Coffee heat rising

Heah Come de Storm!

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Eek! SIXTY-mile-an-hour wind gusts? Say it ain’t so, dear Wunderground!

We’re told to batten down the hatches for a fine little freshet that’s swooping in from the southeast. And yea verily, just now we’re getting some startling rolls of thunder.

Not raining here at the Funny Farm yet, at just 9:00 p.m.

Wait, I take that back! The rain just started…and it is already pounding down. ohhhhh gawd, what a mess that pool is gonna be!

Oh well. At least we’re not out in it.

Just grabbed the chair cushions in from the side deck. One of them: soaked. The other: just damp.

Water is roaring against the bedroom window Arcadia door like someone is spraying the glass with a hose! Yipes!

And now… Huh! Suddenly it stops.

Weird.

Arizona is a weird place. One of its weirdest aspects is its weather.

Dorkification Day

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Monday
August 13

Yes. It looks like today is going to be one of those Days of Dorkification… You know: when everything you touch goes KERSPROOIINGG and everything you do to try to fix it makes it worse.

Today is Cleaning Lady Day. We might also name it after the proprietor: Ungrateful Wretch Day.

Yes. Yes, indeed.  SOOOOOOO lazy am I that I resent having to get off my duff to clean house for the cleaning lady. 😀  Not to say /eyeroll/

Luz the Cleaning Lady Extraordinaire does SUCH a superb job that there’s no way I could match her performance, certainly not without working myself until I fall over face-forward. Even more extraordinary: the Funny Farm is her second house of the day! She starts across the street at Wonder Accountants’ place and then comes over here.

How she does this day after day (presumably she has enough clients to fill all the weekdays) and week after week escapes me. I would die if I had to do that kind of work, day in and day out.

Financially, she seems to be doing OK, if one makes a few assumptions and then does the math. Let’s say she has two houses a day and charges $80/house. That’s $160/day. If she works five days a week (haven’t asked her if she does, it bein’ none o’ my bidness!), that’s $800 a week. Given a couple weeks off, that’s $40,000 a year. And whaddaya bet she doesn’t pay taxes on that?

When a person uses their home as a place of business — as WonderAccountant does, and as I used to when I was working for GDU and freelancing — the cost of cleaning is, o’course, tax-deductible. That means Luz’s pay would show up on my tax returns. If the Taxman chose to look that up, then he could go after Luz for not declaring a full-time income. However, two things would militate against that:

* You’d have to deposit your pay in a checking account.

Many Latina/o immigrants don’t even have checking accounts: they just cash their check at a grocery store or a cambio.

* Everyone who was hiring you would have to declare your pay on their tax returns.

Unlikely. Many people who hire cleaning ladies are Junior League types: wealthy women who spend their days promoting their husband’s careers through highly visible “worthy” charitable works. They’re not hiring a cleaning lady so they can go out and earn their own salary. If you can’t deduct the cost from your taxes, why bother? Some people who do freelance work out of their homes (or are now work-from-home employees) don’t realize that every expense having to do with their house/workplace is potentially tax-deductible, at least to a degree. Plus many folks pay a cleaning lady in cash, so she doesn’t get ripped off at a cambio when she has to convert a check to dollars. This means she’s probably not declaring it… So neither are you, hm?

So, unless WonderAccountant or  some other professional type among her clients is advising Luz on her taxes, Uncle Sam probably has no clue where she works and how much she makes.

At any rate, back to the introductory topic here: everything I touch today goes SPROOOIIINGGG!

Go to put a load of cleaning rags into the washer (it’s only been two weeks since she left them in the garage for me to wash them…), dump the coffee grounds on the potted plants in back…holeeeee sheee-ut! It’s 95 in the shade out there, under cloudy skies. Wunderground predicts a 15% chance of rain.

Yeah: 95 and humid. Where does it think we are: in Saudi Arabia?

****

Speaking of hot and humid…for the love of God, nearly a hundred people killed on Maui, and the searchers think they’ve covered only about 3% of the disaster field.

What. A. Horror.

Y’know…. Even if my own home were unaffected, I can’t imagine that I could go back to a normal life in a place where a catastrophe like that happened. Everywhere you turn your gaze, you must see destruction and signs of death. It’s hard to believe that many folks could make themselves return to Lahaina. It would be just too heart-breaking, too terrifying.

Adding to the horror of it, the town apparently had disaster alarms (so the residents thought…), but they didn’t sound!

WTF? How is that even possible? And can the survivors spell l-a-w-s-u-i-t?

More gawdawful yet, apparently the local officialdom had declared the fire 100% contained. Wrong!

Lawsuit hm? Spell that with ALL CAPS.

****

Hmmmm… In altogether different realms….

No sign of Luz, the Cleaning Lady from Heaven.

Her car is not across the street at WonderAccountant’s.  The WonderAccountants are, as we scribble, touring northern California, having attended a memorial for an old friend in Reno and then having decided to continue to points westerly. WA says she thought Luz was supposed to come over today…but maybe she’s just running late.

Which is fine. The house is actually pretty clean…it really doesn’t need her ministrations today.

*****

BING BONG!

*****

Criminey. Speak of the Devil…

She apparently hasn’t gone to WA’s place yet…she must have figured there was no hurry, since they’re not home.

Drat. So that means no privacy this afternoon.

ohhhhhh well….  It also means we have here an excuse to get off our duff and go shopping for some of the stuff we’re running out of here…

Really, I do need to make a Sprouts run. I just don’t wanna.

Here in the lawless Wild West, it’s legal to sell certain cannabis products…over the counter, like so much candy. And Sprouts, bein’ a hippy-dippy sort of place, carries the stuff, to a degree. Specifically, they carry CBD products: body creams, lip balms, and the like.

Their CBD body lotion is the ONLY thing I’ve found that actually works on the peripheral neuropathy. Aspirin barely touches it. CBD ingestibles: not noticeably  better. But the topical stuff — which you apply directly to the patches of skin where the nerves are buzzing — really cuts that awful tingling.

The other day I stumbled across a credible site that says one cause of peripheral neuropathy is the dread  covid-19 disease.

Hmm…ya don’t say?

Shoofing around, I stumble across an old journal entry that shows the covid-19 episode I picked up at the Mayo’s ER in the fall of 2019 coincided with the earliest appearance of the crazy-making tingling.

I’ll be damned!

Well. Of course I can’t prove it. I can say I do test positive for having had the virus. But I sure can’t prove when I had it.

****

Tuesday
August 15

And oh joy, as a function of Olde Age, I forgot to finish and post this yesterday.

This morning whenever dawn is finished cracking, I have to traipse across the city, barge into the credit union, and try to get SOMEONE there to help me get  back into my account. NONE of the passwords I have will let me in.

Godlmighty am I ever sick and tired of our wondrous password-protected world.

Good Morning, America!

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Midnight: Weird noise outside.

What?  Pool equipment run amok? Air conditioner on the fritz? Juvenile delinquents frolicking?

Stumble outside. Cop copter is circling over the intersection of a neighborhood lane and Conduit of Blight Blvd. He flies up this way, then doubles back. Ugh.

Why DO I live in Crime Central, anyway?

Climb back into bed.

Dog wants out. Wouldn’tcha know it?

Lift dog out of bed. Follow her to the backyard.

* Cop copter is already gone. That’s somethin’, anyway.
* Wait for the dog to do her thing. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait.
* Neighbor’s AC is making the weird noise. Sounds like an expensive fix.
* Motion-sensitive backyard light is losing motion sensitivity. Does it just need a new lightbulb, or is that another expensive fix?

“Come ON, dawg!!”

*Scrabble scrabble scrabble scrabble…. Dog digs up quarter-minus.

Stumble back in the house. Lift dog back onto the bed.

{sigh}

Dog’s stomach is growling dramatically. Why did I imagine I wuz gonna get back to sleep?

Fed her…when? Around 6 p.m.

Helle’s belles. That was seven hours ago!

Do I really have to get up at 1:00 in the morning and feed the dog? And then let her out into the crime-infested night again?

Arrrrghhhh!

Flaming Horror in the Pacific

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No doubt you’ve been following the scenes of disaster from Maui… How could you miss them? They’re all over the news.

And there but for the Grace of God…and a handy divorce court…go I.

DXH loved to travel. Every vacation, nothing would do but what we had to jump on a plane and fly someplace.

Personally, I was less of an enthusiast, having spent my entire childhood and early teens traipsing around the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. But whatEVER.

We had discovered Maui before my son was born, around the time we made our first trip to the Hawaiian Islands. We stayed in a high-rise condo on the beach, where condo owners (from what I could tell) rented out their apartments to tourists. It was gorgeous. And a lot of fun.

So a few years later…he wants to go back. At this point, our son is about three or four years old. And I’m none too enthused about spending two weeks in a hotel with an energetic kidlet.

Solution: we took my step-niece along to babysit! By that time, my widowed father had remarried, producing a fine stepsister (a Superior Court judge) for me, and she had a teen-aged daughter, very sweet, smart, and responsible.

It appears that our hangout is right where all those fires are raging, or very close too it. We roamed all over Lahaina. If we were there again now (and yea verily, it is August, the month most Phoenicians try to leave town!), we would be in the middle of all that.

Far worse, though, would be to live there. Hundreds and maybe thousands of people apparently have lost their homes and their livelihoods. Even those who have escaped that kind of loss are living through a horror show.

Well, it can only be hoped that somehow this disaster will be brought under control. It certainly is a terrible thing to contemplate, to say nothing of having to live through it.

Now What?

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LOL! Speaking of the Hubs of Hades, the local denizens are as weird as anyone you would expect to reside in the Miltonic Underworld. 😀

This afternoon I’m puttering around in the house, not doing anything consequential, and what do I hear but KEEEEEE-RASH!! Coming from the street to the east of the Funny Farm. Car wreck, it sounds like. Right in front of Tony’s Rest Home for Juvenile Delinquents.

Now what, indeed?

See that the dog is safely contained. Find some shoes. Trot out front to  peruse whatever new excitement has occurred. And find…

nothing

Nope. Nary a dented car. Not even a smashed mailbox stanchion.

nothing

No idea, still, what THAT was about. If one of the brats had bashed a parked car, a fender surely would have been crushed. If they’d run into a mailbox, that would make quite a twisted little display.

The brats are in the habit of SLAMming the front door. Apparently it sticks — Tony being the clever handyman that he is, you’d think he’d shave it down so it would fit smoothly. But who knows? Maybe they’ve trained the inmates to slam the door as a signal to tell the overseers that they’re going outside.

Report from the Hubs of Hades

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Good Gawd! It’s only 105 out there, but it sure feels more like about 110 to 112. Probably because the humidity, sez Wunderground, is 24%.

Meanwhile, inside the shack with the air-conditioning pounding away, the thermometer next to the bed where the dawg and I are loafing reads 84 degrees. Balmy. The AC is laboring to drag the thermostat down to 80.

My power bill is gonna be astronomical…

Incredibly, the pool remains crystal-clear — some kind of miracle in this fine, algae-friendly heat. Thing is, I haven’t seen Pool Dude in the past two weeks.

No way in Hell that water could stay that clean all by its fine self. That says that PD is showing up when I’m not here, since Ruby goes BATSHIT with Corgi Joy whenever she realizes he’s here. So either he’s sneaking in during the night — very, v-e-e-r-r-y quietly, or somehow he’s arriving when I’m out. The latter is unlikely, since these days, between the heat and the plague, I don’t go out much. But then, the former is pretty unlikely, too.

At any rate, I just tested the water. It’s very high on chlorine. That suggests Our Hero has been at work.

The floater is full of tabs, and I haven’t put any in there. In this kind of heat, chlorine tabs dissolve quickly, so even though he’s dropping five or six tabs in there, they wouldn’t be THAT plump if he hadn’t shown up yesterday to refill the thing.

Welp, we can’t complain too much about Arizona’s summer heat and…absent monsoons. Good Lord! A million people back East without power. Power lines trapping the natives. Airports shut down. Tornado in Tennessee.

It’s supposed to warm up a bit next week…115 or so, come mid-week. Chance of the traditional late-summer monsoon rains: about nil.