdly airy: the characters are spread out like somebody dropped the letters on the floor and they scattered across the tile. To fix: one, two, three, four, five, six seven, eight, NINE keystrokes for every goddamn word or passage set in boldface!!!!!!!

And since I used B.F. for all sorts of little sub-sub-subfuckingheads and stylistic cutenesses, that was a LOT of goddamn words and passages. So to my profound undelight, I spent most of the day highlighting and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and… Tomorrow I’ll have to go over the entire damn thing and proof it carefully.

But I did find two typos…a friend of mine, the dean of scholarly editing, once remarked on the fact that every time you read a book, you find something else wrong with it.

Oh well.

At any rate, I have more news but just now am too tired to relate it. So..tomorrow.

Watch this space!

Header image of the day: Depositphotos, © tomwang.jpg

Lazy as an old hound…

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…on a summer afternoon!

Okay, I admit to it: spending WAY too much time loafing.

The weather’s gorgeous. The laundry’s laundered, the groceries are shopped, the house is clean, and I. do. not. feel. like. doing. ANYTHING. creative or constructive! I did manage to backwash the pool today and ascertain that once again I need to call the pool guys to come clean out the DE filter. Again. I should’ve gone into the pool bidness.

Had to get up and go away from the computer to get anything done at all today. With the exception of Mr. Comey, reading about the doings in Washington is like watching the antics in a snake pit: at once hypnotically fascinating and revolting. I’m finding it so difficult to keep from flipping over to the news sources to stare in horror at the goings-on that I simply can’t get any work done unless I’m a long way from this contraption.

But by sitting down at a table with a pen in hand, I did manage (somehow) to draft four or five pages, once transcribed to type.

It’ll be interesting to see if this story turns into anything. Once again — as usual — my mood tends to straddle the line between literary and genre fiction. It’s too tacky to be literary, and too intellectual to make good thriller, sci-fi, or romance. What can I say?

I’ve signed up for a MOOC through the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. It starts tomorrow…that should be an amusing way to pass the summer. As voltage goes, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s pretty…low-tension. However, it’s free: you get what you pay for, I imagine. It’ll be interesting to see what comes of it.

Nothing, I expect, of value for the present imagined world. But nothing ventured…

Image: DepositPhotos, © vitalytitov