Coffee heat rising

Angst

Monday, Monday

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Another week gone by in a blink. How can it be Monday again? It was Tuesday yesterday, I’m sure of it…

This Holy Week seemed unusually hectic in the singing department. In addition to the usual Wednesday rehearsal, we had Maundy Thursday and then Good Friday with the Stations of the Cross followed by the Chamber Choir singing the amazingly lovely Seven Last Words by Bern Herbolsheimer followed by us — the Senior Choir — singing Lizst’s Via Crucis (yes, in Latin and in German). Then Saturday the Great Vigil with a baptism and a religious service. Then the Easter Day shebang, complete with brass and percussion.

Very beautiful music was performed. High religious emotion was felt. All in all, a pretty busy week.

And all in all, kind of tiring. I’ve been too exhausted to function, most of the time. Pup wakes up around 4 or 4:30 a.m., and once I’m awake, I don’t usually get back to sleep. Since it’s been 11:30 or midnight before I’ve stumbled into bed, that means I’ve been running on fumes most of the week. What little I have gotten done hasn’t been done very well.

This morning, it’s off to the vet for Ruby-Doo’s last set of puppy shots. I should drag Cassie with me, since the eye drops the vet gave me a couple of weeks ago haven’t helped much.

The whole week has been spent in a haze of fatigue. Struggled, usually without luck, to finish writing the current chapter of the latest novel, but I swear, every time I sat down to write, some damnfool interruption came up. Matter of fact, at one point I became convinced that I was being interrupted every 30 seconds, no matter what I tried to do.

The pool system is running OK, I’m told, despite the fact that it’s running at 20 PSI. The water, not having been changed out last winter because of my overall laziness, is infested with phosphates. To fix that, I’ll  have to dump in the better part of a container of an expensive chemical called Phos-Free. This damn stuff clogs the filter. I just had the filter cleaned, to the tune of $150 plus another $85 to have a pool guy come and tell me that it was just fine at 20 PSI, when I happen to know it’s supposed to run at 10 PSI when it’s clean.

So that will be another $150 or $200 (I forget how much the Phos-Free is, but it’s a lot).

The alternative is to scrub algae off the pool walls, all summer long. To do that efficiently requires me to get into the pool, since the best way to clean the stuff off is to wash the walls down with the hose and a high-pressure spray nozzle. Brushing doesn’t seem to work very well — it’s a particularly stubborn variety of green algae, and I can brush until I turn green without getting it all off the walls.

The pool water is warming up (that’s why the algae is growing), but it’s still a little chilly for actual swimming.

Which brings us to the fact that in the haze of fatigue I haven’t felt like or been able to break loose enough time for the regular walking routine. And that means the fat has been sneaking back. It was up to 132.9 the other day, far in excess of the 128.5 I’d like. Then down to 130.8, and now today, after eating a whole lot of oversalted restaurant food at a friend’s yesterday (they ordered dinner from Boston Market, which IMHO makes the absolute best down-home comfort food of any restaurant around here — certainly the best offering of any chain restaurant, and pretty darned good in comparison with even real, local eateries). Today the scale claims I weigh 130.4: two pounds overweight, by my lights.

So there’s another something that needs to be attended to.

Spent way too much time trying to format the adjunct rant for print-on-demand, following CreateSpace’s Word template. Time-consuming hassle, involving the usual Wyrd catastrophic crash with attendant loss of data in all open files, much redoing of work already done, much cursing, much tearing of hair. And after all that, the designer said it’ll never work.

And…OMG. Wish you could be here to see this!

Puppy has just found a new game here on the back  porch:

Waterbowl Frolics!

She’s got her little front feet in there and is splashing and digging around, apparently trying to catch tiny bits of dry leaves floating around in there. But better yet, she’s learned she can make bubbles in her water bowl! She sticks her schnozz in and blows out through her mouth and nose — just like a little kid playing in the pool — and goes burbleburbleburbleburbleburble. That is SO HILARIOUS!

She is now, of course, soaking wet, so she’s gone off to find some dust to lay in,  the better to coat herself with mud. This may not be so hilarious in another 40 minutes, when I have to pack her into the car for her vet-schlep.

So much to have to do, and so little of it getting done: get the adjunct thing online; get the diet guide/cookbook online; finish editing the novel and get that thing going. And I just don’t seem to be able to break free time to do that, at least not when I’ve got the mental wherewithal to focus on those jobs.

Just when a spot of time opens up, some client or the job presents a new chunk of paying work, which of course has to be prioritized over all this other stuff. Finished up with one client’s project last weekend, with depressing results. Two sets of papers incoming from the maga-writing students; finished those at 10:30 last night. And just as I was about to pop a muscle relaxant in an effort to beat back the latest back pain incursion enough so as I might manage to limp down the hall to the refrigerator, in came another iteration of another paying client’s book. He’s entered major rewrites and wants me to go through the ENTIRE damn thing AGAIN from beginning to end, line by line and character by character.

Oh God. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read that book.

But I can’t complain. He pays well. And, bless him, he’s smart as a whip, a good writer, and in possession of some truly interesting subject matter.

I can’t complain, assuming I don’t care a whit about my own projects. {sigh}

Progress Made: Business; Progress Made: Personal

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So, a new designer came up with a really nice cover design for the adjunct rant, to be called Slave Labor: The New Story of American Higher Education. Hot dang! It looks very handsome. The e-book conversion dude is very pleased. So am I.

Slave Labor is ready to go except for the cover design; plus I need to proofread it on Kindle. It will go live first as an e-book and then as a PoD softcover.

Meanwhile, the diet guide/recipe book is also ready to go…except for the cover design. Title to be How I Lost 30 Pounds in Four Months…Without Hardly Trying. It also will appear first in e-book format and then become available as a bound book.

The novel, Fire-Rider, is also ready to go. Another designer, the former art director of Arizona Highways and a talented illustrator, is in the finishing stages of creating the cover artwork. That book needs a map (of a fictional place) and a timeline (of a fictional era…or two or three), so it’ll be awhile before it arrives on the market.

And I continue to try to struggle through the next book in the Fire-Rider series…around more work, more hassle, and more ditz than the human mind can conceive.

Client with the book that we hope will go to the University of California Press was back today with a fairly thoroughgoing revision. It’s looking good. But it occupied a chunk of time for which a lot of other demands were competing.

The puppy continues her stealth peeing. She pees by mental telepathy: she’s on one side of a room and magically a puddle appears all the way on the other side. So on the advice of people at the corgi forum where I hang out, I consulted with a trainer. Got a “free demonstration”…another term for “sales pitch.” This outfit, which uses a remote vibration collar, charges upwards of $600 to persuade your hound to be a gooood doggy. Way upwards. They charge $225 for the collar alone, which you can buy for less than a third of that on Amazon or through a pet store. Free instructions for use are scattered from one end of the Web to the other.

Interesting. But it consumed an hour of time that should’ve been used otherwise. Another half-hour or 45 minutes was wasted at the Corporation Commission website where, as per usual, the form to file this year’s annual report didn’t work. Onward to trying to get through the day’s challenges:

√ Wash laundry
√ Dust
√ Clean bathrooms
√Walk 2 miles
√ Download stock photos for cookbook; send to designer
√ Wash comforter, store for summer
√ Connect Kindle to wireless; figure out how to work it
Send secret codes to e-book guru
Find out about westside writer’s group membership
Write the rest of current Fire-Rider scene
Start a chart of ongoing events in that series
√ Call grill guy, make appointment
√ Take pool cleaner to Leslie’s, get fixed
Clean and shock-treat pool
Figure out what’s wrong with watering system; fix it
Prepare Cassie’s veggies
√ Shovel out office
√ Fertilize and deep-water citrus
√ Get rid of old blue backwash hose
Clean floors; steam-clean floors
File S-corp’s annual report
√ Wrap gift for M’hijito & do birthday card
Check for more maga-writing student papers

A-a-a-a-a-a-a-n-d just as I reached this point, about two hours ago, Tina sent her part of the latest opus, in which she tried to figure out a complicated tangle: three single-spaced pages of 10-point type, 75 end-notes that sort of imitate Chicago’s notes-&-bibliography references. What a mess. She looked up every single reference and couldn’t find some of them. I looked up the ones she flagged and found a few, but others: ?????????

It is now midnight and, as you can see, I have not finished this post. As I have not finished many of the things that needed or wanted to be done today.

I give up. I’m going to bed. Tomorrow I have to get up and sing.

Creative Work: Good for Your Health?

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Next week, lhudly sing huzzah, I finally get to go back to the cardiologist for his requested three-month check. Not exactly looking forward to it. But I have some kind of cool stuff to report to him…some anecdotal stuff that’s possibly of interest to the rest of the world.

As you may recall, the bodacious CardioDoc delivered a large litter of kittens when he discovered that I’d discontinued gulping the pills he’d put me on, because three or four weeks into the thing they were still making me so dizzy it was dangerous to drive and I felt at risk of falling in my house, where I happen to live alone, with no one to notice me laying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip. He also tried to convince me that the side effects, of which these were only two, were all in my silly little head.

Despite his sh!t-fit, I still felt doubtful that my blood pressure readings were consistently so high that I should make myself sick by swallowing pills that may or may not be necessary. So I tried another cardiologist.

He said, having viewed the record I’d made of almost daily readings tracking progress on and off the drug, that he did not believe I needed to be on blood pressure meds, but he asked me to continue keeping track and to come back for another consult.

 So…after three months of dutifully pumping up a blood pressure cuff (dutifully checked against the doctor’s equipment) and faithfully recording every measurement every day, a few interesting phenomena emerged out of the fog of data.

First, I do occasionally experience alarming blood pressure spikes. These happen during or shortly after particularly stressful events or periods: a long, long hassle with a difficult, frustrating, ENRAGING editorial project; a visit to the doctor’s office (I just hate going to the doctor!); day-long stretches of ditzy, stressful work; a couple of days of drinking too much (three drinks in a day is too much for me). These subside, and in between the readings are in the normal range, and in fact fairly low for someone my age.

 Second, swearing off the sauce, weirdly, does not cause my blood pressure to drop. In fact, it seems to do the opposite. I hopped on the wagon shortly before Lent started, figuring this would be a good little Lenten sacrifice. Heh. What that has now done is provide data showing average BP on and off the sauce.

Five days off the sauce in March produced an average BP of 127/74, and that included a stress-induced spike of 140/80.
Five days on the sauce in February and late February: 118/69.

 Say what? Must be a fluke!

Trying again: five days on the sauce in early February: 126/75. Not great, but still less than the teetotaler’s average. That’s nice. I guess whenever Lent is over, it’ll be safe to go back to my evil ways.

But there’s more: These figures are showing something else that’s much more interesting.

Lately I’ve been working on another novel. This has caused me to spend several hours, whenever I could break them loose from paying work, at  creative writing. This is not necessarily easy work. At one point last week it took two days to grind through about three paragraphs.

That notwithstanding, every time I’ve taken the BP after an hour or more of living in a fantasy world and writing about it, the readings have been way down. I mean, like 107/69, 110/68, 112/67…wow!

D’you suppose there’s a connection?

I find I feel a great deal more relaxed after choir rehearsal, even on an evening that follows a perfectly crazy-making day. Haven’t tested the BP directly after walking in the door from rehearsal (it’s usually late and I want to go to bed, not fiddle with the annoying and uncomfortable gadget).

Huh. Kinda stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’re doing something that makes you crazy and you do it all the time because (arrrhhhh!) you do it for a living, the stress load would tend to push your blood pressure skyward. Substitute something you find satisfying (even it it’s also fairly uphill work), and maybe you’d feel less stressed. Ergo, maybe those BP figures would come back to earth.

I wonder what would happen if all you did was creative work? That is, work of the kind that you enjoy because it’s challenging but satisfying, and because you find it fun or enjoyable. To use a current trope, work of the kind that puts you in “the zone,” where you’re not even aware of time passing.

The bead-stringing, for example, doesn’t fall into that category, at least not for me. It’s just another ditzy and frustrating activity…hours of focusing on something that’s so boring it glazes your eyes and that often has to be undone and done all over again.

But the fiction writing, even if I have to go back and rewrite – and I do commonly write and rewrite and rewrite again – is utterly absorbing, in a pleasurable way. It is, in effect, a form of daydreaming.

Come to think of it, I started writing the first novel during a period when something was needed to distract from a great deal of psychic pain. I had recently divorced and was discovering that was evidently a mistake – or if it wasn’t a mistake, the temperature out of the frying pan wasn’t any cooler than it was inside the pan. I was living with a guy who was driving me screaming nuts, and I didn’t seem to be able to get free of the relationship. Though I had a full-time job, pay was low and I suffered from bag-lady syndrome in a big way – probably for good reason. My father had disowned me. My son refused to speak to me. And the work and politics that come with an academic job are, shall we say, not much fun.

Today I’m certainly not wrestling with that kind of nonstop, day-and-night distress. I no longer need anything to spirit me away from a crazy-making job and a crazy-making personal life. But nevertheless, apparently dreaming up a fictional world, reviving old characters, creating new ones, and putting all that in action is a relaxing thing to do. De-stressing, we might say. Maybe even objectively stress-reducing.

You know, if I could make money off these things – and it wouldn’t have to be much money – I would cheerfully quit the editorial labor, drop the teaching, and spend the rest of my days living in various fantasy universes. If it’s true, as it appears, that one needs a great deal less money than one thinks, I really wouldn’t have to earn much on these things…maybe a net ten grand a year. Peanuts!

If I were doing this all the time – four to six hours a day – I’ll bet I could crank two of these things a year. Over the course of say, three years at that rate, one would build up a backlist of self-published e-books that just might return that much. Hm.

Let’s say, for the sake of a round number, that you netted $2 apiece on an electronically published novel. To net $10,000, you’d need to sell 5,000 copies. But if you had six books out, then to generate 5,000 sales you’d need to sell only 833 copies of each book. Per year, that is. And that, in the strange alternative world that is Amazon, may not be unreasonable.

Wonder if you can have your low blood pressure and eat it, too…

Another Day, Another Dollar…someday. Maybe.

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Okay, this is it. I have GOT to get my act together!

This morning I overslept big time. Awoke at 7:30, about the time the Thursday ayem meeting was starting. Called the speaker to let him know I’d be a half-hour or forty minutes late — he wasn’t there yet, either. Ten minutes later, FLEW out the door and hit the road.

No. Make that “hit a wall of traffic making like a molasses tsunami.”

The fake cowboy DJ on the radio remarks that there’s an estimated 95-minute back-up — that would be an hour and a half, he helpfully translates — on the eastbound 101 at a downtown exit.

We sit through six signals at the intersection of eastbound Glendale and State Route 51. Evidently every eastbound commuter who’s heard this news has dodged off the I-17 (which merges with the 101 downtown and is capable coming to a dead standstill when any significant event occurs). They’re all headed across the surface streets to the other southbound freeway, which arrives downtown several miles to the east of the wreck site.

So it’s quarter after 8 by the time I reach Scottsdale. The program is over and people are sitting around chatting. The chiropractor has already fled for another meeting, but others are socializing, and that’s nice. Chat for awhile; then burn some more gas to get back home.

The assembled company is looking and feeling a little groggy. At 3:49 a.m., reports George the Elder, an Amber Alert went off and rousted EVERYONE out of the sack with a shrill squeal and a desperate-sounding announcement. Some woman’s ex-boyfriend called the cops and claimed she threatened to harm  herself and her brats. She claims that is not so. The cops apparently doubt the accusation enough that they are not filing charges.

Whatever is true, the result was to jolt every cell phone owner in the city awake in the wee hours of the morning.

I’m thinking I may try again with the cell phones. So far I’ve really hated the android-type phones I’ve tried and deeply resent having to pay so goddamn much for something that a) I consider a nuisance; b) I can’t figure out how to work; and c) I hardly ever use and don’t want to use. However, it’s just so risky to be schlepping around the city without a phone when there are no pay phones left anywhere… My son has extracted 100 minutes a month with no contract for his iPhone with T-Mobile (whose service I loathed) for just $30 a month (plus the cost of the contraption). That’s annoying but not impossible. So if — and only if — I can persuade him to help me learn how to use it and help me get T-Mobile’s erratic billing practices as much under control as possible (they don’t bill you and then they cut off your service), maybe I’ll sign up for that. At least I know how to operate Apple’s hardware.

Lo and behold, it’s very easy to turn off the Amber Alerts on an iPhone. If and when I get this device, that will be the first order of business.

What an annoyance! As though in a city of 4.2 million people, I’m likely to spot some homeless woman’s three children at 4 in the morning! A homeless woman who lives halfway to Tucson…

Back at the Funny Farm at 9:30. Starved, of course: no time for breakfast, and I do not eat at The Good Egg (our meeting place), which like most chain restaurants serves processed foods poured out of boxes, bags, and cans. Still haven’t lost the two pounds I picked up on Monday at the IHOP.

And in the “still haven’t” department, it’s now 11:30 in the morning and I have not started on the client’s project, which I surely would like to get done today, so as to ship it off to him at the earliest. If I don’t quit writing this blog post soon, though, the possibility of reaching that little goal will be much diminished.

Met with him for almost two hours yesterday (imagine the number of hours that will be required to put all that content-heavy palaver on paper!). He arrived back from London with an airplane cold, thank you very much. By yesterday evening, it looked like I was coming down with it, in spite of my having driven straight to a store and purchased a package of sanitary wipes with which to scrub the hands, the computer, and the car’s steering wheel. But this morning I seem to have thrown it off.

What I have not thrown off, evidently, is stone laziness.

And so, to work. I suppose…

Lordie!

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…lordie, lordie! How many hours is it between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.? Only 16? Really?

After tossing off yesterday’s FaM post, I worked until 6:00 p.m. on the client’s book. Then spent the entire evening setting up the Canvas site for the magazine-writing section that starts on March 3. It now has just enough students to make — if one drops between now and then, four hours of free work go down the drain. But if I don’t get started on it now, then I’ll have a bitch of a crush at the last minute.

All of the announcements have to be redone, Spring Break having thrown a monkey-wrench into my carefully calibrated calendar. (Oh! alliteration!!!) That’ll be another hour or two of work. Hope that’s all.

The client is pushing to finish the book before he has to leave the country in two weeks. And last night a new project came in from another client, one of the bright lights of the Far East whom I’m not about to turn down.

Gained another pound overnight, even though I didn’t eat much. That’s two pounds in two days, after Monday’s salt-filled breakfast at IHOP followed by a lunch of pasta and scallops. Am getting exactly zero exercise. The dog is sick and can’t walk far, and I haven’t had time to break loose an hour to go trudging around the neighborhood.

Helles belles. I didn’t even have the energy to brush my teeth before falling into bed last night.

Uh-oh…

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Dog is off her feed. She’s been showing some reluctance to eat over the past week or so but, being a corgi, finds it well-nigh impossible to turn down a pile of food.

She’s been licking the tile flooring, too. This is a sign of a doggy upset stomach. (Don’t we all lick tiles when we feel bilious?)

This morning she’s finally given in to whatever is ailing her: left half her food in the dish.

And that is unheard-of. Since corgis live to eat, it’s a bad sign.

Nice timing, just when I’m about to shell out a pile of money for a pup and then some more money and then some more money and then…and then…and then… Can’t really afford a big vet bill for Cassie just now.

Damn. It’s been one ungodly expense after another ever since the first of the year: the trees, the eyes, the glasses, the contact lenses, the landscape repair, the dentist, the puppy, the nagging need for clothes that fit… Holy mackerel. Or is that holy doggerel?

If I were still using the old bookkeeping system wherein I put $200/month aside for emergencies in a cookie-jar savings account, by now — the middle of February! — the short-term emergency fund would be drained. That savings account only had about $1,000 at the end of December. I’ve spent at least four grand since then.

It’s all coming out of the gigantic pile of dough I threw into checking for the purpose of supporting me through 2014. Because of course I’m earning a little each month — at last a check came in from the community college district, and the Social Security Administration is also throwing money into that checking account — the bottom line doesn’t look so gut-wrenching. Certainly not as gut-wrenching as a savings account balance of $0.00.

On the other hand, that pile of dough has to cover taxes and insurance, which in 2014 will come to around $5340, assuming I don’t have to buy a new car this year. What I’m concerned about is that if these extraordinary expenses continue, they’ll eat up the set-aside for those unavoidable gouges.

And that is not good.

To avoid running out of money this year, I’ll have to see to it that some $4,000 is made up by sheer, raw frugality: the slack will have to be taken out of the food, clothing, entertainment, gasoline, and household budgets. I bought another couple pair of Costco bluejeans yesterday, since running the washer every couple of days isn’t very practical. That will have to be the last clothing purchase for the next three or four months. At least.

It still astonishes me that I can get into a pair of jeans with the number “8” on them, and it’s even more amazing that jeans that fit and last can be had for $15.99. I returned the annoying bras to Soma — was amazed that they took the damn things back — but then replaced them with two more from Saks, where I finally found a sales-lady who was willing to wait on an elderly woman (rarity of rarities!). So no net gain was had there, except that now I have one (count it, 1) bra that doesn’t hurt outright and one that’s comfortable enough if I don’t wear it longer than about 45 minutes.

Welp, here’s Gerardo with his campesinos. And so, to work…