Axe Man

The Wife and I took out some bushes from our front yard over the weekend and replaced them with flowering plants.  Taking out the bushes involved me chopping them out with an axe and then digging out the taproots with a garden spade.  The post-yardwork margaritas made me feel better that evening but alas, I've no ability to enjoy such a painkiller today at work.

Summertime Margaritas:

6 limes
6 tangerines
1 cup añejo tequila
1 oz. agave nectar
6 cups ice
Splash of Grand Marinier

Juice the fruit, add all ingredients to blender, drink.  Repeat as necessary.

No More Fire

Thanks to all the well-wishers during the Crown Fire.  The fire line wound up coming very close to the aqueduct near my house, but firefighters stopped its advance just shy of the structures there (including two houses where people who work at firm live; they were evacuated for a night).  My house was about two and a half miles away from that point, which is as close as the fire ever got. 

Some buildings were destroyed, including some ranches, so there are those whose dreams and savings went up in flames.  Also, two parks and a nature preserve were razed.  No human beings were seriously injured and even the wildlife casualties were low.  But no one I know was hurt and actually very few man-made structures were destroyed by the fire other than the ranch buildings.  Even some residences that, by all rights, should have been torched wound up surviving (more importantly, along with all their occupants) thanks to the diligent, difficult, and dangerous work done by emergency responders including firefighters, police, and paramedics.

So while the fire was unquestionably bad news, it could have been a lot worse than it was.  A friend of a friend took a spectacular picture of the fire at its peak, and I'm awaiting her permission to post it here.  Watch this post for updates.

Crown Fire

At our usual Thursday night dinner tonight, one of the partners in the firm got called home early by his wife.  A good thing, too, since the fire line for the north end of the Crown Fire has by now advanced to about a mile from their house and they've been ordered to evacuate.  The aqueduct is something of a barrier but a fire with forty-foot flames would clearly be able to jump over it with only a moderate breeze -- and a moderate breeze, uncharacteristically northerly, is all there is for right now.

The fire is clearly visible from my front yard.  I'd say that it's about two miles south-southeast of Soffit House.  We've still got a fair amount of territory between the fire line and our neighborhood, but when the tall flames are visible across the entire ridge line of Ritter Ridge, and people you know are being asked to move by the authorities, it's a little bit creepy.

It makes me wonder if we need to pack up some clothing and start wrangling the critters around -- which is a big pain for the one cat, who gets psychotic when we try to put her in the carrier.  For now there's no reason to panic, but I've no illusions about the effectiveness of lawn sprinklers and my garden hose to protect my house from the flames of a late-July southern California brush fire if by some chance they are allowed to approach here, so if things get worse in the night, we'll be packing up and finding somewhere to be rather than taking any chances.  But as of a little bit after 9:00 p.m. tonight, I'm only "concerned" and not yet taking action.

The house and all of its contents can be replaced; the insurance is paid.  The Wife and the critters, however, are precious and irreplaceable.  So while things appears safe right now, that can change, which means I'll stay awake for a while and make sure that they don't need to be moved somewhere safe. I'm also noticing some strange noises around the house, which makes me wonder if critters from the hills have come down in panic away from the hills to find safety in the residences.  Or if I just have the jitters.

It's worrisome enough that I'm not going to be concerning myself for a while with stress from work (I think I'm over the hump from this week), the Arizona immigration law being mostly enjoined, the very interesting case of the religious student who lost her suit against a public university for not being permitted to base counseling actions in part on her religion, or Obama bringing us closer to the apocalypse.  Somehow that's just not as important as whether or not I'll have to evacuate my family and household in the middle of the night.  So -- not panicking yet, but yeah, it's a little nerve-wracking.

Updated information about the status of this and other fires is available here.

Guidelines For Dinner Parties At Soffit House

1. If you aren't invited to dinner this time around, please don't be offended.  We can't have everyone over all the time.  We try to bring together interesting people interacting with one another.  Singles are welcome to, but not obliged to, bring dates even if we don't know them.  Married guests leaving their spouses at home got some 'splainin to do.
2. We like to start around 6:00 p.m. and generally, we're sorry to see you go whenever that time comes.  But we understand if you want to be home and in bed before midnight.  We have a spare bed available in an allergen-free room if you have a little too much to drink.
3. All food will be prepared from scratch, or very close to it. We might use dried pasta rather than rolling out our own. Or, as we've done with other guests who had a great time helping us out with it, we might just conscript you to help us roll out the pasta.
4. Booze, beer and/or wine will be consumed.  You don't have to drink it.  But we're going to imbibe freely.  The house drink is a vodka Aviation and if you haven't had one, it's worth trying.  So come thirsty.
5. The only thing we really want a guest to bring is interesting conversation.  Bottles of wine, dishes to pass, flowers, and other gifts are warmly appreciated and will be graciously accepted as tokens of friendship, but they are absolutely unnecessary.
6. Soffit House is not child-friendly.  We have no television, no toys, no video games, glass-topped coffee tables, unsafeguarded electrical outlets and unhatched cabinets.  There is nothing for your child to do here other than play with our pets, and they will lose interest in your child after about half an hour of play.  There are some power tools and spare sheets of lumber in the garage so if your child can amuse herself for hours on end with a double-miter saw while you booze it up in the other room, I suppose we can set her up there.  But if not, and you simply cannot leave your kids with a sitter or a grandparent for an evening, well, The Wife and I would be happy to to meet up with you and your charming-and-well-behaved children in some other venue, at some other time.
7. We love our proteins here.  Most likely, meat of some kind will be served as the focal point of the meal, and in generous quantities.  Sometimes, fish may be served.  If you are vegetarian, not a fish-eater, or are otherwise picky about your protein, you may be out of luck.  There will be plenty of other food for you and you wouldn't be our first dinner guest to make a (typically quite enjoyable) meal out of side dishes.
8. 
   Special dietary needs can be accommodated.  A preference for meat cooked to a temperature higher than "medium rare" is a "special dietary need" around here, and I'll need at least 48 hours notice that you want your steak medium or well done.  No vegetarian dinner guest has ever left Soffit House hungry.  But if you're a vegan, I can't offer the same assurance; see guideline #9.
9. You really ought to think of dinner over here as your "break day" from whatever diet or weight loss program you're on.  You're almost certain to be offered foods made using some kind of tasty animal fat.  I'm talking real butter, real bacon grease, real cheese, real cream.  No apologies will be made for the high fat content of any of these ingredients.  They taste good and the purported substitutes for these products produce unacceptably inferior results.  The Wife typically uses liquor (tequila and whiskey are her favorites for this purpose) instead of milk as the liquid ingredient in her batters, and butter cream frosting (primary ingredients being powdered sugar and butter-not-no-stinking-margarine).  This is all very tasty but none of it is even remotely dietetic.
10. If you leave hungry, it's surely going to be your own damn fault.  And we will try to send extra food home with you no matter how stuffed you say you are.

This Never Happens When I Play The Sims

Three in the morning comes and my bladder tells me it's time for a short interruption in sleep.  This problem is easy to solve.  But the dogs hear me moving about and come in, demanding food.  It's earlier than their typical 4:30 a.m. feeding time but I'm still half-asleep and so I decide to feed them.  My throat is very sore and so after I let the dogs out (they are trained to go outside right after they eat) I decide that a salt-water gargle would be just the thing, so I open up the right-hand pantry door, find the salt among our baking supplies, and mix it with hot water.  The taste is disgusting, so I decide to mix myself up one of those little packets of a flavored beverage to counteract the briny ick of the salt water with something sweet-tasting.  So I open up the left-hand pantry door to get at those and

THUNK

a brand-new bottle of Spanish olive oil overbalances and falls on the floor right at my feet, its yellowy-green contents slowly oozing out all over the tile, which is now decorated with itty bitty shards of cheap, thin glass.  The dogs, fortunately, are still outside but now it's five minutes after three in the morning and I have to clean up a quart of olive oil and a broken glass bottle before I can let them in because, lacking the dignity gene, they're going to lick wherever on the floor has any aroma at all and I don't want them to hurt themselves by acting on their instincts.

A great many paper towels later and most of the oil is sopped up from the floor and I begin my hunt for stray glass, looking as best I can for places where dogs might walk or lick.  This reveals dozens of tiny, sharp fragments which I cannot pick up with my fingers, even if I don't mind a little pain and blood.  So now I've got to find a vacuum cleaner to suck up all this glass, which means making a lot of noise but what can I do?  A few minutes of that produces a sleepy, squinting Wife wondering what in the hell is going on and why I'm awake at this hour, and good Wife that she is she takes it all in and figures out that I'm probably best left to my own devices and after showing me where the wet-mop sponge is kept, goes back to sleep like any sensible person would in her sitaution.

I am, of course, wholly awake by now since removing the oleagenous waste and glass has taken a good half hour, and it takes me what feels like another hour to fall back asleep again.  Neither the dogs nor the cats have yet been bothering the kitchen floor any more than they usually do and have not indicated any pain or favoring on any of their paws, so I think that means I did the job right.

Riddle Me This, Riddle Me That...

How come when I get up in the middle of the night to pee I always step with my bare feet on the last remaining tack strip on the edge of the only carpet in the entire house?

Inspired By Hit Coffee: A Good Local Government Story

Inspired by this post over at Hit Coffee, I should point out two things that are good about the two municipal governments that I have noticed recently. 

First, Soffit House is located on the very edge, but still within the municipal limits, of the city of Lancaster.  Two weeks ago, The Wife and I were walking the dogs and noticed that the retaining wall outside one of our neighbor's houses had been tagged with a large, ugly, gang-associated-looking graffito.  I hadn't noticed it driving home that day, so it must have only been a few hours old when we saw it.  Well, the very next morning, a crew in a city truck was out there at the spot, applying paint remover and a new coat of fresh paint on the spot.  It couldn't have been up on the wall for eight hours, tops.  I thought that was excellent response time and top-notch service from the city government.

Second, yesterday afternoon I saw a dead cat on the side of the road in an undeveloped section of the city in which my office is located.  The unfortunate beast had been struck by someone's car and flattened out to gossamer thinness by the traffic.  I called him "Slim."

This wasn't in front of anyone's house or business; both sides of the street are undeveloped desert.  I think one side of the street is actually unincorporated land.  But this morning, Slim The Unlucky Former Cat was gone; no trade of him was visible.  Someone from the city (or maybe the county) had come by to scrape him up and hose the street down.

Now, I'll grant that The Wife saw some coyotes out in the desert about a quarter mile from where Slim had met his demise.  I didn't associate the coyote sighting with my earlier, more grisly observation.  So maybe they helped clean up Slim, but there would still have been bones, skin, fur, and probably a smear of viscera.  So some human agent at minimum finished the job.  And they got on it pretty fast.  So good on for them.

NOTE:  This blog post satisfies the GGV Challenge ("Graffito, Gossamer, and Viscera") for coherent use of obscure words in context.  I defy you to do better.

Rear Bearing

When the rear bearing on your washing machine goes out, that pretty much means you need to replace it; it can cost nearly as much to fix that part as to replace the unit. Which pretty much sucks. When it goes out, you'll know it because during the spin cycle the machine will sound like a jet engine getting fired up for takeoff, punctuated with horrid thunka-thunka-thunka-thunka sounds akin to a teenager learning how to drive stickshift.

How do I know this, you ask? Suffice to say that The Wife and I had been thinking about going to Paris next year. But now we're worried about having clean clothing next week. One may be more important than the other, but it's a hell of a lot less exciting to be going to Sears than it would be to go to France.

The Covey In My Front Yard

Last year, a covey of quail moved in to my front yard.  There were at least six chicks and at least two adults.  Both had drab coloring, so they seemed to both be females.  Then, a neighborhood cat was seen around the area for several weeks, and The Wife and I feared that the cat had dined upon our state birds.

Well yesterday I saw another covey of at least six quail, all adults, again in the front yard, seeking shelter from the winds.  I could hear that they were there again this morning as I drank my coffee, cooing as they scampered about the yard searching for food.

Was it the same birds as last year?  Obviously I've no way to tell; I can't approach them because they fly away when I do, and I can't see any tags on their spindly little quail legs.  It pleases me to think that they are the same, though, and that the cat didn't get them all.  It's pleasing to have birds make their homes in your home.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons, by Len Blumin (cc 2.0).

New Stuff

New oven. The Wife had several bad experiences with the old one -- it never got hot enough, then it got too hot. The window cannot be cleaned. It doesn't fit in with our decor. And the cast-iron spiders that sit over the burners no longer sit level. So we went to Sears, dropped six hundred bucks, and come Wednesday we'll have a new oven. And in a few days we'll have a rebate card in the mail.

And The Wife insisted that I have a Kindle, and they were on sale. Mine came today and it had a lot of charge on its battery. So I downloaded a book (Free, by Chris Anderson, which was available for a price of, appropriately enough, nothing) and started reading it while I got a prescription filled (more about that in a few moments). The device is easy to use, not-quite-intuitive, light as a paperback book but thinner, and the screen is as easy on the eyes as regular paper (which is particularly important today; again, more about that in a bit).

So, yeah, new stuff. New stuff is cool.

Job Well Done

No posts other than this today, because The Wife and I spent all day putting down the hardwood floor in the guest bedroom of Soffit House. We're both sore in places we forgot we had. There's finish work to do and we're both astonished at how far out of square the walls of that room turned out to be. Doing the job required borrowing my neighbor's table saw, and learning a bit about how to work with bamboo -- it splinters very easily. But the toughest part of the job is done.

Interesting anecdote: when talking with the neighbor, I was still wearing my kneepads. He looked at them and said, "Wow, those are some kneepads you've got there."

"Yeah, well, times are tough. You've gotta keep your job any way you can."

Curing Concrete

Laying a hardwood floor is a much more complicated task than I had anticipated. Now it seems that we need to cure the concrete subfloor before applying the mastic to lay the bamboo flooring. That's going to take two-thirds of a day to dry.

So it looks like today will be cure-the-concrete day, and tomorrow, on Super Bowl Sunday, I'll be laying the floor instead of watching the game. Well, I don't really have a dog in that fight anyway. I wonder what other complications are going to come up. Like, moving the planks out of the room while the subfloor dries -- where do we put them? This is a problem I'll solve in a few hours, after I wake up from my insomniac's sleep.

Observations Of A New Dishwasher Owner

Since The Wife and I got a new dishwasher, we've been using the dishwasher a whole lot more. I don't think it's a function of our staying in and cooking more. We're simply more willing to use the new dishwasher now that we have it.

It's easier to use than the old one, it's more effective for dishes and glasses placed on the top rack, and it rinses cleaner. We're more willing to run it while we're home because it's much more quiet. Or, I can set it on a three-hour start delay when I'm done with my breakfast before going to work, so I can shower without using up all the hot water on the dishes -- and The Wife comes home to clean dishes.

This unit isn't drying the dishes particularly well, though, which is a problem The Wife is taking the lead on solving. Once that's accomplished, we'll be in clean dish nirvana.

It Got Better

Scanning in three years' worth of old pay stubs and other personal records (a job still not yet completed, as there are home purchase contracts and another retirement account to go) has been a tedious job. But it was a cakewalk compared to ripping out the carpet in the spare bedroom to prepare it for a hardwood (or laminate? we haven't decided yet) floor. Our trash cans are full of dead leaves, shred, and scraps of old carpet. Household garbage is going to have to wait until next week.

...And that's how I spent my Christmas Vacation, by Transplanted Lawyer.

Scan and Shred

On New Year's Day, I raked up the back yard. About ninety minutes' worth of moderate physical labor produced a garbage can full to the brim with compacted willow and oak leaves (and no small amount of the results of having four dogs prowling the back yard). Today, you couldn't tell I'd done a thing. And my left hand is still numb from the work. By tomorrow the area under the willow will be covered again and it will be more winter raking for me next weekend.

So today I was given a different sort of task -- scanning and shredding our old files. It's 2:30 in the afternoon and I've made it through the "F" folders. The advantage, of course, is that the zeroes and ones on my hard drive -- soon to be backed up on an online archival service -- take up no space. The disadvantage is that getting all this stuff scanned in the first place is a tedious task. I'll be glad when it's all done and our personal files and archives will be totally paperless.

I've already generated an astonishing amount of shred. I suppose if I wanted to be perfectly safe about it, I'd burn the shred, but the chances of a piece of on-fire shred making it out the chimney are greater than I feel comfortable with. And that, too, is the problem with the leaves -- back in Tennessee, you were almost expected to either burn or mulch your leaves, rather than reducing them to trash. But here in the Antelope Valley of California, burning leaves is not an option, our yard is too small for a compost pile, and we lack a mulcher. So some of the trash is going to have to go out in waves, some this week and some next week.

Grilled Cheese Night

The Wife and I were going to meet a friend at the art museum last night to tour some exhibits and have dinner together. However, we were all trapped on this side of the Newhall Pass by a wildfire that closed down the freeway. So instead, we met here at Soffit House for gourmet grilled cheese night. A trip to TJ's got lots of good cheeses and a very nice soup. At the end of the exercise, I was torn between gruyere and havarti for the best sandwiches.

The chocolate fondue we tried to make for dessert did not work out so well. The chocolate burned and curdled a little bit, and all the oil separated from the cocoa. Maybe there wasn't enough cream? Does a chocolate fondue need flour to bind the oil, the way a cheese fondue does? I'll have to look into that further.

So Here's What I Want To Know

My automatic lawn sprinkler control device fritzed out this morning. It won't turn off (there must be a power feed from somewhere I can't control) and one of the gates stayed open for four hours, watering one portion of my lawn continuously for at least two hours.

So is Barack Obama going to fix that for me? Whaddya mean, no?

I've got some debt piled up on our credit cards left over from our trip to visit our families in Wisconsin. I haven't paid it off in full in one month and you know, the interest is starting to pile up.

Is Joe Biden going to pay that off on my behalf? Come on, Joe, help a brother out. (And I mean that in an entirely race-neutral way.)

My car needs a new catalytic converter. You know what they make those things out of? Platinum, one of the most expensive metals on the planet. A new one will set me back something like fifteen hundred bucks and of course the car won't pass a smog test and will make a funny rattling noise until it gets fixed. So what's the government going to do to help me out? Nuthin', that's what.

Change, my ass. Change is what I'm hoping I have left over when all this crap gets fixed. Hope? I hope I'll be able to get all this crap resolved and paid for before more comes up. That's what I hope.

Invasion Of The Mealworms

We've seen dozens of creepy little tan-colored worm looking things in the house. Our best guess is that they are mealworms. We have no idea how they got in the house. The pets, of course, are all oblivious to them. Rather than deal with an obviously an intolerable situation, we have summoned the experts to distribute poison.

The exterminator will be here Tuesday. In the meantime, we've evacuated all the non-canned food from the cupboards into the fridge and freezer, where we are instructed that it must sit for three days to let any of the nasty little things in them die. The exterminator told me today that mealworms, like most bugs, do not tolerate cold well and will die when exposed to prolonged cold temperatures. If they are mealworms, though, they're pretty hardy and will survive being at refrigerator temperatures for up to 72 hours. Who knew?

So Tuesday, we get to inspect all the chilled flour and pasta before re-stocking it in the pantry where it belongs. Turns out, you have a lot more room in your refrigerator than you think when you take everything out, get rid of the old stuff you forget about and will never use, and re-stock it with things that have flat surfaces.

In the meantime, it's a lot of runs out for take-out burritos because we can't be sure what food has mealworms in it or not until after the cool-them-out treatment is done.

The Painful Hole In My Finger

...is a ruptured blister caused by my rake. The rake saw considerable use yesterday because my lawn mower did not pick up any of the pine needles on the front lawn. So I raked them up, to re-expose the grass to the sun. I collected a stack of needles three feet high. A few pine needles, no big deal. But the front lawn was starting to look like the slopes of the mountains up in the Angeles National Forest, and that grass tends to die pretty quickly.

Gardening Update

Our adventures as fruit and vegetable farmers for the season are coming to a close. For a $96 investment, our usable yield has been:

• All the chives, parsley, and rosemary we've wanted
• Two small yellow peppers of high quality
• One small cucumber, fleshy and bitter
• An uncertain quantity (maybe 50?) of super-sweet pear tomatoes
  
• Five Roma tomatoes, with hard, wood-like ends opposite the stems
• Zero green beans (a dog ate the seeds)
  

This works out to about $8 per pepper, $15 for the cucumber, maybe $2 for each Roma, a quarter each for the pear tomatoes, and let's call it $20 for the herbs.

I think in the future, we should maybe leave farming to the professionals.