Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Tiny Rays of Sunshine

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So come this morning the kitchen sink is still clogged.

A week or ten days ago, I paid an outfit found on Angie’s List $271 to install a new garbage disposal, which the plumber claimed would fix the problem. It did not.

When he saw it would not, he said, well, the way the thing is hooked up under there, this one piece of piping has settled so it’s no longer angled so water drains downward from it. It needs to be replaced, but he’ll have to order the part.  He’ll call when he has it.

Days pass. The kitchen sink continues to clog. It freaking hurts to have to plunge the effer, because of the dissected boob. I call. They say they’ll get in touch with him. Day or two later, I call again. They say he’ll come back NEXT TUESDAY.  Yesterday the sink plugs up and won’t drain.

Back to Angie’s List. Find a different plumbing co, one with 423 “A” reviews. I figured you could fake, purchase, or bribe 100 rave reviews, but 423? Not likely. At least some of ’em must be the real, genuine articles.

Lovely young fellow shows up: handsome, clean, nicely groomed, amazingly punctual and amazingly polite. I tell him the tale told by the previous plumber. He studies the problem.

“Let’s take it apart,” says he.

And yea verily, he shortly discovers the obvious problem: a fat plug of black grease in the drain line.

I do try valiantly not to let grease get down the drain. But when you eat salad every day and you dress it with olive oil and lemon or lime juice, it’s hard to avoid SOME grease getting in there.

He shovels the thing out, rotoroots the thing out, cleans and whacks and cleans and whacks: a miserable job in a cramped miserable space. Reconnects the plumbing.

It works!

He says the black iron plumbing is probably getting constricted, it being quite a few years since it was installed back in 19 and ought 71. It will never, says he, run perfectly. But it’ll do the job for now. Replacing it with copper or plastic, he says, will be extravagantly expensive.

With the Angie’s List discount, he goes out the door with $153 in his pocket.

So…I felt a little less taken advantage of than I have over the past several weeks.

Otherwise, it’s crazy business as usual.

Cleaned up two piles of dog mounds — undoubtedly Cassie’s. Installed the fancy hinged kiddy gate in the office doorway so the dogs can be penned in here with me when I’m working, thereby preventing them from sneaking into the front of the house to poop. Job!

The minute the new plumber showed up at the door a) the phone rang–a choir friend; and b) Ruby escaped from the room where I’d penned her and THREW herself against the front door.

Phone: Lovely and dear friend wanting to commiserate on my trials and tribs. I can’t easily excuse myself because her trials and tribs far exceed mine and … well, it would be rude. I can’t pick up Ruby with one hand while holding the phone with the other because the boob on the  Ruby-picking-up side hurts too much for me to lift 15 or 18 pounds. The young plumber dude waits patiently in the blasting sun.

Finally I corral Ruby, let the gent in the door, and, while chatting, show him into the kitchen. Friend and I get off the phone. She has had REAL cancer, not “precancer” or some such bejabber, and everyone is worried and heartbroken over her very considerable challenges. It was incredibly, amazingly gracious of her to call and offer moral support.

Call old, beloved gynecologist down at St. Joe’s. I want a second opinion, and before I let the high-powered surgeon lop off my boob, I want a third opinion.

The Plumbing Challenge takes some time. Shovel the excellent young man out the door along about mid-day.

Gynecologist’s office calls: will I come in next Thursday at 8:15 a.m.?

Well, of course.

Shit. Good-bye to next week’s Scottsdale Bidness Association meeting. Now have to find someone to foist the meeting-chair junk onto. One person refuses. Other cagily does not answer email.

SBA members have agreed to buy one of the pricey rosaries for our venerable and much-loved server, Cathy. She approached me last Thursday as I was on the way out of the restaurant; when I said they were $50, her face fell. So, tomorrow I have to retrieve one of the rosaries from Choir Director, and next week must find a way to get the thing to an SBA member who does plan to attend the meeting.

Shoot out the door headed for Costco, where I need to buy something, anything for tomorrow’s choir potluck.

Figure to get Whatever for the potluck, a box of dishwasher detergent tabs, and if I can find them, one of the packages of precooked mussels I saw at a different Costco last week.

Potluck: Tres Leches cake/cheesecake/whatever it is, obscene! No mussels. Substitute $moked $almon and some sourdough bread and get some more tomatoes and, having been burned on the peaches now one too many times, buy a bag of apples for breakfasts and snacks.

By the time I get out to the car, I realize my boob isn’t hurting as much as it did. Maybe the Cipro is kicking in?

Doc’s office leaves word saying it should start to work within 48 to 72 hours. It has not been 48 hours since the first dose. Boob is still hot and swollen, but slightly less swollen. Probably a fluke, but who knows? Any port in a storm…

You know…

I forgot how comfortable it is to drive without a seatbelt on.

Can’t stand to have the damn shoulder strap across my chest, so I’ve been shoving that behind me, though keeping the seat strap part connected.

Hideously dangerous, I’m sure. My antique car has no side airbags. But ohhhhh so nice to be able to drive unconstricted!

I’ve always thought people who drive without seatbelts are morons of the widest stripe. But now I can understand why they do it. It’s just soooo much better!!!!

They’re still morons. But comfortable morons.

So: a few bright spots:

• Finally got the kitchen drain running, despite being ripped off by the prior plumbing co to the tune of $271.
• Found a very nice New Plumber; finally get sink fixed.
• Dear, lovely friend gets in touch, commiserates.
• Boob may be getting at least slightly better.
• Nice gift found for business group’s loyal server.
• Potluck dish purchased (not made!)
• Appointment scored with a possible second opinion.
• Decision made to seek third opinion before allowing a mastectomy.

It’s 3 p.m. I have done exactly no work. The dogs and I are going back to bed.

The Worst Threat the World Has Seen Since WW II

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The Guardian is running a story titled “‘Apocalyptic’ Isis beyond anything we’ve seen,’ say US defence chiefs.” Now, it’s true, The Guardian tends to exaggerate. But lemme tellya: this one is no exaggeration.

I lived in Saudi Arabia for ten years, in one of the remotest parts of a remote kingdom. We lived among the local people, who, during the 1950s, were still dwelling in conditions Europeans would think of as medieval, culturally and materially. No love was lost on Americans among the Saudis, and let me assure you, the murder of an innocent victim such as James Foley as a device to express hatred, vengeance, dominance, and menace was culturally acceptable then and it remains so now.

The West in general and the United States in specific have made so many bone-headed mistakes in the Middle East that it is impossible to keep track of them. Those stupid moves are coming home to roost now. With the ascendance of the kind of people who make it a religion to hate the West — to some degree with good reason — and the suppression of ruthless dictators who had a vested interest in keeping the peace, we do indeed face an apocalyptic threat. The Moslem extremists who are fast seizing power are fully capable of and feel justified in exploding nuclear bombs, releasing poison gas, and spreading engineered disease in cities filled with civilians, in any country on the planet. And sooner or later they will do so.

The most serious recent  mistake the West has made was to support the overthrow of strongmen like Saddam Hussein and his ilk. That is because we operate under a fundamental error: we believe, as though it were a religious tenet, that because democracy works for us it must therefore be best for everyone else in the world. And that is not true.

Democracy does not necessarily fit every culture. That is especially so for cultures that spawn groups capable of the atrocities we’ve already seen — atrocities that, you may be sure, are just the beginning. We need to butt out of the governance of other people’s countries. If a dictator is what’s needed to keep extreme jihadists under control, then a dictator is who should be in power. But stupidly, we failed to take advantage of the strongmen who were in a position to do that. When we should have continued to cultivate them, we dethroned them, or encouraged the locals to dethrone them. This was exceptionally stupid.

Our longest-running mistake in the Middle East has been to build dependence on the region’s oil supplies to support America’s enormous, spendthrift energy needs. This forced us to intertwine our economy and our politics with cultures that are not our friends and never have been our friends. Surpassing exceptionally stupid. We would have been better off to dig up all of Alaska, Canada, the Dakotas, the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico than to establish the kind of dependence that we have now and have had for decades. When you compare the two evils, the former would have been less harmful to the United States as a nation and to the West as an alliance of technologically developed nations.

Our second-oldest mistake — hang onto your hats, folks, because I’m about to surpass myself in political incorrectness — was to support the establishment of Israel and maintain an alliance with it.

Think about Israel from an Arab point of view: This is a Western sovereignty populated mostly by people with European cultural roots that was forcibly planted on soil stolen from Palestine. Western allies supported its development shortly after the Second World War for a simple, truly evil reason: no one wanted to provide homes and safety for the millions of Jewish refugees from European tyranny. Instead of opening our borders to the beleaguered victims of a murderous time, we exploited a specious religious belief that a plot of territory on the Mediterranean was a God-given “promised land” to the Europeanized and Americanized descendants of an ancient nomadic tribe. After all, we persuaded ourselves, the Jews were there first.

Well. Maybe. But consider an American analogue. Let us suppose the European Union decided that Virginia should be removed from the governance of the United States and returned to the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Indians, on the theory that they were there first and Virginia is, after all, their land. Imagine how that would go over! It’s just about as rational, though, as ripping out a chunk of Palestine and handing it over to the descendants of the Hebrew tribes.

Given that Israel has systematically oppressed the local Palestinians and as we scribble is in the process of killing hundreds of civilians in its own defense (2000 Palestinians vs. 68 Israelis), it’s not surprising that Arabs feel a certain resentment toward the West.

In my opinion, ISIS is the worst threat to Western civilization that we have seen since Adolf Hitler. We need to crush this outfit NOW, even if it means dropping plutonium bombs on Syria, Iran, and Iraq, killing innocents along with the criminal extremists, and letting God sort them out. We cannot allow ISIS to gain any more power, territory, weapons, or political influence — period. If stopping ISIS means killing everybody in sight, that’s what we need to do.

We need to go all-out in building an energy infrastructure completely free of any association with any Middle Eastern country, even if it means despoiling our lands, raising the price of gasoline, building more nuclear plants across the nation, and perforce limiting the amount of power we expend.

We need to quit sending military aid, economic aid, and political support to Israel, even if it means evacuating every person of European ancestry and Jewish heritage and finding homes and jobs for them in Western countries. How about Virginia for starters?

My mother was not an educated woman. But she was perceptive. Sometimes she said things that amounted to metaphor. Once, she remarked, in so many words, that “Armageddon will come out of the Middle East.”

It sounds extreme. But she was commenting on an extreme situation.

World War III will come out of the Middle East. And WW III, given the kinds of weapons we have now and the fanaticism of our opponents, could very well be the Western world’s Armageddon.

Postscript, 8/23/2014: Don’t believe me? Well then, take a look at this authoritative article by Ed Husain, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior advisor to the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. It appears in this morning’s New York Times. What Mr. Husain describes exactly reflects my own experience of a decade in Saudi Arabia.

Stuff Not Done, Booze, and Wasted Days

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So today after the time-sucking faculty meeting, I’d planned to…

a) make a Costco run;
b) drag another stack of Medicare & Medigap checks to the credit union;
c) return something to Petco and get the dog vitamins I forgot while buying the useless piece of junk there;
d) do all the college tasks I’d listed during the meeting;
e) have a nice lunch/dinner (big meal happens at mid-day here…supposedly good for your diet);
f) write 16 weekly posts for the online 102 course;
g) write more of the current difficult scene in Fire-Rider II;
h) return strange beads I didn’t order to Fire Mountain;
i) write a post for Plain & Simple Writers;
j) write a post for Funny about Money;…

…and so on.

Welp. Got the Costco run done. That’s something. I guess.

At CC, I bought one of their wonderfully delicious (salt-saturated!!!!) roasted chickens. And some sugar snap peas. And some asparagus. And…well, you can’t have chicken without white wine, can you? A bottle of cheap white.

By the time I shot out the door, a stiff breeze had come up, bearing dark clouds from the west. Weather reports had threatened more storms this afternoon. The area up around the college and over where the Costco was hard-hit during the recent monsoon blasts, and it looked like another one was blowing in fast. Decided the checks and the dog thingies could wait until tomorrow. Besides, after two hours of cooling my heels and trying to look interested in the new chair’s every word, I was getting damned hungry.

So flew back into the central city, flew in the house, wrung out the dogs, and proceeded to saute those lovely peas, slice that nice hot juicy chicken, and tossed together an amazing salad with tender little raw asparagus spears, beet, tomato, yummy sweet mini-peppers, LGOs, and on and on. And, well…naturally, took a wrench to the wine bottle’s screw-on cap.

Decided to write a post on the baleful need for a wrench, a pair of pliers, and a heavy-duty pair of scissors or tin snips in the kitchen drawer.

Sat down to eat. And drink.

Yesh.

After consuming a half-bottle+ of that soda-poppy wine, I staggered back into the back of the house and fell face-first on the bed. Slept until five-freaking thirty!!!!!!!

Helle’s belles.

Wine is dangerous. I’ve learned, actually, that hard liquor makes a lot better choice of boozie-poos. Believe it or not.

I love wine. It tastes so good. And it’s so easy to dispense. Just tip the bottle over and presto-changeo! There’s another whole glassful! So when I’m eating that big meal in the middle of the day, I tend to merrily keep pouring enough to go with the food still on the plate…and to lose track of how much I’ve had.

I love bourbon, too. But…making a bourbon and water requires a process. You have to get up off your duff, walk into the kitchen, get the bottle down, get out the jigger, get out a glass, fill it with ice, measure the booze, pour it into the glass, and top it off with filtered ice water from the fridge.

That is what we call a hassle. Enough of a hassle to get one’s attention and say “that’s enough of THAT!” So as a practical matter, when I’m drinking hard liquor I don’t drink anything like as much as I do when I’m pouring wine.

You also have a lot more control over how much alcohol goes into a given mixed drink. Lately I’ve discovered that a half-a-jigger of bourbon mixed with the usual amount of water and ice is not a heckuva lot less satisfying than a whole jigger. Really, bourbon-flavored water is what we’re lookin’ for here. So that means that if I pour two drinks to go with a large meal, I’m actually only drinking 1.75 ounces of alcohol — the amount the gummint classifies as “one serving” of alcohol.

You can’t do that with wine. Well. You can. But who would?

It’s along about 9:40 p.m. now. I did manage to write a new post for P&S Writers. Fed the dogs. It’s raining, a much quieter, softer, gentler, cooler rain than we’ve had of late. I’m sitting on the patio watching the juice run out of this computer. The charge is down to 6%, and soon the thing will give up the ghost.

And so, to Netflix.

 

And WHERE do the days go?

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Where, indeed?

1. Clean up highly perfumed gifts from the dogs, delicately laid on the living-room floor.

2. Take dogs for walk; Pup throws up. Return to house forthwith.

3. Water plants; refill pool.

4. Sweep down pool walls.

5. Try to coax Pup to eat the food I put down. She refuses. Worry!!!

peaches6. Realize the second large peach of four purchased from AJ’s is spoiled on the inside, despite looking gorgeous on the outside. A third, consumed for yesterday’s breakfast, was mealy and flavorless. These peaches cost over $8, when the 10% tax is added in: two freaking bucks apiece!

7. Take last intact peach and spoiled peach back to AJ’s. They offer new peaches. I say no, I’m not taking any more of their peaches but would like to have a lovely pint of Talenti sorbet (subtext: those plastic containers are great for storing beads). They give me the ice cream for “free.” Heh. An $8 pint of ice cream!

8. Arrive at Costco as it opens, figuring to get my hot little hands on some nice mangoes, plus a package of paper towels. While there, discover that my fave jeans, which I suspected CC was about to discontinue, are BACK!!!!!! Grab two pair, lest I never see them again. But at produce department, discover that — hang onto your hats! — COSTCO IS OUT OF PRODUCE! No mangoes. No peaches. No cantaloupes. No edible mini-watermelons. In short: no breakfast food for the Dieting Fatlady. Ask Costco employee: he says they had a busy weekend.

9. Fly home.

10. Melt a palmful of chocolate chips in some butter; add a tablespoon of bourbon. Stir. Pour this over a bowl of Tahitian Vanilla Expensive Sorbet.  Eat. OMG.

11. After that shenanigan, skip lunch. It was worth it.

12. Try to persuade Pup to eat dog food. Fail. Worry.

13. Write an unusually lively post for MyCorgi.com. Heh…it’s good…check it out.

14. Contend with Gerardo the Lawn Dude Extraordinare.

P103020115. Order new beads from Fire Mountain for continuing rosary project.

16. Work on draft chapter.

15. Enter data into Quickbooks.

14. File paper.

15. Converse with accountant.

16. Walk across the street and do business with accountant.

17. Walk back across the street to retrieve hard copy of attachment that didn’t go through in the e-mail.

18. Converse with adorable, handsome and charming new neighbor, father of four children and supporter of SAHM, the two of whom (the adults, that is) have purchased Maria’s house and are beside their young selves with delight.

19. Introduce adorable, handsome and charming new neighbor to accountant/friend.

20. Taking advantage of many hours of accountant/friend’s professional development coursework, figure out how to make Quickbooks do some exotic and delightful things. Feel pleased.

21. Stagger home; figure out why MacMail failed to send attachments. Extreme annoyance.

22. Wrestle with this for some time. Fail to figure out how to resolve issue.

23. Feed Pup again. Figure out how to get her to eat: she’s on a hunger strike because she’s pissed that I’ve been locking her in the X-pen to bring a stop to a) hoovering up her food and then b) racing over to muscle Cassie aside from her dish and hoover up her food. Supervise consumption of dog food.

24. Retype coded list of usernames and passwords (current version); print with extra column in table; fill in column, in handwriting, with clues to what these things mean; copy for presentation to son, for reference should I croak over during the next surgical adventure.

25. Slice a couple pieces of cheese, toss handful of blueberries on plate, pour 1/2 glass wine: dinner.

26. Consider: Is it any wonder that nothing gets done around this place?

Images:

Peaches: my old friend Jack Dykinga, for USDA. Incredibly, in the public domain. Damn, Jack: wish we were still at Highways. Those were the days!
Stone cross: mine.

Stuff You Can’t Get Anymore

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After the latest Cleaning Lady visit, I discovered my favorite old (very old) nail brush has gone missing. I must have put it in some not-routine place, but having searched every drawer, shelf, cabinet, and countertop in the house and the garage, I’m afraid it’s time to declare it lost. And that is not a good thing.

It’s almost impossible to buy a decent nail brush anymore. They used to be in every corner drugstore, and now: gone! At one point I bought an expensive brush at L’Occitane — sweetly appealing with its wooden handle and its “natural” bristles. And sweetly useless. The bristles are so soft that none of them will get under your nails to scrub the dirt off. And whose idea was it to make something that sits in water out of wood?

So it was off to Amazon, that purveyor of so much Stuff You Can’t Get Anymore. Apparently my perception that decent nail brushes no longer exist is just about right on target. Heee! Check out the one-star reviews of the one made by Fuller! And the Rubbermaid nail brush that rusts!

Contemplating this dismal state of affairs, it occurs to me that there’s an awful LOT of Stuff You Can’t Get Anymore. Videlicet, exempli gratia:

• Public phones
• Information operators
• A human being on the other end of virtually any phone call
• Zebco’s Rhino Reel (well, there are 16 left at Amazon, actually…but try to find it at your local Sportsman’s Warehouse)
• A decent bra
• Pyrex that’s undeniably safe to use
• Real Eskimo Pies
• Mounds Bars that are big enough to matter
• Decent sheets that don’t fall apart within three months and don’t break the bank
• A washing machine that works and doesn’t make braids with your clothes
• Pump jockeys (except in states where self-serve gasoline is outlawed)
• Ice picks
• Functional showerheads
• Wind-up alarm clocks
• 4711
• Wind Song
• Mentholatum (you can still order it on Amazon, but it, like Vaseline, is now made in China and so not something you’d want to put around your chapped lips and nose)
• Privacy
• Public civility

LOL! What Stuff do you find you can’t get anymore?

A Neighborhood of Eccentrics

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orchid tree flowerSo along about 5:30 a.m. Ruby and I are trotting into the part of the ’hood that houses the lower-end richerati, several streets of spacious, sprawling 1950s and ’60s ranch houses, most of them beautifully maintained on quarter- to third-acre lots. We see an old guy in a pickup putter by. He waves, friendly.

He stops the truck in front of the shade-tree mechanics’ house (more about which later) and we see an animal at his feet. I’ve forgotten to change from my reading/house-navigating glasses into my annoying bifocals and so think he’s lifted a small dog out of the truck.

What? You drive into our neighborhood so you can walk your dog on our streets? Wouldn’t you rather be at the park? Eh…maybe not: I won’t take my dog into the park at this hour because of all the dogs running off the leash. Why should he?

As we draw closer, his companion resolves into a cat, not a dog. It’s Old Yaller, one of the mechanic brothers’ loose cats. And the guy? It’s the old guy who wanders around the neighborhood feeding treats to people’s dogs. Amazingly, he also doles out kitty food to the cats that are allowed to roam free around the neighborhood!

He’s a nice old boy, lonely. His wife died of a dreadful, slow-killing cancer sometime in the past year. Well, he fed the local livestock before she croaked over,  so evidently he had some loneliness issues even before then.

We stop to chat. He asks if Ruby can have a treat. When I say sure, he breaks out a gigantic Milkbone, the likes of which she’s never seen in her entire seven months on this earth. She doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He breaks it in half. After some experimentation, she manages to chew it apart.

He gets in his pickup and drives off to his next destination, Santa Claus in a 350-reindeer-power sleigh.

Old Yaller, the biggest, most fearless cat you’ve ever seen in your life, lives in and around the garage of the house where the two shade-tree mechanics dwell with their ancient mother. One of the brothers has a job — he works at night and surfaces around 6 a.m. The other: ???  They spend their free time fiddling with old junkers and motorcycles. With the bikes, in particular, it’s pretty obvious that they’re fixing other guys’ hogs for pay. The house is strangely painted — blue, with white batten boards creating a striped effect. The neighbors call it “the ice-cream house.”

Heh. The neighbor who came up with that name is the one  who fills her house with livestock. She and her husband have over a dozen dogs, cats, rabbits, ferrets, and whatever in there. They’re not all “in”: this is another pair of worthies who let their damn cats run around free to devastate native birds, geckos, and small mammals. When asked, the wife will tell you that their cats are “good cats” that would never harm another animal…well, except for the dead hummingbird Puddy-Tat dragged in the other day, wasn’t that cute?

I suppose any older neighborhood has its share of eccentrics. We seem to have quite a few…maybe that’s because, as Southwestern development goes, ours is a relatively “old” area. Many of the original owners still live here, but they’re now very elderly and some seem to have taken leave of their marbles.

Or not.

The tax evader — one of those guys who carries a card declaring him to be a citizen of the sovereign nation of himself — finally lost the house at the entry to the shady, lush cul-de-sac over in that part of the ’hood. He wasn’t living there: he was letting some old guy live in the place, free of charge. No rent. That guy practiced a kind of benign neglect: the house had irrigation, so the lawn and trees were generously watered. Four huge orchid trees graced that house’s front yard, and they were gorgeous. Even though the house was pretty run-down, you didn’t notice because those trees were so spectacular.

At any rate, the place was eventually attached for taxes and then sold to a fix-and-flipper. This guy, we learned, hired the lowest bidder to do the renovations. We know this because a neighbor across the street from this manse is a contractor and he made a bid on the job. He was underbid to such an extent that, he said, there was no way the guy who got the contract could possibly do anything other than a slipshod job.

And he’s right: just from the outside, the place looks terrible. The idiots pruned back the trees till they looked like broomsticks, and then shut off the irrigation! For reasons unknown to any sane human being, they replaced the incredibly cheap irrigation with a sprinkling system that dispenses the world’s most incredibly expensive treated city water to the front yard. But they didn’t turn it on all summer. So, those trees aren’t long for this world: cutting them way back and then turning off the water during a 115-degree summer is a guaranteed way to kill them.

The new front elevation,  painted a stark, eye-searing white, includes an extension of the garage and a new front wing that juts out into the front yard and a little scorching hot front courtyard with this WEIRD keyhole thing on the wall that apparently is supposed to serve as a fireplace. That’s evidently not how they conceived it — they must have thought of it as a decorative element — but evidently someone pointed out how absurd it looked and as an afterthought they tacked on this tiny square brick chimney that looks like they added a crooked top hat on top. Just hilarious.

Welp, that place has been on the market for a couple of months now. No takers.

Do you think it’s the shoddy construction?

Or could it be the level-2 sex offender living next door?

Yeah. Directly across the street from the mechanic brothers is a level-2 sex offender living out his days with his mother. In Arizona, as presumably in other states, they make it virtually impossible for these guys ever to get a job, even if someone wanted to hire them. And then they charge the guys for the cost of their probation officers’ salary. If they don’t pay up, they throw the guy back in jail. So that means the only way the guy stays out of jail is if he’s lucky enough to have a relative — usually a mother — who will give him a place to stay, support him, and pay the bills for his probation.

That place is amiably run down, too. After she dies, who knows what will become of him?

Chances are all most perps did was diddle a teenaged girlfriend, hardly an act of demented rape. But one never knows. “Level 2” means “moderately likely to reoffend,” an assessment made on who knows what fuzzy criteria by who knows what authority-crazed functionary. Still. You can go here and find out what the guy actually did: in our neighbor’s case, “attempted molestation of a child.”  If you were the sort who had a family large enough to fill a five-bedroom house, you’d have to be batsh!t crazy to move in next door to him!

And, IMHO, you’d have to be a little eccentric to buy a fix-and-flip right next door to the guy’s residence, what with sex offender maps readily available online.

Moving on, we passed through the very fanciest part of the ’hood — extremely nice, peaceful, and shaded indeed…who knows what goes on behind those exquisitely manicured front doors? 😀 And from there it was on to the park.

There we saw a big bruiser with a large pit bull running loose off the leash. They were having a grand old time. We walked past on the other side of the street. I silently renewed my vow to stay away from the park when my dogs are with me.

A couple of women drove up in a small SUV. Opened the door and out jumped a happy-go-lucky spaniel type. It shot off down the road like a rocket, its ninny owner calling weakly after it. When the dog finally tired of running around and came bouncing back to her, she managed to grab it long enough to hook a leash to its collar.

Like…really? You really put your dog in the car without a lead on? And you really drove off down the road with your dog bounding around in the car without even so much as a fu*king leash on it??????? And do you really not see that pit bull over there?

Sorry. Willful stupidity drives me to profanity. I simply cannot bear this kind of idiocy.

If you can’t fit your dog inside a crate, fine. This was a good-sized dog — not as big as a German shepherd, but pushing it. I couldn’t have wrangled my GerSheps into a dog crate on a bet. And sometimes I did have to drive them around…dogs have to go to the vet now and again, for example. But whether your dog goes into a crate or not, PUT A LEASH ON YOUR DOG WHENEVER YOU HAVE IT INSIDE A CAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Even a minor fender-bender is loud, startling, and scary. Anything larger is traumatic and terrifying. The instant you or some rescuer opens the car door after an accident, that dog is going to shoot out and run off like the Devil himself was chasing it. If you have a leash already on the dog, at least you have a vague shot at grabbing it and keeping the dog sort of under control after a collision. If you don’t…well, say good-bye to Fido.

Oh, well.

Up the road and around the corner. Cut through the yard, recently mowed, of the vacant house on the corner. The owners must be in the old-folkerie. For some reason, they or their kids have not sold the house. Probably promised the parents they wouldn’t, in hopes that maybe one or both of them eventually would escape the old-age prison. This has gone on for years, so it looks like there’s not much likelihood that will happen. At least they have a lawn service come and beat back the weeds once or twice a month.

Past the house where the neighbors had someone, evidently a professional artist, paint a bizarre tropical sunset mural on the two-car garage door. Mercifully, that garage is set back off the street and protected by a shade structure, so the masterpiece is relatively unobtrusive.

Past the house the young people bought. They pulled out the desert landscaping — which indeed did need to be refreshed — bladed the front yard, and planted a gra$$ lawn. The water bill elicited by attempts to keep a grass lawn alive here will boggle the mind. Think of the trips to Hawaii those kids could have taken instead!

Past the former Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, now neatly and tidily cared for by its new owners.

And finally into our yard: that would be the one overgrown with trees and shrubbery, quite deliberately planted in layers for the purpose of blocking the view to Dave’s UCLM&WA. It looks like a jungle out there now. Really, about half the plantings should be removed.

But which ones? The olive that casts lovely shade in the front courtyard? The mesquite that I think could go but whose extirpation my son objects to? The vitex that bursts into exuberant bloom a couple of times a year? The sky flower that only blooms once a year but that is truly exquisite? The yellow oleander, possibly useless but also given to blasts of amazing flowers? The unbelievably graceful and beautiful desert willow? The unknown xeric shrub that’s covered with snowy white blossoms about half the year? The bubble-gum plant that puts forth fuschia-colored hummingbird flowers that smell for all the world like Fleer’s?

Well, none of them, probably. The eccentric resident is a plant hoarder.