Coffee heat rising

A post with no title: What can one say?

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It’s 9:30 at night and the temperature on the back porch, which has been in the shade all day, is 100 degrees.

Brain’s temperature is somewhere in that vicinity, too. Today reminded me of why I love teaching so bitterly.

Several weeks ago, I spent about eight hours writing an Eng. 102 syllabus and another six to eight hours on an Eng. 101 syllabus. By the time you add all the college’s required boilerplate, one of these things is about 16 single-spaced pages long. Some of said pages are very complex, indeed: braids of the textbook author’s ideas of what the students should learn and what they should already know entertwined with your ideas of what they should learn and what you know your students most certainly will not already know and the college’s idea of what some lawyer on the District board thinks they ought to know and what some veteran of the trenches knows they don’t know and may never figure out.

So I felt pretty good about creating a creditable product, all those weeks ago.

In the interim, the college jettisoned its Eng. 101 text and took on an entirely new text from an entirely different publisher. No problem: there’s only so many ways you can express what an Eng. 101 student needs to learn (if learn she will). It’s all pretty fungible. Recreating the revised 101 syllabus took only about two or three additional unpaid hours.

Then came the announcement that lo! We have a new edition of the Eng. 102 text.

New edition. Why do textbook publishers keep churning out new editions? Because of the lucrative market in textbook resales. At the end of any given semester, college bookstores buy back used textbooks from students who would just as soon never be reminded that they took any of the courses they paid for that semester (about 90 percent of all students, I’d guess). Bookstores buy the books back for ludicrously low prices. Then they resell them for a profit to used-book dealers, who shuffle them around and reconsign them to the college bookstores, who re-resell them to the next batch of students at yet another profit.

Result? Neither the author nor the publisher makes anything on the resale and the re-resale of used textbooks. To continue to make their marginal profit, publishers a) have to jack up the prices of textbooks through the stratosphere (Amazon.com, which regularly underprices college bookstores, is selling the new edition of the 102 text for $78.10), and b) have to grind out new “editions” every two or three years. Each semester a new edition comes out, every single student has to pay the full freight, because no used copies are available. Which is the point.

Secondary result? Instructors get to die with overwork trying to keep up with the shit.

Our textbook author reshuffled her contents so that, although the underlying pedagogical message remained the same, readings were partly deleted, partly reshuffled, and partly changed. To salvage the course plan I’d created…oh, my god. I started around 9:00 this morning and finished at quarter to nine in the evening. During that time I got up twice to pee, and I was interrupted once by SDXB, who killed the better part of an hour talking about himself, and by a volunteer for the Mayo Clinic, who wasted about 10 minutes with a stupid customer service survey. I spent almost ELEVEN HOURS trying to untangle the mess made by the fake “new edition” whose purpose was to pluck the feathers of yet another incoming class of freshmen.

Sumbitch. Not one minute of this time was paid for. My pay for teaching these courses starts when I walk in the classroom door…not during the untold hours I spend preparing the classes.

Academia. What a scam!

Other people’s pets

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How much do you figure your neighbor’s dog (cat, parrot, boa constrictor, tame alligator) costs you? LOL! I have to say, I expect my own pets to be destructive and figure the repair bills to be part of the cost of doing business. But one thing we tend not to budget for is the depredations of other people’s critters.

While M’hijito’s roommate was in Singapore visiting his relatives and hustling for a job, he left his brand-new Infiniti parked in the driveway (Roommate is the scion of a ridiculously wealthy family).

Quick backstory: Some time back, Roommate became enamored of a cat belonging to the old guy who lives in the house behind M’hijito’s place. He took to feeding and watering the beast, much to M’hijito’s disgust (it uses the vegetable garden as its litterbox), and he has thought of it as “his” cat. In his absence, the cat has taken up residence on top of the Infiniti, where it sleeps at night, out of reach of hunting coyotes and stray pit bulls.

So the other day as M’hijito was headed out to work, he noticed a couple of brown mounds on top of the Infiniti. On closer inspection…oops! Cat mounds!

The cat had deposited two large piles of cat poop on the brand-new silver Infiniti’s roof. Unknown how long they’d been there, but in 115-degree heat, it doesn’t take long for such a substance to bake to perfection. With Roommate due to surface yesterday, M’hijito drove the car to a commercial car wash. This removed the mound, but…well, the paint beneath it was etched and permanently stained.

So, that brand-new car is going to need a paint job. Hope Roommate’s insurance will cover it. Meow!

As I write this, Inez and Carlos the Knife‘s demented dog is running loose in their front yard, once again threatening to eviscerate all comers. I see their new next-door neighbors, the present and blessed occupants of the former Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, managed to dodge inside the house before the dog could catch them between their car and their front door.

Carlos, who is coming onto 90, has a little senility problem. Whenever Inez, who still has all her marbles, turns her back, Carlos sneaks over to the front door and lets the dog out. Once free, it lurks around their front yard but refuses to be caught—reasonably so, since Carlos is given to whacking it with his belt. From the front yard, it chases young children, bicyclists, and postal carriers up and down the street. Fortunately, the mail came before this afternoon’s fugue.

This antic, too, has its expenses. In addition to the potential for medical bills and lawsuits, the last time the hound got out, the post office declared our entire block terra incognita. They refused to deliver the mail to anyone until the dog was locked up or hauled off to the pound (whence it came). And they challenged us all to call the county animal control officers. It took about a week to get our mail delivery restarted, by which time my AMEX bill was running late. I had to pay American Express for the privilege of paying my bill electronically, something that made me stabby, very stabby.

But maybe I have no sense of humor.

One of my students suffered permanent injuries when an idiot’s dog, allowed to run free by the idiot, attacked her as she was jogging down the street in front of her house. She managed to fight it off with several hard, well-aimed kicks (she was a tall, athletic young woman), but it ripped a tendon in her leg and damaged a nerve, which never healed properly.  And neighbor Al carries a shillelagh around with him when he walks his little dog, after the moron 125-pound lady who owns three pit bulls and a retrieveroid had one of her “pets” dig out from under her fence and attack him and his little pooch. She paid the vet bill occasioned by sewing the small dog’s throat back together. Generous of her, eh? Same cur gives Cassie the evil eye every time we encounter the woman and her Iditarod team dragging her down the road.

Sometimes I wonder what possesses people who think their animals are their kiddies, and who imagine the rest of us don’t mind dodging their free-roaming dogs and having their cats defecate and urinate all over our homes (and cars!).

How much has your neighbor’s pet cost you? Can you beat a new automotive paint job?

Images:
Annoyed cat, Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez, Wikipedia Commons
Trained attack dog in action, US Air Force, public domain, Wikipedia Commons

Money happens…

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SDXB, a fellow who found his way clear to jump off the hamster wheel in his late 40s and never went back to the workplace, is fond of saying that “money happens.” By that he means that he never seems to lack for money (and it’s true he lives well, despite having little or no visible means of support) and that occasionally unexpected little windfalls happen.

Truth to tell, he has always made money happen. Until he reached retirement age, he supported his bumhood habit by occasionally volunteering to go TDY with the active-duty Air Force Reserve, in which he was the highest-ranking non-com in his job classification. The military pays certain people who are effectively temp workers pretty well, and reservists who stick with it get a nice pension and health care, plus access to commissaries and base exchanges around the world. He also did a fair amount of freelance journalism, especially travel writing, which underwrote trips you and I would regard as vacations and provided some nice tax write-offs.

He insists that a person who is willing to live frugally, who has even minimal resources, and who makes bumhood (read “permanent unemployment”) a priority can live comfortably without having to labor in the salt mines. And for him it’s worked: he’s almost 70, and he hasn’t held a steady job since the day he got up from the editor’s chair at a Scripps-Howard newspaper and walked out the door. He climbed on a plane, flew to Hawai’i, and camped on the beach for a month, where no one could reach him by telephone. He’s bought two houses in cash and he buys his cars in cash; he travels, he never wants for entertainment…and he doesn’t go to work.

Well, I’ve always been too cowardly to pull that one off, even though he kept assuring me that I had more than enough to live on and that money happens.

Now that I’m about to be forced to get out of the editor’s chair myself, though, I’m discovering that the guy may be right. In the past couple of days, money has happened three times.

Two happenings occurred yesterday. First, a client from bygone days resurfaced to ask if I’d edit a new project he’s cooked up. It was short and easy—I got through it in just a few hours and will bill about two hundred bucks. While I was playing with that, the phone rang, and lo! There was the chair of the English and Humanities department of Phoenix College, an inner-city branch of the community college district, conveniently located about eight minutes from my house.

Asked she, would I take on, at the last minute, a 200-level course in journalism?

Happy to, said I, but I’m already signed up to teach the maximum number of credit hours the district will permit.

No problem, quoth she! Because it’s an emergency hire, she can get an override.

You’re on! said I.

She said she’d have to be sure the course actually makes before forking over a contract, but it only needs 18 students. It’s a hybrid course that meets once a week, and when I looked over the district’s requirements, I realized it’s much the same course I’ve taught several times at Scottsdale!

So. This fall, in the four months running up to Canning Day, I will gross ninety-six hundred extra dollars with this side job as a community college teacher. Since our office is winding down, I doubt if this will cause much strain; after all, the “two” GDU courses I signed on to teach in the spring of 2008 morphed into four, and I survived.

Meanwhile, an hour ago I finished reading another detective novel for pay. A pretty darned good one, too: well written and clean. Another $250 in the busker’s hat.

Money happens, but money unhappens, too. A few mutual fund, IRA, and 403(b) statements materialized toward the end of the week, showing that my devastated investments are reviving a little. Since reaching their April 2009 nadir, they’ve climbed about $9,000—and that’s after I took out about $15,000 to pay off the Renovation Loan. Still, the total of retirement savings is down $126,792 from the high balance in May of 2008: thanks so much to the greedy bastards and misguided dogmatists who’ve run the country and the economy this past decade or so.

Think of that: a hundred and twenty-seven grand lost in the collapse of the Bush economy. If that money hadn’t unhappened, I’d have plenty to retire on without a worry in the world. On the other hand…if the economy hadn’t crashed, I’d stick with a boring job for the next three years and not be about to embark on the grand adventure of bumhood.

Win some, lose some. Maybe being pushed to quit working, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, is worth a little money unhappening.

Images:
Hamster and hamster wheel, Dimitar Popovsky, Wikipedia Commons
U.S. Dollar Bill, public domain

The not-enough-long-green blues

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{sigh} Over at Room Farm, Chance was  down in the dumps yesterday, worried about paying off the ginormous debt and feeling overwhelmed by all those little chores given to piling up if your attention is even briefly distracted. Annoying computer is again not letting me speak on Room Farm…some days it works, others it doesn’t. But her remarks do bring to mind the general summer doldrums, not the least of which is the not-enough-long-green blues.

In these parts, summer breeds cabin fever as surely as winter does for our snowbound brethren in the upper Midwest. Today the thermometer on my back porch reached a balmy 115 degrees…and believe me, you’d have to be balmy to go out in that. This leaves you inside the house, contemplating—what else? Your dreary budget and your prospects for penury, a horror show aggravated by the astronomical costs of an Arizona summer. The air-conditioner, set at 82, has been pounding steadily the entire day. Just to keep the potted plants alive, I’ve had to run water every. single. day for weeks—today being Saturday, it’s deep-watering day, so in addition to dumping the daily drench on all the potted plants, the roses and citrus need have water dribbled on them for hours. And a pool loses about an inch and a half to evaporation every day; that has to be replaced daily, lest the pump suck air and self-immolate. I’m going to have to borrow against my first-born child to pay this month’s water and power bills!

I’m turning into a mummified pickle sitting here in front of the computer all day. Other than work, work, and more work, there’s precious little to do. And boredom breeds inaction: the product of sitting on one’s duff all day is generally another day of sitting on one’s duff.

An unexpected visit from my neighbor Harriett reminded me of this. She knew the previous owners well and was curious to see how the house has changed since they left. As I was giving her the grand tour, I remembered that I hadn’t cleaned in four weeks! Old papers, junk, books, piles of shoes (bad habit: leave them on the floor wherever you slip them off your feet!), dog dunes, dirty dishes, unmade bed…eeeeeek!

I realized I need to get this place cleaned up, and then I need to get out of it. Sitting here in my own litter enjoying a blue funk is not a good thing. But…I also realize I can’t afford to spend money entertaining myself. Kathy and I are going to a chamber music concert next weekend, only ten bucks apiece—but that’s about it. I’m broke: can’t afford a cleaning lady, can’t afford to go out, can’t afford to travel, can’t even afford to fill my car’s gas tank without running the budget into the red.

Well, yesterday I scrubbed the joint from stem to stern, and that actually made me feel somewhat better. Then I decided to make a list of things I can do to avoid premature brain-death.  Here are a few ideas that came to mind:

Mall-walking. Some of the covered malls around here open at 7:00 in the morning for folks who would like to get a little exercise without expiring of heat exhaustion. La Maya and I have already started doing this; but it’s not necessary to have a walking buddy to enjoy this free activity. Just keep moving so you don’t have time to look at the (closed!) stores.

Free or low-cost community activities. Next Saturday I’m going on a photo walk with Paradise Valley Community College staff and students.

Take a hobby outdoors. When the extreme heat breaks (it will, as soon as the monsoon rains start), I intend to take a few pencils and a pad of paper to the park to do some drawing.

Invite friends to a casual (read “inexpensive”) dinner. M’hijito is entertaining me and friends at his house next weekend: smoked spareribs with whatever veggies and salad we can come up with.

Clean house. Yah, I know: bleagh! But it’s amazing how much a tidied-up and clean environment changes your outlook on life.

Visit a museum on “bum’s night.” Many museums open for no admission one day per week or per month.

Window-shop in commercial art galleries. Restrain yourself from buying, and this activity can be every bit as interesting as a tour through a contemporary art museum.

Take the dog for a walk. It’s free.

Play with the cat. Also free.

Wrap up your breakfast or dinner and go on an early morning or sunset picnic. Costs no more than you would have spent for food, anyway.

Volunteer. Serving up chow at the local food bank may make your own circumstances look pretty good while it gets you out of the house and into contact with other human beings.

That’s about as much as I’ve managed to dream up. What do you do to chase away the not-enough-long-green blues?

The DIY Dog Food Chef: Should you feed bones to your dog?

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As regular readers know, I feed Cassie the Corgi real food: a carefully calibrated combination of starch, vegetables, and cooked meat plus canine vitamins. Easy to fix and unlikely to be contaminated with adulterants such as melamine.

It being summer, we’re both developing cabin fever: when it’s 105-degrees plus, the pavement is too hot for her feet after dawn and before sunset. In her doggy boredom, she’s been working on creating a fine lick granuloma on one leg. Because she doesn’t pull off bandaids (what kind of a dog is she, anyway?), it’s pretty easy to block her from chewing the incipient wound she’s already built, but all that means is she finds another spot to lick.

No one really knows what leads a dog to lick itself raw, but some veterinarians speculate that one cause is boredom. So I decided she needs something to keep her busy with chewing: let her chew an object instead of her foot.

I never feed my dogs bones, mostly because they’re messy indoors and attract ants and other insects outdoors. Smaller bones, as we all know, are very dangerous to domestic dogs: the risk for intestinal impaction and perforation is high. Some people, however, think you can get away with large knuckle bones, those round heavy things that are pretty hard for a dog to break apart. And many folks figure a dog, being a direct descendant of the wolf and genetically barely discernible from the wolf, should have at any raw bones you care to give it.

A dog, however, is not a wolf. Over tens of thousands of years, Canis lupus familiaris has adapted to live with humans, and it’s a rare domestic pooch that brings down dinner on the range. I did a little research and found this interesting e-mail discussion between a small-animal veterinarian and biologists and caretakers who  manage captive wolves. The wolf experts point out that wild canids eat more than just a bone: when they ingest bones, they’re also eating skin and fur. The fur, in particular, tends to wrap itself around hard objects in the digestive tract, padding sharp bones and protecting the intestine.

Huh. Well, I don’t think I’ll be inviting Bugs Bunny to Cassie’s tea-time while she’s chewing some cow’s knuckles. So…hold the raw bones, waiter.

So what can I do to amuse this animal?

One reasonably safe strategy is to take a Kong-style toy and fill it with peanut butter or dog treats, so that the pooch has to fiddle with it for quite some time to extract the yummy stuff. Peanut butter, while probably harmless unless the dog is allergic to it, is fattening. You can substitute any number of fillers, including raw vegetables if your dog will eat them. Yogurt and cottage cheese can also be used. Ordinary dog treats work well. When using gooey or runny fillings, you can minimize leakage by freezing the filled Kong before giving it to the dog.

The other thing I’ll be trying is adding some omega-3 fatty acids to her food, lest she have a deficiency that’s giving her itchy skin. Easiest way to accomplish this is to include salmon in the diet. She likes salmon, but lately I’ve fallen into the habit of feeding hamburger most of the time. Dogs need a variety of protein sources. In addition to adding fish a couple times a week, I’ll dig some chicken out of the freezer for her, and also pick up some ground lamb the next time I see it on sale at Sprouts.

And finally, even though Cassie is pretty laid-back (she got over her apparent separation anxiety within a few weeks of taking over my house), to forestall any further neurotic behavior I’m going to have to get off  my duff at 5:30 in the morning and take her for a walk, instead of plopping in front of the computer and spending an hour or two blogging. She already polices the neighborhood every evening; in the mornings it will be safe for us to invade the park (we don’t go there after dark). So that should give her (and me) a little more exercise.

So, as to the answer to the question of whether you should feed bones to your dog: in a word, nope.

Dog food at Funny:

Doggie treats
General recommendations
Costs & benefits
Doggie chicken soup

Foil debit card hacking and balance inquiries

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Did you know you can use your debit card without entering a PIN? Identity thieves hacking into merchants’ hardware and software and stealing customers’ PINs have made using a debit card risky business. And some merchants, such as gas stations, transmit balance inquiries each time you use a debit card, racking up bank charges. Here’s an easy way to foil them:

When you get to the merchant’s cash register, swipe your debit card, then select “credit” on the keypad and sign the receipt. Your money still comes direct from your checking account, but when you sign for your purchase, you don’t have to enter a PIN. So, even though you’ve used your debit card, you haven’t put your PIN into the system.

This bit of intelligence comes from the Arizona State Credit Union and is confirmed by another credit union in Virginia. The Virginia credit union adds that the strategy also will avoid balance inquiry fees, which occur when you shop at places like gas stations that transmit balance inquiries when customers use debit or ATM cards, because such merchants don’t do balance inquiries when you select “credit.”

Alternatively, you can tell the cashier that you want to sign for your purchase. She or he will ask you to sign the receipt, as you would do with a credit card.

According to The Consumerist, selecting “credit” with a debit card sends the transaction through a different network than the one used for PIN transactions. Banks like you to do this because merchants have to pay more money for signature debits. But it doesn’t cost you a thing.

Image: Channel R, Wikipedia Commons