Spring is Sproinging in Phoenix

So, you say, it’s colder than a bygod where you are? Heh heh heh heh… Well, it’s pushing 70 here. Reached 81  a couple of days ago but by and large has hovered in the 70s. If you wanna be warm, please come to Phoenix in the springtime. That would be January…

The plants are going nuts already. I came outside to put a little extra water on the citrus and the climbing roses, both of which have gone thirsty all winter. Ended up spending two or three hours puttering around the yard, yakking with the neighbor, throwing the Queen’s tennis ball around.

So, sooo much work to do — shovel off the desk, plow through the latest snowdrift of paper that’s collected there, do the bookkeeping, write the Eng. 235 syllabus, build a new Canvas site for them, ride heard on the 102s, edit copy, edit copy, edit more copy. And y’know what?

I don’t want to work.

If I’m going blind in one eye, maybe it’s my body trying to tell me to quit working and go do something else while there’s still time. Sometimes I think I should shut down the editorial business, quit taking on underpaid junior-college courses, and just loaf.

Maybe not, too. 😉 Heh! Good thing I pulled down Fidelity’s share of this year’s savings ten days ago — for the first time in recorded history, we managed to sell at the top of the market! And it’s prob’ly just as well I didn’t buy a new vehicle. The money for that (most of it) is in an old whole life policy and so neither earning nor losing money while the Dow merrily heads south, but still…my cookies would be frosted if the bottom line had dropped an extra 15 grand for the purpose of buying a car.

The roses, whose population is much depleted because I’m sick of pruning them every year, are bursting out in new growth. The bougainvilleas survived the winter with little or no frost damage, because we haven’t had a single hard frost all year. A fierce little curved-billed thrasher has been excavating the yard in search of bugs, in the process turning over the soil and saving me a fair amount of work. Good bird! The hummingbirds, mostly Anna’s at this time of year, are in a frenzy…OMG! There’s a broad-tail! Who’d’ve thunk it?

We have three hummingbird feeders around the shack, which have had to be refilled with some frequency. Lately I’ve taken to preparing a half-gallon of sugar water and keeping it in the fridge, so I don’t have to fool around with making the stuff when the feeders run dry.

Uhm… A honeybee just flew down into my mug, half-full of tea. Thought she was going to fall into the drink (heh! the literal drink!) but she came to rest on the interior, strolled up to the rim, walked all around it, and then took off for wherever honeybees go at this time of day.

So many things to do out here. I’d like to move a bunch of iris bulbs that have been living but not thriving in a large pot…want to put them in the flowerbeds around the climbing roses. KJG, who gave me the bulbs a couple of years ago, says they don’t do very well in pots. And it looks like she’s right. The bed by the pool is overrun with Mexican primrose and red salvia, both beloved flowers but plants that tend to get out of hand. They’re majorly out of hand just now! One of the citrus trees has sprouted a big yellowing section, indicative of root rot. I need to climb underneath there with a screwdriver in hand and adjust the irrigation, cut it back a bit. And I suspect the dirt Richard’s crew piled up there (when they should’ve hauled it off or spread it in the alley…) is too close to that tree’s root system, which could suffocate part of the tree. Either way, that looks suspiciously like a job. Probably I should hire Gerardo and his underling to come in here and shovel that stuff out of the yard.

Won’t he be thrilled…? 🙄

In the paying work department, I finally finished the intro to the proposed cookbook. Intro is three chapters explaining how to lose weight without really trying. Still have to organize the recipes in a sane order and list the jpegs in the order in which they should appear — that’s going to be a time-consuming job. Then decide exactly how to publish the thing.

One friend publishes cookbooks as PDFs, but I don’t think she can go through Amazon with the things. A business acquaintance has taken up converting Word files to Kindle format and is anxious to do both the cookbook and the novel that way. But he can’t handle many graphics, and the utility of having a recipe book on Kindle just escapes me! He thinks if people want to actually use the thing — like, say, in a functioning kitchen with water and pots and pans and dishes? — they’ll buy the print-on-demand version. I suppose. But I know I sure wouldn’t…if I’d paid for a Kindle version I wouldn’t pony up another ten or fifteen bucks for a print version, not on a bet.

So that question is under consideration.

The novel is about ready to go, at least to a designer. Same business friend wants a shot at converting that to Kindle. The agent who advertised that she was looking for new adult fiction writers never even bothered to send an f**k-you-very-much response to the full-length proposal I sent, which was quite a project to put together. So at this point I’m willing to self-publish the book through Amazon and try to market it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how.

Nor am I enthusiastic about doing a plain-vanilla Wyrd-to-Kindle conversion for the novel. In the first place, the thing has a DIY map that needs to be drawn by a professional graphic artist; in the second, there are several tables that I do not want converted to toilet-paper-style lists. And in the third, it really needs decent cover art, and I feel no craving to substitute a piece of cheap stock art for that.

The designers that my little business has been subcontracting to charge a mind-numbing fee for interior page design. Which IMHO is a little ridiculous, because once you’ve got a design (which isn’t hard) all you do is pour the copy into InDesign. To design cover art? Don’t even ask.

Uninclined to pour a ton of money into what’s really a hobby project — any piece of fiction that doesn’t get published through a legitimate publisher is just that: a hobby — I called an old friend of mine, the former art director at Arizona Highways. He’s semi-retired now, but he’s still doing design for an occasional client. He proposed to do the page design for less than a third of what my underling charges, and the charge for the map and the cover art was pretty reasonable, too. He’s very, very good: at the top of his form was one of the premier magazine designers in the country. So if he’s willing to do it, I’m going to hire him to do the novel, I think.

Speaking of work, none of it seems to be doing itself. So I suppose I’m going to have to get up and stagger back into the salt mine. Bye!