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Update: Life, the Universe, and All That

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So, feeling slightly better when I rolled out at 6:00 this morning, I decided I’d better wash the damn car. The other day while we were at choir practice – god, was it only last Wednesday? no, I think it was a week ago Wednesday…but couldn’t be because two weeks ago I was too sick to drive…I’ve come unstuck in time! – a sudden windstorm blew up. It not only exploded a blast of dust into the air, it also spat just enough rain to cover every car in the parking lot with mud.

What a mess.

I’ve not felt well enough to deal with that, so used the windshield wiper squirter thing to clear the glass enough to see part of the road. And in the meanwhile have been driving around in a car literally coated in mud.

Tomorrow I have to take the vehicle to Chuck’s so he can perform whatever regular maintenance has to be done after six months. And…uhm…well…I do not want Chuck to know that I would let a “new” car languish under a layer of filth, driving around in public like that.

So first crack out of the barrel, before breakfast and (especially) before the sun could climb high enough to shine on the paint, the car went out in the driveway to be soaped up and rinsed down and dried off.

This job used up the entire store of microfiber rags remaining after the last housecleaning adventure. A giant wad of dirty microfiber rags has been sitting by the washer waiting to be laundered, so between those and the ones I used to swab off the car, I pretty much maxed the Speed Queen.

Yesterday I went to clean the debris off the floor of the pool, where it had settled after having been blown in there on said wind. The lazy person’s way to do this is to let the pump run for a day (or two or three or…) without benefit of Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner. This will push the litter into a neat pile along the north side of the pool. Then you can use a leaf bonnet – a gadget that attaches to the end of a hose – to suck up the chunky stuff. Harvey will then vacuum the dust off the bottom.

Junk out…no clogs in the pool equipment. Voilá!

Unfortunately, a pool bonnet comes with a stupid little bag that you’re supposed to cinch on with a piece of string…a highly inefficient way of doing things. About half the time, the string slips loose about when you’ve filled up the bag with half a bushel of debris. It then falls off the gadget and dumps the leaves and twigs and dead worms back into the pool, scattering them all over the bottom.

Naturally this happened yesterday.

It dawned on me, in my fury, that there really is no reason to use the flimsy bonnet baggy thing that comes with the product.

Duh! If a piece of hosiery works as a strainer basket filter, why wouldn’t it work as a “bonnet” on that thing? Cut of off the legs and tie the stumps at the crotch. Then slide the waistband, which is pretty tight elastic, over the top of the leaf bonnet. For good measure, tie it down with a piece of string.

Out with the old…
In with the “new”…

Damned if it didn’t work! Using a pair of hose for a fat lady (I need a “queen size” in L’Eggs), I could almost make the DIY sweeper bonnet stay on by virtue of its built-in elastic. I suspect a pair of hose made for a 12-year-old wouldn’t even have to be tied on.

So…later this week: a trip to the Dollar Store in search of cheapie hose.

I broke or wore out the Sandisk memory card thing for the camera, which will not communicate with the MacBook without it. So had to make a Costco run to buy another. At first I thought it didn’t work, but lo! It surely does.

Blogging from the front courtyard…

It’s a beautiful morning, cool and a little overcast. My poor under-exercised dogs have been loafing on the front patio, craving a doggy-walk, which they’re not gonna get, because I just heard from two of my journal editors, and so must pretend to get to work.

When is lunch?

 

Update: The Disease

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Not goin’ anywhere…

So this weekend I felt so terrible and was still barking so frantically that I’d about decided if this ailment isn’t improved by today – Monday – I’ll have to call Young Dr. Kildare.

Trouble with that scheme, of course, is that there’s little YDK can do other than make sympathetic noises. Though he’s a past master of that skill, one hesitates to drive halfway to Yuma for the privilege.

One of my friends reports, on Facebook, that she also is enjoying the same epizoötic. She describes essentially the same symptoms with essentially the same soul-crushing severity. She went to the doctor, who decided she had a sinus infection and gave her an antibiotic.

Well, in the first place I don’t believe mine is a sinus infection, since there’s been almost no nasal congestion and what there was is now gone. And in the second place, most antibiotics make me sicker than the bug did. And in the third place, you know and I know that a cold that mostly consists of a crazy-making cough is going to be diagnosed as viral bronchitis (medico-speak for “cold with a crazy-making cough”). Last time that happened, the quack prescribed prednisone. The prednisone caused the cold to go away in about the same period that any killer cold goes away…and it also kicked up the GERD.

It’s taken two years to get that flare-up to settle down. And y’know what? I don’t wanna do that again.

Given a choice between coughing all night or lying awake all night with a bellyache whose outcome is, doctors want me to believe, potentially stomach or esophageal cancer, I’ll take the cough.

But it is freaking exhausting. As a practical matter, I do not lie awake all night, because by 8:30 or so I’m so tired I can’t do anything but sleep. Saturday I joined my friends at KJG’s house, where we have an ongoing project to throw, fire, and glaze our very own little pots.

It was great fun! We hung out with KJG and her Fireman all day, during which the cough nagged and nagged and nagged. But other than the cough, I didn’t feel too bad…until about two in the afternoon, when suddenly such a wave of exhaustion came over me I couldn’t even think.

That obviated spending Saturday evening on the current Chinese academic paper, meaning I had to finish it yesterday, when I also didn’t feel at all like working…much less dealing with Word’s effing weirdness.

Felt a little better on arising this morning. Am still so tired that really, all I want to do is go back to bed…and it’s 9 in the morning.

But there’s just too much to have to do.

Update: The Business

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Along about 10:30 last night, I finished editing the latest Chinese academic paper, 12,250 words not counting the half-dozen complicated tables.

You understand: the last allegedly book-length manuscript I read was a little over 12,000 words… This is pretty large, for a journal article, which you would usually expect to run 3,000 to 5,000 words. And extremely arcane: a statistical study trying to make sense of the relationship between corporate board structure, Chinese laws, and the life cycle of firms over a period of 10 or 15 years.

The authors surfaced late last week and said they want it turned around by the end of the month. That is like right now.

Fortunately, by way of saving a few yuan, the co-authors asked me not to review the tables. That was a mercy, because tables cause some big problems with Office.

I sincerely hope the problem was the tables. Wyrd is allergic to tables and typically will react, after enough is enough, by swooning into a catastrophic crash, causing you to lose all your data not only in the file you’re working on but in any other files that are open at the time!

This can be dealt with by setting Wyrd’s auto-recover function to save every five minutes. Thus you lose only a few minutes of work, rather than a quarter-hour’s worth. Sounds good, eh?

Well…. It’s not nice to fool Mother Microsoft… Yesterday the thing started throwing up an error message to the effect that the computer was out of space and the document couldn’t be saved.

Sheee-ut!

On the home stretch, fucking exhausted, anxious to get done…I knew I was GUNNA DIE if this thing decided it wouldn’t save to disk.

Rescued what I’d done by saving to RTF and, as fast as I could, emailing it to myself. This kept all the changes up to the point where these messages – which interestingly enough, occurred every five minutes – began to warn of an impending (current?) crash.

Opened it on the freaking enormous overpowered iMac, found nothing had been lost, and resumed working. Believe me, there’s more than enough space on that thing.

But…the file is still telling me it’s not being saved. Same irritating, nerve-wracking message.

Suspicious, think I, that it saved everything right up to the last edit before I launched it into the email ether. Hmmm…

I hit command-S (which is alt-FS in the real world), and it seems to save. Hm.

Again I email the file to myself…and again the saved attachment does contain all the edits I’ve entered.

At this point, I conclude the problem lies not in the Mac but in our corrupted file. Even the RTF version generates the same aggravating messages. It’s probably the tables.

So I keep working, frantically, and saving manually about at the end of every sentence. Then I have to go through and verify page after page after endless page of references. And yea verily, our worthies have included eight or ten sources to which they haven’t referred in-text. And the References section isn’t alphabetized. Or rather it is, in a cursory way…it takes looking at it with the glazing removed from one’s eyes to realize the problem isn’t just a couple of entries incorrectly entered, but that the entire thing is fucked over.

In a file that has corrupted. Oh, good.

But I finally manage to finish, finally manage to get it saved. Run a compare-docs operation to generate the edited version; then have to review the 23 pages of edits. Oh, God! What a jumble!

And of course, this file, too, keeps generating – every five minutes – the “I ain’t a-savin’ this thing” message.

At last the project is as done it can get, at least until such time as the journal’s editor arrives at the office and finds my query: I need to know how the journal formats References entries for books. This journal uses a bastardization of APA style. It’s largely APA, but with weird quirks…like bold-face italic c/lc for journal titles. My god!

The thing comes out through Oxford. Why the hell not use Oxford style? Ohhhhh no. We have to get weird.

I’m drafting this post in Wyrd by way of seeing what happens.

The answer: nothing. Evidently the problem was in the file, not in the hard drive.

Moving on.

This paper will generate almost $400.

The Copyeditor’s Desk hauled in a phenomenal amount of work this spring. To hit my $20,000 goal for all of 2017 by the first of July, I’ll only need a couple of articles like this a month, or one book-length editing project per month, or one major index per month. That is effing amazing.

If this keeps on, the S-corp will start to generate, for the first time in its existence, enough that I can draw down a salary. Hot dang!

Problem is, I’m pretty fuzzy about where all this business came from. Word of mouth, I think. It’s a little hard to believe that the switch from a page rate to a word rate worked effectively enough to open the floodgates.

The writing bookoid, which I intend not to market on Amazon so much as to use as a marketing tool for the bidness by handing it out at speaking engagements, has yet to go to press, simply because I haven’t had time to fiddle with it. I believe the ebook designer is about done with it, but for the past month I’ve been too sick to go to the weekly networking meeting where he and I see each other on a regular basis, so have no idea where we are there.

I’ve also got to re-up for Toastmaster’s, another task that I’ve been too lazy/busy/sick to attend to.

And so, onward…

The Palace of Impulse Buys

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So  I get downtown  to meet a friend, along about 9:30 this a.m., only to learn that our date is tomorrow, not today. Oh well.

This is good, in two ways:

First, it frees up a day in which to do a few things of my own (as well as rising to the the Newest Client’s task…later, not right this minute), and since a Costco is on my way home, it invites me to fill the gas tank and then run inside and pick up a few things you can’t get anywhere else.

Of course, I hadn’t brought the shopping list, but I could remember enough to create a little mnemonic. POTC:

pecans
olive oil
tomatoes
cheese

Sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

Well, but…no. This is, after all, Costco, the Home of the Impulse Buy.

One of the things I’ve been needing is a new memory chip for my digital camera. Or…possibly a new digital camera. Costco has a chip that a sales dude promises is the real thing, and they’ll even take a gigantic Man’s Xacto Knife and break into the damned consumer-proof package for me. Grab.

Hey. At least I didn’t buy a camera.

I didn’t even buy a new external hard drive for a mere $80, knowing I could get one on Amazon for an even merer $60.

Whilst strolling behind the grocery cart, I recall that I wish I’d had a package of those glorious scalloped potatoes to nourish the ailing body, SO good, the ultimate comfort food. Grab.

Walking toward the scalloped potato counter, I have to pass by the meat cooler. There, calling out “come to me, come to meeeee” like some Broadway fish from South Pacific is a magnificent package of eminently fresh, fantastically luxurious, wild-caught ahi tuna. Oh God! Grab.

Into the produce department. Having a hard time finding the Campari tomatoes, which they’ve hidden away on the far side of the displays. But n-o-o-o problem finding the spectacular candy-sweet seedless red grapes (grab!), the package of six breakfast-eligible golden mangoes (grab!), the double-packet of smoked wild-caught salmon (grab!).

Moving on:

Obtain the olive oil, grab; resist blandishments in that aisle.

Find the pecans; grab. Realize I’m almost out of pine nuts, which of late I’ve taken to spilling all over everything (grab!). And by the way, I ran out of pistachios (grab!).

And…and…wtf is that??? IS it what it appears to be? Oh yes: Glorias: a pair of Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in an astonishing shade of lavender. Holeeee sh!t. Costco hasn’t carried Glorias in colors for lo these many years! GRAB!

By the way, as long as we’re talking vanity and grooming, I need a bottle of Pantene shampoo. Do they have the regular white creamy Pantene? Well. No. They have a pricey-looking lifetime supply of a “Botanical” version of Pantene. It’s clear. That’s kind of cool. Stinks a bit, but Pantene has taken to overperfuming its traditional products, anyway. Pause, ever so briefly… Grab.

By the time I got out the door, I’d racked up a bill of $199 and change, thereby lending some truth to the maxim that you can’t get out of Costco for under $200.

It’s true. So, so true…

Miracle cure…or something…

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Well, I don’t know what worked — the leftover codeine or that reliable old standby, tincture of time — but the Cold from Hell is slowing arriving at the almost tolerable stage. Still barking, but not suffocating anyhow. I managed to drive to choir last night, having swallowed half a dose of the menacing opiate when dawn cracked, a good 12 hours before choir call. So felt it was safe enough to drive by then.

And amazingly I also managed to sneak through two hours of rehearsal without causing a scene that was too operatic. Easter, our religion’s seriously hyuge spiritual frenzy, is fast coming upon us, and some of the music is beyond amazing.

We’re singing Mealor’s Stabat Mater, which defies belief in the “Gorgeous” category.

Last night we also rehearsed Stopford’s Ave Verum, one of my favorites…

And Alan Hovhaness’s “Out of the Depths”…

And K. Lee Scott’s “Open My Eyes”… In English,  it’s true, but this Korean choir does better justice to the piece than the only other rendition I could find on YouTube:

And Pablo Casal’s O Vos Omnes…

 Can you believe we got through all that (and three hymns) in two hours?

No wonder I didn’t feel like driving to Scottsdale at 6:30 this morning. How much longer that networking group is going to put up with my absences, I do not know. Claro que I’ll have to show up  next week if I don’t want to be drummed out of the club!

Meanwhile, one of the things I need to do between now and next Thursday is rejoin a Toastmaster’s group, since speaking gigs will be central to the marketing scheme for the new magnum opus. It’s ready to go to print — I’ve just been too overworked and then too damn sick to do battle with the PoD guy’s software. And I believe the eBook dude is about ready with the Kindle and ePub versions. I intend to sell those off my website, since I’m mightily fed up with dealing through Amazon — and since Amazon sales are beside the point with this book.

And mean-meanwhile: a colleague’s book awaits my editorial attention. And so, away.