Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Return of the Creature!

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SDXB escapes from the hospital today! They’re tossing him out sometime during the day. Sister-in-Sin is headed back to her normal life—BiS has already slipped out of town. And thank goodness, New Girlfriend has agreed to stay with him for the next month or so.

Yesterday he sounded pretty chipper over the phone. They’d let him walk around outside, which much revived his spirits.

He’s not supposed to be left alone at all for several days. But there’s some hope he’ll recover fairly quickly, all things considered. The Mayo Clinic website says many bypass survivors are driving after about three weeks and frolicking in the sack three to four weeks after the surgery. Apparently it takes about 12 weeks for the bones in your chest to reknit, about three months (uhm…four times three: isn’t that the same as 12 weeks?) for the person to start to regain normal energy levels.

The scary thing about this is that SDXB already does all the things the Mayo describes as “cardiac rehabilitation” strategies. It would be impossible for him to make the lifestyle changes this site recommends, simply because he already lives like that. He cooks all his own food, and it’s very good food—by and large low in fat, high in vegetables and fruits. He rarely puts any salt in the food. He doesn’t drink much any more—certainly not the way he used to—and he quit smoking twenty or thirty years ago. He exercises enthusiastically and with pleasure, every day. And he has few sources of emotional stress.

BiS remarked that an element of genetics comes into play with cardiac disease. His mother did die of cardiac problems, but not until she was in her 80s. You’ve gotta die of something, eh? The aunts and uncles are similarly long-lived. His dad died young of Parkinson’s disease brought on by exposure to chemicals in the cleaning plant where he worked, so we don’t know if he might have developed heart disease later in life—but at least one of the aged uncles is on the father’s side. Consider: this guy is 70 years old and he has relatives in his parents’ generation who are still living.

What will be will be, I guess. Meanwhile, just in case…this old bat is off for a vigorous walk, before the sun comes up.

Update:

So here he is, climbing into his car under the doting care of a pretty young  nurse. He must be lapping it up. SiL sent this picture… This afternoon he sounded almost like his old self and was looking forward to a fifteen-minute walk (at least) around the neighborhood in the cool of the evening.

Solar and rocket stoves: Survival Gear…Frugal Extreme…or Just Going Green?

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Okay, so Armageddon is here and the power has gone out…permanently. Your shiny glass-topped stove doesn’t work, neither does the oven, and you have to cook all those pizzas in the freezer before they spoil! What’re you gonna do?

That’s easy: whip out the tinfoil and a couple of cardboard boxes, and build yourself a solar oven! Alternatively, you could build an oven that uses sticks of scrap wood for fuel.

This morning a reader commenting on the Weather! post remarked that it’s very easy to construct a solar oven. So of course I had to check that out. A quick Google search brought up this amazing site. By golly, you can build a solar stove that looks like a nun’s headgear turned upside down. You can make one out of an old innertube. You can make a portable stove out of an umbrella. You can make them out of cardboard boxes. You can even use a pizza box. And if you really want to get fancy, you can hook your stove to a kind of battery-run equatorial mount so it will track the sun all day!

Would one of these contraptions save us cheapskates money? It might, if you have an electric stove. The stove and oven are big energy hogs, especially if you cook indoors all the time. My power bill was $57 last month, and I didn’t turn on the heater or an electric space heater once. I rarely leave the lights burning in unattended rooms, and I only do a couple of loads of laundry a week. My stovetop is gas, but the wall oven runs on electricity. So most of the power had to have been used by the oven, the refrigerator, and the computer. Let’s say four appliances consume the lion’s share of the power (this is just a guess!): $57 ÷ 4 = $14.25.

So. You could stand to save as much as $14 a month by cooking everything bakeable in a solar stove.

Green? Well, except for the mining, manufacture, and hauling of aluminum foil and the wood-pulping, manufacture, and distribution entailed in making cardboard boxes, I suppose it’s green. It would be that much less coal mined or oil drilled. I suppose. Though the energy to make those products has got to come from somewhere.

Hey! Every little bit helps! Eh?

So, what could you cook in such a device? A little cruising shows that cooking is plain and time-consuming. Apparently a solar oven is the (relatively) green equivalent of the slow cooker. Cooking times depend on the kind of cooker you’ve built and, of course, the weather. Roasting a single acorn squash will take you four to six hours. Chicken is said to take anywhere from one to three hours. A pan of lasagne takes three hours, but rice (we’re told) can be cooked in half an hour or so—after the water comes to a boil. One enthusiast cooks beans (all day long) and beer bread in his solar oven.

So if you have some food laying around, come Armageddon, you should be OK, assuming you’ve also laid in enough tinfoil.

Scrolling down at the site of our original discovery, we come across something called a rocket stove. This gadget, built of old cans, barrels, bricks or whatnot, is designed to burn small pieces of wood, such as twigs, scraps, or other small pieces of combustible material. These things can be fairly large—here’s one used to cure tobacco—and certainly could be designed, with care, into a nice backyard bread oven.

From what these authors say, apparently a rocket stove can generate some pretty intense heat. A solar oven? Maybe not so much.

On the other hand, given a 118-degree day a solar cooker might get up some pretty fair heat. It’s already in the 90s here. Maybe later this summer I’ll give one of these gadgets a try.

Has anybody built a solar oven or a rocket stove? How did it work for you?

Summertime, and…what am I gonna do, anyway?

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Only another half-dozen class meetings until the end of the semester. Then a blitz of monster student papers, and then…and then…white-hot silence.

For the first time in many a year, I’m looking at an entire three-month summer break with nothing to do. Even when I was in graduate school and couldn’t take summer classes because they didn’t give enough time to write graduate-level research papers, I had things going on in the summer: research projects, society-wife machinations, trips to Hawaii, West Virginia, Atlanta, England, and waypoints. When I was teaching at the Great Desert University, I usually taught in at least one and sometimes both summer sessions by way of generating a living wage. And of course, over the past five or six years I held a twelve-month administrative position. Though it had normal vacations time, I rarely took any because I had nothing better to do.

So. In the “nothing better to do” department, the question is what on earth am I going to do this summer? Choir ends on May 30, by which time I probably will have both my fall classes set up and ready to go. And in a 115-degree summer, there’s never much going on in Phoenix.

I’m thinking this will be a good opportunity to try to wring a book out of Funny. That’s been on the agenda since shortly after I started the blog. I haven’t done it mostly because I’ve been busy. Mining almost three years’ worth of posts for material that will hang together in a reasonable way will be a big job in itself. With that done, there’ll be the matter of rewriting the stuff to obliterate the blogginess and make it act like print book copy.

Another possibility is to focus on the blog itself and on trying to expand readership. In the past couple of days, Funny has experienced an amazing spike in traffic, apparently because an MSN Money Talks story that mentioned the Great No-Detergent Laundry Experiment was featured on Yahoo.com. The result was huge: in one day, Adsense earned more than it normally does in an entire month.

If daily traffic averaged half that much, 325 days a year, that plus the Social Security plus the normal flow of editorial projects would return my net income to about what I was earning at the Great Desert University. And I’d never have to read another freshman paper again.

It being unlikely that I’d earn that much on a book and certain that book revenues would not stretch out over a period of years, I incline toward spending six to eight hours a day on the blog: writing, marketing, and publicizing. If I actually sat down and organized my time intelligently, three months of that could at least set Funny on the right trajectory.

Or, in the “now for something entirely different” department, I could try to write a genre mystery novel. That’s also an idea that’s been percolating. But I dunno…it’s hard to work up much enthusiasm. I think I’d rather edit them than write them.

Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. Sidney Paget. Public domain.

20 Great Time-Wasters of My Life

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Hah! Scored an amazing 219,400 points on Bookworm before one of the flaming tiles reached the bottom row. Two of the astonishing words formed during this time-killing jag racked up more than 3,000 points apiece.

Amazing, indeed. Amazing waste of time. I justify it by theorizing that I need a break after having made it half-way through 439 of the most boring, pointless, annoying pages of copy I have ever edited in my life. We all need a break now and then, right?

Of course, I could’ve taken a break by trimming the dead roses off the plants, maybe making way for a new bloom before the heat gets too impossible.

Does it ever seem to you that there are altogether too many time-wasting phenomena in your life? When you come to the end of the day and you haven’t gotten a heck of a lot done but you think you’ve been sorta busy, what have you been doing? Here are a few explanations on my list:

  1. Bookworm
  2. Mah Jong
  3. USA Today Crosswords
  4. Uncle Jay Explains the News
  5. Boomshine
  6. PointlessSites.com
  7. StumbleUpon
  8. Checking the stock market
  9. Cleaning house (doesn’t do any good: it just gets dirty again!)
  10. Driving (risking your life while waiting to get from Point A to Point B)
  11. Reading the vitriolic commentary on the local Play-Nooz
  12. Trying to teach students what a comma splice is
  13. BlackBoard Academic Suite, the single greatest time-consumer known to humankind, guaranteed to cut your pay rate from $15/hour to 15¢/hour
  14. Navigating punch-a-button telephone mazes
  15. Trying to comprehend bureaucratic rules
  16. Talking to bureaucrats who don’t understand their own bureaucracy’s rules
  17. Tracking too many bank and brokerage accounts
  18. Waiting for a pan to fill under one of those accursed water-conserving faucets
  19. Checking blog stats
  20. Figuring out workarounds in HTML and various programs to make things happen the way I wish.

Most of these, I’m afraid, are self-inflicted time-wasters, though I decline to take responsibility for phone trees, opaque bureaucrats, online courseware that operates at the speed of a galloping snail, and misguided “good”-for-the-environment plumbing inventions.

What wastes your time?

Decoding the Tax Code

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CBS Marketwatch reports that New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg and Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden are proposing a new attempt to simplify the tax code. For the average Jane and Joe on the street, it will mean a briefer and clearer one-page tax return form. Our present six tax brackets would be reduced to three—15 percent, 25 percent, and 35 percent. And the corporate tax rate would drop from 35 percent to 24 percent.

It won’t pass, of course, because it eliminates a bunch of lucrative tax breaks for corporations (to say nothing of putting an entire cohort of tax accountants out of work). But at least it’s an effort to make a step in the right direction.

That so many ordinary Americans have to hire a tax accountant to figure out their taxes—often paying more for tax preparation than is owed on taxes!—is just outrageous. This year I paid my tax lawyer $460 to prepare the tax return for the S-corporation, which owed no taxes at all. I paid a like amount to discover that I owed the feds $770 in federal taxes and to extract a $1,000 refund from the state. I have to do that because the absurdly complicated tax rules are utterly incomprehensible to me. There’s no way to understand them, because they make no sense and because they’re couched in cryptic language—only an expert can figure out what they mean and how to apply them, and even the experts regularly make mistakes.

What’s refreshing is to see a “Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplification Act.” It’s long past time Republicans and Democrats of good will set aside the pig-headed partisanship and started to work together on the things that matter to the American people.

If people of good will do not step forward to overcome the corrosive divisiveness this country has seen, we will, I believe, be at risk of civil war within another generation—possibly sooner. When political leaders descend into demagoguery and talk about putting those who don’t agree with them “in the crosshairs” so that their followers start to rage about doing violence to elected officials, even the President of the United States, it’s inevitable that violence will follow.

On both sides, the leadership of this country needs to cut off the shackles of partisanship and extremism and come together to lead. Gregg and Wyden’s proposal is at least a tiny sparkle of light from that direction.

Drama of the Day: A hummer!

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So after a mildly hectic day that entailed an unplanned trek to Tempe (a place I’d hoped never to have to visit again), Cassie and I are sitting in the study when we hear a bizarre noise. She starts to bark. I run out to the front of the house in search of the source of the odd sound.

It sounds like a large insect is trapped under one of the unwashed pans occupying the kitchen sink. Cassie is going berserk. Then I realize that no! It’s not coming from the sink. Looking upward, what should I find but a hummingbird frantically trying to get out through the skylight!

I’d left the screen door hanging open, and the little bird had flown indoors. In her confusion, she fixated on what she thought was the sky. Here she is, clinging to the seam between the drywall and the glass, too exhausted to move:

What was needed, I figured, was for someone to climb on the roof and throw a dark blanket over the skylight, so the bird could see the light below and make her way downward and back out the back door. This was not a job for an old bat.

Meanwhile, in the course of dragging the frantic dog out of the kitchen so she wouldn’t terrorize the hummer any further, I dropped her and she landed on her face. That didn’t do her any good.

It was after 5:00 p.m. The Audubon Society was closed. M’hijito regularly works until 6:30 and later, and I’m not allowed to call him at his job. SDXB lives almost an hour’s drive away and by this hour was likely to be fully engaged with the current New Girlfriend. None of my neighbors are any more capable of climbing on the roof than I am.

Eventually I managed to get a couple of volunteers from Liberty Wildlife on the phone. They’re located in far north Scottsdale, too far across the sprawl to drive into my part of town. Called Gerardo the Wonder-Yard Guy; he said he’d send one of his underlings over.

Meanwhile, M’hijito e-mailed me, causing me to realize he must be home. Got him on the phone. He said he’d come over and try to catch the bird.

Then one of the wildlife rescue volunteers called back and put me in touch with a young fellow who, interestingly, lives just a few blocks from M’hjijto. He also headed in my direction.

So within a few minutes three young men of varying sizes and linguistic sets showed up at the door. M’hijito climbed up a ladder and managed to corral the little bird inside a small plastic-lined wicker basket, padded with a napkin for protection. Amazingly, he got her down out of the skylight in one piece.

When we carried her outside, she was so petrified she just sat there. We thought she must be injured, but when the wildlife rescue guy reached in to examine her, she shot into the air like a rocket and took off at jet speed—pursued by an enraged competitor.

The wildlife folks (one of whom was soon back on the phone) worried that she would need to get food, since she would have exhausted so much energy banging herself against the skylight. I’m pretty sure there was still enough light for her to feed off some flowers—the place is awash in blossoms just now, and this morning I saw several swarms of tiny gnats, a favorite source of hummer protein.

Cassie, also, seemed to be OK. She was playing with the wildlife guy, pestering him with Ball, so I guess she wasn’t seriously hurt.

So. That was an adventure.