Coffee heat rising

Computers

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I need to buy a laptop to replace the aging Dell that will have to go back to GDU in the next couple of weeks. I hardly use the Dell anymore, not because I wouldn’t prefer to sit in a comfortable chair or out on the patio, but because it’s a nuisance to operate, and because it doesn’t readily connect with my router.

The one good thing I can say about Qworst is that their online connection was wireless and so I could use the laptop anywhere on the property. My Cox DSL connection comes into the house by cable. M’hijito attached a router so we could set up AirPort and also, putatively, so I could get online with the Dell. But the Dell won’t talk with the router unless it’s in the same room with the thing, and so it’s quite a hassle to get that machine online. And since I live online, that’s why I quit using the Dell.

I’ve been thinking about replacing it with a MacBook.

Before you faint dead away: even though it’s expensive, I can get a pretty good deal with my educator’s discount, bringing the price down significantly. And I can get a new Office for Mac at the GDU bookstore for just $85, which I can use not only  to upgrade the iMac but also to load into the proposed MacBook.

There’s way more cash in savings than I need to survive on, and some of that is in the S-corporation. Indeed, even after the S-corp pays my wages, it still has more than enough to buy a MacBook. That allows me to pay for the thing with tax-free money. Because FaM alone will earn more than the cost of the computer next year (not counting whatever freelance schemes come my way), it’s quite reasonable to run the purchase through the corporation.

The iMac is getting old, as computers go (yeah! more than 18 months!). If it craps out, I’ll need another Mac to run my Quicken, since you apparently can’t convert Quicken for Mac QDFM files to something readable on a PC. When the iMac dies, the MacBook can take its place.

These, I think, are reasonable excuses for buying a Mac over an cheap PC, which is likely to crap out long before even the aging iMac goes.

Then there’s the sheer pleasure of using a Mac. Except for the lack of keyboard commands in Word (actually, they are there: they’re just different and I haven’t gotten around to memorizing them), I’ve come to much prefer using the Macintosh over either of GDU’s PCs.

• In the first place, MS Windows is such bloatware. God, it’s full of trash. And I don’t like the new version of Office, which has eliminated the clues to keyboard commands and tries to funnel you toward endless pointing and clicking and forces you to try to figure out how to work it by interpreting pictures. And the damn antivirus stuff is a constant, unending pain in the tuchus. So are the similarly constant, unending updates and patches. Every time I turn around, the laptop is sending me a message than in XX seconds it’s going to shut down everything I’m working on and reboot, so as to install yet another update. The campus laptop nags constantly for updates, too, but at least it doesn’t shut you down in mid-project.

• The Mac is elegant, clean, and relatively virus-proof. Yes, I do know hackers have Apple in their crosshairs. But though that’s been true for several years, they still haven’t made much headway. The constant virus and malware attacks on Microsoft programs make using a PC a real hassle.

• I’ve never had one single compatibility problem with reading Microsoft programs on the Mac. That is not true with the PC. “Old” (heh!) MS Office versions will not read the infuriating new .docx files generated by the current version of Word. This clearly is a device to force Microsoft users to spend wads of cash for unnecessary upgrades to their software. Well, the Mac will open a .docx file in TextEdit and save it as an .rtf file or as a .doc file, with all the formatting intact. If I hadn’t had a Mac, I would have had to upgrade to expensive new software when the new Office came out.

• True, I didn’t like being forced to upgrade to Leopard or whatever cat the current operating system is called. But that flap forced me to move FaM off iLife onto WordPress, a far superior program, and since FaM has migrated to BlueHost, it’s more than paid for the software upgrade. At least when Apple drags you into the 21st century, you get something worth being dragged for.

• What’s more, Apple has actual, real live customer support, with “Geniuses” who know what they’re doing.

So it goes. This morning I’m going to make an unplanned trip out to GDU, where the bookstore is selling Office for the Mac for an incredible $85, a nice markdown on the $150 the Apple store sells it for.  Wednesday I have an appointment to buy a MacBook, which provides a couple days to think about it.

Sleep!

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A miracle! The three a.m. wake-up call has stopped. The day after finishing my last real task for the Great Desert University, I fell into bed at 8:30 and slept all the way through to 7:00 a.m.: ten and a half glorious hours! Most amazingly, without interruption.

Next night, I slept from 9:30 til around 6:30, nine incredible hours, also without waking up.

Last night I didn’t get to bed until around 11:00 p.m. but slept seven hours, again without the mental alarm going off in the wee hours.

It’s been so long since I’ve slept all the way through the night, I truly can’t remember the last uninterrupted stretch of sleep. Seven hours is a long night’s sleep for me—but it’s normally cobbled together, a few hours before 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. and a couple of hours after 4:00 a.m.

Getting quit of GDU is doing it, I suspect. That and feeling fairly confident that I can get by in penury next year. Next year, at least: there’s enough to live on through 2010, and that will provide a full year to figure out what to do next.

SDXB, a man renowned for the soundness of his sleeping habits, remarked yesterday that he woke up at 3:00 a.m. just as though an alarm clock went off, and after that he was up for the duration. As it develops, last week Child Protective Services removed all four of his daughter’s children from her home, lodging one of them with her ex-husband (on condition of 24-hour supervision: the kid is in his home, but the father’s not allowed to be alone with him) and disappearing the other three. No one knows where the other three kids are, whether they are together, whether they’re in foster homes, group homes, or an institution, or what the state intends to do about them.

I observed that this would explain the insomnia. He insisted that worrying wasn’t what was keeping him awake. He says he’s washed his hands of the daughter’s problems, experience having proven there’s not a thing he can do about them.

Uh huh.

Pretty clearly, what wakes you up in the middle of the night is stress. Even if you don’t actually pop into consciousness with your brain spinning on the issue at hand, before long you certainly are turning it obsessively in your mind. I often would wake up unaware of thinking about GDU or money or the ailing dogs any of the other various little headaches that have haunted my dreams over the past few years. At a certain hour, I would just awaken, as though it were dawn and time to get up. Occasionally, though, I actually would wake up in a cold sweat, with the angst du jour right there in the front of my consciousness.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, evidently even when you think you have the stress under control, it doesn’t go away.

I’ve been yawning all morning. Expect to get another solid night’s sleep this evening. It looks like the body is going to try to catch up with all the sleep it’s lost over the past few years.

The God of Dreams, from Hans Christian Andersen
The God of Dreams, from Hans Christian Andersen

Sons

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What a marvelous thing a young man is, and so much the more marvelous if he’s your son. Not that a daughter isn’t a marvelous creature, too; only that when all you have is a son, he is indeed extraordinary.

Shortly after I hit the “send” button throwing open the gate to my escape from the Great Desert University, M’hijito happened to call on the phone. It was 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. I was just sitting here in front of the computer, stunned and unable to move. To my great delight, he asked if I would like to come down to his place for dinner!

Hallelujah.

When I got to his place, the air was fragrant with the scent of frying onions. The lights were on, the heat was running, the house was warm, wonderful music was playing, wine was poured.

My god, can that kid cook!

Not only that, but he can repair plumbing. In the course of his culinary exertions, the garbage disposal blocked and both sinks backed up. In moments he had the trap under the sink apart, drained, fixed, and back together. Voilà! Problem solved.

Back to the stove: He made this incredible mirepoix, in which (once it was cooked down) he broiled pieces of steak and lamb. The result was a deep brown sauce, so flavorful: sweet from the onions, rich with carrot, celery, mushroom, wine…unbelievable. As if this were not enough, he braised some brussels sprouts he had bought fresh, then blanched and frozen. And he served up a magnificent salad. And lots of good red wine.

Defies belief.

M’hijito’s Steak Mirepoix

You need:

• a good, heavy, oven-proof frying pan
• olive oil
• wine
• one onion
• a carrot
• a stick of celery
• a half-dozen cremini (or other) mushrooms
• about 1/2 glass wine
• salt & pepper
• a couple of pieces of beef filet, or a couple of lamb chops, or both

Coarsely chop the onion, carrot, and celery. Slice the ‘shrooms. Skim the bottom of he pan with olive oil. Place the onions, carrots, and celery in this and cook over moderately fast heat until the onions are well softened. Regulate the heat and stir frequently, so that the vegetables don’t scorch. As the onions are getting pretty well softened, add the sliced mushrooms. Stir, continue to cook until the veggies are golden and well cooked. In this last stage, add a little wine, stirring well to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Fire up the broiler. Preheat it well. Season the meat with salt and pepper.

Place the steak or lamb in the pan amid the cooked veggies. Run it under the broiler. When the top side is seared, flip the meat over and sear the other side. Cook to taste, preferably rare.

Serve the meat with the cooked-down mirepois spread over it as sauce.

Ambrosia!

Gone!

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The coop is flown!

I’m free.

Yes.

I quit. I’m gone. Out the door, never to return. A bird that has flown the coop.

Last night, after I finally finished the latest iteration of the Index from the Black Lagoon, I mailed the damn thing off with an e-mail to our client editor letting him know I’m taking my 350 unused vacation hours, starting TODAY. That will carry me through to the end of the month, all the way to Canning Day.

And what a fine send-off that was! It was the worst episode of overwork I’ve been through since the days of La Morona, a.k.a. My Bartleby. Truly. I’ve been working from 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning deep into the evening, literally until I could not work any more, every day for the past four or five days. Those are eighteen-hour days. Most of that time was spent writing an index—truly a brain-numbing job—and undoing a screw-up of Herculean proportions in (naturally!) an essay that is long enough to stand as a monograph in its own right.

Yes, on top of the screwed-up index that had to be rebuilt almost from scratch, someone took it into his or her mind to set acres of direct quotation in italic. Why? Because it’s in Latin. We italicize foreign languages. Don’t we?

Well, no. Not always. Not in this case.

The flicking article occupies 148 typeset pages.

When our client editor saw the page proofs, he realized something looked odd but didn’t realize the author had it right in the first place: set roman. His response was to ask that we remove all the quotation marks.

After I had gone through 148 pages marking hundreds of deletions, I realized that couldn’t possibly be right: the guy was indicating direct quotes from primary sources. Belatedly, I drag out Chicago and find all that Latin material should have been set in roman type. That’s when, ever so much more belatedly, it occurs to  me to check the original MS, where I found that Author had it right, and someone on our end—probably the new editor in the sponsor’s office—changed it.

So now I had to go back through the 148 brain-boggling pages, STET all the quotes, and mark all the italic roman.

You can imagine how pleased our graphic designer was when I showed up at his door and dumped this mess on his desk. Ours was the third fiasco to enter his life that morning, and I presented myself at around 9:30. He grabbed the great wad of paper, waved it in the air, and demanded to know “Whose idea is it to publish a book as an article???!??”

Not  mine, of that you can be sure.

From there it was on to the index, 33 endless pages of entries and subentries parsing the most arcane subject matter you can imagine.

I really don’t enjoy indexing. This particular annual is difficult to index, because it not only is arcane, it’s dense. Every page has three or four entries, at least. By the time we reach the indexing stage, I’ve read the copy, which can be excruciatingly detailed, several times. And I Do. Not. Want. To. Read. It. Again. So I have to force myself to do this job, which under the best of circumstances takes about five to seven days.

Stupefied with short-termer’s syndrome, I plotted to foist about half the job onto my R.A. The book consists of discrete articles, and so I gave her several that did not overlap (so I thought) with the ones I kept for myself to work on. She wrote her entries; I wrote mine; then I merged the files.

Bad mistake.

First, the two chunks of copy in fact did have some overlapping content. In some cases, we described that content in different terms, so a subject was indexed in two places under two descriptive headings. And second, this young Ph.D. knows next to nothing about Renaissance and medieval history. This makes it difficult to recognize the names of major figures. Or, for that matter, some of the currents of thought and controversy that were BFDs then, but are lost and long forgotten today.

And finally, the aging editor forgets that young people conceive and map out research strategies differently from the way those of us who came up with hard copy do. They think in Boolean terms. A search is something that you do in Google or in a library database, not in an index or a drawer full of index cards. While there are some similarities, there are also some fundamental differences. And those differences are HUGE. The result: an index designed by a younger mind looks different and is different from one built by a survivor of the Cretaceous.

Ultimately, the only help for it was to throw out everything the kid did and start over. Basically, I ended up doing all the work I should’ve done in the first place, and then some. Quite a lot of some.

When I finally hit “Send” about 7:30 last night and realized it was the last thing I’ll ever have to do for GDU, it felt like a loud shrieking squeal had suddenly stopped.

You know how it feels when a migraine ends? Your head doesn’t hurt any more, but there’s a kind of residual echo of the pain? Like that.

My office is empty. Sometime between now and the 31st, I’ll have to go back to campus to return the College’s laptop and turn in the keys. Probably there’ll be one more frustrating runaround with HR. And that is it.

I hope never to have to set foot on the campus of the Great Desert University again.

Image:

Toby Hudson, Domestic Rock Pigeons in Flight, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0

When Giving Goes Awry

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Baker at Man vs. Debt hit the gong at several blog carnivals this week with his rumination on the various excuses not to give money to charities. While the article is well written and I respect the passion with which his readers respond, the enthusiasm for giving away hard-earned wages escapes me.

I rarely donate cash to any charities or churches. There’s a reason for that: charitable giving warped my father’s psychology, influencing his entire life for the not-necessarily-better, and it permanently alienated his two older brothers from each other. Effectively, it destroyed his mother and his family. Because of his experiences, he would never allow my mother to teach me religion or to drag me to church, and he would not permit her or himself to donate to anything.

At the turn of the twentieth century, my grandmother inherited a substantial sum from her father, who had accumulated a small fortune in freighting buffalo hides out of Oklahoma to market in Texas. By the time my father came on the scene, rather late in her life, she was pretty well set: she owned two houses and a commercial property in Fort Worth, and she had money in the bank.

My father was a change-of-life baby: the youngest of his two brothers was 18 years older than he. At the time he was born, his father ran off, abandoning the middle-aged wife to care for the new baby herself. Her two other sons were, by this point, out of the house and launched on their own lives. One became a ranch hand, running cattle in west Texas; the other went to work at a Fort Worth dairy. Both men had their own families, with all the concerns that entails.

Over the next decade or so, my grandmother became engaged with an alternative Christian church that since then has evolved into the mainstream. Neither brother paid much attention to what was going on, although my father realized something was awry by the time he was about ten years old. She was quietly giving money to this church: large amounts of money. The church was gratefully accepting it and offering exactly nothing in return.

The two older brothers learned about this only after it was way too late. They found out when the county seized their mother’s home for unpaid taxes. She couldn’t pay her property taxes, because she had no money. She was flat broke, having given every penny of her fortune to the church.

Did this make her a better person? No. Did it contribute to her personal happiness? Obviously not. Did it make her holy in the eyes of God? Maybe. God didn’t do much to keep a roof over her head, though. Nor did He prevent creditors and the government from taking away what little she had left. She lost both houses and the gas station, and everything she had ever had was gone. There was no help for her from any direction. She died in desperate penury, without a word from the worthies of the church that had taken all her money.

My cattleman uncle blamed his brother, my other uncle, for this state of affairs. He felt that his brother should have been keeping an eye on their mother, since he was the one who stayed in Fort Worth. The two men fought, and after that they never spoke to each other again.

My father was a little boy, but he was old enough to understand that his home was gone, his mother was reduced to poverty, and a substantial inheritance that should have supported her and all three of her sons had evaporated into the coffers of a church. He determined that he would earn back the entire amount that she had lost.

And he did. By the time he reached his goal, forty years later, the dollar amount wasn’t very much, and because he wasn’t an educated man, he didn’t understand that to match the buying power of what she lost, he would have had to save over seven times as much. But that didn’t matter: in his mind he’d regained her losses. As soon as he reached his goal, he retired, imagining he would be set for life.

To do it, he

• dropped out of school in the 11th grade;
• lied about his age to join the navy;
• worked like an animal all his life;
• spent ten grim years of his life, my mother’s life, and my life in a godforsaken outpost in the Arabian desert;
• pinched every penny that came his way;
• based his marriage and his entire life on the accumulation of savings;
• lived a miser’s life right up until the time he died.

To say he was a frugal man is to understate. Saving money became an obsession, and he focused all of our lives on it. Because he didn’t really understand money well, he made some serious mistakes, topmost among them investing all he had in insurance securities, which during the 1950s were returning at a rate of 30 percent. He didn’t realize a) that investments should be diversified, and b) no investment that was earning that much could possibly last long. When the bottom fell out of the insurance securities market, he lost almost everything—just as he stood at the verge of making his goal.

He did eventually earn the lost savings back, but this fiasco added another ten years of hard labor to his financial plan, and it pinched his personality even more than it was already pinched. Overall, he fared pretty well, considering that he had no education and only the opportunities he managed to wrest from life by main force. He kept us in the middle class, and he left about a hundred thousand dollars to his wife, my son, and me.

But his character was changed by his mother’s charity: warped and crabbed. And he was effectively left alone as a teenager, his two brothers spun off like asteroids in deep space. What remained of his family fell apart, and he spent his entire life trying to put what he thought was his birthright back together.

And that’s why I don’t give to churches.

To my mind, charity begins at home. If I give any money away, it’s to my son, who has returned the favor by growing into a decent man. By keeping myself off the public dole, I save the taxpayer a great deal of money.  And let us bear in mind that what I do to keep myself off the dole—mostly teaching—is itself a form of charity: I educate young people for a small fraction of what anyone with comparable skills doing a comparable amount of work with comparable management responsibility would earn in business. She who gives away her time, energy, and skill for the public good donates something worth a great deal more than cash.

. . . to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.

No end in sight…

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So, I had this fantasy that I’d be done with the last of my GDU work before Thanksgiving and would use my 350 hours of unused vacation time to take the rest of the year off. Nice thought, eh?

Ah, how quickly fantasy morphs to horror! Both of the two projects that were supposed to end my tenure with that place have burst out of their cocoons and revealed themselves to be GIGANTIC CLAWING SCREAMING SLAVERING MONSTERS!!!!!!!

I’m doomed. I will never be free of GDU. It will kill me before I break loose.

More later: it’s off to campus to put in another 10-hour day. Enjoyed the 3:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. shift no end; now can hardly wait for the next stint.

😯