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The Beside-the-Dumpster Exchange

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Donna Freedman recently posted a fun article about rescuing various goods from dumpster oblivion. A horde of readers commented on everything from the riches to be had to the ick factor to ecological correctness. The impulse for discovering hidden treasures in the trash is strong!

Here in the neighborhood, we have what can best be called a “beside the dumpster exchange.” Got something you wanna get rid of but it’s too big to easily haul to the Goodwill? Drag it out to the alley and let it sit by the dumpster. By nightfall, it’ll be gone.

Especially if it contains metal: metal scavengers patrol the alleys here and will take anything you leave out for them.

But it’s not just down-at-the-heels guys trying to crank a few bucks to buy some more crank. The neighbors take the stuff.

I know which neighbor took the barbecue I left out one time, because it was easy to track the trail left down by the wheels as he dragged it to his yard. It needed a HUGE cleaning job…but if a person was willing to take a lot of time and plow through a gigantic mess, it was a pretty nice ’cue. Later, I found a cool framed print beside a dumpster, still in its packaging.

It’s become a kind of ad hoc Freecycle: We don’t want it—please take it! You don’t want it—we’ll take it.

For years, my neighbors across the street had a yard sale business. About every three or four months, they would drag out piles and piles and piles of stuff. Put a couple of signs at the main drags, and hordes of folks from the surrounding barrios and slums would descend on our street. Each sale brought in hundreds of under-the-table dollars.

They built their stock in two ways: by haunting yard sales, where they haggled prices way, way down; and by scavenging in the alleys. They found some pretty nice stuff in the alleys, some of which they sold for decent prices.

When you visited their home, you discovered they’d scored quite a few nifty decor items. Under the back patio cover, they created very pleasant outdoor room with yard-sale furniture and an old TV set—she told me it didn’t matter if rain got on the stuff, because they didn’t pay anything for it.

Moments of Fame

Squirrelers hosts this week’s Festival of Frugality, and kindly includes Funny’s squib on signs of life in the local real estate market.

What’s Your Choice: More Years or Better Life?

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So I spent the six hours or so at the Mayo’s emergency room yesterday. Wheezing. I’ve never wheezed before in my life.

Besides being flicking miserable, it was an interesting experience.

The place was absolutely mobbed. People come from all over the Valley, largely, I expect, because so many local hospitals are not all that great and because the Mayo is one of the very few in the state that rank among the top clinically and in terms of safety. I met people who had schlepped to their ER all the way from Mesa, and I spent most of the six hours with a pair of elderly Michiganders who had driven in from Apache Junction, where they spend the winters in their RV.

Because of the overcrowding, once they let us in to see doctors, there were no rooms for us, so the old guy from Michigan and I were stuck on gurneys in the hallway. This, of course, allowed each to hear in detail what was ailing the other.

He was really a sweet old guy, never complaining and always good-natured despite what must have been a great deal of suffering. As it developed, he had come down with diabetes in his old age, shortly after a botched knee replacement. He ended up with chronic painful, itchy swelling in his lower legs, which were covered with chronic sores that refused to heal. One wound had been open for 18 months. His wife had dragged him in to the Mayo because he wasn’t getting adequate care (he was being treated by a PA—hadn’t seen a doctor more than once or twice!) and she figured he could get better attention there.

When the doctor came around, she was visibly horrified to learn the quality of care he was receiving, though she tried to hide it when she was face-to-face with him.

Part of what ailed the old fellow was impaired circulation in his legs. This, she pointed out, was caused by his pack-a-day smoking habit. She suggested that if he quit smoking, he might have less pain.

If he lost about 60 or 80 pounds, too, he certainly would have less pain. Both he and the missus were pretty overweight. She could have done without 40 to 50 pounds and he, upwards of 60. Even if losing some avoirdupois didn’t help the diabetes (as it might), it would at least take some of the pressure off the poor old guy’s legs.

I thought about the old man, driving home at the end of the day. It made me feel terrible that such a nice old fellow was suffering like that.

He had no intention of knocking off the cigarettes, and said so.

The people who manufacture those things are  murderers, plain and simple. They know they’re putting out an addictive product that kills, and they do it anyway. That makes them killers, and it makes the legislators who facilitate their drug business murderers, too.

But that’s neither here nor there.

The question is, let’s say you’re an old person. Let’s say a doctor gives you a choice: do without something that gives you pleasure and relaxation in your daily life and live several years longer, or keep enjoying that something and take those years off your life. Which would you pick?

The answer, to my mind, is not as obvious as it looks.

At a certain age, you realize you’re going to die sooner or later. And you realize you may or may not go through a period of intense suffering before that happens. Maybe forgoing a pleasure that relieves your boredom and distracts you from discomfort today isn’t worth a few extra months or years on the other end: extended life that may be full of pain and misery.

At 20, it’s obviously worth picking and choosing your vices: stay off the fatty foods, stay off the booze, stay off the tobacco, and stay off your fanny. With any luck, you’ll reach old age and old age will be tolerable.

But if you’re already there, or even halfway there? Hm.

What’s your choice? Longer life with asceticism, or shorter life with pleasurable bad habits?

 

RVs and Credit-Card Checks, Oh My!

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😀 Frugal Scholar remarks on the adventures of a new-to-her (and me) blogger at I am the working poor. The articulate and interesting IATWP blogs sporadically, apparently whenever she can break loose a few minutes from what sounds like a very hard-working life. She and her DH have succeeded in paying off their debts and even built up a small emergency fund on the proceeds of low-income jobs.

Most recently, though, she reports that they made a big-ticket impulse buy: purchased an RV from some guy to whom the DH delivered a pizza. They’ve been coveting an RV for months, possibly years, but been unable to swing it before this.

To pay for it, they used one of those “checks” emitted by credit-card companies. By way of luring them back into debt, their credit-card issuer sent them a fistful of blank checks that, if used, would nail them into a one-year no-interest loan.

They figure they’ll be able to pay off the amount in 11 months. Hope so. It’s clear they understand this as a loan, but she doesn’t say whether they realize that typical one-year no-interest deals sock you with a whole year’s interest if you don’t pay in full by the end of the year; after that, a hefty monthly interest fee begins to accrue.

Lordie! So much can happen in 11 months! Car accident, pregnancy, illness, job loss…{gasp!} Maybe I’m too much of a pessimist. But as I’ve noted before, the basis of frugality is pessimism. One saves for a rainy day because one believes it will rain. A lot.

SDXB and I once bought an RV.

Holy mackerel! Talk about a hole in the ground into which to pour money!!! We finally unloaded it, after months of unsuccessfully trying to sell it through the local Truck Trader, to a friend who used it as a rolling condo while he passed some months editing an Albuquerque newspaper (no joke: he lived in the paper’s parking lot); then spent lengthy periods living out of it during trips to Mexico and as a campground manager in US national parks. For him, it was a good deal. For us…not so much.

RVs are probably worth the money if you like to hang out in campgrounds—they don’t work well for off-road car camping, because they tend to torque on dirt roads that are poorly maintained or drop into gullies. SDXB and I were really not into crowded campgrounds. He preferred to go off by himself in the forest or desert. The idea of going camping is to find peace and quiet, not to move into a rolling apartment house with as much or more noise and people in your face as you have at home.

That’s not true of everyone, obviously. We met many folks who truly loved the campground experience. In Arizona, there’s an entire subculture of RVers, people who come here and spend eight months in commercial campgrounds during the winter and then pack up and drive to cooler climes for the summer. And while we were on the road, we did stay in some places where I could imagine lingering for quite awhile.

Sometimes I think it would be great fun to unload my house, buy an RV, toss some jeans, boots, a jacket, a six-pack of Corona, and the dog into it, and take off permanently.

But realistically…don’t think so. As if I didn’t have enough work to do!

🙂

Back in Hock Again

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Added up the bills yesterday. That’s always a thrill a minute! The cost of pulling out the hated devil-pod tree, replacing it with four new plants, blocking off the dug-up muddy area with wire fencing so Charley can’t excavate everything, repairing the damage done to Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner by the tree’s last blast of gunky pollen, and while we were at it having Gerardo pull out a couple of ugglified superannuated plants in front and replacing those ran me over $600 into the hole.

🙁

Luckily, there’s some $1700 in the short-term emergency fund, so I’ll still have a thousand bucks to keep the car running or fix the plumbing or deal with whatever damnfool thing happens next.

Ran all these bills up on the AMEX credit card, which gives me a kickback once a year. A single big-ticket item can make that little bonus add up to $400 or $600, which is nice. Usually, though, I just think of it as ultimately cutting the cost of gasoline by a few percentage points. Doesn’t help at the gas pump, but when the money comes in, it goes right straight back into the survival fund, extending the time I can live on post-tax savings as long as possible.

Of course, the kickback come-on would avail you naught if you didn’t pay off your credit card every month. Obviously, having some lender give you two cents back for every five bucks you have to cough up in interest is, shall we say, not in your interest. However, if you’re in the habit of paying your bills every month, it’s an easy way to pick up some free money.

Other kinds of cards might work to your advantage if you always run a tab or are trying to pay down existing debt so you can get in the habit of paying in full—a zero percent card, for example, would be useful in either of those instances. Depending on your needs, it’s crucial to shop around for the best credit card deals. The last time I got peeved at Chase, I checked into a number of options for the S-corporation’s card before finally deciding that Costco’s AMEX card was the best choice for the business as well as for the personal card—interestingly, they’ll issue a corporate card in addition to a personal card, even if your personal card is associated with the so-called “business” membership.

At any rate, the yard should start to look pretty good once it warms up. Amazingly, the big cocoa-red rose that guards my office window survived last summer’s unholy heat (only two others in front made it through). I decided not to prune it back this winter because it suffered so violently–give it a chance to rest. But some fertilizer and water produced this:

To help drive myself into bankruptcy, I hired Gerardo and his sidekick to hack out two overgrown and shabby-looking plants on the front patio, pull up a root from the deceased tree that once again was heaving the brick pavement in back, help me wrestle with pool equipment, and generally clean up the Funny Farm. They came trotting right over at my electronic beck, and the job was godawful, so as usual when he does a lot of extra work for me, I paid him a chunk of extra money. He replaced one of the uglies with a Texas yellowbell, which is already in bloom:

Charley decided an overgrown, invasive wad of bunch grass growing in the front courtyard made a nice mattress. He probably did find the highest and best use of that plant…but if it was tired-looking before, it was fully uglified by the time he rolled in it a few times. Running low on money, I asked Gerardo to try planting a yellow bird of paradise that had volunteered in a pot, where it’s never done well:

It looks pretty peakèd here, but it’s a hot-weather plant. If it survives, it should fill out when summer gets here. May even bloom. They have a spectacular flower, and they have the strange habit of tossing their seed pods into the air with a funny POP sound.

Come evening, Charley sits by the front door or out in the courtyard waiting for M’hijito to get off work and come pick him up. He stares at every passing car, in hopes that the next one will be His Human’s.

And when at last the Human gets here, we have an explosion of doggy joy…

Mare’s tails riding ahead of a storm system made for a gaudy sunset last night. A friend who lives about 35 miles from the Reno wildfire says they’re hoping for enough rain to douse the flames.

And so it goes.

 

Sick Again…or Still?

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{yuck} Three or four days ago, a heavy cough developed, right out of the blue. No cold symptoms, no flu symptoms: no sore throat, no head congestion, no laryngitis, no achy muscles, no headache, no nothing. It’s a chest-wrenching, goopy cough, one of the worst I’ve ever had.

So day before yesterday I traipsed across the city to a revered physician at the revered Mayo (gotta find a doctor closer to my house!!). She opined that it’s not pneumonia, it’s not bronchitis, and it doesn’t appear to be an allergy. Her theory is valley fever.

Lovely.

She shrugged and said it most likely will go away in a week or ten days.

Right. What she’s shrugging off is the fact that I tested positive for valley fever in my early twenties. That was over 40 years ago.

Valley fever is caused by a fungus that lives in the low Southwestern deserts. It doesn’t go away. Your body may suppress the symptoms, but once the fungus has moved in, it’s there to stay. And a flare-up, years later, can develop into something very nasty, indeed.

It would explain a lot: like why, after years without so much as a sniffle, I developed a mean bug right after I took that damn triple-whammy flu shot (no more of that after this!) and have been sick off and on ever since. This started last September or October and it doesn’t seem to be going away.

So her doctorhood ordered a chest X-ray and a valley fever titer test. The results of the latter, whose reliability is questionable in the first place, won’t come back for a week or ten days.

Meanwhile, though, SDXB has developed a similar goopy cough after two months of the 10-week virus that’s been going around. He thinks what I have is the same as what he has.

However…he developed it as  part of a rhinovirus infection. In contrast, I got the 10-week respiratory bug shortly after I took a flu shot last fall. Eventually it went away. Then a few weeks later I picked up another cold. Shook that off in about 10 days, and have been feeling just fine for a while. It was completely gone and had been gone for several weeks when this new thing developed. I have no other cold symptoms: just a nasty cough.

Well. And one other odd thing: about a week before the cough appeared, I started sleeping all night!!!

It was so wonderful! Or so I thought. Suddenly, after a good ten or fifteen years of five- and six-hour nights, I’m sleeping seven hours, without waking up and watching the clock tick for two or three hours. Then it’s eight hours. Then nine hours. Then right before the cough started I slept ten hours. I haven’t slept ten hours straight since I was a teenager. On reflection, that is not normal.

Then the other evening I was walking the dog and felt a tightness in the chest, like I couldn’t breathe in enough oxygen. It passed, and I didn’t think much about it. And now this expectorant cough comes along. Pretty clearly there’s a connection; and I expect there’s some connection with the oversleeping, too.

Well. I hope this is just another virus and not valley fever, because valley fever can develop into a chronic, crippling, and life-threatening disease. The first book I edited, as a young thing, was by a pulmonologist who specialized in valley fever, and I’ll tell ya: it was real scary to read. The treatment, like chemotherapy for cancer, is about as bad as the disease. The infection or the treatment, one or the other, is likely to weaken your health permanently.

🙄 Just what I need to make my day!

Image: C. Immitis. U.S. Federal Government. Public domain.

Oppose SOPA and PIPA

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 Okay, Funny is not blacking out today. Instead, we’re scraping the following message from MoveOn.org—presumably they won’t mind the copyright violation in a good cause.
 
A number of sites, including Wikipedia‘s, explain the broad implications for free speech and access to information. Some parts of the proposed legislation are redundant with existing law; others are invasive and probably unconstitutional. Go here to find contact information for your representatives, and don’t fail to tell them how you feel about SOPA and PIPA. These are not dead letters, and we need to make our elected leaders understand that we want to see the stuff go away and not come back.
 
From MoveOn.org:

 

MoveOn.org: CENSORED

This Internet Censorship Legislation Is Terrible

The Internet that we know and love is under attack by big media and pharmaceutical corporations. Their lobbyists are pushing Internet censorship legislation like the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The copyright enforcement mechanisms in these bills would restrict online innovation and threaten the existence of websites with user-submitted content—including the MoveOn.org front page, Reddit, and Wikipedia.

We’re taking time today to focus and act on this important issue. We encourage you to do the same.

Get involved

Watch this video from Fight for the Future, which explains the Internet censorship legislation and why it’s so bad.

Learn more:

We’ll be back tomorrow, keeping the pressure up to stop Internet censorship and trying to win every progressive battle that we fight together.

 Paid for by MoveOn.org Political Action, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.