Idle essays

A little revelation dawned today: a part of a large job that I thought was the easiest part is actually the largest PITA and the hardest part of the job. Is it possible that when we think of a job that consists of a series of tasks, we may over- or underestimate the amount of energy or time required for any given one of those tasks?

As you may recall, if you’re doggèd enough to read this blog all the time, a week or so ago I decided to follow my friend KJG’s advice to divide the misery that is housecleaning into one task a day. This scheme has many things to recommend it, not the least of which is that one can maintain one’s shack without the weekly housecleaning frenzy that reduces one to a blob of exhausted jelly.

The plan  has been chugging right along this week: Monday, vacuum & dust-mop 1860 square feet of tile floors; Tuesday, steam-mop floors; today, dust and do pool maintenance…

Okay. Vacuuming and dustmopping were pretty easy. Steam-mopping the whole house: piece of cake. Dusting…ho-o-o-llleeee mackerel!

Maybe it’s because I haven’t done a halfway decent job of cleaning in more months than I’ve been alive. Or maybe it’s because I hate it, because here in lovely uptown Arizona you can dust the furniture on a Wednesday and write your name on the coffee table on Thursday. Something there is about futility that doesn’t lend itself to enthusiasm. Or…maybe it’s that dusting seven rooms of furniture, blinds, ceiling fans, bookcases, framed pictures, framed mirrors, door frames, molding, curtain rods, and miscellaneous doo-dads is, objectively, a MUCH larger job than merely pushing a machine or a dustmop across a couple thousand square feet of flooring.

Thot i wuz gunna DIE by the time i finished!

Part of the problem is, I’ve neglected this job for way, way too long. “Dusting” has entailed a kiss-and-run swat with a microfiber rag for lo! these many months. With the day focused on just one job, one is led to think…

• Gosh, those beloved Thos. Moser chairs are looking downright dessicated.

• Is there anything I can do about those gouges in the top of the family room desk?

• When did this chair in the bedroom develop a crack in its underpinnings?

• Dang, but my office desk is filthy! Can’t I scrub up all that body oil and grime from around the keyboard and rodent?

• How is it possible for so much dust to have accrued on the lampshades?

• Why does the rodent, in the absence of a mouse pad, deposit a galaxy of gummy little black spots all over the desktop?

• Maybe one ought not to pile a modem, a router, a gadget with a jillion USB ports, a defunct cell phone, a camera case, and a spaghetti pile of cables into one box thingie at the back of the desk.

• Why has it taken two microfiber rags to dust the bedrooms and now already I need another clean one?

• I’m going to have to sit down with a dry paintbrush to get the dust off all these accursed fake flowers and foliage.

And so on.

But neglect aside, I suspect that what seems like a small part of the project really has always been much larger than I perceived.

Consider: in the first place, you can’t pick up the office so as to find surfaces to dust without tending to the vast piles of paper that flow in through the mail. So the day started out with bookkeeping and filing tasks that I never welcome. Took an hour to move the junk off the desk, and there wasn’t even that much junk!

Or there was: Entered data from three months’ worth of brokerage and IRA statements. One could say I got behind…considerably behind.

Same is true with the rest of the rooms: stuff has got to be picked up and put away or thrown out before you can get to the stage where you can clean the dust off things.

Often, too, one repair or another has to be made, and these tasks may expand into more tasks. Today, for example, I happened to remember my mother’s folk remedy for scratched table tops: walnuts. This required me to defrost a walnut, since said provisions reside in the freezer.

Massaged a great deal of walnut meat and oil into the maze of scratches ripped into a rather beautiful desk top by whatever mystery material had attached itself to my laptop one day. A stone, presumably. Whatever, it made one heckuva a mess.

As a matter of fact, the walnut trick worked pretty well. Of course, it didn’t fill in the deep scratches that whatever-it-was inflicted. But it disguised them nicely, blending well into the cherry finish. Now I had a schmear of walnut oil in the middle of the tabletop.

Drag out the English Oil and some old rags. Apply said oil to the table; polish polish polish polish polish polish… DAMN but that looks good!!!!!!

And now that the family-room desk looks freaking gorgeous, everything else in the room, including two extravagantly expensive cherry and ash chairs, looks pretty tired.

Proceed to oil the chairs, the media cabinet, the dining room table, the dining room chairs, the three nesting tables, the Stickley table in the living room, the Indian table my father liberated from the docks in Ras Tanura, the weird Mexican folding desk, the annoying Ethan Allen coffee table whose excessively shiny surface the greyhound scratched within an hour after its delivery, and a fair amount of floor tiling onto which I slopped English oil. Scrub English oil off the tilework.

At this point, work has begun to expand to fill all available space…

By the time I finish, I’ve dragged pieces of furniture around and dragged them back into place, climbed up to the ceiling fans (balancing on the bed and chairs to reach them), crawled around on the floor, dragged basket after basket of trash out to the recycling bin, repaired a cabinet door latch, done battle with the Venetian blinds, cleaned the top of the refrigerator, scrubbed fingerprints off the woodwork, and on and on…

It may be that this is characteristic of jobs in the workplace as well as in our personal lives: that we think of some routine tasks as being smaller or taking less time than they really do. If that’s the case, it becomes a time management issue for each of us, and for managers or administrators, it becomes a personnel issue.

If we don’t have a good grip on how much effort or time a given activity takes, then we’re at risk of overwork, missed deadlines, or job burnout — and we may not even know why. With the teaching, for example, the amount of time consumed by course preparation and setting up websites is phenomenal (especially if you use Blackboard) — and since for adjuncts it’s unpaid time, keeping that task under control is useful. Similarly, when I was running the Great Desert University’s scholarly journals office, my dean undoubtedly was not aware of how much of my time was being wasted by riding herd on my eccentric secretary. As a result, she (the dean) allowed the situation to simmer along until I let it be known, by deliberately launching a message to a part of the grapevine that I knew would quickly get back to her, that if said secretary wasn’t gone by a certain date, I was going to quit. Had she been more aware, as a manager, of how her underlings’ time was breaking down, things never would have gone that far.

The take-away message? Maybe it’s a good idea to review tasks occasionally to identify those that are the most time-consuming, if for no other reason than to budget adequate time to complete them — but ideally, to consider ways to do them more efficiently.

Good grief. It is sooooo cold outdoors that the water in the backyard hose has frozen into a thirty-foot-long tube.

No joke. Last night I turned the hosebib to “dribble” by way of protecting the plumbing. Long about bed-time, the dog wanted to go out, and what should we encounter in the backyard but le deluge! The hose is leaking at the juncture of the two pieces I’ve connected.

These are RV hoses, much lighter than ordinary garden hoses and so easier for me to haul around. You can safely drink out of them, too, which is good because the yard dudes and other workmen will often gulp water out of a garden hose. But RV hoses come in short lengths, so you have to connect two of ’em to come up with a hose that will reach where you need it.

By 11 p.m. the hose that was furthest from the house had frozen solid. The length that was directly attached to the hosebib was still unfrozen, so water had burst out of the connection between the two hoses and flooded the patio.

This morning you could’ve gone ice-skating out there!

It’s after noon, and the two pieces of hose are still frozen solid. One has cracked, but the other looks OK. Disconnected that one and laid it out in the sun, hoping it’ll defrost by evening.

Temps dropped into the 20s here last night. At 7 this morning the thermometer on the back porch read 28. Everything that wasn’t covered is damaged or lost.

The citrus are already noticeably frost-burned, even the tough old oranges. Their leaves should grow back in a year or so, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll flower this spring and whether the fruit that’s on the trees — a LOT of fruit! — will survive.

I’m going to be extremely unhappy if all those candy-sweet oranges are trashed. Ordinarily that fruit supplies my breakfasts, generously, from January through the middle of April. I’ve pulled off a few and they look OK, but much more of this kind of cold and they certainly won’t be.

A sheet blew off one of the bougainvillas, so that plant is now history. The others look OK, far as I can tell by peeking under the coverings. Unfortunately the citrus trees are way too big for me to cover, so they will be seriously damaged if this keeps up for another few nights.

Down at the dentist’s office, the staff were huddled in heavy sweaters. They said the high-rise that houses their office was freezing when they came in this morning, the systems having been powered down over the weekend. The receptionist was shivering in her boots!

As for the dentist  himself, he wasn’t too alarmed by the current TMJ spate, since there’s no clicking sounds when I move the jaw and since the specific pain points are not out of the ordinary. He speculated that it was caused by the late, great infinite-loop of an indexing job said to go back to using the annoying mouthguard until it goes away.

At Chuck’s Auto Service, where I dropped by to see if they could fix a busted tail-light, the men had NO heater in their garage. Zero, zip heat. Ohhhhhh! I don’t see how they could hold a screwdriver in their frozen paws, much less do any work with it. Chuck was driving a customer home (no doubt taking advantage of the car’s heater…bet he was in no hurry to get back to the shop!), but two of the guys were under the lifts.

They said they knew an aftermarket retailer where they could get the part for a lot less than Toyota charges. I’m sure it still won’t be cheap, though…. Ran into a concrete planter that had been artfully placed in the middle of a parking lot and painted dark brown, rendering it virtually invisible after dark. Charming. The collision sounded like it did a lot of damage, but no: only the red glass on the rear turn signal shattered. The bulb inside still works, and there’s no denting of the body.

So it coulda been worse.

I hunger and so I am going to see if the grill works in Arctic temperatures…

 Image: Frozen waterfall. Juliancolton.  Public domain.

Ever look back on really old New Year’s resolutions and reflect on whether you actually did them?

In an effort to find mention of a major purchase I made about six years ago, I called up the earliest posts of which WordPress still has a record — far from the site’s first post, but all the way back to 2007. What should I find but this post from the end of December in that year.

I called it a “to-do” list because the usual broad “resolutions” seemed too vague to lead to any meaningful action. What became of all those?

1. Three days a week, add bicycling or mountain park hiking to exercise routine

Har har! Not a chance!!

2. Lose five to ten pounds by

a) staying off the sauce,
b) increasing exercise as above, and
c) continuing to eat lots of whole foods and less sugar & refined grain

Now there’s a righteous concept.

a) nope
b) give me a break!
c) did that, but only because that was already my habit

3. Bring food to the office instead of ponying up $8 for the miserable restaurant fodder that passes as lunch

Well, actually… what happened there is I just quit eating on or near the campus. As things went from bad to worse with the annoying woman I’d stupidly hired as my secretary, I took to leaving earlier and earlier in the day and doing most of my work out of my home office. This meant I started eating lunch around 3 in the afternoon.

4. Drink tea, not coffee, and less of it

Whatever made me imagine I could shuck off my beloved daily coffee fix?

5. Learn to put widgets on iWeb pages

My goodness. I was still using iWeb in 2007? Well, no. You can’t put widgets in iWeb. Or couldn’t. The program doesn’t even exist anymore.

6. Join four social networking sites

Sure, I joined four social networking sites. Hardly ever use them. Facebook annoys more with every new revelation of its privacy-invading habits and Borg-like ambitions, and the public passion for Twitter continues to mystify me. You can take the horse to water...

7. Aim for two no-purchase days a week

These days it’s more like two do-purchase days a week. While I was still working? I expect two no-buy days was reasonable, but don’t recall.

8. Snowflake the Renovation Loan principal down by $1,000 (that’s $83.30 a month)

In 2009, when I realized the university was going to shutter our office and can all five of us — I had nine months’ notice — I started “noonlighting” by taking on face-to-face community college and online GDU courses. One semester I taught the equivalent of four online sections — the same workload I had when I taught full-time for the university — while holding down my full-time editorial job. It was a killer, but it allowed me to pay off the loan before I was laid off.

9. Invest $250 a month in an interest-bearing account to build liquid savings and to provide the option of paying off Renovation Loan within five years

Don’t recall whether I did this specifically, but something along these lines was going on. See below.

10. Invest net income from side job (approx. $3500 a semester) in the same interest-bearing account

Substantial amounts were going into a money-market account at the credit union. Before the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression hit, that account returned a little interest (certainly better than an ordinary savings account). And by the time I was laid off, the loan was paid and some $28,000 had accrued. I’m still living on the remains of that stash.

11. Wear better clothes to the office, using the wardrobe now expanded by after-Christmas clothing purchases

Heeee! Hilarious!!

When I do have “office”-style clothing, I don’t wear it. I find that stuff uncomfortable, and I’m past the point in life where it’s worth making myself uncomfortable to please strangers and passers-by. I continued to wear my favorite Costco jeans to work, and the fancy clothes bought on sale gathered dust in the closet.

12. Try to wangle a Power Mac from the university

That didn’t work.

13. Build cross-campus collaboration by trying to land another research assistantship to be staffed by grad students in the publishing program

Did that.

14. Build new ways to mentor graduate students and reinforce editorial training

Mmhhh…well. We started having weekly editorial meetings, during which we discussed what had been done and what needed to be done. After awhile, though, La Morona’s presence became so annoying that none of us wanted to meet with her interfering, and so that idea petered out.

15. Make new friends

a) through Meetup.com
b) rejoin the choir

I did join Meetup.com. Joined a hiking group, and within a week fell down the stairs at M’hijito’s apartment building, sustaining a severe ankle strain. That put the eefus on my hiking schemes. Another Meetup.com group proved to be an agglomeration of fruitcakes and nerds even more hopeless than me. I lost interest.

And eventually, after an interlude with the Unitarians, I did rejoin the choir. That was good.

LOL! How hilarious.

Do you recall any New Year’s Resolutions of yore? Did any of them ever work out?

What is it with people that they think everyone around them is interested in the soap opera of their lives?

Here we are, waiting interminably in the dim recesses of the Mayo Clinic, where we hope to find out why our back hurts endlessly and whether we fractured our knee the last time we fell on the floor.

And what we have here is a woman yakking on the phone, on her feet and pacing back and forth so as to share the benefit of her piercing voice with as many listeners as possible: what we must tell “him,” how we must say “it” to “him,” how we can manipulate “him” to fit our purposes, and on and on and on…

Please, lady: take it outside. Or just shut up!

Back in the Day, oh yes, the Day… We did not yap loudly in public unless we came from the Midwest, where apparently farm machinery had deafened most of the natives. Otherwise, people spoke quietly, and in waiting rooms especially, they kept their voices way down. As in a whisper. I remember my mother insisting that I barely murmur to her in doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms.

Nor, of course, did we pound away on our typewriters in public.

Brought the laptop so I could continue to work on the interminable index of medieval and Renaissance history. The schedule the Mayo laid on me entails a 90-minute lacuna between the X-rays and the chat with the doctor. So I’ve spent the last 45 minutes searching out terms related to Ottonian and Carolingian fiscs, squinting to read the results on a PDF rendered microscopic on the MacBook’s cute little monitor.

By the time I got up to walk down to the internists’ check-in area, leaving a relatively quiet area near a plashing fountain, I hurt so much I could hardly limp down here.

Ah hah! This leads to a Diagnostic Theory:

The reason my back hurts is that I spend almost all my time at BORING WORK!

boring boring BORING!!!!!

Dayum. My work is literally a pain in the tuchus.

I have got to find something better to do with my life. What little remains of it.

But what?

It looks to me like my choices are

a) sell the house, buy an RV, toss some food and the dog into it, and drive away, never to be seen again; or

b) check myself into a life-care community, where somebody else will have to do the boring stuff of taking care of me and I can rot away playing mah-jongg on the Internet.

One is brought back to real estate. Would answering the phone in a real estate office be as boring as editing and indexing scholarly copy?

Or journalism redux. It was fun to have an excuse to ask people nosy questions.

Possibly, though, I’ve lost my taste for snoopiness, given the boredom factor of the conversation about steering “him” around to wherever the recent speaker wanted “him” to do. And we have just heard about all the furniture in another lady’s house waiting to be yard-saled or moved. Once, I suppose, I found the daily doings of people’s daily lives interesting.

One of my former students now occupies my former job at Phoenix Magazine. I expect if I gave her a call, she’d help to weasel me back in the door there. A nice architectural spread on some overdecorated stately home could be fun. But not, heaven help us, another round-up of night-clubs, cell phones, or movie theaters.

We’re now running 15 minutes behind, so the 90-minute stint of heel-cooling has morphed to two hours. And counting. But of course what do little old bats have to do with their time but sit and stare into the distance?

Finally got around to starting some of the yardwork yesterday afternoon. Spent the whole afternoon hacking back an overgrown plumbago and trimming a man-eating rose. And finally, now that its leaves have dropped, getting around to pruning the misshapen vitex bush into a sort of tree-like shape.

That vitex was such a beautiful little plant when it was put in. Its branch structure was downright sculptural. Then the hated devil-pod tree expanded to fill all available sky, and in its struggle to find sunlight, the vitex became as distorted as the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

It kind of filled in once the devil-pod tree came down, but it’s remained lopsided, and some of its limbs have twisted around each other or crossed.

So I cut out a couple of pretty big limbs — that was hard! — and trimmed out a lot of spindly, tangled twigs and snapped off a lot of deadwood. It still needs some more shaping, which I’d planned to do this afternoon.

But now it looks like once again I won’t be able to get to that. Client sent a draft iteration of the index to the client, whose executive editor sent back a long list of frantic WHAT IS THAT??? queries.

Thank you so much, boss! I really needed to impress this guy like that…

At any rate, though most of the stuff that had the guy exercised had already been fixed, he did spot a number of anomalies. And in the course of going over and over the page proofs, I’ve found sets of entries that could be profitably reorganized and new topics that require endless digital searches through a 360-page PDF. So that job has now officially claimed the entire afternoon. And probably the evening.

Welp. I’m going to wait until 11:30 and then tell them he’ll have to call me with the results of those X-rays. I think an hour is long enough to wait, don’t you?

***

LOL! I’d barely hit the question-mark key when they called me back to the doc’s examination room. That was 15 or 20 minutes ago. When they get your clothes off you, they know they have you trapped.

So now I have to decide whether to get dressed and flee or whether to lay down on this six-foot-long sofa and take a nap.

Probably the latter.

What a weird experience!

Around 2 in the afternoon I fixed a full meal — wonderful piece of steak, salad, pile of garlicky black beans. Along with this, I took it into my little head to have a gin and tonic.

Usually, I serve up hard liquor to myself in the tallest, widest glass in the house. It holds 16 ounces — two full cups. This habit has a couple of advantages:

First, because the glass holds so much, it takes a lot longer to drink my favorite hard-liquor potable, whiskey and water. This means I probably won’t pour a second glass.

Second, a single shot of liquor is much diluted in 15 ounces of mixer, making it a lot less likely that I’m going to get blitzed over dinner.

But yesterday I decided it would be nice to have a gin and tonic in a low-boy glass, not a long-tall-Sally sort of a glass. My short cocktail glasses hold eight ounces, half the amount the taller glass accommodates.

This meant the drinkey-poo in question used only about a third of a can of tonic water. But it tasted like a drink, not like faintly booze-flavored soda pop. That was nice.

So while the food is cooking I almost finish off a swiggle. Pour another. That lasts through most of dinner. But a third of a can of tonic remains, so I pour a short one — about half a jigger of gin, but still…more gin. Pick up the kitchen, read an e-mail from the client asking me to do still more complicated stuff on the interminable index; decide I’d better wait until full sobriety returns to respond to that. Wander off and fall into bed.

Wake up. It’s dark out. I think it’s the usual 4 a.m. wake-up. Get out the flashlight to check what miserable time of the morning it is, and see it’s QUARTER TO SEVEN!

I’ve got to be out the door no later than quarter to eight, because we have an eight a.m. choir call for today’s early service. This is a once-a-month gig the pastor dreamed up and that I personally dislike intensely — usually choir call is at 10 a.m.

Damn! Fly around, feed the dog (think i don’t think i fed the dog last night!), dunk in the tub, wash my hair, paint my face, find something more or less acceptable to wear, and FLY out the door at quarter to eight, pissed off because it’s still dark as pitch outside, I haven’t even had time for breakfast, and the goddamn paper’s not here.

Pretty Daughter’s son has got his car-repair workshop, locally known as his mom’s garage, open and he’s fiddling with a neighbor’s car, which evidently wouldn’t start this morning. Amazing neighbor who can get a teenaged boy out of the sack at this hour on a Sunday.

Streak down Seventh Ave. Shoot into the church parking lot to find…

no. one. there!

I’m totally mystified. I’m sure this is the morning we’re supposed to be there for the dratted early service, because yesterday Joan said “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I must either have the wrong time or she and I both must be wrong about the early service day.

Puzzled, I drive home. I’m thinking I need to tell the choir director I’m just not gonna do these 8:00 a.m. choir shindigs, because I hate hate HATE getting out of bed with my feet running.

The paper still hasn’t shown up. Pretty Daughter’s kid has gone indoors, and there’s no one around. It’s still dark as pitch. On Thursday, SBA Prez Marshall remarked that the longest day of the year was coming up. He wasn’t kidding, I reflect.

Not until I pull into the garage do I think…wonder if it’s actually 8 P.M. instead of 8 a.m.?….. The digital clock in the car doesn’t have an a.m./p.m. indicator; neither do the ones on the stove and the microwave. All the rest of the clocks in the house are analogue.

Park the car, close the garage, charge back to the office, turn on the computer, and…

Yup! It’s 8:10 p.m.!!!!

Sumbiche!

At this point I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep. The last e-mail I opened came in at 3:10. The next one, which I don’t think was on the server when I stumbled away from my desk, came in at 3:19, but I can’t remember whether I fell directly into bed after seeing the client’s latest round of arcane instructions (he has in mind that I’m going to do electronic searches of 300 page proofs for 25 single-spaced pages of indexing terms) or whether I went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Whatever I did, I didn’t get far, because the leftover beans are still on the stove.

If I fell asleep around 3:30, then I slept for three hours. Don’t seem to have a hangover and don’t feel especially drunk (but obviously shouldn’t have been driving!).

Even after all these revelations, it still felt like morning.  To make things stranger, later in the evening when I went to make something to eat, I came across the Bombay Sapphire: not that much was gone. It was still full almost up to the top — so I was right in thinking I’d been pouring pretty short shots.

The dog and I went for a walk. We live in a neighborhood of Christmas light enthusiasts, so it’s pretty gaudy out there at this time of year. The burning bush, which slowly changes colors through the night-time hours, was mostly red with a little white as we strolled past.

The head finally clear, I started back to work on the index. Finished the latest round of changes around 1:00 a.m. Sincerely hope the latest iteration will satisfy the client.

Strange. This kind of thing has happened to me before, when I was much younger: waking up from a nap thinking it’s  morning, only to find it’s actually evening. But in those instances, the sun was still up — as soon as you can see the sun’s position in the sky, you know what time of day it is. It was solid black last night as I was racing toward an empty church. You can’t see the stars well here, this being the eighth- or ninth-largest city in the land…otherwise you’d think I might have noticed Orion in the east, a bit of a give-away.

Oh well. Second childhood: ain’t it grand?

Images:
Glassware, shamelessly ripped off from Crate & Barrel.
Orion. Mouser. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.