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The Virtues of Saving Paper…

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So yesterday among the several little sh!t-fits I had after the coffee poured into an open file drawer was one of my recurring frenzies over the SHEER QUANTITY of paper stashed in file drawers in my office and garage.

Dayum, how I hate all this PAPER! So I started shuffling through it looking for things I could throw out.

Tossed out a ton of records of the endless engagement with the insufferable La Morona, the secretary at GDU whose ouster took almost two years. Threw out a bunch of student evals and annual reviews from my teaching days at GDU, dating back now something like eight or ten years. And that emptied…about a third of one jam-packed drawer.

Another crammed drawer has bank statements dating back to before the invention of electricity. Of course every statement has an account number on it, some defunct, some…not. There may also be papers in there bearing my Social Security number. All those pounds and pounds of paper will have to be shredded or burned.

My shredder is too small to rip up that much paper, so unless I want to track down one of those community shred-a-thons, I’ll have to spend an evening cremating fistful after fistful after fistful of defunct paperwork in the fireplace.

In the middle of all this, what should I find but the receipt for the expensive Chinese wool rug I lent to SDXB and that, last month, he ended up donating to charity in my name.

“Expensive” is what that thing was: I paid over three grand for it at a discount. From deep in an old file of warrantees and paperwork for stuff most of which broke or was discarded years ago, up pops a document showing this rug’s freaking registration number plus its valuation: $4,000.

Holy mackerel. Is this or is this not a gigantic 2012 tax deduction?

Will this or will this not cause the IRS to audit my 2012 returns? But…I have the actual evidence to justify deducting a $4,000 charitable contribution!

Shoot. I should have photographed the thing before we decided to unload it. The truth is, it was in excellent condition: after Anna the Ger-shep came on the scene, I rolled it up and put it out of harm’s way. As a result, it’s been out of the reach of dog teeth, dog claws, and dog rear ends for most of its existence, except for a few years on a little-used floor casa SDXB.

This is not the first time I’ve been surprised and cheered to find a document that any sane person would have shredded years before.

• There was the time PeopleSoft decided I had started at GDU a year later than I did. If they’d gotten away with that one, it would have shorted me an entire year’s worth of sick-leave pay, to the tune of about $17 an hour. Amazingly, I had the 15-year-old statement of my first paycheck.

• Then the financial managers decided they needed to know how much I’d paid to buy into some Vanguard funds, way back in the early 80s.

• Now we have the proof of value for a rug I haven’t seen in five or six years.

Hoarding has its virtues.

That notwithstanding, I’m emptying all that trash out of there at the earliest convenient moment. Like, probably starting this evening!

Business Starts a-Poppin’

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Wow! The corn is popping hereabouts! It’s almost 11 a.m. and there hasn’t been enough time to pause long enough to add a post, either here or at Adjunctorium. We have two clients in hand, both with projects they think we’re going to do right this minute, and a third on the phone inquiring about our services.

None of these folks appears inclined to pay us a living wage. Can’t blame them: I try to bargain service providers down as low as they’ll go, too. Maybe we should be asking absolutely ridiculous prices and then, when people beg us to come down, offer “bargain” rates that really are what we need to pay the overhead and put food on the table.

Naturally, the business shows signs of life moments after I sign up for a voc-ed course designed to get me into a new line of work.

Yesh.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, in these parts the sole perq adjuncts get is a tuition waiver. This will make it possible for me to take the two courses and the half-credit seminar required to get a real estate license, without having to pay more than about $45.

The first course runs from March 20 to May 5. Unfortunately, it meets on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, and of course my classes meet T/Th, from 12:30 to 3:45 p.m., and of course my business group meets at 7:00 a.m. Thursday mornings. So during those seven weeks, I’ll have 14 Days from Hell (especially on Thursdays: on the fly from 6:30 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. Ugh!). But I can put up with it, especially if I can pick up the second three-credit course over the summer and be ready to take the exam in the fall.

Bleagh! I really don’t look forward to taking any more college courses. With a Ph.D. in hand, I feel I’ve had quite enough of those. However, really…I do need to earn more than I’m making at the community college, and for sure, there’s just no way I’m going to keep teaching after the legislature finally pushes through its guns-on-campus bill. Even a part-time job as a gofer in some real estate office would pay more than I’m earning now, probably with a great deal less annoyance.

Drat it. Almost 11:00 a.m. and I haven’t even had a minute put my clothes on to go do the running I have to do today. And M’hijito took the bag of dog food I bought for Charley on Friday.

He’s been feeding the dog a fish-based kibble, which makes him stink to high heaven and which Charley has decided he won’t eat any more (goood dog!). So I bought a small bag of blander stuff to see what he would do, and lo! He scarfed it right down. M’hijito is irked because he has 80 pounds of the fishy stuff in house. He’s not the return-it type, and so he thinks he’s either going to have to force it down the dog or throw it out. I told him I would take it back, but of course he thinks that’s mother-martyrdom and will not go along with any such scheme.

A-n-n-n-n-n-d…

Just to make life perfect I just spilled an entire cup of cold, stinky, stale coffee down into a file drawer, all over the floor, and even managed to splash it onto this computer.

ahhh shee-ut. This is gunna be another Day from Hell, isn’t it…

Adjunctorium Returns!

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Some of you may have noticed that Adjunctorium went defunct for a few days. It’s an unnecessarily long story, mostly involving my arriving at the point where I was too sick to wriggle my fingers just as we were ready to switch the site from WordPress.com to Bluehost.

But today I’m up for a little light housekeeping, and so Adjunctorium is back online with its very own .com address. And I see FaM’s RSS feed is tracking it again.

Expect some upgrades over the next week or two: a better template, graphics, a “subscribe” button, and who knows what else.

Enrich and Extend Your Moisturizing Lotion with…What Else? Olive Oil!

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FaM veterans will remember the late, great post on using olive oil to condition your hair. Believe it or not, that thing has had the greatest longevity of any post ever to appear on this site. It still draws comments from new readers every few days, after all these years.

Well, a recent commenter remarked that she discovered she could extend her moisturizing lotion by adding a little olive oil. Now there’s a thought.

I had an old bottle of Keri lotion laying around the bathroom closet. Hmmm….

The problem I have with just about any body moisturizing and conditioning lotion is that they don’t do much in Arizona’s parching dry climate. You can rub it on and ten minutes later your arms and legs look just like old alligator hide again. Some face creams work pretty well, but they’re way too expensive to smear all over your body. Olive oil alone, yes, will soften and diminish that powdery, craggy dry-skin look, but it’s greasy and too much of it makes you smell like a walking salad bowl. But what if you did mix a little olive oil with some body lotion?

Why not? thought I. So mixed a few drops of Costco’s best with a squirt of Keri lotion in a mise-en-place dish.

Mixing the olive oil into the lotion worked, but it caused the lotion to curdle a bit. That notwithstanding, it worked really well on my skin—went on smoothly, immediately moisturized and improved appearance—and the light scent of the Keri lotion overrode the olive oil aroma. Interesting.

So I decided to try it with a larger sample. Here’s how it went.

First, I filled a well washed old plastic container about halfway with several squirts of Keri lotion. Then splashed in a generous dollop of olive oil:

This move, it developed, was a bit too exuberant. The result, after beating the two together with a fork, was way too oily and liquid. So I added some more lotion.

The result, when mixed thoroughly, was okay. Not great, but okay. It still had too much olive oil, and as with the beta-trial, the lotion curdled in the oil.

The amateur cosmetologist’s kitchen, however, is never without resources. Out came the immersion blender and its little food processor bowl!

After a good whipping in the food processor, the new olive oil/commercial lotion skin conditioner came out looking like this:

Hot dang! It’s creamy, light, and absolutely free of any sign of curdling! It goes on smoother, faster, and more generously than plain Keri lotion, and it does not make you smell like a salad chef!

Applied to the skin, the product does a nice job on the old-lady crepe. If you use it moderately—don’t get carried away with slathering this stuff on—it soaks in well and does not feel greasy. If you put too much on, of course, you feel like you just came out of the auto shop, but a little goes a long way. Apply it sparingly, and it works really well. The positive effect lasts a lot longer than the moisturizing effect of Keri alone.

Next time, I’d use a lot less olive oil. By carelessly splashing in a dollop, I think I started with about a 50-50 mix. Adding another squirt or two of Keri lotion didn’t help much–to get the right proportion, I would have had to add more commercial lotion than my container could hold. If you decide to try this, keep the ratio to about one part oil to three parts lotion, and maybe even less than that. It doesn’t take much olive oil to soften your skin. In experimenting, it looks like you’d do best to start with too little oil and add more slowly to reach the right combination.

But I’m kinda pleased with it! Not only does it make the elephant hide look a lot better for a lot longer, it’s even frugal: extending lotion with olive oil, which is a lot cheaper than commercial cosmetic products, has got to save money in the long run.

🙂

 

It’s Raining Money!

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HOLY mackerel! The January statement for the IRAs came from the financial management firm. The large IRA earned as much in January as I make all year when I’m teaching the maximum load the District permits adjuncts to take on. Raining money, indeed. Wow…

In the past, when times were good (remember those times?), it would occasionally earn ten grand in a month. But this is ridiculous.

So why am I even being bothered to teach, or to do anything else, for that matter? As we’ve seen, it’s a question I’ve taken to asking myself more and more often.

Well, for one thing, under decent conditions I like teaching. I enjoy young people, and even though I don’t delude myself that I “teach” them anything (no one teaches anyone anything: you can take the horse to water…etc. The best you can do is serve as Virgil to the student’s Dante), I find it entertaining to watch them develop when challenged by whatever wacky stuff I throw at them.

And of course, the problem with a sixteen-thousand-dollar windfall is that it comes along once in a blue moon. Stock market investments can’t be relied on to generate any returns on a regular basis, and as a matter of fact for most months since the Crash of the Bush Economy (heeeee! :-D), returns have been negative. You can’t be pulling down what it takes to live on while your nest egg is steadily shrinking.

Hm. Speaking of money management, there’s still a chunk of money sitting in an old whole life policy. I’ve delayed rolling it over into a brokerage account because I haven’t wanted to trigger the tax on it. Plus it does provide my son with almost 40 grand worth of insurance, which would make him right-side up in the upside-down mortgage I got him into.

Financial Advisor and I have been engaged in a long-running disagreement over this little pot of gold. He wants me to draw it down to live on. I want to roll it into a brokerage account and put it to work, even though I’ll have to pay tax on it. Matter of fact, once the tax is paid, it could be used to fund the Roth IRA, which I’m not going to be able to contribute to for many more years.

Or, of course, I could use some of it to buy a much-needed new car.

Either of those, IMHO, would be better than letting it sit in the insurance policy, where it earns about as much as a bank savings account does. The thing returned $1,128 in 2011, plus an $888 cash dividend. LOL! I’ll never get out of the 99 percent at that rate!

Jobs: Out of the Frying Pan

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Yesterday I used my faculty tuition waiver to sign up for one of the two courses required to get a real estate license. Well…two and a half—there’s a half-unit thing on contracts you have to take before you can sit for the exam. As soon as I can get through them and get a Realtor’s license, I’m going to try to find a part-time  job as a gofer in a real estate office.

I’m not interested in selling houses—don’t think I would be good at sales. What I’d like to do is help a successful sales agent with the behind-the-scenes stuff: filling out paperwork, filing, answering the phones, keeping track of appointments. My friend who is a very successful agent tells me that state law requires anyone working in a real estate office, no matter what the job, to be licensed. He says the courses are very easy and even kind of interesting.

Thanks to the waiver, a three-credit course costs me $15. Not a bad little lagniappe: resident tuition at the community colleges here is $75/credit hour. So all-told the underpaid teaching gig should save me about $445.

It’s a pain to have to change course this late in life. However, there’s no question in my mind that sooner or later our bat-brained legislators are going to succeed in making it legal to tote a gun onto the campus. And that is just beyond the pale: no way am I going to stand up in front of a classroom not knowing which and how many students, some of whom are even crazier than the local politicians, have pistols in their backpacks and purses. That is just simply unacceptable.

These courses are offered in short sessions, so I with any luck I should complete them by the end of this summer or, at the latest, by the middle of fall semester.

I figure a 50% FTE job as an underling in a Realtor’s office can’t possibly pay much less than I’m earning teaching in the colleges, and the salary would come in 50 or 52 weeks a year. The business of getting paid eight out of twelve months—when in fact you’re filling your summer and winter breaks with unpaid course-prep work—is for the birds.

Actually, if I did sell houses I might earn as much as I do teaching without putting in a lot more than 20 hours a week. A real estate agent has to split his or her sales commission with the broker and the agency: that is, on a 6% commission, the selling agent gets 3% and then has to fork over half of that again, finally pocketing around 1.5%. So, on the sale of a $200,000 house, you’d make around $3,000 (from which you’re paying the cost of continuing ed, wear and tear on your car, phone service, etc.).

Well. At that rate I would have to sell 5.6 $200,000 houses to earn what I make if I carry the maximum load allowable for adjunct faculty.

That probably isn’t an unreasonable goal, even for a newbie.

At least this will give me a back-up plan. I’d continue to teach the online magazine writing course, if the chair agrees. But I am not going into a classroom full of armed eighteen-year-olds and nutcases.

Welcome to class!

Image: Semiautomatic pistol. Yaf. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license