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SOLD! Another necklace finds a home

February 21, 2013February 20, 2013 by funny

Amazing! Another one of those lariat necklaces I made has sold!

I can NOT believe this. The shop that took it on consignment found someone to buy the thing sometime in the last week or so. Actually, it was my favorite production and I figured when (“if” was not in my calculations) it came back to me, I would just keep it for myself.

At this point, every one of the pieces I’ve made has been purchased: several lariat necklaces and a cool lanyard for a state worker who has to carry her ID card every place she goes.

It just astonishes me that people would want to buy something I made. As much as I’ve wished I could find a way to make a living with some small craft, that I could actually create things people would covet never seemed…well, likely.

Unfortunately my friend who owns the gift and repurposing shop has decided to close. The site was not the best of all possible choices: in an old, quaint house on a main drag, practically invisible to passers-by (it took me three tries to find the place) and devoid of foot traffic. People come to the area for restaurants, but restaurant-goers are rarely there to shop for quirky, environmentally friendly gifts.

Right next door to my friend’s shop is another little shop in the same kind of antique house. Its proprietor carries some exceptionally pretty items, including some truly beautiful vintage jewelry, pretty china and gifts — a mix of old and new. She said she also may close, for the same reason — not enough traffic — but in her case, she’s doing quite well with online sales. Her Etsy shop has a steady trade, and she lives a long way from the brick-and-mortar shop’s gentrified central-city location. She’s open only on the weekends now.

I think I’ll go by there next Saturday and ask if she would tutor me in marketing from Etsy. Three of my other friends are making art (in one case, very nice art, indeed) and crafts. If several of us banded together to stock an Etsy shop, we might have a shot at making it work for us. The proprietor in question observed that the trick with Etsy is to make a lot of things available.

Heh. To do that, I’ll be reduced to making some more of these doodads.

Last night I started on a new one, which I think has some promise. The other day I saw a woman wearing a necklace that incorporated some rectangular mother-of-pearl beads, sort of like these…

…only thinner, more consistent in size and shape, and rather prettier in color. And lo! I realized I just happened to have a handful of those very things.

The half-finished piece, for which I still need to buy a lobster clasp, combines the mother-of-pearl with pearls, garnet, and pink rhodonite. It’s turning out kind of neat…so far, I like it.

I never know how these things are going to look until the beads are actually strung to form a coherent design. Sometimes once they’re on a wire I end up taking them apart and reordering the gems; sometimes the pieces look even better strung together than they do in the design stage.

This one is looking pretty good. The combination of the silvery-iridescent mother of pearl with the rose pink rhodonite, the deep wine-colored garnet, and the creamy white pearl is really very subtle and interesting. It doesn’t jump out and whap you in the face — it’s quietly classy.

IMHO.

At any rate, this one will not be a lariat. The mother-of-pearl rectangles are a little large to make for easy looping or tying, so I decided to make it into a more ordinary, latch-it-together necklace. It may actually be long enough to slide over one’s head, but if a woman has a hairstyle she doesn’t want to mess up, she probably will appreciate a clasp.

I may design it so she could wear it with the clasp either in front or in back. One of the several things I’ve learned about designing bead necklaces is that if you put something near the clasp that has some weight, it will keep the thing from scootching around — the weight will hold the clasp at the back of the wearer’s neck. If that weighted design element were pretty enough, she could choose to display it in front instead of having it hidden behind her. On the other hand, if she wore a collarless shirt or dress, the embellishment I have in mind would look highly decorative in back, too.

A wildly popular farmer’s market has taken up residence on the grounds of a nearby church — they hold forth on Saturdays through the fall, winter, and spring. If I could make about a dozen of these and then get one or two friends to throw in with me, I’m thinking we could rent a table there starting a week before Thanksgiving and keep it right up until Christmas. Betcha we could sell a bunch of loot then. And maybe we could also put our stuff together in a single Etsy shop. It’s a thought, anyway.

Helluva lot better than workin’…

😉

Honey(less)-do’s

February 19, 2013 by funny

With no Honey around the house (except a cute little dog), the only person to do the various small handyperson chores here at the Funny Farm is moi. Quite a few things have stacked up over the months…now that there’s time as well as energy to do them, w00t! Some of them are actually getting done!

One little improvement I’d like to make to the house, whenever I have a few extra dollars again, is to ask Dave the Electrician to install several electric outlets at waist level.

The custom of installing outlets down near the floor is something I’ve never been able to figure out. Even when your back doesn’t hurt every time you bend down, who wants to hunker on the floor to plug in the vacuum (over and over, if you have a big house!), the iron, the heating pad, the laptop? Ideally, I’d like to have at least one waist-height outlet in every room, but of course I can’t afford that. So I’ll have to make do with a few — one next to the bed, two in the office, one or two in the TV room, one in the living room.

At any rate, it’ll be awhile before this project gets done. In the meantime, I had a great idea: outlet strips!

Yeah! Some outlet strips have little holes in the the back that you can use to hang them up. Well, I don’t happen to have enough countersinks to do the job right, with screws. But each outlet strip has four such slots for hang-up screws, so I tacked a bunch of sturdy nails into the drywall — or to the side of the old desk — and stuck the things up there.

In the office, alas, this entailed having to untangle the spaghetti of computer cables, lamp cords, telephone and Ethernet cables, speaker wires, and wires of unknown provenance that’s been growing like fungus under the furniture. Back in the day, I had them pretty well organized, having installed a row of cuphooks under the tabletop’s rim and strung the infrastructure under there. But when the Three Stooges were here screwing up the paint, they yanked out my tidy arrangement and made hash of it. Then they just shoved the desk and table, which are too heavy for me to move, back against the wall.

So it was an unbelievable mess under there. The dog would lose her ball in the briar patch and refuse to dig it out, so tangled were the wires, cords, and cables. Some of those wires, BTW, seemed to have no function…if they ever attached to anything, whatever it was apparently has dissolved into a dust bunny and been vacuumed away.

In the process, I finally figured out why the antique stereo in the office never worked after M’hijito reattached the wires: the Stooges had yanked its antenna out and then wound it up and jammed it back in behind the components in there. Ah! So obvious! Why did I never guess?

Speaking of things electronic, while vacuuming I happened to push the TV rabbit ears, which resided atop a wooden stool next to the TV armoire because they’re too tall to fit on top of it, back against the wall. Idly wondering what that would do to the reception, which has been touchy ever since Big Brother kindly made most broadcast TV stations inaccessible to the hoi polloi who can’t afford cable TV and wouldn’t pay for it even if they could. Turned on the boob tube, and lo! PBS came in bright, clear, and undistorted!

Naaahhh…. Couldn’t be.

Channel 12? Perfect!

How about 10? 3? 15? 5? All of them: clear, HD-ish, and free of snow, ghosts, and pixelation!

This was with the vacuum cleaner sitting there and me moving around the room, both such vast obstacles to modern-day reception as, in theory, to make viewing next to impossible.

Interesting.

I wondered what would happen if the antenna was directly behind the television, stashed behind the armoire. Had to pull the thing out from the wall a couple of inches, which was a trick with a trashed back. It must weigh 200 pounds.

Still worked, but not as well. Four stations were still good, but Channel 12 was scrambled and PBS disappeared. Then, as in one of those murky Magic Eight-Balls, two words surfaced:

aluminum

foil

Wrapped the southerly rabbit ear with tinfoil. Channel 12 came in; Channel 8 was still dark.

Wrapped the northerly rabbit ear in tinfoil. Channel 8 came in, clear as a bell.

EVERY station is now true HD — I mean, you can actually SEE the images! — and none of them break up when the dog runs past with Ball in her mouth. And the hideous contraption is hidden behind the furniture, no longer annoyingly visible to the naked eye.

This evening a cop helicopter was buzzing the neighborhood, and even that didn’t break up the picture. Amazing!

All of this evolved into a hell of a job for me. I hate handyman stuff…it always entails 87 gerjillion trips out to the garage to dig out and haul in tool after tool after tool. Had to break out the Gorilla Tape (a kind of duct tape on steroids) to secure a strange little black box (purpose: unknown; wires: connected to something) to the underside of the work table. Had to fool around interminably to get an old outlet strip to hang horizontally instead of vertically along the side of the desk. Straightening out the mess of wires was another time-consuming headache.

But ta-DAA! Now there are no wires on the floor! I can vacuum under the desk and table. Cassie is not lying in a nest of electric wires. I can plug in a heating pad next to the bed without having to crawl under the nightstand and tip over the lamp onto my head. And I’ll be able to plug in the recharging cables and the iron without having to dig through wires, dog hair, and dust to get at an outlet — and without having to climb around the floor for the privilege.

Much better. 🙂

You Get What You Pay For

February 18, 2013 by funny

Have you seen Mrs. Accountability’s latest post, the one contemplating the glories (or not) of Fiverr? It’s pretty interesting.

She’d mentioned that site over the phone a while back, shortly after the episode with the friend of the “who needs enemies” variety. So naturally, I shot right over there to see what it’s about.

What you find when you arrive at Fiverr is a list of offers of services and small products for five bucks a pop. Some of these (like graphic design) actually could command a decent rate, and some (like images a computer program can toss off in 10 seconds) ought not to. Based in Israel, Fiverr is an international enterprise, and presumably many of its vendors are living in countries where $5 will buy a week’s worth of food.

A similar program (presumably owned by the same outfit, given the identical site design) is called “Twenty Fiverr”; people who think they’re worth more offer the same kind of services and products for twenty-five bucks instead of five. Here’s a guy, for example, who promises to provide seven “quality” articles in less than 24 hours, using a program that generates pap-filled, verbose, redundancy-laced, and vacuous squibs, and he’ll do it for a bargain $25.

I have a lot of beefs with this model.

First, as a self-employed skilled worker who has nothing to sell but skill, experience, and time, I highly resent being undercut by people who are willing to work, it seems, for little more than an ego trip. This is something that for years has kept rates down for writers and for graphic artists, especially those who do business within the publishing industry. Publishers know that some people who can construct a basic article will do it for less than minimum wage — some will do it for nothing — just for the joy of seeing their names in print. The result usually has to be completely rewritten, but that’s what the assistant or associate editor is for. At both of the magazines where I worked full-time, a large part of my job entailed sitting down at a computer and, starting at Word 1, rewriting articles by freelance “writers” from beginning to end.

Many magazines have two or three contract pay scales. Unemployed or moonlighting journalists who actually do know how to research and construct a competent article are paid a living wage. Everyone else gets crumbs. Some publishers simply will not pay a living wage to anyone, because they know plenty of amateurs will do the job (or something like the job) for next to nothing.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of off-shoring. In the case of Fiverr and Twenty Fiverr, it probably is literal off-shoring, too. As an individual buyer of services and products, my sense is that those of us who resent corporate off-shoring of American jobs have no business doing the same to American contract workers. Buy American. And pay something more than slave wages, if you expect to see your country’s standard of living remain above the Third World level.

When one person does a job, even a poor job, for less than fair pay, that person drives down pay for five, ten, or twenty other people for whom work is a living, not a hobby. In my book, that’s wrong.

Second, you really do get what you pay for.

Let’s take a look at the “high quality” article that squib-generator built, using a set of key words relating to weight loss. Here’s its lead:

Weight loss is a confusing topic. There are so many different people and articles telling you so many different things, it can be quite difficult to wrap your head around them all. This article will aim to lay down the essential and necessary basics of weight loss in hopes to clear the fog that surround it.

Does that make you want to keep reading, as a lead should? It makes me want to run away…but let’s stand our ground and take a hard look at the thing.

“Weight loss is a confusing topic.” No, it’s not. Weight loss is a process, not a topic. In any event, as statements go this one adds nothing. Right off, we know we’re dealing with a writer who is either a moron or an amateur. Or, in this case, a machine. Even machines can beat around the bush.

“So many different people…so many different things.” Nice use of redundancy to pad space! Is it likely that a person would say “many identical people telling you many identical things”? If the inserting opposite term creates an absurdity, then the adjective in question — “different,” in this instance — is probably redundant. Here, it is redundant to the power of two.

“Difficult to wrap your head around them…” I should say so, unless your head is made of Silly Putty. Our electronic author first coins a cliché and then turns it into a grotesque image. Note that it injects another cliché (“to clear the fog”) in the following sentence.

Cliché is the least of the next sentence’s offenses, though. First, instead of telling us anything significant or intriguing, the electronic author vows to try to give us a few fundamental pointers on the mind-numbing topic of weight loss, with no promise — only “hopes” — that whatever follows will enlighten us. This kind of pap a lead does not make. Then it ends with a faulty idiom (“in hopes to clear”: a native speaker would write “in hopes of clearing”) and a grammatical error (“the fog that surround”: subject-verb agreement).

Come to think of it, the entire article is replete with grammatical, punctuation, logical, and idiomatic errors:

• “Easier” used as an adverb (Electro-author meant “more easily”).
• “Change subtle habits that will increase the amount of walking one has to do”: if the habits increase the amount of walking you do, why would you want to change them? Possibly Electro-author meant “develop” or “build”?
• No comma after “but” used as an introductory word (some people think it’s bad form to use a conjunction to begin a sentence, but that rule doesn’t apply much in journalistic writing).
• Lettuce that’s “more green”…heeeee!

Writing style is, to put it kindly, nonexistent:

• Neither the second nor the third section shows any sign of paragraph transition.
• Verb mood jumps from declarative to imperative in paragraph 5, for no discernible reason.
• Complex ideas are touched upon and sometimes given a cursory example, then dropped with no clue to how the advice might be interpreted or used.
• The final paragraph regurgitates the first one, adding nothing except another hilariously grotesque image: “too many hands in the soup.” Careful not to choke on those knucklebones!

At Twenty Fiverr you get seven such “quality” articles for $25…not a bad price, to make yourself look like a moron to whomever reads one of the things.

My momma always used to say that you get what you pay for. But it wasn’t until I moved into the first house I bought by my little self, as a single woman, that I truly came to appreciate that old saw.

The house had washer and dryer connections, and it must be said that one of the chores I hated most in life was schlepping my laundry to a coin-op laundromat. First order of business was to install a new washer and dryer.

Being the naturally submissive type, though, and hooked up with a very dominant gentleman, I allowed myself to be persuaded to buy a low-end Monkey Ward washer and dryer. The two machines looked good at the outset: extra large, nothing fancy but evidently serviceable.

The dryer lasted about a year. Soon as it went off warranty, it crapped right out. Annoyed (and by then wise to the fact that boyfriend was pushing me into doing things I knew better than to do), I had to go buy a new one at Sears.

The second model was far from top of the line — it was a mid-range Kenmore, well liked by Consumer Reports. Twenty years later, it’s still out there in the garage running well. From the day I tossed the first load of wet laundry into it, the thing worked better than the Monkey Ward cheapo ever did, and it still works.

By purchasing a piece of junk first, I caused myself to pay significantly more than it would have cost to have just ponied up a reasonable price for a reasonably good product in the first place!

If I’d replaced the junk with another cut-rate product, I’d probably be on my fifth or sixth dryer by now, to the tune of four or five times what a single decent appliance cost.

The personal finance message? Bully for you if you can get a generous mark-down on a good product that started out at a fair price. The blade cuts two ways: paying a lot more doesn’t always buy a lot better quality. Paying a fair price — not the lowest though not necessarily the highest, either — is likely to get you services that do the job well and products that work and hold up over time.

Physical Therapy and Ginger Oil

February 15, 2013February 14, 2013 by funny

So today the physical therapist recommended by Young Doctor Kildare saw me.

Much better than the “sports therapist” outfit across the parking lot from the Walgreen’s. Instead of a gymnasium full of clients besieging a couple of trained therapists and a bunch of not-too-bright assistants, this was one guy with his own office. He did have one assistant, who seemed to know what she was doing. And yeah, he was dealing with several patients at once, but at no time did I have to sit around for 20 or 30 minutes awaiting his attention.

But in the time department, he took the time to inquire in detail after the symptoms, to do an exam, and apparently to think about what he heard.

He agreed with YDK that whatever ails me is not “muscle spasms,” and he explained why he didn’t think so.

Hmmm… I seem not to have related the recent events here.

Backstory, then: After almost a year of back pain and foot pain, and after no visible improvement in the knee that I walloped two and a half months ago, I decided I needed to talk to someone who had more than 15 minutes scheduled to speak with patients. So I traipsed back out to the Mayo to see my doc of some 35 years.

He had me X-rayed and then, reading the radiologist’s report, said the X-rays showed some disk degeneration but not enough to cause significant back pain — and so he didn’t think the cause was a pinched nerve — and the knee didn’t seem to be seriously injured. He opined that the persistent pain is caused by “a muscle spasm condition” and prescribed a muscle relaxant, which proved impossible to get through Medicare Part D. After two more attempts, he finally came up with a drug I could afford out of pocket, cyclobenzaprine.

This dulled the pain a little, caused nightmares that verged on hallucination, and did nothing to eliminate the problem.

On reflection, “a muscle spasm condition” sounded kinda fishy — what kind of “muscle spasm” goes on for ten or twelve MONTHS, and if that’s what he thinks it is, why isn’t he testing me for MS, which in fact could cause something along those lines, or for diabetes, which can cause persistent lower-body pain? So I finally decided to try again with Young Dr. Kildare, who at least accepts Medicare.

After the usual brief interview, YDK begged to differ with the august opinions of the Mayo Clinic — he thinks it is a pinched nerve and advises the prescribed treatments are as follows, in this order:

1) Intensive physical therapy.
2) If this hasn’t worked after six weeks, epidural injection.
3) If that doesn’t work, do MRIs to determine a specific cause and attempt relief with surgery.

As for the knee, he believes the issue is prepatellar bursitis resulting from the fall I took, which would make some sense. If it doesn’t resolve over time, the course of treatment is exactly the same.

YDK is just a young fella on the run from patient to patient in a medical factory. However, to my ear he made a great deal more sense than the Honored and Elder M.D. This wouldn’t be the first time the Old Man has emitted a cattywampus diagnosis — years ago, when I was a bit younger than YDK, he tried to put me on beta blockers for the rest of my life, having decided I had a mitral valve prolapse. Before committing myself to permanent medicating, I asked my father’s cardiologist about it; he said if there was a valve prolapse (which he doubted), it was so minimal as to be virtually undetectable and I should ignore it unless I had some actual symptoms.

So…while Arizona sorely lacks top-quality medical care, the truth is, I’m no more star-struck by the Mayo name, despite their excellent hospital (one of the state’s few consistently rated excellent on a national basis), than by any other cluster of M.D.s around here. The Old Man’s theory didn’t hold water, the drug he prescribed did nothing more than briefly mask the pain, its maker specifically warned against its use for the elderly, and so I was willing to seek some other advice.

Hence, today’s physical therapist, whom Young Dr. Kildare recommended.

He scoffed at the “muscle spasm” theory. He explained the pain as a manifestation of compressed vertebrae brought on by the antic I got up to a year ago, which immediately preceded the symptoms. He decided the knee pain was unrelated to the back issue, and the heel pain may or may not be related to the back pain. In any event, said he, the first order of business was to address the back.

Damned if I know what he did, but whatever it was, it seems to have worked! He pushed on the back and pulled on the back in a way that felt a lot like a deep massage and that seemed reminiscent of chiropractic manipulation. When asked what exactly his procedure would do, he said the point was to “loosen up the joints,” whatever that means.

He recommended a half-dozen exercises, none of which caused any pain, unlike the other therapist’s contortions. By the time I walked out of his office, the back pain was almost gone, and the foot pain is significantly improved.

This evening when Cassie dragged me out the door to tromp around the block in search of cats, I was walking pretty much normally, something that hasn’t been so for months.

So what about the ginger snake oil I cooked up the other day?

Well, it did have a slight analgesic effect, so slight as probably to be wishful thinking. This evening I used some of it to stir-fry some shrimp with piles of onions, garlic, and Napa cabbage. Mighty good!

Probably the highest and best use of the stuff. 😉

Gearing Up for a New Semester

February 13, 2013February 13, 2013 by funny

The magazine-writing course is now mounted in Canvas and ready to go live. All that remains is to figure out a couple of minor details and then, two weeks or so from now, click “Publish.”

And it only took a couple of evenings in front of the television to get it done!

I’ve pretty much got that online course down to a science, so that it requires only a bit of tweaking to update it each semester. Links die; new sites come to one’s attention; the occasional new pedagogical scheme crosses one’s mind. It helps a lot, though, that the course is only eight weeks long. From the student’s point of view, it’s probably pretty intense, especially during the first two or three weeks when they need to come up to speed. But from my point of view, it’s sooo much easier to mount than an online course, and so much less work and hassle than a full 16-week course.

What a relief it is not to be teaching classroom sections! I don’t think even I realized how exhausted I was by the end of last year.

Yesterday I spent some time putting the finishing touches on a client’s manuscript and was shocked at the number of typos and misspellings that had slipped past me. Among the things that hadn’t gotten done: Because Word sees almost all pharmaceutical brand names and generic drug names as incorrect, one’s eye goes blind to all the little red squiggles under every other scientific term. Long ago, I should have checked

every.

single.

drug.

name (patented or generic)!

at its manufacturer’s website.

Our heroic author had misspelled two drug names, and I, assuming after all the guy’s a doctor and he must be right, had missed those errors. Also missed a couple of mundane typos of the sort that escape the bleary eye. So tired was I that I was making stupid assumptions and neglecting to do tasks that ordinarily would be routine.

Of course I picked up that nasty cold just before Christmas, hours after the last day of class, and then was pounced by the Index from Hell. No doubt it was sent to Hell in the first place by my overall zombification; a job that should have taken a week morphed into a three-week marathon.

I’m not missing the teaching income (yet): The Copyeditor’s Desk doubled its revenue goal in January and has done OK so far this month. But that’s not going to last, unless serendipity strikes again…we’re almost out of work and nothing new is in sight. I may be forced to get off my duff and hustle up some jobs.

But in the meantime, not working is some kinda heaven!

Having to schlep to a college campus and cope with roomsful of restless, ill-educated, ill-mannered post-adolescents was blighting my life. In the absence of having to devote some part of every day to tasks I don’t much care for, my life has completely changed. Even though this damn back thing makes everything hurt from the waist down, I feel wonderful!

Literally. Every day is downright blissful. Rain or shine, it’s a beautiful day. (Well. The frost we might have done without…) It’s so heavenly to accompany the Queen of the Universe to the park, loaf around watching tiny people play on the kiddie gym and moms push babes around in strollers and carriages, soak up the sun, and just do…nothing.

And it’s so wonderful to have my house be picked up and clean, without my having to find a full day in which to work myself sick to make that happen. I hate living in a pigpen! But that was what my house was, when I was too busy and too tired to take care of it.

Then there’s the magnificent meal in the middle of the day, complete with rather more wine than prescribed. Today: grilled steak, avocado and butter lettuce salad, grilled yellow summer squash swimming in home-made cherry tomato sauce, strawberries with Greek-style yogurt and crunchy sugar, Castle Rock cheap but highly acceptable pinot noir. Coffee.

And an amazing new phenomenon: sleeping seven hours a night, come Hell, high water, or Saturday Night Live. Yes. True that. The four-hour nighttime naps have gone away. When I go to bed, I sleep seven hours, not the four hours on average (range: two to five hours) to which I had become accustomed. Fall into the sack at 9:00 p.m.: wake up at 4:00 a.m. Go to bed at midnight: wake up at 7:00 a.m. Imagine that!

Life is, for a change, worth living.

What is this? The middle of February? It actually has taken all this time — two and a half months — to unwind enough and rest enough even to become aware of the bliss the new state of affairs brings.

Bumhood.

Some years ago (quite a few, come to think of it), an ambitious young fellow got hired as an associate by the prestigious law firm in which my then-husband was a partner. He accomplished this coup largely on the strength of an original scheme he’d come up with as a student: he spent a summer living on the streets with the homeless, and then he wrote a paper about the experience, which he’d managed to get published.

He once remarked that the single fact that struck him most was the overall happiness of the people he’d met. Even though many, he allowed, were mentally ill, by and large they were surprisingly content and not at all grieved by their chronic state of unemployment. They were reasonably well fed and had adapted to life in a cardboard box; by and large they felt they had few serious problems to deal with and were satisfied with their existence.

He came to mind the other day as The Queen and I were wandering around the park. She wears out pretty fast if I make her hike along briskly (after all, one of my steps equals about ten of hers), but allowed to stroll at her own mostly leisurely pace (except when cats and small children heave into sight), she would probably go a long, long way. Forever, maybe. It occurred to me that if I chose, this dog and I could spend the whole day just roaming around. If I could get her on the bus or the train (and I could, by claiming she’s a “service animal” — one lady brings her poodle to church in that guise), we could explore the entire city on foot. If we so chose.

When my ex- and I lived in the Encanto district (a richly yuppified central-city lawyers’ and doctors’ ghetto), several homeless shelters and halfway houses resided nearby. These outfits would take in people about 5 or 6 p.m., feed them, bed them down, and then eject them by 8 in the morning. They had no place to go. And so what they would do is walk, ride the buses, or sit in the city library all day long. One old gal used to walk around the city all the time. No matter where you went south of Indian School, sooner or later you’d see her marching along the streets. And there was a guy who’d make it up to Glendale, walking, walking, walking.

Cassie and I have our own flophouse. We could see the city, for the price of a pair of shoes and a senior citizen’s bus pass.

Bumhood is good. I like it.

Ginger Oil Painkiller…The Poor Man’s Emu Oil?

February 11, 2013 by funny

Well, my friends, we’d better preface this with a little caveat:

You’re not reading a) science; b) a medical webpage; or c) even a mainstream woo-woo alternative medicine site. You’re reading a wacky little old lady’s blog, so you’re freaking nuts if you take any of this seriously.

Do not, do not, do NOT apply what follows to an open wound, to your acne, or to any source of pain whose cause you don’t understand. If you don’t know what ails you, GO TO A DOCTOR. This is an experiment, and I, Funny about Money, am not responsible for whatever happens to you if you fail to seek medical advice before fooling with your body.

Okay. That said, did you know there’s a new woo-woo alternative painkiller in the form of the fat of the emu? Yes. We’re told that oil derived from the thick layer of fat sported by the exotic Australian flightless bird will cure whatever ails you in the aches and pains department. Got arthritis? Rub it on your sore joints. Decided to go for a mile-long run without training? Rub it on your shin splints. Chiropractor tell you that your achin’ back is fibromyosis? Rub it in! Older than Methuselah and hurt all over your wrinkled, shriveled body? Slather the stuff on!

We’re even told it will cure your eczema (usually spelled wrong in testimonials) and cause your male-pattern baldness to go away.

Taken by the wonders of this particular snake oil, I wandered about the Web following the exclamations of joy and faith, and at one point even came across something that looked like actual science, suggesting (sort of) that the stuff may work. But given the number of people who remarked that it makes you smell of poultry, I wondered why not simply smear chicken fat all over your body. After all, emu, chicken: they’re both dinosaurs. What’s the difference?

{hey, Belagana! We Injuns used to favor oiling ourselves with fat, usually of the buffalo, and I expect if I chose to play that particular card, I could find a way to make myself very rich, indeed. But let’s stick with the Down Under variant.}

The difference is that the Australian poultry fat sells for about $5 an ounce. Huh…anything that costs five bucks an ounce has gotta be good for you, eh?

Having absorbed this intelligence (such as it was), I went on about my business, munching on a piece of candied ginger to ease the aches and pains.

I’m allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen, and presumably all other NSAIDs, so there are no little pills (not any that are legal, anyway) to help with growing collection of sore muscles and painful joints. Ginger, as it develops, has been proven to exert some anti-inflammatory action — it takes awhile to work, and the effect is mild compared to an NSAID, but it does help.

Following this train of thought… Some people swear that creams dosed with salicylates or NSAIDs soak through the skin and ease the pain of arthritis and spavined muscles; research suggests the effect is faint, but it exists. And we do know that lidocaine patches used off-label work on arthritic joints — by numbing the entire area.

What if ginger would soak through your skin, too? Would it dull the constant pain I’ve been enjoying over the past nine months?

Hm.

Bird fat. Olive oil. Both oily stuff you can rub on your body, right? Olive oil, we know, has a variety of salubrious effects when applied to the skin and the hair. And as for the ginger, a large chunk of it resides in the freezer. What if one combined ginger and olive oil and applied it to the pained spots in the manner of the vaunted emu oil?

Off to the lab! (Sometimes called the kitchen…)

The tools:

Small heat-proof sauce dish
Sharp knife
Blender or food processor
Stove
Fine-gauge sieve

The subjects of experimentation:

Olive oil
Fresh, raw ginger

First I cut off a couple of chunks from the ginger root…

…then chopped them coarsely in a small mini-food processor.

Then mixed this with about a cup of olive oil in a small heat-proof dish and placed it on the stove.

The idea was not to cook it. Get olive oil too hot, and it denatures — makes it stink. Instead, what I wanted to do was just heat it to the point where it was barely starting to bubble. The stove needs to be turned on as low as it will go:

When the compound is just this side of hot, turn off the heat and let the mixture sit for several hours. Probably all day would be good. I let it rest four or five hours. Then come back and run it though a sieve, pressing firmly on the oil-saturated ginger with the back of a spoon.

The result is a clear, ginger-scented oil.

I strained it into a refrigerator container, planning to store the liniment in the fridge. Before putting it away, though, I applied some of it to the sore foot and the sore knee. Wrapped the medicated knee in athletic bandages.

How did it work?

Well, yesterday evening the choir performed for evensong. We had an hour-and-a-half-long rehearsal, then sat through about an hour-long recital (incredible! most awesome organ recital I’ve ever heard, and our choir director and his assistant director are beyond amazing themselves), and then we sang for the better part of another hour.

During that time, not once did I enjoy the sensation of someone driving a red-hot needle into the bottom of my heel. The foot was still sore, but it was mighty nice to be free of the breath-catching stabs. The knee: about the same. The back and hip: hurt like hell.

To be fair, I did accompany my large (and delicious!) mid-day meal with one of my favorite analgesics, gin and tonic. But by 5:30, the effects of that medicament had pretty well worn off.

Got home in time to catch Downton Abbey, during which I smeared more gingerfied snake oil on the knee, foot, and backside.

This morning, the knee hardly hurt at all. The foot: still sore, but no needling sensation. And the back and hip: hurt like hell.

The sun, alas, is far from the yardarm, and besides, I’ve got a ton of work to do today. So there’ll be no supplementation of the gingery regimen for several hours. But it’s interesting.

Possibly silly. But interesting.

Image: Head and neck of an emu. William Warby. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.