My goodness, it’s nice to be able to loaf in the sack until after the sun comes up! All of the paying work got done toward the end of last week. And now the house is cleaned (and cleaned again), the bookkeeping done, and the mountain of paper shoveled off the desk.
Peace!
Cassie the Corgi has been blowing her coat for the past month, an activity that did not help the predicament caused by my failing to clean house for two months. Vast quantities of dog dunes have been shoveled up and dumped in the trash; the floors vacuumed, mopped, and steam-mopped; the sheets washed and pillowcases ironed; the bathrooms cleaned; the kitchen cleaned; the caked-on grease scoured off the stove; the nonfunctional stove burner repaired. YES!
What could be better?
It looks like the magazine writing course will not make. An enrollment of twelve is required to make it go. A week or so ago eight students had signed up, but since then a couple have withdrawn, and only six remain. And that’ll be fine — I can do without having to wrangle two online courses this semester. The Eng. 102 section will take up the slack if the writing course doesn’t materialize; otherwise income from said wanna-be Writers with a Capital W will come under the heading of “pure gravy.”
At any rate, until such time as I can believe that section will fly, I’m not putting in any more unpaid hours in course prep. LOAF!
Today’s income-inequality rant at The New York Times holds forth on the alleged upward skew of consumer spending — theoretically, as the rich get richer, fewer mass-market appliances and low-end restaurant meals are getting bought, presumably because the rich are getting a whole lot richer and the rest of us are getting a whole lot poorer. “Those consumers who have capital like real estate and stocks and are in the top 20 percent are feeling pretty good,” the reporter quotes a Price-Waterhouse-Coopers exec.
No kidding? If you count the savings drawdown and the Social Security and the teaching income as “earnings,” I’m in the top 50 percent, and I’m feeling pretty good.
O’course, that’s not counting the outrageous amounts the investments earned over the past several months, during the recent rabid bull market. Add just three months of those proceeds into the AGI and you push me into the top 25 percent of US earners. Precious little of that is coming into reach of American Express and its retailer customers, of course — it’s banked against old age. Nor is it to be imagined that those are real figures: I think of that kind of thing as pretend money, easy come-easy go, poker chips on the craps table.
But for the nonce, at least, having made the 2014 drawdown before the hot air started to seep out of the stock market, I’m feeling moderately confident. In 2014, there should be plenty to live on, even if the current spate of outrageous unplanned expenses continues for several more months. Now, 2015 may be a different story. But we’ll get to that when we get to it.
At any rate, this year, thanks to the chair having come up with the online 102 section and my having volunteered serendipitously to take a summer section, teaching income will be more than normal even in the absence of this spring’s maga-writing course.
How on earth does that man do it? He seems to just BE there, every time I need a new way to earn a chunk of money. This has happened time after time. Someone upstairs must have appointed the guy to be my guardian angel.
So…what to do today?
1. Bill the two major clients, a project that will take a while since I haven’t kept up with billing.
2. Update the imaginary map for the novel and ship that off to the artist.
3. Organize the cookbook recipes in a sane sequence.
4. Delete images from Word recipe files; track down the jpegs and save them to a new subdirectory with numbered filenames that will make them appear in the order in which they need to be inserted in the layout.
5. Call the vet; arrange appointment to inspect new pup (just a month or so to go!) and get new shots for Cassie.
6. Figure out a way to ask the vet about how to feed real food to a pup, or when to start.
7. Go for a dog-and-human walk.
8. If any time remains, continue chapter 1 of the novel’s sequel.
Huh. I suppose this means I’m going to have to get up and do something, eh?