Every now and again a rainbow-like day comes along, one of those phenomena that reminds us of what real wealth is all about.
The choir did a lot of singing this morning—the whole chivaree was quite a songfest, lots of Rutter and some rather challenging chant. Very fun.
Escaping from the church, I met M’hijito for lunch. We went to an old stand-by, a place that bills itself as a “bistro” but which is really salad, sandwich, and pizza joint. The food is always good there.
His roommate having announced, at last, that he is moving on, M’hijito grows more interested in getting a dog. We dropped by the Humane Society, where we saw nothing that interested him, but a dog that I thought was enchanting. The keepers there, who tend to the imaginative in designating breeds, claimed he was a bloodhound. Well, I’ve seen bloodhounds, and fer sure that was not one of them. He looked like he might have some hound in him, not a sight-hound, but I’d say he was more lab than hound. Probably Heinz 57 is the right brand name for this guy. He was mellow and sweet and handsome. If I had been in the market for a medium-sized to large dog, I’d have grabbed him in an instant.
But M’hijito is the one who has to live with this proposed animal.
At my house, M’hijito noticed to his amazement that the Christmas cactus is blooming. It’s the first Christmas cactus plant I’ve ever managed to keep alive—I bought it about five years ago as part of the “staging” of the house I sold then. Astonishingly, it has not only survived my ministrations but has blossomed three times since then. He took photos of the amazing ornament-like flowers:
Later, I grabbed the camera and climbed under the plant, backlighting the blossoms with the sun pouring in through the skylight:
He had to go to the office, unfortunately—not the best of all possible things to do with a spectacular Sunday afternoon.
And spectacular it was. After M’hijito left, Cassie the Corgi and I headed for the North Mountain Preserve. No flowers yet, but the hillsides are green with alien grasses brought to the Southwest by generations of Europeans, the seeds blown evenly across the terrain by the wind. Any good rain, such as the recent products of El Niño that have visited us, will green up the desert mountains and eventually produce poppies and mallow and lupine and vast numbers of yellow things. The air still crystalline after the rains, the mountains to the south stood like violet paper cutouts behind the downtown cityscape.
So…do you risk your life, limb, and (even more precious) your beloved wheels for two hundred bucks?
Raining here. Raining, raining, and raining. It’s almost 8:00 a.m. but the skies are no brighter than the dusk of predawn. The pool water is up to the coping. If it rains steadily for another two days, as predicted, the pool may overflow. Make that will overflow, if we get the prognosticated five to ten inches of rain. No sign yet, mercifully, of the 50-mile-an-hour winds that were supposed to accompany this storm.
One of my client editors expects her page proofs back by tomorrow at the latest, a very easy job for which she will pay a couple hundred bucks. I just finished reading them about 5:00 this morning. Tomorrow I have to teach, 12 miles in the opposite direction of her office, which at the outset is far enough, thank you, from my house. I really, really, really do not want to drive from north Phoenix to central Scottsdale through a downpour over roads that flood in a light sprinkle.
You understand: it doesn’t rain in Arizona (right?), and so we don’t build roads to accommodate water falling out of the sky. We don’t teach motorists to drive in falling water, either.
So high is the hysteria level over this freshet that the police sent out a warning to the city’s neighborhood associations, asking people to stay off the streets or, if they must go out, for godsake to hang up the phone and drive.
Cassie the Corgi, being a smart little dog, feels utterly abhorred by the prospect of going out in the rain to do her doggy duty. When the downpour let up briefly about 4:30 this morning, I decided to take the opportunity to let her into the backyard and wring her out. She decided otherwise. Had to put on her leash and collar and literally drag her out the door.
At any rate, Cassie and the human, in addition to being without visible means of support, have also about run out of food. I put off buying groceries until after the AMEX cycle closed yesterday, so as to put off having to pay until this time next month, when a little money should have arrived in the checking account.
So, in addition to needing to make a run on Scottsdale by way of garnering some of that little money, I also need to stop by a Costco for a major shop on the way home. There’s one more or less on the way. Only one saving grace to that prospect: the store will prob’ly be almost free of crowds.
Yes. Fifty mile-per-hour winds, with gusts to 65. Doesn’t that sound like a balmy breeze? Don’t count on it, though: if we were going to have that kind of weather, it would have blown into town by now. It sounds like more stupid media hype.
You can’t believe much that you hear on the local Play-Nooz.Stürm und drang is the stuff of ad sales, and so the pretend reporters exaggerate every weather report to the point of outright falsehood. Two or three years ago, one TV news operation actually exclaimed that a “typhoon” (i kid you not!) was headed our way!
Typhoon…heeeee!
The day of the typhoon dawned clear, blue, and still. And it stayed that way.
Of course this is terribly dangerous for public safety, because having gotten all worked up for nothing time after time, now no one takes anything they hear on the news seriously. When a real storm comes in, nobody pays the slightest bit of attention, and so the Highway Patrol gets to launch searches for motorists who set off across logging roads as powerful snowstorms roll in and the local cops get to haul people and their cars out of flooded arroyos.
{sigh} I guess I’m not really undecided. I need the money at the earliest possible moment. I can’t afford to piss off that editor by missing a deadline. I’ve got to make a Costco run. And given a choice between charging off to Scottsdale in the rain today and charging off to Scottsdale from North Phoenix in the rain tomorrow after spending half the day in front of classrooms, I suppose today is the lesser of two evils.
Today I went out to the Great Desert University—which (let it be known!) is in reality Arizona State University, the center of the canker upon the Sonoran Desert known as the City of Tempe—to wrap up my 26-year existence in that place. I locked the laptop the College bought for me into a file drawer; cleaned all my data off my terminal and the shared server; erased everything still lurking in Outlook’s e-mail, calendar, and tasks; locked my keys and my underlings’ keys into a desk drawer; gathered the few things remaining that belong to me; checked to be sure the main entry to our suite was locked; and walked away, shutting the door behind me. From there I hiked to my car, drove to the HR building, parked illegally (risking a ticket: yes! ASU employees, would-be employees, and soon-to-be-former employees have to pay to visit the university’s HR department!), walked inside, and delivered my RASL application to a young woman who was too busy talking with a coworker about her five-year-old’s birthday to break off long enough to look me directly in the eye.
Then I left, never (I sincerely hope) to return.
Can you imagine? T-day—termination day—is the day after tomorrow (and it’s 6:00 p.m. as I write this, so in terms of business days it’s actually one freaking day from now), and not once has anyone asked me where the five sets of keys to our office are, where the Dell laptop and the raft of peripherals we bought for it are, what has become of the god-only-knows-how-many flash drives we’ve purchased. Nary a soul has suggested a walk-through to inspect the tens of thousands of dollars worth of capital investment still sitting there in our offices. Not one word.
Think of it. And oh, my friend, if you live in Arizona and you are a taxpayer, do think of it.
Bemused, I’ve been silently waiting to see if anyone would have anything to say about all the loot we’ve been sitting on. But nothing. I’ve announced to one and all that I’m using up my vacation time, so as far as they know I’m not around and never will be around again. The underlings went out before me, my RA on the 15th and my associate editor yesterday. To all intents and purposes, the crew has abandoned ship.
So today I’d thought I would carry the laptop and the keys over to the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, since IT informed me that the hardware was not their department (uh huh) and since I have no intention of hiking to the Kampus Kops, halfway to Timbuktu (no place to park there, either!) and jumping through a half-dozen hoops to turn in the keys. But after some reflection, I thought why ask for trouble? Why bring myself and their administrative lapse to their attention by dumping the stuff on the student worker who passes for a receptionist over there?
If, I reasoned, the deans think the five desktop computers, the three printers, the high-end scanner, the five phones, and the assorted chairs, desks, tables, reference works, paper, pens, Scotch tape and staples are safe behind a locked door, surely the laptop and the keys will be just as safe. Why not?
So, instead of four traipses around the campus, I journeyed to only two destinations: my office and HR.
The elevator in my building has an odd, unpleasant smell. Normally I walk up the steps, but the wheeled suitcase I brought to drag the computer in and my books out was too heavy to haul up or down the concrete staircase. As I rolled the thing into the lift on the way out, a marvelous thought struck me: I will never have to ride this stinking elevator into this condemned building again!
No joke. I’ve spent the past six years working in a condemned building. When it showed signs of crumbling, the city said it had to be torn down, and the university evacuated the top two floors. But after the dust settled, the administration—whose leadership wished to invest not in another classroom building for the social sciences and the liberal arts but in astronomical salaries and extravagant structures for “star” faculty who teach no one and maintain some part of their tenure at more respectable institutions—these worthies quietly declared it un-condemned. The top floor is still cordoned off, but the rest of it was deemed good enough for the peons. It is, in short, a depressing wreck.
Arizona State University Main is one of the most plug-ugly excuses for a university campus on the planet. I’ve seen one campus that is uglier, and it is in Philadelphia. On the whole, I’d rather not be in Philadelphia. No thought of cohesion or thematic harmony was ever given to the jumble that is ASU, not by a one of any of the multitudes of architects called upon to design structures there. The newer buildings are eyesores. The Fulton Center, which houses the eyrie of our beloved president, Michael Crow: ludicrous, with its absurd and pointless glass flange, which we can only take to be someone’s idea of decorative humor. Give the thing wide berth during a high wind—in a stiff breeze panes of glass blow out and crash to the sidewalk below. The Coor Building, with its hilarious reflected WORD, evidently intended to give some sort of character to yet another glass cube: hideous! Looks like the Borg. The only buildings that are not blatantly ugly only just rise to the level of bland.
It’s a dreary, industrial campus in the middle of a tacky, grubby burg. Except for the faux-warehouse urban renewal effort downtown, the City of Tempe consists mostly of tired 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s bedroom tracts and cheaply built, run-down rentals. A six-lane bridge spewing smog and dirt over a eutrophic artificial “lake” counts as a scenic attraction; a lovely new railroad track a cause for celebration.
This garden spot next to the building that houses HR is pretty typical:
A couple blocks up the road, we have this bit of urban renewal:
Nothing like some fine orange facing to spiff up a concrete rabbit warren, eh? Click on the image to appreciate the actual color: true Hallowe’en orange. Love the way the gray parking lot blends with the architecture.
In a moment of ambitious entrpreneurship, the university’s administration decided to spend several millions of dollars to build a cloister for the students in the honors college. The idea was that honors students would live, attend classes, eat, exercise, and socialize within the nine-acre compound, effectively creating a small, exclusive campus-within-a-campus for the elite amid the tumult of the Great Unwashed. How would you like your kid to spend four years in this concrete bunker?
Nice view out those windows of one of ASU’s finest parking garages:
And the spectacle continues as we drive north toward grody south Scottsdale, one awe-inspiring scenic view after another:
Millions upon millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars went into building this astonishing landscape. Like the balloonish tent up there (yeah, that’s what it is: a tent), it stayed puffed up with hot air until the recession came along. Then, as the tent blew down in the first strong wind, so the whole mess has folded in upon itself. Hugely overextended, the university’s financial structure has collapsed, leaving students to cope with vast undergraduate classes overseen by underpaid, demoralized faculty and throwing thousands of support staff out of work. The way it operates is just about as lovely as the way it looks.
I just knewI wasn’t gunna get away from the Great Desert University without at least one more thrilling episode.
This week I started using up the 176 hours that constitutes the use-it-or-lose-it part of my accrued vacation time. I entered 40 hours in the annoying online form PeopleSoft makes us use, leaving a balance of 304 hours.
Comes this message in the e-mail from our bidness office manager:
I am trying to finish up your vacation payout and need to know besides the 450 hours you took last week if you plan to take any more time this week or next. I want to make sure what I submit is correct.
Dang! I thought the community college was charging $20 for the H1N1 shots they were dispensing today. Barreled in there this afternoon and learned they’re free! Even if you’re not a full-time employee. That’s amazing…GDU never did anything like that.
I had to pay $20 for the regular seasonal flu shot last fall, ’cause Cigna, GDU’s new EPO provider, wouldn’t cover it unless you drove downtown to attend their flu shot clinic. Yeah. Right. My time is worth more than twenty bucks.
Even someone off the street could’ve gotten the shot for free, if they’d known about it…they didn’t ask for ID, and the form you had to fill out was just a disclaimer warning you not to take it if you’re allergic to eggs or have certain ailments.
So that was pretty amazing.
Got another nice deal, though not free, at Safeway yesterday: tough old skirt steaks for $1.77 a pound. Had it ground up into enough hamburger to last Cassie the Corgi for another month or two.
An hour & a half before choir practice: think I’ll grill some of it for myself over some fine mesquite charcoal.
The students’ grades posted, the GDU office all but shuttered, and editorial work wound down to one entertaining detective novel to read, the question arises: What next?
So many what nexts: I can think of so much to fill my time I expect to be a great deal busier than I was while trudging in the traces.
• Just e-mailed a friend at the West campus (still there, poor dear!) to see if she’d like to go out to lunch or coffee, since I have to schlep a $500 check from the detective-novel publisher over to the credit union, which is on the campus.
• The community college is dispensing H1N1 flu shots. They even gave me an appointment: 3:00 p.m. this afternoon. Not convinced I need this, since I think I came down with the swine flu last June. However, in the past before I started getting an annual immunization, I invariably came down with the bug in the second semester. So: better safe than etceteraed.
• Gotta prune the roses!
• Gotta tend to the pool, which has been sitting dormant quietly for a while.
• Gotta go outside in the frosty morning and admire the sunrise, which just now is turning the sky brilliant coral.
• Want to spend some time playing with the new computer. Wrapping things up has consumed so much time and energy, I haven’t even had time to look at it.
• Then it’s off to choir practice.
Check out this lovely thing. Not being an all-male choir, we didn’t sound like this when we sang it last week. But we were good. Very, very good.
My RA and my editorial assistant are machinating a proposal to resuscitate our operation, only house it in the President’s or the Provost’s office. They’re going to meet with a faculty member today about this scheme. Since I happen to know, from other sources, that faculty member has been in the President’s office with a couple of colleagues engaged in their own machinations, it’ll be interesting to see how this falls out.
In academe, as (I imagine) in the real world, a well-timed coincidence can create all sorts of little miracles. My own career at GDU was launched when I happened to stumble into the West campus looking to teach a feature-writing course part-time, bearing a Ph.D. and 15 years of magazine journalism experience, at a moment when the American Studies faculty were craving to found a “professional” writing program. Presto-changeo! Not only a full-time job but a program to direct!
So anything’s possible. If they ask the right people at the right time, they just might open a door for themselves.
A friend seemed to feel I should be exercised because there is some indication that my little empire is about to be co-opted, whether by the young people or, more to the point, by my former colleagues who so conspicuously surfaced in the Presidential Presence. Don’t think so.
GDU is so behind me, I just do not care what anyone out there does, or why, or how. If they offered me a job now, I don’t think I’d even consider taking it. And if any of the underlings can revive the office, more power to them. And…good luck to them.
So back to what next. Long-term, I’d like to…
…write one of these detective novels. …rewrite the novel I wrote several years ago, changing the gender of one of the main characters and thereby thickening the plot no end. …take voice lessons. …learn to read music. …take painting lessons. …sign up for yoga classes. …volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden. …volunteer to usher at the Herberger, by way of getting in to the plays for free. …start hiking in the desert again. …take the dog to agility training. …learn XHTML and CSS. …go back to Santa Fe.
But right this minute I’ve gotta get off my chair and go for the morning walk.
