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Unstuck in Time

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What a weird experience!

Around 2 in the afternoon I fixed a full meal — wonderful piece of steak, salad, pile of garlicky black beans. Along with this, I took it into my little head to have a gin and tonic.

Usually, I serve up hard liquor to myself in the tallest, widest glass in the house. It holds 16 ounces — two full cups. This habit has a couple of advantages:

First, because the glass holds so much, it takes a lot longer to drink my favorite hard-liquor potable, whiskey and water. This means I probably won’t pour a second glass.

Second, a single shot of liquor is much diluted in 15 ounces of mixer, making it a lot less likely that I’m going to get blitzed over dinner.

But yesterday I decided it would be nice to have a gin and tonic in a low-boy glass, not a long-tall-Sally sort of a glass. My short cocktail glasses hold eight ounces, half the amount the taller glass accommodates.

This meant the drinkey-poo in question used only about a third of a can of tonic water. But it tasted like a drink, not like faintly booze-flavored soda pop. That was nice.

So while the food is cooking I almost finish off a swiggle. Pour another. That lasts through most of dinner. But a third of a can of tonic remains, so I pour a short one — about half a jigger of gin, but still…more gin. Pick up the kitchen, read an e-mail from the client asking me to do still more complicated stuff on the interminable index; decide I’d better wait until full sobriety returns to respond to that. Wander off and fall into bed.

Wake up. It’s dark out. I think it’s the usual 4 a.m. wake-up. Get out the flashlight to check what miserable time of the morning it is, and see it’s QUARTER TO SEVEN!

I’ve got to be out the door no later than quarter to eight, because we have an eight a.m. choir call for today’s early service. This is a once-a-month gig the pastor dreamed up and that I personally dislike intensely — usually choir call is at 10 a.m.

Damn! Fly around, feed the dog (think i don’t think i fed the dog last night!), dunk in the tub, wash my hair, paint my face, find something more or less acceptable to wear, and FLY out the door at quarter to eight, pissed off because it’s still dark as pitch outside, I haven’t even had time for breakfast, and the goddamn paper’s not here.

Pretty Daughter’s son has got his car-repair workshop, locally known as his mom’s garage, open and he’s fiddling with a neighbor’s car, which evidently wouldn’t start this morning. Amazing neighbor who can get a teenaged boy out of the sack at this hour on a Sunday.

Streak down Seventh Ave. Shoot into the church parking lot to find…

no. one. there!

I’m totally mystified. I’m sure this is the morning we’re supposed to be there for the dratted early service, because yesterday Joan said “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I must either have the wrong time or she and I both must be wrong about the early service day.

Puzzled, I drive home. I’m thinking I need to tell the choir director I’m just not gonna do these 8:00 a.m. choir shindigs, because I hate hate HATE getting out of bed with my feet running.

The paper still hasn’t shown up. Pretty Daughter’s kid has gone indoors, and there’s no one around. It’s still dark as pitch. On Thursday, SBA Prez Marshall remarked that the longest day of the year was coming up. He wasn’t kidding, I reflect.

Not until I pull into the garage do I think…wonder if it’s actually 8 P.M. instead of 8 a.m.?….. The digital clock in the car doesn’t have an a.m./p.m. indicator; neither do the ones on the stove and the microwave. All the rest of the clocks in the house are analogue.

Park the car, close the garage, charge back to the office, turn on the computer, and…

Yup! It’s 8:10 p.m.!!!!

Sumbiche!

At this point I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep. The last e-mail I opened came in at 3:10. The next one, which I don’t think was on the server when I stumbled away from my desk, came in at 3:19, but I can’t remember whether I fell directly into bed after seeing the client’s latest round of arcane instructions (he has in mind that I’m going to do electronic searches of 300 page proofs for 25 single-spaced pages of indexing terms) or whether I went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Whatever I did, I didn’t get far, because the leftover beans are still on the stove.

If I fell asleep around 3:30, then I slept for three hours. Don’t seem to have a hangover and don’t feel especially drunk (but obviously shouldn’t have been driving!).

Even after all these revelations, it still felt like morning.  To make things stranger, later in the evening when I went to make something to eat, I came across the Bombay Sapphire: not that much was gone. It was still full almost up to the top — so I was right in thinking I’d been pouring pretty short shots.

The dog and I went for a walk. We live in a neighborhood of Christmas light enthusiasts, so it’s pretty gaudy out there at this time of year. The burning bush, which slowly changes colors through the night-time hours, was mostly red with a little white as we strolled past.

The head finally clear, I started back to work on the index. Finished the latest round of changes around 1:00 a.m. Sincerely hope the latest iteration will satisfy the client.

Strange. This kind of thing has happened to me before, when I was much younger: waking up from a nap thinking it’s  morning, only to find it’s actually evening. But in those instances, the sun was still up — as soon as you can see the sun’s position in the sky, you know what time of day it is. It was solid black last night as I was racing toward an empty church. You can’t see the stars well here, this being the eighth- or ninth-largest city in the land…otherwise you’d think I might have noticed Orion in the east, a bit of a give-away.

Oh well. Second childhood: ain’t it grand?

Images:
Glassware, shamelessly ripped off from Crate & Barrel.
Orion. Mouser. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The NRA Slips Its Collective Trolley…and other mind-numbing stuff

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OMG, the entire freaking organization must have lost every marble its members had in their heads! Have you heard the NRA’s hilarious proposal? Let’s post armed guards in very school across the land!

Dudes and dudettes! Have you ever really talked to a minimum-wage security guard? REALLY? Do you seriously think we’re all going to trust our kiddies to one poor little underpaid, usually undereducated, often less than richly endowed with IQ points freaking hired security guard? With a pistol? SERIOUSLY?

Best argument in favor of home-schooling I’ve heard today.

Well, you know, I am the child of a gun nut myself, and I’ll say I was mighty happy to have the old man’s Ruger in hand when a sh!thead accused of kidnapping and assault was 30 seconds from getting inside my house. But that notwithstanding, I’m not nutty enough to imagine our liberties demand that every civilian have access to semiautomatic weapons. Bring a stop, once and for all, to selling combat weapons and their knockoffs. Require background checks for wannabe gun buyers. Make it a felony to leave a gun within reach of your kids. But keep Big Brother’s hands off responsible Americans’ pistols, shotguns, and ordinary rifles.

Back to daily life, such as it is: Spent the whole week working like a horse. Nothing like “retiring” from a job to keep you busy, eh? This week Tina and I have done two books, in one way or another. A  bunch of edits and a mystifying list of efforts at references came in from one client, whose project I’ve neglected shamelessly as other demands have impinged. Just as that landed on my desk, an old client called: would I index 360 pages of amazingly arcane scholarship?

Well, sure, for the fee they agreed to pay. Foisted the reference search onto Tina, who spent a good eight hours straightening that out. I knew she was actually spending that much time on it, because DropBox signals whenever somebody changes or updates files. Every time she hit “save” or altered a file, a little tab with some announcement popped up on my computer. Figuring out and adding new copy on my end, plus coordinating the rectified references with the in-text citations took a good four hours on my end. Meanwhile I had to start on the index.

This has been — always is, every year (the thing is an annual) — one of those projects that grows huger the more you work on it. Spent most of the week building that. Wonder if anyone else has been doing anything more interesting?

TB explains why on concrete layers will build a “crack” into a slab: to prevent real cracks later on!

Donna Freedman, who’s flyin’ around again, stays at her dad’s house and gets to deal with a plumbing problem…one that gives her an hours-long workout!

Money Beagle has some good advice for enjoying the Christmas season.

At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal has already started to agonize about a health insurance decision that needs to be made by February.

Nicole&Maggie at Grumpy Rumblings ruminate(s) about crazy (and not) friends.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan talks about reasons for life insurance that might be attractive to retirees.

Planting Our Pennies describes the hassles entailed in living in an “older (1980s!!) home in Florida. Thanks goodness I live where it never rains!

At Brip-Blap, Steve suggests several ways to get free money.

Abigail at I Pick Up Pennies describes one of those brushes with entropy that seem to visit us all now and again.

Mrs. Accountability suspects extreme couponing is actually a form of hoarding.

Speaking of entropy, it’s coming on to the middle of the night, and this old bat needs to go to bed.

(P.S. Well…that was weird. After I hit “post” WordPress somehow deleted almost all the paragraph breaks in this thing. It looked fine in Preview!)

 

 

Planning to Live on Irregular Pay

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Not much time to write today: I’ve worked from dawn to well after dark the past three days on a big rush project. It’s an index of some heavy-duty scholarly work — a mind-numbing job! — and it came along just as a nasty little cold hit. But pay will more than meet The Copyeditor’s Desk‘s minimum monthly revenue goal, and that’s on top of several other projects that came in this month. And it doesn’t count the jewelry sales, which I consider a bit of a fluke.

If I finish this thing today, which I probably will, I’ll earn almost as much in four days as the community college pays for two weeks of work. Think of that… 🙄

When you’re working on a contract basis, it’s important to bear in mind that some months no work will come in. And some months, you’ll have more work than you can handle. That means you have a fairly large kitty from which you can disburse a regular “paycheck” to support your monthly budget.  What made it possible for me to quit my day job, as it were, is the amount that has accumulated in the S-corporation’s bank account, plus the remains of my “survival fund” of emergency savings that I had when I was laid off in 2009.

I’ve spent most of the latter — a fair amount of it went to shoring up the house’s defenses after the late, great garage invasion — but after replenishing with the last Heavenly Gardens paycheck, about $7,000 remains. A year’s worth of living expenses resides in the S-corp. Those two bank accounts taken together (the S-corp’s and Survival Savings) will serve as the kitty to bankroll my future of glorious planned unemployment.

Or rather, “self-employment.”

The plan is to draw down about 3 percent from retirement savings, in quarterly chunks, and at the same time disburse quarterly payments from the corporation. These funds will go into the Survival Savings account at the credit union, from which each month I’ll transfer enough to my checking account to cover regular budgeted expenses and the several self-escrows required to pay insurance, car registration, and property tax.

To avoid impoverishing the S-corporation, The Copyeditor’s Desk will have to earn a set amount per month to pay its bills and support me. But because I live so penuriously, that amount is surprisingly little. Just a couple of halfway decent assignments a month will do the trick.

This month more than a couple have rolled in the door. The amount billed in December is  more than twice the minimum revenue the corporation will need for me to pull this off.

That means next month I don’t have to earn anything. As a practical matter, the S-corp can float along for a month on what it’s earned this month, pay its bills and me, and still not eat into the fund that was in the bank when I quit the teaching job.

Living on irregular pay means finding a way to gather all sources of income into a single kitty from which you can disburse only enough to cover your month-to-month bills. At the outset, you do need to hold on to the day job until you can accumulate a fairly substantial base fund to start with — at least a year’s worth of living expenses, preferably two years’ worth, plus a short-term emergency fund for unexpected expenses. But once you have that, the trick is to regard the “kitty” as something that accumulates its funding on cycles that are longer than your budget cycle.

So, if you budget from month to month, as most of us do, the money from which you fund that budget should be accumulating funds on a quarterly or annual basis. This smooths out the demand for immediate income: if more than enough pay arrives in January, it will reduce the amount that absolutely has to come in February. Assuming your enterprise earns more in March or April, at any given time there should be enough in the larger account to fund monthly expenses.

In theory, you could have one big fund from which you draw for all day-to-day expenses and into which all dribs and drabs of income irregularly flow. Personally, I want to see a bottom line that tells me how much is left to spend in any given month, and I don’t think a large fund would easily allow me to do that. It’s a function of my weak math skills, no doubt. That’s why I have a checking account for expenses and a money market account for the kitty that collects the several forms of irregular pay that come my way. Doing that actually converts the irregular pay to something like “regular” pay: you pay yourself a monthly paycheck out of the collector account.

To make your escape from the rat race, then, you need…

• One or two years’ worth of savings
• One or more sources of self-employment or retirement income
• An account in which to accumulate that income; we’ll call that the “kitty”
• A checking account to hold disbursals for monthly bills

Irregular income → Kitty account → Monthly budget account

From month to month, the kitty account, which is substantially larger than the monthly budget account, will grow and shrink according to how much comes in at any given time. But it’s not on a monthly cycle: it’s actually on a quarterly or yearly cycle. As long as enough comes in over a quarter or a year to cover monthly disbursals, you’re cool.

Gotta get going: more things to do today than there are hours to do them!

What Can Be Done?

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Like everyone who doesn’t have to cover events for a news organization, I’ve been stunned to silence by the events in Newtown, Connecticut.

It was, I’m afraid, inevitable that something like this would happen. Just by dint of reporting on mass killings, we glorify the demented perpetrators, who then become models for the next madman priming himself to go ballistic.

What exactly is to be done to bring a stop to these horrific events?  Locking the doors didn’t help — this one used his long gun to blast his way through a locked door into the school.

Before the stench of gunpowder had cleared from the air, the hue and cry for gun control rose from all quarters. Not surprisingly: it makes some sense to believe that if no one had guns, the insane among us would be unable to hurt anyone. And it is true that the crazies in China who have to use knives to attack grade-school children so far have failed to kill their victims.

Not enough is being said in this discussion, which understandably still borders on the hysterical, about the weak mental health care we have in this country. We closed mental hospitals and, in a well-meaning (and conveniently cost-saving) impulse did away with involuntary hospitalization of the mentally ill. But we do still institutionalize the conspicuously mentally ill: in prisons.

If you’ve ever tried to get mental health care for someone who needed it urgently, you likely came up against a wall. One of my son’s high-school friends locked himself inside a bedroom and told his parents he was going to kill himself. They called 9-1-1, begging for someone to send help before he harmed himself. The police showed up. They smashed in the door, grabbed the kid (who was not very large), slammed him against a wall, handcuffed him, and roughed him up. Great treatment for a mental health emergency.

Dealing with the problem we’ve built for ourselves — violent behavior of unhinged individuals inspired by atrocities committed by other demented individuals — demands a complex response, and it will cost a lot of money.

First: Yes, gun control.

We must get automatic and semiautomatic weapons out of civilian hands. These things are now ubiquitous — on any balmy spring or fall evening that tempts me to open my windows, the tat-tat-tat of automatic gunfire wafts in from the war zone to the north of my neighborhood, and occasionally I’ll hear it closer, from the hectic main drags that form borders between my area and the blight to the north and west, as people shoot at each other in moments of road rage.

No one who is not on the field of battle needs a weapon that fires continuously when you rest your finger on the trigger. This is is a weapon of aggression, not of self-defense. Nor is it a hunting tool: if you can’t hit a deer, an elk, or a dove without an automatic weapon, you are not a good enough marksman to be waving a gun around in the woods. And  as for the burglar: the weapon of choice is an ordinary shotgun.

But taking semiautomatic and automatic firearms off the streets presents an almost insurmountable problem. Many of the things are owned by bad guys. They’re freely available on the black market, and nobody who has one that’s not registered will blithely turn it in on demand. Make owning it a felony? Big deal: committing felonies is a crook’s bread & butter. Too, semiautomatic and automatic guns are expensive. Many legitimate gun owners buy them as investments. No one who has ponied up $500 to $1,000 for a semi is going to cheerfully fork it over to Big Brother.

To rein in these weapons, governments will have to reimburse owners. Thousands of Americans own semiautomatic weapons — one source claims 17% of us do. Fully automatic firearms, which contrary to popular belief are not illegal in this country, cost even more than semis: thousands of dollars. No one who has an unregistered gun is going to hand it over to a government agent for free, nor will citizens who bought their weapons after registration became the law. Many may do so if owning the thing becomes illegal and a buy-back program is put in place. But some people will simply hide their weapons in the walls.

Second: Mental health care

Everyone now knows that access to quality health care is highly problematic in this country. If you don’t have a full-time job or you can’t afford expensive health insurance out of pocket, you have a difficult time getting to a doctor.

Take that situation and multiply it by five, and you’ve got a good picture of our mental health care.

We need to stop using our prisons as mental health hospitals, ensure access to and quality of health care of all kinds, and see to it that people who clearly have mental problems receive adequate and effective care.

That also is going to cost a lot of money. In a time when political leaders are trying to cut back (or one day eliminate) Medicare and Medicaid and when half our elected leaders throw sh!tfits over anything that vaguely resembles an effective national healthcare system, it’s unlikely we will muster the political will to spend what it will take to identify and treat even the most obvious mental cases.

Third: The tenor of “entertainment”

Americans marinate in violence. We think it’s entertaining. Turn on the television any time after about 7 or 8  p.m. You get two choices of  viewing pleasure: mind-numbingly stupid or mind-numbingly violent. The crime dramas that fill prime time are the only alternative to watching amateur singers compete or foolish people indulge in stupefyingly idiotic “reality show” antics, and those crime shows, whose plots are often taken from the news, are so bloody and so violent as to turn your stomach.

Except they don’t. We’ve become so inured to violence that we think it’s a game. Indeed, it’s the stuff of the very computer games our children and teenagers play every day. Is it any wonder that unstable individuals are primed to descend into madness?

All three of these issues cry out for change, and in my opinion the only way we will free ourselves from increasingly horrifying outbreaks of madness will be to open the national wallet and address each issue in a big way.

Telephone Predators on the Elderly

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Yech! A particularly creepy telemarketing sleaze just called. When I picked up the phone, a live human spoke, not an infuriating robo-marketer recording. He sounded like an older man — just my age, lots of common with me, right?

Right away he started in on a pitch for some sort of “emergency call” system. He was peddling those gadgets you wear around your neck that are supposed to summon help when you fall or have a stroke over your fried eggs or whatever. He didn’t get far enough to tell me exactly what gadgets or how overpriced they were, because before he could draw a breath I was telling him my number is on the National Do-Not-Call list, he should be ashamed of himself for harassing old ladies with nuisance phone calls, and he ought to get himself an honest job. He was protesting that he had an “honest job” as I hung up on him.

Honest job, my ass.

If your parents are getting on in years, or if you yourself are elderly, you should be keeping an eye out for scammers who call old people on the phone.

It was clear this guy knew my age and he probably knew I live alone. His MO was to scare me, and if I had been just a little less cagey, he would’ve had an easy time of it.

Last week I did fall, in the middle of the night, and I did hurt myself. I hit my head going down and smacked my knee so hard it was awhile before I could get to my feet.

And yes. This is exactly the kind of thing that scares the bedoodles out of me. No one pays the slightest bit of attention to whether I come or go. I could lay on the floor with a broken hip until I died of thirst, and no one would notice.

Fortunately, I’m clever enough to have put three of the house’s five land-line phones in places that can be reached from the floor. And yes again: that’s why I have a land line: so I can have an extension in every room. A cell phone allows for one, maybe two phones, at an elevated price, and with just two of them, neither is likely to be sitting someplace where I could reach it if I were on the floor and hurt.

I dragged myself to the nightstand and pulled down the phone. Called my son. It was midnight. He didn’t answer.

About to dial 9-1-1, I realized that emergency workers couldn’t get in through the special hardened locks I’d put on the security doors after the late, great garage invasion, and since I’d had to smash the secret key hidey-hole with a hammer the last time I needed to raid the key stash, there are no keys to the house hidden outside. Soooo…it wasn’t going to do much good to call the rescue squad, unless I really, really wanted to have one of those expensive new low-E windows busted in.

Eventually I managed to get up off the floor. But not knowing what effect a whack on the head was likely to have on an old bat, I limped out front, stashed a couple of keys under the Burglars Welcome mat, e-mailed La Maya and M’hijito to suggest that if they hadn’t heard from me by 7 or 8 a.m., they should call 9-1-1 and tell the dispatcher how to get into the house.

The moral of the story is that today’s smarmy chucklehead on the other end of the phone line called at just the right time, and that’s what he was counting on. I’m always subliminally worried about being here by myself. But the recent fall had crystallized the obvious risk.

Meanwhile, researchers have recently discovered that people’s natural wariness of the smarmy and the untrustworthy weakens with age. This explains the ease with which con artists scam the elderly, often cleaning out Granma’s bank account.

I suppose my profound hatred for telephone solicitors serves like a flu shot against the creeps. But if I’d been another ten years older, who knows? Maybe the immunity would have worn off.

If you’re in that sandwich generation, keep an eye on the old folks. Ask them how they’re handling their money or if they’ve decided to make any changes in their investments. Keep your ears open for any sudden decisions to renovate the house or buy a time-share in an RV park.

And if you’re already an old folk? Hang up instantly on all phone solicitors. Do not speak with them, and do not be polite to them. Remember, they have already been rude to you by intruding on your privacy, so you have no obligation to speak courteously to them — nor should you. Do not open junkmail, and never respond to an unsolicited offer that comes in the mail.  And always consult with a trusted adviser before making any major decisions pertaining to money, your estate planning, and healthcare.

Is it only me, or is everyone else getting inundated with scammy phone solicitations — three or four hustles a day now?