Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

WHY does it take old people so LONG to get out of the house?

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Have you noticed that, as a phenomenon — those of you who are no longer young pups? It seems to take for-freaking-EVER to get out the door, whether it’s in the morning for an early meeting or for a mid-day or evening excursion. And it’s crazy-making.

No doubt it would be crazy-making for a young adult companion, too, if I had one around. Can you remember waiting for your mother or grandmother to make a last-minute run to the toilet, whether she needed to go or not, because God Forfend that she should have to use a public loo? We would be running right on time and just as I was grabbing the doorknob to usher her out the door, she’d make an about-face and head for the back of the house.  😀

Well, I have no fear of public bathrooms, but that notwithstanding, it seems like I never can get out the door on time. And I find myself wondering why…what am I doing differently now that I didn’t do when I was a kid?

When I was TA-ing my way through graduate school, the university invariably gave me 7:40 classes, every goddamn morning. At the outset, we lived an hour away from campus; later we moved downtown, shortening the commute to a mere 40 minutes. But to that drive time, add time to park, hike across the campus to the decrepit TA office, try to get in, walk to a public phone and call a campus cop to come unlock the door, wait around till he showed up, get whatever stuff I needed, and then hike to the other end of the campus to meet my classes in the engineering or math building. So I probably left around 6 a.m. I don’t remember eating anything: I probably didn’t eat breakfast at that time.

Today I won’t leave the house until I’ve consumed a couple mugs of French press coffee and something to eat.

I didn’t have a dog to feed and make secure before leaving the building. Today I have two of them.

At first we lived in an apartment: one door to lock. When we moved to our first house, there were four doors to lock up, but again: no dog to wrangle inside or outside. And at six in the morning, only one of the doors would have been unlocked, just long enough for me to dodge out to the car.

Today — having enjoyed two home invasions during my lifetime plus an attempted rape plus the Incident of the Cat Burglar on the Roof — you may be damn sure I live behind locked doors and windows. Eight doors, to be precise. Two sliding doors, each with three separate locking devices in various positions and at different heights from the floor; three exterior doors with deadbolts and locking handles; three steel security doors with hardened dead bolts that will break your effing drill if you try to drill the lock open. That would be…hmmm…FIFTEEN LOCKS to have to secure, and to have to check before you leave the house.

No, make that SIXTEEN. Back in the dark ages, we did not have computers that stored our entire personal and business lives, computers whose loss to a burglar would amount to a major catastrophe. Sooo…I didn’t have a solid-core door on my office secured with yet another drill-proof hardened dead bolt.

A locked door functions in exactly the same way as a set of stairs does. Whatever you want is on the other side. Forget your purse: you have to find your keys, wrestle a deadbolt open, retrieve the purse, wrestle the deadbolt shut. Oh, forgot the file you were supposed to bring? Find your keys, wrestle…wash, rinse, repeat. Sometimes two or three times before you can get out the door…

Come to think of it, there was no e-mail. So there were no messages to check and respond to before you so much as brushed your teeth. That surely saved a lot of time!

When the neighbors divorced and we got custody of their German shepherd — my first German shepherd, my greatest German shepherd, my greatest dog — that of course added dog feeding to the morning race-around. By then, though, I had paid my dues in the TA department and was no longer teaching wee-hours sections. And all Greta ate was kibble: nothing could be easier.

Today’s dogs eat fancy kitchen-made food that has to be measured out on a kitchen scale. The food competition must be refereed, lest blood flow.

Still pretty sure that at that point I probably didn’t eat breakfast. If I did, it was something like cheese and fruit — nothing that had to be cooked. We made our coffee in a Chemex, which didn’t require much time or attention.

No one ever heard of hauling water or tea or coffee around in the car with them.

Today I won’t leave the house without a car-friendly mug of iced water or hot coffee.

When I was a pretty young thing, I wore contact lenses. A pair of nonprescription shades resided in the car or in my purse. I most certainly did not require three freaking pairs of prescription glasses to navigate the world. The progressive glasses, which I need for driving but which do not work for living inside the house and which, goddamn them, render a computer unusable, are always, invariably, every freaking day on the other side of the locked office door, a discovery always, invariably, every freaking day made as I’m sticking the key in the car’s ignition.

A forgotten item that is remembered once you’re in the car, then, requires you to unlock and relock two deadbolts: one to the kitchen door and one to the office.

And when I was a pretty young thing, often I didn’t wear make-up. Today I would frighten small children if I left the building without slathering the requisite three layers of opaque crud over the face.

Back in the day, I grabbed my purse, ran out the door, slammed it and locked it behind me, jumped in the car, and drove away.

Yeah. Okay. It makes sense now. It is objectively true that forty years ago getting out of the house was faster and easier than it is today. And maybe it’s not a function of age so much as a function of our times.

Do you find that to be true in your neck of the woods?

Summer is y-goin’ out

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Lhudly sing huzzah!!

Another beautiful morning, as the heat moderates and the days grow almost imperceptibly shorter. And lookee here! The wee Easter lily cactus that clings to life in the shade of the devil-pod tree expresses its joy:

EasterLilyAugust2016It’s been in that pot for years and barely grown, even though it gets a great deal more water than it should. The burly fellow next to it is a golden barrel cactus, given to me a very long time ago by my friend KJG. It was a housewarming gift…so arrived here 12 years ago. Strangely, in all the years it and its companion in front have been here, I’ve never seen either of them bloom.

But Easter lily cacti in their various varieties bloom in wild profusion.

I am SO not in the mood to work today. Fortunately, except for my own book and for rehearsing tomorrow’s dog and pony show, there isn’t much to have to do, at least so far. But  history tells us that every time the dust settles, a new shamal will blow in forthwith.

Still…fall is y-cumin’ in, and here in Arizona, fall is our second spring. Soon the plants will revive, flowers will bloom, vegetables will thrive.

So I’m thinking maybe instead of (ugh) working all day, I’ll disconnect from the computer and spend the day gardening: pull out the dead stuff, haul off the pots whose residents have fried, maybe even buy a new plant.

One of my favorite indoor plants has some sort of infestation or disease that seems to be killing it.  This is probably the time to get rid of the thing.

TalaveraPlanterIt’s living in a fake terra-cotta pot. I’d like to buy a new talavera pot to take the place of the dying plant in its plastic pot. Maybe I’ll run over to Whitfill’s, buy one of their pots, and then move on to Home Depot in search of a tree-like houseplant to live there. That would kill some time and continue the job of murdering the budget.

Heh! I love those things. One like that would look SO PRETTY in that spot, and then maybe I would feel less crabby.

Then I could go so far as to refill the hummingbird feeders and the seed dispensers for the ordinary birds. That would be good.

It would’ve been good if I’d kept those filled for the poor little critters when it was hotter than the hubs of Hades and I was too lazy or too timorous to stick my nose out the door. But better late than never. I suppose.

What I’d really like to do is get a couple of those raised gardening bed kits and set them, side by side, in the sunny spot in the far northwest corner of the yard. The view of that space is blocked by the orange trees, so I wouldn’t have to look at a truck farm from the back patio and the pool. But if I had two long, narrow troughs set up with enough space for a pathway down the middle, I could reach all parts of the raised garden without putting my back out.

Probably could build something like that with a few two-by-sixes. It would be easy.

Still feeling more or less out of sorts today, though better than the past two days. Last night I refrained from dropping another melatonin pill — or half thereof — yet still slept seven hours. So presumably one of two things has happened:

• either a residual amount of the stuff remained in my system, which would explain a lot; or
• a couple doses somehow realigned my sleep cycle with the sunrise.

Whatever, I suspect the generally shitty way I’ve been feeling has something to do with this drug. Guess I’d rather feel shitty from not getting enough sleep than shitty from the side-effects of some chemical.

I’ve also been unduly affected by the death of my client and friend, the Mongolian Bank Magnate. It makes me feel terrible. And that’s unreasonable: he lived to 68, a decent enough age, and he had a great life.

But still…from the perspective of early old age, 68 seems pretty young. He was a vigorous man with a young wife and a little girl just ready to toddle off to preschool and a great deal more that he wanted to do in this world.

He died of pneumonia incident upon leukemia.

Damn! What awful luck.

Especially when you think of the legions out there who so richly deserve such a fate: rabid terrorists and child molesters and drug dealers and tobacco magnates and pharmaceutical company billionaires and clowns who would ride into the presidency on a tide of hatred and fear and all those who would take away from the world rather than contribute to it…

Oh, hell. What can one say?

I am going to cultivate my garden.

Plumbing Blues…Everything Blues

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RainDrop_on_rose_leafOh F!ck It. That’s about all I can say.

I give up on trying to go to the last art lesson. I give up on all of it.

You know, every single time I have the temerity to indulge myself with some little luxury like a month & a half of art lessons for $175, convened by a city museum in a beautiful historic house, every goddamn thing that can go wrong BREAKS AND FALLS ON MY HEAD!  It never, ever fails.

I was up in the air about going out there this morning, anyway. The damn city has closed 32nd Street, a big thoroughfare and one of the roads I take to get there. Last Thursday, just the city’s getting ready to shut it down jammed up Glendale Avenue for miles to the west. I had to make an eight- or ten-mile detour to get around that mess reach to my meeting in Scottsdale.

To get over to the Schemer gallery this morning, I’ll have to make my way through three neighborhoods to reach a north-south road that I can turn east on. Then drive all the way down to Missouri. Then east on Missouri, which will drop me in some of the worst traffic on Camelback right at the tail end of the rush hour. Then easterly, easterly, easterly, easterly through bitchy traffic. It’ll take about 40 minutes to get there — that’s a drive that should take 20 minutes.

And y’know what?

I don’t wanna.

My scheme to keep the water turned off at the frontyard standpipe, turning it on only when the irrigation system needs to run, did NOT work.

When I turned the two shut-off valves back on this morning, I got sprayed in the face with some kind of backwash: water had been building up under pressure in there and it came squirting out when the valves were opened.

Then the damn irrigation system  hung up on zone 3. So I had to turn on each zone manually…BUT…

Ah yes, but…

That allowed me to see that Gerardo was right when he said there’s another leak! He’d noticed a wet patch near one of the orange trees and said it looks like a pipe’s broken under there. But the water system had been running, and that tree is watered with a standing bubbler that floods the irrigation basin under it. I figured water had leaked out from under the river-rock dam I’d built around there.

Wrong.

Turning on the water this a.m. created another wet patch in that spot…and the water had yet to come on under the trees.

So that’s going to be another expensive fix.

Gerardo charges about $80 to $100 to dig up the piping, find the leak, pull out the low-grade PVC pipe Richard installed, and replace the rotted length with new PVC. Since I’m having to get it fixed about once a month now, I guess it’s time to replace the system or shut it down altogether.

If I shut down the irrigation system and leave it off — as I’ve done with the ovens that gave up the ghost (again) — I’ll have to drag hoses around the yard once a week in the winter and every day in the summer. This yard is almost a quarter of an acre… The alternative is to let all the plantings die. And of course…the yard is the main reason I live in this house.

It costs $4,000 to $10,000 (depending on who does it) to replace one of these systems front and back. It will entail digging up the landscaping and repairing all the damage where new trenches have to be dug. So…if Gerardo does the job? My guess would be $4,000 to $6,000.

So. Resurfacing the aging swimming pool this winter is now out of the question. So is putting any leftover savings into a Vanguard index fund. Every penny I’ve managed to pinch is going to go into paying the $750 or $800 overage from this month and then rebuilding the irrigation. That won’t leave anything to get my teeth fixed, BTW.

The pool is not an emergency. It will be OK for another year or two — won’t look great, but as far as I can tell there are no leaks in the gunite, so…it should hang in there.

The plumbing? That is an emergency.

OMG! A thrasher just caught a gigantic bug! At first I thought he’d nabbed one of those accursed paloverde beetles, but now I see it’s a carpenter bee, a funny and mostly harmless creature. That’s too bad…but something was wrong with the bee — it was already stressed, allowing the bird to catch it with hardly any effort.

Good bird! These birds do catch the accursed paloverde beetles (of which we seem to have a slight dearth this summer, lhudly sing huzzah) and, more to the point, they eat ants in gay abandon.

Well, that was a Moment of Nature interlude, entertaining enough in a morbid way. Maybe I won’t kill myself after all.

When I went to turn on the computer at 5 this morning, the better to respond to emails, emit a receipt to one of the Chinese scholars, and return copy and an invoice to another of those worthies, the damn thing was hotter than a two-dollar cookstove!

I’d left it plugged into the recharger…despite having noticed that thing was running pretty hot yesterday afternoon. It had recharged the battery 100%, but the whole lashup felt like it was ready to combust.

Shut down shut down shut down shut down shut down shut down force quit force quit force quit force quit SHUT DOWN DAMMIT!

Finally got the current versions of the really large files I’ve been working on saved to DropBox, shot off the correspondence to the Chinois, and managed to close all the open programs, shut down the computer, and set it on the cool floor tiles.

It seems to be OK for the nonce. But obviously, another expensive catastrophe is brewing there.

So I don’t know whether it’s the prospect of thousands of bucks going out the door for things that I do NOT want to spend money on, or whether it’s the endless confinement in the house through this hot, penurious summer, or whether it’s the fact that the art thing turned out to be kind of a bust because in my age I seem to have lost what little talent I had (at one time I actually could draw pretty well…but no more!), or whether maybe the melatonin stuff is doing something to me but damn it! I am so depressed. Sometimes I just don’t even see the point of hanging around. If it weren’t that I can’t imagine what to do with the dogs, I would be out the Cosmic door by now.

Guess I could just take them down to my son’s house and leave them there while he’s at work. Doesn’t seem like a very polite way to say good-bye, though.

Last night I cut the 5 mg melatonin tablet in two and swallowed the smallest part. It did seem to keep me asleep until almost 5 a.m. — close to seven hours. And I do feel less crazed than I did yesterday morning. But still: not very happy. I suspect the drug is affecting the mood.

There may be worse things than four-hour nights.

Image:
Acagastya. CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38313449

Another Friday, Another Dollar

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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…

Rats! More Rain!!

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🙂 The irrigation system has been off for three days, lhudly sing huzzah. So much rain has been pouring in there’s been no need to run the water, despite the usual three-digit temps during the daytime. It’s five in the morning now, and yet another freshet is rolling in.

Yesterday so much rain blasted in, it laid down a three-inch lake in the patio…

BackPorch

The trees won’t have to be watered for days! Y’know…that’s a three-foot-deep water control trench where those rocks are…

Backtree

More bills are incoming, though.

I need to get that patio roof repaired. Don’t even know who could do that, since it’s a little exotic: plastic paneling designed to let filtered light in there but keep the rain out. And my son emailed last night to report that he definitely has rats. They’re inside the walls, and Charley has tried to go after a couple of them. He’s wondering if he can train the dog to catch them.

So I suppose I’ll have to pay an exterminator to get rid of those damn things. I hope he can chip in on the cost, because that is NOT how I want to spend next month’s budget.

But where to FIND an exterminator? Angie’s List is now utterly un-credible, so I’m not using that to track guys down. I refuse to click “agree” to their onerous new ToS, so even if I were dumb enough to buy their recommends, I can’t access their site.

Yelp also doesn’t seem very credible to me — I know too many people who put their friends up to posting positive reviews there. So I’m asking the handyman, who doesn’t do much work for me but who seems to be a font of recommendations.

Also asking him about an electrician. My beloved old electrician (“old” is the operative word: he’s even older than me!) seems to have gone out of business. Last time I called his number was out of service. I hope he’s OK, but would be surprised if he is: he’d been losing weight the last time we met, and not in what looked like a good way. What a great guy that one was (and, I hope, still is). I met him when the ex- and I moved into our house in North Central. That was over 30 years ago!

Hard to believe. {sigh}

AND I heard the AC making some strange noises during the night. It’s still on the Goodman warranty, so with any luck most of that cost will be covered. But it’s another unwelcome hassle.

But all hassles are unwelcome, eh? Especially when they cost you out of house & home…

A Strange Little Miracle…

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Have you always suspected, as I have, that work (ach!) is bad for your health? Welp, maybe it’s the other way around. Yesterday a client’s convoluted PhD dissertation seems to have worked a small miracle.

To my annoyance, an appointment scheduled a year ago for a routine check-in with the cardiologist came up right in the middle of a very challenging editorial project, which we’re trying to get done on an extremely tight deadline. Really, I didn’t feel I had time to take off two or three hours to drive to the doctor’s office, sit around, jaw with the guy, and drive home for no very good reason. But neither did I feel like haggling with his staff, whose response (I knew from experience) would be to reschedule me for some equally inconvenient time.

So I took the laptop with the magnum opus with me, hoping to squeeze in at least a little work while sitting around cooling my heels…

I hate doctors’ offices SO much — and especially hate their waiting rooms, where you’re invariably subjected to television yammering on top of the overall suspense and discomfort and worry of a doc’s waiting room — that every time I go to a doctor these days, my blood pressure goes through the roof. To convince this cardiologist that I’m not, after all, at death’s door, I have to keep a running record of my b.p. for about six weeks before showing up in his precincts; that’s been the only thing that proves my issue is “white coat syndrome,” not near-terminal hypertension.

😀

So I’m sitting in the waiting room reading variance analysis in Chinglish and in the background there’s the usual stream of babble about the 82,000 people evicted from their homes by a roaring wildfile that went from 5 acres to 25,000 acres overnight and they didn’t even have time to go home and rescue their pets which are now crispy critters and Donald Trump’s endlessly hideous emanations and car wrecks and child rapes and mother rapes and Syrians and and suicide bombers on and horrifyingly on (why do they think people who are dealing with some personal health crisis want to listen to stürm und drang?)…and, to focus on the copy, I have to really concentrate. Like focus on each. word. one. after. another.

As usual, His Eminence is running late, so I get a lot done — this is very nice. So I finally get in there and the cute young tech takes my blood pressure, and holy sh!t…it’s NORMAL!

I say, “Are you sure?”

He says, “Yeah, it’s right on the mark.”

Mwa ha ha!!!!

So His Eminence has nothing dire to say and no excuse to wave his prescription pad around, and this is very excellent.

Even though he and I agreed, a year ago, that in real life my blood pressure is in the safe range, I always register blood pressure numbers in the “alarming” range while in a doctor’s office. Particularly in the presence of a doctor with some frightening specialty. There’s nothing like an oncologist or a cardiologist to set your heart to going pitty-pat… Hell, even a dermatologist can do that!

On the way out the door, I thought, “That was weird!” Then I realized that I must have been so tightly focused on the golden words that my mind completely shut out the noxious surroundings. Because I wasn’t sitting there dreading having to talk with a doctor and gnashing my teeth at the time wasted and listening to annoying prattle or dire news, the blood pressure was not creeping toward the stratosphere.

Too, too good!

laotse2
Lao-tsu. Osodham & OSHO World Galleria.

Keep on writing, li’l Chinese scholars…