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As I’m darting out the door, FMF sends a notice that Funny’s next round in the March Madness competition is up. Please go here and enter a vote for “Truth”!

More later!

Remember to vote for Funny at Free Money Finance’s March Madness competition. Things are getting fierce as we get down to the wire. Right now Funny’s post, “Truth, the Highest Thing that Man May Keep,” is running behind by three votes!

The current round ends TODAY! So everyone who wants to support Funny needs to run over there today to cast their vote. FMF says he will announce this round’s winner tomorrow.

To vote, all you have to do is go to this site and enter your favorite for one or both of Games 7 and  8—and tis mightily to be hoped that in Game 8 you like “Truth” :-).

No question about it: Apple’s service rocks!

When I bought the cute li’l MacBook last December, the staff said I could bring the iMac and the MacBook in and they would synch the two, and while they were at it would upgrade the iMac to Snow Leopard.

So yesterday I trotted all my computer hardware over there. They sent a guy out to my car to haul the stuff into the store. They were nice to me. They spoke kindly to me. They did not talk over my head. I could even understand what the techies were saying, more or less.

On inspection, the tech dude decided he couldn’t install Snow Leopard in the iMac because it doesn’t have the required memory. The computer’s “too old” to upgrade quoth he.

Too old? Three years is “too old?”

“If that thing were were a little kid, it would just be toddling around the living room!” said I, “If it were a dog, it would still be a puppy!”

“Well,” he said. “I didn’t mean it’s old. It’s just…oldER.”

😀

What do you suppose Apple and all the PC manufacturers think we should do with all the hardware they engineer into superannuation after three years? Possibly we should have special landfills designed to hold only defunct computers. Might be risky, though: all that weight concentrated in a few places could knock the earth off its orbit.

He did clue me on how to install some new RAM, which he says is very easy to do. I’ll probably do that in the next few weeks and then upgrade to the sleek and powerful Snow Leopard.

After promising a 24-hour turnaround, they called me at about 3:30 to let me know they were done! Imagine that: they did the service in about three hours.

Trot back over to the Apple store. They send another cute guy to haul all the junk back out to my car.

Except for the MobileMe fiasco, when the store’s staff was overwhelmed, Apple’s service has consistently been excellent. It’s best to stay away from the place when the company is introducing some new, exuberantly hyped product (the iPad is supposed to come out on April 3—I ain’t goin’ near the place for at least two weeks after that). But during normal times, the people at Apple are pleasant to deal with and effective in their advice and service. That alone is probably worth the machine’s extra cost.

Want to see a little dog’s ears stand straight on end? Here’s what you do. Get yourself a coyote, install him in the back yard, and set him to singing.

In the darkest wee hours of the morning, one of the neighborhood’s coyotes caught a stray cat, just outside the back door. We could hear the cat screech, and then in the same cosmic breath we could hear the coyote call, a joyous, bizarre, and convoluted call, to her mate to come share the midnight snack.

Did Cassie the Corgi know this was the cry of something that would like to eat her as much as it relished the neighbor’s cat? I have no idea. All I can say is that in the dark her little head popped up and her ears stood erect like radar antennae searching out a signal.

Coyote, hallucinatory mariachi in the desert, Coyote the Trickster. There’s something weird, eerie about Coyote’s song that reminds you of a devil’s claw: a melody that curves back upon itself, barbed Satanic hilarity: yip-yip-wooWOO-ah! wooHOOwahaha! Coyote does not bay, he does not bark. He laughs. And oh, my friend, he laughs at us.

Straining through the black night for echoes of Coyote, I thought of the time I was a little girl in Saudi Arabia, alone in my room in the middle of the night when a jackal came calling. It must have been right outside the bedroom window. In the dark, in the quiet, the howl of a jackal is very loud, very loud indeed. In my childish fright, I imagined the beast was under my bed.

As much as he looks like Coyote, even is called by people in India a Trickster, the jackal does not sing like Coyote or behave like Coyote. Jackal bays, and he bays long, mournful, and clear. It’s not a belly-deep sound like a hound’s. It’s a high-pitched, endless howl taken to soprano register and held longer than you would think possible for any breathing creature: roo-roo-ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooo-ra-ra-rah. It’s a sound that seems to fill all of existence and seep into the nooks and crannies of the cosmos, mesmerizing in the depths of its terror.

And yes, like Coyote he would like to eat your poodle, your chihuahua, your cat,  your corgi. But Jackal is not so easily satisfied. This is a dog that will chase down a rider on a horse. Two of our friends were riding their horses outside of camp late one afternoon when a pack of jackals materialized out of the white sand dunes. After stalking them briefly, the jackals gave full chase. Our friends spurred their mares and took off on a dead run. They barely made it through the main gate, where the Arab guards drove off the jackals with gunfire.

Speaking of barely making it through the main gate, one of my students occupied half the period trying to persuade me that instead of addressing the assignment he should write about the latest drama in his life.

I try to distance myself from students’ personal stories. Freshman comp positions one in the English Teacher as Mom role. And I do not want to be their mother. They break my heart too often.

This one was with a bunch of young people who crashed a party. When the resident partiers tried to drive them off, a free-for-all broke out, in which our young pup’s best buddy brained one of the opposition with a vodka bottle. Our pup’s vodka bottle.

The result: Best Buddy is in jail, charged with attempted homicide and assault with a deadly weapon. Pup is on his way to court, thereat to be deposed and then put on the witness stand.

I. do. not. want. to. know.

Where, I asked him, where were your parents???? Where were the parents of the young people whose family’s home was trashed when your buddy ran his truck through the block back fence and then through a wall of the house? Where, where, WHERE were the adults?

He gave me a blank look.

Where were they? Presumably off somewhere else behaving like children themselves. Damn their eyes.

But the nice thing about freelance teaching is that it doesn’t entail too much work. This afternoon is drop-down dead gorgeous, one of the most beautiful days I have ever seen in this land of beautiful days. Reasonably confident that Coyote had gone on his way well-fed and content, the Cassowary and I spent a fair amount of it loafing in the leafy bower outside the dining room.

The tea roses, like these much-revived climbers, are bursting forth in plant joy after all the rain we’ve had. They’re already beginning to make extravagant blossoms, along with the bougainvillea and the various potted plants that decorate the yard.

We are, unmistakably, . . .

Images:

Coyote by Arizona Roadside, Marya
Devil’s Claw. JerryFriedman. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Good grief! As all of us who live in cities large enough to support two or more Costco stores know, individual outlets of that worthy retailer tailor the merchandise to their surrounding demographics. Although basic supplies stay the same from store to store, the blandishments do not: the fancier the neighborhood, the more variety in choices.

Inside the stores, when any two Costco outlets offer the same products, the prices are the same. But outside? Not so much!

I dropped by the Costco near the college today, partly to cash in this year’s AMEX rebate and partly to see if I could pick a few things missing at own much more downscale store. Yes indeed, they did have the lifetime supply of sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil, MIA here in the ghetto. Not only that, but I picked up a pair of periwinkle blue jeans, unheard of among the working classes.

On the way out, I drove through the gas station. “Through” is the operative word: they wanted $2.55 a gallon, not significantly different from the street price and altogether, IMHO, too much.

From there I had to drive to the credit union at the West campus of GDU, there to deposit the $334 rebate (!) in my savings account. Another Costco outlet is located right on the way, and that one resides in a much scruffier area. Whip into the gas line there, and what do I find on the pump but a price of $2.43!

That’s a twelve-cent-a-gallon difference!

Since I bought 6.355 gallons, I saved almost a dollar (well…76 cents) by moving on down the road a couple of miles. The car was about a third of a tank down, so had I done a complete refill, the savings would have been over two dollah.

Hey! Funny about Money won in its first round at Free Money Finance‘s March Madness Competition!

Thanks so much to all of you who voted for Truth, the Highest Thing. This is a great first step toward winning the $500 donation (I hope!) for All Saints.

FMF’s second round is now under way. I’m sure when you consider the sheer number of “games” in each March Madness round, you can extrapolate how much work this project entails. So I hope you’ll participate in each round! The current ones are here.

I have no idea when Funny’s round two entry will come up, but I’ll let you know when it does…and then will hope fervently that you’ll kindly vote again.

🙂