Idle essays

That was interesting: I almost died last night. Went out with a friend to dinner and a concert, and at the restaurant swallowed a piece of corn wrong (it was embedded in cornbread) and choked. As in completely choked: no air was getting through at all.

She tried to do the Heimlich maneuver, but she wasn’t practiced at it and quickly realized it wasn’t working. So she called for help. Luckily, a strapping young woman at a nearby table did have some experience with the maneuver. She got up and took over, and after some effort managed to dislodge the food from my windpipe. About in the nick of time: I was on the verge of passing out.

It was very weird. When it became clear that my friend’s efforts were not going get the stuff out of my throat, I decided this was it: I was going to die.

And it just didn’t seem like that big a deal. I didn’t feel panicked, I didn’t feel scared, I didn’t feel desperate. The thought that entered my mind as I was about to lose consciousness was “So this is what it’s like to die.”

After I failed to die, everyone went on about their business. We all sat back down to dinner. I didn’t feel like eating (mostly because my throat hurt), but everyone else finished their meals.

And we went to a spectacular performance of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil by the combined Phoenix and Kansas City Chorales. The effect was quite noumenal, under the circumstances.

Today I’m none the worse for wear, except for a bruised or possibly fractured rib. Am supposed to go in to the doctor next week for a check-up. Just in case.

Haven’t had a chance to post here because every minute that hasn’t been occupied with work has been occupied with dead exhaustion.

A difficult Chinglish scholarly paper arrived early in the week. That took two full days (by full, we mean something like 12 hours) to plow through. Then, an amazing development:

Another pair of clients had interested the University of New Mexico Press in a (wonderful!) anthology they’ve been working on for the past year or two. UNM had said to send it along — actually, I thought they had a contract, but apparently not — and they were just ready to finish the introduction (the last piece) when they got an e-mail saying the press had decided they had too many collections in their backlist and so…good luck with that!

Well, as you can imagine, they were dismayed.

Within the hour, though, along comes another message, this one from University of California Press. UC Press wants to see it!

This is exceptionally good news: UC Press is a top-tier academic publisher, which UNM Press is not. I’ve felt from the outset that the book should have been sent to UC — it’s that good — and I’d put money on it that the press will grab the thing. So we’re looking at a cloud with a solid gold 24-carat lining. If UC picks the book up, it will make both co-editors’ careers. One of them will soon go up for full; with a publication like that, she can’t lose.

At any rate, they’d like to be ready to send the thing off by Monday morning, and the intro is far from ready to go. They’d spent a week or two banging it out, but by Tuesday it was still a little on the draftig side. So it took a couple of days to plow through that and make some recommends.

Wednesday a new pool guy showed up, me having grown royally tired of Leslie’s. The filter needed to be taken apart and cleaned.

Apparently it’s is a more difficult job than it appears to be…this is the second fly-by-night pool guy who screwed it up. He puts it back together, turns it on, and lo! It’s still running at 20 psi.

I say, lookit, that thing is suppose to run at 10 psi. Twenty psi is way, way too high…as in “shut it down!”

He says no it’s not…as a pool gets older it runs at a higher psi.

Well, this is clear and present bullshit, and I figure he knows it as well as I do. It is true that the water’s running through pretty briskly (normally at 20 psi it barely moves), but it still should NOT run at 20 psi.

The guy has dumped DE directly into the skimmer inlet without running it through the skimmer basket. You’re supposed to put the skimmer basket in and let it kind of sieve the DE. Otherwise the powder can clump up and clog the filter, which is probably exactly what happened.

So now that thing needs to be taken apart  again and cleaned again and another $100 service charge will be incurred. I am pissed.

But I’m still not calling Leslie’s. Yesterday I found a functioning number for Swimming Pool Service and Repair, so I’m calling them in another couple of hours, whenever business hours resume.

The guy also told me that not only is it illegal to replace a single-cycle pump with a  new single-cycle pump, it’s illegal for a pool service to fix a single-cycle pump. He claimed Leslie’s was liable for a $500 fine because their kid replaced the capacitor.

I think that’s highly unlikely, because Leslie’s has fixed that pump before in recent months. And it just doesn’t seem likely that they could pass some law that says you cannot repair something that you already own. Really: that would be unacceptable in the bluest of blue states…and Arizona is not a place that could be called, by any stretch of the imagination, “progressive.” I simply do not believe the wackos in the state legislature, most of whom are climate change deniers, would even think of passing any such energy-saving legislation, no matter how much the swimming-pool lobby paid them under the table.

But that notwithstanding, by yesterday I had to run some errands. Because I refuse to let the community college district have my bank routing and account numbers after they gave all that information and then some some (make that “and then LOTS MORE”) to hackers, now I have to physically deliver my hard-copy paychecks to the credit union. That entails a long drive and so I save up tasks that can be done vaguely on that side of town.

So after the morning junket to Scottsdale, I had to come back here, let the puppy out to pee, lock her back up, and head on out to the westside. Credit union, Lowe’s, gasoline at the Costco in that direction.

Traffic has become just fierce in this part of town. Don’t know why. After the white middle class moved to the suburbs, the streets in the central part of the city actually quieted down significantly. For years, it’s been like driving around in a small town (albeit a small town with a meth habit). But recently, the streets have been jammed!

I guess it’s a good sign: presumably it means commerce is humming along again, at long last, and people have jobs to go to. During the recession, traffic fell way, way off all over the city, because nobody could afford to shop and nobody had work to commute to. That no longer seems to be the case. The roads are packed all day long, and as usual, about a third of one’s fellow drivers are homicidal maniacs.

So it seemed to take for-freaking-EVER to get through those three small errands. About two or two-and-a-half hours to get accomplish three minor chores.

Got about three hours’ worth of sleep between 10:30 p.m. Wednesday and 5:30 a.m. Thursday. So decided to go back to bed for a little siesta along about 2:00 p.m.

Put the pup in her crate, climbed over the barricade I put across the closet door to keep her from consuming my shoes, hung up some clothes, stepped back out toward the bed…and fell over the damn barricade contraption.

Thumped down on the tile floor, got my leg tangled in the contraption, thought I’d fractured an ankle.

{sigh}

Scooted over to the nightstand so as to pick up the walkaround phone and call 911.

No phone.

{sigh}

So started to drag myself across the floor and up the hall to try to find a phone in the living room that I could knock onto the floor and of course scooted…right into another puddle of dog pee!!!!

Jeez. This puppy is now three months old and shows no sign of ever becoming house-trained. She’s OK with No. 2, but the stealth peeing continues apace. I’m pretty sure she knows she’s supposed to go out. She just won’t. So much easier to sneak around a corner and deposit a puddle indoors.

One nice thing about being dunked in dog pee is that it shakes you up enough so you get past your ankle hurting.

So I called the vet to see if they would test her for a urinary tract infection, which is common among corgis. Even corgi pups. They want to stick a needle in her bladder to extract urine. That sounds gawdawful. There’s no way I can catch her to shove a pie tin under her little butt (can you imagine that trick? 😀 ), so some such procedure would be required. But I very much doubt that’s the issue: she shows no other symptoms of a UTI. This sounds like yet another expensive vet bill for naught.

Opinion at the corgi board is mixed. Some think she should be tested. Others say she’s way too young to house-train — that puppies are not ready for house-training before three or four months.

Since I house-trained a golden retriever in two days at the age of nine weeks, I rather doubt that.

At any rate, she’s 13 weeks old, which is three months.

Others on this board describe having corgi puppies that were not trained until they were six or seven months old!!!

That is insane.

These folks say she needs to be kept locked up or on a leash at all times, until she’s old enough (by their lights) to get the idea. They say she should literally never be out of the human’s sight, except when she’s locked in her crate at night or when the human is out shopping.

{sigh}

I will say that for the first six or eight months (longer?) of the Anna the German Shepherd’s life, I had her tied to the kitchen doorknob or to me by a leash. But that wasn’t because of house-training issues. It was because she was so incredibly destructive. This was a dog that ate an arm off a brand-new leather chair. She chewed the leg off a piece of furniture. She tried to chew up the kitchen cabinetry. This puppy is not destructive. Yet.

Right now Cassie and Pup are having a huge wrestling match. Very silly!

So anyway, as usual, I haven’t managed to break free time to do the things I want to do. The current chapter of the current novel remains unfinished. The negotiations over the cover for the adjunct rant are at a standstill. The cover for the novel that’s ready to publish is still unfinished. The cover designer can’t spell my name(!). I haven’t had time to establish blogsites for the three upcoming books, or to do any of the several things remaining to do to get those ready for “publication.” If that’s what mounting these things on Amazon can be called.

Must say I was a little dismayed when Crystal of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff reported, in her latest newsletter, a vast $55 revenue for last month’s sales of her How I Make Money Blogging e-book.

Uh huh. At that rate, the so-called “magic number” of eight published e-books, which I hope to hit by the end of 2015, would fall far, far short of the net ten grand I need to earn on these things. Eight books pulling in $55 a month would gross a grandiose $5,280 a year. And that just doesn’t make it.

Welp, speaking of making money, it’s already 7:15 and I haven’t billed the Chinese client, haven’t figured out what part of the various paying projects to start on next, haven’t even looked at the magazine-writing course’s site (at least one set of papers was due by today)… And so, to work.

 

Holy sh!t. Did you see Crystal’s answers to the 99 questions meme? It is completely, totally, incredibly off the wall. Just the idea that the owner of a Vast Blogging Empire would take time to write answers to 99 questions is in itself off the wall (that’s old-folks’ talk for “jumping the shark,” for you young pups). But the answers are just freaking hilarious.

Let’s see what ensues when an Old Bat tries to answer the questions.

1. Do you sleep with your closet doors open or closed?
Open. It’s too much work to get up and close the door. However, I do have a puppy  barricade strung between the doorjambs, since one of us has taken eating shoes.

2. Do you take the shampoos and conditioner bottles from hotel?
Hotel? You can afford to stay in hotels? Well, I suppose I would, but that’s probably not the sort of dive I’d stay in.

3. Do you sleep with your sheets tucked in or out?
In. Cassie the Corgi sleeps on my feet, so I can’t kick around enough to yank them out.

4. Have you ever stolen a street sign before?
No. Why?

5. Do you like to use post-it notes?
I could not remember my name if I didn’t have a Post-It stuck on the computer to remind me.

6. Do you cut out coupons but then never use them?
I have neither the energy nor the time to devote to couponing. Which is another way of saying I never get around to cutting out coupons. Wouldn’t that require you to subscribe to a local paper? I refuse to pay for that useless rag.

7. Would you rather be attacked by a big bear or a swarm of a bees?
Bear, any day. Got a nice .45 that will scare the poor little gal off. And bear bells. Lots of bear bells.

8. Do you have freckles?
We call those “age spots.”

9. Do you always smile for pictures?
No. I threaten photographers with murder if they try to snap my photo.

10. What is your biggest pet peeve?
Adjunct teaching.

11. Do you ever count your steps when you walk?
I have, actually. Then I realized how weird that was and so…well, stopped.

12. Have you ever peed in the woods?
Many, many times.

13. What about pooped in the woods?
Fewer times, but plenty of times.

14. Do you ever dance even if there’s no music playing?
Well sure. Doesn’t everyone?

15. Do you chew your pens and pencils?
No. Quit that at about the age of 12.

16. How many people have you slept with this week?
Do dogs count?

17. What size is your bed?
Queen

18. What is your Song of the week?
This stupid hymn whose title I don’t remember but whose tune I can NOT get out of my head!

19. Is it okay for guys to wear pink?
Absolutely. I love men who aren’t afraid to wear pink.

20. Do you still watch cartoons?
Not so much.

21. Whats your least favorite movie?
I quit watching movies when mega-violent became S.O.P.  Oh, but my LEAST fave? Love Story. It was so embarrassing. I was the only person in the theater who burst out laughing when the sappy actor enunciated, “Love is never having to say you’re sorry.” Har har har!

22. Where would you bury hidden treasure if you had some?
In the bank.

23. What do you drink with dinner?
Bourbon and water.

24. What do you dip a chicken nugget in?
Nothing. Who on earth would eat such a toxic thing?

25. What is your favorite food?
Prime ribeye steak.

26. What movies could you watch over and over and still love?
N/A, I’m afraid.

27.  Last person you kissed/kissed you?
SDXB

28.  Were you ever a boy/girl scout?
Not a chance.

29.  Would you ever strip or pose nude in a magazine?
Uhm…what magazine, and what’s the fee? Do I get royalties?

30.  When was the last time you wrote a letter to someone on paper?
Gosh. I can’t remember that far back.

31.  Can you change the oil on a car?
Probably. But there must be better things to do with the few moments of life left to us.

32.  Ever gotten a speeding ticket?
Who, me? 😉

33.  Ever ran out of gas?
I’m afraid so. Was driving my (then)-husband’s truck, whose gas gauge was set up exactly in reverse of my Camry’s. Setting out on the open road, I thought it said 3/4 full. It actually said 1/4 full. Oops!

34.  Favorite kind of sandwich?
I’m not nuts about sandwiches.

35.  Best thing to eat for breakfast?
Grilled steak, grilled potatoes, and grilled tomatoes, with coffee and a glass of champagne.

36.  What is your usual bedtime?
Ideally? Around 9 p.m. In reality? Around midnight.

37.  Are you lazy?
Hell, yeah.

38.  When you were a kid, what did you dress up as for Halloween?
Witch. So appropriate, as it developed. 😀

39.  What is your Chinese astrological sign?
Not knowing, I’d hesitate to state for fear of being erroneous.

40.  How many languages can you speak?
Four.

41.  Do you have any magazine subscriptions?
New York Review of Books.

42.  Which are better legos or lincoln logs?
Oh, Legos. No question of it.

43.  Are you stubborn?
Sometimes.

44.  Who is better…Leno or Letterman?
Letterman. Well. Letterman is kind of mean. If you prefer non-mean, then Leno.

45.  Ever watch soap operas?
Used to be an addict. Now watch Desperate Housewives, which is a variety of soap, on Netflix.

46.  Are you afraid of heights?
Not especially.

47.  Do you sing in the car?
All. The. Time.

48.  Do you sing in the shower?
Yesh.

49.  Do you dance in the car?
Say what?

50.  Ever used a gun?
Yup.

51.  Last time you got a portrait taken by a photographer?
About in 2000.

52.  Do you think musicals are cheesy?
Well, I kind of liked Jesus Christ, Superstar and Oh, Calcutta. Otherwise, it’s not my favorite genre.

53.  Is Christmas stressful?
Not anymore. It used to be sheer hell. Old age mellows one, though.

54.  Ever eat a pierogi?
What on earth is it?

55.  Favorite type of fruit pie?
yuch.

56.  Occupations you wanted to be when you were a kid?
Astrophysicist.

57.  Do you believe in ghosts?
Naaah.

58.  Ever have a Deja-vu feeling?
Only in childhood. My mother believed I was the reincarnation of her mother, because when I was very little I could “remember” things that only her mother knew. woooWOOOOOwooo!

59.  Take a vitamin daily?
Not on your life.

60.  Wear slippers?
Too much hassle. In winter I wear socks to bed and will schlep around the first thing in the morning wearing those.

61.  Wear a bath robe?
No.

62.  What do you wear to bed?
I don’t suppose we should discuss that. It could frighten the children.

63.  First concert?
Can’t remember back that far.

64.  Wal-Mart, Target or Kmart?
Target

65.  Nike or Adidas?
Danskos.

66.  Cheetos Or Fritos?
EeeeeeYUCK!!!!!!!!!

67.  Peanuts or Sunflower seeds?
Peanuts.

68.  Ever hear of the group Tres Bien?
Mais non. Dear lord…just think, someday this will be a golden oldie. Talk about your dystopic future…

69.  Ever take dance lessons?
Gawd help us, my mother once made me take ballroom dancing. She thought it might add a veneer of civilization. Didn’t work. Scared a bunch of pre-adolescent boys, though.

70.  Is there a profession you picture your future spouse doing?
Future spouse? What is that?

71.  Can you curl your tongue?
Yes. Why would I want to, though?

72.  Ever won a spelling bee?
Of course.

73.  Have you ever cried because you were so happy?
No.

74.  Own any record albums?
Are CDs the same as record albums? If so, a ton of them. All the vinyl is gone, though.

75.  Own a record player?
No longer.

76.  Regularly burn incense?
Ech!

77.  Ever been in love?
Off and on.

78.  Who would you like to see in concert?
Not knowing, I’d hesitate to state (etc.)

79.  What was the last concert you saw?
Phoenix Chorale (an Emmy-award-winning vocal ensemble)

80.  Hot tea or cold tea?
Six of one, half a dozen of t’other.

81.  Tea or coffee?
Coffee, coffee, coffee.

82.  Sugar or snickerdoodles?
Neither, thank you.

83.  Can you swim well?
Pretty damn well.

84.  Can you hold your breath without holding your nose?
Of course.

85.  Are you patient?
Depends on the context. Less and less, the older I get. Except in the medical sense…

86.  DJ or band, at a wedding?
String quartet.

87.  Ever won a contest?
Yes. Won a trip to Mt. Palomar when I was in junior high school.

88.  Ever have plastic surgery?
No. I’m not into unnecessary surgery, and have been fortunate enough never to have suffered a disfiguring injury.

89.  Which are better black or green olives?
Black.

90.  Can you knit or crochet?
Used to. Forgot how.

91.  Best room for a fireplace?
Bedroom. Or bathroom. Our choir director and his partner have a fireplace right next to the sybaritic bathtub. Dang!

92.  Do you want to get married?
Whatever for?

93.  If married, how long have you been married?
20 years, before achieving freedom.

94.  Who was your HS crush?
Alan, the track star.

95.  Do you cry and throw a fit until you get your own way?
No.

96.  Do you have kids?
If the person is 37, does he still qualify as a “kid”?

97.  Do you want kids?
Thank god I’m past that phase.

98.  Whats your favorite color?
Purple.

99.  Do you miss anyone right now?
Nope.

Don’t know if you ever read the obits in your local or national paper. If you don’t, you should. They contain some of the most interesting and significant reporting of our time.

Here’s one that you you need to know about. Every now and again a person comes into this world that all of us should thank. A person whose presence all of us should be grateful for. Col. Mize was one of them.

Know a veteran? Don’t just stand there. Thank him or her for the service.

So I’m cruising home from points north and west, passing through a meth-head–infested slum that borders the canal to the north of the ’hood. My face itches. Again. Couple weeks ago, the dermatologist remarked that this particular kind of annoying itch is often caused by an overgrowth of the yeasts cells that naturally inhabit your skin. Not the kind, he said, that infects women, but just the ordinary everyday flora of the face that for one reason or another get out of hand. An inexpensive solution, he added, is simply to wash your face with Head & Shoulders shampoo, the stuff people use for itchy dandruff, which is caused by the same little critters.

This is not the type of woo-woo eco-friendly organic stuff sold at places like Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. While it may be available at Costco, I feel no inclination to buy a lifetime supply when I have no idea whether it’ll work. Nor have I felt any urge to make a special trip to the Safeway or to the run-down Albertson’s nearby.

Went into a Walgreen’s on the way back into town from Scottsdale last week. But there was only one little guy at the checkout, all alone in the store from what anyone could tell. Ten or twelve people were standing in line; some nut at the front was arguing with the fellow. Give the kid an average of two minutes per customer to move people through: that would be a twenty-minute wait. At an optimistic one minute per customer, we were still looking at 10 minutes of standing in line. No thanks. I put the junk back and left.

Okay. So there’s the backstory.

On the way homeward through the slum, I pass a CVS, a joint I patronize on rare occasions. It’s clean and usually has some version of whatever you need. This day I need a) a L’Oréal mascara wand, the kind with the white undercoat on one end and the black stuff on the other end; b) a bottle of non-aerosol hair spray; and c) the proposed Head & Shoulders.

In the make-up department, they do carry L’Oréal, but they do not carry mascara in that brand. Ohhhkayyy…

Now I search the shampoo aisle for a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and I can’t find it.

Huh? What kind of drugstore doesn’t carry dandruff shampoo?

I find a stockboy and ask him where the Head & Shoulders is to be found. He directs me to — get this! — a locked case!

No joke. The dandruff shampoo is kept under lock and key in this store. When I make some remark like “you have gotta be kidding,” he says, “if we don’t lock it up, people steal it.” It crosses my mind to ask how it’s used in the manufacture of meth. But I restrain myself. Who knows? Maybe the locals drink it.

Welp, there’s no such thing as easy: Head & Shoulders now comes in all sorts of vanity versions, not just the anti-dandruff variety. Most of them are just ordinary shampoo with various kinds of conditioners and BS in them.

Foolishly (what was I thinking?) I say, “Which one has the active ingredient?”

Of course, the kid has no clue. He’s not the brightest rhinestone on the cowboy shirt, I’ll tellya that. He says he doesn’t know, but I could go up to the pharmacist — he kindly offers to accompany me, he being friendly as a puppy — and ask which one has it. I say I have other things to do with my time than wait in line at a pharmacy counter to ask what’s in a bottle of dandruff shampoo, and I suggest that reading the ingredients would be a faster way to figure this out.

This possibility has never occurred to the kid. Now he proposes to hand me one bottle at a time of each of about eight or ten variants, so I can study the contents. One at a time. Lest given free access to the shampoo safe I might make off with one, I suppose. Silently, I wonder how the lad ever learned to tie his shoelaces.

Oh well.

I leave without the mascara and without the shampoo, but do pick up the single bottle of spritz-type hairspray in the store. When I get this stuff home, I discover why it was sitting there, all by its lonesome: the squirt nozzle doesn’t work. Somebody else must have brought it back.

And now I’ll have to drive back up there sometime in the next few days and take it back myself.

I imagine this is what it’s like in any retail store that caters to poor folks. Sucks to be poor, doesn’t it?