So the new strategy to stand upwhile working in front of a computer is now under way. It occurred to me to wonder if standing and thinking might burn more calories than sitting and thinking. Here’s what the Web says:
So. Each day one restrains oneself from quaffing one’s favorite brew and stands up in front of the computer for eight hours, one deletes 233 calories from one’s daily pack-it-in activities. Put another way, one beer = 1 hour and 55 minutes of standing on one’s feet.
On the other hand, one bourbon-&-water costs you only 52 minutes of labor in front of the computer.
Interesting. I don’t expect we’re supposed to be looking at it that way, are we?
So, late this afternoon I notice the swimming pool is laboring, choked by all the crud sifting down from the hated palm trees. I’m on the phone leaving word with the accountant’s answering machine about a new little project I’ve cooked up while running across the yard to shut off the pump when I spot yet another bird in the sink of death.
That’s what a pool is, you know: a sink of death. It kills all sorts of small things, from little insects to little children, with birds about a third of the way across the spectrum. In size, I mean.
This one, though, has not yet drowned. It’s managed to climb aboard Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner’s hose, where it’s perched next to the intake. Because the pump is so thickly clogged, not enough current is sucking to pull the bird off its life raft.
It was a fledgling white-wing, the second to fall into the pool in the past week or ten days. So stunned was the chick that it allowed me to reach in, wrap a paper towel around it, and lift it out of the water.
But…then what?
It couldn’t come in the house: Cassie would make real short work of it. For the same reason, it couldn’t be left on the ground. If Cassie didn’t grab it, the ants would soon eat it alive.
I carried it around to the west side and set it on the shaded concrete bench, figuring it would probably die soon enough on its own.
Half an hour or so later, peered out the Arcadia door to see it was standing on its little feet, still all wadded up and unhappy-looking but distinctly alive. Put some water in a plant dish and set that and a handful of birdseed on the bench. The bird was not interested.
Went out to wrestle with the pool, around phone calls from Gerardo, who claimed to be trying to get a palm tree dude over here this afternoon or Saturday. Took some doing to persuade him that when I said I intend to spend tomorrow in Waddell, I’m not kidding. Pulled Harvey out of the drink; cleaned out his leaf-catcher and the pump pot but decided to let the extremely premature backwash job wait until after the promised palm tree guys have come and gone, since they’ll make an unholy mess of the pool and the pump will have to be backwashed again. Which reminds me: I’ve lost the bonnet to the water-hose-run debris collector.
Damn! Another Home Depot run. Already $126 in the red this month; by the time these guys are done, I’ll be a good $350 in the hole.
But while I’m out there, I realize a couple of adult doves are flying around with uncharacteristic bravado. They must be looking for their pup. So that means the fledgling belongs on the east side of the house, somewhere near its nest. There’s another fledgling hopping around in the tree, which must mean the mating doves haven’t yet lost all their brood to the pool.
After awhile, I spot their nest: about two stories high in a limb of the devil-pod tree. You’d need a cherry-picker to lift this bird back up there. Hm.
Finally, I decide to put the little bird on top of the metal storage shed, which by this time in the afternoon is fully in the shade. But it’s a 110 degrees out there, and the metal is too hot for it to sit on any length of time. A large, flat plant dish, retrieved from the junk pile hidden behind that side of the house, would work to insulate and hold the bird, though. So I haul out a stepladder and set this thing atop the metal roof.
Go and retrieve the bird, which still shows no inclination to try to escape.
However, when I climb up on the ladder and go to set it in the plant dish, it doesn’t like that idea at all. It panics and tries to fly away, skittering across the corrugated metal roof and falling down behind the shed, between its back side and the concrete wall.
Seriously damn! Dead bird, for sure!
Well, no. I peek back in there and see the bird has landed on its feet and looks OK: a great deal better than it looked when plucked from the pool. The old boards I hid back there years ago are level and coated with an inch or so of composting devil pods and leaves, forming a soft substrate…probably not unlike a nest. It’s shaded and cool back there, and there’s no way Cassie can reach the bird. Probably there are precious few ants back there, too—it’ll take them a while to find the little thing, anyway.
As I write this, it’s coming onto the middle of the night. Out of curiosity, I took the flashlight out and peeked behind the shed, expecting to find an avian corpse out there.
Gone!
The bird has flown the coop. Couldn’t see it on the ground, either. So presumably it must have eventually dried out enough to take flight and, with any luck at all, made its way back into the tree and maybe even back to the nest.
Let’s just hope after all that it remembers to stay away from the darned pool!
{sigh} It’s strangely disorienting to walk into the garage to toss the trash in the recycling bin and find the darned place empty. Vacant. Lonely.
The Dog Chariot is down at Chuck’s Auto Service, there to have its oil leak diagnosed.
Weird, isn’t it, how one develops an affection for inanimate objects? (Or does one? Maybe I’m crazy as a loon!)
My favorite car was the beautiful little Camry I gave to my son at the time I bought the Dog Chariot. I loved that car: gave it a name, “Katydid,” because its license plate (the first I’d ever bought on my own, as an independent person!) started with the letters KTD. But in due course I had to have a vehicle that was large enough that Anna the German Shepherd couldn’t stand on back seat, plant her muzzle next to my ear, and bark (nonstop!) in the decibel range of a nuclear blast.
LOL! Buying a minivan so Anna couldn’t deafen me had a lot to do with the 40 grand I spent on that animal during her lifetime. Hence the sobriquet the thousand-dollar-a-day dog.
At the outset, I wasn’t nuts about the Sienna, an ungainly, lumbering, gas-guzzling bison. Looked like and drove like a suburban mom’s car-pooling bus. Oh well.
But over time, it grew on me. It has a lot of room: room to haul junk around, room to haul not one but two ninety-pound dogs, room to sleep in when you’re car-camping and a scary lightning storm blows up. With its Camry chassis, it’s one helluva lot more comfortable to ride in than a Suburban or a Land Cruiser or a Chevy van (all of which I’ve driven endlessly). And it puts plenty of steel between me and my fellow homicidal drivers.
It is, in short, like a good man: maybe not so rakishly handsome, but kindly, capacious of heart, and reliable.
Last time the cost of gas went through the stratosphere, I took out three of the four back bucket seats, by way of relieving the vehicle of some weight. The effect was to create a cargo bay the size of a limestone cave. Never put them back. It seems to have worked. Despite the car’s decrepitude, this morning I calculated that it made almost 21 mpg over the past two weeks’ worth of exclusively in-town driving. Not bad, for a tank with an EPA rating of 18 mpg.
So, it makes me feel sad not to have the Dog Chariot sitting in its familiar place, right next to the water heater in the garage. (Yeah. I know.) (There’s a fire door between the garage and the house. Yes.) And I guess that’s why I don’t feel in any great hurry to run out and buy a new car, even though it’s past time to get one and even though my financial dude says I can afford it.
Nothing lasts forever, of course. Not even you and me. But I’m going to miss that car when it’s gone.
Into the drink late this morning, after a bunch of yard- and housework was done! Yahoo! The pool water is perfect! Just cool enough to be refreshing but not (quite) so cold as to freeze you into a solid block of ice.
The lovely Texas sage is in full blossom, arching over the deep end to create a shady grotto and setting little leis of purple flowers afloat in the water.
The weather is warming up. Looks like we’ve seen the last of the little stretches of respite that have brought night-time temps into the 60s. We won’t get a break from the heat until August, when (if we’re lucky) evening monsoons will drop temperatures about 20 degrees—but add so much water to the air that the morning heat will feel 20 degrees hotter than its normal 110 degrees.
This is the time of year when a swimming pool is the best thing, a luxury beyond all McMansionville.
This is another guest post by a delightful graduate of my magazine writing course, Anita Martinez. It’s not easy to write humor. Let’s hope she keeps writing! 😀
We were a young couple at the time, having our first home built. This was an exciting event in our lives, interlaced with stress, especially when we had to stay at my in-laws’ home during the process.
For the most part, I got along fine with my in-laws, so it wasn’t too bad at first, in spite of the cramped quarters. I soon found out, however, that hot water for dishes, bathing and showering was a commodity my mother-in-law guarded ferociously. So I figured out a strategy.
Early dawn found me awakening before the rest of the snoozing household, armed with a towel and shampoo. I was thankful my father-in-law’s loud snoring muffled my stealthy entrance to the bathroom and shower.
A dry, cracked bar of Ivory soap lay in the soap dish, waiting to be frothed. I turned the squeaky shower faucets, and a dribble of lukewarm water greeted me.
As I basked in the showerhead’s trickle, my eyes wandered to an object upon the window ledge, directly above me: a smiling ceramic monk, complete with dangling rosary and cross. He had a hard-to-reach opening on top of his belly. I tip-toed and struggled to place my fingertips inside it. He was filled with water. Oh, holy water, was my thought. I must bless myself with it every morning and toss up a prayer that all goes smoothly with the house construction.
I followed this new-born tradition every morning: sneak into shower, plunge fingers in the happy monk’s sacred vessel, cross myself fervently, and pray.
One morning, as our extended stay neared its end, I must have been more alert than usual. As I showered, I noticed the ceramic monk facing me, bearing his happy Bob’s Big Boy grin. His protruding belly displayed printing I hadn’t seen before. In large, uppercase letters, were the words CHOPPER HOPPER. My brow furrowed as I pondered: CHOPPER HOPPER? What could that mean?
With a growing sense of dread, I outstretched my hands, groping and grabbing the grinning monk, whose cold water sloshed upon me. I peered down at the contents of his belly: my father-in-law’s dentures. I had been blessing myself with Efferdent and remnants of beef stew.
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.
St. Isabelle
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 CommonsAttribution 3.0 Unported license.
