Funny about Money

Gearing Up for a New Semester

February 13, 2013February 13, 2013 by funny

The magazine-writing course is now mounted in Canvas and ready to go live. All that remains is to figure out a couple of minor details and then, two weeks or so from now, click “Publish.”

And it only took a couple of evenings in front of the television to get it done!

I’ve pretty much got that online course down to a science, so that it requires only a bit of tweaking to update it each semester. Links die; new sites come to one’s attention; the occasional new pedagogical scheme crosses one’s mind. It helps a lot, though, that the course is only eight weeks long. From the student’s point of view, it’s probably pretty intense, especially during the first two or three weeks when they need to come up to speed. But from my point of view, it’s sooo much easier to mount than an online course, and so much less work and hassle than a full 16-week course.

What a relief it is not to be teaching classroom sections! I don’t think even I realized how exhausted I was by the end of last year.

Yesterday I spent some time putting the finishing touches on a client’s manuscript and was shocked at the number of typos and misspellings that had slipped past me. Among the things that hadn’t gotten done: Because Word sees almost all pharmaceutical brand names and generic drug names as incorrect, one’s eye goes blind to all the little red squiggles under every other scientific term. Long ago, I should have checked

every.

single.

drug.

name (patented or generic)!

at its manufacturer’s website.

Our heroic author had misspelled two drug names, and I, assuming after all the guy’s a doctor and he must be right, had missed those errors. Also missed a couple of mundane typos of the sort that escape the bleary eye. So tired was I that I was making stupid assumptions and neglecting to do tasks that ordinarily would be routine.

Of course I picked up that nasty cold just before Christmas, hours after the last day of class, and then was pounced by the Index from Hell. No doubt it was sent to Hell in the first place by my overall zombification; a job that should have taken a week morphed into a three-week marathon.

I’m not missing the teaching income (yet): The Copyeditor’s Desk doubled its revenue goal in January and has done OK so far this month. But that’s not going to last, unless serendipity strikes again…we’re almost out of work and nothing new is in sight. I may be forced to get off my duff and hustle up some jobs.

But in the meantime, not working is some kinda heaven!

Having to schlep to a college campus and cope with roomsful of restless, ill-educated, ill-mannered post-adolescents was blighting my life. In the absence of having to devote some part of every day to tasks I don’t much care for, my life has completely changed. Even though this damn back thing makes everything hurt from the waist down, I feel wonderful!

Literally. Every day is downright blissful. Rain or shine, it’s a beautiful day. (Well. The frost we might have done without…) It’s so heavenly to accompany the Queen of the Universe to the park, loaf around watching tiny people play on the kiddie gym and moms push babes around in strollers and carriages, soak up the sun, and just do…nothing.

And it’s so wonderful to have my house be picked up and clean, without my having to find a full day in which to work myself sick to make that happen. I hate living in a pigpen! But that was what my house was, when I was too busy and too tired to take care of it.

Then there’s the magnificent meal in the middle of the day, complete with rather more wine than prescribed. Today: grilled steak, avocado and butter lettuce salad, grilled yellow summer squash swimming in home-made cherry tomato sauce, strawberries with Greek-style yogurt and crunchy sugar, Castle Rock cheap but highly acceptable pinot noir. Coffee.

And an amazing new phenomenon: sleeping seven hours a night, come Hell, high water, or Saturday Night Live. Yes. True that. The four-hour nighttime naps have gone away. When I go to bed, I sleep seven hours, not the four hours on average (range: two to five hours) to which I had become accustomed. Fall into the sack at 9:00 p.m.: wake up at 4:00 a.m. Go to bed at midnight: wake up at 7:00 a.m. Imagine that!

Life is, for a change, worth living.

What is this? The middle of February? It actually has taken all this time — two and a half months — to unwind enough and rest enough even to become aware of the bliss the new state of affairs brings.

Bumhood.

Some years ago (quite a few, come to think of it), an ambitious young fellow got hired as an associate by the prestigious law firm in which my then-husband was a partner. He accomplished this coup largely on the strength of an original scheme he’d come up with as a student: he spent a summer living on the streets with the homeless, and then he wrote a paper about the experience, which he’d managed to get published.

He once remarked that the single fact that struck him most was the overall happiness of the people he’d met. Even though many, he allowed, were mentally ill, by and large they were surprisingly content and not at all grieved by their chronic state of unemployment. They were reasonably well fed and had adapted to life in a cardboard box; by and large they felt they had few serious problems to deal with and were satisfied with their existence.

He came to mind the other day as The Queen and I were wandering around the park. She wears out pretty fast if I make her hike along briskly (after all, one of my steps equals about ten of hers), but allowed to stroll at her own mostly leisurely pace (except when cats and small children heave into sight), she would probably go a long, long way. Forever, maybe. It occurred to me that if I chose, this dog and I could spend the whole day just roaming around. If I could get her on the bus or the train (and I could, by claiming she’s a “service animal” — one lady brings her poodle to church in that guise), we could explore the entire city on foot. If we so chose.

When my ex- and I lived in the Encanto district (a richly yuppified central-city lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto), several homeless shelters and halfway houses resided nearby. These outfits would take in people about 5 or 6 p.m., feed them, bed them down, and then eject them by 8 in the morning. They had no place to go. And so what they would do is walk, ride the buses, or sit in the city library all day long. One old gal used to walk around the city all the time. No matter where you went south of Indian School, sooner or later you’d see her marching along the streets. And there was a guy who’d make it up to Glendale, walking, walking, walking.

Cassie and I have our own flophouse. We could see the city, for the price of a pair of shoes and a senior citizen’s bus pass.

Bumhood is good. I like it.

Ginger Oil Painkiller…The Poor Man’s Emu Oil?

February 11, 2013 by funny

Well, my friends, we’d better preface this with a little caveat:

You’re not reading a) science; b) a medical webpage; or c) even a mainstream woo-woo alternative medicine site. You’re reading a wacky little old lady’s blog, so you’re freaking nuts if you take any of this seriously.

Do not, do not, do NOT apply what follows to an open wound, to your acne, or to any source of pain whose cause you don’t understand. If you don’t know what ails you, GO TO A DOCTOR. This is an experiment, and I, Funny about Money, am not responsible for whatever happens to you if you fail to seek medical advice before fooling with your body.

Okay. That said, did you know there’s a new woo-woo alternative painkiller in the form of the fat of the emu? Yes. We’re told that oil derived from the thick layer of fat sported by the exotic Australian flightless bird will cure whatever ails you in the aches and pains department. Got arthritis? Rub it on your sore joints. Decided to go for a mile-long run without training? Rub it on your shin splints. Chiropractor tell you that your achin’ back is fibromyosis? Rub it in! Older than Methuselah and hurt all over your wrinkled, shriveled body? Slather the stuff on!

We’re even told it will cure your eczema (usually spelled wrong in testimonials) and cause your male-pattern baldness to go away.

Taken by the wonders of this particular snake oil, I wandered about the Web following the exclamations of joy and faith, and at one point even came across something that looked like actual science, suggesting (sort of) that the stuff may work. But given the number of people who remarked that it makes you smell of poultry, I wondered why not simply smear chicken fat all over your body. After all, emu, chicken: they’re both dinosaurs. What’s the difference?

{hey, Belagana! We Injuns used to favor oiling ourselves with fat, usually of the buffalo, and I expect if I chose to play that particular card, I could find a way to make myself very rich, indeed. But let’s stick with the Down Under variant.}

The difference is that the Australian poultry fat sells for about $5 an ounce. Huh…anything that costs five bucks an ounce has gotta be good for you, eh?

Having absorbed this intelligence (such as it was), I went on about my business, munching on a piece of candied ginger to ease the aches and pains.

I’m allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and presumably all other NSAIDs, so there are no little pills (not any that are legal, anyway) to help with growing collection of sore muscles and painful joints. Ginger, as it develops, has been proven to exert some anti-inflammatory action — it takes awhile to work, and the effect is mild compared to an NSAID, but it does help.

Following this train of thought… Some people swear that creams dosed with salicylates or NSAIDs soak through the skin and ease the pain of arthritis and spavined muscles; research suggests the effect is faint, but it exists. And we do know that lidocaine patches used off-label work on arthritic joints — by numbing the entire area.

What if ginger would soak through your skin, too? Would it dull the constant pain I’ve been enjoying over the past nine months?

Hm.

Bird fat. Olive oil. Both oily stuff you can rub on your body, right? Olive oil, we know, has a variety of salubrious effects when applied to the skin and the hair. And as for the ginger, a large chunk of it resides in the freezer. What if one combined ginger and olive oil and applied it to the pained spots in the manner of the vaunted emu oil?

Off to the lab! (Sometimes called the kitchen…)

The tools:

Small heat-proof sauce dish
Sharp knife
Blender or food processor
Stove
Fine-gauge sieve

The subjects of experimentation:

Olive oil
Fresh, raw ginger

First I cut off a couple of chunks from the ginger root…

…then chopped them coarsely in a small mini-food processor.

Then mixed this with about a cup of olive oil in a small heat-proof dish and placed it on the stove.

The idea was not to cook it. Get olive oil too hot, and it denatures — makes it stink. Instead, what I wanted to do was just heat it to the point where it was barely starting to bubble. The stove needs to be turned on as low as it will go:

When the compound is just this side of hot, turn off the heat and let the mixture sit for several hours. Probably all day would be good. I let it rest four or five hours. Then come back and run it though a sieve, pressing firmly on the oil-saturated ginger with the back of a spoon.

The result is a clear, ginger-scented oil.

I strained it into a refrigerator container, planning to store the liniment in the fridge. Before putting it away, though, I applied some of it to the sore foot and the sore knee. Wrapped the medicated knee in athletic bandages.

How did it work?

Well, yesterday evening the choir performed for evensong. We had an hour-and-a-half-long rehearsal, then sat through about an hour-long recital (incredible! most awesome organ recital I’ve ever heard, and our choir director and his assistant director are beyond amazing themselves), and then we sang for the better part of another hour.

During that time, not once did I enjoy the sensation of someone driving a red-hot needle into the bottom of my heel. The foot was still sore, but it was mighty nice to be free of the breath-catching stabs. The knee: about the same. The back and hip: hurt like hell.

To be fair, I did accompany my large (and delicious!) mid-day meal with one of my favorite analgesics, gin and tonic. But by 5:30, the effects of that medicament had pretty well worn off.

Got home in time to catch Downton Abbey, during which I smeared more gingerfied snake oil on the knee, foot, and backside.

This morning, the knee hardly hurt at all. The foot: still sore, but no needling sensation. And the back and hip: hurt like hell.

The sun, alas, is far from the yardarm, and besides, I’ve got a ton of work to do today. So there’ll be no supplementation of the gingery regimen for several hours. But it’s interesting.

Possibly silly. But interesting.

Image: Head and neck of an emu. William Warby. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

When Someone You Know Is a Crook

February 10, 2013February 10, 2013 by funny

Money Beagle has a great post on how one goes about making bail, a reflection occasioned by the discovery that a former friend was accused of embezzling $400,000. It’s really a shocker when someone you thought you knew well turns out to be crooked as the proverbial hound’s hind leg.

First time it happened to me was when an ex-flame of mine was arrested somewhere east of Yuma, ferrying the largest haul of cocaine that had ever been nabbed in Arizona.

Heh. He always aimed high. This was the guy who soured me on Republican party politics. If you think “dirty tricks” were dreamed up by Richard Nixon’s boys, think again. 😉

Never occurred to me, though, that his career ambitions extended beyond sabotaging the presidential campaigns and hustling call girls for visiting big-wigs.

Krantcents, commenting on Beagle’s post, reflects on his experience teaching at the Leavenworth army prison and remarks, “The main difference between a criminal and me is I realize I would be caught the very first time where they think they will never be caught….”

Maybe that’s the fundamental difference between the law-abiding type and the crook. I was always too scared of getting caught to cheat, lie, and steal.

So namby-pamby was I, it wasn’t until I hit middle age that I noticed how much stuff some people get away with. The reason some people think they’ll never get caught is that it’s objectively true that they very well won’t ever get caught. The first time I realized a married couple of my acquaintance was committing what appeared to be insurance fraud — again and again! — I was flabbergasted. The worst that happened (other than the disintegration of their life, more a function of their personalities than their larceny) was that their insurer eventually refused to cover their home or car.

After that I began to notice what people around me were pulling off: outrageous mortgages that of course they couldn’t pay; selling bloated mortgages to people who obviously couldn’t afford them; “buying” a dressy outfit, wearing it to a party, and then returning it with a claim that it didn’t fit right; drinking and driving; buying and selling weed and ’shrooms; shoplifting from clothing and grocery stores with impunity; gaming the FMLA law; collecting from insurance companies for nonexistent neck injuries after minor fender-benders; declaring bankruptcy and then heading off to California for an upscale vacation; embezzling from a law firm and leaving the partners holding the bag; and on and on and on.

It’s no wonder college-age students think they can lie and cheat their way to honors-level grades, given the role models they see. They seem to expect to get away with it.

And probably, most of the time, they do.

Would you like a set of Noritake? Or a place setting of Lenox? At a discount!

February 7, 2013 by funny

By way of clearing out some space here at the Funny Farm, I’ve decided to sell some fine China that my then-young self and my then-young husband purchased in late ’60s or early ’70s.

The most interesting of the two items on offer is an 8-place-setting set of Noritake in the “Trudy” pattern. Apparently Trudy is no longer made, so you have to go to places like Replacements, Ltd. to get it — or find it serendipitously in an estate sale. Here’s what it looks like:

That’s the cup and saucer, and below is the plate:

This is stamped on the back of each piece:

Proof positive:

Noritake — yes
Trudy — yes

They’re quietly elegant China. Tiring of the heavy, casual-looking stoneware that was the rage when I was married, I bought this set because I wanted something a little more formal for entertaining, part of the job description for a corporate wife. I found them at Goldwater’s, probably in the early or mid-1970s. Was very proud of them until it dawned on me that hand-washing dishes for eight people was not my cup of tea. It’s been lightly used, and as far as I know (I haven’t unpacked the entire box yet), it has no chips or dings. I think some of the plates may have a little wear of the platinum ring around the outside.

Then we have one place setting of this:

I have one, count it (1), full place setting of Lenox in the Solitaire pattern: plate, salad dish, bread & butter dish, cup, saucer. It’s in perfect condition, having never been used.

When I was a young bride about to marry a corporate lawyer on his way to partner at one of the most prestigious law firms in the Southwest, I did what all the other young brides did and signed up for the registry at every department store in town. For our China, we chose this Lenox Solitaire, which to this day I think is just gorgeous.

Lenox still makes this pattern. Today it’s selling for much less, relative to what Americans earn, than it did back in 1967, when I entered the blessed state of matrimony. The firm bought us a full set of the silverware we craved. But only one person gave us a place setting of this stuff. There was no way my husband and I could afford to buy any more of it — and he made very good money. The company was acquired in 1983; I have no idea whether they made changes in their production or quality control, but one reviewer at Amazon observes that pieces she purchased within the past couple of years don’t compare with Lenox from the 1960s.

Apparently not all the newer products carry the Lenox stamp on the back, which you can see on mine:

I’m going to sell both sets — the eight place settings of Noritake and the single five-piece place setting of Lenox, either through a consignment shop here in Phoenix or through e-Bay. However, first I’d like to ask Funny about Money’s readers if anyone would like to purchase one or both directly from me.

The Noritake has been offered at Replacements, Ltd. for $630 for 45 pieces (eight place settings, of course, will give you 40 pieces); Classic Replacements has had it for $60 for five pieces but evidently has no Noritake in stock; and on e-Bay it has been sold for $55 a place setting (that would come to $440 for the complete set). I’d be willing to sell the Noritake set to a reader for $400, plus shipping.

The Lenox is $90 per place setting at Bed Bath & Beyond, and I spotted it at Amazon for the same price. Replacements, Ltd., is selling it for $70 a place setting. I think $65 plus shipping would be a fair price.

If you would like to purchase one or both of these, please let me know. You can reach me at funnyaboutmoney {at} gmail {dot} com.

Less I$ More

February 5, 2013February 5, 2013 by funny

Not in the good frugal minimalist way. At Cox, it develops, “less is more” means “less for more.”

After endless calls from “Rachel of Card Services” (who actually is a recorded message used by several offshore phone solicitation scammers) and more recently from creeps who know my age and try to scare me into buying various redundant and useless “security” services and devices, I decided to quit resisting and shell out an extra $10 a month for Caller ID.

So this seems to be working. It’s kinda cool. The phones flash up the caller’s phone number, and for unknown reasons one of the extensions tries to enunciate, in Electronic English, the caller’s name, usually coming up with something unintelligible. Entertaining. And on the first couple of days it derailed several incoming scams. Nice!

Then a couple of people said they’d tried to call but the voicemail wasn’t picking up.

I figured they probably dialed the wrong number.

Yesterday I’m on the phone with a client. She’s calling from a cell phone with kind of a weak connection, so I figure the periodic BLEEEET in my ear is from some sort of interference.

Conversation ends. Check the e-mail. Message the first:

“I tried to call but your voicemail isn’t answering…”

Check machinery. Yes, it is answering.

Hmmmm….. BLEEEET…no busy signal…no voicemail…uhmmm… Duh!

So I kill another 10 minutes or so trying to get through to a live person at Cox. I figure the guy I talked to a few days ago added Call Waiting in addition to the Caller ID…must’ve figured he could do me out of another few bucks by tacking on an extra “convenience.”

Dunno about you, but I really dislike Call Waiting.

It’s rude.

• In the first place, I don’t want to be badgered by someone trying, unknowingly, to butt in to a conversation I’m having.

• In the second place, it’s incredibly offensive when someone says “Oh, there’s another call! I’m putting you on hold so I can answer that.” Implication: you aren’t important enough for me to give you my full attention. Or, other possible implication: I think I, wonderful little me, I am sooo important I must be at the beck and call of all my operatives, underlings, and superiors. Either one: offensive.

• And in the third place, it’s just plain bad manners to push the person you’re conversing with out of the way so you can let someone else horn in. If, after all, the late-comer’s call is important, she or he will call back.

Rude. Rude, rude, rude.

Finally a human picks up the line. She confirms that yes, the guy I spoke with did give me a package bundling Caller ID and Call Waiting together.

I say I don’t want Call Waiting.

She says she can arrange that, but it’ll cost more.

“What?”

“To get Call Waiting alone will cost $1.20 extra. Plus tax.”

For godsake.

Well, I figure it’s worth $1.20 — $14.40 a year (plus tax!) — to eliminate yet another of the myriad nuisances of life in the 21st century.

But boy, does it piss me off. Why should consumers have to pay more to NOT get something they don’t want?

Then she remarks that the total bill for the Internet and the land line will come to just under $100 a month.

Really? Seriously? A hundred bucks a month for about $30 worth of flicking services????

Started to look around for other high-speed providers. Looks like there are quite a few, and some, including Verizon (roundly hated, I know…but are any telecommunications providers not reviled?), offer the same things I’m getting for less.

So I guess tomorrow when I feel more like hassling with these people, I’ll start calling around to see if I can get a better deal.

Like I have nothing else to do with my time. 🙄

Survivors and Succumbers

February 1, 2013 by funny

LOL! Is there such a word as “succumber”? I couldn’t think of a noun antonym to “survivor” that ended in -er or -or, so made that one up. Possibly, though, it’s more closely related to “cucumber”?

Spent most of the day yesterday thrashing around the yard. The late frost was one of the strangest climatic episodes I’ve seen here in the low desert. Plants I expected would die made it through just fine, and plants I thought were pretty cold-hardy croaked right over.

The orange and lemon trees suffered more damage than they did in the harder frost we had several years ago, when they were less mature. About half the harvest of candy-sweet oranges is ruined — some pieces are still juicy and good; others are dried out. The Meyer lemon is dropping all its big, ripe fruit into the mud. I’ve tried to give them away to friends but don’t know whether anything remaining can be salvaged. If the hardier oranges are parched, the inside of those lemons must be sawdust.

The lime tree may be lost. Though I hung a couple of shop lights on its limbs, there was nothing I could do to cover it — the tree had grown taller than the roof. At least half of it froze back; it remains to be seen how much more will die.

Click on the images for higher resolution.

I picked the wrong time to have the trees pruned! The parts of the lime that survived were the areas sheltered by the adjacent devil-pod tree. Just a few days before the freeze, the arborist removed a large limb that hovered menacingly over the house — and that also overhung the lime tree. Probably less of the lime would have been blighted had that big limb still been in place.

It will have to stay untrimmed until well after the heat comes up. It will be weeks, maybe months, before we know how much it it will come back.

The yellow oleander also looks like a goner:

Weirdly, this tree did much better in the last frost, which was colder and lasted longer. This year we only had a couple of nights in the low thirties and high twenties. The last frost seemed to go on and on, and as I recall it came and went through several episodes.

On the other hand, that last big frost came with rain. This year has been droughtier than droughty — not a drop of rain in sight. So the plants probably were stressed to begin with, since I cut back the irrigation (which isn’t very effective to begin with) in the winter.

I hope the yellow oleander doesn’t die. It’s a pretty little tree that’s covered with bright yellow blossoms all spring and summer. Most of its limbs are still springy, giving some hope that the leaves may come back. However, with no viable leaves at all, right now it can’t photosynthesize, so my sense is that what we have here is very slim hope, indeed.

Even highly xeric plants, including these agaves and cacti, died back:

Ouch! We’ll be paying Gerardo a nice bonus for shoveling out that mess.

The bougainvillea back there only looks dead. Bougs hate frost and instantly convert themselves to dried arrangements at the first sign of cold. But they’ll come back. The trick is to leave them looking like that, without pruning off the dead stuff, until the weather is good and hot. Along about May, we’ll be able to see which limbs are really dead and which are just hibernating.

Some plants that I covered also died back. Everyplace the sheets and towels touched the potted ficus tree’s leaves, it fried:

Ficus are notoriously touchy about environmental changes, though. Some of these limbs may regrow their leaves, so here, too, I’ll have to wait until the weather has been warm for awhile to see how much needs to be cut back.

I knew the red salvia would freeze, despite being covered. What I didn’t expect, though, is that most of the eight plants that went in last summer would survive! When I went to pull them out yesterday, what should I discover but new growth at the base of the dead sticks:

This was quite a surprise — I’ve rarely seen salvia live through a frost.

I was certain the new gardens I’ve planted over the past few weeks would be flattened, and that all the new bulbs would be frozen underground. But no! In front, the only loss was a lovely little lavender plant. Everything else, even the mint, made it.

Some of the bulbs I planted out there have even started to grow!

I think these are lilies of the valley. But am not sure. Whatever…they look promising. And their appearance bodes well for the survival of the other bulbs lurking in that bed.

Turns out to have been a good thing I pulled the four unwaterable roses out of the front flowerbed and the two in the light-starved westside bed. I’m getting too old to cope with 89 gerjillion rose bushes. Yesterday I pruned the three in back and was just done in by the job. The back, legs, and foot hurt something awful after what seemed like not much exertion.

Though it must be allowed that “not much exertion” did entail hoeing and shoveling 50 or 100 pounds of damp gravel back from one rose to build an enlarged watering pan, hauling rocks over to line it, emptying the new stuff out of the compost bin and digging the fully composted material from the bottom of the bin, shoveling it into the wheelbarrow, and depositing it around two of the roses, and then refilling the compost bin with the uncomposted stuff. That was a bit of a job, I suppose.

This very pretty rose has been struggling with only one piddly little dripper and with the crushed granite top dressing right up against its trunk. It makes a beautiful orange and red flower, but they never last long because the plant is perennially heat- and drought-stressed.

🙂 Found that piece of flagstone buried under the crushed granite. Next time I’m at Baker’s or Summerwinds, I’ll look for a kitsch frog or some such to set on there. Though I have a Talavera frog pot with a cactus in it, Gerardo’s underlings invariably break anything made of pottery that’s left in their way. Baker’s sells molded resin turtles that are amazingly lifelike, and of course cast frogs are a dime a dozen.

At any rate, this pushes the broiling hot granite back from the rose, and it also gives the rose some new and very rich compost.

Also dug in some systemic fertilizer/disease control, since all three plants are showing signs of blackspot and something that’s turning leaves yellow and stunting them.

Closer to the house, a vigorous, large perfumed delight rose struggles through the hot summer.

The trees don’t block enough of the fierce afternoon sun to save it from fricasseeing, and the stupid drippers, even with the largest gallons-per-minute gadget available, don’t give it enough water. It’s a bit out of the way, too, and so I often forget to drag the hose to it when I’m adding extra water to the other plants. That notwithstanding, over a summer it’ll grow as tall as me.

I didn’t prune either of these back as far as I probably should have, because they’re so stressed it’s hard to tell which canes are likely to live and which not. So I removed the diseased and damaged foliage and the canes that obviously were already dead, but tried to leave enough healthy-looking stuff for the plants to keep puttering along as it gets warmer — which is happening very rapidly.

The unruly, ferally beautiful blue plumbago morphed into a gawdawful haystack.

I was about to cut it back to the ground, but thought better of it after having googled care of frost-bitten blue plumbago. While the site linked above says plumbago responds well to pruning, another site says it’s best to wait and see what parts of the plant come back after a frost before pruning.

After the last frost, it died all the way back, and I thought it was gone. As in gone gone. And in fact, the plant that had been put in the flowerbed was gone. This thing sprouted from roots that had extended outside the bed — it actually is growing (or was growing…) just on the other side of the decrepit railroad tie some long-previous owner used to build that bed.

{sigh} There’s going to be a lot of dead foliage sitting around the yard this spring, then. Not only the walloped plumbago but five hammered bougainvilleas, the decimated lime tree, the slammed yellow oleander….lovely.

Oh well. At least some survived. And of course the deciduous vitex and desert willow soon will be back in their full glory.

Desert willow image: Stan Shebs. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.