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New Enterprise a-Dawning?

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Y’know, when it comes to running a business enterprise, I have a problem. To wit: I am not a plow horse; I am a cow pony. What sets the sparks to flying under my hooves is not plodding along in the traces, but galloping into unsown fields. Which is a way of saying, in 21st-century words, that I’m fundamentally entrepreneurial. I like to round up new cows and chase down loose dogies, not turn the soil into row after row after endless tidy row.

Hence, of course, Camptown Races Press…

Because of this psychological quirk, of late I’ve found myself growing mightily tired of the copyediting business. Not that I don’t love my clients and admire their work…just that I tire of turning the stuff into English.

So the other day when a friend suggested I might like to write a grant proposal for a nonprofit that he heads, I was given pause. As in…huh! why am I still doing what I’m doing?

In the past, I’ve written a few grant proposals. I’ve also edited some, in the persona of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc. As a matter of fact, I wrote the proposal that founded the nonfiction writing program at GDU West, which I directed for ten years before moving over to the main campus. I can do this. Sure, I’d need to refresh and update a few skills. But I do know how to write a proposal.

Grant writers earn a helluva lot more than copyeditors do. (Say what? Minimum fee $11,500?????) Not that we haven’t been paid decently when we’ve hooked up with a company or…yeah…a nonprofit. Most of the time, though, we’re working with individuals who try to chisel us down as low as we’ll go on our fees.

Not that I can blame them. They’re individual operators, too — although they at least are earning a salary that, in the US, runs upwards of 60 grand for nine months of work (plus the occasional semester-long or year-long sabbatical, plus travel funds for conferences and research). They’re used to working with graduate students, who perforce will work for next to nothing. And some of them seem to see us as perennial graduate assistants. Not their fault…but annoying nonetheless.

Grant writers, however, work for organizations. They’re more likely to be seen as professionals than as floating RAs. That would mean their clients expect to pay them a living wage.

Why did I not think of this before?

Well, I did. At the outset, I considered grant writing in passing but dismissed it for two reasons: 1) the Kid and I were fully engaged in copyediting, having run the Great Desert University’s office for scholarly journals for the previous five years; and 2) it looked like drudgery. I figured it would be easier to segue into a business that simply extended what we were doing into private enterprise than to do the gear-shifting required to launch into a new trade. And we hoped we would be able to pick up several journals as long-term clients. In fact, we do have one such. But we would need eight or ten of them to come anywhere near supporting the two of us. And that would be an outrageous amount of work. So much so that we would have to hire a crew of underlings, negating the “support us” factor.

But…I could easily write eight or ten small proposals a year. No problem. Add two to four indexes, and the revenue goal would be met and surpassed. One large proposal for a substantial organization would do the same.

So. I’m thinking it’s time to revive those skills, rewrite the resumé, and go in search of a new species of client…

Dog Dunes

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You think I exaggerate, don’t you, with that turn of phrase? Really?

Yes. That is from one (1) twenty-pound dog. A mound of hair larger than Ruby’s head!

Is there any question why I seem to be developing an allergy to dog hair?

Well. Yes, there is. This being lovely uptown Arizona, great swaths of dust accumulate on the floors, too. I dust the floors every day… And here’s the accumulation of one (1) twenty-four-hour period:

Yup. As a practical matter, even more dust than dog hair has settled in the course of one day. And nothing is going on. The air is perfectly still: no breezes blowing, no monsoons wailing, nary a soul tracking in and out of the house.

Arizona. It’s where you come to find out what your allergies are.

😀

No, i do NOT know what that is

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WHY WordPress has kindly decided to reproduce November 4’s post in the sidebar, I do not know. A query is out to the Web guru. Meanwhile, stop that laughing!

Time Management: The Meta-List

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So once again I find myself feeling that I spin my wheels a lot, I loaf a whole lot, and I don’t get many things done. This, as it develops, is not entirely true…but an investigation shows that I surely do not make the best of all possible use of my time.

The other day it occurred to me to list the things that have to be done, and how often (i.e., how many times per week), and the things that I’d like to do but that are not required for survival or sanity maintenance. This produced a couple of interesting lists:

Note that this does not include paid work. This is just the stuff that needs to get done to maintain the house, the human, and the dogs…more or less.

Doesn’t look like much, does it?

Soooo….WTF am I doing that blows away day after day after day with seemingly little or nothing gettin DONE??? That is the question.

Presumably, I answer that question presumptuously, what I’m doing must be LOAFING. Procrastinating. Staring into space. Surfing the Web (which is the same as staring into space).

What always gets me off my duff is a list. So the natural response to this presumption is to create a list. But what came to mind was not a daily list but a kind of weekly list: something that would posit all those things, above, which could be used to drive a daily list. Or rather, seven daily lists a week. How to construct such a thing?

Based on the frequencies suggested in the neurotic accounting above, I wondered how much time do I actually spend on these activities? Assuming I were to do them as often as I think they need to be done… Here’s what developed:

Decimals represent portions of an hour: .25 = 15 minutes, for example.

So…on a day when I was accomplishing all these things (and often I do have to do all those things in one day), I’m spending between 6 hours, 40 minutes and 12 hours, 30 minutes each day just on living tasks…not counting paid work. That comes to a potential weekly total of almost 62 hours.

Total waking hours vary by the season — I tend to sleep more in the winter because it’s dark longer. In general, I’m awake 15 or 16 hours a day, or 105 to 112 hours a week.

So in theory, the demands above do leave time to do paying work. To break loose enough time to handle a major project — approximately 40 hours a week — I would have to cut out cleaning, gardening, networking, physical therapy/yoga exercises, dog care, shopping, surfing the Web (i.e., reading daily news), blogging, and writing. Obviously, this isn’t practical…but as a practical matter, I rarely have a project that demands a full 40-hour work week.

But…think about that:

Just to keep up the house, the yard, and the pool, care for the dogs, care for myself, and have THE most rudimentary of all possible social life occupies almost 62 hours a week! No wonder I’m so tired by the time I stumble off to bed.

Admittedly, a seven-day week…but life does not stop on the weekend. When you’re freelancing, work does not stop on the weekend, either.

So, with this meta-list in hand, what would a typical daily routine look like? Days of the week would differ, of course, because not all of these things have to be done every day.

From the meta-list comes a slew of daily task lists:

Washing the hair is a major project — it requires several hours to dry, and so time must be negotiated around that process. On Wednesday, for example, the hair would have to be done early in the day so as to have it manageable before I have to leave for choir practice. And the job had better be done on Saturday, else I’ll be charging out of the house Sunday morning with dirty hair. 😀

What with the new allergy to something — very probably dog hair & dander — the floors now have to be cleaned every day. Fortunately the house is completely tiled…but this task includes cleaning under all the furniture as well as schlepping up dog hair in more visible places. Oh well. At least the house always looks nice…

Cleaning the pool is easy, but time-consuming. Blogging is time-consuming in a big way. Cleaning the house includes laundry, a multi-taskable job.  It also includes ironing, a nonmulti-taskable job…unless you regard watching Rachel Maddow while ironing as a form of multi-tasking. Writing is by its nature time-consuming, if you make yourself sit down and do the job. A mile-long walk with two dogs, one of which drags you forward and one of which drags you backward, is good exercise but can also absorb 30 or 40 minutes. The physical therapy exercises only take a few minutes, but if I were to actually do the yoga routine that I should be doing every day, that bit of self-care would consume an hour or so. “Water and tend plants” doesn’t look like much till you realize that I live in a xeric jungle. Today, for example, I started hacking back the blue plumbago and the Lady Banks rose at 10 in the morning and knocked off at about 3 p.m.

Come to think of it…I need to knock this off and get on with the next project. And so, to work..

Groceries: Online or In Person?

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A thing of the past?

Here’s an amusement: Whilst Amazon makes a grab for Whole Foods, cheapies down its offerings, and turns it into an order-out joint, Aldi is going in the opposite direction: Opening newer and fancier stores, spiffing up the existing properties, and targeting customers who prefer to buy their groceries in brick-and-mortar establishments.

Interesting development, isn’t it? Aldi, according to the report linked above, is betting the farm (heh!) on the proposition that most people would rather shop for groceries in person, especially where fresh products are concerned.

Though it’s a huge risk, it makes sense when viewed in some lights. Given the traditionally low profit margins in the grocery business (typically around 5 percent), dropping your margin to somewhere around 3 percent for the privilege of letting shoppers order online and have stuff delivered has a whiff of suicide about it.

Also, it’s reasonable to suspect that a large number of shoppers may prefer to buy in person, for a variety of reasons. Some may prefer brick-&-mortar shopping all the time; some may find it more convenient to pick up food on the fly some of the time — and they may prefer to do the picking up in a real supermarket with substantial offerings, not in a Circle K.

This may apply to the young and the techie as well as to us cranky old fossils. Last night, for example, my son invited me over for dinner. He kindly made us a pizza, but realized he was missing a couple of items and he didn’t have a bottle of wine. A ten-minute trip to the Fry’s Supermarket around the corner caused these items to materialize… We didn’t have to search for them online, and we didn’t have to wait hours or a day to have them delivered. Obviously, when you order online, someone has to find your items, package them, ship them, pick them up at the warehouse, drive them across the city, and deposit them at your doorstep. That isn’t going to happen in 15 or 20 minutes.

As for us old folks: we’ve been around the grocery-delivery block.

Some time ago, I decided to try ordering up a week’s worth of groceries from the local Safeway. How wonderful, I imagined, not to have to get in the car, traipse through the homicidal traffic, trudge through the store, stand in line to pay, drag the stuff out to the car, and drive back home through said homicidal traffic.

And online grocery shopping would be wonderful. If it worked.

It probably would indeed work for a certain kind of buyer. If you subsist mostly on restaurant food and, when at home, on processed, packaged food, door-to-door grocery delivery would no doubt be highly successful for you.

But if you’re into real foods, unprocessed foods, fresh foods: not so much. The problem is, grocery-store clerks haven’t a clue about selecting fresh fruits and vegetables. What I got when I made the ballyhooed delivery order was under-ripe tomatoes, over-ripe fruit, and wilted lettuce. They don’t eat that kind of stuff, and so they do not know how a fresh melon or a fresh bunch of asparagus is supposed to look.

Nor do they know how to select a decent cut of meat.

Consequently, what you get is not very good — certainly not worth the price you pay for it.

I think the growing popularity of “organic” foods suggests that a number of people — maybe a lot of people — do care about the quality of the food they consume. And possibly that a larger number than you might expect prepare food in their homes.

My son for example, can make a pizza that you simply cannot buy at any pizzeria or grocery counter. Why would he want (for example) a random bag of soggy mushrooms delivered when he’s building a really first-rate meal?

It’ll be interesting to see what develops.

Meanwhile, while we’re watching: what’s your preference in grocery-shopping: on-line or in person?

Better Living Through Chemistry?

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Chortle! One wonders, doesn’t one, whether all the miraculous elixirs offered up by the pharmaceutical industry are really God’s and Chemistry’s Gift to Personkind. Over-the-counter or by prescription, they all have some kind of side effect.

Lately I’ve been enjoying a new phenomenon: whenever I eat anything — doesn’t matter how much or how little, or what it is — I end up feeling like I’ve got a 10-pound boulder in my belly.

This uncomfortable sensation goes on for several hours. Then all of a sudden, as though a valve opened between the stomach and the gut, it disappears…and voilà! I’m starved again.

Last night as I was driving across the city to a social event, feeling like a stuffed pig, I was wondering what new ailment is this? I’d eaten at noon. It was after 6 p.m.: SIX HOURS LATER, the rather light meal I’d eaten was still sitting in my gut like a cannonball.

Occurred to me that this is a fairly new phenomenon. New…new…what am i doing that’s new… Oooooohhhh yeah!

A few weeks ago I started taking a prescribed regimen of Claritin: 10 mg in the morning and 10 mg at night. This is twice the OTC dose, but it is working to clear up some very bothersome allergic phenomena.

So yeah. Now I don’t have a stuffy nose and clogged throat. Now I have a stuffy, clogged belly.

Hmmmmmm… Wonder if there’s a correlation?

Claritin is one of the lowest-side-effect drugs on the market. Taking twice the recommended dose does nothing to you.* Side effects are rare and mild. And plugged-up-belly is not one of them. It is said to cause “stomach pain,” but this is not pain.

But…maybe “10-pound lead weight in the gut” is too complicated to describe in a list of two- and three-word side effects.

So today I’m going to kick the drug cold turkey. We’ll see what happens.

Well, I’ll tell you what will happen: the nose will stuff up again, the gunk will fill the throat again, and I’ll be choking and gagging again.

The alternative is a dose of Sudafed (pseudoephedrine), a noxious drug that I cannot take after about noon, or else it will block me from sleeping all night long. It does clear up your head, but ugh…

Flonase works handsomely.

Flonase has among its many side effects cataracts and glaucoma.

Thank you, I’d rather have the bellyache or the insomnia. If you’ve been following Windy City Gal‘s misadventures as reported at Facebook, you will know why I do not, not, NOT want to trade off a stuffy nose for glaucoma, thankyouverymuch.

It seems like every drug on the market has some sort of side effect, and among those, at least one is going to be worse than the disease. In my case, if a drug has a rare, weird side effect limited to one in 10,000 users, that‘s the one I’m gonna get. You get to the point, in your jaded old age, where you figure if the disease is not terminal or hopelessly, permanently crippling, you’re probably better off to put up with it than to take on a whole new set of annoying symptoms.

* That is not to say you should double up on the stuff! Consult a doctor before messing with any drug, prescription or over-the-counter. I am not a doctor or a pharmacist and so you should believe nothing that you read here!