I’m back on my hilltop and am momentarily alone here on this quiet sunny Saturday morning in late September. Kim is up caring for Sharon, her older sister and will return later today after having lunch with an old pal in Santa Barbara. Buddy is finishing up a few days stint with his doggy pals at Doggy Day/Night care and is unaware that I will be picking him up in a bit and bringing him home (he will be mightily excited). I’ve seen my daughter and one of my two granddaughters in the past day in Brooklyn and I’ve spoken to one of my son’s in the past day (the other will get my usual weekly call tomorrow). I also just spoke to my sister Kathy just to catch up and see what she’s been up to. While in NYC I dined over three nights with four close friends and I spent three days making business calls with my three business partners to very positive effect. They were happy with my presentations to the five major law firms we saw and those firms were impressed enough with our program that at least three of them have asked that we consider partnering with them on the topic we discussed. That all means that I have fed every emotional and intellectual corner of my self in the past few days, all at the cost of only a somewhat grueling cross-country plane ride both ways (how tough can a first class seat be?).
As far as the hilltop goes, everything is in pretty fine repair. The hot end of summer weather has taken a small toll on the succulents, but not too bad. They will perk up with the first signs of autumnal rains and in the mean time I have the time to water them a bit to help them get through the heat. Speaking of heat, it will top out at about 90 degrees today and much of next week looks to be in the 80s, so it is warm, but not unpleasant, which is just the way we like it on the hilltop. Before I left for NYC I tried to do some yucca tree pruning and it only took getting stabbed in each forearm to convince me that while there is nothing difficult or dangerous about the exercise, it was still better left to Miguel, who will be coming for the day on Monday. I will compile a list over the weekend of the tasks I want him to focus on and for a few hundred bucks he is happy to do the chores that I would rather leave to others. I do have two projects which I want to get onto over the next few days, but they are minor. I have had my basalt column fountain off for a few weeks, so my plan is to pump out the reservoir basin (I have a new pump that operates off the power of a handheld drill, so I will try that out and see how it works. After drying and cleaning out that sump bucket, I will give it a good dose of anti-algaecide and refill it. I am interested in seeing how long a real thorough and proper deep cleaning will last in warding off the algae clogging that tends to slow down the pump and cause me to go through the rigamarole of unearthing (technically, unstoning) the bucket and cleaning the pump filter.
The other project that is somewhat overdue could either be real simple or a royal pain in the ass. The extension outdoor low-voltage uplights down at the entrance of the driveway have been out for a while. I am pretty sure there is nothing wrong with the fine German brass light fixtures with their LED lamps, so I rather suspect that the low-voltage wiring just got cut or loosened somewhere and somehow by a gardener or perhaps my irrigation guy, all of whom tramp around in that area. We’re talking about only 20 feet or so of wire, so if the worst I have to do is just rewire the whole set-up, it’s really not so much work, but its work that requires kneeling in the dirt and threading wiring through spiky succulents and cacti to position the lamps under an old mesquite tree that sits next to the entry boulder. The light washing on the rock under the tree is a very nice entry look, so I’m keen to get that working again. Because it operates on the circuit that works the entry gate lights and is therefore on a photovoltaic timer (and thus not a part of the rest of the outdoor lighting system), its impossible for me to test it to see if I’ve fixed it until nightfall. That means that if I’m lucky I’ll do a good enough job in one day and it will working that night. If not, I have to iterate every day until I get it right. In theory I could probably use a voltmeter and figure out how to activate the photovoltaic switch, but that is way more trouble than I’m prepared to undertake. I will take my chances with my simpler iteration protocol.
I do have 40-foot agave stalk down on the lower back hillside and I thought it might be time to have it cut down, but I see the seed pods are still more or less in tact, so I will leave it for another month or so before asking Miguel, or with any luck, Joventino, if he gets back from Mexico, to cut it down and dispose of it. By the way, I am pretty much done with Alejandro, Joventino’s suggested replacement, as I never feel like I get value and Miguel is both such a hard worker and much more reliable and reasonably priced.
So, I have just run down everything in the world that I have to worry about at the moment and as you can see, it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. What exactly is a hill of beans all about? “A hill of beans” is an American expression for something almost worthless. It combines an old idiom with a farming practice. The “beans” part is very old. Since at least the 1200s, English speakers have used the bean as a standard for trivial value. Phrases like “not worth a bean” appear in Middle English writing, because a single bean was cheap, common and tiny. The “hill” part comes from farming. In early America, beans (and corn and squash) were often planted in “hills,” small mounds of earth holding a few seeds each. Colonists picked this method up from Native American growers. One hill produced only a handful of beans, so “a hill of beans” meant a trivially small amount. The phrase was in American print by the mid-1800s, often as “not worth a hill of beans.” It was cemented by Casablanca (1942). Near the end, Bogart’s Rick tells Ilsa that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Well, it is a very crazy world and that’s what’s nice about being back on this hilltop…there is nothing crazy going on, at least not at the moment. In fact, I think its fair to say that I feel like I don’t have a care in the world, and that’s a wonderful feeling.