Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Business Is Lookin’ Up!

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With great delight we came to an agreement with the new client, a charismatic gentleman with a lot of wit and talent who’s willing to pay us a living wage. I’m thrilled! We’ll back each other up on the copyediting and proofreading, and I’ll do the heavy lifting in the content consultation (which may read “rewrite it”).

Another client is in the wings, but that looks a little dubious. Don’t know if anything will come of that but kind of doubt it.

Meanwhile, my designer friend had no problem changing copy editor to copyeditor, one word on one line, and the result still looks great!

I spent a fair amount of the day, when I wasn’t reading opaque student copy, rewriting our website content. Now Tina needs to add her part, and once DesignerMan comes across with a logo, we’ll be ready to fly with that.

Another advertiser surfaced with an expression of interest in buying space for a real ad (not a blackhat SEO device) on FaM. So that also is very pleasing. Last month, as I may have mentioned, combined ad revenues and editing pay came to about what the college is paying me. If we could make that a regular thing, I could stand down off all the grinding composition courses. Might keep the online magazine writing course, which this semester attracted an amazing 20 classmates, all them claiming they’re actually interested in learning to write.

If the combined business enterprises generated that amount 12 months a year, one or two sections would add enough to allow me to live without having to draw money out of savings, at least for a while.

Meanwhile I have a running head start on the e-book I intend to publish. Its backbone will be how-to advice on minimizing financial stress, but it will be fleshed out with recipes, reflections, and various idle essays from Funny.

This will be the Funny’s 1,635th post. Can you imagine? There’s more, too, still marooned on iLife—a bunch of it didn’t come over when I moved to WordPress.com. Guess that’s all going to go away when Apple’s new Cloud service takes over. Oh well. Anyway, there’s a ton of copy on this thing that could be converted to books.

Caught a nasty cold this weekend. It was Day School Sunday, a chivaree celebrating the Anglican church’s large flock of private schools. About 75 choristers of grade-school age joined us (they, and all their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, godparents aunts, uncles, and accountants: the place was overflowing!) for an hour and a half’s hoedown.

Of course, naturally, I ran very late for choir and I’d forgotten to fill my water thingie as I was racing around trying to get robed and find the stuff I also didn’t have together to haul upstairs (and downstairs, and upstairs). As I was running for the choir loft I realized the water thingie was empty. A tide of bouncing young bodies was flooding out of the choir room, and it was like swimming upstream to get back in there where the water dispenser is.

Sooo…. I filled up the water cup from the public fountain, watering hole for two score and fifteen germy little kids, all the while thinking d-o-o-o-o-o-n’t d-o-o-o-o-o-o-o t-h-a-t!

Chalk up one point for the still small voice.

By the time I got up this morning I was convinced I had a strep throat. Drove around trying to find a clinic for a test this afternoon, but none of the outfits that advertised they would do it actually were doing it.

It’s settled down into a heavy cold and laryngitis now. Sore throat is fading, so I think it’s just the fall miseries.

What the heck. It means I don’t have to go to choir practice Wednesday, and I probably won’t be able to sing on Sunday, either. Since Wednesday is my Day from Hell, I secretly welcome a break that evening.

Is This Ever Gonna STOP?

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Man! In the overworked and underpaid department, I seem to be having a fire sale. Don’t know when I’ve ever worked so hard and earned so little for so much effort.

I thought I’d finished reading stoont papers late last night, clearing the way to work on the Festival of Frugality today, which is absorbing time from the paid work I should be doing for a new client, whose opus I haven’t even had a chance to glance at since he sent it last Friday. Meanwhile, page proofs from a real paying client languish next to the bed, where I’ve been falling asleep over them every night for the past week, never getting far with that editing job.

But nay…I just realized about a half-hour ago that I missed not one, not two, not three, not four, but five flicking student papers! Read one of them, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to get through the rest by the time I have to leave for class tomorrow. It’s almost midnight, I’m stunned with exhaustion, and I’m about to go to bed. Four hours will probably not be enough time, with my son’s puppy bouncing around, to get through the four papers remaining for me to grade.

Most of today was occupied with choir, since we had Evensong tonight, where chant choir customarily sings. We had new material to learn so had to show up early, taking more time out of the day when I should have been reading copy. Then they wanted to do a potluck. Oh god. So I had to race to a store to buy a deli salad, since I had no time to make a salad. That took still more time out of the day, to say nothing of a nice chunk out of the grocery budget.

Yesterday I took the dog to the vet’s trainer, where I got much better advice than M’hijito and I received from the crackpot we hired a couple of weeks ago, speaking of nice chunks out of the budget. This occupied another two hours (and more, some of it spent dodging around a major wreck on the way down there).

And yesterday morning I had the temerity to plant some new seeds in a couple of pots (this entailed hauling the pots around). And I had to backwash the damn pool twice yesterday–it still needs to be tested and cleaned, neither of which will happen soon. Repotted a moribund houseplant (that seems to have revived it) and moved it outside and planted two Trader Joe orchids in a single big pot and hauled that indoors. Did the laundry, washed the sheets…and had no time to clean house.

Got a flu shot on Friday that made me sick. As it develops, they’ve decided old bats should have a double-dose of the gunk, and that is not very good for you. The headache started before I reached the front of the store (got this at the Safeway pharmacy), and things went downhill from there. I’ve been miserable all weekend.

Mercifully, Tina picked up a substantial part of the work on the Festival of Frugality, which will go live here on Tuesday. I’ll still have to collate her work with mine and hope it makes sense. More time to be spent, very soon.

Created a poster for the Copyeditor’s Desk contribution to the choir’s annual gala silent auction. We’re donating 8 hours of our time, plus offering another 32 hours at 50% off. Printed 30 business cards, tracked down an acrylic display holder and a matching acrylic card holder; shlepped this to choir. I hope the cards stay with the display, but don’t hold out much hope. At any rate, the several ideas are a) I have no money or objects to donate to this event; b) I can only donate time, and so here it is; and c) maybe, just maybe somebody actually will buy 9 to 40 hours of our time, and if so, even at half-price we sure could use the money for some of them. Plus it may be a way to build a relationship with a new client. And further, if the business cards don’t go astray, maybe some other potential clients will pick them up.

12:00 a.m. I have gotta go to bed!

Ancient Roman Wine

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The other day while editing a novel set in Britain during the first-century Roman occupation, I had occasion to look up the drinking habits of the ancient Romans. Particularly their wine-drinking habits.

As it develops, Romans of the first century AD drank lots of wine. They thought it was good for one’s health. They even fed it to their slaves, because they figured it would keep them going despite the low-grade nutrition slaves were given.

Interestingly, though, they didn’t drink it straight. They cut it with water: about three parts water to one part wine. Ancient wine was very sweet by comparison with today’s dry preferences—roman vintners would let the grapes sweeten on the vine before harvesting and fermenting—and people flavored the product with some very strange things. The result, I imagine, was something like soda pop without the fizz.

Flash forward to the twentieth century, to a kitchen in Arizona.

After dinner I’d had a second glass of cheap red wine but couldn’t get through it, so had left the glass with about one swiggle sitting on the kitchen counter. Later, I was thirsty and wanted some iced tea. Knowing there wasn’t enough room in the dishwasher for another glass, I was going to toss the wine and pour the tea into that glass. But…throwing out food (or wine) (especially wine!) frosts the tightwad’s cookies. So, casting my mind back over the facts of ancient Roman tippling style, I thought…hmmmmm….

And tossed in some ice and cold tea on top of the wine.

The result was amazingly good!

This sounds bizarre, but iced tea with a few drops of red wine—maybe a tablespoon or two—is really delicious! And very refreshing. It gives the tea a nice little zing, but the combination contains so little wine, it can hardly be called an alcoholic drink.

And so…in vinum veritas! To say nothing of dona nobis pacem.

Image: Red wine in a glass. André Karwath aka Aka. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Can’t get through the work…

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Endless, endless work and hassles and pains in the beautocks and twinkling starfields of interruptions! Haven’t found even a few minutes…

….

….and didn’t even find enough to finish that sentence: Puppy barked to go out (and is now doing…what?). While out, he had to try to excavate the paloverde tree; then, back indoors, had to gouge some new claw-tracks into the kitchen cabinetry…..

…where was I? Yes: haven’t even found a few minutes…

…oh, he’s chewing something…i can hear it…

….

…haven’t even found a few minutes to punch out a short post.  So it’s been going, hour after hour, day after day.

deskmessYesterday felt I’d accomplished a lot because I finished entering elaborate instructions on a set of stoont drafts and altering the rubrics in both courses to specify 50 points off the 100-point final version for those papers whose authors ignore all advice on their drafts and just stick the same illiterate stuff into a Word file and send it in. Posted the new rubrics; harangued the stoonts.

Meanwhile, as I was wasting my time with these activities two last-minute-hurry-up projects awaited on my desk amid all the other trash I haven’t been able to get to. The pile to the left is just a small sampling of the mountain of paper that has come to rest in my office. What a mess!

Finished one rush project about 7:30 this morning.

Meanwhile, among many other things I’d arranged to have the trainer KJG uses come over to help us with a few puppy issues, like flinging himself at the kitchen cabinets, which are now wrecked (so the cost of having her come over is pretty redundant…) and tupping Cassie and nipping hard enough to draw blood and depositing more pee on the floors than Noah had floodwaters. At the time we made this appointment, he was still peeing on the floor, but he seems to have gotten past that, so there’s another redundancy. But we could use some help with the beginning leash training, so I guess it’s not a total waste.

However, what IS a ding on our time: she was supposed to get here at 10:00 a.m. She called at 9:45 to say she had a headache and wanted to put off the appointment for an hour. Well…this shindig is supposed to go on for a minimum of two hours, and KJG says you have to tell her you need to be out the door by a specific time or she won’t stop talking. So now we’ve gone from a 10:00 a.m.-to-noon time slot to an 11:00 a.m.-to-1:00 p.m. (at least) time slot. Since both M’hijito and I have a LOT to do in our respective lives, this is not so good. I suggested we put it off for another weekend. She was having none of that (her urgency hints that she needs the money).

So I called M’hijito, and of course he wasn’t answering his cell. I e-mailed. Of further course, he didn’t see the message.

When he showed up a few minutes before ten, he was distinctly annoyed. So he left the dog with me so he could race off and run some of his errands. This means my dog gets locked up and I don’t get to do the things in the house and yard I need to do. Specifically, I can’t do the laundry, because Pup will pull it off the line; the laundry needs to go out early enough in the day to get the sheets dry. If the new dog trainer indeed hangs around until 1:00 p.m., it’ll be 2:00 p.m. before the sheets come out of the washer IF and only if I kill an extra hour around the house waiting for the washer to run.

I don’t have an extra hour to kill, unfortunately, because I have about a billion errands of my own to run, and so that means the bedding won’t get washed today and very likely won’t get done tomorrow, either, because once I get back here after the Sunday songfest I’ve GOT to shovel out the mess in the office and attend to all that paperwork that I’ve dropped there thinking some one of these days I’ll get to it.

Getting to the endless chores I need to do next week will be delayed by  another foray into the effing Medicare bureaucracy. Every  year Medicare has “open enrollment,” which gives the schools of private insurers an opportunity to raise the bills. So every year you have to plow through the details of 60 or 70 policies, trying to figure out how to get yourself covered at the lowest cost. It’s a monster time-consuming nightmare, and it means, to boot, a nice little disruption in your bookkeeping, too—something else to kill your time.

Three minutes before the woman is supposed to show up. No sign of my son. The laptop has gone offline and I don’t know how to reconnect it. Still haven’t had time to scan the $310 check from a client and e-deposit it (takes about 10 minutes to make the scanner work and then…

…

So the trainer surfaced in the middle of all this, within minutes of the son’s reappearance. Dog peed on the floor not once but twice in the hour-long interim.

Yesh. Peed not once but twice on the floor that I stayed up until 11:30 last night cleaning.

It’s been a good six or eight weeks since I cleaned the house. Ran a dust-mop over the gritty floors a couple of times, when poor Cassie’s eyes started to run from dust allergies. But otherwise, have had time for no cleaning, none, zero, zip. So last night it was FIND TIME after dinner to vacuum in a cursory way, pull the stove apart and scrub up the grease, move everything off the kitchen counters and scrub up the grease, dust the furniture, wet-mop the floors, scrub the woodwork, clean the bathrooms, fall exhausted into bed, continue copyediting the ASAP assignment, fall asleep over it, wake up at 1:00 a.m. with it spread across the bed, pick up the debris and stack it on the floor next to the bed, turn off the light, go back to sleep.

Bedtime around 11:00 p.m. is about the only quiet period a person can expect to be able to focus on a job without an unending series of interruptions.

…

The trainer was much as KJG advertised: chatty, eccentric, and amazingly savvy in the workings of the dog brain. She demonstrated several effective techniques for getting Charley the Golden Retriever Puppy to join civil society and dispensed much practical advice about living with a dog and coming out on top.

Some of the things she suggested, I already knew but had allowed to lapse. Others were fresh ideas, in a couple of cases unique ideas she had come up with herself. Among them:

• Keep the dogs’ water dishes outdoors. Take the dogs out frequently to pee and let them drink while they’re outside, but do not leave ammunition sitting on the kitchen floor with which to reload the puppy bladder.

• Banish the dog from the kitchen. This is safer for the dog (less likely that you’ll pour boiling water over the critter as you carry the pasta from the stove to the sink, stumbling over the dog on the way) and obviates the destruction of your kitchen cabinetry by flailing dog claws.

• Do not lock up Cassie to protect her from Charley’s exuberance. Instead, put Charley in his crate when he gets rambunctious.

• Discourage attention-getting barking by ignoring the dog and by withholding the response for which the dog is lobbying. (Weirdly, this worked!)

• Teach sit/wait before sit/stay; use “wait” to control behavior and as a training device.

• Keep Pup on a leash at all times, so he cannot get out of your sight for his floor-pissing frolics. Place your foot on the leash to help keep the dog where you want him while leaving your hands free for typing and other tasks.

• Rather than limiting crate time to the periods when you’re out of the house, put Pup in the crate whenever you need to focus on a job that requires uninterrupted attention or time.

• To discourage nipping and biting, hold him firmly by the nape of the neck until he quits it.

• Grasp Pup’s collar under his neck rather than at the back of the collar, to avoid injuring the esophagus.

• Want to sleep in past the crack of dawn, when dogs think the day starts? Set your alarm to go off about a half-hour before Dog’s customary awaking. Take the dog out to eliminate. Put the dog back in its crate and to back to bed. Get up at your convenience, not at Dog’s.

Gave the trainer the 30-year-old crate we had, the one that fell apart. She was pleased; says they’re better made than newer ones. She’s probably right. Got it out of my house, anyway.

6:59 p.m.: I can’t hold my head up another minute.

Aborted Day…and night

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Well, I see WordPress published that malformed post yesterday, despite my having taken it offline twice. Yuch. What an afternoon!

Hotter than the hubs of Hades here! Yesterday it was 110 and overcast.

I dread seeing another astronomical power bill next month. The AC has been pounding away day after day after day. Over July and August we’ve had two mornings, count’em, (2), when it was cool enough to shut the system off for a couple of hours. Otherwise, the system has ground along 24/7. And a couple of days I forgot to turn the thermostat back up to 80 in the morning—I no longer can tolerate having it much warmer than about 76 at night. At this age, when I can’t sleep at night I get sick. But after the last programmable thermostat produced not lower but higher bills, I had the AC guys put in a regular thermostat when they installed the new unit. This requires one to remember to turn it back up in the morning, another of those things you don’t do so well as age advances.

Pup was fairly good yesterday—at least I didn’t have to clean up any puddles. But during the hottest part of the day, when he and Cassie are crapped out on the floor like a couple of doggy corpses, I was working myself into a sweat struggling with the damn computer.

Ever since I upgraded to Worpress 3.2.1, the program has decided that it will engross the copy that follows an image into the caption. NOTHING seems to make it stop. It’s OK until I hit “preview” or “publish,” but that action seems to override the HTML clearly visible before then and move the content into the cutline. Sometimes entering a non-breaking line space after the code for the image & caption will work in a crude way, but it doesn’t work consistently. Tried to fix it in two browsers on two computers…finally had to give up. I guess the program is corrupted.

Fixing it is way, way beyond my abilities. Now I’ll have to hire someone to fix that.

Anybody got any nominations? With Mrs. Micah retired from that business, I haven’t a clue to who has that kind of skill.

So, until such time as I can hire someone to figure out how to deal with that, I guess no more images will be going up here.

M’hijito, continuing his after-hours project to escape to better employment, had a chemistry lab last night that went until 10:00 p.m. By evening, of course, Charley the Infant Golden Retriever was going strong. But since I’d wasted the entire flicking afternoon wrestling with WordPress, I had to grade 75 quizzes over my syllabi.

This, it develops, is the only way to get students to read your syllabus: give them an exam on it. And make them sign a form that swears they read and understood the syllabus, which you have to keep all semester because if you don’t they’ll try to claim they didn’t understand your due dates, the nature of your assignments, your “no late papers” policy, and the consequences of blatant plagiarism. As strategies go, it’s only mildly effective at making the students grasp what you’re saying, but it’s extremely effective at adding extra work to your day.

So while Charley was bouncing, I was trying to plod through scoring papers. That led to a fair amount of bouncing on top of Cassie, who was getting tired; running in and out to pee every 20 minutes or so; grabbing of verboten objects; and general frolicking. A couple of times I had to put him in his crate so I could focus on what I was doing, which didn’t help because he barks every minute he’s in there.

With M’hijito gone into the middle of the night, Charley’s visit here extended into Cassie’s dinner hour. Since Charley is a living vacuum cleaner that sucks up everything even vaguely resembling food (including pieces of paper, dead plant leaves, small insects, seeds, bark chips, sticks, and anything else residing on the ground, in the dishwasher, or inside a refrigerator), this posed a problem. Cassie gets real food: meat, veggies, and a starch. Charley finds this cuisine even more exciting than the exuberantly overpriced kibble he’s fed. And he’s already a third again as big as Cassie.

Okay, so I decide to snap a kiddie gate across the hallway with Cassie on the far side of it and then slip her food to her while he’s preoccupied with inhaling his kibble.

Not one of the brightest ideas ever to light up a marquee… Fazing one past Charley is not easy.

The instant he finished polishing his own dish to a high shine, he raced over to the gate to see what she was doing. There he became so exercised by the fact that she had FOOD that he jumped on the gate and knocked it over right on top of Cassie!

He dropped the gate on Cassie’s head, flipped the food dish completely upside down, and then landed on Cassie with so much force she couldn’t even bring herself to snap at him.

Oh god!

After that, he kept jumping on me while I tried to see if she was hurt—she kept licking her lips and I was afraid she’d broken a tooth. Finally I had to put her on the bed, which is so overly high that even I can barely climb into it. That kept him off her for a minute and her out of harm’s way until I could lock him in his crate, clean up the mess in the hall, and get back to inspect her more closely. She was OK, but she did seem a bit shaken up.

Charley continued active right up until the time M’hijito came over to pick him up, sometime after 10:00 p.m.

This made for a long day, since I’d had to be in Scottsdale for a business meeting at 7:00 in the morning.

That notwithstanding, I could NOT get to sleep! At 1:00 a.m. I sent an e-mail to La Maya to tell her I really didn’t want to leave the house at 6:00 a.m. to make the estate sale we were planning to visit—way to hell and gone back out in Scottsdale!

So of course she called me as dawned cracked.

Now I’ve gotta get up, feed Cassie before Charley shows up again, wash the sleep out of my eyes, and get ready to go teach another couple of classes. Thank god it’s Friday!!!

Two-day break…sorta

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So the 7:00 a.m. English 102 class ended on Thursday. Because I’d asked them to turn their last, horrendous 2,500-word essays in on Monday, I managed to post semester grades Thursday afternoon.

Friday was largely occupied with cleaning up the 102 website, writing a complicated addendum to the syllabus to handle the changes inflicted at the last minute when the library announced, two working days before fall classes begin, that it’s canceling in-class literacy instruction, and arranging to get still more pieces of paper printed. So by about 7:00 p.m. last night, I thought the summer courses were finally shoveled off my desk.

Not quite: just noticed I failed to delete drafts and peer reviews from the site. So now the computer grinds away, trying to delete 350 items one “page” at a time. Ugh.

Oh hell. For some reason, WordPress just deleted everything I wrote in this post. Having spent an hour writing all that stuff, I am NOT gonna write it again. Gotta get to cleaning this filthy house: last week’s dust storm again covered the floor with grit, and a week of doggy day care didn’t help things.

Back on Monday!