Coffee heat rising

The High Cost of Changing Your Life

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Okay, so now that I’ve succeeded in losing 30 pounds, thereby dropping the blood pressure back into the more or less “normal” range, the celebrating is done and reality sets in.

This weight-loss glorioski is costing a lot of money. Videlicet: none of  my clothes fit anymore. And I mean none of them. Underwear included.

Costco sells chintzy little made-in-Asia women’s underpants cheaply enough. But their excuse for a bra? Definitely not worth the (low) price. And, I’d come to realize, now that I was skinny I didn’t even know what size I am now!

If I knew the size, I could order my favorite brand online. But I had no clue.

This meant…oh yes!

The sheer unadulterated horror of a shopping trip for bras!

The male contingent may not be aware of this, but the way most women figure out what size fits, in brassieres, is to go to a fairly upscale store that has a decent lingerie department and have a trained saleslady measure the bod’ and then to try on, with her supervision, a whole bunch of bras in different sizes. It is a “trying” experience in more ways than one. I hate it.

So, it was off to Saks, which carries the preferred brand and often puts it on sale.

Or so it once did. No more!

Saks has gutted its lingerie department. Not only do they no longer carry the pricey brand that is the only brand known to fit me, they no longer carry much of anything. They didn’t have the store’s only two, count’em TWO wire-free bras in the size the saleslady and I figured I would probably fit into.

Wire-free bras are now apparently pretty much a thing of the past.

I hate underwires even more than I hate shopping for bras. They are SO. Fucking. Uncomfortable!!!!!

Those things with the plastic Dixie-cup arrangements are now more ubiquitous than underwires. Hideous AND sofuckinguncomfortable!

HOW do women get bamboozled into wearing this stuff? Why??? What sadist in New York gets away with designing miserable crap like this? Nay, gets PAID to design it?

You should’ve seen the gawdawful high heels I saw on an expensive-looking woman in church this weekend, as long as we’re on the subject of sadistic design. One false step, and she’d break her ankle. And a false step was highly likely, since the poor creature could barely hobble around in the damn things.

Back on topic: The only other store in Biltmore Fashion Square – i.e., the only other upscale department store this side of Scottsdale – that carries the desired brand is Macy’s.

I hate shopping at Macy’s. And of all the departments I hate shopping in at Macy’s, I hate their lingerie department most.

Yes. They did have the coveted brand. After searching high and low, I could not find one single wireless bra in that brand. Or in any other brand. The saleslady was too busy yakking away with her friends about personal matters to be bothered to sell anything – she didn’t even notice a customer was there. Pretty typical Macy’s customer disservice, in my experience.

Biltmore Fashion Square hosts a bra shop. The last time I went there, the stupid saleswoman informed me that brassieres are supposed to be uncomfortable.

No joke. It really happened.

Well, I figured I could at least get measured, though I wasn’t planning to buy anything.

There I found a competent brassiere saleslady – she actually seemed to know what she was doing. This poor soul, about my age, was laid off her administrative job at a nonprofit and thrown out on the street to spend the rest of her life selling underwear (probably at minimum wage) to unhappy women forced to shop for bras. Lucky her.

Ah well. Gives the shopper some perspective: when the landscape starts to look like you’re arriving in Hell, there’s always someone else who’s deeper in Hell than you are.

This store, called Soma, is associated with Chico’s. True to Chico’s form, the saleslady immediately started asking a lot of nosy questions, demanding my name, address, phone number, date of birth(!), and e-mail address and promising a few pennies back on the sale if I would just reveal all my personal information. She was not pleased when I informed her that a) I do not give out my phone number or e-mail address to retailers and b) I do not shop at Chico’s because I don’t like being high-pressured by their aggressive sales staff. I’m sure she’d be even less pleased if she knew the address they had in their system was fake.

At any rate, she toned down the sales pitch a bit when she heard the business about how much I dislike being strong-armed at Chico’s and how much I hate their mirrors that distort your image to persuade you that you look better in their bizarrely sized rags than you really do.

Hilariously, she knew about the mirrors.

Moving on, she also finds all of two underwire-free bras in the entire store. And since of course all their stock comes from the same place Chico’s gets its stuff – points far east – no two models in the same size fit the same way. She ends up getting me into a 32A in one model and a 34C in another.

At the risk of repeating myself: No joke. It really happened.

Oh well. We did arrive at a reasonable consensus on the actual size, meaning that the next time I have some money (which at this rate will not be in our lifetime), I can order a Wacoal from Amazon.

Meanwhile, I bought the 32A and the 34C because they were less uncomfortable than most and because they both created the illusion that my boobs do not reside around my waistline. Good enough for government work. I suppose. One was reasonably priced; the other cost as much as a Wacoal, a bra whose manufacturers expect you to ransom your first-born to scare up the purchase price.

Eighty-five bucks plus damn near 10% tax for two bras, neither one of which is in the theoretical size.

More annoying than life, isn’t it?

This lifestyle change that’s supposed to be so good for me is shaping up to cost me a lot of money…

Image: Soutien des seine par une brassiere. 1900. Public domain.

 

Spring is Sproinging in Phoenix

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So, you say, it’s colder than a bygod where you are? Heh heh heh heh… Well, it’s pushing 70 here. Reached 81  a couple of days ago but by and large has hovered in the 70s. If you wanna be warm, please come to Phoenix in the springtime. That would be January…

The plants are going nuts already. I came outside to put a little extra water on the citrus and the climbing roses, both of which have gone thirsty all winter. Ended up spending two or three hours puttering around the yard, yakking with the neighbor, throwing the Queen’s tennis ball around.

So, sooo much work to do — shovel off the desk, plow through the latest snowdrift of paper that’s collected there, do the bookkeeping, write the Eng. 235 syllabus, build a new Canvas site for them, ride heard on the 102s, edit copy, edit copy, edit more copy. And y’know what?

I don’t want to work.

If I’m going blind in one eye, maybe it’s my body trying to tell me to quit working and go do something else while there’s still time. Sometimes I think I should shut down the editorial business, quit taking on underpaid junior-college courses, and just loaf.

Maybe not, too. 😉 Heh! Good thing I pulled down Fidelity’s share of this year’s savings ten days ago — for the first time in recorded history, we managed to sell at the top of the market! And it’s prob’ly just as well I didn’t buy a new vehicle. The money for that (most of it) is in an old whole life policy and so neither earning nor losing money while the Dow merrily heads south, but still…my cookies would be frosted if the bottom line had dropped an extra 15 grand for the purpose of buying a car.

Ruby-Throated_Hummingbird_1The roses, whose population is much depleted because I’m sick of pruning them every year, are bursting out in new growth. The bougainvilleas survived the winter with little or no frost damage, because we haven’t had a single hard frost all year. A fierce little curved-billed thrasher has been excavating the yard in search of bugs, in the process turning over the soil and saving me a fair amount of work. Good bird! The hummingbirds, mostly Anna’s at this time of year, are in a frenzy…OMG! There’s a broad-tail! Who’d’ve thunk it?

We have three hummingbird feeders around the shack, which have had to be refilled with some frequency. Lately I’ve taken to preparing a half-gallon of sugar water and keeping it in the fridge, so I don’t have to fool around with making the stuff when the feeders run dry.

honeyBee-apisUhm… A honeybee just flew down into my mug, half-full of tea. Thought she was going to fall into the drink (heh! the literal drink!) but she came to rest on the interior, strolled up to the rim, walked all around it, and then took off for wherever honeybees go at this time of day.

So many things to do out here. I’d like to move a bunch of iris bulbs that have been living but not thriving in a large pot…want to put them in the flowerbeds around the climbing roses. KJG, who gave me the bulbs a couple of years ago, says they don’t do very well in pots. And it looks like she’s right. The bed by the pool is overrun with Mexican primrose and red salvia, both beloved flowers but plants that tend to get out of hand. They’re majorly out of hand just now! One of the citrus trees has sprouted a big yellowing section, indicative of root rot. I need to climb underneath there with a screwdriver in hand and adjust the irrigation, cut it back a bit. And I suspect the dirt Richard’s crew piled up there (when they should’ve hauled it off or spread it in the alley…) is too close to that tree’s root system, which could suffocate part of the tree. Either way, that looks suspiciously like a job. Probably I should hire Gerardo and his underling to come in here and shovel that stuff out of the yard.

Won’t he be thrilled…? 🙄

In the paying work department, I finally finished the intro to the proposed cookbook. Intro is three chapters explaining how to lose weight without really trying. Still have to organize the recipes in a sane order and list the jpegs in the order in which they should appear — that’s going to be a time-consuming job. Then decide exactly how to publish the thing.

One friend publishes cookbooks as PDFs, but I don’t think she can go through Amazon with the things. A business acquaintance has taken up converting Word files to Kindle format and is anxious to do both the cookbook and the novel that way. But he can’t handle many graphics, and the utility of having a recipe book on Kindle just escapes me! He thinks if people want to actually use the thing — like, say, in a functioning kitchen with water and pots and pans and dishes? — they’ll buy the print-on-demand version. I suppose. But I know I sure wouldn’t…if I’d paid for a Kindle version I wouldn’t pony up another ten or fifteen bucks for a print version, not on a bet.

So that question is under consideration.

The novel is about ready to go, at least to a designer. Same business friend wants a shot at converting that to Kindle. The agent who advertised that she was looking for new adult fiction writers never even bothered to send an f**k-you-very-much response to the full-length proposal I sent, which was quite a project to put together. So at this point I’m willing to self-publish the book through Amazon and try to market it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how.

Nor am I enthusiastic about doing a plain-vanilla Wyrd-to-Kindle conversion for the novel. In the first place, the thing has a DIY map that needs to be drawn by a professional graphic artist; in the second, there are several tables that I do not want converted to toilet-paper-style lists. And in the third, it really needs decent cover art, and I feel no craving to substitute a piece of cheap stock art for that.

The designers that my little business has been subcontracting to charge a mind-numbing fee for interior page design. Which IMHO is a little ridiculous, because once you’ve got a design (which isn’t hard) all you do is pour the copy into InDesign. To design cover art? Don’t even ask.

Uninclined to pour a ton of money into what’s really a hobby project — any piece of fiction that doesn’t get published through a legitimate publisher is just that: a hobby — I called an old friend of mine, the former art director at Arizona Highways. He’s semi-retired now, but he’s still doing design for an occasional client. He proposed to do the page design for less than a third of what my underling charges, and the charge for the map and the cover art was pretty reasonable, too. He’s very, very good: at the top of his form was one of the premier magazine designers in the country. So if he’s willing to do it, I’m going to hire him to do the novel, I think.

Speaking of work, none of it seems to be doing itself. So I suppose I’m going to have to get up and stagger back into the salt mine. Bye!

 

 

Eyeglass Hit

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Lordie! So yesterday I dropped $830 on new visionwear. As a practical matter, I ended up with four new pairs of eyeglasses, so it’s not as drastic as it sounds. But still…like I had $830 just laying around the house?

Figure to make up for it by cutting $100 out of the monthly discretionary budget: for the next eight months, instead of having the usual $1100 to spend, the budget will have only $1000. That makes it seem like not such a big deal.

Except, of course, that most months I do spend all of $1100, and rather little of that is for indulgences. With every stitch in the house, including my underwear forgodsake, falling off my body, I do need to buy some clothing that fits.

But I think I can get away with it. There’s now plenty of stuff to wear while the weather’s relatively cool. And when I was wearing size 10 jeans, I discovered that I could convert the size 12 Costco specials into cut-offs and they fit just fine. So now that I’m down to size 8 in the Costco marvels, I should be able to turn the size 10 jeans into shorts for this summer. But that’s it: no new clothing  purchases between now and next October!

Managed to keep the average price down to under $200/pair (the progressives were significantly more than that!) by recycling old frames. The (very expensive) rimless frames I bought back when I had a job, will, I’m told, probably last a lifetime — all one has to do is reattach the temple and nose pieces to new lenses. Also, though, I had a couple of extravagantly old frames, from way, way way back in another lifetime. These were regular wire-rimmed frames, one from Costco and one from a private optometrist — the latter, a very nice pair. The lenses in the two antiques were even more out-dated than my regular glasses (…you realize…if I bought the fancy rimless frames when I was employed, then they are at least five years old —  but in fact they’re older than that).

Because I now can see neither in the distance nor in a close range (unless it’s held right up to my nose), and because of the amount of close work I do on computers, I need a whole goddamn vision system! And thanks to my stupidity in losing my very best pair of distance shades, I ended up having to replace a ton of hardware in the new prescriptions:

• 1 pair of progressives, for navigating grocery stores, classrooms, and other public places where I might need to see both in the distance and to read things
• 1 pair of clear distance lenses, for night driving
• 1 pair of extra-dark sunglass lenses, for day driving, neighborhood walks, and hikes
• 1 pair of computer-monitor-distance lenses, for working and for navigating the house and yard

In the depths of the Old Glasses Morgue, I found a pair of up-close glasses that still work nicely for reading hard copy — i.e., for  things that are closer than a computer monitor but not within six inches of my face.

All of which is to say that to get around in my world and see what on earth I’m doing, I need six pairs of glasses.

You doubt it?

• I can’t see to work on the computer in the progressives, because I can’t spend hour on hour on hour with my head tipped back, peering down my nose.

• Progressives don’t work for reading newspapers, either, because you can’t see even one full page, to say nothing of a double-truck spread. Often you can’t even read a small article without having to move your head and peer down your nose.

• I can’t drive in the progressives in the daytime, because they’re not sunglasses.

• I can’t drive in the progressives at night, because the distance portion is not strong enough, leaving me essentially night-blind.

• I can’t drive in the computer glasses, because they’re not strong enough to decipher road signs.

• The Arizona sun is so glaring, especially in the summer, that it actually hurts to drive or walk around in it without sunglasses — and, as a practical matter, that powerful sunlight and UV light indeed do damage your eyes over time. You’re crazy not to use a good pair of shades here.

That doesn’t count the nonprescription shades and the nonprescription readers for use with contact lenses. And right now I am wearing the contacts, because I can see a lot better through them.

Whatever was going on with the eyeball (and continues to go on, as of this morning) caused some kind of damage. Through just the right eye, things look kinda hazy, the effect one gets when peering down the street through thick smog. The sky’s a funny color through that eye, too — brown-smogged, one might say. Now, the air here in Phoenix is indeed very dirty during the winter, so there may objectively be some smoggification. But I think it’s mighty peculiar that the effect is visible only through one eye…

At any rate, until I get the Vision System updated, I’m falling back on the contacts, which are a hellacious nuisance…but not, possibly, any more of a nuisance than juggling six pairs of glasses, no one pair of which delivers decent vision.

ooohh well...

$$ Flying Out the Window (and back in…)

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Glasses ApostleQuiet around here just now. The only drama playing these days at the Funny Farm is the perennial Battle of the Checkbook. Lordie! I’ve spent so much money this month that I’ve lost count, and am about to spend some more, on glasses!

About eleven grand remained in the bank at the end of 2013. Of that, $7,700 will have to go to 2014’s property tax, house insurance, car insurance, and Medigap coverage. For 2014, instead of doling out savings in quarterly chunks as I did last year, I decided to draw down enough to cover the entire year’s needs in one swell foop. Figuring on teaching only two sections this year, English-major math suggests I’ll need about 15 grand from savings to supplement Social Security and the minimum-wage adjunct income. I hope.

So: bye-bye Vanguard fund!

Hello cash.

Meanwhile, since I made that calculation I picked up two other community college sections. So far, this spring’s magazine-writing course has only six students — Heavenly Gardens classes make at ten or twelve — but another eight weeks of registration remain for that section, so there’s a good chance it’ll pick up another few. The other extra course is a summer Eng. 102 section, which of course will be packed. So even if neither this spring’s nor next fall’s magazine-writing things makes, I’ll still end up with two sections. Every maga-writing course, then, is pure gravy.

At any rate, with all that booty in the account, for the nonce there’s enough money to cover the current costs.

BUT…the current costs are gonna have to be reined in! Every time I turn around, here’s another $125 or $150 bill. Though I got a smokin’ deal on the clothes I picked up on the latest run to My Sister’s Closet, for example (three very nice shirts, one of them still bearing its Chico’s price tag, a pair of Brooks Brothers slacks, a Dana Buchman skirt, a pair of Eileen Fisher slacks…not bad), it still was $138. I’ve gone out to eat a couple of times, had to stock up on groceries and dog meat, had to pay $50 for the vision assessment part of the late, great ophthalmalogical adventure, and on and on and endlessly on.

So, even though I haven’t calculated the damage to the penny, I know very well that I’ve way overspent this month’s budget. The extra teaching income should cover shortfalls like this, but…gosh, I sure do hate spending money I haven’t earned yet!

Yesterday I put my contact lenses in — haven’t worn them in forever, mostly because contacts are a nuisance. Especially when you’re swimming a lot, as I did this summer as part of the weight-loss campaign. As usual, I can see SO much better through contacts! Even when my glasses aren’t old and scratched, as they are now, contacts really open up the world.

So now that I have a prescription, I’m going down to the Contact Lady to buy a ton of the things (worn every day, one pair lasts three or four weeks). At the end of the year, I’ll buy another lifetime supply, by way of putting off having to pony up another 50 or 60 bucks for another pointless eye exam.

That notwithstanding, I need at least two new pairs of glasses: a new pair for distance and a new pair of progressives. I actually need a third pair: distance shades, since like the regular progressives, the distance progressive shades are pretty ridiculous, but if push comes to shove I can get by with the progressive shades. And right now I’m getting by OK with the up-close glasses. WhatEVER happened to my eye the other day finally seems to be settling down, and I can see through the close-up prescription almost as well as before.

The distance glasses: not so much. The progressives are even more annoying than before — apparently some sort of permanent damage occurred in the right eye, no matter what the doctor imagines. It’s so smoggy here right now that it’s hard to tell, but still: no question the haze is thicker when viewed through the right eye than through the left.

I should drive up to Yarnell, where the air is cleaner, and take a look into the crystalline distance. That way I’d be able to tell a little better just how much new impairment is really there.

At any rate:

• Indispensable: New clear progressive lenses
• Indispensable: New clear single-vision distance lenses (which may require new frames)

• Needed: New single-vision distance shades (which probably will require new frames)

The guys down at the eyeglasses shop can replace the existing prescription with new lenses in existing glasses frames. They definitely will be able to do that for the clear progressives. I lost my beloved pair of extra-strong distance shades some months ago, but I have several pairs of old — very old — metal frames around the house. (heh! NEVER throw out an old pair of glasses!) So I’m gonna ask if they’ll put new clear distance lenses and new distance sunglass lenses in those frames. If not, then it’s off to Costco for those two pairs.

Yeah, I know: order them online. Maybe. I’ll have to extract the pupillary distance from the quack’s office, adding another layer of hassle to my life, as if I didn’t have enough hassle. I think I’d rather pay a little extra at Costco for only slightly marked-up frames than dork around with trying to extract usable ultra-cheap glasses from the Internet.

Damn. Starting the year with a big expense — when you’ve cashed out a mutual fund to live on for the year — is not very pleasing.

Sure do hope all four sections make this year…

Image: Conrad von Soest. The Glasses Apostle. 1403. Public Domain.

Tamale Puppies!

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3 Weeks 120

LOL! They look like a plate of tamales here! These are Keelie’s puppies at three weeks. And here’s the one the breeder currently favors to  keep for herself:

3 Weeks 147Awwww! How cute can you get, eh?

Here’s a male from the Saydee’s pups, the group that the Queen’s new courtier will be coming from:

male red 3 Weeks 073

And a female from that litter:

female purple 3 Weeks 109At ten days old…not quite ready to take on the world, but gettin’ there. Breeder Lindsay thinks the second litter will open their eyes this week.

Another Bullet Dodged…Maybe?

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So, about a week ago I’m driving down Feeder Street a little after dark, and I see these weird flickering lights, sorta thumbnail-paring shaped, in the far right periphery of my right eye.

At first I think it’s headlights reflecting on some part of my glasses.

Wrong.

Then I think holy sh!t. Within a couple of minutes, though, the phenomenon dissipates. I’m wildly busy and don’t have any time to think about it and besides there’s not a thing I can do about it after doctor’s office hours anyway.

Next morning I’m heading out at the earliest crack of dawn for the weekly SBA meeting and the same damn thing happens. Only…uhm…there are no headlights at that moment.

When I get back from the morning’s junketing, I hit the Hypochondriac’s Treasure chest and and learn that flashing lights, especially when coupled with new eye floaters, are a sign of a retinal tear (serious) or retinal detachment (blindness!). Either occasions surgery, one more drastic than the other.

The weekend arrives and yea verily so does a new crop of floaters. And a headache.

Call Young Dr. Kildare’s office; get his partner, who’s on call. “Eek!” quoth she (not in so many words: think a doctorly “eek”), “you need to go to the emergency room.”

Ahhh shit. I hate the ER. But if this phenomenon weren’t alarming enough, a worried doctor saying “go to the emergency room!” will make it downright terrifying.

Amazingly, I get in and out of the Mayo’s ER in less than an hour. The doc on duty can’t see any obvious signs of a retinal tear or detachment; thinks it’s another optical migraine (ooooh no it’s not, I think, but refrain from saying so). He says I need to make an appointment with a specialist.

Monday the Mayo’s underlings are on the phone, trying to make an appointment with an ophthalmologist for me. Moi, not desiring to make yet another trip halfway to freaking Payson, I have already found a doc in town who will take Medicare assignment, very good. Make an appointment. Get in with him today.

He and his staff go to elaborate lengths to examine the suspect eye. After 90 minutes of eye dilating and examination, he delivers the good news: absolutely, positively, I do not have a torn or detaching retina. This interesting experience is yet another of the many entertaining events of advancing age.

He, who is even more advanced in age than I am, reports that he had the same darned thing happen to him a couple of years ago. And of course it happened on a weekend. He being the real deal — an actual living, breathing ophthalmologist — was petrified, understanding what this could mean. He betook himself to his office and was waiting with his eyes already dilated, early on Monday morning, for his partner to show up. The two docs came to the same conclusion in his case: old age creepin’ up, nothing much to worry about. Yet.

Then the bad news: he thinks I might have the start (maybe…maybe not) of macular degeneration. He recommends that I run out and start swallowing multivitamins and a special antioxidant snake oil concocted by Bausch & Lomb (which, we might add, paid to sponsor the study claiming this miracle supplement delays the advance of dry macular degeneration).

Delightful.

At least I’m not in any immediate danger of going blind, assuming I don’t accidentally stab myself in the eye with a fork while scarfing down a lamb chop. But…

Macular degeneration?

Not. Good.

I look up this study and find that the one published in 2010, the one sponsored by B&L, was a shade problematic and, even if you buy the results, proved rather little. A newer study, published in 2013, showed some benefit, maybe. However, the ingredients of the magical concoction of antioxidants pose some risks, not the least of them significantly enhanced chances of developing lung cancer if you have ever smoked (both my parents were very heavy smokers, and so I spent the first 16 years of my life inhaling the equivalent of several cigarettes a day in second-hand smoke). Neither study included people with “maybe” early symptoms: subjects were all people with intermediate to advanced age-related macular degeneration.

So. There we are: I’m not going blind, but maybe someday I will be going blind.

Here. Take these pills!