Just finished reading Abraham Verghese’s engaging book, Cutting for Stone. It’s one of those novels that pulls you so completely into its world that you feel sorry when it ends.
It’s the story of the orphaned and abandoned twin sons of an Indian nun and an Anglo doctor who grow up as Ethiopians in a charity hospital near Addis Ababa. The main protagonist is forced to flee during a period of civil unrest, goes to medical school in the U.S., and ends up as a respected surgeon, along the way nearly dying when his past comes back to haunt. The novel follows the two boys’ lives—and those of the people around them—from their birth into their adulthood.
The vividly drawn characters, interesting narrative line, and abundant detail create a rich tapestry, so that even when the plot waxes a bit melodramatic, you willingly set aside disbelief. It’s a hefty, solid, and highly enjoyable novel.
Verghese, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, has been compared to Salman Rushdie. Maybe. To my taste, there’s a significant difference: Verghese is crystalline in his clarity. He seems not to be drawn to the postmodernism that makes some of Rushdie’s work inaccessible to the literal of mind. And, it must be said, no one is likely to burn this book in the village square.
Whatever its literary merits (which I think are significant), Cutting for Stone is highly recommended.
That’s it. This year I have one goal and only one goal: find a way to manage my time so as to get most or all of my work done and engineer several hours every day for exercise and healthy relaxation.
I’ve suspected for quite a while that one reason the belly has been a mess is the 12 to 17 hours a day I sit in front of a computer screen, seven days a week. As I sit here coping with the cascades of chores that each and every action spawns—and following my whim across the hills and dales of the Internet—the house gets dirtier and dirtier, the dog grows shaggy and shabby, the yard goes feral, and, on days that I don’t have to go out the door, I neglect even to take a shower or brush my teeth.
When M’hijito came over to spend the afternoon and evening on Christmas Eve, I had to get up and race around the minute my feet hit the ground. Along about 6:30, the dog threw up all over the bed and me—merry Christmas! So first crack off the bat, it was haul all the bedding out to the washer, scrub the barf off myself, clean the floor, and treat the sickly dog.
Since I’d managed to get a fair amount of housework done the previous day, the time between dawn and my son’s arrival was occupied with preparing the elaborate Mayan bean recipe I planned to take to the Christmas Eve choir potluck, which takes place between the 8:30 service and the midnight service, and then with a little light cleaning and dinner prep. This was all surprisingly relaxing, and for the first time in God only knows how long, my stomach didn’t hurt.
That confirmed my suspicion: getting off my duff, walking away from the computer early in the day and not going back to it has serious curative powers. The kind of work I do is endlessly frustrating, the sort of niggling little tasks that seem to beget scores of new tasks before a job can get done. Christmas Eve, for example, I sat down to do one little chore associated with next semester’s courses: enter in Google Calendar the dates and times I’d devote to grading next semester’s student papers. Ought to take about ten minutes, right? An hour and a half later I was still at it.
Fooling with a computer is like eating Crackerjacks. You can’t just do one thing. You start on task A and then discover that you need to do task B before you can complete task A, but task B leads to task C, which you know you’d better do right now or else you’re going to forget it, but task C entails task D, which you now have to do to make task C work and then you’re reminded you did forget task E so you’d better do that while you’re at it and…before you know it, three hours have passed, a beautiful afternoon is gone, you haven’t brushed your teeth or fed the dog or even pulled on a pair of bluejeans, and you’re running late for whatever you’re supposed to be doing in the real world. Like Crackerjacks, it’s bad for your teeth.
To say nothing of bad for your health and bad for your sanity. This has got to stop.
The question is, HOW? Except for about six hours a week spent standing in front of a classroom, almost all my work is done online. So I don’t do anything unless I sit down in front of a computer, and because of the self-replicating effect of computer tasks, the minute I do sit down in front of a computer, I’m trapped like a bug in flypaper.
It seems to me the solutions fall into two categories: drastic and not-so-drastic.
Drastic:
a. Quit blogging. I love to write and it’s gratifying to know that somewhere out there someone wants to read my maunderings. But it’s obscenely time-consuming, and the sense that you’re in some sort of competition for page rank, Alexa rankings, traffic, ad revenues, and whatnot is absurd and destructive.
b. Take my classes completely offline. Abandon the online magazine writing course and stick with freshman comp. Junk the monstrously time-consuming, brain-blasting, hair-ripping Blackboard and do everything on paper. Don’t let students anywhere near a computer, and refuse to answer e-mail from the little darlings.
Not-so-drastic:
a. Never turn on the computer until after the dog is fed, the human is washed and fed, the house is picked up, and the human and the dog get at least an hour of exercise. In personal finance terms, this would be like paying yourself first—retrieving some healthy savings out of your budget before you start spending.
b. Set an alarm clock to go off after about two hours of crack-of-dawn work. At that point, stop working, get up and get going. If a blog post doesn’t go up in the morning, it just doesn’t go up.
c. Schedule blocks of time to do specific tasks.
We know that scheduling blocks of time for specific tasks works only marginally. If I’m not done with something by the end of its scheduled period, I’ll keep on working, consuming the planned free time with…yes, more bug-in-the-flypaper time! We know that if I finish a task before a block of time ends, it’s far more likely that I’ll start Stumbling or pick up some other computer-oriented project than that I’ll get up and clean house, clean me, or go out for some fresh air. So that’s off the list right now.
I suspect the alarm clock ruse will have the same effect: I’ll just turn the nuisance off and continue with whatever I’m doing.
The idea of resisting the computer until healthier things are done has its blandishments. The problem there is that it will cut into the number of hours left to plow through the daily 12 or 14 hours of work. This will lead to more impossibly late hours, which grows tedious. By 10:00 or 11:00 p.m., I’m so sick of working I start to hate the work itself.
I’m not real thrilled with the idea of junking Funny about Money. But it has to be said: that would return two or three hours a day to my life. Often I ask myself what else I’d be doing. But the answer is obvious: cleaning the Funny Farm, taking care of the garden and pool (which as we scribble needs to be backwashed), bicycling around the neighborhood, walking the dog, or climbing a mountain.
As for taking all my classes offline…hmmmm…. Grading papers electronically hugely speeds that dreary task; when I first started using Word’s “track changes” and “comments” functions, I found it took about 30% less time to read a set of papers online than it does to grade them by hand. At the time, however, my institution used FirstClass, a much simpler course management program than the bloatware that is Blackboard, and at one point I even built my own website in MS FrontPage and had students submit papers by e-mail. Blackboard should be renamed Blackhole, because that’s what it is: a black hole for instructor time. It vacuums up hours like a warp in the space-time continuum.
This semester instead of having the freshmen do most of their work online, I sent every one of their learning assignments over to the copy center and had them printed out as a gigantic course packet—59 pages, not counting the 12-page syllabus and the three-page calendar. Instead of having them do all that busywork…uhm, all those learning experiences through Blackboard, which requires me to look at the junk and pay students to do it in the currency of the classroom (grades), I’m going to make them do this stuff in the classroom and then go over it in class, forcing them to LOOK at it and discuss it. This will occupy a great deal of otherwise vacant class time and make them look twice at the exercises (when under normal circumstances they glance at the stuff once, through glazed eyes).
Instead of grading the stuff, I’m going to collect exercises at random, so they never know when they may or may not get a score for what they do in class. Raw fear should keep a few of them awake. And as the University of Phoenix does, I’m going to tell them that the exercises are there to help them succeed in the course, and that those who do the exercises will perform better on the (much more heavily!) graded assignments. This strategy cuts the number of columns in my grade book from 21 to 11. So that may be useful.
How to engineer this for a course that’s completely online, I don’t know. Because my tenured colleague, whose course this really is, wanted me to assign four full-length magazine articles instead of the two plus exploratory projects I’d built into the eight-week course, I dropped the drafting and peer reviewing stages, the cumulative daily brainstorming exercise, and the in-depth market research project. However, having discovered that like most beginning freelance writers these folks are stunningly stupid about crafting an article to fit a market, I had to build and include a market research assignment for each article. This left, despite the cuts, exactly the same number of assignments to grade as last semester: 15.
The solution to that, obviously, is to drop the online course. This would cut the total number of papers to grade from 36 to 31; the trade-off would be an extra three hours a week in class, plus commute time. Probably not worth it.
What to do?
Overall, I think the most conservative and reasonable strategy to try first is staying away from the computer until a few hours of living a life get done.
This will mandate that on some days, blog posts will not happen, or they won’t happen until late evening. But that may be a good thing: more readers seem to see and comment on posts that sit online for a couple of days. While content may still be king, when you’re cranking a post or more a day, you may actually be losing your readers in a fog of copy.
If that doesn’t work, then I’ll have to make a major change in the way things happen around here.
Image:
J. C. Leyndecker, Saturday Evening Post covers. Public domain. Layout found at Lines and Colors. Father Time with Baby New Year. Illustration from Frolic & Fun, 1897. Believed to be in the public domain.
LOL! I’m getting so senile I can’t remember how long the thing has been online. Both the current WP version and the old WordPress.com site show December 24, 2007 as the first post, but in it I’m nattering on about biweekly pay, and I know I had 15 online kittens when GDU and PeopleSoft switched us over to that system. Plus I’m casually calling my son “M’hijito,” assuming readers know who I’m talking about. So that can’t be the first post.
I think Funny went online a year earlier, in 2006; it was born in iLife, and that site no longer exists. After a year or so, I switched the blog over to WordPress.com, and then when it was monetized, Mrs. Micah migrated it to BlueHost. In any event, just now 1,378 posts reside on Bluehost’s server.
Among the high points of 2010 were Funny’s $100 win in Free Money Finance’s March Madness contest; the money went to the All Saints choir. And several friends wrote guest posts for Funny after I fell and dislocated my shoulder or at other times:
Some of 2010’s best articles have little or nothing to do with personal finance. I’m afraid where that subject is concerned, my flame is flickering low. It’s getting hard to sustain a burning interest in personal finance, since so many people now are saying the same things over and over. And over. It’s not that I’m no longer interested in money; just that I’m not inclined to repeat the same platitudes from now till Doomsday.
Consequently, Funny has been drifting on the tides of general interest: favored subjects have been education, politics, lifestyle, and the endlessly fascinating pageant of humanity. While all of these things bear on personal finance directly or indirectly, few posts on such topics dispense advice on balancing your budget and getting out of debt. Once or twice I determined to sharpen the personal finance focus—hence the rather flat-footed series on how to get your PF life in order. But really, it’s become hard for me to sustain interest in the subject, at least as it’s presented on most PF blogs.
I think in 2011 I’m going to let Funny become whatever Funny decides to become. Rather than forcing myself to stick with a topic that’s become rather stale, I’m going to write on whatever interests me at any given moment. If you like whatever that might be, I hope you’ll stick with Funny.
My father, being a Texas boy (he used to say the best thing about being from Texas is being as far from it as you can get), loved black-eyed peas. I was never nuts about them, because Southern recipes overcook them to an unappetizing state of sogginess. But in my grown-up incarnation, I learned that they lend themselves to butter-braising very nicely. If you buy them fresh or frozen and cook them to just the far side of al dente, they can make a nice side dish. But first…in honor of New Year’s Eve, when black-eyed peas are said to bring luck to the celebrants, below is an authentic Hoppin’ John recipe, along with the best corn bread I know how to make.
Hoppin’ John
You need:
2 cups dried cow peas or black-eyed peas
1/4 pound salt pork or one meaty hamhock
2 cups cooked rice
salt and pepper to taste
2 Tbsp butter
Ideally, you should soak the peas overnight. But if you’re getting a late start, cover the peas with water in a large pot; bring the water to a rolling boil and hold it there for one minute. Then turn off the heat and allow the beans to soak for one hour. (Skip this step if you’re starting with fresh or frozen black-eyed peas.)
Drain the soaking water and cover the softened peas with fresh water. Cook with the pork until the peas are tender, but be careful to keep them whole. Only a small amount of liquid should be left. When the beans are done, add the cooked rice and season to taste with salt, pepper, and butter; simmer another 15 minutes to combine flavors.
Serve with cornbread and butter. Add a nice green salad and you’ll have a full, healthful meal.
Cornbread
You need:
1/2 cup white flour
1 1/2 cups yellow or white corn meal
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 Tbsp baking powder
3 eggs
1 up milk
1/4 cup cream
1/3 cup melted butter
more butter to oil the pan
Butter a 9 x 9-inch or 8 1/2 x 11-inch baking pan generously. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Place the pan into the oven to warm it while you’re combining the cornbread ingredients.
In a mixing bowl, stir all the dry ingredients together to combine well.
In another bowl, beat the eggs well with a wire whip or hand mixer. Mix in the milk and butter. Using a wooden spoon or the wire whip, mix these liquids into the dry ingredients; stir to combine thoroughly. Add the melted butter and combine well.
Pour the batter into the hot buttered baking pan. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until the cornbread pulls away from the surface of the pan. Serve with lots of butter and honey. Yum!
Yuppified Black-Eyed Peas
Here’s how I like them…
You need
1 bag of frozen black-eyed peas
a tablespoon or two of butter
herbs (fresh or dry) such as marjoram, oregano, or thyme: to taste
a little green onion
fresh parsley, if you have some around
salt and pepper, to taste
cayenne pepper or Tabasco sauce, to taste
water
Bring a pan of water to the boil. Dump the frozen peas into the water and allow to cook a minute or two. Drain the peas in a colander. Toss the butter into the hot pan. When the butter’s melted, return the peas to the pan. Add some herbs, as desired; stir to combine. Cover the pan and allow the peas to simmer gently over low heat until they’re cooked to your taste. I like mine softened but not soggy. At the end of cooking, stir in a chopped green onion and, if you happen to have it, some chopped fresh parsley.
To serve, season with salt, pepper, and (if desired) cayenne or Tabasco sauce.
This post is a rerun of one published a year ago. Hoppin’ John is a perennial favorite, and the recipe is a handy one.
Have you noticed the groundswell of blogospheric opinion in favor of MozRank, a new website page ranking system? Google PageRank is moribund—some rumors suggest it will soon go away altogether—but even if it weren’t, many of us are frustrated with its inscrutability, immutability, and apparent unfairness.
From what I can tell, MozRank is a metric devised by an outfit that calls itself SEOmoz. It ranks your site according to a group of standards based on incoming links and purports to show the site’s relative popularity. Apparently advertisers are beginning to pay more attention to this metric than to PR.
Go to this tool to see how your blog MozRanks. It not only gives you some stats, it offers some useful, if machine-generated, observations and critiques that may help you increase visibility. You can also try this one, billed as a website grader—it gives slightly different information, also full of interesting data.
Google might do well to take note of the number of bloggers who are attracted to MozRank…strikes me as yet another symptom of Google’s aloofness from its market. Check it out:
How does MozRank compare with Google PR when it comes to ranking your site?
PR still shows FaM at 3, where it’s been for the many months since Google decided to bump everyone down one or two levels. It was there before FaM rose into Alexa’s top 100, it stayed there all the time FaM hovered at that stratospheric height, and it’s still the same now that FaM has dropped into the 200s.
Using Blog Grader, MozRank gives Funny a grade of 90 (unclear what this means, but it seems to be more or less adequate) and a rank of 56,536 among 595,676 other blogs SEOMoz has graded. It shows an estimated traffic rank of 322,549 for highest unique website visitors out of 4 million blogs. The SEO Authority, whatever that might be, is 0, probably meaning something in the guts of FaM’s WordPress code isn’t activated or working right.
Running Website Grader on Funny generates a grade of 99; we’re told that “a website grade of 99/100 for funny-about-money.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 99% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness.” Okay…I’ll buy that! 😉 This tool provides some interesting insights. It doesn’t like the number of images, for example—slows loading (and it must be admitted, that silly infographic about the bees does take half your lifetime to load). It says the reading level is at the primary/elementary school level (seriously?). And it gives the site a Moz ranking of 5 out of 10. That’s more like what PR used to say, before it demoted all but the biggest sites.
Whaddaya think? Have you tried MozRank on your site? How do you like it?
It’s gettin’ mighty cold out there! And dark. Here in the middle of the afternoon, all the lights in the room are burning against the twilight gloom that seeps in through the windows.
A big cold front has lurched in from the West Coast. We’re supposed to see rain all day today, tonight, and tomorrow and then, as is common when a winter storm’s cloud cover lifts, a hard freeze. Thursday and Friday temps will drop into the low 20s, once again killing every plant in Phoenix that still possesses a leaf.
Under the kitchen counter and not pleased
I’ve hauled in every potted plant I could pick up or shove onto the dolly. The dining room and family room are populated with them. They’re not pleased with me for cheating them of their chance to soak up some unsalted, unchlorinated water, which is what falls out of our skies, so much superior to what barfs out of the tap. But it will rain again. This freeze will happen only once in the next four or five years. They will be glad to spend the next few nights indoors, those plants.
Gerardo came by with his 16-year-old son, one of those adolescents who starts to look like a young man before he can lift a can of beer to celebrate his new mustache. Wrestled the two surviving strings of old incandescent Christmas lights into the lime tree, in hopes of fending off a repeat of the dieback the last freeze dealt it three or four years ago. There really aren’t enough lights to do much good. We hung a shop light up in the middle of the canopy, too. Hope these will emanate enough heat to save most of the tree.
***
My neighbor Terri got a new air conditioner today. The AC dudes spent a third of the day, most of it in cold, pouring rain, wrestling the old unit off her roof and wrestling a new one on. It possesses a sterling new quality: QUIET! Yes. Last time I looked out there, it was humming softly to itself: quieter right outside my beloved west deck (the Leafy Bower) than the swimming pool motor. This is nice, very nice: in the past when Terri’s AC unit came on, the racket was enough to drive one inside. I hope it saves her as much on her bills as it does in noise relief!
***
Gerardo looked askance at the AC dudes. He refused to leave until he saw that I’d locked the security door on the garage’s west side, which the AC dudes could observe in action all the time he and his son were fooling around out there. {sigh} I’m afraid he’s becoming Americanized.
Gerardo emanates decency. He’s one of those men who revives your confidence in the human race. If you’ve ever traveled deep into Mexico, you’ve met a number of men and women like him: gracious, polite, and genuinely kind. I imagine when you live in a small village, it’s easy to see who’s morally challenged, and so one probably aspires to common decency. Whatever the cultural impetus, it seems to work. Gerardo makes me want to move to the Yucatán, whence he came.
When I first met Gerardo some years ago, he seemed preternaturally trusting. Naive, some of us might say. But alas, Candide takes instruction well, and now, even though with his friends he’s still his Old-World self, he doesn’t waste his goodwill on everyone anymore.
***
As we were untangling the strings of lights I’d heedlessly tossed into a box last winter, the mailman walked into the garage to deliver the first of the two pair of tights I’d bought to go with a couple of the tops captured in Monday’s bargain-hunting frenzy. These were the black Danskins.
They look great with the white Nygård tunic bearing the gaudy peony (or whatever it is) and good enough for government work with the long black knit top. The latter, I think, will be mostly for around-the-house; the former certainly fine for the grocery store and waypoints. But oh! They are so comfortable! Really, I didn’t want to take them off.
The style of wearing tights under a tunic, long a fatlady strategy, is probably passé—my daughter-in-sin, a chronic yo-yo dieter, used to affect this combination when she was feeling tubby. But gosh. Who cares? It makes me drop about 20 visual pounds! It’s far more comfortable than my usual uniform of Costco jeans and knit tops. And…mirabilis! These things don’t have to be ironed!
Quite a few other tunic-length tops reside in the closet, begging to be worn with them.
***
The American Express bill arrived too, along with the tights. Holy mackerel: $2,330!
What on earth happened to my $800 budget?
Well, $520 or so of that was paid by M’hijito, who bought a new dryer at Sears. We charged it on my card so I could get the AMEX kickback, and he instantly wrote me a check to cover it.
Then there was the down payment on the ottoman I’ve coveted at Crate & Barrel, which I planned to pay from diddle-it-away savings.
And the $450 for 2011 Delta Dental coverage. I have got to get my teeth cleaned! Been afraid to set foot in a dental office since my coverage lapsed last May. And I suspect I need at least two new crowns. There’s a waiting period…hope I can last through it! La Maya has a dentist whom she describes as the (hunky!) Dentist from Heaven, so as soon as his office opens after the New Year, I’ll try to get in.
The Times double-charged me again this month, one of those habits of hard-copy periodicals that tends to drive one away from subscriptions. Amazingly, they always contrive to do this in months when I’m already overcharged.
And, since none of this explains a $1,500 budget overrun, this was definitely an overcharge month!
At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail describes a kind of spending exhaustion. That’s exactly how I’m feeling, even though most of this month’s outrageous expenditures were really not extravagances but things that were truly needed. I feel the same way: would like to spend the next month in full frugal mode. Hold the bills, please!
Just finished reading Abraham Verghese’s engaging book, Cutting for Stone. It’s one of those novels that pulls you so completely into its world that you feel sorry when it ends.
