Coffee heat rising

Trees

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How does the Devil-Pod Tree add work to my life? Let me count the hours…

The late great shamal made a fine mess of the pool. Yesterday I spent several hours shoveling out leaves, pods, pollen, and dirt, another hour running to the pool store and dropping $30 on shock treatment and a new skimmer basket (the old one having cracked under the weight of all the gunk it collected!), more time applying said chemicals. Tomorrow I’ll have to backwash and recharge the filter, now that the dirt, dust, and pollen have lodged themselves in the filter.

Ah, yes, the Devil-Pod Tree, named in honor of the house’s feckless previous owner, Satan.

Satan and his fabled wife Proserpine betook themselves to Moon Valley Nursery, the used-car lot of the arborist bidness, where they succumbed to that worthy organization’s time-honored move-it-off-the-lot package: six trees at a stupidly low per-tree cost. Or so it seems. “Stupid” is the term best suited, however, to the buyer. Five of the six trees were totally unsuited for the places where S & P wanted to plant them. A ten-minute Google search would have revealed this, had our happy homeowners been gifted with the faintest intellectual curiosity.

Moon Valley fibbed baroquely to Satan and Proserpine; either that, or those two lied hilariously to me. Whatever. Doesn’t matter. The result was the same: someone (read “moi”) had to get rid of the junk shrubbery.

A few months before they put their house on the market, Satan and the lovely Proserpine purchased two young sissoo trees. They believed, or said they believed, that these monsters would never grow much larger than the ten feet or so to which they had aspired by the time I came on the scene.

Sissoo trees can reach 60 feet in height. The canopy grows to 40 feet in diameter. It is a thirsty plant, requiring weekly deep-watering. Its roots will lift sidewalks and heave foundations. It propagates by root suckers. Satan and Proserpine, apparently believing the fiction that these were modest little things, planted two of them side-by-side in the front yard.

Good move. Better move: I had these pulled out when I relandscaped the front yard.

Then they had Moon Valley’s barely paid crew plant an exotic pine tree, which they believed to be petite and noninvasive, directly next to the eastside wall. Another good move: this thing rises to a good 40 or 50 feet and gets far too large to fit into the space between the house’s east wall and the public sidewalk. I had that critter removed, too. Replaced it with a Texas ebony. It bites, but it doesn’t heave the foundation.

Then they planted two willow acacias, an unbeautiful import from Australia described by the most recent arborist to visit the property as “not recommended.” This is the plant that has richly earned the name “Devil-Pod Tree.” Satan calculated the direction and velocity of the Sonoran desert’s prevailing monsoon gales and then planted one of the damned things directly upwind of the pool.

The Devil-Pod Tree drops seeds that deposit yellow stains on the pool’s plaster. Its long, strappy leaves clog the pool cleaner. And its UNHOLY yellow fuzzballs fly into the pool, where they demonstrate that they are heavier than water by sinking to the bottom, there to be lapped up by Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner, who straightaway delivers them to the pump pot.

Dare to try to collect them in the water-driven hose bonnet, and you shiver them apart into zillions of tiny pieces, which explode into the water like dust in the air only to settle back on the bottom in multizillions of tiny particles. Either way, when these things are sucked into the skimmer basket and the pump strainer, they clog the system with a vengeance. Let them get through those two barriers, and they fill up the filter medium, presenting the homeowner with the immediate pleasure of a backwash job.

It is, in short, a nasty tree.

Satan and Proserpine planted two of them, one next to the pool and the other over on the west side, where it could threaten to crash down on the house whenever a stiff breeze comes out of the setting sun. These trees are as brittle as eucalyptus, and every bit as capable of shedding large, roof-shattering chunks.

The tree that has grown by the pool is actually not unaesthetic, as willow acacias go. It’s relatively shapely and it casts some nice shade on the patio. None on the house, alas, but some on the concrete. That’s not bad, because a slab of concrete accentuates the effect of a 115-degree day by radiating heat into the adjacent foundation and onto the wall of your house, jacking up your air-conditioning bills commensurately.

Nevertheless. Every time I have to spend upwards of an hour cleaning its mess out of the pool, I think it needs to go.

Then there are the damnable palm trees.

What on earth possesses people to plant palm trees????  What is the appeal to these hideous, filthy, roach-ridden, termite-attracting sticks? They are the filthiest goddamn things! And they require annual trimming, to the tune of $50 to $100 apiece, depending on whether you can find an undocumented immigrant to do the job or whether you’re forced to hire a recently released American ex-convict.

These little gems drop rock-like seeds into the pool, there to break your pool cleaner. This happens after they have released several million sharp-edged nasty little flower things to clog the filter. The tree trimming guys hack this stuff off in the late spring, along with enough of the canopy to totally eradicate what little shade the ghastly things might have cast over your pool and yard. Soon enough, they shoot up some more flowering rods, which drop some more razor-edged blossoms and rock-like seeds into the pool. In the course of trimming off fronds, the tree guys leave behind large, shield-shaped attachments, which sit on the trunk and dry up. Comes the next stiff breeze, these huge, dirty, thorned nuisances blow off and alight in your pool and all over the street. You as the homeowner get to pick up all this filthy debris.

Cockroaches adore palm trees. If you have a palm tree or two, you will have roaches. That’s why you’ll observe handsome and active Gila woodpeckers working the trunks and canopies: they’re gorging themselves on fat little snacks.

Desert termites like palm trees, too. Late in the summer these charming creatures swarm, much like their cousins the ants. They build mud nests on the sides of these palm trees, temporary homes where they reside while deciding which human shack to settle into.

The various previous owners of the House from Hell have planted not one, not two, not three, but FIVE palm trees around that pool.

So. What we have here are six exceptionally messy trees discharging trash into the already plenty workful pool.

My desire, if not my plan (only because I can’t afford my desire), is to uproot all six of them. Replace the hated acacia with an emerald paloverde, itself a moderately messy creature but as nothing compared with the incumbent. The two palm trees might be replaced by a Swan Hill olive, if there’s a way to determine how aggressive its roots are around an underground pool.

All trees, of course, drop one thing or another, and usually several things. But palm trees as poolside foliage are a mystification. And the willow acacia: nonstop horror show!

Removing them? $$$$$$$

Weather!

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Quite a little freshet blew through last night. Apparently it started around 11:30—that’s when my power went out—and carried on into the wee hours. Cassie woke me at one in the morning, barking at the distant thunder and fretting to go out. The wind was blowing so hard it made a weird, symphonic noise: like an orchestra of kazoos.

Almost 300,000 utility customers lost power. Mine came back on around 8:30 this morning. By then, the refrigerator’s interior appeared to be at about room temperature: around 62 degrees. I haven’t dared to open the freezer, but I expect it will be OK, even though, being a cheapie, it’s not well insulated.

This minor episode brought one issue sharply to my attention: I am not prepared for a serious emergency lasting any length of time.

I couldn’t even make a cup of coffee this morning: without power, I can’t grind coffee beans. (OK, OK: I do have a molcajete and yes, yes, I could have ground the darn things by hand. I’d have to be driven to greater depths of desperation to do that, thank you.)

Without a propane grill—I dumped mine in favor of a much nicer charcoal grill—I would be in trouble if the gas went out along with the electric power.

My gas stove will operate during a power outage, but it’s not happy, and the manufacturer inveighs against it. Modern gas ranges have electric igniters, so when the power’s out you have to light the gas with a match or butane lighter. Problem is, the burners want to flicker out; in the absence of a pilot light (which is what used to light gas burners and keep them lit), you risk asphyxiating yourself. Or blowing up the kitchen. You have to stand there next to the stove all the time the burner is going and keep a close eye on it.

I do have water stored, but I forget to empty it over the plants once a month, wash out the carboys, and refill them. Must get my act together there.

And I think it would be a good idea to pick up a camp stove and a couple bottles of propane. Actually, I think one of those stoves will run off a barbecue-sized propane canister, two of which I happen to own. Probably all I need is the stove and a canister refill.

The other thing I don’t have is a cooler. I need to pick up one of those, so I can carry dry ice to stock the freezer during an extended outage.  They’re cheap and can be had readily at yard sales.

There’s food enough in the house to last a month or so. The issue is cooking it. And, in the case of frozen and refrigerated items, storing it.

Really, there’s no excuse not to be prepared. Here’s what I see as the bare minimum to have around the house:

• Blankets
• Toilet paper
• First-aid kit
• Analgesics, antihistamine tablets, and any prescriptions you need
• Five to ten gallons of clean water
• Propane
• Propane stove or grill with side burner
• Candles
• Camping lantern
• Flashlights and batteries
• Battery-operated radio
• Cell phone, BlackBerry, or land-line phone that is not wireless
• Supply of food, enough to last from a week to a month
• Possibly a five-gallon can of gasoline

Got any other thoughts? What else might one have around the house, just in case?

Update:

In just a couple of days, a slew of ideas have come in, over the transom and through the “Comments” on this post. Here’s a summary:

• A hand-cranked radio may be more reliable than a battery-operated one. At the very least, have more than one radio that will operate on something other than AC. And keep a good supply of fresh batteries.

• Cash stash. The Katrina disaster proved that cash speaks louder than bank cards or checks. When power goes down and stays down, computerized cash registers quit working. Unable to process bank transactions, many merchants will accept cash when nothing else works.

• Barterable goods may come in handy in a crisis that lasts for a lengthy time. Cigarettes, alcohol, and (yes, I’m going to say it!) grass can be traded for food, clothing, bandages, medications, and other necessaries. Also useful: sanitary napkins and tampons, candy, jewelry.

• Water purifer and sanitizer. Check camping stores for devices and chemicals designed to disinfect suspect water. Among these are the SteriPEN, iodine tablets or liquid, and chlorine tablets. Remember that water filters do not kill pathogens.

• More than a few gallons of clean water may be needed. Adults may need as much as three gallons of drinking water a day.

• Remember that a water heater holds 20 to 60 gallons of potable water. Swimming pool and decorative fountain or pond water, while not drinkable without purification, can be used for washing and bathing. Dishes can be washed in ocean, river, or lake water, with plenty of detergent. Rinse in boiling water.

• Watch yard sales to collect a stash of candles. Tea lights as well as tapers and pillar candles are good to have on hand. I personally find that tapers put out more light than other types of candles.

• Propane camp lanterns or oil lamps are also good to have on hand. Use devices that are sources of combustion outdoors.

• Build a stash of matches as well as butane lighters. Keep your matches dry inside Ziploc bags.

• All these supplies should be kept in a dry, safe place, out of childrens’ reach.

• Some readers have questioned the safety of using a propane stove indoors. City codes require an effective venting system over a gas stove for a reason! That reason is called “carbon monoxide,” an odorless, toxic gas that is a byproduct of burning. If you’re forced to use a propane stove inside because of weather conditions, place it near or on your stovetop and turn on the vent. If you have no power, use it near an open window or place it in the cold firebox of your fireplace with the flue open, and don’t use it for any length of time. It is best to use these devices outdoors.

Computers

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I need to buy a laptop to replace the aging Dell that will have to go back to GDU in the next couple of weeks. I hardly use the Dell anymore, not because I wouldn’t prefer to sit in a comfortable chair or out on the patio, but because it’s a nuisance to operate, and because it doesn’t readily connect with my router.

The one good thing I can say about Qworst is that their online connection was wireless and so I could use the laptop anywhere on the property. My Cox DSL connection comes into the house by cable. M’hijito attached a router so we could set up AirPort and also, putatively, so I could get online with the Dell. But the Dell won’t talk with the router unless it’s in the same room with the thing, and so it’s quite a hassle to get that machine online. And since I live online, that’s why I quit using the Dell.

I’ve been thinking about replacing it with a MacBook.

Before you faint dead away: even though it’s expensive, I can get a pretty good deal with my educator’s discount, bringing the price down significantly. And I can get a new Office for Mac at the GDU bookstore for just $85, which I can use not only  to upgrade the iMac but also to load into the proposed MacBook.

There’s way more cash in savings than I need to survive on, and some of that is in the S-corporation. Indeed, even after the S-corp pays my wages, it still has more than enough to buy a MacBook. That allows me to pay for the thing with tax-free money. Because FaM alone will earn more than the cost of the computer next year (not counting whatever freelance schemes come my way), it’s quite reasonable to run the purchase through the corporation.

The iMac is getting old, as computers go (yeah! more than 18 months!). If it craps out, I’ll need another Mac to run my Quicken, since you apparently can’t convert Quicken for Mac QDFM files to something readable on a PC. When the iMac dies, the MacBook can take its place.

These, I think, are reasonable excuses for buying a Mac over an cheap PC, which is likely to crap out long before even the aging iMac goes.

Then there’s the sheer pleasure of using a Mac. Except for the lack of keyboard commands in Word (actually, they are there: they’re just different and I haven’t gotten around to memorizing them), I’ve come to much prefer using the Macintosh over either of GDU’s PCs.

• In the first place, MS Windows is such bloatware. God, it’s full of trash. And I don’t like the new version of Office, which has eliminated the clues to keyboard commands and tries to funnel you toward endless pointing and clicking and forces you to try to figure out how to work it by interpreting pictures. And the damn antivirus stuff is a constant, unending pain in the tuchus. So are the similarly constant, unending updates and patches. Every time I turn around, the laptop is sending me a message than in XX seconds it’s going to shut down everything I’m working on and reboot, so as to install yet another update. The campus laptop nags constantly for updates, too, but at least it doesn’t shut you down in mid-project.

• The Mac is elegant, clean, and relatively virus-proof. Yes, I do know hackers have Apple in their crosshairs. But though that’s been true for several years, they still haven’t made much headway. The constant virus and malware attacks on Microsoft programs make using a PC a real hassle.

• I’ve never had one single compatibility problem with reading Microsoft programs on the Mac. That is not true with the PC. “Old” (heh!) MS Office versions will not read the infuriating new .docx files generated by the current version of Word. This clearly is a device to force Microsoft users to spend wads of cash for unnecessary upgrades to their software. Well, the Mac will open a .docx file in TextEdit and save it as an .rtf file or as a .doc file, with all the formatting intact. If I hadn’t had a Mac, I would have had to upgrade to expensive new software when the new Office came out.

• True, I didn’t like being forced to upgrade to Leopard or whatever cat the current operating system is called. But that flap forced me to move FaM off iLife onto WordPress, a far superior program, and since FaM has migrated to BlueHost, it’s more than paid for the software upgrade. At least when Apple drags you into the 21st century, you get something worth being dragged for.

• What’s more, Apple has actual, real live customer support, with “Geniuses” who know what they’re doing.

So it goes. This morning I’m going to make an unplanned trip out to GDU, where the bookstore is selling Office for the Mac for an incredible $85, a nice markdown on the $150 the Apple store sells it for.  Wednesday I have an appointment to buy a MacBook, which provides a couple days to think about it.

Sleep!

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A miracle! The three a.m. wake-up call has stopped. The day after finishing my last real task for the Great Desert University, I fell into bed at 8:30 and slept all the way through to 7:00 a.m.: ten and a half glorious hours! Most amazingly, without interruption.

Next night, I slept from 9:30 til around 6:30, nine incredible hours, also without waking up.

Last night I didn’t get to bed until around 11:00 p.m. but slept seven hours, again without the mental alarm going off in the wee hours.

It’s been so long since I’ve slept all the way through the night, I truly can’t remember the last uninterrupted stretch of sleep. Seven hours is a long night’s sleep for me—but it’s normally cobbled together, a few hours before 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. and a couple of hours after 4:00 a.m.

Getting quit of GDU is doing it, I suspect. That and feeling fairly confident that I can get by in penury next year. Next year, at least: there’s enough to live on through 2010, and that will provide a full year to figure out what to do next.

SDXB, a man renowned for the soundness of his sleeping habits, remarked yesterday that he woke up at 3:00 a.m. just as though an alarm clock went off, and after that he was up for the duration. As it develops, last week Child Protective Services removed all four of his daughter’s children from her home, lodging one of them with her ex-husband (on condition of 24-hour supervision: the kid is in his home, but the father’s not allowed to be alone with him) and disappearing the other three. No one knows where the other three kids are, whether they are together, whether they’re in foster homes, group homes, or an institution, or what the state intends to do about them.

I observed that this would explain the insomnia. He insisted that worrying wasn’t what was keeping him awake. He says he’s washed his hands of the daughter’s problems, experience having proven there’s not a thing he can do about them.

Uh huh.

Pretty clearly, what wakes you up in the middle of the night is stress. Even if you don’t actually pop into consciousness with your brain spinning on the issue at hand, before long you certainly are turning it obsessively in your mind. I often would wake up unaware of thinking about GDU or money or the ailing dogs any of the other various little headaches that have haunted my dreams over the past few years. At a certain hour, I would just awaken, as though it were dawn and time to get up. Occasionally, though, I actually would wake up in a cold sweat, with the angst du jour right there in the front of my consciousness.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, evidently even when you think you have the stress under control, it doesn’t go away.

I’ve been yawning all morning. Expect to get another solid night’s sleep this evening. It looks like the body is going to try to catch up with all the sleep it’s lost over the past few years.

The God of Dreams, from Hans Christian Andersen
The God of Dreams, from Hans Christian Andersen

Sons

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What a marvelous thing a young man is, and so much the more marvelous if he’s your son. Not that a daughter isn’t a marvelous creature, too; only that when all you have is a son, he is indeed extraordinary.

Shortly after I hit the “send” button throwing open the gate to my escape from the Great Desert University, M’hijito happened to call on the phone. It was 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. I was just sitting here in front of the computer, stunned and unable to move. To my great delight, he asked if I would like to come down to his place for dinner!

Hallelujah.

When I got to his place, the air was fragrant with the scent of frying onions. The lights were on, the heat was running, the house was warm, wonderful music was playing, wine was poured.

My god, can that kid cook!

Not only that, but he can repair plumbing. In the course of his culinary exertions, the garbage disposal blocked and both sinks backed up. In moments he had the trap under the sink apart, drained, fixed, and back together. Voilà! Problem solved.

Back to the stove: He made this incredible mirepoix, in which (once it was cooked down) he broiled pieces of steak and lamb. The result was a deep brown sauce, so flavorful: sweet from the onions, rich with carrot, celery, mushroom, wine…unbelievable. As if this were not enough, he braised some brussels sprouts he had bought fresh, then blanched and frozen. And he served up a magnificent salad. And lots of good red wine.

Defies belief.

M’hijito’s Steak Mirepoix

You need:

• a good, heavy, oven-proof frying pan
• olive oil
• wine
• one onion
• a carrot
• a stick of celery
• a half-dozen cremini (or other) mushrooms
• about 1/2 glass wine
• salt & pepper
• a couple of pieces of beef filet, or a couple of lamb chops, or both

Coarsely chop the onion, carrot, and celery. Slice the ‘shrooms. Skim the bottom of he pan with olive oil. Place the onions, carrots, and celery in this and cook over moderately fast heat until the onions are well softened. Regulate the heat and stir frequently, so that the vegetables don’t scorch. As the onions are getting pretty well softened, add the sliced mushrooms. Stir, continue to cook until the veggies are golden and well cooked. In this last stage, add a little wine, stirring well to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Fire up the broiler. Preheat it well. Season the meat with salt and pepper.

Place the steak or lamb in the pan amid the cooked veggies. Run it under the broiler. When the top side is seared, flip the meat over and sear the other side. Cook to taste, preferably rare.

Serve the meat with the cooked-down mirepois spread over it as sauce.

Ambrosia!

Gone!

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The coop is flown!

I’m free.

Yes.

I quit. I’m gone. Out the door, never to return. A bird that has flown the coop.

Last night, after I finally finished the latest iteration of the Index from the Black Lagoon, I mailed the damn thing off with an e-mail to our client editor letting him know I’m taking my 350 unused vacation hours, starting TODAY. That will carry me through to the end of the month, all the way to Canning Day.

And what a fine send-off that was! It was the worst episode of overwork I’ve been through since the days of La Morona, a.k.a. My Bartleby. Truly. I’ve been working from 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning deep into the evening, literally until I could not work any more, every day for the past four or five days. Those are eighteen-hour days. Most of that time was spent writing an index—truly a brain-numbing job—and undoing a screw-up of Herculean proportions in (naturally!) an essay that is long enough to stand as a monograph in its own right.

Yes, on top of the screwed-up index that had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, someone took it into his or her mind to set acres of direct quotation in italic. Why? Because it’s in Latin. We italicize foreign languages. Don’t we?

Well, no. Not always. Not in this case.

The flicking article occupies 148 typeset pages.

When our client editor saw the page proofs, he realized something looked odd but didn’t realize the author had it right in the first place: set roman. His response was to ask that we remove all the quotation marks.

After I had gone through 148 pages marking hundreds of deletions, I realized that couldn’t possibly be right: the guy was indicating direct quotes from primary sources. Belatedly, I drag out Chicago and find all that Latin material should have been set in roman type. That’s when, ever so much more belatedly, it occurs to  me to check the original MS, where I found that Author had it right, and someone on our end—probably the new editor in the sponsor’s office—changed it.

So now I had to go back through the 148 brain-boggling pages, STET all the quotes, and mark all the italic roman.

You can imagine how pleased our graphic designer was when I showed up at his door and dumped this mess on his desk. Ours was the third fiasco to enter his life that morning, and I presented myself at around 9:30. He grabbed the great wad of paper, waved it in the air, and demanded to know “Whose idea is it to publish a book as an article???!??”

Not  mine, of that you can be sure.

From there it was on to the index, 33 endless pages of entries and subentries parsing the most arcane subject matter you can imagine.

I really don’t enjoy indexing. This particular annual is difficult to index, because it not only is arcane, it’s dense. Every page has three or four entries, at least. By the time we reach the indexing stage, I’ve read the copy, which can be excruciatingly detailed, several times. And I Do. Not. Want. To. Read. It. Again. So I have to force myself to do this job, which under the best of circumstances takes about five to seven days.

Stupefied with short-termer’s syndrome, I plotted to foist about half the job onto my R.A. The book consists of discrete articles, and so I gave her several that did not overlap (so I thought) with the ones I kept for myself to work on. She wrote her entries; I wrote mine; then I merged the files.

Bad mistake.

First, the two chunks of copy in fact did have some overlapping content. In some cases, we described that content in different terms, so a subject was indexed in two places under two descriptive headings. And second, this young Ph.D. knows next to nothing about Renaissance and medieval history. This makes it difficult to recognize the names of major figures. Or, for that matter, some of the currents of thought and controversy that were BFDs then, but are lost and long forgotten today.

And finally, the aging editor forgets that young people conceive and map out research strategies differently from the way those of us who came up with hard copy do. They think in Boolean terms. A search is something that you do in Google or in a library database, not in an index or a drawer full of index cards. While there are some similarities, there are also some fundamental differences. And those differences are HUGE. The result: an index designed by a younger mind looks different and is different from one built by a survivor of the Cretaceous.

Ultimately, the only help for it was to throw out everything the kid did and start over. Basically, I ended up doing all the work I should’ve done in the first place, and then some. Quite a lot of some.

When I finally hit “Send” about 7:30 last night and realized it was the last thing I’ll ever have to do for GDU, it felt like a loud shrieking squeal had suddenly stopped.

You know how it feels when a migraine ends? Your head doesn’t hurt any more, but there’s a kind of residual echo of the pain? Like that.

My office is empty. Sometime between now and the 31st, I’ll have to go back to campus to return the College’s laptop and turn in the keys. Probably there’ll be one more frustrating runaround with HR. And that is it.

I hope never to have to set foot on the campus of the Great Desert University again.

Image:

Toby Hudson, Domestic Rock Pigeons in Flight, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0