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Livelying Up Again

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Last couple of days I’ve felt more lively than I have all summer. Probably it has to do with the slight drop in outside temperatures — still in the low 100s, but 105 is a far cry from 115. And the mornings and evenings now are really lovely.

So I’ve contrived to get off my duff long enough to do a few small jobs that have lain fallow for month after unjustifiable month. The bermudagrass that I cleared out of the flowerbed last November sprang back in all its glory over the summer. I’ve just been too, too lazy to get out the chemicals, mix them up, get them all over myself, barricade the dogs away from the chemical dump, clean up the mess, and scour myself down with dawn and a scrub brush. What ought to be a fairly easy task is made difficult by the presence of presumably toxic, very stinky chemicals.

Anyway, the smell is dissipating this morning, even though I poured a-plenty of it on the damn devilgrass. Yesterday I finally got around to that job, along with figuring out what to do about the trash situation and cleaning the pool and picking up after the dogs and cleaning up after the yard guys and running the laundry and swiffering up the dog hair.

Gerardo’s guys pulled the translucent plastic paneling off the cedar beam & lathwork that covers the back patio, so that the painter can clean up the mess where the stuff leaked and apply new sealer. However, they left the strips that hold the things on…some of them. I think they did that pursuant to putting new stuff on, but…they busted up a lot of the strips. And how exactly the painter is supposed to get around that junk escapes me. Nor am I convinced Gerardo and his underlings have got what it takes to replace that stuff without having it leak from the git-go.

After Richard’s crew applied it, the thing lasted 10 years before it started to leak. Really, only one area leaked, which leads me to think the hail and probably a damned cat jumping on it caused the damage.

Some time during the day, I’ll go up to Home Depot and see if they can refer me to a contractor who knows how to install that stuff. Richard, I think, is no longer in business — he never answered my call. He fell off a roof a couple years ago and broke his back in a dozen places, so he’s presumably not in any shape to wrangle a work gang.

Meanwhile, naturally, I’ve got to drive way to hell in the opposite direction from the damn HD to get gasoline at Costco, hoping to reach the pumps before prices go through the proverbial roof. I’m afraid it’s probably too late, though.

So that mean’s I’ll be on the road for about an hour, dodging my fellow homicidal drivers. Ugh! I do hate driving in this city!

But meanwhile, finally some work came in from China — thank God! After that deluge in the first-quarter, it has been a long, dry summer.

Couple days ago my friends VickyC and KJG had a shopping get-together: drove out to the East Valley to visit Ikea, where VickyC needed to buy a small occasional table. And of course, we couldn’t miss wandering through the entire place ogling the loot. I picked up a box of candles (Ikea has THE best no-stinkum candles!) and impulse-bought an inexpensive pair of glass candle-holders.

We also went to REI, just down the road, where the camp stove offerings are far superior to the ones I’ve seen elsewhere. I may go over to the REI here in town to get one of those. It looks like they require a special propane canister, which will mean having to keep several of those on hand for emergencies. But…time to be prepared, IMHO.

It keeps getting better…

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In the moron department, where we visited the day before yesterday… I’m sitting here trying to figure out what to do next when my son e-mails and says $9,000 suddenly showed up in his savings account.

The beleaguered teller, one of the stars of our late, great blog post, had deposited the money needed to pay off the car loan into my son’s savings account.

Holy sh!t.

So I say, can you just transfer it over to my checking, since if I can see yours you must be able to see mine.

He now freaks out and says I should not be able to see his checking account, and he cannot see mine, either. Well…of course not: those two shared accounts (savings/checking) were set up so I could transfer money for my share of the mortgage payments on the house we copurchased lo! these many years ago.

Ducky.

However, when I get online I realize I can see my checking account while also seeing the two shared accounts. So, holding my breath, I press the endless buttons needed to move the money out of shared savings and into MY savings account.

Miraculously, it worked.

Also in the moron department, that orange-haired buffoon in the White House played to the mob some more by pardoning the sleazy former Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Big Orange must regard Joe as a kind of mentor: no one can play to the mob better than Arpaio.

LOL! It’s like taking lessons from Darth Vader.

{sigh}

Gerardo and his two underlings came over to remove the corrugated plastic covering over the latticework patio roof, so the painter can deal with the wood up there. The plastic has leaked for the past couple of years, and the cedar beams and lattice are stained.

They did get the corrugated sheets off. But they did not take off the plastic guides that help secure the things in place. Well…they did and they didn’t. They broke a bunch of them and left pieces hanging, leaving it to me to climb up and yank or cut the stuff off. But most of it they left attached.

I was able to get the busted-up pieces down, but exactly how we’re going to get rid of the strips that remain in place…escapes me.

My original idea was to go buy more pieces of plastic and have the guys bolt them back down. But now that I look at it, I think it may be better — certainly cheaper and easier — just to leave the thing uncovered. It’ll mean I’ll have to get the painter to come back every couple years and reseal the wood…but when seen from the street, that plastic stuff looks mighty white-trash.

I put it in there when I moved here because the rising sun would blast the inside of the house through the east-facing slider in the family room. If I hadn’t come up with something fast, it was going to ruin the furniture and books. And of course, having a semi-solid roof there allowed a little light in did keep the patio furniture dry.

But…the potted ficus that came over here with me from the other house has, after 13 years under that softened sunlight, grown. A lot. If I were to move that plant over to the other side of the patio, so it stands right outside the window, it would block the early morning light. It would be happier there, too: better protected from frost and the searing summer sun. Plus there’s a dripper hose in that corner that could be modified to get water on that pot: one fewer plant to have to water every day in the summertime.

Anyway, so those plastic strips are still up there. When I called Gerardo last night, he said he’d come over around 7 this morning to take them off. But he hasn’t shown up.

The painter will not be pleased.

However, unlike the plastic sheets, those things apparently are not bolted on. I think they’re just tacked on there, and so it ought to be possible to remove them by tapping them from below with a hammer and a crowbar or dowel. Tried that this a.m., but it will take more physical strength than I have — and besides, by the time I got to that point, it was too bloody hot out there to fool with any such project.

I hate to get rid of the covering, because it does keep the furniture dry. On the other hand, the only things that really needs to be kept dry are the seat cushions, which could easily be stashed in the garage whenever rain threatens. Everything else out there can stand to get wet.

On the other other hand, that will mean a heavy rain will pour directly off the roof onto the patio, which already floods in a good monsoon. Despite a French well on the far side of the patio…a lot of water could back up on that slab. Hm. Removing that plastic is going to change the drainage pattern…maybe not for the better.

Well. There’s no hurry: I suppose we can just wait and see what happens come the next rainstorm. If it makes a mess, then we can rebuild the plastic covering. If not: money saved, hassle saved.

I guess.

…they ALWAYS get in front of me…

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{chortle!} Here’s my favorite conspiracy theory:

All of the morons of the world have a radar chip implanted in their brains. This chip is tuned into my car. Every time I get in the car and turn on the engine, a signal goes out to all the morons at once. It impels every one of them to drop what they’re doing, leap into their cars, and hurry out to get in front of me.

You think I jest?

No. It is objective truth: if there is a moron, it gets in front of me. Every moron in the world gets in front of me the minute my car rolls onto the road.

So. Late in the morning, I get around to transferring nine grand from the S-corp’s checking account to my personal checking account, pursuant to the scheme to pay off the onerous car loan.

Having driven over there just yesterday, I happen to know that Thunderbird Road, the main route to the credit union on the GDU West campus, is a frenetic, gawdawful mess, all dug up with road construction.

So I decide to range westerly on a main drag that runs several miles south of there. This is good. I’m driving along smoothly, nothing too wacky happens, and in fact it occurs to me to wonder…where on earth are all the morons?

Welp. I’ll tellya where the morons were: inside the credit union. That’s where.

When I prance in, there’s one (count her: 1) woman at the teller’s counter in front of me. There are only two people staffing the teller’s counter, but one of ’em isn’t doing anything that resembles customer service. Another teller is exiting through the employee door but, seeing me come in and recognizing me (we all know each other by now), she chirps, “We’ll be right with you.”

Oh, forlorn hope!

The woman in front of me, it develops, is trying to withdraw a large amount of money — let us say, many of thousands of dollars — in cash.

This transaction is so irregular that it gives our sweet young teller kittens. She’s moving forward with it, but it is clearly very hard to accomplish. She wrestles and she fences and she doughtily does battle. But it takes a long time. Finally she’s ready to fork over the stacks of cash.

The woman says, “I want to count it.”

At this point I and the three men who have stacked up behind me stifle our moans, but alas, we are audible. One of the guys — you have to hand this to him — is an artist at the Dramatic Sigh. One of his DS’s elicits another promise that “we’ll be right with you!”

By now, this is beginning to strike me as freaking hilarious: I should’ve known! 😀

The hapless teller gives the woman the “you-are-gonna-make-me-faint-dead-away” look. The manager, who by now has come in, seen what was up, and started to lurk, says “we’ll have to machine-count it.”

“OK,” says the moron. “Let me see.”

So they demonstrate the machine to her but inform her that nooo, she is not coming behind the counter.

As this part of the transaction proceeds, the manager says to the moron, agreeably enough, “You’ll be using this to buy a car?”

The moron gives her a blank look.

The manager explains that when someone withdraws such a large amount of cash from a credit-union account, they need to know what it will be used for.

The moron replies with something unintelligible, but clearly it’s a lot more polite than the response this would have elicited from moi, the Wicked Bitch of the West. I think she says something like “why do you ask?,” not “it’s none of your effing business.” Apparently she refrains from saying, “I’m investing in $70,000 worth of meth.”

Now the manager, put on the defensive, tries to explain that the nosy question is posed only out of concern for the customers’ well-being, given the plurality of scams out there. Note how neatly she refrains from saying “we may have to report this batsh!t transaction to the IRS”…

In fact, there’s a limit to how much you’re allowed to pay in cash for a single transaction. I forget what it is, but I learned this from ex-DH, who had a client who was trying to sell a large and fancy boat. Some guy came into the client’s store (he owned a small retail business) and offered to buy said schooner for ten grand, cash dollah.

No. Bad sheeple!

They beat around the bush a little, the woman offers a weak excuse, and the transaction continues.

Finally the young teller and her boss shovel the moron out the door.

A Dramatic Sigh of relief is heard from the line of customers.

I’m next, and I do nothing to make our excellent young woman’s life any better. I fork over the $9,000 check I’ve written on the corporate checking account and explain that the effing system will not let me deposit it to my personal account. What I expect is she will simply deposit it to checking.

She, however, being a creature with common sense but still being too young to understand that common sense no longer applies in our world, says sensibly, “I can just make this transfer.”

“That would be perfect,” I say, succumbing to the same illusion.

So now the poor kid tries to accomplish this. She struggles and she wrestles and she keyboards and she taps. Eventually the manager AND the non-customer-servicing teller emerge to try to help her. They all struggle.

More Dramatic Sighs waft heavenward from the customer line.

After some determined persistence, they succeed. God bless ’em! I am thrilled and very, very glad I did not persist in trying to make the transfer electronically, $4,000 on one day and then $5,000 on the next. (Just imagine the potential for fuck-up!) I fly out of the office, not waiting to eavesdrop on the next transaction but hoping that all Mr. Dramatic Sigh wanted was to extract enough cash to buy a Big Mac for lunch.

And thinking… “Thank you, God, for not making me work in customer service!”

Image: DepositPhotos

Back to Personal Finance: The 2018 Budget

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So it’s time for the annual Required Minimum Withdrawal (RMD) from the big IRA, which resides with Fidelity. Actually, I had to accelerate the drawdown by a few weeks, because I’m running out of money…waiting for the scheduled drawdown date in mid-September risked bouncing utility and car loan payments.

The car loan is the problem. Last fall when I bought the car, I put $4,000 down on it, which I could afford. What I couldn’t afford is the $400-a-month payments over the next five years.

Net 2018 annual income, based on the RMD and Social Security, will be $35,657. Net 2018 expenses, if they remain the same as they have been over the past 12 months, will be $36,899: a fine shortfall.

Payments are $194 twice a month: almost $400 a month, except…they’re set up to go out biweekly, meaning there are two extra payments a year, for a total of almost $5,044 a year.

I could probably cut the amount I spend by a couple hundred bucks a month: lay off Gerardo; buy cheaper dog food (or adopt out one of the dogs); eat more beans, rice, and pasta; grow some vegetables; stay out of Costco and cancel the Costco membership; cancel the Amazon Prime membership. That still wouldn’t make up the shortfall.

And…y’know…for reasons unknown, no substantial extraordinary costs have happened this year.

So even if I could cut $400 a month from the budget, it still wouldn’t cover surprise medical bills, dental bills, house repairs, car repairs, clothing, vet bills, and God only knows what else.

Somehow, then, I’ve got to get rid of that shortfall…and that somehow would be by getting rid of the auto loan.

One is not limited to the legally mandated RMD…one could (after all) draw down more than that.

Wonder-Accountant, however, pointed out that The Copyeditor’s Desk, an S-corporation, owes me money from a series of loans to it. If I drew a fair amount of it, I’d have to draw down that much left from investments. And the boss man at Stellar Financial pointed out that I could take the remaining cash out of an old Roth IRA. It would mean that much less would be earning tax-free…but the two strategies taken together would raise enough to get rid of the burdensome loan without incurring much tax liability.

Several expensive upkeep items are simmering on the burner…

• The house needs to be painted: got an estimate of $3,000, which is probably about right.
• A tooth hurts mysteriously. Whenever we figure out what’s causing the pain, that’s likely to rack up a stiff bill: $1,000+++
• The pool still needs to be replastered and the pump replaced: $4,000 to $6,000

Holy mackerel. Maybe I should draw down an extra three grand for the painter now, while shares are still worth something; then pay off the car, thereby leaving enough to pay for one other major expense this year.

If you have to sell stocks to unload a damn debt, this is the time to do it. The stock market isn’t going to stay up forever. Even under the best of circumstances, what goes up must come down. And we are decidedly not in the best of circumstances. Sooner or later, having elected a mentally unbalanced bully to the highest office in the land is going to come back to bite us all…

 

Trumperies in progress

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So this evening our illustrious president (as it were) is slated to make trouble in downtown Phoenix. With his link-bait “will he/won’t he” pitch about pardoning the sleazy ex-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, he’s attracting lots of attention…and lots of very, very angry demonstrators.

Arpaio was one of the worst demagogues ever to hit this state. He pandered to the meanest emotions of people who feel fear of the Other, who resent having lost decently paying work, and who are convinced there’s an “illegal” on every corner watching to see when the locals leave their houses so as to break and enter.

Thousands of people are pouring into the downtown area — some are already starting to line up at 8 this morning. Businesses, law firms, government offices, and the courts are closing, and — get this! — the Post Office is removing the blue postal boxes between Jefferson and McDowell, 7th Avenue to 8th Street. That means they expect the unrest to spread up into the historic district north of the freeway!

Thank God I don’t live there anymore…

A bunch of geriatric Hell’s Angels is motoring into the downtown, too, proposing to help “keep the peace.” That oughta be good.

We have a shindig at the church this evening. It’s something I would like to go to, so had to make a decision:

church party?
or
rioting in the streets?

Actually, I did think the patriotic thing to do would be to show up downtown and express outrage at the Orange Buffoon’s behavior and his henchmen’s sabotage of the American way. But the logistics escape me.

There will be zero parking down there, plus one wouldn’t want to take a car into a war zone, anyway. If you did, the city is gouging people well over $2.00 an hour to park on the street. So really, the only way to get down to the Convention Center would be on the train or, if you could find one, a bus. The potential for unrest is very high. If violence breaks out, the train service would be stopped…and then how the hell are you going to get out of there? In hundred-degree heat…

I could easily walk from the Convention Center to McDowell if the weather were a little more moderate. But today is hot and humid, and I’m quite sure I’m not going to be up for hiking several miles north, then having to fight my way onto a bus, ride all the way up to Sunnyslope, and hike another three miles back to the house.

Plus of course…why even acknowledge the schlep with one’s presence?

And why play into his strategy? Transparently, his whole purpose in making this little junket, whose clearest purpose is to foment civil unrest to distract attention from his Russian troubles and the investigation into his and his pals’ money-laundering activities. Keep the proles amused with riots, Nazi salutes, and flag-waving and they’ll never even notice the criminal proceedings against him.

Images: By Evan Nesterak – White supremacists clash with police, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61723994
By Anthony Crider – Charlottesville “Unite the Right” Rally, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61769434

Eclipse: Low-Impact Version

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Mercifully, Arizona was not in the path of the total eclipse. (It’s not like we don’t have enough tourists.) (And besides, what would the poor critters do with 100-degree-plus heat?) But we did get a nice partial eclipse.

A partial eclipse has its own Kewl. Why?

Well…y’know those DIY cereal-box projectors you see plugged on the Internet? Trees with lots of leaves will do something very similar. So, for that matter, will a swimming pool. So that means that during a partial eclipse, the shadows cast by a tree graced by a halo of small leaves, such as an olive tree, will display 87 gerjillion iterations of the crescent sun evinced during said eclipse.

The effect is weirdly wonderful:

Strange, strange… Does a dog notice, even?

and..

Be thou our vision
O Lord that thou art…

Banner Image of the Day: DepositPhotos

Solar eclipse