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Readings

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Money Beagle holds forth on life insurance. It’s an interesting post and something to think about, especially if you have a young family, a disabled child who will need care through adulthood, or a spouse whose earning power would not suffice to pay the mortgage or maintain a comfortable lifestyle.

And as if by mental telepathy, SVB discusses whole and term life insurance at The Digerati Life.

At A Gai Shan Life, Revanche takes up the ongoing national conversation on women, the workplace, and the quality of women’s lives. This subject has been in the national media for the past few weeks, with articles in the Atlantic and the New York Times dominating the stage. Revanche’s thoughtful post reflects not only on the general state of affairs but on her own growing sense of frustration and burn-out…and she clearly hits a nerve with the many 20- and 30-something professionals among her readers.

At Prairie Ecothrifter, staff writer “Happy Homeowner” addresses the same issue with advice on managing “the third shift.”

Frugal Scholar is vacating, more or less, but still taking advantage of the sales, which wax large over the summer. The links in this post, BTW, take you to places to die for.

Speaking of vacations, eemusings is on the wing from Auckland to another destination that will make you green with envy.

Five Cent Nickel does a nice analysis comparing the costs of driving and flying to your vacation destination.

Don’t know whether the Centavos are back from Italy yet; last I heard, 101 Centavos was speculating on why Europeans are so much thinner than Americans.

Crystal and Mr. BFS, as you may know, are having a brand-new home built. And over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, they’re becoming acquainted with the concept of “contractor standard time.”

Over at Blue Collar Workman, TB is thinking about starting his own business. I think a lot of skilled craftsmen do OK on their own, if they can master the art of finding customers.

Free Money Finance posts an interesting cautionary tale about life in the social media.

In the runaround department, nicoleandmaggie received a masterful one from Equifax the other day.

Speaking of rants, Evan has some great fun with his latest moment of bemused outrage over at My Journey to Millions.

At Out of Debt Again, Mrs. Accountability reflects on her youngest son’s recent flight from the coop.

Manwhile, Donna Freedman has returned to her roost, but she’s still very much in motion.

And on that note, I need to get into motion myself. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

Image: Small American Flags. Lipton Sale. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

 

 

 

The Ambivalence of Doggy Love

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After M’hijito returned from his seaside vacation, he decided that Charley the Golden Retriever is now old enough to stay on his own all day, and so the dog-sitting gig has come to an end. Seems to be working out pretty well for him: he hasn’t complained about any furniture being eaten, and when I dropped by su casa over the weekend, I noted that Charley seems to have regained all the lost weight and looks great.

Funny thing about humans and dogs and their symbiotic relationship. Every time I lose a dog—and most of them will pass on to their furry fathers before we do, with any luck—I feel really bad and miss the dog a lot. It’s been four years since Anna departed and I still miss that dog. And yet weirdly, at the same time there’s this huge sense of relief. All that work comes to a stop.

It was reasonable to feel relieved when Anna passed. The cost of the meds and vet bills was well-nigh crippling, and the amount of work involved in taking care of a large, sick animal is substantial, indeed. When Anna got so blind she fell in the pool, the workload surpassed ridiculous—I built a jury-rigged fence around the Sink of Death to keep her away from it, but that kept me and the pool cleaning chemicals and gear away from it, too. Everything had to be hauled over the fence, several times a week.

Charley, except for the size of his dog mounds (cleaning up Cassie’s rabbit pellets is as nothing!) and his chronic gollywobbles, was far less of a burden than Anna. But…I’d resuscitated the old wire fencing (and bought a lot more of it!) to barricade my plants and the bubblers he loved to chew, barricading myself out of the flowerbeds, too. And pups, unlike older dogs, track in a phenomenal amount of dirt. I tend to get discouraged when faced with a lot of dirt in the house: often as not, I’ll just give up and ignore it. That makes me even more depressed, because I don’t like living in dirt. Then there was the frenzy generated by his pulling up and eating a half-dozen irrigation sprinklers and drippers, most of which I couldn’t then find and still haven’t found to repair. Half the irrigation system is now nonfunctional.

Hm.

Dog out, cleaning and yard repair in.

This weekend I spent most of Saturday and the entire morning Sunday scrubbing the filthy, filthy house. Finally got around to seriously vacuuming the floors, moving and sweeping under the furniture and sucking the dead insects out of the window casings and vacuuming the dust off the baseboards and on and on. Then the entire 1860 square feet of tile had to be dustmopped, especially under pieces that I can’t move, like the bed. Toward 9:00 p.m. I was running out of gas and so as a shortcut dragged out the Simple Green and the janitorial-sized mop and wet-mopped the sticky, stained kitchen, dining room, hall, and living room floors.

Mopping, though, really does nothing to clean the floor. It just moves the dirt around.

So, after a night’s sleep, it was time to haul out the good old floor steamer. This thing actually does pick up the dirt. Because dirt gets absorbed into the microfiber rag I clip to the steamer head, the rags usually have to be changed two or three times during a routine cleaning. Yesterday I went through seven rags, each of which turned black before a room was finished. Even then, in the dirtier rooms the floors finished smeary and streaky and had to be redone until they were closer to clean. Had to steam-clean the kitchen floor twice and the dining room three times to get them to the point where they look clean.

And truth be told, they really need to be steam-cleaned another couple of times. And I really need to get down on hands and knees and scrub the grout clean. Later.

All this was made so much the more pleasurable by the bout of sciatica I’ve cleverly inflicted upon myself. A week or two ago I spent altogether too many hours parked in front of the computer, sitting in my habitual contortionist’s position, feet propped on the desk and rear end resting on the sacroiliac. Must have pinched a nerve. Back and hip and right leg hurt like hell. This antic also caused the plantar fascitis and accompanying Achilles tendonitis to flare up. The right heel hurts so much I can barely walk.

Tough nougies, though. There’s nobody else to do all this work. So I just have to put up with it.

My pretty little flowerbed by the pool has turned into a weedbed, but in the extreme heat and endless goddamn drought, even the weeds out there are dead. Because the doggy fence made it too difficult to reach in there and dig out the weeds, I’ve  just let everything die.

The dried-out, weed-infested ground is so hard that I couldn’t pull the dead weeds out at all—they were just stuck in there. So last night I let the water run in there, to soften up the soil. Flooded the flowerbed after dark, went to bed, got up at 4:30 a.m., and started to work.

Mercifully, we’re having a brief cold snap. This morning we had a little cloud cover, and by 8:30 it was only 90 degrees out there. This provided several hours of clean-up time.

Pulled out the wire fencing, inflicting a nice hematoma on a finger when I had to force a section out of the solidly baked clay on the east side. Good riddance to that: now I can get water on the hopseed and orange jubilee I planted there to reconstitute a privacy shield, and do it without tripping and falling on my face. Now that I’m old, the leg doesn’t swing as high as it used to…I’ve gotten tangled in that stuff twice and both times fell to the ground. Fortunately, I fell in the dirt and not on the concrete; otherwise I would have hurt myself good. Now that little menace is gone.

The young hopseed plants that went in last winter are now almost up to the top of the wall. By  next summer, for sure, they’ll be tall enough to block curious neighbors and passers-by from peering into my yard. The orange jubilee has survived, by dint of extravagant watering—apparently Texas yellowbells and their cousins are not well adapted to Arizona’s extreme conditions. Looks like it probably will survive the summer, but I’m sure it will freeze back next winter. The vitex, shown here on the left in its winter nekkidness, has run amok in the absence of the sun-hogging Devil-pod Tree. It’s now a huge shrub. Next time the arborist is here, I’ll have to ask him to trim it up into a tree shape. It also will help a great deal as a privacy screen.

Back to work, though: shoveled, troweled, and pulled the weeds and as many rampant roots as I could grab out of the flowerbed. Filled a giant black bag with that stuff. Realized the reason the Lady Banks rose looks like it’s barely clinging to life by the tips of its roots is that the damn thing is barely clinging to life. It hasn’t been getting anything like enough water. The weeds that took over the little flower garden I put around its base also were dried out and dead, the ground hard as concrete. Soaked that area with water (understand: water has been running on the landscaping every day since the heat came up! but the drought has been so extreme—one day humidity was 2 percent!—that I’ve had to drag hoses every single day to keep plants and trees alive) and figured I’ll come back tomorrow to dig up and clean out that area.

Dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses dragged hoses… The irrigation system came on. Spotted one dripper hose that Charley had nipped off below grade, now visible by the fountain it made. Dug the dirt out around it so I can come back in the cool of another morning and repair that. Think I’ll need to buy another package of sprinkler heads to fix it. Never did find where the other four or five chewed-up sprinklers and drippers came from.

Now I’m thinking I’ll go over to the Depot and buy a few flowers to brighten up the abandoned flowerbed, and while there pick up a couple of plants to replace the indoor plants that had to go when Charley came to stay. It would make sense, though, to wait until I’m in Scottsdale for the Thursday a.m. meeting and visit the HD out there, since Home Depot outlets, like most mass retailers, offer a better selection and higher-quality goods to more upscale demographics. Especially in the house-plant department, I’m likely to find nicer specimens in Scottsdale than I can up the road.

Most of the morning is now gone and I have not begun to address paying work. We planned to return nine chapters to the honored client today, and I see by the notices from Drop Box that Tina has been laboring assiduously on that project.

And so…to work.

 

 

Waldo Canyon: Staggering Video

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A breathtaking time-lapse video by Steve Moraco, a Colorado Springs artist, records five days of the Waldo Canyon fire. Click on the full-screen mode. Takes a while to watch it…but once you start, you can’t turn away from it.

Moraco shot the video by setting up a camera on the deck of his home and then worked it into this incredible footage. Check out his website and also his page on Vimeo.

M’hijito went to school in Colorado Springs. The area where the fire started is near a popular picnic hangout for college kids and locals. Impossible to even imagine what the people who live there are feeling, much less to put it into words. Steve’s video says it all.

There but for the Grace of God…

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Here’s a hair-raising story of not just one but several formerly middle-class Americans who today are living out of their cars. The issue has become so dire in California that a nonprofit in Santa Barbara has arranged with various owners of large parking lots to provide “safe” space for people to car-camp. Meanwhile, so much as a whiff of the word “homeless” makes it even more difficult—indeed, pretty much impossible—for these once decently earning workers and small-business owners to get jobs.

Looking at photos of Janis Adkins trying to make a home in the back of a Toyota Sienna—which happens to be the make and model of the Dog Chariot, though hers is newer than mine—I thought, holy Christ! How lucky am I not to be walking in her shoes! Like Adkins, I’ve never been able to get another real job; not for any lack of trying, either. But at least I’m still in my home.

So…what happened that kept a roof over my head while she was being put out on the street?

Well, I think it’s a combination of a few decisions made, long ago, that happened to be right (even though they were questionable at the time), raw luck, and social safety nets that kicked in just in the nick of time.

The Decisions

The big decision, maybe the only smart one I’ve made since I left my husband, was to pay off my house.

One day while I was tooling up the freeway, a little revelation dawned: once the alimony ran out, the mortgage on my home would consume over half my net income, which was, shall we say, not very generous to begin with. I was just getting by on a combination of the alimony and net pay for a full-time, non-tenure-track teaching position at the Great Desert University. In fact, most months I ran a little in the red. With the alimony gone, my salary would not cover the mortgage payments and put food on the table. I needed to pay off the $80,000 mortgage as fast as I could: clear it off the books before I had to rely on salary alone to live.

A small inheritance from my father, another from a remote aunt, plus some other money I then had in short-term corporate bonds would close that debt. My financial adviser had a freaking kitten when I told him I intended to cash out those investments and pay them toward the house. “You’re over-invested in real estate,” said he (my 403(b) owned an REIT), “and it wouldn’t be a good idea to pay off the mortgage.”

Right.

So I went right ahead and did it.

Eight or ten years later, I sold that house and used the cash to buy a comparable house in a quieter, better-kept part of the neighborhood, with a pool, a larger lot, and lots of upgrades. Selling price of the old house was more than twice what I paid for it.

If I hadn’t had that cash to buy this house, I’d be up to my nose in debt today, since it also cost more than twice what I paid for the first shack. And if I’d owed money to a bank at the time GDU canned me and all my staff, I probably couldn’t have paid it. Almost certainly, by now I would have lost my home, and I, too, could be living in a minivan under some parking-lot’s trees.

Other lucky/wise decisions:

• Bought a Toyota. Today, when I can’t afford to buy a newer car, it’s 12 years old, has 112,000 miles on it, and still runs like a top.
• Got in the habit of living frugally. Not being able to go out to eat, to take a trip, to afford cable or a cell phone, to see a movie or go to a concert: none of those is much of a hardship, because I didn’t do those things in the first place.
• Didn’t get another big dog. Few things will empty your bank account faster than the cost of owning large dogs. Especially German shepherds…
• Banked at a credit union, which did not then and still does not inflict nicks and gouges for the privilege of letting them invest my money.
• Refinanced the house my son and I were co-purchasing through the credit union, which made a loan modification as soon as we told them I was out of work.

Raw Luck

The expensive dogs were gone by the time I lost my job. Not that I wanted to lose them. But today I couldn’t even begin to pay the vet and drug bills for the German shepherd. I’d have had to find another home for her, had she still been living when GDU canned me.

The university laid me off on the last day that people were eligible for the 50% COBRA discount.

My health was good, my teeth were good, and I already had all the pairs of glasses and contact lenses I needed.

My car, all the appliances in the house, and the air conditioner were running well.

A hailstorm wrecked the roof and the ancient air-conditioner, causing the homeowner’s insurance carrier to replace both of those very expensive items, each of which will probably last as long as I’m likely to stay in the house.

The Social Safety Nets

No way could I have afforded health insurance if I’d had to pay the full freight of COBRA. Thanks to the 50% discount, which I grabbed just under the wire, COBRA cost me less than Medicare does. We might note, however, that Medicare costs approximately eight times what I was paying for an EPO that gave me access to the best doctors and medical facilities in the Valley. Still. I’d have been uninsurable if I’d had to pay the full cost of COBRA.

Mercifully, I was already eligible for Social Security. Although I was forced to take it at a much-reduced rate—I’d intended to wait until I was 70, another six years, to collect Social Security—it paid several times the amount of Unemployment Insurance, without the hassles. The $2,400/semester the adjunct teaching pays would have rendered me ineligible for UI, anyway.

And, thank God, I became eligible for Medicare on the first day of the month after COBRA ended. Paying eight times what health insurance should cost for less coverage and fewer willing providers is less than perfectly desirable, but at least I’ve got some coverage!

Overall, it was a confluence of decent financial management, one or two reasonably intelligent decisions, frugal living, crucial government antipoverty programs, and incredible luck that kept me from spending my old age in a minivan. Even though things can be difficult at times, at least I have my home and my health. So far. My mother was right: I am blessed.

 

At the End of the Day…

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Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy,
Whose trust, ever childlike, no cares can destroy,
Be there at our waking, and give us, we pray,
Your bliss in our hearts, Lord, at the break of the day.

Lord of all eagerness, Lord of all faith,
Whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe,
Be there at our labors, and give us, we pray,
Your strength in our hearts, Lord at the noon of the day.

Lord of all kindliness, Lord of all grace,
Your hands swift to welcome, your arms to embrace,
Be there at our homing, and give us, we pray,
Your love in our hearts, Lord, at the eve of the day.

Lord of all gentleness, Lord of all calm,
Whose voice is contentment, whose presence is balm,
Be there at our sleeping, and give us, we pray,
Your peace in our hearts, Lord, at the end of the day.

Choir of Ely Cathedral
“Lord of All Hopefulness”
Tune: Irish folk melody “Slane”

New Arcadia Door Curtains: $75!

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Et voilà! Now that the fine new ultra-low-E, all matching Arcadia doors were installed, I developed a craving for prettier draperies in the bedroom. The sliding doors in the dining and family doors have sheer floor-length curtains that I made shortly after moving in to the house. I ran out of steam, though, before I got to the back room. In there, a couple of layers of Pier One curtains were jury-rigged on a double rod to keep out the early-morning light…not very effectively.

While I was washing the sheers that had to be taken down for the new door installations, it occurred to me that a set of sheers laid over that cheapo peacock-colored silk curtain just might look pretty nice. They would attenuate the gaudiness of the eye-popping teal, which picks up a more subdued teal on the bedroom’s accent wall. And with windows that no longer radiate heat like a wall furnace, the blue-green things could be slid open, allowing sheers to filter the light and making the room look pretty nice.

So it was off to Fabric Depot, the one surviving fabric store within 15 miles of my house, to pick up the nicest sheer white nylon they had, in 96-inch lengths. They didn’t have the wood clip rings I wanted, but Home Depot did. Unfortunately, HD’s were too dark; however, the clips are easy to remove, and I have a shoebox full of wooden rings that lack the clips. I needed 22 with clips; I had 18 of those. So…it was just a matter of buying one package of HD’s Mediterranean-ugly rings, removing their clips, and snapping them onto my lighter-colored rings. Fabric: $68. Rings: about 8 bucks.

Making unlined draperies is a little time-consuming, but really very easy. First, get the fabric retailer to cut the cloth into the lengths you need. Wide curtain and upholstery fabric comes on rolls that fit into a machine designed to measure out the correct lengths; these have a groove along which the sales clerk can cut a pretty straight line. Once you get the stuff home, lay it out on the floor, one piece atop the other, to be sure they really are the same length.

These are folded in half—they’re actually twice as wide as they appear in the photo. As you can see, the raw edges are not exactly straight—although the saleslady did a better job than most! Straighten the edges either by running a long straightedge from selvage edge to selvage edge (usually these are straight and pretty close to parallel) or by folding the fabric up so that a selvage edge runs along the cut edge, showing where the cut edge is uneven.

Good nylon irons easily; you can press a sharp crease in it, and you also can easily press it out and press out any wrinkles. Set your iron at silk/wool, anddo not try to steam the fabric. At the lower temperatures, your iron will not steam; it will spit. Higher temps will melt nylon. Use a spray bottle to lightly dampen the fabric as you go.

Your ironing board should be well padded, and you’ll need a package of very sharp pins. Large craft pins are sometimes dull; use sharper pins designed for sewing. You’re going to use the pins to secure the hems as you press them in, and then, once a hem is properly pressed and creased, take pin it in place  preparatory to stitching it.

I started by turning the selvage over to form a narrow hem on what would be the curtain’s vertical edges. Fold it over once, pressing:

Press and pin it as you go. You can stick the pins straight down into the ironing-board cover to hold the fabric in place while you press this narrow edge, and then lift them out to secure the hem after it’s creased:

Stitch these narrow hems, and you have now finished the vertical sides of your curtains.

No, I don’t cut off or slash the selvage. And yeah, I know you’re supposed to. For one thing, nylon doesn’t shrink when it’s washed, and so you don’t risk puckering. For another, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

You can sew these curtains on a machine or by hand. Personally, I prefer to stitch each hem by  hand. Obviously, a sewing machine will go a lot faster, but with very fine fabric, you need some real skill with the machine to avoid puckering or damaging the fabric. The effect of hand-stitching is very nice—makes your curtains look like you paid a ton of money for them. If you do use a machine, set it for fairly long stitches with a light tension.

It’s very easy, however, to sew long straight hems by handpicking with a long, baste-like whipstitch. Use a single (not doubled) strand of thread. Tie a knot on the end and start by poking the needle through the folded part of the hem. Then pick up two or three stitches from the weave of the fabric, on the side that will be the front; pull the needle through that and then back into the folded section. You can make eight or ten such stitches at a time, holding as many as your needle will take, and then pull the thread through them all at once. This speeds things along mightily.

Wax the thread to keep it from tangling as you sew. Ideally, beeswax in a special holder works the best. However, these are now pretty hard to find. You can substitute a white(!), unscented(!) candle. Lay the length of thread against the side of the candle and hold it firmly with one finger. Pull it through, coating the thread with wax.

Alternatively, you can wax a piece of thread with the natural waxy oils from your skin, but you cannot be wearing makeup to use this trick. Place the length of thread against the side of your nose and hold it firmly in place, as shown above with the candle. Pull the end so that you run the entire piece of thread between your finger and your nose. This will lightly coat the thread enough to help keep it from tangling, especially if you’re fairly young and still have an oily face. 😉

Now you’re ready to stitch the top and bottom hems. First, fold over the top and bottom edges in exactly the same way as you did the vertical hems. Because these narrow hems will not show, you can sew a simple running stitch to hold them down. Press these edge hems flat. And now you can move on to sew the actual hems.

I like a hem about four inches wide. Use a tape measure or ruler to ensure that these turn out to be the same width all the way across.

Once again: pin, press, and stitch.

You’re almost done! All that remains is to measure for the bottom hems and stitch those up.

First, clip or otherwise hang your curtains-in-progress to the rods you intend to use. I have a peculiarity with sheers, in that I like to fold the top hem over so that it lazes loosely and sensuously between the clip rings (which IMHO are about 897% easier to use than sewing on regular rings. You’ll need to do some math here: take the width of the curtain and divide it by the number of hangers you want to use. This will tell you how far apart to place the clip rings. I came up with 14 inches.

The curtain’s bottom edge will now drape on the floor.

This was the height of fashion a few years ago, and if you like that effect, well…then you’re done. But I think most of us have now figured out how big a mess and hassle it is to clean around curtains that slimpse stylishly across the flooring. So if housework is not your cup of tea or you can’t afford a cleaning lady about whose welfare you care nothing, you’ll be wanting to hem the bottom. This is very easy, much the same as hemming a woman’s skirt.

Because I wanted those peacock silk curtains in behind the sheers, I hung them before measuring the bottom hems. This was to make sure the sheers came out no shorter than the curtains behind them.

Draw the curtains together in the center. Gently pull them down—do not exert a lot of tension here—and note where you would like the bottom of the hem to fall. Place pins to mark this level in each panel. This is where the bottom of your curtain will fall.

Take the curtains down and measure the distance between the pin and the bottom of the curtain. This will be the depth of your bottom hem.

Pin up, press, and stitch your hems, and your sheers will be ready to hang. Before stitching that last seam, you might want to hang the pinned-up curtain, just to be sure you have the hems the right length and that they’re even. That extra step is a lot easier than having to rip out hems, remeasure, and restitch.

You understand, this is wild stuff, putting the sheers outside the colored drapes. But I was right: the effect is really  neat. It allows you to create several styles.

Closing the sheers over the top of the bright Pier 1 silk curtains softens the gaudiness while letting some of the teal hue be seen. It’s after dark here, so you can’t see what happens when sunlight is shining in from the other side.

You can pull the sheers open, to expose the colorful underlayment:

You can have them both opened, sort of layered so you can see both sets of curtains but also have sunlight come in. This looks a lot better in the daytime:

And, speaking of the daylight hours, pulling the underlying colored curtains open behind the closed sheers creates yet another effect, filtering the bright outdoor light and yet letting the teal shade come through. It’s hard to see with the Arizona sun backlighting the window, but to the human eye it looks pretty nice.

Here’s a view of those flipped-over hems at the top. They’re folded toward the back and clipped along the sewn part of the hem. This gives them a little more heft and causes them to drape attractively between the clip-rings.

This project took two evenings in front of my favorite videotaped TV programs plus a Sunday afternoon listening to Click and Clack and This American Life on NPR. Obviously, if you used a sewing machine you’d get through it a lot faster—you probably could put both panels together in one afternoon.

Not bad, eh, for $75!