Coffee heat rising

self-employment

Groceries: Online or In Person?

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A thing of the past?

Here’s an amusement: Whilst Amazon makes a grab for Whole Foods, cheapies down its offerings, and turns it into an order-out joint, Aldi is going in the opposite direction: Opening newer and fancier stores, spiffing up the existing properties, and targeting customers who prefer to buy their groceries in brick-and-mortar establishments.

Interesting development, isn’t it? Aldi, according to the report linked above, is betting the farm (heh!) on the proposition that most people would rather shop for groceries in person, especially where fresh products are concerned.

Though it’s a huge risk, it makes sense when viewed in some lights. Given the traditionally low profit margins in the grocery business (typically around 5 percent), dropping your margin to somewhere around 3 percent for the privilege of letting shoppers order online and have stuff delivered has a whiff of suicide about it.

Also, it’s reasonable to suspect that a large number of shoppers may prefer to buy in person, for a variety of reasons. Some may prefer brick-&-mortar shopping all the time; some may find it more convenient to pick up food on the fly some of the time — and they may prefer to do the picking up in a real supermarket with substantial offerings, not in a Circle K.

This may apply to the young and the techie as well as to us cranky old fossils. Last night, for example, my son invited me over for dinner. He kindly made us a pizza, but realized he was missing a couple of items and he didn’t have a bottle of wine. A ten-minute trip to the Fry’s Supermarket around the corner caused these items to materialize… We didn’t have to search for them online, and we didn’t have to wait hours or a day to have them delivered. Obviously, when you order online, someone has to find your items, package them, ship them, pick them up at the warehouse, drive them across the city, and deposit them at your doorstep. That isn’t going to happen in 15 or 20 minutes.

As for us old folks: we’ve been around the grocery-delivery block.

Some time ago, I decided to try ordering up a week’s worth of groceries from the local Safeway. How wonderful, I imagined, not to have to get in the car, traipse through the homicidal traffic, trudge through the store, stand in line to pay, drag the stuff out to the car, and drive back home through said homicidal traffic.

And online grocery shopping would be wonderful. If it worked.

It probably would indeed work for a certain kind of buyer. If you subsist mostly on restaurant food and, when at home, on processed, packaged food, door-to-door grocery delivery would no doubt be highly successful for you.

But if you’re into real foods, unprocessed foods, fresh foods: not so much. The problem is, grocery-store clerks haven’t a clue about selecting fresh fruits and vegetables. What I got when I made the ballyhooed delivery order was under-ripe tomatoes, over-ripe fruit, and wilted lettuce. They don’t eat that kind of stuff, and so they do not know how a fresh melon or a fresh bunch of asparagus is supposed to look.

Nor do they know how to select a decent cut of meat.

Consequently, what you get is not very good — certainly not worth the price you pay for it.

I think the growing popularity of “organic” foods suggests that a number of people — maybe a lot of people — do care about the quality of the food they consume. And possibly that a larger number than you might expect prepare food in their homes.

My son for example, can make a pizza that you simply cannot buy at any pizzeria or grocery counter. Why would he want (for example) a random bag of soggy mushrooms delivered when he’s building a really first-rate meal?

It’ll be interesting to see what develops.

Meanwhile, while we’re watching: what’s your preference in grocery-shopping: on-line or in person?

General Business Frustrations

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So this was an aggravating day of general business frustration. (Notice how skillfully, not to say clunkily, I include the title’s main words — yea, verily: all the words — for the pointless benefit of Google’s search engines? Thank you, oh, thank you, dear Lord Google, for improving our writing style and making us all sound like talking bots.)

High on today’s list of tasks to accomplish was to post the writing tome’s body copy and cover copy to the printer’s website and order up a set of page proofs. This chore, I expected, would occupy an hour, maybe at the outside two hours.

No.

It consumed the entire frigging day! Started on that around 10 a.m., having returned from this morning’s bidness meeting (does Google’s search-bot perceive “bidness” as a synonym for “business”?) and having completed a few chores so small they don’t rank high enough to get on the Whiteboard List, I loaded up the PoD guy’s site and began the rather simple task of uploading content.

1. Convert the Wyrd file to PDF (already done) and upload the file to the order page.

2. Go through the file for one last proofread.

3. Fix the few remaining issues.

4. Convert the Wyrd file again to PDF and re-upload the PDF.

5. Go through the file for one last, last proofread.

6.Convert the Wyrd file again to PDF and re-upload the PDF. Shirk the duty of proofing it again.

7. Upload a PDF (or is it a JPEG??) of the wrap-around cover. Make minor adjustments in size and position.

8. Submit; pay money.

9. Order one (1) set of page proofs.

Does this look hard?

Well, no. It doesn’t LOOK hard. And I don’t suppose it would be hard, if things went according to plan.

1. Go through the file for one last proofread…

Discover that in a paragraph urging readers to be sure to hire a copyeditor before inflicting their golden words upon the world, the word “your” appears as “you r.”

Far more annoying, several diagrams that came across just fine from Wyrd into the PDFs have somehow corrupted. Three of the five graphics are fucking trashed.

Fix the typo and a couple of other small issues. Then try to figure out what’s wrong with the artwork. After several re-conversions to PDF and then several hours spent rebuilding the (damned complicated!) diagrams, there is no way on God’s green earth I can figure out why the images are corrupted and what I can do to fix them. The new, upgraded versions come across even MORE distorted than the originals.

2. Giving up on this effort, along about three in the afternoon I decide at least to upload the cover.

Can’t remember whether they require a PDF (think so) or a JPEG (which of course would make sense). Upload a PDF. Result: a wide white border all around the painfully, tediously constructed, elaborate wrap-around cover.

Try uploading a JPEG. Result: nothing.

Wrestle with the PDF. Can NOT get the uploaded image to quit appearing inside a wide white border.

Screw with this several times but have no luck.

Decide to try re-uploading the content PDF, in hopes that maybe refreshing that page will let it upload the rebuilt images.

No luck.

It was after 5:00 by the time I decided to give up wrangling this stuff. But along about then, as I was closing out of the PoD outfit’s page, I noticed the cover had mysteriously uploaded, as if on its own or by mental telepathy, in such a way as to look almost normal.

Must be Cox’s wondrously expensive new modem/router is SO DAMN SLOW that it takes not seconds, not minutes, but large fractions of an  hour to complete a transaction.

So that was a bit of a frustration.

This morning’s business breakfast in lovely mid-town Scottsdale was a bit of a frustration, too.

You know, I’ve never much cared for First Watch, not since the first bloom of the business faded. So it was not with much joy that I greeted news that our meetin’ place of lo! these many years, a dowdy Good Egg, was to be consumed by the not-much-less dowdy First Watch. Trepidation, indeed, you might say: not joy.

And those trepidations have proven prophetic. The new management has decided serving up a weekly breakfast to a group of 12 does not meet their definition of profitability. So they’ve been pressuring us to move on for quite some time. First thing they did was move our meeting table (which occupied a part of a semi-private back room) and stuff us into uncomfortable bench seating. Then they took our favorite waitress away and gave us airheads in her place. They changed the menu, but as one would expect, it’s no better than any other lovely American breakfast menu: oversalted, oversugared, and overgreased.

Yech.

While I was sick, the group tentatively tried out a Denny’s, a store whose location would add another two miles to my already annoying drive into the blinding early a.m. glare.

Really, I do not like Denny’s. I haven’t been back to Denny’s in years, not since the time that they served me a cup of coffee in a mug with some woman’s bright red lipstick print stuck to the rim. When I asked for a clean cup, they refused to give me one!!!!!

So I do not relish meeting at Denny’s.

But it probably doesn’t matter, because I rarely order anything at the Good Egg/First Watch. Eggs make me vomit instantly, and overall I don’t care for foods that are mushy and sweet or that are oversalted. That pretty much lets out…

• Bacon & eggs
• Ham and eggs
• Oatmeal as served in US restaurants
• Gooey sugary yogurt “parfaits”
• Pancakes made of undercooked commercial mix and topped with gooey sticky stuff
• Cottage fries drenched in salt
• And…you name it.

Their coffee’s so bad it’s undrinkable So that leaves one with…well…a glass of water.

Today’s service was so bad and the seating so uncomfortable that we decided enough was enough. We planned to meet at Denny’s next week.

This of course entailed my tracking down Denny’s management and confirming that our band of merry robbers could meet there next week, making a reservation, and sending out a notice to the membership. And that elicited a suggestion from the Boss Man that really, really despite my peevishness I should let First Watch let we would not be there next week.

That is because he is a nice man and I am not a nice woman. I personally feel that their not even bothering to have set up our table this morning is a perfectly fine reason not to bother to inform them that we will not be there next Thursday.

And therein lies the difference between a gentleman and the Wicked Bitch of the West…

Discussed the e-book with Wonder E-book Fomatter. The elaborate graphics have him pulling out what little remains of his hair, too. Not only do the images make him crazy (he’s actually got those down pat), he hates loathes and despises footnotes, which generate layer on layer on layer of extra work for him. He tortured himself by counting the damn things, leading him to point out — four or five times — that I’ve inserted 88 notes in the thing. I suggested he simply substitute links; this elicited a lengthy disquisition on what a PITA that is.

Life is a PITA.

It is now after dark. I haven’t walked the dogs. Yea verily, I haven’t walked the dogs in many days. They grow frustrated; I grow fat.

Oh well. Things could be worse. Our honored Clown in Chief could, for example, launch us into an open war with Syria, for example….

That oughta up his approval rating amongst the ones born every day…

 

 

Paper!!!

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Wads and wads and wads of paper… Am I the only sheeple who’s sick & tired of having piles of paper inflicted on her? Paper physical and paper virtual, makes no difference: it’s all time-consuming, annoying, goddamn clutter.

Every April, I have to file an annual report with the Arizona Corporation Commission for The Copyeditor’s Desk. What this really is is an excuse to extract $45 from you. To distract you from the reality, they blitz you with pointless paperwork, which you now have to fill out online.

The annual report entails plodding through four pages of pointless questions, all of which are the same pointless questions posed last year. The pointless questions never change.

Their pointlessness aside — there’s really no reason to ask most of the questions in the first place, and there’s certainly no point in posing them over and over and over and over, once every year that your company is in business — because they’re endlessly repetitive and pro forma, all the ACC really needs to do is ask you “has anything changed since last year.” But this would absorb about 20 seconds of your time — as opposed to half an hour or so — and would consume only one line of electronic copy. As opposed to making you click through page after page after pointless page.

Once this exercise is completed, you have to — or rather, if you have a brain in your head you will — download and print a lengthy PDF showing what answers you made and attesting that you filed the document and ponied up 45 bucks. You also will download and print the receipt for the 45 bucks.

Stash this in your already bloated file folder, and then move on to the next exercise in futility: You’re also required to write and keep the minutes of your corporation’s annual meeting. Nevermind that your board of directors consists of one (1) person: you’re still required to meet with yourself and record what you said to yourself.

Interestingly, you’re not required to file this silly document with the state. But you are required to write it and keep it on file…in perpetuity.

Honestly. The amount of paper that comes into this place, whether for business or personal matters, defies belief. You could, in theory, store it to disk… But who wants to trust that a computer will not crash or a hacker will not hack when it comes to documents that the government or some insurance company requires?

Okay, so much for that rant. Now to emit some paperwork of my own…

Image: Depositphotos, © gemenacom

March showers bring April winds…

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So the spring winds are here. These are somewhat more brisker than a breeze but don’t (usually) rise to monsoon levels. Normally they blow the leaves and flowers off the shrubbery and the fruit off the trees, with the aim of dumping all that stuff in the natives’ pools.

Over the past week or ten days, though, we’ve had some passing stiff blows. Conveniently, these have provided an opportunity to test the latest panty-hose approach to pool filtration. And, by golly, it works!

Picked up some cheap hose on sale at a grocery store the other day. Lobbed off the legs, tied them off, and tied the resulting bag to the leaf-catcher. The booty-bag vacuumed up the leaves and twigs in about twenty seconds, without once threatening to slip off the device and dump its cargo all over the bottom of the pool. The one I secured inside the skimmer basket filter also stayed firmly in place; it was chuckablock full of leaves and blossoms this morning.

The trick is to disconnect Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner whilst the wind blows. This keeps him from choking on twigs, flying pecan shells, and the like. Dust, twigs, palm tree cuttings, and heavier leaves drop to the bottom of the pool; small blossoms and the BB-like palm-tree seeds alight on the surface and flat. After the wind dies down, one then turns on the pump, which sucks the floating debris into the skimmer basket and, by way of the current it sets up, pushes everything on the bottom into a convenient pile in one spot. Hence: the garden-hose driven leaf-catcher, which easily lifts the mound off the bottom and sucks it into the booty-bag.

Despite the half-bushel or so of plant debris, the pool is still holding its own against the recurring mustard algae, which by this time last year was joyously coating the walls with moss.

At one point earlier this spring, I was reminded that when I first moved into this house, I was so delighted with the pool that I used to sweep it down every day or so. Of late, that enthusiasm has flagged — not so much out of boredom with the pool but because the year of surgeries broke me of habits that entailed even small amounts of physical exertion and because of late the editorial workload has been such that I just flat haven’t had time to fiddle with the yard and the pool.

LOL! A friend of mine, a middling prominent music critic, once remarked that self-employment allows you to set your own hours: any 18 hours of the day you please.

Yea, verily.

When I moved into the house, lo these many years ago, I had…well, you know…a job. (Urk!) I worked regular hours, and those hours did not start at 6:30 or 7 a.m. and run all the way through to 11 p.m.

So, back in the day, I had lots of time to break out the pool brush and run it up and down the walls. It only takes about 10 minutes, once you get yourself off the dime. So there really was no problem with doing a few light maintenance chores before leaving for work.

Today when a job or three are in-house, it’s roll out of the sack, grab the computer, answer the mail, do the books, pay the bills, work on someone’s copy — all before breakfast. Feed the dogs, bolt down some toast and coffee, maybe write a blog post (maybe not), post some PR to Facebook & Twitter, edit copy or compile index entries…allllll day long.

Heh. No wonder I never get anything done!

Update: The Business

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Along about 10:30 last night, I finished editing the latest Chinese academic paper, 12,250 words not counting the half-dozen complicated tables.

You understand: the last allegedly book-length manuscript I read was a little over 12,000 words… This is pretty large, for a journal article, which you would usually expect to run 3,000 to 5,000 words. And extremely arcane: a statistical study trying to make sense of the relationship between corporate board structure, Chinese laws, and the life cycle of firms over a period of 10 or 15 years.

The authors surfaced late last week and said they want it turned around by the end of the month. That is like right now.

Fortunately, by way of saving a few yuan, the co-authors asked me not to review the tables. That was a mercy, because tables cause some big problems with Office.

I sincerely hope the problem was the tables. Wyrd is allergic to tables and typically will react, after enough is enough, by swooning into a catastrophic crash, causing you to lose all your data not only in the file you’re working on but in any other files that are open at the time!

This can be dealt with by setting Wyrd’s auto-recover function to save every five minutes. Thus you lose only a few minutes of work, rather than a quarter-hour’s worth. Sounds good, eh?

Well…. It’s not nice to fool Mother Microsoft… Yesterday the thing started throwing up an error message to the effect that the computer was out of space and the document couldn’t be saved.

Sheee-ut!

On the home stretch, fucking exhausted, anxious to get done…I knew I was GUNNA DIE if this thing decided it wouldn’t save to disk.

Rescued what I’d done by saving to RTF and, as fast as I could, emailing it to myself. This kept all the changes up to the point where these messages – which interestingly enough, occurred every five minutes – began to warn of an impending (current?) crash.

Opened it on the freaking enormous overpowered iMac, found nothing had been lost, and resumed working. Believe me, there’s more than enough space on that thing.

But…the file is still telling me it’s not being saved. Same irritating, nerve-wracking message.

Suspicious, think I, that it saved everything right up to the last edit before I launched it into the email ether. Hmmm…

I hit command-S (which is alt-FS in the real world), and it seems to save. Hm.

Again I email the file to myself…and again the saved attachment does contain all the edits I’ve entered.

At this point, I conclude the problem lies not in the Mac but in our corrupted file. Even the RTF version generates the same aggravating messages. It’s probably the tables.

So I keep working, frantically, and saving manually about at the end of every sentence. Then I have to go through and verify page after page after endless page of references. And yea verily, our worthies have included eight or ten sources to which they haven’t referred in-text. And the References section isn’t alphabetized. Or rather it is, in a cursory way…it takes looking at it with the glazing removed from one’s eyes to realize the problem isn’t just a couple of entries incorrectly entered, but that the entire thing is fucked over.

In a file that has corrupted. Oh, good.

But I finally manage to finish, finally manage to get it saved. Run a compare-docs operation to generate the edited version; then have to review the 23 pages of edits. Oh, God! What a jumble!

And of course, this file, too, keeps generating – every five minutes – the “I ain’t a-savin’ this thing” message.

At last the project is as done it can get, at least until such time as the journal’s editor arrives at the office and finds my query: I need to know how the journal formats References entries for books. This journal uses a bastardization of APA style. It’s largely APA, but with weird quirks…like bold-face italic c/lc for journal titles. My god!

The thing comes out through Oxford. Why the hell not use Oxford style? Ohhhhh no. We have to get weird.

I’m drafting this post in Wyrd by way of seeing what happens.

The answer: nothing. Evidently the problem was in the file, not in the hard drive.

Moving on.

This paper will generate almost $400.

The Copyeditor’s Desk hauled in a phenomenal amount of work this spring. To hit my $20,000 goal for all of 2017 by the first of July, I’ll only need a couple of articles like this a month, or one book-length editing project per month, or one major index per month. That is effing amazing.

If this keeps on, the S-corp will start to generate, for the first time in its existence, enough that I can draw down a salary. Hot dang!

Problem is, I’m pretty fuzzy about where all this business came from. Word of mouth, I think. It’s a little hard to believe that the switch from a page rate to a word rate worked effectively enough to open the floodgates.

The writing bookoid, which I intend not to market on Amazon so much as to use as a marketing tool for the bidness by handing it out at speaking engagements, has yet to go to press, simply because I haven’t had time to fiddle with it. I believe the ebook designer is about done with it, but for the past month I’ve been too sick to go to the weekly networking meeting where he and I see each other on a regular basis, so have no idea where we are there.

I’ve also got to re-up for Toastmaster’s, another task that I’ve been too lazy/busy/sick to attend to.

And so, onward…

New Plumbers…wooHOO!

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So yesterday I lucked in to not one but TWO new plumbers, both highly recommended by people who should know. The one who returned my call first got my business: he came over and in short order unclogged the problem bathtub drain. Bill? $59.

That was one heckuva lot less than expected.

That guy surfaced on Yelp, where he has way, way more raves than anyone could possibly generate by bribing and begging one’s friends, customers, and Fiverr contractors to post there. The other man is beloved of WonderAccountant, her family, and her friends. He called later and made an excellent impression over the phone.

The first guy mostly does roto-rooting and drain clean-out, though he will do some plumbing chores. The second is a PLUMBER plumber: he installs and repairs pipes and fixtures. And, he allows, he doesn’t do much drain cleaning, largely because he doesn’t like to haul equipment up onto roofs.

My all-time favorite plumber dude feels the same about cleaning out drains. But the problem is, sometimes that’s the kind of plumbing help you need. And the problem with that is, fave plumber dude is one of those people who hates to tell people NO to their faces. So instead what he’ll do is say he’s involved in something or driving, and he’ll call you back when he returns to the shop.

Somehow, he never gets back to the shop. Like Poor Old Charlie on the MTA….

Alas, I’ve grown tired of decoding that message and have decided to hire WonderAccountant’s guy for serious plumbing jobs and the drain guy for plugs and plogs.

Besides the fact that I’ve been living with several faucets that I hate for the past 13 years, since I moved into the house, there is about to be some serious plumbing work in this place. Drain Dude says that he couldn’t retrieve the doodad that fell into the bathtub drain, and the next time it plugs up, we may have to pull out the bathtub, take out the drain, and rebuild it. Charming.

On Other Fronts…

Yesterday also saw the completion of a number of other projects: Finished the latest math paper and shipped it off to the client along with a statement. Calculated a statement for editing 14 scholarly papers, based on the varying difficulty of the respective papers, and sent that to the anthology’s editor. Calculated how much we would have earned had we charged by the word instead of by the page; reported thereon to bidness partner. Wrote a post for Plain & Simple Press. Entered budgeting data. Filed paper filed paper filed paper filed paper…. Paid bills. Tried to write a post for LinkedIn but gave up after LinkedIn crashed the damn thing, apparently erasing everything I’d written. I hoped it didn’t somehow publish it, because it wasn’t finished and of course it wasn’t even faintly proofread.

LinkedIn has revamped its site, making it difficult to navigate and difficult to use. This morning I found the errant post, which had crashed when I tried to insert a jpeg in the post. Apparently you are NOT allowed to insert images in your “articles,” except for the one you put in the banner. You can enter “multimedia” — figuring out how will take more time than I care to kill when I’m this busy. Why fix it, dear LinkedIn, if it ain’t broke?

All but two important tasks ultimately got done yesterday. Those are still hanging fire. I have to leave in half an hour to meet a client-become-friend for lunch; on the way home have to stop at Safeway and the credit union, meaning it will mid- to late-afternoon by the time I drag back in the door.

And…having just posted that LinkedIn article, I’m now running late for the luncheon appointment. So, away!