Coffee heat rising

Estate-saling in a tropical storm

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La Maya and a cousin of La Bethulia’s dropped by early this morning to pick me up on the way to an estate sale in the fancy part of a far-flung arm of the galaxy. The house was located in the elegant suburbs of far, far, far north Scottsdale.

Actually, it dwelt in a small patch of tract houses surrounded by large, expensive late-model houses on acre-plus lots. The tract itself consisted of modestly sized structures—maybe 1,600 to 2,000 square feet—on typical tiny tract lots, what we dinosaurs would call “patio homes” but today’s mammals think of as full-sized family houses. Its saving grace was that its tiny backyard looked out over a vast swath of undisturbed open space, giving it a view across only lightly raped Sonoran desert all the way to the mountains that ring the Valley. Very pretty. Maybe even pretty enough to justify the $600,000 asking price for three tiny bedrooms, a single living area dominated by a wall of ungainly niches built to house a hulking television and an array of large speakers, and not a single wall anywhere broad enough to hold a decent bookcase.

At any rate, the owner had a flair for decorating. We got there a little late to grab the nicest things, but we did see a nice array of lovely Asian pottery and ceramics, many beautiful clothes (once incredibly expensive but all, alas, in the smaller petite sizes), and some very nice artwork. But Gini, the sale proprietor, kept slipping new things onto the countertops as buyers cleared the merchandise, and so, stepping into the kitchen at just the right moment, I scored this nice old carving set:

The blades are carbon steel, a feature much coveted in the Aptosaurus family. M’hijito loves the carbon-steel knives I passed to him after SDXB nabbed them in a yard sale and gave them to me. Tho’ they’re softer than stainless and can’t be left to corrode in a puddle of water on the drainboard, they sharpen easily and take a beautiful edge.

See those little decorative collars at the top end of the handles? Those are marked “sterling.” There’s no maker’s mark on the blade or fork, but the sterling silver deco touch suggests they’re good pieces, like everything else the woman owned. I think the handles may be bone or possibly horn, not plastic. And the blade has been sharpened many times.* The pieces have a little corrosion, as if they were put away and forgotten at some point. I’ll bet the owner inherited it, or else acquired it early in her marriage and kept it all her adult life.

Meanwhile… The tail end of Hurricane Jimena has been drifting north across the Chihuahan and Sonoran deserts, and now it has ambled into the Valley. On the way home we passed through a sharp storm cell, the lightning copious and the rain ferocious. About the time we hit the freeway it really started to fire-hose. People were pulling off onto the shoulder, but La Maya managed to make it to an offramp several miles north of our neighborhood. This put us in the middle of an electrical storm. At one point a lightning bolt struck just a few yards from us. Its C-R-R-A-C-K and BOOM shook La Maya’s sturdy RAV-4 and all three of us yelped at once!

But we outran it a little south of Thunderbird, where the North Mountains blocked the blustery clouds’ passage long enough for us to run ahead of the rain and lightning until we reached our part of town. We were mighty glad to see the rain, and just as glad to get off the road and inside a building!

It caught up with us as I was running from the car to the front door. Just had time to power down and unplug the Mac (which I had stupidly left sleeping despite the encroaching storm) and heat some breakfast before the lightning threatened to fry the local power lines. Now the noise and heavy downpour have come and gone, and we have a lovely steady rain, temperatures in the balmiest of mid-seventies. Lovely!

Next week will be very busy. I’ve fallen behind in my plan to stockpile posts, and so today’s post is today’s post. But have many things to share and so will carve out as much time as I can find this weekend to write and schedule the next few days’ entries. If I miss a day or two, it’s not because I’ve forgotten you but because this fall’s expected flood of work is starting to rise.

* BTW, here’s an interesting article on sharpening fine blades, the most thorough explanation I’ve ever see this side of my Daddy’s workbench.

Storm image: FIR002, flagstaffotos.com.au Lightning strike, January 2007
Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
Please note that this image is not in the public domain and must be used and acknowledged accordingly.

On blogging and money

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One of my favorite sites is Problogger, a blog on blogging. Alas, I’m guilty of not visiting often enough: I rarely do subscriptions because there’s too little time to keep up with them all, and when it comes to proactively visiting various sites, I get distracted easily. No doubt, though, if a person read the thing every day and blogged every day and studied other blogs carefully, before long the person would become expert at the blogging game and even make some money at it.

This morning, feeling a bit annoyed at Google AdSense, I dropped over to Problogger to see if Proprietor Darren Rowse had any clues to improve one’s relationship with that outfit. And lo! Up popped this article by Todd Fratzl, holding forth on two basic ideas: 1) that you should experiment with ad size and placement, and 2) that with AdSense, less is more.

The first is fairly self-evident: since no two blogs are the same and no two sets of readers are identical, it makes sense that placement, color, and frequency would yield different results for every individual blog. In fact, given  the Internet’s fluid nature, it’s also reasonable to expect that blog readership will change as blog content evolves. So it’s probably a good idea not only to try different sizes and placements for your blog’s advertising, but to test new patterns at regular intervals—say, at least once a year.

Personally, I was far more taken by the less-is-more concept. Much as I’d like to see FaM make a few shekels, I wasn’t happy about having to mothball its original WordPress design (White as Milk, the most exquisitely minimalist design WordPress.com offered) in favor of a three-column theme that lends itself to ad clutter. The idea of having only one or two ad blocks appeals…and it appeals a lot if Todd is right, that more readers will click on a site’s advertising if fewer ads are offered.

I’m certainly not getting rich off Funny about Money. Nor did I expect to: from what I can see,  PF bloggers whose sites earn enough to let them quit their day jobs are very techie, work at it six to eight hours a day at least five days a week, and are strong marketers. None of those applies to moi. In theory, it’s making a little more than other part-time bloggers claim to earn: as a paying hobby, it’s OK.

In reality, though, it’s not paying anything. None of the on-paper revenues that AdSense shows the site has earned have ever been paid, and I’m beginning to suspect I’ll never see a cent of that money.

AdSense is extremely frustrating to deal with. It has exactly zero customer support. Literally: you can not reach a human being. The entire operation is designed to frustrate attempts to get answers to questions beyond the “frequently asked.” The only live people you can reach are equally frustrated fellow customers, who gather at forums whose e-conversations are so diffuse you could spend days trying to find someone addressing your issue and still not get an answer that pertains to your circumstances.

And then we have its bizarre payment policies. No money is disgorged until you reach a certain threshold (just now, $100). After your site has accrued that much, you then have to wait upwards of two months for payment. Thus, when FaM became eligible for a payment in June, the payment was not scheduled to arrive at my mailbox until the end of August.

“Mailbox” is the operative word: the direct deposit function doesn’t work. Because there’s no human responsible for addressing customer problems, there’s no way to find out what the problem is or how to get AdSense to deposit funds directly to your account. The forums? Full of other people bitching that the direct deposit function doesn’t work.

So the August check didn’t arrive. In that case, your only option is to ask that Google cancel the check it allegedly has issued and cut a new check. Do that, and you delay payment another entire month! So, the soonest I can expect to see money earned last June is sometime near the end of September.

It’s not a huge rip, but it is a rip. What it means is that AdSense is piggybacking free ad space on the blogger’s work. Effectively, I’ve been providing AdSense free space for the past three months, and will continue to do so for at least another month. Multiply that by the 87 gerjillion bloggers who publish ads, and you get a clue how much Google profits by taking advantage of customers who can’t get in the front gate because there is no gate-keeper. The longer AdSense delays paying its ad publishers and the more publishers it stiff-arms, the more interest Google earns on ad revenues!

How much is Funny earning in never-paid revenues? Not much! Just now it’s generating a modest amount each month (or would be, if I could ever get paid). It’s paid for the server space. Otherwise, you could say it earns enough to buy a bag or two of groceries each month.

Considering that I would probably blog anyway, the 30 cents an hour that AdSense revenue boils down to amounts to a spoonful of gravy. However, I could do without the hassle, and I could do without the frustration entailed in dealing with a megalithic corporation that sets up impermeable barricades between its employees and the unwashed customers. I’m beginning to feel that despite the passive nature of AdSense—after all, once you’ve accomplished the initial set-up you don’t have to do much to earn that 30 cents an hour—it’s probably not worth the page clutter.

It appears to me that advertising may be the least of the effective ways to monetize a blog. Probably creating a product, such as an e-book or (depending on your blog’s topic) some physical object that’s related to your blog’s content, will generate more profit. Trent Hamm, for example, is selling a book spun off The Simple Dollar plus four downloadable e-books, also spin-offs. He has to split his print book’s $7.95 retail price with the publisher and the middlemen, but every cent of the $2.00 downloads goes direct to his bank account. Since his readership is huge, he likely sells a fair number of those. Trent runs plenty of ads, too; but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he puts most of his effort into generating content and traffic.

Regular blogging by its nature generates a salable product: copy. If the site is focused on a specific topic—or even covers two or three topics regularly—the blogger should have no trouble coming up with at least one publishable book and a number of DIY e-books. But there again, it’s a matter of marketing: books don’t sell themselves any more than blogs do!

Postscript: Dave Taylor at Ask Dave Taylor provides an e-mail address for AdSense support and swears they respond promptly: adsense-support@google.com. In my experience, the answer bounced me right back to the page where the instructions didn’t work and no troubleshooting clue was anywhere to be found. Sending you straight back to reperform the function that doesn’t work without giving you some idea how to make it work is…well, circular is the kindest term I can think of.

BTW, if you haven’t come across Taylor’s site, you should pay a visit: he demystifies technopuzzlements and describes a lot of cool gadgetry.

Mexican water

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When I served up the recently invented bubbly lemonade to M’hijito, he observed that it’s a variety of Mexican water; and when I described the version I made with watermelon, he said that’s classic Mexican water.

So…what’s “Mexican water,” besides something you shouldn’t drink or brush your teeth with? It is in fact very similar to my concoction, except that it’s made with flat water instead of seltzer. Here’s a typical recipe for one made with watermelon:

You  need:

about 4 cups cut-up watermelon, seeds removed (I used seedless melon)
8 to 12 cups water
a blender
a large pitcher
about 1.5 cups sugar, or to taste

In batches, purée the watermelon in a blender. Add water and then stir in the sugar. Chill well and serve with a slice of lime or a mint garnish.

For the fizzy version I invented, I added no sugar. Instead I used one of those small, round melons, which are wonderfully sweet. This makes about two servings:

a cut-up slice of watermelon, seeds removed (I used seedless melon)
a can of seltzer water, chilled
a blender
a tall glass
ice

Purée melon in the blender. Pour enough into a glassful of ice to fill about 1/3 to 1/2 to the top. Top with cold seltzer or club soda.

M’hijito says you can make these with cantaloupe or strawberries. In that case, he suggests, run the purée through a strainer before adding water.  A squeeze of lime is an authentic Mexican touch, too.

Any of these drinks lend themselves to the addition of vodka or rum.

How bad public policy and other people’s foolishness cost you and me

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Am I the only so-o-o-cialist in the world who is annoyed at the way my homeowner’s insurance floats ever upward to cover the cost of homes that people deliberately build in harm’s way? Does anyone else wonder why local governments issue building permits in disaster-prone areas and why state and federal governments do nothing to discourage or prevent people from moving into areas where lives and property are put at risk? Is there really any justification for having you and me pay when houses built in the way of floods, tornadoes, and fires are reduced to piles of ash or sodden sludge?

In 2004, disaster-related economic costs in this country exceeded $145 billion, up from the $3.9 billion annual cost in the 1950s. The problem is not so much storms and fires allegedly related to global warming but the fact that too many people are building in risky areas. In Canada, where an expanding population is moving into forest fire-prone areas, citizens saw their homowner’s premiums rise 4.3 percent in 2001 over the previous year, a rise of 9.4 percent from 1997.

New Orleans was known to be at risk of disastrous hurricane damage for years before Katrina struck. Yet people were allowed to continue living and building in districts that scientists and government agencies recognized would flood—and flood catastrophically—when a major hurricane hit the city. Little was done to rebuild the eroded marshes and barrier islands that, before human intervention, protected the site where the city stands. Many parts of the coastal Southeast are prone to powerful storms and major flooding; the Midwest is notorious for its tornadoes, yet people are permitted to live in flimsy mobile homes throughout these regions.

And then we have California: what possesses humanity to build its homes in canyons whose ecology is evolved to thrive in brushfire?

Yes. Chaparral actually needs fire to germinate. Nature has designed plants that grow along the West Coast to function like torches. They’re bombs waiting to explode. This is something that has been widely known for years. But how do we respond? We let people build deep in a fire zone, and then we underwrite their short-sightedness.

When an insurer pays to rebuild a house incinerated in one of these fires, the  operative word is we. The insurance company raises everyone’s rates to help cover its losses. This year the losses in California are likely to be huge. Topanga Canyon alone houses over 5,400 people. It is an area of extreme fire hazard and today is among many populated areas in the path of the vast wildfire presently consuming a large swath of Southern California, where more than 12,000 homes are at risk.

Why should firefighters lose their lives and every homeowner in the country see their insurance costs soar because foolish people insist on living in the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains, areas where wildfires and mudslides are part of the local environment’s natural cycle? Instead of relying on insurance companies to cover untoward and foolish risk and then screaming when the companies refuse to insure homes in disaster-prone regions—or raise premiums out of sight—we should be passing laws that prohibit people from deliberately building  structures whose likely destruction will hit everyone’s pocketbooks.

Now, I yearn to get out of the city’s anthill as much as anyone else, and if I had enough money to build a manse in the Santa Monica hills, I’d be sorely tempted. But maybe if people who crave and can afford a pleasant, quiet environment were forced to stay in the city with the rest of us peons, we’d all have more livable cities! If, instead of running away from poorly planned, blight-ridden urban areas, wealthy homeowners lived in their cities, the money and political influence they would bring to the urb would fuel renovation, improvement, effective crime control, enforcement of noise abatement laws, better schools, walkable shopping districts, decent public transport, and green space.

And the rest of us would have lower homeowner’s insurance premiums.

Image: David S. Roberts, The Harris Fire on Mt. San Miguel
One homeowner died in this fire; his teenaged son suffered burns, as did four firefighters who attempted to rescue them. Four migrant workers also are thought to have died in the Harris fire. Nine hundred thousand people were evacuated, and a power emergency was declared after several major transmission lines, including the 500,000-volt power line from Arizona to San Diego, were damaged.

Ecologically friendly give-away contest

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Simply Forties, now comfortably ensconced in Virginia, is celebrating her blogiversary with a very nice giveaway prize: EcoSmart’s essential oil-based insect-fighting products that are billed as 100 percent nontoxic to humans. Visit and comment on her site this week, or tweet about it, for a chance to win a package of these intriguing products, just what I need in the current Ant Wars.

While you’re there, be sure to check out the rest of the blog. The latest Make It from Scratch Carnival went up today (more about which later this week), with lovely pictures of the area where she recently moved. And I was especially taken by the story of a cabin a friend built from a Home Depot kit: the result is a hunting or vacation camp with real charm. The frugal empty-nester can see grand possibilities here.

How to deal with ants

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They’re b-a-a-a-a-c-k! The little myrmidons who think my yard is their empire are moving in on the house again. I had a little frenzy the time they got into the kitchen, where they evinced great joy at their discovery of the dishwasher, a rich new world heretofore unknown to the Ant Queendom. And then, after an hour of frantic activity, was a bit ashamed of myself for having sprayed them in a panic.

Yuck! How unecological. How self-destructive. How…messy!

After all, I do know better. When I first moved into this house, the backyard was overrun with ants…never saw so many biting ants in my life! About that time I realized I’d purchased the House from Hell, and the previous owner was Satan. The ants, it appeared, had burrowed all the way down to Satan’s throne.

Gila woodpecker

I really dislike bug spray—have had it make me very sick, indeed—and I will not have an exterminator on the property. (Not willingly, anyway.) Ant baits are pretty effective, but at the time I had two big dogs and didn’t relish leaving poison on the ground where they might get at it.

A little research, however, revealed that many birds, even seed-eaters, will eat ants. Matter of fact, a few local characters eat a lot of ants: the flicker, its relative the Gila woodpecker, the curve-billed thrasher, starlings, sparrows, grackles, Abert’s towhees, possibly mockingbirds. So, at that time I called in as many birds as I could by hanging bird feeders from the eaves and from a branch of the neighbor’s tree that overhung my side of the wall. This worked well. Within a couple of months, the ant population was under control.

Understand: I’m not interested in killing off all the ants. They serve many useful purposes, and besides, they’re interesting creatures. I just don’t want them to make themselves at home in the house. Or around the patios where I like to sit.

Abert's towhee

Lately, I’ve noticed it’s been unnaturally quiet in the mornings and evenings. At dawn, normally, the neighborhood is all a-chatter with birdsong. In the desert, a city with its lawns, trees, and shrubbery forms a kind of riparian area, and so we have a lot of birds. This summer’s extreme heat and droughty conditions, though, may have killed them or driven them to shelter. The heat really has been outrageous this year: we’re two days short of September and it’s still 114 degrees. Plus the ash tree in front has finally, once and for all, died. That removed a lot of shaded shelter, so they may have just moved on down the block. Still: weirdly silent. As in “no birds.”

Then a week or so ago, I’m sitting on the deck and yipe! My feet are getting chewed! The place was overrun with ants! Looking for nothing in particular, as far as I could tell: just foraging around. They were coming from a mound next to a lavender plant which, incidentally, they seem to have undermined and killed. I put down some baits, and, to keep the dog out, laid an old wire fan cage over them.

Red-shafted flickers

The dog and I decamped to the back porch for breakfast. I’d carried a dish of dog chews outside, so I could bribe her to leave me in peace to read the paper. Forgot to bring that in. That evening when I went out to retrieve it, lo! A blanket of ants was swarming over the doggy chews and all over the glass-topped table, carrying off the dog treats an ant-bite at a time!

Argh! In that encounter, a few of the little gals made their way into the house. I beat them back with dish detergent, eventually carrying the day.

But, it was clear, only a day. Time to mobilize the troops.

My neighbor next door—she of the overhanging tree limb—dislikes birds. Hates them. That could be another explanation for their absence, come to think of it. She threw a hissy-fit when she discovered Other Daughter, who’s next-door to her on the far side, was feeding the doves and thereby calling in a passel of grackles…which, it must be admitted, are messier than your average airborne elephant. As you can imagine, then, I need to be careful here.

This afternoon I bought some fresh bird feed, the old stuff having run out a couple years ago, and hung up the two feeders. If you enjoy using your patio to eat outside or just to sit and enjoy the fresh air, you don’t want to call birds in too close to the house. They can make quite a mess, not being amenable to toilet-training. So I placed one feeder in an orange tree, out of the neighbor’s line of sight, and one on an eave away from the patio and the deck, the same location where it hung the first time around.

There are other nonchemical, relatively nontoxic ways to engage battle with ants. Boric acid, available at drugstores and sometimes at Target, is more or less benign, unless you’re a cat and given to licking your paws. Sprinkle a line of it around the foundation of your house and across each threshold. It’s like fine cut glass to ants—slices up their exoskeleton, eventually causing them to dehydrate and die. Because it doesn’t kill them quickly, they’ll carry it back to the hive on their bodies, spreading it around among their sisters and, with any luck, getting some of it on the queen. Takes a while, but eventually it will get rid of them.

Some people claim you can “erase” the scent trails they follow (ants lay down pheromones to communicate where the food is) with 409 or similar strong household cleaners. I have never found that to be true.

Some say you can kill a hive by pouring boiling water over it. Ditto: never found it to work. Doesn’t do any plants around the nest much good, though.

Ant traps are almost as effective against the little ladies as roach traps are against roaches, which is to say very effective. You have to be sure they’re out of reach of pets and children though. And they do kill all the ants, which might not be the wisest thing to do.

No. Birds are your friends here. Bring enough of them into your yard and they’ll take care of the ants for you. They’ll make short work of field roaches, crickets, and other annoyances, too. A plastic bird feeder (available cheap at Home Depot; I got one of mine even cheaper at a yard sale) or even a planter dish full of bird seed will do the job. Remember to refill the feeder(s) every day or two, to keep them coming back. If you don’t have room to store birdseed, bread crumbs work just as well: save heels of bread, break them up into coarse crumbs, and scatter them around some distance from porches and patios. Then sit back, enjoy the show, and say good-bye to the bugs.

Curved-bill thrasher