Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Crabby Gardening Lady

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Okay, stand back! I’m goin’ in!

Or off, actually. As in off the fu*kin’ wagon. There’s nothing like a nice cold bourbon and water to brighten your crabby day.

Actually, there’s nothing but bourbon and water, as I’ve unloaded all the wine and beer in the house on friends, by way of refraining from drinking it. I’m not all that nuts about bourbon, so I didn’t donate that to anyone’s cause when I went on the current wagon ride. But..well. One has to allow that bourbon does have its high points.

As it were.

For the past several weeks, I’ve thought the portulaca living in the hanging Mexican pots and growing in ground pots over by the west wall was being eaten by some kind of insect. What kind of insect escaped me, since as far as I know we don’t have anything around here just now that’s capable of stripping the leaves off a portulaca. And even if we did…hmmm…well, the leaves are laying on the ground, not occupying space in some bug’s innards.

Soo… I google “leaf drop portulaca” and discover lo! the main cause of leaf drop in elephant-food plants is overwatering.

Overwatering????? WTF? The watering schedule is exactly the same as it is every summer in these parts: 20 minutes a day, early in the morning, leaving about 14 or 16 hours of sunlight to dessicate the soil in those pots. If you don’t water a potted plant every day in these parts, it will croak over by nightfall. In the summertime, that is.

And summertime is what we’ve had, with a vengeance. It’s been hotter than the hubs of Hades for the past three months. It’s 100° out there, as we scribble. This morning when I took the dog out, humidity was 52%; now, at a little after noon, the air has dried out to a mere 22%, which isn’t quite what I’d call “a dry heat.” It’s particularly not “dry” when you need to work outside but you’re required to cover every square inch of your skin to keep from exposing any part of you to the sun.

That humidity isn’t so horribly high, but we’ve had very little rain. Effectively, “monsoon” season passed us over this year. It just didn’t happen. We got humid, stuffy, yucky, Georgia-summer air, that’s true. But precious little rain.

So I would’ve thought, if anything, that the problem was the plants were underwatered.

But now I think not: the pots’ soil is soggy. If it’s been that wet for the whole summer, well…yeah. The succulents could very well be drowning.

Meanwhile, the rest of the garden has been mightily neglected. The spider plants are dancing the hula in skirts of dead leaves. The calla lilies, also apparently overwatered, are curling up and dying. The bulb thingies Joan gave me are barely clinging to life. The citrus needs to be fertilized. My neighbor Terri’s accursed pepper tree has again seeded the yard, so half a dozen baby invaders need to be sprayed. One of the pots of chard croaked over in the summer heat: new seeds need to be tracked down and planted in that thing.

Ugh. How do I want to work in this heat? Let me count the ways…not…

That profound non-desire notwithstanding, I charged out and cut back dead stuff, cut back dead stuff, cut back more dead stuff. Transplanted one very sick-looking spider out of the pot it had outgrown into a much larger pot that had enough soil to accommodate it…noted that said plant, too, appears to have been overwatered. Dragged three bags of debris out to the garbage, along with two trashcans full of household garbage that was living (heh) in the garage.

Turned off the watering system. Made a calendar note to check soil moisture on Sunday and turn the water back on, as indicated. If indicated.

Having no potting soil, I was unable to transplant the suffering portulaca in the hanging pots. The next time I’m out running around — which will be tomorrow — I’ll stop by a nursery or Home Depot and buy a bag of dirt; then figure out what on earth to do with those things. While there, I’ll get a packet of chard seeds and drop them into the bereft chard pot.

Now we await the defrosting of the scallops, which we intend to stir-fry with garlic and pine nuts and serve up over some lovely chard  + spinach, possibly curried  (there’s not enough chard in that pot to supply a meal just now). Yes. Possibly curried, or possibly just smothered in Pomí tomatoes, which handsomely approximate a decent tomato sauce.

Wacka-Day…

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So the day started out looking like another long, lethargic loaf. Heh…Not so much. One wacky happening after another — on a low-key scale.

Dog-walk this morning: we encountered nine other pooches on our perambulation, not counting the several large dogs illegally allowed to run loose around the park. There were at least four of those, bringing the total to around thirteen. This is about par at that time of day: around 6 to 7 a.m. All of which is well and good, except it means I have to be on the alert to keep Ruby from lunging at any of them and triggering a reprisal sally. Nothing too wacky there, except for the sheer number of residents in this neighborhood who are out walking their dogs at dawn.

Two guys showed up at the door, wanting to trim the accursed palm trees. It’s been two years since I decided to belay trimming the filthy things. Every time the wind blows, they drop piles of debris onto the street, the alley, and the neighbors’ yards, which I then have to run out and pick up. And even when the air is still, they sprinkle tens of thousands of BB-like seeds that jam Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s innards and stop him dead.

Ordinarily I would ask Gerardo to do this job, and in fact this spring he and I have considered it, in a desultory way, but what with his wife’s illness and demise, needless to say he’s had his mind on other things.

So when these guys showed up and offered to do the job for $45 per tree, plus another chunk of dough to shave off the frond stems that cling to one of the four trunks, I thought…why not? And told them to PLEASE not drop the stuff in the pool.

Ohhh no, señora! No fronds in pool!

😀

Well, easier said than done. When I looked out there after they climbed down from the sky, they’d filled the pool with palm tree fronds and debris! What a mess!!

But…they managed to get all of the giant, wet, heavy leaves out, all of the sticks and floating crap, all of the dried out shreds of palm leaves. Piles of dirt and BBs and miscellaneous crap still lay on the bottom. So I got out the leaf bagger, screwed it on the hose, and started to vacuum the stuff up.

Well. Sr. Luis had never seen such a thing in his life, and he was delighted. Forthwith he took over the job, and before long the pool was spotless. He asked where I’d gotten it, and I referred him to the Home Depot. And I suggested that if he found clients who had these damn trees near the pool and offered to clean the pool after trimming the things, he could beat out the competition and also charge more.

And I paid him more than he asked, further flooring him. It still was well under $100 per tree, for a dangerous job that can best be described as horrendous. All told, each man earned about $100 apiece for three hours of hard physical work, by the time they bought gas to run their pickup and large trailer up the freeway to the county landfill and then paid the fees to use said landfill.

These guys are horribly underpaid to do a difficult and dangerous job. Every now and again one of them dies when a palm frond falls on him and he suffocates, or when he falls off three-story-high tree.

So there was that.

Then there was today’s saga of the shoes.

Our choir director asks us to wear closed-told black shoes to process up and down the aisles of the sanctuary. Sounds easy enough, eh?

I’m sure it is, if your feet don’t hurt all the time and if you don’t have to buy spectacularly overpriced European shoes so that you can walk without pain. Those shoes are usually sandals…with…yes: open toes.

Finally I decided that if that’s what he’s going to insist on, he’ll have to put up with Sanitas, since those are about the only closed-toed shoes I can manage without agony. But…the ones I have are about worn out. And to buy new ones, I have to drive to Tempe (40 minutes one way) and pay through the schnozzola for the things.

And so, away…to the Internet!

All the Amazon retailers are out of stock. But I found the Sanitas company itself! They also will ship your purchase to you. So I ordered a pair of black clogs, size 40.

Sanitas doesn’t seem to have the touch for overnight delivery that Amazon does. A week later, the shoes show up on the front porch. Eagerly I open the box and find…a pair of size 35 shoes!

Thank you so much, folks!

So I had to package these back up and schlep them through gawdawful afternoon traffic to the UPS store on the other side of the freeway, one bitch of a drive. Rush hour starts here at 3:00 p.m. Fortunately, they’d included a return label, so I didn’t have to pay to ship it back to them.

Homeward bound I remembered that I could cut through an industrial park to dodge some of the worst traffic on Conduit of Blight Blvd. So that was a small redeeming factor. Anyway.

After the sun went down, I dumped two gallons of liquid chlorine into the pool, which should help to beat back the algae deposited by the palm fronds and gunk.

And now, coming onto 9:00 p.m., a loud monsoon storm is blowing by to the south and east, with lots of lightning and wind.

A-n-n-n-d it’s beginning to rain. The dog and I have pulled the wicker chairs indoors (well: the human hauled; the dog oversaw), and now we’re going to crawl into the sack, before the power goes off.

Toooo late! Just as I was about to hit “PUBLISH” a bolt of lightning hit nearby. Knocked both computers down. Took 20 minutes to get the laptop back online, with a fair amount of data probably lost.

Oh, screw it! WHAT a day…

Saudi Arabia: SO glad to be gone…

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Back at the old homestead, I see, those who wish the Americans ill have bombed a refinery. Abqaiq. Oh, God: define Chez Pitts, and you’ve got it… We lived within driving distance of that garden spot, in another hole called Ras Tanura.

Rasty Nasty, as my father used to call it, was a port for oil tankers. At the time, the refinery was located there — I don’t know, really, whether there was also a refinery at Abqaiq…or what. At any rate, oil was loaded onto the tankers at Ras Tanura, and most of the Americans who lived there were refinery or port workers, plus a few support staff such as teachers, medical staff, and administrators.

Dhahran was largely occupied by administrative staff, plus there was an Air Force base there and also an airport for commercial traffic.

And Abqaiq, out in the most gawdawful desert you can imagine, was an oil field. Horrible places, each and every one.  At the time, Dhahran and Ras Tanura had gated residential communities for American families of company employees; these were isolated small towns, occupied exclusively by Americans, who were there on two-year contracts. The paterfamilias got a three-month leave every two years, for which the company would fly him and his family to New York, or, if preferred, to some European destination, and a two-week leave in the middle of the two-year contract, which most of us would spend in Bahrain or Beirut.

This kind of attack was exactly the kind of thing the company secretly expected, and for which it had plans. In the event of riots or revolution, American family members in Ras Tanura were to be loaded onto buses and driven to Dhahran, where magically we were to board airplanes and be flown out of the country.

Har har!

On the two-lane “highway” between Ras Tanura and Dhahran there was an oasis occupied by locals who were, shall we say, less than positive about Americans. Along that road, you could see a billboard that read, in Arabic, “Yankee Go Home.” A pipeline ran out of Abqaiq, which posed a chronic problem: it was always being cut or otherwise sabotaged by the locals.

My father, who was a harbor pilot at the Ras Tanura port, had been a merchant mariner for years before landing the highly paid job that took us to this garden spot. He made his own plans for us, in the case of unrest. We each — my mother, my father, and me — had a grab-and-go suitcase, always packed for a quick escape. (Mine contained my favorite stuffed animals.) Because of his long experience at sea, he knew most of the tanker captains well.

He had made arrangements with all of his tanker-commanding friends to take my mother and me on board should the need arise. We would be hidden until the ship could set to sea (which you may be sure would have been forthwith), and carried through the Persian Gulf, out the Strait of Hormuz, and thence to the Suez Canal. The company confiscated our passports when we arrived in-country, and so we would have no papers. We would have had to be taken someplace that had a US consulate to be let off the ship. Cairo, presumably?

My father had somehow smuggled a pistol into the country, which he hid somewhere in the house where even I couldn’t find it. (That was saying something: I could find almost anything in that place.) He planned to use it in the event riots got inside the camp.

But of course, when the time came…well…he wasn’t there. That night when rioters did almost break through the Main Gate, he and my mother were playing bridge at the home of another couple. My best friend Pamela was staying the night at our house. We slept through all the excitement, and neither we nor our parents had a clue until after the fact. Had the insurgents managed to get into camp, my father wouldn’t have had a chance to get back to the house to protect us, and of course we wouldn’t have had a chance to defend ourselves, either…because I had no idea where the gun was. Nor would I have known how to use it.

What a horrible place it was. Living there was like living in a remote small town in the Southwest — such as, say, Ajo — only with no access to a city, no escape from the social pressure-cooker, and little access to free news reporting. Summers were almost as hot as Arizona‘s, only it was not by any means a “dry heat.” When you would wake up in the morning, water would be dripping off the eaves and puddling on the ground — so humid was the air that once I was standing in the front yard when rain began to fall out of a clear blue sky.

At least the residents of Ajo are not universally hated by the locals — what few of them remain after our ancestors leveled the place. It’s hard to say that’s a “good” thing…but it’s one helluva lot better than having to live in fenced, guarded compounds.

Y’know, there are a lot of good reasons for America to reduce its dependence on oil. Climate change may be the foremost among them. But Saudi Arabia is a close second.

When they say “Empty Quarter,” they ain’t kidding. This is where we lived. For ten long years…

Any Bum in a Port…

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Or is that any port for a bum?

Lordie! Started the morning out with one of the ‘Hood’s signature Happenings.

Ruby and I headed out for the daily doggy-walk right at 5:30. We step forth through the side gate and lo! Out from the driveway of the house across the street comes this very shady-looking character. He has exactly zero business there, unless he had managed to get under the roof over their front-door entryway to get out of last night’s melodramatic storm. He has a backpack.

He sees me and says something to me — whatever he said was unintelligible at my distance from him — and then proceeds south on Tiny Lane, headed toward East-West Feeder Street. I don’t see the neighbors out there but can see a light on in their house. Our guy is wandering — not marching along but sniffing into one yard or another, roaming in a circle across the street, just…meandering.

It rained like Hell last night, first storm we’ve had up here all year long. Lightning like God wanted to disintegrate someone’s house. Thunder enough to raise the termites right out of the ground. I sure wouldn’t have wanted to spend that night in the rough. But he didn’t appear to be wet. Either he was able to keep some clothes dry inside his backpack, or he got into someone’s carport to stay out of the worst of the driving rain. Probably the latter: right around the corner, there’s a house with a large carport that, now that the owners have been shuffled off to an old-folkerie, stands empty. Great bum hotel! 😀

This guy has an invisible sign on his back reading BURGLAR SERVICES, CALL 1-800-999-1234. So, having once again forgotten to bring my cell, I turn around, grab a phone from indoors, and call 911. Go back outside to watch the guy’s progress.

While I’m talking to the dispatcher on the phone, the old gal comes outside. I ask if she’s OK, and she says they’re fine…she had no inkling that this guy was lurking in their yard. She says surely if he’d come very close to the door the dog would have barked. Well, they do have a dog, but he’s no yapper. He actually woofs quietly once or twice while we’re chatting and moving around the driveway, but he makes no fuss over my being on his property.

Their front entryway, thank goodness, has an iron gate across it, and it’s locked. I figure the guy was probably peering in their windows and maybe looking for a way to get in, but had decided to move along right about when Ruby and I came out our door.

Dispatcher gets off the phone. Neighbor goes back in her house. Ruby and I go on our way.

Two miles of doggywalking and a good 45 minutes later, we’re just coming up Tiny Lane headed back to the house, and lo! a police SUV cruises by. Floats around the corner and parks in front of the Funny Farm. We hurry to catch up with them.

They want to hear all about it, and apologize for the length of time it took to respond: their station is way to hell and gone off on the northeast side! Forgodsake, no wonder the cops never get here during the same lifetime when you call them.

(This, BTW, is why you’re taking our pistols and our German shepherds out of our cold, dead hands…)

I repeat everything I told the dispatcher to the two officers. They’re very nice. Shortly, they head over to the neighbors’ to ask them if they’re OK. They said they’d perform a “wellness check” and be sure none of the windows or doors had been tampered with.

Guy was probably harmless. Most of the homeless mentally ill drug addicts around here are harmless. But you never know. They’re sometimes very high on some very dangerous drugs. They might be fine when their voices are quiet and they’re sober, but…yeah. You never know with these guys. And this one was not acting even faintly straight.

Humid? Hot? Holeeeeee sheee-ut! It was a little cooler, at 5:30 this morning, than it has been. But the air was soggy. One of the humans owned by Sammy the Pound Puppy said the humidity was 64%. That sounds about right.

Normally, monsoon starts along about the end of July or the first part of August. But we haven’t had any rain all summer. This is the first noticeable storm in our parts — “our parts” being in the rain shadow of what Sonoran desert dwellers think of as (heh!) a mountain. If you’re a normal human, you’d call it a “hill”…but whatever it is, the thing is big enough to block most of the rainfall that threatens the ‘Hood’s  microclimate.

It’s a chilly 102° right now, along about noon.  There’s a slight chance of rain in the forecast for this afternoon, but those of us who know how to read an Arizona sky would say “not so much…” Saturday night we have about a 39% chance of rain, so they say, and Sunday night a much more promising 61%. Next week, predictions suggest more normal monsoon action, with a pretty fair chance of precip every evening through September 7.

 

Lost in Dystopia???

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Okay, I’ve either come unstuck in time or I’ve come unstuck in space. Or from reality. Quite possibly, in reality we live in some imagined dystopia, more horrible than Aldous Huxley or George Orwell or even Mitch McConnell could dream up for us.

The morning started with an unplanned appointment. I’d left despairing word on the voicemail of the supposed Stupendous Pool Dude favored by WonderAccountant and Mr. WonderAccountant. SPD only noticed my plaintive cry for help along about 6 this morning. He called to reply while I was in the backyard wrestling (again…still) with the damned pool and thinking it’s time to seriously consider filling the thing in and replacing it with a nice, big shade tree.

I call him back and he says “I’m on my way.” And he shows up here at 7 a.m.

Most of what he had to say was nothing new. Nevertheless, taken together his advice may prove helpful. One can always hope…

After much testing, discussing, and thinking, the old fella (he IS an old fella! been doing this for a LONG time) opined as follows:

  • The pool renovation dudes had indeed applied a stabilizer when they refilled the pool; the CYA levels are good.
  • Nevertheless, the pH is out of whack (no shit, Jose?)
  • This was likely caused by the use of granulated chlorine, which is highly acetic. Use that only to shock-treat, not for day-to-day chlorination.
  • Running the pool cleaner off the skimmer inlet rather than through the new port in the side of the pool is problematic; it dampens the speed with which the water can be recirculated, plus he truly hates it that the thing pulls debris into the pump-pot strainer basket.
  • Better circulation can be acquired by setting the thing to pull water through the main drain, which will move the water faster and should help to filter out the haze-making stuff, which he suspects is bacterial rather than algal.
  • The chlorine was just OK as of 7 a.m., but that was only because a half-hour earlier I’d poured in my last half-gallon of liquid chlorine.
  • Harvey might work better with a shorter length of hosing…

He sprinkled in another four or five pounds of soda ash. This brought the pH level up into the “ideal” range, and he said to keep applying liquid Cl a couple times a day. (So that means, oh hooray, I get to traipse to Home Depot between the lunch-time confab with VickyC and her collaborator in the nonprofit biz and the 4:00 p.m. spree with WonderAccountant that I’m committed to. Wheee!)

Shovel him out the door. Write a list of the 87 gerjillion things I have to do between the 11 a.m. meeting and the 4 p.m. meeting. Fly around trying to clean up, paint the face, disguise the hair, and throw on some socially acceptable clothing. Shoot out the door just in time to get to Windsor on Central, the designated restaurant meeting place.

I’m the first to arrive, a bit before the appointed hour. Get a booth. Order up some iced tea. Peruse the menu.

This is a trendy restaurant with trendy prices.

  • Soup: $4 for a measly cup; $7 for a bowl
  • Salads: $11 – $11.50
  • Sandwiches and hamburgers: $13 to $15.50
  • Hors d’oeuvres (called “starters” because apparently younger restauranteurs and their customers can neither spell nor pronounce the actual word): $11 – $15
  • Full meals: $15 to $19.75

Plus tax. Plus tip.

Yeah. Don’t s’ppose they have a side of onion rings? No. Of course not. 😀

So I figure I’ll have a $7 (plus tax, plus tip) bowl of soup for lunch. And I wait for the others to show up.

And wait. And wait. And wait…

By about the third wait, my ears are hurting seriously. WHAT is with the current fad for blasting restaurant patrons with loud, nerve-jangling, conversation-negating noise? Wherever you go these days, you get blasted with some excruciating excuse for music, which usually entails one or more performers screaming. And why do people persist in going to restaurants whose proprietors bombard them with ear-splitting, unpleasant noise? And who persuaded otherwise sane businessmen and women that this racket is music? Or Muzak?

It’s not just loud and unharmonic and ugly. It’s gutter “music.” It’s some guy  shouting about his cocaine use to a gut-banging background thump.

Dude! I don’t care about your cocaine habit! And I especially don’t care to have it shoved in my face while I’m trying to eat my $7 bowl of soup or my $20 hamburger.

Fifteen or twenty minutes into the wait, I can stand it no longer. I get up and leave.

Is it because I am old, I wonder? Do I think rap is ugly, is not music, is antithetical to a decent (expensive!) meal because I am old, passé, and out of it? Really?

What was trendy when we were pups? Northern Italian. For sure. Nothing would do but veal scallopini. Food was about the same: trendily stylish. Tasted about the same as the stuff you get now: restaurant food has always tasted pretty uniformly the same from one establishment to the next. That has not changed.

So what was the difference? Ambience-wise: instead of annoying loud music, you got annoying echoes rattling around a hard-surfaced cave-like interior. And yes, that racket tended to drown out conversation, too. Food-wise: though it was largely supplemented by pasta, most of the cuisine did not appear to have come out of a box, a can, or a bag.

My parents would have been capable of enjoying a Northern Italian-style restaurant of the early 1970s, even though they wouldn’t have appreciated the echo effect. It would, however, not have been their preference.

What was trendy when they were pups? Red velvet wallpaper with mahogany trim. White tablecloths. Muted lighting. And beef. A lot of beef. Roast beef. Grilled steaks of various grades. Stewed beef. Casseroled beef. Beef chili. A fair amount of potatoes accompanied these fine dishes. And coffee: they drank coffee with dinner instead of wine.

After what I felt was altogether too long a wait for my mysteriously absent friends, I concluded that…

  • I had the wrong day…
  • Or I had the wrong time…
  • Or I had the wrong place…

And I certainly had the wrong purveyor of Muzak. Out the door, into the accursed Venza, and down the road with me!

From there it was up to Home Depot, there to purchase eight gallons of liquid chlorine, which should tide the pool over for something like four to six days. Grabbed a few sundries, shot out the door, stopped by the Walmart long enough to grab a bag of bird seed to tide the doves over until 40 pounds of seed arrive from Amazon. Sailed home.

Dumped another half-gallon of the chlorine into the pool. Observed that it still looked very hazy.

Poured a bourbon and water. Threw a mahi steak on the grill along with an ear of sweet corn. Consumed this with half an avocado, a handful of campari tomatoes, and a glass of wine.

Another couple of hours have passed. The pool looks like it’s beginning to clear. The heat is weirdly miserable, inexplicably: it’s only 109 out there, which is just not all that hot. But for some reason it feels almost as excruciating as cocaine-obsessed rap.

Now I have about 15 minutes before I have to get dressed again, this time to visit a favorite hangout with WonderAccountant, where we are determined to cool off with Margaritas, guacamole, and chips.

Never more well-deserved.

 

Prioritize the Freakin’ Priorities!

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It is SOOOO hot that it is physically impossible for Person nor Beast to get anything done. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it.

Actually, no: I’m determined to come unstuck.

The past few weeks have put me into a kind of coma. I get up, walk the dog, feed the dog, fart (interminably!) with the pool, then plop down in front of the computer and…and…yeah: sit there. Allll day long. Reading the news. Corresponding with friends. Reading the news some more. Reading those links that Google sticks in the pages upon which it forces you to rest when you enter a search. Writing a blog post (which is akin to writing a diary entry). Posting it to Facebook. Cruising Facebook interminably. Playing Internet games. Reading the news some more. Playing some Internet games some more. Fighting with the hazy swimming pool some more. Writing a Quora post or two. Driving to the grocery store or some odious appointment when forced to it. Fight with the pool again. Playing Internet games some more, again….and so on until around 6 p.m., when it’s time to feed the dog again, wrestle with the pool again, and waste some more time watching PBS news.

In short: I get exactly NOTHING done.

So…something’s gotta happen here. Decided it should be A Schedule: Set aside specific periods of time in which to do things. Write Ella’s Story, which I dropped and forgot about as I sank to the bottom of Lake Comatose. Post Fire-Rider segments, which also have languished. (Interestingly, revenues from Amazon have risen, suggesting the idea of posting freebie chapters from the various books actually does boost sales.)

And today I did, somehow, manage to drag myself around to preparing, finding images for, and posting Part VI of Fire-Rider and then posting links on Facebook and Twaddle.

Sounds great, eh?

Except that already tomorrow a fly will drop into that ointment: Not one but two workmen are slated to show up between 10 and noon. If one of them doesn’t soak up the entire day, the other will. Together they’re guaranteed to put the eefus on the “hour-a-day” scheme.

The pool is still foggy. A little better than it was this morning, but still a disaster area. I figured out it has something to do with the filter, which is operating in a suspicious manner.

The hand lesion that was found to be on the verge of flipping over into a squamous cell carcinoma is not healing. It hurts. It itches. And this morning I find a white spot — a very itchy white spot — right at the location of the original white nasty itchy actinic keratosis that send me to the dermatologist in the first place. And it’s growing. Growing very fast.

So, come Monday I’ll have to traipse halfway to Yuma AGAIN — just the drive there and back consumes almost two hours. This thing is going to have to be removed surgically…I can feel that in my bones. And how many gerzillions of hours will that consume? Don’t even bother to try to estimate.

Tomorrow morning will be consumed with trying to explain to the pool guy what has been going on — complete with photos — and, probably at the same time,. trying to explain to the Cox dude what the goddamn VoiP modem they stuck on my computer did yesterday, dragging me offline in the middle of an Amazon movie.

In the meantime, here’s something you can do for pore, pore pitiful me… 😀

This post at Quora is racking up more “likes” than any squib I’ve ever stuck up there. How’s about you visit that link, enjoy the anecdote (true story! 100 percent!), and if you so choose, click “like” at the bottom of the post? The thing is inching toward 1,000 likes…and I would get quite a kick out of it if it actually did reach that coveted goal. Share it on Facebook and Twitter and whatever other platform you haunt.

In the time-wasting preoccupation department, how cool would it BE to rack up 1.000 votes for that post?

Moving on: after about three hours of sleep last night, I cannot hold my eyes open even though the sun has yet to slide beneath the humid, hot horizon. And so…away….