Coffee heat rising

Not one but TWO giveaways!!

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Check out what Revanche is up to over at A Gai Shan Life. She’s engineered a double giveaway contest: in a single event, she’s offering chances at a free year-long subscription to PearBudget and a chance at 500 free full color (!) business cards from Uprinting.

PearBudget is an online budgeting program, described by its proprietors as simpler and more convenient to use than Quicken. If you’re new to budgeting or it’s a task you truly hate loathe and despise, the freebie online test run is an easy way to get started on a simple, workable budget.

Online business card printing is kinda cool. Tina managed to score a box of freebies for The Copyeditor’s Desk from one of the online companies. The design was just fine, printing was excellent, and the cards were very serviceable—and infinitely better than running them off on an HP desktop printer. I’d like to get some for FaM.

Time for a retread!

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What a beautiful few days we’ve had! Incredible weather in the 60s and 70s, peace and quiet, and now an unexpected holiday (the State of Arizona, because of the legislature’s deep and abiding resentment at being forced to approve Martin Luther King Day, took President’s Day away from its employees, but the County abides no such scantily veiled bigotry). The young classmates and I don’t have to reconvene until Wednesday, o mirabilis!

Now that the racket of the three-ring circus that is the COBRA, Social Security, and Medicare bureaucracies has died down for a while, I’ve finally had a chance to relax, unwind, catch my breath, and think a few thoughts.

And here is what I think:

• My face is beginning to show my age. This is not surprising, since I was born in the early Pleistocene.

• My face is showing the effects of too much ultraviolet light. Also not surprising: born in an early Pleistocene desert, I grew up in one of the harshest deserts on the planet during a time when sunshine was supposed to be good for you (can anyone else remember the phrase “a healthy tan”?), and then I spent my entire adulthood in one of the most biologically diverse deserts on the planet. I am, in short, a creature of the sun.

• I am fat.

• I am boring as Hell. This is probably because…

• I am stuck in a rut.

There’s gotta be some changes made.

First, I need to get out from in front of the computer and put my body in motion. More exercise…lots more exercise! In addition to meeting La Maya whenever we can get together on weekday mornings for an hour’s walk, I need to walk the dog at least a mile a day, and I must get off my fanny and onto the mountain! There’s a very fine mountain with several quarter-mile vertical hikes just to the north of my house. Need to go there and do that. Ideally, every day; as a practical matter, no less than three times a week.

I have a gaudy pink beach cruiser of a bicycle. It sits in the garage while its tires decompose in the heat. I need to get on the bicycle every day and explore my neighborhood and nearby enclaves.

I have a perfectly fine, athletic little sheep dog. I need to let her take me for a run every day. Not a walk: a run.

At the age of 65, dear friend Garnett Beckman (scroll down that page!) started hiking Phonix’s North Mountain Park several times a week. Just retired from a lifetime of teaching, she decided that no grass would grow under her feet. She was 84 the last time I walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with her. And yes, I’m afraid she did get out before I did. She’s 102 now. She still has all her marbles, and she’s still going strong.

Role model! Listen: can you hear that voice saying, “What are you waiting for, dear?” That would be, yes, Garnett.

A close second: I need to lose about ten or fifteen pounds. It should come naturally if I manage to drag myself away from the endlessly fascinating Internet and start walking. But I also need to eat better. I eat too much pasta, too many sugary treats, too few green and orange veggies. And, let’s face it: I drink wayyy too much for an old lady: two beers a day, down from half a bottle of wine. A day.

Yesh. Sixteen years of working at ASU earned me a mighty fine drinking habit. If it’s any excuse (it’s not), I’m not alone: hardly any of my friends and former colleagues arrive home from a day at that place without craving a drink or two or three. Some of them crave a lot more booze than I can ingest, and that is plenty. One recently lapsed from AA; the others…don’t ask.

I must stop drinking. Really stop drinking. Not reduce drinking. Knock it off.

After a day of gallivanting with M’hito, in which we visited many venues and spent not very  much money, I came home not even faintly interested in a drink. Clearly, one thing that will help is to fill my days with something other than counting shekels and clicking on Web sites until my eyes glaze over. I think more exercise and an organized diet program will help a lot.

Other strategies: Use the neat new refrigerator-door-sized glass bottles to make sun tea. Prepare a lot of ginger-pinapple drinks and frescas. Have plenty of pleasing things on hand to drink other than wine, beer, or whiskey.

In the horrible face department: it’s time to get serious about maintenance. Tomorrow it’s off to Costco to buy some “mineral” makeup. Not that I expect any miracles, certainly not on sagging jowls and hide as convoluted as the surface of Mars, but I’m beginning to suspect L’Oréal liquid foundation is a bit passé. Time to try something new, develop a few fresh techniques.

And it doesn’t take much reading of Une femme d’un certain age to get the clue that it’s time to update the wardrobe. I’m starting with red and red. I’m also going to follow Frugal Scholar‘s and SDXB’s advice to shop in thrift stores by way of upgrading the wardrobe. At the very least, I must have some new tops to disguise the Costco jeans. New tops, new sweaters, new jackets, new vests, new skirts, new dresses, new whatever else that comes along. I have got to start dressing better!

New (to me) clothes, fresh make-up, more exercise, better food: these should jump-start the project to get a life. Who knows? Maybe once a little momentum builds up, I’ll have the nerve to do what Mary has done; drop it all and embark on a whole new existence.

Onward!


Another sad day for academe

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Deflected from writing a post this afternoon by the startling news from Alabama: denied tenure, a junior faculty member tried to take out her department and succeeded in killing three colleagues.

What a tragedy for everyone, the maddened assistant professor as well as those whose lives she ended, and all their families.

Considering how much commitment, work, and struggle go into attaining a Ph.D., how much more struggle, work, abuse, frustration, and sometimes downright misery a junior faculty member goes through, and how much rides on a single tenure decision—often made by committees not all of whose members may operate with the purest of motives—it’s surprising this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. In fact, the fear that it could does surface every now and again.

Some years ago my department on the West campus of Arizona State University decided to dismiss a tenure-track assistant professor after the chronic frustration of working at that august institution had driven him quite insane. One of my students, a police officer, had let it slip in front of another student that she had arrested this guy for beating up a young boy; I reported this to the dean. The dean and the campus cops confirmed its accuracy, but no action was taken. Only after he threatened to cut off a colleague’s head and pee down the hole—giving said colleague an excuse to decline to come into campus even to meet his classes—did our administrators finally feel moved to get rid of him.

The chair of the department went to the man’s house, accompanied by a phalanx of armed police officers, to give him the news and to tell him he was not to come back to the campus. Before he left on this mission, however, the chair called some but not all of the faculty members and warned them to stay away from campus that day. Strangely, he didn’t tell everyone. It was obvious as day that if our disaffected colleague walked into the second-floor office suite carrying a street-sweeper, he wasn’t going to distinguish between those who merely annoyed him and those who drove him to distraction. But some of us were left to take our chances.

Jayzus! Imagine having a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard University and then being denied tenure by a public school in a state like Alabama…probably the only state in the Union that’s more backward about education than Arizona. How crushing!

For those who don’t know what this implies: it’s extremely difficult to land a tenure-track job at a university in the best of times; during times of recession, almost impossible. To hang onto the job and build anything resembling a career in academia, you have to fight your way to tenure, usually on a three- to seven-year deadline. Tenure decisions require you to jump through many flaming hoops, and too many times the decisions are anything but fair. If you fail to obtain tenure, your job at that institution is over and your chances of landing another tenure-track job are nil. Should you stay in the academy at all after that, you’ll likely end up teaching five sections a semester in some junior college, with no research agenda and no chance of ever having a research agenda. Effectively, tenure denial ends the career for which you spent 10 to 15 years preparing.

So, all the while a junior faculty member is working toward tenure, he or she is under soul-wracking pressure. It is, even for the best of us, a difficult time. It’s not surprising that some people crack. Given the pervasive violence and madness in our culture, I guess we’re lucky events like today’s are rare.

Prius: The road not taken

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Well, for a change she who hesitates wins. I am sooooo glad I didn’t run out and buy a Prius or some other new Toyota during the infamous gas price inflation of 2008.

Because I was employed at the time, I could’ve afforded it in spite of the market conditions. And I most certainly did covet one of those snazzy hybrids. In saner moments, I thought seriously about trading in the Dog Chariot, which guzzles gas in an obscene way, for a smaller, more fuel-efficient gasoline-powered car. After many years of satisfaction with Toyotas, whatever I would have selected would have come from that maker.

Luckily for me, I couldn’t make up my mind and so did nothing. At one point, I calculated how long it would take for the savings in gas to pay for a replacement vehicle and realized that trading in the ten-year-old Sienna would amount to cutting off my nose to spite my face.

Given the Toyota’s recent, spectacular quality-control troubles, I sure am glad I didn’t leap off that cliff. Probably I would have sent my broker straight to his favorite Toyota dealers without noticing that recent consumer reviews have issued increasingly negative reports. Edmunds, for example, has this to say about the Corolla:

In reviews, we’ve been disappointed with the current Toyota Corolla. Competitors from Honda, Hyundai and Mazda outdo it in most regards, specifically in the areas of interior quality, value and driving pleasure/confidence. In a consumer comparison test where we invited six regular Americans to test several competitors in this class, the Corolla finished dead last and was deemed a disappointment by most.

U.S. News and World Report‘s 2010 round-up suggests that the Camry’s overall quality also is slipping:

In years past, Toyota has had a strong reputation for nearly all its models, but some recent reviews report that the gold standard is becoming tarnished. Toyota fell from first place to fifth in Consumer Reports’ annual reliability survey last year, and the V6 Camry specifically received a “Below Average” rating—a first for the popular car.

Experienced, long-term Camry owners remark that the vehicle’s “interior is getting cheaper every year,” apparently because management has decided to follow Detroit’s tradition of cheesying up the product so as to maximize profits at the consumer’s expense and safety.

How sad. Even in Japan, greed trumps integrity every time.

I can’t say that I absolutely will not buy another Toyota when the time comes. But it’s no longer a foregone conclusion.

How about yourself? Will your next car be a Toyota? Or what?

Every Writer Needs an Editor!

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“Every writer needs an editor” is our slogan over at The Copyeditor’s Desk. How true it is! Fortunately for this writer, longtime journalist and MSN Smart Spending ringmaster Karen Datko keeps a sharp eye on the antics at Funny about Money.

She points out, in the virtual equivalent to standing in the middle of the newsroom, waving a piece of misbegotten copy in the air, and hollering who wrote this?, a number of shortcomings in my recent rant about the tax increases proposed by the Phoenix city council and the governor of Arizona. Directing my attention to this report and also to this, she notes that the “temporary” tax the state hopes to faze past taxpayers amounts not to 3 percent (!) but to 1 (count it, ONE) percent.

That notwithstanding, even if the bloated figure I inserted in my post had been right, my English-major math left something to be desired. Whereas the fictional 3 percent added to the existing 8.3 percent tax presently holding good in Phoenix does indeed add up to 11.3 percent, in the first place 11.3% + 2% = 13% (2% being the proposed 2 percent city tax), not 15.3 percent. And in the second place, the proposed 2 percent city tax would apply to food only. So the tax on food would not be 11.3% (charged on all nonfood items) + 1% + 2%; it would be just 2 percent.

Since most grocery store, Costco, Walmart, and Target runs include a variety of household items, calculating the total tax bill on a shopping trip would be pretty complex. It would consist of 11.3 percent on nonfood items, which could comprise some or even all of your purchases, plus 2 percent and only 2 percent on the food items. In any event, there’s no way the total could come anywhere near 15.3 percent.

Ohhhh well! 🙄

Any way you look at it, though, sales taxes most certainly are on their way up. And a sales tax on food is as about as regressive as you can get.

Image: Pearson Scott Foresman, Quill pen. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

Good news for one of the young people

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My late, great associate editor and de facto business partner Tina has a good shot at a full-time editorial position at the Great Desert University’s business college. It’s incredibly good news. The presumptive boss managed to extract an assistant editor’s line from the university despite the dire economic conditions. It means this is someone with enough political clout to get money when no money is there.

I just spoke to the woman and rhapsodized about the kid’s overall genius and entrepreneurial touch. She sounded impressed. Let’s just hope she’s impressed enough to hire!

🙂