Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Loafing

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My goodness, it’s nice to be able to loaf in the sack until after the sun comes up! All of the paying work got done toward the end of last week. And now the house is cleaned (and cleaned again), the bookkeeping done, and the mountain of paper shoveled off the desk.

Peace!

Cassie the Corgi has been blowing her coat for the past month, an activity that did not help the predicament caused by my failing to clean house for two months. Vast quantities of dog dunes have been shoveled up and dumped in the trash; the floors vacuumed, mopped, and steam-mopped; the sheets washed and pillowcases ironed; the bathrooms cleaned; the kitchen cleaned; the caked-on grease scoured off the stove; the nonfunctional stove burner repaired. YES!

What could be better?

It looks like the magazine writing course will not make. An enrollment of twelve is required to make it go. A week or so ago eight students had signed up, but since then a couple have withdrawn, and only six remain. And that’ll be fine — I can do without having to wrangle two online courses this semester. The Eng. 102 section will take up the slack if the writing course doesn’t materialize; otherwise income from said wanna-be Writers with a Capital W will come under the heading of “pure gravy.”

At any rate, until such time as I can believe that section will fly, I’m not putting in any more unpaid hours in course prep. LOAF!

Today’s income-inequality rant at The New York Times holds forth on the alleged upward skew of consumer spending — theoretically, as the rich get richer, fewer mass-market appliances and low-end restaurant meals are getting bought, presumably because the rich are getting a whole lot richer and the rest of us are getting a whole lot poorer. “Those consumers who have capital like real estate and stocks and are in the top 20 percent are feeling pretty good,” the reporter quotes a Price-Waterhouse-Coopers exec.

No kidding? If you count the savings drawdown and the Social Security and the teaching income as “earnings,” I’m in the top 50 percent, and I’m feeling pretty good.

O’course, that’s not counting the outrageous amounts the investments earned over the past several months, during the recent rabid bull market. Add  just three months of those proceeds into the AGI and you push me into the top 25 percent of US earners. Precious little of that is coming into reach of American Express and its retailer customers, of course — it’s banked against old age. Nor is it to be imagined that those are real figures: I think of that kind of thing as pretend money, easy come-easy go, poker chips on the craps table.

But for the nonce, at least, having made the 2014 drawdown before the hot air started to seep out of the stock market, I’m feeling moderately confident. In 2014, there should be plenty to live on, even if the current spate of outrageous unplanned expenses continues for several more months. Now, 2015 may be a different story. But we’ll get to that when we get to it.

At any rate, this year, thanks to the chair having come up with the online 102 section and my having volunteered serendipitously to take a summer section, teaching income will be more than normal even in the absence of this spring’s maga-writing course.

How on earth does that man do it? He seems to just BE there, every time I need a new way to earn a chunk of money. This has happened time after time. Someone upstairs must have appointed the guy to be my guardian angel.

So…what to do today?

1. Bill the two major clients, a project that will take a while since I haven’t kept up with billing.
2. Update the imaginary map for the novel and ship that off to the artist.
3. Organize the cookbook recipes in a sane sequence.
4. Delete images from Word recipe files; track down the jpegs and save them to a new subdirectory with numbered filenames that will make them appear in the order in which they need to be inserted in the layout.
5. Call the vet; arrange appointment to inspect new pup (just a month or so to go!) and get new shots for Cassie.
6. Figure out a way to ask the vet about how to feed real food to a pup, or when to start.
7. Go for a dog-and-human walk.
8. If any time remains, continue chapter 1 of the novel’s sequel.

Huh. I suppose this means I’m going to have to get up and do something, eh?

Work, Community Service, Argh!

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Worked like a horse all day yesterday: first to the morning networking meeting, then some light yardwork, then until 8 p.m. on a client’s book. It’s good…I hope he likes the final edits.

Now must race — it’s already quarter to six!! — to get down to the law school: mock trial for the country prosecutor’s office. Last year I got “volunteered” by one of my former TAs, who graduated from law school and was interning for the prosecutor, into serving on a mock jury for a project put together to train young litigators. It was fun, so I said I’d do it again.

Hence, all the work pushed up a day.

And now, it’s off and running again. Hope your Friday is grand!

The_Jury_by_John_Morgan

The Jury, by John Morgan. 1861. Bucks County Museum, England.

 

 

Spring is Sproinging in Phoenix

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So, you say, it’s colder than a bygod where you are? Heh heh heh heh… Well, it’s pushing 70 here. Reached 81  a couple of days ago but by and large has hovered in the 70s. If you wanna be warm, please come to Phoenix in the springtime. That would be January…

The plants are going nuts already. I came outside to put a little extra water on the citrus and the climbing roses, both of which have gone thirsty all winter. Ended up spending two or three hours puttering around the yard, yakking with the neighbor, throwing the Queen’s tennis ball around.

So, sooo much work to do — shovel off the desk, plow through the latest snowdrift of paper that’s collected there, do the bookkeeping, write the Eng. 235 syllabus, build a new Canvas site for them, ride heard on the 102s, edit copy, edit copy, edit more copy. And y’know what?

I don’t want to work.

If I’m going blind in one eye, maybe it’s my body trying to tell me to quit working and go do something else while there’s still time. Sometimes I think I should shut down the editorial business, quit taking on underpaid junior-college courses, and just loaf.

Maybe not, too. 😉 Heh! Good thing I pulled down Fidelity’s share of this year’s savings ten days ago — for the first time in recorded history, we managed to sell at the top of the market! And it’s prob’ly just as well I didn’t buy a new vehicle. The money for that (most of it) is in an old whole life policy and so neither earning nor losing money while the Dow merrily heads south, but still…my cookies would be frosted if the bottom line had dropped an extra 15 grand for the purpose of buying a car.

Ruby-Throated_Hummingbird_1The roses, whose population is much depleted because I’m sick of pruning them every year, are bursting out in new growth. The bougainvilleas survived the winter with little or no frost damage, because we haven’t had a single hard frost all year. A fierce little curved-billed thrasher has been excavating the yard in search of bugs, in the process turning over the soil and saving me a fair amount of work. Good bird! The hummingbirds, mostly Anna’s at this time of year, are in a frenzy…OMG! There’s a broad-tail! Who’d’ve thunk it?

We have three hummingbird feeders around the shack, which have had to be refilled with some frequency. Lately I’ve taken to preparing a half-gallon of sugar water and keeping it in the fridge, so I don’t have to fool around with making the stuff when the feeders run dry.

honeyBee-apisUhm… A honeybee just flew down into my mug, half-full of tea. Thought she was going to fall into the drink (heh! the literal drink!) but she came to rest on the interior, strolled up to the rim, walked all around it, and then took off for wherever honeybees go at this time of day.

So many things to do out here. I’d like to move a bunch of iris bulbs that have been living but not thriving in a large pot…want to put them in the flowerbeds around the climbing roses. KJG, who gave me the bulbs a couple of years ago, says they don’t do very well in pots. And it looks like she’s right. The bed by the pool is overrun with Mexican primrose and red salvia, both beloved flowers but plants that tend to get out of hand. They’re majorly out of hand just now! One of the citrus trees has sprouted a big yellowing section, indicative of root rot. I need to climb underneath there with a screwdriver in hand and adjust the irrigation, cut it back a bit. And I suspect the dirt Richard’s crew piled up there (when they should’ve hauled it off or spread it in the alley…) is too close to that tree’s root system, which could suffocate part of the tree. Either way, that looks suspiciously like a job. Probably I should hire Gerardo and his underling to come in here and shovel that stuff out of the yard.

Won’t he be thrilled…? 🙄

In the paying work department, I finally finished the intro to the proposed cookbook. Intro is three chapters explaining how to lose weight without really trying. Still have to organize the recipes in a sane order and list the jpegs in the order in which they should appear — that’s going to be a time-consuming job. Then decide exactly how to publish the thing.

One friend publishes cookbooks as PDFs, but I don’t think she can go through Amazon with the things. A business acquaintance has taken up converting Word files to Kindle format and is anxious to do both the cookbook and the novel that way. But he can’t handle many graphics, and the utility of having a recipe book on Kindle just escapes me! He thinks if people want to actually use the thing — like, say, in a functioning kitchen with water and pots and pans and dishes? — they’ll buy the print-on-demand version. I suppose. But I know I sure wouldn’t…if I’d paid for a Kindle version I wouldn’t pony up another ten or fifteen bucks for a print version, not on a bet.

So that question is under consideration.

The novel is about ready to go, at least to a designer. Same business friend wants a shot at converting that to Kindle. The agent who advertised that she was looking for new adult fiction writers never even bothered to send an f**k-you-very-much response to the full-length proposal I sent, which was quite a project to put together. So at this point I’m willing to self-publish the book through Amazon and try to market it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how.

Nor am I enthusiastic about doing a plain-vanilla Wyrd-to-Kindle conversion for the novel. In the first place, the thing has a DIY map that needs to be drawn by a professional graphic artist; in the second, there are several tables that I do not want converted to toilet-paper-style lists. And in the third, it really needs decent cover art, and I feel no craving to substitute a piece of cheap stock art for that.

The designers that my little business has been subcontracting to charge a mind-numbing fee for interior page design. Which IMHO is a little ridiculous, because once you’ve got a design (which isn’t hard) all you do is pour the copy into InDesign. To design cover art? Don’t even ask.

Uninclined to pour a ton of money into what’s really a hobby project — any piece of fiction that doesn’t get published through a legitimate publisher is just that: a hobby — I called an old friend of mine, the former art director at Arizona Highways. He’s semi-retired now, but he’s still doing design for an occasional client. He proposed to do the page design for less than a third of what my underling charges, and the charge for the map and the cover art was pretty reasonable, too. He’s very, very good: at the top of his form was one of the premier magazine designers in the country. So if he’s willing to do it, I’m going to hire him to do the novel, I think.

Speaking of work, none of it seems to be doing itself. So I suppose I’m going to have to get up and stagger back into the salt mine. Bye!

 

 

$$ Flying Out the Window (and back in…)

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Glasses ApostleQuiet around here just now. The only drama playing these days at the Funny Farm is the perennial Battle of the Checkbook. Lordie! I’ve spent so much money this month that I’ve lost count, and am about to spend some more, on glasses!

About eleven grand remained in the bank at the end of 2013. Of that, $7,700 will have to go to 2014’s property tax, house insurance, car insurance, and Medigap coverage. For 2014, instead of doling out savings in quarterly chunks as I did last year, I decided to draw down enough to cover the entire year’s needs in one swell foop. Figuring on teaching only two sections this year, English-major math suggests I’ll need about 15 grand from savings to supplement Social Security and the minimum-wage adjunct income. I hope.

So: bye-bye Vanguard fund!

Hello cash.

Meanwhile, since I made that calculation I picked up two other community college sections. So far, this spring’s magazine-writing course has only six students — Heavenly Gardens classes make at ten or twelve — but another eight weeks of registration remain for that section, so there’s a good chance it’ll pick up another few. The other extra course is a summer Eng. 102 section, which of course will be packed. So even if neither this spring’s nor next fall’s magazine-writing things makes, I’ll still end up with two sections. Every maga-writing course, then, is pure gravy.

At any rate, with all that booty in the account, for the nonce there’s enough money to cover the current costs.

BUT…the current costs are gonna have to be reined in! Every time I turn around, here’s another $125 or $150 bill. Though I got a smokin’ deal on the clothes I picked up on the latest run to My Sister’s Closet, for example (three very nice shirts, one of them still bearing its Chico’s price tag, a pair of Brooks Brothers slacks, a Dana Buchman skirt, a pair of Eileen Fisher slacks…not bad), it still was $138. I’ve gone out to eat a couple of times, had to stock up on groceries and dog meat, had to pay $50 for the vision assessment part of the late, great ophthalmalogical adventure, and on and on and endlessly on.

So, even though I haven’t calculated the damage to the penny, I know very well that I’ve way overspent this month’s budget. The extra teaching income should cover shortfalls like this, but…gosh, I sure do hate spending money I haven’t earned yet!

Yesterday I put my contact lenses in — haven’t worn them in forever, mostly because contacts are a nuisance. Especially when you’re swimming a lot, as I did this summer as part of the weight-loss campaign. As usual, I can see SO much better through contacts! Even when my glasses aren’t old and scratched, as they are now, contacts really open up the world.

So now that I have a prescription, I’m going down to the Contact Lady to buy a ton of the things (worn every day, one pair lasts three or four weeks). At the end of the year, I’ll buy another lifetime supply, by way of putting off having to pony up another 50 or 60 bucks for another pointless eye exam.

That notwithstanding, I need at least two new pairs of glasses: a new pair for distance and a new pair of progressives. I actually need a third pair: distance shades, since like the regular progressives, the distance progressive shades are pretty ridiculous, but if push comes to shove I can get by with the progressive shades. And right now I’m getting by OK with the up-close glasses. WhatEVER happened to my eye the other day finally seems to be settling down, and I can see through the close-up prescription almost as well as before.

The distance glasses: not so much. The progressives are even more annoying than before — apparently some sort of permanent damage occurred in the right eye, no matter what the doctor imagines. It’s so smoggy here right now that it’s hard to tell, but still: no question the haze is thicker when viewed through the right eye than through the left.

I should drive up to Yarnell, where the air is cleaner, and take a look into the crystalline distance. That way I’d be able to tell a little better just how much new impairment is really there.

At any rate:

• Indispensable: New clear progressive lenses
• Indispensable: New clear single-vision distance lenses (which may require new frames)

• Needed: New single-vision distance shades (which probably will require new frames)

The guys down at the eyeglasses shop can replace the existing prescription with new lenses in existing glasses frames. They definitely will be able to do that for the clear progressives. I lost my beloved pair of extra-strong distance shades some months ago, but I have several pairs of old — very old — metal frames around the house. (heh! NEVER throw out an old pair of glasses!) So I’m gonna ask if they’ll put new clear distance lenses and new distance sunglass lenses in those frames. If not, then it’s off to Costco for those two pairs.

Yeah, I know: order them online. Maybe. I’ll have to extract the pupillary distance from the quack’s office, adding another layer of hassle to my life, as if I didn’t have enough hassle. I think I’d rather pay a little extra at Costco for only slightly marked-up frames than dork around with trying to extract usable ultra-cheap glasses from the Internet.

Damn. Starting the year with a big expense — when you’ve cashed out a mutual fund to live on for the year — is not very pleasing.

Sure do hope all four sections make this year…

Image: Conrad von Soest. The Glasses Apostle. 1403. Public Domain.

Back from “Vacation”…with a New Book

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Hah! That was some vacation from blogging! Naturally, I got the nasty cold that’s been going around, probably once again picked up from sick students turning in germy hard-copy papers on final exam day. Have been sick as a dog the whole time I set aside for R&R. Of course, singing was out for the entire Christmas season, so there’s been pretty much nothing to do but sit in bed or a rocking chair and work.

But that itself has been moderately salubrious. Picked up a new client and have made decent progress through his and the other author’s magnum opuses (opi?).

One of these guys has written a vast saga of a novel. It’s pretty entertaining, but he needs some coaching on how to write fiction, he being by and large an academic sort of fella. As I was racking my brain trying to think of ways to explain how to blend setting, description, narrative, and characterization with the dialogue that he does best, it occurred to me that somewhere in the murky depths of an old hard drive, I had some examples that illustrate exactly those issues, and if I could find that stuff, I would know exactly where to go to find the right examples for the specific issues in question.

A plunge off the dock into the digital lake dredged up…yes! A novel I wrote way to hell and gone back in 2000! And yes, it did have examples of exactly what needed to be explained.

Huh. Think of that.

Out of boredom work-avoidance, I started re-reading the half-forgotten tale…and thought holy sh!t!

Did i write this?

REALLY???

The thing is incredibly good. It was good from the git-go, and right now — fourteen years later — it fits into a genre that’s selling briskly. It’s one of those things that leaves you wondering where these characters came from, where their story came from, and how on earth you ever came up with the skill to tell their story.

Why did I not try to publish when I finished it?

Well, because I got discouraged.

Stupidly — I knew better — I allowed myself to be talked into “workshopping” (yeah) the manuscript with a group of friends who wanted to be Writers with a Capital W. Two of them were taking graduate-level coursework in GDU’s creative writing program, at the time ranked among the top ten such programs in the country. Basically what creative writing programs do is teach people to run their copy past groups of readers who are interested in doing the same thing they’re doing (i.e., fellow authors of unpublishable fiction), subject themselves to criticism by these groups, rewrite, run the copy past…and so on to infinity. It’s an incestuous process that, in my opinion, produces just the kind of narcissistic snoozers that pass for literature these days. It discourages excitement and encourages conformity.

One of these women really did not like what I was writing, which, shall we say, ran to the swashbuckling and highlighted manly enterprise. And it must be said, in her defense, that the novel in question does contain some startling violence and alarming prognistications about the direction humanity will take in a post-post-apocalyptic era. This lady was into postmodern feminist Theory and New Age woo-woo (chakras! :roll:). My hero was the ultimate (male! :shock:) pragmatist in a Dark Age dominated by religious hoo-haw run amok. She hated that.

At one point, she announced that she refused to read any more of it. But she expected me to keep reading her endless naval lint-picking, which may have been wonderful as an exponent of the naval lint-picking genre but which, as it developed, she never had any intention of trying to publish. Because, she said, her feelings would be hurt if some editor rejected it.

Right.

As a result, I became so discouraged that I simply set the manuscript aside, even though it was essentially complete. My co-conspirator had me convinced that it was no good.

Wrong, lady!

When I picked it up again, fourteen years later, I could not believe I could have written anything that good. It is amazing stuff. Right now I’m preparing a proposal for an agent who says she’s looking for new authors (let’s hope this one isn’t into chakras). If she rejects, I may simply self-publish the thing — one of my business associates does Kindle formatting. One way or the other, this thing is going to see some kind of light of day.

So I’ve spent the alleged vacation dividing the days into thirds: half the daylight hours working on the client’s Micheneresque novel; half the day working on the other client’s memoir; and the evening working on the proposal. Let’s hope the index of 460 pages of medieval maritime history doesn’t drift in anytime soon!

As for the experience with the wannabe writer’s group: it pretty much confirmed what I’ve always thought about writer’s groups. It’s the blind leading the blind.

Want to write a book? Sit down and write it.

You don’t write it, jaw about it, and then rewrite, ad nauseam. You write it. You see if it works. You see if it works with professionals, not with a bunch of amateurs. It works or it doesn’t work. Then (and not until then) you move on.

 

A Phone Call to Daddy

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by Jennifer Kinnaman

Here’s a great kick-off for the New Year: a wonderful true story from one of last semester’s magazine-writing classmates. Some people think kids say the darnedest things!

Every once in awhile a confluence of incidents leads to a bizarre and somewhat hilarious event.  Such was the case on a sunny April morning.

The evening before, my husband had called our insurance company to tell them we did not want to renew our life insurance policies that were expiring in two days, due to the downturn in the economy and cost. The next morning, my five-year-old daughter wakes me up with phone in hand to ask if she could call Daddy at work. After grumpily telling her that she is not allowed to wake people up who are sleeping, especially her mother who is fighting a bleeding rash on her neck, I tell her that all she had to do is hit the redial button on the phone if she wanted to call Daddy at work. Since he was the last person I called on that phone, it should ring right into his office.

Ten minutes later, as I’m drifting back to sleep, my eight-year-old son runs into my room and tells me that someone is banging on the front door, looking in the windows and coming into our fenced back yard.  I leap from the bed to look through the window and discover that several Sheriff’s officers are trying to get into our house.  I bang on the window and say, “Can I help you?”  They tell me to come to the front door.

After quickly getting dressed, I open the front door to find police officers all over our front yard, three standing on our front porch.  I ask if everything is OK.  One says, “That’s what we’re here to find out, ma’am.”

They said they got a 911 call from our insurance agent this morning who said that they had a five-year-old girl on the line who was telling them that she can’t wake mommy or her brother up and that mommy has blood on her neck and that she needs to call daddy and wondered if they have his number at work.

Based on the things my daughter was saying, the insurance agent believed Daddy had possibly killed Mommy for the insurance money before the policy expired the next day and had called the police. Mortified, I apologized profusely.

And that’s why my daughter is not allowed to use the phone for the next five years!