Soo many pent-up blog posts to share with you! Well, let’s start with this: Check out the story of Revanche and PiC’s Faux-lopement, a tale told in three installments…
But isn’t getting married always an adventure? (To say nothing of staying married…)
Best wishes to Revanche and PiC, excellent young people
♥ ♥ ♥
Reminds me of my own wedding…
My mother wanted to throw an elaborate shindig. So impressed was she that I had snared a corporate lawyer on track for partner at one of the most prestigious firms in the Southwest, she determined to create a Big Society Event. She planned to hire out space at Mountain Shadows, then a very tony resort that basked in the shadow in Camelback Mountain, deep in the heart of Paradise Valley. There at a sit-down dinner we would receive the cream of Old Phoenix; videlicet, every member of the large firm, every secretary, every clerk, every receptionist, and all their spouses. Plus her friends, my friends, the groom’s family and friends, and anyone else she could think of.
This, as you can imagine, quickly grew into something that looked very, very expensive.
My father’s financial habits made Scrooge McDuck look profligate. He viewed my mother’s plans with increasing alarm.
Shortly after he saw the printing bill for the invitations, he made his move: He called the fiancé and offered to give him $3,000 if he would please elope with me.
No joke.
My father paid my soon-to-be-husband to undercut my mother’s plan for an elaborate wedding. Naturally, the groom took him up on the offer.
Three grand was a lot of money in those days. It was still the time when a young college graduate figured he would have it made in the shade if he ever, during his lifetime, earned $12,000 a year. A $12,000 salary was about the equivalent of a six-figure income today.
It came back to bite my father, in a funny way. Funny odd, I mean.
We set the wedding day in early December of 1967. We would be wed in the groom’s church, a bland Methodist institution in the heart of North Central. I invited my best friend from high-school to fly over from Southern California to be the maid of honor. My mother invited her oldest and best friend to come over, also from Southern California.
My father was still going to sea, piloting tankers up and down the West Coast. He’d planned to get off the boat in San Francisco and fly over for the marrying; then turn around and meet the ship in Long Beach.
Well, along about the end of November, a gigantic storm bore down from the Arctic and barreled into Alaska, where the tanker was bound to put in at Anchorage. The ship headed out to sea and laid off the coast of Alaska, waiting for the storm to pass.
Pass, it did not.
He called ship-to-shore to say he couldn’t make it back to Arizona by the appointed wedding day.
Since it was now a very informal affair, we simply postponed the wedding day. New airline tickets were purchased for out-of-staters, and the groom called the resort where we planned to honeymoon and changed our reservations.
The new appointed wedding day drew nigh. The storm stayed parked over Alaska, and the boat stayed parked on the high seas off Alaska.
Another postponement. More changes in travel plans, another call to the honeymoon resort. My mother’s friend, drawing the wrong conclusion, remarked in what she must have thought was a between-confidantes intimacy, that “these things happen in the best of families.” My mother flew into a high rage and never spoke to her friend again.
Another week passed. The storm did not pass. My father’s boat stood out to sea. Still. The designated maid of honor had Christmas plans and had to demur from attending our wedding, should it ever occur.
After the third postponement, the groom announced that he could not ask the resort in Carmel to change our reservations again, and we would have to move forward with the wedding whether or not my father could get here.
And that’s exactly what happened. We were wed while my father was stuck at sea. I had no maid of honor. The groom’s parents couldn’t make it in from Colorado, either. My parents’ next-door neighbor, whom I hardly knew, “gave me away” in the ceremony. As if I were an object that could be given away, for the price of $3,000.
We used the three grand to buy furniture for the apartment that looked out over the back lot of Sanderson Ford. Probably the young husband used part of it to defray the cost of the honeymoon.
Sometimes I wonder… If we had actually gone through with the elaborate wedding and the big formal ceremony in a church that had some meaning for me (not one I had never gone into before and never went into again), would we still be married?
So with SORT OF a break today (only one student paper that I missed on the server and only two or three that students are trying to faze past me late), I decided to knock off the community college servitude and spend a few hours focusing on exactly where The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., is gonna go in 2012. As part of our scheme to make a living off this thing, Tina and I need to get together and write a 2012 business plan.
I think we each need to articulate some specific goals, both in terms of what we think this business can do for our careers and our personal lives and of how much we need to earn. She’s apparently knocked out with the Bug today and incommunicada. But here are my goals:
2012:
• Cut back teaching load to 2 & 2 • Gross $26,250 to $36,870 from blogging and editorial work combined
Not unreasonable, eh? Well, we’ll see.
2013
• Quit teaching altogether • Earn enough from blogging and editorial work to meet all my living expenses after covering business expenses.
We need to calculate how much we need, combined, to draw out of this business. In Tina’s silence, I did use today’s relative peace to figure out how much I think I need. It’s a range, actually: from the bare minimum I need to cover my present expenses to what I really would like to have to make my life ever so slightly less miserable. In the latter category, I want (but probably don’t need) a regular pool service (once-a-week maintenance), a handyman on call to for honey-do’s, and Gerardo to show up two to four times a month instead of just once a month.
Those services, which almost seem within reason, boost my annual living expenses by about $10,600 a year.
gaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
Don’t believe me? Here are the actual living, breathing figures:
Jeez. Fifty or sixty grand to live here in the Funny Farm without sinking into the Slough of Despond. Amazing.
“Business expenses” don’t actually run $400 a month right now, though they may once we start joining up the various chambers and networking groups we should belong to. In fact, the S-corp needs a new iMac or MiniMac+large screen right now (±$2000), and I think it’s reasonable to expect that various hardware and software updates will represent a regularly recurring expense.
I can’t even express (without risking a breakdown!) the amount of time I spent just today on repair and yard tasks around this place. I need someone who knows what he’s doing to come here and do this shitwork!!!!!!!!!!!!! And that’s th’truth!
Okay, I need a husband. But I’m not gonna get one of those in the near (or distant) future, so I’m going to have to hire the rough equivalent in the form of Gerardo the Lawn Dude Extraordinaire and Jack the WonderHandyman.
Moving on.
So, how exactly do we think Little Me is going to earn these spectacular figures? Right now FaM earns around $1,800 a year on Adsense (though the cavalry recently galloped over the ridge, so there’s hope).
Eighteen-hundred dollars being negligible, we move further on. Teaching nets about $12,725 a year and Social Security returns $12,252, for a munificent more or less reliable (if irregular) income of $24,978 a year.
God help us.
This means that the S-corporation is going to have to earn some serious dollars in 2012 if Yours Truly is not to sink beneath the waves.
Let’s try to keep calm here.
I hate teaching, and I especially hate teaching freshman comp. Therefore in my Ideal Universe I would teach nothing at all.
Here is what the S-corporation (i.e., Funny about Money + The Copyeditor’s Desk) would have to earn if I declined to teach any community college courses:
[emits maniacal laughter]
You understand, $35,875 is more than I earned when I started teaching full-time at The Great Desert University, and $46,496 is one helluvalot more than I was earning at the time I escaped teaching into a quasi-administrative position.
Oh well. This is 20whateveritis. Moving on.
Now, if I were to teach two sections a semester, the net proceeds would ALMOST cover my share of the upside-down mortgage on the Downtown House, which inflates as each year passes. So, what happens if I do that?
Left is HAVE to earn; right is WANT to earn.
Okay, 2 & 2 isn’t intolerable, especially if the online course makes every semester, which so far it has done. It would mean I’d have to drag out to campus to meet only one class, and if I begged appealingly enough, His Chairmanship might grant me a once- or twice-a-week section.
What we’re seeing in the bottom line here is the amount I would need for the S-corp (FaM + The Copyeditor’s Desk) to earn over 12 months. Really, $27,000 to $37,000 is not far out of line, as we’ll see in a few minutes.
The maximum number of courses I’m allowed to teach is (theoretically) three a semester. And, one might add, that’s more than quite enough. How much would the S-corp have to make if I were teaching a miserable 3 & 3?
Okay, so, not counting the amount that Tina needs to earn to keep food on the table for her and the Kidlet and to keep the Kidlet covered by healthcare insurance (Tina has given up on trying to cover herself), just for me alone The Copyeditor’s Desk will have to earn between $21,432 and $32,052, assuming I grind my way through three sections a semester.
Gasp!
Things are desperate, but not as desperate as they seem.
The 2012 goal (for me alone, pending word from The Kid) is to drop back to teaching 2&2 and to earn gross $28,247 to $38,867 from The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.
Adsense is paying about $1800 a year (on average, $150 a month…and oh, yes, dear Google, what you are paying is not enough for me to give a fig if you take offense at my revealing these numbers). IMHO, the total amount CED is earning must be replaced with an amount that will add up to the totals needed to support me, my dog, and my home.
Let us assume Google does not notice I have blurted out the amount its exploitive service actually earns for a PR 4 site, and that this amount continues to flow in. Here’s what this would look like if I taught nothing, if I taught two sections a semester, and if I taught three sections a semester, with the number of $60 hours I would have to work to make ends meet in each scenario:
You can click on any of these spreadsheet images to see them in a larger format.
Hmmm. Really? REALLY????
What kind of workloads would be involved in cranking enough to live on, in these different scenarios—not teaching at all, teaching just two sections a semester, and laboring under three grossly underpaid sections a semester?
Hoooowww many hours would I actually have to WORK under which conditions?
This is where things get interesting….
When you teach three sections a semester, even though the community college district pretends you’re not working half-time and therefore are ineligible for any benefits, you’re actually putting in about 60% of a 40-hour week: right around 24 hours a week. Two-and-two amounts to about 50% FTE, or 20 hours a week.
Let’s recall, too, that some days ago we posited that for each billable hour of our $60 time, we must put in an equivalent hour on marketing.
With those factoids in mind, here’s what we come up with in contemplating what we really would like to have by way of living a moderately comfortable life here at the Funny Farm and what we absolutely positively have to get in order to survive (want to earn and have to earn):
This is kinda interesting: the fewer hours I teach, the more I earn.
Well. Of course. If you’re earning three times as much per hour, you should in theory have to work a third as many hours to make the same amount of money.
Teaching three sections a semester and earning the bare minimum needed to support myself and keep me in my home, I would be working 61 hours a week. As a practical matter, that is about what I’m working right now, and earning nowhere near enough to make ends meet.
But if I were to shuck off all the teaching and substitute those hours with decently paying work, I would earn enough to live reasonably well. The fly in that ointment, of course, is that I have no idea whether I can get enough editorial work to take up the slack.
Still…eleven to fifteen hours a week doesn’t seem far out of reason. Especially if I’m spending an equivalent number of hours in marketing.
So. It’s entirely possible that the only way I’ll ever get the workload down to a manageable 45 or so hours a week will be to quit teaching and generate a reasonable number of $60 hours in editorial work.
What if I quit writing Funny about Money, which in a light week takes up about 7 hours of my time and in a more realistic week consumes about 21 hours?
Well, $1800 a year divided by my $60 an hour earning potential = the equivalent of 30 hours of editorial time spent on blogging. Divide that by 50 weeks (I figure I deserve 2 weeks of vacation time in a year) and you find that I could earn the same amount by adding .6 hours a week to the editorial work. Let’s round that up to one whole hour. Then what would the workload look like?
Which is to say that if I were to quit teaching and quit blogging, I could make ends meet by working less than half the number of hours I put in as we speak.
Isn’t that interesting?
Well, I like to blog. But I will allow that it takes up an awful lot of time.
It has to be added, though, that recently Adsense has not been the sole source of this site’s revenues. In September ad income generated enough to cover that insane mortgage payment, and this month it came very close. Plus I have two e-books in the wings, and I’m told one can earn a little from those, given some decent marketing.
So, I’m thinking FaM needs to remain part of the 2012 business plan. I’m going to give it until the end of next summer (when I don’t expect to be teaching and so will have more time to devote to marketing and Copyeditor’s Desk work). If I can get at least two e-books on the market, and if sales of ad space and appropriate, relatively inoffensive paid links come through, the site may earn enough to justify the time it takes. If not, by the end of August I’ll have to decide whether to continue the folly or not.
Meanwhile, the goal is to drop the teaching load to 2&2 in 2012 and to nothing in 2013. The strategies are to emphasize sales of ad space and inconspicuous paid links on the website, to publish at least two and preferably three e-books by August 2012, and to market the editorial business vigorously to other business through a networking campaign, ads in local law and medical journals, and some strategically placed ads.
You know… If all that’s required to make a living on this is 12 to 15 hours of marketing a week and 12 to 15 hours of copyediting, Tina and I working together should be able to make this business fly.
Now that I’m done whining about my tiny travails, it’s time to consider someone who has some serious issues:
Love Drop is at it again! They just came back from the Indianapolis area where they dropped $2,500 worth of baby gifts on newborn triplets (they’re so cute!!), and THIS month they’re trying to round up the love for another mother who needs our help — this time fighting against cancer for the 3rd time in 10 years.
Any of us in the same situation would probably use any extra money toward medical bills, so that’s why this month we want to instead focus on giving Marci and family the gift of quality time together. Let’s send them somewhere amazing and help them form memories that will last forever! We’re looking for creative ideas this month… financial gifts too, but also anything that will help them escape together for a while.
Want to help Marci and her family from Fort Collins, Colorado out? Here are 3 ways:
• Give $1.00 – This money will help us give her some great quality time! • Give a gift card – Gift cards are extremely helpful, especially to places that are national. • Donate TRAVEL stuff – Airline miles, timeshare options, destination packages, etc. – whatever you have access to!
Thanks guys! You can reach the Love Drop team here anytime with questions: team (at) love drop (dot) us., or by checking them out at LoveDrop.us. Thanks everyone! We’ll let you know how it goes!
So… Are you well? Are you free of major health problems? Are your kids healthy and full of ginger? Will you put food on your table tonight?
How’s about for each blessing you have, you donate $5 for Marci?
Late last night Tina e-mailed to say she’d gone to urgent care and been told she has a sinus infection and bronchitis. She has sounded, for some time, like she has exactly the same thing I have. A doctor there told her that a cold shouldn’t last more than seven days, and if it goes on longer than that, then it’s something else.
Ugh. Mine has gone on for over three weeks.
Of course, there’s NO WAY I’m going to get to an urgent care facility today. The nearest one is a half-hour drive from here.
Well. I suppose if I left right this instant—6:40 a.m.—maybe I could get in there, get seen, get pills, and get back here in time to throw on some rags before running out the door to class. However, that would mean no breakfast and probably not even time to take a shower. And of course, on Wednesday from Hell there’s no time to get lunch, either. So the first time I would eat would be around 5:00 p.m. Very quickly.
I should show up at choir tonight…I’ve been out almost a month, and we have a big shindig this Friday that I’m committed to go to. But there’s no way I can sing: I’m still barking and hacking.
Welp, if a real cold goes away after seven days, that means I’ve never had a real cold in my life. That’s ridiculous. I’ve never gotten free of a cold in less than two or three weeks.
However, you’d think by now this one should be getting better. And it is…at least now I can sleep at night without having to spray a toxin into my nose.
One saving grace: Pup was so well-behaved yesterday, I wondered if something was wrong with him. He’s starting to act almost like a dog!
The only times he jumped Cassie were when she deliberately teased him. (Yes: a great deal of the tup-the-Corgi game is initiated by the Corgi, who thinks it’s great fun to get him in trouble.) When told to “leave it!,” most of the time he left it. He did not dig up the yard, charge around the house like a rocket, drag me back and forth, gouge the kitchen cabinets with his claws, pick up pieces of palm tree litter to chew on, or otherwise make mischief. He was off the leash most of the day.
I hope he’s OK. Assuming he’s not sick, it’s a good sign: it means he’s beginning to get the idea of what it means to live with humans. He’s a bit young to grasp that concept, so I’m suspicious. But…it could be promising.
A stiff breeze blew all night long. Amazingly, there’s hardly any crap in the pool. The wind must have come in from the north, blowing the devil-pod leaves away from the water. Thank heaven for small miracles.
Better get up and get going if I’m gonna get any food or coffee before M’hijito shows up with Pup. Looks like the earliest I can get in to an urgent care facility will be mid-morning tomorrow. I could drop by the place on the way back from the SBA meeting.
After tomorrow, only four more Wednesdays from Hell! God, I can not wait until this semester is over. Not that I don’t appreciate getting the extra composition course, and not that I’m not unutterably grateful to end up with four sections this semester. I am, ohhh I am.
But I’m tired.
This is my third week of being sick with a stupid cold. As usual, it will NOT go away. Invariably it takes twice as long for me to shake off a virus as it takes normal human beings. I’ve missed several choir practices and songfests because I can’t speak, much less sing, without falling into a coughing frenzy.
Under the best of conditions, Wednesday is a Day from Hell. After coping with the puppy from 8:00 to 10:30 a.m., I get to stand in front of classes for five hours straight with no break; then come back, cope with Pup for another hour while bolting down a meal; then shoot out the door for choir practice, where I have to be “up” for another two hours. By the time I get home, I’m beat, and I haven’t even begun to look at student papers or read copy.
Last Wednesday, though, took the Devil’s-food cake.
I let the Wednesday-only afternoon section go a little early because I just couldn’t talk anymore or even stand up. Stumbled in the house around 4:15 or 4:30, dizzy, nauseated, so sick and so tired all I wanted to do was fall into bed. That, I knew, would be impossible with a 300-watt puppy anxiously waiting to be let out of his crate.
Sick as a dog, I was. But not as sick as that dog. Soon as I walked in the door, a great stink walloped me in the face.
Oh.
No.
Oh, yes. Charlie had squirted diarrhea all over his nest and got it all over himself and all over the floor and…what a mess!
So I had to shuck my clothes and shoes, grab the squirming 45-pound puppy, drag him outdoors, wash the shit off him with shampoo, wash the shit off me with more shampoo, towel him as dry as possible. Then drag him back in the house and tie him to a doorknob while I dealt with the unbelievable stinking mess in the living room.
Thank God for tile floors, anyway.
Before I could put the blanket in the washer, I had to haul it out to the backyard and hose the crap out of it. Drag the wet, heavy, stinking blanket through the kitchen and out to the washer in the garage and run that through with plenty of hot water and detergent.
Then take the crate apart so I could remove its plastic floor, which was covered with puddles of shit. Drag that outside and wash it in the hose.
That was when, yes. I stepped on the honeybee.
That’s right. I stepped on a dying honeybee that was flopped in the water on the pavement.
It drove its stinger into my foot, between the large and second toe. Oh SHIT did that hurt.
But at that point I was up to my ankles in dogshit and water, struggling with the large, clumsy plastic bottom to the crate. By the time I got to the point where I could disengage from that mess, the bee’s venom sack had pumped about as much poison into my toe as it could.
Retrieved a knife, scraped the venom sack and stinger off my foot. Dog is hollering and straining to get free.
Stumble back in the house to clean up the remaining smears and puddles of doggy diarrhea, which are still decorating the living room tile. Another 20 minutes or so of scrubbing and upending of the dog cage and scouring the wire walls and doors and it was time to run the blanket through the washer a second time. It seemed a wise thing to do.
Hosed the remaining shit and the deceased honeybee off the back porch. Soaked the burning foot in the cold swimming pool water. Dosed the puppy with Pepto-Bismol. Dosed myself with two Benadryl, not knowing how the body with its recently acquired panoply of allergies would react to the second bee sting of my lifetime.
Climbed in the shower and scrubbed the stink off myself.
Doorbell rang. Charlie broke free, raced for the door to greet M’hijito in a frenzy of dog joy. Caught the flicking leash on the coffee table, dragged the table across the living room floor, slammed it into the sofa, and flang the pottery riding it to the tiles, where it broke into a zillion pieces.
Now my son is pissed off at me because I fly into a rage because now I have ANOTHER mess to clean up and I’m barefooted because my foot hurts like hell and the dog is bouncing up and down in the center of a lake of shattered stoneware and because I did NOT want that piece of hand-thrown stoneware to end up in a thousand pieces on the floor!!!!!!!!!
Shovel the kid and dog out the door. Lock Cassie in the bedroom. Spend another 30 or 40 minutes sweeping up the large pieces and moving the furniture and vacuuming up at least a jillion tiny sharp pieces of broken pottery, some of it thrown all the way into the hall, 15 feet across the room.
Retrieve the blanket from the washer, hang it on the line in back.
Feed Cassie.
By now the Benadryl has taken full effect. It’s only just after dark, but I’m so zonked I can barely wobble down the hall. Fall in the sack and pass out, along about 7:30.
Wake up at 2:30—at least I got seven hours of sleep. That’s something. Anyway.
Friday the dermatologist told me that after his wife stepped on a honeybee on the beach at Rocky Point, it took about three weeks for her foot to stop aching. This being almost a week after the fact now, I’d guess that’s about right.
Oh, yea…while all this was going on, I was also nursing stitches in a surgical wound.
He did say, however, that the lump he biopsied was not a leiomyoma but was indeed, a plexiform neurofibroma. That’s good in that it’s not an indicator of kidney cancer. Not so good in that it’s hereditary and can cause some big problems in one’s offspring and one’s offspring’s offspring…like bone deformities, mental retardation, widespread disfigurement, internal tumors, high blood pressure, susceptibility to cancer. About 10% of people with these charming little lumps do see them morph into cancer. And the ugly things cannot be removed from one’s shoulder, where they frighten passers-by, without causing significant scarring and worse disfiguring than the ugly lumps themselves.
{sigh} I don’t know where this came from. Don’t recall either of my parents having anything like this. But then you don’t have to actually manifest the lumps to pass the defective gene to a child. And I never saw either my grandmothers or my grandfathers.
It was late when my still-youngish husband and an even younger me arrived home from a night on the town. We were both very tired.
Our aged German shepherd, Greta, had been cooped up inside all night long and half the day. Her plumbing didn’t work so fast any more, she being an indeed very aged Ger-shep. We’d acquired a new Ger-shep, Brandy, who we hoped would take the illustrious Greta’s place when the time came for Greta to pass through the veil. But Brandy was still a puppy. She knew from nothing.
Greta, however, could open and close the screen door into the back yard. So, that night, not wanting to wait for Her Ladyship to do her endlessly slow Thing, we left the back door into the fenced yard open and the screen unlatched, so she could visit the doggy facilities at her convenience. Without a second thought, the humans fell blithely into the sack.
Well, my not-so-very-young husband, pushing early middle age, was beginning to snore. The volume had yet to reach the stage where I was forced to spend all my nights on the sofa (and eventually in a bed far from his house). But at that time, on occasion when he was very tired he would snore loudly enough that I couldn’t sleep. So it was that night.
After he started sawing logs, I got up and repaired to the living-room sofa, where I pulled a blanket over my altogether naked body and stuck my head under a pillow.
Greta the German Shepherd, half-deaf, was at her usual station, asleep in the hall right outside our bedroom door. Brandy…who knows? Probably somewhere near the bed, or in the baby’s room.
Along about three in the morning, I awoke and heard Greta go boof? A quiet, tentative inquiry, launched from the hall outside the bedroom. Blinking the sleep from my eyes, I saw a light in the kitchen: a flashlight beam.
Here’s what goes through the mind of a youngish mother at three in the morning:
Oh! John must have gotten up to get a bottle for the baby, and the power must be out and he had to get a flashlight to get into the fridge.
I go, “John?”
And from the the back of the house a flickin’ NUCLEAR EXPLOSION ERUPTS!
Holy God!
Greta comes blasting into the front of the house with both afterburners roaring.
The flashlight is jerking around frantically. Greta’s savage rage is splitting the air. John and I each shoot up about three feet off our respective sacks. The flashlight goes berserk. Greta goes even more berserk.
Still innocent of what’s going on, I drop the blanket like Venus Rising from the Shower Drain and walk toward the kitchen. As I flick on the light, John comes in from the other direction. Greta is at the side door, hackles on end and mad as Hell.
“Who was that man?” he asks.
“What man?” say I.
“The one who just went out this door!”
The light dawns on the lush young society matron. “Oh, my god!”
He opens the door. Greta charges outside. He slams the door shut.
The guy had come in the back screen door—develops he’d been seen trying someone else’s back door in the neighborhood—and wandered into the kitchen. When Greta heard me call her name from the living room, realized I wasn’t in the bedroom and that wasn’t me in the kitchen either, she went ballistic and got between him and the door he’d come in. Those old houses in the Encanto district are like mazes, with their various additions, so he had a panicky search for a way out.
Fortunately, the burglar had the presence of mind to shut the backyard gate behind him as he fled. So Greta is not still chasing him around and around the world. Still, I imagine by now the poor guy has circumnavigated the globe about eight times.
One thing you have to say for an angry German shepherd: it’ll get your attention. Having an asthma attack, need a shot of adrenalin? Piss off a German shepherd.
The cop who eventually showed up after John called remarked that someone who comes into your house when he knows you’re there doesn’t mean you any good.
It wasn’t the first time Greta saved her humans. Wasn’t the last. But it probably was the most memorable.
Image: Botticelli. La Nascita de Venere, ca. 1486. Public domain.
