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Work, Community Service, Argh!

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Worked like a horse all day yesterday: first to the morning networking meeting, then some light yardwork, then until 8 p.m. on a client’s book. It’s good…I hope he likes the final edits.

Now must race — it’s already quarter to six!! — to get down to the law school: mock trial for the country prosecutor’s office. Last year I got “volunteered” by one of my former TAs, who graduated from law school and was interning for the prosecutor, into serving on a mock jury for a project put together to train young litigators. It was fun, so I said I’d do it again.

Hence, all the work pushed up a day.

And now, it’s off and running again. Hope your Friday is grand!

The_Jury_by_John_Morgan

The Jury, by John Morgan. 1861. Bucks County Museum, England.

 

 

Why Is It So Much Cheaper to Be Skinny?

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Down to 128.8 this morning: hot dang. Exactly on target.

We’re now at the end of January. I hit the 130-pound diet goal on September 26. Since then it’s been too cold to swim and I’ve been too busy to walk every single day (though usually do get some sort of activity in most days). But I’ve managed to stay right around 130 pounds, give or take a pound or two.

I haven’t run a Quickbooks report to prove it, but it’s my belief that I’m spending a LOT less on groceries, despite the mountains of fresh veggies and fruits and the “less meat but BETTER meat” strategy. I’ve spent about $250 on groceries this month — a far cry from the typical $350 to $400 of a year ago.

Why? In theory, it should cost more to eat nothing but whole foods. Are we not told that poor folks consume all that junk food because it’s cheaper, on the surface, to buy processed junk and fast-food? Is it not true that corn is subsidized and healthier vegetables are not? Do we not believe that grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, wild-caught fish, and humanely raised pork are astronomically expensive?

The key, I think, is that when you’re not thinking ahead about what you’re going to eat, you’ll buy anything that comes to hand. Also, when you’re not thinking about cuisine, you tend to eat more at any given time.  When you have a diet strategy in mind, you’re a lot more careful about what you buy, and of course you eat less per sitting.

Now that I’m in the habit of eating smaller portions, the loot hauled in the door from a grocery trip lasts a lot longer. A single stir-fry, for example, provides two or three meals instead of one or two meals. Before, I would scarf the whole delicious thing down and so would have to cook, say, seven separate dinners for a week instead of five or six.

Also, with what we might call “mindful dining,” one is much less inclined to the impulse buy. Before, if I was hungry and in the vicinity of a better AJ’s or a Whole Foods, I would run in and grab a large box of sushi (maybe two!) and, naturally, a beer. Or more likely, a four-pack or six-pack of dark, foamy, delicious stout. And by golly, look at that: real Stilton! And what’s this “white” tea? And ohhhhhh I do love those spectacular barbecued baby back ribs. You can’t have those without a giant twiced-baked potato slathered in cheddar cheese…

“Ma’am? May I rent that llama over there to haul this stuff out to the car?”

And speaking of foamy-delicious beer, although I haven’t quit swilling a potable once a day, my choice of alcoholic beverage has changed enormously.

Quit drinking beer pretty much altogether, except as a special treat: too calorific.

Wine proved to be highly problematic: I dearly love wine and will drink it like soda pop. And it’s too damn easy to pour like soda pop. You finish a glass of wine halfway through your meal, so what do you do? Tip the bottle into the glass to add “just a little more” to come out even. And then just a little more. And then just a little… Uh huh. By the time you’ve finished your diet feast, you’ve consumed half a bottle of $10 red. This not only was too calorific, it was too much to drink and too expensive: at $8 to $12 a bottle plus exorbitant taxes, if you’re buying two bottles of wine a week you’re ponying up around $80 a month — and that doesn’t include the beer you’re buying to go with the sushi and the barbecued ribs!

So the wine imbibulation had to go.

Interestingly, certain breeds of hard liquor contain significantly fewer calories per dose than does a glass of wine. And because I’m not averse to watering my booze down, I can make a shot of whiskey or gin go a lot further than a beer or a glass of wine will go. A single bottle of very good bourbon from Costco will last well upwards of a month, at half the price of eight $10 bottles of middling wine.

Hard liquor has as its advantage that you have to get up and mix another drink if you want another. This activity — get ice, get the bottle out of the cupboard, retrieve the jigger from the dishwasher, get cold water from the fridge — is enough to remind you that it’s time to stop, whereas “just a few drops” more wine encourages you to keep pouring.

In the booze + food department, one thing that soon became apparent is that once you hit your target weight, you can keep it down more effectively by eating larger meals earlier in the day and smaller meals or even just healthy snacks at dinner time. I like a drink with dinner. So, I wait to have a large, glorious mid-day meal until I’ve finished whatever running around needs to be done and know I don’t have to drive any more that day. Because this is likely to be around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, it means I have to eat a good breakfast that will last until after the noon hour.

This eating pattern, by sheer coincidence, turns out to be an effective weight-loss and blood-glucose management strategy! That’s nice. It also means, though, that if I’ve had a bourbon and water or a gin rickey at 2:00 p.m., I am not going to go back out to the grocery store in the afternoon. By two or three, I’m done with running around spending money.

So, in a lot of subtle ways that have nothing to do with personal finance, the diet plan also works to promote frugality.

Image: Nejmlez. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

A Budget for Retirement: Annual, not Monthly?

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God, for an English major I am too, too bizarrely fascinated with playing in Excel sandboxes! Just came up with a new budget scheme: instead of tracking expenditures by the month, why not track them over the course of a year? Since Fidelity will be sending savings drawdowns annually, and since one annual drawdown will, in theory, cover all my living expenses, who cares how much is left at the end of a month? When you’re living on retirement savings, the figure that matters is what’s left at the end of the year.

Annually, my living expenses — exclusive of taxes, insurance, and minor emergencies (which are covered by Social Security and teaching income) — come to $1721/month. That’s based on the maximum costs of air conditioning and water, which occur during the summer months; during the winter, total costs are somewhat less, because I rarely turn the heat on and I don’t have to water the yard or refill the pool much. That works out to $20,652 a year, just to get by.

So here’s a research question: If you tracked your budget by the year, would over-expenditures (such as I’m enjoying right now and expect to continue enjoying through March!) eventually balance out with under-expenditures? Well, in 2014, we’ll find out.

We have the research instrument:

AnnualBudgetBy subtracting $1721 for each month, I can easily see how much is left for the remainder of the year at any given time. This does not reveal the amount that’s actually in hand — or will be — for 2014. The teaching income will cover most of the tax and insurance charges, and Social Security will cover what obviously is likely to be a serious shortfall in the budgeting scheme, plus any major unexpected expenses.

If I subtract a) the balance after a given month’s debits (shown in the column titled “Balance after debits”) from b) the balance that the budget should show at the end of that month, were I managing to stay on budget (shown in the column titled “Budgeted proj. balance”), then I will see c) far how into the red or the black I happen to be at that time (shown in the column titled “Budgeted vs. actual balance”).

Budgeted projected balance – Balance after debits = Budgeted balance compared to current balance

Lovely. I’m already $802 in the hole. This includes the down payment on the four pairs of glasses, an accountant’s bill, a car repair bill, and $680 for the massive tree-pruning job. Plus the $135 to My Sister’s Closet for a little bonanza in second-hand clothing, purchased before I realized I was riding a waterslide into a pool of red ink.

That does not include another $430 owing toward the glasses, God only knows how much for contact lenses, God only knows how much for the visit to the ER, and the $800 still owing for the puppy, an amount I had stashed conveniently away before I got walloped with a new set of medical and vision bills. And of course we’re still faced with the fact that about the only rags in the closet that fit me are a few Costco bluejeans. And a couple of uncomfortable bras.

Welp. It certainly is a good thing Social Security is still operating.

🙄

The High Cost of Changing Your Life

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Okay, so now that I’ve succeeded in losing 30 pounds, thereby dropping the blood pressure back into the more or less “normal” range, the celebrating is done and reality sets in.

This weight-loss glorioski is costing a lot of money. Videlicet: none of  my clothes fit anymore. And I mean none of them. Underwear included.

Costco sells chintzy little made-in-Asia women’s underpants cheaply enough. But their excuse for a bra? Definitely not worth the (low) price. And, I’d come to realize, now that I was skinny I didn’t even know what size I am now!

If I knew the size, I could order my favorite brand online. But I had no clue.

This meant…oh yes!

The sheer unadulterated horror of a shopping trip for bras!

The male contingent may not be aware of this, but the way most women figure out what size fits, in brassieres, is to go to a fairly upscale store that has a decent lingerie department and have a trained saleslady measure the bod’ and then to try on, with her supervision, a whole bunch of bras in different sizes. It is a “trying” experience in more ways than one. I hate it.

So, it was off to Saks, which carries the preferred brand and often puts it on sale.

Or so it once did. No more!

Saks has gutted its lingerie department. Not only do they no longer carry the pricey brand that is the only brand known to fit me, they no longer carry much of anything. They didn’t have the store’s only two, count’em TWO wire-free bras in the size the saleslady and I figured I would probably fit into.

Wire-free bras are now apparently pretty much a thing of the past.

I hate underwires even more than I hate shopping for bras. They are SO. Fucking. Uncomfortable!!!!!

Those things with the plastic Dixie-cup arrangements are now more ubiquitous than underwires. Hideous AND sofuckinguncomfortable!

HOW do women get bamboozled into wearing this stuff? Why??? What sadist in New York gets away with designing miserable crap like this? Nay, gets PAID to design it?

You should’ve seen the gawdawful high heels I saw on an expensive-looking woman in church this weekend, as long as we’re on the subject of sadistic design. One false step, and she’d break her ankle. And a false step was highly likely, since the poor creature could barely hobble around in the damn things.

Back on topic: The only other store in Biltmore Fashion Square – i.e., the only other upscale department store this side of Scottsdale – that carries the desired brand is Macy’s.

I hate shopping at Macy’s. And of all the departments I hate shopping in at Macy’s, I hate their lingerie department most.

Yes. They did have the coveted brand. After searching high and low, I could not find one single wireless bra in that brand. Or in any other brand. The saleslady was too busy yakking away with her friends about personal matters to be bothered to sell anything – she didn’t even notice a customer was there. Pretty typical Macy’s customer disservice, in my experience.

Biltmore Fashion Square hosts a bra shop. The last time I went there, the stupid saleswoman informed me that brassieres are supposed to be uncomfortable.

No joke. It really happened.

Well, I figured I could at least get measured, though I wasn’t planning to buy anything.

There I found a competent brassiere saleslady – she actually seemed to know what she was doing. This poor soul, about my age, was laid off her administrative job at a nonprofit and thrown out on the street to spend the rest of her life selling underwear (probably at minimum wage) to unhappy women forced to shop for bras. Lucky her.

Ah well. Gives the shopper some perspective: when the landscape starts to look like you’re arriving in Hell, there’s always someone else who’s deeper in Hell than you are.

This store, called Soma, is associated with Chico’s. True to Chico’s form, the saleslady immediately started asking a lot of nosy questions, demanding my name, address, phone number, date of birth(!), and e-mail address and promising a few pennies back on the sale if I would just reveal all my personal information. She was not pleased when I informed her that a) I do not give out my phone number or e-mail address to retailers and b) I do not shop at Chico’s because I don’t like being high-pressured by their aggressive sales staff. I’m sure she’d be even less pleased if she knew the address they had in their system was fake.

At any rate, she toned down the sales pitch a bit when she heard the business about how much I dislike being strong-armed at Chico’s and how much I hate their mirrors that distort your image to persuade you that you look better in their bizarrely sized rags than you really do.

Hilariously, she knew about the mirrors.

Moving on, she also finds all of two underwire-free bras in the entire store. And since of course all their stock comes from the same place Chico’s gets its stuff – points far east – no two models in the same size fit the same way. She ends up getting me into a 32A in one model and a 34C in another.

At the risk of repeating myself: No joke. It really happened.

Oh well. We did arrive at a reasonable consensus on the actual size, meaning that the next time I have some money (which at this rate will not be in our lifetime), I can order a Wacoal from Amazon.

Meanwhile, I bought the 32A and the 34C because they were less uncomfortable than most and because they both created the illusion that my boobs do not reside around my waistline. Good enough for government work. I suppose. One was reasonably priced; the other cost as much as a Wacoal, a bra whose manufacturers expect you to ransom your first-born to scare up the purchase price.

Eighty-five bucks plus damn near 10% tax for two bras, neither one of which is in the theoretical size.

More annoying than life, isn’t it?

This lifestyle change that’s supposed to be so good for me is shaping up to cost me a lot of money…

Image: Soutien des seine par une brassiere. 1900. Public domain.

 

Spring is Sproinging in Phoenix

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So, you say, it’s colder than a bygod where you are? Heh heh heh heh… Well, it’s pushing 70 here. Reached 81  a couple of days ago but by and large has hovered in the 70s. If you wanna be warm, please come to Phoenix in the springtime. That would be January…

The plants are going nuts already. I came outside to put a little extra water on the citrus and the climbing roses, both of which have gone thirsty all winter. Ended up spending two or three hours puttering around the yard, yakking with the neighbor, throwing the Queen’s tennis ball around.

So, sooo much work to do — shovel off the desk, plow through the latest snowdrift of paper that’s collected there, do the bookkeeping, write the Eng. 235 syllabus, build a new Canvas site for them, ride heard on the 102s, edit copy, edit copy, edit more copy. And y’know what?

I don’t want to work.

If I’m going blind in one eye, maybe it’s my body trying to tell me to quit working and go do something else while there’s still time. Sometimes I think I should shut down the editorial business, quit taking on underpaid junior-college courses, and just loaf.

Maybe not, too. 😉 Heh! Good thing I pulled down Fidelity’s share of this year’s savings ten days ago — for the first time in recorded history, we managed to sell at the top of the market! And it’s prob’ly just as well I didn’t buy a new vehicle. The money for that (most of it) is in an old whole life policy and so neither earning nor losing money while the Dow merrily heads south, but still…my cookies would be frosted if the bottom line had dropped an extra 15 grand for the purpose of buying a car.

Ruby-Throated_Hummingbird_1The roses, whose population is much depleted because I’m sick of pruning them every year, are bursting out in new growth. The bougainvilleas survived the winter with little or no frost damage, because we haven’t had a single hard frost all year. A fierce little curved-billed thrasher has been excavating the yard in search of bugs, in the process turning over the soil and saving me a fair amount of work. Good bird! The hummingbirds, mostly Anna’s at this time of year, are in a frenzy…OMG! There’s a broad-tail! Who’d’ve thunk it?

We have three hummingbird feeders around the shack, which have had to be refilled with some frequency. Lately I’ve taken to preparing a half-gallon of sugar water and keeping it in the fridge, so I don’t have to fool around with making the stuff when the feeders run dry.

honeyBee-apisUhm… A honeybee just flew down into my mug, half-full of tea. Thought she was going to fall into the drink (heh! the literal drink!) but she came to rest on the interior, strolled up to the rim, walked all around it, and then took off for wherever honeybees go at this time of day.

So many things to do out here. I’d like to move a bunch of iris bulbs that have been living but not thriving in a large pot…want to put them in the flowerbeds around the climbing roses. KJG, who gave me the bulbs a couple of years ago, says they don’t do very well in pots. And it looks like she’s right. The bed by the pool is overrun with Mexican primrose and red salvia, both beloved flowers but plants that tend to get out of hand. They’re majorly out of hand just now! One of the citrus trees has sprouted a big yellowing section, indicative of root rot. I need to climb underneath there with a screwdriver in hand and adjust the irrigation, cut it back a bit. And I suspect the dirt Richard’s crew piled up there (when they should’ve hauled it off or spread it in the alley…) is too close to that tree’s root system, which could suffocate part of the tree. Either way, that looks suspiciously like a job. Probably I should hire Gerardo and his underling to come in here and shovel that stuff out of the yard.

Won’t he be thrilled…? 🙄

In the paying work department, I finally finished the intro to the proposed cookbook. Intro is three chapters explaining how to lose weight without really trying. Still have to organize the recipes in a sane order and list the jpegs in the order in which they should appear — that’s going to be a time-consuming job. Then decide exactly how to publish the thing.

One friend publishes cookbooks as PDFs, but I don’t think she can go through Amazon with the things. A business acquaintance has taken up converting Word files to Kindle format and is anxious to do both the cookbook and the novel that way. But he can’t handle many graphics, and the utility of having a recipe book on Kindle just escapes me! He thinks if people want to actually use the thing — like, say, in a functioning kitchen with water and pots and pans and dishes? — they’ll buy the print-on-demand version. I suppose. But I know I sure wouldn’t…if I’d paid for a Kindle version I wouldn’t pony up another ten or fifteen bucks for a print version, not on a bet.

So that question is under consideration.

The novel is about ready to go, at least to a designer. Same business friend wants a shot at converting that to Kindle. The agent who advertised that she was looking for new adult fiction writers never even bothered to send an f**k-you-very-much response to the full-length proposal I sent, which was quite a project to put together. So at this point I’m willing to self-publish the book through Amazon and try to market it, though I haven’t the faintest idea how.

Nor am I enthusiastic about doing a plain-vanilla Wyrd-to-Kindle conversion for the novel. In the first place, the thing has a DIY map that needs to be drawn by a professional graphic artist; in the second, there are several tables that I do not want converted to toilet-paper-style lists. And in the third, it really needs decent cover art, and I feel no craving to substitute a piece of cheap stock art for that.

The designers that my little business has been subcontracting to charge a mind-numbing fee for interior page design. Which IMHO is a little ridiculous, because once you’ve got a design (which isn’t hard) all you do is pour the copy into InDesign. To design cover art? Don’t even ask.

Uninclined to pour a ton of money into what’s really a hobby project — any piece of fiction that doesn’t get published through a legitimate publisher is just that: a hobby — I called an old friend of mine, the former art director at Arizona Highways. He’s semi-retired now, but he’s still doing design for an occasional client. He proposed to do the page design for less than a third of what my underling charges, and the charge for the map and the cover art was pretty reasonable, too. He’s very, very good: at the top of his form was one of the premier magazine designers in the country. So if he’s willing to do it, I’m going to hire him to do the novel, I think.

Speaking of work, none of it seems to be doing itself. So I suppose I’m going to have to get up and stagger back into the salt mine. Bye!