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One Don’t-Wanna DONE!

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Admitted: I’ve let the Don’t-Wanna tasks pile up. You know: those little nagging chores that need to be done but can be put off. And put off. And put off some more…

The present case in point: a mound of Mexican primrose that has grown in the backyard for several years. Some there are who regard this plant as invasive, but in my experience it stays where you put it. Assuming, of course, that you put it in a flowerbed, not broadcast seeds over a hillside… 😀

Well, the primrose around the pool is very happy, but over the past year some kind of bug got into the backyard mound.  Because gardening is a laissez-faire proposition here at the Funny Farm, I never got around to doing battle with the critters. Think I sprayed them a couple times with dilute Dawn detergent — an effective insecticide, but you have to get it on the little beasts. And because the mound is kind of out of sight from the back porch and the pool area, it’s been out of mind, too.

Result: as spring is sproinging, those plants are nothing but sticks. Green sticks, promising a possible resurrection. But sticks. Meanwhile, the pool is alive with beautiful pink flowers, and some are even growing in the crevices between the flagstones. So it doesn’t look like the mound is going to come back this year.

So this morning being unduly cool, I trotted out there and pulled up or broke off all the denuded sticks. Presumably it will soon grow back — it’s hard to kill this stuff. And when it does revive, I’ll have to remember to mist it with Dawn every week or two.

A-n-n-n-n-d…what else remains to be done, having been put off interminably through all the tolerably cool winter months?

  • Trim back the plants along the east and west ends of the pool, which now block passage to all but the most intrepid of sherpas.
  • Pull out the primrose that’s gone a bit wild in its adopted home between the flagstones
  • Replace the now very agèd chard (it’s lasted a good four years!!) with new grown-from-seed babes
  • Clean out the flowerbed around the olive in front. That’ll take half a day.
  • Pull out dead plants in pots on west side; replant or else haul the pots away. Figure out why they’re not getting watered adequately.
  • Put Luis up to removing the overgrown Texas ranger in front. Get him to thin the trees.
  • Fertilize and deep-water the roses
  • Treat paloverde, Texas ebony, and desert willow with borer killer

None of these is very difficult. And in fact, despite a year of neglect and the rainiest winter on recent record, there just isn’t all that much that needs to be done.

This house is absurdly easy to take care of. But of course…I planned it that way.

It’s such a pretty little house now, I really don’t want to move: bum invasion, Conduit of Blight, Gangbanger’s Way, and outsized property taxes notwithstanding.

My friends who moved to the Beatitudes retirement home sicced that place’s marketing department on me. This morning a woman from their sales office called and asked if I wouldn’t like to take the grand tour and listen to her pitch.

Well. Sure. I’m willing to do that. They’re building a whole sub-campus of patio homes that look to me one helluva lot better than an apartment in a vertical hive. So yeah: I’m curious.

But…the fact still remains: I don’t wanna move out of here.

What I really would like is to live here until I die. Which is not at all out of the question, given how minimalist the maintenance tasks are. All that would be needed to keep me here into my full dotage will be a competent cleaning lady and a good yard dude. A decent handyman would be nice, too. And no matter how many people I have to hire to keep this place up and myself in food and clean clothes, the cost would be nothing compared to the cost of living in one of those old-folkeries.

And despite the Bum Express delivering drug-addicted derelicts to our front doorsteps, the fact is that this is one of the few even vaguely affordable in-town neighborhoods — if you think of $350,000+++ as “affordable.” Young people have discovered it. And they’re gentrifying in swarms. Just on Ruby’s short doggy-walk circuit, four houses are being renovated, big-time. One fix-&-flipper just sold for $729,000 — an outrageous amount that represented a shameless rip-off of an elderly single man, that’s true: but there it is. It still goes on the record as what these houses are “worth.” Even though that price is ridiculous, it nevertheless will push our values inexorably upward.

At this point, I could afford to move to Prescott, a sweet and scenic little burg where property values are inflated by incoming Californians. If my son didn’t live here, I probably would. But as long as he’s in these parts, I expect I will be, too.

The Weirdness That Is Walmart

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So I’m on the way home from the Depot, thereinat to purchase another two gallons of liquid chlorine to dump into the re-hazed pool water. Traffic is its usual demented self.

I decide to stop at the Walmart up on Gangbanger’s way, thereinat to purchase…what? Some fruit to eat for breakfast…some cheap pasta, having run out of the fancy stuff from AJ’$; and a few other small things.

This place never ceases to amaze me. What do I find in  it?

  • Pasta, all right. Are you ready? REAL made-in-Italy-with-Italian-ingredients (altogether RoundUp-free) pasta! Yes. Just like the stuff at AJ’$, only marginally affordable.
  • A bottle of 14 Hands Cabernet, one of my favorite cheapo wines…two bucks less than I paid four days ago at Fry’s, which was already pretty cheap.
  • A ripe watermelon, truly ripe to my now very practiced eye: no doubt imported from Argentina.
  • Passels of ebony-haired brown-skinned mothers with beautiful little Hispanic children, so adorable as to die for. Long may they thrive!
  • A tired bum making his way through the aisles, searching out something decent to eat and to pay for with his food-stamp card.
  • An extraordinarily stupid woman standing near the front door hollering at the cashier, “What time does the pharmacy close?” (Walmart pharmacies, interestingly enough, shut down over the lunch hour.)
  • A weary-looking, worn cashier who replies (hang onto your hat), “There’s a sign at the pharmacy counter that says when they close.” 😀
  • A weary-looking, worn cashier who manages to perk up when I say to her, “How’re you doin’ today? You look like you’re workin’ too hard…bad for your health, don’tcha know?” We laugh. We comment on the weather. Her day improves, maybe…if only for a moment.

Ah, Walmart. Ah, humanity…

Networking: Time Is Money?

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So…yesterday I schlepped out to Tolleson, a far-flung suburb of shiny new elbow-to-elbow styrofoam-and-stucco housing tracts, to attend a meeting of the West Valley Writer’s Workshop.

This is a pretty good group, as hobbyist groups go, because its members are not all rank amateurs: Gale Leach, Ellen Buikema, Dharma Kelleher, Laura Kirwan, and this amazing guy whose name I don’t recall but who made himself a national name with his personal narrative/science book on the heart-lung transplant he managed to survive — all of these redoutable people and then some are very bright and competent writers with skills at a professional level.

This makes for an unusual writer’s group; normally these little clubs are full of people who have no clue what they’re doing, telling other people who do not know what they’re doing what they should do.

I haven’t attended for several months, because — truth to tell — I’ve developed such an aversion to driving in the Valley’s homicidal traffic that I haven’t been able to force myself to make the traipse. It’s an hour’s drive each way, unless you’re willing to drive on the freeway, in which case the drive (one-way) is 40 minutes. But I will no longer drive on the I-10, period: it’s just too damn dangerous. That highway is utterly unpatrolled. The only time you see a cop down there is when he’s cleaning up a wreck. Of which there are a-plenty. I’ve been cruising across that freeway at 80 mph and had people pass me like I was going 45. And half the drivers around here are either yapping on the phone or intoxicated on booze or drugs. Or stupidity: one could come to believe stupidity is itself an intoxicant.

The surface streets aren’t much better: on the way out there yesterday, I missed a wreck by about eight feet. But a crash at 40 miles an hour is a helluva lot more survivable than a crash at 80 miles an hour.

BUT…. But one of my current clients was a direct referral from Gale. This is a guy who did not even blink at my present per-word rate…something for which I was exceptionally grateful when the China Trade collapsed around my ears. I now have two book authors as clients, each of whom is paying enough to keep baby in shoes for awhile. So I figure I should trick out a flyer (done!), print out about 40 of  ’em (done!), staple my business cards to the things (done!), and schlep them over there today to hand out to the eager wannabe writer masses.

Bob, the passionately dedicated guy who runs the thing, has no objection to shameless marketing, so when I arrive, I put a flyer at each seat along the assembled desks. This is good. I guess. Maybe.

But…except…but…

Yeah, but none of the usual suspects are there! Well, except for Bob, who emcees. Not only are none of the named talents present, neither are any of the other budding but highly creditable lights!

In their absence, this get-together devolves into a meeting of a more typical wannabe writer’s club: a lot of folks who have no idea what they’re doing advising other people who have no idea about what to do.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m too cynical? Okay, get this: one guy wanted to know how he could copyright his name, lest someone steal his by-line!

No. I kid you not. That was not a joke.

These meetings go on for three hours: noon to 3:00 p.m. Along about 1:30, I begin to wonder if there’s some way I can slip out unnoticed. Not a chance, of course. There’s not even a bathroom break that I could use to claim I have appendicitis and must away to the emergency room.

Finally, a little early (ten minutes to three), the meeting breaks up, and I fly out the door. Speaking of the which, it takes a full hour door-to-door to get back to the Funny Farm.

Was traipsing across the city to hand out 15 or 20 flyers worth the time and effort? Highly dubious. If you figure my hourly rate at right around $60 — which I think is about right — schlepping out there, sitting around, and schlepping back home cost me three hundred dollars! While it was indeed lovely to meet new people and excellent to see the redoubtable Bob in action again, I very much doubt that the five hours sunk into this effort will return that much in earnings.

The Wages of Longevity

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So Monday I’m over at Costco with my friends whom I enjoy driving to various shopping junkets. We’re checking out and chatting with the cashier, who remarks that it’s his fortieth anniversary on the job at Costco!

Wow! Can you imagine? Working as a Costco cashier for forty years! That means he would have started in 1979. He must have started back when it was Price Club, because the first Costco didn’t open until 1983. Price Club opened in 1976, in San Diego.

We know people who work for Costco love working there. Several of them have remarked to that effect to me — in fact, when I happened to say that I’d been laid off, shortly after GDU shut down our shop, one employee recommended that I apply at Costco.

I wonder how a senior cashier’s pay compares with a teacher’s in Arizona?

Hmmm… Costco cashier salaries range from $14 to $25 an hour. That’s $29,120 to $52,000. On the high end, that’s about what I was earning in a 12-month administrative job at GDU, after 15 years in the saddle. When I was teaching there, I made about $45,000 a year.

But believe me: no one at GDU will tell you they love their job. Morale in that place hovers in the sub-basement.

On the other hand, I was able to work at home a lot. Telecommuting was not much of a problem in the particular position I had. This isn’t true of all the jobs there, but faculty positions usually require you to show up only to meet classes, confer with students, and sit through faculty meetings. As a practical matter, most people are generally “around,” and many classes meet at inconvenient hours (such as 7:40 in the morning or 7 to 10 p.m. at night). But…it’s interesting that with a Ph.D., 15 years of teaching and administrative experience, and 15 years of journalism experience, you earn about what a senior cashier at Costco makes.

Yea verily: the median salary for K-12 teachers in Arizona is $47,980; average base pay in Phoenix is $38,441. And believe me, that is not for just 9 months of work: you spend your summers preparing for the next year and whiling away your time in unpaid seminars, conferences, or teacher improvement courses. Or in second jobs, to keep the wolf from the door.

Think of that: At Costco, a cashier earns more than a teacher. With one helluva lot less aggravation.

The iPhone Surrender

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Okay, so I give up: I’m getting a damn iPhone.

I’ve put it off and put it off and PUT IT OFF, because one of my worst eccentricities is that I really truly honestly absolutely positively do NOT want an electronic tether around my neck.

No. I love you dearly, but I do not want you to be able to flag me down and yak at me while I’m driving my car or wandering around a shopping center or diving into my swimming pool or sitting in a movie theater or trying to learn how to sing some complicated musical arrangement in choir or what-freaking-EVER.

After three weeks of electronic torture, no: I do not welcome anymore techno-learning curves, techno-hoop-jumps, or techno-hassles.

But…alas. It does look like there’s no choice. Toting a cell phone around is now the standard. And you can’t very well get out of it these days.

Well. Once I tried an Android phone, purchased through T-Mobile. It was just horrible. No matter what I tried to do, I simply could not learn how to use the damn thing. Finally gave up, disconnected, and tossed the accursed thing in a box behind a bookcase.

We’re told the iPhone is easiest for the elderly to learn to use, compared to all the other obnoxious gadgets out there. And during the several lengthy, brain-banging visits I’ve had to make to Apple stores over the past three weeks, I’ve looked at these doodads and decided…yeah… I don’t want to clutter my mind with this crap, but…it’s probably easier-to-swallow clutter than most. Looks like I’ve got at least a shot of learning how to use the thing.

A-n-n-n-n-d… It appears that TracFone, which sells service by the minute, makes itself available to practically any phone for which you have a sim card (i.e., you don’t have to buy the gadget from them; you don’t have to let them “lock” it so you can’t use it with any other carrier). And the folks at Target will get those minutes downloaded into the phone for you.

Maybe. If they don’t, then one of the Apple dudes advised that In His Humble Opinion, Verizon is the best (of a bad lot) among the cell carriers.

So. I’ve purchased a sim card at the Target.

Next step, if I can ever get quit of climbing out from under the pile of work that didn’t get done during the past three weeks of computer nightmares, will be to drive way to hell and gone back out to Scottsdale, purchase an iPhone, purchase an AppleCare contract, and have them set the damn thing up for me. Then drive way to hell and gone back into Phoenix, present myself at a Target store’s electronics counter, and have them sign me up for enough minutes to figure out how to use the thing. Then figure out how many minutes I would need during the course, of, say, three months or six months; buy that amount of time; and use it to practice using the thing.

The Apple Genius I talked with the other day recommended NOT deep-sixing the land line (which really isn’t a land line but in truth is VOiP. Thus I keep the phone number used for The Copyeditor’s Desk (along with the NoMoRobo that helps, to a modest extent, to block nuisance calls). But…I end up with an iPhone that can do several things:

  • Make calls while I’m roaming around
  • Send text messages
  • Function as a mobile computer
  • Function as a camera and upload direct to iCloud
  • Let me read and answer emails on the fly
  • Track my movements everywhere I go, potentially reporting them to Big Brother or Big Advertiser
  • And jangle me up in the privacy of my car when, thankyouverymuch, I would prefer to be left alone

Ugh.

Since I now have a half-dozen dormant cell phones that can be used to dial  911 (assuming they’re kept charged), I can set these things around the house in places where I could reach them if I’ve fallen on the floor and hurt myself too badly to get up. Then I can cancel the land line (getting rid of a stiff charge from Cox) and use the iPhone as my primary phone number.

That’s something.

I guess.

A break in the clouds…

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, yonder breaks a beam of light through the clouds!

Yesterday developed into surprisingly de-toxifying day.

First off, I discovered the reason the MacBook was throwing out messages to the effect that it couldn’t hold all the data stored on iCloud was…ohhh, wait for it… BECAUSE… The damn computeris somehow CLONING ALL THE DATA FILES ON ITS HARD DRIVE…over and over and over again.

Call up the AppleCare people and reach the first tech there that I’ve ever talked to who hadn’t a clue. She had never heard of such a thing and didn’t know what to do, so she made me an appointment with the Apple “Geniuses.” Like I have nothing else to do with my time…

Whenever I get off the phone with her and calm down a bit, I think to do a Web search. Find an Apple user’s forum where a) some guy says you can get rid of the redundant files by shutting down and rebooting, and b) they will eventually come back. Another user reports that this is a function of the Sierra operating system. Say what????

Well, I’ve had this computer for two years and it’s been running on Sierra for almost that long and I’ve never seen endless strings of duplicate files before. Presumably older versions of Sierra didn’t do that. When the guys in Tennessee replaced everything in this device’s innards, they would have had to reload Sierra, and in doing so, they presumably would have loaded a slightly newer iteration of Sierra. Hence: iterations, all right: thousands of them!

Really, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just CAN. NOT. DEAL. WITH. THIS. SH!T any longer!

At that point, I about decided to shut down The Copyeditor’s Desk. The computer headaches, the DropBox headaches, the PayPal headaches…all conspiring at once: it’s more than I can handle.

Naturally, the minute I make that decision, a new Chinese mathematician e-mails in a sweat, needing to get 10 (typeset!) pages of new copy edited and jammed into an article that’s already been provisionally accepted. He, however, is at the Great Desert University, where I have spies. And he has a bank account. So he at least can pay me. However, that means I have two book projects in hand, another pending, this math thing, and a computer that is laboring to undercut me.

But… But, indeed: his piping up reminded me that not all Chinese mathematicians, scientists, and scholars of business management labor away their lives on the Mainland! A whole lot of them live in the United States. And they can pay with checks. Or get their universities to pay with checks.

And how hard is it to make nice to these folks and cultivate that set?

He blinked not at all at my bracing  per-word rate, so I will be paid fairly for turning his golden words into publishable copy.

This sounds sooo weird, but I love copyediting these Chinese scientists’ copy. The beauty of a math paper is that if its author says something stupid, I don’t know it. That, alas, is not true of work in just about any other discipline. 😀

And most of the stuff is strangely interesting, at base.

He wants to meet next week and trudge through the new content, face-to-face. That’s a new one for me, but it should be interesting. I figure if I can make nice to him and not persuade him that I’m a complete idiot, he may refer me to colleagues.

Whiled away part of the day with another new client’s effort at science fiction writing. That was light and amusing and did not leave me in a rage. Which is good. Always good.

In the morning, I tested the blood pressure again — still obsessing about whatever it was that happened in the wee hours the day before yesterday. Back down into to fairly normal range: average 123/77. One reading was an amazing 115/75. Not bad for a 74-year-old, eh?

So I think it’s safe to assume the episode in the night was a stress attack, not a life-threatening cardiac event.

That alone relieved a whole lot of stress. So did the idea that I might simply fold The Copyeditor’s Desk and really, seriously retire retire.

And in the evening, we — the Women’s Schola — sang at Compline, a particularly lovely end-of-the-day service that, being absent the hoopla of a mass and all that, is a lovely, contemplative moment entirely sung and presented by candlelight. Meditative, it is. And a very fine antidote to crazy-making stress.

This service — Compline — is in my opinion the most lovely and spiritual event in the church’s entire repertoire. Hardly anybody seems to know about it: attendance can be numbered in the single digits. This is too bad, because a whole lot of people are missing out on something that ought not to be missed.

And now…away! Off to pick up the Old Folks, the first traffic-traipse of the day.