Idle essays | Funny about Money

Major Project DONE!

January 2, 2017 by funny

At last! The writing book — The Complete Writer — is done, indeed. It’s a MAJOR major project: 433 pages with the index and the back matter in place. I’m very pleased…it has been a huge job, made all the more huge by my having screwed up the page count twice, leading to not one, not two, but three total rewrites of the endless index.

An index is mind-numbing enough to compile without having to do it three times. That’s for damn sure…

Still have to do a wrap-around cover for the print version. I do have one for the e-book incarnation, but have heard nothing from the e-book formatter so don’t know where or if that thing is.

Trudging through that accursed index for the third time (eight single-spaced, double-column pages set in 10-point type…phbhphtbt!), it crossed my mind that the thing has its uses: an index points to a book’s topics in a more succinct and telling way than any table of contents does. Index topics are sharply focused, unfanciful, and succinct.

The marketing strategy for The Complete Writer involves a lot of public speaking: before groups, clubs, classes, whatever I can get. That, o’course, is going to entail coming up with things to speak about. Well…where do I have an eight-page list (two columns, 10-point Alegreya)? Mwa ha ha! Scan your eye down the index of a book on any subject you know well, and lo! You see a gold mine of subjects you can turn into dog-and-pony shows.

Matter of fact, I have to give a presentation on Thursday. Believe its subject will be “Scams for Writers…and How to Avoid Them.” The index points to everything I need to address, and it also refers me to web pages where I can download some handouts.

Hot diggety.

Donna Freedman is in town. It was good to see her yesterday…we had lunch at a favorite hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint and then killed an inordinate amount of time chatting. That was fun! 🙂

She’s looking to market her blog writing course and also has been hustling up a lot of writing assignments. I’m reminded of how lucky I was to have a working husband when I was covering the earth with copy as a freelance writer. Keeping the pump primed takes an enormous amount of work, and you dare not pause. The minute you quit drumming up work, the pipeline runs dry.

Today is gray and damp and vaguely chilly. I’ve spent half the day wrestling the last of the index into place and another several hours scrubbing up and battling dog hair. The dogs and I are now ensconced with an electrically heated throw atop the bed, there to loaf the rest of the day away.

And so it goes.

Happy New Year to you!

Gardening, Baking, Loafing…

December 30, 2016 by funny

Eat your hearts out, East-Coasters and Midwesterners and Canadians! It’s almost 70 degrees out here in the Leafy Bower, deep in the heart of the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun! Ha haaaaaa!!!!!!!

So instead of actually Working 🙁 (heaven forfend!), I decided to spread the compost that’s been rotting away inside last summer’s Amazon purchase. A month or so ago, I put some on the potted rose plant, but plenty remained for the climbing roses on the west side and the endlessly struggling Perfumed Delight that fries all summer long on the northwest corner of the house. And YES, I was too damn lazy to dig it into the ground. Don’t worry. It’ll work its way in sooner or later.

Kinda pretty, isn’t it, fresh out of the compost barrel? Nice and dark and rich-looking.

The Mexican lime tree, one of the critters that shades this bower, is in the middle of its midwinter leaf-drop. Amazingly, it has spawned a new crop of juicy little limes — this after last summer’s frenzy. I raked the leaves and some of the limes up and refilled the emptied composter, which worked well enough put promised some pretty acetic stuff.

During the raking activity, I reflected on the success of M’hijito’s and my scheme to bake the ribeye roast inside the propane grill. It worked, you know. The roast came out gorgeously cooked — a little more done than I prefer, but still succulent and delicious. Being low on food and not inclined to run to the grocery store, I considered the fact that I’d like a loaf of bread…but of course, I can’t bake bread without an oven.

Or…

Can I?

M’hijito and I realized that the way to keep the meat from cooking too fast was to raise it higher above the heat source — the propane burners — enough so that with the lid closed the food would be roasted primarily from heat circulating inside the cooker, rather than from the flames below it.

Well. The last time I tried to bake bread in that thing, it converted the bottom of two free-form loaves into layers of charcoal. The dough spread and flattened the loaves into thick pancakes. The result was, in a word, inedible. Out they went.

The ribeye roasting experiment revealed what the problem was: The heat inside a closed propane grill is actually rather slow. Even though you think it’s very hot, it’s not. I mean, it is and it isn’t. It’s kind of hard to describe: I think the issue is it’s quite hot near the griddles, but quickly as you move upward, the interior cools. Relatively speaking.

Thus an oven thermometer placed in a propane grill is only vaguely accurate. It’s better than the thermometer that comes with the grill itself (which is a silly joke), but it’s not really telling you what the temp is where the food sits. Especially if the food isn’t flat.

So. What if…you placed a device (such as a pan…or…lo! a vegetable grill) on the barbecue rack, and then on top of that you placed a roasting rack, such as the one we used to hold the meat fairly high above the grill’s heat source? So that would be the surface on which you would set your bread?

If that doesn’t work, nothin’ will.

And what if instead of trying to bake a free-form loaf like some ancient Babylonian would have made inside a brick or adobe oven, what if you just put the dough into a regular Yankee-style baking pan?

Yes.

So into a pair of Pyrex bread pans went two blobs of risen dough. Even though it’s pretty nice outdoors, it’s still a little cool inside the house — about 67 degrees…probably cooler than yeast likes. How to give the friendly microbes a sub-tropical environment, in the absence of an oven? Hmmm…

Ah! Of course! The superbly politically incorrect incandescent light!

Thank God I had the foresight to stockpile those things.

Mwa ha ha! So..within an hour or two, I expect, the two chunks of dough should be risen enough to endure their experiment inside the grill. Hope it works, because I am bloody hungry. And the plan is to serve up some of that leftover gorgeous beef roast in a sandwich made of the proposed bread.

Meanwhile, as these goings-on were going on, the yard activities proceeded. After all the lime-tree leaves were packed into the tiny composter, it occurred to me that citrus leaves and citrus fruit would make a pretty acidy compost. There had to be something else to add…

Well…no. Not so much. There was, I realized, the shredded junkmail. Not much, but surely enough to provide, at least, a little variety.

No, the paper is not blue. It’s white. Don’t ask. I haven’t a clue.

And how grows the grocery-store garden?

With superb mediocrity. The lettuce stump that I planted did in fact grow a few leaves. But then…yes…then it bolted to seed!

Say what? In the freaking middle of the winter!

Oh well.

I bought two packages of that hydroponic lettuce, the heads that come with their roots attached. One package, containing a head of butter lettuce, was mostly consumed by M’hijito and me with Christmas dinner. So the remains of that took the place of the romaine experiment (which went into the compost bin). I’ve found these things grow quite nicely if you leave a few leaves around the stem.

The other package contained not one but four small heads of exotic leaf lettuce: two green and two ruby. Tomorrow those will go into a salad that will be my contribution to New Year’s dinner at my dear friends’ house. And you may be sure the root ends of all four heads will go right into a pot. So with any luck, in a few weeks we’ll see not one, not two, but five heads of lettuce thriving in the backyard.

Excellent.

What to do now?

December 29, 2016December 29, 2016 by funny

For the first time since the memory of personkind runneth not to the contrary, I have nothing pressing to do today! With current spate of paying work lobbed back into the client’s court, I feel totally uninclined to restart the unpaying work — have to do an index for the writing book…for the third time.

Thinking Our Merrie Groupe was not meeting today (it being nearly New Year’s), I failed to go to the Scottsdale Business Assn meeting. B-a-a-ad human! They did meet. And I missed last week’s shindig because I decided I did not want to drive to Scottsdale through rush-hour traffic in the pouring rain.

And of course, last Thursday we did indeed have a shitload of paying work on hand…

Normally I would visit two or three grocery stores on the way home, making Thursday a weekly Shopping Day. That plus the early a.m. meeting occupies half the day…it’s 11 a.m. or later by the time I get back to the Funny Farm.

So this is all unaccustomed free time. I don’t know what to do with it!

Candidates:

• Walk the dogs
• Drive the dogs to a mountain park and walk them in the desert
• Write & mail belated thank-you cards
• Get New Year’s gift for my friends who are having me over for NY Eve
• Backwash and shock-treat pool
• Enter charges for December budget tracking
• Move basil plants back outside; water
• Prune roses
• Remove frost coverings from plants
• Clean bathrooms
• Buy mattress & box spring set
• Clean refrigerator
• Buy food
• Prepare food
• Write neglected index
• Draft new piece of terrible fiction
• Revisit idea of joining Toastmasters
• Clean floors

Hmmm… Doesn’t appear that there’s really NOTHING to do. It’s just that with one exception none of it is very urgent or very interesting.

Macy’s is having a sale on mattresses and box springs: $249 with supposed free delivery. Unclear whether it includes the metal stand thingie that cheap mattresses go on. Might be worth driving over to see what they have.

Not feeling very trusting of the mattress stores in town. At least one of them — whose name I no longer recall because I failed to write it down while cruising the Web — is selling discounted “new” mattress sets that actually are used. Yuch!!

Macy’s at least is a known quantity. Also they sell decent bedding, and I believe there’s a Target in or near that shopping center. Actually, the shopping center that houses the Macy’s that carries furniture (most of them don’t, here) has a Penny’s, I think, where I could probably get some twin-sized bedding relatively cheap.

Et voila! That may be the Project of the Day.

Certainly better than launching a third try on a mind-numbing indexing job…

Image: DepositPhotos, ©Serggn

Merry Christmas!

December 25, 2016December 25, 2016 by funny

Cheers! And a happy Christmas Eve and joyous Christmas Day to you!

What are you up to for this year’s Joy Frenzy?

Me, I’m headed over to the church in an hour or so: rehearsal at 7:30, 8:30 service, fast potluck, midnight service, then deliver my friend back to his house (unless he decides to leave with his wife at the end of the early service), then back to the Funny Farm.

Which, I hope, will still be intact. I really don’t like to wander off on one of the premier burgling days of year. But it’s been pouring rain all day long, which I hoped would discourage the thieving activities. Even though the rain has now stopped, it’s still pretty soggy out there.

Gerardo’s cousin Antonio came over with a pile of beautiful chicken mole tamales, the kind they make in the deep south of Mexico and in Central America, wrapped in banana leaves. These I’m combining with another batch made by another friend, to present as my contribution to the potluck.

Unfortunately, it’s not much: we’re told this Christmas Eve potluck serves some 70 people. I’ve only got a couple dozen of these things. But I’m truly broke just now. Every hand has been out — often more than once, plus of course I’ve had to buy Christmas presents and I haven’t recovered (and won’t, not for another five years) from the new car loan arrangements or the various SURPRISE costs that plagued October and November. So it’ll be first come, first served.

How to keep these things warm? Argha!

Decided to put about an inch of hot water in the bottom of a crockpot, then set a steamer basket in there to hold the tamales out of the water. Then set the thing on “warm” or “low” for the two hours that we’re singing. It looks like that’s going to just about work.

La Maya suggested packing them into pot with loosely wadded-up tinfoil, to keep them upright and be sure they don’t fall into the water. So okayyyy… They’re in there, and they fill the thing up, jam-tight, to the top. The lid will just barely fit on — it certainly doesn’t sit tight.

But I think it’ll be all right. I hope.

Self-serving these things will be a trick: I’m bringing a pair of tongs, plus a stack of paper plates for people to use to discard the wrappers. And I’ve got two containers of guacamole, for those who like to top their tamales with something.

Spent half the day screwing around with a math paper that should have taken an hour or two, at most. This, thanks to effing Word’s endless, reliable intransigence.

God, I hate that program. How can I say how much I want XyWrite back!!!!!

Wyrd does not like mathematical statements. It especially doesn’t like them if they’ve been converted from some other program, like…say, LaTex. So late yesterday afternoon, I’m just finishing this goddamn thing and click “enter” on some edit and…Word does its Catastrophic Crash Trick. The whole program goes down and everything in every file that was open is lost.

Fortunately the program is set to save every five minutes, because of this behavior. But I’m editing in regular view, not in Track Changes — we’ve found it’s much easier to just edit the copy and then do a “compare documents” maneuver, which elicits a file that shows all the changes and edits. But that means I can’t tell where I left off. And that hat means I have to run Track Changes > Compare Documents on the edited copy and the original so I can view the changes (which are not really entered quite chronologically…) and then eyeball them both, side-by-side, line by line by line by line by line by line by….

God DAMN it!

So I finally finish this just as something else comes up. I save and close the file.

When I try to open it, Word refuses to open the damn thing. After much wrestling, I do get it open TextEdit — as a plain text file, missing all the math, missing all the edits, missing all the comments & queries. And single-spaced.

Now I have to go through and compare again, side-by-side, line by line by line…, and enter the math and comments back into the copy manually.

I just finish this and go to check some damnfool factoid online, and damned if Firefox doesn’t crash.

When Firefox crashes on a Mac, it brings down the entire system!

So the reconstructed file closes down, and once again, I can’t get it open.

FVCK!

Finally it dawns on me: the file appears to be intact; it’s just that Wyrd doesn’t want to open it because it doesn’t like the math, which is copied and pasted over from the original or maybe just crudely converted from LaTex. Or some such.

I e-mail it to my giant desktop superpowerful iMac.

The iMac refuses to open it.

ooooookkkkaaayyyyy… Search the problem in Google.

Here I find the observation that Word will run a program with math in it if the thing is saved as a .doc file, but that a .docx file (thank you very much, Microsoft) is likely to cause problems.

So I get onto Zamzar and contrive to convert the .docx file to .doc format, and LO! it works!

But now I have to run Compare Documents again — both files had to be converted to .doc format to accomplish this.

Now with two probably unstable files open, I wonder how the Hell this stuff is going to get to the client. The light dawns: save to RTF.

So I save both files in .rtf, evoking four files: two .docs and two .rtfs. And I suspect that the next time an attempt is made to open either file, we’re going to see the same “Word cannot open the file” message. But no: shut them down; reopen, and it still works. So off they went to the client, after much time-sucking hassle.

A two-hour project ended up taking about five hours: $35. Total, not per hour

***

It’s after 1 in the morning, Christmas Day. The tamales went over reasonably well at the potluck: all but part of one (which apparently fell apart) were eaten and several people remarked on how good they were. Much other excellent chow was offered.

We sang Christmas carols and fancy classical Christmas music, accompanied by a band of classical violinists, till we were blue in the face. At the midnight service, we were treated to a full-blown bells-and-smells service. So that was fun and interesting.

The whole religion thing is endlessly fascinating, as is human nature in general.

And so, at last, to bed…

Merry Christmas, one and all!

Overworked & Underpaid

December 13, 2016 by funny

This morning I sat down to the computer at 7 a.m. (having overslept an hour or two). Edited difficult, convoluted, doctrinaire copy for two and a half hours. Stood up around 8:30, staggered into the kitchen, fed the dogs, tossed a couple pieces of bread into the toaster, bolted them down with a pot of coffee, went back to work.

Many mind-numbing hours later, shipped the edits off to CED’s associate editor for back-up checking and to be passed along to our documentation formatter (AKA the Dray Horse). Received.

AE is, in passing (I sincerely hope), irked with Dray Horse, who is not performing up to par (read: is not producing glow-in-the-dark perfection). She’s talking about canning Dray.

Argh.

I have nothing to say about this, because Dray Horse is her underling, not mine. But Dray does a great deal of dreary work that I do not want to have to do on top of mine own fvcking dreary work. Oh well.

Moving on: Returned to the Augean job of proofreading and formatting 445 pages of book copy — a new iteration, lhudly sing goddamn — running “compare documents” on it and the now-outdated version, and highlighting everything of interest to our e-book formatter. On and on and on and on and…you think reading scholarly research and cant is mind-numbing? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This exercise revealed a number of fairly technical issues blighting the copy formatted for print. Yes. Four. Hundred. and. Forty-five. Pages of supposedly formatted copy. Beat these back, in the process creating several PDF iterations, which themselves revealed a new technicality.

WTF?

Fixed that.

Finished, entered endless data, proofread, and formatted the index. Thrill a minute.

Every time I look at this sh!t, I find something ELSE wrong with it!

What is the answer?

Why…never to look at it again, of course…

Reached that conclusion about 5:15. By then I’d been glued to the computer a good 10 hours nonstop.

Fed the dogs again, whilst considering…

If Dray Horse goes, who is going to do the scutwork? I’ve already quietly tested two potential replacements. Not. A. Chance.

Who in her (or, if especially craven, his) right mind would do this kind of scutwork? Who indeed, for what we can afford to pay? Yea verily, who for any amount of money on this earth?

What would it be like to work for the sheer joy of whatever you do, never worrying about mere money?

If I’d been born 30 years later, I could’ve become a priest. An Episcopal priest. Think of that! Imagine doing good works with your time and by and large not having to worry very much about where your next meal is coming from? Imagine believing you’re doing God’s Work? How beautiful is that, anyway?

Reminder to self: do not do not do not look at the news, online or otherwise.

God help us all. If She’s listening.

And while we’re considering existential questions: why has the wine run out?

I am going to iron the pillowcases and go to bed.

Good night, m’dears.

And a few more rustic sights…

December 9, 2016 by funny

Or sites… SDXB send over a few of his pictures, taken during yesterday’s wanderings.

Team ropers in action…

This horse looks a lot like my beloved mare Babe, who herself was a cattle horse. The things an animal like this can do defy belief. That rider shortly threw his lasso around the rear feet of a fast-moving calf.

Think you could stay aboard this critter?

Peace & quiet…

One nice thing about coming to rest in the middle of the desert: you don’t have to spend eternity working at pushing up grass, ’cause there ain’t no grass.

Here’s Roger, the rustic carpenter.

We didn’t get a good picture of his table, which is shown in part here, overexposed. The top of that thing is amazing.

Representatives of SDXB’s harem…

Yes. There are quite a few more of us. Why do you ask? 😀