Coffee heat rising

Apply for a job halfway across the country?

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Well, there’s an opening in Atlanta, at a very fine university. They’re looking for a managing editor to run a medical research journal. My résumé and cover letter are ready to send, and now all that remains is click an e-mail button and send the stuff winging its way through the ether to the hiring committee. A statement of desired salary is required  for consideration. One of my mentors thinks I can probably ask around $90,000 and get $85,000; another is advising me to ask $90,000 to $100,000, plus relocation costs.

That’s an astonishing amount of money to me. The cost of living in Atlanta is slightly lower than it is here, and a quick perusal of the real estate listings shows some very sweet places for what I can get for my house. 

So…why haven’t I sent my stuff?

Well. The truth is, I’m not at all sure I want to work that hard. 

When I first saw the ad, I figured the journal was probably a semimonthly or, at most, a monthly. Closer study, however, reveals that the thing comes out weekly! It publishes a hundred pages a week!! The M.E. has seven staffers, more contributing editors than a person can easily count, and an editorial board of two score medical researchers. 

Mathematical Biosciences and Engineering, our busiest client journal, comes out six times a year and keeps my most ambitious editor busy most of the time. Our client editor is not very demanding and in fact discourages us from riding herd on the writers very hard.  

This thing I’m looking at is the real McCoy. It follows AMA style, and I expect it’s very well edited, indeed. The senior editor, who is in New York, can’t possibly have time to comb the worst of the nits out of several hundred manuscript pages a week, and so those seven editors (one of the seven underlings is an admin assistant, leaving six associate editors and one managing editor) are dealing with some seriously raw copy. Just because you have an M.D. doesn’t mean you can write your way out of a paper bag. 

All of which goes to say that this job could very well amount to a 90-hour-a-week gig.

I find myself wondering if I want to work 90 hours a week. Or any hours a week. Maybe I’d rather spend the rest of my life loafing, living on savings and Social Security, and teaching a few freshman comp classes.

You know, I’ve become so disaffected with my job that I feel I don’t want to work at all. Not at GDU, not anywhere. I stay away from the place as much as possible, because no one notices whether I’m there or not and because the two-hour round-trip commute feels like an utter waste of time (so does sitting around the office with little or nothing to do). My house is so much work it expands to fill all of my waking hours: I can easily keep myself busy from 5:00 in the morning to 10:00 at night with yardwork, pool work, housework, grocery shopping, the Workman Waltz, financial management, blogging, and freelancing. Who has time for a job?

Especially for a job that’s going to soak up every living, breathing minute of your conscious existence?

Plus it’s a long haul from here to Atlanta. I don’t know anyone there, and I don’t make friends easily. I’d have to sell my house, which could take several months. Where would I live until I got the cash from this place to buy a new place? I’d have to rent.

Of course, with a real, living wage I could afford to rent: the proceeds from this house could go straight into savings. Or it could be used to pay off the downtown house, freeing my son to quit his hated job and go back to school. 

And it must be said that if I could hold a job like that even for three years, I could recover handsomely from the crash of the Bush economy. Three years of frugal living on a decent salary would leave me well set for retirement; five years would guarantee security for the rest of my life. By then the recession will have passed (we hope) and my savings would allow me to buy a nice place in New Mexico and live happily ever after.

If I lived to see an ever after…

Image:
Midtown Atlanta by Evilarry at Wikipedia Commons

Programmable Thermostats: Aren’t they supposed to save on power?

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So the electric bill arrived in the mail, bearing news of a stiff gouge out of my checking account. Comparing this month’s bill, the first of the air-conditioning season, with what I paid for the same period last month, what should I find but that this year’s bill is $50 more than last year’s! And this year we had a fairly cool spring. Andddd….this month was the first time I used the new programmable thermostat.

The power company, Salt River Project, raised its rates 3.9 percent in January. That should have increased my bill by about $13, not by fifty bucks. And the newsletter SRP stuffs into its billing envelopes announced that SRP plans to raise rates again!

Well, the only thing that’s changed has been the advent of the programmable thermostat. During the winter, I didn’t use it at all—the experiment to rely on space heaters to keep warm worked, and I didn’t turn the central heat on more than two or three times, for an hour or two at a time. A couple of months ago, M’hijito came over and figured out how to set the thing so it would run at 79 degrees during the day (I wanted 80 degrees, but he thought that would be too hot) and then drop to 76 degrees between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m., so I would at least have a shot at sleeping all night.

About 76 degrees is where I used to set it at night when I had the old-fashioned round analog thermostat. I did keep it at 80 during the day, but it doesn’t seem like one degree should account for a $37 spike.

There could be some user error here: the instructions are so cryptic, I can’t understand them at all. When I try to figure out how to set it, it’s just like reading Chinese—utterly incomprehensible. My son, who uses his own programmable thermostat with ease and success, took quite some time to parse out the way to work mine. And he’s pretty clever with electronic gadgetry. Entertainingly, the AC people said this is their easiest-to-use model. 

The only thing I can figure is that programmable thermostats are not what they’re cracked up to be. Either the old analog model was inaccurate and the temperature in my house was higher than 80 degrees, orrrrrr….. oh yes: the story that leaving the AC off until you can’t stand it overworks your system and jacks up your bill JUST…AIN’T…SO.

Afraid so: that’s actually what I used to do. Because in my dotage I no longer can sleep in a warm room, I would ratchet the thermostat down to 76 (or even…hang onto your hat: 72!) at night. Then I would turn it off when I got up, around 5:00 or 6:00 a.m. I would leave it off until I couldn’t breathe any more, which on a normal 105- to 110-degree day occurs around noon. By then it would be bloody hot indoors. At that point, I’d turn on the unit and set the thermostat to 80 degrees. 

Air-conditioning techs will tell you no, no, no, no: you must keep the house at an even temperature at all times. If you don’t, we’re told, the structure will become “heat-saturated” and instead of cycling on and off, the unit will run nonstop. This, they say, will result in higher, not lower, air-conditioning bills. 

Huh. That appears to be the exact opposite of empirical experience. Another emperor has no clothes, eh? 

Images from Wikipedia Commons:
Analogue thermostat by Flicker user midnightcomm 
Programmable thermostat by Stuuf 

The attack of the midnight skulkers

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Augh! What a day! 

One of several low points has been an ant invasion. They’ve established a beachhead in the kitchen, and now they’re strategizing ways to take over the whole house.

This morning while I was cooking up an entire package of Costco sausages, the better to have a frozen stash of cooked food, I opened the dishwasher to grab a pair of tongs, and yipe! the washer was alive with ants! Since I hadn’t run the washer the night before, they thought they’d found their own Ant Costco. 

Heh. Gives new meaning to “big box store,” doesn’t it?

This, on its own, was not difficult to deal with: turned on the dishwasher, tracked the little troops to an opening under the kitchen door, sprinkled the threshold and the area around their entry with boric acid, and mopped the floor with vinegar and laundry detergent. I thought that would bring a stop to that.

Wrong!

This evening I fall asleep in front of House, M.D., wake up around quarter to ten, stumble into the kitchen to let the dog out, and yipe again! My feet get bitten. The floor is swarming with more ants than I have ever seen in my entire freaking life!

This time they’re not in the dishwasher, but they’re just about everyplace else. They’ve packed themselves into the dog dish, which the dog had licked clean hours earlier. They’re lapping up invisible stuff from the floor, which I thought I’d scrubbed clean in the morning. And most interestingly, they’re not marching in the usual antsy line but are wandering all…over…the…floor. They’ve strolled right in over the boric acid, and they’ve spread out over the kitchen floor in an even living blanket. 

And they’re not brooking any interference.

They’re only in the kitchen. They’re only on the floor. The garbage is in the garage, but they haven’t found that. 

I hate bug spray. And I especially hate bug spray inside my house. But pushed to the wall by an army of marauders, I locked up the dog in the back room, threw open the doors and windows, turned the fans to “high,” grabbed the Raid, and applied it as lightly as I could manage to the writhing floor.

Yuch, what a stink! Nauseating.

Ants in retreat, then I got to mop the floor. Five times. Three times with detergent; twice more with Simple Green. 

That got up most of the stink. It’s still pretty gross in there, though. Of course I can’t leave the doors and windows open all night—this is the big city, after all. 

We’ve got worse home invaders than a tribe of ants. This afternoon—another high point of the day—two workmen showed up to hang the gutters on M’hijito’s house. God, what refrigerator do these characters climb out from under? They both sported a fine array of combined prison and professional tattoos. Neither was a guy you’d want to meet in a dark alley (or even a brightly lit alley), but one of them was a very creepy-looking dude. And in the course of climbing around the back of the house, they got a good eyeful of the kid’s elaborate computer equipment, clearly visible behind a set of eminently vulnerable French doors.

Damn!

Well, fortunately the roommate’s car was parked in the driveway, he and the girlfriend having absented themselves to Singapore. I remarked to the men that I was expecting the roommate and his girl at any time, and in fact was surprised they hadn’t come home from their college classes yet. And as they were leaving I indicated I was going to wait around for the young people.

Paranoid? Mebbe. SDXB’s house was burglarized by just such gents, employees of a moving company who overheard that he was going to stay at my house the night of the move-in. Never put an NRA sticker on your vehicle: it advertises that you have guns in the house. Fortunately, he’d left his armaments at his mother’s place, but they stole a beautiful old zebrawood bow and his collection of machetes picked up on various military assignments around Latin America. It was clear they were after weapons—except for his wallet, which he’d left on the kitchen counter, that was all they took. They must have been surprised to find all the Goodwill and yard sale junk he’s accrued over the years.

Then there was the landscaper’s laborer who stole a bicycle out of my garage. He came back the next night but couldn’t get the second one, which was locked, out the door, so he just removed the front wheel and made off with that. And the yard cleanup guys who took advantage of an open garage door to steal my tools. And…well, one could go on and on. 

Image: Meating-eating ant lapping honey, by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos 
whose website and galleries are not to be missed.
Reproduced under the GFDL free documentation license  

To renew or not to renew…

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…that is the question. Whether ’tis better to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous costs, or to read my favorite magazine online for free. 

Actually, the cost isn’t outrageous: Atlantic Monthly is trying to get me to re-up my subscription, telling me the regular price of $25 I’ve always paid is some sort of special “alumni” discount. As though they really could get new subscribers to pony up $60 for twelve issues. Twenty-five bucks is only two dollars apiece to have the magazine packaged up and delivered to my door by the U.S. Postal Service. That can’t possibly cover the cost of mailroom staff, mail list management, packaging, and shipping. It’s a bargain, really.

I do enjoy The Atlantic. But the problem is, oftentimes I don’t read it. Sometimes a new issue will arrive and I’ll realize the old issue is still sitting on the bureau in the bedroom or on the desk in my office, scarcely ever opened. My life is so fractured and so gestalt that I rarely find enough time to focus on anything longer than a few minutes. Unless…yes, unless I’m in front of the computer. These days, the only time I focus on anything for any length of time is when I’m sitting in front of a monitor or trapped on the light rail reading page proofs.

And oddly, The Atlantic is online! Apparently the whole thing is posted, free of charge, cover to cover. Not only that, but it’s got videos, it’s got slideshows, it’s got blogs…all sorts of extra content. And all free. 

So…why would anyone even think of sending a $25 check to get a paper version—a lesser version, really—of all this splendid stuff? It’s hard to come up with an excuse.

One reason, I guess, is the impulse to try to help keep journalism alive. It’s like a charitable contribution. Too bad it’s not tax-deductible.

Would I pay $25 to read it online? 

Nope. As a medium, the computer screen doesn’t give me what I’m looking for in leisure reading: the tactile sensation of pages turning, the portability…with a high-speed cable connection, you can’t carry a computer to the backyard, to the breakfast table, to the bathtub. And what could be more uncomfortable than craning your neck to read a laptop monitor? That’s not my idea of leisure reading.

On the other hand, as a practical matter I’m not reading the magazine in those places.

I do occasionally pick up on ideas from Atlantic writers for this blog. If I read every issue online, I probably would engage more of those ideas in my own writing, more often, because FaM’s dashboard would be right at hand. Instead of putting down an article with the thought that I must blog about it—and then forgetting it—I might go directly from the author to Posts > Add New.  

Hmmm… Maybe I should void this check?

What say you?

Do you cling to your hard-copy, snail-mail subscriptions, or have you abandoned them in favor of the Internet? Why? If we all stop reading print magazines, what will that do to the world as we know it? And what will happen come the Revolution, when all us proles are knocked offline, or, as in China, our online choices are censored?

Chance has fishes!!

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OMG! Take a look at the pair of incredible trout Chance and her friend the goddess came up with!

She wants some ideas for recipes. Go there and share yours.

Blogger isn’t speaking to me again this morning, so below is my offering, which I hope will reach Chance one of these days:

 SDXB likes to poach trout in white wine. I believe he dilutes the wine with a fair amount of water. Adding some herbs gives it a little panache. Simply place the fish in simmering water & wine and cook gently until it’s done through.

When he first proposed to do this on a camping trip, I thought he’d lost his mind, because my ONLY way to prepare fresh-caught white fish was sautéed in butter. He was having nothing of it, though. He insisted on poaching…and I was amazed at how delicious the result was.

I’m not sure this would work with trout, but here’s something I learned from the proprietor of a Greek restaurant: Preheat the oven to around 375 degrees. Chop some ripe fresh tomatoes. Add some minced garlic, some parsley, and some other chopped fresh herbs such as marjoram, thyme, basil, chives—whatever you have. Add some crumbled feta. Toss together. Place a fish steak (I’ve used salmon, halibut, cod, and mahi-mahi) in an open pan. Pile the tomato mixture on top of the fish. Drizzle a little olive oil over it. Then bake until the fish is done to perfection—don’t overcook. To die for.

How to keep the customers coming back

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Awesome customer service! That’s how a small business keeps customers coming back in the door, year after year. And it’s the way a specialized hardware store beats the big boxes.

• A human being answers the phone.
• Employees treat customers as they would like to be treated themselves.
• Skilled workers really are skilled.
• People go above and beyond the call of duty.

Doors in progress
Doors in progress

While we were renovating the downtown house, I stumbled across an amazing windfall: in my neighborhood, a great old house on horse property was being demolished to make way for a cluster of McMansions. The guy who was pulling it down had salvaged the doors: two sets of huge solid mahogany French doors, a matching single back door, and a solid mahogany front door. I grabbed the entire lot, including all the hardware, for $300. 

These magnificent pieces of workmanship now reside at the little house downtown, where they have transformed the place. 

The hardware, as it develops, was all made by Baldwin, one of the most expensive lockmakers on the planet. All of it except the front door’s lockset was in perfect working order. The hardware on the front door never worked right, and the level handle on the interior flopped down like a broken paw. And, as it also develops, Baldwin locks are very hard to repair: not just any locksmith can work on them. To complicate matters further, the hardware dates back to about 1950.

A couple of months ago, the deadbolt broke. I called a locksmith whose name I lifted from Angie’s List while the Phoenix-area list was still free. He came by, looked at it, and said it was beyond his ken. He referred me to an outfit called Anderson Lock and Safe, and said if anyone could fix it, they could. 

Amazingly, these folks will send a locksmith within an hour or two after you call. Even more amazingly, they have a whole crew of locksmiths who seem to know what they’re doing. Soon we had learned that the deadbolt was broken because Eric the Fly-by-Night Contractor had installed the strikeplate wrong, so the bolt was hitting metal; eventually that’s what broke the lock. As for the handle: that was a challenge. A spring on the inside had worn out, and Baldwin no longer made such a spring.

One of the men took the lockset apart and showed me the complicated interior. It was fashioned, he said, like a Swiss clock. All the interior parts were hand-milled. Today, even Baldwin uses mass-produced parts, to keep costs down. Although a Baldwin lock sells for upwards of $300, no one makes anything like the lockset we had. He estimated its value at around $400; his boss thought it was worth more like $700.

This guy repaired the deadbolt, fixed the strikeplate, and got the handle to sit horizontally, but without the spring it had to be manually placed in position. It didn’t really work: it just looked like it sorta worked.

Then along came Bila the Painter. He needed to remove the lockset so he could sand and refinish the outside of the door. He couldn’t figure out how to get it off, so I paid to have Anderson come over and remove it and then paid again to have them come back and reinstall it.

In the course of this project, the handle ended up flopped back down again. Pretty quick, Anderson sent over Bill the Locksmith. This guy, who seems to have the best time in the world playing with locks, took everything apart, did some more repair work on the thing, but said he couldn’t fix the handle without a spring.

I said, well, the other guys had said that spring is no longer being made.

True, said he, but he figured there had to be something like it somewhere. He promised to keep an eye out. He went off. M’hijito and I gave up.

So yesterday the phone rang out of the blue, and there was Bill the Locksmith! He had found a spring he thought would work in the lock. So I threw on some clean clothes and raced down to meet him at the house. 

Half an hour or forty minutes later, lo! The lock worked, the handle stood cheerfully at attention, and the entire assembly operated like new!

Not only that, but he planed down part of the door frame that Eric the F-b-N Contractor had left crooked and sprinkled powdered graphite on the ill-fitting weatherstrip that Greg the Handyman installed. So, when M’hijito got home from work last night, he found a front door, deadbolt, and fancy lockset that actually work!

Says he, by e-mail:

This is most incredibly fantastic.

 

I am sitting here and I am very, very pleased.  It’s probably hard for someone else to understand the degree of my pleasedness.

Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s two people who will tell all their friends to use Anderson Locksmiths. One of them will broadcast that message to the population of the world. And that’s how small businesses can fight big box chains.

🙂