Coffee heat rising

Furniture Revisited: Feeling Happier

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Okay, so some time has passed since the repaired and refinished furniture came back to my precincts. Today I’m feeling quite a lot better about the stuff.

Polishing the refinished Ethan Allen table with paste wax and then with Old English and Weiman’s  lemon oil actually did resolve the problem. As these products kind of sank in to the grain, that table began to look pretty darned good. The foggy and spotty effect has gone away, and what remains is a richly glowing natural grain. The tabletop consists of narrow planks that were joined together without regard to how the wood grain might match — because of course Ethan Allen would stain it a brown so dark as to be almost black and then apply a high-gloss varnish, obscuring the grain. But in a way, the randomly variegated grain creates an interesting and handsome effect.

So that turned out to be pretty good.

As for the chairs:

They’re a little lighter than I’d like.

However, the Watco oil with the “cherry” stain in it was a little more ridiculous than I’d like… “Cherry” turns out to be approximately the shade of that fake redwood stain people paint on their outdoor decks. Decided applying that stuff would be ill advised.

Before driving up to Home Depot to look for another color, I called the furniture repair guys and asked how they’d finished the pieces, dissembling my reason for inquiring by saying I wanted to know how best to care for the stuff. Manny said they’d applied paste wax to all three pieces.

Thought so.

The prospect of bathing both those chairs, each with 13 spindles, in mineral spirits did not appeal.

Really did not appeal.

By light of day (or was it light of reason?), I realized the color wasn’t that far off from the older chairs that had been refinished some 35 years ago.

Naturally, those chairs would have darkened over time. These probably will, too. Not that I’ll live another 35 years to see it.

Speaking of this, my son and heir dropped by last night. And — get this! — he didn’t notice the difference!

{chortle!} I pointed out the refinishing job to him without editorial comment. He thought the stuff looked great! And apparently he truly couldn’t tell much difference in the chairs.

If the de facto owner thinks they look fine, who am I to complain?

I laid on a layer of butcher’s wax, followed by three coats of furniture oil. And they look OK. Considering how old they are and how violently they’ve been abused, they’re probably as good as they’re gonna get. With the Navajo rug draped over the one chair that resides in the dining room, it looks just fine. And since only the dog visits the bedroom, where the other one lives, WGAS?

All this thrashing around delayed another project: I’d agreed to do a webinar on editing for a local publishers’ group, as a freebie — a favor to a friend. Though what needed to be done was all mapped out, I still needed to create a slide show and a script.

Because I found the prospect of oiling furniture a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting in front of a computer for god only knew how many hours, I got sidetracked from PowerPoint.

When I finally sat down to work, I just turned on the computer and PLINK! The power went out.

They’re building the damn lightrail up the main drag just to the west of us, creating vast chaos. I figured the workers had hit an electric line — when they ran the thing past my son’s house, the power, water, and gas were constantly going out.

Exceptionally annoyed, I felt a bad thought enter my mind: I had never violated the city’s laws by carrying an alcoholic drink into the park. So I poured a bourbon and water into a coffee mug, lashed up the dog in a collar and leash, and headed out.

The streets — all of them! — were overrun with traffic. Apparently they were diverting people off said main drag, or so I thought. Stopped to chat with the neighbors. Moved on.

Cassie didn’t want to go in the direction of the park, and neither did I, since it didn’t look like we could make our way across the roads clogged with hordes of confused and angry-looking drivers. So instead we wandered into the neighborhood to the south.

There, in the quietest and most dead-end corner of the ’hood, what should we come across but these people standing by the side of the road, looking stressed and unhappy. Incredibly, a car of genteel-looking old folks had crashed into a lawn dude’s truck and trailer. This encounter smushed in the front end of the old folks’ vehicle; barely scratched the Sanford & Sons-style truck. They were unhappy because the lawn dude didn’t have a driver’s license (and, you can bet, didn’t have insurance, either). He was unhappy because he was no doubt about to be deported.

How can you run into each other on a tiny neighborhood lane where you have noplace to go — it’s not a through street, for godsake — and where you should be driving about 10 mph??

At any rate, they reported on the cause of the power outage. They were on Northern when they witnessed a wreck: “When we saw the power pole coming down, we thought it looked pretty bad.” All the people charging through the neighborhood were being diverted off Northern, one of the busiest streets in the city.

By the time Cassie and I wandered back to the house, the lights were back on.

Powered up the iMac, which came on without much complaint but was a hassle because Word recovered all or most of the files that were sitting open and re-opened them with no names. Takes forever to figure out what they were called and where they were stashed and resave them under the correct filenames.

But the MacBook, which I wanted to use so I could sit in an easy chair because my back and leg hurt like hell every time I sit in this desk chair, would not come on!

It just sat there whirring its goddamn gear-shaped mandala.

This was a problem, because the most recent version of a document I needed was on that computer, and because it wasn’t coming up on DropBox.

Finally I gave up trying to reboot and just let it sit there and whir away while I wrestled with Word, Excel, and Preview files.

About then the phone rang: M’hijito. He wanted to take me to dinner!

I never say no to an offer like that. Besides, he couldn’t have called more serendipitously: here was a man who could get the MacBook running again, if anyone this side of the Genius Bar could.

By the time my son showed up at the door, the laptop had come back on…but it had lost its wireless connection. He got it back online, and then we headed for a restaurant.

So I didn’t get started until after dark. And it was quarter to one in the morning by the time I finished the twenty-slide PowerPoint presentation and its accompanying script. I have NO idea how long it will take…went to bed before rehearsing it.

I doubt if we’ll get any business from this. Unless I’m mistaken, this group consists pretty much of the same set who made up the defunct Arizona book publishers’ association, whose members are not prepared to pay a living wage to contract editors. That’s why we’ve been targeting corporate work: Tina and I need to put food on our tables. But things are pretty slow just now — for reasons I don’t understand, all the work comes in at once, so we’re invariably faced with a gigantic crush, and then we have a month or two with nothing to do. So I can afford to donate my time.

Who knows? Maybe something will come of it.

Meanwhile, though, I’m feeling a lot better about the furniture. That’s something.

 

 

 

Expensive Disappointment

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{sigh} Couple weeks ago, one of my mother’s Conant Ball chairs, which she bought in San Francisco when we came back to the States from the Middle East in the late 1950s, broke. A piece of wood that supported the legs dried out and finally gave way.

It and its partner needed some work, anyway. Not knowing how much she must have spent on the stuff, my father decided to make the dining set they belonged to into outdoor furniture. The house they moved into in Sun City didn’t have room to accommodate a dining-room set and a television, and my father certainly could not be expected to live without his TV. So he covered the solid birch table and six chairs with layer on layer on layer of polyurethane. Then he stuck them out on the screened-in porch, where they resided for the rest of my mother’s life — about 15 years.

To give you a clue to the enormity of this act, Thomas Moser makes chairs that look very much like them:

Eastward

$1,075 for the side chair on the left.

Newport

$1,225. That’s right: apiece.

Admittedly, the Moser chairs are made of cherry and ash, not birch. But they look very much like the chairs my mother bought in San Francisco, back in 1957. They’re almost identical, except that my mother’s side chairs had padded seat cushions.

After my mother died, my father moved to an old-folkerie and gave me the set. A friend stripped the polyurethane off the table and the side chairs and I refinished them with Watco’s lightly stained Danish oil. This looked OK. A helluva lot better than yellow varnish, anyway. But Friend tired of the job before he finished the captain’s chairs, so they stayed covered in polyurethane.

Obviously, I can’t afford to replace them. Not even at the 15 percent discount Thos. Moser is offering just this moment.

So, I took the occasion of the busted leg to ask the furniture repair guys I’d found through Angie’s list not only to repair the leg assembly but also to strip and refinish the both captain’s chairs, and while they were at it, to strip and refinish the scratched-up Ethan Allen coffee table I’d never been very satisfied with. So they carted it off the end of last month.

They delivered the finished job today.

I didn’t expect perfection. The chairs are very old, and 15 years out in the heat, the dust, and the rain couldn’t have helped them, embalmed in polyurethane or not. And the table is just a mass-produced thing not designed for a hand-rubbed oil finish. But the chairs’ cirrhosis-yellow varnish and the scratched-up shiny surface of the table have annoyed me for years. So I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And perfection is decidedly not what I got.

I can’t imagine what they did to remove the table’s finish, but it looks like they scraped at it with some sort of tool like a spackling knife. The surface has patches of small abrasions — doesn’t look like sandpaper marks, at least not from a circular sander (which one would hope they’d know better than to use). Overall they did a nice job of sanding — all three pieces are satin-smooth to the touch. It’s possible, in fact, that they oversanded: if you sand with too fine a grade of sandpaper and steel wool, Danish oil won’t soak in the way it’s supposed to.

At any rate, it looked mighty sad after they’d plopped it down in the living room. Yet, interestingly, they’d done an amazingly good job of imitating the color and finish of the Stickley table that lives next to the couch.

The chairs are pretty pale and wan: looks like they only applied one coat of Watco. To do the job right requires several coats. But it’s just as well, because I think they used a walnut color, which is decidedly not what was on the other chairs. Watco’s “cherry” version would come fairly close to the oil I used in the 70s to refinish the side chairs and table. If they’d done the job right, the result would have been way too dark.

Studied the table for a while. Then decided to try a coat of butcher’s wax, which I happened to have lurking in a closet. Applied three coats.

This helped a little, but not enough. Waxing brought out several splotches where it looked like the wood might have gotten wet after they’d stripped it. We’ve had a lot of rain, and it sure could be that their roof leaked or someone walked past it dripping water. Whatever, this was annoying.

Once the wax was dry and polished as well as it was going to be polished — which wasn’t very — I applied some furniture oil. Put on a couple of coats of English oil, which helped more than I expected. Then I came across an old bottle of Weiman’s lemon oil in the cleaning closet. Weiman’s is a superior product, so I figured, why not? Applied another coat of that oil.

And that did make a big difference. It looks much, much better. Not perfect. But perfection clearly is not attainable here.

P1020073

By the light of an incandescent lamp, it actually looks pretty good. (As usual, you’re gonna have to click on the image to get anything resembling resolution out of WordPress…) But view it by sunlight from an angle, and the effect is somewhat cloudy and blotchy.

Oh well.

Now, as for the chairs…what to do?

While I was out replenishing the larder yesterday, I dropped by the Home Depot and picked up a can of Watco oil laced with “cherry” stain.

Before applying that, though, I’ve got to figure out what our boys did in their refinishing effort. If they applied wax, I’ll have to get that off before rubbing in another three, four, or five coats of Watco. The chairs don’t smell of paste wax. But the guys called me about a week ago asking to deliver them; I put this off until today, because I wanted to push the payment into a new AMEX billing cycle, so as to be able to cover it out of cash flow rather than having to raid savings. The odor of wax could have dissipated by now.

It is going to take for-fucking-EVER to do the job right on those chairs, with all those damn spindles. This project will have to wait until I finish a dog-and-pony show I have to write and trick out in PowerPoint for a webinar a local writer’s & self-publisher’s group asked me to do. I’m not getting paid, but we could pick up some work — I doubt it, though, because my experience with these folks is that they don’t have the money to pay professional rates.

At any rate, though my heart’s not exactly broken, neither am I pleased. This job cost $800, and so I’d just as soon not have to do it over myself to get it right.

On the other hand, just to replace the two captain’s chairs (to say nothing of the table) would cost three times that much. To extract the coffee table from Thos. Moser would cost another $1,250. So if I can get all three pieces to look acceptable, I suppose I can’t complain.

You get what you pay for…

 

SOLD! Another necklace finds a home

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P1010810Amazing! Another one of those lariat necklaces I made has sold!

I can NOT believe this. The shop that took it on consignment found someone to buy the thing sometime in the last week or so. Actually, it was my favorite production and I figured when (“if” was not in my calculations) it came back to me, I would just keep it for myself.

At this point, every one of the pieces I’ve made has been purchased: several lariat necklaces and a cool lanyard for a state worker who has to carry her ID card every place she goes.

It just astonishes me that people would want to buy something I made. As much as I’ve wished I could find a way to make a living with some small craft, that I could actually create things people would covet never seemed…well, likely.

Unfortunately my friend who owns the gift and repurposing shop has decided to close. The site was not the best of all possible choices: in an old, quaint house on a main drag, practically invisible to passers-by (it took me three tries to find the place) and devoid of foot traffic. People come to the area for restaurants, but restaurant-goers are rarely there to shop for quirky, environmentally friendly gifts.

P1010807 - Version 2Right next door to my friend’s shop is another little shop in the same kind of antique house. Its proprietor carries some exceptionally pretty items, including some truly beautiful vintage jewelry, pretty china and gifts — a mix of old and new. She said she also may close, for the same reason — not enough traffic — but in her case, she’s doing quite well with online sales. Her Etsy shop has a steady trade, and she lives a long way from the brick-and-mortar shop’s gentrified central-city location. She’s open only on the weekends now.

I think I’ll go by there next Saturday and ask if she would tutor me in marketing from Etsy. Three of my other friends are making art (in one case, very nice art, indeed) and crafts. If several of us banded together to stock an Etsy shop, we might have a shot at making it work for us. The proprietor in question observed that the trick with Etsy is to make a lot of things available.

Heh. To do that, I’ll be reduced to making some more of these doodads.

Last night I started on a new one, which I think has some promise. The other day I saw a woman wearing a necklace that incorporated some rectangular mother-of-pearl beads, sort of like these…

motherofpearl

…only thinner, more consistent in size and shape, and rather prettier in color. And lo! I realized I just happened to have a handful of those very things.

The half-finished piece, for which I still need to buy a lobster clasp, combines the mother-of-pearl with pearls, garnet, and pink rhodonite. It’s turning out kind of neat…so far, I like it.

I never know how these things are going to look until the beads are actually strung to form a coherent design. Sometimes once they’re on a wire I end up taking them apart and reordering the gems; sometimes the pieces look even better strung together than they do in the design stage.

This one is looking pretty good. The combination of the silvery-iridescent mother of pearl with the rose pink rhodonite, the deep wine-colored garnet, and the creamy white pearl is really very subtle and interesting. It doesn’t jump out and whap you in the face — it’s quietly classy.

IMHO.

At any rate, this one will not be a lariat. The mother-of-pearl rectangles are a little large to make for easy looping or tying, so I decided to make it into a more ordinary, latch-it-together necklace. It may actually be long enough to slide over one’s head, but if a woman has a hairstyle she doesn’t want to mess up, she probably will appreciate a clasp.

I may design it so she could wear it with the clasp either in front or in back. One of the several things I’ve learned about designing bead necklaces is that if you put something near the clasp that has some weight, it will keep the thing from scootching around — the weight will hold the clasp at the back of the wearer’s neck. If that weighted design element were pretty enough, she could choose to display it in front instead of having it hidden behind her. On the other hand, if she wore a collarless shirt or dress, the embellishment I have in mind would look highly decorative in back, too.

A wildly popular farmer’s market has taken up residence on the grounds of a nearby church — they hold forth on Saturdays through the fall, winter, and spring. If I could make about a dozen of these and then get one or two friends to throw in with me, I’m thinking we could rent a table there starting a week before Thanksgiving and keep it right up until Christmas. Betcha we could sell a bunch of loot then. And maybe we could also put our stuff together in a single Etsy shop. It’s a thought, anyway.

Helluva lot better than workin’…

😉

Honey(less)-do’s

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With no Honey around the house (except a cute little dog), the only person to do the various small handyperson chores here at the Funny Farm is moi. Quite a few things have stacked up over the months…now that there’s time as well as energy to do them, w00t! Some of them are actually getting done!

One little improvement I’d like to make to the house, whenever I have a few extra dollars again, is to ask Dave the Electrician to install several electric outlets at waist level.

The custom of installing outlets down near the floor is something I’ve never been able to figure out. Even when your back doesn’t hurt every time you bend down, who wants to hunker on the floor to plug in the vacuum (over and over, if you have a big house!), the iron, the heating pad, the laptop? Ideally, I’d like to have at least one waist-height outlet in every room, but of course I can’t afford that. So I’ll have to make do with a few — one next to the bed, two in the office, one or two in the TV room, one in the living room.

At any rate, it’ll be awhile before this project gets done. In the meantime, I had a great idea: outlet strips!

Yeah! Some outlet strips have little holes in the the back that you can use to hang them up. Well, I don’t happen to have enough countersinks to do the  job right, with screws. But each outlet strip has four such slots for hang-up screws, so I tacked a bunch of sturdy nails into the drywall — or to the side of the old desk — and stuck the things up there.

In the office, alas, this entailed having to untangle the spaghetti of computer cables, lamp cords, telephone and Ethernet cables, speaker wires, and wires of unknown provenance that’s been growing like fungus under the furniture. Back in the day, I had them pretty well organized, having installed a row of cuphooks under the tabletop’s rim and strung the infrastructure under there. But when the Three Stooges were here screwing up the paint, they yanked out my tidy arrangement and made hash of it. Then they just shoved the desk and table, which are too heavy for me to move, back against the wall.

So it was an unbelievable mess under there. The dog would lose her ball in the briar patch and refuse to dig it out, so tangled were the wires, cords, and cables. Some of those wires, BTW, seemed to have no function…if they ever attached to anything, whatever it was apparently has dissolved into a dust bunny and been vacuumed away.

In the process, I finally figured out why the antique stereo in the office never worked after M’hijito reattached the wires: the Stooges had yanked its antenna out and then wound it up and jammed it back in behind the components in there. Ah! So obvious! Why did I never guess?

Speaking of things electronic, while vacuuming I happened to push the TV rabbit ears, which resided atop a wooden stool next to the TV armoire because they’re too tall to fit on top of it, back against the wall. Idly wondering what that would do to the reception, which has been touchy ever since Big Brother kindly made most broadcast TV stations inaccessible to the hoi polloi who can’t afford cable TV and wouldn’t pay for it even if they could. Turned on the boob tube, and lo! PBS came in bright, clear, and undistorted!

Naaahhh…. Couldn’t be.

Channel 12? Perfect!

How about 10? 3? 15? 5? All of them: clear, HD-ish, and free of snow, ghosts, and pixelation!

This was with the vacuum cleaner sitting there and me moving around the room, both such vast obstacles to modern-day reception as, in theory, to make viewing next to impossible.

Interesting.

I wondered what would happen if the antenna was directly behind the television, stashed behind the armoire. Had to pull the thing out from the wall a couple of inches, which was a trick with a trashed back. It must weigh 200 pounds.

Still worked, but not as well. Four stations were still good, but Channel 12 was scrambled and PBS disappeared. Then, as in one of those murky Magic Eight-Balls, two words surfaced:

aluminum

foil

Wrapped the southerly rabbit ear with tinfoil. Channel 12 came in; Channel 8 was still dark.

Wrapped the northerly rabbit ear in tinfoil. Channel 8 came in, clear as a bell.

EVERY station is now true HD — I mean, you can actually SEE the images! — and none of them break up when the dog runs past with Ball in her mouth. And the hideous contraption is hidden behind the furniture, no longer annoyingly visible to the naked eye.

This evening a cop helicopter was buzzing the neighborhood, and even that didn’t break up the picture. Amazing!

All of this evolved into a hell of a job for me. I hate handyman stuff…it always entails 87 gerjillion trips out to the garage to dig out and haul in tool after tool after tool. Had to break out the Gorilla Tape (a kind of duct tape on steroids) to secure a strange little black box (purpose: unknown; wires: connected to something) to the underside of the work table. Had to fool around interminably to get an old outlet strip to hang horizontally instead of vertically along the side of the desk. Straightening out the mess of wires was another time-consuming headache.

But ta-DAA! Now there are no wires on the floor! I can vacuum under the desk and table. Cassie is not lying in a nest of electric wires. I can plug in a heating pad next to the bed without having to crawl under the nightstand and tip over the lamp onto my head. And I’ll be able to plug in the recharging cables and the iron without having to dig through wires, dog hair, and dust to get at an outlet — and without having to climb around the floor for the privilege.

Much better. 🙂

You Get What You Pay For

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Have you seen Mrs. Accountability’s latest post, the one contemplating the glories (or not) of Fiverr? It’s pretty interesting.

She’d mentioned that site over the phone a while back, shortly after the episode with the friend of the “who needs enemies” variety. So naturally, I shot right over there to see what it’s about.

What you find when you arrive at Fiverr is a list of offers of services and small products for five bucks a pop. Some of these (like graphic design) actually could command a decent rate, and some (like images a computer program can toss off in 10 seconds) ought not to. Based in Israel, Fiverr is an international enterprise, and presumably many of its vendors are living in countries where $5 will buy a week’s worth of food.

A similar program (presumably owned by the same outfit, given the identical site design) is called “Twenty Fiverr”; people who think they’re worth more offer the same kind of services and products for twenty-five bucks instead of five. Here’s a guy, for example, who promises to provide seven “quality” articles in less than 24 hours, using a program that generates pap-filled, verbose, redundancy-laced, and vacuous squibs, and he’ll do it for a bargain $25.

I have a lot of beefs with this model.

First, as a self-employed skilled worker who has nothing to sell but skill, experience, and time, I highly resent being undercut by people who are willing to work, it seems, for little more than an ego trip. This is something that for years has kept rates down for writers and for graphic artists, especially those who do business within the publishing industry. Publishers know that some people who can construct a basic article will do it for less than minimum wage — some will do it for nothing — just for the joy of seeing their names in print. The result usually has to be completely rewritten, but that’s what the assistant or associate editor is for. At both of the magazines where I worked full-time, a large part of my job entailed sitting down at a computer and, starting at Word 1, rewriting articles by freelance “writers” from beginning to end.

Many magazines have two or three contract pay scales. Unemployed or moonlighting journalists who actually do know how to research and construct a competent article are paid a living wage. Everyone else gets crumbs. Some publishers simply will not pay a living wage to anyone, because they know plenty of amateurs will do the job (or something like the job) for next to nothing.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of off-shoring. In the case of Fiverr and Twenty Fiverr, it probably is literal off-shoring, too. As an individual buyer of services and products, my sense is that those of us who resent corporate off-shoring of American jobs have no business doing the same to American contract workers. Buy American. And pay something more than slave wages, if you expect to see your country’s standard of living remain above the Third World level.

When one person does a job, even a poor job, for less than fair pay, that person drives down pay for five, ten, or twenty other people for whom work is a living, not a hobby. In my book, that’s wrong.

Second, you really do get what you pay for.

Let’s take a look at the “high quality” article that squib-generator built, using a set of key words relating to weight loss. Here’s its  lead:

Weight loss is a confusing topic. There are so many different people and articles telling you so many different things, it can be quite difficult to wrap your head around them all. This article will aim to lay down the essential and necessary basics of weight loss in hopes to clear the fog that surround it.

Does that make you want to keep reading, as a lead should? It makes me want to run away…but let’s stand our ground and take a hard look at the thing.

“Weight  loss is a confusing topic.” No, it’s not. Weight loss is a process, not a topic. In any event, as statements go this one adds nothing. Right off, we know we’re dealing with a writer who is either a moron or an amateur. Or, in this case, a machine. Even machines can beat around the bush.

“So many different people…so many different things.” Nice use of redundancy to pad space! Is it likely that a person would say “many identical people telling you many identical things”? If the inserting opposite term creates an absurdity, then the adjective in question — “different,” in this instance — is probably  redundant. Here, it is redundant to the power of two.

“Difficult to wrap your head around them…” I should say so, unless your head is made of Silly Putty.  Our electronic author first coins a cliché and then turns it into a grotesque image. Note that it injects another cliché (“to clear the fog”) in the following sentence.

Cliché is the least of the next sentence’s offenses, though. First, instead of telling us anything significant or intriguing, the electronic author vows to try to give us a few fundamental pointers on the mind-numbing topic of weight loss, with no promise — only “hopes” — that whatever follows will enlighten us. This kind of pap a lead does not make. Then it ends with a faulty idiom (“in hopes to clear”: a native speaker would write “in hopes of clearing”) and a grammatical error (“the fog that surround”: subject-verb agreement).

Come to think of it, the entire article is replete with grammatical, punctuation, logical, and idiomatic errors:

• “Easier” used as an adverb (Electro-author meant “more easily”).
• “Change subtle habits that will increase the amount of walking one has to do”: if the habits increase the amount of walking you do, why would you want to change them? Possibly Electro-author meant “develop” or “build”?
• No comma after “but” used as an introductory word (some people think it’s bad form to use a conjunction to begin a sentence, but that rule doesn’t apply much in journalistic writing).
• Lettuce that’s “more green”…heeeee!

Writing style is, to put it kindly, nonexistent:

• Neither the second nor the third section shows any sign of paragraph transition.
• Verb mood jumps from declarative to imperative in paragraph 5, for no discernible reason.
• Complex ideas are touched upon and sometimes given a cursory example, then dropped with no clue to how the advice might be interpreted or used.
• The final paragraph regurgitates the first one, adding nothing except another hilariously grotesque image: “too many hands in the soup.” Careful not to choke on those knucklebones!

At Twenty Fiverr you get seven such “quality” articles for $25…not a bad price, to make yourself look like a moron to whomever reads one of the things.

My momma always used to say that you get what you pay for. But it wasn’t until I moved into the first house I bought by my little self, as a single woman, that I truly came to appreciate that old saw.

The house had washer and dryer connections, and it must be said that one of the chores I hated most in life was schlepping my laundry to a coin-op laundromat. First order of business was to install a new washer and dryer.

Being the naturally submissive type, though, and hooked up with a very dominant gentleman, I allowed myself to be persuaded to buy a low-end Monkey Ward washer and dryer. The two machines looked good at the outset: extra large, nothing fancy but evidently serviceable.

The dryer lasted about a year. Soon as it went off warranty, it crapped right out. Annoyed (and by then wise to the fact that boyfriend was pushing me into doing things I knew better than to do), I had to go buy a new one at Sears.

The second model was far from top of the line — it was a mid-range Kenmore, well liked by Consumer Reports. Twenty years later, it’s still out there in the garage running well. From the day I tossed the first load of wet laundry into it, the thing worked better than the Monkey Ward cheapo ever did, and it still works.

By purchasing a piece of junk first, I caused myself to pay significantly more than it would have cost to have just ponied up a reasonable price for a reasonably good product in the first place!

If I’d replaced the junk with another cut-rate product, I’d probably be on my fifth or sixth dryer by now, to the tune of four or five times what a single decent appliance cost.

The personal finance message? Bully for you if you can get a generous  mark-down on a good product that started out at a fair price. The blade cuts two ways: paying a lot more doesn’t always buy a lot better quality. Paying a fair price — not the lowest though not necessarily the highest, either — is likely to get you services that do the job well and products that work and hold up over time.

 

 

Physical Therapy and Ginger Oil

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So today the physical therapist recommended by Young Doctor Kildare saw me.

Much better than the “sports therapist” outfit across the parking lot from the Walgreen’s. Instead of a gymnasium full of clients besieging a couple of trained therapists and a bunch of not-too-bright assistants, this was one guy with his own office. He did have one assistant, who seemed to know what she was doing. And yeah, he was dealing with several patients at once, but at no time did I have to sit around for 20 or 30 minutes awaiting his attention.

But in the time department, he took the time to inquire in detail after the symptoms, to do an exam, and apparently to think about what he heard.

He agreed with YDK that whatever ails me is not “muscle spasms,” and he explained why he didn’t think so.

Hmmm… I seem not to have related the recent events here.

Backstory, then: After almost a year of back pain and foot pain, and after no visible improvement in the knee that I walloped two and a half months ago, I decided I needed to talk to someone who had more than 15 minutes scheduled to speak with patients. So I traipsed back out to the Mayo to see my doc of some 35 years.

He had me X-rayed and then, reading the radiologist’s report, said the X-rays showed some disk degeneration but not enough to cause significant back pain — and so he didn’t think the cause was a pinched nerve — and the knee didn’t seem to be seriously injured. He opined that the persistent pain is caused by “a muscle spasm condition” and prescribed a muscle relaxant, which proved impossible to get through Medicare Part D. After two more attempts, he finally came up with a drug I could afford out of pocket, cyclobenzaprine.

This dulled the pain a little, caused nightmares that verged on hallucination, and did nothing to eliminate the problem.

On reflection, “a muscle spasm condition” sounded kinda fishy — what kind of “muscle spasm” goes on for ten or twelve MONTHS, and if that’s what he thinks it is, why isn’t he testing me for MS, which in fact could cause something along those lines, or for diabetes, which can cause persistent lower-body pain? So I finally decided to try again with Young Dr. Kildare, who at least accepts Medicare.

After the usual brief interview, YDK begged to differ with the august opinions of the Mayo Clinic — he thinks it is a pinched nerve and advises the prescribed treatments are as follows, in this order:

1) Intensive physical therapy.
2) If this hasn’t worked after six weeks, epidural injection.
3) If that doesn’t work, do MRIs to determine a specific cause and attempt relief with surgery.

As for the knee, he believes the issue is prepatellar bursitis resulting from the fall I took, which would make some sense. If it doesn’t resolve over time, the course of treatment is exactly the same.

YDK is just a young fella on the run from patient to patient in a medical factory. However, to my ear he made a great deal more sense than the Honored and Elder M.D. This wouldn’t be the first time the Old Man has emitted a cattywampus diagnosis — years ago, when I was a bit younger than YDK, he tried to put me on beta blockers for the rest of my life, having decided I had a mitral valve prolapse. Before committing myself to permanent medicating, I asked my father’s cardiologist about it; he said if there was a valve prolapse (which he doubted), it was so minimal as to be virtually undetectable and I should ignore it unless I had some actual symptoms.

So…while Arizona sorely lacks top-quality medical care, the truth is, I’m no more star-struck by the Mayo name, despite their excellent hospital (one of the state’s few consistently rated excellent on a national basis), than by any other cluster of M.D.s around here. The Old Man’s theory didn’t hold water, the drug he prescribed did nothing more than briefly mask the pain, its maker specifically warned against its use for the elderly, and so I was willing to seek some other advice.

Hence, today’s physical therapist, whom Young Dr. Kildare recommended.

He scoffed at the “muscle spasm” theory. He explained the pain as a manifestation of compressed vertebrae brought on by the antic I got up to a year ago, which immediately preceded the symptoms. He decided the knee pain was unrelated to the back issue, and the heel pain may or may not be related to the back pain. In any event, said he, the first order of business was to address the back.

Damned if I know what he did, but whatever it was, it seems to have worked! He pushed on the back and pulled on the back in a way that felt a lot like a deep massage and that seemed reminiscent of chiropractic manipulation. When asked what exactly his procedure would do, he said the point was to “loosen up the joints,” whatever that means.

He recommended a half-dozen exercises, none of which caused any pain, unlike the other therapist’s contortions. By the time I walked out of his office, the back pain was almost gone, and the foot pain is significantly improved.

This evening when Cassie dragged me out the door to tromp around the block in search of cats, I was walking pretty much normally, something that hasn’t been so for months.

So what about the ginger snake oil I cooked up the other day?

Well, it did have a slight analgesic effect, so slight as probably to be wishful thinking. This evening I used some of it to stir-fry some shrimp with piles of onions, garlic, and Napa cabbage. Mighty good!

Probably the highest and best use of the stuff. 😉