Take time out of your busy day, or your relaxing day, to remember those whose sacrifice made it possible for us all to be busy or relaxed in freedom, and those who as we pass our day in peace at home are at the fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
To get your mind around the enormity of war, take a look at this mix of image and fact by author Robert M. Poole (On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery) and design studio Rumors.
A fair amount of comment spam is getting through my current spam filter. Besides the annoyance factor, dealing with this issue is starting to waste way too much time. So, in the next day or two I’m going to reactivate Akismet, a highly effective spam filter.
That plug-in has throttled FaM in the past. Akismet has issued a couple of updates since I deactivated it, so I hope the problem has resolved itself. But there’s a chance it will take FaM down, and if so, it may require some time to get BlueHost on the phone to fix it.
So if you drop by and get an error message or some such, don’t give up. Come back later—the problem will be temporary.
I really have no business thinking about this thing. Just a couple of months ago I bought a Eureka Boss Smart-Vac Upright HEPA Vacuum Cleaner at Fry’s Electronics. Bad move: whereas the Eureka does not suck (literally!), Fry’s return policy decidedly does. I just hate the Eureka. And I hate taking things back to Fry’s so violently that I’m resigned to keeping the piece of junk, or donating it to Goodwill.
Hate, loathe, and despise it! The Eureka is so heavy I work up a sweat pushing it around the all-tile floors in this house—and that was before I dislocated my shoulder. With the arm out of whack, I couldn’t use it at all. It doesn’t pick up. You have to pass the thing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and FORTH over small particles of debris before they get lifted from the floor. It has no suction at all around the front and sides, so you have to use the hose and attachment to vacuum along the baseboards. All the baseboards. Every. single. goddamn. baseboard. It’s so wide you can’t get it around the furniture or squeeze it between the toilet and the bathroom cabinetry. And the foot lever is so stiff I have to wear a sturdy pair of clodhoppers to operate it—you can NOT push the foot lever barefooted or in flip-flops. To snap the machine back up into its upright position after vacuuming, I have to roll it up against a wall, brace it firmly, and then shove it into place hard; otherwise I can’t get it to pop it upright to put it away.
Disgusted—and needing to vacuum the floors willy nilly, sore arm or no sore arm—I repaired the broken handle on my good old Panasonic with soft felt fabric and yards of duct tape (the home handyman’s secret weapon!), relegating the new junk to the garage. So now it’s functioning again.
But the Panasonic is really old. Sooner or later it’s going to give up the proverbial ghost. Feeling a little stung after the Eureka débâcle, especially since Consumer Reports puffed the thing, I hesitate to run out and buy another vacuum cleaner. At least not without some real-life reports from people who have actually used it in their homes.
Do you have any experience with theShark Navigator? If so, do tell…in the comments below, please! 🙂
In my usual OCD way, I continue to worry about how I’m going to make it through the summer. With no idea when the surprise reimbursement for the online course prep will happen, I’m not relying on that to underwrite the astronomical summer utility bills.
In a low-desert summer, power and water bills take off for Saturn’s orbit. If they weren’t already burdensome enough, both local power companies and the city water department hiked rates, so I’m figuring an extra 10 percent for both electric and water. Southwest gas also raised its rates; add another five or ten bucks there, too.
Meanwhile, in May the breathtaking costs for Medicare kick in. Part B—$110 a month—is deducted by the Feds from your Social Security check, commensurately reducing net income. The $20/month Medicare Part D plan I signed up for magically morphed into a $40 bill. The woman there had some excuse for this, but it was such double-talk I couldn’t follow her pitch, so just gave up. Though I paid upfront for a year’s worth of $90/month Medigap coverage, as a practical matter another $1080 to pay for next year’s bill will have to come from somewhere—make that $1080 and then some, because you know they’ll jack up the premium in 2011. So I’m having to self-escrow that out of cash flow. These two costs plus the $200 monthly savings and the $325/month self-escrow to cover property tax, homeowner’s insurance, and car insurance raise the monthly nonnegotiable expenses from $800 to $1240. That’s if the lawn man doesn’t show up.
Even that is a little short. Budgeted power and water bills are based on past high watermarks. But the fact is, those are way past watermarks. I’ve been figuring $225 for power and $125 for water. Last summer’s highest bills, though, came in August: $257 for electric and $133 for water. Add about 10 percent for the rate increases, and you get estimated August bills of $282 and $146, respectively. The grayed-out items below represent estimated figures for statements that have yet to come in.
Two things are saving me this year: a rainy winter drove cool-season water bills as low as $57, and learning to live in a cold house produced four months of $60 to $70 electric bills, both well under budget. So there’s some cushion in the checking account to cover the summer’s astronomical costs.
However, everybody has their hand in my pocket. Three years ago, when I had a decent income, I pledged $100 a year, for three years, to Andrea’s Closet. They neglected to bill me last year, but now that I’m unemployed and about to be broke, they want their money. I guess I’m going to have to pony it up, since I said I would, but it’s going to make things awfully tight. Charity’s dandy, but not when you need some yourself…
Well OK, I don’t. But it still frosts my cookies. I wish I’d just given them the three hundred bucks then, rather than going along with their pledging strategy.
Anyway, as you can see, I should make this month’s budget with about $5 to spare. That’s if the lawn dude doesn’t show up. And assuming I don’t pay Andrea’s Closet…
But of course, Gerardo the Lawn Dude is going to have to show up, because the damnable palm trees are already sprouting spikes from which to launch their pool-clogging blossoms. Even if I don’t let him do any clean-up, he or one of his compatriots will have to climb into the trees and cut that stuff out, to the tune of about $200. So at least one month this summer—undoubtedly June—is going to end in the red.
According to my ditzy calculations, there should be enough to carry me through the summer, if no major expenses arise and if I can manage to do most of my own lawn and pool work. Big, big if.
If the college actually pays the $2,400 that was bandied about, I figure the net should be around $1,920. That plus the alleged $400 end-of-summer remainder would come to $2,320, a pretty comfortable amount of play.
But it remains to be seen whether that comes to pass.
at Fry’s Electronics. Bad move: whereas the Eureka does not suck (literally!), Fry’s return policy decidedly does. I just hate the Eureka. And I hate taking things back to Fry’s so violently that I’m resigned to keeping the piece of junk, or donating it to Goodwill.
