Coffee heat rising

Puttering around, catching up…

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Shameful neglect of the blogging project! The fast-bloating set of chores and goals and paid work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, and so I’ve let Funny slide a bit and, at least for the nonce, given up on the Half-Off Diet. Decided to let “Fear and Loathing” sit at the top of the site for a day, because it strikes me as one of the best things I’ve written in a long time and because quite a few people kindly left comments. Half-Off? Well…I’m afraid my dieting habits have tended to “Twice On” the last couple of weeks! {sigh}

The low-desert summer’s unholy heat is slowly fading. The past few mornings have been gorgeous. La Maya and I have crawled out of our air-conditioned boxes to restart our early-morning constitutionals, and it’s finally cool enough in the evenings to walk Cassie before 10:00 at night.

La Bethulia, an accomplished gardener, is planning her fall and winter crops, and of course I can’t let that go unchallenged. It’s been a busy couple of days, despite the crush of student papers, the ad-selling scheme, and various client projects.

Yesterday morning after a breakfast meeting followed by a drive to a client’s office but before it got too bracingly warm (the thermometer eventually rose to 108°), I dropped by Baker’s Nursery, my favorite purveyor of garden goods, to pick up a rat bait station. Of course I couldn’t resist a few packages of seeds and some plants…

Back at the ranch, I managed to pull out some old onions (or possibly garlic chives? don’t think so…think they’re overgrown LGOs) from a big pot. Used part of a bag of potting soil to transplant the ficus and its attendant decorative plantlets into that big pot, a Costco plastic number that looks convincingly like terra cotta.

Earlier this summer, the ficus blew over in a monsoon, breaking its real terra cotta pot. It was so rootbound that its dirt just clung to it in a clotted ball. M’hijito lifted it into another pot about the same size, and, pushed way in under the back patio cover, it managed to stay alive through the remaining horrific heat. Just now it’s shivering with joy to have more room and fresh soil.

The pot recovered from the struggling ficus, which itself is a pretty good-sized terra cotta pot, was refilled with the rest of the potting soil, along with another large pot and a smaller wall pot reclaimed from a wad of dead roots. Decided to use the pots only to hold herbs, and so now we have a new parsley plant, a new sage plant, and a vigorous young basil plant, ready to burst into growth. This is what happens, you  understand, when fall is spring: in Arizona plants thrust out joyous foliage in October.

The basil on the west side is two or three years old now, and it’s getting tired. Really, it’s an annual. But where the weather’s mild and the human is willing to haul the pot into the house during frosts, you can make it behave like a perennial by cutting it way back now and again. Like a rose, it responds to pruning with new (delicious!) growth. But there’s a limit: no matter what, basil doesn’t last forever.

I’m thinking when I get around to tossing that aged basil plant, its pot can hold some chives, summer savory, and maybe a new thyme or tarragon plant.

But for the nonce, I planted a few parsley seeds in the pot with the sage and basil. I love parsley, especially the flat-leafed Italian type. Baker’s was billing its parsley plants as flat-leafed, but the one I got looks curlier than flat. Besides, parsley bolts to seed at this time of year, and so that plant won’t last until it gets cool enough for parsley to live a long and productive life.

One of the things I’ve missed over the past straitened summer has been parsley. I’ve stayed out of grocery stores pretty  much—have grazed out of the freezer and off the shelves, and what I’ve bought has come from Costco, whose limited fresh produce offerings do not include parsley. So it will be nice to have the stuff growing out there again.

Into the pool to cool down around 11:30 a.m., by which time I was thoroughly fricasseed. This is the nicest time of year for pool swimming! The water has cooled down enough to be refreshing, and the sun has slipped behind the devil-pod tree, so a fair amount of the pool is shaded. It is absolutely lovely. It took a half-hour and a couple of dips to let the water soak the heat out. During that time I noticed the pump wasn’t pushing water through there very fast, and from there observed the pressure gauge was into the “clean me” range. Another day…

In the afternoon around reading stoont papers I cooked some of those golden Mayan beans, planning to make a soup. Out of onions (another item that hasn’t been on the shopping list all summer) but still managed to flavor up the beans with celery, carrots, garlic, rosemary and thyme from the garden, dried herbs, and a few aging tomatoes. Just as the beans had reached the desired stage of doneness, La Maya called and invited me over for an impromptu dinner.

Well, given a choice between bean soup and La Maya’s incredible cooking, it was off to her restaurant with me and Cassie! She fixed a fresh pesto sauce with a mountain of basil from their garden, served over pasta. Awesome!

So this morning the beans still resided in the fridge. And a great many chores remained to be done.

Before getting started, though, I decided to have a real, decent meal for breakfast: defrosted a piece of steak, wrapped some asparagus in tinfoil, and tossed both on the grill to cook. Served those up with one of the pears liberated a couple days ago from Costco, now ripened to glorious juiciness.

Having enjoyed that and a cup of pretty darned good coffee, moved the car so I could climb into the attic up the folding stairs in the garage. Sally’s Handyman had come by to secure the loose screens and close up any other suspicious openings, by way of keeping new rats out and locking any resident rats in. A few days ago I’d bought a pair of Tomcat rat traps, a lot safer to use than the Victor traps, which are just gigantic mouse traps. I’ve never been able to set a mouse trap without snapping my fingers in the damn thing. Snap your finger in a rat trap, and you’ll end up with a busted finger…or no finger at all.

The plan is to trap any rats still hiding in the attic, if any are up there at all (it’s now beginning to appear not, thank goodness!), and then to pizzen any visitors that climb up the paloverde overhanging the deck roof before they get a chance to try to break in. It will be easy for me to climb a ladder to the roof over the deck and plant a rat bait station up there. A rat station holds the rat poison inside a box with a rat-sized entry that’s too small for a cat and unattractive for birds, thereby minimizing the risk to the neighbor’s pets and one’s favorite singing bug-eaters.

This is a nuisance, but far less nuisance then getting rid of a covey of little roommates after they’ve already moved in. So today’s first project was to bait the traps with peanut butter and haul them into the attic. That went quietly and I did not whap any fingers in the things.

Onward:

• Hauled the untouched sticky rat traps (proven useless in the past, but they were all I had) down from the attic and out to the garbage.
• Backwashed and recharged the pool filter.
• Dragged the hose to water the plants.
• Cut back the dying thyme plant, which is mightily infested with hated bermudagrass.
• Preserved some of the surviving stems that bore still-living thyme leaves.
• Loosed the opening salvo against the hated bermudagrass.
• Cleaned up the resulting mess; hauled the dead shrubbery out to the garbage.
• Sprayed weeds growing in the alley along the back wall.
• Figured out how to bait the rat station, approximately.
• Walked the dog.
• Dropped in the pool to cool down, again.
• Made the bed.
• Cleaned up the kitchen.
• Started the laundry.
• Shoveled several piles of old student papers out of the closet in my office, filling the gigantic blue recycling barrel about halfway up to its top.
• Gagged the shredder on the wads of paper the school sent containing former students’ ID numbers, scores on placement tests, and grades on earlier efforts at remedial English, ESL English, English 101, and English 102.
• Decided that paperwork should be treated like clothing: if you haven’t looked at it in a year, throw it out!
• Shoveled the first 20 or 30 junk messages of the day out of the e-mail.
• Wrote this post.

And so to work… Back to reading student papers, a pastime that occupied time until about half-past midnight this morning.

🙂

Image: Cynodon dactylon (hated bermudagrass). Bidgee. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Fear and Loathing in America the Beautiful

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My father, a Texan born in 1909, used to say he was a bigot and proud of it. He used the N-word freely, and he had a pejorative for every race, ethnicity, and nationality on the planet.

He had a bizarre cosmology of race, a hierarchy in which Asians ranked highest as most evolved among the human family, followed by whites (in his time, Latinos were regarded as white, more or less: highly sexualized whites who liked bright colors, so my mother said), American Indians, Blacks, and, at the bottom of the ladder, hybrids of all sorts. The Arabs among whom we lived were scarcely better than monkeys, he believed, because they were the product of intermarriage between African slaves and light-skinned Semitic slave-owners, and so inherited the worst of both breeds.

Even as a child, I used to marvel at the strangeness of this construct, its basic metaphysical weirdness. It wasn’t until we came back to the United States and I was halfway through junior high school that the vicious wrongness of his thinking revealed itself to me.

In San Francisco, I attended an urban school that was about a third white and Asian, a third black, and a third Latino. At the start of the seventh or eighth grade, I don’t recall which, the school assigned an African American girl to share a P.E. locker with me. I was put out not because of who she was but because I had zero desire to share anything with anyone. But when my parents found out that the sharee was black, they charged down to the school and demanded that I be assigned a white lockermate. The principal, to his lasting credit, said “thank you very much” and ignored them.

Before long, the young girl stopped coming to school, so in effect I had our locker to myself. Two or three months later, she resurfaced, with a horrifying story. Her clothing had caught fire in a kitchen accident. In her terror, she ran through a glass sliding door before anyone could catch her. She had been in the hospital for weeks.

So it was brought home to me, forcefully, that this was not some sort of subhuman creature but another early-teen girl, just like me. A living, breathing, feeling, fragile human being.

Not until I was in my twenties did it cross my mind that my father’s fierce bigotry toward everyone not like him—a broad, inclusive bigotry that took in women and homosexuals as well as people of different races and nationalities—was rooted in fear. He feared the Other, and that fear, being unmanly in a time when men were men or else, manifested itself as hatred. He feared the Other more than he hated the Other. What I couldn’t figure out, didn’t understand for many, many years, was why? What was he so afraid of? What about a 13-year-old black girl is frightening?

A great deal of time passed.

Toward the end of his life, he admitted to something profoundly ironic: his grandmother was a Plains Indian. His mother, whom I never met, was half-Indian. His brother had made noises to this effect over the years, but my father vehemently denied it, said Ed was full of beans. This interesting revelation took on more poignancy when one day a young man rang his doorbell and said he’d noticed my father’s name on the front door. The visitor was working on the roof at the retirement home where my father and his current wife were living and, since the name was a little unusual, he worked up the nerve to introduce himself, because his last name was the same. He came from a whole tribe by that name. And he was a full-blooded Choctaw.

Well, helle’s belles. My father was outed. I have no idea what his father was or what he looked like (though my father was distinctly Indian in appearance, with high cheekbones and black hair that stayed dark until after he was 80). My grandfather ran off when my father was born and before long was found dead by the side of a road, an apparent suicide. But whatever the details, ultimately the truth was that he—my father—himself was the Other. What I do know is that the family was passing as white and that my father clung to that identity. He clung to it with some desperation.

But still I didn’t know why was he so afraid? Why was he possessed of such fear that it invaded his soul, curdled into hatred, and took up permanent residence in his heart and mind?

One’s children are slow on the uptake, no? It takes a long time to grasp a parent’s humanity. Sometimes it takes the odd intervention.

Yesterday I was editing a forthcoming book by novelist Donis Casey, Crying Blood, due out in February 2011 from Poisoned Pen Press, and very much enjoying it. The characters live in Texas during the 1910s, the time when my father was a boy. They arrived there from the same part of the Deep South that my father’s family came from, and they behave and sound much like my father’s family—though a bit more enlightened, given their author’s immersion in the culture of the twenty-first century. Casey has a real gift for character and voice: her people sound exactly like my father and uncle did.

Along about the end of the book, we learn that the protagonist, rancher Shaw Tucker, has a great deal of Indian in him, having come from a family “woven through with Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry from as early as anyone could remember.” His mother was the daughter of a full-blooded Cherokee woman.

But he was raised to be White. In fact, even though he was an enrolled tribal member, he was White enough in blood and looks and way of life that the U.S. Government never bothered him. No one had ever come to take his children away and put them in boarding school. No one had ever proscribed his movements or told him where he had to live, or how. Shaw Tucker was White and he viewed the world in the way of a White man.

Well, now. There’s something to be afraid of! Your children kidnapped and hauled off to boarding school, there to be assimilated into an alien culture. Your way of life extinguished and your people forcibly removed from their homelands. That would have been the experience of my father’s parents and grandparents.

Why did I never see this? It seems so obvious. He wasn’t afraid of all the people he’d taught himself to hate. He was afraid of what he wanted to be.

He wanted to be white, whiter than the whites who were his forefathers’ mortal enemies and exploiters. More precisely, he needed to be white, so that he could have a shot at decent jobs and the same kind of freedom the majority of Americans took as their born right. The contradiction must have twisted around and around inside him and finally come out as hate. Bizarrely metamorphosed hate.

§

The present discourse on immigration rings of my father’s language. I can hear his voice in every pejorative: “illegals,” “Mexicants,” “beaners,” and in every random news story that commenters turn into a racist tirade. The new N-word is “illegals,” and the new “greaser” is “Mexican.” It’s as dreary as it is disturbing.

So what are we, as Americans, afraid of? What terror inside the American soul writhes around and comes out as hatred? My Muslim students tell me of experiences when they personally have been the targets of hate and threats. Latinos and Indians, citizens of the United States of America, say they dread being stopped by the police, hassled, and made to show papers.

Whatever it is, we need to get over it. The current fear and loathing of the Other, to the point where citizens express distaste for small brown-skinned children, is dragging our polity and our people back to the 1950s, when it was OK to utter the N-word in polite company and grown men and women thought it made sense to raise hell when a white kid and a black kid were assigned to share a locker for 40 minutes a day.

We have met the Other, and he is us.

Image: Choctaw woman. Public domain.


The Fun of Thrift Stores

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The following is a guest post by Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. Her blog covers living expenses, saving for your future, and the fun stuff along the way.

I love shopping at Goodwill. I don’t shop for clothes often—once every year or so—but when I do, I go to Kohl’s, Dillard’s, and Goodwill.  Oh, and Shirt Woot, but that’s more for the humor than the shirts themselves.  🙂

Kohl’s has my favorite line of tops (Dana Blumenthal).  Dillard’s carries my favorite line of work slacks (Investments).  Goodwill is just for fun.

There’s just something about browsing rows and rows of clothing that I don’t have to feel guilty for wanting to buy.  I’ve only bought one t-shirt and four blouses over the past 3 years, but all of those are still my favorites and cost less than $25 altogether.  Two of the blouses make great work tops!

My first trip to those lovely aisles was with a friend about 3 years ago.  We had a ton of fun trying on 30 or 40 pieces each and coming out of the dressing area to get the thumbs up or down from each other.  It was also fun to think of the outfits we could easily put together for friends and family members that weren’t there—the tackier the better, lol.

I thought that Goodwill would have worn-out stuff that was all from before I was born, but I was pleasantly surprised.  Sure, there are some old styles, but there is also a lot of new stuff too.  Not all tops come with shoulder pads.  🙂

My favorite Goodwill blouse is easy to clean and fades from a tan to black from shoulder to stomach so it looks elegant and works great for a woman with a little fluff (like me).

For guys, the fashions don’t seem to change as much so there seems to be more general options.  My husband would be fine with almost any of it, but his wardrobe is complete for right now.

Have you ever shopped at Goodwill or a different thrift store? If you have, how did you like it?  If you haven’t, would you consider it?

The Green Beauty Guide

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If you like beauty products but are made nervous by applying products containing gunk like formaldehyde and 1,4-dioxane to your skin, you (or your lady friend, for those of the male persuasion) will be very interested in Julie Gabriel‘s comprehensive encyclopedia of DIY and commercially available nontoxic creams, perfumes, nostrums, and make-up. My friend KJG shared a copy the other day. It’s called simply The Green Beauty Guide.

This woman has compiled an incredible amount of research on synthetic, “natural,” and “organic” ingredients in make-up, body, hair, and aromatherapeutic products of all kinds. The book is largely free of the kind of gullible credulity that you find in much of this sort of thinking—Gabriel is not shy about cluing readers to the risks inherent to the many “green” products out there, just as she is frank about the industrial ingredients that render many drugstore and department-store products toxic.

I would add one caveat, though: Gabriel seems to be very fond of Bare Escentuals products. You should be aware that the line does contain bismuth oxychloride, as do most mineral powder make-ups. If you are at all sensitive to this chemical, it can cause severe redness, itching, and long-term irritation to your skin. Check the ingredients of all beauty products; just because they’re labeled “organic” or “natural” does not mean they’re free of potentially unpleasant ingredients.

The fun aspect of this book, though, is its wonderful collection of make-it-yourself beauty nostrums, from nail creams to acne nostrums. Did you know you can make your own self-tanning oil, right in your kitchen? You can whip up your own shampoo, conditioner, lip balm, face creams, depilatory wax, and even hair coloring. Lots and lots of things to experiment with here, some of them very simple to make!  Try, for example, this enhanced version of olive oil as cleanser, something Funny reported on some time back.

To two ounces of organic extra-virgin olive oil, add 1 ampoule of vitamin E and one drop of essential oil of chamomile. Shake well. You can dispense this from a pump bottle, where it will keep for a long time in a cool, dry place.

The other very positive aspect of this guide is that Gabriel names names. In discussing commercially made green products, she gives brand names and in many cases critiques products. She also tells you specifically what’s wrong with which conventional products, and she provides an appendix listing common ingredients in over-the-counter beauty products and cleansers explaining what those ingredients will do to you. Another appendix provides online resources for less-toxic beauty products.

You can have a lot of fun with the many recipes Gabriel provides for beauty nostrums of all varieties. Or, if you prefer to buy your products instead of making your own, her advice on which low-toxicity products to buy can help you feel more comfortable about what you put on your face, hair, and body.

Highly recommended!

Also check out these pages at FaM:

Olive Oil: The Ultimate Hair Conditioner
Olive Oil: The Miracle Skin Cleanser
Sunscreens: Be Scared, Be Very Scared
Frugal Cosmetics: Lemons for Your Beauty Routine
Lemon and Vinegar Highlight Your Hair

Tiny Places of My Past

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The following is a guest post by Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. Her blog covers living expenses, saving for your future, and the fun stuff along the way.

Nicole from Grumpy Rumblings of the Untenured left a comment asking if I had seen this post at a new blog, Step Away from the Mall.  It boiled down to a small rant about the fact that a couple looking for a $500,000 house in Texas could possibly complain about houses that were like mansions from the point of view of a guy that recently lived in a $1700 a month, 400 sq.ft. “apartment” in NYC.

Putting aside that the cost of living between NYC and Texas is amazingly different (and I assume the salaries are as well), his description of his 400 sq.ft. space brought back my memories of dorm living and right-out-of-college housing.

The smallest space I have personally lived in was a 10 ft by 12 ft dorm room that I shared with another girl in college.  We shared the tiny bathroom with the two girls in the adjoining room.  In short, I had a 5 ft by 12 ft space to myself—60 square feet.

You want to know the weirdest thing?  I LOVED IT!  I absolutely adored dorm room living.  I loved the fact that a bunk bed and an efficient use of storage could make me feel like an adult in her own digs.  I also loved the fact that I could poke my head out the door at any time—day or night—and find someone else to hang out with.  It was awesome.

Fast forward 3 1/2 years, and the smallest space that I ever shared with Mr. BFS was our first apartment out of college.  It was technically a one-bedroom 550 sq.ft. space that really felt more like an efficiency with an extra half wall.  The kitchen was too narrow to fit 2 people into at once and the only place to put the computer was next to the bed.  My favorite feature was a built-in book shelf next to the red brick fire place.

I loved the cozy feeling of that apartment too, but there were several times I came close to committing homicide while Mr. BFS played computer games 2 feet away from my head in the wee hours of the morning.

Fast forward another 2 1/2 years, and we own our own 1750 sq.ft. house.  I have no idea if I could live in such small spaces again and be as happy as I was those few years ago.  Hubby has his own gaming area and we have an adult bedroom with actual furniture and even a Tempurpedic (non-blow up) mattress.  I am spoiled to say the least but still have very fond memories of the tiny places of my past.

What are the most cramped quarters you remember?  Did you like them as much as I liked mine or do you think I’m nuts?

Oh, and Step Away from the Mall, you will hate this, but that 550 sq.ft. apartment we had in late 2004- mid 2006 was $399 a month.  😛  Feel free to join us low cost of living folks whenever you wish.  🙂

Friday Torpor

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Well, only ten more days to go in this month’s discretionary budget cycle, and I’m well on target, for the first time in months. Now that I’m finally getting paid, now I’m staying on budget! Every single month this summer I’ve gone over budget, with too little money coming in to cover base expenses even if I could have made budget. One little calamity after another racked up one big bill after another.

It looks like I’m going to be paid about $545/pay period, about $83 a month more than I expected. If I transfer $249 a month from the summer stipend (prorated over 16 weeks), then I’ll end up with about $185 a month more than needed to cover basic expenses.

As the weather cools, the amount of play will be more than that, since the air-conditioning and water bills drop steeply during the winter months.

That, btw, is without a drawdown from the 403(b). I cut the drawdown to a dollar a month by way of preserving capital. The state requires retirees to take something out, to remain eligible for the payout for unused retirement pay, which, thanks to our leaders’ infinite wisdom, is irrationally paid out over three years. I rolled most of the money in that account over to my big IRA, where it could be invested more intelligently, but had to leave enough to cover this year, 2011, and the first two months of 2012. The last RASL payment is due in February 2012; the instant that  hits my checking account, whatever remains in the 403(b) goes straight to the IRA.

I’d left enough to cover a $500/month drawdown, since no one at GDU, the State of Arizona, or Fidelity seemed to know what was the minimum drawdown one could take and still qualify as “retired” for RASL purposes. Late last spring, some guy at Fidelity finally revealed that you could take out as little as a dollar a month. Not having enough to live on over the summer, I kept the $500 ($383 net) coming through the summer but arranged for it to drop to a net 77 cents a month starting this month.

The stock market has been so volatile—and the fact that we’re in an economic depression so obvious—that I wanted to avoid pulling out money from investments whose value probably is near their nadir. This strategy will keep $6,000/year in that account, instead of having it come to me to be frittered away on living expenses.

Nevertheless… I’m thinking that next summer I’ll draw a chunk out of that fund to make life a little less precarious.

If I do get a summer course—or if I can find some other job—then I’ll take out enough to net about $2,000. That would allow me to run the air-conditioning enough to keep the house tolerably comfortable. I am tired, tired, tired of breaking a sweat by working my fingers on a computer keyboard! It might even provide enough, combined with whatever I’ve managed to economize over the nine-month academic year, for me to take a little vacation someplace cooler. If I don’t get a course, then I’ll need net $3225 to cover my living expenses from the end of May to mid-September: that’s a $3,970 drawdown. In that case, I won’t be living comfortably or taking any trips, but at least I’ll be able to get by.

At any rate, in theory I should be able to do OK without having to take much out of savings, as long as I’m teaching. I can improve on that theory significantly if, come next May when I reach so-called “full” retirement age (don’t you love it? at 65 you can be “fully” unemployed and unemployable, but you can’t be “fully” retired!), if next May I take my entire emergency fund and pay back the amount of SS the feds have doled out so far. This would jack up my Social Security payout to the amount it would have been had I managed to hang onto my job to age 66, a better pittance than the one I’m getting now. The amount would the more than the 4 percent drawdown one can supposedly take from investments, and so I think this would be a smart move.

It leaves nothing to buy a new car, however. The Dog Chariot won’t run forever, and so I’ll have to figure out a way to afford a replacement set of wheels sometime in the near future. Oh well…later. I’ll think about that later.

For the nonce, I’m in a daze—another 4:00 a.m. wake-up call, lhudly sing goddamn. Along about 6:00, stumbled into the kitchen to fix breakfast for me and the hound and was jolted awake by a sharp chomp on a toe: more Ondts! I think they’re coming in under the back door this time, but am not sure because I can’t find them outside. They may be entering through the woodwork. Sprayed the little gals with some more home-made window cleaner, mopped the floor, and am now waiting for the tile to dry so the dog and I can get some food.

One reader asked what’s in the window cleaner. I no longer measure, but just toss the stuff together by eyeball. It’s about half a spray bottle of rubbing alcohol, to which is added about 1/8 to 1/4 cup ammonia and a like amount of vinegar. Fill to the top with tap water, and voilà! A very fine grease-cutter, glass-cleaner, and ant-killer.

Sooo much work to do today…must get moving.