Coffee heat rising

Month: December 2011

Stress-Free Finances: Close Out Revolving Debt

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The biggest drain on your budget—and one of the biggest financial stressors around—is revolving debt: credit card and store card debt. The availability of easy credit in this country has had strange effects on the consumers’ psychology and on the way businesses work; IMHO it’s not especially good for either party.

The other day I saw an ad for those Bose headphones that are supposed to block out ambient sound, creating the illusion of silence. Like all things Bose, they’re expensive: three hundred bucks. So, the company offers an “easy” 0% payment plan on purchases between $299 and $1500.

Wow! For just $25 a month, we can have this miraculous electronic object, right now! Who can’t afford this? Let’s order one today…

What’s wrong with this picture? Well, to start with, that’s $25 a month that you’re committed to pay, not that you can pay if you happen to have an extra twenty-five bucks laying around. If something happens to stress your budget—you have a big dental bill; the kids need money to go on a school field trip to the marine biology station in Baja California; some chucklehead rear-ends you and you have to pay a big deductible on your car insurance—suddenly, it’s not so affordable. And to end with, when you realize you can get your hands on things you want without paying for them, quite naturally you’re likely to start grabbing everything you can get.

The result is your debt, most of it costing a lot more than 0% interest, soon gets out of hand. It starts to consume more and more of your monthly income, until you’re saddled with never-ending debt payments that leave nothing for you to spend on anything more than debt repayment and bare necessities. The cost of what you’re buying on the cuff increases by the amount of the interest: if you’re paying 18% interest on some credit card, a $100 purchase actually costs you $118. This means the value of every dollar you pay for an item is actually only 82 cents: $1.00 less 18 percent.

Meanwhile, businesses and lenders love it. Or so their management thinks… For the nonce, you’re buying with abandon and paying through the nose for the privilege. Merchandise is moving briskly, and you’re on the hook for a lucrative debt from which you may never get free. You are, in short, a cash cow.

However, eventually the cow will run out of milk. At some point, you will no longer be able to purchase much of anything, even necessities, especially if you lose your job or some other hardship comes your way. When people face hardship, as has been the case after the 2009 economic crash, they stop buying. And when consumers stop buying, businesses go belly-up.

That’s why, in the long run, revolving debt is as bad for business as it is for you and me. Eventually, it will drive us all into the hole.

The solution is easy: buy things when you can pay for them, not when you want them. If you can afford to pay $25 or $100 a month to a credit-card issuer, you can afford to pay $25 or $100 to yourself. Put the money into a savings account, and when you’ve accrued the $300 for the marvelous sound-blocking headphones, go to the store or the online site and buy them—and pay for them. In cash.

Now you own them; they don’t own you.

But what if you’re already in debt up to your schnozz? What if you’re at the point where all you can do is make the minimum payments on an array of credit cards that could be used to play Blackjack if only they had spades, diamonds, clubs, and hearts printed on them?

It’s discouraging, but it’s not hopeless. Lots of people have managed to get out of debt, and you can do it, too. Here are the strategies:

First, stop charging! Take the credit cards out of your wallet and stash them in your file cabinet. Until you get the debt paid off, if you can’t buy something in cash, don’t buy it. Put off purchases, large and small, until you have the cash to pay for them.

Next, try to consolidate credit-card debt on the lowest-interest card you can get. Some lenders offer rates as low as zero percent for limited periods. Try to transfer as much of your balance to a low- or zero-percent card as you can, giving yourself a period in which to pay down the balance that you can’t transfer first.

Call your card issuer and ask if you can work a better deal. Sometimes you can negotiate lower minimum payments in exchange for a higher interest rate, or a lower rate if you agree to make higher minimum payments.

I personally would never borrow against my house to pay off credit-card debt, because it’s too risky. However, if you still have equity in your house and you’re facing credit card debt in the range of thousands of dollars—and you know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you can be disciplined enough to pay it down and to stop charging on cards altogether—interest on a home equity loan is lower, by far, than credit-card interest, and it’s tax deductible in the same way mortgage interest is.

Once you have the debt moved into the lowest-interest instruments you can find, pay it off as fast as humanly possible.

To accomplish this, make a plan and stick with it. Write down your goals, figure out how to meet those goals, and write down your scheme. Post it on the refrigerator and check off your progress as you go.

The most commonly used plan is called “snowballing.” With this strategy, the debt-ridden consumer quits charging, continues to make minimum payments on all cards, and throws a specific extra payment toward principal on a specific debt. Say you owe on a Mastercard at 8 percent, a Visa card at 15 percent, and an American Express card at 21 percent. You would figure out what you can afford above and beyond minimum payments—suppose it’s $100 a month—and you would pay that toward the card that charges the highest rate. In the scenario above, you’d pay your extra $100 a month on the AMEX card.

As soon as that card is paid off, you take its minimum payment plus your $100 paydown budget and apply it to the next highest-interest card. So, if your minimum payment for the American Express card was $20 a month, you now have $120 freed up to pay toward the Visa card. Once the Visa card is paid off, you would add its minimum payment into your pay-down budget and apply that to the Mastercard. Supposing the Visa’s minimum payment was $15 a month, as soon as that card is paid off, you’ll have $135 a month ($120 + $15) to pay toward the Mastercard.

Your paydown budget is the maximum that you can afford. If you quit charging things and make it a point to live frugally, you may find that amount is a lot more than you expect. And building the paydown budget cumulatively will allow you to clear debt much faster than you may think.

Some people prefer to pay down the smallest debt first, rather than focusing on the debt with the highest interest rate. Psychologically, this is cheering: it feels great to get out from under a debt, any debt. Apply whichever strategy makes sense to you and will help you keep on track.

To “snowballing” you can add “snowflaking”: using every windfall that comes your way to pay down the debt. In this strategy, you apply your income tax return, your annual kickback on the Costco AMEX card, gifts in cash, yard-sale proceeds, income from side jobs, and every other nickel and dime to the debt you’re working on.

So…where do you get the money for that extra $100 or more a month? Two sources are at hand:

• Side jobs and incidental income sources.
• Frugality

Generate More Income

Take on an extra job and apply all the net income to the debt.

About a year before the ax fell, I began to realize the Great Desert University would likely lay off me and all my staff. I had a $30,000 equity loan against my otherwise paid-off house. I did not want to have to deal with that in unemployment, and so I took on an adjunct teaching job at the university’s west campus. At the time, GDU was paying Ph.D.’s about $3300 per class. When they double-enrolled my two sections, I demanded—and got—double pay, earning the equivalent of teaching four sections. Between this amount, freelance editorial income, assiduous snowflaking, and a payment out of my savings, I succeeded in getting rid of the debt by the time the official canning announcement came down.

Most of us can find some paid work on the side. Deliver Away Debt’s blogger Jeff discovered he could earn $1400 to $1800 a month delivering pizzas for 22 hours a week. At that rate, with just the side job money alone, you could pay down a $30,000 debt in about 16 months.

Another source of income is selling things on Amazon, Craig’s List, and eBay. Clean out the closets, get rid of the dustcatching book collection, buy items at yard sales and estate sales and sell them for a profit online.

My neighbors used to run an under-the-table yard sale business. They would spend three or four  months running around to yard sales and scavenging throw-aways from the alleys (you’d be amazed at the perfectly good stuff people will discard!). They’d store the stuff in the garage, and then three or four times a year they would throw a huge yard sale. Over time, they learned how to price the stuff, and they made pretty good money at it.

Live Beneath Your Means

Your “means” is the actual amount of dollars you have on hand today, right now. Not tomorrow. Not next month. Not next year. Today.

That’s the principal behind frugality. Know how much you have on hand to spend, and spend only that. Or better yet: spend less than that—live beneath your means.

Remember, when you pay for something in cash, your dollar buy more because you’re not having to pay a premium in credit card interest. Each dollar is worth a whole dollar, not a dollar less 18 or 20 cents. Weirdly, when you don’t charge things, you have more money to buy things. So, as you can see, it actually pays you money to hold off purchases until you can afford to pay for them outright.

Much has been said about frugal living. Overall, though, its strategies look like this:

• Live light on the land. Distinguish between needs and wants, and purchase and use only what you need.

• Cultivate a minimalist lifestyle. Occupy only the space you need, and fill it only with the objects you need to live comfortably.

• Figure out how much money you can spend and how much you can save.

• Build a budget to manage spending and saving.

• Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without. Often you’ll find you already have something that does the job, or in fact you don’t need to replace an item because you don’t really need it.

• Buy things at a discount or don’t buy them at all. If a food or drug item you need is not on sale, buy the store brand, which is the made by the same suppliers that make the expensive brands and is cheaper.

• Eat in, not out. Learn to cook. It’s easy, the food tastes better, and it’s healthier. And by the way, it’s lots cheaper.

• Learn to fix things yourself. It’s not hard to change the oil in your car, and most of us can learn to use a screwdriver and a hammer. While some chores need a pro, many need little more than a few minutes of your time.

• Learn to make things yourself. From household cleaners and toiletries to simple draperies, DIY products save a ton of money.

• Shop at estate sales and thrift stores. Nowhere is it written that everything we purchase must be brand new. In fact, sometimes we can get better products by finding practically unused items second-hand.

Frugal habits can save quite a bit of money—enough that you will soon find yourself spending less than you budget. Use the amount to pay off that debt. Once you’re debt free, use it to live better or save it to live better in the future.

Do You Really NEED It?…

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…Or can you use what you have, wear it out, make it do, or do without? Have you noticed that we’re surrounded by things that we think we need, but that we could easily live without? Some of those are expensive don’t-needs.

The example that comes to mind is my clothes dryer. The thing has been on the fritz for at least a couple of years now. Its thermostat apparently died: on any of the heated cycles, the machine gets so hot it will burn your hand, clearly creating a fire risk. I’ve never replaced it, mostly because I can’t justify a $300 to $600 hit for a new dryer.

Instead, I strung a few clotheslines from the rafters under the patios, and on laundry day I simply hang my clothes outdoors. Not long after I started doing this, I realized I much prefer drying clothes on the line.

• It frees you from the nagging b-l-a-a-t of a dryer buzzer going off every twenty minutes.
• You get to put your clothes away at your convenience, not at the dryer’s.
• It saves on electricity.
• It’s better for the environment.
• And line-dried sheets smell wonderful!

And it saves the expense of having to buy a big-ticket appliance.

The dryer still works on air-dry, so I occasionally use it to tumble dog hair out of Cassie’s blanket or to whack out the wrinkles in my jeans. But otherwise…it turns out I don’t really need a dryer! All the laundry has to be taken out, hung up, folded up, and put away anyway. So why not take it off a clothesline at my convenience, rather than hurry to haul it out of a machine every time a buzzer goes off?

Not too long ago, Sierra Black ruminated on the same topic at Get Rich Slowly, when she reported that instead of fixing a showerhead whose temperature control device quit working, she simply turned down the thermostat on the water heater. She reflects that frugality is about making choices—in this case, between taking weekend time to fix the plumbing instead of spending the time with the kids, or between paying a plumber to fix it instead of using the money on yoga classes or a family camping trip.

I wonder how many amenities that we’ve come to take for granted are really things we could do without? And to what extent do some of those “conveniences” actually represent more hassle than we realize?

Personal Finance, Academics, and the Perpetual Recession

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Yesterday I came across a shiny new blog over at WordPress.com by a young academic working in the South. She calls it Budget Glamorous: Living Well on Less. (hmmm… What is it about academia that leads its denizens to write personal finance blogs?)

BG, it develops, is presently working in exactly the same position at her university where I started at the Great Desert University: as a full-time non-tenure-track lecturer.  Apparently the idea is considered relatively innovative in Appalachia, as it was here (more or less) when I hired on at GDU, said idea being that the school would hire a small cadre of moderately paid Ph.D.’s and M.A.’s to teach four-and-four or five-and-five, with no research & publishing expectation.

These jobs are paid one helluva lot better than ordinary adjunct gigs: you get a full year’s contract at pay that would be laughable in the corporate world but that looks pretty darned good to an unemployed wretch fresh out of six years in graduate school. I started at the same figure as the assistant professors in my cohort. By the time I left to found and direct the editorial office on the main campus, I was earning the median annual salary for Arizonans—not very much, but as a lecturer I was paid for only nine months of work. My pay, however, most certainly did not keep up with my cohort’s, by then at the associate level.

GDU already had a full-time non-tenurable position, which they called “instructor” and for which they paid shamefully. These were held mostly by ABDs and by women hangers-on, academic groupies who were having affairs with faculty members or who simply wanted a career on a university campus but for one reason or another could not get a position elsewhere. Once an incumbent finished the Ph.D., he or she was out of a job. So in effect, accepting such a position brought your academic career to a halt, in real terms.

The lecturership, by contrast, may be held indefinitely—one colleague at the West campus retired after about 20 years on the job. It has no future: you are not going to get a promotion, you are never going to get a shot at a tenurable position, and the only raises you will get will be COLAs, except that when times are tough (which is most of the time) there are no COLA increases. GDU lecturers earn about half of what a community college instructor here earns, with a comparable course load and much larger classes. To frost the cookies, you have no job security whatsoever: annoy a dean, and you’re canned with no appeal. The university can refuse to renew your contract and does not have to give a reason. No joke: this happened to a friend who got crosswise with a dean.

The advantages for the university are obvious: One lecturer can be made to teach two or two-and-a-half times the number of lower-division students that can be foisted on a tenure-track faculty member. Accrediting agencies look askance at large numbers of undergraduate courses taught by part-time adjuncts, and so hiring anyone at “full-time” status helps hugely at accreditation time. This handles the scut-work courses at a little higher cost than hiring adjuncts who will work for sweat-shop wages and no benefits, but the crucial importance of accreditation overrides that added cost. A lecturer in a non-tenure-track position can be canned at will, giving administrators a little more control over department, division, and college budgets…and a convenient political shilelagh. This came in handy at GDU when, as the current economic depression reached its height, some 550 employees were laid off, and as the layoffs continue to this day.

The advantage to the budding academic? A job. Even before higher education was pinched by the fall of the Bush economy, graduate schools were turning out many more Ph.D.’s in the humanities than there were jobs to accommodate them. There simply are not enough jobs to go around. A full-time junior-college opening can attract two or three hundred qualified candidates. So, obviously, unless you enjoy waiting tables or cleaning house, it’s much to your benefit to grab whatever academic job you can get, if it pays anything like a living wage.

Like BG, I enjoyed teaching as a full-time nontenurable lecturer, at first. I like students and in time found ways to mitigate the obscene workload. It was great for the first seven years. After that, political infighting led to the disintegration of our department and morale went south, fast. I started looking for other work, in and out of academe; it was three years before I managed to get myself into an administrative position on the Main campus.

The question is, if you know what you’re getting into, can one of these exploitive jobs be made to work to your advantage?

Possibly so.

If I were starting that position now, knowing what I know today, I would use the job as a springboard to another job, and I would work as hard and as fast as I could to find that other job. I would not delay just because I liked the teaching or felt grateful to have broken into academia.

If I wanted to stay in the university environment, I’d be angling for an administrative position, even it it meant getting another degree. The Ph.D. in an academic subject may or may not help you get into administration, but certain vocational doctorates indeed will.

You can get these degrees online or in low-residency programs. At GDU, I watched people move from underpaid nontenurable jobs to administrative positions after obtaining advanced degrees in educational administration or online course design. Most of the coursework was done online. An Ed.D., it develops, is as good as a Ph.D. in the job market—maybe better, if it has something to do with administration or marketing.

Meanwhile, I would apply for every tenure-track position advertised in the Chronicle, no matter where it is. I also would not be too proud to apply in the community colleges, where the same workload is rewarded with better pay and job security.

If I wanted to work in the real world, I would be looking all the time for any job I could convince an employer I could do. And classroom skills translate magnificently to the real world:

• Communications
• Publications
• Management
• Human resources (here, too, think online courses: get an online degree in human resources or management)
• Personnel training
• Online personnel training course design (where do you think they get people to build those see-Dick-run employee tutorials—and those annoying courses for traffic schools?)
• Translator jobs (if you’re fluent in a second language)
• Executive director of nonprofit
• Development officer for nonprofit

Some industries that seem far afield of academia welcome academics as they welcome any smart, self-starting, ambitious individual. A friend of mine went into real estate as she neared the end of the doctoral program. She had a long and lucrative career selling spectacular high-end houses to the ridiculously rich. Another went to work for Peter Bogdanovich and became an executive vice president of Paramount Pictures. Two others went to law school—today one is a prominent immigration lawyer; the other went to work in the AG’s office. Another left a tenured associate professorship in communication to found a very successful personnel training business, for which she simply transferred what she had been teaching in the classroom into the corporate workplace.

And if getting a real-world job meant I had to walk from a nontenurable academic contract in mid-semester, that’s exactly what I’d do. A university feels no loyalty to its NTTT faculty (it’s an institution: it feels nothing), and so there’s no rational or moral reason not to move on when a less exploitive opportunity comes your way.

Life Lessons from the Mountain

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w00t! Amazing!

Yesterday I decided to start anew on the ever-flagging effort to get off my ever-enlarging fanny and lose some weight. On the way home from class, I went over to Shaw Butte to start what I hope will be at least three days a week of climbing. To my delight, they have not yet started charging people to park at the trailhead (otherwise I’d have had to drive around the corner and leave my car in a grocery-store parking lot), and better yet, no one was there!

These vertical gyms are usually packed, so it’s mighty nice to start up the trail and be greeted by silence and a watching cottontail.

I didn’t figure I’d make it to the top the first time out. Nowhere near, come to think of it: Shaw Butte has some pretty steep stretches, even on its relatively gentle north side. So the plan was to walk about a third of the way up the first day, stopping at a little scenic perch where you can peer off the south side. Do that two days in a row; then the third day go about halfway up. Two days in a row of that; then on the fifth day hike about three-fourths of the way. And on the seventh day, to rest not but go all the way to the top.

Well. The scenic step-out was a great deal further up than I recalled, and the climb a great deal less strenuous. In fact, you don’t reach the lookover until you’re just below the last stretch below the summit.

About halfway up, I figured oh, what the hell, I’m not that tired, and kept walking. Two-thirds of the way, I could see where the overlook is and thought oh, what the hell and kept walking. At the overlook, I realized it was really only another few steps to the top and thought oh, what the hell and kept walking.

Whoa! Can you believe it? I made it all the way to the top on the first day!!!!!!!

True, I had to stop several times on the way. Quite a few several times…drank about 16 ounces of water in the process. And true, I used to be able to get up there without stopping at all. But it’s been years since I’ve climbed anything more interesting that a couple flights of steps. In fact, I hardly get up from the desk, ever—I spend 12 to 14 hours a day parked in front of a computer. That’s why I look like I’m about five months pregnant.

I figure it will take about three months to lose ten pounds, assuming I don’t diet (which I hate and which I will not stick with) but do knock off the sauce (again :roll:). I’ll never be my old sylph-like self, but that’s just as well because I can’t afford to buy a closet-full of new Costco  jeans.

It was really exciting to succeed in doing that. On the way down the trail, it occurred to me that there are some larger life lessons in this small adventure, life lessons that apply in general to work and saving and debt escape and self-improvement in general.

Videlicet:

• You probably can do better than you think you can.

• When you start a project, stack the deck in your favor. (In this case, I brought a lot of water, chose a cool day to hike, and picked a time when only about three hours of work remained to be done that day.)

• Setting a goal helps you go further.

• The only one you’re in competition with is yourself.

• Once you meet a goal, keep going.

• But if you know, realistically, that the pursuit is harming you, stop and find something else to do, without feeling guilty about it.

• Life is short. Eternity is long. Do it now.

Bunny rabbit photo: Desert cottontail. Howcheng.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.
Photos of North Mountain Park by SDXB.

Eau de Bourbono Mouthwash

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LOL! Check this out:

I finally guzzled down the last of the lifetime supply of bourbon purchased some time back at Costco. Nice bottle…why throw it out? Decided to fill it with Listerine and use it to decorate the bathroom.

Heckuva lot better than this ugly plastic thing sitting on the bathroom counter advertising its glories, eh?

Ill-advisedly, I bought the mint-flavored version of the mouthwash. Don’t  like mint—but that was all that Costco carried—and in any event, the mint does nothing to disguise the nasty taste of Listerine. So as soon as I get through the lifetime supply of the blue stuff, I’ll replace it with the regular variety, which looks…alarmingly  like bourbon!

{chortle!}

Reminds me of my misspent youth.

The dockhouse on the pier where my father spent 10 years working

Then as now, when I grew up in Saudi Arabia all types of alcohol were strictly contraband. Americans were not allowed to bring their favorite potables out there, and so supposedly the camp was dry.

Supposedly.

In those days, though, Americans still lived up to their reputation for ingenuity. Down at the machine shop, there was a guy who was a real, live Kentucky bootlegger. He built several stills and taught people how to use them. These contraptions would be quietly passed from household to household, where amateur distillers would percolate their own high-test on the kitchen stove.

My father fermented his mash in a big closet in the service porch at the back of our house, using either raisins or orange-juice condensate. The product was clear and, when tested by setting a spoonful alight, burned with a purely invisible flame.

Well, as you can imagine, this booze wasn’t especially tasty. It would be, I suppose, much like high-proof vodka.

Meanwhile, back in New York, the pharmacy at the Barbizon Plaza, where the Company put up its employees when they returned to the States, learned about this burgeoning custom. Some bright fellow had the idea of marketing flavorings for the bootleg grog.

The challenge, of course, was to get them into the country.

Fortunately, the Arabs who manned Customs at Dhahran were a bit naive on this subject. So the pharmacists tricked out a “First Aid Kit” that could be carried through Customs without attracting attention. It contained, in pharmacy bottles, the Eau de Bourbono Cough Medicine, the Crème de Menthe Nose Drops, the Amaretto Headache Tonic, and so on.

Who knows? Maybe one of them was billed as a mouthwash!

Ras Tanura. What a place to grow up! 🙄

w00t! Wednesdays from Hell Are OVER!!!

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Gustave Doré. Charon rowing across the River Styx. Plate 9, Dante's Inferno, Canto III

Yay! Today is the last Wednesday from Hell!

The Wednesday afternoon class let out a little early, giving time to race by the Safeway to pick up a celebratory bottle of wine and the pool store to pick up some chemicals. Then raced home to discover M’hijito had not come by over the lunch hour, and that left Charley caged and unfed for five hours. Opened the crate door, released a nuclear explosion. Fed the explosion some dog food. Chased around. Ran a second hose from the westside bibcock to the empty pool, turned it on full-blast to supplement the full-blast flow from the bibcock on the north wall. Chased around some more. Locked Cassie in a bedroom to protect her from pup’s turbocharged maleness. And on it went.

Still have choir tonight, tho’ I don’t consider that the least bit Hellish.

Most of what has sent this semester’s Wednesdays blowing in from the subterranean regions has originated in my own quirks.

The insomnia: Until the nights get cold (as in the house is around 60 degrees), I wake up sometime between 2 and 5 a.m. By mid-autumn it’s dark outside at that hour, and anyway when you get waked up by insomnia you feel terrible and the last thing you want to do is walk the dog (which is what you should do) even if it were safe at that hour. And so invariably I park myself in front of the computer and start working. So my work day normally begins around 5:00 a.m. That’s after a good night’s sleep…

The ad-hoc organization: On Wednesdays from Hell, it’s meant two hours of work before I notice the time and jump up and race around to feed Cassie and myself before M’hijito shows up with the Animated Rocket (i.e., Charlie the Golden Retriever Pup). Bolt breakfast. Receive pup. Go back to work, interrupted repeatedly and frequently. About 10 a.m., race to bathe and get dressed, fly out the door, teach until almost 5:00 p.m., fly back to the house.

The inability to bring a stop to work: Fix dinner. Bolt down dinner. Shovel Charley out of the house. Feed Cassie. Race out the door to choir. Practice till 9:00 p.m. Race home. Finish whatever I was working on in the few minutes of peace between end of choir and start of unconsciousness. Hit the sack about 10 or 11 p.m. Read ARCs until I fall asleep, which is usually pretty quick. Next morning, Thursday, I have to be in Scottsdale by 7:00 a.m.

A workday that runs from 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning to 10:00 or 11:00 at night, all of it filled with one kind of labor or another, is not a day. It’s flickin’ torture.

Today, lhudly sing huzzah, it ends!

A mountain of stoont papers sits on the server, waiting to be read, but we have a week and a half to get through that stuff. Next Wednesday the once-a-week class meets for a Fake Final (extra-credit quiz for those whose grades are on the borderline, by way of getting them to show up for the required finals week meeting, without which I will not get paid). But only the Wednesday afternoon class meets that day; the two earlier classes’ finals happen on Monday. So that exempts next Wednesday from the Hellish category.

Next semester my schedule exceeds ideal. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30–1:45 and 2:00–3:15. Only two days a week. Time enough to get lunch (or at least a snack) before running to campus. Enough class time to get something accomplished. (I just loathe the damnable, useless 50-minute class meetings! Why bother to meet them at all???) Then out of there before the worst of the afternoon rush hour starts to roar. And classes do not fall on a choir day!

And it means I’ll be able to sing at the noon service on Good Friday. Just simply too good to be true.

As soon as the student papers are shoveled off the desk and grades are filed, all I’ll have left is a week of free labor to rewrite next semester’s courses, and then…F.R.E.E.D.O.M!!!

Just two projects are on the table (just two!) for winter break: kick the marketing plan for The Copyeditor’s Desk into gear, and create a test e-book by way of learning how to make and market e-books.

Funny about Money has almost 1700 posts. From what I can see, there’s enough material there for at least three short books of the size that lends itself to the e-book genre. One of them, actually, will be long enough and substantial enough to qualify as a real book—I may offer that to one of my erstwhile publishers. But at least two of them are going online to be marketed through FaM and Amazon.

The first, which I hope to have ready before Christmas, will be a collection of FaM recipes, supplemented by some of the best from lifetime favorite recipes. That is, the FaM recipe book will contain more cookery than appears on the website.

Quite a few of its recipes will lend themselves to holiday meals. That’s why I’d like to get it together in time for Christmas. That may be asking too much, though.

At any rate, it’s an hour and a half until choir. Charley is quiet. Cassie is lobbying to get out of the back bedroom. Maybe I can sneak a bite to eat and a glass of wine before it’s time to get going again.

🙂