Coffee heat rising

New Arcadia Door Curtains: $75!

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Et voilà! Now that the fine new ultra-low-E, all matching Arcadia doors were installed, I developed a craving for prettier draperies in the bedroom. The sliding doors in the dining and family doors have sheer floor-length curtains that I made shortly after moving in to the house. I ran out of steam, though, before I got to the back room. In there, a couple of layers of Pier One curtains were jury-rigged on a double rod to keep out the early-morning light…not very effectively.

While I was washing the sheers that had to be taken down for the new door installations, it occurred to me that a set of sheers laid over that cheapo peacock-colored silk curtain just might look pretty nice. They would attenuate the gaudiness of the eye-popping teal, which picks up a more subdued teal on the bedroom’s accent wall. And with windows that no longer radiate heat like a wall furnace, the blue-green things could be slid open, allowing sheers to filter the light and making the room look pretty nice.

So it was off to Fabric Depot, the one surviving fabric store within 15 miles of my house, to pick up the nicest sheer white nylon they had, in 96-inch lengths. They didn’t have the wood clip rings I wanted, but Home Depot did. Unfortunately, HD’s were too dark; however, the clips are easy to remove, and I have a shoebox full of wooden rings that lack the clips. I needed 22 with clips; I had 18 of those. So…it was just a matter of buying one package of HD’s Mediterranean-ugly rings, removing their clips, and snapping them onto my lighter-colored rings. Fabric: $68. Rings: about 8 bucks.

Making unlined draperies is a little time-consuming, but really very easy. First, get the fabric retailer to cut the cloth into the lengths you need. Wide curtain and upholstery fabric comes on rolls that fit into a machine designed to measure out the correct lengths; these have a groove along which the sales clerk can cut a pretty straight line. Once you get the stuff home, lay it out on the floor, one piece atop the other, to be sure they really are the same length.

These are folded in half—they’re actually twice as wide as they appear in the photo. As you can see, the raw edges are not exactly straight—although the saleslady did a better job than most! Straighten the edges either by running a long straightedge from selvage edge to selvage edge (usually these are straight and pretty close to parallel) or by folding the fabric up so that a selvage edge runs along the cut edge, showing where the cut edge is uneven.

Good nylon irons easily; you can press a sharp crease in it, and you also can easily press it out and press out any wrinkles. Set your iron at silk/wool, anddo not try to steam the fabric. At the lower temperatures, your iron will not steam; it will spit. Higher temps will melt nylon. Use a spray bottle to lightly dampen the fabric as you go.

Your ironing board should be well padded, and you’ll need a package of very sharp pins. Large craft pins are sometimes dull; use sharper pins designed for sewing. You’re going to use the pins to secure the hems as you press them in, and then, once a hem is properly pressed and creased, take pin it in place  preparatory to stitching it.

I started by turning the selvage over to form a narrow hem on what would be the curtain’s vertical edges. Fold it over once, pressing:

Press and pin it as you go. You can stick the pins straight down into the ironing-board cover to hold the fabric in place while you press this narrow edge, and then lift them out to secure the hem after it’s creased:

Stitch these narrow hems, and you have now finished the vertical sides of your curtains.

No, I don’t cut off or slash the selvage. And yeah, I know you’re supposed to. For one thing, nylon doesn’t shrink when it’s washed, and so you don’t risk puckering. For another, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

You can sew these curtains on a machine or by hand. Personally, I prefer to stitch each hem by  hand. Obviously, a sewing machine will go a lot faster, but with very fine fabric, you need some real skill with the machine to avoid puckering or damaging the fabric. The effect of hand-stitching is very nice—makes your curtains look like you paid a ton of money for them. If you do use a machine, set it for fairly long stitches with a light tension.

It’s very easy, however, to sew long straight hems by handpicking with a long, baste-like whipstitch. Use a single (not doubled) strand of thread. Tie a knot on the end and start by poking the needle through the folded part of the hem. Then pick up two or three stitches from the weave of the fabric, on the side that will be the front; pull the needle through that and then back into the folded section. You can make eight or ten such stitches at a time, holding as many as your needle will take, and then pull the thread through them all at once. This speeds things along mightily.

Wax the thread to keep it from tangling as you sew. Ideally, beeswax in a special holder works the best. However, these are now pretty hard to find. You can substitute a white(!), unscented(!) candle. Lay the length of thread against the side of the candle and hold it firmly with one finger. Pull it through, coating the thread with wax.

Alternatively, you can wax a piece of thread with the natural waxy oils from your skin, but you cannot be wearing makeup to use this trick. Place the length of thread against the side of your nose and hold it firmly in place, as shown above with the candle. Pull the end so that you run the entire piece of thread between your finger and your nose. This will lightly coat the thread enough to help keep it from tangling, especially if you’re fairly young and still have an oily face. 😉

Now you’re ready to stitch the top and bottom hems. First, fold over the top and bottom edges in exactly the same way as you did the vertical hems. Because these narrow hems will not show, you can sew a simple running stitch to hold them down. Press these edge hems flat. And now you can move on to sew the actual hems.

I like a hem about four inches wide. Use a tape measure or ruler to ensure that these turn out to be the same width all the way across.

Once again: pin, press, and stitch.

You’re almost done! All that remains is to measure for the bottom hems and stitch those up.

First, clip or otherwise hang your curtains-in-progress to the rods you intend to use. I have a peculiarity with sheers, in that I like to fold the top hem over so that it lazes loosely and sensuously between the clip rings (which IMHO are about 897% easier to use than sewing on regular rings. You’ll need to do some math here: take the width of the curtain and divide it by the number of hangers you want to use. This will tell you how far apart to place the clip rings. I came up with 14 inches.

The curtain’s bottom edge will now drape on the floor.

This was the height of fashion a few years ago, and if you like that effect, well…then you’re done. But I think most of us have now figured out how big a mess and hassle it is to clean around curtains that slimpse stylishly across the flooring. So if housework is not your cup of tea or you can’t afford a cleaning lady about whose welfare you care nothing, you’ll be wanting to hem the bottom. This is very easy, much the same as hemming a woman’s skirt.

Because I wanted those peacock silk curtains in behind the sheers, I hung them before measuring the bottom hems. This was to make sure the sheers came out no shorter than the curtains behind them.

Draw the curtains together in the center. Gently pull them down—do not exert a lot of tension here—and note where you would like the bottom of the hem to fall. Place pins to mark this level in each panel. This is where the bottom of your curtain will fall.

Take the curtains down and measure the distance between the pin and the bottom of the curtain. This will be the depth of your bottom hem.

Pin up, press, and stitch your hems, and your sheers will be ready to hang. Before stitching that last seam, you might want to hang the pinned-up curtain, just to be sure you have the hems the right length and that they’re even. That extra step is a lot easier than having to rip out hems, remeasure, and restitch.

You understand, this is wild stuff, putting the sheers outside the colored drapes. But I was right: the effect is really  neat. It allows you to create several styles.

Closing the sheers over the top of the bright Pier 1 silk curtains softens the gaudiness while letting some of the teal hue be seen. It’s after dark here, so you can’t see what happens when sunlight is shining in from the other side.

You can pull the sheers open, to expose the colorful underlayment:

You can have them both opened, sort of layered so you can see both sets of curtains but also have sunlight come in. This looks a lot better in the daytime:

And, speaking of the daylight hours, pulling the underlying colored curtains open behind the closed sheers creates yet another effect, filtering the bright outdoor light and yet letting the teal shade come through. It’s hard to see with the Arizona sun backlighting the window, but to the human eye it looks pretty nice.

Here’s a view of those flipped-over hems at the top. They’re folded toward the back and clipped along the sewn part of the hem. This gives them a little more heft and causes them to drape attractively between the clip-rings.

This project took two evenings in front of my favorite videotaped TV programs plus a Sunday afternoon listening to Click and Clack and This American Life on NPR. Obviously, if you used a sewing machine you’d get through it a lot faster—you probably could put both panels together in one afternoon.

Not bad, eh, for $75!

 

Quit the Day Job? How’s about PART of the Day Job?

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The two-year small-business development program for which I’ve applied—and it now looks like we have a fair chance of acceptance—has a four-month “boot camp” period in the fall, requiring a once-weekly meeting that conflicts with one of my afternoon courses. Adjunct teaching can’t be called a “day job” by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s the closest thing to it that I have on my plate just now. Of the three enterprises at which I labor, the part-time teaching job brings in the most cash on a quasi-regular basis.

We will not know until just before the semester starts whether the AAAME program will accept The Copyeditor’s Desk. If we don’t get in, I sure don’t want to forego that munificent $2,400 paid over four months. 🙄 However, I didn’t feel I could wait until the day before class begins to tell the departmental chair, who has been very generous with me, that I’m walking out on a section.

So, I made up my mind to quit part of the day job: to drop the afternoon class that would overlap the AAAME meetings. It’s not like I don’t have $2,400 in my long-term survival savings account, after all.

Actually, over the past couple of months, enough work has come in to The Copyeditor’s Desk that the business could pay me that much next fall without doing itself any harm. Matter of fact, it owes me a little over $3,000 in the form of a loan for start-up capitalization, made way back in two thousand and aught-ten. So I could simply withdraw the equivalent of my net pay, which doesn’t come anywhere near $2,400, as a tax-free loan repayment.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?

Well. When I went to meet with the chair, he suggested that instead of dropping the third course altogether, I pick up an early-morning Tuesday-Thursday section. That would hedge my bets, and I wouldn’t have to draw down funds from the business to cover base living expenses.

Unenthusiastically, I agreed to this; then realized that at 7:30 every Thursday morning, I’m supposed to be in Scottsdale! It would be counterproductive to enroll in a business development program that’s supposed to be showing you how to market your company while, at the same time, dropping out of one’s main networking group, eh?

So he countered that I should take on a Monday-Wednesday section, at the same ungodly hour.

Ugh. I sure don’t relish traipsing to campus at 6:45 in the morning. Nor do I especially welcome a “full” course load (which it ain’t , but it’s the most the junior college district will allow adjuncts to teach) while I’m devoting a minimum of 16 hours a week to the AAAME project and hustling business and, with any luck at all, actually doing business.

On the other hand…

We do not know that we will continue to get the kind of work we’ve seen this summer. It’s a never-rains-but-it-pours sort of business: you can go for months without seeing a single assignment, and then all of a sudden a bevy of nice jobs lands on your desk. There’s no guarantee that we’ll get any work this fall, to say nothing of enough to keep the wolf from the door.

And, if we do get enough work that I actually could pay myself a little salary and take a little dividend…think of that! Another three to five thousand dollars of income would mean I could live almost like a normal human being!

That would be refreshing.

Even the unholy hour presents an advantage: it will force me to get up, get dressed, leave the house, and meet some live human beings before the real workday starts. Right now, the weekly Scottsdale Business Association meeting is the only thing that makes me do that. Since I routinely get up at 4 or 5 a.m., I often roll out of the sack, walk the two steps across the hall, and plop into a chair in front of the computer. There I will sit, all. day. long, often without getting up to so much as bathe and brush my teeth. I’m getting so little exercise that my back and hips have started to hurt from sitting in a desk chair for hours on end without moving.

Later in the semester, when the mornings cool off a bit, I could throw my hiking boots in the car and stop by the mountain preserve on the way home, getting in a mile of walking before parking myself in front of the monitor. This would help a great deal with the aching joints and the avoirdupois.

As unpleasant as it sounds, having to get up and get going at that hour will actually be a good thing.

Sooo…. Now I’m scheduled to teach a 101 section at 7:30 in the morning Mondays & Wednesdays, a 102 section at noon Tuesdays and Thursdays, and the magazine-writing course online in the second half of the semester. It’s far from ideal—my dream is to quit the “day job” (such as it is) altogether—but it has some things to recommend it.

I guess.

🙁

 

The Gift Not Given

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Do you have something around the house that reminds you vividly of another person, possibly someone who’s not in your life anymore? I have this odd little thing:

It’s a stoneware sauce or gravy server (I guess), about 4½ inches in diameter. On the surface, it’s fairly useless…but in fact, it’s absolutely perfect for melting butter. And that’s how I use it, with some frequency.

Quite a few years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of the students who was  a cohort ahead of me announced he was getting married. He invited me and my husband to his wedding. Nordley, his name was.

Well, this was a shade flummoxing. I hardly knew the man; had never sat in a classroom with him, and I’d never even heard of the prospective fiancée, much less met her. I had exactly zero idea what to get for a wedding gift, but clearly a wedding gift was expected and required. They were not registered, as far as I could tell. And I didn’t have a clue to their taste.

I wandered in to an upscale gift shop where all the young lawyers’ wives obtained their stylishly upscale stoneware, stuff with names like Heath and Dansk and Arabia. Nothing seemed appropriate. Nothing. Went into a jewelry store that carried crystal and silver tchochkies, the sort of useless dustcatchers people gave me as wedding gifts. Not an inspiration in sight. Stumbled through the department stores. Niente. Finally I went back to the gift shop, resigned to having to buy something stupidly expensive for people I didn’t know and who I suspected issued  invitations to passing acquaintances for the sole purpose of furnishing a household with wedding gifts. Since this search took half the afternoon, I began to resent the whole thing.

There in the gift shop, my eye fell on this little bowl. Perfect: unusual enough to please academics and cheap enough to fit my mood. Grabbed it, had it gift-wrapped, and went on my way.

I think it cost about ten bucks, which in those days would buy a week’s worth of groceries. So, for what it was, it was kind of expensive. But it wouldn’t break the bank. And it was different.

A couple of weeks later, along came a new announcement: the wedding was off!

No explanation was given, or if it was, it wasn’t offered to those of us who barely knew Nordley and didn’t know the prospective wife at all. I took the thing off the shelf to return it to the store. But…

On second thought, I kind of liked it. And in those days I was averse to asking for money back. So I unwrapped it, stuck it in the kitchen cabinet, and there it resided.

It’s resided in a number of kitchen cabinets over the years. It seems to be unbreakable, and it comes in very handy whenever I want to melt butter or heat some small amount of something, whether in a microwave or on the stove. Occasionally I’ve used it to serve some fancy sauce to guests.

Every time I use that thing, I think about Nordley. He was the sort of guy we’d call a nerd today: kind of small and slender, balding, probably a little older than the rest of us. ABD, he was treading water in one of those exploitive jobs universities call “instructorships”: at the Great Desert University, these were low-paid full-time positions that you could hold until you finished the dissertation. As soon as you completed the degree, though, you were out of a job. Some people hung on in limbo like that for years, until the university established a deadline for completing the Ph.D.

Nordley  managed to escape, though. He got a job at a community college in Monterey, California.

If you have to teach freshman comp for the rest of your life, you could find lots worse places to do it. 🙂

Don’t know what became of him.  A while ago, after the Internet made it easy to stalk people, I looked him up and did find a mention. Now there’s no trace of him on the Web, anywhere. Presumably he’s retired or died. Or both.

Nordley lives on, though, in the gift that I never gave him.

Reference Works

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My good old Random House fake-Webster’s Dictionary, dating back to some time before the end of the Paleolithic, has just flat worn out. And my Chicago Manual…yes, I’m afraid it’s still the 15th edition. I’ve dawdled on getting a new one, because the current rules can be found online, with some hassling around, and because I’m stone-lazy and flint-cheap. Characteristics, I suppose, that are appropriate to a survivor of the Stone Age. I need new reference works! In honor of our latest client, whose project we’re very enthusiastic about doing and who uses Chicago, I decided to get brand-new hard copies of both these key tools.

And I wanted them now, not three or four days from now.

So drove over to the nearest Barnes & Noble, situated in a decrepit shopping center on the Interstate 17. And yes, they do have Chicago 16. But… If you want to buy it in their brick-&-mortar store, you pay a 10% surcharge unless you cough up private information and get a goddamn “member card!” Order it online, and they don’t extort the personal factoids…but of course you have to give them your name, phone, number, and address to get them to ship the stuff to you. I said I thought not.

Momentarily considered driving to the Great Desert University’s westside campus, but then remembered how the bookstores at that grand institution gouge the customers, and so decided to go home and do what I should’ve done in the first place: order it from Amazon. Better one monolithic corporation than two should snarf up my personal information

Got Chicago for the same price and Oxford New American Dictionary for $5 less than B&N charges. Good enough for government work.

For day-to-day use, I really prefer a hard-copy to a digital reference work. There’s a number of reasons for that.

Chicago’s online site, which is very good, takes you right straight to the answer to your question (assuming you’ve framed the question right). And that’s nice. But sometimes I’m better served by being able to browse the closely or tangentially related sections that appear either close by the relevant section in the text or under the main heading in the index. If nothing else, understanding ancillary issues adds to my expertise. And sometimes I discover that in fact, I’ve asked  the wrong question, and there’s a better solution to what Author needs to do.

As for the dictionary… I have yet to find an online dictionary that suffices for professional work. Maybe one is out there, but it hasn’t come to my attention. The iPad apps I’ve seen leave a great deal to be desired. Web-based dictionaries are OK if all you need is the probable spelling and a brief definition. But if you want to know something about a word? Look it up. On paper.

Then we have the locale factor. I don’t do all of my work perched on an uncomfortable chair in front of an eye-glazing computer screen. Sometimes I read copy on the sofa. And as for copyediting those wonderful detective novels: they’re bed-time reading. When, come midnight, I’m comfortably hunkered under the sheets with the dog snuggled by my side, the last thing I want to do is get up and trudge into my office and turn on the computer to look up some word or style matter. This will require me to lift the awakened dog off the bed and let her outside (for she will demand to go out), and the whole process will consume ten minutes…to accomplish a task that could have happened in 10 seconds if I’d had a real dictionary sitting on the nightstand.

Online reference works have their uses. But real ones still can’t be beat.

Image: Title page of A Dictionary of the English Language, written by Noah Webster.  Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Public Domain.

Dust in the Air, Dust in the Gears…

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Peeked out the window at 5 this morning. The air was (and still is) so dirty it looks foggy out there. Ugh. Nice Valley fever weather.

Oh well. At this time of morning it’s cool enough to walk the dog, so we took a stroll through the rich folks’ neighborhood. And the pool water is perfect for a post-doggywalk dip.

The pool is sooooo much easier to take care of now that the devil-pod tree is gone! It’s practically trouble-free. Yesterday I had a new guy from a new company come over to clean out the filter, which he did quickly and for less than Leslie’s charges. The last CSR encounter with Leslie’s pretty much tore it for me. Went over to Angie’s List and started calling A-rated companies till I found one that considers a central Phoenix house to be in its “area.” Liked the guy: he was quiet and efficient. And now the pool is humming along merrily.

Meanwhile, my computer seems have gotten a little fog-making dust in its innards. Yesterday Word crashed (again). I think the Word for Mac on the desktop has corrupted. It’s emitting those “Word had to quit unexpectedly. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this has caused” messages. What this means is that you’ve lost everything since your last autosave, and possibly then some.

The other day when that happened, I rebooted and it started opening scores and scores of old files!

At first I thought, holy sh!t, no wonder it crashed if I had that many files sitting open! Because I do get in the habit, sometimes, of leaving way too many files open in various programs. But soon (as in instantly) it became apparent that no one could have that many files open at once.

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!

Force-quit.

Start over.

Does it again!!!

So I just sat there and let it open and open and open…thought it was going to open all the files on the disk, which would be about 2700. But no, it finally stopped after 30 or 40.

So now I had to close each one manually. And no, they were definitely not things I’d been working on. Some dated back to 2008! Hadn’t been opened in years!

As nothing, though, compared to yesterday’s adventures. I’d been working on a client’s book; spent about three hours on the current chunk of copy the previous day and expected to finish  in about an hour and a half. It’s difficult, arcane, and tiring to read. Goin’ along fine for about a half-hour, and

“Word had to quit unexpectedly”

Damn.

Reboot. Open the file.

Take a look… It has lost ALL of the work I’d done the day before!!!!!!!!!

WTF? How is that possible? I know I hit save before I went to bed, and besides, the thing is set to save every ten minutes. It should have saved almost all the edits I’d entered. Thrash around and thrash around: nope! No backups, no nothin’!

Weirdly, it had saved stuff I’d done near the end, in the past half-hour or so. But  none of the stuff I’d done the previous day!

So I was mightily screwed. I had to redo three hours of work before I could get on to the hour and a half worth that remained. Set the thing to autosave every three minutes. Typing and typing and wrestling and wrestling, and damned if it doesn’t crash AGAIN! This time it saved all but about two pages of edits. E-mailed it to myself and downloaded onto the laptop. Used the Macbook to finish editing the chapter. Took hours and hours and hours. All that work I’d done the day before was down the toilet, reducing my pay from $45/hour (academic rate) to about $22.50/hour.

More annoyingly, I’d planned to give myself a little break yesterday afternoon. In the Darwin Award department, I’ve hurt my back by sitting too long in front of the computer with my feet propped on the desk—gave myself a roaring case of sciatica. Just sitting in a desk chair hurts, and I’m so spavined I can barely limp to my favorite venue, the refrigerator.

Welp, I’d bought some nice fabric with which to  make some new drapes for the bedroom, and I figured, what with Charley staying at M’hijito’s house for the nonce, that I could spread the stuff out on the floor, trim it up, and get started on sewing the hems. Having to reach and stretch like that would surely loosen up the kinked muscles and pinched nerve.

That didn’t happen. It was after 5 p.m. before I finished. Then I had to race to wash up and get to class, skipping dinner to get there on time.

Today I have about three hours to do on another two chapters of this author’s work. It will have to be done on the laptop, obviously. While it’s possible that the Japanese characters in the copy are overtaxing Word, I kinda doubt it. I’m pretty sure the desktop’s program has corrupted. Oh well. At least I can sit on the sofa to work. If I can finish by noon, maybe I’ll still get a chance to make curtains.

And so, to work…

Readings

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What I’m reading this morning:

Revanche of A Gai Shan Life received a very creepy series of telephone calls. Fortunately, she’s bright enough to recognize a scam, even when it’s posed as an alarming threat and associated with the name of an outfit  accredited by the Better Business Bureau. The levels to which crooks will go…amazing! It’s important to know about this one, and always to remember never to share any information with anyone who calls on the phone and tries to wheedle or extort it from you.

Rachel Adams over at The New Yorker cranks a ridiculous number of words on a ridiculous topic.  Just to show how WT old Funny really is, at heart…I crave what’s in the picture—for breakfast! Yum!

At The Atlantic‘s website, Derek Thompson and his readers hold forth on the cost of bringing up baby. Thompson publishes a pair of pie charts that compare the cost of parenthood in 1960 with today’s costs. Having been around and fully sentient in 1960, I commented on the article as Melete, my incarnation as proprietor of Adjunctorium:

In 1960 most women stayed home and took care of the kids, and decent public schools were the rule, not the exception. Today women must work to help keep the staggeringly expensive roof over the family’s head, and so the kids are warehoused in day care facilities that may consume half or more of the woman’s salary. Today public schools are institutions of social work, not education, and so people who care about their kids’ learning put them in private or parochial schools — again necessitating that their parents leave them in an expensive shelter while Mom and Dad work 8 to 10 hours a day.

With both parents trudging to the office every day, owning two cars is no longer an option. In 1960, many families had only one car, especially if they lived in regions that had viable public transit.

Housing, cars, gasoline, and healthcare cost much more relative to income than they did in 1960. Clothing manufacture has been offshored, taking away Americans’ jobs but giving us acres and acres of cheap clothing.

The cost of child-rearing is thus interwoven with many of the other costs on the chart: Higher costs of housing and health care (not to mention social pressures) push both parents into the workplace, and this drives up the cost of caring for the kids. Education costs more because without a SAHP in most households, middle- and upper-income families are less engaged with the public schools, the quality of the schools continues to fall, and so those parents shell out to put their kids in private schools.

Not all these factors are necessarily bad — few of us want to return to the good old days when most women couldn’t get a decently paying job because they weren’t welcome in the boys’ club that was the workplace. But…the cost of providing women career opportunities and cutting the chain to the stove obviously is going to be higher child care costs and higher transportation costs.

LOL! Speaking of the cost of education, I was amazed to learn what the school where we sent our son is charging today. If we had to educate a child today, we could not begin to send him there on what my husband earned as a corporate lawyer. We’d both have to be corporate lawyers to put the kid in that school! Instead, we would have had to move to the suburbs (DXH strongly disliked commuting, and so we lived in an upscale central-city enclave) in hopes of finding a halfway decent public school, pushing up the cost of transportation and day care.