House, Yard, and (Book) Marketing

Much cooler this morning than of late! It’s after 10 and only about 101 on the back porch. So far. That’s grand: it was balmy enough to walk the dogs a mile, then drop them off and go back out for another real walk of about 1.5 miles, then drop in the drink and clean the pool a bit, water the plants, fart around.

The accursed palo verde beetles are back, damn their multiple eyes. This is the time of year when they like to come out — at the height of the alleged monsoon. We haven’t seen much sign of the annual summer rains, though — a couple of sprinkles a few weeks ago, some mild humidity, and that’s it. But I guess when you gotta hatch, you gotta hatch, rain or shine.

Last summer a guy at Home Depot, a fellow who presented himself as a retired landscaping business owner who KNOWS about PV beetles, claimed that a Bayer product the store peddles absolutely positively will kill the things. I doubt it — when you look the critters up you find almost nothing will kill them — about the only thing you can do is try to keep your tree healthy and hope it’ll last longer than the seven years it takes for the monsters to kill it. Besides, read the label and you find the Home Depot dude’s stuff is really a miticide. A three-inch-long Triassic bug a “mite” does not make.

Oh well. It IS an insecticide, and it IS ridiculously concentrated.  So I decided to try this strategy, which I don’t think will work, but I don’t think it will do much harm, either.

This morning I poured the Bayer product, uncut, down the four exit holes that have surfaced so far. By the end of the season, there’ll be at least a dozen — probably more like two dozen. There are so many grubs under the soil out there that I’ve actually found the damn things in plant pots next to the deck!

So far, I’m not seeing any visible die-back to the tree’s limbs. Yet. However, paloverde grows aggressively. In the city, where a paloverde is close to a house, you need to trim it back once every year or 18 months to keep its limbs off your roof and your neighbor’s. Pruning, no matter how carefully done, isn’t good for paloverde trees — it can damage the tree’s overall health. Supposedly, trees that are pruned are more vulnerable to these damned bugs.

They have, though, started to damage one of the Arizona sweet oranges — it’s dying back in the area closest to the paloverde’s infested roots. The things like citrus as much as they love paloverde, and supposedly they’ll finish off your fruit tries as fast as they’ll finish off your shade trees.

One arborist told me than when his crew cuts out a paloverde that’s dying from a paloverde beetle infestation, they find literally thousands of the grubs in the ground. Before a new tree can be planted — if it ever can be — they have to apply insecticide directly to the grubs repeatedly, trying to kill off as many as they can.

And good luck with that endeavor…

We’re told the adult females come back to their exit holes to lay their eggs. And yea verily, an expired momma was flopped on her back out there this morning, gone to meet her Buggy Maker. I figure if you pour a mighty strong insecticide down the holes and then water it in, the stuff will spread around by capillary action. Maybe it will kill whatever little guys are burrowing around nearby. And maybe it will kill the new eggs.

So that’s what I’m hoping for. Speaking of “good luck with that”…

Meanwhile, in the insect department, the plants on the kitchen counter seemed to be hosting a tribe of gnats. I figured they were attracted by the mangoes I’d left to ripen on the counter and then were overjoyed to find the swamp that had developed in the pot where the coleus cutting died. Threw out the coleus, swatted the bugs back.

This morning, however, closer inspection revealed that most of them were not the flying kind. In fact, they were the tiniest, most delicate little ants you’ve ever seen! Gnants!

And none too many of them. With the fruit in the fridge and the dead plant gone and a squirt of Dawn in the plates under the living plants, there wasn’t much for them to scavenge. But still, hope springs eternal in the antish breast.

They’re so fragile that a light spray of very dilute Dawn does the poor little things in forthwith. I felt bad about killing them, because they’re such charming little gnants. Yet off they must go: we’re not sharing the kitchen counter with the wildlife, thank you.

Followed them to their tiny entry way in a tiny opening in the kitchen door threshold. Brushed around that with some DE. Then scrubbed off the counter with Mrs. Meyers. And what the heck: the kitchen sink hasn’t been decently scoured in a decade or so: scrubbed that till it glows.

So that counter looks about as good as it’s going to look. Which isn’t very: it’s got several cracks in it, and I haven’t been able to find a tile guy who’s willing to fix it.

I’m thinking if I could find a slab of marble in a kind of beigeish color that would go with the existing Mexican tile, I might replace the stuff on that side of the kitchen — there’s actually rather little backsplash there, so if it had to be torn out and replaced, it wouldn’t take much to do so.

I really don’t like stone countertops, even though yes, I do understand they’re the permanent rage. I’d so much rather have tile. But what must be must be, I suppose. The big question is whether I could keep the sink if I had to install marble or butcher block. It’s one of those things that’s flush with the counter, so you don’t have to fart around with cleaning up the mess around the sink’s rim. It was a very expensive Kohler sink, too: there’s nothing wrong with it and I’d like not to bet rid of it.

On housewifely reflection, I realized that I haven’t cleaned and oiled those expensive kitchen cabinets since before the horrible medical adventures began — two and a half years ago! So I need to break out the Murphy’s Oil Soap and the orange or lemon oil, wash them down, and polish them up. (How does that kind of labor take on directionality?) That will make the kitchen look a lot better…later. Much later. It’s not a job to do when the AC labors to cool that part of the house to 83 degrees.

This fall: clean cabinets.

Put out a couple of feeders full of fresh bird seed for the feathered critters. Almost every variety of bird eats ants (with the possible exception of ducks and hummingbirds). I’ve found that attracting them to the backyard really does help with the Ant Wars. But lately, in the heat, I’ve been lazy about feeding them.

Also put out fresh sugar water for said hummers.

Speaking of wildlife, it looks like the resident duck has failed to hatch ducklings. She seems to be gone now, with no babes waddling around or drowning in the pool (which they will do, if any ever do hatch). I’m pretty sure she built a nest in the cat’s claw, a far better one than DuckDuck built last spring: deeper into the shrubbery and much harder to spot. But apparently she had no better luck in the reproductive department than did the previous occupant.

These ducks are quite charming. As long as they don’t produce babies to die in the pool, which will break my flinty little heart, they’re more than welcome to float around and tease Ruby. They really don’t make that much mess: the pool cleaner quickly cleans up the occasional dropping, which IMHO isn’t any more drastic than the purple stuff the grackles deposit in the pool as they fly back and forth. I’m pretty confident that the chlorine and acid take care of any microbes — certainly a vigorous shock-treat will do so.

I’ve been madly hawking my wares on the various social media. The Pinterestified images Jackie has been creating make perfect ads elsewhere, especially if I fiddle with them by inserting them in a horizontal ad. So I went through the P&S Press Blog and made a long list of the many, many, MANY posts I’ve failed to publicized. Then determined to flog three a day at all points:

My Facebook timeline
The Plain & Simple Press FB page
The Copyeditor’s Desk FB page
FB Group: Writers of Nonfiction
FB Group: KDP Select Authors (who reads this stuff? It’s ALL self-serving ads!)
FB Group: Book Promotion (ditto, in spades!)
FB Group: Books Gone Viral (who??? why????)
FB Group: Authors & Book Lovers Discussion (well, okay…maybe)
Twaddle
Google+

Sticking links to the various posts does seem to be doing something. Every day I get a slew of new people following The Girls on Twitter, and presumably I’m reaching more people on Facebook…if anybody actually reads that trash.

In fact, though, the Writers of Nonfiction group apparently is inhabited. The moderator keeps a grip on things there — she allows ONE day a week in which people can post their ads — and only as comments to a post there. Otherwise, the content is real conversation. And some of it is pretty good.

And strangely, a tiny but steady stream of users keep subscribing to the P&S Press page, for reasons I cannot imagine.

Welp, what with the ant cleanup frenzy and Cassie flying into a barking frenzy that elicited another endless spasmodic reverse-sneezing frenzy from the puppy and the bird feeding and the pedicure (multitasked while writing) and the current laundry load (multitask) and all that, it’s now past lunch time. I hunger.

And so, finally, onward with the day.