Idle essays

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!

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? 😀

And waypoints…  Yesterday SDXB and NG wanted to take a day trip up to Wickenberg and then, via the back road through Yarnell, up to Prescott.

Well, given that SDXB had a whole slew of “sights” he wanted us to see, reaching Prescott was a forlorn hope. But we did make it up to Yarnell eventually.

We were waylaid at Wickenburg when we came across a place with two big arenas where people — mostly guys — were practicing calf-roping. Like LOTS of people. It seems to be the home of the National Team Ropers Tour.

And is it a hoot! An army of big, expensive horse trailers — some with living quarters, like RVs with attached stables (!) — were crowded into the huge parking lot. These people were working their horses and then, along about 10 a.m., they had a competition. Two riders would work together to lasso a calf.

Don’t get excited, animal-lovers: the calves had these headpieces on to protect their noggins, and they were never yanked to the ground. About half the time, the little pistols got away.

No one seemed to object to our watching, so we stopped there for quite awhile to view the show. That is definitely something I’d go back to see.

SDXB wanted to explore Congress, a desolate wide spot in the road if ever there was one. So nothing would do but what we had to stop at one of the “antique” shops by the side of the road. In desert-rat lingo, the word “antique” means “junk.”

There in amongst the junk, we found a one-eyed man, a classic old Arizona codger if there ever was one, with a scraggly white beard and scraggly white hair and a blacked-out lens in his glasses and baggy old dirty jeans. Roger, his name was.

Roger, as it developed, is a master carpenter in the vernacular tradition. There in his workshop he had this HUGE table, in its finishing stages, built of old, recycled timber. Its legs were made from a thick viga, cut to size and measured carefully (and with what must have been considerable skill) to make the rustic top level. The top was easily three inches thick. How you would move it escapes me: presumably with a crane.

The thing was beautifully finished. Its untamed-looking grain, which from a distance looked like it must be rough to the touch, was perfectly smooth. The wood had two or three short cracks that he had either cut himself or had enhanced (don’t know which) and filled with chrysocolla, a copper mineral that resembles turquoise. These, with some difficulty, he had sanded smooth with the tabletop and edges. The effect was just stunning.

A copper mine executive had ordered it for his office. Roger was also making a backbar to match. The top, still in its early stages, was a good ten or twelve feet long. Roger said some file cabinets would go under it.

Holy  mackerel! What a phenomenon to find out in the middle of the godforsaken desert, sandwiched between a train line and a highway.

I didn’t get a photo because when we walked in there I’d left my purse and camera in the car, not expecting to find anything of interest. But SDXB got a few pix. Whenever he sends them over (he got mad at his carrier and canceled his Internet, so has to go to the library to email photos taken with an actual camera), I’ll post them.

This part of Arizona is crawling with eccentrics and their eccentricities. There’s not a lot to do in the middle of the desert, you understand. So one indulges one’s eccentric artistic impulses.

Never to be missed, for example, is the venerable Yarnell Frog.

Folklore has it that this 60-ton boulder was painted by whimsical locals around 1928. It became such an attraction that people in Congress and Yarnell took to keeping it up. I’ve heard crews go out once a year to refresh the paint job.

That frog looks a lot crankier than it used to when I was driving up that hill to go to our ranch on the Kirkland Junction road. Back in the day, the frog was pretty mellow. Too many tourists will curdle your personality, I guess.

Boulder art is a local specialty, come to think of it. On the dirt road that parallels the train tracks up to Hillside and Baghdad, you come across this masterpiece:

Skull Rock, we’re told, was the brainchild of some very, very bored Santa Fe employees. Story has it that they got the bright idea of telling passengers that angry Apaches had picked off a tourist and left his skull on the desert. Then the train would come across…this.

 Once we hit Yarnell, nothing would do but what we had to visit the Shrine of St. Joseph, a remarkable outdoor tour of the Stations of the Cross built into the boulders above the town. Even though it was badly damaged by the Yarnell Hill fire — they lost their gift shop and many of the sculptures were damaged — they soldier on. Supposedly the stark white statues depicting Christ’s last hours were built in 1939 by Felix Lucero, a native American artist who at the time was living under a bridge in Tucson. It’s a beautiful and strangely restful installation —  not to be missed if you’re ever in this part of the world.

Moving on from the sublime to…yeah. We couldn’t leave town without visiting my favorite landmark, the Yarnell Emporium, home to all things arty and kitschy.

NG and I did our best to convince SDXB that his yard needs — needs, we say! — a flying pig…

…but he was having none of it. No accounting, eh?

The Emporium carries a collection of hand-made, artisan crucifixes (because of the Shrine being a tourist attraction…get it? heh…), which I’ve taken to collecting. They’re not very expensive, and some of them are very cool. Picked up two of them yesterday.

No matter what I try to do here, my camera refuses to do these things justice. They’re really very handsome artifacts… The one on the left is stoneware with a yellow-gold and red glaze; the inset cross is a deep bluish-green. The other one is an iron cross with a stoneware inset cross, blue-glazed with a stone that looks convincingly like turquoise but that, given the price, almost certainly is not.

Moving on, we visited a couple of historic cemeteries SDXB had heard of, way out in the desert. The ones that date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries remind you of how hard life must have been out on the frontier, way to hell and gone out in the middle of nowhere: the babies, the young man dead at 22. Heaven help them. One was a veteran’s cemetery, filled with men and women who had served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

It’s so beautifully quiet out there. In one of the graveyards, I saw javelina tracks, where a herd of the critters had strolled through at some point. So wonderfully quiet.

When I wake up in my bedroom here in lovely uptown Phoenix, I awaken to a distant roar — every morning — that sounds like jet aircraft flying over, maybe two or three miles off. After awhile, you figure out it’s traffic noise: it’s the ungodly roar of rush-hour traffic passing almost a mile away.

If I could be buried in the place of my choice, it would be out in the desert among the boulders and the hills and the javelina. Failing that…

Calf roping: CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11066091

Finished another mid-sized academic project that floated in the door on the networking winds. Reasonably interesting, it’s the product of an international collaboration whose lead author is clearly a rising young star, on his way no doubt to a deanship or, one day, a presidency. Conveniently, two of his colleagues are Chinese — the work is a study of two management strategies used in China. And so naturally I pointed out to him our specialization in working with ESL authors. Especially Chinese authors.

🙂

Now with nothing else to do, let’s spend the evening perusing the Motley Fool’s news site. The market remained up today — “flat,” says the Fool. I don’t know whether that’s good, bad, or neutral. The latter, I suspect. But who’s to know?

Meanwhile, the dollar falls back and emerging markets rebound globally, as citizens of other countries shake off their shock and horror at their American brethren’s bizarre choice of leadership.

But if hedging your bets is what you’d like to do — building a concrete bunker in the boondocks possibly not in the cards — the Fool recommends investing in products people will have to use no matter what their circumstances, stuff like Clorox, for example. The maker of Clorox also produces  Pine-Sol, Glad bags, Brita water filters, and even Hidden Valley ranch dressing. The Fool likes Johnson & Johnson and Berkshire-Hathaway, too.

Five-Thirty-Eight opines that Trump’s disdain for renewable energy won’t make much difference, one way or the other, to its future development. Comes under the heading of wishful thinking, IMHO.

The Christian Science Monitor notes that Mr. Trump’s tax plan is anything but populist. Let’s hope our Republican senators and representatives manage to hang on to what little remains of their wits.

LOL! If you’ve enjoyed a Samsung washer or refrigerator, you’ll know here’s a car not to buy! 😀

Ryan plans to gut Medicare, according to Salon. Luckily, there are enough geezers out here to gut him…so he may want to keep his own wits about him… Seriously, though: if you’re a young person, prepare to add into your financial planning the costs of caring for your elderly parents. Otherwise you’ll be visiting them under the freeway overpass.

Back to the Fool: writers there speculate that Amazon has a new brick-and-board bookstore empire in its bag of tricks. Where have we heard this before? Home Depot, hm? Echoes of the extinction of locally owned hardware stores and American-made home improvement products. Once they’ve killed off all the competition, they raise the prices.

Because, of course, they can…

The day ends as it began: with a helicopter circling overhead, a bullhorn bellowing orders to some wretch below. Actually, this morning’s copter was not a cop copter but a news snoop in the sky, ogling the scene where some hapless jay-walker died. But copters are copters: noisy, annoying, nervous-making. No wonder we have anxiety attacks.

And so, to bed.