Will your computer play the .wav file I’m uploading? One way or the other (yea or nay), are you on a Mac or a PC platform? I wanna see if I can record lectures on iPad, upload them to my online course’s website, and have them be usable for all the classmates regardless of the platform they’re using.
And then please let me know in a comment what happened. There’s a brief silence at the beginning while I tried to tell whether it was running after I turned it on.
It looks like the app will record for as long as an hour & a half. The audio recordings that Blackboard gagged on were about 15 minutes long.
An only marginally comprehensible technologese entry in Wikipedia on .wav files says an uncompressed .wav file is quite large, so this may be impractical for lectures unless I can figure out how to compress them and how students can uncompress them. Anybody got any insight into these processes, if they exist at all?
Wow! This last week or so has been difficult. But last night I got to go to a nice party hosted by the financial management firm that handles my life savings. It was great fun!
In the first place: ego-stroking! I gussied myself up in the St. John suit I picked up at My Sister’s Closet the other day (did I mention the jacket alone was around $1200 when new? mwa ha hah!). I felt like Cinderella! Several women actually came up to compliment me on how good I looked! So that was nice.
More entertaining, I met two very interesting people who are perfect candidates for Funny’s “Entrepreneurs” series. I’ve been meaning to revive that for quite a while but with the ridiculous work overload, have not managed to work up that much energy. Both of these folks are doing some wonderfully creative things, as is the woman I’ve intended, for the past several months, to write about. So: for sure, next week I’ll try to get in touch with these folks and interview them. Pour vous.
Today: two more student papers to drag through, one of them truly gawdawful and one just awful. Of the five papers I read yesterday afternoon, I did not pass a single one. Well…unless you consider a D-minus passing. Not, I might add, because of any ditzy little schoolmarm-type trash, but because they did not bother to do the assignment. No joke. Five papers of five in which the bouncing young freshman did not read the instructions (which are the same for all the other assignments that they’ve succeeded on, more or less) and did not do what they were asked to do.
Now this, IMHO, you can’t blame on the public schools. Well. Except insofar as kids who can’t or won’t follow basic instructions are passed through the grades and given a diploma after killing 13 years in the K-12 system.
You can take a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Maybe we ought not to be certifying the dry horses as having been watered. 😉
As soon as that task is done, it’s onward to finishing the content for the CE Desk website and then off to an Alphagraphics to get our new business cards printed up. Yay!
That may leave enough time this weekend, around singing tomorrow morning and performing the Fauré requiem in the evening, to actually clean this filthy house and try to undo some of the puppy damage in the backyard and tend to the limping pool.
But first, there’s a farmer’s market at a park up on the other side of the North Mountains. Think I’ll take Cassie and stroll around there.
6:00 a.m.: Student turns in late paper, with a viable excuse. A new raft of papers scheduled to come in today, this paper must be read now to prevent total melt-down later. Naturally, it’s the most difficult paper of the entire set. Takes forever.
7:15 a.m.: Knock off reading paper so as to get breakfast and feed Cassie before M’hijito shows up with Charley the Pup.
7:16 a.m.: Out of food. Make Costco list. Scrounge breakfast from leftovers; cook pasta to throw over leftovers and add to Cassie’s pittance.
7:40 a.m.: Go back to reading impossibly tangled student paper.
7:45 a.m.: M’hijito shows up a little early. Pup is berserk.
7:50 a.m. forward: Sit down, go back to reading student paper, get up, deal with dogs; sit down, go back to reading paper, get up, deal with dogs; sit down, go back to reading paper, get up, deal with dogs…repeat, ad infinitum. Realize I can’t answer all the e-mail pending; triage. Squeeze in a bath and hairwash.
10:45 a.m.: Out the door.
11:30 a.m.: Meet 101s. Lecture.
12:30 p.m.: Meet 102s. Lecture.
1:30 p.m.: Counsel student on life/career/education strategies.
2:00 p.m.: Meet another set of 102s. Lecture.
3:30 p.m.: Let 102s out early; head for Costco to replenish larder.
4:45 p.m.: Return home. Let pup out of crate. Pup is berserk. Let him out into the yard to destroy things while I unload car. Return La Maya’s phone call; tell her I can’t go with her to a Scottsdale estate sale and then dinner because I have choir.
5:00 p.m.: While explaining this over the phone, pull a leg off the Costco roast chicken; parboil and butter some asparagus. Notice a smell. Clean up Cassie’s shit from under the family room desk, while still talking on the phone. Continue to chat while walking outside to see what the pup is up to and see…Charley standing over the shrubbery vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting. And vomiting. Dog is clearly distressed.
5:16 p.m.: Get off the phone to attend to dog. He staggers off. Look of fear dissipates from animal’s face. He seems more or less O.K. Goes in and drinks water. Get hose and spray back at least a gallon of vomit, with little luck.
5:20 p.m.: Put food on table. Tie fractious dog to doorknob so as to break loose enough peace to bolt down piece of chicken and asparagus.
5:20:30 p.m.: Dog is pawing at eye. Dog paws at eye and ear. Dog frantically digs and scratches at throat. Not good.
5:21 p.m.: Leave food and beer on table. Throw dog and wallet into the car and race for the vet’s office.
5:30 p.m.: Reach vet. Drag dog into lobby. Vet’s office is full of people with dogs and cats. Pup goes berserk. Wrestle animal under control and explain what’s going on.
5:32 p.m.: Get parked in a waiting room. Pup hates vet and is frantic to get out. Throws himself against the door repeatedly trying to escape. Nothing calms dog. Tell my story to the vet’s technician. Get left to wait for the vet. Dog continues to throw self against doors.
6:00 p.m.: Vet appears. Have to repeat the whole damn story again, for the third time.
6:05 p.m.: Vet observes dog. Vet believes dog has been bitten by a spider or bee and is suffering an allergic reaction. I remember the plant growing between the damn palm trees that is a member of the deadly nightshade family…damn! Should’ve pulled that thing out of there before Pup ever showed up at my house! She thinks he would have thrown it up before it did much harm. She sticks to her theory that it’s an allergic reaction to insect or spider venom. She proposes to shoot him up with an antihistamine and another shot.
6:15 p.m.: M’hijito shows up at the vet’s, just as the vet is about to haul Charley off to be medicated. Repeat the whole story again: fourth retelling. Vet describes her theory and how she proposes to treat it. M’hijito looks at dog, notes swelling on jaw, notes bouncing behavior.
“Nothing is wrong with this dog,” says he. “I don’t want him dosed with medications if it can be avoided. Also, we can’t take the financial hit. Is this really necessary? I doubt it.”
Vet wavers. Vet lobbies for shots of antihistamine and whatever.
M’hijito stands firm.
Vet looks at me. “It’s his dog,” I say. “It’s his decision.”
Vet now fesses up that probably if the dog were going to go into anaphylactic shock, it would have done so by now, although there’s still some risk for the next two hours. Vet’s office is open until 10:00 p.m. She suggests giving him Benadryl and watching him closely. If he gets worse, come back.
6:30 p.m.: Exit the vet’s office, $45 lighter. Drive Charley to M’hijito’s house. Drag him inside and wait for M’hijito to return from the Walgreen’s with a bottle of Benadryl. Chat for a few minutes.
6:45 p.m.: Drive to choir rehearsal. Practice singing for two hours.
9:15 p.m.: Arrive home. Feed Cassie. Make sandwich out of congealed chicken. Throw out stale beer. Wash sandwich down with a stiff bourbon and water.
9:30 p.m.: Pick up kitchen, wash dishes, try to restore a little order to the chaos. Let Cassie out. Put heating pad in bed and turn it to “high.”
10:00 p.m.: Answer a few e-mails. Read Google News. Celebrate exit of evil Russell Pearce, recalled from legislative office by hordes of angry voters; celebrate election of several Good Guys to city council. Has the electoral worm turned?
10:30 p.m.: Dope self with Benadryl. Crash in the bed.
Tuesday Thursday a.m. [jeez…how distracted AM i? I can no longer tell the difference between Tuesday and Thursday!]: Benadryl worked—slept a nearly unheard-of seven hours. Am now late for Tuesday Thursday a.m. meeting. Tuesday Thursday agenda:
7:00 a.m. meeting, Scottsdale
9:30 a.m. meeting, Scottsdale
11:30 a.m. meeting, Tempe
1:00 p.m. hair stylist appointment, Tempe
2:30 p.m.: arrive back here. Spend rest of afternoon struggling with dog and trying to grade papers.
w00t! A notice came from The Hartford’s auto insurance side announcing that next year’s premiums will…wait for it!…DROP BY $26!
Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! It’s the first time I can recall a significant drop in quite some time.
O’course, what they’re trying to say is the 12-year-old Dog Chariot is no longer worth the current annual premium of $1125. But what the heck! It’s still running, despite its $106,000+++ miles. What more can a person ask (other than decent mileage)?
Can you imagine? I’ve never owned a car that ran a hundred thousand miles. What a vehicle!
And it’s not alone. The other day I saw another just like it, parked in the blasting sun. Its formerly black bumpers were bleached, like the Chariot’s, to a powdery slate gray. But like the Chariot, somehow it has escaped serious dents. With any luck, its owner was enjoying the same automotive longevity and insurance-company largesse.
The Hartford is not giving to dispensing good news to its customers, except on the occasions that it kindly and generously covers natural disasters. I will say that the company’s coverage after the late, great hailstorm could not be beat. My house has a new roof and a new air conditoner, neither of which I could have afforded out of my own pocket—not on a bet. Handyman Jack’s painstaking and excellent paint job (fee commensurate to the quality of the job) was also covered without complaint. So were several other blandishments, not a one of which I could’ve afforded on my own.
Now…you’ll notice that the company has NOT sent me a joyous little flyer announcing a cut in my homeowner’s insurance. Dollah to donut, that will be going up, not down. But frankly, they’d have to bill an awful lot more to recover the thousands of dollars they put into this house; at least, to recover it during my lifetime. So I’m not complaining.
If the homeowner’s rate doesn’t rise more than $26, I’ll be happy.
Speaking of insurance, it’s still open enrollment for Medicare. From what I can tell, the Medigap policy won’t go up a lot. I have nothing to complain about there, either, so probably there’s no point in putting myself through the hassle of changing. Apparently there are some significant changes in Part D (prescription drug coverage), but figuring it out will take several hours, none of which I happen to have. And I’m still not taking any drugs on a chronic basis, and so there’s no way to compare. My inclination is just to stay put with what I’ve got.
It’s the lazy individual’s way, of course.
But really: does anyone have several hours to plow through this stuff and figure it out? It’s 10 after 10 p.m. as I write this. I’ve been working since 6 a.m. (got a lot done!), and my eyes are so glazed over I can barely see what I’m typing. For several weeks I’ve been telling myself to pick up the voluminous paperwork and try to figure it out. Besides the fact that the task is inherently aversive, I truly have not. had. time to do that.
Speaking of the which, it’s past time to drag off to bed!
So the question of the day is, “Why do I think Cassie can’t take care of herself?”
She has teeth. She bites. And she deliberately eggs Charley on.
This morning I decided to unhook the leash and let nature take its course. And y’know what happened?
Nothing.
They wrestled, they barked, they growled. They whirled around like a little cyclone and for a moment looked like the tigers that ran around the tree so fast they turned themselves into butter. Then they stopped. They went on about their business.
Charley’s business was to try to pick up two toys at once and bounce around the yard with them. Failing that, he fell to the next task, running around and around and around at near-supersonic speed. Then he had to lay down on the plant he’s turned into a dog pillow and chew a bone. Right now he’s roaming around the house, possibly too quietly.
Cassie shat under the family-room desk, just to show him a thing or two.
And now she’s engaging him in another mock fight. And she’s driving him FREAKING CRAZY! He’s flown into a squirming barkfest.
LOL!
It’s violent, but maybe this is harmless dog play. I’m thinking if they’re just left alone to work it out themselves, the issue will resolve.
And indeed, in the time it’s taken to write this, the frolic has ended, the dust has settled, and Charley is flopped on the floor next to the desk. Cassie is resting on the other side of my chair, apparently unperturbed and none the worse for wear.
The alleged fruitless olive in the front courtyard is not. Fruitless, I mean.
This summer it bore a nice crop of smallish olives, very much like the olives that appear on the old stock planted years before the state’s ban on olive trees went into effect.
Olive pollen is said to be too cruel to the delicate noses of allergic residents here, and so to protect the hapless, the beautiful and useful olive tree was made illegal. Eventually a nursery entered the breach with the Swan Hill olive, a patented sterile tree.
Supposedly.
The one I planted in the front yard must have been grafted onto fruiting stock, because in recent years about a third of the canopy has taken to bearing olives.
Well. I happen to have a recipe for curing olives without benefit of lye. Many years ago, a friend returned from Greece with instructions for how to cure olives in water. It’s very easy, though it takes a while.
A-huntin' the wild olive...
Fresh off the tree, olives are too bitter to eat, because of their high content of phenolic compounds and oleuropein, which makes them pretty unpalatable. Except to dogs, that is… Charley the Golden Retriever, like Anna the Ger-Shep before him and Greta the Ger-Shep before her, loves the things and will scarf them up off the ground with great joy.
Last weekend was truly beautiful, and I was done in with work and an endless, miserable cold. So, watching Charley clean up the fallen olives, I decided to chuck the paper-grading and the writing and the editing and spend some time going back to the earth.
The tree was heavy with olives, at least on the northwest side. The first step in curing olives, of course, is to get the olives. So I dragged the ladder around from the backyard, climbed up, and pulled off enough to fill a couple of quarts.
Charley thought that was just the business, since I probably knocked as many on the ground as I got into my collection basket. Apparently they don’t harm dogs—I’ve never had one of my dogs get sick from eating raw olives, and the pits just pass right through.
The next thing to do, after you put the ladder away, is to prepare the fresh-picked olives for a long soak.
For this process, the olives should be ripe—deep red or dark purple, but not mushy overipe. I’ve learned, too, not to use the ones that have hit the ground. They shouldn’t be bruised or contaminated with dirt. I washed my little harvest well in a sinkful of cold water and dilute dish detergent, then rinsed thoroughly.
Now here’s the pleasant part: this is where you get in touch with your ancestors.
The time-honored way of getting started—and it’s a very ancient way—is to sit outside in the shade of your lush olive tree and prepare your fruit for the next stage. Take a sharp knife and cut a single slash across the blossom end (opposite the stem) of each olive.
This takes awhile. But it’s an amazingly soothing and calming process. There’s something zen about working with your hands in the way women before you must have done for thousands of years back into the Mediterranean past.
Every time I do something like this, I think how I wish I could live in Yarnell, making a living with my hands at some quiet, soothing craft. Would you buy my olives? Could I sell you some jewelry? Enough to keep the old miner’s shack warm with propane through the winter? Imagine spending one’s afternoons always in some peaceful, reasonably productive pursuit that does not require you to read student writing that grates your nerves or to dispense D’s and F’s to the authors of said works, that does not require you to meet deadlines, that really doesn’t ask much more of you than patience and a little facility with your hands.
Yes.
Cassie thought this was an altogether appealing idea and found the whole olive-slashing project pretty exciting.
Cassie would love it in Yarnell.
Charley in love?
Charley is easily distracted. He soon moved on from olive-hunting to the Tup-the-Corgi game. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem to quite know which end is…uhm…which. Half the time he tries to hump her head. Apparently he’s too young to understand what this is all about.
Make my day, mutt!
What Cassie understands about Charley’s obsession remains unknown. It is known, however, that she sometimes eggs him on, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s doing it on purpose.
Somehow, this wasn’t what I had in mind when, back in my hippie-dippie days, I used to sing along with with Buffy Sainte-Marie…
Gwine to be a country girl again,
With an ole brown dog an’ a big front porch an’…
Yeah. They still have those in Yarnell. And coyotes and cougars and javelina and skunks and rattlesnakes, all of which regard small brown dogs as fair game and your big front porch as something to sleep under.
Okay. So after you get all your olives slashed, your next challenge is to find a nonreactive container to hold them in. Glass or stoneware is best, though I’m told plastic will do.
Scavenging around the house, I came across the lifetime set of beverage jugs I’d bought at Costco. Glass, large, lidded, and easy to manipulate…perfect!
Instead of packing all of the olives into one of them, I decided to distribute the prepared fruit between two jars. This leaves lots of room for extra water. And since the jars are easy to dump and refill, two are no more trouble than one. In the past I’ve used large stoneware bowls. These work fine, too, but take up more room on the countertop, and to pour off the water you end up dumping everything into a colander in the sink, dirtying up a tool each day.
Bear in mind, this next phase of the project takes five or six weeks. So it’s convenient to use compact containers that are easy to haul around.
Place the olives in the container, whatever it is you decide to use, and cover them with cold tap water. Put some sort of cover over the top of the container, and leave it to sit in a cool place. I imagine you could keep it in the refrigerator, though presumably the ancient Greeks didn’t have refrigerators. Just depends on how authentic you choose to be, I suppose.
Now, each day for the next five or six weeks, pour the water off and refill the container with cold tap water. Do this every day, without fail.
About four or five weeks into the process, you can begin tasting the olives. When they no longer set your teeth on edge but instead have a nice Greek-olive flavor with a tang, it’s time to pack them in brine.
Wash the olives again, in a sink full of clean cool tap water.
Make a pickling solution, as follows:
4 tablespoons salt
2/3 cup vinegar laced (if desired) with lemon or lime juice
bottled water to make one quart
Do not use home-made wine vinegar, because its level of acidity is not reliable.
Gently pack the olives into clean, lidded jars. Add your choice of spices, according to your imagination. Possibilities include any and all combinations of the following:
You can, I’m told, substitute the juice from a jar of dill pickles for all or part of the water. However, in my opinion the very best way to flavor up these olives is to add, to your quart of pickling solution, 1 teaspoon of curry powder, 2 teaspoons of minced dried onion, and 1/2 to 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper.
Leave about an inch or so of headroom in each jar after all the olives are covered in pickling solution. Then pour in about 1/2 inch of olive oil. If your jar narrows at the top, olive oil sahould cover the wider part below.
In my younger days, I used to store these at room temperature. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’d keep them in the fridge. It is impossible not to eat them promptly.
