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Entrepreneurship: How much time should I spend on…?

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The other day I remarked that contract teaching is by far the most reliable source of income among my various little enterprises.

Editorial work, however, pays better by the hour, is less taxing, and requires little or no driving around.

Blogging is entertaining and a nice sop for one’s ego but does almost nothing for the bottom line.

Thinking about how Tina and I might market and grow our editorial business, it crossed my mind to block out a certain percentage of the day or the week for each activity, thereby allowing me to schedule in a regular slot for marketing and networking. And this led straight to the question of how much is a reasonable amount of time to allot to one’s various money-making activities?

“Reasonable” aside, how much am I already allotting to this, that, and the other exploit? I spend rather more time on the blog than I should, given the tiny amount of revenues it represents. Really, until recently FaM has been the only one of the three enterprises that I’ve worked on every single day.

Exclusive of Social Security, teaching generates about 64% of my income. Editorial accounts for about 26%, and Funny about Money, about 8%. So, it would make sense for about 2/3 of my working time to be spent on teaching, about 1/4 of my time on editing, and less than 1/10 of it on blogging.

Because so much teaching work is done up-front in the form of course preparation that happens before a paycheck comes in (and therefore represents unpaid labor), it’s difficult to estimate how much of my time actually is spent on that endeavor. I spend about 9 hours a week in class, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours in course preparation, and to grade a single set of papers can take anywhere from 6 2/3 hours to 20 hours. One of my courses is online, requiring zero hours of class time. In a 16-week semester, not counting drafts, I collect about 15 sets of papers. So it would make sense to approximate an average of 6 to 8 hours a week grading papers. That’s approximately 15 to 17 hours a week, not counting the extensive course prep time. Figure about 100 hours for that, and you can add another 6.25 hours a week, for about 23 hours a week on teaching.

That’s more than 50% of a normal work week.

Editorial? Depends on what’s in house. On any given day, I can spend anything from 30 minutes to 16 hours on editing. It probably averages around 8 or 10 hours a week.

And as for blogging, I average about two hours a day on it; 14 hours a week.

So we have 23 + 8 + 14 = 45  hours of paying work a week.

If that’s accurate, then right now I’m spending about 51% of my work time on teaching, 17% of it on editorial work, and 31% of it on blogging.

What that adds up to is this: the smallest amount of my working time is spent on the best paying work. The second-largest slab of my time is spent on work that pays, at most, about $20 an hour—probably considerably less. And almost a third of my working hours are spent on an activity that brings in a laughable $200 a month.

Well. There’s a little insight, in the “what’s wrong with this picture” department!

If one is to work smarter instead of harder, it would make sense for the largest portion of working hours to be spent on the highest-earning activity, no? That would be…yes! Editorial.

I think we (by that I mean me and my associate editor) could do far better by targeting commercial enterprises—more plumbing/HVAC contractors!—than by working with individual writers and vanity presses. We need to go out into the world and meet the people who bring you all that obnoxious advertising and who blanket the Internet with “information” about their products and services. One thing that’s clear: business executives expect to pay other businesses a fair rate. Too often, individuals do not.

And if we want to earn more from better-paying work, then we need to devote more time, proportionately, to the better-paying work.

Duh!

I should probably try to up the proportion of working hours spent on The Copyeditor’s Desk from around 15% to 20% to something more like 40% to 50%.

It would be possible to do that simply by setting aside an hour or two a day to work on marketing the little business, and then intensifying that effort during the winter and summer breaks—using time that would be spent on teaching to network and market to businesses. It might require me to spend less time on teaching, and it certainly would cut into the time available for poking at a keyboard to produce blog posts.

At $50 an hour, an editor working 15 billable hours a week should earn about $750 a week, or about $37,500 a year, given a two-week break. Double the number of billable hours for marketing: 30 hours a week, and you come up with exactly the number of hours/week I’m working right now. $37,500 is about $7,950 more than projected earnings from all three enterprises in a typical year. Helle’s belles: I just got a paycheck from the community colleges for two weeks of teaching three sections.

Is that a reasonable allocation of working vs. marketing hours: 66% in peddling the business and 33% in actual work? Various self-styled experts vary, recommending that the small business entrepreneur devote between 20% and 60% of one’s working time to marketing. So if I were spending “only” 60% of my time at hustling business from other businesses, I’d have 18 hours a week to devote to actual paid editorial work, amounting to $900 a week or $45,000 a year. At 20%, I’d be pulling in $1,800 a week, or $90,000 per 50-week year.

Now that’s working smarter!

There’s another model, of course: videlicet, I do most or all of the marketing and Tina does most or all of the editing. In this scenario, I earn a salary from the S-corporation for my services and Tina gets paid an hourly contract rate.

So let’s say I manage to bring in 40 hours a week worth of work. That’s $2,000 a week, or $100,000 in a 50-week year. We split the income 50-50, and we each earn 50 grand a year.

LOL! Not likely that I could corral that much paying work at $50/hour. But anything’s possible. One never knows until one tries, does one?

😉

Benefits of Joining a Business Group

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Thursday: another early-morning trek across the Valley to the weekly breakfast meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association.

When I was invited to join this group, I privately thought it was going to be more hassle than it was worth. Because eggs make me upchuck unless they’re well diluted with flour and sugar (as in chocolate cake…), it’s always difficult for me to find something to eat for breakfast in an American restaurant. The group’s venue, the Good Egg, sounded especially unpromising {urk!}. And having to dive into the rush-hour traffic at quarter to seven was only slightly less unappealing.

However, I’ve found it really has been a very useful thing.

The benefits have extended far beyond the occasional job lead. For those of us who operate out of home offices, belonging to a local business group has the sterling quality of getting the entrepreneur away from the keyboard and out into the world. If I weren’t teaching, the only time I’d see another human being would be in choir and during shopping trips. Meeting weekly with a dozen other business people means I get to talk with professionals about topics that matter and enjoy the friendly company of a diverse and lively bunch of people.

More concrete benefits have included leads to useful business tools, such Carbonite’s cloud-based backup service, and presentations describing how various financial instruments and business-related strategies work. To those we might add practical advice: last week my dog-&-pony show was a discussion of how my associate editor and I are planning to step up marketing for our editorial business, The Copyeditor’s Desk. In response, practically everyone in the group had some idea or advice to contribute, and this morning they all wanted to know what progress we’d made on our plan.

On the other hand, except for a small local group of women bloggers, I don’t belong to associations of bloggers. Not because I don’t want to and not because I don’t see the value in linking with others who are trying to monetize their sites, but because an online network doesn’t serve the purpose of getting me out of my garret. Virtual socializing, while it has its purposes, is not the same as meeting people face to face. And it doesn’t take you off your chair and out from in front of your computer.

Too, Funny about Money doesn’t provide enough of my little corporation’s total revenue to make it worth spending a lot more time on it than I already do. One half-way decent editorial assignment returns two or three months’ worth of Adsense revenues; the recent two-week plumbing company gig paid more than seven times the amount FaM earns on Adsense in a month. Given that disparity, it makes sense to spend a lot more time on marketing the editorial business than it does to try to further monetize the blog. Really, if I spent as much time every day marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk as I do writing blog posts (hmm…like this one…), it would be earning as much as or more than I earn teaching, which other than Social Security is my only moderately reliable source of income.

Probably one doesn’t need to rub elbows with other business owners to arrive at revelations like this. But it helps.

Pound-wise, Penny-foolish?

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A new J. Jill catalogue arrived the other day. I’ve been planning to buy another of their sleeveless short dresses in the “Wearever” line, since they’ve finally come out with an actual color—blue. Well, they had an actual color last year—old-lady mulberry—and I bought one of those. So now I have two: the regulation black and the mulberry number.

They’re incredible pieces for women who resent having to have decent-looking clothes dry-cleaned and who also resent having to spend an hour fiddling with their grooming before they can get out the door. All you have to do is pull the thing over your head, throw on some jewelry and a decent pair of shoes, and voila! You’re dressed!

So while I was leafing through the catalog, I came across this hobo bag:

Exactly what I’ve been looking for to replace the pricey bag I bought in a fit of depression, when my dear boss invited me to an expensive luncheon to celebrate my longevity at the Great Desert University a few days after she informed me that I and all five of my staff were to be canned. I’ve been carrying that purse about every day for almost two and a half years, and it’s only just beginning to look a little tired.

The red bag I picked up in Yarnell earlier this year, which was relatively cheap, is already acting like it’s about seen its duty, and I’ve only carried it a dozen times—if that much. The faux leather is starting to sag, and where the purse is supposed to stand up, it flops over. Still fine for casual wear, but it’s not a purse you can carry with you everywhere, in every venue but the ballroom.

Well, so I filed the existence of the J. Jill purse away in the labyrinth of my mind, figuring that if I went out to Fashion Square in hopes of finding a sale there over the Labor Day weekend, maybe I’d buy the purse along with the dress. Especially if they’d give me a break on the price.

But…fortunately before I could get myself to a brick-and-mortar store, I made a little discovery.

Poking around a closet in search of a light bed throw that might be a little less linty than the one I’m using just now, what should I come across but this:

CoachBagWhaa? I’d forgotten I still had the thing. It’s amazingly aged. But y’know what? It’s a Coach bag.

It was covered in dust. I’d stashed it on the top closet shelf because its rolled edges were getting a little worn, and as I recall I’d decided to switch over to another purse. Yea verily, probably the exit-party purse.

After a good dusting and thorough oiling with leather conditioner, what you see above is what I got. Looks an awful lot like that J. Jill bag, doesn’t it? Matter of fact, I like the design a lot better.

I think I paid about $200 for it, so long ago that the Memory of Person does not stretch back that far. Quite some time ago I quit buying Coach bags, to my regret. They got rid of their beautiful classic styles—no doubt because when you have a classic purse that never wears out, you don’t keep coming back to buy more purses. They started plastering their logo, Gucci-bag style, all over their products. And I just hate that. My feeling is that if you expect me to be your walking billboard, you pay me, not the other way around. But they think otherwise: in exchange for the privilege of hauling the Coach corporate logo everywhere you go, they expected customers to pay even higher prices.

Nine West, Fossil, and J. Jill produce comparable bags for a lot less money, without the requirement that you provide free advertising, so I said good-bye to Coach.

Luckily, though, I hadn’t said good-bye to this particular pricey Coach bag. That’s $149 that I will not have to pay to J. Jill for a new purse.

My point here, money-wise, is that sometimes it’s worth spending what seems like a lot to get an item that you use all the time and that will hold up under that kind of wear. The purse I bought over two years ago has been dragged from pillar to post and back again. It’s been used to carry computer gear. It’s been sat upon. It’s been rained upon. It’s been threatened by a chewing puppy. It’s been hauled through the desert. It’s been set on the floor in public bathroom stalls where the management has removed the coat hooks. It’s been searched by security guards time and again. And when I put it away and forget about it, two or three years from now it will be resuscitated and hauled around for another two years.

Same thing with the dresses. J. Jill’s Wearever line is not cheap, and the stuff hardly ever comes on sale. However, the little dresses in that line cover my paunch so I look nowhere near as fat as I am. They’re easy to wear. They wash like a charm and come out looking brand-new. They’re ideal for church, they’re perfect for teaching, and—accessorized properly—they’d probably work for a job interview. I wear one of them at least once a week.

When you’re going to get a lot of use out of something, in my opinion it’s worth the extra money to get something that will last. Cheap junk, like the red purse from Yarnell, wears out long before its time. If you have to replace a $60 item in a year or less, you’re a lot better off paying $200 for something that will last longer than three years.

 

Cherry-picking the Looniness

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🙂  E. Murphy, one of my favorite commenters, engages the discussion that stemmed from a post of a couple of days ago. Says E.:

Okay, you can cherry pick some looniness within the Republican party. But you can also cherry pick some looniness within the Democrats also.

For godssakes women, the world is NOT black and white.

In the wee hours of this morning I was mulling over the issue: what are the roots of our present calamity? I do not see the basis of the irrecoverable disaster toward which we’re sliding on a skateboard as stemming from “looniness,” in the sense of isolated incidents of irrationality or stupidity. I see it as rooted in a deep, intransigent ideology that brooks no dissent from its dogma.

Here’s a little table showing the big missteps we’ve taken since the Reagan era. Let’s remember, too, that today Reagan would be considered “moderate” and Barry Goldwater, regarded as a right-wing loon in his day, would be trending to the left.

I submit that one does not “cherry-pick” right-wing lunacy. The crop of cherries is so thick and so ripe that all one has to do is stand under the tree, hold out a basket, and watch it fill.

Happy Labor Day, for those of you who still have a job. As for those who don’t and those who are marginally employed at a fraction of what you earned when you had a real job: go fish!

 

Weekend Recouping and Recombobulating

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One long round of extreme work! Give me a four-day weekend (mine is four days because I don’t have to go back to campus till Wednesday, thank God) and that’s what you’ll get.

Is this only Sunday?

Saturday morning I decided to return the rockers I’d purchased at Pier One. The stationary outdoor fake-wicker chairs, billed (somewhat clumsily) as “nesting” chairs, worked just fine. But the rockers…not so much. After endless unwrapping of cardboard and twine and plastic, one is left with the chair, its naked feet, and two loose metal rocker pieces.

The lucky purchaser is supposed to slide the holes in the rockers over the chair’s feet and then (what could be easier?) insert screws to hold them in place.

What could be easier, indeed?

Well, the problem is, the chair’s feet don’t align with the holes in the rockers. The only way you can get them in is to bend the chair’s metal frame and force the ends of the legs into the holes.

This is a feat best suited to a youngish man at the prime of his strength.

An elderly woman is not up to it. I explained this when I left Pier One, as their saleslady was merrily telling me it would be no problem while their male manager sulked behind the counter, trying not to be noticed.

More annoying, after I got the first chair unwrapped and realized there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to get the rockers onto it, I noticed that the fake wicker was unraveling.

Experimentally, I unwrapped the feet only of the other cardboard- and plastic-swathed chair and found that noooo, none of the supplied rockers would fit on those, either.

So, back they went.

Wrestled the two rockers back into the car. Shlepped them back to Pier One. Retrieved $225, charged back to American Express. Despite annoyance, was pleased about this. I had other things to spend $225 on.

From there it was on to a Costco run, a Home Depot run, a Safeway run, and back to the house mid-afternoon. Driving around this city through the unholy heat is in-fucking-sane. Drivers here go mad when temps exceed 100 degrees.

Northbound from a very long on-ramp I hit the I-17 at speed—just over 65 mph. As I entered the freeway I could see a guy in my rear-view mirror, moving with the traffic a good long way behind me. He saw me trying to merge into the right lane, so he floored it and came roaring up behind me, trying to cut me off.

He, alas, was driving a Corolla. My aged Sienna has had most of its heavy seats removed but still retains its vast, superbly maintained six-banger. I breathed on the gas pedal and the thing shot forward like a Mercedes-Benz. Or, to speak in today’s terms, like a Titan rocket.

phphphbphbphhhhttttt!

Heat drives white folks crazy.

rockingchairscrapedThe old Cost Plus rockers are tired, but not beyond resuscitation. So I spent most of the afternoon scraping off peeling paint and sanding.

Had to drag them indoors for this activity, because at 108°-plus, it’s way too hot and way too humid outdoors to be scraping and sanding wood.

Despite several layers of paint, they’re sunburned and rain-soaked to the point where most of the paint just chipped right off.

This is either the third or fourth time I’ve painted the damn things. It’s a bitch of a job. It was a bitch of a job eight years or so ago, when I first did it. And each year of advancing age seems to make it more of a bitch of a job. That, truth to tell, is why I wanted to buy new weatherproof fake wicker chairs!!!!! I just didn’t want to do it again.

paintingchairs1By sundown on Saturday the things were scraped and filled and sanded and dusted as best as one can dust old wicker chairs. In the relative cool of the evening before sundown. I applied one layer of paint to the underside and backs of the chairs. This took the better part of an overheated hour.

It also consumed both of the two cans of white paint I’d bought at the Depot. Luckily, though, two ancient cans of white spray paint in the garage were still functional, despite residing there for three or four 110-degree summers.

By the time I finished, it was after dark. I had inhaled enough aerosolized paint to vomit it up for a good hour afterward. That was grand fun.

Sunday morning the runners were dry enough that I could flip the chairs upright and repeat that drill by light of dawn.

Getting the picture about why I really, really did not want to do this again? About maybe why that $225 for those two discounted chairs—a mere $500 for six, all told—felt like one helluva bargain?

Oh well.

They look pretty good  now. By mid-afternoon, when the skies were starting to clabber up again, they were dry enough for me to pick them up and carry them back to the covered patio, where with any luck if it rains tonight they’ll be at least moderately protected.

The effect is somewhat…rustic. They’re weathered, pleasantly weathered. I do like these chairs and wish they weren’t wearing out with age. This latest slathering with spray paint, I expect, will tide them over for another year. I can’t imagine they’ll last much longer than one or two more years. By then, though, maybe I can afford to buy a couple of fake-wicker chairs from some outfit that puts them together, rather than expecting elderly women to construct them.

After my arms quit hurting and my right hand quit shaking, I decided I’d better try to replant the schefflera I’d bought a week ago into a pot that it could live in. Quite a nice plant, this thing from Costco. Figured it could take the place of the dying thing that’s on its last legs in the family room.

So I dragged a heavy pot M’hijito had given me around to the side yard and primed it with some of the potting soil I bought during yesterday’s HD run.

Tried to shake the schefflera out of its plastic pot.

No luck. Trudged into the garage; retrieved the big plant nippers. Cut open all four sides of the square plastic pot the plant came in.

Went to lift the big plant out of the pot. And….

SPLAT!

It fell apart!

Yes. It fell apart into half-a-dozen small plants, each with a root ball about the size of a 99-cent potted plant’s.

So. Instead of paying $12.99 for one large schefflera, I’d paid $12.99 for x + (.99 ·5 y) + ~$8. ARGHHHH!

Jumped in the pool to wash the sweat off. Blow-dried the chlorinated hair. Painted the face. Threw on a moderately presentable dress and some makeup. Piled the plant debris into a box and tossed it in the back of the van. Set out again into the vicious traffic.

Got the $12.99 back from Costco. Didn’t have the nerve to ask them to pay for the large bag of potting soil I’d bought at HD, intending to transplant their fraudulent house foliage.

From Costco, intended to head east on Missouri toward Scottsdale, skirting my son’s neighborhood.

At 15th and Missouri a godawful wreck had had shut down the intersection. Fifteenth was closed northbound; Missouri in both directions. One of the crushed automobiles was an aged, once-silver Honda.

It looked exactly like my son’s car. Trying to convince myself that ten thousand cars a day drive through that intersection, I cut through the neighborhood to get around the accident scene. Headed east on Missouri from Seventh Avenue. Made a U-turn. Drove back to M’hijito’s house.

No answer at the doorbell, no puppy yapping. Stood in the heat silently rehearsing what I would say to the cop at the intersection…was one of the victims a 30ish man? did he have a white puppy with him? where are you taking him? can I take the pup, if it’s still alive?

Finally after what seemed forever a voice from the back of the house hollered “coming!”

Holy God.

Back on the road, eastering, eastering through the madding traffic. Arrived at Scottsdale Fashion Square, the erstwhile home of the upscale.

It’s getting a bit worn with age. Marble steps are cracking. Brass treads, where broken, have been replaced with black tape. No joke.

It’s still populated by upscale stores. The crowds, however, consisted of hoi polloi like me in search of smokin’ deals. What a zoo!

At J. Jill’s, I picked up a coveted little dress at a 20% discount. At Macy’s, I got an allegedly $80 pair of sleek sterling silver earrings for $29. Could’ve gotten them for another 20% off if I’d been willing to use my Macy’s card…no chance of that, though, after the last fiasco, despite their manager’s fine recovery. Dropped by the Coach store and confirmed that a hobo bag I covet costs $298; add 10% tax to that and you’re looking at a $330 price tag. For a purse. And that’s cheap. The really cool bag they had was $425. Before taxes.

Well, it’s clear I don’t get out enough. So long has it been since I visited those rarified climes that I had no idea Pottery Barn had closed its outlet there and been replaced by three new boutiques. Some stores have moved. Others, little remembered and less regretted, have been replaced by new palaces of mercantilism.

I must have walked through thirty acres of merchandise. And the weird thing was…almost none of it appealed to me. In all that huge expanse of expensive products, I couldn’t find anything more than a mid-priced dress and a pair of plainspun earrings that wanted me to buy them.

No wonder the economy is going down the tubes. Americans are learning to do without and prefer it.

Oh well.

Homeward bound. Stopped by a Safeway to grab a bottle of wine, having decided that now is not really the time to ride the wagon again.

Fed the dog. Fixed a piece of steak, a slab of Costco scalloped potatoes, a fine green salad. Wine.

Noticed the dog’s eyes are running. She has an eye infection, lhudly sing goddamn. Sunday night before Labor Day: soonest I can possibly get her to the vet is Tuesday. Soaked paper towels in ice water and applied cold compresses to her eyes. Seemed to relieve her a little. Now we’re having a frenzy of ball chasing.

I have not graded student papers.

I have not cleaned the house.

I have not repaired the kitchen cabinets where Charley scratched them up (again).

I have not dug the new pup-resistant fencing into the ground around the poolside garden.

I have not washed the car.

I have not cleaned the garage.

I have not loved my fellow drivers as myself.

Heaven help us.

Image of God at work: Michelangelo. Believed to be in the public domain.


 

 

 

 

Worrying

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God, I hate waking up at quarter to four in the morning! It seems to happen every night unless I dope myself with Benadryl. And dammit, every single time I awake in the wee hours, my first conscious thought is some worry. I don’t know whether I wake myself up worrying in my sleep (in which case it’s no wonder I grind my teeth…), or whether there’s nothing else to think about in the dark and so the worrying comes naturally.

A dear friend is having some health problems. It’s potentially very serious. I can’t imagine how she’s going to cope…her job is running out and so she’ll soon be without health insurance. I think she figured she could just put her six-year-old on COBRA and try to get on our state’s miserly equivalent of Medicaid herself. But clearly she’ll have to buy COBRA for herself, which will be financially crippling. Awful.

Damned Republicans, getting us into this financial mire.

Speaking of financial mires, our clever right-wing leaders crow that they cut our taxes here in lovely uptown Arizona. To accomplish this, they’re shutting down schools, laying off teachers, closing school libraries, cramming kids into classrooms like sardines, trying to crush the police and fire unions, laying off city, state, and university employees.

Well, my property tax bill arrived yesterday. The county  has devalued my home by over $20,000. And my “reduced” taxes have gone up by three hundred dollars!

Of course, because we were told our taxes not only would not rise, they would drop, I kept the self-escrow for property taxes at the same level as they were last year. So I haven’t set aside enough to cover this bill, nor have I set aside enough to cover the taxes for the downtown house, which we pay ourselves. Son of a bitch.

So that money will have to come out of the money budgeted for me to live on. Which means, effectively, it comes out of grocery money.

If they continue to raise the taxes at that rate—$300 a year—I won’t be able to stay in my home. In two more years, that will amount to a $900 increase. I already set aside $375 a month to cover property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and insurance on an 11-year-old junker. That is right at the limit of what I can afford, even working the equivalent of full time (which is what I’m doing when I’m teaching four sections—this year I’ve taught as many classes as I ever did when I was paid a full-time wage at GDU, and I’m doing it for less than half of what I earned there.)

In April, the city raised water rates 7 percent. That came on top of the 40 percent increase they’d already enacted. So there’s where the $170 water bill came from. Power bills are also beyond the pale: sweltering in an 88-degree kitchen leaves me owing $228 to the Salt River Project.

So I’m going to have to start thinking more seriously about moving.

I can’t sell my house for anything like what I paid for it. The value of this house has dropped to what it was about 15 or 20 years ago.

If I’m going to move into an apartment or patio home, it needs to be in a reasonably safe part of town. That means Scottsdale, probably, which is out of my price range. So my price range leaves me with Sun City. And, god damn it, I don’t want to live in Sun City.

Nor, come to think of it, do I want to spend the rest of my life teaching freshman composition. When I got out of graduate school, which I largely financed by teaching comp as a slave, I vowed that even if I had to go on welfare, I would never teach freshman comp again. But here I am, looking at spending the last functional years of my life teaching freshman comp.

I don’t hate it as much as I used to. And because community college courses, especially during economic hard times, are liberally sprinkled with adult students, teaching at Paradise Valley is a LOT less obnoxious than teaching at the Great Desert University. But it’s still a grind that requires you to spend most of your waking hours reading drivel and feeling that you waste your time trying to teach people in one semester what they failed to learn in 12 or 14 years of grade- and high-school miseducation. If they haven’t got it by the time they reach college, they’re not going to get it. And if they do have it (as some do), they’re wasting their time in your course.

Given this basic fact, teaching freshman comp is a profoundly frustrating activity.

Well, it’s finally dawn. I’d better get up and get going.

Looks like it must be overcast out there. By this hour the sky should be a little brighter. Goody! A hundred and twelve degrees predicted…and cloudy.

{ugh}