Idle essays

By golly! Funny is once again hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance this weekend! The thing goes live on Monday, so be sure to send your submissions by about mid-day on Sunday — no later than 5 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, which is the same as 5 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Kind of a weird week here. Personally, I’ve been crippled up by the back/hip/whatever-the-heck-it-is enough that I haven’t felt like working or playing. It’s been hotter than a three-dollar cookstove outdoors, and with rain coming in for the so-called monsoon season, just freaking soggy. Couple of days ago, I washed my hair after getting out of the pool about 8:30 a.m….at 1:15 it was still damp!!! And it’s not even very long yet. At all.

Look at this charming thing I found on Etsy, at a shop called LizzyStuff:

How cool is that, I ask you?

It’s going to be the focal piece of an Anglican rosary that I intend to make and donate to this year’s silent auction for the choir. It’s a one-of-a-kind (as far as the shop owner knows) made-in-Mexico vintage piece. The plan is to create a Southwestern motif by selecting silver or copper, malachite or turquoise, and lapis for the thirty-three beads.

Actually, this project is the offspring of a massive Fail, possibly one engineered by a bemused God Herself.

With three pieces already in the can, I decided to combine piles and piles of seed beads ( 🙄 for which I had never been able to find any use…) into a long rope that a woman could wrap around her neck a few times or simply allow to hang long and loose.

It took for-freaking-ever to make this stupid thing. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the design to get it just right, combining vast numbers of green, red, gold-tone, and silver seed beads with units of pearls, red seed beads, and tiny silver spacers to create just the right “rhythm.”

Along about halfway through this endless project, it dawned on me that I didn’t know how to connect the thing into a single uninterrupted strand without putting in an ugly crimp bead. And worse, the small silver beads would NOT let me run the wire back through them to secure the connection, crimp or no. All through the mind-numbing process of arranging 44 inches of these things just. exactly. so, I contemplated this conundrum. And finally it occurred to me:

Why not string the things on heavy thread, rather than wire? Then instead of having to crimp the ends together, all that would be required would be a good knot.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? I suppose you can guess where this is going.

So I threaded the damn things on three long (long, long) strands of heavy nylon upholstery thread. And it worked! It looked great! Tied them off and felt mighty proud.

Well. Sorta.

Held this elaborate rope of shiny beads up to the light and realized…hm. The pattern of green and red and gold tubular beads looked exactly like a coral snake.

Yes. A colorful green and red and gold hyper-venomous serpent.

Now, realistically…how many women would think of that?

Indeed. One woman thought of it. Strikes me that suggests a fair number of women just might think of it.

In that case, of course they’ll all run to plunk down $80 or $100 bucks for the thing. Of course. Who wouldn’t?

Argh.

I set it down and went away, so as to look at it by the light of another day.

Comes a new dawn.

I go back and look at it again, and yup! Looks exactly like a coral snake.

Ohkayyyy….maybe it would look better in the wearing. I sling it around my neck and

PLING!!!!!

The knot gives way and a jillion little goddamn green and yellow and gold and silver beads FLY ALL OVER THE ROOM!!!!!!!

Bleyachhh! I give up. Toss the remainder down and go away.

At first it seemed best to just submit the several pieces I’d already made. But then, from out of nowhere, the idea of creating a rosary formed. I have no idea where that came from. I do not pray the rosary myself, and come to think of it, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an Anglican rosary, although I have seen one of our clergy wearing something that looked a great deal like a string of prayer beads.

So there it is. Did a little research and learned the RC rosary is pretty elaborate and comes in several flavors. My friend, fellow jewelry-maker, and partner in musical crime is going to bring over several of her own tomorrow when we junket out to Scottsdale, so I’ll be able to see what those look like and maybe get some good ideas. Then once a design is on paper, I’ll order up the beads or buy them from local purveyors, and from there it shouldn’t be long before the finished product is in hand.

The Southwestern motif, which came about purely by the serendipity of an Etsy search, is amazingly appropriate, not just because we’re here in Phoenix but because of what the church in question is and how it came about. One of its original founders, who was a practically inseparable friend of the church’s founding pastor, Paul Urbano, was Paul M. Roca, who was what we might call old Arizona. These two developed a passion for tracking down and exploring Jesuit missions in northern Mexico. Paul Roca acquired one of the early Toyota Land Rovers, a jeep-like affair capable of taking on all terrains, and the two of them made a habit of taking off for the wilds of Sonora and Chihuahua. Paul wrote several books on the subject, describing the churches and ruins they found as they tried to follow in the steps of the missionaries through southern Arizona and Mexico.

The two men as well as the church, founded in the heart of what was then the city’s most affluent district, were central to the development of Phoenix from its small-town Southwestern roots to one of the largest cities in the United States.

So. Southwestern rosary. What could be more perfect?

Images:

Hecho in Mexico crucifix, shamelessly ripped off the Internet.
Coral snake. Norman Benton. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

 

 

Stupid Reasons:

1. It’s only a little pasta.

2. I swam 50 laps yesterday. That’s almost a mile. Or so.

3. Don’t you think losing 1.7 pounds overnight is a bit much? Maybe we should put the brakes on this dieting phenomenon for a day or so.

4. On other days when I’ve fallen off the Diet Wagon, nothing has happened. In fact, after I ate the lamb souvlaki pita and the deliciously greasy French fries sprinkled liberally with feta cheese, the weight went down 1.2 pounds.

5. I can’t face another bowl of baked eggplant. 😛

6. It’s a hideous hot, cloudy, steamy day that’s so miserable the air is clammy even indoors where the AC is blasting away. This calls out for comfort food.

7. It would be a shame to let all those beautiful, sweet  Campari-type tomatoes go to waste. They call out to be made into comfort food.

8. I can’t face another plateful of cabbage salad. Or any other kind of salad.

9. It’s so hot in here that Cassie can barely bring herself to harass the Human with Ball. She needs a piece of limp spaghetti to cheer her up.

10. M’hijito has gone incommunicado and will not answer requests to help his crippled mom haul a year’s supply of pool chlorine tablets back to the house from Costco. This calls for comfort food.

11. The ongoing PITA hurts so much I can’t even contemplate dragging through a regular grocery store, to say nothing of limping almost to the back of a gigantic Costco. That also cries out for comfort food.

12. Harvey broke last night and today ran up a $70 repair bill.

13. That comes a day after the $100+ tab for cleaning out the DE filter, which in this ungodly heat must have damn near kilt the service dude.

14. An unplanned $170 in pool bills leaves too little money to buy a year’s worth of pool  tablets from Costco, anyway.

Real Reasons

15. On top of their usual round of headaches and the days of not knowing whether the house in Yarnell is still standing, La Maya and La Bethulia have both come down with a nasty bug. Other people’s misery should be acknowledged and honored with comfort food.

16. Half of beloved Yarnell has been reduced to piles of ashes. Many homeowners there were uninsured. It remains to be seen how much, if any, of the town will be rebuilt.

17. Nineteen fine young men were lost to the pile of ashes. In making the loss of half the town seem insignificant, this also makes the event infinitely worse.

18. No one seems to know when the residents there will be able to return to their property. Water and power are out; the water situation was described by a Yavapai County Sheriff’s deputy as “extremely bad,” and cleanup crews want to replace all the propane tanks, any one of which may be a continuing hazard.

19. The climate change some of our craven leaders would like to ignore and of which the current ten-year-long drought is just one manifestation pretty well guarantees that over the next few decades most of the West’s forestland will die off and burn away. Some of the most magnificent country on the planet is becoming unlivable.

20. It is way too late to do anything about this. Such things render the choice between spaghetti and cabbage salad irrelevant.

 

The entire state is stunned over what’s gone on in Yarnell. The loss of almost an entire crew of Western firefighting’s best and brightest leaves everyone floundering, struggling to comprehend.

Heavenly Gardens Community College has a firefighting program. Many of our students are at the college specifically because of that program, and so often some of the young people drawn there move through my classes. And one of my all-time favorites, a quiet guy who so loved the outdoors he could barely tolerate sitting inside a classroom but whose writing was superb, went off to fight fires in Wyoming. Checked the list of the deceased and didn’t see his name in it. Thank goodness.

No word today about the fire, whether it’s still consuming the town, or which parts of the town are still standing. The local papers are understandably preoccupied with the 19 deaths and all the activity around them. A British paper has printed some aerial photographs. It’s hard to correlate the mental map of Yarnell with the devastation seem from a helicopter, but if the image seen in the seventh photo in that series correlates with a Google or Mapquest version of the street map, what I think is La Maya & La Bethulia’s house looks unscathed.

Maybe.

Presumably it will be days or even weeks before people are allowed back in there.

Speaking of days, weeks, and profound doldrums, the Mayo finally called back with appointment dates and times for me to get still more X-rays and then meet with a rheumatologist out there. “Out there” is their Scottsdale clinic, which is halfway to Payson from my house.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect: today the excruciating pain acts like it would like to resolve itself. Pain scale is about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, down from 8 the day before yesterday and 6 yesterday. Today I can almost walk normally, and forcing myself to walk without a lurch hurts little more than the Frankenstein tromp. Apparently it’s calmed down to the point where the anti-spasmodic has a noticeable effect, which has not been the case for lo! these past two weeks. Heh…They’ve got me scheduled the middle of next month, by which time presumably no symptoms will be evident.

Cripes. What a grand medical system we have.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Young Dr. Kildare’s initial guess — pinched nerve, not muscle spasms — was probably correct, and his second, most recent guess — degenerative hip disease — is probably wrong. The pain is in the back, not in the hip. Give me a marker and I can draw a circle around it, just to the right of the tailbone. That is NOT hip pain. What we have is referred pain from a back problem.

Image: Yarnell Hill fire with firefighters. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

 DAY-UM!!!!!

Just as I was about to hit “Publish,” I knocked a glass over. It exploded all over the living room floor, shooting shrapnel under, over, and on top of the sofa. And half the other furniture, too. And splashing liquid all over the floor and under the sofa.

The floor needs to be cleaned. It was already covered with dog hair before Charley showed up for a four-day visit, and by the time M’hijito retrieved the retriever, the dog dunes were up to my ankles. But I’ve been putting it off because just limping up the hall hurts like the dickens — the last thing I’ve felt like doing is hauling a vacuum and a mop around.

So now I got to drag the coffee table aside and heave the eight-foot sofa across the room, scrub up water and the old dried-on coffee one of my charming clients spilled all over and under the sofa and vacuum up all that broken glass and as long as the damn vacuum cleaner was out go through the whole house and suck up pounds of dog hair.

Every push on that vacuum feels like someone is shoving a dagger into my hip. OW WOW  WOWWWWW!!!! God, but it hurts!

So…now the pain level is up from 4 to 8. Again.

So much stuff I thôt I wuz gonna get done to day… Guess not!

Hideous  news out of the rustic little plateau town of Yarnell, where we love to hang out. Nineteen Hotshot firefighters died in a brushfire trying to protect homes. They were dropped into an area near the fire but the wind shifted and blew them off-course, so they were surrounded by a wall of flames.

We’re told half the town has already burned: 250 homes. On Twitter, where the most immediate news is appearing, they’re saying the area called Glen Isla is burning. La Maya and La Bethulia’s place is in another section, so there’s still a little hope. But it looks like a pretty remote one.

It took a while to get ahold of them. Mercifully, they were both here in the Valley — at a movie, far from the lurid news. So it was good to know they’re OK.

Sort of. La Maya has been using the Yarnell house as a writing retreat this summer, spending the weeks up there working on a monograph that she needs to finish before she goes up for full professor. She has a lot of research materials stashed there, much of it from archives here and in Ohio. That will be a very serious loss, if their house burns. Hope she brought her laptop down here, at least.

The A-frame house they show going up in flames looks very much like one SDXB and I looked at some years ago. We decided against it, he being highly skeptical about the construction in the outlying counties, where building codes are most often honored in the breach. That was one of three houses up there that I’ve seriously thought I could live in. But the prospect of abandoning what little social life I have in the sixth-largest city in America to move to a small town was just a bit too daunting. And the prospect of taking care of two houses was too much to contemplate.

Thank goodness! I’m sooo glad I don’t own property up there.

Once a fire gets started in that chaparral up there, it can move extremely fast, especially at this time of year when everything is tinder-dry and winds can really whip around. The town is built right up into the chaparral, many of the houses nestled among the huge, picturesque boulders. Really, as I think about it, just about every house has trees and brush growing right up to the walls. There’s a tree in direct contact with La M & La B’s deck, and the house I coveted the last time we were up there had a large, flammable-looking tree towering over it. A fast fire in a fast wind would be almost impossible to stop.

So I’ve spent the past two or three days working on a prospectus for the adjunct teaching rant book and this morning sent it off to the acquisitions editor at the desired press. Soon we should be hearing peals of laughter from the direction of Maryland echoing merrily across the land.

LOL! I’ll be surprised if this guy goes for it. But strange things happen. Occasionally.

The project morphed into a fair amount of work. I reworked and added to the introduction; rewrote some of the Adjunctorium material and added a bunch of essays to the recycled posts, bringing the number of entries to 45. Planned additions and revisions to the afterword. Wrote a proposal, table of contents, and chapter outline, put them together with the spiffed-up introduction and a short-form CV, and made the introduction’s citation & documentation conform to Chicago 16’s author-date format. Converted this mound of paper into a PDF and shipped it off, under an e-cover letter.

This little chore has been a mighty distraction from the dieting and exercising enterprise.

But then along came another, much more onerous, distraction: more pain!

The back was feeling more or less better — sometimes down as low as a .25 on a scale of 10. But over the past several days the pain gauge has risen to a definite 7. Down the tailbone and into the hip: my god it hurts!

I can barely walk around the house — it feels, weirdly, like one leg is somehow longer than the other, creating a bizarre limp — and really shouldn’t be driving the car, because I’m having a hard time lifting my foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal.

Obviously, this brought a screeching halt to the weight-loss scheme. Actually, it was in hiatus, anyway: after 12½ pounds, I hit a plateau, so over the past four or five days haven’t been losing weight. But when the fat was burning away, what was working was 3½ miles of brisk walking and a half-mile of swimming. Right now just kicking my legs in the pool hurts.

That’s kaput. I can barely crawl from the back of the house to the kitchen, though I was able to bicycle the 3 1/2 miles this morning.

Had to bring the bike in the house so Gerardo could blower out the garage, and by the time all that was done there was no way I could roll the thing back out there. {sigh}

Decided to try a glass of wine, since alcohol often dulls the back pain. Naturally, this required a steak and potatoes, eh?

Naturally, the grill wouldn’t come on. So instead of roasting the potatoes and grilling the meat over the fire, I had to sauté them in butter. Very thinnening.

Didn’t work. Tasted good, though.

An hour or so ago, it dawned on me that since this pain is radically different from the usual aches and pains, maybe it is different. What if instead of a pinched nerve, it’s a real, actual muscle spasm?

Hm.

So I dropped one of the generic Flexerils that came my way when the Mayo guy speculated the back, hip, and foot pain were caused by some sort of chronic muscle spasm.

Stuff didn’t work on that, but in the hour or two since I took the thing this afternoon, the hip feels a little better. Not so’s I can walk around. But better.

Shit. This getting old business is for the birds.

Oh well. The question is, what will I do with this manuscript after the guy in Maryland rejects it?

Not, I expect, sink $1200 into graphic design and e-book conversion. A friend has recently started converting Word files to Kindle format. He’s only charging $250 or so, and he does a good job.

So I’ll need to decide whether to try another scholarly or mainline publisher or to just go ahead and peddle it myself on Amazon.

Don’t know. We’ll just have to see what kind of response it gets.

Image: Books. Johannes Jansson/Norden.org. Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Denmark license.