Idle essays

Why didn’t we think of it before?…

• Go to Costco about 6 or 7 p.m., and you avoid the crowds. The place stays open until 8:30, but by 6:00 or so, the mob has gone home to dinner.

• Those clear plastic boxes that hold pre-picked and supposedly washed lettuce? Emptied and washed, they’re perfect to hold your salad makings: a bag of carrots, a couple bunches of green onions, a half-used cucumber, a bunch of radishes, a bell pepper, a small jar of artichoke hearts. No more rummaging through  refrigerator drawers every time you want to make a tossed salad!

• Salad greens that come in those clear plastic boxes usually wilt soon and often end up half-spoiled. One could avoid that and still have convenience by saving the boxes, then buying whole heads of lettuce, washing them, breaking off the leaves, patting them dry, and storing them in the boxes. Put a paper towel in there to help stabilize humidity in the box.

• A digital tool that runs on batteries needs to have fresh batteries. Change the batteries in the bathroom scale, known to run two or three pounds lighter than the balance scale in the doc’s office, and lo! It comes up with a number half-a-pound heavier than it did. Still not accurate, but closer.

• Members of the One Percent are exempt from ordinary laws that apply to the hoi polloi.

Case in point: woman is walking her large dog through the park, off the leash. I have to maneuver Cassie away from Poopsie, who approaches us aggressively and does not come to call. Later, as I come around the last leg of my jog around the park, I see Poopsie running loose in the park, no sign of his human. She’s across the street opening the back door of her vehicle for him. He runs across the road — a feeder street through the neighborhood, and this is now high rush hour — and jumps in. The oncoming car, fortunately, is far enough away to miss hitting him. She climbs into the driver’s seat and, smiling, drives contentedly away in her Mercedes SUV.

Wonder what a permit to let your dog run loose costs?

• If I would not check e-mail at 5:00 a.m., I wouldn’t be sucked into the client’s vortex of confusing changes in proof 3 (!!!) and then maybe I could get out the door before 6:30, when the sun is glaring in everyone’s eyes and the thermometer is already pushing Hotter Than Hell.

• If I would jog first and then walk Cassie, that would circumvent her occasional not-gonna-do-this mood, and then I wouldn’t have to drag her back from the park, put her in the house, and start over again.

• The brand-new, very nice Sprouts is on the canal. I could ride my bike down there, if there’s a place to lock it up at the store. Come to think of it, after the weather cools off, I could walk to that Sprouts! And that would be a long enough hike to make up the day’s required aerobic self-abuse.

• If one would not take on any new clients, one wouldn’t have the issue of having too g.d. much work to do. Betcha one wouldn’t see any more mind-boggling, byzantine labyrinths of corrects on corrects on corrects on corrects, either.

So on Wednesday it was up to Yarnell with SDXB, there to visit La Maya, who is combining the summer, a fall semester of online courses, and a spring sabbatical to engineer a six-month retreat from the craziness that is her life down here in the Valley. She’s using the time to finish the anthology that she’s compiling with a co-editor (and that I’m copyediting) and to complete the monograph she’s begun. I expect she’ll spin off at least a couple of articles, too.

It’s so lovely up there, cool and breezy and quiet. Very quiet. Very soothing.

About a third of the town is for sale, thanks to the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression. Walking around, we came upon the CUTEST little mini-house. They want $140,000 for it. Somebody bought one of the old miner’s shacks, basically demolished it to a wall, and then rebuilt completely. The result is…hard to describe.

The place is basically one room, but not. It’s a large one-story space where a generously sized bedroom has been partitioned off. There’s a very handsome, well appointed kitchen and a huge living space. And a service porch with a washer-dryer hookup and, I think, room enough for a freezer. An upright freezer would certainly fit in there, and you probably could get a small chest freezer into the space.

At first, peering in the windows, I thought DOWNSIZE!!!! Here’s your chance to downsize with a vengeance.

On second glance, though, it didn’t look to me as though the place has enough space for even one decent clothes closet. That would make it useful, alas, only for weekend retreats. It doesn’t look like you could reasonably expect to live there, no matter how much junk you divested yourself of.

While I could fit all my clothes into one closet, here in the Valley one of my house’s bedroom closets is completely given over to office supplies and computer gear. And it’s full. I need that stuff to do business, so, alas, there’s no practical way I could actually live up there. At least, not in that place.

Another holds linens plus the space heaters in winter and the fans in summer. No place in that pretty little house to fit your sheets and towels, either, as far as I could see.

But oh, it’s totally cute. It has its own well, which frees one from a very large expense (the local water company knows it has the residents by the short hairs). The natural landscaping with big local trees and a pile of granite boulders in back is just gorgeous.

Not a single helicopter buzzed us all day long. One noisy fighter jet passed by to the west, a single outlier from Luke Air Force Base. Otherwise, the sky was the way a sky is supposed to be: quiet, except for the occasional wind blowing through the trees. And the occasional bird tweeting, cooing, or cawing.

What would it be like to live there?

Quiet, I imagine.

And limited: when there are only so many people in a town, there are only so many personalities to get to know. And only so many activities, other than arguing over the water company, ever go on. And there’s no place to shop. by that, we mean really no place to shop. The locals have to drive all the way in to Prescott, Wickenburg, or Phoenix to visit a Costco or a supermarket. One gas station (imagine what gas costs in that place!).

It’s a great place to visit, but…yeah.

The wish i could afford a vacation home thought wafted briefly through my mind, followed by the ARE YOU CRAZY? thought. Even if I could afford it, do I or do I not have enough work taking care of the place I’m living in, which is itself in a place that people pay to come and visit.

Speaking of taking care of the place, it’s past time to finish the laundry and clean up this shack. Bye!

Lookit this little guy!

Click on the images for larger, clearer view.

There’s a hibiscus that should not be with us. The mother plant spent several years living on the shaded west-facing deck, where it would occasionally put out a kind of peach-colored blossom but by and large just sat around looking sickly. I thought it was some sort of hybrid of a pink hibiscus. Last fall, it was attacked by a web-spinning bug that encased the tips of its limbs in nests for its offspring. Even though I cleaned and cut them off, the plant never recovered.

After planning to put it out of its misery, I relented. Transplanted it into a larger pot and dollied it around to the front patio, where it suffered through the winter — survived February’s hard frost by dint of being rolled into the living room, where it looked even more miserable than it had looked on the west deck. Carted back outside when the weather warmed, it hunkered in its pot, stunned.

I really thought it was going to die, and kept thinking, “Gotta throw that thing out in the alley!” It was saved, though, by the human’s innate laziness.

Weeks passed. The bug-eaten tips slowly, gradually, glacially emitted a few sprigs of post-apocalyptic-looking new growth. Didn’t look very promising, but I was still too lazy to drag the thing out to the alley.

But lo! As temps approached 100, the plant approached viability! Some actual leaves appeared, and yesterday out popped this scarlet red blossom!

Who’d have thunk it? Apparently hibiscus produce faded blossoms when they don’t have enough light. Why this flower has a hole in one petal, I have no idea…the place is overrrun by slugs at night — one of them probably snacked on the bud.

Speaking of survivors, we have this accursed thing:

That is the undead remnant of the devil-pod tree from Hell, allegedly killed in December of 2011. That was 18 months ago! The thing spawns dozens of zombie offspring, each one craving to grow a hundred feet high, preferably out of the footing of a block wall or the foundation of a house.

This little gem is a good thirty feet from the Undead Stump, where it arrived by tunneling under a concrete patio and coming up behind a set of block-and-board shelves. Another sprout is all the way on the other side of the swimming pool. Round-up, which I’ve been advised to use on the damn thing, seems to fertilize it, not kill it.

Talked to a couple of arborists. One said to just keep on spraying every sprig with Round-up. Another will come by later this week to see about grinding the stump out, though probably it’s too late for that. And a third recommended drilling holes in it and filling them with an herbicide. Lovely.

The other day I found a tiny praying mantis nymph clinging to a wall in the house. Glorioski!

Eventually I managed to catch her without harming her and place her in the plants outside. How cool can this be? This morning I found her prancing around in the parsley. 😀 Long may she feast on mosquitoes!

This weekend M’hijito and I went from scorning Mother’s Day as a grossly commercialized Hallmark Holiday to indulging in a Mother’s Day frenzy. Saturday he came over here and prepared astonishing pizzas and glorious globe artichokes, on which we gorged until we were stuporous.

The sauce is mostly garlic — like a half-dozen cloves or more, chopped — with Italian canned tomatoes. Awesome! This tiny bit leftover from the pizza later got used to top a grilled steak and later still (this evening), enhanced with a dollop of red wine, made an incredible spaghetti sauce. With shrimp.

Sunday we went to a Mother’s Day brunch at the home of his friends’ mother, replete with galloping grandchildren and the most elaborate organic aquaculture arrangement you ever saw. So that was a lot of fun.

Altogether, fairly mellow.

In other precincts…

Wild about Finance hosts the Carnival for Young Adults  and kindly included Funny’s squib about increasing property values and gentrification by young single urban adults in these parts. Neil Frankle hosts the Carnival of Personal Finance at Wealth Pilgrim, and he included the FaM post on the decision to drive the Dog Chariot until it dissolves into the pavement.

Today I’m supposed to perform as a “juror” for mock trials used to train brand-new county prosecutors. It should be pretty entertaining…

One of my former assistant editors at the Great Desert University, a young woman who at the time of the Great Layoff had  just completed a master of fine arts in writing as well as the graduate certificate in scholarly publishing, used the period of the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression to go through law school. She recently finished, and while waiting for admission to the state bar is working for this grant-funded training program. She e-mailed a couple of days ago frantically seeking volunteers for today’s mock trials.

LOL! Apparently it didn’t occur to them that most folks have jobs, and even those who can spend a day at the courthouse on Friday are inclined to regard jury duty as an onerous task and imposition, not the privilege of a free people.

Have to be at the courthouse door at 8:00 a.m.  So, to race around…

Image: Bulloch County courthouse, Statesboro, Georgia. Richardeleanechambers at the English Language Wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

🙂 After all that physical therapy and all that exercise, I made it to the much-anticipated hike up the West Fork of Oak Creek. As you may recall, along about last October, at the annual silent auction fundraiser for the choir, I bought a ticket to an excursion organized by two of the day school‘s teachers. At that time I thought surely the back pain I’d inflicted on myself the previous January would go away in time for me to get in shape by late April, 2013.

Well, of course, it didn’t. By February of this year I still could barely move, much less go hiking…or even walk very far. Two doctors and six weeks of intensive physical therapy later, I’d recovered enough to walk briskly and even climb. This left…well…seven days to get ready for the hike. As of yesterday, I sure wasn’t in top physical shape (and probably never will be again…so we’re told ;-)), but was one heckuva lot better than I have been.

It was great fun! The organizers have been at All Saints so long they actually remembered my son, who’s pushing middle age these days. Several other people associated with the church or the choir showed up, all of them really neat people, a pleasure to be around. Early yesterday morning we boarded the school’s large van for the short ride up the freeway to Sedona, and by mid-morning we’d arrived at the trailhead and were on our way!

Here are some of the sights…

In the 1870s, the Mayhew Lodge stood near what is now the paved road through Oak Creek Canyo0n; before that, there was probably a homestead. A small grove of apple trees survives from that time, as well as a few red-rock ruins. As usual, click on the images for larger, higher-definition views.

View of the creek from the bridge near the trailhead.

This, we’re told, was the lodge’s chicken coop. Up behind it is a cave that was used for storage.

From the outset, sandstone cliffs loom above you.

And loom…

And loom… Yes, that is actually the real color of the sky.

Here’s part of our merrie groupe. Check out the cute little dog: each of our guides owned one of these doughty miniature poodles, acquired at the same time from the same litter.  They make awesome hiking companions and are so delightful I’m thinking maybe a poodle would make a better roommate for The Queen of the Universe than another (difficult-to-find!) corgi.

The trail meanders up the canyon. We crossed the creek maybe a half-dozen times during our five-mile hike.

We paused to rest a few minutes on this sandstone bench.

Strange nest of a type of tent caterpillar. Weird, huh?

A rockfall dropped this truck-size boulder and a bunch of its companions across the path. Our guides could remember a time when this little fellow wasn’t there.

Some more debris from that rockfall.

More scenery…

Our guides are into geocaching. One of them climbed up here to retrieve a stash left by a previous visitor.

We stopped here for lunch or snacks. The little dogs had a grand time swimming in the creek here!

These lichens on the rock look like artwork…

Here’s the whole canvas!

More scenery.

After that stop, we headed back to the car, like so many horses trotting for the barn.

You know you’re there when you see those old, old apple trees again.

After the hike, we stopped in Sedona for lunch and drinks at Indian Gardens, a nifty restaurant and market in a historic building, said once to have housed a roadside gas station. It has a lovely big back patio where we could sit with the little pooches, enjoy some delicious sandwiches, and soak up a little tea…or, in my case, a Black Butte.

I’m ready to go again! One of the women on the hike, also a choir member, suggested she and I should get together for other trips. So it looks like we’ll be hiking companions. This could get to be a great deal of fun.