Okay, so we all remember how Chuck, the redoubtable owner of Chuck’s (Awesome, Incredible) Auto Service, opined that the work needed to keep the aged Dog Chariot running would come to some $1,300. And how this led me to speculate that now may be the time to raid my Car Savings and purchase something newer, jazzier, and more fuel-efficient.
Well. Yesterday the Chariot had its second major surgery down at the car hospital, and the mechanics handed over their bill:
$786. And change.
Say what?“Did you include the price for fixing the oil leak last week?”
“Yup. This is the total.”
Good thing I didn’t decide to trade the thing in, eh?
My decision to keep it was based on the theory that $1,300 is a far cry from the $20,000+ a new car will cost. Think of how much farther a cry $786 is!
Awesome! This will mean I just may not have to raid the long-term living expenses fund to pay the bill.
I’ve got about $538 left in the budget, to last 22 days. That’s more than enough if I don’t eat out or diddle away money on clothes or buy booze or indulge in any similar distractions. Somehow I think I can get restrain myself for three weeks. Let’s say I have $200 left from the regular discretionary budget by the end of the June/July cycle: that leaves $586 to scrounge up somewhere.
Conveniently, about $1,700 remains in emergency savings, despite the dental bills, a large chunk of which were paid for out of that cookie jar. Of course I don’t want to draw it down by $600 (give or take). But I certainly can. It gets replenished at the rate of $200 a month, so if no more ridiculous things happen (yeah…), it will be back to normal in three months and looking flush in four or five months.
Meanwhile, the boys down at Chuck’s believe the car will run pretty much trouble-free for another 50,000 miles. One of them thinks it could run well for another 100,000 miles!
I put about 10,000 miles a year on a car. At that rate, the Dogmobile will last another five years.
In five years, I’ll be 71 years old (holy gawd!). If I buy a new car then, it should run at least ten or twelve years, maybe longer. By then, it’ll be time to quit driving.
In other words, if the Dog Chariot runs another five years, the next car really will be the last car I’ll have to buy. Hallelujah!
Not that I’m in any hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil… But among my favorite things to do, buying cars ranks up there with…oh, having a root canal without anaesthetic. I just loathe dealing with car salesmen. Much, much worse than dentists!
And…I have enough savings to buy one, count it, (1), more vehicle in my lifetime. If I buy a car now, it probably won’t last until I’m forced to get off the road. Unless things magically get a lot better (and between you and me, I believe the exact opposite is in the works), I can’t imagine how I could possibly come up with the cash to buy even a second-hand car in 2021.
So, driving the Chariot until it falls apart like the Minister’s One-Hoss Shay is going to work out. Very nicely.
This afternoon KJG happened to mention that she came across an incredible way to get those dratted clear glass shower doors really clean—and do it without working yourself to death. She’d heard you could use Jet-Dry, the blue rinse agent that goes in the dishwasher, to cut soap film in the bathroom.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained…last night in a moment of boredom she poured some on a sponge and slathered it generously over the shower door where her DH loves to splash suds around. Then she rinsed it off.
And to her amazement, the glass came totally clean. With no scrubbing!
This has been a well-encrusted shower door, she says, one that she hasn’t been able to fully de-soapify in years.
So. Try this.
If you have clear instead of frosted shower doors, be aware that some clear doors have a coating that’s supposed to repel soap scum. If yours is one of those, you might want to be careful about smearing Jet-Dry on it—the stuff is pretty strong. Test it in a small corner first. Wear a pair of rubber gloves to protect your skin, and be very careful not to let it splash near your eyes. The manufacturer pointedly does not list the ingredients (what are they trying to say to us?), but the fumes are unpleasant, IMHO, suggesting the stuff is not something you’d want to wallow around in.
Wiping with a Magic Eraser is said to help, too.
Once the shower door is clean, you can make it soap-scum repellant by adding a coat of Rain-X, the water repellant made to go on car windshields.
Funny is celebrating the Fourth of July by hosting the Totally Money Carnival. Today among other things I’ll be spending some time viewing the posts that have already come in. Submissions are open until 6:00 p.m. Sunday, Central Daylight Time. So be sure to submit your best and totally money story through this handy form.
Urkl. The workload during the present “vacation” has been so outrageous I haven’t sent any of my own pieces to carnivals for several weeks. Nor, for that matter, have I written much that could reasonably be accused of falling into the “personal finance” category. 🙄
Worse, I haven’t had time to read many of my favorite blogs, or comment on them. Blogger’s new scheme to force readers to create their own Blogger site before they’ll let you comment has discouraged me from reading and commenting on blogs in general, mostly because many of my favorite sites are on Blogger. This started at Frugal Scholar, who’s adventuring in Nantes just now. Be sure to keep an eye on that site for updates.
At a Gai Shan Life, where Blogger also has decided to block comments from non-members, Revanche pauses in her wedding plans to reflect on the cost of adopting a dog—a cost she detailed a few days ago. LOL! Dogs do cost a ton of money. Sounds like Revanche and PiC’s new critter, though, is worth it.
Donna Freedman has posted a number of interesting pieces since last I visited my friends. Here it is, almost the Fourth of July, and she’s already thinking about Christmas giving. Possibly this is a way of deflecting thoughts about the death of a beloved aunt and that lifelong loneliness we suffer when we lose our loved ones.
At the Digerati Life, SVB compares public school and private school costs. Public schools in California are getting expensive, what with taxpayer revolts and the general collapse of the body politick there.
Hm. Speaking of home-schooling and other parental eccentricities, Five-Cent Nickel reports that the new credit-card law will make it difficult or impossible for a stay-at-home parent to get a credit card in her or his name. As some readers there comment, it also will put abused women at even more risk and make it harder for them to escape their abusers. Thank you very much, O infinitely wise leaders!
Free Money Finance contemplates the possibility of living the royal life on $900 a month. Would you be willing to do what it takes to make that possible?
And speaking of parenting, Evan recently celebrated his first Father’s Day. As a dad, that is.
Mrs. Accountability ponders the art and science of filling out business deposit slips, and along the way drops a couple of amazing factoids about the strange things people will do.
Brip-Blap remarks that he feels he’s about plateaued out with blogging about PF issues. Sustainable living is beginning to interest him more…check out the cool lawn chairs he rescued and fixed up.
Check out the amazingly ambitious Crystal’s new blog—as if Budgeting in the Fun Stuff and several other enterprises weren’t enough, she’s created a new site called (ta da!) How I Make Money Blogging. LOL! Maybe I should start one called “How I Make Money Editing.” 😀
At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail and Tim are closing in on a smokin’ deal on a house. They’ve been house-hunting for a while in Phoenix’s surprisingly hot low-end market: speculators now believe prices have hit rock-bottom and now are bidding up prices in a new frenzy to get into the rental or fix-&-flip market. And here’s a new refinement of the “you can’t post here unless…” phenomenon: her host thinks I’m still logged in as my WordPress alternative to Blackboard, a site URL I do not care to publicize. Even though I’m actually logged off of WordPress.com, it insists that I have to sign up for something called “Intense Debate” to avoid posting under my course’s URL. Jeez!
Maybe I’m too cranky about this. But you know, it’s like being asked to carry around yet another “member” card to get a fair price on goods at grocery stores. My wallet is so stuffed with those things I break my fingernails on them trying to get out a credit card. I’ve stopped shopping in stores that demand that I fill out yet another form with personal information that’s none of their business. There’s a limit. And I’m at my limit for filling out forms for online sites, too. No more of that!
Welp, speaking of making money editing, now that I’ve finally shoveled the last big project off my desk, I’ve gotta spend half the day catching up with the bookkeeping and paying bills. So…it’s off to see the Wizard (the online QuickBooks wizard, that is).
So the new strategy to stand upwhile working in front of a computer is now under way. It occurred to me to wonder if standing and thinking might burn more calories than sitting and thinking. Here’s what the Web says:
So. Each day one restrains oneself from quaffing one’s favorite brew and stands up in front of the computer for eight hours, one deletes 233 calories from one’s daily pack-it-in activities. Put another way, one beer = 1 hour and 55 minutes of standing on one’s feet.
On the other hand, one bourbon-&-water costs you only 52 minutes of labor in front of the computer.
Interesting. I don’t expect we’re supposed to be looking at it that way, are we?
Cassie the Corgi fell in the drink this afternoon. Squirreling around with the ball, she tumbled right in. And oh! The terror!
This little dog hates water so much that if she sees a sprinkler while we’re walking, she’ll insist on crossing over to the other side of the street. And if you think dogs don’t feel emotions like humans do, you needed to be here to see the look of raw fear in her eyes.
WTF?
Fortunately, she was so close to the edge that all I had to do was reach over, grab a few hairs on her mane, and guide her over to the steps, where she soon found her footing. And then she was a very, very, very disgusted dog.
Naturally, I’d washed the dog towels, having laundered the dog herself not so long ago. Didn’t notice that after I’d put them on the line, they slipped off and fell on the deck. So when I went to retrieve them, they were lying on the planks in a wet heap, useless. Had to press some human towels into service.
And naturally, it’s 6:00 in the evening, and so she’s still going to be wet by bed-time. This animal’s coat is so thick that when she gets soaked to the skin, it takes her six or eight hours to dry out. So I’ll have to find something for her to lay on that will protect the mattress. {sigh}
Knowing how much she hates water and also knowing that she never lets me out of her sight when we’re in the yard, I’ve been lazy about teaching Cassie to paddle over to the steps, where she can get out of the pool by herself. And indeed, when she fell in, she was right under my feet. In fact, for a while there she was giving me the evil eye…I think she thinks I kicked her in there.
When the puppy gets here, she is going to need to know how to get out of the pool. The first thing that’s gonna happen is that little critter is going to tip her right over into the water. In fact, they’ll probably both fall in. So…I’ve got about six weeks in which to teach this dog to swim. We’ll be starting the first thing in the morning.
Then we’ll have to train the pup to swim out, too.
Hm. This may not be a great idea…
Oh, the dog? Never fear. She’s none the worse for wear.
I'll live to eat again! Soooooonnnn!
Before she’d even shaken the last of the water out of her fur and onto the kitchen cabinetry, she was back in business…
Once again we’re reminded of how unhealthy it is for us to spend most of our waking hours seated at a desk or loafing in our favorite easy chair. The latest report tells us a 14-year study showed women participants who spent six or more hours a day sitting down were 40% more likely to croak over prematurely than women who spent the time standing or moving around; men got lucky this time—the sitting male is only 20% more likely to die.
Six hours? Six hours?? Would that I could get off my duff after only six hours! Dunno about you, but between blogging, editing, and grading papers, I spend eight to ten hours a day, every day—that’s seven days a week—sitting in front of a computer. That would be in normal times; get a crunch, and you can revise that figure upward to twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours. Easily.
We’re told, too, that no amount of exercise reverses the damage done by this habit. Holy mackerel. I’m doomed.
This is an issue that’s been nibbling at the periphery of my consciousness for quite some time. It doesn’t take a controlled scientific study to tell you sitting on your duff all day long ain’t natural and cain’t be good for you. For the privilege of loafing in front of a computer exercising my fingers ten to twenty hours a day, I’m paying in pounds. I’m getting fatter and fatter and fatter.
Nothing very abrupt: just a very, very slow but steady accretion of love handles and belly fat and tight, tight jeans.
When your size 12 jeans are too tight, you know you’ve got a problem…
I keep telling myself I’m going to go on a diet, going to set a timer to go off every twenty minutes and make myself get up and stretch or walk around the house, going to take the dog for 30- to 40-minute walks twice a day, going to bicycle every day, going to swim 20 laps every day… Right. Well. Tomorrow, for sure.
All those promises go into the same trash barrel, along with the New Year’s resolutions and the good intentions.
Killer app?
The problem is the computer. It’s like a magnet. I can’t stay away from it, even when I’m not actually working. First thing in the morning, I stumble across the four feet between the bedroom and the office, turn the damn thing on, read the mail, read the Play-Nooz, write a blog post. Now it’s not the first thing in the morning anymore. And now it’s time to get down to work. Fix breakfast, throw down some food for the dog, and head back to the office to start computing for pay. When the work is done, do I get up and move around? Hell, no! I cruise the Web (StumbleUpon is one of my favorite toys), search my favorite news sites for the day’s most lurid stories, read other people’s blogs, comment on other people’s blogs, play Internet games, glance up at the clock…and it’s 11 p.m.! Haven’t had dinner, haven’t fed the dog, and most certainly have walked neither the dog nor me.
The computer is like the family TV of yore. Television was decidedly addictive. I knew people—many people—who ran it all the time, from the instant they rolled out of bed in the morning to the minute they went to bed. Some friends would have a TV in the bedroom, where they deliberately left it running as a lullaby to send themselves off to sleep—they’d put a timer on the thing so it would go off after they were out.
This, obviously, was not healthy. But the computer is worse, because it’s interactive. When a television is blathering, it’s sending its message at you: the noise and pictures are coming out of the set toward you, and your only task is to change the channel now and again. But, unless you’re running a movie or music, a computer demands that you physically be in front of it. To make it do its hypnotic thing, you have to be there feeding messages into it.
When I was a kid, my family had the television going all the time. It was on while we were cleaning house, on while we were cooking, on while we were washing dishes, on while we were ironing (to this day I can’t iron without a TV program to alleviate the boredom), on while we were eating, on while we were reading the papers, on while we were doing our homework, on while we were sewing or knitting or pasting photos in the family album, on while we were playing, on while we were talking (isn’t that quaint? In the olden days, family members conversed with each other). All of which is to say that the TV did not necessarily interfere with physical activity. In fact most of the time we were moving around the house while the boob tube was blathering on.
Okay. Flash forward to 2011. We now have these fundamental facts:
1. I am not gonna give up my computer habit. 2. None of us can give up our computer habit, because it’s now the basis of our lives and social interaction and, heaven help us, our livelihoods. 3. Whatever is to be done about the health effects has to be simple and easy to work into one’s daily routine…and that, I’m afraid, does not mean setting the kitchen timer to interrupt your train of thought every twenty to sixty minutes. 4. There actually is a very simple solution.
Yes. There is a simple solution:Stay off your duff while you’re in front of the computer!
Where does it say that you have to sit down to use your computer? You don’t. You can work on a computer standing up.
Instrument of death?
Before you fall off your well-worn chair laughing at this concept, consider:
Some years ago, I went through a spate of tenacious back pain. It hurt all the time, and it went on for so long I thought it was going to be a life-long problem that would never go away.
After a year or two of this, a friend who was a licensed massage therapist and yoga instructor started giving yoga classes at my house. The women in her group ranged from early middle age to their late 70s, and one gal was so overweight as to be disabled. All of us were beginners. So, as you can imagine, the level of the yoga we were doing wasn’t very strenuous.
I found that after a few weeks of this, the back started to feel a little better. If such mild exercise helped with that very stubborn pain, I figured, there must be other things I could do to fix it. Maybe there was something in my life that was contributing to the pain, and maybe I could change it. My attention turned to my daily habits.
And on inspection, what should I find but…yes! A threadbare desk chair. I realized that then, as now, I was spending uncountable numbers of hours in front of the computer, and as I was sitting there, I was slouching grotesquely, perched on my tailbone with my feet up on the desk and my head stuck forward, staring at the screen. Hour after hour after hour.
The execrable posture and the fact that I sat in the same bad-for-you position most of the day had to have some bearing on the back pain. How many chimpanzees spend their waking hours sprawled in a chair with their feet on their desk and all the weight of their bodies bearing down on their tailbones? This could not be natural.
Well, years before, my then-husband had a law associate who dealt with his own chronic back problems by working at a standing desk. The firm special-ordered him a beautiful standing desk—it was a handsome piece of furniture—and he claimed this kept the back pain under control.
Ordering up a standing desk from Thomas Moser was out of the question. I certainly couldn’t afford to spend upwards of $6,500 just to see if it would work. However, gathering dust out in the garage was an old drafting table we’d bought for our son when he was a little boy. A brief inspection revealed that the top, meant to be used at an angle, could be adjusted to lay flat—at a height that would let you stand up to work on a computer.
So I washed it down, dragged the thing back to my office, put it together, set it up, and voilà ! a standing computer table!
With my PC and keyboard perched on this thing, I had to stand up to work or play on the computer. A hard wooden stool, bought very cheap at one of those big linen & household goods stores that are now defunct, served as a perch when my feet started to ache.
And it worked! The back pain went away.
Soooo… Would the circulatory damage also go away (or not start) if a person worked standing up at a computer on a high table?
After the back had been feeling better for a good while, the table exited during a redecorating frenzy. The thing took up a lot of room and really made the office ugly and cramped. So I got rid of it.
Now, I guess, I need to get another one. Amazon has a similar model, only with a fake wood plastic veneer instead of a white plastic veneer. As you can see, these things give you a fairly roomy top—leave the pencil holder off, and you get an expansive flat workspace. The little shelf on the bottom is too flimsy to hold reference works and binders, as intended; but it works nicely as a footrest when you’re perched on a stool. Mine didn’t have that back thing, which would get in the way of your feet, but I’ll bet I could find one just like my old drafting table at an art store.
For the nonce, though, the solution is free: it’s called the kitchen counter. I’m working on a Macbook in the kitchen instead of on the aged iMac. In some ways, this is an improvement: the iMac is so old it won’t take Snow Leopard, and so I can’t load Lion into it, either. It runs at the speed of a galloping snail, which is one reason I pass so many hours in front of the computer: much of that time is spent watching the computer grind away…and grinding my teeth as it grinds its silicon innards. The MacBook runs like a rocket, by comparison.
Yesterday I read 60 pages of a new client’s copy—about five or six hours of work—while standing at the kitchen counter.
Sounds awful, doesn’t it? But not only wasn’t it awful, it had these salubrious effects:
• Forthwith I found that because I was standing up, I was inclined to take occasional breaks for short yoga exercises.
• All the time I was standing there, weight was bearing down on the osteopenic bones in a non-impact way. That’s exactly what your skeleton needs as it ages.
• Before long I realized I could practice balance exercises without interfering with work concentration. Get this: today I balanced on one foot for a full minute without teetering, and in fact quit only out of boredom, not because I fell over. This is huge for old ladies. And for men, gentlemen: you can fall and break your hip, too.
• I got through the work faster. A lot faster. Because I wasn’t loafing in a chair, I was less inclined to wander off to cruise the net, so I stayed on task longer. And because this computer runs faster, much less time was wasted on waiting for things to happen.
• The kitchen got cleaned the first thing in the morning—who wants to look at a dirty dish while they’re working?
This could work.
Eventually, if I decide it’s a healthy thing to make permanent, I’ll have to get a new drafting table for the office. The kitchen counter is a little low for comfort, and it’s inconvenient to have the printer in the other room. For the moment, though, setting the MacBook’s cardboard carrying box under it holds it at the right height.
I think if I’m going to shove a tall table in the office, I’d like to get rid of the old furniture, replace the clunky old desk with a couple of lateral files, and go considerably minimalist. Less junk is better.
