Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Weird Wind-up to a Peckish Day

by

Fat, bloated raindrops are thumping down out of a strange sky.

The weather is just strange this evening. Don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it.

An hour or two ago I noticed the sky was turning a funny color, sort of yellowy green…like when it hailed last fall. Yipe! That’s all we need: another monster hailstorm.

Anyway, about then I remembered I hadn’t added the chlorine tabs I was supposed to have fed to the pool yesterday, so I went out to get those and found this…like fog!

Very, very hot fog.

It was dust, of course. But what made it weird was that no wind was blowing. It was almost perfectly still out there. Dust was just hanging the air, seemingly of its own dusty volition. For a minute, I thought maybe it was smoke. But you can recognize the smell of smoke. This was just thick air, so thick it felt hard to breathe.

I chased the Cassowary back in the house—dogs are even more susceptible to valley fever than humans, and it makes them a lot sicker—and retreated to the kitchen, there to fry up a satisfyingly greasy dinner.

* * *

The dinner having cooked itself and been consumed, I just stuck my head back out there. Temp is down to a chilly 88. Air is muggy. The wind is scented with the perfume of creosotebush, a beautiful smell like…rain. We’ve had some restive thunder—the Cassie hates that. And now I’m about to clean up the kitchen and go see if anything’s on the TV at 8:00 of a Thursday night. Probably not, but nothing ventured….

* * *

Phone rings. SDXB is back in town, having left New Girlfriend in Colorado so he can come back to ungodly uptown Arizona for the late-summer dove hunt. She has a house in the Boulder area, where they hung out for a fair amount of the summer. Then they decamped to his sister and brother-in-law’s house at the Hood River, traveling by roundabout way of Canada.

SDXB craves to buy a motorcycle.

When he was a young man, mere observation of the homicidal tendencies of Arizona drivers was enough to get him to let loose of the bike he had in those days (he being a fairly bright young man). But now that he’s old, he’s let loose, all right: of his marbles. Says he, he wants to get one of those fat balloony things the old buzzards ride around on, something he can feel comfortable riding at about 70 mph.

Soooo, say I, are you planning to ride NG on this thing, or are you making her buy her own?

Not likely, says he.

Interesting, how women seem to hang onto their marbles longer than men do.

But maybe you’ll ride on it with me.

LOL! I can picture how much NG will love that! So you think I’ll do something that NG is too smart to do? What are you trying to say to me?

SDXB’s cell phone mercifully runs out of gas.

* * *

Bitch of a day!

It should have been a lovely, relaxing day. Today marked the last meeting of the class that meets at 7:00 a.m. Feelings about it are mixed:

• This bunch is one of the two best classes I’ve ever taught. Just loved them all: great, great group of people.

• But god, how I hate hitting the ground with my feet running! Rolling out at 5:00 a.m. (or more often at 3:00 a.m., with no time to grab an extra hour’s sleep after two hours of insomnia) is just flicking painful. So, so glad to have that go away.

So I’d thought I’d have the afternoon to myself. In fact, since all I was doing on this last day was giving them a Mickey-Mouse quiz that would give me a pile of handwriltten, dated evidence that yes, as required, we were all there on the final exam day, I figured to get out the door a little before 8:00 a.m.

But nay.

Just as I was shutting down the computer preparatory to exiting stage left, who should stumble in, swathed in a sleepy fog, but on of my favorite (perennially late) students. Nothing would do but what he had to respond to the stupid questions I’d dreamed up. This, while yakking up a storm.

So it was after 9 before we wandered out of there, me feeling a little irked.

As nothing, in the irkitude department.

Backstory: the college has the most incredible staff of librarians. Or at least it did This summer one of the excellent staff members took it upon herself to retire. This would be depressing enough for the rest of us, but was it enough? Ohhh no! Another very fine librarian forthwith gave notice. Rather short notice, apparently.

So the staff is down by two heavy-duty members, and meanwhile our idiot Tea-Party legislators have been strangling the state’s colleges and universities, cutting to the point of hemorrhage. There’s not enough money left in the budget to replace these women.

One of the many amazing things they would do is come into our classes and provide customized library literacy training: what’s in a library, how to find it, and how to use the vast banks of challenging databases.

Lest you think this ought not to be necessary: no, it ought not. Couple semesters ago a young man told me he hadn’t been in a library for seven years; the last one he’d visited was in his junior high school. He, alas, is not atypical.

So these librarians present some very crucial information, and because of their familiarity with the college’s and the district’s resources, they do it one helluva lot better than I can.

Welp, yesterday—after anyone (like me) who has her act together has had her syllabus, calendar, and 70-page course packet all planned out, put together, and printed (at the expense of many, many hours of unpaid labor)—yesterday they inform us that because what remains of the staff can’t deal with the work, they’re canceling the classroom lectures and replacing them with scheduled workshops. Students can come in and take them at what passes for their convenience.

Of course, given a student body most of whom work full-time or at least part-time, the late-afternoon hours when these events are mostly scheduled are going to be effectively unattainable for my students. That notwithstanding, little choice remains but to require one of these workshops (25 points), which requires something else: a revision of my flicking syllabus!

Well, I couldn’t very well throw out 100 pounds of paper and print new packets, so I had to come up with corrigenda for not one, not two, but three sections. Type that stuff up. Arrange to get it printed. Beg the copy center to get it done by midday Monday.

Complicating matters, we’re told that we can’t just bring a class into the library to work ad lib: we have to arrange ahead of time. I had a half-dozen trips to the library planned, each of which now had to be time-consumingly scheduled.

And the days when librarians are not going to show up to eddycate my students? I had to figure out something to do with them, which largely entailed having to make appointments to drag them to the computer lab so as to get them working on the databases: another endlessly time-consuming chore.

Meanwhile, the puppy yaps, the puppy finds the paperwork for the mortgage on the downtown house and decides to eat it, the puppy pees on the floor, the puppy grabs Cassie and gets walloped, the puppy does dances to puppy joy, the puppy evinces starvation every 30 minutes and has to be fed, the puppy digs a hole under a citrus tree, the puppy grabs Cassie’s Angry Bird out of her mouth and bounces away with it, the puppy has a gay old time. During this celebrating, I have to make my way through a Chase Bank phone maze to find out why they’re charging me a $132 redemption fee because I canceled their damn card. The puppy eats the mortgage documents while I’m on the phone to one Hrothgar or whatever the hell his fake name is. Hrothgar opines that the “redemption fee” is really money they owe me, and that they’re going to send it along to me. Any day now.

That’s nice. The puppy is up to something unknown in the bathroom.

By the time I’ve finished revamping my courses again, the afternoon is over and I haven’t begun to get around to taking down the remains of the summer 102 course’s website and cleaning it up for the new bunch. Bunches, that is.

We have 25 students in the 101 section, 24 in the mid-day MWF 102 section, and only 14 in the Wednesday afternoon endless section. This is good, I guess. Only 14 students, I mean.

Five people have shown up in Buggy Whip Design 201, which means we have a fair shot at seeing the course make by the time it starts in October. I’ll be rich as…as Bilbo Baggins, I expect.

* * *

SDXB says a powerful storm dumped a flood of water out there in Sun City. Some school bus children were trapped under downed power lines. Hereabouts, in the rain shadow of the North Mountains, we got the dust fog, the spattering of fat rain drops, some vague lightning, and eventually a bit of wind.

Weird.

A weird ending to a difficult day. Strange.

 

Jack Daniels and the Swizzle Stick

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Annoyingly enough, I’ve taken to calling my son’s dog, tentatively named “Jack,” by my idea of his name: jackdaniels.

My poor son. Will there ever be any relief for him?

Jackdaniels is quite the active puppy. He’s been keeping me and Cassie the Corgi busy every living breathing minute between the time I get home from campus and the time M’hijito comes to pick him up, which is often quite a while, because my son regularly puts in 12-hour days.

This has been putting a crimp on my blog-scribbling and paper-grading activities. Clearly something had to be done to distract him.

Today I decided to celebrate the end of my Eng. 101 summer class with a trip to Whole Foods. Though I can’t afford Whole Paycheck, I was hungry and wanted something good to eat and there’s precious little left in the pantry. They had none of the stuff I craved: the sale on $4.50/lb wild crab doesn’t start til tomorrow and they were out of my beloved tuna and salmon poke and I can’t afford their cheeses. So it was on to the Trader Joe’s in the same strip mall, where I snabbed a very fine chunk of ripe brie and some exceptionally nice baby artichokes. And across the parking lot, what should I spot but…a fancy pet store!

Mais certainement!

Jackdaniels has taken to chewing on the kitchen cabinetry, which will never do. So I dropped by to ask if they didn’t have some sort of chew toys that will not choke the dog, and (as I’ve read elsewhere) the salesdude said all the vets were recommending bull pizzle as relatively safe. The product is also called bully sticks. Right. For the sake of our male readers we will not discuss what these objects actually are.

Suffice it to say that the fancy pet store was the Whole Paycheck of the dog world. Bull pizzle is selling for just slightly under the price of gold, which in these panicky times is fairly high. No joke: $45 for a package of the damn stuff!

Well, I did find some six-inch pieces selling at an astonishing $4 apiece. To prevent mayhem and bloodshed, I realized I’d have to get two of them, one for the pup and one for the Queen of the Universe. And remembering how Anna the Gershep could polish off a large chew stick in about 30 seconds, I figured I’d better get two apiece: $16 for four six-inch pizzle sticks.

Hence, across the city with two bags of groceries and the gold-plated dog chews in tow.

Well, it was $16 worth of dog joy! And interestingly, neither dog has been able to destroy one yet. They must be pretty sturdy, because both pooches have been chewing happily on them for the past two hours, and neither has made much progress at consuming them.

So it looks like even though these things are stupidly overpriced, they may at least last longer than your average pig’s ear.

Cuter than cute!

Meanwhile, we’ve been dwelling in Stress City for the past few days. Oh god.

It’s effing hot here in the kitchen, where the dogs and I are penned in to ensure that jackdaniels doesn’t demolish the rest of the house. With the AC set at 80, which is about what I can afford in the summer, it’s 88 degrees here in the kitchen. And humid…sticky, sticky, icky humid. This is August. You don’t need a calendar to know that.

So this is a bit draining and does little for my enthusiasm to grade papers or clean house or work on a blog carnival or do much of anything. But…much must be dealt with.

Tomorrow morning the Mr. Lutz the Trustworthy Plumber is coming over before it gets too, too hot to climb into the attic, there to examine what I expect is a half-assed repair job on the water heater vent. He said he would inspect the other vents, too, although he thinks they’re probably OK because those are hard pipes rather than aluminum ductwork. I wouldn’t put it past the roofer’s bunch, though, to have screwed those up, too.

And I’ll have another little chore for him: at 5:00 this morning when I went out to shovel back the results of last night’s violent windstorm, what should I find but this nice little damp spot off the east side of the patio slab… The spot above it is dog pee, but the large puddle is neither dog pee nor rainwater. Though the north valley was inundated, we in the rain shadow of the North Mountains saw nary a drop last night.

Soooooo….one might reasonably ask, “WTF??? Where is that coming from?”

Well, there’s a hose bib on a standpipe coming off a line that runs (where else?) underneath the KoolDeck-swaddled slab that covers about 550 square feet out there. Uh uh.

Visions of jackhammers dance in my head…

One of my students is an architect, interestingly enough. I asked him what he thought fixing that would entail, and he thought that if it was actually a leak (and what other than a leak could explain yesterday’s HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-DOLLAH WATER BILL!!!!!?????), the water would not have moved in that direction.

Well, we’ll see what the miracle plumber says, assuming he can think through the sound of the cash register jingling in his head.

Damn. I’m beyond being able to cope with any more zillion-dollar emergency bills.

If I have to have the pavement jackhammered out, the plumbing dug up and repaired, the paving relaid, and the hideous KoolDeck smeared all over everything again (what is the appeal of that stuff?), it’s going to cost every penny I earn this summer plus several thousand more. Oh…damn, oh hell, oh damn!

Really. I’ve worked like an animal all summer, devoted weeks of unpaid labor to creating my own CMS in WordPress and Google Docs to get around the flicking NIGHTMARE that is Blackboard, and I’d planned to use the munificent three grand I’m earning to fold into survival savings to delay having to draw down from retirement savings another three months.

And as we see the market swooning once again, we can see that said delay is no longer a “want” but an absolute, positive need. The last time this happened, grâce à our fine political leaders, I lost two hundred grand from my savings. That loss was just about recovered, and now, thanks to the FLICKING STUPIDITY we’ve seen from what passes for our elected leadership, the money is going right back down the drain again.

And so, believe me, the last thing I want to do is pour my summer earnings into the literal drain.

Nor do I want to do what I’m about to do, which is to take off my clothes, go out in the blast-furnace midday sun, and work on the pool; then come back in and start grading student papers.

Busy Weekend

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A minute to 9:00 p.m. and rain is pouring down. Lightning is lightninging and thunder is thundering. The back porch is already starting to flood.

Weather has been hot and humid, not cooling much below 90 degrees at night because we haven’t had any real rain. But the teasing clouds have given us the occasional spectacular sunset and sunrise:

 

Our illustrious leaders have been busy all weekend and supposedly have come up with some sort of compromise solution for the deficit issue. From what little we’ve had time to hear, it sounds like a lash-up that will please no one, other than maybe Wall Street: the Asian market has already soared 10,000 points on the news. But that assumes the lash-up will hold together at all. 🙄

Since we and our country are doomed, let us consider what remains to matter for us; to wit, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Not much literal cultivating going on in 110-degree heat, but within the metaphorical garden all sorts of things have been going on.

Friday we drove out to the far side of the galaxy to pick up M’hijito’s adorable new puppy, an eight-week-old English golden retriever. This went smoothly enough, though we were told he has a ….oop! just lost power! thank goodness for lithium batteries… Campylobacter infection and is on antibiotics. And he truly hates going in a crate.

Ohhhhhkaayyyyy…

A little investigation revealed that various types of intestinal pathogens—the sort that cause what we humans call “food poisoning”: Campylobacter species, Salmonella species, three variants of E. coli—have been spreading steadily through the ranks of show dogs because of the growing popularity of the BARF diet. Adherents to BARF feed their dogs raw meat and bones in the mistaken belief that canids are immune to pathogenic bacteria. As a practical matter, this is wildly untrue: all dogs are susceptible to the food-borne pathogens that cause the same kinds of sickness in humans, and puppies and old dogs (like small children and elderly humans) can die from these infections. Puppies pick up the microbes when they suckle and climb around on their mothers, whose fur of course is contaminated with the bugs.

Yea verily, one of our breeder’s pups did die and another was seriously weakened: not from our pup’s litter but from the much fancier concurrent breeding engendered by a dose of doggy sperm expensively imported from Sweden.

So we were concerned.

At any rate, we made it back to M’hijito’s house uneventfully. Pup was awed and stunned to find himself in an alien environment, and he succeeded in keeping M’hijito awake most of the night.

LOL! Doggy parenthood.

In the morning M’hijito called to opine that nothing is wrong with the dog: all systems appear to be functioning quite normally.

By Saturday afternoon, M’hijito had Pup persuaded that the crate was OK to walk into, as long as the door isn’t closed. He’ll go into the crate and loaf around but still doesn’t like to be closed in. That is, I think, very significant progress in one day.

M’hijito’s friends, who have been dying to see this miraculous beast, descended on his house Saturday night, children in tow, for hamburgers and dog admiration. Apparently Pup took all the partying in stride, the result of which was he only woke up twice last night.

Today they—the dog and his human, that is—showed up at my house, here to be introduced to the doggy day-care where he’ll be spending his weekdays. M’hijito put the old, well-scrubbed dog crate together and persuaded Pup to walk into it and then it was off for more exploring and partying.

Cassie is not impressed. She’s taken an attitude reminiscent of Garfield’s toward Nermal the Disgustingly Cute Kitten. She remains fixated on the Ball, although she would like to deconstruct Pup’s stuffed toy.

M’hijito decided to go swimming and of course was followed outside by Pup, who was called by the water like Odysseus by the sirens. Before M’hijito could step into the pool with both feet, Pup tumbled/jumped into the water—it was hard to tell which—and took off swimming like an otter. M’hijito had to dive in and swim after him to catch him.

We steered him over to the steps where he could climb out, but it was pretty clear from his first experience he didn’t get that concept. This dog is going to have to be watched every. single. minute he’s in the backyard. In fact, I’m thinking he’d probably better be on a lead when he’s out there.

In another couple of months, he will have figured out how to find the steps and get out of the water. And his waterproof retriever coat will be growing in. But for the nonce there’s no hurry to be diving into that thing.

After Friday’s $150 bill from the Leslie’s repairman, the pool is on the fritz again. So tomorrow I’ll have to hassle with those clowns again. Yay.

Pup loves to lounge in the breeze from a fan. After the water frolics he curled up under the kitchen counter and dozed off with his little ears flapping in the wind…

If you’ve ever had a kid, you know that babies do not lay still while snoozing on the bed. They rotate on a private internal axis. So, it appears, do puppies. This one came perilously close to rotating down the step, so we propped him up:

Awwwwww….

M’hijito has yet to settle on a name for this beast, though just now he’s considering “Seymour” or “Jack.” I’m for “Jack Daniels,” myself. 😉

Holy mackerel! It’s getting rambunctious out there! Lightning just struck right outside the house—probably hit a palm tree. Cassie’s getting scared. Think it’s time to post this and go hunker down somewhere with the Mistress of the House.

 

Dog Days of Summer

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Now before this goes any further, let’s get to the important stuff: A bright star just rose in the otherwise hot and muggy summer.

Jacob over at My Personal Finance Journey has announced the final results of his first Tour de Personal Finance blog competition. And who should the winner be but (who else??) our own favorite PF scribbler, Donna Freedman! She won with her eloquent post, “This Isn’t Your Grandparents’ Recession.”

Argh! I remember when she first put that piece online. It’s one of those things that makes you go damn! why can’t i write like that?

A close runner-up was Paula’s thoughtful and smart piece from Afford Anything, explaining how and why she would go into debt if she had a million bucks. I’m not going to recapitulate everything on Jacob’s competition post—be sure to go there and check out all the winners for yourself!

Dog days, indeed: last night it was 95 degrees outdoors at 9:00 p.m. The pavement would still have burned Cassie’s feet and the air would have dessicated both of us, had we dared to go for a doggie walk. So the dog and the human spent another day and another night flaked out on the tile floors with the air conditioning blowing on us.

Do not even ask what the power bill will look like this month. Try not to think about it.

This evening after work M’hijito is going to make the trek to Mesa to pick up the new pup! The little guy is tentatively named Prince. Or maybe King. The breeder had planned to add the name “Prince” to his fancy pedigree moniker but apparently that name was already claimed, so now he’s going to be a King. M’hijito says he’s a prince now and soon will be a king. 😀

Anyway, he invited me to come along to help him transport the little dauphin back to Phoenix. So that will be a joyous moment.

We bought a big wire crate at Walmart, and shortly thereafter one of M’hijito’s friends volunteered to lend him a similar one, at least until the friend needs it again. So we’ll need to take our purchase back this weekend and retrieve our 80 buckolas. While there, we must remember to latch onto a few packages of those plastic plugs you put into electric outlets. Young dogs are fond of kissing electric outlets, the outcome of which is not good.

At my house, I also have a crate, which M’hijito disassembled, scrubbed thoroughly, and now needs to reassemble. Pup (Prince? King? Louis XIV?) will have to go in there while I’m at class, which mercifully is only a couple of hours a day. Next week I’ll be home by 11:30 or noon, but since he won’t get here until around 9:00, the wait to get out will short. And it gets even shorter the following week: the 101s finish their five-week tour of duty next Thursday, and so after they’re gone, I’ll have only the 102s, who meet at 7:00 a.m. Their class is out at 8:50, so I’ll be home by 9:00 or 9:30, leaving Pup in his crate no more than about a half-hour. Two more weeks of that, and then fall semester begins, with classes that start at 11:30 a.m. and meet only three days a week.

Thursday the 11th, however, I’ll be gone a bit longer. I have to toss the surviving 102s out the door by about 8:15 and then fly downtown. Beeeeecause… Phoenix College is offering a new online certificate program in “Medical Transcription.” You can get through it in a year, and voilà! Now you’re magically certified to earn something between $12 and $30 an hour typing dictation from doctors.

Apparently, in the Phoenix area pay is halfway decent (which, in these parts, comes under the heading of pretty darned good). I’ll bet that with a Ph.D. and 20 years of editorial experience, I can come in at least at the median and maybe better than that.

Median pay for a medical transcriptionist working half-time is $2,000 more than I can earn teaching the maximum number of courses allowed for community college adjuncts. And whaddaya bet a glorified secretary for doctors doesn’t fill hour after hour after freaking hour of her time with unpaid labor in the form of “course prep”?

Two thoughts on this:

First, it could be the answer to the conundrum of what on earth I’m going to do when I’m too old to dodder into a classroom and too old to hold my own against a pack of restive 19-year-olds or when I simply can NOT stomach reading another inane student paper ever again. This work can be done remotely. As long as I can still wriggle my fingers, I can transcribe digital content. And I’m good at that kind of thing—I type as fast as most people can speak.

Second, this type of work, while low-paid compared to what Tina and I can command as technical editors or project managers, could be a convenient addition to The Copyeditor’s Desk’s repertoire. If we can pick up some work doing medical transcription at a hospital or big medical center and then let it be known what we really are, it could open the door to medical editing work. And that’s just the sort of thing we do best.

Thus on two fronts I can see this certificate program as worth the cost, whatever the cost may be. I think the S-corp can afford to pay my tuition, but I’ll have to check with the accountant to see if it’s OK for the corporation to foot the bill for its slave’s voc-ed training.

On other fronts, a notice came in the mail that as a member of a broad class I’m eligible for a $7.50 settlement in a class action suit against New Horizon, late the holder of a small HELOC I paid off and canceled some time ago. Well. $7.50 (less the cost of the stamp, less the cost of the envelope) is better than nothing, I guess. It’ll buy a cup of café Americano at Starbucks, anyway.

Exactly what the cause was, I can’t discern well. Apparently it had something to do with the way New Horizon told customers the due date for payments was later than the actual date by which payments had to be posted to avoid finance charges. I never borrowed much on it—it served as a line of credit. When I was thinking about using it to finance the improvements M’hijito and I made on the downtown house, I called to confirm that the impression I’d been given, to the effect that the variable interest rate was capped at around 8.3 percent. Wrong! The not-very-friendly customer disservice rep I reached informed me that it could go as high as 21 percent!!!!!

Holy mackerel. Think of 21 percent interest on the $30,000 we needed…. What a rip! I canceled the line of credit and took out a second from the credit union, which I paid off from the proceeds of the noonlighting jobs I took up when it became apparent the university was about to shut down my office and can us all.

I don’t think I pulled that 8.3 percent figure out of the air; indeed, I distinctly remember asking the broker, with whom I’d done business before, how high the interest on that HELOC could go. So IMHO a certain amount of misrepresentation was going on there. But it must be admitted, I did not take off my glasses and hold each and every one of the eight or ten pages crammed with 8-point type up to my nose and read it. So: my bad.

La Bethulia left for California this morning, whereat La Maya already is encamped.

Naturally, one of La Bethulia’s brand-new tires picked up a nail yesterday afternoon, so she had the privilege of spending an hour or two after work at Discount getting that fixed. I ran over to the eyeglasses place, which closed at 6:00 p.m., to pick up La Maya’s new pair of prescription shades, which she will need on the beach, and La Bethulia came by on her way home to snag those.

Remains to be seen whether they ever get to the beach. La Maya left for the Imperial Valley a week or ten days ago, on news that her mother is dying. The entire family has been gathered around the bedside for all this time. The old gal rallied, after a fashion, but now she can’t walk at all. She’s stopped eating and drinking, and they expect her to pass any time. They’ve called in hospice, which is a mercy, and now they’re all just waiting.

La Bethulia and La Maya had, long ago, arranged their vacation in San Diego.  So La B went over to set up shop in the condo they’re renting, and La Maya probably will join her there. Maybe. It’s only about an hour and a half from Brawley, where the Maya family homestead stands, and so she figures that if things stabilize, she’ll be able to spend at least a little time in San Diego.

Pool guy just called! He’s on his way over right now, craving to get done with work early so he can head off for his own vacation at Huntington Beach. So…he will lighten my load by about $150 to $200. Let’s hope it’s not more than that, which it certainly could be.

The beach. Gosh. Think of that. I will never see a beach again. Too bad: I love the ocean, having grown up next to one. Oh well. Keep saying it: that’s a want, not a need.

Sooo cranky in the heat and the humidity and the short, short nights of sleep. Each day seems full of don’t-wannas: don’t wanna grade papers, don’t wanna be at work at 7:00 a.m., don’t wanna stand in front of classes four & a half hours straight, don’t wanna wrestle with the pool, don’t wanna do the yard work, don’t wanna clean house, don’t wanna drive around the city in the heat, don’t wanna  listen to Cassie yap, don’t wanna diet, don’t wanna spend any more money on expensive little “emergencies,” don’t wanna don’t wanna don’t wanna be in Phoenix in the summertime…

Spent a good 90 minutes or two hours as dawn cracked this morning, hacking away at the cat’s claw vines that have made good progress in their campaign to consume the pool equipment. They’d recovered, with a vengeance, from my last attack on them, earlier this spring when the Leslie’s guy came round to clean out the filter for the summer season. What a job!

Well, this will be convenient: I’m running low on food and had planned to race out to a grocery store this morning. Since the guy was scheduled to show up between noon and 5:00 p.m., that would have given me about two hours to do the several hours of running that awaits, and so I figured I wouldn’t be able to get all the stuff I really need. Now I should be able to pick up food and gear and finish grading most of the stoont papers today.

And so…to quit procrastinating.

My Daddy’s Diet

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In the past two and a half weeks, I’ve lost an amazing eight pounds.

Did standing up for the daily eight to ten hours of computer work do the trick? I kinda doubt it. No visible change had happened after a week of that stuff.

Did knocking off the sauce (again :roll:) make it happen? Not likely. About once every six months I jump back on the wagon for a few weeks, and it never changes the scale reading. Besides, I don’t think one or two glasses of wine, beer, or bourbon and water really is that far over the top.

The weight loss has occurred, in fact, over just the past week or so, after I decided to experiment with my daddy’s favorite folk diet: cut out all starch.

By “starch,” he meant bread, potatoes, rice, cereals, and pasta.

LOL! In the good old days, they didn’t eat much of what we would call “pasta.” It would never have crossed my parents’ minds to serve a big bowl of spaghetti topped with fresh chopped tomatoes, basil, and shredded Parmesan. Spaghetti, to their generation of Americans, was some kind of ethnic food that entailed a full day of simmering a gloppy red sauce. Macaroni was served with cheddar cheese and white sauce. And noodles were to be smothered in rich beef, pork, or chicken gravy, preferably with cream added.

Yum. If it were just a little cooler (say, about 50 degrees cooler…) I sure could do with some of my mother’s beef strogonoff over noodles.

Well, anyway. As soon as I quit eating “starch,” the weight started to drop.

We could say this is a modified Atkins diet. Actual, real Atkins, it is not. On My Daddy’s Diet, you’re allowed to eat anything you want except “starch” and desserts loaded with refined sugar (pie and cake, for example, would be nixed, but plain strawberries or peaches would be OK). Atkins wants you to stay off sweet, juicy, delicious fruits (at least at the outset) and certain kinds of veggies dubbed too high in carbs.

Sorry, Dr. A, but I wasn’t about to let the candy-sweet watermelon and the Costco flat of astonishing peaches in the fridge go to waste. So I’ve been blithely scarfing down two or three peaches a day, and as much as a quarter of a watermelon.

And I still lost weight!

Atkins also wants you to kick not just your alcohol habit but your caffeine habit: he theorized that caffeine somehow interfered with your metabolism. Right, sure. Life’s miserable enough without a bourbon and water in the afternoon. I’ll be darned if I’m doing without my morning coffee and my all-day iced tea supply. Matter of fact, as we scribble I’m swilling down coffee with élan.

And I still lost weight!

Hot dang.

Daddy’s scheme allows you to eat pretty well, without making you feel unduly deprived. Come to think of it, I don’t feel in any way deprived…now and again I push away from the table feeling I ate altogether too much. It’s just a matter of finding something unstarchy to substitute for your favorite cereal and potato products. For me, it’s been lettuce, lots of lettuce. Cabbage is good, too.

Breakfast looked a little problematic. Though I don’t eat much cereal (hate the processed stuff, and am not crazy about gooey cooked cereal), I’ve long been in the habit of fixing two pieces of bacon, two slices of toast, and about a gallon (so it seemed!) of orange juice frappéed with frozen strawberries.

I substituted a couple of sweet, flavorful tomatoey Campari tomatoes for the toast. With so much fruit in the house, often I’ve scarfed down a large peach or slab of melon in place of the juice, which itself consists of one large glass of OJ blended with about four large berries and a drop of vanilla extract. There’s been plenty of fruit at breakfast: a few days I’ve had a peach and watermelon!

When I took it into my little pea brain to cook up a stir-fry, I was given pause. After all, isn’t the whole point of stir-fry to eat the rice soaked in soy sauce? Well, it was late at night and I sure didn’t feel like making a green salad, which didn’t sound very good with stir-fry, anyway, so I just added lots of veggies and tried it sans rice. It was delicious! It didn’t need rice at all to be highly wonderful. What’s an Asian word for sans?

{chortle!} I figure the initial poundage drop is the loss of bloat from drinking one or two bourbons and water a day. I rarely drink more than two, and they’re pretty watered-down, but still…they are alcohol, which when you come down to it is just another sugar, only even less benign than the white granulated stuff. The pot belly is still there, though the love handles are noticeably reduced.

Exercise? Not hardly! It’s been too hot to poke one’s nose outside the door this past month. By 10:00 p.m., when it’s marginally cool enough to walk around and the pavement won’t burn Cassie’s feet, I’m usually just too pooped to do much other than drag into bed.

This morning when I woke up at 5:00, though, it was an unheard-of seventy-five degrees out there! A brilliant full moon hovered over the western horizon like a hallucinatory alabaster plate floating in the sky.

Grabbed the dog and made a tour of the neighborhood (as far from the German shepherd hosts as possible). After we returned and Cassie was fed, it was still cool enough for me to pump up the bicycle tires and ride all over Richistan, just to the east of us. Then plunged in the pool before breakfast.

So I got a little exercise, certainly nothing very vigorous but better than nothing. And it’s not likely to happen again soon, because the brief cold snap we’re having is supposed to dissipate today.

But it’s only a little after nine, all that activity has been activated, the plants are watered, all the laundry is done, and the sheets are on the line. Dang! Not a bad kick-off for the day.

I’d like to lose another eight or ten pounds. Even though I’m back in the “normal” BMI range, which I’d managed to edge above, I believe about 140 is more like “normal” for a woman my height and age. What I hope to do is get down to 135, so that during the times of day when one weighs out at one’s heaviest, the scale would never read more than about 140. And if that actually comes to pass, which would surprise me, I think the only way to maintain it will be to stay off the sauce permanently and after this to refrain from dumping vast mounds of spaghetti on my plate.

Welp, speaking of mounds, a pile of student papers awaits. And so, to work…

Image: From a photo by Aoife of  box of pareve Pillsbury pancake mix marketed in Israel. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.