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Stuff Wears Out…

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socks …Obviously. But here’s the question: Why does all Stuff always wear out at the same time?

First, we have the socks. Admittedly, these are not young socks. They came from Costco, among many pairs purchased over the course of several seasons. Though they weren’t all bought at once, interestingly they all fell apart at once!

I darned three pair of them the other day.  This works to extract a few more wearings, but frankly, darning socks is a ditzy chore and not something I feel like doing when I’m tired and can hardly hold my eyes open at the end of a long workday.

Costco  no longer carries women’s socks, leastwise not that I can find. What could they be trying to say to us?

Amazon does, though. And they’re cheap and cute.

I like to wear socks to bed at night, because when it’s cold and the heat is off by way of saving a few pennies, you feel a lot warmer when your feet are warm. They also function as slippers…which may explain the holes in the bottom. 🙂

Here’s something less goddamnably explicable:

redshoeheel

That is the (former) heel of a pair of expensive Clark’s shoes. The heels on both shoes suddenly crumbled apart. I discovered this when I came home from the Christmas Eve songfest services and noticed something that looked like little pieces of charcoal tracked all over the floor.

And I have another pair, exact same design, in black. The heels on those are also beginning to fall apart!

redshoetopThe tops of both pairs are in perfect condition — they look brand-new.

If indeed they were brand-new, I would be absolutely furious. As it develops, this is what we call a “known issue” with Clark’s: consumer after consumer describes  disintegrating heels. Several people say that if you call their consumer service number, they’ll ask you to produce photos and the shoe’s model number and size, in return for which they will send you a new pair of Clark’s.

Thought about that. Then thought…more hassle than it’s worth. These are not new shoes. They’re at least several years old, and between you ‘n’ me, I think the operative term is “a lot of years old.” I don’t even  remember when I bought them, but believe it was during a shopping expedition with my friend VickyC, whereinat we raided a Clark’s outlet in what was then a halfway decent mall on the east side that was just starting to decline.

Said mall is now in full decline, no longer a place where you would feel safe parking and leaving your car or one that harbors stores of much interest. So that gives you a clue to how long it’s been since I bought those two pairs of shoes.

I need a pair of black, presentable flats. My favorite shoe store is having a frenzy of sales. They carry Naots and Mephistos and Pikkolinos, among many other high-quality, attractive pain-frees. Right now they have a sale going until the 31st. I may drive out there today, come to think of it.

Yeah. I probably will. We’re almost done with the current client’s first raft of copy — The Kid has the last two pieces on her end right now. That means…hallelujah, brothers and sisters! No paying work sitting on the desk right this minute.

Absolutely. Get in car. Drive to Tempe. Get shoes. Drive home. Try not to get killed on the way.

🙂

How to Reduce Facebook Ads

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I hate Facebook Ads. I especially  hate the ones disguised as posts forwarded from or recommended by my friends. As soon as Facebook figured out how to defeat Adblocker, my FB feed was swamped with annoyances —  about one ad for every three messages from friends or acquaintances. Then I figured this out: though you can’t get rid of the damn things, you can vastly reduce the number of Facebook Ads you see, at least temporarily.

Here’s the trick. When an annoyance comes up, click on the down arrow that appears in the ad’s upper right-hand corner.

1-adkill-arrowA menu with several choices will appear:

2-adkillSelect “Hide ad.” Another menu will come up:

3-adkill

Click on the circle next to “It’s not relevant to me”; then click “Continue.”

4-adkillFinally you will see the annoying message above. Of course, you do not want Facebook to show you “better” ads, because there’s no such thing as a “good” intrusion.

Now, here’s the thing: you can rid  your feed of almost 100% of Facebook Ads — temporarily — if you run down the page  (whatever it’s called in Facebook-babble: the page that comes up when you click on “Home”) and do this for every single ad that comes up. If you tag every ad as “it’s not relevant to me,” you’ll find that almost no ads will appear while you’re visiting Facebook.

This lasts for about a week to ten days. Then you’ll start having to “hide” ads again — but there’ll be a lot fewer of them.

Will this eventually get rid of Facebook Ads in your feed? I don’t know. Could be. Or…sooner or later, Facebook may tumble to this and negate your option to “hide” ads. That, I suggest, is the time to quit patronizing Facebook altogether.

This strategy does not get rid of the ads that appear in the right-hand sidebar. However, if you’re like me, you’ve already learned to mentally filter out sidebar ads, thanks to the nuisance that is Google Adsense. I don’t even see ads (or much of anything else) in a website’s sidebar. You can train yourself to do this by focusing solely on the content that interests you, which usually appears in the center column.

What will happen if you click “I keep seeing this” or “It’s offensive or inappropriate”? I don’t know.

Facebook claims it will quash content that you find “offensive,” whatever that means. But most FB ads are not naughty in any way — they’re just intrusive. Repeatedly labeling ads for fabric softener or some such offering as “offensive” may get YOU in trouble. As for “I keep seeing this”: Suuurre! Facebook and its advertisers give a damn whether you don’t like seeing some ad over and over. Elephants are pink, too. 🙄

Facebook tells its advertisers that if a user clicks “it’s not relevant to me,” the ad’s “relevancy score” drops:

If a user submits feedback on your ad and reports It’s Not Relevant to Me, your relevancy score will go down. Conversely, people who engage with your ad cause the relevancy score to go up. If your ad’s relevance score is high (with 10 being the highest), your ad is more likely to be served than other ads targeting the same audience.

This suggests that by labeling an ad as irrelevant, you’re likely to cause it to appear less often in your feed. It also is less likely to appear to other people that Facebook deems are “like you.” So with any luck, maybe the damn thing will appear less frequently in everybody else’s feed, too.

Take a little time to make your FB experience more enjoyable. Who knows? Maybe it’ll help do the same for all of us.

🙂

Merry Christmas!

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Cheers! And a happy Christmas Eve and joyous Christmas Day to you!

What are you up to for this year’s Joy Frenzy?

Me, I’m headed over to the church in an hour or so: rehearsal at 7:30,  8:30 service, fast potluck, midnight service, then deliver my friend back to his house (unless he decides to leave with his wife at the end of the early service), then back to the Funny Farm.

Which, I hope, will still be intact. I really don’t like to wander off on one of the premier burgling days of year. But it’s been pouring rain all day long, which I hoped would discourage the thieving activities. Even though the rain has now stopped, it’s still pretty soggy out there.

Gerardo’s cousin Antonio came over with a pile of beautiful chicken mole tamales, the kind they make in the deep south of Mexico and in Central America, wrapped in banana leaves. These I’m combining with another batch made by another friend, to present as my contribution to the potluck.

Unfortunately, it’s not much: we’re told this Christmas Eve potluck serves some 70 people. I’ve only got a couple dozen of these things. But I’m truly broke just now. Every hand has been out — often more than once, plus of course I’ve had to buy Christmas presents and I haven’t recovered (and won’t, not for another five years) from the new car loan arrangements or the various SURPRISE costs that plagued October and November. So it’ll be first come, first served.

How to keep these things warm? Argha!

Decided to put about an inch of hot water in the bottom of a crockpot, then set a steamer basket in there to hold the tamales out of the water. Then set the thing on “warm” or “low” for the two hours that we’re singing. It looks like that’s going to just about work.

La Maya suggested packing them into pot with loosely wadded-up tinfoil, to keep them upright and be sure they don’t fall into the water. So okayyyy… They’re in there, and they fill the thing up, jam-tight, to the top. The lid will just barely fit on — it certainly doesn’t sit tight.

But I think it’ll be all right. I hope.

Self-serving these things will be a trick: I’m bringing a pair of tongs, plus a stack of paper plates for people to use to discard the wrappers. And I’ve got two containers of guacamole, for those who like to top their tamales with something.

Spent half the day screwing around with a math paper that should have taken an hour or two, at most. This, thanks to effing Word’s endless, reliable intransigence.

God, I hate that program. How can I say how much I want XyWrite back!!!!!

Wyrd does not like mathematical statements. It especially doesn’t like them if they’ve been converted from some other program, like…say, LaTex. So late yesterday afternoon, I’m just finishing this goddamn thing and click “enter” on some edit and…Word does its Catastrophic Crash Trick. The whole program goes down and everything in every file that was open is lost.

Fortunately the program is set to save every five minutes, because of this behavior. But I’m editing in regular view, not in Track Changes — we’ve found it’s much easier to just edit the copy and then do a “compare documents” maneuver, which elicits a file that shows all the changes and edits. But that means I can’t tell where I left off. And that hat means I have to run Track Changes > Compare Documents on the edited copy and the original so I can view the changes (which are not really entered quite chronologically…) and then eyeball them both, side-by-side, line by line by line by line by line by line by….

God DAMN it!

So I finally finish this just as something else comes up. I save and close the file.

When I try to open it, Word refuses to open the damn thing. After much wrestling, I do get it open TextEdit — as a plain text file, missing all the math, missing all the edits, missing all the comments & queries. And single-spaced.

Now I have to go through and compare again, side-by-side, line by line by line…, and enter the math and comments back into the copy manually.

I just finish this and go to check some damnfool factoid online, and damned if Firefox doesn’t crash.

When Firefox crashes on a Mac, it brings down the entire system!

So the reconstructed file closes down, and once again, I can’t get it open.

FVCK!

Finally it dawns on me: the file appears to be intact; it’s just that Wyrd doesn’t want to open it because it doesn’t like the math, which is copied and pasted over from the original or maybe just crudely converted from LaTex. Or some such.

I e-mail it to my giant desktop superpowerful iMac.

The iMac refuses to open it.

ooooookkkkaaayyyyy… Search the problem in Google.

Here I find the observation that Word will run a program with math in it if the thing is saved as a .doc file, but that a .docx file (thank you very much, Microsoft) is likely to cause problems.

So I get onto Zamzar and contrive to convert the .docx file to .doc format, and LO! it works!

But now I have to run Compare Documents again — both files had to be converted to .doc format to accomplish this.

Now with two probably unstable files open, I wonder how the  Hell this stuff is going to get to the client. The light dawns: save to RTF.

So I save both files in .rtf, evoking four files: two .docs and two .rtfs. And I suspect that the next time an attempt is made to open either file, we’re going to see the same “Word cannot open the file” message. But no: shut them down; reopen, and it still works. So off they went to the client, after much time-sucking hassle.

A two-hour project ended up taking about five hours: $35. Total, not per hour

***

It’s after 1 in the morning, Christmas Day. The tamales went over reasonably well at the potluck: all but part of one (which apparently fell apart) were eaten and several people remarked on how good they were. Much other excellent chow was offered.

We sang Christmas carols and fancy classical Christmas music, accompanied by a band of classical violinists, till we were blue in the face. At the midnight service, we were treated to a full-blown bells-and-smells service. So that was fun and interesting.

The whole religion thing is endlessly fascinating, as is human nature in general.

And so, at last, to bed…

Merry Christmas, one and all!

cropped-Christmas_Tree.jpg

 

 

WooHoo! The Refinan¢e Apprai$al Is IN!

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So the appraiser showed up the other day, after my son, a housecleaner, Gerardo’s crew, and I spent two days sprucing up his house and yard. He’s trying to refinance the downtown house, to escape the scheduled balloon payment inherent to the 30/15 loan he took out when he moved down here from San Francisco.

I’d helped him to qualify for that mortgage, figuring he’d be here about five or six years and then (as he planned) would go back up to the City.

That was before the Crash of the Bush Economy… As you know, we lost our communal shirts in that, six ways from Sunday.

We did manage to hang onto the house, though, even though we sank underwater to the tune of about 80 grand.

So over the past eight years, the economy has turned around, people have jobs, young folks are buying houses again, and his neighborhood is once again gentrifying.

It’s all Obama’s fault, of course…

Seeing that interest rates were about to rise, M’hijito managed to lock in a low rate through the credit union…something like two days before the Fed raised its rate. All we’ve been waiting on was the appraisal.

Last time we tried this, the appraisal came in well below what we felt the house was worth. The cost of the refinance struck him as too high, and the fact that the appraisal made it look like we didn’t have 20% equity in the house (we’d put 20% down at the time we bought!) meant he’d have to pay mortgage insurance. That irked him so much he declined the deal.

This time he got much better terms for the loan. A-n-n-n-n-d…

The house appraised for $300,000.

YES!

That’s $65,000 more than we paid for it, and about $145,000 more than it was worth at the bottom of the Bush Recession.

Meanwhile, just down the street from the Funny Farm, a house that’s the same model as Wonder-Accountant’s just went on the market. Hers has the same square footage as mine, and both of our places are on larger lots than said new offering. They want $395,000 for the shack!

Holy mackerel. I paid about the same for this place as M’hijito and I paid for the downtown house. So…kaching kaching…let’s imagine the seller extracts $385,000 from some sucker. That would put the value of my shack at $150,000 more than I paid for it.

Wow!

Welp, the value of this place is really neither here nor there for me, except insofar as it affects the property taxes. But where my son’s house is concerned, the assessor’s valuation is a HUGE relief.

It means my son will not have to worry about being turned out of his home when the present loan matures, only a few years hence. If interest rates rise back to their historic norms, there’ll be no way he could afford to refinance what he owes for that place. At 4 percent, he can pay for it; at 8 percent…not so much.

So he should be in pretty good shape indefinitely, assuming he hangs onto his job or moves into a better one. If he chooses to move back to the City — or to Oregon, where some of his friends are, or to Idaho, where he figures there’ll be more water in the ongoing drought — he will be able to sell the house without a back-breaking loss. Who knows? He might even make a little profit on the thing.

Some day.

Crazy-making day…

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editingmessIt’s 12:30 in the freaking afternoon and my wheels are still spinning.

I’d planned not to go to this morning’s meeting of the Scottsdale Bidness Association. It’s a long drive under the best of circumstances, and today it’s raining. Meanwhile, as usual in my drought-and-flood business model, the flood pours in right at Christmastime, the only time of year when I have a lot of social activities that (for a change) keep me busy. These are social activities that I do not want to give up, most certainly not in favor of plodding through eye-glazing academic ponderosity, much of it infested with cant.

So I slept in until 7:30. Then sat down briefly (heh…) to read the email while waiting for the coffee to brew.

At 11:30 I got up to throw out the forgotten coffee, now stone-cold, and bolt down a piece of cheese and a few grapes. While the new coffee brewed, tossed the dogs’ bed throw into the dryer to shake out the fur, loaded the Swiffer with a Costco microfiber rag, dustmopped the floors to pick up another couple days’ worth of dog hair and dust.

Awhile back, I assigned myself the project of machine-shaking out the dog throw and dust-mopping the floors every morning, having discovered that this easy, almost work-free routine keeps the floors clean and holds off the allergies handsomely.

In the process, the puppy got trapped in the garage. Neither dog will bark to be let out of the garage. They just stand there at the door, apparently figuring their mental telepathy will reach you.

In the “brief” interval between 7:30 and 11:30, what was I doing that I missed breakfast and missed even so much as a swig of hot coffee?

Reviewed The Kid’s herculean effort to untangle the worst excuse for an academic paper I’ve seen this side of freshman comp. She has spent hours on this thing (as I have), and this morning she finally threw up her hands. The anthology’s editor — our client — is going to have to send the magnum opus back to the author for a rewrite. What an UNGODLY mess.

But of course, the process of a) CYA and b) explaining to the client what the problem is takes God only knows how long. A long, long time.

The Kid has fired our formatting lady, for reasons that explain why one of our journal’s co-editors had a kitten over the documentation for an entire issue’s worth of scholarly papers. So now we have to hire someone to take up that slack, and damned fast because we’re both about to drown under the deluge of Incoming.

A new Chinese scientist wants his paper Englished. Haven’t even had time to answer his query. That’s next.

I’ve drafted a couple of skills tests for APA, Chicago notes-&-bibliography, and Chicago author-date styles, but it must be said that because it’s been 15 years since I had to actually teach these methods in the classroom, I don’t have an existing set of quizzes or anything I can plagiarize for the purpose. So this morning after trying to figure out the tangle and then trying to explain it to the client, after updating our copy-flow records, after going back & forth with The Kid, after cleaning out the DropBox folders, after… after… after…, I return to the task of trying to make some sense of the skills-testing project.

Along the way I realize about half of these papers are formatted in Wyrd’s newer default — one-inch margins all the way around — rather than with the old default margins — one inch top and bottom, 1.25 inch left and right. Our page rates are predicated on the old default. Is there SOME REASON Microsoft has to fuck with EVERYTHING?????????

That extra quarter-inch reduces the length of a typical 35- to 40-page paper by three to five pages. So we are getting cheated when we base our fees on the length of a page that has Microsoft’s new margins. That means either we have to raise our rates — which, believe me, will not bring us any new work — or about every second or third page has to be reformatted. And I need a tracking table for that task, showing the number of pages per paper with 1.25-inch margins, the number of pages we’ve edited in total, the number of words per paper and in toto and goddamn it. Talk about your fucking pointless time sucks. Why? Because some moron at Microsoft decides it’s fun to mess with the customers’ heads.

The skies darken with my mood.

At length the clouds split open and a freaking waterfall cascades down into the backyard. A lake rises toward the back door.

It doesn’t get high enough to over-run the concrete threshold — the house’s slab rises four, maybe five inches above grade. Thank God. If the foundation had been any lower, I would’ve had water in the house.

The water has now receded — it’s 2:00 in the afternoon, this writing having been interrupted by a lengthy telephone conversation with another client.

In any event, the good thing is…the good thing is…is…there’s GOTTA be a good thing here somewhere, doesn’t there? The GOOD thing is I’m sure as hell glad I didn’t drive to Scottsdale in this rain. Phoenix’s drivers are homicidal under the best of conditions. In the rain, they’re confused homicidal drivers.

And now…I have to get some work done.

 

Car bubble?

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Well! Here’s something I wrote a couple months ago and blithely forgot to post. This was before the Fed decided to start raising interest rates. It’s an interesting idea, if you have a vehicle that’s getting old but still running…don’t be in any hurry to replace it just because rates may rise.

***

At our networking group, the thought is that we’re seeing a “bubble” in cars comparable to the housing bubble, BECAUSE interest rates are so low. With a 1.9% or 2.9% loan, you incline to buy a WHOLE lot more car than you can actually afford. Growing numbers of people are already defaulting on these loans. And if the economy stumbles — as it inevitably will, for whatever goes up must come down — a huge number of people will default.

Some of the guys suggested waiting a year, on the theory that the market will be flooded with repossessed vehicles offered at a cut rate.

***

LOL! “Whatever goes up…” It pays to be a cynic: we’re never disappointed and sometimes pleasantly surprised. 😀