w00t! A notice came from The Hartford’s auto insurance side announcing that next year’s premiums will…wait for it!…DROP BY $26!
Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! It’s the first time I can recall a significant drop in quite some time.
O’course, what they’re trying to say is the 12-year-old Dog Chariot is no longer worth the current annual premium of $1125. But what the heck! It’s still running, despite its $106,000+++ miles. What more can a person ask (other than decent mileage)?
Can you imagine? I’ve never owned a car that ran a hundred thousand miles. What a vehicle!
And it’s not alone. The other day I saw another just like it, parked in the blasting sun. Its formerly black bumpers were bleached, like the Chariot’s, to a powdery slate gray. But like the Chariot, somehow it has escaped serious dents. With any luck, its owner was enjoying the same automotive longevity and insurance-company largesse.
The Hartford is not giving to dispensing good news to its customers, except on the occasions that it kindly and generously covers natural disasters. I will say that the company’s coverage after the late, great hailstorm could not be beat. My house has a new roof and a new air conditoner, neither of which I could have afforded out of my own pocket—not on a bet. Handyman Jack’s painstaking and excellent paint job (fee commensurate to the quality of the job) was also covered without complaint. So were several other blandishments, not a one of which I could’ve afforded on my own.
Now…you’ll notice that the company has NOT sent me a joyous little flyer announcing a cut in my homeowner’s insurance. Dollah to donut, that will be going up, not down. But frankly, they’d have to bill an awful lot more to recover the thousands of dollars they put into this house; at least, to recover it during my lifetime. So I’m not complaining.
If the homeowner’s rate doesn’t rise more than $26, I’ll be happy.
Speaking of insurance, it’s still open enrollment for Medicare. From what I can tell, the Medigap policy won’t go up a lot. I have nothing to complain about there, either, so probably there’s no point in putting myself through the hassle of changing. Apparently there are some significant changes in Part D (prescription drug coverage), but figuring it out will take several hours, none of which I happen to have. And I’m still not taking any drugs on a chronic basis, and so there’s no way to compare. My inclination is just to stay put with what I’ve got.
It’s the lazy individual’s way, of course.
But really: does anyone have several hours to plow through this stuff and figure it out? It’s 10 after 10 p.m. as I write this. I’ve been working since 6 a.m. (got a lot done!), and my eyes are so glazed over I can barely see what I’m typing. For several weeks I’ve been telling myself to pick up the voluminous paperwork and try to figure it out. Besides the fact that the task is inherently aversive, I truly have not. had. time to do that.
Speaking of the which, it’s past time to drag off to bed!
So the question of the day is, “Why do I think Cassie can’t take care of herself?”
She has teeth. She bites. And she deliberately eggs Charley on.
This morning I decided to unhook the leash and let nature take its course. And y’know what happened?
Nothing.
They wrestled, they barked, they growled. They whirled around like a little cyclone and for a moment looked like the tigers that ran around the tree so fast they turned themselves into butter. Then they stopped. They went on about their business.
Charley’s business was to try to pick up two toys at once and bounce around the yard with them. Failing that, he fell to the next task, running around and around and around at near-supersonic speed. Then he had to lay down on the plant he’s turned into a dog pillow and chew a bone. Right now he’s roaming around the house, possibly too quietly.
Cassie shat under the family-room desk, just to show him a thing or two.
And now she’s engaging him in another mock fight. And she’s driving him FREAKING CRAZY! He’s flown into a squirming barkfest.
LOL!
It’s violent, but maybe this is harmless dog play. I’m thinking if they’re just left alone to work it out themselves, the issue will resolve.
And indeed, in the time it’s taken to write this, the frolic has ended, the dust has settled, and Charley is flopped on the floor next to the desk. Cassie is resting on the other side of my chair, apparently unperturbed and none the worse for wear.
The alleged fruitless olive in the front courtyard is not. Fruitless, I mean.
This summer it bore a nice crop of smallish olives, very much like the olives that appear on the old stock planted years before the state’s ban on olive trees went into effect.
Olive pollen is said to be too cruel to the delicate noses of allergic residents here, and so to protect the hapless, the beautiful and useful olive tree was made illegal. Eventually a nursery entered the breach with the Swan Hill olive, a patented sterile tree.
Supposedly.
The one I planted in the front yard must have been grafted onto fruiting stock, because in recent years about a third of the canopy has taken to bearing olives.
Well. I happen to have a recipe for curing olives without benefit of lye. Many years ago, a friend returned from Greece with instructions for how to cure olives in water. It’s very easy, though it takes a while.
A-huntin' the wild olive...
Fresh off the tree, olives are too bitter to eat, because of their high content of phenolic compounds and oleuropein, which makes them pretty unpalatable. Except to dogs, that is… Charley the Golden Retriever, like Anna the Ger-Shep before him and Greta the Ger-Shep before her, loves the things and will scarf them up off the ground with great joy.
Last weekend was truly beautiful, and I was done in with work and an endless, miserable cold. So, watching Charley clean up the fallen olives, I decided to chuck the paper-grading and the writing and the editing and spend some time going back to the earth.
The tree was heavy with olives, at least on the northwest side. The first step in curing olives, of course, is to get the olives. So I dragged the ladder around from the backyard, climbed up, and pulled off enough to fill a couple of quarts.
Charley thought that was just the business, since I probably knocked as many on the ground as I got into my collection basket. Apparently they don’t harm dogs—I’ve never had one of my dogs get sick from eating raw olives, and the pits just pass right through.
The next thing to do, after you put the ladder away, is to prepare the fresh-picked olives for a long soak.
For this process, the olives should be ripe—deep red or dark purple, but not mushy overipe. I’ve learned, too, not to use the ones that have hit the ground. They shouldn’t be bruised or contaminated with dirt. I washed my little harvest well in a sinkful of cold water and dilute dish detergent, then rinsed thoroughly.
Now here’s the pleasant part: this is where you get in touch with your ancestors.
The time-honored way of getting started—and it’s a very ancient way—is to sit outside in the shade of your lush olive tree and prepare your fruit for the next stage. Take a sharp knife and cut a single slash across the blossom end (opposite the stem) of each olive.
This takes awhile. But it’s an amazingly soothing and calming process. There’s something zen about working with your hands in the way women before you must have done for thousands of years back into the Mediterranean past.
Every time I do something like this, I think how I wish I could live in Yarnell, making a living with my hands at some quiet, soothing craft. Would you buy my olives? Could I sell you some jewelry? Enough to keep the old miner’s shack warm with propane through the winter? Imagine spending one’s afternoons always in some peaceful, reasonably productive pursuit that does not require you to read student writing that grates your nerves or to dispense D’s and F’s to the authors of said works, that does not require you to meet deadlines, that really doesn’t ask much more of you than patience and a little facility with your hands.
Yes.
Cassie thought this was an altogether appealing idea and found the whole olive-slashing project pretty exciting.
Cassie would love it in Yarnell.
Charley in love?
Charley is easily distracted. He soon moved on from olive-hunting to the Tup-the-Corgi game. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem to quite know which end is…uhm…which. Half the time he tries to hump her head. Apparently he’s too young to understand what this is all about.
Make my day, mutt!
What Cassie understands about Charley’s obsession remains unknown. It is known, however, that she sometimes eggs him on, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s doing it on purpose.
Somehow, this wasn’t what I had in mind when, back in my hippie-dippie days, I used to sing along with with Buffy Sainte-Marie…
Gwine to be a country girl again,
With an ole brown dog an’ a big front porch an’…
Yeah. They still have those in Yarnell. And coyotes and cougars and javelina and skunks and rattlesnakes, all of which regard small brown dogs as fair game and your big front porch as something to sleep under.
Okay. So after you get all your olives slashed, your next challenge is to find a nonreactive container to hold them in. Glass or stoneware is best, though I’m told plastic will do.
Scavenging around the house, I came across the lifetime set of beverage jugs I’d bought at Costco. Glass, large, lidded, and easy to manipulate…perfect!
Instead of packing all of the olives into one of them, I decided to distribute the prepared fruit between two jars. This leaves lots of room for extra water. And since the jars are easy to dump and refill, two are no more trouble than one. In the past I’ve used large stoneware bowls. These work fine, too, but take up more room on the countertop, and to pour off the water you end up dumping everything into a colander in the sink, dirtying up a tool each day.
Bear in mind, this next phase of the project takes five or six weeks. So it’s convenient to use compact containers that are easy to haul around.
Place the olives in the container, whatever it is you decide to use, and cover them with cold tap water. Put some sort of cover over the top of the container, and leave it to sit in a cool place. I imagine you could keep it in the refrigerator, though presumably the ancient Greeks didn’t have refrigerators. Just depends on how authentic you choose to be, I suppose.
Now, each day for the next five or six weeks, pour the water off and refill the container with cold tap water. Do this every day, without fail.
About four or five weeks into the process, you can begin tasting the olives. When they no longer set your teeth on edge but instead have a nice Greek-olive flavor with a tang, it’s time to pack them in brine.
Wash the olives again, in a sink full of clean cool tap water.
Make a pickling solution, as follows:
4 tablespoons salt
2/3 cup vinegar laced (if desired) with lemon or lime juice
bottled water to make one quart
Do not use home-made wine vinegar, because its level of acidity is not reliable.
Gently pack the olives into clean, lidded jars. Add your choice of spices, according to your imagination. Possibilities include any and all combinations of the following:
You can, I’m told, substitute the juice from a jar of dill pickles for all or part of the water. However, in my opinion the very best way to flavor up these olives is to add, to your quart of pickling solution, 1 teaspoon of curry powder, 2 teaspoons of minced dried onion, and 1/2 to 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper.
Leave about an inch or so of headroom in each jar after all the olives are covered in pickling solution. Then pour in about 1/2 inch of olive oil. If your jar narrows at the top, olive oil sahould cover the wider part below.
In my younger days, I used to store these at room temperature. Now that I’m older and wiser, I’d keep them in the fridge. It is impossible not to eat them promptly.
Soo many pent-up blog posts to share with you! Well, let’s start with this: Check out the story of Revanche and PiC’s Faux-lopement, a tale told in three installments…
But isn’t getting married always an adventure? (To say nothing of staying married…)
Best wishes to Revanche and PiC, excellent young people
♥ ♥ ♥
Reminds me of my own wedding…
My mother wanted to throw an elaborate shindig. So impressed was she that I had snared a corporate lawyer on track for partner at one of the most prestigious firms in the Southwest, she determined to create a Big Society Event. She planned to hire out space at Mountain Shadows, then a very tony resort that basked in the shadow in Camelback Mountain, deep in the heart of Paradise Valley. There at a sit-down dinner we would receive the cream of Old Phoenix; videlicet, every member of the large firm, every secretary, every clerk, every receptionist, and all their spouses. Plus her friends, my friends, the groom’s family and friends, and anyone else she could think of.
This, as you can imagine, quickly grew into something that looked very, very expensive.
My father’s financial habits made Scrooge McDuck look profligate. He viewed my mother’s plans with increasing alarm.
Shortly after he saw the printing bill for the invitations, he made his move: He called the fiancé and offered to give him $3,000 if he would please elope with me.
No joke.
My father paid my soon-to-be-husband to undercut my mother’s plan for an elaborate wedding. Naturally, the groom took him up on the offer.
Three grand was a lot of money in those days. It was still the time when a young college graduate figured he would have it made in the shade if he ever, during his lifetime, earned $12,000 a year. A $12,000 salary was about the equivalent of a six-figure income today.
It came back to bite my father, in a funny way. Funny odd, I mean.
We set the wedding day in early December of 1967. We would be wed in the groom’s church, a bland Methodist institution in the heart of North Central. I invited my best friend from high-school to fly over from Southern California to be the maid of honor. My mother invited her oldest and best friend to come over, also from Southern California.
My father was still going to sea, piloting tankers up and down the West Coast. He’d planned to get off the boat in San Francisco and fly over for the marrying; then turn around and meet the ship in Long Beach.
Well, along about the end of November, a gigantic storm bore down from the Arctic and barreled into Alaska, where the tanker was bound to put in at Anchorage. The ship headed out to sea and laid off the coast of Alaska, waiting for the storm to pass.
Pass, it did not.
He called ship-to-shore to say he couldn’t make it back to Arizona by the appointed wedding day.
Since it was now a very informal affair, we simply postponed the wedding day. New airline tickets were purchased for out-of-staters, and the groom called the resort where we planned to honeymoon and changed our reservations.
The new appointed wedding day drew nigh. The storm stayed parked over Alaska, and the boat stayed parked on the high seas off Alaska.
Another postponement. More changes in travel plans, another call to the honeymoon resort. My mother’s friend, drawing the wrong conclusion, remarked in what she must have thought was a between-confidantes intimacy, that “these things happen in the best of families.” My mother flew into a high rage and never spoke to her friend again.
Another week passed. The storm did not pass. My father’s boat stood out to sea. Still. The designated maid of honor had Christmas plans and had to demur from attending our wedding, should it ever occur.
After the third postponement, the groom announced that he could not ask the resort in Carmel to change our reservations again, and we would have to move forward with the wedding whether or not my father could get here.
And that’s exactly what happened. We were wed while my father was stuck at sea. I had no maid of honor. The groom’s parents couldn’t make it in from Colorado, either. My parents’ next-door neighbor, whom I hardly knew, “gave me away” in the ceremony. As if I were an object that could be given away, for the price of $3,000.
We used the three grand to buy furniture for the apartment that looked out over the back lot of Sanderson Ford. Probably the young husband used part of it to defray the cost of the honeymoon.
Sometimes I wonder… If we had actually gone through with the elaborate wedding and the big formal ceremony in a church that had some meaning for me (not one I had never gone into before and never went into again), would we still be married?
So with SORT OF a break today (only one student paper that I missed on the server and only two or three that students are trying to faze past me late), I decided to knock off the community college servitude and spend a few hours focusing on exactly where The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc., is gonna go in 2012. As part of our scheme to make a living off this thing, Tina and I need to get together and write a 2012 business plan.
I think we each need to articulate some specific goals, both in terms of what we think this business can do for our careers and our personal lives and of how much we need to earn. She’s apparently knocked out with the Bug today and incommunicada. But here are my goals:
2012:
• Cut back teaching load to 2 & 2 • Gross $26,250 to $36,870 from blogging and editorial work combined
Not unreasonable, eh? Well, we’ll see.
2013
• Quit teaching altogether • Earn enough from blogging and editorial work to meet all my living expenses after covering business expenses.
We need to calculate how much we need, combined, to draw out of this business. In Tina’s silence, I did use today’s relative peace to figure out how much I think I need. It’s a range, actually: from the bare minimum I need to cover my present expenses to what I really would like to have to make my life ever so slightly less miserable. In the latter category, I want (but probably don’t need) a regular pool service (once-a-week maintenance), a handyman on call to for honey-do’s, and Gerardo to show up two to four times a month instead of just once a month.
Those services, which almost seem within reason, boost my annual living expenses by about $10,600 a year.
gaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!
Don’t believe me? Here are the actual living, breathing figures:
Jeez. Fifty or sixty grand to live here in the Funny Farm without sinking into the Slough of Despond. Amazing.
“Business expenses” don’t actually run $400 a month right now, though they may once we start joining up the various chambers and networking groups we should belong to. In fact, the S-corp needs a new iMac or MiniMac+large screen right now (±$2000), and I think it’s reasonable to expect that various hardware and software updates will represent a regularly recurring expense.
I can’t even express (without risking a breakdown!) the amount of time I spent just today on repair and yard tasks around this place. I need someone who knows what he’s doing to come here and do this shitwork!!!!!!!!!!!!! And that’s th’truth!
Okay, I need a husband. But I’m not gonna get one of those in the near (or distant) future, so I’m going to have to hire the rough equivalent in the form of Gerardo the Lawn Dude Extraordinaire and Jack the WonderHandyman.
Moving on.
So, how exactly do we think Little Me is going to earn these spectacular figures? Right now FaM earns around $1,800 a year on Adsense (though the cavalry recently galloped over the ridge, so there’s hope).
Eighteen-hundred dollars being negligible, we move further on. Teaching nets about $12,725 a year and Social Security returns $12,252, for a munificent more or less reliable (if irregular) income of $24,978 a year.
God help us.
This means that the S-corporation is going to have to earn some serious dollars in 2012 if Yours Truly is not to sink beneath the waves.
Let’s try to keep calm here.
I hate teaching, and I especially hate teaching freshman comp. Therefore in my Ideal Universe I would teach nothing at all.
Here is what the S-corporation (i.e., Funny about Money + The Copyeditor’s Desk) would have to earn if I declined to teach any community college courses:
[emits maniacal laughter]
You understand, $35,875 is more than I earned when I started teaching full-time at The Great Desert University, and $46,496 is one helluvalot more than I was earning at the time I escaped teaching into a quasi-administrative position.
Oh well. This is 20whateveritis. Moving on.
Now, if I were to teach two sections a semester, the net proceeds would ALMOST cover my share of the upside-down mortgage on the Downtown House, which inflates as each year passes. So, what happens if I do that?
Left is HAVE to earn; right is WANT to earn.
Okay, 2 & 2 isn’t intolerable, especially if the online course makes every semester, which so far it has done. It would mean I’d have to drag out to campus to meet only one class, and if I begged appealingly enough, His Chairmanship might grant me a once- or twice-a-week section.
What we’re seeing in the bottom line here is the amount I would need for the S-corp (FaM + The Copyeditor’s Desk) to earn over 12 months. Really, $27,000 to $37,000 is not far out of line, as we’ll see in a few minutes.
The maximum number of courses I’m allowed to teach is (theoretically) three a semester. And, one might add, that’s more than quite enough. How much would the S-corp have to make if I were teaching a miserable 3 & 3?
Okay, so, not counting the amount that Tina needs to earn to keep food on the table for her and the Kidlet and to keep the Kidlet covered by healthcare insurance (Tina has given up on trying to cover herself), just for me alone The Copyeditor’s Desk will have to earn between $21,432 and $32,052, assuming I grind my way through three sections a semester.
Gasp!
Things are desperate, but not as desperate as they seem.
The 2012 goal (for me alone, pending word from The Kid) is to drop back to teaching 2&2 and to earn gross $28,247 to $38,867 from The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.
Adsense is paying about $1800 a year (on average, $150 a month…and oh, yes, dear Google, what you are paying is not enough for me to give a fig if you take offense at my revealing these numbers). IMHO, the total amount CED is earning must be replaced with an amount that will add up to the totals needed to support me, my dog, and my home.
Let us assume Google does not notice I have blurted out the amount its exploitive service actually earns for a PR 4 site, and that this amount continues to flow in. Here’s what this would look like if I taught nothing, if I taught two sections a semester, and if I taught three sections a semester, with the number of $60 hours I would have to work to make ends meet in each scenario:
You can click on any of these spreadsheet images to see them in a larger format.
Hmmm. Really? REALLY????
What kind of workloads would be involved in cranking enough to live on, in these different scenarios—not teaching at all, teaching just two sections a semester, and laboring under three grossly underpaid sections a semester?
Hoooowww many hours would I actually have to WORK under which conditions?
This is where things get interesting….
When you teach three sections a semester, even though the community college district pretends you’re not working half-time and therefore are ineligible for any benefits, you’re actually putting in about 60% of a 40-hour week: right around 24 hours a week. Two-and-two amounts to about 50% FTE, or 20 hours a week.
Let’s recall, too, that some days ago we posited that for each billable hour of our $60 time, we must put in an equivalent hour on marketing.
With those factoids in mind, here’s what we come up with in contemplating what we really would like to have by way of living a moderately comfortable life here at the Funny Farm and what we absolutely positively have to get in order to survive (want to earn and have to earn):
This is kinda interesting: the fewer hours I teach, the more I earn.
Well. Of course. If you’re earning three times as much per hour, you should in theory have to work a third as many hours to make the same amount of money.
Teaching three sections a semester and earning the bare minimum needed to support myself and keep me in my home, I would be working 61 hours a week. As a practical matter, that is about what I’m working right now, and earning nowhere near enough to make ends meet.
But if I were to shuck off all the teaching and substitute those hours with decently paying work, I would earn enough to live reasonably well. The fly in that ointment, of course, is that I have no idea whether I can get enough editorial work to take up the slack.
Still…eleven to fifteen hours a week doesn’t seem far out of reason. Especially if I’m spending an equivalent number of hours in marketing.
So. It’s entirely possible that the only way I’ll ever get the workload down to a manageable 45 or so hours a week will be to quit teaching and generate a reasonable number of $60 hours in editorial work.
What if I quit writing Funny about Money, which in a light week takes up about 7 hours of my time and in a more realistic week consumes about 21 hours?
Well, $1800 a year divided by my $60 an hour earning potential = the equivalent of 30 hours of editorial time spent on blogging. Divide that by 50 weeks (I figure I deserve 2 weeks of vacation time in a year) and you find that I could earn the same amount by adding .6 hours a week to the editorial work. Let’s round that up to one whole hour. Then what would the workload look like?
Which is to say that if I were to quit teaching and quit blogging, I could make ends meet by working less than half the number of hours I put in as we speak.
Isn’t that interesting?
Well, I like to blog. But I will allow that it takes up an awful lot of time.
It has to be added, though, that recently Adsense has not been the sole source of this site’s revenues. In September ad income generated enough to cover that insane mortgage payment, and this month it came very close. Plus I have two e-books in the wings, and I’m told one can earn a little from those, given some decent marketing.
So, I’m thinking FaM needs to remain part of the 2012 business plan. I’m going to give it until the end of next summer (when I don’t expect to be teaching and so will have more time to devote to marketing and Copyeditor’s Desk work). If I can get at least two e-books on the market, and if sales of ad space and appropriate, relatively inoffensive paid links come through, the site may earn enough to justify the time it takes. If not, by the end of August I’ll have to decide whether to continue the folly or not.
Meanwhile, the goal is to drop the teaching load to 2&2 in 2012 and to nothing in 2013. The strategies are to emphasize sales of ad space and inconspicuous paid links on the website, to publish at least two and preferably three e-books by August 2012, and to market the editorial business vigorously to other business through a networking campaign, ads in local law and medical journals, and some strategically placed ads.
You know… If all that’s required to make a living on this is 12 to 15 hours of marketing a week and 12 to 15 hours of copyediting, Tina and I working together should be able to make this business fly.
Now that I’m done whining about my tiny travails, it’s time to consider someone who has some serious issues:
Love Drop is at it again! They just came back from the Indianapolis area where they dropped $2,500 worth of baby gifts on newborn triplets (they’re so cute!!), and THIS month they’re trying to round up the love for another mother who needs our help — this time fighting against cancer for the 3rd time in 10 years.
Any of us in the same situation would probably use any extra money toward medical bills, so that’s why this month we want to instead focus on giving Marci and family the gift of quality time together. Let’s send them somewhere amazing and help them form memories that will last forever! We’re looking for creative ideas this month… financial gifts too, but also anything that will help them escape together for a while.
Want to help Marci and her family from Fort Collins, Colorado out? Here are 3 ways:
• Give $1.00 – This money will help us give her some great quality time! • Give a gift card – Gift cards are extremely helpful, especially to places that are national. • Donate TRAVEL stuff – Airline miles, timeshare options, destination packages, etc. – whatever you have access to!
Thanks guys! You can reach the Love Drop team here anytime with questions: team (at) love drop (dot) us., or by checking them out at LoveDrop.us. Thanks everyone! We’ll let you know how it goes!
So… Are you well? Are you free of major health problems? Are your kids healthy and full of ginger? Will you put food on your table tonight?
How’s about for each blessing you have, you donate $5 for Marci?
