Coffee heat rising

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!

Save the Last Dance for Me…

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The Workman Waltz begins again! Darn. I thought my dance card had been used up and tossed away. But nooo… Now we start another round, first with an air-conditioning contractor, then with a roofer, then with…???

Actually after the new air conditioner has been installed and the five-year-old roof has been stripped off and rebuilt, there won’t be enough to repair and coat the CoolDeck, even after the alleged $1,500 tax break on the high-efficiency AC unit.

It would be a break-even deal if the $1,500 materializes. Somehow, though, I doubt I’ll ever see a penny of that. It’s a “tax rebate.” How can you get a rebate on nothing? It’s highly unlikely I’ll owe any taxes this year. I’ve barely earned enough to get by, and thanks to the combined costs of Medicare Part B, Medigap, Medicare Part D, long-term care insurance, and one pair of glasses, my health care bills far exceed 7.5% of gross income. The EnergyStar folks observe,

These energy efficiency tax credits are technically “non-refundable,” which means you can’t get more money back in tax credits than you pay in federal income taxes (your tax liability). Check your last year’s tax return to get a sense of your tax liability (line 61 on the 2008 1040 form, called “total tax”). You can claim all of your tax credits as long as your tax liability, is greater than zero after all tax credits have been applied. . . . If you don’t pay any taxes, then you can’t get the credit.

Probably I should’ve opted for the cheaper, less efficient unit. However, I’m hoping that a better unit will allow me to cool the house into the comfortable range without raising the power bills a lot. One summer of sitting here sweating 24 hours a day was quite enough.

My beloved roofer came in with a bid about $2,000 more than he charged to reroof the house five years ago. I realize petroleum prices have risen, but that seems a bit much. So I’m getting another bid on that. If the other guy’s price is about the same, then the insurance payment of $11,300 will fall about $1,270 short of covering just those two repair costs—air conditioner and roofing. The CoolDeck, I guess, will just have to stay the way it is. Gives the place character!

Rustic, very rustic.

This morning I signed up with Angie’s List in order to get access to their recommended contractors. If you’re interested in this outfit, BTW, when you go to pay the forty bucks for a year’s membership, they ask if you have a coupon code. At that point google promo codes for Angie’s List and up will come a bunch of them. I got in for $31, which was still (IMHO) a bit much.

Can’t say I recommend Angie’s List. It was great that first year, when it was free (they give out freebie memberships in markets they’re trying to break into). But the full-fledged version is bloated and confusing to navigate. To my great annoyance, I found that top-rated businesses had some “D” and “F” ratings once you got into the details. Apparently if a business wangles an “honor” it goes right to the top of the list. In the searches I did, businesses further down the list sometimes had better overall ratings, occasionally with more respondents.

Eventually I came across a roofing company whose sign I recognized from the upscale section of the neighborhood. We’re overrun with fly-by-night outfits right now, come in from all over the country to participate in the insurance-funded feeding frenzy. At any given moment, about one in five roofs in the neighborhood is being torn up and rebuilt. This outfit is well reviewed—no one reported a bad experience, and one guy said he’d learned about the company from a building contractor with whom he’d done some business. So that sounded mildly positive. He’s coming over tomorrow.

Lordie! There are people out there reporting that they paid $10,000 and $12,000 for roofing jobs. What are they putting on those shacks?

“Ya-a-as, we decided to go with the sterling silver shingles instead of the solid copper. Copper is so 2009!”

Some Angie’s List respondents report paying comparable amounts to replace air-conditioning units—$8,000; $10,000…good grief! For residential construction!

Evidently that storm was sent by God Herself to lift Phoenix’s economy out of the doldrums.

Okay, okay, I’m glad (I guess) to get yet another new roof and a brand-new 14-seer air conditioning unit on the insurance company’s dime. Not thrilled: if I don’t own an interest in that company now, I certainly have in the recent past, and I regard it as my insurance company. Paying out for “catastrophic” hail storms cuts into the profits. But it’s good, in its way. The house needed a new heat pump, and I certainly didn’t have $5,200 laying around to pay for it. I’d planned to let it go the same way as the aging Dog Chariot: run it until it falls apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.

And you know when that would be: at 5:15 p.m. on the evening before the hottest July 4 in history, which will fall on a Friday.

{sigh} I love workmen, respect workmen, learn a lot from workmen. But oh! What a job it is to ride herd on them! It’s true, I’ve had a couple years of respite. But I hoped for about a 15-year break!

🙄

Image: Two Roofers at Work in New Orleans, Lousiana. Editor B. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Hurrah!

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Evan, our favorite conservative and proprietor of My Journey to Millions, is a father! The Wife brought a baby boy into the world, and Evan lived to tell the story. Congratulations, Evan.

If you’d like to celebrate the arrival, consider subscribing to LoveDrop, a micro-giving group that engineers monthly gifts to needy individuals and families. For as little as a dollar a month, you can join a community whose founders include Budgets Are Sexy founder J. Money, obviously a high recommendation. Do be aware that it’s not a 501(c)3 charity; it’s a for-profit group dedicated to doing good works. Fifty percent of revenues go to recipients, 20 percent to taxes, and 30 percent to operating costs. Given that the group has to pay taxes (unlike traditional charities), this is a very good ratio.

w00t! First Payment from Amazon!

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Well! The first payment ever from Amazon Affiliates just surfaced! It ain’t much, I’ll tellya…but it’s sure better than a hit on the head.

For a week, I thought it hadn’t landed in the S-corp’s checking account. The darn thing didn’t appear in the credit union’s online page! Today, though, I got around to reconciling the paper statements that came in the mail and discovered the credit posted on a date far from the one Amazon posted it.

Kewl!

Only trouble with electronic funds transfers is that you can’t frame one and put it on the wall. 🙂