Coffee heat rising

Month: January 2009

Moments of Fame

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The 162nd Festival of Frugality is online at Gather Little by Little. Funny’s post on the perqs of pinching penniesmade editor’s pick! ?Let’s hope I don’t have to use those pennies anytime soon in a forced early retirement. Money Theory has one of the nicest essays I’ve seen on how frugality can lead to contentment and even fun. Military Finance Network revisits the issue of whether one should invest savings or use them to pay off loans. And Wenchy Poo has some creative money-saving ideas.

The Make It from Scratch Carnival celebrates its 100th edition at Stephanie’s Make It from Scratch site. Funny’s post on the low-budget landscaping project appears here.Jason explains why it’s better to buy a whole chicken and butcher it yourself than to buy precut chicken parts. Check out Grandmother Wren’s clever and easy idea for making an easel and paint box for the little one’s artwork! And I was highly entertained by Timbuk2 Mom’s tale of her experiments with DIY dishwasher detergent. She’s braver than I am!

The Carnival of Money Stories is up at The Sun’s Financial Diary, where Funny’s rant about our legislators’ attack on the state’s educational system appears. Darwin’s Finance reports on 3.99% mortgage rates being offered by Toll Brothers. At Living Almost Large, you can join the conversation about why you’re saving for retirement. Harvesting Dollars contemplates (with horror!) the cost of independent health insurance.

Great carnivals, all. Be sure to visit each and check out the other excellent posts!

Ten stress reducers

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Elevated blood pressure can be a sign of stress, among other things. When I had my little stress attack a while back, my blood pressure was so alarmingly high that the doctors suspected a heart condition; if I so much as lifted my head off the pillow, it went even higher. After the episode passed, the blood pressure numbers went back to normal. But it was scary there, for a few hours. Whenever I go into a doctor’s office, it’s often a little high, especially if I’m not sitting in a chair with my legs uncrossed and my feet flat on the floor. This phenomenon—blood pressure that rises when you go into a doctor’s office—is called “white coat syndrome.”

A week or so ago, GLBL reported at Gather Little by Little that an incident of white coat syndrome led him to buy a blood pressure monitor and keep tabs on himself for a while. This revealed that his blood pressure was higher while he was at work than over the weekend, at home. He put it down to stress.

The work environment can be very stressful, even if you’re not in a high-tension job such as police work, emergency medical or fire services,journalism,or teaching. Certainly one of the elements that led up to my episode—one of the petals of the Poison Poppy, as I call them—was workplace stress, largely resulting from friction with a subordinate. After great effort, I discovered a number of fairly easy strategies to reduce stress, which really comes at you from all directions, not just from the workplace. Here are ten of the best:

1. Reduce caffeine intake

Substitute other satisfying drinks. Some varieties of soda pop are caffeine-free: Sprite, 7-Up, ginger ale, and many brands of root beer. Read the label to be sure. Fruit juices can be combined with soda water or tonic water to make DIY pop, which IMHO tastes better than the canned stuff. Green tea is said to contain less caffeine than black. Sometimes just cutting back the amount of caffeine you take in helps: decaf coffee and tea are not caffeine-free, but substituting them for high-test may help bring down your blood pressure and lower your stress level.

If you go off caffeine cold turkey, you’ll get a headache that may be fairly bracing, but it will pass in a day or two. You can avoid or minimize this by tapering off instead of quitting abruptly. The fact that eliminating caffeine can make you sick should tell you something.

2. Try to de-stress your commute.

Leave earlier so you have plenty of time to get to your destination. Driving in the slow lane reduces the number of people tailgating and jerking around you—you tend to see more of that obnoxious behavior when you’re driving faster in the middle and outside lanes.

Do not listen to the stürm und drang on the news and yak shows. Avoid stations that carry advertising, which also can be stress-inducing and annoying. If your local airwaves don’t carry stations that broadcast the kind of music you enjoy, free of advertising, then get yourself an iPod or MP3 player and bring your own entertainment. Make it something soothing.

Learn some alternate routes to and from the workplace. If you see the freeway backing up, get off and proceed on the surface streets for a while.

3. Keep a low profile at work, and leave work at the office

Refrain from arguing with coworkers or bosses. Let the BS slide off your back like water off a duck’s feathers.

Do your job well and quietly.

Keep coworkers’ and customers’ oddities in the perspective of the large picture. How exactly will their ridiculous behavior change the course of world history?

Don’t bring work home. Make your private time exactly that: your time. And do not work more hours than you are paid to work. If you’re expected to do so, maybe it’s time to find a new employer or a new line of work.

4. Leave the office during lunch hour

Never work through lunch. If you are brownbagging, go outside or to a coffeehouse where you are allowed to eat your own food if you buy a beverage. If you must stay on the premises to eat, take some time to go for a walk. If your company offers a workout room, use it over the lunch hour. Or, if you hate gyms as much as I do and you have an office, close the door and do some yoga during breaks or lunchtime.

5. Learn to meditate.

Use break time or lunch-hour time for brief periods of meditation. Prayer is a form of meditation. If you are religious, spend a few moments at your desk in quiet prayer.

6. Reduce alcohol intake.

Restrict wine, beer, and other potables to one drink a day, max. Alcohol pushes up your blood pressure and interferes with your sleep. If you’ve been in the habit of having a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, you may find you sleep better if you have water instead. Treat yourself to wine on the weekends and on special days only. Nope…for this purpose, every day is not a special day!

7. Find a form of exercise that you enjoy and do it every day.

Walking the dog is exercise. Climbing three flights of stairs instead of taking the elevator is exercise. Bicycling is exercise. Roller-skating is exercise. Gardening is exercise. You don’t have to spend half the day at these activities or exert yourself to the point of exhaustion. A half-hour of walking goes a long way toward lowering your blood pressure and brightening your outlook.

8. Turn off the television.

The constant flow of violence and disturbing imagery flowing out of our TV sets inundates us with stress, if only on a subliminal level. I find I sleep much better if I don’t watch the idiot box at night.

9. Develop a strategy to pay off debt, create a budget, and keep your financial books up to date.

Money worries form a huge part of the stress we all suffer. Getting a grip on these issues, although it won’t instantly solve your financial problems, will at least help you to feel more control of things. And this will ease your stress.

10. Join a group, totally unrelated to your job, that will get you out of the house and into the company of other people. Examples: church, hiking or bicycling group, pet fanciers’ club, hobbyists’ club, Habitat for Humanity, or some other service group.
Try it! You’ll like it!

Monkeywrench lands in layoff plan

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OMG. If the possible-probable-maybe-definitely layoffs weren’t bad enough, here comes a new curve. La Maya discovered that the famous sick leave payoff we’re supposed to get disappears if you’re laid off. You get it only if you retire.

Yes. If they decide to can you, they give you an extra kick in the shins by taking away the benefit tied to the hundreds of hours of sick leave most of us have accrued—in my case, it’s over 1,100 hours, worth more than $17,500. That is tens of thousands of dollars more than the piddling unemployment insurance Arizona pays its workers. And it’s money I planned into my financial strategy for layoff. For that matter, even if I weren’t laid off, it’s money planned into my retirement finances.

There are only two ways to hang on to this fund in the face of a likely layoff:
1. Retire right now.
2. Declare that I will retire in the near future and then hope, if I don’t get laid off, that the dean will allow me to push the retirement date back a few months.

If you state that you are going to retire (says HR—who knows how accurate this is!) and the university then lays you off or otherwise cans you, the state still has to pay the benefit.

So, if I formally announced that I intend to retire just before my contract runs out, I could lay claim to something in excess of $17,600. And if I can engineer it with the dean’s office, when “retirement” time draws nigh, I “decide” that I’ve changed my mind and push it back another three months. This could, in theory, get me through the crisis: if I’m laid off, I walk with all my benefits; if I’m not, I still have the job that I need to hang onto until I reach age 70.

The risks, of course, are painfully obvious.

Humane, inexpensive dog collar

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leaderharne1
Annoying harness

Yesterday M’hijito and I went in search of a small but reasonably easy-to-use harness for Cassie the Corgi. Her collar is loose enough that she can easily slip it, and I realized that if our coyote friend had noticed her instead of being intent on some other prey, she might have wriggled loose during a confrontation and tried to run off. That would have been the end of her.

Well, we went into PetSmart, not one of my favorite emporiums, and there we tried on a nylon harness. The part that slips over the dog’s head and is supposed to encircle the chest and shoulders needed to be adjusted. In our efforts to do that, we ended up making it tighter around her neck. So tight, in fact, that I could barely fit my finger under it. Try as we might, we could not loosen it! I finally had to take my jackknife out of my purse (alarming my son, who thought we’d be arrested) (all right, all right, it does look a little fierce and you could think it’s a Mexican switchblade) (but it’s not!)and cut the dog out of the stupid thing. So that was $9.50 for nothing, and a customer lost permanently to PetSmart.

So, to the Internet. The harnesses that operate simply are training devices. Cassie doesn’t really need a training device. She just needs something that won’t slip off her head.

Greyhounds, I recalled belatedly, have bullet-shaped heads that moot the value of a regular buckle collar. To get around that, you use a martingale: a collar with two loops, one of which slides, so that when the dog exerts pressure on it, the collar tightens. Because the martingale is made of nylon or fabric ribbon, it doesn’t jerk or pinch the dog the way a chain collar does. It does, however, work effectively to keep a sighthound from dragging you down the street in chase of cats, birds, and flying plastic bags. Works on a German shepherd, too… And, BTW, if you have a clue how to train a dog, it’s far more humane than chains and pinch collars.

Duh! Sighthounds come in many sizes. Italian greyhounds are chihuahua-sized, and whippets are the size of Cassie: around 25 pounds. Somebody, somewhere, must be making martingales for smaller dogs.

Yea, verily! Google “martingale collar” and up comes a raft of sites, many of them by people who are hand-crafting the things. You can get them much cheaper at Petco (Petsmart doesn’t seem to carry them), but the ones in the chain brick-and-mortars are just plain, ugly nylon things. Greyhound lovers really get into crafts for their dogs, and some of them make gorgeous collars.This outfit, so far, is my favorite. Problem is, I can’t make up my mind! Check these out, if you will, and tell me which would be your preference.

Here’s the dog, brown and white:

jun14cassie

And here are the coveted collars:

 

Bronze lotus
Bronze lotus
Bronze dragon
Bronze dragon
Blue cherry blossom
Blue cherry blossom
Brown dragon
Brown dragon

Which one would you choose? Click on an image to see it in all its enlarged glory.

Personal finance IS politics

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A few days ago, JD posted posted a request at Get Rich Slowly as he was coping with the unexpected passing of a dear friend:

Finally, please stop sending me anti-Obama links. I’m not going to post them. I don’t post pro-Obama links, either. Nor did I post links in opposition to or in favor of President Bush.  Get Rich Slowly is not a political blog, and it’s not about to become one. The political divisiveness in the U.S. makes me tense, and I refuse to contribute to it.

This elicited some conversation, among which was a comment from Steve of Brip Blap:

I hear what you’re saying, and I wouldn’t want to see you start launching into political polemics on GRS…but unfortunately politics have a huge impact on personal finances (taxes, retirement savings laws, and on and on). The divisiveness is there for a reason – politicians have drastically different ideas about how we should be able to handle our own money.

So I understand completely where you’re coming from in regards to the blog – no sense in going there – but it’s a huge part of what’s going to happen with our money in the future. We will all need to contribute to whichever side we think is right.

800px-united_states_one_dollar_bill_obverseI have to agree with Steve: although I wouldn’t ask JD (or anyone else) to hold forth on topics that make him uncomfortable, the fact is that politics and personal finance are so tightly intertwined, there’s no separating them. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that personal finance and politics are aspects of the same thing.

We are all suffering today because a decade ago (much longer, really, looking back to the Reagan years) we elected a party whose dogma was largely based on some misguided theories. Among these was the idea that the market will keep itself healthy and on track if left to its own accord. This theory has given us unbridled greed and irresponsibility, eleven million people out of work, depressed salaries for those of us who have managed to hold onto our jobs, a plague of foreclosures that is casting millions of Americans out of their homes, astronomical gas price spikes, a failing healthcare system, collapsing banks, and the prospect of another Great Depression. The fix for this mess will saddle our kids and our grandkids with national debt, high taxes, and a lowered standard of living, and you can be sure the politics that will come out of that circumstance will be interesting, indeed.

Bill Clinton’s byword, “It’s the economy, stupid,” put this fact in a nutshell: politics and money are the same thing. Free-market economics is a political theory every bit as much as it is an economic theory, and it was imposed, in an extreme form, on our nation through the workings of politics.

That’s why it’s so urgently important for Americans to be well educated in the history of their country and in the history of the world: votes made in ignorance lead to disaster, such as the one we’re seeing today. It’s why we need a free press, and why the collapse of the Fourth Estate poses an enormous threat to America’s republic. We need to understand the workings of our government’s leadership, and the easiest way to spread that understanding to the largest number of people is through a free press that focuses on something other than celebrity antics.

And it’s why as Americans we need to return to honest, forthright discussion and quit sniping at each other. The bitter conflicts, the nasty behavior, the substitution of crass rudeness for “debate” that have been fomented in certain quarters for the purpose of putting a specific party in the dominant position it has held for the past decade need to come to an end. If we are to escape the quicksand that’s fast sucking us to our economic doom, we must work together in a political and a politick way to make things as right as we can make them.

Funny about Money will continue to refer to political topics, and incivility will not be tolerated here. I make no secret of my opinion of the Bush Administration and its controllers. And I respect the right of others to disagree: politely.

Cheapskate’s landscaping

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Some months ago, a commenter on someone’s blog (don’t recall who on whose: sorry!) remarked that she had filled in the cracks between her patio flagstones with (expensive!) black stones, to good effect. At the time, I thought there’s an interesting idea! Filed the thought away but did nothing about it.

Over the summer I cast wildflower seeds between the flags in the front courtyard. This worked to interesting effect…lots of bright, strange-looking, probably invasive blossoms. All very sweet. But the truth is, one person’s wildflower is the next person’s…well, weed. What I had left after the wildflowers had blown was a rangy tangle of straw with tap roots headed for the center of the earth. This, I realized, was not a practical idea.

When Richard the Landscaper installed the flagstones on dirt, the plan was to cultivate dichondra in the cracks between the pavers. Great plan. Except that in Arizona, two other varieties of groundcover are endemic: burr clover and bermudagrass (known in some parts of the country as “crabgrass” and in others as “devilgrass”). Burr clover has a certain charm: it makes pretty little yellow blossoms, and it doesn’t seem to grow burrs. But bermudagrass is as horrid an invader as you can imagine: steel wire with ugly scrawny leaves attached. Left to its own devices, it will grow as high as your hind end. People cultivate it as lawn grass here, because it’s about the only grass that will survive a 115-degree summer. All you need to make it grow is water. It loves heat and water. The more water you dump on it, the thicker it will grow. It has, however, a somewhat contrary personality: this is a plant that thrives wherever you don’t want it and dies wherever you do want it.

Where I did not want it was between the flagstones. Consequently, that’s where I had a fine stand of the stuff. Between the bermudagrass and the burr clover, the dichondra was snuffed out and the whole place looked pretty grungy.

So, last fall I decided to dig all the tired, wiry, failed ground cover out from between the flagstones and fill the spaces with stones. A few trips to nurseries and warehouse stores confirmed that black rocks were well beyond the price range, and besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted black. It’s plenty hot in that brick oven during the summer without paving the ground in black stone. Another discovery: occasionally, Michael’s sells decorative polished stones at incredible markdowns. But even on sale, these would cost way too much to fill in an entire patio’s worth of flagstones. And contemplating the number of little mesh bags of such stones that would be required boggled the brain.

However, this neighborhood is full of river rocks: polished multicolored stones used as decorative landscaping accents. People buy too many of them or get tired of them and dump them in the alleys behind their houses. When I pulled a bunch out of my old yard, two blocks to the north, that was exactly what I did with them: tossed them on the ground in the alley. Lo! A quick reconnoiter confirmed the things were still there.

And they’re scattered all over the other alleys throughout the neighborhood. Free for the taking!

So: for the past many weeks, I’ve been slowly digging out the weeds and roots from between the flagstones, collecting stones from points far-flung, and redecorating the front courtyard. A week or so ago, I got tired of hauling bagsful of stone around the neighborhood (I’ve burned off eight pounds in this endeavor!) and capitulated: drove up to a quarry not far from my neighborhood and bought two big plastic binsful of stone for all of five bucks.

As of this weekend all but one corner of the patio was done. Today I dug out all the rest of the weeds and sand between the stones, and also dug out the burr clover growing under the olive tree on the patio. Around that tree, I planted about a zillion anemone bulbs. Love anemones. A couple of other unknown bulbs had managed to push their way though the clover, and so I’m hoping that with some cultivation these will join the anemones and fill in the basin under the tree with lots of color.

At this point, it should only take another four or five bags of stones quarried from the alleys to fill between the rest of the flagstones. I should be able to gather those in another week or two.

Meanwhile, I think the overall effect is pretty nice, especially considering what I paid for it. Sprinkling on a few polished stones from the craft store really zings up the river stones, and when they’re wet after a rainfall, they all look like they’ve been through a polisher. It will take some doing to beat back the bermudagrass and burr clover until they give up, but a weekly application of Roundup to each new sprig should do the trick, after a summer or so. And no, I don’t like Roundup…but it is biodegradable, it can be applied with a dropper (I use an old Spray & Wash bottle with one of those squirter nipples) to the target’s leaves only, and it’s better than any of the alternatives. Including a yardful of weeds.

So far this project cost me about $15 or $20 plus four months of sporadic work, not a bad price! And it should save on water, because I won’t be trying to cultivate dichondra, wildflowers, or clover.