Coffee heat rising

July 4: A Miracle Happens in Arizona!

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Holy mackerel! It’s almost 8:30 in the morning and the temperature is only 85 degrees! Doors and windows are open, fresh (if somewhat soggy) air is flowing through the house, fans are blowing…air conditioning is OFF! Off off off, for the first time in weeks!!

We awoke at 5 to a solid overcast and bizarrely cool air. This is the first July 4 I can remember that has not been searing, scorching hot. Normally at this time of year the outside air is so hot all you want to do is huddle inside your air-conditioned box. People in Alaska get snowbound in winter; here the residents are heatbound, and just as stir-crazy.

Actually…I may overspeak.

Before the low desert was obscenely overdeveloped, it used to be that summer storms would roll in about 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon. Mornings and early afternoons would be hot—though nothing like they are today. Temps would be 105, maybe 110 at most. Then the afternoon rains would drop the temperature, abruptly, to around 80 degrees. This happened every day from early July through the end of August.

Now 110 is a “normal” day, and temperatures of 112 to 115 are routine. I can remember when a 112-degree day was extraordinary, and 115 degrees, unheard-of. We rarely see summer rains anymore, and when we do, it’s long after dark.

Our nasty summers are the direct result of paving over the desert. We’ve created a heat bubble that acts like a big plastic dome over the city. Where thirty years ago rainstorms would flow across the Valley floor, now they bounce off a barrier of reflected, amplified heat. As they cascade in from the southeast, you can see them split aside and pass by the city, the clouds moving out of the Valley and proceeding around through Carefree and Anthem to the north and below the South Mountains and the Estrellas in the other direction. Indirectly, climate warming undoubtedly has something to do with it. Either way, it stems from the same basic primate stupidity.

Oh well.

So de bonne heure it was out the door and into the backyard, there to continue reconstructing the landscaping now that Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy has outgrown the need for dog-sitting and taken up full-time residence at M’hijito’s house.

Yesterday I made a run on Home Depot to pick up some new plants. At first I thought not to get new bedding plants, because it does seem like an exercise in futility. Young annuals are almost bound to fricassee in the hot little bed next to the pool. And putting water in there will just cause all those damn weeds, whose thready roots now infest the soil, to come surging back. But I couldn’t resist.

Picked up two six-packs of zinnias, one of red salvia, and one of something called lisianthus. All of these allegedly crave six+ hours of full sun a day. We’ll see. These plants may define “sun” as something other than “blast furnace.”

Salvia does do pretty well out there. A volunteer between the pots and two plants in one of the pots next to the bed are still alive, despite the heat and drought. As for a lisianthus: never heard of it before. Kinda pretty blue thing, though. All these plants look a little tired. They were sopping wet yesterday afternoon when I set them on the shaded table beneath the patio overhang. This morning they were parched and looking peakèd. We’ll see if they recover after being put in the ground and generously watered.

The two salvia in the pot are sharing space with, of all things, an oleander that volunteered in there! I’ve never seen oleander volunteer before. They do make a seed pod, so it’s not out of the question…but how did the seed get into the pot? Oleander is very toxic and will kill birds (and just about anything else) that eat any part of it. Seeds, flowers, stems, leaves: the whole damn plant is poisonous.

Hm. Come to think of it, there was a dead dove out there awhile back…

However.

It gets quite large (we have 30-foot-high hedges in the neighborhood), and it makes a pretty flower. So I’m thinking that when the weather cools a little, I’ll move this little guy into the center of a larger pot and see if it’ll grow as a patio ornamental. If it doesn’t…well, it didn’t cost anything.

Oleander is expected to go extinct in the Valley within a decade. A bacterial infection carried by a type of leaf-hopper is killing them off. There’s no treatment for it, and nothing seems to be effective against the insect, either. Not a great loss…but another of those changes having to do with too many people doing too many disruptive things that, in concert, alter the nature of our living space.

Two days ago I soaked the flowerbed, to soften the soil so as to dig out the weeds. This morning? Bone dry! So it looks like to keep these things alive I’ll have to water every day and deep-water every two or three days. Another chore added to the daily list.

Well, it’ll be worth it if they grow and prettify the pool area.

Speaking of adding chores, I also picked up a couple indoor plants, too: on sale for ten bucks. One is a fiddle-leaf fig; the other an umbrella plant.

These are both varieties of ficus.

The potted ficus on the back porch thrives, although it’s sunburned right now because the blast of the morning sun has been too much for it. I’ve propped a screen against it, but that thing blows over in the lightest breeze. Guess I’m going to have to put up some hooks along the patio overhang’s beams and hang a length of shade cloth from them.

Later.

Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see if I can keep these things alive indoors. Didn’t realize the fiddle-leaf fig is somewhat xeric. Its soil was very dry, so I put it under the faucet and soaked it. Only then did I bother to go online and discover that it prefers to be dry and does not like soaking. The umbrella tree apparently has more normal watering needs, so watering that is less likely to kill it. But I figure that despite the passing cloud cover, the air here is so dry the fiddle-leaf will soon desiccate to its preference, and after that I’ll be more careful about watering it.

The neighborhood had its annual July 4 parade at 7:30 this morning. I’ve been to it once and almost expired in the heat. But the weather was so clement today I considered trotting over to the park to watch the goings-on. But…

But…so many excuses!

But…by 8:30, when the parade ends, if the cloud cover broke it would be way too hot for Cassie to walk home.

But…at 6:30 it was starting to rain. Did I really want to stand out in the rain to watch an extremely small-time parade and listen to some politicians harangue us?

But…my foot hurts. A lot! (Boy, does it hurt!)

But…my back still hurts.

But…I’m not drivin’ a block and a half and fighting for a place to park, because that would be ridiculous.

But…I’d rather go swimming.

But…I want to sit outside for breakfast.

Can’t believe it’s now nine in the morning and still nice enough to have the doors open.

Time to get up and put some water on the frazzled roses. And so…to work!

Readings

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Money Beagle holds forth on life insurance. It’s an interesting post and something to think about, especially if you have a young family, a disabled child who will need care through adulthood, or a spouse whose earning power would not suffice to pay the mortgage or maintain a comfortable lifestyle.

And as if by mental telepathy, SVB discusses whole and term life insurance at The Digerati Life.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche takes up the ongoing national conversation on women, the workplace, and the quality of women’s lives. This subject has been in the national media for the past few weeks, with articles in the Atlantic and the New York Times dominating the stage. Revanche’s thoughtful post reflects not only on the general state of affairs but on her own growing sense of frustration and burn-out…and she clearly hits a nerve with the many 20- and 30-something professionals among her readers.

At Prairie Ecothrifter, staff writer “Happy Homeowner” addresses the same issue with advice on managing “the third shift.”

Frugal Scholar is vacating, more or less, but still taking advantage of the sales, which wax large over the summer. The links in this post, BTW, take you to places to die for.

Speaking of vacations, eemusings is on the wing from Auckland to another destination that will make you green with envy.

Five Cent Nickel does a nice analysis comparing the costs of driving and flying to your vacation destination.

Don’t know whether the Centavos are back from Italy yet; last I heard, 101 Centavos was speculating on why Europeans are so much thinner than Americans.

Crystal and Mr. BFS, as you may know, are having a brand-new home built. And over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, they’re becoming acquainted with the concept of “contractor standard time.”

Over at Blue Collar Workman, TB is thinking about starting his own business. I think a lot of skilled craftsmen do OK on their own, if they can master the art of finding customers.

Free Money Finance posts an interesting cautionary tale about life in the social media.

In the runaround department, nicoleandmaggie received a masterful one from Equifax the other day.

Speaking of rants, Evan has some great fun with his latest moment of bemused outrage over at My Journey to Millions.

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability reflects on her youngest son’s recent flight from the coop.

Manwhile, Donna Freedman has returned to her roost, but she’s still very much in motion.

And on that note, I need to get into motion myself. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Image: Small American Flags. Lipton Sale. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

 

 

 

The Ambivalence of Doggy Love

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After M’hijito returned from his seaside vacation, he decided that Charley the Golden Retriever is now old enough to stay on his own all day, and so the dog-sitting gig has come to an end. Seems to be working out pretty well for him: he hasn’t complained about any furniture being eaten, and when I dropped by su casa over the weekend, I noted that Charley seems to have regained all the lost weight and looks great.

Funny thing about humans and dogs and their symbiotic relationship. Every time I lose a dog—and most of them will pass on to their furry fathers before we do, with any luck—I feel really bad and miss the dog a lot. It’s been four years since Anna departed and I still miss that dog. And yet weirdly, at the same time there’s this huge sense of relief. All that work comes to a stop.

It was reasonable to feel relieved when Anna passed. The cost of the meds and vet bills was well-nigh crippling, and the amount of work involved in taking care of a large, sick animal is substantial, indeed. When Anna got so blind she fell in the pool, the workload surpassed ridiculous—I built a jury-rigged fence around the Sink of Death to keep her away from it, but that kept me and the pool cleaning chemicals and gear away from it, too. Everything had to be hauled over the fence, several times a week.

Charley, except for the size of his dog mounds (cleaning up Cassie’s rabbit pellets is as nothing!) and his chronic gollywobbles, was far less of a burden than Anna. But…I’d resuscitated the old wire fencing (and bought a lot more of it!) to barricade my plants and the bubblers he loved to chew, barricading myself out of the flowerbeds, too. And pups, unlike older dogs, track in a phenomenal amount of dirt. I tend to get discouraged when faced with a lot of dirt in the house: often as not, I’ll just give up and ignore it. That makes me even more depressed, because I don’t like living in dirt. Then there was the frenzy generated by his pulling up and eating a half-dozen irrigation sprinklers and drippers, most of which I couldn’t then find and still haven’t found to repair. Half the irrigation system is now nonfunctional.

Hm.

Dog out, cleaning and yard repair in.

This weekend I spent most of Saturday and the entire morning Sunday scrubbing the filthy, filthy house. Finally got around to seriously vacuuming the floors, moving and sweeping under the furniture and sucking the dead insects out of the window casings and vacuuming the dust off the baseboards and on and on. Then the entire 1860 square feet of tile had to be dustmopped, especially under pieces that I can’t move, like the bed. Toward 9:00 p.m. I was running out of gas and so as a shortcut dragged out the Simple Green and the janitorial-sized mop and wet-mopped the sticky, stained kitchen, dining room, hall, and living room floors.

Mopping, though, really does nothing to clean the floor. It just moves the dirt around.

So, after a night’s sleep, it was time to haul out the good old floor steamer. This thing actually does pick up the dirt. Because dirt gets absorbed into the microfiber rag I clip to the steamer head, the rags usually have to be changed two or three times during a routine cleaning. Yesterday I went through seven rags, each of which turned black before a room was finished. Even then, in the dirtier rooms the floors finished smeary and streaky and had to be redone until they were closer to clean. Had to steam-clean the kitchen floor twice and the dining room three times to get them to the point where they look clean.

And truth be told, they really need to be steam-cleaned another couple of times. And I really need to get down on hands and knees and scrub the grout clean. Later.

All this was made so much the more pleasurable by the bout of sciatica I’ve cleverly inflicted upon myself. A week or two ago I spent altogether too many hours parked in front of the computer, sitting in my habitual contortionist’s position, feet propped on the desk and rear end resting on the sacroiliac. Must have pinched a nerve. Back and hip and right leg hurt like hell. This antic also caused the plantar fascitis and accompanying Achilles tendonitis to flare up. The right heel hurts so much I can barely walk.

Tough nougies, though. There’s nobody else to do all this work. So I just have to put up with it.

My pretty little flowerbed by the pool has turned into a weedbed, but in the extreme heat and endless goddamn drought, even the weeds out there are dead. Because the doggy fence made it too difficult to reach in there and dig out the weeds, I’ve  just let everything die.

The dried-out, weed-infested ground is so hard that I couldn’t pull the dead weeds out at all—they were just stuck in there. So last night I let the water run in there, to soften up the soil. Flooded the flowerbed after dark, went to bed, got up at 4:30 a.m., and started to work.

Mercifully, we’re having a brief cold snap. This morning we had a little cloud cover, and by 8:30 it was only 90 degrees out there. This provided several hours of clean-up time.

Pulled out the wire fencing, inflicting a nice hematoma on a finger when I had to force a section out of the solidly baked clay on the east side. Good riddance to that: now I can get water on the hopseed and orange jubilee I planted there to reconstitute a privacy shield, and do it without tripping and falling on my face. Now that I’m old, the leg doesn’t swing as high as it used to…I’ve gotten tangled in that stuff twice and both times fell to the ground. Fortunately, I fell in the dirt and not on the concrete; otherwise I would have hurt myself good. Now that little menace is gone.

The young hopseed plants that went in last winter are now almost up to the top of the wall. By  next summer, for sure, they’ll be tall enough to block curious neighbors and passers-by from peering into my yard. The orange jubilee has survived, by dint of extravagant watering—apparently Texas yellowbells and their cousins are not well adapted to Arizona’s extreme conditions. Looks like it probably will survive the summer, but I’m sure it will freeze back next winter. The vitex, shown here on the left in its winter nekkidness, has run amok in the absence of the sun-hogging Devil-pod Tree. It’s now a huge shrub. Next time the arborist is here, I’ll have to ask him to trim it up into a tree shape. It also will help a great deal as a privacy screen.

Back to work, though: shoveled, troweled, and pulled the weeds and as many rampant roots as I could grab out of the flowerbed. Filled a giant black bag with that stuff. Realized the reason the Lady Banks rose looks like it’s barely clinging to life by the tips of its roots is that the damn thing is barely clinging to life. It hasn’t been getting anything like enough water. The weeds that took over the little flower garden I put around its base also were dried out and dead, the ground hard as concrete. Soaked that area with water (understand: water has been running on the landscaping every day since the heat came up! but the drought has been so extreme—one day humidity was 2 percent!—that I’ve had to drag hoses every single day to keep plants and trees alive) and figured I’ll come back tomorrow to dig up and clean out that area.

Dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses… The irrigation system came on. Spotted one dripper hose that Charley had nipped off below grade, now visible by the fountain it made. Dug the dirt out around it so I can come back in the cool of another morning and repair that. Think I’ll need to buy another package of sprinkler heads to fix it. Never did find where the other four or five chewed-up sprinklers and drippers came from.

Now I’m thinking I’ll go over to the Depot and buy a few flowers to brighten up the abandoned flowerbed, and while there pick up a couple of plants to replace the indoor plants that had to go when Charley came to stay. It would make sense, though, to wait until I’m in Scottsdale for the Thursday a.m. meeting and visit the HD out there, since Home Depot outlets, like most mass retailers, offer a better selection and higher-quality goods to more upscale demographics. Especially in the house-plant department, I’m likely to find nicer specimens in Scottsdale than I can up the road.

Most of the morning is now gone and I have not begun to address paying work. We planned to return nine chapters to the honored client today, and I see by the notices from Drop Box that Tina has been laboring assiduously on that project.

And so…to work.

 

 

Waldo Canyon: Staggering Video

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A breathtaking time-lapse video by Steve Moraco, a Colorado Springs artist, records five days of the Waldo Canyon fire. Click on the full-screen mode. Takes a while to watch it…but once you start, you can’t turn away from it.

Moraco shot the video by setting up a camera on the deck of his home and then worked it into this incredible footage. Check out his website and also his page on Vimeo.

M’hijito went to school in Colorado Springs. The area where the fire started is near a popular picnic hangout for college kids and locals. Impossible to even imagine what the people who live there are feeling, much less to put it into words. Steve’s video says it all.

There but for the Grace of God…

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Here’s a hair-raising story of not just one but several formerly middle-class Americans who today are living out of their cars. The issue has become so dire in California that a nonprofit in Santa Barbara has arranged with various owners of large parking lots to provide “safe” space for people to car-camp. Meanwhile, so much as a whiff of the word “homeless” makes it even more difficult—indeed, pretty much impossible—for these once decently earning workers and small-business owners to get jobs.

Looking at photos of Janis Adkins trying to make a home in the back of a Toyota Sienna—which happens to be the make and model of the Dog Chariot, though hers is newer than mine—I thought, holy Christ! How lucky am I not to be walking in her shoes! Like Adkins, I’ve never been able to get another real job; not for any lack of trying, either. But at least I’m still in my home.

So…what happened that kept a roof over my head while she was being put out on the street?

Well, I think it’s a combination of a few decisions made, long ago, that happened to be right (even though they were questionable at the time), raw luck, and social safety nets that kicked in just in the nick of time.

The Decisions

The big decision, maybe the only smart one I’ve made since I left my husband, was to pay off my house.

One day while I was tooling up the freeway, a little revelation dawned: once the alimony ran out, the mortgage on my home would consume over half my net income, which was, shall we say, not very generous to begin with. I was just getting by on a combination of the alimony and net pay for a full-time, non-tenure-track teaching position at the Great Desert University. In fact, most months I ran a little in the red. With the alimony gone, my salary would not cover the mortgage payments and put food on the table. I needed to pay off the $80,000 mortgage as fast as I could: clear it off the books before I had to rely on salary alone to live.

A small inheritance from my father, another from a remote aunt, plus some other money I then had in short-term corporate bonds would close that debt. My financial adviser had a freaking kitten when I told him I intended to cash out those investments and pay them toward the house. “You’re over-invested in real estate,” said he (my 403(b) owned an REIT), “and it wouldn’t be a good idea to pay off the mortgage.”

Right.

So I went right ahead and did it.

Eight or ten years later, I sold that house and used the cash to buy a comparable house in a quieter, better-kept part of the neighborhood, with a pool, a larger lot, and lots of upgrades. Selling price of the old house was more than twice what I paid for it.

If I hadn’t had that cash to buy this house, I’d be up to my nose in debt today, since it also cost more than twice what I paid for the first shack. And if I’d owed money to a bank at the time GDU canned me and all my staff, I probably couldn’t have paid it. Almost certainly, by now I would have lost my home, and I, too, could be living in a minivan under some parking-lot’s trees.

Other lucky/wise decisions:

• Bought a Toyota. Today, when I can’t afford to buy a newer car, it’s 12 years old, has 112,000 miles on it, and still runs like a top.
• Got in the habit of living frugally. Not being able to go out to eat, to take a trip, to afford cable or a cell phone, to see a movie or go to a concert: none of those is much of a hardship, because I didn’t do those things in the first place.
• Didn’t get another big dog. Few things will empty your bank account faster than the cost of owning large dogs. Especially German shepherds…
• Banked at a credit union, which did not then and still does not inflict nicks and gouges for the privilege of letting them invest my money.
• Refinanced the house my son and I were co-purchasing through the credit union, which made a loan modification as soon as we told them I was out of work.

Raw Luck

The expensive dogs were gone by the time I lost my job. Not that I wanted to lose them. But today I couldn’t even begin to pay the vet and drug bills for the German shepherd. I’d have had to find another home for her, had she still been living when GDU canned me.

The university laid me off on the last day that people were eligible for the 50% COBRA discount.

My health was good, my teeth were good, and I already had all the pairs of glasses and contact lenses I needed.

My car, all the appliances in the house, and the air conditioner were running well.

A hailstorm wrecked the roof and the ancient air-conditioner, causing the homeowner’s insurance carrier to replace both of those very expensive items, each of which will probably last as long as I’m likely to stay in the house.

The Social Safety Nets

No way could I have afforded health insurance if I’d had to pay the full freight of COBRA. Thanks to the 50% discount, which I grabbed just under the wire, COBRA cost me less than Medicare does. We might note, however, that Medicare costs approximately eight times what I was paying for an EPO that gave me access to the best doctors and medical facilities in the Valley. Still. I’d have been uninsurable if I’d had to pay the full cost of COBRA.

Mercifully, I was already eligible for Social Security. Although I was forced to take it at a much-reduced rate—I’d intended to wait until I was 70, another six years, to collect Social Security—it paid several times the amount of Unemployment Insurance, without the hassles. The $2,400/semester the adjunct teaching pays would have rendered me ineligible for UI, anyway.

And, thank God, I became eligible for Medicare on the first day of the month after COBRA ended. Paying eight times what health insurance should cost for less coverage and fewer willing providers is less than perfectly desirable, but at least I’ve got some coverage!

Overall, it was a confluence of decent financial management, one or two reasonably intelligent decisions, frugal living, crucial government antipoverty programs, and incredible luck that kept me from spending my old age in a minivan. Even though things can be difficult at times, at least I have my home and my health. So far. My mother was right: I am blessed.

 

At the End of the Day…

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Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,
Whose trust, ever childlike, no cares can destroy,
Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,
Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.

Lord of all eagerness, Lord of all faith,
Whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe,
Be there at our labors, and give us, we pray,
Your strength in our hearts, Lord at the noon of the day.

Lord of all kindliness, Lord of all grace,
Your hands swift to welcome, your arms to embrace,
Be there at our homing, and give us, we pray,
Your love in our hearts, Lord, at the eve of the day.

Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm,
Whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm,
Be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.

Choir of Ely Cathedral
“Lord of All Hopefulness”
Tune: Irish folk melody “Slane”