Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

School’s out! (…almost…)

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w00t! Yesterday was the last day of class! Would that I could raise a toast to it!

Two rafts of papers to read, two courses to post on Blackboard, and then with any luck at all an entire month’s break.

I got a head start on the magazine writing students’ papers yesterday. Today I’ll read the Little McBoingers’ freshman comp papers (what a bunch this class has been!), then finish the budding journalists’ papers on Saturday. With any luck, I’ll be ready to file grades by…what? Monday? Then a day or two to load next semester’s courses, and after that…waHOO! A whole month of freedom!

This is the first real, credible vacation I’ve had in six years. Despite my highly developed expertise in Creative Malingering, the fact is that while “telecommuting” I was reading arcane academic copy steadily, plus supervising three or four bright young editors from afar (and doing freelance copyediting, and noonlighting with one to four upper-division writing courses on the side, and running this blog). Before that, when I was on GDU’s teaching faculty, an occasional break would come up, but it was usually filled with unpaid course prep work. I would grab every summer course I could get, and the time in between was occupied with getting ready for the next round of courses.

Boy, do I need a break! The stress of working 12 to 17 hours a day while trying to make some very frayed ends meet plus worrying about what we’re going to do, if anything, about the underwater house is making me sick. It’s obvious that the belly thing is stress-related, plus I’ve developed a fantastic new hypochondria, highly annoying and distracting. What next, Lord?

Of course, this “break” will be blighted a bit by the Workman Waltz, an added round of hassle one could do without. In addition to the roofers and the AC guy, I need to get the plumber in here. The kitchen sink is backing up in a weird way…think something’s amiss with the garbage disposal. While he’s here, there are a bunch of honey-does he can attend to.

That notwithstanding, I have a vacation plan. Mostly, it entails finally getting back into a healthy exercise routine. The scheme is as follows:

• Walk the dog first thing in the morning.
• Later in the morning, walk in one of the mountain parks, probably the one in Glendale, which is cleaner and more pleasant than ours and whose proprietors have announced no plans to fleece the users with parking fees.
• Ride the wonderful new purple bike in the afternoon.
• Walk the dog again in the evening.
• Spend the time in between gardening, touching up the paint, and reading stuff that is pure froth.

Maybe I can even get some socializing in somehow. That, of course, would entail finding someone to socialize with, not a likely prospect. But at least choir will be doing a lot of singing over the holidays, so that’ll provide some human contact. I’m going to spend Christmas Day at SDXB’s—with M’hijito at his dad’s and New Girlfriend in Denver with her family, we’ll both be orphaned again. Our plan is to hike part of the day and then fix a swell dinner.

So, maybe with some relief from work and a stab at getting back into what was once a pretty typical exercise routine, I’ll start to feel normal again.

bicycle

Images:

Nikolai Petrovitch Bogdanov-Belsky, Mental Calculations. Public Domain.
Funny about Money, Snapshot of Purple Bicycle. You want that photo? Feel free!

Hurrah!

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Evan, our favorite conservative and proprietor of My Journey to Millions, is a father! The Wife brought a baby boy into the world, and Evan lived to tell the story. Congratulations, Evan.

If you’d like to celebrate the arrival, consider subscribing to LoveDrop, a micro-giving group that engineers monthly gifts to needy individuals and families. For as little as a dollar a month, you can join a community whose founders include Budgets Are Sexy founder J. Money, obviously a high recommendation. Do be aware that it’s not a 501(c)3 charity; it’s a for-profit group dedicated to doing good works. Fifty percent of revenues go to recipients, 20 percent to taxes, and 30 percent to operating costs. Given that the group has to pay taxes (unlike traditional charities), this is a very good ratio.

Tiny House Demo

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Here’s something kinda charming:

Neat, huh? I love his “tiny fireplace…but it’s a tiny house”! 🙂 And how about that scenery in those places where  he’s plopped the things?

Every  now and again Mary at Simply Forties will ruminate about these minuscule little gems and wonder…could a person actually live in one of them? Like…permanently?

Pour moi, I don’t know. I occupy a four-bedroom house. It’s a little loose for me, but at 1,680 square feet, it’s not so huge I want to get free of it. One of the bedrooms is devoted to storage—it holds a freezer that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen; the closet holds linens that won’t fit in the linen closet, some art and sewing supplies, during the summer the space heaters, and during the winter the fans. A wallful of old bookcases holds food staples that won’t fit in the kitchen pantry and shouldn’t be stored in 115-degree heat in the garage. Another bedroom holds my office, file storage, and office supplies; I spend most of my waking hours here, operating not one, not two, but three enterprises. The master bedroom is just another closet—none of these rooms is very large—but I can’t imagine doing without it.

I could, however, do without the bedroom that’s occupied by the television, since I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Last night I sat down to veg out while writing a post for another site and found the offerings so bad, with all four channels of NPR begging for money and just garbage on all the other stations, that it didn’t even suffice as background noise.

And I could live without two bathrooms. And the extra living room that is the “family room.” That would cut about 470 square feet off my present space, bringing the desired living space down to about 1,210 square feet.

The underwater downtown house is about 1,300 square feet, to my mind just about ideal for one person. The kitchen is large enough to function. The dining room is big enough to entertain friends. The living room will hold an overstuffed sofa and chair (nonnegotiables, in my book); one of the bedrooms has plenty of space for an office, one is roomy enough for a queen-sized bed or maybe even a king; and the little back room will do for extra storage or as a guest room or sitting room.

What bothers  me about Jay’s minidigs, besides the fact that you’d have to be pathologically tidy to live there, is the loft bedroom. It’s a firetrap. Get a fire started below you—propane is wildly flammable—and you’re dead. There’s no way in hell you’re gonna get out of there. Check out that teeny little window: cute, but a grown man couldn’t begin to fit through it. And if he did, where would be be? Over the top of a flaming porch?

HUH-uh. Don’t think we’ll be contemplating life by Walden Pond in that thing.

Now the one in Texas that Mary photographed looks more reasonable. The bedroom is on the ground floor (there doesn’t appear to be a second floor). With some exuberant downsizing, you could indeed fit inside that place. At least, one person could. Two might be a little tight. Personally, I’d like more kitchen space—I cook a lot, and I’m not seeing enough space there for someone who likes to cook and likes to eat.

It’s a perfect little guest house or vacation getaway. As Mary points out, to make it permanently livable it would be good to have a place for a washer and dryer (or a washer alone…you hardly need a dryer, at least in a warm climate). For the $45,000 Mary’s friend paid to install this on her lot, you might be able to get an ordinary manufactured home in a park model; Cavco is selling them for around $49,000. Clayton claims to build a three-bedroom mobile home for as little as 49 grand…but who knows what you really get for that.

For not very much more that $45,000, I suspect you could get enough space that you wouldn’t have to ponder whether you really could live in it. You’d need to buy a plot of land, of course…there’s the rub! But if you already have one, this would be an inexpensive way to build on it.

Another interesting day forthcoming

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So around 10:00 a.m. the insurance adjuster is supposed to show up. It’ll be interesting to hear what he has to say about the heat pump, the roof, and the CoolDeck.

The air-conditioning dude who tried to sell me a capacitor for the allegedly destroyed unit (alleged by two other AC dudes) dropped by M’hijito’s house and said nothing was wrong with the brand-new unit on his roof. So I suppose that’s a hopeful sign.

That notwithstanding, it probably would be a good idea to have the roofer look at that house, too. It sez here in Wikipedia, the Font of Hive Wisdom, “Hail damage to roofs often goes unnoticed until further structural damage is seen, such as leaks or cracks. It is hardest to recognize hail damage on shingled roofs [that would be us!] and flat roofs, but all roofs have their own hail damage detection problems.”

Otherwise, I’m hoping for a quiet day, for a change. I still have to read two Eng. 101 papers that the endlessly annoying Blackboard somehow “hid,” despite the students having filed them on time. I do need to track down the invite from a couple of blogging friends to join their Google site, which I haven’t been able to find a minute to do in all the craziness of the past couple of weeks. And I should work on course prep for next semester, since I’d dearly love to have that out of the way before the end of this semester, so I can have an actual break during winter break.

On the other hand…there’s a farmer’s market at Town & Country, starting about the time the insurance guy is supposed to show up. I could dart over there the minute he goes out the door. Or I could just ride my bike around. That would be good.

Or maybe I’d like to spend some time with this. Awesome! And it’s free.

Images:

A large hailstone that fell in Harper, Kansas, May 14, 2004. U.S. National Weather Service. Public Domain.

Gustave Doré’s illustration to Dante’s Inferno. Plate IX: Canto III: Arrival of Charon. “And lo! towards us coming in a boat / An old man, hoary with the hair of eld, / Crying: ‘Woe unto you, ye souls depraved!'” (Longfellow’s translation) “And, lo! toward us in a bark / Comes an old man, hoary white with eld, / Crying “Woe to you, wicked spirits!” Public Domain.

w00t! A Beautiful Bike!

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Look what my friends in the choir gave me over the weekend!

(Click for an enlarged view)

My friends Joan and Lee offered me this beautiful purple bicycle, which happens to be exactly what I’ve been looking for and exactly what I can’t afford. These things cost something over $500 these days. They bought a pair of bikes about 16 or 18 years ago, because they were living in a nice house near the canal, which has been turned into a miles-long linear park with bike paths. They said they only used the bikes a half-dozen times or so, and then the things became garage sculptures.

Well! Can you imagine?

I took it over to my favorite bike shop, where they dusted it off and fitted it out with new tires, mega-puncture-proof innertubes, and a sort of bicycle Barcalounger for a seat. The bike guys much admired it. They were amazed that it was in such good condition. One of them said he used to sell that model, and that it looks brand-new.

Check out this little doodad I found:

It’s a little bell for binging at pedestrians so as not to catch them unawares when you come up behind them. Cool, eh?

I’ve been wanting a bike with gears for a long time, to make it possible to ride along the canal. The bike path goes under the roads, so that to get out from beneath the underpass you need at least three speeds. On my old beach cruiser, I have to get off and push the thing uphill out of the underpass, which isn’t much fun.

So! This will allow me to go for miles and miles. SDXB rides in from Glendale following the canal; it goes all the way through Scottsdale into Tempe.

Now I’ll be able to get the exercise that has been so direly lacking in my life the past few years. If there’s a blood pressure problem (it’s beginning to look less likely), a few hours of long-distance riding a week in addition to the daily dog-walking should take care of it. My friends may have given me more than a bicycle…they may be giving me several more years of healthy living!

Amazed Little Cassie

Thanks, Joan and Lee! ♥

Back to the Future…

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{sigh} We have seen the future, and it is…the Dark Ages. The Party of No has wrested control of the U.S. House of Representatives from the Party of the Half-Baked. No hope for relief from the metastasizing mean-mindedness and outright viciousness that have invaded our body politic is to be found, anywhere.

Here in Arizona, voters have approved a measure that exempts citizens and businesses from the national healthcare plan. The comically moronic Governor Jan Brewer (she of “uhhhhhh………..tee hee!……..uhhhhhmmmmmm”) was re-elected, of course, and the craven pol who presided as superintendent of public instruction while Arizona’s school system sank to the bottom of the national rankings is now, God help us, the state attorney general.

Now I’ll have to say, I wasn’t pleased with Obama’s healthcare plan. Without a national option, it’s just another iteration of what we already had: it threw us into the lion’s den with a pride of hungry insurance companies. We needed an option to make something like Medicare available to everyone who wished to accept it. Medicare is expensive — even after the state’s insurers raised their rates, my employee plan cost an eighth of what I’m paying to be fully covered under Medicare. However, for what I’m paying, coverage is better. If I fall ill and have to go doctors frequently, my overall costs will be much lower. Requiring everyone to sign up for full coverage with private insurers while blocking insurers from shafting people who really need care simply guaranteed that everybody’s costs would go up, coverage would be no better than what we have, and the well-heeled insurance industry would be joined by every other well-heeled industry in mounting a no-holds-barred campaign against the Obama administration.

Accepting compromise on healthcare was stupid. If the Democrats couldn’t swing a national healthcare option, then they should have dropped their plan until they could.

As for the Afghanistan mess: We were in Afghanistan long before Obama came along. Matter of fact, it seems to me we entered the war in the Middle East because a certain pack of lies emanated from a previous administration. Afghanistan was where the perp was hiding, but instead of going after him, we took it upon ourselves to depose a dictator who was formerly our ally, not because he was much of a threat but because, said our then-President, “This is the guy who tried to kill my dad.”

So…now we have in office some folks who think it’s acceptable to stomp on the head of a woman who disagrees with their doctrine.

Time to get out our brown shirts and iron them. And if you still believe you’re in the middle class, say good-bye to all that.