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Livelying Up Again

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Last couple of days I’ve felt more lively than I have all summer. Probably it has to do with the slight drop in outside temperatures — still in the low 100s, but 105 is a far cry from 115. And the mornings and evenings now are really lovely.

So I’ve contrived to get off my duff long enough to do a few small jobs that have lain fallow for month after unjustifiable month. The bermudagrass that I cleared out of the flowerbed last November sprang back in all its glory over the summer. I’ve just been too, too lazy to get out the chemicals, mix them up, get them all over myself, barricade the dogs away from the chemical dump, clean up the mess, and scour myself down with dawn and a scrub brush. What ought to be a fairly easy task is made difficult by the presence of presumably toxic, very stinky chemicals.

Anyway, the smell is dissipating this morning, even though I poured a-plenty of it on the damn devilgrass. Yesterday I finally got around to that job, along with figuring out what to do about the trash situation and cleaning the pool and picking up after the dogs and cleaning up after the yard guys and running the laundry and swiffering up the dog hair.

Gerardo’s guys pulled the translucent plastic paneling off the cedar beam & lathwork that covers the back patio, so that the painter can clean up the mess where the stuff leaked and apply new sealer. However, they left the strips that hold the things on…some of them. I think they did that pursuant to putting new stuff on, but…they busted up a lot of the strips. And how exactly the painter is supposed to get around that junk escapes me. Nor am I convinced Gerardo and his underlings have got what it takes to replace that stuff without having it leak from the git-go.

After Richard’s crew applied it, the thing lasted 10 years before it started to leak. Really, only one area leaked, which leads me to think the hail and probably a damned cat jumping on it caused the damage.

Some time during the day, I’ll go up to Home Depot and see if they can refer me to a contractor who knows how to install that stuff. Richard, I think, is no longer in business — he never answered my call. He fell off a roof a couple years ago and broke his back in a dozen places, so he’s presumably not in any shape to wrangle a work gang.

Meanwhile, naturally, I’ve got to drive way to hell in the opposite direction from the damn HD to get gasoline at Costco, hoping to reach the pumps before prices go through the proverbial roof. I’m afraid it’s probably too late, though.

So that mean’s I’ll be on the road for about an hour, dodging my fellow homicidal drivers. Ugh! I do hate driving in this city!

But meanwhile, finally some work came in from China — thank God! After that deluge in the first-quarter, it has been a long, dry summer.

Couple days ago my friends VickyC and KJG had a shopping get-together: drove out to the East Valley to visit Ikea, where VickyC needed to buy a small occasional table. And of course, we couldn’t miss wandering through the entire place ogling the loot. I picked up a box of candles (Ikea has THE best no-stinkum candles!) and impulse-bought an inexpensive pair of glass candle-holders.

We also went to REI, just down the road, where the camp stove offerings are far superior to the ones I’ve seen elsewhere. I may go over to the REI here in town to get one of those. It looks like they require a special propane canister, which will mean having to keep several of those on hand for emergencies. But…time to be prepared, IMHO.

Birdosaurus Rex and Bums

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So last night after the human got back from watching fireworks, the Tribe went out in back to wring out the dogs. There in the darkness I see a black form scuttling across the ground.

“Huh,” think I. “Biggest cockroach I’ve ever seen.”

Well, no: it’s a paloverde beetle: about four inches long and an inch wide, a mighty handsome monster of a bug. These critters’ babies can kill a mature paloverde tree in seven years. And yea verily, they infest the ground all around my beautiful Desert Museum specimen. They’re also going after a couple of the citrus, and I found one exit hole over by the olive tree on the other side of the house, too.

Paloverde beetles are essentially immune to bug sprays. They’re unfazed by any of your schemes to rid the world of their ugly little faces. It is, in essence, an impregnable insect.

Almost.

Curve-bill thrasher

They are not immune to thrashers and mockingbirds. Those little dinosaurs (as we know, birds are dinosaurs) can take on one of these Cretaceous cockroaches, kill it (with some trouble), and eat the damn thing.

That is one helluva bird, because a paloverde beetle is about a third the length of a thrasher, which is not small at-tall as tweetie-birds go.

So this morning I’m sitting here, and down by one of the orange trees, there’s a thrasher doing battle. A paloverde beetle can inflict a fierce bite, and this one is fighting back. You can see the bird dodge out of the way, then dart back in, grab the critter, whack it on the ground, toss it in the air, and dodge aside again.

Finally Birdosaurus rex wins out and enjoys a handsome feast by the light of dawn.

This is the benefit of fighting off the neighbors’ damn cats. No cats in the yard means more birds, safer birds, healthier birds…and lots fewer bugs.

We’ve not seen a single minion of the Ant Queen’s armies this year. Birds—almost all tweetie-birds and many game birds—eat ants.

Another beneficiary of the de-cattification campaign is the single most amazing gecko I have ever seen. He must be a good seven inches long, from the tip of his nose to the end of his graceful, whiplike tail. He lives in the termite nest…uhm, firewood stacked by the wall, as far away from the house as it can be stacked.

In the hour or three after dawn, he comes out to soak up some vitamin D, presumably: races up the wall, parks himself in the sun, and does a series of push-ups.

This, we’re told, is a strategy for cooling the reptilian body.

Lizards eat vast quantities of bugs, notably…yes!…goddamned mosquitoes. There are at least two of the little critters over there, the gigantic gecko and another in a more typical size. And lo! We have hardly any skeeters these days.

What we need here is a Bumosaurus rex. We do have a great deal more bums than mosquitoes around the ’hood these days.

Just went out, armed to the teeth, to investigate the goings-on in the alley and found this poor little guy: filthy dirty, sweaty, exhausted-looking, and claiming to be lost.

Well, he’s lost, all right, but not in a geographical sense.

He remarks on the shillelagh I’m carrying (which of course I have in hand for self-defense), and I say it’s my dog shillelagh, because you’ll run into loose pit bulls and the like around here. This is a lie: he knows it’s a lie, I know it’s a lie, but it’s convenient.

He says, “Sometimes people call me Dog.”

I say, “You’re not a dog; you’re a man.”

He says, with a grin, “A friend! I need a friend.”

{sigh}

I clue him to the activities of Catholic Social Services, who are building “low-income” (read “homeless”) housing down the street from us and suggest that if he finds himself in those parts he should go in and ask about it. I do not say that last night someone said the complex will be only for families. Virtually all of the homeless who haunt our alleys are single men.

We wander off on our separate ways.

There, but for the grace of God, go we.

Happy Fourth of July!

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Yesh…despite our country’s dire political straits and the question of whether we continue at all as a democratic republic or whether we turn into a Mussoliniesque dictatorship, we still are, après tout, America. For the time being. One thing you have to allow: with a pagliaccio tweeting away from the White House, the daily news is a hoot a minute.

In the meantime, life is quiet. For the time being.

The high point of the summer, casa mia, is a party at some friends’ home. This couple lives about halfway up a mid-town high-rise, in an apartment that overlooks the Phoenix Country Club and the Steele Indian Park and, beyond those local landmarks, commands a view of the entire southeast and northeast valley. The country club and the city park each host spectacular fireworks, and we’re practically on top of them. Last summer the country club’s display went on for a good 45 minutes, and then a few moments later the park’s began. Awesome!

Moved a journal article back to the client on the other side of the globe. In these parts, the academics are quiescent for the summer, so things are slow. We’re told to expect a large indexing project in August, and…you know what that means. Everything will come crashing in during that month.

The computer issue continues. A little web-cruising reveals that most — probably all — of the ongoing bugs in both computers are incident upon the ludicrously designed El Capitan operating system. Apparently Apple is infested with clowns these days, too. This morning I discovered it had disabled all the “rules” that I’d had to reinstate in Mail to derail spam, and so once again my in-box was full of junk. The fix was easy enough, but time-consuming and pointless. Why do I have to waste my time because Apple can’t get its act together?

The iMac is working more or less OK, but the MacBook Pro, which is the go-to computer because I can use it in a chair that doesn’t make my hip and back hurt, is a hopeless mess. It keeps dropping the wireless connection. Possibly the fix is to get a wireless booster…but the chances that buying one of those will be a waste of time and money are high: the thing never lost connectivity before. So the two other choices are to buy a comfortable chair and ottoman that can be installed in the office, or to buy a PC and hope it will run better.

The wireless is the least of the MacBook’s issues. Unpredictably, it freezes up, then crashes and reboots. Up flashes an insulting message: “You chose to close your computer…” No, I did not. Of course, it loses all the data you were working on at the time. So…not acceptable.

This also is a known issue with El Capitan.

What do you suppose they’re thinking at Apple, foisting a piece of junk like that on their customers?

Well, my coffee is getting cold and breakfast awaits, and so…away!

Digital Junk

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Do you not feel overwhelmed by the sheer, VAST quantity of digital ephemera that comes at you from every direction? About 99.9 percent of it is pure junk; maybe 1 percent (at the outside…) is something you asked to see and need to review.

I have my mail system set up to divert things I regard as ephemeral into a “Trash” folder, so that I don’t see them until I have some time to waste. That includes the 87 berjillion beeps from Facebook, the 37 million “likes” and queries from Quora, whatever Twitter emits, and all known senders of spam. “Spam” IMHO includes newsletters, Goodreads blather, chirpy emails from Realtors, Meetup.com notices, and on and on and infinitely on. Just now MacMail has 71 “rules” for that purpose. The accursed OS update erased all my standing rules; before that little fiasco, I had applied over 90 rules. So presumably in the next short while I’ll have to rebuild another 20 of them.

Then there are the people who “Reply-all” to someone who is trying to organize some event and is sending out a dozen or more emails to members. This very morning, a half-dozen people in one group of friends are merrily doing that, so I end up with not one or two messages from the organizer but 6, 12, 18, 24 back-and-forths between her and the participants.

Please. Don’t “Reply-all” unless you’re asked to do so!

Truly, I think we get far more digital junk mail than we ever got in the snail-mail: it’s free and it’s easy to disseminate and I guess they don’t give a damn how much they annoy people. And indeed, why should they? What are you gonna do, after all? Jump into your transporter and beam yourself up to Seattle and throttle the bastards on the spot?

The nuisance phone calls amount to a variety of digital junk, too. It’s just another device to spam you: most of them emanate from digital robocallers equipped to spoof phone numbers and to keep dialing you back until you answer.

The handy-dandy call blocker I bought a while back is helping a lot with the robocall problem, though on average one or two a day are still getting through.

They come in waves. You’ll have days — often days on end! — when no spam phone calls get through at all. Then you’ll have a bunch at once — I’ve blocked three of the SOBs today.

So far I’ve blocked 133 real and spoofed phone numbers. That’s on top of the 5,000 blocked numbers the device comes with. It’s a little annoying to have to manually block the ones that get through…only because my system has so much hardware wired in that the device has to be set up so that I have to walk to the back of the house, push a button to locate the caller’s number, and push another button to block that number forevermore.

On the other hand, it surely is satisfying to hear an incoming call ring once and then die. Sort of like squashing a cockroach…

Email icon image: DepositPhotos, © yupiramos
Banner image of the day: DepositPhotos, © nevarpp

Wake Up America!

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Buy a T-shirt: Support sanity!

Over at Facebook, I suggested we need a new national bipartisan movement called “Wake Up America!” Its name could be taken as direct address (Wake Up, America!) or as a call to action (Wake Up America!) for people who are shocked and dismayed by the present goings-on. It’s getting “Likes.”

🙂

And it is time to take action. Everyone who has even the faintest sense of good will toward our country and our people must get off our duffs and start working for a better future. That does not mean a worse future where millions of people have no health insurance, where the many aftereffects of rape can make you ineligible for insurance coverage, where Americans can’t get jobs, where elected representatives work to take the “public” out of public education, where ignoramuses tell us science is “fake,” where the our leadership seeks to crush the Constitution and the Fourth Estate, where women are to be put back in their place — barefoot and pregnant, where Dodd-Frank is undone and Wall Street is invited to treat us to yet another back-breaking recession, where political appointees are explicitly exempted from ethics rules, where we have a clownish, dangerous buffoon in the White House….and on and on and freaking on.

A friend got herself chosen as a precinct committeeman (well, committeeperson, eh?) in our district. She invited me to go to the monthly meeting and see if I wanted to get active.

The shindig was in a church, in a large meeting hall. And to my astonishment, the place was packed! They said hundreds of people were flocking to volunteer support and time.

Understand: I can remember when all the liberals in Arizona could fit in one person’s living room. So that really is astonishing.

Ended up volunteering as a precinct committeeman myself.

I’m not fond of politics. When I was a young thing, I dated a man who had political ambitions. He was a sidekick of a state representative from Prescott. It was during the Goldwater presidential campaign. In California, I’d been a Goldwater Girl (believe it or not!) and an active supporter of the Republican Party, anti-Communism, isolationism, de facto racism, and every right-wing -ism you can imagine. We lived right down the road from Knott’s Berry Farm, a nexus of John Birch Society activism, and I used to go over there and buy books off their shelves.

Yet I was never so thrilled as when John Kennedy won the Democratic Presidential nomination. A bundle of contradictions, I was.

Anyway, this guy, our Handsome Hero, was deeply involved in Goldwater’s campaign. He and his mentor went to the 1964 Republican convention, and he came home with proud stories of all the “Dirty Tricks” the two of them got up to. He actually bragged about the vandalism and subterfuge they committed to prevent anyone who opposed their guys from being heard. He also told me, one evening, that part of his job was to hustle up prostitutes to entertain visiting political bigwigs while they were in town.

All that and more utterly turned me off not just the Republican Party but politics in general. It’s a dirty, often unethical game.

Right now the worst of the unethical are in power. And if we care at all about our country, we need to step up and do something about it.

I can’t do much. I don’t have billions of dollars to buy a political office. I don’t have the personality or the drive to run for office, even if I did have that kind of cash. But I figure the least I can do is get out the vote.

That may not be hard, given the number of people who showed up at that meeting on Tuesday…

Now is the time, my friends. Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country.

Wake Up America!

Banner image of the day: DepositPhotos, © nmcandre

Amazing Easter

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So I hope you had a Happy Easter this spring, if that celebration happens to be applicable to you. This spring, I have to tellya: our church’s choir director, professional singers, and clergy outdid themselves. What an amazing performance on Easter Eve and then again on Easter morning.

The Easter Eve service is always more or less the same — a strange, wonderful, and dramatic series of traditions that involves lighting an elaborate candle with the flame from a blessed bonfire, a procession and lengthy chanting in the dark, lighting of parishioner’s candles, a Litany of the Saints (also in the dark, with the choir marching around by candlelight), recitation of a sermon by St. John Chrysostom (A.D. 347-407), a communion — oh, and by the way, a couple of baptisms. All of this conducted by clergy decked out in gold-embroidered crimson robes.

The effect of the Easter Eve service was just jaw-dropping. At one point I could not refrain from saying aloud, “What an astonishing religion!” My friend who sits next to me (we’re still in the choir loft at this point) is herself an ordained minister. She also looked astonished. She looked at me wide-eyed and said, “I’ve been with the church for a long time, and I’ve never seen anything as amazing as this.”

On Good Friday, after the Stations of the Cross, we sang Paul Mealor’s Stabat Mater, a pretty amazing piece of music. Yesterday — Easter — we sang Rutter’s Gloria, even more amazing and, to my mind, very challenging. Our director recruited a group of brass players (!) to accompany the full choir — that would be the professional chamber choir plus us of the sing-along set, and he also arranged a string section to accompany the chamber choir, which sang at the early service.

The Chamber Choir sang Pawel Lukaszewski’s Responsoria Tenebrae, an astonishingly complex work, a kind of choral tapestry.

All in all, it was an awe-inspiring accomplishment on the part of our choir director and clergy.

If you love classical music and vocal performance of ecclesiastical music and you’re in the Phoenix area, you need to visit All Saints Episcopal Church during its music season, which runs from fall through spring. Don’t miss it!

6300 North Central Avenue
Just south of Maryland on Central