Coffee heat rising

Month: June 2011

Off the Grid!

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Wow! I can’t believe it: I’m now free of Blackboard!

Everything the comp students could possibly need online henceforth resides, as of this moment, at WordPress.com. I’ve transferred all the course materials, all the links, and all the weekly announcements, and I’ve invented a way for students to post drafts and peer reviews at the site.

For communication, I’ve set up g-mail accounts for each course, so that instead of getting lost in the flood of junkmail the college district dumps in my in-box, students’ messages will arrive in their own neatly filtered in-boxes. All the student e-mails from 102 will come to one place; all from 101 to another place; all from 235 to a third place. It’ll be easy to spot who the senders are and what they need. In theory, we probably could use Google’s instant messaging or chat for real-time conversation, but I’d just as soon not have them in my face outside of class hours.

And in Google Docs I’ve set up spreadsheets to track grades for all three classes, neatly clustered in a single workbook. These were incredibly easy to organize—much, much simpler than the time-consuming, ditzy process of setting up Blackboard’s grade book.

LOL! What’s happened here is that I’ve created my own course management system using Blackboard and Google. It’s not all-in-one, but it’s so much faster, easier, and reliable that whatever the drawbacks to having the grades & messaging in Google, they’ll be worth it.

Click on the image to see a larger version.

I’ve categorized the weekly “learning module” announcements by term lengths: five-week courses, seven-week courses, sixteen-week courses. Once I have them all written, these can reside on the server as unpublished posts until they’re needed. Then when I’m assigned, say, a five-week course, I can filter posts by the “5-week modules” category, access them easily, and simply reset the scheduled publication date. At the end of each course, I unpublish everything; tweak whatever needs to be tweaked (these are set up to be as timeless as possible), and then schedule them all to go back up at the desired intervals.

Same with the “Assignments” categories: the copy in the “draft” posts (where students will post their drafts and peer reviews as comments) is as plain-vanilla as possible, so these can be recycled with little revision.

Freestanding items such as the syllabus, course calendar, instructor’s e-mail, and the like are posted in pages, which in the Twenty Ten theme appear in the banner’s bottom margin:

I’ve deep-sixed the “Blogroll” and replaced it with “Resources,” a list of links to various sites and tools that may help the students.

This is all the same stuff that resided in Blackboard, except it’s all on one page, and its organization is intuitive to young people who are accustomed to navigating the Web. One thing you can say about Blackboard (of the many things you could say about it…) is that it’s about as unintuitive as unintuitive gets.

And one thing you can say about WordPress.com, of the several things you could say, it does not go down!

Oh, and what else can we say about it?

• It does not refuse to accept a PowerPoint presentation.
• It does not turn posting a video into a trip to Hades and back.
• It does not inform you that because you were stupid enough to download the latest Firefox or IE upgrade, you can no longer access your course.
• It does not inflict changes that require whole new learning curves every couple of years.
• When the WordPress folks install an upgrade or a new tool, it does not cause the entire system to crash.
• Nor does it disable the very part of the system that you were using to drive a key part of your pedagogy.
• It does not make you jump through a half-dozen hoops to send an e-mail to a student.
• It does not present functions that stop working and are never fixed.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is better even than being off the electric grid. At least the utility companies function. Most of the time.

How to Cook

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Fearlessly. Incrementally. Ad lib. That’s how we cook.

My mother used to say “if you can read, you can cook.” Surely that’s true: following a recipe isn’t very hard, and the result is usually better than anything you can buy in a restaurant.

Cooking goes beyond reading, though. Eventually it arrives at creativity: at making it up.

La Maya gave me a couple ears of some corn she bought at a roadside stand whose proprietor said they would be wonderful if you just cooked them long enough. Yesh. This corn is white and hard and, when raw, flavorless: the sort of thing, I’m sure, that led humans to feed corn to their livestock.

Coincidentally, my teeth hurt.  The temporary crown the dentist’s assistant applied to the tooth His Dentisthood ground down to a nubbin hurt, and it was making all the teeth in my upper jaw think they hurt so much I couldn’t chew on a damn thing. Hence: soup.

Soup, soup, wonderful soup!

sauteeing onions

Picked up a cebolla cafe at the Mexican market this afternoon—if you speak my language, you would call it a yellow onion. Raided the pantry: a tin of cheap Target canned tomatoes; another of canned beans, a canister of bulk rice. Invaded the refrigerator: remains of a head of red cabbage. Back yard: parsley, marjoram, thyme, sage, carrots growing long in the carroty tooth. Explored the freezer: spinach, peas, the dog’s veggie mix of broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots.

What to do with a cebolla? Dice it and sauté it slowly, over low heat, in olive oil, in the bottom of a stock pot. Add some chopped garlic (ajo); continue to cook slowly.

Cut the tough, strange corn off the cob and throw it in with the cebolla and ajo. Let it keep cooking slowly. Mince the garden herbs and throw them in with the cebolla and ajo and maize. Let it continue to cook slowly. This is where we get the “incremental” part.

After a while, when it looks like the cebolla is soft and golden and maybe even beginning to brown a little over that very slow heat, open the can of tomatoes and dump the contents into the pot. Take a wooden spoon or whatever you have to hand and break open the tomatoes. Stir. Cover and continue to cook slowly.

Now add a fair amount of homemade chicken-beef broth, which you cooked up some time ago. Stir. Add a splash of cheap red wine from the bottle standing on the countertop. Put in a half-cup or more of rice. Stir. Continue to cook slowly, covered.

Slice the cabbage into strips.

Go into the garden and pull up a bunch of carrots. Wash these well; cut them into bite-sized pieces. Place the tops and trimmings into the compost. Let the cut-up carrots sit on the cutting board with the sliced cabbage until the rice appears to be about cooked.

When you think the rice is coming onto cooked, add the cabbage and carrots. Continue to cook slowly, covered.

soup w tomato, cabbage, riceAbout the time the rice is looking almost soft enough to eat, add the cabbage and carrots. Let these cook slowly another short while, until the cabbage brightens up in the way that some veggies do when added to hot liquids.

Open the can of beans. Dump them into a strainer or colander and rinse off the liquid from the can. When it appears that the rice and the fresh veggies are just about cooked, add the beans.

While they are heating through, feed the dog.

Then feed yourself with the elixir that is in your stock pot. Add whatever seasonings and condiments please you: yogurt, sour cream, croutons, herbs, wine, whatEVER.

That is how we cook.

😉

 

Finished veggie soup

How to Make a Composter

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A couple weeks back, I purchased a would-be composter from Costco. Rejected: too complicated to put together, too obtrusive, and at around $100, too expensive. Lucky Costco has a generous return policy.

You may recall that I had a wonderful composter, a gift from my friend La Bethulia. I really loved it. In the first place, its design was the soul of simplicity: a round plastic barrel that fit in a base, allowing you to turn it like a ferris wheel to mix and aerate the compost.

It died a gruesome death at the hands of a so-called “beekeeper” who wrongly decided the feral honeybees that had invaded it were nesting inside it. This idiot filled the thing with powdered insecticide—after I told him not to. It not only destroyed the compost inside, I couldn’t get the contaminated compost out because every time I tried, clouds of powdered poison flew up into my face.

These things are surprisingly expensive: around $170 at Amazon. They’re probably worth it, because of the simplicity of their design, their effectiveness, and the fact that they do not contribute an eyesore to your garden.

However, in my current state of chronic unemployment, that’s a little more than I’d like to pay. Hence the unsuccessful attempt at the cheaper model from Costco. Ninety-nine bucks looked pretty good for a 75-gallon tumbler. w00t!

Having returned it, I was depressed. A big old plastic plant pot covered with its (now sunlight-crumbled) pot saucer was decocting a small amount of compost, mostly compiled from the pool’s leaf-catcher and pump pot. But it wasn’t enough to do much for the garden, and a plastic plant pot the world’s most efficient composter does not make.

Then the other day I cut back the cat’s claw, which after reviving from its drubbing by last fall’s hail and the winter’s hard freezes has decided it’s a jungle plant. Had to scissor it back from around the pool equipment so the Leslie’s guy could service the filter. Along the way I pulled spent veggies out of the garden, harvested the leeks and trimmed off their tough outer leaves, and raked some leaves. The result: a large pile of highly compostable vegetable matter that I really, really, really did not want to throw in the garbage.

The yard needed a composter. It needed one that did not take three men and a horse to put together, would not cost upwards of $150, and would not be plug hideous.

So I decided to make one. Here’s how that came down:

The trash can

First: the Home Depot run. There, purchase a plastic trash bin (round, not square, and not the kind with wheels). Be sure it has a lid that snaps on securely.

Drag this home and take off the manufacturer’s glued-on stickers. Place it in the backyard near an electric outlet.

Haul out your trusty electric drill and a handy-dandy extension cord. Install the heftiest drill bit you own.

Beloved drill

And yes, gentlemen! I know that’s a masonry bit and I do know the plastic is gonna melt all over it, but I’m past the time in life when I crave to drill any more holes in concrete. Besides, as a practical matter, the plastic didn’t melt onto it at all.

Okay. Flip the trash bin upside down and take the drill to the bottom of it. You want to drill plenty of drain holes all around the bottom, because compost likes to be damp but not soggy.

While you’re at it, drill a bunch of holes around the trash can’s sides, too. The idea here is to let enough air in to please the little compost bugs. Although much of composting is an anaerobic process, compost bugs go a long way to break down vegetable matter, too. These useful little creatures will suffocate unless they have enough air. Voilà…

Once the bottom and sides are thoroughly punctured, set the can upright in the corner of the yard where you’d like to keep it. Throw in some stuff you’d like to compost—just about anything organic that is not meat or animal waste—and sprinkle lightly with a little water. Don’t overdo this: moist is good; boggy is not.

I topped my recent cuttings with the half-composted stuff in the plant pot. If you already have a little compost, it’s a good idea to put it in with the new material, because it acts like starter dough: the organisms that break down plant matter are already thriving in it, giving you a head start on the new batch.

Snap the lid on firmly, and then just go away. Over time, the organic material in the dark, warm, damp environment will cook down into lovely black compost, which will make your plants extremely happy. You can keep adding kitchen waste and garden trimmings ad lib.

Now and again you should toss compost to aerate it and mix it around. A small pitchfork would work with this contraption, but I have a much better plan: when the time comes, in a few weeks, to shake it up, I’m going to secure the lid with a tight bungee cord run through the handles. Then flop the thing on its side and just roll it back and forth a few times. That will accomplish the same thing the fancy tumbling composter does, for about a quarter of the cost.

Speaking of the garden, here’s what’s been growing lately…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Swimming pool w00t!

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Into the drink late this morning, after a bunch of yard- and housework was done! Yahoo! The pool water is perfect! Just cool enough to be refreshing but not (quite) so cold as to freeze you into a solid block of ice.

Texas sage

The lovely Texas sage is in full blossom, arching over the deep end to create a shady grotto and setting little leis of purple flowers afloat in the water.

The weather is warming up. Looks like we’ve seen the last of the little stretches of respite that have brought night-time temps into the 60s. We won’t get a break from the heat until August, when (if we’re lucky) evening monsoons will drop temperatures about 20 degrees—but add so much water to the air that the morning heat will feel 20 degrees hotter than its normal 110 degrees.

This is the time of year when a swimming pool is the best thing, a luxury beyond all McMansionville.

Life is good.

For the time being…

Close Encounters of the Wee-Hours Kind

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Ugh! What could be worse than waking up at two in the morning with a headache?

Well…waking up at two in the morning with a headache, booting up your Mac, and having Firefox try to redirect to an Amazonaws site.

{sigh} Good morning to you, too!

I think Firefox may have blocked it. FF popped up an “invalid certificate” message. Amazonaws is a redirect virus—from what I can tell, it hijacks your browser to a site that tries to sell you fake antivirus software. I was able to abort the tab before it could load. Cleared the cache, then rebooted Firefox and don’t see anything amiss just now. Started Safari: no problem there…at least, not that’s readily visible.

At any rate, everything I’ve been working on over the past several endless days is backed up to an external drive and to the cloud, so if this antique unit is infected, the world will not come to an end.

Nothing much new here. All work and no play is making Funny a very dull girl. I’m still laboring through the phenomenal amount of work involved in building my summer courses with the new scheme to raise their academic standards. I’ve rewritten the calendars and syllabi, cleaned up and revised the PDF packages, replaced the peer review guidelines with the new modified rubrics, scheduled time in the library and computer commons (I hope…assuming they’ll let my classes in as desired). Remaining to do: write weekly modules for 102 course; finish writing weekly modules for the 101 course; create the 101 website; post and schedule modules on both sites; create grade sheets in Excel and upload to Google Docs; create individual reporting gradesheets; set up organizational labels in gmail accounts for TAs. That should take about three more days.

Then I’ve gotta start all over again for the fall classes. Fall course prep has to be done NOW, because these second-session summer courses bump right up against the start of fall classes. There will be exactly zero break between the end of the 8-week 102 course and the beginning of fall semester. So my fall classes will have to be ready to go before these summer courses begin.

Now that the new Lady Cruella scheme is realized, though, it should be relatively easy to recycle the stuff I’ve written for the summer courses. I’ll have to write fall calendars and syllabi. Plus we have a new textbook for 101, starting in the fall, and so the 101 reading assignments will have to be rewritten.

The new text is much superior to the Longman handbook we’ve been using. Unfortunately for me, that means I’ll have to read the damn thing. There’s exactly a month to go before summer classes start…and I’m afraid every minute of that time is going to be occupied with unpaid labor.

In the money department, I’m afraid to enter all the charges I’ve run up in the past couple of weeks. The receipts are sitting in my wallet waiting to be entered in Excel. Though I’ve managed to stay out of Costco, I did go into the terrifying Pier One and spend something over a hundred bucks on decorator items.

Bad human!

Then to make things worse, I so much liked the tube dress from Whole Foods that I decided to go grab another one. They’re not expensive—under $30—but when things are tight even thirty dollah seems like too much. But where clothing is concerned, I tend to operate on the theory that if it fits, it looks good, and you really like it, you should get two of them because you’ll never see them again.

Didn’t stop there, though: got my hair done. Went back to my lady in Tempe, which was an excuse to go out to lunch with my former associate editor and present subcontractor, whose second layoff from the Great Desert University is being spun out over about a year.

Hair lady only charged $50, which is an amazing bargain considering that she produced a style very much like the amazing Shane’s for a little more than half of what he charges. The S-corp paid for the business lunch, so that at least doesn’t come out of my regular cash flow budget.

But a couple of other restaurant junkets most certainly will. Gotta stay out of restaurants and gourmet grocery stores! 😀

Spent some more money at Home Depot, speaking of places to stay out of. Still want a composter, but am not, not, not going to pay $150 for the privilege. I’d picked up one from Costco for $99 (even that was way too much). Brought it home and realized I couldn’t even begin to put it together: it required two people and power tools. Reviews on the Web were replete with people complaining that it took four or five hours to construct, and the job really needed three, not two people. If I’d had Jack the Handyman do it, he’d have charged as much as I paid for the thing.

So, having returned that contraption a couple of weeks ago, yesterday I picked up a plastic trash bin with a snap-on lid. I’ll punch holes in the bottom and sides, load it with vegetable waste, and voila! Compost bin. Secure the lid with a bungee cord, and you can flop it over on its side and roll it back and forth to turn your compost. Cheaper, but still…not what you’d call “free.”

Moving on, my car has developed an oil leak and it needs a new timing belt. Chuck remarked that sometimes oil leaks on that model spring up around some timing belt thingamajigger whose name I don’t recall at this hour; if that’s the case, he wants to change the belt now, not later. Interestingly, though, I don’t happen to have $350 or $400 laying around, not after the late, great dental adventures.

I hate to put a chunk of money into that old clunk. Really, I should get a new (or at least newer) vehicle. But this is not the time. I missed my chance to take money out of a brokerage account for that purpose; with the market plummeting, I’m not about to cash out now. And if I’m going to buy a car, I’d rather wait till the end of the year, when prices are a little lower.

Water bill came in surprisingly low, under a hundred bucks. It’s getting hot enough now that the potted plants need to be watered every day to keep them alive. So I expect it’ll be up to $125 next month. By then, though, a paycheck will be coming in. Mirabilis!

Welp, the headache is easing and it’s not even dawn yet. I’m goin’ back to bed!

Image: Perseid meteor striking the sky just below the Milky way. Mila. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

Wafting on the Wind…

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It’s 10:00 p.m. and I just finished the last revamped syllabus for the summer courses, which begin to incorporate my various schemes to make life terrifying interesting for my students. Been a bit silent on the blog because of the workload and the various adventures.

This morning my friend KJG came into town to socialize. She lives on the far side of the galaxy, halfway to San Diego, and so getting together can be a project. She brought her doberman pinscher along to schmooze with Cassie the Corgi. That was entertaining.

KJG’s dobe was a rescue dog that came to K and her husband with some serious behavioral problems. Today, though, the dog is impeccably well mannered. She’s mellow, quiet, and amazingly intelligent. Amazingly alert, too: very little gets past this animal.

Contemplating that very beautiful beast, it crossed my mind to wish I could still handle a big dog. As much as a large, powerful animal can be a challenge, it’s also reassuring to have something that will take out an intruder or die trying. Cassie slept through the guy trying to get in the side door a while back and remained silent while the alarm was squealing. KJG’s dog would have shot out of the bedroom and down the hall before I could’ve regained consciousness from the deep sleep that the door alarm interrupted.

A week or ten days ago, a couple of guys practicing the same MO—quietly breaking in at four in the morning—tied up an elderly couple and beat the bejayzus out of them. Imagine beating up a pair of 80-year-olds!

Nothing like a little meth to cut the boredom factor.

Speaking of the which, yesterday along about 2:30, after I’d come home from eight hours of driving around the city, I picked up the phone to chat with La Maya. Carrying it around the property, I walked into the garage for something and remarked that Phew! It smelled like something had died out there!

La Maya said she’d smelled a bad odor when she got home, too: when she walked from the garage through the courtyard into her house, she thought she smelled gas.

I said it didn’t smell like gas; it smelled like sulfur. And yes, it was indeed outdoors…I could smell it in the side yard and in the sheltered back patio.

But by the time I got inside, the stench had wafted into the house so that the family room and dining room stank to high heaven! Dayum!

La Maya also could smell it at her house. We debated whether we should report this, and if so, to whom. Ultimately we decided she would call Southwest Gas and I would call the City.

The City sent an engine full of firemen, who did nothing.

Southwest Gas sent a guy who inspected both houses and the gas lines in the alleys. He couldn’t find a gas leak. He agreed that he didn’t think it smelled like natural gas and speculated that it could be sewer gas released by some of the construction in the area.

I said I used to live near 15th Avenue and Osborn, where, because an excess of high-density housing has overwhelmed the sewer system, the air stinks of sewer gas most of the time. So I know what sewer gas smells like, and that ain’t it.

He allowed as to how it didn’t smell exactly like sewer gas to him, either. Whatever, he opined that it was not flammable and that it was outdoors, and so he went on his way.

Yes. Smells like natural gas or rotten eggs (i.e., “sulfur”).

A fair breeze was blowing in from the southwest, meaning we were upwind from the nearest construction, about a mile away. And also meaning it was blowing in from the gang-infested slums that have risen from the blight between us and the freeway. I suspect we were smelling meth in the cooking process.

It’s not the first time a whiff of it has perfumed the family room, either. I’ve smelled it several times over the past few weeks. Figured it was eau de doggo, since I haven’t committed an excess of cleaning while I’ve been working myself stupid lately. But Cassie is not a smelly dog at all. If she smelled like that, I’d have noticed the odor on her, not in the air.

gaaaahhhhh! I need to move away from here! Sure would be nice if I could afford a comparable house in a safer part of town. Or a safer part of the world.

But I can’t.

Makes a large dog with sturdy fangs and hair-trigger nerves look like a charming pet.

Image: European dobermann pinscher. By Ilicivan at en.wikipedia. Public domain.