Idle Essay Day

An overcast day, threatening to rain, and our august nannies leaders have issued an “excessive heat warning.” Actually the heat isn’t excessive — it was only 92 when I headed out for a bike ride late this morning, but what the heck. No doubt some poor soul from Ohio or New Jersey thinks a balmy 92 is “excessive.”

Still, warm and on the high side of humid doesn’t leave you much in the mood for sharp cerebration. A stack of drafts having to do with things financial and political sits in WordPress’s queue, and alas, I feel exactly zero desire to think hard enough to expound on any of those topics. And so I declare today an official Idle Essay Day.

Check out this recipe for grilled baby back ribs, spotted in the food section of today’s Times. It’s part of a posy of recipes that accompany an article inveighing against marinating meat before grilling it. Buried deep in altogether too much effete verbiage is a good idea (instead of soaking meat in a marinade before grilling, try giving it a rub with the dry ingredients, grilling it, and then dipping it in the liquid ingredients right before serving), but it’s hard to find it in the blizzard of words the authors need to fill the required column inches.

Welp, despite a relatively cool morning, the daily two-mile exercise walk was out because I had to show up at the Mayo along about 8:00 a.m. to be poked, prodded, and X-rayed. The “itinerary” they mailed (yes: the Mayo’s management thinks of its appointments as somehow akin to medical tourism…) had me not even getting in to the radiology department till 10:20, but mercifully they were moving right along and I was back on the road, headed home, at 9:30. So it was still cool enough (hm) for a bicycle tour of the neighborhood, about 1.75 miles with the gear set to create a little extra work.

Ran into my neighbor Sally, sweltering over the plants in her front yard. You’ll recall that she had put her house on the market shortly before her über-elderly mother’s final illness, and (thankfully, from my point of view) took it off after the old gal died. You have to understand what’s meant by “old gal” here: Sally herself is in her 80s… She’s quiet, unobtrusive, and tidy, so I was extremely relieved when she decided to stay put.

Sally said her nephew, a real estate broker who’d listed the house for her, called the other day to say he’d run the comps in the neighborhood and he also was extremely glad she didn’t sell: the place is now worth $50,000 to $60,000 more than they were asking just last April! And he thinks that when the lightrail construction is finished and the boondoggle train is trucking up and down the main drag that separates us from the slum bordering the freeway, values will go up even further.

That remains to be seen: an hour or so ago the homeowner’s association sent out an e-mail asking neighbors to bitch to the city council over a methadone clinic the SOBs just opened in said slum, right around the corner from our glorious wanna-be luxury district — bringing with it a surge in petty crime and an increase in the number of homeless folks hanging out in the area. Did they bother to tell us before they installed this fine cultural amenity? Well, no.

There was a reason our City Parents gerrymandered our neighborhood into the ultra-downscale Maryvale district, and you can be sure that reason did not bode well for the middle-class residents here.

Now that real estate values are on the mend, several of the neighborhood’s stately mansions are on the market. This 3200-square-foot bagatelle, for example, is nestled on one of the prettiest streets in the central city:

(Click on the images for larger, higher-res views.)

You can have it for a mere $590,000.

The kitchen alone is probably worth that…

Imagine cleaning the grease out of the alcove in which the handsome gourmet stovetop resides…

As you might guess by the placement of the artwork, no grease will need to be cleaned from this artifact, because people who can afford to buy and maintain the palace in question can afford to go out to eat. Every day. Morning, noon, and night, if they so choose.

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp how HUGE some of these North Central lots are. Check this out:

That is just the part of the backyard that’s behind the swimming pool fence!

Holy sh!t. You, too, can pay to have someone come in and mow that Sahara of bermudagrass and St. Augustine.

The nicer part of the landscaping, IMHO, looks like this:

Ah well. Back at the Funny Farm, it was into the pool to chill out after the bike ride. Despite my former whinging about the pool’s upkeep, now that I’m old and enjoying chronic back pain, I have to say the smartest da^^n thing I ever did was to buy this house because it had a pool!  Getting rid of the devil-pod tree helped, though: upkeep is almost nil without that monster dropping bushels of leaves, pods, and pollen into the drink.

The pool has saved my tuchus twice now, first with the shoulder injury — after a summer of water exercises, I escaped surgery there — and now with the constant pain in the tail. By the time I got out of the drink this afternoon, the back pain, which was helped a little by the bicycling, was down from about a 2 (on the obnoxiousness scale of 1 to 10) to about a .75. So that, like the neighbor’s backyard, was HUGE.

It’s so huge, as a matter of fact, that I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to install a solar pool heater.

These are expensive: around four grand.

However, one of my friends succumbed to the blandishments of an outfit that leases residential solar power arrays. She and her husband are mightily pleased, because, despite the monthly rental bill from said outfit, they’re earning so much from selling power back to the electric company that their outlay for power has dropped to around $20 a month…in the dead of summer! Among other things, the solar power vendor threw in a pool heater as part of the deal!

In these parts, a pool heater adds about two months to the swimming season. That’s certainly not enough to justify an investment of four grand. However, if I could persuade some such company to embellish my house with a solar power system and tack on a pool heater, too, well…that might be worth it.

In other fields of idleness, perhaps I was unduly annoyed at American Express this morning… I wish they would settle on ONE DATE on which to close their billing cycle.

Normally the AMEX billing cycle ends on the 20th. This date is apposite because it marks the final day of one of the two billing cycles that dictate my budget. Just now I’m about out of food and out of gasoline, and I’d figured that as long as I had to go to the Mayo up on the 101, which would take me halfway to Scottsdale and right past a Costco, I could continue on to the Container Store in Scottsdale to buy some boxes for the craftsy items I’m donating to the church’s silent auction, then turn around and, heading home, get the stuff I need and refill the car’s gas tank at the Costco.

Fortunately, I was given pause by the belief that I’m about $85 in the red on the AMEX budget, so far. On rare occasions, American Express closes that billing cycle on the 21st. If they did so this month, I would be up to my nose in red ink after an expensive Costco run and a $45 refill.

So, before I left for the Mayo, I called American Express. First off, their talking robot informed me that I’m actually $300 in the red, not $85. After 10 minutes of hanging on hold, a sort of human being picked up the phone.

“When does the current billing cycle close?”

“At 11:30 this evening.”

Lovely.

Well, that cut out an entire day’s worth of running around, none of which can be done until next month’s billing cycle kicks in. Tomorrow. And it also posed a new problem: where the Hell am I going to come up with the unaccounted-for $300 I owe the bastards?

That will clean out my savings account again. Every time I get caught up with the short-term emergency/diddle-it-away fund, I have to raid it again!

And of course there’s the question of what charge(s) I failed to enter in Excel… We’ll find out soon enough, I suppose.

Oh well. By the time I got out of the pool, I was starved. Having refrained from scarfing meat for the past several days, it was time for a real meal:

Lovely little New Zealand lamb chop…first meat in several days. Gorgeous dainty asparagi. Even the salad greens are still fresh and tasty.

It occurred to me that despite feeling sometimes that the diet is out of balance, what with the weight-loss project going on for several months, I’m ingesting a surprising amount of vegetation. Lookit that: asparagus with juice of half a lime. Lettuce, onion, radishes, blueberries, and an entire carrot with fresh lemon juice and olive oil. That’s after this morning’s meal of lentils and fresh pineapple. This evening: xergis, which is mostly cucumber blended with yogurt. Clearly I’m not starving on this diet. 😀

And so, to work…