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Wherever You’re Going…

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Ya can’t get there from here!

The city has had Main Drag South dug up not for weeks, not for months, but for years, thanks to the light-rail boondoggle. Though the thing is now built and open, the workmen persist in excavating this major thoroughfare.

To that they’ve added a new excavation of Main Drag East, so you CAN. NOT. TURN. EAST. OUT. OF. THE. HOOD. ON. ANY. OF. THE. MAIN. DRAGS!

At least, not without miring yourself in a traffic jam that will add a good 8 to 10 minutes to your commute.

I need to drive out to Tempe to meet my associate editor — have about a half-hour before I’d better leave. That entails driving south on one freeway and east on another. And of course driving east from the ‘hood to get to the southbound freeway.

Last night the cops shot some guy on the I-10, westbound at 24th Street. Killed him dead. So that road has been shut down since 4:30 this morning. But only west-bound, so in theory it would be OK. But…coincidentally, some morons created another crash on the State Route 51 on-ramp to the I-10. That ramp is now closed.

Normally to get around a roadblock on the SR 51 ramp, I would drive through city traffic to 24th Street, piddle down to the I-10, and head east from that point. But with the road closed westbound, 24th Street will be dead stopped, making it as impossible to get on the freeway eastbound as it is to get on it westbound.

So it looks like I’m going to have to pass through three neighborhoods to get from my house to a south-bound main drag that’s moving. Then schlep south two miles to a major thoroughfare that goes all the way into Scottsdale and doesn’t stop at the Phoenix Mountains. Drive east on that to 32nd Street, trudge down 32nd to Washington, dodge the effing lightrail there to get east on Washington, proceed to Priest, continue down Priest to Rio Salado Boondoggle Parkway, and from there make my way to our favorite restaurant.

That’s going to take about an hour. At this time of day, it should be about a 20- to 30-minute drive.

Yay.

Charley the Golden Retriever is visiting, having given himself the doggywobbles by consuming an entire plate of cookies at his house. M’hijito’s house doesn’t have a doggy door, so the gigantic dawg has to be someplace where he can get out.

Charley and Ruby are having a sh!tfit just now at a passing band of religious nuts. One nice thing about Charley: his deep bass bark makes hims sound very formidable, even though he’s not. The proselytizers decided to pass is by. Good dog, Charley!

So tomorrow the ladies who know breast cancer are coming over to help build the video application for the $20,000 grant I hope to land. Hope, of course, but don’t expect. Still: the second runner-up gets $3,500: even that would help sustain the project long enough to get it to the send -it-to-an-agent stage. And being able to say someone thought it was worth supporting with grant money would get an agent’s or an academic press editor’s attention.

I’m pretty well ready, I think; now have to refine and rehearse (rehearse, rehearse, rehearse) my part of the dog & pony show.

One of our clients bellyached about the quality of editing in the references of a set of journal articles. I’d foisted them off onto my sidekick, whose life has of late been, shall we say, maxed. So I suspect she probably foisted them onto her own subcontractor, who probably did exactly what one of my subcontractors did a few months ago: used the wrong style manual.

This particular journal, for reasons incomprehensible, uses Chicago author-date style, which is similar to APA style, but different enough to be…different. And confusing. If we follow the journal to Texas when it leaves GDU, which I’m told we probably will, I’m going to suggest to the new editor that they switch to APA style, since most of their contributors are scholars in the social sciences. This would be far easier and less headache-making for their write rs, and it would solve some headaches for us, too, not to have to ask our underlings to use Chicago’s quirky, obscure version of author-date.

That notwithstanding, one thing I want to suggest to Bidness Partner is that it’s past time we came up with an editing test for would-be subcontractors, who tend to line up outside the door. And it’s got to be something that they can’t run through a machine, since some of them are in other states. We need to be sure they actually understand the differences between the various manuals, that they can engage all the manuals accurately, and that they have enough sense to look things up when there’s some obvious discrepancy or nonsense.

Exactly what this test will look like is still pretty vague in my hot little head. But the Kid is one hell of a lot smarter than I am and so no doubt will come up with something that will work.

And now, it’s time to away. Happy Columbus Day!

 

Yipe? The Perp?

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This morning as the dogs were circumnavigating the ’hood with the human in tow, we came across a gent who looked very much like the fellow in the video who jumped over two walls to get at a couple of small children playing in their backyard. The instant I saw him, I thought holee crap! That’s the guy!

He and another BoB (Burglar on Bike) came out of an alley here in the poor folks’ section, riding bikes and bearing backpacks, and proceeded toward Richistan. They crossed Feeder Street N.S. and rolled into the area where the incident occurred. The character in question rode a bike with distinctive bright green wheel rims.

So I called CrimeStop. But I doubt anything will come of it. A cop would have had to be in the ’hood already to catch up with them. They were probably across Main Drag North and well into Methland before a cruiser showed up.

Oh well.

Beautiful weather: great morning for casing a neighborhood. This is the reason we live in Arizona.  🙂

I should do some gardening, but have actual Work work to do before taking time for anything pleasurable. The mâche I planted in a pot never sprouted, so I imagine the seeds were too old. Need to drive up to Home Depot and pick up some chard seeds to fill that pot.

Yesterday La Maya pointed out that the Great Desert University’s much ballyhooed and very ambitious online program (they’re ripping off the University of Phoenix’s business plan) has attracted thousands of would-be majors in subjects no one in their right mind would dream of selecting in the past: psych and history, for example. All of these online courses are taught by adjuncts.

GDU pays adjuncts a little better than the community colleges do ($3300 per course, vs. about $2800). However, adjuncts are limited to two sections per semester. On the other hand, the online courses are only about nine weeks long, so you’d only be teaching one course at a time. But on the third hand, they have no caps on those courses, so a course that meets a gen-ed requirement could dump 400 students on you.

$3300 x 4 comes to less than I was earning in the junior college. But it would amount to a lot less work, especially if you were teaching something other than freshman comp. A course that’s not writing-intensive can be assessed almost solely with machine-graded T/F/Multiple-guess quizzes. Creative writing courses can be set up in BlackBoard or Canvas to ape the “workshop” style that’s been popular for decades: students read and comment on each others’ efforts. Yep: for credit. All the instructor has to do is check in once every week or ten days to be sure each classmate is actually posting the required creative squibs and the required number of comments.

GDU’s courses now sell for around $500 to $1100 per credit hour. Plus (contrary to what that link says) assorted fees.

Here’s one in the English Department: three units of upper-division credit for scoping out the literary journal marketplace. Got that? You pay us to do about four hours of work you could do on your own in a library or at a halfway decent bookstore.

Heh heh heh…speaking of perps… You thought used car dealers are con artists? You aint’ seen nuthin’ yet!

Life in the Big City…

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When you insist on dwelling in the central part of a big city — for whatever reason: you hate commutes, you style yourself as an urbanite, you fancy antique homes and neighborhoods — you get used to certain hazards of life. The bums. The burglars. The mail thieves. The car thieves. The nightly visits from cop helicopters. The boondoggles City Hall inflicts on you to “improve” your town by way of enriching the politicos’ sponsors. It’s all just Life in the Big City.

But sometimes “Life” goes beyond the pale.

Not far from the ’hood a few days ago, some guy jumped over the back wall of a yard where two little girls were playing, a seven-year-old and a five-year-old. He exposed himself to them and then grabbed the smaller child. (BTW, some of the facts are wrong in that linked story: the guy did not spend 40 minutes in the family’s yard but had been spotted in the area over a 40-minute period.)

When I read this in a local news report, I assumed he’d jumped over the alley wall — alleys being a natural hazard in an inner-city neighborhood. But this morning while the dogs and I were perambulating, one of the neighbors stopped to chat. He said the guy had jumped a neighbor’s wall and then jumped into the girls’ yard.

Obviously, he’d been watching the family, he knew where they lived, he’d plotted a way to get at the kids, and he knew when they were outdoors.

Think of that. You can’t even let your kids play outside inside their own walled yard without their mommy hovering over their shoulder every minute!

I will admit that I was abhorred by the self-righteous attacks on the couple who let their kids play in a neighborhood park all by their little selves. One of the reasons the ubiquitous digital invasion of personal privacy gives me the whim-whams is that when I was a little girl, I was allowed to go outside and PLAY, which is what little kids are supposed to do. When I got home from school, I jumped on my bike and was gone until dinnertime.

But when predators as bold as this one make themselves known, you  have to figure the best thing to do is lock your kids inside and never let them see the direct sunlight. Guys like this jerk are riding up and down the alleys all the time — if you were outside watching, you’d see them every day. Cassie and Ruby go batshit every time they hear someone out there, and they hear someone out there with some frequency.

If those were my kids, the next morning they’d have a new 90-pound pet. They probably also would be looking at a “For Sale” sign in the front yard. No wonder people covet walled compounds governed by HOAs!

When my son was small, we lived in a quaint downtown neighborhood — a very pretty historic area. There were many, many more bums than we have here in the ’hood. You couldn’t stick your nose out the door without seeing a bum. The crime rate was much higher; the present ’hood has a surprisingly low crime rate, despite the neighboring blight. And no, my child did not play outside in front unless either I or the neighbor’s nanny was standing out there watching.

We had German shepherds, and that was why we had German shepherds.

Moving on…

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Mercifully, the much beloved Abby Perry, proprietor of I Pick Up Pennies and author of Frugality for Depressives, is back home and back in action after a brush with a potentially life-threatening ailment while she and her mom, Donna Freedman, were at FinCon. They were able to get to a hospital in San Diego, where the medicos succeeded in identifying the bacterium that had attacked her and beat it off.

So, welcome home, Abby! And…keep on truckin’.

The dust having settled here at the Funny Farm, in another hour I need to make this month’s Costco run — the shopping list is surprisingly short, lhudly sing huzzah — and then get to work on a) the video that we hope will land a grant to support the Boob Book and b) the ever-growing list of house and yard chores that I’ve neglected.

In the general hysteria over the car purchase adventure, I’ve generally neglected life, the universe, and all that. Late last night while cleaning out the 74 unopened emails, I came across an essay I was supposed to have critiqued for an anthology whose board I volunteered to serve on. Ohhh well…10 days late and a dollah short… So by the light of the moon I found myself plodding through some truly execrable writing and trying to formulate a polite way to say “the highest and best use of this thing is to be run through the shredder and turned into compost.”

Got a great idea for the P&S News blog but have not managed to shift the engine into gear to write that.

Have not…

…sprayed the bermudagrass that’s taken over the poolside flowerbed
…cut back the rampant cat’s claw and Lady Banks rose that are smothering the pool equipment like jungle overgrowth burying the ruins of a Mayan village
…raked up the mountain of limes dropping from the tree
…fertilized the citrus
…ordered some more “beneficial nematodes” from Arbico
…tested & adjusted the pool chemicals
…brushed the dog
…vacuumed up the dog hair
…wrestled the bike into the car and schlepped it up to get its tires repaired
…cleaned out the now empty garage cabinets where the Dog Chariot’s back seats were stored
…trimmed back the elephant’s foot plants
…watered the vitex and the feral olive tree
…contributed to the FB author’s group I  joined awhile back
…contributed to the Author’s Guild website
…rejoined the Chamber (grump!) (or, around here, more like “Trump,” something I’d prefer not to have to listen to)
…joined up Toastmasters
…done any paying work

Mea gulpa!

The September AMEX bill, the one with the miraculously low general spending balance, was at the same time one of the highest AMEX bills I’ve ever racked up: I charged the $4,000 down payment for the Venza. So I had to pony up $4,579 in a month when living expenses (exclusive of utilities & the like) only ran to $579. Drat!

On the other hand…that card has a kickback. So we should soon be seeing a nice balance in that department.

Let’s hope the English major math is correct that I’ll about break even at the end of each of the coming five years, despite the car bills of almost $400 a month. This is the stuff of Bag Lady Syndrome.

Well, the coffee is consumed and the hour is late. And so, away!

Boob Book: The Newest Bu$ine$$ Plan

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Today I need to begin work on cornering a $20,000 business grant, which would nicely support and (more important!) market the Boob Book.

The three big projects now at hand:

  • Write and rehearse a script for the application video (the application is a video)
  • Interview three women to grab sound bites for said video
  • Recast the existing table of contents and chapter outline to reflect the new approach conceived for the book

The grant is for small businesses in Arizona and Colorado; the main prize is 20 grand, which of course would make any small bidness owner ecstatic, and the runner-up prize is $3,500…a figure that would be extremely helpful in itself.

Luckily, Plain & Simple Press is an imprint of The Copyeditor’s Desk, which is an incorporated business and has been so since 2000 and ought-10. The pitch I’m going to present is that the book will set the business on course to full-blown success and allow me to hire ever so many underlings.

The new approach I’m going to take to the book — which will be pretty easy with the material already in hand — is to present it as a guide for women who have received a breast cancer diagnosis to the many (one might say “endless”) decisions you have to make along the way.

Every chapter can readily be set up in terms of decisions: At this point you have to decide…A or B. At the next point, you’ll need to decide…C or D or E. And so on. Each woman’s decisions need to be informed by fact and by her own preferences and circumstances. And her decisions may be illuminated by other women’s experience.  Each chapter can present a decision, summarize the facts and advice that we know today, and point readers to sources where they can get more in-depth information.

One of my former students was an audio major. He’s taken a course in videography and he has some equipment. So I’ve already roped him in to helping out with this project. And I’ve already made contact with three breast cancer “survivors” who are willing to speak in front of a camera.

As usual, I’m not holding my breath until the money rolls in. But…as a practical matter, the proposal does have a chance of succeeding. P&S Press, as a subentity of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., is a verifiable business. And this new approach I’ve come up with will create a genuinely useful work for women who are blindsided (as we all are, unless we have enough cancer-ridden relatives to clue us to a genetic problem) by a diagnosis of breast cancer, DCIS, or LCIS.

We shall see!

WOW! Costco Escape Yields Results!

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The AMEX bill came today. The bottom line: amazing. Defies belief. The result of staying out of Costco for a month is…well, to coin a phrase, it’s YYYYUUUUUGE!

As you know, the usual monthly budget to support the Funny Farm is around $1200, including just about everything but utilities.  Except for utilities and a few bills paid annually (insurance & taxes) everything goes on AMEX and is paid off at the end of each month. I try to keep the total under $1200 but often fail in that endeavor.

Incredibly, the September bill came in at $759.60.

Holy mackerel! I don’t think I’ve ever had such a low monthly AMEX bill. The only explanation is that I stayed out of Costco (a.k.a. Impulse Buy Hell) except for buying some dog food makings and a bottle of booze.

This, despite going over budget in several areas: The $40 bottle of Maker’s Mark, the cookies for a church potluck, and a box of Parmesan crisps (impulse buy!) exceeded the $150 Costco allotment by $41 after purchases of dog meat and household sundries. I went $55 over budget in regular grocery stores, splurged on clothing and restaurant meals with friends and son, and coughed up $83 for towing and a $25 ding for an Experian report on the Venza.

Jeez. If my car hadn’t crapped out, the September bill would have been around $650: about half the usual AMEX budget!!!