Forty-five minutes before I have to fly out the door to choir.
It’s going to be an odd choir chivaree this morning. Our honored director is in New York, conducting the young things in a performance at Carnegie Hall. This leaves no one to direct us — his occasional stand-in doesn’t seem to be around, and his assistant director has to play the organ, oddly enough.
Add to that: a couple of the pieces we’re singing are those darn modern atonal things, difficult even with a talented director to show us the way. AND: everybody and his and her little sister has got the hideous, heavy cold that’s going around — the one that quickly devolves into bronchitis. About every third choir member seems to be out. The director also picked it up, and he, heaven help him, had to get on a plane and fly across the country with it, while wrangling a herd of high-school kids.
Can you imagine?
At any rate, I’m using this short, relatively quiet time to water nematodes into the ground around the paloverde and lime trees.
Yeah: nematodes. Worms.
These two trees, both of them gorgeous and major shade-makers on the west side, are infested with the evil paloverde borer, a type of huge beetle that looks like a giant flying cockroach. These things live underground for several years as grubs, feasting on the roots of paloverdes, roses, and citrus.
An outfit in southern Arizona sells cultures of infant nematodes that they claim may attack the paloverde borer grubs. No science exists to prove this, leastwise not that I can find, but we do know that these particular little bugs do attack most kinds of borers.
At any rate, the cost is pretty nominal — you’d have to buy dozens of packets to spend what it would cost to cut down and replace even one of these trees. And I love the trees…don’t want to replace them! It’s a crap shoot — the critters may or may not have a taste for monster paloverde grubs — but it’s worth a try.
You have to mix them with water and spread them over the entire area where the trees roots are, trunk to dripline and beyond. Then for the next several days you run the sprinkler for awhile, to keep the ground damp so the little guys can make their way down into the soil and find their prey. That’s a nuisance because the hose timer on the west side broke and I can’t afford to replace it until the 22nd, so I have to set the kitchen timer to remind me to get up every three minutes to move the sprinkler.
Poor little Ruby is trying to amuse herself. Cassie hurt her leg the day before yesterday and so is indisposed. Ruby wants Cassie to chase around with her (which, come to think of it, is how Cassie injured herself). Cassie is better but still limping, and though she wants to chase, she still seems to be indisposed.
Hm. The odor of burning plastic is on the air…wonder where that’s coming from? I suppose I’m going to have to go inside, since it smells pretty toxic.
Yesterday evening I had to call the cops to check on the Things That Go Bump in the Night. Along about 11 p.m. I was about to pack it in, having read 3/4 of the student papers on the server but just not able to stomach any more of it. Figured to leave the rest until this afternoon. Was just finishing a comment on the paper I planned to stop with when I heard this weird tapping at the window. Sounded like someone tapping on the glass the end of a key.
Didn’t see anyone out there, so thought it was probably a moth drawn to the window by the light, or maybe a bat chasing insects in the light. After the adrenalin settled down I got up to go to bed and whackety whack whack! There it was at a different window — where no lights were on.
The dogs weren’t barking but they did get up to investigate. Two of these little weirdnesses were more than I could tolerate. So I dialed 911.
This is the time when you do wish, in passing, that “dog” were not defined by “23 pounds.” Oh, that Gershep was a nuisance and a menace, but sometimes a nuisance and a menace is much to be desired….
Time passed. A lot of time passed. I locked myself and the dogs inside the office and, having nothing better to do, returned to grading student papers.
Finished them all and composed an annoyed “Announcement.” Posted that at both sections. Videlicet:
In discussions of causal analysis, the word is spelled c-a-u-s-a-l, not “casual.” Try sounding it out: a plain a with consonants on both sides has a flat, short sound as in “cat”: thus “casual” is pronounced cazh-u-el. The au sound is pronounced “aw”: so “causal” is pronounced cawz-el. They’re different words.
I accepted a few late papers at the beginning of the semester because there was a little confusion at first. However, the time to overlook the no-late-papers policy described in the syllabus is long past. If you want me to read your papers, get them in on time, not two, three, or more days late.
Although many classmates are turning in excellent chapter synopses and essay analyses, some folks seem either not to be reading the material carefully (or, in some cases, at all) or not understanding it well.
If you’re having a difficult time understanding the content of the chapters, try rephrasing each paragraph in your own words. This may help to clarify the meaning.
Along the same lines, please read the assignment. Several people turned in reading reviews of the wrong chapters. The chapter in question is not always the same number as the reading review number. RR 7, for example, was not about chapter 7.
Remember that the point of analyzing the essay is to apply the principles described in the chapter. Thus simply summarizing the essay does not suffice. For example, chapter 10 describes the use of cause and effect in building an argument. How exactly does the essay you select demonstrate the use of causal analysis? How successful is the author’s use of cause and effect to prove his or her points?
Please proofread your work. Do not turn in copy that is full of grammatical mistakes, sentence fragments, misspellings, and the like. This is pretty basic. No employer wants to hire a careless employee; any kind of work, including written work, that is full of careless errors will do nothing to get you a raise.
Poor little things. You understand, they can’t read because they don’t read — many of them come from homes that have never been disgraced by the presence of a book, a magazine, or a newspaper — and so they don’t read because they can’t read. It’s pretty circular, and it’s also pretty daunting: if you haven’t learned how to extract meaning from six or eight pages of copy aimed at the 10th grade level by the time you’ve graduated from high school, your chances of learning to do so are very slim.
By now it was almost midnight. The cops still not in evidence and no burglar having made himself to home, I called 911 to ask them to call off the hounds. The 911 operator said they were outside the house. And so they were. Of course, they found nothing. If anyone had been around, in the period of almost an hour between the time I called for help and they time it showed up, they were long gone.
And speaking of long gone, it’s time for me to fly the coop. Bye!
And here we have the more credible after…
