Entrepreneurship is one helluva lot of work. So are dogs. So is life. And if the Universe cares, it would be nice if it would, just once, transmit a message to that effect. 🙂 I hope you appreciate how SEOly I just put every key term in this post’s title into its first paragraph. But honest to god…I am so tired I could weep. Over the past few days (weeks? months? years?), the sheer amount of physical and intellectual work has damn near killed me. The business, the dogs, the lifestyle: hoooleee mackerel!
Bidness:
Client 1: due back in-country after several weeks of hanging out in the country where he lives as a contented ex-pat. Promised to surface Friday or Sat’day. Translate: bigawd, get my project ready for me to review and jaw about no later than about 4 p.m. Friday afternoon.
Human: Yessir.
Client 2: decides to utterly, totally, completely, MASSIVELY rewrite his book. Emits a chunk thereof. Holy shit.
Prospective Client 3: And it’s only 225 PowerPoint slides. How much would you estimate it will cost to edit this project?
Life (Interrupted by Business):
Choir director: Missing rehearsal for what? For only one regular service and the annual concert? Uh huh. Lovely.
Puppy: Doggy water bowls make the best swimming pools ever! And RRRROOOOO how I DO LOVE a mop!
Business:
Designer 1: sends a new set of page proofs: please read these soonest.
Designer 2: sends two new sets of graphics: please respond soonest.
Designer 3: sends new design with new cover lines: please respond soonest.
Bluehost: down at 7:30 this morning. Down at 8 this morning. Down at 8:45 this morning. Human gives up.
Life:
Son: Bringing sick dog to your house soonest. No need to respond; will let self in.
Human: Deconstructs Pup’s X-pen and turns it into a fence to keep Pup out of the pool, using X-pen’s gate to provide an opening through which Human can pass without tripping on the goddamn dog barrier.
Veterinarian 1: AARGH crash thud growl bite hit scream yowl THROW!
Veterinarian 2: Bring her in at 2:45 Monday afternoon, with a fresh bottle of dog pee. The bottle itself and the collecting instrument should be freshly sterilized…
Son: Forget small differences that seemed to foretell alienation at best, homicidal frenzies at worst. En route to your house with flowers, special bourbon (!), dog, and my own extraordinarily charming company (the only good thing to happen this week).
Business:
Human to Associate Editor: And this will get the number of assignments for you and the underling to read during the four-week summer course down to four. Think you and Underling can handle some (read “most”) of these?
Associate Editor to Human: That will leave only two of the four for you to have to do.
Life:
Gerardo: We’ll be there at noon to undo the horrific mess Richard the (now-FIRED) landscaper inflicted. Ai, caramba! “What does that mean in analogue time?” Gringa! What do you think it means? See you whenever.
Doctor’s Office: So you say that surgical incision incision is infected? You must come right in! Whaddaya mean you can’t come over here right this minute??? Okay, you must be here as dawn cracks tomorrow.
Human: Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby come ON come DOG we have to fly out the door to the veterinari…
BING BONG! Gerardo: Bueno! Here we are! Donde the job?
Veterinarian 2: Uh huh. Yeah. This dog indeed does have blood in its urine. It has white blood cells floating around, too. And it has crystals, despite its obscene youth. Otherwise, it’s swimmingly healthy. Take this antibiotic. Take this prescription dog food full of shit no one in their right mind would think of feeding a dog if they had any clue what really goes into dog food. Call in one week. Come back in two weeks. That will be 58 dollah.
Business:
Human to Associate Editor: And it’s only 225 PowerPoint slides. How much to edit behind me?
Human to Client #2: Palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver palaver…
Human to Client #1: Nothing. Where the heck is the dude? But…silence is golden and do not look a gift horse in the mouth.
Human to Client #3: And that will be $60/hour…
Human to Designer 3: Fix the cover lines so they’re visible, ALL of them are visible in an Amazon thumbnail.
Human to Designer 2: {discreet silence}
Human to Designer 1: {discreet silence}
Human to Departmental Secretary: Please review the attached 25-page syllabus, as required by the Department and District policy…
Life:
Swimming Pool to Human: CONK!
ogodogodogodogod
Gerardo the Chinese-Mexican Miracle Worker kindly rescued the backyard from the unholy mess Richard left. By the time Richard was done with his answer to the French well I asked for, which was what local landscapers call a “river of rock” (i.e., it was something he and his underlings know how to do), he had bifurcated the yard in such a way as to put anyone who wished to take out the garbage at risk of a fractured ankle. Fortunately he flat-out refused to carry off the mountain of dirt he excavated by way of creating this little fiasco.
Gerardo showed up with two of his slaves (how does he pay these guys on what he charges? He must have something on them!). They pulled all the ankle-twisting rocks up from Richard’s stupid “river of rock” and used them to reinforce the berms around the citrus trees. They shoveled the crushed-granite top dressing off the area around the ditch Richard’s guys excavated, shoveled it off the mounds of dirt they left, hauled the dirt over to the ditch, filled up the ditch with said dirt, stomped it down, filled with more dirt, stomped it down, regraded the yard manually (this is what is called a “Mexican grader”…heaven help them), spread crushed-granite top dressing over the repaired area (you do not want to KNOW what a cubic foot of crushed granite weighs, to say nothing of a cubic yard), and finally spread the remaining crushed granite over what remained of Richard’s mounds, which wasn’t much by the time these guys were done.
I paid Gerardo about twice what I thought he’d ask. That is about half of what his and his guys’ labor is worth. I wonder if he would be insulted if, for next winter’s Christmas gift, I paid his tuition for the Spanish-language Master Gardener’s Class at the Desert Botanical Garden. Probably. At any rate, it would be counter-productive: six weeks in that thing, and he’d come away knowing what he actually could earn for his services.
My yard is now back. It is now possible to carry the trash out to the alley without risking a broken ankle. The dogs can now walk across the backyard without risk of incurring a vast veterinary bill. Once again they have a space in which to chase balls and flying toys and each other. Enough of Richard’s rock-flled ditch survives to serve as a half-assed version of a French well, probably reducing this summer’s patio flood by about 50 percent.
The man’s a saint.
With all that editing work….maybe you can quit your adjunct gig!
That very thought entered my hot little brain about 20 minutes ago. Departmental admin called to say enraged mother was on the phone: her little darling got a D in Eng 102 and is challenging the grade. I go online to check this:
a) in the Excel version of the grade sheet I downloaded from Canvas, she had a semester score of 98% (this is a kid who is obsessive about getting her work in on time and, to boot, happens to be a competent writer), and
b) the District’s system has taken down the grade sheets, so I can’t tell exactly how that error got entered or whether I’ve somehow given half a dozen kids the wrong scores or whether some ninny got this kid’s A or what.
In theory, I should have entered an A for this kid, and no error could easily have been made, since hers is the last name on the roster. I double-checked the grades I entered THREE TIMES, and so I fail to understand how this happened.
Now I have to spend two hours schlepping up to the GD campus and dorking around with paperwork to fix this. Like I have NOTHING ELSE TO DO TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Really. How could I do without this? Let me count the ways…
That would be $2400 x 6 – 20% = 11,520 ways