Coffee heat rising

funny

This post may be a paid guest contribution.

Busy Weekend

by

A minute to 9:00 p.m. and rain is pouring down. Lightning is lightninging and thunder is thundering. The back porch is already starting to flood.

Weather has been hot and humid, not cooling much below 90 degrees at night because we haven’t had any real rain. But the teasing clouds have given us the occasional spectacular sunset and sunrise:

 

Our illustrious leaders have been busy all weekend and supposedly have come up with some sort of compromise solution for the deficit issue. From what little we’ve had time to hear, it sounds like a lash-up that will please no one, other than maybe Wall Street: the Asian market has already soared 10,000 points on the news. But that assumes the lash-up will hold together at all. 🙄

Since we and our country are doomed, let us consider what remains to matter for us; to wit, il faut cultiver notre jardin.

Not much literal cultivating going on in 110-degree heat, but within the metaphorical garden all sorts of things have been going on.

Friday we drove out to the far side of the galaxy to pick up M’hijito’s adorable new puppy, an eight-week-old English golden retriever. This went smoothly enough, though we were told he has a ….oop! just lost power! thank goodness for lithium batteries… Campylobacter infection and is on antibiotics. And he truly hates going in a crate.

Ohhhhhkaayyyyy…

A little investigation revealed that various types of intestinal pathogens—the sort that cause what we humans call “food poisoning”: Campylobacter species, Salmonella species, three variants of E. coli—have been spreading steadily through the ranks of show dogs because of the growing popularity of the BARF diet. Adherents to BARF feed their dogs raw meat and bones in the mistaken belief that canids are immune to pathogenic bacteria. As a practical matter, this is wildly untrue: all dogs are susceptible to the food-borne pathogens that cause the same kinds of sickness in humans, and puppies and old dogs (like small children and elderly humans) can die from these infections. Puppies pick up the microbes when they suckle and climb around on their mothers, whose fur of course is contaminated with the bugs.

Yea verily, one of our breeder’s pups did die and another was seriously weakened: not from our pup’s litter but from the much fancier concurrent breeding engendered by a dose of doggy sperm expensively imported from Sweden.

So we were concerned.

At any rate, we made it back to M’hijito’s house uneventfully. Pup was awed and stunned to find himself in an alien environment, and he succeeded in keeping M’hijito awake most of the night.

LOL! Doggy parenthood.

In the morning M’hijito called to opine that nothing is wrong with the dog: all systems appear to be functioning quite normally.

By Saturday afternoon, M’hijito had Pup persuaded that the crate was OK to walk into, as long as the door isn’t closed. He’ll go into the crate and loaf around but still doesn’t like to be closed in. That is, I think, very significant progress in one day.

M’hijito’s friends, who have been dying to see this miraculous beast, descended on his house Saturday night, children in tow, for hamburgers and dog admiration. Apparently Pup took all the partying in stride, the result of which was he only woke up twice last night.

Today they—the dog and his human, that is—showed up at my house, here to be introduced to the doggy day-care where he’ll be spending his weekdays. M’hijito put the old, well-scrubbed dog crate together and persuaded Pup to walk into it and then it was off for more exploring and partying.

Cassie is not impressed. She’s taken an attitude reminiscent of Garfield’s toward Nermal the Disgustingly Cute Kitten. She remains fixated on the Ball, although she would like to deconstruct Pup’s stuffed toy.

M’hijito decided to go swimming and of course was followed outside by Pup, who was called by the water like Odysseus by the sirens. Before M’hijito could step into the pool with both feet, Pup tumbled/jumped into the water—it was hard to tell which—and took off swimming like an otter. M’hijito had to dive in and swim after him to catch him.

We steered him over to the steps where he could climb out, but it was pretty clear from his first experience he didn’t get that concept. This dog is going to have to be watched every. single. minute he’s in the backyard. In fact, I’m thinking he’d probably better be on a lead when he’s out there.

In another couple of months, he will have figured out how to find the steps and get out of the water. And his waterproof retriever coat will be growing in. But for the nonce there’s no hurry to be diving into that thing.

After Friday’s $150 bill from the Leslie’s repairman, the pool is on the fritz again. So tomorrow I’ll have to hassle with those clowns again. Yay.

Pup loves to lounge in the breeze from a fan. After the water frolics he curled up under the kitchen counter and dozed off with his little ears flapping in the wind…

If you’ve ever had a kid, you know that babies do not lay still while snoozing on the bed. They rotate on a private internal axis. So, it appears, do puppies. This one came perilously close to rotating down the step, so we propped him up:

Awwwwww….

M’hijito has yet to settle on a name for this beast, though just now he’s considering “Seymour” or “Jack.” I’m for “Jack Daniels,” myself. 😉

Holy mackerel! It’s getting rambunctious out there! Lightning just struck right outside the house—probably hit a palm tree. Cassie’s getting scared. Think it’s time to post this and go hunker down somewhere with the Mistress of the House.

 

Dog Days of Summer

by

Now before this goes any further, let’s get to the important stuff: A bright star just rose in the otherwise hot and muggy summer.

Jacob over at My Personal Finance Journey has announced the final results of his first Tour de Personal Finance blog competition. And who should the winner be but (who else??) our own favorite PF scribbler, Donna Freedman! She won with her eloquent post, “This Isn’t Your Grandparents’ Recession.”

Argh! I remember when she first put that piece online. It’s one of those things that makes you go damn! why can’t i write like that?

A close runner-up was Paula’s thoughtful and smart piece from Afford Anything, explaining how and why she would go into debt if she had a million bucks. I’m not going to recapitulate everything on Jacob’s competition post—be sure to go there and check out all the winners for yourself!

Dog days, indeed: last night it was 95 degrees outdoors at 9:00 p.m. The pavement would still have burned Cassie’s feet and the air would have dessicated both of us, had we dared to go for a doggie walk. So the dog and the human spent another day and another night flaked out on the tile floors with the air conditioning blowing on us.

Do not even ask what the power bill will look like this month. Try not to think about it.

This evening after work M’hijito is going to make the trek to Mesa to pick up the new pup! The little guy is tentatively named Prince. Or maybe King. The breeder had planned to add the name “Prince” to his fancy pedigree moniker but apparently that name was already claimed, so now he’s going to be a King. M’hijito says he’s a prince now and soon will be a king. 😀

Anyway, he invited me to come along to help him transport the little dauphin back to Phoenix. So that will be a joyous moment.

We bought a big wire crate at Walmart, and shortly thereafter one of M’hijito’s friends volunteered to lend him a similar one, at least until the friend needs it again. So we’ll need to take our purchase back this weekend and retrieve our 80 buckolas. While there, we must remember to latch onto a few packages of those plastic plugs you put into electric outlets. Young dogs are fond of kissing electric outlets, the outcome of which is not good.

At my house, I also have a crate, which M’hijito disassembled, scrubbed thoroughly, and now needs to reassemble. Pup (Prince? King? Louis XIV?) will have to go in there while I’m at class, which mercifully is only a couple of hours a day. Next week I’ll be home by 11:30 or noon, but since he won’t get here until around 9:00, the wait to get out will short. And it gets even shorter the following week: the 101s finish their five-week tour of duty next Thursday, and so after they’re gone, I’ll have only the 102s, who meet at 7:00 a.m. Their class is out at 8:50, so I’ll be home by 9:00 or 9:30, leaving Pup in his crate no more than about a half-hour. Two more weeks of that, and then fall semester begins, with classes that start at 11:30 a.m. and meet only three days a week.

Thursday the 11th, however, I’ll be gone a bit longer. I have to toss the surviving 102s out the door by about 8:15 and then fly downtown. Beeeeecause… Phoenix College is offering a new online certificate program in “Medical Transcription.” You can get through it in a year, and voilà! Now you’re magically certified to earn something between $12 and $30 an hour typing dictation from doctors.

Apparently, in the Phoenix area pay is halfway decent (which, in these parts, comes under the heading of pretty darned good). I’ll bet that with a Ph.D. and 20 years of editorial experience, I can come in at least at the median and maybe better than that.

Median pay for a medical transcriptionist working half-time is $2,000 more than I can earn teaching the maximum number of courses allowed for community college adjuncts. And whaddaya bet a glorified secretary for doctors doesn’t fill hour after hour after freaking hour of her time with unpaid labor in the form of “course prep”?

Two thoughts on this:

First, it could be the answer to the conundrum of what on earth I’m going to do when I’m too old to dodder into a classroom and too old to hold my own against a pack of restive 19-year-olds or when I simply can NOT stomach reading another inane student paper ever again. This work can be done remotely. As long as I can still wriggle my fingers, I can transcribe digital content. And I’m good at that kind of thing—I type as fast as most people can speak.

Second, this type of work, while low-paid compared to what Tina and I can command as technical editors or project managers, could be a convenient addition to The Copyeditor’s Desk’s repertoire. If we can pick up some work doing medical transcription at a hospital or big medical center and then let it be known what we really are, it could open the door to medical editing work. And that’s just the sort of thing we do best.

Thus on two fronts I can see this certificate program as worth the cost, whatever the cost may be. I think the S-corp can afford to pay my tuition, but I’ll have to check with the accountant to see if it’s OK for the corporation to foot the bill for its slave’s voc-ed training.

On other fronts, a notice came in the mail that as a member of a broad class I’m eligible for a $7.50 settlement in a class action suit against New Horizon, late the holder of a small HELOC I paid off and canceled some time ago. Well. $7.50 (less the cost of the stamp, less the cost of the envelope) is better than nothing, I guess. It’ll buy a cup of café Americano at Starbucks, anyway.

Exactly what the cause was, I can’t discern well. Apparently it had something to do with the way New Horizon told customers the due date for payments was later than the actual date by which payments had to be posted to avoid finance charges. I never borrowed much on it—it served as a line of credit. When I was thinking about using it to finance the improvements M’hijito and I made on the downtown house, I called to confirm that the impression I’d been given, to the effect that the variable interest rate was capped at around 8.3 percent. Wrong! The not-very-friendly customer disservice rep I reached informed me that it could go as high as 21 percent!!!!!

Holy mackerel. Think of 21 percent interest on the $30,000 we needed…. What a rip! I canceled the line of credit and took out a second from the credit union, which I paid off from the proceeds of the noonlighting jobs I took up when it became apparent the university was about to shut down my office and can us all.

I don’t think I pulled that 8.3 percent figure out of the air; indeed, I distinctly remember asking the broker, with whom I’d done business before, how high the interest on that HELOC could go. So IMHO a certain amount of misrepresentation was going on there. But it must be admitted, I did not take off my glasses and hold each and every one of the eight or ten pages crammed with 8-point type up to my nose and read it. So: my bad.

La Bethulia left for California this morning, whereat La Maya already is encamped.

Naturally, one of La Bethulia’s brand-new tires picked up a nail yesterday afternoon, so she had the privilege of spending an hour or two after work at Discount getting that fixed. I ran over to the eyeglasses place, which closed at 6:00 p.m., to pick up La Maya’s new pair of prescription shades, which she will need on the beach, and La Bethulia came by on her way home to snag those.

Remains to be seen whether they ever get to the beach. La Maya left for the Imperial Valley a week or ten days ago, on news that her mother is dying. The entire family has been gathered around the bedside for all this time. The old gal rallied, after a fashion, but now she can’t walk at all. She’s stopped eating and drinking, and they expect her to pass any time. They’ve called in hospice, which is a mercy, and now they’re all just waiting.

La Bethulia and La Maya had, long ago, arranged their vacation in San Diego.  So La B went over to set up shop in the condo they’re renting, and La Maya probably will join her there. Maybe. It’s only about an hour and a half from Brawley, where the Maya family homestead stands, and so she figures that if things stabilize, she’ll be able to spend at least a little time in San Diego.

Pool guy just called! He’s on his way over right now, craving to get done with work early so he can head off for his own vacation at Huntington Beach. So…he will lighten my load by about $150 to $200. Let’s hope it’s not more than that, which it certainly could be.

The beach. Gosh. Think of that. I will never see a beach again. Too bad: I love the ocean, having grown up next to one. Oh well. Keep saying it: that’s a want, not a need.

Sooo cranky in the heat and the humidity and the short, short nights of sleep. Each day seems full of don’t-wannas: don’t wanna grade papers, don’t wanna be at work at 7:00 a.m., don’t wanna stand in front of classes four & a half hours straight, don’t wanna wrestle with the pool, don’t wanna do the yard work, don’t wanna clean house, don’t wanna drive around the city in the heat, don’t wanna  listen to Cassie yap, don’t wanna diet, don’t wanna spend any more money on expensive little “emergencies,” don’t wanna don’t wanna don’t wanna be in Phoenix in the summertime…

Spent a good 90 minutes or two hours as dawn cracked this morning, hacking away at the cat’s claw vines that have made good progress in their campaign to consume the pool equipment. They’d recovered, with a vengeance, from my last attack on them, earlier this spring when the Leslie’s guy came round to clean out the filter for the summer season. What a job!

Well, this will be convenient: I’m running low on food and had planned to race out to a grocery store this morning. Since the guy was scheduled to show up between noon and 5:00 p.m., that would have given me about two hours to do the several hours of running that awaits, and so I figured I wouldn’t be able to get all the stuff I really need. Now I should be able to pick up food and gear and finish grading most of the stoont papers today.

And so…to quit procrastinating.

Still Pouring Out There…

by

Geez. It never rains but it pours. So they say.

Paycheck for these past two weeks posted (but not received by my bank until tomorrow): $200 less than expected.

Bill for car repair posted on American Express: $786.58.

I don’t have that much left in emergency savings, so about $90 of it will have to come out of cash flow. But it doesn’t stop there:

Rip-off to register the car: $72.56.

Rip-off for car emission test: $27.75.

Fortunately, exclusive of the unexpected car repair bill, I came in $55 under budget this month, for the first time in recorded memory. So despite the $787 car bill and the $140 in repairs on the pool equipment and the $95 to the electrician to repair the shorted, overheating light switch, and the $140.76 in medical bills not covered by Medicare, I have yet to overdraw my checking account.

Barely. Give it time, though. Today is only the 27th. This month has 31 days. Plenty of time for some new expensive fiasco to occur.

It’s clear now that we won’t be receiving next month’s Social Security checks. Bloody lucky thing I managed to land these two summer classes; tomorrow’s paycheck is just about the amount of a Social Security payment. It will tide me over August.

September, however, is a different matter: I stashed enough in my son’s and my joint account for mortgage payments to cover the summer, but in September I have to start coming up with $717/month again. And if those bastards in Washington haven’t gotten off the dime, I won’t be able to pay it.

Well. I will, but it will mean my savings to survive on for the next year will quickly disappear.

Damn it. Even when I manage to keep day-to-day spending well within the budget, I’m still swimming in red ink!

Image: Rain from a thunderstorm over Fogg Dam. Bidgee. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Making $7,390 stretch for a year…and living decently

by

Okay, so just now $7,390 is left of the $28,000 of layoff savings that I entered unemployment with 18 months ago. This little stash, which I found sitting in my various bank accounts as my fine former job wound to a close, has been supporting me, along with Social Security and the irregular pittance I earn as an adjunct professor of English, while I try to delay having to draw down my IRA and brokerage accounts.

It’s lasted longer than anyone thought it would, and with any luck at all, it’s about to last another year.

The other day I revisited my ultracomplicated cash flow scheme, largely because I need to find a way to extract more monthly spending money from this Pushmi-Pullyu. The truth is, I’m not giving myself enough to live on comfortably. It was tight when I started a year and a half ago, but the increases in food and fuel costs (not inflation, right?), along with a never-ending slew of unplanned expenses, lately have made it impossible to stay on budget. I’ve been allocating $800 for discretionary expenses (a total of $2050 a month for all expenses, discretionary and fixed), when the fact is I really need something more like $1,500, for a total of around $2,750.

Unless a miracle happens (for example, I land that one-year-only job or, more likely, win the lottery), not only am I never going to earn any more than the $19,200 I’m making this year, my earned income actually is going to drop $2,400, because of the recently announced tightening of the noose around the adjuncts’ necks.

That means, I guess, the allocation from this serendipitous little “survival fund” will have to be adjusted.

Also, I’d like to simplify my bookkeeping.

What I have been doing is when money comes in, I transfer some of it to the joint account from which M’hijito and I pay the mortgage on the submerged house, transfer some of it to a self-escrow account for paying insurance and tax bills, transfer some into a short-term emergency and diddle-it-away fund, keep some of it in my checking account, and transfer $1060 from the survival fund to make up the shortfall between income and outgo. This complex shuffle no longer suffices to cover expenses. Way complicated!

So, I’ve cooked up something slightly different. In some ways, it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other (or, could we say, robbing Peter to pay Paul?). But it’ll give me a little bit more money—raising the discretionary budget to about $1,100 most (but not all) months—and the process will be simpler. I can’t afford the amount I actually need, but even a little increase will help.

Instead of moving money from Survival Savings to checking in amounts that supplement Social Security and teaching  pay, I’m going to go the other way around: move every penny of income—Social Security, teaching, bank heists, windfalls—from checking to Survival Savings. Then, once a month, I’ll pay myself $2,300. If any cash is left from the previous month’s budget, I’ll just “top up” the checking account to reach a base figure of $2,300.

This gives me a raise of about $250 a month, which I hope will cover the increase in routine expenses.

The problem with figuring out whether this will work and what it will do to the Survival Fund’s longevity is the extreme irregularity and unpredictability of adjunct income. From pay period to pay period, I rarely know what my check is going to hold. One week I can get $300, and two weeks later it’ll be $800 or $1,000, with no clear rhyme nor reason. HR seems not to know how to figure out what one will be paid, and not being an accountant, I can’t even make an educated guess. All I know is that during the summer when I most need extra money, my teaching pay drops into the basement, and during the month between fall and spring semesters I get nothing.

The only way to project the effectiveness of this scheme—and the length of time the Survival Fund will last—is to enter 2010-11 pay amounts into a spreadsheet showing how the new transfer scheme will work.

The upshot is surprisingly positive. Well…all things considered. Transfers into and out of Survival Savings  look like this:

If my amazingly tedious calculations are correct, Survival Savings will run out in August 2012. At that time, I’ll have to cash in a whole life policy; the post-tax balance from that will probably stretch another year or 18 months. After that…well, let’s hope the stock market is doing OK, because at that point I’ll have to start drawing down investments.

During the winter break and the month or so of summer that I’ll have no income, I’ll have to drop my living-expenses budget back to its present level, $2,090. This will be difficult next summer, because utilities are so high during the heat and because, as we’ve observed for the second summer running, everything goes wrong when you can least afford it. However…that comes under the heading of tough nougies.

If all this comes to pass as estimated (a very big If, indeed), then I should be able to live adequately and pay my share of the mortgage without exhausting Survival Savings until a year from this August. Might even be able to stretch it out for another month or two, if I can keep expenses significantly under $2,300 for several of the cooler months. That’s not unreasonable; when nondiscretionary bills are at their lowest, I can have a surplus of $300 or $400. Four of those would keep that $7,390 grubstake going through September.

Obviously, I’m not thrilled at the precariousness of this system. On the other hand… I feel like it’s really not too bad. If in fact the insurance payout will last another 18 months or so, then I will have succeeded in pushing back the time I’ll have to draw down investments for four years after Canning Day.

Those investments have about recovered their former, pre-Crash glory. Assuming our esteemed leaders don’t bring on another market crash with their grandstanding shenanigans, a 4 or 5 percent drawdown plus Social Security (assuming, again, that it still exists in 2013 or so) should cover my expenses and pay the mortgage—without benefit of flakey part-time teaching income.

The Weirdness That Is Adsense

by

I enjoy exploring the mazes of Google Adsense’s labyrinthine reports and policies. Adsense has been phasing in a new reporting system, which provides a lot more information than the older system did—or at least, it provides it more accessibly. It’s full of curiosities.

Every now and again, you’ll see things in it that are truly mysterious.

One of the things they can do now is to identify the type of computer that was used to access a page. If you select “Performance Reports” and then click on “Platforms,” Google can actually tell you how many views of your site were made by people with desktops, mobile devices, etc. This amazes me (also creeps me out a bit: who needs Google spying on you in quite that much detail?).

Over the past week, for example, FaM readers viewed 563 of Funny’s pages with “high-end mobile devices.” Some of them apparently clicked on ads, since they generated a couple of bucks this week. The first time I discovered this Adsense Reports blandishment, a few people had been accessing the site through their mobile gadgets, but none of them were rising to any advertiser’s bait. Now, though, apparently some of them are biting.

Meanwhile, 5,005 pages were viewed from desktops. Unclear whether a “high-end mobile device” can be a laptop, or whether “desktop” = a big clunker on your desk or something like a MacBook, which today has more power and speed than my immobile iMac.

Equally unclear what is meant by “unmatched ad requests,” a line that appears on the “Platform” page. Whatever it is, it can’t be very significant: it always registers “0.”

Adsense kindly includes a sort of glossary with its reports page—it’s really an agglomeration of FAQs, I think. Look up “unmatched ad request” and you get the answer to some customer’s question about why this item appears in his reports:

An ad request is counted each time your site requests an ad to be served, even if no ad is returned. Unless your coverage is 100%, you will have more ad requests than matched requests (ads that are returned and displayed on your site), resulting in some unmatched requests.

Some reports have columns that are meaningful only for matched requests. For example, the Targeting type report shows how ads displayed on your site have been targeted. When an ad request is unmatched, there are no ads to consider, so the request has no targeting type. This is why unmatched requests appear in a separate row.

Uhm…yeah. Doesn’t that just clear everything up for you?

Oh well.

Moving on, the Biggest Mystery of Adsense—at least for my feeble little brain—is why some days and some weeks vast lucre (oh, say, $1.95 a day!) comes pouring in, and at other times pay is in pennies. The past two or three weeks, FaM has been cranking more pennies than usual (??? in the dead of summer when readers should be vacationing at the beach?????). But last month it didn’t earn enough to get Adsense off its duff to send a payment. I can’t for the life of me figure out what I’m doing (if I’m doing anything) to cause Adsense revenues to increase in some weeks and flatten out in others.

It does seem as though spikes in revenues may increase when you discuss certain topics. For example, the current increase seems to have occurred around the time I was holding forth about credit cards. A bunch of ads for banks, credit cards, loan sharks, and the like came up (at least, they did on my computer—apparently these things are tailored according to what Google can see of your browsing habits as it spies on you). Maybe ads from well-heeled institutions pay better…i.e., maybe Google charges ING more than it charges some local air-conditioning or pool company and then passes a few pennies of the profit along to the site publisher???

LOL! That would explain why some bloggers create whole sites devoted to nothing but discussing credit cards. 😀 Boooooring, but profitable.

Adsense has performed moderately well over the past week. Not well enough to retire to the Côte d’Azur, by any means, but well enough that if I could be certain it would behave this way all the time, the S-corporation that receives the vast lucre could afford to buy me a cell phone.

{sigh} But I’m afraid it’s just like adjunct teaching: catch as catch can.

 

 

Pupple!

by

M’hijito sends a photo of his Intended Puppy, below.

{click to enlarge}

Ain’t he cute? He comes home to M’hijito’s house next weekend.