Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

A Night on the Town

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Just bought a ticket to a chamber music performance that will include Karen Knudsen, one of the choir’s professional altos. I love listening to these talented artists perform—they all have lovely voices (one has a magnificent voice, IMHO). Next Tuesday’s concert, part of the annual Bach Festival, will feature Bach cantatas and include oboist Marian Buswell, organist Scott Youngs, violinist Stephen Redfield, and cellist Jan Simiz.

If you’re in central Arizona, you should consider attending one or more of the Bach Festival performances. They’re really top-flight, and a ticket for a concert is only $25 ($20 if you’re in your dotage). Five concerts will take place over a week, from January 8 to 14. Here’s a list of the events.

{sigh} Wish I could afford to go to all of them. As it is, though, one twenty-dollah hit means no meals out for me this month. Twenty bucks blows my “entertainment” (hah!) budget direct to Hell.

Had an interesting insight over the weekend, as I was setting up a Quickbooks Online account for my personal accounts. Between the $2100 drawdown from savings and the $1080 Social Security benefit, net inflow to my checking account is actually just about what it was when I was working full-time for GDU.

So…why do I live in a constant state of penury?

Because I’m paying my share of the mortgage on the downtown house out of pocket, instead of out of long-term savings as I was doing when I had a job and when the stock market was whaling along magnificently, and because I’m having to pay over $130 a month for Medigap and Medicare Part D.

So my available income (if you can call drawdowns from savings “income”) is $865 a month less than what it was in 2009.

No wonder I feel pinched all the time. And no wonder going to one inexpensive concert means I can’t go out to lunch for an entire month.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it? There’s a reason I’m working like an animal but still feeling like I have to live like an anchorite. Dang. All an anchorite has to do is tend his garden and pray all the time.

Welp, speaking of working like an animal, I agreed to spend a day with friend KJG, whose house is way to heck and gone out at the White Tanks. Will have to leave by 9:00 a.m., but I still have a project to do for a client that has to get done this morning.

So…to work.

 

Happy New Year!

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Happy 2012!

Imagine living long enough to see not only years beginning with “2” but 2000 years counted in the tens. Who’d have thunk it?

Sounds like a war is going on out there. Cassie, cowering under my feet just now, is so terrorized she won’t go back to bed. So it looks like we’ll be up until people stop shooting off their guns and fireworks.

Our fruitcake state legislators decided the decades-old ban on fireworks offended every red-blooded American’s liberty, and so they passed a law nullifying the socialistic ban. The cities, whose fire departments and EMTs were already overworked enough on New Year’s and the Fourth of July, responded by enacting local bans, which the idiot legislature was persuaded to allow despite the new spirit of freedom.

The result is that the City of Phoenix is forced to allow the sale of dangerous fireworks, but the people who live here are not allowed to use them.

Confused yet?

That’s right. You can buy fireworks that will blow your hand away and set fire to the neighbor’s roof, but you can’t set them off.

As you can imagine, that last detail is honored about as religiously as the ban on using fireplaces they announced on Christmas Day.

2012. Can’t wait to see what they do next!

😀

 

How Do You Spell “Puppy”? c-h-a-o-s

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Make that c-h-a-o-s-! The exclamation point is part of the spelling, when the term applies to puppies.

Holy mackerel! What a morning. And it’s just starting. While I wait the 20 to 40 minutes it will take to make the decrepit iMac (the only computer in the house that will speak to the printer) scan and store two clients’ checks and then upload them to the credit union, let us entertain ourselves with Charley’s antics of the day. So far.

So I get a little bit of a late start, in spite of awaking at 4:30 a.m. I’ve dawdled over the online news and my favorite time-killing games until ten after seven. Not only does Cassie need to be fed, but I like to have had my own breakfast before the young dynamo shows up around ten to eight. If Cassie and I don’t get going by seven, breakfast is going to be hurried.

She’s bolted her Queen of Sheba breakfast and I’m about to sit down to my three slabs of bacon and dry toast when I hear the blower running outdoors.

Gerardo! Have to unlock the side gate so he can get into the backyard, and also confer with him.

He wants to know when M’hijito wants him to show up at the downtown house (an assignation my son has  put off, put off, and put off some more, mostly because the yard needs little maintenance that he can’t do, plus with a six-month-old pup excavating, there’s not much point in paying a yard dude. Now, having accrued a fine mess, he wants it cleaned up before his New Year’s party). I say Pup has destroyed a bunch of planting there that needs to be removed but I don’t know what to tell him exactly, it not quite being my house, and but M’hijito will show up in half an hour and they can speak directly.

Now, as a matter of fact I know M’jihito will be flying through like a rocket, because he’s chronically late to work, and I know he’s not going to want to talk to Gerardo. But when he shows up, I make him go out and confer.

This means I have to stand in the kitchen with what remains of my miserable little breakfast congealing atop the table, coffee turning cold, and HOLD the writhing, frantic Charley, because the old bathmat I put in front of the door to the garage (through which my princely son has exited) is all wadded up so I can’t close the door, and I can’t bend down to move it or shove it with my foot without losing my grip on Charley, who is already powerful enough to draw Santa’s sled. And of course M’hijito has left the door from the garage to the backyard open, and Gerardo has left the side gate open, so under no circumstances can I let go of Charley because he will head for Yuma on a dead run.

Conference over, my son pushes the rug back into place, shuts the kitchen door, and races out the front door, even later for work than usual.

I sit down to finish my congealed bacon and now cold, limp toast.

A slurpy little noise drifts out of the kitchen. What? Charley walks out, smacking his lips. I figure the noise was him lapping something off the extremely dirty floor, which as usual I haven’t had a minute to clean in weeks.

I finish eating, look up, and notice Cassie has shat (again!) under the desk in the family room (thank God for tile floors!). So I get up to retrieve some paper towels to pick up that mess. Rummage in the under-sink cabinet; can’t find the spray bottle of Simple Green; start to cuss when I realize I am standing almost up to my ankles in a YELLOW PUDDLE!

Ah yes. That was what the trickling noise was…

Charlie has pee’d a sea of pee all over the kitchen floor. The soles of my shoes are covered with it; he has tracked it all over the kitchen, and now I’m tracking more of it all over the kitchen. And I’m out of paper towels.

Out to the garage, tracking pee behind me. Open a new package. Swab up the piss, after a fashion—it’s raining here and the air is wet (not to say damned stinky) and the stuff isn’t drying and so I have to swab and swab and swab and swab to get enough of it up to matter.

Pour a pail of hot water liberally laced with Simple Green concentrate (never did find the spray bottle, but this job is beyond spray bottle help).

Start mopping the kitchen floor.

Gerardo whacks on the Arcadia door. He’s done and wants to be paid.

Wrestle Charley into his nest. Lock him in. Cassie is hiding in the bathroom, having been terrorized by heights to which the decibel level of the cussing has risen.

Confer with Gerardo. Refrain from telling him that Mike will remove the Devil Pod Tree early next month, knowing that Gerardo will want to do it, that Gerardo will underbid Mike, and that I absolutely positively do not want Gerardo and the Slapstick Sunnyslope Seven taking down a 60-foot tree that abuts my house. He will be offended, but let’s at least wait until after Christmas to offend.

Hand Gerardo a check for twice what he charges: Christmas bonus.

Finish mopping the kitchen and family room floors.

Coffee has gone stone cold.

Free Charley. Watch little dance to spring.

Let Charley into the back yard.

It’s like letting a colt into a pasture! He takes off at a gallop, thudding across the freshly raked, very wet crushed granite, digging it up with every stride. Dump the pissy mop water, wash the mop out, hang it outside.

Pick up the four-inch-deep pile of paperwork that’s accrued on the dining-room table; carry it back to my office to add it to the six-inch-deep pile that’s been building over the past month.

Smell a smell.

One helluva smell.

Go in search of the source. Charley has deposited a gigantic bratwurst right in the middle of the throw rug by the bed.

Why do dogs and cats ALWAYS search out a soft spot to pee, shit, and barf? Have you ever noticed that? If there’s one throw rug in a houseful of hard floors, that is where the animal will go to make a gigantic, stinking mess!!!

What a stench. What a mess.

Takes two plastic grocery-store bags to clean that up. I can’t wash the rug because it’s raining and my dryer doesn’t work. Throw it on the floor in the garage.

Fortunately I can’t afford to run the heater, and so it doesn’t matter that I now have to throw open the Arcadia door in the bedroom and the front door and turn on the overhead fans in my office and the bedroom to move the gagging stink out.

Hate the scanner function on this flicking HP printer. Hate the way the ancient iMac barely works. It’s scanned one side of one check as I’ve written this. Can you imagine how long it’s taken to write this? I could’ve driven to the damn credit union by now. And I can tell you for certain that after all this, the CU’s e-deposit software is going to announce that the back side is a different size from the front side and refuse to accept the check, so I’m going to have to drive up there anyway.

Charley is in the garage going berserk. He’s barking frantically and fiercely. WTF?

Hit “scan” again. And again. Spinning mandala comes on. Traipse out to the garage. Cassie takes up the cry. Both dogs are now berserk. Open the garage security door. Charley tears out like an enraged Rottweiler. He’s looking up into the air and barking.

Two guys are on Terri’s roof. They’re trying to figure out where it’s leaking.

Lure maddened dogs back into the house. Come back to the scanner, hit “accept.” Hit “save as…”

Charley will not be dissuaded from telling the workmen what for. Ah, God, they’re barking in parts: Charley tenor, Cassie soprano. Fortissimo!

My son forgot to bring dog food today, and I’m out. So to avoid having to buy a $30 bag of dog food, which I can NOT afford (damn it, I can’t even afford to buy food for myself!), I’ll have to drive all the way down to his house and then all the way back up north and over to the west side to get to the flicking credit union. This will consume about 90 minutes of my time, maybe more depending on the traffic.

But that of course is not puppy chaos. It’s just ordinary daily chaos.

 

Eau de Bourbono Mouthwash

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LOL! Check this out:

I finally guzzled down the last of the lifetime supply of bourbon purchased some time back at Costco. Nice bottle…why throw it out? Decided to fill it with Listerine and use it to decorate the bathroom.

Heckuva lot better than this ugly plastic thing sitting on the bathroom counter advertising its glories, eh?

Ill-advisedly, I bought the mint-flavored version of the mouthwash. Don’t  like mint—but that was all that Costco carried—and in any event, the mint does nothing to disguise the nasty taste of Listerine. So as soon as I get through the lifetime supply of the blue stuff, I’ll replace it with the regular variety, which looks…alarmingly  like bourbon!

{chortle!}

Reminds me of my misspent youth.

The dockhouse on the pier where my father spent 10 years working

Then as now, when I grew up in Saudi Arabia all types of alcohol were strictly contraband. Americans were not allowed to bring their favorite potables out there, and so supposedly the camp was dry.

Supposedly.

In those days, though, Americans still lived up to their reputation for ingenuity. Down at the machine shop, there was a guy who was a real, live Kentucky bootlegger. He built several stills and taught people how to use them. These contraptions would be quietly passed from household to household, where amateur distillers would percolate their own high-test on the kitchen stove.

My father fermented his mash in a big closet in the service porch at the back of our house, using either raisins or orange-juice condensate. The product was clear and, when tested by setting a spoonful alight, burned with a purely invisible flame.

Well, as you can imagine, this booze wasn’t especially tasty. It would be, I suppose, much like high-proof vodka.

Meanwhile, back in New York, the pharmacy at the Barbizon Plaza, where the Company put up its employees when they returned to the States, learned about this burgeoning custom. Some bright fellow had the idea of marketing flavorings for the bootleg grog.

The challenge, of course, was to get them into the country.

Fortunately, the Arabs who manned Customs at Dhahran were a bit naive on this subject. So the pharmacists tricked out a “First Aid Kit” that could be carried through Customs without attracting attention. It contained, in pharmacy bottles, the Eau de Bourbono Cough Medicine, the Crème de Menthe Nose Drops, the Amaretto Headache Tonic, and so on.

Who knows? Maybe one of them was billed as a mouthwash!

Ras Tanura. What a place to grow up! 🙄

Bye-bye, Mr. Postman

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Postal Carrier, Argentina

We’re told that the U.S. Postal Service is taking another step down the road to extinction: not only will they raise the price of a first-class stamp to 45 cents, they’ll no longer even try to deliver first-class mail in a timely way.

But never fear: all that junk mail they chuff into your mailbox for you to haul straight to the recycling bin will get to you on time!

{sigh} I’d like to say this is a real loss to America. And over time, the slow degradation of the USPS certainly has been a loss. I can remember when I used to wait with bated breath for the postman to show up. Now I just groan every afternoon at the prospect of having to retrieve and throw out another big wad of trash.

Does anybody other than junk mailers still do business with the USPS on purpose? I have only one client who persists in sending hard-copy checks. Not that I don’t appreciate the payment ( 🙂 ), but it’s a a bit of a nuisance, forcing me to waste time either scanning the check to e-deposit it or traipsing across the city to drop it off at the credit union.

Granted, I still get paper statements from the credit union, AMEX, and MasterCard. But none of those is necessary. I check my credit union statements online a lot more often than once a month, and if the credit-card issuers sent me statements by e-mail, I would bestir myself to hassle with their online sites to check charges. Truth to tell, there’s really no need to have that data printed out and mailed to me.

Now, I do love getting The Economist, Sunset, and The New York Review of Books in the mail. There are some circumstances in which little glowing letters on a screen just do not substitute for the real thing. But…as a practical matter, these days I get most of my news online. You’ll note that today’s news flash came from Bloomberg’s website, which I read three hours before the Times showed up with the same story on the front page of its business section.

The big, genuine regret here will be the loss of our postal carriers. Having these cheerful and friendly workers tooling through the neighborhood adds to the quality of our lives, at least in big cities…it’s one of the few pleasant traditions that have survived the gritty dystopianism we’ve seen over the past 50 years. Me, I haven’t been inside a post office in years—the service is so slow and the overworked staff are so unhappy, I’ll pay a little more to ship a package through UPS or FedEx. But when the day comes for the postal service to close down, I sure will miss the mail carriers.

Image: Rosarinagazo. The Postal Carrier, sculpture by Erminio Blotta y Pedro Cresta, Palacio de Correos, Rosario, Argentina. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

End in sight…but apparently not the end of teaching

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Only four more sets of papers to grade! Then, thank God, this semester will be over.

I was amazed to see that Mr. Boxankle’s final paper is something of a tour de force. Holy macquerel! He must have gone to the writing center. It’s totally reorganized, plumped up with new cited and documented sources, and decently edited. Whatever his strategy, let’s hope he can transfer it to his other courses. 🙂

The gent who’s already writing at the publishable level was not content to let good enough be. He also has produced a new, edited version, which I haven’t read yet because at two this morning I was busy plodding through his colleagues’ drafts.

Fell asleep around 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. last night and so naturally awoke in the wee hours. Finished the last set of drafts. Fell back in bed around 6:30. Slept until 8:30.

LOL! Maybe that’s the trick to getting a decent night’s sleep: go to bed at dusk!

Today I need to read the 101 students’ papers. Have to get through that by 2:00 p.m. so I can go to La Maya’s art exhibition in Scottsdale along about 3:00 p.m. That will leave only two sets of 2,500-word monstrosities from the 102 students, plus a set of brites from the magazine writers.

The brites should only take an hour or so. A brite by its nature is very short, and the feature-writing students are in that class because they want to be there. Although a few are a bit tone-deaf, by and large they all can write with some competence. And as for the endless 102 papers: final grades aren’t due until the 16th, so we have some time.

Making them turn their final monster papers in a week before the end of the semester, while it leaves me having to occupy them with busywork for three days, was a stroke of genius. It means we don’t have to do the marathon horror show on an impossibly tight deadline.

Well, having heard nothing from the church, I assume the hiring committee figured out that I was not the job candidate of their dreams. No doubt the line formed at the left, with hordes of unemployed accountants muscling each other aside to get in the door. Our pastor remarked that he’d like to get someone in place by the  middle of this month, which would be…yes. A week and a half from today. So, by now if they haven’t made their choice, they must at least have lined up interviews for everyone on their short list.

My application for the f/t job at Paradise Valley is still in the hopper. That closes on January 15, so it will be mid-semester (at best) before they’re interviewing. Realistically, there’s no way they’re going to hire anyone past retirement age into one of their plummiest jobs. But nothing ventured…

And I have one other scheme, besides the effort to hustle $60/hour business for the Copyeditor’s Desk: get a Realtor’s license, which will make it possible to get a scutwork assistant’s job in a real estate agency. Like the church admin job, pay would be poor and the job would be mostly clerical and bookkeeping, but at least it would be year-round.

Well, speaking of bookkeeping, in addition to a raft of papers to read, I have bills to pay and Quicken to update. And so, to work…