Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

The Comeback Kid?

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Amazingly, despite yesterday’s miseries (and my dire expectation of three to four weeks of Fun with Influenza), today the body decided to make a little comeback. Yesterday, apparently having picked up a case of the flu at the Mayo’s ER a couple of nights earlier, I was classically miserable: fever, sore throat, splitting headache, aches & pains all over the bod’. I had to cut choir practice, and I really was thinking oohhh shit! here it comes!

Normally it takes me weeks — even months — to get over a case of the flu. One curious doctor did a series of blood tests on me some years ago, which revealed that I have some small genetic flaw in my immune system that indeed does make me more susceptible to these damn viruses than most people and makes it harder to get over them. For that reason, I try to stay out of public places when they’re really crowded (Costco at Christmastime, heaven help us!) and also do not take communion because I will not share wine out of a communal cup, and no, I don’t care that someone thinks having the cup made of gold magically disinfects the rim on which the members of the congregation have rested their lips. These strategies usually fend off disease…but not so much when you spend six hours in an emergency room while the current strain of influenza is “widespread” in your parts.

Last night I managed to steal a few hours of sleep, and this morning the fever was down to a balmy 99. Still high, considering that “normal” for me is around 98 or even lower. But a helluva lot better than 100º+. The sore throat: better (still there, but at least I can swallow now). The headache: still there, but not racking.

It’s a miracle.

Seriously: you have no idea how long these damn things can hang on with me. And to complicate matters, allergies to aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen mean I can’t even wangle a little symptomatic relief. A noticeable improvement after just a couple of days is a real surprise. The only explanation I can think of is that the flu shot I had a week or ten days ago must have just started to kick in and so somehow is helping the bod’ to beat off the bug.

So now, for the first time in several days, I was hungry. And there was exactly NO food in the house. What I wanted was some of that decently prepared soup that comes in boxes, under the brand names “Pacific” and “Imagine.” These are carried at Sprouts. And conveniently, there’s a Sprouts right down the road from the Funny Farm. There’s also a Walgreen’s in that shopping center — I needed a new bottle of nose squirt, so figured to pick one up there.

Heh.

You have to understand, though…the “road” is Conduit of Blight Boulevard. And the environs that fine avenue skirts have their eccentricities.

First, into the Walgreen’s.

Oh, God! You can not go into that store without some strange new experience.

First off, I couldn’t find the damn Afrin (and associated knock-offs). Nor can I find a roaming employee except for this strange guy who is moving goods around with a freight cart and making WEIRD noises. At the top of his lungs: OH! OW! OOFFF! and on and on. He appears to be mentally challenged. Nice of Walgreen’s to give him a job, but not very helpful for the customer.

I traipse to the pharmacy counter to ask where the hell the nose squirt is. Get behind a woman who is receiving zero satisfaction and is told to come back some other time. This, it develops, is because they only have one employee back there. Guess their other staff are all out with the flu. I think fuck it! and decide I’ll have to go across the street to the Albertson’s to find the nostrum, another of the Hood’s gracious landmarks. Please, please, please waste some more of my time!

But on the way out I take another look in the stuffy-nose section and discover they’ve put the decongestant sprays all the way down on the very bottom shelf. Well, that’s good…at least I don’t have to traipse across the damn train tracks (sitting through at least one and probably two interminable red lights). Buy this and then walk over to the Sprouts.

Incredibly, the store is now not stocking even ONE actual soup by Pacific or Imagine! No joke! They have a pile of boxed chicken broth and boxed beef broth, but that is not what I want. I need a hearty soup that is going to give me some nourishment without making me sick(er).

Fu*k!!!!!!!

Defies belief.

So I get in the car and drive all the way down to the fancy new Sprouts at Osborn and Seventh Ave, now the heart of Millennial Country. Yes. There I find the actual soups for which Sprouts is famed. Grab an armload of these: potato leek, tomato (creamy!!), and butternut squash. While there I find a package of frozen warm-it-up in minutes mussels in tomato sauce. Hot damn! That, I’m going to eat whenever I finish this blog post.

So when I get up to the checkout, I ask the guy — who is, by the way a retired professor funding his cruise travels with part-time cashiering, and quite a kick — why on earth they’ve taken these soups out of the market in the ‘Hood. Poor people eat soup, too, y’know! This gets their attention.

They have to allow that they don’t know the answer to this conundrum, but yes, it probably does have to do with the demographics. (Let’s whack’em while they’re down!)

A fairly entertaining exchange with the two idle check-out clerks and a wandering manager now takes place. The professor and the other check-out clerk, a mature black woman, slender and sharp-looking, are both old-time Phoenicians. When I remark that the ex- and I were part of the first wave of gentrification in the Encanto district, a great flurry of reminiscence ensues.

“Do you remember the Basha’s that used to be in this parking lot?”

“Yes, and the Osco drugstore that went out of business and just sat there empty for years?”

“Did you ever go to the China Doll, right next door?”

The woman told me, to my astonishment, that she and her family used to live in the apartments that once were behind the present fancified shopping center. But for the longest time, she said, black people weren’t allowed to live there.

I said, “You’re kidding!” I knew there was a lot of discrimination — Arizona is fundamentally a Southern state, politically and culturally. But you can’t live in Central Phoenix? It wasn’t exactly Whiteyville at the time.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s true.”

“When was this?”

“It was in the late 50s and early 60s.”

“Wow! That pre-dates my time. If that had been going on when all the Yuppies were moving into Encanto, there would have been riots in the streets.”

She laughed.

So now I make my way home, circumventing the accursed goddamn train tracks, backtracking to Feeder Street Northwest (which actually is a minor main drag that goes all the way down to the capitol area), then back-backtracking to the speedier 7th Avenue once I reach a road that moves smoothly east and west. Ugh.

And fall into the sack, having no energy to heat any of the fine delicacies in hand.

What a place we live in. And have lived in…

Tornadoes Outside, Whirlwind Inside

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LOL! Hilariously, every time it rains here, the news media — whose employees are perennially bored witless — regale us with tales of tornadoes, monsoons, and menacing floods that would put Noah’s Ark to shame. They’re having a great time just now: a tropical storm has blown up from the Sea of Cortez, and everyone’s in a great uproar. Oh, the horror! Oh, the terror! Omigod, it’s a tornado!

Well, no it’s not: it’s a whirlwind that picked up a lot of dry dirt. We call those “dust devils” in these parts.

As for the terror and the horror: well, yeah…the level of stupidity that holds forth among Arizona drivers is terrible and horrible. They drive into flooded washes, and then they’re astonished to find that a car will stop running when it’s up to its carburetor in muddy water. 😀

This morning when it came time for our dawn walk, huge pregnant clouds were floating overhead, and the richly humid air felt thick as cake batter. Ruby the Corgi and I decided to risk it, though: we set out for a mile-long hike with an umbrella in hand. But nay…we never needed to open the thing.

Shortly after we got back to the house, though, water coalesced out of the atmosphere in a brief, stiff downpour, huge drops falling straight down. No wind to speak of. No lightning, no thunder.

Ruby is not fazed by wind and rain, though she could do without bright flashes of celestial light and ear-splitting thunder. Just now, though, she is terrorized by an indoor whirlwind: this little dog hates, loathes, and despises the vacuum cleaner. Luz the Wonder-Cleaning Lady is here, forcing the vacuum to suck up every micron of dust off the floors. Ruby’s pet human, on the other hand, is most grateful to have someone else doing that job, and doing it exceptionally well.

After the Dog and the Human returned from journeying around the neighborhood — delightfully, the threat of rain chased most of the dog-lovers indoors, so we encountered just three other dogs, two of them on a single lead — the Human took it upon itself to shovel out four of the five office file drawers that have become overgrown with weeds. The sheer amount of paper that pours into this house — most of it generated by Medigap, Medicare, and assorted financial institutions — truly defies belief. So much of it piles in that it induces a kind of paralysis, so that after awhile you end up with mounds of paper stacked atop every table.

My active file drawers had grown pretty unintelligible. Cleaning out and organizing those things was an all-morning challenge…not to say “aggravation.” However, a strategy for simplifying the tasks of filing and finding occurred to me: Once the files are cleaned out and reorganized, create an index for them.

Duh! How obvious is this?

So now I have four tables generated in Word — one for each drawer — that show where each set of file folders resides and how the things are organized. I’m going to print out these little guides and drop them in the desk, where they can easily be found…et voilà! No more searching for paper stashed…where?

Or at least, with any luck, a whole lot less searching.

This little project entailed hauling out pounds and pounds of paper to the long-term storage file cabinet in the garage. One of the disadvantages of self-employment is that you have to save every piece of business-related paper until after the fall of American civilization. This accrues a phenomenal amount of debris. So much, in fact, that the big four-drawer cabinet in the garage is now chuckablock full. No way can I squeeze so much as one more sheet of paper in there. If this paper-storing enterprise is to continue, next year I’ll have to start stashing the stuff in cardboard boxes and storing those in the garage cabinets. Like I’ve got lots of room in the cabinetry to waste on paper.

Welp, here comes another downpour, this time accompanied by a little lightning and thunder. A little…close-by lightning! Since we’ll likely soon lose the power, time to post this thing and begone.

 

 

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.