Coffee heat rising

Roses! She’s at it again

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Check out this lovely painting La Maya did yesterday at her mentor’s studio!

Cuadraz_Roses

She calls it “Roses for Love.”

This is the time of year for roses in southern Arizona. The plants are so overjoyed to have survived another brutal summer, they burst forth in spectacular blooms. For some reason, the rose scent seems to be stronger during the fall than in the springtime. A variety of deep red rose that grows here has a hypnotic perfume.

La Maya has posted a number of new works since she started her own website. The still life has always been her forte, and she has done some very nice landscapes. The ones she’s got online right now picture the Imperial Valley and the high Arizona desert. I wish she still had the one she did when she and La Bethulia were in Spain—they came across an incredible field of lavender with mountains in the background. Somebody bought that piece instantly, and she’s never tried to reproduce it. It was gorgeous.

Recently she’s started to do some portraiture, too. That’s brave. I never have been able to draw or paint an acceptable image of a human being. That takes some talent.

Interesting idea for a Christmas present, eh?

Was your data caught up in the Gawker hack?

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Here’s a tool to discover whether your username or e-mail was hacked in the recent attack on Gawker Media and its manifold sites. If like me you downloaded the list of compromised usernames, you found they were all “hashed,” and no explanation of how to translate your username or e-mail into the code used in the document was given. This tool at GawkerCheck converts your comprehensible terms into “hash” and then provides a list for you to search.

Here’s another tool from Slate that’s easier to use. If you want to test more than one username or e-mail, reload the page between attempts.

By now you probably realize that Gawker itself was not the only hacked site. Others include

• Gizmodo
• Jalopnik
• Jezebel
• Kotaku
• Lifehacker
• Deadspin
• io9
• Fleshbot

This morning (Monday) Consumerist reported that when the site went over to Consumer Reports, subscribers were asked to change their passwords. Some people, however, neglected to do so; if you were among them, your data might be compromised.

GawkerCheck claims that, contrary to some reports, if you signed in to any of these sites through Twitter or Facebook, some of your information may appear in the hacked database; while your password will not have slipped through, you still could be at some risk. Might want to consider setting up a dummy e-mail address or two by way of shifting your identity.

If you’re in the habit of using one or two passwords at several sites, it would be wise to change them forthwith. Start with anything even faintly resembling a financial institution and then move on to your e-mail and websites. GawkerCheck advises not changing your password on the Gawker sites.

As of this morning, I couldn’t access the password-change function at Consumerist. If I ever had one at Lifehacker, I sure can’t remember what it was. Probably is outdated by now, if it ever existed. Obviously, though, if the information vandals are still able to hack into the databases, changing your password there would be highly counterproductive.

The Workman Waltz: Flirtation Stage

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So here we are at the first stage of hiring workmen to replace the air conditioner and reroof the house. The insurance company ponied up about $11,100 for a new AC, a new roof, and repairs to the CoolDeck. That amount will cover the air conditioner and the roof, just barely.

I joined up Angie’s List by way of getting names of contractors who have at least not driven SOME people into fits of rage. The result was a little mixed, but I did find a roofer who’s supposedly OK. And, having become disenchanted with my own AC guy after the company changed hands, I’d already learned of one air-conditioning contractor from my neighbor Sally; the other new neighbors, who moved in to Dave’s (former) Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, recommended a second one based in Sunnyslope, right around the corner from us.

M’hijito and I have used a roofer—both houses needed to be reroofed shortly after we purchased them—who did a good job and seemed to be honest. I called him and found him strangely reluctant, but he showed up and produced a bid of $7,200: almost $2,000 more than he bid five years ago to roof the same house, when he had to replace rotted plywood to the tune of $48.50 per sheet.

The Sunnyslope roofer wanted $5,400 to install a 14-seer Goodman air conditioner, the smallest SEER for which the government will disgorge a $1,500 tax kickback on a high-efficiency unit.

$5,400 + $7,200 = $12600
$12,600 – $11,100 = $1,500

Unfortunately, it’s highly  unlikely that I’ll ever see any tax refund from that federal offer, because it’s unlikely that I will pay any taxes at all this year. Thanks to the costs of Medicare B, Medicare D, Medigap, and long-term care insurance, my medical costs—before the $700 pair of glasses—far exceed 7.5% of my income. Social Security, the main source of my 2010 income, is taxed under some strange and incomprehensible system that keeps the cost fairly low, and I’ve hardly drawn down any of my savings this year. Income from teaching is even more minuscule than Social Security benefits. And the S-corporation will shelter almost all my freelance income, which was more minuscule still.

So…I’m going to have to land the best deal I can on the least cheesy product anyone will offer me.

The Sunnyslope air-conditioning guy came in with a bid of $5,400, and he proposed to defraud my insurance company by emanating a bid for a 14-SEER unit but calling it 13-SEER, since he claimed that the insurance company would pay for nothing better than 13-SEER—once again proving that crime doesn’t pay. Sally’s guy issued a bid for $5,200 for 14-SEER, hold the bullshit.

Two hundred dollars isn’t a big difference, but he didn’t propose to lie to the insurer. In my experience, if a person will cheat someone else, sooner or later he’ll cheat you, too.

Now about that $7,200 roof… The guy whose name I got from Angie’s list gave me a bid of $6,100, eleven hundred bucks better than my old roofer’s proposal. Same job, same quality of shingling (different brand, though), a little higher on replacing plywood, decking, molding, and fascia.

That’s getting down into the almost reasonable range.

$6,100 + $5,200 = $11,300

Only a couple hundred bucks more than the insurance has paid.

However, here is a very interesting site, where various kinds of contractors go online and talk shop. Get into the roofers’ forum, explore around, and eventually you’ll come to a thread where the men are chatting about a practice in which the outfits that descend on a town after a storm offer to pay a homeowner’s deductible to get their business. Well, there is an outfit in the neighborhood just now that doesn’t appear to be altogether fly-by-night. It’s a little suspicious that the company’s A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau dates from November of 2010 (and, one might note, that when one looks into how you apply for an A+ rating, one is not left with much confidence in that), but the Registrar of Contractors shows that they’ve been in business for 20 years. They’re flying through with crews of six or eight men and reroofing each house in a day or two. I could ask for a bid and find out if they’ll come down the amount of the $2,000 deductible.

The forum-going roofing guys think this practice is unethical. Some of them think it’s illegal—they think it’s insurance fraud. However, it’s hard to see how it would be fraudulent if the insurance company has already paid out and has seen bids from legitimate companies that are not basing their bids on any such schemes. Once the insurance company has paid what its representatives think is fair, it’s up to the homeowner to find the best price within the confines of the amount she has to work with.

What fun! I can hardly wait to get started on the construction.

School’s Out!

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Hurrah! Finally finished grading papers last night! The papers are read and semester grades are online, and after about two more days needed to wrestle three new sections into Blackboard, I won’t have to think about school for a whole month! Mirabilis!

Like most things that are any fun, teaching is poorly paid. But it sure is a hoot! I love students, even when they’re up to no good. This semester the 101s were full of mischief. We had not one but two hilarious ringleaders, one a young woman whose mouth absolutely refused to stay shut no matter how hard she tried to keep it under control, and the other a boisterous young man whose lifelong job title, clearly, will be “Life of the Party.” In these circumstances, I don’t bother trying to suppress them; instead I play along with them and use their energy to drive one teaching moment after another. Though this requires more work, it’s entertaining. Makes for a very noisy classroom, but my theory is that when they’re too quiet they’re asleep.

The online magazine-writing course went reasonably well. A great deal more boring to teach, alas—but at least it doesn’t require any driving. Or any shushing of bouncing blondes! Quite a few students dropped, but those who survived did pretty well. Some of them were actually writing at a publishable or near-publishable level by the end of the term. My co-conspirator taught a hybrid version of the same course in first eight weeks of the semester, and she reports that a lot of her students dropped, too. She made them write five articles, which is quite a few for such a short course. I inflicted only two on mine, but made them do market research, write queries, and jump through one prewriting hoop after another. If we’d had sixteen weeks, I probably would have made them write four feature-length articles and a brite. But eight weeks is, IMHO, too little time for a nonprofessional writer to get a running head start on more than two or three 800- to 1,500-word pieces with queries, interviews, and other research, plus exams on the reading material.

Now it’s time to go sing. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

😀

Image: Interior of the Francis M. Drexel School, from John Trevor Custis, The Public Schools of Philadelphia. Public Domain. Says the contributor who posted this
on Wikipedia:

The interior of the Francis M. Drexel School in Philadelphia from the Custis book, published in 1897, p. 435 (original numbering) – out of copyright. Available at Google Books. I’ve downloaded a jpg format (rather than pdf format) taken from http://www.thedrexelschool.com/ sub page “History from 1888” (clearly the same photo from the same source). Notice the gaslights in the classrooms and the moveable classroom walls that have been folded up and stored.

Christmas Is for Friends

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Melancholia I

A few days ago over at a Gai Shan Life, Revanche described spending Thanksgiving with a friend, having opted a trip to visit her perennially stress-inducing relatives. Though she was obviously relieved to have freed herself from another angst-filled holiday, you can almost touch the guilt vibes coming off that post.

Is there one among us who does not feel this?

The purpose of family is to spoil holidays for adult children, siblings, and cousins. It’s part of the cosmic order.

I find Christmas especially depressing, because my mother loved it so and made a very big deal of it. She learned her flair for Christmas celebration from her grandmother, who turned Christmas into high performance art. It was the holiday for us. I miss my mother a lot, and I miss her and her family the most during Christmas.

My stepmother, who came on the scene shortly after my mother died, practiced her own art of making Christmas miserable. Like many who loudly pretend to be followers of Christ, she was just downright mean. It took a long time before I realized she was doing it on purpose: exploiting holidays to stage a hurtful remark or a nasty stunt. I finally figured it out when she tried to do a number on me at Easter. Unlike her tribe, my family, not being worshipers of the man from Galilee, didn’t celebrate Easter. So when she threw a zinger at me that spring it had no effect…except to make it clear that she thought I would be missing my family and that she was taking the opportunity to reduce me to tears again. Later her daughter revealed that I wasn’t the only target of her machinations—that she’d been doing it for years to everyone around her.

When we were young, my husband and I used to get together with our best friends the weekend after Thanksgiving and throw a magnificent feast, which we called TGTGIO: Thank God Thanksgiving Is Over! Turkey was absolutely out of bounds, and so the focus of dinner would be roasts like leg of lamb, duck, prime rib… My friend Barbarella could REALLY cook, and so could I.

It went a long way toward making us feel better.

Later, when I could no longer stomach another Midwestern meal of flat white stuff (the new relatives favored overcooked steamed Butterball turkey, mashed potatoes with the consistency of library paste, and cauliflower, accompanied by “salad” of canned fruit in lime Jell-O), we would bundle the kid and ourselves in the car and drive 12 hours (one-way) to Grand Junction, Colorado, there to spend Thanksgiving with my husband’s mother. It was a desperation move. Just imagine: driving 24 hours, often through blizzards and over long stretches of black ice, to get out of spending three or four hours with that bunch!

I wasn’t a lot fonder of my mother-in-law. She was so powerfully opinionated that she believed her every thought, no matter how cockamamie or faddish, was dead right, and if you didn’t agree with her in every detail you must be a blithering fool. However, she was at least neither deliberately mean nor stone stupid. Since she admired intellect no end, I could safely bury myself in a book all the time we were there, avoiding most confrontations.

Well, all those people are gone now or nearly so, and though I will confess to an occasional moment of loneliness at the holidays, I certainly don’t miss those who went out of their way to create unhappiness. M’hijito’s circle has developed a holiday tradition of putting on a big party for all their young friends, and the older generation is invited to that. It’s a great deal more fun than any of the true “family” holidays many of us experience.

They say Generation X substitutes friends for family. Maybe that’s as it should be.

Ebenezer Scrooge celebrates Christmas with Bob Cratchit

Images:

Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia I. Public domain.
John Leech, Scrooge and Bob Cratchit. Illustration for Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Public Domain.

School’s out! (…almost…)

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w00t! Yesterday was the last day of class! Would that I could raise a toast to it!

Two rafts of papers to read, two courses to post on Blackboard, and then with any luck at all an entire month’s break.

I got a head start on the magazine writing students’ papers yesterday. Today I’ll read the Little McBoingers’ freshman comp papers (what a bunch this class has been!), then finish the budding journalists’ papers on Saturday. With any luck, I’ll be ready to file grades by…what? Monday? Then a day or two to load next semester’s courses, and after that…waHOO! A whole month of freedom!

This is the first real, credible vacation I’ve had in six years. Despite my highly developed expertise in Creative Malingering, the fact is that while “telecommuting” I was reading arcane academic copy steadily, plus supervising three or four bright young editors from afar (and doing freelance copyediting, and noonlighting with one to four upper-division writing courses on the side, and running this blog). Before that, when I was on GDU’s teaching faculty, an occasional break would come up, but it was usually filled with unpaid course prep work. I would grab every summer course I could get, and the time in between was occupied with getting ready for the next round of courses.

Boy, do I need a break! The stress of working 12 to 17 hours a day while trying to make some very frayed ends meet plus worrying about what we’re going to do, if anything, about the underwater house is making me sick. It’s obvious that the belly thing is stress-related, plus I’ve developed a fantastic new hypochondria, highly annoying and distracting. What next, Lord?

Of course, this “break” will be blighted a bit by the Workman Waltz, an added round of hassle one could do without. In addition to the roofers and the AC guy, I need to get the plumber in here. The kitchen sink is backing up in a weird way…think something’s amiss with the garbage disposal. While he’s here, there are a bunch of honey-does he can attend to.

That notwithstanding, I have a vacation plan. Mostly, it entails finally getting back into a healthy exercise routine. The scheme is as follows:

• Walk the dog first thing in the morning.
• Later in the morning, walk in one of the mountain parks, probably the one in Glendale, which is cleaner and more pleasant than ours and whose proprietors have announced no plans to fleece the users with parking fees.
• Ride the wonderful new purple bike in the afternoon.
• Walk the dog again in the evening.
• Spend the time in between gardening, touching up the paint, and reading stuff that is pure froth.

Maybe I can even get some socializing in somehow. That, of course, would entail finding someone to socialize with, not a likely prospect. But at least choir will be doing a lot of singing over the holidays, so that’ll provide some human contact. I’m going to spend Christmas Day at SDXB’s—with M’hijito at his dad’s and New Girlfriend in Denver with her family, we’ll both be orphaned again. Our plan is to hike part of the day and then fix a swell dinner.

So, maybe with some relief from work and a stab at getting back into what was once a pretty typical exercise routine, I’ll start to feel normal again.

bicycle

Images:

Nikolai Petrovitch Bogdanov-Belsky, Mental Calculations. Public Domain.
Funny about Money, Snapshot of Purple Bicycle. You want that photo? Feel free!