Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Life, Interrupted

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Ever have the feeling that every single time you sit down (or stand up) to do something, you get interrupted about every 30 seconds? It feels like that most of the time around here, which is weird, because there’s no one around to interrupt but a couple of dogs. Yesterday, when I was trying to get out from under the two- or three-day task of rewriting and posting this summer’s English 102 course, the phenomenon seemed to be working in full force.

Woke at four, as usual, which should’ve given me plenty of time to get my act together. Wrote blog posts, started back to work on the course, eventually got around to fixing breakfast. If it’s not dogs barking and mock-fighting, it’s phones ringing, e-mail notifications binging, timers going off, the teapot whistling, people showing up at the door, plants crying out for water as temps hit 100 degrees, the pool pump making a weird noise, pool cleaner stopping dead in the water… Even Gerardo the Lawn Dude Extraordinaire surfaced, bearing a check I’d written a few days before. He’d left it in his pocket when he put his pants through the washer, and the ink washed off. Would I write him another?

Hateful HP scanner software made me rescan a check for deposit four times. It operates so slowly that I’ll get up while it’s dragging its way through a process and go do something else: self-interruption, as it were. Went off to make the bed. Came back, restarted the program. Went off to feed the dog. Came back, restarted. Went off to put a load of laundry in the washer. Came back, restarted. And so on to infinity.

The whole day went that way. Got a lot done, but it was all done in fits and starts. Gestalt is the pattern of my life.

Came down with a sore throat yesterday. Cringe! Surely not a relapse of that hideous disease that made me so sick…and with which La Maya is still sick after six weeks of it???

Had to go to choir, that notwithstanding. Dragged home, dropped a Zyrtec knockoff, hoping the throat was an allergy symptom. Climbed into the sack around 10:30. Fell asleep over detective-novel copy, due back to the publisher on the 23rd.

Awake again at 4 a.m. At that hour, dawn is just barely beginning to break. How does the body know when the sky is only just starting to grey out? Must be magnetic, like a bird’s brain. Oh well. At this time of year, that’s a fact of life: the alarm is set to go off at 4 in the morning.

It’s kind of nice, because it does provide time to approach the day at a leisurely pace.

Throat still hurt. Must not be an allergy: otherwise the Zyrtec would have fixed it overnight.

Out the door at 6:45, off to the weekly business group meeting. So, so, sooo tired I could barely drive. Almost fell asleep at the wheel while stopped at a light. Realized…uh-oh. Shouldn’t have been driving at all.

Still zombified by the time the Scottsdale meeting broke up around 9:30. Had to consciously fight falling asleep as I drove back across the city. WTF?

Got home. Crawled into the sack around 10:15 or 10:30, after a few minutes of doggy exuberance. Charley soon gave up trying to drag Cassie off the bed and settled down on the floor. Slept all the way through until two o’clock in the afternoon! Holy mackerel. I don’t usually sleep in the daytime at all, much less for four hours.

Woke up feeling refreshed, for the first time in weeks. And the sore throat was gone.

Googled Zyrtec. Decided the toxic drowziness was probably a side effect. When they say “24-hour,” they’re not kidding.

Started to write this post. Ignored Charley. He responded by depositing diarrhea all over the family room. Cleaned that up. Remembered the frying plants. Pavement too hot to walk on barefooted; went to get shoes; interrupted by discovery that Charley had already retrieved shoes (he is a retriever, after all) and was eating them. Retrieved shoes from retriever. Watered plants. Back to computer. New e-mail. Decided to check neglected college e-mail system. Important message from departmental secretary, nearly missed. Cope with that, after retrieving another stolen shoe from the retriever. And so on, again, to infinity.

Many, many, many interruptions later, came back to this post, which by then had managed to disappear. Rewrote the first part. M’hijito showed up an hour and a half late. Miserable day for him, no doubt: when he refrains from complaining, that’s when you know he’s beyond his endurance level. Played with dogs. Consumed whiskey. Saw son and dog out the door. Came back to finish this. “This” interrupts plan for dinner, which interrupts need to finish editing the detective novel, which once again will interrupt sleep tonight.

And so, to work….

One Down, a Million More to Go…

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Last night we had the final exam for the real estate course. I felt like I was walking into the Jaws of Doom, so convinced was I that I was gonna bomb the thing. I was totally unprepared, and so exhausted I could hardly walk. The past 5 weeks have devolved into one time-consuming, headache-inducing screw-up, hassle, bugaboo and freaking catastrophe after another, and so I’ve had almost no time to study the content. I figured I was going to fail for sure.

Well.

When our Realtor friend said getting the license was “easy,” he wasn’t kidding. Of the 80 questions, I’d be surprised if I missed 10. Most of them were factoid questions, and of those most were so intuitive you probably could answer a good 80% of them without ever reading the book. There were five or six math questions, which of course I’m incompetent to do. Of those, I know I got three correct; I made a good guess at one, leaving two almost certainly wrong. So: two or three of the math questions wrong. Three or four of the factoid questions concerned material not covered in our textbook (the instructor draws on two texts for his questions)—had to make guesses on those. So I’m estimating I missed about six or seven questions.

To get 75%, you’d have to get twenty questions wrong! And…to get twenty of those see-Dick-run questions wrong, you’d have to be so far out in left field you’d qualify as mentally retarded.

All of which is neither here nor there, because on Tuesday, when he reminded us that because it’s a five-week course the final was scheduled for last night, not next week during the regular final exam period and I realized that on Wednesday I wouldn’t have a chance of finding time to review 14 chapters, I asked him what would happen if I failed this exam after having scored a 96 on the mid-term. And…brace yourself…at that point he said not to worry, everyone in the course would get an A or a B. No one would get less than a B in the course.

Heh.

Anyway. It is ridiculously easy. And it’s pretty interesting. You certainly learn a lot of things that you should have known before ever setting a pen to a purchase contract, a mortgage agreement, or an apartment lease.

Bitch of a week here. I told you we fired the client who converses with the dead, right? That leaves us without work, which has Tina agitated. Two incoming queries appeared today; one looking for someone to edit his thesis, another from some outfit trolling for slave labor. Last week of instruction—finals coming up next week. Students are also agitated, lobbying for hurried return of their gigantic final papers. Much nagging, whining, and nail-biting in those precincts.

This morning I’m going out to Tempe to drop by and sign some paperwork at the new insurance agent’s office. Thence to the credit union branch on the main campus. Then over to the GDU library to scour Literary Market Place for leads to publishing houses Tina and I can hit up for freelance work, and then it’s off to meet Tina for a nice lunch to celebrate the end of the semester and, more to the point, to calculate a strategy to bring in some more (and better) work. Back to the house to write up an exam for my own students and send that off to the copy center. Then have to translate their grades out of my spreadsheet into the hated Blackboard so they can view their final score, a process that takes about eight times as long as it should because it has to be done manually and because BB screws around with you as you enter Each. And. Every. Score.

So that will fill absorb every moment of productive time today, I expect.

Discovered a $1230 discrepancy in my checking account and can NOT find the error(s), so had to make a balance adjustment in that amount. Fortunately it’s in my favor; otherwise I’d have ended this month with about a $300 balance. But it looks like I’ll have to hire the accountant to untangle whatever mess I made there.

Noticed last night that the pool is busted again. Gotta get up from writing this post and go fix that, or else turn off the power and leave the thing to grow algae while I’m racing around the city today.

Had to buy a new toilet, the facility in the middle bathroom having given up the ghost. Actually, neither that one nor the one in the so-called master bathroom had a very strong grip on the ghost when I inherited them from Satan and Proserpine. I like this new one so much, I may have WonderPlumber come back after I recover from the summer’s penury and replace the one in the alleged master bathroom.

Told him about my idea to turn the fourth bedroom (now the unused TV room) into a luxurious spa, complete with vast bathtub and a walk-through into the closet-like master bathroom. He thought it was a great idea. Estimated it would cost around 10 grand.

Well…when I’m a rich old real estate agent, eh?

Another best-laid plan defunct

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{sigh} So the scheme to do a little market research and then race out to Tempe to meet my business partner got derailed last night.

I was thinking the real estate course’s final exam took place next week, during finals week. No. It’s tomorrow!

Forgot that these five-week short courses do not have dedicated final exam periods. I assumed we would meet next Tuesday for the exam. And of course, since I was figuring I’d have Friday, Saturday, half of Sunday, and Monday to read the three chapters I haven’t looked at and to figure out the math procedures that went over my head, I am SO not prepared. Not only that, but I’m only about 3/4 of the way through the page proofs that are due tomorrow morning—had figured to spend late afternoon and evening finishing that, since I’ll hit the road at 6:45 tomorrow morning.

So had to cancel everything for today and dedicate the entire day to reading page proofs and trying to catch up with the course material that I fell behind on while dealing with the toxic client. Shee-ut! That was not what I had in mind.

Fortunately, I scored a 96 on the mid-term. Asked the instructor if I would get a “C” in the course if I fail the final, which I fully expect to do. Did I really need to ask? This is a junior college, after all… He said not to worry, everyone in the class would get an A or a B, and that the final would have no meaning.

Why are we doing this? Why…why…? Because we have to sit in a classroom for 90 hours before we’re allowed to take a certification exam that could easily be passed by simply reading a 26-chapter book, about 80 percent of which consists of common sense and about 20 percent of which contains career-specific information that really does need to be learned?

So I figure I can prioritize the page proofs. Get that done by noon, maybe sooner—about 11 would be good. Bolt down some cheese and crackers for lunch. Then move on to trying to learn something about real estate; work on that into the night, until I can’t hold my head up anymore.

You know…the crazed thing about “retirement” is that the number of hours in the day seems to shrink. You never seem to have enough time to get through all the stuff you need or want to do. Mostly “need.” Rarely “want,” in my case, given the joy and pleasure I take in teaching and in reading the ramblings of demented wannabe writers.

And—here’s the weird part—the phenomenon is not exclusive to neurotic little moi. Almost everyone I know who is retired or semiretired says exactly the same thing. Most of those people manage time a great deal better than I do. SDXB, for example—no one is better organized than that guy, and on top of that he’s a freaking rocketship. He does so many things, every day, day in and day out, and he gets them all done between around 5 in the morning and 9 at night, when he goes to bed. But for him everything is quite orderly (he has, yes, a military mind). His schedule is not gestalt, the way mine is: he gets one thing done at a time.

Other, more normal folks, whose inclinations lie more centrally on the spectrum between gestalt and pristinely organized, report that after they quit their jobs they never seem to have enough hours in the day to do all the things they need or want to do. Maybe it’s a function of age. Or maybe it has to do with making a shift between the regimentation of work life and the naturally gestalt structure of freedom.

Whatever. I need to get back to work just now. Bye!

Day at the Botanical Garden

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The amazing Desert Botanical Garden, located in a small desert park on the south side of Scottsdale, is in full bloom at this time of year. Our friend KJG has a pass and invited me and mutual friend VickyC for a day in the garden. It is just gorgeous.

Check it out. I think if you click on these images, they should enlarge in all their glory. Click once on an image to isolate it from the gallery and then again for a larger, higher-resolution (ad-free!!) view. Then hit your browser’s back arrow twice to return to this page.

 

Cruising the Web for Fun and…Profit?

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So…while contemplating the workings of flammable barbecues and commenting, yesterday, to the effect that it’s too bad propane grills aren’t built so the tank would be carried outside the unit rather than inside, underneath the burners, it occurred to me that maybe Weber actually makes such a contraption. Out of idle curiosity, I cruised on over to the Weber site.

No, Weber doesn’t seem to have hit on this peculiarly ingenious design. But what should we find, in fine print, at the bottom of the homepage but this link to a class action settlement.

Hot dang! Is it possible? Could it be that mine was not the first grill to flare up in the backyard? Dreams of dollar-shaped sugar-plums danced in my head!

Heh.

Possibly not.

Turns out some outfit sued Weber, claiming that because one of the company’s many lines is assembled in China, Weber broke the law by advertising its products as made in America. The fabulous wealth awarded to members of the class (which includes just about anyone who’s bought a Weber grill since 20-ought-seven) comes to $2, $5, or $9.

Hey. It’s enough for a MacDonald’s, eh?

It sounds like an extraordinarily stupid lawsuit, the sort of thing designed to enrich lawyers and greedy speculators (the plaintiff’s firm has asked for $995,500 in fees). And while it’s not nice to claim your products are made in America when one of them is made in China, whose workers take jobs from Americans and whose policies make it possible for American firms to sidestep safety, health care, and common decency, still… It rings of harassment.

Would you take $2 from this suit? $5? $9? What if the return were more substantial…say, the entire amount you paid for the grill? Here in Arizona, with its 9.3% sales tax, that would come to $436.11.

It’s the principle of the thing, you say…but what is the principle? Is it or is it not OK to lie to American consumers? Is it or is not OK to offshore our jobs and then sell us products at made-in-America prices?

Actually, two bucks would let me join the weekly pool at the Scottsdale Business Association twice in a row! A win will return $13.

Not a bad investment, as investments go.

😀

 

On the Fly Friday

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Loved readers’ idea for post: lifetime best/worst financial decisions. Will work on that when a moment presents itself.

Just jetted in from estate sale, halfway to Yuma—had to be there at 6:45 ayem to get entry number. Worth the drive. Pix to come.

Now must spend the rest of the a.m. and afternoon studying real estate. Way behind. But cheered: got halfway through the take-home mid-term last night and was surprised to find the questions nowhere near as hard as expected.

Later!!