Coffee heat rising

Computers

Is It Just Me…or Is It Just Chaos?

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Beer! God’s greatest gift to Personkind…

Amazingly, I slept past my usual 3 a.m. wake-up call. Didn’t roll out of the sack until 7:30 in the morning. That’s a lot of sleep for an old cave woman. If we’d still been living in little tribes on the veldt, the entire clan would have been consumed by a sabre-toothed tiger around 3 :00, while the elder slept through the mayhem.

Fortunately, the only carnivore in evidence was a corgi, who also slept through till sunrise.

This has been one of those days. Nay, one of those weeks. You know: the “whatever can go wrong” variety?

When I came home the ’tother night from the Thanksgiving feast, fed and significantly refreshed, my attention was again drawn to the strange streaks on the bedroom walls I’d noticed before but, having no strength to fart with whatever that was, decided to ignore. About halfway in (I’d guess) to recovery from the present bronchitic episode, I explored.

Yes. Well. Those streaks looked wet because they were wet. As in…you know…water.

And that’s what they were: condensation from the two steamers that have been running in that room just about nonstop for the past six weeks.  The walls were coated with vertical puddles of water! These mixed with the ambient dust to form mud puddles.

Fortunately I have a lifetime supply of those Mr. Clean wall scrubber sponges, purchased from Costco in enough quantity to accommodate the cleaning lady until death do us part.

Equally fortunate: the water had condensed only on the room’s two exterior walls. This, presumably, because of the temperature differential between the outside air and the heated interior.

As it was, it took an hour to pull out the bed and scrub those two walls down from ceiling to floor. Jolly fun! In the middle of the night.

Laptop developed a wackshit quirk late last week, disconnecting it (so we’re told…but maybe not so much???) from iCloud. Now I have to traipse it to Scottsdale tomorrow…oboyoboy, i can hardly wait.

But that’s only part of the problem. It’s also hanging the cursor — totally disabling it so that I have to force-quit the computer and crash all the programs that are open in order to get the machine back to where it will function. This appears to be associated with a Washington Post game I like to play, but why that would be is profoundly unclear.

A-n-n-d Word just hung when I tried to reopen a file that was crashed in the most recent force-quit. So now I have to crash out of that.

The mail program crashes at random, for no discernible reason. And I keep getting a nagging pop-up message demanding that I sign in to iCloud — even though I am signed in to iCloud. And…none of the present and past passwords I have for iCloud seems to work, nor does there seem to be a way to reset the password in any way that makes any kind of sense. Or that works.

Apple’s formerly superb customer service has gone down the sewer. Until just the past few weeks, they’ve had THE most amazing phone techs, who could solve anything and fix anything over the phone. The last three times I’ve called, though, the people on the other end have been, shall we say, dumb as posts. How the Hell they got hired escapes me. They not only don’t identify the problem or come anywhere close to fixing it, the last nitwit actually made it worse.

So…that’s disapppointing. Interestingly, they’ve quit sending “how’d we do?” emails…presumably, then, Apple is fully aware of this.

Now I have to spend half the day Monday schlepping the MacBook to the Apple Geniuses, way to hell and gone in Scottsdale (since Apple kindly closed the central Phoenix store) and probably will end up having to ship the thing off. This will entail the usual endless arguments over my antique Word and Excel system. And of course, yet another endless trip to the recently dystopiified Scottsdale Fashion Square.

Really, I need to download LibreOffice and learn to use its word processor and spreadsheet software. But I cringe: I am SOOOO done with the electronic learning curve.

Speaking of the marvels our Our Technological Age, some strange email purporting to be from FeedBurner came in…go to site, fix this, fix that. WTF? Guru Grayson suspects it’s phishing, but in any event, FeedBurner was installed long before he took over wrangling the site. He advises that I should go over to FeedBurner’s website, sign in, and see if they really are bellyaching at me. Of course, it wants a password.

Well. That thing was installed by a previous web wrangler. If I ever had a password (which I highly doubt), I don’t have it anymore.

Back to Grayson. “The program is junk and no one is using it anymore,” says he. So it goes. One of us will deal with that later. Much later.

Still coughing. It’s s-l-o-w-l-y getting better, but at this rate it’ll be weeks — probably several months — before the hack goes away.

To frost the cake, I screwed up the Call-Blocker. Accidentally blocked the dermatologist’s number — is there a reason their robocall nuisance called on a Saturday night(!!!!!!!) to pester-remind me about next Tuesday’s appointment? Can’t unblock it following their instruction booklet. Now I have to get their techs on the phone — they’re not in on Sundays — and figure out how to undo that mess.

Amazon Prime video has hung up. So I guess not only may I not play an idle video game, neither can I watch one of the very few videos there that appear to be worth wasting one’s idle moments on. End up with an old John Wayne clunker. Thrill-a-minute… 😀

Oh, god. I’ve seen this thing. Soooooo long ago it was, and yet I still remember the opening scene.

Under Frikkin’ Petty Siege…

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Ever feel like you’re under siege from all directions? In a petty way, I mean.

There is, of course, under siege, Main Edition:

  • Your car deliberately drives itself into a utility pole.
  • Your cat croaks over.
  • Your roof leaks and melts the ceiling drywall.
  • Your house burns down, flood from the leaky roof notwithstanding.

Petty siege is not that kind of assault from the Fates.

Petty siege is the one-little-annoyance-after-another variant. An act of petty siege does not entail major catastrophe or heart-rending tragedy or budget-busting surprise expense. No. Petty siege is when every stupid little thing that can go wrong or that can make you crazy occurs, one after another.

9:00 p.m. For the second time, the MacBook barfs up an error message claiming I can’t get into iCloud and must enter a password. It won’t accept any of the several word/number combos I hope to be the password. I spend an hour or more on the phone with an Apple customer service tech, who is uncharacteristically stupid. We go around and around and around and around in circles and get nowhere. Finally iCloud starts working again — at random, not by virtue of anything we’ve done — and we conclude it must be a problem with Cox’s connectivity. This, not before I’ve fucked up my passwords, leaving me pretty much in the dark as to what combination of letters and numbers applies where. I give up, frustrated and angry.

10:00 p.m.: In comes an email from Amazon demanding that I pay $8 for the OxiClean that was never delivered.

3 a.m.: Wake up and can’t get back to sleep.

5 a.m.: Give up trying to sleep; decide to pass time on the Internet. Get the “you can’t get into iCloud message” again. This time before calling Apple, I send myself an email. It goes through, eventually. I go to iCloud and open a document. The MacBook forthwith delivers the document. I decide to forego another hour of frustration on the phone. Wander off, the mystery unresolved.

6 a.m.: Rain dripping off the roof is hitting a plastic drain cover, making a weird drumming sound. Dog is alarmed.

6:10 a.m.: Try to get the dog to go outside to do her business, which she declined to do in the rain late last night. Not a chance, Human! quoth she. She doesn’t want to get wet. Have to go outside into the middle of the yard, bare-footed in the rain, and call her to follow me. Then wait until she decides she can manage to do the job in spite of water falling on her head.

6:30 a.m.: Wipe the mud off the kitchen floor. Lay down one of the late Cassie’s pee pads in front of the back door. These things make efficient mud-catchers, BTW.

7:00 a.m.: Get an Amazon CSR on the phone (mirabilis!!!). She says the bill was sent in error and claims it is hereby canceled. Yeah, Right. We’ll see about that.

8 a.m.: Pool guy shows up, just as the heavens split open. He’s at the front door, in a downpour. I invite him in, of course. He treks through the house to the back door, Ruby excitedly dancing along. So much for Luz’s shiny clean floors, rendered that way less than 48 hours ago…

9 a.m.: The nuisance phone calls start up again. Despite the CPR 5000 Call Blocker, which has been a marvel, more and more nuisance callers have been getting through, most of them by spoofing local numbers. By 10 or 10:30, I’d been interrupted four times by these pests.

10 a.m.: My beloved, rustic, eccentric-old-lady electric heater — an old-fashioned “heat dish” — throws a hissy fit. Its alarm goes off in a buzzy blast, the kind of noise it makes if someone picks it up or moves it or tips it over while it’s on. It’s on, all right, at Day-Glo blast because it’s cold and damp in here. But it hasn’t been touched or jiggled in any way…unless we had an earthquake that I failed to notice. Unplug that.

10:40 a.m.: Stumble across my second, back-up eccentric-old-lady electric heater, stashed upside down in the back of a closet where a more organized search failed to unearth it earlier. Plug it in: seems to be working. Decide against driving through the rain to buy a new space heater. Ugh.

11:00 a.m.: More and more e-mail spam comes in through a blog contact page. Earlier this morning I disabled the Contact Page at The Copyeditor’s Desk by way of circumventing the bastards. So they go over to Funny about Money and send their BS through its contact page. Now I have to get into that site and delete that Contact form.

11:30 a.m.: Another goddamn nuisance phone call. Traipse back to the office, intent on calling CPR 5000’s customer service to ask after workarounds. First, though, I go so far as to read the instructions. (Isn’t THAT quaint!) Discover that I can enter codes to block “Name Unavailable” callers, VoIP Rogue callers, and “Withheld/Private” callers. Jump through the hoops to accomplish that.

12:08 p.m. Another nuisance phone call, this one from area code 213. Can I block all incoming from (213)? Yeah, I can…but that could be problematic. Though I have no friends who would call me from that area code, I could occasionally do business with clients in Southern California. This is, I think, the sixth nuisance call and we’re not even halfway through the day’s waking hours…

The problem with blocking each number as it comes in — well, there are several problems. In the first place, to block a number you have to pick up the receiver and then punch in a code. When someone picks up the receiver, of course, that alerts the robocaller that someone is on the other end of the line, which triggers an avalanche of further calls. And in the second place: virtually all of the numbers you see on Caller ID are spoofed. And the robocaller is programmed to generate literally an infinite number of phone number spoofs, something made possible by the fact that telephone numbers contain 10 numbers now.

12:32 p.m. A mighty deluge of water is pouring out of the sky. The back patio floods. So far it hasn’t reached the back door’s threshold, thanks to Gerardo’s guys having removed the plastic covering over the shade structure, which prevents a back-up by allowing water flowing off the roof to disperse evenly. That’s something. I guess.

12:41 p.m.: Another nuisance call from my area code. And of course, blocking one’s own area code is contraindicated. So is blocking most of the exchanges within your area code: who knows when someone will call from such an exchange?

12:47 p.m.: Discover, deep in the complicated instructions the Call Blocker, that to block a call with the “#2” code from a cordless extension, that extension has to be plugged into the call blocker! Holeee shit! But no.., not so! Here online, the how-to-block instructions say “answer the call from a DECT 6.0 wireless handset then press the # key then the 2 key…” Yes, my handsets are DECT 6.0. Okay, guess that’s been working, anyway. For all the good it’s doing me…

12:53 p.m. I’m hungry. I want a beer. And I want a nap. The roof is rattling to the approaching thunder squall.

‘Bye!

Good things…Dumb things

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In the GOOD THINGS department… Have you ever noticed how little disasters seem to lead to large benefits? Why is that, d’you suppose?

Case in point today: the busted tooth disaster. How did I NOT want to have my muzzle cut open to remove that broken tooth? And how did I TOTALLY not want to pay out my entire goddamn year’s tax refund to an endodontist for the privilege? Let me count the ways…oh, wait! I can’t count that high.

But…oh, yes, but…

With that cracked fang out of there, the mouth doesn’t hurt annnnyyy more.

That is correct: no pain. Zero-point-zero-zero twinges, stabs, or aches.For the first time in a couple years, I can chew on that side of the maw…and did you know your taste buds are different, one side of the tongue from the other? Yeah: food tastes different (read BETTER) when you can munch it on the other side of your mouth.

I know: weird.

Yet another benefit of the Battle of the Busted Tooth: whilst convalescing, I learned about Pacific boxed soups. Not that I hadn’t tried a few of them. But canned (and by extension, packaged) soups are not my cuppa. My experience with canned soups and broths has been that they’re oversalted and they taste of industrial chemicals.

But I had to eat something. One of Funny’s readers had recommended the Pacific brand, so I picked a variety of them at Sprouts.

Hot dang!

These things taste like REAL SOUP. I mean, they taste like that soup would taste if I’d made it myself, upon mine own stove.

The potato soup? Outta the way, Julia Child!

The tomato soup… What? It seems to have…well…tomatoes in it. The sweet potato ginger Thai soup? To DIE for.

What? Today, after having had a lovely and interminable morning farting with the computer, I finally rose from the chair into which I had been frozen along about 11 a.m., starved and craving a ration of strong drink. Remaining in the cupboard: a little box of Pacific brand lentil soup.

Dump into pan. Add a little chard. Heat. Zing up with a squeeze of lemon. Use it as an excuse to pour a glass of wine. And…

Dayum! How do they do that? Once again, it actually tasted like real lentil soup. If I made a giant pot of lentil soup, it would taste just like that.

In other precincts, check out this little post at Quora: it’s garnered 242 “likes” since I put it up just a few hours ago. Probably because it’s kind of funny. Stupidly hilarious, we might say, if we were cynical enough…

In the Dumb Things department: might as well ’fess up: I just do not have it anymore when it comes to techno-talent.

Yea verily. Back in the Dark Ages, I was ahead of the wave. Always on top of the computer revolution. And all that bullshit. But today: I do not care soooooo much that I can’t remember stuff I learned and knew and used for years.

Last night I set up the first raft of FREE READS Fire-Rider stories to post automatically starting about 7:00 this morning. There. All done. Nice, eh?

Heh.

Well. It would be if I were still even faintly competent with computers.

What did I fail to take into consideration? Wellllll….  With a blog, the most recent post is what appears first to the reader. Soooo… If you posted chapter 1 and then chapter 2 and then chapter 3 and then chapter 4, your reader sees your posts effing BACKWARDS: she sees chapter 4 FIRST.

Arrrghhhhh….. Yea verily, I failed to remember this basic factoid — i.e., the computer universe is unstuck from reality every which way from Sunday, which in computer land is the last day of the week, not the first day. So when I got back from this morning’s wee-hours doggy-walk, I found that the first few posts had appeared…bass-ackward.

So I had to sit down and repost every goddamn entry, with the first entry to go online last, so that it appeared at the top of the queue…

THEN…then I discovered that for the life of me I can. not. remember. how to build a widget.

Worse yet, I do not want to know.

Absolutely positively not. I do. fucking. NOT. want. to track that BS down and relearn it!

See why I don’t own a smartphone? Because I do not want a damn telephone that’s smarter than me, that’s why.

 

Phone-dango!

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So… I’m in the Costco thinking about replacing my houseful of phones, the current system evincing signs of advanced age. All the batteries are running down, so every time I turn around I pick up another dead handset. And lo! There on the shelf at the Costco is this elegant Panasonic model. It’s an elaborate lash-up, very much like mine only updated for the 21st century. Not only does it include 87 gerjillion (well…four) wireless handsets plus the required answering machine, this thing includes a call-blocking feature similar to the much-missed CPR Call Blocker.

I threw my CPR Call Blocker out after Cox barged in and forced its customers to switch to VoIP, having been told it wouldn’t work with Cox’s accursed modem. Cox, however, now offers NoMoRobo, supposedly the be-all and end-all for nuisance call blocking.

Not so much. The CPR Call Blocker 5000 cut the nuisance calls to at most one or two a day, but more typically to none.

NoMoRobo? Holy sh!t, what a nuisance! It takes the robocall nuisance and multiplies the aggravation by a factor of about 10. It does not block robocalls, because the robocallers automatically generate thousands, hundreds of thousands, and ultimately (one presumes) millions of fake phone numbers. They target your area code and phone exchange, or one close to where you live, so that incoming calls appear to be coming from someone in your neighborhood. The kids’ school, perhaps. Your neighbor across the street. Your pharmacy, telling you a prescription is ready. WhatEVER. Pick up the phone, and you get a scam.

The deal here with NoMoRobo is that it can not be programmed to block all calls in a given area code. None of my friends, acquaintances, or business contacts have the same exchange as mine. This means that any call incoming from this exchange is, by definition, a scam and nothing but a scam.

I get between six and twelve such calls every day, starting around seven in the morning and running through till nine at night.

To block spam calls, you have to go to NoMoRobo’s website, type in the offending phone number, describe the circumstances, and send the squib. This turns an ordinary nuisance into a time-consuming nuisance. And it’s pointless: the scammers don’t care that you blocked thus-and-such a combination of figures…their machines are constantly generating new combinations.

Even when NoMoRobo blocks a number, it lets the first ring jangle you up! So…yeah. That’s real helfpul, isn’t it? When you’re trying to focus on something — or hell, trying to take a nap! — the god damned phone jerks you away from what you’re doing, even if it’s a blocked call!

Most of the calls, however, are not blocked, because the spoofers generate many, many more calling numbers than NoMoRobo can catch.

At one point, I suggested to their alleged customer service that they should allow users to block entire area codes. They said ohhh no! That can’t be done!

Well, it sure as hell can be done, because the CPR Call Blocker does exactly that. It can be programmed to block calls from whole countries, to say nothing of local exchanges.  So either NoMoRobo’s developers don’t want to be bothered with making their system do that, or their customer service people are not altogether forthcoming.

At any rate, when I saw this fancy Panasonic wonder-phone, I thought hot dang! Kill two birds with one stone: replace the aging Uniden phones and get a built-in call blocker!

So I grab it off the shelf.

Having become ever-so-much-more wary over time, though, before opening the box and setting up this complicated marvel, I looked up the user reviews on Amazon. And then on Costco’s website.

Not so good.

A lot of people on both sites complained of poor sound quality. This seems to be a nigh unto universal issue. Also roundly hated: poor customer service and incomprehensible instructions. Ten percent of Amazon reviewers pan it with one (!) star. Interestingly, the rate is about the same over at the Costco site.

At Amazon, I figure when one-star ratings add up to more than 9%, that ain’t a happy sign.

For 8 bucks, I could buy four rechargeable phone batteries supposedly approved by Uniden. So I ordered up eight of the things, for a total of about $18 including tax…a far cry from $108 for a complicated phone system that may or may not work.

So I decided to replace the batteries in the existing handsets and hope for the best. If that doesn’t work, Uniden sells the handsets alone: it’s still cheaper to replace a few of those than to buy a whole new Panasonic system.

Apparently, if I’d just waited until the steam stopped shooting out of my ears after the Cox fiasco, I could in fact have attached my old CPR Call Blocker to Cox’s accursed modem. But I can’t find the thing now, so I guess I must have tossed it in a rage. That would be pretty typical.

It’ll cost another hundred bucks to get a new one. But at this point I’m thinking…let’s see if these new batteries hold a charge. If they do, fine: invest in a new CPR 5000, call their excellent customer service on the phone, and get them to coach me through connecting it to Cox’s accursed modem. Et voilà! Say good-bye to the NoMoRobo joke.

Schlepped the unopened Panasonic back to Costco this morning; received a fistful of money back on the card.

Now I’m going to think about this for a few days and, if I can confirm that the CPR 5000 will work, with the hated new Cox equipment, then I’ll just bite the bullet and buy another one. I know their customer service will coach me through connecting the thing to the complicated junk Cox cluttered my desk with — at least, I think they will. They post a phone number at Amazon, which I’ll call tomorrow to see if they’ll agree to do so.

Failing that?

Well, frankly, I think the only alternative is to disconnect the land line. Replace it with an iPhone for actual calling and texting, and several charged-up but un-connected cheap clamshells for dialing 911 in a pinch.

The iPhone Surrender

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Okay, so I give up: I’m getting a damn iPhone.

I’ve put it off and put it off and PUT IT OFF, because one of my worst eccentricities is that I really truly honestly absolutely positively do NOT want an electronic tether around my neck.

No. I love you dearly, but I do not want you to be able to flag me down and yak at me while I’m driving my car or wandering around a shopping center or diving into my swimming pool or sitting in a movie theater or trying to learn how to sing some complicated musical arrangement in choir or what-freaking-EVER.

After three weeks of electronic torture, no: I do not welcome anymore techno-learning curves, techno-hoop-jumps, or techno-hassles.

But…alas. It does look like there’s no choice. Toting a cell phone around is now the standard. And you can’t very well get out of it these days.

Well. Once I tried an Android phone, purchased through T-Mobile. It was just horrible. No matter what I tried to do, I simply could not learn how to use the damn thing. Finally gave up, disconnected, and tossed the accursed thing in a box behind a bookcase.

We’re told the iPhone is easiest for the elderly to learn to use, compared to all the other obnoxious gadgets out there. And during the several lengthy, brain-banging visits I’ve had to make to Apple stores over the past three weeks, I’ve looked at these doodads and decided…yeah… I don’t want to clutter my mind with this crap, but…it’s probably easier-to-swallow clutter than most. Looks like I’ve got at least a shot of learning how to use the thing.

A-n-n-n-n-d… It appears that TracFone, which sells service by the minute, makes itself available to practically any phone for which you have a sim card (i.e., you don’t have to buy the gadget from them; you don’t have to let them “lock” it so you can’t use it with any other carrier). And the folks at Target will get those minutes downloaded into the phone for you.

Maybe. If they don’t, then one of the Apple dudes advised that In His Humble Opinion, Verizon is the best (of a bad lot) among the cell carriers.

So. I’ve purchased a sim card at the Target.

Next step, if I can ever get quit of climbing out from under the pile of work that didn’t get done during the past three weeks of computer nightmares, will be to drive way to hell and gone back out to Scottsdale, purchase an iPhone, purchase an AppleCare contract, and have them set the damn thing up for me. Then drive way to hell and gone back into Phoenix, present myself at a Target store’s electronics counter, and have them sign me up for enough minutes to figure out how to use the thing. Then figure out how many minutes I would need during the course, of, say, three months or six months; buy that amount of time; and use it to practice using the thing.

The Apple Genius I talked with the other day recommended NOT deep-sixing the land line (which really isn’t a land line but in truth is VOiP. Thus I keep the phone number used for The Copyeditor’s Desk (along with the NoMoRobo that helps, to a modest extent, to block nuisance calls). But…I end up with an iPhone that can do several things:

  • Make calls while I’m roaming around
  • Send text messages
  • Function as a mobile computer
  • Function as a camera and upload direct to iCloud
  • Let me read and answer emails on the fly
  • Track my movements everywhere I go, potentially reporting them to Big Brother or Big Advertiser
  • And jangle me up in the privacy of my car when, thankyouverymuch, I would prefer to be left alone

Ugh.

Since I now have a half-dozen dormant cell phones that can be used to dial  911 (assuming they’re kept charged), I can set these things around the house in places where I could reach them if I’ve fallen on the floor and hurt myself too badly to get up. Then I can cancel the land line (getting rid of a stiff charge from Cox) and use the iPhone as my primary phone number.

That’s something.

I guess.

A break in the clouds…

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, yonder breaks a beam of light through the clouds!

Yesterday developed into surprisingly de-toxifying day.

First off, I discovered the reason the MacBook was throwing out messages to the effect that it couldn’t hold all the data stored on iCloud was…ohhh, wait for it… BECAUSE… The damn computeris somehow CLONING ALL THE DATA FILES ON ITS HARD DRIVE…over and over and over again.

Call up the AppleCare people and reach the first tech there that I’ve ever talked to who hadn’t a clue. She had never heard of such a thing and didn’t know what to do, so she made me an appointment with the Apple “Geniuses.” Like I have nothing else to do with my time…

Whenever I get off the phone with her and calm down a bit, I think to do a Web search. Find an Apple user’s forum where a) some guy says you can get rid of the redundant files by shutting down and rebooting, and b) they will eventually come back. Another user reports that this is a function of the Sierra operating system. Say what????

Well, I’ve had this computer for two years and it’s been running on Sierra for almost that long and I’ve never seen endless strings of duplicate files before. Presumably older versions of Sierra didn’t do that. When the guys in Tennessee replaced everything in this device’s innards, they would have had to reload Sierra, and in doing so, they presumably would have loaded a slightly newer iteration of Sierra. Hence: iterations, all right: thousands of them!

Really, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just CAN. NOT. DEAL. WITH. THIS. SH!T any longer!

At that point, I about decided to shut down The Copyeditor’s Desk. The computer headaches, the DropBox headaches, the PayPal headaches…all conspiring at once: it’s more than I can handle.

Naturally, the minute I make that decision, a new Chinese mathematician e-mails in a sweat, needing to get 10 (typeset!) pages of new copy edited and jammed into an article that’s already been provisionally accepted. He, however, is at the Great Desert University, where I have spies. And he has a bank account. So he at least can pay me. However, that means I have two book projects in hand, another pending, this math thing, and a computer that is laboring to undercut me.

But… But, indeed: his piping up reminded me that not all Chinese mathematicians, scientists, and scholars of business management labor away their lives on the Mainland! A whole lot of them live in the United States. And they can pay with checks. Or get their universities to pay with checks.

And how hard is it to make nice to these folks and cultivate that set?

He blinked not at all at my bracing  per-word rate, so I will be paid fairly for turning his golden words into publishable copy.

This sounds sooo weird, but I love copyediting these Chinese scientists’ copy. The beauty of a math paper is that if its author says something stupid, I don’t know it. That, alas, is not true of work in just about any other discipline. 😀

And most of the stuff is strangely interesting, at base.

He wants to meet next week and trudge through the new content, face-to-face. That’s a new one for me, but it should be interesting. I figure if I can make nice to him and not persuade him that I’m a complete idiot, he may refer me to colleagues.

Whiled away part of the day with another new client’s effort at science fiction writing. That was light and amusing and did not leave me in a rage. Which is good. Always good.

In the morning, I tested the blood pressure again — still obsessing about whatever it was that happened in the wee hours the day before yesterday. Back down into to fairly normal range: average 123/77. One reading was an amazing 115/75. Not bad for a 74-year-old, eh?

So I think it’s safe to assume the episode in the night was a stress attack, not a life-threatening cardiac event.

That alone relieved a whole lot of stress. So did the idea that I might simply fold The Copyeditor’s Desk and really, seriously retire retire.

And in the evening, we — the Women’s Schola — sang at Compline, a particularly lovely end-of-the-day service that, being absent the hoopla of a mass and all that, is a lovely, contemplative moment entirely sung and presented by candlelight. Meditative, it is. And a very fine antidote to crazy-making stress.

This service — Compline — is in my opinion the most lovely and spiritual event in the church’s entire repertoire. Hardly anybody seems to know about it: attendance can be numbered in the single digits. This is too bad, because a whole lot of people are missing out on something that ought not to be missed.

And now…away! Off to pick up the Old Folks, the first traffic-traipse of the day.