Suffering again from heart palpitations, a few weeks ago I visit Young Dr. Kildare, who sends me to a cardiologist. He diagnoses “stress” but recommends a stress test. The blood pressure, BTW, is hovering in the lower stratosphere.

The stress test gets put off for two or three weeks while I struggle with the accursed insurance companies, trying to get a better rate from one of the rapacious private Medigap carriers. While going through underwriting, I cannot have any diagnostic tests pending, even “routine” ones. Finally I get accepted for a new plan with a new insurer.

So at last, on Wednesday I stumble into the cardiologist’s office for the stress test. That seems to have gone OK — it was pretty easy and even kind of fun — but afterward the technician keeps taking my blood pressure. Over and over and over. Even though it slowly drops a little, it is very high.

She tells me to go buy a blood pressure monitor (yup! I needed a gratuitous $50 expenditure just as the AC bills start to peak!) and track my blood pressure between then and next Tuesday, when I’m supposed to go back to the cardiologist.

The heart palpitations, which are very uncomfortable and (despite assurances that they’re probably harmless) quite scary, continue. The blood pressure scores are mind-boggling: 147/93 ; 154/86…holy SHIT!

Yesterday morning I awaken at 2:10 and take another reading. In the past, my blood pressure readings have been lowest just after awakening. Not at this particular awaking, though: 145/80.

“Normal,” for those of you who are as yet uninitiated, is <120/<80.

So I’m sitting at the dining room table contemplating this state of affairs when it occurs to me that I’d squirted my nose with generic Afrin, because it was kind of stuffy when I woke up at 2:00 a.m. Come to think of it…I’d been squirting every evening, in a sleepy haze, right before I went to bed. Bad. Normally I would use the stuff no more than two or three nights in a row, but in a frenzy to get more than four or five hours of sleep a night, I’d been snorting decongestant up my schnozz every night for…longer than I could remember. At least ten days or two weeks; probably longer than that.

Years ago, when SDXB was living with me, he had a terrible cold and couldn’t breathe through his nose. I suggested he try a squirt of Afrin nose spray to clear his head, He said he couldn’t use decongestants because they drive up one’s blood pressure — he’s had chronic high blood pressure forever.

Well… There in the wee hours I came to remember that exchange, out of the blue. It dawned on me that, when asked what drugs I was on by the cardiologist and later by his tech, I’d totally blown off the nose squirt — my mind didn’t register it as a drug, and besides, I’ve been using it late at night or the episodes of insomnia, when I’m half asleep and barely conscious.

Interesting.

So I go online and look up the drug — generically it’s called oxymetazoline hydrochloride — and damned if it doesn’t say “causes high blood pressure and heart palpitations.”

Holy shit, indeed.

Also learned that for a lush like me (I have two drinks a day, which the US gummint describes as “heavy drinking” for a woman), knocking off the booze all at once will drive up the blood pressure. You’re supposed to taper off over a period of weeks. I haven’t had a drink in several days.

Well, “weeks” isn’t very practical, because the focus is just NOT THERE to limit the amount of booze in ever-diminishing amounts over that long a period. It’s either lap it up or don’t taste it at all. I figure I could have one five-ounce glass of wine yesterday and half of that today and then kick the habit.

So I knock off the nose squirt. Along about 5:30, I fix myself an amazing dinner and serve it up with 1 glass of white wine. Take the dog for a stroll and jog four of the six blocks (in my achy dotage I’m no longer capable of running).

Come back. Sit down for half an hour. Take the blood pressure: 120/76.

Well damn. That’s the first time it’s been anywhere near the normal range since these antics started. Skip the nose squirt on retiring.

This morning: 111/80. And the heart palpitations are almost gone.

I hadn’t made the connection between the crazy-making heart palpitations and the nose squirt. And I never would have, if SDXB hadn’t made that remark all those years ago.

Take-away message: Just because you don’t swallow it doesn’t mean it isn’t a drug. And just because something can be bought off the shelf in a grocery store or pharmacy doesn’t mean it’s harmless. Always look up every nostrum before taking it! Prescription or over-the-counter, you should know what’s in any medicament you swallow, rub on your skin, drop in your eyes, inhale into your chest, or blow up your nose, and know what its potential side effects are…before you ingest it.

When I wrote about preparing your family and your home for the various kinds of emergencies and catastrophes that can befall us, I surely had no idea the subject would suddenly become so topical. Again. We’ve seen, time and again, the danger and heartache that a natural disaster brings to individuals, families, and homeowners. But what about business owners and leaders? What can you do to prepare your business for disaster?

Some business entrepreneurs have been there before us and can offer some advice. Forbes contributor Elaine Pofeldt, for example, lists some wish-I’d-thought-of-this preparations that would have helped get her own and her husband’s home-based businesses through Hurricane Sandy:

• generator
• car charger for laptops
• back-up Internet service
• printed list of hotels in nearby states
• bicycle at the ready.

If your business has outgrown a room in the back of the house and is an established, brick-and-mortar retail store, wholesale operation, or service office, your planning issues are more complex and more crucial to the business’s survival. Some 25 percent of small businesses are unable to come back after a natural disaster, largely because they are unprepared. A December 2012 survey showed that 74 percent of businesses have no disaster plan, 84 percent have no natural disaster insurance, and a third have no idea how quickly they could get back in operation after a natural disaster.

Experts urge the importance of several coordinating strategies. These include

• having a disaster recovery plan in place;
• migrating IT functions, data, applications, and processes to the Cloud;
• developing a back-up communication system that does not rely on cell phones;
• and anticipating ways to help restore normalcy to employees whose lives are upended.

Clearly, a crucial strategy is to move data and computer functions off-site, to a secure site in the Cloud. This should include not only archived records and programs, but all work in progress. Not only will this protect your company’s and your clients’ data, it can make it possible for employees to work remotely, in case they can’t get to the office or the office itself is out of commission.

The Pacific County (Washington) Economic Development Council has posted an excellent and broad-ranging series of guides and checklists for business preparedness, in connection with a conference on the subject. If you own a business or are in charge of preparedness at your workplace, this is an invaluable series of resources. While you’re at this site, click on the “Business Planning Document” link at the top of the page. This will load a Word document containing a full business preparedness plan whose purpose is “to allow the company to resume mission critical operations within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, followed by the resumption of all other company operations within three to five days.”

Financial Services Group PNC adds the suggestion that business managers identify their organization’s most vulnerable points — computers located on a first floor vulnerable to flooding, for example — and take action to remedy those situations before the fact.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has published several pages of useful information at its website, including a set of planning and implementation guides for businesses. Also on these pages you can find suggestions for building emergency kits, either for families or for businesses, and descriptions of various kinds of hazards and how to prepare for them. Another FEMA document, “Every Business Should Have a Plan,” provides a succinct set of recommendations for preparations to help to keep your employees safe during an emergency and help your company stay in business afterward.

There are actually two aspects to disaster preparedness: readying oneself and one’s group for natural disasters and preparing for manmade disasters and catastrophic human error. Quite a lot of information addresses the possibility of natural events such as earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, and floods, but there’s less public information about preparing for a terrorist attack. Probably the best organized and most useful discussion appears at FEMA’s site on terrorist hazards. There you’ll find links to pages with details on protecting yourself from biological and chemical threats, cyberattacks, explosions, nuclear blasts, and radioactive dispersion devices.

Another of the best planning documents designed to help businesses cope with manmade disasters is a primer published by Business Executives for National Security. This guide covers the several possible kinds of terrorist attacks, risk assessment and preparation, employee training, terrorism insurance, ways a business can respond to a terrorist attack, and recovery. It includes a short, to-the-point checklist.

In the recovery department, the Small Business Administration offers a variety of business physical recovery loans for companies in a declared disaster zone.

Palm Beach County (Florida) provides a business guide for disaster preparedness that also addresses bomb threats, enraged employees or customers, sabotage, cyberterrorism, and hacking. And King County (Washington) publishes a short and to-the-point set of actions to take in various scenarios, ranging from hazard recognition to survival if you’re trapped under debris.

The Red Cross has a PDF on responding to terrorist attacks; it contains some helpful advice, including instructions for sheltering in place.

In 2003, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) prepared an eye-opening report on potential terrorist actions and the nation’s preparedness for them. A key part of this discussion has to do with the threat to financial markets posed by a successful, major attack. We saw what happened when some joker hacked in to the Associated Press’s Twitter feed and posted a report that the White House had been struck — an instantaneous, deep stock market dip. Had the report been real, the consequences would have been very serious, indeed. The GAO report deals largely with the financial markets, the banking industry, and the telecommunications infrastructure. Even though it’s a decade old, the report and its recommendations are still worth a business executive’s attention.

Images:

Tornado in central Oklahoma, 1999. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Public domain.
King David Hotel (Jerusalem) after attack by Irgun, 1946. Public domain.

Jestjack’s comment on last Saturday’s post, about the vet who opined that the wide-ranging pisser of a cat had “anger issues” (heeee!), reminded me of Anna the German Shepherd, a dog for whom “trainability” was an alien term.

Actually, Anna was highly trainable. But she was a working dog with a capital W and a capital D, and she had so much drive that she really needed a full-time doggy job to run off her bottomless reserves of energy. This was an animal that needed to herd sheep. Or cattle. Or camels. She was so strong that for many months I faced quite the challenge keeping her under control.

A woman who trained search dogs and drug dogs for the police had been the most successful of a largely unsuccessful lot of dog-and-human trainers. By the time Anna was about 18 months old, she was marginally leash-trained, despite daily efforts on my part. This police dog trainer favored a vicious pinch collar, something that just made me cringe…but I couldn’t afford to have the dog drag me into the traffic, or to have to let her go as she charged in front of an oncoming vehicle. Since she craved to bring cars and trucks down by their oil-pans, suicide by car was a likely end for Anna. The pinch collar at least put a damper on that activity. To a degree. A low degree.

One day I mentioned this to Jerry Jenkins, a now-retired veterinarian who over the years had become a friend. He said he knew a “dog behavioralist” that maybe I should try. Silently thinking “holeee mackerel, what next?” I took the guy’s phone number. In a moment of desperation, after having been dragged around the neighborhood again, I called him.

Now, you should bear in mind that another friend of mine, at the time, was a lady who claimed to believe in astrology and who was in the act of hanging out her shingle as a pet astrologist and mind-reader. No. Yes. She was serious. I think. Who can tell?

At any rate, you can imagine the eye-rolling over the “dog behavioralist.”

So I call the guy up, and it turns out that under the silly psycho-babble veneer, what he really does is teach owners (not dogs) how to behave. Abhorred by the stainless-steel pinch collar, the first thing he did was demonstrate how to get Anna to heel using nothing more than a leather leash and her ordinary everyday rolled leather collar. It wasn’t very difficult. The trick was, you had to do it several times a day. Didn’t matter whether you did it in the house, did it in the backyard, did it on a sidewalk, or did it in the park. You just had to do it for a short period, over and over, every day.

Here’s how to do it:

Get a rolled leather collar (it’s better for long-haired dogs and it will work better for your purposes). Get a sturdy leather leash (not nylon). Place the collar on the dog and hook the leash to the collar. Have the dog sit next to you. Step forward with the dog at your left side. Each time the dog surges ahead of your knees, say “HUP!” and give the leash a sharp jerk. Always precede the jerk with the “HUP!” sound. Never jerk the leash and then say “HUP.” Walk steadily and confidently forward. Never let the dog get past your knees without going “HUP” and giving it a jerk.

This won’t hurt the dog, but it will get its attention. Reward the dog with friendly noises for heeling correctly over brief periods. You may heel and sit, heel and sit, heel and sit if that’s necessary to underscore the idea that the human walks the dog, not the other way around. Do not fail to do this for a few minutes at least three times a day — five or ten minutes per session will suffice.

After awhile, the dog will start to expect a jerk whenever you say “HUP!” You can then use the word “HUP” to mean, approximately, “heel.”

It works.

So last Wednesday at choir rehearsal I was reminded that, today being the end of our season, we have our annual choir send-off party and pot-luck. This was a bit of an embarrassment, since I’ve pretty much spent the grocery budget and, if Cassie and I are to survive until the end of the month without going in the hole, I can’t make a run on Costco or Safeway to buy a bunch of stuff to make a fancy pot-luck dish. We’re already cleaning out the freezer one bite at a time.

I scribbled down “some kind of pasta” on the sign-up list and ran away.

Hot dishes are problematic, because it’s hard for a single person to get the stuff to the church without having it spill all over the car or be stone cold by the time we’re ready to eat. So I decided the “some kind of pasta” would have to be a package of Costco penne (thank God for Costco’s lifetime supplies of everything!) into which I would dump a little of anything in the house that even faintly resembled salad makings and then would chill until dinnertime. Thus:

It actually turned out looking kinda pretty — well, at least not revolting — and tasting pretty good.

To reproduce (more or less), spin off this general theory:

Cook up a bunch of whatever kind of pasta you have in the house. Ain’t got no pasta? You can substitute cooked beans, hominy, or cut-up pieces of bread, or any combination thereof. Dress the starchy stuff with a good vinaigrette (recipe follows) and start adding whatever you can find in the fridge, freezer, and garden.

Vinaigrette dressing:

Squeeze a juicy lemon. If your lemons are not very juicy, squeeze two of them. Pick out the seeds and toss those. If you don’t have lemons, use about 1/8 cup of vinegar (any kind; use more if you’re making something vast). Add olive oil: about three parts oil to one part lemon or vinegar. Whisk together with a fork. Taste. Add oil or more lemon/vinegar to taste. Add salt and pepper to taste. Add dried herbs (such as tarragon, thyme, fines herbes, herbes de provence, parsley, summer savory, or whatever you have around) to taste.

Addenda for the pasta:

• frozen peas (if this is going to sit in the fridge for a while, no need to defrost them –  just toss in a handful or two or three)
• carrots, diced or chopped in small pieces
• green onions, sliced or minced
• garlic, finely minced
• bell pepper, chopped (I used those tiny new sweet peppers that come in bags)
• olives, pitted
• cucumber (I had about a third of a cuke left)
• walnuts, chopped
• basil, chopped (or whatever else is in the garden…parsley would be nice)
• tomato, chopped
• feta cheese (parmesan would work, too

Toss these things (or whatever you happen to have on hand) into the dressed pasta, stirring between additions. Top the salad with another sprinkling of cheese, and chill until ready to eat. This is one of those dishes that improve with time, so have no fear about preparing it hours or even a day ahead.

The other day Cassie flew into the air, chasing Ball up the driveway, and came down wrong on a hind leg. She yelped once, licked her foot, and then went on about her frenetic business.

She seemed OK. Maybe a little sore but not enough to slow her down. She’s still racing around like a rocket, lobbying for doggy walks, and throwing stuffed teddy bears, stuffed vultures, stuffed Angry Birds, and tennis balls at the human in an unceasing campaign to get all of the above airborne.

And yet…and  yet, she’s been off her game a bit. Instead of harrying the human every waking moment, she’s taken to moping in the back room or the office. Her enthusiasm for trotting outdoors at the drop of every hat is limited.

A close inspection of the offended foot reveals a worrisomely lopping toe.

Notice how that toe on the inner side of the foot on the left looks deformed? The corresponding toe on the other foot looks straight and smooth, and it lies tight against the foot. The bent toe is loose and stands away from the other toes.

Looked this up on the Internet and came away abhorred: vet bills running into the thousands of dollars; dogs wrapped up in casts under which any number of infections and mildew grew; dogs who ended up having to have infected legs amputated; dogs developing gangrene under too-tight wrappings; dogs ripping their own foot off trying to remove the damn cast; dog owners reporting that casting the leg in such injuries appears to be a scam whose main purpose is to milk the owner’s bank accounts; dog owners reporting that some vets say to just leave the dog alone and let nature take its course; dog owners hacking off casts themselves, to find the dog was just fine without it and healed up with no problem when left alone…. Oh, shit.

Well, by this morning she didn’t seem great. So I took her to a vet M’hijito found by way of his father’s current wife. This lady practices in a part of town called “Little Mexico,” where most of the shopping consists of Dollar Stores and Goodwill outlets. Which is to say, she doesn’t cater to a clientele with deep pockets. The vet I’ve been using, referred to me by La Maya (who has an actual income and a partner with an actual income), is what we might call a thousand-dollar-a-day vet. She’s close, and that’s nice. But she knows how much dog lovers living in the $400,000 to $1.5 million houses that populate North Central can be persuaded to pay.

Vet looked at the dog’s foot and opined that it was either broken or dislocated. In either event, the best course of action was to leave it alone. She said she would try to pull it back into place if she were sure it was dislocated, but without an X-ray, she didn’t want to do that — because it could, after all, be broken. She thinks the best thing to do is let nature take its course. Gave me an anti-inflammatory, handed me a $58 bill, and said good-bye.

In six days, I can afford to have the dog X-rayed (can’t just now, unfortunately: am at the end of the budget cycle and all is pretty much spent). I may call again then and ask if they’ll X-ray her, just to see what the story is.

Maybe not, too. The vet said the dog will recover. Maybe less really is more.

You know, consumers have to be careful with veterinarians. It’s no less true that you should get a second opinion when a vet recommends some pricey procedure than that you should when a dentist does the same. Yesterday I talked to a young fellow who came by to provide an estimate for pruning a hugely overgrown carob tree in M’hijito’s front yard. By way of chatting, we found we each had wounded small dogs. His family’s lab had landed on their chihuahua during a frolic. Whacked the little dog’s leg.

Wife took the lap-dog to the vet, where several hundred dollars’ worth of X-rays ensued. She was informed that the dog needed $1700 worth of surgery “to round off” a hip bone, and that was just for starters. When he recited this story, I said, “Look. Really: get a second opinion. I had a German shepherd that a vet said needed dual hip replacements, to the tune of thousands of dollars. I took her to another vet for a second opinion, and he said the X-rays the first outfit had done were not good enough to diagnose anything about the dog’s hips, and that the dog most certainly did not need surgery.”

This tale got his attention. He said he would do that before giving the go-ahead for this elaborate procedure.

Most vets are good people who do not want to cheat you or inflict unnecessary treatments and pain on animals by way of fleecing their owners. However, there’s no question that some of them are in it for the money. In general, U.S. and British pets are over-vaccinated, over-examined, and over-treated.

Caveat dog owner…

Thank goodness! The agent I stumbled across while trying to navigate the Medigap labyrinth after Mutual of Omaha decided to up its Medicare supplement premium by $433 a year called to say Government Personnel Mutual’s underwriters have approved me for a Plan G policy.

That will be a difference of almost $700 off the two grand that Mutual of Omaha proposed to jab me with.

A few months ago, I’d heard from another insurance salesperson that Mutual of Omaha (which is part of United of Omaha) is notorious for luring new Medicare recipients into a Medicare supplement policy by offering the lowest prices around, but then after a year or two, they jack up the prices through the ceiling. The current episode suggests she was right.

What’s going on there is that when you first get on Medicare, you have a window of a few months in which to decide whether to buy a Medigap policy; in that first “open enrollment” period, carriers may not subject you to underwriting, and they can’t except pre-existing conditions or anything they imagine might be a pre-existing condition. But after that introductory period, any change, even to a different Medigap policy offered by the same company, has to go through underwriting.

Because most Americans in their 60s have been “diagnosed” and something like 90 percent of those 65 and over are on some sort of medication, after you’re enrolled in that first Medigap plan you have about a snowball’s chance of getting approved for a new policy. Thus, once you’ve signed up for a Mutual of Omaha policy, in about 90 percent of cases it’s a gotcha. In a big way. They can raise their prices and there’s not a damn thing you can do, short of going bare or switching to an HMO.

To accomplish the $700 difference, I had to switch to Plan G with Government Personnel Mutual. It’s the same as my old Plan F policy, except that Plan G hits you with a $142 deductible, whereas Plan F has no deductible. Obviously, Plan F is preferable; however, I can afford $142 out of pocket, and the difference in premiums is so great that it’s worth it.

After running through an interminable punch-a-button noise-maker at Mutual of Omaha, I finally reached a person who seemed in a position to put an application for a Plan G policy through that outfit’s underwriting. She sent me not one, not two, but three duplicate applications. These are multipage, intrusive questionnaires, and so I felt no call to fill it in and drive it to the post office three times. I sent one. Haven’t heard a single word back from them.

Government Personnel Mutual has a better A.M. Best rating than Mutual of Omaha and far fewer consumer complaints floating around the Internet. And, apparently, it has no reputation for gouging its customers.

So. That’s a relief. And it’ll even give me a few extra dollars in my pocket next year.

So yesterday I went completely off the deep end. Damn near kilt myself with overwork.

Monday is vacuuming day. Check.

Tuesday is steam-mop day.

Well, it’s been quite some time since I steam-mopped the 1680 square feet of tile in this house. As a stop-gap, I’ve been wet-mopping the dirtiest floors, which usually are the kitchen, the hall, the dining room, and the living room. Wet-mopping doesn’t really get the floor clean; it just pushes the dirt around.

Steam-mopping lifts the dirt off the floor…within limits.

Yesterday, it became clear that the limit had been reached and surpassed long ago. Every microfiber rag I attached to the steamer — quite a few — came up tar-black. I figured I’d better go over the floors twice. Rags were still black, and by the time the job was done, the floor was streaky. Decided to run the steamer over the kitchen floor again. The result: streaks.

The floors were so filthy, the steam-mopper couldn’t clean them. The grout, which in fact is not grout but this paint-on “sealer” stuff Satan & Proserpine applied, in a light gray color called “oyster” (what were those people thinking?), had turned dark brown with dirt.

I’d already been thinking I needed to get down on hands and scrub the damn floors.

But hold the Simple Green, which I suspect of being part of the problem, it having been applied in the wet-mopping. Instead of detergent, I used clear water, a stiff scrub brush, a scouring sponge, and rags; for the grout, I applied DIY glass cleaner — a mix of alcohol, ammonia, vinegar, and water.

It worked. In fact, it worked swimmingly. Here’s a before…

(Click on the image for closer inspection.)

And here’s an after…

The problem was, it worked altogether too well!

The project quickly turned into an absolutely crushing job. With back and hips already hurting, hunkering down on hands and knees and applying all the weight and strength of your upper body to scouring tile and grout is not much fun. And it took hour after hour after pain-enhancing hour. The problem was, I couldn’t stop! The difference between the cleaned space and the still-dirty tiles was eye-popping:

And I knew that if I stopped, there was no way in Hell I would come back the next day to finish the rest of the floor. It was a matter of do the whole job now or don’t do it at all.

Making this manageable entailed scouring two rows at a time, crosswise across the room (that is, taking the shortest distance, which in this case was from that bookcase to the wall opposite it). After just two rows, the water would turn almost black:

Actually, I had to get up and change the water more than once per two-row cycle. But you get the idea…

Ugh. After scrubbing the kitchen, dining room, living room, and hall floors, I thought I was gunna die! It was about 5:30 by the time the last bucketful of brown water was poured down the drain and a giant pile of rags went into the washer. Since this project began in the middle of the morning, I’d been on hands and knees for about 6 or 7 hours.

Fell into bed around 6:30. Woke up at 10 p.m., swilled down some puréed ginger root in tonic water — both traditional muscle-pain remedies, since I’m allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, & acetaminophen (it actually worked, believe it or not!) — got back to sleep around 1 a.m., and was out cold until 6 a.m.

By light of day, the floor looks awesome! It hasn’t looked this good since I moved in here. The clean floors make the rooms look a lot brighter and bigger. Very nice.

And all in all, today I don’t hurt an awful lot more than I did yesterday morning, before plunging into the crazy project. Which isn’t saying much…except that things could be worse. A lot worse.

Problem is, all that flooring represents, ohh….maybe a third to almost half the total square footage of tilework. There are still four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the family room that need to be cleaned.

The remaining parts of the house were tiled by my guy, Mike the Bosnian Godfather. Of course, we couldn’t buy the same tile — it was long gone. But Mike found a much better grade of tile that, incredibly, picked up all the colors of Satan & Proserpine’s choice. Its surface, though textured to ape stone, is harder and less porous-feeling than S&P’s, so dirt dust-mops up more easily.

Mine, not theirs!

And I have better sense about grout than those two did: IMHO the grout for floor tiling should be the color of dirt at the outset. It’s actually a little lighter than I would have selected on my own, at Mike’s insistence — he felt true dirt-color would have contrasted too much with the existing tile’s off-white grout.

But still, it’s dark enough that it doesn’t look just terrible after five or six years of wear and tear. I’m thinking that, at least for the nonce, I can go over it several times with a new mop-head dipped in clear, unadulterated water. If and when I work up the energy, I’ll scrub the tiles in the office (Cassie and I spend most of our time in the kitchen and the office) and then let the rest of it be.

Homeownership. What a joy!

Lookit this little guy!

Click on the images for larger, clearer view.

There’s a hibiscus that should not be with us. The mother plant spent several years living on the shaded west-facing deck, where it would occasionally put out a kind of peach-colored blossom but by and large just sat around looking sickly. I thought it was some sort of hybrid of a pink hibiscus. Last fall, it was attacked by a web-spinning bug that encased the tips of its limbs in nests for its offspring. Even though I cleaned and cut them off, the plant never recovered.

After planning to put it out of its misery, I relented. Transplanted it into a larger pot and dollied it around to the front patio, where it suffered through the winter — survived February’s hard frost by dint of being rolled into the living room, where it looked even more miserable than it had looked on the west deck. Carted back outside when the weather warmed, it hunkered in its pot, stunned.

I really thought it was going to die, and kept thinking, “Gotta throw that thing out in the alley!” It was saved, though, by the human’s innate laziness.

Weeks passed. The bug-eaten tips slowly, gradually, glacially emitted a few sprigs of post-apocalyptic-looking new growth. Didn’t look very promising, but I was still too lazy to drag the thing out to the alley.

But lo! As temps approached 100, the plant approached viability! Some actual leaves appeared, and yesterday out popped this scarlet red blossom!

Who’d have thunk it? Apparently hibiscus produce faded blossoms when they don’t have enough light. Why this flower has a hole in one petal, I have no idea…the place is overrrun by slugs at night — one of them probably snacked on the bud.

Speaking of survivors, we have this accursed thing:

That is the undead remnant of the devil-pod tree from Hell, allegedly killed in December of 2011. That was 18 months ago! The thing spawns dozens of zombie offspring, each one craving to grow a hundred feet high, preferably out of the footing of a block wall or the foundation of a house.

This little gem is a good thirty feet from the Undead Stump, where it arrived by tunneling under a concrete patio and coming up behind a set of block-and-board shelves. Another sprout is all the way on the other side of the swimming pool. Round-up, which I’ve been advised to use on the damn thing, seems to fertilize it, not kill it.

Talked to a couple of arborists. One said to just keep on spraying every sprig with Round-up. Another will come by later this week to see about grinding the stump out, though probably it’s too late for that. And a third recommended drilling holes in it and filling them with an herbicide. Lovely.

The other day I found a tiny praying mantis nymph clinging to a wall in the house. Glorioski!

Eventually I managed to catch her without harming her and place her in the plants outside. How cool can this be? This morning I found her prancing around in the parsley. Long may she feast on mosquitoes!

This weekend M’hijito and I went from scorning Mother’s Day as a grossly commercialized Hallmark Holiday to indulging in a Mother’s Day frenzy. Saturday he came over here and prepared astonishing pizzas and glorious globe artichokes, on which we gorged until we were stuporous.

The sauce is mostly garlic — like a half-dozen cloves or more, chopped — with Italian canned tomatoes. Awesome! This tiny bit leftover from the pizza later got used to top a grilled steak and later still (this evening), enhanced with a dollop of red wine, made an incredible spaghetti sauce. With shrimp.

Sunday we went to a Mother’s Day brunch at the home of his friends’ mother, replete with galloping grandchildren and the most elaborate organic aquaculture arrangement you ever saw. So that was a lot of fun.

Altogether, fairly mellow.

In other precincts…

Wild about Finance hosts the Carnival for Young Adults  and kindly included Funny’s squib about increasing property values and gentrification by young single urban adults in these parts. Neil Frankle hosts the Carnival of Personal Finance at Wealth Pilgrim, and he included the FaM post on the decision to drive the Dog Chariot until it dissolves into the pavement.

Here is a really cool online publication put out by the Oregon humanities council. It contains interesting articles of wide appeal to readers with eclectic curiosity.

Mother Jones, that bastion of liberalism, has run an article that overlaps almost perfectly with what we Second-Amendment gun nuts have been saying all along: the problem with violence in American culture has little to do with the weapon at hand and everything to do with our abysmal mental health care system.

Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey calls a crime like Houston’s “a predictable tragedy.” That’s what he has also called the Gabrielle Giffords shooting; he says the same thing about the Virginia Tech massacre, the Aurora movie theater shooting, the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting, and dozens of other recent homicides, some of them famous mass killings or subway platform shovings, but many of them less publicized. Ten percent of US homicides, he estimates based on an analysis of the relevant studies, are committed by the untreated severely mentally ill…. And, he says: “I’m thinking that’s a conservative estimate.”

While you’re there, check out this blood-curdling map of state-by-state cuts to mental health care.

Here’s a fun new-to-me blog that reflects the current rage for small-scale farming. Lookit this idea for herb jelly — what an interesting flavor combination! Sure goes beyond mint… The proprietor’s “farm” was part of an “edible garden tour” in an upscale district of Phoenix. KJG and I were planning to go to this, but they sold out of tickets very early.

And in the home farming department, 101 Centavos is still doing battle with late-season frosts. He’s got a couple of very interesting ideas for protecting young plants from low temps.

Crystal isn’t looking to turn the front yard landscaping into lunch, but she is thinking of ways to create nice gardens and landscaping for her beautiful new house.

Normally I’m none too fond of infographics, but Evan’s lead into this one at My Journey to Millions is startling. The graphic itself tends to confirm one’s suspicions about the megacorporatization of your daily lives, and then he follows it with another eye-opening chart.

At Blue-Collar Workman, guest writer Ronald J. Curell expresses a certain jaded skepticism about the marvels of the GPS.

Loving that twice-a-day trudge through the rush-hour traffic? Can’t think of a better way to start the day than by bolting down a toaster waffle as you fly out the door, or to end it with a Burger King grabbed on the way home from picking up the kids at day care? Looking forward to spending another day sitting in a cubicle breathing in your neighbors’ cold germs and listening to their banal phone conversations? No? Well, then you need to read this post at Afford Anything. Absolutely.

Edward Antrobus posts a series of involved strategies to avoid the extra gouges airlines inflict on customers with ever-increasing frequency. We really need to vote in a Congress that will do something about this — like bring back regulation. What a nation of sheep we are!

At  Planting Our Pennies, Mr. & Mrs. PoP contemplate a strategy for getting rid of a paid-off HELOC line of credit originally used to help finance their real estate empire.

Money Beagle has a close call but avoids having to pay dumb tax for not having followed a crucial checklist.

As usual, Blogger will not let me post at Frugal Scholar, Google having decided you must sign up for Google+ for the purpose. I have enough “social media” invading my privacy, thank you. Frugal Scholar has posted an interesting piece in which she describes a scheme to increase the number of points available to her students to 1000. This comes in response to complaints on Rate My Professor (a site where students may post anonymous libels against faculty members and rate their sex appeal) that “there aren’t enough points” in her class. The scheme is to multiply the number of points per assignment by 10; at the end of the semester, the vast total will then be divided by 10 to calculate the final grade. She compares this, with perspicuity, to J.C. Penney’s recent decision to increase prices on its retail goods and then have sales and distribute coupons, because consumers would rather imagine they’re getting a bargain on an artificially inflated price than get a fair price every day. The problem with applying that psychology to the classroom is that it requires the instructor to come up with flurries of small assignments (which, as Frugal says, she already does), an issue I’ve addressed at Adjunctorium in response to Frugal’s post. Since in fact you could assign as many or as few points as desired to any number of assignments, you certainly could generate upwards of a thousand points simply by giving every 10-item assignment 100 points. Or…by giving 250 points to each of four essays and holding the busywork. And yes, students who have to break out a calculator to divide by 10 will very likely be dazzled if you snow them with numbers.

At I Pick Up Pennies, Abby and Tim are off on an anniversary minivacation — not before a fine new plumbing bill, of course. Murphy’s Law strikes again.

And at NZMuse, eemusings is off on an extended honeymoon. If you’d like to see what she and her handsome hero look like, she’s posted two adorable photos at her site. Mazeltov, eemusings!

As for the rest of you, Happy Mother’s Day. I’m cutting choir to go to a Mother’s Day Brunch with M’hijito, and so to play…

No, I didn’t get paid to trot downtown and spend 2/3 of a day in a mock jury trial orchestrated to train budding county prosecutors. Did it because an old friend, recent law-school graduate, worker at a grant-funded county project importuned. All volunteer…it was worth it. What a hoot!

So here was the scenario:

Boyfriend and Girlfriend go to a local casino to celebrate Boyfriend’s birthday. They have a nice dinner, imbibulating a few boozies to go with the food. After a couple of hours at the all-you-can-eat chow line, whereat Boyfriend scarfs up more BBQ’ed ribs than a starving African lion could dream of, they move on to the gambling room.

Girlfriend parks herself at a one-armed bandit. Boyfriend goes to the tables to play a game called Show Low, and as the evening and early morning wend on, he’s doing pretty well. He’s about $860 to the good, but more enticing to his feeble brain-pan, he’s now in the running for a chance at a lottery to win an expensive gift, and he’s also in the running to win a Bass boat, something he’s been coveting for quite some time.

She, however, is not faring so well. When she runs out of money, she applies to Boyfriend for a few bucks to continue playing the slots. As part of their live-in arrangement, they share incomes, so she regards this as a request for her own money.

He declines.

She throws a sh!tfit. The decibel level quickly accelerates. Just as quickly, the casino management asks them to depart. The argument moves into the parking lot.

In the ensuing discussion, according to Girlfriend, he throws her to the pavement, kicks her several times in the ribs, gets in his car, and drives away, thereby “abandoning” her in the casino parking lot. (In Arizona, that would be on an Indian rez, a good long distance from wherever the Belagana She and Boyfriend probably live.)

Nine-one-one is called. A cop arrives. As he’s interviewing Girlfriend, Boyfriend weaves his way back into the parking lot, where, despite creeping along at an ultra-cautious 5 mph, he knocks over three parking stanchions and inserts his car into not one but two parking spaces.

Girlfriend, meanwhile, has displayed several bruises to Cop, which she claims to be the outcome of the evening’s quarrel. Cop takes due notice but does not bother to photograph these alleged injuries.

BF staggers over and engages Cop in a quarrel, during which he expresses his suspicion that Cop, whom he calls “Mr. PlasticBadge,” is GF’s new boyfriend. Cop, not surprisingly, arrests the bastard for drunk driving and domestic abuse.

Fake Jury is asked to discern Boyfriend’s guilt in the matters of

a) driving with even a WHIFF of intoxication;
b) driving sh!tfaced (Arizona’s definition of sh!tfaced is a blood alcohol count of .08; Boyfriend’s was .094);
c) domestic violence in the matter of kicking the bedoodles out of the broad after he tossed her on the pavement.

Prosecution and Defense put on spirited cases. Fake Jurors learn a helluvalot about Arizona DUI and domestic abuse laws, after which we are despatched to a room to deliberate.

OK. In Arizona, it’s illegal to drive a vehicle if you’re even slightly impaired. (This would mean if you have the hiccups, to say nothing of having ingested the numerous hard-liquor drinks Girlfriend says Boyfriend consumed.)

In Arizona, it is believed that any blood alcohol count (BAC) over .08 indicates impairment. Boyfriend has registered over .09.

First off, Defense tells us Boyfriend is a Disabled War Hero, having sustained several concussions (six years prior…) and shrapnel to the knee in Iraq. The apparent unsteadiness on his feet and the inability to follow a point back and forth without jerky eye movements are the aftereffects of his war wounds. Next, Defense tries to insinuate that we have no way of knowing whether the crew of scientists who run the BAC tests have f*cked up said tests. Therefore, say they, we have a reasonable doubt.

Prosecution trots in a forensic chemist (called a “criminalist” in the dumbed-down language of the early 21st century) who bowls everyone over with her professionalism and expertise.

Girlfriend weeps on the stand.

Boyfriend,  limping in with a baroquely exaggerated stagger, proclaims his innocence.

All very informative. Soooo…

How do we hold in the matters of

charge 1: driving a vehicle with even a whiff of intoxication;
charge 2: driving a vehicle heavily under the influence;
charge 3: kicking Girlfriend while she was down?

When we went off to confer about this, I was amazed to discover that I was far from alone in thinking Boyfriend was three sheets to the wind when all these shenanigans occurred but that the evidence did not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he beat the bejayzus out of Girlfriend, once he had her in the parking lot.

We suspected the bruises could have been sustained earlier. We worried that Cop failed to photograph these wounds. Our suspicions were aggravated because Girlfriend didn’t go to an ER to see whether she had any broken ribs or internal injuries. Several of the younger members of the Fake Jury noted that casinos have video cameras coming out the ying-yang, and that Prosecution was remiss in not at least subpoenaing videos of the quarrel inside the building, to say nothing of the probable videos of whatever went on in the parking lot.

Verdicts:

Guilty on counts 1 and 2, DUI
Not Guilty on count 3, domestic abuse.

Here are a few things I learned:

• Police reports are not admissible as evidence. When an officer reports that X person said yyy, that is regarded as hearsay and is not admissible. Only what the officer actually saw and could measure on the scene is admissible.

• Imagining a police officer should document wounds from an alleged domestic violence incident with photographs comes under the heading of “CSI syndrome.” Lawyers should try to elicit these tendencies from prospective jurors and disqualify people who expect concrete documentation of violence.

• Even if you’re far from sh!t-faced, you can be convicted of DUI. Arizona, for example, makes it a felony to be driving to any degree impaired.

• A good lawyer can put on one helluva show.