Endless Thrashings-About

Haven’t had a chance to post here because every minute that hasn’t been occupied with work has been occupied with dead exhaustion.

A difficult Chinglish scholarly paper arrived early in the week. That took two full days (by full, we mean something like 12 hours) to plow through. Then, an amazing development:

Another pair of clients had interested the University of New Mexico Press in a (wonderful!) anthology they’ve been working on for the past year or two. UNM had said to send it along — actually, I thought they had a contract, but apparently not — and they were just ready to finish the introduction (the last piece) when they got an e-mail saying the press had decided they had too many collections in their backlist and so…good luck with that!

Well, as you can imagine, they were dismayed.

Within the hour, though, along comes another message, this one from University of California Press. UC Press wants to see it!

This is exceptionally good news: UC Press is a top-tier academic publisher, which UNM Press is not. I’ve felt from the outset that the book should have been sent to UC — it’s that good — and I’d put money on it that the press will grab the thing. So we’re looking at a cloud with a solid gold 24-carat lining. If UC picks the book up, it will make both co-editors’ careers. One of them will soon go up for full; with a publication like that, she can’t lose.

At any rate, they’d like to be ready to send the thing off by Monday morning, and the intro is far from ready to go. They’d spent a week or two banging it out, but by Tuesday it was still a little on the draftig side. So it took a couple of days to plow through that and make some recommends.

Wednesday a new pool guy showed up, me having grown royally tired of Leslie’s. The filter needed to be taken apart and cleaned.

Apparently it’s is a more difficult job than it appears to be…this is the second fly-by-night pool guy who screwed it up. He puts it back together, turns it on, and lo! It’s still running at 20 psi.

I say, lookit, that thing is suppose to run at 10 psi. Twenty psi is way, way too high…as in “shut it down!”

He says no it’s not…as a pool gets older it runs at a higher psi.

Well, this is clear and present bullshit, and I figure he knows it as well as I do. It is true that the water’s running through pretty briskly (normally at 20 psi it barely moves), but it still should NOT run at 20 psi.

The guy has dumped DE directly into the skimmer inlet without running it through the skimmer basket. You’re supposed to put the skimmer basket in and let it kind of sieve the DE. Otherwise the powder can clump up and clog the filter, which is probably exactly what happened.

So now that thing needs to be taken apart  again and cleaned again and another $100 service charge will be incurred. I am pissed.

But I’m still not calling Leslie’s. Yesterday I found a functioning number for Swimming Pool Service and Repair, so I’m calling them in another couple of hours, whenever business hours resume.

The guy also told me that not only is it illegal to replace a single-cycle pump with a  new single-cycle pump, it’s illegal for a pool service to fix a single-cycle pump. He claimed Leslie’s was liable for a $500 fine because their kid replaced the capacitor.

I think that’s highly unlikely, because Leslie’s has fixed that pump before in recent months. And it just doesn’t seem likely that they could pass some law that says you cannot repair something that you already own. Really: that would be unacceptable in the bluest of blue states…and Arizona is not a place that could be called, by any stretch of the imagination, “progressive.” I simply do not believe the wackos in the state legislature, most of whom are climate change deniers, would even think of passing any such energy-saving legislation, no matter how much the swimming-pool lobby paid them under the table.

But that notwithstanding, by yesterday I had to run some errands. Because I refuse to let the community college district have my bank routing and account numbers after they gave all that information and then some some (make that “and then LOTS MORE”) to hackers, now I have to physically deliver my hard-copy paychecks to the credit union. That entails a long drive and so I save up tasks that can be done vaguely on that side of town.

So after the morning junket to Scottsdale, I had to come back here, let the puppy out to pee, lock her back up, and head on out to the westside. Credit union, Lowe’s, gasoline at the Costco in that direction.

Traffic has become just fierce in this part of town. Don’t know why. After the white middle class moved to the suburbs, the streets in the central part of the city actually quieted down significantly. For years, it’s been like driving around in a small town (albeit a small town with a meth habit). But recently, the streets have been jammed!

I guess it’s a good sign: presumably it means commerce is humming along again, at long last, and people have jobs to go to. During the recession, traffic fell way, way off all over the city, because nobody could afford to shop and nobody had work to commute to. That no longer seems to be the case. The roads are packed all day long, and as usual, about a third of one’s fellow drivers are homicidal maniacs.

So it seemed to take for-freaking-EVER to get through those three small errands. About two or two-and-a-half hours to get accomplish three minor chores.

Got about three hours’ worth of sleep between 10:30 p.m. Wednesday and 5:30 a.m. Thursday. So decided to go back to bed for a little siesta along about 2:00 p.m.

Put the pup in her crate, climbed over the barricade I put across the closet door to keep her from consuming my shoes, hung up some clothes, stepped back out toward the bed…and fell over the damn barricade contraption.

Thumped down on the tile floor, got my leg tangled in the contraption, thought I’d fractured an ankle.

{sigh}

Scooted over to the nightstand so as to pick up the walkaround phone and call 911.

No phone.

{sigh}

So started to drag myself across the floor and up the hall to try to find a phone in the living room that I could knock onto the floor and of course scooted…right into another puddle of dog pee!!!!

Jeez. This puppy is now three months old and shows no sign of ever becoming house-trained. She’s OK with No. 2, but the stealth peeing continues apace. I’m pretty sure she knows she’s supposed to go out. She just won’t. So much easier to sneak around a corner and deposit a puddle indoors.

One nice thing about being dunked in dog pee is that it shakes you up enough so you get past your ankle hurting.

So I called the vet to see if they would test her for a urinary tract infection, which is common among corgis. Even corgi pups. They want to stick a needle in her bladder to extract urine. That sounds gawdawful. There’s no way I can catch her to shove a pie tin under her little butt (can you imagine that trick? 😀 ), so some such procedure would be required. But I very much doubt that’s the issue: she shows no other symptoms of a UTI. This sounds like yet another expensive vet bill for naught.

Opinion at the corgi board is mixed. Some think she should be tested. Others say she’s way too young to house-train — that puppies are not ready for house-training before three or four months.

Since I house-trained a golden retriever in two days at the age of nine weeks, I rather doubt that.

At any rate, she’s 13 weeks old, which is three months.

Others on this board describe having corgi puppies that were not trained until they were six or seven months old!!!

That is insane.

These folks say she needs to be kept locked up or on a leash at all times, until she’s old enough (by their lights) to get the idea. They say she should literally never be out of the human’s sight, except when she’s locked in her crate at night or when the human is out shopping.

{sigh}

I will say that for the first six or eight months (longer?) of the Anna the German Shepherd’s life, I had her tied to the kitchen doorknob or to me by a leash. But that wasn’t because of house-training issues. It was because she was so incredibly destructive. This was a dog that ate an arm off a brand-new leather chair. She chewed the leg off a piece of furniture. She tried to chew up the kitchen cabinetry. This puppy is not destructive. Yet.

Right now Cassie and Pup are having a huge wrestling match. Very silly!

So anyway, as usual, I haven’t managed to break free time to do the things I want to do. The current chapter of the current novel remains unfinished. The negotiations over the cover for the adjunct rant are at a standstill. The cover for the novel that’s ready to publish is still unfinished. The cover designer can’t spell my name(!). I haven’t had time to establish blogsites for the three upcoming books, or to do any of the several things remaining to do to get those ready for “publication.” If that’s what mounting these things on Amazon can be called.

Must say I was a little dismayed when Crystal of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff reported, in her latest newsletter, a vast $55 revenue for last month’s sales of her How I Make Money Blogging e-book.

Uh huh. At that rate, the so-called “magic number” of eight published e-books, which I hope to hit by the end of 2015, would fall far, far short of the net ten grand I need to earn on these things. Eight books pulling in $55 a month would gross a grandiose $5,280 a year. And that just doesn’t make it.

Welp, speaking of making money, it’s already 7:15 and I haven’t billed the Chinese client, haven’t figured out what part of the various paying projects to start on next, haven’t even looked at the magazine-writing course’s site (at least one set of papers was due by today)… And so, to work.