The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
funny First, you’ve gotta read this hilarious article by Pamela Druckerman! I could barely get through my morning coffee without choking on it. 😆
One thing’s for sure: the lady can write circles around Yours Truly. Where my post plods with the snails, hers sails with the swifts. Don’t miss it.
So I’ve been thinking for awhile that it’s time to clean out the closets. Even if I hadn’t been gifted with a fine new body style, it would be time to shovel out the increasingly decrepit clothing. But now that some of the stuff will never fit again, one feels moved to tidiness.
Surprisingly, most of the stuff looks OK. A few tops look pretty grotesque, but others drape nicely and create a slender, athletic effect. It’s impossible to tell which will do what, though, simply by looking at them. They have to be tried on.
Even so, the tops that don’t adapt themselves to a certain boy-like verticality are happy when worn over falsies — yea verily, some look markedly better than they did before. 😀
Problem is, quite a few of them hurt. As it develops, a burning or tingling sensation in response to the touch of fabric on the skin can persist for quite some time after the surgical incision has healed. This apparently is the result of dissected nerves regenerating. For many women, the effect goes away after some months. But one of WonderSurgeon’s nurses told me that for some women, it never disappears.
Lovely.
So some of these old shirts are headed for the recycler or the thrift shop. Which ones, though, remains to be seen. Mostly, it seems the type of no-iron, no-dry-clean knit pullover I favor is particularly irritating. But you can’t tell just by looking at them: some shirts that look like they ought to set your teeth on edge have no effect at all. Some that should be comfortable hurt.
Rather than try on every single one of the darn things, I decided to set aside all the pieces I know hurt or think might be uncomfortable and sequester them for about three months, by which time this condition should have passed, if it’s going to pass. Three months from now is the middle of May.
Hence, stage 1: set apart all all the suspect garments.
Meanwhile, over time the closet contents have gotten massively jumbled: winter clothes mixed in with lightweight summer stuff, grubby gardening rags with nice dresses and skirts.
So, stage 2: sort the stuff out!
The winter stuff went into the back-room closet, along with the potential throw-aways. The summer stuff got moved into the bedroom closet, along with the precious collection of Costco jeans. Voila! Ready for the next season!
An ongoing annoyance with those closets has been the inevitable jumble that results from stuffing clean laundry back in there. Every time I shovel these things out, the mess grows back like kudzu. Within two weeks, it’s a jungle in there. Again.
The challenge calls for a full OCD charge. And nobody can do OCD better than I can…
Stage 3: regiment the clothes hangers!
Masking tape strips on the hanger racks mark out sections by clothing type: jeans, casual shirts, better shirts, dresses & skirt, and on and on. Added some labels to remind me to quit jamming stuff in higgledy-piggledy. And since I know I won’t remember the scheme to test the suspect tops all the way until the middle of next May, I put the date on a label over that high-style collection. With any luck at all, the tag will remind me to go through that stuff and get rid of the stuff that can’t be used anymore.
O’course, that assumes I’ll look in a closet full of winter clothes on a day when the temperature’s hovering around 100 degrees…
Forty-five minutes before I have to fly out the door to choir.
It’s going to be an odd choir chivaree this morning. Our honored director is in New York, conducting the young things in a performance at Carnegie Hall. This leaves no one to direct us — his occasional stand-in doesn’t seem to be around, and his assistant director has to play the organ, oddly enough.
Add to that: a couple of the pieces we’re singing are those darn modern atonal things, difficult even with a talented director to show us the way. AND: everybody and his and her little sister has got the hideous, heavy cold that’s going around — the one that quickly devolves into bronchitis. About every third choir member seems to be out. The director also picked it up, and he, heaven help him, had to get on a plane and fly across the country with it, while wrangling a herd of high-school kids.
Can you imagine?
At any rate, I’m using this short, relatively quiet time to water nematodes into the ground around the paloverde and lime trees.
Yeah: nematodes. Worms.
These two trees, both of them gorgeous and major shade-makers on the west side, are infested with the evil paloverde borer, a type of huge beetle that looks like a giant flying cockroach. These things live underground for several years as grubs, feasting on the roots of paloverdes, roses, and citrus.
An outfit in southern Arizona sells cultures of infant nematodes that they claim may attack the paloverde borer grubs. No science exists to prove this, leastwise not that I can find, but we do know that these particular little bugs do attack most kinds of borers.
At any rate, the cost is pretty nominal — you’d have to buy dozens of packets to spend what it would cost to cut down and replace even one of these trees. And I love the trees…don’t want to replace them! It’s a crap shoot — the critters may or may not have a taste for monster paloverde grubs — but it’s worth a try.
You have to mix them with water and spread them over the entire area where the trees roots are, trunk to dripline and beyond. Then for the next several days you run the sprinkler for awhile, to keep the ground damp so the little guys can make their way down into the soil and find their prey. That’s a nuisance because the hose timer on the west side broke and I can’t afford to replace it until the 22nd, so I have to set the kitchen timer to remind me to get up every three minutes to move the sprinkler.
Poor little Ruby is trying to amuse herself. Cassie hurt her leg the day before yesterday and so is indisposed. Ruby wants Cassie to chase around with her (which, come to think of it, is how Cassie injured herself). Cassie is better but still limping, and though she wants to chase, she still seems to be indisposed.
Hm. The odor of burning plastic is on the air…wonder where that’s coming from? I suppose I’m going to have to go inside, since it smells pretty toxic.
Yesterday evening I had to call the cops to check on the Things That Go Bump in the Night. Along about 11 p.m. I was about to pack it in, having read 3/4 of the student papers on the server but just not able to stomach any more of it. Figured to leave the rest until this afternoon. Was just finishing a comment on the paper I planned to stop with when I heard this weird tapping at the window. Sounded like someone tapping on the glass the end of a key.
Didn’t see anyone out there, so thought it was probably a moth drawn to the window by the light, or maybe a bat chasing insects in the light. After the adrenalin settled down I got up to go to bed and whackety whack whack! There it was at a different window — where no lights were on.
The dogs weren’t barking but they did get up to investigate. Two of these little weirdnesses were more than I could tolerate. So I dialed 911.
This is the time when you do wish, in passing, that “dog” were not defined by “23 pounds.” Oh, that Gershep was a nuisance and a menace, but sometimes a nuisance and a menace is much to be desired….
Time passed. A lot of time passed. I locked myself and the dogs inside the office and, having nothing better to do, returned to grading student papers.
Finished them all and composed an annoyed “Announcement.” Posted that at both sections. Videlicet:
In discussions of causal analysis, the word is spelled c-a-u-s-a-l, not “casual.” Try sounding it out: a plain a with consonants on both sides has a flat, short sound as in “cat”: thus “casual” is pronounced cazh-u-el. The au sound is pronounced “aw”: so “causal” is pronounced cawz-el. They’re different words.
I accepted a few late papers at the beginning of the semester because there was a little confusion at first. However, the time to overlook the no-late-papers policy described in the syllabus is long past. If you want me to read your papers, get them in on time, not two, three, or more days late.
Although many classmates are turning in excellent chapter synopses and essay analyses, some folks seem either not to be reading the material carefully (or, in some cases, at all) or not understanding it well.
If you’re having a difficult time understanding the content of the chapters, try rephrasing each paragraph in your own words. This may help to clarify the meaning.
Along the same lines, please read the assignment. Several people turned in reading reviews of the wrong chapters. The chapter in question is not always the same number as the reading review number. RR 7, for example, was not about chapter 7.
Remember that the point of analyzing the essay is to apply the principles described in the chapter. Thus simply summarizing the essay does not suffice. For example, chapter 10 describes the use of cause and effect in building an argument. How exactly does the essay you select demonstrate the use of causal analysis? How successful is the author’s use of cause and effect to prove his or her points?
Please proofread your work. Do not turn in copy that is full of grammatical mistakes, sentence fragments, misspellings, and the like. This is pretty basic. No employer wants to hire a careless employee; any kind of work, including written work, that is full of careless errors will do nothing to get you a raise.
Poor little things. You understand, they can’t read because they don’t read — many of them come from homes that have never been disgraced by the presence of a book, a magazine, or a newspaper — and so they don’t read because they can’t read. It’s pretty circular, and it’s also pretty daunting: if you haven’t learned how to extract meaning from six or eight pages of copy aimed at the 10th grade level by the time you’ve graduated from high school, your chances of learning to do so are very slim.
By now it was almost midnight. The cops still not in evidence and no burglar having made himself to home, I called 911 to ask them to call off the hounds. The 911 operator said they were outside the house. And so they were. Of course, they found nothing. If anyone had been around, in the period of almost an hour between the time I called for help and they time it showed up, they were long gone.
And speaking of long gone, it’s time for me to fly the coop. Bye!
So here’s the problem:
I cannot make myself get back to productive work.
No matter what I try to do to get back on track, I just. cannot. do. it. Before the past seven months of surgical fun began, a normal day’s to-do list consisted of fifteen to twenty tasks. Now I’m lucky if I get through five. Day by day, I’m not getting any work done, and perhaps more alarmingly, I don’t want to get any work done.
If this is the New Normal, it’s going to freaking bankrupt me.
When I am supposedly working, I’m spending about half the available time cruising the Web: reading various news sites, reading up on the odd item some client or student addresses (how do you spell Genghis Khan’s real name, and why, and who was he anyway, and did he really bring civilization to Europe, and speaking of Europe, I wonder what the BBC has to say this afternoon?), playing computer games, blogging, reading e-mail, hanging out at the corgi site, and whatnot. Add up the actual number of time-stamped hours spent on a client’s Wyrd file, and you get about half the number of hours I sat in front of the computer while pretending to work on the project.
Okay, I’ve always had that tendency. But it’s never stopped me from getting work done, one way or the other, sooner or later. But now I’m not getting much done. Because…
• I don’t want to start.
• I don’t want to stay focused (or can’t stay focused?)
• I’m stuporous with boredom.
So I decided to devote some time today to trying to figure out what the heck is the matter with me. Hence, the following rumination…
The Problem: I can’t get back to productive work.
Reasons:
1) What I’m doing bores me stupid!
Even though most of my paid contract work is pretty interesting, even the best of copy can get a little old on the second read and what we might call “boring” on the third read and exponentially more boring on the fourth read.
Reading student work is not only boring, it’s often annoying. Yea verily, even infuriating.
BUT: It pays the bills.
BUT1: The bills aren’t so huge that they can’t be paid from other funding sources.
2) Possibly I’m suffering some sort of existential angst.
Any health crisis brings one’s mortality to mind: Do I really want to spend what little time remains to me on work that puts me into a coma?
No.
BUT: What else am I going to do?
• Can’t afford to travel
• Can’t work up much enthusiasm for any other pecuniary endeavor
• The status quo is comfortable
3) Possibly the status quo is too comfortable?
4) Possibly I’m mildly depressed?
Are There Any Solutions?
1) Bored with work
a) Stop editing copy
• This would cut boring tasks by about 20% to 50%
BUT: I use the money to keep computer hardware up-to-date and to support websites.
BUT2: Most of the websites would be redundant if the business were closed.
b) Stop teaching
• This would cut boredom by about 50% to 80%.
BUT: Teaching makes it possible to live without drawing down much from retirement savings.
c) Get a job
• This would make Social Security pure gravy and eliminate the need to spend savings. All required IRA withdrawals could be reinvested or gifted to M’hijito.
BUT: I dislike few things more than having to trudge to a workplace every day.
BUT3: I’m too old to get a decent job.
d) Take a break
• Go on a vacation somewhere. Get out of here for two to three weeks.
BUT: Who’s going to care care of the dogs?
I can’t afford to travel.
I find flying aversive in the most intense way.
My car should not be driven into the sticks.
• One could go camping. It’s easy enough to camp for a week or two at a time. Rent a truck and get some new camping gear. The dogs could then go with.
BUT: Who’s going to take care of the house, pool, and yard?
• Simply sign off all work, including Scottsdale Business Association, for a couple of weeks.
BUT: I’ve already done that, perforce, thanks to the past five surgical procedures. The effect was to make me not want to come back to work!
• Find ways to take mini-breaks.
Set aside days in which no work will be done.
Rent vehicles for day trips.
2) Existential angst
a) Find something else to do with life.
Quit teaching, quit editing, sell the house, and go someplace utterly different.
BUT: This seems way too risky and could lead to more, not less angst.
b) Find some other line of work.
• Look for a paid job.
BUT: I don’t want to go back to work! UGH!
BUT4: Last time I tried to get hired, prospective employers made it abundantly clear they considered me too old. That was six years ago!
• Try going back to freelance reporting. It’s fun and does allow one to meet a lot of people.
BUT: Talk about your second childhood!
BUT5: It pays no more than what I’m doing now.
BUT6: And it would put a helluva lot more wear and tear on the ancient vehicle.
• Get a real estate license. This could be amusing and might even earn some money.
BUT: It’s costly and there’s no guarantee I’d earn anything. The amount of work put into marketing real estate could be devoted to selling books.
• Quit working for others and do your own thing.
BUT: The chance of earning a living wage is exactly nil.
3) Change the status quo
a) In a small and subtle way: Devote specific amounts of time per day and per week to the boring work. Do not devote any more time than allocated to these tasks.
b) Make day trips once or twice a week or a couple of times a month. Rent vehicles and bring the dogs.
c) Change the effin’ attitude!!
4) Address the possibility of depression
a) Limit boring work to specific, scheduled periods. Do not work outside these periods.
b) Get more exercise.
• Back on the mountain!
• Bicycling
• Specific, scheduled period, maybe more than once a day, for exercise; e.g.,
dog walk
human hike
yoga/physical therapy exercises
c) Train the puppy properly
• Take Ruby to obedience training
d) Take art classes
• Check at Shemer, Desert Botanical Garden
• Or just start drawing again
e) Break loose time in which to do only my own thing
• Set computer to run offline; use offline time to write my own books.
• Or do my own writing on paper, of all things, and then type second drafts online
So if I were to organize time so as to accomplish the following, what would that look like? The following:
1 day trip per month
2 days/week to do my own thing
1 new endeavor, such as returning to art
4 hours of paying work per day, five days a week, for paid work, limited to that.
4 hours x 5 = 20 hours
20 hours x $60/hour = $1200/week, max
4 x $1200 = $4800/month, max
20 hours x $45/hour = $900/week, max
4 x $900 = $3600/month, max
Okay, I can live with either of those scenarios.
When do these famous work hours get done? Eight to noon or one to five, obviously. This leaves the evenings to grade student papers in front of Netflix, which dulls the pain. It leaves four hours a day for exercise, dogs, shopping, and housecare. And it leaves two full days per week in which to do nothing or to go on day trips.
On Thursdays I’m in Scottsdale, getting out of a meeting around 9 a.m. An upscale Costco is located on the way home from that venue, as are two Trader Joe’s, an AJ’s, a Walgreen’s, a fancy Fry’s, and a less than perfect Whole Foods. If I diddled away an hour until Costco opened, I could go there once a month and hit the grocery stores on the other Thursdays, thereby minimizing the car trips and allowing me to shop in much nicer stores than the ones in my part of town — for the same price.
{Sigh} It’s hard to believe that just “getting organized,” which is what all this comes down to, would dispel whatever the present cloud is — whether it’s boredom, angst, or nascent clinical depression. On the other hand, some steady exercise certainly wouldn’t do any harm. And starting something new, such as a new art course, doggy obedience training, or just exploring more by bicycle would at least create a distraction.
Grrr! Ya can’t fix stupid…a particularly frustrating circumstance when it’s your own stupidity you have to cope with. See this ’yere matching set of decorator items?
Welp, I bought that smaller bottle some years ago, when I was running short on cash and felt not inclined to buy a lifetime supply when I really only needed enough to tide me over until I could afford a Costco run. Month or two later, when the fifth-size bottle ran out, I realized it’s one heckuva lot handier to use than the Costco Magnum Size Maker’s Mark Lifetime Special. So I’ve kept it, lo these many years, to use as a decanter. Whenever it runs low, I transfer a little more from the Magnum into the cute little MM bottle.
To accomplish that without slopping any of the Precious Elixir all over the drainboard, I use — what else? — a kitchen funnel.
Funnel. Yes. You use these convenient devices for all sorts of tasks. For example, if you have long hair that you like to blow dry or curl on hot rollers, you can funnel a small amount of your favorite hair conditioner into a squirt bottle, fill said bottle with water, shake the bedoodles out of it, and come up with a killer frizz and split ends control. Mist a little of that into your hair before drying or curling, and you’ll never see frizz or splits again.
The other day I poured a little bourbon and water to go with the amazing chicken and rice dinner I’d concocted. Sat down to take a sip and thought…huh! Something’s off here.
It had a kind of floral flavor. Not awful. But not bourbon.
Glass must not have gotten clean in the washer, I imagine.
So I get out a clean glass; pour another swiggle. Once again: eau de fleurs!
WTF? I think. Somebody’s trying to pizzen me! Note that I still haven’t tumbled to what happened.
Now I get down the giant Costco bottle of booze. Pour a few drops, neat, into the shot glass. Taste.
Good. Very good. Nothing wrong with that.
Pour a few drops out of the short bottle.
Eau de fleurs!
Mixed a new bourbon and water and sat down to contemplate this state of affairs. Finally it dawned on me that even though I’d rinsed the funnel in hot water and washed it in dish soap and more hot water, I must not have gotten all the hair conditioner out. What I was tasting was industrial hair conditioner perfume. Ech!
So, that ENTIRE decanter of Maker’s Mark had to go down the kitchen sink.
Tragedy! The horror!
Fortunately, I hadn’t filled the little bottle all the way up — had only put about 3/4 of a bottle in there. But it still was too damn much of an expensive potable to have to dump down the drain.
Takeaway message: Have several funnels around the house, and dedicate one solely for use with food and drink.
***
And on another front, here’s today’s hilarious happening:
Cleaning lady shows up this morning. She needs some products, so I drive down to the nearby Albertson’s, a venue that I ordinarily avoid because I don’t feel safe in the parking lot. It caters to the slum apartments across Main Drag West, and it tends to be full of fairly threatening white trash — once I actually stood in line behind a guy with teardrops tattooed down his cheek — and you’re almost sure to be accosted by panhandlers between your car and the front door. Some of them even stand right outside the entrance, so they don’t have to chase you around the parking lot.
So I’ve picked up some scouring powder and stuff and, after waiting behind one of the elder idiots who don’t know how to use a credit or a debit card while she sloooooowwwleeeee painstakingleeeeeee fills out a check, asking what date it is and asking three times for confirmation of the amount and then standing there and not effing getting her fanny OUT OF THE WAY while the cashier is asking me to swipe my card in the machine she persists in blocking, I’m finally on the way back out to the car.
Yep.
Charging purposefully (and, I hope, aggressively) across the parking lot, I’m approached by a woman. I figure she’s going to hit me up for a handout. She doesn’t look like the average bag lady: she’s sharp-looking — Latina (I’d guess, or maybe Roma), nicely dressed, handsomely made up. But still, she does have the “My purse was stolen and the baby needs formula” look about her.
She barges up to me and says — wait for it!…
“Hello, sweetie. Do you speak English?”
I say, “No,” and she goes on her way.
Heeeeeee! It doesn’t occur to me to say “Nein. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Darn it. I never think of anything until it’s too late.
Marvelous. On this particular day, I fit right in with the WT ambience of that store: I’m wearing cutoffs, an old shirt worn loose so it won’t rub on the sore chest, a pair of old clodhoppers that serve as gardening shoes. I’ve just washed my hair and it’s hanging dry — loose unset shoulder-length hair on an older white woman in public says one thing: “I can’t afford to go to the hairdresser.”
So what’s with do you speak English?
Almost would have liked to hear her pitch…
😆
So I haul off the freeway at Dunlap Road, a major east-west thoroughfare that passes through some of the most…interesting…parts of town. Street-wise, as I hit the off-ramp I maneuver to put my car in the outside left-turn lane, so that the panhandler at the off-ramp’s signal can’t easily walk up to my door and holler at me.
About three or four blocks off the freeway, at a bus stop near 25th Avenue, I see a guy — a BIG, athletic-looking guy — who looks like he’s having a major seizure. He’s jerking his torso back and forth and flailing his arms in the air. At first I think another local crazy and then, even less kindly, ya gotta be more careful with that dope, brother. Then realize, as he falls to the pavement, that he could be having a grand mal epileptic seizure.
I’m in the middle lane and so can’t pull over to stop even if I were inclined to do so — which I am not, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. Traffic is just flat-out fierce, so I can’t reasonably grope around for my purse, dig out the seldom-used flip-phone, figure out how to use it without crashing a fellow homicidal driver, and dial 911.
A-n-d… Just a week or two ago, the neighborhood association sent out a safety alert. One of the neighbors, tooling down Main Drag East due south of Dunlap, had some guy jump out in front of her car. When she stopped, thinking she had hit him, he mugged her. The police advised that this is a common scam to get people to get out of their cars so they can be robbed.
We are now told never to unlock our doors if it appears that we have hit a pedestrian. Of course, it’s illegal to leave the scene of such an accident. (If it is an accident…) So you should stop your car, lock your doors, stay inside the vehicle, and call 911. Wait until the police arrive before getting out of the car.
With that little bit of intelligence in mind, you may be sure that I was not about to stop and render aid to a flakey-looking large man who’s waving his arms around, jerking frantically, and flopping down on the sidewalk.
As soon as I got to a place where I could call safely, I did call the police, who relayed the message to the fire department, who said they’d send a meat wagon.
But lordie! How un-Christian is that? What the hell has the world come to when you dare not stop to help someone who appears to be in dire trouble?
Am I too, too crazy paranoid? What would you do? Would you stop your car beside an eight-lane thoroughfare in a sketchy part of town to try to help a guy thrashing around as though he were having a seizure? Really?