Coffee heat rising

Month: December 2011

How Do You Spell “Puppy”? c-h-a-o-s

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Make that c-h-a-o-s-! The exclamation point is part of the spelling, when the term applies to puppies.

Holy mackerel! What a morning. And it’s just starting. While I wait the 20 to 40 minutes it will take to make the decrepit iMac (the only computer in the house that will speak to the printer) scan and store two clients’ checks and then upload them to the credit union, let us entertain ourselves with Charley’s antics of the day. So far.

So I get a little bit of a late start, in spite of awaking at 4:30 a.m. I’ve dawdled over the online news and my favorite time-killing games until ten after seven. Not only does Cassie need to be fed, but I like to have had my own breakfast before the young dynamo shows up around ten to eight. If Cassie and I don’t get going by seven, breakfast is going to be hurried.

She’s bolted her Queen of Sheba breakfast and I’m about to sit down to my three slabs of bacon and dry toast when I hear the blower running outdoors.

Gerardo! Have to unlock the side gate so he can get into the backyard, and also confer with him.

He wants to know when M’hijito wants him to show up at the downtown house (an assignation my son has  put off, put off, and put off some more, mostly because the yard needs little maintenance that he can’t do, plus with a six-month-old pup excavating, there’s not much point in paying a yard dude. Now, having accrued a fine mess, he wants it cleaned up before his New Year’s party). I say Pup has destroyed a bunch of planting there that needs to be removed but I don’t know what to tell him exactly, it not quite being my house, and but M’hijito will show up in half an hour and they can speak directly.

Now, as a matter of fact I know M’jihito will be flying through like a rocket, because he’s chronically late to work, and I know he’s not going to want to talk to Gerardo. But when he shows up, I make him go out and confer.

This means I have to stand in the kitchen with what remains of my miserable little breakfast congealing atop the table, coffee turning cold, and HOLD the writhing, frantic Charley, because the old bathmat I put in front of the door to the garage (through which my princely son has exited) is all wadded up so I can’t close the door, and I can’t bend down to move it or shove it with my foot without losing my grip on Charley, who is already powerful enough to draw Santa’s sled. And of course M’hijito has left the door from the garage to the backyard open, and Gerardo has left the side gate open, so under no circumstances can I let go of Charley because he will head for Yuma on a dead run.

Conference over, my son pushes the rug back into place, shuts the kitchen door, and races out the front door, even later for work than usual.

I sit down to finish my congealed bacon and now cold, limp toast.

A slurpy little noise drifts out of the kitchen. What? Charley walks out, smacking his lips. I figure the noise was him lapping something off the extremely dirty floor, which as usual I haven’t had a minute to clean in weeks.

I finish eating, look up, and notice Cassie has shat (again!) under the desk in the family room (thank God for tile floors!). So I get up to retrieve some paper towels to pick up that mess. Rummage in the under-sink cabinet; can’t find the spray bottle of Simple Green; start to cuss when I realize I am standing almost up to my ankles in a YELLOW PUDDLE!

Ah yes. That was what the trickling noise was…

Charlie has pee’d a sea of pee all over the kitchen floor. The soles of my shoes are covered with it; he has tracked it all over the kitchen, and now I’m tracking more of it all over the kitchen. And I’m out of paper towels.

Out to the garage, tracking pee behind me. Open a new package. Swab up the piss, after a fashion—it’s raining here and the air is wet (not to say damned stinky) and the stuff isn’t drying and so I have to swab and swab and swab and swab to get enough of it up to matter.

Pour a pail of hot water liberally laced with Simple Green concentrate (never did find the spray bottle, but this job is beyond spray bottle help).

Start mopping the kitchen floor.

Gerardo whacks on the Arcadia door. He’s done and wants to be paid.

Wrestle Charley into his nest. Lock him in. Cassie is hiding in the bathroom, having been terrorized by heights to which the decibel level of the cussing has risen.

Confer with Gerardo. Refrain from telling him that Mike will remove the Devil Pod Tree early next month, knowing that Gerardo will want to do it, that Gerardo will underbid Mike, and that I absolutely positively do not want Gerardo and the Slapstick Sunnyslope Seven taking down a 60-foot tree that abuts my house. He will be offended, but let’s at least wait until after Christmas to offend.

Hand Gerardo a check for twice what he charges: Christmas bonus.

Finish mopping the kitchen and family room floors.

Coffee has gone stone cold.

Free Charley. Watch little dance to spring.

Let Charley into the back yard.

It’s like letting a colt into a pasture! He takes off at a gallop, thudding across the freshly raked, very wet crushed granite, digging it up with every stride. Dump the pissy mop water, wash the mop out, hang it outside.

Pick up the four-inch-deep pile of paperwork that’s accrued on the dining-room table; carry it back to my office to add it to the six-inch-deep pile that’s been building over the past month.

Smell a smell.

One helluva smell.

Go in search of the source. Charley has deposited a gigantic bratwurst right in the middle of the throw rug by the bed.

Why do dogs and cats ALWAYS search out a soft spot to pee, shit, and barf? Have you ever noticed that? If there’s one throw rug in a houseful of hard floors, that is where the animal will go to make a gigantic, stinking mess!!!

What a stench. What a mess.

Takes two plastic grocery-store bags to clean that up. I can’t wash the rug because it’s raining and my dryer doesn’t work. Throw it on the floor in the garage.

Fortunately I can’t afford to run the heater, and so it doesn’t matter that I now have to throw open the Arcadia door in the bedroom and the front door and turn on the overhead fans in my office and the bedroom to move the gagging stink out.

Hate the scanner function on this flicking HP printer. Hate the way the ancient iMac barely works. It’s scanned one side of one check as I’ve written this. Can you imagine how long it’s taken to write this? I could’ve driven to the damn credit union by now. And I can tell you for certain that after all this, the CU’s e-deposit software is going to announce that the back side is a different size from the front side and refuse to accept the check, so I’m going to have to drive up there anyway.

Charley is in the garage going berserk. He’s barking frantically and fiercely. WTF?

Hit “scan” again. And again. Spinning mandala comes on. Traipse out to the garage. Cassie takes up the cry. Both dogs are now berserk. Open the garage security door. Charley tears out like an enraged Rottweiler. He’s looking up into the air and barking.

Two guys are on Terri’s roof. They’re trying to figure out where it’s leaking.

Lure maddened dogs back into the house. Come back to the scanner, hit “accept.” Hit “save as…”

Charley will not be dissuaded from telling the workmen what for. Ah, God, they’re barking in parts: Charley tenor, Cassie soprano. Fortissimo!

My son forgot to bring dog food today, and I’m out. So to avoid having to buy a $30 bag of dog food, which I can NOT afford (damn it, I can’t even afford to buy food for myself!), I’ll have to drive all the way down to his house and then all the way back up north and over to the west side to get to the flicking credit union. This will consume about 90 minutes of my time, maybe more depending on the traffic.

But that of course is not puppy chaos. It’s just ordinary daily chaos.

 

When DO i get my life back?

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Finally sent the Eng. 102 and Eng. 235 syllabi off to the chair and his redoubtable admin, along about 12:30 a.m. That would be, yes, this morning.

Though I’m pleased with what I came up with, my God it was a lot of work! It took the better part of a week of the usual 12-hour days to rewrite the 102 course. And the desktop, because it’s so antiquated, runs with the speed of a stumbling snail. So last night it took a full half-hour to e-mail the 235 syllabus and calendar (which, thanks to the MacBook, I wrote while sitting on the sofa) over to the desktop, watch it grind away and grind away trying to open MacMail, watch it grind some more trying to open the files in Word, watch it grind more and more trying to open Acrobat Professional, watch it gasp and wheeze and grind some more at saving the files from Word to PDF, watch it grind and grind and grind merging the PDFs into a single document, watch it slooooooowwwwwwllllllllllyyyyyyyyyy upload the 102 and then the 235 syllabus-calendar lash-ups, and finally, and at half-past twelve, manage to send the damn things into the ether.

Still have to save the stuff down to the backup drive, but since the files now reside safely in MacMail’s “sent” folder, I gave up and went to bed.

The chair has decided he wants to see detailed week-by-week calendars with learning goals and activities for each section. This stuff would normally be on my websites—posts outlining learning goals and assignments go up automatically on Saturday mornings. To convert from WordPress posts to something that can fit in a table set up as a calendar takes freaking HOURS, even though I don’t have to write all new stuff.

Except…I did write all new stuff for the 102s.

{cackle!}

This is so cruel! I just love it. Half the students will flee to other sections when they see what the course will entail this spring. Then I’ll only have about 20 papers to grade.

The idea is to give them specific subject  matter to write about. Last semester I did this by coming up with three general topics (the Great Depression in Arizona; communities [ethnic and otherwise] in Arizona; and urbanization and the environment, pertaining to Arizona).

They hated this, because it precludes recycling the puerile ramblings they’ve already written for other courses. And while the approach worked in the short summer term, which attracts brighter students, the fall bunch struggled (three of them confessed to not knowing what the word “urbanization” means, and one of them never did figure it out). The library’s resources are rather limited when it comes to local issues (electronic databases focus on national and international scholarship). And because most American students know so little about their country’s history and don’t want to know (some people are utterly lacking in intellectual curiosity), many failed to come up with workable paper topics. This, despite days of in-class brainstorming and coaching.

So, this semester they will have one large topic—Prohibition and the Great Depression—and instead of having to craft their own topics, they will choose topics of my devising.

What took so long to rebuild the 102 course, then, was coming up with 90 workable paper topics about U.S. and international history of that period. Make that 90 linked paper topics, so that each student can write three papers on roughly the same subject, the issue being that unless they’ve done some of their research for the 2,500-word position paper early in the semester, they don’t have a chance of coping with a ten-page end-of-term paper. Videlicet:

Click on the image to get a readable view.

Mwa ha hah!!!!  I ended up with four pages of this stuff, which I printed out and scissored apart, horizontally across the landscape page. Come the first week of class, I’m going to hand out the sliced-apart topics and each student will get to pick one. With that in hand, she’ll have topics for all three papers assigned before the end of Week 1. They’ll have a sign-up sheet on which to record which set of topics they reeled in, so I also will know what they will be writing about all semester long.

Will they hate this? Ohhh, you have no idea how much they will hate it.

Will it mean I don’t have to read any post-adolescent ramblings about how the drinking age should be lowered to 18, how beauty is an internal thing, how medical marijuana should be made legal with no questions asked, how we should build an electrified fence along the entire US-Mexico border? Oh, yes.

Will they do a half-baked job on these papers? Of course. They’re just kids. But at least they’ll try. Some of them may actually learn something.

Better they should do a half-baked job on a paper that requires them to do some research, learn something about the world, and actually think about it than that they should barf out still more uninformed teenage drivel based on breathtaking ignorance and eye-glazing clichés. Or turn in their senior social studies paper for credit, for the eleventh time.

The drafts, comments upon which they ignore, are going away. They will have just one draft, for the first paper. Since even fewer of them have ever written an extended definition than have ever written a sourced paper (no joke!), the first paper of the semester is actually the most difficult for them, even though it’s only 750 words.

So we’ll do a draft on the first paper—no peer review, a pointless waste of time. This draft will be graded according to the same rubrics that will be applied to the final version, but since it will be worth only 50 points, a failing grade will have less effect on their final semester score than a flunking grade on a regular paper. I will then tell them that they now see what the standards are and how the papers will be assessed, and so henceforth it will be their responsibility, not mine, to put together a decent paper.

And that will bring a stop to the frustration of spending hours trying to help them succeed, only to have them paste the original clumsy draft into a Word file and turn it in unedited. It also will cut the grading workload in half.

Collaborative groups will go away (another waste of time!), except insofar as we’ll set up informal groups of people with roughly similar topics to function as mutual support groups. In keeping with the Depression-era theme, I’m calling them “co-ops.” They can commiserate with each other, help each other with research (to the extent that they figure out how to do research), and ask each other out on dates.

So. That was a bitch to design and write.

Naturally, I created some extra work for myself in the Eng. 235 department, too. Ruminating over the course schedule, I realized the order of the assignments was kind of self-defeating. It should go from the easiest-to-write type of magazine feature to the toughest, ending with something short that I can handle while coping with fifty 2,500-word research papers from the 102s. In fact it went from middling easy to difficult to simple to middling easy to the shortie. Reorganizing the order in which those papers occur entails rewriting the entire course. That didn’t take anywhere near as many hours, but it still ate up an entire day.

And now I still have to redo both courses’ websites. That probably will consume another three days. You understand, all of this work is done off the clock. The semester is over, and whatever I do for the college when class is not actually in session amounts to free labor.

Before I get to that, though, I’ve got to shovel the mountain of incoming paperwork off my desk and catch up with the bookkeeping I’ve neglected for the past month.

Is there a question as to why I never get around to writing the e-books I’d like to spin off this site?

Hot Buttered Rum for a Cold Wintry Day

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Hot buttered rum makingsIt rained all night. Today it’s still overcast and damp out there. Down at the church a number of coreligionists remarked that it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…something that is remarkable in a place that very rarely looks like a European’s idea of the season.

My son having made it amply clear that he’d just as soon not find his mother on his doorstep midday on Sundays, I joined some choir members singing at a nearby hospice. That was a good thing to do.

Arriving home an hour later, I was cold, hungry, and lonely. Thought I might mull some of the leftover wine that’s sitting on the kitchen counter, but then thought no; it actually was a decent bottle of wine. Got it on sale and hesitated to waste it by dumping spices and orange peel into it. So that left…what? Tea? Coffee? How festive…

But what’s this in the back of the larder? Lo, an ancient, half-forgotten flask of dark rum! Now that’s  festive. What could be better on a dim and chilly day than a mug of hot buttered rum?

Checked my Joy of Cooking to refresh the memory. Alas, this edition is not the REAL Joy—I left that behind when I ran off with the harmonica player. The fools who took it upon themselves, some years ago, to “update” that great classic, left out much of what made the Joy a joy. Among the missing: a recipe for hot buttered rum.

Luckily, this old lady’s memory is not so far gone that she couldn’t dredge up the way to make the stuff. Embroidered on it a bit by using demerara sugar (that crunchy brown stuff you can get in grocery stores now) instead of regular white sugar or the even more old-fashioned sugar cube. Good. Very good.

Here’s how to make hot buttered rum for one (or for as many as you please):

For each boozehound, get yourself a large, pleasing mug. Have on hand a bottle of decent rum, some water in a kettle, a cube of unsalted butter (salted will be OK, if that’s all you have), a bunch of sweet spices such as clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and some sugar.

Put the water on the stove to boil.

While the water’s heating, place a tablespoon or so of sugar in the bottom of a mug. Add ground spices to taste (I used them all, being somewhat undisciplined by nature). Pour a jigger of rum over the sugar and spices and stir to mix. Let this steep while the water comes to a boil.

Once the water does come to a boil, fill the cup with hot water. Add a pat of butter (about a tablespoon, give or take).

Consume. Be careful. It’s hot.

Other than a third of a bottle of rum, the larder is pretty bare today. I’m out of food and out of money, and even if I could afford to buy groceries don’t feel much like driving around in the rain. So I decided to make bread, of which I’ve had none for the past week.

The kneaded dough lends itself to nice little lunchy hors d’oeuvres, as follows:

Make some bread. I use a bread machine to knead the dough, but find that baking the result in the oven makes a loaf that tastes more convincingly handmade. So…

Get out the bread machine.

Put in two cups of hot but not scalding water. Add a tablespoon of active dry yeast. Then measure in five cups of white flour or a combination of white and whole wheat flour, as desired. Add about two teaspoons of granulated salt or a scant tablespoon of chunky sea salt. Turn the machine to “knead.”

Go away while the machine kneads the bread. When the kneading cycle ends, come back and tear off a few chunks of dough–two pieces about a tablespoon or two in volume for each munchie you wish to cook. Close the lid and leave the rest of the dough to rise.

Pat the little pieces of dough into circles. In the center of one, place a piece of cheese, a pecan, or both. Cover with another circle of dough and pinch the edges together.

Over medium heat, melt some butter in a small skillet. Place the filled dough circles in the hot butter and brown on both sides, flipping them over midway through the cooking process.

Serve with whatever you wish to drink. A light salad would sort of make this into a meal. More or less.

These make a great snack for kids or grownups. They go pretty good with hot buttered rum, too!

🙂

Oh. The rest of the dough? Let it rise in the bread machine. When the rising cycle ends, turn the dough out onto a floured board. Shape it into a loaf or two. If you’re doing free-form loaves, you can either make them into long baguettes or into a round loaf. Or if you prefer, shape it into a pair of loaves to fit into a couple of traditional bread pans.

Cover these with a clean dish towel. Let them rise again—probably about a half-hour or forty minutes. While they’re rising, preheat the oven to about 400 degrees. Then put the risen loaves into the oven and bake until they sound hollow when tapped with a fingernail—about 40 or 50 minutes. Good to eat!

Bake the bread dough in a cloche for this result

 

Health Insurance Eye-Popper

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Wow! You should take a look at the comments on this post over at Get Rich Slowly. J.D. asked readers to report on how much they pay for health insurance. It’s just gut-wrenching. One reader remarked that she had paid tens of thousands of dollars for healthcare coverage but never made a claim; another said after she’d paid for the insurance, she couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. Another reader, who used to work for a company that did business with health insurers, described the insurers’ strategy of submitting requests for double-digit rate increases every few months, so they could settle for regular, steady single-digit increase targeting specific zip codes.

Meanwhile, if that doesn’t frost your cookies enough, the comments from Canadians—and from the guy in Japan—certainly will. One Canadian woman had cervical cancer…the only cost to her was the parking fee at the clinic where she had to go once a week for treatment. Other Canadians do remark that health care in that country is far from “free” for your taxes. But pretty clearly few or no Canadians can expect that a major illness or accident will pauperize them.

Really.  You just can’t imagine why anyone who’s not a congressional representative and in the pocket of big donors and lobbyists would oppose a national health care plan. Medicare’s not cheap—largely because of the ever-increasing rates charged by insurance companies that have managed to get their fingers in that pot, too. But at least it’s marginally affordable and does cover most conditions.

Back at GRS, comment number 234 mentions something kind of interesting. It’s a healthcare co-op for folks whose feelings about forcing women to bear unwanted babies are so strong they won’t subscribe to commercial insurance lest their morals be contaminated when some other subscriber gets an abortion to save her life. Or to have a choice about what her and her family’s life will be. It’s called Samaritan Ministries.

For a family, according to this reader, monthly cost is $320. Coverage is rather skimpy: you pay out of pocket for medical costs under $300 a month (so if you come down with a chronic ailment, your monthly cost is now $620 a month, minimum—not counting drugs, vision, and dental), pre-existing conditions are not covered, and the most it pays out is $250,000. Get yourself a case of cancer or a heart attack, and that $250,000 will be gone in a trice…you’ll soon find yourself paying a lot more than parking fees!

In the absence of a national health care plan, though, it’s an interesting scheme. If you were young and healthy, it might be worth considering. It certainly is better than nothing, and far more affordable than commercial plans that gouge you thousands of dollars for limited coverage or for insurance you can’t afford to use.

Incidentally, Samaritan Ministries publishes a guide to finding healthcare providers. One of these is an outfit that, for a fee, will collect bids from doctors for you.

Meanwhile, a Christian blogger in Alabama casts a jaundiced eye on this outfit. Writing as DrAbston, this observer points out that it functions as a loophole for Americans to get out of buying the required insurance under the new Affordable Healthcare plan, that requirements skew the membership toward cherry-picking, and that its ballyhooed Christian philosophy contains an inherent contradiction.

So it appears that the faith-based (or anything else-based) health-sharing scheme, while perhaps useful for a limited number of special-interest groups, is not a viable answer to our country’s health care issue.

When you read the responses to JD’s post—245 and counting!—you realize something has got to be done.

Exeunt the Devil-Pod Tree, Pursued by a Chain-Saw

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devil-pod-treeOne of the Funny Farm’s sources of eternal labor is the Devil-Pod Tree, a vast weeping acacia planted in the backyard, just upwind of the swimming pool, by the previous owners Satan and Proserpine. This unholy plant, now a couple of years older than it was in the photo to the right, towers three times as high as the roof.

And it sheds stuff. It sheds stuff All. The. Time. All year round, I haul bushels of crud from that tree out of the pool.

In the winter, it makes fuzzballs, wads of pollen that cover the earth and clog the pool’s filters. In spring and fall, it drops long, strappy leaves that choke Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner and clog the pool’s filters. And all summer long, it produces devil pods, beans that stain the plaster, bring Harvey to a dead stop, and clog the pool’s filters.

And I finally figured out why the pool water is as acid as pickling solution, when I never add a drop of muriatic to it: Acacia trees poison the soil around them by dropping highly acetic debris on the ground, thereby discouraging competition from neighboring plants. So much crud from that damn tree drops in the pool that not only do I have to dump in PhosFree by the gallon, it turns the water to vinegar.

This week I had just replaced the pump pot basket that split in four pieces from the weight and pressure of being clogged by Devil-Pod pollen, had just drained the acid water out and refilled the pool with 18,000 gallons of treated city water, when another rainstorm came in. Not much wind: just rain, mostly fairly gentle.

So much of that pollen crud floated into the drink that once again both the pump pot basket and the skimmer basket were packed so tight the pump could barely push water through them. A great mound of pollen accrued in a pollen dune on the bottom of the pool. Before I could shock-treat and condition the new water, I had to get all the crud out. Again.

Last night the skimmer basket was perfectly clean. By the time the arborist—ah, yes, the arborist!—showed up along about 3:00 p.m., it was more than half full of packed-down pollen. Again.

To frost the cookies, the tree is right next to the house. Like other acacias, it has a reputation for dropping large branches onto (and through) roofs. What with the now-unmistakable climate change, the winds get fiercer here every summer. Matter of fact, as I write this, a stiff breeze is blowing. I’d just as soon be rid of the tree before it lands in my bedroom.

What has given me pause about taking that tree down—other than the slight amount of shade it casts on the northeast corner of the house and my general reluctance to kill plants, especially trees—is the potential cost. Neighbors around here have had house-dwarfing trees removed, to the tune of around a thousand dollars.

Well, I finally figured a thousand bucks is less than it would cost me to move and less than it would cost to fill in the pool and relandscape the backyard. So I’d called Mike of South Mountain Landscaping, a premier arborist, to discuss the tree’s demise.

It is, he says, not a tree he recommends to his clients. Too bad he wasn’t here to restrain Satan and Proserpine from shopping at Moon Valley Nursery, where the staff specialize in high-pressuring people into buying “packages” of “bargain” trees that are totally inappropriate for their yards.

He offered to take the damn thing out for $350.

I couldn’t believe it! So, that is a job that is SOLD! For another $150, he’ll trim up the people-eating palo brea in front, untangle the jungle formed by ongoing battle among the palo brea, the olive tree, and the vitex, and do a little other light cleanup.

For privacy, he suggested orange jubilee. Those things are, however, pretty frost-sensitive around here. My inclination is to go for something like a Lady Banks on the outside of the east wall and maybe a Mexican bird of paradise on the inside. Lady Banks will hold up against the cold weather and gets huge enough to block the view of idle passers-by, while Mexican birds are very pretty and call hummingbirds. There might even be room in that space for a little creosote bush, which emits a lovely scent every time it rains.

Three hundred and fifty dollah! What a bargain…that’s going to be a large, difficult job.

Rain Puppy

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Rain + Puppy bred to swim around in lakes after ducks =

Charley in the mud

LOL! Says M’hijito: “Five unsupervised minutes for him to take a leak…”

Must’ve been five minutes of computer-gaming standard time. When Charley was discovered in this frolic, he’d excavated a hole about two feet across and two feet deep, spread the dug-out dirt around the flowerbed, and packed it down into finely crafted paw-stamped paving. Dog joy!

When next seen by moi and Cassie the Corgi, he was fully laundered and dried and brushed and drop-down-dead gorgeous.

Who would think that this…

…could strike this pose?

Charley in the car
"To the theatre, Jeeves!"