Coffee heat rising

Angst

A New Salvo in the Stress Wars…

by

Stress: it comes and goes. For awhile you’ll think you’ve got it under control. Then for awhile you’ll realize what a benighted idea that was. I feel like I’m in a constant state of siege warfare with the minor daily stresses that make me crazy.

Yesterday was a seemingly interminable case in point.

Up at 5:15. Feed the dogs, medicate the puppy, bolt down a small snack. Just about out of human food: I can’t stand the oversalted, oversugared, artificially flavored and colored gunk served up the restaurant where I’ll soon be headed, and so always eat something at the house so I can avoid having to order breakfast there. With the cupboard nearly bare, that ration was precious scarce. Brush the pool walls while waiting for the puppy to perform outdoors. Throw on some clothes, wrestle the hair into place, lock up the dogs, pack the meeting gear and a file for the second meeting into the car.

At 6:15 a.m., beloved friend calls, a whimper in her voice. She is miserable. She is sick. She is not car-pooling to this morning’s meeting.

At 6:45 a.m., out the door and on the road to Scottsdale for the weekly networking meeting. Miserable traffic, as usual. At least for a change I’d managed to get the car washed, so (o mirabilis!) I could actually see the road through the glare of the morning sun.

Leave that meeting early so as to get to the next meeting with the designer: way to hell and gone across the county, almost up to freaking Anthem! The pup can’t be left locked in her crate until I get back from this thing, so I fly home to let her out for a couple of minutes. Traffic is just a bitch. Every heavy truck, every school bus that stops and blocks east- and west-bound traffic while some kid ambles up its steps, every bus that stops at every goddamn corner, every gotta-get-there-firster, every nitwit yakking on a cell phone gets in front of me. And naturally, every light turns red as I drive up to it.

By 9 a.m., even northbound traffic on the I-17 is hellish.

One amusement Arizona’s homicidal drivers like to indulge is actively blocking cars from entering a freeway lane from an on-ramp.

You understand, I normally hit the freeway at 65 to 70 miles an hour. The Dog Chariot has a six-banger for a reason… At any rate, I’m not letting any grass grow under my tires.

Some ass who’s a good eight car lengths behind me sees me coming. As I reach the end of the on-ramp, he floors it and deliberately tries to cut me off. He succeeds.

The cowboy behind him thinks that’s a great idea, and he tries to cut me off, too! Now I’m on the shoulder and I’m traveling at 70 mph. The six-banger engages with élan, God bless the thing. I damn near graze his front bumper as I cut in front of him. Eff you, ba*tard! And  .|..

So it goes.

I streak into the Starbuck’s coffee shop, where the designer is waiting, just a few minutes late.

Spend an hour or so discussing graphics and page design for the first Fire-Rider novel (and, incidentally, Old Times). The guy is still good, despite all the years that have passed since we first made each other’s acquaintance. I learn a lot about the unreasonableness of Amazon’s CreateSpace folks and realize probably I should hire them to do the page design for the PoD version instead of hiring my own designer for that. This guy will not do page design any more: too ditzy, too annoying, and too frustrating. All he does is illustration and covers.

I’m out of food. Our networking group’s treasurer has handed me a check for something over $200, to cover last week’s guests’ breakfasts, which (because he had to leave early that day) I charged on my corporate credit card. There are no grocery stores to speak of on this side of town, but there’s a Costco on the way home. Really could do without a Costco run, always a crowded hassle, but I figure at least I can pick up some fruit, some avocados, and some cheese, which will tide me over until I can make it to a real grocery.

There’s no off-ramp, that I know of, from the I-17 to Yorkshire, the east-west street that takes you to 27th Avenue that takes you down to the Costco.  So I figure I’ll go west on the 101 to 35th Avenue — there being no exit ramp from the 101 to 27th, either — and then go south a few blocks to Yorkshire and backtrack to 27th; thence south to the Costco.

Well. There’s no exit ramp on the westbound 101 to 35th Avenue, either. Nor is there an exit westbound to 43rd Avenue

Understand: these are major main drags.

I end up having to schlep all the way to fuckin 51st Avenue to get off the goddamn freeway!

Then I have to circle back on the overpass and drive all the way back to 27th to get to the road that goes south to the Costco.

So finally, pissed royally, I drag in there and find myself, as usual, in madding crowds and standing in line, as usual, behind some moron who has to make a special case of himself and hold up the show interminably.

Back on the road:

I need a new plastic bucket for use in applying chemicals to the pool. The old one finally busted, after ten years of steady use, ten years of being left out in the broiling sun. Naturally, Costco does not sell scrub buckets. So I have to find someplace else. There’s a Lowe’s on Thunderbird, which is directly on the way to the credit union, which otherwise is hugely off my beaten path. I figure I’ll run by the CU, deposit the check, then hit the Lowe’s to grab a bucket, then head home to stash the Costco loot, feed the puppy, wring out the puppy again, and then race to my afternoon meeting.

Except… Lo! The damn check is made out to me, not to the S-corp. The CU won’t let me deposit it.

In my frustration, I fail to think (duh!!!) “just cash the thing and then deposit the cash to the S-corp’s account.” Ohhh no. That would make sense, and we can’t have that, can we?

I notice the “pay to” phenomenon after I’ve trudged across Yorkshire to 43rd Avenue, having had a bellyful of freeway travel.

So I decide to opt the CU. And now have to backtrack again (!!), across Thunderbird back to the Lowe’s, which is on the I-17, which is east of 27th Effing Avenue.

Lowe’s does not carry what you’d call a “good” selection of plastic scrub buckets. In fact, what they have are these flimsy little things with wire-like metal handles that attach through a small hole in the plastic. And they hide them, so you have to track down a sales rep (an endangered species at Lowe’s) and ask where they are. I ask if they have anything any better, and point out that after about six uses, the flimsy handle is gonna snap off the cheesy bucket.

He asks what I intend to use it for. I say “heaving water and acid into a swimming pool.” Slack-jawed ooohhhhhhh…. “This is all we have,” says this worthy.

“Thanks,” I say. “I’ll look at Target.”

The nearest Targets are either all the way to Hell and Gone in Paradise Valley or all the way to Hell and Gone at 19th and Montebello.

I figure to drive home across Thunderbird and down 19th, having had a bellyful of freeway traffic. To avoid the years-long construction project that blocks 19th for several miles south of Dunlap, I’ll trundle down to Hatcher, veer east into a desperate, meth-infested slum (car doors locked!), make my way through the depressing landscape there, and then proceed the rest of the way south on 7th Avenue. You understand: even though this cuts a fair amount of time and frustration off the journey, it takes me miles out of my way.

There’s a Home Depot on Thunderbird just west of the 17. Reminded of that, I think, wonder if they do any better in the bucket department? If so, I could escape a trudge to a Target.

I’m in the middle lane, and so overshoot the intersection into the parking lot. Muscle my way into the fast lane, drive to the next wide spot, pull a U-ie, back-track to the HD, trudge in there, track down another sales rep, and am directed to a shelf full of plastic scrub buckets.

There I find one similar to the deceased: smaller and not as well constructed, but at least it looks like it’ll last for, oh, maybe the better part of a year. With any luck. Decide to buy it, obviating another endless drive to reach a Target.

Home Depot is trying to force people to use its automated self-checkout stands. I hate, loathe, and DESPISE self-checkout!!!!!  Every time I try to use one, I end up all tangled up in it. To make you use them, though, they only have one live human checkout clerk, and they place her AS FAR FROM THE DOOR  AS POSSIBLE. So you have to hike all the way across the huge, annoying, hectic box store to buy one stupid little thing, and then hike all the way back across the store to get out. That’s OK: I need the exercise.

So I’m standing in line, and one of the self-checkout shills asks me if I wouldn’t like to come down and check out my own stupid little bucket. I say, no thank you, every time I try that I end up dorking it up, and trust me, it’s better if I stand in line. She, interestingly, appears to understand whereof I speak.

There’s one, count him, (1) guy in front of me. All he has to buy is a handful of card things that look sort of like paint chips. I figure I’ll be outta there in 30 seconds.

But no.

Whatever these card things are, every single one of them has to be painstakingly and carefully registered and charged up separately. And he has 15 of the damn things.

The cashier, who is decidedly not the sharpest three-penny nail in the hardware bin, s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-l-y rings up the card things. I zone out while she goes through this process and the guy and I stand and stand and stand and stand and stand… Then of course the guy has to — oh, yes!!!!! — make an exception of himself and dicker with her endlessly about how to pay for the goddamn things.

By the time I get home, it’s almost 1 p.m.

I’ve been on the road since 6:45. I’ve had no breakfast and no lunch. The puppy has to be fed, wrung out again, and locked back in her crate (gawdlemighty, poor little thing), and I have to meet the client at 2:00 p.m.

And i. want. a. drink!

You know, I want altogether too many drinks. Just reciting all this shit is making me want a drink, and it’s only 11:00 in the morning!

Let pup out, usher her out the back door. Run to the computer. Get Client’s cell; get his e-mail. Call his cell, tell his voicemail I’d like to cancel the meeting scheduled in less than an hour, but if I don’t hear from him by 1:30 I’ll be there. E-mail the same to him.

Feed the pup, wrestle the Costco and HD purchases in the door, put them away.

Check e-mail: no answer.

Wring pup out again, as best as possible (good luck with THAT!), drag a.m. meeting stuff out of the car, file, try to figure out what Honored Client could possibly want to talk about now (i thot we were done!).

Check e-mail one more time preparatory to locking in poor little pup again.

Blessed, brilliant, lovely, angelic Client has found the message and agrees to defer meeting.

Thank you, God. Thank you, Worshiped Client!

Defrost several huge, wild-caught Costco shrimp. Prepare an incredible meal (you should’ve been here!!) of spectacular shrimp sautéed in butter and garlic, doused mightily in fresh Meyer lemon juice and white wine, served over spaghetti dressed with real tomatoes (they have an actual flavor, can you imagine?), fresh basil from the garden, and pine nuts. As long as the bottle of Kim Crawford is open…what the hell! Drink the damn stuff.

By the time I finish lunch/dinner, I am three sheets to the wind and truly regretting being three sheets to the wind. I don’t know how much wine I’ve consumed, because I poured a fair amount of it over the shrimp. All I know is half the bottle is gone, however much I’ve had was more than the maximum two glasses allowed, and this is far from the first time I’ve swilled down more than the allowed max in the middle of the freaking day.

This, I think, is getting to be a habit. And it’s a habit that needs to stop.

Forthwith, despite the number of full sails to the wind, I start to try to figure out what is the deal with the drinking habit and how I can make it stop.

Here’s what I think:

The midday drinking has Five Triggers:

Stress
Fatigue
Frustration
Hunger
Habit

On reflection, it occurs to me that HABIT is a device to deal with the other four issues, which threaten to swamp my little rubber life-raft. Hunger, frustration, and fatigue feed stress, and stress leads to the drinking habit.

FRUSTRATION has two components.

1. Immediate

→ Having to make money doing things that annoy me or that I dislike, such as teaching composition
→ Dealing with bureaucracy
→ Shopping in faceless big-box stores
→ Falling behind with annoyances and hassles and so not keeping up either with those or with things I’d prefer to do
→ Driving from pillar to post, constantly
→ Endless mind-numbing grocery shopping

2. More remote frustrations

Having to spend so much time doing things I dislike or that bore me
→ Teaching composition
→ Dealing with bureaucracy
→ Killing time shopping
→ Cleaning house, a chore that has to be repeated the next day at this time of year; a week later in better times
→ Negotiating crowds
→ Driving, driving driving

Living in L.A. East
→ I hated living in the L.A. area when I was a kid.
→ If I wanted to live in L.A., I’d live in California.

Having so little time to do things I might prefer to do
→ How long have I been trying to finish Chapter 3?

What could be done about these?

Quit teaching altogether

→ Not the best of all possible ideas. Teaching provides the only other steady source of income after Social Security. I can’t afford to quit teaching.

Minimize, in some way, contact with and dealings with bureaucratic hassles

→ Rely more on accountant/bookkeeper to ride herd on expenses and financial statements
→ Find someone who knows how to navigate medical bureaucracy and Medicare hassles

Could I use some or even all of the teaching income to hire out the jobs I hate?

→ At $80/day, the net income from one section would pay a cleaning lady to come in twice a month.
→ This would leave net income from five other sections to relieve other hassles and migraines!

Find ways to minimize driving and transactions in annoying stores

→ Hire cabs or limo service to do some schlepping
→ Have groceries delivered
→ Have most household and personal products delivered through Amazon
→ Find out how much Amazon Prime costs and compare with the cost of gasoline expended on tracking down such goods

Hm. Amazon Prime costs $100 a year. That’s $8.34 a month. I spend about $80 a month on gasoline. There seems to be, as they say, “no comparison.”

The bucket I bought at Home Depot? You can buy it for the exact same price on Amazon.

Almost everything I buy at HD, Costco, Lowe’s, Target, & waypoints could be had from Amazon. If I had Amazon Prime, I could get the stuff shipped to me for free, and that would obviate a lot of driving through a lot of ugly traffic and would minimize the tedious jaunts to mobbed big-box stores and reduce exposure to clueless customer service types.

Most food items could be delivered, for a modest fee, by various grocery stores. That would obviate even more driving and shopping annoyance.

And what about the East L.A. factor?

Every day, every moment, the greater Phoenix Metropolitan area resembles the ugly, tacky, bourgeois greater Los Angeles area more and more. It’s noisy, it’s ugly, it’s dreary, it’s monotonous, it is an unpleasant environment to live in! The crime, the dirt, the smog, the helicopter noise, the airplane noise, the traffic noise, the ticky-tacky, the crassness, the overcrowding, the freeway craziness, the mobs and mobs of people…all of it, hideously reminiscent of the unlovely time I spent in the L.A. area through my high-school years. In a word: yuch!

Should I move? Where on earth would I go? And what guarantee that the place would be any improvement?

Okay. After all those ruminations, I came up with a few proposed strategies:

Potential Solutions: Stress

Amazon Prime: Use it to order junk that now has to be chased down at Target, Walgreen’s, Costco, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Ace Hardware.

Whole Foods delivers.
AJ’s may deliver.

Once in the past I tried Safeway’s delivery service. Fiasco: because I eat real food and don’t buy much that comes in packages, I have to select my produce and meat carefully. Some high-school bag-boy assigned to throw an order together has no idea how to assess an avocado, a head of lettuce, or a piece of beef. But Whole Foods has nothing but high-quality produce and meat; same is true of AJ’s Fine Foods. I’ve taken to buying most of my groceries in those places anyway. And so…why not pay an extra five bucks to have it delivered?

Find a cleaning lady. Hire her to come twice a month.

Ask Gerardo how much he’d charge to come twice a month. Use the extra time to get him to do yardwork I end up having to do.

Make a conscious decision to short-circuit the drinking habit.

→ Don’t keep liquor or wine in the house.
→ Make iced tea: serve that instead of wine with food.
→ Exercise when stressed: yoga, pool, bicycle, hiking, dog walks.
→ Decide to quit tippling every day.

Et voilà! The fruits of yesterday’s hassles.

This morning I finally finished Chapter 3, BTW.

Entrepreneurship, Work, Dogs, Life, the Universe, and All That…

by

Entrepreneurship is one helluva lot of work. So are dogs. So is life. And if the Universe cares, it would be nice if it would, just once, transmit a message to that effect. 🙂 I hope you appreciate how SEOly I just put every key term in this post’s title into its first paragraph. But honest to god…I am so tired I could weep. Over the past few days (weeks? months? years?), the sheer amount of physical and intellectual work has damn near killed me. The business, the dogs, the lifestyle: hoooleee mackerel!

Bidness:

Client 1: due back in-country after several weeks of hanging out in the country where he lives as a contented ex-pat. Promised to surface Friday or Sat’day. Translate: bigawd, get my project ready for me to review and jaw about no later than about 4 p.m. Friday afternoon.

Human: Yessir.

Client 2: decides to utterly, totally, completely, MASSIVELY rewrite his book. Emits a chunk thereof. Holy shit.

Prospective Client 3: And it’s only 225 PowerPoint slides. How much would you estimate it will cost to edit this project?

Life (Interrupted by Business):

Choir director: Missing rehearsal for what? For only one regular service and the annual concert? Uh huh. Lovely.

Puppy: Doggy water bowls make the best swimming pools ever! And RRRROOOOO how I DO LOVE a mop!

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Business:

Designer 1: sends a new set of page proofs: please read these soonest.

Designer 2: sends two new sets of graphics: please respond soonest.

Designer 3: sends new design with new cover lines: please respond soonest.

Bluehost: down at 7:30 this morning. Down at 8 this morning. Down at 8:45 this morning. Human gives up.

Life:

Son: Bringing sick dog to your house soonest. No need to respond; will let self in.

Human: Deconstructs Pup’s X-pen and turns it into a fence to keep Pup out of the pool, using X-pen’s gate to provide an opening through which Human can pass without tripping on the goddamn dog barrier.

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Veterinarian 1: AARGH crash thud growl bite hit scream yowl THROW!

Veterinarian 2: Bring her in at 2:45 Monday afternoon, with a fresh bottle of dog pee. The bottle itself and the collecting instrument should be freshly sterilized…

Son: Forget small differences that seemed to foretell alienation at best, homicidal frenzies at worst. En route to your house with flowers, special bourbon (!), dog, and my own extraordinarily charming company (the only good thing to happen this week).

Business:

Human to Associate Editor: And this will get the number of assignments for you and the underling to read during the four-week summer course down to four. Think you and Underling can handle some (read “most”) of these?

Associate Editor to Human: That will leave only two of the four for you to have to do.

Life:

Gerardo: We’ll be there at noon to undo the horrific mess Richard the (now-FIRED) landscaper inflicted. Ai, caramba! “What does that mean in analogue time?” Gringa! What do you think it means? See you whenever.

Doctor’s Office: So you say that surgical incision incision is infected? You must come right in! Whaddaya mean you can’t come over here right this minute??? Okay, you must be here as dawn cracks tomorrow.

Human: Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby come ON come DOG we have to fly out the door to the veterinari…

BING  BONG! Gerardo: Bueno! Here we are! Donde the job?

Veterinarian 2: Uh huh. Yeah. This dog indeed does have blood in its urine. It has white blood cells floating around, too. And it has crystals, despite its obscene youth. Otherwise, it’s swimmingly healthy. Take this antibiotic. Take this prescription dog food full of shit no one in their right mind would think of feeding a dog if they had any clue what really goes into dog food.  Call in one week. Come back in two weeks. That will be 58 dollah.

Business:

Human to Associate Editor: And it’s only 225 PowerPoint slides. How much to edit behind me?

Human to Client #2: Palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver…

Human to Client #1: Nothing. Where the heck is the dude? But…silence is golden and do not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Human to  Client #3: And that will be $60/hour…

Human to Designer 3: Fix the cover lines so they’re visible, ALL of them are visible in an Amazon thumbnail.

Human to Designer 2: {discreet silence}

Human to Designer 1: {discreet silence}

Human to Departmental Secretary: Please review the attached 25-page syllabus, as required by the Department and District policy…

Life:

Swimming Pool to Human: CONK!

ogodogodogodogod

Gerardo the Chinese-Mexican Miracle Worker kindly rescued the backyard from the unholy mess Richard left. By the time Richard was done with his answer to the French well I asked for, which was what local landscapers call a “river of rock” (i.e., it was something he and his underlings know how to do), he had bifurcated the yard in such a way as to put anyone who wished to take out the garbage at risk of a fractured ankle. Fortunately he flat-out refused to carry off the mountain of dirt he excavated by way of creating this little fiasco.

Gerardo showed up with two of his slaves (how does he pay these guys on what he charges? He must have something on them!). They pulled all the ankle-twisting rocks up from Richard’s stupid “river of rock” and used them to reinforce the berms around the citrus trees. They shoveled the crushed-granite top dressing off the area around the ditch Richard’s guys excavated, shoveled it off the mounds of dirt they left, hauled the dirt over to the ditch, filled up the ditch with said dirt, stomped it down, filled with more dirt, stomped it down, regraded the yard manually (this is what is called a “Mexican grader”…heaven help them), spread crushed-granite top dressing over the repaired area (you do not want to KNOW what a cubic foot of crushed granite weighs, to say nothing of a cubic yard), and finally spread the remaining crushed granite over what remained of Richard’s mounds, which wasn’t much by the time these guys were done.

P1030062

I paid Gerardo about twice what I thought he’d ask. That is about half of what his and his guys’ labor is worth. I wonder if he would be insulted if, for next winter’s Christmas gift, I paid his tuition for the Spanish-language Master Gardener’s Class at the Desert Botanical Garden. Probably. At any rate, it would be counter-productive: six weeks in that thing, and he’d come away knowing what he actually could earn for his services.

My yard is now back. It is now possible to carry the trash out to the alley without risking a broken ankle. The dogs can now walk across the backyard without risk of incurring a vast veterinary bill. Once again they have a space in which to chase balls and flying toys and each other. Enough of Richard’s rock-flled ditch survives to serve as a half-assed version of a French well, probably reducing this summer’s patio flood by about 50 percent.

The man’s a saint.

Lists as…Transcendental Meditation? Last Grip on Sanity? Other?

by

So as (unfortunately) usual, I fail to get my act together at 5:30 in the morning but instead stumble into the office, directly across the hall from the Queen of the Universe’s reclining room, where she allows the human to sleep at night. By quarter to seven I’ve spent over  an hour working on the client’s stuff and on some PoD formatting for one of my own books. I have not (not, not, no indeed NOT) made the one- to two-mile walk necessary to shuck off the two or three-pound gain I would dearly like to rid myself of.

Dogs are not fed.

Pup has hunger-barfed (so I imagine…more to come) because she was not fed (I think) when we rolled out of the sack as dawn cracked.

M’hijito is supposed to show up a bit before 8 a.m. with Charley, the inveterate amuser of puppies, and so it is now too late to go for a walk. I will remain fat another day.

Must race to get resident hounds fed before Charley shows up, and so race around doing that. To avoid having to chase one of them to Yuma, I sneak out into the garage and slam the door behind me, there to open the garage door and run out and grab the newspaper before The Queen realizes what’s up.

That’s when I notice the cage thingie I put down to deflect dogs from the ant bait I put down yesterday is…moved. Like…REALLY moved…as in pushed all the way to the front of the garage.

Whaa?

AND…there’s no ant baits inside there.

Holy shit. Did Ratty get back into the garage and steal the ant bait? Hm. I know Ratty’s signs, and I can’t see any indication that she’s come visiting. She could easily squeeze in around the security door or the garage door, neither of which fit well when regarded as part of the Roof Rat Universe.

Ratty likes ant baits? Really?

The raccoons could not have weaseled (heh!) their way in: they’re way too husky to wriggle in through the cracks around the door.

BUT…Ratty leaves certain unmistakable signs, wherever she goes. And…there ARE no Ratty signs to be seen.

So that leaves only one suspect: DOG!

Cassie has never shown the slightest interest in ant bait, nor has she ever shown any skill at relieving my home-made ant traps of their bait. Now we have narrowed our suspect list to one: PUPPY!

Pup has consumed two packets of ant bait: lock, stock, poison, plastic container, and barrel.

Sumbitch.

So I look up the ingredient of said ant bait and discover it’s the same gunk people in tick- and flea-infested parts of the country smear on their dogs to kill and repel external parasites. In the amounts Pup ingested (assuming the Ingester was Pup and not Ratty), the stuff is relatively harmless. I mean, it could kill her, but it probably won’t. What’s much more likely to kill her is the plastic she chewed up and swallowed.

Pup is eating well. Cassie is eating well. I’m on the Internet.

M’hijito calls: running late; begs off delivering Charley the Golden Retricver and Perennial Puppy. Thank god.

Call the vet; too early.

With no Charley en route, I realize there’s time for that one- to two-mile walk after all. It’s too late and so too hot to bring Cassie, so I throw on some clothes, grab a hat, and fly out the front door, dodging the enraged Sovereign of All Creation.

While walking…walking…walking, the mind gyrates. So damn many things to do…  Beloved client has sent a large quantity of hugely revised (we could say “wholly rewritten”) copy, expecting an answer along about yesterday. Got less than halfway through the set of page proofs I was supposed to return to the designer yesterday. MUST pay that AMEX bill that’s been gathering dust on the desk for…how long? Why did I not send a receipt to the New England client? Local client paid about half of what was owed… Can I figure out, from my English-major record-keeping, a) how much she actually owed at the outset; b) how much she paid; and c) how much she still owes?  Can I express this without pissing her off? Must take checks to credit union. While up there, better drop by the middle-class Costco up on the freeway, restock. SDXB is supposed to show up here tomorrow; the house is dirty. He especially hates dirty bathrooms, of which I have two (2). Cassie needs tennis balls. I need more CereVE; is there a Walgreen’s on the way to the credit union? Where? I haven’t finished formatting Fire-Rider for the designer. I forgot to post grades. The wound left by the dermatologist’s procedure, performed yesterday, will probably preclude today’s scheduled mammography; why didn’t I call the boob X-ray people yesterday afternoon? The puppy has petrified pee all over her butt again; must be washed. The plants are parched, now that temps are over 100 degrees. Water plants; adjust irrigation schedule. Must call vet about ant baits. Must write new copy: describe landscape from very depressed protagonist’s point of view.

Pup slept all the say through till 5:30. Is that a good sign? Or is she too sick to roll out of the sack for her usual 3:33 a.m. reveille? Pool is getting green; must clean. Plants are dying; must water. Cactus is paling out; must water.

Must finish the current scene: describe the landscape in front of the marching troops, as they drop down the eastern face of the Sierra Madere in about the year 5200 A.D., from the point of view of the very tired, discouraged, and homesick protagonist. Say what? Describe an imaginary scene as seen through an imaginary man’s eyes in an imaginary time? And…how, pls?

AUUUGH! All this in 20 minutes???????

Evidently I’m getting hysterical. Must get a grip.

When I get home, I write a list:

√ Call mammography clinic; try to get out of mammogram
√Call vet
. . .Call Pet Poisoning Hotline
. . .Failing that (which does FAIL), find out about poison online
. . .Figure out what to do
Wash pup
√Pay AMEX bill
Enter data in Quickbooks
√Take $960 worth of client checks and $775 worth of paycheck to credit union
√Send receipts to clients
√While in northwest Phoenix, go to Costco on I-17
Look at local client’s new material
√Bathe
√Clean bathrooms
Continue formatting project
Continue writing current chapter
√Reset irrigation system
√Water parched plants
vTurn on irrigation system for emergency run today
Sweep down pool walls
Return call to KJG
Finish reading page proofs
√Fend off student whining
√Post grades

It’s 3:30. Pup, not yet dead, is sleeping on the bed with Cassie. I’m about to join them in the afternoon siesta. The checkmarked items are done. Didn’t get everything done (yet)…but equilibrium is marginally regained.

Lists. The grappling hook to Sanity.

Stormy Day, Puppy Day

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Mighty stormy-looking skies out here on the back porch with the dawgs. Hasn’t started to rain yet, but it will. Snow is expected in Flagstaff, and the wind started whipping around yesterday. Nothing like the tornadoes expected in more beleaguered parts of the country. But still: 68 degrees and pregnant clouds amount to quite a change from high 90s, sun, and the pool about ready for a plunge. The pups, however, are unfazed. If anything, they prefer weather in the 60s.

Charley, my son’s two-year-old golden retriever, is still a puppy in mind and heart. So Charley and Ruby the Corgi Pup have found something in common: they’re both children. They play and play and play and play — hilariously! They’ve become inseparable except when they’re sleeping, and even then, Charley sleeps in the bedroom to keep watch on Pup in her crate.

These storms are passing inconvenient. Pup still pees about every 20 seconds — she remains to be housetrained in the number-1 department, the only dog I’ve ever had that I couldn’t train easily and fully within a couple of weeks. It appears this is a corgi characteristic. One issue seems to be that she doesn’t consider widdling worth her attention. She’ll get up out of her squat and start wandering around before she’s finished, the result being that she soaks the fur around her rear end. And dog urine sets up like…well, cat food. Forthwith, you have this stinky, tarry stuff all over the pup’s rear end.

I don’t like to wash my dogs when it’s less than 90 degrees outside. But this morning there was no putting it off. So…into the bathtub with Ruby-Doo.

Fortunately, she doesn’t hate bathing the way Cassie does. Today she decided it was a great game. She’s already learned to blow bubbles in her water dish. (True! Did you know dogs can hold their breath, stick their schnozz in water, and blow out through their nose and mouth?) She was having a grand time bubbling and chasing around. And that meant she stayed in the tub long enough to help soak the gunk off.

Now, of course, I need a bath.

But more to the point about the weather, M’hijito has to drive home from southwestern Colorado tomorrow. It can get real unpleasant in southern Colorado, Utah, and northern Arizona when it’s snowing. He’ll hit Flagstaff about sunset, right about when the roads freeze. And he’s driving his dad’s piece of Ford junk. I would really like it quite a lot if that were not happening.

He seems to have been too little to remember when his dad and I would drive home from Grand Junction through crazy blizzards in near-whiteout conditions. Maybe he was sleeping. Whatever. He shrugs it off and doesn’t think it’ll be anything. Hope he’s right.

Men! 🙄

Welp, pup has run out of steam and climbed into her X-crate for a nap. It’s 8:19 a.m., and I am going back to bed. The two clowns have been rousting me out of the sack around 3 a.m. for a midnight excursion to the backyard. If Pup so much as squeaks in the dark, nothing will do but what Charley has to get me up. This morning I never did get back to sleep. That would be 4.5 hours of sleep, thank you. Need to work on the client’s project but don’t think I’ll be doing him any favors trying to do the job in zombie mode.

Happy weekend! Hope you’re not getting stormed on.

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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.