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Idle essays

A Much-belated, Rainy-day Roundup

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What a beautiful morning! A lovely, soft feminine rain has been falling all night and is still sprinkling down. Every plant that can be moved has been dragged out under the sky, and now Cassie and I are sitting around doing as little as possible.

When we turned out of the sack around 5:30 the patio was flooded — Richard the Landscaper was supposed to have surfaced by now to realign the grade out there, but nary a word has been heard from the old boy since he came by a couple weeks ago. Cassie hates water, and she certainly is not about to wade through a lake to get to the doggy loo.

Fortunately, the paloverde on the west side filters rain so it never floods out there. She managed to reach her favorite peeing grounds by the side door to the garage. But she still got wet, to her profound disgust.

I’ve had a sinus headache or migraine (not sure which) for the past three days. A soggy doggy and a chilly kitchen were not what I had in mind by way of greeting the day. So toweled the dog off, lifted her back onto her doggy blanket, and crawled back into the sack with her. She crapped right back out (do dogs do ANYTHING other than eat, chase balls, and sleep?) until 8:00. Her Majesty’s second awakening, though, was THE awakening, and so we had to stumble off to the kitchen to find food.

Hey, I came up with a potentially promising ad-hoc food combination. The other day Costco had some nice little Mexican mangos, actually ripe of all things. So of course I had to grab a lifetime supply of those. Wanted to eat one of them for breakfast, but in the cold and damp, also wanted something HOT. So the choices were refried polenta topped with fresh cut-up Campari tomato and some scallion and nuts, or a cut-up mango with nuts and maybe a daub of yogurt. Hm.

While studying these possibilities, the light dawned: why not combine the mango and the tomatoes, hold the onion, herbs, & salt, mix in a little sweet tarragon, and then brown some pecans with the frying polenta? And…oh, why not?…top it with some crumbled feta cheese.

Dang! Sometimes i amaze me.

This combination actually turned out to be quite tasty. The feta added a nice tang, and in fact I ended up adding a little crunchy sea salt, which to my surprise complemented the mango nicely. Next time I think I’d add some cumin.

You could wrap up the mango & tomato combination with, say, half an avocado (cut up) in a nice corn tortilla and end up with a lovely snack or healthful quick lunch.

Now that the day has started…it’s been a LONG time since Funny has run a round-up. They’re very time-consuming. Over the past few months it’s been all I can do to keep up with teaching, scribbling a few posts a week, editing, singing, and serving The Queen of the Universe…really, all of those have been in triage mode. And so, let’s look around and see what other folks have been up to.

Windy City Gal is back from her trip to Scotland! She’s a little under the weather, having been battling a respiratory bug for quite awhile, but nevertheless is working and riding and getting back into normal life.

At Thirty-Six Months, Marissa reflects on the need for freelancers to be discriminating about the clients and jobs they’ll take on. To that I can only add and how!

The Asian Pear has a very funny post on getting back into the online dating game. One of my friends actually started a blog where she intended to relate her hilarious adventures in the meat market, some of which were silly beyond belief. 😀 Hope TAP will keep us up to date with these adventures.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche has been coping with what she calls “the week of harrowing” and now (beat me some more!!) is considering adopting another pooch. Well, I can’t call that kettle black, what with the scheme to inflict a brand-new furniture-chewing, floor-pooping, ear-grabbing, dog food-poaching puppy  on the Queen of the Universe.

At Afford Anything, Paula hosts a guest post by a friend (apparently a real one: she even knows how tall he is), who provides a really interesting discussion about how he engineered real estate investments to produce a nice passive income…while he was still in his 20s. The caveat is that this guy appears to be smarter than the average snail, and that he evidently learned enough about the business to know what he was doing and to make some good decisions.

Miranda Marquit holds forth at Bargaineering on tax breaks that are about to go away at the end of this year. Some of them…I had NO idea! Better check it out.

Here’s a really cute and also very smart piece at Surviving and Thriving. Your mom or mother-in-law probably thinks your kids have too many expensive toys…but rarely do they model for you exactly what you can do to keep the tykes occupied in the absence of those shiny gadgets.

Streets Ahead Living is calculating how she’s going to get through the holidays successfully in her present state of penury, first by finding good buys and making gifts and then by raising some extra cash.

Along the same lines, Daisy Flower at Prairie Eco-Thrifter suggests some low-stress, high-sensible ways to deal with this year’s Christmas frenzy.

The Empress of the Blog Universe, Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, shares some wisdom with nine excellent, highly doable strategies for growing a blog.

Check out this canny post by Luke Landes at Consumerism Commentary: fast ones to watch out for on Black Friday. Very eye-opening!

Don’t Quit Your Day Job’s three proprietors have held forth on the question of stock market overvaluation longer than Funny held forth on the great dishwasher adventure. Start with the first post, which appeared on November 3, and move forward. I have to say, the supra-16,000 status makes me nervous…maybe it’s time to buy gold. Or bitcoins. Or…or Coleman lanterns and wind-up radios?

Speaking of 16,000, the PoP’s wonder if they made the right move in paying down debt instead of buying stock or more real estate. That’s the thing about this money stuff: there’s always a “GULP!” moment.

Mrs. Accountability brings up an interesting topic at Out of Debt Again when she asks whether insisting on controlling the money in a relationship amounts to a kind of abuse.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan wonders if readers can even imagine what it was like to live during the Great Depression. I sure can: my parents told me all about it. That’s why I neurotically believe you should never buy anything on time that you can’t pay for today.

Think the grass is greener on the other side of that fence? Mebbe not: NZ Muse and her new hubby are back in Auckland and searching for a place to live. The place makes San Francisco look like the land of bargains!

After 14 years, Money Beagle was finally forced to buy a new dishwasher. Amazing track record, I’d say!

Five-Cent Nickel has an insightful rumination on the apparently inflated value of the Dow at 16,000. Interesting point of view!

Free Money Finance is doing a series on people who earn six-figure incomes. The current interviewee offers an interesting suggestion: plan to change jobs every five to seven years.

At Frugal Confessions, Amanda and Paul are bracing for the effects of his layoff and putting their ducks in a row as fast as they can.

Frugal Scholar, with characteristic good sense, explains why she’s not buying a turkey this year.

At Grumpy Rumblings, nicoleandmaggie ruminate on the effects, psychological and other, of DH’s new job in the real world. When academics and self-employed folks land work in private industry, it feels like money is falling out of the sky!

Abigail is back at I Pick Up Pennies, which was briefly down, is back online.

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{grump!} I hit “publish” instead of “save” awhile back, so this thing probably went out on the wire, as it were, in half-baked form. Oh well. Now it’s off to paying work!

Loafifarious Morning

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It’s a quarter to 11, the morning pot of coffee has yet to be consumed (because it didn’t come into being until about 10:30), the morning walk has not been walked, I have done NOTHING, in 45 minutes Cassie and I are heading for La Maya’s house, and I am not even dressed. Okay, okay…I have an excuse for loafing: I read the magazine-writing students’ papers till 2:00 this morning.

But that was only because I spent the several usable hours of yesterday afternoon loafing.

Today I’ve got to backwash the pool (which in theory I could do right now…), read papers for the other course, shovel off the desk, finish the bookkeeping, figure out what happened to the tickets to the Bach Festival, and really…I should clean house.

The immediate cause for all this celebratory loafing is that I finally finished editing the esteemed Chinese graduate student’s dissertation. That was an experience! It actually turned out to be more difficult than I expected because, paradoxically, her English is better than many Chinese scholars’. As a result, the techno-statistico-psychobabble she was emitting by way of earning a Ph.D. from one of the most prestigious universities in Asia was deceptively understandable. Because I rarely had much trouble catching what she was trying to say, at irregular intervals various nonidiomatic turns of phrase would slip past me. Then when I went back for a second read, my jaw kept dropping.

OMG! Five biplanes just flew over in formation, wingtip to wingtip, their old reciprocating engines thundering away! What a hoot!!!!!

So I ended up foisting the edits onto my sidekick Tina to review, even though I’m taking graduate-student pay from the client and can’t afford to pay Tina a fair rate to read the stuff. She found still more stuff that I’d missed. So that took another couple of days and required me to go through the whole thing yet again, reading behind her. Finally shipped the thing off yesterday, feeling the effects of brain-fry.

There they go again. They must be flying over a Veteran’s Day parade.

Welp, in my opinion, watching guys fly around in old Sopwith Camels is a lot more fun than blogging. And so, away…

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HAPPY VETERAN’S DAY!

Ringiquette

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Soooo… Here’s a question for you:

Can an unmarried woman who has no male in the offing and all of whose friends know she has no male in the offing get away with wearing a ring on her left hand, especially if it doesn’t look at all like a wedding or engagement band?

The other day while fishing around in the jewelry drawer, I came across some silver rings I haven’t worn in years. Back in the day, I really loved them and wore them all the time.

For reasons that I chose not to appreciate, as the years wore on the rings wore…less and less. Eventually I couldn’t get them on, or worse, I couldn’t get them off. So they got put away and forgotten.

When they turned up last week, I remembered how much I used to enjoy those pieces and wondered…now that I’m thin again, is there any chance the things would fit?

Well. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters: they DO fit!!!

They fit freaking perfectly!

Couldn’t believe it.

So now I’m trotting around with one or the other on my maidenly right hand. But I’d love to be able to wear two of them, the way I used to wear two rings or sets of rings back when I was a corporate wife and society matron.

D’you suppose it would be too, too outré and tacky to wear one of these babes on the left and one on the right? As you know, I do have a countercultural streak. But I’d just as soon not cause one of the church ladies to faint dead away…

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Changes

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{sigh} Feeling a little better now.

RHDonating my beloved old Restoration Hardware easy chair and ottoman to my son’s cause made me feel weirdly sad. I mean, how stupid, huh? Feeling depressed over a 15-year-old CHAIR???????

The back and leg have been hurting so much I no longer can sit in most of the furniture in the house, certainly not for more than a few minutes at a time. The big, comfortable (…well, formerly comfortable) chair in the TV room presented several problems:

• The seat’s depth is longer than my thighs, so my feet don’t touch the floor. That’s never mattered, because the big ottoman turned the thing into a kind of chaise longue, perfect for parking in front of the television with a computer on your lap.

• It has such a nice big seat, and its soft overstuffed arms are at exactly the right height for curling up and falling asleep. And that’s exactly what happens, no matter how hard I try not to fall asleep in front of the mind-numbing television.

In either event — whether I sit there with feet up on the ottoman and a computer perched on my lap or whether I actually try to watch the television with the sound muted through the endless stupid advertising and end up falling asleep while waiting for the program to come back on, the result is agony. Just sitting in the chair long enough to watch a program or write a blog post causes leg and hip pain. But holy mackerel! Falling asleep in the damn thing invariably leaves me with such violent, awful sciatic cramps I can barely crawl down the hallway. A couple of times I’ve thought I wasn’t going to make it to the bedroom.

Ugh.

I dragged in a wooden chair from the back porch, made a cushion for it, and tried sitting in that.

It’s not too bad. Sitting in anything causes pain, but chairs that force one to sit up straight cause less pain. It’s apparently loafing, slouching, and curling up in a ball with your head on a chair arm that cause serious hurting. A smaller chair that allows the feet to rest on the ground helps, and also there’s no way anything larger than a cat could fall asleep in the thing.

The other chair in the TV room is a very pretty, very useless wicker rocking chair I got on a whim from Pier One. Like most Pier One furnishings, it looks good and feels…well…pretty awful. LOL! I have yet to find a comfortable piece of furniture at that place. So it’s a decorator item, not a chair.

LilyChairCopenhagen Imports sells a small, leather-covered swivel chair that I’ve always found extremely comfortable and that’s small enough to let my feet hit the ground. It’s about the same size and shape as the outdoor chair…just looks as though it were intended to be inside. If I put the laptop on a TV table, I can sit here for a half-hour or forty-five minutes without too much consequence. I imagine the softer seat will extend that time a little.

So I gave my beautiful easy chair to my son. And he wasn’t real happy about it. The thing has a (very faded, very tired) rose-patterned slip cover, which he hates. He thinks it’s unmanly.

To replace the slip covers will cost about $460 for the chair and another $250 for the ottoman, and that’s on the low end. He can’t afford that, so even though new slip covers probably would extend the chair’s life another 10 years (it’s otherwise in fine condition), it ain’t gonna get any restoration work.

So it made me sad to give it to him, because he didn’t much want it.

But what really made me feel sad was just having to get rid of it. Being forced to get rid of a beloved object because of a growing disability.

It feels like the first step toward the day when I’ll no longer be able to live in my home. That time is coming. Maybe not soon. But eventually it will get here. And then I’ll have to lose this place that I’ve come to love and that I really don’t want to empty out and leave. Certainly not to have to go into an old-folkerie.

Very, very sad, that echoey, empty room.

Well.

I got out the throw M’hijito gave me a Christmas or two ago. It happens to have the same colors as the cushion and pillows on the wicker rocker — reds with green and turquoise accents. For that reason I got the Copenhagen chair, which will be delivered next Wednesday, in a dark brown leather (it comes in a wild spectrum of colors): so it will match the coffee-colored wicker. The wooden yard chair is brown, too…so the throw kind of gives the idea of how this new throne is going to look.

Then, dog notwithstanding, I pulled an old area rug down from a closet shelf. It goes with the curtains and also picks up some of the colors in the pillows and throw. And of course it absorbs enough sound to bring a stop to the empty-cave echo effect.

And actually, it looks pretty nice.

So I suppose there’s no reason to be so forlorn about the stupid rose-covered chair. I just don’t like changes, is all.

Interestingly, as we get older we seem to like change less and less. It’s oddly disorienting…leaves you feeling at loose ends, in a funny way. Something that shifts your environment, when you’re an old bat, makes you feel out of sorts, unhappy, restless.

Why? I don’t think it’s because your marbles are starting to slip out your ears and bounce down the road.

No.

As your options, slowly and imperceptibly, grow fewer, a change represents something that you may never be able to undo and that very well may not be to your advantage. Or to your taste. Many things that are for the best are not necessarily to one’s taste.

By and large, I could do without them — changes.

Filling the Day: Good Stuff to Eat, College Classes, Universities

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So by the beginning of next week the mythology class — students and new instructor — should be caught up with the week and a half they missed when the full-time faculty member who usually teaches the course fell ill. Yesterday I spent the whole day reading their papers and their textbook. Then it was off to choir.

And at the crack of dawn, off to the east side for a meeting, and then a race to the campus to meet the class. Then back to the Funny Farm via Whole Paycheck, there to grab some tomatoes that allegedly have some flavor. Wanna make some gazpacho, something I’ve been craving for awhile.

Highly Dietetic Amazingly Delicious Gringo Gazpacho

You need…

a small red onion (about 3/4 cup chopped)
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
2½ cups diced tomatoes (peel if you feel fastidious — I don’t, though)
1½ cups finely chopped bell pepper
salt & pepper to taste
1 tsp paprika or chili pepper flakes
1 Tbs. chopped chives (or use a scallion)
1/3 cup olive oil
½ cup lemon juice
2 cups tomato juice
1/2 cup shredded, pared cucumber
about 1/8 cup chopped cilantro or parsley
1 Tbsp dry sherry (or a splash of white or red wine)

The original recipe calls for 2½ teaspoons of salt and ½ teaspoon of sugar. IMHO, there’s no need for sugar. And almost a tablespoon of salt(!) is a little much, especially since canned or bottled tomato juice has more salt than you need — just one cup of the fancy organic juice I bought this afternoon contains 16 percent of your RDA. So…hold the salt until the soup is concocted, and then add some to taste, if necessary.

Otherwise, it’s pretty self-evident: cut up the veggies, mix all the ingredients in a nice, large bowl, and chill for a couple of hours. Serve cold.

It looks like the college will officially get me hired on as the mythology course’s instructor along about next Monday. That would be good…so far because they don’t have me as the official instructor, I haven’t been able to get a Canvas shell or get into the District’s grade records. This weekend I’ll have to create an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of grades and attendance, since it’s beginning to look unclear whether I’ll ever be able to get into Canvas.

The class has 27 students, but it looks like a bunch of them have given up. Only about half that many showed up today. Pretty typical of a community college, where students often are trying to support themselves with full-time jobs or with two or three part-time jobs and may have to deal with children, too. When something has to go, the class is the easiest one to drop.

From the classroom it was over to the Honors Department with a kid who had only a few hours left before the deadline to get himself enrolled for honors credit. Then to the library, there to try to track down — with no luck — the videos mentioned in the syllabus. We figure the exiting instructor must own the videos. The humanities librarian unearthed some great links and clues to other videos, which I’ll also have to track down this weekend and then work into…well, I guess, a new syllabus, eventually.

The chair suggests we drop the two fairly lengthy papers called for in the syllabus, since it has classmates turning in an amazing seventeen short squibs. I’d like them to do some kind of sourced paper, though…for crying out loud, it is supposed to be a college course, after all. What seems reasonable is to drop the first one, which in theory is due in the next week or 10 days, and then turn the other one into a take-home final exam. That will make the course fairly simple to handle.

I was entertained to discover that said chair, who also is teaching a section of the mythology course (it must fill some requirement…), also is puzzled at the out-of-date textbook that promulgates its own myth, disguised as fact. He also is telling his students to take that stuff with a grain of salt.

The stoont papers are significantly easier to grade than freshman comp horrors, mostly because you have fewer characteristics to have to assess. Really, all I’m going here is checking to see if they did the assignment with some degree of competence.

The instructor seems to have the students doing presentations almost every day. It’s unclear whether she planned to lecture at all. If she did, she must have kept the lecture time mercifully brief. The class sessions are almost an hour and a half long, so it wouldn’t be wise to try to fill that much time with instructor yakking. Make them yak, instead. 😀

In other precincts, SDXB is headed to Colorado, there to rejoin New Girlfriend, who has a home in Boulder. Mercifully, NG’s place is out of the flood zone. He says that despite the unholy amount of rain, she hasn’t had any water damage.

The weather is cooling here after two days of steady rain in the low desert. I expect we’ll have one more blast of hot weather — selfishly I hope so, since the pool is already cooling to the point of being a bit chilly. That pool is what’s keeping me mobile these days. And no, I can’t afford to install a heater and I don’t want to install a big ugly rolling cover (something else for me to take care of!).

Our honored chair at the Heavenly Gardens Department of English is a graduate of Grand Canyon University. Since his time there, the place was purchased by a corporation whose business is building proprietary schools. Interestingly, GCU’s development officer has surfaced at the Scottsdale Business Association, and he’s a very interesting fellow.

Among several things that came up at today’s meeting was the observation that since Arizona State has raised its tuition beyond reason, Grand Canyon is now competitive with said third-rate public school, where students get beat up by fraternity brothers emulating gangs of thugs and every time you turn around you hear about another murder or rape out there. Engaged in a mammoth building campaign, Grand Canyon now can provide dormitory space for its students, and because it’s a religious school the administration actually rides herd on the students and tries to take some responsibility for their safety and behavior. Quaint, huh?

One of our members just sent her son off to the Great Desert University (which, if you haven’t figured it out, is my sobriquet for Arizona State). She said that between the tuition and the room & board, it’s costing twenty grand a year to put the kid in school at that zoo. He’s enrolled in the honors college, which has its own special, elite dormitory and classrooms, so those kids in effect go to a sequestered, semi-private school in the midst of the vast, chaotic campus, pretty much sheltered from the rowdy hoi polloi.

Given all the things that have happened at ASU over the past several years, from the apparently deliberate driving of faculty morale into the sub-sub-basement to the out-of-control student body, I’d be darned if I’d put a kid of mine out there, even if they cloistered him inside a concertina-wire fence. If he or she couldn’t get into a decent school like U.C. Berkeley, Michigan, or Stanford with scholarship funding, or if sending him out of state was financially impossible, I’d send the kid to the University of Arizona in Tucson or Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. Neither is what you’d call a great school (although the U of A has some highly ranked departments and colleges), but at least they’re relatively quiet.

And just now it’s getting pretty late at night, i yam totally done. Bye!