Coffee heat rising

Rain, Rain…Come Again?

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Here it is, mid-morning of an August day, high monsoon season.

We’ve been told repeatedly that (eeeeek!!) a HURRICANE is blowing in from the west and (eeeeeeek!!) we must be prepared for heavy winds and lots of rain.

Eeek.

Well. What we have is a gray, overcast, still day. But so far nary a drop of rain.

Usually if the Valley is going to get rain, our parts are first to see it. That’s because the ‘Hood backs up against a set of low mountains that marks the north end of the central part of town. Those hills collect rain clouds, so we get most of the action.

It’s plenty humid, that’s for sure. Some laundry that I set out on hangers to air-dry is still damp, after hours of hanging there. The sky is solid gray. But it ain’t a-lettin’ go of any raindrops.

The media just LOVE rain here. It’s such a rare and bizarre phenomenon that it gives local reporters (such as they are) opportunity to croon on and on and ON about…nothing…

We’re told that

Heh heh…The nice thing about rain predictions for reporters in Arizona is that you can fill up space without having to get up from behind your desk and doing any actual…you know…reporting.

Hm. I’m thinking I should take Ruby for another walk now, before (if) it starts to rain again. The nice thing about the cloud cover is that it’s keeping the temps down in the tolerable range.

But we went out at our usual 5:30 a.m. hour — get out much later than that, and you’re toooooo late.

And as a practical matter, my enthusiasm for traipsing over to the park and back through bathroom-level humidity is low, at best.

Wunderground, the most accurate source of weather reporting I’ve found in these parts, is also indulging in the widespread repertorial hysteria:

Jayzus… Guys! Teeth are “impacted.”

Airplanes are delayed.
Flights are canceled.

Just a little literacy would help a lot, when it comes to American reportage.

😮

Brave New Annoyance….

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Lordie, am I ever tired of living in the Brave New World! Every which way from Sunday, you’re assaulted by electronic nuisances and hassles.

It’s 3:00 in the morning. I’m sitting here playing with my computer by way of passing time until the current spate of insomnia passes. It’s dark out. It’s dark in, mostly, except here in the bedroom where a nightstand light is glowing.

And what do I get serenaded with?

Low batt’ry!

Low batt’ry!

Low batt’ry!

Aaaahhhh SHEEE-UT! 

Get up and traipse into the office, whence the racket seems to be emanating. Shoof around. Several old cell phones are sitting there…is one them the culprit?

Check each one. Can’t find any way to tell, with some sort of gauge or screen or whatnot, which if any of them has a “low batt’ry!”

Plug in as many of them as I can find a cord for. One of them takes a round connector. None of the cords in there has a round connector. So I can’t attach them all. Nor can I tell which one is making the racket.

I guess if the damn thing keeps yapping, I’ll have to gather up all the portable whatnots and carry them out to the garage.

Why is this better than what we had in, say, 1950?  Is it REALLY so wonderful to have telephones that you can walk around with and distract yourself with while you’re driving that we need to be harassed constantly by the damn things?

Revisiting the Good Old Days…

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{ooookayyyy…. Let’s see if this effort retains the formatting I kindly asked WordPress to emit…}

So…this morning, driving home from an expedition in a southerly precinct, I happened to wander through our old neighborhood, known hereabouts as the Encanto District.

It’s a beautiful area, consisting of tracts that date from the 1920s to present. The Young and the Upwardly Mobile live there, partly because it’s close in — no significant commute — and partly because the beautiful old houses are handsome, unique, and built to last the ages.

Here’s a pretty little shack in our old stomping grounds: just $1,050,000. Dollars. Yeah. It looks a lot like my friend Emily R’s place, the more or less elegant residence for her and her extraordinary husband, who believed he was a girl and in time had himself surgically transformed accordingly…

This thing is right on the park.

But then we have this, two blocks from where we lived on Cypress.  It sold for eight hundred and thirty-five grand….

The reason I wanted to leave that area, BTW, was two-fold:

* I thought our son should be able to go to the public schools. But that wasn’t an option down in the historic slums. If we moved up to North Central, he could go to the Madison schools, which had an excellent reputation, not only locally but nationwide.

* And yes, the place was overrun with bums and burglars.

My mother started to campaign after the evening that the guy tried to pop the deadbolt on the side door to the utility room, which opened into the TV room where I was sitting on the floor typing up a grad-school seminar paper…in my bra and panties. He came very close to succeeding. When I heard the rattling noise as he was trying to jimmy the lock, I got up to see WTF — I’d thought it was the cats shoveling litter out of their catboxes, one of their favorite activities. Finding the lock lever jumping around, I ran out to the front courtyard and started screaming FIRE! FIRE! CALL THE FIRE DEPARTMENT.

This, as desired, brought all the neighbors out to watch the house burn down, and that caused the would-be rapist to take off to the boondocks.

On the other occasion, a guy did get inside the house. DH’s resonant snoring had driven me out of the bedroom and onto the living-room sofa. Our German shepherd, Greta, was very elderly by this time. She was sleeping in the hallway right outside our bedroom door.  I woke up in the dark of the night, saw a flashlight in the kitchen, and thought (no kidding!) ooohhhh! the baby must have waked up and John must have gone into the kitchen to get him a bottle! 

 When I went “John??…well!  At the sound of my voice, Greta knew that whoever was ambling around in the kitchen was not me and not John.

She JUST EXPLODED! It was one of the most terrifying noises I’ve ever heard…truly: you do NOT want to piss off a GerShep.

She got between the poor li’l perp and the door he came in. As she was about to despatch him to his maker, he found the side door. Managed to dodge outside and slam the door in her face, just as John ambled into the kitchen from the back of the house.

Still clueless, I get up and trundle out to the kitchen.

“WHO WAS THAT MAN?” he demands.

“What man?” say I.

“THE ONE WHO JUST RAN OUT THIS DOOR!”

Holy sh!t. 

Well. I’ll tellya…it was the end of the romance for me. That his first thought would be that I was entertaining some chucklehead while he was sleeping off the evening’s drunk said to me this guy doesn’t trust me and he probably doesn’t even like me. I never felt particularly comfortable with him after that.

Life is strange that way…

 

Speaking of Storms: The Perfect $torm…

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This morning the power went out in the two back bedrooms, shutting off my Internet connection and closing down the big computer.

Jeemineee.

Called the electrician, whose services I haven’t needed in an age or two. He came over with a sidekick, and they spent the ENTIRE MORNING wrestling with the wiring. Truly: they were here for a good three or four hours, and no grass grew under their feet.

Ultimately they decided the problem lay with the previous homeowner’s DIY Adventures in Wiring. Satan, as the guy is still (un)lovingly known, made a hobby of taking on challenges in the building trades. Seriously:

  • He removed a plastic shower surround in the master bathroom and installed new plumbing and stone tile all by his manly li’l self. Nice job…except the stuff has to be resealed every six months….yes, indeed: filling the bedroom with toxic fumes each time. 😀
  • Removed flooring in living room, dining room, and hallway; replaced it with new tile.
  • Rebuilt a wall between the living room and the front bedroom, removed by a prior owner. In the process, forgot to re-install the doorbell, so….now we have to rely on those battery-operated (highly-stealable) bing-bongs.
  • Removed the asbestos popcorn from the ceilings and replastered them.
    • Note that he didn’t understand how dangerous asbestos is, and so breathed in great quantities of dust as he scraped the stuff off the ceilings…
  • Installed a new mantel over the fireplace…out of code.
  • Installed new Home Depot cabinetry and tile countertops in both bathrooms.
  • Replaced the master bedroom window with a sliding door (Burglars Welcome Here!)
  • Replaced the master bathroom sink with a shiny new Home Depot fake marble sink.
  • Filled in the wall between the living room and the front bedroom, which a Previous Genius had ripped out so as to create a gigantic party room.
  • But didn’t notice that in doing so, P.G. removed the wiring for the doorbell. So now, the only doorbell that works for this house is one of those battery-run portable things.
  • Installed, for reasons incomprehensible, an electric outlet on the front porch down near the ground, where it gets drenched every time the watering system comes on.
  • Built the side deck on the west side of the house, and did a good job of it.

Great work. Seriously!

But…

Well, if you’re not a licensed, bonded electrician, you really shouldn’t be messing with wiring and electrical fixtures. /eyeroll/

At any rate, today’s Adventure in Homeownership set me back $380.

Uh huh.

While I’m glad to get the tangle in there cleaned up some, frankly, I doubt if it was necessary. I’ve been in this house for…what? eight or ten years. And no problems have ever ensued from the wiring lash-up in the office.

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.