Coffee heat rising

When Life Hands You Lemons…Turn Them into Easter Eggs!

by

Yah. Paint those effing lemons!

So here’s a little discovery along those lines: You can cover up your mastectomy scars with TATTS!

Yes. Tattoos, and we don’t mean fake areolas. We mean extravagant, baroque, surrealistic, and truly wonderful artwork that turns something you’d just as soon not look at in the mirror into a delight.

Check out this marvelous “sleeve” that grows into a spectacular vine:

This lady has a reconstruction, and a pretty darned good one, too. Looks mighty convincing, assuming you think women’s breasts should be bulbous, as in the shape of  grapefruit. Nevertheless, even a very good reconstruction can leave you with some nasty scars. The tattoo, with its wonderful organic structure, distracts from the artificialiaty of the reconstruction job and in fact takes advantage of it. If there were any scars there, the artwork covers it exquisitely. To die for!

Here’s one, by the same artist, Vyvyn Lazonga, that appears to be over a no-reconstruction job, covering the straight, flat scar that results when the woman is rather slender and the surgeon is skilled

Now that, I could stand to look at in the morning. Or at any time of day.

For the reconstructed set, look at what the same artist did for this poor soul:

One of the things docs don’t always make clear to women is that autologous reconstruction — wherein blobs of flesh are ripped out of other parts of your body and hung on your chest to create fake boobs — is violent, destructive surgery that leaves you with scars from terrific wounds on your belly, back, fanny, or thighs. This is the “before” shot:

Here’s another very successful and appealing decoration of an unreconstructed mastectomy:

Personally, I decided to elect a double mastectomy so as to avoid becoming lopsided — out of concern about effects on posture and hoping to avoid aggravating the chronic back pain. But as a matter of fact, a design like this could overcome at least one of those concerns.

Here’s my kinda woman:

She looks like she’s close to my age, and she’s not afraid of anything. Don’t you love it?! That gecko is as perfect as perfect can get. And she looks great.

There are many more to be seen at Oddee.com and at SheKnows.com. Also — wouldn’cha know? — there’s an app for that.

From what I understand, before getting a boob tatt you need to wait a year or two after the surgery, to be sure the incisions are fully healed and everything has settled down.

Besides finding an artist who can actually do these amazing things (how to find her?), your main concern with choosing a tattoo is to address the risk of infection. The inks are injected into your skin, through the epidermis (the outer part that sheds or peels off when you get a mild sunburn) and into the dermis. Obviously, that procedure poses some risk of transferring pathogens, whether bacterial skin infections or hepatitis, a potentially lethal viral infection.

However, there are ways to maximize safety. The Mayo gives you quite an earful on the subject, plenty of useful guidelines on that site. Consumer Reports advises on what to look for and how to insure the safest procedure. The FDA, not surprisingly, inveighs against the practice, but the Washington Post reports that by and large it’s considered reasonably safe.

But if you’re scared — or just not so sure how it would look — you can get fake, temporary tattoos. Obviously, these are not going to be as gorgeous as the real thing custom-designed by an in-the-flesh (heh!) artist. But they could at least give you a clue about how a real tatt would work on your particular body.

Images:

Pink sleeve and vine: Vyvyn Lazonga, found at Ad Agency Jumps on Tattoo Bandwagon
Morning glories over flat scar, Vyvyn Lazonga, found at Tattoo Art 101: To Cover Up or Not to Cover Up.
Vine around the belly, Vyvyn Lazonga (I think–apologies if this is wrong), found at Tattoo Art 101: To Cover Up or Not to Cover Up.
Pre-vine belly: ibid.
Flower and vine over single mastectomy: Found at Tattoo Road Trip via Fifteen Most Amazing Mastectomy Tattoos — sorry, I can’t find the artist’s name at either site.
Grand lizard: Jane Fox, found at Tattooists Turn Scars into Butterflies; again, no artist’s name seems to be provided, at least not that I can find.

Car Shopping

by

Toyota_Venza_--_NHTSA_2So this afternoon while cruising back into town after a meeting with a graphic designer, I decide to get off the I-17 at Bell Road, where there’s a long strip of car dealerships. The Toyota dealership up there is significantly less sleazy and more customer-friendly than the mid-town outfit, and I want to test-drive the Venza.

After lengthy standing around and gassing with the sales guy, this comes to pass. As a matter of fact, I get to drive both both the four-banger and the six, the salesman (being male) having decided that the Little Woman couldn’t possibly tell the difference.

Well, this little old lady can. And yeah, I still do prefer the six. Heh heh…50 to 90 in less time than it takes to draw a deep breath.

I like the Venza. It’s a pleasant car, modestly luxurious, sort of like a tall, bloated Camry. But I found myself thinking the same thing that I think about the newer Camry: it’s cramped in there.

Maybe it’s not the car; maybe it’s me. After fifteen years of driving a Sienna, maybe I’ve just become spoiled to all that extra space.

One other thing I didn’t care for about the Venza — or about the Tacoma pickup — is that when the back seats fold down, they don’t fit flush against anything. A gap remains between the folded-down seat back and the floor…and that gap is big enough for a corgi to fall into. Or for a bigger dog to stumble into and break a leg. Thanks, but no thanks.

I looked at a Sienna on the lot. Very nice. It doesn’t seem to have undergone much of a redesign since the 2000 model I’m still flogging across the roads. EXCEPT…it’s now billed as an eight-passenger vehicle. That would mean they must have an extra bench seat at the back, or else they’ve installed two more captain’s chairs. That presumably would make the vehicle longer than mine, which about fills up the garage. Since my washer & dryer are in the garage, the Sienna I’ve got is about as long as a vehicle can be and still fit in there.

The Sienna’s seats can be removed. And when you do that — as I’ve done with three of the four back seats in mine — you end up with a VAST cargo space. It really is awesome. You can carry just about anything in the back of a Sienna once you’ve taken out the seats. And it’s flat, so you can either let a dog run around in there or you can pack in a couple of dog crates (more than a couple, actually).

So I may go back later and revisit the Sienna. In a way, it’s a perfect compromise between a pickup and a passenger vehicle: plenty of room to haul gear and critters, and yet a comfortable ride.

Heh. Maybe I really do want a pickup. All that business about the proposed Ram 1500 was a bit of a joke. But…hey. The Ram has a crew cab with back seats that fold up, leaving you with a large interior space to stash dog cages or loose dogs, to say nothing of whatever other junk you’d like to haul around without leaving it out for passing sticky fingers. Plus its back seats are said to be comfortable with plenty of leg room and the ride is said to be car-like.

Still. It’s awfully large. And the price is high.

Not at all crazy about the Toyota’s dashboard. Honest to God. I do not want to go back to school for a bachelor’s in aviation technology to learn to drive the damn car. There is just too much computerized clutter in that thing.

For one thing, I personally do not need or want an animated electronic map. I know which way is north. And I rarely get lost.

I’m sure the GPS map distraction would be handy if you lived in the older cities of the East. But if you live anyplace in the Southwest that’s been heavily influenced by Mormons, then you live in a city or town that’s laid out in a grid. North/south; east/west. Such a city is extremely easy to navigate, and it’s almost impossible to get lost, unless you get into one of the ill-designed suburbs with swirling, serpentine residential streets.

Nor do I wish to have to point and click or tap a screen to operate the radio — one that offers an image of real radio controls. Why can’t I just have a real radio? Why can’t I have analogue everything, come to think of it? I don’t want to have to fiddle with a computer to turn on the air conditioner or unlock the doors.

Please. All I need is a key to turn the thing on (a button is cute, but…why?), a switch to turn the heat and air-conditioner on and off, a switch to turn the headlights on and off, a switch to lock and unlock the doors, a button to open and close the windows, a switch to turn on the radio, and a dial to tune in my favorite NPR and cowboy stations and no I do not need and am not going to pay for satellite radio.

What a curmudgeon, huh?

Maybe what I really need is a horse.

A Modern Massacre of the Innocents

by

This Christmas, as we often do, our choir sang William Stopford’s version of Lully Lulla, the Coventry Carol. A survival from a medieval mystery play, the carol tells the story of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which we are told that King Herod ordered the slaughter of all boy children under the age of two in Bethlehem.

Some scholars believe this episode never happened. Indeed, such is the story’s horror that one would like to imagine no king, no leader of men and women could possibly be capable of such a thing. But of course we know human nature well enough to know exactly the opposite is true.

Over at Daily (W)rite, Damyanti Biswas’s consistently interesting blog, we find a cri de coeur and an empathetic declaration of humanity over the Taliban’s mass murder of children in a Pakistani school. Her words are well said.

When we began to rehearse Lully Lulla, it was all I could do to keep from weeping, so vividly did it bring to mind this latest horror. If the Biblical story itself is fable, so be it. Yet it’s emblematic: it tells the sorry story of humanity’s repeated outrages, of massacres of innocents down through the ages. After 2015  years, we don’t seem to have changed much, as a species.

“Why Am I in the English Department?”

by

You recognize the allusion, of course. Hint: Mark Harris.

The question of the day, to be more specific, is why WAS I in the English Department? What on earth would possess any sane human being with a sliver of a normal sense of self-preservation to get a FREAKING Ph.D IN ENGLISH????????  What part of “you will never be able to get a decent job that will not leave you tearing your hair” can such a person fail to understand?

Today I engaged eleven years of advanced university education for EIGHT HOURS, trying to untangle the formatting mess left by yet another MS Wyrd crash and then doing things like searching “[any digit] + blank space + a” trying to find every reference to a time of day in 272 single-spaced pages so as to regularize format for each one, roughly according to Chicago style. With curlicues to make allowances for the author.

[Why would I do such a wacko thing? Because AU has written times of day as N a.m., N am, N AM, N:nn a.m., N:nn am, and NN AM. And so on. These all need to be regularized, made to follow the same style.]

So, here’s how this came down:

Last night around 11 p.m., I stumble away from the computer.

This morning around 8:30, I come back to the project. When I turn on the computer, I find a message: Word had to shut down.

Again?!?

This is a constant thing with MS Wyrd: for no good reason that anyone, human or silicon, can figure out, Word will crash. Out of the effing blue.

But this is something new, or so it seems: the program has gone down after I clicked Open-Apple > Sleep.

Fortunately, only three files were open at the time of the crash, one of them very short. Two are easy to restore.

Then we have 272 pages of client disquisition.

He is an articulate client who pays handsomely. And on time. An interesting man. The sort of client for whom one pines to do well.

The restored back-up file comes up and seems not to have lost much data (shouldn’t have: I saved before putting the computer to sleep).

No. It hasn’t lost data. Au contraire. It’s ADDED data.

Every. single. paragraph has been reformatted: “Not superscript/subscript,” proudly advertised in Word Track Changes.

Huh?

Not a single footnote number was ever changed (on my part) from superscript to anything else. And nary a subscript character appears among a single word filling those 272 pages.

These changes are all intertwined with hundreds of edits — I’ve already read 100 pages, and every page has changes on it: at least a few and usually quite a few.

The only way to get rid of the phantom changes is to click “Accept.” If you reject the change, then it converts the copy to superscript!

There seems to be no way to search “superscript” or “superscript/subscript.” The list of edits doesn’t come up.

And — inconsistently, with no rhyme nor reason — in some paragraphs if I highlight the graf and click “accept all,” Wyrd keeps the tracked edits in place. But in some, it accepts all edits. That won’t do, because Client needs to see the changes I’ve made.

On average, each page has about ten of these “Not superscript/subscript” commands.

No joke: that means something like TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED AND TWENTY spurious tracked changes to delete!

Some beach!

Shortly I figure out that I can go from the end of the file toward the last edited page and click “accept all” over batches of paragraphs. This isn’t very satisfactory, because I’ve done a number of global searches and replaces, and I really don’t want to lose those. So even though some of these “accept” commands work to get rid of the “not superscript/subscript” things, I have to watch carefully and Ctrl-Z to undo and manually fix each erroneously accepted “not superscript/subscript” command, ONE at a painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing TIME.

This only partly lengthy procedure leaves about 100 fully edited pages to go through, ONE painstaking, mind-numbing, hair-tearing, goddamn infuriating command at a TIME.

Along about three in the afternoon, I find  myself revisiting the question of whether I should shut down the editorial business.

I mean, why am I doing this?

If I wanted to be a typist, I’d hire out as a virtual assistant. Oh, hell. If I hired out as a virtual assistant, I’d make a helluva lot more than I earn as a high-test editor, because there’s one helluva lot more demand for virtual assistants. Some woman at the last meeting of the West Valley Writers group I attended dasted to ask me if I’d type her manuscript.

{sigh}

If I charged enough by the page, I’d make almost as much as I make editing content.

I can’t charge the client for work created because my computer crashed. So today I’ve spent a good six hours working for free.

Do I hate reading freshman comp drivel more than this?

I hate reading freshman comp drivel a lot.

Quite a lot.

But more than this?

Possibly not.

If I took on two extra adjunct courses from the Great Desert University, which pays a Ph.D. almost a grand more than the junior colleges do, I’d earn as much per year as the S-corp earns from my editorial efforts. Actually, all told I’d earn about $3,000 more than that.

It would be miserable, of course. I’d have to hold out for face-to-face sections, which I truly loathe. GDU has lifted all caps from online sections, meaning you can end up with 120 students or more in a writing-intensive course. How on earth would you ever handle any such thing? You couldn’t assess papers. You couldn’t even make the faintest pass at trying to teach. All you could do is rubber-stamp.

Ethically, there’s a limit.

But maybe there’s a limit to this other stuff, too.

Teaching, as miserably paid as it is, provides the only steady, predictable income I have other than Social Security, which is nowhere near enough to live on. The junior-college courses plus the Social Security just about cover most of my expenses, except for property taxes, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance. If I drew down only enough to cover those latter gouges, I’d be OK. One or two more courses, paid at university rates, could mean that I wouldn’t have to use retirement savings at all. Not as long as I could mount a course on a CMS.

So. Why am I doing this?

Why am I not in the English Department?

Zombified…but Yogafied!

by

Managed to get almost nothing done today, other than scribbling a post for Writers Plain & Simple and recording a couple of videos for the online magazine-writing course.

This was one of those mornings when you wake up tired, for reasons unknown. Ever have those? Guess it must be the result of not sleeping well. Or something.

Fiddled with QuickTime all morning without even noticing the time pass — took some doing to figure out how to make a video of a PowerPoint presentation and get the audio to run with it. Looks pretty good, and now it should be fairly easy to cook up a few more how-to-do-it videos for that bunch.

Back hurting as usual, very annoying. Plus, equally annoying, sitting around fooling with QuickTime meant I never got around to the planned a.m. mile-long walk. Fat fat fat fat…. So I decided to combine an ad-hoc yoga session with the physical therapy exercises. Helped some but certainly didn’t effect a cure.

Along about 1:30, prepared a nice little meal:  salmon with asparagus, dates, and corn tossed with red bell pepper (not bad), all cooked on the propane grill. Continued to diddle away the afternoon, again with modest results. Finally, along about 4:30 I could NOT hold my eyes open one. more. minute.

Stumbled off to bed, accompanied by dogs. Crapped out until dusk.

And now here’s the WEIRD part: when I woke up, the back pain was gone.

Completely, totally GONE!

That is weird, because normally any time spent inert on a bed freezes up the back and creates exuberant pain. So…wow! Several whole hours, pain-free!

Too good for words.

Out with the dogs: one mile, locked between one dog that tries to drag the human  forward up the street and another that tries to drag it backward. That was fun.

Now to edit some copy in front of a Bones rerun.

🙂