Face it: I’ve become a crazy old lady. If I started out “funny” about money, now I’m a little strange about most everything. It could be accentuated by 115-degree heat, which makes you crazy when you go out in it and makes you stir-crazy by imprisoning you inside air-conditioned boxes. But likely there was some underlying funniness to start with…
Check it out:
The big potted ficus tree, which gives the potentially stark back porch some character and even a little shade, is getting sunburned in the blasting heat. That’s even though the thing is under the shade of the patio roof. The morning sun is so fierce it burns the leaves before it gets high enough to be blocked by the roof.
Don’t believe it? Last night the patio thermometer read 101 degrees…at ten o’clock at night! Don’t even ask how hot it gets out there in the daytime.
The tree is roped to the patio upright, because the stiff breezes we get at this time of year (normal people would call them “violent dust storms”) invariably knock it over, causing me to have to risk putting my back out (again) pulling it upright and creating quite a nice mess. It is not gunna get unroped.
What to do?
Well, I had these curtains left after I built new sheer curtains for the bedroom. Think of that.
Screwed a few more cuphooks into the patio beam and then hung the drapes on those. Voila!
Gorgeous, huh?
They’re even more colorful when viewed from the other side, a scenic embellishment visible from the street, if you’re curious enough to peer over the wall.
Oh well. They’ll come down as soon as the weather moderates, probably mid- to late August.
One nice thing about this lash-up is that it creates a kind of tent where I can shuck off my clothes and wrap a towel around myself to dart over to the pool without being observed from the neighbor’s front windows or by tall or nosy passers-by.
Speaking of the wall and scenic embellishments and privacy, I tied another lash-up to the east wall bordering the street:
Exquisite, no?
Those things are old tumble-down wooden trellises, to which I nailed old shade screen and then tied to the wall’s decorative block row. They also serve to block curious eyes from peering into my yard as I go about my business, often in various states of undress. Look just awful! But they’ll do the job until those hopseed bushes can get big enough to take over from the deceased devil-pod tree as a privacy screen.
This is the joy of not living in a homeowner’s association: you’re free to decorate your yard in Early Poor White Trash.
Just look at those bushes! They were little one-gallon twigs when I planted them this spring. At that time they just came up to the bottom of the third row of blocks from the bottom—not counting the row that’s half-buried there. Now they’re almost to the top of the wall! They certainly will have reached the top by the end of the summer. From what I can tell, they’re pretty frost-tolerant—not that we get hard freezes around here anymore, thanks to the global warming that is not global warming. So assuming they don’t freeze down to the ground this winter, by next summer they should be tall and vigorous enough to block the view from the road. Thank goodness!
And speaking of the hopseed bushes, remember the “oleander” I reported as having volunteered in a pot? Well…hmmmm….
“Oleander”→
←Hopseed bush
Now personally, I still don’t think they’re the same. Click for extreme close-ups and notice the slightly wavy edges on the known hopseed bush, and then compare with the smooth edges on the intruder. Also the volunteer plant has shiny (oleander-like!) leaves, whereas the hopseed’s leaves are slightly less waxy-looking. However, the leaves are the same size and color and the growing habit is strangely similar.
We’ll know sooner or later. If the visitor puts out pink, magenta, or white flowers, it will give itself away. However…if that thing is a baby hopseed bush, it doesn’t bode well. The hopseeds growing fifty feet away from it put out about three little seed pods this spring. If they sprout that readily, once they start really producing pods, we’ll have a bumper crop of hopseed babes!
My favorite orange tree, the one that produces fruit so sweet they taste like candy, has been suffering. This spring it quit adding new leaves, and the leaves that still cling to the branches are as sunburned as the ficus’s. I really don’t want that tree to die.
I think the problem is that it hasn’t been getting enough water. The other tree, which is thriving, is planted on a slight incline, so that the bubbler pours water toward the alley. To keep all the water from flowing out under the back gate, I built a berm along its north side, creating a well for the water to pool. Also, the sickly tree has the bubbler installed right next to the trunk (not good for citrus, I’m told), and so the water coming out of that bubbler has never spread out to the drip line.
←An orange tree is supposed to look like this.
So, I broke out the shovel and the hoe and, over three days, scraped the crushed granite back away from the tree, mounding it up to build a berm under the drip line. Really, it probably should be further out from the drip line than this, but that would make the side yard nonnavigable. Still need to get some river rocks to shore it up—otherwise the first hard rain (which, if we’re gonna get it, should come in the next month) will melt this fine moon crater back down to grade level.
It was a bitch of a job in 112-degree heat. But…uhm…good exercise. I still need to cut the shade cloth underlaying loose and pull it out, but I may foist that job onto Gerardo. Then probably will spread some compost around the bottom of the crater.
Yesterday I finally bought the proposed cell phone: a Nokia X 2. Apparently this is an older model that T-Mobile is trying to get rid of by offering as an Internet-only deal. You can’t get it in the stores, nor can you get the plan I want: $30 for 100 minutes of talk, unlimited texting, and unlimited Web crawling. In fact, if you ask about it in the store, they’ll tell you T-Mobile doesn’t offer it at all and try to get you to buy the 1500 minutes of talk or text messages plus a generous 3 MB of Web usage. Uh huh.
It takes two to five days for the phone to show up, assuming it actually does show up. Let’s hope they haven’t yanked the coveted plan by then. You can’t sign up for the plan until you have the phone in hand.
Anyway, the phone is well reviewed. Its data speeds aren’t great, but I don’t intend to use it for web-surfing. I have a perfectly fine iPad for that job, should I feel impelled to surf the web and check e-mail while I’m driving to campus. This thing will do the job nicely for sending texts to certain sons who no longer answer the telephone at all, for calling friends, and for summoning roadside assistance when the Dog Chariot breaks down, as it inevitably will, one of these days.
Well, it’s past time for me to get on with my crazed life. And so, to work…