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Idle essays

Eventually, This Too Shall Pass

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After tomorrow, only four more Wednesdays from Hell! God, I can not wait until this semester is over. Not that I don’t appreciate getting the extra composition course, and not that I’m not unutterably grateful to end up with four sections this semester. I am, ohhh I am.

But I’m tired.

This is my third week of being sick with a stupid cold. As usual, it will NOT go away. Invariably it takes twice as long for me to shake off a virus as it takes normal human beings. I’ve missed several choir practices and songfests because I can’t speak, much less sing, without falling into a coughing frenzy.

Under the best of conditions, Wednesday is a Day from Hell. After coping with the puppy from 8:00 to 10:30 a.m., I get to stand in front of classes for five hours straight with no break; then come back, cope with Pup for another hour while bolting down a meal; then shoot out the door for choir practice, where I have to be “up” for another two hours. By the time I get home, I’m beat, and I haven’t even begun to look at student papers or read copy.

Last Wednesday, though, took the Devil’s-food cake.

I let the Wednesday-only afternoon section go a little early because I just couldn’t talk anymore or even stand up. Stumbled in the house around 4:15 or 4:30, dizzy, nauseated, so sick and so tired all I wanted to do was fall into bed. That, I knew, would be impossible with a 300-watt puppy anxiously waiting to be let out of his crate.

Sick as a dog, I was. But not as sick as that dog. Soon as I walked in the door, a great stink walloped me in the face.

Oh.

No.

Oh, yes. Charlie had squirted diarrhea all over his nest and got it all over himself and all over the floor and…what a mess!

So I had to shuck my clothes and shoes, grab the squirming 45-pound puppy, drag him outdoors, wash the shit off him with shampoo, wash the shit off me with more shampoo, towel him as dry as possible. Then drag him back in the house and tie him to a doorknob while I dealt with the unbelievable stinking mess in the living room.

Thank God for tile floors, anyway.

Before I could put the blanket in the washer, I had to haul it out to the backyard and hose the crap out of it. Drag the wet, heavy, stinking blanket through the kitchen and out to the washer in the garage and run that through with plenty of hot water and detergent.

Then take the crate apart so I could remove its plastic floor, which was covered with puddles of shit. Drag that outside and wash it in the hose.

That was when, yes. I stepped on the honeybee.

That’s right. I stepped on a dying honeybee that was flopped in the water on the pavement.

It drove its stinger into my foot, between the large and second toe. Oh SHIT did that hurt.

But at that point I was up to my ankles in dogshit and water, struggling with the large, clumsy plastic bottom to the crate. By the time I got to the point where I could disengage from that mess, the bee’s venom sack had pumped about as much poison into my toe as it could.

Retrieved a knife, scraped the venom sack and stinger off my foot. Dog is hollering and straining to get free.

Stumble back in the house to clean up the remaining smears and puddles of doggy diarrhea, which are still decorating the living room tile. Another 20 minutes or so of scrubbing and upending of the dog cage and scouring the wire walls and doors and it was time to run the blanket through the washer a second time. It seemed a wise thing to do.

Hosed the remaining shit and the deceased honeybee off the back porch. Soaked the burning foot in the cold swimming pool water. Dosed the puppy with Pepto-Bismol. Dosed myself with two Benadryl, not knowing how the body with its recently acquired panoply of allergies would react to the second bee sting of my lifetime.

Climbed in the shower and scrubbed the stink off myself.

Doorbell rang. Charlie broke free, raced for the door to greet M’hijito in a frenzy of dog joy. Caught the flicking leash on the coffee table, dragged the table across the living room floor, slammed it into the sofa, and flang the pottery riding it to the tiles, where it broke into a zillion pieces.

Now my son is pissed off at me because I fly into a rage because now I have ANOTHER mess to clean up and I’m barefooted because my foot hurts like hell and the dog is bouncing up and down in the center of a lake of shattered stoneware and because I did NOT want that piece of hand-thrown stoneware to end up in a thousand pieces on the floor!!!!!!!!!

Shovel the kid and dog out the door. Lock Cassie in the bedroom. Spend another 30 or 40 minutes sweeping up the large pieces and moving the furniture and vacuuming up at least a jillion tiny sharp pieces of broken pottery, some of it thrown all the way into the hall, 15 feet across the room.

Retrieve the blanket from the washer, hang it on the line in back.

Feed Cassie.

By now the Benadryl has taken full effect. It’s only just after dark, but I’m so zonked I can barely wobble down the hall. Fall in the sack and pass out, along about 7:30.

Wake up at 2:30—at least I got seven hours of sleep. That’s something. Anyway.

Friday the dermatologist told me that after his wife stepped on a honeybee on the beach at Rocky Point, it took about three weeks for her foot to stop aching. This being almost a week after the fact now, I’d guess that’s about right.

Oh, yea…while all this was going on, I was also nursing stitches in a surgical wound.

He did say, however, that the lump he biopsied was not a leiomyoma but was indeed, a plexiform neurofibroma. That’s good in that it’s not an indicator of kidney cancer. Not so good in that it’s hereditary and can cause some big problems in one’s offspring and one’s offspring’s offspring…like bone deformities, mental retardation, widespread disfigurement, internal tumors, high blood pressure, susceptibility to cancer. About 10% of people with these charming little lumps do see them morph into cancer. And the ugly things cannot be removed from one’s shoulder, where they frighten passers-by, without causing significant scarring and worse disfiguring than the ugly lumps themselves.

{sigh} I don’t know where this came from. Don’t recall either of my parents having anything like this. But then you don’t have to actually manifest the lumps to pass the defective gene to a child. And I never saw either my grandmothers or my grandfathers.

Enough, already. I can’t stand it anymore.

🙁

Grumpy Old Lady’s Jaundiced View of Fools

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Here’s something remarkably stupid: The L.A. Times’s staff is caught on the horns of a dilemma—what on earth to do with the candy the kids collect in their annual door-to-door solicitation.

Dear me. If it matters to you that much, why let the kids go trick-or-treating at all? You’re not mom enough or dad enough to utter the dread word, No? You can’t think of anything else for the offspring to do that night? Throw a big kiddy party? Cook toxicly sugared candy at home and get dressed up in fright costumes and and answer the door and scare the neighbors’ kids and then dose the neighbors’ kids with the stuff?

We have here descriptions of helicopter parents actually counting the calories in pieces of Hallowe’en candy and making the kids trade out a bag of lunch chips for a piece of sugary junk. Junk food for junk food, as it were.

Is there a surer way to make your child more neurotic than your neurotic cat? Anorexia, anyone?

LOL! My mother had a pretty good way of dealing with the Hallowe’en candy conundrum, which no doubt crossed her fevered mind now and again: during the rest of the year, she simply didn’t deliver sweets on anything like a routine basis. We didn’t have desserts (allegedly my father didn’t like them; but after she was dead and gone and he was living in a life-care community, I noticed  he was given to taking two pieces of industrial pie from the chow line at dinnertime). I rarely ate candy. It wasn’t forbidden; it just wasn’t a normal part of daily life. Result: I wasn’t especially interested in junk candy.

I did love to collect it at Hallowe’en. But by the time I was old enough to go trick-or-treating, I was pretty picky about what I would stuff in my mouth. Most of it got thrown out—by me, not by my mother.

What part of common sense is hard to grasp here?

When M’hijito was little, all the women in our car-pool, who lived pretty much in the same neighborhood, would conspire to buy really high-quality candies or fruits and party favors, which would be dispensed only to the kids they recognized. Then they’d buy a bushel of the cheapest junk on the market to hand out to the hordes of children trucked and bussed in from the surrounding  blight. Cruel, but it kept our kids in halfway decent junk and kept the cost of servicing over a hundred trick-or-treat parties a night within reason.

Whether you have kids or not, the question does remain: what to do with unused and unusable junk candy inflicted by the Hallowe’en tradition. Whether your kid drags it home or you have to buy it to amuse someone else’s kids, what do you do with the leftover stuff?

Me, I avoid it altogether. Come Hallowe’en, Cassie and I go out on the town, walking through a part of this neighborhood where parents from the surrounding barrios descend with their little kids. It’s great fun: the kids are jumping up and down and all dressed up and cuter than cute. The neighbors, who encourage the invasion for that very reason, all drag folding tables into their spookily decorated front yards and sit around socializing. We can easily wait out the onslaught by hanging out to watch the show, so that by the time we get home, alas, no more kiddies are coming to our door.

I used to buy wrapped candies to hand out. Most parents around here won’t let their kids eat anything that’s not individually wrapped in the manufacturer’s branded plastic. You’d be crazy to do otherwise, really. But that means old home-made favorites like popcorn balls and caramel apples are out (and kids never come to know those wonderful treats). And if you don’t eat the stuff yourself, as I don’t, and not enough kids come around to collect all the junk, then what do you do with the stuff?

At one point I thought, well, take it over to Goodwill or down to the food bank and donate it. But…uh…no. They don’t want it, either. They have ethical compunctions, as anyone with any decency should, about giving sugary crap foodoid to hungry children.

So, donating it is out. Throwing it away is a lot like throwing money in the garbage, because even the cheapest of the stuff is not really cheap. I resent being pressured into buying stuff I would never eat myself and that I think is unhealthy for children and that half the time I end up throwing away. So I just don’t buy it at all: I leave the house for the evening.

What do you do with unwanted or undesirable Hallowe’en treats?

 

Business Is Lookin’ Up!

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With great delight we came to an agreement with the new client, a charismatic gentleman with a lot of wit and talent who’s willing to pay us a living wage. I’m thrilled! We’ll back each other up on the copyediting and proofreading, and I’ll do the heavy lifting in the content consultation (which may read “rewrite it”).

Another client is in the wings, but that looks a little dubious. Don’t know if anything will come of that but kind of doubt it.

Meanwhile, my designer friend had no problem changing copy editor to copyeditor, one word on one line, and the result still looks great!

I spent a fair amount of the day, when I wasn’t reading opaque student copy, rewriting our website content. Now Tina needs to add her part, and once DesignerMan comes across with a logo, we’ll be ready to fly with that.

Another advertiser surfaced with an expression of interest in buying space for a real ad (not a blackhat SEO device) on FaM. So that also is very pleasing. Last month, as I may have mentioned, combined ad revenues and editing pay came to about what the college is paying me. If we could make that a regular thing, I could stand down off all the grinding composition courses. Might keep the online magazine writing course, which this semester attracted an amazing 20 classmates, all them claiming they’re actually interested in learning to write.

If the combined business enterprises generated that amount 12 months a year, one or two sections would add enough to allow me to live without having to draw money out of savings, at least for a while.

Meanwhile I have a running head start on the e-book I intend to publish. Its backbone will be how-to advice on minimizing financial stress, but it will be fleshed out with recipes, reflections, and various idle essays from Funny.

This will be the Funny’s 1,635th post. Can you imagine? There’s more, too, still marooned on iLife—a bunch of it didn’t come over when I moved to WordPress.com. Guess that’s all going to go away when Apple’s new Cloud service takes over. Oh well. Anyway, there’s a ton of copy on this thing that could be converted to books.

Caught a nasty cold this weekend. It was Day School Sunday, a chivaree celebrating the Anglican church’s large flock of private schools. About 75 choristers of grade-school age joined us (they, and all their parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, godparents aunts, uncles, and accountants: the place was overflowing!) for an hour and a half’s hoedown.

Of course, naturally, I ran very late for choir and I’d forgotten to fill my water thingie as I was racing around trying to get robed and find the stuff I also didn’t have together to haul upstairs (and downstairs, and upstairs). As I was running for the choir loft I realized the water thingie was empty. A tide of bouncing young bodies was flooding out of the choir room, and it was like swimming upstream to get back in there where the water dispenser is.

Sooo…. I filled up the water cup from the public fountain, watering hole for two score and fifteen germy little kids, all the while thinking d-o-o-o-o-o-n’t d-o-o-o-o-o-o-o t-h-a-t!

Chalk up one point for the still small voice.

By the time I got up this morning I was convinced I had a strep throat. Drove around trying to find a clinic for a test this afternoon, but none of the outfits that advertised they would do it actually were doing it.

It’s settled down into a heavy cold and laryngitis now. Sore throat is fading, so I think it’s just the fall miseries.

What the heck. It means I don’t have to go to choir practice Wednesday, and I probably won’t be able to sing on Sunday, either. Since Wednesday is my Day from Hell, I secretly welcome a break that evening.

Is This Ever Gonna STOP?

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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

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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…

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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.