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A Measure of Success

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Yesterday a small miracle occurred: I was able to tuck a shirt into my blue jeans, run one of my favorite old leather belts through the loops, and buckle it!!!!

Not only that, but the buckle fit on the SECOND HOLE!

Lordie! I haven’t been able to get that belt around me in years. Not that one nor any of the other belts that have been hanging in the back of the closet gathering dust for all these past years. And yesterday was the first time in living memory that tucking in a shirt did not make me look like an overstuffed walking sausage.

Couldn’t believe it.

This morning the fat-o-meter broke 138: if you can imagine, 137.8! And that was in spite of yesterday’s greasy restaurant breakfast of twice-fried potatoes and four slices of (apparently undrained) bacon. Thought for sure I’d be up a pound today, not down almost a full pound.

So that leaves a little under three pounds to reach CardioDoc’s expressed goal of 135. I think, however, that I’m going to try to get down to 130, since these elegant measures are being taken the first crack off the bat in the morning. In reality, by the middle of the afternoon, the scale (should I dare to get on it) is running two or three pounds heavier. So it seems reasonable that if one shot for 130 pounds, one’s real-life, mid-day weight would hover around 133–34 pounds.

Yesterday was so cool — only 80 degrees all day long — that I didn’t have to turn on the air conditioning! That will save about $7.20 off the electric bill. The Nest sent its monthly AC power use report, grutching about my having run the contraption 52 hours longer in July than in August. It scolds, too, about my noxious habit of turning the thermostat down at night so as to get more than four hours of sleep (if that much):

• In July, the lowest temperature you set at night was 76°F.
• Top savers in your area like to keep it at 78°F or higher at night.
• Nesters in your state are setting Nest to 78°F or higher at night.

Oh yeah? Well, dear Nest, just because some sheep like to lie in a puddle of sweat all night doesn’t mean they all have to. Grrrrr!

LOL! Lest you think I keep the thermostat at 76 all night, the Nest is programmed to drop from 83 degrees to 78 along about 6:00 p.m.; then to go down to 76 around 10:00 p.m. when I might be expected to go to bed; then rise back up to 78 at 1:00 a.m. — by which time, if I’m not asleep yet, I’m not going to get to sleep at all.

Because the morning was so mild, I ventured to take the first walk around the park since the 21st of June. That’s about a mile and a half, including a short detour through the prettiest part of the neighborhood. Tried to maintain a stately pace, not charging along like a Marine making a run on Tripoli. And it worked: hardly any pain, and no aggravation of what there was. Did it again this morning, and walking actually felt good!

So there’s hope, maybe, for that 130-pound goal.

What hurts, as it develops, is sitting in front of the computer. This morning it occurred to me that when the feet are up on the stool that resides under the desk, it causes me to cantilever back and sit on my tailbone. And the tailbone does hurt. Along with just about everything else.

So the footrest came out and got shoved way across the room.

How lovely it is to stroll around the rich folks’ part of the ’hood!

The corporate lawyer, who favored expensive vacations, once took us to a very swell resort in Santa Barbara, the sort of place the likes of Ronald Reagan would hang out in. We walked all over the residential area around this retreat, and I remember thinking holy mackerel! Just imagine being able to live in a place like this!

Well, amazingly, today I live in a place like that. Right on the fringe of it, actually. Because of the patchy nature of Phoenix’s in-town neighborhoods, it’s possible to buy a middle-class (or lesser) home in an area that abuts a very upscale district, and that’s the nature of my present living arrangement. I look at newer houses — as I was doing online just this morning — plopped in amid the far-flung square miles of homogeneous suburban tracts that have been smeared across the desert, and think i am so lucky to have this pretty little house in a quiet corner of the middle of everything, a block from a beautiful park and a five-minute walk from what is probably the loveliest street in the entire city.

Yes. In addition to the solidly upper-class housing surrounding the park, we have the cutely named Why Worry Lane, a little piece of high-toned Santa Barbara transplanted to West Hell. The entire area is shaded by gorgeous, mature (as in 30 to 50 years old) trees, and because the acreage is irrigated (it all used to be agricultural land), every house has deep, rich lawns front and back. Because the real estate is so expensive, the people who live there are the sort who can afford to maintain it. And maintain it they do: in stately splendor.

WhyWorry

Some of these big old spreads are just gorgeous. Walking past them is great entertainment…and getting back to my little house, just a few yards from theirs but eminently less work, less expense, and less of a headache to care for, is a real joy. 🙂

A measure of success in itself.

If You’d Asked Me, I Would’ve Told You…

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Some of us prefer paper and pencil (yea verily, graphite) for making notes and keeping calendars. Consider:

• A pencil does not have to be turned on, rebooted, or turned off.
• Pencils are never updated.
• Once you know how to use a pencil, there’s never a new learning curve to figure out how to keep on using it.
• Pencils never stop working just because the power goes out.
• Pencils cannot be hacked by some jerk in Russia.
• Pencils cannot readily be watched by Big Brother.
• If you lose it, a pencil can be replaced easily and cheaply.
• No one can call you on a pencil while you’re in the middle of lunch or dodging homicidal drivers on the freeway.

The best button on the TV remote is the “Off” button.

PBS’s beg-a-thons are more intrusive than advertising because they take whole shows off the air and replace them with garbage.

I never could understand why PBS imagines people who are affluent enough to donate are fascinated by bloviated lectures and superannuated pop musicians.

whiteseatA person who would upholster the seat of a dining-room chair in white fabric with satiny-looking fleurs-de-lis either never eats or is crazy as a loon.

Loons get a bad rap as crazies, especially as compared with the jabbering great ape that has taken over the planet.

Subjecting yourself to plastic surgery because you imagine it will make you look younger is amazingly stupid.

The pathetic idea that you must get cosmetic surgery to hide your age so you can get or keep a job reflects a truly ugly loathing for the elderly already widespread and rapidly growing in American culture.

Except in the direst emergencies, cop helicopters should be banned from flying over residential neighborhoods.

Gawker “news” helicopters should be banned, period.

Stilettos-heels-publicdomainHigh heels were and still are designed by men who hate women.

Images: Pencil, heels: public domain. Chair: shamelessly ripped off from an estate-sale ad.

How to Annoy the Queen of the Universe…and other weekend exploits

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So, how do you annoy the Queen of the Universe?

By cleaning.

Dogs hate it when you clean house. They particularly resent vacuum cleaners. But if you really want to jump the shark, then the trick is to gather up all the (stinky! ratty!) Toys in the house and throw them in the wash machine.

Anyone who thinks dogs have no feelings or are incapable of sentience should wash a Toy in front of a dog, and note how the behavior resembles that of a four-year-old who sees his Blankie sinking into the washer.

“What are you doing?”

“Give that back!!!!!”

“But it’ll drown!”

“You’re killing it!“

“Is it done yet?”

“When will it be done?”

“Where is it?”

And finally, defeated and destroyed: “How on earth could you do such a thing?”

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The Pinkbird of Joy had to be fully deconstructed to be washed, after Cassie eviscerated him and ripped off one of his ears. His tennis-ball-sized squeakers came out of his weird-looking head and fat little belly, the incisions secured for laundering by a pair of safety pins. Once laundered, partly dried, restuffed, and sutured up, he looked none too worse for the wear, except for lacking an ear. Or a wing. Or whatever it is:

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Well, he was fine until he found himself in the clutches of the Jackal of Despair, who snatched him away from the Underling forthwith:

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hmm… You have to allow, don’t you, that as aliens go, a dog is one scary critter. Lucky for us this one just about comes up to the middle of my shin. Few of us, I suspect, would care to be the size of the Pinkbird of Joy. Not with that animal around, anyway.

Speaking of dogs, Charley the Golden Retriever (the lowliest of the underlings) is in Colorado with M’hijito. Here he is trotting around Grand Junction:

Charley

Click on the image to view its full glory.

The Queen was mightily aggravated by the full-day-long cleaning frenzy. This being about the third day I’ve felt almost normal after the recent infirmity, I took it into my pea brain to make up for two months’ worth of neglect. Started with some light yardwork, replacing busted sprinkler heads and the like. Then on to the interior of the Funny Farm, after laundering Toys and handwashing a sweater.

It took the entire afternoon to vacuum, dust-mop, and mop the flicking floors. And that was with mopping only the kitchen, dining room, and living room… Yuck!

Her Majestic Highness sheds a steady snowfall of stray fur wherever she goes. Since I’ve been in bed the better part of two weeks and she’s been hanging around the bedroom with me, the dog dunes under and around the bedroom furniture were up to my ankles. Just after cleaning the bedroom, the vacuum was jammed with as much dog hair as it normally picks up from the whole house!

At any rate, now the house is dog-dune free, dust-free, soap-film-free, water calcification-free, grease-free, floor-grime-free, paperwork-on-the-desk-free, and grody-Toy-free. The back hurts, the hip hurts…again. But at least the place is fit for human and canine habitation, for a change.

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Entire court of the Queen of the Universe, drying out in the garage.

Weekend Explorations

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A couple of new-to-me blogs: Don’t Quit Your Day Job. Proprietor PK asks if you’re doing better financially now than you were six years ago.

And the founder of the brand-new A Terrible Husband tells us he had an epiphany one day that’s led to a project to recreate himself as a better human being.

Have you been following the newlyweds’ adventures at NZ Muse!? Eemusings should do an e-book after she gets settled in her new home! The current stop is in Munich after the amazement that is Berlin. In the Black Forest, they had a great experience working as volunteer instructors in an immersion English-language program.

Money Beagle has a surprisingly entertaining post on preparing to exit the jobsite for vacation.

At Windy City Gal, Linda is doing battle with plantar fasciitis — not terminal, but damned excruciating!

Speaking of doing battle, the Asian Pear has a frustrating moment with her diet after a difficult month at the job.

Mrs. Accountability reports on a little shopping secret most of us have probably lost track of.

Evan’s post on the life-changing potential of money has elicited a lot of commentary!

Planting Our Pennies has a great post on the transition from an undergraduate degree in the liberal arts to a six-figure income in the business world.

There’s hope for the hypereducated, after all!

 

Your Taxpayer Dollars at…uhm… Work?

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Oh, for heaven’s sake. Did you see PBS Newshour’s report on this astonishing proposal?

Okay, admittedly I read it very fast and maybe I’m missing something. But it looks like we’re talking about a gigantic welfare system that will give pretend jobs to the vast number of Americans who find themselves in an underclass that exists because jobs for the illiterate, the disadvantaged, and those who suffer from less innocent shortcomings have gone away and are not coming back. We imagine that the experience gained in this vocational welfare scheme will magically make participants more attractive to real-world employers.

The junior-college students who come shuffling into my classrooms — about 80 percent of whom are not there because they’re smart enough to have figured out how to keep their university loan burden down by taking core courses at low-rent institutions — those folks are on the high end of the body of Americans who can’t get jobs. This country has a huge underclass of people who simply are not qualified, for a variety of reasons, to get hired. Meet the best of this group, the ones who show up in my JC classes, and you’ll have an idea why.

Look. One in four Army applicants fails the entrance exams! And, my friends, that ain’t the half of it. Three in four are rejected because of physical unfitness, a criminal record, failure to graduate from high school, and the widespread chronic use of drugs like Ritalin for diagnosed ADHD.

Do you understand what that means? Typical word questions on the Army aptitude test look like this:

Function most nearly means:

(A) calculate
(B) exist
(C) operate

 It was a sturdy table.

(A) well-built
(B) ugly
(C) thick

That’s pretty hard. How about arithmetic, an even scarier subect?

If 1/3 of a 12-foot board is sawed off, how much is left?

(A) 4 feet
(B) 3 feet
(C) 8 feet
(D) 6 feet

At a cost of $1.25 per gallon, 15 gallons of gas will cost:

(A) $20.00
(B) $18.75
(C) $12.50
(D) $19.25

Hm. Pretty tough. Maybe we’ll do better on the science section, ’cause we read a lot of sci-fi comics… Okay, we don’t exactly read them, but we love to look at the pictures!

The earth completes one trip around the sun approximately every:

(A) 7 days
(B) 365 days
(C) 30 days
(D) 30 weeks

The ovaries produce:

(A) androgen
(B) estrogen
(C) adrenaline
(D) growth hormone

Would you trust your kids to a day-care center staffed by people who couldn’t answer questions like these? How about hiring a guy who can’t answer one of those math questions to run a table saw at your shop or heavy equipment at your construction site?

I have students — a lot of them — who could not pass a general science exam that contained ten questions like those you see here. And they’re the ones who probably could qualify for Army recruitment: most of them have finished high school, and, although they’re not good at readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic, most of them can parse out the instructions on a bottle of aspirin. More or less.

That 75 percent of military applicants who are rejected are folks on the lower end, academically and socioeconomically, of student bodies in schools that ranked 14th out of 34 in reading among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, 17th in science, and 25th in mathematics.

 Indulge me while I repeat what I posted at the Newshour site:

When you neglect education for everyone and you also cultivate a large and growing underclass, what you can expect is what we have right now. Providing fake jobs for people who are unqualified for real paying work of any kind is not going to solve the problem.

{Pardon me for yelling, but I don’t think anyone is listening.}

What’s needed is a national education corps, with a competent leadership and a staff of teachers, master craftsmen, and trainers who know how (to the extent it’s possible) to meet the needs of this unemployed and unemployable group; and then to engage that corps a massive education campaign for low-SES youth and adults to build literacy, job skills, physical fitness, and social values among those who presently don’t qualify for employment.

An education system that could do those things would look like…what?

• It would de-emphasize social work and re-emphasize the teaching of reading and fundamental math in the lower grades.

• It would de-emphasize political correctness and re-emphasize social and moral values, possibly even hiring clergy in an effort to engage children, youth, and lost adults in concepts of basic decency (you remember: the Ten Commandments and all that?)

• It would engage master craftsmen in the training of future workers for the trades, beginning at the middle-school level (anyone remember shop class?).

• It would provide at least an hour a day of physical activity of the sort that appeals to and runs energy off of boys and young men; and, in addition to that hour, it would provide several 15- to 20-minute recess periods throughout the school day; and it would include an hour-long lunch break. Students at all grade levels would attend school no less than seven hours a day, five days a week. Adults undergoing vocational training would attend eight to ten hours a day.

• It would include apprenticeships and internships in a wide variety of occupations.

• It would include frequent, random drug testing and intensive therapy for those found to be using.

• It would provide birth control for girls; education explaining how and why to use birth control; and frank indoctrination in a value system that discourages early pregnancy, trains girls to recognize desirable and undesirable characteristics in boys and men, and urges girls to build job skills and spend some time using them before spawning babies.

• It would provide day care for parents in vocational training programs, and transportation for school-age children to and from their grade schools to the day care.

• It would include a system to redeem and expunge a record of lesser criminal offenses in exchange for demonstrated mastery of specific literacy standards and job skills.

• It would provide safe housing to shelter families living in violence-prone slums, with the requirement that residents abide by specific, strict guidelines of maintenance and behavior — sort of like an HOA. 😉

• It would require university students to complete two years of vocational training before launching into their major course of undergraduate study.

Once we had a nominally educated potential workforce, we’d have to provide decently paying jobs for these workers. And yeah: those could be government and military jobs, if the private market couldn’t absorb that many low-end workers.

But let’s not put the cart before the horse.

’Druther Drive Than Ride, Thanks…

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Sometimes a news report is better than a thousand of a blogger’s words:

Police Search for Two Suspects…

While I was riding the lightrail from Central & Third Avenue to Tempe three to five days a week (a 20-minute drive; a 40- to 60-minute train ride), folks who looked just like those two got on and off all the time. Fortunately, most guys who look like that don’t misbehave in public, and so I never got a ringside seat to any of the drama. Nor do I care to.

“Safe and Secure“