Yesterday was incredibly hectic, full of a staggering amount of work, all of which distracted 100% from paying projects. Wow!

To start with, though, SDXB showed up here at 9 a.m. to go hiking in the nearby mountain preserve. This seemed OK, because I didn’t yet know how fantastically my little efforts to produce something salable were about to be obstructed. 😀

By the time I got home, the freshly washed and set hair was soaking wet…so there was a job that would have to be done again.

As long as I was already drenched in sweat, I figured I’d better finish the job of cleaning out and refurbishing the storage shed. Started the project several days ago. I knew it would be huge, and it was. By now I’d hauled the junk out, carted a lot to the trash, deconstructed the brick-and-board shelving and reconstituted it in the corner outside (this is all out of sight of the backyard and pool). Found that water had seeped in under the cinderblock supports and corroded the plywood floor Satan had put into the shed.

Why would you put plywood flooring into a construct that sits outside in the rain? Even though he set it on top of some block paving he’d built, of course water is going to seep up out of the ground and get into your finely built floor. What possesses people? Why not use the stuff he build the deck out of: fake wood planks made of some sort of indestructible synthetic? I’ve lived here now for twelve years, perched plants on it, watered them every day throughout the summer, and the thing is as good as it was when I moved in.

Oh well. That was a mess.

So the shed flooring has been drying out for the past couple of days, with all the junk strewn around the yard waiting to be put back.

At Lowe’s, I found some flimsy but serviceable plastic shelving that snaps together like Tinker-Toys — about the limit of my handyperson skills. The bottom-most shelf sits on the ground, but it’s ventilated, and the only part that actually touches the ground is the outside rim of the thing. Air should be able to move through there and allow the plywood to dry out after the next rainstorm. They’re very deep, so they conveniently fit around the rotted spots in the floor.

Meanwhile I used the metal shelving Satan had left behind, which according to Home Depot has a carrying capacity of 250 pounds, to hold the leftover tiles Mike the Tile Dude and Satan himself had left on the floor in there. They groan under the burden, and it remains to be seen whether the weight will eventually break through the weakened plywood floor. If it does, then The Handyman from Heaven can be begged to replace it with something better.

After tapping the big new cheesey plastic shelves together with a rubber mallet, it was time to reload.

The things I actually need — pool gear, mostly — now occupy only a couple of shelves, right in front. The valuable old paint cans, the precious old mortar, the beloved old tile grout: all that went on the metal shelving, pushed all the way to the shed’s back end.

This left plenty of room for the priceless collection of rags to cover plants in wintertime.

Yeah. I’ve now got two gigantic, deep shelves jammed with old sheets and drape panels, lest Phoenix ever get another hard freeze. This hasn’t happened for the past several years. If we’re to believe the climate prophets, it may never happen again. But…it’s a symptom of my cheapskateness, I suppose: I can’t bring myself to throw out anything I just might need again someday. And they do have another use. Many are already spattered with paint: they make fine drop cloths. Just in case I should ever choose to paint the house again… 🙄

This project and its aftermath — scrubbing out the shop-vac, which ended up with mud inside it — consumed most of my energy.

But day was not done…not by a long shot.

Eventually I sit down in front of the MacBook. Go to switch from some program over to Word, aptly nicknamed Wyrd in these parts.

Word hangs on a file that contains data I need to use all the time. It won’t open, apparently because something in that file is awry.

Force-Quit Wyrd.

Try to reload. Wyrd hangs.

Force-Quit. Hangs.

Look up how to keep OSX from auto-reopening files after a crash. The system is already set that way. Look up how to keep Wyrd from reopening files after a crash. You have to get into Word’s Preferences, which means you have to open the program. The program won’t open.

Now I’m beginning to panic. Are the files I’ve been laboring over saved to Time Machine? Check external hard drive: the goddamn thing has somehow disconnected itself! Even though the cable is tightly connected and seems to be operative.

In a word, f-u-c-k.

Get into the iMac. The suspect file, which resides on DropBox, is functional there. Apparently the problem is not a corrupt Wyrd file.

Having force-quit Wyrd yet again, I now manually closed all the rest of the open programs, shut down the computer, and let it sit for a few minutes.

When the computer rebooted, Wyrd loaded normally.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that any file that’s under construction at any given time should be on DropBox, where Time Machine on the iMac will back it up…just in case the MacBook’s external drive mysteriously disconnects itself.

Just LOVELY.

Ah. But that was but the beginning.

The Wyrd file for the book I’ve been working on for the past several days has developed a strange little quirk: on every recto (odd-numbered) page, a little symbol that looks like a dwarfed, compressed paragraph (hard return) mark appears in the upper left-hand corner. The first two lines of copy wrap around this thing, creating an indent.

The book can’t go to print with the first two lines of every other page indented about 1/8 of an inch.

I did not put this character there. I cannot make it go away. It will not delete. There seems to be no way to insert such a thing and no way to get rid of such a thing. A search of the Web with several keyword strings brings up two (2) references to the issue, with no explanation as to what it is and, most to the point, no clue as to how to get rid of it.

Friedman’s Word guru suggests it indicates an anchored image or object in the line above it. I think not: there are no objects or images in the text.

I have done a phenomenal amount of work on this damn thing, and it now appears that if it is to be prepared for print, I’m going to have to type all 325 pages over, from beginning to end!

Along about 10 p.m. last night, it dawned on me that if Wyrd can’t highlight the thing, Word probably can’t copy the thing. So I created a new file in the desired template, highlighted a copied a chapter, and pasted it into the new template.

Hallelujah! It worked.

After a fashion.

This strategy lost a lot of the formatting I spent hours fixing: now I have to go through the whole damn thing and fix a whole new raft of widows, orphans, and loose lines. The small cap formatting reverted to all caps or lc/roman, only Word doesn’t recognize that. Where in the other file I could search all caps and replace with small caps, in this file it thinks the all caps are small caps. So I have to plod through 302 pages again and reapply the small-caps style. The pagination all has to be readjusted to  make chapters appear on recto pages. Running headers/footers have to be redone. Word can no longer read the chapter title styles, so EVERY CHAPTER TITLE has to be restyled!

To wit: most of the three days’ worth of mind-numbing work I did on this thing now has to be done all over again. And then some. But at least I don’t have to retype it from beginning to end. I guess.

I. hate. Word.

LOLOLOLOL! This is too good… You’ve gotta click on the link.

Dog, Riveted:

Subject of Dog’s Attention:

Ducks, redux!

So I’ve gotten three, count’em (3) publishing enterprise-related activities done today. And that’s about it. Can’t quite say I’ve been totally loafing. But it’s close.

This morning I typed up and emitted our newsletter to those hardy souls who kindly subscribe. (You know who you are! ♥ ) Sounds simple, looks simple enough. Doesn’t it?

No.

It consumed the entire morning, from about 8:30 to almost 1:00 p.m. Let the dogs out after they rousted me at 7:00; turned on the heat, fed the dogs, and then climbed back into the sack with the laptop to wait until the chill was off the refrigerated air.

Read the news on the Internet. Played a computer game. Filled in a crossword puzzle. Then figured I’d just flow the copy I’d drafted into MailChimp, tidy it up, add a picture or two, and ship it off.

No.

Should’ve known better. Once sucked in, I was like a fly in a vacuum cleaner: there was no escape.

Item: Do not, ever, paste copy from Wyrd directly into MailChimp. At the very  least save your file as an HTML file. But don’t. Best choice: Paste it into a WordPress post, edit it there, and then copy and paste from WordPress into MailChimp. This will cause relatively little conversion wackiness.

Failing that, paste it into a plain text editor. Do the best you can to edit in that, then paste into your MailChimp page and edit copy and add your images there.

After merging content from two draft sources, pasting the resultant Wyrd copy into MailChimp, and fiddling around ad nauseam to make the result vaguely coherent, I tried to format heads, subheads and body copy and add an image or two. Holeee crap! What a nightmare.

Hours of fighting with MailChimp later, I finally gave up and sent it out. And what did I see in the version MC kindly sent to me?

Let me assure you, it looked nothing like what MC was showing me at its site. Crazy type fonts in the subheads — some look sort of like Copperplate Bold (huh?????), some like Tahoma. The bulleted lists? The bullet points appear in the middle of the second character in the first line of each list item! Like that character overwrote the bullet point. Wha-a-a-a-a?

I had set the whole damn thing, blanket-style, in Times New Roman 12 points! Each subhead was formatted using Mailchimp’s “Styles” function. The bulleted lists were set using “Styles,” too.

If I tried to pull up extra space between a level 2 head and the following paragraph, sometimes the paragraph would morph into 18 point boldface. Sometimes it would not. Sometimes the graf would appear flush left, no first-line indent; sometimes it would appear indented. No rhyme nor reason for these quirks was evident. It was all catch as catch can, trial and error.

So I spent the larger part of the morning dorking with that, to not very good avail.  Would’ve been a lot better off to have printed out my draft from Wyrd, dropped the print-out next to the computer, and transcribed the entire thing character by character into MailChimp. Would have saved a lot of time by doing that.

Oh well.

Then it was off to the church to drop off a couple of small donations.

From there: a straight shot into the scariest part of South Phoenix, where the printer has his plant.

Somewhere near there, according to a couple of hand-lettered signs, are a couple of living spaces. One is described as barato; the other as barrado. Spelling variation?

Hm. Barato means “cheap.” Or it can mean “trashy.” What is this person trying to say to us?

Barrado means “barred.” Now that would be a selling point. But corduroy can be described as barrado; so can striped fabric. Maybe the joint has a fancy paint job.

And if you happen to be in Chile, barata, which around here means “sale” (as in “at the sale”: en la barata), can also mean cockroach. Personally, I rather prefer la cucaracha. Much jazzier. I’ll bet the person trying to unload the real estate has the same thought. 😉

Picked up the page proofs, which show that on the new equipment the cookbook’s cover will have to be tweaked. That’s frustrating: I’d expected to walk in, say “uh huh, fine,” and order ten copies.

So….if you’re waiting for your copy of the cookbook, it’ll be a few more days. {grump!}

Back at the Funny Farm, I could not face another session of fiddling with the computer. So decided to do some yard chores that have been neglected since before the start of the first Adventure in Medical Science — damn near two years ago. Though the  yard is fundamentally minimalist, the plants have been suffering.

Occasionally I look at old iPhoto images and see the spectacular flowers I used to grow. No more of those around here! Usually at this time year and also as the weather cools in the fall, one has an attack of spring fever and wishes to do nothing other than garden. Haven’t gotten into that in…well, way too long.

Pruned three roses, two of them climbers.

The recent long, soaking rains have revived many of the plants, among them the roses. I’d thought the beloved climbing roses were dying of old age. But apparently that’s not the issue. Apparently the issue is, between the gawdawful heat and the drought they haven’t been getting enough water.

Lo these many years ago, when my parents dragged me here to Arizona, the climate was altogether different. Every winter, we had what the Indians used to call “female rains”: days of slow, soft, soaking rain that did not run off, but rather soaked into the ground, deep-watered everything, and eventually made its way to the water table. Each summer we had what silly Europeans call “monsoon” rains: crazy hard showers pouring out of thunderheads, much of whose water rolled off the hard desert floor, made its way to the nearest riverbed, and eventually ended up in the Sea of Cortez.

The summer rains would roll through late in the afternoon, around  4 or 5 p.m., and they could easily drop the ambient temperature by 20 degrees. So a hundred-degree afternoon would soften to an 80-degree evening. A high of 110 was unusual, 112 was strange, and no one ever heard of a 118-degree day.

Good times.

Now the weather here is not conducive to plant life. Nor, we might add, to human life. The water table has dropped to Hades’ front door, and we almost never see a hard rain in the Valley unless it comes out of something that looks alarmingly like a tornado cloud.

But of course, there’s no such thing as climate change. Our legislators assure us that’s true. 😉

After two or three years of neglect, the “perfume delight” rose that used to be so beautiful was now scrawny, rangy, and as big as even a Mr. Lincoln can get. And a Mr. Lincoln is a big hybrid tea rose.

Only two more roses to prune, and one of them is in a pot located in a hot place with a lot of reflected glare, so shouldn’t be trimmed back very much. Then I need to cut the dead stuff off the blue plumbago and prune back the orange thing that wants to take over the galaxy.

And I really should soak the flowerbed by the pool, dig out every piece of plant life in there, and replace it with something beautiful. But I’m not going to. Right now there’s a mat of Mexican primrose in there, interlaced with bermuda-grass tentacles. The heck with that. With any luck, the Mexican stuff will suffocate the crabgrass (good luck with that). If it doesn’t…well…no one sees it, anyway.

So it goes.

Many thanks to Donna Freedman for the giveaway she’s running around the 30 Pounds/4 Months cookbook! Go on over to Surviving and Thriving and sign up — it’s easy! And you’ll get a chance to read some of her handsomely written posts, while you’re at it.

Earlier this year I remarked on the absurd cost disparity between men’s and women’s personal grooming products. Well, “pink” pricing goes way beyond shaving cream and face lotion. Like…a $20 price hike for a child’s scooter painted pink, and a $5 gouge for a back brace labeled “for women.”

If there was ever any doubt that a certain faction in Western civilization wishes to keep women in their place, this report should remove it. That not enough to convince you? Try this one.

In the Department of Dollars, a friend of mine is trying to persuade me to put about half my retirement savings into an annuity and let him manage the rest of it. I’ve been putting him off politely, because I’m happy with the money management where I am, thank you very much, and because I don’t understand annuities in general well enough to make an informed decision. Mostly, I’m wary of the costs, which he hasn’t detailed, and I’m not happy at the prospect of having a large chunk of my money tied up in an instrument that’s difficult (if not impossible) to get out of. So I appreciated this excellent, clear description of annuity pro’s and cons.

I’m not a Yuccie, but I do covet this car! Luckily, the cravings of an eccentric 70-year-old academic are unlikely to plant the Kiss of Death on Toyota’s pride and joy. In this part of the world, you need at least a ton of metal between you and your fellow homicidal drivers. So the next  Dog Chariot is likely to be a Ram 1500, since Toyota has discontinued the Venza. But…how cool IS it!

At year’s end, Revanche counts her blessings. Possibly the sub-text to this amiable post is the fact that those of us whose families have been in the US for several generations haven’t much of a clue to how good daily life really is here.

In the mood for a mystery? Here is a truly bizarre story.

And on that strange note, I’m taking myself, the dogs, and the worst cold of 2015 back to bed!

Happy New Year!