Coffee heat rising

Month: September 2012

Report from the Ramparts of Hell

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{moan} I think I’m gunna die but that’s not possible because I’ve already died and gone to Hell, which is where I spent the entire accursed day.

Actually, the day started out OK, but it swiftly went downhill. It was a stressful day whose prospect has been causing frissons of NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO IT all week long. Is it possible that stress could influence the bellyache?

Awake at 3 a.m., unable to go back to sleep. Hungry & headachey; ate a piece of cheese & three figs; had coffee. Didn’t want to have an actual breakfast because I had to go to a breakfast meeting as dawn cracked and didn’t want to be rude by refraining from eating.

6:45 a.m.: raced to said meeting. Knew there’d be no chance for lunch and so ordered a blueberry pancake, bacon, & tea. Stomach was already upset when I got there; this didn’t help. Converted burpy to urpy.

The minute the meeting broke up, flew across the city to the new gastroenterologist’s office; made it on time. Conferred with her. Liked her a lot. She agreed with Young Dr. Kildare that I probably don’t have cancer, probably have developed gastric reflux disease, that it’s unlikely to go away soon, and that for the rest of my life I will be taking a drug that saps calcium out of my already osteopenic bones and is known to cause clinical depression. She also agreed that it made reasonable sense to do a noninvasive test for H. pylori, given my history of living in a Third-World country, before moving forward with an endoscopy. In fact, she felt an endoscopy is unnecessary.

She wants to do a blood test. I said the Mayo doc had opined that a positive result for H. pylori proved only that one was once exposed to the pathogen, not that one was presently infected. She begged to differ: if you test positive, she said, it means the microorganism is still resident in your gut. If you have not been treated with several rounds of antibiotics combined with proton pump inhibitors, then you are still infected. Therefore, in the absence of previous treatment for Helicobacter, a positive result means you are infected. She said she would treat me for H. pylori if she could prove I have it. So…that was reassuring.

Out the door. Not enough time to go home between the doctor’s appointment and class.

Trudged up to campus, a 45-minute drive. Stood (on the sore goddamned foot!) in front of a computer terminal passing another 35 minutes until class started. Steered students to computer commons, for librarian’s presentation.

Had to deal with unruly student (again!). Kid is out of control. She is just completely batshit. DAMN it, twelve more goddamn weeks of this??????

Computers went down. Librarian was unable to do her presentation. She filled time talking about life in China, whence she came. Some students interested, some bored stiff. Afterward she wanted to set another date, so now I’ll have to drag them over there again next week. This screws up my carefully orchestrated schedule, but I think I can do it by killing a busywork assignment.

Tina, trying to cope with her usual overload, sends worried e-mail. I finally escape and get home.

 Stomach royally upset and actually hurting by the time I get back to the house. Significant heartburn. Annoying after ten days of feeling pretty good. Very, very annoying.

Gulp down some disgusting generic Gaviscon. Has no discernible effect.

A plagiarized paper surfaces. I give it a 0 and copy the chair; now will have to deal with THAT next week, god effing DAMN it.

Not hungry but decide to try some yogurt with honey, which sometimes is soothing. Feel marginally better, but not much.

 Exhausted. Field some e-mails, stare glassy-eyed at news sites for some indefinite period. After a while, recover enough to continue working on website, hugely updating it, writing new pages. It now looks pretty good.

It’s after 7 p.m. The dog is whining and nagging at me, I’m sort of hungry but afraid to fix much food because I’m afraid it’ll make me sicker. The dog hasn’t been fed and is running out of food. I have no more meat to cook for her and don’t feel even faintly like grinding up veggies for her, either. Have canned dog food but that stuff always gives her the runs. May have to feed it to her, though.

Tomorrow, another doctor’s appointment, lunch with friends, all of which will put me behind even further on the various to-do’s I’ve set up for myself.

Of this week’s to-do’s, I’ve done ten of the twenty projects & tasks I listed. Some of them didn’t get done because the website needed to be updated and improved before moving on to things that would entail posting links at various networking groups’ sites.

Done:

• Joined Local First Arizona.
• Fixed Tina’s CE Desk e-mail.
• Reorganized and rewrote entire website for client.
• Downloaded Google Contacts into Excel; used that to start a database and start preparing a hard-copy address/contacts book for CE Desk.
• Revamped the CE Desk website.
• Started building files for new contract workers.
• Cleaned out space to hold files for the same.
• Compared costs of Business Networking International (BNI), National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO),  & Trustegrity vs. probable marketing value; decided NAWBO is the best bet.
• Got in touch with two previous employees, schmoozed.
• Sent receipt to client.

NOT done:

• Look into Scottsdale Airpark business publication, for ads & possible PR opportunities.
• Come up with articles ideas for the same, for Phoenix Business Journal, for Scottsdale Chamber’s publication.
• Call Chamber’s director to discuss publicity; try to volunteer as ambassador.
• Set up a calendar on the iPad and try to get into the habit of using the damn thing (but realized that’s not going to happen…I’m unlikely to fiddle with that).
• Join NAWBO.
• Track down the third former employee who, I think, would be good to keep in touch with.
• Finish the database.
• Write this month’s newsletter.
• Bill website client for 5 hours of work. And, come to think of it, three earlier hours of work.
• Scan and e-deposit two other clients’ checks.

 Pending:

• Volunteered for Habitat for Humanity; have to meet them at 5:30 a.m. Saturday.
• Choir director thinks we’re going to show up at 8:00 on Sunday morning.

I don’t want to. I hate racing around at dawn and hate this stupid schedule with two 7:30 a.m. classes a week and a 7:30 meeting in Scottsdale and do not want to fly out the door at 7:30 Sunday morning and I. need. a. BREAK!

No wonder my stomach hurts.

The Great Pantie Hoarding Caper

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Hot dang!!!! AT LAST Costco has decided to carry ordinary, real women’s underpants. Not a variety of girdle. Not a thong. Not some sort of athletic gear. And not your great-grandmother’s undies. Nice cute little bikinis, with lace trim, that—hang onto your hats, ladies—that actually FIT a grown woman!

It’s some sort of a miracle.

As normal women know, most women’s underpants fit only one body type: teensy and board-flat. If you’re shaped like nature built you to bear children, or if you’ve gone so far as to have borne a child or three, you need not apply to the underwear department. There’s no way most of us can find a pair of panties that fit around the rear end and don’t try to slice us in half vertically, like a laser saw in a James Bond movie.

The other day I spotted these things at Costco. Hm…DKNY…not a bad brand. Made in Bangladesh. But they’re here. No one’s going to send them back to the Third World, moral outrage being alien to our lopsided, offshored corporate economy. Why not chance them?

So I bought a package of four, brought them home, and tried on a pair.

And holy mackerel! They actually fit around my capacious aft beam! Not only that, but they’re comfortable.

Couldn’t believe it.

Next morning I jumped in the car and flew to the nearest Costco in a halfway upscale neighborhood (the store in the nearby inner-city shopping center tends not to carry stuff like this). Grabbed every box of “Extra Large” I could lay hands on. That wasn’t so many, because size 12 is considered pretty outré in the women’s underwear biz, so it’s not easy to find panties that fit women who wear what is considered the average size among American women and which, dear hearts, is flicking NOT “extra large.”

WhatEVER. 🙄

I ended up buying a total of five packages, 20 pairs, to the tune of about 75 bucks.That’s $3.75 a pair, about what you’d pay on sale for a pair of department-store panties that don’t fit in any size.

All my old underwear was pretty well shot, much of it falling apart. Matter of fact, a couple pair of Hanes panties I bought at Dillard’s just two or three months ago had already sprung holes in the fabric. I threw out every moth-eaten, flabby-elastic, never-fit-from-the-git-go panty in the drawer and neatly stacked the new goodies in there.

Provided these don’t pop holes in the seams or the fabric, too, I shouldn’t have to buy another pair of underpants for two or three years. Maybe longer. This may be the last underwear hassle I’ll have to go through for a long, long time.

🙂 When you see something that fits, grab it, ’cause you’ll likely never see it again. Especially if you found it at Costco.

Yummy Little Fig & Bacon Bites

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Trader Joe’s has had an abundance of fresh, ripe figs in its produce section. Yum! They are so good. M’hijito taught me to wrap bacon around figs to make a nice li’l snack. I’d been cooking them on the stove, but recently discovered it’s pretty darned easy to cook them on the gas grill. Or charcoal grill, should you care to go to that much trouble.

Just get yourself one of those grill griddles that has holes in it–inexpensive at Lowe’s or HD. They’re designed, I think, to hold fish without letting it flake into the fire. But they work fine for any small food items.

Wrap a piece of bacon around a fig and secure it in place with a skewer or a long toothpick. The thin-sliced variety seems to work better than thick-sliced bacon, simply because it cooks through quicker. But either will do the job. Place the wrapped figs on the grill griddle pan and put them over medium to medium-high heat. Cook, turning a few times, until the bacon is browned to your taste.

Great for breakfast with some cereal or toast. Great as a casual hors d’oeuvre (they could be finger food, but offer plenty of napkins…and remove the toothpicks). Great all the way around.

Fall Has Sprung!

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It looks like our annual second spring is here early. The heat has broken, a good month sooner than normal. We still could get another blast or two, but the longer it stays cool, the less likely that is. The frazzled plants have decided it’s safe to blossom again. One of the fricaseed roses managed to put out a small, tentative flower:

Not bad, considering how fried this poor shrub has been. I’ve had water bills pushing $150 trying to keep the plantings alive…and that’s with no grass!

Don’t know what this thing is, but isn’t it interesting?

It has strappy leaves like a garlic chive, but there’s no scent. I think it’s some kind of bulb that finally decided to come up…I’m always sticking bulbs in the ground and forgetting about them. WhatEVER. Cassie likes it…

Actually, what she’s liking here is pestering the human to throw the ball. Bossy little dog!

Even the cacti are happy with the cooler weather! Look at this amazing thing that appeared in the front yard…

You need to click on the image to get the full effect.

Not to be outdone, the Easter lily cactus in back put out three of these:

The little garden I planted next to the pool, in the dead of summer, survived the brutal heat and is now showing its appreciation for milder temps:

Zinnias and salvias: 99 cents for a pack of six! I thought they were going to die when they were little, especially the salvia. But they managed to make it, mostly by dint of being flooded with hose water once or twice a day. Pretty little things, aren’t they? Not spectacular, but they do the job of allaying one’s general depression.

The pool, which has been very well behaved in the absence of the Devil Pod Tree, is fast getting too cool for swimming. Now that only a few days of swimming time remain, I’ve taken down the privacy screen I jury-rigged out of a couple of old wooden trellises and some shade screen (they really DID look white-trash!), which should increase the amount of light the new hop-bush plants are striving for. You  may remember that all four of these plants were about two feet high when I planted them.

The most robust of the hopseed bushes is now almost up to the top of that six-foot wall. By next summer, they should do  just fine to block the view from the sidewalk and the neighbors’ front windows into my yard.

That orange jubilee in the foreground, contrary to the nurseryman’s opinion, did not appreciate 115-degree days. It barely made it through the summer, again, by dint of my pouring vast quantities of water on the thing. Once established, though, a plant like this can get quite large. It could easily top that ugly shed.

The shed itself is not as obtrusive in real life as it appears in this photo. From most parts of the yard, it’s barely visible, and I think when these plants fill out, it should become even less prominent. Thought about putting up a trellis and training a jasmine or two up there, but that sounds a great deal like more trouble than it’s worth.

Best thing I’ve done for myself in this house was to take out the accursed Devil Pod Tree that occupied that corner. In the absence of the bushels and bushels of strappy leaves and equipment-clogging, plaster-staining pods, the pool has run almost trouble-free all summer long. We have had a few windy, dirty monsoons, but none required me to get out there and haul pounds of debris off the bottom of the pool. Matter of fact, the pool has been virtually trouble-free. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner has easily handled what little stuff has fallen into the drink, and I’ve only had to shock-treat once. That alone represents a large savings.

Part of the savings came from dumping Leslie’s and hiring a local pool company. I’ve had that guy out here once, count it, once, since the heat came up. Oh…except for the time the pump pot lid worked itself loose. What I thought would be a $300 to $600 repair job cost me $60. And he gave me a new lid for free. You can bet that Leslie’s would have taken me to the cleaners over that misadventure.

The Devil Pod Tree is undead, though. It keeps pushing up suckers, trying to rise from the grave:

I’ve found these sprouts fifty feet away from the trunk! The accursed tree had shot its roots under the patio all the way over to the far side of the yard, heaving the concrete in the process. The only thing that will kill these things is straight, undiluted Round-up.

Whatever could have possessed Satan and Proserpine to plant such a thing? Stupidity, I guess…they stuck some other mighty dumb things in the ground, too. They were pretty good with interior remodeling, but landscaping was just not their thing.

There’s another Devil Pod Tree on the west side of the house. It’s now as tall as the forty-year-old palm trees some other hapless homeowner put next to the pool. Since the arborist only charged $300 to take down the Undead One, I’m thinking I may have him take that one out, too. Several trees need some pruning this winter, and so we might as well be rid of the other mess-maker while his crew is here. In addition to dropping large quantities of mess all over the place, this one is dangerously close to the house. Willow acacias are as brittle as eucalyptus, and this one now has big branches that could break off and crash onto my house or my neighbor Terri’s. And of course Satan planted the thing right next to the wall, which the tree is threatening to heave. I’d just as soon get rid of the tree now than have to get someone in here to rebuild that wall in a few years. The emerald paloverde now provides all the shade that’s needed to protect the west side of the house from the broiling afternoon sun.

Darn! It’s already 5:30…have to start to run to get all the stuff done so as to race out the door to get to class by 7:30 a.m. Oh…they’re in the computer commons today. Good: I won’t have to talk to them. The Tuesday-Thursday class, the one that soaks up three of my most productive hours in the middle of the day, is in the library on Thursday, so I’m relieved of having to entertain them this week. Only two days this week to fill with lecture and busywork. This is Week Five. Just eleven weeks left of this impossible routine!

It’s going to be made a lot worse this week and next: I agreed to substitute for a colleague who’s going in for some surgery. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays I won’t get out of class until 4:30 in the afternoon! Then I’ll have to drive home through the rush-hour traffic. Meanwhile three projects for a client are sitting on my desk…how the hell I’m supposed to do those while I’m wrestling with students four days a week, I do not know. Fortunately, he’s just as overworked as I am, and so distracted he doesn’t realize I’m not moving forward on his work at anything more than a stately pace.

Welp…off and running!

Comment Killers

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What is it with sites that seem purposely designed to discourage readers from commenting? Have you noticed that more and more comments functions are set up to deliver your remarks to utterly irrelevant forums or to force you to identify yourself as a persona that’s not relevant to the community you’re cruising and that you don’t care to use for the purpose? And to ride my favorite hobby-horse again: are you aware of the extent to which these things invade your privacy?

Lookit this:

WordPress.com is especially egregious in this respect. Here, I wrote a comment on a favorite blog, hit post, and up came this. I am not logged in to WordPress right now, or at least, I don’t intend to be. But WP has decided I will identify myself as a WordPress blogger, whether I want to do so or not, and I will not identify myself as Funny about Money, which no longer is hosted there. The initial offer I get is to identify myself as the irrelevant “pvcccourseseng102,” a moniker that will make no sense to the blogger and that is utterly irrelevant to the PF community to which the blogger is holding forth. Nor will it pass any sort of recognition along to my blog.

But if I prefer, instead of surfacing as a WordPress.com blogger, I could post my comment to Twitter or Facebook.

Well, in the first place, I’m not talking to freaking EVERYONE IN THE WORLD WHO SUBSCRIBES TO FREAKING TWITTER, dammit. I’m addressing one blogger and maybe three readers who have commented on her site. And I’m not even faintly interested in commenting to everyone in the world. So the answer there is “No, thanks.”

Nor am I interested in posting my comment to Facebook, where it will be read by various friends and “friends” who have little knowledge and less interest about the blog in question. Why would I want to post an irrelevant message to my Facebook account?

And in the second place, why on earth would I or anyone want WordPress to “read Tweets from my timeline” (WhateverTF that is), see who I follow, see when I follow some new FaM admirer, update my profile for me? The answer to that one is NO, but hold the polite “thanks.”

Moving on, we arrive at Blogger.

OpenID is another service that forces you to sign up before you can comment. It has been shown to make users vulnerable to various kinds of malicious attacks. Even if it were safe as pablum, as with “loyalty cards,” I have “signed up” with quite enough acquisitive and inquisitive websites and merchandising scams, thank you, and I’m not signing up for another one. Nor am I signing up for LiveJournal (the pencil), Typepad (the cloud), or…or the American Institute of Mathematics (???? which is what “AIM” signifies to me). Here, too, Blogger thinks I’m pvcccourseseng102, a meaningless identity I have no intention of using on anyone’s blog or any other website. Other than my freshman comp website, of course.

Blocked from two of my favorite websites, let’s visit The Huffington Post:

Here you’re given the option of signing in to Facebook, Twitter, or AOL. The “more” options include Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, or Hotmail. Again…why would I want a random comment I make on some random news site to be linked with and presumably displayed to readers on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn? Select Google and you’re told that Huffington wants to access your real-world name, your country, your language, and all your Google contacts!

And once again, the answer is NO / replace “Thanks” with an unprintable expletive.

Then there’s Disqus. The makers of this thing, available for WordPress as a plug-in, apparently are trying to make it ubiquitous, and they’re not doing a bad job of that. It tracks every comment you make, anywhere and at any time, under the persona that you first registered with. Nevermind that you might want to post as Melete of Adjunctorium at one site and as Funny of Funny about Money at another: you are who you aren’t. Nevermind whether you’re logged in or not: this little gem tracks you as you wander from site to site. It knows your IP address, the version of your Web browser, what page you came from before you landed on one of its sites, and where you go when you leave.

The information Disqus collects, which has been shown to be “de-anonymizable,” is shared with third parties. And with lots of other folks: Disqus publishes your entire commenting history, along with a list of blogs and services you frequent, on a publicly viewable profile page. Not only that, but you can be banned from commenting on your favorite Disqus-powered site for no reason whatsoever, as has happened to me with The Atlantic. As it develops, publishers can ban entire blocks of IP addresses, and if yours happens to be in that block, tough nougies—we don’t need no steenking First Amendment!

I understand that WordPress would like readers not to publish naughty and mean-minded comments on the sites of its mostly newbie bloggers, some of whom may be children or teenagers. But Akismet, which comes with all WordPress.com sites, does a fine job of blocking spam, and most WP webmasters can figure out how to block unwanted commenters. It’s really very easy.

As for the others, obviously they’re intent on gathering personal information. I’m just as intent on not sharing it with them.

These annoying devices bring a dead stop to commenting on blogs and news sites, as far as I’m concerned. And I think that’s too bad. It’s kind of fun to jump into the commenting fray at a news site.

But the whole point of blogging is to invite comments…that’s what blogs are for! The comment-killing gimmicks just stymie me. I can not understand why anyone would deliberately want to discourage readers from commenting on a blogsite. If you want reader comment, choose a host that doesn’t try to extort information from your readers. Or configure your comments function so readers can choose to identify themselves as their online personae. If you don’t want reader comment, then for heaven’s sake, save bandwith and use a spiral notebook to write your journal.

Grrr! Am I the only person in the world who hates these things and refuses to leave comments on sites that use them?

 

Networking Groups

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Does anybody belong to Business Networking International (BNI)? How effectively is it working for you, in terms of rainmaking?

Three people have recommended BNI to me. It seems a little pricey. On the other hand, one or two good jobs presumably would pay for the fees. But of course…you’ll need to generate more than one or two jobs to put bacon on your plate. It looks like a lot of work…and it also looks like it’s a profit-making enterprise for the gent who founded it. On the other other hand, do either of those things matter if it’s actually producing business for you?

I’ve joined a local Chamber of Commerce group. As a vehicle for meeting other business owners, it’s awesome. And since my business proposes a b2b model, it’s the perfect venue for networking. I’ve already met some very interesting people, including a woman with a start-up that sells a program—not an app—that causes a website to adapt automatically to whatever device a visitor is using. It creates a really neat page for a cellphone (for example), and does so by using code on your site, rather than running it through an app. Also have run into a graphic designer who specializes in print only, lawyers coming out the wazoo, and the usual array of mortgage brokers, insurance agents, and financial advisers. Plus the Chamber itself has some pretty neat offerings, including free air time on a radio show, space in its newsletter for articles, and plenty of ad space.

However, Wednesday at the Chamber meeting, one person told me he gets about 60 percent of his referrals from BNI and 30 percent from the Chamber. If that’s so, it could be worth the cost. Or maybe not, if he’s talking about a total of three referrals…

Yesterday one of the guys at the Scottsdale Business Association recommended the National Organization of Women Business Owners. That appears to be an extremely active group, at least in this part of the country.

It looks to me like one probably needs to pick one’s networking groups with care. Most of these outfits are not cheap: annual dues plus $15 or $20 for breakfasts or lunches add up to a hefty fee. One or two such organizations might pay for themselves, yes, with a single successful referral. But a half-dozen of them could mean the proceeds of half a dozen jobs would be consumed before you’d make a profit. Probably it’s best to focus on one or two, spending more time there rather than less time at a larger number of meetings.

The question is, which groups to pick?

Do you network? What types of networking, or which specific groups, seem to be the most effective?