Coffee heat rising

A House Is Not a “Home”…

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…and it decidedly is not a “dream.” That’s an embarrassing little truth that Evan lays bare in a recent post at My Journey to Millions. In a burst of his characteristic common sense, he wonders whether a better name for “the American dream” might be “the American nightmare.” In a shoot-from-the-hip comment, I vaguely agreed with him, despite several commenters’ arguments that “owning” a home is better than renting. But since his post went up, I’ve found myself returning to his query of the sacrosanct American ideal. The question is impossible to brush off, especially if you’ve had any serious experience with homeownership.

Consider: if we do a search for “real estate” in our city, we find a Google link to Trulia: “Find Homes For Sale in [Yourtown].” Realty Executives wishes to direct us to “Historic Phoenix Homes,” something that surely is an oxymoron, to say nothing of moronic. We’re lectured that “Buying a home is one of the biggest investments you may ever make financially” and “the Urban Team can help you buy a home,” to which we answer, “That’s quite a trick,” because my dears, home is not a place; home is where you hang your hat.

We don’t buy and sell homes. We (and our mortgage lenders) buy and sell houses. A house is, in most (but not all) circumstances, an investment. Because real estate prices in livable neighborhoods are so outlandishly huge, few of us who live outside the One Percent can afford to pay for a house in cash; consequently, most of us borrow outlandishly huge sums, putting up our “homes” as collateral and nailing ourselves to debt that will persist for upwards of 30 years. Over three decades, should we last long enough to pay off the loan, the mortgage interest alone will be as much as or more than the purchase price of the dwelling.

Some investment, eh?

Oh, you say, but in 30 years the house will be worth many times more than what we paid for it! Well…not quite.

In 30 years, the value of a dollar will be worth many times less than it was when you bought the shack. If you are very lucky and the neighborhood doesn’t decline, the amount you can clear from the sale of your future paid-off house will be just about enough to purchase a similar home in a similar or lesser neighborhood. In terms of real purchasing power, then: no. Thirty years from now your house will not really be worth more than what you paid for it.

In the meantime, though: you’ve actually disbursed, to the mortgage banker, twice as much as the house’s purchase price. That is, after thirty years have passed, the place is worth about half what you paid for it, over the long run.

Almost.

But not quite: you’ve installed at least one new roof ($5,000 a hit); repaired and probably upgraded the plumbing system ($5,000 to $10,000), likely upgraded the kitchen and bathrooms two or three times ($5,000 to $15,000); painted inside and out four or five times ($2,000 to $5,000 if you hire someone to do this bitch of a job); replastered the pool ($10,000); cut down a 25-year-0ld shade tree ($1,000) and replaced it with an expensive specimen tree ($500); installed a new security system ($1,000 + a monthly subscription); installed energy-efficient windows ($5,000), replaced the door the burglar kicked in ($500 to $1,500; $500 deductible for the home insurance, plus the increase in premiums), replaced two water heaters ($500 to $800 apiece), repaired the HVAC system three times (a lot) and finally replaced that, too ($4,000)…and on and on and on.

Begins to make Evan’s “American nightmare” sobriquet ring true, doesn’t it?

You know, it’s not necessary to pony up mortgage payments for thirty years to achieve the “American dream.” If you crave to own a house, some day, you could do what my father did:

Don’t purchase the roof over your head until you retire, at which time you will need housing that doesn’t drain your bank account once a month.

Instead, during your entire working life, either rent or live in company housing. Take the savings that result — which will be considerable, since you will not have to pay for maintenance, repairs, insurance, taxes, mortgage interest, and fancification of your dwelling — and invest every penny.

Then, when you’re ready to retire (which, if you’re not paying through the wazoo for the roof overhead, is likely to be well before the age of 65 or 67 or 70 or 75 or whatever standard “retirement age” is inflicted on your generation), use part of your savings to purchase a modest but comfortable, low-maintenance house in cash. This will vastly reduce your monthly out-of-pocket costs — now you will have to pay neither rent nor a mortgage — and you will have achieved the “American dream.” Since you will have been married for upwards of 25 years, it’s unlikely you’ll divorce, and so your investment in the “dream” will be pretty safe. Voilà.

During the entire time I was growing up (and before then, as far as I can tell), my father never owned our several homes. He and my mother rented, except when we lived in Arabia, where Aramco provided our housing — essentially the same as renting. My mother, who was in charge of finding and maintaining these dwellings, usually got us into fairly decent places to live. Some were very nice indeed; only one was typical Southern California ticky-tacky. We never wanted for comfortable, peaceful housing. And as for said housing being a “home”: home was what the people who lived in it created.

My father was 53 when he quit his job to retire; my mother would have been 48. He moved them to Arizona (women didn’t make these decisions then, nor did they buy and sell houses, at least not without a power of attorney from their dear husbands), because taxes and real estate prices were far lower than anything they could find in California. He bought a house here in cash, providing them with a place to live that cost almost nothing: a modest annual tax bill was about it. Of course, they had to pay for the utilities and maintenance — but because the house was new, maintenance and repairs were almost nil for quite some time.

For him, the American dream was to quit working. And he achieved it largely by avoiding what Evan aptly calls “the American nightmare.” My father didn’t let himself get sucked into the myth.

Why should you?

 

 

 

Use It Up, Make It Do, Wear It Out: The Joy of Fixing Stuff

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UseItUpWearItOutMakeItDoSome years ago, I bought a pretty little copper watering pot. It came from Smith and Hawken, though I may have found it at Target, which used to carry quite a lot of Smith and Hawken products, especially before the outdoor department was shut down. I don’t even think Smith and Hawken makes this design anymore — it doesn’t come up in a cursory search.

Well, it was very cute, but none too practical — its long, graceful spout dispenses water too slowly for my taste. I’m the douse-and-run type of indoor gardener, I’m afraid. So it got set down between a couple of potted plants and pretty much forgotten, unless a visitor remarked on how interesting it was. Last time I used it, it got splashed with water and put away wet, giving it a smallpox-like spattering of dark, round stains. Over the years, it acquired a dark brown layer of tarnish, which did nothing to cover the pox.

It looked terrible. I pushed it back behind the pots (too lazy to find a real place to put it away) and forgot about it.

Well, you know, indoor plants suffer as much from the drought as the landscape and the forests do. The dry air sucks moisture out of potting soil, and in the summer when the AC is set at 80 to 83 degrees, it’s really too hot for tropical plants best suited to live on the rainy side of Hawai’i. They cling to life, but barely.

The other day I decided to clean up the dead foliage and then thoroughly water and fertilize the poor little things. And what should I find in behind the sanseveria and prayer plants but that old copper pot, much the worse for neglect.

Would a quick scrub with Barkeeper’s Helper clean off those dark, ugly water spots?

Nothing ventured…

…And nothing gained: the answer was nope! It did revive the copper glow a little, though. Not much, but some.

The rubber gauntlet was now down: here was a challenge I had to rise to.

Out came all the metal-cleaning products and all the old-wives’ wisdom to which I am privy — which by now, my children, is quite a bit. So…

How to Clean and Polish Copper

Just about any good metal cleaner will help to scour tarnish off copper. The ones actually marketed as copper cleaner are by far the best — brass cleaner and silver cleaner will work, but not as effectively. Dedicated copper cleaner, interestingly, is not all that easy to find these days. If you want it, you may have to order it online.

CopperCreamPersonally, I prefer the creamy type, possibly just because that’s what I’ve always used. But I didn’t have any around, so used some silver cream, also by Wright, which seems to have a good toehold on the grocery-store shelves.

Silver cream didn’t work much better than the Barkeeper’s Helper. So it was time for recourse to the home products.

Just about any combination of salt plus sour stuff will eat the tarnish right off uncoated copper. Your choices look this:

• vinegar and table salt
• cut lemon and table salt
• ketchup (contains vinegar and salt, along with all the sugar, the tomato, and the artificial ingredients)
• lemon juice and cream of tartar

Neither ketchup nor lemon & cream of tartar work much better than Barkeeper’s Helper, which is good enough for government work. If you don’t want a really shiny effect, one of these three choices may do the job for you.

Rubbing a half a lemon over the metal and then sprinkling liberally with salt does the job a little better, IMHO. It’s a fair amount of work — you have to reapply the lemon juice and salt several times, and scrub well with a dampened sponge.

The easiest and hands-down most effective home copper cleaner is a combination of white vinegar and table salt. You can mix these together (at least 3 Tbsp salt to two cups of vinegar) or simply pour vinegar all over the object, then salt it generously, and then scrub with a sponge or rag.

Whether you use lemon juice or vinegar, WEAR RUBBER GLOVES FOR THIS CHORE! Vinegar and salt combine to form hydrogen chloride, a strong acid — I once actually etched a concrete floor with the stuff.

As soon as your copper piece is clean, wash it well in soap and water or with baking soda (neutralizes acid), and wash down your sink, lest any leftover acid etch the porcelain. Then dry the piece well with a clean, dry towel.

Copper tarnishes fairly quickly in the presence of oxygen and carbon dioxide — that would be the stuff we call “air.” Some people like that effect, regarding it as a pleasing patina. Others like their copper shiny.

You can delay the corrosion and also give your copper piece a deeper glow by rubbing a very light layer of vegetable oil over it. Go easy on this — you don’t want it to be greasy, just polished. I used olive oil, which also makes the brightwork in the kitchen and bathroom look pretty nice.

Don’t you love to bring new life to old things like this? I think it’s much more satisfying to fix stuff than to go out and buy new stuff.

Here’s how the little pot turned out…

P1020468

Perp Tales: Update on the Garage Invasion

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It appears that the sweaty star of last year’s garage invasion drama finally copped a plea. Staff from the Maricopa County Attorney’s probation department had to prepare pre-sentence reports on our perp and his pals, which they kindly sent to me. And now we have the full story.

On May 4, 2012, the three creeps knocked over a Cash America Super Pawn store located in the historic but blighted district to the north of my neighborhood. After threatening employees with a gun, they made off with $89,568 worth of jewelry and caused about $500 worth of damage to the display cases they busted apart to get at the loot.

Interesting, isn’t it, that an area hosting several homeless shelters and largely home to the very poor could supply a pawn shop with 90 grand worth of jewelry, isn’t it? Once again: I picked the wrong business…

But moving on: Our boy, one Matthew Jason Avery, 25, was hopped up on meth, heroin, and Percocet at the time he jumped the wall into my backyard and hid in the garage. Clearly, it was  lucky that the commotion in the streets caused me to get up and lock the door between the kitchen in the garage. If he’d entered the house before I managed to get my pistol, I would’ve been in deep trouble. That would have been true even if I did have a gun in hand, because I would have shot him the instant I laid eyes on him, and that would have created a whole different tangle of trouble for me.

The “presumptive” sentence for armed robbery is 10½ to 15 years, followed by a period of probation. Matthew is arguing that the court should reduce this term, since this is supposedly his first criminal exploit. (Yeah, right!) He claims he didn’t have a gun during the robbery — that his colleague Tyshawn Simmons was the one who waved a weapon around — and so the county probation officer is recommending that he receive a shortened sentence on the count of sticking up the pawn shop, plus the presumptive sentence of 3½ years for burglarizing my garage. They also want him to make restitution to Cash America, whenever the value of the stolen property that is not in police custody can be determined. So presumably this guy will get out in three years or so, what with credit for the 239 days he’s already spent in jail waiting for court action.

On the gun issue: the cops sure as hell thought he was armed. After they dragged him off, one of the officers and I searched the garage and the backyard looking for the pistol they were pretty sure he had. We didn’t find it, but…

A few days after Matthew was arrested, the sheriff’s office informed me that he was bailed out of the slam. That evening someone entered my backyard during the night. They left the side gate hanging open, signaling that they’d come a-visiting. Obviously, Matthew came back looking for what he left in the shrubbery, and presumably what he left was a weapon.

Possibly the most disturbing element in all this is that Matthew, the poor little sh!t, was born into this world without one single, forlorn hope. This was a kid who was doomed from the outset.

Raised by his biological mother and abused as a child, he was “home-schooled” until the seventh grade, when he and his parent ended all pretense of educating him. The poor schmuck reads below the sixth-grade level and is incapable of supporting himself.

Not surprisingly, he started using meth at 16 and got into weed and coke at 17. He didn’t develop the heroin habit (so it says here) until he reached the age of 24.

Think of that. A grown man who, thanks to “home-schooling,” does not even have a grade-school education. When something like that happens to a kid, the most likely outcome will be drugs, crime, and violence. An escape from such a fate would be mighty near miraculous.

Oh well.

One last word on the matter, a piece of advice:

If you are ever the “victim” of a crime in which you lose little or nothing and from which you emerge unharmed, the police will ask you if you want to prefer charges against the perp. Tell them “NO.”

The hassle factor involved in being a so-called “victim” of a clown like this is just astonishing. The County’s action against Matthew has gone on for fourteen months. During that time, I’ve been the target of a steady blitz of paper, much of it subpoenas to appear at ever-changing trial dates.

One such subpoena is more threatening than Matthew in the garage, because each of them contains a peremptory order to appear in court at 8:00 a.m. on X, Y, or Z date (never mind whether you have a job, whether your pay will be docked if you don’t show up at work, whether you have small kids or a sick relative to care for, whether you’ve paid for airline or hotel tickets, whether anything else). And each of them informs you, in boldface type, that if you do not show up you will be arrested and jailed.

Every time I turned around, I found another of these aggressively worded subpoenas in the mailbox, each one demanding a reply. Once the sheriff’s office even sent a deputy, who parked his vehicle conspicuously in front of my house and marched up to the door to deliver yet another subpoena — even though I had faithfully replied to every one of the things that yes, yes I would be there.

Every piece of correspondence regarding the case had return addresses from the sheriff’s office, the probation department, the county attorney, and various other agencies that made it look, to anyone who didn’t know what was inside the envelopes, like I was the target of criminal prosecution. And as we know, much of my mail is misdirected to my neighbor Mannie, who lives at the same house number on a road whose street name is almost identical to mine. Can you imagine what Mannie and his wife must think? What the postal carrier must think?

If your perp is unlikely to return and you sustained no substantial harm, the best thing to do is to let it drop.

Navigating the Food Desert

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Muffin_NIHYesh, so...the three restaurant meals I’ve consumed over the past two days have put almost two pounds back on the decrepit frame.

Why?

Three words:

salt
sugar
starch

Folks, we Americans don’t live in a food desert. No. We live on the freaking PLAINS OF MARS where food is concerned!

When you can go into a typical restaurant and find almost nothing on the menu that is not gonna be bad for you because of the way it’s been prepared and what was in the ingredients the cooks had to work with, you have virtually no chance of arriving at my age in good health. Not unless you prepare all your food at home, and most Americans wouldn’t think of any such thing because it just isn’t practical.

When you work eight or ten hours a day (or more, as many of us do), you still have to eat. Dragging a brown bag to the office every day isn’t much fun. But more to the point, if you’re a professional or a business executive, you are expected to make some rain. And you’re not making any rain when you’re parked in the lunchroom munching an egg salad sandwich.

You’re expected to take the clients to lunch. And if no client is handy, you’d still better show up at a restaurant or at the club and make yourself seen, and once a week you’d better be at a Chamber luncheon eating some bad Italian food served off a steam table while you glad-hand and schmooze. Your boss knows where you’re eating lunch…

And so you get in the habit of eating out. It’s so much easier than cooking, isn’t it? So you think, anyway. For a mere 25% over the inflated cost of the food, you get someone to wait on  you and pick up after you. How convenient!

So you eat out whether or not you have to entertain clients and shake hands with your competition colleagues and potential customers. You eat out because you’re too tired to cook. Because the kids want a Burger King and won’t eat whatever you put on the table. Because one of you got home late and the other one is about to expire from hunger. Because there’s nothing in the house to eat.

This morning I’m meeting two of my favorite friends for a shopping junket in old town Glendale, a venue graced with charming boutiques in fun antique buildings. They want to start at a restaurant where we can get a muffin (or some such) for breakfast and end at another restaurant where we’ll have lunch.

I am not eating any goddamn muffins. Let’s take a look at the ingredients of such an object, made from a mix, as most restaurant bakery goods are:

White flour
Sugar
Blueberries Canned In Light Syrup (Blueberries, Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup)
Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oil
Modified Corn Starch
Vital Wheat Gluten
Baking Soda
Sodium Aluminum Phosphate
Salt
Propylene Glycol Monoesters of Fatty Acids
Mono and Diglycerides
Corn Starch
Maltodextrin
Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate
Citric Acid
Cellulose Gum
Xanthan Gum
Artificial Flavor
Modified Cream

Yummy!

When you’re avoiding salt, what you’re really trying to avoid is sodium, because it drives up your blood pressure. “Salt” is the word we use in conversation for a compound called sodium chloride; the sodium part is the part we’d like to do without — whether some doctor told us to or not. You do need some sodium for good health. However, most unadulterated food has as much naturally occurring sodium as you need.

Take a look at that list:

Baking Soda
Sodium Aluminum Phosphate
Salt
Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate

Baking soda is high in sodium. In other words, what you’ve got there is sodium, sodium, sodium, and sodium. Probably about four times as much as you would need to bake your own blueberry muffins and have them come out tasting one helluva lot better than a concoction that needs artificial flavoring to make it convincing.

But this product is sweet, not salty! How does it get that way, with all that salty stuff in it? Well, it contains

Sugar
High Fructose Corn Syrup
Maltodextrin
Modified Corn Starch
Corn Starch

That would be sugar, sugar, sugar, and sugar.

The undisguised sugar may be the best of a bad lot here. We’re told by the august authors of Wikipedia that “heated corn starch raises the blood glucose levels even faster than sugar, and like pure sugar, white bread and potatoes, it easily leads to excessive weight gain.” Which is to say that you don’t have to go far to learn what this stuff is gonna do to you.

If you were to make a batch of blueberry muffins from scratch — a project that would take maybe five minutes longer than pouring some water into a boxed mix would take — the result still wouldn’t be very good for you, but it would be a helluva lot better for you than the baked witch’s brew you’d be eating in a restaurant.

To start with, you’d use fresh or frozen blueberries, which come without benefit of high-fructose corn syrup.

Your only sweetener would be sugar, plus the fruit. At least you would then know what’s in the batter: you would know exactly how much sugar you were serving up.

You would use two sources of sodium: 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 teaspoons baking soda. Here, too, you would know exactly how much of the stuff you were getting.

You would use 1/4 cup of butter, not hydrogenated oils, whose baleful effects are well known. You would add 1/3 cup of milk, not (yuck!) “modified” cream.

Ninety-nine percent of restaurants — especially the ubiquitous chain restaurants — serve up packaged, processed foods. Treats that wouldn’t be great for you to start with are downright toxic when they’re mixed up this way. Food that you imagine is healthy actually comes to you swimming in sugar, salt, and chemicals with unpronounceable names.

So…what to do?

It’s hard to say. When I go into a restaurant these days, I order a bowl of fruit. This noon I plan to ask for a salad — hold the dressing, hold the croutons — and then pull a recycled spice jar containing a mix of wine vinegar, olive oil, and fines herbes out of my purse. Otherwise? Try to get baked fish, broiled meat (not fried, which too often is what “grilled” means), and plain vegetables. Ask for salad with a cruet of vinegar and oil or a slice of lemon and a cruet of oil.

It takes the joy out of restaurant-going. But trust me: some doctor telling you that you need to swallow blood pressure pills until you topple over into the grave will take the joy out of life. So will a heart attack or a stroke.

This is the specific reason Americans are fat. It has nothing to do with people being lazy or slovenly or worthless or any other insult that the self-righteous sling at the overweight. It has everything to do with the kind of food that is being marketed to us — and what’s in it, largely without our understanding.

Image: U.S. National Institutes of Health. Public Domain.

Fell Off the Diet Wagon!

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Doomed!

This morning the body broke the 140 barrier for the first time: down to 139.1 pounds! w00t!

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Yeah. It did at 5:30 this morning.

Then it was off to Scottsdale for the Thursday ayem shindig at The Good Egg.

There’s a problem with The Good Egg: there’s nothing to eat there. If you can’t eat eggs (urp!!! ….literally, and immediately) and you’re trying to hold your blood pressure down by not eating stuff with salt in it and you’re trying to keep the weight down by abstaining from breads and pancakes and English muffins and you’re not eating sugary stuff like sweetened yogurt, there’s nothing to eat there! As usual, I ordered a bowl of fruit, which as usual came out soggy and uninspiring, and drank a lot of bad coffee.

By the time I got home around 9 a.m., I was so hungry I decided I would forget the piss-poor packaged berries garnished with half a banana and move on a full meal. Had a piece of steak in the freezer but was low on veggies, so drove back out to the store and picked up some delicious broccolini and…yes! Some lovely little red new potatoes! Cooked all this stuff on the grill, and what the hell…the sun was over the yardarm somewhere, so opened a bottle of wine and had a couple of snorts of that to wash down the feast.

Very lovely.

Figured to eat salad the rest of the day. That actually is a routine that’s been working: cook up a great, fairly large meal for breakfast (sans the wine chaser) and then eat really light from then on.

What I didn’t figure on was M’hijito calling at quittin’ time to invite me out for Mexican food.

Now, you’d think a grown woman with will power could resist that siren call, wouldn’t you? No. There’s just no way I’m going to turn down an invitation from my wonderful son to go out to dinner. And once seated at our favorite hole in the wall, the chances of turning down chips, salsa, beer, a relleno stuffed with melted cheese, a side of refried beans, and another beer are exactly nil.

Nil, nil, nil! And soooooo good!

It’s nine p.m., and I’m still so stuffed I can barely wriggle. And I suppose we could have some sort of lottery betting on how fat I’ll be by tomorrow ayem!

😆

The early-morning meeting put the eefus on the vigorous swim before the carcinogenic sun comes up. At noon it was so freaking hot and humid in the house that I decided to risk death and take a plunge in the pool at high noon.

And that’s when I realized something: jumping off the side and splashing around in the deep end while the dog races back and forth yapping is play. Locking the dog in the house and swimming twice the length of the pool 33 times is work.

Which, presumably, is why I’m finding it difficult to make myself do that once or twice a day. Work is just not my thing.

Not that it wasn’t pleasant enough swimming up and down by moonlight this evening. Just…that it’s work.

Carnival Comin’ Our Way! And various chatter…

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By golly! Funny is once again hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance this weekend! The thing goes live on Monday, so be sure to send your submissions by about mid-day on Sunday — no later than 5 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, which is the same as 5 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Kind of a weird week here. Personally, I’ve been crippled up by the back/hip/whatever-the-heck-it-is enough that I haven’t felt like working or playing. It’s been hotter than a three-dollar cookstove outdoors, and with rain coming in for the so-called monsoon season, just freaking soggy. Couple of days ago, I washed my hair after getting out of the pool about 8:30 a.m….at 1:15 it was still damp!!! And it’s not even very long yet. At all.

Look at this charming thing I found on Etsy, at a shop called LizzyStuff:

MexicanCross

How cool is that, I ask you?

It’s going to be the focal piece of an Anglican rosary that I intend to make and donate to this year’s silent auction for the choir. It’s a one-of-a-kind (as far as the shop owner knows) made-in-Mexico vintage piece. The plan is to create a Southwestern motif by selecting silver or copper, malachite or turquoise, and lapis for the thirty-three beads.

Actually, this project is the offspring of a massive Fail, possibly one engineered by a bemused God Herself.

With three pieces already in the can, I decided to combine piles and piles of seed beads ( 🙄 for which I had never been able to find any use…) into a long rope that a woman could wrap around her neck a few times or simply allow to hang long and loose.

It took for-freaking-ever to make this stupid thing. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the design to get it just right, combining vast numbers of green, red, gold-tone, and silver seed beads with units of pearls, red seed beads, and tiny silver spacers to create just the right “rhythm.”

Along about halfway through this endless project, it dawned on me that I didn’t know how to connect the thing into a single uninterrupted strand without putting in an ugly crimp bead. And worse, the small silver beads would NOT let me run the wire back through them to secure the connection, crimp or no. All through the mind-numbing process of arranging 44 inches of these things just. exactly. so, I contemplated this conundrum. And finally it occurred to me:

Why not string the things on heavy thread, rather than wire? Then instead of having to crimp the ends together, all that would be required would be a good knot.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? I suppose you can guess where this is going.

So I threaded the damn things on three long (long, long) strands of heavy nylon upholstery thread. And it worked! It looked great! Tied them off and felt mighty proud.

Well. Sorta.

coral snakeHeld this elaborate rope of shiny beads up to the light and realized…hm. The pattern of green and red and gold tubular beads looked exactly like a coral snake.

Yes. A colorful green and red and gold hyper-venomous serpent.

Now, realistically…how many women would think of that?

Indeed. One woman thought of it. Strikes me that suggests a fair number of women just might think of it.

In that case, of course they’ll all run to plunk down $80 or $100 bucks for the thing. Of course. Who wouldn’t?

Argh.

I set it down and went away, so as to look at it by the light of another day.

Comes a new dawn.

I go back and look at it again, and yup! Looks exactly like a coral snake.

Ohkayyyy….maybe it would look better in the wearing. I sling it around my neck and

PLING!!!!!

The knot gives way and a jillion little goddamn green and yellow and gold and silver beads FLY ALL OVER THE ROOM!!!!!!!

Bleyachhh! I give up. Toss the remainder down and go away.

At first it seemed best to just submit the several pieces I’d already made. But then, from out of nowhere, the idea of creating a rosary formed. I have no idea where that came from. I do not pray the rosary myself, and come to think of it, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an Anglican rosary, although I have seen one of our clergy wearing something that looked a great deal like a string of prayer beads.

So there it is. Did a little research and learned the RC rosary is pretty elaborate and comes in several flavors. My friend, fellow jewelry-maker, and partner in musical crime is going to bring over several of her own tomorrow when we junket out to Scottsdale, so I’ll be able to see what those look like and maybe get some good ideas. Then once a design is on paper, I’ll order up the beads or buy them from local purveyors, and from there it shouldn’t be long before the finished product is in hand.

The Southwestern motif, which came about purely by the serendipity of an Etsy search, is amazingly appropriate, not just because we’re here in Phoenix but because of what the church in question is and how it came about. One of its original founders, who was a practically inseparable friend of the church’s founding pastor, Paul Urbano, was Paul M. Roca, who was what we might call old Arizona. These two developed a passion for tracking down and exploring Jesuit missions in northern Mexico. Paul Roca acquired one of the early Toyota Land Rovers, a jeep-like affair capable of taking on all terrains, and the two of them made a habit of taking off for the wilds of Sonora and Chihuahua. Paul wrote several books on the subject, describing the churches and ruins they found as they tried to follow in the steps of the missionaries through southern Arizona and Mexico.

The two men as well as the church, founded in the heart of what was then the city’s most affluent district, were central to the development of Phoenix from its small-town Southwestern roots to one of the largest cities in the United States.

So. Southwestern rosary. What could be more perfect?

Images:

Hecho in Mexico crucifix, shamelessly ripped off the Internet.
Coral snake. Norman Benton. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.