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.
SO…here I was, about to write a complacent little post about how NICE is it that I’m getting a little respite from the grinding workload this summer and how a friend is coming over and we’re going to go window shopping at the long-ignored “fashion square” upon which we ruminated yesterday, and ahhhhh isn’t everything beer and skittles…
Never fails, does it?
Our Fair City, in all its City Parents’ bat-brained wisdom, evades going so far as to fix worn-out streets by patching them instead of resurfacing them. They send crews around about once every 10 to 15 years to fill and spray oil over the cracks in your neighborhood’s streets. This enhances the Look of Blight so fashionable in our town and delays having to do the job right for another while.
Week or so ago, they threw flyers on our driveways (we call those “Burglars Enter Here!” notices) informing us that we were to keep our cars off the roadway, because if they came across a vehicle parked at the curb when they arrive to fill in the cracks, they will have the vehicle towed.
I’m sitting here, then, about to start scribbling today’s post, when the dogs go FREAKING BATSH!T.
The tarring crews are out in front, and they are flummoxed. Neighbor catty-corner across the street, a very beloved and nice neighbor, has left an SUV parked out in front of his house. The workmen are obviously trying to get a rise out of the house’s occupants. Some of the men are taking the opportunity to loaf, to inspect the car, and generally to scurry around aimlessly. No answer: Joel & Dita presumably are…you know…at work.
I call WonderAccountant, whose house/office is next door to them. She hadn’t gotten the message that the City intended to impound vehicles left parked on the street, but in any event, the car is not Joel’s. It belongs to a friend of theirs who’s trying to sell it. Friend lives in a gated compound and is not allowed to leave it out for potential buyers to see. Not that they could get in through the gate anyway. So Joel & Dita are letting the guy sell it from our street instead of his.
W.A. texts Joel. Joel contacts Dita. Dita is home but like all women around here, wisely not answering the door to strangers; she is going to run out and move the car.
Ah, the drama. Ah, the operatic flights of fancy!
Respite…yeah, OK…what was that about? Oh yes…
The nasty cough that was the only symptom (except for a brief 102.5° fever) of the late great homicidal cold is still hanging on. FOUR MONTHS LATER.
After 12 weeks of choking and gasping, accompanied by some unprintably disgusting effects, I finally gave up and visited Young Dr. Kildare. The reason I persist in seeing this man, despite his having moved his practice to a part of town where you have to dodge bullets to get from the parking lot to the door, is that his signal quality is common sense.
You don’t often find that in a doctor.
So I tell him I’ve been to WonderAccountant’s lung doc, who says it’s not asthma and who says the X-ray he ordered came back “clear.” YDK whips out his stethoscope and listens to everything you can listen to and says he can’t hear anything in the chest, either.
I remark that the evil Other Symptoms sound a lot like the cough you can get with GERD. He being a GERD veteran himself, remarks that it could be.
He suggests that I go back on the omeprazole for two weeks. If it helps, we’ll know it’s the GERD and a few more weeks of omeprazole should calm it back down. If it doesn’t help, then we’ll know it’s not GERD and then we’ll have to figure out what to do next.
Two long weeks later… Nothing. The omeprazole plus liberal doses of ranitidine have effectively zero effect.
Well, not quite zero. It’s gotten a tiny bit better, but not so much as you’d notice.
This means I really should go over to my “official” GP at the Mayo. But I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna because those folks at the Mayo are test-happy. Extravagantly test-happy. They are going to subject me to hour after hour of tests — which will entail endless drives to the far side of Scottsdale. And one of the tests they’d like to foist on me involves shoving a camera down my throat. I do not want a camera shoved down my throat. Enough medico-miseries are ENOUGH, already.
So I think…hmmmm…. So it’s probably not GERD. It’s not lung cancer (though it surely could be esophageal cancer but it’s probably not). It’s not Valley fever. It’s not pneumonia. What can we conclude from this?
a) If it’s not esophageal cancer, it’s likely not life-threatening; and b) It probably has something to do with the Cold/Cough from Hell.
I’m not swallowing any more of the carefully husbanded stash of codeine cough medicine, which I think is contraindicated anyway because the reason I’m coughing so hideously is all the gunk that’s coming up. But I do have some Mucinex left over, purchased when I came down with this thing. It didn’t do a whit of good then. But…it functions to make you cough stuff out. What if the problem is that this hideously thick, gummy stuff is stuck in there and needs to be expelled? The worst that could happen is the Mucinex could kill me, and at this point, that doesn’t sound like an altogether bad thing.
So I try the stuff. And amazingly…next morning, the cough is about 90% better! It’s still there, but it’s not about to drown me, nor am I gasping for air.
Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!
So that’s relief number 1.
Relief number 2 will be engineering a chance to visit with my friend for several hours today. And even to go into a very fancy, very air-conditioned mall and view the way the One-Percenters live. Always an amusing prospect.
This relief is attenuated by the facts that…
a) A new version of Honored Clients’ 33-page (typeset!) tome on matters economic arrived yesterday, with a request to please turn it around in three days; and b) The second set of The Complete Writer‘s page proofs are ready at the printer’s shop, and my Honored Spy there thinks the cover is still not working — suggests redoing it from scratch.
Welp, I got through 12 pages of the Chinese economic study yesterday, plus the headnotes of the 8 single-spaced pages of 11-point tables. So if I can get through six pages today and six pages tomorrow — not at all unreasonable — that may leave time to proofread tomorrow afternoon, or at least will make me only one day late.
Meanwhile, I have a presentation on Saturday and really wanted to have the book in hand to sell to the audience. This means those proofs have to be picked up today!!!!!!!!
It also pretty well guarantees I will not finish the Chinese paper tomorrow, because it will take a good half a day to rebuild the goddamn cover, and because I’m still not finished preparing the presentation. And the interior copy will need to be double-checked to be sure the three or four dozen changes came across OK.
So I propose to suggest that Dear Friend, who planned to drive today, leave her car in my garage and let me drive, thereby consuming my gasoline for the considerable drive to the printer’s shop.
If she agrees to this exploit, it will be an experience for her, since the printer is located in a part of town where…shall we say…nice girls do not go. It’s due south of the airport, in one of the most desperate slums in the Southwest.
Used to be you couldn’t find a shaded place to park at Scottsdale Fashion Square for love nor money. Especially not on a weekend.
Yesterday morning I had to drive to darkest Old Town Scottsdale to visit the Hair Stylist from Heaven. He’s talking about moving to Prescott, where he and his sister own a house that they trade off using as a weekend retreat. If Shane moves to Prescott, I am goin’, too.
Drove past Fashion Square on the way to Shane’s place. It’s one of the few malls around there that’s still going strong. There are probably three, one of them a sprawling open-faced thing supposedly modeled on a small-town Main Street, with expensive apartments upstairs over the stores.
Y’know…I haven’t been in that place — Scottsdale Fashion Square — in years. I used to go there all the time, not necessarily to buy things but just to walk around. Really didn’t buy much — sometimes I’d buy nothing. But it was pleasant to just schmooze around in the stores, see what’s stylish and what’s on sale.
Don’t know when I stopped, precisely. Probably when I lost my job. When you don’t have a regular cash flow — more than Social Security provides — you don’t go into stores. These days I buy most of my clothes at Costco and a couple of small boutiques, and all my shoes at a boutique in Tempe. Yard and household items: Target or Home Depot. Otherwise: Amazon.
The boutiquey places aren’t cheap. But on the other hand, I don’t shop there much. They’re not places you go to window-shop; they’re places you go to buy specific items.
On the way home, I missed my turn and had to cut through the parking lot to get back to 68th Street. There was hardly anybody there. I could’ve parked right outside the door of any of the tony department stores, or had no problem getting a close-in spot in the shade structures. Admittedly, it was a 118-degree day. But…it didn’t use to be that way.
Wonder how much longer that place will survive? The middle-class shopping malls around here — Paradise Valley Mall, Metrocenter, Christown, Fiesta Mall — are decrepit wrecks. None of them are places you would go to walk around for the fun of it. Some are dangerous. One is being converted into a medical center.
On the other hand, Scottsdale Fashion Square is and always was in a different class from those has-beens. although it had (still has) a Dillard’s and a few other more or less normal stores, it’s also got a Nordstrom’s and a Nieman-Marcus and an Armani store and a Gucci store and naturally a Prada store and a Tiffany’s and a place to buy your Ferragamos… Not likely to go away soon. I guess.
Finally it dawns on me what happened to the two shiny brass hose nozzles that disappeared out of the flowerpot where I store them in the back yard. About the only thing that could have happened: the pool guy must have taken them when he was using the hose to clean out the filter.
Gerardo hasn’t been here for two months…and besides, he’s not given to stealing. Even though I can’t be depended upon to remember where I last set my toothbrush down, I’m pretty sure I didn’t put them “away” in some weird place because there would be no reason to do so. And I’ve searched every weird spot on the property for them.
These little gadgets are not easy to find around here. So when I spotted a boxful of them on a Home Depot shelf, I grabbed three of them. One was on the hose. The other two are now gone. And since the things are just the ticket for the kind of job he does, I figure when he spotted them, he just picked them up and dropped them in a pocket.
He also broke my hose timer, the jerk.
What IS it with workmen and hose timers? These cheesey little things are really nothing more than a kitchen timer on a valve…how hard IS it to turn a kitchen timer to 15 minutes? Every time one of those guys spots one of the things, he gets confused. And I forgot to turn it on for him…one too easily forgets how stupid other human beings are.
Given the creature we’ve elected as president, it’s hard to grasp how one could forget such a thing: clearly we’re a nation of dolts. But there it is. Busted timer, stolen nozzles.
Oh well. Like my father used to say: if it ain’t red-hot or bolted down, someone will steal it.
This morning in comes news, first from a friend and then from a news story, of not one but two terrifying incidents of harassment and bullying of women.
On Facebook, a friend reported that some guy in a pick-up went off on her while she was on the road riding her Harley. One thing you should know about my friend — she does not keep this a secret — is that she is transexual; in her previous life she was biologically a male and a biker. Yeah: that kind of biker…though she always has identified, psychologically, as a woman, she was probably not the sort of person you’d willingly meet in a dark alley. In her present incarnation, she looks like a pretty normal woman whose presence strikes no fear into your heart. She writes highly entertaining novels whose protagonist is a wild-assed woman biker.
So this guy goes berserk and starts to follow her. She does everything she can to shake him, at high speeds no doubt, but she can’t get rid of him. Beginning to panic, she heads back to her house and parks her bike in the driveway. He follows her and informs her that he’s going to come after her. As you can imagine, she’s somewhat alarmed.
Even more alarmed is the woman in a Phoenix suburb whose home was entered — more than once, apparently — by a lunatic who left a note — while she was sleeping — to tell her he wanted to have sex with her.
Most women begin to experience threats and events of this sort starting at about the age of 12 or 14. I’ve repeatedly been followed, harassed, propositioned, and threatened by strange men — after six decades, it gets old. And “old” is an operative term: even after you’re no longer a juicy, nubile young thing, the creeps still think you’re fair game for threats and harassment, especially when you’re abroad in a car or walking across a parking lot.
This is how I developed my taste for German shepherds…
Seriously and no joke: After the downtown neighbors divorced and I got custody of their dog, all the harassment, all the cat-calls, and all the aggressive passes in public suddenly went away when I had her at my side. What a guy thinks a GerShep is going to do to him while he’s sailing past at 40 miles an hour escapes me…but as a practical matter, the nasty yells and lewd hoots stopped dead when I started taking that dog out with me.
But long before I got the dog, I learned a number of strategies to cope with this kind of sh!t. Note that I have never taken a “woman’s self-defense” course, except for one short session that was inflicted on us in a high-school P.E. class. These things generally scare you more than they help you: you’re told all the horrific things that a$$hats have done to women, and then you’re instructed in techniques that have about a snowball’s chance of working effectively for most women.
The trick is to avoid situations that put you at risk. Since you can’t avoid them all — just being female puts you at risk — you must be mentally prepared and you must always have a variety of emergency plans in mind.
First off, when you’re driving around, know where the nearest police stations, emergency rooms, and fire stations are along your beaten path. Mentally map routes to these places. In our parts, police stations are secured like a castle under siege, and so it may be difficult to get a cop’s attention without getting out of a car — but if that’s the closest refuge, go there and lean on the horn. If you have a cell with you, call 911 and report where you are.
Fire stations tend to be more open, and they’re usually populated by large, fit men. And they’re the kind of men whose altruism triggers their testosterone: show up at a fire station in distress, and they’ll all leap on their white chargers.
An ER is also likely to have someone around who will notice if you park by the door and lean on your horn. Often there are police or firemen around ERs, too.
Failing one of these outposts, always keep an eye out for places that have lots of people around: a crowded parking lot, a popular store, a busy strip mall. I once escaped a nut case by swerving left across oncoming traffic into a shopping center. The crazy kept on rolling down the road, unwilling to continue harassing me in the presence of others.
When driving home, watch your rear- view mirror. If someone follows me into the neighborhood and then stays on my tail after I’ve made the first couple of the turns I have to take to reach my house, I don’t go home. Instead, I take another route back out of the ’hood. If the person stays on my tail, I head for the nearest police station or fire house.
While in public, try to look dowdy. Refrain from dressing sharply (unless you have a man with you, of course), and certainly do not wear obviously expensive clothing or carry an expensive, name-brand handbag. I no longer carry a purse at all these days: too dangerous in the grocery-store parking lots near my house. I keep a credit card and a couple of store cards in a business card case, which I can carry in a pocket.
At home: equip your doors with heavy-duty, drill-proof, bump-proof Shlage or Medeco deadbolts.
Don’t know what “bumping” is? Mwa ha ha! Check this out:
As the “burglar” type in this video remarks, a bump-resistant lock ain’t cheap. But believe me: it is so worth it. Try to drill a Schlage or a Medeco lock, and it’ll break your drill.
Obviously, putting a fancy lock on a kitchen door with a window in it is self-defeating. Install your deadbolt on solid-core exterior doors with no window(!), or — much more cost-effective and handy for letting fresh air flow through the house — install security doors and put the high-end lock on those. You’ll need a top-notch locksmith for the job, because many metal security doors are too thin to accommodate this type of lock; the locksmith will need to special-order a type of metal ring that adds space to install the deadbolt.
Do not use double-cylinder deadbolts. These can trap you or a child in the house if a fire starts — if you can’t reach the key that you’ve stashed out of the burglar’s grasp, or if the person trying to get out doesn’t know where to find it, you’re done for. Remember, the likelihood that you’ll need to get out in a hurry is at least as high and certainly more urgent than the likelihood that some guy will try to get in.
Upgrade your windows. The new double-paned windows have more than one locking system, allowing you to complicate a burglar’s life. And if any of those windows are sliders, add a third “lock” by dropping a stick in the track. You also can buy stick-on battery-operated alarms, which will squeal like an enraged cat if anyone (you included) opens the window. Again, bear in mind: You don’t care if they get in, as long as you get enough advance warning to get out a different door or window.
Make friends with a German shepherd. Get yourself a dog, preferably a large one with a protective temperament.
The dog strategy, however, is problematic. German shepherd dogs are overbred and potentially dangerous — truly, too many representatives of the breed today are batsh!t. Pit bulls — pace, dear pit-bull-loving friends — are unpredictable and also potentially dangerous. You do not want a dog that has a higher than normal propensity to turn on you. This includes a number of purebred lines. The best strategy is probably to rescue a mixed-breed dog, preferably one that does not appear to be part GerShep or part pit bull.
German shepherds and many other large, assertive breeds are high-energy, high-drive dogs that require a lot of time, training, and physical strength to help them adapt to living in your home. You must be prepared to train and exercise these dogs — and to do so you will need training yourself that goes well beyond the YouTube variety — and you must expect to spend some time every day exercising and working your dog.
A smaller dog may be better: most dogs this side of a greyhound are walking burglar alarms. They can’t “protect” you the way most people imagine a shepherd or a Doberman will do…but that’s a fantasy. No dog can or should be expected to protect you. The only critter that can protect you is you.
And you do that with common sense.
Is keeping a gun in the house a manifestation of common sense?
Only if you’re fully trained to use it, if you keep in practice, and you keep the weapon clean and lubricated. And even then, only if you really, truly, deep in your heart of hearts are prepared to use it against another human being. Police officers and members of the military are specifically trained to overcome this scruple.
Most people who are not psychopaths will hesitate to shoot another person. And just a fraction of an instant can give an aggressor the chance to shoot you, if he’s armed or if he grabs your gun and takes it from you. For that reason, I personally think that for most people it’s pointless and, if you have kids around the house, dangerous to keep a gun in your residence. Keep your wits about you, and you won’t need a gun.
So we’re number 13. Thirteen? We don’t know thirteen what, but there it is: spray-painted in the dirt at the end of the alley.
Every alley in the ’hood suddenly turned up with a number spray-painted at each end, in ox-blood red. No explanation from our honored city parents or the utility companies as to what’s up.
I assume this is a harbinger of more chaos: they no doubt intend to dig up the alleys and create some more mess for us.
But there’s another possible explanation: one fraught with controversy but one that, if they were to push it through, would be exceptionally good for the neighborhood.
The alleys here provide cover for the bums who are now imported every day by lightrail. The lovely train brings them up to the end of the line at the corner of Conduit of Blight Blvd and Gangbanger’s Way, where they’re all disgorged onto the street — made to get off the cars. So they stream into the nearby parking lots, where they hang out for awhile before roaming into our neighborhood. They use the alleys as their bedrooms and bathrooms. Sometime they peer over the fences by way of figuring how to burgle houses. And a few months back one of these charmers jumped a young couple’s wall and molested two small girls who were playing in their backyard.
Personally, I don’t like to take the garbage out back at all — our garbage cans are in the alley — and will not do so at night. It was OK when I had the German shepherd — once Anna stood off a weirdo when she went with me to take the trash. But these little corgis are useless that way.
After the wall-jumping episode, the City suggested we should fence off the alleys, spanning each end with gates that could be opened, using a code, by residents and by the cops and the fire department.
Naturally, nothing like that can ever be easy. Some people thought it was a good idea; others rose up in arms against it. La Maya, for example, hates the idea, because it would mean garbage and trash would have to be collected from the fronts of our houses instead of from the alleys.
Recycling is already picked up in front. For garbage, communal four-person bins are set out in the alleys, to the City’s displeasure: they want to replace the things with one-household bins to be picked up in front, because the newer garbage trucks are too large to easily navigate the narrow alleys. La Maya thinks people will make a fine mess, stacking up debris in front of their houses for the quarterly loose trash pickup.
They’re doing that over in Richistan now, and yes, it is messy in the week or two before the loose trash pickup, which only occurs about every three or four months. But by and large in a neighborhood where people take care of their homes (most people here do), it’s not a serious problem.
Obviously, blocking vagrants from adapting the alleys as their private toilets and campsites would make life a great deal better around here. And safer: one reason they’re attracted to our neighborhood is that the alleys make convenient hidden passageways for them, as well as campgrounds. And the garbage cans are an attractive nuisance. Tomorrow is garbage pickup day, so the bins are full. This morning when I took the dogs for a walk, what should I see but a seedy character burning his way up past the park, pushing his grocery cart as fast as he could go. Half-an hour later, when I came back into my part of the neighborhood, by golly, there he was in an alley, pulling junk out of one of the trash bins. He was specifically called here by the sheltered trash bins, which make it possible to scavenge for goods you can sell for drug money.
So…yeah. I really hope 13 is a lucky number this time.
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.
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.
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.
