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Idle essays

Greener Grass? To move or not to move

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La Maya and La Bethulia have made up their minds to sell their beautiful, hacienda-like house down here in the Valley and move to Prescott, a more or less historic town in the cool upland parts of the Colorado Plateau. The redoubtable La B is applying for jobs there, and if she lands one (a foregone conclusion!), the house goes on the market forthwith.

So La Maya invited me on a real-estate expedition to Prescott in the near future. That should be entertaining. She’s already spotted a couple of houses online that she wants to see.

Cottonwood tree in fall
Cottonwood tree in fall

I’ve toyed with the idea of moving to Prescott myself, and with two of my best friends about to make the leap, it’s something to consider again. Summers here are getting really obnoxious. Temps of 110 degrees are tolerable, but when it gets up to 115 (or higher) and stays there, day after endless day, it’s just not livable. And whether or not you believe in global warming, it looks like what used to be a fluke is settling into the routine now: these extreme temperatures have happened for the past several years.

After the recent astronomical power bill, I turned the thermostat up to 85 degrees. Eighty-five is balmy enough when you’re outdoors in the open air, or when you can open up the house and let the outside air flow through. But when you’re cooped up in a boxful of stale air, 85 degrees is just plain hot. The house felt hot when I came in the back door from work, and it feels hot now. Most of the rooms, including the office where I’m writing this post with two fans blasting on me, really are uncomfortable.

And of course, there’s the ongoing drudgery (and cost) of pool maintenance.

Just imagine living someplace where it’s always cool enough to sleep at night! Where the locals think a 90-degree day is pretty darned hot.

Dang. With retirement coming up and GDU beside itself with joy at the very thought of farming out online scams courses to underpaid adjuncts, MOVE TO PRESCOTT oughta be a no-brainer. But being myself, of course I have to chew over all the possibilities.

Number One issue: What, really, is it gunna cost to move up there?

The last move I made took me across all of a block and a half. It cost about a thousand dollars. On the same day, a dear friend moved about five miles across the city. She paid two thousand dollars, and the difference in outcomes proved that my choice was radically penny-wise and pound-foolish. I won’t go into detail about the cocaine-snorting movers whose discarded baggy clogged the toilet, causing it to overflow  at exactly the moment my Realtor called to say the buyer was on her way over for the walk-through… Suffice it to say that it was The Move from Hell. After this, Funny ponies up enough to hire a decent moving company.

Average cost: about $100 an hour.

Well. To move my belongings a block and a half, the cut-rate chuckleheads I hired had to make two trips. Assuming I hire a major cross-country carrier, presumably they’ll bring a truck big enough to hold everything. Even so, it will take the better part of a day to load the contents of a four-bedroom house, and then it’s a two-hour drive to from here to Prescott.

Let’s give them ten hours for the first day; they stay overnight (do I pay for their time in a Prescott motel?); then they spend the better part of another day unloading.

If I don’t have to pay for their down time while they overnight in Prescott, then we’re looking at about $2,000. If they get paid $100 an hour for sleeping in a motel, dining, and eating breakfast, we can add another $1,000 to that. I’ll bet about $3,000 is conservative for a city-to-city move.

Now we have the cost of selling this house and buying a new one. Guess who gets stuck with all the closing costs? These days, sellers routinely are being asked to pay for the buyer’s closing costs, meaning to unload this place I’ll probably have to pay more than just the Realtor’s 6 to 8 percent fee (on $270,000, that will come to $16,200 to $21,600!). And how likely is it, really, that a Realtor who is invested in getting me to buy a house in Prescott is going to press for a seller to cover an out-of-towner’s costs, especially if that out-of-towner has sold her own home and now has no place to live?

We’re looking at a bare minimum of  $19,200 in selling and moving costs…and that’s before we learn that the water heater is crapping out, the dishwasher doesn’t work, the refrigerator leaks, and the wiring is not to code! Add the usual three percent of purchase price for the inevitable fix-up and nasty surprises: since I’ll only be able to afford about $250,000 for the Prescott dwelling, that will tote up to a mere $7,500 in first-year costs.

So: this proposed move could easily take $26,700 out of my pocket. Or more.

Compared to a $50 increase in summer power bills…uhm… Does that compute?

Number Two issue: Once I get there, then what?

Well, I’ll have two, count ’em, two friends: La Maya and La Bethulia. My son will still be here.

I kinda like being able to see M’hijito now and again. Sometimes he even drops by on the way home from work! If I lived in Prescott, I’d be lucky to see him three or four times a year.

Then, if seeing my pal who lives in Waddell takes an Act of Congress and logistics like those required to move the Continental Army, how likely is it that I’ll ever see her again? Or VickyC, whose social life is so vibrant she has to be trapped with a butterfly net to get her into my slow-moving orbit?

And then we have the choir. Ah, yes. The choir. Prescott undoubtedly has ladies who sing in church. But I can tell you for sher: it doesn’t have a choir anchored by a half-dozen professional singers, nor is it likely that any choir directors up there are engineering a lot of performances by members of the fifth-largest city in the nation’s symphony. Betcha no one up there has a multimillion-dollar organ and a church designed to accommodate it, either… Do I really want to walk away from that, now that the director has agreed to let me come back?

Number Three issue: What if I don’t like it?

Another friend, having served on her homeowner’s association board during a difficult time and felt alarmed about the wackos who rose out of the swamp to threaten board members, decamped to Cottonwood, the blue-collar suburb (as it were) of Californicated Prescott. Her son lived there, where he worked with his father building upscale housing for wealthy California expatriates.

She was sadly mistaken in imagining her son would welcome her presence. He and his second wife decided her highest and best use was to babysit their brats. She was in a wheelchair; they lived in a two-story house. You see the mentality, eh?

Before the car wreck that landed her in the wheelchair, she had been a high-powered corporate executive. Child care was, shall we say, not her forté.

On top of this depressing turn of events, she found herself in a place where she had no friends, no social infrastructure, and nothing to do. She hated it. But because it had cost her a lot of money to move, she was pretty much stuck. And that’s where she resides, unhappily, to this day.

Well. If I can’t afford $26,700 to move up to Prescott (and I surely can’t!), as you might imagine, I won’t be able to afford a similar hit to move back into Phoenix. Or anywhere else. Once I’m there, I’m there. And the prospect of ending up in my friend’s predicament does not appeal.

And finally…

Number Four issue: Is the grass really greener on the other side of that fence?

The lawn is already showing the effects of a certain amount of blow-torching, wouldn’t you say? But the above three matters aside, it’s not altogether clear to me that, other than slightly more clement weather during two or three summer months, Prescott has $26,700 worth of advantages to offer.

Trade-off for a warm summer? Cold winters! It snows in Prescott. Rarely does the snow stick on the ground, but what does stick on the ground is ice. I personally am not fond of driving on ice. And while I think 60 degrees is fine for sleeping, 30 degrees does not seem like the ideal snoozing temp. During the winter, Prescott’s lows drop into the teens.

Brrrr, I say to that!

Then it must be remembered that Prescott is a small town. I am a city girl. Not only that, but I’m a raving bitch. Make one enemy in a small town, and you might as well start wearing a red letter on your bodice. I know: I’ve lived in a small town. They can be even worse than homeowner’s associations.

The past few mornings, Cassie the Corgi and I have awakened to 70-degree mornings. These days have been truly lovely until 10:00 or so…and we’re still in early August. Temperatures were tolerable enough, if warm, until the middle of June. So we’re really only talking about maybe six or eight weeks of really awful weather. The rest of the time, this is a gorgeous place to live.

And a lot of stuff goes on here. In a couple of weeks, Kathy and I will go to an evening of jazz to benefit a charity that VickyC supports. Recently we attended a very fine chamber music concert in the Phoenix Art Museum. And, for that matter, every Sunday is chamber music morning down at the church meetin’ hall.

Furthermore, the Valley hosts the largest community college district in the country. As long as I live here, there’ll always be teaching gigs for me. Not my favorite work, but better than driving the zoo train or selling cosmetics at Walgreen’s. Prescott  has only three institutions of higher ed: an aeronautical school; a junior college, and a small, rather eccentric private liberal-arts college. None of these will pay as much as the Maricopa County College District, which itself is presently offering adjuncts about $500/course less than the Great Desert University pays, nor will they have as many openings. And while it’s true that GDU offers many online courses, a) there’s no guarantee enough courses will be available to keep me going; b) if you’re not physically present to remind departmental chairs that you exist, you soon will be superceded by someone who is present; and c) I have some ethical issues with online instruction, which I regard as passing fraudulent.

Maybe if La Maya and La Bethulia make their way to Prescott, I can have my cake and eat it too: stay here, save 30 grand or so, and visit them when the weather’s hot here!

Image: Mike Pedroncelli, Wikipedia Creative Commons

Funny knocks off Paul’s geeky air-conditioner

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If you haven’t seen Seattle’s best answer to a heat wave, check out Paul’s guide to how to make your own air conditioner, complete with detailed photos, over at Fiscal Geek.

It being hotter than a three-dollar cookstove here in lovely uptown Arizona just now, I decided the damped-down central HVAC $y$tem needed a little boost along these lines. Copper tubing is beyond my girlie handyperson skills, though…also beyond my level of industry, in 115-degree heat.

But a fan: I have a fan. It’s parked on my desk, where it blows directly on me, especially during the afternoon, when 82 degrees at the hall thermostat translates to about 90 degrees in the back bedroom that is my office.  And down on the bottom of the deep freezer I happen to have an old gallon orange-juice bottle, filled with frozen water. That’s ice, for the nonengineers among us.

Not only that, but I have Arizona folkways. The old buzzards used to say (long before I was an old buzzard myself) that before the advent of refrigeration, the few hardy Phoenicians brave enough (or poor enough) to spend the summer in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun would stay cool by hanging wet towels over the cages of electric fans. This always sounded a little apocryphal to me…how did they survive electrocution, in the era of ungrounded plugs? But who am I to question my elders, eh?

So, I decided to try a couple of adaptations to Paul’s schema. These would rely on only one electrical device—the fan—rather than a fan and an aquarium pump, and would not require any manly tools to construct.

First, we have the Old Frontier version of swamp air conditioning.

This thing, in case you don’t recognize it right off the bat, is the rack that comes with a clothes dryer, on which you’re supposed to lay out flat stuff and tennis shoes to be dried, tumble-free. Maybe, just maybe, we’ve finally found a use for it.

And this? A wet rag. Actually, it’s a wet flour-sacking type kitchen towel.

The clothes dryer rack is clunky enough that it almost stands on edge by itself. Conveniently, though, our abbreviated five-foot shelf of reference works resides atop the desk, right next to the fan’s summertime abode.

This allowed me to prop the rack against a couple of the books, a maneuver that stood the rack up steadily enough to tolerate the wet rag without falling over and keeps the wet rag from contacting the electric fan. Just in case, though, I laid a section of the New York Times on the desktop, underneath the rack and its damp covering.

Then it was just a matter of…yes! turning on the fan!

Thar she blows!
Thar she blows!

This invention works best when the fan is set to full blast. At lower speeds, the wet towel, even though its fabric is pretty lightweight, blocks the air flow enough to leave you wondering what happened to the breeze.

The effect is…well…a bit swampy. Gives you some insight into why our City Grandparents decamped to the high country every summer.

Moving on… The first attempt with a plastic-encased block of ice looked like this:

Knowing the frozen bottle would sweat in the heat and suspecting its lid would leak, I put a cookie sheet (girlie tool) underneath it. Further concerned that the cold and possible condensation under the aluminum sheet could damage the fine surface of my superb cut-rate on-sale desk, I set a trivet under the bottle. This, I figured, would allow air to flow under the cold object, as well as around and over it.

In a later version, I put the trivet beneath the cookie sheet. This provided better balance. The slippery bottle, unevenly inflated as the water inside expanded while freezing, wanted to skid off the trivet; this arrangement proved a lot more stable. The aesthetic is tidier, too:

And how do these schemes work? Well, I’d say the ice block strategy is marginally more efficient than a wet towel on a fan. Interestingly, the ice block scheme cools better as the water inside melts and the plastic jug’s exterior sweats a layer of water. Probably the cooling effect comes from the water’s evaporation. In either lash-up, the fan has to be set on high to create any noticeable cooling effect.

IMHO, the effect is much enhanced by the application of ice to bourbon and water.

Mr. President! Mr. President!

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Listening to an American president who can speak intelligibly: what a thrill! As soon as President Obama began to speak to the nation on the evening of July 22, he had my attention. How I would have liked to have been among the White House press corps: Mr. President! Mr. President! So many questions.

I liked what he said about the way we may be able to make affordable health care a reality for most or all Americans, and how he seemed to recognize that though this is huge, truly huge, it’s not the only problem facing our country. I liked the way he seemed to hear the cries of Americans who face a choice between survival and penury…or between death and death. I liked the way he recognized that employers feel as much grief as workers over the failures of our healthcare system, and so, ultimately, will our entire economy.

And I would’ve like to know, really: Mr. President! Mr. President! Surely you don’t think that Medicare will be the model for this new system? What will you do about the fact that an American elder who has the misfortune to suffer an expensive chronic illness may pay as much as $40,000 a year for medications, until he has no more money, nay, not a sou, to support him in his technologically extended life or to keep his wife out of poverty as long as she survives him or to leave to his children to help keep them in the middle class?

Mr. President! Mr. President! What can we do to cover everyone in this country, even the ones who don’t expect to “get hit by a bus,” without bankrupting all of us?

Mr. President! Mr. President! The “97 to 98 percent” coverage of Americans you say will take place…is that enough? Please, will you define who can “afford” medical coverage?

Mr. President! Mr. President! How much of the proposed savings will come from…well, let’s call it what it is: rationing of health care?

Mr. President! Mr. President! What can be done to bring the partisan players together? Why do we have to put up with morons worthies who think they can use this crucial, painful issue to gain a political advantage?

Mr. President! Mr. President! How can we be sure American doctors can make not just a living wage, but the excellent pay deserved by a vocation that saves people’s lives?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Are we going to lose our choice of doctors and caregivers?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Are we going to lose end-of-life care?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Are elders going to be told they can’t have life-saving care, no matter how vigorous or productive they might be, because some statistician says they’re too old for the privilege?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Will we end up with a system of mediocre healthcare for the masses and “Bond Street” care for those who can afford first-rate medical care?

Mr. President! Mr. President! Will we have bureaucrats—whether in government or private industry—telling us which “blue pill” or “red pill” we’re allowed to have, no matter what our doctors and medical researchers think is best?

Mr. President! Mr. President! What exactly do you have in mind when you talk about “cuts in Medicare”? What will you do about the Monster from the Black Lagoon that is Medicare Part D? You say the donut hole will be half filled. But half  of 40 grand is still 20 grand…unaffordable to people on fixed incomes.

Mr. President! Mr. President! You say “the whole point of this is to encourage changes that work.” How can we know whether a change will work in the context of a profit-making culture that doesn’t care whether things work as long as money is made? What will you do about the profit-making mentality that has infested delivery of health care in our country?

Mr. President! Mr. President! You  mention the Mayo Clinic as a role model of what’s being done right. Yet Medicare’s benefits are so miserly that the Mayo will not accept new patients who are on Medicare. How will your agenda overcome this, given that a government-run program will resemble Medicare in many ways?

And you? If you were there, if you were a reporter in the White House Press Corps, what would you ask President Obama about healthcare reform?

A post with no title: What can one say?

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It’s 9:30 at night and the temperature on the back porch, which has been in the shade all day, is 100 degrees.

Brain’s temperature is somewhere in that vicinity, too. Today reminded me of why I love teaching so bitterly.

Several weeks ago, I spent about eight hours writing an Eng. 102 syllabus and another six to eight hours on an Eng. 101 syllabus. By the time you add all the college’s required boilerplate, one of these things is about 16 single-spaced pages long. Some of said pages are very complex, indeed: braids of the textbook author’s ideas of what the students should learn and what they should already know entertwined with your ideas of what they should learn and what you know your students most certainly will not already know and the college’s idea of what some lawyer on the District board thinks they ought to know and what some veteran of the trenches knows they don’t know and may never figure out.

So I felt pretty good about creating a creditable product, all those weeks ago.

In the interim, the college jettisoned its Eng. 101 text and took on an entirely new text from an entirely different publisher. No problem: there’s only so many ways you can express what an Eng. 101 student needs to learn (if learn she will). It’s all pretty fungible. Recreating the revised 101 syllabus took only about two or three additional unpaid hours.

Then came the announcement that lo! We have a new edition of the Eng. 102 text.

New edition. Why do textbook publishers keep churning out new editions? Because of the lucrative market in textbook resales. At the end of any given semester, college bookstores buy back used textbooks from students who would just as soon never be reminded that they took any of the courses they paid for that semester (about 90 percent of all students, I’d guess). Bookstores buy the books back for ludicrously low prices. Then they resell them for a profit to used-book dealers, who shuffle them around and reconsign them to the college bookstores, who re-resell them to the next batch of students at yet another profit.

Result? Neither the author nor the publisher makes anything on the resale and the re-resale of used textbooks. To continue to make their marginal profit, publishers a) have to jack up the prices of textbooks through the stratosphere (Amazon.com, which regularly underprices college bookstores, is selling the new edition of the 102 text for $78.10), and b) have to grind out new “editions” every two or three years. Each semester a new edition comes out, every single student has to pay the full freight, because no used copies are available. Which is the point.

Secondary result? Instructors get to die with overwork trying to keep up with the shit.

Our textbook author reshuffled her contents so that, although the underlying pedagogical message remained the same, readings were partly deleted, partly reshuffled, and partly changed. To salvage the course plan I’d created…oh, my god. I started around 9:00 this morning and finished at quarter to nine in the evening. During that time I got up twice to pee, and I was interrupted once by SDXB, who killed the better part of an hour talking about himself, and by a volunteer for the Mayo Clinic, who wasted about 10 minutes with a stupid customer service survey. I spent almost ELEVEN HOURS trying to untangle the mess made by the fake “new edition” whose purpose was to pluck the feathers of yet another incoming class of freshmen.

Sumbitch. Not one minute of this time was paid for. My pay for teaching these courses starts when I walk in the classroom door…not during the untold hours I spend preparing the classes.

Academia. What a scam!

The not-enough-long-green blues

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{sigh} Over at Room Farm, Chance was  down in the dumps yesterday, worried about paying off the ginormous debt and feeling overwhelmed by all those little chores given to piling up if your attention is even briefly distracted. Annoying computer is again not letting me speak on Room Farm…some days it works, others it doesn’t. But her remarks do bring to mind the general summer doldrums, not the least of which is the not-enough-long-green blues.

In these parts, summer breeds cabin fever as surely as winter does for our snowbound brethren in the upper Midwest. Today the thermometer on my back porch reached a balmy 115 degrees…and believe me, you’d have to be balmy to go out in that. This leaves you inside the house, contemplating—what else? Your dreary budget and your prospects for penury, a horror show aggravated by the astronomical costs of an Arizona summer. The air-conditioner, set at 82, has been pounding steadily the entire day. Just to keep the potted plants alive, I’ve had to run water every. single. day for weeks—today being Saturday, it’s deep-watering day, so in addition to dumping the daily drench on all the potted plants, the roses and citrus need have water dribbled on them for hours. And a pool loses about an inch and a half to evaporation every day; that has to be replaced daily, lest the pump suck air and self-immolate. I’m going to have to borrow against my first-born child to pay this month’s water and power bills!

I’m turning into a mummified pickle sitting here in front of the computer all day. Other than work, work, and more work, there’s precious little to do. And boredom breeds inaction: the product of sitting on one’s duff all day is generally another day of sitting on one’s duff.

An unexpected visit from my neighbor Harriett reminded me of this. She knew the previous owners well and was curious to see how the house has changed since they left. As I was giving her the grand tour, I remembered that I hadn’t cleaned in four weeks! Old papers, junk, books, piles of shoes (bad habit: leave them on the floor wherever you slip them off your feet!), dog dunes, dirty dishes, unmade bed…eeeeeek!

I realized I need to get this place cleaned up, and then I need to get out of it. Sitting here in my own litter enjoying a blue funk is not a good thing. But…I also realize I can’t afford to spend money entertaining myself. Kathy and I are going to a chamber music concert next weekend, only ten bucks apiece—but that’s about it. I’m broke: can’t afford a cleaning lady, can’t afford to go out, can’t afford to travel, can’t even afford to fill my car’s gas tank without running the budget into the red.

Well, yesterday I scrubbed the joint from stem to stern, and that actually made me feel somewhat better. Then I decided to make a list of things I can do to avoid premature brain-death.  Here are a few ideas that came to mind:

Mall-walking. Some of the covered malls around here open at 7:00 in the morning for folks who would like to get a little exercise without expiring of heat exhaustion. La Maya and I have already started doing this; but it’s not necessary to have a walking buddy to enjoy this free activity. Just keep moving so you don’t have time to look at the (closed!) stores.

Free or low-cost community activities. Next Saturday I’m going on a photo walk with Paradise Valley Community College staff and students.

Take a hobby outdoors. When the extreme heat breaks (it will, as soon as the monsoon rains start), I intend to take a few pencils and a pad of paper to the park to do some drawing.

Invite friends to a casual (read “inexpensive”) dinner. M’hijito is entertaining me and friends at his house next weekend: smoked spareribs with whatever veggies and salad we can come up with.

Clean house. Yah, I know: bleagh! But it’s amazing how much a tidied-up and clean environment changes your outlook on life.

Visit a museum on “bum’s night.” Many museums open for no admission one day per week or per month.

Window-shop in commercial art galleries. Restrain yourself from buying, and this activity can be every bit as interesting as a tour through a contemporary art museum.

Take the dog for a walk. It’s free.

Play with the cat. Also free.

Wrap up your breakfast or dinner and go on an early morning or sunset picnic. Costs no more than you would have spent for food, anyway.

Volunteer. Serving up chow at the local food bank may make your own circumstances look pretty good while it gets you out of the house and into contact with other human beings.

That’s about as much as I’ve managed to dream up. What do you do to chase away the not-enough-long-green blues?

You couldn’t make this stuff up!

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In the wee hours of the morning, past the midnight deadline for shutting down the state government, our august leaders in the legislature passed an excruciatingly bad budget. That doesn’t mean, however, that we’re rescued, because the governor still has to pass or veto it. And there’s a good chance she will veto, because they took out her one-cent sales tax hike.

Local reporting here is so poor it’s hard to get a straight story—or much of any story—about what’s going on. Apparently they also took out the proposed flat tax, but getting details isn’t easy; the Arizona Capitol Times and the Arizona Guardian, which report decently on statewide issues, are by subscription only, so you can’t get into the story past the lede. The Repulsive offers a few details on its website, ruminating on whether the governor will veto or not (she has threatened to veto any bill that doesn’t include a sales tax increase) and reporting in a cursory way about the massive cuts to education and health care this thing entails.

Brewer (the guv) has ordered that state operations continue as usual and told state workers to appear at work on time this morning. Some observers think that indicates she intends to sign at least part of the bill. The Guardian suggests she’ll veto all but one of the package, leaving just enough in place to keep the government running for a while.  She has ten days in which to make a decision.

One of the liveliest political bloggers in these parts drove up from Tucson to attend the legislative session, which went on past 1:00 a.m. According to him, the Democrats forced voice votes on a series of proposals to ameliorate the most vicious effects of the retrograde budget package, which of course the Republicans knee-jerked down—providing plenty of grist for the 2010 elections.

Meanwhile, most of the state’s parks, except for a few where local municipalities volunteered to oversee them temporarily, have already closed down. The Republican party, evidently grasping the implications for its political future, is calling for increases in clean election funding and in the amounts PACs can contribute to candidates by way of helping out prospective GOP candidates.

As for my own Beloved Employer, the prez sent out an e-mail telling everyone to report to work as usual and claiming that only 25 percent of the institution’s funding comes from the state.

Arizona State University, which has nearly 20,000 students attending summer classes and programs, more than 10,000 staff and students involved in research supported by a wide range of funding sources, and 70,000 students arriving in 6 weeks for the fall semester will remain open for service during this period of financial decisions by our partner, the State of Arizona.

More than 75 percent of ASU operating revenues come from sources other than the state of Arizona. Specific tuition driven and research driven revenues fund our summer operations. As a result we will focus our attention relative to state funding interruptions on our planning for the fall semester.

A state government shutdown lasting through the opening of the fall semester on August 24 would impact staffing and program availability significantly.

The exact impact and the ability of the university to operate normally will be evaluated on a weekly basis moving forward.

In the interim all assignments and work of the university will move forward.

Evidently intended to stave off panic, this missal is full of speciousness. Twenty-five percent of the university’s budget is huge, more than enough to shut the place down. It is, after all, a state university, not a private college. And it has already sustained cuts that have forced it to can hundreds of workers, closing down entire academic programs. The likelihood that the state will shut down and stay shut down through the middle of August, when fall semester begins, is nil. But that little bit of drama does allow him to segue quietly to the remark that operations will be reassessed on a week-by-week basis. In other words: at any time you could be laid off…

My paycheck notice is online, but it remains to be seen whether the money actually will be deposited in the credit union on Thursday. I’m expecting it will. But as for next payday: it’s anyone’s guess.