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Car Shopping

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Toyota_Venza_--_NHTSA_2So this afternoon while cruising back into town after a meeting with a graphic designer, I decide to get off the I-17 at Bell Road, where there’s a long strip of car dealerships. The Toyota dealership up there is significantly less sleazy and more customer-friendly than the mid-town outfit, and I want to test-drive the Venza.

After lengthy standing around and gassing with the sales guy, this comes to pass. As a matter of fact, I get to drive both both the four-banger and the six, the salesman (being male) having decided that the Little Woman couldn’t possibly tell the difference.

Well, this little old lady can. And yeah, I still do prefer the six. Heh heh…50 to 90 in less time than it takes to draw a deep breath.

I like the Venza. It’s a pleasant car, modestly luxurious, sort of like a tall, bloated Camry. But I found myself thinking the same thing that I think about the newer Camry: it’s cramped in there.

Maybe it’s not the car; maybe it’s me. After fifteen years of driving a Sienna, maybe I’ve just become spoiled to all that extra space.

One other thing I didn’t care for about the Venza — or about the Tacoma pickup — is that when the back seats fold down, they don’t fit flush against anything. A gap remains between the folded-down seat back and the floor…and that gap is big enough for a corgi to fall into. Or for a bigger dog to stumble into and break a leg. Thanks, but no thanks.

I looked at a Sienna on the lot. Very nice. It doesn’t seem to have undergone much of a redesign since the 2000 model I’m still flogging across the roads. EXCEPT…it’s now billed as an eight-passenger vehicle. That would mean they must have an extra bench seat at the back, or else they’ve installed two more captain’s chairs. That presumably would make the vehicle longer than mine, which about fills up the garage. Since my washer & dryer are in the garage, the Sienna I’ve got is about as long as a vehicle can be and still fit in there.

The Sienna’s seats can be removed. And when you do that — as I’ve done with three of the four back seats in mine — you end up with a VAST cargo space. It really is awesome. You can carry just about anything in the back of a Sienna once you’ve taken out the seats. And it’s flat, so you can either let a dog run around in there or you can pack in a couple of dog crates (more than a couple, actually).

So I may go back later and revisit the Sienna. In a way, it’s a perfect compromise between a pickup and a passenger vehicle: plenty of room to haul gear and critters, and yet a comfortable ride.

Heh. Maybe I really do want a pickup. All that business about the proposed Ram 1500 was a bit of a joke. But…hey. The Ram has a crew cab with back seats that fold up, leaving you with a large interior space to stash dog cages or loose dogs, to say nothing of whatever other junk you’d like to haul around without leaving it out for passing sticky fingers. Plus its back seats are said to be comfortable with plenty of leg room and the ride is said to be car-like.

Still. It’s awfully large. And the price is high.

Not at all crazy about the Toyota’s dashboard. Honest to God. I do not want to go back to school for a bachelor’s in aviation technology to learn to drive the damn car. There is just too much computerized clutter in that thing.

For one thing, I personally do not need or want an animated electronic map. I know which way is north. And I rarely get lost.

I’m sure the GPS map distraction would be handy if you lived in the older cities of the East. But if you live anyplace in the Southwest that’s been heavily influenced by Mormons, then you live in a city or town that’s laid out in a grid. North/south; east/west. Such a city is extremely easy to navigate, and it’s almost impossible to get lost, unless you get into one of the ill-designed suburbs with swirling, serpentine residential streets.

Nor do I wish to have to point and click or tap a screen to operate the radio — one that offers an image of real radio controls. Why can’t I just have a real radio? Why can’t I have analogue everything, come to think of it? I don’t want to have to fiddle with a computer to turn on the air conditioner or unlock the doors.

Please. All I need is a key to turn the thing on (a button is cute, but…why?), a switch to turn the heat and air-conditioner on and off, a switch to turn the headlights on and off, a switch to lock and unlock the doors, a button to open and close the windows, a switch to turn on the radio, and a dial to tune in my favorite NPR and cowboy stations and no I do not need and am not going to pay for satellite radio.

What a curmudgeon, huh?

Maybe what I really need is a horse.

A Modern Massacre of the Innocents

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This Christmas, as we often do, our choir sang William Stopford’s version of Lully Lulla, the Coventry Carol. A survival from a medieval mystery play, the carol tells the story of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which we are told that King Herod ordered the slaughter of all boy children under the age of two in Bethlehem.

Some scholars believe this episode never happened. Indeed, such is the story’s horror that one would like to imagine no king, no leader of men and women could possibly be capable of such a thing. But of course we know human nature well enough to know exactly the opposite is true.

Over at Daily (W)rite, Damyanti Biswas’s consistently interesting blog, we find a cri de coeur and an empathetic declaration of humanity over the Taliban’s mass murder of children in a Pakistani school. Her words are well said.

When we began to rehearse Lully Lulla, it was all I could do to keep from weeping, so vividly did it bring to mind this latest horror. If the Biblical story itself is fable, so be it. Yet it’s emblematic: it tells the sorry story of humanity’s repeated outrages, of massacres of innocents down through the ages. After 2015  years, we don’t seem to have changed much, as a species.

“Why Am I in the English Department?”

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You recognize the allusion, of course. Hint: Mark Harris.

The question of the day, to be more specific, is why WAS I in the English Department? What on earth would possess any sane human being with a sliver of a normal sense of self-preservation to get a FREAKING Ph.D IN ENGLISH????????  What part of “you will never be able to get a decent job that will not leave you tearing your hair” can such a person fail to understand?

Today I engaged eleven years of advanced university education for EIGHT HOURS, trying to untangle the formatting mess left by yet another MS Wyrd crash and then doing things like searching “[any digit] + blank space + a” trying to find every reference to a time of day in 272 single-spaced pages so as to regularize format for each one, roughly according to Chicago style. With curlicues to make allowances for the author.

[Why would I do such a wacko thing? Because AU has written times of day as N a.m., N am, N AM, N:nn a.m., N:nn am, and NN AM. And so on. These all need to be regularized, made to follow the same style.]

So, here’s how this came down:

Last night around 11 p.m., I stumble away from the computer.

This morning around 8:30, I come back to the project. When I turn on the computer, I find a message: Word had to shut down.

Again?!?

This is a constant thing with MS Wyrd: for no good reason that anyone, human or silicon, can figure out, Word will crash. Out of the effing blue.

But this is something new, or so it seems: the program has gone down after I clicked Open-Apple > Sleep.

Fortunately, only three files were open at the time of the crash, one of them very short. Two are easy to restore.

Then we have 272 pages of client disquisition.

He is an articulate client who pays handsomely. And on time. An interesting man. The sort of client for whom one pines to do well.

The restored back-up file comes up and seems not to have lost much data (shouldn’t have: I saved before putting the computer to sleep).

No. It hasn’t lost data. Au contraire. It’s ADDED data.

Every. single. paragraph has been reformatted: “Not superscript/subscript,” proudly advertised in Word Track Changes.

Huh?

Not a single footnote number was ever changed (on my part) from superscript to anything else. And nary a subscript character appears among a single word filling those 272 pages.

These changes are all intertwined with hundreds of edits — I’ve already read 100 pages, and every page has changes on it: at least a few and usually quite a few.

The only way to get rid of the phantom changes is to click “Accept.” If you reject the change, then it converts the copy to superscript!

There seems to be no way to search “superscript” or “superscript/subscript.” The list of edits doesn’t come up.

And — inconsistently, with no rhyme nor reason — in some paragraphs if I highlight the graf and click “accept all,” Wyrd keeps the tracked edits in place. But in some, it accepts all edits. That won’t do, because Client needs to see the changes I’ve made.

On average, each page has about ten of these “Not superscript/subscript” commands.

No joke: that means something like TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY spurious tracked changes to delete!

Some beach!

Shortly I figure out that I can go from the end of the file toward the last edited page and click “accept all” over batches of paragraphs. This isn’t very satisfactory, because I’ve done a number of global searches and replaces, and I really don’t want to lose those. So even though some of these “accept” commands work to get rid of the “not superscript/subscript” things, I have to watch carefully and Ctrl-Z to undo and manually fix each erroneously accepted “not superscript/subscript” command, ONE at a painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing TIME.

This only partly lengthy procedure leaves about 100 fully edited pages to go through, ONE painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing, goddamn infuriating command at a TIME.

Along about three in the afternoon, I find  myself revisiting the question of whether I should shut down the editorial business.

I mean, why am I doing this?

If I wanted to be a typist, I’d hire out as a virtual assistant. Oh, hell. If I hired out as a virtual assistant, I’d make a helluva lot more than I earn as a high-test editor, because there’s one helluva lot more demand for virtual assistants. Some woman at the last meeting of the West Valley Writers group I attended dasted to ask me if I’d type her manuscript.

{sigh}

If I charged enough by the page, I’d make almost as much as I make editing content.

I can’t charge the client for work created because my computer crashed. So today I’ve spent a good six hours working for free.

Do I hate reading freshman comp drivel more than this?

I hate reading freshman comp drivel a lot.

Quite a lot.

But more than this?

Possibly not.

If I took on two extra adjunct courses from the Great Desert University, which pays a Ph.D. almost a grand more than the junior colleges do, I’d earn as much per year as the S-corp earns from my editorial efforts. Actually, all told I’d earn about $3,000 more than that.

It would be miserable, of course. I’d have to hold out for face-to-face sections, which I truly loathe. GDU has lifted all caps from online sections, meaning you can end up with 120 students or more in a writing-intensive course. How on earth would you ever handle any such thing? You couldn’t assess papers. You couldn’t even make the faintest pass at trying to teach. All you could do is rubber-stamp.

Ethically, there’s a limit.

But maybe there’s a limit to this other stuff, too.

Teaching, as miserably paid as it is, provides the only steady, predictable income I have other than Social Security, which is nowhere near enough to live on. The junior-college courses plus the Social Security just about cover most of my expenses, except for property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance. If I drew down only enough to cover those latter gouges, I’d be OK. One or two more courses, paid at university rates, could mean that I wouldn’t have to use retirement savings at all. Not as long as I could mount a course on a CMS.

So. Why am I doing this?

Why am I not in the English Department?

Zombified…but Yogafied!

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Managed to get almost nothing done today, other than scribbling a post for Writers Plain & Simple and recording a couple of videos for the online magazine-writing course.

This was one of those mornings when you wake up tired, for reasons unknown. Ever have those? Guess it must be the result of not sleeping well. Or something.

Fiddled with QuickTime all morning without even noticing the time pass — took some doing to figure out how to make a video of a PowerPoint presentation and get the audio to run with it. Looks pretty good, and now it should be fairly easy to cook up a few more how-to-do-it videos for that bunch.

Back hurting as usual, very annoying. Plus, equally annoying, sitting around fooling with QuickTime meant I never got around to the planned a.m. mile-long walk. Fat fat fat fat…. So I decided to combine an ad-hoc yoga session with the physical therapy exercises. Helped some but certainly didn’t effect a cure.

Along about 1:30, prepared a nice little meal:  salmon with asparagus, dates, and corn tossed with red bell pepper (not bad), all cooked on the propane grill. Continued to diddle away the afternoon, again with modest results. Finally, along about 4:30 I could NOT hold my eyes open one. more. minute.

Stumbled off to bed, accompanied by dogs. Crapped out until dusk.

And now here’s the WEIRD part: when I woke up, the back pain was gone.

Completely, totally GONE!

That is weird, because normally any time spent inert on a bed freezes up the back and creates exuberant pain. So…wow! Several whole hours, pain-free!

Too good for words.

Out with the dogs: one mile, locked between one dog that tries to drag the human  forward up the street and another that tries to drag it backward. That was fun.

Now to edit some copy in front of a Bones rerun.

🙂

Half the day scrubbed…the rest on the way out

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Damn. I planned to make a run on the Costco on the fringe of Richistan to pick up a roast for Christmas, having let time slip past me to the point where if I don’t do it today I’ll end up in the Hell of Retail-Land that is Costco on the weekend before Christmas.

But I’ve been working (remember that?) this morning and so was running late; have an appointment with Financial Adviser Dude early in the afternoon.

The morning was partially consumed by a little computer scare: I start to work and suddenly see a pop-up: An appointment is being entered in iCal, and I need to open it for that to happen.

Huh? iCal? I never use iCal. If I use an electronic calendar, it’s Google Calendar because it’s connected to my business account.

I try to close it. No chance. I try to close iCal. It won’t shut down. Go to a system command and close out of iCal. This works.

Temporarily. Forthwith, though, up comes the same demand: I should enter my Mac password.

Don’t think so… Use the same command to close the errant iCal again. Back up DropBox again to a flash drive. Shut down the iMac (this is happening on the MacBook, but the iMac is on so I can watch Netflix).

Try to make an appointment at the Genius Bar but Apple has complicated this process SO ridiculously that eventually I give up. Figure after the afternoon appt I’ll drop by the Apple store and ask about this.

So finally, after this and some other banging around, along about 11 I go to get into my car…

And…discover that the remote key fob doesn’t work. Try to unlock a door — I need to get into the passenger compartment to put some cargo on that side — and find the key doesn’t open the lock manually, either!

Holy shit.

Fortunately, when I stumbled into the house last night after, I’d left the driver’s side door unlocked, and fortunately, the damn car had NOT locked itself, which it does off and on, erratically and unpredictably. Otherwise, I’d had to break a window to get into the vehicle.

Knowing my proclivity for operating on autopilot, I could just see myself getting out of the car in some parking lot and, by reflex, pressing LOCK on the key fob. Or the damn car locking itself on a whim.

Dig out the Gorilla Tape and slather it down over the little pop-up switch that causes the lights to come on whenever the car door is open. Said car being parked in the garage, leave the driver’s door open.

Call the mechanic. Get his answering machine.

By now it’s too late to do a Costco run all the way to hell and gone out to Paradise Valley, get home, put the groceries away, and get to my afternoon appointment.

A client importunes me. I tell her, as politely as I can, to f*** off.

My son, bless his marvelous heart, VOLUNTEERS OUT OF THE BLUE to pick up meat. Love love love!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That gives time to throw some meat on the grill

Mechanic calls. He says to bring the car by after my afternoon meeting…maybe they can fix it.

I SHOULD’VE BOUGHT A NEW CAR!

 I think lunch is almost cooked. And so, up, up, and AWAY!

Tune in next week, same time, same place. 😉