Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Marketing Away…time to take a break

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Nothing like a blog post to occupy yourself while you snack on figs and cheese. Have been working on marketing Camptown Races most of the day, with the exception of a brief trip to the drugstore & the grocer’s. Finally got a Twitter page established for the Camptown Ladies: https://twitter.com/RacyLadies

If you’re into Twitter, please follow them! Mwa ha ha! They love camp(town) followers. 😉

Very soon now, we’ll have a Giveaway contest: The girls need names! I suggested they might like to be called Madison and Ashley, but they didn’t much like that idea. And Aunt Tilly was abhorred!

So it was decided that we would ask the Hive Mind to come up with something fitting and true. Watch for that!

LOL! I’ll bet  you can’t guess who Aunt Tilly is.

olive as tilly brightenedAunt Tilly is my grandmother, Olive, whom I never  met. She was a flapper, in the true sense of the word — which was somewhat pejorative at the time. Apparently she was one wild little number.

A divorce-court judge removed my mother from the custody of both Olive and her caddish husband, assigning the three-year-old to the care of the cad’s parents. The previous child, whom I found out about only when I unearthed my mother’s birth certificate after my father had died, must have been adopted out — Olive was 18 when my mother was born. So…what can one say?

Except, Olive, my dear: You are PERFECT for Aunt Tilly!

She certainly was a woman highly qualified to pronounce the words “Not husband material.” The ideal mentor for the Camptown Ladies.

As long as we’re uploading images… How do you like this new entry in the Home Decorating Awards Competition?

orchid

That little Talavera pot contained an elephant’s-foot plant that had taken root (from sprigs) and so outgrown its soil that there effectively was no soil left. It was shriveling from lack of water, especially in this summer’s unholy heat. Exit the elephant’s foot, into a larger pot.

Then it occurred to me that one of those little orchid plants you find at HD and Trader Joe’s would fit perfectly in there. And it does!

Here at the Funny Farm, orchids will survive, but they don’t grow appreciably. I expect this one will live for two or three years before giving up the ghost or outgrowing its home. Kinda cute, isn’t it?

To attach it to the wall, I hung the top end (which has a length of florist’s wire strung through a pair of holes in the back side) from one nail, and then a few inches below it inserted a tack into the wall which holds the pot’s lower end away from the drywall. To water it, of course, I’ll set it in the sink. But this will obviate any damage should I fail to wipe it dry before hanging it back up.

Ah. I see Amazon has responded to my query with an explanation as to how to establish a Goodreads Author profile.

And so, to work.

A Little Freshet Blows through Phoenix

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Wow! Take a look at this gallery of photos, posted at a local TV station’s website. Quite a little storm blew through the Valley last night.

As usual, it bypassed the ’hood. We dwell in the rainshadow of the North Mountains, and so the Valley could have a 400-year flood and we’d barely notice. Literally: only a few drops of rain fell here, barely noticeable. A brief, brisk windstorm came through but nothing that could do any damage. We could hear the thunder to the south, like a nonstop cannonade. But that was about it.

My son just got in from Colorado and picked up Charley the Golden Retriever, who has resided here since last Thursday night. Don’t know whether his house has power or not — he thinks so, though, because his Nest thermostat responded to some communiqué that he sent to it today. Hope so, ’cause it’ll be mighty hot inside that little house if the AC has been off all day.

Staccoto_LightningImage: Griffinstorm, CC BY-SA 4.0

Weird Weather / Weird Electrical Event

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Today has been so humid, it’s been hot and sticky even inside air-conditioned buildings. The weather service is predicting, in a rote way, the usual “chance” of isolated thunderstorms, another way of saying “we have no clue.” Last night’s “chance” knocked out power to 13,000 people.

As is typical, we had no storm or even a sprinkle in this part of town, though we did have a brief, brisk blow.

However, we did have a weird happening. Along about 9 or 10 p.m., a strange, loud electrical sound burst out just to the north of the Funny Farm, a kind of wwWWMRARMRMRMRMMMMWRMM. I could see a bright, orangey light through the curtains.

It wasn’t lightning — wrong color. Lightning’s blue in these parts. And the sound was definitely not thunder.

The dogs were alarmed. I didn’t think much of it.

But then about ten minutes later it happened again, and the flare was much brighter and then the power went out.  I got up to look: absolutely no storm going on.

The noises sounded electrical, and I thought I could see a fire at the end of the street. And I thought the sound and flashes had come from the vicinity of Manny’s house.

Our tract has underground utilities. So if it was over by Manny’s place, then…???… It sounded like a big power surge — like this one.

But can a power surge be visible when the power lines are underground?

The surrounding tracts have overhead lines, so if a surge or a transformer malfunction occurred in one of them, it would have happened  a little further away than Manny’s house.

I finally decided the “fire” was somebody’s headlights (or something) and went back to bed. The dogs remained disturbed for awhile, but after the power came back on, they settled down.

Strange night.

And right now it’s hot and sweaty in here even though the AC is pounding away. Enough. I’m going to bed, or maybe to bed down on the cool tile floors.

That’s one of the reasons desert dwellers have tile floors, after all…

 

Taking a Brief Break…

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“Brief” is the operative term. After several frantic weeks, things are cruising along on a fairly even keel just now, so I think I can take off a morning or so to rest and try to think. Actually, I should run out to a grocery store, but the crushing heat discourages one from venturing out of one’s burrow.

We are now ready with about a dozen racy bookoids for Camptown Races Press. That will provide about a month or six weeks’ worth of uploads, if we’re putting them online about every three or four days. With any luck, we’ll be able to run a month or so ahead of that.

Book V of Fire-Rider went online this morning: Kay’s Ghosts. After an angry confrontation leads Tavi to rebel against Kay’s apparent lack of empathy, Kay asks Tavi how he thinks he (Kay) came to learn the Espanyo language. In the absence of an answer, Kay’s horrifying personal story emerges, one that parallels Tavi’s and possibly even outdoes it.

Yesterday I spent some time trying to learn how to use Twitter. The “hashtag” thing has always been a mystery to me. I guess it amounts to a user-generated search term. Apparently you can found one simply by typing it into a tweet. And apparently you can associate a tweet of your own with a larger community (as it were) of people nattering on the same topic. Say, for example, something like “Camptown’s latest #eroticromance just went online at Amazon: http://bitly.hotsytotsy.”

The first experiment with Tweetvertising is branded (uhmmm… I guess that’s the term) with #FireRider, #postapocalyptic, #futurehistory, and #adventurestory. Now I need to find some cool things to share with readers, so I’m not just blitzing folks with ads.

Can you post images on Twitter?

What I don’t yet understand is what the “@” symbol is supposed to do. I think it’s some sort of identification badge.

And can you create a Twitter account or an entity in a new  name, or are you limited to one account? I think the FunnyAboutMoney Twitter persona was created way back in the day, by the delightful Mrs. Micah. (Remember her?)

Same question applies to FaceBook: can I create a site for Camptown RP and the Ladeez? Since certainly I can’t be blitzing my coreligionists, who comprise most of my FB “friends,” with news of lascivious literature.

Also yesterday I made an interesting discovery that will allow me to build a large and entertaining backlist quickly and easily. Better not discuss that here: it will soon become evident what I’m getting up to. It’s a stealable idea, and I think it’s best not tip my hand before the launch.

Working on learning how to make “boxed sets” compiling related bookoids under one electronic cover. You can do this cheaply using freeware called Gimp, but I think I’d rather have Gary Bennett, who designed the Fire-Rider cover, create the things, since he’s a pro, he has many years of experience with PhotoShop, and the result is likely to look a lot more professional than anything I could trick out in a program I don’t know.

Must decide today whether to cancel the New York Times.

The paper uses a local delivery service that also throws the Wall Street Journal and the Arizona Republic onto people’s driveways and into any available puddles. This delivery outfit just stinks. One of two specific reasons I canceled the Republic was that they used to call me on the phone about ten days before the bill was due and harass me to pay up right that minute, as though I were a deadbeat and was late on payment. (The other reason is that the Sunday paper contained nothing but advertising and went directly into the recycling bin without even being read.)

The Times wasn’t delivered either Saturday or Sunday. On Saturday, I don’t believe they came up our street at all: I walk the dogs before it gets too hot and so can see whose driveway has a dead tree on it.

I called and complained. No paper was ever forthcoming.

On Sunday (apparently as a consequence of my complaint), everyone else got a paper but I didn’t.

This is not the first time such a thing has happened, and it’s far from the first time I’ve complained about this bunch.

I have an “educator’s” discount for the Times, which makes it marginally affordable. Still, they’ve raised the bill with some regularity, to the extent that if I canceled that paper, I could use the money to subscribe either to the New York Review of Books (a favorite I can no longer afford) or to The Economist (a weekly that I’ve always coveted).

An online subscription comes with the dead-tree subscription to the Times. If you want to read the Times online only, you have to pay for the privilege. I don’t know if it’s a lot less. Nor do I know whether I would want to pay for the privilege: though I use it all the time to post links to Times articles, I usually find those articles first in the hard-copy version. And I do not find reading the thing on a tablet to be very alluring.

But even when they do deliver the damn thing, these days I rarely get a chance to read it. I’ll look at it while I’m bolting down breakfast, and then I’m launched into 14 or 18 hours of nonstop work. That means I may read maybe two or three pages. Why am I forking over money for that? At that rate, one issue of The Economist would provide reading material for an entire week of breakfasts.

I want to support the little high-quality journalism that survives in this country. But hell. Donating to Pro Publica or PBS would accomplish that.

Such a deal.

 

Hullo?

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Idle Essay Day…

Item: Are you reading this? I don’t even know for sure whether Funny about Money is appearing online. I think it is. The last post I published appears to be visible. But who knows? Firefox caches things in inscrutable ways. I may be writing this in some phantom site, and a phantom published page may be coming up in the Twilight Zone.

I feel distinctly  like I’m in the Twilight Zone. Most of my websites are nonfunctional, particularly Writers Plain & Simple, my key marketing site, which actually had a decent number of followers.

Then some guy had the nerve to notice WP&S’s disappearance and spam me with an offer to fix it, for a small fee!!!!!

Shee-ut.

As usual, everything happens at once. I just posted a new Fire-Rider story, but I’ve been so distracted with this mess I haven’t been able to even try to market it.

Then my neighbor Sally announced (once again) that she’s putting her house on the market. This time she’s serious: she’s rented an apartment in a Scottsdale old-folkerie.

The last time she stuck her Realtor nephew’s sign in the front yard, the Perp showed up that very day and tried to buy the house. She hates the Perp and says she won’t sell to him, but she simply does not understand that you can’t refuse to sell to a qualified buyer just because you don’t like him.

The Perp, I’ve learned, is roundly feared and hated by the other neighbors. This is the guy, in case you haven’t been following Funny for the past ten years, who vandalized my pool shortly after I moved in — to the tune of $10,000. SDXB and I took him to court and won. When he lost, he threatened the judge, who was so alarmed that he would not let SDXB, me, or our lawyers leave the courtroom until after a police officer reported the Perp had gotten in his car land driven out of the parking lot.

My lawyers were alarmed, too. Terrorized, actually, is le mot juste. They urged me to move out immediately and put the house on the market forthwith. They wanted me to take an apartment and be gone ASAP.

Well, I’d just bought the house. I couldn’t afford the tax hit involved in buying a house and turning right around and selling it, and even if I could, I’d also  had a bunch of upgrades installed right before I moved in. By this time, I’d only been in the place three or four months.

I had a German shepherd and a Ruger and a bad attitude, so I stayed.

Nothing happened except that the German shepherd took after the poor little psychotic Son-in-Law when he tried to enter through a side gate. Scared the guy so bad he never came back.

But obviously the Perp has not forgotten. If he gets Sally’s house, he will work very hard, indeed, to make my life miserable. And he won’t have to work very hard at all: What he’ll do is rent the place to the slimiest trash he can find and let them do the job.

One of the houses he turned into a rental was occupied by a creep who abused his children so violently that the neighbors across the street sold their (very nicely renovated! recently renovated!) home and moved. When asked what possessed them, they explicitly said that the screams of this guy’s tortured children were frightening their children to the extent that they felt they could not stay in the vicinity.

We had not yet made an enemy of the Perp, who lived right next door to SDXB, who had witnessed this creep abusing a pair of puppies (the creep lived directly behind SDXB). So SDXB passed this bit of intelligence along to the Perp, who called the renter and told him that the neighbors had said they were going to call Child Protective Services if they heard his kids screaming while he was beating them again.

The creep moved out that night. Following morning he and his “family” were gone, skipped out.

So that’s the kind of folks the Perp rents to.

He’s been out of the  rental business for awhile. When he first bought and moved into the house next door to SDXB, he started buying up homes in this neighborhood, which is only about two blocks wide by three blocks long. He would watch and find aging original owners — since the houses were built in 1971, these people were getting on in years, and they also had no idea what their houses were worth. He’d then go to their doors and offer to buy the house and pay in cash.

He obtained six houses in this area that way, all of which he turned into rentals. He would tell mortgage companies he was buying them to house family members or to move into himself (until relatively recently, you could get anyone’s real estate paperwork online through the County Assessor’s office, so you could find the deeds and mortgage agreements — that’s how we know he was lying to mortgage lenders).

He would chop down all the trees on a property — he really dislikes trees — and then rent it out.  Any maintenance was done by him, and much of it was out of code. He built what Down-Easterners might still call a “summer kitchen” (they’re Romanian refugees, and their customs are a bit different from the natives’) on the back of the house next door to SDXB’s and bragged that he’d tied into the city sewer without a permit. He presumably installed the electric and plumbing without benefit of permit, too.

A house next door to some friends of mine is back on the market. I almost bought that house during the crisis described above, but it needed some very costly renovation. Much more than I’d spent on this house. I felt I couldn’t afford it.

Now it’s on the market for about $400,000. However, my house may be worth over $300,000 now. And the house in question has been HUGELY renovated. It’ really is gorgeous. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t have a gas stove, which pretty much is a non-negotiable for me.

But. With the Perp breathing down my neck…I might manage to make my peace with a glass-top stove. I do most of my cooking on the propane grill, anyway. Next grill could have a gas side burner…wtf?

So that’s where we are now. General frustration. General fear. Ongoing hassles. And I’m not getting any work done while all this disruption continues.

If you can read this post, please say hello in the comments! 🙂