Coffee heat rising

Dirt!

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Wow! Last night we got a dirt storm of the sort that usually occurs in late July and August around here. That, plus spitting, dirty rain. Thirty- to forty-mile-an-hour winds picked up tons of disturbed topsoil — all those half-baked housing developments that never got built left the desert all torn up — and dumped most of it into my swimming pool.

It was still raining at 3 a.m., when I got up and did a couple of hours of work on the Project That Will Not End. Went back to bed around 5:30; at 7 when the dog and I rolled out of the sack once and for all, rain was still falling. It stopped at Cassie’s command — the Queen of the Universe, Who hates to get wet, needed to use the facilities — and it hasn’t started again.

By light of day, it became evident that the pool is no longer filled with water. Mud is what it contains. I’ve never seen so much dirt in the pool, not even after the Great Dust-Up of 2011.

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This was after I’d swept the steps and walls. The water’s roiled because the pump’s running. After a couple of hours, it will have pushed the sunken leaves and debris into a couple of mounds on the north side of the pool, making it easy for me to scoop them out so they won’t choke Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner. Once the worst of the trash is lifted out, Harvey will have to go in and vacuum up the mud that’s settled to the bottom — that brown streak to the north of the steps is dirt that’s settled out of the water, and the dark patches are just some of the leaves, twigs, and spent blossoms that are already beginning to coalesce.

First, though, the pump will have to run for several hours to pull as much of the dust-laden water through the filter as possible. And that, of course, will clog the filter, so that, after having blown my diddle-it-away savings on a birthday present for M’hijito, I will have to call the service guy and have him take the thing apart and clean it out. Whoop-de-doo.

Running the pump without Harvey connected will also skim off the floating debris. This is after the big stuff was lifted out:

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All…over…the…surface…of…18,000…gallons…of…water…  What a mess!

Dumped an extra load of chlorine in there.

One thing that has to be said for the strategy of changing out the water every two years: The $200 cost more than pays for itself in chemicals and service calls. Over the past year, I’ve bought one, count it (1), Costco container of chlorine tabs to the tune of $80, and there’s still about a third of them left. I’ll have to buy another boxful in a month or so. You need to dump a lot of acid in until the water is stabilized — chlorine tabs, I’m told, contain stabilizer, but it takes several weeks for them to kick in. Acid, though, is very cheap.

And instead of hosting the pool repair guy every few weeks, I think I’ve had the new guy in here twice over the past year or so.

Since I’ve started draining and refilling the pool every second year, the thing has been practically maintenance-free…especially after I got rid of the devil-pod tree. Never thought I’d exult at cutting down a shade tree, but I must say, that was the messiest tree I’ve ever seen, even more so than the three eucalyptus trees I once planted to protect a house from a 30 percent rate increase by Arizona Public Service.

Heh. My neighbor never stopped bitching about those things!

It looks like this kind of weather is going to be the new normal, along with increasingly extreme heat during the summer. Used to be that 108 or 110 was a very hot day, indeed. Now 110 is par for the course from June through September, and we often get 115- to 118-degree days. In Sun City, where all the landscaping is gravel and people erect those trailer-courtly metal overhangs as patio covers, SDXB routinely reports 120-degree temps on his back porch.

The guy writing for the L.A. Times who predicted this area will become unlivable within the next few decades is probably right. Between the drought, which is not expected to end anytime in the foreseeable future, and the steadily increasing heat, the capacity of this land to sustain 1.1 million-plus residents is questionable. To put it mildly.

I expect about the second summer of 120- to 125-degree days will inaugurate an exodus. Some things are worse than higher property taxes and snow.

Me, I’d like to move to Oregon, since I can’t now and never will be able to afford the Bay Area. At least they have humane end-of-life policies there.

Whacked and Windblown

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Not good for much today. Anxiety attack — I hate those — drove me to a well marinated dinner. Well. Two dilute bourbons and waters wouldn’t marinate most folks, but it seems to have a) stopped the fibrillateous heartbeat and b) stopped all attempts at working or thinking.

Young Dr. Kildare reminded me that he’d referred me to a cardiologist for the same neurotic symptoms four months ago. He underestimates the ability of old bats to blow off scary recommendations. Armed with a new phone number, I made an appointment for later this week. Possibly I will find a way to forget it between now and then?

Our first dust storm of the year blew in today. Naturally, on floor-vacuuming day. Every time we get one of these windstorms, the floors collect a gritty layer of dust, annoyingly palpable by the bare foot. Dutifully following the one (or two)-chore-a-day schedule, first crack out of the box this morning I ran the machine over 1860 square feet of tile floors. Decided to wait until tomorrow to dust-mop, by way of wasting less energy.

But more wind & dust are expected for the foreseeable future, so dust-mopping it up seems like an exercise in futility.

It’s spitting rain out there right now: just enough to add a skiff of mud to the piles of parched leaves and debris that have blown in to cover the yard I paid Gerardo $75 to clean up just a few days ago. And, picturesquely, to fill the pool that has been so pristine all winter.

What IS the point, anyway?

Billing for the Little Stuff

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I  have a bidness problem with electronic media: because of its gestalt and instantaneous nature, it tends to blitz you with tiny jobs that, one by one, take little time but that taken together add up to a lot of billable hours.

Take e-mail, for example.

Shooting off a short e-mail takes less than five minutes. Do you bill for a two-minute squib? Gathering the facts for that e-mail may take more time; if it takes five minutes to collect information for a message that requires two minutes to write, do you bill for five minutes or do you bill for ten minutes? (One normally bills in increments: five, ten, fifteen minutes…any part of that increment means billing for that increment.)

This weekend in a moment of idleness I added up all the time involved in writing messages residing in the “sent” folder that went to one of my clients. A few of them were fairly complex and took ten or fifteen minutes to write. But twenty-five of them were things that took at most five minutes apiece to shoot off.

Five minutes times 25 e-mails comes to two hours’ worth of my time.

If I don’t bill for every one of those teeny little squibs, I lose money — at $60 an hour, that’s a hit. But there’s something about charging a client for an activity so ephemeral that seems…I don’t know. Beyond the pale.

Asked a friend and long-time mentor about the ethics of this.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me this question!” squawked she. “Weren’t you married to a lawyer? You bill the sob for every minute of your time.”

You heard about the lawyer who dies and ascends to the gates of Heaven?

“There must be some mistake,” he says. “Why are you taking me now? I’m only 45.”

And St. Peter replies, “According to your billable hours you’re 82.”

 What say you, readers? Do you (or would you, if you were self-employed) bill for every minute of your time, no matter how fleeting the task?

And Spring Slides into Summer…

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What was it? All of a week ago that we were exulting over springtime on the desert? Well, spring has done sprung, and now summer has entered, stage left. Despite a skiff of overcast, the back porch thermometer is hovering between 85 and 90 degrees. Tomorrow is supposed to be 90, and so it will go for at least the next week.

Then it will get hot.

The pool is warm enough to swim in — still brisk, but no longer cold enough to freeze off any vital parts. In fact, I’m thinking I may take the plunge in the next few moments of this still and rather stuffy afternoon.

Various bits and pieces of news and idleness…

First up: It develops that commenter marzy doats was right in speculating that my neighbor Sally was not legally bound, by reason of ethnicity, to accept any halfway reasonable offer on her house from the neighborhood slumlord.

This morning at the weekly Scottsdale Business Association breakfast chivaree, it was our Realtor‘s turn to entertain the rest of us with a presentation. During the Q&A, I described what had happened and asked if it was true, as Sally’s agent claimed, that she could not just reject Mr. B***’s lowball offer. He said no, she was not bound to accept or make a counteroffer to any offer that came in the door. If the prospective buyer was not black, unmarried, or conspicuously religious, she could simply reject the offer with no comment.

However, if the offer met the asking price, with no strings attached, that would be a different matter.

So: score one for Funny’s readers!

Next: It appears that I’m now the president of the Scottsdale Business Association. Can you imagine? Me…the English major, president of a bidness group? Wonders never cease.

Our beloved past president, who to our shock had to go in for bypass surgery, took that opportunity to step down, having run the thing for quite a few years.

I called a business meeting for later this month. He suggested we appoint him as treasurer & secretary (since English-major math definitely will not make it in the bookkeeping dept.) and then select a vice-president who can take over if I’m not there and also who will step in as president in a year. He thinks we should have a rotating presidency, and I think that is a great idea.

Yesterday was an exceptionally busy day. Among other things, my self-publishing author, feeling overwhelmed with the technicalities of going to print, asked me to package his magnum opus.

That took me a bit aback, because it wasn’t what I signed on to do: I expected to do the editing. Period. And it really couldn’t come at a worse time, because another pair of clients are now racing to complete the anthology of first-person narratives they’re compiling, and they need to get the last few contributions edited. Now.

So I passed the lion’s share of the guy’s project along to a former client, a designer who owns a small packaging business. She agreed to do the most involved parts of the work, if I would do the hand-holding.

He’d like to see the book ready to go to print by the end of this month. We think it will take four to six weeks to get him registered with Ingram, set him up with CreateSpace, design the pages, adjust the cover design to fit the perfect binding (he commissioned an artist to create a cover and is busy having her lay out the back cover copy, and she apparently wants to do something fancy with the spine), and then produce and read proofs. After that, depending on who he chooses to hire, putting the thing in Kindle and getting it up on Amazon should take a week or so.

Tomorrow is going to be even more crazy.

It’s out the door at 6:45 a.m. to get to an estate sale in the ritzy part of town. See this set of nesting tables? (Click on the image for a better view, but avert your eyes from the hideous lamp.)

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Those are solid maple, mid-century modern tables by Conant-Ball. They’re identical to the set my mother purchased in San Francisco in 1958, after we came back from ten years in  Saudi Arabia. M’hijito has coveted those tables for years, but he’s not getting the things until I croak over.

I haven’t seen any of these pieces for sale in quite some time. As develops, they’ve become collector’s items, and they’re stupidly expensive. These have been stripped and refinished, which damages their antique value — but then, mine have had the same treatment. Frankly, a good oil finish looks a helluva lot better on this stuff than the original yellow varnish did. Whatever: original finish or no, the price is still bracing.

So. That is going to be my son’s birthday present.

Two other people, both dealers, are trying to get there ahead of me. Forewarned by the proprietor, La Maya and I are heading for the East Side as dawn cracks, and we intend to camp outside the door until they open up the place at 8.

From there, it’s an about-face and a fast drive to the far West Side, where I have to meet KJG and VickyC at Arrowhead Mall. VickyC wants a new love seat, and in fact, I would like one, too, if one could be found at the right price. VickyC has an almost magical gift for finding really neat-looking interior appointments, from furniture to tschochkies, at ludicrously bargainish prices. So KJG and I want to tag along on her search, in hopes of nailing a bargain ourselves.

I’ll only have until 4:00 p.m. At that witching hour, I’ll have to fly back into town to get here in time to feed the dog, change clothes, and shoot out the door to go to dinner and chamber music with my neighbor and friend.

Naturally, tomorrow the maga-writing students submit their first full-blown articles. By midnight there’ll be a raft of those sitting on the server — a few eager beavers have already sent theirs.

Fortunately, only seven of the original 20 enrolled students survive, and they seem to be the cream of the crop. They’re all doing quite well, and most are articulate and creative. So reading this stuff shouldn’t be torture. I hope.

Charley the Golden Retriever spent a day visiting earlier this week. Cassie the Corgi is looking a bit bored just now, without him to chase around. They spend a great deal of time teasing each other. When they’re not conkered out on the floor, they’re a blur of motion.

We have, for example, the opening feint: a toy-snatch…

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Cassie, who has doggle telepathy, knows what he’s up to. That thing he’s trying to kill is one of her beloved stuffed vultures, lately brought home from Costco.

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Not so fast, hound!

Now for the showdown. First, though, click here for the sound effects…

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Make my day, White Cur!

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And it’s a total rout. Even if they weren’t shooting up and down the hall like rockets (and charging the human so it can’t hold the camera steady), Charley’s tail would be wagging so fast it would be a blur, despite (or because of) Cassie’s savage barking frenzy.

Gerardo was over here a couple days ago cleaning up the yard, which was still suffering the aftermath of the freeze. He and his underling picked up a ton of fallen citrus — the Meyer lemon was especially hard-hit by the frost, and the two Arizona sweets also dropped a lot of frozen fruit. And of course there were dead leaves and spent spring blossoms all over the ground, plus thorny dead branches to prune out of five bougainvilleas, plus the dead stuff off the blue plumbago, plus the dead stuff off the yellowbell that froze down to the ground, plus more weeds than Carter has oats.

In the course of pulling out clover and chickweed, Underling broke off an agave plant, an old favorite in the backyard. It was pretty badly frost-damaged, but still…I wasn’t too thrilled to have to haul it out to the garbage.

Whenever Gerardo’s underlings do some sort of damage, they invariably try to hide it. LOL! The guy propped up the beheaded agave so it would look like it was still just sitting there normally. Unfortunately, though, it did look ever so slightly strange. 😀

So now I have to figure out what to do with this spot.

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Interestingly, there’s a rather pretty agave growing in the front yard, one that does NOT have fierce man-gouging thorns on it of the sort that (dis)graced the deceased. It tolerates more water than I expected — I thought it would be pretty xeric, but as it develops, to keep it looking good I have to drag a hose out to it now and again. That’s good, because there’s an old tree bubbler in the now vacant spot.

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And darned if that plant doesn’t have a good-sized baby growing on it!

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So sometime in the next few days, I’ll have to twist that thing off and stick it in the backyard.

Weird things are growing from those bulbs I planted a few weeks ago.

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And now instead of editing anthology essays, I have diddled the entire afternoon away at blogging. And so, to work…

 

The Time Management Waltz

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So the back is feeling a little better, though we’re told by the physical therapist and Young Dr. Kildare that it will never be 100 percent again.

The most obvious immediate cause of this predicament is my habit of spending hour after uninterrupted hour in front of the computer.

Yesterday, for example, I woke up at 12:30 a.m. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Finally gave up a little after 1:00, got out of bed, and sat down in front of the computer. Graded 14 student papers. Wrote a blog post. Answered e-mails.

Fell back into bed after dawn, around 5:30 or 6 a.m. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Rousted out of bed by Gerardo, shortly followed by M’hijito, who dropped off his sick dog to preclude a gigantic floor mess at his house.

After all that dust settled, parked myself in front of the computer again. Edited a lengthy article by an ESL writer. Read a broad and random selection of news and play-nooz stories online. Commented on fellow bloggers’ sites. Fielded e-mail. Responded to student queries and plaints. And on and on and on and on… Shipped off the edited copy to the anthology editor about 8 p.m.

This

has

got

to

stop.

So later in the evening another activity that occupied time in front of the computer monitor was an analysis of just how much time I do spend and how much I should spend sitting in front of the computer monitor.

It occurred to me that, with the help of a cheap kitchen timer, I should be able to establish some limits on the amount of time per day that I spend sitting in a back-demolishing desk chair. Set the thing for 30 minutes or an hour and when it goes off, get up and do something else for a while. Or — outlandish idea — just stop working!

Thinking about this some more, it struck me that I tend to work at random, plowing through whatever pile is on the desk in an attempt to get through it all as fast as possible. So on some days, I’m doing things that don’t really need to be done that day — they could be put off. This habit tends to keep me sitting in front of the computer for unnecessarily long stretches.

Because I have several enterprises going at once — teaching, blogging, making jewelry, writing the proposed books that never get finished because there are so damn many other things to do — there’s always something that either needs to be done right now or could be done right now. And that creates the illusion that everything must be addressed right this minute.

Not, of course, so…

I took it into my head to list the things I typically do in a day, strictly limiting them to the smallest number of minutes or hours I estimated it would take to do them. This, I figured, would allow me to get a grip, simply by setting a timer for the designated period per task and then stopping and moving on to the next task each time the timer bleats.

The bare minimum number of hours needed to accomplish all I do in a typical day came to slightly over eight.

Holy sh!t. No wonder I spend my entire life in front of a computer.

Finally, it crossed the feeble mind that one could, at the start of any given day, decide what will be the dominant task of the day. Knowing that x or y will be emphasized that day, one could then schedule enough computer time for that job and, if desired, for one or two other jobs. And then, knowing what amounts of time should be scheduled for the given computerized projects of the day, one could limit that time.

The result, with any luck, would be fewer hours spent at the desk and more hours devoted to getting a life.

This thought appears to be on the right track. I created a spreadsheet showing what would happen if one spent x number of hours on one task and y and z hours on other things. The assumption here is that eight hours is the absolute maximum I wish to spend in pursuit of profit. The number of hours slated for each specific activity appear as negative figures, so they will subtract from the 8 hours allotted per day using the ∑ button.

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Here, the hours per task are subtracted from eight hours budgeted per day. The “Remaining hours” row shows the time that could be used getting up out of the bone-crushing chair or devoted to tasks that don’t get done during the time allotted to the scenarios posited in the top row (i.e., spending more hours than usual blogging, or more hours on editing).

The first column, “On Average,” represents the number of hours I typically spend on any given task — assuming nothing out of the ordinary is going on. So, if on a typical day I spent only the typical number of hours on those activities, they would occupy about eight hours.

As a practical matter, they’d occupy a lot more than that, because few of these activities limit themselves naturally to the periods shown in column 2. That’s because I tend to work on something until I’m done, rather than stopping after a reasonable time.

The bottom row shows the number of hours each scenario would have me working.

Let’s say I follow this scheme to allocate time. If I spend three hours on blogging, one or more other tasks will have to be cut back or go away altogether — as we see in column 3, to provide three hours for blogging and still keep the workload at 8 or fewer hours, I’d do no editing, no other writing, and no jewelry-making. Teaching time would be limited to one hour. And so on.

Some of these task allocations would free up a significant amount of time. Others…not so much. On a day when I did a lot of blogging and then tried to complete one four-foot-long beaded lariat, I’d end up spending 9 hours (at least!) with my nose on the grindstone. As a practical matter, this would add up to much more than that, because it’s not easy to stop when you’re on a roll. The kitchen timer went off about five minutes ago, and I haven’t stopped typing…

In theory, I should get up right now and vacuum the floors. But wouldn’t it be good if this post went live before the day ends on the East Coast? To make that happen, I have to sit here and FINISH the damn thing!

But a few helpful guidelines do present themselves from this exercise.

• Get a timer and set it for one-hour periods. Once an hour, get out of the chair and spend 15 minutes moving around the house or yard.

• Editing and serious writing really take it out of you, and each requires large chunks of uninterrupted time. Do not try to do these on the same day. (I don’t put blogging in the “serious” category because it doesn’t require a lot of formally cited and documented research, nor, like writing fiction, does it require you to transport yourself mentally into a detailed imaginary world and enter the minds of fully conceived imaginary characters.)

• The jewelry-making is ditzy and demanding. One needs to focus on that for a lengthy period, too. Don’t try to do it on the same day as editing or real writing.

• Occasionally, the work of teaching is also somewhat demanding and tiring. Do not try to combine a lengthy stretch of course prep or grading with a lengthy stretch of editing or serious writing.

• Don’t assume the budgeted time must be consumed by the assigned tasks. If the work is done, stop. Spend the rest of the day socializing, exercising, cleaning, gardening, playing with the dog, or loafing.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Well. Let’s see if mindfully following this scheme works…

A Close Call in the Real Estate Department

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My neighbor Sally, the one who lives directly across the alley behind me, has resurfaced. I thought she’d moved out, as she hasn’t been home at least a month. She put her house on the market — the “For Sale” sign has been up for two or three weeks.

But finally this weekend she reappeared. As develops, her 98-year-old mother died last week, after having fallen in the bathtub. The old gal didn’t break any bones, but apparently she hurt herself on the inside. After several weeks of suffering, she died in hospice. Sally has been at her side the entire time.

Sally had already decided to put her house on the market and move to a smaller place before this happened — her agent had listed the house literally hours before the event. But, she said, she’s now so exhausted she can’t face the upheaval of having to empty out a lifetime of possessions and move across the city.

So — hallelujah! — she’s taking the house off the market!

It’s much in my interest for Sally to stay put. She’s quiet —  no barking dogs, no screaming children, no loud rock or salsa music — and she keeps the place up pretty well. Plus she’s a pleasant enough neighbor to have around.

But: it was a very close call, indeed.

She told me that Mr. B*** — the guy who vandalized my pool by throwing about three gallons of used motor oil over the wall into the water — made a bid on the house.

Mr. B***, also known in these parts as The Perp and as The Romanian Landlord, made a business of turning our three-block by two-block neighborhood into his private rental empire. He bought the house next door to SDXB’s, when SDXB’s neighbor was scared off by the local burglars. Seemed like a nice enough fellow at the time.

But then he started buying houses from the elderly neighbors. This tract was built in the early 70s, and, because it’s a decent area (once a very nice area), many of the original owners still live here. And they’re getting on in years.

He would spot someone who looked like they were old enough to be tired of working on a place or whose spouse had recently died; then he would go to the door and offer to buy the house for a song, saying he would pay in cash. Many of these elderly people, especially women, had no idea how much their houses were really worth. They would jump at his offer, apparently without even bothering to consult a real estate agent. And so, in at least a couple of cases we know of, he was practically stealing houses, picking them up for tens of thousands under market value.

He would finance them by telling mortgage companies that he was going to move into them or put relatives in them — this, it develops, appeared in the public records, easily available online.

Then he would promptly turn them into rentals. From there they would devolve into wrecks.

Apparently he was getting advice and possibly financial backing from someone knowledgeable about real estate and the rental business, because he personally is not a very sophisticated soul. Hard-working, yes — but wise in the ways of the world, not so much. At one point he had his clutches on a half-dozen houses here, all of which he was allowing to go to pot and all of which were, of course, driving down property values as compared to adjacent tracts that had few or no rentals.

At the very peak of the real estate bubble, Mr. B*** abruptly sold all but one of these rental houses. So, no doubt thanks to whoever was advising him, he maximized his profit in a big way.

He then bought a house on a huge lot in the pricier neighborhood just to the south of us — where values are higher because there are no rentals wearing out the properties. The house isn’t much, but it’s a prime piece of real estate; the land itself is worth more than the structures. He kept the house next door to SDXB’s former dwelling and turned it into a rental. (After the pool fiasco and resulting court appearances, SDXB fled to Sun City, selling his house to Manny, who bought it with money the city gave him when it condemned his neighborhood to build an airport runway and who has let it run down).

In the wake of the real estate collapse, it looked like B*** was going to stay out of the rental business, or maybe that he just had enough sense to stop soiling his own nest and pissing off the neighbors — maybe he’d go trash someone else’s neighborhood. However…

As soon as he saw the For Sale sign in Sally’s front yard, he called the realtor, who’s one of Sally’s cousins. She wanted $225,000. He offered $180,000.

When Sally heard that that B*** had made a bid on the house, she told her cousin that she wouldn’t sell to him. The cousin informed her that she could not refuse to sell the house to a legitimate bidder.

He told her she needed to make a counteroffer. So she said, “OK, tell him my counteroffer is $224,999.”

As far as we know, that’s the end of it. But I think legally the only way we can be sure of that is for the house to go off the market right now and that sign to come down. She said she’d told her cousin that she’s decided not to move, under the circumstances.

At two and a quarter, the house is offered at or slightly below market, and prices are appreciating fast here. In our zip code, home prices rose 20% in 2012, and they’re expected to go up about 10 percent this year. So, if as I suspect, Mr. B*** wants to get Sally’s house just to spite me — and to put the worst sh!theads he can find in there — he’s entirely capable of coming back with a full-price offer.

If that happens before the house is officially withdrawn from sale, or if she dies (she’s 78) and he gets his hands on the place, I will be out of here in an instant.