Spent half the morning paying some more dumb tax. 🙄 Last night not one but two amorous gentleman crickets took up residence in the family room, where they filled the night air with serenades to every lady cricket within miles. At night, when it’s quiet and still, these elegant little bugs sound less cheery than they do in the daytime and more, well…like they’re screaming.
Even with the bedroom door shut, way down at the other end of the house, their shrill fiddling kept me awake. Wide awake.
Interestingly, they can sense you approaching, even if you sneak up on them quiet as a stalking cat. As soon as you get close enough to maybe spot where they’re hiding, they clam up. So I couldn’t find them…were they in the fireplace? in the cracks around the Arcadia door? in the plant pots? They were impossible to find.
Finally I gave up, tromped out to the garage, and grabbed a can of bug spray.
I hate bug spray. I hate the stink of the stuff, hate the way it makes my stomach upset, hate having it anywhere near the dog, hate using it near the bug-eating geckos around the yard, and especially hate using it inside the house. But the hour was growing later and later, I wasn’t getting any sleep, and I couldn’t see any other way to shut the critters up. So I tried to restrain myself, spraying it only where I thought they probably were ensconced.
Even a little of a bad thing is too much of a bad thing.What a stench!
The dog and I raced to the bedroom and slammed the door, hoping to keep the fumes out. This worked marginally. We were trapped, but at least we weren’t gagging in there. And the noise quieted down enough for me to get to sleep.
Come this morning, though…ugh! The front part of the house still stank to high heaven.
So, by dawn’s early light I was throwing open all the windows and doors, turning the fans to “tornado,” and scrubbing the floor on hands and knees. Scrubbed the floor twice with Simple Green and vinegar but still didn’t get all the stinky stuff up.
The smell still lingers, to some degree. It’ll be a day or two, I suppose, before it’s no longer noticeable to the human schnozz. Who knows how long a dog can smell it?
So annoying. I wish there was a better way to do in a noisy cricket. If you can’t catch it, swat it, or vacuum it, you’re kinda stuck with applying noxious chemicals.
One site I found said diatomaceous earth will kill the little guys. The pool filter uses that stuff. I’m less than thrilled about getting it around the dog—it’s irritating to the nose and dangerous if you breathe it into your lungs. And it’s really messy…sprinkling it around the house seems kinda counterproductive.
Here’s some folksy-sounding advice: pour a little pile of cornmeal in the middle of a glue board, the type you use to catch mice and rats. Comes from the University of Nebraska, so who am I to argue? Still, it takes a couple of days. What does one do for sleep while waiting for the cricket to stroll onto the glue board?
For that matter, Rattie wasn’t fooled by glue boards. Is there a reason to expect a cricket is any less wiley than a roof rat?
Anybody got any better ideas?
Image: Gryllus assimilis (common black cricket), from Robert E. Snodgrass,
Insects: Their Ways and Means of Living. New York: Smithsonian Institution, 1930. Public domain.
It’s getting untenable. I can’t keep on doing this.
Don’t know how long “this” has gone on, but it feels like it’s been forever. I’m working ten, twelve, fourteen, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Maybe longer than that. It’s 3:30 in the morning. By the time I finish writing this post, it’ll be time to get up and get going. By “get up and get going” I mean feed the dog and myself and then come back to the computer. Don’t know what time I went to bed last night, but it was late. The “workshops” I’m having to take to earn another $2,400 this summer (one of several tasks that have to be done to show I have done the course prep for the online feature writing section) turn out not to be what I would think of as idle on-the-job training workshops, but actual courses.
Yes. Yesterday afternoon I arrived home at 5:00 p.m. with homework! As though I had time for anything above and beyond the four hours a day in the classroom this thing requires. The instructor expects a documented and cited research paper, due today! By the time I finished that and fell into bed, I was so exhausted I didn’t even remember to lock the damn back door. Wouldn’t the roving burglars have loved that, if they’d come a-visiting tonight?
I feel like I’m tethered to the computer. I’m not getting any exercise at all. Not that I would get much if I could break free from the keyboard for any length of time: ten minutes ago, when the dog went out into the wee-hours darkness, it was 90 degrees out there! In this heat, even a walk around the block is more than I can contemplate, to say nothing of climbing hills (not that I can afford $2 a day to get into the city park) and riding bicycles.
At least for godsake when I was schlepping to GDU I had to hike a half-mile in to the office and climb up a couple flights of stairs.
When I wake at three o’clock in the morning after three, maybe four hours of sleep, what’s roiling through my mind is the scalding question of what on earth I’m going to do when I can’t keep working like this. I can’t get by without the piddling income I’m earning. Financially I’m barely making it. But this can’t go on forever.
“Forever” is likely to be a lot shorter eternity than I planned: sooner or later this is going to make me sick.
And what am I doing it for? For fourteen flicking thousand bucks a year?
This is insane. I’m working 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a poverty wage? I’d do better cleaning house! At 80 bucks a day, I’d make $20,000 a year, much of it under the table. And get some exercise in the bargain. Figure in the state’s tax increase, and the 14 grand a year I’m earning now puts a munificent $10,780 in my pocket!
Or maybe this?
I guess what I’d better do is see if I can get some sort of menial job. That would gross $12,000 or $14,000, but I’d only have to work 8 hours a day at it, a big improvement on 16 hours.
Problem is, I’ll have to dumb down the résumé. How do I explain the kind of work I was doing at GDU without admitting to an advanced degree or two? No one is going to hire a Ph.D.—or even an M.A. or a B.A.—into the kind of job that earns minimum wage or less.
What do I have to show for all these health-crushing hours of work?
Yesterday, Funny made all of $10. Day before, it made something like 8 cents. Over the past week, it’s made a grandiose $52.23. Before we bitch too much about that, we must say that it hits the goal. To get me out of one section of freshman comp a year, FaM has to earn about $50 a week.
But to make it do that, I’m working a good six to eight hours a day on it! Eight hours a day to earn $2,600 a year?????
Editorial work earns a helluva lot more than that, but there’s almost none of it out there. By the hour it pays more, sure. But by the job? It pays about the same: I’m earning around $250 a month reading detective novels. Little other work to speak of is coming in.
Teaching a few adjunct courses, which believe me can easily absorb eight or ten hours a day, pays the 14 grand. So if you add up the teaching, the editing, and the blogging income, you come to something like $19,600. Gross. Cut 23% out of that and you get a take-home of $15,000. Since that exceeds the Social Security limitation, it’s a liability: it means a chunk of my Social Security income will be taken away, cutting the total gross to something more like $15,000. Even with the contract income going into the S-corporation, the teaching income alone exceeds the SS limitation.
Still, add the teaching and freelance income to the 15 grand of Social Security, and it’s almost not bad. But in a major American city, $30,000 is not good. It’s poverty-level income. I’m getting by, but just barely. All it will take is one major expense—replace the air conditioner, replaster the pool, reroof the house—and I’m screwed big time. And if something happens to to put me out of commission, like the fall that wrenched my arm out of its socket, the result will be the same: screwed, screwed, ge-screwed.
I’ve got to get a break from this grind. Last night I couldn’t even take Cassie to her agility training (there’s a break for you: running around a field with a dog in 100-degree heat!), because I had to write a research paper. Sunday I couldn’t go to church (again!!) because I had to finish a rush job for the detective-novel publisher. And work on the Carnival of Personal Finance.
Tomorrow Today (!) before the workshop, I have to drive across the city, to the tune of a quarter-tank of gasoline, to deliver the edited page proofs. With any luck, the detective-novel publisher have another book for me to read.
Speaking of books, these workshops put the eefus on my plan to wring a book out of FaM this summer. There’s plenty of content to do that, but nothing like enough time. I figured I’d better take the money from the college, because it’s a sure thing…who knows how much an obscure e-book would earn?
But though there’s some money coming in, it’s a dribble of pay compared to the amount of work I’m doing.
The problem here is I’m working about as unsmart as it’s possible to work. I’ve got to find a way to make a living that will pay the bills without expanding to fill every waking hour, including those insomniac hours that take place in the middle of the night. Even if it means waiting tables.
Images:
Waitress Taking an Order. Alan Light. Creative CommonsAttribution 2.0 Generic License
“I Should Like to Make My Own Living.” William Thomas Smedley. Cabinet of American Illustration, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. Public Domain.
Time for anotherCarnival of Personal Finance! This one is the 265th edition, and once again many a PF blogger has submitted their best choice of articles for this week. All of these are good reading, but a few jump out at me. I’ve tagged those Editor’s Choices with little red hearts: ♥
Enjoy!
♥♥♥
Round Pegs: Posts That Don’t Fit into Square Holes
Donna Freedman
Surviving and Thriving Malachi and mud
Research indicates that exposure to soil improves a person’s immune system and increases production of the feel-good chemical serotonin. No wonder gardeners and children always look so happy.
♥ Neal Frankle
Wealth Pilgrim Will I Lose My Home If I File Chapter 13 Bankruptcy?
Good question! Interesting article that discusses whether a person with overwhelming credit-card debt need even consider Chapter 13 in the first place.
Paul Williams
Provident Planning How to Get Out of Debt: Step 8 – Celebrate Milestones
During your journey to pay off your debt, it’s important to celebrate milestones. Taking time to celebrate will keep you motivated and help you reach your destination.
Miranda Marquit, guest post author
Good Financial ¢ents
Will Credit Inquiries Hurt Your Credit Score?
There are two main types of credit inquiry: “Soft” and “hard.” Find out which can damage your credit score.
Laura Adams
DINKS Finance How to Know If Refinancing Is Worth It,
Today’s historically low rates should pique your interest if you have a mortgage or are thinking about buying a home. Here are some tips to find out if it’s worth it 🙂
Credit Card Rewards
mbhunter
Mighty Bargain Hunter Rewards Giveth, and Rewards Taketh Away
Rewards programs just aren’t as rewarding as they used to be, unfortunately. The article explains why.
Silicon Valley Blogger
The Digerati Life Combine Credit Cards To Earn Up To 4% In Rewards
Some smart ways and strategies for using your credit cards. Make credit cards work for you, not against you!
Tim Chen
NerdWallet Credit Card Watch Chase Freedom—Now With More Confusion
Tim has made no secret about the fact that Chase Freedom isn’t one of his favorite cards. Chase goes out of its way to make this one of the most confusing credit card offers available—you have to opt-in to the rotating 5% reward programs each quarter, and they seem to like switching the reward program every year out of sheer boredom. Now they’re offering two different versions, to make it even harder to keep track of.
Barb Friedberg
Barbara Friedberg Personal Finance MBA Course: Investing & Portfolio Management-BONDS
Friedberg, a graduate level professor of business, has the advantage of being an educator. Her posts occasionally come direct from her graduate-level courses; this one is an example.
Mike Piper
Oblivious Investor American Funds in Your 401k or IRA
Mike asks whether the third-largest mutual fund company’s products are really a good bet.
Bret
Hope to Prosper My Visit with a Financial Advisor
Entertaining story about (yet another) encounter with a newbie in the finance industry.
2 Cents
Balance Junkie 10 Ways to Protect Yourself from a Double Dip There’s a lot of debate about whether or not we’re headed into a slowdown or a double dip recession. These suggestions will help you protect your money if the economy dips. If it doesn’t, you’ll still be in great shape!
♥ Tool Guy
Home Tool Review Best Place to Buy Used Tools.
Think of it, guys (and gals)…a whole blog on tools! Weirdly, most of the posts are pretty interesting. This one is useful, especially for single or newly single women who suddenly find themselves in a house or apartment that needs some DIY care.
♥ Guest Post by Rachelle (Landlord Rescue)
Money Smarts 10 Resources to Check Before Renting an Apartment
Proprietor Mike describes the author as “a real estate guru who works as a property manager.” Excellent list for prospective renters to check out—issues that you might not otherwise think about.
♥ Michael
The DoughRoller Which Netflix Plan is the Best Netflix Plan
A comprehensive and economical approach to determining which Netflix plan is the best bang for your buck. Very wiley!
Elle
Couple Money Extended Warranties for Video Game Consoles
Should you get an extended warranty for your PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or Nintendo Wii? Find out how you can run the numbers and see if extended warranties are a good deal for you. This is a good survey of what different warranties cover.
Adam
Money Relationship Spring Cleaning = Cash
Looking to scrounge up some extra cash? Check out this post to find out how to sell some of your junk for cash!
Mike
Saving Money Today Organizing 101: Filing Your Bills Neatly
You’ll never forget to pay another bill if you follow this simple system for organizing your bills.
Simon Zhen
Realm of Prosperity Unemployment” Is Life Giving You Lemons?
Includes a documentary video with a series of examples of people who took creative approaches to surviving unemployment.
Cara Henis
Taking Charge Fashionable Ways to Fight Identity Theft
A witty series of product reviews. Some of these gadgets are so hilarious you have to check the post date to be sure it’s not April 1.
Mr. Credit Card
Ask Mr. Credit Card Costco Membership Review
Overview of the benefits of Costco membership, with an assessment of the upgraded “Executive” membership
Kim at MMI
Blogging for Change What Does It Mean to Be ‘in Debt’?
Questions whether the extent of one’s debt should be taken into consideration when applying the term “in debt.”
Craig Ford
Money Help For Christians Christian Lending | Should Lending Be Abolished?
Craig ponders a mind-bending question: “If borrowing enslaves then why aren’t more people going after lenders?” This is a thoughtful rumination on whether Christians should lend or borrow at all.
Doc S
Finance Your Life Parents Make Bad Money Decisions
Doc S begins to realize that his aging parents are making questionable financial choices and worries about how to discuss it with them.
Miss Bankrupt
Miss Bankrupt Symptoms of a Shopaholic
Miss B does does a bit of research into a pop-psych condition.
Bucksome
Buck$ome Boomer’s Journey to Retirement An Odd Couple Team Up for Long Term Insurance
Nontraditional businesses are now selling insurance. Is that in the best interest of the consumer?
Travel
Jim
Wanderlust Journey Passport Fees Increase July 13th.
I’ve always considered a passport something that ought to be in one’s emergency kit, in case some reason arises to make you want to leave the country quickly. This makes your passport one of the most expensive items in the kit!
♥♥♥
That’s it for this week. Next Monday the carnival will be hosted by NerdWallet. Be sure to send your submissions by the Sunday afternoon deadline through this handy form. And don’t fail to check out NerdWallet’s findings next week!
Years ago I edited a huge report that comes out once every five years for the state Parks and Recreation Department. In it, the bureaucratic authors wrote several times about “managed recreation opportunities,” a term that neatly described their attitudes about you and me and the wilderness. When you go for a hike in the Great Outdoors, you’re not alone: Big Brother is watching you.
Big Brother is installing toilets at the trailhead, pouring loose scree on the trail (erosion control, not a deliberate attempt to break your ankle), putting up signs to herd you this way and that, and roping off areas you oughtn’t to see (clearcut forests, for example). Such “improvements” to the out of doors often do little or nothing to change the reason you’re there, but are simply crowd control or worse, crowd encouragement. Fewer toilets and tourist centers would mean fewer people thumping the wilderness, for example…but without them, how could your “recreation opportunities” be properly “managed,” eh?
These “improvements,” which cost money, often entail erecting a gate across roads that access the “opportunity.” Usually the accompanying gatehouses stand empty. But in the most popular places, such as Oak Creek Canyon’s Slide Rock, recreation managers staff the gates with ticket-takers and charge people to use the parks and forests for which we’re already paying with our taxes. “No Parking” signs go up for miles along the roads leading to the parking lot, so you can’t use your public lands without paying a second tax in the form of a “parking fee.” Effectively what this does is make the site inaccessible to those who can’t or won’t pay extra to use it.
The City of Phoenix hosts a number of desert preserves, land that was donated or purchased to preserve small stretches of desert, mostly graced by low mountains, from the fierce sprawl of development. Our city parents watched what was going on with the state’s efforts to manage recreation opportunities and took the lesson.
Over the past few years they’ve quietly been installing gates across access roads to all the city’s desert parks. When I saw the one they stuck up at Piestewa Peak (formerly “Squaw Peak”; the difficult name is a politically correct bow to folks who think the Anglicized term is an insult to Indian women and an effort to honor a young Navajo woman who died in Iraq), I wondered when they were going to start charging people to use the hugely popular park.
Well, the answer is “now.”
The City recently announced it would start charging five dollars (!!!) to park your car at the mountain preserves!
Understand, large numbers of regulars use these parks every single day. I’ve mentioned my friend Garnett Beckman, who at 104 is still going strong. She was one of those regulars; at age 65, when she retired from teaching, she began climbing to the top of 1,190-foot SquawPiestewa Peak every day. This produced an amazing effect on her health. She continued to hike there, all over the American Southwest, and all over the world…well into her 90s. When I went with her on one of her Christmas hikes to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, she was 84. So well known was she that a bench with her name on it has been installed three-quarters of the way up the mountain.
That would be one of the “improvements.” It’s gracious and lovely, as gestures go; but if you can hike 890 feet up a steep hill, you probably are tough enough to sit on a boulder or the ground to catch your breath.
Like me, Garnett was living on Social Security and not much else. There’s no way on God’s green earth that Garnett could have afforded to pay $5.00 a day for the privilege of parking her car at the base of the mountain. Neither can I.
I used to hike there or in North Mountain park several times a week myself. After I took on the 40-hour job at the Great Desert University, that went by the wayside, but one of my plans for this fall, after the weather cools and I’ll be teaching only one section at at time, was to get back into hiking.
For $50 you can get a pass to park for six months—a hundred bucks a year to use a park your tax dollars are already paying for.
These fees are supposed to pay for the “improvements” the City took upon itself to build. The gate, for example. The toilets. The running water. The tourist center.
North Mountain did not need a tourist center. While parking-lot bathrooms are nice for the kiddies, the truth is the trails are so sparsely vegetated there’s no place to hide to do your thing, and so most adults hold it until they can get back to their car and drive to to a bathroom. During the many years before some genius decided to run plumbing into the desert, the trails were never running sewers.
It is true that during the summer morons get themselves stuck up there on those hills with regularity. They don’t carry enough water (often they don’t carry any water!) or they go off the trails, and then they have to be hauled down on a litter or airlifted off the side of a mountain. But instead of gouging those of us who have better sense, why not charge the chuckleheaded and the feckless the full cost of sending a rescue team after them?
And it is true that the homeless mentally ill sometimes set up semipermanent camps in the desert parks, and so the city has to hire park rangers to chase them off. That problem could be resolved by providing decent mental health care services for everyone. Oh sorry, I know: s-o-o-o-cialism!
And it is true, I will not deny it, that a couple of times I’ve run into some scary dudes out there, including a man who chased me up a trail behind SqPiestewa Peak. None of the hired park rangers, however, were anywhere to be seen. I eluded him by hiding in a draw, pushing my bright blue day pack beneath me so my dun-colored clothes would blend in with the brush. Unless the city can put a cop at every bend in the trail, rather little can be done to stop that kind of thing. The laws have been changed so that women can carry concealed weapons into those parks, likely to be more effective protection than absent park rangers.
So what’s happening here is the City is using its “improvements,” most of them utterly unnecessary, as an excuse to start milking the cash cow that’s been standing there staring the city parents in the face all these years.
It’s amazing they haven’t gotten around to it before this. Piestewa Peak is so popular you can’t find a place to park at all when the weather is nice. Regulars who are acclimated to heat either go up there around five in the morning or wait until mid-day, when it’s too hot for most casual exercise walkers and families with young kids. Same is true on the north side of North Mountain, where you can access a milder trail than the one on the south side. The parks have been money waiting to happen for years. I guess, though, that the city council members figured they’d better wait for a really serious recession to pull this stunt; if they’d tried it with no obvious excuse, they’d have all been voted out of office forthwith.
So there you go. Another cut in our fair city’s quality of living.
OMG! Funny just made it onto the first page of WiseBread’s Top 100+ Personal Finance Blogs! Number 99 out of 100, with an Alexa ranking of 127,986.
This, thanks to Financial Samurai‘s Yakezie Challenge to bloggers who wanted to improve their traffic and various measures of popularity. The idea was, by July 4, to move your ranking from wherever it was up to the next rung. If, say, you were in the 200,000s (on a scale of 1 at the highest to a zillion at the leastest), you would vow to break into the 100,000s. If you were already there, you would try to get into the five digits. And so on. The theory behind Sam’s scheme: Power in numbers. Collaboration surely had to get us all somewhere.
Funny was a late-comer to this effort. Several friends urged me to join, but I was busy and came up with many excuses to drag my feet. Finally, a little more than a month ago, I downloaded the medallion, installed the Alexa toolbar, and announced FaM’s participation.
At the outset, FaM’s ranking was about 235,000. In just a week or two, this dropped to 199,463. It took 29 more days to arrive at today’s figure, which lifts the site into the Top 100.
So, who are these Yakezieites and what can they do? Just yesterday, Penny at The Saved Quarter published a really nice round-up of the some of the members’ best posts. This is a great place to go to find PF bloggers showing off their favorite work.
From the Yakezie site I found what appears to be the latest membership list and alphabetized it. There may be others who don’t appear on the list—I see a few names on Penny’s post that don’t seem to be here, while some here aren’t in hers. But it was the only membership list I could find. This, then, is my version:
Many of our doughty bloggers have reached the WiseBread Top 100. Some were already there at the time the Yakezie Challenge began. And others are closing in fast.
Bookmark Penny’s page and this page! Come back and check out each of these ambitious writers’ sites as you have time. You’ll find it’s very rewarding.
Well, the power and water bills showed up at once yesterday. Not too bad: the electric was only $176.63 The water came in a dollar over budget at $126.42, but at least it didn’t out-zing than the power bill, as it did last month.
When it gets to be over 100 degrees, you have to water the potted plants every day. The roses, of which I have way too many, also need to be watered several times a week. And ohhh yeah: yesterday’s water bill also reflects the day I forgot and left the water running in the pool! Dumb tax!
So far, we’ve had a pretty temperate summer…only one 115-degree day. Now, though, we’re headed into monsoon season. At 5:30 this morning it was 90 degrees out there, and overcast. The air conditioning was roaring away when I awoke…had to jack it up to 85 to settle it down. Yuck. It’s hot and wet outdoors. This is the only really uncomfortable season in Arizona, and it will last through to the end of August.
That means the really big power bill is yet to come. The $175 is for June, a relatively cool month. The 115-degree day, when the A.C. thumped along alllll daayyyyyy long almost without stopping, occurred in July. The bill for that (and for most of the really hot and humid days) won’t come until next month. The past few days have seen the shaded back-porch thermometer at 110, and the unit has been running pretty much continuously all day long, except in the morning, when I shut it off until I can’t stand the heat any longer.
By comparison, last July’s power bill was $165.78, ten bucks less than this month’s gouge. Salt River Project, our power provider, has jacked up its rates. I forget exactly how much they managed to wangle out of the corporation commission. They tried to get an increase of 8.8%, but as I recall they dropped it, in the face of shrieks from customers, to 4.9%. That would’ve raised this year’s July bill to $174. Since I’ve kept the temps around 85 during the day—it has to go down to 78 or 80 at night, or I can’t sleep at all—that means that even at uncomfortable temps the power bill continues to move toward unaffordable.
There’s no way to compare the water bill with last year’s, because the City of Phoenix screwed up the billing by canceling my service when someone gave them the wrong address to close out their own service. In July 2008, I had a $127 water bill. I wouldn’t be surprised but what the actual bill in 2010 was somewhere near that. In January the City also jacked up its rates, by 7.2% (!). I expect the fact that this month’s bill didn’t rise to $136, even after I almost overflowed the pool one fine day, reflects the savings realized from cutting down the endlessly thirsty, moribund ash tree.
Despite my intermittent bitching about it, the pool has earned its keep this year.
Earlier this season, I discovered that ten or fifteen minutes of paddling around in the pool really made the sore arm feel better. A lot better. So lately I’ve been setting the kitchen timer to go off every two hours, to force myself to get up off my duff and drop into the pool. While the injury is not healed and probably never will fully heal, it certainly is much improved. At least I’m not waking up in acute pain every morning, and I can now move the arm into most positions where it needs to go without too sharp a jab.
This has led me to rediscover what I’d long ago forgotten: the way I managed to keep the power bills down in the gigantic, leaky house my ex- and I occupied was by staying wet all day. I used to shut off the AC the minute the man walked out of the house, and it would stay off until around 5:00 p.m.; because he got home around 6:30, the house would be cool by the time he came in from work. This was tolerable for me because I would run out to the pool about once an hour. In those days, I wore a swim suit and my hair hung down to my shoulders, and so my clothes and hair were damp almost all the time.
And that’s how you survive two months of 110-degree weather without bankrupting yourself. 😉
Image: Filamentary plasma in the sun’s chromosphere. NASA. Public domain.
