Idle essays

Early this morning the dogs and I walked about a mile and a half through the neighborhood. And once again I was left thinking, This is not the kind of exercise that’s gonna take the flab off the belly. Wrestling a half-trained dog around a park and up a few sidewalks does not, alas, fill that bill.

We got back to the house early enough, however, that I realized that I could lock up the puppy, throw on a pair of boots, and head over to North Mountain Park for a short hike over at least some terrain that offers a little up- and downhill walking. It’s been a year since I’ve been on the mountain. It’s a time-sucking hassle to get over there, and so not something one readily does without the impetus of a companion who wants to make the hike, too.

Entered by way of one of the south-side entrances, having no intention of actually climbing either Shaw Butte or North Mountain. There’s plenty of rolling terrain that will serve to get you started before you try for a stroll on the highway to heaven.

On the south side of Shaw Butte there’s a low rise, a hill with a trail that takes you to the top of the mound and then, if you follow it further, up a pretty steep incline to the main trail on the butte’s backside.

What the hell, thought I, and proceeded up the rise.

Well. It’s not very far. And when you’re on top of that thing, you’re almost halfway up to the junction with the Shaw Butte trail. So naturally, I kept walking.

It’s a less than perfectly pleasant place to walk, especially when the weather’s nice. The park has become very crowded, largely with stupid people who haven’t got enough sense to keep their yaps shut as they’re hiking. Apparently they think everyone within a quarter-mile of them wants to hear about the intricacies of their office’s politics or their boyfriend’s behavior. Yakity yakity yakity yakity yak yak yak yak!

More kindly, I expect that most people don’t realize how far their voices carry across a desert landscape. In the county’s mountain  parks, you can hear people talking a half-mile away — especially women, but a tenor male voice will carry a long way, too. I find that annoying…but I suppose it’s because I’m the rara avis that happens to relish solitude. And I’d really rather hear the doves cooing, the quail hooting, and the thrasher calling than to hear a human’s voice babbling on.

Oh well.

Before long, I’d hit the main trail. Decided not to proceed to the mountaintop, figuring discretion was the better part, at least for today. The southside trail has two or three fairly steep sections — one of which I’d just traversed — and I’d just as soon not be crippled tomorrow. Considered following the main trail down to its starting point, but that would put me on the flat about a mile and a half from my car. To get back to the car, I’d have to walk along a main drag through a dangerous district: Meth Central, we might call it. Since that didn’t seem like the brightest of strategies, I turned back down the trail I’d come up and before long, voilà! arrived at the trailhead parking lot.

The other reason these trails are less than perfectly pleasant for hiking — besides the ubiquitous yakkers — is that all the trails in North Mountain are paved, at least in part, with loose scree. This debris turns into roller-bearing rocks when you’re walking downhill. It’s pretty dangerous: real ankle-twisting terrain.

It was 10:30 by the time I got home, soaked in sweat: half the morning was gone and now I had to bathe and wash my hair and wash my clothes, and that burned some more time. It’s now after one p.m. and so far I have not done a SINGLE ONE of the several things I really need to do today: read 25 pages of the client’s magnum opus, ride herd on the course that starts today, read and mark up notes for the Boob Book, or even write this silly little blog post.

And therein lies the problem: getting enough exercise by hiking, while it’s a quintessentially effective way to build health and shed flab, consumes a lot of time. It often doesn’t leave enough time in a given day for me to do the other tasks I need or want to do.

I guess I could take the attitude that dedicating a couple of hours a day to moderately strenuous hiking is something that I need to do, as much as I need to do paying work. For some reason, I find that difficult to do. Don’t know why.

So, yes, the Post of the Day is over here. I converted this morning’s Scottsdale Business Association presentation to a blog post. Turned out better than I expected. Longer, too.

Hm. That squib elicited a like from this WordPress blogger, a fellow named Anthony Vicino who writes an engaging book review. If he can emit fiction as entertaining as his reviewing, it surely must be worth checking out his books.

Otherwise quiet on the home front. Spectacularly beautiful day (sorry, you Easterners). Nice doggy walk. No bills in the mail. No burglars in the living room. What more (or less) could anyone want?

The other day Anne remarked that it must be possible to save even MORE dollahs than planned by not visiting a grocery store every week. Ah, but no, argued I: lettuce and other fresh veggies don’t last more than a week in these parts: surely refraining from a grocery visit was IMpossible.

But nay: score 1 for Anne, minus 1 for Funny. I wuz wrong. This morning there was no real reason to visit a grocery on the way home from lovely uptown Scottsdale. I did make a brief run on the gourmet market, but for a non-grocery item. Anne could be right: with careful planning, it may be possible to evade even an ordinary grocery store for ten-day to two-week stretches. Hot diggety!

In other fine news: I just got excused from jury duty, on the Mayo’s say-so. Thank you very much, WonderSurgeon and staff! The alternative was a 90-day extension, which might have been OK, but in fact I have no idea whether I’ll be able to wear a shirt for the entire day by then or not. So that’s good. I guess.

Students are quiescent. So far no one has bellyached (much) about the quizzes I substituted for the reading reviews. Very nice…and it sets me up to have to read a whole lot less drivel.

Meanwhile, a small mystery: in one section only a couple of classmates (of 22) elected to turn in the extra-credit rewrite of the first District-required essay. These things represent 50 extra points — 50% of the value of one of the required essays, a free give-away. Most of the other section returned edited versions of one variety or another. But this bunch: ?????  I have no idea why they didn’t take advantage of such an easy opportunity to rack up free points.

Oh well. That much less to have to read.

And it frees up this evening to work on drafting the Boob Book!

 Dolly: Funny
Talent Scout Dude: Future employer
Auditioners: Freshman comp students

😆

This does not compute. How could Spock die at 83, a mere thirteen years older than me, when I’m only 25?

We must be in some kind of time warp. It’s the only logical explanation.

{sob!} Spent yesterday evening watching old Star Trek episodes and movies on Netflix. And I must say…I wonder what I found so alluring in that stuff? Really, they were pretty clunky stuff. The ones with Jean-Luc Picard were more nuanced, a little better in the fiction department. Oh well. He was loved while he was with us.

While watching reruns, I learned to knit from some YouTube videos. Well…not the whole shebang, but only what’s needed to make knitted “buttons”: casting on and casting off.

Casting on means to build the original number of stitches on a knitting needle. It’s extremely easy — essentially, you use the needles to tie loose knots on one of the  needles.

Casting off means to get the finished product off the needles by sort of tying off the stitches, one at a time, so they form a neat ravel-proof edge. That chore is more difficult because it’s fussy and it’s easy to drop a stitch.

For my purposes, a dropped stitch was not the end of the world, but it sure would be frustrating if you spent hours and hours and hours making a sweater or some such.

Anyway, I got one of the button thingies made, and hallelujah! It looks like it’s going to work to make the Raggedy-Ann Cushions workable!

The R-AC’s, those of you who have been watching  may recall, were sent by Knitted Knockers to be used as fabric prosthetics — foobs, as we call them. They work pretty well, except that the person who made them pulled the yarn that was supposed to flatten the backside so tight that the things look like fat little cushions for dolls! 🙂

Being the offspring of an avid knitter, I realized that if you could make a pair of knitted buttons — which are nothing but a narrow strip of knitted yarn rolled into a circular shape and stitched tight — you could attach them over the indentations, and inside a bra the effect would then look like actual boobs, not like you had inverted nipples.

The effect is surprisingly good.

Here we have the hilarious before…

And here we have the more credible after…

I think that’s going to do the job. If the new pair Knitted Knockers said they’d send is any good, then I’ll have two pairs. I’m also going to learn how to knit these things, so I can give them to my friends and also possibly use them myself.

But interestingly, I’m finding I rather like being as flat as I was at the age of 10. It’s amazingly liberating! No hassles, no uncomfortable underclothing, no sags, no sticky sweatiness…. Jeez. Why didn’t I do this years ago?

So it remains to be seen whether I’ll use things and how much. Most of my clothes look just fine without blobs of flesh protruding from the chest. I’m not, after all, going to have to trudge out and buy a whole new boobless-friendly wardrobe — what’s in the closet will suffice for the nonce. Maybe a couple of things will look better with these foobs, but they’re not things I wear all the time. Still, it’ll be handy to have them.

And if learn to make them, it’s something to do in front of Netflix when I’m not grading papers, and they can be donated to women who feel that can’t be seen in public looking boyish.

😀

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!

Stupor Bowl Sunday opened with a rare meteorological fluke: FOG IN ARIZONA! We woke up to San Francisco in the desert.

Photos leave something to be desired…I’m afraid the camera’s on its last legs. Or whatever cameras have. Don’t know why the lens decided to create the sprinkler effect: no rain was in evidence, and the lens was dry. Oh well.

It actually wasn’t a San Francisco fog. In Arizona it’s more like tule fog, where a freak of temperature causes moisture in the ground (it’s been raining for two or three days) to rise into the air. Like tule fog, it was patchy — barely filmy in some places but thick as soup in others. Overall, though the effect was very lovely.

Cassie and Ruby are definite San Francisco dogs. We had time for a doggy walk this morning before I had to race off to choir. They were thrilled. Both dogs frisked right along, and Cassie did not, for a change, run out of steam.

Arizonans, unfortunately, cannot drive in fog. Amazingly, as we were crossing Feeder Street North, along came some moron with his lights off. If I hadn’t heard him coming and stopped at the curb, he would’ve hit us.

Ah, my fellow homicidal drivers… They can’t drive in fog. They can’t drive in rain. Snow? Don’t even think it! And heat drives them mad. As a practical matter, I suppose they can’t drive at all, really. Came across a brace of cops attending a fender-bender a mile from the house; more policia between there and the church.

So it goes.