Coffee heat rising

Of Dancing Dogs, Kitchen Counters, Cheap Expensive Hardware, and Morning Interrupted

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Did you know that Dogs Got Rhythm? That you can train a dog to dance with you, pretty easily?

Wynton Marsalis is on the noise-maker just now, and of course that marvelous acoustical jazz has a strong, distinctive beat. When you dance to that beat, all by yourself, your apprentice dancing dog is captivated. She comes over and stares up at you, astonished. If she’s a herding dog, as, for example, a corgi is, she may try to get you to shape up there! by feinting at your feet. She will dance around you with great delight. And if you hold your hands out at her height, she will rare up on her hind legs, place her front paws in your hands, and actually jig with you.

Heh! The simple things in life are the best things. 😉

It’s been a morning interrupted about every ten or fifteen minutes by stuff like that. I have done NOTHING since rolling out of the sack at 6:30, having overslept an hour by dog standards.

Well, almost nothing: I did write a fairly lengthy e-mail to a client and review the copy I wrote yesterday for Fire-Rider Book II.

Damn, I’m good! It’s an unusual chapter, unlike anything I’ve written before: all three scenes consist of the characters’ interior reflections. So far I’ve only got three brief passages of dialogue — but still have the third scene to write. Took some doing to convince myself to try this technique, if “technique” it is: I was afraid it would feel too static. Too Proustian, one might say. But it’s working. The characterization positively smokes, and IM-not-very-HO, it actually moves the thematic issues forward by a great leap.

But every time I sit down to write the final scene, something happens (or I cause something to happen), breaking any nascent train of thought that might be in progress.

The phone rang at 8 a.m. Dougie: he has eight new glass crosses in the kiln for me to convert into rosaries. I’m to drop by his studio this evening, after he gets off his day job.

Pup has conceived a great craving to visit the out of doors. Of course, the out of doors happens to be hotter than the hubs of Hades just now, so these junkets don’t last long. She’s out. She’s in. She’s out. She’s in. She’s out. She’s….argh! Mercifully, the dancing lesson exhausted her, and now she’s crapped out on the cool, cool tile floors.

While trudging back and forth between the back door and my work chair, I noticed the cleaning lady had done a nice job of polishing up the sink. Decided to fill both sinks with water and drain them, by way of helping to keep the plumbing unplugged. This reminded me that the garbage disposal has been backing up into the large adjacent sink. Many gallons of water surging through the two drains, between concocting of pots of coffee, did little to help. Called the plumber; left word.

Ran some ammonia down the offending drain. Filled both sinks with hot water. Drained. Twice. This seemed to help some. Hm.

Noticed the cleaning lady had not cleaned the hard-water spots off the brightwork around the drain in the big sink. Scoured it and the fitting around the garbage disposal with Barkeeper’s Helper. Little avail there.

Soaked a paper towel with vinegar and patted it down around the regular drain’s brightwork. Fifteen minutes later, came back to find that, yes, that worked pretty well. Scrubbed it with some Weimann’s glass stovetop cleaner and a toothbrush. Nice. Extremely nice.

Repeated the process on the brightwork around the garbage disposal. Worked there, too. The plumber will be sooo impressed with “my” housekeeping…

The radically expensive faucet set that I installed back in the day when I had a steady income had developed rings of hard-water deposits around the four parts that protrude from the back of the sink. This elegant set, which I purchased at an upscale interior design and hardware store, cost a freaking ARM AND A LEG! It was billed as brushed stainless steel.

Well.

Make that made-in-China-style fake stainless-steel veneer laid down over base metal and, in the case of the spray attachment, over plastic. Get vinegar on this fine stainless steel, and it eats right through to the base. Not stains it, as acids will if left very long on on real stainless steel: eats it off. So trying to get the crust off the enameled sink around the bases of the faucet set presents a challenge.

Tried Barkeeper’s Helper again: no luck, again. Apparently BKH can be declared impotent against Colorado River water.

Finally decided to try rubbing the vinegar-soaked towel over the crud and wiping off the vinegar as quickly as possible. This worked…eventually. But it took a long, long time. And it didn’t do the fake stainless-steel finish any good.

What junk we Americans have resigned ourselves to furnishing our lives with, now that most of our manufacturing has moved offshore. I need to buy a new set — the plumber advised not replacing it with another high-end set, because, says he, no matter how many dollars you spend on domestic hardware, it’s all trash. He says Home Depot carries faucet sets in similar styles that are the same junk. They’ll have to be replaced no sooner than the expensive junk, and so you lose nothing by buying cheap junk: over the long run, the cost is actually less because the alleged good stuff is engineered to crap out just as fast as the HD special.

Jeez.

And speaking of spending money on the kitchen, one of these days I’m gonna have to replace the kitchen counter, or if possible get it repaired. Tracking down a tile guy or deciding what else could replace the Mexican tile and finding someone to install that is more than I can bear just now. But soon, soon I’ll be forced to it.

Shortly after Mike the Bosnian Godfather installed this particular counter (the guy was a tiling genius, in addition to running an empire of skilled craftsmen), three or four of the tiles developed some hairline cracks. He was reluctant to replace them (knowing, in a way  you and I could not possibly know, what a PITA it is to pull out and replace individual soft-fired Mexican tiles…), because he thought the cracks must have resulted from some settling and suspected more cracks would develop. He suggested waiting some months before proceeding with any repairs.

Then Mike fell off the roof of one of his rentals (yeah, he has a rental empire, too, that includes not only several houses and an apartment building here but also an apartment building and a villa in Bosnia) and busted up his ankle. As you can imagine, the delights of hauling boxes of tile around no longer called to him. So he retired from the tile business.

No more cracks appeared until quite recently. A few weeks ago, the countertop on the righthand side of the sink pulled away from the tiled backsplash, splitting the grout and cracking several of the field tiles.

Damn!

I don’t even know whether these can be repaired, nor do I have any idea where to find a tile guy with the kind of expertise necessary to do the job. You’ve got to be pretty good at this kind of thing to know what you’re doing and to do it right. {sigh}

I suppose I could replace the tile counters with granite. But y’know…secretly, I just don’t like granite countertops. They’re very nice,  I’m sure (assuming you don’t use lemons, limes, or vinegar when you cook…). But…meh!

When granite first became the rage, I recall thinking that it was going, one day, to be just like all that damn avocado green and harvest gold everyone put in their houses when I was a kid. You’d walk into someone’s house and think, “Ohhh! You redecorated this kitchen in 1979, didn’t you!” Ugh.

So, OK, granite counters haven’t gone out of style. Unfortunately. Now what I don’t like about them is that everybody has them. They are, in a word, B-O-O-O-O-R-ING

Besides. If tile can settle and crack, why can’t granite settle and crack? Ditto the briefly popular concrete countertops?

The kitchen in our old house in Encanto had two sinks. One of them — the one I used the most — was set in a countertop make of a large slab of butcher block.

Yes. A wooden kitchen countertop with a sink in the middle of it. I just loved that thing! It was wonderful to use and easy to take care of — all you had to do was rub a little mineral oil into it every few months. It stayed gorgeous, and it was totally, completely DIFFERENT.

The counter where the present huge double sink resides is 10 feet 8 inches long. So…hang onto your hats… What if the sinks were flanked by small platforms of tilework, and the rest of the counter were butcherblock?

Would that look weird?

Uhm. Possibly.

So what if the whole open, unobstructed 10 3/4-foot-long counter were topped with butcherblock and the small backsplash at the far right end retained its pretty tilework, which matches the tile around the stove on the opposite side of the kitchen?

Now that…that could be cool.

$$$$$$$$

Dollars Got Wings…

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Lordie, what a money hemorrhage! Dollar bills (or maybe we should say bills in denominations of $50 and $100) have sprouted little butterfly wings and are flying out the windows and doors. An AMEX bill of less than two grand feels like an accomplishment these days.

Getting ready for surgery and an unknown recuperation period has really racked up the bills.

• Cleaning lady
• Pool guy
• Showerhead on a hose
• Shower curtain & hooks to trick out center bathroom to be used for shower
• Dog gate with a swinging gate in it so I can fence three dogs out of the bedroom without risking breaking a hip climbing over a kiddie gate
• Weeks (I hope!!) worth of dog food (which may morph into days’ worth), cooked and stashed in the freezer
• Food cooked and stashed in the freezer for myself
• Endless, endless, endless bills from the Mayo, some of which are covered by Medicare B and Medigap, but only in dribs and drabs
• Dog spay, done early so Pup won’t come into heat while I’m flat on my back

Then the usual crap…

• Routine dental cleaning: $150
• Car registration
• Irrigation system repair
• Entertain friends for dinner: $28 bottle of gin + package of Costco steaks
• Car carrier pad to carry surged dog home
• Huge power bills
• Huge water bills

And the charitable project, making rosaries to sell to benefit the choir…

• Fire Mountain, Fire Mountain, Fire Mountain…
• Heard Museum (wow!!)
• Bead World, Bead Word, Bead World…

Actually, except for the rosary schemes, there aren’t that many extraordinary costs. It’s just that costs are so damn high right now, it being the dead of summer, the electric banging away 24/7, and a nearly constant flow of water barely keeping the xeric plantings alive through 120-degree heat. And of course, no teaching income.

The piddling adjunct pay actually was supplementing Social Security well enough that until my last class ended, I was about breaking even and not having to even think about budgeting and pinching pennies. But the last $1900 AMEX bill (hey! It’s an improvement over $3000! 🙄 ) makes it clear that I’m going to have to return to the tedious routine of marking down every single expenditure, by way of getting a grip.

And indeed…a grip is what needs to be had. We have 22 days to go in the current budget cycle, and I’ve got all of $512 left for discretionary spending — which includes all the groceries and household goods.

2014 budget julyaugOf course, the cleaning lady, the pool dude, and the yard dude are paid with checks and so do not appear on this. They’re carried as nondiscretionary, even though, with the exception of Gerardo the Scintillating Yard Dude, they’re as discretionary as you can get.

I figure that whenever I recover from this surgery and whatever else gets inflicted on me, the pool guy and the cleaning lady are going away. But I wanted to get them in place before I’m knocked out of commission.

And it must be said, the pool guy has managed to get the infestation of mustard algae  under control, which I was not doing. In November, the pool will have to be drained, the tilework patched, and a few other minor repairs done. I figure if we hit it hard with the fiercest algaecide he can get his hands on and let it sit for a day or two before draining the water out, that probably will dislodge its little tendrils from the porous plaster walls. And after this I’ll just have to apply PhosFree once a week, pain in the tuchus though it is.

BUT…under normal conditions, I can take care of the pool myself. And I consider it an enormous waste of money to pay someone $80 a month to come in once a week to do a job that really is a daily task.

The cleaning lady. Oh god. How can I do without cleaning ladies? Let me count the ways! This one is pretty darned good, but still she’s broken a vacuum cleaner, she derailed the heavy glass shower doors,  she INSISTS on using an old junk mop that falls apart and drops yarn on the floor for the pup to swallow even though there’s a very excellent janitorial quality  mop out there, and just go ahead and TRY to stop her from spraying crap chemicals on your Stickley and Thos. Moser furniture! I hate that.

On the other hand…even though she only comes once every two weeks, when my friends came over last week all I had to do was wipe down the middle bathroom, push a dustmop around the floors, and wipe up the doggy pawprints near the door with a wet rag. Otherwise, the house was clean enough for guests, something I was very grateful for because I’d put off the grocery shopping until that day and wasn’t looking forward to having to scrub floors, beat back dust, and scour the bathrooms and kitchen on top of charging around town in 110-degree heat.

So. Even though I can’t afford these two workers, I may keep at least one of them. Which one remains to be seen.

Speaking of the cleaning lady, it’s 9:30 and she hasn’t shown up  yet. I’ve got to traipse to the post office to return broken &  unwanted beads to Fire Mountain; traipse to the credit union to deposit more drib-and-drab checks from Medicare and Medigap (what a system!!!), traipse to Costco to grab some more breakfast fruit and various household items best purchased there; refill the propane tanks at Costco; traipse to Lowe’s or Home Depot on the way home to pick up some more birdseed by way of calling in the little ant predators again; traipse to a Target or supermarket to pick up cleaning goods for which I do not desire a lifetime supply… Ugh! That’s a good three hours of running around. I wish she’d get her tail over here so I can leave!

Dollars got wings, and I’ve got to go launch a few more of them into the sky.

How Much Does Home-Made Dog Food Cost…

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…compared to a comparable canned dog food?

Cassie and Ruby eat a diet of real food — about 1/2 high-quality meat protein, 1/4 dog-friendly vegetables, and 1/4 starchy foods, plus a daily vitamin. It’s comparable to an ultra-premium canned food, except that rotating the ingredients doesn’t make either dog sick, as changing up commercial pet food is apt to do (yes, this should tell you something about commercial dog food).

By way of preparing for the upcoming surgical adventure, I’ve been cooking up piles of dog food in advance. Just finished shoveling another 10 pounds’ worth into the freezer, and I’m not at all sure it’ll be enough to last for a week or ten days after the surgery, which is about as soon as I figure I’ll feel like shopping for Costco-sized packages of meat and frozen mixed veggies, cooking it, grinding it, and packaging it.

Because Pup is eating half again as much as Cassie, they’re going through a pound and a quarter of food a day. (At her present age, Pup really should get twice as much as the aged Cassie, but there’s a limit to what I can handle, and besides, she looks pretty healthy — she surely isn’t emaciated!)

Lordie, but that’s a lot of food, even though just half of it is meat. And holy mackerel is it a lot of work to lay the stuff up in advance! And…speaking of holy mackerel, how much does it cost for a pair of dogs to eat their way through a pound and a quarter of food every day?

And would it be enough cheaper to feed them commercial dog food to make it worth sacrificing the health benefit of knowing what they’re eating each day? Would it, indeed, be cheaper at all??????

Let us consider:

Cassie eats 8 ounces a day of Her Royal Highness’s Custom Cuisine. Half of that is meat, whose price ranges from about $2 to about $3.50 per pound. Let’s say, then, that the average is around $2.75/pound. That’s a little on the high side, because it’s a rare day when I pay as much as $3.25/pound, to say nothing of $3.50. But for the sake of argument: average cost of meat = $2.75/pound.

Just now, a package of Costco “Normandy-style” vegetables, the mix I favor, is $7.64 for 6 pounds, or $1.27/pound. The proportion of meat to veggie is 4:1 (i.e., 1/4 pound veggie to 1 pound meat).

The cost of rice, oatmeal, or other starch is essentially negligible. The proportion is the same: 1/4 pound cooked starch to 1 pound meat, and a package of oatmeal or rice, which is cooked with twice as much water as dried product, will last a couple of months, at least. Let’s say that is subsumed in the overestimate of the meat cost. Round up the $1.27 to $1.30, too. So the average cost of veggies + rice is probably about $1.30/pound.

One-half of that (i.e., 1/2 pound @ $1.30/pound) is added to each pound of meat to create dog food; $1.30/2 = $.65. So, to make 1.5 pounds of dog food we spend $2.75 + $.65 = $3.40 for a pound and a half of food, or $2.26/pound of the final mix.

Premium dog food costs, pretty much across the board, $2.60 per can. But a can does not contain a pound of dog food! It only contains 13 ounces of food. Together, Cassie and Ruby are presently consuming a pound and a quarter of food a day: that’s 20 ounces a day.

So how does that shake out, cost-wise?

Well, let’s look at the monthly cost of canned food first:

Cassie eats 8 ounces a day:

8 oz x 30 days = 240 ounces a month
Divided by 13 oz/ can = 18.46 cans per month

Ruby the Corgi Pup eats 12 ounces a day:

12 oz x 30 days = 370 ounces a month
Divided by 13 oz/can = 27.69 cans per month

18.46 cans Cassie food + 27.69 cans Ruby food = 46.15 cans/month
46.15 cans @ $2.60/can = $119.99 a month

Okay: so, $120 a month to feed both dogs a superpremium dog food that makes at least one of them mighty sick.

Total monthly cost of home-made dog food consumed by Cassie (8 oz/day)  and Ruby (12 oz/day):

240 oz (Cassie) + 360 oz (Ruby) = 600 ounces/month
600/16 oz per pound = 37.5 pounds/month
37.5 pounds x $2.26/pound = $84.75/month

That’s a difference of about $35.25/month, or about $423 a year.

And that’s pretty conservative. I’m sure I pay less than $2.75/pound on average for the dogs’ meat, sometimes much less. And we’re not factoring in the veterinary bills that you get to pay when you have your dog on commercial food: either the immediate cost of the resurgent diarrhea and vomiting or the long-term cost of ailments likely related to low-quality food, such as thyroid disease, obesity, and diabetes.

Obviously, it would be cheaper to feed your dog kibble than canned food (well…maybe not: ultra-premium kibble is darned pricey!). But…you do not want to know what’s in dog kibble. And most of it is made in China, where quality control is nil and manufacturers think it’s OK to add melamine to pet food and infant formula. The number of recalls for dog food, which come fast and furious virtually every week of the year, simply boggles the mind. You haven’t seen vet bills until you’ve seen the effect of tainted food on your dog…

Makes the crazy little old lady look a lot less crazy, doesn’t it?

Not starved yet...
Not starved yet…

Some People’s Kids

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{grump!} This morning when I headed out for the not-daily-enough two-mile walk, along about 6 ayem, I picked up a branch that had snapped off the neighbor’s silk oak and went to carry it to the giant trash bin in the alley.

Shee-ut! Someone (or possibly last night’s microburst) had tipped over that gigantic thing and rolled it into the middle of the alley. And they’d had themselves a little party, so it seemed, right outside my back wall: a pile of empty Negro Modelo bottles, a Guinness can, an empty Smirnoff bottle, and several stacks of the iconic red Solo cups had been dumped behind the yard.

And as I  strolled out of the alley, who should I spot coming out of the empty for-sale house on the corner but the three high-school bud’s who seem to be associated with the real owner of that place. Apparently it was a rental — which explains why the damn thing was allowed to run down despite having been expensively renovated by the previous owners — and now their dad, a gray-haired fellow of the lawyerly class (these young gents look like Brophy Prep or Phoenix Country Day students…they do have a “look” that you can’t miss). The old boy must have decided to get out of the landlord business, so now it’s on the market. And what do you bet Dad has no clue the little darlings spent the night there? He’s probably out of town and “trusting” his straight-arrow-looking sons to behave themselves back at the manse, no doubt located in Northeast Scottsdale or some such.

Presumably they were not actually partying on the far side of my backyard pool — Cassie and Ruby would have gone batshit had any such goings-on been going on — but rather had spent Saturday night in the for-sale house and then, by way of hiding the evidence, carried the clean-up debris over to our alley instead of depositing it in the trash bin behind Dad’s soon-to-be-former rental.

How do I know this? Well, certain Brophy Prep Men of my acquaintance also were given, once upon a time, to perching on rooftops and partying hearty. Actually, in their high-school days we  might say they “partied silly,” but…

LOL! The thing about baby boys is that they do grow up to be men!

The lads climbed into their car and drove, ever so carefully, away. (Did you know that one way cops can spot a drunk driver is that when you know you’re plotzed you tend to drive much slower than the speed limit?)

One of Sally’s male relatives was puttering around her garage. We recruited him to right the giant trash bin and drag it back to its assigned place.

See? Men do have their uses. 😉

Rain! At LAST!

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Last night we finally got a decent rain here, for the first time in I would say two years. Maybe more.

The ’hood is in the rain shadow of the North Mountains, and so even when other parts of the city do see rainfall, we do not. A day or so ago, Scottsdale had a major downpour; we got nothing.

But last night a sharp little squall blew in with enough power to drive it past the hills. We got actual rain — some parts of the Valley got a lot more than that — and hallelujah, brothers and sisters! It dropped the temperatures so low that right now, at almost 10 o’clock in the morning, all the doors & windows in the house are hanging open, and I’m sitting on the deck to write this.

Mirabilis!

Must be all those rosaries made in Her name, eh? 😉  Buy one now, and you single-handedly will rescue the sixth-largest city in the nation from a decade-long drought!

😀

The cool, cool morning provided a nice opportunity and enough time for some much-needed garden cleanup. The unholy heat we’ve been having has about killed everything in sight. So I ran around cutting back and pulling out fried plants and wiry, overgrown Mexican primrose and setting the hose in front on areas that apparently haven’t had enough water since last winter. There’s still much to do, but at least the place  looks a little less feral.

Drip watering as a water-conserving measure, I think, is one of the biggest frauds that ever came along. Right up there with the toilet that uses a third less water but that you have to flush three times every time you go and the accursed high-efficiency, power-saving, water-saving clothes washer that takes an hour and a quarter to run a 20-minute load, braids your clothing together into a Gordian knot, and presents you with a “washed” load that has great patches of stone-dry fabric.

In the summer, my system comes on every single day and runs for 20 minutes, about as long as I can afford. This keeps the potted plants and a few of the xeric plants alive. The two climbing roses that keep the west side of the house livable and help hold power use down and the four citrus trees require a hose drag. Daily. Summer water bills are often as high as power bills, and in a 115-degree summer, believe me, it costs more to air-condition this place as it would cost to heat it in a U.P. winter. Really, I would save money on water if I shut down the drip irrigation system and did a daily hose drag.

Of course, I have nothing else to do for two or three hours a day but drag hoses around the yard, right?

It’s been so hot and dry that one of the cacti in the front yard is dying from drought. I recognize the symptoms: it turns yellow all over. Give it some water, and it greens right back up. The cute little pocket garden I put in front is pretty much all dead — that was a FAIL of the first water. Or the first waterless…

At any rate, it’s good to see some rain, at last. Supposedly an El Niño is expected this winter. If so, that will bring a lot of water into the Southwest. Good for us, not so great for Central America.

What Would You Do to Realize Your Dream?

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lompocAnd at what point in your life will you be ready to try to realize your dream? OMG. Check out this incredible offering near Lompoc, a rural burg in Santa Barbara County, California.

Ogodogodogod, run your eyeballs over those enticing photos. Imagine living in a place like that, making wine to support your habits, traveling around the world to sell your wine and learn more about wine-making…oooogod!

They only want $950,000 for this property. Although there are no vines planted yet, it has 6 1/3 acres that could be cultivated as one desired…smack in the heart of wine country. Or, failing that, it calls out to host a B&B.

Forwarded this to M’hijito, who says, “Too bad I’m not a millionaire.”

Heh. Little does he know. 😉 Oh well. What he doesn’t know could harm him, I suppose.

But that’s not the issue at all. What else he doesn’t know that could harm him is that if something like this were carried on his books as a business enterprise — say, he incorporated an entity to buy it and the entity did all the borrowing and the spending — he wouldn’t need to be a millionaire to live in it and work for it.

Some years ago, a friend offered to sell me his very successful bed-and-breakfast in Flagstaff. He and his wife had built it into a profit-making enterprise and now were looking to retire — although you can live nicely on a b&b and funnel virtually all of your living expenses through the business (it’s astonishing!!), it nevertheless is a work-intensive business. He wanted a million dollars for the property, the business, and all its accouterments.

Welp. I was younger then and a great deal less bold and certainly every bit as averse to work as I am today…so I declined.

But in retrospect…hm.

If I were 30 or 40 years younger, knowing now what I know about how S-corps and C-corps work and how people wangle a living out of them, I would look at this property altogether differently than I looked at the Flagstaff opportunity lo! these many years ago.

Work? Holeee shit! The amount of work beggars the imagination. But if you’re in your 30s or even your 40s, you can do it. And working that hard for yourself is far less onerous than working half that hard for The Man. Learning curve? Argha! You’d have to pick up the equivalent of a master’s degree in viniculture or the hospitality industry in a year — preferably less. But you could do it. If you wanted to.

How much work would you do — how much risk would you take — to devote your life to doing something that looks like what you’d really want to do?