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WHY does it take old people so LONG to get out of the house?

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Have you noticed that, as a phenomenon — those of you who are no longer young pups? It seems to take for-freaking-EVER to get out the door, whether it’s in the morning for an early meeting or for a mid-day or evening excursion. And it’s crazy-making.

No doubt it would be crazy-making for a young adult companion, too, if I had one around. Can you remember waiting for your mother or grandmother to make a last-minute run to the toilet, whether she needed to go or not, because God Forfend that she should have to use a public loo? We would be running right on time and just as I was grabbing the doorknob to usher her out the door, she’d make an about-face and head for the back of the house.  😀

Well, I have no fear of public bathrooms, but that notwithstanding, it seems like I never can get out the door on time. And I find myself wondering why…what am I doing differently now that I didn’t do when I was a kid?

When I was TA-ing my way through graduate school, the university invariably gave me 7:40 classes, every goddamn morning. At the outset, we lived an hour away from campus; later we moved downtown, shortening the commute to a mere 40 minutes. But to that drive time, add time to park, hike across the campus to the decrepit TA office, try to get in, walk to a public phone and call a campus cop to come unlock the door, wait around till he showed up, get whatever stuff I needed, and then hike to the other end of the campus to meet my classes in the engineering or math building. So I probably left around 6 a.m. I don’t remember eating anything: I probably didn’t eat breakfast at that time.

Today I won’t leave the house until I’ve consumed a couple mugs of French press coffee and something to eat.

I didn’t have a dog to feed and make secure before leaving the building. Today I have two of them.

At first we lived in an apartment: one door to lock. When we moved to our first house, there were four doors to lock up, but again: no dog to wrangle inside or outside. And at six in the morning, only one of the doors would have been unlocked, just long enough for me to dodge out to the car.

Today — having enjoyed two home invasions during my lifetime plus an attempted rape plus the Incident of the Cat Burglar on the Roof — you may be damn sure I live behind locked doors and windows. Eight doors, to be precise. Two sliding doors, each with three separate locking devices in various positions and at different heights from the floor; three exterior doors with deadbolts and locking handles; three steel security doors with hardened dead bolts that will break your effing drill if you try to drill the lock open. That would be…hmmm…FIFTEEN LOCKS to have to secure, and to have to check before you leave the house.

No, make that SIXTEEN. Back in the dark ages, we did not have computers that stored our entire personal and business lives, computers whose loss to a burglar would amount to a major catastrophe. Sooo…I didn’t have a solid-core door on my office secured with yet another drill-proof hardened dead bolt.

A locked door functions in exactly the same way as a set of stairs does. Whatever you want is on the other side. Forget your purse: you have to find your keys, wrestle a deadbolt open, retrieve the purse, wrestle the deadbolt shut. Oh, forgot the file you were supposed to bring? Find your keys, wrestle…wash, rinse, repeat. Sometimes two or three times before you can get out the door…

Come to think of it, there was no e-mail. So there were no messages to check and respond to before you so much as brushed your teeth. That surely saved a lot of time!

When the neighbors divorced and we got custody of their German shepherd — my first German shepherd, my greatest German shepherd, my greatest dog — that of course added dog feeding to the morning race-around. By then, though, I had paid my dues in the TA department and was no longer teaching wee-hours sections. And all Greta ate was kibble: nothing could be easier.

Today’s dogs eat fancy kitchen-made food that has to be measured out on a kitchen scale. The food competition must be refereed, lest blood flow.

Still pretty sure that at that point I probably didn’t eat breakfast. If I did, it was something like cheese and fruit — nothing that had to be cooked. We made our coffee in a Chemex, which didn’t require much time or attention.

No one ever heard of hauling water or tea or coffee around in the car with them.

Today I won’t leave the house without a car-friendly mug of iced water or hot coffee.

When I was a pretty young thing, I wore contact lenses. A pair of nonprescription shades resided in the car or in my purse. I most certainly did not require three freaking pairs of prescription glasses to navigate the world. The progressive glasses, which I need for driving but which do not work for living inside the house and which, goddamn them, render a computer unusable, are always, invariably, every freaking day on the other side of the locked office door, a discovery always, invariably, every freaking day made as I’m sticking the key in the car’s ignition.

A forgotten item that is remembered once you’re in the car, then, requires you to unlock and relock two deadbolts: one to the kitchen door and one to the office.

And when I was a pretty young thing, often I didn’t wear make-up. Today I would frighten small children if I left the building without slathering the requisite three layers of opaque crud over the face.

Back in the day, I grabbed my purse, ran out the door, slammed it and locked it behind me, jumped in the car, and drove away.

Yeah. Okay. It makes sense now. It is objectively true that forty years ago getting out of the house was faster and easier than it is today. And maybe it’s not a function of age so much as a function of our times.

Do you find that to be true in your neck of the woods?

Swimmin’ in the Rain!

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Yeah, I know: bucking for a Darwin Award. 🙂

But there’s no lightning or thunder, so why not live dangerously? And swimming in the rain is living! How extraordinarily lovely.

We’re being visited by the outer fringes of Hurricane Newton, which crossed Baja with some dire consequences and then hit the mainland. It’s faded to “tropical storm” now: heavy, pregnant gray clouds drifting close to the earth and drizzling rain. We’re told Tucson is supposed to get a fair amount of heavy rain and Nogales is already getting pounded, but supposedly not much will happen this far north. We shall see.

Meanwhile, it’s really nice now, humid but fairly cool. I may go back in the pool if no sign of electrical activity develops.

One of the Chinese academics resurfaced yesterday with another rush job. What they don’t realize is that they’re a day off of our time. So when Our Man at Nanjing says he needs a paper on the 8th, it’s already his 7th here. 😀 Anyway, his subject matter isn’t very arcane — business management is the College of Education of the MBA world — and I’m getting so used to editing Chinglish that it’s really no more difficult than reading freshman comp. And a hell of a lot more remunerative!

So I sent off his paper last night and now have returned to the current would-be novelist’s magnum opus.

That scribbler requires a lot of coaching. I’m not so much editing, with this one, as teaching the finer points of creative writing.

It dawned on me, in the course of working on his MS, that what I’m really doing with The Copyeditor’s Desk is engaging the same skills I used in teaching, probably in a way that’s more cost-effective for me. Instead of reading 30 papers of the same ilk, I’m reading one. And I’m getting paid by the page, not by the semester. In theory, then, if I got the same number of clients as I have students over a 16-week period, I’d earn about the same amount as adjunct teaching.

You could argue that I’m working harder at editorial work because the deadlines are often non-negotiable and the content can be extremely challenging. However, academic work very rarely contains any stupid stuff — or if it does, it goes over my little head — and you do not have to meet classes, put up with rude students, suffer fools gladly, write course syllabi and calendars, deal with pointless bureaucratic rules, hassle with course management platforms, or confront people with psychological problems.

hmmmmmm….

Let us test that. A comp course is capped at 30 students. I earned about $140 for yesterday’s 23-page academic effort, about twice the length of a typical freshman research paper (but of course, containing about 1/1000 of the stupidity…). A student writes one 10 page paper and two or three short papers.

3 x 2.5 = 7.5 pages per student in addition to the 10-page research paper
7.5 + 10 = 17.5 pages per student per semester
17.5 x 30 students = 525 pages per section

A section is 16 weeks long.

525 /16 = 32.81 pages per week

I net $1100/month for teaching 7 sections a year. Per 30-student section, that would average out to $157 per month, prorated over the 12 months that the income has to cover.

If I taught freshman comp to each student on a contract basis, person-to-person, then at $6 a page, I would charge each student $105 for the total number of pages required for the entire course — over 16 weeks (17.5 pages x $6). (Heh…tells you something about why our students can’t write a simple sentence, to say nothing of a literate business document, doesn’t it?)

At my median rate of $6 or $6.50/page, I turn around 23 pages of Chinglish in two days and earn $138 to $149.50 — in one helluva lot less than a week. In 16 weeks, in theory I could read 16 academic papers to the tune of $2,308 to $2,392. And because that money goes into the S-corp, anything that’s spent on business expenses escapes taxation.

The $1100/month adjunct income is what I net if I teach seven sections over an entire year (3 + 3 + 1), a teaching load equivalent to what my full-time load was at GDU (with benefits, an office, and a computer, 3 + 4 + 0 — no summer session). And it assumes I will get seven sections a year: not a given. By way of comparison: in the last year I taught at GDU I grossed about $3750/month and netted about $2625.

When I’m teaching, I’m teaching 120 students a semester, each of whom turns in three or four papers, in page count about the equivalent of one academic paper per kid, over four months. When I’m editing, I read 52 papers over an entire year.

Let’s look at it another way: if 30 students turned in 16 research-length papers (one a week) over the course of a semester, and I charged them what I charge my clients, I would gross $4140 ($6/page x 23 pages x 30 students), or a net of $3312. Multiply that times 3 to see what I would earn from the typical enrollment in three sections/semester: $9,936 net.

As a practical matter, I don’t get a paper a week per client. I get more like one paper per week all told. But even that pays significantly more than teaching.

My name is abroad in China…every time I turn around, a new graduate student or junior faculty member appears at the digital door.

So it’s mighty clear that the enterprise needs to focus on editing and on coaching would-be Famous Writers, not on publishing unsaleable books.

And so, to work…

Melatonin Redux

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So the night before last, having not slept much in the previous 24 hours, I decided to give the melatonin one last try, on the theory that three’s a charm. The first time I used the stuff, it worked to keep me asleep for seven hours. The second time, as I remarked in my post on this experiment, a half-pill left me feeling “cranky” — that was an extreme understatement. I was on a tear for about 2/3 of the day: everything, but EVERYTHING made me mad as a cat.

But nevertheless, the three- and four-hour nights soon returned, leaving me too tired to function during the day. So I took another pill.

Bad idea.

The result was a migraine, an episode of optic neuritis, and swollen ankles. I slept like a rock but awoke feeling just awful! I haven’t had a migraine in years, nor have I had the needle-jab in the eye, which is associated with the migraines, in that long. The needle-jab makes the migraine feel like a fun ride in the park — my god that hurts!!!

Although some people have complained of edema in the ankles following a dose of melatonin, there’s no proof of an association. In fact, it may have been brought on by a pair of new peds I put on to keep the toenail nostrum in place and not get it all over the sheets — those are elastic-y all over and kind of tight. Within five minutes of removing those, the swelling went down.

On the other hand, I’m like a canary in a coal mine where meds and nostrums are concerned: if something has a weird side effect, I will be among the one in 64,000 who get it.

But the headache sure as hell didn’t go away. At one point, too, I got so dizzy I had to sit down.

Among the top side effects of melatonin are sleepiness (check!), irritability (check! in spades…), headache (check!), dizziness (check!), and short-lasting feelings of depression (check!).

I hadn’t made the connection between the snake oil and the depression until I found a reference to it at the Mayo website. For several days after I started trying the stuff, I fell into such a deep blue funk I literally could not work. I just sat here staring that the computer. I have done nothing on Facebook: dropped off the face of the earth in the writers’ group I joined up, and have done no other marketing work at all anywhere else. Nor did I do any work on the book, which is now almost finished.

This interesting piece at the Huffington Post suggests melatonin should be regulated as a drug by the FDA, not as a “dietary supplement” (for godsake!). Many of the formulations you can buy off the shelf contain way more of the stuff than you need to make you fall asleep.

It’s easy to take too much, and most of melatonin’s side effects are the result of just that. While there’s no evidence that too much melatonin could be fatal, or even remotely life-threatening, exceeding the proper dosage can upset the body’s natural processes and rhythms.

“With some hormones, if you take too much you can really put your body in danger,” says Dr. [Richard] Wurtman [the MIT neuroscientist who patented the drug as an insomnia nostrum]. “With melatonin, you’re not in danger, but you’re also not very comfortable. It won’t kill you, but it’ll make your life pretty miserable.”

Yeah. You could say that.

By about 8 p.m., the effects were wearing off. In a haze all day long, I’d fought taking a nap, because anytime I sleep during the day, I’m not gonna sleep at night. But now I began to feel almost revved up…like…say…like it was dawn!

The melatonin seemed to have reversed the time of day. It was like the body wanted to sleep all day long — two or three p.m. felt just exactly like two or three a.m. But now that it was dark outside, the body wanted to spring awake.

So along about 11 p.m. I dropped a half a tablet of Benadryl. That worked: slept 6½ hours and awoke feeling rested and enjoying the illusion of being in control of life.

There it is, then. Don’t let minor annoyances push you to experimenting with over-the-counter nostrums and snake oils. There are worse things than not sleeping at night. And if you have a real ailment? Seek medical treatment…from a doctor. One with “M.D.” or “D.O” appended to the name.

 

How to Repel Ants from a Hummingbird Feeder

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Humfeeder1Yesterday I went to refill one of the hummingbird feeders near the side deck. Hadn’t seen any hummers around lately, even though it was a third full, so I figured the sugar water had gone stale. It was “stale,” all right: when I unscrewed the bottle I found about a zillion drowned ants clogging the bowl!

Poor little gals. Oh well: they died happy.

The ladies had made their way to the rafter, down the feeder’s hanging rod, down the jar, and thence into the little holes the hummers use to suck up the fake nectar humans like to put out for them.

There’s an easy way to stop this incursion. All you need is the lid from a can of spray paint, some vegetable or olive oil, a hammer and a long, sturdy nail, and a little tape.

Take a look at your spray paint lid: it has a cup in the center that snaps over the can’s sprayer.

HummerCap2This forms a kind of moat between the inner lid and the outer wall of the can’s lid. That moat will hold your secret weapon.

First, take your nail and place it dead center in the middle of the can’s lid, on the top. Gently tap it with the hammer until it breaks through the plastic.

Now push the lid onto the feeder’s hanger, so that the top of the lid faces the ground and the “moat” faces upward.

Tape the lid firmly in place on the hanger. I’ve used black electrician’s tape and outdoor double-sided tape — either works well. Avoid masking tape and scotch tape, which will degrade in weather.

Adjust the lid to make it sit as level as you can — it doesn’t have to be perfect.

Now pour some vegetable oil or some olive oil into the moat section of the lid. No need to fill it all the way up. All you need is enough to cover the bottom of the cap. If the lid doesn’t sit level, pour in enough oil so that the moat contains at least a few millimeters of oil in all parts.

HummerCap3Hang the thing where it where you want it and then hook your feeder to it.

Ants will not cross the oil moat!

This device lasts a very long time. The reason my feeder had ants is that I had removed the one I’d installed several years ago. I’d forgotten about it until I went to do some gardening this spring. When I took a close look at it, I discovered the oil had long since dried up, forming a mummified layer on the bottom of the spray-can lid “moat.” Thinking (wrongly!) that it must not be doing much good, I took it down. And was too lazy to build a new one.

Hence: ants.

Apparently they won’t cross even ancient mummified oil.

Try this. It works. It’s easy.

AnnasHummingbirdPaloAltoNorvig
Latter-day dinosaur…

Hummer image: Norvig. CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6347595

Homeless Outside Our Homes

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So along about 4:30 yesterday, along came a message from the local homeowner’s club announcing that a pow-wow was to be held at a church in a different North Central neighborhood on the subject of the rapidly growing transient problem — at 7:00 p.m.!

Jeez.

So I skipped rehearsing the dog & pony show I was supposed to give this morning in order to go to that.

Turned out to be an interesting meeting and one well worth sitting through. It’s too bad they didn’t get the message out soon enough — quite a few people showed up, but a LOT more would have, had they known about it in time.

The “homeless” situation has exploded, especially in this part of town. The county, state, city, and a homeless rescue mission have developed ways to turn at least some people around, and they’ve now got enough understanding to distinguish between people who are down on their luck and open to rehabilitation, and chronic street dwellers and drug addicts who are by and large impervious to treatment efforts. They’re also figuring out that a certain set of homeless people will need permanent welfare housing, period — and again, they seem to be developing the insight to recognize who will never be able to care for themselves and who might be helped back onto their feet

Two things they admitted that I’ve never heard a politico or bureaucrat fess up to:

1. The  endlessly ballyhooed light rail has hugely exacerbated the problem in our neighborhood; and
2. In our part of the city, it’s not so much a “homeless” issue as a “drug addict” issue.

The addicts ride the light rail to get into the air conditioning. They ride it to the end of the line, which is Dunlap, where they have to get off. From there, they disperse into the surrounding neighborhood.

One of the audience members remarked that you can’t use the fancy new QT the city’s so proud of, across the street from the new “station” because when you get out of your car to pump gas you’re accosted by panhandlers, and another person said that the Fletcher Tire guy told him he has to chase off around 15 loiterers every morning to move cars into his shop for servicing.

They’re going to build low-income housing a couple blocks west of Conduit of Blight Boulevard — fortunately, it will be for the elderly, but one wonders whether that’s just the foot in the door.

Meanwhile, someone brought up the (endlessly sore) fact that no one alerted the neighborhoods before a private subcontractor inserted the methadone clinic at the same locale. This was greeted with guilty silence — obviously that oversight was deliberate.

However, they did openly admit that the meth clinic does draw addicts into the neighborhood.

A couple of people then reported that businesses around there have been under siege from addicts who go there to pick up their meds and then don’t leave. They hang around the area for the rest of the day, particularly at the Circle K across the street. The Circle K manager told one woman that the employees were afraid to go out to gather the garbage and dump it out, because they had been stabbed by needles.

The authorities sounded genuinely surprised by this. One of them said they hadn’t heard about it and that they would contact the neighboring businesses to learn more.

Overall the meeting was pretty interesting. They are trying to do something about the homeless issue, but the City of Phoenix apparently has the worst homeless/drug addict problem in the state. The outlying suburbs don’t have such a large problem with it — apparently they actively send their bums to us. 😮

I reported to WonderAccountant, who was unable to go because she’s still wrestling with clients’ business tax returns.

Said she:

Some cities like Gilbert have done away with the Salvation Army giving utility subsidies to residents in their cities.  They just don’t allow it.  So even though they are a private charity, they can’t help people in that town.  I’m not a fan of Gilbert.  It may be a nice place to live, but I think that there is an element of unkindness in that sort of policy.  Even though you don’t really want “those people” in our neighborhoods, we cannot permanently ignore the fact that they are part of our society, the least among us, if you will.

Nice! Let’s just legislate poor folks out of existence..

Probably a bunch of Trump voters. We’ll build a fence between us and the poor people, and make the drug pushers pay for it!

The Salvation Army guy was really interesting, because he’d been living on the streets himself, after becoming addicted to an opioid prescribed for an athletic injury. He stated the obvious: that like any group of people, the “homeless” are not homogeneous. He felt they fall into three groups, broadly speaking:

• Those who desperately don’t want to be on the streets but are stuck because once you have no place to live, wash up, and call “your address,” it’s almost impossible to get a job.
• Those who are too ill — mentally or physically — to care for themselves and have no one who will take them in.
• And those who truly are criminal, mostly drug addicts who support their habit with petty theft and burglary.

Their most successful program has been an outreach to the first group; they’ve done pretty well with strategies to get jobs and temporary housing for people who are seriously down on their luck. For those who can’t care for themselves, the city, county, and state have finally (I say…don’t know how recent this revelation is…) recognized that permanent housing must be provided. And they’re working on building exactly that: facilities to house people who would otherwise be on the street because they simply can’t do anything to earn enough to keep a roof over their heads. As for the rest: “please call the police.”

I have no idea how this view of the problem matches up to reality. But it surely sounds reasonable.  And at least somebody is trying to do something.

The costs, though, defy belief. One homeless soul costs the relief services and taxpayers $40,000 a year. The city had to shut down a bare-bones shelter because operating costs were running in the millions of dollars, and they flat ran out of cash.

Gilbert, eh? So which is it? Gilbert, or a new German shepherd?

Homeless_man_in_Anchorage

Summer is y-goin’ out

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Lhudly sing huzzah!!

Another beautiful morning, as the heat moderates and the days grow almost imperceptibly shorter. And lookee here! The wee Easter lily cactus that clings to life in the shade of the devil-pod tree expresses its joy:

EasterLilyAugust2016It’s been in that pot for years and barely grown, even though it gets a great deal more water than it should. The burly fellow next to it is a golden barrel cactus, given to me a very long time ago by my friend KJG. It was a housewarming gift…so arrived here 12 years ago. Strangely, in all the years it and its companion in front have been here, I’ve never seen either of them bloom.

But Easter lily cacti in their various varieties bloom in wild profusion.

I am SO not in the mood to work today. Fortunately, except for my own book and for rehearsing tomorrow’s dog and pony show, there isn’t much to have to do, at least so far. But  history tells us that every time the dust settles, a new shamal will blow in forthwith.

Still…fall is y-cumin’ in, and here in Arizona, fall is our second spring. Soon the plants will revive, flowers will bloom, vegetables will thrive.

So I’m thinking maybe instead of (ugh) working all day, I’ll disconnect from the computer and spend the day gardening: pull out the dead stuff, haul off the pots whose residents have fried, maybe even buy a new plant.

One of my favorite indoor plants has some sort of infestation or disease that seems to be killing it.  This is probably the time to get rid of the thing.

TalaveraPlanterIt’s living in a fake terra-cotta pot. I’d like to buy a new talavera pot to take the place of the dying plant in its plastic pot. Maybe I’ll run over to Whitfill’s, buy one of their pots, and then move on to Home Depot in search of a tree-like houseplant to live there. That would kill some time and continue the job of murdering the budget.

Heh! I love those things. One like that would look SO PRETTY in that spot, and then maybe I would feel less crabby.

Then I could go so far as to refill the hummingbird feeders and the seed dispensers for the ordinary birds. That would be good.

It would’ve been good if I’d kept those filled for the poor little critters when it was hotter than the hubs of Hades and I was too lazy or too timorous to stick my nose out the door. But better late than never. I suppose.

What I’d really like to do is get a couple of those raised gardening bed kits and set them, side by side, in the sunny spot in the far northwest corner of the yard. The view of that space is blocked by the orange trees, so I wouldn’t have to look at a truck farm from the back patio and the pool. But if I had two long, narrow troughs set up with enough space for a pathway down the middle, I could reach all parts of the raised garden without putting my back out.

Probably could build something like that with a few two-by-sixes. It would be easy.

Still feeling more or less out of sorts today, though better than the past two days. Last night I refrained from dropping another melatonin pill — or half thereof — yet still slept seven hours. So presumably one of two things has happened:

• either a residual amount of the stuff remained in my system, which would explain a lot; or
• a couple doses somehow realigned my sleep cycle with the sunrise.

Whatever, I suspect the generally shitty way I’ve been feeling has something to do with this drug. Guess I’d rather feel shitty from not getting enough sleep than shitty from the side-effects of some chemical.

I’ve also been unduly affected by the death of my client and friend, the Mongolian Bank Magnate. It makes me feel terrible. And that’s unreasonable: he lived to 68, a decent enough age, and he had a great life.

But still…from the perspective of early old age, 68 seems pretty young. He was a vigorous man with a young wife and a little girl just ready to toddle off to preschool and a great deal more that he wanted to do in this world.

He died of pneumonia incident upon leukemia.

Damn! What awful luck.

Especially when you think of the legions out there who so richly deserve such a fate: rabid terrorists and child molesters and drug dealers and tobacco magnates and pharmaceutical company billionaires and clowns who would ride into the presidency on a tide of hatred and fear and all those who would take away from the world rather than contribute to it…

Oh, hell. What can one say?

I am going to cultivate my garden.