Coffee heat rising

Shamelessly using Roundup, and other ungreen confessions

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Milk thistle
Milk thistle

With delight I rose to the bait when My Small Homestead posted a link to This Garden Is Illegal’s list of seven DIY weedkillers. What I wouldn’t give to have something cheap and handy to beat back the predator vegetables that infest the yard and gardens, especially during rainy season, when they keep me awake all night chorusing “Feed Me, Seymour”!

Alas, though, I’ve tried all of Illegal’s seven nostrums, and not a one of them does any good. One, boiling water, even stimulates milkweed to grow more vigorously! 

Your choices are to spend several hours once or twice a week on hands and knees digging weeds up by the roots (not very practical when you have a job, or when it’s 115 degrees in the shade) or…yes. I’m afraid so: Roundup! That’s glyphosate to the chemists among us.

Some folks think Roundup is evil, and one guy claims it killed his dog, but a little googling suggests that conclusion may be unlikely. If you believe the science, the stuff degrades on contact with the soil, although there is some evidence it doesn’t all go away. It’s bad for aquatic life and should be kept out of pools, ponds, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Of the commercial herbicides, it’s evidently less toxic than most, although you wouldn’t want to mix it in your evening cocktail. I don’t. But I do use it on weeds. 

Directly on the weeds and only on the weeds. How? By putting it in an old container with one of those drip nipples, of the sort that come on sports water bottles. But don’t use a water bottle for this purpose! Too easy for innocent bystanders to decide to take a sip out of it. Lots of other containers have these things, including old dish detergent bottles and, my favorite, an ancient Spray’n’Wash bottle. Despite a high initial cost, I find it economical to buy Roundup in concentrate form and mix up a small amount as needed. One container of it will last a couple of years. Mark it clearly, so you can’t miss the contents.

Pour the stuff into the applicator bottle and then dribble it carefully onto the leaves, and only the leaves, of the offending weed. Because the nipple lets the herbicide drib out a few drops at a time, you have a lot more control over where it goes than you do with a sprayer, and you’re lots less likely to get any of it on surrounding plants. Roundup is absorbed and metabolized through the plant’s leaves and, over the course of a few days, does the plant in. Little or none of the chemical is left—I leave the weeds to biodegrade or for Gerardo’s guys to carry off in the monthly clean-up. I don’t, of course, put them in the compost.

Because this gives a lot of control in where you’re applying the stuff, you can deal with a problem like the one pictured here, where milkweed has taken hold in the middle of a lantana plant. Spraying Roundup on these things would guarantee a dead lantana. However, because contact with just a few leaves will kill the weed, all I need to do here is bend one of the milkweed’s long stems over away from the ornamental plant, set a rock on it gently (so as not to kill or damage it), and dribble a little Roundup on the part of the weed that’s being held away from the plant. As soon as the Roundup dries, I can remove the rock. In a couple of days, the milkweed will shrivel up and go away.

Organic? Heck, no. Environmentally friendly? Well, marginally at best. Better than any other approaches I’ve found? Yup.

And speaking of my ungreen career as an environmental criminal, ROI sings the praises of low-flow showerheads. {cackle!} Hand me that screwdriver, say I! Dribbles there a more annoying self-important appliance than a low-flow showerhead, other than the damnable low-flow toilet???

How exactly a showerhead that rations water so that you have to stand under it two or three times as long to get clean saves water (and money) over one that actually works escapes me. If the showerhead saves 20 percent on water use, but it takes you five times as long to rinse the shampoo and conditioner out of your hair, it would appear that the dribbley showerhead uses more water, not less.

You can jimmy most low-flow showerheads, an activity that may be illegal in some places but that satisfyingly expels Big Brother from your shower stall. Of course, if you’re in the habit of standing under the hot water until your body turns to spaghetti, this strategy will a) drain the hot water out of the tank a lot faster, cutting short  your trip to nirvana, and b) run up your water bill. But if your main reason for taking a shower is to get clean, you can speed things along significantly by getting rid of the low-flow restrictor.

Newer low-flow toilets work better than the earlier models did, thank God. After I innocently replaced the toilets in my last house, little knowing that Home Depot and Lowe’s no longer carried toilets that worked, I ended up having to flush twice to get rid of urine and three or more times whenever anything more solid was deposited in the bowl. Two or three times a week, the toilet clogged and overflowed. I learned to be very quick at shutting off the water valve (but still sometimes had to clean up the mess off the floor!), and I got pretty good with the plunger, too. 

Finally I had to buy a special model that actually would flush, available through only one manufacturer at a cost of well over $300. Then I had to pay to have a plumber take out the “old” new toilet and replace it with the hugely overpriced gadget I’d been forced to purchase. This left me with two bathrooms and one functional toilet. I made up  my mind that I would never again replace a working toilet for decorative reasons. I even started to watch the alleys for discarded old toilets, planning to grab the first complete, unbroken one I found and stash it for future use. I also planned to take the take the functional model with me when I moved.

And that’s exactly what I would have done, had toilets not been somewhat improved. They’re still not great, but at least they work most of the time. Again: if a plumbing device saves 1/3 on water use (as low-flow toilets are said to do) but you have to operate it three times as much to make it work, how does it save anything?

What a rogue!

Am I alone in the universe? What do you think of as “green” irrationality?

Ridiculous day, so far…

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Okay, okay. I can’t even blame anyone (other than my turkey self) for this day’s launch. It wuz all my fault.

Out of the sack at 5:15. Off to M’hijito’s at 6:30, there to meet Bila the Painter par Excellence (or, if not p.e., at least par incredibly cheap), slated to arrive at 7:00 a.m. Son is still in the sack. A half-hour passes. No Bila. I’m hungry, not having had energy or volition to bolt down more than a couple pieces of cheese and a banana. Another half-hour passes. Kid gets up. No Bila. Shee-ut.

I drive to the train stop, 400 photocopied page proofs in hand, planning to earn another $50 in the transit to and from the Great Desert University. Stick my credit card in the ticket machine. Receive message: Not accepting credit cards today. Bureau-code for Eff You Very Much!

Naturally, I have no cash on me, because I never carry cash. Doesn’t matter: last time I tried to stick a bill in the machine, the machine spat it right out. If you don’t happen to carry $2.50 in nickels, dimes, and quarters, you’re not riding. Curse, stalk back to my car, drive to Costco, fill up. 

In the course of this Brownian motion, the local NPR station is delivering its flaming-debris-in-the-middle-lane reports: State Route 51 is dead stopped from the interchange back to Northern; the 202 has a wreck at 32nd Street. Wheeeeeee!

After filling up, I decide I’d druther wait at my house than on the road for the freeways to clear up, so I drive home and work on an article for a GDU client editor while the rush hour passes. Back at the casa, I glance at the calendar and learn that Bila is scheduled for the 18th, not for today.

Oh good. We can repeat all this next Monday!

Dumb tax!!!

Arrive on campus around 10:30. Duck through the church courtyard to avoid walking past Her Deanship’s office window. There have to dodge around a homeless mentally ill person sleeping on the sidewalk. Emerge near the stoplight at the crosswalk, where I’m panhandled by another homeless mentally ill person and then cross the street almost hand-in-hand with a third homeless mentally ill person. Really. We should at least set up showers on the streets for folks who need them, since We the People can’t bring ourselves to provide shelter and psychiatric care for our most helpless compatriots. Oh. Sorry. That would be SOCIALIST!!!!!, wouldn’t it?

Moving on, Her Deanship has requested that I send in the two endless forms to fulfill the requirements for the spring 2009 annual review. I point out that this is a bit redundant, since I’ll be gone in December (if not sooner, should I happen to find actual work elsewhere…). She replies that she thought I’d like to have it, “since you’ve worked hard this year.” 

Over the weekend, it’s occurred to me that I probably wrote most or all of the annual review b.s. shortly before she canned me. So, after I shovel the first supplicant out of my office, I dig up this spring’s paperwork. And yea, verily: it’s already filled out and filed on my computer. Thank God!

Nine. Single-spaced. Pages. Of. Ten-point. Arial. Pointless. Circular. Repetitious. Meaningless. Palaver.

Why on earth would the woman want to subject herself to this nonsense over an employee who’s out the door? Why??? I’ll tell you why: because one of her higher-ups must have ordered her to do it! Left to her own devices, she’s not crazy.

This. This one, for a change, is not my doing. For annual reviews, the GDU bureaucracy makes employees answer a long series of specific written questions, many of them amazingly stupid, that ask you to find original ways to repeat yourself seven different ways from Sunday. The result is a jumble of garbage, a vast waste of time.

Well, thank God I’d already wasted my time before the ax fell, since I had plenty of constructive things to do today. Now it’s Her Deanship’s turn to waste some time.

Another meeting, this one of disaffected staffers. We lay out tentative plans for our workflow for the rest of our tenure at GDU. One employee describes the bizarre antics of the soon-to-be-ex-husband. Dear God…what is wrong with people? The guy makes GDU sound like a haven of sanity. Moving on, we come up with 87 gerjillion things for me to find out from our client editors.

SK describes a new freelance assignment. I’m to find and sign a contract returned to us by a guy who wants us to edit a religious tract. Back to my fault: I set it aside on Friday and blew it off.

I send out a flurry of e-mails to the client editors, by way of accomplishing the 87 gerjillion things. By now I’ve infected every member of my staff plus the Dean’s factotum, who presented herself for the first meeting. No doubt by Wednesday (commencement!) so many clones of my virus will be circulating through the campus population that I will, by proxy, infect the President of the United States of America. Talk about your six degrees of separation!

Flee! Early afternoon comes and I escape, stopping by a Yup Grocery for two packages of pretty good sushi, I suffering again, for the second day, from a great craving for soy sauce. Must be some sort of electrolyte imbalance. Home to consume the stuff with dos cervezas. 

E-mail from SDXB: the cops are reopening his daughter’s 15- or 20-year-old case, in which she was kidnapped from the GDU campus, hauled into the desert, tortured, and then set free (or she escaped, unclear which) after her car was torched—coincidentally on a ranch belonging to a friend of mine. My friend’s mother-in-law saw the fire and called the Highway Patrol, who rescued her after the perps had fled. Oh hell, why not? We haven’t had our fill of drama, have we?

I can’t stand it. I’m going back to bed.

Transfer Limits on Savings Accounts: Or, why I love my credit union

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Gather Little by Little reports that he ran up against the six-withdrawal limit with an ING Direct savings account he was using as his “firewall.” The bank informed him that the next time he made more than six transfers out of that account in a month, the account would be closed.

Take that, you PF desperado!

Well, I must say, I was surprised, too. I thought this applied only to money market accounts. Withdrawals from money market savings and checking accounts are strictly limited. Turns out the Federal Reserve’s Regulation D applies to regular savings accounts, too. I cruised over to my credit union’s site to see what they had to say on this issue, and lo!

What constitutes a Regulation D transaction? Transfers or withdrawals by Online Banking or Telephone Banking, preauthorized withdrawals or transfers, and transfers to cover overdrafts. Unlimited withdrawals or transfers may be performed in person or at an ATM, institution fees may apply.

Interestingly, you can withdraw your little heart out if you physically go in to the bank, or, bizarrely enough, if you transfer or withdraw money through an ATM. ???? What the heck is the difference between an electronic transaction on an ATM and an electronic transaction done on your PC (except for the greater opportunity presented by ATMs to gouge customers)?

Oh, well. What it tells you is that there’s at least one advantage to using a brick-and-mortar institution: you can’t go in person to an online bank, but you can visit a credit union or bank that’s within driving distance.

Flaws in WHOSE health care system???

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Have you seen this AP story? In it, the reporter uses the swine flu episode to highlight the shortcomings of Mexico’s health care system (which, as anyone who has been injured or fallen ill in Mexico can attest, does have its challenges). As I was reading through it, I thought…this stuff sure sounds familiar…

Mexicans will do almost anything to avoid a public hospital emergency room, where ailing patients may languish for hours slumped on cracked linoleum floors that smell of sweat, sickness and pine-scented disinfectant.

Let’s tweak that to reflect the experience of citizens of another large North American country:

Americans will do almost anything to avoid a public hospital emergency room, where ailing patients may languish for hours slumped on cracked linoleum floors that smell of sweat, sickness and pine-scented disinfectant.

Exactly my experience. When I was suffering from acute appendicitis, I went to the ER of a major urban medical center, where I waited for hours—in exactly the conditions described above. After four hours of excruciating pain, I gave up, called some friends, and (at midnight) asked them to drive me home. I knew what was wrong with me, but figured I’d rather die in my bed than huddled on a concrete bench outside the ER in the winter cold. In that entire time, I never saw a doctor or a triage nurse and encountered only some surly staff who gave me a dirty look when I threw up into the bucket I’d brought. I sat next to a young woman who was miscarrying a pregnancy; she also had been there over four hours with exactly zero medical attention. There was no place inside to sit, and the floors were too filthy to sit or lie down on.

Many don’t see doctors at all, heading instead to the clerk at the corner pharmacy for advice on coping with a cold or a flu.

Good luck trying to get in to see a doctor for something as minor as a cold or flu! American access to medical care pretty much forces you to head for the corner Walgreen’s or the local naturopath to ask for over-the-counter nostrums.

Some patients suspected of having swine flu told The Associated Press that public hospitals turned them away or forced them to wait for hours for treatment even after the government declared a national emergency.

Some people at the ER where I waited had been sitting in the waiting room for eight hours. I was told the typical wait was six hours. No tweaking needed here to make this apply to the US experience.

“If someone is sick, he can’t simply say, ‘I’m going to the doctor’ or ‘I’m going to the hospital,’ because it depends on whether he has Social Security…”

Uh huh:

“If [an American] is sick, he can’t simply say, ‘I’m going to the doctor’ or ‘I’m going to the hospital,’ because it depends on whether he has Medicare or health insurance…”

And…

While access to health care is a right enshrined in the Mexican constitution, millions of Mexicans have no health insurance at all.

Heee!

Access to health care is most certainly not regarded as a constitutional right, and millions of Americans have no health insurance at all.

And, annoyingly enough:

Mexico spends only 6.6 percent of its gross domestic product on health care — less than half the U.S. figure. No country in the 30-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development puts a smaller share of public money into its health care system.

Think of that. We have a healthcare system that in many ways, for the average Joe and Jane on the street, functions on a par with that of the most underfunded system in the OECD. What’s wrong with this picture?

What’s your favorite comfort food?

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Food! It’s the best medicine for whatever ails you, right? And comfort food, those often nonnutritional, even junky goodies Mom would slip to us when we were enjoying a day of real or imagined misery, that’s the finest penicillin of all. IMHO.

What’s your favorite?

Mine, prosaically enough, is chocolate milkshakes. Yah. Ice cream. Chocolate. Whapped together with a little milk. Curative!

This morning the flu’s fever was gone. But though my temperature was back to normal I still felt like a truck had run over me: head hurt, nose hurt, throat hurt, body hurt, whining volume set to “high”…and more to the point, it was the start of the third day in which I could not even look at food. Decided I’d better eat something, or I was gunna fade away to a shadow. So I schlepped over to the grocery store (sharing my virus with everyone with whom I came in contact, but alas, there’s no one else to run errands here) and bought a gallon of Safeway’s finest generic ice cream and a half-gallon milk and the only Hershey’s syrup left on the shelf (tellingly, they were almost out, suggesting I was not alone in search of comfort). Brought it home, mixed up a bunch of it in the blender, and slurped it all down.

🙂

Ahhh! Cured!

Well, not exactly cured, but it sher made me feel a lot better.

My mother used to soothe me with macaroni and milk: she’d cook some macaroni, heat some milk, mix in the pasta, and add butter, salt, and pepper. Too much work for the adult me, though: when I’m sick, I don’t wanna work at hunting and gathering.

What does the trick to get you out of the poor-me doldrums?

Right-wing legislators, pushed to the wall, raise taxes

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LOL! What should I notice in today’s paycheck but a $13.43 pay cut?

So I enquire of our business manager…whazzat? She forwards the following:

State increases tax withholding rates


The Arizona state income tax withholding rates will increase effective May 1, 2009. ASU employees’ paychecks issued on May 8 will reflect the new tax rates mandated by Arizona Senate Bill 1185, which was signed into law April 9, 2009. The Senate bill amends the amounts required to be withheld for Arizona state withholding tax as a percentage of an employee’s federal withholding tax.

 

Between May 1 and Dec. 31, 2009, the withholding rates will increase. Between Jan. 1, 2010, and June 30, 2010, the withholding rates will decrease. Please consult your personal tax professional if you need further assistance.

Decreasing the withholding rate won’t help those of us who are to be canned on or before December 31, such as, say, moi. Given these chuckleheads’ rabid opposition to any kind of tax increases—and heaven forFEND any increases on the businesses here who help to keep this a right-to-work (for nothing) state—it certainly is inspiring. Notice how they get around admitting it is a tax increase by changing the old way the state figured taxes to a percentage of federal income taxes.

So in addition to the furloughs and layoffs, the kookocracy brings us yet another pay cut.