Idle essays

Have been almost incommunicado for the past month or so: underwater with clients’ work. Everything happens at once, and then nothing happens. 😀

At last most of it is shoveled off the desk. I’ve only got one task left to do just now, and I may not even do that today. I think I’m going to loaf all day, swim in the pool, watch the plants grow, and after dark, maybe take the dogs for the walk I was too lazy to manage while it was still cool this morning. Or maybe I’ll drive them to the park and let them walk around in the shade.

Choir has gone to sleep for the summer, and so that opportunity for socializing and fun is on hold. Friends are searching out new restaurants — Honored Client introduced me to one last week where I hope to convene some friends in the next week or so. Fave Writing Group meets the first Saturday of the month — last month I was too maxed to drive over there, and the month before that I had to take work with me to keep plugging away during the meeting. So looking forward to June’s meeting, when I’ll actually be able to pay attention to what’s going on! Attended one (1) meeting of Toastmaster’s and have wanted to go back, but breaking free in the middle of the day has been out of the question.

And…in all the paying frenzy, I’ve neglected the Saga of Connie, Queen of the Big-Rigs!

This morning I collected a bunch of her new adventures, and whenever I get out of the swimming pool this afternoon will compile them into posts for you.

Watch this space…

 

 

How do you like the new pot I picked up yesterday at the local family-run nursery?

Kind of a pretty little guy, isn’t it? The blue plate under it is an old, chipped dog dish that I had to retire from duty lest one of the pooches cut her tongue on it.

It’s another of those Mexican Talevera-style imports that Home Depot gets now and again and overcharges royally for. The nursery in question tends to be expensive — if you were in Mexico, you could buy these things for a few pesos and the maker would be happy. But HD is more so.

I love Talavera. That spider plant was sitting on the counter in a much smaller pot in which it volunteered, years ago. When I cleaned out and around the flowerbed, I found whatever had been in the little pot was long gone, and this critter was living in it. So I brought it inside, plopped it on the kitchen counter, and forgot about it.

Friend was over here the other day and noticed the thing. These plant-lovers can spot plant abuse in an instant. She tsked over the dry soil and the yellowing leaves.

{sigh}

So I promised to repot it.

Driving around the city yesterday, I found myself on the road that passes the nursery and thought, As long as i have to put that plant in a new pot, it might as well be a Talevera pot, which i will love. i will not especially love another cheap terracotta or plastic pot from HD or Michael’s.

Zip! Into the nursery. Coveted every plant on the grounds. Made my way to the back part of the lot where the Talavera pots are piled high. And lo, there was a whole collection of…uhm…blue-pot specials. Prices were not on “special,” but the pots were striking in their minimalist color scheme: blue and white.

Grabbed this; resisted the temptation to buy another gaggle of plants; raced on about my business.

I love the blue, because my son bought me a beautiful blue bowl for Christmas, which is on display atop the counter at all times. Also, the decorative tiles in the Mexican tile counter are predominately blue. So I suspected the pot would be perfect. And it is. IMHO, that is.

If you live in Phoenix or if you visit, and if you also happen to love Talevera pots and kitsch, you must visit Whitfill’s. They have several locations around the greater metropolitan area. And unlike certain competitors, they do not hawk landscaping trees like they were peddling used cars. 😀

In other news… The client’s book has gone to press. He seems pretty pleased, and as we scribble is bearing several copies to family members in Seattle. The index is probably in the can — I hope the last few ditzy issues were finished yesterday. All that remains on the table is the current Chinese dissertation author’s magnum opus, and helping to get her through an unusually stressful period. This project is driving her bats, and she has herself all keyed up, poor kid. With any luck, though, she’ll get through it.

If and when the last of the current work tsunami recedes, my plan is to kill some more time writing a new Fire-Rider novel and also writing a nonfiction book about cats.

Cat books sell exceptionally well… As for fiction: I have neither the skills nor the patience to peddle that stuff, and have decided to regard those scribblings much as I regard blogging — as a kind of hobby. I’ve got some fun new ideas for FR, one of which includes an invasion of cryptids.

Inspired by Honored Client, I may also compile a little genealogy of my family and put it together in book form as a gift for my son, since it’s so easy to create PoD volumes. The other day I stumbled upon a lead on my father’s purported Native American forebears: his eldest brother was living on the Chickasaw Nation in 1900. Today the tribal rolls [my fingers are determined to make that roles!] are sprinkled with the family name. So they may have  been Chickasaw rather than Choctaw.

Maybe not, too. By 1900, more whites than Indians lived on the Chickasaw, plus the two tribes were closely allied and a lot of intermarriage went on between them. To find out more, I’ll need to pony up some cash money to get into the pay-to-peek genealogical websites. But it could be worth it.

If I could learn more about that guy and wherever the hell his parents came from, creating a genealogy with some narrative would be pretty easy, because one of my cousins on my mother’s side converted to Mormonism and committed that side of the family history to the Mormon archives.

It’s 10 a.m. It’s already getting hot, and, finding myself out of food, I must fly to the grocery store before getting down to work. And so, away!

 

 

woo-HOO! My friends Tina and Ron’s wedding reception was terrific! She looked SO pretty in a beautiful ebony satin dress with an awesome new hairstyle, and he was handsomer than handsome all dressed up in a nice suit. Daughter was spiffed up, too: this one, in addition to being startlingly bright, is showing every sign of growing into a spectacular young woman. Everybody behaved well, at least within reason, and a good time was had by all.

People came from all over the country to celebrate the marriage. The two families have a very interesting combined set of friends and relatives.

Y’know, whenever you get to know new people, you realize that your limited little definition of what is happiness or well-being does not by any means cover the bases. At dinner I sat next to a woman from another flyover state (Arizona being one of those) who lives in a city much smaller than Phoenix. Despite what must have been some very hard times, she came across as a contented and self-confident person — holding down two jobs and making her way through a pre-nursing program. She clearly has a good relationship with her grown daughter and dotes on her gorgeous nephews, who are indeed too adorable to be real.

It’s the second time I’ve met a person who lives a good life that probably would make me restless. SDXB’s childhood buddy and lifetime friend never left the Upper Peninsula. He stayed in the tiny town where they grew up, held the same steady work for year after year, and raised a healthy family in a modest home. When I met him, I thought he was the happiest man I’d ever met. Still true, come to think of it: I’ve never known anyone who seemed more contented and confident in the goodness of life than that guy.

Personally, I’m like my mother: a city girl. I much prefer to be in a big city where few others know my private business. I deeply hated living in the ultra-small town that was the American camp where I grew up in Saudi Arabia, and didn’t blossom until we returned to the US and took up residence in San Francisco.

Yet I can see that people benefit (evidently) from living in a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business. Maybe it’s good for you when everyone knows every time you take a deep breath. I dunno. One thing’s for sure: what’s sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander.

Speaking of sauce: the dinner was awesome. The young people had hired a patio at our favorite hang-out, the House of Tricks, which catered hors d’oeuvres, wine & beer, and a delightful dinner. The weather was unbelievably gorgeous: none of the crazy winds we’ve had, an absolutely perfect evening.

Against my better judgment, I had a glass of wine, a pile of carrots, quinoa risotto, and a piece of roast pork tenderloin. And then a large piece of brain-bangingly rich and wonderful chocolate cake. The salad looked gorgeous, too, but I was too scared to eat lettuce.

And what do we have here that’s poisonous to the old lady?

• wine
• vegetables that haven’t been boiled limp and puréed like baby food
• roast meat
• chocolate

If it tastes good, if it has any texture, it’s gonna try to kill me.

But…nay! Even though I felt like I had a rock in my stomach after consuming all that food, I wasn’t sick. Went home, went to bed, slept seven hours without benefit of Zantac or Benadryl. And when I woke up? No lump in the throat, no queasy stomach, no diarrhea.

It’s a freaking miracle!!!

Maybe I just need to eat three meals a day at Tricks. 😀 It surely would be worth the price to not wake up sick every morning.

Actually, it’s not that big a surprise: whatever ails me has slowly been getting better, in two-steps-forward-one-step-backward fashion.

I suspect the problem was likely an ulcer brought on when the Year of the Six Surgeries coincided with the misbegotten publishing enterprise, which probably would have failed even if it hadn’t been star-crossed by the medical horror show. Either of those would have been highly stressful on its own. Combined, they were toxic.

Six weeks of uninterrupted megadoses of omeprazole — plus giving up on even trying to sell books — seems to be doing the trick.

Young Dr. Kildare thought it would take eight weeks for the stuff to work. The new teen-aged internist at the Mayo thought more like three months.

WhatEVER. It’s so amazing to get up in the morning and not feel miserable, especially after having made an entire meal of trigger items, that I’m willing to gulp the stuff till the cows come home. Osteoporosis (which it causes…) be damned.

This morning I felt so good I took it upon myself to refill the bird feeders, after god only knows how many years, with some stale seed that has been taking up room in the garage cabinets.

Now that the Cat Repelling System is keeping Pretty Daughter’s goddamn cats out of the back yard, I think it’s safe to call in the regular birds. There’s already quite a few — they seem to have discovered the area is relatively safe. They’re welcome to stay, and bring their friends. They do keep the noxious insect population down.

The ant population is much diminished in the presence of the current tribe of birds. I haven’t had to put out ant bait for several months, nor have I seen any of the little gals in the house.

A-a-a-a-n-d…as we scribble, here comes a hummingbird to inspect the newly refilled hummer feeder, too. Hummingbirds eat mosquitoes, along with gnats, aphids, and other small delectables.

Even though the CDC says our area has a low to moderate risk of getting the zika virus very soon, I’ve seen A. aegypti in the house. Whether the little ankle-biting desert mosquitoes will also carry the disease remains to be seen…but I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t. A blood-sucking bug is a blood-sucking bug, no matter what its genus.

Now that the economy is better, fewer houses in the ‘hood have empty pools with green mosquito-breeding puddles at the bottom. So we have had fewer skeeters these past few springs and summers. But we haven’t had a hard frost for years…and that’s about all that keeps the nuisance bugs at bay around here.

Here’s a curve-billed thrasher, too: voracious ant-eater. Dude! Have a few seeds and make yourself to home! 😀

It’s been so long since I refilled the hummers’ feeder that the jar of sugar water I keep in the fridge for the purpose had a wad of black fungus floating around in it. That is something! Because supersaturated sugar syrup is not what you’d call friendly to microbes.

So I had to dump that out and make a couple of quarts of new sugar water for the three feeders front and back.

Cassie just chased a young mockingbird off, the little twit! Fortunately, he wasn’t fazed.

The arborist is supposed to show up here mid-morning. It’s now after that, but he operates on mañana time, so I’m not concerned.

This guy is a great tree dude. Nay, he’s an artist: he really knows how to trim and shape trees. He does the job by hand, and he engages the brain…and a formidable eye for tree development. So I’m mighty happy to have found him (at work in a neighbor’s yard!) and to be able to persuade him to come in my direction.

The trees have run amok this summer, so the bill is going to be pretty bracing. Trees that he worked on last year still look pretty good — they only need a little pruning. The ones we skipped now need some serious work, though. They’ve all grown exuberantly this spring, thanks to the soaking rains we got during the winter. If only we could have El Niño permanently…

If and when Tree Dude arrives and gets himself established for the day, I hope to meet M’hijito at Costco, where I propose a) that he help wrangle a year’s supply of pool chlorine tablets into a basket, then into the car, then into the back shed; and b) that he advise and consent on the purchase of a new iPhone.

Yes. As much as I cringe at the prospect of yet another attempt to lash myself to an electronic tether, I see that Costco offers a monthly plan for the iPhone at just about what I’m saving by extracted a rate cut from Cox.

I’m told that the iPhone is a little easier for elderly pholks to learn. And since I’m already familiar with the mentality behind Apple’s software, I’m hoping that I can figure out how to use one of the things.

If I can make it work and find I actually use it, then after a year (when Cox will try to up its rate again), I’ll cancel the land line service and connect the cordless phones to Ooma, a VoIP service that will let me use NoMoRobo and costs a tiny fraction of Cox’s gouge.

The plan to use Cox’s selective call-blocking and anonymous call rejection features to cut down on the phone solicitation nuisance has had, as expected, only qualified success.

I’m no longer getting half-a-dozen calls a day. At least, for the nonce.

However… To use selective call blocking, you have to enter a code: #0#. My phones read that as “start a conference call.” And they refuse to STOP the conference call. So the first time I tried to block some SOB who got through the anonymous call rejection, I tied up every phone in the house and could NOT untie them.

Tried to call Cox on the flip cell phone, but found I couldn’t dial through the umpty-umpteen berjillion god-DAMNED punch-a-button hoops because the keys are so small my fingers can’t press them accurately. After five tries at 9:00 on Friday night, I was beginning to feel a little desperate: too late at night to call friends to ask them to let me use their phones. And pretty damn scary, not being able to dial 9-1-1.

Finally I was able to get through on the one remaining non-cordless phone by going around the house and unplugging EVERY cordless extension and power charger from the power and from the phone outlets. Cox’s tech and I screwed around for half an hour trying to un-conference-call the phones. Eventually another mass unplugging and replugging worked.

But I sure don’t want to do THAT again.

So now I’m getting two calls a day, consistently. That’s better than six. But I’d sure as hell rather have none. Zero. 0.00. Zip.

NoMoRobo is reputedly the best junk-call bouncer available. So, if I can force myself to learn how to use an iPhone, then I can use that for personal calls and the VoIP for business calls. How exactly you keep people from pestering you with ads on a cell phone escapes me, but we’ll cross that bridge if and when we get there.

Welp, I’ve killed half the morning here…and probably  in your precincts, if you’re read this far. And so, away…

 

 

Loafing away the afternoon. In another couple of hours, have to leave for our beloved Tina’s wedding reception. In between times: doing exactly nothing.

Yesh. Remember Revanche‘s angst over the wedding and the family and all that? Well. The drama in Tina’s family rises to match Revanche’s…and like Revanche, she seems to have the strongest grasp on her sanity in the tribe. No. That’s wrong. She has a fully sane sister. But since it’s a LARGE Italian-Mormon family, that means it’s two against…well, against a roistering party. 😀

Tina, being a pretty smart little bird, came up with a particularly fine idea: She and Fiancé (now DH) eloped to the County Courthouse, adorned in their best bluejeans and silliest T-shirts, where they tied the knot in public privacy, unaccompanied by hysterical family members. She sent over a picture…I don’t think I’ve ever seen her looking happier.

Then they arranged a reception at a favorite restaurant — and paid the restaurant to do all the heavy lifting! We — her crazed family and followers — all meet tonight to toast the Event. Which, we might add, occurred about two weeks ago, allowing plenty of time for some of the dust to settle.

Pretty brilliant, eh?

About all I’ve accomplished this week is to create a new website for our networking group, the Scottsdale Bidness Association.

It turned out pretty well, IMHO. Our former Web guru, a long-time Arizona art director whom I’d met on the job at Arizona Highways days, used to be a member of the group and had taken on the job as a kind of low-paid lagniappe. At one point, though, he packed up his business in a cedar chest and took a full-time job (gasp! can you imagine?) producing a monthly custom magazine for a national company based in Scottsdale. Recently, after several years at that gig, he took it into his head to retire.

In the process he shut down his account with the web host he was using, thereby killing our much out-of-date website.

I managed to retrieve the content from a cached version. A couple of pages needed to be completely revamped, but three of them required only minor tweaking.

That’s a very ordinary WordPress template, but I think it looks reasonably nice. As freebies go, that is. We’ll use the right-hand sidebar to post a plug for our charity, Every Kid Counts. Here’s a draft of the widget:

(If you’d like to donate, it’s never too late!! Click on the image to go to their website.) This group serves poor kids in one of the city’s most underprivileged school districts…and in Arizona, that is sayin’ something. It does a lot of good, and we’re proud to participate.

Right now I’m just waiting on approval of that design…probably will put it up this weekend or early next week.

Beneath the EKC widget, I propose either to arrange all our company logos, into infinity (which I think would make the site look unduly strange), or, if we can swing it, to post a “Member of the Week” or “Member of the Month” widget.

This sounds like a PITA, but once the widgets are built, I don’t think it will be. We have one member speak each week (see the  Calendar), and so what we could do is make the current speaker be the Member of the Week. With the widgets stored to WordPress.com, it would just be a matter of moving one widget down to the unused widget space and snaring another to move up into the sidebar.

To build visibility, I’d love to use the site’s blog function (it is a blog, with a static front page and, so far, no posts) to publish our dog-and-pony shows. Doubt that’s going to work, though: many of us speak ex tempore and so don’t have prepared speeches. One guy, a former high-school teacher, does some awesome presentations using videos and PowerPoint, but even he probably doesn’t have a speech written out.

So…I don’t know what to do about that idea. Probably nothing.

Otherwise, it’s been a day in La-La Land. I’d planned to run errands at three venues today. Jumped in my car, drove and drove, got to the first place, shoved my way into a parking place…and realized I’d left my purse at home.

So I had to drive all the way back to the Funny Farm, retrieve the suitcase, and drive all the way back to the Overpriced Gourmet Grocery Store. At that point I decided to opt the other two chores. Was able to find a couple of things there that I’d planned to pick up elsewhere, so none of the rest is very necessary.

At OGGS, I came across some artisanish mayonnaise that contains no sugar and that looked like it might actually taste like mayo used to taste. And yea verily, it does: rather better, actually, because it uses stone-ground mustard instead of mustard powder or Dijon.

I happened to have a can of pink salmon lurking on a shelf. So mixed that up with a quarter of an apple (minced) and a few capers. The result was quite tasty!

LOL! Having bought some Overpriced Gourmet Seed-Strewn Crackers caused me to remember, on the way home, that when I was a little kid (in another century!!), my mother and I used to make a snack by spreading mayonnaise on Saltine crackers.

They were so good!

Can you imagine? I haven’t even seen a Saltine in years.

Women used to use them to fend off morning sickness. The idea was that you should munch a Saltine before you lifted your head from the pillow. 🙄 I never found that very effective myself. But then I didn’t have morning sickness. I had morning-noon-and-afternoon sickness.

It’s getting late, so I must get ready for the evening’s shindig. Luz the Arborist was just here. He reports that the traffic between here and the East Valley is truly horrible, so I suppose I’ll have to get an early start for lovely downtown Tempe.

And so, away…