Coffee heat rising

Angst

DON’T WANNA WORK…or much of anything else…

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It’s 10:40 Saturday morning and I do NOT feel like working today. Dammit.

Three more sets of busywork “reading response” papers are in from the English 102s. That’s a hundred and twenty-six papers to read! Actually, in each section three students are MIA (thank God). So that leaves “only” 108 mind-numbers to look at and assess.

They’re only  worth 15 points and they don’t actually have to be read carefully: it’s just a matter of looking at them to judge whether our nimrods seem to have read the assigned chapters and tried to apply the principles therein to one of the included essays. Some students are so effing useless that unless you MAKE them read the assignments by demanding that they regurgitate the gist of what they’re supposed to read, they won’t do it.

Even then, sometimes they won’t. One guy obviously just looked at the chapter’s title, which appears in the syllabus, and made up a lot of vague bullshit.

Many students flat-out refuse to buy the textbooks for their college courses. And you can’t blame them: textbooks are horribly overpriced. When it comes to a required bullshit course like freshman comp, which most students highly resent being made to pay for, the textbooks are a frank rip-off. Sixty, eighty, a hundred bucks for a $20 trade paperback? GIVE. ME. A BREAK.

And forgodsake give the students a break.

For the magazine writing course, my colleague and I are trying to concoct a “virtual” workbook by finding websites that contain the same information as the pricey textbook. Really, it would be easier to do that for freshman comp, and I don’t understand why the colleges don’t assign a committee to identify a dozen websites with the instructional content and another couple dozen online essays and articles to examplify that content, and then let us point classmates in that direction.

Even if the students had to sign up for sites with paywalls, like The New York Times, it would be infinitely cheaper than having to fork over some enormous amount of money for a textbook you don’t want and will get rid of on the last day of class, to your significant financial disadvantage.

Ugh. I’ve been sitting here drinking coffee and cruising the Web for the past several hours. GOTTA either get to work or get off my duff, walk the dogs, and do some yardwork.

Yesterday I did manage to get several major chores done:

Cleaned up final (or next-to-final) copy for a client’s 275-page manuscript (single-spaced; that would be something over 500 pages if it were double-spaced the way it’s supposed to be…). Drafted a proposal for said client to send to publishers. Read about 60 stoont papers. Attacked the weeds in the quarter-acre yard and up the alley. Walked the dogs. Devised a yoga routine and tested it (not long enough yet…). Met with my son to discuss the proposed refinance; found him once again unhappy with the idea. Realized he may be right.

My father may have been right, too: mortgage instruments are designed to screw the customer, no matter how cheerily they are presented and no matter how “low” the interest. One might, just might be better served to live in cheap apartments or company housing throughout one’s adulthood, squirreling every penny into savings, and then buy the retirement residence in cash.

God, but the news stinks these days. One exception: Jordan is moved to blow ISIS out of existence.

About bloody time someone got off that dime. If the Jordanians succeed in extinguishing those lunatics, their pilot’s life will not have been lost in vain.

Unlike, we might add, the many lives we’ve thrown uselessly into that vortex.

There’s only one way to bring a stop to extremist attacks on Western targets and on (relatively) innocent locals, and that is to demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt that we will exterminate the perpetrators and anybody who happens to be standing nearby. That is what they understand and that is all they understand.

Sorry to sound harsh, but I grew up in Saudi Arabia. I can assure you, the only reason the Saudis ever pretended to be our “friends” was and is spelled O-I-L. In reality they hate Westerners, they hate Christians, they hate Jews, and they especially hate Americans. That was as obvious while my family was there as it it obvious today.

ISIS represents the worst threat to civilization — any civilization, not just the West’s — since Adolf Hitler. In fact, I would venture to suggest that ISIS is worse than the Nazis, because they have religion behind them, and religion rectifies just about anything. Like the Nazi, they would happily relieve the world of every Jew, every gay and lesbian, every mentally or physically disabled person, everyone they imagine is “immoral,” and everyone who fails to toe their political line. But to that list you can add vast numbers of other nationalities, races, faiths, and non-faiths.

These are people who would not hesitate to detonate a nuclear bomb in New York, London, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Tokyo, Singapore…you name it. Or to unleash chemical or biological weapons on hundreds of thousands of human beings. They would do so without compunction, because they believe God approves.

This is an enemy that truly does embody pure evil. If Americans, Europeans, and Asians do not clear the fog from their vision soon, we won’t have to worry about global warming much longer. There won’t be anybody left to release carbon into the atmosphere. At least, not from combustion sources much more impressive than a campfire.

Cripes. I suppose I’d better get up and get to work. Though under the circumstances there hardly seems any point in it.

Lazied Out???

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ooohhhhhhhhhh…. Has WonderSurgeon turned me into a zombie? Whaa?

Of late, I just do NOT seem to be able to get my act together in the morning. It’s a good thing I don’t have to be at a job come 8 or 9 ayem, because I sure wouldn’t last much longer, at the rate I’m going.

Down at the church, we have what has been dubbed “Switch Sunday”: every third Sunday of the month senior choir sings at the nine o’clock service, meaning we have to surface there at eight o’clock, two hours earlier than our normal choir call. I’ve never been fond of this relatively new “tradition,” because Sunday really is the single day that I prefer to move slowly.

One reason I pay to have the New York Times delivered in hard copy IS the Sunday Times: I want to read the Magazine, the book review section, the Sunday Review, the business section, and the front section (pretty much in that order) over breakfast and a second pot of coffee.

As a practical matter, if I don’t get to the Times over breakfast, I’m not going to get to it, because there are so many other things that have to be done day by day. And so that expensive Sunday paper is going to get dropped into the recycler, mostly unread.

But whatEVER. It’s not that big a deal. I guess. On these inconvenient Sundays I try to at least look at the Magazine while bolting down breakfast, and then the rest of the pile of dead, mashed trees goes into the trash. I’d rather be singing than reading a newspaper, any day.

 This morning, though…f’r hevvinsake!

The alarm went off at 5:30.

NOT, for a change, loafing in the sack for another 20 minutes, I got up, read and responded to a couple of emails, fed the dogs, returned briefly to the ongoing project of de-stinking the slow cooker (which smells grossly of the many pounds of dog meat that have simmered interminably therein), cooked my breakfast, sat down to eat. As I was stuffing a piece of apple into my face, I glanced up at the clock to see how long I had to get dressed…and…

IT WAS ALMOST 7:30!

And my face wasn’t even washed.

Where the hell two hours went, I do not know! Needless to say, I didn’t make it to choir this morning.

Really, since about the third of these five endless surgeries, I simply don’t seem to be able to get moving in the morning. Often these days I’ll be stumbling around the house, feeding the dogs and doing the early a.m. chores and answering emails and checking on students, I’ll look at a clock, and it’s FREAKING 9:30 IN THE MORNING! And I haven’t even gotten dressed yet!

Ugh! What an enormous amount of wasted time!

Somehow, I have got to get over this!

Great News!

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Just heard from the Mayo’s breast clinic: the path report came back NEGATIVE!!

By coincidence when the call rang through I was standing around fiddling with the required self-care procedures and thinking  “ooohhhhh i’m sooo scared the path thing is going to show an invasive cancer moooaaannnn!” 😀

She said the Innocent Boob was clear of any threatening cells; the Guilty Boob still had some residual DCIS, which is what we suspected. The margin was clear, and so it looks like the end of this little horror show is finally in sight.

woo HOOO!

Twiggy_promoAdmiring my new sylph-like self in the mirror, I believe I’ll change my name to Twiggy. 🙂 Remember her?

 

 

 

 

A Modern Massacre of the Innocents

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This Christmas, as we often do, our choir sang William Stopford’s version of Lully Lulla, the Coventry Carol. A survival from a medieval mystery play, the carol tells the story of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which we are told that King Herod ordered the slaughter of all boy children under the age of two in Bethlehem.

Some scholars believe this episode never happened. Indeed, such is the story’s horror that one would like to imagine no king, no leader of men and women could possibly be capable of such a thing. But of course we know human nature well enough to know exactly the opposite is true.

Over at Daily (W)rite, Damyanti Biswas’s consistently interesting blog, we find a cri de coeur and an empathetic declaration of humanity over the Taliban’s mass murder of children in a Pakistani school. Her words are well said.

When we began to rehearse Lully Lulla, it was all I could do to keep from weeping, so vividly did it bring to mind this latest horror. If the Biblical story itself is fable, so be it. Yet it’s emblematic: it tells the sorry story of humanity’s repeated outrages, of massacres of innocents down through the ages. After 2015  years, we don’t seem to have changed much, as a species.

“Why Am I in the English Department?”

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You recognize the allusion, of course. Hint: Mark Harris.

The question of the day, to be more specific, is why WAS I in the English Department? What on earth would possess any sane human being with a sliver of a normal sense of self-preservation to get a FREAKING Ph.D IN ENGLISH????????  What part of “you will never be able to get a decent job that will not leave you tearing your hair” can such a person fail to understand?

Today I engaged eleven years of advanced university education for EIGHT HOURS, trying to untangle the formatting mess left by yet another MS Wyrd crash and then doing things like searching “[any digit] + blank space + a” trying to find every reference to a time of day in 272 single-spaced pages so as to regularize format for each one, roughly according to Chicago style. With curlicues to make allowances for the author.

[Why would I do such a wacko thing? Because AU has written times of day as N a.m., N am, N AM, N:nn a.m., N:nn am, and NN AM. And so on. These all need to be regularized, made to follow the same style.]

So, here’s how this came down:

Last night around 11 p.m., I stumble away from the computer.

This morning around 8:30, I come back to the project. When I turn on the computer, I find a message: Word had to shut down.

Again?!?

This is a constant thing with MS Wyrd: for no good reason that anyone, human or silicon, can figure out, Word will crash. Out of the effing blue.

But this is something new, or so it seems: the program has gone down after I clicked Open-Apple > Sleep.

Fortunately, only three files were open at the time of the crash, one of them very short. Two are easy to restore.

Then we have 272 pages of client disquisition.

He is an articulate client who pays handsomely. And on time. An interesting man. The sort of client for whom one pines to do well.

The restored back-up file comes up and seems not to have lost much data (shouldn’t have: I saved before putting the computer to sleep).

No. It hasn’t lost data. Au contraire. It’s ADDED data.

Every. single. paragraph has been reformatted: “Not superscript/subscript,” proudly advertised in Word Track Changes.

Huh?

Not a single footnote number was ever changed (on my part) from superscript to anything else. And nary a subscript character appears among a single word filling those 272 pages.

These changes are all intertwined with hundreds of edits — I’ve already read 100 pages, and every page has changes on it: at least a few and usually quite a few.

The only way to get rid of the phantom changes is to click “Accept.” If you reject the change, then it converts the copy to superscript!

There seems to be no way to search “superscript” or “superscript/subscript.” The list of edits doesn’t come up.

And — inconsistently, with no rhyme nor reason — in some paragraphs if I highlight the graf and click “accept all,” Wyrd keeps the tracked edits in place. But in some, it accepts all edits. That won’t do, because Client needs to see the changes I’ve made.

On average, each page has about ten of these “Not superscript/subscript” commands.

No joke: that means something like TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY spurious tracked changes to delete!

Some beach!

Shortly I figure out that I can go from the end of the file toward the last edited page and click “accept all” over batches of paragraphs. This isn’t very satisfactory, because I’ve done a number of global searches and replaces, and I really don’t want to lose those. So even though some of these “accept” commands work to get rid of the “not superscript/subscript” things, I have to watch carefully and Ctrl-Z to undo and manually fix each erroneously accepted “not superscript/subscript” command, ONE at a painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing TIME.

This only partly lengthy procedure leaves about 100 fully edited pages to go through, ONE painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing, goddamn infuriating command at a TIME.

Along about three in the afternoon, I find  myself revisiting the question of whether I should shut down the editorial business.

I mean, why am I doing this?

If I wanted to be a typist, I’d hire out as a virtual assistant. Oh, hell. If I hired out as a virtual assistant, I’d make a helluva lot more than I earn as a high-test editor, because there’s one helluva lot more demand for virtual assistants. Some woman at the last meeting of the West Valley Writers group I attended dasted to ask me if I’d type her manuscript.

{sigh}

If I charged enough by the page, I’d make almost as much as I make editing content.

I can’t charge the client for work created because my computer crashed. So today I’ve spent a good six hours working for free.

Do I hate reading freshman comp drivel more than this?

I hate reading freshman comp drivel a lot.

Quite a lot.

But more than this?

Possibly not.

If I took on two extra adjunct courses from the Great Desert University, which pays a Ph.D. almost a grand more than the junior colleges do, I’d earn as much per year as the S-corp earns from my editorial efforts. Actually, all told I’d earn about $3,000 more than that.

It would be miserable, of course. I’d have to hold out for face-to-face sections, which I truly loathe. GDU has lifted all caps from online sections, meaning you can end up with 120 students or more in a writing-intensive course. How on earth would you ever handle any such thing? You couldn’t assess papers. You couldn’t even make the faintest pass at trying to teach. All you could do is rubber-stamp.

Ethically, there’s a limit.

But maybe there’s a limit to this other stuff, too.

Teaching, as miserably paid as it is, provides the only steady, predictable income I have other than Social Security, which is nowhere near enough to live on. The junior-college courses plus the Social Security just about cover most of my expenses, except for property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance. If I drew down only enough to cover those latter gouges, I’d be OK. One or two more courses, paid at university rates, could mean that I wouldn’t have to use retirement savings at all. Not as long as I could mount a course on a CMS.

So. Why am I doing this?

Why am I not in the English Department?

What IS so all-important, really?

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This morning SDXB calls to tell me he’s decided not to drive into town and grace me with his presence half the day because it’s raining and too cold to sit outside on some coffee shop’s patio. He wants to reschedule for some day totally inconvenient for me, and as usual is consternated when I keep telling him I can’t do Thursday, I can’t do Friday, I can’t do….

It’s kind of comical. And probably it’s just as comical that I find it eye-rolling ANNOYING that he calls me up and announces he’s going to descend on me at some time and date of his choice. He seems to assume I have nothing to do but entertain him.

This morning I found myself wondering why I do find that trait so annoying. What on earth do I have to do that it can’t be put off to spend time with an old friend? What’s more important than one’s friends and family, anyway?

I suppose it’s the presumption that he can tell me when he’s going to show up here and I’ll go yup yup yup and drop everything for him.

So what did I do yesterday that’s typical of what I think is so damn important?

• First, the cleaning lady was here all day, so really, I needed to stick around. But that’s not what you’d call do-it-or-lose-it WORK.

• Wrote a post for Writers Plain and Simple, a lengthy one that required some thought and a fair amount of time.

• Wrote a post for Funny about Money, an afternoon bagatelle, but still: content added to a website that needs to be fed daily.

• Deposited five checks, one for the corporation, one laughable adjunct “paycheck,” and three from Medicare and Medigap. This turned into an inordinately time-consuming proposition, because my system and the credit union’s both work at the speed of a stampeding snail.

• Called the Mayo and remitted the amount paid by Medicare and the Medigap insurer, by charging it to American Express.

• Went back into the credit union’s excruciatingly slow site and paid that amount to AMEX, so as to fork it over before I get a chance to diddle it away on prime steaks from Whole Foods. Or some such.

• Entered deposits and payments in Quickbooks.

• Tested the chemical levels in the newly refilled pool; decided it would suffice until the pool dude shows up. Realized I’d better buy more acid, since Pool Dude knocked the lid off the last containerful that was out there and I had to throw out the remaining muriatic acid rather than let it sit there in the yard in an open jug.

• Calculated how long I think it will be before I can lay off Pool Dude, who’s nice but whose services are altogether redundant when I’m feeling well, which I expect to be along about the end of January. Not having to be subjected to radiation will cut a month or more of hassle, time consumption, and suffering off the ongoing boob horror show.

• Vacuumed up leaves off the bottom of the pool that blew in there as the present storm was wafting in on the wind. And cleaned out the skimmer basket and reattached Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner.

• Made an appointment with Mega-Client, who’s back in town and hot to trot. Sent him 100 pages of edited copy.

• Made an appointment with Financial Adviser.

• Added up 2014 expenses and income; then estimated the amount of drawdown from savings needed for 2015 — a frightening figure. Organized that data in an Excel report preparatory to the meeting with Financial Adviser on Friday. Have a bad feeling F.A. expects a market downturn, a sense gleaned from his rather antsy response to my phone call about the 2015 drawdown.

• Corresponded off and on through the day with Novel Author Client, who’s struggling with a scene that he can visualize but is having a hard time putting into words.

• Corresponded with my mastectomy buddy, who will be going in for her DMX shortly after Christmas.

• Corresponded with Windy City Gal, who happens to know how to make these amazingly cool fake boob insert things that Buddy and I both covet.

• Wrote three book reviews for Goodreads, leaving my sticky little fingerprints there in the form of ads for Slave Labor.

• Learned how to view Kindle’s sales record for Slave Labor and corresponded with the art director about the same.

• Corresponded with the director of distance learning at the college, regarding next semester’s workload.

• Took the three Goodreads reviews, converted them to blog posts for Writers Plain & Simple, and scheduled those posts to go up once a week through January 12. That will keep WP&S alive at the rate of one post a week until I’ve recouped from the upcoming surgery, I think.

• Explored the sites of several followers of Writers Plain & Simple and took note of their URLs by way of using them in a round-up, which I suppose I’m going to have to write today,  huh?

• Articulated, in writing, a broad outline for a book on the mastectomy/reconstruction/no-reconstruction drama and began gathering research for the same. Considered whether to seek an agent for this to publish through a mainstream press or whether to add it to the Plain & Simple Press publishing empire. Decided I lean toward the former. Put that thought on a back burner.

• Finally, walked a mile with the dogs.

Really, is any of that anything that could not be handily co-opted by a visit from His Nibs?

What would I have missed doing today had he showed up as announced?

• Write cover copy for PoD versions of Slave Labor and FireRider.

• Try to finish chapter 9 of FireRider, book II.

• Do the laundry.

• Try again to contact a local press that I would like do business with.

• Write and send out this week’s announcement to SBA members.

• Write a newsletter update for clients of The Copyeditor’s Desk; in addition to sending out season’s greetings, add a plug for Slave Labor by way of update, and clue them that the company is now in a position to help them with any self-publishing projects.

• Start working on incoming copy for current issue of Chicana/Latina Studies.

• Write a post for Funny about Money.

• Write the round-up post for Writers Plain & Simple; schedule it.

• Write a new post for Adjunctorium.

• Figure out how to get invited to present to a Chamber of Commerce meeting; begin groundwork for engineering that.

• Create and post a video for the spring-semester 102 sections on how to write a position paper.

• Dream up a subject I might present to my writer’s group and figure out how to get invited to do that.

• Do physical therapy exercises and figure out how to work a daily yoga session into the schedule. 🙄

• Chat with Cox tech CSR over the phone about the slow service (DONE!).

• Visit Cox website, identify compatible DOC 3 wireless modems, and identify retailers, preferably Costco or Fry’s electronics.

• Start nagging M’hijito to come over this weekend (or sooner,  if at all possible), install it, and configure it.

• Walk at least two miles, rain or no.

Huh. I’d better get to work on that stuff…