The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
My beautiful son
Great friends
The All Saints Choir
Cassie the Corgi
Charley the Puppy
A roof over my head
Enough to eat
A beautiful cool morning
What are you giving thanks for today?
Images:
Jennie A. Brownscombe, The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth. 1914. Public Domain.
Charles William Jefferys, The Order of Good Cheer, 1606. 1925. Public Domain. (The Order of Good Cheer was an early Canadian thanksgiving holiday.)
Wow! This last week or so has been difficult. But last night I got to go to a nice party hosted by the financial management firm that handles my life savings. It was great fun!
In the first place: ego-stroking! I gussied myself up in the St. John suit I picked up at My Sister’s Closet the other day (did I mention the jacket alone was around $1200 when new? mwa ha hah!). I felt like Cinderella! Several women actually came up to compliment me on how good I looked! So that was nice.
More entertaining, I met two very interesting people who are perfect candidates for Funny’s “Entrepreneurs” series. I’ve been meaning to revive that for quite a while but with the ridiculous work overload, have not managed to work up that much energy. Both of these folks are doing some wonderfully creative things, as is the woman I’ve intended, for the past several months, to write about. So: for sure, next week I’ll try to get in touch with these folks and interview them. Pour vous.
Today: two more student papers to drag through, one of them truly gawdawful and one just awful. Of the five papers I read yesterday afternoon, I did not pass a single one. Well…unless you consider a D-minus passing. Not, I might add, because of any ditzy little schoolmarm-type trash, but because they did not bother to do the assignment. No joke. Five papers of five in which the bouncing young freshman did not read the instructions (which are the same for all the other assignments that they’ve succeeded on, more or less) and did not do what they were asked to do.
Now this, IMHO, you can’t blame on the public schools. Well. Except insofar as kids who can’t or won’t follow basic instructions are passed through the grades and given a diploma after killing 13 years in the K-12 system.
You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Maybe we ought not to be certifying the dry horses as having been watered. 😉
As soon as that task is done, it’s onward to finishing the content for the CE Desk website and then off to an Alphagraphics to get our new business cards printed up. Yay!
That may leave enough time this weekend, around singing tomorrow morning and performing the Fauré requiem in the evening, to actually clean this filthy house and try to undo some of the puppy damage in the backyard and tend to the limping pool.
But first, there’s a farmer’s market at a park up on the other side of the North Mountains. Think I’ll take Cassie and stroll around there.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
6:00 a.m.: Student turns in late paper, with a viable excuse. A new raft of papers scheduled to come in today, this paper must be read now to prevent total melt-down later. Naturally, it’s the most difficult paper of the entire set. Takes forever.
7:15 a.m.: Knock off reading paper so as to get breakfast and feed Cassie before M’hijito shows up with Charley the Pup.
7:16 a.m.: Out of food. Make Costco list. Scrounge breakfast from leftovers; cook pasta to throw over leftovers and add to Cassie’s pittance.
7:40 a.m.: Go back to reading impossibly tangled student paper.
7:45 a.m.: M’hijito shows up a little early. Pup is berserk.
7:50 a.m. forward: Sit down, go back to reading student paper, get up, deal with dogs; sit down, go back to reading paper, get up, deal with dogs; sit down, go back to reading paper, get up, deal with dogs…repeat, ad infinitum. Realize I can’t answer all the e-mail pending; triage. Squeeze in a bath and hairwash.
10:45 a.m.: Out the door.
11:30 a.m.: Meet 101s. Lecture.
12:30 p.m.: Meet 102s. Lecture.
1:30 p.m.: Counsel student on life/career/education strategies.
2:00 p.m.: Meet another set of 102s. Lecture.
3:30 p.m.: Let 102s out early; head for Costco to replenish larder.
4:45 p.m.: Return home. Let pup out of crate. Pup is berserk. Let him out into the yard to destroy things while I unload car. Return La Maya’s phone call; tell her I can’t go with her to a Scottsdale estate sale and then dinner because I have choir.
5:00 p.m.: While explaining this over the phone, pull a leg off the Costco roast chicken; parboil and butter some asparagus. Notice a smell. Clean up Cassie’s shit from under the family room desk, while still talking on the phone. Continue to chat while walking outside to see what the pup is up to and see…Charley standing over the shrubbery vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting. Dog is clearly distressed.
5:16 p.m.: Get off the phone to attend to dog. He staggers off. Look of fear dissipates from animal’s face. He seems more or less O.K. Goes in and drinks water. Get hose and spray back at least a gallon of vomit, with little luck.
5:20 p.m.: Put food on table. Tie fractious dog to doorknob so as to break loose enough peace to bolt down piece of chicken and asparagus.
5:20:30 p.m.: Dog is pawing at eye. Dog paws at eye and ear. Dog frantically digs and scratches at throat. Not good.
5:21 p.m.: Leave food and beer on table. Throw dog and wallet into the car and race for the vet’s office.
5:30 p.m.: Reach vet. Drag dog into lobby. Vet’s office is full of people with dogs and cats. Pup goes berserk. Wrestle animal under control and explain what’s going on.
5:32 p.m.: Get parked in a waiting room. Pup hates vet and is frantic to get out. Throws himself against the door repeatedly trying to escape. Nothing calms dog. Tell my story to the vet’s technician. Get left to wait for the vet. Dog continues to throw self against doors.
6:00 p.m.: Vet appears. Have to repeat the whole damn story again, for the third time.
6:05 p.m.: Vet observes dog. Vet believes dog has been bitten by a spider or bee and is suffering an allergic reaction. I remember the plant growing between the damn palm trees that is a member of the deadly nightshade family…damn! Should’ve pulled that thing out of there before Pup ever showed up at my house! She thinks he would have thrown it up before it did much harm. She sticks to her theory that it’s an allergic reaction to insect or spider venom. She proposes to shoot him up with an antihistamine and another shot.
6:15 p.m.: M’hijito shows up at the vet’s, just as the vet is about to haul Charley off to be medicated. Repeat the whole story again: fourth retelling. Vet describes her theory and how she proposes to treat it. M’hijito looks at dog, notes swelling on jaw, notes bouncing behavior.
“Nothing is wrong with this dog,” says he. “I don’t want him dosed with medications if it can be avoided. Also, we can’t take the financial hit. Is this really necessary? I doubt it.”
Vet wavers. Vet lobbies for shots of antihistamine and whatever.
M’hijito stands firm.
Vet looks at me. “It’s his dog,” I say. “It’s his decision.”
Vet now fesses up that probably if the dog were going to go into anaphylactic shock, it would have done so by now, although there’s still some risk for the next two hours. Vet’s office is open until 10:00 p.m. She suggests giving him Benadryl and watching him closely. If he gets worse, come back.
6:30 p.m.: Exit the vet’s office, $45 lighter. Drive Charley to M’hijito’s house. Drag him inside and wait for M’hijito to return from the Walgreen’s with a bottle of Benadryl. Chat for a few minutes.
6:45 p.m.: Drive to choir rehearsal. Practice singing for two hours.
9:15 p.m.: Arrive home. Feed Cassie. Make sandwich out of congealed chicken. Throw out stale beer. Wash sandwich down with a stiff bourbon and water.
9:30 p.m.: Pick up kitchen, wash dishes, try to restore a little order to the chaos. Let Cassie out. Put heating pad in bed and turn it to “high.”
10:00 p.m.: Answer a few e-mails. Read Google News. Celebrate exit of evil Russell Pearce, recalled from legislative office by hordes of angry voters; celebrate election of several Good Guys to city council. Has the electoral worm turned?
10:30 p.m.: Dope self with Benadryl. Crash in the bed.
Tuesday Thursday a.m. [jeez…how distracted AM i? I can no longer tell the difference between Tuesday and Thursday!]: Benadryl worked—slept a nearly unheard-of seven hours. Am now late for Tuesday Thursday a.m. meeting. Tuesday Thursday agenda:
7:00 a.m. meeting, Scottsdale
9:30 a.m. meeting, Scottsdale
11:30 a.m. meeting, Tempe
1:00 p.m. hair stylist appointment, Tempe
2:30 p.m.: arrive back here. Spend rest of afternoon struggling with dog and trying to grade papers.
Ain’t retirement grand?
Soo many pent-up blog posts to share with you! Well, let’s start with this: Check out the story of Revanche and PiC’s Faux-lopement, a tale told in three installments…
Here…
and here…
and here…
What an adventure!
But isn’t getting married always an adventure? (To say nothing of staying married…)
Best wishes to Revanche and PiC, excellent young people
♥ ♥ ♥
Reminds me of my own wedding…
My mother wanted to throw an elaborate shindig. So impressed was she that I had snared a corporate lawyer on track for partner at one of the most prestigious firms in the Southwest, she determined to create a Big Society Event. She planned to hire out space at Mountain Shadows, then a very tony resort that basked in the shadow in Camelback Mountain, deep in the heart of Paradise Valley. There at a sit-down dinner we would receive the cream of Old Phoenix; videlicet, every member of the large firm, every secretary, every clerk, every receptionist, and all their spouses. Plus her friends, my friends, the groom’s family and friends, and anyone else she could think of.
This, as you can imagine, quickly grew into something that looked very, very expensive.
My father’s financial habits made Scrooge McDuck look profligate. He viewed my mother’s plans with increasing alarm.
Shortly after he saw the printing bill for the invitations, he made his move: He called the fiancé and offered to give him $3,000 if he would please elope with me.
No joke.
My father paid my soon-to-be-husband to undercut my mother’s plan for an elaborate wedding. Naturally, the groom took him up on the offer.
Three grand was a lot of money in those days. It was still the time when a young college graduate figured he would have it made in the shade if he ever, during his lifetime, earned $12,000 a year. A $12,000 salary was about the equivalent of a six-figure income today.
It came back to bite my father, in a funny way. Funny odd, I mean.
We set the wedding day in early December of 1967. We would be wed in the groom’s church, a bland Methodist institution in the heart of North Central. I invited my best friend from high-school to fly over from Southern California to be the maid of honor. My mother invited her oldest and best friend to come over, also from Southern California.
My father was still going to sea, piloting tankers up and down the West Coast. He’d planned to get off the boat in San Francisco and fly over for the marrying; then turn around and meet the ship in Long Beach.
Well, along about the end of November, a gigantic storm bore down from the Arctic and barreled into Alaska, where the tanker was bound to put in at Anchorage. The ship headed out to sea and laid off the coast of Alaska, waiting for the storm to pass.
Pass, it did not.
He called ship-to-shore to say he couldn’t make it back to Arizona by the appointed wedding day.
Since it was now a very informal affair, we simply postponed the wedding day. New airline tickets were purchased for out-of-staters, and the groom called the resort where we planned to honeymoon and changed our reservations.
The new appointed wedding day drew nigh. The storm stayed parked over Alaska, and the boat stayed parked on the high seas off Alaska.
Another postponement. More changes in travel plans, another call to the honeymoon resort. My mother’s friend, drawing the wrong conclusion, remarked in what she must have thought was a between-confidantes intimacy, that “these things happen in the best of families.” My mother flew into a high rage and never spoke to her friend again.
Another week passed. The storm did not pass. My father’s boat stood out to sea. Still. The designated maid of honor had Christmas plans and had to demur from attending our wedding, should it ever occur.
After the third postponement, the groom announced that he could not ask the resort in Carmel to change our reservations again, and we would have to move forward with the wedding whether or not my father could get here.
And that’s exactly what happened. We were wed while my father was stuck at sea. I had no maid of honor. The groom’s parents couldn’t make it in from Colorado, either. My parents’ next-door neighbor, whom I hardly knew, “gave me away” in the ceremony. As if I were an object that could be given away, for the price of $3,000.
We used the three grand to buy furniture for the apartment that looked out over the back lot of Sanderson Ford. Probably the young husband used part of it to defray the cost of the honeymoon.
Sometimes I wonder… If we had actually gone through with the elaborate wedding and the big formal ceremony in a church that had some meaning for me (not one I had never gone into before and never went into again), would we still be married?
Probably not.
But who knows?
A wedding ceremony at Christ Church Cathedral, New Orleans. Kris Arnold. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
After tomorrow, only four more Wednesdays from Hell! God, I can not wait until this semester is over. Not that I don’t appreciate getting the extra composition course, and not that I’m not unutterably grateful to end up with four sections this semester. I am, ohhh I am.
But I’m tired.
This is my third week of being sick with a stupid cold. As usual, it will NOT go away. Invariably it takes twice as long for me to shake off a virus as it takes normal human beings. I’ve missed several choir practices and songfests because I can’t speak, much less sing, without falling into a coughing frenzy.
Under the best of conditions, Wednesday is a Day from Hell. After coping with the puppy from 8:00 to 10:30 a.m., I get to stand in front of classes for five hours straight with no break; then come back, cope with Pup for another hour while bolting down a meal; then shoot out the door for choir practice, where I have to be “up” for another two hours. By the time I get home, I’m beat, and I haven’t even begun to look at student papers or read copy.
Last Wednesday, though, took the Devil’s-food cake.
I let the Wednesday-only afternoon section go a little early because I just couldn’t talk anymore or even stand up. Stumbled in the house around 4:15 or 4:30, dizzy, nauseated, so sick and so tired all I wanted to do was fall into bed. That, I knew, would be impossible with a 300-watt puppy anxiously waiting to be let out of his crate.
Sick as a dog, I was. But not as sick as that dog. Soon as I walked in the door, a great stink walloped me in the face.
Oh.
No.
Oh, yes. Charlie had squirted diarrhea all over his nest and got it all over himself and all over the floor and…what a mess!
So I had to shuck my clothes and shoes, grab the squirming 45-pound puppy, drag him outdoors, wash the shit off him with shampoo, wash the shit off me with more shampoo, towel him as dry as possible. Then drag him back in the house and tie him to a doorknob while I dealt with the unbelievable stinking mess in the living room.
Thank God for tile floors, anyway.
Before I could put the blanket in the washer, I had to haul it out to the backyard and hose the crap out of it. Drag the wet, heavy, stinking blanket through the kitchen and out to the washer in the garage and run that through with plenty of hot water and detergent.
Then take the crate apart so I could remove its plastic floor, which was covered with puddles of shit. Drag that outside and wash it in the hose.
That was when, yes. I stepped on the honeybee.
That’s right. I stepped on a dying honeybee that was flopped in the water on the pavement.
It drove its stinger into my foot, between the large and second toe. Oh SHIT did that hurt.
But at that point I was up to my ankles in dogshit and water, struggling with the large, clumsy plastic bottom to the crate. By the time I got to the point where I could disengage from that mess, the bee’s venom sack had pumped about as much poison into my toe as it could.
Retrieved a knife, scraped the venom sack and stinger off my foot. Dog is hollering and straining to get free.
Stumble back in the house to clean up the remaining smears and puddles of doggy diarrhea, which are still decorating the living room tile. Another 20 minutes or so of scrubbing and upending of the dog cage and scouring the wire walls and doors and it was time to run the blanket through the washer a second time. It seemed a wise thing to do.
Hosed the remaining shit and the deceased honeybee off the back porch. Soaked the burning foot in the cold swimming pool water. Dosed the puppy with Pepto-Bismol. Dosed myself with two Benadryl, not knowing how the body with its recently acquired panoply of allergies would react to the second bee sting of my lifetime.
Climbed in the shower and scrubbed the stink off myself.
Doorbell rang. Charlie broke free, raced for the door to greet M’hijito in a frenzy of dog joy. Caught the flicking leash on the coffee table, dragged the table across the living room floor, slammed it into the sofa, and flang the pottery riding it to the tiles, where it broke into a zillion pieces.
Now my son is pissed off at me because I fly into a rage because now I have ANOTHER mess to clean up and I’m barefooted because my foot hurts like hell and the dog is bouncing up and down in the center of a lake of shattered stoneware and because I did NOT want that piece of hand-thrown stoneware to end up in a thousand pieces on the floor!!!!!!!!!
Shovel the kid and dog out the door. Lock Cassie in the bedroom. Spend another 30 or 40 minutes sweeping up the large pieces and moving the furniture and vacuuming up at least a jillion tiny sharp pieces of broken pottery, some of it thrown all the way into the hall, 15 feet across the room.
Retrieve the blanket from the washer, hang it on the line in back.
Feed Cassie.
By now the Benadryl has taken full effect. It’s only just after dark, but I’m so zonked I can barely wobble down the hall. Fall in the sack and pass out, along about 7:30.
Wake up at 2:30—at least I got seven hours of sleep. That’s something. Anyway.
Friday the dermatologist told me that after his wife stepped on a honeybee on the beach at Rocky Point, it took about three weeks for her foot to stop aching. This being almost a week after the fact now, I’d guess that’s about right.
Oh, yea…while all this was going on, I was also nursing stitches in a surgical wound.
He did say, however, that the lump he biopsied was not a leiomyoma but was indeed, a plexiform neurofibroma. That’s good in that it’s not an indicator of kidney cancer. Not so good in that it’s hereditary and can cause some big problems in one’s offspring and one’s offspring’s offspring…like bone deformities, mental retardation, widespread disfigurement, internal tumors, high blood pressure, susceptibility to cancer. About 10% of people with these charming little lumps do see them morph into cancer. And the ugly things cannot be removed from one’s shoulder, where they frighten passers-by, without causing significant scarring and worse disfiguring than the ugly lumps themselves.
{sigh} I don’t know where this came from. Don’t recall either of my parents having anything like this. But then you don’t have to actually manifest the lumps to pass the defective gene to a child. And I never saw either my grandmothers or my grandfathers.
Enough, already. I can’t stand it anymore.
🙁
Here’s something remarkably stupid: The L.A. Times’s staff is caught on the horns of a dilemma—what on earth to do with the candy the kids collect in their annual door-to-door solicitation.
Dear me. If it matters to you that much, why let the kids go trick-or-treating at all? You’re not mom enough or dad enough to utter the dread word, No? You can’t think of anything else for the offspring to do that night? Throw a big kiddy party? Cook toxicly sugared candy at home and get dressed up in fright costumes and and answer the door and scare the neighbors’ kids and then dose the neighbors’ kids with the stuff?
We have here descriptions of helicopter parents actually counting the calories in pieces of Hallowe’en candy and making the kids trade out a bag of lunch chips for a piece of sugary junk. Junk food for junk food, as it were.
Is there a surer way to make your child more neurotic than your neurotic cat? Anorexia, anyone?
LOL! My mother had a pretty good way of dealing with the Hallowe’en candy conundrum, which no doubt crossed her fevered mind now and again: during the rest of the year, she simply didn’t deliver sweets on anything like a routine basis. We didn’t have desserts (allegedly my father didn’t like them; but after she was dead and gone and he was living in a life-care community, I noticed he was given to taking two pieces of industrial pie from the chow line at dinnertime). I rarely ate candy. It wasn’t forbidden; it just wasn’t a normal part of daily life. Result: I wasn’t especially interested in junk candy.
I did love to collect it at Hallowe’en. But by the time I was old enough to go trick-or-treating, I was pretty picky about what I would stuff in my mouth. Most of it got thrown out—by me, not by my mother.
What part of common sense is hard to grasp here?
When M’hijito was little, all the women in our car-pool, who lived pretty much in the same neighborhood, would conspire to buy really high-quality candies or fruits and party favors, which would be dispensed only to the kids they recognized. Then they’d buy a bushel of the cheapest junk on the market to hand out to the hordes of children trucked and bussed in from the surrounding blight. Cruel, but it kept our kids in halfway decent junk and kept the cost of servicing over a hundred trick-or-treat parties a night within reason.
Whether you have kids or not, the question does remain: what to do with unused and unusable junk candy inflicted by the Hallowe’en tradition. Whether your kid drags it home or you have to buy it to amuse someone else’s kids, what do you do with the leftover stuff?
Me, I avoid it altogether. Come Hallowe’en, Cassie and I go out on the town, walking through a part of this neighborhood where parents from the surrounding barrios descend with their little kids. It’s great fun: the kids are jumping up and down and all dressed up and cuter than cute. The neighbors, who encourage the invasion for that very reason, all drag folding tables into their spookily decorated front yards and sit around socializing. We can easily wait out the onslaught by hanging out to watch the show, so that by the time we get home, alas, no more kiddies are coming to our door.
I used to buy wrapped candies to hand out. Most parents around here won’t let their kids eat anything that’s not individually wrapped in the manufacturer’s branded plastic. You’d be crazy to do otherwise, really. But that means old home-made favorites like popcorn balls and caramel apples are out (and kids never come to know those wonderful treats). And if you don’t eat the stuff yourself, as I don’t, and not enough kids come around to collect all the junk, then what do you do with the stuff?
At one point I thought, well, take it over to Goodwill or down to the food bank and donate it. But…uh…no. They don’t want it, either. They have ethical compunctions, as anyone with any decency should, about giving sugary crap foodoid to hungry children.
So, donating it is out. Throwing it away is a lot like throwing money in the garbage, because even the cheapest of the stuff is not really cheap. I resent being pressured into buying stuff I would never eat myself and that I think is unhealthy for children and that half the time I end up throwing away. So I just don’t buy it at all: I leave the house for the evening.
What do you do with unwanted or undesirable Hallowe’en treats?