Coffee heat rising

Bloggin’ Luv

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Over at 20s Finances, proprietor Corey Frick got my attention with a post suggesting, eloquently enough, that one should get to know one’s professors — assuming one is in college, of course. It’s a good idea, within reason. Most faculty enjoy students and like schmoozing a bit. And sometimes faculty can give you a leg up with a variety of opportunities, such as internships, graduate assistantships, and fellowships. However, it depends on what the faculty member is doing at the time, what priorities are placed on job performance (teaching is often low on the evaluation totem pole), and whether the person is actually an employee or is an adjunct contract worker. Adjunct faculty often have no place to meet with students, and pay is so low that any work done outside the classroom amounts to free labor. And meeting with students is a form of work. Also, there are circumstances in which it can be unprofessional for faculty to “hang out” with students.

Here’s a very nice rumination from Revanche at A Gai Shan Life on the subject of charity and generosity. As a tightwad and the daughter of a fine artist of tightwaddery, I find it difficult to think clearly about this…the bag lady syndrome tends to get in the way. I’m willing to volunteer my time and talents to certain causes, but I really don’t like giving money. One reason for that is indoctrination by my father, whose mother forked over her entire inheritance — the inflation-adjusted equivalent of something over a million dollars — to scam artists and a questionable church. My father was left with an abiding distaste for organized religion and was dead set against charitable giving of any kind. In his memory, I’m pretty damn skeptical about giving money to causes, myself.

* * *

Dayum. Pup just damn near drowned in the swimming pool!

Wet bluejeans sure are heavy…

Oh well.

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Where were we?

Revanche’s reflection about charitable giving and attitudes thereunto inspired another post on the subject over at I Pick Up Pennies, one that segues into a fugue on bag lady syndrome.

And speaking of good works, you’ve gotta read this amazing story at Asian Pear!

There’s a great post at 101 Centavos about stupid interview questions job applicants have been known to ask. Heeee! If you’ve ever been in a position to hire, you know these make some of your interviewees look smart…

Crystal at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff never, ever ceases to amaze me. This pair, IMHO, is the ultimate PF blogger’s role model.

Along the same lines, Mr. & Mrs. Planting Our Pennies also take stock of their finances. Very nice. Everyone who has money in the market seems to be feeling pretty good about things these days!

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan is doing reasonably well with the dividend income, too.

LOL! I almost fainted when I saw last month’s Fidelity statement…the crazy thing earned over 23 grand! In one month, enough to support me for a year, when combined with Social Security. More than enough, come to think of. I try not to get too exercised about those statements, though: next month it could just as easily show a $23,000 loss. 🙄

Here is a highly entertaining — and amazing — story at DQYDJ, occasioned by some wacky speculation about the possibility of the Russians having some fun manipulating US treasury debt. The figures boggle the brain.

Like 101 Centavos’ “Fish Wraps,” nicoleandmaggie’s round-ups can be too much fun. Definitely check this one out.

The Frugal Scholars are engaged in a bizarre saga with what appears to be a demented dentist’s staff. You need to scroll back through the site to get the whole, strange story. I dunno…if it were me, their most recent rather polite letter to this outfit would be emanating from my lawyer. But then…I tend to go around with my .45 strapped to my waist.

A very funny rant recently appeared at Donna Freedman’s Surviving and Thriving. The story’s good, and so are some of the comments. 😀

Back in New Zealand, NZ Muse has landed a job she loves; Mr. NZ Muse is still searching and wondering whether to hold out for The Dream Job or to take whatever comes along.

Money Beagle surveys the several important things in the Beagle empire that need a checkup. And how, brother! The pool pump just went out here: that’ll be $1500.

At Streets Ahead Living, Tara posts an entertaining rant about entitlement…or the illusion of it.

Here’s a word to the wise about multi-level marketing from Mrs. Accountability.

Pup is waking up from a long nap following her trauma, so I guess it’s time to run around. Bye!

 

 

 

 

Thank You, Sir

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Don’t know if you ever read the obits in your local or national paper. If you don’t, you should. They contain some of the most interesting and significant reporting of our time.

Here’s one that you you need to know about. Every now and again a person comes into this world that all of us should thank. A person whose presence all of us should be grateful for. Col. Mize was one of them.

Know a veteran? Don’t just stand there. Thank him or her for the service.

The Joys of Living in the Low-Rent District

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So I’m cruising home from points north and west, passing through a meth-head–infested slum that borders the canal to the north of the ’hood. My face itches. Again. Couple weeks ago, the dermatologist remarked that this particular kind of annoying itch is often caused by an overgrowth of the yeasts cells that naturally inhabit your skin. Not the kind, he said, that infects women, but just the ordinary everyday flora of the face that for one reason or another get out of hand. An inexpensive solution, he added, is simply to wash your face with Head & Shoulders shampoo, the stuff people use for itchy dandruff, which is caused by the same little critters.

This is not the type of woo-woo eco-friendly organic stuff sold at places like Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, and Whole Foods. While it may be available at Costco, I feel no inclination to buy a lifetime supply when I have no idea whether it’ll work. Nor have I felt any urge to make a special trip to the Safeway or to the run-down Albertson’s nearby.

Went into a Walgreen’s on the way back into town from Scottsdale last week. But there was only one little guy at the checkout, all alone in the store from what anyone could tell. Ten or twelve people were standing in line; some nut at the front was arguing with the fellow. Give the kid an average of two minutes per customer to move people through: that would be a twenty-minute wait. At an optimistic one minute per customer, we were still looking at 10 minutes of standing in line. No thanks. I put the junk back and left.

Okay. So there’s the backstory.

On the way homeward through the slum, I pass a CVS, a joint I patronize on rare occasions. It’s clean and usually has some version of whatever you need. This day I need a) a L’Oréal mascara wand, the kind with the white undercoat on one end and the black stuff on the other end; b) a bottle of non-aerosol hair spray; and c) the proposed Head & Shoulders.

In the make-up department, they do carry L’Oréal, but they do not carry mascara in that brand. Ohhhkayyy…

Now I search the shampoo aisle for a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and I can’t find it.

Huh? What kind of drugstore doesn’t carry dandruff shampoo?

I find a stockboy and ask him where the Head & Shoulders is to be found. He directs me to — get this! — a locked case!

No joke. The dandruff shampoo is kept under lock and key in this store. When I make some remark like “you have gotta be kidding,” he says, “if we don’t lock it up, people steal it.” It crosses my mind to ask how it’s used in the manufacture of meth. But I restrain myself. Who knows? Maybe the locals drink it.

Welp, there’s no such thing as easy: Head & Shoulders now comes in all sorts of vanity versions, not just the anti-dandruff variety. Most of them are just ordinary shampoo with various kinds of conditioners and BS in them.

Foolishly (what was I thinking?) I say, “Which one has the active ingredient?”

Of course, the kid has no clue. He’s not the brightest rhinestone on the cowboy shirt, I’ll tellya that. He says he doesn’t know, but I could go up to the pharmacist — he kindly offers to accompany me, he being friendly as a puppy — and ask which one has it. I say I have other things to do with my time than wait in line at a pharmacy counter to ask what’s in a bottle of dandruff shampoo, and I suggest that reading the ingredients would be a faster way to figure this out.

This possibility has never occurred to the kid. Now he proposes to hand me one bottle at a time of each of about eight or ten variants, so I can study the contents. One at a time. Lest given free access to the shampoo safe I might make off with one, I suppose. Silently, I wonder how the lad ever learned to tie his shoelaces.

Oh well.

I leave without the mascara and without the shampoo, but do pick up the single bottle of spritz-type hairspray in the store. When I get this stuff home, I discover why it was sitting there, all by its lonesome: the squirt nozzle doesn’t work. Somebody else must have brought it back.

And now I’ll have to drive back up there sometime in the next few days and take it back myself.

I imagine this is what it’s like in any retail store that caters to poor folks. Sucks to be poor, doesn’t it?

Puppy Cuteness

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She’s in love with her new Rope Toy: carries it everyplace she goes. Problem is, it’s almost as big as she is!

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Cassie and the new sidekick:

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OMG! And w00t! Great News…

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So this morning it’s off to New Cardiodoc, a fellow whose practice is SO busy he has no time for nonsense.

Since we last met, along about the end of December, I’ve dutifully tracked my blood pressure, every goddamn day. Since diddling away time with a blood pressure monitor is not my favorite activity, it’s been a pain in the tuchus. BUT…the result was a nice little data trove that showed…

a) my monitor calibrated almost perfectly with Young Dr. Kildare’s, suggesting it’s reasonably accurate;
b) the average BP, even with a couple of stress-induced spikes, is 128/75;
c) the average BP when I’m off the sauce is as much as 9 points higher than when I’m on the sauce.

And…and…What’s this spike in December?

That’s where Old Cardiodoc was yelling at me.

What? Why?

I stopped taking the meds he prescribed because I wanted to see what would happen if I lost weight. You’ll recall I lost 30 pounds and started exercising regularly. He flew into a frenzied shitfit.

So…you can identify specific circumstances associated with this and these other two or three spikes?

Yup. They have to do with my annoying work.

Well, hell. New Cardiodoc’s response to all this was that I do not need to be on blood pressure meds.

Do I do upper-body exercise as well as all the walking? No? Well, spring for the cost of a personal trainer: one session should be enough to learn how to do all that’s needed. For hevvinsake, have one drink a day. Two is OK. Three is excessive. Come back in one year. ’Bye!

heh heh heh heh… I’m beginning to like this doctor a lot.

Here’s what I’d say, for general consumption: If you ever have even the slightest doubt about what a doctor says to you, GET A SECOND OPINION!

If the second doc agrees with the first doc, then fine: you have a consensus and a credible diagnosis, even if you don’t like it.

If the second doc disagrees with the first doc, then maybe your suspicions are confirmed. In that case, any other cost to you is decidedly worth it.

😉

Creative Work: Good for Your Health?

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Next week, lhudly sing huzzah, I finally get to go back to the cardiologist for his requested three-month check. Not exactly looking forward to it. But I have some kind of cool stuff to report to him…some anecdotal stuff that’s possibly of interest to the rest of the world.

As you may recall, the bodacious CardioDoc delivered a large litter of kittens when he discovered that I’d discontinued gulping the pills he’d put me on, because three or four weeks into the thing they were still making me so dizzy it was dangerous to drive and I felt at risk of falling in my house, where I happen to live alone, with no one to notice me laying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip. He also tried to convince me that the side effects, of which these were only two, were all in my silly little head.

Despite his sh!t-fit, I still felt doubtful that my blood pressure readings were consistently so high that I should make myself sick by swallowing pills that may or may not be necessary. So I tried another cardiologist.

He said, having viewed the record I’d made of almost daily readings tracking progress on and off the drug, that he did not believe I needed to be on blood pressure meds, but he asked me to continue keeping track and to come back for another consult.

 So…after three months of dutifully pumping up a blood pressure cuff (dutifully checked against the doctor’s equipment) and faithfully recording every measurement every day, a few interesting phenomena emerged out of the fog of data.

First, I do occasionally experience alarming blood pressure spikes. These happen during or shortly after particularly stressful events or periods: a long, long hassle with a difficult, frustrating, ENRAGING editorial project; a visit to the doctor’s office (I just hate going to the doctor!); day-long stretches of ditzy, stressful work; a couple of days of drinking too much (three drinks in a day is too much for me). These subside, and in between the readings are in the normal range, and in fact fairly low for someone my age.

 Second, swearing off the sauce, weirdly, does not cause my blood pressure to drop. In fact, it seems to do the opposite. I hopped on the wagon shortly before Lent started, figuring this would be a good little Lenten sacrifice. Heh. What that has now done is provide data showing average BP on and off the sauce.

Five days off the sauce in March produced an average BP of 127/74, and that included a stress-induced spike of 140/80.
Five days on the sauce in February and late February: 118/69.

 Say what? Must be a fluke!

Trying again: five days on the sauce in early February: 126/75. Not great, but still less than the teetotaler’s average. That’s nice. I guess whenever Lent is over, it’ll be safe to go back to my evil ways.

But there’s more: These figures are showing something else that’s much more interesting.

Lately I’ve been working on another novel. This has caused me to spend several hours, whenever I could break them loose from paying work, at  creative writing. This is not necessarily easy work. At one point last week it took two days to grind through about three paragraphs.

That notwithstanding, every time I’ve taken the BP after an hour or more of living in a fantasy world and writing about it, the readings have been way down. I mean, like 107/69, 110/68, 112/67…wow!

D’you suppose there’s a connection?

I find I feel a great deal more relaxed after choir rehearsal, even on an evening that follows a perfectly crazy-making day. Haven’t tested the BP directly after walking in the door from rehearsal (it’s usually late and I want to go to bed, not fiddle with the annoying and uncomfortable gadget).

Huh. Kinda stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’re doing something that makes you crazy and you do it all the time because (arrrhhhh!) you do it for a living, the stress load would tend to push your blood pressure skyward. Substitute something you find satisfying (even it it’s also fairly uphill work), and maybe you’d feel less stressed. Ergo, maybe those BP figures would come back to earth.

I wonder what would happen if all you did was creative work? That is, work of the kind that you enjoy because it’s challenging but satisfying, and because you find it fun or enjoyable. To use a current trope, work of the kind that puts you in “the zone,” where you’re not even aware of time passing.

The bead-stringing, for example, doesn’t fall into that category, at least not for me. It’s just another ditzy and frustrating activity…hours of focusing on something that’s so boring it glazes your eyes and that often has to be undone and done all over again.

But the fiction writing, even if I have to go back and rewrite – and I do commonly write and rewrite and rewrite again – is utterly absorbing, in a pleasurable way. It is, in effect, a form of daydreaming.

Come to think of it, I started writing the first novel during a period when something was needed to distract from a great deal of psychic pain. I had recently divorced and was discovering that was evidently a mistake – or if it wasn’t a mistake, the temperature out of the frying pan wasn’t any cooler than it was inside the pan. I was living with a guy who was driving me screaming nuts, and I didn’t seem to be able to get free of the relationship. Though I had a full-time job, pay was low and I suffered from bag-lady syndrome in a big way – probably for good reason. My father had disowned me. My son refused to speak to me. And the work and politics that come with an academic job are, shall we say, not much fun.

Today I’m certainly not wrestling with that kind of nonstop, day-and-night distress. I no longer need anything to spirit me away from a crazy-making job and a crazy-making personal life. But nevertheless, apparently dreaming up a fictional world, reviving old characters, creating new ones, and putting all that in action is a relaxing thing to do. De-stressing, we might say. Maybe even objectively stress-reducing.

You know, if I could make money off these things – and it wouldn’t have to be much money – I would cheerfully quit the editorial labor, drop the teaching, and spend the rest of my days living in various fantasy universes. If it’s true, as it appears, that one needs a great deal less money than one thinks, I really wouldn’t have to earn much on these things…maybe a net ten grand a year. Peanuts!

If I were doing this all the time – four to six hours a day – I’ll bet I could crank two of these things a year. Over the course of say, three years at that rate, one would build up a backlist of self-published e-books that just might return that much. Hm.

Let’s say, for the sake of a round number, that you netted $2 apiece on an electronically published novel. To net $10,000, you’d need to sell 5,000 copies. But if you had six books out, then to generate 5,000 sales you’d need to sell only 833 copies of each book. Per year, that is. And that, in the strange alternative world that is Amazon, may not be unreasonable.

Wonder if you can have your low blood pressure and eat it, too…