Idle essays

The mountain of student papers is finally graded and all the grades are in. Thinking grades were due at 5:00 p.m. yesterday—not 11:00 a.m., as was the fact—I was late because one student had special dispensation to turn in assignments late. But finally all that ess aitch eye got done and officially stamped and filed.

A record number of students failed, two for plagiarizing but most simply because they stopped turning in papers. It’s interesting, the number of community college students who don’t drop when they can’t keep up with a course. On the surface, it would seem better to have a W on your transcript than a D or an F. Apparently, though, there’s a financial incentive: it appears that if they pretend to stay in a course, they get to keep scholarship or loan money that evidently would be forfeited if they dropped. This little bit of fraud is abetted by the District’s policy of allowing them to repeat courses several times and counting only the highest score in the GPA. Thus if you got an F in math and later managed a B, your grade-point average would reflect only the B.

From an instructorly point of view, one shouldn’t complain: it’s that many fewer papers to have to read.

From a taxpayer point of view, though, it seems wasteful. In the comp courses alone, 13% of the classmates failed for this reason.

Oh, well… As soon as grades were filed, it was on to indexing this year’s issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History. After plowing through that much student drivel, reading SMRH is actually refreshing! Yesterday I got through a well written piece on a recently discovered Vie of Isabelle of France, a thirteenth-century Franciscan réligieuse sainted because of the alleged miracles she could work. Medieval Europe was so strange that reading about it is like reading of the doings on another planet. It has a science-fictionlike character. To say life in Europe before the Renaissance was very, very different from our reality is to understate.

Meanwhile, I haven’t even begun the Arizona Book Publishing Association’s newsletter, which was due a week ago. And today I have to go to a meeting of our neighborhood group, for which I have agreed to work on a newsletter or write web content—don’t know which yet. And very soon now (like…today?) I need to start the course preps for the summer 101 and 102 classes. That’ll absorb another week of unpaid time. Ugh.

I’m about to slip the bonds of Evil Blackboard, creating new sites on WordPress.com for all three of my courses. The one for the 102s is already up and running—this semester’s bunch tested it for peer-reviewing drafts of their final endless paper, and it worked pretty well. For the purpose, it’s much easier than using Blackboard’s half-baked blog function, because in its clumsiness BB effectively “hides” responses to posts, forcing you to search twice in two different functions for every single student. In WP, all you have to do is run your eye down the page, or sign in as the admin and simply go to manage > comments to find their most recent work. That’s only one of several functions I think will be much simpler.

The other new strategy will be to establish Gmail accounts for each section and tell the students they have to use them to e-mail me and to submit their papers. This will organize all incoming student correspondence by section number, and it also will get it off my personal e-mail, which is swamped with trash forwarded from the college’s and the District’s wayyy tooo many departments.

Not only do these entities emit reams of irrelevant messages to everyone with a maricopa.edu address, employees are in the habit of hitting reply-all to every little self-congratulatory message, every announcement that someone’s spouse died, every invite to a retirement party, and on and on. The largest community college system in the country (vaster even than the Great Desert University, with over 70,000 students the largest pretend-university in the land), the Maricopa County Community College District has a lot of employees, all of them yakking to each other irrelevantly over the e-mail system. The result is that student correspondence (and other important matters) gets lost in the shuffle.

I’d like to unforward the college’s e-mail, once I get the students established in Gmail, and then give my real-world address to the division chair, the division secretary, and the few friends I’ve made over there. However, occasional important messages do come through, and having to visit the college’s system every day in search of those would still require me to sift through all that trash, while adding an extra layer of sign-in hassle.

Meanwhile, several efforts by the magazine-writing students are good enough to press into service as guest posts, and so in the next week or so, while I deal with the mass of urgent work that didn’t get done while I was grading papers, I’ll be running some of those here.

Welp, the sun is up and so I’d better get going. Later!

Images:

Bust of Aristotle. Copy of a bronze by Lysippus. Photo by Jastrow. Public domain.
Sainte Isabelle de France par Louis Desprez (1841), statue refaite d’après un original gothique. Porche de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois, Paris. Photo by Jastrow. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

 

 

Okay, we have no idea how many days into Lent we are, because we are innumerate and cannot count up a total if the figure to be calculated exceeds the number of our fingers and toes. Therefore, let us offer up the last couple of thanks to God, who has more important human errors to marvel at.

Lenten thanks, Day 39

Dogs, God…thanks for making dogs. Nice microcosm of the in-Your-image paradigm: a creature at once magnificent, hideous, merciful, merciless, kindly, fierce, forgiving, angry, best friend of humanity, dangerous nemesis.

Lenten thanks, Day 40

Thank you, God, for making the human a musical creature.

At the risk of enraging Her, I’d say this has been a Good Friday from Hell. Except it really hasn’t—by midday it was hugely redeemed.

The Cassowary is happily chasing tennis balls around the house. She is not vomiting and shitting blood, as expected, and since she’s not doing that now she probably won’t be, at least not anytime soon. I hurt all over my body but probably will get over it in a week or two.

The emergency trip to the vet set me back only $90, somewhat less than expected. Thank God (set that type in Lenten purple!) I had not made my usual start-of-the-billing-cycle run on Costco…we’ll be holding off on buying groceries for awhile! The nocturnal trip to the Mayo’s ER should set me back little or nothing, if the pricey Medigap policy works as advertised.

oohhhhhhhhhhh what a night, what a day!

But things could be worse. Much worse.

Earlier this week, in the midst of rehearsing a performance of Tavener’s Lament for Jerusalem (listen! the choral part is on the far side of the orchestral section) and fielding what appears to be an infinite number of semester-end student papers and reading an ARC for The Client (well…the favorite Client) and seeking out The Pup of 2011, I took it into my feeble little brain to do a little terraforming in the backyard. Building and reinforcing a berm to hold water under the big orange tree (rather than having it flow downhill under the back gate and into the alley), I hunker down on the ground, reach out simian-style, grab a 5-pound rock, lift it…and damn near faint from the stab of pain that penetrates my chest.

It feels like the stiff waistband on my jeans has shoved its way through the fat and come up under the ribs and yanked on the rib cage, in an up-and-out motion.

Holy God, what pain!

At first I thought, “Have I perforated my liver? Where is the liver, anyway?” Then thought I must have fractured a rib. As the wave of pain receded, I realized it felt exactly the way your achin’ back feels when you first put it out. Concluded it was probably a muscle spasm. After I caught my breath, I went on about my business. This seemed like it ought to be hunky and dory, except…

Over the next day or two, it got worse. Progressively worse. A lot worse.

Last night I had to lie down on the floor to fish a tennis ball out from under a piece of furniture, whence it had fled Cassie the Corgie. Only way I could reach it was to lie on my back and stick my arm under the cabinet as far as I could reach. Success…ball back in the welcoming jaws of the dog….and…

I could. not. get. off. the. floor.

No. The torso hurt so much I couldn’t lift myself off the ground. All the phone extensions were a long way away, and up on top of other pieces of furniture.

Uh oh.

It took a while, I don’t know how long, before I could force myself through the surge of agony required to climb to my feet. Omigod, it hurt!

So I staggered down the hall, grabbed an icepack out of the freezer, and lay down on the bed. After a bit, this seemed to calm things down, so I moved on with life: cleaned up the kitchen in a half-assed way and went to bed.

Along about 1:30, the usual insomniac awakening occurred. Dog wanted to go out. I needed to go to the bathroom. Went to climb out of the bed, and oh my GOD what pain! Take-your-breath-away pain; as in literally I can’t breathe. Managed to get the dog off the bed—getting her back up there was out of the question, and getting myself back onto that elevated bedstead was a bit unlikely, too. Began to wonder if I’d broken something after all. Or done more serious damage.

Finally about 2:30 a.m. I presented myself at the emergency room. The advantage of going to the Mayo in the wee hours is that you actually get some attention, contrary to what you will experience at any other ER in the city. I was out of there by 4:00, bearing a doctor’s opinion that I’d probably torn a muscle but not broken a rib and carrying a prescription for an addictive painkiller. {sigh}

Back to bed; out of sheer exhaustion, fell asleep and stayed asleep until around 7:30. Looked up the addictive painkiller online; decided some things are worse than a terminal backache situated in your ribs.

Had time between the end of breakfast and choir call to putter around the yard. Out front, discovered I could lift my arms well enough to pull off some of the desert willow’s new suckers, which have sprouted since it was so massively mutilated by the roofing vandals. Cassie is also puttering around the front yard. I look up and notice she’s digging and…and eating. What????

She’s in an area that was covered by an overgrown bougainvillea, until Gerardo trimmed it back so Jack the Handyman could paint, by way of repairing some of the hail damage. Mine is a corner lot, and so every passing turkey that drives by dumps trash on it. Once a month Gerardo comes over and, among other things, gathers the fast-food wrappers and drink cups to haul them to the dump.

So she could be eating the remains of a Burger King or a McDonald’s. Or…

The neighbor across the street has declared war on the roof rats. She puts rat poison out along the tops of her block walls. And where does a sickened rat go to die? Right: under the shrubbery. Under, for example, an overgrown bougainvillea.

I can’t find the remains of any animal—no feathers, no fur, no beak, no bones. If anything organic and animal was there, it’s decomposed in the leaves and compost from the boug. But Cassie’s mouth has recently been full, she’s going smack, smack, smack, and she stinks. She smells of some sort of chemical. The ground where she was digging has a similar stink.

I call the vet’s. Her assistant says, “Can you be here by 10:00?” It’s ten to ten. I say, “I’m on my way.” I scoop a bunch of the smelly dirt into a plastic dog, toss it and the dog into the car, and race to the veterinary, wending my way around every moron in the city who feels compelled to get in front of me and drive 10 mph under the limit!

We arrive at the vet’s. They park us in the very examining room where I had to say good-bye to Anna the Ger-shep. Then they come and take Cassie away from me. I sit there and start to cry.

Some time later, the vet comes in. Her opinion? In a nutshell: I dunno. They can’t tell anything from the amorphous crud I’ve hauled in. The dog seems OK, but it’s probably too early to see anything. The biggest risks are that she’s swallowed something that could harm her gut or that she indeed has eaten a poisoned rat or mouse. The vet thinks there’s some probability that even if she has consumed a dead rodent, she may be OK, warnings on the outside a the rat poison box to the contrary. At a bit of a loss, she suggests we try a prophylactic course of vitamin K, which is what they give animals that have swallowed rat poison, and pray for the best.

At 11:01 a.m., I stumbled into the house with the dog, unwashed, untooth-brushed, and swathed in dirty jeans and a sweaty T-shirt. Choir call for the Good Friday concert is at 11:30. I wrap a pill in a slice of chicken, hand it to the dog, and run for the shower. Arrive at the choir room at 11:27 with wet hair, face free of make-up, and body barely clad in a pullover dress.

What was it the ER doc said? Slow down and let that injured muscle rest! Oh well.

The music was just awesome! We sang the Taverner lament to a marvelous orchestral setting, directly after the stations of the cross. The effect was stunning. The centerpiece of the senior choir is a small ensemble of professional and semiprofessional singers who are capable of carrying the day. Our director had selected two soloists—an alto and a soprano—to sing the parts in the recurring “cosmic laments,” and they were both splendid. What a privilege to be allowed to play a tiny part in supporting such wonderful performers.

So that erased the Not-So-Good from Good Friday.

It’s almost 6:00 p.m. I’ve dosed myself with a fine dinner and my favorite analgesic  (alcohol!), and still the little dog needs to go for a walk. By the time I’ve limped around the block with her, I will be capable of nothing more.

And so, soon, to bed. Happy Passover, Happy Easter, Happy Whatever to all of you.

Lenten thanks, Day  30

Thank God I don’t live in Iowa!

Lenten thanks, Day 31

Today is my mother’s birthday. She would be 100 years old today. I’m glad I had some time in my life with her, and thankful that most Americans no longer buy the products of the people who murdered her. But I do wish my son, who came along just a year after she died, could have met her.

Time to quit complaining because a minor cold has caused me to fall so far behind that I’m working every day to catch up and still falling further behind! Things could be worse: way worse.

Take a look at this incredible footage from Iowa:

Those are just two of the ten tornadoes confirmed to have struck the state. Makes a little hailstorm seem as nothing.

Seeing this news reminded me that I haven’t seen the $650 supplemental check that was supposed to be forthcoming from The Hartford. Just sent off a reminder to the claims adjustor, but I’ll bet he has his hands full with other issues just now. Many other issues, no doubt.

I’m still playing catch-up with the work that piled up while I was sick. With Blackboard deciding not to play nice with anyone who had the temerity to update their browser, student papers have gotten lost in the vast tide of e-mail that floods my in-box every day. Yesterday I tried to sift through all that stuff, but evidently lost some of them, since several students who never miss a deadline turned up with no papers. That means that on top of the full class of papers I have to read today—also belatedly—another four or five dreary freshman comp papers will come thudding in today or tomorrow.

To gild that lily, the chronic insomnia is back with a vengeance. Haven’t had more than four hours’ sleep in a good two weeks. Yesterday after I planned to spend the afternoon reading the rest of the comp papers so I could spend today reading the journalism papers, but after lunch I was so tired I couldn’t hold my eyes open. So laid down for an hour’s nap. Two hours later M’hijito called and jarred me out of a comatose sleep. By then it was 4:30 and I was so groggy I could barely move around the house, much less think clearly enough to read an awful paper, figure out what’s wrong with it, try to explain what’s wrong with it, and try to attach a fair grade to it.

He invited me to dinner. Shouldn’t have been driving the car, but I never turn down that kind of invite. On the way to his place I realized nooo, right about then I was supposed to be headed to evensong. So when I got to his house I e-mailed the choir director to weasel out of that. Really didn’t want to cop out, but I wouldn’t have been much use in those parts.

So while M’hijito shopped for food and then cooked it, I read two papers, both of which were pretty bad. Still was too stunned to eat much…couldn’t get around all of the wonderful dinner he fixed. Then back home to read the rest of the stuff. Finally into bed around midnight.

Dropped two Benadryl by way of drugging myself back to sleep. It worked: slept till 7:30 this morning.

Guess I need to get off the coffee again. And off the wine, which probably doesn’t help things. And off the whine, too! 🙄

A perfect storm of stoont papers doesn’t hold a candle to a perfect storm of 165-mile winds.

Lenten thanks, Day 9

I thank God for the prolific orange trees in the back yard, which despite being battered by hail and hard frost still provide enough vitamin C to kill an army of rhinoviruses.

Too diseased today to write anything original. So let’s entertain ourselves with a cruise through a page of the endlessly entertaining Google News.

Tragedy strikes in Appleville: writing for The Telegraph, British columnist Christopher Williams bemoans the shortage of iPad 2 parts, some of which emanated from Japan. Needless to say, the dwindling supply of Japanese compasses and ultrathin batteries threatens the future of personkind. One commenter on this effete little piece remarked drily, “Until iPads become edible, they are of no real importance in the current circumstances.”

BBC observes that the doctrinaire demagogues in the U.S. House of Representatives have voted to cut funding to National Public Radio. Public media being s-o-o-o-o-o-cialism and good investigative reporting invariably being LIBeral (nevermind that it’s scarcer than fur on a chicken’s egg these days), we should all be grateful for this heroic effort to get rid of all that, so more voting Americans can cast ballots without bothering their sweet heads with things like facts. It might be noted that public broadcasting is not just for the intelligentsia; more than half of Americans access it every month. The Senate has yet to vote on this issue, and so it’s not too late to write to your elected representatives. Go to 170 Million Americans for more information.

If you weren’t already afraid, very afraid, get ready for real terror: America is becoming a Hispanic country! Oh, the horror. Just as it became an Irish country after the potato famine, a Polish country during the waves of Eastern European immigration, a Chinese country while the railroads were being built, a Welsh country while we were importing miners to rip ore out of the earth…heaven help us!

In Japan, a country in no danger of turning Hispanic (yet!), 7,000 people have been confirmed dead, the government has raised the danger level at Fukushima a notch, and Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls the situation “grave.”

That notwithstanding, the Japanese stock market is recovering as the Bank of Japan and G7 countries intervene on the falling yen. Just the other day, Frugal Scholar was worrying about the ethics of taking advantage of investing as markets tumble in response to a disaster. Now’s the time, folks, to buy stock in companies that produce the supplies that will be needed to rebuild Japan.

Citizens of the globe don’t put much stock in their governments’ soothing words about the potential meltdown of not one, not two, not three, but four nuclear reactors. Despite world leaders telling their people don’t worry, be happy, consumers as far away from Japan as Great Britain are racing to buy potassium iodide, a substance said to block the uptake of radioactive iodine. Better buy some stock in the companies that make that stuff, too!

Speaking of the Brits, the Prince of Wales is spending a great deal of energy saving a variety of red squirrel native to Great Britain.

Faced with the threat of invasion by UN forces to “protect civilians,” Libya has declared a cease-fire. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Stem cell research, that bane of the right-threaded wingnut, is now poised to save many right- and left-wing lives. Injecting stem cells into the hearts of cardiac arrest victims can bring scarred heart tissue back to normal. This astonishing development promises to relieve untold suffering and restore health to millions of people.

Now…if only we could come up with a cure for the common cold…

Lenten thanks, Day 8

Thank God for Social Security! Without it, I’d be spending my old age in real poverty.

Busted because I spent over $200 yesterday, just sitting here in the house. Disgusted because after KJG left, I came down with a roaring sore throat. And cain’t be trusted to show up at the weekly trade group breakfast meeting because of the roaring sore throat.

{sigh} I hope KJG doesn’t catch this bug. At least I’m not exposing my friends in Scottsdale to it. And thank goodness it’s spring break and I don’t have to entertain 50 freshmen today. Ugh!

Some spring break, eh? It starts out with three solid days wasted doing battle with the unholy Blackboard and ends with a nasty cold.

After I paid Gerardo twice as much as his usual fee for the extra work he and his sidekicks performed by way of cleaning up after the recent hard freeze, he lost the check. His pocket had a hole in it. Actually, all his pockets have holes in them, as we discovered when he resurfaced here asking for another one. So I had to stop payment on the first check. That will cost me fifteen bucks, so, bitch that I am, I wrote him a new check for $15 less than the first one. Maybe that was ungracious. But…I really shouldn’t have paid him double his usual amount to begin with, and to add a hefty bank fee on top of that when I’m trapped in my house because I can’t afford to buy gasoline until next Monday was a bit beyond the pale.*

*Update: This turned into a pricier adventure than I imagined at the time I was writing. The credit union has upped its stop-payment fee from $15 to $32!

Then the locksmith charged $111 to install a new lock and make keys for it. That also was a bit beyond the pale for a job a handyman could’ve done.

Anyway, now there’s a lock on there that can’t be opened by someone who decides to break the windowpane.

The kitchen doors on these houses are the most vulnerable entryways, through which most of the break-ins happen. By and large the residents secure the sliding doors; although those are notoriously flimsy, a few simple tricks will make them harder to break through than most burglars like. But if you have an ordinary lock on the back door, which is the only egress in the event of a fire on the stove, then the burglar can just punch a hole in the window, stick his hand through it, unlock the door, and make himself to home. Because of the safety issue—trapped by a fire, a person could panic and not find a hidden key to a deadbolt—people tend to install single-cylinder deadbolts on those back doors.

During my cleaning frenzy the day before yesterday, I discovered a greasy forehead print on one of the backdoor windowpanes. It wasn’t that long ago that I cleaned those windows, so this must have happened fairly recently. Evidently the perp—or some other wannabe perp—cased the joint.

Don’t think this happened on the night of the event, because the motion-sensitive exterior lights were not on when I walked out to investigate. They stay on for about five or ten minutes, so, unless the guy waited until after they clicked off to try his luck on the side door, it doesn’t seem likely he peered into the kitchen at that time. Besides, what could he have seen at 4:00 in the morning by the light of the microwave clock? It’s very dark out there.

Charming.

As soon as I regain consciousness this morning, I’ll have to burn my last gallon of gasoline on a trip up to Home Depot, there to buy some prison bars for the back door. I just hate those ugly things—dammit! it’s the bad guy who belongs behind bars, not me!—but without a big, mean dog and now lacking the wits and reflexes of a younger woman, I just don’t feel safe anymore.

Well, I see one client sent a new chunk of technomaterial to edit yesterday, and the other called while KJG was here asking if I’d do a rush job, which she dropped in the mail yesterday. Sooo…. I’d better get to work. Sore throat or no, it’s gonna be a busy day!

Image: Human rhinovirus 16-coat protein at high resolution. A. T. Hadfield and M. G. Rossmann. Posted at the Protein Databank, an “archive of macromolecular structural data that is freely and publicly available to the global community.”