Walls, Roofs & Flower Beds

A parapet is a wall that extends above the roof line.
Our living room has six walls. All six extend to parapets,
as do all exterior bedroom walls.
That's a scupper in the middle.

Of the three — walls, roofs and flower beds — the most damaging was the flower bed. The culprit is water, which by itself is pretty odd given that we live in a desert, albeit one of the earth's wetter deserts.

Walls and roofs are supposed to keep water outside of a house. Well, apparently rainfall in the Sonoran Desert is sufficiently unusual that architects and builders need not bother themselves too much about it. Take our concrete paved backyard and swimming pool apron, for example. They slope towards the house. Come heavy monsoon rains — an annual affair most monsoon seasons — water flooded under the two back doors into the house.

Flat roofs are common here: flatter than your sewer pipe which by code has to slope at least a quarter inch to the foot.

The living room wall where the insulation and framing
were littered with ancient rodent droppings. After
demolition and chlorine, nice and clean.

Our roof is typical. It is so flat that water puddles with dew even on a clear morning. But hey, coat the flat roof with that white elastomeric polymer stuff. It's very good stuff, actually. But if you read the teeny tiny print on the container, in both English and Spanish, it's not recommended for flat roofs that puddle.

From my observation, my explanation is because it ever so slowly but surely dissolves and erodes the coating. You need a new coat every couple of years, if not more often.

Stucco walls are common here. Stucco covers the stick built frame. Stucco is also good stuff but, like the roof, it needs maintenance to remain water tight. Like many houses here, ours has parapets: walls that extend above the roof. The tops of those walls are stuccoed and they are boundaries between what roofers roof and what painters paint. They are directly exposed to sunshine and weather.

Parapets also have scuppers in them, metal channels to drain rainwater. Stucco (basically, cement and sand), metal (the scuppers themselves) and polymer elastomeric all expand and contract differently. Plus, having reached in myself with a brush generously dipped in elastomeric it's almost impossible to get a good coat inside the six-by-four opening that is twelve inches deep. So you get cracks and gaps.

Parapets, scuppers, and stucco are architecturally pretty. They also can be maintenance nightmares. 

The north wall which was covered with
cat claw vine. Yours truly broke up the
solid line of masonry that held the
flower bed planter against the stucco
wall. It was this area where Vinny replaced
wall board in the bedroom on the inside.

Then we have flower beds. If you put them next to the stucco walls — I mean the soil rests against the bottom foot or two of the stucco, even above the concrete foundation — you are asking for trouble. That's what the previous owners did, Auggie and Karen, and who knows how many other previous owners in the five decade history of this house. Yes, there is a tar paper lining between the soil and the stucco, but if you do a lot of watering, which Auggie and Karen did, the sprinklers throw water on the walls.

All we knew when we bought the place was there was so much damage to the north side that Auggie and Karen's broker, Vinny "Cover & Conceal" Yackanin, had his slap and dash crew tear out and replace wall board inside the north bedrooms, dig out all the house-hugging flower beds, and replace the soil with cheap one-inch crushed rock.

Vinny also had his crew put a coat of elastomeric on the roof to hide decades of neglect, leaks, and rotten plywood.

Cover & Conceal worked. Our building inspector — a curse on that profession which has never disclosed anything significant to me buying a house — never noticed a thing and pronounced the roof in good shape..

A fascinating footnote. We noticed the stucco outside the guest bedroom (where Vinny had to repair water & mold damage) and the adjacent cement block chimney had been covered with creepers. Remnants of the cat claw vine still hung to the stucco all the way to the roof like ivy on a ruined English castle. That flower bed, like the others, was irrigated by electronic sprinkler system. (When Shari set up our account at Tucson Water, she was told the property had been labeled high use.) Well, that creeper served as a freeway for the rodents to get on the roof and gnaw their way inside the living room walls.

Not a pretty sight even in a photo. The insulation and
the studs on this corner of the bedroom were covered
with black mold. Major wood rot around and under the
window. The corner on the other end of this same
wall has a corner stud three-quarters eaten out by
termites attracted by the moisture. (We had the termites
eradicated some years back.)

That was all covered up by Vinny's roof coat.

We don't know what was planted and watered by the flower bed on the east side outside the master bedroom. Cover & Conceal also had that dug out, but he never bothered to repair the damage to the window and inside the walls.

The good news is the heavy monsoon rains this year caused leaks in the living room, my office, and the master bedroom. That prompted us to work on the scuppers, parapets and roof. More importantly, we had the insides inspected by mold specialists who confirmed the problems. Even more importantly, the mold specialist was so long getting us his estimate, we hired Bear Down Builders (of tower remodel fame) to do the work.

Then we got the mold specialist's seven-page quote, complete with Biblical verse (Corinthians 12:9-10). Admittedly an upside bid, it was $12,000. Bear Downs' estimate was $2,000, although we expect we will go over. We are paying time and materials and we know and like the folks at Bear Down Builders. We want the work done.

The bedroom wall exposed. Nice and clean.

I cleaned up after the Bear Down Builders work pulling drywall nails and bits and pieces of wretched insulation. That would save them some time when the new drywall is installed and it gave Shari and me opportunity to get a close look. Shari donned lab coat, industrial face mask, and thick gloves to scrub mold and spray chlorine bleach over all exposed areas. We have had the rooms breathing and drying with fresh air.

I must say, having the walls exposed and cleaned, we are overwhelmingly grateful to have the work done.

Caesalpinia

 Or, The Effect of Monsoon Rain on Life. 

In this case, on Caesalpinia pulcherrima. In the Sonoran Desert, we call the legume plant with spectacular flowers, Mexican bird of paradise. Its common names include peacock flower and in Bermuda, where it is the national flower, the pride of Bermuda.

Anyway, our winter and spring rainfall having been almost non-existent, our Caesalpinia was sparse and struggling. Then came July, then August, and we are not done with September. Tucson's rainfall already this year has exceeded its annual average.

Nature responded. Our Caesalpinia is a flowering jungle, and the unusually plentiful butterflies and moths are feasting upon the flowers.

The River Flows

Weather is in the news all around the world. Much of it is pretty dire.

It's been a while, but so far the monsoon season this year has brought us rain pretty much every day this July, and the forecast is more of the same.

We had a trace all through June. Here in the Foothills for July, we are at around three to four inches.

The monsoon bust last year, coupled with a wildfire in the Catalinas, make us appreciate the rain. We could not be more ecstatic.

These days remind us why it's called the Rillito River. Can you hear the Colorado River toads croaking?

The Creek Flows

When we get rain in the Sonoran Desert, we get excited. When we get monsoon rain, I grab my video camera.

The first monsoon deluge is always a welcome relief after weeks and weeks of dry summer weather with daily three-digit high temperatures (38+C.).

This deluge was particularly welcome. Some months ago I uncovered and opened up four culverts under the driveway. They had been blocked for as long as we have lived here. When we had heavy rains, a large lake formed on the north side of the driveway. My plan was to restore the creek flowing from the roof of the house down into the gully on the south side of the driveway, into Coat Hanger Valley.

The plan worked.

The Tower Gets Shade

 A video program chronicling the evolution of the old tower into the new.

New Stairs to the Tower

The original plan was to hire some guys to build a trellis over the tower. That meant redoing the tiled surface that had suffered over the years between baking in the sun and flooding in the rain. Little did we suspect the stairs also were in really bad shape.

Fortunately, the "guys" to whom we were referred really know their stuff, worked with us, and are remarkably excellent folks. Among other capabilities, they have connections who fabricated a new steel staircase.

Here is the crew putting it up.

If you need some construction work done in the Old Pueblo, we have a great referral for you.

Purple Finch

 Saguaros are handy places for nests, but the chicks have to keep really still.

Dancing Light

Sitting outside on a February evening, appreciating the warm light of the setting sun, Shari takes a video shot. On playback, a light can be seen, sometimes a single spot of green, sometimes splitting into several spots all clustered together, an aura around them.

The camera is pointed to the sunset, and the light disappears as the camera moves away from the sunset, but the light does not move with the camera. It seems to have a life of its own.

Cooper's Hawk

We see hawks often enough, but not hanging around our swimming pool. We wondered whether this Cooper's hawk was thinking about taking a dip. (It didn't.)

A New Way of Reading

Mór Jókai

Growing up in Sydney, then through high school in Seattle, I read voraciously. Enid Blyton wrote over twenty books in the children's series, The Famous Five, and another seventeen in The Secret Seven series. I probably read most of them, if not all. Then my sister was reading breast-heaving novels by Georgette Heyer who wrote over forty-eight of them. I probably red six or a dozen.

I graduated to several novels by Dickens, Jane Austin, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, and even Thackeray's Barry Lyndon before tackling Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf and Magister Ludi, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and Crime and Punishment.

I would devour novels. It took me only three weeks to read War and Peace, one day to read Jane Eyre, and a week to get through Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. I was that eager to find out what happens at the end.

Law school cured me of the reading habit. I had to read so many legal opinions, my eyesight grew weak and, frankly, I was burned out. Pretty much all I read was non-fiction. In more recent years, thanks to the encouragement of my sister who had passed on those Georgette Heyer novels, I became fascinated reading a translation of Les Miserables. It took me a couple of months or more to get to the end.

Two years ago I tackled Egri csillagok ("The Stars of Eger"), the Hungarian historical novel which is one of the most widely read books in Hungarian literature. I purchased an English translation, became dissatisfied with it when I compared it to the original Hungarian text, and spent a year on my own translation. (Copies available at Lulu.com.)

As I approach retirement, I am thinking maybe I should take up reading more seriously. I spent $1.99 on another Hungarian novel, an e-book version of a 19th century English translation of another Hungarian historical novel, The Golden Age in Transylvania by Mór Jókai. That was slow reading. I was bothered by the translation. As with Egri csillagok, I downloaded the Hungarian original, Erdély aranykora, as a text file from the web. 

I became dissatisfied with the Victorian English translation as I compared it to the Hungarian original and decided to make my own translation. That was twenty-four days ago. I just finished the translation this morning. The initial hard work of translation is done and my eagerness to find out what happens at the end has been satisfied. At least for this novel, I not only devoured it, I ruminated over the meaning of each sentence before going onto the next.

The novel really is a page-turner. It is a written historical novel set in the semi-independent Principality of Transylvania in the years 1661-1674.

It is also a psychological novel with historical characters that have depth and evolve.

In some chapters, the novel is a fantasy with detailed descriptions of exotic oriental pleasure palaces set in the remote mountains of Transylvania and the northern Carpathians. Translating Jókai's descriptions of forest streams, craggy mountains, polished rock cirques, and even an avalanche brought back my own memories of hiking in the Cascades and Olympic Mountains. Clearly, the author had visited and observed such places. The Victorian translation either omitted these vivid descriptions or condensed them into a short paragraph.

A Reclining Odalisque,
by Gustave Léonard de Jonghe, c. 1870

Then there is many a passionate breast-heaving scene, which portions the Victorian translation also omitted, and a generous sense of comedy, sometimes slapstick, often subtle. Jókai knew very well how to appeal to a broad audience of human emotions.

Chapters bounce back and forth in time and from scene to scene. Connections develop as the novel progresses, and seemingly inconsequential details and the occasional obvious clue assume necessary significance in a later chapter. The chapters are like scenes in a play, and Jókai's descriptions of the characters' emotions and thoughts are like a playwright's directions to actors on a stage.

The fantasy scenes are an allegory and the themes are hubris and the seductions of wielding and manipulating power. It is a novel about a national tragedy.

Mór Jókai in his study

Jókai participated in ill-fated Hungarian war of independence, 1848-1849, and kept a low political profile for the following fourteen years during which he wrote some thirty novels. The Golden Age in Transylvania was published in 1852. After the Great Compromise of 1867 established the dual monarchy of Austro-Hungary, he was even more prolific: several hundred volumes. His novels were translated and very popular in Victorian Britain, even with the Queen herself. 

There is lots of material to satisfy my need for a hobby. I have a new way of reading. Instead of quickly reading a novel to simply take in the plot, having to translate slows me down to appreciate and admire the details.

The hard cover of my treasured Hungarian-English dictionary is beginning to wear and tear at the folds. I am addicted to not only Google translate (mis-translations often great for a good chuckle), but also to Google's Hungarian dictionary that often holds clues to decipher archaic or unusual Hungarian words. Often I had to get up and pace, maybe make another cup of coffee, before the meaning of a baffling, obscure and convoluted (to an English reader) Hungarian sentence pops into my mind.

As I walk Nazar the Wonder Dog in the wash, my mind is full of prose.