Idle essays

What strategies do you use to relieve your brain when the synapses go numb during especially tedious, ditzy work?

“Tedious” and “ditzy” pretty much describe my work from beginning to end.  There’s a point at which I find myself unable to keep concentrating without taking a break. Make that many points.

Online computer games do it for me. Though they also can be tedious and ditzy, they are at least different tedium and ditz. Do you use online computer games for this purpose? Or any other easily accessible (read “free, don’t have to sign in”) activities on the Web?

Early on, I discovered Bookworm, a repetitive little word game that requires minimal cogitation. Things are always moving on it, which improves considerably on lines of type on a book page.

It’s kind of a boring game, but when you’re already bored stupid, it relieves the tedium.

There’s always Mah Jongg, of course…it’s impossible to go wrong with Mah Jongg, in the Eye-Glazing Distraction Department.

I happen to like this layout, which is “traditional” in the American/digital sense and easy to read.

The Washington Post has a lot of these things on its website. Unfortunately, their designers, like all computer designers, can’t leave well enough alone. Eventually some programmer comes along, changes them around and wrecks them.

Spider Solitaire is an example. It was a wonderful game, but a few months ago WaPo took down the really neat version and posted a totally dorked-up variant. Luckily, there’s a site called “Great Day Games,” whose proprietors mourn(!) that their games can no longer be updated. You can find the old WaPo version of Spider Solitaire there, lhudly sing huzzah.

This is one of the great anaesthetic computer games of the Western World, along with Mah Jongg. Either of them will ease your pain almost as quickly as a bourbon and water.

The Post’s daily crossword is pretty good — better than most, but not as good as it used to be. It used to be far and away superior to any other crossword I’ve seen on the Web: it was challenging but (eventually) solvable. Alas, however, they caught their crossword editor allegedly plagiarizing clues from other puzzle-makers. How exactly you can be said to “plagiarize” a crossword puzzle clue escapes me — you can’t copyright a list, after all, and a crossword IS exactly that: a list of clues. However, a great flap ensued. They fired the guy. Whoever took his place does OK, but it’s nowhere near as good as the old criminal WaPo daily crossword.

Still…it passes the time. And numbs the overheated brain.

Ah, but the Queen of Online Computer Games — nay, the Emperor of Online Computer Games — is The New Yorker‘s endlessly amusing, gently time-killing jigsaw puzzle based on old covers. For the brain-banged screen gazer, it’s a gift from God.

Just look at that thing! (Click on the image to see its full glory.) Doesn’t it bring to mind a real crossword puzzle, scattered all over the tabletop? It actually works almost like one, except it doesn’t take three days to put it together. With a little strategy, you can complete one of these in about 25 minutes. Or less: I put the one above together in 23 minutes.

The trick is to think in terms of shapes first, not colors, not images. Sort the pieces roughly by shape; begin assembling the outside of the puzzle (as above), and then you can click on a button marked “show edges.” This will hide all the pieces that are not edges, making it simple to construct the outside lines.

Next, assemble the remaining pieces in groups according to their shapes. I call them “innies” and “outies”; and there’s a variety called a “club,” whose shape includes a clunky oval shillelagh.

These are pure innies and outies:

Note that on the left-hand side, an “innie” has an indentation and an “outie” has a knob. And note the occasional spines, and also that some have hook-like appendages, pointing (one could say) up or down. So the top shape is an innie with (starting at the top, counterclockwise) a knob/upward-facing hook/downward-facing hook/knob/spine/knob/spine. This is useful information.

There are innie and outie clubs:

Note that some of the pieces — a lot of them, actually —  have little decoration. The topmost innie is all blue, and the bottom outie club is almost all army green with only a tiny fleck of some other color. But once you realize that all you really need to know is the shape, you can proceed with élan.

Group the pieces together by their shapes, as in the top jigsaw image. There, the plain innies are along the top, followed by the innie clubs, then the outie clubs, then the plain outies.

Notice, too, that the assembled exterior gives you a jagged edge all the way around the interior. Your challenge now is to find pieces that fit into those jigs and jags. Each piece will fit in only one place, so you can’t make a mistake.

For example, here…

…you can clearly see that whatever fits in there is an outie with a left-facing knob, a downward-pointing spine, and a downward-facing knob. Only so many pieces fit that description…especially if you have a general idea of the color in that part of the image.

Here you need an innie with two left-facing clubs. Piece of cake!

And finally, note that a few pieces have characters on them. Most issues of The New Yorker published the masthead with the name in the center, the price on the left, and the date on the right, at the top. And many had the artist’s signature at the cover’s lower left or right. Pieces with parts of letters are easy to fit together.

And what a nice little flush of triumph you feel when you succeed in putting the thing together!

Heh! How strange is that image, anyway?

After you’ve finished, you can peek inside that issue, briefly. If you’d care to subscribe online, you can pay to read every issue the magazine has ever printed.

I love this puzzle so much and am so vividly reminded of how much (back in the William Shawn day) I used to love The New Yorker that I think, despite the fact that Condé Nast now owns it, I may subscribe to the hard-copy edition. It still has a lot of great writing, as long as you don’t read what passes for their humor, which can be annoyingly metro-elitist.

Got any other suggestions?

Images:

Bookworm: © PopCap
MahJongg: © Free games.Ws
The real Spider Solitaire: © Arkadium, Inc.
Washington Post crossword: © WashingtonPost.com
New Yorker jigsaw puzzle: © Condé Nast

This is the worst cold I’ve had in years. Picked it up at Costco — must have rubbed my face or eyes or something after touching a cart handle or product that was smeared by another sufferer. Y’know, you try to train yourself to keep your hands away from your face…but it never does any good. 😀

At any rate, I’ve been out of it for several days and still am nonfunctional. Last night I had a temp of 101, and since my normal temp is only about 98.2, that’s pretty high. And miserable.

Thank God I got out of the jury duty gig! That would’ve been beyond horrible.

Obviously I’m not going to choir rehearsal tonight. I probably won’t be able to sing on Sunday, anyway. And I’m not going to the weekly business group’s meeting on Thursday. Or, probably, to the lecture I’d planned to attend with some friends. Dayum!

I apparently have some kind of hypersensitivity to rhinoviruses. They can make me radically sick…which is what’s happening now. This isn’t the worst head-and-chest virus I’ve ever had, but it’s close. What will happen next, we know from experience, is two to three weeks of spasmodic coughing, sometimes so extreme I can’t breathe at all. That is the worst part of these things, which overall are pretty obnoxious.

And that’s why I hate it when people go out in public when they’re sick. Please stay home if you have a cold or the flu. Some people get a whole lot sicker than others do.

Haven’t been able to eat in two days. A piece of bread hurts too much going down. And there really isn’t much in the house to eat. I did get some ice cream while I was performing yesterday’s can’t-get-out-of-it errands (“stay home,” says she, after spreading her germs all over Sprouts).  That with some nuts over it is about all I’ve been able to get down. This morning I ate a banana, though: yuck! Everything is tasteless. A tasteless banana is…uch.

And so…back to bed!

Image: DepositPhotos, © sararoom

Damn! I’ve got a nasty, spit-uppy cough. Yesterday I thought it was an allergy — no sore throat, no fever, and rather little head congestion make this a very atypical cold. A month or two of steady rain has caused everything under creation to burst into bloom, and now the spring winds are starting…so it was reasonable to think the early symptoms were allergic, not viral.

Not so much today: now I can’t speak for the laryngitis and I’m coughing and gagging. Fortunately I still have some codeine cough medicine from the last time this happened — about three years ago. But how I’m going to get that into the courthouse escapes me. I’m afraid if I try to take it with me, they’ll confiscate it. Given how hard it is to get a doctor to prescribe codeine in the present paranoid atmosphere, I’ve hoarded the bottle in the fridge since  2014, and I don’t want it taken away from me.

Plus I can’t drive after I’ve had a swig of that stuff. Knocks me into the middle of next week. In theory, though, I guess I could hide it in the car — in a container that doesn’t show the Rx — and then walk the half-mile to the car and swallow a dose of the stuff over the lunch hour. That, however, would entail a mile-long walk over the lunch hour, leaving no time to bolt down the miserable cheese sandwich I’m planning to drag with me.

You’re not allowed to weasel out of jury duty on the day before you have to show up. So tomorrow as dawn cracks I’ll have to get up, try to clear out the throat and chest, and traipse downtown through the rush-hour traffic, there to spend the entire day in the company of strangers, doing nothing.

It’s like being put in prison for a day, for no offense.

Well, on the good side, at least I finished the client’s book. Two people have sent inquiries about their projects — one looks rather promising. But I have yet to start those, so will not feel blindsided and bamboozled if they stick me with a trial.

While I still thought this was an allergy, not a bug, WonderAccountant and I went out for a great lunch and then to a concert of the Phoenix Chorale. It’s a multi-Grammy-winning group…they put on some great performances. Yesterday they had a splendid guitarist and a wonderful pianist, along with the usual crew of outstanding vocalists.

Oh well. To add to the general entertainment, in a half-hour I’ve got to go get my eyes checked. It’s been two or three years, and the glasses no longer are doing the job. Especially at night…if I’m not in familiar territory, I really can’t see well enough to drive at night. At the very least, I’ve got to get new progressives…but probably need to ask about cataracts and macular degeneration. {sigh}

And so…<glug!>…AWAY!!!!

This morning it’s raining magnificently…again. Storm after storm has hit California and bounced over the Sierras into Arizona. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

Haven’t seen rain like this in many years. Matter of fact…we haven’t see much rain, period, in years. Or at least so it seems. The reservoirs are now filled up, so the general low-level hysteria about the water situation will settle down a bit.

That’s probably not a good thing: a few rainstorms will not make a decades-old drought go away. This kind of weather would need to go on and on, to be a permanent fixture the way it was when I was a girl here. Back in the primeval period, we had rain like this every winter, come February, and it also rained in the summer time. In August, thunderstorms would roll in about 4 in the afternoon. They’d break the heat, dropping temps from the low hundreds to the mid- or low 80s. A 115-degree day was almost unheard-of; today they’re commonplace.

Too damn many people with too damn little care for the world around them. Oh well. That world is gone now. It won’t be back, at least not in our lifetimes. So might as well forget about it.

Meanwhile, with a flood pouring off the roof, I ran outside with buckets and plastic trash cans by way of gathering water for the plants that live indoors or under the eaves. When it rains this much, I tend to forget that about half the outdoor potted plants aren’t eligible for rainfall. 🙂

Already poured one scrub-bucketful of fresh rainwater on the calla lily, which was mightily peeved at not getting rained on in the last storms. Will scoop up a fair amount more for the rose bush on the east side, which probably will need to be transplanted into a bigger pot before the weather starts to get warm. The rest can go on the ficus, the potted palm, and the indoor greenery.

All of which provides a fine work-avoidance gambit.

But I must hurry. I have 15,000 more words to read between now and the day I have to show up (again!) for effing jury duty. That’s to read. Then I have to go back over the current chunk of 30,000 words and check — as fast as I can! — the edits I’ve made. Some stuff is going to get missed, partly because the job is mind-numbing and partly because it’s just too much to get through in under a week.

Can you believe it? Hauled down to the courthouse to waste another day (at least!) AGAIN! Every time I turn around, I get another summons. Usually it starts with the county. Then I get one from the city courts. Then I get another from the feds.

At least the federal courts are reasonably well organized. When you get down to the federal courthouse, you are already impaneled on a jury and you go straight to the judge’s courtroom for voir-dire.

At the county, you have to show up at 8 a.m. — if you don’t appear on time, they count that as not showing up at all and you can be charged with a crime. Then they park you in a waiting room where you sit. And sit. And sit. And sit. And sit. All day long. If you’re lucky, they may let you go around 4 p.m., but you’re told to expect to be there until 5:00.

They may haul you into a courtroom to be interviewed, but usually you’ll be discarded. Then, with any luck, you can go home. But maybe not. You may have to go back to the waiting room and sit.

It used to be that you had to sit there and listen to damned televisions blatting at you, since apparently the majority of Americans are comforted and soothed by the sound of TV sets blathering away. If you’ve brought the work that you can’t afford not to be doing, well…tough.

Now at least they have a quiet room — or they did, the last time I was there. Using it entails getting your computer past the security guards, an iffy proposition. So far I’ve managed to get in without having my work confiscated. But the paranoia grows more acute with each passing day. So we’ll see what happens when I try to carry my laptop in there next week.

To complicate  matters, they’ve moved the parking about a half-mile or so from the courthouse. So you’re supposed to find the parking structure (not easy in the mess that is downtown Phoenix — it’s a maze of one-way streets) and then hop a shuttle to the courthouse. Later, after the rain lets up, I’m going to drive downtown and try to find both the structure and the courthouse. Otherwise, trying to locate it at 7:30 in the morning will be a horror show.

You know, I wouldn’t mind being called if, like the feds, the county and the city could get their act together and not waste my time. But I really hate having a day ripped out of my schedule with no compensation and no consideration whatsoever.

One of my friends was called up. She was a political science Ph.D., and so powerfully opinionated that (believe it or not!) she made me look like an avatar of even-handed open-mindedness. Being who and what she was, she was thrilled to serve.

She was impaneled for a civil case. The judge told the selected jurors that he expected the case to last about three days and asked if that would be a hardship for anyone.

You understand: she had two jobs. One was an adjunct teaching position at the Great Desert University. When you’re adjunct, if you don’t show up, you don’t get paid. There are no substitute teachers for courses taught by adjuncts, so your students lose out on the coursework for which they are paying through the schnozz. But three days, she figured she could finesse. So she made no objection.

The trial went on for over three weeks!

She lost three weeks worth of pay. She had to pay a friend, out of pocket, to cover her course, and even then her students had fallen way behind by the time she got back to work.

Teaching is not considered important enough that a judge will excuse you from jury duty. Interestingly, though, seeing to it that people pay their taxes on time is: my accountant friend has repeatedly gotten himself excused by stating, correctly, that he had to prepare clients’ tax returns on time.

One thing I did learn, by accident, is that if you ask to have your “service” rescheduled and you can finagle them to schedule you on the day before Christmas, you’re likely to get completely out of it. What happens is that lawyers do not want to show up at the courthouse on the day before a major holiday. So try to wangle an appointment right up against a Christmas, New Year’s, or the Fourth of July, and although you may have to show up, you’ll be sent home quickly.

Welp, enough with the ranting. Unfortunately, I’ve got to get to work!

The News of the World is not so great — you tune into Google News just to see what new signs of dementia are emanating from the White House — so one looks to a smaller scale in the search for things that have turned out well.

• The CRP V500 Call Blocker ordered up from Amazon a couple weeks ago. Damned if the thing doesn’t WORK, pretty much as advertised. The nuisance calls have fallen off to almost nil. The crooks who like to jangle your phone at 7:00 a.m.: blocked. The sh!theads that call at 9:00 p.m.: blocked.

The number of robocalls per day has dropped from about a half-dozen to one. As a reviewer at Amazon noted, nuisance incoming drops precipitously as you block those who do get through. The first day or two after the gadget came to live on my phone line, robocall harassment dropped from six or eight a day to two or three. Within another few days, it was down to one a day. That’s one helluva big improvement on six or eight interruptions a day, especially when you do the kind of high-focus, ditzy work I do.

Speaking of the which…

• Billing by the Word. Why did I never think of this before? It looks more and more like it’s true that when people hear “YY cents per word,” they imagine that sounds better than “X dollars per page.” This is so even when the YY cents works out to more, overall, than X dollars.

I just sent off the most incredibly mind-numbingly complicated piece of network theory to its Chinese authors — really, on the highest end of what I’m qualified to do. They didn’t even blink when I asked for a stiff fee expressed in pennies per word. The result: I’ll get paid something close to what my time and skills are worth. No more giving away hours of time for minimum wage. Or less.

Now I’m thinking there should be a way to convert this by-the-word approach to indexing. As a matter of fact, the latest would-be indexing client asked how much I would charge to index his academic tome “per word.”

Indexing is not normally calculated by the word; it’s charged by indexable printed page. You work from page proofs, unless you’re entering code in a Wyrd manuscript for machine indexing. I personally find that to be more work than just going through page proofs and…you know…reading the copy. And, oh, say thinking about where entries belong, how they should be ordered, who’s going to use the index, and why.

But it does occur to me that I could calculate an average number of words per page by pasting from PDF to Wyrd and figuring an average from, say, 10 pages. Or simply copying all the indexable pages into Wyrd and reading the total word count.

When you think about how you would do that so as to come up with the desired $4 to $6 a page, you come up with a per-word range of 1.05 to 1.75 cents per word. A typical 350-page academic tome would have something between 81,250 and 82,500 indexable words. That would create a range of about $800 to about $1200, which is what I’ve been getting with the existing page rates. It would even allow for pushing an estimate as high as $1445, for really complicated and abstruse horror shows.

Today, if I have time after getting through 10,000 words of the other client’s Great Novel of the 21st Century, I’ll update the business’s website to reflect a per-word system for indexing as well as for editing.

• The Countertop Oven Gambit. Now that has worked out well. The self-destructing wall oven is permanently turned off at the breaker, and any broiling, roasting, or toasting that needs to be done happens on the propane grill or in the little oven.

It works exceptionally well to make toast. REAL toast, not warm bread, not slabs of charcoal. It’s fast, clean, and out of the way.

Given Mrs. JestJack’s concerns about the potential fire hazards associated with the things, it gets unplugged after each use. It now resides in the garage, on a work table lined with ceramic flooring tiles. It seems to be pretty well insulated — doesn’t ever get hot underneath the thing — but I’m careful not to put any paper products near it and also to be sure it’s left unplugged. Although I have yet to get around to installing another smoke alarm out there, that’s high on the list of priorities. In lieu of an alarm, I’m careful to leave the door open between the kitchen and the garage, and not to wander off while bread is toasting or cheese is melting.

• The Weather, For a Change. It’s raining again, lhudly sing huzzah. We’ve had so much rain this winter, I’ve been able to turn off the irrigation system altogether, thereby cutting the city’s water gouge in half.

Just now we’re getting the tail end of the storm that’s hovering over Southern California. The drought is officially broken in that state, reservoirs full and streams running again. Whether that’s the case here remains to be seen — our drought has run longer than 10 years. However, the kind of soft rain we’re having now is crucial: it recharges the groundwater, because it doesn’t run off to the Gulf of California the way a hard rain does.

We should have wildflowers this spring. Real wildflowers. For the first time in years!

• Shopping Less at Costco. Not allowing myself to be dragooned back to Citibank’s obnoxious Visa card has worked to surprisingly good effect. Because it’s a little bit of a hassle to charge up goods on the credit union’s Visa card or debit card — you have to produce your official Costco card as well as a second piece of plastic, and now you have two statements to hassle with instead of just one AMEX bill — I’ve taken to shopping in grocery stores and on Amazon in preference to Costco.

That means I’m spending a lot less, overall, each month.

Yesterday’s bills came in on budget, in theory: about $1200, right around what I’ve always figured for routine spending. But… The actual routine spending was a lot less than that. The $1200 tab included a $235 HVAC service/repair bill, $200 for a pair of shoes I didn’t need and shouldn’t have bought, and $150 for the dentist.

So that means I spent $585 less than I used to spend routinely! Mostly by staying out of Costco.

• The Wash Machine Gambit. I love, love, love and worship the new Speed Queen washer. Oh, my GOSH what a difference between this marvelous old-fashioned machine and the accursed HE, low-water contraption. It works, it actually gets the clothes clean,  it never tangles anything into a braid, and it does the job in 30 minutes flat.

It’s a miracle.