APPLE WANTS YOU!(r laptop battery)

Sometimes the news on TV hits close to home. With me, the recent recall news from Apple did. I own one of the iBook G4's whose Sony-made batteries have a tendency to overheat (and, apparently, burst into flames on rare occasions). So, I am awaiting my replacement battery from Apple for my recalled one. I always thought the left-hand side of the laptop got freakishly warm. Now I know why!

BACK TO UNEMPLOYED STATUS

Well, my summer teaching stint with the American Language Institute at Cal State Long Beach is now up, as of August 18, and I am blessedly unemployed for a while. It was not a minute too soon. I was losing sleep nightly during the work week and hating the job by the last month. And due to a "bureaucratic oversight", the already long wait for my first paycheck has been put back even longer. Seems the Payroll office didn't have any records of my working in June. After checking on the incresingly maddening delay on my paycheck with the Payroll office this past week, I've had to resend them my June work information. So, I guess this 3-month summer job was really just a 'volunteer' position.

But don't worry (yet). I am still owed checks for June, July, and now August. (All prepared and mailed on separate dates.) So they should start coming in bit by bit now that the Payroll office is sufficiently embarrassed and belatedly aware I exist. Well, too, the entire California State University system should be embarrassed at being unable to offer summer faculty a contract that manages to get them their first paycheck until over two months after they begin. (Indeed, I'm writing the California State Assembly member from Long Beach about the issue. I can't imagine how a state provides its post-graduate educated employees with less legal labor protection than it does busboys in fast food joints. This excessively long period withholding pay should be illegal.)

For the final "graduation" ceremony for the summer ESL classes, I was asked to be master of ceremonies/name reader since I can pronounce all those Saudi names. An honor, I guess. I also have experience with Chinese, Korean and Japanese names by now, too, so I'm multi-talented in name reading: "And would the Level 4B teachers and students come down to the front now to receive their certificates. The first student is Nobuhiro Kakatani, ..." The English transliterations of many Saudi names are highly ambiguous, however, and even knowing a lot of Arab names didn't always help. One of my own grammar students, in fact, took me politely to task after the ceremony for mispronouncing his family name: Al-Maleadan. Turns out they're a distinguished family in the southwest corner of Arabia by the Yemeni border from a village outside of Najran, which I visited on a vacation in 1995. The famous British Arabist and explorer St. John Philby was a guest of his family for a number of months back in the early 20th century, it turns out. Now, if only the name list had been written in Arabic!

ALI wanted me to stay on this fall for a semester contract, but I politely declined. For one thing, I hated the lifestyle I developed when I was teaching 5 days a week - the lack of sleep, lack of time for my own job hunt and other necessities of modern life like doing laundry, continual grading of papers during mealtimes. It felt like I was living for ALI only even when I was home after classes. But I also realized by mid-summer that I needed to get back to my own job hunt for a "real" job, and the ESL job was actually standing in the way of doing that right. In addition, it wouldn't be fair to them for me to start teaching for fall and then drop out midway through to take some other job. So for many reasons, I decided by the end of the summer not to take a full-time job there this fall even if asked. And the final straw that made it 100% sure: there wasn't even a week between the end of my exhausting summer classes and the start of the fall classes this week. Kill myself all summer then jump right back in less than a week later? Uh uh. No sirree. No way, José!

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

So, for my "break" the weekend after playing host at the graduation ceremony, I drove upstate to Marin County, north of San Francisco, for a friend's choral concert last Sunday. That provided the when and part of the why. The other part of the why was to visit Dad's relatives Walt and Lois (and her daughter and son-in-law), who also live in Marin County. I actually stayed with the daughter and son-in-law in Mill Valley one night. He's a very sociable Jewish doctor, and I thought it a bit ironic the couple were planning to vacation in Berchtesgaden after a medical conference in Munich in few weeks (Hitler's mountain hideaway). But they insisted Berchtesgaden is a national park, and the reason the Nazis went there is the same reason everyone else goes there: it's drop-dead gorgeous scenery! (OK, maybe the "drop-dead" part was ill-spoken of me.)

Then I worked my way back south, staying one extra night at Pacific Beach, on the sea side of San Francisco at a hotel Dad discovered a couple of decades ago that is in walking distance of beautiful trails, views of the Golden Gate (and Golden Gate Bridge) and Land's end. Coming back from my one-hour beach walk the first evening, I spotted a group of people by the side of the road at Land's End. A fleet of fire trucks and police cars were just arriving, so along with a bunch of other accidental onlookers, I stood around to see what had happened. Then I noticed the white picket fence along the road was broken in one place, and just below it nearly hidden in the bushes was a red sports car facing down at a 90º angle! Seems two young male drivers had pulled out of the tourist parking lot just across the street, driven across four lanes of not-too-busy traffic, mounted the sidewalk and plunged right down the side into the bushes! (Would love to hear THEIR version of that incident!) No injuries, apparently, and all the paramedics and firemen stood around looking a bit sheepish. Heck, all they really needed - besides one cop with a breathalizer machine - was a tow truck!

I stopped in Santa Barbara both on the way up Sunday (for church at Elmo, Mom and Dad's old church) and Wednesday to see an old Aramco friend Betty Johnson, whose husband had pastored several Aramco congregations in the late '50s to '60s. She and Cecil were the main reasons Mom and Dad found out about the Samarkand retirement community to begin with and decided to relocate there in 1998. We had a very nice early-bird fish dinner out at a restaurant at the beach with Betty's daughter Alice. Then I headed back to LA at about sunset.

I am happy to report that as these post-ALI days go by, I am getting caught up slowly but surely with my own life: most of the pile of dishes heaped up during the heat of my teaching weeks is washed and put back, my checkbook is close to balanced, the laundry washed and folded, and even some email written! (Not to mention this update to my blog.)