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Stress Management Redux

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One of this blog’s founding tenets was stress control: Money management hand-in-hand with stress management, as it were. At the time FaM came into being, I was fully employed but tended to obsess over money, constantly worrying about whether there would be enough. And a neighbor situation had led to $10,000 worth of vandalism, probably not optimal for one’s peace of mind.

In retrospect, the money matter looks pretty silly: trying to live on Social Security and adjunct teaching makes the challenge of scraping by on $60,000 look hilarious. But the stress thing? Not so silly.

I made a little discovery a few days ago: Benadryl works a miracle cure on GERD. Why? Because the bellyache evidently correlates directly with stress. And I’ve been enjoying plenty of that, some of it self-inflicted and some not.

Like most old ladies, I don’t sleep well. Older women, and to a lesser extent older men, wake up in the wee hours typically around 4:00 a.m. It’s like an alarm goes off, and you have exactly zero desire to go back to sleep. The solution to the sleep deprivation issue, then, is to go to bed earlier. If you hit the sack at 9:00 p.m., you get the ideal seven hours of snooze time. No matter when you get to sleep, you’re going to wake up at the same time, so if you linger abroad with the younger people, you can expect to pack in many fewer hours of sleep than is good for you.

This works, I guess. Except that lately, I’ve been popping awake earlier. And of course some nights I have so much work that I have to keep at it until 10 or 11 p.m. The other day I woke up at 1:15 a.m., after having gone to bed around 10 o’clock.

After a day of wandering around in a haze of exhaustion, I decided to drop a fake Benadryl, available in army-sized supplies from our favorite purveyor of such goods, Costco. The stuff is counterindicated for the elderly, because it can cause cognitive disfunction, especially when used as a sleeping pill. So ordinarily I resist taking it except for noticeable allergic reactions, and when in extremis. Well, the other day I was unmistakably in extremis after three hours of sleep and a full day of bellyache.

So, consider:

I knock myself into the middle of next week by dropping an antihistamine that reliably puts me into a stupor. I fall into the sack before 10 p.m. and I sleep like the proverbial rock, all the way through until 6:00 a.m. And WTF? When I wake up the next morning, I don’t feel good…I feel great!!!

I’ve been off the omeprazole for a week, with no noticeable difference in the bellyache department. By this point, that drug has pretty well cleared itself out of my system, and the GERD or whatever is no worse, no better. Except that after a full night’s sleep, there’s not so much as a twinge from the gut.

Not only that, but I stay feeling great all day!

Better living through chemicals…

Interesting. What could this mean? If anything?

Reflecting on that question, it dawned on me that the most recent flare-ups—the ones I have some record of, because I’ve been keeping a symptom diary so as to report to the doc’ what’s working and what’s not working—have occurred when I’ve felt very stressed, and that the most recent immediate short-term stresses are overlaid atop some chronic stresses that take the form of long-term pain and long-term unhappiness with the way I’m diddling my life away.

On the day I woke up at 1:15 in the morning for example:

At 1:15 a.m., anticipating another horrid day:

• The pointless class at the impossible hour
• Another confrontation with another idiot student
• A race to Scottsdale to meet a client
• Then another race to north Scottsdale to a Chamber of Commerce meeting.

I hate teaching and I hate driving around this accursed city and I hate trying to find places where I’ve never been. Last CofC meeting took me almost as long to find the damn restaurant as it did to traipse to Scottsdale. One of the projects I’m working on gives me some ethical pause; another is just annoying.

4:00 a.m.

• Have to deal with a failing student
• Have to file 45th-day grades but couldn’t get into the effing system to do so because it’s down in the wee hours
• Have to be up and running by 6 a.m.
• Realize I will net all of $170 for two weeks’ worth of substitute teaching
• HATE HATE HATE my job

 4:00 p.m. Bilious and heartburny while running around. But by the time I get home and unwind, am feeling OK.

Next day:

6:00 a.m. Drugging myself so I’d sleep worked. Awake at 6 and loaf until it’s getting late, and so…

• Have to fly around like a rocket to get out the door in time for my 9:30 appointment in hideous suburban Tempe
• Because of rush-hour no-left-turn rules, have to wend my way through three neighborhoods before I can turn east to reach the freeway.
• Traffic on the freeway exceeds hideous.

Feel OK in the late afternoon…again, after the worst of the running around is over and the back and foot pain subside a bit.

And the next day:

Feeling pretty good despite having been jolted awake at 4:00 a.m. by the alarming sound of shattering glass. No burglar: frame fell off the wall and broke apart with a loud crash. Enjoyed spending half an hour vacuuming up shards of glass and, as long as the damn vacuum was plugged in, vacuuming up a houseful of dog hair.

• Nearly got hit by a semi-truck & trailer as the driver changed lanes when he didn’t see me.
• Traffic on the 10 was horrific. My stomach was tense when I got to the client’s.
• Client is not a native speaker, and there’s a cultural divide. He claimed that he hadn’t asked me to do the large job I performed but only wanted a couple of pages revised. Thus $621 worth of work went out the window.  He gave me a check for $315, about half of what I billed.

I seem to feel stress in my gut. The prospect of having to get back on those gawdawful freeways to drive home elicited a sensation that felt like a squirt of acid in the stomach. Uncomfortable and weird.

§ § §

Felt pretty good for a couple of days after sleeping through the nights. But then had to work late one evening; didn’t notice the time and so had to fix dinner at 9:30. Fell asleep shortly after that: highly ill-advised. Next day was truly miserable, lots of pain and discomfort. Resisted going back on the omeprazole; the following day, that flare-up settled down.

Observing that I seem to feel better late in the afternoon, I realized this is when the things that stress me out the most are past. Also, reviewing the garbage above and much more along the same lines, I could see that in many instances—near-death experiences on the freeway, for example…or just the intense annoyance of dealing with fractious students—an almost immediate reaction occurs in the gut. And that anticipation of an unpleasant day, of which there are altogether too many, seems to coincide with early-morning belly misery.

Where is all this stress coming from? Do I really hate adjunct teaching so much it’s making me sick? It never made me sick before…

§ § §

I went to Young Dr. Kildare early in August. By then I’d been suffering with the bellyache, the backache, and the plantar fasciitis for quite some time. I’d gone to the Mayo about two weeks before deciding to find a doctor that would accepted Medicare for the expensive tests the Mayo doctor proposed and a week or two before that was in the ER a week having chest pain diagnosed as dyspepsia.

Therefore, the cause of the stress can not be this semester’s ridiculous class schedule, because it started long before classes began.

However, I in fact was very stressed throughout the process of applying for the AAME program, and the disappointment and anger engendered by the AAME board’s offensive remarks and turn-down were pretty extreme. It’s reasonable to think that episode might have kicked off this flare-up.

From the AAME fiasco I went directly to the start of this semester, which student-wise and work-wise hasn’t been too bad, except for the frustration and annoyance of having to put in four and a half days of unpaid time in course prep. What has been difficult has been the schedule:

• four days on campus, a commute that consumes gas, doubles my fuel bill, and wastes incalculable amounts of time;
• two days a week having to get there and start the performance at 7:30 in the morning, which I truly hate;
• a third day each week of racing to Scottsdale by 7:15 in the morning;
• two other days a week in which three hours of productive time are ripped out of the middle of my day.

And trying to focus on an organized plan to move The Copyeditor’s Desk into the realm of credible business while dealing with the distractions of running these courses at exceptionally inconvenient hours has been especially annoying and difficult. The effect has been gestalt—I can’t focus on anything long enough to get through a single task in any coherent way.

Right now I have four clients’ projects in hand, and I need to be able to work on those projects without having to drop everything and go entertain a bunch of 19-year-olds for three hours, four times a week. Just thinking about this right now is causing an uncomfortable sensation in the gut!

Add to that my having focused sharply enough on my dislike of teaching composition to make the decision that I will quit teaching at the end of this semester, and the devil take the hindmost. In the first place, contemplating how much you hate something that you have to attend to every day is stressful enough. In the second, we have the question of what will happen when I start to draw down savings to live on. And in the third, we also have the uncertainty of whether CED will earn enough to supplement Social Security and drawdowns to keep me from going broke.

These worries entail some very scary prospects.

In addition, pain is another source of stress on an organism. I’ve been suffering plantar fasciitis and back pain for weeks. More weeks than I can count.

Summarize the stress points:

• Chronic physical pain since last June: back and foot
• Commuting to campus, to meetings, and to Tempe client
• Awaking at 4 in the morning; because of workload, not getting to bed early enough to sleep 7 hours before then
• Therefore, insufficient sleep
• Early morning class and business meetings
• Church’s decision to move senior choir to early service once a month, adding yet another predawn wake-up and early race-around to a week with three pre-existing unpleasantly early race-arounds
• Conflict between class meetings and client work
• Low pay for teaching
• Negative outcome of AAME project
• Conflict between teaching workload and large amount of work required in getting the business on its feet
• Two challenging clients
• Chronic worry about money
• Lack of exercise
• Heartfelt dislike of teaching freshman comp
• Difficult student who had to be dragged to the chair of the department for talking-to
• Because of time conflicts, inability to meet weekly goals no matter how hard I try
• Inability to even clean the damn house because of workload and time conflicts
• Sense that things are only marginally under control—and sometimes out of control—because of heavy workload and time conflicts that make it difficult to handle the work
• Concern about relationship with son; worry about son’s unhappiness and future
• Workman waltz, things that have broken, borer infestation of magnificent tree, and endless large unplanned expenses during the summer when I had almost no income; these have drawn down survival savings to barely enough to last through fourth-quarter 2012.

 Twenty sources of chronic stress???? Holy mackerel! No wonder my stomach hurts!

What am I doing to deal with this?

1. Made decision to quit teaching
2. Made appointment for physical therapy
3. Drugged self to sleep all night – this, unfortunately, cannot continue
4. As weather cools, trying to bicycle when possible
5. Made plan for survival without teaching income

 What else could I do?

• Possibly bow out of early-morning choir.
• Deal with most challenging client issues first and head-on. (Mary Kay Ashe: Always take on the difficult stuff first thing in the morning!)
• Shift some editorial work to Tina.
• Schedule specific blocks of time for e-mail, blogging, and CED work around the periods lost to teaching.
• Try to stop thinking about how much I hate teaching; find something else to think about!
• Get up and leave the computer when I’m not focusing on productive things.

Well. It looks sort of like a plan.

♦ I told the chair this afternoon, just three hours ago, that I would not be back to teach face-to-face sections again. He said keeping the online magazine writing course would be no problem, and even suggested (contrary to what he’s said before) that a fully online comp course might be available. I’d druther not, I expect…but in fact, if I could create a really streamlined comp course that was not bogged down with having to find things to fill 32 ninety-minute class meetings, that might be OK. The online course, once it’s up and running, is really very easy to handle. A little bit of student nuttiness comes through the digital ether, but at tolerable levels. If I didn’t have to physically go out there and kill time…maybe. And it would be that much income that CED wouldn’t have to earn.

On the other hand, maybe not, too…

♦ Yesterday I started physical therapy for the back and foot. The therapist thinks I’m going to entertain myself with stretching exercises six times a day. As you can see, I have tons of time to spare at three therapy sessions a week plus six at-home sessions every day.

♦ I dealt with the most difficult client issue a couple of days ago; haven’t heard back from that one. Need to send him a new bill.

♦ And indeed I did foist a bunch of complicated ditz onto Tina last night. In the overworked department, she was as usual parked in front of her computer.

♦ As for the early morning Sunday services…hm. I hate to cop out of those. In the first place, I like singing in choir, and there are only so many opportunities to do so. And it the second place, it seems kind of lâche: wah! I’m too lazy to get out of the sack at 5 a.m. on Sunday! Since they only happen once a month, there are only three more of them between now and the end of the semester. Can I really not live through three wee-hour wake-ups on Sunday?

Oh well. It’s after 6:00 p.m. I’ve spent too long on this. Gotta go read some copy.

New Growth

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Sustainable Personal Finance reports on a surprise harvest from the yard: out of the blue a tomato plant found a welcoming place to grow. Check out the pictures of what the little volunteer produced! And tell SPF about your take on gardening.

Me, I’ve pretty well given up on growing veggies in the yard. Buying them at the store, even organics, seems more cost-effective, and it’s one heckuva lot less work.

LOL! Look what volunteered in my yard. Spotted it when it was just making a bud and thought…what the heck, maybe it will be some sort of purty little flower. Its leaves look vaguely geranium-like, after all.

It’s probably some sort of wild gourd. Could be a squash of some sort, I suppose. But…does that look like a zucchini or a crookneck to you? Naaaahhhhh….  SDXB had a squash-like volunteer in his yard a couple of years ago. Hoping for a bonanza, he let it grow. It turned into a leggy, sprawling vine with hard, inedible fruits, evidently a native gourd that never made it to cultivation.

Budgets are Sexy hosts an amazing story in which blogger “Joe Taxpayer” claims to have turned a $4,550 profit by taking up a credit-card lender on a 10% back offer: he and the wife used this miraculous Platinum Mastercard to buy $50,000 worth of Visa and AMEX gift cards. It worked for him. But…hmmm…. Don’t try this at home, kids! 😉

At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail ruminates about the crying need (or not…) to own a smartphone. In the ensuing comments, one of her readers mentions an app called Pinger that allows iPad and dumbphone users to make free phone calls and texts. Suddenly this makes my iPad look a lot more interesting…

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan contemplates the strategy of borrowing from himself (i.e, against various assets) to come up with a larger down payment on the house he’s buying. Uh huh. That’s one of several ways Ex-DH and I got ourselves one million dollars (count’em, $1,000,000) in debt. Argh! If ya can’t pay for it today, don’t buy it!

Mrs. PoP has been having a bit of an anxiety attack over the advent of her mother, who intends to visit for the next eight days. {sigh} I wish my mother could come and visit.

She died before M’hijito was born. She’d be 101 now, if she hadn’t been murdered by the tobacco peddlers. (And yes: selling an addictive product that you know causes cancer, stroke, and cardiac disease is indeed a form of homicide.) I wonder how different our lives would have been if she had lived even to my age, to say nothing of the 94 years other women in the family have reached. My son’s would have been better, of that I’m pretty sure.

Oh well.

At Bargaineering, Jim Wang is not quite so harsh on the tobacco druglords as I am…but check out this discussion of the relative cost of cigarettes for low-income smokers.

Budget Glamorous is calculating some strategies for gardening on a shoestring. Apparently she has a nice green thumb, for she reports being able to revive those underwatered, peakèd plants the warehouse stores stick on a back shelf and peddle for a few pennies. Where she lives, though, they have a foraging deer issue… Where there are deer, can coyotes be far behind? Maybe set out some dog food to call the coyotes in? Deer repellent on four feet!

Eemusings is filling a blog break with a whole series of guest posts at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander, some of which are very good. I got a kick out of cantaloupe’s reflections on what she learned while couch-surfing her way across the U.S. this summer.

At a Gai Shan Life, Revanche contemplates spending, nonspending, and a large looming vet bill.

Hmmm… Just got a notice from Tie the Money Knot that yesterday’s post, “The Relativity of Time,” has been accepted for this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, slated to go live tomorrow morning. Thanks for that, TTMK! [Update: Gosh…that post made Editor’s Pick! w00t!]

Have you seen this province in Crystal’s blogging empire? The proprietor of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, she’s built a number of other sites. This one, which discusses copywriting for various purposes, goes into detail about writing for business websites (and other purposes). Of interest to bloggers, here’s a really good disquisition on five common mistakes blog writers make.

At Blue Collar Workman, TB rings his readers’ bells with a rumination on fences. This post elicits a long series of crazy neighbor stories. Very entertaining!

Today FMF has his usual Sunday sermonette at Free Money Finance, in which he reflects that the advice dispensed by prominent personal finance gurus is basically the same common sense that appears in the Bible. He reflects briefly on how modern-day Americans could have lost track of that common sense.o

Afford Anything came home from a camping trip to a plague of headaches. She explains why delegating tasks is the best way to get a life.

Heh heh heh…you probably have to be an academic to appreciate this. At first, I didn’t realize it was a parody, so near to truth does it ring.

In the seriously??? department, did you know there are people—make that “people who don’t live under the Seventh Avenue Overpass”—who argue with a straight face in favor of going unbanked? The Digerati Life hosts a guest blogger who advocates abandoning commercial banks and following a 100% cash-only lifestyle. Generated a whole lotta comments at TGL.

The hour grows late. The dog wishes to dine. The weekend’s almost over. And so, to work…

 

The Relativity of Time

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Something weird happens as you get older: time itself goes faster and faster.

You don’t believe me? You will. It’s a law of nature: the passage of time accelerates as you draw nearer to the end of your life.

I first noticed this as I was approaching middle age, probably in my early thirties. It struck me that when I was a kid, an hour seemed like an eternity. That was one reason why, when offered a choice of whether or not to take piano lessons, I inadvisedly declined: the whole hour the neighbor kid had to spend every day at practice filled my little heart with horror. By the age of 30, an hour felt like a half-hour, barely enough time to get anything done.

Now that I’m old, an hour passes in a minute, sometimes even a second. It goes by unnoticed. Day by day, there’s never enough time to get through all the things I want or need to do.

Yesterday SDXB remarked that he’d been in the Sun City house almost ten years. He moved out of the neighborhood shortly after I moved into my present home. How can that be? I couldn’t possibly have lived here an entire decade!

It confirms what one of my former graduate assistants said the other day. She’d checked in from the Midwest to say she was applying for a swell new job and could use a recommendation. She’s now a mother about to enter her second marriage, working in a publishing house. “I can hardly believe it’s been ten years since I started at GDU,” she said.

Ten years? It hasn’t even been ten months, kid!

But no. I moved into this house at the same time I moved over to GDU’s main campus to found the editorial office that employed her. If SDXB moved to Sun City ten years ago, then she went to work for me ten years ago, and indeed, I bought my present house ten years ago.

SDXB reflected that he and his former wife married over 50 years ago. My ex-DH and I would have been married 45 years this December, had I not run away to the Outback.

What does this have to do with you young pups and your money? A lot.

Before you know it, you’ll be old. At that point, only a few moments will remain in your life, or so it will seem to you. The relativity of time makes it seem like old age is a long way off. But it’s not.

For your money, it means…

• Plan early and often for retirement.
• Start saving for the future now.
• Even if you’re just starting, save more than the standard amount toward retirement.
• Put savings in several instruments: a 401(k) or 403(b) if your employer matches contributions, or if not, your own standard IRA; a Roth IRA; and ordinary brokerage accounts. Use non-tax-deferred instruments as well as deferred.
• Pay off the roof over your head as quickly as you can.

For the quality of your life it means…

• Do not waste your life in a job you hate. If you’re unhappy on the job, search for other work.
• Make a plan, one that will guide you in the direction of contentment, if not security. But do not marry your plan—stay flexible and open to new opportunities and ideas.
• Get yourself educated in something that will open the door into reasonably un-obnoxious work. Happiness is more important than money, on the job as well as in your personal life.
• Take care of your health. Eat well, exercise, and spend time in activities you find pleasurable.
• Free yourself, to the extent possible, of the toxic people and situations in your life.
• Engage in altruism. The people who are happiest in their careers have relatively low-paying jobs that help others—members of the clergy rank number one in job satisfaction. If you can’t help others for a living, do it as a volunteer.

Enjoy it while you’ve got it.

Costco: How Much Does Saving Money Cost You?

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Scrutinizing the budget now that this month’s bills are all paid… Several extraordinary costs—those Heath dishes, for example, and a pair of shoes, and a trip to the car mechanic’s—ran the American Express budget $325 into the red. But in theory, all of them combined shouldn’t have overtaxed that budget. So…WTF?

In addition to those two extravagances and the car repair, I’ve been spending with gay abandon at Costco: $407.39 diddled away in that place!

And what on earth, pray tell, might I have purchased with this munificent amount? I’ve been strictly on the wagon for the past three months, so it didn’t go to my favorite potables. Mostly food and household goods, I think: the lifetime supply of paper towels. And the $75 or so for the underwear extravaganza. Haven’t bought toiletries. Haven’t bought pool tablets. Haven’t bought Brita filters or blue jeans or replacement toothbrush heads or a lifetime supply of laundry detergent. Looks like the main costs were large packages of chicken thighs (at 99 cents a pound, a better buy than anyplace else where I shop), pork, produce, the paper goods, and clothing.

Probably paper towels and toilet paper and detergent, purchased in bulk, are a little more cost-effective than the same goods bought in smaller quantities more often at grocery stores. However, a funny thing happens on the way to the Costco: Sure, a giant container of paper towels lasts four to six months. It sets you back $15. But then next month you need toilet paper: $20. Next month after that, you need chlorine tabs for the pool: $80. And so on  to infinity. If every month you’re buying a lifetime supply of one thing or another, then each month you’re spending more on groceries and household products than you would at an ordinary retailer for smaller amounts that would only last a week or a month.

Although over the long run you might spend more at a grocery store for a specific product than you would, unit-wise, by purchasing a gigantic supply at Costco, because each month you buy a new lifetime supply of something else, each month’s bills are likely to be higher than they would be if you equalized purchases over time.

What that suggests is even though you’re paying less per unit for certain products, you’re actually paying out more each month as you have to replenish different products month by month.

By comparison, during the budget cycle just ended, I spent only $35 at Safeway and $68 at Trader Joe’s. Admittedly, I haven’t felt well and so haven’t eaten much—mostly I’ve grazed off the Costco stash. But still..one wonders.

I decided to try to limit Costco purchases to $200 a month. Which…well, really, shouldn’t that be more than enough?

This led me to consider what routine purchases are available only at Costco, and what things might be bought somewhere else in more manageable quantities at more manageable ongoing prices. Videlicet:

Some of these items are hard to find at other stores around here, or can’t be found in the same quality or for the same price, or both. I’ve marked those in green.

There also are a number of things I buy on occasion at Costco because they don’t seem to exist in any other stores or because, as in the case of the chlorine tablets for the swimming pool, Costco far underprices its competitors:

Bed sheets comparable to the sets you get at Costco, which come with four pillowcases BTW, would cost far more in other stores unless you caught them on sale. Anywhere else, it’s almost impossible to find either underwear or denim jeans that fit a normal adult woman. Face cream is expensive at Costco but downright outrageous elsewhere. So it goes.

I’m none too sure what these things would cost at non-warehouse stores. But I’d be willing to bet that when you buy less, you pay less at the checkout stand, even if you’re paying more per unit. In some cases, you’d have to pay a fair amount more. For example, I wouldn’t consider buying fish at Safeway; probably the only other source of acceptable fish in town is Whole Foods. Don’t even ask what they charge for the stuff.

If I limit spending to $200 for the September/October budget cycle, what could I buy between now and the end of the month-long cycle?

I’ve already spent $104 at Costco this month. That leaves $96 to diddle away:

That’s not unreasonable, I think. It provides enough meat to last the dog for the rest of the month (since canids need about 2/3 of their food to be in the form of animal protein, a 25-pound dog consumes a surprising amount of fresh meat). My blue denim jeans are wearing out, frayed at the cuffs and faded at the knees—the height of style for younger things, but not, I’m afraid, for moi. So pretty quick I’ll need a new pair. Arizona doesn’t charge tax on food, and so the 10% soaking applies only to the clothes. And…that even leaves something for one or two other purchases! Buying the rest of my food—mostly produce, since at least two months’ worth of beef, fish, and chicken reside in the freezer—shouldn’t cost much at Safeway, Trader Joe’s, or Ranch Market.

What think you? Does it make sense to try to stay on budget by spending more per unit on less product?

 

 

More Days from Hell

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Ugh, ugh, ugh! Will this never stop?

Yesterday:

• Up at 4 am.
• Blood test bright & early: H. pylori or not?
• Noon class, the one that takes a gigantic chunk out of my work day
• Take the disruptive kid by the hand, sit her down in a conference room with my chairman, and tell her how the cow ate the cabbage
• Race to the creative writing class for which I’m substituting: another 2½  hours

The day is done by the time I get home. Between 4 and 6:45 a.m., wrote two blog posts, answered e-mail, responded to blog commenters, put issues on paper for unruly student, hustled a graphic artist friend to do our brochure, watered plants, fed the dog, bolted down a chicken sandwich, and flew out the door. After class: too exhausted to move. Ate dinner, fell into bed.

On the docket today:

• Feed dog; forget watering plants, forget making bed, forget any and all other routine tasks
• 7:30 a.m. class
• Another confrontation: student who hasn’t shown up for 5 of the 10 class meetings turned in a failing paper; expects to be allowed to turn in a paper she didn’t do several weeks ago, asks to be forgiven for all the absences, and thinks she’s going to pass the course.
• Race from that to meeting with client.
• Race from client to Chamber of Commerce meeting
• Race home, try to work
• Choir practice: 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

I won’t get any work done, of course, because I’ll be too tired. I got up at 1:15 a.m.  Worked, spending part of the time trying to decipher nervy bird-brained student’s incomprehensible paper, 3 pages with no paragraph breaks. Went back to bed at 4. I’m now about to be late for class and haven’t even had time to brew a cup of coffee.

Bathtub’s full. Gotta run!

What Goes Around Comes Around

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In a good way, not just in the negative way that phrase usually connotes.

Yesterday afternoon the phone rings. It’s the guy whose company installed all those sliding doors and the window I ordered up after the late, great garage invasion. After the work they’d done, installing some very nice improvements at a comparatively reasonable price, I wrote a rave review at Angie’s List. The boss didn’t notice this until a couple of days ago, when Angie’s called to hit him up for more money (yes…people pay to be listed at that site) and mentioned that he had a couple of reviews to check. When he saw what I’d written about his company, he was beside himself with joy. Called to thank me profusely (?? I’m the one who was lucky to find this outfit!) and invited me, free of charge, to an upcoming BNI meeting.

That, he said, would give me a chance to introduce myself and hand my cards around.

Mwa ha ha! We’ll need to get our brochure printed between now and then. BNI meets at the same time one of my classes meets this semester, so it’ll have to wait until after fall classes end. But this will be a nice opportunity.

And speaking of the merry-go-round, 101 Centavos not only linked to both Adjunctorium and Funny about Money in this week’s round-up, he also generously highlighted one of my recent rants at Adjunctorium, along with a cri de coeur by a young anthropology Ph.D. that appeared at Al Jazeera.

A couple of naive comments at Centavos’ site led me to publish another rant this morning, about the specious theory that teaching is somehow “rewarding” in a metaphorical sense. Where on earth do people get ideas like that?

Image: Larry Pieniazek, View of the Grand Carousel at Kennywood. GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.