6 Results: Baby steps on the road to peace of mind
The Vandalism Issue
If meeting my honored neighbor in court (four times) wasn’t nightmarish enough, my lawyers’ predictions about what they thought he would do next came straight from Elm Street. The fact was, though, I simply did not have the financial resources to sell my house and move. What I did have was a German shepherd still healthy enough to make some real trouble for an intruder, a shotgun, and no compunction whatsoever about using it on anyone rabid enough to keep coming past the dog.
One of my former husband’s legal clients owned a security alarm business. He wired all the doors and windows in the house so that any surprise visitors would alert the police and the security company, as well as setting off an ear-piercing racket. This had one great outcome: in spite of the large claim against my homeowner’s insurance, the Hartford actually LOWERED my premium! However, it did nothing to secure the yard’s gates or the block wall that was, at its highest point, only six feet high and easily scalable by a healthy man. Therein lay the problem.
It appeared the B*** clan had determined to harass me with a campaign of minor vandalism until I gave up and moved away. A few weeks after the initial dust settled, the mentally ill B*** son-in-law came face-to-fang with Anna the Ger-shep when he tried to come in the side gate; hilariously, he jumped in his car (which he’d left running at the curb), floored the gas pedal, zoomed into his driveway one house down the street, and sat there as though he thought I couldn’t see him. Following that laughable episode, a nonstop series of minor incidents occurred, most of them at night during the full moon, none of them very serious but all of them designed to let me know someone was entering my yard at will.
After eighteen months or so of this routine, much of it died down. The most bothersome matter still happening was that about once a month I would find the swimming pool’s pump pot lid unfastened and laying loose on the pot. This was big: if I didn’t discover it before the timer kicked on, the pump would run dry and burn itself up—an expensive fix, indeed. Four different pool technicians at two pool companies insisted that the lid could not come off by itself.
I bought four motion sensors and set them around the backyard at positions high enough not to be triggered by the dogs. These would set off an alarm next to my bed if anyone came into the yard. Worked really well when the wind blew leaves around and moths flew past, too. This unnerving arrangement less than ideal, I had a fence guy take the remnant of the old pool fence that, after the main part of the fence was removed, had been left in place to serve as a trellis for vines to hide the pool equipment, and connect with it to construct a covered, gated enclosure around the pump & filter. When the lid still kept coming up unfastened, I realized it was easy to take a stick, poke it through the bars, give the handle a little tap, and knock the lid loose. I wired plastic panels to the wrought iron gate sections, but it still happened. The pool repairman was certain the lid could not come loose on its own, and he was certain I was putting it on correctly. He thought the perp was reaching the lid through a gap in the top of our jury-rigged structure.
A day after he had secured the pump pot himself and padlocked the gate, I found the lid undone again.
My son, now beginning to believe his mother might not be a candidate for the funny farm after all, came over to the house and installed three infrared security cameras, which he wired into a hard drive and connected to the television. We could now digitally record every moth, flying leaf, and doggy toilet trip that took place 24/7. Before long, yup! I found the lid popped off again.
With great excitement (and dreams of retiring on the proceeds of the lawsuit), we studied the images on the TV screen. The pump was good at 4:30 p.m. when the equipment shut off; at 9:00 the next morning, it was sucking air. In between times, moths and bats turned on the motion-sensitive lights a few times; the greyhound went out to pee; the German shepherd went out to pee; a cat walked across the yard; and not one bogeyman materialized out of the night.
The pump pot lid had worked itself loose. All by its little self, unaided by any demented neighbors.
The camera system cost almost $1,500, but it was the best $1,500 I’ve ever spent. All the months of angst and fear evaporated! I bought a rubber mallet to tap the pump pot lid in place, bringing an end to that problem. Suddenly I no longer dreaded driving into the garage, wondering what damnfool thing I would find when I got out of the car. Before long, I actually liked coming home. The place, which I had taken to calling The House from Hell, has come to feel comfortable and lovely. I no longer keep an eye on Son-in-Law’s comings and goings. He seems to have forgotten about me, too.
An entire toxic petal from the Poison Poppy fell away.
Money: The Payroll Migraine
To add insult to the considerable injury the switch to biweekly pay would cause, the Great Desert University’s wise leaders decided to jump, at the same pay period, from the old payroll system to a PeopleSoft system. They elected to do so in the stupidest way possible, resulting in catastrophic payroll errors that continued for months. Many people were not paid at all; others were double-paid and then had future paychecks docked at unpredictable intervals. Some pay errors were never corrected—if you were overpaid and kept quiet, you had a good chance no one would notice. My accrued vacation time disappeared and then I was told I was ineligible for vacation. Contributions to my retirement plan were not posted. Over five months, not ONE of my paychecks was 100% correct. Many errors were costly to me and made it difficult for me to pay my bills or caused me to lose retirement savings. Not until twenty weeks had passed did I learn what my net pay actually was supposed to be.
To this day, I have to enter every figure on my pay statement into an Excel spreadsheet and compare each set of figures against the others to check for any further mistakes. I am quite sure my W-4 will contain errors, but since I am not a payroll accountant, I have no way of knowing how to identify them. My lawyer says this will be GDU’s problem, not mine.
The whole fiasco added an enormous dose of stress to the already frightening prospect of a de facto $220 cut in monthly pay. I had no idea how I was going to cover monthly bills on biweekly pay, given that I was just making ends meet on bimonthly pay. I don’t live quite like the Queen of Sheba, and other than getting rid of the dogs I could not imagine how to cut any more costs. Again it appeared that I would have to sell my home and move someplace cheaper, a strategy that would require me to find new homes for two twelve-year-old dogs, one of them expensively ailing, or put them to sleep.
I did not get permission from my boss to take on two courses on a contract basis until it was too late to do so in the fall semester. I looked in to taking on a minimum wage job as a museum guard, but Creative Malingering is a catch-as-catch-can affair that doesn’t allow one to commit to twenty specific daytime hours every week.
Meanwhile, GDU raised the cost of disabled parking to $770, almost doubling it and putting on-campus parking way beyond my reach. Coincidentally, however, I learned from a police officer that the City of Tempe allows people with handicapped stickers to park, free of charge for unlimited periods, in any metered space! Instantly, I canceled my GDU parking sticker, saving almost $40 a month in the old regime and $60 a month in the new one. I bought a scooter designed for adults and took to riding in from the metered parking north of campus. Not only did I save 27% of the amount slated to be gouged out of my monthly cash flow, now I was having a few moments of fun getting to work!
I added exemptions to my income tax withholding. Because of the endless paycheck screw-ups, it was weeks before I could tell whether enough was being withheld to cover my taxes, and to this day I am not certain about that. All I can do is hope and pray I don’t have to come up with more than a couple hundred extra bucks come April—otherwise I’ll have to draw down retirement savings to pay 2007 taxes.
I’d already dumped my health insurance and replaced it with a cheaper plan, thanks to a surprise mini-open enrollment a couple months before the payroll disaster came down. The new plan covers all my doctors, so far without a squawk of complaint, and it costs $22 a month, not the $140 the old plan nicked out of my pay. So now I had a $118 savings on healthcare plus $60 on the parking, for a total of $236 a month. Translated from bimonthly to biweekly figures, this retrieved about $217 from gross pay, leaving me with a net close to what it had been. Because of the changes in withholding, my net is actually about $100 a month more than I took home before the change to biweekly and the PeopleSoft fiasco. Of course, there’s still no way of knowing whether the net PeopleSoft shows really is correct, or whether the correct amount of taxes is being withheld from my check. But at least I have enough to live on; the overage and then some is being used to pay off a small loan I took out for renovations on the investment house.
The income tax questions will just have to be dealt with later.
Dogs
The two aged dogs dined on premium dog kibble. Greyhounds have delicate guts and lots of allergies; in specific, Walt was allergic to corn, the main ingredient in most commercial dog food. To persuade them to eat the pricey stuff I was putting in front of them, I had to dose it with boiled chicken and broth. Most canned meats for humans contain a variety of adulterants, to which the greyhound was inclined to have untoward reactions. They were going through two forty-pound bags of $30 kibble a month, and once or twice a week I had to hassle with cooking, deboning, and storing the cheapest chicken I could scrounge from the local ethnic market.
This was expensive and annoying. Sometimes I felt as though I were stuffing money into their mouths and then picking it up off the ground and throwing it in the garbage.
In addition, Anna suffers from every chronic ailment known to German shepherdom, two of which allow the vets to demand that I schlep her in every six months for a $200 test to get permission to spend another $80 on another bottle of pills or vial of eye drops. You understand: that’s EIGHT HUNDRED BUCKS A YEAR for the privilege of buying about $300 or $400 worth of medicaments. While I was looking at a $220 a month pay cut, I did not think I could continue to cover these expenses.
About this time, I discovered that Trader Joe’s premium dog food a) contains no corn; b) contains approximately the same ingredients as ultra-premium kibble; and c) costs a fraction of what I was forking over to PetSmart. The dogs minded it no more than they minded any kibble, so I made that switch.
Didn’t seem to be much else I could do about the cost of feed and medicating. But I did decide to start doping their kibble with canned dog food instead of home-made Dog Soup. They didn’t like it much, but they would eat it. More or less.
About a week later, the Great Dog Food Scare struck. Trader Joe’s pulled its canned foods off the shelves, claiming it was a precautionary move and the stuff was clean. In the brou-ha-ha that followed, it was impossible to tell what if any commercial feed was safe, as one brand after another turned up contaminated with toxic chemicals.
After a few days of study about what canids eat in the wild, I decided to start feeding Anna and Walter exactly what they would have had if they were born more than about 50 years ago: people food. A dog is not an obligatory carnivore; it is adapted to an omnivorous diet, and preparing healthy, balanced dog meals right in your kitchen is simple. Given the widespread bacterial contamination we were seeing in food marketed for human consumption, I decided against the popular raw food diet. Instead, I decided to feed the dogs two pounds each of cooked food—including meat, vegetables, and reasonably digestible starches—every day.
This of course increased the hassle factor by a magnitude of…a lot!
However, after a couple of weeks on this chow, the German shepherd stopped limping. Her hair took on a shine, and she looked like she’d dropped about four years off her advanced age. Both dogs’ mounds became more compact and easier to clean up, and there were lots fewer of them. Why? Because the dogs were digesting all their food, not just the small amount in kibble that actually is digestible.
Wow.
I began to wonder how much of Anna’s decrepitude had to do with what she had been eating. As she gained strength, I decided to cut back on her thyroid meds, since hypothyroidism is one of the most overdiagnosed ailments in veterinary practice. She stopped the constant heavy panting and gasping for breath. When I cut out the thyroid pills altogether, she went into a torpor, so pretty clearly she needed at least some of the stuff. With a little experimentation, though, I found that instead of three pills a day, she did just fine on one and a half. These moves represented a significant savings, and it rewarded the extra kitchen work with lots less worrying about the dog’s health and lots less yard clean-up.
After several months on real food, Walt the Greyhound began to lose weight, and he developed an unexplained cough. Thinking he must not be getting enough nutrition, I switched both dogs back to kibble. As it developed, though, he was wasting away because he had an aggressive cancer.
Anna seemed OK on the kibble, and by then I was mightily tired of cooking 28 pounds of dog food a week. Even though the job is not intrinsically difficult, it’s time-consuming and, if you don’t plan carefully, messy. So I decided to leave her on the commercial junk.
Losing Walt was a shock: because I’d thought he had valley fever, I was blindsided by the diagnosis of terminal cancer. Anna refused to eat for three days, and I went into a two-week blue funk.
However… One fewer dog is an awful lot less dog. Half as many dogs means half as many annual shots and licensing bills. Half as much food means half as much basic cash outlay. Half as many dog mounds means half as much yard policing and sewage hauling. I love my dogs, but after this, the next pet will be one that eats less than I do.
Office Headaches and the Hated Commute
Within a week after the stress attack, I decided to cease keeping a regular log of every wacky thing that went on in the office. This helped a little but presented the problem that it directly bucked HR. With my supervisor’s knowledge, I soon devised some new management strategies, which for obvious reasons can’t be discussed here but which had the effect of quieting things down for a while.
Shutting off the car radio during the dreary commute to and from work was a stroke of genius. Radio is as permeated with violence, fear, and general angst as is the rest of our culture, and NPR is no exception. I already know we’re going to Hell on a skateboard, and I don’t need Diane Rehm to tell me that for an hour as I maneuver through cutthroat traffic in the morning, nor do I need to hear it again from NPR News, BBC News, and All Things Considered during the endless return trip. A few CDs of Mozart and Bach go a long way toward making those stressful, depressing drives tolerable.
Overall Angst
Daily exercise makes an enormous difference. A neighbor (from another street!) and I walk through the tony section of our district 30 to 40 minutes a day, and I try to add a couple miles of bicycling to that. I never did get into the mountain parks, where I used to hike several times a week—just can’t break loose enough time for that. But I do occasionally add a half-hour of yoga, and when the weather is warm I swim every day.
I’ve also found that leaving the television off has a calming effect. Television “entertainment” vomits out a constant stream of disturbing, creepy violence interspersed with “be scared, be very scared” news. Quaintly enough, I’ve taken to reading, and I get lots more news off the Internet—REAL news about issues and important events, not “if it bleeds it leads” stuff—than I ever did from local and national television news.
The blood sugar, high levels of which have been associated with stress, has dropped from prediabetic into the normal range, even though I haven’t lost weight. So I guess something must be working.
Self-Medicating
After a week-long headache,I was free of my favorite addictive potable: espresso-roast high-test prepared in a French press. I had been drinking six to ten cups of the stuff a day. I substituted two cups of hot green or fancy white tea, for a pleasant start to the morning.
Getting off the sauce looked like a bigger challenge. For thirty-five years, I had been in the habit of drinking one to three glasses of wine, beer, or hard liquor every day. However, I managed to kick the habit by assuming a new attitude:
Stone cold sobriety is normal. Feeling mellow, slightly tipsy, or woozy is NOT normal. I do not want to be chemically enhanced. I want to be normal.
To my astonishment, conceiving a desire to be “normal” by this definition worked. At first I thought I would just cut back to one or one and a half glasses of wine a day. Then I decided that even a slight “glow” is NOT NORMAL.
Not that I’m unwilling to be NOT NORMAL now and again: just that I’d rather be normal most days.
After about three alcohol-free, caffeine-free weeks, the insomnia went away. So did the constant, vague feeling of being slightly wired. I now sleep seven or eight hours a night, with no long wee-hours interruptions and no help from Benadryl or Chlor-Trimeton.
It’s a miracle.
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