Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Is This Ever Gonna STOP?

by

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

by

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…

by

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

by

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

by

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!

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.