Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

DON’T WANNA WORK…or much of anything else…

by

It’s 10:40 Saturday morning and I do NOT feel like working today. Dammit.

Three more sets of busywork “reading response” papers are in from the English 102s. That’s a hundred and twenty-six papers to read! Actually, in each section three students are MIA (thank God). So that leaves “only” 108 mind-numbers to look at and assess.

They’re only  worth 15 points and they don’t actually have to be read carefully: it’s just a matter of looking at them to judge whether our nimrods seem to have read the assigned chapters and tried to apply the principles therein to one of the included essays. Some students are so effing useless that unless you MAKE them read the assignments by demanding that they regurgitate the gist of what they’re supposed to read, they won’t do it.

Even then, sometimes they won’t. One guy obviously just looked at the chapter’s title, which appears in the syllabus, and made up a lot of vague bullshit.

Many students flat-out refuse to buy the textbooks for their college courses. And you can’t blame them: textbooks are horribly overpriced. When it comes to a required bullshit course like freshman comp, which most students highly resent being made to pay for, the textbooks are a frank rip-off. Sixty, eighty, a hundred bucks for a $20 trade paperback? GIVE. ME. A BREAK.

And forgodsake give the students a break.

For the magazine writing course, my colleague and I are trying to concoct a “virtual” workbook by finding websites that contain the same information as the pricey textbook. Really, it would be easier to do that for freshman comp, and I don’t understand why the colleges don’t assign a committee to identify a dozen websites with the instructional content and another couple dozen online essays and articles to examplify that content, and then let us point classmates in that direction.

Even if the students had to sign up for sites with paywalls, like The New York Times, it would be infinitely cheaper than having to fork over some enormous amount of money for a textbook you don’t want and will get rid of on the last day of class, to your significant financial disadvantage.

Ugh. I’ve been sitting here drinking coffee and cruising the Web for the past several hours. GOTTA either get to work or get off my duff, walk the dogs, and do some yardwork.

Yesterday I did manage to get several major chores done:

Cleaned up final (or next-to-final) copy for a client’s 275-page manuscript (single-spaced; that would be something over 500 pages if it were double-spaced the way it’s supposed to be…). Drafted a proposal for said client to send to publishers. Read about 60 stoont papers. Attacked the weeds in the quarter-acre yard and up the alley. Walked the dogs. Devised a yoga routine and tested it (not long enough yet…). Met with my son to discuss the proposed refinance; found him once again unhappy with the idea. Realized he may be right.

My father may have been right, too: mortgage instruments are designed to screw the customer, no matter how cheerily they are presented and no matter how “low” the interest. One might, just might be better served to live in cheap apartments or company housing throughout one’s adulthood, squirreling every penny into savings, and then buy the retirement residence in cash.

God, but the news stinks these days. One exception: Jordan is moved to blow ISIS out of existence.

About bloody time someone got off that dime. If the Jordanians succeed in extinguishing those lunatics, their pilot’s life will not have been lost in vain.

Unlike, we might add, the many lives we’ve thrown uselessly into that vortex.

There’s only one way to bring a stop to extremist attacks on Western targets and on (relatively) innocent locals, and that is to demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt that we will exterminate the perpetrators and anybody who happens to be standing nearby. That is what they understand and that is all they understand.

Sorry to sound harsh, but I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I can assure you, the only reason the Saudis ever pretended to be our “friends” was and is spelled O-I-L. In reality they hate Westerners, they hate Christians, they hate Jews, and they especially hate Americans. That was as obvious while my family was there as it it obvious today.

ISIS represents the worst threat to civilization — any civilization, not just the West’s — since Adolf Hitler. In fact, I would venture to suggest that ISIS is worse than the Nazis, because they have religion behind them, and religion rectifies just about anything. Like the Nazi, they would happily relieve the world of every Jew, every gay and lesbian, every mentally or physically disabled person, everyone they imagine is “immoral,” and everyone who fails to toe their political line. But to that list you can add vast numbers of other nationalities, races, faiths, and non-faiths.

These are people who would not hesitate to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York, London, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Tokyo, Singapore…you name it. Or to unleash chemical or biological weapons on hundreds of thousands of human beings. They would do so without compunction, because they believe God approves.

This is an enemy that truly does embody pure evil. If Americans, Europeans, and Asians do not clear the fog from their vision soon, we won’t have to worry about global warming much longer. There won’t be anybody left to release carbon into the atmosphere. At least, not from combustion sources much more impressive than a campfire.

Cripes. I suppose I’d better get up and get to work. Though under the circumstances there hardly seems any point in it.

Budget Redux

by

{sigh} I’m supposed to be working (still!) but can’t stand another minute of it and so instead have decided to abandon my livelihood in favor of blogging. For the moment.

PF Topic of the Day: revisiting the budgeting scheme I abandoned in 20-and-aught-14. Holy mackerel, what a Year from Hell! In more ways than one: financial fiasco and healthcare fiasco proceeded hand-in-hand.

Well before a hyper-sensitive mammogram’s little discovery of an alleged one-centimeter lesion — the one that sucked me into an inescapable vortex leading to a double mastectomy for “not a cancer” — the large unplanned expenses began. Yea verily: they started in January, with surprise pool bills, plumbing bills, car repair bills, and on and on and on… Once the health-care fiasco began, I just flat gave up.

What, after all, was the point of even trying to track one crazy expense after another, let alone trying to keep them under control, when even the Mayo Clinic with all its considerable corporate power could not begin to tell me what I really owed them? They still do not know. Neither do I.

It’ll be months before enough dust settles to figure out what, after Medicare and Medigap payments, I actually have to pay toward the $60,000 or $70,000 worth of medical misadventures.

Meanwhile, I’ve gotta get back on track. So, I’ve revived the system to track monthly discretionary and nondiscretionary expenditures, in an effort to keep the discretionary spending under $1200 a month. The current iteration is slightly less onerous than previous versions: in Excel, I’m not noting the vendors that absorb my livelihood, that intelligence, after all, being redundant with the data recorded in QuickBooks. All the new tracking system shows is each expenditure and the running total.

Budget 1 2015

Last month I did pretty well: only $955 in discretionary expenditures — well under budget! — and $74 in extra water charged up by draining and refilling the pool. Not bad. This happened because I was flat on my back in bed most of the month.

As for February? Welll…..we seem to be making up for lost time.

Budget 2 2015

Extraordinary expenses are freaking through the roof: $65 to the yard dude for service above and beyond the call of duty at my son’s house; $136 to get my teeth cleaned; $307 to clean the pool filter and repair a part the disgraced Pool Dude probably broke.  Holy shit: we started out $507 into a budget of $1200 (which we’d like to keep down to $1100 if at all possible)! It’s gone downhill from there.

With $507 of extraordinary expenses and $734 of normal discretionary expenses, I’m already more than $40 in the hole: and 16 days remain to go in the discretionary budget cycle. By the end of February, mercifully a short month, I am going to be deep, deep in the red.

As yet no paycheck from Heavenly Gardens Community College, even though we’re into the third week of the semester. The joys of adjunct teaching.

Yesterday I bought gasoline, probably enough to last until the new AMEX cycle kicks in (not shown in these figures…). But clearly I can’t do without at least one or two grocery store runs between now and the end of the month. And we’re running low on dog food: that means I’ll have to go into Costco to pick up more large packages of chicken or pork to make new food, which I believe to be healthier for the dogs and cheaper than the closest commercial approximation of Real Food for dogs.

I’d planned to make one, count it (1) Costco run per month, limiting the $200 trips to that Emporium of Impulse Buys, but if that is to happen, I’ll have to buy twice as much dog-food meat per trip as I’ve been accustomed to purchasing at any given time. Even this, though, may prove cost-effective: every time I go into Costco, I come out with my bank account several times lighter than expected. In any given month, the fewer C0stco visits, the closer I come to ending on budget. So, even if I buy more of X product category in a given trip, stocking up on enough to head off a second trip that month will save money.

This month’s utility bills have yet to come in, of course, it being only the seventh. But in a February, power and water bills should both be fairly low, well under the $660 nondiscretionary budget. So with any luck the total discretionary + nondiscretionary should not exceed the total planned $1860 by very much. I hope.

But…the only way to keep within this limit, as the weather grows hotter and utility bills bloat accordingly, will be to keep a grip on grocery bills and the various nasty little surprises.

$1,860, by the way, is about $660 more than Social Security pays. Social Security is my only consistently reliable income source, adjunct teaching being the joke that it is.

Not good, is it?

How to Wash Clothes in a Samsung Washer

by

How to wash clothes in a fancy, expensive Samsung top-loading washer? Don’t.

P1030351The Samsung top-loader is not up to the job of laundering garments. If an item has a sleeve, a pants leg, or a strap, it will end up literally braided into anything else you put in the machine. Packing every stitch of clothing into mesh bags does not help and often ends with a tangle, too. These wads can take a good ten minutes to pull apart, and the extricated clothing will often be damaged and always be wadded into intractable wrinkles.

The machine does a decent job on sheets, comforters, and blankets, which do not seem to tangle inside the Samsung. But it simply is not designed to wash clothing.

Well, owning one of these pieces of junk and finding myself unable to afford to buy another washer that probably won’t work any better, I realized I had to find another way to wash my jeans, underwear, and shirts.

Luckily, my house came equipped with an indispensable tool that makes this project possible: a utility sink, conveniently  located next to the washer/dryer hookups.

Here’s what you’ll need to do your laundry-day chore:

• Samsung top-loading washer
• Good-sized household utility bucket, plastic
• A utility sink, preferably adjacent to the washer, preferably with running hot as well as cold water
• A functioning dryer or clothes line
• Dirty clothes, separated into whites and coloreds
• HE detergent, or a small amount of clear, unperfumed dish detergent
• Oxygen bleach (optional)
• Spot remover such as Spray ’n’ Wash (optional)

P1030350Place your bucket in the sink. Place a load of clothing into the bucket. If you have a lot of dirty clothes, you may have to divide the whites and the coloreds into several small loads each, by way of discouraging the Samsung from twisting them into braids.

Pretreat stains and extra dirt: spray or squirt on some spot remover; if desired, spot-treat stains with oxygen bleach. In some cases, such as stains from blood and other bodily excretions, O2 bleach will foam up and “eat” the offending substance — that’s because it contains hydrogen peroxide, the same stuff that foams up if you pour it on a cut, imagining H2O2 will disinfect. It won’t, but it looks impressive. And it does bleach blood and wine out of fabric, more or less.

For whites: Add a small amount of HE detergent —  no more than enough to fill the cap to the line, but really much less is needed; about half that amount will do, especially if you have a small load. Add a capful of oxygen bleach, if desired.

If you are using oxygen bleach, fill the bucket with enough HOT water to cover the clothes. Oxygen bleach is activated by hot water, so if you choose to include it, wash in water that is as warm as you can stand it without being hot enough to burn your hands. It also sometimes contains the equivalent of old-fashioned bluing (that’s why it’s blue…get it? heh heh heh!), which causes white fabric to come out looking DayGlo white. So if you like your whites extravagantly white, use plenty oxygen (not chlorine!!!) bleach.

Unless you like your clothing decorated with holes and white spots, do not use chlorine bleach with this method.

If you’re not using O2 bleach, don’t waste your money on heating the water. Fill the bucket with cold water.

Now go away for 20 minutes or more. Come back whenever you feel so inclined. Roll up your sleeves and slosh the clothing around in the bucket for a few minutes. Scrub any known spots, either by rubbing the fabric together vigorously or by scrubbing each spot with an old toothbrush, a nailbrush, or a scrub brush.

P1030352Pour out the water. Wring the clothes gently (no need to get rough with this) to squeeze out most of the soapy water. Place them in the utility sink. Put the plug in the drain and fill the tub with enough cold water to cover the wet clothes generously. Hot water is not needed for the rinse process.

Again slosh the clothes around, to rinse out as much of the soap as you can, easily. This does not have to be perfect, because you’re about to make the Samsung rinse them for you. In fact, if you haven’t overdone the soap and you have used HE detergent instead of dish soap, you can probably skip this step.

Wring the clothes gently again, squeezing out the (now soapy) rinse water. Toss each item into the washer tub after wringing it. Drain the utility sink tub and set the plug where it can’t accidentally float into position to stop the drain again.

Set the Samsung cycle on Rinse/Spin, with cold water. Close the lid and turn the thing on.

P1030355

Twenty minutes later, come back and retrieve your clothes. Place them in the dryer or hang them to dry, as desired.

For colored clothing: Follow the same instructions, with these two exceptions:

• Do not add oxygen (or any other) bleach.
• Use cold, not hot, water for washing.

Here’s how a pair of jeans came out of the Samsung this morning:

P1030359Straight out of the wash, they’re hardly wrinkled at all. A couple of sharp shakes, and they don’t even have to go into the dryer!

Apparently the braiding process occurs during the Samsung’s wash cycle, not during the rinse cycle. This load of colored clothes had two pair of jeans, two long-sleeved shirts, several kitchen towels, three or four pairs of socks, and a cami with spaghetti straps. Not one item tangled. They all came out of the wash almost wrinkle free, with the exception of a knit shirt, which will shake out nicely in the dryer.

Notice the amazing number of advantages to this strategy:

In the first place, the accursed Samsung takes an hour and ten minutes to run an ordinary load that my old Kenmore agitator washer would do in twenty minutes. To wash one piddling load of laundry!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Presumably  it takes some time to work 15 pounds of wet clothing into braids, eh?

Even if you let a bucket of clothing soak for 20 minutes — it’s really not necessary unless the stuff is very dirty, indeed — it only takes about five or ten minutes to slosh the stuff around in the sink and transfer it into the washer tub. The Samsung’s Rinse/Spin cycle runs through in just 21 minutes. So let’s say 20 minutes to soak + 10 minutes to wash (very generous) + 21 minutes to rinse and spin out the water: that’s 51 minutes: twenty minutes less than it takes the Samsung to wash a load of clothes on the only cycle that uses enough water to actually get them clean. If you don’t presoak a load, you’re done with the job in 31 minutes.

Second: You control the amount of water that’s used. You can use as much or as little water as necessary to get your clothes clean. Most of the time, that’s not much.

But when you do need plenty of water to deal with a large load or with something that’s stained or unusually dirty, you don’t have to do battle with an infuriating machine to get it.

Third: You use a very minimal amount of energy: the washer runs less than 1/5 of the amount of time the damn thing would take to run through a functional wash cycle.

Fourth: You can use as much or as little detergent as you please.

Fifth: You’re not chained to using ultra-expensive HE detergent. If you’re willing to stand there and rinse thoroughly by hand, you can use dish detergent or clothes detergent that actually works (assuming any of that is still on the market).

Sixth: Your clothes are going to last much, much longer. Machine washing is hard on clothing. Even if a machine doesn’t wrap everything into wads and braids, the action inside any machine abrades, stretches, twists, and wads fabrics, adding hugely to wear and tear. Hand washing, being gentler, extends a garment’s lifetime, saving you on your wardrobe budget.

Seventh: You will never be worked into a high rage by your wash machine, thereby reducing the wear and tear on you and extending your own functional lifetime.

Whites in the 20-minute rinse/spin cycle. NO BRAIDS, NO WADS, NO WRINKLES! Isn't that clear lid cool? Especially when you don't expect the machine to actually wash clothes...
Whites in the 20-minute rinse/spin cycle. NO BRAIDS, NO WADS, NO WRINKLES! Isn’t that clear lid cool? Especially if you don’t expect the machine to actually wash clothes…

 

Foggy Fantasy

by

Stupor Bowl Sunday opened with a rare meteorological fluke: FOG IN ARIZONA! We woke up to San Francisco in the desert.

P1030344

P1030343

Photos leave something to be desired…I’m afraid the camera’s on its last legs. Or whatever cameras have. Don’t know why the lens decided to create the sprinkler effect: no rain was in evidence, and the lens was dry. Oh well.

It actually wasn’t a San Francisco fog. In Arizona it’s more like tule fog, where a freak of temperature causes moisture in the ground (it’s been raining for two or three days) to rise into the air. Like tule fog, it was patchy — barely filmy in some places but thick as soup in others. Overall, though the effect was very lovely.

Cassie and Ruby are definite San Francisco dogs. We had time for a doggy walk this morning before I had to race off to choir. They were thrilled. Both dogs frisked right along, and Cassie did not, for a change, run out of steam.

Arizonans, unfortunately, cannot drive in fog. Amazingly, as we were crossing Feeder Street North, along came some moron with his lights off. If I hadn’t heard him coming and stopped at the curb, he would’ve hit us.

Ah, my fellow homicidal drivers… They can’t drive in fog. They can’t drive in rain. Snow? Don’t even think it! And heat drives them mad. As a practical matter, I suppose they can’t drive at all, really. Came across a brace of cops attending a fender-bender a mile from the house; more policia between there and the church.

So it goes.

 

Super Bowl Solitary Confinement

by

A Metlife blimp just drifted over, propelled by what sounds like an outboard motor. Always a hoot! Wouldn’t it be fun to ride in one of those things?

The Stupor Bowl is in town, and the place is overrun with tourists and all their larcenous hangers-on. Tomorrow is Stupor Bowl Sunday, and promoters are doing their best to whip locals and visitors into a slobbering frenzy. Consequently, where a sane person wants to be is OFF THE ROADS. What a zoo!

Got a couple of errands I’d like to run — I printed up a sheet of business cards with updated emergency numbers; want to take those by FedEx to have them laminated, so they’ll hold up when stored in places like a wallet, the car visor, and waypoints.  That FedEx store happens to be in the same shopping center as a Trader Joe’s and a Whole Foods…just now I sure could use some fresh veggies and fruits, and maybe a nice steak to cut into pieces for several meals.

But no. There is no chance I’m going into a grocery store, any grocery store, the day before Stupor Bowl Sunday. Nor, I think, am I going to try to park in the ordinarily hectic WF/TJ parking lot. So I’m marooned in the house, for the nonce.

Can’t wait for this orgy of hype to get over.

For a hopeless skeptic (some would say cynic), hype seems to be what this event is all about. After money, of course.

I never have been able to grasp the lure of professional football. Something must be missing in my personality, I guess. To me the game itself is as ugly as ancient Roman gladiatorial games. And then the glorification of men who rape women and KO their wives in elevators escapes me. WHAT about this would cause you to fork over $8,000 for a ticket to watch?

What a scam.

What an obscenity! Really, if violence lights your fire, why not use your eight grand to hire a mercenary or two to kill some ISIS thugs? Surely if you have that kind of money, you would also have that kind of influence. Do something decent for the world.

So, I’ll just have to wait it out. In a day or two, the roads will be navigable again. And of course, every day I stay off those roads is a day of NOT spending money in stores.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a ton of student papers to grade.

Sun Dogs…and Move Over, Dolly!

by

You’ve heard of the Valley of the Sun, of course — we who live here recognize it as the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun: 118 degrees now being a summer norm. Welp, it’s raining in the VotWEMS, and you know what that means? Very, very unhappy dogs!

Ruby the Corgi Pup has acquired Cassie the Corgi’s profound disdain for water. And when water falls out of the sky? Oh, my. What a horror! These are Sun Dogs. Anything other than a clear day is weather for some other planet.

Ruby rousted me out of the sack at 5:30, whining and ooorrrking. She makes the distinctive, strange corgi noise, something like a combination of purring and baying, a sound that Cassie abjures in favor of pretty much constant barking. Figuring she needed to pee, I rolled out of the sack and lifted them down from the bed.

No. Apparently she was complaining about the sound of the rain falling. She ran into the bathroom and refused to come out!

Cripes.

Cassie was persuaded to step onto the back porch, but declined to go further.

Tell me you don't seriously think I'm going out there!
Tell me you don’t seriously think I’m going out there!

Grumpily, I went back to bed. Ruby refused to get back on the bed — she ran out of the bathroom and huddled in her crate.

A couple hours later, clouds were sitting atop North Mountain, a low butte a couple miles from the Funny Farm. Briefly, though, it had stopped raining.

P1030331Ruby ran back into the bathroom and refused to come out. Cassie stood at the door and stared out, aghast. Their attention, finally, was grabbed by the rattling of the Doggy Treat Jar.

Yes. I had to lure them into the backyard with dog treats. They did their thing in the moments between rainshowers, but they were not pleased. No dog pleasure here. None.

That is about ENOUGH of that!
That is about ENOUGH of that!

 In other news…

Windy City Gal, who is making a pair of Tit Bits for me, asked me to try the “seat cushions” that came from Knitted Knockers in one of my bras, to see whether the size we estimated is right.

P1030335
Don’t everybody’s boobs look like seat cushions for Raggedy Ann and Andy? 😀

heh heh heh heh…

The result, even with the whoopie-cushion effect, was va-va-VOOM! Get outta, my way, Dolly Parton!

P1030315

This is too hilarious to be believed!

Of course, it’s too everything to be believed, and certainly should not be. Believed, that is.

However, it must be said: with a shirt on, the effect is surprisingly believable. And certainly much more buxom than I’ve ever been in real life.

Now…all I’ve gotta do is get the hair right….