Coffee heat rising

Keyboard: The outcome

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So how’s that external keyboard workin’ for ya? So far, the outcome is OK. Of course, juggling external peripherals is not ideal. But Apple has made that true in spades by killing off the USB port, requiring you to buy an adapter that you have to plug into Apple’s version of a port connection. The one I got — far better reviewed on Amazon than the one the guy at the Apple store tried to sell me — works loose at the slightest jiggle. Move the computer aside so you can get up from your easy chair and the damned dongle disconnects. And of course, that disconnects the wireless doodad, which disconnects the keyboard.

But that is not insurmountable.

As I sit here, I remember more and more wonders of the PC keyboard, wonders that do not exist on the Mac keyboard. For example, the “Home” and “End” keys. How have I managed to do without those all these years? I used to use them all the time. When you take on the Mac, it’s scroll-up-scroll-up-scroll-up-scroll-up… or scroll-down-scroll-down-scroll-down-scroll-down-scroll-down… ad nauseum. The Home, End, PageUp, and PageDown keys on this thing operate with no extra holding down of function keys, no farting around with a touchpad, no learning of arcana, no guesswork.

Created a table. Found the keyboard navigates cells and rows in the normal way, with the directional arrows. The “formula” arrow works nicely to add up a column of figures in a table. However, the presence of the keyboard seems to disable the “formula” function in Word. Oh well.

The function keys that run along the top of the row of number keys work in interesting ways. They seem not to correspond with their icons. One that runs the spellcheck is marked unenlighteningly with the back of an envelope. F5, which shows an open file folder with a curvey arrow, operates the Find, Replace, and Go To functions. Hot damn! These are not available on the Mac keyboard — to operate those in Wyrd, you have to enter a keyboard command.

Forgot how much I’d missed the “go to” button.

F4 pastes memorized copy — in Word, anyway. Not in WordPress. Hm. But Windows-V (which is Ctrl-V, which is Command-V) works in all programs, so why you would need a dedicated command key that works only in Microsoft programs: ????

F1 deletes a piece of copy permanently, such that Windows-Z will not bring it back. That’s odd.

F12 is Save As. F11 is a shortcut to the desktop, great for hiding whatever you’re playing with from the boss. F10 reduces the size of a window. F9 brings up a tableau of all open windows, which is extremely kewl.

If there’s a way to activate the function key that apparently is supposed to make the numbers pad work as a calculator, I haven’t figured it out yet. The would also be, well…beyond kewl.

But at least, thank GOD, it has a number pad. The Mac keyboard does not, and that is a considerable aggravation. I just hate having to stretch fingers to reach the keys in the topmost row, or else have to take my hands off the letters keys and hunt & peck for numbers.

The volume and audio on/off keys work swimmingly. Other keys apparently meant for Web cruising or controlling audio or video functions remain incomprehensible.

Not crazy about the “feel” of the keyboard keys, which aren’t as comfortable as the wired Microsoft board. But they still aren’t as cockamamie as the Mac’s keyboard. Occasionally I have  a little trouble hitting the keys straight on, but still is much better than the MacKeys that don’t fit your fingers.

That struck me as weird, because they don’t look all that much different. Maybe, I thought, it’s the “ergonomic” shape?

Well, no. It absolutely is the keys’ size and the distance between them.

MacBook: Letter key width: 4 pica; Distance between keys: .5 pica
Microsoft: Letter key width: varies, 3-5 pica; Distance between keys: 1.5 pica

Apparently because of the MS keyboard’s “ergonomic” curviness, the letters G, H, B, and N are wider. Seems to have no effect on typing efficiency, though.

The rodent is surprisingly easy to use. And it loses the aggravations inherent to the Mac’s touchpad. Maybe because I used a rodent for so many years B.MB. (Before MacBook), it seems less annoying to use than the damn touchpad.

The touchpad does unpredictable things because of the cutesy “gestures” Apple builds in. For example, all of a sudden it will decide the program you’re in is no longer active, so you have to go down to the bar hidden at the bottom of the screen and click on Firefox or Word or whatever program the damn thing has decided you don’t really want to be in. Or surprise! What’s on the screen is enlarged by a factor of ten or shrunk to Lilliputian size. Or the “gesture” that’s supposed to do X, Y, or Z does nothing. Or worse, does A, B, or C.

And I’d forgotten how handy the little roller thing is on the mouse. You don’t have to disengage your brain from whatever you were doing to scroll up and down the page. SO much less annoying!

Will this be a BIG improvement? Probably not titanic. But an improvement it surely will be.

Magazines lost

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Yeah, I know: we still have magazines. Just look at any magazine rack in any supermarket. But they’re not like magazines used to be. Most focus on some narrow topic — quilting or tech or whatever lights your candle. Hardly any are general-interest or news magazines. The few that remain of those are mostly fluff, froth, and advertising — their editorial wells are, shall we say, exceptionally shallow. Magazines went out, along with newspapers, when the Internet came in. They were already struggling with the costs of printing and fulfillment and with the distraction of television. But they drowned in the tsunami that is the Web. And when we lost magazines, we lost a lot more than pictures and light content: we lost an informed public.

What, you ask, brings us this rumination?

Friend of mine, a bright and reasonably educated youngish woman with experience of the world, wondered aloud on Facebook why some people are so vociferously opposed to a national ID card. I remarked that no doubt the idea brings to mind Nazi “papers.” She responded with “I don’t understand.” Two of her followers — moi included — leapt to inform her that the Nazis used a national ID card to track and help trap members of the various groups they wished to extinguish.

I thought how odd that people wouldn’t know that!

But then realized it’s not odd at all. If I learned that in school, I don’t recall learning it there. I learned it from magazines like Life and Saturday Evening Post.

Back in the Dark Ages, magazines published actual content, not just fluff and advertising. Among the things they published were history stories. I remember, for example, learning about the Hindenberg disaster from a terrifying photo spread in the Saturday Evening Post. We learned about Nazi extermination programs from Life, the Post, Time, and even Newsweek, complete with graphic photos of concentration camps. And we learned about how the Nazis operated and what they intended to do once they took over Europe and waypoints. We also learned about Japanese imperialism and what they were up to in their Pacific venues.

Sure, they also published plenty of froth about movie stars and pop singers. But major national and international periodicals did not fail to include solid content presented in an interesting, easy-to-understand, memorable way. Even women’s magazines published real content. Have you picked up a Lady’s Home Journal lately? A given issue contains nothing but advertorial (much of it unmarked) and advertising. It was not always so: Lady’s Home Journal, McCall’s, and their sister publications used to carry real articles about real subject matter.

You didn’t learn the facts behind life in your present society from television. Few documentaries appeared on the boob tube — which was why Newton Minow called it “a vast wasteland.” What we live in now is exactly that — multiplied by some astronomical factor on the Internet, a place where attention span shrinks to secondes. Only in the absence of magazine journalism, we have nothing to take up the slack.

That is why we have voters who do not understand what is wrong with the proclamations of people like Trump and Pence. What we lost was an educated public of adults with common sense and the ability to set current events in their historic context. If things continue as they are going along this shameful trail of ignorance, we soon will lose the Republic itself.

And that is a big loss.

De-accessioning As Frugalist Strategy

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Getting rid of stuff feels so good! Out with it! Seriously: one tried and true frugalist strategy is simply not to buy things you don’t really need. Another, though, is getting rid of stuff that you no longer need. (Or…ahem…maybe never needed in the first place.)

Case in point: the beloved Pawley Island hammock that has resided in the backyard since I moved into this place. Actually, I bought it in the old house, quite some years before I moved out. Since I was there about 12 or 14 years, I’d probably had it there about 8 or 10 years. That house had park-like landscaping full of mature trees, and so I could hang it between a big old olive tree and a silk oak, one of the messiest trees known to personkind.

Loved loafing in that hammock. Once it came over here, though, I had no place to hang it. Satan and Proserpine (the previous owners) were great at DIY interior redecorating, but they simply did not know what to do with any space not under roof. The backyard had almost no trees. So I bought one of those arc-shaped hammock stands. Like this…

Expensive as all get-out. Took three men and a horse to put it together. Too heavy to move without said three men and the horse. But once in place, it worked fine.

I’ve been in this house for 14 years now. So…that hammock lasted about twenty years before it finally rotted in the sun and rain and fell apart under my weight. No kidding. This: a couple weeks ago. No problem hauling off the hammock. But the wooden stand itself was a challenge.

Thought about replacing the hammock, to the tune of $150. Then thought…why?

Gerardo came by Saturday with his crew. They were happy to take it away. They did deconstruct it (the only way they could get it into their truck). Whether they’ll reconstruct it, I don’t know. But with four guys there, I expect one of them will cheerfully accept the donation.

SDXB used to say that throwing out stuff he was no longer using made him feel lighter. And there’s something to that. In the old house, the thing hung over a patio, so I could walk up to it bare-footed. Here, it stood in the middle of a field of quarter-minus. That’s very fine gravel. It pokes your feet, and if that doesn’t poke your feet, the sharp debris the devil-pod tree drops surely will. So to lay on the hammock, first I had to put my shoes on! Since I’m usually barefoot in the house, shoes are usually lost somewhere. Having to track them down made hammock-swinging more trouble than it was worth.

Hence, the contraption’s near-abandonment.

I’m so glad to get that thing out of there. Even though it served its purpose, it took up a phenomenal amount of room. The dogs would go in behind it to do their business, meaning I would have to climb in behind it to clean up after them. One fewer thing to have to take care of! The yard looks better without the clutter, and now there’s nothing over there for the hose to get caught up on.

Deciding to get rid of the arc stand, which was approaching decrepitude, too, meant I saved a hundred and fifty bucks.

No. Make that more like three hundred bucks. The stand itself was getting pretty weather-beaten and would soon need replacing…and those things cost $150, sans hammock.

There’s no way I’d get another $300 worth of use out of a new hammock and new fancy stand. At the old house, I certainly got my money’s worth out of the hammock. But here, for the reasons above, I’ve rarely used it.

How does that translate into a general Frugality Rule of Thumb?

Well, when something gives up the ghost, delay replacing it. Don’t hurry right out and buy a new one right this minute. Put off a new purchase long enough to see whether you can comfortably do without the thing. Maybe you really don’t need it. Maybe you really don’t want it.

And maybe your spirit will be lighter without it.

Keyboards: Back to the Future!

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Here I am typing this post on an antique Microsoft Curve ergonomic keyboard, plugged into the stupid dongle on the idiotically designed (and idiotically expensive) MacBook Pro that I shouldn’t have bought a year or so ago.

The Macbook has a number of issues, most of which you eventually get used to. But the biggest issue — in my opinion — is the dreadful design of the keyboard. While you’re shopping down at the Apple store, the design fails to register with you as dreadful. That is because the changes they’ve made in the damn thing are so subtle they’re barely visible to the naked eye. You need a transparent ruler, an old MacBook, and a new MacBook to tell the difference. Or else you need to sit down and start typing on the thing.

If you’re a touch typist and you type fairly fast, you cannot enter copy without also entering a slew of typos. No matter how carefully (read s-l-o-o-o-w-l-y) you try to hit the keys, you invariably end up with a slew of crazy typos.

For a long while, I assumed this was my own incompetence. I do type very fast — I can type as fast as most people speak, a convenient skill in a journalist who does a lot of phone interviews. Something must be wrong with me, I thought. Have I had a stroke? Apparently not. Am I drunk? No…happens whether or not I’ve had a glass of wine with dinner. Am I senile? Possibly, but you’d think that would affect other motor skills, like driving and painting one’s face…

Eventually I realized that the new MacBook’s keys are wider than the old ones were, by a fraction of an inch. And they’re a fraction-of-a-fraction of an inch more widely spaced. The result of this is that when your fingers aim for a key, you tend to miss by a narrow margin. But miss you do: and that causes you to hit two keys. Hence, if you typed “hence” on the Macbook, you’d get something like “h3ence.”

Over and over and over again…

Yesterday I ran out of patience and resurrected this ancient Microsoft thing. And what a difference! Suddenly I’m typing normally again, not having to backspace every three or four characters to fix typos, not having to proofread copy two or three times to sift out all the errors one misses on a fast read. Hot DAMN!

Of course, you have the problem that Apple and Microsoft operate in parallel universes. What works on a Mac keyboard does not work on a Microsoft-compatible keyboard.

At first I thought I would have to remap the keyboard, which is a project and which, I feared, might gum up the computer’s works intolerably. So I called Apple Support and forthwith reached — can you imagine? — a human being. Explained the problem…he seemed familiar with users’ bitching about the keyboard, interestingly enough. But it is the presence of human beings who actually answer the phone and speak with you in human tongues that keeps me with the Mac.

This guy said there’s no need to remap the keyboard, because the main functions for the Apple already reside in any Microsoft-friendly keyboard. They’re just marked with different names. Thus…the “Command” key is not what you would think — “Control.” Rather, it’s the “Windows” key — of which, like “Command,” there are two, one to the left and one to the right of the space bar. It is also called the “Start” key.

Ohhhh yeah? Tell me more, dude…

The Mac’s “Option” key is Windows’ “Alt” key. Mac’s “Delete” is Windows’ “Backspace.” And obviously, Mac’s weirdly named “Return” key is Windows’ “Enter.”

These function in the standard keyboard combinations, along these lines:

Copy = Start-C
Paste = Start-V
Undo = Start-Z
Redo = Start-Y
Highlight all = Start-A
Delete = Backspace

I’ll be damned.

Not only that, but this keyboard operates Mac functions that didn’t exist, even on a Mac, when the keyboard was built. For example, Alt-Escape will cause the Mac’s Dictation function to read a highlighted passage aloud. Holding down a key will bring up a diacritical, so that — voilà — you don’t have to search for every diacritical in the accursedly busy “Symbols” table.

A-n-n-n-d this keyboard has features that do not exist on a MacBook keyboard…like a number pad, for example. On the new MacBook Pro, the only way to turn sound up, down, on, or off is with the amazingly annoying touchbar, a thing that requires you to take your hands off the keyboard and dork around and dork around to get it to come on and then to operate it. Lo, the dinosaur keyboard still has KEYS that control the sound AND start or stop video and audio play.

Of course, a number of its keys don’t work, or if they do, I haven’t figured out how to activate them. Yet. This keyboard has a set of keys designed to help navigate the Web. Except for the audio keys, those don’t seem to do anything on the Mac. It also apparently has a function that will make the number pad work as a calculator, but that one also doesn’t seem to speak Applese. Too bad. However, just the few things I’ve listed that do work increase functionality and productivity about 98%.

Because of Apple’s inane decision to remove RSB ports from its new computers, using a plug-in keyboard is a nuisance. The damned “dongle” attachment thing doesn’t stay connected — hiccup and it you’ll knock it loose enough to disconnect. Plus of course the reason I have a laptop is to do away with the miles of cables and cords.

However, both Microsoft and Logitech make this very style of keyboard in a wireless version. I’m thinking I’ll get one of those. That will allow me to set the computer on a table next to my easy chair, put the keyboard on my lap and my feet up on the wonted ottoman, and proceed far more comfortably and less crankily with life.

But really, dear Apple…why should your customers have to jump through such stupid hoops to get a fully functional professional-level keyboard?

Amazon the Addictive

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Returning home from an aborted trip to the westside (wherever you’re going in lovely Phoenix, ya can’t get there from here!), I found the door to the front courtyard standing wide open.

Gerardo and his crew were here early in the day, but if they’d left it open, I would’ve noticed it on the way out. Park the tank. Walk into the courtyard, check the front door and windows. No sign of breaking and entering. If anyone tried to get in, that hardened drill-proof lock stopped them. Enter through the garage, call the dogs, check the house: no burglars.

Drat! Never any fun around this place! Oh well.

I figured Amazon must have delivered the RV hose I ordered (the Depot has quit carrying them) and a porch pirate probably lifted it. Once ensconced indoors, called up Amazon’s “orders” menu and found the thing is not supposed to arrive before tomorrow.

When I looked at the list of things I’ve ordered from that place, I was amazed at the number of items!

It is just too damn easy to buy stuff on Amazon.

Or…is it?

Most of this stuff is “need it” items, not “want it” impulse buys. The hose in the backyard, for example, really needed to be replaced. Then: Birthday present for my son…very convenient not to have to drive across the damn city to get it. Crystal deodorant sticks: can’t buy them locally here anymore, not at Walgreen’s, not at Walmart, not at Target, not at Safeway, not at Costco. Bought enough to last the rest of my lifetime, with any luck. Le Creuset teakettle to replace one whose whistle gave up: no doubt one could get it at Williams-Sonoma, but again: wonderful not to have to do battle with traffic to get it. Three hard-copy books: there are no bookstores here anymore, except for one that sells nothing but detective stories. Bottle of bubble-wrap-free loperamide: not available here at all, anywhere.

True, I did NOT need a lifetime supply of diarrhea pills. But what the heck. Now I can give them away to friends. Or go to Mexico once a week from now until I croak over.

The prices seem to be within reason, and with Prime, Amazon sends them “free” (har har!).

When Amazon announced it was going to jack up the price for Amazon Prime, I was given pause. IMHO a hundred bucks a year is probably too much, since their video offerings can’t hold a proverbial candle to Netflix. Another $20 may be more than I want to pay. On the other hand, if you order a steady stream of stuff that you either can’t buy locally or can’t get without driving to Hell & gone and back again, over the course of a year you probably save that much in postage.

I’ll bet I’ve saved at least $20 in Amazon shipping fees since the first of the year. Probably more than that. But add to that the cost of gasoline, wear & tear on the vehicle, and wasted time driving from pillar to post: then you can be pretty sure that “membership” fee is paying for itself.

What think you? Is Amazon Prime worth the up-front cost?

To REALLY retire or not to REALLY retire?

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That is the question.

It’s not so much that I’m all that sick of this self-employment stuff. It’s that the older I get, the lazier I get. And the less I feel like working at ALL. Barf.

Just now The Copyeditor’s Desk, a registered Arizona freaking S-corp, has about $2,000 in outstanding receivables. Among these receivables is one due from a university in Texas that paid through the monumentally faceless Oracle Corporation, which a few days ago sent me a notice saying the check was in the SNAILMAIL. And — get this! — reminding me to be sure it clears their banking institution (or whatever a monumentally faceless corporation engages these days) before trying to use it.

Uh huh. Days have gone by, as you might expect. No sign of this highly unstable and perhaps rubbery check in the mailbox.

Then we have the Chinese clients.

Not that I don’t love the Chinese clients. I do. They’re wonderful and interesting and great to work for. It’s getting paid by universities in China…therein lies the problem. Other countries, you understand — more advanced than the U.S. — no longer transact business with paper checks. They want to transmit payments electronically.

That would be fine if I were using a major international bank to hold my vast empire’s wealth. But I dislike major international banks, because, still living in the mid-twentieth century as I do, I persist unreasonably in expecting (of all things!) some customer service. And I deeply resent being dinged for fees to keep my money in their bank, where it is not in their bank but in investments turning a profit for said bank. Consequently, I use a credit union.

Most credit unions are too small to have a SWIFT number. This means that a Chinese client (usually a major university) has to send an international money transfer, but it has to be done indirectly. That is, they can’t just send the money direct to the credit union. They have to use an international bank, such as Bank of China or hateful Wells Fargo, as an intermediary: they send the money to the giant faceless international bank, and the GFIB sends it to my credit union, extracting a substantial gouge in the process.

This is time consuming, to say nothing of noxious.

No, they will not use PayPal. They are rightfully suspicious of PayPal. As am I. It can be done, but they don’t want to do it and so will tell you that their university will not allow them to do it. Could they pay by Visa? Probably. I haven’t looked into it, because I’m not sure who to ask. Plus I would have to pay to get into a system to make credit-card transactions. Blech.

Truth to tell, because I don’t want to work much, I don’t get paid much. By the hour, my clients pay many times more than colleges and universities pay for adjunct teaching. However, because the minimum-wage teaching gigs are more or less steady work, after all is said and done a couple of classes a semester put as much as or more into my checking account than the editorial work.

This leaves us with the obvious question: Why am I bothering with this?

Plus…frankly, I suspect I get less and less competent the older I get. My agèd secretary, who was a complete dunderhead, used to drive me freaking nuts because she could not figure out the digitized office procedures we had to accomplish tasks that we once did, much faster and much easier, by analog processes. Those analog processes had gone away at the Great Desert University (as in the larger world), and so she had no choice but to try to use the digital upgrades. And what a mess that woman could make when she did try.

Welp. This pot can no longer call that kettle black. I’ve found that I do not want to keep climbing an endless Mt. Everest of a fucking learning curve. I’m sick of trying to figure all this shit out, I’m sick of having it not work no matter how hard you try to make it work, I’m sick of the FUCKING TIME SUCK involved — spending hours to do something that should take ten minutes, every time you turn around.

Today — ah ha! Here it is: the immediate cause of this rant — I went online to pay the corporate and the personal AMEX bills.

The credit union’s bill-pay function, as we’ve found in the past, is problematic: It makes it appear that you’re paying electronically, but behind the scenes sometimes the CU is actually sending a paper check, meaning it takes up to ten days from the pay date for the creditor to receive its money. There’s no rhyme nor reason to this check-paying quirk, and the underlings cannot tell you why they do this and which creditors are likely to be paid by check.

As part of its ongoing learning curve, the CU recently instituted a shortcut to its bill-paying service. Instead of having to proactively click on “Bill Pay,” next to your list of accounts you now see a pane  labeled “Make a Payment.” We are told you can tell — after you’ve jumped through the hoops to schedule and make a payment (which in this new protocol requires more clicks than before) — how payment will be made: look for an icon next to the amount scheduled to pay. Lightning bolt means e-payment; envelope means snail-mail. But…those icons are not visible on the customer’s end. The CSR is unaware of that.

Farting around with this today took SO FUCKING LONG it would have been easier, faster, and infinitely less aggravating simply to have written checks, stuffed them in envelopes, choked up a half-buck apiece (!!!!!!!) in postage, and driven them over to the post office. (No. You can’t put them in your mailbox and flag them for the mailindividual to pick up. That would be insensate. They would be stolen long before the mailperson arrives, which these days is usually sometime after 5:00 p.m.). Half my morning was wasted with the simple chore of trying to pay the goddamn credit-card bills.

Well. Admittedly: I did have to transfer $2,800 from savings to checking to cover the homeowner’s and car insurance. But that took all of about 30 seconds.

So the point here is that this kind of electronic futzing to get simple clerical chores done is

a) endlessly annoying;
b) endlessly time-consuming;
c) endlessly unproductive; and
d) not something on which I wish to spend the limited amount of time left to me on this earth.

I don’t want to learn it. And once learned, I don’t want to do it.

And it is entirely possible that because of my age, I can’t learn it. The issue may very well be more than don’t want to.

Lately it has become painfully evident that I’m no longer competent to do even the chores that I’m (supposedly) good at. Long after editing and proofreading a document, long after sending it off to the client, I will happen to revisit something and discover…holy shit! Glaring errors interposed by me in the form of typos and passages that the computer has dorked up without my noticing it. Obvious inconsistencies or errors on the part of the client that I have inexplicably missed — despite proofreading, despite proofing again behind the computer’s “dictation” function that reads it aloud.

It should be impossible for me to miss these things. But…it is not.

Many of these errors have gotten past me and gone back to the client. That is a freaking menace.

Even in my own creative work, I come across weird stuff: chunks of copy moved…but moved to the wrong place and left there unnoticed. Inconsistencies. Typos. Wackshit stuff that would never have escaped attention even five years ago, to say nothing of ten or fifteen.

Week or two ago, I volunteered to do receptionist work for the church. They have a whole crew who staff the front desk during the weekdays. I should be competent at that: my first full-time real-world job was working as receptionist at a law firm. And I loved it. Best job I’ve ever had, except for the editorial job at Arizona Highways.

After sitting at an experienced person’s elbow for two shifts — six hours, all told — it occurred to me that I cannot remember how to operate the very simple phone. It is like a real switchboard and it is not like a real switchboard. It’s enough not — and staff’s wishes and nonwishes are complex enough — that it’s going to be difficult or maybe even impossible for me to learn how to do it.

Then we have the fact that I’m no longer a cute young girl. Back in the day when I had an acceptable face, no gray hair, and 34-23-36 measurements, my cuteness over-rode the strangeness of my personality. The god’s truth is, one reason I’m not good at marketing books (besides the fundamental laziness) is that I do not do well with people. I annoy them and offend them and do not know how or why.

This has been true since I was a little girl. In grade school, I had no friends. The kids simply hated me. By second grade (no kindergarten in those days), I’d alienated them all — well, except for one little girl who was as weird as I was. She was taken back to the States in the third or fourth grade. Some years later — after we also had come back to the States — I walked into an empty classroom where two girls were fooling with something in a closet. With their backs turned to me, they didn’t see me come in. And they were both going on about how much they hated me. I didn’t even know who they were! Couldn’t have told you their names to save my own life.

My guess is that today I would be “diagnosed” with a mild case of Asperger’s. I don’t get along with people because I don’t read their expressions well, I don’t pick up on their tone of voice well, and little verbal hints they drop often fly right past me.

Which, I suppose, explains why the more I get to know people, the better I like my dog…

These things were overlooked when I was a sexy young woman married (or about to be married) to a prominent lawyer. Today: not so much.

At any rate, I suspect that it’s best if I’m not around other human beings, for their happiness and for mine.

So that leaves, as a money-making gig, adjunct teaching. Online.

I loathe adjunct teaching. I’m not all that fond of teaching when I’m paid a respectable salary. But the sub-minimum wage that adjuncts earn is just plain insulting. After a semester of that stuff, you’re left with the same question: Why am I doing this?

Yeah. Why AM I doing this???