Day from Hell Peters Out in the Wee Hours…

It was quite the day yesterday:

• Killer bees take up residence under the outdoor deck in my favorite shady bosque.
• Duck returns; as expected, poops on CoolDeck, with the same effect as dog poop.
• Speaking of the which Cassie finds another cache of the neighbor’s accursed cat’s deposits in the unused flowerbed.
• The water heater goes out, after I pony up a chunk of dough to the new arborist dude.
• Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner comes to a dead stop. He has, it appears, croaked right over.
• The neighbors in the rental(?) across the street announce they’re having a big chivaree for a daughter’s wedding reception — we should expect the streets the be parked up and the “music” to be loud…hope that’s not too much of an inconvenience for you folks.
• Programming the phone system I bought turns out to require a master’s degree in engineering; damned if I can figure out how you bring up the [MENU], which you have to accomplish to make it do anything. Decide to take it back, which will help because all these little surprise expenses are gonna land me in the poorhouse.

Ohhhhh god…

§ § §

Okay, so after Arborist Dude clued me to the new occupants of the westside yard, I jury-rigged a barricade across the backyard’s narrowest reach, by way of keeping Cassie and Ruby from enraging the little gals. Ain’t it lovely?

Logged into Angie’s List and called a couple of exterminators, in search of someone who could deal with the bee issue. All wild bees in Arizona are now considered Africanized, so our new occupants posed a potential threat — not just to small dogs given to annoying them by trying to catch them on the wing, but just about anyone or anything that disturbs them.

One guy, a fellow named Irish Doherty called me back. He offered to come by yesterday evening, but the Accountant from Heaven and I had tickets to a Chanticleer concert and plans to go to dinner beforehand. No problem, said he…how’s about he comes by around 10 p.m.?

Holy mackerel.

Well, we got back to the ’hood around 10:30. When I called his cell, I found him in the middle of another job. An hour or so later, he surfaced here, just about the time the noisy party across the street was breaking up.

Get this: the guy uses organic pesticides!

Uh huh. Lots of organic things, like, oh, say, nerve gas, are organics… But whatever. He proudly showed me the label. Enough remains of my long-lost photographic  memory for me to remember the ingredients long enough to Google the only one that had a chemistry-lab-bench name. It turned out to be a common ingredient of hand cream. The other stuff was mostly odoriferous “essential oils.”

Knowing my experience with objects and substances eco-friendly, you no doubt can sense my skepticism about this proposition.

Marginally, it seems to have worked. One lonely bee was flying around out there this morning. I thought she’d gone away, but now, a few hours into the day, four or five of them are going in and out. That’s a lot fewer than were out there yesterday, but… If the guys managed to kill the queen, then the surviving bees will die. But if not, they’ll soon be back in force.

Amazingly, in the middle of the night the guy and his assistant went totally beyond the call of duty to get at the nest, which the bees had established on the ground underneath a set of boards that were bolted down. They removed the boards, sprayed like crazy, and then replaced the boards.

It was 3 a.m. before I crawled into the sack, and  of course as usual Cassie and Ruby were ready to bounce at 5 a.m. Thank HEAVEN we have no choir this morning!

Meanwhile, as I was building the Great Wall of Corgi, it dawned on me that the wire garden fencing I was layering between the old strips of picket-fence garden fencing could substitute nicely for the chicken wire I figured I was going to have to buy and lay down over the empty flowerbed that damn cat is using as its toilet. Thank gawd I never throw anything away — one fewer thing to have to spend money on and hassle with.

So I took a bunch of the stuff and dropped it on the ground where the cat has claimed its territory. Probably all that will do is move it over to some other part of the yard. Wish I could figure out how to get rid of that cat without getting blood on my hands…

And yesterday morning when Ruby barked up the duck, I sprinkled the little gal with the garden hose. Hilariously, DUCKS DON’T LIKE TO GET WET!!!!!

No kidding! She took to the sky like a 747, and she didn’t come back until…just now

😀

Chased her off again. Later today when I take Harvey up to Leslie’s to be shoveled out — after I’ve had a chance to get some rest — I’ll see if I can get one of those floating pool alarms for a reasonable price (like I’ve got even a nickel’s worth of spare cash laying around…). If it’ll go off every time she lands in the water, she’ll probably give up in short order. Then I can give the contraption to the  young couple across the street, the folks who are raising four little kids on a teacher’s salary.

Called the plumber who surfaced at SBA a few weeks ago. Our building contractor guy liked him and was impressed, so since the beloved Mr. Lutz seems to have gone out of business, we’re trying him out. He said he’d come around mid-day on Monday, meaning two days (at least) without hot water.

So I’m washing the dishes by hand, which would be OK if the ACCURSED new dish detergents actually worked. In cold water they do not touch grease or stuck-on food. To get the dishes clean last night I had to boil a pot of water on the stove and pour it into the sink, therein to soak and rewash the damn dishes.

While I was waiting for the Bee Dude to show up in the middle of the night, I finally plowed my way through an enormous, difficult, and highly technical paper on the potential complications of the various types of mastectomy.

Holy shit. If women had ANY idea of the astonishingly high rates of adverse outcomes from reconstruction, no one would even think of subjecting herself to such a thing. Ordinary mastectomy, even one that does not involve messing with your lymph nodes, poses some serious risk of very unpleasant aftereffects. But reconstruction ups that risk by orders of magnitude and adds some special nasty complications of its own.

The fact that the medico-pharmaceutical complex has launched an initiative to persuade every woman who needs a mastectomy to elect breast reconstruction…well…it’s just abhorrent. The only way doctors could possibly persuade anyone who’s not just effing dumb as a post is to downplay the many potential negative consequences and the astonishing length of time it takes to recover from such procedures. What we don’t know won’t hurt us, eh?

It appears that, thanks to the Pink Craze, we’re not only performing large numbers of surgeries that probably are unnecessary, in addition we’re inflicting even more traumatic and potentially very harmful surgery on women by pushing reconstruction.

This book is going to raise the roof.

The research is going faster than expected — I’ve had a lull in stoont papers to read. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the stuff I printed out to annotate and organize; in the course of that job, I’ve also found a number of other relevant scientific papers, which I’ll need to print out, analyze, and annotate. But progress is definitely being made. With any luck, I’ll have the proposal ready to ship off before the end of the summer and the book pretty well written by December. Sooner, maybe, if I can shake clear of enough paying work over the next few months.

And so, away…