Coffee heat rising

Life in the Desert

Life on the Phoenix Roads…

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If you read this blog often, you know how much I /s LOVE /s driving in Phoenix. Our drivers make California drivers seem eminently sane, drug-free, and thoughtful of their fellow beings.

Today I drove out to ever-fascinating Sun City to socialize with SDXB, visit a large Asian market on that side of town, and then have a very nice dinner at his house. Then it was time to drive back into beautiful uptown Phoenix.

Earlier in the day, we had ascertained that I should, at all costs, avoid driving back toward the Loop 101 freeway on Bell Road, one of the mainest drags leading in and out of Sun City. Bell, an eight-lane thoroughfare, cannot handle the volume of Christmas shoppers pouring in from the west side to the Arrowhead Mall shopping center, and so eastbound it was dead stopped. He urged me to head homeward via Union Hills, the last surface street south of the 101 to intersect with the western north-south stretch.

No problem maneuvering through Sun City’s winding streets to Union Hills and thence onto the 101.

So now…I’m flying east across the 101 behind some air-conditioning company’s service truck, whose driver leads the way with confidence and apparent derring-do. Well… Until he gets a bit confused.

He wants to go south on the I-17. But like any normal human being, he’s buffaloed by the signage and the spaghetti strands, so starts to turn off on 35th Avenue. But then it dawns on him: DAYUM! NOT HERE!! 

So of course he veers across the painted lane triangle and plunges back into the traffic.

You expected common sense?

So, no doubt, did he, that small lapse aside. But forthwith he runs into AIRBORNE DEBRIS, flying junk that whacks his windshield and bounces around in the breeze.

WTF?

Now he and I sail past some woman who’d been traveling in front of him, driving an agèd white sedan. This character slows a bit, as she & her passenger are dumping stuff out of the car onto the freeway. She swerves onto the shoulder and the woman passenger opens the passenger side door — with the vehicle still moving — and briskly shakes out a blanket, discharging even more trash into the air and onto the road.

W, indeed, TF…

The AC dude and I jet past her, unscathed. At least my car is unscathed…don’t know if any of the junk hit his truck and if it did, whether it chipped or dented anything.

You know my theory about Arizona drivers, right?

Hypothesis A: Every moron in the world has an electronic chip implanted in their brain. This chip is linked to my car, which sends out a signal every time I climb into the driver’s seat and turn on the ignition. Alerted by this signal, all of the morons drop what they’re doing, leap into their cars, shoot onto the road, and get in front of me.

Well, I’ve refined that theory, which has as its drawback the logical outcome that no one else on the road, other than me, would ever encounter a moron. As we know, everyone on the roads here encounters morons. Alllllll the time.

So. with that evidence in hand, we have:

Hypothesis B: At any given time, one in ten of your fellow drivers on the Arizona roads is a moron. That means one of every 10 cars coming toward you and one of every 10 cars sharing the lanes on your side of the road is, indeed, a certifiable moron.

Hypothesis B has a number of advantages over Hypothesis A. First and most obviously, it explains the presence of morons in the company of all drivers here, not just me. While you could explain that by noting that the morons have to pass over the streets in order to reach me, thereby encountering quite a few other drivers upon their appointed journey, if all the morons were activated by the chips in their brain and those chips were signaled by only one transmitter in my car, the roads closer to my starting point would have more morons than the roads further away, because the morons would converge on the source of the signal. Also the morons would be on the road only when I am, which does not, empirically speaking, appear to be the case.

Hypotheses B explains the homogeneity of the moron presence in the traffic and shows how the morons are able to affect all reasonable drivers, not just one.

Less paranoid, too, Hypothesis B is…

Map from Wikipedia. By Algorerhythms – self-made, using data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5816748

Comes the Deluge…

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Wow! What a fantastic day!

It’s been raining since about 8:30 this morning. Temps in the 70s. Naturally, I’d put off driving up to 2nd Opinion Vet’s office to pick up the doxycycline she wants to inflict on poor old Cassie’s urinary tract infection. So I had to shoot up there under darkening skies. Darted in, grabbed the pills, ran back out, jumped in the car…and the skies opened!

Along came a downpour like the great old rainstorms we used to get back in the day, before Arizona was destroyed by development and too damn many people, parking lots, buildings, and machines. Yeah: the kind of rain where you can barely make out the road in front of you. 🙂

Without the fiberglass cover over the back porch, rain sluices right down onto the pavement, which tends to turn into a lake. But interestingly, despite a LOT of rainfall, water did not come up to the back doors’ threshholds. Apparently when the cover was there, it channeled so much water to the rocks off the back patio (submerged in this picture) that the French well and rock “river” couldn’t handle it. If the amount that fell today couldn’t flood that patio up to the level of the back door, presumably the back door and slider are pretty safe from water damage.

Got home without incident, mostly because there weren’t many people on the road early on a Saturday morning. It’s now 3:30 and the rain has just let up. The local play-nooz is reporting that October is now the 2nd wettest month on record (right! I’ll believe that when pigs fly). Whatever: the pool is now filled to the coping. Another few inches of rain and it will overflow. I probably need to open the valve on the filter to let some of that water out, but truth to tell, I have no idea what will happen when I do. So…discretion being the better part…

How do you like this little toadstool that popped up in the rain? Cute little guy, ain’t he?

Finished another two sections of the present client’s annual promotion & tenure paperwork. Ohhh dear God, am I ever glad not to be in the academy anymore! Crazy-making. And this woman: she’s like some sort of nuclear engine. A real powerhouse! When you look at what she’s been doing, you wonder when she has time to breathe at all, much less have a life.

Cassie is enjoying doggy moments when she seems MUCH better. This morning she was just about back to her old bright-eyed, yappy self. Never thought a dog’s barking would be a welcome sound! She does have her ups and downs, though. Right now she’s doping off on the bed again. The vet said the doxycycline could have some unpleasant side effects, but so far…so good. But of course, she’s only swallowed one of them.

She’s still unduly thirsty and still peeing gallons, but no longer on the floor. She can make it outside, and she doesn’t have to pee every 20 minutes. Thirst and frequent, copious urination are symptoms of Cushing’s disease — i.e., something wrong with the adrenal glands. BUT…they’re also side effects of Benadryl, with which I’ve been dosing her copiously. It seems to have helped the cough significantly, although the cough and wheeze have not gone completely away. And they’re side effects of prednisone, of which I suspect she was given too much. She’s much better…but lifting her off the bed presents a problem in the breathing department: the weight of her chest on my arms as I lift her down apparently sets off a coughing/wheezing spree. So…yeah…there’s something wrong there.

Coughing, though, seems not to be a sign of Cushing’s. We shall find out, sooner or later.

2nd Opinion Vet made a few remarks that were unwittingly revealing… She said that one of those ultrasound scans costs $450 to $500 — this was said in the context of her mild surprise when I said I couldn’t afford to spend vast amounts of money trying to keep a 12- or 13-year-old dog alive. When I told her that MarvelVet had comped the ultrasound, she was startled.

Now, he may have done that out of the Goodness of His Heart. He is a very nice man, after all. So it seems. But…I’ve begun to suspect that he thinks he misdiagnosed the supposed Valley Fever and in doing so gave her two drugs that he shouldn’t have given her. Either one would have made her very sick. The fluconazole, as we’ve seen, damn near killed her. The Temaril-P probably was responsible for the incontinence, explaining why that phenomenon is going away now that the Temaril has about worn off. He probably figures he practiced mal, and he’d better find some way to make up for it. Or to cover it with a convenient other ailment.

And lo! there is an other ailment, all right: 2nd Opinion Vet finally got a copy of the ultrasound — days after requesting it — and she said there indeed is a mass on one of the adrenal glands, but it’s impossible to tell what kind of mass it is. She uses the term “Cushing tumor,” which doesn’t seem to be standard — at least, I’m not finding it. At any rate, there’s a 50/50 chance the tumor is benign. The only way you can know is to take it out and biopsy it.

I can’t afford $1000 to operate on a dog that’s this close to the end of her normal life span. That sounds awfully cold…but it’s a fact of life. I don’t have thousands and thousands of dollars to spend on a pet…and if that’s what’s involved in taking in a pet, then obviously I can’t afford to have a pet.

A urinary tract infection is among several signs of Cushing’s disease, the effect of a tumor on an adrenal gland, and so if the tumor is non-benign,  she may  never go back to normal. But…it’s worth knowing that Cushing’s can also be caused by over-administration of steroids — of which prednisone is one. And we did give her two rounds of that stuff. Often iatrogenic Cushing’s clears up after you quit dosing the dog…although the stuff can do permanent damage. Gee, doc…thank you so much for telling me that [not!]. Do I have to look up every goddamn thing for myself?

2OV was also startled when I told her MarvelVet said her UTI was so minor as to be insignificant and did not need treatment. She said the numbers were about as high as they can get. Which would explain why the poor dog was peeing out undiluted blood. I gave the stuff to Ruby, who came to me from the breeder with a UTI, and she had no problem. This dog is agèd and has been very sick, indeed, and so we could see some side effects. But we won’t know until we try it. If it works, though, she may be OK. Also, if the cough is from a bacterial infection, the doxycycline may help with that. Which brings us to another gripe: MarvelVet has not sent the purported X-ray of Cassie’s lungs and heart to 2OV…hmmm…. Was there even a real X-ray, or did he show me some other dog’s X-ray to scare me into paying for expensive treatment for Valley fever?

2OV did not say so but she sounded a little nonplussed by MarvelVet’s prognosis that the dog will live about 3 months if left untreated.

Arrrghhh! I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West to be so skeptical about all this. But my own Adventures in Medical Science — to say nothing of past Adventures in Veterinary Science — incline me that way. I just have the worst feeling that this thing is not only a tempest in a teapot, it’s a fraudulent tempest….

Meanwhile, speaking of Adventures in M.S., I’m not yet very alarmed about the alleged skin cancer thing. In the first place, we don’t know that it is skin cancer. Young Doctor Kildare a) is not a dermatologist and b) is a D.O., not an M.D. Although osteopaths are licensed to practice medicine in this state, a D.O. from Midwestern University is not the same as an M.D. from Johns Hopkins or some such. YDK’s sterling quality is COMMON SENSE. And we see this characteristic here: Duh! Send this woman off to a dermatologist.

Hmmm…and lookee here: the lady is not just an M.D., she’s listed in U.S. News and World Report!

I haven’t been able to get in to a dermatologist for years. They’re all backed up for six months or more — literally, you can NOT get an appointment. So YDK’s having shoved me in to see this woman — in three days flat — is quite a little feat. And a relationship with her will be valuable for me, because when you live in Arizona you really should go to a dermatologist about once every year or two and have all the colorful growths that sprout inspected. Just about everybody who lives here permanently eventually gets some kind of skin thing.

Seventy-one degrees and a rainbow over the ’hood!

Eight Dogs and a Bird

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Make that eleven dogs: add in Cassie, Ruby, and Charley.

This morning I needed to make a Walmart run fairly early in the day, so as to buy another package of giant pee pads with which to protect my floors from Cassie’s incontinence. In fact, she’s getting a lot better. But not having to mop up great Salton Seas of urine and then disinfect the lake beds made such a difference in the human’s misery quotient that I determined not to run out of the things.

Charley, who’s visiting while M’hijito junkets in Colorado, also tends to defile the floor…but not with pee…

Leaving them here unobserved so soon after feeding time was ill advised. So I did something even more ill advised: decided to leave the back door hanging open while I was out, so they could come and go as nature called.

It was, after all, pouring rain. Not likely any burglars would be working in that deluge. If they were, they would earn whatever they stole. 😀

So yeah. No burglars came visiting, but another intruder moved in: a hummingbird flew in the back door. Once in the house, he flew up into the kitchen skylight, where he became hopelessly, despairingly confused. He could see the sky through the cloudy glass, and of course, being a bird he figured that WAS the sky. But being a bird, he could neither figure out why he couldn’t get through it nor figure out that he needed to go DOWN, not up, to get out of his trap.

This is the second time such a thing happened. Last time, some years ago, I called Liberty Wildlife. The volunteer I reached this morning was dubious. In the pouring rain, all their distressed-critter rescuers were hunkered down, and believe me: NONE of them wanted to venture into the downpour.  Quite reasonably so.

He asked me to call back after 11, when a different volunteer would be on duty and more folks might be available to call on.

Right.

So I called several other rescue organizations, some of which could not be reached at all, some of which had endless yakathon/ear-splitting Muzak phone trees (how i HATE those things!) that were so discouraging that after five or ten minutes I’d hang up, some of which just didn’t answer at all.  Game and Fish greeted me with the familiar electronic run-around. Called the Fire Department’s non-emergency line. They suggested Game and Fish. I said I thought not. So they suggested the Humane Society. The Humane Society’s aggravating yakathon said they’d answer the phone in about ten minutes and then blasted an even MORE infuriating loud fake music at me. I couldn’t turn the sound down on the phone-set low enough to make it less distracting or less infuriating. Finally I realized that the Humane Society is less than ten minutes away from me. So jumped in the car and drove up there, where I found a roomful of live human beings. They suggested Game and Fish. 😀

Back at the Funny Farm, I called Liberty Wildlife again. The new wrangler on duty said they really weren’t supposed to rescue birds that weren’t large enough to harm a person.

Heh. Do you suppose I could persuade them that the hummer was trying to poke my eyes out with its long spear-like bill?

She agreed to call some volunteers, having identified the person she thought was closest to the Funny Farm. But she wasn’t sure she could round him up.

So that was pretty discouraging. I figured I’d just have to wait until the little bird became exhausted and dehydrated enough to fall to the floor, at which point it would die.

But no! Not too much later, along comes a phone call from a man who says he’ll be right over!He lives in the mid-town area, and seemed not to be fazed at the prospect of driving through the rain to rescue a hummingbird from a strange woman’s house.

LOL! Liberty Wildlife has come through!

He arrives at the door. Cassie, Ruby, and Charley, all three of ’em, fly into an ecstasy of Dog Joy upon greeting the guy. They clearly think this is the single best human they have ever seen on this planet, bar none. He introduces himself as Chris. The dogs apparently interpret that as “Christ”: they are now in full-out worship mode.

Chris says he loves dogs. He and his wife have eight of them, several of which are rescues. I say I found Cassie at the dog pound, where she’d been relegated because she barks. He agreed that barking was surely a unique trait for a dog…

I’ve already hauled the ladder in and wiped it dry. Takes Chris about thirty seconds to snab the hummer in one of those nets you use to lift fish out of water. I make a mental note to get one of those next time I’m near the sporting goods store. Bird delivered to the Great Outdoors, it takes off like a feathered rocket, chirping furiously.

So that was good. Sent them a little donation as a token of appreciation.

That and the fact that Cassie is getting much, much better were the only decent things that happened today, a true, certifiable Day from Hell.

The Pre-Dawn Doggy Walk

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Having rolled out of the sack somewhat before five, the dogs and I were on the road as the minute hand hit 12. (Remember those? Yes, my house still has clocks with hour and minute hands!) It was dark out yet. The sky began to pale a bit as we hit Richistan. We got back to the Funny Farm right at 5:40, about the time we usually head out.

But oh! Is it lovely to get out at that hour! Though in August it’s a bit sticky out there, the air was reasonably cool. No sun beating down on you. And no one around!

We encountered one human: a guy on a bike with a headlamp to help him make his way. That was it.

No bums.

No coyotes. (Surprising, as dawn is the prime hunting hour.)

No neighbors standing out in front to intimidate you from letting your dog dump on their yard. 😀

No early morning commuters headed for Starbucks in a dazed and cranky mood.

And most charming, no fellow dog walkers!

Not that I don’t love my fellow dog walkers…but wrestling with two gingery corgis who want nothing more than to pounce your (fill in the blank: pit bull/mastiff/German shepherd/90-pound lab/Great Dane/angry Chihuahua) is far from the most pleasant way to start the day. Nor, indeed, does every one of my fellow dog walkers appear to be having the best of all possible fun keeping their own hounds under control. Odd, isn’t it?

So really…the dark before dawn was pretty much the ideal time to circumnavigate the ‘hood with the dawgs.

And now, a couple hours later, it’s still pleasant enough to sit outside. The various kids are frolicking around the street before they’re carted off to school. Ruby is yapping at every passing dog and its human, the hummingbirds are grating, and the doves would be feeding were not for Ruby chasing them.

We have a nice little covey of whitewings hanging around. So I decided to put up a couple of feeders for them, it now being too hot for much food to be readily available. The bugs go to cover, underground or under the rocks. The seeding plants barely cling to life. One wonders why the birds don’t migrate north with their relatives.

Well. The reason of course is that a city full of humans amounts to a riparian area on steroids. Stuff grows here. Water flows from long hollow ropes strung across the ground and sprays out of mysterious springs that erupt at the same time each day. And a forest of trees provides a lot of cover and roosting space.

How do you like this gadget I scored from Amazon?

Dunno how well you can see the device: it’s a wrought iron hook that fits over the tree branch and then swings down into an elegant swoop to hold your bird feeder. It works handsomely, and it makes reloading the feeder so much easier, by making it easier to take the thing down and put it back up.

The reason I bought it, however, had nothing to do with aesthetics or convenience and everything to do with the usual yard hassles.  Luis, when asked to clear some space so Gerardo’s men could move around the backyard without risking decapitation by tree limb, blithely hacked a big chunk out of the lime tree, exposing its interior to the full blast of west sun. I was surprised, because Luis is usually pretty savvy about trees. But he sure missed the proverbial boat this time!

To keep the tree from dying, I had to wrap swaths of shade cloth around the major interior limbs. That wasn’t enough to protect it from the summer blast furnace, though; this spring I had to drape more lengths of cloth across its entire west face.

This meant I couldn’t hang the feeder from its usual perch in the lime tree…said perch now being wrapped in plastic shade cloth. Lovely.

We still have a feeder hanging from the north eave, but it’s not readily visible from the deck. And since the main reason one hangs up a bird feeder is to watch the birds, I missed the lime tree station greatly. Solution: hang it from the paloverde tree.

Alas, though, the hang-it gadget I had would not fit over a paloverde limb. New solution? So obvious: AMAZON.

Forthwith they sent three of these swell doodads. The top hook just fits over the desired limb. Though it’s a little closer to the ground than I’d like — leaving the birds possibly vulnerable should one of the neighbor’s effing cats come over the cat-repelling wall — I think they’ll have plenty of time to escape should that happen.

Matter of fact, Ruby just strolled there and terrorized them. They all flew off, leaving a bold wren behind to gorge down as much as it can before the competition returns.

Ruby is actually drawn by the twitta-twitta-twitta alarm call of a whitewing dove. If one of them makes the outtahere! noise, she rockets out the door like a furry little missile and gallops around under the trees. Doesn’t seem to occur to her that by the time they’re making that noise, they are already soooo gone.

Summertime, and the cacti are blooming. Across the street a neighbor has a huge, invasive columnar cactus. The things can be quite a job to keep under control in your landscape. However, it makes these amazing blossoms:

Strange and wonderful, aren’t they? They attract strange and wonderful pollinators, too, especially bats (which is one of the reasons they open at night) and a particularly crazy flying critter called a “carpenter bee.” This little animal can best be called a sorta flying thing. Like a bumblebee, which it sort of resembles, it leaves you wondering how it ever imagined it could get airborne. Tried to catch a photo of one, but it came out a bit on the unclear side.

That flower is as big as your whole spread-out hand. So you get an idea of the critter’s size. Hysterical posts published by exterminating companies aside, carpenter bees are pretty harmless (unless you try to grab one) and are actually highly beneficial pollinators.

Also in summer we still have the ghost of Arizona’s once vigorous monsoon season. The “heat island” effect now bounces rainclouds away from the urban areas, and of course the climate change that all the President’s nitwits…uhm, “men” tell us does not exist has created a decades-long drought. That notwithstanding, we’ve had at least had some impressive cloud displays.

Alors. It’s warming up out here. So I suppose it’s about time to go inside and get started on something constructive. À bientôt, then.

Heat-Soaked, Heat-Tired…

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Two in the afternoon. It’s 112 in the shade of the back porch. Running up the power bill by leaving the thermostat at the night-time temp: 78 degrees. I keep fading, coming back, fading. Feel OK for and hour or two, then feel like I need to go back to bed. Just finished eleven (count-’em, 11) sentences in the Ella’s Story chapter that needs to go online tomorrow. Have no idea where the thing is going.

What next? How about back to bed?

Why, you ask, do I feel so tired, other than that the fine enervating effect of prolonged 112-degree heat? Why, indeed:

  • Up at 4:30 a.m.
  • Read email, answer messages.
  • Read news, grind teeth.
  • Get dressed, more or less.
  • Out the door with the dogs: 5:15 a.m.
  • Walk dogs one mile
  • Feed dogs
  • Mix up large container of Roundup (yeah, I know, but if you want to come over and pull fire-hazard weeds out of the alley by hand, be my guest!)
  • Unlock iron bars that span the back gate to discourage transients from using the gate alcove as a loo.
  • Don heavy garden gloves.
  • Drag wheelbarrow and dog pooper-scooper through back gates, up the alley, into front yard.
  • Use the scooper to lift a very prickly piece of prickly-pear cactus off the ground and into the barrow.
  • Lift the pot with the dead prickly-pear cactus off the ground and into the barrow, trying not to touch the plant.
  • Roll these to the garbage can in the alley.
  • Lift pot (very heavy, even though dessicated) into the shoulder-high trash can. Toss.
  • Toss dead prickly-pear pad in after it.
  • Peel ruined gloves off and throw them and the myriad stickers they’ve collected into the trash can.
  • Drag wheelbarrow back into yard. Close and lock back gate.
  • Pick up dog mounds; deposit in dog poop/junk mail container — another device to discourage transients, who will go through the trash looking for things with your name and address…especially credit-card offers.
  • Carry dribble-bottle of Roundup into the front yard
  • Drip Roundup on weeds on east side of house.
  • Down the alley: Douse the idiot neighbor’s butt-high crop of fire-hazard weeds with Roundup.
  • Drip Roundup on the few weeds that have broken through behind my house.
  • Put away the Roundup gear.
  • Lubricate the wheelbarrow, whose squealing probably woke up the idiot neighbors (one can only hope…)
  • Put wheelbarrow back in its place.
  • In bathroom, dig out tweezers. Pick (painful!) hair-thin prickly-pear stickers out of fingers and out of a toe (!! HOW???)
  • Back outside: water potted plants.
  • Turn sprinkler on bedding plants and rose on west side.
  • Check pool chlorine.
  • Jump in pool, swim around.
  • Rinse incipient growth of mustard algae off steps.
  • Wash self and hair in hose.
  • Turn soaker hose on cat’s claw vines.
  • Dry off.
  • Comb out tangles and put up wet hair.
  • Fix and consume coffee and breakfast.
  • Put away dishes.
  • Pick up dog dishes, too.
  • Write to correspondents.
  • Begin trying to write Ella, chapter 28.
  • Daydream.
  • Read news.
  • Think how fricking TIRED I am.
  • Worry that weight continues to fall off despite effort to end diet.
  • Write to correspondents at some length.
  • Write and publish a short Quora essay. Watch with amazement and amusement as a flurry of “likes” flashes up on the screen, forthwith.
  • Consider, in awe, that 17,200 people have read one of those Quora essays!
  • Make note in relevant Facebook discussion as to how you can use Quora to guide traffic to your website or author page.
  • Think how fricking HUNGRY I am.
  • Decide to fix slumgullion, using US-made pasta, which seems to be more fattening than expensive Italian pasta guaranteed made with European wheat. Ooohhkkkayyyy…
  • Think how much I do not want to drive to Sprouts to buy one (1) onion.
  • Realize I have a bunch of frozen mirepoix.
  • Exhume this from the fridge.
  • Start mirepoix sautéing. Throw in some frozen chopped spinach.
  • Defrost hamburger.
  • Set large pot of water to boil.
  • Mince garlic, add tbat and a fistful of walnuts to mirepoix.
  • Sauté hamburger.
  • Start pasta boiling.
  • Toss browned meat into mirepoix, adding dash of nutmeg, sprinkle of cinnamon. Simmer.
  • Add half a box of leftover Pomí tomatoes to frying pan. Approve: an acceptable sauce, even absence a splash of red wine.
  • Retrieve pasta; mix with sauce. Dump some on a plate; put the rest in a refrigerator container.
  • Sprinkle generous amount of Parmesan over the chow on the plate.
  • Eat.
  • Feel a lot better: maybe I’m not dying of liver failure after all?
  • Start writing.
  • Procrastinate, racking up large numbers of game points.
  • Read Facebook.
  • Write.
  • Think how fricking TIRED I am.
  • Lift the dogs onto the bed.
  • Climb on after them.
  • Write this.

So it goes.

Live-Blogging from Storm Central

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July 30, 8:00 p.m.

Well, not exactly blogging: power’s out and likely to be that way for quite some time. We could say “pre-blogging”…in Word, the laptop being fully charged but, of course, offline.

Dinner at M’hijito’s house. Just as we were finishing the feast, we could see the storm blowing in, and then a pretty heavy dust-storm hit his part of town. I wanted to get home, as I’d taken a Benadryl a few hours earlier to stave off a (weird!) allergic reaction, and it had turned me into a zombie. Just wanted to go home and go straight to bed.

Not so much.

So I figured if I was lucky and the traffic was thin, I could fly low and get home before the rain started.

Wrong.

About halfway up the north leg of the trip, some serious rain started to sluice down. Limbs were already down all over the road, and now it was sheeting rain. An ambulance trundled by and – oh yeah, naturally – turned into the ’hood.

My beaten path to avoid Big Brother’s hateful speed bumps and aggravating round-abouts entails entering our area from the east side on a little neighborhood lane that everybody who lives here knows runs from Main Drag east to Primary Feeder Street North/South.

Via Neighborhood Lane, I’m trying to reach Secondary Feeder North/South, midway between Main Drag East and Primary Feeder Street North/South, by way of making my way up to the small neighborhood road that runs from Lower Richistan to Normalville, my part of the ’hood.

I get about three-quarters of the way up to Small Neighborhood Road and find a large branch down across Secondary Feeder N/S. So hang a U-ie and go back down to Neighborhood Lane, upon which I figure to reach Primary Feeder N/S. And THERE I find my neighbor Josie stopped in front of an entire downed tree.

In the dark, it appears a whole Aleppo pine – and these things are HUGE – uprooted and came crashing down across the road. I get out of my car to check the house across the street, to see if everyone’s OK. It looks like it didn’t quite reach that house, but it’s in their yard. If the residents are home, they’re huddled inside. I don’t think anyone’s hurt.

Josie knows the people who own the house where the tree stood, and she’s on the phone to them. They’re not home. We think their house is OK…except, ahem, for the absence of one exceptionally large shade tree.

Now I tell Josie that I couldn’t get through on Seccondary Feeder N/S. She says she couldn’t get through on the Main Drag to the south, either, because the power is out and the traffic is insane. She doesn’t think we can even reach Primary Feeder Street N/S along Main Drag South.

I say I think I can pull the downed limb off the road if we go back up Secondary. We both make U-turns and she follows me up Secondary. But by now others are trying to get through, and now a neighbor – a large male neighbor – is out in front of the house where the limb fell, trying to wave people away from the traffic jam.

I say I think we can pull it far enough off the road for cars to pass. He says he tried and couldn’t move it. He suggests we go up the wrong way on Secondary – Secondary is a divided road with a planter strip up the middle. No one is coming in our direction, so Josie and I cut across the road and make our way up the down street.

Luckily, we reach Main Feeder East/West before anybody comes our way. And before a cop comes along.

Because the power is out, once I get to the Funny Farm I can’t get into the garage. It is pouring rain. Leaving the dogs in the car, I enter the house, free the garage opener latch, and push the door open. Manage to haul the door closed behind the car – fortunately the door is well balanced, because it’s old, all steel, and damned heavy.

July 30, an hour later:

The power is still out. It’s damn hot in here. I’ve opened the doors that have security screens with drill-proof deadbolts, but of course can’t leave any of the sliders or the windows open. Well….I do have the bedroom sliding door open, because what we have here on the bed is a dual alarm system. If anyone comes anywhere near the place, they go off like banshees.

Which, I suppose, is what they are.

Not surprisingly, I can’t get online, so cannot check the Salt River Project website for word of how soon they might get the power back on. Not very, I expect. People are wandering around outside yakking, babies are screaming, and it’s wet and steamy. Still sprinkling a little, but not enough to keep the yakkers indoors. Or to keep the damn helicopters from buzzing overhead.

Some very odd things are working in the outage.

The phone, for example. I was told it would not run without electric. The Cox guy put a battery in the modem, but that thing died forthwith. So I’m bopping around in the dark when I hear an unfamiliar phone bell ringing. WTF? The clamshell throwaway phone??? My son, trying to get through????!?

Grab the camp lantern, make my way to the office, whence the noise emanates. It’s the main phone that plugs direct to the cable connection. Pick it up: La Maya on the phone. We yak for awhile. She says to be careful about leaving doors or windows open, because she caught a sh!thead prowling outside one of her windows a night or so ago.

Thank heavens for Schlage and Medco locks, think I.

Still. This is the time when you do want your German shepherd back.

And in the weirdly still-working department: I had a Washington Post online game up on the computer before I left the house. Even though the computer is offline, the little game is working! 😀

Strange.

The streetlight outside the Funny Farm flickered a few times, as though the power was trying to come on. Then went dark again.

And now it’s raining steadily again. It’s hot and stuffy in here. Believe I’ll throw a sheet on the tiles and go to sleep on the floor, where it’s cooler. A lot cooler…

July 31, 1:00 a.m.

The power finally came back on sometime in the wee hours., just as I was figuring that come dawn, I’d have to make a run on Walmart, Fry’s, and whatever other stores I could think of in search of dry ice to try to preserve the food in the fridge and freezer. If the whole area’s power was down all night, it could be quite a long grocery store run…

Salt River Project’s website says the power went off here around 7:15 last night. So it’s been off five and a half hours, give or take. This would be O.K. if it hadn’t been around 100 degrees when the power went out. Just now it’s about 80 outside, and around 83 inside the shack.

I see a new assignment came in from a client while all these shenanigans were going on. I hope they don’t want the thing back tomorrow, because today I’m gonna be in no shape to read technical copy. Ugh.

July 31, 7:17 a.m.

Power was out most of the night. Cox has been up and down. No phone, no pool, two heat-soaked pets…ain’t got no cigarettes.

I think the cable (i.e. phone) connection is up right now, but that doesn’t mean it’ll stay up. Here at the Funny Farm, though, it looks like things are intact. Thank heaven Luis came earlier this summer and thinned out the forest! But for sure…I’m going to have to do something about that devil-pod tree. If that thing falls over, it will smush either my house or Terri’s.

July 31, 8:27 a.m.

Dogs fed and walked. Property reconnoitered. Phone and Internet crashed again and are still out…I do hate Cox. Really. Hate. Cox.

Neighbor took this foto of the scene on Neighborhood Lane, just west of Primary Feeder Street N/W.  That tree was uprooted and blown out of the front yard on the right-hand side of the image. Fortunately, the lots are huge and the houses are set back a good distance off the road. If it had been most other neighborhoods in this city, that tree would have fallen into the house situated on the left side of this picture.

That’s an Aleppo pine, a type of tree popular when the tract was built out…back in the 1950s. So the tree is probably 50 or 60 years old. At least. Another pine in the yard lost about a third of its branches — whether because this tree hit it on the way down or from the action of the wind.

Mercifully, no damage here at the Funny Farm. The potted ficus tree, which has waxed huge in its new place beneath the lath shade covering, fell over. Its pot didn’t break, thank goodness, and I managed (just) to haul it back upright and drag it, a quarter-inch at a time, back into the shelter. Fine mess in the pool, but Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner was up to it with no problem. Harvey was already out of the water, in anticipation of just such an event as occurred. Turned on the pump, which scooted the big stuff into a pile. Scooped that out easily with the hose-end water vacuum. Then dropped Harvey back in the drink, where he began tracing white trails through the brown dust. Otherwise everything seems OK except maybe the bougainvillea on the side, which got royally walloped.

Was very glad I’d hired Luis to trim all the trees in front. That devil-pod tree on the side, though, is beyond one man and a saw….Gerardo wants to take it down, but I’m afraid of having one of his cousins fall out of the damn thing. Since he’s laid first dibs on the job, though, I’m also afraid of pissing him off by hiring a tree company (at many times what he’ll charge) to cut it down. And don’t know what could take its place…as hated as it is, it DOES shade the west side of the shack.

I see the wind did blow a lot of shingles off the neighbor’s roof catty-corner behind me. That guy…there’s always one in every neighborhood, isn’t there?…is a shiftless soul. He inherited the house from parents who lived there till they died. And since he didn’t have to pay for it and is one of those clowns who doesn’t understand that real estate = dollars and paid-off real estate = investment, he’s just let it rot away. So that won’t be fixed, and what was already getting to be an eyesore will now be even dumpier.

Checked my own roof with binoculars. Doesn’t look like there’s much damage, though a couple of shingles might need repair. The roofing guys who installed that roof after Late Great Hailstorm didn’t leave me any extra shingles! Duh! I didn’t even think about it at the time. So…finding shingles to match may be a bit of a challenge. Dollars to donuts, they’re not available at the Depot, eh?

July 31, 10:34 a.m.

Having enjoyed all of about two hours’ sleep last night, I’m going back to bed. And so, away…