THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. : Unsuspecting civilians find themselves sucked into the missions of a secret, clandestine organization devoted to saving the world, and have thrilling adventures.
TORCHWOOD: Unsuspecting civilians find themselves sucked into the missions of a secret, clandestine organization devoted to saving the world, and get killed.
ROBOSAURUS!!!
From The Arizona Republic newspaper, November 27th, "Bake Sales, Beware":For more than two decades, Earlene McDonald and her neighborhood friends have baked cookies to raise dough for their central Phoenix neighborhood.
They cooked thousands of rum balls, rows of gingerbread and loads of other Christmas treats to sell to the crowds at the annual holiday home tour in the F.Q. Story Historic District.
And, until this year, they did it all in the comfortable, familiar settings of their own kitchens.
The tradition changed after a visit last year by a Maricopa County health inspector who said she would snatch up the cookies because they weren't prepared in a kitchen approved by the county.
So, instead of mixing and measuring in their own homes, they gathered one night this week to bake away inside the gigantic kitchen of a professional catering company.
"Last year, (an inspector) was going to have us throw them away, and I about had a heart attack," said McDonald, 68, who is in charge of the neighborhood cookie operation. "This is a tradition. All our neighbors love it."
At the peak of holiday cooking season, as Valley residents enjoy tamales, cookies, breads and cakes, county Department of Environmental Services officials want to raise public awareness about bake-sale guidelines.
Not a new requirement
The guidelines have been on the books for decades and are meant to prevent contamination and food-borne illnesses such as hepatitis.
The rules call for all food that is sold or given away [emphasis added] to be prepared and packaged in a central location, such as restaurants or school cafeterias, that are regulated and inspected by county health inspectors. More neighborhood groups, such as the residents of F.Q. Story, are borrowing or renting kitchens to comply with the rules.
But for years, many neighborhood, school and civic groups have flown under the health-code radar, officials said, partly because they're unaware of the rules.
Also, it's tough for health inspectors to keep track of the many fund-raisers that pop up in neighborhoods throughout the year.
School requirements
Some Valley school districts have written formal policies that require parents to bring in labeled store-bought cupcakes, cookies and other goodies, though parents often cheat and bring in homemade treats packaged in bakery boxes.
No reports of illnesses from bake sales have been filed with environmental services [emphasis added], said David Ludwig, division manager for the Environmental Health Division.
Officials could not provide figures on how many citations they have issued to neighborhood groups for breaking the guidelines, he said, because they don't track citations by types of events.
Typically, health inspectors would issue a warning before they wrote a citation, Ludwig said. Fines can amount to hundreds of dollars.
Cookies are generally low-risk because bacteria are not likely to multiply as quickly as they do with "potentially hazardous foods" such as tamales, eclairs, cream puffs and pies. Still, it's a concern in this age of contamination.
"Mom might bake a great batch of cookies, but if she has an egg-based cookie and doesn't cook it to the proper temperature, you could get salmonella," Ludwig said.
"If you were out there selling Rice Krispy treats and they were not wrapped, we'd ask you to cease and desist."
Damn.
Shorter Health Department: "You people are pigs! Your kitchens are cesspools! You're trying to poison your friends and neighbors!"
Criminy. Strictly interpreted, the Health Department's regulations would mean that potlucks, bake sales, church socials, possibly even taking a dish to a family Thanksgiving, are all illegal.
The underlying default assumption behind the HD's actions is that home kitchens are inherently unhealthy.
I kinda resent that. Considering that e. coli infections from restaurants are reported on a semi-regular basis, eating professionally prepared foods hardly seems risk-free. (The worst -- actually, only -- case of food poisoning I had came from a dim sum restaurant in Los Angeles; by the time I got home to Phoenix the next day, I was doing the double-ended chunder and came close to ending up in the hospital.)
There really ought to be a recognition that there's an assumption of risk in every daily activity. But there's reasonable risks and unreasonable risks. The Health Department is acting as if eating home-cooked products was an unreasonable risk.
I don't think so. I think it's safe to assume that when I cook something for someone, anyone, I'm not trying to poison them. I think it's safe to assume that most people old enough to cook without supervision know that sufficient heat + food = dead germs. I think it's safe to assume that when I nibble at the Christmas potluck at work next week, I'll still be alive Christmas morning.
This calls for a bumper sticker:
[photos from stock.xchng. Cookie-stack by singhajay (Ajay Singh). Oven mitt by mzacha (Michael Zacharzewski).]
"These people... these humans... they have created something that is a physical manifestation of the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC: 'Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination'. Clearly, they are fit to join with other races."
We had an overnight visitor last week, a fairly large desert tortoise.
This came about when the household's female members (Hilde, Kay, Tabbi and Holly) went off to a friend's place for the evening.
When they came back out to go home, this guy had wedged himself in the space between a tire tread and the carport.
Their friend recognized him as coming from the crack house several houses down the street, the crack house where the residents had been raided and arrested recently, and were still in jail awaiting trial. A neighbor kid had taken the tortoise in, but the tortoise kept escaping from the kid's back yard.
So it was decided the tortoise needed a better home. Not us; between Mim and the cats, ours isn't the best choice for a tortoise. (Also, they're a protected species, and this guy was probably being kept without a permit by the people in the crack house.) But we could shelter it for the night in the backyard's sunken garden (a filled-in swimming pool), which has a low fence to keep the dog out, until we could find an appropriate rescue organization to take it in.
Come morning, I went out to take a better look at the tortoise.
Y'know what? Tortoises are cool. Crack House Charlie (my nickname for the tortoise) ambled back and forth across the garden, checking out the new territory. I fed him some of the cauliflower trimmings we'd set out for him; he seemed to like being hand-fed.
A tortoise is a very calming thing to have around; they're a walking embodiment of "phlegmatic". They have the face of a wise old Zen master.
How could you possibly not love a face like that?
Kay went online Sunday morning and eventually contacted the Phoenix Herpetological Society; one of their members who had a permit to foster desert tortoises came over in the afternoon to pick Crack House Charlie up.
It turned out Crack House Charlie was actually Crack House Charlotte. My plans for a new career as a tortoise sexer after retirement now lay in ruins.
Sidebar 1: One of the cliches of fanzines -- the old ink-on-paper productions where I got my start as a informal-essayist/raconteur/critic-at-large/public-jerk/etcetera -- and blogging is "The Pain Story", the great and not-so-great tellings of injury, sickness and suffering in the writer's life.
"Pain Stories" tend to get old pretty quickly, especially when they start to be the writer's most frequent subject. And I've already had a pretty major Pain Story here recently, writing about my night in the ER and the hip bursitis that followed.
So I don't want to over-do it on the medical-issues stuff. But there have been some major developments on that front for me lately, and a lot of thinking about them, that may lead to some major lifestyle changes. So this is Important Stuff, to me if not necessarily to my occasional commenters and vast hordes of lurkers. (There... there are vast hordes of lurkers out there, right? Raise your right hand if you're lurking. No, the other right.)
So bear with me a bit on this. Thanks.
And then there's the Fun Shit. The Fun Shit is the stuff you want to do. It's what you do in your leisure time. Reading. Writing. Blogging. Watching movies or television. Exercise. Cooking. Gardening. Building things.Sidebar 2: We try and shift some of that other Normal Shit onto other people; we've always had housemates, and part of their "rent" has always involved helping out Hilde. Tabbi is Hilde's current daytime caregiver, and gets free room & board, plus a pittance of pocket money (a lot less than she'd get doing the same things professionally); it doesn't hurt that Tabbi is also sweet and amusing. But there's still a lot of things Tabbi can't do, that I have to do for Hilde myself.
And that 800-pound gorilla never goes away. In some ways, it's like being in a three-way relationship where one of the partners is an abuser. Except you can't get rid of it. You can't evict it, you can't divorce it, you can't call the police on it, you can't set fire to its bed.
You can mollify it somewhat, with drugs and surgeries and emotional support. But the gorilla is always there. Always.
Sidebar 3: Hey, go see Stardust. You'll thank me.
Blogging, both reading other blogs and writing on my own here, has probably been the most time-using Fun Shit I've done for the past several years. Not all of it's been fun Fun Shit; I read a lot of the political blogs I do to try and keep up with what's been going on in the United States and the World (more a case of self-protection than actual fun). So one of the things I've tried to do the last several months has been cut back on that blogging time, and the main casualty has been posting to UNDULANT FEVER; a lot of other peoples' blogs are being skimmed more rapidly and commented on less.
I'm not happy with this state of affairs, but I've had to take some steps to try and make more time for more sleep, to try and do something about the overwhelming sleepiness during the day.
(It's not just "sleepiness", a feeling of being about to fall asleep; there have been episodes, too many, where I've had "mini-blackouts" of a second or two at the wheel of my postal delivery truck. This is not good. This is, in fact, very very bad.)
I've managed to squeeze a little more sleep-time out of the day; I'm probably managing six to seven hours a night (tho' usually closer to six than seven) recently, rather than five to six.
I've also seen my doctor, who's prescribed me a medication called Provigil. Provigil is one of the drugs given to Top Gun pilots to help them stay awake and alert on long or repeated missions, so I call it my "Tom Cruise pill". (Alas, it doesn't seem to make me "Sexiest Man Alive", although, hey, the idea of an evil space alien named Xenu being behind all mankind's problems... that seems reasonable.)
The Provigil has worked pretty well the last several months. It doesn't keep you from feeling tired, but it feels like that cloud of exhaustion wrapped around your head and brain has been displaced about a yard up and to the right, hanging off in mid-air where you know it's there but it can't directly affect you. One pill generally lasts me about fifteen hours.
("Generally" in this case means that I hope it isn't losing it's effectiveness over time. It seems to have been less effective over about the last week, and Friday and Saturday I had to take two pills to get thru the workday. This is... worrisome. [And hopefully not a sign that all this is actually more than just long-term sleep-deprivation; "Helloooooo, narcolepsy!" is a phrase I'd rather not add to my vocabulary, thanks.] If this continues, I'll try to move up my next doctor's appointment.)
So, trying to squeeze out more sleep, combined with the Provigil, seems to have brought things back into a normal range (or, at least, for own own peculiar range of "normal") for the moment.
But in the long-term, I've come to the realization that we really need to make, eventually, some major lifestyle changes.
Basically... I need to retire from the Postal Service.
I mentioned above that I'm now in my mid-fifties; I turned 55 earlier this month. Fifty-five is the minimum age at which one can retire from the Postal Service.
Until recent months, my plan had been to retire in early 2010, when I would be 57 and a bit. By that time, the house mortgage would be paid off (we've been making extra payments on the principal for quite a while, so it's been shrinking pretty quickly), which would give us the financial leeway to be able to retire. (Not luxuriously, but at about the level of turnip-squeezing we've done for years anyway.)
The recent problems with the sleepiness and mini-blackouts have made me wonder whether I'm going, at this rate, to make it to 2010.
So I've been trying to pull together all our financial data, and examine all the options, to see whether I could possibly retire sooner, rather than later. We've been talking to our mortgage company and insurance agents to see if things could be rearranged to better advantage.
Some of the information has been encouraging: We could refinance the mortgage, and consolidate our credit card debt and the loan on the new car we recently purchased into it, and still have a minimum mortgage payment about two hundred dollars less per month than the current mortage. And our insurance agent tells us there's "additional cash value" on our insurance policies that could be turned into a monthly annuity.
But... if I retire right now, I'd only get about 61% of my current base salary, a drop of about, ohhhh, twenty thousand dollars a year. (If I worked a couple more years, that percentage would raise to its maximum of 65%.)
And... whenever I retire, that will mean the Postal Service no longer kicks in the lion's share of our medical insurance premiums. Meaning our monthly cost for medical insurance will go from less than three hundred dollars a month to nearly a thousand. Ouch.
Sooooooo... a full retirement isn't looking too likely.
I've been trying to figure out if retiring from USPS, and getting a part-time job (probably at a lot less per hour than USPS), will enable us to make ends meet. I'm still working on researching figures and juggling numbers, but even with a part-time job, the prospect looks pretty damn iffy.
So I've also been considering the idea of retiring from USPS and then getting another full-time job. In that instance, between the retirement money and the new income (even if it's at only half the pay-rate I'm getting at USPS), we probably could get by.
"Wait a minute, Bruce," someone asks, "If you get another full-time job, how will that help with the sleep-deprivation?"
Good question. And the answer is that if I only work 40 hours a week, I'll be saving a lot of time over my current hours at the Postal Service.
In nearly thirty years with USPS, not counting annual leave or sick leave periods, I think I've had two paychecks that didn't include some amount of overtime pay.
Usually, the overtime per paycheck has ranged between four and eight hours. But this has been growing in recent years. Part of this is that postal management has been, more and more, following the policy that it's cheaper to work your current employees more hours at overtime rates than to hire new employees and pay them benefits.
(real workplace conversation: "Do you think they're actually trying to KILL us?" "Probably.")
Within limits, this is okay. A few extra hours a week, I can manage. And that overtime money has largely been what's made it possible to pay down the principle on the mortgage as much as we have.
But it's gotten to be more than a few extra hours a week. This entire past summer, not only was I working several hours a day overtime, but I was forced in to work on almost every one of my scheduled days off.
This gets real old, real fast. For one thing, that kind of hours means you're pretty wiped out by the time you get home, so the Shit That Needs To Get Done that you would have done after a normal eight-hour day ends up not getting done. And when Sundays are the only day you can depend on having off from work, it means that even more STNTGD is left undone.
So, even if I have to take on a new full-time job after retirement from USPS, I'd still be working fewer hours than I have most of my postal career. (And a lot less than I have in recent months.)
There'd be another advantage to taking on a different job: I was hired on at USPS thirty years ago, so I'm still under Civil Service guidelines, which means I don't earn credits towards future Social Security payments. Credits from previous employers will only bring in about $500 a month, once I'm old enough to collect SS payments; so retiring from USPS and getting a different job would earn additional SS credits, and eventually higher SS payments.
And there's still another reason, even beyond health concerns, why I'd like to retire from the Postal Service: I'd like to try and start doing my fiction-writing on a regular basis. If I could, I'd like that to be the part-time or full-time job I end up doing in retirement.
Sidebar 4: Writing has generally tended to be something I've done on a "when available" basis. A lot of writers have day jobs, but have managed a degree of success by treating writing as their second job, and working at it regularly.
In my case, I not only have a day job, but my second and third jobs are as housekeeper and caregiver. So writing has been, at best, my fourth job.
For a fourth job, I think I've actually done pretty well, with about a dozen short stories published, a television script sold, and several anthologies edited.
(The most productive writing period I've had was during the early 1990's. The money from the script I sold to Star Trek: The Next Generation made it possible to take my name off the "Overtime Desired" list at work, so I worked a lot less overtime for four or five years. Most of the writing I did during that period was on movie scripts, trying to follow up on the success of that TNG script, but though I got called out to Hollywood for several meetings with production companies, no one ever actually put money on the table for a script of mine. [THE FOOLS! THE BLIND, IGNORANT FOO-- *ahem* A couple of those scripts were pretty damn good, if I may say so.]
"First I shredded the curtains, and no one stopped me.
Then I destroyed the sofa, and no one stopped me.
Until finally. . . but you've only yourselves to blame. Mraaa-ha-ha-ha-ha!"
(photo from AP)
