Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

The Writer’s Dinner

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I did it to myself. I’m crankin’ away at the second installment of Bobbi and the Biker’s tale. He takes her to his favorite sh!t-stompin’ place, a country-western biker joint in a bad part of town. Tells her they have the best hamburgers in town. She thinks he’s putting her on, of course. But lacking anything better to eat, she orders a cheeseburger after they sit down to a big ole picnic table with his cronies.

Ketchup and mustard were passed up the table, and we dug into a classic American dinner like I hadn’t tasted since I was a little girl. Tender beefy flavor enriched with the nutty cream of melted Swiss and the tang of dill pickles and the sweet overtone of Heinz filled my mouth and I thought this was something I’d never get enough of. The fries were fat and hot, crisp on the outside and floury tender on the inside.

“Satisfactory?” BillyBob asked.

“Oh, my god!” I said when I could speak.

He smiled and bit into his own burger.

{chortle!} Well, by the time I finished this delectable passage, I was craving a hamburger — a real one — so bad I could hardly sit still.

Anyone remember real hamburgers? The ones that had real meat in them? Enough meat that when the short-order cook fixed it “rare” it actually came out rare? With tomatoes that had a flavor? And kosher dill pickles? And potatoes that looked and tasted like chunky slices of real Idahoes, not like long thin potato chips?

Dayum!

If you can remember that, I’ll bet you can remember real milkshakes, too.

Welp. By the time I finished the scene, nothing would do but what I had to have a real hamburger!

Needed to go to the grocery store, anyway, so it was off to the Safeway.

Back in the Day, Safeway and Smitty’s (defunct now, alas) used to sell beef round and chuck roasts for less th an they sold ground round and ground chuck. So I used to buy a roast and ask the butcher to grind it for me.

And the DIFFERENCE! Oh my. Fresh-ground hamburger was an entirely different critter from the stuff you bought off the counter in a styrofoam tray. That always mystified me…only because in those days we’d never heard of “pink slime.”

Ew.

Eventually Safeway got wise to that strategy and butchers would refuse to grind it for you. At that point I pretty much stopped buying hamburger. Even in my ignorance of the glories of pink slime, the cost seemed like just too much money for what it was.

Today, though money was no object. Such was my Art-induced craving for a real hamburger.

Also picked up some crumbled blue cheese (speaking of too goddamn much money for what it is…). Stuffed a patty of hamburger with some of it. Threw the meat and the potatoes on the grill…not quite the same as real French fries, but a helluva lot better than a bath in hydrogenated oil.

Tossed together a salad from one of those hydroponic heads of lettuce that tastes a lot like lettuce used to taste.

Incredible. You forget how good real food is.

Now. Let’s see what else we can do to get Bobbi to utter, “Oh, my god!”

Stuff Done, Stuff in Progress

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“In Progress”: I have no idea whether this post will go online or whether it will stick once it does. Beloved Web guru Jesse, now constrained (by a job, of all things, poor guy!) to the weekends to perform his magic for the clientele, worked into the night to move the blog empire to WestHost and reported, sometime after midnight, that he would be spending a fair amount of today in pursuit of the same goal.

So today’s idle post may be being scribbled while he’s roaming around the site doing whatever it is that Web Magicians do. Oh well. It all goes off into the Internet Ether anyway, I guess.

Yesterday’s frenzy, the one that produced NINE major jobs all of which occupied Slot #1 on the priority list, did eventually produce a little forward progress. To wit:

1. I studied the Calibre user manual and thought holy shit! Decided to go through KDP for most of the Magnum Opuses, with the possible exception of the diet/cookbook. The cookbook has a relatively complex layout. Friedman’s user manual for the Word templates I purchased claims that if styles are used assiduously, even something with lists and tables should transfer into the enormously arcane Calibre software. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

If it doesn’t work, then I’ll have to hire my friend the e-book builder to prepare that one.

The smυt, though, is extremely simple and should fly through the process with no problem. I hope.

1. And I studied Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing tool. It looks extremely simple.

Okay, we do know looks can be deceiving, and that where things digital are concerned, 99.998% of the time looks are deceiving. But at least I have an idea of what I’m supposed to do.

1. Tina’s edits are now entered in the diet cookbook MS and some final layout polishing has been done. The thing should be ready to convert to PDFs today. The e-book conversion is more problematic; see above.

1. I realized the PoD version of the cookbook could and probably should be coil-bound, since those who don’t buy its e-book incarnation probably have in mind opening it out on the drainboard so they can follow recipes while cooking. Coil-bound cookbooks work better for that purpose than perfect-pound, because they lay flat. This is good, because it  will be much simpler to convey the cover to the Snowflake Press. So the cookbook and the PDFs for Slave Labor go over to the printer today.

1. Though I did not start a month’s subscription and start downloading cover images, I did go through all my notes (with URLs for the images already spotted) and transfer the relevant data into a spreadsheet. This little ledger will show where stock art was acquired, the vendors’ stock number for each piece, when it was acquired, what work it was used for, and when it was published. Today if I have time, I will start the subscription and begin the downloads, a chore that will take some hours.

1. Though I did not create a second mock-up cover in PowerPoint (I’ve done that in the past and see that it seems to work, but whether it gets past Kindle and Nook’s gatekeepers remains to be seen), I did ascertain that a color image converted to a JPG by PowerPoint does convert in RGB, thank God. So, if the guy who says he makes his covers with stock art in PP is right, creating covers for the p0rn will be down-and-dirty easy, since nothing very artistic is required for those.

1. And finally, I managed to add a few words to the current Bobbi and the Biker bookoid, in which BillyBob finally calls Bobbi (whose lust for his magnificent body can best be described as “overheated”) and invites her to go line dancing at his favorite country-Western sh!t-stompin’ bar. This should be interesting…

 Today I’d like to start with a sample chapter a prospective contributor sent over. Looking forward to reading that more closely — took a brief look at it yesterday but became swamped with yesterday’s frolics, which occupied almost every living breathing moment until about 9:00 p.m., when I crapped out. So probably that will be priority number one, after a bunch of Life Maintenance chores:

1. DONE Feed dogs

2. Check pool chemicals, restore balance; clean pump pot; backwash if necessary; shock-treat if necessary.

3. DONE Pour vast quantities of Bayer Tree & Shrub evil chemical around the paloverde and climbing roses in attempt to damage and kill off as many evil paloverde borers as possible.

The “beneficial nematodes” that I bought from Arbico last fall and this spring seem to have helped some, but another dozen of the monsters emerged from the ground, meaning hundreds if not thousands of root-eating grubs reside under the surface, where they’re working at killing the magnificent paloverde that shelters the west side of my house from the blast-furnace afternoon sun. Seeing their exit holes (which go about 18 inches underground), I got the idea of pouring borer-specific insecticide directly down those holes, on the following theories:

a) the fertilized females often return to their hole to lay their eggs…laying the things in a bug-killer infested hole can’t do the babes much good; and

b) applied in this way, the liquid will go directly down to the level where the damn grubs are chewing on my tree’s roots and presumably, by capillary action, soak into the soil where the little horrors reside.

4. UNDER WAY Wash and dry the bathroom rug and the puppy-dirt-collecting rug by the side door. Clean the dirt out of the washer and utility sink (a larger job than it appears, involving use of a shop vac and repeated running of the endlessly annoying washer’s “rinse” cycle.)

5. DONE. Find a place to store stacks of notecards indexing research for Boob Book. Get that stuff off the family room desk so the desk can be dusted!

6. Read contributor’s creative work; respond in something that resembles a coherent manner.

7. Upload Slave Labor to Snowflake Press.

8. UNDER WAY Write back cover copy for print version of diet/cookbook.

9. Upload diet/cookbook to Snowflake Press.

10. Continue writing the latest installment of Bobbi & the Biker.

11. Get to the 36 unread emails on the server.

12. Write job description for proposed intern, in connection with internship/apprenticeship initiative planned by members of Scottsdale Business Association.

How exactly I’m supposed to explain to some college internship coordinator that candidates must be 18 years of age but preferably over 21 remains to be seen. Oh well. Tomorrow’s another day.

 

Happy Fourth of July! And…next?

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Welp, we’ve made it to another Independence Day without self-destructing. That’s something.

What are you doing for the holiday? Moi, I’ve been invited to a party at the home of some friends who live in a mid-town high-rise. Their place overlooks the Phoenix Country Club and the Steele Indian School, which host the two largest fireworks displays in the central part of the city. And from their balcony you also can see the large show at Tempe Town Lakes and several other smaller shindigs.

An old, halfway-long-lost friend who lives in that apartment building shows up at these evenings, so I’m looking forward to seeing her again. It promises to be a nice evening.

But between now and then:

Students have turned in their “extended definition” papers. In the world of people who recycle their high-school English essays, this means they’ve picked some exceptionally sappy and ill-focused topic such as “what is love” — apparently inflicted on them by  teachers following a required curriculum. The results would be painful to read even if they fit the assignment, which by and large they do not. So {sigh} we have to plod through 23 of those.

Then there’ll only be one more assignment — 2500 words of like drivel — and I’ll be DONE. Never to read another brain-banging freshman comp paper again! 😆

I sincerely hope, anyway.

I’ve started a second racy book — spectrophilia, Ouija board! This should be good. And last night while watching a couple of episodes of some TV show streaming through Kodi, poured another several Fire-Rider bookoids into Friedlander’s Word template. Now am up to book 13, leaving only another five to do. As soon as the cover images are delivered, I’ll be ready to post!

Almost: still have to write “Our Story So Far” blurbs for most of them. And get their ISBNs.

To re-jumpstart the entrepreneurial spirit, I’ve made a list of what I call “foot-draggers”: tasks that need to get done before I can make any headway but that I keep resisting because I know they’re going to be complicated as hell and require some sort of learning curve and I’m just effing learning-curved out. Videlicet:

1. Move Funny and other sites from Jesse’s server to WordPress.com
2. Upgrade WordPress.com service
3. Assign remaining ISBNs to books in progress
4. Buy 100 new ISBNs
5. Buy a month’s subscription to shutterstock. Make a list of general categories for future images and download the maximum allowed.
6. Organize these images on disk and in database by category & book title.
7. Read Friedlander’s template documentation carefully. Figure out how to do the Kindle conversion. Download a Kindle reader app to the laptop so layout can be checked before publication.
8. Learn how to publish epub versions on Barnes & Noble
9. Find the specs for Kindle and Nook covers; relearn how to do this in PowerPoint.
10. Upload diet book to Kindle.
11. Send Slave Labor to Snowfall press for PoD prep
12. Using PowerPoint and stock photo, make Biker Babe cover; create and edit Kindle version. Store to disk.
13. Develop new, more efficient record-keeping to keep track of ISBNs, titles, artwork, and freelances & subcontractors.
14. Develop task flow routine for publication of each book, w/ checklist.

So I figure if I do three of these a day, in less than a week I’ll be up and running.

Which sounds good until you recall that we have 23 student papers sitting on the server right now and another 23 incoming shortly. All told that comes to 58,250 mind-numbing words, the length of a short novel, to be read, commented upon, used as a teaching tool, and assessed. And most of them are high-school papers turned in because the students don’t feel called upon to bother to do the course’s assignments. With just a few exceptions, a total, unutterable waste of the instructor’s time.

But since the instructor’s time is worth less than minimum wage, I suppose no one accounts that as much of a loss…

If I start on the current raft of sea foam today, I won’t get to three of the tasks on the list above today. But if I put it off, it’ll drive me nuts, and whenever I run up against a tight deadline, invariably some student has to make a special case of him/herself and create a major problem. So the only question is, which day would I prefer to have wasted?

Miamifireworks

 

But it’s a dry heat…

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It was 120 here today. So they tell us. Cold snap is coming in, though: down to a chilly 105 by next Thursday. Brrr!

Rub_al_Khali_002

LOL! Can you believe I actually grew up in that place?

By comparison, this part of the world looks pretty lush…and trust me, 120 in Arizona is balmy compared to a summer day in the Rub’ al Khali.

SaguaroNatlMnmt

Images

Rub’ al Khali: Nepenthes. CC BY-SA 3.
Sonoran Desert National Monument. BLM. Public domain.

One of Those ARRRRGGGH!@#$%^ Days

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Have you ever noticed how everything always happens at once? Wonder why that is…

This has been one of those uphill-haul days, wherein every single damnfool thing you want to do has to be done the hard way, and you have a LOT of damnfool things to do.

That’s because you’ve left the damnfool things to do another day and, yes, this is another day.

I cruise back into town after this morning’s networking group meeting, having heard an excellent presentation and been the target of a rousing pep talk, after the meeting, by the presenter himself. I’m hot to get to work and full of ideas. But first…

But first, I  have to go by the electric supply house and pick up the lamp that was left to be rewired by way of repairing Ruby’s latest cord-eating depredation. It looks nice, and they charge me less than a quarter of what the last predator charged.

But…

Yeah. You get what you pay for. Twelve dollars and change does not enough wire to reach the outlet purchase.

The damn wire is about four inches too short.

I call. They agree to rewire it.

But this entails trying to get across Conduit of Blight Boulevard AGAIN. As you may recall, the city is building a ridiculous lightrail line up Conduit of Blight, making the entire corridor nonnavigable and rerouting rush-hour traffic through the middle of our neighborhood. You cannot get across Conduit of Blight at Main Drag South at all. So you have to drive up to Main Drag North, taking you way afield of the electric outfit, or else you have to drive two miles to the south and one mile back north  — three miles out of your way — to get around the construction horrors. Make that three miles x two, if you have any designs on coming home.

Either way, the environmentally chummy public works project converts a four-mile drive into a six-mile drive. One way.

I decide to drive up to the Depot and just buy a damn extension cord. There I pay almost nine bucks for a six-foot piece of overkill.

While I’m there, I return the hose connector that the very nice sales clerk told me was a set — male and female — and that was not. Whatever it was, it was not what I wanted. It was unusable.

I hate shopping in Home Depot. Hate it hate it hate it HATE. IT. Today there’s not a soul, not even an incompetent wretch who has no idea what she’s talking about, to help. I find the paint roller I need (only because past safaris have taken me into the Veldt of Paint) but have a bitch of a time finding the extension cords, which are nowhere near where two of the worthy employees pointed me.

When I get the eventually found extension cord home and discombulate its intricate packaging, I see it has a connection that would accommodate enough plugs to light a half-a-dozen Christmas trees.

Come ON, guys. This is for ONE freaking LIVING ROOM LAMP. And I have to tape it to the floor, the table, and the wall so as to keep Ruby from eating the lamp cord for the fourth time. A big honking clunky umpteen-plug connection does not lend itself to discretion. Or to transparent packing tape.

Two choices now: Take the lamp back to French Electric and wait another week to get it rewired again, or take the lamp cord back to HD and try to find one that works.

I believe the Depot does not have regular lamp-cord sized extensions, because two HD Dudes tried to help me find the same. We all failed.

Finally I decide to check the local TruValue and, if I can find a normal 1950s-style lamp cord with one count it (1) plug on the end, I will keep the short cord on the lamp and defer returning the ridiculous extension to a day when I’m in the vicinity of an HD for some other constructive reason.

Over to the TruValue. Yes, they have such a thing: four dollah.

Climbing into my car, it occurs to me that Home Depot is upselling by quite deliberately NOT STOCKING lamp-sized extension cords.

It is hot, and it is humid. By hot we’re talkin’ upwards of a hundred degrees.

As per usual, every moron in the county gets in front of me on the road. How the HELL do they KNOW when I’m out?

The last time Ruby ate the living-room lamp cord, I moved another lamp in there and used transparent packing tape to stick the cord to the inside of the table leg, the floor, and the wall between the lamp and the light plug. This a) worked and b) was very easy.

Not so today.

It may a) work, but it was b) incredibly NOT very easy. I ended up with broken fingernails from trying to peel the damn tape off of the damn roll and wads of stuck-together tape strewn all over the living room floor. By the time the job was done, my hair was yanked and my teeth were ground.

While I was at the electric supply store, we tried to remove the lamp shade. The finial was frozen on. None of us could get it loose. But we did succeed in ripping the fabric.

This lampshade was purchased back when I had a job and could afford nice things.

I get on Amazon to try to find something comparable. The cheapest selection: Seventy-five dollah!

Holy shit.

I take a more or less functional lampshade off another lamp (which now goes naked) and put it on the repaired lamp. It looks like what it is: a cheap piece of junk from Target.

Lurking at the back of consciousness: Pay the $1,588 Medigap premium! Find out how far in hock you are to AMEX! Figure out where the money to pay these extravagant bills will come from!

AMEX? Exactly $1,000 over budget. That is twice the amount I paid on the shoe extravaganza. We will have to wait for the itemized bill to arrive to figure out the other charges.

The Medigap premium, surprisingly considering the past year’s medical misadventures, is inflated by less than $100 over the 2014 gouge. And of course, it’s allowed for in the annual budget. But still. Fifteen hundred and eight-eight dollars is fucking painful.

Because I had a meeting halfway across the city at this morning’s crack of dawn, I have not cleaned the pool pump pot, which must be cleaned every morning because the fucking palm trees cannot be trimmed because DUCK has taken up residence in the tree trimmers’ direct line of fire. DUCK is absent this afternoon, it being afternoon and the time at which she forages. Does she not KNOW about the damned garden slugs that overrun the yard at night and that are turning the basil plant into a skeleton of itself? Why is she not doing her DUCK job out there? And where the Hell is she, anyway?

One of the eggs DUCK has hidden lies exposed. What part of “grackle” does DUCK not understand?

Avian concerns, however, do not form a major part of today’s Day from Hell qualities.

Web Guru’s bill needs to be paid. I try to get online to pay this quarter’s bill. His auto-collect software wants me to sign  in as…HIM!

Naturally.

I crash out of his auto-collect software and reboot. Now it tells me I owe an extra payment, which I happen to know I paid.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to cook my lunch, it being 3 o’clock in the afternoon and only slightly past lunchtime, by a mere three hours. Trusty Kitchen Timer is called into action to remind me when X or Y minutes have passed, so the grill will not carbonize the food.

Trusty Kitchen Timer is killed in action.

I try to revive her by replacing her battery.

No dice. TKT is deader than a doornail.

Why doornails are said to be dead is a question that has always plagued me, given that a) I do not know what a doornail is and b) I can’t imagine why anyone would impute either life or death to such an object.

So it goes.

The work I intended to get done was not, repeat, NOT done by 4 p.m., when I shook off the worst of this miasma. Instead of doing anything meaningful, I guess I’ll spend the rest of the day formatting another Fire-Rider episode.

And so…into the fog.

 

 

 

Lost Mockingbird Chick

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Yesterday afternoon Ruby the Corgi Pup shot across the side yard and GRABBED something! O doggie joy!

It was a baby mockingbird, just starting to fledge but not big enough to fly yet. When I hollered, Ruby dropped the little chick.

At first it looked like her wing was broken, but in short order she had it back in place and was able to move it normally. Other than being terrorized, she seemed fine.

Ruby back in the house. Lock Ruby and Cassie indoors.

I figured the best thing to do was to leave Chick outside where she was sheltering in the shade and CHIRK-ing for her mother. Usually with wild things, it’s best to let nature take its course. Probably (I hoped) she could fly well enough to make her way back into a tree and from there to find her nest.

But no.

A couple of hours later, the mother bird was CHIRK-ing from the lime tree, trying to lure her babe back home. The babe was CHIRK-ing from the ground but making no effort to move.

Half an hour before closing time, I called Liberty Wildlife, a wildlife rescue group. Unfortunately they no longer come by to help save critters in predicaments — some years ago they rescued a hummingbird that flew into the house and decided the only exit was through a skylight (unopenable). But the recession threw them into a permanent tailspin, and they no longer have the resources to do that. The woman I spoke with referred me to another woman, who referred me to another woman.

While these worthies were on the phone, I asked them about the care and feeding of DUCK and her progeny. All three said that baby ducks routinely drown in swimming pools, because they can’t make it from the surface of the water over the coping to the ground. The third woman, who eventually took Chick, said I should gather up the eggs and bring them to her, and she would put them in an incubator.

Welp. In the first place, it’s against the law to mess with a wild mallard’s nest. In the second place, I don’t want to mess with DUCK’s nest. And in the third place, the third woman I spoke with sounded…well, kind of nutty.

And yea verily, when I arrived at her house with CHICK, she proved to be…well, kind of nutty. Their house, in a down-at-the-heels “arty” section of North Phoenix, had been transformed into a kind of aviary and wild-mammal kennel. When I say “nutty” here, I mean seriously nutty.

However, the strange woman quickly made it obvious that she was very knowledgeable about wild birds. And in fact, she proved to be a kind of Mockingbird Whisperer. As soon as she picked up the terrorized little bird and stroked it under its birdie chin, it relaxed, closed its eyes, and looked as if it would purr if only it could figure out how.

One glance at Chick and she exclaimed, “Oh, you have pox on your eyes!” When I asked what that meant, she pointed out the wart-like growths over the bird’s upper eyelids. Hm.

Soon as I got home, I called up the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest. And indeed, avian pox or a bacterial infection with similar symptoms was probably what ailed Chick. Pox can infect a bird’s throat and innards. So it’s possible that the little bird was on the ground because it was sick and was going to die anyway.

{sigh}

The eccentric bird rescuer said she would dose Chick with antibiotics, and maybe the bird would recover. She said she’d raised many mockingbirds.

By the time I got home, the mother mockingbird was gone.

Meanwhile, we have the problem of the drownable ducklings. More to come on that, after I figure out what to do about it…