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Dressed, Stressed, and Messed!

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Messed up, that is. Why is it that after you’ve been overworking your idiot self for way, way too many weeks on end, when you finally get a few days of peace and quiet, you feel nervous, edgy, and…well, stressed?

Last week I arrived at a point where at last, for the first time in longer than I can remember, nothing remained that had to be done right now, if not sooner. Yes, there are a few things I should’ve done before this. I’m getting to them one at a time, slowly. But for a change, there’s no hurry and nothing that’s going to make us or break us hangs on any of these few bits and pieces of ditz.

You’d think this would lead one to unwind and unlax, right?

Well, no.

For the past few days I’ve been having heart palpitations (no joke! sounds just like a neurotic old lady, doesn’t it?), headaches, and even migraine auras. Damn! Dragged in to see Young Dr. Kildare this morning, because the nonstop pitter-pat of my little heart won’t quit.

He thinks it’s Return of the Anxiety Attack, but that theory notwithstanding, he’s sending me to a cardiologist to be jumped through all sorts of hoops, and he wants to test for kidney and liver issues.

I don’t know: as a practical matter, this doesn’t feel like the anxiety attack that sent me to the Mayo’s ER thinking I was having a heart attack. It doesn’t make me feel like I’m going to faint or cause such extreme lightheadedness that I can’t drive. And it doesn’t come and go. The monster anxiety attacks came and went suddenly. This doesn’t stop, or at least not for any length of time. Yesterday I woke up with it and went to bed with it. This morning I felt OK till I had to leave for class (hmmm…). It’s after four and the sense that my heart is beating too fast that started around 6:45 a.m. continues unabated.

Oh well. It hasn’t kilt me yet. Maybe it won’t. Or, with any luck at all, maybe it will. 😉

So…what could be making me feel soooooo stressed that it’s giving me phantom cardiac symptoms?

High on the list of possibilities: Extremely drawn-out short-timer’s syndrome. I told my honored chair that I wished to quit teaching composition what…two, three weeks ago? Sometime in the foggy past. Another eight weeks remain in the semester. It feels like forfuckinEVER to me.

Probably, too, dwelling on the ludicrousness of one’s job and how much one hates it is not good for one’s mental health. Possibly I should try not to think about the joys of teaching.

I must say, though, that I’ve managed to extract some pretty good blog posts from it. 😀 Matter of fact, I’m thinking I’ll make an e-book of Adjunctorium’s count-down to freedom. Try to peddle it through that guy who has the big Spreadsheet in the Sky documenting exactly how scandalously adjunct faculty are paid and treated.

Next on the neurosis list: money. The usual. Money.

I do not know why the prospect of starving to death under the Seventh Avenue overpass freaks me out. But it does.

As a practical matter, just this month I’ve billed enough to cover the first quarter of The Copyeditor’s Desk’s contribution to my 2013 upkeep. And as a practical matter, even if CEDesk earns not. one. more. penny this year and next, it has enough in its bank account to support me for a year.

If in fact the business continues at this rate (maybe it’s this quiet spell that makes me nervous?), one month can pay for a quarter’s drawdown and the other two will pay for overhead. But as yet another practical matter, the quarterly budget includes a monthly set-aside for major expenses like computer and printer hardware; pay for subcontractors comes out of the earnings they bring in…and the rest of it is small change.

I don’t know why it’s nervous-making…it just is.

Well. Possibly it’s that there’s no other source of income, absent the hated teaching job, that credibly can keep the wolf from the door.

What else?

I hurt. I’m tired of being sick. Very tired of being sick.

The other day I realized I’ve been sick nonstop for a full year. It started last fall when I took that accursed double-whammy flu shot, which brought on the respiratory infection that led to the horrible bronchitis, which the pulmonologist treated with antibiotics and Prednisone, which led to the bellyache that lasted for months on end, and then I did the job on my back and leg tendons, which led to the sciatica and the plantar fasciitis, neither of which will go away, which led to my drinking two bourbons and waters as I have been writing this, which has not stopped the busy heartbeat but which most certainly has made it a great deal more tolerable.

And so…being duly cocktailed up, to throw a steak on the grill…

 

How to Know When It’s Time to Clean Out the Garage…

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It’s time to clean out the garage when…

• You can’t find your (expensive!!!!) masonry bit, but you can find an old package of box nails whose label looks like it’s vintage 1948.

• You find an empty bandaid box sitting on a shelf amongst a litter of loose nails, screws, and bolts.

• A mysterious green squirt bottle is laying on its side behind a bunch of junk. You examine it: Deep Woods Off! You haven’t visited the deep woods since your thirty-something son was in the fifth grade.

• You discover a roll of vine ties hiding among several rolls of duct tape and electrical tape. The vines died about nine years ago.

• You find a Phillips-head screwdriver bit for your drill, sitting at the back of a shelf in its unopened plastic baggie. You still haven’t found the masonry bit.

• You unearth a plastic bag, emblazoned with instructions on how to suffocate yourself or your kids, containing a bunch of gray plastic square things, a baggie full of screws and brackets, and four double-sided stickers. You have no idea what these objects are or what function they could possibly serve.

• You find a rat trap and an unopened box of rat bait that you intended to return to Home Depot, if and when you could ever find the receipt. The neighbor murdered the last of the local roof rats about three years ago.

• You think cleaning the garage sounds a great deal more fruitful than riding herd on clownish students.

Hm. That last one may not be strictly relevant to garage messes. More, one would expect, to the mess that is our educational system. Oh well.

Moving on… Have you ever noticed that the best thing about friends is that you get to pick them? Whereas family…well. Revanche has an always interesting set of relatives who periodically pose some new conundrum.

Mrs. Accountability, realizing her old term policy is about to expire, ruminates about life insurance.

One of the things that’s missing in my personality is the capacity to enjoy spectator sports. Still..Evan writes the first interesting piece about football I’ve ever read. 🙂

Abigail reminds us that it’s a good idea to check carefully before assuming an appliance or other possession is shot and needs to be replace.

FMF posts a second piece on the subject of annuities. It’s worth reading the first post, too, and also the commments on both articles.

Crystal and Len are finally in their new house, after the usual hair-tearing hassles that all us homeowners know and love (to hate). Check out the photos!

TB’s court case over the road rage incident came to a close, and so he is free to tell the whole wild story. IMHO, this TB dude is not a fellow you want to cut off in a dark alley. 😉 Luckily, the whole scary exchange came to naught.

Eemusings got to drive a hybrid on her recent junket. She and her readers contemplate whether it’s worth buying one of the things.

101 Centavos spent time this summer doing battle with garden bugs. Ever hear of catch-cropping? Me, neither. It’s an interesting idea.

At Grumpy Rumblings, Nicole&Maggie contemplate the timeless question facing parents of newborns: cloth or paper?

Mr. PoP describes, in a series of posts, how he went from a minimum-wage job to earning 80 grand a year. Today’s post is the third; scroll down from the homepage to find the others.

Uh oh. Now that Donna’s made the big move to Alaska, it looks like she’s going native!

Brip-Blap writes an interesting and counterintuitive post on the relationship between free time and productivity. Brings to mind the old chestnut that the busiest people are the ones who are most likely to take on extra work and volunteer jobs.

Budget Glamorous is pinching pennies in the time-honored manner of young academics. She’s found a way to earn some extra money, though: international students. Could be promising…

At Afford Anything, Paula has an adoption story that’s more amazing than any I’ve ever heard.

Five-Cent Nickel has a nice post on when to haggle. I hate it, myself…that’s one reason I drive a 12-year-old car: few things are more repellent than the prospect of having to argue with another Toyota salesman!

Speaking of repellent, my head hurts. Think I’ve got another migraine (or a revisitation of the first one). And so, away!

A Little Coup at the Second-Hand Store

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Yesterday I took a nice old skirt that I really love to the tailor at the cleaner’s near the restaurant where the Thursday morning business group meets. It needed a new strip of elastic in the waist.

An outlet of My Sister’s Closet, the upscale resale consignment store, is right next door. Well, I really needed some tops to replace the threadbare rags I’ve been wearing with my vast collection of Costco jeans. So, I thought, why not?

“Why not,” of course, is that place is dangerous. But amazingly, I managed not to spend much money and still came away with a major shopping coup.

Ended up at the racks and racks of second-hand Chico’s outfits. Ordinarily I don’t shop at Chico’s and didn’t, even when I had a job, because I dislike their high-pressure sales tactics and because the 1 through 3 sizing is very annoying. However, with no one hovering over my shoulder or lurking outside the dressing rooms to tell me how “wonderful!” I look in something that makes me look like a potato sack tied in the middle, I thought again, why not?

Incredibly, I found a sheer silk shirt with its price tag still on it, really pretty: they were selling it for $20. And even more incredibly, it fit. The original price was $100!

On the same hanger was a matching beige tank top, also with its original $38  price tag hanging from the collar tag: $8.95!

Can you believe????

Also in the $10 and under range, I got a nice loose-woven crocheted sweater from Jones New York and an awesome matching cami-like thing (only heavier fabric than a cami), both in deep amethyst…perfect for wearing with a red hat. 😉

And a cute little blue sweater that will look great with the blue Sanitas clodhoppers I bought a while back. Since clodhoppers are now about all I can wear, thanks to the endless foot and back agonies, I’ll be getting a lot of use out of those shoes and anything that will go with them.

And a pretty crocheted tank top that will look utterly awesome over the collected Costco camis. And a blue polyester tank that they were practically giving away.

I won’t have to buy any more clothes this winter. Except for networking group shindigs and the rare client meeting, most of the time I live in Costco’s old-lady jeans. Once class finally comes to an end, I’ll have few occasions to wear anything else. These tops will make me feel a lot less grody, and they’ll be acceptable for grocery-store runs and schmoozing with friends. The silk top with its beige tank will work nicely for those Chamber meetings.

To give you an idea of what I mean by Chico’s absurd sizing system, one of these things is a size one, two are size zero(!), and the others are size two.  A history of the chain reveals that this scheme is deliberately designed to confuse buyers about sizing: “A woman who in another store would be wearing a size 16 might be flattered to fit into a 3 at Chico’s.” Right: aren’t us customers dumb?

I’ve found that virtually none of the stuff I find in their stores fits, though it’s hard to tell with the sales staff buzzing around your head like hungry mosquitos. The same business profile reports that “Sales clerks were to make astute judgments about fit and style and also offer accessories or additional pieces of an ensemble.” LOL! That’s a polite way to put it.

At the checkout register, I remarked to the clerk that I never go in to Chico’s because I’m so put off by the high-pressure sales tactics. The sales rep laughed and said she’d been in retailing all her adult life (which, we might add, was probably about as long as mine) and that she also wouldn’t shop there, for the same reason.

“You’ll notice how they don’t have mirrors in the dressing rooms. That’s so you’ll have to go outside the room to look at how things fit in those big mirrors—and so the sales staff can get at you every time you try on anything.

“And,” she added, “those are slimming mirrors. They make you look more slender than you are, so you think the clothes look better on you than they do.” She said when she saw herself in one of those things, she thought, “That’s not me in this mirror!” And she never went back.

🙄

Well, I couldn’t say one way or the other whether that’s true. If the mirrors are “slimming,” it must mean I’m not gonna look any better ten pounds lighter than I do right now, and so I guess I can have a beer with breakfast.

But I can say that almost everything I’ve tried on in Chico’s looks awful on me, and I dislike being pestered and barraged with false flattery so much that I don’t shop there. It was interesting that at My Sister’s Closet, where sales assistance is so low-key as to be nonexistent, I found several things in their brand that I like. It may be that the clothes are OK but the atmosphere in Chico’s stores is discouraging.

Am I the only one who finds high-pressure sales tactics SO off-putting as to actually negate any impulse to buy things?

 

Cute, Cheap “Ergonomic” Stool: A Qualified Success

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At last the funny little tractor-seated plastic and chrome stool arrived from Amazon.com. I have to ask you, is this cute or not?

It’s purple!

My latest scheme is to get out of the desk chair, which I believe aids and abets some extraordinarily self-destructive habits (not the least of which is spending too damn many hours in front of the computer). I’ve been perching on one of those little wooden stools you can get in waypoints like Walmart and Target, whose legs my son cut down to make it the right height. This has helped some with the back pain, by making it very difficult to slouch and pretty easy to sit up straight.

However, the wooden stool, with its flat, excessively firm disk-shaped seat, is a little hard on the rear end. The proposed solution to that was one of those padded rolling stools of the sort dentists and manicure technicians use. Amazon has those, too…but if you look up “stools” on that hegemonic site, up comes this little guy. Purple (“violet,” in advertisingese) is not his only guise: he comes in 12 colors, including staid black and the spritely white.

Several retailers are peddling these at Amazon, at a wide variety of prices. I found one for $35, so figured…hey! if it doesn’t work out, nothing much will be lost. The same manufacturer makes one with a minimalist back, too.

It’s very cheaply made, but it has a kind of Ikea appeal. I figure if this plan doesn’t work and I can’t get comfortable on the thing, I’ll have to buy one of those ugly ergonomic chairs in the Herman Miller vein. One way or another, this contraption isn’t likely to last long, and so I’ll need to replace it with something.

If this idea it does work and I end up liking it and not having my back hurt, then for the same amount one would pay for some designer’s hideous dystopic nightmare, I can get a beautiful hand-crafted Thos. Moser stool, one that decidedly will not fall apart during my lifetime. Or my son’s. Or my grandchildren’s.

Thos. Moser will make these things at any height that will seat you comfortably at your desk.

They have no casters, unfortunately. Or maybe fortunately, for their looks. It is good, in an office (home or otherwise), to be able to roll around. However, for Thos. Moser, I could learn to live a casterless life.

The Frugal Virtues of Buying Expensive Stuff

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This morning a moment of chaos led to an impromptu kitchen cabinet clean-out. It’s not a large cabinet, but it’s one that holds stuff I use all the time, so it gets messy, what with all the shoving in and out of utensils and bowls. As I was setting stuff on the floor preparatory to cleaning the shelves and figuring out a better way to store things, I reflected that if I’ve been in this house for ten years—a proposition I still find hard to believe—then some of those things are really quite old.

There is, for example, a nesting set of stainless-steel strainers, which I use mostly as colanders. I don’t even remember when I bought those—I had them in the old house, and I may have brought them with me when I flew the marital nest. If that’s the case, then they’re a good twenty years old; in any event, they’ve been around for at least fifteen years. And they look and function just like new.

They weren’t cheap. I’m pretty sure I bought them at Williams Sonoma, or maybe from Sur La Table, a favorite source of gourmet cooking gear back when I could afford to buy anything my little heart desired. Williams Sonoma is charging $37 for the current version just now. But like the set of stainless pots and pans with the copper-core bottoms, they’ve lasted and lasted and lasted, through daily use and occasional misuse.

These are things that I couldn’t afford to replace today. Now, if a good piece breaks or wears out, I have to replace it with something cheaper, which about 97 percent of the time equates to something that won’t last. Case in point, the late, great cheapo percolator I bought to replace the very nice teakettle that gave up the ghost after many, many years of service. You may remember this:

Came from Amazon. See that cute little glass bubble thing at the top? That’s where coffee perks up, if you’re using it to brew coffee. It has some half-baked threads that let you sort of screw it into the lid. They’re already shot: the lid won’t stay together anymore. As you’ll recall, I bought this thing last July. Now I need to buy another one.

If I’d paid two or three times as much for a teakettle from Sur La Table or Williams Sonoma, I’d have a pretty kettle on my stove (something that happens to please me, for it makes the kitchen look like someone lives here) that would survive another ten years of daily use.

But, being forcibly “retired,” I didn’t feel I could pay twice as  much for a teakettle that may very well last longer than I will. That’s because I couldn’t. This summer, with everything in sight breaking and expensive upgrades to doors and windows installed after the notorious Garage Invasion (which came within a gnat’s eyelash of becoming a home invasion) and almost no money other than Social Security coming in, I didn’t have the cash.

I’m glad that when I had a job, I bought as much quality as I could afford—considerably more than I can afford now. The Crate & Barrel buffet, the Thomas Moser rocker, the Restoration Hardware overstuffed armchair, the leather chairs and sofa, the Stickley side table (on sale!!!), the good set of stainless cookware, the Heath dinnerware: those will last for the rest of my life, never fall apart, and probably even retain their looks up to the end. Mine, that is. Though they were expensive, they actually were frugal: I’ll never have to buy any of these objects again.

When retirement starts to appear as a speck on the distant horizon, that’s the time to stock up on expensive, well made, and sturdy housewares, tools, and furniture. While you still have an income, buy for the future. It will save you having to replace cheaper stuff several times during your (heh!) “golden years.” The gold in them thar hills, folks: it’s pyrite.

One Fewer Worry to Obsess About…

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Called the office of the podiatrist who pointlessly injected a dose of dexamethasone into my excruciating foot along about the beginning of September. It was disturbing enough when the New England Compounding Pharmacy’s list of recalled medications included this steroidal nostrum, even when only the stuff doctors were squirting into patients’ spines was known to cause problems. But today two more of their products are implicated, and the FDA is now saying that any injectable drug produced by NECC is “of significant concern.”

Although so far the offending spinal infusion seems not to have been shipped to Arizona, nevertheless NECC’s website says that in general they ship to every state in the union (well…it did, when it was online). So just because methylprednisolone acetate wasn’t sent to your state doesn’t mean none of the company’s scores of other compounds was sent.

After a good 8 or 10 minutes of obnoxious music and annoying advertising, a human being finally got on the phone. He rattled off the names of the doctor’s suppliers; none of them were NECC. Or at least, so he claimed.

So…that’s good. I guess.

If you’ve had any steroid injections for pain, it might be a good idea to check NECC’s list, and if the drug is on there, you might want to call your doctor’s office to find out where it came from. No one seems to know what are the incubation periods of any diseases the contaminating fungi can cause; in the case of meningitis, one person took 42 days to come down with it. At least it’s reassuring to know that your doctor didn’t get the drug from New England Compounding. If, however, that’s where it did come from, you should know to be on the lookout for any unusual symptoms.