Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

School’s Out! (briefly…)

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Yay! It’s spring break! One of the little blandishments of teaching that I’d forgotten about, it having disappeared in a fog of 9-to-5 overwork quite some time ago.

Mountain Laurel in bloom

Remembering it, however, after Departmental Chair kindly gave me three sections to plan for this semester, I set things up so that no student papers would sit on my desk and demand to be read over this lovely 70-degree week. The last raft came in on Wednesday, and I finished reading them and posting grades around 10:30 Thursday night. So…we’re looking at a whole week with no work!

The weather’s incredible and a mountain of household, yard, and computer chores have backed up and demand to be done. So there’ll be plenty to keep me busy over the next seven days. The question, however, is how idleness will play out not now but over the summer, when the community college hires no adjuncts (the plummy summer jobs go to full-timers) and even if they did, Social Security prohibits me from earning any more than a few classes in the spring and fall will pay.

Even though we didn’t work much around the editorial office during the summer, we were employed and I did have to traipse out to the campus several times a week. A lot of that traipsing amounted to time-wasting, but it did at least occupy time, if fruitlessly. Before I took on the administrative job, I always used to teach during the summer. Full-time faculty members earn a percentage of their salary for each summer course, amounting to a nice slab of cash—far more than adjuncts are paid for the same work. It was enough to fund a vacation, if I wanted to travel somewhere, or (more to the point) to cover some new improvement or purchase for the house. That’s where the dollars came from, for example, to buy things like the gorgeous sidebar from Crate & Barrel and the leather sofa and chair in the living room.

Next year, when I can earn as much as anyone will pay me, I may ask for a section or two at the West campus, which pays almost a thousand dollars more than the junior colleges pay. Probably to no avail: the university is hemorrhaging students as it raises tuition and fees while cutting services. The community colleges’ summer enrollment, we were recently told, jumped 17 percent over last year’s, which itself showed a significant rise. Thus it’s unlikely the university will have any summer sections to farm out to adjunct faculty…particularly since the Board of Regents just announced that, as a sop to students and parents enraged by the latest 20 percent (!!) tuition hike, they’re cutting university employees’ salaries by 2.75 percent. To make up for it, everyone will be trying to teach a summer section, and of course there will be far fewer sections to go around.

Mwa ha ha! How glad am I that I’m not working there anymore? Let me count the gladnesses…

At any rate, back on topic after that digression: What to do this summer? I’ve never had an entire summer break with nothing to do—even as a student, I went to summer school. Adding to the problem is that summer weather here is as oppressive as an Upper Peninsula winter. Instead of getting snowbound, though, people get heat-bound: it’s so excruciatingly hot you just don’t want to stick your nose out of the refrigerated cube that is your house.

I’ve thought about shutting the place down and going somewhere else over the summer. In 118-degree heat, it costs so much to run the air-conditioning and water that the cost of decamping to Yarnell probably wouldn’t be that much more than staying here. The problem is, though, that when you have a pool and a bunch of trees and plants, you can’t just shut the place down and walk away. In the summertime, when monsoon winds fill the chlorinated puddle with debris from the devil-pod tree and from every palm tree for miles around, you have to be here to clean the damn thing every day. And anything in a pot that’s not watered first thing each morning is fried by noon.

Back in the day when I was married to the globe-trotting lawyer, never once did we leave town but what we came home to some baroque new mess, crisis, or catastrophe. Yea verily, even before we owned a house with a pool, going out of town simply dictated that some fiasco would happen when we were gone. Dead cats, fires, thieving house-sitters, house-sitter killing himself and three young women in a drunken car crash, painter painting the black cat white, father doing battle with house-sitter’s wannabe burglar boyfriend, dogs retrieved from the kennel sick, ohhhhh god. I got to the point where I just. did. not. want. to. leave. town.

So. My enthusiasm for batting around the countryside all summer is about nil. Some things are worse than being hot.

This leaves: what to do next summer?

One possibility is to try to wring a book out of Funny about Money. I think there’s more than enough copy to pull together something coherent. If I finish off the “Financial Freedom” series before the semester ends, that can be the core of the thing. Anything that’s vaguely related can serve as support material, and a few entertaining irrelevancies can be thrown in as frills and flounces.

The question remains, though, whether I can sell something that’s already been done. Too many PF bloggers have already taken their (somewhat hackneyed) advice to press. Who is gunna buy a FaM book and how much are they gunna pay up front? I suppose I could go back to William Morrow. But both my agent and my editor there are long gone. No one at that house knows me anymore. And my inclination to seek out another literary agent is about as lively as my inclination to pack up and leave town for the summer.

The ancient book published through Columbia is still selling, though weakly…I might be able to persuade someone there to buy a FaM spin-off. It’s not very academic, though. On the other hand, in these times university presses need to stock their lists with at least a few items that will sell. The recession could work in my favor there.

Another possibility is to try to write a detective novel and peddle it to my favorite client, Poisoned Pen Press. These things are such a hoot! And I know I can write the stuff. I’ve done two novels, neither of which I’ve tried to publish. Though they are unpublishable, they did provide plenty of practice building characters, plots, and scenes. One of them, IMHO, is pretty damned good—certainly better written than some of the stuff I’m seeing.

PPP’s advances are very low: from what I understand, only about $1,000. The way you make money off the things is to get out there and peddle them yourself. Obviously, if I’m teaching classes every day I’m not going to have time to junket around the country signing books and schmoozing with bookstore buyers.

Still, in a Bumhood setting, where we see that we really don’t need extravagant amounts of cash to live quite comfortably, a thousand bucks of money happening is, well—not unacceptable.

Speaking of PPP, just now I’m reading a wonderful thing by a writer named Judy Clemens, The Grim Reaper’s Dance. It’s due out in August. This is an amazing piece of writing! In the first place, Clemens is a fluent and graceful stylist—the astonishing characterization and plotline aside, her prose is a joy to read. And then we have the fantastic magical-realist story…what a tour de force! The conceit that takes this mystery novel way above the level of genre writing is the protagonist’s companion: Death.

Yes. That would be him: the Grim Reaper himself. Our heroine Casey is shadowed by the very Personification, who, materialized in the form of an amusingly creepy eccentric, follows her around and generally watches out for her. Along the way, he collects this and that soul. Visible only to Casey, who herself is pretty postmodern, Death may or may not be a hallucination. That very ambiguity makes the story strangely credible and highly entertaining. It’s a great piece of summer reading—highly recommended!

A third possibility is to volunteer to commit some good works. Trouble is, most everything around here closes during the summer, and so there won’t be much to do. Nor, really, am I fond of working for nothing. I’ve never been much of a joiner, alas.

And finally, there’s the possibility of actually learning something. La Maya is always engaged in one painting class or another; she says her teachers are open to taking on rank amateurs. These cost rather more than I can afford, however.

One of my students teaches piano. Once she’s out of my class, no conflict would be entailed in hiring her to teach me to plunk away. That would be useful for choir: I do need to how to read music a great deal better than I can now.

Or I could take yoga or dancing classes at the community colleges. Tuition is amazingly low for several weeks of entertainment. Who knows? Maybe I could take piano at the college.

Speaking of doing something, it is, I’m afraid, time to get up from the computer and go kill some of the exuberant weeds that are trying to take over the front yard. Onward!

Lord, it’s hard to be humble…

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Of course, we know one of us is perfect in every way, right?

Do you find it difficult to be patient with people whose foibles are really not significantly worse than your own? I have to keep reminding myself to be kind. Sometimes. Like, f’r example…

When the friend who likes his wine calls on the phone three sheets to the wind (again!) and drones on, on, and further on about nothing very much. Invariably he calls when I’m in the middle of something I’d like to get finished with now, not later. So his interrupting me while I’m struggling to get through some involved or laborious project does nothing to enhance my gracious personality. And then he bores me stupid with an endless monologue rehearsing all the uninteresting trivia of his day as though these were earthshaking matters of state. The entire one-sided conversation, which groans along until I tell him to get off the phone because I’m busy, concerns one subject and one subject alone: himself. The only responses that are expected or allowed are “uh huh,” hmmm,” “how wonderful,” and “isn’t that interesting?” Even those are hard to wedge in edgewise.

I hate listening to drunks on the phone. Even amiable drunks.

True, we should give thanks that at least he sleeps well at night. His perennially shit-faced cousin used to call at 2:00 in the morning and natter on in exactly the same way. On and on. And on.

Today when he called I managed to blurt out that a mutual friend has sold her house and is moving to his neck of the woods.

“Well, don’t give her my phone number!” said he.

“Don’t give her your phone number? Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to listen to her go on and on about hummingbirds. She’s the most boring person I’ve ever met!”

Heeeee!

Then he proceeded to tell me, for the third time, about the glories of his startling discovery that you can put an egg in bread dough.

Yes. Did you know you can put an egg in bread dough? You can. You can put an egg in bread dough.

😀

Truly. You couldn’t make this stuff up!

What happened to newspaper journalism?

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Modern life, that’s what.

The Times didn’t arrive at the usual hour this morning (nor, I notice, did the Arizona Repulsive, delivered to the neighbors). It finally did show up, around 9:00 a.m.: it was reclining in a puddle of rainwater when I went to drive out of the garage.

A paper that gets to me after breakfast is a paper that arrives too late. I won’t even open the thing. I won’t have time to look at it, because I’ll be fully engaged in the hectic round of time-consuming, repetitive, can’t-be-neglected activities that is my daily life. And my life isn’t even especially busy, compared to most people’s.

As newspaper subscribers realize they’re paying to have half-a-forest of pulped wood delivered to their front doorstep that they have no time to read, they cancel their subscriptions. Revenues fall and management cuts back on the delivery of news. We get less content, less serious reporting, less of value. More readers cancel. In due time, the paper falters and then fails.

That’s about where I am with the Times just now. The only reason I haven’t canceled is that I got a smokin’ deal while I was on the ASU faculty. If I cancel the paper and then decide I want it back, that incredible bargain won’t be available again. I certainly can’t afford to subscribe to the New York Times at its full price. In addition, the Times is instituting a scheme to limit readers’ access to its online edition unless they’re already subscribers to the paper version (huh?) or are willing to pony up some cash for the privilege of cruising the web version. So…it’s either keep the paper subscription, continuing to abet the destruction of forests, the contamination of the environment in the production of ink, and the transport of wads paper smeared with ink that go directly into the recycling bin, or (since on principle I do not pay for Web content) forgo reading the Times altogether.

It sets up quite the internal conflict. I’d like to support journalism. It’s one of the pillars of democracy. Without good reporting—real reporting, not Play-Nooz—citizens cannot know what their elected leaders are doing (or not doing) and can’t know when it’s time to throw the rascals out. The long, slow demise of journalism has traced the long, slow demise of education in this country, and in fact when solid journalism no longer exists, the American republic will soon cease to exist.

But still… Sometimes I feel like a fool, continuing to pay for something that’s fading away like the Cheshire cat.

Image: John Tenniel, The Cheshire Cat. Illustration for Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. Public Domain

El Niño: The long rains

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Whenever the surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean shift in just the right way, we get an El Niño event, a periodic rainy season that goes on and on and on. All winter long, we’ve had rain at least once a week.

Blue Dick

It’s raining again this morning. Poured half the night. The desert is greening up, and soon the hills and valleys will be awash in wildflowers. And, consequently, our noses awash in pollen. Arizona is the place to come when you want to find out what you’re allergic to!

Our xeric landscaping also bursts out in wildflowers, more familiarly known as weeds. Right now my front yard is filling up with milkweed and ragweed, filaree and dandelions, many of them noxious imports from other parts of the country and the world.

Arizona lupine

Some are very pretty. A variety of lupine, for example, will sprout in the alleys and occasionally in the lawn. By and large the ones that grow in the city, though, are plug-ugly, invasive, and turn your yard into a jungle of fanny-high brush that, as soon as the heat comes up, dries out and turns to tinder.

Most of the really pretty plants won’t grow in the city, though. You have to get out on the desert and climb a slope to see the carpets of Arizona poppies during the brief few days they bloom. I’ve rarely seen one volunteer in my yard—maybe once or twice, but they’re not happy and they don’t last long.

Arizona poppy

What with all this water falling out of the sky, the yard crop is fierce, noxious, thick, and so robust that it regards Round-up as a minor nuisance. I’ve dribbled the stuff on the front yard weeds twice, to exactly zero effect. And yes, I know… but let qui mal y pense come over here and spend a few days on hands and knees digging thorny plants that exude rash-inducing sap out of a quarter-acre of gravel.

London rocket

The house plants are happy, though. There’s  no question that plants can tell the difference between rain and tap water. As the roses are vibrating with joy, so the indoor plants radiate vegetable contentment when they’re allowed to sit below the eaves and bathe in falling rain.

Plants singin' in the rain

Problem is, of course, you have to yank them indoors at the first sign of hail, of which we have a-plenty. That Christmas cactus out there ran amok the first time it was put out in the rain this winter:

Christmas Cactus

Cassie the Corgi, not being a plant, hates loathes and despises water when it’s not in a dish. Water falling out of the sky is particularly abhorrent. This morning she ran out into the wet dark, pivoted on a dime, streaked back into the house, and deposited a lovely steaming pile in the family room for me to clean up. {sigh}

Well, whenever I get back from ululating down at the cult headquarters, I guess I’ll have to set another fire in the fireplace, the better to keep the Cassowary warm and dry, and spend the afternoon in front of it grading student papers.

Ball likes to be warm, too...

The great mineral make-up experiment

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Okay, so after we decided I needed a retread and then we went out and bought a kit of mineral make-up from Costco (nearly removing my fingers in the process of opening the thing), I broke out the camera and conducted a few quasi-scientific experiments.

The research questions:

Does make-up do a woman any good at all, or is it just another waste of money designed to enrich gigantic corporations at the expense of the consumer’s vanity, whims, and general silliness?

If make-up does anything positive for the aged face, how does regular cream foundation compare with the new powdered mineral make-up variant?

The research method:

Stage 1: Wash face. Apply face cream. Photograph subject’s face using “macro” setting of swell new camera (lab equipment!) donated by M’hijito.

Stage 2. Wash face. Apply cream. Apply full full complement of L’Oréal’s True Match Foundation; color n5, “True Beige.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.

Stage 3. Wash face. Apply face cream. Apply coat of Kirkland Borghese Mineral Make-up, color “Light to Medium.” Photograph subject’s face using new lab equipment.

Stage 4: Compare.

Results

Stage 1, the Naked Face, is pretty alarming, even to a seasoned researcher:

BeforeRightNoMakeup

Amazingly enough, this is our subject’s “good” side. A liberal sprinkling of age spots lie along the jaw line, to the extent that one can say a jaw line is still visible through the fat and sagging jowls. When I said this face looks like the surface of Mars, I wasn’t kidding. The wrinkles in this region are less pronounced. However…

BeforeLeftNoMakeup

The left side shows the true vintage leather effect produced by a combination of genetics (my mother’s face looked just like this) and too much sun. The age-freckles and moles (I’ve always been speckled) along the jaw are joined by a prominent brown spot high on the cheekbone, one that I’ve never been able to persuade a dermatologist to remove because, of course, he knows he’s not going to be reimbursed by my insurance and he also knows I can’t afford to pay him out of pocket for any such procedure.

So, now we’ve established the reason the subject avoids mirrors and cameras. Moving on…

Stage 2, cream foundation, produces some results. What they are remains to be seen.

Here’s the right side, slathered with plenty of L’Oréal. This make-up has as its sterling quality a capacity to cover brown spots. As you can see, it does a pretty good job of smoothing out the blotchy coloring and hiding the brown speckles. Like all make-up, though, it settles into the crevasses of the aged face, thereby not only not hiding the wrinkles, but actually accentuating them.

The left side, courtesy of L’Oréal:

It covers the large brown spot to some degree. Blotchiness can be said, perhaps, not to have been elided but simply to have been moved around in new ways. As for the wrinkles: the microbial flora on this face need rock-climbing tools to get around.

Stage 3 engages the powdery new mineral make-up, co-branded with a big-box store’s warehousey name and a line of expensive department store cosmetics’ exotically Italianate name. Surely with fire-power like that, it’s gotta do some good.

The right side: fairly smooth, with neither the age spots nor the general blotchiness too pronounced. Not sure what that grayish effect is. Following the instructions given on a YouTube tutorial, I used a small amount of cover-up to help disguise the brown spots; that may be showing through here, or it may be the lighting. In later efforts, I deleted the cover-up step, since the makeup itself seems to do a fairly good job of hiding spots.

And so, to the left side…

It should be noted, too, that I added the mineral make-up’s blusher, which is very light and (seen in a mirror) hardly noticeable. I don’t use blusher with the L’Oréal, because it makes me look like something from Ringling Brothers.

Conclusions

Well, now that we’re at stage 4, I’d say something’s better than nothing. I guess. Both foundations provide some degree of cover-up, and given that the skin has suffered significant damage from the effects of weather and age, cover-up is what’s needed. Probably a veil of the sort favored by Taliban women would fill the bill.

For comparison’s sake, can we get all these photos together in one place?

Ah. Science advances. Et aussi la nausée.

I kind of like the mineral stuff, though it’s significantly more hassle to apply. However, I found that as time passes, it tends to yellow a bit. After five or six hours, it doesn’t look all that great. The L’Oréal does not do that: it retains its initial qualities even after several hours, although it does rub off over time.

What think you, fellow lab rats?

Time for a retread!

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What a beautiful few days we’ve had! Incredible weather in the 60s and 70s, peace and quiet, and now an unexpected holiday (the State of Arizona, because of the legislature’s deep and abiding resentment at being forced to approve Martin Luther King Day, took President’s Day away from its employees, but the County abides no such scantily veiled bigotry). The young classmates and I don’t have to reconvene until Wednesday, o mirabilis!

Now that the racket of the three-ring circus that is the COBRA, Social Security, and Medicare bureaucracies has died down for a while, I’ve finally had a chance to relax, unwind, catch my breath, and think a few thoughts.

And here is what I think:

• My face is beginning to show my age. This is not surprising, since I was born in the early Pleistocene.

• My face is showing the effects of too much ultraviolet light. Also not surprising: born in an early Pleistocene desert, I grew up in one of the harshest deserts on the planet during a time when sunshine was supposed to be good for you (can anyone else remember the phrase “a healthy tan”?), and then I spent my entire adulthood in one of the most biologically diverse deserts on the planet. I am, in short, a creature of the sun.

• I am fat.

• I am boring as Hell. This is probably because…

• I am stuck in a rut.

There’s gotta be some changes made.

First, I need to get out from in front of the computer and put my body in motion. More exercise…lots more exercise! In addition to meeting La Maya whenever we can get together on weekday mornings for an hour’s walk, I need to walk the dog at least a mile a day, and I must get off my fanny and onto the mountain! There’s a very fine mountain with several quarter-mile vertical hikes just to the north of my house. Need to go there and do that. Ideally, every day; as a practical matter, no less than three times a week.

I have a gaudy pink beach cruiser of a bicycle. It sits in the garage while its tires decompose in the heat. I need to get on the bicycle every day and explore my neighborhood and nearby enclaves.

I have a perfectly fine, athletic little sheep dog. I need to let her take me for a run every day. Not a walk: a run.

At the age of 65, dear friend Garnett Beckman (scroll down that page!) started hiking Phonix’s North Mountain Park several times a week. Just retired from a lifetime of teaching, she decided that no grass would grow under her feet. She was 84 the last time I walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with her. And yes, I’m afraid she did get out before I did. She’s 102 now. She still has all her marbles, and she’s still going strong.

Role model! Listen: can you hear that voice saying, “What are you waiting for, dear?” That would be, yes, Garnett.

A close second: I need to lose about ten or fifteen pounds. It should come naturally if I manage to drag myself away from the endlessly fascinating Internet and start walking. But I also need to eat better. I eat too much pasta, too many sugary treats, too few green and orange veggies. And, let’s face it: I drink wayyy too much for an old lady: two beers a day, down from half a bottle of wine. A day.

Yesh. Sixteen years of working at ASU earned me a mighty fine drinking habit. If it’s any excuse (it’s not), I’m not alone: hardly any of my friends and former colleagues arrive home from a day at that place without craving a drink or two or three. Some of them crave a lot more booze than I can ingest, and that is plenty. One recently lapsed from AA; the others…don’t ask.

I must stop drinking. Really stop drinking. Not reduce drinking. Knock it off.

After a day of gallivanting with M’hito, in which we visited many venues and spent not very  much money, I came home not even faintly interested in a drink. Clearly, one thing that will help is to fill my days with something other than counting shekels and clicking on Web sites until my eyes glaze over. I think more exercise and an organized diet program will help a lot.

Other strategies: Use the neat new refrigerator-door-sized glass bottles to make sun tea. Prepare a lot of ginger-pinapple drinks and frescas. Have plenty of pleasing things on hand to drink other than wine, beer, or whiskey.

In the horrible face department: it’s time to get serious about maintenance. Tomorrow it’s off to Costco to buy some “mineral” makeup. Not that I expect any miracles, certainly not on sagging jowls and hide as convoluted as the surface of Mars, but I’m beginning to suspect L’Oréal liquid foundation is a bit passé. Time to try something new, develop a few fresh techniques.

And it doesn’t take much reading of Une femme d’un certain age to get the clue that it’s time to update the wardrobe. I’m starting with red and red. I’m also going to follow Frugal Scholar‘s and SDXB’s advice to shop in thrift stores by way of upgrading the wardrobe. At the very least, I must have some new tops to disguise the Costco jeans. New tops, new sweaters, new jackets, new vests, new skirts, new dresses, new whatever else that comes along. I have got to start dressing better!

New (to me) clothes, fresh make-up, more exercise, better food: these should jump-start the project to get a life. Who knows? Maybe once a little momentum builds up, I’ll have the nerve to do what Mary has done; drop it all and embark on a whole new existence.

Onward!