It seems ungracious to be thankful for an El Niño, given the havoc the phenomenon wreaks on the Western hemisphere. But here in Arizona, the effect is not so much tornadoes and floods but much-needed rain. The occasionally recurring effect of a warm current in the Pacific Ocean, El Niño brings weather disturbances that can have some severe economic and health effects in the countries it affects. In Arizona, though, it brought back the kind of gentle winter rains we used to see every year when I was a young thing.
You get used to drought after it’s been going on for a couple of decades — 22 years, to be precise. Native flora shrivels up, and the springtime wildflower shows go away. Once-flukish 118-degree days occur every summer now. And ornamental plants? Forget it!
So I had pretty much resigned myself to the belief that the beautiful climbing roses that turn the west-side deck into a leafy bower were going to have to be taken out this year. All that remained of them was a few parched sticks, no matter how much water I thought I was pouring on them.
But nay! Check this out!
Who’d’ve thunk it?
So overjoyed were these plants at actually getting enough water for a change — for the first time in years — and actually getting water all over them, that last January one of them burst forth with a single blossom:
Neither of the vines has made another one yet, but they’re getting ready to. And both are covered with more leaves than they’ve had in as long as I can remember.
Earlier this winter, in a fit of spring-planting enthusiasm (it’s been spring since January…), I bestirred myself to plant some flowers. It’s the first time I’ve felt like gardening since the marathon spate of surgeries, which really left me very depressed. But spring has sproinged, and oit looks like even the old lady is shaking off the long, dry winter.
LOL! I give up on trying to force WordPress to put these images where they oughta be! Is there a reason computer technology has to be such an unholy timesuck?
Dogs love springtime, too…probably the more so because they never indulge in electronic distractions.
Ever spend the whole darned day working busily, come to the end of the day thinking, “Gosh, I got a LOT done,” and then on reflection realize you really didn’t do very much?
That was yesterday. A bunch of time-sucks occupied most of my waking hours…
•Breakfast and light shopping with Associate Editor Tina and her sister. Okay. Not a time suck. That was fun. •Correspond briefly with new client: her project is delayed. •Review Big Kahuna Client’s magnum opus. Realize there’s not much more I can do until he gets back to town. •Decide to use the time thereby freed up by creating a couple of Word templates for future client work: one for APA style and one for Chicago Style. Very time-consuming, but will save time on future projects. •Acquire Nanyang University’s style sheet (one of them) for Ph.D. dissertations; consider creating another style sheet based on APA but tailored for the university. Decide against it: different departments there have different requirements. •Consider how I might make a few pennies on these handy-dandy style sheets; fail to figure out how that would work. •Consider the possibility of using them as give-aways in conjunction from some marketing effort or other, as yet inchoate. •Write this month’s publishing co. newsletter, only two weeks late •Publish the same through MailChimp, a PITA •Publish the same on LinkedIn, easier but still requires tracking down a public-domain image. PITA.
I’ve decided to massage said newsletter so as to downplay the racy books a little and up-play (hee! is there such a word?) the book that’s selling: to wit, the cookbook. Hence, the shift away from news about the enterprise and toward useful information: this month’s newsletter describes three common triggers that can cause Word to crash, and what to do about them.
Also used the LinkedIn post recycling the newsletter copy to add a plug for the editorial bidness. A fair amount of new editorial work has come in. Since we’re not getting rich a-sailing the Amazon, I’m thinking that if we put the amount of effort and money into marketing The Copyeditor’s Desk as I’ve dumped into the publishing scheme, within a few months we would have enough editorial income to matter. And you know…editing Chinglish dissertations is really nowhere near as mind-numbing as wrestling with Amazon, Goodreads, Facebook, and other refractory institutions, hour after fruitless hour. Nor is it quite as boring as jumping through hoops to register ISBNs and jumping through more hoops to publish bookoids at Amazon and waypoints.
Meanwhile, though, I’ve hiredJackie Beck to help drive Pinterest traffic toward the Plain & Simple website and found she’s imbued with the common sense I so sorely lack. She has suggested that instead of mounting posts and images on three different websites — Camptown Races, Fire-Rider, and Writers Plain & Simple — it would be smarter to post all the marketing blats at a single site. She proposed that we use the Plain & Simple Press blog for that purpose, since P&S is the imprint for the two books I’m hot to market just now: 30 Pounds/4 Months and Fire-Rider. This will relieve me from an awful lot of jumping around and website hassling. Plus it just makes good sense.
One plan is to post a “riff” on Fire-Rider once a month: all new, never before published vignettes, scenes, and brief stories from the strange and fierce world of Okan.
I think of Fire-Rider not so much as science fiction as a kind of “reverse anthropology.” The story of a future culture, it rides on the science of anthropology to create its imagined world. The first riff (in that link above) shows Kaybrel, an aging warlord famed as a wise man and healer, teetering on the edge of the dark night of his soul, which will come in the next novel. In the latest one, The Women Warriors, we visit the home life of an Okan warrior’s family in a setting where extended families are truly extended. With a chronically decimated male population, the Okan practice polygamy. The elite women, who themselves are trained in the arts of war, have as much political and social power as the men. They decide whom they will marry and, if they please, they decide which other women their men will have as wives.
The first novel (now available in three handsome print volumes, btw, or electronically in three collections at Amazon) follows the men as they spend a summer tromping through enemy territory. The next novel, replete with cryptids (yeah!), will take Kaybrel through a spiritual crisis and show a number of the women in action.
Order the print books through Plain & Simple Press and you get $5 off the retail price.
Welp, time’s a-wastin’…must run to the post office, the credit union, and Costco before getting back down to work.
So the Great Rent-a-Room Experiment ended this morning when Roomie stuffed the last of her gear into her car, waved good-bye, and set off for San Francisco, where DH and Son hope to see her before the end of Christmas Day.
I’ll kind of miss her, because it’s nice to have a live human being around, particularly one who happens to be considerate, tidy, a good conversationalist, and so overworked she’s out of the house most of the time. 😀
So as experiments go, it was pretty successful. As a matter of fact, it worked out so well I could imagine going into the short-term rental biz, as an off-and-on sort of thing. Don’t think I’d care to do Air BNB, because I wouldn’t want total strangers around here. But occasionally visiting musicians come to town, and every now and again you hear a request for people to put up foreign students for a semester.
It’s not something I’d want to do all the time. But I could imagine hosting an out-of-towner two or three times a year.
For my purposes, Roomie could not have come along at a better time. The whole adventure was pretty stressful for her, given the circumstances she was having to cope with. But for me…hot dang!
Right at the time she was moving in, the pool pump sprang a leak. That was $600. Then of course it’s freaking Christmastime. I found the coolest hand-made artisan thingie for my son. To swing that I had to mortgage both his first-born sons (if he ever has any). And while junketing with my dear friends, I not only dropped more money than Croesus would even have considered paying for a very fine lunch, I bought myself a ludicrously overpriced purse and wallet.
Those two will go back, as soon as the holiday is over. But meanwhile the six hundred buckolas and the lunch and the Christmas presents pretty much broke the bank.
So number one Big Advantage to hosting a house guest for a month or two: the company.
Number two Big Advantage: those few incidental dollars for the rent probably saved my tail this month.
Two things I’d do differently the next time:
1. Buy a twin bed for the spare room.
Roomie bought one of those blow-up mattresses, which she tossed on the (cold!!!!) tile floor to sleep on. She insisted it was plenty comfortable, but I’ll believe that when I see corgis fly. Obviously, if I’m to volunteer that room for guests, it needs to have a decent bed in it.
2. Charge something for the utilities.
My son, a veteran of the Roommate Wars, urged me to add more to what I charged to cover utilities, and he probably was right. We’ll find out soon, when the water and gas bills show up.
When you live alone, you get so sot in your ways that you forget other people don’t live the same way you do. For example, in the wintertime, I like the ambient temperature to be cool. Very cool. Some folks (such as, oh, say, the occasional Roomie) might call it FREAKING FREEZING. I sleep better when the central heating is off and the bed is warmed first by a heating pad and then by a couple of furry friends. When the heat is set to 70 (or even 68), I’m sweltering.
Weirdly enough, Roomie found the climate on the tile floor a little too bracing for her tastes. So she would trot into the hall and jack up the heat. Eventually I would wake up in a sweat, sneak out into the hall, and turn it back down. At one point, outside temps dropped far enough below freezing to seize up the heat pump, which caused it to labor away for hours blasting us both with icy air before one of us woke up and shut the damn thing off.
We found the way around that problem when M’hijito showed up with a fancy space heater with a remote control and a swell thermostat. It really worked very well to keep that room comfortable — Roomie expressed her joy. Nevertheless, I expect the electric bill will be pretty startling.
And Roomie is one of those folks who likes to stand in the shower until the hot water runs out. You forget there are people who are not tightwads where water and power are concerned. I’m very cheap about both and, though I insist on drawing a bath (dislike showers, by and large), filling the tub does not run the water long enough to drain a 50-gallon water heater. And when the weather’s cold, I’m not in the habit of bathing every single day, something that’s not good for aged skin and not necessary if you don’t work yourself into a sweat every day. So the water and gas bills also are likely to be…interesting.
So I think if I were to do this on a short-term basis again, I’d add a set amount to cover utilities. If the person were going to be here more than six or eight weeks, then I’d probably ask them to cover half the utility bills.
And if I were seriously to do this as a semi-regular thing, I might move myself into the guest room. The master bedroom in this house is no larger than the secondary rooms, and its bathroom is tiny. Day-to-day, I use the hall bathroom, which has room to move around and also has the bathtub. The master bathroom is about the size of the closet…and this house was built before the day of TractMansions with closets the size of a baby’s nursery.
Also, the dog door is in the guest room. To keep Ruby out of Roomie’s things, we closed off the dog door and also kept her bedroom door closed. This was OK — luckily, neither dog left any deposits around the house. But it was a little bit of a nuisance. If I were sleeping in that room, there’d be no need to keep the pooches out of it. I’d have access to the “good” bathroom. And the alleged master bedroom, which resides in the back of the house, would be more private for a guest, too.
Now I must run to the second Christmas party of the day. And so…
Breakfast-time, the usual moment I have and prefer for reading print anything, occupies so few minutes that there was no way I could get through the entire paper before I had to get to work. Along the same line, my guess that a weekly edition of The Economist and a monthly New York Review of Bookswould suffice to entertain me over solitary meals proved to be correct. I can only get through a couple of Economist pieces before breakfast is finished. And when I’ve run out of Economist copy, the NYRofB’s more than takes up the slack.
Both periodicals contain plenty of interesting and informative copy.
Is any of it current news? Well. No. But how much current “news,” after all, do you want to fill your brain cells with? How many shootings and hit-and-runs and idiotic politicians’ utterances can one mind absorb?
I find myself searching out more news online now, though. Google News leaves much to be desired — such as, oh, say…news. The problem with Google News is that it’s uncurated: the hive mind dictates what appears on any given “page” of Google News. Apparently no real editors exist, and so no real intellect manifests itself there. The result is gestalt, unreliable, and often downright stupid.
What are your favorite news sites online?
Lately I’ve become enamored of Sci-News.com, a compendium of reasonably well educated science reporting. The site is organized by discipline. For the really good stuff, click on the top menu’s right-most link, “More.” Great stuff!
Raw Story, while often undisciplined, is usually entertaining and often interesting. I like that it tends to run long-form stories. Although I prefer print for longer stories, as a practical matter I don’t get print any more, so this is as good a source as any…assuming you don’t mind a slightly yellowish tinge.
Far more polished and arguably more sophisticated is Salon. Just now they’re having quite a frenzy over the ludicrousness of the Democratic presidential candidates.
Salon, like The Atlantic, tends to skew a little too demagogically to the left for my taste. And really, the present “lite” version of The Atlantic is just fluffy enough and just ill-thought-through enough to annoy. But still: if one must have demagoguery with one’s news, I suppose left-leaning is better than what the right has to offer these days. {sigh}
BuzzFeed is amusing, but if Raw Story smacks of yellow journalism, Buzzfeed is…what? Unprintable? Is it really impossible to deliver news without benefit of click-baiting?
BBC News is consistently good at reporting and interpreting events. Coverage is broad and, for a newspaper, deep.
The Washington Post, like the New York Times, provides responsibly reported, reasonably objective, and fairly thoughtful reportage. Unfortunately, both organizations limit the number of stories you can read before they start gouging you a fee-per-view, and so I tend to avoid their sites unless something urgently important is happening.
Access to local news poses a much bigger challenge than finding acceptable national and international reporting. In many parts of the country, there are no decent local news organizations. One could argue that’s the fact here in lovely uptown Arizona, where the most up-to-date and often most comprehensive local reporting is, heaven help us, on the Fox TV station. That should tell you something…
One local radio station emits a kind of news digest. But like almost all the other local news media, it reads like it was written by lower-division J-school students without benefit of editors. Often the writing is barely literate, full of cliches, factual errors, and bêtises. That leaves one doubting the veracity of anything that appears.
A local business journal produces some OK reportage, but its scope is limited. The local alternative weekly is a haven for yellow journalism, when it’s reporting news at all — mostly it covers restaurants and entertainment. The only halfway decent source of reporting on the rascals at City Hall (or at the Legislature) is solidly barricaded behind a paywall. And it’s very expensive, reinforcing the impression that only the elite can afford to be educated about government these days. Of course, what really costs the dollars is real reporting…but the impression remains.
…before SDXB and NG show up here to spirit me away from the 87 gerjillion things that need to be done today.
They want to go hiking in the McDowell Mountains, which are on the northeast side of Scottsdale. Halfway to Payson from their house; about a third of the way from mine.
Oh well. It’s a nice break, as long as they stay off the subject of politics. NG is even further to the right than SDXB, which places her at the right hand of Adolf Hitler. If it comes out of the mouth of some Tea-Partier, they think it must be true. It’s hard to stay silent in the face of such nonsense.
I’ve learned to run ’em. If they start talking stupid stuff, I start hiking as fast as I can go (which is faster than I can run…). About ten minutes of trying to keep up with me runs them out of breath, so they can’t speak and walk at the same time.
Mwa ha ha!
Meanwhile, where were we? Yeah: all the things that need to be done.
I managed to get the December Camptown Races newsletter out this morning, despite MailChimp putting up a fight. If you subscribe to FaM, you probably got that in your email, or will whenever MailChimp’s queue sends it off.
The latest Fire-Rider collection, Fire and Ice, is live at Amazon: Books VII through XII. This is the part of the saga where Kaybrel and his cousin Jag Bova make heroes of themselves. It’s fairly violent — they engage the enemy in an ambush whose consequences will echo down through the generations, and they manage to escape extermination only by wile and steel nerve.
Do download it! And please, please, PLEASE go over to Amazon and review it! Fire-Rider needs your reader reviews!
In other Plain & Simple Press news, the hard-copy cover for the new version of the cookbook is done. If and when I EVER get some time to myself today, I’ll upload that and the content to the print-on-demand guys.
A-n-n-d…here’s our boy! And so it’s off to spend the day doing essentially nothing. Hope yours is more productive.
Putting the brakes on the ambitious publishing enterprise, and they’re finally beginning to engage. It takes a long time to persuade an 18-wheeler to slow down…
So freaking tired of computers am I that I’ve developed a flinch reflex at the very thought of re-engaging The Machine.
Last night I mounted an entire month’s worth of Racy Books to Amazon — which is really only seven shorties but goodies. It’s the first set of books we wrote under the Roberta Stuart byline, two of them by moi and five by a writer who for a number of reasons can’t publicize her name. This lady is really a very good writer, with an actual — get this! — SENSE OF HUMOR. Her stories always have a mellow wit that makes them charming to read.
Assuming you like Racy Reading. 😉
Also got the second “boxed set” of six Fire-Rider books up. That really is a serious book; each of the three collections of six “books” apiece will be novel-length on its own.
So, with the design and bureaucracy done, all that’s left to do is click “Publish.” The plan is to “publish” (I use that work guardedly: to my mind, putting a book up on Amazon is more akin to “posting” than to “publishing”) one bookoid a week through December and into January. This gives us eight books each of which can be posted with a single click. So if I click “publish” each Tuesday, then each Wednesday a new bookoid should appear on Amazon.
In the meantime, I will try harder to figure out how to get Goodreads to work. It’s purely torture.
And I will try to mount a FaceBook advertising campaign, a prospect that makes me cringe. I may try to hire someone to do that, possibly from Problogger or Fiverr.
Hiring a pig in a poke from Fiverr also makes me cringe. But it occurred to me that there may be bloggers who know how to handle FaceBook — or at least are younger, more flexible, and techier than I am. So I think I’ll post an ad on the Problogger job board and then do a few searches at Fiverr.
If YOU know how to deploy FaceBook Ads, by the way (this will entail identifying the right demographics in technolanguage that FB can understand and use), I’m interested in talking with you! Leave a comment below with a functional email address in the little sign-in form above the comments box, and I’ll get in touch. The book that would be advertised at the outset is Fire-Rider, not the erotica.
In another few weeks, I may have a boxed set of “Family at the Holidays” available, which would then be worth putting money into for marketing. If the PoD guy comes through (he has not, so far), then we already have a print version of “Family.” Either of those could also be marketed on FaceBook, if it’s possible to identify adult audiences(!!) who want(!!) to read erotica.
How exactly you target those audiences without accidentally hitting some kids escapes me. For that reason, I’m very dubious about advertising the Camptown Races bookoids on Facebook.
At any rate, if I can hire someone to relieve me of some of the social media marketing torture, that would free up time a) to have a life, of all the outrageous things; b) to write some more copy; c) to manage design and production; and d) to take care of business, which has been sliding.
FireFox lately has been given to strange catastrophic crashes, which can on occasion crash my computer. And of course we know Wyrd loves nothing more than to crash, preferably taking your entire system down with it.
Whenever the system crashes while any Office programs are up, every file you had open at the time reloads in two versions: whatever was saved at the time the system went down, and a “recovery” file that may or may not contain the most recent data you entered. My system is set to auto-save every five minutes, so not much data is lost. However, if you have, say, seven files open on Wyrd (not unreasonable around here: I often move from file to file), you have to compare FOURTEEN files line by line to see what was lost and what can be saved. If the auto-save has more recent data, then you have to close the file you were working in and save the auto-save over it with the new filename. But sometimes this process causes the system to “forget” where the original file resides, so you have to figure that out — my computer contains literally thousands of data files, and I’ll tellya…some days it ain’t easy to find where a recovered file is supposed to go.
Well, one of the recent crashes took down the Excel file I’d built to transmit data to WonderAccountant, after QuickBooks converted itself into something I simply cannot use. Even she has a time with it — and she takes courses in Quickbooks!
So, after I realized I had neither the time nor the inclination to learn the entire new program that QuickBooks has mounted, I went back to recording credits and debits in Excel spreadsheets. This workbook I posted on DropBox for WonderAccountant’s delectation — she does my bookkeeping, and really, if the spreadsheet is set up correctly, all she should have to do is upload to the correct account.
Last night I discovered that during a recent crash, data was lost from this Excel workbook.
But SOME data was saved in another iteration of it, which resided in another directory on my terminal.
Recovering the data entailed opening both workbooks and comparing each spreadsheet, line by line by infuckingTERminable line, to determine a) which was most current and b) how to consolidate the data in one file.
And needless to say, this entailed not one but several fuckups. By 9 p.m. I was tearing my hair out by the roots! It took over four hours of this hateful process to straighten it out!
And that, my children, is why the old lady is coming to hate computers.
Really. It was so much easier when you just noted debits and credits in a real, paper book of blank spreadsheets.
And it’s why I need to find somebody else to mount and manage the marketing campaign. At this point, when I get up in the morning and think about having to wrestle with the computers again, I just cringe.
No wonder my stomach hurts!
Whenever I finish diddling away time with the hobby blog, then, I need to take the dogs for a walk; then bring them back here and go back out for another 2.6-mile tour by myself. That gets in about 3.6 miles a day (assuming I get time in a day for these hijinks), which helps a lot with the stress and is helping to bring the weight back down.
But yes…”get time in the day…” As dawn cracked, the phone rang: pool guy. He wants to come over between ten and noon to fix the leak in the pump. Let us hope Gerardo is right, that the leak is just from a gasket. Thanks to Gerardo, the guy is going to have a challenge trying to upsell me to a new pump, which will set me back a couple thousand bucks. Not looking forward to that exchange…
Anyway, carving that chunk out of my morning means no doggy & human walks: it’s already after 9:00 a.m. Walking a mile with the dogs, who have to sniff every blade of grass and lunge at every passing dog or cat, takes a half an hour. And the 2.6-mile junket requires 45 minutes.
It was very cold this morning — by Arizona standards — and so at 6:00 a.m. I decided to wait until it warmed up. It usually takes this pool guy days to respond to a phone call, so I figured I’d have today to myself. Not so… Now we’ll have to wait until after the guy gets here and lightens my pocketbook some more before we can go out. By then I’ll be fully engaged in something else.
The roommate left before dawn to fly to New York for an audition. She’s an opera singer. So the dogs and I have the Funny Farm to ourselves for a day. That means there are quite a few things I need to do by way of cleaning up the place and making it more livable for her. Those could easily fill up the day.
Roommate: I haven’t written about the roommate because she hadn’t announced to all and sundry that she’s leaving her several jobs in town. She’s one of the paid professional singers with the choir, a very lovely mezzosoprano who sings alto in our rowdy crowd. She also teaches at the Great Desert University and is enrolled in her second master’s degree program out there. Well, her husband got a job in the Bay Area, so she’s having to drop everything and move up there.
She didn’t want to walk away from the teaching job (some day she hopes to get an academic position, and so there’s a bridge she doesn’t want to burn), nor was she happy to leave the other contract gigs she has here in town. But they realized that, given the cost of housing in and around San Francisco, even on DH’s very substantial new salary, they couldn’t afford to maintain two dwellings even for a couple of months. So they sold their house here, rented a place in the City, and she is now couch-cruising to fill in the gap.
Actually, she’s got my guest bedroom, which is a lot better than a sofa. Except there’s no bed in there, so the poor thing is sleeping on one of those blow-up mattresses. All of which makes me feel mighty guilty for not having bothered to buy a bed for that room. It would involve hiring a moving man to move the impossibly heavy TV armoire, which is no longer used for TV but is full of linens & things, and that exceeds the hassle factor that I feel like dealing with. So does purchasing and installing a bed in there, come to think of it.
Anyway, it’s kind of nice to have a human being around. I mean, dogs are charming company and all, but…well, they are dogs. She’s not around much, because she has a hectic schedule that usually keeps her out from morning till late at night. Yet a few conversations have been had, and that is nice.
If it were possible to be sure you could find a person as quiet and considerate as this one, renting out a room would seem like a very good idea. It would provide some company and obviate the need to actually work. But I’m pretty certain this one is rare as diamonds.
So overjoyed were these plants at actually getting enough water for a change — for the first time in years — and actually getting water all over them, that last January one of them burst forth with a single blossom:
Neither of the vines has made another one yet, but they’re getting ready to. And both are covered with more leaves than they’ve had in as long as I can remember.
