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Stupid People

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Argh! We’re surrounded by Stupid People.

No. 1 Stupe would be moi.

Left the house before dawn this morning, for the daily two+ miles through the neighborhood. Knowing the sun would be glaring in my eyes within twenty minutes, I took my favorite old pair of prescription shades and hooked one temple thingie over my T-shirt’s collar. After one turn around the park, I ran into my friend Harriett, and we proceeded further, yakking away.

So busy was I with talking I failed to notice when the glasses fell off my shirt and tumbled to the ground. Not until I walked in the front door did I realize I’d lost $200 worth of wire and plastic!!!!

Irreplaceable wire and plastic, we might add. No matter how much I beg and plead, I can not persuade a glasses dispenser to give me a new pair of glasses in this old Rx. They insist on using the new one, and not once in god only knows how many years has a current prescription been as strong or as effective as this pair. God damn it — officious bastards.

I’ve got one last pair in this old prescription — clear ones, not shades — that I use for night driving. When they’re hanging on my nose at night, I can see the road clear as a bell. My regular glasses in the current prescription? Really…I shouldn’t be driving with those on at night. It’s not a “night vision” problem; it’s a the goddamn prescription isn’t strong enough problem.

Oh well. Stupid me: now I’ve lost an indispensable tool that I won’t be able to replace.

Speaking of stupid, in the gray dawn hours I came upon the couple who take their great Dane to the park and let it run loose for an hour or so. Stopped to chat and pet the Dane — it’s much smarter than its humans, though they’re kindly and gentle creatures. As we were strolling toward the park, I mentioned, in a friendly way, that I had a German shepherd that hated dogs and would fake “friendly” until the other person’s dog would get within reach — and then she would rip into its neck.

This didn’t register.

“I couldn’t take Anna to the park because people would have their dogs off-leash and she would harm any dog that came up to us — that meant my poor dog never got to take walks at all.”

Dumb as posts: this didn’t register, either.

Later as I hike up the east side of the park I see the male dolt standing out in the open hollering. The dog is way the hell and gone over on the west side of the park — bear in mind that this plot of land is a full mile around.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog.

He calls the dog…

The dog ignores him.

Eventually, after about eight or ten minutes of this nonsense, the dog starts to move vaguely in his general direction.

Over on the other side of the park, the female dolt is sitting at a park bench. She now takes it into her head to call the dog over to her.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog.

She calls the dog…

So what they have there is a big, honking clown of a dog that does not come to call and that they allow to run off a quarter- to a half-mile away from them in a public park used by people who may be afraid of dogs, people who may dislike dogs, runners who look like prey to dogs, dogs that may be protective of their owners, and maybe even the occasional German shepherd that craves nothing more in life than to wag cheerfully to lure over the stray pets of morons who let their dogs run loose and RIP THEIR GODDAMN THROATS OUT!

You think I jest, don’t you?…

Having discovered the glasses were lost, I jumped on my bike and retraced my steps, to no avail. Over, again, on the east side of the park, I encounter the air-head who rides her bike with a big mug of coffee in one hand and a large energetic pit pull trotting along beside her. Off-leash, of course.

We see each other every day and say hello, so I ask if she’s spotted a pair of shades on the ground. She says she’ll keep an eye out for them. I stop to say hello to the dog, which, while not slaveringly chummy like the Dane is at least fairly mellow if unchallenged. For godsake…she doesn’t even have a collar on him!

What part of anything that scares this animal, like a car wreck nearby or a fire engine flying past or a German shepherd trying to remove his jugular vein, will cause him to run off does she not understand?

This dog probably could have held his own against Anna. Maybe. When she worked herself into a towering rage, she was something to behold. I don’t think I’d care to come up against her even if I were a pit bull.

Speaking of stupes, Other Daughter and her schizophrenic husband have a little tortoiseshell tabby that they dote on. They let this animal run loose in the neighborhood, being of the species of moron that imagines leaving the cat out is somehow good for the cat. Nevermind the pack of coyotes who’ve taken up residence. Nevermind the cars. Nevermind the delinquent across the street who thinks it’s fun to lay rubber on the block-long road in front of your house. Kitty must go out.

Welp, Kitty has moved in to my yard. She likes to sit on the wall around my front courtyard, and she marks the gates with plenty of spray. Pulling Cassie loose from that delicious stink-fest is quite a task, when it’s time to take her for a walk. Cassie loves cat stink. I could do without it.

But what I could especially do without is having this damn cat use my backyard as a toilet. The desert landscaping in back is crushed granite…approximately the texture of cat litter, which is exactly what Kitty thinks it is. Yesterday I’m sitting in back reading the paper over my morning coffee and what do I see but Cassie nosing up something and happily munching away on it.

Yup, you guessed it: cat shit.

Why do dogs like to eat cat shit? Why??????

WhateEVER…I don’t want it in my backyard.

So the question now arises: how to keep these morons’ cat out of my yard?

I suppose I could go up to the pound and get my own pit bull. Problem is, you can’t leave a dog outdoors in the heat here. Some people do, but that’s another variant on Stupid. It’s cruel to start with, and a fair way to shorten your dog’s life to end with.

As a practical matter, Anna the GerShep and Walt the Greyhound did a pretty fair job of keeping the cats out of the backyard, because they could go in and out at will through the gigantic dog door I carved in the back wall. Anna liked to go out and take the morning air now and again, thought she didn’t spend more than half-an-hour at a time in this hobby. That, apparently, was enough to discourage cats from taking up residence.

However, a pony-sized dog is not the only thing that can go in and out that dog door… Especially after the Garage Invasion episode, I would just as soon leave it bolted shut. Because Cassie won’t use a dog door, I’ve become accustomed to the old-fashioned way of serving the hound’s needs (pay attention and get up off your duff when the dog goes to the back door!). And I have no desire to change back to the Burglar Entry method.

Besides, why should I have to take on the expense and hassle of another dog because stupid people can’t take care of their cat responsibly?

No, you can’t trap a cat and take it to the pound. Well, you can. But what will happen is that if you try to leave it off there, they will charge you ninety-six bucks! The pound and the Humane Society here are so overrun with feral and stray cats that they don’t want people to bring them any more! So they hit you with a stiff gouge for turning in a stray cat.

The alternative is to trap the cat and take it up to Lake Pleasant and drown it, or simply to let it loose in the desert to be eaten by coyotes (not until it’s devastated some more of the native birds and small creatures, we might add — cats are hell on native wildlife). This activity, however, is illegal. It has been deemed animal cruelty. And the law will put you in jail for a good long time if they catch you dumping a cat.

And that brings us back to the question of how to keep these people’s cat out of my backyard.

I could resurrect the dragon’s teeth, strips of nails I tied up there to keep Son-in-Law from jumping the fence after the interlude in which he told Semi-Demi-Exboyfriend that he would come into my yard whenever he felt like it.

Hm. Now there was a time when the hassle and expense of owning a German shepherd was worth it. LOL! She caught him coming in the side gate. He never tried that again. 😀

The dragon’s teeth are very tacky. And really, I do not feel like drilling holes in 2-inch strips, pounding nails through them, and wiring them to the top of the wall. Like I don’t have enough to do with my time?

Satan and Proserpine, the house’s previous owners, bolted a strip of vine lattice along a short stretch of the west wall. I think they did it because they wanted some privacy, because they never planted vines there. And in fact, it does work to block the view from my neighbor Terri’s westside window. Which is moot, because she has heavy drapes that she never, EVER opens.

But the lattice has another effect: it blocks the cat from getting over the wall there. Too narrow for her to climb up on, and too high for her to jump over in a flying leap. I could, in theory, buy hundreds of feet of wooden lattice and bolt it to the block wall.

This would be a) expensive as hell and b) more hassle than the human mind can conceive.

Possibly the proposed pit bull would be cheaper and less of a nuisance…

I could super-glue broken glass to the top of the wall, in the Mexican mode.

This would be tacky, too, but possibly not as tacky as strips of nails. Also, during the SDXB-vs-Schizophrenic Son-in-Law adventure, I was advised that the police likely would look askance at a litter of broken glass along a wall, especially if an officer elected to jump the wall in pursuit of, say, a Garage Invader.

I could sprinkle mothballs on the tops of the walls. Unfortunately, these are toxic. If the cat knocked some on the ground (which it certainly would, because it jumps on the wall and walks around all the time), Cassie might get into them. Same effect when a breeze causes the paloverde or one of the other plants to brush across the top row of blocks.

Or I could wire or tie a layer of chicken wire along the top of the wall. That will be almost as pretty as the nail strips, eh?

Or maybe I could go out and buy several containers of cat repellent and sprinkle that atop and along the base of the wall. Reviews of such products look less than encouraging, though; 34 people panned the stuff at Amazon, vs. 21 who rated it great, sorta OK, or pretty much worthless. One reviewer suggested it would work well as a kitty snack.

Anyone who knows cats also knows that when you elect to do battle with one, the loser is going to be you.

HOOT! I can’t believe this…

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Closing in on the fat-killing goal, which I expect to make by the end of this week — possibly even tomorrow — I decided to drag out the hated blood pressure monitor and see what progress has been made in that department, if any.

Defies belief!

120/68, pulse 78

Holy macquerelle! That is a drop of twenty-nine points in systolic pressure since May 22nd, and twenty points in diastolic. Without benefit of prescription drugs.

That’s right: I threw over the Irbesartan because I didn’t care for the side effects. This is purely the result of eating better, losing weight, and exercising mildly.

I have not beat myself up with running or gym-crawling. I have not starved myself. I have not interrupted my drinking habit. Indeed, as we scribble I’m dosing myself with a gin & tonic. Not once have I felt in any way deprived.

This amazing result has come about as a result of these strategies:

1. Cut sodium intake from incidental and unintended sources.

• Quit eating two to four pieces of bacon every damn day of my life.
• Refrain from scarfing down sausage, pastrami, salami, and other kinds of salt-laden processed meat.
• Read the labels on packaged and canned foods! Seek out similar foods with lower sodium content.
• Eat less cheese, which is high in sodium.
• Avoid restaurant food, which is astronomically high in sodium.

2. Prefer real food to food-like substances.

• Avoid all processed food!
• Instead, seek out the most delicious of all possible whole foods, including candy-sweet ripe fruit, crisp fresh veggies, and delicious fresh greens.
• Buy the best quality food available on the market.
• Have at least one excellent salad a day, always containing a wide variety of good things to eat. Use a real salad dressing (not commercial bottled stuff) of olive oil and lemon juice, lime juice, or vinegar.
• Make nutritious soups in quantities large enough to provide several meals. I happen to like cold soups such as xergis and gazpacho, which are extremely convenient to eat and (if you use low-fat yogurt in the xergis) low in calories.
• Evade eating in restaurants, most of which sell little or no real food.

3. Eat less meat but better meat. Much, much better meat…

• Cut meat-centered meals to two or three times a week.
• Seek out…
…wild-caught fish
…humanely farmed beef, lamb, and pork
…free-range chicken
…antibiotic-free meat
…hormone-free meat
…air-cooled meat
…meat whose packaging specifically says no extra liquid (i.e., brine or saline solution) has been added

4. Eat smaller portions.

• Serve food on smaller plates, so that it looks like you’re eating the same pile of food but in fact you’re consuming less.
• Eat slower and enjoy your food  more.

5. Eliminate most starches.

• Refrain from eating potatoes, bread, and rice
• Include whole wheat in this ban
• Include brown rice, too
• And, alas, include the beloved PASTA! Oatmeal (the cookable kind) is OK, though…occasionally

6. Try to engineer about 40 minutes to an hour of moderate exercise a day.

• Walk one to three miles through the neighborhood
• Swim ad lib
• Indulge in yoga for relaxation and pain relief
• Bicycle when weather and traffic permit

None of these things (except possibly the business of staying out of restaurants) is difficult. None of them makes you feel especially deprived. Possibly the most difficult element is simply pulling them all together so you can engage them all at once.

The interesting thing about this is that once you do get all the strategies all engaged in a single project, falling off the wagon once in a while doesn’t seem to make much difference. Despite the shocking frolic at Tricks the other day, I still hit my goal of dropping to 132 pounds the following morning. And the weight did not go up a day or two later, in some sort of delayed revenge.

I think what works is to develop an effective plan, to engage it, and to turn it into a routine. The plan should not be so extreme that you can’t reasonably stick with it over the long term — and by that we mean “for the rest of your life.”

And speaking of the rest of your life, check out this interesting study, which suggests that pursuing whole foods and exercising moderately may actually reverse the ravages of aging. If you read what they report having tested, you find that the men in the study who achieved not only less aging but apparently reversed aging did exactly what I have described here. It’s pure serendipity…but it seems to work.

Cheers! 😉

The Queen of the Universe vs. the Queen of Sheba

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P1010644Her Holy Highness The Queen of the Universe has been more than usually imperious of late. She’s developed a limp, and because she desires not to walk around the Castle, she barks at the Slave to come to wherever she happens to be. Usually the command is to pick up a ball and toss it (gently) for her delectation. Sometimes, however, the desired behavior is unclear.

The Slave, a.k.a. the Human, a.k.a. the Queen of Sheba, undoubtedly communicated the wrong message to Her Holy Highness today, elevating her beyond the level of mere Queen of the Universe to Empress of All Time, Eternity, and Hyperspace.

Yesterday the Slave slow-cooked a mound of pork for Her Highness’s delectation. It was too hot to food-process into manageable choppings, and so it was spread out upon a dinner plate, covered, and set inside the fridge for future reference. This evening, having presented the last of the chicken to the Queen of the Universe in the morning, the Slave ran the chilled, exceptionally greasy meat (dogs Queens like grease. A lot!) through the food processor. This left a special treat: a lovely plate smeared in grease and meat leavings, something Her Highness regards as quite the delicacy.

So the Slave piled up Her Highness’s dinner on said plate, so as to present both the Royal Dinner and the Royal Delicacy in one fell swoop. A rather silly exchange ensued:

Slave: “Here’s your dinner, Cassie…”

Majesty: [wag!]

Slave: “You good dog, you!”

Majesty, internal monologue: “Now what brought that on? Must have been the imperious barking at the miserable, lazy creature. Interesting. It likes to be barked at. After this, lots more barking!”

{sigh}

The Slave has been eating like the Queen of Sheba, and so it deludes itself that it is the Q of S.

I picked up a pound of spectacular wild-caught salmon at Sprouts yesterday — four meals’ worth! — and this evening decided to grill a piece deliciously over the backyard BBQ. Dinner was simple: the magnificent salmon with a lush salad of crisp greens, crunchy carrot, lovely blueberries, zingy scallions, buttery avocado, and tasty walnuts. And it was marvelously luxurious in its simplicity.

Diet? What diet?

In all this disappearing of 25 pounds over the past few weeks, the Queen of Sheba has never gone hungry. And most of the time what I’ve had to eat has ranged from very nice to incredibly delicious. Tonight’s dinner fell into the latter category, thanks (I believe) to the “less meat but LOTS better meat” strategy.

Meanwhile, the Queen of the Universe and Empress of All Existence beckoned.

The Queen of Sheba Slave parked itself in front of the television to scarf down its chow in front of Antiques Roadshow, something it apparently favors because it itself is an antique.

Her Majesty deigned to carry Ball into the room, by way of getting the creature’s attention.

That’s when I noticed that for the second night in a row, Her Highness is limping badly.

Last night I thought she must have pulled a muscle chasing Charley the Golden Retriever around. Or trying to protect him: believe it or not, she FAKED A BITE at my son when he was hauling Charley into the pool.

Charley doesn’t exactly like going into the drink but he will try, unhappily, to climb onto the steps when the humans are in the pool. Also we discovered that the only time he’ll hold still to have his tail combed is when he’s petrified in the water.

CharleyWhiteMtsWhile he and his human were camping, he managed to build a large mat in the beautiful flag-like fringe that is his tail fur. M’hijito didn’t know what else to do but take a pair of scissors and cut it out, thereby destroying some of Charley’s roguish beauty. The Slave, having been a young girl with long hair and a fierce mother sometime in her remote past, realized that the mat could probably be teased out with a hair pick and a comb, if the hound could be made to sit still long enough. Hence: the Hair Salon on the Pool Steps.

As M’hijito was lifting Charley into the pool for a second or third dip and he was trying to make himself heavy by way of resistance, Her Highness took a running whack at the offending human. That was a surprise!

It took about an hour to tease the tangles out, but eventually it worked. And it really, really, REALLY annoyed the Queen of the Universe. Mercifully, she didn’t break skin (only because she apparently didn’t intend to). But she certainly got the attention of the Slave and Charley’s Human.

At any rate, while Charley wasn’t being groomed in the pool, Her Highness was chasing him around the yard. Hence, I figured, a pulled muscle or strained ligament.

This evening, though, I found a big scrape hidden under the thick fur on her leg. it runs from below the “elbow” joint almost up to her shoulder.

Poor little Queen! No wonder she’s limping.

So now her leg is slathered in antibiotic ointment and wrapped in bandaging, presenting an amusing challenge to Her Highness: she’ll have all that off by morning.

Don’t like to see her hurting enough to limp (one critter in the house doing that is enough!), but am sorta glad it’s an actual injury, probably the result of skidding through the gravel in pursuit of Ball, and not arthritis or a dislocated joint. In a few days it will heal and then she’ll be back to normal. Hopefully a less barkifarious normal.

Never a dull moment here in the Queendom!

Changes

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{sigh} Feeling a little better now.

RHDonating my beloved old Restoration Hardware easy chair and ottoman to my son’s cause made me feel weirdly sad. I mean, how stupid, huh? Feeling depressed over a 15-year-old CHAIR???????

The back and leg have been hurting so much I no longer can sit in most of the furniture in the house, certainly not for more than a few minutes at a time. The big, comfortable (…well, formerly comfortable) chair in the TV room presented several problems:

• The seat’s depth is longer than my thighs, so my feet don’t touch the floor. That’s never mattered, because the big ottoman turned the thing into a kind of chaise longue, perfect for parking in front of the television with a computer on your lap.

• It has such a nice big seat, and its soft overstuffed arms are at exactly the right height for curling up and falling asleep. And that’s exactly what happens, no matter how hard I try not to fall asleep in front of the mind-numbing television.

In either event — whether I sit there with feet up on the ottoman and a computer perched on my lap or whether I actually try to watch the television with the sound muted through the endless stupid advertising and end up falling asleep while waiting for the program to come back on, the result is agony. Just sitting in the chair long enough to watch a program or write a blog post causes leg and hip pain. But holy mackerel! Falling asleep in the damn thing invariably leaves me with such violent, awful sciatic cramps I can barely crawl down the hallway. A couple of times I’ve thought I wasn’t going to make it to the bedroom.

Ugh.

I dragged in a wooden chair from the back porch, made a cushion for it, and tried sitting in that.

It’s not too bad. Sitting in anything causes pain, but chairs that force one to sit up straight cause less pain. It’s apparently loafing, slouching, and curling up in a ball with your head on a chair arm that cause serious hurting. A smaller chair that allows the feet to rest on the ground helps, and also there’s no way anything larger than a cat could fall asleep in the thing.

The other chair in the TV room is a very pretty, very useless wicker rocking chair I got on a whim from Pier One. Like most Pier One furnishings, it looks good and feels…well…pretty awful. LOL! I have yet to find a comfortable piece of furniture at that place. So it’s a decorator item, not a chair.

LilyChairCopenhagen Imports sells a small, leather-covered swivel chair that I’ve always found extremely comfortable and that’s small enough to let my feet hit the ground. It’s about the same size and shape as the outdoor chair…just looks as though it were intended to be inside. If I put the laptop on a TV table, I can sit here for a half-hour or forty-five minutes without too much consequence. I imagine the softer seat will extend that time a little.

So I gave my beautiful easy chair to my son. And he wasn’t real happy about it. The thing has a (very faded, very tired) rose-patterned slip cover, which he hates. He thinks it’s unmanly.

To replace the slip covers will cost about $460 for the chair and another $250 for the ottoman, and that’s on the low end. He can’t afford that, so even though new slip covers probably would extend the chair’s life another 10 years (it’s otherwise in fine condition), it ain’t gonna get any restoration work.

So it made me sad to give it to him, because he didn’t much want it.

But what really made me feel sad was just having to get rid of it. Being forced to get rid of a beloved object because of a growing disability.

It feels like the first step toward the day when I’ll no longer be able to live in my home. That time is coming. Maybe not soon. But eventually it will get here. And then I’ll have to lose this place that I’ve come to love and that I really don’t want to empty out and leave. Certainly not to have to go into an old-folkerie.

Very, very sad, that echoey, empty room.

Well.

I got out the throw M’hijito gave me a Christmas or two ago. It happens to have the same colors as the cushion and pillows on the wicker rocker — reds with green and turquoise accents. For that reason I got the Copenhagen chair, which will be delivered next Wednesday, in a dark brown leather (it comes in a wild spectrum of colors): so it will match the coffee-colored wicker. The wooden yard chair is brown, too…so the throw kind of gives the idea of how this new throne is going to look.

Then, dog notwithstanding, I pulled an old area rug down from a closet shelf. It goes with the curtains and also picks up some of the colors in the pillows and throw. And of course it absorbs enough sound to bring a stop to the empty-cave echo effect.

And actually, it looks pretty nice.

So I suppose there’s no reason to be so forlorn about the stupid rose-covered chair. I just don’t like changes, is all.

Interestingly, as we get older we seem to like change less and less. It’s oddly disorienting…leaves you feeling at loose ends, in a funny way. Something that shifts your environment, when you’re an old bat, makes you feel out of sorts, unhappy, restless.

Why? I don’t think it’s because your marbles are starting to slip out your ears and bounce down the road.

No.

As your options, slowly and imperceptibly, grow fewer, a change represents something that you may never be able to undo and that very well may not be to your advantage. Or to your taste. Many things that are for the best are not necessarily to one’s taste.

By and large, I could do without them — changes.

Breakin’ 132!!!

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Hot dang! Not to say w00t!

One

Hundred

Thirty

–

One

point

Four

POUNDS!!!

At 5:30 in the morning. The morning AFTER having met Tina at a fancy restaurant to celebrate her new job. And mightily pigging out on a gorgeous meal with perfectly grilled salmon over a deep-fried risotto cake with an awesome sauce atop an amazing base of greens and veggies, followed by a spectacular Italianate custard with fruit and this buttery COOKIE and two glasses of wine and syrupy coffee with cream and…good grief!

LOL! The last time the scale claimed I weighed this little, ships navigated by sextant and only Dick Tracy had a cell phone. Actually, it was a wrist radio…same general principal, though. 😉

Believe it or not, the other day I actually managed to squeeze into a SIZE 8 pair of blue jeans. True…they were Ralph Lauren (at that price, they can afford to fudge the sizes). Truer still: even though they would fasten (after a fashion), this kind of muffin effect appeared around the waistband. So I guess we won’t be changing from those Costco little-old-lady specials soon. 😀

Here’s a fun (or funny?) BMI and everything else calculator. What a hoot!

According to this thing, once I hit the target goal of 130 (like…maybe in about a week? less, even???), I could maintain the present weight on 1739 calories a day — about 240 more than I’ve supposedly been ingesting. Except when I’m scarfing down rice cakes and Italian custards.

Actually, compared to what I used to weigh as a young girl, I’m still a little fat. As a 20-something, my weight stayed at a steady 125. Post-pregnancy, it went up to about 132. Then starting about age 40, the pounds started to creep on, an ounce at a time…pretty much unnoticeably.

Don’t recall what I weighed when I started on the Atkins diet, about 10 years ago…around 145 or so, I imagine.

Atkins worked. Got back down to around 130 or 125.

Well. It worked for about 18 months.

Then I got hungry for pasta.

And beer. A lot of beer. A lot of pasta.

It’s pretty unrealistic to think you can live for the rest of your life without your favorite foods. With any luck, after this experiment I should be able to have the occasional deep-fried risotto cake and the occasional sugary dessert, as long as it doesn’t go back to being an everyday thing.

Hope so. It’d sure be nice never to see 156.8 on a scale again!

Filling the Day: Good Stuff to Eat, College Classes, Universities

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So by the beginning of next week the mythology class — students and new instructor — should be caught up with the week and a half they missed when the full-time faculty member who usually teaches the course fell ill. Yesterday I spent the whole day reading their papers and their textbook. Then it was off to choir.

And at the crack of dawn, off to the east side for a meeting, and then a race to the campus to meet the class. Then back to the Funny Farm via Whole Paycheck, there to grab some tomatoes that allegedly have some flavor. Wanna make some gazpacho, something I’ve been craving for awhile.

Highly Dietetic Amazingly Delicious Gringo Gazpacho

You need…

a small red onion (about 3/4 cup chopped)
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
2½ cups diced tomatoes (peel if you feel fastidious — I don’t, though)
1½ cups finely chopped bell pepper
salt & pepper to taste
1 tsp paprika or chili pepper flakes
1 Tbs. chopped chives (or use a scallion)
1/3 cup olive oil
½ cup lemon juice
2 cups tomato juice
1/2 cup shredded, pared cucumber
about 1/8 cup chopped cilantro or parsley
1 Tbsp dry sherry (or a splash of white or red wine)

The original recipe calls for 2½ teaspoons of salt and ½ teaspoon of sugar. IMHO, there’s no need for sugar. And almost a tablespoon of salt(!) is a little much, especially since canned or bottled tomato juice has more salt than you need — just one cup of the fancy organic juice I bought this afternoon contains 16 percent of your RDA. So…hold the salt until the soup is concocted, and then add some to taste, if necessary.

Otherwise, it’s pretty self-evident: cut up the veggies, mix all the ingredients in a nice, large bowl, and chill for a couple of hours. Serve cold.

It looks like the college will officially get me hired on as the mythology course’s instructor along about next Monday. That would be good…so far because they don’t have me as the official instructor, I haven’t been able to get a Canvas shell or get into the District’s grade records. This weekend I’ll have to create an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of grades and attendance, since it’s beginning to look unclear whether I’ll ever be able to get into Canvas.

The class has 27 students, but it looks like a bunch of them have given up. Only about half that many showed up today. Pretty typical of a community college, where students often are trying to support themselves with full-time jobs or with two or three part-time jobs and may have to deal with children, too. When something has to go, the class is the easiest one to drop.

From the classroom it was over to the Honors Department with a kid who had only a few hours left before the deadline to get himself enrolled for honors credit. Then to the library, there to try to track down — with no luck — the videos mentioned in the syllabus. We figure the exiting instructor must own the videos. The humanities librarian unearthed some great links and clues to other videos, which I’ll also have to track down this weekend and then work into…well, I guess, a new syllabus, eventually.

The chair suggests we drop the two fairly lengthy papers called for in the syllabus, since it has classmates turning in an amazing seventeen short squibs. I’d like them to do some kind of sourced paper, though…for crying out loud, it is supposed to be a college course, after all. What seems reasonable is to drop the first one, which in theory is due in the next week or 10 days, and then turn the other one into a take-home final exam. That will make the course fairly simple to handle.

I was entertained to discover that said chair, who also is teaching a section of the mythology course (it must fill some requirement…), also is puzzled at the out-of-date textbook that promulgates its own myth, disguised as fact. He also is telling his students to take that stuff with a grain of salt.

The stoont papers are significantly easier to grade than freshman comp horrors, mostly because you have fewer characteristics to have to assess. Really, all I’m going here is checking to see if they did the assignment with some degree of competence.

The instructor seems to have the students doing presentations almost every day. It’s unclear whether she planned to lecture at all. If she did, she must have kept the lecture time mercifully brief. The class sessions are almost an hour and a half long, so it wouldn’t be wise to try to fill that much time with instructor yakking. Make them yak, instead. 😀

In other precincts, SDXB is headed to Colorado, there to rejoin New Girlfriend, who has a home in Boulder. Mercifully, NG’s place is out of the flood zone. He says that despite the unholy amount of rain, she hasn’t had any water damage.

The weather is cooling here after two days of steady rain in the low desert. I expect we’ll have one more blast of hot weather — selfishly I hope so, since the pool is already cooling to the point of being a bit chilly. That pool is what’s keeping me mobile these days. And no, I can’t afford to install a heater and I don’t want to install a big ugly rolling cover (something else for me to take care of!).

Our honored chair at the Heavenly Gardens Department of English is a graduate of Grand Canyon University. Since his time there, the place was purchased by a corporation whose business is building proprietary schools. Interestingly, GCU’s development officer has surfaced at the Scottsdale Business Association, and he’s a very interesting fellow.

Among several things that came up at today’s meeting was the observation that since Arizona State has raised its tuition beyond reason, Grand Canyon is now competitive with said third-rate public school, where students get beat up by fraternity brothers emulating gangs of thugs and every time you turn around you hear about another murder or rape out there. Engaged in a mammoth building campaign, Grand Canyon now can provide dormitory space for its students, and because it’s a religious school the administration actually rides herd on the students and tries to take some responsibility for their safety and behavior. Quaint, huh?

One of our members just sent her son off to the Great Desert University (which, if you haven’t figured it out, is my sobriquet for Arizona State). She said that between the tuition and the room & board, it’s costing twenty grand a year to put the kid in school at that zoo. He’s enrolled in the honors college, which has its own special, elite dormitory and classrooms, so those kids in effect go to a sequestered, semi-private school in the midst of the vast, chaotic campus, pretty much sheltered from the rowdy hoi polloi.

Given all the things that have happened at ASU over the past several years, from the apparently deliberate driving of faculty morale into the sub-sub-basement to the out-of-control student body, I’d be darned if I’d put a kid of mine out there, even if they cloistered him inside a concertina-wire fence. If he or she couldn’t get into a decent school like U.C. Berkeley, Michigan, or Stanford with scholarship funding, or if sending him out of state was financially impossible, I’d send the kid to the University of Arizona in Tucson or Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Neither is what you’d call a great school (although the U of A has some highly ranked departments and colleges), but at least they’re relatively quiet.

And just now it’s getting pretty late at night, i yam totally done. Bye!