Coffee heat rising

What Goes Around Comes Around

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In a good way, not just in the negative way that phrase usually connotes.

Yesterday afternoon the phone rings. It’s the guy whose company installed all those sliding doors and the window I ordered up after the late, great garage invasion. After the work they’d done, installing some very nice improvements at a comparatively reasonable price, I wrote a rave review at Angie’s List. The boss didn’t notice this until a couple of days ago, when Angie’s called to hit him up for more money (yes…people pay to be listed at that site) and mentioned that he had a couple of reviews to check. When he saw what I’d written about his company, he was beside himself with joy. Called to thank me profusely (?? I’m the one who was lucky to find this outfit!) and invited me, free of charge, to an upcoming BNI meeting.

That, he said, would give me a chance to introduce myself and hand my cards around.

Mwa ha ha! We’ll need to get our brochure printed between now and then. BNI meets at the same time one of my classes meets this semester, so it’ll have to wait until after fall classes end. But this will be a nice opportunity.

And speaking of the merry-go-round, 101 Centavos not only linked to both Adjunctorium and Funny about Money in this week’s round-up, he also generously highlighted one of my recent rants at Adjunctorium, along with a cri de coeur by a young anthropology Ph.D. that appeared at Al Jazeera.

A couple of naive comments at Centavos’ site led me to publish another rant this morning, about the specious theory that teaching is somehow “rewarding” in a metaphorical sense. Where on earth do people get ideas like that?

Image: Larry Pieniazek, View of the Grand Carousel at Kennywood. GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution 2.5.

Weekend Roundup: Politics as High Comedy Edition

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The Presidential debate is coming up. Am I the only one who thinks the whole affair is garnished with high comedy? Some of the things the Romney people have said, especially… The other day as I listened to the news while driving across the city, we were told that the Republican party is “the natural home of Latinos.” I started to laugh, and then broke out in guffaws when Romney followed that up with “we’re not rounding people up and deporting them!”

Freaking hilarious. I guess that makes Sheriff Joe not a Republican. 😀

Some of the things the extremists say wander so far beyond the pale that they come out as truly laughable. It’s scary, though, to realize that when our college students think World War I happened during the 1800s and Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain State, the average Joe and Jane on the street could very well be convinced that most of the writers of the U.S. Constitution were clergymen  and that Joe McCarthy was our greatest American hero.

America needs Jon Stewart to emcee that debate.

Fortunately, PF bloggers are so staid and so stodgy that we never say anything silly. Right?

🙂

Various new stuff has been ongoing this week, none of it likely to force you to pull off to the side of the road until a crippling spasm of laughter passes. Recently, though, I did come across an entertaining and engaging writer with a fun schtick and a way with words: Mr. Money Mustache. You’ve gotta check out this guy’s site. His post on electric cars seems to be pretty typical: well written, skeptical, and thorough.

Speaking of things to make us skeptical, over at Blue Collar Workman TB reports on a moment of human greed and stupidity.

Budget Glamorous is back from a summertime hiatus. She continues to wrestle with the challenges of living well on an academic income (such as it is).

As if Mrs. Accountability didn’t have enough on her plate, she just learned that she gets to engage battle with Arizona’s endlessly incompetent bureaucrats again…this time for no good reason whatsoever.

Here’s an interesting personal story from Planting Our Pennies, about the time Mr. PoP took a minimum-wage job and viewed it as a great opportunity.

101 Centavos holds forth about American exceptionalism and…uhm…some exceptions to that. Nice, articulate essay.

Two interesting posts at A Gai Shan Life this week, one of them amazing. Those of us who have followed Revanche’s adventures for the past few years recall when she was laid off her job in the depth of the Recession-That-Is-Not-a-Depression. She spent some time searching anxiously for new work and then landed a nice position at a highly respected company in San Francisco. Lately she’s decided it was time to move on from that as she’s re-evaluated her priorities and assessed what really matters in life. Various recent sources of stress, though, seem to have caused a flare-up of a painful chronic ailment, which she’s now plodding through unhappily. In describing this episode, she publishes a poem, and it is an extraordinary thing. One would expect to find it in a literary magazine, not a PF blog. Don’t miss it.

Frugal Scholar contemplates the strategy of regarding frugality as its complement, enrichment. Burritos will make you rich!

Money Beagle’s cookies were frosted by the discovery that roller-coaster riding days may be a thing of the past. Moving on, the Beagles purchased a new video monitor to keep an eye on the puppies, with mixed results, according to their review of the gadget.

Hmm… Speaking of risk-taking (which is how timid souls like me regard roller-coaster rides), eemusings has been heavy into risk-taking this week! If she’s not losing her shirt at the poker table, she’s throwing herself out of airplanes! Take a look at those photos… New Zealand is even more gorgeous than Arizona. Which is gorgeous.

An interesting guest post by a writer named Em surfaced at My Journey to Millions this week: the author says that sticking to organic, whole foods and grass-fed beef relieves her depression, and that the connection is so evident that slipping off the real food for even a few days results in noticeable symptoms.

The globe-trotting Donna Freedman is moving—yeah, as in picking up and moving, lock, stock, & barrel—from Seattle to Anchorage. She writes winsomely about those strange going-to-miss-all-this feelings that come on us as we’re about to take permanent flight.

Over at I Pick Up Pennies, Donna’s daughter Abigail describes a surreal reunion with a suicidally inclined woman who claims to know her well, but whom Abigail herself doesn’t remember.

Fabulously Broke has published a whole slew of posts on interesting topics, about half a dozen one right after another. Naturally, being the flibberdegibbet that I am, I gravitated instantly to the fluffiest piece: how to avoid make-up shopping blunders! Buying make-up is a lot like buying shoes and purses: one tends to do it because it makes one feel better. Better than what? That’s a question best asked after the stuff is paid for and the budget has recovered…

At Bargaineering, Jim wonders about the extent of upward mobility still accessible in this country and asks his readers to comment.

NicoleandMaggie discuss the strategy of using one’s emergency savings to “float” a debt. Not my favorite scheme, now that I have no real, credible income. But I did use to do it back in the Dark Ages, when I had a real job.

Where’s My Trust Fund is collecting interviews from PF readers and bloggers.

We know there’s no such thing as too much fun. Five-Cent Nickel considers whether you can have too many credit cards.

So it goes.

 

Report from the Ramparts of Hell

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{moan} I think I’m gunna die but that’s not possible because I’ve already died and gone to Hell, which is where I spent the entire accursed day.

Actually, the day started out OK, but it swiftly went downhill. It was a stressful day whose prospect has been causing frissons of NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO IT all week long. Is it possible that stress could influence the bellyache?

Awake at 3 a.m., unable to go back to sleep. Hungry & headachey; ate a piece of cheese & three figs; had coffee. Didn’t want to have an actual breakfast because I had to go to a breakfast meeting as dawn cracked and didn’t want to be rude by refraining from eating.

6:45 a.m.: raced to said meeting. Knew there’d be no chance for lunch and so ordered a blueberry pancake, bacon, & tea. Stomach was already upset when I got there; this didn’t help. Converted burpy to urpy.

The minute the meeting broke up, flew across the city to the new gastroenterologist’s office; made it on time. Conferred with her. Liked her a lot. She agreed with Young Dr. Kildare that I probably don’t have cancer, probably have developed gastric reflux disease, that it’s unlikely to go away soon, and that for the rest of my life I will be taking a drug that saps calcium out of my already osteopenic bones and is known to cause clinical depression. She also agreed that it made reasonable sense to do a noninvasive test for H. pylori, given my history of living in a Third-World country, before moving forward with an endoscopy. In fact, she felt an endoscopy is unnecessary.

She wants to do a blood test. I said the Mayo doc had opined that a positive result for H. pylori proved only that one was once exposed to the pathogen, not that one was presently infected. She begged to differ: if you test positive, she said, it means the microorganism is still resident in your gut. If you have not been treated with several rounds of antibiotics combined with proton pump inhibitors, then you are still infected. Therefore, in the absence of previous treatment for Helicobacter, a positive result means you are infected. She said she would treat me for H. pylori if she could prove I have it. So…that was reassuring.

Out the door. Not enough time to go home between the doctor’s appointment and class.

Trudged up to campus, a 45-minute drive. Stood (on the sore goddamned foot!) in front of a computer terminal passing another 35 minutes until class started. Steered students to computer commons, for librarian’s presentation.

Had to deal with unruly student (again!). Kid is out of control. She is just completely batshit. DAMN it, twelve more goddamn weeks of this??????

Computers went down. Librarian was unable to do her presentation. She filled time talking about life in China, whence she came. Some students interested, some bored stiff. Afterward she wanted to set another date, so now I’ll have to drag them over there again next week. This screws up my carefully orchestrated schedule, but I think I can do it by killing a busywork assignment.

Tina, trying to cope with her usual overload, sends worried e-mail. I finally escape and get home.

 Stomach royally upset and actually hurting by the time I get back to the house. Significant heartburn. Annoying after ten days of feeling pretty good. Very, very annoying.

Gulp down some disgusting generic Gaviscon. Has no discernible effect.

A plagiarized paper surfaces. I give it a 0 and copy the chair; now will have to deal with THAT next week, god effing DAMN it.

Not hungry but decide to try some yogurt with honey, which sometimes is soothing. Feel marginally better, but not much.

 Exhausted. Field some e-mails, stare glassy-eyed at news sites for some indefinite period. After a while, recover enough to continue working on website, hugely updating it, writing new pages. It now looks pretty good.

It’s after 7 p.m. The dog is whining and nagging at me, I’m sort of hungry but afraid to fix much food because I’m afraid it’ll make me sicker. The dog hasn’t been fed and is running out of food. I have no more meat to cook for her and don’t feel even faintly like grinding up veggies for her, either. Have canned dog food but that stuff always gives her the runs. May have to feed it to her, though.

Tomorrow, another doctor’s appointment, lunch with friends, all of which will put me behind even further on the various to-do’s I’ve set up for myself.

Of this week’s to-do’s, I’ve done ten of the twenty projects & tasks I listed. Some of them didn’t get done because the website needed to be updated and improved before moving on to things that would entail posting links at various networking groups’ sites.

Done:

• Joined Local First Arizona.
• Fixed Tina’s CE Desk e-mail.
• Reorganized and rewrote entire website for client.
• Downloaded Google Contacts into Excel; used that to start a database and start preparing a hard-copy address/contacts book for CE Desk.
• Revamped the CE Desk website.
• Started building files for new contract workers.
• Cleaned out space to hold files for the same.
• Compared costs of Business Networking International (BNI), National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO),  & Trustegrity vs. probable marketing value; decided NAWBO is the best bet.
• Got in touch with two previous employees, schmoozed.
• Sent receipt to client.

NOT done:

• Look into Scottsdale Airpark business publication, for ads & possible PR opportunities.
• Come up with articles ideas for the same, for Phoenix Business Journal, for Scottsdale Chamber’s publication.
• Call Chamber’s director to discuss publicity; try to volunteer as ambassador.
• Set up a calendar on the iPad and try to get into the habit of using the damn thing (but realized that’s not going to happen…I’m unlikely to fiddle with that).
• Join NAWBO.
• Track down the third former employee who, I think, would be good to keep in touch with.
• Finish the database.
• Write this month’s newsletter.
• Bill website client for 5 hours of work. And, come to think of it, three earlier hours of work.
• Scan and e-deposit two other clients’ checks.

 Pending:

• Volunteered for Habitat for Humanity; have to meet them at 5:30 a.m. Saturday.
• Choir director thinks we’re going to show up at 8:00 on Sunday morning.

I don’t want to. I hate racing around at dawn and hate this stupid schedule with two 7:30 a.m. classes a week and a 7:30 meeting in Scottsdale and do not want to fly out the door at 7:30 Sunday morning and I. need. a. BREAK!

No wonder my stomach hurts.

The Great Pantie Hoarding Caper

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Hot dang!!!! AT LAST Costco has decided to carry ordinary, real women’s underpants. Not a variety of girdle. Not a thong. Not some sort of athletic gear. And not your great-grandmother’s undies. Nice cute little bikinis, with lace trim, that—hang onto your hats, ladies—that actually FIT a grown woman!

It’s some sort of a miracle.

As normal women know, most women’s underpants fit only one body type: teensy and board-flat. If you’re shaped like nature built you to bear children, or if you’ve gone so far as to have borne a child or three, you need not apply to the underwear department. There’s no way most of us can find a pair of panties that fit around the rear end and don’t try to slice us in half vertically, like a laser saw in a James Bond movie.

The other day I spotted these things at Costco. Hm…DKNY…not a bad brand. Made in Bangladesh. But they’re here. No one’s going to send them back to the Third World, moral outrage being alien to our lopsided, offshored corporate economy. Why not chance them?

So I bought a package of four, brought them home, and tried on a pair.

And holy mackerel! They actually fit around my capacious aft beam! Not only that, but they’re comfortable.

Couldn’t believe it.

Next morning I jumped in the car and flew to the nearest Costco in a halfway upscale neighborhood (the store in the nearby inner-city shopping center tends not to carry stuff like this). Grabbed every box of “Extra Large” I could lay hands on. That wasn’t so many, because size 12 is considered pretty outré in the women’s underwear biz, so it’s not easy to find panties that fit women who wear what is considered the average size among American women and which, dear hearts, is flicking NOT “extra large.”

WhatEVER. 🙄

I ended up buying a total of five packages, 20 pairs, to the tune of about 75 bucks.That’s $3.75 a pair, about what you’d pay on sale for a pair of department-store panties that don’t fit in any size.

All my old underwear was pretty well shot, much of it falling apart. Matter of fact, a couple pair of Hanes panties I bought at Dillard’s just two or three months ago had already sprung holes in the fabric. I threw out every moth-eaten, flabby-elastic, never-fit-from-the-git-go panty in the drawer and neatly stacked the new goodies in there.

Provided these don’t pop holes in the seams or the fabric, too, I shouldn’t have to buy another pair of underpants for two or three years. Maybe longer. This may be the last underwear hassle I’ll have to go through for a long, long time.

🙂 When you see something that fits, grab it, ’cause you’ll likely never see it again. Especially if you found it at Costco.

Yummy Little Fig & Bacon Bites

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Trader Joe’s has had an abundance of fresh, ripe figs in its produce section. Yum! They are so good. M’hijito taught me to wrap bacon around figs to make a nice li’l snack. I’d been cooking them on the stove, but recently discovered it’s pretty darned easy to cook them on the gas grill. Or charcoal grill, should you care to go to that much trouble.

Just get yourself one of those grill griddles that has holes in it–inexpensive at Lowe’s or HD. They’re designed, I think, to hold fish without letting it flake into the fire. But they work fine for any small food items.

Wrap a piece of bacon around a fig and secure it in place with a skewer or a long toothpick. The thin-sliced variety seems to work better than thick-sliced bacon, simply because it cooks through quicker. But either will do the job. Place the wrapped figs on the grill griddle pan and put them over medium to medium-high heat. Cook, turning a few times, until the bacon is browned to your taste.

Great for breakfast with some cereal or toast. Great as a casual hors d’oeuvre (they could be finger food, but offer plenty of napkins…and remove the toothpicks). Great all the way around.

Fall Has Sprung!

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It looks like our annual second spring is here early. The heat has broken, a good month sooner than normal. We still could get another blast or two, but the longer it stays cool, the less likely that is. The frazzled plants have decided it’s safe to blossom again. One of the fricaseed roses managed to put out a small, tentative flower:

Not bad, considering how fried this poor shrub has been. I’ve had water bills pushing $150 trying to keep the plantings alive…and that’s with no grass!

Don’t know what this thing is, but isn’t it interesting?

It has strappy leaves like a garlic chive, but there’s no scent. I think it’s some kind of bulb that finally decided to come up…I’m always sticking bulbs in the ground and forgetting about them. WhatEVER. Cassie likes it…

Actually, what she’s liking here is pestering the human to throw the ball. Bossy little dog!

Even the cacti are happy with the cooler weather! Look at this amazing thing that appeared in the front yard…

You need to click on the image to get the full effect.

Not to be outdone, the Easter lily cactus in back put out three of these:

The little garden I planted next to the pool, in the dead of summer, survived the brutal heat and is now showing its appreciation for milder temps:

Zinnias and salvias: 99 cents for a pack of six! I thought they were going to die when they were little, especially the salvia. But they managed to make it, mostly by dint of being flooded with hose water once or twice a day. Pretty little things, aren’t they? Not spectacular, but they do the job of allaying one’s general depression.

The pool, which has been very well behaved in the absence of the Devil Pod Tree, is fast getting too cool for swimming. Now that only a few days of swimming time remain, I’ve taken down the privacy screen I jury-rigged out of a couple of old wooden trellises and some shade screen (they really DID look white-trash!), which should increase the amount of light the new hop-bush plants are striving for. You  may remember that all four of these plants were about two feet high when I planted them.

The most robust of the hopseed bushes is now almost up to the top of that six-foot wall. By next summer, they should do  just fine to block the view from the sidewalk and the neighbors’ front windows into my yard.

That orange jubilee in the foreground, contrary to the nurseryman’s opinion, did not appreciate 115-degree days. It barely made it through the summer, again, by dint of my pouring vast quantities of water on the thing. Once established, though, a plant like this can get quite large. It could easily top that ugly shed.

The shed itself is not as obtrusive in real life as it appears in this photo. From most parts of the yard, it’s barely visible, and I think when these plants fill out, it should become even less prominent. Thought about putting up a trellis and training a jasmine or two up there, but that sounds a great deal like more trouble than it’s worth.

Best thing I’ve done for myself in this house was to take out the accursed Devil Pod Tree that occupied that corner. In the absence of the bushels and bushels of strappy leaves and equipment-clogging, plaster-staining pods, the pool has run almost trouble-free all summer long. We have had a few windy, dirty monsoons, but none required me to get out there and haul pounds of debris off the bottom of the pool. Matter of fact, the pool has been virtually trouble-free. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner has easily handled what little stuff has fallen into the drink, and I’ve only had to shock-treat once. That alone represents a large savings.

Part of the savings came from dumping Leslie’s and hiring a local pool company. I’ve had that guy out here once, count it, once, since the heat came up. Oh…except for the time the pump pot lid worked itself loose. What I thought would be a $300 to $600 repair job cost me $60. And he gave me a new lid for free. You can bet that Leslie’s would have taken me to the cleaners over that misadventure.

The Devil Pod Tree is undead, though. It keeps pushing up suckers, trying to rise from the grave:

I’ve found these sprouts fifty feet away from the trunk! The accursed tree had shot its roots under the patio all the way over to the far side of the yard, heaving the concrete in the process. The only thing that will kill these things is straight, undiluted Round-up.

Whatever could have possessed Satan and Proserpine to plant such a thing? Stupidity, I guess…they stuck some other mighty dumb things in the ground, too. They were pretty good with interior remodeling, but landscaping was just not their thing.

There’s another Devil Pod Tree on the west side of the house. It’s now as tall as the forty-year-old palm trees some other hapless homeowner put next to the pool. Since the arborist only charged $300 to take down the Undead One, I’m thinking I may have him take that one out, too. Several trees need some pruning this winter, and so we might as well be rid of the other mess-maker while his crew is here. In addition to dropping large quantities of mess all over the place, this one is dangerously close to the house. Willow acacias are as brittle as eucalyptus, and this one now has big branches that could break off and crash onto my house or my neighbor Terri’s. And of course Satan planted the thing right next to the wall, which the tree is threatening to heave. I’d just as soon get rid of the tree now than have to get someone in here to rebuild that wall in a few years. The emerald paloverde now provides all the shade that’s needed to protect the west side of the house from the broiling afternoon sun.

Darn! It’s already 5:30…have to start to run to get all the stuff done so as to race out the door to get to class by 7:30 a.m. Oh…they’re in the computer commons today. Good: I won’t have to talk to them. The Tuesday-Thursday class, the one that soaks up three of my most productive hours in the middle of the day, is in the library on Thursday, so I’m relieved of having to entertain them this week. Only two days this week to fill with lecture and busywork. This is Week Five. Just eleven weeks left of this impossible routine!

It’s going to be made a lot worse this week and next: I agreed to substitute for a colleague who’s going in for some surgery. So on Tuesdays and Thursdays I won’t get out of class until 4:30 in the afternoon! Then I’ll have to drive home through the rush-hour traffic. Meanwhile three projects for a client are sitting on my desk…how the hell I’m supposed to do those while I’m wrestling with students four days a week, I do not know. Fortunately, he’s just as overworked as I am, and so distracted he doesn’t realize I’m not moving forward on his work at anything more than a stately pace.

Welp…off and running!