The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ―Edmund Burke
So, the Board of Regents has met. The dreaded announcement of layoffs should be coming down the pike at any moment. Or not.
Instead of beckonings to HR, this is what we get. Interesting. Amusing. But does it have meaning? Is it translatable? If so, is the translation printable?
How do I love my job? Let me count the ways….
😀
Yayyy! It’s wintertime and everything is in bloom.
Well, not everything, but a lot of stuff that prefers cool weather to the blast-furnace effect of a globally warmed Sonoran desert. Roses, for example, are very fond of winter here…
The big lavender plant that would like to shove the Myer lemon tree out of its way has recovered from its fall haircut, it having wearied during the summer. It will stay in bloom all winter, all spring, and through most of the summer.
The bougainvillea doesn’t much care what time of year it is: as long as we avoid a freeze, it blooms all year round. Right now it’s pretty vigorous.
Something—probably burr clover, not dichondra—is struggling back to life between the flagstones in back. Gerardo hollered at me because he thought I wasn’t watering enough. But I don’t think that was the problem. It acts more like pearl mites, a rugged little parasite that devastates lawns in these parts. Right now it’s cool enough to drive them dormant, and so the walk-on-me plants between the stones are coming back to life.
The bush peas I put in a few weeks ago are blossoming, and here’s our first baby pea pod! Yum.
Several other veggies are thriving. Ready now: the Swiss chard: 
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No need for Christmas decorations around here. The orange trees come with their own ornaments:
Over the weekend, Cassie and I hung out in the front courtyard, where I read endless pages of copy about medieval and Renaissance history and she took the afternoon air, watched hummingbirds, and barked in harmony with Biker Boob’s yapping pit bull:
So it goes. Like Dilsey, summer or winter, hard times or good, some things endure.
Unbelievably gorgeous Arizona sunset this evening. The air is crisp—almost cold—as a rain front is ambling in from the west. A buttermilk sky floating in ahead of the storm turned first hot gold and then deep red against a turquoise backdrop. Very nice: A-minus, God.
Today piled atop yesterday to create 48 hours from Hell. At four in the morning, the dog threw up all over the bed. I’d run out of meat last night and so cooked her a couple of eggs…you can imagine what a mess that made. But try not to! By the time I got out of bed and got her off the bed and pulled the soiled blankets off (the heat has been off to save money toward the expected RIF, and so four blankets and throws were stacked on the sheets), we had yellow, stinking barf all over me, all over the floor, all over the throw rug, all over the bed, all over the bureau drawer. Fortunately it didn’t get on the pillows and didn’t soak through to the mattress, but I had to launder every stitch of bedding.
Since I don’t have any other blankets or sheets, that was the end of sleeping, after a five-hour nap.
The washer ran from four in the morning to about noon. So did the dog: she kept right on barfing, even though she had nothing left in her to throw up. After about the dozenth woof, I called the vet.
The issue here is that a day before Thanksgiving she got ahold of some sort of plastic–what it was and where she found it remains a mystery. Whatever, she chewed it up into tiny sharp pieces and swallowed a fair amount of it. This put her at risk of an obstruction or a perforated intestine.
Over the phone at the time, the vet advised me to feed her some vaseline, which works like mineral oil to…uhm…grease the works, as it were. We managed to get through the holidays without incident, but the vet also had said to watch for vomiting. Here, we had vomiting. With a vengeance.
Meanwhile, I have 200 typeset pages of medieval and renaissance research to index by tomorrow. Wuz supposed to have read a chunk of it yesterday, but as you may realize, that did not happen, partly because I was so exhausted and so harried I couldn’t function.
After the 9:00 a.m. junket to Borders to pick up the lost AMEX card, it was off to the vet at 12:30, marking pages and cleaning up barf around those trips.
A set of X-rays showed the dog has something in her gut near the caecum. What, the vet did not know. She advised watchful waiting. Gave the dog an antiemetic shot, advised me to give her Pepcid AC to try to cut down the barfing of yellow bile, and said to ease up on feeding her. That’ll be $225.
So much for trying to live on $300 this week. Well, I wasn’t going to make it anyway, but now I’ll have to raid savings to make ends meet. How on earth do I imagine I’m going to live on a gross income that’s $880 a month less than I net today?????
Managed to get through 52 pages before I fell asleep. Woke from a nap with the same headache I’ve been enjoying nonstop for the past two weeks. Do wish it would go away.
There are a lot of things one wishes would go away.
Perusing the daily news, I about had cardiac arrest when I read this story. If I may be permitted to say so: God Damn It! A cherubic eight-year-old child dies because some moron hands him a loaded freaking Uzi. No ordinary moron, mind you: a freaking chief of police!
As a screaming left-wing liberal who happens to take the Constitution literally and so believes that law-abiding citizens do indeed have a right to bear arms, I am so enraged by this stupidity that I can barely breathe. What in the name of heaven could these people have been thinking?
But apparently “handle a gun safely” was not on the agenda at this fun event. w00t! Full auto rock & roll!
Forty-eight hours from Hell.
Have you noticed that? We live in a couples culture. Single adults constitute a large portion of the U.S. population:36 percent of women between 20 and 44 are single, and less than half of U.S. households consists of married couples. Yet the way our society operates is based on the assumption that most people are partnered, in a live-in way. America as an economy and Americans as individuals would profit if we changed that.
There’s nothing new about this observation. But until recently the only element about it that bothered me much was the inequity in the cost of traveling—a single traveler pays far more than she or he would as a member of a couple. As I grow older, though, and less able to handle mountains of work, it’s beginning to wear on me. It really takes two people to cope, especially if you have a job and expect to have a life, too.
Today was a case in point.
A trade group that The Copyeditor’s Desk belongs to was having a shindig this evening: a potluck. We’ve already generated a lot of work through this networking group, and so it behooves us to show up to the meetings. The DIY dinner (the group usually meets at a chain restaurant that caters the get-togethers) moved the meeting time up from 7:00 p.m. to 5:30, a freaking impossible hour when you have an hour-long commute and no place at the office to store food.
I was busy this week and didn’t have time to go out and buy extra food and cook up a potluck dish. Ech. I don’t at all care for potlucks, unless they’re at a friend’s house (and even those are suspect). Usually the food consists of tamale casseroles concocted with lots of Kraft cheese slices and canned enchilada sauce, accompanied by grocery-store raw veggie platters and grocery-store pies. This meant I would have to leave the office early, race to the grocer, pick up some sort of easy-to-construct foodoid, race home, throw it together on a sturdy paper plate or two, wrap it tight, jump in the car with it, and race to the meeting.
First thing in the morning, 7:15, La Maya calls and invites me to go for a 7:30 walk. I’ve overslept and haven’t even brushed my teeth at this point, but don’t want to turn her down because the morning constitutional is the main nexus of our socialization. Throw some food down for the dog and race out the door. Since the dog won’t go outside through a dog door, I figure to have to clean up a mess when I get back.
But no! Pleasant surprise; still, it means the dog has to be taken for a walk. By now it’s 8:30 and I still haven’t had one bite to eat, to say nothing of the morning dose of caffeine or even so much as a sip of water. My head hurts. Walk the dog. Race back in, fix breakfast, bolt it down, throw my dirty clothes on the bed, yank on some office clothes, race out the door, running radically late.
Drive for what feels like half my life to get to campus. Download a 200-page PDF and print it out, preparatory to writing an index. Spend a significant amount of time struggling with the printer, which has decided it has a paper jam in a place we can’t reach. Waste more time trying to figure out if an illegal charge was made on my purchasing card. Waste a bit more time yakking with one of the RAs. Waste another half-hour or so cranking an annoyed post about some very stupid stuff to the intranet blog and reposting a bowdlerized version to The Copyeditor’s Desk. By the time I leave the office, I’m hungry and still running late.
At the gourmet grocery store, in addition to the potluck makings I pick up some sushi to tide me over—or, I hope, to fill me up so I won’t have to eat another tamale casserole. Have you ever noticed that one package of grocery-store sushi is not enough for a single meal, but two is too much? Very hungry by now, I buy two.
At the check-out register, I discover my American Express card is missing. Nice timing!
Okay, there’s never a good time for a credit card to go missing. But in the have-you-ever-noticed department, have you ever noticed that things like this always happen at the most inconvenient of all possible moments?
Charge the food on Visa, race home (all the while trying to remember where I was yesterday), race in the door, search the office and house: no card. Call the hair salon; then remember I’d gone by Borders to buy a 2009 wall calendar. Yes, Borders has the card locked in its safe. Too late now to drive way to hell and gone over there (one of the charms of being centrally located is that the middle-class infrastructure follows the white middle class to the suburbs, abandoning you in your central location); arrange to pick it up tomorrow.
Throw the potluck foodoid together, wrap it up, toss it in the car, and race downtown. I decide not to feed the dog, even though it’s coming onto her dinnertime, because I really don’t look forward to having to clean a dog mound off the family room floor when I get home from the soirée. Struggle through hideous traffic made even more gawdawful by the lightrail, which is being tested up and down my route by its proud developers. Lightrail morphs formerly timed signals into guaranteed reds at every intersection, and it takes a good two minutes (at least!) to cycle through a light change.
Arrive at the central library, where the shindig is taking place, so tired I can barely speak, much less “network.” I get stuck sitting next to an aged couple who have, God help us, written and self-published a book rhapsodizing about their lifelong extramarital affair, which culminates when their love child tracks the woman down and brings the two birth parents back together after they’d put their relationship in cold storage, thereby ending two thirty-year marriages and breaking up two homes that had nurtured a total of seven children. This story, I might add, was a great deal less entertaining in the telling than one might hope.
I escape early, lhudly sing huzzah, and plod home, navigating past what appears to be a fatal accident. By the time I turn into my driveway—narrowly missing my neighbor Al and his little dog—I am just dead exhausted. But I still have to feed and walk the dog. And of course I haven’t posted to this blog, either. The bed is unmade, dirty clothes are strewn around the room, running shoes rest on the floor beneath the bed, dirty dishes clutter the kitchen counter…augh!
Dog fed and wrung out, house sorta picked up, it’s now almost 10:00 p.m. as I write this.
The point? Yesh, the point:
All of this would have been a lot less nightmarish had I been a couple. Setting the meeting time and asking people to show up with food a half-hour after work guaranteed that a single person would have one heck of a time getting there. A spouse, a partner, even a willing roommate would have taken the pressure off, because that person could have…
Even ONE of those little helpmeety acts would have made getting to that meeting a lot easier and a lot more doable.
The assumption that everyone has a life partner not only is bad for the general sanity of singles, it’s also bad for business. At the meeting, I was simply too tired to function. Because I ran so late for work, I didn’t do a heck of a lot for the taxpayer today, either. As a society, I suspect we would be better off if we would take account of the fact that fewer and fewer people live together and more and more live alone.
By all means, for example, we should provide mothers and fathers plenty of time off work (or better yet, make it possible for more parents to elect to stay at home when the kids are little, if they so choose). But we also should provide comparable amounts of time for single adults to deal with their home lives, which amazingly enough are not empty! We should refrain from gouging travelers who would like to go it alone. We should provide places in restaurants to wine and dine single patrons, and not park single concert-goers behind columns and in the depths of the concert hall’s dead space. In short, as a culture we should recognize and accommodate the fact that something between a third and a half of Americans are single.
How is this hard?
Seriously. How dumb DO they think we are? And more seriously: could they be right??
Late in October I dropped by my doc’s office to get a flu shot. I was there for all of 10 minutes, 8 of them spent in the waiting room.
Friday, comes a statement from my insurance company: the doctor has charged my insurer $86. The insurer is disallowing it, claiming the Her Doctorness is not in the RAN+AMN network. So now I’m expected to pay this bill.
Yup. You read that right. EIGHTY-SIX BUCKS for a $10 flu shot.
So I shot off an e-mail to her, she also being one of my coreligionists who sang in the choir with me ($86 for a flu shot: ain’t that Christian?). She replied that she was shocked and would get after the office manager. And so she did. Yesterday morning, comes this missive from that worthy:
I am very sorry for the inconvenience. We deal with hundreds of insurance plans and our front office MA should have known that we are out of network for Ran+Amn. You must understand however that your card also has BENEFITOPTIONS and BEECH STREET in large letters. We do participate in these plans and it is the ultimate responsibility of the patient to make sure hisor her primary care physician is on the plan.
Grocery store flu shots are less expensive because they are purchased in extreme bulk for the masses. They also have a greater incidence of sideeffects, Dr. Wallbanger [my doc friend’s senior partner in the practice] tells me.
In our practice, we normally do a nurse visit taking the vitals of thepatient receiving the flu shot. Insurance billing requires that we bill $40 for this procedure and insurance pays whatever they like.
Billing code 90471 is administration of the flu vaccine and the going ratefor insurance billing is $26. The rate for the vaccine itself is $20.
We administer flu shots in our practice as a service to our patients, andwhen billing insurance there are set amounts for each service provided.
As our front desk did make the error, we will write off all but $20 of the remaining balance for your flu shot.
Total price for a cash pay flu shot is $30, you already paid $10, so
remaining balance is $20.
Again I am very sorry for the inconvenience.
Okay. Are you following this?
Item 1: The head partner in this practice is actually suggesting, with a straight face, that the vaccine he’s getting is BETTER than the second-rate vaccine dispensed at Walgreen’s or Safeway, where, if I’d had the time and patience to track down a flu shot clinic event, I could have had the shot for a $10 copay.
Oh, dear Dr. Wallbanger: can you spell S-P-E-C-I-O-U-S?
You understand: he and his office manager assume I’m so stupid I will buy this story.
Item 2: We’re told the insurance company requires that the practice overbill, in the amount of $40, for a grand total of 2 minutes of a junior college graduate’s time.
And Item 3: We learn that really, we shouldn’t believe anything we’re told by the front office staff. Just because the staff says the practice is in-network doesn’t mean it is in-network. In other words: it’s the patient’s responsibility to read our minds. And BTW, try to read RAN+AMN’s corporate mind, too, since that worthy organization does not publish a list of participating providers online, at least not that three Google searches will bring up.
What’s being said here is either “we try to gouge your insurance company and if we can’t get away with it we still overcharge you but only by about half of the overcharge we try to extract from your insurer” or “we think you’re dumb as a post.” Or maybe some combination of those.
Okay, okay, I admit it: They could be right!
This afternoon I donned some garden gloves and rolled the compost bin into the alley by way of trying to salvage it after the Great Bee Fiasco. By the time I got it where I wanted to dump the contaminated compost, wisps of white vapory stuff that looked like smoke were leaking out around the lid. It kept on leaking. “Is it on fire?” I wondered. Felt the side to see if it was hot: no, not especially. So I waited a while till this phenomenon settled down.
Finally opened the lid. White airborne powdery stuff was still floating around inside.
Waited a while longer. Then rolled the thing upside down and tried to dump out the compost.
No luck. It really needed to be pulled out a fistful at a time, not a practical option with weird (stinky!!!!) white powdery stuff drifting in the air.
Went into the garage to drag out a little hand-sized pitchfork-like thing. Held my breath and tried to fork out the bin’s contents without inhaling any powdery vapor.
This did not work well, and soon I was fairly certain that if I breathed much more of the “beekeeper’s” crud, it was gunna make me good and sick. Rolled the composter over to the bulk trash pick-up place, where it will sit for the next two and a half months, providing the Trash Cop doesn’t wander up the alley before the next pick-up is scheduled. He hates that.
By the time I finished, my throat was burning and I felt dizzy. Luckily, I’m going to dinner at the home of friends, one of whom is a nurse-practitioner. A psychiatric nurse-practitioner (where was she when I was busy hiring the bee dude?), but a nurse nonetheless. Matter of fact, this is the very friend who gave me the composter as a lovely and much-valued gift, some years ago. She should be able to recognize if I start to croak over during the salad course.
The bee dude’s bill is in hand: Contrary to his listing online as such, this guy is no “beekeeper.” He works for an outfit called “Atomic Exterminating Company.” Atomic, indeed: young Dr. Strangelove nuked my bees, nuked my composter, and damn near nuked me.
Well: Dumb tax, eh?
I’m still left with the question of how we’re supposed to know when service people are lying to us! I guess that requires you to be smarter than this Ph.D. is.
Dunno about you, but I’ve developed quite a crush on Margaret and Helen, two alleged old bats with strong sentiments about moronic politicians, about the state of the economy, and about life, the universe and all that. I especially enjoyed their pre-election characterization of Sarah Palin, which was somewhat less kind and distinctly more on-target than anything that ever appeared on SNL. Apparently I’m not alone: as of this evening they’ve scored more than a million hits.
The question is…are they real? Are these really two li’l ole ladies given to tooling around on electric scooters and, incidentally, regaling the planet with their trenchant opinions on the lunatics, nincompoops, and would-be dictators who have been in charge of this country lo! these many years? And if they’re not real, well then…who’s behind the blog, anyway?
I hope they are real. They’re my kinda women, if I had the guts to be their kinda woman. But I’ll admit to harboring some doubts. After umpty-gerjillion years teaching English and editing writing from all kinds of scribblers, I’d hazard a guess that they sound more like 28-year-olds than 80-year-olds. The syntax, the vocabulary, the rhythm of the language…none of it rings of 1928.
Right up until my generation (and beyond, really), women with the kind of education and wit reflected in the blog’s writing were powerfully socialized to refrain from vulgarity. Nice girls did not use coarse language. Neither, surprisingly, did many men—certainly not in mixed company. Not until Vietnam radicalized us and the women’s liberation movement oversensitized us to the restrictions that bound us to the pedestal did women begin to use the f-word, or even the s-word or the p-word or any other of those words. It just wasn’t done. You can be sure my mother would have thought all sorts of “words” about the incumbents, but even more surely, she wouldn’t have said them. And god forfend that she should put them in writing!
That kind of training is not easily overcome.
Hilariously typical, for example, is this passage, where the conversation turns to bail-outs:
So many of you kept wanting us to talk about Sarah Palin. Sorry, but I have tuned her out. If I want to hear an ass talk I can just ask Harold to pass gas. And speaking of gas, several of you asked about the Auto Industry Bailout. At first we thought “How Boring” but then Harold showed me his credit card bill from Exxon and that got us going…
But just when you’re thinking “naahhh! The grandson’s writing it. This is the language and the humor of a 28-year-old guy of the sort who sits in front of the computer a lot,” ZAP! Up pops something unmistakably produced by a female mind of a certain age:
Life is short. You realize that even more when you are old. I have said before that in dog years I am already dead. So each morning when I wake up there is a brief moment until I realize that I still need my glasses to see the clock before realizingI must still be in this old body of mine… Then I turn and put a mirror under Harold’s nose to determine ifI still need to put on my make-up and do my hair.
Even a passage or two in the Bitch Palin post can ring of the mature voice:
I’m old enough toremember the Republican party of Barry Goldwater – when the party stood for fiscal responsibility, small government and personal freedoms. I remember whenI couldtalk withfriends about politicsand just agree to disagree. And then religious nut cases decided that if you didn’t agree with them you were immoral.So they went and elected George Bush President so he couldtake the Republican Party from being a party full of respectable people to a party filled with asses, jackasses and yes – bitches like Sarah Palin.
Goldwater himself famously used the a** word in reference to the neocons, and if he were alive today I’m sure he’d be using it and other choice expressions…dare we say it?…liberally. And I do know one woman pushing 75 who has been heard using plenty of strong language about our soon-to-be former leadership. One. A wild one, she.
Here we have two wild hares. Is that credible? What do you think? Are they real or not?
My money’s on the grandson. But my heart is with Margaret and Helen.